Introduction to the Special Section on the Psychology of Security

Abstract

Concerns regarding human security arguably define the contemporary world. Such concerns relate to the human desire to live with "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" (United Nations System Task Team, 2012). There are significant challenges for contemporary human security that have emerged with processes of globalization, climate change, migration, population growth, violent extremism, transnational crime, constantly developing technologies, poverty, and inequality. More than ever perhaps, it is essential to consider the importance of economics, livelihoods, ecology, health, politics, and society when we seek to better understand human security. However, the dominant focus in psychology has remained relatively fixed on individual needs, perspectives, and experiences.Security has long been an object of study within the discipline of psychology. With notable exceptions related to issues of the environment, culture, and society that appear in this special section, our disciplinary approaches have tended to approach security rather narrowly as an individualized process. As a discipline, we have primarily focused on understanding and supporting secure minds, thoughts, emotions, and identities, in essence a stable selfhood that grows in a stable or secure personal environment. Beginning with a North American humanistic perspective, security was initially theorized in psychology as requiring a blending of fundamental needs as well as personality development to create different levels of secure personhood (Maslow, 1942). Psychoanalytic thinkers have posited relational attachments as central to developing the psychic organization needed for this secure sense of self (Ainsworth & Ainsworth, 1958;Bowlby, 1958;Fairbarin, 1952;Klein, 1927). Primarily, it was considered that successful emotional and social development results from positive attachment experiences in both childhood and adulthood.This notion of the secure personhood has permeated other nation states beyond the United States and Europe, where the focus has tended to remain on individualistic aspects of personal security. As such, cross-cultural psychologists have also considered security in terms of people's internal psychological processes through attention on developmental perspectives (Mesman, van Ijzendoorn, & Sagi-Schwartz, 2016), psychological needs (Malka, Soto, Inzlicht, & Lelkes, 2014), and moral values (Schwartz, 2012.

Scaling the Security Staircase

“…These three elements are widely considered as building blocks of cybersecurity processes and security management (Moghaddisi, Sajjadi, & Kamkarhaghighi, 2016). In everyday life, access to the Internet can pose a variety of threats to, as well as opportunities for, personal security—from access to employment (e.g., working from home during a pandemic) to being targeted for cybercrime, misinformation, online bullying, online sex trafficking, illicit trade in arms and people, and more (Hopner et al, 2020, in press). At group and community levels, the Internet can shape and preserve identity (e.g., Alonso & Oiarzabal, 2010; Bennett, 2013), but it has also been connected to the rise in identity‐based conflicts which have been so damaging to human security in the last decades (e.g., Yamamoto & Kushin, 2014).…”

“…Stepwise dynamics towards human security, from distal to proximal, remain relevant today in the psychology of security (Hopner et al, 2020). An example of a contemporary security issue in this respect is the extent to which political leaders and followers are willing to establish standards for societal gun control (Pierre, 2019).…”

“…Cybersecurity, for instance, can be personal, such as protecting one's privacy, through to political, as in normalizing mass surveillance of assemblies during the Covid‐19 pandemic (Hopner et al, in press). While a human‐security perspective foregrounds subjective experience, it does not rule out the influence of social and political structures on people's everyday behavior (Hopner et al, 2020). Just as society can be changed through “understanding up” from grass roots to societal levels of change (MacLachlan, 2014, p. 85), so too, “proximate causes of behavior can be triggered by more distal social causes” (Williams & Montgomery, 2018).…”

“…As a relatively youthful subdiscipline that is, according to Jost and Sidanius (2004), “happy to borrow from neighboring fields” (p. 1), political psychology has been important to security issues for decades (see the deterrence literature, e.g., Jervis, Lebow, & Stein, 1991). Furthermore, intersections between these two areas of study have considerable potential to inform both fields as well as the United Nations Development and Security Agendas (Hopner et al, 2020; Paris, 2001).…”

“…As we have noted above, a diversity of psychological research has examined the human security concerns identified by the United Nations (Hopner et al, 2020). Additional examples range from the psychology of personal security (Knutson, 1954), health security (Howell, 2011), food security (Carter, Kruse, Blakely, & Collings, 2011), and community security (Groot, van Ommen, Masters-Awatere, & Tassell-Matamua, 2017) through to economic security (Seubert & Hopfgartner, 2019), environmental security (Price-Mitchell, 2019), and political security (Bar-Tal, 2020).…”