The purpose of this study was to determine the training needs of first-line supervisors employed at the University of Papua New Guinea. Thirty managers and 30 first-line supervisors responded to a questionnaire designed to assess the importance of, and training offered in, various skills relevant to first-line supervision. “Need” was defined as the absence of sufficient training in a skill judged to be of importance. The results show that there are significant differences between the perceptions of the first-line supervisors and managers with respect to training needs of first-line supervisors. Managers rated “people skills” as important for first-line supervisors, while first-line supervisors rated more administrative type skills as most important for them.

In psychology, the study of tradition-directed societies (Riesman, 1950) has usually served to “confirm” existing theories as being of universal validity. The same holds true of psychoanalysis: in 1929, Geza Roheim travelled to Normanby Island in Melanesia to prove the universality of the Oedipus complex. He did so in reaction to Bronislaw Malinowski, whose research with the Trobriand Islanders had led him to question that idea. Similarly, C. G. Jung thought he recognized specific archetypal manifestations of the collective unconscious in the tribal traditions of primitive populations.

The primary concern of the psychoanalysts was to identify and understand certain regularities in the aliens and to draw parallels between alien and western psychological processes. They were aware of the different psychological structure of members of tradition-directed societies, but their evaluation was biased by their feeling of mental and moral superiority. This bias often resulted in an overly obvious reproduction of the earlier colonialist power structures. Ultimately, the alienness of those populations was as frightening as their similarity; they reminded us of the alien within ourselves, of our own unconscious which Freud called the foreign, or alien, interior.

This study evaluated relationships between the use of psychoactive drugs, susceptibility to social influence, and locus of control in a sample of 79 Papua New Guinean university students. Contrary to expectations, drug users did not differ from nonusers in either locus of control or in susceptibility to social influence.

In this article I question the idiocentric/allocentric distinction on the grounds that: a) it utilizes an increasingly discredited humanist conception of the rational autonomous subject associated with the definition of idiocentrism; b) it distinguishes forms of motivation which fail to offer reliable indices of behavioural patterning; and c) it offers a characterization of different cultural norms and societal morality which is ultimately misleading.

Views presented in this journal by Lea (1991) and Mules (1992) concerning whether human mental states can be studied empirically are evaluated in this article; I conclude that both authors' positions are self-defeating. Specifically, Lea's subjectivistic analysis of mind results in it being impossible to know the meaning of mental terms both in our own case and in the case of others; this problem cannot be avoided by using argument by analogy. The relativistic theory of knowledge, within which Mules suggests that the empirical study of mind can proceed, does not enable us to have knowledge about mental states or anything else. It is argued that mind-brain identity theory provides a defensible account of the mind which does not rule out in principle the possibility of studying it empirically.