Ilja van Beest

Candidate for Representative at Large on IACM Board - 2013 Elections

Ilja van Beest is a professor of social psychology at Tilburg University. The IACM conference has been his choice conference for most of his academic career. He highly values how the conference brings together both scientists and practitioners and would be honored to help maintain the high standards of the IACM as representative-at-large. 

  His research focuses on coalition formation, negotiation, social exclusion, and symptom attribution. The    general theme of his research on coalition formation and negotiation is that self-interested behavior is fuelled by fairness concerns. A provocative finding in this line of research is that players rather form fair coalitions that do not maximize their individual payoffs than unfair coalitions that do maximize their individual payoffs. His research on social exclusion aims to understand why people are hurt when ostracized and how victims cope. An intriguing finding in this line of research is that ostracized individuals are hurt even when this is financially beneficial. A dominant theme in his research on symptom attribution is that people are likely to attribute negative physical states to their illness even if this is objectively not the case. For example, children with asthma that are put under stress may misattribute their stress to having an asthma attack.

He is currently associate editor of the journal Social Influence and the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. His dissertation was chosen to be the best dissertation of the year  by the Dutch association of social psychology. His work on symptom attribution was award the Ig-nobel prize for medicine. He was one of the authors that contributed to popular book about social science that was awarded the Silver Slate Pencil for best children book of the Netherlands.