I’m a social psychologist, best known for my work on social identity and intergroup relations, including research on prejudice and stereotyping. My recent research has also addressed issues related to individualism and collectivism, interdependent problem-solving, migration processes, the need for closure, social class, and social integration. My recent work is also more multidisciplinary, combining areas such as personality, social, organisational, clinical, and environmental psychology as well as educational research.
Many researchers focus on the brain and adopt a neuroscientific approach when addressing mental health issues, and that is an essential approach. But as a social psychologist, my focus is more on people and the relationships between people. Consequently, I see mental health issues as a problem of social groups and communities as much as of brains. For example, my recent research has shown that social class differences in parenting style and social integration help to explain social class differences in mental health (Rubin & Kelly, 2015).
Like many other countries, Australia suffers from a marked social class inequity in the health of its citizens. One of the key goals of my research is to inform social interventions that help to reduce the size of this inequity. My future focus is on applying social psychological methods and theories to afford a greater understanding of mental health issues
Dr Mark Rubin is a social psychologist in the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle. His research focuses on the social psychological processes that underpin social identity, stereotyping, prejudice, and social exclusion. He has authored over 45 major research publications in this area. Over half of his journal articles are published in journals that are ranked in the top quartile of their field based on the SCImago Journal Rank indicator. His work has been cited over 2,500 times, and he is ranked in the top 20% of social psychologists based on his publication impact (career-stage e-index compared with 611 North American social psychologists; Nosek et al., 2010).
Dr Rubin's work in the area of social identity includes several highly-cited articles that defend social identity theory against its critics and call for more sophisticated tests of its hypotheses.
In the area of stereotyping, he has identified new processes that explain why people perceive members of social groups to be “all the same.” His work on prejudice has identified cognitive and motivational factors that predict bias against “category-inconsistent” people such as migrants and counterstereotypical individuals. Finally, in the area of social exclusion, Dr Rubin has identified personality, motivational, and resource-related variables that predict social integration and exclusion, including migrant integration and the exclusion of working-class students from social life at university.
I have expertise in several areas of social psychology, including group processes and intergroup relations, stereotyping, social identity, and social class. I specialise in quantitative, correlational and experimental research using online survey platforms. I have conducted a meta-analysis using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis, and I use Hayes' (2013) PROCESS software to conduct moderation and mediation analyses. I also have expertise with structural equation modelling and longitudinal research designs.
