Portrait of Michael Hogg

Michael Hogg, a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA), is professor of social psychology and director of the Social Identity Lab at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles, an honorary professor at the University of Kent in the U.K., a former Australian Research Council professorial fellow, president-elect of the International Society for Self and Identity, and a past president of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

He is the recipient of a number of senior career awards: the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues’ 2022 Kurt Lewin Award, for “outstanding contributions to the development and integration of psychological research and social action”, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s 2021 Campbell Award, for “distinguished scholarly achievement and sustained excellence in research in social psychology”; and the International Society for Self and Identity’s 2020 Distinguished Lifetime Career Award, for “researchers who have made major, enduring contributions to understanding self and identity over the course of their academic careers”. He is also the recipient of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s 2010 Carol and Ed Diener Mid-Career Award in Social Psychology, for “outstanding contributions to the fields of personality and social psychology for scientists in their mid-career”, and the Australian Psychological Society’s 1989 Early Career Award, for “excellence in scientific achievement in psychology among psychologists who are at early stages of their research careers”.

He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. He is also an advisory board member for the department of psychology at Durham University, serves as a scientific advisory panel member for the Center for Research on Online Political Hostility at Aarhus University in Denmark, and is a member of the external scientific monitoring committee for the Center for Psychology at the University of Porto (CPUP) in Portugal.

Hogg was born in India, spent his childhood in Sri Lanka, and moved to the U.K. in his mid-teens. After studying physics for a year, he received his undergraduate degree in psychology from Birmingham University and his PhD in social psychology from Bristol University. He started his academic career teaching at Bristol University, and then moved to Australia where he held academic appointments at Macquarie University, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Queensland. At the University of Queensland, he founded the Center for Research on Group Processes, served as associate dean of research for the faculty of social and behavioral sciences, and was an Australian Research Council professorial fellow. He has also taught at Princeton University; been a British Academy visiting professor at Birmingham University; and a visiting professor and scholar at Aston Business School, the University of California Los Angeles, the University of California Santa Cruz, City University Hong Kong, the University of California Santa Barbara, Università Roma Tre, and Sapienza Università di Roma. He moved to California and joined the faculty of Claremont Graduate University in 2006.

Hogg’s research on intergroup relations, group processes, influence and leadership, and self and identity is associated with the development of social identity theory, and has been widely published (more than 400 scientific publications cited 130,000 times, h-index 143). He is foundation editor-in-chief with Dominic Abrams of the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, a senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology, and a former associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and of The Leadership Quarterly. Hogg has graduated 41 PhD students, and co-authors with Graham Vaughan the leading introductory Social Psychology text in Europe, Britain and Australasia, first published in 1995 and now in its 9th edition (2022).

He also founded and is director of Claremont Graduate University’s Social Identity Lab, an internationally recognized center for social psychological research on intergroup relations, group processes, and the self-concept. Current research focuses on social identity-related influence and leadership processes in public and small group contexts; the role played by social identity in radicalization, populism, and social disintegration; and in translating self-uncertainty into orthodoxy, societal extremism, and intergroup conflict.

Chen, K., & Hogg, M. A. (2024). What makes us “we”? The positivity bias in essentialist beliefs about group attributes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 111, 104581.

Guillén, L., Jacquart, P., & Hogg, M. A. (2023). To lead, or to follow? How self-uncertainty and the dark triad of personality influence leadership motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(7), 1043-1057.

Hogg, M. A. (2023). Walls between groups: Self-uncertainty, social identity, and intergroup leadership. Journal of Social Issues, 79(2), 825-840.

Hogg, M. A., & Rast, D. E. III (2022). Intergroup leadership: The challenge of successfully leading fractured groups and societies. Current Directions in Psychological Science., 31(6), 564-571.

Hogg, M. A. (2021). Uncertain self in a changing world: A foundation for radicalization, populism and autocratic leadership. European Review of Social Psychology, 32(2), 235-268.

Hogg, M. A. (2021). Self-uncertainty and group identification: Consequences for social identity, group behavior, intergroup relations, and society. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 64, 263-316.

Hogg, M. A. (2019). Radical change. Uncertainty in the world threatens our sense of self: To cope, people embrace populism. Scientific American, 321(3), 85-87.

Rast, D. E. III, Hogg, M. A., & Van Knippenberg, D. (2018). Intergroup leadership across distinct subgroups and identities. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44, 1090-1103.

Kerr, N. L., Ao, X., Hogg, M. A., & Zhang, J. (2018). Addressing replicability concerns via adversarial collaboration: Discovering hidden moderators of the minimal intergroup discrimination effect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 78, 66-76.

Hogg, M. A., Abrams, D., & Brewer, M. B. (2017). Social identity: The role of self in group processes and intergroup relations. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 20, 570-581.

Hohman, Z. P., Gaffney, A. M., & Hogg, M. A. (2017). Who am I if I am not like my group? Self-uncertainty and feeling peripheral in a group. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 72, 125-132.

Hogg, M. A. (2016). Group members differ in relative prototypicality: Effects on the individual and the group. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, e153, 28-29.

Hogg, M. A. (2015). Constructive leadership across groups: How leaders can combat prejudice and conflict between subgroups. Advances in Group Processes, 32, 177-207.

Hohman, Z. P., & Hogg, M. A. (2015). Fearing the uncertain: Self-uncertainty plays a role in mortality salience. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 57, 31-42.

Hogg, M. A. (2014). From uncertainty to extremism: Social categorization and identity processes. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 338-342.

Hogg, M. A., Van Knippenberg, D., & Rast, D. E. III. (2012). Intergroup leadership in organizations: Leading across group and intergroup boundaries. Academy of Management Review, 37, 232-255.

Hogg, M. A., Van Knippenberg, D., & Rast, D. E. III. (2012). The social identity theory of leadership: Theoretical origins, research findings, and conceptual developments. European Review of Social Psychology, 23, 258-304.

Grant, F., & Hogg, M. A. (2012). Self-uncertainty, social identity prominence and group identification. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 538-542.

Rast, D. E. III, Gaffney, A. M., Hogg, M. A., & Crisp, R. J. (2012). Leadership under uncertainty: When Leaders who are non-prototypical group members can gain support. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 646-653.

Group Processes and Intergroup Relations
Self and Identity
Extremism/Extremism in Society
Social Identity Theory and Research
Directed Research in Social Psychology