EDITOR'S PREFACE - September 11, 2001: How Can Peace Psychologists Be Most Helpful?

Abstract

It's so hard to know how to be truly helpful in response to the September 11, 2001, catastrophe. In these pages (Volume 8, No. 1), we made a first effort, publishing Herbert Blumberg's (2002) culling of relevant research from electronic indexes of psychological publications, noting as well the pertinence of several other articles (Azar & Mullet, 2002; Suleiman, 2002) in that issue. We also made clear our hope that we would receive manuscripts concerning psychological aspects of terrorism. The desired flood of high quality articles has not materialized. Should we have been surprised? No, not really. The norm in psychology for years has been that respectable publications must be methodologically "Western" (i.e., based on data collected in well-controlled, value-free correlational or experimental studies) and that they should not be presented in an evaluative manner. But how do you conduct such research on unique experiences, on events that cannot meaningfully be duplicated in the laboratory or through hypothetical scenarios? If we look at the psychological research expertise ultimately brought to bear on the Cold War's nuclear arms race, a variety of methods was applied to study competition, escalation, crisis management, cognitive processing under stress, and the like. We did learn some things of value from these studies. But the ecological validity of this type of research was questioned-especially by those who mattered: policymakers (Kull, 1988)-and there seems little likelihood that today's policymakers will pay much attention to basic psychological research efforts, at least in the near term.