About Robert Jones
Bob (Robert G.) Jones comes from family traditions of service and music. His experiences as a chorister with the Chicago Children's Choir during the Civil Rights Era deeply enriched his views of service to others, and revealed enduring questions he still seeks to illuminate today. As both a scholar and practitioner, Bob has wrestled with ways to manage the intractable intergroup problems of exclusion, emotive perception and responding (both contributing factors of prejudice), family preference, and—for the past twenty years—the human inclination toward social invention. In addition to being our revolutionary adaptive strategy, this inclination to organize ourselves into a spectacular variety of social configurations is at the core of environmental problems, as it has led us to invent means of dramatically enhancing current individual comfort, at the expense of our collective future. His work has become a search to find new ways to manage the psychological factors underlying our social organizing.
Bob has taught, presented, consulted, and published numerous books and articles relating to group management and organizing, including three recent books (Taylor and Francis, Routledge, and American Psychological Association publishers) on Applied Psychology of Sustainability, in the hope that groups of readers will find ways to steer us toward a better future. Understanding and managing emotion, and people's responses to emotion, is central to these efforts.
Bob has served as an elected official, along with extensive volunteer work where managing inter-group boundaries was integral to success. He and his spouse are avid hikers, and he still performs with professional and semi-professional music ensembles, in his home state of Montana and elsewhere.