Veronica Hopner & Darrin Hodgetts: Reflections on the Spychological Contract in Everyday Lives Disrupted by Crisis

We are living through a time of global upheaval where global institutions, societies and scholarly disciplines need to pause, reflect, and focus on ways to help. In Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt (1968) reminds us “That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination”. During the present dark time, it is important to extend our disciplinary engagements with issues of (in)security and various associated tensions around surveillance, risk, safety, privacy, trust, solidarity and respect. Aotearoa/New Zealand took an early and decisive stance to eradicate COVID-19 cases. The Government has called upon the imagined community of ‘the nation’, or what the Prime Minster (Jacinda Ardern) refers to as ‘our team of five million’ to join together in a ‘mission’ to fight the virus that is severely disrupting the social fabric of everyday life on a global scale. In this presentation, Veronica and Darrin will reflect on how this current crisis has been met with heightened solidarity with various sectors of society coming together to act in more coherent and compassionate ways that place people’s safety and wellbeing as paramount. Defining this crisis as a state of emergency has brought about increased surveillance, restrictions on movement, loss of freedoms, and the shutdown of ‘normal’ everyday life. Through current work of the Psycurity Research Cluster (a concentration of Psychology and Security Studies scholars) at Massey University, we have developed the concept of the Spychological Contract, a tacit understanding between citizens and the State, balancing risk, surveillance and security. This concept is useful when engaging with these dark times to understand the dynamic interplay of choice, coercion and power in relation to people ceding their privacy and trust to the state in return for potentially increased security to be gained through surveillance, lockdowns and contact tracing. The everyday functioning of this contract will be considered in the wider context of the preliminary findings from a study using the Security Staircase Psycurity Barometer (developed by our cluster), which highlights the importance of macro level security concerns in the conduct of everyday lives. We will also introduce Project SAFE (Security Assessment for Everyone), which is designed to advance scholarship regarding the psychology of security and inform efforts to increase human security and wellbeing.

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