Although many people who studied psychology may work in jobs that perhaps do not, on the surface, seem "scientific," the practice and education of psychology is guided by research findings that are firmly grounded in the scientific method. There are some disciplines within psychology that are even more aligned with the natural sciences, such as neuropsychology, which is the study of the brain's influence on behavior. Psychology is commonly recognized as a social science, and is included on the National Science Foundation's roster of recognized STEM disciplines.

Many psychology undergraduate programs are shaped by the goals laid out in the American Psychology Association's "Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major", said Dr. Michelle Hill, senior associate dean of psychology programs at Southern New Hampshire University. Goal 2 of the American Psychology Association guidelines version 2.0 is "Scientific Inquiry and Critical Thinking," which includes the following subgoals: Use scientific reasoning to interpret psychological phenomena, demonstrate psychology information literacy, and interpret, design, and conduct basic psychological research.

More widespread recognition of psychology as a science is one of the points of emphasis in the APA guidelines, Hill said.

"Professionals in the field who 'do psychology' (e.g. research, teaching, psychotherapy) understand that psychology is a scientific discipline," said Nickolas H. Dominello, Ph.D., lead faculty for SNHU's undergraduate psychology program.

Psychology's status as a science is grounded in the use of the scientific method, said Dominello. Psychologists base their professional practice in knowledge that is obtained through verifiable evidence of human behavior and mental processes. Psychological studies are designed very much like studies in other scientific fields. It is through these studies that psychologists contribute to the body of research in their field.

Learning to design these studies and interpret the findings is a significant part of psychology education. Undergraduate students learn to develop a research question and select a data collection method, and have the opportunity to design and refine a hypothetical research investigation, said Dominello.

Psychology is always growing and always building on itself, he said. "The subject of psychological science, behavior and mental processes, is vast and complex," said Dominello. "Therefore, establishing conclusive evidence is challenging. Psychological research is cyclical, and published research findings often spawn additional inquiries. Each 'brick' of knowledge contributes to the overall structure of knowledge for a particular phenomenon."

So, if psychologists agree that psychology is a science, where does the confusion come from? What prompts some people to think of psychology as a soft science?

"I feel that in part, this misrepresentation of psychology stems from the diversity within the field (i.e. the various subfields) and the fact that psychological science findings often lead to more questions and avenues of future research. This contrasts with some of the more traditional sciences that only search for concrete, definitive answers," said Dominello.

Psychology also utilizes a wider array of qualitative methods than some traditional sciences.

"Although qualitative research provides a different route to understanding than traditional quantitative methods, I feel that is also 'scientific,' just grounded in different philosophical underpinnings," said Dominello.

Research methods can be categorized as either quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative research results in numerical data that can be analyzed. Qualitative research employs methods like questionnaires, interviews and observations. Qualitative research can be analyzed by grouping responses into broad themes. This melding of quantitative and qualitative methods is essential to understand the human factor inherent in psychology.

"Psychology as a science embraces this broader exploratory perspective in order to better understand human phenomena. When merged, qualitative data can breathe life into quantitative data," Dominello said.

"Psychology is unique in that it adds breadth and depth of knowledge in conjunction with so many other disciplines, because we are all curious about understanding human behavior to some extent, whether it's one's own behavior or the behavior of others," said Hill.

This rich combination of qualitative and quantitative skills makes psychology a good undergraduate degree that can prepare students for a wide array of careers. Individuals with a bachelor's degree in psychology can pursue careers in social services, education, human resources and medical fields, using their education and skills as a foundation for understanding and working with others, Dominello said.

Hill said that that a psychology undergraduate program's focus on effective communication, information literacy and understanding human behavior can lend itself to many areas outside psychology, including sales, marketing and many others.

Those who wish to practice as psychologists or work in academic research must pursue additional education beyond a bachelor's degree, often a Ph.D. This advanced education in psychology often involves a strengthening of research skills, and an increased focus on the scientific method and the design of research studies, according to Dominello.

Is psychology a science? The short answer is yes, but the long answer is much more expansive and flexible. Psychology begins with the scientific method, and researchers employ many of the same methods as their colleagues in the natural and physical sciences, but psychology also calls for a deep understanding of human behavior that goes beyond science alone.

Pete Davies is a marketing and communications director in higher education. Follow him on Twitter @daviespete or connect on LinkedIn.

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Is Psychology a Science? - Southern New Hampshire University

Obedience, in human behavior, is a form of "social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure".[1] Obedience is generally distinguished from compliance, which is behavior influenced by peers, and from conformity, which is behavior intended to match that of the majority. Depending on context, obedience can be seen as immoral, amoral or moral.

Humans have been shown to be obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures, as shown by the Milgram experiment in the 1960s, which was carried out by Stanley Milgram to find out how the Nazis managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murders of the Holocaust. The experiment showed that obedience to authority was the norm, not the exception. Regarding obedience, Milgram said that "Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others."[2] A similar conclusion was reached in the Stanford prison experiment.

Although other fields have studied obedience, social psychology has been primarily responsible for the advancement of research on obedience. It has been studied experimentally in several different ways.

In one classical study, Stanley Milgram (as part of the Milgram experiment) created a highly controversial yet often replicated study. Like many other experiments in psychology, Milgram's setup involved deception of the participants. In the experiment, subjects were told they were going to take part in a study of the effects of punishment on learning. In reality, the experiment focuses on people's willingness to obey malevolent authority. Each subject served as a teacher of associations between arbitrary pairs of words. After meeting the "teacher" at the beginning of the experiment, the "learner" (an accomplice of the experimenter) sat in another room and could be heard, but not seen. Teachers were told to give the "learner" electric shocks of increasing severity for each wrong answer. If subjects questioned the procedure, the "researcher" (again, an accomplice of Milgram) would encourage them to continue. Subjects were told to ignore the agonized screams of the learner, his desire to be untied and stop the experiment, and his pleas that his life was at risk and that he suffered from a heart condition. The experiment, the "researcher" insisted, had to go on. The dependent variable in this experiment was the voltage amount of shocks administered.[2]

The other classical study on obedience was conducted at Stanford University during the 1970s. Phillip Zimbardo was the main psychologist responsible for the experiment. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, college age students were put into a pseudo prison environment in order to study the impacts of "social forces" on participants behavior.[3] Unlike the Milgram study in which each participant underwent the same experimental conditions, here using random assignment half the participants were prison guards and the other half were prisoners. The experimental setting was made to physically resemble a prison while simultaneously inducing "a psychological state of imprisonment".[3]

The Milgram study found that most participants would obey orders even when obedience posed severe harm to others. In fact, about 2/3 of the subjects carried the procedure to its bitter end, fully realizing that they were posing a serious threat to the life and well being of the "learner." This result was surprising to Milgram because he thought that "subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will".[2]

Zimbardo obtained similar results as the guards in the study obeyed orders and turned aggressive. Prisoners likewise were hostile to and resented their guards. The cruelty of the "guards" and the consequent stress of the "prisoners," forced Zimbardo to terminate the experiment prematurely, after 6 days.[3]

The previous two studies greatly influenced how modern psychologists think about obedience. Milgram's study in particular generated a large response from the psychology community. In a modern study, Jerry Burger replicated Milgram's method with a few alterations. Burger's method was identical to Milgram's except when the shocks reached 150 volts, participants decided whether or not they wanted to continue and then the experiment ended (base condition). To ensure the safety of the participants, Burger added a two-step screening process; this was to rule out any participants that may react negatively to the experiment. In the modeled refusal condition, two confederates were used, where one confederate acted as the learner and the other was the teacher. The teacher stopped after going up to 90 volts, and the participant was asked to continue where the confederate left off. This methodology was considered more ethical because many of the adverse psychological effects seen in previous studies' participants occurred after moving past 150 volts. Additionally, since Milgram's study only used men, Burger tried to determine if there were differences between genders in his study and randomly assigned equal numbers of men and women to the experimental conditions.[4]

Using data from his previous study, Burger probed participant's thoughts about obedience. Participants' comments from the previous study were coded for the number of times they mentioned "personal responsibility and the learner's well being".[5] The number of prods the participants used in the first experiment were also measured.

Another study that used a partial replication of Milgram's work changed the experimental setting. In one of the Utrecht University studies on obedience, participants were instructed to make a confederate who was taking an employment test feel uncomfortable. Participants were told to make all of the instructed stress remarks to the confederate that ultimately made him fail in the experimental condition, but in the control condition they were not told to make stressful remarks. The dependent measurements were whether or not the participant made all of the stress remarks (measuring absolute obedience) and the number of stress remarks (relative obedience).[6]

Following the Utrecht studies, another study used the stress remarks method to see how long participants would obey authority. The dependent measures for this experiment were the number of stress remarks made and a separate measure of personality designed to measure individual differences.[7]

Burger's first study had results similar to the ones found in Milgram's previous study. The rates of obedience were very similar to those found in the Milgram study, showing that participants' tendency to obey has not declined over time. Additionally, Burger found that both genders exhibited similar behavior, suggesting that obedience will occur in participants independent of gender. In Burger's follow-up study, he found that participants that worried about the well being of the learner were more hesitant to continue the study. He also found that the more the experimenter prodded the participant to continue, the more likely they were to stop the experiment. The Utrecht University study also replicated Milgram's results. They found that although participants indicated they did not enjoy the task, over 90% of them completed the experiment.[6] The Bocchiaro and Zimbardo study had similar levels of obedience compared to the Milgram and Utrecht studies. They also found that participants would either stop the experiment at the first sign of the learner's pleas or would continue until the end of the experiment (called "the foot in the door scenario").[7] In addition to the above studies, additional research using participants from different cultures (including Spain,[8] Australia,[9] and Jordan)[10] also found participants to be obedient.

One of the major assumptions of obedience research is that the effect is caused only by the experimental conditions, and Thomas Blass' research contests this point, as in some cases participant factors involving personality could potentially influence the results.[11] In one of Blass' reviews on obedience, he found that participant's personalities can impact how they respond to authority,[11] as people that were high in authoritarian submission were more likely to obey.[12] He replicated this finding in his own research, as in one of his experiments, he found that when watching portions of the original Milgram studies on film, participants placed less responsibility on those punishing the learner when they scored high on measures of authoritarianism.[13]

In addition to personality factors, participants who are resistant to obeying authority had high levels of social intelligence.[14]

Obedience can also be studied outside of the Milgram paradigm in fields such as economics or political science. One economics study that compared obedience to a tax authority in the lab versus at home found that participants were much more likely to pay participation tax when confronted in the lab.[15] This finding implies that even outside of experimental settings, people will forgo potential financial gain to obey authority.

Another study involving political science measured public opinion before and after a Supreme Court case debating whether or not states can legalize physician assisted suicide. They found that participants' tendency to obey authorities was not as important to public opinion polling numbers as religious and moral beliefs.[16] Although prior research has demonstrated that the tendency to obey persists across settings, this finding suggests that at personal factors like religion and morality can limit how much people obey authority.

Both the Milgram and Stanford experiments were conducted in research settings. In 1966, psychiatrist Charles K. Hofling published the results of a field experiment on obedience in the nursephysician relationship in its natural hospital setting. Nurses, unaware they were taking part in an experiment, were ordered by unknown doctors to administer dangerous doses of a (fictional) drug to their patients. Although several hospital rules disallowed administering the drug under the circumstances, 21 out of the 22 nurses would have given the patient an overdose.[17]

Many traditional cultures regard obedience as a virtue; historically, societies have expected children to obey their elders (compare patriarchy, slaves their owners, serfs their lords in feudal society, lords their king, and everyone God. Even long after slavery ended in the United States, the Black codes required black people to obey and submit to whites, on pain of lynching. Compare the religious ideal of surrender and its importance in Islam (the word Islam can literally mean "surrender").[18]

In some Christian weddings, obedience was formally included along with honor and love as part of a conventional bride's (but not the bridegroom's) wedding vow. This came under attack with women's suffrage[citation needed] and the feminist movement. As of 2014[update] the inclusion of a promise to obey in marriage vows has become optional in some denominations.

Some animals can easily be trained to be obedient by employing operant conditioning, for example obedience schools exist to condition dogs to obey the orders of human owners.

Learning to obey adult rules is a major part of the socialization process in childhood, and many techniques are used by adults to modify the behavior of children. Additionally, extensive training is given in armies to make soldiers capable of obeying orders in situations where an untrained person would not be willing to follow orders. Soldiers are initially ordered to do seemingly trivial things, such as picking up the sergeant's hat off the floor, marching in just the right position, or marching and standing in formation. The orders gradually become more demanding, until an order to the soldiers to place themselves into the midst of gunfire gets an instinctively obedient response.

When the Milgram experimenters were interviewing potential volunteers, the participant selection process itself revealed several factors that affected obedience, outside of the actual experiment.

Interviews for eligibility were conducted in an abandoned complex in Bridgeport, Connecticut.[2][19] Despite the dilapidated state of the building, the researchers found that the presence of a Yale professor as stipulated in the advertisement affected the number of people who obeyed. This was not further researched to test obedience without a Yale professor because Milgram had not intentionally staged the interviews to discover factors that affected obedience.[2] A similar conclusion was reached in the Stanford prison experiment.[19]

In the actual experiment, prestige or the appearance of power was a direct factor in obedienceparticularly the presence of men dressed in gray laboratory coats, which gave the impression of scholarship and achievement and was thought to be the main reason why people complied with administering what they thought was a painful or dangerous shock.[2] A similar conclusion was reached in the Stanford prison experiment.

Raj Persaud, in an article in the BMJ,[20] comments on Milgram's attention to detail in his experiment:

The research was also conducted with amazing verve and subtletyfor example, Milgram ensured that the "experimenter" wear a grey lab coat rather than a white one, precisely because he did not want subjects to think that the "experimenter" was a medical doctor and thereby limit the implications of his findings to the power of physician authority.

Despite the fact that prestige is often thought of as a separate factor, it is, in fact, merely a subset of power as a factor. Thus, the prestige conveyed by a Yale professor in a laboratory coat is only a manifestation of the experience and status associated with it and/or the social status afforded by such an image.

According to Milgram, "the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer sees himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow." Thus, "the major problem for the subject is to recapture control of his own regnant processes once he has committed them to the purposes of the experimenter."[21] Besides this hypothetical agentic state, Milgram proposed the existence of other factors accounting for the subject's obedience: politeness, awkwardness of withdrawal, absorption in the technical aspects of the task, the tendency to attribute impersonal quality to forces that are essentially human, a belief that the experiment served a desirable end, the sequential nature of the action, and anxiety.

Another explanation of Milgram's results invokes belief perseverance as the underlying cause. What "people cannot be counted on is to realize that a seemingly benevolent authority is in fact malevolent, even when they are faced with overwhelming evidence which suggests that this authority is indeed malevolent. Hence, the underlying cause for the subjects' striking conduct could well be conceptual, and not the alleged 'capacity of man to abandon his humanity... as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures."'[22]

In humans:

In animals:

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Obedience (human behavior) - Wikipedia

Saturday, Aug. 12, is World Elephant Day 2017, the sixth such global observance to spread awareness of the soul-crushing plight of elephants in the wild. These sentient gentle giants lead rich emotional lives with values similar to humans but have been driven to the brink of extinction by habitat destruction for cash crops and, more jarring, hunters who mercilessly rip out their ivory tusks while theyre still alive then leave them to die excruciating, slow deaths from hemorrhage.

Ivory hunting is a brutal illustration of increasing violence toward elephants that conservationists warn could wipe out the species in both Asia and Africa within 12 years. Asian elephants number only about 40,000 and are classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. There are about 400,000 remaining in Africa, and IUCN classifies them as vulnerable.

Here are five things you can do right now to affect elephant survival rates:

1. Dont buy ivory, and if you have ivory heirlooms sitting around the house, crush them and have a burial ceremony with your kids in the backyard. Crushing events take place on massive scales just last week, state and federal environmental and conservation officials in Albany, New York, crushed a ton of illegal ivory trinkets worth a staggering $6 million. Family-centered ivory disposals can help kids connect with a species that Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter said demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness and social intelligence.

But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior, Carter said, according to the post on the World Elephant Day website.

2. Get involved in campaigns for more restrictions on ivory bans. Last year, new rules announced by the Obama administration were a near-complete ban on the multi-billion-dollar ivory trade. The rules outlawed ivory imports but had some exceptions for example, ivory legally imported before 1990, heirloom ivory that is more than 100 years old and ivory used in gun handles and musical instruments. Those rules prevent the trade of ivory between states but dont regulate the ivory trade in individual states. Seven states have now added an extra layer of protection, and elephant advocates in a handful of others are asking for similar statewide ivory bans.

3. Support one of 10 elephant conservation projects in critical landscapes through The Bodhi Tree Foundations "Power of 10" initiative. Each of the projects focuses on countering the forces that threaten elephants poaching, habitat loss, human-elephant conflict and a lack of vital rehabilitation and veterinary care. Some of the projects are funded, but others are in dire need of support. The Bodhi Tree Foundation says 100 percent of donations go directly to the project of the donors choosing.

4. Be an informed consumer. Coffee and palm oil plantations have decimated elephant habitat, so dont buy coffee that isnt fair-trade or shade-grown, and avoid products containing palm oil. (Warning, thats going to be tough because its the most widely used vegetable oil in the world, but possible.) Also, make sure wood products are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

5. If you want to experience elephants, be aware that many used for entertainment purposes are mistreated, sometime terribly so. The decision by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to retire its last working elephants reflected the publics growing understanding of elephant intelligence and distaste for activities that exploit them, and the travel website Trip Advisor is no longer booking excursions to attractions with captive animals, including elephant rides. But exploitation still happens. If youre planning on experiencing elephants in the wild, make sure you choose eco-friendly tourism options.

If you want to know more about how human behavior is altering elephant behavior, check out the fascinating read published in 2006 by The New York Times titled An Elephant Crackup?

Among the conclusions: Young male elephants are running amok across Africa, India and Asia, goring children in villages where they once peacefully co-existed with humans, because decades of ivory poaching, habitat loss and other threats have disrupted the fabric of elephant life and the societal and familial structures under which young elephants are raised and, essentially, kept in line.

The slaughter is traumatic for young elephants and profoundly changes them, psychologist Gay Bradshaw told The Times.

The loss of elephant elders and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants, said Bradshaw, who at the time was doing research for what became the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity."

Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images News/Getty Images

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World Elephant Day 2017: 5 Ways To Stem Their Extinction - Patch.com

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How do you get a person to buy a product or service? Psychology holds answers to questions that have preoccupied marketing departments for decades, particularly surrounding how to influence people and how people respond to attempts to influence their behaviors.

"Persuasion is no longer just an art, it's an out-and-out science," said Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. "Indeed, a vast body of scientific evidence now exists on how, when and why people say yes to influence attempts."

Cialdini has synthesized years of research on social influence into six universal principles for understanding attempts to influence human behavior. These can be used by businesses and consumers alike to better understand the inner workings of purchasing behaviors, as well as which appeals are more or less likely to succeed.

Armed with these six principles of influence, companies can more adeptly navigate their potential consumers and convert more to sales. However, Cialdini warned against crossing the line between influence and manipulation. To do so, he said, could spell disaster in the long run.

"People, companies and marketers need to ask themselves whether the principle of influence is inherent in the situation that is, do they have to manufacture it or can they simply uncover it?" he said. "No one wants to be a smuggler of influence. Claiming to be an expert when they're not, exploiting power those eventually will have negative consequences.

"We can focus too heavily on economic factors when seeking to motivate others toward our offerings and ideas," he added. "We would do well to consider employing psychological motivators such as those we have covered here."

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The Science of Persuasion: How to Influence Consumer Choice - Business News Daily

Bloomberg View columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews Matt Wallaert, a behavioral scientist who works at the intersection of technology and human behavior. After several years in academia and two successful startups, he joined Microsoft, where he led a team of experts using technology to help people live happier, healthier lives. During his time with Microsoft, he was a director at Microsoft Ventures, the firms venture capital arm. He sits on the boards of a variety of startups and nonprofits. Wallaert and Ritholtz discuss the role of behavioral psychology in startups. This interview aired on Bloomberg Radio.

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Matt Wallaert Is on a 'Chief Behavioral Officer' Mission - Bloomberg

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has seen its reputation take a battering over the last ten years or so. Bailed out by the U.K. government during the global financial crisis in 2008, nearly 73 percent is still owned by the taxpayer.

Almost ten years on, the bank is focusing on the future. "RBS is probably the poster child of the financial crisis and we're well aware of the mistakes we made in the past," David Wheldon, chief marketing officer of RBS, told CNBC's Marketing Media Money on Thursday evening. "We're well aware of the legacy issues, but that was the bank that we once were," he added. "We're focussing on the bank we are today and the bank we want to be in the future. And what we want to be is the 'most preferred' bank."

RBS, Wheldon added, was focussed full square on the customer and its customer facing brands.

Wheldon said that RBS wanted to become number one for customer service, trust and advocacy by 2020. Is the ambition of becoming the most trusted bank an achievable one? Wheldon said it was, although challenges clearly remained.

"It's certainly a stretching target becauseif you look at RBS, it is still the least trusted brand in the least trusted sector," he explained. Focusing on customer facing brands such as NatWest and Ulster Bank was an important part of the process.

"By doing this we've really been able to get our staff focussed again on customer facing brands, leaving RBS behind us, because that was the global brand that we were attempting to build before it went wrong."

A recent ad campaign for NatWest, for example, used the slogan "we are what we do." A black and white film showed various types of human behavior, from the caring nature of a parent carrying a sleeping child to hooligans kicking tables and chairs.

The ad was something of a mea culpa for the bank and, according to Wheldon, a way of getting permission to be heard again.

"Inside there as well is the human truth: we're all what we have done, we're all what we will do," he said. "We're no different," he added. "We are what we do, so it was an admission of fault and an invitation to hold us to account, and our customers do exactly that."

Looking to the future, Wheldon said he wanted RBS to be trusted again.

"We've rebuilt pride internally and that's a really important thing for us because at its heart our strategy is... (to) engage our colleagues," he added.

"If we engage our colleagues and motivate them they'll service our customers well. If we do that well enough, our customers will advocate us. And there's a beautiful virtuous circle there that will lead us to number one."

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After the dark days of the financial crisis, RBS wants to regain its customers' trust - CNBC

LONDON (Reuters) - Engravings on a human bone from a prehistoric archaeological site in a cave in southern England shows that human cannibals ate their prey and then performed ritualistic burials with the remains, scientists said on Wednesday.

The forearm bone appears to have been disarticulated, filleted, chewed, and then engraved with a zig-zag design before being broken to extract bone marrow, said scientists from Britain's Natural History Museum who conducted the analysis.

The finding, published in the journal PLOS ONE, adds to previous studies of bones from the site, called Gough's Cave, thought to be from Britain's Palaeolithic period - the early Stone Age.

Those studies confirmed human cannibalistic behavior and showed some remains had been kept and modified, making human skulls into bowls, or "skull cups".

The zig-zag cuts are undoubtedly engraving marks, the scientists said, and had no utilitarian purpose but were purely artistic or symbolic.

Silvia Bello, a Natural History Museum who worked on the study with colleagues from University College London, said the engraved motif was similar to engravings found in other European archaeological sites.

"However, what is exceptional in this case is the choice of raw material - human bone - and the cannibalistic context in which it was produced," she said.

"The engraving was a purposeful component of the cannibalistic practice, rich in symbolic connotations."

Discovered in the 1880's, Gough's Cave in Somerset, southern England, was excavated over several decades ending in 1992.

Archaeological investigations there revealed intensively processed human bones intermingled with butchered remains of large mammals and a range of flint, bone, antler and ivory artefacts.

Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky

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Engraved prehistoric human bones show ritualistic cannibalism - Reuters

Thucydides is on a roll these days.

The ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War, who lived almost 2,500 years ago, makes the title of Graham Allisons prominent new volume, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydidess Trap?

The great historian merits this because his analysis of the causes of the ancient war between the Athenians and the Spartans provides the essential dilemma of Allisons book: Can states avoid catastrophic war when a rising power begins to challenge a dominant states control? Thucydides pessimistic answer seems to be No: War was inevitable, we are told, when emergent power Athens contested Spartas supremacy 2,500 years ago. Allison offers only a slightly more optimistic take (War is more likely than not) in analyzing Chinas growing challenge to Americas dominating position globally.

The Trump White House is reportedly obsessed with Thucydides, thanks in good measure to Allison. But senior administration officials like National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster have long taken seriously the ideas of the ancient writer, even if some think he misunderstands what Thucydides is really saying.

And now even Wonder Woman has Thucydides name on her lips: In the recent blockbuster superhero movie, the title character and a villain refer to the historian in a dramatic scene (incorrectly, as it turns out, since a quotation is erroneously attributed to him.)

All this attention, both serious and silly, raises the question: What can we truly learn from Thucydides, a writer who lived over two millennia ago, about power relations today? Quite a bit, in my view, but not necessarily in the way people like to.

This moment is not, of course, the first time modern policy experts have turned to Thucydides for his insights. The cognoscenti have long known of the utility of his history. To take a prominent example, during the Cold War much used to be made of the bipolar world of Thucydides. America was often cast in the role of Athens because both were democracies, while militarized, oligarchic Sparta was played by the Soviet Union. But this analogizing got things backwards in strategic terms: Sparta (much like the United States) led an alliance of relatively free, vulnerable allied states who looked to it for protection against a repressive imperial power. Meanwhile, Athens (much like the Soviet Union) controlled its allies by force or intimidation, causing a great deal of anxiety in the opposing coalition.

But regardless, this attractive bipolar comparison stoked fears that the unavoidable war Thucydides described in his time would mean World War III for all of us.

Happily, it didnt turn out that way.

This brings me to my first point about appropriately using Thucydides history: Be careful about the analogies you see. Thucydides compelling vision of the Peloponnesian War, with its meticulously delineated causes, combatants, and alliances, make it easy to find parallels later in history, right up to the present day. Thucydides clarity about power relations and human behavior in times of conflict gives his readers all the tools they need to see larger patterns at work that they may identify with events in their own times. Thucydides himself foresaw the utility of his work. He says that he wrote it not to entertain for the moment but to be of lasting value, because people could use it to clearly understand past events and also understand future events given that, people being people, similar sorts of things will happen again.

But as we have seen, one can get the analogies wrong. That similar sorts of things may come up again in human affairs (as Thucydides put it) does not mean that everything turns out the same in the end. Thus, the dangerous, decades-long American-Soviet standoff did not result in catastrophic war the way the Athens-Sparta confrontation did. Such a failed analogy doesnt mean Thucydides was wrong, only those who tried to prognosticate based on his text. Thus, we ought not be too eager to seize upon another comparable strategic situation modern Chinas challenge to the United States (equivalent to Athens challenge to Sparta?) and try to use Thucydides to predict the outcome.

Now, to be fair to Allison, Destined for War does not go quite this far. He is more cautious. For one thing, like a good political scientist, he expands his dataset beyond Thucydides to include 16 other, supposedly comparable, cases of rising versus established powers from various periods in history. In 12 of these, he says, war resulted and in four it did not. Moreover, his goal is not really to make a prediction. Rather, he wants to use what he identifies as the Thucydides trap the tendency for wars to break out in circumstances like Chinas growing challenge to U.S. dominance to put Americans on guard to the danger and encourage policymakers to take appropriate action, including embarking on a long-term strategic reassessment.

And yet the risk of misunderstanding Thucydides remains when he is used this way, however carefully. First, we should understand that Thucydides himself never talks of a trap. Thats a modern construal, not just by Allison but by Arlene Saxonhouse, when she asserts that, reading Thucydides history, we see a Power Trap described, whereby states like Athens become trapped by their unending pursuit of power. But Thucydides never describes the complex strategic history of his time as any kind of paradigm or trap. He never warns that this set of circumstances may occur again and that we all must be on guard for it in the future. To use his history as if he did risks turning it into a kind of parlor game of potentially predictive analogies. I see 19th century England in ancient Athens! No, Athens is 21st century America! No, Sparta is! We better watch out look what happened in the Peloponnesian War!

So how should we use Thucydides, then? Does his history have anything valuable to offer modern thinkers or policymakers? It certainly does, and this brings me to my second point. Years of working with Thucydides in the classroom and as a scholar tell me that what his book teaches most of all is what we might call historical mindfulness. By this I mean a generalized understanding about the workings of history: what kinds of forces tend to inspire people, drive politics, create crises and bring (or prevent) resolution, with what consequences for human communities? Thucydides was not a prophet nor a political scientist, but a keen observer and explicator of the human condition in collective conflict. And we can gain much wisdom by studying his work with this in mind.

For example, when we read Thucydides account of the devastating civil war in Corcyra, with his astute observations of the way political struggles of this kind twist ambitions and norms and the very meaning of words, there is much to learn. The horror and tragedy of the events in Corcyra friends become enemies, kin kill kin, a once-prosperous polity virtually self-destructs make his account riveting and give weight to his thoughts on how such things can come about. Several of his observations stand out: that the existence of a larger war (between Athens and Sparta) paved the way for Corcyra and, later, other polarized cities to fall into internal violence; that political behavior previously honored as prudent and honest becomes, in these circumstances, scorned as disloyal or cowardly; that atrocity led to counter-atrocity, while mutual distrust made de-escalation almost impossible. Seeing the truth in Thucydides observations about events in Corcyra (which, in general ways, recall incidents from other civil wars in other times and places) can teach us a great deal about civil strife and of politics gone wrong. It helps make us historically mindful.

This manner of reading Thucydides offers, I would assert, a deeper wisdom than analogy-hunting. (The Corcyrean oligarchs are like the hardliners in Iran! No, they are the loyalists in Syria! And the Corcyrean populists must be the Syrian Kurds! Now we can predict what will happen!)

Consider another example. One of the most renowned parts of his history is the Melian dialogue, where Thucydides reports on a conversation that took place between envoys from an invading Athenian force and officials from the small island city-state of Melos, which the Athenians were about to assault. In the dialogue, Thucydides presents his readers with a stark view of the Athenian imperial mindset of the time, while also putting us in the shoes of a vulnerable community that found itself in the path of a much more powerful one bent on swallowing it. The Melians ask the envoys to be left alone, appealing to reason and justice. They claim a desire to remain neutral in the Spartan-Athenian struggle, contend that the Athenians would outrage gods and men if they attacked them, and warn that the Spartans would intervene on the Melians behalf. The Athenians, in contrast, argue from a basis of naked power: We will forego fancy words of self-justification and simply tell you that we are strong, you are weak, and you can only save yourself by surrendering your freedom to us or we will crush you. Our empire was built by taking what we can and thats how we will maintain it. Oh, and the gods seem to like us just fine. (And dont delude yourselves about Sparta coming to help you; it is obvious that they wont.)

The contrast between the harsh words of the Athenians and the alternately brave, hopeful, and desperate arguments of the Melians makes this exchange one of the most memorable in Thucydides history. The fact that the Melians, who refused to surrender and resisted the Athenian siege for as long as they could, suffered obliteration in the end at the hands of the Athenians (all surviving men were executed, all the women and children were sold into slavery) adds to the drama and message of the episode. Thucydides follows his Melian account with a lengthy description of Athens grand Sicilian expedition. This was another arrogant attempt at imperial expansion, but one that instead ended in disaster for Athens.

Scholars have argued about how exactly we should interpret the Melian dialogue, but two conclusions seem fairly clear. First and foremost, Thucydides wants us to see the brutal thinking and overbearing pride of the Athenians in the way they conceived of and sought to expand their empire. Fair-seeming words used on other occasions to justify ethically their imperial expansion are stripped away, revealing the cold calculus beneath. Thucydides moralizing purpose shines through, both in the painfully unjust treatment of the honorable Melians and in the comeuppance that he shows the overconfident Athenians suffering in the immediately following narrative of the catastrophic Sicilian expedition. Naked, cruel aggression can rebound against its practitioners.

But there is more to it than this. Thucydides is also teaching us about realistic expectations in dangerous times. The Melians, for all the justice of their cause, made a terrible error in deciding to resist the Athenians. The Spartans did not lift a finger to help them, much as the Athenians predicted. The Melian forces were completely outmatched, much as the Athenians said they would be. And the Melians paid for their delusions with their very existence.

I could produce many more fertile episodes for examination from Thucydides ample history. There is, for example, his famous multifaceted treatment of the short- and long-term causes of the Spartan-Athenian war (on which see S. N. Jaffes recent and wise commentary in War on the Rocks.) But the expositions I have provided, brief as they are, show, I hope, how contemplating Thucydides rich text can yield many insights about fundamental matters of politics, war, and the human condition. We can see in Thucydides work (and, of course, in written accounts of other times and places, if not always as incisively) the dynamics of history at work. Understanding the predicament of the Melians, or the civic self-immolation of the Corcyreans, or the corrosive imperial ideology of the Athenians, together with the long-term causes and consequences of their conflicts, helps one to perceive, at a general level, how human communities can prosper or falter or fail. Guided by Thucydides, we see dynamics at work that can facilitate the analysis of strategic confrontations in any era.

Fostering such historical mindfulness does not, unfortunately, grant one the straightforward ability to predict the course of future events. Neither does Thucydides history itself. He did not write an oracular text. Trying to peg the Chinese or Americans as latter-day Athenians, or distilling Thucydides work into axioms of history (when x power challenges y, z will result) while, admittedly, intellectually stimulating misses a more profound education available in his text, an education that can provide students of public affairs with a nuanced, historically grounded grasp of how the world works.

Eric W. Robinson is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Indiana University. His most recent book is Democracy Beyond Athens: Popular Government in the Greek Classical Age (Cambridge, 2011). He has written about Thucydides and causes of the Peloponnesian War in The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides (Oxford, 2017).

Image: Jastrow, CC

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What Thucydides Teaches Us About War, Politics, and the Human Condition - War on the Rocks

In another leak from the Trump Administration, The New York Times obtained a report on climate change last night (August 7).

Titled the Climate Science Special Report, it is based on the work of scientists from 13 federal agencies, and it concludes that it is extremely likely that more than half of the increase in global temperatures over the past 40 years is because of human activity. Though this has been the assertion of many of the worlds expertsand laypeopleon global warming, it is a belief that starkly contradicts those of a number of Trumps cabinet members, who claim it is uncertain how much human behavior is to blame.

The draft is now under review by the White House, which received it several weeks ago. According to New York magazine, 13 government agencies must sign off on the draft, which has already been approved by the National Academy of Sciences, by Sunday.

The Washington Post reports that scientists from these agencies fear suppression from the White House. One of the agencies that must approve it is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is headed by Scott Pruitt, who has said that he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary factor in global warming. The report insists otherwise.

In addition to Pruitt and other cabinet members disbelief about human influence on global warming, The Guardian reported yesterday that aseries of emails shows staff at the Department of Agricultures Natural Resources Conservation Service is censoring the use of the term climate change. Instead staff has been advised to use the term weather extremes.

The current situation will provide an acid test of whether the Trump Administration is open to hearing the scientific truth about climate change or is so much in the thrall of fossil fuel interests that they are fixated on hiding the reality from the public, Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, told the Times.

The draft report, says The Washington Post, estimates that human impact was responsible for an increase in global temperatures of 1.1 to 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 to 2010.

In addition, scientists studied all areas of the United States. Per the Post:

It also dismisses talk of a so-called hiatus in global warming, noting that the most recent years reinforce longer-term trends. Instead, the report says, the United States faces temperature increases of 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the next few decades even under significantly reduced future emissions. And the record-setting temperatures of recent years will become relatively common in the near future.

Aside from a rise in temperatures across the nation, the report also posits thatair and ground temperatures in Alaska and the Arctic are rising at twice the rate of the global average. There are already coastal Native communities in Alaska that are wrestling with the realitieseconomic and culturalof relocating inland to avoid rising sea levels.

As Colorlines has previously reported, coastal communities of color bear a disproportunite brunt of climate change in the U.S. Such communities tend to live on lower-lying land more susceptible to flooding, and when it floods, they often lack the proper funds to deal with it and rebuild.

The entire report can be read here on the Times site.

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New Federal Report on Climate Change Refutes Beliefs of Trump Cabinet - ColorLines magazine

The American Society of Safety Engineers conference in Denver sponsored a debate of sorts between the proponents of behavior-based safety (BBS) and what has come to be called human and organizational performance (HOP). These were touted as two different philosophies of workplace safety aimed at reducing workplace injuries and fatalities. The latter of these two was presented as a shift in thinking.

There are several problems with both ways of thinking that should be obvious to those in charge of safety at the site or organizational level.

The first problem is that neither of these represent an overall strategy for safety. Each approach focuses on one aspect of what is needed to create a safe workplace and ignores almost everything else. Neither really is a philosophy, but rather a program or process.

A true strategy is a value proposition that defines how to win. In the case of safety, it would define how to win the war against accidental injuries and fatalities. Both these approaches fail to define what true safety excellence looks like or what it takes to achieve it. Rather, both prescribe a series of steps to fail less.

For decades, safety metrics largely have been lagging indicators or failure metrics. Such measurements prompt organizations to work reactively to drive the metrics down or fail less. Success is defined as the lack of failure rather than a strategic achievement.

The second problem lies in the fact that every site (even within the same organization) has a unique culture. While both of these approaches have been successful at reducing accidents, the successes are less a function of methodology and more a function of fit. BBS stresses working on specific behaviors and HOP stresses working on organizational support factors. The approach that will work best for the specific site is the one that best addresses the site-specific safety challenges. The factor that can change this reality is the extent to which the process can be customized for the site.

BBS became so popular at one time that many practices with little to do with mainstream behavioral thinking were labeled as BBS. Academic experts and consultants proposed very specific methods for doing BBS. Because of this, many people have a very limited or specific view of what BBS really is. Based on the most popular approaches, BBS has several main components:

Selecting specific safety-related worker behaviors. Observing workers to see if they are doing these behaviors. Using various methods to encourage (positively reinforce) or discourage the behaviors. Using the observation data as a leading indicator to enhance safety. Some attempted to shape the safety culture through worker interaction, caring and ownership of the process.

Many of these approaches to change worker behaviors failed to realize and address the organizational influences on the behaviors and simply attempted to force a change at the individual worker level. This omission was one factor that led to the formation of HOP.

Human and organizational performance (HOP) proposes that workplace factors of various sorts impact worker behavior and the organization should align these factors to prompt the kind of safety performance it wants.

The spokesman for human and organizational excellence in this debate explained the difference, stating BBS sees the worker as the problem to be solved while HOP views the employee as the problem solver. Neither of these recognize the worker as the customer of safety efforts. The workers definitely are not the safety problem, but neither are they the problem solvers. If workers could solve their own safety problems, they already would have done so.

While HOP requests feedback from workers on what they need to be safe, it ignores the truism that people dont know what they dont know. It is the responsibility of the safety efforts to add value to the worker: increased skills, better risk awareness, strategies for handling risks, personal protective equipment, etc. Even if the worker doesnt know they need these things, the safety department should.

Safety constantly should try to predict and exceed the needs of the worker, not just meet the known demands. Steve Jobs said no one knew they needed a smart phone until he invented one. Henry Ford said if he had given people what they thought they wanted, it would have been a faster horse. It is not enough to just ask workers and rely on their perceived wants and needs.

In all fairness, the statement that BBS views the worker as the problem is inaccurate as well. Most BBS programs focus on behaviors and realize that behavior is influenced by much more than the individual. In this regard, the two philosophies tend to agree. The organization should manage influences on human behavior, not just ask workers to change.

In this sense, these two approaches are part of a greater whole. BBS produces a measurement of targeted behaviors and an excellent opportunity to better understand what influences behavior at the very touchpoint where it is happening. If BBS observers would quit confronting workers to change behavior and start asking why when desired behaviors are not occurring, the organization could better target the specific influences impacting worker behavior.

Without such information, human and organizational performance approaches are simply seeking generic actions to prompt performance. Without the why approach, BBS naively is thinking it can change behaviors without changing the influences on behavior that could be modified in a HOP program. If these two programs quit debating and start cooperating, the result would be a much more holistic approach.

Even so, addressing worker behavior and its organizational influences only impacts one element of safety excellence. The greatest potential value of either of these programs (or a combination of them) would be if they fit into an overarching safety strategy that defined success and the specific role these programs would contribute to that success.

Terry Mathis, founder and CEO of ProAct Safety, has served as a consultant and advisor for top organizations. A respected strategist and thought leader in the industry, Mathis has authored four books and numerous articles and blogs and is known for his dynamic and engaging presentations. EHS Today has named him one of the 50 People Who Most Influenced EHS four consecutive times. Mathis can be reached at [emailprotected] or 800-395-1347.

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Safety and Performance Excellence: Two-Dimensional Safety - EHS Today