Alex Haslam

Haslam grew up in Elsenham, Essex and completed his secondary education at Felsted School. He holds a Master of Arts (MA) degree from the University of St Andrews and a PhD from Macquarie University (Sydney). His doctoral work at Macquarie was supervised by John Turner (psychologist) and funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship. This was preceded by a year as a Robert T. Jones Scholar at Emory University (Atlanta). Prior to his current appointment at the University of Queensland, Haslam worked at the Australian National University (Canberra) (1991–2001) and the University of Exeter (2001–2012).

Haslam is a recipient of the European Association of Social Psychology's Kurt Lewin Medal (2005), the British Psychology Society's Presidents' Award for distinguished contributions to psychological knowledge (2016), the International Society of Political Psychology's Nevitt Sanford Award for distinguished contribution to political psychology (2017), and the Australian Psychological Society's Award for distinguished contribution to psychological science (2018). In 2009 he was granted the British Psychological Society's Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Psychology, and a National Teaching Fellowship from the Higher Education Academy. He was an Associate Editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology from 1999 to 2001 and Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Social Psychology from 2001 to 2005, and President of the psychology section of the British Science Association from 2009 to 2010. He is currently an Associate Editor of Leadership Quarterly (from 2017).

In 2001, Haslam collaborated with Steve Reicher (University of St Andrews) on the BBC television programme The Experiment, which became known as the "BBC Prison Study". This examined the behaviour of a group of individuals within a simulated prison environment, returning to issues raised by the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). Amongst other things, the study's findings challenged the role account of tyranny associated with the SPE as well as broader ideas surrounding the "banality of evil". The core insight from the study was that tyranny results from the engaged followership of subordinates rather than blind conformity to roles or rules. Recent work has also demonstrated that the same analysis can explain the behaviour of participants in Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments.

Since the 1990s, Haslam has collaborated with a number of social identity researchers, notably Steve Reicher, Michael Platow, and John Turner, developing a social identity analysis of leadership. This work focuses on the role of perceived shared identity as a basis for mutual influence between leaders and followers. It argues that leaders' success hinges on their ability to create, represent, advance and embed a social identity that is shared with those they seek to motivate and inspire.

This approach to leadership is informed by two influential social psychological theories: social identity theory and self-categorization theory. The critical contribution of social identity theory is to recognize that, in a range of social and organizational contexts, people’s sense of self is not primarily defined by their sense of themselves as individuals (in terms of their personal identity, as “me” and “I”). Rather, it is defined by their sense of themselves as members of particular groups (in terms of their social identity, as “we” and “us”).

Through its capacity to structure people’s sense of self, social identity has wide-ranging implications for cognition and behavior — two of which are especially important for leadership. First, when people define themselves in terms of a given social identity they are motivated to see that (in)group (‘us’) as positively distinct from other comparison (out)groups. In simple, terms we want the groups that matter to us to be special. …

In 2011, he was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2022 Australia Day Honours for "significant service to tertiary education, particularly psychology, though research and mentoring".