The current studies aim to examine the underlying predictors of heterosexual feminist women's willingness to participate in solidarity‐based collective action for LGBTQ+ rights. We hypothesized that feminist identification, perceived discrimination against LGBTQ+, and strategic intra‐minority alliance between feminists and LGBTQ+ would predict their willingness to participate in solidarity‐based collective action. Study 1 (N = 141) showed that higher feminist identification and more endorsement of the strategic intra‐minority alliance predicted more willingness to participate in solidarity‐based collective action among heterosexual feminist women in Turkey. Study 2 (N = 644) replicated and extended the findings of Study 1 with a larger sample by showing that higher awareness of sexual orientation privilege predicts more willingness to participate in solidarity‐based collective action. By following an intersectional and multi‐identity approach in Study 3 (N = 280), we showed that higher feminist identification predicted more willingness to participate in solidarity‐based collective action, whereas higher heterosexual identification predicted less willingness.

Western scholarship has underlined the relevance of social identity, perceived efficacy, emotions, and costbenefit assessments as central catalysts of collective action. Little has been done to understand the contextsensitivity of these catalysts by means of cross-culturally comparative designs. The current study explores their context-sensitivity. It aims to find out whether existing opportunity structures in a democratic, nonrepressive country like Germany produce catalysts of collective action different from those produced in an autocratic, repressive country like Turkey. It also aims to understand the role of social media in mobilizing people in these two contexts. Semistandardized interviews with activists were carried out in both countries (n = 18 in Germany and n = 15 in Turkey) and analyzed by means of a cross-culturally comparative inductive coding procedure including initial and focused coding. Results show that collective action is related to different configurations of collective-action catalysts in the two countries. Solidarity concerns at the face of existential risks are more pronounced in Turkey, whereas political-change concerns are more important in Germany. The role of social media accordingly differs, adhering to the different activist goals. Theoretical implications for the role of context in studying collective action are discussed.

The World Health Organization (WHO) identified +65 individuals as one of the most vulnerable populations in the current pandemic. Previous research has shown a robust association between ageism and derogatory attitudes and behaviors targeting older people. We proposed that reluctance of people under age 65 to endorse the policies that benefit older adults can be further explained by their adherence to social Darwinism. We tested a mediation model to examine whether social Darwinism would predict support for policies directly and indirectly through the endorsement of ageist attitudes. We conducted two correlational studies in Turkey (Study 1; N = 1261) and the United States (Study 2; N = 210). In Study 1, we collected data through social media and messaging platforms in April 2020. In Study 2, participants were recruited via Prolific Academic in May 2020. In both studies, we found that adherence to social Darwinist beliefs negatively predicted support for policies. We also found that this association was positively mediated by ageist attitudes. Overall, our research contributes to the scholarly effort to identify the social‐psychological barriers to public support for legal initiatives aimed to secure a healthy and productive future for older people.

Despite the ongoing shift in societal norms and gender-discriminatory practices toward more equality, many heterosexual women worldwide, including in many Western societies, choose to replace their birth surname with the family name of their spouse upon marriage. Previous research has demonstrated that the adherence to sexist ideologies (i.e., a system of discriminatory gender-based beliefs) among women is associated with their greater endorsement of practices and policies that maintain gender inequality. By integrating the ideas from the system justification theory and the ambivalent sexism theory, we proposed that the more women adhere to hostile and benevolent sexist beliefs, the more likely they would be to justify existing gender relations in society, which in turn, would positively predict their support for traditional, husband-centered marital surname change. We further argued that hostile (as compared to benevolent) sexism could act as a particularly strong direct predictor of the support for marital surname change among women. We tested these possibilities across three cross-sectional studies conducted among women in Turkey (Study 1, N=118, self-identified feminist women; Study 2, N=131, female students) and the United States (Study 3, N=140, female students). Results of Studies 1 and 3 revealed that higher adherence to hostile (but not benevolent) sexism was associated with higher support for marital surname change indirectly through higher gender-based system justification. In Study 2, the hypothesized full mediation was not observed. Consistent with our predictions, in all three studies, hostile (but not benevolent) sexism was found to be a direct positive predictor of the support for marital surname change among women. We discuss the role of dominant ideologies surrounding marriage and inegalitarian naming conventions in different cultures as obstacles to women’s birth surname retention upon marriage.