GrouPsy-Lab

Meet the Team

Assoc. Prof. Çiğdem Bağcı

I am an Associate Professor of social psychology at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. After completing my BSc degree in psychology at Bogaziçi University, I continued my academic career at the University of Surrey (MSc in Research Methods) and at Goldsmiths, University of London (PhD) in United Kingdom.

I like to conduct both theoretical and applied research in the field of intragroup and intergroup relationships. I am interested in exploring relationships between various intergroup processes among both majority and minority group status children and adults. My main research areas include intergroup contact and cross-group friendships, prejudice and discrimination, social identity, and psychological well-being.

Recently, I have been working on various projects with international collaborators, including collective narcissism among minority group members, collective ownership threat, and social identity processes in vegetarianism.

Click for CV

Duygu Yurt

Sabanci University

1st year PSY MSc student

Duygu received her bachelor’s degrees in Guidance and Psychological Counseling (2021) and Psychology (2022) from MEF University. During her undergraduate education, she took part in MEF’s social psychology laboratory as a research assistant and discovered her passion for intergroup relations. Her current research interests include intergroup attitudes and threat perceptions, she is also working on a project focusing on understanding tolerance. Besides her academic interests, she enjoys watching movies and catching up with film festivals whenever possible.

İrem Kuyucu

Sabanci University

1st year PSY MSc student

İrem received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Bilkent University in 2021. During her undergraduate studies, she worked in various projects including ones concerning emotional memory narrowing and Theory of Mind development in children before discovering her passion for social psychology and group processes. Now she is doing her Master’s in Social Psychology to specialize in this area and working on projects about Intergroup Tolerance and Human-Robot Interaction. Her research interests include stereotyping, social identity formation and intergroup attitudes. Besides her academic interests, she enjoys solo sports like kick-boxing and yoga; reading fiction books and traveling.

Zeynep Soyalan

Sabanci University

4th year Psy student

Zeynep is a senior undergraduate student in the major of psychology at Sabancı University. She is also doing two minors; the first being- decision and behavior, the second being- conflict analysis and resolution. This is her first lab experience yet she is passionate about social psychology. Her current research interests include but are not limited to prejudice and discrimination, intergroup processes, empathy, close relationships, and prosocial behavior. She is planning on doing a master’s degree in social psychology. Besides her academic interests; she enjoys watching movies, exploring new places, dubbing and playing the piano.

İpek Güvensoy

Sabanci University

2nd year PSY PhD student

İpek received her bachelor's degree in Psychology at Uskudar University in 2019. During her undergraduate studies, she went on an overseas internship in Northern Ireland, Belfast. As a visiting researcher, she studied intergroup relations there under the supervision of Rhiannon Turner. After that, she continued to work on the same project under the supervision of Sabahat Cigdem Bagci. Their experimental project has been published on the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. She received her Master's degree at Koç University in the Social/Organizational Psychology department in 2021. During her master's studies, she worked on close relationships, and her master's thesis was published on the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Now she is continuing to work on group-level perceptions and intergroup-level attitudes. Besides her academic interest, she enjoys roller skating and skateboarding.

Hayal Sude özcan

Sabanci University

3rd year PSY student

Hayal is a 3rd-grade psychology student at Sabancı University. She is interested in intergroup and intragroup relationships and the effects of empathy, moral judgments, and personality traits on those groups. Also, she engages in stress and well-being, romantic relationships. It is her first time in a laboratory environment so, she is thrilled at working in a laboratory, analyzing data and formulating experiments. Aside from psychology, she enjoys scuba diving, exploring underwater, catching up with art exhibitions and theaters, as well as spending time with her loved ones.

Damla Türkseven

Sabanci University

4th year PSY student

Hi everyone, I'm Damla and senior psychology student in Sabancı University. I have my minor in decision and behavior. My deep interest in human nature and mind lead me to major in psychology and I'm so happy to be a part of Sabancı University and our social psychology lab! Apart from that, I am fond of my health both mental and physical, that's why I became a board member of Suwell, Sabancı University Health and Wellbeing Club. I am a lifelong learner and always improving myself is part of my daily routine. I want to discover my real self and believe in my heart that being a part of Sabancı University is an important step for it.

Selen Akay

Sabanci University

1st year PSY MSc student

Selen Akay is a Master’s student in psychology at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey. She received her Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Bilkent University, Turkey. She plans to specialize in social psychology, but she has also been involved in interdisciplinary research crosscutting across different areas in psychology and related disciplines. Her research interests include but are not limited to intergroup attitudes, close relationships, adult attachment, human-robot interaction, and mind attribution.

Zeynep Ecem Piyale

İstanbul University SOC. PSY PhD student

Zeynep's researchinterests are moral decision making, relational models of morality, moral emotions, intergrouptolerance and intergroup processes. Her research has appeared in academic journals such asEmotion, British Journal of Social Psychology, Personality and Individual Differences.

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Ayşe Gül Efe

Bogazici University
4th year PSY Undergraduate Student

Ayşe Gül is a senior undergraduate psychology student at Boğaziçi University. She has worked in the Social Psychology Lab and the Cognitive Processes Lab at Boğaziçi University. She is planning to do a master’s degree in social psychology. Her research interests are intergroup relationships and social identities. More specifically, she is interested in the relations between different ethnic, gender, and religious groups in the context of mobility, and the intersections of social identities. Aside from psychology, she enjoys watching movies, taking long walks, and drinking iced coffee on a sunny day.

Büşra Kaplan

Bogazici University
Undergraduate Student

Büşra is a senior undergraduate psychology student at Boğaziçi University. During her semester in Erasmus Program, She worked in the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology at KU Leuven in Belgium. Afterward, she has worked in the Social Psychology and Cognitive Psychology Lab at Boğaziçi University. She is planning to pursue a master's degree in social psychology. Her research interests mainly focus on social identity, migration, intergroup relations, political action, and media studies. Along with psychology, she enjoys cooking, traveling, and spending time with her friends.

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Emrullah Kahraman

Bogazici University
Grade Student

Emrah is a recent graduate of Boğaziçi University Psychology department, and he took lots of supplementary courses in English literature. He worked at the Social Psychology Lab and contributed to studies on Child Well-Being Project in Boğaziçi University. While his research interests are focused on social cognition and sense of control, he is preparing to pursue master’s in Social or Cultural Psychology. Beyond academia, he maintains a passion for literature, and more specifically poetry. He loves to spend his time consuming any media that includes storytelling.

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Esra Kamacı

İstanbul University
2nd Year PSY MSc Student

Esra received her undergraduate education in Psychology (2021) and Sociology (2022) from Istanbul University. During her undergraduate education, she took part in social development and bilingualism studies in different laboratories. She also conducted research on immigration and diaspora issues and took part in different NGO about migrant right. Now she is doing her Master’s in Social Psychology at İstanbul University. Her current research interests include moral psychology, perception of justice in children and political psychology. Besides her academic interests, she also enjoys taking care of her cats, growing her pencil collection and filling out a diary.

Büşra Neziroğlu

MEF University
3rd Year PSY Student

Büşra is a third year psychology student at MEF University. Her research interest focuses on intergroup and ingroup relations. In particular, she works on topics such as factors affecting common in-group identity and ethnic hierarchy. At Tepe Morality Lab, she is involved in TUBITAK 2209A funded projects as well as participating in various research projects and internships. She enjoys spending time with friends and trying new cuisines.

Alumni

Berfin Acar

Berfin received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Middle East Technical University and her master’s degree from Sabanci University. In her master’s thesis, she investigated how majority group members perceive intergroup toleration and the contextual factors that play a role in this perception.

Her research interests include majority-minority relations, intragroup processes, collective action, social identity, intergroup toleration, and migration. She is currently doing her PhD at The Université libre de Bruxelles, under the supervision of Dr. Jasper Van Assche, aiming to unravel polarization and mobilization processes underlying intergroup tolerance and prejudice.

Ayşenur Didem Yılmaz

Started with Tajfels-Turners, continued with Allports. She got her M.S. degree in Psychology from Sabanci University, and B.S. in Psychology from Middle East Technical University. Her thesis explored the reformulated intergroup contact theory’s 4th process of change: deprovincialization hypothesis.

Now, she is enjoying the time she got before pursuing on her doctoral studies.

She also enjoys non-scientific way of living and for that she adopted enough perspective shift techniques to go on with.

Interest areas: SIT; intergroup contact; deprovincialization; relative favoritism; identity fusion; attitude generalization

Faruk Tayyip Yalçın

Faruk is a social psychology PhD student at Penn State, specializing in empathy and moral psychology.

Aside from social psychology, he enjoys reading and talking about politics, philosophy of science, and statistical methods. He is into blogging and photography. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Bilkent University in 2021.