2 results
2 - The Conservative Crowd?
- from Part I - Roots of Revolution
- Edited by Brady Wagoner, Aalborg University, Denmark, Fathali M. Moghaddam, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Jaan Valsiner, Aalborg University, Denmark
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- Book:
- The Psychology of Radical Social Change
- Published online:
- 03 April 2018
- Print publication:
- 03 April 2018, pp 11-28
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- Chapter
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Summary
The events of the 1871 Paris Commune, when the working class of that city declared a revolutionary republic separate from the French state, were the stimulus for one of the most influential social psychology books ever written, Gustave Le Bon’s (1896/1947) The crowd: A study of the popular mind. The book was an attempt not simply to explain the kinds of (violent) crowds that Le Bon had witnessed during the Commune and read about in accounts of the 1789 French Revolution, but to control and combat these crowds. Yet while Le Bon and others in his class feared that crowds threatened civilization, he also argued that their violent revolutions were incapable of bringing about real social change because of the primitive mentality of crowd members. This chapter challenges Le Bon’s argument first by briefly surveying some of the literature on social change. Here we find that the crowd often figures as a central actor. In a number of cases, social change and psychological change seem to be connected, so in the second section of the chapter we describe some of the psychological transformations that have been documented among participants involved in social change and in collective action more generally. These transformations involve embracing new ideas about the self, politics and the world, and so tell against Le Bon’s claim that crowd events are associated with a conservative or regressed psychological state. We then outline an elaborated social identity model (ESIM), which specifies the intergroup processes through which many of these psychological changes occur. The remainder of the chapter illustrates the usefulness of the ESIM in explaining how participation in crowds struggling to create social change can itself change crowd participants’ understandings of the meaning of their actions. The illustration consists of evidence from an ethnographic study of pacifists’ experiences conflict, which served to challenge their humanistic rationale for their collective actions.
45 - Studying Harm-Doing without Doing Harm
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- By S. Alexander Haslam, University of Exeter, Stephen D. Reicher, University of St. Andrews, Mark R. McDermott, University of East London
- Edited by Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University, New York, Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, New Jersey
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- Book:
- Ethical Challenges in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- Published online:
- 05 February 2015
- Print publication:
- 26 January 2015, pp 134-139
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Summary
The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is widely recognized as one of the most ethically controversial psychology studies ever conducted. In 1971, 24 college students who had volunteered to take part in a “psychological study of prison life” were randomly assigned to roles as guards and prisoners within a “prison” that had been specially constructed in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department. As most psychology students would be aware, the study had to be brought to a premature close after six days due to the intense distress that the prisoners were experiencing at the hand of the guards. At the time, the ethical framework for conducting research of this form was poorly defined and relatively informal. But partly as a consequence of the horrors it led to, after the SPE, psychologists’ code of research ethics was formalized and tightened, with the result that many felt it would never again be possible to conduct studies of this form.
Despite – or perhaps because of – this, since it was conducted, the SPE has exerted a vice-like grip over discussions about the issues of tyranny and evil that it investigated. This means that when reflecting on large-scale human atrocity, it is commonplace for researchers and commentators alike to reprise the argument that this reflects people’s “natural” tendency to conform uncritically to the specifications of any group roles they are assigned, however noxious they might be. This in itself is of major ethical concern, potentially letting perpetrators off the hook. Thus, if conducting studies like the SPE raises serious ethical issues, not conducting them is equally of ethical concern.