Particulars

Ipek Guvensoy is a social psychologist with a specific focus on intergroup contact, prejudice, polarization and collective action. She got her first degree in Psychology from Uskudar University in 2019. During her undergraduate studies, she went on an overseas internship in Northern Ireland, Belfast. As a visiting researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, she studied intergroup contact under the supervision of Rhiannon Turner. After that, she received her master’s degree at Koc University in the department of Social/Organizational Psychology in 2021. Ipek is now a senior (final year) PhD student at Sabanci University. During her doctoral studies she also went on an overseas internship in Lisbon, Portugal. As a visiting researcher at ISCTE, she studied all-inclusive identities under the supervision of Rita Guerra. Ipek is the coordinator of Groupsy Lab and actively executes 5 projects. Her research appeared in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Research Interests

Since 2018, she has experimentally worked on various forms of intergroup contact including electronic contact, imagined contact, mediated contact and direct contact. Ipek has conducted research on various intergroup contexts including Turkish-Kurdish, Black-White interethnic relations, Catholic-Protestant, meat-eaters – vegan/vegetarians, environmentalists – non-environmentalist intergroup relations and arbitrary-based groups. Ipek’s doctoral thesis looks at the effects of intergroup contact on meta-perception accuracy, and intergroup attitudes. Besides her doctoral thesis, she dedicated herself to improving theoretical frameworks in collective action research, particularly an overlooked construct in the overall collective action literature, anti-minority collective action. This work further drew her into the theoretical gaps in social identity literature.