Where These Come From

Every literature the ten modules stand on, in one place, so you can go and disagree with it.

Why There Were No Footnotes

Nothing in the ten modules carried a citation in the text. That was a deliberate choice and it has a cost, so it is worth saying plainly what the choice was.

Inline sources make prose harder to read, and this course was written to be read by people who are not being paid to get through it. They also create a false impression of rigor, because a sentence with a reference attached looks settled whether or not the reference supports it. Most readers do not check. The ones who do check deserve a real list rather than a decorative one.

So the sources are all here, in one place, organized by where they came up.

How To Read This List

This is not a bibliography of every fact in the course. It is a map of the literatures the course is standing on, so that you can go and disagree with it.

Where a name appeared in the lessons, it appeared because you are likely to meet that name elsewhere and should recognize it. Where a claim was introduced with something like "researchers have found," it was because the name was not doing any work for you and the finding is spread across many studies.

One warning before the list. Where an area is genuinely contested, this appendix says so. A reading list that presents every entry as settled is doing the same thing as a citation that nobody checks.

Module One: Attention

The physiology of the stress response and the delay between an event and conscious awareness of reacting to it come out of standard affective neuroscience and psychophysiology. Any current undergraduate textbook covers it.

The distinction between anger and contempt, and the finding that contempt is the more informative signal in close relationships, comes from John Gottman's observational work on couples, conducted over several decades with physiological monitoring alongside recorded conversation. His popular books cover it adequately. The research is more careful than the popular versions and the popular versions are more confident than the research.

The practice described in Lesson 1.4 is a stripped down version of secular attention training in the lineage of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. Lesson 9.1 gave the full disclosure about where it comes from and what was removed from it.

Module Two: The Shape Of The Problem

Negative and positive peace come from Johan Galtung, who introduced the distinction in the 1960s and founded the field's main journal. Structural violence, the harm with no attacker, is also his. He is the vocabulary of peace studies and he is worth reading directly.

The scale ladder is this course's own construction. The underlying rule, that each level runs on its own mechanisms and skills do not transfer upward, is not original and is not usually stated as a rule. It is assembled from the way the separate literatures behave: interpersonal psychology, group dynamics, institutional economics, and international relations do not share a mechanism and mostly do not cite each other.

Module Three: How Ordinary People Do Terrible Things

Stanley Milgram's obedience studies were run at Yale in the early 1960s and reported at length in his 1974 book. Read the book rather than the summaries, which have been unreliable in both directions for fifty years. The archival reanalyses of his own records, published over the last two decades, are worth knowing about: they show more variation between conditions and more resistance from participants than the popular account admits, and they do not overturn the central finding.

Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison study of 1971 is famous and is the weakest thing in this module's literature. Its methodology has been dismantled repeatedly, including with evidence that participants were coached. The course treats it as a cultural artifact rather than as evidence. The properly designed replication run for the BBC by Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam in 2002 produced close to the opposite result and is the better study.

The vocabulary of dehumanization and moral exclusion draws on Herbert Kelman, Susan Opotow, and Nick Haslam. On how ordinary the participants in mass killing generally are, Christopher Browning's study of a single German police battalion remains the clearest single case, and Daniel Goldhagen's response to it is the standard opposing argument. Both are worth reading and they disagree about the mechanism.

On humiliation and honor, the experimental work of Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen on honor cultures is the usual starting point.

Module Four: Arrangements

The well in Lesson 4.1 is a commons problem. Garrett Hardin's original statement of it is the famous one and is substantially wrong about the conclusion. Elinor Ostrom's work, which won a Nobel and which documents the many communities that solve these problems without either privatization or an outside enforcer, is the correction and is the more useful reading. Mancur Olson on collective action is the other half of the picture.

The security dilemma was named by John Herz around 1950 and developed by Robert Jervis. It is one of the few ideas in international relations that transfers cleanly downward to small groups.

Institutions as conflict machinery draws on the institutional economics of Douglass North and colleagues, and on the political science of state capacity. The five signs in Lesson 4.4 are this course's own compression of a scattered literature on institutional trust and legitimacy, and should be treated as a reading aid rather than as an instrument with validated properties.

Module Five: Two People

Physiological flooding, the point past which a person cannot process what is being said, is Gottman again, and it is the best supported thing in the module.

Listening and concession draw on negotiation and clinical literatures rather than a single source. The general finding that being understood reduces defensiveness is robust. The specific techniques marketed under names are considerably less well supported than their marketing implies.

Repair attempts and their role are Gottman. The five part structure given in Lesson 5.4 is this course's own formulation, assembled from apology research, which is a real and reasonably careful field.

Module Six: Groups

Motivated reasoning and identity protective cognition are large and well replicated literatures. Dan Kahan's work is the most direct on how more knowledge can increase disagreement rather than reduce it.

The distinction between policy disagreement and how people feel about each other is the distinction between ideological and affective polarization, and the measurements cited in Lesson 6.2 come from that literature, principally the work of Shanto Iyengar and colleagues. The marriage question is a standard instrument in it, not a rhetorical device.

Purity spirals have no settled academic literature and this should be said clearly. The mechanism described in Lesson 6.3 is assembled from work on preference falsification, most directly Timur Kuran's, and from historical cases. Treat it as a well evidenced pattern rather than as a measured finding.

The effect of internal criticism, and the reason a member's objection lands differently than an outsider's, rests on preference falsification and on the conformity experiments of Solomon Asch, in which a single dissenting voice reduced conformity dramatically. That last finding is old, replicated, and load bearing for the whole lesson.

Module Seven: Societies

The finding that nonviolent campaigns have historically succeeded more often than violent ones comes from Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's 2011 book and the dataset behind it, which is public. The three and a half percent figure comes from that dataset.

Read the criticisms alongside it. The selection of cases, the definition of success, and the question of whether the comparison is fair have all been challenged seriously, and Chenoweth has published on how the picture has worsened since roughly 2010. The course took the finding as usable while showing you the objections, which is the standard Lesson 8.3 then applied to the course's own tradition.

Pillars of support and the mechanics of withdrawal come from Gene Sharp, whose catalogue of nonviolent methods is the foundational document of the field. The historical cases in Lesson 7.2 are all well documented and each has a substantial literature of its own.

Module Eight: The Audit

The study examined in Lesson 8.3 was published in the journal Social Indicators Research in 1999, reporting on an assembly held in Washington in the summer of 1993, with authors affiliated with the organization that ran the assembly. Read it yourself. It is the responsible thing to do before accepting this course's account of it, and the paper is not hard to find.

The evidence on what attention training does is best approached through systematic reviews rather than individual studies, since individual studies in this field are small and the field has known replication problems. The 2014 review published in JAMA Internal Medicine is the usual reference point and reports modest effects for anxiety, depression, and pain, and little support for the broader claims. Later reviews have not substantially improved that picture.

Module Nine: Staying In It

Moral injury was named by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in his 1994 book on combat trauma in Vietnam veterans. The concept was widened by later researchers, principally Brett Litz and colleagues, to cover acts committed and acts witnessed. The widening is contested and some argue the term has been stretched past usefulness.

The literature on burnout is old, large, and built around a standard measurement instrument. It is not the same thing as moral injury and the two are frequently conflated.

The evidence that contemplative practice supports endurance in occupations that deal professionally with distress is real and modest, and is drawn mostly from studies of clinicians and first responders.

Module Ten: Your Position

There is very little citation in this module because there is very little empirical claim in it. It applies what came before.

The one place it makes a claim of its own is the argument that your leverage is concentrated at a level most people ignore. Lesson 2.4 promised you would be told when the course was making a judgment rather than reporting a finding, and both Lesson 10.1 and Lesson 10.2 say so on the page. Nobody has measured this. It follows from the evidence and it is not itself a finding.

The Short Version

If you read only four things after this course, read Galtung for the vocabulary, Milgram in his own words rather than anybody's summary, Ostrom for the best available answer to the arrangement problem, and Chenoweth and Stephan for the data, along with the objections to it.