Psychology forms a smaller but significant part of my interdisciplinary academic work. I do not present myself as a specialist psychologist in the same sense that I am a specialist in law and taxation, or as extensively established in political economy and institutional research. Rather, I have formal university-level training in psychology that has informed a sustained strand of my research into human behaviour, social relationships, institutions, cognition, creativity and language.
My interest in psychology developed from questions that were already emerging in my research on social institutions. If law, economic behaviour and political institutions are socially embedded, this raises a further question: what is it about human beings that makes social relationships, groups, identity and institutions so important to their behaviour?
In pursuit of these questions, I completed a graduate-level award in psychology at the University of Derby in 2012. My studies included social psychology, biological psychology and cognitive psychology. This provided a formal psychological foundation for intellectual interests that I have subsequently pursued across several disciplines.
Social Psychology
Social psychology has been particularly important to my work because much of my research concerns the relationship between individual behaviour and social environments.
My earlier research on China had already led me away from models that treat individuals as essentially autonomous actors. Families, guanxi networks, social obligations, group membership and relationships of authority all demonstrated the extent to which behaviour that appears individual is embedded within relationships with other people.
Psychology provided another level at which to investigate this phenomenon. Sociology can identify the structures and institutions surrounding individuals; social psychology helps explain how groups, identities, norms, leadership and interpersonal relationships actually influence individual cognition and behaviour.
This perspective has subsequently informed my work on institutions, government, leadership, compliance and social identity. It also contributes to my more recent research concerning democracy and political behaviour, where questions of group identification and social influence become particularly important.
Leadership, Groups and Institutions
The clearest published application of my psychological training is my collaborative research with Ian Murray on leadership, institutions and the rule of law.
That work drew upon social-psychological theories of leadership to investigate institutional questions normally approached primarily through law or economics. We were interested in whether effective leadership might enable organisations and administrative systems to function despite weaknesses in their formal institutional structures.
This required treating leadership as more than a formal legal position. Leadership is a relationship between people. Its effectiveness depends upon such matters as group identification, perceptions of authority, social influence and the willingness of individuals to respond to particular forms of leadership.
The resulting work represents an example of the interdisciplinary approach that characterises much of my scholarship: psychological theory was used not as an isolated subject but as a means of better understanding how legal and governmental institutions actually function through human behaviour.
Biological and Social Human Beings
Biological psychology contributed to another longstanding interest: the relationship between the biological characteristics of human beings and the social worlds they construct.
I am particularly interested in avoiding an artificial division between biological and social explanations of human behaviour. Human beings are biological organisms, but they are also exceptionally social organisms. Culture, language, relationships and institutions do not somehow sit outside human biology. The capacities that make these phenomena possible are themselves features of the evolved human organism.
This has informed my thinking about relationships, attachment, cooperation, competition, group formation and the human tendency to construct complex systems of shared meaning and social obligation.
It also provides an important qualification to excessively individualistic models of human behaviour. The individual human being does not ordinarily develop or function independently of relationships with other people. Sociality is not simply an external constraint imposed upon an otherwise isolated individual; it is fundamental to human development and behaviour.
This interest provides one of the bridges between my work in psychology and my work in sociology, political economy and institutional analysis.
Cognition and Intelligence
My study of cognitive psychology developed my interest in the processes underlying thought, memory, perception, learning and problem solving.
I have subsequently maintained a particular interest in intelligence and in the limitations of treating intelligence as a single general capacity. Human intellectual achievement involves different combinations of memory, abstraction, pattern recognition, acquired knowledge, language, imagination, association and the ability to reorganise existing information in new ways.
These questions have become increasingly relevant to my recent work on creativity and associative insight. I am interested not only in the capacity to solve a problem once it has been defined, but also in the processes through which a person recognises an unexpected relationship between things that had previously appeared unrelated.
That distinction is important to understanding intellectual creativity.
Creativity and Associative Insight
My recent unpublished work examines human creativity and what I describe as associative forms of insight.
Much creative intellectual work does not arise from producing an answer through a straightforward sequence of conscious reasoning. An important idea may instead emerge through an unexpected association between previously separated bodies of knowledge, experiences or concepts.
I am interested in the cognitive processes that make these connections possible: the accumulation and organisation of knowledge, memory and retrieval, associative networks, unconscious or partially conscious processing, pattern recognition and the circumstances in which previously distant concepts become connected.
This has implications for understanding creativity across academic, artistic and practical domains. Expertise supplies knowledge, but creativity may depend partly upon the capacity to move across the conventional boundaries separating bodies of knowledge.
My own interdisciplinary research has made this question particularly important to me. Moving among law, economics, sociology, politics, history, theology, linguistics, psychology and the arts repeatedly raises the possibility that a problem understood in one field can be illuminated by concepts originating in another.
Psychology and Language
Psychology also intersects with my substantial interest in language.
Language is simultaneously cognitive, biological and social. It depends upon individual cognitive capacities while being acquired through social interaction and existing as a shared system between people.
My later formal study of linguistics has therefore developed questions first encountered through psychology concerning cognition, categorisation, meaning, learning and communication.
The relationship is particularly important to my interest in how human beings construct and communicate systems of meaning. Language does not merely transmit independently formed thoughts. It is deeply implicated in the ways people categorise experience, construct social identities, participate in groups and understand the behaviour of others.
Psychology Within My Interdisciplinary Work
I regard psychology as one component of a larger attempt to understand human behaviour at different levels.
Biological psychology concerns some of the capacities and constraints arising from humans as biological organisms. Cognitive psychology helps explain processes occurring within individual minds. Social psychology examines how those individuals behave in relation to other people and groups. Sociology examines the larger relationships, institutions and social structures that emerge from and shape those interactions.
Law, economics and politics then construct formal systems that operate through the same human beings.
These levels cannot simply be collapsed into one another, but neither can they sensibly be treated as completely independent.
My credentials in psychology therefore serve a particular role within my wider scholarship. I have formal academic training across biological, cognitive and social psychology; have incorporated psychological scholarship into published interdisciplinary research; and have continued to develop psychologically informed work concerning leadership, sociality, intelligence, language, creativity and associative insight.
I do not claim psychology as my principal professional discipline. I regard it instead as a mature component of my interdisciplinary scholarship and as an important part of my attempt to understand a more fundamental question:
How do the biological, cognitive and social characteristics of human beings combine to produce the extraordinarily complex relationships, institutions, cultures and systems of thought through which human life is organised?
