Floyd Webster Rudmin
- Media Contact
My academic degrees are a BA in philosophy, MA in audiology, PhD in social psychology. My common threads through these three fields have been semantics and psycholinguistics, in cross-cultural contexts. Specific topics of interest include:
(1) Psychology of ownership: What does it mean to "own" something? What are the inner psychological forces that underlie perceptions, cognitions, and behaviors pertaining to private property? I have done numerous cross-cultural studies and cognitive studies. A present interest is to revive Heider's theory of ownership.
(2) Cognitive History: Again following Heider's lead, history is not so much about what happened in the past, as what we believe happened in the past. How do we acquire historical beliefs? Or change them? Why do we seem so ready to fight for our historical beliefs, to kill, risk death, and dare the destruction of our own communities? Although there is a massive psychological literature on self-identity, the processes by which we attach national history to our personal biography have been little examined.
(3) Cross-cultural methods: One interest is to articulate the phenomenological methods used by Heider and Ichheiser so successfully. But I must admit that I do not yet understand these well enough to use them myself or to teach them to students. A second interest is to systematically critique the psychometric methods used in cross-cultural psychology. This field has been excessively and unnecessarily lax. For example, acculturation attitude scales of assimilation, separation, integration, and marginalization (a) have ill-conceived constructs, (b) violate norms for good psychometric items, (c) lack controls on acquiescence and social desirability bias, (d) are routinely used in multivariate analyses even though they are ipsative with one another, and (e) are variously discussed as "modes", "styles", "strategies", values","options", etc.
(4) History of social & cross-cultural psychology: McDougall's 1908 book was not about social psychology. "Stereotype" was not coined by Walter Lippman. The Fundamental Error of Attribution was articulated by Ichheiser in the 1940s. The first cross-cultural study in 1801 was a precursor to genocide. Without history, our science is just hear-say.
Primary Interests:
- Aggression, Conflict, Peace
- Applied Social Psychology
- Culture and Ethnicity
- Ethics and Morality
- Internet and Virtual Psychology
- Law and Public Policy
- Political Psychology
- Research Methods, Assessment
Note from the Network: The holder of this profile has certified having all necessary rights, licenses, and authorization to post the files listed below. Visitors are welcome to copy or use any files for noncommercial or journalistic purposes provided they credit the profile holder and cite this page as the source.
Image Gallery
Video Gallery
Mass Population Grief Reactions As Climate Collapse Ends All Narratives
Journal Articles:
- Rudmin, F. W. (2006). Debate in science: The case of acculturation. AnthroGlobe Journal. [Won SPSSI’s 2005 Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award.]
- Rudmin, F. W. (2003). Critical history of the acculturation psychology of assimilation, separation, integration, & marginalization. Review of General Psychology, 7, 3-37. (Won 2nd prize in APA’s 2004 "George Miller Research Award." Reprinted (2006), in Z. Nolan & B. Kim (Eds.), Asian American studies: A reader. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.)
- Rudmin, F. W. (1998). Cross-cultural correlates of the ownership of private property: A summary of five studies. AnthroGlobe Journal.
- Rudmin, F. W. (1994). Gender differences in the semantics of ownership: A quantitative phenomenological survey study. Journal of Economic Psychology, 15, 487-510.
- Rudmin, F. W. (1991). "To own is to be perceived to own": A social cognitive look at the ownership of property. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6(6), 85-104.
- Rudmin, F. W. (1990). Cross-cultural correlates of war. Peace Research, 22(3), 33-44.
- Rudmin, F. W. (1990). Seventeen early peace psychologists. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 31, 12-43.
- Rudmin, F. W. (1990). The economic psychology of Leon Litwinski (1887-1969): A program of cognitive research on possession and property. Journal of Economic Psychology, 11, 307-339.
- Rudmin, F. W. (1988). Dominance, social control and ownership: A history and a cross-cultural study of motivations for private property. Behavior Science Research, 22, 130-160. (Won 1987 C.S. Ford Cross-Cultural Research Award.)
- Rudmin, F. W. (1986). Psychology of ownership, possession and property: A selected bibliography since 1890. Psychological Reports, 58, 859-867. (Reprinted 1987, IAREP Newsletter, (March), 17-27)
- Rudmin, F. W., & Ahmadzadeh, V. (2001). Psychometric critique of acculturation psychology: The case of Iranian migrants in Norway. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 42, 41-56.
- Rudmin, F. W., Ferrada-Noli., M., & Skolbekken, J.-A. (2003). Questions of gender, age, and culture in the epidemiology of suicide. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 44, 371-379.
- Rudmin, F. W., Trimpop, R., Kryl, I., & Boski, P. (1987). Gustav Ichheiser in the history of social psychology: An early phenomenology of social attribution. British Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 165-180.
- Østvik, K., & Rudmin, F. W. (2001). Bullying and hazing among Norwegian Army soldiers: Two studies of prevalence, context, and cognition. Military Psychology, 13, 17-39.
Other Publications:
Floyd Webster Rudmin
Department of Psychology
University of Tromsø
9037 Tromsø
Norway
- Phone: (+47) 77 64 59 53
- Fax: (+47) 77 64 52 91