Taking sustainable fashion mainstream: Social media and the institutional celebrity entrepreneur

There is a growing imperative to address the negative environmental impact of fashion and an increased awareness of sustainability issues: the sustainable fashion concept (SFC). However, while consumers are becoming more aware and concerned about sustainability, this is not resulting in the purchase of sustainable fashion products in preference to “mainstream” goods. This so‐called attitude–behaviour gap is well documented in academic literature, and yet there is a lack of research into potential methods of disrupting this phenomenon. This study seeks to redress this by examining the potential influence of celebrity institutional entrepreneurs (CIEs) to raise awareness of the SFC and to therefore guide and change consumer behaviour towards more sustainable practice. CIEs are celebrities who use their social position to espouse their values with the intention of influencing institutional habits and behaviours. In this case, Emma Watson is identified as an appropriate and credible proponent, and her @the_press_tour Instagram account was used to examine her influence. A netnographic investigation of this account was conducted in combination with eight in‐depth interviews with account followers to examine attitudes and actions towards sustainable fashion. Findings showed that the account had partial impact on consumer engagement with the SFC in that it led to the participants being more likely to discuss and consider the issues around sustainable fashion; however, it had no significant impact on purchases of sustainable fashion. The study concludes that CIEs can impact the attitudes of mainstream consumers towards sustainable fashion; however, further research is required to determine any long‐term influence.     

Solidarity across group lines: Secondary transfer effect of intergroup contact,perceived moral distance,and collective action

We tested, in three studies, whether the generalization of contact effects from primary to secondary outgroups—the secondary transfer effect (STE)—occurs for collective action. The results supported a serial mediation model: contact with immigrants by advantaged group members (Italians: Study 1, N = 146, 121 females, M_age = 28.31 years; Study 3, N = 406, 239 females, M_age = 36.35; British people, Study 2, N = 160, 113 females, M_age = 32.31) was associated with lower perceived moral distance toward primary outgroups, which in turn was associated with more positive attitudes and greater collective action intentions toward primary outgroups, and lower perceived moral distance toward secondary outgroups. Lower perceived moral distance toward secondary outgroups and stronger collective action intentions toward the primary outgroup were associated with higher collective action intentions toward secondary outgroups (results were inconsistent for attitudes). We discuss the findings with a focus on how a consideration of perceived moral distance extends current theorizing, and the relevance of generalized prejudice for the STE.     

Smell and taste function in the visually impaired

Surprisingly few quantitative studies have addressed the question of whether visually impaired individuals evidence, perhaps in compensation for their loss of vision, increased acuteness in their other senses. In this experiment we sought to determine whether blind subjects outperform sighted subjects on a number of basic tests of chemosensory function. Over 50 blind and 75 sighted subjects were administered the following olfactory and gustatory tests: the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT); a 16-item odor discrimination test; and a suprathreshold taste test in which measures of taste-quality identification and ratings of the perceived intensity and pleasantness of sucrose, citric acid, sodium chloride, and caffeine were obtained. In addition, 39 blind subjects and 77 sighted subjects were administered a single staircase phenyl ethyl alcohol (PEA) odor detection threshold test. Twenty-three of the sighted subjects were employed by the Philadelphia Water Department and trained to serve on its water quality evaluation panel. The primary findings of the study were that (a) the blind subjects did not outperform sighted subjects on any test of chemosensory function and (b) the trained subjects significantly outperformed the other two groups on the odor detection, odor discrimination, and taste identification tests, and nearly outperformed the blind subjects on the UPSIT. The citric acid concentrations received larger pleasantness ratings from the trained panel members than from the blind subjects, whose ratings did not differ significantly from those of the untrained sighted subjects. Overall, the data imply that blindness, per se, has little influence on chemosensory function and add further support to the notion that specialized training enhances performance on a number of chemosensory tasks.     

Updating and feature overwriting in short-term memory for timbre

Previous research has demonstrated a potent, stimulus-specific form of interference in short-term auditory memory. This effect has been interpreted in terms of interitem confusion and grouping, but the present experiments suggested that interference might be a feature-specific phenomenon. Participants compared standard and comparison tones over a 10-sec interval and were required to determine whether they differed in timbre. A single interfering distractor tone was presented either 50 msec or 8 sec after the offset of the standard (Experiment 1) or 2 sec prior to its onset (Experiment 2). The distractor varied in the number of features it shared with the standard and comparison, and this proved critical, since performance on the task was greatly impaired when the distractor either consisted of novel, unshared features (Experiment 1) or contained the distinguishing feature of the comparison tone (Experiments 1 and 2). These findings were incompatible with earlier accounts of forgetting but were fully explicable by the recent timbre memory model, which associates interference in short-term auditory memory with an "updating" process and feature overwriting. These results suggest similarities with the mechanisms that underlie forgetting in verbal short-term memory.     

Effects of phase changes in low-numbered harmonics on the internal representation of complex sounds

A series of experiments investigated the effect of phase changes in lownumbered single harmonics in target sounds that were either synthesized steady-state vowels or periodic signals having only a single formant. A matching procedure was used in which subjects selected a sound along a continuum differing in first formant frequency in order to get the best match with the target sound; perceptual effects of the phase manipulations in the target were detected as a change in the matched first formant frequency. Stimuli had to contain at least three harmonics to produce the effect, but it did not require a particular starting phase of the components. A suppression phenomenon is discussed, in which phase changes alter the phase-locking characteristics of auditory fibres tuned to low-numbered harmonics.     

The “contact hypothesis”: Critical reflections and future directions

Research on intergroup contact has grown exponentially over the past decade. Such research has typically extolled the benefits of positive interaction between members of historically divided communities, particularly on outcomes related to prejudice reduction. Emerging work in the field, however, has qualified this optimistic picture by identifying three gaps in the existing literature. First, in everyday life, contact may be construed as a negative experience that increases rather than decreases responses such as prejudice, anxiety, and avoidance. Second, in real‐life settings, contact is often circumscribed by informal practices of (re)segregation that are easily overlooked if researchers rely primarily on examining structured contact and explicit processes using primarily laboratory and questionnaire methods. Third, positive contact may have “ironic” effects on the political attitudes and behaviors of the historically disadvantaged, undermining their recognition of social injustice and decreasing their willingness to engage in collective action to challenge the status quo. Although it is now a truism that intergroup contact can reduce intergroup prejudice, these developments emphasize the importance of maintaining a critical perspective on the “contact hypothesis” as a model for promoting social change in historically divided and unequal societies. They also lay the foundations for future developments in the field.