by DK
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Memory studies
BEFORE
1890 William James makes a distinction between short-term (primary) memory and long-term (secondary) memory.
1932 Frederic Bartlett’s studies show that recollective memory is not simply a matter of retrieval; it is an active reconstruction of past events.
AFTER
1982 US psychologist Ulric Neisser argues that flashbulb memories do not use a special mechanism and can be inaccurate due to multiple “rehearsals” after the event.
1987 In Autobiographical Memory, American psychologist David Rubin suggests that we remember landmark events that define us as people.
In the late 1970s, Harvard University professor Roger Brown co-wrote a paper called Flashbulb Memories that became the classic study on a memory phenomenon. Brown and his colleague, James Kulik, coined this term to refer to a special kind of autobiographical memory in which people give a highly detailed, vivid account of the exact moment that they learned about an event with a high shock value.
The paper argues that culturally and personally significant events, such as the shooting of J.F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, trigger the operation of a special biological memory mechanism (“now print”) that creates a permanent record of the event and the circumstances in which we first become aware of it. Almost like a flash photograph, we can picture where we were, who we were with, and what we were doing when we heard the shocking news—such as the destruction of the twin towers on 9/11. Brown and Kulik claim these memories are vivid, accurate, and enduring. However, researchers such as Ulric Neisser have contested the special mechanism theory, suggesting that the memories’ durability stems from the fact that they are thought about (or rehearsed) repeatedly after the event, by the individual and the wider world, and so are continually reinforced within memory.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 was shocking and culturally significant. Brown claims these kinds of events cause the formation of “flashbulb” memories.
See also: William James • Jerome Bruner • Endel Tulving • Frederic Bartlett • Ulric Neisser
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Social constructivism
BEFORE
1807 German philosopher Georg Hegel says that our ideas and values are fashioned by the zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, which constantly changes through the reconciliation of opposing views.
1927 German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” reveals that the observer affects the observed.
1973 American psychologist Kenneth Gergen writes Social Psychology as History, which marks the emergence of social constructivism.
AFTER
1978 In his zone of proximal development theory, Lev Vygotsky puts forward the idea that learning is fundamentally a socially mediated activity.
In the late 1960s, some social psychologists, known as the social constructivists, argued that the voice of ordinary people was being lost from psychological research. The concern was that individuals were wrongly being portrayed as merely perceiving their social worlds rather than actually constructing them. In order to counteract these worrying trends, social psychologist Serge Moscovici conducted a piece of research that became a classic study of the way people absorb ideas and understand their world.
In his study, Psychoanalysis: its image and its public, published in France in 1961, Moscovici explored the belief that all thought and understanding is based on the workings of “social representations.” These are the many concepts, statements, and explanations that are created in the course of everyday interactions and communications between people. They allow us to orientate ourselves in our social and material worlds and provide us with the means to communicate within a community. They are, in effect, a collective “common sense”—a shared version of reality—that is built through the mass media, science, religion, and interaction between social groups.
To test his theory, Moscovici looked at how the concepts of psychoanalytic theory had been absorbed within France since World War II. He studied mass-market publications and conducted interviews, searching for evidence of the type of information that had been floating around the collective consciousness. He discovered that psychoanalytic theory had trickled down both in the form of “high culture” and as popular common sense: people thought about and discussed complex psychoanalytic concepts in a way that seemed quite normal, but on the whole they were using simplified versions.
Molding common sense
The translation of difficult concepts into accessible and more easily transmissible language is not problematic, Moscovici contends, because “the goal is not to advance knowledge, but to be in the know;” to be an active participant in the collective circuit. The process allows the unfamiliar to become familiar, and paves the way for science to become common sense. In this way, social representations provide a framework for groups of people to make sense of the world. They also affect how people treat each other within societies. Whenever there is debate over a controversial social issue—such as whether it should be legal for homosexuals to adopt children—the impact and importance of social representations becomes apparent.
Moscovici insists that social representations are genuine forms of knowledge in their own right, not diluted versions of higher-level information. In fact, he makes it clear that these everyday thoughts (rather than the more abstract, scientific versions) are significant, because “shared representations are there to set up and build a common ‘reality’, a common sense which becomes ‘normal’.”
SERGE MOSCOVICI
Born Srul Hersh Moskovitch to a Jewish family in Braila, Romania, Serge Moscovici attended school in Bucharest, but was expelled due to anti-Semitic laws. After surviving the violent pogrom of 1941, in which hundreds of Jewish people were tortured and murdered, he and his father moved constantly around the country. He learned French during World War II, and co-founded an art journal, Da, which was banned due to censorship laws. In 1947, he left Romania and traveled via “displaced persons” camps until he reached France a year later. In 1949, he gained a degree in psychology, then a PhD under the supervision of Daniel Lagache, with the support of a refugee grant. He co-founded the European Laboratory of Social Psychology in 1965, and as a professor of psychology has taught in prestigious universities across the US and Europe.
Key works
1961 Psychoanalysis
1976 Social Influence and Social Change
1981 The Age of the Crowd
See also: Friedrich Herbart • Kurt Lewin • Solomon Asch • Lev Vygotsky
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Choice Theory
BEFORE
c.350 BCE Greek philosopher Aristotle says we are driven by three things: sensual appetite, anger, and boulesis, the rational desire for what is beneficial.
1943 Clark L. Hull says that all human behavior comes from four primary drives: hunger, thirst, sex, and the avoidance of pain.
1973 US scientist William T. Powers develops perceptual control theory (PCT), which suggests that our behavior is how we control our perceptions in order to keep them close to internally fixed reference levels.
AFTER
2000 US psychiatrist Peter Breggin publishes Reclaiming our Children, criticizing the use of psychiatric drugs as “cures” for troubled children.
William Glasser openly rejected conventional psychiatry and the use of medication, claiming that most of the mental and psychological problems that people experience are actually on a spectrum of healthy human experience, and can be
improved through changes in behavior. His ideas focus on achieving greater happiness and fulfilment through personal choice, responsibility, and transformation.
In 1965, he developed Reality Therapy, a cognitive-behavioral, problem-solving approach to treatment that encourages clients to seek what they really want in the present moment, and to assess whether or not the behaviors that they have chosen are bringing them closer to or further away from achieving their goals.
"Improving our relationships is improving our mental health."
William Glasser
Choice Theory
Over decades of practicing Reality Therapy, Glasser realized that his entire approach was based on the idea of people actively identifying what they want to do in order to be fulfilled, and this led him to develop Choice Theory. This theory holds that we are all motivated to act in ways that increase pleasure and decrease pain—we want to think and behave in ways that will make us feel better. All pleasure and pain, he says, derives from our efforts to satisfy five genetically encoded needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun. Any behavior that satisfies one of these is pleasurable, and any that fails to do so is a source of pain, and ultimately, he explains, it is only through human relationships that we can satisfy these needs. When we are struggling to survive, the help of another makes us feel good; in order to feel love and belonging, we need at least one good relationship; to sense even the least of our power, we need someone to listen to what we say; to feel free, we must feel free from the control of others; and while it is possible to have fun on our own, it is much easier with other people. For these reasons, he argues, “we are, by nature, social beings.”
Glasser emphasizes that lasting psychological problems are usually caused by problems in our personal relationships (rather than signifying a biochemical abnormality in the brain), and distress can be remedied through repairing these relationships without recourse to psychiatric drugs. He points toward the basic human need for power, which we try to satisfy by attempting to control other people. In fact, the only thing that we can control is the way we behave and think; we cannot control others. Trying to, he says, shows a lack of respect for others and is the cause of unhappiness. Choice Theory is a self-control psychology designed to counteract this tendency and to help us find happiness within our relationships.
Interpersonal strife with those close to us leads to rifts and resentments that produce symptoms of mental illness; these problems are, in fact, the logical consequences of troubled relationships.
WILLIAM GLASSER
William Glasser was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1925. Originally trained as a chemical engineer, he attended medical school in Cleveland and trained in psychiatry in Los Angeles. He began practicing in 1957. Through the writings on perceptual control theory (PCT) by William T. Powers, Glasser was introduced to control theory systems. In 1967, Glasser founded the Institute for Reality Therapy in California (later renamed the William Glasser Institute), which trains students in Choice Theory. His approach is taught in more than 28 countries, and he has written on mental illness, counseling, and how to improve schools. He is the recipient of many awards, including the “A Legend in Counseling Award” and the Master Therapist designation by the American Psychiatric Association.
Key works
1965 Reality Therapy
1969 Schools Without Failure
1998 Choice Theory
2003 Warning: Psychiatry Can be Hazardous to your Mental Health
See also: Emil Kraepelin • Sigmund Freud • David Rosenhan • Clark L. Hull
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Attribution theory
BEFORE
1958 Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider investigates the attribution process, or how people judge the factors that influence a situation.
1965 American psychologists Edward E. Jones and Keith Davis argue that the goal of attribution is to discover how behavior and intention reveal a person’s basic nature.
AFTER
1971 US sociologist William J. Ryan coins the phrase' “victim blaming,” exposing how it is used to justify racism and social injustice.
1975 American psychologists Zick Rubin and Letitia Peplau find that firm believers in a “Just World” tend to be more authoritarian, more religious, and more admiring of existing social and political institutions.
People are most comfortable when they have a sense of control over their lives. We need to believe that we live in a world where the good are rewarded and the bad are punished, and this contributes significantly to our sense that it is possible to predict, guide, and ultimately control events. This “Just-World hypothesis” is a tendency to believe that “people get what they deserve.” But, according to Melvin Lerner, this is a dangerous misconception that places undue importance on the supposed character traits of the people involved rather than on the actual facts of a situation. If someone is suffering or being punished, we find it easier to believe that that person must have done something to deserve such treatment. The Just-World theory becomes a comforting rationalization of seemingly inexplicable events, and stops the world from appearing chaotic or random. It also allows people to believe that as long as they are “good,” only “good” things will happen to them, generating a false sense of safety and control.
In his book, The Belief in a Just World, Lerner argued that we ask children to “be good” and promise them that in return for effectively putting their natural impulses and desires to one side, they will be rewarded in the future. For this contract to be fulfilled, we must live in a just world; and so children grow into adults with this belief firmly in place.
"People need to believe they live in a Just World."
Melvin Lerner
Victim-blaming
In a 1965 study, Lerner found that students who were told that a fellow student had won the lottery rationalized this event by believing that the winner must have worked harder than his peers. It seems that belief in a Just World allows people to adjust the facts of a situation. This can be especially damaging when applied to the way we might view victims of crime or abuse. In rape cases, for example, it is often suggested that the female victim was “asking for it” because she wore a short skirt or was flirtatious, effectively absolving the perpetrator of responsibility and placing it in the hands of the victim. By blaming the victim, outsiders also protect their own sense of safety.
Lerner did emphasize, however, that belief in a Just World does not always lead to victim-blaming. The seeming innocence, attractiveness, status, and degree of similarity of the victim to those assessing them can affect whether or not people are held responsible for their misfortune.
Lerner’s hypothesis became the foundation of important research into social justice. It also sparked debate over the effects of a Just-World approach to life. Does it help people stand up to difficulties? It may instead stimulate the feeling that any wrongdoing, however minor or unintentional, leads to disaster—a belief that Australian psychologist Dorothy Rowe has suggested can lead to an increased susceptibility to depression.
Homelessness, like many other social problems, is much easier to tolerate, or be indifferent to, if you believe that people are ultimately responsible for their own misfortunes.
MELVIN LERNER
A pioneer of the psychological study of justice, Melvin Lerner studied social psychology at New York University, receiving his doctorate in 1957. He then moved to Stanford University, California, where he studied for his post-doctorate in clinical psychology.
From 1970 to 1994, Lerner taught social psychology at the
University of Waterloo in Canada. He has also lectured at a number of universities in the US and Europe, including the University of California, Washington University, and the universities of Utrecht and Leiden in the Netherlands.
Lerner was editor of the journal Social Justice Research, and in 2008 was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Society for Justice Research. He is a visiting scholar at Florida Atlantic University.
Key works
1980 The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion
1981 The Justice Motive in Social Behavior: Adapting to Times of Scarcity and Change
1996 Current Concerns about Social Justice
See also: Dorothy Rowe • Elizabeth Loftus
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Social psychology
APPROACH
Attitude change
BEFORE
1956 Social psychologist Leon Festinger states his theory of cognitive dissonance, which posits that having inconsistent beliefs causes uncomfortable psychological tension.
1968 The My Lai Massacre of civilians in Vietnam takes place, possibly because US soldiers dehumanized victims to reduce cognitive dissonance.
