psychologists – Engaging Peace

Storytelling and the path to peace

Posted on August 25, 2011August 25, 2011 by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison: Today we welcome guest author Alan O’Hare, who reflects on the role of stories in building community and peace. Alan is a storyteller, psychologist, and university educator.]

On the journey in search of peace and non-violence, we meet many guides. At the heart of each encounter is a story expressed through rich and colorful language.

Listening to each others’ stories provides an opportunity to gain new information, insight, and skills to build peace together. Keys to that dialogue can include:

Moving beyond prejudices, attitudes, or values that create barriers to hearing the other person’s story
Learning what has led the other to this place, thus discovering a way to address each person’s differences
Engaging with each other in a way that can promote peace within ourselves and between us.

Psychologists and other mental health professionals bring an invaluable gift to this dialogue–the ability and experience needed to listen, honor, and create connections among stories to build a sense of community.

Over the past several years, I have been fortunate to be in dialogue with many people whose lives are reflections of this perspective, and to co-create with them multi-arts performances that celebrate their life stories. The path that led me to this work began as a community psychologist and has gradually evolved back to my ancestral Celtic roots as a seanchie, a weaver and itinerant storyteller.

It was the seanchie who roamed among the villages of the Irish countryside 2500 years ago, gathering the threads of people’s stories and weaving them into a tapestry celebrating their lives.

This heritage is mirrored throughout the world in our diverse cultural roots. We are all inheritors of these traditions, and we are all called to express and witness stories of peace throughout the world. Please send us YOUR story.

Alan O’Hare, founder and artistic director of Life Story Theatre, can be reached at bridges95@aol.com

[An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Psychologists for Social Responsibility conference in the summer of 2010, and published in the journal Peace Psychology.]

Ordinary people: Thoughts about war and peace

Posted on February 3, 2011July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

Ever since 9/11, the Group on International Perspectives on Governmental Aggression and Peace (GIPGAP) has been studying the views of ordinary people concerning war and peace and related issues.

We started our work at Boston University but soon attracted psychologists and other social scientists from around the world to work with us on the project.

We have investigated, for example, the extent to which people from different countries, different continents, different religions, different ethnicities, and different genders define terms like “war” and “peace” in similar—or different—ways. We have also studied people’s justifications for invading other countries or torturing prisoners of war, and explored the extent to which such justifications vary among people from different countries, religions, etc.

We have findings from countries as diverse as the United States, Iceland, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Egypt, South Africa, India, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, Peru, and Nicaragua.

Consider what you know about government-sponsored aggression around the world. In what countries do you think the greatest support for government-sponsored aggression can be found? We’ll report some findings in our next post.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Theories of war and peace

Posted on August 19, 2010July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

Why do people go to war? Are they just naturally aggressive? Are they “blank slates” who are conditioned by rewards and punishments to fight?

War cemetery photo from Bavaria, Germany — Durnbach War Cemetery, Bavaria, Germany. (From WikiMedia Commons; Permission granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.)

A few psychologists have developed theoretical “constructs” that may shed light on these questions. These ideas could prove useful in understanding the apparent readiness of humans to tolerate and participate in wars and other inhumanities at the urging of their political and military leaders.

In this blog, we will discuss some of these theoretical frameworks.

We use the term “constructs” to remind readers that “constructs” are what theories address. That is, philosophers and scientists impose their own theoretical constructions on reality to try to make sense out of it. They invent terms like “aggressive instinct,” “fight or flight,” and “need for power” to try to explain the behaviors they see.

The ultimate test of any theory is its (probably temporary) success in helping people make sense out of the complexities of their experience.

Our goal will not be to convince you of the rightness or wrongness of any theory. Rather, we invite you to consider with us the extent to which the theories help us understand why throughout history so many people (but by no means all of them) have seemed so ready to slaughter and be slaughtered.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology