Chapter 8, Surrounded with trouble (June 5 - June 10). The BIS board decides to grant a second credit to the BIS, but only after a prolonged discussion and it is made conditional on the placement of the Austrian government loan. There is increasing concern about the schilling as capital flows out of the country and the government issues take increasing priority, without being placed. At the same time, Germany’s reparations issues become ever more present as the German Chancellor Brüning meets with Prime Minister MacDonals at Chequers. Shortly before, Brüning published a statement saying that the burden on the German people has reached its limit. The international creditors too become increasingly nervous about the Austrian situation.

In the 1980s and 90s in psychology, many cross-cultural comparisons were made concerning individualism and collectivism with questionnaires and experiments. The largest number of them compared “collectivistic” Japanese with “individualistic” Americans. This chapter reviewed 48 such empirical comparisons and found that Japanese were no different from Americans in the degree of collectivism. Both questionnaire studies and experimental studies showed essentially the same pattern of results. Many researchers who believed in “Japanese collectivism” suspected flaws in those empirical studies. However, none of the suspected flaws was consistent with empirical evidence. For example, although it was suspected that “Japanese collectivism” was not supported because college students provided data as participants, the studies with non-student adults did not support this common view either. It is thus unquestionable that as a whole the empirical studies disproved the reality of “Japanese collectivism.”

This chapter focuses on the individuals who actively worked to protect and save members of targeted groups during genocides, often at great personal risk. By presenting sociological, psychological, and neuroscience research designed to understand better the profile of those who risked their lives to rescue strangers in times of war, this chapter asks what makes this small subset of the population react differently than others. By combining research and interviews with rescuers, the chapter shows that both individual processes and environmental factors contribute to risking one’s own life to rescue threatened human beings. People who engaged in rescue efforts during a particular event came from a range of different backgrounds, and no single factor can be reliably used to predict why they chose to help. Some rescuers were motivated by their religious or moral beliefs, while others were motivated by empathy or a desire to protect. The chapter also argues that even though rescuers are not numerous, they are nonetheless a living examples that another choice is possible, and that human beings may find the strength to overcome hateful propaganda. This raises hope of developing efficient interventions aimed at reducing susceptibility to blind obedience.

This chapter shows how human obedience is captured in an experimental setup, and how such research methodology can help us understand how people can comply with orders to hurt another person on a neurological level. By reviewing past experimental research, such as the rat decapitation study of Landis, the studies of Stanley Milgram on destructive obedience, and the Utrecht studies on obedience to non-ethical requests, this chapter shows that under certain circumstances, a majority of individuals could be coerced into inflicting physical or psychological harm on others at levels generally deemed unacceptable, even without any tangible social pressures such as military court or job loss. The chapter also describes a novel method where people can administer real painful electric shocks to someone else in exchange for a small monetary reward, and describes how such a method allows neuroscience investigations that would focus on the neural mechanisms associated with obedience.

The role of psychology, the relationship with culture, and a profile of today’s main cultural psychologies (and pathologies).

Among patients with mood disorders, suicidal thinking, planning, and acts are common, particularly during major depressive episodes or mixed episodes. In this chapter, the epidemiology and aetiology of suicidal behaviour in major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder are outlined, followed by the relevant risk factors, and risk assessment of suicide. Finally, the latest evidence on treatments is discussed from a pharmacological, psychological and physical perspective.

The chapter locates Pirandello’s characters against the backdrop of modernist culture. Beginning with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche’s reflections on the multiple nature of the “I,” Pirandello’s construction of his characters proves fully in tune with contemporary developments in European thinking. When dealing with such fictional characters as Mattia Pascal and Vitangelo Moscarda, Pirandello goes for an anti-heroic approach to their relationship with history as opposed to nineteenth-century Romantic heroism. Theatre characters, on the other hand, escape definitions and roles to the extent that they become Nobody, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Binet, and Blondel’s reflections on psychology and freedom.

The Introduction provides an overview of the book’s argument about how novels in nineteenth-century Britain (by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy) represented modes of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of uncertainty. It also offers a synopsis of key intellectual contexts: (1) the history of probability in logic and mathematics into the Victorian era, the parallel rise of statistics, and the novelistic importance of probability as a dual concept, geared to both the aleatory and the epistemic, to objective frequencies and subjective degrees of belief; (2) the school of thought known as associationism, which was related to mathematical probability and remained influential in the nineteenth century, underwriting the embodied account of mental function and volition in physiological psychology, and representations of deliberation and action in novels; (3) the place of uncertainty in treatises of rhetoric, law, and grammar, where considerations of evidence were inflected by probability’s epistemological transformation; and (4) the resultant shifts in literary probability (and related concepts like mimesis and verisimilitude) from Victorian novel theory to structuralist narratology, where understandings of probability as a dual concept were tacitly incorporated.

Although civil trials provide for the lawful resolution of many kinds of disputes, the vast majority of civil matters are resolved through other processes: Negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. This chapter provides an overview of the main psychological and structural factors that influence disputants’ decisions to select and use these primary alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes. Further, the chapter discusses the psychology of decision-making in the context of alternative dispute resolution, including identifying what constitutes successful outcomes and how biases and other tendencies can prevent parties from realizing these outcomes. Finally, the chapter addresses research on the ways in which non-parties such as mediators, facilitators, arbitrators, and judges can improve (or diminish) the likelihood that parties’ voices will be heard, that parties will be satisfied with the process, and that the selected process will result in substantively satisfactory outcomes. Major research gaps and policy implications are identified and discussed.