Ole Jacob Madsen

Social norms as solutions

Policies may influence large-scale behavioral tipping Climate change, biodiversity loss, antibiotic resistance, and other global challenges pose major collective action problems: A group benefits from a certain action, but no individual has sufficient incentive to act alone. Formal institutions, e.g., laws and treaties, have helped address issues like ozone depletion, lead pollution, and acid rain. However, formal institutions are not always able to enforce collectively desirable outcomes. In such cases, informal institutions, such as social norms, can be important. If conditions are right, policy can support social norm changes, helping address even global problems. To judge when this is realistic, and what role policy can play, we discuss three crucial questions: Is a tipping point likely to exist, such that vicious cycles of socially damaging behavior can potentially be turned into virtuous ones? Can policy create tipping points where none exist? Can policy push the system past the tipping point?

Lost in Paradise: Paradise Hotel and the Showcase of Shamelessness

This article examines the Norwegian and Danish versions of the reality television series Paradise Hotel. The reality show emulates what postmodern consumer society wants us to believe in: a kind of “second transgression” for the human being, in which she is both free and without anxiety. The guests (predominantly male in line with prevailing gender norms) at Paradise Hotel may qualify as shameless—after spells of physical and psychological revelations in front of the camera with no visible regrets—still, the price is perhaps the loss rather than the gain of freedom. The medialized shameless self demands the subordination to narrow bodily and emotional standards during filming, which postpones most of the guests’ shame and regrets until after the cameras are turned off. This particular Fall may have unwanted personal consequences that lead to a spiral ascent crueler than Adam and Eve ever underwent.

On the relation between social dominance orientation and environmentalism : a 25-nation study.

Approval of hierarchy and inequality in society indexed by social dominance orientation (SDO) extends to support for human dominance over the natural world. We tested this negative association between SDO and environmentalism and the validity of the new Short Social Dominance Orientation Scale in two cross-cultural samples of students (N = 4,163, k = 25) and the general population (N = 1,237, k = 10). As expected, the higher people were on SDO, the less likely they were to engage in environmental citizenship actions, pro-environmental behaviors and to donate to an environmental organization. Multilevel moderation results showed that the SDO–environmentalism relation was stronger in societies with marked societal inequality, lack of societal development, and environmental standards. The results highlight the interplay between individual psychological orientations and social context, as well as the view of nature subscribed to by those high in SDO.

‘I am a philosopher of the particular case’ An interview with the 2009 Holberg prizewinner Ian Hacking

When Ian Hacking won the Holberg International Memorial Prize 2009 his candidature was said to strengthen the legitimacy of the prize after years of controversy. Ole Jacob Madsen, Johannes Servan and Simen Andersen Øyen have talked to Ian Hacking about current questions in the philosophy and history of science.

Depression: Diagnosis and suffering as process

Abstract The high rates of depression – as well as the widespread diagnosis of depression – are both controversial and contested in contemporary late-modern society. Issues of flawed definition have been voiced to account for the bourgeoning rates of depression and the diagnosis has been subject to criticism of medicalization and pharmaceuticalization. Others have stated that the actualization of depression is to be seen in light of societal and structural transformations. Be that as it may, depression is affecting more and more people and the diagnosis is prevalent. In this context, a more nuanced understanding of how people relate to, experience and ascribe meaning to their suffering as depression and being diagnosed as such is needed. This article draws on qualitative interviews from Denmark and Norway to explore lay accounts of depression in contemporary late-modern society. The findings reveal that lay accounts of suffering, including living with the diagnosis of depression is a dynamic process, meaning that people vacillate in and out of various perspectives of suffering and categorization to make it fit their specific life situation and prospects of the future. In this article we thus highlight the perspectives of thoroughly analyzing suffering and the diagnostic experience by applying the overall concept of process, which takes on different meanings in the course of the analysis.

The mind is a brittle object: The abortion law and therapeutic legitimation

This article takes a historical look at abortion in Norway, especially the parliamentary debates and the legislation on selective abortion. By using metaphor theory and discourse analysis we disclose that mental health issues came into practice as a legitimate cause for selective abortion for women in Norway from the 1960s and recur in more recent debates about important amendments in 1996 and 2003. In order to abort, women must simultaneously adopt a psychological means of self-representation. The history of the discourse on selective abortion in Norway thus illustrates the often ambiguous relationship between reproductive policy and ‘psy’. The analysis also shows that a therapeutic discourse today creates a framework of meaning for all political parties in Norway in the questions regarding abortion, including the Christian Democratic Party traditionally committed to religious motifs. This particular part of the history of abortion in Norway suggests that the psy-sciences and a therapeutic outlook on the self and society came into being in Norway from the 1960s, marking a defining moral shift from the previous religious and moral reasoning to a therapeutic ethos.

The liturgical reform of the Sunday high mass: The last attempt of Christ?

This article examines the intersection between the therapeutic and the Christian cultures, and the common conviction among scholars of the therapeutic, such as Philip Rieff, that the subjective turn eventually will overthrow organized Christianity. The culture clash between secularism and religion is engaged through the Protestant Church of Norways liturgical reform of the Sunday high mass 2004–2011, which aims to make the liturgical service more relevant. The analysis of both institutional and theological attempts at finding a balance between the old and the new suggests that the authority of the emotive self strongly challenges the truth of God. Still, there are signs of a cultural merger that suggest the Church of Norway will prevail. The outcome, however, will not satisfy conservative theologians and critics of the therapeutic culture, as God, in order to survive, must accept a more subordinate supportive role as an optional remedy for well-being.

Psychology oblivious to psychology: Some limits on our capacity for processing psychology in society

George A. Miller’s presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1969 urged psychologists “to give psychology away” in order to solve social problems related to human health and welfare, and has since become a standard reference for calls for social responsibility. But Miller also envisioned a psychological revolution that would ultimately change humankind’s concept of itself. In the decades that followed, according to numerous historical studies, psychology’s influence was vital to the conduct of self-governing that resulted in a globalised therapeutic culture. Yet, professional psychology’s self-perception, in Norway and around the world, continues to rest on the modernist assumption of psychology being something underrepresented and external to society. I argue that the psychological revolution that Miller foresaw should lead responsible professionals to revise the ethical framework; in fact, the moral justice of “taking psychology away” should now be seriously considered.

Parenthood in Norway: Between Politics and Science

Norwegian legislators have recently altered the legal regulations for the parental leave. Parents are now given the chance to split the existing one year of leave fifty-fifty. A newly proposed bill even seeks to make paternity leave mandatory. Several Norwegian medical and psychological experts have opposed this newly introduced legislation. Their argument is that ‘Research shows that…’ young children may show symptoms of stress reactions and in the worst case suffer from mental health disorders later in life when the primary caregiver changes during the child’s first year of life. Many of the experts implicitly seem to defend a normative idea of static ‘natural preferences’ between men and women, as a basis for a conservative political outlook, that neglects that deducing from scientific knowledge to political decision-making rarely is straightforward. The experts in question rarely seem to recognise that questions of maternity and paternity leave, also concerns opposing values and political priorities, for instance equal rights between the sexes.

Psychology as science or psychology as religion

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1908: 9) once famously remarked that: “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history”. The short history tells us that Wilhelm Wundt founded modern psychology as an independent science when he established the first experimental research laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 devoted to the study of basic human reactions like sensations, attention and perception (Boring 1957). Psychology’s brief, yet highly successful (his-)story is well-known as this lesson is taught at most introductory courses in psychology around the world. However, psychology’s long past usually remains less illuminated, or if told, presents the listener with a narrative where modern day psychology is the unremitting highpoint of Western pre-scientific conceptions like Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s ideas of the soul (Parker 2007). Even so, the recurring idea of the present age as postmodern, and psychology as a project of modernity, means that the science of psychology might be out of touch with the current age (Kvale 1992). One of the many implications of postmodernity was a shift from the sole study of the interior individual psyche to the practical repercussions of psychological knowledge in society, including epistemological, ethical and political implications (Kvale 1992). The postmodern rupture in confidence in Western science means that psychology can just as easily be understood as a substitute for religion in providing the fundamental guidelines for life. Yet, the religious roots and assumptions of psychology are seldom explored in full.