Dr Dario Krpan
Dario Krpan is Associate Professor in Behavioural Science in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science.
What is your area of expertise, and how did your interest for this area come about?
Being an extreme personality myself, I have always been interested in reading about and exploring how humans operate in extreme and unusual situations, because those are the moments when we act and think in most unique ways that make us human. Initially, my interest in this theme was expressed through reading books by Dostoevsky and Kafka, whom I still consider to be among the most important psychologists. It is therefore not a wonder that the topic on which I focus today is to some degree reminiscent of the transformation from a human being into a giant bug that Kafka describes: transformative behavioural change. This term typically applies to a shift in someone’s actions that can be described as significant, fundamental, radical, and/or difficult-to-achieve, and involves a transformation of one’s way of being and living.
As an example, a person may lead a lifestyle of abundance and excess that involves living in large houses, frequent travel, consuming luxury goods, omnivorous diet, etc. However, to save the planet from ecological breakdown, the person may completely transform their life and move to a smaller dwelling, renounce the consumption of any non-essential goods and products, decide to reuse and repair old items rather than buy new ones, abandon any forms of environmentally unfriendly travel, adopt a vegan diet, etc. Although this example is from sustainability, transformative behavioural change can occur in any domain, from health and wellbeing to work and relationships. Within the topic of transformative behavioural change, I pursue several lines of research. The first aims to understand what drives this type of change, ranging from personality to environmental factors. The second focuses on examining human psychological processes in response to disruptive trends and events that are likely to require from humans to transform their being and living (eg disruptive technologies such as robots).
What’s been your favourite research project to date, and why?
This is a very difficult question. I will write about a project I did individually, since I have engaged in many meaningful projects with my academic friends, and I don’t want to insult someone by not mentioning them. The project I am referring to was actually not a research project; it was one of my theoretical articles titled “Unburdening the Shoulders of Giants: A Quest for Disconnected Academic Psychology”. In a nutshell, in this article I proposed how psychology as a discipline could be transformed to increase the amount of knowledge it produces about human mind and behaviour by creating disconnected psychology in which researchers develop their ideas by following the main principles of psychological method, but they are disconnected from a “field” consisting of other psychologists and therefore do not follow the discipline’s norms and conventions. This is one of my favourite projects because I have been working on my ideas and theories since I was 16, but many of them would be considered unsuitable for mainstream psychology for various reasons. “Unburdening the Shoulders of Giants” was the first time I managed to present one of these ideas in a way that it was accepted by one of the flagship journals in the field. I consider it to be a transformative moment in which I figured out how to present unusual and extreme ideas in a way that I can publish them, and it was followed by many other publications that contain such ideas.
What impact are you hoping that your research will have on the world?
Together with my friend Frédéric Basso from our department, we have developed a scale that measures transformative utopian impulse for planetary health, which refers to people’s propensity to have thoughts and engage in actions of which the purpose is to transform the current society into a better one in the future by addressing existing global issues. One of the items on this scale is as follows: “I frequently have the impulse to help transform the current society into a new world where the biggest issues of our age are extinct.” In the best-case scenario, if my research makes at least some form of contribution toward creating a transformed society that has managed to some degree overcome the biggest challenges we have today, I will be happy.
What are the biggest challenges in your area of study?
Considering my interest in transformative behavioural change, the biggest challenge I face is that this change is rare and only a small proportion of the population have experienced it. As a scientist, to be able to study a phenomenon, you need to be able to observe it and measure it, which is challenging when it comes to transformative behavioural change. However, I am actually very positive about this challenge because it forces me to be creative and explore and combine many different methodologies, from qualitative to quantitative, when studying transformative behavioural change. Hopefully in the future there will be more individuals who successfully engage in this change to resolve some of the biggest societal challenges, from climate change to inequalities.
What are the best and worst things about being an academic?
Being from Croatia, it is cultural that I always mostly focus on negative things and neglect the positive ones. I think academia is still a good place for people who like thinking and want to develop their ideas. However, the way it is set up at the moment does not favour coming up with major discoveries. The emphasis is on quick publications rather than on profound and transformative ideas that take time to develop. If coming up with a major invention took working on a single project for 10 years in the past, today it may probably take longer (eg 20, 30, 40 years) because there are fewer and fewer things to discover. I would be more interested to see what an academic can achieve after spending 40 years writing a single book than after spending 40 years constantly rushing to publish hundreds of articles. Instead of encouraging academics to publish several articles per year, academic institutions should encourage them to spend 30-40 years on a single intellectual pursuit because this would show us the heights that human mind can achieve, and it would also be significantly more beneficial to society.