F M Moghaddam
Biographic Data
| ID | 5451 |
|---|---|
| NAME | F M Moghaddam |
| GIVEN NAMES | F M |
| FAMILY NAME | Moghaddam |
| SIGNATURE | MOGHADDAM F M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0462-7973 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 87 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 764 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 87 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The New Immigration Challenge: A Psychological Exploration Toward Solutions
Due to shifting demographic trends and the increased need for workers, immigration continues to grow in many parts of the world. However, the increased diversity that immigration creates within societies is also associated with intergroup friction, perceived threat, and the rise of extremist right-wing nationalist movements, making it a central political issue that impacts societies globally. This book presents a psychological explanation of the …
I Get Knocked Down but I Get Up Again: Autonomous Motivation Sustains Identification and Collective Action After (Specific) Failure
Movements often experience setbacks while striving to achieve (or prevent) social change. We examined whether autonomous motivation—which captures supporters’ internalized commitment to a cause—would sustain identification with the movement and collective action after experiencing failure (vs. success) outcomes following the marriage equality vote in Australia (Study 1; N = 186), and an experimental induction of movement failure (Study 2; N = 137…
Three dilemmas underlying runaway rights: Universals, relativism, and banal authoritarianism
Although we are in an age of rights, psychologists have given little attention to human rights, and even less to human duties. In order to stimulate more research in this domain, we explored what we call runaway rights. Three lively critical reviews of our paper have been published. In this response, we have identified three overarching dilemmas. The first dilemma concerns the claim for universal human rights, which seems to clash with particular…
Runaway rights: How rights become expanded, adopted, and coopted
We are in an age of rights, in the sense that major social and political movements use the rhetoric of rights (not duties), including women’s rights, Black rights, gay rights, and animal rights. This paper explores runaway rights , the trend of extending rights to more and more domains, and using the language of rights in social contestations. This accelerating profusion of different kinds of rights is integral to contemporary culture and is unde…
How leading climate movement advocates perceive collective gridlock in social change advocacy
Despite mass mobilization efforts, most countries are failing to meet their internationally agreed 2030 goals to mitigate climate change, representing a failure of the climate movement to achieve their key aspirations. Most research on failure and collective action examines one‐off failures but does not address lasting failure. We conceptualize this ongoing failure as collective gridlock: times in social change advocacy where insufficient progres…
Overcoming Climate Gridlock: Perspectives of Climate Leaders on How to Achieve Social Change During Persistent Failure in Australia
Despite sustained efforts of social movements worldwide, there has been a lack of progress on mitigating climate change. Recent research examined the psychological consequences of one‐off collective action failures, but there has been little research on how to overcome persistent failure to create social change. This qualitative research ( N = 26) interviews leaders, founders, experienced advocates, and philanthropists from organisations ranging …
The Psychology of Revolution
Based on decades of psychological research and personal experience, Fathali M. Moghaddam presents a new and dynamic introduction to the psychology of revolution. He sets out to explain what does and does not change with revolution, using the concept of political plasticity or the malleability of political behavior. In turn, psychological theories of collective mobilization, the process of regime change, and explanations of what happens after regi…
Similarity-attraction across ethnic, religious, and political groups: Does Celebrating Differences or Similarities Make a Difference
Extensive research supports a positive association between similarity and attraction at the inter-personal level; the very limited research at the intergroup level is also supportive. In the context of increasing diversity in major societies, alternative diversity management approaches give priority to celebrating differences versus celebrating similarities. We tested to see if similarity-attraction at the intergroup level remains robust in condi…
Political Plasticity: The Future of Democracy and Dictatorship
Political plasticity refers to limitations on how fast, how much, and in what ways political behavior does (or does not) change. In a number of important areas of behavior, such as leader-follower relations, ethnicity, religion, and the rich-poor divide, there has been long-term continuity of human behavior. These continuities are little impacted by factors assumed to bring about change such as electronic technologies, major wars, globalization, …
Political plasticity and possibilities for political change
This brief paper explores possibilities for change in political behavior through what I term “political plasticity.” Revolutions provide a suitable context in which to critically examine political plasticity, particularly when the revolutionaries who come to power attempt to bring about radical political changes. The examples of the Bolsheviks who attempted to implement collectivization after the 1917 revolution in Russia, and the Shi’a Muslim fu…
The Democratic Citizen, Political Plasticity and National Development: A Psychological Perspective
The global context in which national development is taking place has changed in important ways, including widening and entrenched inequalities, deglobalisation, weakened democracies, more aggressive dictatorships and the rise of authoritarian strongmen in many countries. Within this changed context, we examine the central role of the democratic citizen and political plasticity in national development. Our arguments are supported by reference to e…
Failure Leads Protest Movements to Support More Radical Tactics
Most social movements will encounter setbacks in their pursuit of sociopolitical change. However, little is known about how movements are affected after protestors fail to achieve their aims. What are the effects of failure on subsequent engagement in various conventional and radical actions? Does failure promote divergent reactions among protestors and/or dissatisfaction with democracy? A meta-analysis of nine experiments ( N = 1,663) assessed t…
Rethinking peace psychology: Toward an integrative discipline
Peace psychology has reached a crossroad. There is now greater interest in peace psychology, particularly among a new generation of researching and practicing psychologists. Growth in peace psychology is reflected in national and international meetings, as well as publications, including introductory textbooks (Blumberg et al., 2006; MacNair, 2012), varieties of edited volumes (Bretherton & Law, 2015; Christie, 2011; Christie et al., 2001; Seedat…
Peace psychology and the deadly competition between democracy and dictatorship
Critical periods in group development
What has Shakespeare got to do with it
The psychology of bureaucracy: A normative account inspired by Rom Harré
During the last years of his life, I had a number of discussions with Rom Harré about the puzzling growth of inefficient bureaucracy around the world. He was particularly critical of the sharp rise in the number of administrators at Oxford, Georgetown, and other universities in which he had invested his academic life. In this paper, I provide a normative account of inefficient bureaucracy inspired by Harré. I give priority to narratives that sust…
Rom Harré: A brief biography
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Harré and the study of personality
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Revisiting Rom Harré in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour
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Philosophy of education in a new key: On radicalization and violent extremism
This collective paper on radicalization and violent extremism part of the ‘Philosophy of education in a new key’ initiative by Educational Philosophy and Theory brings together some of the leading contemporary scholars writing on the most pressing epistemological, ethical, political and educational issues facing post-9/11 scholarship on radicalization and violent extremism. Its overall aim is to move beyond the ‘conventional wisdom’ associated wi…
The effect of perceived threat on human rights: A meta-analysis
Individuals express support for civil liberties and human rights, but when threatened tend to restrict rights for both others and themselves. However, the question of whether or not rights are restricted to punish others or protect ourselves remains unclear. This meta-analysis integrates the findings of the effect of perceived threats on support for restrictions of civil liberties from 1997 to 2019. It includes 163 effect-size estimates from 46 d…
I can't breathe”—Political plasticity, peace, and justice
Omniculturalism, diversity, and human commonalities
Mutual radicalization and the coronavirus pandemic
The Staircase to Terrorism: A Psychological Exploration
To foster a more in-depth understanding of the psychological processes leading to terrorism, the author conceptualizes the terrorist act as the final step on a narrowing staircase. Although the vast majority of people, even when feeling deprived and unfairly treated, remain on the ground floor, some individuals climb up and are eventually recruited into terrorist organizations. These individuals believe they have no effective voice in society, ar…
Recent Advances in Positioning Theory
Positioning theory opens up a new dimension in the psychology of interpersonal encounters, through explicit attention to the role of rights and duties in the management of action. People are positioned or position themselves with respect to rights and duties to act within evolving story-lines, and on the basis of claims about relevant personal attributes, the discursive process of prepositioning. Some recent applications of positioning theory are…
Responding to membership in a disadvantaged group: From acceptance to collective protest
Responding to\tmembership\tin\ta disadvantaged group\t[microform]\t:\t from acceptance to\tcollective\tprotest\t
The Volatility of Collective Action: Theoretical Analysis and Empirical Data
Collective action is volatile: characterized by swift, unexpected changes in intensity, target, and forms. We conduct a detailed exploration of four reasons that these changes occur. First, action is about identities which are fluid, contested, and multifaceted. As the content of groups’ identities change, so do the specific norms for the identities. Second, social movements adopt new tactics, or forms of collective action. Tactical changes may a…
Similarity and attraction among majority and minority groups in a multicultural context
As a policy for managing cultural diversity, assimilation has emphasized similarity—attraction, whereas multiculturalism highlights a “celebration of differences”. We tested two competing hypotheses, similarity-attraction and similarity-differentiation, among samples from six ethnic groups in Greater Montreal, Canada. Six-hundred and five participants were interviewed by means of an individually administered structured interview procedure conduct…
Interobjectivity and Culture
The wide-ranging review by Coelho and Figueiredo (2003) serves as a useful point of departure for highlighting two major limitations of discussions on intersubjectivity: first, rifts between different specialized groups; second, reductionism. As an albeit modest step forward, I suggest, first, stronger links between groups of specialists exploring intersubjectivity. Second, responding to the reductionist nature of the concept of intersubjectivity…
The Process of Social Identification for Visible Immigrant Women in a Multicultural Context
Haitian and Indian women rated their identification with (self-perceptions), and the extent to which they believed majority Canadians perceived them as being (metaperceptions), Haitian or Indian, immigrant, and Canadian. Self-perceptions and metaperceptions were compared in order to understand the quality of integration for the two sample An attempt was made to predict self-perceptions on the basis of pragmatic (years in Canada, age at arrival, c…
The Psychological Citizen and the Two Concepts of Social Contract: A Preliminary Analysis
A shift in focus from the logical to the psychological social contract allows us to better explore the socialization of the psychological citizen, and the relationship between identity of individuals and the socio‐political order, with its particular group‐based inequalities. Traditional psychological studies have provided valuable insights into certain aspects of identity, but the new narrative research is leading to novel insights into longer t…
Toward a Cultural Theory of Duties
This article puts forward a number of propositions as a step toward a cultural theory of duties. The concept of 'duty' is set up in contrast to that of 'rights', in that while the former is owed to others, the latter are demanded of others. We believe that the psychology of duty has been neglected. Duties are associated with important continuities in social life, and to elaborate this point we introduce the concept of carriers, symbolic devices o…
The relationship of perceptions and emotions to behavior in the face of collective inequality
Reflexive Positioning and Culture
Commentary: Intersubjectivity, interobjectivity, and the embryonic fallacy in developmental science
Traditional research adopts the embryonic fallacy: the assumption that as soon as life begins, the individual becomes the source of psychological experiences. The embryonic fallacy has resulted in intersubjectivity being treated as ‘a problem’: how can each individual, the source of private experiences, understand the private experiences of ‘self-contained’ others? This ‘problem’ disappears when we recognize that intersubjectivity is regulated th…
Catastrophic Evolution, Culture and Diversity Management Policy
Two parallel debates, on cultural diversity and on diversity in animals and plants, are underway with insufficient meaningful contact, but a shared focus on declining diversity. Underlying the sharp decline in diversity in many human and non-human domains is cultural change, bringing about sudden contact between life forms with no previous experience of contact with one another. A common consequence of sudden contact is catastrophic evolution, in…
Assimilation vs. multiculturalism: Views from a community in France
Modulative and Generative Orientations in Psychology: Implications for Psychology in the Three Worlds
Psychology in the United States and the other industrialized nations, as well as in Third World societies, has tended to be modulative in orientation, in that it “reacts to” rather than instigates societal change. The urgent need in Third World societies to achieve fundamental change and modernization has led some psychologists to show interest in generative psychology, which attempts to initiate and influence macrolevel change. A greater emphasi…
Globalization and a Conservative Dilemma: Economic Openness and Retributive Policies
Globalization is associated with economic openness and, in this sense, is in line with conservative free market ideology that embraces less government intervention. Globalization is also associated with greater contact with dissimilar outgroups and potential threats from terrorists and seems to run against conservative attitudes toward outgroup threat and civil liberties. We report research employing two nationally representative samples of 1,000…
Commentary: Omniculturalism: Policy Solutions to Fundamentalism in the Era of Fractured Globalization
Cultural researchers need to pay more attention to religious fundamentalism, which has persisted and even increased, against expectations raised by modernization theories. This discussion represents a preliminary exploration of fractured globalization and global conditions associated with religious fundamentalism. Continuing intergroup conflicts, fundamentalism, and terrorism suggest a need to rethink traditional policies for managing diversity. …
Psychological distress and perceived discrimination: A study of women from India
The effect of perceived threat on human rights: A meta-analysis
Individuals express support for civil liberties and human rights, but when threatened tend to restrict rights for both others and themselves. However, the question of whether or not rights are restricted to punish others or protect ourselves remains unclear. This meta-analysis integrates the findings of the effect of perceived threats on support for restrictions of civil liberties from 1997 to 2019. It includes 163 effect-size estimates from 46 d…
The Maintenance of Self-Esteem: Lessons from the Culture of Alzheimer's Sufferers
There is now an extensive body of research both on independent selves as conceived in western societies, and more recently on interdependent selves common to many non-western cultures. Instead of looking at the growth of self-esteem from a developmental angle, we focus on the issue of the maintenance of self-esteem as seen in Alzheimer's disease (AD) sufferers. We use a case study approach to examine relations between AD sufferers and the non-aff…
Attitudes and Attributions Related to Psychological Symptomatology in Indian Immigrant Women
This study explored the patterns of attitudes and attributions associated with relatively high and low distress among a sample of (N = 104) immigrant women from India living in Montreal. Results showed the high distress group to be less satisfied with their roles in the home and in the job market, to be more in favor of modem sex roles, to want less to pass on traditional sex roles to their children, to attribute success and failure more to their…
The New Global American Dilemma and Terrorism
Interrogation policy and American psychology in the global context
Rather than the ethics or efficacy of torture interrogation, this article explores the wider sociopolitical context in which torture takes place, with particular focus on the global role of American psychology. Psychological research, such as on displacement of aggression, suggests that torture might be undertaken for reasons other than information gathering. American psychologists enjoy relatively greater freedom to explore the wider psycho-poli…
Cultural Surplus and Social Mobility among Minorities
The traditional approach to the study of the integration of immigrants has assumed the main constraints to be fixed dispositional characteristics internal to individuals. An alternative, in line with Verkuyten and de Wolf (2002), is to view constraints as cultural, as part of a collectively constructed and collaboratively upheld social world that is fluid and changing rather than fixed and static. The concept of cultural surplus is introduced to …
Revolutions, Samurai, and Reductons: The Parodoxes of Change and Continuity in Iran and Japan
This paper assesses policies for managing cultural diversity in Iran and Japan, with particular focus on the treatment of women as a cultural minority. Following social reducton theory, the distinction between rates of cultural change at macro‐ and microlevels is highlighted. It is argued that macro political and economic changes have taken place fairly rapidly, but micro changes in everyday social practices have changed much more slowly. The lat…
Psychology in the developing world: An evaluation through the concepts of "dual perception" and "parallel growth."
Psychology in the developing world: An evaluation through the concepts of "dual perception" and "parallel growth."
Psychology in the three worlds: As reflected by the crisis in social psychology and the move toward indigenous third-world psychology
Psychology in the three worlds: As reflected by the crisis in social psychology and the move toward indigenous third-world psychology
Attitudes and Behavior Toward Human Rights Across Different Contexts: The Role of Right‐wing Authoritarianism, Political Ideology, and Religiosity
Three studies were carried out to examine attitudes and behavior toward human rights. ‘Universal’ human rights implies that there should be cross‐situational consistency in attitudes and behavior toward human rights. An alternative interpretation is that attitudes and behavior toward human rights may shift across contexts, as a function of ideology. We reasoned that Canadian subjects would be more critical of the human rights records of Soviet an…
The Personal/Group Discrimination Discrepancy: Perceiving My Group, but not Myself, to be a Target for Discrimination
An unexpected finding that has surfaced in research on discrimination is that respondents perceive a higher level of discrimination directed at their group as a whole than at themselves as individual members of that group. The present study directly tested this personal/group discrepancy by focusing on two groups of Canadian immigrants who have been the targets of much discrimination, Haitian and South Asian women. Respondents were questioned abo…
Assimilation vs. multiculturalism: Views from a community in France
Culture and Interpersonal Communication
Modulative and Generative Orientations in Psychology: Implications for Psychology in the Three Worlds
Psychology in the United States and the other industrialized nations, as well as in Third World societies, has tended to be modulative in orientation, in that it “reacts to” rather than instigates societal change. The urgent need in Third World societies to achieve fundamental change and modernization has led some psychologists to show interest in generative psychology, which attempts to initiate and influence macrolevel change. A greater emphasi…
Responding to membership in a disadvantaged group: From acceptance to collective protest
Responding to\tmembership\tin\ta disadvantaged group\t[microform]\t:\t from acceptance to\tcollective\tprotest\t
Attitudes and Attributions Related to Psychological Symptomatology in Indian Immigrant Women
This study explored the patterns of attitudes and attributions associated with relatively high and low distress among a sample of (N = 104) immigrant women from India living in Montreal. Results showed the high distress group to be less satisfied with their roles in the home and in the job market, to be more in favor of modem sex roles, to want less to pass on traditional sex roles to their children, to attribute success and failure more to their…
The relationship of perceptions and emotions to behavior in the face of collective inequality
"Balan ced Multiculturalism" an d the Challenge of Peaceful Coexistence in Pluralistic Societies
Assimilation and multiculturalism are two contrasting policies for managing pluralistic societies. The first aims to achieve cultural homogeneity, and the second cultural diversity. While assimilation and multiculturalism are associated primarily with immigrant re ceiving countries, such as the United States and Canada, it is argued that these policies are relevant to all pluralistic societies. Underlying assimilation are the similarity-attractio…
Rethinking the Laboratory Experiment
Two fundamentally different research approaches to the study of social behavior are represented in the logico-empirical and the discursive traditions, which have now existed side by side for some time, with little constructive interaction. In this article, we address some of the issues raised by this situation, with particular focus on how the laboratory setting has been and could be used. We propose to redefine the laboratory as an encycIema, a …
The Process of Social Identification for Visible Immigrant Women in a Multicultural Context
Haitian and Indian women rated their identification with (self-perceptions), and the extent to which they believed majority Canadians perceived them as being (metaperceptions), Haitian or Indian, immigrant, and Canadian. Self-perceptions and metaperceptions were compared in order to understand the quality of integration for the two sample An attempt was made to predict self-perceptions on the basis of pragmatic (years in Canada, age at arrival, c…
Reflexive Positioning and Culture
Attributions and Discrimination: A Study of Attributions to the Self, the Group, and External Factors among Whites, Blacks, and Cubans in Miami
This study examined the self-protective role of social attributions by comparing attributions made to the self, one's ethnic group and to factors external to oneself, and to one's ethnic group. Respondents were lower or middle-class White, Black, or Hispanic mothers living in Miami. When presented with the hypothetical case where they person-ally were successful in improving their employment status, all groups attributed success to the self. In t…
Theories of Intergroup Relations: International Social Psychological Perspectives
The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations The Freudian Legacy of Intergroup Research Realistic Conflict Theory Social Identity Theory Equity Theory: Reconciling Affirmative Action Relative Deprivation Theory: Meeting the Challenge of Resource Mobilization Theory A Five-Stage Model of Intergroup Relations: Tokenism as a Potent Form of Discrimination Stereotypes, Attributions, and Discrimination Intergroup Contact: From Desegregation to Multicu…
Similarity and attraction among majority and minority groups in a multicultural context
As a policy for managing cultural diversity, assimilation has emphasized similarity—attraction, whereas multiculturalism highlights a “celebration of differences”. We tested two competing hypotheses, similarity-attraction and similarity-differentiation, among samples from six ethnic groups in Greater Montreal, Canada. Six-hundred and five participants were interviewed by means of an individually administered structured interview procedure conduct…
The Sky is Falling, But Not on Me: A Cautionary Tale of Illusions of Control, in Four Acts
Since the early 1980s, researchers have attempted to unravel the sources of a tendency for minority group members to report higher levels of discrimination directed at their group than at them selves personally. The favored explanation for this personal/group discrimination discrepancy has been denial of personal discrimi nation. However, subsequent research has revealed that this discrep ancy is not specific to the domain of discrimination, or t…
Revolutions, Samurai, and Reductons: The Parodoxes of Change and Continuity in Iran and Japan
This paper assesses policies for managing cultural diversity in Iran and Japan, with particular focus on the treatment of women as a cultural minority. Following social reducton theory, the distinction between rates of cultural change at macro‐ and microlevels is highlighted. It is argued that macro political and economic changes have taken place fairly rapidly, but micro changes in everyday social practices have changed much more slowly. The lat…
Psychology and National Development
Psychologists have important contributions to make to the debate on national development, particularly because human development is now viewed as central to national development. A major shortcoming of the psychological literature on national development is the lack of an adequate explanation of change. We address this gap through an account of national development based on social reducton theory and reversal theory, two recent theories that focu…
The Maintenance of Self-Esteem: Lessons from the Culture of Alzheimer's Sufferers
There is now an extensive body of research both on independent selves as conceived in western societies, and more recently on interdependent selves common to many non-western cultures. Instead of looking at the growth of self-esteem from a developmental angle, we focus on the issue of the maintenance of self-esteem as seen in Alzheimer's disease (AD) sufferers. We use a case study approach to examine relations between AD sufferers and the non-aff…
Toward a Cultural Theory of Human Rights
Although the term `human rights' is traditionally taken to refer to fundamental rights enshrined in formal documents, certain basic `normative rights', such as turn-taking, are central to everyday social life. This paper moves toward a cultural theory of rights, proposing that certain fundamental relations, referred to as `primitive social relations', are inherent in human social life and relative to the local political orientation can appear as …
Toward a Cultural Theory of Duties
This article puts forward a number of propositions as a step toward a cultural theory of duties. The concept of 'duty' is set up in contrast to that of 'rights', in that while the former is owed to others, the latter are demanded of others. We believe that the psychology of duty has been neglected. Duties are associated with important continuities in social life, and to elaborate this point we introduce the concept of carriers, symbolic devices o…
Political science (56 works) · Psychology (52 works) · Sociology (51 works) · Law (47 works) · Social Psychology (37 works) · Politics (33 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (28 works) · Law (24 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (20 works) · Epistemology (20 works)