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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

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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

Chesham & Amersham: a Middle-Class Revolt brewing?

It was, of course, only a byelection. There were clearly very important local issues – in particular, the impact of HS2 on the area and fears about the Government’s planning reforms – and the Liberal Democrats have a long history of exploiting local issues with great success at byelections. However, the sheer size of Sarah Green’s victory – overturning a 16,000 Tory majority for an 8,000 Lib Dem majority in a seat that has only ever been Tory – has got a number of pundits looking for national electoral significance in the result. It could be as shallow as “Some voters just don’t like Boris” – as ‘one senior Tory’ told The Guardian’s Katy Balls. Certainly there are many things about Boris Johnson himself – from his dishevelled appearance to his overt contempt for the rule of law – that irk an awful lot of people. However, it may be that the voters of Chesham & Amersham have to come to dislike the narrow-minded, xenophobic, neo-racist, authoritarian and brazenly self-interested-to-the-point-of-outright corruption brand of Toryism that Johnson and his cronies have infected the Conservative Party with. A dislike so intense they broke with lifelong support of the Conservatives and gave their vote to… Read More

Northern Ireland under the Brexit Bus

Well, Wednesday evening’s videos of youths setting a double decker bus ablaze with petrol bombs – see below (courtesy of The Guardian) – seem finally to have got the current surge in violence in Northern Ireland on to at least some of the news channels.   Even so, Northern Ireland was only on 3 front pages yesterday morning – as the montage below demonstrates.  As ex-MP Anna Soubry commented on Thursday night’s Sky News Press Preview, it’s almost as if much of the news media are determined to ignore the spreading violence – preferably in favour of heartening stories of winning the war against Coronavirus. A frozen conflict On Facebook this week I saw Northern Ireland described as a ‘frozen conflict’. Initially I rejected that term. ‘Frozen conflicts’ were the ‘little wars’ Vladimir Putin’s Russia fought on its borders with Georgia – see Tribal War in South Ossettia – and Ukraine – see Hope from the Tragedy of MH17..? and The Madness of Pietro Poroshenko…? Frozen conflicts…wars, official in Ossetia and unofficial in Ukraine, in which the Russians had gained as much as they wanted to or could, in the face of international condemnation and minor economic sanctions. So they simply… Read More

Coronavirus Crisis: can We go back to ‘Normal’?

All governments around the world are still continuing to approach the coronavirus crisis as though a return to ‘normality’ is not only desirable but possible. Boris Johnson used the term several times in yesterday afternoon’s Downing Street briefing. A number of recent reports have revealed how the pandemic is exacerbating existing massive social and economic inequalities, both nationally (eg: Philip Aldrick in The Times) – and globally  (eg: Oxfam). This lunchtime Sky News‘ Nick Martin showed how Covid-19 is increasing poverty in the already desperate town of Oldham. Of course, a return to the kind of normality described in the Oxfam report may desirable for some but abhorrent for others – ultra-Capitalist systems that create “a rigged economy…enabling a super-rich elite to amass wealth in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, while billions of people are struggling amid the worst job crisis in over 90 years.” This is the kind of normality a great many in the Plutocracy – as defined by Guy Standing (2009; 2011) – and their Elite lackeys in the right-wing media and political parties are working towards developing further. (See: How the Plutocrats are waging War on the Bureaucrats…) Not only do a… Read More

Self-Actualisation/YELLOW

Updated: 12 December 2020 One nomenclature Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) have used for the YELLOW vMEME, the first of the 2nd Tier, is ‘Flexiflow’. This captures both the incredible flexibility in this level of thinking and the sense of peak performance Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1993) identifies athletes, musicians, etc, experience when they enter the state of ‘flow’. In both his posthumous works (1971b/2002, p25; 1978/2005, p148), Clare W Graves unequivocally equated his seventh level G-T (YELLOW) to “Maslow’s self-actualising man”. Jane Loevinger (1976, p46) equated her Autonomous Stage of Ego Development with Self-Actualisation and Graves (1978/2005, p444) equated G-T with Autonomous…so it’s clear that Graves and Loevinger, both of them steeped in years of hard research, very much felt they were talking about the same way of thinking as Abraham Maslow (1943; 1954; 1956). However, this equation is not without controversy; nor is the term ‘Self-Actualisation’ used here in quite the same way as it is most commonly in Psychology. So there is some need to clarify our understanding(s) of ‘Self-Actualisation’ before we can benefit fully from this equation with YELLOW. Goldstein’s Self-Actualisation The term ‘Self-Actualisation’ was originally introduced by the Organismic theorist Kurt Goldstein (1934) for the motive to realise… Read More

Race and Demographics: Biden’s Challenge

So, thankfully, Joe Biden got enough Electoral College votes to claim victory in the 2020 US presidential election. However, it is far from the landslide that the more wishful-thinking Democrats had hoped for and which might have obliged Donald Trump to concede defeat. As it is, Trump is threatening a barrage of lawsuits to challenge the results in several states, alleging electoral fraud. Given that a Michigan judge has already rejected the Trump campaign’s allegations as lacking any substance, as reported by CNN’s Jessica Schneider & Laura Jarrett, Trump may find he simply doesn’t have the backing of his sponsors and donors to pursue his case throughout so many courts. According to Sky News’ James Matthews, some of Trump’s closest advisers are against his continuing Tweets about electoral fraud and senior Republicans such as Maryland governor Larry Hogan and Congressman Adam Kinzinger are calling for Trump to cease these allegations. However, given Trump’s history of erratic behaviour, it is entirely possible that he may refuse to accept Biden’s victory and resist his own dismissal, using every tactic available to him, from the courts to white supremacist militias like the infamous Proud Boys. So unpredictable is Trump seen to be that there are… Read More

Prejudice & Discrimination Theories #3

PART 3 Common In-Group Identity Model The Common In-Group Identity Model is a theoretical model proposed by Samuel Gaertner et al (1993) that outlines the processes through which inter-group bias may be reduced.  It is derived from the Social Identity Theory approach to inter-group behaviour. The model describes how intergroup bias can be reduced if members of different groups can be persuaded to see themselves to be part of the same, larger group, then they would develop more positive attitudes of the former out-group members. An individual will change the way they view the out-group through re-categorising former out-group members as members of the enlarged in-group. In other words, their existing schema set is modified by taking on board memes of shared values. Re-categorising is driven by giving the different groups a ‘common out-group’ that they are concerned about. Thus, they start to see themselves as having a shared in-group identity against the shared out-group. Eg: in soccer Manchester United vs Liverpool fan conflicts can be transcended by getting both sets of fans to see themselves as being England supporters vs Scotland supporters. Working together against the common ‘enemy’ creates a sense of homogeneity amongst the former opponents. Importantly, while  re-categorisation… Read More

Social Change #2

Part 2 Lower Left Quadrant and Minority Influence Social heroes usually can achieve little or nothing on their own. They need collaborators and, if they are leaders, they need followers. This means the social hero has to convert others to their cause and, thus, create a minority influence. The more people are converted to the cause, the more conversion to the cause (as a process) picks up momentum – the ‘snowball effect’ (Eddy Van Avermaet, 2001). Eventually the minority grows into a snowball so large that it becomes the majority. The social hero in the Upper Left is influencing culture and thought in the Lower Left. So how does a social hero convert others and how does a minority gain enough converts to become a majority? Giddens posits that people in general have a deep-seated need for ‘ontological security’, that their world is orderly, stable and predictable. Therefore, by their actions most people most of the time reinforce the existing culture and structure, There is a sort-of natural resistance to change. Just how resistant to change will vary as to which vMEMES dominate in a culture; individual resistance will also vary as to where that person is on their Dimensions of Temperament. People… Read More

The Prison Studies #2

PART 2 Evaluation of the Stanford Prison Experiment Most criticisms of Zimbardo’s study are on ethical issues:- Zimbardo deceived the ‘prisoner’ participants, with their arrest at the beginning of the experiment. They were not told partly because final approval from the police wasn’t given until minutes before the arrests were due to begin and partly because the researchers wanted the arrests to come as a surprise. However this was a breach of the ethics of Zimbardo’s own contract that all of the participants had signed It was not ethically acceptable to expose people to such degradation and hostility even with their fully-informed consent Zimbardo being both ‘superintendent’ and chief researcher produced a conflict of roles whereby he lost sight of the harm being done to the participants – in effect he undermined his own competence to conduct the study,  competence of the researcher being somewhat  belatedly recognised as a key ethical issue by the British Psychological Society in 2006 Those who had been guards had to face up to the disconcerting fact that they had been willing to mistreat their prisoners. Guard ‘A’ said in debrief: “I was surprised at myself – I made them call each other names and clean the toilets out with… Read More

SocioPsychological Factors in Crime #4

PART 4 Defining behaviour as crime Picking up from Sutherland’s 9th principle – also discussed earlier when exploring the work of Bonger and considered in Crime & Deviance – the Difference – who decides what is criminal and what is deviant is no simple matter. Nor are there absolute definitions as even Functionalists argue definitions can change over time and between cultures. In the Interactionist view laws are, to all intents and purposes, political products that reflect the power of some groups to impose on others their memes of right and wrong and normality. Thus, Anthony Giddens (1993, p128) writes: “The labels applied to create categories of deviance thus express the power structures of society.” This goes beyond the Marxist view that the social control is about Capitalists using the law to control the working classes.  Howard Becker’s (1963) application of Labelling Theory to crime and deviance posits that, rather than a fixed scenario of the Capitalists dictating values that reflect their interests in society and are enforced via the legal system, in fact politics is a competition between different groups to gain the power to impose their values on others. Routes to such power obviously include legislative institutions such as Parliament… Read More