‘Are we going to be snapped back into individuality? That’s up to us…’

Good to see you in person… I don’t know about you, but I feel something is lost doing everything on Zoom, and part of that relates to your research – kindness.

It’s interesting how contrasting things can coexist. In a pandemic, forced to isolate, there was a weird sense of being united with a common purpose. You would imagine that ought to provoke more kindness, through a sense of connectedness. But at the same time, there’s that issue of working more on your own, not in the same space with others, leading to a way of thinking which is ‘what’s the consequence going to be for me?’ Your world revolves around what you are doing.

Shrinking horizons. So potentially a good time to be involved in the organisation of a ‘Congress’, an actual coming together.

Which is all about uniting. It is a really nice opportunity. We’re all going through that experience of having in person interactions and saying, ‘Oh, isn’t this so lovely? We’ve really missed this.’ I’ve had a lot of firsts in terms of people I haven’t met for a long, long time. The most recent one was the Association of Heads of Psychology Departments. All the small conversations, walking together getting coffee, those kinds of things. There is definitely some truth to the idea that the small stuff, in many cases, is the big stuff.

So a conference now is not just about being in a room having somebody give a talk at you, it’s about the micro-interactions, the true congress, congregation.

Exactly. But at the same time, there’s a real worry that we need to do some work to recapture the sense of the collective, the community. That sense of common purpose, from when we were forced into the first lockdowns – we may face different circumstances, but we’re in this together – that seems diminished to me.

I think you’re right about the potential rebound to individuality… when times are hard, as in lots of ways they still are, and increasingly are, I suppose it’s natural to look out for number one.

I think that might be it. I’ve been doing this big piece of work with BBC Radio Four on kindness. One of the things which seemed to attract a lot of media interest was the finding that about two-thirds of people who responded to the survey reported that people have become kinder and as a result of the pandemic. Less often reported was that this was not even across different countries. In some countries, it was significantly lower. For example, in the US, it was around a third. So people did feel in some places, like it was bringing people together, even as they were being isolated. And yet, what is going to happen afterwards, are we going to be snapped back into individuality? I think that’s up to us.

That sense of common purpose, from when we were forced into the first lockdowns, seems to have diminished to me.

Maybe it’s that kindness has become more complex. There’s even an argument that kindness has become weaponised – some have said that the whole #BeKind is one way of shutting down some legitimate debate and expression.

And there’s a real concern about that. One of the tricky things, of course, is that one person’s view of what the kind of thing to do is, may be quite different to another person’s view – even if both those people are really interested in caring for others, people’s welfare. They can have that same motivation but arrive at different answers.

‘You have to be cruel to be kind’… that’s a tricky one to unpick psychologically!

Exactly. If you talk about a definitive judgement on whether a given outcome is kind, that’s complicated you have to ask all these qualifying questions – short term or long term? This one individual, or the whole team, or indeed the whole population? What could be kind to one person in the short term might be deeply unkind to a whole raft of people in the long term. A way of taking a more nuanced psychological orientation is to understand the motivation. Then you can say that actually, these people who are arriving at diametrically opposed views about a particular issue, are starting from a common interest in others’ welfare. We need to then explore that commonality. Because quite often, what we do is we react to the difference. We make an assumption that one is right one is wrong, or you have to pick your sides and so on, and you miss the fact that actually there might be a common starting point in terms of the psychological motivation. Recognising that leads to a very different kind of dialogue. We’re hearing each other’s starting point, rather than just responding to where each person has landed.

It’s quite a kind thing to be involved in organising the European Congress, perhaps particularly at this time post-Brexit? Do you feel there’s an importance to the event, because of what’s happened in recent years on a European level?

It really is important to bring people together and that’s what this whole conference is about. Saying that we can learn from that, identify some of the commonalities as well as the differences, and explore that together. It’s transcending the politics – there shouldn’t be any boundaries that stop us from connecting with each other, learning from each other and sharing with each other, especially good practice. That’s a valuable thing to be doing at this time. What people are concerned about now, rightly, is this feeling of there being divisiveness that separates people in this society. Finding ways to unite people with a common purpose is really important.

Have you found that the practicalities of collaboration have changed after Brexit?

Just yesterday, I was talking with someone about exchanges, and thinking, actually, this plan that we have, we’re not going to be able to do it. There are very practical consequences to what’s happened in recent years. Sometimes you end up thinking, ‘what’s the alternative scheme, how are we going to still manage to be a player in such and such a network?’. But one of the really nice things about conferences is that it’s not necessarily about networks, costings, grant schemes… it’s about common interests and shared experiences, and being able to talk with each other and make those connections. Not just the formal stuff.

Do you feel like a European psychologist?

Yes, I still do. I’m probably not the best person to ask about it, because I’ve got such an international background in terms of my upbringing, my nationality and heritage. But yes I very much do see myself as a European psychologist. Conferences do have a role to play in this. Over the years, I’ve been to lots of European conferences and North American conferences. Maybe it’s just a personal thing in terms of identity, but I think I probably feel like the European ones are, in a sense, closer to home. Not just geographically, they do feel closer in some sort of psychological sense, and it’s not because I’m collaborating more with one than the other.

There shouldn’t be any boundaries that stop us from connecting with each other, learning from each other and sharing with each other.

What will make a good European Congress?

One that is inclusive. We want people to feel this is a home for them. And it’s going to be a really vibrant place, which is welcoming, not exclusive. It’s not going to be a very clique thing.

I think Brighton is a great location for it. Obviously, I’m biased – I have a very international background, but I’ve been in Brighton now for 30 years. It’s a very special place, it has that perfect combination of being small enough that it feels quite intimate – you can bump into people, you’re not completely anonymous – and yet at the same time, large enough and exciting enough that it feels really cosmopolitan. There’s a lot of activity, a lot of culture, things sparking in different directions. That’s a nice combination, it’s what makes Brighton feel special.

In terms of the main theme of uniting communities for a sustainable world: do you feel your own work speaks to that?

The work that I’ve been doing over the years on the social and emotional development of children and young people absolutely does connect with that. In fact, one of the things we’re just in the process of planning is a strand of Congress activity around children and inequality. And this is building on a piece of work funded by the BPS, actually, bringing a network of people together around that theme. We also got a grant from ESRC for engaging with colleagues in South Korea around that same topic.

What I’ve been doing in my research, over such a long time, is trying to understand, and where possible support, children’s activity in navigating that complex social world. It’s a world where there are so many differences. People have different views about different things… I do a lot of work on theory of mind, and people have different perspectives on what’s going on, beliefs. From that simple, trivial level, in a standard false belief task, through to much wider socio-cultural issues around how different people from different backgrounds are thinking about really quite complex things – children have to learn to navigate all of that. Communities are something that every single child, younger person and adult are learning about all the time.

I’ve followed your progress a bit over the years and it seems like marginalisation, and advocating for the marginalised, is a thread running through your work.

Absolutely. So much attention is being placed on young people who are at risk. I use that phrase very loosely – at risk of various different kinds of mental health difficulties. And I think it’s absolutely right, there should be a lot of attention on those young people who have been marginalised and who are at elevated risk for mental health difficulties. But there’s also something really important about not using that to separate people from each other. One of the things that you can do inadvertently, quite often with the best intentions, is end up separating out those people who are vulnerable or marginalised from everybody else. And you end up with this weird thing where you’re saying, ‘OK, this really doesn’t concern most of you, it’s just this group of people who’ve got these particular difficulties, we need to sort them out’. You end up with a quite a weird approach to mental health where it becomes very individualistic.

What we need to do is not just fix the child, but fix the environment and change the system.

Before you know it, you’ve fallen into a bit of a trap, thinking our work on mental health has become just a matter of figuring out which kids have problems, early identification, early intervention, ideally someone with expertise, who can then ‘fix’ that child, and then they’ll be ready to be reintegrated with everybody else. I think that’s really a mistake. Because the reality is that those mental health difficulties are not just sitting inside that one child’s head. It’s the whole system. It’s the whole network of relationships in which that child is embedded. That’s what we need to understand.

So a lot of what I’ve been trying to do most recently is to show that whatever targeted work we’re doing with vulnerable, at risk or marginalised groups, is well integrated with what we’re doing for everyone how we’re creating a whole school environment which supports mental health for all positively. That’s the crucial bit of the puzzle that we need to sort out.

Which is quite funny to me, because when we knew each other when I was an academic 25 years ago, that whole idea of bullying as a group process, embedded in a cultural context, that was around then too. So it must be a difficult message to truly embed.

It’s just easier, almost administratively, to individualise… to say, ‘right, this doesn’t concern 90 per cent of people, just this 10 per cent, we just need to figure out who they are. Of course, what you’ve got now is the concern that actually, it’s not 10 per cent, it’s rising, it’s not 15 per cent, it’s maybe 20 per cent, maybe 25 per cent. And before you know what’s happening, you’ve come to the conclusion that our approach has resulted in people being absolutely swamped with the individual treatment type of orientation. In some cases, it literally is kids lining up to see a very under-pressure and under-resourced clinician or counsellor. What we need to do is not just fix the child – fix the environment, change the system. But that’s a really difficult thing, to say change the group, change society.