In Seattle, following the 1999 WTO protests, in which violence and riots were far too common, the police department increased their tactical response ability with military-style weapons, armor, and vehicles. Following the 9/11 attack in 2001, police departments, large and small, around the country were given surplus military gear to better equip them for possible future attacks.

The images above are from the last week in Ferguson, MO, where tactical officers were called in to help police clear protestors who had taken to the streets over the police shooting of Michael Brown.

Research over the years has shown that the presence of heavily armed police increases the rate of violence and the likelihood of violence:

a great deal of social-psychological research, as well as important anecdotal evidence from law-enforcement specialists themselves, suggests that militarized policing can greatly inflame situations that might otherwise end peacefully

One wonders if the events in Ferguson will be a wake-up for police departments to avoid the military and militaristic approach to protests.

How Militarizing Police Can Increase Violence

By Jesse SingalFollow @jessesingal


Long before the killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which have brought with them countless images of heavily armored local authorities pointing guns at and firing tear gas and other nonlethal weapons at unarmed protesters, some were disturbed by what Washington Post journalist Radley Balko calls “the rise of the warrior cop” — that is, the increasing tendency of some local police forces to rely on military-style gear and tactics, even in situations that appear devoid of any real threat to officers’ safety.

The story of how this happened and the oftentimes tragic results have been well-told by Balko, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others. In short, there’s been a flood of drug-war and post-9/11 money that has helped outfit police departments, even towns where a single murder is an incredibly rare event, with gear that could help repel seasoned paramilitaries.

What’s less clear is how this gear changes the psychological dynamics of policing and crowd control. Is it true, as many people are arguing online, that “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” — that is, that simply having military gear will make police more likely to act in an aggressive manner toward civilians? How does this change the relationship between police and civilians?

At the most specific level, these questions haven’t been studied empirically. But a great deal of social-psychological research, as well as important anecdotal evidence from law-enforcement specialists themselves, suggests that militarized policing can greatly inflame situations that might otherwise end peacefully.

The so-called “weapons effect” can partly explain what’s going on in Ferguson and elsewhere. The mere presence of weapons, in short, appears to prime more aggressive behavior. This has been shown in a variety of experiments in different lab and real-world settings.

“Theory underlying the weapons effect or similar kinds of phenomena would suggest that the more you fill the environment with stimuli that are associated with violence, the more likely violence is to occur,” said Bruce Bartholow, a University of Missouri social psychologist who has studied the weapons effect. Brad Bushman, a psychologist at Ohio State, agreed. “I would expect a bigger effect if you see military weapons than if you see normal weapons,” he said.

This isn’t just about a link between visual stimuli like guns and violence, however. It also has to do with the roles people adopt, with how they respond to the presence of others who may — or may not — mean them harm. To a certain extent, if you dress and treat people like soldiers facing a deadly enemy, they’ll act like it.

“This process isn't necessarily good or bad, but depends on the extent to which the more militaristic role fits the situation,” said Craig Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State, in an email. “When it doesn't fit well, it is likely to lead to more judgment and behavior errors.” Maria Haberfeld, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has studied how police departments outfit themselves, said the dynamic could be particularly dangerous in the context of nonviolent protests like Ferguson (there was rioting and looting earlier this week, but there have also been widespread reports of nonviolent protests being broken up by police aggression).

“Military equipment is used against an enemy,” said Haberfeld. “So if you give the same equipment to local police, by default you create an environment in which the public is perceived as an enemy.” On the other side of these confrontations, this could have a negative effect on protesters. “We live in a democratic country, and we believe that this is our right to go out and exercise the right to [free speech],” she said. “And when you go out there and exercise that right and suddenly you are faced with soldiers — even though these are not soldiers, but police officers looking like soldiers — then something is triggered, definitely.”

Bushman said that meeting nonviolent protests with a militarized response is “really a bad idea. I can’t believe they’re doing it.” “It’s just really bad for the officers because they feel more powerful, more invincible, more militaristic, ready to attack,” he said. “And also, I think it elicits a response from the observers that, hey, this is war, and people become defensive and they have a fight/flight response.” The adoption of masks themselves in a militarized setting, on the part of police or protesters, can also contribute to violence by triggering senses of anonymity and what psychologists call deindividuation. "There's all kinds of evidence in social psychology that that will lead people to do things that they wouldn't do if they could be identified," said Bartholow.

All this militarization, said Bartholow, can be contrasted “against the old kind of beat-cop model where people in the neighborhood know the police officers’ name and he’s kind of everybody’s buddy in a sense.”

Gil Kerlikowske, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and former police chief of Seattle, drew out this distinction in a striking recent interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep. He explained that at the one-year anniversary of the damaging 1999 World Trade Organization riots, he took conscious steps to have his officers dressed like police rather than a counterinsurgency unit, which he said made it easier to deal with potentially dangerous crowds. But the police guild didn’t approve of this approach — its members wanted him to give the officers as much armor as possible.

INSKEEP: Kerlikowski paid attention [to the guild]. Though he came to wish he hadn't. The next time there were troublesome crowds it was Mardi Gras. Police did not go out in soft gear, they went out heavily protected. So, the cops felt safer but somehow the crowd became harder to control. Scores of people were injured as violence spread. Women were sexually assaulted. One man was killed as police watched.

KERLIKOWSKI: Well, to tell you the truth it makes it pretty difficult when you're talking from behind a face shield with a gas mask, to engage with the public and say, look let's tone this down, let's calm things down, let's make sure that those people that need to be apprehended are arrested because of their intoxicated state, their level of violence etc. It's pretty hard to engage in those discussions when you're hardened up. I regret that - today. I should've stuck by my decision earlier, I didn't.

Kerlikowski, Haberfeld, and other law enforcement seem to have developed an intuitive understanding of the psychological effects of police militarization. But that may not matter, because all this surplus military gear isn’t going away — $450 million of it was distributed to police in 2013 alone. So even after things calm down in Ferguson, we’ll still be in the midst of a sweeping, potentially dangerous experiment in social psychology and criminology.

“Even in my small midwestern town, the police no longer drive a standard police cruiser,” Bartholow said. “They drive these kind of big SUVs — they almost look like military humvees, and they’re more intimidating looking.”

Claude Steele is the author of Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Issues of Our Time) (2010), a book that escaped my attention but seems to offer some important insights into how stereotypes narrow our experience of the world.

The acclaimed social psychologist offers an insider’s look at his research and groundbreaking findings on stereotypes and identity.

Claude M. Steele, who has been called “one of the few great social psychologists,” offers a vivid first-person account of the research that supports his groundbreaking conclusions on stereotypes and identity. He sheds new light on American social phenomena from racial and gender gaps in test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men, and lays out a plan for mitigating these “stereotype threats” and reshaping American identities.

Below the talk given at UC Berkeley is a longer review of the book from the Harvard Education Review.

Claude Steele - Stereotype Threat: How It Affects Us and What We Can Do About It

Published on June 17, 2014


Claude Steele, internationally renowned social scientist and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, will discuss his theory of stereotype threat, which has been the focus of much of his research and writing throughout his academic career. The theory examines how people from different groups, being threatened by different stereotypes, can have quite different experiences in the same situation. It has also been used to understand group differences in performance ranging from the intellectual to the athletic. Steele's recent book, "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us and what we Can Do," published in 2010, was based on this research and lays out a plan to mitigate the negative effects of "stereotype threat."

* * * * *

 From the Harvard Education Review:

Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us

Claude M. Steele
New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. 
242 pp. $25.95. 

 

Why are students of color not graduating from college at the same rate as white students? Why might white students be reluctant to take courses with a substantial number of students of color in them? What can educators do to address these problems?
In his new book, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, social psychologist Claude Steele helps us find answers to these questions based on findings from social psychology experiments. Steele’s book sets forth an argument for understanding how contextual factors—not individual characteristics or personal beliefs motivated by prejudice or malice—help explain so-termed “racial achievement gaps” in education and ongoing societal racial and ethnic segregation.
In an accessible, page-turning account written for a general audience, Steele explains how identity contingencies—the conditions that a given social identity forces us to face and overcome in a particular setting—affect our everyday behavior and perpetuate broader societal problems. Expanding on his prior work, he focuses on a specific type of identity contingency: stereotype threat, or the fear of what people could think about us solely because of our race, gender, age, etc. An African American male walking down the street at night, for example, faces the threat of being seen as potentially violent. Steele recounts how, to deflect this stereotype threat, African American New York Times writer Brent Staples whistled Vivaldi while walking the streets of Hyde Park at night to signal to white people that he was educated and nonviolent. Another example of stereotype threat would be a white student in a class that is predominantly nonwhite facing the threat of being perceived as racist. Steele explains how such threats follow us like a “cloud.”
Steele summarizes research findings that show how the concerns students face as a result of these stereotype threats affect a wide range of educational outcomes. He explains how the threat of a stereotype and the extra efforts required of students who try to dispel it interfere with academic performance. The additional stress and anxiety, which can operate without awareness, can lead to underperformance in the classroom or on standardized tests relative to ability. Stereotype threat can also undermine feelings of belonging, competence, and aspiration. Importantly, Steele explains how contextual cues, such as being in an environment where there are few students or faculty of color, or where the curriculum marginalizes the experiences of students of color, are enough to trigger a stereotype threat that undermines performance.
Steele offers practices educators can use to help counteract these messages. For instance, self-affirmation exercises in the classroom, particularly for students of color, can be enough to counter negative messages that trigger stereotype threat. Some other practices include emphasizing incremental views of intelligence (i.e., intelligence as an expandable as opposed to fixed characteristic) and facilitating faculty-to-student or student-to-student mentoring and cross-racial interactions. Steele’s insights are so helpful that I was disappointed when he relegated some other important discussions to footnotes, such as when he outlines how findings about the effects of stereotype threat call into question past research that suggests families, not schools, are responsible for the achievement gap.
In the later chapters of the book, Steele focuses on how identity threats influence interracial interactions more broadly. He explains how our actions, conscious or not, contribute to persistent racial segregation as, understandably, each of us may retreat to the safety of a more homogeneous environment that does not trigger the risk of a stereotype threat. But Steele’s outlook is hopeful: the factors that contribute to our living segregated lives also have the potential to help us bridge our differences. We are all affected by identity threats, and awareness of this commonality should help us empathize with the experience of others.
Overall, Steele provides strong evidence demonstrating how situational cues affect student performance, and educators can benefit from the practical implications of his research in their efforts to remedy racial inequities in education. While the importance of addressing structural factors should not be overlooked, simple institutional practices can counter the otherwise powerful cues that trigger stereotype threat for students of color. The findings presented in this book unearth the powerful and prevalent ways in which group identity affects us all and demonstrate the need to acknowledge this fact: we need to be “identity conscious” if we are going to improve race relations across
our society.
l.m.g.

A World-Is-Random Model to Explain How Disorder and Chaos Skews Cognitve Scripts

From Frontiers in Psychology: Personality and Social Psychology, this is an interesting cognitive model for understanding how perceived chaos and disorder can create a world-is-chaotic mindset that shapes expectations and one's sense of self-efficacy and personal agency.

Full Citation: 
Kotabe, HP. (2014, Jun 13). The world is random: A cognitive perspective on perceived disorder. Frontiers in Psychology: Personality and Social Psychology; 5:606. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00606

The world is random: a cognitive perspective on perceived disorder

Hiroki P. Kotabe

• Center for Decision Research and Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Abstract

Research on the consequences of perceiving disorder is largely sociological and concerns broken windows theory, which states that signs of social disorder cause further social disorder. The predominant psychological explanations for this phenomenon are primarily social. In contrast, I propose a parsimonious cognitive model (“world-is-random” model; WIR) that may partly account for these effects. Basically, WIR proposes that perceiving disorder primes randomness-related concepts, which results in a reduction to one’s sense of personal control, which has diverse affective, judgmental, and behavioral consequences. I review recent developments on the psychological consequences of perceiving disorder and argue that WIR can explain all of these findings. I also cover select correlational findings from the sociological literature and explain how WIR can at least partly explain them. In a general discussion, I consider possible alternative psychological models and argue that they do not adequately explain the most recent psychological research on disorder. I then propose future directions which include determining whether perceiving disorder causes a “unique psychology” and delimiting boundary conditions.

Most of the research on the possible effects of perceived disorder on humans is sociological and concerns broken windows theory (BWT). BWT basically states that signs of social disorder (e.g., broken windows) cause further social disorder (e.g., more vandalism, theft; Wilson and Kelling, 1982; see also Keizer et al., 2008). Explanations for broken windows effects (BWE) are generally social. They focus on social norms, social signaling, and lack of social monitoring. In contrast, in this article, I propose a cognitive, “inside-one-head” model of the psychological consequences of perceiving disorder. After proceeding with the cognitive analysis, I turn back to the important naturally occurring social phenomena that I believe are partly explained by this cognitive model.

Before reviewing some recent developments relevant to this model, I should operationalize what I mean by “perceived disorder” (and “perceived order”): Perceived disorder is an interpreted state of the world in which things are in non-patterned and non-coherent positions. Oppositely, perceived order is an interpreted state of the world in which things are in patterned and coherent positions. Note that these broad definitions include all animate or inanimate things (i.e., all things that can be represented in mental “chunks”), and thus may apply both to purely physical disorder (e.g., objects randomly scattered about on a computer screen) and social disorder (e.g., littering, crime). The key requirement is that the stimuli are processed as non-patterned and non-coherent chunks.

There seems to be a developing interest among psychologists in the consequences of perceived disorder on human psychology (not necessarily in the context of BWT, however). Recently, some consequences of perceived disorder pertinent to the proposed model were documented by – in chronological order – Heintzelman et al. (2013), Vohs et al. (2013), and Chae and Zhu (2014): Heintzelman et al. (2013) documented a psychological state consequence of disorder. Across four studies, they manipulated perceived disorder either by (a) presenting people with pictures of seasons in temporal sequence (e.g., autumn, winter, spring, summer) or random sequence (e.g., winter, autumn, summer, spring; Experiments 1 and 2) or, in a more stripped-down presentation, (b) presenting people with semantic triads (i.e., Remote Associates Test items; Mednick, 1962) that were either coherent (e.g., “falling, actor, dust”; common associate: star) or incoherent (e.g., “belt, deal, nose”; Experiments 3 and 4). Subsequently, people across all four experiments reported less meaning in life in the disorderly condition than in the orderly condition (ds ranging from 0.37 to 0.54). Vohs et al. (2013) documented some judgment and behavioral consequences of perceived disorder. Across three experiments, they manipulated the immediate lab environment to be either orderly or disorderly. People in disorderly environments donated less (d = 0.73) and chose fewer healthier snacks (φ = 0.37; Experiment 1); they were rated as more creative in coming up with alternative uses for an ordinary object (d = 0.61; Experiment 2); and they showed stronger preference for an unconventional product whereas those in the orderly environment showed stronger preference for a conventional product (interaction, φ = 0.20; Experiment 3). Most recently, Chae and Zhu (2014) documented some other judgment, behavioral, and state consequences of perceived disorder. Across four experiments, they manipulated perceived disorder à la Vohs et al. (2013) – by having people do tasks in either a disorderly or orderly lab environment. Compared with people in the orderly environment, people in disorderly environments reported being willing to pay more for tempting but unnecessary products (d = 0.43; Experiment 1); they reacted slower in a Stroop task (d = 0.46) and reported feeling more depleted (d = 0.69; Experiment 2); and they did not persist as long on an unsolvable puzzle (d = 0.42, Experiment 3; d = 0.73, Experiment 4). Further, and most germane to the proposed model, they found in Experiment 4 that a threat to feeling in control mediated the effects of perceived disorder on persistence.

Perceived disorder apparently has a variety of psychological consequences for affect (broadly defined, see Gross and Thompson, 2007), judgment, and behavior. Is there a common process underlying these effects? Next, I will elaborate on a model that could account for the foregoing experimental findings as well as correlational findings in the sociological literature. In a general discussion, I will discuss three possible alternative psychological models that may explain some but not all of these findings, as well as future directions.

The World is Random

To follow along, see Figure 1 for a diagram of the proposed world-is-random model (WIR): Neglecting randomness, chance, and luck leads us to an illusion of control. WIR proposes that perceiving disorder primes concepts related with randomness/chance/luck (thus creating a “world-is-random” mindset). It may thus lead us to (accurately) believe we have less control over outcomes in low-control/high-chance situations because we weight available representations related to randomness/chance/luck more (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973). Through the same mechanism, it may even lead us to (erroneously) believe we have less control over ourselves when strongly tempted (i.e., when in a state of low-control/high-chance). This sense of losing personal control may have a variety of affective, judgmental, and behavioral consequences.

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 1. The world-is-random (WIR) model.

WIR can account for the experimental findings discussed earlier. Regarding the investigation on perceived disorder and meaning in life by Heintzelman et al. (2013), WIR explains these results as a negative consequence of losing a sense of personal control. Feeling in control is a fundamental human need (White, 1959; Bandura, 1977; Deci and Ryan, 1985; Higgins, 2011). If not met, humans suffer. One plausible manifestation, according to self-determination theory, is a feeling that life is meaningless because one cannot control outcomes (unfulfilled competence need) or choose their own way (unfulfilled autonomy need).

The sense of losing control resulting from perceiving disorder can also explain the results from the experiments by Vohs et al. (2013). In Experiment 1, people in a disorderly environment (a) donated less and (b) chose fewer healthy snacks. Having personal control means being able to agentically influence outcomes (White, 1959; Deci and Ryan, 1985). Thus, people whose sense of personal control is reduced, by definition, see their actions (e.g., donating) as having less consequence. Similarly, people whose sense of personal control is reduced are likely to see their efforts to control oneself as more in vain, thus it follows that they would exert less self-control. In Experiment 2, people in a disorderly environment were rated as more creative. Research has shown that people are more creative when they enter a state of “flow,” which necessitates, among other operating conditions, a reduction in executive control (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). WIR proposes that, through priming and increasing the judgment weight of randomness-related concepts, perceived disorder decreases our sense of control over oneself. Such changes to our beliefs may reduce the motivation to exert executive control (Job et al., 2010; Kotabe and Hofmann, submitted), facilitating advancement into a flow state of unshackled creativity. Regarding Experiment 3, people in a disorderly environment more strongly preferred an unconventional product whereas people in an orderly environment more strongly preferred a conventional product. WIR explains these results similar to how it explains the results from Experiment 2. By reducing our sense of personal control and use of control resources, perceived disorder may facilitate a state of flow in which conventional boundaries “disappear.”

World-is-random explains the results from the experiments by Chae and Zhu (2014) in a slightly different way. It assumes that the sense of losing control is threatening, and that this threat, in turn, is depleting to cognitive resources (Glass et al., 1969; Baumeister et al., 2007; Inzlicht and Kang, 2010), thus resulting in more impulsive behaviors across various domains. Accordingly, in Experiment 1, people in a disorderly environment were willing to pay more for tempting products and, in Experiment 2, people in a disorderly environment were slower to react in a Stroop task and reported feeling more depleted. In Experiments 3 and 4, people in a disorderly environment persisted less on an unsolvable puzzle. Moreover, the authors showed that a reduction in and threat to one’s sense of personal control mediated the effect of perceived disorder on persistence in Experiment 4, consistent with the mechanisms I propose.

WIR can also (partly) explain a variety of correlational findings in the sociological literature. For brevity, and because this paper does not focus on the sociological consequences of perceived disorder, I will only review select research intended to demonstrate the breadth of findings WIR may at least partly account for (for a summary, see Table 1)1. First, take a cross-sectional study by Geis and Ross (1998). Analyzing data of a representative sample of 2,482 adults, aged 18–92 years, in Illinois (from the 1995 survey of Community Crime and Health), they found that neighborhood-level disorder was associated with perceived powerlessness. WIR can explain this similarly to how it explains the “meaning in life” findings by Heintzelman et al. (2013). That is, by making the world feel random, people start to lose a sense of control which manifests itself in negative outlooks on life such as feeling powerless and meaningless. Another likely manifestation is distress; Cutrona et al. (2000) found that neighborhood-level disorder was associated with distress, and this was moderated by life outlook, temperament, and quality of relationships. Specifically, disorder was associated with higher distress among people with a more negative life outlook, more negative temperament, and low-quality relationships. Importantly, this study suggests that although perceiving disorder may result in negative affect via a reduction in a sense of personal control, it is not inevitable. This is consistent with recent psychological research showing that people sometimes buffer against the threat of losing control through compensatory control mechanisms (Whitson and Galinsky, 2008; Kay et al., 2010). It seems to be currently assumed that people generally possess and use this ability, but future research may find that there are individual differences. This would clearly have implications for the proposed model, and may necessitate including moderators. Ross (2000) analyzed other data from the 1995 survey of Community Crime and Health and found that neighborhood disorder was associated with self-reported depression. Again, these results are consistent with the idea that perceived disorder results in a sense of losing control, which has insidious psychological consequences. Lastly, Perkins and Taylor (1996) surveyed 412 people across 50 neighborhoods in Baltimore to evaluate the relationship between neighborhood disorder and fear of crime. Three methods were used to measure both physical and social dimensions of neighborhood disorder: self-reported resident perceptions, on-site observations by trained raters, and newspaper content analysis. All three measures of neighborhood disorder predicted fear of crime, corroborating the general definition of perceived disorder assumed in WIR. As fear is an affective response to threat (Watson, 2000), these findings can be explained by the sense of threat resulting from losing a sense of control: When we are threatened, we generate a primitive fight-or-flight response in which we pay particular attention to sources of threat in our environment (so we can avoid them or prepare for them), such as lurking criminals. It follows that people would start to lose a sense of security and safety, as documented in this study.

TABLE 1


TABLE 1. Select experimental and correlational findings on the psychological consequences of disorder.

General Discussion

In the following discussion, I consider possible alternatives to WIR and explain why they may be inadequate. I then discuss some future directions for psychological research on perceived disorder.

Alternative Explanations

Cognitive Disfluency Explanation

Perceived disorder might be cognitively processed more disfluently than perceived order. Disfluency is thought to make people think more deeply and abstractly (Alter, 2013). Therefore, perceived disorder might have effects on judgment and behavior through disfluency, though it is unlikely that disfluency would have as severely negative affective consequences as the sense of losing control proposed by WIR. That said, both accounts could explain how perceived disorder may result in more accurate judgments in low-control/high-chance situations – the difference being the mechanism through which this happens. WIR would make this prediction by stating that disorder in the environment results in priming concepts related to randomness/chance/luck, and thus, through the availability heuristic, these concepts are appropriately weighted more in judgment. The cognitive fluency explanation would make this prediction by stating that people make more accurate judgments in a disorderly environment because they think harder (utilizing more effortful “system 2” processing, Kahneman, 2011). Both mechanisms could jointly work together, however, the recent experimental research reviewed in this article is more consistent with the conditioning/priming account of WIR than a disfluency account, since it seems unlikely that cognitive disfluency would result in the sense of losing control. If anything, it would result in the opposite.

Social/Rational Agent Explanation

This general and prevalent view concerns how perceived disorder may signal information about social norms and social monitoring. It suggests that people’s judgments and behaviors in disorderly environments can be understood as rationally aimed at minimizing expected costs and maximizing expected benefits, given the available social information. Regarding social norms and signaling, environmental disorder (e.g., litter) defines the descriptive norm (“littering is okay here”) which inhibits the effectiveness of the injunctive norm (e.g., no littering policy), thus the perceived costs of littering are lowered and people litter (Cialdini et al., 1990; Cialdini, 2007). Regarding social monitoring, perceived disorder may reduce the perceived costs of crime (e.g., littering) by signaling that monitoring/policing is low and thus punishment is unlikely, thus reducing expected costs of committing crimes. While these explanations can account widely for BWE (thus their popularity), they do not provide a clear account for the recent advances in psychological research on perceived disorder, which has documented that perceived disorder results in threats to and reductions of the sense of control. That being said, I do not doubt that perceived disorder can have such social effects, which is partly why I think that there may be a “unique psychology” (i.e., a distinct constellation of psychological phenomena) caused by perceiving disorder―more on that later.

Goal-Based Explanation

This explanation makes similar predictions to the social/rational agent explanation. Basically, a reduction in the expected costs of a crime (e.g., littering) due to perceived disorder of that form in the environment results in a weakened ‘act-appropriately’ goal and consequently increases the strength of “hedonic” (e.g., littering) and “gain” (e.g., stealing) goals (see Lindenberg and Steg, 2007; Keizer et al., 2008). Thus, people who see litter in the environment also commit other crimes such as illegally using graffiti and stealing. Again, while this can explain BWE and the “spreading of disorder” (see Keizer et al., 2008), it does not seem to relate with the documented reduction in a sense of personal control.

Future Directions

A Unique Psychology?

As mentioned above, one direction for future research is to determine whether there is a distinct cluster of psychological consequences caused by perceiving disorder. Is there more to it than just priming randomness-related concepts and the associated consequences proposed by WIR? To my knowledge, there is no experimental evidence yet to confirm this. Although Keizer et al. (2008) proposed that goals are activated and deactivated in response to perceiving disorder, they did not measure this, and rather it is implied from the behavioral evidence which may be completely accounted for by reduced self-control. However, given the related research on social norms and signaling, I do not doubt that there is indeed more to the story. Further research can determine this conclusively.

Individual Differences?

Cutrona et al. (2000) provides correlational evidence that effects of perceiving disorder may be moderated by individual differences such as negativity and poor relationships. Moving forward, we should experimentally test whether personality measures of negative temperament (e.g., adult temperament questionnaire, Rothbart et al., 2000) and relationship quality (e.g., the positive relations with others scale, Ryff, 1989) have moderating effects and why. One possibility is that some people may not use compensatory control mechanisms (effectively). Further, Vohs et al. (2013) assumes that individual differences in reactions to perceiving disorder may translate into reactions to situational-level disorder. In light of this proposition, it may make sense to test whether there are interactions between classic personality measures regarding reactions to perceived disorder – such as preference for consistency (Cialdini et al., 1995), need for structure (Neuberg and Newsom, 1993), need for closure (Webster and Kruglanski, 1994), and ambiguity tolerance (Norton, 1975) – and perceiving disorder in one’s surroundings.

Dependent Variables

To advance an interdisciplinary connection between the psychology of perceived disorder and the sociology of BWT, it will be important to develop laboratory measures analogous to those interpreted in the sociology of BWT. What would a laboratory analog be for “throwing a rock through the window of an abandoned building?” One may look to the aggression literature for inspiration. For example, research in this domain has employed creative behavioral measures such as serving hot sauce to a confederate (Bushman et al., 2005), blasting a confederate with aversive noise (Bushman et al., 2005), and delivering ostensibly painful shocks (Zillmann, 1971) to assess aggressive tendencies, which may have some parallels with criminal behaviors such as vandalism and theft.

Concluding Remarks

Research on the psychology of perceived disorder is a new and exciting development. In this article, I propose a parsimonious cognitive model possibly explaining a variety of effects and relationships concerning perceived disorder documented across the psychological and sociological literatures. To recap, WIR proposes that perceiving disorder results in a threatening sense of losing personal control (via priming randomness-related concepts), which can account for a variety of affective, judgmental, and behavioral findings in the literatures. Going forward, it is important to further corroborate each link in this model and delineate boundary conditions. It is also important to determine what aspects of this model have to do with BWT and what aspects do not. A broader and more challenging future direction is determining whether there are parallel psychological processes triggered by perceived disorder that collectively define a unique constellation of psychological phenomena.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers, Reid Hastie, Ayelet Fishbach, and Spike W. S. Lee for their useful feedback.

Footnotes

1. ^Across the selected studies, they control for various community- and individual-level variables such as urban area, neighborhood disadvantage, race, education, and income that may correlate with the dependent variables, yet perceived disorder remained a significant covariate.

References available at the Frontiers site.

Sub-Clinical Narcissists CAN Feel Empathy, If They Can Take the Other's Perspective

This research was widely reported in the media last week, but this article from The Atlantic offers the most balanced report of the study of those I have read.

Okay, an important note, made below, is in order. The subjects of this study were only assessed for narcissistic traits, not for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The results here should not be extrapolated to individuals with NPD.

The upshot is that your everyday, garden variety, pain-in-the-ass with narcissistic tendencies or traits can feel empathy for another person if asked to take that person's perspective. This means some of those around us who are not fully narcissistic can change. But it also means that we can teach children to be empathetic when they are still quite young and are, by nature, little narcissists.

How to Make the Narcissist in Your Life a Little Nicer

A new study finds that deliberately considering the perspectives of others can help conceited people feel empathy.

Olga Khazan | Jun 3 2014


Caravaggio/Wikimedia Commons/Atlantic
Love is great, but it’s actually empathy that makes the world go ‘round. Understanding other peoples’ viewpoints is so essential to human functioning that psychologists sometimes refer to empathy as “social glue, binding people together and creating harmonious relationships.”

Narcissists tend to lack this ability. Think of the charismatic co-worker who refuses to cover for a colleague who’s been in a car accident. Or the affable friend who nonetheless seems to delight in back-stabbing.

These types of individuals are what’s known as “sub-clinical” narcissists—the everyday egoists who, though they may not merit psychiatric attention, don’t make very good friends or lovers. "They tend to cheat on their partners and their relationships break up sooner and end quite messily."

“If people are in a romantic relationship with a narcissist, they tend to cheat on their partners and their relationships break up sooner and end quite messily,” Erica Hepper, a psychologist at the University of Surrey in the U.K., told me. “They tend to be more deviant academically. They take credit for other peoples' work.”

Psychologists have long thought that narcissists were largely incorrigible—that there was nothing we could do to help them be more empathetic. But for a new study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Hepper discovered a way to measurably help narcissists feel the pain of others.

First, she gathered up 282 online volunteers who hailed from various countries but were mostly young and female. They took a 41-question personality quiz designed to assess their levels of subclinical narcissism, checking boxes next to statements like “I like to have authority over other people” or “I will be a success.” They then read a story about a person named Chris who had just gone through a breakup, and then took another quiz to determine how bad they felt for Chris. The more narcissistic among them were indeed less likely to feel empathy for the fictional jilted man.

An important note here: The study participants, though they’re described as “narcissists,” were not clinically diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a bona-fide mental illness. Psychologists aren’t sure how much overlap there is between functional people who are very narcissistic and those who suffer from NPD. One rule of thumb, Hepper tells me, is that most ordinary narcissists are happy, while NPD tends to lead its sufferers to extreme dissatisfaction with life.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

For her next manipulation, Hepper and her co-authors asked a group of 95 female undergrads to take the same narcissism quiz, and then later to watch a 10-minute documentary about Susan, a victim of spousal abuse. Half were told to try to put themselves in Susan’s shoes (“Imagine how Susan feels. Try to take her perspective in the video...”), while the others were told to imagine they were watching the program on TV one evening.

The subjects who were told to take Susan’s perspective were significantly more likely to score higher on empathy. In fact, the more narcissistic they were, the more the trick seemed to work.

“I think what's going on here is that people who are low on narcissism are already responding to people—telling them what to do isn't going to increase their empathy any further,” Hepper said. “But the higher on narcissism you get, the less empathy [you feel]. By instructing them to think about it, it activates this empathic response that was previously much weaker.”

And the narcissists weren’t just faking it. In a third experiment, Hepper showed that extreme narcissists had lower-than-average heart rates when listening to a recording of a woman in distress. (That is, “Their lack of empathy is more than skin-deep,” Hepper writes.) But if they were told to take the woman’s perspective, their heart rates leapt back up to a normal level.

Hepper thinks that eventually, this research could help shape therapeutic interventions aimed at narcissists. Teachers or human resources representatives could use such tools to try to get their resident egomaniacs to be more charitable.

Perhaps one day we can banish all the world’s narcissists to a desert island littered with tanning beds and TV cameras. Until that day, this type of compassion training might be the best weapon we have against the self-absorbed. As Hepper said, maybe it can help make the world “a nicer, more prosocial place.”

Jan Groenveld - Social Psychology and Group Dynamics of Cults

 

This is a real basic overview of cult structure and behavior, written by Jan Groenveld, a woman who had been both a Jehovah's Witness and a Mormon. Here is a brief background from Wikipedia:

Jan Groenveld (1945 – 22 October 2002) was a former member of the LDS Church and the Jehovah's Witnesses. She spent a total of fifteen years in these organizations before leaving them in 1975. After her negative experiences in these organizations, she resolved to make more information about what she saw as "cults" available to the general public. Her personal experiences involving these groups were featured in Richard Guilliatt's book, Talk of the Devil.

Groenveld coined the often quoted phrase:

“The most dangerous lie is that which most closely resembles the truth.”

The author offers Jehovah's Witnesses as an example for several of her points below. Smaller organizations often have similar traits in a smaller scale. Additionally, a lot of this information applies to charismatic teachers and spiritual leaders, as well.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND GROUP DYNAMICS

Written by Jan Groenveld
(email: py101663@dingo.cc.uq.oz.au)

May be distributed freely providing it contains the above identifying information and the text is not altered in any way.

Studies have shown that today's cults use a stronger form of control than those of 50 years ago. The advent of new psychological experiments in the 60's and 70's have produced the modern methods of mind control which are far more sophisticated than the BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION TECHNIQUES and THOUGHT REFORM developed by the Chinese. To understand mind control you need a basic understanding of Behavior Modification Techniques.

What is BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION?

Simply described, it is "reward or punishment for actions" association. It was used on you as a child whenever you were being commended or otherwise for your behavior.

Taking away a privilege is usually a sure-fire method to persuading a child to change its behavior when that child is old enough to under-stand the process. Praising a child for doing good is another method of changing behavior, especially in the child who is anxious to please. The rod of education applied to the seat of learning is another method of bringing about a desired behavior change.

When behavior modification techniques such as these are applied in a loving, caring and consistent way, the child changes their behavior without holding feelings of resentment. However, if these techniques are perverted in any way, damage is done to the child's psyche, their emotions, e.g., the abused child syndrome. Cults use a sophisticated and perverted form of behavior modification which damages an individual’s emotions.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Leon Festinger is a psychologist who studied groups that predicted the end of the world. He found that most members became stronger than ever when the prophecy failed. His investigation revealed that members had to find a way to cope psychologically with the failure. They needed to maintain order and meaning in their life. They needed to think they were acting according to their self-image and values. Festinger described this contradiction which they had to overcome as what has become known as the Cognitive Dissonance Theory.

The three components he described are:

CONTROL OF BEHAVIOR - CONTROL OF THOUGHTS - CONTROL OF EMOTIONS

Each component has a powerful effect on the other two: CHANGE ONE AND THE OTHERS WILL TEND TO FOLLOW. When all three change the individual undergoes a complete change. Festinger summarized the basic principle:

"If you change a person's behavior, his thoughts and feelings will change to minimize the dissonance."

When there is a conflict between thoughts, feelings or behavior, then those in conflict will change to minimize the contradiction. This is because a person can only tolerate a certain amount of discrepancy between these components which make up his identity. In cults this dissonance is created to exploit and control them.

Steven Hassan, author of Combating Cult Mind Control, added a fourth component to Festinger's: CONTROL OF INFORMATION

By controlling the information one receives you can control and restrict the individual's ability to think for himself. You limit what he is able to think about. 

BEHAVIOR CONTROL - The control of an individual's physical reality

This can include control of where he lives, what he eats, his clothing, sleep, job, rituals etc. This is why most cults have a stringent schedule for members. There is always something to do in destructive cults. Each cult has its own distinctive set of behaviors that bind it together. This control is so powerful that the cult member will actually participate in their own punishment and come to believe he actually deserves it! No one can command a person's thoughts but IF YOU CAN CONTROL BEHAVIOR THEN HEARTS AND MINDS WILL FOLLOW.

THOUGHT CONTROL - The control of an individual's thought processes

The indoctrination of members so thoroughly that they will manipulate their own thought processes. The ideology is internalized as "the truth". Incoming information is filtered through the beliefs that also regulates how this information is thought about.
The cult has its own language which further regulates how a person thinks. This puts a great barrier between cult members and outsiders.

Another form of control is "thought stopping" techniques. This can take many forms: chanting, meditating, singing, humming, tongues (some even pay money to learn it), concentrated praying, etc. The use of these techniques short-circuits the persons' ability to test reality. The person can only think positive thoughts about the group. If there is a problem the member assumes responsibility and works harder.

EMOTIONAL CONTROL - The control of the individual’s emotional life

This manipulates a person's range of feelings. Guilt and fear are used to keep control. Cult members cannot see the control by guilt and like other abuse victims are conditioned to blame themselves when things are wrong, even grateful when a leader points their transgressions. 

Fear is used to manipulate two ways. The first is to create an outside enemy (we vs them) who is persecuting you. The second is the fear of punishment by the leaders if you are not "good enough." Being "good enough" is following the ideology perfectly. The most powerful emotional control is phobia indoctrination. This can give the person a panic reaction at the very thought of leaving the group. It is almost impossible to conceive that there is any life outside the group. There is no physical gun held to their heads but the psychological gun is just as if not more powerful.

INFORMATION CONTROL - The control of the individual’s information sources

Deny a person the information needed to make a sound judgment and he will be incapable of doing so. People are trapped in cults because they are denied both the access to the critical information they need to assess their situation. The psychological chains on their minds are just as powerful as if they were locked away physically from society. So strong is this psychological process they also lack the properly functioning internal mechanism to process any critical information placed in front of them. 

THE EIGHT MARKS OF MIND CONTROL TOTALISM - ALL OR NOTHING

Mind Control is a PROCESS of eradicating former beliefs and instituting new beliefs in their place through the use of COERCIVE persuasion. It is a PROCESS which is designed to break a person's independence and individuality and replace it with the ideology clone. The Chinese called this process "thought reform" which was poorly translated into English as "brain-washing".

BRAIN-WASHING

Brain-washing is now considered to be a different process to thought reform or mind control. In brain-washing the victim knows who is the enemy. An example is American Patty Hearst who was kidnapped by a terrorist group. Through physical abuse she finally became a member of the group and took part in terrorist activities and bank robberies. 

THOUGHT CONTROL

Thought control is more subtle. The victim doesn't know who is the enemy because the enemy seems like their best friend who only has their best interests at heart. 

Cults practice a more refined form of thought control than that used by the Chinese. Leading psychologist, Dr Margaret Singer, said cults do it better than the Chinese because it is easier to get people to do what you want through manipulating them with guilt and anxiety. During this process the prospective recruit is re-educated and will abandon the precepts he has learnt from life for the "truth" or "enlightenment" offered by the group. In some cults this is done over a long period of time; Other cults can bring about this change within 48 hours. Whichever way the process takes place the results are the same. The individual has undergone a total change in personality and is often unrecognizable by their family. 

The process of thought control has been documented by Robert J Lifton who researched what happened to the American prisoners of the Communist Chinese. He labeled the steps which have become the standard by which to judge whether a group is using "brain-washing" or "thought reform" on its recruits. 

Robert J Lifton's research showed that -

"These criteria consist of eight psychological themes which are predominant within the social field of the thought reform milieu. Each has a totalistic quality; each depends upon an equally absolute philosophical assumption; and each mobilizes certain individual emotional tendencies, mostly of a polarizing nature. Psychological theme, philosophical rationale, and polarized individual tendencies are interdependent; they require, rather than directly cause, each other. In combination they create an atmosphere which may temporarily energize or exhilarate, but which at the same time poses the gravest of human threats." (Thought Reform & the Psychology of Totalism, p 420)

The eight marks noted by Lifton are: 

1. MILIEU CONTROL - Control of the Environment and Communication

The control of human communication is the most basic feature of the thought reform environment. This is the control of what the individual sees, hears, reads, writes, experiences and expresses. It goes even further than that, and controls the individuals communication with himself - his own thoughts. 

Everything other than their beliefs is excluded. The organization appears to be omniscient. They seem to know everything that is going on. Reality is their exclusive possession. In this environment the individual is deprived of the combination of external information and internal reflection required to test reality and to maintain a measure of identity separate from his environment. The individual can feel victimized by his controllers and feel the hostility of suffocation - the resentful awareness that his striving toward new information, independent judgment and self-expression are being thwarted. 

EXAMPLE - Jehovah's Witnesses are a classical example of a closed community living within and mixing with the wider community. Because they are so well known we have used them as an example.

In Jehovah's Witnesses

- You could "go beyond the 'truth' - beyond what they taught. This showed you were thinking for yourself and put yourself above leadership. Those moving ahead of the Organization are counseled
- No gatherings other than those allowed or organized by organization (1982).
- Not making comments from your own thoughts at the meetings. Only comments from the study articles are permitted. No independent thinking is permitted.
- The organization always seemed to know what was going on in your congregation and article appeared in Watchtower publications just at the right time ("food at the proper time"). This was done through Circuit Servants reports to Headquarters.
- Use of 'publisher record cards' etc. to monitor activities of members. Watchtower is aware of trends etc. by strict reporting and control of individual Witnesses activities.
- Report on fellow brothers & sisters (cannot get away from organization)
- Monitoring or observation of disfellowshipped or marked people.
- Non Witnesses are viewed as 'bad association'
- Worldly education discouraged - better to go door-to-door
- Employment that takes up time which should be devoted to Watchtower activities is also discouraged.
- Should be 'buying out the opportune time' in 'theocratic activities'.
- Taught to indoctrinate self!
- 'Shepherding' of those who fall behind.

2. MYSTICAL MANIPULATION - The Mystique of the Organization

This seeks to provoke specific patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that these will appear to have arisen spontaneously from within the environment. For the manipulated person this assumes a near-mystical quality. This is not just a power trip by the manipulators. They have a sense of "higher purpose" and see themselves as being the "keepers of the truth." By becoming the instruments of their own mystique, they create a mystical aura around the manipulating institution - the Party, the Government, the Organization, etc. They are the chosen agents to carry out this mystical imperative. 

The pursuit of this mystical imperative supersedes all considerations of decency of immediate human welfare. The end justifies the means. You can lie, deceive or whatever to those outside the organization. Association with the "outside" is only to benefit their own cause in some way. Some cults like Moonies and Hare Krishna's call their deception "heavenly deception" or "transcendental trickery". Members believe in the ideology to such a degree that they rationalize these deceptions. Members are kept in a frenzy of cult related activities. There is little time or energy to think about their lifestyle. 

"The psychology of the pawn" - This person feels unable to escape from forces he sees more powerful than himself. His way of dealing with this is to adapt to them. He learns how to anticipate problems with the organization and to manipulate events to avoid incriminating himself. This is the person who has been in the organization long enough, knows something is wrong, is on the verge of leaving then suddenly becomes very loyal. They sell out to the organization and will turn in friends who may have confided in them.
In Jehovah's Witnesses

- "Theocratic strategy" - If you don't have a right to know the truth it is OK to lie to you. (See "Insight" under 'Lie')
- Avoid telling prospects- No blood, holidays, family, friends, etc
- Bring someone new each time they call so prospect gets to know the people at the Kingdom Hall when they attend. (Planned spontaneity)
- The ideology supersedes the welfare of the individual. They are not involved in charities outside the group [or in the group].
- Not helping fellow memmbers to the detriment of promoting the ideology. This is more important than helping the sick & elderly.
- Prayers are general - for the organization not the needs of the individual. See God as not interested in you as a person.
- Blessed only for effort in promoting the Kingdom.
- Ability of organization to accomplish the 'preaching work' seen as evidence of Jehovah's blessing, direction and angelic help
- Jehovah 'sifts out' those not truly 'in the truth', those without 'the right heart condition' which is why people leave or must be disfellowshipped. No one leaves legitimately.

3. DEMAND FOR PURITY - Everything is black & white

Pure and impure is defined by the ideology of the organization. Only those ideas, feelings and actions consistent with the ideology and policy are good. The individual conscience is not reliable. The philosophical assumption is that absolute purity is attainable and that anything done in the name of this purity is moral. By defining and manipulating the criteria of purity and conducting an all-out war on impurity (dissension especially) the organization creates a narrow world of guilt and shame. This is perpetuated by an ethos of continuous reform, the demand that one strive permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is alien to the human condition. 

Under these conditions the individual expects humiliation, ostracism and punishment because of his inability to live up to the criteria and lives in a constant state of guilt and shame. Since the organization is the ultimate judge of good and evil, this guilt and shame is used to manipulate and control members. The organization becomes an authority without limit in the eyes of members and their power is nowhere more evident than in their capacity to "forgive".

All impurities are seen to originate from "outside" (the world). Therefore, one of the best ways to relieve himself of the burden of guilt is to denounce these with great hostility. The more guilty he feels, the greater his hatred, the more hostile is his denouncement. Organizationally this eventually leads to purges of heretics, mass hatred and religious holy wars. The group will point to the mistakes of all other belief systems while promoting their own purity. This gives the impression that their organization is perfect, clean and pure as a people or group.

In Jehovah's Witnesses

- Dress and grooming have been laid down at various times. These rules change at the whim of the leaders.

No pantsuits for ladies - No beards or moustaches on men
Short hair on men - No colored shirts for men
No gold rimmed glasses - Certain styles of clothing prohibited

- Only 2 organizations: Jehovah's and Satan's. You cannot be part of both.
- World has no conscience - all dishonest
- Must keep clear of worldly celebrations (Christmas, Easter, Birthdays, Mother's & Father's Day, Thanksgiving etc)
- Loyalty displayed through meeting attendance and participation, field service, choice of marriage partners [strong 'in the truth'], shunning disfellowshipped relatives and friends.

4. CULT OF CONFESSION - Reporting to leadership

This is closely related to the demand for purity. Confession is carried beyond the ordinary religious, legal and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for these vulnerabilities. 

Totalist confession is an act of self-surrender, the expression of the merging of the individual and environment. There is a dissolution of self, talents, and money. It’s about conformity.

The cult of confession has effects quite the reverse of its ideal of total exposure; rather than eliminating personal secrets, it increases and intensifies them.

The individual becomes caught up in continuous conflict over which secrets to preserve and which to surrender, over ways to reveal lesser secrets can be revealed and ways to protect more important ones.

The cult of confession makes it virtually impossible to attain reasonable balance between worth and humility.

In Jehovah's Witnesses

- Confessing infringements to an Elder.
- Putting in field reports (test of spirituality) [A monthly report of one's activities for that month. How many hours door-knocking; number of books and magazines sold; number of people one studied doctrine with etc.]
- Accept orders without question. Ask "How high" when told to jump.
- Any who are aware of another's sin must put this one in to the elders or the guilt will rest on their shoulders.
- Congregation is made aware of the sin through talks and restrictions placed on guilty ones.

5. SACRED SCIENCE - Absolute "Truth"

Their "truth" is the absolute truth. It is sacred – beyond questioning. There is a reverence demanded for the leadership. They have ALL the answers. Only to them is given the revelation of "truth". 

The ultimate moral vision becomes the ultimate science and the person who dares to criticize it, or even think criticism, is immoral, irreverent and "unscientific".
The assumption here is not so much that man can be God, but rather that man's IDEAS can be God. 

This gives sense of security to the member. They are confident they can get the answer to the most difficult problem or question.

In Jehovah's Witnesses

- You can be disfellowshipped (kicked out) for daring to question what is taught in their publications.
- Watchtower demands full devotion of members. Must not question the Organization (= questioning God)
- There is an answer to everything, if you cannot find it in the publications you must 'wait on Jehovah' and not 'push ahead'.
- Organization itself will survive Armageddon but individual Jehovah's Witnesses have no such assurance.

6. LOADING THE LANGUAGE - Thought terminating clichés

Everything is compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.

There are "good" terms which represents the groups ideology and "evil" terms to represent everything outside which is to be rejected. Totalist language is intensely divisive, all-encompassing jargon, unmercifully judging. To those outside the group this language is tedious - the language of non-thought.

This effectively isolates members from outside world. The only people who understand you are other members. Other members can tell if you are really one of them by how you talk.

This narrowness of the language is constricting. The individual is linguistically deprived because language is central to the human experience and his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely restricted.

While initially this loaded language can give a sense of security to the new believer, an uneasiness develops over time. This uneasiness may result in a withdrawal into the system and he preaches even harder to hide his problem and demonstrate his loyalty. It may also produce an inner division and the individual will publicly give the right performance while privately have his own thoughts.

Either way, his imagination becomes increasingly disassociated from his actual life experiences and may even tend to atrophy from disuse.

e.g. - In Jehovah's Witnesses

- Theocratic strategy - "ark of salvation" - "new light"
- "meat in due season" - "faithful & discreet slave" - "apostate"
- "The anointed" - Book study - Christendom
- "Christ Jesus" instead of "Jesus Christ"
- 'back calls' now called 'return visits' (terminology changes indicate who might be falling behind or who is not really a member)
- "Jehovah will take care of it in his due time."
- "It's the truth" - doesn't matter if they make a mistake
- Where else is there to go?
- Worldly - Governing Body - New System of Things

7. DOCTRINE OVER PERSON - Doctrine supersedes human experience

The ideological myth merges with their "truth" and the resulting deduction can be so overpowering and coercive that is simply replaces reality. Consequently past events can be altered, rewritten or even ignored to make them consistent with the current reality. This alteration is especially lethal when the distortions are imposed on the individual's memory.

They demand character and identity of a person be reshaped to fit their clone of mentality. The individual must fit the rigid contours of the doctrinal mold instead of developing their own potential and personality.

The underlying assumption is that the doctrine - including its mythological elements - is ultimately more valid, true and real than is any aspect of actual human character or human experience. The individual under such pressure is propelled into an intense conflict with his own sense of integrity, a struggle which take place in relation to polarized feelings if sincerity and insincerity.

Absolute sincerity is demanded by the group yet this must be put to one side when changes take place the individual has to deny the original belief ever existed. Personal feelings are suppressed and members must appear to be contented and enthusiastic at all times.

Some cults believe that all illness is a result of lack of faith and evidence of sin in your life. These things have to be prayed away and medical attention is ignored as a "sign of faith."

In Jehovah's Witnesses

- "There is no life outside the organization" so when they see people who have made a life outside they revert back to doctrine over what they see.
- If an experience doesn't fit, it must be demons.
- Will ignore needs of others because doctrine overrides human experience, i.e., will ignore needs of disfellowshipped or marked persons no matter how serious those needs are.
- Those who were JW's before 1975 and are still JW's will deny they ever believed Armageddon was due that year - even those who sold homes, delayed medical treatment etc.
- Watchtower has final authority even over personal experience. Blood transfusions, etc. Conscience matters are discussed only in the light of Watchtower doctrine (not left to individuals' consciences).

8. DISPENSING OF EXISTENCE - Who is worthy to live

They have the right to decide who is worthy of life and who isn't. They also decide which history books are accurate and which are not. Those in the organization are worthy of life; those outside worthy of death. The outsiders can be permitted to live if they change and become an insider. Members live in fear of being pronounced "dead".

They have a fear of annihilation or extinction. The emotional conflict is one of "being vs nothingness".

Existence comes to depend upon creed (I believe, therefore I am), upon mission (I obey, therefore I am) and beyond these, upon a sense of total merger with the organization. Should he stray from the "truth" his right to exist may be withdrawn and he is pronounced "dead".
 
In Jehovah's Witnesses

- "Sheep and goats" - how one responds to "Christ's brothers" decides their future. ("Christ's brothers" are those who rule the organization. How you respond to their message as carried by their messengers decides your eternal future).
- Elders decide who is worthy of life at Judicial Committee meetings.
- They decide who is worthy of a resurrection - (Sodom & Gommorah).
- Disfellowshiping 'sinners' denies them any hope for a future outside the Organization.
- They will blatantly lie to achieve goals and consider this to be "theocratic strategy".
- Any information contrary to the Watchtower 'system' is not considered worth listening to or reading.
- Witnesses are forbidden to discuss such information, especially if is considered 'apostate' [put together by former members]

IN SUMMARY

The more clearly these eight points are obvious, the greater the resemblance to ideological totalism. The more an organization utilizes such totalist devices to change individuals, the greater its resemblance to thought reform.

Remember . . . A group does not have to be religious to be cultic in behavior. High demand groups can be commercial, political and psychological. Be aware, especially if you are a bright, intelligent and idealistic person. The most likely person to be caught up in this type of behavioral system is the one who says "I won't get caught. It will never happen to me. I am too intelligent for that sort of thing."


Written by Jan Groenveld
Internet Address: py101663@mailbox.uq.oz.au
Fidonet Address : 3:640/316
(c) Cult Awareness & Information Centre, PO Box 2444,
Mansfield 4122, Australia,
May be distributed freely providing it contains the above identifying information and the text is not altered in any way.

Svenja Matusall - Social Behavior in the “Age of Empathy”?

From Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Svenja Matusall offers the perspective of a social scientist on social behavior in the "Age of Empathy." Interesting article.

Full Citation: 

Matusall, S. (2013). Social behavior in the “Age of Empathy”?—A social scientist's perspective on current trends in the behavioral sciences. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience; 7:236. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00236

Social behavior in the “Age of Empathy”?—A social scientist's perspective on current trends in the behavioral sciences

Svenja Matusall

• MINDLab and Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Recently, several behavioral sciences became increasingly interested in investigating biological and evolutionary foundations of (human) social behavior. In this light, prosocial behavior is seen as a core element of human nature. A central role within this perspective plays the “social brain” that is not only able to communicate with the environment but rather to interact directly with other brains via neuronal mind reading capacities such as empathy. From the perspective of a sociologist, this paper investigates what “social” means in contemporary behavioral and particularly brain sciences. It will be discussed what “social” means in the light of social neuroscience and a glance into the history of social psychology and the brain sciences will show that two thought traditions come together in social neuroscience, combining an individualistic and an evolutionary notion of the “social.” The paper concludes by situating current research on prosocial behavior in broader social discourses about sociality and society, suggesting that to naturalize prosocial aspects in human life is a current trend in today's behavioral sciences and beyond.

Introduction

Recently, several behavioral sciences, for instance neuroeconomics (e.g.,Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003), primatology (e.g., De Waal, 2009) and social neuroscience (e.g., Frith and Frith, 2010), became increasingly interested in investigating biological and evolutionary foundations of (human) social behavior. Scholars from these fields argue that the biology of humans is itself much more prosocial than previously thought. Prosocial behavior is a core element of human nature. It is rooted in each individual, has evolved during the course of evolution, is located in the brain, its genes, functions, hormones and neurotransmitters and is embedded in an environment. A central concept of this new perspective on human nature is the “social brain” (Brothers, 1990) that is not only able to communicate with the environment but rather to interact directly with other brains via neuronal mind reading capacities such as empathy (see Young, 2012a).

Taking social neuroscience as an example, this paper explores the notion of “social” in contemporary behavioral sciences and how a new concept of human nature emerges. At the core of this new concept is the notion that default human behavior is prosocial. The paper sets out to investigate what “social” means in social neuroscience. (1), the research field is introduced before a glance in the history of the social sciences shows that “social” is by no means an unambiguous term (2). The historical roots of the social brain are explored (3) and the paper concludes (4) by situating current research on social behavior in broader discourses about sociality and society, suggesting that the trend to look for prosocial aspects in human life, culture and society also takes place in other spheres of society.

What is Social Neuroscience?

Social neuroscience is much more diverse than this brief perspective paper could picture and hence this paper's aim can only be to outline general trends within the field. The term “social neuroscience” was first coined by social psychologists Gary Berntson and John Cacioppo in 1992 (Cacioppo and Berntson, 1992). They propose a cooperation between social psychology and neuroscience in order to avoid the pitfalls of reductionism by adding multiple perspectives to given problems. But it took another decade before a field with research groups, professorships, university courses, textbooks, conferences, societies, and journals emerged that calls itself social neuroscience (Matusall et al., 2011). In this process, a second important impetus came from a paper by Ochsner and Lieberman (2001), who should also be named among the founding figures of the field.

Many of social neuroscience's topics of interest fall into the realm of classic social psychology, for instance the study attitudes, prejudices and stereotypes (Matusall, 2012). Interestingly, however, is the field's new focus on emotion, empathy and altruism (cf. Decety and Ickes, 2009;Singer and Lamm, 2009). Recently, prosocial behavior moved into the center of attention, not only in social neuroscience but also in other behavioral sciences such as primatology and anthropology (cf. De Waal, 2009; Tomasello, 2009).

What does Social Mean in Social Neurosciences?

In social neuroscience, prosocial behavior is sought in genes, brains and evolutionary past. “Social” is simultaneously understood as a capacity of the organism's brain to cope with the environment and as an evolutionary advantage of the species. This perspective on the social differs fundamentally from sociology's perspective, where the social can be anything from the sum of individual actions to power relations or social structures. The list of phenomena having been defined to be social in the course of the history of the social sciences is rather long and diverse as (Greenwood, 1997, p. 3) points out by giving a random collection of those phenomena: “states, families, armies, religious organizations, literary societies, mobs, street brawls, people chatting on a street corner, the Roman Catholic Church, the Renaissance, insect communication, dominance hierarchies among primates, language, financial instruments, and traffic flow in a city.” Thus, “social” is by no means an unambiguous term and for understanding social neuroscience's notion of “social,” it is crucial to look into the history of experimental social psychology, which is one of social neuroscience's intellectual parent disciplines. Looking at the questions social neuroscientists tackle in their research, it soon becomes evident that they focus on the way social stimuli are perceived and processed in the brain—no matter whether they study empathy, attitudes toward out-group members or voters' behavior. This individual-centered approach may be self-evident for social neuroscientists, yet it is a historically contingent approach as will be shown in the next section.

Genealogy of a Concept

The individualistic perspective on the social has a long tradition in experimental social psychology: since its emergence in the 1920's, this discipline has understood itself as a branch of individual psychology (Allport, 1924), investigating whether and how the perception and processing of social stimuli differed from the perception and processing of non-social stimuli. In order to apply experimental methods to such questions, social psychologists had to frame their objects of investigation as statistically measurable. In this process, the social was redefined as a quality of countable entities. This perspective differed from theories in 19th century social psychology that connected the social with morality and religion, respectively with institutionalized power (Danziger, 1997). Moreover, the individualist notion of the social had a crucial role in defining and defending the individualistic American Way of Life against collectivist notions of society and the individual (Rose, 1998). The political background of its emergence seems all but forgotten by those employing this notion of social today as a variable investigated by experimental methods. Most social neuroscientists are trained in social psychology and most positions are located in psychology departments. Their research questions and their argumentation stand in the tradition of experimental social psychology. By relocating the “social” in the individual's brain and neurobiology, social neuroscientists are in line with their predecessors in treating it as an individual capacity. 

Perspectives from Sociology

Looking with the eyes of a sociologist, investigating problems in small pieces, such as brain activation, entails the risk of losing the perspective on the broader picture and taking the small piece for the whole problem (Star, 1983). The experimental design of “social” in social neuroscience research requires rendering research in a quantitative fashion.1 This does not necessarily imply a reduction of complexity in the stimuli presented but in the questions asked. If complex issues such as voters' emotional reactions to election outcomes or empathy with members of an “out-group” are measured by quantitative tools, it has to be assumed that complex phenomenona can be split up into several problems and thus are not more than the sum of their parts. This approach differs fundamentally from hermeneutic approaches towards complex phenomena, which are more interested in meaning than in mechanisms and which are dominant in humanities and non-quantifying social sciences.

To some extent, social neuroscientists seem to be aware of this and pay credit to the problem of complexity by drawing on the notion of levels (Cacioppo and Berntson, 1992; Ochsner and Lieberman, 2001). Cacioppo and Berntson (1992) maintain that although the brain is an essential component of all social beings, brain, behavior and society are each too complex to be reduced to one another. Hence, social neuroscience aims to combine data generated on different levels to reach a better comprehension of social behavior. Yet, knowledge from other disciplines can only be integrated if compatible with the standards of quantifying sciences and qualitative knowledge is difficult to incorporate in such paradigms.

History of the Social Brain2

Not only in social psychology, also in the brain sciences, questions about the “social” have a long tradition. The relationship between the brain and the social has been an issue of hot debate ever since the emergence of modern brain science in the late 18th century. In these debates, the pendulum has been swinging happily back and forth between seeing either nature or nurture as responsible for human behavior. Early 19th century's phrenologists, for instance, defined a cerebral faculty for each human property and thus saw a clear causal direction from brain to behavior, while psychiatrists in the second half of the 19th century made harmful social conditions responsible for psychiatric disorders and thus reversed causal directions (Hagner, 2007). Theories of evolution were central to 19th and early 20th century's concepts of the brain and the social. These theories were associated with a hierarchical organization of brain areas: the younger, more evolved parts such as intellectual capacities or morality controlled older parts such as drives and emotions (e.g., Jackson, 1884).

Not least as a reaction to the role medicine and biological sciences played in Nazi ideology, after the Second World War research in the West was dominated by behaviorism, cybernetics and cognitive science (Hagner, 2007). During that time questions about human interactions did not play a role in mainstream neuroscience and psychology. This began to change slowly in the 1980's and with even more force in the 1990's when the social brain returned to the debate in three independent theories about the relationship between brain and social: the social brain hypothesis, thesomatic marker hypothesis and the mirror neuron theory, which will be discussed in next section. 

The Social Brain Since the 1990's

The social brain hypothesis suggests that the size of the neocortex and the group size of mammals living in social groups correlate (Brothers, 1990;Dunbar, 1998). The bigger the group, the more complex the social situations which the brain has to process. Certain cognitive skills evolved to cope with social complexity. Consequently, the way we act in social interactions is determined by evolutionary heritage. The social brain hypothesis does not explicitly discuss the impact of history, culture, society, or life experiences on social cognition abilities in an individual or a group. Only in an evolutionary time frame these factors may have an impact on how future generations may engage with each other (Matusall, 2012). Nor does it answer the “hen and egg” question of whether the complex social groups or the cerebral capacities for processing them was first; or whether both evolved together. What it does is providing an evolutionary explanation for both, human sociality and the species' big brains.

The second theory, the somatic marker hypothesis was introduced by neuropsychiatrist Antonio Damasio and it suggests that positive experiences are connected with positive memories leaving a positive somatic marker, i.e., an incentive for deciding in favor of similar actions in future decision-making processes while negative experiences are connected with negative memories leaving negative a somatic marker, i.e., an alarm bell, leading to deciding against similar actions in future decision-making processes. These markers are acquired during socialization not only through experienced events but also by incorporating norms and rules and can change throughout life if new experiences occur (Damasio et al., 1991). This means a crucial shift in thinking about the social and the brain, which is later taken up by social neurosciences and related disciplines (Cacioppo and Berntson, 2005; Glimcher et al., 2009; Ariely and Berns, 2010). The somatic marker hypothesis couples biology with cultural and social environments. Somatic markers and thus the ability to act socially is part of the biological make-up with which humans are born, yet the way this sociality takes shape depends on the particular beliefs and values of the society one is born into (Damasio, 1994).

Around the same time when Damasio developed his somatic marker hypothesis, in Italy a team of neuroscientists reported to have found a neural basis of the capacity of primates to engage with others (di Pellegrino et al., 1992). It followed an ever-increasing interest in these neurons, which were soon named mirror neurons, and their hypothesized function included a growing number of areas of social life (e.g., Gallese, 2003). This theory did not only seem to explain human social behavior, development and learning but also how we participate, for example, in another person's joy and distress automatically, by biological default. Yet, after the first excitement faded away, mirror neurons became contested (see for instance Hickok, 2008; Gallese et al., 2011) and it is too early to decide whether the mirror neuron theory will become canonical knowledge in the attempt of how mind and brain work. Like other such theories such as the concept of brain plasticity, mirror neuron theory enjoys a broad popularity outside the scientific community—perhaps not least because it provides a biology based on prosociality. The idea of biologically automatic responses to other people's behavior and even emotions is alluring, since it seems to argue in favor of a prosocial default of human nature. Even though feeling does not automatically lead to acting, being able to empathize may lay a foundation for prosocial action.

These three theories and their focus on social aspects of the human condition differ from preceding notions of human nature in one fundamental respect: Homo sapiens are understood as a social and empathic species rather than an individualistic one. Contrary to older models, it is now suggested that it comes quite naturally to humans to act prosocially. Evidence for the prosocial nature of humankind is found in humans' evolutionary history and the neurobiological and hormonal substrate of the brain. By looking at social behavior from this perspective, it appears that cooperation and altruism are beneficial. Working together, so the argument goes, made life easier and increased the chances of survival of the group's offspring (see e.g., Brothers, 1990 and Dunbar, 1998). 

Future Perspectives

Evolutionary reasoning about prosociality can be summarized as follows: since Homo sapiens are a social species, organized in communities, individuals, who are able to decipher social stimuli and to act in prosocial ways had better chances of reproduction and hence, social brains evolved.3This evolutionary heritage equips contemporary humans with the tools for coping with the complexity of social organizations and to engage in social relationships. Not everyone acts prosocially all the time, but every healthy person bears in themselves the potential to do so and has the option to act on that potential. This perspective on sociality means a shift in the conceptual framework of what it is the norm and what needs explanation. While protagonists of this new version of human nature do not deny that aggression is as much part of human nature as is empathy, it now becomes marked as the other, the trait which needs to be explained and this also provides a new perspective on pathologies such as psychopathy or autism, which are now defined by their lack of empathy (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 2011;Blair, 2011). But not only pathologies, even everyday behavior such as envy is interpreted in terms of empathy, respectively the lack thereof (e.g., Shamay-Tsoory, 2009). This does not mean that antisocial behavior is no longer a part of this paradigm. Yet, it becomes the other, the non-normal, which needs to be explained.

In social neuroscience, the individualistic notion of social rooting in American social psychology and the more collectivist notion of the social rooting in anthropology come together and thus in this framework, social relations are intelligibly investigated within the individual. The focus is not on structures, institutions, power relations, all things that can potentially be changed, but on the social as a biological category—nature—that cannot be changed. Sociality becomes a naturalized, innate quality and thus every “normal” individual is capable of behaving prosocially. At a time when responsibility for social cohesion is de-centralized, the neural capacity for prosociality is found.

Neosociality?

Social neuroscience's notion of social relates to a new notion of what human beings are and how they normally act, in short a new version of a biologically based human nature. In this narrative, sociality is the driving force behind human evolution.

The notion of “social” employed in social neuroscience research is located in the individual brain, its ability to decode a certain kind of stimuli and to interact with others. It is a noteworthy historical concomitance that the investigation of social interactions via social structures or collective processes is replaced by the investigation of processes that take place within individuals at the same time when, in a broader societal setting, collectivist solutions have been replaced by more individual solution (e.g., in welfare, see for instance Sennett, 2006; Lessenich, 2008). Rabinow (1999) described this development as the transformation towards a “biosociality”—social structures become less important while identities are more and more based on individual (i.e., genetic) attributes than on social or group attributes. Investigating the social via communal genetic make-up or individuals' brains is rather different from studying the external conditions for a social structure. In this approach, prosocial behavior becomes something innate and thus every normal individual is capable of behaving prosocially.

Conclusion

Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary endeavor aiming to investigate sociality. Taking its methods from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience and its explanatory frame from evolutionary anthropology, it defines the social as both a feature of Homo sapiens' environment and an inherent human capacity to cope and survive. Doing so, it contributes to a new, prosocial notion of human nature. The lens through which social behavior is studied, has changed.

Yet, at the moment, both its focus on quantitative methods and reservations from many arts and social sciences exclude qualitatively operating social science from participating in this endeavor. A methodological and epistemological openness on both sides would be desirable because this could really increase knowledge about social conditions of human nature. Examples for such openness and collaborations can for instance be found in projects on “neurofeminism” (Bluhm et al., 2012; Dussauge and Kaiser, 2012; Einstein, 2012; Matusall, in press). These projects experiment with collaborations bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative disciplines. 

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments

The research was in part funded by ESF grant number 2423, SNF grant number 100011-116725/1 and MINDLab.

Footnotes

^On the potential dangers of the “mereological fallacy”, see Bennett and Hacker, 2003 and also Krüger, 2010.

^For more detailed historical analyses of discourses on the social brain and its relationship to society, see the recent work by anthropologist Allan Young: Young, 2011, 2012a,b. For a philosophical perspective on prosociality in neuroeconomics, and particularly a critical examination of the notion of altruistic punishment, see e.g., Klein, 2012.

^The relationship between prosociality, cooperation, and altruism is complex and by no means uncontested in evolutionary psychology and other behavioral sciences. For overviews over the debate see e.g.,Henrich and Henrich, 2006; Boyd and Richerson, 2009.

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