Four best socio-psychological experiments

The four most beautiful and tale-teling experiments that combine the best of experimental science and participant observation are:

The Third Wave experiment

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

Stanford Prison Experiment  
Milgram Experiment

They all paint a rather bleak picture of the most of the humanity, however. Apparently, when given the chance most earthlings will turn into monsters. It is only their own pain or the fear of authority - God, government, parents - that keep most of them from that.

Interestingly enough, all the three experiments are considered controversial. All had to be terminated by emergency, as they, nearly or very much so, went out of hand - quite like actual life outside the ivory silo always does. 

Primary thinking process (definition)

Primary thinking process is what 80 to 90% of our mind is busy with, and of which we are only marginally aware  through dreams, Freudian slips, moods, insights, intuition, etc. Mental processes there are ideational, i.e., image-based, rather than what we commonly call logical or word-based. It is the playground of eternal myths and archetypes, where time and space conflate and the logic and common sense we earn through education do not apply.

This fundamental difference with the reality we are used to causes a lot of confusion among social scientists. Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in the 1930s famously misunderstood Freudian psychology as being all about sexual urges. After the war, Victor Turner in his Forest of Symbols famously called the psychological "Medusa's cave", probably because social theory has no relevance to it whatsoever and thus effectively renders social scientists helpless/useless when dealing with human psychology. That's probably the main reason why, say, Rabinow was extra-careful to specify that he would by no means deal with anything even remotely psychological in his Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. This attitude makes anthropology, the science of the human, peculiarly devoid of the human. I blame it on Durkheim who was doggedly insistent on separating "social facts" from "sociological facts" to boost the position of sociology in the late 19th-century France.

One of the possible ways to bridge the primary thinking process with the secondary, rational one are kōans.

See also: how to marry social sciences and psychology 

Unlearn before learning

I see my objective as a  lecturer to explain how to think not what to think. That needs to start by getting principles of qualitative analysis under one's belt from sources, books and articles, where they are developed and elaborated on at length. Only after that we go on to learn to use them to make up our own opinions. In other words, we first analyse how knowledge is manufactured, evaluate the merits and demerits of each approach and then investigate how the state of the field has bee achieved by analysing its context. That way we can deconstruct public opinion, media influences social biases, scientific epistemes, personal opinions etc.: in other words, a meta-analysis of all existing points of view as opposed to simply asserting your own opinion at the expense of all others.

 

Some sources are very good to learn such principles of meta-analysis, mostly writings with a strong philosophical slant like Arendt, Baudrillard or Foucault.

Unlearning the old ways and accepting the uncertainty of new ways you are expected to discard as mere ideal types, can take a while. I saw first feeble flashes of light after about half a year and the process picked up the momentum at the end of the second year. I was lucky enough to choose a discipline with a major  epistemological preoccupation, namely anthropology, and also with a couple of lecturers extremely skilled at asking very good questions.

I recommend my students good sources as Zen-Buddism style kōans. There is no enlightenment in them, but in the truth at which they hint. Each attains their own, to the level of the questions they ask. Light never penetrates minds that are full of answers, rather than questions.

Epistemology (definition)

Epistemology in one sentence: 'How do I know that what I know is true?' 

Most scientists are never invited to ask themselves that question at any point of their professional training, because, as I have once overheard at one PhD research method seminar in a famous university, "that would undermine the very existence of our discipline". How very true.

Operationalisation (definition)

Operationalisation in social/psychological sciences is reducing the complexity of life (overdetermination) to two variables to try to explain the former by a quantified relationship between  the latter.

Serves to assert the status of a "proper science" by impressing those whose education never included mastering qualitative analysis.

Needs to be taken very seriously, as questioning its very premise will definitely yank the carpet from under the feet of many an academic discipline.

Green-washing

It takes A LOT of energy to develop and implement green technologies. As environmental costs are always disregarded in economic calculations, the madness of shipping Prius batteries twice around the globe for their production-assembling-sales cycle never registers in the mind of environmental activists. The so called green technologies are, in fact, another artificial "bubble" to sustain the growth of the credit-based economy, which exactly IS based on growth for the sake of growth. There is a name for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing

Now for a bit of constructive input: solutions cannot be found from within  the system that causes the problem in the first place, although the contradictions that arise in the process always contain the seeds of the gradual change that eventually will bring about a new system. 

In this particular case, no amount of updating the basic concept of an ever-more-complex mechanical vehicle will ever get us anywhere close to the much fanfared "zero carbon impact". It  is as an unattainable pipe dream as perfect elective democracy or the American Dream. Both are ideals taken out of their context and with their actual cost disregarded.

In this particular case of "green technologies", we are to ignore the energy necessary for extracting minerals to produce steel, glass and plastic, moving them around the globe and building facilities to produce, store and sell the products made of them. The impact of later releasing most of the energy, previously bound in carbon fuel, into the atmosphere as heat, is never calculated into the environmental impact of "green technologies" either. It is as if wind turbines and hybrid cars fall ready-made from the sky and, upon the completion of their usage cycle, are miraculously absorbed back into where they came from without a trace.

Human psychology and the financial system

"But we travel in a world with a systemic bias to optimism that typically chooses to avoid the topic of the impending bursting of investment bubbles. Collectively, this is done for career or business reasons. As discussed many times in the investment business, pessimism or realism in the face of probable trouble is just plain bad for business and bad for careers. What I am only slowly realizing, though, is how similar the career risk appears to be for the Fed. It doesn't want to move against bubbles because Congress and business do not like it and show their dislike in unmistakable terms. Even Federal reserve chairmen get bullied and have their faces slapped if they stick to their guns, which will, not surprisingly, be rare since everyone values his career or does not want to be replaced à la Mr. Volcker. So, be as optimistic as possible, be nice to everyone, bail everyone out and hope for the best. If all goes well, after all, you will have a lot of grateful bailees who will happily hire you for $300,000 a pop."

Financial Week