theory, methodology, and invitation to participate

[Alice Maher]

I just wrote this to the APsaA list and I thought I'd pass it on to this group:

As many of you know, I argue passionately for our field to develop new theories and new techniques that will allow us to safely enter the as-yet-uncharted territory of sociopolitical dynamics. I don't believe we will be able to resolve our conflicts and be useful to society until we agree to venture there. I believe that we need to transition from a theory of pathology to a theory of difference.

Some of you may have seen the YouTube videos where I interviewed the MAGA conservative and a group of analysts discussed it in a metadialogue, and the one where I entered an arena after two colleagues got stuck around their different concepts of God.

I'm developing a new project. I'd like to invite discussion and some new participants.

Six people will divide into three dyads. Both will be able to see out of their Right and Left political eyes, but one side will be dominant and leading. Three of them will primarily support the Israelis and three will primarily support the Palestinians, with overlap and empathy for both. The dyads will spend some period, likely a few months, talking, emailing, zooming, etc, using whatever modes of communication and whatever rhythms work best for them.

At that point, all of us will meet together in a recorded Zoom metadialogue. Participants will talk about insights and impasses. What factors interfered with their ability to respond with honesty, integrity, empathy, and creativity, and imagine paths forward together? If several individuals or dyads get stuck in similar places, we can search for theoretical and methodological models to explain the overarching problem and find workarounds that can be generalized and later studied.

It doesn't have to be the Middle East situation. There are many other sociopolitical problems that would be fascinating to study in arenas like this. Race? Religion? Sex/Gender? Liberal/Conservative? Abortion? Theoretical and political conflicts within our field?

I'm interested in your response to my idea. Please share your thoughts. If you or anyone you know might be interested in participating, please contact me. Lay people would be most welcome.

Warmest regards for the holidays and the New Year.

Alice

[Hans Bakker]

The core idea is a good one.

But it has to be set up properly.

The idea that one group will primarily support the Israelis is a bit weird.

That assumes that the issue is something that all citizens of Israel agree on.

Similarly, the idea of a unified group called the Palestinians is misleading. 

I myself would like to have one group try to defend Theodor Herzl's ideas concerning Zionism and then another compare the original ideas to how they evolved after the Yom Kippur War, etc. (Remember, Herzl wrote BEFORE WWI & wanted to buy the land owned by rich landowners who were often affiliated with the Ottoman Empire.) Herzl was worried that Jews would NEVER be accepted the way Jews are now accepted in the US. (There are still elements of anti-Semitism, but Jews are "white" and not specifically "Semitic" in the US today.)

Another group could try to defend the Bund notion that it was not a good idea to have ALL Jews come to Israel in order to escape from countries which might inevitably expel them in the long run. 

As to Hamas, we can distinguish the military wing from the other aspects of Hamas. (We do that all the time when we discuss the Vietnam War and the role of the military. The actions of the POTUS and the military were not necessarily based on the beliefs of 98% of all US citizens.) 

We can also have a representative of the women and children of Palestine. Some 20,000 Palestinians have died. I doubt if 1,000 of those people were directly connected to Hamas. 

In other words, do not set up the sides in reified binaries. 

Cheers,  Hans

J. I. Bakker

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[Alice Maher]

Hi Hans,

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. I truly appreciate it. 

Would you be interested in finding a dialogue partner and giving it a try? 

My hypothesis is that it won’t matter if we begin with academics with a deep understanding of history and human nature or kids on TikTok who didn’t finish college. (I’ve already recruited some of those.) My hypothesis is that the forces of human nature will emerge in similar ways, ways that can be examined analytically and scientifically. This will lead to the emergence of new theory and techniques for the analysis of simple human differences. 

Alice

On Dec 24, 2023, at 12:50 AM, Hans Bakker <hba...@uoguelph.ca> wrote:



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[Brian D'Agostino]

I agree with Hans that it is simplistic and unproductive to construe this as a matter of "Israelis" vs. "Palestinians."  If you want your participants to think outside such boxes, then don't frame the problem in terms of such boxes in the first place.  The legitimate needs of Israelis and Palestinians must be sharply distinguished from the fascist and genocidal leaders who purport to speak for each side, notably the Netanyahu government on the one side and on the other side the Palestinian factions (including most of Hamas) who think Israel can and should be eliminated.  

Note also that if public opinion and mass psychology were really in the driver seat, which is not the case in this conflict or most any other in politics, we would have had peace a long time ago.  Unfortunately, defense contractors, military bureaucracies, and big geopolitical players (first the US vs. the USSR, now the US vs. Iran) empower the fascist and genocidal elements on both sides, locking Israel/Palestine and the entire region into perpetual war.  Alice, I don't think you have ever accepted this analysis of what perpetuates war, and accordingly, this results in confusion about what your dialogue projects can hope to accomplish.  I think your work has some value for clarifying the psychology underlying political and other contested belief systems.  But as Hans said, it matters how you conceptualize the belief systems you are trying to understand. 

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[Alice Maher]

Brian,

I don’t see it as my job to “conceptualize the belief system I’m trying to understand.” I’m not trying to conceptualize and understand belief systems. I’m trying to allow the dynamics that lay beneath human differences to rise to the surface in a safe, controlled environment so we can eventually (quoting the subtitle of my book) “Slow Down or Abort Humankind’s Leap to War.” Left/right differences are merely ways to begin. 

On Dec 24, 2023, at 2:49 AM, Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Brian D'Agostino]

Good luck with this work, Alice.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/B35162D2-A566-4BB8-9688-44F5F231C1BB%40gmail.com.

[Esa Palosaari]

Hi,

I also wish good luck to Alice with the work!

I wonder if you know about deliberative democracy experiments with small group discussions (+)? It sounds like there is some similarity to what you are doing. For example, people I have worked with have compared face-to-face small group political discussions with online discussions (Grönlund et al. 2009), and the effects of the deliberative discussions on empathy (Grönlund et al. 2017) and other virtues (Grönlund et al. 2010). 

Maybe you might also be interested in an example of one of the more informed and constructive discussions I've seen about the Israel and Gaza, at Harvard, with researchers from both Palestinian and Israeli side, although everybody seems to be left-leaning liberals or socialists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wf68H9zr_k

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Esa

References

(+) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy

Grönlund, K., Strandberg and, K., & Himmelroos, S. (2009). The challenge of deliberative democracy online – A comparison of face-to-face and virtual experiments in citizen deliberation. Information Polity, 14(3), 187–201. https://doi.org/10.3233/IP-2009-0182 

Grönlund, K., Setälä, M., & Herne, K. (2010). Deliberation and civic virtue: Lessons from a citizen deliberation experiment. European Political Science Review, 2(1), 95–117. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773909990245

Grönlund, K., Herne, K., & Setälä, M. (2017). Empathy in a Citizen Deliberation Experiment. Scandinavian Political Studies, 40(4), 457–480. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9477.12103

P.S. Brian, would you happen to have data about public opinion from Gaza and the West Bank which would support your views? After working with Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon, I now tend believe the polling results which find that the majority of Palestinians support the destruction of Israel from the river to the sea, and that they specifically support Hamas and the violence against Israelis whether with knives, cars, rocks, or rockets made out of water pipes (https://pcpsr.org/en/node/961). I also believe the polls showing that the support is even higher in the West Bank, and that Hamas would easily win elections if the Palestinian Authority would allow them, like Islamists tend to win in pretty much all Muslim majority countries nowadays. 

If there are some people here interested in and knowledgeable of the psychological underpinnings of such support, I would like to know more about such research. One place I came across the connection between the support for Islamism and deMause's growth panic concept was at the University of Copenhagen's Ebrahim Afsah's (*) course Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World where he recommended reading Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom if you wanted to understand the dislike of modernity (and specifically modern constitutions) in the Muslim world. The course is free on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/muslim-world

(*) https://jura.ku.dk/english/staff/research/?pure=en%2Fpersons%2Febrahim-afsah(406094f9-2f00-4953-acf3-67a01b5d6ecd).html

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[Brian D'Agostino]

Hi, Esa,

Regarding your question about public opinion in Gaza, there is an article forthcoming in Disarmament Times by Barbara Taft that says: " ... a recent Zogby poll indicated that the popularity of Hamas was waning.  According to Jim Zogby, director of the Arab-American Institute, who works with his brother John conducting surveys around the world (as Zogby Associates), "In our last poll in Gaza (2021) only 11% identified as Hamas supporters--as opposed to 32% who said they were with Fatah.  Back in 2006, the Fatah margin over Hamas in Gaza was 32% to 29%."  In other words, Hamas had been losing supporters before its foray into Israel and its terrorist attack.  It is interesting to note that current (unofficial) surveys of Gazans indicate that Hamas now enjoys greater popularity as a result of Israel's disproportional use of force during the current campaign.   It is being said that Benjamin Netanyahu is performing the role of recruiter for Hamas.  With the current chaotic situation, it is impossible to conduct accurate polling, but it is estimated that perhaps 50% or more of Gazans currently support Hamas, and that it is largely due to the fact that Hamas is viewed as attempting to protect Gaza's population." 

I don't know lot about Palestinian public opinion, but in the case of US public opinion, a 1992 study of massive available data concluded that the US public as a whole generally forms rational and enlightened opinions about public affairs when given accurate information, but is vulnerable to disinformation in the mass media; see Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences.

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[Esa Palosaari]

Thanks Brian!

Unfortunately I was not able to find that Zogby poll.

The Harvard panel I linked to before included the pollster Dr. Khalil Shikaki of Palestinian Center of Policy and Survey Research. Its polling in 2021 -- the year of the Zogby poll -- suggested that Hamas would have won in Gaza with 47% of the votes compared to 29% for Fatah (https://pcpsr.org/en/node/866), but Fatah would have fared better than Hamas in the West Bank at that moment. In 2021, 39% supported the two-state solution and 50% supported armed uprising. 

In the 2022 September poll, Hamas got 44% support in Gaza, whereas 29% would have voted for Fatah (https://pcpsr.org/en/node/920). The expressed support for a two-state solution was 37%, and for armed uprising it was 48%.

In the 2023 September poll, just before the latest war, 44% of the polled people in Gaza would have voted for Hamas and 32% would have voted for Fatah (https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/955). 63% of all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank supported the abandonment of the Oslo Accords. 32% supported the two-state solution. 53%-58% supported violence as a method for solving the conflict.

Esa

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[drwa...@aol.com]

Dear Alice,

 

Check out DepolarizingGPT.org   This is from the Institute for Cultural Evolution, a group that I support. Ask it about any issue and it will give you a progressive, conservative, and depolarizing viewpoint. You don't have to register to try it out, but it is safe and simple to register.

 

Those interested in conflict resolution should find this helpful. 

 

Happy Holidays,

Bill

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cliospsyche/B35162D2-A566-4BB8-9688-44F5F231C1BB%40gmail.com

.

[Brian D'Agostino]

Thanks, Esa.  I'll pass your information on to Barbara Taft and see what she says.  Note one limitation of looking at poll data only, however.  As Page and Shapiro showed in the case of fifty years of US public opinion data, the mass public is vulnerable to disinformation and propaganda, so we cannot equate poll results with innate attitudes of the mass public.  We also need to examine, as Page and Shapiro did, the mass media content to which the polling subjects were exposed before their opinions were sampled.

In addition, Lloyd deMause and many other clinicians and psychohistorians uncritically assume(d) that electoral outcomes are generally driven by mass psychology, which is also incorrect.  Trump in 2016 and most other recent Republican US presidents were elected despite losing the popular vote in the US.  Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 even though a large majority of Germans in the last election voted socialist, communist, or Catholic and only a minority voted for the Nazi or other far right parties.  Hitler came to power with the support of big capital, the big landowners, and the military establishment and did not reflect mass public opinion in Germany, even though the myth to the contrary persists.

Although I am not up to speed on the particulars in Israel-Palestine, if the mass public is autonomously running the show there, and not powerful special interests (especially the war lobby), I think this would be an anomaly in how power is organized in most of the world under our current regime of capitalism, militarism, and plutocracy.

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[Alice Maher]

Hi Bill,

This looks really interesting; thanks. I will check it out. Meanwhile, if anyone in your group might be interested in developing analytic theory, let me know and we'll figure out how to integrate your perspective and mine.

Happy Holidays!

Alice

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