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GrouPsy-Lab

Meet the Team

Prof. Dr. Çiğdem Bağcı

I am a Professor of social psychology at Sabancı University, 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.

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Alumni

Our Grad 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

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Ayşenur is pursuing her PhD at Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, with Prof. Loris Vezzali as her supervisor. She is interested in intergroup contact studies, especially online contact, as well as various social identity paradigm topics such as deprovincialization.

She received her M.S. in Psychology from Sabanci University in 2023 and her B.S. in Psychology from Middle East Technical University in 2021.

She reads fiction in her spare time. Although she has a tendency to favor the works of art within the classical & modern Turkish literature; she  knows that the mind is unbounded and explores works form around the globe.

Faruk Tayyip Yalçın

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 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.

Esra Kamacı

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.

Zeynep Ecem Piyale

Zeynep's research interests 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.

Our Undergrad Alumni

  • Hayal Sude Özcan

  • Damla Türkseven

  • Zeynep Soyalan

  • Ayşe Gül Efe

  • Emrullah Kahraman

  • Büşra Neziroğlu

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