Minds of the Movement

An ICNC blog on the people and power of civil resistance

Rachel MacNair

Rachel MacNair is the author of the textbook The Psychology of Peace: An Introduction and the monograph Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: the Psychological Consequences of Killing. She edited for an activist audience Working for Peace: A Handbook of Practical Psychology. She is Director of the Institute for Integrated Social Analysis, research arm of the non-profit organization Consistent Life Network; she also coaches dissertation students on statistics. She graduated from Earlham College, a Quaker school, with a Bachelor's in Peace and Conflict Studies, and got her Ph.D. in psychology and sociology from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, USA.

Writings from Rachel MacNair

Articles

Scholarship & Research

Defection as Therapy? A Closer Look at the Trauma of Repressing

Would suffering from Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) symptoms make agents of repression more likely to defect, or less? Do those suffering from PITS find defection to be a good therapy, and if so, is there a way of using this knowledge to encourage defections? […]

by Rachel MacNair
February 28, 2019

Ideas & Trends

Encouraging Agents of Repression to Defect: Psychology for Activists

One lab experiment that focused on why people repress is the Stanford Prison Experiment, where participants were put in a simulated prison. The experiment was supposed to go two weeks, but had to shut down after six days. Participants got into a madhouse of social roles… The reason it was finally shut down was that an outsider with some authority intervened, doing on a small scale what nonviolent social movements do on a large scale. […]

by Rachel MacNair
December 11, 2018