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On Friendship — On the family we choose

• [article] When groups go bad — 3 Jan 2025
  Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile environment, normalised physical and emotional violence, and a lack of mental and physical resources, and you have the ingredients for atrocity.
• [article] Mob mentality is fine — 20 Dec 2024
  You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our social identity is formed by making the distinctions between in- and out- groups clear. Then it all makes sense.
• [article] Catastrophic leadership is actually really hard — 13 Dec 2024
  For group dynamics to produce really bad behaviour, you really need to work at it. You have to train your authority figures to be cruel, prevent dissent or disengagement, and intervene all the time to stop people fixing things. It’s <em>hard</em>.
• [article] Our success is not our own — 23 Jun 2022
  The success of the people we surround ourselves with directly influences our performance and sense of accomplishment. It’s worth paying attention to how we balance this, both with those more successful but also those less.
• [article] The value of relationship control — 13 May 2022
  ‘Control’ isn’t always a bad thing in a relationship. In fact it’s necessary. We always have a level of control over our partners, we must just use it with their approval, and to meet their needs as well as ours.
• [article] Explaining group dynamics — 29 Mar 2022
  Group dynamics are often thought to be a complicated thing to explore. But a 50-year-old model explains much of it with only three things: a need for Belonging, for Affection, and for Control.
• [article] The true meaning of family ties — 24 Sep 2020
  It’s no secret that we are lonelier than ever. We have many complaints of modern society, but our growing isolation is a common one. There are two reasons for this unhappy accident—the difficulty of finding people in ever more crowded cities, and the fact that we have lost sight of what a community is really made of. This article is about the latter.
• [article] The loneliness epidemic — 20 Sep 2020
  One in five people are lonely. This is not trivial. Loneliness is emerging as one of the greatest threats to physical and emotional health. And it shouldn’t be, because unlike many of our most intractable problems, this one seems so solvable.
• [article] Folie à deux: the madness of two — 10 Sep 2020
  Folie à deux is a striking phenomenon, but poorly understood. It seems to me that it might be just one misleading face of social isolation.
• [article] On Emotion — 31 Jul 2020
  Emotion is an impossible term to define. Seems important though, so let’s try anyway.
• [article] Why people lie to you (and you let them) — 24 Jul 2020
  When we first meet someone, we follow a certain social script. That script calls for certain kinds of lies. But it’s not malicious. It’s a fundamental part of the relationship building process. They lie to us, and we tell them what kinds of lies are ok. Because humans are flawed creatures, and all we want to do is connect.
• [article] We're setting goals wrong, we're missing the point, and it's troubling — 30 May 2020
  I bet you’ve heard of S.M.A.R.T goals. If you haven’t you should, and luckily enough I’m going to tell you about it here. But this article isn’t about S.M.A.R.T goals. It’s about what’s underneath. It’s about how we consistently miss the point of goals in our quest for success. It’s about how that’s toxic. And mostly, it’s about celebrating ourselves a little more, because that’s more important than we seem to want it to be.
• [article] On attraction and love — 13 Mar 2020
  Much is written on the subject of attractiveness. It has become synonymous with beauty. Attractive celebrities, attractive influencers, attractive art. And through this myopic lens, attraction becomes something ugly. Something that people have or do not have. Something to be jealous of. Something to be torn down. But it doesn’t have to be. It can actually be something very beautiful indeed.
• [article] The three reasons why everyone is so 'cliquey' — 5 Nov 2018
  The psychology of cliques has a pretty stereotypical pattern. It’s been well-described since the 80’s. There are three phases, and often they end in collapse.
• [article] Coming together - the pattern of friendship and love — 12 Jun 2018
  Making and keeping our connections to others remains one of the fundamental arts we learn in life. And having a stickybeak into other people’s relationships is one of the fundamental past times. But if there’s one thing psychologists are good at, it’s identifying patterns in the way people behave. In that spirit, this model describes the process of people coming together used in the counselling office and by counsellors people-watching over coffee that’s quite beautiful.