Vladimir J. Konečni

Vladimir J. Konečni (born October 27, 1944 ) is an American and Serbian psychologist, aesthetician, poet, dramatist, fiction writer, and art photographer, currently an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego.

In psychology, he has carried out influential work in several distinct areas, related to each other by strong methodological concerns.

Konečni has conducted laboratory and field studies of human emotion and (physical and verbal) aggression, as well as of altruistic behavior, which have been cited in numerous social psychology textbooks.

Decision-making has been another major research area in which Konečni has been heavily involved (in close collaboration with Dr. Ebbe B. Ebbesen, a long-time colleague at the University of California, San Diego).

Most of their work has been devoted to judicial decisions in the criminal justice system, but they have also conducted a number of frequently cited studies of drivers' decisions in real-world settings.

Finally, Konečni has for some forty years worked in the multi-faceted interdisciplinary domains of empirical aesthetics, psychology of art, and music psychology.

Notable groups of his studies in these areas have addressed the highly specialized and technical problems of the "golden ratio" (or "golden section") in visual art, the significance of macrostructure in music, peak aesthetic responses, and the relationship between music and emotion.

Vladimir Konečni grew up in Belgrade (then the capital of Yugoslavia, now of Serbia).

His parents were Dora D. Konečni (née Vasić), an economist and banker, and Josip J. Konečni, M.D., a Professor of Medicine at the University of Belgrade.

Konečni is of Serbian, Czech, and Austrian descent.

Konečni is married and has two sons.

He lives in San Diego (California, USA), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Tallinn (Estonia), and Belgrade (Serbia).

Konečni received his Bachelor of Arts degree in experimental and clinical psychology, and philosophy, from the University of Belgrade in 1969; as an undergraduate, he published three refereed articles.

In 1970, he began graduate studies in experimental and social psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, receiving an M.A. degree in 1971 and a Ph.D. in 1973.

The title of his dissertation was "Experimental Studies of Human Aggression: The Cathartic Effect."

In the period 1972 to 1984, Konečni carried out, in parallel, field experiments on altruistic behavior, and laboratory and field studies on human physical and verbal aggression.

With regard to aggression, on the basis of experimental findings, Konečni distinguished among physical, verbal, play, fantasy and other types of aggression, and proposed the existence of bidirectional causation (behavioral and psychophysiological) between the degree of anger (high arousal antagonistically labeled) and the amount of expressed physical aggression.

This theoretical model, which emphasized previously unacknowledged feedback loops, seems to resolve the classical issue of "catharsis".

By means of definitional clarity and experimental precision, the model shifts the debate to the many implications of the theoretically sound and empirically observable "cathartic effect", replacing unfocused appeals to sources as diverse as Aristotle's Poetics, Kleinian play therapy, and Albert Bandura's social learning theory.

This Anger-Aggression Bidirectional-Causation (AABC ) theoretical model parsimoniously accounts for hundreds of experimental findings in the literature.

These ideas have also been applied to the role of aversive events in the development of intergroup conflict.

Subsequently, Konečni's writing on aggression was extended to the concept of revenge and the expression of anger and violence on the stage and in literature.

Also in 1973, Konečni was appointed Assistant Professor and thus began his 35-year-long uninterrupted association with the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego (Associate Professor in 1978; Professor in 1982; Emeritus Professor in 2008).

In the period after 1973, he was at various times a Visiting Professor at a number of renowned universities outside the United States, including the London School of Economics, Sydney University, Hebrew University Jerusalem, University of Cape Town, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and Freie Universität Berlin.

In the course of his career so far, Konečni has given colloquia on his research at some 150 universities on all continents.

From 1973 to 2011 (the year of Emeritus Professor Ebbe B. Ebbesen's passing), Ebbesen and Konečni worked on judicial decision-making in the criminal justice system.

Using quantitative methods, they studied how various participants in the system – judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, police officers, perpetrators, and others – combine the information available to them into decisions that then become information items for other decision-makers in the system.

This work has been very influential and has been described as "arduous" and "pioneering".

One of its major features has been the comparison of data from experimental simulations to those obtained from archival records and court hearings, often involving the same participants or the same classes of participants (even Superior Court judges participated in the simulations).

After their much-cited first article, in 1975, comparing judges' bail-setting decisions in a simulation to those they made in the courtroom, Ebbesen and Konečni published a number of critical methodological articles on the key issue of external validity at many points in the existing research on the legal process, with special reference to jury simulations.

This led both to resistance and critiques of the resistance.

In his first article (1976) in psycho-aesthetics, Konečni, influenced by Daniel Berlyne (one of his graduate-school mentors ), successfully combined work on physiological arousal with his own prior work on the "cathartic effect" to study music preference (as a dependent variable).

A broad and innovative empirical approach to the study of emotional, mood, and personality antecedents of aesthetic preference and choice in both visual art and music resulted in a number of publications with several American and European graduate students and in various languages.

Konečni also wrote two widely cited theoretical articles that addressed (a) the social, emotional, and cognitive determinants of aesthetic preference and (b) the measurable psychological consequences of exposure to aesthetic stimuli, resulting in his formulation of the "Model of Aesthetic Episode" (MAE), which he continued to refine over many years.

In 1982, Konečni and Ebbesen edited a book (dedicated to Egon Brunswik and Kurt Lewin), The Criminal Justice System: A Social-Psychological Analysis, to which they contributed five chapters that outlined their theoretical and methodological viewpoint and addressed several major empirical issues.

One of the chapters presented the results of a large project (over one thousand cases) on judicial sentencing for felonies in California; among other findings, it included a causal analysis that eliminated several popular views of sentencing and highlighted the decisive role of probation officers.

Konečni and Ebbesen, with several students, also conducted empirical investigations of "mentally disordered sex offenders", child-custody decisions, and other issues of societal importance.

They also published extensive critiques of what they believed were mistaken, yet entrenched, views on another major issue in legal psychology, namely, the probative value of prior eyewitness memory research in general, and, specifically, the probative value of psychologists' testimony on eyewitness issues in the cases of exonerations by DNA evidence.

Finally, while working in Konečni's laboratory, G. Kette, an Austrian psychologist, coauthored two articles with Konečni on communication channels and the decoding and integration of cues in judicial decision-making.

Throughout his career, Vladimir Konečni has conducted numerous experiments in diverse areas of empirical aesthetics – a field dominated by scientifically oriented psychologists and thus often referred to as psychological or (psycho-) aesthetics (distinct from "aesthetics", which usually refers to philosophical aesthetics).