**2.3 Interventions fostering and impeding resilience**

In the modeling of Ungar, social institutions shape the positive conditions for resilience. In addition, we contend that social institutions may impede as well person's faculties for finding successful responses to adverrsity and stressors. For instance, Ungar discusses a study in which accultured migrants, in their ambition to participate in society, self-report on their well-being inferioir to less accultured migrants in the same neighborhood. He contributes this paradoxal finding to social comparison processes [13].

Too protective and too neglective parenting or care-giving both deprive children from learning by success and failure after taking modest risks [29–31]. Veroff and Veroff [31] illustrate their argument with an example that can be used to understand the choice of appropriate care and subsequent interventions. A young child is reaching for an object but does not succeed and becomes frustrated. A protective parent will get it and give it to the child just the way. A resilience fostering parent waits for an inattentive moment of the child, then places the object within reach, and encourages the child to try again. Veroff and Veroff propose the concept of pacing, implying that the balance between protection and challenge is adjusted to the person's stage of development and learning speed [31].

We propose to build up an argument from a social system perspective. The institutions are elements in the person-in-environment system that shape conditions for the person and seek to intervene in his or her attempts to overcome disadvantages. Because of the complexity of a person-in-environment system, they are forced to follow strategies that reduce its complexity. An obvious strategy, is abstracting from the paradoxical fact that interventionists themselves are a part of the system as well. By doing so, the intervention is mediated as it were performed in a lower order system like a control-regulated home heating system. The outcome of this strategy are likely to be rather unpredictable because of fact taht the subjects perceive this strategy and attribute intentions to it. In his treatise on rationality, Luhmann [32] distinguishes the next complexity reducing strategies:


Goal-means rationality is based on hierarchal way of thinking, has an almost unlimited potential for expansion in detail, but is inflexible [32] and based on the antipode of resilience, namely anticipation [33]. The application of this kind of rationality is not per se conflicting with resiliece. For instance, legislation can safeguard fundamental rights, policy programs can mobilize and distribute resources, resources can be warranted by evaluation procedures, and schooling standards may offer challenges to deprived children. Opportunism seemingly associates with

## *An Explorative Perspective on the Resilience in Neighborhoods in the Netherlands DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98818*

challenges, but pure opportunism detaches from the original situation, and all occasional side effects and long-term consequences [32]. Resilience is not served well by sole attention to assets while neglecting the exposure to stressors and risks [13, 17]. Value oriented and problem-to-solution rationality seems mostly suited for fostering of resilience in persons. However, both require an interchange with the value configurations, the problem perceptions and the opportunity preference of the addressed person. The adaption of the care intervention to the needs and hopes of a client requires an unconditional and unpremeditated exchange of information, a requirement that would be met by interpersonal and institutional trust.

Trust is a complexity-reducing interaction mechanism as well [34]. In elaboration of Luhmann, Lewicki and colleagues have proposed a two-dimensional conception of trust and distrust [35]. Trust is operent when agents are willing to approach eachother in social relationships, while distrust relects an avoidant attitude. Thr tendidencies can coexist in a relationship. In a matrix the authors render the four combination of trust (high/low) and distrust (high/low) (see **Figure 1**). High trust combined with low distrust shapes the condition for high-value congruence, interdependence, pusuit of opportunities and new initiatives. Low-trust in combination with low-distrust limites the assets of the relationship to bounded, árm-length transactions, while the combination of high-trust and high-distrust induces a fragmented and calculating exchange [35].

To our opinion, the latter two options reflect goal-means and opportunistic strategies of institutions. The combination of low trust and low distrust reflects the attidude of courteous professionals and neutral public officials. In their benevolence, they try to be objective, and do not invest in a relationship with clients or citizens and fail to adjust to personal specificities. The combination of high trust and high distrust Is found in the behavior of opportunistic agents. Like salesmen, they build relations in order to retrieve information on opportunities and risks, but preemtively take the opportunities while averting the risks to the counterpart. Neither of both strategies is well-suited to foster resilience.

In a state of low-trust and high-distrust, undesirable eventualities are expected and feared of, harmful motives are assumed, and the behavioral expressions diverge

**Figure 1.** *Elaboration on the trust-distrust matrix of [35].* between preemption and paranoia. The mental state of a distrusting person Is characterized by fear, skepticism, cynism, wariness, and watchfulness [35].

We have added the antonyms anticipation and resilience of Douglas and Wildavsky [33] and the development from infant's dependency to interdependence of Veroff and Veroff [31].

The two-dimensional model of Lewicki and coworkers is supported by neuroimaging research [36], and can be regarded as an instance of the BIS-BAS interaction. Dimoka's study relates distrust to the fast, evolutionary older brain regions, while trust is regulated from slower parts of the modern brain. The finding is in accordance with common sayings about trust and distrust. Anyway, building of trust in a care-giving relation will often be a laborious affair.

### **2.4 Research question, modeling, and leveraging processes**

Summarizing, we come to the next question for our research:

Which conditions and interventions foster respectively impede the resilience of people in disadvantaged neighoods in their search for outcomes that contributes to their personal development and reshape conditions and interventions to the benefit of themselves and of others? In addition, in what way do impeding conditions and interventions reinforce the disadvantages of people in the neighborhoods? (**Figure 2**).

The model for resilience in neighborhoods is conceived as a complex adaptive system. There is a public belief in leverage points. That are places in social and ecological systems were a small intervention may cause a big change [37]. Experienced adaptive systems researchers warn for the phenomenom that members within such a systems are capable of pointing out a leverage point, but choose intervention that affect change in the wrong direction. Leverage points tempt to be counterintuitive [37].

The trust/distrust matrix of Lewiecki and colleagues embodies a counterintuitive leverage point. Interventions from low distrust can be countereffective while interventions from high trust can be disadvantageous when crosswisely matched with the options of the other dimension. Second, we put to the fore the generic process of social comparison. Humans seek peers in order to compare abilities, opinions, and attributes. However, as opinions are more easily formed than abilities are improved, opinions come to substitute the evaluation of the abilities. As consequence, homogeneoused groups become indifferent to outcomes, inaccesible to newcomers with other opinions and attributes and ignorant of information from

**Figure 2.** *Conceptual model for resilience in disadvantaged neighborhoods002E.* *An Explorative Perspective on the Resilience in Neighborhoods in the Netherlands DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98818*

other groups [38]. An evolutionary process that originally would drive the learning of motor and speech acts, and of cognitive, social, and occupational skills is easily turned into a mechanism that enhances exclusion and an indifference to negative outcomes for others.

Social comparison makes communities ambivalent in their orientation as well. Granovetter has pointed at the importance of ties of members of peergroups to other groups. Within the group information is predominantly reduced to opinions and directed to conformity, wheres agents who openly connect to other groups obtain richer information [39]. In addition, Thagard [40] argues that peer-different connections are more valuable in the search for corroborative knowledge than peersimilar ones. Both contributions adocate for diversity and dynamics in social action.
