Folks outside of the field may not know what a period of re-examination we are in, in the psychological sciences, of older claims that have been perpetuated for a long time to describe human beings in crowds and groups as selfish, power-mad, automatons, destructive.
These narratives are everywhere, yet as group & identity & crisis researchers have been arguing for a long time, the reactions of people in large crowds in sudden unanticipated emergency are most often marked by calm helping
People can be stressed, anguished, in fear for their lives and directly witnessing violence, and they will still rapidly and immediately form groups with the people they are with and try to get everyone out. Counter to the idea that our "civilization" falls away, revealing our "secret real nature." We are social, we don't just "put on" social.
Obviously our capacity to form groups is exploitable, but that does not mean it isn't extraordinary and a source of tremendous compassion and action.
The re-examination of contextual validity, across the psychological sciences, is also a quietly seismic revolution in my opinion.
One big example, cultural context seems to change the efficacy of clinical interventions, and the severity of the negative outcomes of certain symptoms in mental health, in ways that conventional models have failed to imagine. Rather than imagining an isolated individual who has culture "put on" to them, perhaps culture+self deeply entangle to create our thinking
@grimalkina I find this so hard to communicate in an age of skepticism. So many people have a fixed idea of science as uncovering true facts which are then known to be true for all time, which is very fragile and inevitably leads to "well if that was wrong how can we trust any of it?"
Yet a naïve understanding of science as a living body of knowledge paves the way for subjectivism and "alternative facts".
It feels like patiently explaining the "living body" thing more deeply is the only way
Dr. Cat Hicks
Jez 🍞🌹
Joel Ethan Koan