Jeffrey Reber: Lessons Learned the Hard Way: Crisis and the Rethinking of Psychological Assumptions about Human Altruism and Agency

As abhorrent as global crises are, they magnify aspects of humanity that might otherwise be missed, ignored, or not taken seriously enough by psychologists and other social scientists to prompt a critical examination of their assumptions about human being. Historically, the sheer scale of a global crisis and the prima facie empirical evidence it provides about human behavior, thoughts, and feelings has provoked a rethinking of assumptions in several disciplines and, in some cases, has significantly altered the landscape of theory, research, and practice within a field of study. Such has been the case, to some degree, with the subdiscipline of social psychology. A number of social psychologists had to reconsider the prevailing psychological assumptions about many aspects of human being in the wake of the crisis of World War II and the Holocaust, including the assumptions of egoism and determinism, which proved to be inadequate in explaining the individuals and groups who risked their lives and the lives of loved ones to rescue Jews. In this presentation, I will outline the contours of this rethinking and discuss how the rescuers' actions helped to compel it. I will also discuss some of the possible ways that the current global crisis might prompt further reconsideration of assumptions about human motivation that fail to appreciate its complexity and cannot account for its altruistic and agentic possibility, whether in times of crisis or not.

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