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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

Hood’

Could the Political Centre be making a Comeback?

    Could it just be that, with Bernie Sanders’ 13 April endorsement of Joe Biden as Democratic candidate in November’s presidential election – see the ABC News clip above – and the 4 April ascension of Keir Starmer to leadership of the Labour Party, the ‘centre’ is making a comeback in American and British politics? A new poll reported by The London Economic’s Jack Peat puts the centrist Starmer’s net favourability 50 points ahead of Jeremy Corbyn, the ‘hardcore leftie’ he succeeded. (Of course, Corbyn was not really the Marxist the right-wing media slandered him as, though his views  were well to the left of Labour under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and even Ed Miliband) Meanwhile Sanders’ concession to Biden effectively signals the end of what might be termed the Democrats’ ‘hard left’ campaign to win the nomination for presidential candidate. (By ‘hard left’ here, we mean the leftie side of social democracy; again Sanders is nothing like the Marxist some on the hard right claim he is!) Biden is decidedly centrist in his politics – some might even argue right of centre – but that enables him potentially to pick up leftie Republican votes, especially those who are totally… Read More

The 7th Code

by Don Beck October 2006 Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck is occasionally prone to post what effectively amount to teach-ins or mini-lectures on the Spiral Dynamics e-lists. This is an extract from one such posting in 2000. You can e-mail Don or visit the Spiral Dynamics Integral website to find out more about his work. Clearly, the contours of YELLOW (G-T/Systemic/Authentic) have not been etched in tin much less set in concrete. But, with all due respect to other developmental models, this highlights the uniqueness of the Gravesian/SDi perspective in that it does address, with great specificity, how each new vMEMETIC code actually appears; what are the life conditions that spark and drive it; and how life problems ‘G’ will awaken the capacities (T) to deal with new realities, new challenges and new threats as well. What provides the totem pole for development is, in our view, the accumulation of the vMEMETIC codes or schemes (with the multiple expressions of content or themes) that form societal stacks that maintain all of the awakened codes and set the stage for new ones in the future. This is what we call The Double Helix; namely the interaction between life conditions experienced and the… Read More

Robber’s Cave

Relaunched: 4 March 2018 The Robber’s Cave study is on a par with Stanley Milgrim’s ‘Obedience Experiments’ and Philip Zimbardo’s infamous prison study at Stanford University (Craig Haney, Curtis Bank & Philip Zimbardo, 1973), both for its sheer audaciousness and what it tells us about situational pressures to produce normative influence. Muzafer Sherif had been a growing force in the development of Social Psychology ever since his ‘autokinetic effect’ experiments in 1935 had developed the concept of conformity that would come to be known as informational influence. In fact, Sherif could be considered one of the founders of Social Psychology. His work was also highly thought of by interactionist sociologists, becoming the first psychologist to receive the Cooley-Mead Award for contributions to Social Psychology from the American Sociological Association. By the end of the 1940s his interest in understanding social processes, particularly social norms and social conflict had led him to conceive of developing a field experiment in which pubescent boys would be nurtured into forming 2 distinctive teams with strong group identities to see how conflict between the 2 groups could be exacerbated and then reduced. This would be the basis of the famous and challenging Robber’s Cave study of 1954 (Muzafer Sherif et al, 1961).… Read More

Bibliography S

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 Sabbioni, M E E (1991): ‘Cancer and Stress: a Possible Role for Psychoneuroimmunology in Cancer Research?’ in Cary Cooper & Maggie Watson (eds): ‘Cancer and Stress: Psychological, Biological and Coping Studies’ (Wiley, Chichester) Sachs, Jeffrey (2005): ‘Why Aid does work’ (BBC News) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4210122.stm (Accessed: 01/01/17) Sachs, Jeffrey (2011): ‘Stop this Race to the Bottom on Corporation Tax’ in Financial Times (28 March) Sachs, Wolfgang, Reinhard Loske & Manfred Linz (1998): ‘Greening the North: a Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity’ (Zed Books, London) Saggar, Shammit & Joanna Drean (2001): ‘British Public Attitudes and Ethnic Minorities’ (Performance & Innovation Unit, Cabinet Office, London) Sagi, Abraham, Marinus Van Ijzendoorn, Ora Aviezer, Frank Donnell & Ofra Mayseless (1994): ‘Sleeping out of home in a Kibbutz Communal Arrangement: It makes a Difference for Infant-Mother Attachment’ in Child Development 65/4 Sagi, Abraham, Marinus Van IJzendoorn & Nina Koren-Karie (1991): ‘Primary Appraisal of the Strange Situation: a Cross-Cultural Analysis of Preseparation Episodes’ in  Developmental Psychology 27/4 Sahlins, Marshall (1997): ‘The Original Affluent Society’ in Majid Rahnema, Victoria Bawtree (eds): ‘The Post Development Reader’… Read More

Bibliography H

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 Haaretz Service (2010): ‘Shas Spiritual Leader: Abbas and Palestinians should perish’ (Haaretz) http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/shas-spiritual-leader-abbas-and-palestinians-should-perish-1.310800 (Accessed: 08/08/14) Habermas, Jürgen (1962; translated by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence, 1989): ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society’ (Polity, Cambridge) Hackett, Conrad (2015): ‘5 Facts about the Muslim Population in Europe’ (Pew Research Center) http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/17/5-facts-about-the-muslim-population-in-europe/ (Accessed: 24/11/15) Haggbloom, Steven, Renee Warnick, Jason Warnick, Vinessa Jones, Gary Yarbrough, Tinea Russell, Chris Borecky, Reagan McGahhey, John Powell, Jamie Beavers & Emmanuelle Monte (2002): ‘The 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century’ in Review of General Psychology 6/2 Haggerty, Michael (1999): ‘Testing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: National Quality-of-Life across Time’ in Journal of Social Indicators Research 46/3 Haidt, Jonathan (2001): ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: a Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgement’ in Psychological Review 108/4 Haidt, Jonathan (2005): ‘The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom’ (Basic Books, New York NY) Haidt, Jonathan, Craig Joseph & Jesse Graham (2009): ‘Above and Below Left–Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations’ in… 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

Biological Factors in Crime

Updated: 7 December 2016 Are criminals born or ‘made’? This is a question which has vexed philosophers for millennia and psychologists and sociologists since the dawn of the behavioural sciences early in the 19th Century. The deterministic view offered by biological explanations for criminality – ie: you have no real choice, it’s in your biological make-up – have major implications for how society treats criminals – especially violent ones.  Biological theories assert criminal behaviour has a physiological origin, with the implication that the ‘criminal’, therefore, has difficulty not committing crime because it is ‘natural’ –  ie: the ‘born criminal’ concept. Biological determinism can be used to undermine the legal concept of criminal responsibility: criminals are held to be personally and morally accountable for their actions. Only when the Law of Diminished Responsibility is applied in cases of self-defence and mental illness – and in some countries (eg: France) ‘crimes of passion’ (temporary insanity) – is the defendant assumed not to have acted from their own free will. 3 cases illustrate how biological arguments have been used as mitigating factors to reduce the level of criminal responsibility:- In 1994 Stephen Mobley was sentenced to death for shooting dead the manager of an American branch of Domino’s Pizza. He was also found… Read More