Abstract: In this chapter, Tirres revisits John Dewey’s A Common Faith (1934) through the lens of Human Nature and Conduct (1922), highlighting Dewey’s evolving understanding of habit, custom, and social transformation. While A Common Faith offers a dynamic view of spirituality, its stark division between “the religious” and institutional religion often proves rigid and incomplete. Human Nature and Conduct provides a more nuanced perspective, emphasizing how habits and customs shape moral and social life, sometimes restricting but also enabling intelligent growth. Dewey’s time in China helped him see how custom, often dismissed as conservative, can be a site of meaningful reconstruction. Yet, in A Common Faith, Dewey is preoccupied with rejecting supernaturalism, overlooking the potential for religious customs to foster ethical and social progress. Tirres argues that had Dewey integrated insights from Human Nature and Conduct, he might have offered a richer account of religion’s social dimensions. By reconstructing Dewey’s approach, Tirres suggests that religious traditions, rather than being inherently stifling, can be intelligently reshaped to promote communal and social transformation, aligning with contemporary movements like liberation theology and engaged Buddhism.

This chapter focuses on the foundations of study design and statistical analysis in psychological research. It explores strategies for ensuring internal validity, such as randomization, control groups, and large sample sizes. Additionally, it addresses the complexity of human behavior by exploring multivariate experiments and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in neuroscience. The chapter also discusses the replication crisis and the emergence of open science practices, encouraging students to think critically about isolated scientific findings and offering tools for identifying credible research. Lastly, it critiques null hypothesis significance testing and p-values while providing an overview of key statistical topics like correlation coefficients, standardized mean differences, and regression.

Abstract: In this chapter, Fahy explores the parallels between John Dewey’s and Aristotle’s moral psychology, particularly their shared emphasis on habit (hexis) and practical wisdom (phronesis). He shows how Dewey, like Aristotle, views habits as the foundation of moral character, shaping perception, deliberation, and choice. Aristotle defines virtues as acquired dispositions that guide action through practical wisdom, whereas Dewey extends this idea, emphasizing the dynamic, transactional nature of habit formation. Both thinkers see deliberation as dramatic and integrative, determining both actions and the meaning of values in lived experience. However, they diverge on key points: Aristotle envisions a hierarchical structure of virtues culminating in contemplation (theoria) as the highest good, while Dewey rejects fixed ends, advocating continual growth. This chapter concludes by stating that despite differences, both of these accounts of moral psychology provide rich frameworks for understanding human action, ethical deliberation, and character development.

To decolonize social institutions (i.e. political, criminal justice, educational, and economic systems) a more profound commitment to inclusion and well-being will require a reimagining of the embedment of anti-racist and anti-oppressive paradigms. Various social institutions either inherited or created to meet the needs and aspirations of the former colonized, have faltered and failed under the pressures of Neo-Colonialism and structural racism, and have manifested in their various forms as structural adjustment programs, outsourcing, privatization of human services, and the rise of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s). There is an urgent need for new and innovative research on the subject of producing a brave and adaptable generation of leaders who understand the value of servant leadership principles coupled with the principles of the Afrocentric Perspective as a framework to create social policies and engage in leadership practices that are sensitive to the needs of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and other oppressed groups in general as a conceptualization of a praxis of decoloniality. This chapter will address how these two approaches can contribute to the reinvigoration of upcoming leaders committed to serving BIPOC and other oppressed and marginalized groups.

Abstract: In this chapter, Heilbronn argues that Dewey’s discussion of habit in Human Nature and Conduct is pertinent to the formation of preservice teachers. The chapter shows how Dewey’s discussion, taken alongside his works in which he is specifically talking about teaching, can guide us toward necessary principles that should underlie the education of teachers. Such principles are particularly important to counteract the way in which teachers’ critical reflection and deliberation are devalued in teacher education in many parts of the world today. These contexts serve to deprofessionalize teachers. Heilbronn discusses one such context, namely England’s current teacher preparation program, to illustrate this point in the final section of the chapter. Heilbronn contrasts the case of England with the Deweyan vision of teacher education. The chapter points out how Dewey’s vision is relevant today; it can serve as a foundation for a reconstructed teacher education grounded in the idea of teaching as an art within contingent situations that require responsiveness to learners.

This chapter explores the many ways social work supervision and leadership practice engage with and overlap with communities through anti-oppressive work. Focuses include utilizing supervision and leadership to engage communities, transitional leadership and succession planning, connecting and utilize the arts in community empowerment, messaging, and liberative movement.

Human Nature and Conduct (1922) does not appear to be overtly about education at first glance. For one, Dewey uses the term education sparingly in the book. And, what is more, in terms of its scholarly reception, HNC has not commonly been considered within the central works of Dewey’s corpus on education. However, notably, the conclusion of HNC, a book on morals, is that “morals is education,” suggesting that the upshot of Dewey’s argument for education writ large is significant. The chapters in this section illuminate how Human Nature and Conduct is intertwined with Dewey’s theory of education.

Human Nature and Conduct was published in the time period between the publication of two of Dewey’s major works on education, Democracy and Education (1916) and Experience and Education (1938).

In this chapter, multiple anti-oppressive and liberative lenses are reviewed and discussed as application to anti-oppressive decolonial clinical social work supervision and leadership practice. This chapter both review of the theory or practice lens and an emphasis on application to practice. By design subsequent chapters will overlap, deep dive, and offer multiple practice views of several concepts offered in this chapter.

John Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct is the most comprehensive statement of a pragmatist moral psychology and provides among the most important treatments of ethical theory in the Dewey corpus. The book’s subtitle “An introduction to social psychology” can be misleading, because the book is not about social psychology as an academic discipline. Dewey clarifies his intention in the preface to the book’s first edition in 1922, when he writes that he aims to put forth not a social psychology as such but rather “an understanding of habit” as the key to social psychology. He views the problem of social psychology as understanding how customs or “collective habit” shape the minds of individuals in the social group. With Human Nature and Conduct, he sets out to attend to just this problem, providing a way to rethink the meaning of habit and how habits – collective and individual – shape our lives.

Abstract: In Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Dewey seems to suggest that we can and should change human nature. In this chapter, McBride queries Dewey’s account of native impulses and how instincts, impulses, and dispositions relate to human nature. Dewey proffers insights into the ways in which impulses, habitual conduct, and social institutions condition and circumscribe the dominant mode of being human (and the ordering principles that enjoin the relations therein). The chapter argues that these particular Deweyan insights could potentially help us to conceive an education-based path to a decolonial conception of anthropos (human being). In this light, the chapter critically reassesses the Deweyan democratic conception of the alterability of human nature. It brings in additional insights from the decolonial thinking of novelist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter to extend Deweyan philosophy and point to the Euro-American coloniality that undergirds the present order of things. In closing, McBride suggests that a viable decolonial way forward will require a change in human nature in ways that transform our habits and demand the establishment of new social and educational institutions.

Abstract: In Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Dewey writes that bad habits are ones that have a “command over us” making us “do things we prefer not to do,” because as he puts it, “we are the habit.” In this chapter, Striano describes how education has a role in our understanding of the command of habit over our lives. The chapter considers how within the process of growth we can start reshaping our habits, making them increasingly intelligent so as to inform “intelligent dispositions.” Intelligent dispositions are central to helping us come to perform new, more reflective, courses of action in the world. The chapter concludes with the ideas that such intelligently reconstructed habits − ones that have been channeled through educative experiences which account for both human plasticity and the changes and “obstacles” in our environment − have the power to determine an effective transformation of our attitudes, behaviors, and understandings and, therefore, of our selves.

Abstract: In this chapter, Forstenzer asks: How can education help us deal with a world in which the harsh realities of climate chaos, violence, and catastrophe threaten our collective survival? To explore this question, the chapter examines Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (1922), beginning by discussing his conception of human nature and violence. Second, it addresses how Dewey conceives of how we overcome the threat of violence via cultural means. Third, it discusses our orientation toward the future, as well as problems and catastrophes. Fourth, it addresses the role that education and higher education in particular plays in supporting the task of intelligently responding to problems and catastrophes. Ultimately, Forstenzer argues that Dewey’s conception of intelligent cultural adaptation provides us with a helpful injunction to focus our efforts on fostering the development of moral, civic, and epistemic character across the community.

In this chapter, the intersection of systemic inequality, oppression, and trauma are explored. We outline outlines the deep historical and contemporary roots of oppression and trauma, explores the multifaceted impact on individuals and communities, and suggests practical strategies for dismantling these systems, all with an eye toward long-term healing and justice.

This chapter unpacks the DEIPAR social justice framework, which accounts for intersectionality, power and antiracism, in relation to supervision, leadership and power-sharing. The discussion of antiracism details the connection between racism, colonialism, and anti-Blackness, to create clarity regarding the colonial dynamics and hierarchy of supervision. Building on these connections, a pathway is provided for developing socially just power-sharing using the DEIPAR framework in the context of supervision.

This chapter addresses the role of oxytocin and vasopressin in shaping social behavior, reviewing both human and animal studies. The chapter critiques the early optimism around oxytocin’s ability to foster trust and emotional understanding, providing evidence from failed replication studies and highlighting the effects of sex, context, and brain region-specific interactions. It also assesses clinical research on oxytocin as a potential treatment for autism spectrum disorder, pointing out the limitations of current approaches and the complexity of translating animal research into human applications.