Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour最新文献

This paper seeks to describe the fundamental properties of social reality and elucidate the normative behavioural processes constituting these properties. Relying on previous theoretical work on social behaviour and institutions, the paper synthesises key theoretical concepts and put forward a formal expression of these. Social reality is conceptualised as an institutional reality, where normatively based phenomena such as language, cultures and ideologies are considered institutions. These institutions are established through collectively accepted systems of rules, known as status functions. The creation of institutions relies on collective intentionality and brings about deontologies that provide reasons for action independent of personal inclinations. Norm circles are described as the social entities that establish and enforce normative pressure, thereby maintaining status functions. These circles are crucial for the creation and sustenance of institutions, as the rules of institutions lack causal power on their own. Social structures are understood as both the ontologically subjective characteristics internalised by individuals and the epistemically objective phenomena that shape these characteristics. The proposed theory acknowledges the existence of external social structures while addressing critiques of reductionism by highlighting the internalisation of characteristics by individuals.

Explanations of the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war tend to drift towards one of two lines of argument. These are the ‘NATO expansion’ argument, chiefly focusing on the structure of the international system and the possibility of the acceptance of Ukraine into NATO, and the ‘Putin's war’ argument, which attempts to place the bulk of blame for the war on the actions and agency of Putin himself. Both arguments might better be considered as focused on processes rather than structures, and this leads to explanations operating at the level of actual manifestation of causes rather than real and underlying structures. Critical realism cannot tell us what structures are the right ones to study, but a plausible explanation might lie in the notion of the patrimonial imperialism of Russian state–society relations. To address the issue of an alternative to these arguments, one overly structural and the other overly agential, this article proposes a framework referred to as patrimonial imperialism. It will attempt to show how an imperialist state structure can come to perpetuate and ingrain itself and thereby induce actors to behave in certain ways consistent with the state structure. The above framework will be integrated into a model of stratified reality and will situate the constituent arguments surrounding the causes of the war into an ontological framework that will allow greater clarity and coherence of thought when attempting to grapple with the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Although denaturalisation has been formulated in several different ways, for those working in the liberation psychology paradigm, denaturalisation refers to the practice of resisting mainstream psychology's psychologisation—and thus naturalisation—of systemic oppression. In this article, I work from within the liberation psychology paradigm to consider what denaturalisation means for psychologists working with collectives to consolidate anti-capitalist struggles through radical political imagination and collective historical memory. Where denaturalising political imagination pushes us to envision a world outside of the naturalised limits imposed by patriarchal and colonial capital, denaturalising memories foregrounds the processes by which structural oppression has become naturalised. In considering memory and imagination in this manner, I attempt to make clear how denaturalised fragments of liberation can be located across historical, contemporary and future-oriented timescales. Liberation psychology, I argue, draws out how such denaturalisation processes are psycho-political and can assist activists in taking on the agonistic, psychically demanding and intersubjective processes inherent to denaturalisation. I conclude by reflecting on some of the directions that future liberation psychology work might take in making use of denaturalisation to advance emancipatory grassroots politics.

It has been recently proposed that memory studies should move beyond focusing on explicit, identity-creating and backward-looking forms of collective memory, such as commemorative remembering, and pay more attention to implicit memory processes within social groups. This article demonstrates that, in taking this advice, one would throw the baby out with the bathwater. Revisiting Bartlett's theory of remembering from the perspective of contemporary enactivist accounts of cognition, it argues that no form of collective memory is independent of identity and all forms of collective remembering have an implicit aspect. More specifically, the significance of the collective past and group identity are dynamically and reciprocally constructed through a history of habitual interactions within the group. On this view, group identity is maintained by a highly embodied system of collective interactive schemas that are constantly reactualised in the ever-changing social, cultural and political environment. It follows that commemorative remembering, as a paradigmatic example of such collective habits, is better described as an adaptive, future-oriented becoming than merely a backward-looking, explicit recollection of memories.

The article analyses people's initial attraction to leaders. The general claim is that the origins of attraction to leaders are rooted in both our phylogenetic need at the species level and our psychological needs at the individual and collective level. The attraction to leaders stems from followers' response to two types of signals: innate signals and acquired signals. The first evokes universal responses that are clearly more evident in crisis situations, whereas the latter evokes a variety of responses arising from collective identities. The patterns of response to these signals are discussed in the article and constitute a conceptual framework for understanding and analysing the phenomenon of followership.

Conspiracy theories have become a prominent topic for sociological research. But although emotions such as paranoia and panic are—sometimes dismissively—referred to in classical accounts of conspiracy theories and different emotions have been empirically linked to conspiracy beliefs, a comprehensive theoretical account of the emotional underpinnings of conspiracy theories is still lacking. In this contribution, I aim to fill this gap by proposing a theoretical model that focuses on the transformation and collectivisation of emotions, facilitated by conspiracy theories. Drawing on existing research, I first identify three groups of emotions relevant to conspiracy theories: (1) anxiety and fear, (2) excitement, fascination and awe and (3) anger, ressentiment and hate. Many of these emotions are both considered to drive individuals towards conspiratorial beliefs and are found to be evoked by conspiracy theories, which raises questions regarding their causal relationship to conspiracy theories. To clarify this conceptual ambiguity, I propose a processual account, according to which conspiracy theories enable the transformation of individual emotions which are marked by powerlessness and thus are frequently suppressed into emotions that are less harmful to the self and can be expressed and acted upon. Crucially, the resulting emotions are experienced collectively and consequently can drive the formation of emotional collectives. Thus, the emotional mechanism does not only motivate individuals to subscribe to conspiracy beliefs but also allows them to reassert their collective political agency and sense of control. In this process, however, the original emotional concern may be lost, resulting in potentially misdirected political actions.