Turning Psychology into Social Contextual Analysis (Exploring the Environmental and Social Foundations of Human Behaviour)

This groundbreaking book shows how we can build a better understanding of people by merging psychology with the social sciences. It is part of a trilogy that offers a new way of doing psychology focusing on peopleâ••s social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than internal and individualistic attributions.Putting the â••socialâ•• properly back into psychology, Bernard Guerin turns psychology inside out to offer a more integrated way of thinking about and researching people. Going back 60 years of psychologyâ••s history to the â••cognitive revolutionâ••, Guerin argues that psychology made a mistake, and demonstrates in fascinating new ways how to instead fully contextualize the topics of psychology and merge with the social sciences. Covering perception, emotion, language, thinking, and social behaviour, the book seeks to guide readers to observe how behaviours are shaped by their social, cultural, economic, patriarchal, colonized, historical, and other contexts. Our brain, neurophysiology, and body are still involved as important interfaces, but human actions do not originate inside of people so we will never find the answers in our neurophysiology. Replacing the internal origins of behaviour with external social contextual analyses, the book even argues that thinking is not done by you â••in your headâ•• but arises from our external social, cultural, and discursive worlds.Offering a refreshing new approach to better understand how humans operate in their social, cultural, economic, discursive, and societal worlds, rather than inside their heads, and how we might have to rethink our approaches to neuropsychology as well, this is fascinating reading for students in psychology and the social sciences. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Information 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of contents 6 Figures 8 Tables 9 Preface 10 Acknowledgements 12 A note on referencing 13 1 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago: An erroneous turn at the fork in the Gestalt road 16 Turning psychology inside out 16 What can we learn from a broken triangle? 17 What did the Gestaltists do with this? 19 Psychology at a fork in the road: where to from here? 20 Pathway 1 21 Pathway 2 23 Where current psychology went wrong: back to the triangle, but from the outside 26 A bit more about Pathway 1: neuropsychology, cognitive psychologies, and the many psychologies based on everyday terms 28 The rise and rise of neuropsychology 28 Early (and later) cognitivisms 29 Stimulus–response behaviourisms 31 The beginnings of cognitive psychology 32 Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960) 33 Later cognitive models 35 Psychologies of everyday terms 37 Our everyday words are dangerous for understanding what we do 37 References 39 2 Going back to the ‘fork in the road’ and starting a fresh contextual approach 41 Gibson and direct perception 42 Skinner and environmental behaviourisms 44 Whatever happened to the ‘soul’ and the ‘mental’? The social and cultural contexts for using language 47 Social contextual analysis 49 A brief overview of social contextual analysis 53 What are resources? 53 What are resource–social relationship pathways? 54 Where to next? 56 References 56 3 Language is a socially transitive verb—huh? 58 How can language possibly arise from our environments? 58 What you most need to know about language use 59 What is language? 61 Why language is a socially transitive verb 62 How much is language use part of our lives and worlds? 64 How do our uses of language arise from the world? 64 What does language do in the world that has consequences? 68 Summarizing the general properties of language use 70 What is wrong with the other views of language use? 72 How should we analyse conversations and other discourses? 73 How sensitive is language use to social contexts? 76 What are the functions of the main parts of language? 77 What do we do to people with different forms of language use? 78 What are the main types of language we use? 79 References 80 4 How can thinking possibly originate in our environments? 83 So, what is thinking? 84 Some exercises 87 Exercise on overlearning language responses 87 Basic exercise on thinking 88 Quick exercise 91 Big set of exercises 91 1. Using ‘motor behaviours’ 91 2. Using talking 92 3. Beginnings of thinking 93 Exercise for ‘serious’ thinking and for sampling ‘random’ thoughts/conversations through a Quaker meeting 93 Sounds and images 95 Finally 95 “Why does it feel like ‘I am my thoughts’ and ‘my thoughts control my behaviour’?” 96 A final set of exercises 97 Summary of thinking as the product of a natural social ecology (Pathway 2) 100 Taking the social ecology of thinking and talking even further 100 References 102 5 Contextualizing perception: Continuous micro responses focus-engaging with the changing effects of fractal-like ... 104 The hub of the problem: first attempt 105 The hub of the problem: second attempt 110 Perception and focus, differentiation, attuning, and discrimination 110 Types of perceptual responding 112 Caveat on methodology 114 The hub of the problem: third attempt 115 Perception is like focusing many telescopes at the same time into a fractal world 116 Photos, paintings, hallucinations, and other environmental representations 119 The problem for Gibson 120 References 121 6 Contextualizing emotions: When words fail us 123 The different views of emotion 123 Emotive talk 127 Emotional behaviours 128 Summary: a contextual approach to emotional behaviours 128 What to do about emotional behaviours? 131 Some examples 133 Humour 133 Wonderment 134 Those situations we call ‘mental health’ issues 135 References 136 7 The perils of using language in everyday life: The dark side of discourse and thinking 138 The 14 pitfalls of language use 138 1. We confuse words and reality 138 2. False assurances and nonchalance 141 3. Restricts our attention (socially) 141 4. Language–life gaps 142 5. Gaps from the world changing 143 6. Gaps from observing less with our senses 144 7. Distraction 144 8. Gaps when our normal talk gets challenged 144 9. Gaps when we cannot speak or name at all 145 10. Dissociation 146 11. Anxiety, rumination 146 12. Illusions of self 147 13. Effects of being socially biased 147 14. Rules (in law, governance, and bureaucracy) 147 References 149 8 Weaning yourself off cognitive models 150 The cognitive revolution 150 Weaning yourself off cognitive models by considering new assumptions for alternative ecological, behavioural, or contextual ... 153 Assumption 1 153 Assumption 2 154 Assumption 3 154 Assumption 4 155 Assumption 5 155 Assumption 6 156 Replacing some basic ‘cognitive processes’ 156 Some general changes to ‘cognitive thinking’ 156 Uncertainty reduction, catharsis, cognitive dissonance, prototypes, and ‘schema-driven thinking’ 161 Cognitive biases and heuristics 166 References 170 Index 172