Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Russ Volckmann - A Conversation with Marc Lucas

I recently posted Marilyn Hamilton's summary of some new research from Marc Lucas on neural correlates of Clare Graves/Spiral Dynamics values memes. This is an interview from Integral Leadership Review, conducted by Russ Volckmann with Marc Lucas - from August, 2010.


Here is an excerpt from the article - here Lucas gives just a brief summary of what he is working on.
Marc: We’re doing integral studies at the University of Cologne. We are exploring certain fields of the AQAL theory and are trying to find out whether we can validate what we find with some empirical data.

Russ: Tell us about the program at the University of Cologne.

Marc: Okay. First I have to say, at the moment, I’m engaged in two German universities. There is the “Distance” University of Hagen, which has the master degree course in integral leadership. Wendelin Küpers started the program and now Jürgen Deeg and I’m responsible for this program because he moved to New Zealand. We’re developing this program further. It’s a curriculum for people to do their master’s degree in economics. They can learn about different interpretations of integral theory and we enhanced the original framework because we have to combine what he says to hard economic theories which we try to fit in there.

I’m also working at the University of Cologne. There’s a Center for Integral Studies (CIS) there (www.ineko-cologne.com), which is related to the Department of Psychology. At this center, we are already doing research. We have, at the moment, several PhD theses underway. I can’t tell too much about that because the research is not finished and we are, at the moment, trying to hand in some articles for quite important journals. I can tell you the topics of what our main aims are with this research project.

Russ: I would appreciate that.

Marc: One research project we’re doing right now, which will also be a PhD thesis, is quite interdisciplinary, because we are working together with researchers from Neuro Sciences, from Psychology and Economics.

We’re trying to re-establish, redefine, or redo an original approach by Clare Graves. He called it tachystoscopic research. He wanted to find out something about neurologic correlates of his theory of adult development, and of course, we have much more capacity nowadays than Graves had in the 80s when he started his research on that.

We first had the people do several pencil and paper tests. These were e.g. the sentence completion tests, the values test Don Beck put together and some personality tests. In the fMRI design, we were measuring what happened in the participants brains while they had to choose between sets of two words that were simultaneously shown to them. Those words were correlated to the different levels of development in the original theory, which you might know as Spiral Dynamics developed by Don Beck and Chris Cowan and Cook-Greuter's Ego-Development. And by doing that, we could find out different neurological not structures but patterns in the brain which correlate to more individualistic choices and to more collective choices. We also saw different behavioral orientation in first and second tier in our groups.
I wish there was more - I'm interested in this, so I will keep digging around.


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