MRAVNÁ VÝCHOVA V ŠKOLÁCH NA SLOVENSKU A V ZAHRANI ČÍ

TECHNOLOGY AND PROSOCIAL LABORATORY IN
PERSONAL DOMAINS FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE
Robert Roche OLIVAR
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, E
Facultat de Psicologia, e-mail: Robert.Roche@uab.es
Psychology is gradually focusing more on studying processes of positive and optimal development for
individuals’ mental health and for maintaining and improving interpersonal and social relationships.
One of the fields in which the headway in this realm may have more prominent social repercussions is
peace.
The concept of peace, as the antonym of war, has generated cognitions related to collective dynamics
that can be beyond not only an individual’s control but also any of his or her possibilities to intervene
and thus reserved solely for people with very high political responsibilities or a great deal of power.
Speaking about a culture of peace brings us closer to the concept, to the possibilities for action, and
thus to a certain degree or responsibility. The culture of peace is a concept taken on, for example, in
school-based education.
Universities, too, as educators, with their experience of exercising universality and neutrality, have
always been institutions that build peace.
Psychology, as the science of behaviour, alongside other disciplines such as sociology and political
science, is highly responsible for observing, describing, explaining, interpreting and thus optimising
those causes that are omnipresent yet perhaps still unknown to other disciplines which until now had
been the only ones to attempt to explain the processes leading to conflict or war.
And there is still much more to explore in the role played by these causes linked to very basic
mechanisms of human behaviour. Assuming that human beings are aggressive or that power
relationships govern relationships amongst human beings and thus that confrontation and violence are
inevitable is too simple for the current state of knowledge.
The variables that make these results more complicated from a perspective that is called cultural
learning are highly varied and interesting. Perhaps it has been this interest, and at times certain
evidence, that has prevented the opposite mechanisms that might play a role not only in inhibiting
violent attitudes and behaviours but the prevention or true optimisation of interpersonal and social
relationships from being studied as avidly.
Education for peace would be one of the most effective, safe ways of making headway in this
direction, with peace regarded not merely as the absence of war or violence, rather as a type of
awareness, a sensitivity, actions that weave a social fabric of relationships based on positive
reciprocity aimed at fraternity and unity, which beginning in interpersonal relationships will clearly
be involved in transforming social, civic and political structures, with special focus on disadvantaged
collectives.
Along these lines, we have been working to explore the potential of prosocial attitudes and behaviours
since 1982 (Roche, 1995, 1998, 1999).
After working to develop systematic programmes for this field of learning in all levels of education,
both in Spain and in Slovakia (Roche, 1992. Lencz, 1994), Italy (1997, 1991) and Argentina (1998),
and within the Prosocial Optimisation subject in our faculty, for six years we have steadfastly
undertaken a project entailing practical experiences which enable students in the second cycle of their
degree programmes to gain more in-depth knowledge of prosocial behaviour that involves them
personally, as a way to enable it to be critically examined in both theory and practice.
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