Home Interpersonal & Group Psychology Cooperation / Competition Binding and Connections: Collective Coherence and Contagion

Binding and Connections: Collective Coherence and Contagion

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Much as the expansion of our collective beliefs regarding the positive side of human behavior has been led by advocates of Positive Psychology (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), so in a more limited but very powerful way, an auditorium in Edmonton Alberta and a Canadian author of children’s books can help to expand someone’s Bubble of Belief about the positive side of sustained caring, childhood courage and bodily smells.

Conclusions

An old Beatles song is appropriate here: “I get by with a little help for my friends”. We would modify this a bit: “We get by with a little help from our friends and our neighbors”.

But what does it mean to “get by”? Is it at the expense of those who are not our friends or neighbors? Or is getting by an altruistic action taken on behalf of not only our friends and neighbors, but also all human beings and, pushing it further, perhaps our entire planet.

The choice between the conspiratorial and altruistic pathways resides at the heart of the matter regarding Ligato. Are we binding together on behalf of the greater good or a primitive evil? Both reside within us.

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References

Alderfer, Clayton (1972) Existence, Relatedness, and Growth: Human Needs in Organizational Settings, New York: Free Press.

Ardrey, Robert (1966) The Territorial Imperative. New York: Atheneum.

Aronson, Elliot (2018). The Social Animal. New York: Worth Press.

Bair, Deirdre (2003) Jung: A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Bandura, Albert (1977) Social Learning Theory, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bateson, Gregory. (2000) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brothers, Leslie (2001) Mistaken Identity: How Society Shapes the Human Mind, New York: Oxford University Press.

Brown, Roger (1986) Social Psychology (2nd Ed.) New York: The Free Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi (1990), Flow. New York: HarperCollins.

Durkheim, Emile (1912/2008) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: Oxford University Press.

Freud, Anna (2018) The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense. London: Routledge.

Heider, Fritz (1946) Attitudes and cognitive organization. Journal of Psychology, 21, pp. 107-112.

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