Dennis Fox’s Weblog

I left the hyperbolic “First International Academic Conference on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Pathways to Peace” halfway through its second day. The conference had its positive moments. I met a few interesting people, but only a couple whose political take on things left them as frustrated as I was. For the most part my previously discussed hesitations about whether to participate proved to be on target. Maybe someday I’ll learn to trust my instincts and stop trying to manufacture optimism.

Mazin Qumsiyeh attended the first day. He and I both tried to raise critical points about the underlying even-handed, equal-victimization assumptions. Except for our own presentations to smaller groups, though, we could only ask questions at the end of keynote talks. The schedule left no time for the entire group to address what we both thought central: the implications of forging ahead without considering whether their basic framework made sense. We asked our questions, and were met with polite interest, but no follow-up.

One thing that did surprise me - to show my own naiveté -  was the lack of Palestinian participation. The conference was billed as co-sponsored by JANIP, the Jewish-American Network for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, and ATFP, the American Task Force on Palestine. And the featured speakers included almost as many Palestinian or other Arab academics as Jewish (Israeli and American). I knew the motivating force was Moises Salinas, whose book on the psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve reviewed critically. And I knew the conference theme — working toward something like the Geneva Initiative - was more attuned to Israeli perspectives than Palestinian. But despite this I did think they’d have actual Palestinians more or less on their wavelength in the room. But I was wrong. The actual conference program reveals the paucity of Arab names.

When I asked about this disjunction during a lunch-time announcement break (since there was no time scheduled for this sort of discussion), the response was predictable. We tried to get more Palestinians, but they didn’t come. The ATFP is not an academic organization, and so doesn’t have JANIP’s connections. But although there were regrets about this, there was zero discussion of whether this Palestinian absence was one more sign that the underlying assumptions were, by their very even-handedness, tilted toward Israeli interests.

Many of the Jewish attendees were affiliated with JANIP and/or Meretz-USA, an affiliate of Israel’s left-Zionist Meretz party. There were a lot of members of the campus-based Union of Progressive Zionism. The conference was, in reality, a strategy session of these inter-connected political groups rather than a serious scholarly effort to get at the root of the problem.

Mazin Q, a geneticist by training, pointed out in his talk that the group was focusing on symptoms and moving to treatment without having come up with an adequate diagnosis. I made much the same point using other terminology (Academic Objectivity, Political Neutrality, and Other Barriers to Israeli-Palestinian Reconciliation). Thinking about this as I drove home yesterday, I boiled it down to this: In approaching an issue such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, academics claiming objectivity should begin with no preconceived notions about either the cause of the underlying problem or the preferred solution. This conference, though, explicitly rejects the usefulness of looking at history and responsibility, and aims explicitly for a particular outcome. These assumptions make the scholarly garb pretty feeble. They also demonstrate a main point of my presentation, that the pose of objectivity more often than not supports a status quo in which those with power stay in power.

As I’ve reiterated endlessly here, proper diagnosis should take into account how existing injustices came about. Polls that show majority Palestinian support for a two-state solution, which the conference stalwarts rely on heavily, don’t really get to whether Israel would possibly agree to the kind of two-state solution most Palestinians think fair. My own sense is that, in addition to a viable state, Palestinians want Israeli acknowledgment of its responsibility for Palestinian oppression and some method of making up for that past to the extent feasible. Some people at the conference agreed this is reasonable, but the more formal presentations and suggestions made it clear that Israel should not be expected to delve into the past.

There was a lot of conference talk about generalizations and stereotypes, a lot of psychologizing about people on both “extremes” who don’t quite see things as they really are, who don’t understand their own cognitive biases. This got pretty thick, but not once did I hear a presenter speculate about whether their own analyses might fall into the same trap.

I was reminded, as I had feared, of my experience last summer at the Minneapolis Dialogue on the Wall panel discussion, another public event that became a Jewish-centric forum where the polite search for peace and reconciliation meant an even-handed process that excluded reference to justice, human rights, and law. It just astonishes me, over and over, that so many people claiming progressive motivation can dismiss these concerns as irrelevant, not even worth talking about.

Technorati Tags: critical psychology, dialogue, international law, Israel, Jewish State, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Moises Salinas, neutrality, Palestine, Reconciliation, social psychology

Presented at the “First International Academic Conference on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Pathways to Peace” - New Britain, Connecticut, March 2008.

I have previously discussed my hesitations about whether to attend this conference. The next posting describes my post-conference frustrations.

This paper is also posted on my website.

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Academic Objectivity, Political Neutrality, and Other Barriers to Israeli-Palestinian Reconciliation

The declared goal of this conference is to “highlight the contribution that social scientific and humanistic research and scholarship can bring towards peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians” in order to achieve a “just and equitable solution.” That sounds pretty good. Unfortunately, I come here today skeptical that traditional academic research and scholarship will bring a lasting solution that is also just and equitable. Before turning to Israel and Palestine, though, I want to make three brief points about the relevance of academic assumptions and practices to political issues more generally, and then a word about underlying assumptions in conflict resolution.

Academic Assumptions and Practices

First, academic research is not as objective and value-free as traditionally imagined. Even in the hard sciences, our personal, professional, and political biases inevitably come into play, from the choice of theoretical model and framing of research questions to the scramble for funding and selection of methodology to the analysis and presentation of findings and policy recommendations (Rein, 1976). Most significantly, the pose of objectivity and ethical neutrality that often masks personal preferences and institutional inertia favors the powerful at the expense of others. This point may seem obvious to those of you in disciplines where critical approaches have received significant attention, such as sociology (Levine, 2004) and anthropology (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997), law (Kairys, 1998; Unger, 1986), pedagogy (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985; Freire, 1970; Illich, 1971), and maybe even geography (Mitchell, 2000). But in my own field of psychology, which is central to much of this conference, endorsement of traditional values, assumptions, and practices remains particularly strong despite abundant activist, feminist, radical, and postmodern critiques (Brown, 1973; Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997; Fox, Prilleltensky, & Austin, 2009; Martín-Baró, 1994; Sarason, 1981; Tolman, 1994; Wilkinson, 1986).

Technorati Tags: dialogue, international law, Israel, Jewish State, Moises Salinas, one-state solution, Palestine, Reconciliation, social psychology, two-state solution

(more…)

Another proposal I’m involved in is for the August conference of the American Psychological Association. Since I’m mostly outside institutionalized academia these days, I don’t often go to APA, but this summer’s conference will be right here in Boston. With a few friends certain to show up, doing a session together might even be fun.

Thomas Teo, Isaac Prilleltensky, and I are proposing a Conversation Hour on the topic Critical Psychology Issues. Instead of a formal panel to read prepared papers, the conversation format is designed to generate discussion with whoever shows up. Here’s our proposal:

Critical psychology has generated an increasing number of books, journals, conferences, and other components of academic respectability. However, despite a general critique of mainstream psychology and a concern for social justice, it remains difficult to define critical psychology by consensus and to identify the principles its various approaches share. Two participants in this conversation hour — Dennis Fox and Isaac Prilleltensky — have just co-edited (with Stephanie Austin) the second edition of Critical Psychology: An Introduction; and Thomas Teo has recently published a book on the history and theory of the critique of psychology.

From these vantage points, the participants seek to raise and discuss a number of questions, including the following:

(a) Allegiances: Are critical psychologists primarily psychologists interested in theoretical rigor, advocating political goals only because they happen to be compatible with critical theory? Or, are we motivated by sources outside psychology such as Marxism, feminism, or anarchism and are we primarily activists interested in social change, using psychology’s theory and methods only when they happen to coincide with our politics?

(b) Methods: Should critical psychologists use traditional positivist methods to expose inequality and injustice and foster political and institutional reform, or should we reject methods that strengthen mainstream claims to legitimacy? Are qualitative methods more appropriate for critical psychology?

(c) Legitimacy: Should critical psychologists claim special expertise as psychologists to advocate social change, or does rejecting positivist methods reduce our rationale for doing so?

(d) Moral relativism: Can we advocate politically preferred values such as equality and empowerment or must we abandon all value preferences as culturally determined?

(e) Audience, style, and diversity: In our writing, conferencing, and teaching can we escape the conventional boundaries of academic life or should we adhere to academic norms? Is it at all important to answer these questions?

The three of us bring to this conversation hour a variety of perspectives on these and other issues within critical and radical psychology. I’ve worked with Isaac Prilleltensky, now Dean of the School of Education at the University of Miami, for about 15 years. Together we co-edited the first edition of Critical Psychology: An Introduction in 1997 and, as noted above, we’re now working on the second edition with Stephanie Austin, a former student of both Isaac and Thomas. We also co-founded RadPsyNet (Radical Psychology Network) in 1993 and have worked on a number of other projects. Thomas Teo is a professor at York University in Toronto, in the History and Theory of Psychology section. His 2005 book is The Critique of Psychology: From Kant to Postcolonial Theory. He is also writing a key chapter for our new critical psychology book describing the development of, and trends within, critical psychology.

The new edition of Critical Psychology, to be published in 2009, will address more directly the dilemmas critical psychologists confront. For my own approach to some of these issues, see my website.

Technorati Tags: American Psychological Association, critical psychology, Isaac Prilleltensky, positivism, social psychology, Stephanie Austin, Thomas Teo, RadPsyNet

In September I noted here a planned academic conference in Connecticut next March on Israeli/Palestinian “Pathways to Peace.” I also described my hesitations about its focus, which seems much in line with the  book Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Moises F. Salinas, which I reviewed here.

Despite my cautions, I tried to arouse interest in collaborating on a panel discussion on any of several relevant issues. No luck. But in the end I decided to submit a presentation proposal on my own. Here’s the proposal. Reflecting several themes I’ve touched on previously, it’s titled “Academic Objectivity, Political Neutrality, and Other Barriers to Israeli-Palestinian Reconciliation”.

It is not self-evident that academic research can help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A traditional academic stance often promises more than it delivers. Conventional norms highlight approaches adaptable to status quo requirements while relegating to the sidelines scholarship that challenges underlying assumptions. Efforts to extend boundaries are routinely dismissed as impractical or irrelevant.

Norms demanding the appearance of objectivity mask the passion that drives researchers into contentous fields to begin with while over-emphasizing rock-no-boats approaches. They also reinforce the ideological belief that significant social problems derive from poor data rather than conflicting values and access to power. The combination of academic objectivity, political neutrality, and the language and styles of even-handed mediation and dialogue should be treated cautiously precisely because it is so powerful. When it gets things wrong, the damage can be significant.

In this paper I will apply these considerations to various approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, although this conference’s Call for Proposals “encourage[s] researchers from all sides of the conflict to send their proposals,” the primary sponsors all seek a two-state solution representing what many consider to be an international consensus. it is not clear if this underlying goal will be open to reassessment.

Similarly, assuming an equivalence of perception and victimization, depoliticized models based on neutrality-based negotiation, mediation, and dialogue often discount appropriate external standards. Approaching issues initially as a neutral can help identify complex issues for further exploration, but a primary research goal should be to sort through complexity as a means of assessing responsibility. That does not mean taking sides. It does mean using reasonable principles and standards regardless of which side benefits more. Scholarship that reinforces inaccurate perceptions is unlikely to lead to stable outcomes.

I’ll let you know if they accept the proposal.

Technorati Tags: academic objectivity, dialogue, Israel, Moises Salinas, Palestine, Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain, Reconciliation, social psychology, Zionism

Book Review of Moises F. Salinas (2007), Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

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This is an electronic version of an article published in the online journal of SPSSI, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Citation: Dennis Fox, Can Social Psychology Depoliticize the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (OnlineEarly Articles). doi:10.1111/j.1530-2415.2007.00130.x
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Moises F. Salinas seeks in Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict to outline “some of the social and psychological factors that are central to the conflict and its resolution.” The author deserves credit for bringing this sensitive subject to an undergraduate psychology audience. Perhaps unsurprisingly for such a complex conflict, though, this brief book promises somewhat more than it delivers.

After a useful introductory overview emphasizing competing historical narratives, the book’s four main chapters review research findings demonstrating the impact of stereotypes and prejudice, hate (extremism, dehumanization, and violence), pain (trauma), and hope (reconciliation and the psychology of peace). Some of the summarized research is particularly revealing of Israeli and Palestinian attitudes and perceptions, and the level is appropriate to the target audience in social psychology, Middle East studies, and similar courses. Each chapter ends with two illustrative interview transcripts, one of a Jewish Israeli, one of a Palestinian from either Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank. A brief epilogue reiterates the book’s main point: “the obstacles to achieving peace are more psychological than political.”

Despite its helpful literature review, Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain has several perplexing omissions. At the methodological level, Salinas tells us almost nothing about his “dramatic ethnographic interviews” (p. xxv). Instead of an extended description of what must have been a challenging enterprise, a single paragraph notes the “innovative methodology” and the help of “250 Palestinian and Jewish Israeli student interviewers.” Eight transcripts, varying widely in scope, method, and style, appear after the relevant chapter without explanation or assessment of interviewees’ statements, some of which are confusing, disjointed, and even shocking. Student readers accustomed to standard research reports will wonder about many details, such as whether the interviewers received course credit and what their instructions were. The author does not explain how he used these interviews to help identify his themes or whether instead they merely illustrate the traditional social psychological points he intended to make anyway. I could find no citation to a more extensive research report.

Also left hanging is the 32-page appendix, which presents the full text of the Geneva Accord, a peace agreement proposed in 2003 by prominent Palestinian and Israeli political figures without official authorization. Salinas explains that the proposal parallels similar efforts supported by “the majority of both peoples [who] agree (or at least are resigned) on the broad parameters” of “a two-state solution with borders approximating the pre-1967 armistice lines; compensation to all 1948 and 1967 Palestinian refugees, while only a smaller group of them would be allowed to return to Israel proper; [and] a joint solution for Jerusalem that will allow both sides to claim some sovereignty” (p. xiii). Instead of using this document’s many controversial specifics and omissions to demonstrate how a future reconciliation process might fare, however, Salinas does little more than point to the proposal as the basis for a solution.

A more substantive concern is that the book’s even-handed tone studiously avoids the politics behind its analysis. Some will consider this an advantage, required by academic norms demanding at least the appearance of objectivity. Sometimes, though, avowed neutrality deflects the gaze from much that is relevant. Readers should always wonder how an author’s background and commitments affect choices about what evidence to credit and what lessons to draw.

In this case, the author’s insistence that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is social psychological rather than political and that “perception is more important than reality” may reflect more than just straightforward reading of the research and traditional academic awareness of complexity. Indeed, the best clue to Salinas’s own views comes not in his endorsement of the Geneva Accord but in the book’s concluding “About the Author” page. Here we learn that the Mexican-born Salinas, who lived in Israel for several years and took part in left-Zionist peace activities before moving to the United States, was “one of fourteen young Zionist leaders worldwide to be honored with the first Herzl Awards from the World Zionist Organization [in 2004 ] … for his contributions to the Zionist movement.” At the risk of impoliteness, it is worth asking if this personal history might affect the book’s structure and conclusions. Salinas doesn’t say.

One example is the book’s shunting aside Middle East history after the brief introduction. That makes sense if one considers all perceptions equally valid or even equally invalid, or if conflict is defined as a technical problem rather than an indication of injustice and oppression, or if the proposed ahistorical process leads to a politically preferred result. It might make less sense to Ibrahim, one of Salinas’s interviewees, who says the only “really unlikely” alternative to permanent total war is that “the large countries will force Israel to sign and agree with international law.”

Salinas doesn’t tell us if Ibrahim’s appeal to an external legal standard should matter. Instead, the chapter on reconciliation emphasizes relevant but incomplete subjects: paying more attention to different negotiation and communication styles, creating more effective procedures, providing alternative cultural and educational settings, and so on. Although Salinas notes Israel’s superior negotiating power, he does not address a central issue: whether meaningful reconciliation requires acknowledging past injustice and committing one’s side to end it. It is not just the violent extremists the author criticizes who reject splitting the difference through decontextualized dialogue and then moving on.

What form reconciliation might take is particularly touchy now that Israel’s Arab citizens increasingly define themselves as Palestinian and insist that their country become a “state for all its citizens” rather than a state for the worldwide Jewish people, while Palestinian society in Gaza and the West Bank continues to fragment. Which assumptions are up for grabs? Which aren’t? A text designed to help students understand complexity should broaden exploration rather than narrow it.

The problem is not that Salinas is a Zionist activist. The problem rather is that he does not consider how his own political identity might shape his argument, a possibility very relevant to the book’s discussion of negotiation complications. Knowledgeable readers on both sides, thus, are likely to find the author’s approach frustratingly off the mark. More troubling, those less knowledgeable won’t be able to dissect Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain’s ideological underpinnings unless their instructors also assign more varied supplemental readings. Those supplements might help students recognize that Moises Salinas may be his own best example of how preexisting assumptions can shape both political and social scientific analysis.

Technorati Tags: conflict resolution, international law, Israel, academic objectivity, Palestine, social psychology, Zionism

I’ve been asked to publicize this March conference. First the publicity, then my hesitations.

“Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Pathways to Peace”

March 28-30, 2008

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS DUE NOVEMBER 30, 2007

Sponsored by:

• Central Connecticut State University
• Jewish Academic Network for Israeli-Palestinian Peace
• American Task force for Palestine
• Geneva Initiative North America

The goal of the conference will be to highlight the contribution that social scientific and humanistic research and scholarship can bring towards peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. Presentations and panels will focus on research examining the factors fueling the longest conflict of modern times, and contributions with instrumental ideas to achieve a just and equitable solution to the conflict.

The meeting will include keynote speakers, concurrent presentations and panels. We will strive to maintain a balance between Israeli, Palestinian and other U.S. and  international speakers and encourage researchers from all sides of the conflict to send their proposals.

Presentations will highlight research regarding obstacles and opportunities to the achievement of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to) research in:

• Social and psychological factors in the conflict
• Historical, philosophical, and theological issues
• Economic factors and cooperation
• Demographic realities and solutions
• Geographic obstacles to peace
• Negotiations – Models, perceptions and strategies

Given my recent experience participating in the Dialogue on the Wall in Minneapolis, which left me feeling burned by the moderator’s acknowledged failure to treat Palestinians in the audience even-handedly, I’m proceeding cautiously. Besides, conferences based on conventional academic norms about appropriate topics and styles generally leave me frustrated and worn out; that problem is likely to be magnified when the focus is Israel and Palestine.

Another issue: The chair of the conference is Moises Salinas, a JANIP member who has written a new book called Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. My critical review of the book will soon appear in ASAP, the online journal of SPSSI (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues). The book, which so far has gotten positive reviews elsewhere, reflects what seems to me a narrowly focused social psychological conflict-resolution analysis, devoid of political context, that happens to match Salinas’s own position as a left-Zionist Meretz member who supports the Geneva Accord. In brief, the book emphasizes things like taking into account the different negotiating styles of Israelis and Palestinians and downplays or ignores history, justice, and law — crucial concerns also dismissed by the rabbi who moderated last month’s Minneapolis panel.

Perhaps not coincidentally, neither justice nor law appears in the conference’s list of suggested topics.

So when Salinas asked me to spread word of the conference, I asked in return if it would be open to people who do not share the two-state goal of the sponsoring organizations or who depart from mainstream perspectives in other ways. Encouragingly, he responded by saying the organizers had already said yes:

[A]s long as a paper was methodologically sound (for the discipline) and that it was an analysis of obstacles/opportunities to end the conflict (not ‘Side Bashing’), it should be welcome. We have a wide field of reviewers that espouse many points of view, but we’ll do our best to keep political views out of the reviewing process.

Salinas added that a panel on the issue of Single State/Two-State Solution would be welcome.

That’s encouraging. So right now I’m leaning toward submitting something, probably along the lines of things I’ve written about here and on my website. Several other possible panels come to mind, such as the relevance for peace and justice of Israel’s effort to be both a Jewish and a democratic state and the Palestinian divide over how much compromise is feasible or acceptable. For the moment I’m assuming political criteria won’t be imposed later, perhaps masked by overly zealous “academic” concerns. But after Minneapolis, I’m taking nothing for granted.

Technorati Tags: critical psychology, Israel, Palestine, social psychology, Zionism

I won’t be at next week’s American Psychological Association convention in San Francisco, but those of you in the area may want to join a series of talks and a Friday rally in opposition to APA’s weak policy on psychologists who participate in interrogations and torture. Schedules and other details at Psychologists for an Ethical APA.

Philip Zimbardo’s response to critics of his new book, The Lucifer Effect, includes a useful paragraph relevant to a wide variety of situations, ranging from the prison abuses Zimbardo addresses here to a wide variety of contexts, including the actions of Israelis and Palestinians that outsiders often find so incomprehensible.

Zimbardo says this:

Before turning to the criticism that is most personally distressing regarding understanding of the Abu Ghraib abuses, it is important to mention that while personality and social psychologists spar about the relative contributions of dispositions and situations, we have ignored the most significant factor in the behavioral equation–the System. “The System consists of those agents and agencies whose ideology, values, and power create situations and dictate the roles and expectations for approved behaviors of actors within its spheres of influence. “Bad Systems” create “Bad Situations” create “Bad Apples” create “Bad Behaviors,” even in good people. (Lucifer, p. 445-6) It is not possible to really understand what happened at Abu Ghraib without a comprehensive appreciation of the influences of the Military and Civilian chain of command operating top-down in that prison and other detention centers that were created as part of the “war on terror.” When understanding complex behavior in the real world, beyond our laboratories or classroom surveys and personality scale data collection, it is essential to begin with a systems level top-down analysis because that is where the real power lies. Such understanding gives us the necessity leverage to develop public health paradigms designed to change unacceptable situations as well as the perpetrators of evil functioning in those situations (See Haney & Zimbardo, In press).

This is a touchy issue on many accounts, but I think Zimbardo is right to remind us that we all operate within systems we had no part in creating. Part of the touchiness has to do with blame within the criminal justice context. If bad acts are caused by circumstances rather than by choice, then what justification is there for legal-system judgments of guilt and punishment?

Within the Israeli/Palestinian context that has concerned me most directly in recent years, it is common to hear people on both sides ascribe purely personality-related attributions for the destructive actions of those on the other side. Even within the recent Fatah-Hamas warfare in Gaza, supporters of one faction often jumped to personality attributions to explain the actions of those on the other.

A couple of years ago I noted a meeting in Tel Aviv with members of Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers who amassed photographs and testimonies documenting the abuses they and their peers had perpetrated on ordinary Palestinians living in Hebron. They generally blamed themselves for having failed to live up to their own sense of morality — a dispositional account — but they also described the situational pressures leading them and so many others to commit what they considered to be evil acts.

This is the System Zimbardo emphasizes. In teaching social psychology, the tendency is to focus on the immediate situation (if not, increasingly and unfortunately, simply on the individual’s own inner perceptions). That’s often how Zimbardo’s classic work on the Stanford Prison Experiment is presented. Here, though, Zimbardo emphasizes the larger system and looks for accountability higher up the chain. That may not be the only place to look within a criminal law context, but it’s the first place to look if the goal is to end evil-producing systems.

One of the thing that attracts me to anarchism is its opposition to hierarchical systems of authority. Most anarchists have a somewhat rosier view of human nature than do people who think strong authority is the only thing that keeps evil in check. But I’ve always liked this quote from Paul Goodman’s Humanizing our Future, which I used in an article I wrote more than twenty years ago when I was a graduate student at Michigan State University. Coincidentally, that’s where many of the signers of the criticism Zimbardo is responding to are situated:

[T]he beauty of the decentralist, anarchist position is that nobody can do much harm….[If] people are corrupt as hell, therefore don’t give anybody any power…because the people who have power are not going to be any better.

This still makes sense.

Last year I posted several entries describing what I called “social psychology essences.” I’ve re-worked that series into an essay, now retitled Five Social Psychology Essentials and published at the new on-line social psychology magazine,  In-Mind, short for Inquisitive-Mind. You can read the full piece at In-Mind if you register, which also allows you to comment on articles, participate in discussions, etc.

Or you can read it on my website.

In-Mind is an effort by European social psychology graduate students to generate interest in social psychology and offer an outlet primarily, but not only, for graduate student writing aiming to reach the general public. Although their site is excited about, and embedded in, mainstream social psychology, the editors seem open to publishing alternative and critical perspectives. Try it!

Catching up on other interests beyond my recent Israel/Palestine trip, a special issue of the Annual Review of Critical Psychology on Critical Psychology in a Changing World includes two dozen articles on the various strands of critical psychology developing around the world.

There is no article on critical psychology in Israel, perhaps for reasons I’ve considered elsewhere.

Next week at the University of Miami I’m scheduled to do a relatively informal talk-and-discussion that combines several pieces I’ve described here in more detail. The topic: “Critical Psychology, Justice, and Reconciliation in Israel and Palestine, or Why Jimmy Carter is Only Half Right.” I’m still trying to sort out some of the ambiguities.

In November, I spoke at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva about critical psychology’s potential relevance to Israel. Critical psychology has more than one strain, but in large part it challenges mainstream psychology’s support for an unjust status quo. In that talk and in other Israeli settings I speculated about what an Israeli critical psychologist might find worth paying attention to. One thing I emphasized, especially in my course on Psychology, Law, and Justice, was the widespread insistence that Israel can be both a Jewish state and a democratic state. The failure to make democracy meaningful for all but the Jewish majority is so obvious that anyone who looks at the situation critically should wonder just why so many Israelis and their supporters abroad believe the impossible, or at least say they believe it.

That this topic is so touchy should make critical psychologists even more interested, because when an untenable assumption becomes part of the dominant ideology the logical consequences mount rapidly and even bureaucratically into outcomes that could never be justified if they were examined with an open mind. Example: yesterday’s matter-of-fact story in Haaretz about debates between demographers over how to alter Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries to ensure a Jewish majority. What does it mean that so many Israelis can read something like this and not be horrified? How would Israel’s American supporters react to a U.S. city’s declared plan to change its borders to exclude residents of the wrong race, religion, or ethnicity? This policy may be explained by nationalism or tribalism. But democracy?

After leaving Be’er Sheva in December for Ramallah, I talked at Birzeit University about law, justice, and reconciliation. I tried to distinguish between, on the one hand, dialogue groups and other formats designed to reach peace and co-existence through better understanding and empathy, and, on the other hand, a more substantive reconciliation based on taking justice seriously, acknowledging past misdeeds, and transforming the institutions and ideologies that created injustice to begin with. I think I need to work on this part, partly because the distinction is not easy to convert into action and partly because too often there are preconceived notions about just who is to become reconciled. It’s one thing to call for reconciliation between Israel and Palestine — accepting the official but probably impossible two-state goal — but it means something else to talk about reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians as people who live on the same piece of land, free of nationalist and religious bottom lines. That seems to many the most impossible prospect, but maybe it’s my pessimism about the traditional framework that makes me think something more far-reaching is worth aiming for.

Otherwise another horror from this week’s Haaretz will also escalate into matter-of-fact routine: the decision to move the Separation Barrier near Modi’in Ilit eastward a few miles to make sure 1500 more Jewish settlers are on the Israeli side of the future de facto border - even though this will strand 20,000 Palestinians in the no-man’s land west of the fence. 

After I returned home — more than a month ago now, and it seems much longer — I wrote a short piece on Jimmy Carter’s refusal to criticize Israel’s internal democracy even as he denounced its apartheid-like policies toward Palestinians under occupation (such as that decision to move the fence eastward). At his Brandeis speech last week Carter mentioned this issue in passing. He didn’t follow up on it, but just suggesting that visitors to Israel might examine Israel’s treatment of Arabs within its borders clarified that Carter knows more than he’s willing to say.

So where does all this leave me when I sit down in Miami for wine and cheese with what promises to be a small roomful of academics and psychologists? I dunno. I’ll let you know later where the discussion takes us.

This afternoon I gave a colloquium talk to about 20 people - psychology faculty at Ben Gurion University and a variety of other departmental visitors. The title was “The Development of North American Critical Psychology, Plus Questions About its Relevance to Israel.” The first part, the bulk of the presentation, covered themes I’ve developed in other settings. The presentation is available on my website. I’m posting the final section about Israel here. It might make more sense if you’ve read the whole paper.

When I talked about this last section, I saw a lot of nodding and some knowing, possibly nervous, smiles. No one addressed this topic after the talk, but I hope to elicit more on the subject during the rest of my time here.

Afterwards one professor asked me to talk to her graduate psychotherapy students next week about critical psychology, and a  short while later half a dozen of us headed for coffee, one of whom, a Bedouin social worker, agreed to talk to my class about  the context of his work as an organizer for Bedouin rights.

All in all I think it went pretty well.

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The Israeli Context

Before moving to questions and, I hope, general discussion, I would like to ask several questions of my own related to the situation facing academics here in Israel. I would like to hear from you, both in this discussion today and over the course of the next month, how critical psychology in particular and a self-consciously political approach to academic work more generally, have been applied, or might be applied, to the kind of work you do. In other words, what would an Israeli critical psychologist find worth exploring? I will acknowledge first, though, that my questions reflect my own ignorance about the work you are engaged in as well as my distance from the complex situations you all face daily. But I blunder ahead anyway, with three general questions.

First, how does mainstream psychology here, as it does in the US, help maintain an unsatisfactory status quo either by directly supporting it, or by imagining that a “values-free” psychology is divorced from politics, or by avoiding politically charged issues completely and turning instead to topics that may be intellectually interesting but politically safer? Has Israeli social psychology, for example, had its own “crisis of confidence” such as the one in the US three and four decades ago, and if not, why not?

Second, are there critical psychologists in Israel? Is it possible, under the difficult conditions Israelis face daily, for psychologists inside or outside the academy to gaze at the society around them free of more general societal assumptions and allegiances? Does a critical perspective, in other words, depend on a certain degree of alienation from social norms and assumptions? Does it depend on marginality?

I first learned of Kurt Lewin’s (1941) work on the Jew as Marginal Man in 1966 in Jerusalem, in a course on Zionism, and ever since the concept has made sense to me. I was not surprised decades later to realize that many leading critical psychologists in the United States have been Jewish, both accepted by, and still on the fringes of, American culture. I have wondered if, here in Israel, the benefits of fully belonging reduc the advantages of not belonging.

In the US and elsewhere, critical psychologists and critical theorists and researchers in other fields identify with the downtrodden, the oppressed - the marginalized. Can that happen in Israel, where societal divisions often seem, to an outsider at least, more absolute than in the US? We have our own difficult problems back home, which we’ve made too little progress in resolving. Yet here, the divides between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, religious Jews and nonreligious Jews, Sephardi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews, Zionists and post-Zionists, often seem to my pessimistic external gaze insurmountable, especially so when victims are so readily perceived as enemies. In the long run, I wonder, if a critical rejection of mainstream assumptions depends on marginality, will Israel’s future critical psychologists more likely come from your Arab students than your Jewish ones?

Finally, and most importantly, how can critical psychologists help resolve the most one-sided internal conflict, that between Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis, and the broader national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians across the Green Line? What empirical issues are worth investigating, what ideological myths worth dissecting, what assumptions worth challenging? What is the role of ethnic and religious identity, of nationalist appeals based on cultural mythologies and dehumanization of the Other, of the cognitive effort necessary to resolve the inconsistency between Jewish statehood and democratic statehood? I know something of the work done by Professor Dan Bar-On (2001) and others, but I don’t know how common this is, or how it is perceived, or how useful it is likely to prove given the high stakes, strong emotions, and firm commitments on both sides to underlying interpretations and justifications. All of these, of course, raise important, and sensitive, psychological questions. So I wonder: What can be done to enable more psychologists to escape the confines of the dominant discourse so they can help others see things anew?

This online petition comes from an Israeli psychologist seeking other Israeli mental health workers and psychologists. It ends:

The time has come for us to stop being hostages to our own trauma, our past, our education and our media. The time has come for us to stop regarding ourselves as eternal victims who always have justice on their side. The time has come for us to recognize our own power and take responsibility for the destruction and suffering we are inflicting on our fellow human beings. The time has come to show courage by stopping the cycles of trauma, destruction, humiliation and retribution. The time has come to open circles of compensation and healing – a process which demands compromise and concessions, but it is the only one that stands a chance if we want to look after our loved ones, our own souls, and our moral integrity.

We believe that if Israel aspires to be a civilized state, it can not let itself be carried away by provocations or power-drunk fantasies. We ask Israel’s government to put an end to the spiraling bloodshed and instead opt for the path of recognition and of communication with the other. We call for the immediate start of negotiations – without crippling conditions, and with the assistance of any external agent who is prepared to help in this process.

Stephen Soldz commented last week on the Defense Department’s decision to use only psychologists, rather than psychiatrists, to help get information out of prisoners at Guantanamo. First Soldz’s comment, which he titled Psychology, profession in shame:

The New York Times reports that the Defense Department is switching and will now use only psychologists, and not psychiatrists, to aid their torture efforts [they of course, use a euphemism] in Guantanamo. The reason is that the American Psychiatric Association has clearly stated that psychiatrists should not participate in interrogations at Guantanamo, whereas the American Psychological Association has taken a mealy-mouthed position that allows psychologists to do whatever they want. Presumably, the American Psychological Association is too addicted to its closeness to power to take any stand on one of the defining moral issues of our time.

This is a moment of crisis for the profession of psychology. Will psychologists stand for human decency, or will the profession become the whores of the Pentagon and the Guantanamo torturers? If psychologists as a group do not roundly condemn the gulag in Guantanamo and force the American Psychological Association to change its position, the profession will have given up standing for human decency and the dignity of the individual. In that case, American psychologists will deserve the badge of shame that we will receive around the world.

Unfortunately, I think the answer to Soldz’s question is that psychologists as a profession will probably not follow the psychiatrists’ lead. They don’t have the psychiatrists’ medical ethics to rely on. Psychologists can be more … flexible. As the Times put it:

The counterpart group for psychologists, the American Psychological Association,… said last July that its members serving as consultants to interrogations involving national security should be “mindful of factors unique to these roles and contexts that require special ethical consideration.”

Stephen Behnke, director of ethics for the organization, said psychologists knew not to participate in activities that harmed detainees. But Dr. Behnke also said the group believed that helping military interrogators made a valuable contribution because it was part of an effort to prevent terrorism.

Former military interrogators at Guantánamo told The New York Times last year that some psychiatrists and psychologists had advised them on how to “break” detainees to make them more cooperative. The former interrogators said they had been counseled on how to use a detainee’s fears and longings to increase distress. One example was their taking advantage of a prisoner’s fear of the dark, known from his medical records.

Dr. Winkenwerder, the Pentagon official, disputed those assertions Tuesday, saying he did not believe that such counseling had occurred. He said the biscuit teams gave interrogators advice only on how to establish a positive rapport with detainees.

That settles it, no?

Not really a surprise, but good to see documented:

Experts Defining Mental Disorders Are Linked to Drug Firms:

Every psychiatric expert involved in writing the standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses, a new analysis has found.

Of the 170 experts in all who contributed to the manual that defines disorders from personality problems to drug addiction, more than half had such ties, including 100 percent of the experts who served on work groups on mood disorders and psychotic disorders. The analysis did not reveal the extent of their relationships with industry or whether those ties preceded or followed their work on the manual.

“I don’t think the public is aware of how egregious the financial ties are in the field of psychiatry,” said Lisa Cosgrove, a clinical psychologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, who is publishing her analysis today in the peer-reviewed journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

The analysis comes at a time of growing debate over the rising use of medication as the primary or sole treatment for many psychiatric disorders, a trend driven in part by definitions of mental disorders in the psychiatric manual.

Cosgrove said she began her research after discovering that five of six panel members studying whether certain premenstrual problems are a psychiatric disorder had ties to Eli Lilly & Co., which was seeking to market its drug Prozac to treat those symptoms. The process of defining such disorders is far from scientific, Cosgrove added: “You would be dismayed at how political the process can be.”,,,,

On the blog Anarchia, which I confess I found because it links to mine, I found this explanation of its name:

In the USA in the 1800’s, many people who opposed a centralised federal authority and criticised the government were diagnosed with Anarchia, which was defined as having an “excess of the passion for liberty” that “constituted a form of insanity”. So thats where the name comes from.

The political use of psychiatric diagnosis won’t surprise anyone familiar with critical psychology, but I don’t remember hearing about anarchia before. So reading this sent me searching, and soon I found a ZMag article from last year by clinical psychologist Bruce Levine, author of Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations, and a World Gone Crazy:

Two ways of subduing anti-authoritarianism are criminalizing it and pathologizing it and U.S. history is replete with examples of both. In the same era of John Adams’s Sedition Act, which criminalized criticism of U.S. governmental policy, Dr. Benjamin Rush, “the father of American psychiatry” (his image adorns the APA seal), pathologized anti-authoritarianism. Rush diagnosed those rebelling against a centralized federal authority as having an “excess of the passion for liberty” that “constituted a form of insanity.” He labeled this illness anarchia.

Historically, both direct and indirect resistance to authority have been medicalized and diseased. In an 1851 article in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright reported his discovery of drapetomania, the disease that caused slaves to flee captivity, and dysaesthesia aethiopis, the disease that caused slaves to pay insufficient attention to the master’s needs. As with anarchia, few took drapetomania and dysaesthesia aethiopis seriously—but this was before the diseasing of anti-authoritarianism was accompanied by Big Pharma drugs and marketing blitzes.

While drapetomania has given way to ODD [Oppositional Defiance Disorder] and CD [Conduct Disorder], dysaesthesia aethiopis has given way to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The vast majority of kids  “with ADHD” are capable of paying attention and being cooperative in environments that they are comfortable in. Studies show that they will pay attention to activities that they have chosen, that they find stimulating, or for which they are getting paid. They routinely pay attention to what interests them but tend to blow off school, especially homework. In 1992 the then APA medical director proudly described the relationship between the APA and pharmaceutical corporations as a “responsible, ethical partnership,” and, in 2001, the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that four to six million ADHD-labeled U.S. kids were taking Ritalin and Ritalin-like drugs.

The rest of Levine’s article is worth reading. So is Anarchia.

Here’s a short review of Levine’s book by Mel Starkman in Radical Psychology Journal (published by RadPsyNet) and a 2001 interview with Levine in LiP Magazine.

Also from Eliot Gelwan today is a link to a 2004 item on Dave Pollard’s weblog that lists 56 books and articles Pollard says ” forever changed my worldview, and my purpose for living.” It’s a good list. I’ve even read some of the books.

What I’m most glad to see is Pollard’s short first section: What Life was Really Like Before Civilization: Revisionist History. Modern misconceptions about what “human nature” is all about and what human society was like before civilization’s agriculture, cities, governments, law, organized religion, corporate personhood, and other so-called necessities affect what we think we need today and what we’re willing to put up with to get it.

Of the six authors in this section, I’m glad to see anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. His article on The Original Affluent Society is basic. As Pollard says about it, “If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy, agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery, wouldn’t you try to portray the alternative life as ’short, nasty and brutish’?” (Sahlins’ related book Stone Age Economics is listed on my own old long list of “Reading Suggestions for the Curious Social Psychology Student (and others)” in the section on Human Nature, Human Origins, & Personality. Someday I’ll update that list, maybe…).

Further down Pollard’s  list is the category Radical Analyses, Radical Solutions. Pollard says these three books “are the most important readings, but you probably won’t ‘buy’ their arguments unless you’ve first read much of the material above. One of these books is A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. I haven’t read it, but Pollard says this is “a profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our current predicament won’t work.” That suits my own long-standing view that moderation and compromise are often exactly the wrong approach. No doubt Jensen’s book is more developed than my own short article on the subject.

All in all, a good list.

An email from someone in the Czech Republic asking for materials about anarchism and psychology reminds me I don’t have many to point to. When I’ve used an anarchist perspective in exploring social psychology and the psychology/law connection, I’ve cited anarchists and psychologists, both modern and classic, but I haven’t found many book-length treatments, nor even lengthy articles directly on topic that don’t seem to be written for already persuaded audiences (such as Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 The Revolution of Everyday Life, which addresses a wide range of topics social psychologists should, but generally don’t, find interesting.) At any rate, if you know of material on anarchism and psychology please let me know and I’ll link to it on my website.

This essay by John P. A. Ioannidis on Why Most Published Research Findings Are False focuses on medical research, but many of the points apply as well to experimental social psychology. (Thanks to Eliot Gelwan for the link.) The summary:

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

A few excerpts relevant to issues a social psychology class might address (boldface is mine).

Modeling the Framework for False Positive Findings: Several methodologists have pointed out [9–11] that the high rate of nonreplication (lack of confirmation) of research discoveries is a consequence of the convenient, yet ill-founded strategy of claiming conclusive research findings solely on the basis of a single study assessed by formal statistical significance, typically for a p-value less than 0.05. Research is not most appropriately represented and summarized by p-values, but, unfortunately, there is a widespread notion that medical research articles should be interpreted based only on p-values. …

Conflicts of interest and prejudice may increase bias, u. Conflicts of interest are very common in biomedical research [26], and typically they are inadequately and sparsely reported [26,27]. Prejudice may not necessarily have financial roots. Scientists in a given field may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings. Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure. Such nonfinancial conflicts may also lead to distorted reported results and interpretations. Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma. Empirical evidence on expert opinion shows that it is extremely unreliable [28].

The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

The original article provided details on these and other issues, and there are also some good letters in response.

New online journal of interest: Social Action / Acción Social. See the website’s Guidelines for Authors.

The Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology is an official publication of Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) and Counselors for Social Justice (CSJ). This electronic journal upholds highest academic and professional standards using a peer review process.

Mission

• To bring social action research, practice, and training into the forefront of scholarly discourse in counseling and psychology
• To provide a forum for demonstrating effective interventions for addressing social problems
• To foster international collaboration and understanding
• To encourage dialogue between individuals and communities toward the resolution of social problems

Audience

The journal is relevant to counselors, psychologists and related professionals as well as students and educators. Policy makers and community organizers will also find the content to be informative and relevant to their work.

Format

The journal is published in an electronic format (PDF) and adheres to standard journal formatting. Articles will be accepted in either Spanish or English and published with abstracts in the other language. The content varies depending on type of manuscripts accepted for any particular issue.

The following are examples of the types of articles that are appropriate for SA/AS.

• Articulation of theory of social action practice in counseling and psychology
• Examples of collaborative efforts to address a particular social issue with reflection
• Research using methodology that brings the voices of communities and individuals most affected by particular social problems to the forefront
• Research documenting the occurrence and complexity of a particular social issue
• Outcomes research highlighting community interventions that have been successful in addressing social issues
• Interviews of notable practitioners, community organizers, psychologists, counselors and educators
• Dialogues between scientists/practitioners, policy makers and community members both nationally and internationally

Details of our editorial policy are still being finalized.  Our plan is to publish our first issue in Fall 2006.  The deadline for that issue will be June 1, 2006.

The journal’s editors are Rebecca Toporek from Counselors for Social Justice and Tod Sloan from Psychologists for Social Responsibility. Tod is a friend from RadPsyNet. Partly to avoid journal proliferation, right now it looks like RadPsyNet’s existing online Radical Psychology Journal will cease operation after another issue or two and become Social Action’s theory section.

Could be an interesting journal.

The Stanford Daily Online Edition:

“I’ve gotten letters from both sides,” she said, “People just don’t believe it. Or they say they’ve been waiting 20 years for an article like this because they’ve known this all along. That’s often what happens in psychology. Whatever finding you have, half of the people will say they knew it all along, their grandmother said it; the other half won’t believe it.”

This quote is a pretty good depiction of how we often react to research findings. The focus of this particular article: self-esteem and performance.

Contrary to popular belief, high self-esteem does not necessarily lead to increased productivity or better academic performance, according to Roy Baumeister, professor of social psychology at Florida State University, in an article titled “Rethinking Self-Esteem.” Published in The Stanford Social Innovation Review, his findings created a stir among nonprofit groups who aim to raise child self-esteem.

But:

Hazel Markus, a professor of psychology at Stanford who studies related issues, disagreed with Baumeister’s conclusions. “I thought it was too harsh and that there are many ways to look at the evidence,” Markus said. “Most importantly, it depends on your understanding of self-esteem. If you just think of self-esteem as going around and saying, ‘I’m wonderful, I’m great,’ then it’s not going to work.”

….According to Markus, with a solid foundation of self-esteem, one will be more able to have a positive outlook, and that will be the cause of good outcomes. She said she finds Baumeister’s view too narrow, as it only takes into account the kind of self-esteem that is felt but not earned…..

“You can’t just tell kids to look in the mirror every morning and say I’m beautiful and expect to do something,” she said. “You just end up with a bunch of conceited people.”

Trying to boost school performance by getting kids to have more confidence in their ability may sound good, but it also sounds like the typically American approach that puts everything on the individual. If one kid has a problem with self-esteem and school work when everyone else is flourishing, it makes sense to figure out what’s going on with that kid. When millions of kids supposedly have the same self-esteem and performance problems, we need to raise our sights a little higher and look at what’s wrong with surrounding system. It’s easy to blame the kid, harder to change the schools and families and neighborhoods and mass media and everything else that replicates our so-called individual problems.

An Israeli psychologist I met at last spring’s conference of Psychologists for Social Responsibility in Portland sent this petition in support of Arab psychologist Majed Kana’aneh who is now in an Israeli prison. As described elsewhere on the support group’s website, Kana’aneh is a 36-year old politically conscious clinical community psychologist with a range of professional experiences. The site provides more details about the trial and its background and about the nature and relevance of paranoia, as well as excerpts from Kana’aneh on optimism, identity, responsibility, and more.
The petition:

We are colleagues from all areas of the mental health professions: psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and psychotherapists. We wish to support our associate, the Arab psychologist Majed Kana’aneh. Majed was charged and trialed for breaching state security. In Feb. 2004 he was found guilty and sentenced to ten and a half years imprisonment plus conditional four years. The appeal will be heard in March 2006.

We wish to caution and protest the obvious demonizing orientation towards of the facts’ interpretations apparent throughout the trail!

We are horrified by the ease with which Majed was accused of the most severe crimes and the obvious distortions and one sidedness of the indictment. We protest the extreme hostile position reflected in the verdict, with no consideration of the man and his circumstances.

Despite the sensitivity of the security issues, we strongly protest the weakening of elementary judicial standards and lack of basic humane perspective and balance when it comes to trying an Arabic citizen!

Throughout the trail the prosecution was focused on drawing a grim picture of our friend Majed Kana’aneh as a dangerous, subversive person, who acted knowingly and deliberately against Israel ’s security. To our dismay, this line was accepted fully by the court, without sufficient criticism or consideration. It was obvious that the court was inclined to be persuaded easily by the prosecution; any information that could potentially question or disprove their claims was dismissed. 

We accompanied Majed throughout the trail, attending those sessions which were open to the public. What we heard there, including the judges’ reasons for the sentence, imply a dynamics of paranoid anxiety, which has no place in an enlightened court of law, and shouldn’t be the basis of sentencing and condemning any man.

This is the final posting for now on my Social Psychology’s Essence series. To recap, the purpose is to come up with a tentative short list — short enough to have some hope of getting it across to students — of what I think an undergraduate should take away from a mainstream introductory social psychology course (as opposed to a course in critical social psychology). Long after the details disappear, and assuming most students don’t go on to more advanced courses, what would I be glad to see my students retain in the back of their minds? This list is a work in progress. It represents my thinking about social psychology and related areas, but I’m writing this as I go along and don’t suggest this is the final word. As noted previously, feedback is welcome.

Previous postings proposed four items:

1. Identifying and Questioning Empirical Assumptions
2. Imagining and Exploring Alternatives
3. Behavior has Multiple Interacting Causes
4. Maximizing Individuality and Community

The fifth and final item is this:

5. Social Psychology as Technology

The social psychology of technology gets some attention, but what I have in mind is the opposite — the use of social psychological knowledge and methods as a form of technology. Social psychology textbooks often note the ethical dilemma facing researchers who discover techniques that might be used in negative ways, but rarely delve deeply  because, of course, a social psychology class is supposed to teach students that responsible researchers do a good job balancing the pros and cons. Science marches on.

Most textbooks emphasize social psychology’s positive uses — to help resolve environmental problems, for example, and to uncover and resist social influence, create cooperative work groups, reduce prejudice, and more. All this is true, but an honest course would equally emphasize the opposite — how social psychological knowledge deceives consumers, represses dissent, increases conformity, and maintains unjust societal conditions. At minimum, students should get a better sense of just why social psychologists are recruited to work in advertising, government, and the CIA. Indeed, it’s often this sort of discussion that brings home to students how useful social psychology really can be. If the CIA wants social psychologists, there must be something to it.

My own take on most forms of technology is pretty negative. I don’t really buy the argument that, because knowledge is neutral, any technology can be used for good or bad depending on who controls it, and so the goal should be to make sure the right people are in charge. Instead, I think many forms of technology inevitably lead primarily in negative directions with horrendous consequences for individuals, societies, and the planet itself. Of course we can use that technology for positive uses as well — the Internet helps us organize against repression, television exposes things elites want hidden, social psychological principles help activists organize more effective campaigns. But anything we can do, they can do better. And, more to the point, the technology itself changes society without bothering to subject those changes to democratic debate and decision making. It changes us. With more technology, maybe we become them.

It remains an open question whether social psychology can create a technology of liberation that’s not simply overpowered by its technology of social control and manipulation. Latin American liberation psychology is one important component of critical psychology’s critique of mainstream  psychology. I remain pessimistic, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

From a 1992 article:

Students often complain that social psychology, instead of presenting a coherent framework for understanding and improving social life, typically confronts students with a hodge-podge of seemingly unrelated, contradictory, and overly detailed research findings. Topic follows disconnected topic. Multiple choice tests rarely ask students to consider the interrelationships among subject areas, partly because such questions are difficult to put into machine-gradable format, but also because most social psychologists have themselves learned to view the field in the same disconnected way. The common belief that increments in factual knowledge will lead to slow but steady theoretical and social progress stands in the way of perceiving connections between topics, connections that, if examined more holistically, might make the isolated segments of the field more understandable.

One connection between many of social psychology’s disconnected topics is the degree to which they reflect the tension between the individual and the group. This tension is often remarked upon but rarely developed, especially as the field focuses less on groups at all. That individuals belong to groups is a commonplace observation of every social psychology course, but the narrowing of the field’s mainstream gaze from the group to the individual is obvious. In any case, merely identifying the consequences of individual-group interaction doesn’t go far enough. Instead, an introductory social psychology course would benefit from emphasizing the importance of maximizing both individuality and community within the society we have now and within possible alternatives.

The textbook I’m using in my introductory class, Elliot Aronson’s The Social Animal, doesn’t even have a chapter on group dynamics — how groups operate, the different roles of group actors, what makes groups effective, satisfying, competitive, or cooperative. Some of this finds its way into other chapters, such as the one on conformity, but what was once a basic core concern has been moved to the edges or tossed out completely. Longer texts often do include more, but the tendency there too is to emphasize group influence on the individual rather than the group as a whole. And those influences are typically seen as mostly negative. Even in a book that generally does a good job trying to get students to raise their sights, David Myers’ Social Psychology, the author feels the need to add a postscript listing the positive benefits groups can have. His conclusion, though — “we had better choose our group influences wisely and intentionally” — reinforces the dangers rather than the benefits. His later discussion of cooperation in a chapter on conflict and peacemaking is useful, but a chapter explicitly on groups would better reflect the importance of groups in our lives.

I should say here that my thinking about the balance between individuality and community developed in the context of anarchist political theory. I doubt mainstream social psychologists will spend much time trying to do the same, but hear me out.

As I’ve discussed in more detail elsewhere, anarchists traditionally seek not simply a do-your-own-thing autonomy but a society that takes both individuality and community seriously. That’s part of the reason Paul Goodman identified what he called the “anarchist principle” that “valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment.” Goodman called this principle “a social-psychological hypothesis with obvious political implications,” but social psychologists who take that hypothesis seriously are hard to find.

In that 1992 article I quoted at the beginning of this blog entry I also cited Alan Ritter, whose “analysis of classical anarchist thought makes it clear that the ultimate anarchist goal is not simply unlimited freedom but, instead, a form of ‘communal individuality’ in which individuality flourishes in a supportive communal environment.” I continued:

Anarchist theory is related to work on trust and cooperation, the tragedy of the commons, personal values and belief systems, false consensus and attribution theory, the self-fulfilling prophecy, interpersonal relationships, group dynamics, environmental effects on behavior, hierarchy and conformity, and many other topics. Reading between the lines, there is support within the standard social psychology textbook for the view that a society organized along decentralist anarchist lines, where communal mutuality is emphasized, would be one in which trust, friendship, equality, autonomy, and empathy would be increased, and competition, materialism, overconsumption, energy waste, hierarchy, and exploitation would be decreased.

How to maximize both individuality and community is a social psychological question that students should ponder. Anarchism might be too much for most to take seriously, but that’s not the main point. More relevant right now is that an anarchist perspective can help fit the different pieces of the course together in a way that students are more likely to remember. If they finish the course thinking that individuality and community are both important enough to enhance, so much the better.

In my first posts in this series I suggested introductory social psychology can impart two related general attitudes and skills: the ability to identify and evaluate empirical assumptions about human behavior, and the ability to imagine and evaluate alternative behaviors and social arrangements. Even when their knowledge of the course’s specific subject matter disappears without a trace, students whose ability to think critically will be better off (or at least that’s my own empirical assumption). Ideally, of course, students would also absorb these attitudes from other courses across the liberal arts curriculum aimed at critical thinking. The particular subject matter may not matter for teaching general critical thinking skills.

But that doesn’t mean subject matter is unimportant. As I’ve noted before, despite critical psychology’s criticisms of how mainstream psychologists decide what topics to research and how to research them, social psychology’s landscape is important even if many of the details are not. Aggression, cooperation, prejudice, conformity, obedience — these and other standard topics are worth encouraging students to think about. It’s also worthwhile showing students how social psychologists do their research and how different audiences use research findings, sometimes for oppressive or manipulative purposes. But beyond addressing this substantive core throughout the semester, what can we reasonably expect students to remember later?

Perhaps the most obvious principle is that human social behavior has many causes. Mainstream social psychology texts typically emphasize that every specific behavior reflects an interaction between the person (personality, biology, age, etc.) and the situation (often called the setting or environment). Some people act more consistently across settings than others, and some settings elicit more predictable behavior than others, but variation is inevitable and behavior is rarely completely predictable. Students of social psychology should be able to apply this perspective in future life when they try to understand the causes of any particular action, including their own.

Students who internalize social psychology’s awareness that behavior is multi-caused are likely to remember Eliot Aronson’s “first law” as noted in his Social Animal text: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. They should be less likely to dismiss as irrational aberrations repressive guards at Guantanamo, or suicide bombers in Iraq, or college students drinking until they pass out. Even if they don’t recall Zimbardo’s prison experiment, remembering that behavior also reflects settings should make them wonder about the context within which those behaviors are embedded and about how that context might be changed.
Courses with a more critical perspective on behavior’s multi-causality might help students look for explanations of behavior not just at the individual and interpersonal levels but at the societal level as well. Class discussion of behavior’s context should more routinely consider societal assumptions about which behaviors are natural and expected, about who benefits and who loses from existing institutional arrangements, and about how and why those assumptions and institutions differ across cultures. Raising the level of analysis toward the societal and global could fit easily enough into introductory courses that end with discussion of applied areas such as social psychology and the environment, or health, or law, though ideally that discussion would take place throughout the semester.

So far today I’ve posted two blog entries about what I’m coming to think of as social psychology’s essence: the short list of what even undergraduates who pay little attention to the field’s morass of experimental findings should carry with them after finishing the introductory course. I’m not sure how long this short list will become, though right now I’m thinking of maybe five key principles or attitudes or bits of knowledge. Why five? It’s a nicely rounded and obtainable number, and if students could remember five things a few years down the road I’d be thrilled. If I remembered five things from every college course I took I’d know a lot more than I do now.

I’m emphasizing essentials that are part of, or could legitimately become part of, a fairly ordinary mainstream US social psychology course. It would be great if more students studied critical social psychology, but most won’t, and indeed most colleges and universities don’t offer such a course. So the challenge is to identify what might be valuable within the traditional course that instructors who a