Playbook Table of Contents
1. Social psychology as liberation
In the introduction of the playbook, we introduce Liberation Psychology through Ignacio Martín-Baró’s urgent call to use the tools of social psychology in the service of societal transformation. We frame social psychology as a hopeful lens, because it suggests that humans learn to enact power, love, and evil from social influences in their environments from childhood onwards. Thus we challenged ourselves to explore how to reshape societal environments to influence human behavior towards more peaceful and loving co-existence. Inspired by M Scott Peck’s vision of a “true community,” students identified six communal values for our new society: collective leadership, safety for everyone’s humanity, learning to fight gracefully, belongingness across difference, commitment through hard times, and a spirit of higher consciousness. They also identified five forms of power to spread across our new society: respectful, trustworthy, democratic, collective, and personal power.
2. Researching healthy power dynamics
We explore the core question social psychologists have been researching since Nazi Germany: how can ordinary people can be influenced to use power towards evil and harm? (which Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil‘). We overview two groundbreaking research studies, the Milgram Shock Experiment and the Stanford Prison experiment, which demonstrate how evil is normalized in systems of hierarchy where power is left unchecked. Students then proposed that we conduct a classroom phenomenological inquiry into how power can be used in healthy ways. Our guiding question became: “What is the lived experience of using power to empower?” Referencing our own stories of lived experience, we generated five insights about the qualities of loving leadership: (1) empathy, emotional intelligence, and healing intentions; (2) integrity and truth-telling (3) encouragement of others’ ideas and actions; (4) inspiring collaboration vs. competition among community members; and (5) generously sharing access to resources and opportunities.
3. Raising empathic leaders
Though empathy is essential for loving leadership, we recognize the capacity for empathy doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It is often a quality socialized in children from a young age by their caregivers, who play a fundamental role in shaping their children to become adults who use power non-narcissistically. As psychologists, we are also aware of how intergenerational trauma and authoritarian parenting can interfere with the capacity to teach and show empathy from parents to kids. As such, we designed a 10-week parenting course called “Raising Empathic Leaders,” which supports parents to raise their children to gain healthy self-worth, the capacity for empathy, and altruistic behavior towards others. This course provides psychoeducation to parents about how their use of power influences children’s self-worth, offers therapeutic support to heal their own childhood wounds, and teaches them emotional regulation and active listening skills from family and play therapy to model deep empathy through their own parenting.
4. Compassionate accountability
Our society needs to hold people accountable for harmful behavior. However, many remediation programs rely on the fundamental attribution error to do so, which is the tendency to overestimate personality characteristics (i.e. bad kid) over situational factors (i.e. trauma, poverty, oppression) when explaining behavior. This error can lead to zero-tolerance disciplinary policies in schools and harsh and punitive treatment in the criminal justice system. We outline proposals for two intervention ideas that hold youth and adults accountable in more loving and compassionate ways: the “Trauma-Informed Remediation Program in Schools,” and the “Critical-Restorative Justice Program in Communities.” Both programs replaces punitive discipline with healing practices and awareness of social context, and view accountability as the possibility for a person to evolve through greater attention, understanding, and nurturance.
5. Media for cultural healing
The average person uses seven hours of screentime a day. We explored how to use media as a tool for love rather than brain rot. We developed the strategy for a multimedia prosocial advertising campaign called “Together We Shape What Comes Next,” which inspires citizens across cultural and political divides to envision a more loving future, and begin manifesting that vision now. The media campaign will tell stories of compassionate cultural leaders from all walks of life making real change happen in their local communities. Using social media, documentary storytelling, local outreach, community partnerships, and psychology expertise, the campaign reinforces the message that the most powerful tool for change is our collective imagination. Through hopeful messaging and real-world case studies, it will show that everyone can influence society’s future—from governance and education to healthcare and economics. The media campaign will reframe hope as a collective practice of co-creation, not merely an emotion.
6. Belonging-centered social norms
Modern social life operates through “coercive conformity,” which Kenji Yoshino defines as cultural pressures that force us to “cover” unique aspects of our humanity in order to belong. The current social norms socialize us into sameness, ensuring we become carbon-copy robots of each other or else we will be excluded. If social norms depict the agreed-upon values of a society, we declare the new norm to be authenticity, to ensure all people feel safety and belonging within their communities without needing to mask for social survival. We list ways to instill this new norm in our local and national communities, such as: belonging-centered education, bullying reduction and remediation, representation of difference in institutional hiring, media that celebrates the many ways of being human, and peer-led multicultural celebrations. We also propose a new curriculum program for public school education called “The Power of Diverse Perspectives,” which teaches students to embrace diversity as a tool of creative collaboration to create solutions that can benefit the human species.
7. Non-hierarchical governance
bell hooks said that love cannot exist in systems of rigid hierarchy, and our thinktank agrees. The core problem with rigid hierarchies is that one leader, at the top of an institution or nation, holds executive decision-making power. We explored psychological and social consequences of hierarchal governance on both the leader and society. It can lead to ego inflation, relational isolation, and health issues for the leader, and cult mentality, group polarization, and marginalization of minority voices in society. We share examples of non-hierarchal governance in organizations that embrace horizontal power dynamics, such as rotating leadership, democratic voting, and consensus decision-making of all members. We then designed a new governance model for our nation which replaces the position of a single president with “A Multi-Council Network of Shared National Leadership.” This non-hierarchical governance system will operates as a web of interconnected councils with rotating leadership that share responsibility across all domains of public life.
8. Eradicating wealth inequality
The countries with the highest income inequality tend to have the most violence. In the U.S., the top 10% own 60% of U.S. wealth, leaving many feeling desperate and powerless. We outline solutions for a more loving society to eradicate income inequality and heal financial despair. These includes: transforming societal values from excess towards simple living, providing universal basic income, healthcare and other safety nets, implementing fair taxation and ensuring the ultra-wealthy pay their taxes, expanding shared corporate ownership, fair wages, and accessible education, and inspiring community interdependence and resource-sharing. We propose a mental health intervention called the “Psychospiritual Wealth Recovery Program,” which is a peer-led wealth addiction recovery intervention to help people in the billionaire class transition from an identity rooted in money accumulation towards spiritual wealth, ethical legacy, and commitment to philanthropy. The program will offer concrete pathways to redistribute their money to end poverty.
9. Prejudice as public health crisis
As a thinktank of people with highly diverse identities, it is difficult to attempt radical empathy to those who hate us. But this might be what a psychologically-minded approach to prejudice reduction requires of us. We identified psychosocial causes of extreme prejudice, and how stereotyping can turn into hate when psychological pain is coupled with societal reinforcement. We explored ways to “treat” prejudice as a mental health crisis at both the individual and structural levels. Individual therapy treatment includes: psychodynamic therapy to explore how childhood wounds shape bias, CBT for cognitive distortions, group therapy for intercultural contact, and Jungian shadow work to undo projections. Public health interventions include: institutional bias training, representation of difference, intergroup contact, accountability programs, and anti-discriminatory policies in all institutions. We propose an intervention called the “National Shadow Work Program,” which spreads shadow literacy across all domains of society, so people can be supported to heal inner conflicts that tend to be projected onto cultural others.
10. Nonviolent conflict resolution
We explore possibilities for reconciliatory dialogue in our polarized society. Dehumanization is the main factor interfering with peace-building, perpetuating violence in both personal and political spheres. The psychologist Marshall Rosenberg developed a tool to heal these divides called Nonviolent Communication (NVC)—a 4-step method to restore shared humanity, foster empathy, and move towards collaborative problem-solving. We list ways to teach NVC in homes and schools to support individuals and families to navigate conflict in safer, trauma-informed ways. We then identify ways to integrate NVC into the political sector, i.e. ensuring political campaigns, political debates, town halls, and educational spaces relinquish dehumanization and shape civic dialogue towards reconciliatory aims. Finally, we propose an intervention to heal political divides in the U.S.: “Non-Partisan Town Hall Meetings to Build a More Loving World.” These blueprints will serve as a springboard for communal creativity—with lived experience and vulnerable storytelling emphasized as avenues to social change, not ideological debate.
11. Love as institutional ethic
We summarize the point of these blueprints: to spread a love ethic across all sectors of society. We adhere to M Scott Peck’s definition of love as “the will to extend yourself to nurture the spiritual growth and wellbeing of self and others.” Aligning with bell hooks, we suggest all citizens should consciously enact this definition in relationships and institutions. In personal relationships, this means: making time to be truly present, confronting conflict and rupturing repairs, nurturing spaces of communal belonging, sharing burdens and resources in community, and doing inner work to heal trauma. In institutions, this means: designing policies that honor humanity over productivity, prioritize wellbeing over efficiency, share power and leadership, teach empathy and trauma-informed practices, and empower people’s self-actualization journeys. We propose “A Love-Ethic Redesign of the College Classroom,” which encourages professors to reduce hierarchy, affirm student wisdom and leadership, emphasize compassionate communication, and design assignments in service of building beloved community.
12. A pedagogy of hope
In this section, I re-conceptualize this entire project as a trauma-informed intervention, at a time when many students are enduring personal and societal struggles. I discuss my philosophy of teaching as a “Pedagogy of Hope,” particularly as a clinical psychologist who seeks to help struggling students avoid giving up on the world. My classes aim to awaken students to the realization that they can use their creative imaginations to bring more beauty and love to the world—together, in community with each other. My method of transforming classrooms into thinktanks borrows from Paulo Freire’s philosophy of liberatory education, and David Bohm’s method of dialogue for collective knowledge-production. At the end of this section, I provide practical tools for educators and community organizers who wish to facilitate Bohmian dialogue for collective knowledge-creation and community-building amongst people with diverse cultural and political worldviews.