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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

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Functionalism

Updated: 18 May 2017 Functionalism is a Structuralist theory – hence it is sometimes known as Structural Functionalism. It is a ‘top-down’ theory that focuses on society rather than the individuals within it. As such, it is a powerful concept for exploring the Lower Right in 4Q/8L and how it influences and is influenced by the Lower Left – structuration, in Anthony Giddens’ (1984) terms. In Functionalism society is the focus because the individual is produced by society – ‘social products’, as George Herbert Mead (1913) termed them. People are the product of all the social influences on them: their family, friends, educational and religious background, their experiences at work, in leisure, and their exposure to the media. All of these influences make them who and what they are and how they perceive themselves: the confluence of schemas in their selfplexes. In this view, people are born into society, play their role in it – like cogs on a wheel – and then die. However, the deaths of individuals do not mean the end of society. Society continues long after they are gone. According to Émile Durkheim (1893), beliefs and moral codes are passed on (memetically) from one generation to the next.… 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

A Company by Neurological Levels

April 2004 Identity – what is it? Distribution and service company Values – what’s important to us? Customers ~ purchasing price (suppliers) ~ profitability ~ workforc Beliefs – what do we believe about what’s important? Need customers to survive and prosper ~ need to know customers’ requirements (close relationship) ~ need customer loyalty ~ need good suppliers – competitive price and availability (close relationship) ~ need efficiency to produce profitability – control costs ~ need loyal workforce – to be fair and honest with them ~ competent ~ need to utilise their values to get commitment ~ flexibility Capabilities – what skills and knowledge do we need? Technical knowledge ~ management skills ~ company knowledge ~ knowledge of customer needs ~ market (price) knowledge Behaviour – what is it we do/should be doing? Supply products and knowledge for customer requirements ~ should have customer focus – research needed into customer needs ~ resource to meet customer needs – profitability impact? How is our environment? Internal: relaxed and comfortable External: highly competitive ~ increasing disloyalty ~ price (not quality) driven ~ decline in OEMs ~ customers want more service and supplier flexibility This was the result of a Neurological Levels-based analysis I facilitated… Read More

Neurological Levels

Updated: 28 May 2016 The Neurological Levels concept was developed by Robert Dilts (1990) taking much of his inspiration from the work of Gregory Bateson (leading anthropologist, philosopher and seminal figure in the early development of NLP – particularly his Logical Levels of Learning construct (1972). For this model of abstracted levels of what we learn and how it affects us, Bateson himself drew on the Logical Typing of mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1910). Taking his cue from Bateson, Dilts conceived a hierarchy of levels the mind uses to order its relationship with the world. Dilts linked these ‘Logical Levels’ to neurological functions and structure of the brain. Thus, Neurological Levels! While the supposed ‘logicality’ of the model has been attacked and the way Dilts’ has used neurology is sometimes open to question – see Peter McNab’s Article, Aligning Neurological Levels -a Reassessment (1999) – almost everyone who has worked with the model testifies to its power to describe what we might call Nominal Level Adaptation. (See: Integrated SocioPsychology.) In other words, the match of Identity – and the Values & Beliefs which flow from Identity – to the Environment in which we find ourselves. The key to a healthy psyche (selfplex),… Read More

Knowing Me, Knowing You

An Integrated SocioPsychology Guide to Personal Fulfilment & Better Relationships Available as a FREE downloadable PDF!!! (see below) Read what they’ve said about this book! “Best Psychology Book of the Year”– Bill Hajdu, Berkeley, California on www.amazon.com 368 pages paperback with comprehensive index, includes 74 diagrams and charts. Available from Trafford Publishing. ISBN 9781412082914 The handsome paperback version of ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ can be purchased directly from the Trafford website and Internet retailers such as Amazon and Books Etc.  ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ can also be ordered via high street chains such as W H Smith and Waterstones and most reputable high street bookstores, using ISBN-10 1412082919 or ISBN-13 9781412082914. ‘Knowing Me, Knowing Y0u’ is also available as a PDF. The PDF contains 373 pages , with comprehensive index, includes 74 diagrams and charts (most in full colour). About ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’… Do you want to know more about you – why you do what do, why you think and feel as you do? Do you want to resolve issues – perhaps that have been troubling you for years…? Do you want to understand others more? Do you want to improve key relationships – so that you and the other… Read More

Integrated SocioPsychology

Updated: 20 December 1920 ‘Integrated SocioPsychology’ is the term I have coined for developing a highly-practical and integrated approach to the behavioural sciences… Integrated – the aim is to learn how all the elements of the behavioural sciences and the complementary ‘hard’ sciences’ of Biology and Neuroscience fit together to explain… Psychology – how and why people think and behave as they do in different contexts in different times… Socio – taking into account group dynamics and the influence of culture and the society people live in as those cultures and societies morph and change This page provides a basic overview of the Integrated approach and how the key models link together. More specific detail on the individual models is available on their linked pages. Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology are fractured fields of study, with several different (and often competing!) schools of thought and even areas of exploration. The history of the behavioural sciences is littered with disputes both between those competing schools (which are accepted academically) and also between academia and ‘fringe’ or ‘alternative’ approaches such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). The structure of an Integrated approach Integration is made possible by building the structure of SocioPsychology around the frame of… Read More

The Meaning of Charlie Hebdo…for Islam and the West

The power of the web has been demonstrated very powerfully the last 5 days in just how many cogent positions have been staked out so rapidly re the Charlie Hebdo murders. It also says something about how powerfully the shootings in Paris have touched so many Westerners emotionally to galvanise such strong responses. That in itself, though, is part of a disturbing narrative that feeds into the terrorists’ hate-fuelled ideology. Just 17 people are massacred in Paris and the Western media – formal and social – goes into meltdown. In comparison the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights documentation of over 76,000 deaths in 2014 in the Syrian conflict – the vast majority innocent civilians – warranted around one smallish article per newspaper – eg: The Guardian’s 28 lines – or one short item per news broadcast. The subtext of this comparison is that French lives are worth an awful lot more than Syrian lives – and this comparison is then easily meta-stated into the Western media being racist, anti-Arab, anti-Islamic, etc, etc. It’s one more piece of evidence to support such frames of reference from a line of evidence that notably includes the Americans counting Western lives lost in Iraq 2003-2011… Read More

The Northampton ‘Supergran’ and the Issues She raises

The footage of ‘supergran’ Ann Timson belting hell out of a bunch of would-be ‘smash ‘n’ grab’ scooter boys at a jewellers in Northampton the other week (7 February, to be precise) has had me musing ever since it was first  broadcast. The fact it is has become a ‘viral phenomenon’, spreading right around the world, has only caused me to muse further. By pure coincidence, a camera man was over the road filming for a documentary and he managed to capture the entire event on film. The footage was aired on ITN News that evening. Within hours, it was on YouTube and received nearly 6,000 views over the next 24 hours. Now there are multiple versions all over YouTube, Daily Motion, etc, using Superman logos and music like Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’, etc, etc, etc. Ann Timson’s onslaught has made news bulletins in the United States, Australia and many other countries. The event itself raises important questions – as does the fact it has become such a ‘viral phenomenon’. Just in case you haven’t seen it or you need a reminder, here’s a slight edit of the original footage…   Ann Timson So what made a 71-year-old grandmother with arthritis in… Read More

David Cameron’s right about Multiculturalism BUT…

This past weekend David Cameron pushed forward considerably ideas his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been moving progressively towards …. In essence, this is to say pretty explicitly that, if you want to be British, you need to buy into the British identity and British values. (Ironically, freed from the collective responsibility of Cabinet, Blair on these issues is almost certainly well to the right of Cameron these days – see: ‘Radical Islam’ and the Return of Tony Blair). Cameron criticised ‘state multiculturalism’ and argued the UK needs a stronger national identity to stop people turning to extremism. With MI6 warning last week that Britain faces an “‘unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers”, Cameron could hardly have ignored the threat from radicalised young Muslims; and it seems logical to ascribe their lack of identification with ‘British values’ as one cause of their radicalisation. In his speech on Saturday (5 February) Cameron accused multiculturalism of leading to a Britain of ‘divided tribes’. The prime minister posited that the multiculturalist dogma, which increasingly dominated political and social thinking from the early 1970s on, had meant the majority had to accord each minority ethnic group respect and the freedom to pursue its… Read More

The Curious Case of being British

by Jon Twigge I am thrilled to be able to publish another contribution by Jon Twigge, an ardent Spiral Dynamics Integral enthusiast and supporter of the Centre of Human Emergence – UK. Jon wrote the piece for his own blog and has graciously consented to it being published here as well. Unusually for me this post contains a little bit of my personal history… Jon What exactly does it mean to be British? Well, for most of my life I lived without really knowing what it meant at all.  At least, not consciously. I have been brought up in a rather sterile environment from the point of race and the world.  I lived most of my young life until I was 18 in a small village in rural Derbyshire in England.  The local village school, that I attended until I was 11, was a Church of England school, nominally at least, and I don’t particularly remember any overt racial, cultural or religious content to my first years at school. I have to admit to having a terrible memory for facts but I don’t recall a single non-white face from my years at infant and junior school.  Perhaps that is not too… Read More