Respect,equality, and power: A social psychological perspective

In this article I outline a principled social psychological approach to respect. As a first definitional approximation, I suggest that respect for someone involves the willingness to include that person as a factor in the psychological equation underlying self-regulation. I then review and discuss the fairly recent, but thriving, career of the notion of respect in social psychological research, with particular emphasis on intragroup respect. Next, I turn to conceptual specification and purification necessary for a principled approach to respect and discuss promising efforts to identify the critical social psychological principle or active ingredient of respect. In particular, I make out a case for an equality-based conception of respect in which recognition as an equal plays a central role. The final section examines further theoretical and practical implications of this conception including its relation and relevance to issues of social power. Bernd Simon (Dipl.-Psych., Dr. habil.) is Professor of Social Psychology and Evaluation Research and one of the Directors of the Institute of Psychology at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (Germany). He studied psychology, sociology and philosophy at the University of Münster (Germany) and the University of Kent at Canterbury (England). In his research, Bernd Simon investigates inter-and intragroup processes, with particular emphasis on issues of identity, power, politicization and respect. He is author/co-author of a number of research articles in international journals and books, including Identity in Modern Society (Blackwell Publishing).