Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? The interweaving of values and science

The role of values in the scientific process is widely debated. But evidence and values cannot be neatly separated. Instead, values infuse the entire scientific process, starting with the choice of research questions. Research avenues are selected based on prior beliefs about the workings of the world. In fact, informally assigned prior probabilities and normalizing constants play an essential role in distinguishing causes from correlations and ignoring irrelevant associations that would otherwise be suggested by raw data. But since these initial probabilities often have a heterogeneous pedigree – often not all that went into their formation is known or knowable – it becomes difficult to cleanly separate evidence from values. At the same time, this reality does not undermine science’s unique status in generating knowledge. This is because it is not the evidence per se generated by science, but rather the method by which science generates it, that justifies science’s privileged role.     

Social Context and the Dynamics of Cooperative Choice

Recent work using decontextualized economic games suggests that cooperation is a dynamic decision‐making process: Automatic responses typically support cooperation on average, while deliberation leads to increased selfishness. Here, we performed two studies examining how these temporal effects generalize to games with richer social context cues. Study 1 found that time pressure increased cooperation to a similar extent in games played with in‐group members and out‐group members. Study 2 found that time pressure increased cooperation to a similar extent in games described as competitions and games described as collaborations. These results show that previous positive effects of time pressure on cooperation are not unique to neutrally framed games devoid of social context and are not driven by implicit assumptions of shared group membership or cooperative norms. In doing so, our findings provide further insight into the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision making. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Patterns of psychotherapy development: A mixed-method analysis using assimilation indices

Understanding how assimilation develops is essential in promoting personal change. By attending to signs or indices of assimilation in the speech of clients, therapists can use this process to assess how the therapy is developing and to tailor intervention. The system of assimilation indices was developed to use assimilation to understand the process of change. This system signals five sub-processes of assimilation: external distress, pain, noticing, decentring, and action. This study consisted of a longitudinal mixed-method analysis, following a multiple cases embedded design. The system of assimilation indices was applied to the recordings of nine psychotherapies and contrasted with both the outcome of the therapy and the perspectives of the therapists and clients about their therapy process. The results show that the system of indices is useful in understanding multiple pathways for assimilation. The system of indices is seen as a useful tool for understanding assimilation and as having clinical value in anticipating challenges to the success of the therapy. This study also shows how the indices are sensitive to the nuances in the change process observed in clinical settings.     

The Community Story,Relationality and Process: Bridging Tools for Researching Local Knowledge in a Peri‐urban Township

In intervening in social challenges impacting local communities, Western forms of dispute/conflict resolution have been critiqued for imparting norms, values and practices that marginalise worldviews of indigenous people. From a decolonizing stance, indigenous scholars have emphasised the need for recovery of ‘lost’ values, beliefs and practices to advance indigenous knowledge. We highlight some of the conceptual challenges associated with applying ‘indigenous knowledge’ and culture‐specific ‘indigenous methodologies’ to a marginalised peri‐urban, ethnically plural township community situated on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. In embracing the mutuality of indigenous and Western knowledge forms, we explore three elements: the community story, relationality and process in relation to initial engagements with our study community. We attempt to transcend the dualism between ‘Western’ epistemologies and ‘indigenous knowledge’ through these ‘bridging concepts’. What is offered is not a formula or model but an orientation that aims to foster mutual learning through collaborative partnerships within and between communities and researchers with a view to inspiring possibilities for creative and meaningful solutions for violence prevention and dispute/conflict resolution. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When symptom is symbol: some comments on Rosemary Gordon's, ‘Masochism: the shadow side of the archetypal need to venerate and worship’

This paper is a commentary on Rosemary Gordon's paper, ‘Masochism: the shadow side of the archetypal need to venerate and worship’, with a suggestion for an alternative interpretation of masochism as a part of a sado‐masochistic couple. Gordon postulates an archetypal need to venerate and worship that can be hidden in the shadow and distorted in such practices as sexual masochism. Her paper also offers several avenues of exploration for further studies in connection with the phenomenon of masochism, including sexual perversion (‘paraphilia’), chronic psychological victimhood, PTSD and traumatology, religious extremist behaviour such as self‐flagellation, transformation in the individuation process and numinous experience. An extension of her hypothesis to include religious problems of modernity is suggested.     

Group process in Jungian analytic training and institute life

Group process experience for analytic candidates is a neglected dimension of training, and receives little attention in the analytic literature. Jung observed group dynamics, but he never studied them closely, attending instead to the psychology of the individual. Unconscious currents in small groups have been studied by others, most notably by Wilfred Bion, and there are similarities between his theories of the group unconscious and Jung's theories of complexes. Experiential and didactic seminars in group process were added to the analytic curriculum at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in the early 1990s, leading to changes in the group dynamic of trainees and analysts alike. A discussion of the theories of Bion and Jung are followed by a report on our experiences of facilitating group process for analytic candidates. We give quotes from candidates and analyst members to illustrate the group process and its effects. The need for further study to develop a uniquely Jungian perspective on the unconscious structure and dynamics of the group is suggested.     

Decision making and confidence given uncertain advice

We study human decision making in a simple forced-choice task that manipulates the frequency and accuracy of available information. Empirically, we find that people make decisions consistent with the advice provided, but that their subjective confidence in their decisions shows 2 interesting properties. First, people's confidence does not depend solely on the accuracy of the advice. Rather, confidence seems to be influenced by both the frequency and accuracy of the advice. Second, people are less confident in their guessed decisions when they have to make relatively more of them. Theoretically, we develop and evaluate a type of sequential sampling process model—known as a self-regulating accumulator—that accounts for both decision making and confidence. The model captures the regularities in people's behavior with interpretable parameter values, and we show its ability to fit the data is not due to excessive model complexity. Using the model, we draw conclusions about some properties of human reasoning under uncertainty.