Another major success for excellent research at the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc. Professor Konstantinos Kafetsios from the Department of Psychology at the Faculty of Arts, UP has been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for his five-year research project CORESPOND (Connecting Relationship Experiences with Social Trust, Cooperation, and Cohesion).

The project will explore how experiences from close personal relationships shape broader social phenomena – particularly trust, cooperation, and social cohesion. It will investigate why societies differ in their responses to major challenges such as migration, climate change, and value-based conflicts.

CORESPOND will combine laboratory experiments, economic games, cross-cultural comparisons, and computational modelling. By working with data from dozens of cultures, the project aims to improve our understanding of social resilience and contribute to the development of approaches that strengthen trust and cooperation in increasingly diverse societies.

The project has received €2.3 million in ERC funding for five years. The achievement is particularly remarkable given the highly competitive nature of the ERC Advanced Grant call, where only 9.8% of submitted proposals were funded.

This success is also a result of the long-term strategic support provided by the Grant Office of the Faculty of Arts (GOFF), which supports researchers in preparing ambitious international grant proposals and strengthening their competitiveness in European funding schemes. Through individual consultations, project development support, and coordination throughout the application process, GOFF helps researchers transform excellent ideas into successful grant proposals.

For the Faculty of Arts, UP, this is already the second ERC grant awarded within a short period of time. In the previous ERC Consolidator Grant call, Rune Steenberg from the Department of Asian Studies received support for the NEWXUAR project, focusing on the impact of repressive state policies on minority communities in Xinjiang, China.

These achievements confirm that the Faculty of Arts has the expertise, research environment, and support structures needed to succeed at the highest European level.

Congratulations to Professor Kafetsios and the entire research team! 👏