The basic question here on PsyDip today is: what can Developmental Psychology tell us about Diplomacy? Can nations, leaders, or citizens (including our own) be looked at in terms of a lifecycle or lifespan, starting from conception and going until death, and possibly even "rebirth"? Are particular nations’, leaders’, and people’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors reflective of their developmental stage? Can we intervene on that basis to help a given nation/leader/people move from one developmental stage or phase to a more mature one? Should we devise engagement approaches based on a nation/person’s level of development? Are there predictable levels of development of nations/leaders/people and even of foreign ministries and diplomatic corps that would help us to predict their future behavior or how they would behave under certain circumstances? More broadly, can we look at the totality of the human species and consider world-wide developmental phenomena wherein our species as a whole is becoming more mature in one way or another?
Developmental Psychology is the subfield of psychology that studies psychological changes across the human lifespan. Originally Developmental Psychology just looked at infancy and childhood, but it now covers the entire human lifespan, “from womb to tomb”. Developmental Psych looks into such issues as whether or not there are distinct stages of maturation in cognitive, behavioral, and emotional capacity when we go from very young to very old. It even considers our moral and social development. Developmental Psychologists draw from the gamut of paradigms in psychology to formulate their explanations for psychological maturation, including invoking explanations from Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism, Humanism, Cognitivism, and Evolutionary Psychology. For example, Psychoanalysis looks at development in terms of ego formation and controlling impulses; Behaviorism uses the terminology of stimulus-response conditioning and learning; Humanism talks about developmental hierarchies of personal needs; Cognitivism examines evidence for stages of thought processing capacity, and Evolutionary Psychology theorizes about our biological and genetic histories as a species with certain evolved characteristics (see September 12 blog entry for a discussion of psychology paradigms). In all cases, Developmental Psychologists are acutely aware of the fact that as animals, we age. We are genetically determined to “expire” and ultimately to die. Our individual lifespan starts at conception of egg and sperm and we subsequently experience a rise and fall in our biological and therefore psychological capabilities. Since nation-states are comprised of human beings with finite lifespans, it stands to reason that nation-states would carry some life cycle characteristics, despite being super-organic. Before we consider this idea any further, it is useful to know some basic research in Developmental Psych.
Some prominent Developmental Psychologists have included: Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Mary Ainsworth, Harry Harlow, John Bowlby, Lawrence Kohlberg, Lev Vygotsky, Erik Erikson, Urie Bronfenbrenner, among others. A very brief review highlights Freud’s work on the concepts of the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. The Id represents that part of the mind that is unabashedly pleasure-seeking; the Ego is the component of the mind that aims to satisfy the Id through physically and socially appropriate means; and the Superego is the mind component that functions as a conscience, striving for idealized behavior through guilt induction. Freud discussed psychological development in terms of the relative strength of these mind-concepts across the lifespan and across the conscious-unconscious divide. Jean Piaget identified four stages of cognitive development: 1) Sensorimotor, 2) Preoperational, 3) Concrete operational, and 4) Formal operational. These stages reflect “schema” maturation of the individual from his/her first attempts to coordinate senses with what they represent, all the way to the emergence of abstract reasoning and logic. Erik Erikson extended the stage notion further by identifying eight life stage issues he thought we all go through: 1) Trust vs. Mistrust, 2) Autonomy vs. Shame/Doubt, 3) Initiative vs. Guilt, 4) Industry vs. Inferiority, 5) Identity vs. Role Confusion, 6) Intimacy vs. Isolation, 7) Generativity vs. Stagnation, and 8) Ego Integrity vs. Despair. Of course, there are many different models of development in the very amorphous field of psychology. Some have been more rigorously tested through empirical research than others.
Many of us have had exposure to the work of Freud, Piaget, and Erikson in Psych 101 classes. A newer area of Developmental Psychology is “EDP”, or Evolutionary Developmental Psychology. The basic premise of EDP is the following: the individual human develops the way he/she does because of the way the species evolved across the long haul of our evolutionary history. In technical terms, our ontogeny is rooted in our phylogeny. Some of the big names in this field include David Geary and David Bjorklund. The idea is that across all cultures, humans proceed through psycho-biological maturation in essentially the same way, as a function of our unique heritage as mammals and as primates, with the naturally selected traits we have. The stages we go through have their roots in the niches within which we evolved as social animals. For example, we as humans have a relatively long juvenile period compared with other animals. The EDP explanation is that juvenile period length in both humans and other animals is directly proportionate to the social complexity of the given animal, to allow for practice and refinement of socio-cognitive competencies in adulthood such as competition for mates, as well as enhanced tool use, depending on the given species and niche within which it had to survive and evolve. Here is a more detailed explanation:
http://web.missouri.edu/~gearyd/EvoDevPsy.pdf
Armed with some basic Developmental Psychology, we may further ask: Can we better understand and work with other nations and their leaders and citizenry by looking into how developed they are? Importantly, to what extent are we kidding ourselves, to wit, by viewing some peoples as “more” developed than others if we are doing so based on any one particular dimension such as industrialization or societal structure? Given different preferences and ideals for society, can national developmental models ever be universal or will they inevitably require “apples and oranges” comparisons? Is there a way to actually measure a Developmental Psychological Diplomacy using empirical measures or is bringing Developmental Psych to bear on Diplomacy purely a metaphorical exercise? If we do come to find reliable and valid ways to measure developmental factors at the PsyDip interface, to what extent are we then morally obligated to do what we can to foster a healthy development of nations?
Lastly, acknowledging both the perspectives of anarchists and of advocates of world government, to what extent is the existence of the nation-state itself a stage of development in the broader context of human civilization? One that we may not always desire in one scope or another as individual humans collectivize at different population levels to face one common enemy or another? Is there any collectivizing or back-lash to collectivizing that we can predict as the world becomes increasingly “flat” through increasing inter-cultural contact and interconnected markets? How will the very concept of nation-state alliances change when nations themselves form unions as in the European Union or when the desires of different cultural or sub-cultural groups cut across nation-state boundaries? Looking far, far afield to the time when our very planet’s life-cycle expires – either by its core cooling, its atmosphere warming, its orbit around the sun changing, or some other climatic or extraterrestrial cataclysm – what would become of our survival as a species, let alone our nation-state concepts? Is there some yet unforeseen stage of development we should now be working towards for our own good but are failing to currently see, owing to our own previously evolved brain/mind-limitations?
Some possible topics in a Developmental PsyDip are: child labor, child soldiers, youth programs, adoption, grants, loans, development projects, educational programs, rule of law, corruption, security, food security, the rise and fall of nations, political maturity, compromise, leadership and management stages/phases, civilization age, health, rich-poor gaps, human development index, age demographics, lifespan, generation gaps, environmental foot print, conservation, common goals, renewable energy, space exploration, militarization of space, search for intelligent life, emergency action plans, contingency planning, population growth, transportation sustainability, post-colonialism, basic and applied research, policy planning, reconstruction, nation building, alliance building, resettlement, biodiversity and the interconnected development of species, technology transfer, sustainable development, religious reconciliation, development of the internet and digital networks, digital access gaps, etc. Arguably everything has a lifecycle and therefore everything in Developmental PsyDip has a lifecycle component to consider when decision-making in diplomacy.
Some books that have looked at lifecycle explanations for the rise and fall of nations (with varying levels of success) include: The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (Paul Kennedy), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Samuel Huntington), and The Post-American World (Fareed Zakaria).
An interesting list of extinct states:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_states
Interesting timelines of evolution, history, and culture:
http://www.timelineindex.com/content/home.php
