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EASP is the European Association of Social Psychology with more than 1200 members and a tradition of more than 50 years. The General Meeting takes place every three years and is the largest conference on social psychology on the European level.

Nathalie Bick took part in a poster session at EASP 2023. Her study is part of her dissertation in the CATALPA Junior Research Group "Stereotype Threat." "It went really well," she says. "Higher distance education was hardly represented at the conference. Therefore many of the attendees had a lot of interest in the topic and it was possible to have in-depth discussions about our work with different scientists."

In her work, she studied 1210 FernUni students majoring in psychology. They were able to define which social groups they felt they belonged to - for example, by gender or age, but also according to whether they identified themselves as students with non-German native language, employment, disability or chronic illness. "We had already identified the groups in an earlier phase and were now able to draw on them," explains Nathalie Bick.

She found out that students' social identity does play a role in the FernUni context. In particular, students with a chronic illness or disability, with children, a job or with a different native language fear that peers may have prejudices against their group regarding skill or performance. This phenomenon is called "stereotype threat" in social psychology. Nathalie Bick found that high-threat groups tend to feel less belonging to the FernUni and to virtual learning groups. In turn they feel less motivated to initiate and maintain contact with peers. "In a next step, we now want to examine whether this can also be proven with regard to content-related cooperation in virtual learning groups," says Nathalie Bick. "We also want to find out more about how we can support students from different social identity groups to feel more belonging in higher distance education."