Kumar > Kumar's Quotes

“Even if trafficked sex workers initially chose to go abroad to do sex work,
they had been led to believe they would do so under different conditions than the
slavery-like forced prostitution they were eventually subjected to. Following the
definition of the Palermo Protocol, their knowingly entering prostitution does not
make women less of a victim if they are eventually deceived and forced to do
the sex work.”
― Jan van Dijk, The New Faces of Victimhood: Globalization, Transnational Crimes and Victim Rights

“[P]eople cannot be influenced by ideas to which they are not exposed.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“The social nature of anti-Semitic beliefs is substantiated by the fact that dur­ing the late nineteenth century, most Germans had little, if any, contact with Jews. Jews made up only about 1% of the total German population (Goldhagen, 1996). Because of the general anti-Semitic social representation associated with Volkstum, many Jews had left Germany for safer havens elsewhere. Thus, most of what people knew (or thought they knew) about Jews was based on social consensus, not actual experience. As Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory argues, social reality becomes paramount when physical reality provides few, if any, cues upon which one can base an opinion.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“Often we believe certain things to be true simply because most, if not all, of the people around us believe and/or assert them to be true. With­ out any direct means to assess the validity of such beliefs, we infer their va­lidity based on consensus. Once we have these beliefs, and find that they are shared quite liberally within our social networks, we take them for granted and rarely think about them as needing validation. Moscovici (1984) has re­ferred to such generally shared beliefs as “social representations.” Such shared beliefs form the basis of a social aggregate’s shared reality and are often used to justify or substantiate other related beliefs or opinions.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“Thus, social repre­sentations are believed because they are shared, not because they are inher­ently valid outside of our social reality.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“[S]ituations do not only interact with dispositional factors to affect behavior, they
also shape and change those dispositions.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“Hence insight may be regarded as the core of social knowledge. It is arrived at by being on the inside of the phenomenon to. be observed, or, as Charles H. Cooley put it, by sympathetic introspection. It is the participation in an activity that generates interest, purpose, point of view, value, meaning, and intelligibility, as well as bias.”
― Karl Mannheim, Ideology And Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge

“What conditions are usually necessary for outgroups to be mistreated? Activation of a
social identity leads to such negative outcomes after two conditions are met. First, ingroup members must believe that a common set of norms and values apply to both themselves and to members of the outgroup. Second, the ingroup must see its values as the only acceptable values, so that their values overwhelm those of the outgroup and are the ones that should guide both themselves and the outgroup. The combination of these two factors leads the ingroup to perceive members of the outgroup as deviant, morally inferior, and a potential threat to ingroup values.”
― Kristin J. Anderson, Benign Bigotry: The Psychology of Subtle Prejudice

“[B]enign bigotry often manifests in giving one group the benefit of the doubt, while other groups that are stereotyped are held to tight standards.”
― Kristin J. Anderson, Benign Bigotry: The Psychology of Subtle Prejudice

“There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority”
― Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority

“Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior.”
― Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority

“In honor cultures, people are shunned and criticized not for exacting vengeance but for failing to do so.”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“Honor also makes people verbally aggressive. Just as status can be lost by accepting insults, so it can be gained by issuing them. The Montenegrans, for instance, are said not only to have “a low personal tolerance for insults” but also to exhibit “a
strong tendency to insult other people in the name of manly fearlessness” (Boehm, 1984: 103). Verbal pugnacity is a feature of most honor settings.”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“Insults can be much more subtle, posing dangers for the visitor unschooled in local custom as well as dilemmas for the insider familiar with the etiquette of honor. Part of the give-andtake of honor cultures, their “dialectic of challenge and riposte” as one sociologist puts it (Bourdieu, 1966: 197), is that people issue ambiguous affronts that force the recipient to choose between appearing excessively sensitive, on the one hand, or insufficiently manly, on the other (Pitt-Rivers, 1966:28).”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“Honor is the morality not of the bureaucrat or accountant but the warrior and aristocrat.”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“A culture of dignity expects people to ignore rather than to confront insult, to cultivate inner strength rather than outward display, and to let the state rather than the aggrieved prosecute violence.”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“As in days gone by, maintaining a public reputation for fearlessness is a central consideration for those located within a modern culture of honor (see, e.g., Horowitz, 1983: chap. 5). An honorable person must display heart, must not only be prepared to fight but be seen to, for in the competitive world of honor others will create tests: “There are always people around looking for a fight to increase their share of respect” (Anderson,
1994: 88). Turning the other cheek does no good, avoiding confrontation now will only attract more later. Word that somebody can be taunted or pushed around will inevitably spread. It is therefore far better in the long run to fight and lose than not to fight at all (Canada, 1995: 16).”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“Thus, the deeper problem in honor disputes is nearly always that of respect, and respect is vital when a reputation for strength or vulnerability quickly becomes public knowledge and largely determines how others will treat one. (For this reason, as the historian Edward Ayers [1984: 274] has noted, a white
southern aristocrat of the nineteenth-century would probably better understand the violent conflicts of young, lower-income males than do most middle-class people today.)”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“With deep theoretical roots (e.g., Bandura 1973; Dollard et al. 1939), there are at least two functions of aggression: aggression that
serves to attain some goal of the perpetrator (i.e., instrumental aggression, which can be considered planful and cool-headed) and aggression that is impulsively enacted in response to some provocation, real or imagined (i.e., reactive aggression, which can be considered unplanned and hot-headed). A simple example of instrumental aggression is an attack on the victim for some material reward, such as money or an iPhone. Reactive aggression is exemplified by an outburst to a perceived or actual slight. For child developmentalists, the distinction is important because each is associated with a unique developmental trajectory and consequent socioemotional outcomes. For example, reactively aggressive children are more apt to display poor psychological adjustment because their dysregulation leads to related
social difficulties such as peer rejection (Coie and Koeppl 1990). By contrast, instrumentally aggressive children are not necessarily dysregulated. Moreover, their
success at goal attainment may even lead to positive peer regard.”
― Todd K. Shackelford, The Evolution of Violence

“In large part, bullying is defined by repeated acts of aggression against someone with lesser social standing.”
― Todd K. Shackelford, The Evolution of Violence

“One of the most pervasive ways in which collusion with oppression is enacted is through victim blaming. Even when oppression is acknowledged, victim blaming (by victims themselves, perpetrators, or society) denies any relation between, on one hand, oppression originating in society, such as racism, and, on the other hand, inner oppression, such as self-blame or other psychic compulsions. Consequently, reflecting such denial, the victim blaming stance posits either a decontextualized, abstract, and thus dehumanized notion of human freedom—agency as atomized willing.”
― Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity

“Much of our normative orientation to the world is at the level of dispositions and emotions, indeed not only aesthetic but ethical dispositions can be part of the habitus, acquired through practice as intelligent dispositions which enable us often to react appropriately to situations instantly, without reflection.”
― Andrew Sayer

“This reflects the standard social-Darwinist view that those who fail to succeed in a dog-eat-dog environment have inherent deficiencies, whether genetic (right-wing conservatives) or rooted in social conditions (liberals). As Ryan showed, in neither case is the cause related to the very foundation of society itself, its pervasive racism, classism, and sexism.”
― Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity

“Clearly, it is difficult for an observer to disentangle all the reciprocal influ­ences that people and situations have on each other. Perhaps more surpris­ing, though, is just how poorly people appreciate how their own behavior can shape their social contexts. Social actors do not always appreciate or acknowl­edge the extent to which they affect situations—including how they affect the
other people in those situations—even when their influence would seem to be obvious.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“[R]esearch on perceiver-induced constraint reveals that people do not always account for situational constraints on behavior, even when they themselves have constructed the situation. Thus, perpetrators could have focused on the degraded and pathetic state of their victims as justifica­tion for both their past and their future victimization, even though the per­petrators were actually responsible for their wretched state.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as "class warfare," while race, gender or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and
cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism—its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a
technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.”
― Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy

“Business and financial interests were no more unified or consistent than the social movements, but their activities forged languages and concepts, practices and policies, and founded new institutions to promote mechanisms that either shored up or established inequalities of power, rank, wealth, or cultural status.”
― Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy

“Fraser's widely influential version of a distinction between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution, first articulated in Justice Interruptus (1997), very carefully notes that these are analytical distinctions, and not a real world separation between intertwined political histories.”
― Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy

“The challenge is to explain, without resorting to the all-too-easy concept of evil, how people are capable of causing extreme hurt to one another. So let’s substitute the term “evil” with the term “empathy erosion.” Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or a desire to protect. In theory these are transient emotions, the empathy erosion reversible. But empathy erosion can be the result of more permanent psychological characteristics.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty

“We all know the kinds of short-term states we can enter that can compromise our empathy. These include being drunk, tired, impatient, or stressed, during which we might say or do the wrong thing to someone else and later regret it. The feeling of regret is a sign of our empathy circuit coming back on, but the fact that we say or do the wrong thing is nevertheless—at that moment—a fluctuation in our empathy circuit.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty