Where can I find the Spiral Dynamics studies?

[Shane Hanlon]

I've read both spiral dynamics books and searched the internet for the actual studies that make up spiral dynamics. I can't find them. Does anyone know where to look?

[Carl-Richard]

Don Beck and Chris Cowan used Clare Graves' Emergent Cyclical theory as the basis for their model, and developed it while working with various projects in South-Africa and America. The empirical basis of the stages was mostly laid down by Graves:

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In the early mid-twentieth century, Graves decided to conduct experiments that he hoped would reconcile the various approaches to human nature and questions about psychological maturity,[12] as he saw elements of truth and error in all theories known at the time.[13] Rather than construct a hypothesis about how the conflicting systems could be resolved, Graves posed several open-ended questions and looked to see what patterns would emerge from his data. While not typical at the time, these approaches would later become known as grounded theory and inductive thematic analysis.[14]

Based on data collected over the next several decades, Graves observed that the emergence within humans of new bio-psycho-social systems in response to the interplay of external conditions with neurology follows a hierarchy in several dimensions, though without guarantees as to time lines or even direction: both progression and regression are possibilities in his model. Furthermore, each level in the hierarchy alternates as the human is either trying to make the environment adapt to the self, or the human is adapting the self to the existential conditions. He called these 'express self' and 'deny self' systems, and the swing between them is the cyclic aspect of his theory. Graves saw this process of stable plateaus interspersed with change intervals as never ending, up to the limits of the brain of Homo sapiens, something he viewed as far greater than we have yet imagined.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_W._Graves

Edited November 27, 2022 by Carl-Richard