Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) is
pleased to announce that (long-time ISPP member) Professor Floyd Rudmin of
the University
of Tromsø in
Norway has been awarded the 2008
Anthony J. Marsella Prize for the Psychology of Peace and Social Justice.
The Awards Committee, in selecting Dr. Rudmin, cited his “consistent and
innovative contributions as a scholar-activist to the understanding of war
and peace.”
In the early 1980s, Dr. Rudmin helped establish a
Canadian PsySR. His own research at that time focused on biographies of
prominent psychologists who were also peace activists, such as William
James, Ivan Pavlov, and William McDougall. These biographies now number more
than 20. Dr. Rudmin also devised quantitative research on the cultural
correlates that predict societies waging war.
In the 1990s, Dr. Rudmin began examining historical
beliefs as causes of war, concluding that we need a new, interdisciplinary
field of “cognitive history.” Later, his research shifted to critiques of
faulty research on the cultural adjustments of immigrants, indigenous
peoples, and other minorities.
Since 2001, Dr. Rudmin has been writing blogs that
bring psychological theory to bear to help explain current crises. For
example, he has argued that the Bayes Theorem shows it is mathematically
impossible to find terrorists by spying on all Americans, that the use of
definite articles (e.g. “the” ) in a government’s promotion of war can cause
people to believe that untrue statements are true, and that aggressive war
plans can create paranoid projections of the enemy’s intentions, thus
justifying the aggressive plans and subsequent preemptive war.
For more about the
Anthony J. Marsella Prize, see
http://www.psysr.org/about/awards/
