RESEARCH TOPICS

(1) Threat and challenge: the making and transformation of social knowledge related to threats and collective risks (terrorism, environmental hazards, crises, health-related issues). Dynamics, normative regulation, and time perspective in the transformation of threats into challenges.

(2) Relationships between societies and their environments. Health and environment. Environmental education.

(3) Social representations and conducts related to Water (lack, or excess of, Water); cultural and cross-cultural approaches.

(4) Civic responsibility and education related issues.

(5) Corporate social and environmental responsibility.

(6) Lay thinking and behaviors about money and debt issues.

(7) Collective risks: lay thinking, behaviors, and collective memory.

(8) Contribution of the Theory of Social Representations to the study of the efficacy of laws

THEORETICAL ISSUES

(1) Social Practice (Conducts) as a determinant of the elaboration and transformation of social representations

(2) Personal Involvement as a mediator of the elaboration and transformation of social representations

(3) Injunctive function of social representations (how do social representations guide action?)

(4) Personal Involvement and Sociability (e.g., associative affiliation) as enhancing factors of engagement in (risk-related) social conducts

(5) History of social psychology. European Jewish foundations

APPLIED MATTERS

My students and I work on various applied matters such as:

(1) Collective risks: social thinking, memory and behaviours (work in progress: Social representations of terrorism, environmental hazards, crises)

(2) Conflict resolution and peacebuilding

(3) Social thinking and conducts related to water and water pollution

In the past, I have supervised students' research on matters such as social proximity as an enhancer of message acceptance in various collective or individual risk-related contexts (floods, earthquakes, tsunami, AIDS, etc.) or other controversial social topics, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the French referendum of the European Constitution, the U.S. troops in Iraq, Antisemitism, racism, euthanasia, drugs, and obesity.