What psychology is about

“Human psychology not only encompasses thoughts and emotions, but also underlying basic instincts, essentially vague, at times hastily fleeing, fantasies and diverse mystical conceptions. The basic instincts are regulated via our physiological senses (hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching) in combination with our hormonal surges. Sexually charged images and their appertaining attracting and/or repellent powers, can pop up at any time and any place. My proneness to charge myself with aggressive energy is beyond describing in simple words. When I turn the other cheek I suddenly get the urge to hit out with a sharp weapon; if no one is available then I try to slay using words. The impulses know no limits.”
The above lines are from an article by me, being published in Meetings International, no.4, 2010. It will during Spring become published in a book by me titled Meetings & Psychology.
Do you want to read the book? You can already now order it through this website address: www.meetingsinternational.com/shop_en.php

Group think

“American social psychologist Irving Janis came into the public eye in the 1960s with his studies on how people are affected by scaremongering propaganda. In the early 1980s he refined his analytical investigations through powerful events in the USA and other parts of the world in a book he entitled Groupthink. Primarily he attempted to put his finger on how President John F. Kennedy, his administration and military staff could even consider the fruitless attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro as a means of crushing the Communist Party. The year was 1961 and the Bay of Pigs intermezzo ended in total fiasco….”
The above lines are excerpts from an article I wrote about Group Defense Mechanisms in the exclusive magazine Meetings International (2009, no.2). It will be one of many more articles becoming published in a book, titled Meetings & Psychology.
Do you want to read more? Do you want to order the book? It is possible to do it already today. The book is expected to become published within a couple of months. You could put the order at www.meetingsinternational.com/shop_en.php
Welcome with your order!

Psychological assessment of a Sea officer

During the last days I have met people asking me how it was possible for an experienced Sea captain to let a giant cruise ship sail way out from the programmed course causing a terrible disaster. My answer has so far been that we do not know yet if the Costa cruise ship had encountered any serious technical problems or if it was a big Human Factor failure.
The latest reports from the media, though, have provided us with some clarifications: the officers on the bridge had deliberately taken a risk when they went off course just to salute a retired colleague ashore. The Captain and the First Officer have been arrested. It looks like a monstrous scandal.
Could this disaster have been avoided if the selection and training of the Sea officers had been even more careful from the very beginning?
This is for sure a difficult question, but based upon my more than forty years professional experiences I would say that if the employment selection process includes psychological assessments of the applicants’ capacities and personality the risk factors could have been minimized.
Such psychological assessments are often a basic requirement within Swedish Shipping industries. I have no idea if they are used also in Costa Cruises, but if not I guess that its top management will give it a try in the future.

Contributions to a Fresh conference

Fresh = new, modern, creative, out-of-the-box. There are some very committed people making a lot of work in order to arrange a conference on Meeting architecture, Meeting design, Meeting facilitation, Meeting techniques. The Meeting industry is for sure an industry creating turnovers of many billion USD’s worldwide. The Swedish magazine Meetings International is mirroring this industry in a very interesting and professional way.
The conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, had attracted around 100 attendants from several countries. I was invited to make quite a brief speech about meetings and psychology: has psychology anything to do with meetings?
Of course it has. Everything concerning togetherness involves special social psychological dynamic movements. Everything occuring on the surface does not reveal the whole story. I gave some inputs on this theme, trying to get the audience to reflect of what kind of culture they constructed by behaving as they did. I mentioned also my book, Meetings & Psychology, that at the moment is on the go and will become launched in some weeks from now.

Anything new?

Yes, it is a new year. For some millions. But not for all. We in the Western world and some more places are educated following the Gregorian calendar. But others have invented other calendars. But we say that this is the year of 2012. 2012 years after what? The birth of Jesus Christ? Well, not exactly as he was supposed to have his birthday on December 25 and not on January 01. So, what exactly is the meaning of new year?
And, talking about new year, anything new in your life?
When I look around I do not see so many new things. Well, there are some new technical appliances here and there, smart phones, iPads, such devices, but….
Most people are not hunting for news, they are hunting their own tails. Round and round we go, our behavior patterns much of the same. But the small kids grow up, become youngsters and remind us of our own aging processes. But there is not so much new with that.
By the way, I read in the newspapers about a big scale research project being conducted in France and England, pointing out that we lose some of our cognitive capacities when we are getting older and this declining process starts at the age of around 45. But nothing new about that either.
Anything new from your point of view?
Welcome to write something in the commentary field below!
And – Happy New Year!

Christmas time

Once upon a time a newborn was raised by his Jewish parents, Joseph and Mary, who gave birth of their son in the small town Bethlehem. They named their son Joshua, which means Savior. Some hundred years later the name was translated into the more common English name: Jesus. Christ was at the beginning a title, stemming from the Hebrew Messiah, the anointed one.
Even though the Gospels are quite silent about Jesus as a young child there are some reasons to believe that he was trained to act as a carpenter, supervised by his father. He spoke Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew, but learned probably also some Greek during his later travels around in the region.
The Jewish boy grew up and at around the age of 30 he was attracted by the preachings of John the Baptist and let him baptize him. After that some of John’s followers started to follow Joshua (Jesus) because he repeatedly told the public the he was sent by his Father in heaven, and that this father was God. After a while Jesus established his group of twelve disciples who obeyed him and preached together with him and they did not only spread his words, but told people stories about the miracles: turning water into wine, walking on water, healing the sick, casting out deamons and raising a man from the dead.
Jesus took a big risk when he opposed the Jewish men in power, claiming his own authority. Also the Roman rulers were uncomfortable with the tales of the Messiah who said that he would liberate the Jews from the Roman rules.
The rest is history.
And the history is very interesting indeed, and I am not now primarily thinking about the torture and the crucifixion, but how he came to be a legend for thousands and thousands and later on millions of people and how we, especially in the Western world, still tend to believe that he was born on December 25 more than 2000 years ago (which is probably not correct) and how people have raised churches everywhere (almost), establishing roads for bishops and priests to lead people in this belief of him as God’s son.
It is really interesting.
It is Christmas time. And today we have Santa Claus instead of Jesus and we have all become happy-go-lucky victims of this giant commercialism, so very far from the preachings of the baptized Jewish man called Joshua from Nazareth.

Organized and disorganized

Moments after birth: everything is chaos. The newborn baby has not yet the capacities to organize all streaming impressions. There is just light and darkness and movements and noise and, at the very beginning, just faint connections and almost no relations at all.
Everything is then set to force the baby to develop into the organization that we call life, or rather The social life, or even better The very special human organization of life. By lots of means and tools we do our best to convince the growing child to follow the road that we have built, telling her/him that this is the best that we can offer, so you´d better follow our teachings, our enticements and our punishments.
It all serves as a plate armor. There is no freedom and there is no other creativity than what the social settings are prepared to tolerate. And believe me, the space set up for you is very narrow, very constrained.
When you have learned how to behave you are possibly quite well organized. But all humans are not able to cope with these requirements. They can´t or they won´t or they do not understand the meaning of it. Instead they start to develop internal tensions that could blossom into pure anxiety (´cause thay are so incredibly afraid of being punished over and over again). Some break down into pieces, reacting in ways that will become diagnosed as psychic illness, perhaps psychoses.
It is all about organization.
And it is all about repression.
There is no freedom but just a very, very tiny part of a space offered to you, in which you may imagine that you are free.
I do hope that you are lucky as a well organized individual and that you do like to live your life in a well organized social setting.

Recruitment and personality assessment

Some years ago they were called Head Hunters. Nowadays they are named Recruitment or Search companies. The number of them grows every year. Usually they offer to take care of the whole lot of a recruitment process: working out the job specification profile, finding the right applicants, assessing the ones that are most suitable, selecting and suggesting the final candidate.
Several companies and organizations buy quite easily such a service as this could save time and efforts. But, normally, it is not cheap. If you want a new top executive it will in many cases cost the total sum that is expected to be paid as an annual salary to the one that is going to become employed.
Is it worth it? It could be so.
But chains could have a weak link.
Setting up a requirement profile is not that difficult. Finding a number of candidates with CV’s appropriate for the position could be somewhat harder, but during turbulent times when well educated people want to look for an even more safe opportunity they will appear both here and there. So, not too difficult.
But finding and selecting the ultimate right one is of course the core process in the recruitment program. And this is often the weak link in the chain. The assessments of personality layers and structures, brain capacities included, are really the difficult parts.
Som recruiters rely on the results of one or two or even three test instruments, something that is quite risky as tests are very large caliber weapons, meaning that they are not that precise. The use of so called personality tests has increased dramatically during last years, but personality tests are in fact quite unreliable , especially in the hands of recruiters with just a small portion of knowledge of general psychology and statistical methods.
When hiring a recruitment company it is of importance to find out if the recruiters have experience and knowledge enough to carry through and accomplish the personality assessment part in a highly professional way = having enough psychological knowledge and the right investigation methods in order to make the right and true evaluations of the candidates.

The lonely wolf

We declare quite often that we want to assist each individual to grow into an independent and self-sufficient person. We call this autonomy. We imagine that this is a development into further maturity. It is not that difficult to bring forward a picture of a man or a woman standing on his/her own, strong, decisive, always prepared to take care of his/her own future.
But an absolute majority of people shows everyday and everywhere something else: we are depending on the others, we are looking and longing for leadership, we try to dress up in order to assimilate into the herd, looking like most others around us.
Yes, I know that there are the unique ones, but they very often try to find or create groups around them that they could cling to; look, we are now several being pierced and tattooed! with shaved skulls.
To really become a lonely wolf and be happy with that takes a lot. Then you really have to edge yourself – and your teeth – because now you have to stand on your own., and now you have to be very much awake, alert, warning bells on. You’ll have to sharpen your critical thinking and you have to be careful not becoming fooled into any more or less stupid Human movement that just wants you to be alike the others.
You’ll have to act as a wolf. Not many will like you, quite a lot of shooters would prefer to see you dead.
You’ll have to act smart. Sometimes you’d better dress up as a sheep or someone else looking like all the others. If they spot you as the wolf you are you will most probably end up in serious trouble.
But you may always try to apply for a top executive position somewhere. It could be a quite safe platform for a wolf.

Closing eyes, shutting ears

Changes are speeding up. I am thinking of the danger of the environmental threats, the effects of the global warming-up, the global financial situation, the continuous hard competition on the markets between nations, which automatically will lead to very straining situations for people living in countries with higher salaries etc..
A very typical human defense reaction is closing eyes and shutting the ears, trying to convince oneself – and the neighbor – that everything will be fine, especially in the long run. Stressing this leads the steps to the shopping malls, particularly in Christmas times. Consuming more and more is one of the expressions of the wishes to take the seat behind the shields.
Am I right?