Engaged followership and organisational misconduct

Work on this paper was supported by a pump-priming grant from the British Psychological Society.PostprintPeer reviewe

Violence brief interventions: a rapid review

Provision of a Violence Brief Intervention (VBI) to young men undergoing treatment for a violent injury may represent a teachable moment for the prevention of future interpersonal violence in Scotland. Prior to intervention design, a rapid review of the research literature was necessary to examine existing programmes. After title and abstract screening, eight distinct VBIs were identified from full texts. Whilst none of the programmes were a perfect match for our intervention goals, they did demonstrate the potential effectiveness of brief interventions for violence prevention at both cognitive and behavioural levels. Key themes of successful interventions included brief motivational interviewing as an effective method of engaging with at-risk participants and encouraging change, the utility of social norms approaches for correcting peer norm misperceptions, the usefulness of working with victims of violence in medical settings (particularly oral and maxillofacial surgeries), the importance of addressing the role of alcohol after violent injury, the advantages of a computer-therapist hybrid model of delivery, and the need for adequate follow-up evaluation as part of a randomised control trial. This information has been used to design a VBI which is currently under evaluation

Preliminary research informing policy on remote alcohol monitoring in criminal justice : the Scottish experience

This study was funded in part by a grant from the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit to Peter D Donnelly (no grant number) and partly by a grant from the Scottish School of Public Health to Fergus G Neville (no grant number).Objectives. To explore the views of Scottish offenders on the impact of alcohol on their experience of offending and their lives in general. Further, to explore their views on the concept of Remote Alcohol Monitoring (RAM) as a way to address alcohol misuse upon liberation from prison. Methods. A convenience sample of 12 serving offenders participated in one of three focus groups.Data were analysed using the principles of thematic analysis. Results. Analysis of the data revealed the significant impact of alcohol on the lives of the participants. Key themes included the amount and frequency of alcohol consumption; the association of alcohol with harm; the association of alcohol with offending; previous attempts to reduce alcohol consumption and possible reasons for failure; and the views of the participants on the utility of RAM in relation to crime prevention. Conclusions. This group of offenders had significant issues with alcohol misuse prior to incarceration that had impacted on their offending and resulted in a variety of health and social harms. Participants were generally positive but pragmatic about RAM, recognising that technology alone may not be enough to change deeply ingrained and addictive behaviours.PostprintPeer reviewe

A warrant for violence? An analysis of Donald Trump's speech before the US Capitol attack

On January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump's speech during a ‘Save America’ rally was followed by mass violence, with Trump's supporters storming the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the presidential election. In its wake, there was a great deal of debate around whether the speech contained direct instructions for the subsequent violence. In this paper, we use a social identity perspective on leadership (and more specifically, on toxic leadership) to analyse the speech and see how its overall argument relates to violence. We show that Trump's argument rests on the populist distinction between the American people and elites. He moralises these groups as good and evil respectively and proposes that the very existence of America is under threat if the election result stands. On this basis he proposes that all true Americans are obligated to act in order prevent Biden's certification and to ensure that the good prevails over evil. While Trump does not explicitly say what such action entails, he also removes normative and moral impediments to extreme action. In this way, taken as a whole, Trump's speech enables rather than demands violence and ultimately it provides a warrant for the violence that ensued.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Engaged followership and toxic science : exploring the effect of prototypicality on willingness to follow harmful experimental instructions

Funding: This research was supported by Economic and Social Research Council grant (ES/L003104/1), a Fellowship from the Australian Research Council (FL110100199), from funding received from the School of Management at the University of St Andrews.Drawing on the ‘engaged followership’ reinterpretation of Milgram’s work on obedience, four studies (three of which were pre-registered) examine the extent to which people’s willingness to follow an experimenter’s instructions is dependent on the perceived prototypicality of the science they are supposedly advancing. In Studies 1, 2 and 3, participants took part in a study that was described as advancing either ‘hard’ (prototypical) science (i.e., neuroscience) or ‘soft’ (non-prototypical) science (i.e., social science) before completing an online analogue of Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ paradigm. In Studies 1 and 2, participants in the neuroscience condition completed more trials than those in the social science condition. This effect was not replicated in Study 3, possibly because the timing of data collection (late 2020) coincided with an emphasis on social science’s importance in controlling COVID-19. Results of a final cross-sectional study (Study 4) indicated that participants who perceived the study as to be more prototypical of science found it more worthwhile, reported making a wider contribution by taking part, reported less dislike for the task, more happiness at having taken part, and more trust in the researchers, all of which indirectly predicted greater followership. Implications for the theoretical understanding of obedience to the toxic instructions of an authority are discussed.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Engaged followership and toxic science:Exploring the effect of prototypicality on willingness to follow harmful experimental instructions

Drawing on the ‘engaged followership’ reinterpretation of Milgram's work on obedience, four studies (three pre-registered) examine the extent to which people's willingness to follow an experimenter's instructions is dependent on the perceived prototypicality of the science they are supposedly advancing. In Studies 1, 2 and 3, participants took part in a study that was described as advancing either ‘hard’ (prototypical) science (i.e., neuroscience) or ‘soft’ (non-prototypical) science (i.e., social science) before completing an online analogue of Milgram's ‘Obedience to Authority’ paradigm. In Studies 1 and 2, participants in the neuroscience condition completed more trials than those in the social science condition. This effect was not replicated in Study 3, possibly because the timing of data collection (late 2020) coincided with an emphasis on social science's importance in controlling COVID-19. Results of a final cross-sectional study (Study 4) indicated that participants who perceived the study to be more prototypical of science found it more worthwhile, reported making a wider contribution by taking part, reported less dislike for the task, more happiness at having taken part, and more trust in the researchers, all of which indirectly predicted greater followership. Implications for the theoretical understanding of obedience to toxic instructions are discussed

Engaged followership and toxic science: Exploring the effect of prototypicality on willingness to follow harmful experimental instructions

Drawing on the ‘engaged followership’ reinterpretation of Milgram’s work on obedience, four studies (three of which were pre-registered) examine the extent to which people’s willingness to follow an experimenter’s instructions is dependent on the perceived prototypicality of the science they are supposedly advancing. In Studies 1, 2 and 3, participants took part in a study that was described as advancing either ‘hard’ (prototypical) science (i.e., neuroscience) or ‘soft’ (non-prototypical) science (i.e., social science) before completing an online analogue of Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ paradigm. In Studies 1 and 2, participants in the neuroscience condition completed more trials than those in the social science condition. This effect was not replicated in Study 3, possibly because the timing of data collection (late 2020) coincided with an emphasis on social science’s importance in controlling COVID-19. Results of a final cross-sectional study (Study 4) indicated that participants who perceived the study to be more prototypical of science found it more worthwhile, reported making a wider contribution by taking part, reported less dislike for the task, more happiness at having taken part, and more trust in the researchers, all of which indirectly predicted greater followership. Implications for the theoretical understanding of obedience to the toxic instructions of an authority are discussed

Self-categorization as a basis of behavioural mimicry: experiments in The Hive

Introduction Do we always do what others do, and, if not, when and under what conditions do we do so? In this paper we test the hypothesis that mimicry is moderated by the mere knowledge of whether the source is a member of the same social category as ourselves. Methods We investigated group influence on mimicry using three tasks on a software platform which interfaces with mobile computing devices to allow the controlled study of collective behaviour in an everyday environment. Results Overall, participants (N = 965) were influenced by the movements of confederates (represented as dots on a screen) who belonged to their own category in both purposive and incidental tasks. Conclusion Our results are compatible with collective level explanations of social influence premised on shared social identification. This includes both a heuristic of unintended mimicry (the acts of group members are diagnostic of how one should act), and communication of affiliation (based on a desire to make one’s group cohesive). The results are incompatible with traditional ‘contagion’ accounts which suggest mimicry is automatic and inevitable. The results have practical implications for designing behavioural interventions which can harness the power of copying behaviour, for example in emergency evacuations

Fraping, social norms and online representations of self

Charting the Digital Lifespan research project was funded by EPSRC Grant Reference No EP/L00383X/1.This paper reports on qualitative insights generated from 46 semi-structured interviews with adults ranging in age from 18 to 70. It focuses on an online social behaviour, ‘fraping’, which involves the unauthorised alteration of content on a person's social networking site (SNS) profile by a third party. Our exploratory research elucidates what constitutes a frape, who is involved in it, and what the social norms surrounding the activity are. We provide insights into how frape contributes to online sociality and the co-construction of online identity, and identify opportunities for further work in understanding the interplay between online social identities, social groups and social norms.PostprintPeer reviewe