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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

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Is Vladimir Putin what CORAL looks like?

PROLOGUE  (04/03/22) This post has undoubtedly caused a lot of offence amongst people who subscribe to Gravesian and developmental thinking. Unfortunately, some people have assumed I’m saying Putin definitely does CORAL thinking. I wasn’t and I’m not. I’m offering it as a potential explanation for his outrageous and deadly behaviour. I’m saying: Maybe we should look at this as a possible explanation..? If we can understand Putin, then maybe we can deal with him. The post is meant to stimulate discussion amongst people who, quite frankly, understand 2nd Tier thinking a lot better than I do. It reflects none too well on me that I failed to anticipate just how badly it would be received. So I’m sorry for the offence caused…but I have decided to leave the post up (for the time being). I’m hoping that, with this prologue, it can still serve to stimulate discussion which can help lead to greater understanding of Putin and the dreadful situation he has put the world in – and most especially the people of Ukraine. _____________________________________________________________ I once wondered whether Vladimir Putin was a 2nd Tier thinker – and whether Barack Obama, for all his many laudable qualities, wasn’t. As Putin’s war… Read More

Graves: Systems more than Stages

30 August 2020 Historically Psychology is full of stage theories. From Sigmund Freud’s (1905) Psychosexual Stages, through Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages, Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development, Abraham Maslow’s (1943) Hierarchy of Needs, Lawrence Kohlberg’s (1958) Stages of Moral Development, Jane Loevinger’s (1976) Stages of Ego Development to Michael Commons et al’s (1998) Model of Hierarchical Complexity, etc, etc, etc. Sociology has a fair few stage theories too – such as Max Weber’s (1922) Social Action Theory and Theodore Adorno et al’s (1950) Types of Prejudiced & Unprejudiced Persons. A stage is a period in development – often, but not always, related to age – in which people exhibit behaviour patterns and establish particular capacities typical to that particular stage. Most stage theories have people pass through the stages in a specific order, with each stage building on capacities developed in the previous stage. This suggests that the development of certain abilities in each stage, such as specific emotions or ways of thinking, have a definite starting and ending point – ie: the stages are discreet from each other The pros and cons of stage theories Stage theories allow us to look at motivations, emotions, cognitions and behaviours that seem to cluster… Read More

A 2nd Tier Approach to a 1st Tier World

Published in the Integral Leadership Review e-zine – http://integralleadershipreview.com/ – August 2018. Guest editor Robin Lincoln Wood had been asked to put together a special issue both to celebrate and follow on from the Spiral Dynamics Summit on the Future that May. As one of the conference speakers I was asked by Robin to write an article which both built on the theme of the presentation and took it forward. The version republished here is only very marginally-different from that which appeared in Integral Leadership Review. The Spiral Dynamics Summit on the Future (Dallas, 20-22 April 2018) was a fairly awesome event. A gathering of leading Gravesian practitioners (both on the stage and in the audience), partly to honour Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck and partly to focus on how the Gravesian approach can be used to tackle the current malaises afflicting the world. (Many of the presentations are reflected in the articles comprising the special edition of ILR.) Speaker after speaker gave us theoretical understandings and practical applications. All were good. All were insightful. Some were simply inspirational. There was a great sense of community amongst the participants, whether speaker or non-speaker, and fascinating discussions took place on the side-lines of the conference in the breaks, in the evenings… Read More

Psychosocial Development #2

PART 2 In his later stages, Erikson moves away from and beyond Sigmund Freud’s 5 stages. STAGE 5: PEER RELATIONSHIPS/ADOLESCENCE It was adolescence that interested Erikson first and most; and the patterns he saw here were the starting points for his thinking about all the other stages. At this stage, adolescents are in search of an identity that will lead them to adulthood. Adolescents make a strong effort to answer the question “Who am I?” Erikson notes the healthy resolution of earlier conflicts can now serve as a foundation for the search for an identity. If the child overcomes earlier conflicts, they are prepared to search for identity. Did they develop the basic sense of trust? Do they have a strong sense of industry to believe in themselves? Without these things, the adolescent is likely to experience confusion about their social role(s), meaning an uncertainty about your place in society and the world. When an adolescent is confronted by role confusion, Erikson says that is likely to produce an identity crisis. Erikson strongly supported the notion that society should provide clear rites of passage – certain accomplishments and rituals that help to distinguish the adult from the child. In one way… Read More

vMEMES #4

PART 4 How complex is people’s thinking? The issue of just how far the bulk of any population ascend the Spiral/Hierarchy – experience the emergence of vMEMES in an ascending sequence – is a contentious one. In 1996 Beck & Cowan conjectured that the percentages of the world’s population dominated by a nodal vMEME in their thinking was:- BEIGE: 0.1% PURPLE: 10% RED: 20% BLUE: 40% ORANGE: 30% GREEN: 10% YELLOW: 1% TURQUOISE: 0.1% The percentages, of course, don’t add up to 100% and there is no breakdown of percentage to continents, cultures or societies. Cowan (Chris Cowan & Nastasha Todorovic, 2006b) has admitted that the figures were a (very!) rough interpretation/extrapolation of various data sets (including United Nations data) while Beck has never commented (for public consumption) on the estimates. Nonetheless, in general it supported the notion that the bulk of the population – the Western population, at least – were not significantly beyond a BLUE (Kohlberg) or BLUE/orange (Loevinger) way of thinking. Further support for this notion came from research using Kohlberg’s concepts. Using what effectively was a 9-stage model incorporating 3 sub-stages, Lawrence Walker, Brian De Vries & Shelley Trevethan (1987) found general agreement with Kohlberg. They interviewed 40 boys and 40 girls… Read More

TURQUOISE/Transcendence

Updated: 19 May 2021 This vMEME is barely present in the world yet. Although there are increasing numbers of people in certain circles – eg: Integral salons – who claim to think in this way, there is yet to be sufficient scientific evidence to say for sure what the TURQUOISE way of thinking is. From the Gravesian approach Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) posit it will be on the collectivistic self-sacrificial side of the Spiral and it will be a more complex way of thinking than Self-Actualisation/YELLOW. Lawrence Kohlberg & Clark Power (1981, p257) note it is “much less unitary and definable”. Beyond this, with only tiny samples and anecdotal evidence, it is as much an untested hypothesis as a reality and descriptors must be read with great caution. Humanistic psychologists like Abraham Maslow (1943) and Carl Rogers (1959) considered Self-Actualisation to be the pinnacle of development of the human mind – the highest level in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. When someone had become all that they could be and fulfilled all their potential, then they could be said to have completely self-actualised. Maslow’s (1956) attempt to be specific about how a self-actualised person would think defined a way of thinking he… Read More

3 Stage Theories of Development #2

PART 2 Stages of Moral Development Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development constitute an adaptation of a psychological model originally conceived of by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1932). Kohlberg, while a Psychology postgraduate student at the University of Chicago, expanded Piaget’s concepts and then developed them throughout the course of his life. The theory holds that moral reasoning, the basis for ethical behaviour, has 6 identifiable developmental stages, the thinking at each more adequate at responding to moral dilemmas than its predecessor. Kohlberg followed the development of moral judgement far beyond the ages studied earlier by Piaget who also claimed that logic and morality develop through constructive stages. Expanding on Piaget’s work, Kohlberg (1963) determined that the process of moral development was principally concerned with justice and that it continued throughout the individual’s lifetime – a notion that spawned dialogue on the philosophical implications of such research. Kohlberg also took the concept beyond Piaget’s model in that he allowed for moral development to be influenced by aspects of the social environment such as what other people might say. (Piaget limited moral development to the effects of the individual’s own active self-discovery.) Kohlberg’s methodology used the Moral Judgement Interview he had first developed… Read More

Bibliography K

 A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H    I    J    K    L    M    N    O    P-Q    R    S     T     U    V    W    X-Y-Z Kadushin, Alfred (1970): ‘Adopting Older Children’ (Columbia University Press) Kagan, Jerome (1976): ‘New Views on Cognitive Development’ in Journal of Youth & Adolescence 5/2 Kagan, Jerome (1984): ‘The Nature of the Child’ (Basic Books, New York NY) Kagan, Jerome (1994): ‘Galen’s Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature’ (Basic Books, New York NY) Kagan, Jerome & Howard Moss (1962): ‘Birth to Maturity: a Study in Psychological Development’ (John Wiley & Sons, New York NY) Kagan, Jerome & Robert Klein (1973): ‘Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Early Development’ in American Psychologist #28 Kagan, Jerome, Steven Resnick & Nancy Snidman (1988): ‘Biological Bases of Childhood Shyness’ in Science #240 Kagan, Soeren (2015): ‘Germany’s Muslim Demographic Revolution’ (Gatestone Institute) http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6423/germany-muslim-demographic (Accessed: 23/11/15) Kahane, Adam (2012): ‘Working together to change the Future: Transformative Scenario Planning’ (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco CA) Kahn, Meehran (2017): ‘UK GDP Growth slows to 0.3% in Q1’ in Financial Times (28 April) Kahn, Stephen, Gary Zimmerman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Jacob Getzels (1985): ‘Relations Between Identity in Young Adulthood and Intimacy at Midlife’ in Journal of Personality & Social Psychology… Read More

Bibliography C

A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H    I    J    K    L    M    N    O    P-Q    R    S     T     U    V    W    X-Y-Z Cadoret, Remi, William Yates, Edward Troughton, George Woodworth & Mark Stewart (1995): ‘Genetic-Environmental Interaction in the Genesis of Aggressivity and Conduct Disorders’ in Archives of General Psychiatry #52 Cadwalladr, Carole (2017): ‘Robert Mercer: the Big Data Billionaire waging War on Mainstream Media’ in The Observer (26 February) Cairns, R B, D J McCombie & K E Hood (1983): ‘A Developmental-Genetic Analysis of Aggressive Behaviour in Mice I: Behavioural Outcomes’ in Journal of Comparative Psychology #97 Caledonian Foundation (2013): ‘Engaging Discussions at So Say Scotland’ https://www.caledonianfoundation.org/index.php/news/44-engaging-discussions-at-so-say-scotland  (Accessed: 2015) Callaway, Ewen (2009): ‘Murderer with ‘aggression genes’ gets Sentence cut’ in New Scientist (3 November) Calvert, Jonathan, George Arbuthnott & Jonathan Leake (2020):  ‘Coronavirus: 38 Days when Britain sleepwalked into Disaster’ in Sunday Times (19 April) Camber, Rebecca (2011): ’Supergran Unmasked: Pensioner who saw off Hammer Raiders speaks out… as Friend reveals She has spent Ten Years fighting Violent Crime’ in Daily Mail (9 February) Cameron, David & Dylan Jones (2010): ‘Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones’ (4th Estate, London) Cameron, Catherine, Stuart Oskamp & William Sparks  (1977): ‘Courtship American… Read More

vMEMES

Updated: 22 December 2020 PURPLE (B-O) thinking works on emotion, security, rituals, tokens, sense of belonging (my family, my friends, my workplace) and is very responsive to peer and family pressures RED (C-P) thinking is assertive (aggressive!), energetic, powerful, indulgent, self-centred and wants to dominate/be the best BLUE (D-Q) thinking is concerned with procedures, routines, order, quality, the correct way of doing things, is highly responsive to the ‘correct’ higher authority and punishes ‘sinners’ ORANGE (E-R) thinking is strategic and future-focussed, wants to achieve and improve, loves technology and innovation, and marks progress – eg: with status and wealth GREEN (F-S) thinking values people – all are equal and to be treated correctly, with decisions made by consensus In which of these ways do you think – at what times and in what contexts/circumstances? These vMEMES or modes of thinking form the second (PURPLE) through to the sixth (GREEN) ‘levels of existence’ in the Gravesian approach, arguably the most advanced map of human needs and motivations developed to date. vMEMES can be thought of as ‘value systems’, ‘core intelligences’ or even ‘mini-selves’. They each have their own way of thinking, sets of needs and motivations, and contextual strengths and weaknesses. The… Read More