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

Anyway, I should go write my psychology book instead of writing psychology threads :). But it is a marvel to me to keep reading the literature, to keep witnessing bold, brave and far more inclusively-minded cohorts of young scientists pushing our models and in some cases taking a beautiful sledgehammer to them. Those first-first author grad student papers are where it's at sometimes, and all disciplines are *living* bodies of knowledge. Like healthy water and air, best to not let it stagnate.

@grimalkina "Anyway, I should go write my psychology book instead of writing psychology threads"

Why not both? 😅

@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

@petrichor it's VERY VERY hard I don't really know the answer 😭 I think we need to get people engaged in feeling ownership and belonging to the collective knowledge vs science and scientists as some object we can just demand answers from, similar to trying to get people to see their choices about climate change matter
@grimalkina @petrichor If there’s a way out of this age of distrust of “experts” and any sense of value in knowledge, it’s to harness the skepticism people have to engage in the scientific process rather move to nihilism.
@grimalkina As someone who was raised extremely religious and deconstructed as an adult, the idea that culture shapes our sense of self seems pretty self-evident to me. I went through a full-blown identity crisis when I became disillusioned, because all my motivation and behavior patterns hinged on something I no longer believe in. (therapists keep saying) I'm more self-aware than the average person , but I've had to consciously rebuild my worldview over the last several years to recover.
@grimalkina psych really operates on some strange metaphoric presuppositions, and i'm glad some of them are finally getting unearthed and interrogated in a broader sens.
@cour13r5 it's honestly not one field but many frenemies or straight-up "no we disagree" other subfields, perhaps every massive discipline ends up being this 😂
@grimalkina oh yeah totally. i'm in one of the subfields, so i'm like. in the dang conflict a lot of the time, haha
@cour13r5 felt!!! heard!!!!
@grimalkina actually, probably more accurate to say i'm in multiple sub-fields, so i'm even at conflict with myself, lol.
@cour13r5 I think this is the only reasonable location to be in when you're someone who wants to be rigorous but also help people

@grimalkina probably true!

i'm literally operating at street level, but also constantly trying to zoom out and catch research, but ALSO find things that *work* even if there's not great research about them yet (because the research is always decades behind)? etc. which...isn't common where i am.

@grimalkina Oh yes, and the experience of helpers coming out of the woodwork when everything formal has broken down. My first reading about this was about the 1953 storm-surge disaster in the Netherlands. Or then, those fishermen in their villages along the Sound when Denmark's Jews suddenly had to get out.