PsyDip: Psychological Diplomacy

Transmedia Storytelling: It’s the Story Stupid

2011-10-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., M.B.A.:
We need a new name for 'transmedia storytelling'. It seems like all the excitement about big transmedia storytelling projects has made it the buzz term du jour. But somehow, in all that excitement, the fundamentals have become obscured. It's important to remember that in 'transmedia storytelling,' that 'transmedia' is an adjective. 'Storytelling' is the noun.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positively-media/201110/transmedia-storytelling-it-s-the-story-stupid-0

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

2011-10-08T05:28:00.000-07:00

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life... Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

Pocket Guide to China (1944): A U.S. Army Publication

2011-06-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

Pocket Guide to China (1944)

View more presentations from Don Kilburg III

PsyDip came across the fascinating “Pocket Guide to China” at an out-of-the-way World War II memorabilia show in rural Minnesota and just had to pick it up. Written in 1944 by the United States Army, it was intended as a guide for American military personnel stationed in China. I figured it would be well worth the five dollars to get some insight into the official American mindset toward China at the time and to own this little collector’s gem. Often these kinds of casual guides are very telling, since they have been simplified for the layperson. Here I provide you with some interesting excerpts from the guide and a link to the guide itself...

The first thing that amazed me was the cover. It’s what we know now as Taiwan’s flag. Yet as you’ll recall, the Taiwan we know now did not exist at that time. Back in 1944, our conception of mainland China was basically that of a budding democracy, a fellow capitalist society. There was no self-proclaimed Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan and there was no People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the Chinese mainland—not until 1949, when a bloody revolution forced the capitalists to flee to the island of Taiwan and the communists took over the mainland. How ironic that during WWII we were so closely aligned with China as an ally, waging war against the Japanese—and yet now we are inclined to think of China as our adversary.

A look at the 1944 “Pocket Guide to China” is a window into history, a snapshot of American thinking. Not only did we once view China as a great ally, but also as a kindred spirit—at least that is what the U.S. Army wanted to instill in its soldiers assigned to China. The guide spends a considerable amount of time talking about how Chinese people are just like Americans and how they love individual freedom like Americans, even at the expense of using what are now deemed pejoratives toward our contemporary Japanese allies:

“If you think of the Chinese as a yellow-skinned people of a totally different race from us, you probably will never get to know them. What’s more, you’ll be playing right into the hands of Hitler and the Japs.” (p. 2)

The guide goes on:

“Of all the peoples of Asia, the Chinese are most like Americans. Those who know both peoples often remark at the likeness. One of the reasons, perhaps, is that we both live in countries where there is plenty of space and a great variety of climate and food. We are alike, too, because we both love independence and individual freedom.” (p. 4)

The guide even praises the Chinese as being superior to Americans in many ways, especially when it comes to social relations:

“They are better than we are, perhaps, at human relationships. They value these above all else, and have learned to get along with people through centuries of getting along with each other.” (p. 5)

Clearly U.S. Army writers of 1944 found it hard to imagine that these same highly sociable Chinese people would go on to carry out one of the greatest upheavals in human relationships of all time, the so-called Cultural Revolution. An estimated 35,000 to as high as 1.5 million people were killed or committed suicide in that decade-long struggle, due principally to ideological differences between Maoists and those perceived of as being counter-revolutionary, i.e. capitalists. To this day social scientists still lack a coherent explanation as to how such a highly sociable people got so carried away in such a grand dispute.

Referring again to China’s democratic tendencies, statements like the following seem on the one hand misplaced (since China would go on to become a communist country, with clear privilege distinctions based on party membership) and yet on the other hand perhaps prescient (given China’s post-Mao economic liberalization).

“We are alike also because of our natural democratic tendencies. There are few class distinctions in China, no hereditary aristocracy. Anybody can get anywhere if he can prove himself able and intelligent enough.” (p. 8)

Perhaps it is this democratic tendency that endured the Mao years and resurfaced again in Deng Xiao Ping’s open door policy and economic reforms.

The guide also ventures into race, gender, and social comparisons, albeit somewhat awkwardly:

“The Chinese people vary widely. In the north the people are tall and handsome. In mid-China they are of average height and in the south they are short and stocky.” (p. 9)

And the 1940s oft-used “queer” makes several appearances:

“One thing to understand at the beginning: The Chinese think we look queer. They are accustomed to everyone having black hair and black eyes, so naturally they think it is strange for people to have red or brown or blonde hair and eyes of unfamiliar colors. Also we are bigger-boned than the average Chinese, and hairier. As a matter of fact, the Chinese have an ancient belief that the hairier people are, the more uncivilized they are.” (p. 13)

We also see glimmers of Chinese women having a proverbial leg up on American women when it comes to political and military participation:

“Chinese women in some ways are more free than they are here in America—that is, they do some things which American women don’t yet do. They are in the Army, for instance, and they fight side by side with the guerillas.” (p. 15)

And there is elaborate mention of China’s subtle forms of communication:

“…the Chinese have ways of getting information which have nothing to do with newspapers or organized sources of information.” (p. 23; see also “kill Japs for your own pleasure”, second to last sentence on p. 23, for a colorful example of the kind of mutual bonding the U.S. Army hoped to encourage between Americans and Chinese.)

We also see a continuous attempt on the part of the U.S. Army to get its soldiers to treat Chinese soldiers with respect, which may underlie a common problem of the period—but at least this comes off as noble, especially for the time in question.

“You have no reason to feel superior because you are better fed or better armed. On the contrary, give the Chinese soldier his due in admiration for his plain, common guts.” (p. 40)

The guide culminates in a highly progressive nod to Chinese civilization and to human equality; something I should point out predates the American Civil Rights Act of 1964 by over two decades.

“China is the oldest civilization in the world and its civilization is in many ways the greatest. As a natural result, the Chinese will not bear any assumption of superiority on the part of a white man because he is white. China herself has no color prejudice against anyone with a different colored skin. She is prepared to treat everyone on terms of human equality, and you cannot do better than approach China in the same spirit.” (p. 41)

A shout out to cultural relativism rules the guide, as its aim is clearly to have American soldiers get along with the Chinese they encounter, in order to defeat the Japanese as smoothly as possible.

“Discourage anyone who acts as though the Chinese are queer. They are not queer. After all, there are more people in the world eating Chinese food and wearing Chinese clothes than there are Americans eating American food and wearing American clothes. They live their way and we live ours. If you respect them, they will respect you.” (p. 42)

In what must have been an obvious concern for racism among U.S. troops in 1944, Pocket Guide to China ends by pointing out that if you are racist you essentially support Hitler, not the Allies.

“Remember it’s Hitler who harps on the superiority of his own color, his own people, his own country.” (p. 45)

In sum, this is really a fascinating little guide that gives you a quick but meaningful glimpse into a time when America and China viewed each other quite different from how they view each other today. I am struck by how much can change in national psychologies in the course of just one or two generations—and yet how much they can stay the same. We still have concerns about ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, and certainly quickly changing geo-political alliances. We still have great powers that find ways to oppose each other despite common human interests. But ultimately it is that same core self-interest across cultures that propels us to yearn for individual freedom and democracy, so that we can all have an equal and fair shot at excelling based on our own individual merits and initiative. That’s my own personal take anyway. What do you think?

Here is a PDF of the entire 1944 U.S. Army publication, “Pocket Guide to China”. Check it out:

http://slidesha.re/jInScA

PsyDip Author to Appear in Chinese Movie: "Qian Xuesen"

2011-03-05T23:46:00.000-08:00

After a long "hiatus" of intense Chinese language study, PsyDip is back with a story of foreign film intrigue! It all started late one night at a jazz club in Beijing. A Chinese big band was serving up Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)”. I had a gin and tonic in one hand and a cigar in the other. A friend and I were having a good laugh about life and I must have been gesturing with liquid-confidence. Two women approached and didn’t waste time before offering me a part in a movie. They said I looked like the guy they wanted for a new Chinese movie partly set in 1950s California. I thought for sure it was either a joke or a scam. But curiosity got the best of me and low and behold it turned out to be an actual movie. After a lengthy clearance process with the Department of State, to my surprise, I was cleared to play the small but exciting part of Grant B. Cooper, a famous lawyer. The story: “Qian Xuesen” (钱学森, Qián Xuésēn).

Qian Xuesen is a national hero in China. He almost single-handedly started China’s missile and space program. He did so with the knowledge that he gained in America, starting with a U.S. Government scholarship, as a Chinese graduate student. His story reads like a McCarthy era spy novel. In short, the very brilliant Qian Xuesen was groomed by the U.S. Government to be a top rocket scientist but then tragically ran up against fear of communism in the 1950s. Qian’s highly successful career at California Institute of Technology was brought to a grinding halt when the U.S. Government pulled his top secret security clearance, on little to no evidence, and put him under what was essentially house arrest for five years -- out of concerns that he was a communist spy. Finally Qian was forced back to China where he took his missile know-how and helped turn China into a nuclear power. This led his American lawyer Grant Cooper to later declare: "That the government permitted this genius, this scientific genius, to be sent to Communist China to pick his brains is one of the tragedies of this century." Practically no one in contemporary America knows this story. PsyDip certainly did not until now.

The fascinating story of Qian Xuesen’s life is now being resurrected on the big screen by critically-acclaimed Chinese film director Zhang Jianya (張建亞, Zhāng Jiànyà ). It stars the big name Chinese actors Chen Kun (陈坤, Chén Kūn) and Zhang Yuqi (张雨绮, Zhāng Yǔqǐ ). It also features fine American and Australian actors Steve Boergadine (of “Contract Killers”) and Nick Tate (of “Lost”). The timing of the film is ideal because Qian Xuesen would have been 100 years old this year had he not passed away in 2009 at the age of 98. Director Zhang Jianya has about nine million U.S. dollars worth of funding to tell Qian Xuesen’s story in a way that will honor him in the eyes of the Chinese. Qian’s story is inherently fascinating, as he was born in China in the time of rickshaws and yet died having helped China put a man into outer space.

PsyDip suspects this movie will not be particularly critical of Qian Xuesen, but rather will showcase the rocket scientist’s great contributions to China that came as a result of apparent mistreatment by the United States Government. The film is reportedly being made with the blessing and insistence of the Chinese Communist Party, which still very much runs China. They put no large premium on critical depictions of their heroes. After all, glorified Communist dictator Mao Ze Dong is still prominently featured on all Chinese currency to this day. PsyDip fully imagines that when the Qian Xuesen movie hits Chinese theaters this fall, it will showcase Qian Xuesen in almost entirely positive light and it will showcase the U.S. Government in mostly negative light. So why would an American diplomat want to play Grant B. Cooper in this movie?

Grant B. Cooper is someone who proudly defended Qian Xuesen in his deportation hearings in Los Angeles in the early 1950s. He and several other American characters in the film came to Qian Xuesen’s defense in the name of what is good and true about America: justice, fairness, due process. As such, the film presents a great teachable moment for the U.S. perspective. Despite dark periods in America like McCarthyism, America has a proud history of addressing our legal failings and fighting hard to self-correct them. Hopefully some of those great American voices will come through in the movie, despite any mistreatment Qian Xuesen may have received by the American government at that time.

Though Chinese audiences watching the Qian Xuesen movie probably won’t see them, from at least one major American writer's perspective, Qian Xuesen may in fact have had some downsides (aside from the lingering, though remote possibility he may have actually been a Chinese spy). Famous author and fellow University of Illinois alumnus Iris Chang wrote about Qian Xuesen in her book “Thread of the Silkworm”. Chang was no stranger to critical analysis of historical figures and events (readers may recall her compelling book “Rape of Nanking”, which documented the Japanese Army’s atrocities in China -- a book Chinese have certainly accepted as proof of their victimization). Thread of the Silkworm highlights the very harsh treatment Qian Xuesen received by the American government in the 1950s, but also suggests that Qian went on to become exactly the kind of rigid bureaucrat that he had so despised in the United States. In fact, according to Chang, that is the big story—Qian’s transformation from open-minded American academic to closed-minded Communist bureaucrat.

Chang asserts that Qian Xuesen helped to design China’s Great Leap Forward which resulted in at least 36 million Chinese people starving (according to several authoritative accounts, even by long-time Chinese Communist Party member, Yang Jisheng). Chang also asserts that Qian Xuesen publicly supported the crack-down on the democratic student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Of course despite these criticisms of Qian Xuesen, he certainly may have been very well-intentioned in both cases. He may also have felt forced to comply with Mao Ze Dong’s wishes in order to stay in his good graces during the persecution of the Cultural Revolution. The point here on PsyDip is that you probably will not see any of this multi-facted analysis in the Qian Xuesen movie, as its goal is to make Qian Xuesen shine at his best.

In any event, “Qian Xuesen” promises to be a great movie. I can tell you first hand that the production is running with great attention to detail and great expertise in both acting and directing. It has been a real honor to meet Zhang Jianya, Chen Kun, and Zhang Yuqi and to help tell the story of a very remarkable man. It’s clear that Qian Xuesen was both a genius and that he made incredible contributions to both American and Chinese society. His story needs to be told and discussed. I am happy to be a small part of that and to play the part of Grant Cooper, a great American lawyer.

For those who are curious what it took for me to get State Department clearance to act in the film, the answer is: 1) no contract, 2) no use of real name in the film credits, 3) no filming while on the clock, 4) no pay. I’m actually donating the pay I would have got to a local charity. The point of all this is to make clear that my participation is entirely non-official.

Here’s to hoping the film turns out well! Whether it ever becomes available for viewing at theatres outside of China will really depend on how well the film does in China and whether it could be adapted for Western audiences. One thing’s for sure, acting on camera is a real thrill!

-PsyDip

Here is a Wall Street Journal article from 2009 describing the life of Qian Xuesen:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125721495250424443.html

A promotional video of the two big stars in the movie:

http://video.sina.com.cn/p/ent/m/c/2011-03-07/170061275245.html

Some video from the press conference at start of filming:

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjM3ODg4NTQ0.html

Here is some information on the Chinese internet about the movie:

http://ent.hunantv.com/d/x/20110308/870502.html

Here's an opinion from another foreigner who is an extra in the film (interestingly, state-controlled "Global Times" printed it):

http://opinion.globaltimes.cn/foreign-view/2011-03/629436.html

Try Putting Yourself in China's Shoes

2011-01-24T04:18:00.000-08:00

PsyDip usually doesn't post articles from China's state-run media, but this one really showcases how a lot of Chinese people view the U.S. and as such is worth a read. What do you think, does the author have a valid point?...

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2011-01/24/content_11903456.htm

10 Psychology Studies from 2010: Any implications for diplomacy?

2010-12-20T04:34:00.000-08:00

Ten Psychology Studies from 2010 Worth Knowing About

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/neuronarrative/201012/ten-psychology-studies-2010-worth-knowing-about

PsyDip: What if any implications do these studies have for diplomacy?

American Diplomacy Revealed - as Good

2010-12-04T04:32:00.000-08:00

American Diplomacy Revealed - as Good

"...thoughtful, well-informed and dedicated servants of the American interest who write clear, declarative English sentences."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/opinion/03iht-edcohen.html?_r=3&src=twrhp

China Reinvents Freud

2010-11-22T03:43:00.000-08:00

China Reinvents Freud

Stimulated in part by Hollywood's dream-drenched sci-fi flick, "Inception", psychology-hungry Chinese are reviving Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory.

"His psychoanalysis deals with ordinary things, such as quarrels, pride and pressure," added Huang (Harvard). "These things echo with the current state of mind of many Chinese."

Read the full article here...
Screens and dreams fuel Freud fever

By Li Li (China Daily)

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-11/22/content_11583956.htm

On treatment of mental illness in China...

2010-11-10T19:56:00.000-08:00

"It has been nearly 35 years since the end of the Cultural Revolution, when mental illness was declared a bourgeois self-delusion and the sick were treated with readings from Chairman Mao. Psychiatric treatment has returned."

"Only 1 in 12 Chinese needing psychiatric care ever sees a professional, according to a study last year in The Lancet, a British medical journal. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/world/asia/11psych.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

PsyDip: Selected highlights from 2009-2010

2010-09-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

After over a year of periodic blogging, PsyDip continues to ask bold diplomacy questions from a wide range of psychological perspectives: Abnormal, Behavioral, Biological, Clinical/Counseling, Cognitive, Comparative, Critical, Developmental, Educational/School, Evolutionary, Forensic/Legal, Global, Health, Humanistic, Industrial-Organizational, Linguistic, Personality, Positive, Psychoanalytical, Quantitative, and Social.

Here are some selected highlights from PsyDip blog entries over the past twelve months:

Psychology Paradigms and Diplomacy Topics

http://psydip.blogspot.com/2009/09/psychological-paradigms-and-diplomacy.html

Why Diplomats Envy Babies

http://psydip.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-diplomats-envy-babies.html

Diplomacy and Social Psychology: Up Against Sheep?

http://psydip.blogspot.com/2009/09/social-psychology-is-another-area-of.html

Diplomacy and Abnormal Psychology: Are Countries Sometimes Crazy?

http://psydip.blogspot.com/2009/10/diplomacy-abnormal-psychology-are-some.html

Developmental PsyDip: Do Nations Have Lifecycles?

http://psydip.blogspot.com/2009/11/developmental-psydip-do-nations-have.html

Color-based & Power Differential-based Privilege: The Broader Core Issues

http://psydip.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-we-became-white-people-by-christian.html

More entries are forthcoming in 2010-2011, so stay tuned! In the meantime, you can browse old entries in the blog archive section at the right margin. And as always with diplomacy, think about the psychology behind it!

-PsyDip

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Grassroots diplomacy and other issues...

2010-09-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

“In this era of instant communication and grassroots diplomacy, we recently observed someone previously unknown hijack the national discourse by threatening to burn a Koran. We then observed high ranking public officials comment directly on this, including the President. Do you think we'll see more of this sort of grassroots diplomacy hijacking and where should high ranking officials and media editors draw the line in potentially adding fuel to the fire by covering it?”

On the Record Online and Politico, podcast...

http://ontherecordpodcast.com/pr/otro/political-news-social-media-jim-vandehei.aspx

Crossing the language barrier with technology

2010-08-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

Check out this new iPhone app, called Pleco 2.2, for reading Chinese characters. The technology for crossing the language barrier is really improving rapidly when you consider the olden days when people had to thumb through paper dictionaries to get their point across. What long-term effects will these new technologies have for bringing people together, for contributing in some measure to cross-cultural understanding?

Pleco 2.2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc&feature=player_embedded

Will we one day see the "Universal Translator" depicted in Science Fiction since 1945? The idea is that you could speak one language into one end of the device and out would come another language from the other end of the device.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_translator

Any future universal translator would naturally be a moving target if folks like Wittgenstein, Sapir, Whorf, and Chomsky are right, as language does not necessarily derive from inherent logical structures, nor does it remain static as people's experiences change. These are things to ponder as the world's speakers of 4000+ different languages come closer and closer to one another in an increasingly connected world.

PsyDip in China

2010-08-20T17:48:00.000-07:00

PsyDip is now based in Beijing, China! Stay tuned for new blog entries.

Happy Birthday USA! ...Social Psychology of Freedom, an essay by Lee Harris

2010-07-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

An essay on the Social Psychology of Freedom, by Lee Harris:

http://bit.ly/dsffG9

Shrinking the shrink

2010-06-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

America.gov dispels the myth of the popular psychologist...
Dr. Phil

Tough love, on cue

http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplace-english/2010/June/20100615163416ihecuor0.6547009.html

More Classrooms for American Diplomats

2010-06-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

Foreign Service Institute adds 100 Classrooms:
http://nicholaskralev.com/2010/06/20/foreign-service-school-adds-100-classrooms/

Audio: U.S. State Dept use of Social Media, Jared Cohen

2010-06-11T17:38:00.000-07:00

State Department using social media to meet mission.
How does technology shape foreign policy?
Jared Cohen shares his view. Have a listen...

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=17&sid=1976692

Psychological Healthcare, Virtual World Tech...

2010-06-07T20:28:00.000-07:00

Psychological Health Care through Virtual World Technology

http://science.dodlive.mil/2010/06/07/psychological-health-care-through-virtual-world-technology/

Diplomatic Folk Wisdom...

2010-06-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

Diplomatic folk wisdom in the form of pithy definitions of diplomatic terms as spoken by the greats...

The Diplomat's Dictionary, by Chas Freeman...
http://bit.ly/8YUU6m

Guest post: Dr. Michael Elasmar on International Public Opinion Formation

2010-06-01T19:49:00.000-07:00

From a public diplomacy perspective, knowing what influences the variation of opinions will reveal what it will take to change them in a desirable direction. In this case, understanding why international public opinion toward the U.S. varies is vital to improve this international public opinion. While describing the trend in public opinion falls solely within the domain of statistics, empirically explaining the variation of public opinion trends involves the use of statistical analytic approaches for testing theoretical explanations. – Michael Elasmar, Ph.D.

PsyDip is very excited to have a guest post on the blog today from friend and colleague Dr. Michael Elasmar, distinguished Associate Professor and Director of the Communication Research Center at Boston University. Dr. Elasmar’s specialty is in the application of psychometric and other mathematical models for solving practical problems in the field of communication. He is also editor of the American Journal of Media Psychology. What we have here now from Dr. Elasmar is a theoretical piece that addresses the topic of public diplomacy from a psychological perspective by focusing on international public opinion. Public diplomacy professionals will be especially interested in this informative article.

Title: “Understanding the Process of International Public Opinion Formation: Implications for Public Diplomacy”. Here is the featured article in full:

http://bit.ly/dmaTgy

And here is some supplemental information about Dr. Elasmar and his work:

Michael Elasmar, Ph.D.

http://www.bu.edu/com/about/faculty/michael_g_elasmar.shtml

Communication Research Center at Boston University

http://www.bu.edu/com/crc

American Journal of Media Psychology

http://www.marquettejournals.org/mediapsychology.html

(above image: collage by Judy Wapp, “Public Opinion”)

"The era of one-way broadcasting is dying"...

2010-05-18T18:31:00.000-07:00

http://mashable.com/2010/05/17/state-department-social-media/

Actual data on Illegal Alien apprehensions

2010-05-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

In 2004 PsyDip's author used social science research methods to examine government data on illegal alien apprehensions, over a 3-month period. Here is the original unclassified cable sent through U.S. Department of State channels. PsyDip is posting this analysis here now as it is germane to the current discussion on illegal immigration recently reignited by the Arizona legislature and rippling throughout the country at this time.

Data were sampled for a 3-month period from September to November of 2004. Some key findings of the study included:

Over 225,000 illegal aliens were apprehended in the 3-month period.
The vast majority of illegal aliens were apprehended in Arizona.
Most apprehended illegal aliens had never applied for a visa before crossing illegally.
Only a small percentage reflected "special interest aliens", but nevertheless 69 cases did.
Only a small percentage of visa refusal cases were subsequently apprehended for crossing illegally.
The vast majority of apprehended illegal aliens were young, Mexican males.
Over 6000 apprehended illegal aliens were children under 11 years of age.

Here is the full report:
http://www.slideshare.net/donkilburg3/2004-illegal-aliens-and-visas

.

FOIA release on MK-ULTRA, CIA/DOD mind-control experiments (1977)

2010-05-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

FOIA release: More details on the MK-ULTRA project that dosed thousands of unwitting subjects with hallucinogens back in the 1950s, to study "brain-washing"...

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/02-A-0846RELEASE.pdf

American Negotiating Behavior: Wheeler Dealers, Legal Eagles, Bullies, and Preachers

2010-05-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

"...influences that shape how U.S. policymakers and diplomats approach negotiations with foreign counterparts and the behavioral patterns that transcend individuals, institutions and administrations"...

"Four distinctive mind-sets have combined to shape U.S. negotiating practice: a businessperson's pragmatic quest for concrete results, a lawyer's attention to detail, a superpower's inclination to dictate terms, and a moralizer's sense of mission." (Amazon)

Video book review from United States Institute of Peace (USIP):
http://www.usip.org/newsroom/multimedia/video-gallery/the-book-american-negotiating-behavior-wheeler-dealers-legal-eagle

Overseas Posts: Personal interaction counters misunderstandings

2010-05-11T13:30:00.000-07:00

"Only through personal interaction can the PD [Public Diplomacy] professional really understand local concerns and views of America, and personal interaction is the best way to counter misunderstandings about the United States."
http://www.layalina.tv/publications/Perspectives/WilliamRugh.html

Today is World Press Freedom Day

2010-05-03T16:26:00.000-07:00

"A free press is essential to an empowered citizenry, government accountability and responsible economic development."...
http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/clinton_world_press_freedom

2010 map with more detail...
http://www.freedomhouse.org/images/File/fop/2010/MOPF2010.pdf

Stunning visualization of world-wide development statistics

2010-05-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

A recent presentation from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) series...

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Color-based & Power differential-based privilege: The broader core issues

2010-05-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

“How we became white people”, by Christian Lander… now on CNN.com…

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/29/lander.who.am.i/index.html?hpt=T2

PsyDip’s reaction…

Color-based & Power differential-based privilege:
The broader core issues

PsyDip agrees with Christian Lander's "How we became white people" - a timely, "light-hearted" article on international race relations and assimilation in the United States - but PsyDip adds further important qualification. White immigrants to America have certainly had an easier acceptance rate in their quest to be considered prototypical Americans. This is historical fact (see, “How the Irish Became White”, by Noel Ignatiev). At the same time, there is a key addition to the story: the same dynamics of white assimilation in multi-racial America hold true with equal potential risk for other colors of people in other majority-minority, power-differential environments outside of America (and within a future Latino majority America) and will likely continue to hold true well into the future, unless and until skin color becomes as arbitrary in our minds as eye color. That is to say, when considering “boiled down” human nature and when methodologically controlling for which color is in the majority as well as which color is in the higher-powered societal position, what you find is that the issue is not the color of white per se, but rather same-color/culture affinity, magnified by power gaps.

The dimension of color, including white, is “merely” a marker that triggers the human mind to assume cultural affinity with the like color. Further, when that color is a learned marker for higher status, deference tendencies (or rebellion tendencies) are magnified, as a function of perceived potential risk or opportunity. If this were not fundamentally true about human nature, we would not see racial discrimination in non-white societies/cultures (we do). If this were not fundamentally true, we would be taking the racist position that some colors of humans are somehow genetically superior in their ability to overcome their own color-based and culture-based preconceptions, above other colors of humans. In short, no color of humans has been shown to be genetically superior at not being racist.

In fact, when we have observed racism and xenophobia in non-white societies such as in Japan and China, or between different groups not of Northern European origin in Near East Asia, Africa, and Latin America, etc., we have observed the same basic human nature to grant at least non-conscious favoritism to those of like color, especially to those of like color in higher-powered positions. We have observed these dynamics in the United States as more closely tied to whiteness primarily because of the fact that the United States was not only officially founded by whites of Northern European extraction, but also because the United States is the only country in the world that has become such a cutting edge, social experiment of multi-racial/cultural inter-mixing to this level of interaction and principled equality. This dynamic is underpinned by the historical fact that Europe’s ecology and history gave rise to its conquest of the world prior to the inverse (see “Guns, Germs, & Steel”, by Jared Diamond). In an alternate world, had Japan, for example, developed first and then conquered the New World first, it is myopic to think there would be no such thing as “Japanese or ‘yellow’ privilege” in America, were the majority and ruling population of America of Japanese descent. Certainly the atrocities of wartime Japan in the 1930s and 40s have given no hint to the contrary.

We have to learn not only about “white privilege”, but also about “color-based privilege” in general and “power differential-based privilege” in general. These deeper and broader phenomena put the onus more squarely and truthfully onto the basic pitfalls of human nature, as opposed to one manifestation of it. In this analysis, “color-based privilege” includes the color white and every other color of human being, past, present, and future. The notion of “white” versus “people of color” is actually a social construction, aimed at shoring up support for one or another group’s goals. We need only look at President Obama to see the product of a “white” parent and a “black” parent, and to note that technically his biological origin is 50% white and 50% black, were it not for the forces of social construction to the contrary. Scientifically, race has no such biologically-based demarcations to put “white” in one category and “of color” in another – rather human phenotypes run along multiple continua and their proportions are constantly in flux as a function of interbreeding (some scientists even think Homo sapiens carry some Neanderthal genes from long ago interbreeding: http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0429/Study-suggests-humans-mated-with-Neanderthals).

If all white people never existed, or suddenly became extinct, or at least were relegated to the minority population and the lower economic class in the United States and in the world, clearly the challenges we humans as a species face with “color-based privilege” and “power differential-based privilege” would continue to persist. The challenges would exist among other colors of people, as a function of color polarization in society, vis-à-vis majority-minority population numbers and power differentials. If we ever hope to overcome tribalism in an ever-globalizing and ever-diversifying world, we need to come to grips with these basic facts about our nature as a species and to work toward gracefully overcoming them collectively, regardless of color. Given our common genetic propensities, it would seem then that the ways forward are primarily socio-cultural. That is, education, equal opportunity, and increased positive cross-racial, cross-cultural, and cross-class contact. We owe as much to our children and our children’s children.

Further reading on human skin color at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History...
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/skin-color

An interesting study on children's racial beliefs, attitudes, and preferences...
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/05/13/expanded_results_methods_cnn.pdf

An Empire Decomposed: American Foreign Relations in the Early 21st Century

2010-04-25T19:14:00.000-07:00

PsyDip added highlights to this recent speech by Ambassador Freeman to illustrate the significance of the psychological component in diplomacy. Psychology has something to say about each of the highlighted words. To what extent can we therefore consider our current diplomatic challenges to be "psychosomatic" in nature? As Ambassador Freeman says: "America's fundamentals are sound. Our diminished influence is much more the result of dysfunctional behavior and organization..."

An Empire Decomposed:
American Foreign Relations in the Early 21st Century

By Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., USFS (Ret.)

Americans are accustomed to foreigners following us. After all, for forty years, we led the industrial democracies against the former USSR and its captive entourage. After the Soviet collapse, we bestrode the world as its sole colossus. For a while, we imagined we could do pretty much anything we wanted to do on our own. This, in the opinion of some, made followers irrelevant and leadership unnecessary.

Still, on reflection, we thought things might go better with a garland of allies and a garnish of friends. So we accepted some help from NATO members and some other foreign auxiliaries in Afghanistan. And, when we marched into the ambush of Iraq, we recruited a few other nations eager to ingratiate themselves with us to tag along in what became known as "the coalition of the billing." In the end, however, in Iraq, it came down to us and our faithful British collaborators. Then, without even a "yo! Bush," the Brits too were gone. And when we looked for other allies to follow us back into Afghanistan, they weren't there.

All this should remind us that power, no matter how immense, is not by itself enough to ordain leadership. Power must be informed by vision, guided by wisdom, and embodied in strategy if it is to inspire companions and followers. We're a bit short of believers in our leadership these days, not just on the battlefields of West Asia but at global financial gatherings, the United Nations, meetings of the G-20, among human rights and environmental activists, in the world's regions, including our own hemisphere, and so forth. There are few places where we Americans still enjoy the credibility and command the deference we once did. A year or so ago, we decided that military means were not always the best way to solve problems and that having diplomatic allies could really help do so. But it isn't happening.

The excesses that brought about the wide-ranging devaluation of our global standing originate, I think, in our politically self-serving reinterpretation of the Cold War soon after it ended. As George Kennan predicted, the Soviet Union was eventually brought down by the infirmities of its system. The USSR thus lost its Cold War with America and our allies. We were still standing when it fell. They lost. We won, if only by default. Yet Americans rapidly developed the conviction that military prowess and Ronald Reagan's ideological bravado — not the patient application of diplomatic and military "containment" to a gangrenous Soviet system — had brought us victory. Ours was a triumph of grand strategy in which a strong American military backed political and economic measures short of war to enable us to prevail without fighting. Ironically, however, our politicians came to portray this as a military victory. The diplomacy and alliance management that went into it were forgotten. It was publicly transmuted into a triumph based on the formidable capabilities of our military-industrial complex, supplemented by our righteous denunciation of evil.

Many things followed from this neo-conservative-influenced myth. One conclusion was the notion that diplomacy is for losers. If military superiority was the key to "victory" in the Cold War, it followed for many that we should bear any burden and pay any price to sustain that superiority in every region of the world, no matter what people in these regions felt about this. This was a conclusion that our military-industrial complex heard with approval. It had fattened on the Cold War but was beginning to suffer from enemy deprivation syndrome — that is, the disorientation and queasy apprehension about future revenue one gets when one's enemy has irresponsibly dropped dead. With no credible enemy clearly in view, how was the defense industrial base to be kept in business? The answer was to make the preservation of global military hegemony our objective. With no real discussion and little fanfare, we did so. This led to increases in defense spending despite the demise of the multifaceted threat posed by the USSR. In other words, it worked.

Only a bit over sixty percent of our military spending is in the Department of Defense budget, with the rest hidden like Easter eggs in the nooks and crannies of other federal departments and agencies' budgets. If you put it all together, however, defense-related spending comes to about $1.2 trillion, or about eight percent of our GDP. That is quite a bit more than the figure usually cited, which is the mere $685 billion (or 4.6 percent of GDP) of our official defense budget. Altogether, we spend more on military power than the rest of the world — friend or foe — combined. (This way we can be sure we can defeat everyone in the world if they all gang up on us. Don't laugh! If we are sufficiently obnoxious, we might just drive them to it.) No one questions this level of spending or asks what it is for. Politicians just tell us it is short of what we require. We have embraced the cult of the warrior. The defense budget is its totem.

Of course, our virtue as Americans is self-evident, at least to us. Our military power is famously irresistible. Those with the power to do good have the duty to do it. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave us a virtual monopoly on global military power. It followed that we must use our power to impose our values on others abroad unfortunate enough to have different mores. Or so the neocons argued, in a sort of parody of the beliefs of America's long-vanished, Christian Wahhabis — my Puritan ancestors. Hence, Operation Iraqi Freedom. Liberal interventionists often join the neocons in their eagerness to remake the world in our image. Hence, the war to secure Afghanistan for feminism and other undeniably worthy causes not normally associated with that country. Americans are learning the hard way that armed evangelism and the diplomacy-free foreign policy associated with it give birth to more enemies than they kill. But what's done is done. We're addicted to military surges and the substitution of campaign plans for strategies. We just can't seem to quit.

The many trillions we spent on perfecting our capability to use force against our Soviet enemies included paying billions of dollars to universities and research institutes to develop doctrine for influencing foreigners by coercive means. To date, there has been no comparable effort to research how to persuade others to do things our way without whacking them. Problems without military components get lower priority. That is why we strain to relate issues like climate change to future military tasks. Two generations of decision-makers have been taught that only the threat or the use of force can really change foreign minds or produce decisive results. Of course, to change minds at home we draw on bonds of friendship, seduce, inveigle, coax, wheedle, beguile, or make it worth their financial while for them to do things our way. Few of us would consider it appropriate or effective to seek our compatriots' cooperation by pulling a gun or pistol-whipping them. Foreigners are a different matter. In American politics, common sense now stops at the water's edge.

Amazingly, as an example, we retain a touching faith in sanctions as an instrument of coercive influence. Our diplomacy follows a predictable pattern. It begins with bluster, experiments with covert action, then proceeds to demands that others join us in sanctions, which become a diplomatic end in themselves. When sanctions fail – as they always do, we put the bombers in the air and the tanks on the dirt. Somehow, the thought that foreigners could, like Americans, be induced rather than bombarded into seeing it as in their interest to do things our way is seldom, if ever, considered. After all, they're not like us. The only language they understand is that uttered by firepower. Only wimps attempt to reason with such people.

Given our idiosyncratic and often counterproductive preference for military solutions, it's hardly surprising that we have lost our political hegemony. Equally clearly, the neo-liberal dogma of deregulation and the "bankster" capitalism it fostered on Wall Street have been discredited. The wingnut notion that fiscal deficits don't matter has been disproved. All these developments, and the military adventurism that catalyzed our fall from global grace, have indeed brought disrepute on our country. Other nations are indeed strengthening. Yet, America remains the only military power with worldwide reach, the safe haven of rattled foreign investors, the possessor of the single most important reserve currency, and by far the largest economy and market in the world. Much to the distress of proponents of higher culture everywhere, our entertainment industry and universities retain preeminent appeal to the world's youth. In short, the United States continues to possess unmatched fundamentals. Our decline — if that is the word — is self-inflicted. So is the collapse of our self-confidence.

It is hard to believe what we have done to ourselves. It is harder still to know where to start to diagnose it and to begin to prescribe appropriate solutions. I have no experience in domestic politics. I cannot explain how the Congress became so venal and corrupt — a forum dedicated almost completely to the sale and trading of favors on behalf of special interests — or why we have allowed our political, economic, and social systems to decay to the extent they have. I do not know how we decided we were OK with foreign nations excelling us in an ever-growing range of social and economic indicators. I will stick to what I know, which is foreign affairs.

The bottom line in that arena? Without really understanding what we've done, we have thoroughly militarized our approach to foreign policy. It has come to the point that the Secretary of Defense (of all people) feels obliged to complain about the atrophy of civilian instruments of influence and the incapacity of non-military elements of our national security apparatus to manage programs abroad. He's right to do so. Civilian incapacities leave soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to do a mediocre job of diplomacy and development instead of the superb job they can do as war fighters.

But it's not just that military forces, funding, and capabilities dwarf those of the Department of State, related agencies, and the Foreign Service. (So, of course, do those of the intelligence community.) Budgets can be plussed up, and to some extent this is happening. More than a quantitative problem, however, our statecraft deficit and crisis of civilian capacity are qualitative problems. They have to do with decades of underfunding, malorganization, deprofessionalization, inattention to training and professional development, and — let's face it — sometimes truly catastrophic leadership by elected officials and political appointees. And they have to do with civic illiteracy amongst Americans.

As the Chinese saying has it: "three feet of ice didn't freeze in a one day of cold." These problems took time to reach their current severity. They can be fixed. But this will take time as well as money. And fixing them will be politically demanding to say the least.

Among other things, it will require stripping the congressionally mandated barnacles from the ship of state. The foreign affairs agencies must be reorganized to deal with the world beyond our borders rather than to appease special interest groups at home. To placate particular blocs of voters, Congress has created a bewildering Rube Goldberg-type array of wheel-spinning bureaucratic entities — bureaus, ambassadors-at-large, special coordinators, czars, and the like. These establishments make it look as if we're taking special interests seriously. So what if their work eats resources but doesn't connect to much in the real world beyond our borders? We have knocked together a Department of State that even gifted managers find unmanageable and a policy process that produces more platitudes than strategy.

Regaining diplomatic effectiveness will require an unprecedented emphasis on training and professionalization. The concept of the foreign service as a refuge for dilettantes went out of style a while back. Replacing dilettantes with campaign gerbils, as we did in Iraq, was not an improvement. But our foreign service is not only amateurish, untrained, and unreflective in comparison with our military, it is far less trained and professional than the foreign services of other great and middle-ranking powers. It should not surprise anyone that retired flag officers, rather than foreign service officers, are now being appointed to some of our most difficult ambassadorial assignments. What can one say of a so-called profession that cannot present the best qualified candidates for its own most senior and demanding positions? What's happening confirms the militarization of our diplomacy. It also reflects a judgment about the professional incapacities of our career diplomats.

Meanwhile, new employees and a whole lot of contractors are being rushed to the diplomatic front with next to no training beyond brief familiarization with government operations. Well, why not? After all that's how we train the third of our ambassadors whose principal qualification for diplomacy is wealth and political connections. In other countries, civilian control of the military is paralleled by political control of diplomacy, that is, a foreign policy whose goals are set by elected and appointed national leaders but whose implementation is carried out by experienced professionals. We are now alone among nations in imagining that political appointments should be made directly to the diplomatic battlefields on which policy must be implemented. We let our ambassadors learn their trade through trial and error on the job. We expect their career subordinates to cover for them. As a nation, we have less margin for error than we used to have. We can ill afford diplomatic operations that are so much less competent and professional than the related operations of our armed services.

Given the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, we need to leverage our huge natural advantages as a nation into restored international leadership. Rather than allowing others to rearrange the world to their gain and our loss, we need to shape the global trends and regional events that bear on our interests and values. To be able to do this, we must, no less than other nations with which we compete and cooperate, develop and insist upon professional standards from the bottom to the top of our diplomatic services.

The last election seemed to herald the demilitarization of our foreign policy and a return to diplomacy. So far it hasn't worked out that way. The reason is the political culture bequeathed to us by the four decades of the Cold War and the decade and a half of national hubris that followed it. The notion that military phenomena are the only significant element of national security policy would be regarded elsewhere as simple-minded. It is, however, the politically correct view among our elite. This accounts in part for the strange pattern of American military activism and diplomatic default in regions like the Middle East.

Since very few Americans have any idea what diplomats do or what diplomacy is, it is hardly surprising that they imagine it as appeasement and the avoidance of strife rather than a means of cultivating support for US positions and sizing up adversaries while setting them straight about US interests. Nothing in their educational experience, on their television screens, in popular fiction, or in movie theaters gives Americans any basis for understanding where diplomacy begins or ends or what it can or can't do. Of course, a public that is so ignorant of geography that it cannot distinguish Australia from Iraq on a world map and so parochial that it is aware of no connection between Judaism and Islam might not know what to do with diplomacy even if it understood it. Yet the international alternative to diplomacy is violence — either violence from us or violence against us. Our schools and colleges don't just fail to prepare Americans to deal with the challenging world we live in. They reinforce dysfunctional approaches to the world and dumb us down about it while reassuring us that we are the best and most virtuous.

Erroneous assumptions and assertive ignorance about foreign societies are self-reinforcing. Polls show that Americans do not want more foreign news in part because they feel they lack the background to understand it or to see how it links to the fate of our country or themselves. For this and many other reasons (including often obvious ideological biases), our news oligopolies filter what they report about the world beyond our borders. The net effect is to reinforce blind spots and prejudice rather than to challenge stereotypes or provoke thought about why U.S. policies often seem to produce backlash rather than progress toward their declared objectives.

Perhaps this sort of contempt for the intelligence of the American people explains our leaders' evident fear of candid discourse on an expanding range of international issues. Take, for example, our pathetic national inability to do demand management. Without the insatiable demand of North American addicts, neither drug lords nor the current bloodletting in northern Mexico would exist. Americans sell Mexican cartels the guns they use to kill anyone who gets in the way of supplying other Americans with drugs. Yet our politicians, to the extent they take account of the issue at all, talk about supporting the Mexican authorities, not about ending the American drug culture that is the source of the problem or curbing the gun sales that make it so lethal. Or think about the last presidential election, in which candidates promised the American people both cheap gas at the pump and lessened dependence on oil imports. Or consider our efforts to deal with Muslim terrorists with global reach while denying that our subsidies for Israel and our own invasions and occupations of Muslim lands have anything to do with motivating their attacks on us. Dumb-downs, demagoguery, and denial do not provide a basis for resumed global agenda-setting by the United States.

The absence of American leadership is conspicuous in a widening range of international problem areas — the precarious transnational role of the dollar, the missing peace process in the Middle East, the all-but-abandoned effort at trade liberalization, Russia's still undefined relationship to Europe, the eroding rule of international law, the wobbling US-Japan alliance, accelerating climate change, contriving a satisfactory Chinese role in global governance, and many other arguably less momentous matters come to mind. Then there are perplexing issues we can neither defer nor evade, like how to cope with spreading hostility in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how to extricate ourselves from Iraq without throwing it either to Iran or into turmoil — or both. I have not exhausted the list. Doing nothing about so many international issues — or letting them drift to all-too-plausible ruin — should not be an acceptable option for our country.

What, then, are the prospects for a renewal of effective American international leadership? And, if it is not forthcoming, what — other than vacuum — will replace it?

I have discussed a few prerequisites for a revival of American diplomacy. These include a more sophisticated understanding of foreign affairs by citizens and their representatives; the reorganization of our foreign affairs agencies to focus on U.S. national interests abroad rather than to posture for special interests at home; the development of a more professional civilian presence abroad; and the appointment of better qualified officials at policy-making levels in Washington. Until these pieces are in place, it is hard to see how the United States can conceive or implement strategies for foreign affairs that require robust contributions of a political, economic, cultural, or informational nature to complement those of our military.

There are two ways to reform our educational system, government structure, career development programs for diplomats and development specialists, and inappropriate use of political appointees. One is effortless. We can wait for disaster to impose recognition of the need for change. This is a time-honored American tradition. Think of our failure to prepare for Pearl Harbor; think of Sputnik or Hurricane Katrina. The other way is arduous. We can try tackling our deficiencies before they do more damage to us and the world. I see heads shaking in disbelief that we might actually attempt any such thing. The collapse in our national confidence is a problem too. European friends who have not been here for a while tell me they are struck by the extent to which the vaunted optimism and can-do spirit of American society are now in eclipse. The dominant motif in our politics is pessimism and partisan rancor, coupled with a deep cynicism about Washington's capacity to acknowledge, let alone mount rational responses, to the challenges we face as a nation and people.

If pessimism proves justified — if we cannot do what is required to pull our diplomatic act together — we must expect a further decline in our power to shape the world order and what happens within it. For the past decade or more, in the absence of American leadership and engagement, the focus of problem solving has been devolving to the sub-global and regional levels. It has been moving beyond our control. This trend is accelerating.

China and others are experimenting with new policies and monetary groupings to hedge the dollar. Events in the Middle East are taking their own perilous course, not only undirected but often uninfluenced by us. Trade deals at the bilateral and regional level fill the vacuum left by the disintegration of the Doha Round. Russia and Europe are working out a separate peace without regard to stated American interests. Since the United States no longer polices its own behavior, other nations have begun to do so, issuing arrest warrants for U.S. officials engaged in actions, like extraordinary rendition and torture, that violate international law. American-sponsored practices on matters like the law of the sea are being set aside in favor of interpretations that disadvantage us. Japan is charting a course to an unknown destination, without apparent benefit of American counsel. U.S. relations with Turkey are in free fall. In the absence of a global regime for climate change, major polluters are each doing their own thing. For the first time in decades, China is picking diplomatic fights with the United States and we are preparing to pick fights with it. Brazil is staking out positions at odds with our own on a widening range of global and regional issues. I could but will not go on.

Let me instead sum up. The United States remains militarily supreme but increasingly unable to work its will politically or economically on the global or regional stages. America's fundamentals are sound. Our diminished influence is much more the result of dysfunctional behavior and organization — diplomatic incapacity aggravated by militarism — than of national weakness. Be that as it may, the world now looks elsewhere for leadership. With the inherited international system no longer working and no one in charge, an increasing number of urgent issues fester unattended. A resurgence in American leadership is needed. Such a resurgence is possible. It is, however, unlikely that our politicians or public will muster the determination to bring it off until catastrophe imposes it.

In the absence of reinvigorated U.S. diplomacy, others — including allies and friends as well as enemies — will craft solutions to issues in ways that exclude us. Solutions like that may benefit them. As likely as not, they will adversely affect the well-being and domestic tranquility of the United States. Opportunities to advance our national interests will meanwhile be lost. This is, in fact, already happening. An increased defense budget and greater capacity to use violence against foreigners will not turn this around — even if supplemented by additional diplomats and development specialists. That will certainly be the case if these civilian augmentees are neither professionally qualified nor properly trained.

The Cold War taught us to put military matters first. In the 21st Century, it has become clear that this does not work. As John Maynard Keynes once remarked, "the difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." To preserve both our liberties and our prosperity, Americans need to rediscover our values, remake our government, and reinvent our current militaristic approach to international relations. We have the potential to renew ourselves and the power to play a revitalized role at the center of world affairs. The longer we wait to do this, the harder it will be. Why not start now?

**Remarks to the Foreign Affairs Retirees of Northern Virginia -Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., USFS (Ret.) -Arlington, Virginia, 24 March 2010

A call for papers, in a PsyDip-related area...

2010-03-25T19:49:00.000-07:00

How can we describe, explain and predict

the psychological processes of public diplomacy?

Media Psychology and Public Diplomacy

A Special Issue of the American Journal of Media Psychology

There was a time when much of public diplomacy occurred amongst diplomats and at times also targeted opinion leaders of various countries. Today, public diplomacy entails explicit and implicit messages sent by one country to members of a general public in another country for the purpose of shaping their attitudes toward some aspect of the sending country. What processes can best describe attitude formation and /or attitude change as it relates to public diplomacy in a global media environment? What role, if any, do the international media networks (news and entertainment, traditional and web-based) play in this context?

Researchers with interests in such areas as attitude formation and change, media-psychology, social psychology, cross-cultural communication, political communication, political psychology, public opinion, international communication, news exposure, international relations, media effects and related topics are invited to submit papers to the American Journal of Media Psychology for a special issue that focuses on explaining attitude formation and attitude change as related to international public diplomacy within a global media environment.

Submissions sought are ones that tackle this topic by either focusing exclusively on applying psychology and /or communication theories to this topic area, and/or conducting comprehensive literature reviews of studies that have findings that are applicable to this topic area, and/or carrying out theory-driven empirical investigations that focus on this topic.

The current deadline for submissions is August 27, 2010.

The American Journal of Media Psychology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes theoretical and empirical papers and essays and book reviews that advance an understanding of media effects and processes on individuals in society. Submissions should have a psychological focus, which means the level of analysis should focus on individuals and their interaction with or relationship to mass media content and institutions. All theoretical and methodological perspectives are welcomed. For instructions on submitting a manuscript, please visit:

http://www.marquettejournals.org/submissionguidelines.html

To see a sample issue of AJMP, please point your browser to: http://www.marquettejournals.org/accessthejournals/amerjourofmediapsych.html

Questions about this call for manuscripts can be directed to Dr. Michael Elasmar, Editor, American Journal of Media Psychology at elasmar@bu.edu

Google in China: Context and Consequences, a talk by Kaiser Kuo

2010-03-17T16:57:00.000-07:00

Google in China: Context and Consequences

Kaiser Kuo's recent talk on differing internet cultures in China vs. in the U.S. The PsyDip implications are many, when considering the individual user's experience and its effects on his/her perception of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship, especially with regard to human rights and economic development.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwGy4cEMXC8&feature=player_embedded

In China's Shoes: A great PsyDip-like analysis by Headley

2010-02-28T05:55:00.000-08:00

Headley:
Some months ago I made a crude attempt to describe China’s psychology to a large group of professional U.S. investors. I had precisely two minutes, so on a whim I decided to lay out an alternative history of the U.S. with the hope of giving the audience some understanding of China’s domestic identity. So, forgive the vast revisionism and crude reductionism, and please consider what our national attitudes and debates might resemble if the U.S. had gone through something like the Chinese experience.

Read full article here...

http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?postId=2771877

PsyDip: This is an excellent look at China's psychology through historical perspective-taking.

Should we put more religious thought into foreign policy?

2010-02-27T17:13:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post explores the topic of religion in U.S. foreign policy...
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/index.html

U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF)...
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/irf/index.htm

Internet Freedom: Open Access to Global Mind?

2010-01-21T16:38:00.000-08:00

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: "The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet." (01/21/10)

Landmark speech from SecState Hillary Clinton today asserting 5 key Internet freedoms, paraphrased here:

1. Freedom of expression (People should be allowed open exchange of ideas on-line, including criticism of government).

2. Freedom of worship (People should be allowed to assemble on-line in faith, prayers, and beliefs).

3. Freedom from want (People should be allowed on-line access to available social & economic opportunities).

4. Freedom from fear (People should be free from cyber-attacks from on-line criminals and authoritarian governments).

5. Freedom to connect (People should be allowed to connect to the Internet, websites, and each other on-line, free from government interference.)

See Clinton's speech here...

http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/internet_freedom

PsyDip: Open Access to Global Mind?

What are the implications for authoritarian governments?

The original, unofficial Chinese response to Hillary Clinton,

in the Global Times (01/22/10):

The real stake in (pg 8)

Quote: With her seemingly impassioned speech Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may be said to have raised the stakes in Washington's clash with Beijing over Internet freedom. "We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas." Clinton's words may sound perfectly right to some in the West, but would be regarded as a new threat by people in other parts of the world. The U.S. campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted Internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy. The hard fact that Clinton has failed to highlight in her speech is that bulk of the information flowing from the U.S. and other Western countries is loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those countries that do not fol low their lead. In contrast, in the global information order, countries that are disadvantaged could not produce the massive flow of information required, and could never rival the Western countries in terms of information control and dissemination. Countries disadvantaged by the unequal and undemocratic information flow have to protect their national interest, and take steps toward this. This is essential for their political stability as well as normal conduct of economic and social life. These facts about the difficulties of developing nations, though understood by politicians like Clinton are not communicated to the people of Western countries. Instead, those politicians publicize and pursue their claims purely from a Western standpoint. This practice is morally unworthy and has been resisted by intellectuals in developing countries.

PsyDip: here you have both sides of the issue, thanks to an uncensored Internet. To quote John Gilmore, "The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it." In psychological terms, this is known as neuroplasticity, the lifelong ability of the brain to reorganize neural pathways based on new experiences. It begs the question, can anyone really control the Internet at this point? Perhaps the Global Mind genie is already out of the bottle, despite authoritarian governments' best attempts at censoring the web?

And an additional irony (01/24/10)...

"In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access."

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/index.html?hpt=C2

PsyDip: Clearly we are navigating new ground in Global Mind, Global Brain. To what extent is it beneficial (and for whom) to permit access across networks? Continuing with the neural network analogy to play devil's advocate, is it appropriate to have full parallel access across neurons and neural networks? When that is the case in Neuropsychology, do we not call it things like Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, and Synesthesia, for instance? (Such as in excess "spreading activation" of neurons or information nodes) Might it be more adaptive for the organism (and the Internet) to have compartmentalized communications? If so, at what point are we getting into the domains of repression, denial, multiple personality disorder, and various other unhealthy states of neural network (and computer network) miscommunication or mis-education? If we apply the neural network metaphor to the Global Mind of computer networks, what lessons can we take given competing egos, nation-states, and other mind-entities?

In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/world/26cyber.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

PsyDip: When talk of digital combat in cyberspace arises, have we not already moved into the realm of Global Mind "reading", digital-psychological warfare, and at minimum virtual terrorism? Given that in an information age, information societies depend on the secure and reliable flow of digital information, do hackers (both state-sponsored and independent) not pose a real, tangible threat to intellectual property, logistics control, and information management? Are these fundamental concepts not rooted in psychological dynamics that have potentially life-threatening dimensions, as when economies are brought to their knees or when societal life support functions are crippled by those who would introduce malicious code into our cognitive-organizational software? How can information societies rebound under such "fire sale" calamities when they have become so dependent on computerization of fundamental services such as power supply and communication?

Given network vulnerability and the never-ending evolution and "arms race" characteristics of digital security environments, are we not in large measure newly dependent on benevolent technocrats in whom we must put our faith? How can we ensure that our digital interests are always maintained one step ahead of those of our digital detractors and yet at the same time avoid creation of a digital divide so large it invites attacks from those who feel they have nothing to lose? In short, how can we create a sound psychological doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" in the digital age? Can it be that digital interdependence is both the problem and the solution?

"It would be especially good if Beijing could be encouraged into an agreement about what types of hacking -- say, messing with another country's electrical grid -- constitute an act of war."...

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/26/the_chinese_internet_century

"The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom."

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704878904575031263063242900-lMyQjAxMTAwMDMwMDEzNDAyWj.html

On Cyberwar...
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1957679,00.html

The Psychology of Suffering: How We Cope With Cosmic Evil (Hell in Haiti)

2010-01-18T06:58:00.000-08:00

On existential crises brought about by cosmic evils...

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evil-deeds/201001/the-psychology-suffering-how-we-cope-cosmic-evil

On magical thinking surrounding events large and small...

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200802/magical-thinking

Haiti Earthquake, Psychologists & International Emergencies

2010-01-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

Our hearts go out to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Please donate to a preferred charity directing emergency supplies to Haiti, for example the Red Cross: http://www.redcross.org/

Here are some resources from the standpoint of psychology and international emergencies:

APA on Managing Stress in Wake of Haiti Earthquake:

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/01/stress-haiti.aspx

U.S. State Department Haiti Earthquake Relief:

http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/ha/earthquake/index.htm

Statement on the Role of Psychologists in International Emergencies, by the American Psychological Association (APA):

http://www.apa.org/international/resources/emergency-statement.aspx

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Response to Haiti Earthquake:

http://www.usaid.gov/locations/latin_america_caribbean/country/haiti/eq/

Guidelines on Mental Health & Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings, by the World Health Organization (WHO):

http://www.who.int/mental_health/emergencies/guidelines_iasc_mental_health_psychosocial_june_2007.pdf

U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti:

http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/minustah/

Developmental PsyDip: Do Nations Have Lifecycles?

2009-11-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

Developmental Psychological Diplomacy:

Do Nations Have Lifecycles?

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

State Dept: Make up your own mind about God

2009-10-29T06:14:00.001-07:00

PsyDip of Supernatural Thinking

State Dept: "So it is our hope that [this report] will encourage existing religious freedom movements around the world and promote dialogue among governments and within societies on how best to accommodate religious communities and protect each individual’s right to believe or not believe, as that individual sees fit."

PsyDip: What happens when people of some nationalities believe their religion is the one true religion and other religions are not? What happens when people believe their national government should endorse a religion? If religions are predicated on humanity and doing good, why are there so many international religious conflicts? How does religious thinking solve international problems? How does religious thinking cause international problems? Why isn't it enough for most people to "be good for goodness sake"? What do all religions have in common internationally? What if a nation's peoples do not believe in religious freedom and instead believe that it is the duty of all to convert all others to the "one, true religion"? How can we get beyond religious conflict? Do religious mandates (e.g. "turn the other cheek") even apply at the geopolitical level? Are people somehow genetically hard-wired to believe in supernatural forces? Do people with no religious beliefs deserve equal freedom of conscience as those who do believe in supernatural forces? Is there some merit to religious diversity for the sake of it? Is there some merit to freedom of choice about what one believes about the nature of the universe? Assuming he/she/it exists, what would God want? Is there something to be gained by defending human rights internationally, even the right to life, with or without appealing to a higher authority? Given that religions emerged in disparate, tribal environments in pre-industrial, pre-scientific, and agrarian societies, how can they now be adapted to meet the needs of an increasingly information-based, technological, and interconnected modern world? Is global society bound to see religious heads butting up against one another until one side can convert, annihilate, or overpopulate the others, or can we somehow all agree to peaceful co-existence?

Test your implicit biases about religions using a Harvard experimental method here:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/featuredtask.html

Read Karen Armstrong's article on God and foreign policy, in this month's Foreign Policy magazine:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/god_0

Former SecStates: PsyDip of Gender Key to Global Security

2009-10-27T03:30:00.000-07:00

Rice & Albright Posit PsyDip Link Between Gender & Global Security, Citing Shriver's Report

A society that is not decent to women is not a decent society, and an indecent society is a dangerous one. Men who tyrannize women are prone, in time, to extend their despotism to social and political rivals of every description. In our 21st-century world, such societies ultimately pose the greatest threats to global security.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28738.html

Diplomacy & Abnormal Psychology: Are Countries Sometimes Crazy?

2009-10-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

Diplomacy & Abnormal Psychology: Are Countries Sometimes Crazy?

Abnormal Psychology is one of the most intriguing areas of psychology for its focus on cognition, emotion, and behavior that falls outside the range of “normal” – that is, outside the range of what the majority of people experience. Certainly creative genius can be considered unusual, but Abnormal Psychology’s focus is on the maladaptive. On September 12^th, this blog showcased five broad psychology paradigms: Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism, Humanism, Cognitivism, and Evolutionary Psychology. Abnormal Psychology is not a paradigm per se, but a sub-field of content in psychology. Psychologists can use one or more of the five broad psychology paradigms as analytical reference points for interpreting Abnormal Psychology, just as with Social Psychology, which appeared on this blog on September 25. Our focus in this blog entry is, how can Abnormal Psychology be brought to bear on Diplomacy? Can a discussion of Abnormal Psychology help us in any way to better understand international relations? Are countries and/or leaders sometimes “abnormal” on the world scene? As a concrete case in point, might the international slave trade of the colonial period be considered to have been a mass mental illness? A collective delusion?

Abnormal Psychology probably stretches back historically to the dawn of human understanding, in that early peoples tried to understand mental illness in terms of demon possession, Gods, and magic. The Ancient Greeks and Romans began to think of mental illness in terms of medical, biological disorders (especially Hippocrates). Ancient Chinese thought of mental illness in terms of imbalanced “Yin” and “Yang”. Yet for most of human history, mental illness has been grossly misunderstood and incorrectly interpreted as possession, witchcraft, lunacy, and/or a consequence of sinful or immoral behavior – especially during the Middle Ages when scientific thinking was rejected. Since the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, mental illness has been viewed principally in naturalistic, scientific terms. Then in the 20^th Century, Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, and John Watson were able to establish classification methods and a research tradition for advancing the professional field of abnormal psychology in order to address psychosis and neurosis empirically.

Abnormal Psychology has almost never been applied to diplomacy, at least not publicly or formally. Exceptions include the work of creating psychological profiles and explanations of behavior for certain notorious world leaders, for instance: Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and Milosevich. Here is an example of a report on Hitler’s personality generated by a psychologist working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, during WWII: http://library.lawschool.cornell.edu/WhatWeHave/SpecialCollections/Donovan/Hitler/index.cfm

With the benefit of over 60 years of psychological research since WWII, psychology now has the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. The “DSM” is a massive guidebook of mental disorders used by mental health professionals to diagnose and treat people with psychological disorders. Though far from perfect, the DSM strives to have a solid, empirical foundation for its classifications. The APA releases new editions as the field of knowledge grows, based on scientific research and clinical practice. Factors that contribute to mental illness are well-established now in terms of stress, genetics, and environmental influences. The brain is, with its complex biochemical processes, well-established as the seat of psychopathology. The DSM categorizes mental disorders in terms of axes, with the understanding that clinical interventions can take place both at the cognitive-behavioral level and by taking direct action on the biochemistry of the brain, through therapy and drugs, respectively. Axis I includes major mental disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Axis II includes pervasive conditions such as personality disorders and mental retardation. Axis III includes brain injuries and other acute medical conditions. In reviewing the details of the DSM and its axes, it is tempting to consider this guide in terms of the affairs of international leaders, nation-state populations, and domestic and foreign policies.

We might simply ask: do some nations, leaders, and citizens (including our own) exhibit anti-social behavior, relative to those of other countries, as a function of some sort of mental disorder, caused by biological, social, or cultural forces? If so, can we bring their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors into the “normal” or “acceptable” range by some sort of “clinical” intervention? Do some people have chemical or emotional imbalances which need to be considered in our interactions with them? Can we better understand and work with other nations and their leaders and citizenry by looking into where their (or our) behavior fits in terms of world norms and how we can get the behavior into the normal range (or into an ideal range that is not the norm)?

We might consider that some world leaders throughout history have engaged in behaviors so extreme and malicious that it would be naïve not to consider that some type of personality disorder, or at least delusional thinking was involved. For example, who can argue that Ivan the Terrible was a psychologically balanced person? We might consider too that the populations that make up some nations or groups of people in a given time period might have social or cultural propensities that would put them in the category of neurotic or psychotic as a group collectively. For example, consider the group mentality, comprised of individual mentalities, in groups of people during the Salem Witch Trials of colonial Massachusetts. And what about some of the torment that took place during China's Cultural Revolution? More recently, look what is going on in the Congo, where rape is being used as a military weapon:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/10/16/amanpour.congo.rape.documentary/index.html

Can anyone legitimately argue that this behavior is in any way representative of psychologically healthy individuals? In all of these cases, to exclude psychology’s role in international relations would be short-sighted, no doubt. The difficulty in making the leap from Abnormal Psychology to Diplomacy is that we have to understand that mental health tends not to be a binary question. One is not either normal or mentally ill. Mental health runs on a continuum – a continuum comprised of a multitude of sub-continua, running along many different factors. As we have noted before in our discussion of the psychology of terrorism, people can be totally “normal” in nearly every way in terms of their cognitive functioning and yet they can still be prone to engage in gross acts of violence or inhumanity. Therefore, creating a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of diplomatic proportions would be an undertaking of large scale complexity, something much harder to do scientifically than to analyze the behavior of individuals.

Nevertheless, what we are doing with treaty and protocol tools like those of the Geneva Conventions is precisely to create international standards for what is and what is not disordered or “ill” behavior. This is no doubt challenging when there are often deep-seated conflicts in the very fundamentals of what people of different nations consider “normal” and “acceptable” behavior. When you look at the underlying value debates between concepts such as individualism and collectivism, secularism and sectarianism, and those of different economic models such as capitalism and communism, you are really hard-pressed to come up with universal norms for what constitutes a “healthy and balanced” leader, nation, or citizenry in any global sense of the word. That said, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the powers that comprise the United Nations is probably the best vehicle for this discussion. Running at the PsyDip nexus, we might consider it to serve as a kind of “Diplomatic DSM” and a guide that can help us interpret when a country's behavior may border on “disordered”, if “only” in a global, value-judgment sense.

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

As a caveat, we certainly do not want to get into the business of labeling all our adversaries as mentally ill and the target of diplomatic therapy. Nevertheless, PsyDip argues that we can and should pursue interpretations from Abnormal Psychology for the realpolitik that so often underlies the pomp and circumstance we observe in global affairs. If all we do is look at our own national behavior with the humble lens of “self-improvement”, it could serve as a catalyst for other nations to do the same. It is no accident that would-be clinical psychologists are typically required by graduate programs to undergo their own psychotherapy as part of their training to provide such services to other people. The notion is that relations between people always occur through the ether of psychology, whether one-on-one or between countries.

This posting started out by mentioning slavery. We might do well to consider how else to explain slavery and other such dehumanizing global practices if not by way of Abnormal Psychology. In closing, here are some other diplomatic topics which could potentially fall at the nexus of Abnormal Psychology and Diplomacy: genocides, terrorism, arms races, dictatorships, demagogues, crises, paranoia, censorship, extreme unilateralism, coups, election fraud, torture, atrocities, holocaust issues, kidnapping, parental child abduction, war crimes, trafficking in persons, sex trafficking, piracy, etc. There is clearly no shortage of inhumanity to consider on the world scene. The question is, are we ready to do what it takes to become better people, better countries?

Getting in Touch with Your Inner Intelligence Agent

2009-10-05T21:24:00.000-07:00

The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

Richards J. Heuer, Jr.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/index.html

Of the diverse problems that impede accurate intelligence analysis, those inherent in human mental processes are surely among the most important and most difficult to deal with. Intelligence analysis is fundamentally a mental process, but understanding this process is hindered by the lack of conscious awareness of the workings of our own minds.

A basic finding of cognitive psychology is that people have no conscious experience of most of what happens in the human mind. Many functions associated with perception, memory, and information processing are conducted prior to and independently of any conscious direction. What appears spontaneously in consciousness is the result of thinking, not the process of thinking.

Weaknesses and biases inherent in human thinking processes can be demonstrated through carefully designed experiments. They can be alleviated by conscious application of tools and techniques that should be in the analytical tradecraft toolkit of all intelligence analysts.

PsyDip: To what extent do we fail to prevent acts of terrorism and/or blow-back by virtue of how our brains are wired? Do we not over-simplify causality in our attempts to understand why something happened and whether something will happen in the future? Do we not pay most attention and favor interpretations of facts which confirm our pre-existing beliefs? Do we not often fail to see "outside the box" until it is too late? When something new is revealed to us that we did not see coming, why is it that we often feel like in retrospect it was so obvious and right under our noses all along?

How can we foster organizational settings that honor the taking of multiple perspectives in a constructive way? How can we reduce "blind spots" in how we process information both as individuals and as groups? What can we do in our institutions and our daily workplaces to give constructive dissent its proper place as the harbinger it often turns out to be? What can we do to remain hyper-vigilant to ever-changing realities and most importantly the fact that none of us perceives reality exactly as it is? Like Neo in the Matrix or Plato's Allegory of the Cave, would we not benefit by staying mindful of our mind's prisms?

Blame it on the Media?

2009-10-03T18:55:00.000-07:00

Psychology of Media & Conflict

PsyDip attended a lively panel discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) this past Thursday, October 1st, entitled: "Media as Global Diplomat II: New Findings on the Science of Media and Conflict". USIP is an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress. Its goals are to prevent international conflict, promote post-conflict stability, and increase conflict management capacity. This panel discussion with keynote speaker Queen Noor of Jordan proved to be an interesting combination of psychology, media, and international relations, which is why PsyDip took note.

http://www.usip.org/events/media-global-diplomat-ii

Topics included an inspirational address by Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan, followed by a segment on the brain and violent conflict, and another segment on the news and entertainment media. The first segment was expertly moderated by former U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, Cynthia Schneider; the second just as well by Tamara Gould, VP for ITVS International Distribution. The main idea of the discussion was that there is a psychology to the media's influence on worldwide conflicts and that society needs to do more to harness the power of media for conflict prevention and resolution. A lot of big ideas were aired and discussed in a short amount of time. An example of the way forward was trotted out early in the day, by pointing to "Search for Common Ground":

http://www.sfcg.org/

What PsyDip found most interesting was the discussion led by Cognitive Neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe, currently at MIT. Dr. Saxe gave a brief overview of the science of media and conflict from what is essentially a psychologist's point of view. Her three key points from psychological research findings were as follows:

1) People don't generally know their own minds. Attitudes often reflect deep emotions and unconscious thoughts.

2) People generally resist changing their minds. Attempts at direct persuasion typically fail.

3) People are most likely to change their minds in order to be more like other people. They are most willing to change their minds to reflect those of people they view as being most like themselves.

Dr. Saxe is a young, female scientist with a lot of fresh ideas and energy to bring to the table. MIT is clearly proud of these facts, as noted here in MIT News:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/saxe-tt0514.html

What PsyDip found most compelling about her talk at USIP was the reminder that diplomacy may need to take a different tack from direct persuasion if it is to succeed. Direct persuasion may have a place, but the research literature seems to show that it is mostly ineffective, at least by itself.

Dr. Saxe argued that science can offer conflict resolution, and therefore diplomacy, several assets. Here are three that she mentioned:

1) The technology to look "under the hood", by way of measuring psychological associations, autonomic nervous system responses, and direct brain imaging.

2) A focus on "how", by way of reduction of problems to so-called "minimal pairs", i.e. factors that go together in a relationship in an irreducible way.

3) Quantitative measures and statistical techniques for analysis of problems.

Dr. Saxe described an experiment she conducted on how dialog can change an out-group's opinion, in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This work is not yet published, but basically it involved a control group and two experimental groups, comparing attitude change before and after Skype video calls between Israeli and Palestinian research participants. What Dr. Saxe found was basically that listening and being heard where much more instrumental in causing attitude change, versus mere essay exchange. She hopes to add a brain imaging component and perhaps some other physiological measures to this research paradigm in subsequent trials. The message appeared to be that if we want to change someone’s opinion, we really need to do our best to listen to their own.

At the macro-level, Dr. Saxe argued that the media play a significant role in shaping emotions and that in doing so they exert indirect persuasion on their consumers. The implication was that the media should choose their role models carefully. The notion that attitudes can be easily changed by direct persuasion was downplayed. In contrast, Dr. Saxe and the others on her panel argued that subjects are most likely to change their attitudes when they are told and believe that society's or their peer group's attitude is changing, and they wish to align themselves with that change. Context and process were said to be very important in this dynamic, which underscores the high relevance of the new and social media in eliciting change in contemporary media environments.

Dr. Jay Winsten from Harvard's School of Public Health was also on the panel and added key insights relevant to PsyDip:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/jay-winsten/

Dr. Winsten mentioned how communication deeply affects public health, as evidenced by the success of the "designated driver" campaign. In a short amount of time, the DD campaign was able to capitalize on social norms in order to change public opinion and reduce drunk driving fatalities. Dr. Winsten argued that there is a lot of untapped potential for new strategies in modeling healthy behavior in news, advertising, and especially in entertainment. He referred to psychologist Albert Bandura's work on Social Learning Theory as an early pioneering effort in this area. Winsten said that something as little as incorporating several lines of purposeful dialog into an entertainment script can lend momentum to a social change that is emerging or desired. The diversity-conscious role modeling and dialog in the Cosby Show of the 1980s was cited as a pivotal example.

What impressed PsyDip about the second segment of the panel was that the media professionals who spoke were very invested in their causes. These professionals included a Hollywood Studio Executive, a Senior News Anchor, and documentarians.

(see http://www.usip.org/events/media-global-diplomat-ii for complete list.)

All the media panelists easily agreed that the role of emotion is pivotal in effective storytelling. They all also argued that it’s important to let people tell their own stories, especially from the individual perspective and the character perspective. This would appear to stand in contrast to attempting to influence, persuade, or describe with policy statements, numbers, and data per se. The challenge is not only that those anecdotal depictions can themselves be considerably biased in nature, but that as a rule people tend to want to consume news and entertainment that validates the views they already hold. The question lingered as to how to get people to step beyond their preconceived notions, to surmount stereotypes.

Film producer Arik Bernstein provided a very impressionistic example of a new documentary technique that empowers viewers to draw their own conclusions from a variety of side-by-side comparisons of real life perspectives. In this case, “GazaSderot: Life Inspite of Everything” goes arguably to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a very visual way. When you watch the program, you can toggle forward and backward chronologically and side to side from Gaza to Sderot, across a difficult time period. Take a look here:

http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv/

Lucas Welch from Soliya, a network aimed at bridging the West-Muslim gap, brought home the point that media literacy is increasingly important in the science of media and conflict. You can see more about Soliya here:

http://www.soliya.net/

The point is that perhaps more now than ever, we need consumers of media to know how to consume it critically. Two different people may habitually watch different news sources and never another, and even if they do watch the same source, they may reach entirely different conclusions. The only thing to prevent a media consumer from being seduced by one stereotype or another would be his or her ability to critically analyze the images and messages to which he/she is being exposed. Without critical thinking skills and an understanding of how emotional content can affect one's perception, that may be asking a lot.

Overall, this panel discussion at USIP was excellent grist for the mill of understanding how psychology and diplomacy relate. Not only can media act as global diplomat, whether intentionally or not, but also media exert influence on people by way of psychological mechanisms. These are the sorts of statements that sound trite, but that we may do well to revisit with frequency in today's media saturated environment.

PsyDip asks: what would it do for us to know which areas of the brain are most active during which aspects of cognitive or emotional processing of media information surrounding conflicts and violence? Is the media really that influential in creating and perpetuating stereotypes, to the point where it could perpetuate them despite no real underlying veracity to the given stereotype? Or do all stereotypes have at least some basis in fact? How can we rear children and educate students such that they become more critical consumers of media? How should we even define an educated consumer of media? Considering overall data patterns more accurately showcase broad-based reality (in contrast to what emotional anecdotes showcase), isn’t it a bit disingenuous to use emotional anecdotes just because they are more persuasive? Do we really want what is most emotionally or anecdotally evocative to drive behavior? Can we impose our will on media in a direct or indirect way without running the risk of creating a propaganda environment? To what extent is it "social engineering" to endeavor to persuade people to political correctness by way of media? Is the alternative any better? With the same end goal in mind, is it better to "listen" to hearts and minds, rather than to try to "win" them? What are the parameters of psychology in going through media to reduce conflict under the circumstances of conflicts that are underpinned by very deep, irreconcilable differences in belief systems or resource squabbles? At some point is conflict something we simply need to let play out, the chips falling where they may? When does a PsyDip approach then turn into a PsyWar approach?

Diplomacy & Social Psychology: Up Against Sheep?

2009-09-25T17:15:00.000-07:00

Social Psychology is another area of psychology that can pose bold questions for diplomacy. On September 12, this blog showcased five broad psychology paradigms: Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism, Humanism, Cognitivism, and Evolutionary Psychology. Social Psychology is not a paradigm per se, but a sub-field in psychology. It focuses on human beings in groups. Social Psych is similar to Sociology, in that it studies human social behavior, but its focus is on the mind when it is engaged in thinking or feeling about the social world, versus the social world itself. Some key topics in Social Psych are: prejudice, discrimination, gender, culture, attitudes, persuasion, attraction, the self, altruism, violence, aggression, leadership, and conflict resolution. (Prominent social psychologists include: Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, Walter Mischel, Albert Bandura, Roy Baumeister, Robert Cialdini, and Hazel Markus.) If we think in terms of PsyDip questions, at the nexus of Social Psychology and diplomacy, there are a lot of possibilities, because diplomacy is largely a social endeavor aimed at resolving conflict between human minds.

At the diplomacy level, a Social Psychologist might ask: to what extent do nations, leaders, and citizens (including our own) think, feel, and act as a result of how they view their social (and cultural) environments? What are the ways in which their beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes can be understood to cause their behavior? What sort of pressures do they respond to in terms of their social groups? How individualistic versus collectivistic are they? What does it take to persuade them? How do they process, remember, and distort information about their social worlds? Is it fruitful to know any of these dynamics in constructing an approach to engaging with these nations/leaders/people? Can we categorize a nation’s or a people’s social prejudices to predict how they will react to social forces in the future? Can we use what we know about them to alter the way they will view us and others? Can we better understand and work with other nations and their leaders and citizenry by looking into how they see their own social group and others?

Some possible topics at the Psychological Diplomacy interface include: discrimination, civil rights, anti-Semitism, exchanges, racism, religious freedom, summits, web chats, arbitration, citizenship, visas, immigration, agreements, treaties, gay rights, border security, democracy, human rights, dissent, dual citizenship, fellowships, Middle East Peace, nonproliferation, political prisoners, political unrest, scams, sex trafficking, weapons, women’s issues, leadership, warnings, masculinity and aggression, etc.

Additional reading...

10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/11/10-piercing-insights-into-human-nature.php

175 web-based Social Psychology experiments, surveys, and studies:

http://www.socialpsychology.org/expts.htm

Some famous Social Psychology experiments:

http://www.experiment-resources.com/social-psychology-experiments.html

At U.N., Obama calls for new era in world relations: If not this message, then what message?

2009-09-23T19:11:00.001-07:00

President Obama Addresses the UN General Assembly

At U.N., Obama calls for new era in world relations

http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entries/real_change_is_possible/

PsyDip asks: if not this message, then what message? That is, what else could people around the world possibly want to hear? What would inspire other nations to work with the United States to solve global problems if not this message of multi-lateralism espoused by this "dreams-come-true" president? Certainly actions speak louder than words and many of America's critics would like to see the U.S. Government put its proverbial money where its mouth is, but is this not at the least exactly the type of rhetoric our staunchest critics would want to hear? If not, what would that rhetoric be? This is a PsyDip question because it goes right to the heart of the psychology of leadership and the psychology of motivation. If it is not good enough to have an emphatic message about doing what is widely perceived as right on a global level, delivered by a world leader of this magnitude who enjoys this level of popularity on the world scene, then what is better? Domestic politics aside for the moment, focusing strictly on what message/messenger would or could measurably motivate other world leaders and peoples to follow and or co-lead, what would it take? Are there critics who are so skeptical by nature or position that they would never under any circumstances agree to follow or join causes with other nations, even in compromise? Is there any way to motivate them to agree at the least to step aside and not actively thwart the efforts of leaders who will to try to solve world problems amicably? Let's see what the global reaction is to Mr. Obama's speech in the coming days, weeks, and months, and be mindful of the PsyDip question: what would it really take for a leader to motivate the world around a global sense of purpose? If the answer is another type of message, what type of message? If it is another type of messenger, what type of messenger? If it is another ideology altogether, what ideology? This question is rhetorical, literal, and empirical all at once.

State's Hardship Mandate: Guerrilla Diplomacy?

2009-09-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

State's Hardship Mandate: Guerrilla Diplomacy?

Diplomacy Under Fire: Out of the Embassies, Into the Streets

http://www.americaabroadmedia.org/programs/view/id/132

PsyDip: The connotation of "diplomat" is changing in the U.S. Foreign Service. No longer the icon of a Cold War cocktail party in romantic Western Europe, the modern American diplomat spends much of his/her career in the diplomatic trenches of developing countries and indeed even in war zones, with flak jackets. This might be called the new "Guerrilla Diplomacy" mandate of the State Department (see Daryl Copeland's new book by the same title). The PsyDip question is: what new psychological trade craft does the modern American diplomat need to work in places of great hardship and strife, both on his/her subject matter and his/her own well-being? Will he/she benefit from taking an approach different from what is stereotypically mandated for a diplomat? Will he/she take on some of the same opportunities, risks, and responsibilities of his/her military counterparts? Are we going to start seeing more diplomats with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or psychological maladjustment due to service in hardship or danger posts? In terms of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, is the State Department prepared to have a resultant organization that promotes first and foremost those who have been willing/able to serve in dangerous environments at the cost of what they have sacrificed or neglected? What impacts both positive and negative would this have on the organization, its skill sets, and future policy-making? How about its families? What is the psychology of "nation building", both on the spot and back home?

Daryl Copeland's new book "Guerrilla Diplomacy"...

http://www.guerrilladiplomacy.com/

Diplomatic Shock Therapy: A Clockwork Orange Role Reversal?

2009-09-21T15:30:00.000-07:00

UN plans 'shock therapy' for world leaders on environment

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/20/united-nations-summit-climate-change

PsyDip: In Stanley Kubrick's cult classic remake of Anthony Burgess' dystopian novel, "A Clockwork Orange", the state-controlled power apparatus attempted to use behavioral psychology to reform a violent psychopath. The results were largely seen as an indictment of behavioral psychology, because in response to conditioning, the criminal subject went berserk. Yet in the original novel, the antagonistic Alex matures and outgrows his pathology (evidently healthy outcomes don't sell as well in the movies). Now in an ironic turn of events at the U.N., it is the bureaucrats themselves who are the subject of "shock therapy". The hope is that leaders of the more affluent countries will be pushed outside of their comfort zones to see the apparently devastating consequences of climate change. So the question is this: are we seeing the start of a new trend to spur change in world leaders by more direct exposure to elements that run counter to their cherished beliefs? Is there a way to go about this process more systematically and yet still avoid the pitfalls of "re-educating" or propagandizing one another? At the least, might we wish to build into our prerequisites for world leadership the CV entries of well-traveled and well-educated? Let's say our efforts at behavioral modification are successful. Will we then begin to see the earth as one inter-related system, even a validated Gaia hypothesis? Will we be forced to confront global resource use and abuse on a global per capita basis? Would the people at large be willing to make adjustments in their standards of living? Would implications for population control logically follow? Would the climate even respond positively at this point? Have we out-grown our planet already?

Secretary of State Clinton visits FSI

2009-09-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

Secretary of State Clinton visited the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) this afternoon. FSI is the Department of State's training facility where diplomats are trained for their onward assignments overseas, with courses in tradecraft, language, culture, and history. PsyDip's blogger, yours truly, is currently enrolled in Mandarin training at FSI. Secretary Clinton's message was both inspirational and right on target in summarizing our core training goals at State. Have a look at the video here...

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/09/129377.htm

PsyDip asks: what can we do to make sure our diplomats go out to the field with a grounding not only in the relevant tradecraft, language, culture, and history for their assigned country, but also with a grounding in the psychological tools, research, and country-specific concepts that could increase their effectiveness?

Why Diplomats Envy Babies

2009-09-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

Why Diplomats Envy Babies:

The Psychology of Language Learning

Ever wonder why babies and young children can learn languages so easily, yet as adults we struggle? This basic question strikes a PsyDip cord, because of the fact that language is a large part of what separates us transnationally as "foreign" to one another. A review of the world's nations arguably demonstrates the larger the language gap between two nations, the greater the chances of mistrust and cross-cultural miscalculations. Certainly this conclusion is confounded by geography, as different peoples will be more likely to share language roots if they share geography, but it is principally through language that we transmit culture. So let's take a quick look at what psychologists know about language and the baby brain.

Within 18 months babies have a solid vocabulary of around 50 words. By their sixth birthday, that vocabulary has expanded to over 6,000! That means during early childhood we learn at least three words a day. This keeps us on pace to learn the 50,000 words required (for English speakers) for normal conversation. So how do we do it and why do we suddenly get so bad at it as we leave childhood?

It turns out language development is hard-wired into the brain, as an enduring legacy of millennia of evolution. That hard-wiring provides large neuronal trees which are shaped linguistically by a process of "pruning". All babies are born to babble the full range of human sounds possible, across all languages (over 6,800!). All human brains have about the same number of neurons -- about 100 million, but babies brains are wired differently. Babies' neurons are each individually connected to as many as 15,000 other neurons. In contrast, adult neurons have about a third fewer links. With so many links at birth between neurons, babies are equipped with a broad capacity to receive linguistic imprinting, by exposure to local sounds. Sounds not heard locally will not be babbled for long and therefore neuron links to support those unheard sounds will be pruned and absorbed by the brain, as the baby begins to focus on the native language.

In addition to having the extra wiring "built-in" from birth, babies have a processing speed for neuronal firing that far exceeds that of adults. When they hear different sounds in succession as in the case of a language, they are able to register the differences between those sounds in a relatively fast process, because the neurons that fire electrical impulses to record learning are able to re-load quickly and move on to the next audio distinction. Adult neurons cannot fire and reload as quickly, so the sounds of new languages quickly get backed up in our attention span and we cannot register them as distinct sounds beyond a certain point. The "circuit board" in a baby’s brain can handle many more bits of linguistic information in a short span of time - enough to retain key distinctions in pronunciation, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary.

So why do we lose this great power as we age? In short, when it comes to language, nature is only as efficient as it needs to be. Those neurons associated with language begin to crystallize around the preferred local language. A brain that retains a large and redundant system of additional neurons for alternative but unused language sounds is not an efficient one. It takes many extra calories to run the quadrillion cellular links of the large carbon-based neural network a baby has for picking up languages it encounters. Those neurons are "use or lose", meaning once the organism is no longer exposed to certain sounds beyond a certain point (basically 7 years of age) it loses its biological capacity to easily register those sounds. The neuron links there at birth to support such receptivity have been consumed by other demands or absorbed into the system for energy needs. This seems absurd today in calorie-saturated developed countries, but the brain evolved during times of nutritional challenge, long before modern agriculture and processed food.

What does this all mean for international understanding? Firstly, it means we ought to be exposing our children to other languages at an early age. The sooner the better. Researchers say even infants less than 18 months of age show receptivity to language that cannot necessarily be retained over time. Certainly, children should be exposed to other languages prior to age seven if the goal is to speak "native". After age seven our ability to learn other languages shuts markedly. It is true that we can and do refine our language skills within our primary and well-learned languages well into old age. However, we never again have access to a system of 1 quadrillion synapses to absorb the full gamut of language sounds producible by the human voice box and mouth. Lastly, current research indicates that because language evolved in social settings for the purposes of communication, we learn it best in actual, live social situations - not from audio and video recordings. The brains of babies and young children are most likely hard-wired to respond best to real human eye contact and pointing. That is the best way to learn language. Now if we could just agree on the "right" language!

Let's end with a list of the world's most spoken languages (native, by population):

Mandarin (885 Million)

Spanish (332 Million)

English (322 Million)

Bengali (189 Million)

Hindi (182 Million)

Portuguese (170 Million)

Russian (170 Million)

Japanese (125 Million)

German (98 Million)

Wu (77 Million)

Referenced above and provided for further reading:

"Your Brain: A User's Guide", Language and the Baby Brain, by Jeffrey Kluger

"The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language", by Steven Pinker

Psychology Paradigms & Diplomacy Topics

2009-09-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

Psychology can ask a lot of bold questions of diplomacy, opening up new ideas and possibilities for consideration. There are at least 20 different angles to pose these questions from, and probably many more. Let's start with the first five, which represent the broad historical paradigms of psychology so far. Once we've covered those, we can get into the many sub-fields of psychology. If you look at the history of psychology it has been most influenced by these five paradigms: 1) psychoanalysis, 2) behaviorism, 3) humanism, 4) cognitivism, and 5) evolution. Here we'll go into each school of thought very briefly. Then we will extend its questions into the context of diplomacy. And finally we will mention some possible PsyDip application areas for the paradigm.

Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud and further developed by Carl Jung, Karen Horney and others. Its basic focus was on resolving unconscious conflicts rooted in early childhood. At the diplomacy-level, we might therefore ask: do some nations, leaders, and citizens (including our own) have unconscious, repressed psychological conflicts and taboos rooted in their early histories? Can these conflicts be brought into awareness through introspection and thereby reconciled by way of a national or individual catharsis? Would such potential resolution result in a more balanced, less distressed foreign policy? Can we better understand and work with other nations and their leaders and citizenry by looking into our/their historical psychodramas? Possible PsyDip application areas: human rights, history of foreign relations, holocaust issues, cultural exchanges, elections, library programs, peace process, transparency, censorship, political participation, public reconciliation, communication, historical accuracy and redress, etc.

Behaviorism was founded by John Watson and embraced by Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner, among others. Its focus was on measuring objective behaviors with methodological rigor. As such it was a reaction to the subjectivity of psychoanalysis. At the diplomacy level, the Behaviorist might ask: Do some nations, leaders, and citizens (including our own) have patterns of behavior which are the result of conditioning or learning in a context of stimulus and response? Can their measureable behavior be changed by modifying antecedents and consequences to it? Can the negative or undesirable habits of these nations and individuals be changed or reshaped by new schedules of reinforcement that associate new positive and desirable habits with rewards and old negative and undesirable habits with punishment or at least lack of reward? Can we better understand and work with other nations and their leaders and citizenry by looking into what they have been rewarded for doing and what they have been punished for doing? Possible PsyDip application areas: embargos, investments, microcredit loans, rewards for justice, smart power, tariffs, sanctions, bribery, claims, treaties, agreements, pay, warnings, refugees, World Trade Organization, allowances, drug trafficking, donations, intellectual property, hardship pay, castigation, praise, anti-terrorism, etc.

Humanism was founded by psychologists like Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Fritz Perls. It was a reaction to both Psychoanalysis and Behaviorism. It attempted to look at the whole person, arguing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Maslow created a hierarchy of needs, Rogers created client-centered therapy, and Perls spoke of the "gestalt" of a person (his/her experiential present amidst the web of his/her relationships). Humanistic psychologists thought Psychoanalysis was too focused on neurosis and Behaviorism was too focused on lab rats. A psychologist from this school might ask at the diplomacy level: Do some nations, leaders, and citizens (including our own) have unique and subjective meanings for themselves that can be invoked, elicited, and appealed to? By looking at a nation, an individual leader, or citizen as a whole and not just a series of parts or dysfunctions, can we then focus in on their positive growth and meaningful identity development? Can nations and their people be attracted to a perspective of free will that will enable them to build up from core needs to self-actualization of their highest potential? Can we better understand and work with other nations and their leaders and citizenry by helping them to reach their full psychological and perhaps even spiritual potential? Possible PsyDip application areas: Art in Embassies Program, democracy, arbitration, development finance, relief, rule of law, water for the poor, confidence and security building measures, religious freedom, population stability, sustainable development, culture, recreation, human potential development, etc.

Cognitivism was pioneered by thinkers like Ulric Neisser, Noam Chomsky, and George Miller. It built upon the experimental foundations of Wilhelm Wundt and Jean Piaget. The focus was on information processing. Cognitive psychologists conceive of people as information processing systems whose mental operations can be described in computational and linguistic terms. At the diplomatic level, they might ask: Do some nations, leaders, and citizens (including our own) think and speak in predictable ways that can be changed for the better by cognitive restructuring or reorganization? Can their negative or undesirable thought or speech patterns be changed by reframing, revising, or convincing them to think and use language differently - perhaps to even remember differently? Can we change the way nations and their people think and believe by endeavoring to change the way they use linguistic or mental representations of things or by the way they process information? Can we better understand and work with other nations and their leaders and citizenry by looking into how they think and by trying to actively change their thinking? Possible PsyDip application areas: language services, Freedom of Information Act, dissent channel, information technology, telecommunications, publications, communications policy, policy planning, translations, State Magazine, propaganda, interviews, town halls, mission statements, information policies, debate, science, education, editorials, speeches, briefings, campaigns, media coverage, etc.

Evolutionary psychology was pioneered by Charles Darwin in his book, Descent of Man. It has been further developed by David Buss and Steven Pinker, among others from varied disciplines. The core idea of evolutionary psychology is that much of human behavior is generated by psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments. Consistent with the process of natural selection, the idea is that humans have inherited certain adaptive, hard-wired capacities such as that of language, emotional intelligence, a preference for healthy mates, fears of spiders and snakes, etc. In short, we have what we have because of our evolutionary context and survival needs for given ecologies. At the diplomacy level, an evolutionary psychologist might ask: Are some nations/leaders/peoples (including our own) more evolved than others for certain niches/domains/times? Are some nations/leaders/peoples evolved in different and unique ways relative to others? What evolutionary baggage do we all carry? Are some nations/leaders/people more homogenous or more heterogeneous than others and does this affect their or our capacity or capabilities for interaction? Should we tailor our approach to a given nation/people by taking into consideration their literal or figurative DNA, sexual/reproductive/matching behavior, or traits we see them select among themselves? Can we find a use for a given literal or figurative genetic or memetic/social mutation we observe? Can we engage in literal or figurative selective matching of characteristics we deem desirable by connecting previously disparate players in the population? Can we better understand and work with other nations and their leaders and citizenry by looking into how evolved they are, literally or figuratively, in either broad terms or terms specific to a particular domain/task? And most importantly, how can we analyze our human behavior in animal terms but not succumb to thinking that is all we are and can possibly be? In short, how can we both acknowledge our capacity for brute nature and at the same time rise above it? Possible PsyDip application areas: AIDS, diversity visa, relationship-based visas, resettlement, science, Tuberculosis, conflict, war, war crimes, domestic violence, women's rights, economic and political competition, nationalism, ethnic cleansing, gene mapping/therapy, physical and social viruses, population dynamics, overpopulation, population control, information flow, physical and psychological diversity awareness/appreciation, peace accords, law enforcement, economics, aggression, law, medical ethics, biotechnology, human genome project, etc.

As you can see, psychology has a lot of bold questions. What you do not see here is the incredible amount of detailed research that has gone into and come out of each of these traditions, to one degree of experimental rigor or another. Most professional psychologists publish in esoteric journals reviewed only by peers in the field and read only by professionals and students in the field. This posting is an initial attempt to bring together what they have to offer diplomacy so that further connections can be explored for their potential. Not all psychology matters will apply to diplomacy of course, but a great many will, as most diplomacy is carried out by individuals - individuals with individual minds - the stuff of psychology. Often connections emerge over time as their considerations become relevant in contexts which we later take for granted. As Sigmund Freud said, "the voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing."

How Can a Hermaphrodite Compete?: Gender, Sports, and International Politics

2009-09-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

How Can a Hermaphrodite Compete: Gender, Sports, and International Politics

It looks like the world's sports bureaucracy is coming to the reality psychologists have known for many decades: sex/gender is on a continuum, it is not a 100% discrete or binary variable. Not infrequently and quite naturally we encounter people who do not fall conveniently into the male/female dichotomy. Indeed, science shows evolution is not a cut and dried process. It is overall only as efficient and streamlined as it needs to be for survival of the given population or species as a whole. Lots of physical and psychological characteristics make it from one generation to the next in the form of recessive traits and mutations, even if they do not necessarily enhance survival or improve reproductive output. More than "survival of the fittest", evolution is about "survival of the good enough to get by". Quite often even maladaptive DNA clusters persist across generations, so long as they are piggybacked on to other DNA clusters which are fit or at the least good enough to get by, either at the individual or group level. Being a hermaphrodite is maladaptive from the individual organism's standpoint of not being able to get one's genes into the next generation, however it is quite a natural phenomenon observed within the full range of gender/sex expression of the DNA, and it has piggy-backed stay power in groups and in the gene pool at large. In short, it is not so maladaptive that it is eliminated from the larger DNA repertoire.

The current case of Caster Semenya is fascinating not only because he/she is an amazing athlete, but because his/her apparent hermaphrodite status has touched off an international conflict in the sports world that is directly related to world society's inability to conveniently categorize people who are intersexed. To the diplomat it begs the rhetorical question, can't we all just get along? After all, international sports competitions are supposed to be about nations coming together and channeling negative competitive forces into positive ones, in a kind of sublimation. To the psychologist, it begs the rhetorical question, do we not socially construct gender when we divide sports competitions into separate male and female categories? Semenya reminds us all that our world is based on collective and shared myths. It doesn't matter to most people that Venus Williams can beat most normal men at tennis, she is a female and competes as such. It doesn't matter to most people that intersexed people have desires to compete and develop their bodies athletically just as distinct males and females do. As humans we are so confused when our categories don't work out, that we engage in a kind of brinksmanship until consensus reality once again regains control and dismisses the "misfits" to the fringes or the unseen margins. The irony in reasserting our clean cut categories is that our logic is at its sloppiest when we do so.

Here is the latest on Caster Semenya and the brink of "third world war" over gender and international sports...

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SPORT/09/11/athletics.semenya.gender.iaaf/index.html

Here is a nicely done dissertation on the psychology of intersex...

http://www.medhelp.org/WWW/AIS/PDFs/Gallacher-Dissertation.pdf

Let's see what happens with Semenya. It may depend on whether he/she attempted to deceive anyone. Yet that too would beg more questions about the degree to which an athlete should be bound to disclose information about his/her internal organs or lack thereof - in this case Semenya apparently has external but no internal female genitalia. There is so far no evidence of any hormone supplements either.

Some could be tempted to argue that just as we no longer have race-based leagues in baseball and other sports, we should no longer have gender/sex-based leagues. But then where would this leave the majority of women who as a whole carry less muscle mass than their male counterparts? They would likely be relegated to second-class competitors and therefore lack athletic opportunities. Herein lies the conundrum. When is discrimination based on physical characteristics acceptable and when is it not? And what obligations do nation-state athletic institutions have to uphold world-wide consensus reality regarding gender/sex-based discrimination? On the flip-side, do they have any obligation to speak out against it?

911 Anniversary: Reason to be hopeful

2009-09-10T17:18:00.000-07:00

PsyDip: On the 8th anniversary of "911", PsyDip honors the innocent and fallen heroes that died in that tragic attack in 2001. We honor them by taking a moment to look deeper into the root social-psychological causes of terrorism. Here are two interesting papers that look at the empirical research in this area and attempt to summarize it for a better understanding of the problems we continue to face as lovers of civil society and due process.

One interesting thing about these papers is that one was written before 911 and the other after it. Yet both make the case that terrorists are made, not born. Often in psychology we struggle with the relative influences of "nature versus nurture" and conclude that an interaction between the two causes most behaviors. Another interesting thing about these papers is that when characterizing terrorists who act in terrorist groups (as opposed to the lone "lunatics"), they both make the case that terrorists are not by and large mentally unstable or certifiably mentally ill. A third interesting thing is that terrorists do not appear to have a single "terrorist personality" or any one predictable personality type. However, there are certain people who are drawn to terrorist groups for reasons they accept as justifying and mandating certain behaviors, as part of a set of beliefs regarded as absolute and meaningful. Of course terrorists make their own individual choices and therefore a discussion about learned behaviors in no way justifies or excuses such behaviors, rather it gives us a starting place for considering a way forward.

Taken as a whole, these three points should actually give us reason to be hopeful. Why? Because when a behavior is learned and not innate, it is more easily extinguished. As a general rule in psychology, the more hard-wired in the DNA a behavior is, the harder it is to control. The more learned a behavior is, the easier it is to control, or to unlearn. We "simply" have to find the root causes, the antecedents, and the consequences and work hard to change those.

What social and geopolitical conditions provide root causes and therefore fertile milieus for terrorist groups to emerge and gain traction? What are the common psychological antecedents and consequences in the behavioral trajectories of those who join terrorist groups? What interventions are more likely to succeed in getting would-be terrorists to take another path in life and avert the dreadful step of carrying out a terrorist act? Can we identify common denominators among individuals who were once flirting with terrorism but later changed course and renounced terrorism, so as to cultivate what it is that happened right in their cases? There are many other questions, to be sure.

Now on to the research...

Psychology of Terrorism

http://worlddefensereview.com/docs/PsychologyofTerrorism0707.pdf

(Department of Mental Health Law & Policy, University of South Florida, 2004)

The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism:

Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?

http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/pdf-files/Soc_Psych_of_Terrorism.pdf

(Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1999)

Patriotism & National Identity: All in Your Head?... The Psychology of Nation-State Membership

2009-09-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Patriotism and national identity are arguably "all in your head" -- at least to a large extent. That is, they are learned, social-psychological constructs (the view from outerspace shows no such boundaries). However, these constructs are distinct in important ways. Scoring high on patriotism does not necessarily lead to greater political involvement. In contrast, scoring high on national identity typically does lead to greater political involvement. For more on this, check out this interesting empirical work by Huddy & Khatib...

American Patriotism, National Identity, and Political Involvement

http://ms.cc.sunysb.edu/~lhuddy/Huddy&KhatibAJPS%202007.pdf

(American Journal of Political Science, Volume 51 Issue 1, Pages 63 - 77, 2007)

PsyDip: what are the implications for the ideologues who may express either a form of uncritical patriotism or a form of uncritical anti-patriotism? Might the things held dearly by those high in national identity represent the enduring national values that extend beyond one or another political administration on the left or the right and form the basis for what's really worth fighting for? Are there implications for viewing patriotism and national identity as "all in your head" when endeavoring to foster civil society, fair and balanced debate, and increased political participation? What are the tangible components that must objectively be in place to sustain a given level of patriotism and national identity? What are the pros/cons of promoting national reverence within one's own borders and those of other countries? In what ways are patriotism and national identity at odds, if at all, with multi-lateralism? Lastly, how does adding religiosity to the mix ("God & Country") affect the outcome?

"Diplomacy: the ability to tell someone to go to hell so that he'll look forward to making the trip".

2009-09-08T16:51:00.000-07:00

Some time ago a relative brought me a coffee cup containing the inscription: "Diplomacy: The ability to tell someone to go to hell so that he'll look forward to making the trip." Although pithy, the saying captured the essence of diplomacy--the ability to convince foreign leaders that doing what you want is in their interest. By necessity, convincing sometimes requires credible threats of dire consequences if not followed. Nevertheless, diplomacy's essence is the art of persuasion. Not surprisingly, whether as individuals or as representatives of governments, we are more likely to succeed if we have a clear psychological understanding of the person we are trying to convince.

-Stuart Seldowitz, Foreign Service Officer

(p. 47, The Psychology of Diplomacy, 2004)

PsyDip: To what extent can we bring to bear on this topic the scientific research findings from the psychology of persuasion and the psychology of personality? And what about the clinical psychologists who say even if one can send another to hell happy, it will come back to bite the sender in the end, psychologically-speaking, perhaps even karmically-speaking?

Can we learn to overcome fight-or-flight dichotomies with tend-and-befriend alternatives?

2009-09-06T20:29:00.000-07:00

PsyDip in the Broad Context of the Genographic Project:

"When humans first ventured out of Africa some 60,000 years ago, they left genetic footprints still visible today. By mapping the appearance and frequency of genetic markers in modern peoples, we create a picture of when and where ancient humans moved around the world. These great migrations eventually led the descendents of a small group of Africans to occupy even the farthest reaches of the Earth."

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/atlas.html

PsyDip: this is a very ambitious and enlightening project by National Geographic. It connects empirical data from genetics, geneology, history, and migration, among other disciplines. To what extent does it give us a comprehensive framework and form a backdrop upon which we can view psychological and diplomatic developments, evolution, and emergence in our species? And important for our PsyDip topic, are we still carrying out psychology and diplomacy with the same brains we had (biologically-speaking) 195,000 years ago in Ethiopia's Omo River Valley? Do we not have the same challenges in conflict we did back then, but magnified exponentially with our modern weapons and techniques? Are we not as a species still caught up in many of the same fight-or-flight responses, albeit with more sophistication and folly? Can we learn to overcome fight-or-flight dichotomies with tend-and-befriend alternatives? Can we do so before the pressures of overpopulation render it irreversibly difficult? Food for thought and we need everyone to chew their part.

Winning hearts and minds in Iraq (sounds like doing psychology)

2009-09-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

“You know, we win the minds of Iraqis by building things like schools, bridges, and roads, but we win their hearts by building relationships and giving them respect. We won hearts here this year."

http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entries/reflecting_iraq/

PsyDip: what psychological models and interventions does this exemplify or epitomize? Can we systematically expand upon these to augment measureably positive outcomes for all parties involved?

Coming Soon!...

2009-09-05T22:34:00.000-07:00

Bold Diplomacy Questions from 20 different areas of psychology:

Abnormal, Behavioral, Biological, Clinical/Counseling, Cognitive, Comparative, Critical, Developmental, Educational/School, Evolutionary, Forensic/Legal, Global, Health, Humanism, Industrial-Organizational, Personality, Positive, Psychoanalytical, Quantitative, and Social.

Stay tuned.

PD, PA, & PsyOps: A Naval Post Grad Thesis

2009-09-04T21:03:00.000-07:00

THE ROLE OF PUBLIC DIPLOMACY, PUBLIC AFFAIRS, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS IN STRATEGIC INFORMATION OPERATIONS

Bryan R. Freeman, Naval Post Graduate School

(2005)

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA435691&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

PsyDip: Are DOD & State cooperating any better on Psy-initiatives now?

State Department's Leadership Course: Spot On!

2009-09-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

Just finished "PK 245: Basic Leadership Skills" today and I give it two thumbs up! For those not acquainted with PK 245, it’s the U.S. State Department’s junior to mid-level leadership course, taught at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia (at NFATC). The reason I bring it up here on PsyDip is because it was very heavy on psychology content. Ever since Colin Powell, State is getting better and better at providing its people with good training. PK 245 was chock full of psychology models and activities to train State’s current and future leaders. These models and activities drew widely from personality, motivation, cross-cultural psych, industrial-organizational psych, etc. and included: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Situational Leadership Model, Tuckman’s Group Development, the Johari Window, Loden’s Diversity Wheel, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Herzberg’s Theory of Motivation, etc.

Another key component from psychology was the 360 Degree review process employed using State Department run software. This was basically a process of evaluation by one’s bosses, peers, and subordinates, using a variety of skills reflective of leadership and management tasks. The 360 solicits evaluative data from the participants’ real workplace, current or past, and generates output on a range of quantitative scales. It also includes qualitative data in a comments section of pros/cons.

Probably the best part of the training was the fact that various models from psychology were brought to life in the form of hands-on activities and discussions drawing from participants’ real work experiences out in the field. The overall emphasis of the course was on leading and managing by way of self-awareness and behavioral flexibility, in order to adapt to a wide range of organizational settings. Kudos to the State Department for taking lessons from the Ivory Tower and putting them into a practical training format for diplomats headed out to new and continuing assignments.

Here are some of the models PK 245 utilized. Psychologists won’t necessarily view these as the best or most current models in the field, but they will surely recognize them as fine products from the vast repository of psychological wisdom from the 20^th Century…

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator:

http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/

The Situational Leadership Model:

http://www.12manage.com/methods_blanchard_situational_leadership.html

Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development:

http://www.chimaeraconsulting.com/tuckman.htm

Johari Window self-awareness model:

http://www.businessballs.com/johariwindowmodel.htm

Loden’s Diversity Wheel:

http://www.diversitycentral.com/leaders_toolkit/toolkit/definition1.html

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/maslow.html

Herzberg’s Theory of Motivation:

http://www.businessballs.com/herzberg.htm

Peace Operations Training Institute

2009-09-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

The Peace Operations Training Institute trains peacekeepers, humanitarian workers, United Nations staff, and other persons interested in global peace and security...

http://www.peaceopstraining.org/

PsyDip: This is impressive

International Psychology's Rockstar: Chris Stout

2009-09-03T18:03:00.000-07:00

Chris Stout brings health and psychological assistance to children and families around the world.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec07/rockstar.html

PsyDip: Pretty cool Dr. Stout!

Governments go digital...

2009-09-03T16:29:00.001-07:00

P2P2G: The rise of e-diplomacy

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23310.html

PsyDip: Can the internet help connect people to people to government (P2P2G) and link international mind to mind (M2M) better than ever before?

PsyDip is on Twitter now...

2009-09-03T10:19:00.001-07:00

Follow PsyDip updates on Twitter...

http://twitter.com/psydip

American Psych Assoc. has PsyDip Tie-In

2009-09-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

The American Psychological Association has two divisions that tie into Psychological Diplomacy:

APA's International Psychology Division 52 encourages its members' participation in intercultural research, discussions of effective assessment and treatment models in working with particular cultures, and a better understanding of the sort of psychological problems which predominate in a given region of the world.

http://www.apa.org/about/division/div52.html

APA's Peace Psychology Division 48 works to promote peace in the world at large and within nations, communities, and families.

http://www.apa.org/about/division/div48.html

PsyDip: can a scientist-practitioner model be realized with these associations? How can the gap between academic research and policy practice be bridged? Are there practical lessons that can be learned by psychologists and applied in the "real world" of diplomacy?

Military Accused of Profiling Reporters

2009-09-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

Military Cancels Contract To Profile Reporters

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112416399&ft=1&f=1020

PsyDip: Are there credibility limitations to the PsyWar approach?

Chomsky's Propaganda Model

2009-08-29T05:50:00.000-07:00

"Has the Internet Changed the Propaganda Model?"...

http://www.prwatch.org/node/6068

PsyDip: Does the Internet get around mass media censorship/filters?

Use of art to persuade on behalf of the state

2009-08-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

"The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?"...

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/pcourrielche/2009/08/25/the-national-endowment-for-the-art-of-persuasion-patrick-courrielche/

PsyDip: What constitutes propaganda and what does not?

Judith McHale, Chief U.S. Image-Maker

2009-08-29T05:40:00.000-07:00

"It makes more sense to engage people internationally on their own terms, in ways that respect their languages and customs, than it does just to bring them warmed-over versions of American programming."...

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/124007.htm

PsyDip: Can the message be tailored to the recipients' ears without losing its meaning?

Admiral Mullen on "Strategic Communication":

2009-08-29T05:28:00.000-07:00

"To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate."...

http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Press/jfq_pages/editions/i55/1.pdf

PsyDip: Is the military shifting more toward the PsyDip side of the spectrum? Even if actions speak louder than words, will those given actions resonate positively with the recipients?

Welcome to "PsyDip", a blog for Psychological Diplomacy topics.

2009-08-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

In contrast to "psychological warfare", which is the use of psychological weapons to influence the mind of the enemy, "psychological diplomacy" is the use of psychological tools to augment shared understanding between two or more countries.

What you will find here are open questions and food for thought, in the spirit of the dialectical method of learning and engagement. Most of the content here will focus on perspectives from the United States. Comments are encouraged.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent offical U.S. Government policy. Further, the author takes no official position in any official capacity that runs counter to official U.S. Government policy.

Thank you,

Don