Progress-focused

Peter, a reader, responded to my article on workplace democracy. He informed me that there was unrest within his department after the previous manager, who was not functioning well, had to leave quickly. The management started a recruitment procedure, and Peter and his colleagues noticed that they were not involved.

Carol Dweck, founder of mindset theory, has written an ambitious new paper in Psychological Review . In this paper, she presents a new theory about how personality is formed and how both nature and nurture play a role in this. The interesting thing about this theory is that it both establishes connections between old and new theories within psychology and that is brings together separate psychological disciplines. Social psychologists have often been criticized for paying too little attention to theory building and for merely developing fragmentary knowledge. Dweck now comes up with a strong answer to these criticisms in the form of a broad theory which may turn out to explain a broad range of psychological phenomena. This type of theorizing is not only important for social scientists but also for practitioners for whom psychological knowledge is relevant (and who is really excluded from this group?). Good theory can help practitioners deal with problems in more informed, systematic ...

In this post from 2012 , I wrote that people may create fear in order to control other people. I explained that creating fear is an effective way of gaining people's attention, creating hyper-vigilance, suppressing their rationality, and legitimizing violence in order to fight the (supposed) threats and to enforce loyalty. People doing this set in motion a vicious cycle. In other words, a process of escalation seems inevitable. In order to keep their followers' fears sustained, and their rationality suppressed, they have to keep feeding them new information about the (supposed) threat. By creating more fear, they get more attention, suppress more people's rationality, legitimize greater violence, and acquire greater control. These are the methods dictators use.

Parenting style affects how autonomous and related children will feel. Self-determination theory has shown that individuals, throughout their lives, have needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Simply put, the more their needs are fulfilled, the better individuals feel and function. Past research has shown that the degree to which parent support the fulfillment of these needs the more adapted and well-functioning their children will tend to become ( read more ). When parents use an authoritative and controlling parenting style, their children's development is likely to be hampered to some degree. Examples of such a controlling parenting style are: use of controlling language, emphasis on punishment ànd reward, use of threats, arousing guild and anxietym and using contingent parental regard and affection.

George, a high school teacher, looked into the classroom of his colleague Bill and saw, to his amazement, that the students of the class, which had a reputation of being a very difficult class, were quietly working. At lunch break he asked Bill with a surprized smile: "How did you get them to do that, man? I get nothing but trouble from this class. I see no other solution than to get really tough with them. That'll teach them!" Bill smiled and then explained how he used the principle of autonomy-support in his classroom and he said this worked rather well. He explained that this meant, among other things, to provide many choices for students, taking students' feelings and opinions quite seriously, and avoiding controlling language. When he heard that, George said: "That sounds rather naive of you. If you do that they will walk right over you!"

In Going from Good to Great with Complex Tasks , Ozgun Atasoy explains that the belief that consciously thinking about what we are doing, when performing complex tasks, by definition harms our performance, is wrong. It is true that some type of conscious thinking can harm our functioning. For example, when we are typing on a keyboard, we run largely on auto-pilot. If we would try to consciously control the typing of each separate letter, this would slow us down a great deal and probably cause us to make many mistakes.