15,474 research outputs found
Just obeying orders?
No full textOrdinary people can commit atrocities simply by following orders, iconic experiments from the 1960s concluded. But this notion of the “banality of evil” is wrong, argue psychologists Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reiche
The importance of remembering and deciding together: Enhancing the health and well-being of older adults in care
No full textIn the above observation, Emerson captures the pivotal role that our memories play in maintaining self-continuity throughout life. He goes further in saying that memory is "the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action" (Emerson, 1893, p. 63). Thus, by providing the means to connect our past and present lives, memory helps us to make sense of who we are. It is not surprising, then, that when memory fades, as it does in dementia, so too does one's understanding of self. Yet despite the claim that the memory loss associated with dementia destroys the person, there are also reports that some elements of self, particularly from the distant past, survive even in advanced stages of the disease (Cohen-Mans®eld, Golander, & Arnheim, 2000; Davis, 2004; Kitwood, 1993; Klein, Cosmides, & Costabile, 2003; Sabat & HarreÂ, 1992). Importantly, these remnants can provide a foundation from which the self can, to some extent at least, be reconstructed. However, it is not entirely clear how best to harness these remnants and how to build upon them in order to achieve this outcome
Social Support
No full textFirst paragraph: Flick through any autobiography of a celebrated athlete and you will find that one of its key themes is social support. Certainly there will be discussions of training and tactics, distress and disappointment, guts and glory. But the backdrop to all this is likely to be the support the athlete received from key individuals and groups along the way. The mother who drove them to training every day in the middle of winter, the coach who instilled a sense of self-discipline and pride, the backroom team who always had a kind word when things hadn’t gone quite to plan. This is beautifully exemplified by a legendary yet bitter-sweet moment from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, where hot-favourite sprinter Derek Redmond from the United Kingdom tore his hamstring during the 400 meters semi-final. His father, Jim, jumped the balustrades and pushed past event officials to help his son cross the line and finish the race. We hobbled over the finishing line with our arms round each other, just me and my dad, the man I’m really close to, who’s supported my athletics career since I was seven years old. (Bos, 2017) Accounts such as this are also often filled with heroic examples of athletes going ‘above and beyond’ to provide support to others in their team — even to the extent of making personal sacrifices for the ‘greater good’. Consider the 2012 Tour de France, when Chris Froome gave up his opportunity to secure personal victory, instead opting to help his teammate Bradley Wiggins secure the coveted maillot jaune. Clearly, the role of socially supportive others, across both sport and life more generally, cannot be understated. For this reason, social support plays a key role in optimal functioning across a range of performance contexts — not only in sport, but also in the workplace, at school, or at home (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2012; Freeman & Rees, 2009; Sarkar & Fletcher, 2014). Indeed, work by the fourth author and his colleagues highlighted how supportive families, coaches, and networks are key to the development of super-elite athletes (Rees et al., 2016)
Having a lot of a good thing: multiple important group memberships as a source of self-esteem.
No full textCopyright: © 2015 Jetten et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedMembership in important social groups can promote a positive identity. We propose and test an identity resource model in which personal self-esteem is boosted by membership in additional important social groups. Belonging to multiple important group memberships predicts personal self-esteem in children (Study 1a), older adults (Study 1b), and former residents of a homeless shelter (Study 1c). Study 2 shows that the effects of multiple important group memberships on personal self-esteem are not reducible to number of interpersonal ties. Studies 3a and 3b provide longitudinal evidence that multiple important group memberships predict personal self-esteem over time. Studies 4 and 5 show that collective self-esteem mediates this effect, suggesting that membership in multiple important groups boosts personal self-esteem because people take pride in, and derive meaning from, important group memberships. Discussion focuses on when and why important group memberships act as a social resource that fuels personal self-esteem.This study was supported by 1. Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT110100238) awarded to Jolanda Jetten (see http://www.arc.gov.au) 2. Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (LP110200437) to Jolanda Jetten and Genevieve Dingle (see http://www.arc.gov.au) 3. support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being Program to Nyla Branscombe, S. Alexander Haslam, and Catherine Haslam (see http://www.cifar.ca)
Social scaffolding: supporting the development of positive social identities and agency in communities
No full textStress and well-being in the workplace: support for key propositions from the social identity approach
No full textOf all the domains in which issues of well-being rear their head, the workplace is one of the most prominent. Apart from anything else, this is because it is apparent that an unhealthy workforce is an unproductive one. In recognition of this point, the ®nancial costs of mismanaging well-being are of considerable interest to labour economists and organizational policy makers. For example, a recent report by the UK's National Director for Health and Work, Dame Carol Black (2008), estimated that in Britain around 175 million working days were lost to sickness in 2006 (around 7 per employee), and that work-related ill health costs the country in excess of £100 bn a year ± more than the entire health budget of the National Health Service and around £4,000 for every employee. Black's report laid much of the blame for this on the fact that nearly half of all UK organizations had no policy for managing issues of health and sickness in the workplace, and, accordingly, had taken no proactive steps to try to minimize this impact. While at an economic level this would seem to be a major oversight, at a human one it would seem to be catastrophic. For, as Black's report highlights, by failing to tackle these issues directly, organizations are not only being ®nancially negligent, they are also greatly increasing the sum of human distress and misery ± impacting not just on individuals, but also on their families and on society as a whole
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