Categories

Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

Evolutionary Psychology’

A New England from the Racial Abuse of Footballers…?

Many decent people are rightly outraged by the racist abuse heaped on Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho on social media in the wake of them missing their penalty shots in the Euro 2020 final last Sunday. England footballer Tyrone Mings has accused Home Secretary Priti Patel of pretending to be disgusted by racist abuse, after she previously described taking the knee as ‘gesture politics’. Patel had said she was “disgusted” by the online abuse directed at the England trio. However, Mings Tweeted that she had “stoked the fire” by refusing to criticise fans who booed the England team for taking the knee (BBC News). Patel’s boss, Boris Johnson, is also being criticised for not condemning fans booing the England team taking the knee. After England’s final warm-up game, he refused 4 times, when asked by journalists, to condemn fans who had booed players taking part in the anti-racism protest. Thus, when, at last Monday’s Downing Street press conference, he said: “Shame on you [the social media abusers] – I hope you will crawl back under the rock from which you emerged” – the criticism appeared to be more a matter of political expediency than being genuinely heartfelt revulsion. Showing… Read More

Influences, Acknowledgements & Gratitude

Update: 25 October 2019 Along the way, certain people have been particularly influential in terms of career progression and/or personal development; so it’s appropriate to acknowledge as many as I can remember. So here goes… Close friends and relatives My parents Ted & Betty Rice, of course. My uncle George Chandler who, playing guitar in a nightclub jazz trio and building a yacht to sail around the world, epitomised ‘cool’ to an impressionable 10-year-old. Rita Smith, always the aunty I was closest to and her daughters Norma (now Norma Klunder) and Maureen (now Maureen Williams) who embodied the mysteries of ‘teenage girl’ to their younger, only child male cousin. Ex-wives Linda Rice and Jane Rice inevitably have left their marks on me – as have ex-fiancees Jennie Beasty and Val Horsfall. Liz Olson was an American and a fellow Jefferson Starship fan who flew across the Atlantic to challenge some of my precepts! My 2 oldest friends, Chris Scurrah and David Burnby have been hugely influential in very different ways – Chris for inspiring me and supporting me to become a musician and Dave for supporting me in applying the Gravesian approach to real life. My stepdaughter Viki Harris has sometimes forced me to think about things differently… Read More

Is Sexual Infidelity Inevitable? #2

PART 2 Are environmental factors important? Looking at this from an Integrated SocioPsychology perspective, we can say that the Evolutionary concepts fit with the BEIGE vMEME’s need to reproduce and the Sociobilogical identification of the role of bond-producing hormones in sex gives us a BEIGE-PURPLE link into PURPLE’s need to belong to our lover. So how does it so often go so wrong? An important clue here is provided by a 1994 study by Georg Sasse et al. Their research indicated that, from a (large) sample of 1600, only 1.4% of Swiss children were born to biological fathers not named on their birth certificates. A staggeringly low figure when set against the 10%-30% claimed for Britain. Are the Swiss genetically different from Britain and much of the rest of the Western world? The answer is almost certainly a ‘yes’ – but a very qualified and extremely minor ‘yes’ and probably not in ways which would explain such a statistical difference. So we have to look at environmental factors – the Stress side of the Diathesis-Stress equation. Swiss society is notoriously BLUE – so much so that the polite manners, conformity to rules and general mechanical nature of much of what goes… Read More

What is Romantic Love? #3

PART 3 Triangle of Love Following on from their work on the famous  Love Quiz, Phil Shaver & Cindy Hazan  (Phil Shaver, Cindy Hazan & Donna Bradshaw, 1988) proposed that love is composed of 3 behavioural systems:- attachment caregiving sexuality The 3 systems interact to produce the adult love style. According to Shaver, Hazan & Bradshaw, the attachment and caregiving systems are acquired in infancy. The latter is knowledge gained about how one cares for others, learned by modelling the behaviour of the primary attachment figure – effectively an internal working model of John Bowlby’s Continuity Hypothesis. The sexuality system is also learned in relation to early attachment – eg: insecure-avoidant individuals, with their PURPLE vMEME’s safety-in-belonging needs unfulfilled, are more likely to have the view that sex without love is pleasurable There is considerable correspondence with the work of Berscheid & Walster, as well as the Triangle of Love theory of Robert J Sternberg (1986). Shaver, Hazan & Bradshaw, for example, proposed that companionate love would include attachment and caregiving but not necessarily sexuality. Passionate or romantic love might involve only sexuality. Sternberg’s theory is, in his own words, a theory of ‘consummate love’, comprised of components or elements. The model is illustrated below… Sternberg explains the… Read More

Citizen-Driven Community and Nation Building

by Bjarni Snæbjörn Jónsson 7 June 2018 I am honoured to publish this ‘guest feature’ on the MeshWORKS conecept by the remarkable Bjarni Snæbjörn Jónsson.  His main research interests lie in large systems development through public participation.  He was a founding member of The Anthill in Iceland which organized a cross-sectional National Assembly in 2009 involving abt. 1000 randomly sampled citizens which were physically joined for a day to formulate the Icelandic nation‘s future superordinate goals, following the financial crisis of 2008 which hit Iceland particularly hard. These goals were at the centre of the drive for constitutional reform which has dominated Icelandic politics since. Bjarni’s feature originally appeared in  Innovative Development: Emerging Worldviews and Systems Change (Integral Publishers, August 2015), edited by the late Tom Christensen. It is reproduced here with Bjarni’s express permission and encouragement. With the exception of some minor formatting changes and a several links added, it is reproduced exactly as it appeared in ‘Innovative Development’. To maintain the integrity of the piece as published, I have retained Bjarni’s use of the SDi terminology. However, for the purposes of this site, readers should effectively susbstitute ‘Gravesian’ for ‘SDi’. The truth is not to be found in books, not even good books. The truth… Read More

Lives on the Spiral

Personal Reflections On The Influence Of SDi ‘Lives on the Spiral’ is one of 2 contributions commissioned from me by Tom Christensen for his compendium, Developmental Innovation: Emerging Worldviews and Individual Learning (Integral Publishers, August 2015). Originally the work was to be entitled ‘SDi Applied’ as Tom wanted to present chapters which reflected Don Beck’s ongoing development of Clare W Graves’ research. Accordingly, Tom wanted the primary term used to be SDi rather than Spiral Dynamics or the ‘Graves Model’. Although I readily acknowledge my debt to Don Beck (and Chris Cowan, for that matter), I have never operated under the SDi umbrella, preferring to use terms such as the Gravesian approach. To maintain the integrity of the piece as published, I have retained the SDi terminology. However, readers should know that effectively I mean ‘Gravesian’. Tom ended up with so many strong contributions – including from the likes of Said E Dawlabani, Elza Maalouf, Barbara N Brown and Fred Krawchuk – that he and Integral Publishers split the material into 2 volumes: the first on Systems Change and the second on Individual Learning. Both my contributions are in the second book. I’ve had an interest in Psychology since my first year at… Read More

2006

‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ 1988-1996    1997   1998     1999     2000     2001    2002      2003     2004     2005     2006     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013     2014      2015     2016     2017     2018      2019     2020    2021-2023 21st Century Group     HemsMESH     Humber MeshWORKS     Humberside MESH Network January: Completed longer programmes of counselling & therapy for 2 clients. Commentary: Having started to use aspects of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy the previous Summer, I now found myself using both it and elements of Psychodynamic (Freudian) for these clients. Often the NLP-type therapeutic interventions I’ve favoured resolve issues for clients in a relatively short space of time. However, by coincidence, I took on 2 cases almost simultaneously where the complexity of the issues required longer-than-usual intervention, using a range of strategies. February: Pre-release copy of ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ received ringing praise from L Michael Hall, developer of the Meta-States concept. Commentary: The inspiration to write came from a combination of experience, research and my blossoming understanding of how a cohesive meta-approach could be developed to align and integrate the all-too fractured behavioural sciences. While there were clearly others moving in a similar ‘integrated’ direction – eg: Peter McNab (excellence for all)… Read More

2005

Busy, Quiet 1988-1996    1997   1998     1999     2000     2001    2002      2003     2004     2005     2006     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013     2014      2015     2016     2017     2018      2019     2020    2021-2023 21st Century Group     HemsMESH     Humber MeshWORKS     Humberside MESH Network January: My article, The SME Spiral, published in Quality World, the monthly journal of the Institute of Quality Assurance. Article distributed directly to its membership by London Excellence. January-February: Contributed 2-hour brief introductory sessions on Integrated SocioPsychology to the inaugural meetings of Hull’s 7 Community Development Workers Networks. Commentary: These area networks were Hull City Council Regeneration Services’ response to Government pressure to develop means of collecting more feedback and facilitating more collaboration from workers involved in various initiatives at the ‘sharp end’ of social regeneration work. Kate Bowers, one of the Hull area directors, saw my presentation on Integrated SocioPsychology as a lure to get community development workers from various agencies along to the meetings. With several of the network meetings oversubscribed, Kate was proved right! February: Invited at short notice to contribute to ‘How can we think better’ feature on BBC Radio 2’s The Jeremy Vine Show but unable to take… Read More

2003

Change Engineer, Psychology Teacher! 1988-1996    1997   1998     1999     2000     2001    2002      2003     2004     2005     2006     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013     2014      2015     2016     2017     2018      2019     2020    2021-2023 21st Century Group     HemsMESH     Humber MeshWORKS     Humberside MESH Network January: Kicked off the New Year with a Cobus  planning summit. Led by Steve Beevers, of course, the session also featured Steve’s wife, Susan Rose , a trainer and consultant in her own right, and Lloyd Thomas, another leading light from 21st Century Group days. Commentary: After something of a mixed year for Cobus (with minmal involvement from me), this was an attempt to reinvigorate the company. For much of the previous year, Steve had been distracted from his consultancy work by getting a new business, Cyclerax, off the ground. In truth, little real activity came out of the planning session and the more lucrative Cyclerax largely dominated Beevers’ thinking over the next few years. January: Started working with the Consortium for Learning Board on Phase 2 of their Business Plan. January: Asked to do what I called ‘Personal Therapy’ with ‘Jasmine’, a heroin ‘addict’ wanting to quit the drug. Commentary: I wouldn’t pretend for a second… Read More

Biological Factors in Crime #2

PART 2 Hormones In 1980 Dan Olweus et al measured blood testosterone level in institutionalised delinquent and non-delinquent 16-year-old boys and assessed aggression using a questionnaire. High levels of self-reported physical and verbal aggression were associated with higher levels of testosterone – though the results were not statistically significant. It was also noted that those with higher levels of testosterone were likely to respond more vigorously in response to challenges from teachers and peers. John Archer (1991), in a meta-analysis of 5 studies covering 230 males, found a low positive correlation between testosterone and aggression. However, the type of participant and the form and measurement of aggression differed substantially between the studies. Angela Book, Katherine Starzyk & Vernon Quensy (2001), in a meta-analysis of 45 studies, found a mean correlation of 0.14 between testosterone and aggression – though John Archer, Nicola Graham-Kevan & Michelle Davies (2005) challenged Book, Starzyk & Quinsey’s findings on the grounds of methodological problems with the study which meant that a correlation of 0.08 was more appropriate.  James Dabbs et al (1987) measured salivary testosterone in 89 violent and non-violent criminals and found those with a history of primarily violent crime had the highest levels of testosterone whereas… Read More