“Self-defense is a countermeasure that involves defending the health and well-being of oneself from harm.”
Source URL: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defense
Protecting the mind can be seen as analogous to protecting the body from physical attacks. However, the difference is that psychological attacks are much more difficult to perceive and to objectify. However, their effects can be much more harmful to the organism than physical attacks. Many people practice physical self-defense but only very few systematically train their psychological self-defense mechanisms.
“This chapter focuses on individual and team characteristics associated with psychological resilience during space missions. an initial discussion describes the types of mission factors (e.g., environmental stressors such as microgravity and radiation and habitability stressors such as confined space as well as privacy and work-related factors). two types of individual factors are discussed: (1) individual state factors such as sleep, fatigue, and mood and (2) individual resilience factors such as personal values and coping strategies. the final sections of the chapter turn to team resilience, its relation to team performance, and how best to select and train for resilient teams. a discussion of specific team skills provides some detail on the attributes of resilient teams.”
Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M.. (2013). Psychological resilience: A review and critique of definitions, concepts, and theory. European Psychologist
“The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the variety of definitions, concepts, and theories of psychological resilience. to this end, the narrative is divided into three main sections. the first considers how resilience has been defined in the psychology research literature. despite the construct being operationalized in a variety of ways, most definitions are based around two core concepts: adversity and positive adaptation. a substantial body of evidence suggests that resilience is required in response to different adversities, ranging from ongoing daily hassles to major life events, and that positive adaptation must be conceptually appropriate to the adversity examined in terms of the domains assessed and the stringency of criteria used. the second section examines the conceptualization of resilience as either a trait or a process, and explores how it is distinct from a number of related terms. resilience is conceptualized as the interactive influence of psychological characteristics within the context of the stress process. the final section reviews the theories of resilience and critically examines one theory in particular that is commonly cited in the resilience literature. future theories in this area should take into account the multiple demands individuals encounter, the meta-cognitive and -emotive processes that affect the resilience-stress relationship, and the conceptual distinction between resilience and coping. the review concludes with implications for policy, practice, and research including the need to carefully manage individuals’ immediate environment, and to develop the protective and promotive factors that individuals can proactively use to build resilience.”
Rutten, B. P. F., Hammels, C., Geschwind, N., Menne-Lothmann, C., Pishva, E., Schruers, K., … Wichers, M.. (2013). Resilience in mental health: Linking psychological and neurobiological perspectives. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica
“OBJECTIVE: to review the literature on psychological and biological findings on resilience (i.e. the successful adaptation and swift recovery after experiencing life adversities) at the level of the individual, and to integrate findings from animal and human studies.nnmethod: electronic and manual literature search of medline, embase and psychinfo, using a range of search terms around biological and psychological factors influencing resilience as observed in human and experimental animal studies, complemented by review articles and cross-references.nnresults: the term resilience is used in the literature for different phenomena ranging from prevention of mental health disturbance to successful adaptation and swift recovery after experiencing life adversities, and may also include post-traumatic psychological growth. secure attachment, experiencing positive emotions and having a purpose in life are three important psychological building blocks of resilience. overlap between psychological and biological findings on resilience in the literature is most apparent for the topic of stress sensitivity, although recent results suggest a crucial role for reward experience in resilience.nnconclusion: improving the understanding of the links between genetic endowment, environmental impact and gene-environment interactions with developmental psychology and biology is crucial for elucidating the neurobiological and psychological underpinnings of resilience.”
Ong, A. D., Bergeman, C. S., Bisconti, T. L., & Wallace, K. A.. (2006). Psychological resilience, positive emotions, and successful adaptation to stress in later life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
“In 3 studies, the authors investigated the functional role of psychological resilience and positive emotions in the stress process. studies 1a and 1b explored naturally occurring daily stressors. study 2 examined data from a sample of recently bereaved widows. across studies, multilevel random coefficient modeling analyses revealed that the occurrence of daily positive emotions serves to moderate stress reactivity and mediate stress recovery. findings also indicated that differences in psychological resilience accounted for meaningful variation in daily emotional responses to stress. higher levels of trait resilience predicted a weaker association between positive and negative emotions, particularly on days characterized by heightened stress. finally, findings indicated that over time, the experience of positive emotions functions to assist high-resilient individuals in their ability to recover effectively from daily stress. implications for research into protective factors that serve to inhibit the scope, severity, and diffusion of daily stressors in later adulthood are discussed.”
Luthans, F., Avolio, B. J., Avey, J. B., & Norman, S. M.. (2007). Positive psychological capital: Measurement and relationship with performance and satisfaction. Personnel Psychology
“Two studies were conducted to analyze how hope, resilience, optimism, and efficacy in- dividually and as a composite higher-order factor predicted work performance and sat- isfaction. results from study 1 provided psychometric support for a new survey measure designed to assess each of these 4 facets, as well as a composite factor. study 2 results in- dicated a significant positive relationship regarding the composite of these 4 facets with performance and satisfaction. results from study 2 also indicated that the composite fac- tor may be a better predictor of performance and satisfaction than the 4 individual facets. limitations and practical implications conclude the article.”
APA. (2017). The Road to Resilience
Show/hide publication abstract
“This brochure explains how to develop and use a personal strategy for enhancing resilience despite challenging life experiences.”
Southwick, S. M., & Charney, D. S.. (2012). The Science of Resilience: Implications for the Prevention and Treatment of Depression. Science
“Human responses to stress and trauma vary widely. some people develop trauma-related psychological disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) and depression; others develop mild to moderate psychological symptoms that resolve rapidly; still others report no new psychological symptoms in response to traumatic stress. individual variability in how animals and humans respond to stress and trauma depends on numerous genetic, developmental, cognitive, psychological, and neurobiological risk and protective factors.”
Gooding, P. A., Hurst, A., Johnson, J., & Tarrier, N.. (2012). Psychological resilience in young and older adults. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
“Research on adult reactions to potentially traumatic events has focused almost exclusively on post- traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). althoughthere has been relatively little research on the absence of trauma symp- toms, the available evidence suggests that resilience following such events may be more prevalent than previously believed. this study examined the prevalence of resilience, defined as having either no ptsd symptoms or one symptom, among a large (n 5 2,752) probability sample of new york area residents during the 6 months following the september 11th terrorist attack. although many respondents met criteria for ptsd, particularly when exposure was high, resilience was observed in 65.1% of the sample. resilience was less prevalent among more highly exposed individuals, but the frequency of resilience never fell below one third even among the exposure groups with the most dramatic elevations in ptsd.”
Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M.. (2012). A grounded theory of psychological resilience in Olympic champions. Psychology of Sport and Exercise
“PNAS – resolução, apresentação, introdução, 1. análise situacional, 2. política pública de assistência social, 3.gestão da política nacional de assistência social na perspectiva do sistema único de assistência social – suas. nob-suas – resolução, 77 apresentação, 79 1. justificativa da norma operacional básica do suas, 2. tipos e níveis de gestão do suas, 3. instrumentos de gestão, 4. instâncias de articulação, pactuação e deliberação, 5. financiamento, 6. regras de transição,”
Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S.. (2012). Mindsets That Promote Resilience: When Students Believe That Personal Characteristics Can Be Developed. Educational Psychologist
Bonanno, G. A., Galea, S., Bucciarelli, A., & Vlahov, D.. (2007). What Predicts Psychological Resilience After Disaster? The Role of Demographics, Resources, and Life Stress. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
“A growing body of evidence suggests that most adults exposed to potentially traumatic events are resilient. however, research on the factors that may promote or deter adult resilience has been limited. this study examined patterns of association between resilience and various sociocontextual factors. the authors used data from a random-digit-dial phone survey (n = 2,752) conducted in the new york city area after the september 11, 2001, terrorist attack. resilience was defined as having 1 or 0 posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and as being associated with low levels of depression and substance use. multivariate analyses indicated that the prevalence of resilience was uniquely predicted by participant gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, level of trauma exposure, income change, social support, frequency of chronic disease, and recent and past life stressors. implications for future research and intervention are discussed.”
Sarkar, M., & Fletcher, D.. (2014). Psychological resilience in sport performers: a review of stressors and protective factors. Journal of Sports Sciences
“Abstract psychological resilience is important in sport because athletes must utilise and optimise a range of mental qualities to withstand the pressures that they experience. in this article, we discuss psychological resilience in sport performers via a review of the stressors athletes encounter and the protective factors that help them withstand these demands. it is hoped that synthesising what is known in these areas will help researchers gain a deeper profundity of resilience in sport, and also provide a rigorous and robust foundation for the development of a sport-specific measure of resilience. with these points in mind, we divided the narrative into two main sections. in the first section, we review the different types of stressors encountered by sport performers under three main categories: competitive, organisational and personal. based on our recent research examining psychological resilience in olympics champions, in the second section we discuss the five main families of psychological factors (viz. positive personality, motivation, confidence, focus, perceived social support) that protect the best athletes from the potential negative effect of stressors. it is anticipated that this review will help sport psychology researchers examine the interplay between stressors and protective factors, which will, in turn, focus the analytical lens on the processes underlying psychological resilience in athletes.”
Thompson, R. W., Arnkoff, D. B., & Glass, C. R.. (2011). Conceptualizing mindfulness and acceptance as components of psychological resilience to trauma. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse
Walker, F. R., Pfingst, K., Carnevali, L., Sgoifo, A., & Nalivaiko, E.. (2017). In the search for integrative biomarker of resilience to psychological stress. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
“Psychological resilience can be defined as individual’s ability to withstand and adapt to adverse and traumatic events. resilience is traditionally assessed by subjective reports, a method that is susceptible to self-report bias. an ideal solution to this challenge is the introduction of standardised and validated physiological and/or biological predictors of resilience. we provide a summary of the major concepts in the field of resilience followed by a detailed critical review of the literature around physiological, neurochemical and immune markers of resilience. we conclude that in future experimental protocols, biological markers of resilience should be assesses both during baseline and during laboratory stressors. in the former case the most promising candidates are represented by heart rate variability and by in vitro immune cells assay; in the latter case—by startle responses (especially their habituation) during stress challenge and by cardiovascular recovery after stress, and by cortisol, dhea and cytokine responses. importantly, they should be used in combination to enhance predictive power.”
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in which the authors propose that the mass communication media of the U.S. “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”, by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title derives from the phrase “the manufacture of consent,” employed in the book Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).
The book was revised 20 years after its first publication to take account of developments such as the fall of the Soviet Union. There has been debate about how the Internet has changed the public´s access to information since 1988.
“Pantheon books, 1988 the mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. it is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. in a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda. in countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of dominant elite. it is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. this is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. what is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance. a propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. it traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. the essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news ‘filters,’ fall under the following headings: (i) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) ‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) ‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism. these elements interact with and reinforce one another. the raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. they fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the …”
Herman, E. S., & Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, N.. (1988). Manufacturing Consent. News: A Reader
“An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, herman and chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting. whether or not you’ve seen the eye-opening movie, buy this book, and you will be a far more knowledgeable person and much less prone to having your beliefs manipulated as easily as the press.”
Comeforo, K.. (2010). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Global Media and Communication
“Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, why do workers not work harder? michael burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: why do workers work as hard as they do? why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? manufacturing consent, the result of burawoy’s research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. manufacturing consent is unique among studies of this kind because burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of donald roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since world war ii, in industrial relations.”
Borkar, V. S., Karnik, A., Nair, J., & Nalli, S.. (2015). Manufacturing Consent. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control
“An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, herman and chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting. whether or not you’ve seen the eye-opening movie, buy this book, and you will be a far more knowledgeable person and much less prone to having your beliefs manipulated as easily as the press.”
Chomsky, E. I. A. S. O. I. I.. (1992). Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. East
Show/hide publication abstract
“Explores the political life and times of the controversial author, linguist and radical philosopher, noam chomsky. highlighting his analysis of media, chomsky focuses on democratic societies where populations not disciplined by force are subject to more subtle forms of ideological control.”
Han, R.. (2015). Manufacturing Consent in Cyberspace :. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs
“Studies on public expression in china tend to focus on how the state and internet users (netizens) struggle over the limits of online expression. few have systematically traced discourse competition within state-imposed boundaries, particularly how the authoritarian state has adapted to manage, rather than censor, online expression. this paper explores and evaluates the state’s attempts to manipulate online expression without resorting to censorship and coercion by examining the role of internet commentators, known as the ‘fifty-cent army’, in chinese cyberspace. to cope with the challenge of online expression, the authoritarian state has mobilized its agents to engage anonymously in online discussions and produce apparently spontaneous pro-regime commentary. however, due to a lack of proper motivation and the persistence of old propaganda logic, this seemingly smart adaptation has proven ineffective or even counter-productive: it not only decreases netizens’ trust in the state but also, ironically, suppresses the voices of regime supporters.”
Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N.. (1988). Manufacturing Consent, A Propaganda Model. Manufacturing Consent
Show/hide publication abstract
“Pantheon books, 1988 the mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. it is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. in a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda. in countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of dominant elite. it is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. this is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. what is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance. a propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. it traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. the essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news ‘filters,’ fall under the following headings: (i) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) ‘flak’ as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) ‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism. these elements interact with and reinforce one another. the raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. they fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the b…”
Burawoy, M.. (2012). Manufacturing Consent revisited. La Nouvelle Revue Du Travail
“Cet article présente rapidement manufacturing consent publié en 1979 dans lequel la direction d’Allis chalmer organisait la discipline du travail ouvrier par la coercition et par le consentement, en particulier à travers l’établissement des quotas de production qui fondait une sorte de jeu social entre ouvriers (the game of making out). l’auteur revient sur la méthode ethnographique utilisée alors pour la critiquer et il propose de la remplacer par « l’étude de cas élargie » (the extented case method) qui prend en compte le contexte du travail dont les trajectoires des acteurs, les transformations des marchés et du rôle de l’État, sans négliger les éléments spatio-temporels facteurs de changement. c’est l’occasion pour l’auteur de passer en revue les publications récentes qui ont élargi les objets de recherches à la question du genre, au travail domestique, aux travailleurs migrants, aux services, au syndicalisme, etc. l’article suggère que l’enjeu des luttes passerait de l’exploitation à la marchandisation (commodification) avec les luttes consuméristes qui l’accompagneraient ; lesquelles inaugureraient une nouvelle ère de mobilisations transnationales étendues à l’Europe de l’Est et à l’Asie. ce qui conduit l’auteur à reprendre les thèses de polanyi sur la grande transformation en les actualisant avec l’avènement présent d’une troisième vague ultra-libérale qui étend la marchandisation à la nature (terre, eau et air) et aux connaissances : les mouvements « d’occupation » (‘occupy’ movements) en seraient les premières ripostes.”
Impression management is a conscious or subconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object or event. They do so by regulating and controlling information in social interaction.[1] It was first conceptualized by Erving Goffman in 1959 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and then was expanded upon in 1967.[2] An example of impression management theory in play is in sports such as soccer. At an important game, a player would want to showcase themselves in the best light possible, because there are college recruiters watching. This person would have the flashiest pair of cleats and try and perform their best to show off their skills. Their main goal may be to impress the college recruiters in a way that maximizes their chances of being chosen for a college team rather than winning the game.[3]
Impression management is usually used synonymously with self-presentation, in which a person tries to influence the perception of their image. The notion of impression management was first applied to face-to-face communication, but then was expanded to apply to computer-mediated communication. The concept of impression management is applicable to academic fields of study such as psychology and sociology as well as practical fields such as corporate communication and media.
Johnson-Cartee, K. S.. (2010). Impression management. In Political and Civic Leadership: A Reference Handbook
“Social networking sites like myspace, facebook, and studivz are popular means of communicating personality. recent theoretical and empirical considerations of homepages and web 2.0 platforms show that impression management is a major motive for actively participating in social networking sites. however, the factors that determine the specific form of self-presentation and the extent of self-disclosure on the internet have not been analyzed. in an exploratory study, we investigated the relationship between self-reported (offline) personality traits and (online) self-presentation in social networking profiles. a survey among 58 users of the german web 2.0 site, studivz.net, and a content analysis of the respondents’ profiles showed that self-efficacy with regard to impression management is strongly related to the number of virtual friends, the level of profile detail, and the style of the personal photo. the results also indicate a slight influence of extraversion, whereas there was no significant effect fo…”
Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M.. (1990). Impression Management: A Literature Review and Two-Component Model. Psychological Bulletin
“Impression management, the process by which people control the impressions others form of them, plays an important role in interpersonal behavior. this article presents a 2-component model within which the literature regarding impression management is reviewed. this model conceptualizes impression management as being composed of 2 discrete processes. the 1st involves impression motivation-the degree to which people are motivated to control how others see them. impression motivation is conceptualized as a function of 3 factors: the goal-relevance of the impressions one creates, the value of desired outcomes, and the discrepancy between current and desired images. the 2nd component involves impression construction. five factors appear to determine the kinds of impressions people try to construct: the self-concept, desired and undesired identity images, role constraints, target’s values, and current social image. the 2-component model provides coherence to the literature in the area, addresses controversial issues, and supplies a framework for future research regarding impression management.”
Gardner, W. L., & Martinko, M. J.. (1988). Impression Management in Organizations. Journal of Management
“Evidence of the process through which organizational members cre- ate and maintain desired impressions is provided by this review of so- cial psychological and relevant management research on impression management. propositions regarding the stimuli and the cognitive, motivational, and affective processes related to impression manage- ment and audience responses are advanced. finally, directions for fu- ture research into impression management in organizational settings are suggested. impression”
Moro, E., & Vidailhet, M.. (2010). Management. Blue Books of Neurology
“JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. we use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. for more information about jstor, please contact support@jstor.org. american marketing association is collaborating with jstor to digitize, preserve and extend access to journal of marketing this content downloaded from 130.160.243.18 on mon, 08 aug 2016 15:31:08 utc all use subject to about.jstor.org/terms this article develops empirically based guidelines to help managers select typefaces that affect strategically val-ued impressions. the authors discuss the potential trade-offs among the impressions created by typeface (e.g., pleasing, engaging, reassuring, prominent). the selection of typeface can be simplified with the use of six under-lying design dimensions: elaborate, harmony, natural, flourish, weight, and compressed. the visual aspects of a corporation’s marketing”
Bolino, M. C., Kacmar, M. K., Turnley, W. H., & Gilstrap, B. J.. (2008). A multi-level review of impression management motives and behaviors. Journal of Management
“This article selectively reviews studies of impression management (im) published since 1988 and identifies strengths, limitations, and future research directions in three key areas: research investigating the use of im at the individual level of analysis (e.g., performance appraisal); research that applies im theory, concepts, and thinking to better understand organizational phe- nomena (e.g., feedback seeking); and research investigating organizational-level im (e.g., how firms create legitimacy). following their review, the authors offer some overarching recommen- dations for future examinations of im in organizations, giving particular attention to the need for clear definitions and categories of im behaviors and the value of multi-level investigations.”
Wayne, S. J., & Liden, R. C.. (1995). EFFECTS ON IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT ON PERFORMANCE RATINGS: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY.. Academy of Management Journal
“We tested a model proposing that subordinates’ impression management behavior influences performance ratings through supervisors’ liking of and perceived similarity to subordinates. we measured impression management behavior, liking, and similarity six weeks after the establishment of supervisor-subordinate dyads and measured performance ratings after six months. results indicated support for the overall model and several specified relationships. additionally, impression management behavior had a significant, indirect impact on performance ratings. implications of the results for research on impression management and performance appraisal are discussed.”
Barich, H., & Kotler, P.. (1991). A Framework for Marketing Image Management. Sloan Management Review
“Managers know that the customer’s impression of an organization is important. and sometimes companies attempt to determine just what that impression is. they conduct ad hoc surveys and focus groups. but too often the data is insubstantial, or difficult to analyze, or even inaccurate. barich and kotler introduce the concept of ‘marketing image’ and describe a system of image management: designing a study, collecting data, analyzing image problems, modifying the image, and tracking responses to that image. they argue that only a systematic approach will yield useful and accurate information that a company can translate into action.”
Bolino, M. C.. (1999). Citizenship and impression management: Good soldiers or good actors?. Academy of Management Review
“Previous research on organizational citizenship behavior suggests that employees who engage in such behavior are ‘good soldiers,’ acting selflessly on behalf of their organizations. however, such behaviors also may be impression enhancing and self-serving. in this article i provide a framework showing how impression-management concerns may motivate citizenship behavior and address the conse-quences of citizenship in this context, as well as the interaction of impression-management motives with motives identified in previous research on citizenship. finally, i discuss the methodological issues associated with isolating self-serving from other-serving motivation and implications for future theory development.”
Grant, A. M., & Mayer, D. M.. (2009). Good Soldiers and Good Actors: Prosocial and Impression Management Motives as Interactive Predictors of Affiliative Citizenship Behaviors. Journal of Applied Psychology
“Researchers have discovered inconsistent relationships between prosocial motives and citizenship behaviors. we draw on impression management theory to propose that impression management motives strengthen the association between prosocial motives and affiliative citizenship by encouraging employees to express citizenship in ways that both ‘do good’ and ‘look good.’ we report 2 studies that examine the interactions of prosocial and impression management motives as predictors of affiliative citizenship using multisource data from 2 different field samples. across the 2 studies, we find positive interactions between prosocial and impression management motives as predictors of affiliative citizenship behaviors directed toward other people (helping and courtesy) and the organization (initiative). study 2 also shows that only prosocial motives predict voice – a challenging citizenship behavior. our results suggest that employees who are both good soldiers and good actors are most likely to emerge as good citizens in promoting the status quo. [publication abstract]”
Paulhus, D. L.. (1984). Two-component models of socially desirable responding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
“J. millham and l. i. jacobson’s (1978) 2-factor model of socially desirable responding based on denial and attribution components is reviewed and disputed. a 2nd model distinguishing self-deception and impression management components is reviewed and shown to be related to early factor-analytic work on desirability scales. two studies, with 511 undergraduates, were conducted to test the model. a factor analysis of commonly used desirability scales (e.g., lie scale of the mmpi, marlowe-crowne social desirability scale) revealed that the 2 major factors were best interpreted as self-deception and impression management. a 2nd study employed confirmatory factor analysis to show that the attribution/denial model does not fit the data as well as the self-deception/impression management model. a 3rd study, with 100 ss, compared scores on desirability scales under anonymous and public conditions. results show that those scales that had loaded highest on the impression management factor showed the greatest mean increase from anonymous to public conditions. it is recommended that impression management, but not self-deception, be controlled in self-reports of personality. (54 ref) (psycinfo database record (c) 2012 apa, all rights reserved)”
Bolino, M. C., & Turnley, W. H.. (2003). More than one way to make an impression: Exploring profiles of impression management. Journal of Management
“Individuals try to influence the way they are perceived by others in the inter-personal arena, a practice known as impression management. there is in social psychology a large literature devoted to impression management, or in communicative terms to the sender and the messages she sends regarding her own identity. ‘people attempt to control information for one or more salient audiences in ways that try to facilitate goal-achievement’ (136). they do so by structuring a certain account. these processes can also operate at a mass mediated level. in the following case we are interested less in the processes that produced the account than in the influence an account, in our case a mass-mediated one, has on the audience. a good quote for the aptness thesis: ‘effective communication requires that information be tailored or fitted to the audience’s knowledge and value systems, using terms, symbols, and evidence that will be readily understood and accepted without challenge’ (155).”
Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas: (1) the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification,[2][3] (2) various problems of skepticism, (3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and (4) the criteria for knowledge and justification. Epistemology addresses such questions as: “What makes justified beliefs justified?”,[4] “What does it mean to say that we know something?”,[5] and fundamentally “How do we know that we know?”.[6]
The tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor”, on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).[11][12]
The tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory, which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or how unusual or emotionally charged they may be.[17]
A self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).[18]
The tendency to ignore base rate information (generic, general information) and focus on specific information (information only pertaining to a certain case).[21]
A person who has performed a favor for someone is more likely to do another favor for that person than they would be if they had received a favor from that person.[23]
The tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).[12]
The tendency to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. Misinformation can still influence inferences one generates after a correction has occurred.[32] cf. Backfire effect
Preferences for either option A or B change in favor of option B when option C is presented, which is completely dominated by option B (inferior in all respects) and partially dominated by option A.[37]
Based on the estimates,[clarification needed] real-world evidence turns out to be less extreme than our expectations (conditionally inverse of the conservatism bias).[unreliable source?][5][46]
The tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.[47]
The observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, graphology, and some types of personality tests.[49]
Form function attribution bias
In human–robot interaction, the tendency of people to make systematic errors when interacting with a robot. People may base their expectations and perceptions of a robot on its appearance (form) and attribute functions which do not necessarily mirror the true functions of the robot.[50]
Drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.[51]
Frequency illusion
The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).[52] This illusion is sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.[53]
The tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, “I’ve flipped heads with this coin five times consecutively, so the chance of tails coming out on the sixth flip is much greater than heads.”[55]
The “hostile attribution bias” is the tendency to interpret others’ behaviors as having hostile intent, even when the behavior is ambiguous or benign.[60]
The “hot-hand fallacy” (also known as the “hot hand phenomenon” or “hot hand”) is the belief that a person who has experienced success with a random event has a greater chance of further success in additional attempts.
Discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time – people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning.[61] Also known as current moment bias, present-bias, and related to Dynamic inconsistency. A good example of this: a study showed that when making food choices for the coming week, 74% of participants chose fruit, whereas when the food choice was for the current day, 70% chose chocolate.
The tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves, such as furniture from IKEA, regardless of the quality of the end result.[63]
Occurs when a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense are treated as equivalent. The two variants of this fallacy are the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of division.
The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy.
An over-reliance on a familiar tool or methods, ignoring or under-valuing alternative approaches. “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
When a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).
Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.[5][80][81][82]
A vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) is perceived as significant, e.g., seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing non-existent hidden messages on records played in reverse.
The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation’s usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
The tendency to overestimate how much our future selves share one’s current preferences, thoughts and values, thus leading to sub-optimal choices.[83][84][74]
The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice (see also Reverse psychology).
The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent. Often used to refer to linguistic phenomena; the illusion that a word or language usage that one has noticed only recently is an innovation when it is in fact long-established (see also frequency illusion).
Regressive bias
A certain state of mind wherein high values and high likelihoods are overestimated while low values and low likelihoods are underestimated.[5][86][87][unreliable source?]
Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. A famous example being used in the O.J Simpson trial with the defense’s use of the phrase “If the gloves don’t fit, then you must acquit.”
The tendency to notice something more when something causes us to be more aware of it, such as when we buy a car, we tend to notice similar cars more often than we did before. They are not suddenly more common – we just are noticing them more. Also called the Observational Selection Bias.
The tendency to over-report socially desirable characteristics or behaviours in oneself and under-report socially undesirable characteristics or behaviours.[89]
Losing sight of the strategic construct that a measure is intended to represent, and subsequently acting as though the measure is the construct of interest.
Concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that didn’t because of their lack of visibility.
Underestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively low speed and overestimations of the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) from a relatively high speed.
The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Also known as bikeshedding, this bias explains why an organization may avoid specialized or complex subjects, such as the design of a nuclear reactor, and instead focus on something easy to grasp or rewarding to the average participant, such as the design of an adjacent bike shed.[93]
Unit bias
The standard suggested amount of consumption (e.g., food serving size) is perceived to be appropriate, and a person would consume it all even if it is too much for this particular person.[94]
The tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality).
The tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion.[95]
An exception to the fundamental attribution error, when people view others as having (situational) extrinsic motivations and (dispositional) intrinsic motivations for oneself
The tendency to give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. For example, horoscopes.
The tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior[74] (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect).[75]
The biased belief that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole or the tendency to assume that group decision outcomes reflect the preferences of group members, even when information is available that clearly suggests otherwise.
The tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in others’ perceptions of them (see also physical attractiveness stereotype).[98]
Overestimating one’s desirable qualities, and underestimating undesirable qualities, relative to other people. (Also known as “Lake Wobegon effect”, “better-than-average effect”, or “superiority bias“.)[100]
The tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don’t are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.
The tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias).[102]
Known as the tendency for group members to spend more time and energy discussing information that all members are already familiar with (i.e., shared information), and less time and energy discussing information that only some members are aware of (i.e., unshared information).[103]
The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest. (See also status quo bias.)
The tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
Similar to the fundamental attribution error, in this error a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.
In psychologyandcognitive science, a memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. There are many types of memory bias, including:
The retention of few memories from before the age of four.
Conservatism or Regressive bias
Tendency to remember high values and high likelihoods/probabilities/frequencies as lower than they actually were and low ones as higher than they actually were. Based on the evidence, memories are not extreme enough.[86][87]
Consistency bias
Incorrectly remembering one’s past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.[106]
That cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).
Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one’s exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was.
That self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
The inclination to see past events as being more predictable than they actually were; also called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect.
Humor effect
That humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.[108]
That people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
Inaccurately remembering a relationship between two events.[5][67]
Lag effect
The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session. See also spacing effect.
Memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.[109]
That different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness.[110]
List-length effect
A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well. For example, consider a list of 30 items (“L30”) and a list of 100 items (“L100”). An individual may remember 15 items from L30, or 50%, whereas the individual may remember 40 items from L100, or 40%. Although the percent of L30 items remembered (50%) is greater than the percent of L100 (40%), more L100 items (40) are remembered than L30 items (15).[111][further explanation needed]
The notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts.[115][116][117][118][119][120]
That items near the end of a sequence are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a sequence; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.[121]
Processing difficulty effect
That information that takes longer to read and is thought about more (processed with more difficulty) is more easily remembered.[122]
The tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
When a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought to be an instance of “blocking” where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other.[105]
That the “gist” of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording.[130] This is because memories are representations, not exact copies.
Availability heuristic – estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples[66]
A 2012 Psychological Bulletin article suggested that at least eight seemingly unrelated biases can be produced by the same information-theoretic generative mechanism that assumes noisy information processing during storage and retrieval of information in human memory.[5]
Individual differences in decision making biases
People do appear to have stable individual differences in their susceptibility to decision biases such as overconfidence, temporal discounting, and bias blind spot.[134] That said, these stable levels of bias within individuals are possible to change. Participants in experiments who watched training videos and played debiasing games showed medium to large reductions both immediately and up to three months later in the extent to which they exhibited susceptibility to six cognitive biases: anchoring, bias blind spot, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, projection bias, and representativeness.[135]
Debiasing
Debiasing is the reduction of biases in judgment and decision making through incentives, nudges, and training. Cognitive bias mitigation and cognitive bias modification are forms of debiasing specifically applicable to cognitive biases and their effects.
Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Lee, J. Y., & Podsakoff, N. P.. (2003). Common Method Biases in Behavioral Research: A Critical Review of the Literature and Recommended Remedies. Journal of Applied Psychology
“Interest in the problem of method biases has a long history in the behavioral sciences. despite this, a comprehensive summary of the potential sources of method biases and how to control for them does not exist. therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which method biases influence behavioral research results, identify potential sources of method biases, discuss the cognitive processes through which method biases influence responses to measures, evaluate the many different procedural and statistical techniques that can be used to control method biases, and provide recommendations for how to select appropriate procedural and statistical remedies for different types of research settings.”
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D.. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology
“The study of heuristics and biases in judgement has been criticized in several publications by g. gigerenzer, who argues that ‘biases are not biases’ and ‘heuristics are meant to explain what does not exist’ (1991, p. 102). the article responds to gigerenzer’s critique and shows that it misrepresents the authors’ theoretical position and ignores critical evidence. contrary to gigerenzer’s central empirical claim, judgments of frequency–not only subjective probabilities–are susceptible to large and systematic biases. a postscript responds to gigerenzer’s (1996) reply.”
Oechssler, J., Roider, A., & Schmitz, P. W.. (2009). Cognitive abilities and behavioral biases. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Griffiths, T. L., Chater, N., Kemp, C., Perfors, A., & Tenenbaum, J. B.. (2010). Probabilistic models of cognition: exploring representations and inductive biases. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F.. (2008). On the Relative Independence of Thinking Biases and Cognitive Ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
“In 7 different studies, the authors observed that a large number of thinking biases are uncorrelated with cognitive ability. these thinking biases include some of the most classic and well-studied biases in the heuristics and biases literature, including the conjunction effect, framing effects, anchoring effects, outcome bias, base-rate neglect, ‘less is more’ effects, affect biases, omission bias, myside bias, sunk-cost effect, and certainty effects that violate the axioms of expected utility theory. in a further experiment, the authors nonetheless showed that cognitive ability does correlate with the tendency to avoid some rational thinking biases, specifically the tendency to display denominator neglect, probability matching rather than maximizing, belief bias, and matching bias on the 4-card selection task. the authors present a framework for predicting when cognitive ability will and will not correlate with a rational thinking tendency. (psycinfo database record (c) 2016 apa, all rights reserved)”
Hallion, L. S., & Ruscio, A. M.. (2011). A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Cognitive Bias Modification on Anxiety and Depression. Psychological Bulletin
“Cognitive biases have been theorized to play a critical role in thenonset and maintenance of anxiety and depression. cognitive biasnmodification (cbm), an experimental paradigm that uses training toninduce maladaptive or adaptive cognitive biases, was developed to testnthese causal models. although cbm has generated considerable interest innthe past decade, both as an experimental paradigm and as a form ofntreatment, there have been no quantitative reviews of the effect of cbmnon anxiety and depression. this meta-analysis of 45 studies (2,591nparticipants) assessed the effect of cbm on cognitive biases and onnanxiety and depression. cbm had a medium effect on biases (g = 0.49)nthat was stronger for interpretation (g = 0.81) than for attention (g =n0.29) biases. cbm further had a small effect on anxiety and depressionn(g = 0.13), although this effect was reliable only when symptoms werenassessed after participants experienced a stressor (g = 0.23). whennanxiety and depression were examined separately, cbm significantlynmodified anxiety but not depression. there was a nonsignificant trendntoward a larger effect for studies including multiple training sessions.nthese findings are broadly consistent with cognitive theories of anxietynand depression that propose an interactive effect of cognitive biasesnand stressors on these symptoms. however, the small effect sizesnobserved here suggest that this effect may be more modest thannpreviously believed.”
Gigerenzer, G.. (1991). How to make Cognitive Illusions Disappear: Beyond “Heuristics and Biases”. European Review of Social Psychology
“Most so-called ‘errors’ in probabilistic reasoning are in fact not violations of probability theory. examples of such ‘errors’ include overconfi dence bias, conjunction fallacy, and base-rate neglect. research- ers have relied on a very narrow normative view, and have ignored conceptual distinctions—for example, single case versus relative frequency—fundamental to probability theory. by recognizing and using these distinctions, however, we can make apparently stable ‘errors’ disappear, reappear, or even invert. i suggest what a reformed understanding of judgments under uncertainty might look like.”
Roiser, J. P., Elliott, R., & Sahakian, B. J.. (2012). Cognitive mechanisms of treatment in depression. Neuropsychopharmacology
“Cognitive abnormalities are a core feature of depression, and biases toward negatively toned emotional information are common, but are they a cause or a consequence of depressive symptoms? here, we propose a ‘cognitive neuropsychological’ model of depression, suggesting that negative information processing biases have a central causal role in the development of symptoms of depression, and that treatments exert their beneficial effects by abolishing these biases. we review the evidence pertaining to this model: briefly with respect to currently depressed patients, and in more detail with respect to individuals at risk for depression and the effects of antidepressant treatments. as well as being present in currently depressed individuals, negative biases are detectable in those vulnerable for depression due to neuroticism, genetic risk, or previous depressive illness. recent evidence provides strong support for the notion that both antidepressant drugs and psychological therapies modify negative biases, providing a common mechanism for understanding treatments for depression. intriguingly, it may even be possible to predict which patients will benefit most from which treatments on the basis of neural responses to negative stimuli. however, further research is required to ascertain whether negative processing biases will be useful in predicting, detecting, and treating depression, and hence in preventing a chronic, relapsing course of illness.”
Haselton, M. G., Nettle, D., & Andrews, P. W.. (2015). The Evolution of Cognitive Bias. In The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology
“(From the book) in this chapter, martie haselton, daniel nettle, and paul andrews present theory and empirical research on the evolution of cognitive biases in social interaction. they provide sound arguments that certain social cognitive biases are in fact designed and functional, resulting in better solutions to adaptive problems than cognitive mechanisms that ‘accurately’ detected social signals. they call for an evolutionary reformulation of the entire ‘heuristics and biases’ literature, which typically cast humans as making illogical and unfounded errors. this new line of work has already led to the discovery of new cognitive biases and offers much promise for the future discovery of additional adaptive biases. it also may lead to the detumescence of decades of work that has cast humans erroneously as fundamentally irrational and hopelessly muddled in their judgment and decision making. (psycinfo database record (c) 2006 apa,”
Haselton, M. G., & Nettle, D.. (2006). The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review
“Human cognition is often biased, from judgments of the time of impact of approaching objects all the way through to estimations of social outcomes in the future. we propose these effects and a host of others may all be understood from an evolutionary psychological perspective. in this article, we elaborate error management theory (emt; haselton & buss, 2000). emt predicts that if judgments are made under uncertainty, and the costs of false positive and false negative errors have been asymmetric over evolutionary history, selection should have favored a bias toward making the least costly error. this perspective integrates a diverse array of effects under a single explanatory umbrella, and it yields new content-specific predictions.”
Croskerry, P.. (2003). The importance of cognitive errors in diagnosis and strategies to minimize them. Academic Medicine
“In the area of patient safety, recent attention has focused on diagnostic error. the reduction of diagnostic error is an important goal because of its associated morbidity and potential preventability. a critical subset of diagnostic errors arises through cognitive errors, especially those associated with failures in perception, failed heuristics, and biases; collectively, these have been referred to as cognitive dispositions to respond (cdrs). historically, models of decision-making have given insufficient attention to the contribution of such biases, and there has been a prevailing pessimism against improving cognitive performance through debiasing techniques. recent work has catalogued the major cognitive biases in medicine; the author lists these and describes a number of strategies for reducing them (‘cognitive debiasing’). principle among them is metacognition, a reflective approach to problem solving that involves stepping back from the immediate problem to examine and reflect on the thinking process. further research effort should be directed at a full and complete description and analysis of cdrs in the context of medicine and the development of techniques for avoiding their associated adverse outcomes. considerable potential exists for reducing cognitive diagnostic errors with this approach. the author provides an extensive list of cdrs and a list of strategies to reduce diagnostic errors.”
Bertrand, M., & Morse, A.. (2011). Information Disclosure, Cognitive Biases, and Payday Borrowing. Journal of Finance
“If people face cognitive limitations or biases that lead to financial mistakes, what are possible ways lawmakers can help? one approach is to remove the option of the bad decision; another approach is to increase financial education such that individuals can reason through choices when they arise. a third, less discussed, approach is to mandate disclosure of information in a form that enables people to overcome limitations or biases at the point of the decision. this third approach is the topic of this paper. we study whether and what information can be disclosed to payday loan borrowers to lower their use of high-cost debt via a field experiment at a national chain of payday lenders. we find that information that helps people think less narrowly (over time) about the cost of payday borrowing, and in particular information that reinforces the adding-up effect over pay cycles of the dollar fees incurred on a payday loan, reduces the take-up of payday loans by about 10 percent in a 4 month-window following exposure to the new information. overall, our results suggest that consumer information regulations based on a deeper understanding of cognitive biases might be an effective policy tool when it comes to regulating payday borrowing, and possibly other financial and non-financial products.”
Ioannidis, J. P. A., Munafò, M. R., Fusar-Poli, P., Nosek, B. A., & David, S. P.. (2014). Publication and other reporting biases in cognitive sciences: Detection, prevalence, and prevention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
“Behavioral decision research has demonstrated that judgments and decisions of ordinary people and experts are subject to numerous biases. decision and risk analysis were designed to improve judgments and decisions and to overcome many of these biases. however, when eliciting model components and parameters from decisionmakers or experts, analysts often face the very biases they are trying to help overcome. when these inputs are biased they can seriously reduce the quality of the model and resulting analysis. some of these biases are due to faulty cognitive processes; some are due to motivations for preferred analysis outcomes. this article identifies the cognitive and motivational biases that are relevant for decision and risk analysis because they can distort analysis inputs and are difficult to correct. we also review and provide guidance about the existing debiasing techniques to overcome these biases. in addition, we describe some biases that are less relevant because they can be corrected by using logic or decomposing the elicitation task. we conclude the article with an agenda for future research.”
Douglas, C., Bateson, M., Walsh, C., Bédué, A., & Edwards, S. A.. (2012). Environmental enrichment induces optimistic cognitive biases in pigs. Applied Animal Behaviour Science
“The objective assessment of affective (emotional) state in farm livestock, especially positive states, poses a significant challenge. in human psychology, there is evidence that affective state can alter cognition, with more positive states being associated with an increased likelihood of judging ambiguous information postively (a phenomenon described as optimistic cognitive bias). the aim of this study was to investigate whether judgement biases could be used to assess affective states in pigs housed in environments with different levels of enrichment. two groups of five gilts were housed in either enriched (e) or barren (b) environments for the first five weeks of the experiment. the enriched group had more space, straw and objects to manipulate. the pigs were trained on a go/no-go task to discriminate two auditory cues, a positive cue that predicted a food reward if the pig approached a hatch, and a negative cue that predicted a mildly aversive experience if the pig approached the same hatch. the quality of the pigs’ environment was then changed over time in a balanced, cross-over design (either ebe or beb). tests of cognitive bias were made on individual pigs before and after each change in environment using an unreinforced, ambiguous, auditory cue different from either the positive or the negative cue. in test sessions, positive, negative and amibiguous cues were presented in a randomised sequence, and the pigs’ responses (whether they approached the hatch and latency to approach) were recorded. both groups were more likely to approach the hatch and were faster to approach the hatch in response to the ambiguous cue when currently housed in the enriched environment. there was also an interaction between current and past environment, whereby pigs that started in the enriched environment were subsequently less likely and slower to approach the hatch when moved to a barren environment than pigs intially housed in the barren environment. these results show that pigs have more optimistic judgement biases in enriched environments indicative of a more positive affective state. also, pigs that have spent time in an enriched environment react more negatively to being subsequently housed in a barren environment. we conclude that cognitive bias has potential to provide additional information about the effect of various management regimes on farmed animals’ welfare. this will be increasingly important for identifying practices to promote positive affective stat…”
Greenwald, A. G.. (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history. American Psychologist
“ABSTRACT: this article argues that (a) ego, or self, is an organization of knowledge, (b) ego is characterized by cognitive biases strikingly analogous to totalitarian information-control strategies, and (c) these totalitarian-ego biases junction to preserve organization in cognitive structures. ego’s cognitive biases are egocentricity (self as the focus of knowledge), ‘beneffectance’ (perception of responsibility for desired, but not undesired, outcomes), and cognitive conservatism (resistance to cognitive change). in addition to being pervasively evident in recent studies of normal human cognition, these three biases are found in actively functioning, higher level organizations of knowledge, perhaps best exemplified by theoretical paradigms in science. the thesis that egocentricity, beneffectance, and conservatism act to preserve knowledge organizations leads to the proposal of an intrapsychic analog of genetic evolution, which in turn provides an alternative to prevalent motivational and informational interpretations of cognitive biases.”
Bateson, M., Desire, S., Gartside, S. E., & Wright, G. A.. (2011). Agitated honeybees exhibit pessimistic cognitive biases. Current Biology
Peters, E. R., Moritz, S., Schwannauer, M., Wiseman, Z., Greenwood, K. E., Scott, J., … Garety, P. A.. (2014). Cognitive biases questionnaire for psychosis. Schizophrenia Bulletin
“Objective: the cognitive biases questionnaire for psychosis (cbqp) was developed to capture 5 cognitive distortions (jumping to conclusions, intentionalising, cata-strophising, emotional reasoning, and dichotomous think-ing), which are considered important for the pathogenesis of psychosis. vignettes were adapted from the cognitive style test (cst), 1 relating to ” anomalous perceptions ” and ” threatening events ” themes. method: scale structure, reliability, and validity were investigated in a psy-chosis group, and cbqp scores were compared with those of depressed and healthy control samples. results: the cbqp showed good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. the 5 biases were not independent, with a 2-related factor scale providing the best fit. this structure suggests that the cbqp assesses a general thinking bias rather than distinct cognitive errors, while anomalous perception and threatening events theme scores can be used separately. total cbqp scores showed good conver-gent validity with the cst, but individual biases were not related to existing tasks purporting to assess similar rea-soning biases. psychotic and depressed populations scored higher than healthy controls, and symptomatic psycho-sis patients scored higher than their nonsymptomatic counterparts, with modest relationships between cbqp scores and symptom severity once emotional disorders were partialled out. anomalous perception theme and intentionalising bias scores showed some specificity to psychosis. conclusions: overall, the cbqp has good psychometric properties, although it is likely that it mea-sures a different construct to existing tasks, tentatively suggested to represent a bias of interpretation rather than reasoning, judgment or decision-making processes. it is a potentially useful tool in both research and clinical arenas.”
Hoppe, E. I., & Kusterer, D. J.. (2011). Behavioral biases and cognitive reflection. Economics Letters
Marshall, J. A. R., Trimmer, P. C., Houston, A. I., & McNamara, J. M.. (2013). On evolutionary explanations of cognitive biases. Trends in Ecology and Evolution
“Numerous studies have shown that diagnostic failure depends upon a variety of factors. psychological factors are fundamental in influencing the cognitive performance of the decision maker. in this first of two papers, we discuss the basics of reasoning and the dual process theory (dpt) of decision making. the general properties of the dpt model, as it applies to diagnostic reasoning, are reviewed. a variety of cognitive and affective biases are known to compromise the decision-making process. they mostly appear to originate in the fast intuitive processes of type 1 that dominate (or drive) decision making. type 1 processes work well most of the time but they may open the door for biases. removing or at least mitigating these biases would appear to be an important goal. we will also review the origins of biases. the consensus is that there are two major sources: innate, hard-wired biases that developed in our evolutionary past, and acquired biases established in the course of development and within our working environments. both are associated with abbreviated decision making in the form of heuristics. other work suggests that ambient and contextual factors may create high risk situations that dispose decision makers to particular biases. fatigue, sleep deprivation and cognitive overload appear to be important determinants. the theoretical basis of several approaches towards debiasing is then discussed. all share a common feature that involves a deliberate decoupling from type 1 intuitive processing and moving to type 2 analytical processing so that eventually unexamined intuitive judgments can be submitted to verification. this decoupling step appears to be the critical feature of cognitive and affective debiasing.”
Das, T. K., & Teng, B. S.. (1999). Cognitive biases and strategic decision processes: An integratwe perspective. Journal of Management Studies
“Previous studies have not adequately addressed the role of cognitive biases in strategic decision processes. in this article we suggest that cognitive biases are systematically associated with strategic decision processes. different decision processes tend to accentuate particular types of cognitive bias. we develop an integrative framework to explore the presence of four basic types of cognitive bias under five different modes of decision making. the cognitive biases include prior hypotheses and focusing on limited targets, exposure to limited alternatives, insensitivity to outcome probabilities and illusion of manageability. the five modes of strategic decision making are rational, avoidance, logical incrementalist, political and garbage can. we suggest a number of key propositions to facilitate empirical testing of the various contingent relationships implicit in the framework. lastly, we discuss the implications of this framework for research and managerial practice.”
Gudmundsson, S. V., & Lechner, C.. (2013). Cognitive biases, organization, and entrepreneurial firm survival. European Management Journal
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations or TIHR is a British not-for-profit organisation which applies social science to contemporary issues and problems. It was initiated in 1946, when it developed from the Tavistock Clinic, and was formally established as a separate entity in September 1947.More at Wikipedia
References
Neumann, J. E.. (2005). Kurt lewin at the tavistock institute. Educational Action Research
“Abstract notions of action research and of integrating object relations and field psychologies have exerted a steady influence on both the initial formation of the tavistock institute in london and on the subsequent 60 years of its professional identity and approach to work. these notions can be tied directly to early scientific contact with kurt lewin, and indirectly through the lewinian philosophy that staff incorporated into an overall ?house style?. from 1990, however, changes in the institute’s funding environment undermined this historical source of integrity. recent developments to reclaim and update the roots of kurt lewin at the tavistock institute. notions of action research and of integrating object relations and field psychologies have exerted a steady influence on both the initial formation of the tavistock institute in london and on the subsequent 60 years of its professional identity and approach to work. these notions can be tied directly to early scientific contact with kurt lewin, and indirectly through the lewinian philosophy that staff incorporated into an overall ?house style?. from 1990, however, changes in the institute’s funding environment undermined this historical source of integrity. recent developments to reclaim and update the roots of kurt lewin at the tavistock institute.”
Sir Charles Galton Darwin, KBE, MC, FRS was an English physicist who served as director of the National Physical Laboratory during the Second World War. He was the son of the mathematician George Howard Darwin and a grandson of Charles Darwin. More at Wikipedia
Hormonal modification
“Another type of discovery may be connected with hormones, those internal chemical secretions which so largely regulate the operations of the human body. The artificial use of hormones has already been shown to have profound effects on the behaviour of animals, and it seems quite possible that hormones, or perhaps drugs, might have similar effects on man. For example, there might be a drug, which, without other harmful effects, removed the urgency of sexual desire, and so reproduced in humanity the status of workers in a beehive. Or there might be another drug that produced a permanent state of contentment in the recipient—after all alcohol does something like this already, though it has other disadvantages and is only temporary in its effects. A dictator would certainly welcome the compulsory administration of the “contentment drug” to his subjects.” p183
Oligarchical monopoly
“Widespread wealth can never be common in an overcrowded world, and so in most countries of the future the government will inevitably be autocratic or oligarchic; some will give good government and some bad, and the goodness or badness will depend much more on the personal merits of the rulers than it does in a more democratic country.” p.194
Normative government
“To think of it as possible at other times is a misunderstanding of the function of government in any practical sense of the term. If the only things that a government was required to do were what everybody, or nearly everybody, wanted, there would be no need for the government to exist at all, because the things would be done anyhow; this would be the impracticable ideal of the anarchist. But if there are to be starving margins of population in most parts of the world, mere benevolence cannot suffice. There would inevitably be ill feeling and jealousy between the provinces, with each believing that it was not getting its fair share of the good things, and in fact, it would be like the state of affairs with which we are all too familiar. If then there is ever to be a world government, it will have to function as government do now, in the sense that it will have to coerce a minority – and indeed it may often be a majority – into doing things they do not want to.” p.191
George Pember Darwin (1928–2001) worked developing computers, and then (1964) married Angela Huxley, daughter of David Bruce Huxley. She was also a granddaughter of the writer Leonard Huxley and a great-granddaughter of Thomas Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog”.
After the death of his first wife, Leonard married Rosalind Bruce (1890–1994), and had two further sons. The elder of these was David Bruce Huxley (1915-1992), whose daughter Angela Huxley married George Pember Darwin, son of the physicist Sir Charles Galton Darwin (and thus a great-grandson of Charles Darwin married a great-granddaughter of Thomas Huxley). The younger son (1917-2012) was the Nobel Prize winner, physiologist Andrew Fielding Huxley. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huxley_family
Further References
Fancher, R. E.. (2009). Scientific Cousins: The Relationship Between Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. American Psychologist
“This article traces the personal as well as the intellectual and scientific relationship between charles darwin and his younger half-cousin francis galton. although they had been on friendly terms as young men, and darwin had in some ways been a role model for galton, the two did not share major scientific interests until after the publication of darwin’s on the origin of species in 1859. that work precipitated a religious and philosophical crisis in galton, which he gradually resolved after conceiving and developing the basic ideas of ‘hereditary genius’ and eugenics. more mathematically inclined than darwin, he subsequently contributed to the darwinian evolutionary discussion, and to the future science of psychology, by proposing the basic concept of the nature-nurture dichotomy, the conceptual and statistical foundations for behavior genetics, and the idea for intelligence testing. (psycinfo database record (c) 2010 apa, all rights reserved). (from the journal abstract)”
Gillham, N. W.. (2001). Sir Francis Galton and the Birth of Eugenics. Annual Review of Genetics
“The eugenics movement was initiated by sir francis galton, a victorian scientist. galton’s career can be divided into two parts. during the first. galton was engaged in african exploration, travel writing, geography, and meteorology. the second part began after he read the ‘origin of species’ by his cousin charles darwin. the book convinced galton that humanity could be improved through selective breeding. during this part of his career he was interested in the factors that determine what he called human ‘talent and character’ and its hereditary basis.”
Galton, D. J., & Galton, C. J.. (1998). Francis Galton: And eugenics today. Journal of Medical Ethics
“Eugenics can be defined as the use of science applied to the qualitative and quantitative improvement of the human genome. the subject was initiated by francis galton with considerable support from charles darwin in the latter half of the 19th century. its scope has increased enormously since the recent revolution in molecular genetics. genetic files can be easily obtained for individuals either antenatally or at birth; somatic gene therapy has been introduced for some rare inborn errors of metabolism; and gene manipulation of human germ-line cells will no doubt occur in the near future to generate organs for transplantation. the past history of eugenics has been appalling, with gross abuses in the usa between 1931 and 1945 when compulsory sterilization was practised; and in germany between 1933 and 1945 when mass extermination and compulsory sterilization were performed. to prevent such abuses in the future statutory bodies, such as a genetics commission, should be established to provide guidance and rules of conduct for use of the new information and technologies as applied to the human genome.”
Galton, F.. (1985). Essays in eugenics. The History of hereditarian thought ; 16
“CONTENTS: the possible improvement of the human breed under existing conditions of law and sentiment eugenics, its definition, scope, and aims restrictions in marriage studies in national eugenics eugenics as a factor in religion probability, the foundation of eugenics local associations for promoting eugenics sir francis galton (1822-1911) was a victorian polymath: geographer, meteorologist, tropical explorer, founder of differential psychology, inventor of fingerprint identification, pioneer of statistical correlation and regression, convinced hereditarian, eugenicist, proto-geneticist, half-cousin of charles darwin and best-selling author.”
Harper, P.. (2002). A life of Sir Francis Galton. From African exploration to the birth of eugenics. Human Genetics
“Few scientists have made lasting contributions to as many fields as francis galton. he was an important african explorer, travel writer, and geographer. he was the meteorologist who discovered the anticyclone, a pioneer in using fingerprints to identify individuals, the inventor of regression and correlation analysis in statistics, and the founder of the eugenics movement. now, nicholas gillham paints an engaging portrait of this victorian polymath. the book traces galton’s ancestry (he was the grandson of erasmus darwin and the cousin of charles darwin), upbringing, training as a medical apprentice, and experience as a cambridge undergraduate. it recounts in colorful detail galton’s adventures as leader of his own expedition in namibia. darwin was always a strong influence on his cousin and a turning point in galton’s life was the publication of the origin of species. thereafter, galton devoted most of his life to human heredity, using then novel methods such as pedigree analysis and twin studies to argue that talent and character were inherited and that humans could be selectively bred to enhance these qualities. to this end, he founded the eugenics movement which rapidly gained momentum early in the last century. after galton’s death, however, eugenics took a more sinister path, as in the united states, where by 1913 sixteen states had involuntary sterilization laws, and in germany, where the goal of racial purity was pushed to its horrific limit in the ‘final solution.’ galton himself, gillham writes, would have been appalled by the extremes to which eugenics was carried. here then is a vibrant biography of a remarkable scientist as well as a superb portrait of science in the victorian era.”
Magnello, M. E.. (2013). Galton’s Law of Ancestral Heredity. In Brenner’s Encyclopedia of Genetics: Second Edition
“Francis galton developed his theory of ancestral heredity in the late 1880s to determine the relationship between various traits, especially stature in parents and their offspring. he created the idea of a ‘midparent’ to measure the contribution of both parents over three generations. his theory incorporated elements of both blending and particulate inheritance, which generated interest from many victorian scientists, including charles darwin, james clerk maxwell, and karl pearson. galton’s ideas on reversion, regression, and correlation provided the framework from which pearson went on to devise a battery of correlational techniques and statistical models for simple and multiple regression.”
Bulmer, M.. (2003). Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry. Journal of Heredity
“If not for the work of his half cousin francis galton, charles darwin’s evolutionary theory might have met a somewhat different fate. in particular, with no direct evidence of natural selection and no convincing theory of heredity to explain it, darwin needed a mathematical explanation of variability and heredity. galton’s work in biometry—the application of statistical methods to the biological sciences—laid the foundations for precisely that. this book offers readers a compelling portrait of galton as the ‘father of biometry,’ tracing the development of his ideas and his accomplishments, and placing them in their scientific context.though michael bulmer introduces readers to the curious facts of galton’s life—as an explorer, as a polymath and member of the victorian intellectual aristocracy, and as a proponent of eugenics—his chief concern is with galton’s pioneering studies of heredity, in the course of which he invented the statistical tools of regression and correlation. bulmer describes galton’s early ambitions and experiments—his investigations of problems of evolutionary importance (such as the evolution of gregariousness and the function of sex), and his movement from the development of a physiological theory to a purely statistical theory of heredity, based on the properties of the normal distribution. this work, culminating in the law of ancestral heredity, also put galton at the heart of the bitter conflict between the ‘ancestrians’ and the ‘mendelians’ after the rediscovery of mendelism in 1900. a graceful writer and an expert biometrician, bulmer details the eventual triumph of biometrical methods in the history of quantitative genetics based on mendelian principles, which underpins our understanding of evolution today. — a. w. f. edwards, university of cambridge, author of pascal’s arithmetic triangle and likelihood”
Sandall, R.. (2008). Sir Francis Galton and the roots of eugenics. Society
“The eugenics movement was initiated by sir francis galton, a victorian scientist. galton’s career can be divided into two parts. during the first, galton was engaged in african exploration, travel writing, geography, and meteorology. the second part began after he read the origin of species by his cousin charles darwin. the book convinced galton that humanity could be improved through selective breeding. during this part of his career he was interested in the factors that determine what he called human ‘talent and character’ and its hereditary basis. consequently, he delved into anthropometrics and psychology and played a major role in the development of fingerprinting. he also founded the field of biometrics, inventing such familiar statistical procedures as correlation and regression analysis. he constructed his own theory of inheritance in which nature and not nurture played the leading role. he actively began to promote eugenics and soon gained important converts.”
Liu, Y.. (2008). A new perspective on Darwin’s Pangenesis. Biological Reviews
“In 1868 charles darwin proposed pangenesis, a developmental theory of heredity. he suggested that all cells in an organism are capable of shedding minute particles he called gemmules, which are able to circulate throughout the body and finally congregate in the gonads. these particles are then transmitted to the next generation and are responsible for the transmission of characteristics from parent to offspring. if any cells of the parent undergo changes as a result of environmental change, they will consequently transmit modified gemmules to their offspring. soon after darwin’s pangenetic theory was published, francis galton designed a series of blood transfusion experiments on differently pigmented rabbits to test its validity. he found no evidence in support of the existence of darwin’s gemmules and the concept of pangenesis was largely abandoned. in this article, recent reports of successful induction of heritable changes by blood transfusion are reviewed. detection of circulating nucleic acids and prions in plant sap and animal blood is considered as fresh evidence for the existence of gemmules. it is now apparent that a considerable revision of views on darwin’s pangenesis must occur before a new comprehensive genetic theory can be achieved.”
Galton, D. J.. (2005). Eugenics: Some lessons from the past. Reproductive BioMedicine Online
“This article examines the views of darwinist evolution on issues regarding race and how this contributed to the spread of racism in the united states. the writings of charles darwin and a myriad of his followers are examined, including herbert spencer, francis galton, and others. the influence of darwinism in contributing to the growth of institutional racism and the teaching of scientifically based racist thought is addressed. the article also examines how darwinist evolutionary thought affected the nation’s beliefs about those with special needs and how this contributed to people’s perceptions about people of color. the author asserts that the blatant inaccuracies of darwinist evolution regarding race raise questions about the theory’s overall veracity and how teachers should approach instruction regarding darwin’s theory. ”
Champkin, J.. (2011). Francis Galton centenary. Significance
“This year marks the centenary of the death of the great victorian scientist sir francis galton (1822–1911). galton, a cousin of charles darwin, and wildly eccentric, is a key and curious figure in the founding of modern statistics – and of several other sciences as well. we celebrate the life and achievements of an extraordinary man.”
The Freedom of the Press Orwell’s Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’
Excerpt
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
This book was first thought of, so far as the central idea goes, in 1937, but was not written down until about the end of 1943. By the time when it came to be written it was obvious that there would be great difficulty in getting it published (in spite of the present book shortage which ensures that anything describable as a book will ‘sell’), and in the event it was refused by four publishers. Only one of these had any ideological motive. Two had been publishing anti-Russian books for years, and the other had no noticeable political colour. One publisher actually started by accepting the book, but after making the preliminary arrangements he decided to consult the Ministry of Information, who appear to have warned him, or at any rate strongly advised him, against publishing it. Here is an extract from his letter:
I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think… I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs[*]. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.
* It is not quite clear whether this suggested modification is Mr… ’s own idea, or originated with the Ministry of Information; but it seems to have the official ring about it. [Orwell’s Note]
This kind of thing is not a good symptom. Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ‘co-ordination’ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you arc not allowed to criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticise our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld. There are other forbidden topics, and I shall mention some of them presently, but the prevailing attitude towards the USSR is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group.
The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the BBC celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar without mentioning Nelson, but it evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so. A particularly glaring case was that of Colonel Mihailovich, the Jugoslav Chetnik leader. The Russians, who had their own Jugoslav protege in Marshal Tito, accused Mihailovich of collaborating with the Germans. This accusation was promptly taken up by the British press: Mihailovich’s supporters were given no chance of answering it, and facts contradicting it were simply kept out of print. In July of 1943 the Germans offered a reward of 100,000 gold crowns for the capture of Tito, and a similar reward for the capture of Mihailovich. The British press ‘splashed’ the reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihailovich: and the charges of collaborating with the Germans continued. Very similar things happened during the Spanish civil war. Then, too, the factions on the Republican side which the Russians were determined to crush were recklessly libelled in the English leftwing [sic] press, and any statement in their defence even in letter form, was refused publication. At present, not only is serious criticism of the USSR considered reprehensible, but even the fact of the existence of such criticism is kept secret in some cases. For example, shortly before his death Trotsky had written a biography of Stalin. One may assume that it was not an altogether unbiased book, but obviously it was saleable. An American publisher had arranged to issue it and the book was in print — 1 believe the review copies had been sent out — when the USSR entered the war. The book was immediately withdrawn. Not a word about this has ever appeared in the British press, though clearly the existence of such a book, and its suppression, was a news item worth a few paragraphs.
It is important to distinguish between the kind of censorship that the English literary intelligentsia voluntarily impose upon themselves, and the censorship that can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of ‘vested interests’. The best-known case is the patent medicine racket. Again, the Catholic Church has considerable influence in the press and can silence criticism of itself to some extent. A scandal involving a Catholic priest is almost never given publicity, whereas an Anglican priest who gets into trouble (e.g. the Rector of Stiffkey) is headline news. It is very rare for anything of an anti-Catholic tendency to appear on the stage or in a film. Any actor can tell you that a play or film which attacks or makes fun of the Catholic Church is liable to be boycotted in the press and will probably be a failure. But this kind of thing is harmless, or at least it is understandable. Any large organisation will look after its own interests as best it can, and overt propaganda is not a thing to object to. One would no more expect the Daily Worker to publicise unfavourable facts about the USSR than one would expect the Catholic Herald to denounce the Pope. But then every thinking person knows the Daily Worker and the Catholic Herald for what they are. What is disquieting is that where the USSR and its policies are concerned one cannot expect intelligent criticism or even, in many cases, plain honesty from Liberal [sic — and throughout as typescript] writers and journalists who are under no direct pressure to falsify their opinions. Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed. This rule has been almost universally observed since 1941, but it had operated, to a greater extent than is sometimes realised, for ten years earlier than that. Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives. On the other side there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro-Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly me whole of the highbrow press. Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ‘not done’. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ‘inopportune’ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest. This attitude was usually defended on the ground that the international situation, and me urgent need for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded it; but it was clear that this was a rationalisation. The English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty towards me USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on me wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy. Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in me purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in me Ukraine. And if this was true before the war, the intellectual atmosphere is certainly no better now.
But now to come back to this book of mine. The reaction towards it of most English intellectuals will be quite simple: ‘It oughtn’t to have been published.’ Naturally, those reviewers who understand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones. They will say that it is a dull, silly book and a disgraceful waste of paper. This may well be true, but it is obviously not me whole of the story. One does not say that a book ‘ought not to have been published’ merely because it is a bad book. After all, acres of rubbish are printed daily and no one bothers. The English intelligentsia, or most of them, will object to this book because it traduces their Leader and (as they see it) does harm to the cause of progress. If it did me opposite they would have nothing to say against it, even if its literary faults were ten times as glaring as they are. The success of, for instance, the Left Book Club over a period of four or five years shows how willing they are to tolerate both scurrility and slipshod writing, provided that it tells them what they want to hear.
The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular — however foolish, even — entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ‘Yes’. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ‘How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?’, and the answer more often than not will be ‘No’, In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street-partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them-still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of: but by holding heretical opinions they ‘objectively’ harmed the régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.
These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a workingmen’s college in South London. The audience were working-class and lower-middle class intellectuals — the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to be tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves! Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?
It is important to realise that the current Russomania is only a symptom of the general weakening of the western liberal tradition. Had the MOI chipped in and definitely vetoed the publication of this book, the bulk of the English intelligentsia would have seen nothing disquieting in this. Uncritical loyalty to the USSR happens to be the current orthodoxy, and where the supposed interests of the USSR are involved they are willing to tolerate not only censorship but the deliberate falsification of history. To name one instance. At the death of John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World — first-hand account of the early days of the Russian Revolution — the copyright of the book passed into the hands of the British Communist Party, to whom I believe Reed had bequeathed it. Some years later the British Communists, having destroyed the original edition of the book as completely as they could, issued a garbled version from which they had eliminated mentions of Trotsky and also omitted the introduction written by Lenin. If a radical intelligentsia had still existed in Britain, this act of forgery would have been exposed and denounced in every literary paper in the country. As it was there was little or no protest. To many English intellectuals it seemed quite a natural thing to do. And this tolerance or [sic = of?] plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for Russia happens to be fashionable at this moment. Quite possibly that particular fashion will not last. For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilisation over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:
By the known rules of ancient liberty.
The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals arc visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. An example of this is the failure of the numerous and vocal English pacifists to raise their voices against the prevalent worship of Russian militarism. According to those pacifists, all violence is evil, and they have urged us at every stage of the war to give in or at least to make a compromise peace. But how many of them have ever suggested that war is also evil when it is waged by the Red Army? Apparently the Russians have a right to defend themselves, whereas for us to do [so] is a deadly sin. One can only explain this contradiction in one way: that is, by a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia, whose patriotism is directed towards the USSR rather than towards Britain. I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country — it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today — it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I have written this preface.
“This paper re-considers the relevance of peter sedgwick’s psychopolitics (1982) for a politics of mental health. psychopolitics offered an indictment of `anti-psychiatry’ the failure of which, sedgwick argued, lay in its deconstruction of the category of `mental illness’, a gesture that resulted in a politics of nihilism. `the radical who is only a radical nihilist’, sedgwick observed, `is for all practical purposes the most adamant of conservatives’. sedgwick argued, rather, that the concept of `mental illness’ could be a truly critical concept if it was deployed `to make demands upon the health service facilities of the society in which we live’. the paper contextualizes psychopolitics within the `crisis tendencies’ of its time, surveying the shifting welfare landscape of the subsequent 25 years alongside sedgwick’s continuing relevance. it considers the dilemma that the discourse of `mental illness’ – sedgwick’s critical concept – has fallen out of favour with radical mental health movements yet remains paradigmatic within psychiatry itself. finally, the paper endorses a contemporary perspective that, while necessarily updating psychopolitics, remains nonetheless `sedgwickian’. social theory & health (2009) 7, 129-147. doi: 10.1057/sth. 2009.7”
Robins, R. S., Post, J. M., Metz, C., Gurrieri, G., Robins, R. S., & Post, J. M.. (2008). Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred. In Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred
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“Author(s): robert s. robins and jerrold m. post published by: yale university press. (1997)”
Layton, L. B.. (2000). The Psychopolitics of Bisexuality. Studies in Gender and Sexuality
“This article begins with the observation that multiple current uses of the term ‘bisexuality’ render the practice of sexual desire for both men and women invisible. it then centers on the use of the term in contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory and argues that here, too, its use to mean the mix of male and female genitals or of masculinity and femininity renders bisexual desire invisible. although theorists suggest that psychic bisexuality can work clinically to deconstruct gender polarities, the essay argues that any use of masculinity and femininity reinstates rather than challenges such polarities. (psycinfo database record (c) 2012 apa, all rights reserved)(journal abstract)”
Morgan, K., & Nerison, R.. (1993). Homosexuality and psychopolitics: An historical overview.. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, …
“Abstract 1. traces various sources of attitudes toward homosexuality (hmsx) throughout history and explores the scientific and political forces that contributed to the depathologization of hmsx in the psychological community via the american …”
Hook, D.. (2012). A critical psychology of the postcolonial: The mind of apartheid. A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The mind of Apartheid
“Of the theoretical resources typically taken as the underlying foundations of critical social psychology, elements, typically, each of marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, one particular mode of critique remains notably absent: postcolonial theory. what might be the most crucial contributions that postcolonial critique can make to the project of critical psychology? one answer is that of a reciprocal form of critique, the retrieval of a ‘psychopolitics’ in which not only is the psychological placed within the register of the political, but—perhaps more challengingly—the political is also, strategically, approached through the register of the psychological. what the writings of fanon and biko make plain in this connection is the degree to which the narratives and concepts of the social psychological may be reformulated so as to fashion a novel discourse of resistance, one that opens up new avenues for critique for critical psychology, on the one hand, and that affords an innovative set of opportunities for the psychological investigation of the vicissitudes of the postcolonial, on the other.”
Greco, M., & Stenner, P.. (2013). Happiness and the Art of Life: Diagnosing the psychopolitics of wellbeing. Health, Culture and Society
Building upon the idea of a psychology without foundations and on vitalist approaches to health, the paper presents the concepts of ‘joy’ and of ‘gay science’ as theoretical points of contrast to seligman’s ‘happiness’ and ‘positive psychology’. defined by spinoza and nietzsche as the feeling of becoming more active in the world, joy emphasises the embodied connection between self and world. by contrast, we propose, a defining characteristic of the contemporary happiness dispositif is precisely the feature of splitting the subject from their world; of treating feelings and desires as purely internal, individual and subjective affairs; and of effectively cutting people off from any of their powers that do not correspond to a limited mode of entrepeneurial subjectivity and practice.
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Rau, A.. (2013). Psychopolitics at work: The subjective turn in labour and the question of feminization. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
“Purpose ? the purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between recent transformations of labour and corresponding predictions made to gender equity. it reflects in particular the german discussion on the subjective turn in labour, termed as subjectivation of work, and the diagnosis of a feminization of gainful labour work given in this context, by focusing on the governing of the psyche.design/methodology/approach ? the paper is both a theoretical reflection as well as a presentation of empirical findings. it refers to foucault’s concept of governmentality, thereby considering ?psychopolitics? as a new type of power, and taking it as an approach for qualitative empirical research. the empirical findings are based on narrative biographical interviews with female and male employees working in the ict sector.findings ? due to an under?elaborated conception of the subject (and its interrelation to power), the diagnosis of a subjectivation of work as a feminization of work is inadequate and misleading. instead, the empirical analysis gives evidence to the argument that the feminization of work turns out as a (re)masculinization of life and existence.originality/value ? by drawing on considerations within governmentality studies, the concept of ?psychopolitics? offers a new and fruitful approach for research, implying also a dynamic concept of the subject. the empirical analysis provides new insights on the discussion on the issue of gender equity within the realm of gainful work.”
Greenblatt, M.. (1974). Psychopolitics. American Journal of Psychiatry
“Power, money, and the welfare of millions of americans are today entrusted to a handful of psychiatric administrators, many of whom the author believes are inadequately trained for their jobs and often become entangled in political controversies that limit their effectiveness, if not their term in office. in many respects the philosophy and ideology of the psychiatric professional and the politician are opposites; yet it is the task of the psychiatric executive to reconcile these trends if the masses of patients dependent on governmental care are to benefit. today, state systems of care are extraordinarily vulnerable to political and news media attacks, and the citizens are aroused as never before. drawing on his many yr of experience in executive roles, the author describes what it is like to live in the center of the ‘psychopolitical’ arena, working to advance the goals of a mental health system within a complex political framework.”
Alschuler, L. R.. (2016). The psychopolitics of liberation: Political consciousness from a jungian perspective. The Psychopolitics of Liberation: Political Consciousness From a Jungian Perspective
“Lawrence r. alschuler uses the ideas of albert memmi, paulo freire, and jungian psychology to explain changes in the political consciousness of the oppressed. his analysis of the autobiographies of four native people, from guatemala and canada, reveals how they attained ‘liberated consciousness’ and healed their psychic wounds, inflicted by violence, exploitation, and discrimination. their lessons and alschuler’s proposed public policies may be applicable to the oppressed in ethnically divided societies everywhere.”
Cresswell, M., & Spandler, H.. (2013). The Engaged Academic: Academic Intellectuals and the Psychiatric Survivor Movement. Social Movement Studies
“ABSTRACT this paper considers some political and ethical issues associated with the ‘academic intellectual’ who researches social movements. it identifies some of the ‘lived contradictions’ such a role encounters and analyses some approaches to addressing these contradictions. in general, it concerns the ‘politico-ethical stance’ of the academic intellectual in relation to social movements and, as such, references the ‘theory of the intellectual’ associated with the work of antonio gramsci. more specifically, it considers that role in relation to one political ‘field’ and one type of movement: a field which we refer to, following the work of peter sedgwick, as ‘psychopolitics’, and a movement which, since the mid- to late-1980s, has been known as the ‘psychiatric survivor’ movement— psychiatric patients and their allies who campaign for the democratisation of the mental health system. in particular, through a comparison of two texts, nick crossley’s contesting psychiatry and kathryn church’s forbidden narratives, the paper contrasts different depths of engagement between academic intellectuals and the social movements which they research. key”
Klein, E., & Mills, C.. (2017). Psy-expertise, therapeutic culture and the politics of the personal in development. Third World Quarterly
Reid, J.. (2012). The Neoliberal Subject: Reslience and the Art of Living Dangerously. REVISTA PLÉYADE
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“While security has functioned historically as the major rationality for the subjection of populations to liberal governance, the rationality enabling that subjection is fast changing to that of resilience. this is not just a semantic shift. resilience entails a fundamental change in conceptions of the relationship of human beings to danger. to be secure, classically conceived, means to be free from danger. the discourse of resilience functions to prevent humans from conceiving danger as a phenomenon from which they might free themselves from and, in contrast, as that which they must now expose themselves to. this is because the modelling of human subjectivity under conditions of neoliberalism reifies its biological life as the domain of agency and governance. in this sense resilience represents a significant extension of the biopolitical drivers of neoliberal modernity. contesting the global injunction to give up on security requires a subject capable of imagining itself as something more than merely biological material. a political subject whose humanity resides in its freedom to secure itself from the dangers that it encounters. in context of which it is necessary we turn from the mere analysis of biopolitics to the theorization and practice of psychopolitics.”
Stopford, A.. (2013). Unconscious dominions: Psychoanalysis, colonial trauma, and global sovereignties. Subjectivity
“Ethnohistory.colonialism, and the cosmopolitan psychoanalytic subject: sovereignty in crisis / john d. cash ; denial, la crypte, and magic : contributions to the global unconscious from late colonial french west african psychiatry / alice bullard ; géza róheim and the australian aborigine : psychoanalytic anthropology during the interwar years / joy damousi ; colonial dominions and the psychoanalytic couch : synergies of freudian theory with bengali hindu thought and practices in british india / christiane hartnack ; psychoanalysis, race relations, and national identity : the reception of psychoanalysis in brazil, 1910 to 1940 / mariano ben plotkin — trauma, subjectivity, sovereignty : psychoanalysis and postcolonial critique: the totem vanishes, the hordes revolt : a psychoanalytic interpretation of the indonesian struggle for independence / hans pols ; placing haiti in geopsychoanalytic space : toward a postcolonial concept of traumatic mimesis / deborah jenson ; colonial madness and the poetics of suffering : structural violence and kateb yacine / richard c. keller ; ethnopsychiatry and the postcolonial encounter : a french psychopolitics of otherness / didier fassin ; concluding remarks: hope, demand and the perpetual / ranjana kanna.”
Post, J. M.. (1999). The psychopolitics of hatred: Commentary on Ervin Staub’s article. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology
“Comments on the article by e. staub (see record 1999-15763-002) which discussed the origins and prevention of genocide, mass killing, and other collective violence. post proposes that in order to understand the psychological basis for ‘ethnic cleansing’ and man’s inhumanity to man, it is critical to understand the powerful relationship of malignant leaders and vulnerable followers. at times of political and economic transition, hate-mongering demagogues, serving as malignant group therapists to their wounded nations, can provide sense-making explanations for their beleaguered followers, exporting the source of their difficulties to an external target, justifying hatred and mass violence. the loss of enemies in the wake of the collapse of the soviet empire led to an intensification of ethnic-nationalist hatred as old enemies were revived and new enemies were created, providing a fertile climate for genocidal destruction. (psycinfo database record (c) 2013 apa, all rights reserved)”
