Empowering Ethnically and Racially Diverse Clients Through Prejudice Reduction: Suggestions and Strategies for Counselors

This article focuses on the persistent problems of prejudice in multicultural societies. Various theories of prejudice and other psychological, social, and political factors that contribute to prejudice are discussed. The salient feature of this article is the demonstration of several counseling theories and techniques as applied to case vignettes dealing with prejudice and racism.     

Favourableness of leadership situations studied with information integration theory

In Fiedler's contingency theory, situation favourableness for leader depends upon three situational variables — Group Atmosphere, Task Structure and Position Power. Each variable is dichotomized as high or low to define a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial cube with eight octants, and correlations between leadership style and effectiveness are plotted against the octants. To place these octants along a one-dimensional scale of favourableness, Fiedler assumes that Group Atmosphere is most important and Position Power is least important, and that the situational variables combine according to an adding rule. In four judgmental experiments conducted during different periods of national emergency in India, favourableness of leadership situations was studied with the methods of Anderson's information integration theory. Results indicated (a) that relative importance of situational variables changed across situations, (b) that situational variables were averaged in judgment of situation favourableness, and (c) that spacing of octants on the horizontal axis according to their functional measurement values generated a considerably better bow-shaped curve for correlation between leadership style and effectiveness than was obtained with Fiedler's octant scale. Judgmental experiments seemed to have great potential for providing a more analytic approach to further work on contingency theory and leadership behaviour.     

Private Morality and the State

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - The demarcation of the private and public life leads to role of the state in private life. Many individuals have been the unflinching voice for...     

Physical Attractiveness and Altruism in Two Modified Dictator Games

Several studies find that male individuals are more altruistic toward attractive women, suggesting altruism may serve as a courtship display. Many studies exploring this phenomenon have used vignettes and facial images. We tested the sexual selection hypothesis as an explanation for altruistic behavior, where players played the dictator game with “live” participants. Two studies were conducted (Study 1, n = 212; Study 2, n = 188) where we manipulated stakes and anonymity between participants to explore the relationship between the dictator’s allocations and their perceived attractiveness of the recipient. We found no relationship between attractiveness and altruism. Dictators were consistently fair when allocating stakes, irrespective of the recipients’ attractiveness.     

Deconstructing the Punjab crisis of 1984: Deer,hawks, and siqdārs (‘officials’) as agents of state-sponsored violence

Acts of violence or non-violence are social phenomena that take place at particular historical junctures. They cannot be described as essential features of any community. The Punjab crisis of yesteryear reflected the multidimensionality of violence. On the one hand, involvement of the agents of ‘Third Agency’ in the garb of Sikh militants in random acts of violence and guerrilla warfare was totally unwarranted and counterproductive; on the other, one cannot overlook the sheer egregious and unjust acts of state, killing in the name of order, security, and sheer power. This paper looks at this dark period in recent Sikh history through the lens of Gurū Nānak’s Malār hymn. This is an insightful composition in which the Guru employs the metaphors of deer (hara?), hawks (bāj) and state officials (siqdār) who act as trained agents provocateurs to push a community in a particular direction – especially on the path of self-destruction – to justify state violence.     

Using the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies to Decolonize Counseling Practice: The Important Roles of Theory,Power, and Action

The Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC; Ratts, Singh, Nassar-McMillan, Butler, & McCullough, 2015) ask counselors to “apply knowledge of multicultural and social justice theories” (p. 8). Counselors who implement the MSJCC in this manner have the opportunity to critically examine traditional counseling theories that were developed within a predominantly White and Western framework, that reproduce North American and European colonist ideology if not contextualized, and that neglect Indigenous approaches to healing (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Watkins & Shulman, 2008). In this article, the authors present 4 key multicultural and social justice theories that can support counselors in adopting a decolonizing paradigm and implementing the MSJCC in their practice with clients: relational-cultural theory (Miller, 1976), critical race theory (Bell, 1995), intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), and liberation psychology (Martín-Baró, 1994).