Politics in Movement Within and Between Cultures.

This article is a response to the insightful pieces written about my beginning attempt of defining and elaborating on a cultural political psychology (Carriere, 2022), of which there were four - Beckstead and Jordan (2023); Busch-Jensen and Røn-Larsen (2023); Mazur (2023a); and Rutherford (2023). Their commentaries were varied in their expansions and thoughts on the work, and each provided a unique perspective on the future of a cultural political psychology. Here, I expand on the points made by each of the authors and synthesize their expansions to look forward to further theoretical elaborations within a cultural political psychology.

Rights for me but not for thee: Restriction of human rights based on group membership and threat perceptions.

Policies aimed at limiting border crossing and influencing other cultural values have been enacted domestically and internationally in the name of security. However, do these decisions concerning such tradeoffs resonate equally across all groups? In two studies, we probe the moderating impact of intergroup threat on the inclination to restrict human rights. In Study 1, we employ a unique economic tradeoff model to directly compare the value of security with the rights of either citizens or non-citizens. In Study 2, we broaden these findings by examining whether support for infringements on the right to privacy varies among diverse groups. Across both studies, our results consistently show that an increase in intergroup threat corresponds to heightened restriction of rights, but only when contemplating individuals who are not citizens, such as non-citizens, residents, or foreigners. We propose future research directions that include promoting the concept of a global community and exploring altruistic behaviours associated with rights protection.

Workers' rights are human rights: organizing the psychology of labor movements.

A surprisingly small body of research in psychology documents the costs and benefits of labor unions on an individual's psyche. However, the importance of labor unions - so critical it was codified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights - requires a renewed examination of labor movements beyond the individual differences that predict labor membership. I review the body of evidence that shows labor has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on the workplace and have begun to use social movement actions of growing support and building power. I conclude by highlighting new questions for future research, and calling on a renewal of union psychology research by studying unionization as the emergence of a new culture.

Culture cultivating culture: the four products of the meaning-made world.

Culture, in a semiotic cultural psychology, is defined from the viewpoint of cultivation--the meaning making processes that give meaning to the world (Valsiner 2000, 2007a). However, the individual is not simply a process-machine in an empty world--there are both the external outcomes of meaning making (individual and group based) as well as the collective influence on the cultivation process. I argue to examine the cultivation process more completely, one must look at these external influences that catalyze future cultivation processes. By examining the power of the external (environmental Umwelten) and group-internal (myths, morals), a much greater understanding of the behavior of individuals can be accomplished beyond examining the individual's process of meaning making. Further work into examining the objects that affectively activate the individual as well as group action and meaning making is called for and examples of such studies are given.