A doctoral thesis concerning intergroup relations currently being developed and studied at the University of Malta has been published in the prestigious Frontiers in Psychology journal.
The thesis builds on an understanding of human cognition as motivated by shared intentionality.
This enables the formation of coalitions in the social domain specifically intended to advance self-interested projects. Intergroup conflict, the paper argues, results from conflicting projects that bias human social cognition in determined ways.
This conception of intergroup conflict requires a reformulation of social representations research, which is outlined in the manuscript. The action-oriented reformulation of social representations seeks to understand a collective's 'social representations for' a specific project. Studies are currently underway testing the proposed formula focused on Maltese-Arab relations in Malta. The doctoral work reported in this paper is being undertaken by Luke Buhagiar under the supervision of Prof. Gordon Sammut.
Frontiers in Psychology is an open-access journal with an impact factor of 2.13. The journal is listed in the Web of Science Core Collection. The article can be accessed online.