John R. P. French (1913–1995) American psychologist
Source: "Overcoming resistance to change." 1948, p. 520
Abortion in the United States, Report of a Conference Sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., (1958)
John R. P. French (1913–1995) American psychologist
Source: "Overcoming resistance to change." 1948, p. 520
Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) Social psychologist
Source: Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View (1974), p. 121
Context: When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority. (Not that the group is always on the right side of the issue. Lynch mobs and groups of predatory hoodlums remind us that groups may be vicious in the influence they exert.)
Patricia Hill Collins (1948) African-American scholar
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2000) p. vii
Robert Trivers (1943) American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist
As quoted in Science at the Edge: Conversations with the Leading Scientific Thinkers of Today (2008), p. 170
Context: People are often unconscious of some of the mechanisms that naturally occur in them in a biased way. For example, if I do something that is beneficial to you or to others, I will use the active voice: I did this, I did that, then benefits rained down on you. But if I did something that harmed others, I unconsciously switch to a passive voice: this happened, then that happened, then unfortunately you suffered these costs. One example I always loved was a man in San Francisco who ran into a telephone pole with his car, and he described it to the police as, "the pole was approaching my car, I attempted to swerve out-of-the-way, when it struck me."
Let me give you another, the way in which group membership can entrain language-usages that are self-deceptive. You can divide people into in-groups or out-groups, or use naturally occurring in-groups and out-groups, and if someone's a member of your in-group and they do something nice, you give a general description of it – "he's a generous person". If they do something negative, you state a particular fact: "in this case he misled me", or something like that. But it's exactly the other way around for an out-group member. If an out-group member does something nice, you give a specific description of it: "she gave me directions to where I wanted to go". But if she does something negative, you say, "she's a selfish person". So these kinds of manipulations of reality are occurring largely unconsciously.
Julie Burchill (1959) British writer
Julie Burchill, British feminist and abortion advocate, in Damaged Gods, 1986.
Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist
Source: 1960s, Authority, Goals and Prestige in a General Hospital, 1960, p. 16
Henri Poincaré book Science and Hypothesis
Source: Science and Hypothesis (1901), Ch. IV: Space and Geometry, Conclusions (1905) Tr. https://books.google.com/books?id=5nQSAAAAYAAJ George Bruce Halstead
Robert Nozick book Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Source: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), pp. 231-232 http://books.google.com/books?id=fVITAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT138