Sunday e-mail 8th September: Doing Psychology is like being in Dubrovnik

Also, Crime & Psychology news from around the world

The nights draw in, the rain grows colder, an an academic’s fancy turns to thoughts of…what, exactly? Well, in my case, Dubrovnik, and why not?

You may remember last week’s Sunday e-mail, in which I commemorated a summer of backpacking with a bullet-list of five destinations best avoided if you happen to take up the hobby yourself. You may also remember that there was one last destination – a dark, shadowy, sixth destination – that deserved a Sunday e-mail to itself.

That destination was Dubrovnik.

Are you familiar with Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland – ‘There’s no there there’? the comment has been borrowed by just about every travel writer since. They’ve usually been referring to Los Angeles. But Dubrovnik fits just as well.

Yes, I know some (not many, surely) have called it the World’s Most Beautiful City. Yes, I know a successful sword-and-sandals epic was filmed there. Yes, I know tourists flock by the millions every summer. But when they get there, what do they do? They be. They are in Dubrovnik. And that is the full range of activities open to them. There is nothing in Dubrovnik apart from Dubrovnikness. There is nothing to do but be there. Dubrovnik offers nothing but itself.

I refer to Dubrovnik’s Old Town, of course: the bit the tourists see. The rest of Dubrovnik – well I wouldn’t know. It may be a fine place to live indeed, but I cannot comment. Like most, I was inside the walls. Dubrovnik’s Old Town, you see, is a bit like a prison: high walls all around you; nothing to do; difficulty leaving; overpriced items in the commissary.

Well, I say ‘nothing to do’ but that’s not quite true. There is one thing to do: shop. You can shop at any one of twenty thousand tourist outlets, every one of which sells the exact same thing: a range of merchandise saying ‘I HEART Dubrovnik’. Tourists may buy the merchandise, but they don’t honestly seem to HEART Dubrovnik. Why would they? The city is simply an advertisement for itself. It is its own reflection, its own self-image. Caught there for a day or two, you may catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror.

It's not that there’s nothing there. It’s that there is no thing there.

Self-referential and strictly postmodern, Dubrovnik is the only city on Earth that is entirely about itself. Who needs content when you have such lovely packaging?

That final observation brings me back to our topic. Yet another academic year. I keep saying ‘This one will be my last,’ but each one keeps on not being my last. Almost every academic I know has the same experience. It’s not the students or the lectures or the tutorials or any of that. For the most part, we’re in favour of that stuff. It’s what we signed up for. In other words, content is not the problem. The problem is the packaging.

Photo by Markus Clemens on Unsplash

One of the most common, and dreaded, words in academia is admin. It is the name of the enemy. Every year the enemy’s forces grow stronger – and every year more good academics are lost. Like any bureaucracy, admin is self-reinforcing. Add a layer and no one, no matter how well-meaning, can subtract it again. What if something goes wrong as a consequence? It’s their job on the line! And so the solution becomes this - add more admin, more, and more. Academics struggle to find time to do their actual job.

Today, one can barely muster the energy to do any research in Psychology. The sheer number of forms I have to fill in just to allow a Masters student to collect their data…well, it takes more hours than I am paid for.  None of this helps the cause of science at all. If anything, it does the opposite. But no one fixes it, because the subject isn’t Psychology any more. The sign on the door might say Psychology Laboratory, just as the sign outside the town might say Dubrovnik. But inside it’s a wilderness of mirrors, as the CIA agent, James Jesus Angleton, used to say about his own self-reinforcing profession. It’s comforting and safe. It’s about research. But it isn’t research. Hear that sound? It’s a PhD student’s soul eating itself.

It's my last year, this year. My very last, oh yes.

This week’s Crime & Psychology newsletter will not, you’ll be pleased to hear, be about admin. I thought we’d distract ourselves by taking a look at some nineteenth-century monsters. There will be plenty of crime, and a surprising quantity of psychology, too – especially bearing in mind that the discipline wasn’t invented until late in the century.

Now, I know it feels a long time to wait, so please feel free to pass the time by bashing some blue buttons and checking out this week’s bullet list. Here is Crime & Psychology news from around the globe:

AFGHANISTAN: This week’s ‘greatest external threat’ to Europe is Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), which is the Afghan wing of Islamic State. The frequency of attacks has accelerated recently, in harness with its increased focus on propaganda and incitement. You might think it would take a great deal of propaganda to make a person become a terrorist, but it’s worth bearing in mind the influence of the silo’d, windowless culture the internet (which was expected to do exactly the opposite) has created. If one is never exposed to opinions different from one’s own, the phenomenon that psychologists call ‘reality checking’ vanishes. Here at Crime & Psychology, we may have a newsletter on ‘persuasive communications’ before long.

AUSTRALIA: Ashley Griffith faced so many charges of paedophilia and child sexual exploitation that it took a judge more than two hours just to read them all out. Many of Griffith’s victims were in care at the time – Griffith’s care. Caring for children was his job. In 2023, he was charged with no fewer than 1623 offences against 91 victims in 12 different locations. Like anyone else, my first thought on reading about this was, ‘Why?’ I wanted to know what makes a person like that. A moment’s thought, though, and I have to ask myself what kind of an answer I am looking for. What could possibly explain it? As I wrote in my piece about Lucy Letby, there may simply be no explaining such atrocities. Not even Griffith himself could explain. He is just the person he is.

GERMANY: The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) emerged from state parliament elections in a far stronger position than it went in. The AfD came first in Thüringen, (32.8% of the vote); second in Saxony, (30.6%). The only thing more predictable than the result was the commentators’ horror. Gerhard Schröder said it was ‘catastrophic’ while Martin Schirdewan flapped around telling everyone not to panic. This result is just the latest in a whole series of so-called ‘populist’ wins across Europe. Why is everyone always surprised? Any undergraduate who has attended a course on Social Identity Theory surely knows that Europe’s unspoken policy of mass immigration, coupled with a zeitgeist that prioritises group over personal identities, could have virtually no other effect. I hope our elders and betters read some Social Psychology textbooks soon. Meanwhile, if you’d like to read my introduction to Social Identity Theory, you can check it out here.

SPAIN: A 12 year-old child who was involved in the recent wave of riots that hit Britain after the Southport stabbings had his sentencing adjourned. Why?: because his mother was in Ibiza on holiday. Said the judge, ‘I am frankly astonished,’ and so am I. I’m sure you are, too. One has to wonder exactly what chance the 12 year-old in question ever had in life if his background truly is what is appears to be. St this point, psychologists might start asking questions about nature and nurture… But we must await more details.

UNITED KINGDOM: A think tank called More in Common discovered that voting preference can be (partly) predicted from a person’s perception of the world. Those who perceive it as a threatening place tend to vote for political parties on the right: those who have a sunnier outlook may vote liberal or green. Supporters of the right-of-centre Reform and Conservative parties are most likely to argue that the world and their neighbourhood are getting more dangerous. Interesting as this is to learn, it’s no surprise to anyone who has studied Terror Management Theory (TMT). It tells us that voters who feel threatened tend to turn to leaders on the right. For all the mockery he used to receive about his perceived low IQ, President George W Bush was a master of applying TMT. Donald Trump says he will ‘Make America safe again’ and that Kamala Harris will deliver ‘crime, chaos, destruction and death’. Someone somewhere has read some textbooks.