‘Too black or not black enough’: Social identity complexity in the political rhetoric of Barack Obama

The election of the first African‐American President of the United States, Barack Obama, has been widely recognised as an extraordinary milestone in the history of the United States and indeed the world. With the use of a discursive psychological approach combined with central theoretical principles derived from social identity and self‐categorisation theories, this paper analyses a corpus of speeches Obama delivered during his candidacy for president to examine how he attended to and managed his social identity in his political discourse. Building on a social identity model of leadership, we examine specifically how Obama mobilises political support and social identification by building an identity for himself as a prototypical representative of the American people, notwithstanding the protracted public debate within both the White and Black American communities that had questioned and contested Obama's identity. Moreover, we demonstrate how Obama managed the dilemmas around his identity by actively crafting an in‐group identity that was oriented to an increasingly socially diverse America—a diversity that he himself exemplified and embodied as a leader. As an ‘entrepreneur’ of identity, Obama's rhetorical project was to position himself as an exceptional leader, whose very difference was represented as ‘living proof’ of the widely shared collective values that constitute the ‘American Dream’. Drawing on social identity complexity theory, we suggest that by providing more inclusive and complex categories of civic and national identity, Obama's presidency has the potential to radically transform what it means to be a prototypical in‐group member in America. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Counselling young people: Counsellors' perspectives on ‘what works’ – An exploratory study

Aim: Counsellors who work with young people in a range of contexts know that they are not engaging with ‘mini‐adults’. The issues young people bring to counselling are often complex, challenging and wide‐ranging, as adolescents are experiencing times of turbulence and change in their physical, emotional, social and psychological development. This paper focuses on a research project undertaken with five counsellors who work with young people, and asks the question: ‘What works?’ Method: The research project is an in‐depth qualitative study into the counsellor's experience of counselling young people, using a narrative approach. Findings: Four key shared themes emerged: the significance of ‘safety’ in the relationship; building the therapeutic alliance; flexibility and integration relating to theoretical orientation; and the use of creativity. Outcomes: This paper offers counsellors the opportunity to reflect on ‘what works’ and consider the professional knowledge, which underpins their own counselling practice with young people.     

The ‘romance of teams’: Toward an understanding of its psychological underpinnings and implications

Although advocates of teamwork suggest that teams enhance performance, empirical evidence does not consistently, or robustly, support these claims. Still, a belief in the effectiveness of teams—among managers, employees, and the general lay population—seems very strong. What accounts for this ‘romance of teams’? In this paper, we offer a psychological answer to this question. We review evidence regarding the actual effectiveness of teams, in order to show that teams are not as effective as many believe them to be, and we argue that the romance of teams stems from the psychological benefits of group‐based activity. Specifically, we propose that team members experience both social‐emotional, and competence‐related, benefits, and we review an eclectic mix of research in support of this claim. We argue that these psychological benefits of teams lead people to assume that teams are ‘high performance’, thus, causing the romance of teams. Finally, we discuss potential implications of the romance for organizations, researchers, and employees.     

School pupils' perceptions of the police that visit schools: Not all police are ‘pigs’

This paper presents data concerning young people's perceptions of the police taking part in a police—schools liaison programme. Eighty-one 14-year-old school pupils took part in 28 semi-structured group discussions concerning their perceptions of the ‘typicality’ of police officers working in their schools. Pupils clearly differentiated between these and those ‘on the street’. Central to this differentiation was the issue of police power; the perceived atypicality of the police in schools was intimately bound up with pupils' perceptions of the qualitatively different social relations that obtain between young people and the police ‘in the school’ and ‘on the street’. The implications of these data for the literatures concerning the ‘contact hypothesis’ and police—schools liaison are discussed.     

Against Pogge's ‘Cosmopolitanism’

Thomas Pogge labels the idea that each person owes each other person equal respect and concern ‘ethical cosmopolitanism’ and correctly states that it is a ‘non‐starter’. He offers as an allegedly more convincing cosmopolitan alternative his ‘social justice cosmopolitanism’. I shall argue that this alternative fails for pretty much the same reasons that ‘ethical cosmopolitanism’ fails. In addition, I will show that Pogge's definition of cosmopolitanism is misleading, since it actually applies to ethical cosmopolitanism and not to social justice cosmopolitanism. This means that cosmopolitanism as defined by Pogge is wrong in the light of his own arguments and that Pogge is not even a cosmopolitan in the sense of his own definition. I will further show that he is also not a cosmopolitan if cosmopolitanism is defined as a philosophical position involving the claim that state borders have no fundamental moral significance.     

Conceptualizing ‘social capital’ for health promotion in small local communities: a micro‐qualitative study

This paper reports on a micro‐qualitative case study of peoples' experiences of local community life in a south‐east English town. This material is used as the basis for a critical discussion of the suitability of Putnam's notion of social capital as a conceptual tool for the design and evaluation of ‘community strengthening’ policies and interventions. The study was motivated by a concern that too much debate about social capital has been conducted by academics and policy‐makers in a top‐down manner, with inadequate attention to the realities of life in the local communities that they refer to. Three‐hour semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 37 residents in two less affluent wards in our town of interest. Informants—half men and half women, and spread across the 15–75 age group—were encouraged to talk about their personal experiences of local community life. Interview findings are presented within the ‘norm’ categories of trust, neighbourliness and reciprocal help and support, and the ‘network’ categories of participation in informal networks, voluntary groupings and community activist groupings. Our case study points to a number of ways in which Putnam's concept needs to be refined if it is to inform ‘community strengthening’ policies and interventions in England. Far more notice needs to be taken of the role played by informal networks of friends and neighbours in the construction of local community life. Attention also needs to be given to the complex and shifting geographical spread of peoples' significant social networks. Putnam's conceptualization of cohesive local communities and his unitary notions of trust and local identity may also be unduly essentialist. In our particular communities of interest, they failed to capture the fluidity of local community norms and networks in a rapidly changing society. They also failed to do justice to the extent to which social distinctions—such as age, gender, ethnicity and housing tenure—shape and constrain the way in which people create, sustain and access social capital. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Winnicott's invitation to ‘further games of Jung‐analysis’

Winnicott signs off his celebrated review of Jung's (1963) autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections with the warning that translation of ‘erreichten’ as ‘attained’ (implying assimilation) rather than as ‘reached to’, could ‘queer the pitch for further games of Jung‐analysis’. This subtly underscores his view that Jung—who he described earlier as ‘mentally split’ and lacking ‘a self with which to know’—remained essentially dissociated. However, Winnicott, whilst immersed in this work on Jung, wrote a letter to Michael Fordham describing himself as suffering ‘a lifelong malady’ of ‘dissociation’. But this he now reported repaired through a ‘splitting headache’ dream of destruction, dreamt ‘for Jung, and for some of my patients, as well as for myself’ (Winnicott 1989, p. 228). Winnicott's recurrent concern during his last decade was with ‘reaching to’—that quintessential Winnicottian term—some reparative experience that could address such difficulties in constellating a ‘unit self’. This is correlated with his engagement with Jung and tracked through his contemporaneous clinical work, particularly ‘Fear of Breakdown’ (1963). Themes first introduced by Sedgwick (2008) and developed by the author's earlier ‘Winnicott on Jung; destruction, creativity and the unrepressed unconscious’ (2011) are given further consideration.     

THE ‘EXTENDEDNESS’ OF SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE

In recent years, the idea has been gaining ground that our traditional conceptions of knowledge and cognition are unduly limiting, in that they privilege what goes on inside the ‘skin and skull’ (Clark 1997: 82) of an individual reasoner. Instead, it has been argued, knowledge and cognition need to be understood as embodied (involving both mind and body), situated (being dependent on the complex interplay between the individual and its environment), and extended (that is, continuous with, rather than separate from, the world ‘outside’). Whether these various interrelations and dependencies are ‘merely’ causal, or are in a more fundamental sense constitutive of knowledge and cognition, is as much a matter of controversy as the degree to which they pose a challenge to ‘traditional’ conceptions of cognition, knowledge and the mind. In this paper we argue that when the idea of ‘extendedness’ is applied to a core concept in epistemology and the philosophy of science—namely, scientific evidence—things appear to be on a much surer footing. The evidential status of data gathered through extended processes—including its utility as justification or warrant—do not seem to be weakened by virtue of being extended, but instead are often strengthened because of it. Indeed, it is often precisely by virtue of this extendedness that scientific evidence grounds knowledge claims, which individuals may subsequently ascribe to themselves. The functional equivalence between machine‐based gathering, filtering, and processing of data and human interpretation and assessment is the crucial factor in deciding whether evidence has been gathered, rather than the distinction between intra‐ and extracranial processes or individual and social processes (or combinations thereof). To prioritize biological processes here, and to assert the superiority of human cognitive capacities seems both arbitrary and unwarranted with respect to gathering evidence, and ultimately would lead to an unattractive skepticism about many of the methods used in science to gather evidence. In other words, conceiving of scientific evidence as ‘impersonal’ (or at least not necessarily personal) not only better captures the character of evidence‐gathering in practice, but also makes sense of a large amount of evidence‐gathering that ‘personal’ accounts fail to either acknowledge or accurately describe. Whilst we suggest it is likely that all internally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are merely contingently internal processes, a significant number of externally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are necessarily externally‐distributed. Some evidence can only be gathered by extended epistemic agents.     

An investigation into alleged ‘hauntings’

In cases of alleged hauntings, a large number of seemingly trustworthy witnesses consistently report experiencing unusual phenomena (e.g. apparitions, sudden changes in temperature, a strong sense of presence) in certain locations. The two studies reported here explored the psychological mechanisms that underlie this apparent evidence of ‘ghostly’ activity. The experiments took place at two locations that have a considerable reputation for being haunted—Hampton Court Palace (Surrey, England) and the South Bridge Vaults (Edinburgh, Scotland). Both studies involved participants walking around these locations and reporting where they experienced unusual phenomena. Results revealed significantly more reports of unusual experiences in areas that had a reputation for being haunted. This effect was not related to participants' prior knowledge about the reputation of these areas. However, the location of participants' experiences correlated significantly with various environmental factors, including, for example, the variance of local magnetic fields and lighting levels. These findings strongly suggest that alleged hauntings may not necessarily represent evidence for ‘ghostly’ activity, but could be, at least in part, the result of people responding to ‘normal’ factors in their surroundings.     

‘Pre‐discursive’ racism

This paper makes the case that discourse analytic approaches in social psychology are not adequate to the task of apprehending racism in its bodily, affective and pre‐symbolic dimensions. We are hence faced with a dilemma: if discursive psychology is inadequate when it comes to theorizing ‘pre‐discursive’ forms of racism, then any attempts to develop an anti‐racist strategy from such a basis will presumably exhibit the same limitations. Suggesting a rapprochement of discursive and psychoanalytic modes of analysis, I argue that Kristeva's theory of abjection provides a means of understanding racism as both historically/socially constructed and as existing at powerfully embodied, visceral and subliminal dimensions of subjectivity. Kristeva's theory of abjection provides us with an account of a ‘pre‐discursive’ (that is, a bodily, affective, pre‐symbolic) racism, a form of racism that ‘comes before words’, and that is routed through the logics of the body and its anxieties of distinction, separation and survival. This theory enables us, moreover, to join together the expulsive reactions of a racism of the body to both the personal racism of the ego and the broader discursive racisms of the prevailing social order. Moreover, it directs our attention to the fact that discourses of racism are always locked into a relationship with ‘pre‐discursive’ processes which condition and augment every discursive action, which escape the codifications of discourse and which drive the urgency of its attempts at containment. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A puzzling misinterpretation of the Asch ‘conformity’ study

In this article, we examine the interpretations by social psychologists of Asch's widely cited study of independence and conformity. Though it has become known as the ‘Asch Conformity Study’, Asch equally, if not more, intended and interpreted it as demonstrating the powers of independence. The evidence for this analysis consists of 99 accounts in social psychology textbooks published between 1953, following the appearance of his study, and 1984. We asked whether these accounts were accurate, or whether, as we suspected, they minimized the role of independence and exaggerated that of conformity. We found that authors have often distorted Asch's findings, and that this trend has increased substantially with time: they have increasingly accentuated the role of conformity and underestimated that of independence. We suggest several reasons for this distortion. For one, there has been insufficient care in reading the findings and drawing conclusions. Second, authors have generally limited themselves to reports of quantitative results. Although these were strong and beyond question, authors have usually neglected the intimately connected qualitative findings, which would have discouraged the misinterpretations. Third, the study of Asch was an integral part of his perspective on social psychology, which authors again ignored, thus encouraging a limited and out-of-context view of his study. We conclude with a thematic presentation of Asch's general theoretical framework, showing how it bears on independence and conformity.     

‘The Extremely Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency

Abstract: In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Despite this revival, however, certain aspects of Murdoch's views remain poorly understood, including her account of a concept that she famously described as ‘central’ to moral philosophy—i.e., love. In this paper, I argue that the concept of love is essential to any adequate understanding of Murdoch's work but that recent attempts by Kieran Setiya and David Velleman to assimilate Murdoch's account of love to neo‐Aristotelian or neo‐Kantian theories of moral agency are misconceived. We will not understand what Murdoch is trying to do unless we understand her position as a radical alternative to such theories. Here, I present a reading of Murdoch's account of love as a form of Platonic eros directed toward two objects: the Good and the particular individual. It is in navigating the tension between these two objects that we find ourselves facing what Murdoch famously described as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’. When properly understood, Murdoch's account of love opens up conceptual space for an alternative approach to some of the central questions in contemporary moral theory.     

Philosophical dialogues as paths to a more ‘positive psychology’

Although family support programmes have been in place for several decades in Greece very little attention has been paid to evaluating the effectiveness of such endeavours, the techniques that influence their outcomes and the receptiveness to their messages. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of research findings collected during the first qualitative research phase of a community mental health promotion project. The research was conducted in order to delineate programme outcomes and the characteristics that had an impact on the participants' lives. The 3‐month family support programme intended to introduce ‘philosophical dialogues’ as means to developing personal and communal understandings of what makes life worth living. The programme was developed and implemented on Crete under the auspices of a non‐profit community organization appropriately named ‘The Lyceum for Women’. The features of the programme that contributed and enhanced the participants' tendencies to become not passive targets but active partners and stakeholders in the process will be clarified, as will the conceptualization and approach. Of the 45 evaluation protocols that were analysed the following themes were most important for the participants: ‘Group as‐a‐whole process’—the sense of sharing and development understandings in a ‘parea’ (in‐group); ‘relational outcomes’—feeling of belonging, ‘reciprocated kindness’, and giving of self to others; personal and emotional outcomes‐self‐efficacy and empowerment; knowledge outcomes‐learning about positive emotions and enjoying the simple things in life; and group facilitator outcomes‐sharing stories, ‘gives of self to the community’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The ‘conjunction fallacy’ revisited: how intelligent inferences look like reasoning errors

Findings in recent research on the ‘conjunction fallacy’ have been taken as evidence that our minds are not designed to work by the rules of probability. This conclusion springs from the idea that norms should be content‐blind—in the present case, the assumption that sound reasoning requires following the conjunction rule of probability theory. But content‐blind norms overlook some of the intelligent ways in which humans deal with uncertainty, for instance, when drawing semantic and pragmatic inferences. In a series of studies, we first show that people infer nonmathematical meanings of the polysemous term ‘probability’ in the classic Linda conjunction problem. We then demonstrate that one can design contexts in which people infer mathematical meanings of the term and are therefore more likely to conform to the conjunction rule. Finally, we report evidence that the term ‘frequency’ narrows the spectrum of possible interpretations of ‘probability’ down to its mathematical meanings, and that this fact—rather than the presence or absence of ‘extensional cues’—accounts for the low proportion of violations of the conjunction rule when people are asked for frequency judgments. We conclude that a failure to recognize the human capacity for semantic and pragmatic inference can lead rational responses to be misclassified as fallacies. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Positioning a ‘mature’ self in interactive practices: How adolescent males negotiate ‘physical attraction’ in group talk

This article presents a discursive psychological approach in examining the ways that adolescent boys (ages 12–15 years) accomplish a sense of ‘maturity’ by bringing off and managing certain features of ‘heterosexuality’ in group interaction. We focus on and analyse moments when the boys negotiate implicit challenges, make evaluations and offer assessments concerning their physical and sexual attraction to girls' looks. These moments are highly important for negotiating their peer status, for working toward a distinction between ‘childhood’ and ‘adolescence’, and for marking a normatively heterosexual self within the burgeoning institution of adolescence. We will specifically show how ‘heterosexual desire’ is carefully managed in group discussions where the boys participate in normative heterosexuality, but in ways that are nevertheless designed to appear mature and knowing, rather than shallow, naïve or sexist. Three discursive methods of negotiation are identified and described in detail: (1) underscoring the non‐literality of actions by appealing to motives, (2) denials with built‐in concessions, and (3) differentiation through caricature. Couched within the proposed discursive framework, we are reversing the traditional logic of developmental approaches to ‘maturation’. Rather than viewing maturation as the effect of resolving developmental tasks, we argue that ‘maturity’ comes to existence in the way talk is accomplished; that is, as highly flexible and fragile projections of identity that involve a continuous refinement of ‘finely tuned positioning skills'.     

The ‘crisis’ in social psychology,an empirical approach

The preponderance of empirical research in social psychology has ofren been a central issue in the ‘crisis literature’. However, no extensive empirical study has ever been undertaken vis a vis the ‘crisis’ in social psychology. In two studies, factors effecting the perceptions of social psychologists of their discipline were investigated. Although in the first study, among Dutch social psychologists, four hypotheses were tested and confirmed, a large part of the total variance in the perception of the ‘crisis’ remained unexplained. In the second study, both a worldwide sample of active social psychological researchers as well as a sample of authors of the ‘crisis literature’ were surveyed. The stances of both groups differed considerably. Although a majority of the active researchers did not agree that a crisis is at hand in social psychology, a large minority did. The active researchers agreed with many of the criticisms of social psychological research and theorizing. Attitudes on nine central issues, including the functioning of the editor/reviewer publishing system, predicted a large percentage of the total variance in the subjects' attitude toward the existence of a ‘crisis’ in their discipline.