Reaction Paper: The Challenge of the Psychology of Poverty in Africa

The content of this abstract is a reaction to the various articles appearing in this special section of the Journal of Psychology in Africa with a focus on the Psychology of Poverty in African countries. The articles deal with the psychology of poverty from different perspectives, as they impact on African children, men and women. Some of the topics covered are focussed on poverty and education, poverty and employment, poverty and marital relationship, poverty in relationship to men and women who are friends on intimate basis. What is clear from the various presentations is that poverty is obviously affecting Africans adversely and presents a serious challenge to men and women. Such a serious challenge must be addressed by all those concerned so that Africans can lead a better life than that which they have been sentenced by poverty.     

War and Peace: Possible Approaches to Reducing Intergroup Conflict

ABSTRACT— We discuss four potential ways to reduce conflict between groups: consideration of future consequences, independent leadership, outgroup empathy, and coordination. We review relevant empirical findings for each method and discuss how each can be used to promote intergroup cooperation.     

Philosophy,Famine Relief,and the Skeptical Challenge From Disagreement

Disagreement has been grist to the mills of sceptics throughout the history of philosophy. Recently, though, some philosophers have argued that widespread philosophical disagreement supports a broad scepticism about philosophy itself. In this paper, I argue that the task for sceptics of philosophy is considerably more complex than commonly thought. The mere fact that philosophical methods fail to generate true majority views is not enough to support the sceptical challenge from disagreement. To avoid demanding something that human reasoning cannot supply, sceptics must show that philosophers have sufficient overlap to resolve their disagreements in particular concrete cases.     

Voices Unheard: The Psychology of Consumption in Poverty and Development

Many facets of contemporary global problems posed by poverty pertain to the deprivation of consumption capability and are within the consumer psychologist's expertise domain. This article (based on my 2004 Presidential Address to the Society for Consumer Psychology [SCP]) outlines how consumer psychology research can contribute an understanding of the cognitive, motivational, and sociocultural dimensions of poverty, and how poverty depletes and alters the human need and capacity to consume. Consumer psychology research can also help suggest the nature and function of material and psychological interventions that can help ameliorate these conditions, focusing their design and monitoring their effects. These are important research priorities for consumer psychologists and deserve more and sustained attention from our community. Apart from garnering voice in policy conversations in government, industry, and academe, such research eventually will enhance our field's substantive contribution to improving the contemporary human condition.     

Fact and the Narratives of War: Produced Undecidability in Accounts of Armed Conflict

This paper explores how providing the inferential basis to argue for a range of equally plausible interpretations features as a way of managing issues of accountability in talk about armed confrontation. We examine conversation produced in open-ended interviews with diplomatic representatives of the United States and Great Britain in discussion about those countries' involvement in the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990–91. By providing the inferential basis upon which to argue for a range of equally plausible interpretative scenarios, speakers attend to the potential for any one account to be privileged over another. Further, in speculating upon the relationship between interpretative particulars and the inferential outcome to be drawn for some specific version of events in question, speakers work to establish the parameters of an admissible narrative trajectory with which to account for those events. In so doing, they manage the implications that excluded versions would otherwise make relevant.