Prosociality, International Law, and Humanitarian Intervention

A significant insight of behaviouralism and social psychology, well-established through experimental research, is that actors display ‘social preferences’, other-regarding or non-self-interested decision-making. Contrary to rational choice assumptions, people may have only ‘bounded selfishness’ in decisions, caring not only about their own payoffs, but about those of others. This chapter provides a broad framework for assessing the relevance of prosociality to international law, discussing the levels of analysis problem that inheres in any shift from individual psychology to corporate actors such as states. The chapter focuses on one area in which prosociality may enrich discussion of a contested issue in international law and the problems it raises—humanitarian intervention. How can motivation and personality—the main variables of prosociality—apply to international actors? Is the ‘bystander effect’ prevalent in international relations? Which other areas of international law relate to prosociality? And can (or should) international law encourage prosociality?

Introduction

After staging the stakes of the mid-century turn towards psychography in W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” the Introduction provides a pre-history of “psychography,” a term coined in the Victorian Era to describe a series of disparate practices of recording and materializing individual psychology. These practices—including telepathic communication, automatic writing, and the literary methods of Stracheyan psychobiography—demonstrate “mind-writing” as an emergent literary concern long before the invention of modern polling. Even in this protean stage of psychography, writers worried these new practices might empower malignant actors to weaponize psychographic power against the nation. Invoking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an exemplar of this phenomenon, I highlight that the vampire frightens not only because he will feed on London’s “teeming millions,” but also because his infectious power will “create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons.” In effect, Dracula weaponizes his telepathic power to execute psychological control over the masses. At the time Stoker was writing his novel, the science of public opinion was understood by sociologists only through such tropes of spiritualism, disease, and contagion. The chapter traces the transformation of this early modernist vision of psychographics to its reprisal in the mid-century institutionalization of public opinion polling, using Auden as a touchstone to demonstrate the radical and rapid institutionalization of group psychology into everyday discourse and institutions.

Individual Psychology and Grand StrategyRomancing the State

Individual psychology at the both mass and elite levels is potentially relevant for grand strategy, but its impact is very difficult to establish. This chapter first reviews the epistemological challenges of showing individual agency in international politics in a way that satisfies “positivist” criteria for good social science. It then turns to how these problems are particularly pronounced for establishing how and why leaders matter for grand strategy, which likely explains why there is so little research on the subject. The piece makes the case for a turn away from the substance of grand strategy towards a focus on leadership style, introducing a distinction between realists and romantics. These two leadership styles emerge out of fundamentally different patterns of cognition: romantics are marked by their emotional, intuitive, and less procedurally rational psychology and realists by their deliberative and objective thinking style. Romantics are also better positioned, and more likely, to make the kind of appeals to public opinion that provide a mass basis for a grand strategy.

Religion as ‘universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’? Re-reading Freud on religion

In his writings on culture, Freud stipulates a close relation between religion and psychopathology, and obsessional neurosis in particular. In this article, I would like to explore the nature of that relation. How is it articulated, and how is it transformed in the course of Freud’s work over four decades, between 1894 and 1939? (How) can cultural (i.e. by definition, collective) phenomena be understood on the basis of symptoms described for individual psychology? On what basis can categories of individual psychology be extended to the analysis and history of cultural and societal formations? What perspectives can psychopathology open up for the analysis of culture? Is religion ‘the cure’, or ‘the symptom’? Or are there grounds for breaking open the relation between psychopathology and religion as it has increasingly solidified in the course of Freud’s work, and has been hotly contested ever since? This article works its way through these questions, and proposes to open some paths of investigation on the subject that are inherent in psychoanalytic theory, but have been prematurely closed off by Freud himself, as well as his adepts and critics.Contribution: This article critically engages with Freud’s most (in)famous statements on the relation between psychopathology and religion through an exposition of the articulations of this relation, as they change with the introduction of particular concepts and theories.

Approaching Mrs. Slipslop, Uncle Toby and Mr. Bounderby from a Modern Individual Psychology Perspective

The paper examines the psychological superiority/inferiority complexes coined by Alfred Adler (1870-1937) in three selected characters from different novels: Mrs. Slipslop from Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), Uncle Toby from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) and Mr. Bounderby from Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). These complexes are traced in the characters and associated with how they are induced by the characters’ physical and social deformities. The paper attempts to demonstrate that such psychological complexes in the character make it difficult for him/her to communicate as well as interact with others around them. Such deformities become whimsical obsessions that alienate them from their society and disorder their lives particularly at communication and result in impossibility of mutual understanding. The paper also highlights such complexes on the linguistic level.

Resistance to Song: A Modernist View of Early Modern Lyric

In Theory of the Lyric Jonathan Culler makes powerful arguments for analogies between lyric and song, especially with regard to each medium’s commitment to producing pleasure and separating the speaking voice from individual psychology. But his case runs the risk of avoiding or oversimplifying lyric poems that resist these analogies. These poems call for interpretive acts that fully engage the work of syntax and structure in establishing distinctive modes of experience. Here Shakespeare’s sonnets demonstrate the roles syntax and structure can play, especially in cultivating complex acts of self-consciousness for which Hegel provides our best critical lens. With this focus, some important roles played by metaphysical conceits also become clear. The conceit forces acts of intense reflection. In the poetry, quintessentially in Donne’s “The Extasie,” there emerges a drama of the agents carrying out distinctive acts of self-interpretation: the fullness of love depends on hearing themselves speak and trying to imagine the objective difference that hearing is making in their behavior toward the other lover.

Alfred Binet and the psychology of testimony

In the early 1890s, Alfred Binet (1857-1911) became one of the most famous specialists in the study of human memory. He conducted research on many different aspects of memory and was a pioneer (1) in the study of the influence of suggestions (1894) on memory and the whole question of what would nowadays be called false memory or memory illusions, and (2) in founding the science of testimony (1900) by examining the influence of suggestion on memory but also its distortions. It was first within the framework of his program of individual psychology that Binet engaged in research that would lead to the idea of the foundation of this new field of research. In his book "on suggestibility" (1900), Binet formally established the scientific foundation for a "Science of testimony", studying the effect of suggestibility with images as stimuli. Inspired by Binet's experimental investigations, Stern (1902) had the talent to bring to light this process of natural falsification of memory. He outlined the plan and the limits of the new field of research glimpsed by Binet, he systematized its methods and procedures, he specified the points to be researched, and he finally gave a personal example of how the experiment should be conducted. Stern's work showing that error-free recollection is not the rule but the exception was the starting point of a movement that clearly attracted the world of German psychologists and jurists, and soon psychologists and jurists from various countries.

Emotional Correctness

First, I offer an analytic summary of the 10 main theses in Stephen Asma and Rami Gabriel’s (2019) The Emotional Mind. Second, I raise an objection about Asma and Gabriel’s assumption that the emotions have phenomenal sameness in individual psychology, across species and cultures. Third, I focus and develop a critique of Asma and Gabriel’s objections to evaluating emotions in terms of “correctness,” “aptness,” or “fittingness.” I argue that analyzing correctness is an essential task of normative inquiry in psychology, psychiatry, and moral philosophy, and it is perfectly intellectually respectable and compatible with most genealogies of the emotions.