Social Psychology

Terrorism has returned to Northern Ireland. In the years after the Real IRA bombing of Omagh in 1998, violent Republican groups have re-emerged as a major security threat to a region that has for too long been denied peace, stability, and prosperity. Those responsible have many names. They are dissidents, breakaways, splinter factions, spoilers, “residual” terrorists. The Real IRA, Continuity IRA, and Óglaigh na hÉireann are only some of the groups now responsible for a growing wave of bombings, shootings, threats, and intimidation across Northern Ireland. These are the rejectionists for whom there seems to be no negotiated settlement, no peace deal, no consensus solution that will convince them to accept the will of the majority of the people on the island of Ireland. Divided We Stand: The Strategy and Psychology of Ireland’s Dissident Terrorists presents the results of meticulous research conducted by the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at the Pennsylvania State University. Since 2007, John Horgan, the Director of the center, has led a research project to monitor the activities of Ireland’s new terrorists. Drawing on one of the largest open-source militant databases yet assembled, this book describes the activities, histories, motivations, psychology, and strategy of the small, dynamic, and rapidly evolving splinter groups that continue to erode peace, stability, and normalization in Northern Ireland.

Most contemporary North Americans take for granted the universality of their conceptions and experiences of themselves as individuals with uniquely valuable psychological lives. However, such psychological conceptions of selfhood are historically quite recent, dating mostly from the late eighteenth century. Perhaps more surprisingly, understandings of ourselves as creatively self-expressive and strategically self-managing individuals are, for the most part, products of twentieth-century innovations in Enlightenment-based social sciences, especially disciplinary psychology, in both its scientific and professional guises. This book examines the role that psychology (especially educational psychology) played in the transformation of American and Canadian classrooms and schools into sites for the self-development of students, creating an ideal image of the successful student as self-expressive, enterprising, and entitled to forms of education that recognize and cater to such expressivity and enterprise. Specific attention is given to each of the major programs of psychological research and intervention in American and Canadian schools from 1950 to 2000: self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy, and self-regulation. Critical consideration is provided with respect to definitions, conceptualizations, research measures and methods, intervention practices, and the sociocultural consequences of these programs of inquiry and practice. In light of these considerations, the backlash against what some have come to regard as a self-absorbed generation of young people may be interpreted, at least in part, as a reaction to the scientific and professional activities of psychologists, many of whom now appear to share in the general concern about where their activities have left students, schools, and society at large.

The present book engages with the phenomenon of protracted occupation, which it perceives as both attention-grabbing and puzzling in the 21st century, an era in which it has become an exceptional and very rare phenomenon. The analysis begins with a view which suggests that occupation, by its very nature, has in most cases acquired a negative connotation because in the great majority of cases it is carried out coercively, against the will of the occupied population. In the discourse on this phenomenon, therefore, the focus of the interest is frequently on the occupied society, became it bears the very heavy tangible and intangible burdens of the occupation. Indeed there is growing literature on this issue. It is consequently requisite upon us also to analyze the relatively neglected effects of the occupation on the occupying society, effects that are not always explicit and easily observed. The present book focuses on a particular case of prolonged occupation – that of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israel following the Six Day War in 1967. Of importance for us is the fact that since 1967 Israel has been occupying Palestinian territories and the Palestinian population has been living for over four decades under this occupation. We focus on the relative gap in the interactive analysis in the context of occupation – the effects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and of the Palestinian people, on the State of Israel and its society. The consequences of the occupation are felt in wide range of aspects of life from political, societal, legal and economic to cultural and psychological.

A half century of research shows that most citizens are woefully uninformed about public affairs, liberal-conservative ideologies, and the issues of the day. This had led most scholars to conclude that policy voting lies beyond the reach of typical American voters and to condemn them as politically inept. This book breaks sharply with this view. Once attention turns away from liberal-conservative predispositions and issue preferences, there is indisputable evidence that nearly everyone holds genuine policy principles and uses these to guide their votes come Election Day. Three principles that reflect the major cleavages long dividing the Democratic and Republican parties are paramount: limited government, traditional morality, and military strength. Integrating work from social and political history, social and political psychology, and electoral behavior, the book argues that these three principles are available in the minds of nearly all citizens; function as central heuristics in their belief systems; are rooted deeply in basic human values; and guide presidential choices to a comparable degree for voters across the sophistication spectrum. Analysis of opinion data from the past six presidential elections and three new surveys yields unequivocal support for these claims. Contrary to the indictment leveled by most of the scholarly community and political pundits more generally, ordinary citizens who are neither deeply knowledgeable nor engaged with the world of public affairs prove as adept as their more sophisticated counterparts at grounding presidential votes in abstract views about public policy.

Principles of Social Change offers a comprehensive guide to the development of community interventions and provides the tools and resources to initiate and sustain progress. I examine various strategies developed by community activists, coalitions, and social scientists to break down what motivates people. What worked and why? What can be applied to other scenarios? I also discuss practical solutions to complicated issues, such as protecting children’s well-being, combating abuses of power, providing affordable housing, and cleaning up the environment. These ideas are designed to bring about enduring systemic changes at all levels of community life. Although activists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Saul Alinsky, Jane Addams, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. have effected transformational change, everyday citizens and social entrepreneurs have also made tremendously important and sustainable contributions. The five principles reviewed in this book can be used by anyone who wants to bring comprehensive, structural solutions to some of our most vexing social issues. These principles and strategies demonstrate that there is, in fact, a tangible way to achieve change—ordinary people throughout history have done it. This guide is intended for anyone with a desire to improve his or her community. It is expressly for activists with a wide range of causes, from changing environmental regulations to helping disadvantaged children, or other complicated social problems. The five principles described in this book are essential to solving these problems, and they carry the potential to influence new generations of engaged citizens, community activists, and students of psychology and related social sciences. By understanding these principles, community leaders and activists will be poised to bring about a more just and humane society.

This book invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant the decision maker little time for deep thought, protracted information search, or complex calculations. The social world also encompasses domains, however, where social animals such as humans learn from one another how to deal with the vagaries of a natural world that both inflicts unforeseeable hazards and presents useful opportunities and dare to trust and forge alliances with one another to boost their chances of success. According to the book's thesis, the undeniable complexity of the social world does not dictate cognitive complexity as many scholars of rationality argue. Rather, it entails circumstances that render optimization impossible or computationally arduous: intractability, the existence of incommensurable considerations, and competing goals. With optimization beyond reach, less can be more. That is, heuristics—simple strategies for making decisions when time is pressing and careful deliberation an unaffordable luxury—become indispensible mental tools. As accurate or even more accurate than complex methods when used in the appropriate environments, these heuristics are good descriptive models of how people make many decisions and inferences, but their impressive performance also poses a normative challenge for optimization models. In short, the homo socialis may prove to be a homo heuristicus whose intelligence reflects ecological rather than logical rationality.