The Ethical Perspective: An Identity Theory of the Psychological Influences on Moral Choice

The 2008 Presidential Address presents the theory of ethical perspective, an identity theory of moral psychology designed to detect the psychological influences on moral choice. Part 1 treats findings on altruism and genocide as an analytical lens through which we can gain insight into political and moral behavior. Part 2 describes moral psychology as a field, presenting a new and broader conceptualization for the discipline. Part 3 outlines an identity theory of moral choice that focuses on the critical role of the ethical perspective, to suggest how an empirically based theory of moral choice looks in practice. Part 4 concentrates on the basic assumptions underlying the theory of ethical perspective. It presents empirical evidence that supports this theoretical framework, from fields as diverse as neuroscience and primatology to child development and linguistics, thus demonstrating political psychology's important links to other disciplines. In addition to presenting a new theory of moral psychology, designed to fill an important gap in the literature on ethics and moral choice, the Address treats studies of altruism and genocide as an illustration of research that reveals broader insight into the nature of political psychology as a discipline.     

La psychologie contemporaine des « traits » dans le cadre de la recherche néogaltonienne : comment elle est censée fonctionner et pourquoi en réalité elle ne fonctionne pas

For its epistemic integrity as a framework for scientific personality studies, contemporary trait psychology requires the assumption that aggregate statistical patterns gleaned from correlational studies of individual differences constitute an epistemic “window” onto what is transpiring with the individuals comprising that aggregate. This assumption is the cornerstone of the “neogaltonian” paradigm for psychological research (Danziger, 1987) in terms of which Cronbach (1957) famously called for a merger of scientific psychology's experimental and the correlational disciplines. In the present contribution, this perspective on personality studies is submitted to close critical scrutiny and shown to be scientifically untenable. It is argued that a viable science of personality will be one focused on persons and not on individual differences variables.     

Notes for a Critical Personality Psychology: Making Room under the Critical Psychology Umbrella

Inspired by the liberation psychologist Martin‐Baró who provocatively defined personality as that of which individuals can be robbed in conditions of social injustice and research psychologists in training whose appreciation of the possibilities of personality psychology has been limited by the dominance of trait approaches, this paper claims that we need and can practice a critical personality psychology. Conceptual and methodological tools for such an enterprise are identified in two arenas of current research: the study of narratives and new forms of history in personality psychology. Within critical personality psychology, personality is understood to be an expression of (i) a multifaceted organization that includes individual, interpersonal, social, cultural, and political contexts; (ii) individual and social change; and (iii) the moral dimensions of human psychology. Notes on future directions draw on areas of inquiry within and outside personality psychology to insure a place under the critical psychology umbrella.     

Advancing a critical social psychological perspective on women's leadership: A case illustration from the Global South

When applied to the Global South, mainstream positivist approaches to work and organisational psychology impose alien theories of personality (the self) and leadership. In the case of women, they fail to capture the richness of their experiences of life and leadership, which are influenced by the nexus between history, power and marginalisation—for many, even oppression. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the value of a critical social psychological approach, despite its grounding in the Global North discourse, to analyse women's leadership from a cross-cultural context. To illustrate, we provide an empirical example of a Vietnamese woman leader's life-story drawing on the theoretical resources from critical social psychology to interpret her experiences. When viewed from this perspective, women's leadership is understood within a dialogical space, which is prior to and more fundamental than any instrumental reason and technical rationality. It is argued that this approach resists essentialising assumptions about gender and cultural practices of leadership, providing a more liberating means to understand the life and leadership of Vietnamese women. In the final analysis, we argue that this study contributes to the nascent field of critical work and organisational psychology.     

Critical Health Psychology: Developing and Refining the Approach

This article outlines the need for a critical health psychology and how this approach was originally formulated as a challenge to mainstream health psychology. Critical health psychology articulates the need for a more reflexive approach – one that is able to analyse the complex moral, emotional, ethical and political issues underpinning peoples’ experiences of health and illness. This article discusses how critics have responded to the development of critical health psychology, to debates regarding what actually constitutes a critical approach, and finally, to how critical approaches might be refined in future research.     

Considering love: Implications for critical political psychology

Within psychology, love is typically understood in fundamentally psychological terms. Even those critical psychologists who have interrogated the sociopolitical dimensions of love seem unable to break from conceptions of love as romantic, familial, and/or private. In this article, I argue that in understanding love as a disposition, rather than a feeling, political psychologists are able to bring nuance to mainstream psychology's engagement with the emancipatory potentialities of love while, simultaneously, instating a critical reorientation of political psychology. To this end, I offer two pathways through which political psychologists can work with love: rooting counter-hegemonies in the love ethic, and enunciating love knowledges across contexts. I conclude by reflecting on future directions for critical political psychologists who are concerned with a multifaceted, materialist, psychopolitical and contextually-bound notion of love.     

Phenomenology and Critical Social Psychology: Directions and Debates in Theory and Research

There has been significant growth in critical approaches to social psychology in recent years. Phenomenological, discursive and psychoanalytically informed perspectives, amongst others, have become increasingly popular alternatives to ‘mainstream’ cognitive social psychology. This paper describes the fundamental philosophy and methodology underpinning phenomenological psychology along with discussion of a number of key issues in qualitative research in social psychology. In particular, I discuss the role of interpretation, the turn to language and need for political engagement within critical social psychology. More recently, there has been a growth in phenomenologically informed narrative theories and methodologies and in this paper I introduce my own development of a critical narrative analysis. In the process I discuss some of the most pressing debates about research within the phenomenological tradition and provide rebuttals, solutions and possible future directions for phenomenological theory and research that may lead to yet greater recognition for this social psychological perspective.     

American psychology and the religious imagination

In just three generations, American psychology grew from a fledgling science to a culturally authoritative discipline. Standard accounts of psychology's meteoric rise typically omit what most needs to be illuminated: the resonance between psychological theory and the symbolic universe underlying America's popular religious imagination. This article sketches a cultural history of American psychology by examining how many of its core concepts invoke a metaphysical horizon associated with the nation's heritage of unchurched spirituality.     

情境交互作用理论体系：辩证心理学与交互行为心理学

摘要 辩证心理学和交互行为心理学是近年对心理学理论建设和方法论改革影响较大的心理学取向,它们可以共同归纳到心理学的情境交互作用理论体系之下。情境交互作用理论体系打破了传统心理学只关注意识、行为和心理机制的单一维度,认为心理学应该关注机体与情境交互作用中的意义。文章对辩证心理学和交互行为心理学的主要观点和主要假设进行了详细阐释。最后对情境作用理论体系对当代心理学的影响和启示进行了说明,可以为未来心理学的发展指明方向。     

The psychology laboratory at the turn of the 20th century

The author provides a brief history of the psychology laboratory from 1879 to 1900, discusses its crucial role in the founding of scientific psychology, and describes how it enabled psychology's separation from philosophy. The laboratory model is described as a research and graduate training enterprise that operated with K. Danziger's (1990) concept of a "community of scholars" and was eventually extended to the training of undergraduate students.     

Historical relations of psychology as an object-science and a subject-science: toward psychology as a human science

Textbooks and other teaching of psychology's history oversimplify to the point of presenting it as the evolution of an exclusively object-science--despite general familiarity with integral extrascientistic practices and assumptions. Representative examples are presented, along with an overview of object-psychology's cultural/practical routes to dominance. The purpose of highlighting these facets of psychology's development is to call for psychology to take explicit account of humans' subjecthood as well as objectness, on the way rereading our history toward an integrated science.     

The Silence of Psychologists

Unlike certain Israeli historians or sociologists who have developed a critical "post-Zionist" approach, Israeli psychologists display few signs of this critical trend. This is especially disquieting in light of the latest back and forth movement between warfare to the peace process—a movement that created many new social and individual dilemmas that would benefit from an open debate within social and clinical psychology. This paper tries to account for this deficiency by looking at its possible historical, political, and cultural roots. The historical aspects relate to the influence of European and American psychological traditions. Two political aspects are presented: (1) Israeli psychologists, through their involvement in the military and their acceptance of the Zionist claim for security, tend to belong to the political mainstream (Gergen, 1973, 1989); and (2) a hyper-political atmosphere scared Israeli psychologists into neutrality and objectivism. This provided a convenient rationale for apoliticism, especially when Israeli political polarization in the 1980s and 1990s was perceived as threatening psychologists' professional authority. Culturally, the psychologists, like the European social strata from which most of them originated, tended to adopt the American tradition of individualism as a reaction to the strong collectivist trend that dominated Israeli society during its early years. This may account for their weak and delayed social response of humanism, feminism, and constructivism. Exceptions to this general trend are highlighted, and the question of how Israeli psychology might become more politically sensitive and critical is explored. This discussion may have relevance for the development of political psychology in other societies, especially those going through transition of values or suffering from long, violent conflicts.     

Applying the Psychology of Science to the Science of Psychology: Can Psychologists Use Psychological Science to Enhance Psychology as a Science?

ABSTRACT— Added to the already tremendous diversity of subdisciplines of psychological science is the psychology of science. Although research on the psychology of science began in 1874, the field has seen a substantial expansion of activity in recent years. One particular subset of this research literature has special importance: namely, inquiries into the psychology of doing great science. These investigations may be assigned into four groups: cognitive, differential, developmental, and social. Each of these deal with critical questions that can, if answered, contribute directly to the improvement of psychology as a science. Potential applications include (a) the identification of scientific talent in psychology, (b) the education of future investigators in psychological science, and (c) the evaluation of psychology's progress as a scientific endeavor.     

Public skepticism of psychology: why many people perceive the study of human behavior as unscientific

Data indicate that large percentages of the general public regard psychology's scientific status with considerable skepticism. I examine 6 criticisms commonly directed at the scientific basis of psychology (e.g., psychology is merely common sense, psychology does not use scientific methods, psychology is not useful to society) and offer 6 rebuttals. I then address 8 potential sources of public skepticism toward psychology and argue that although some of these sources reflect cognitive errors (e.g., hindsight bias) or misunderstandings of psychological science (e.g., failure to distinguish basic from applied research), others (e.g., psychology's failure to police itself, psychology's problematic public face) reflect the failure of professional psychology to get its own house in order. I offer several individual and institutional recommendations for enhancing psychology's image and contend that public skepticism toward psychology may, paradoxically, be one of our field's strongest allies.     

ARE THEORIES OF PERCEPTION NECESSARY? A REVIEW OF GIBSON'S THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO VISUAL PERCEPTION

Representational theories of perception postulate an isolated and autonomous "subject" set apart from its real environment, and then go on to invoke processes of mental representation, construction, or hypothesizing to explain how perception can nevertheless take place. Although James Gibson's most conspicuous contribution has been to challenge representational theory, his ultimate concern was the cognitivism which now prevails in psychology. He was convinced that the so-called cognitive revolution merely perpetuates, and even promotes, many of psychology's oldest mistakes. This review article considers Gibson's final statement of his "ecological" alternative to cognitivism (Gibson, 1979). It is intended not as a complete account of Gibson's alternative, however, but primarily as an appreciation of his critical contribution. Gibson's sustained attempt to counter representational theory served not only to reveal the variety of arguments used in support of this theory, but also to expose the questionable metaphysical assumptions upon which they rest. In concentrating upon Gibson's criticisms of representational theory, therefore, this paper aims to emphasize the point of his alternative scheme and to explain some of the important concerns shared by Gibson's ecological approach and operant psychology.     

Reinvigorating the concept of situation in social psychology

The concept of situation has a long and venerable history in social psychology. The author argues that recent approaches to the concept of situation have confused certain important elements. Herein, the author proposes that attention to three of these elements will reinvigorate the concept of situation in social psychology: (a) that the analysis of situations should begin with their objective features; (b) that situations should be conceptualized as affordances; and (c) that the interpersonal core of situations, in particular the extent to which they are influenced by relationships, is the proper and most profitable focus for social psychology. These elements are consistent with recent developments in the study of situated social cognition and may help better define social psychology's position within the sciences.     

Pavlovian George Windholz (1931-2002): An Exemplar of Scholarly "Observation and Observation" and a Critical Contributor to Psychology, and Hence to Behavioral Neuroscience

Although most members of the Pavlovian Society properly focus their efforts on empirical research, the scholarly, critical conceptual contributions of some individuals are also relevant to progress in psychology and behavioral neuroscience. This paper discusses the contributions of the late George Windholz (often in collaboration with Peter Lamal) as: (a) a historian of Pavlov's life and work; (b) an analyst of priority issues in psychology as a science; (c) a refuter of myths perpetrated by psychology texts. These contributions provide an example of the scholarly form of the motto "observation and observation," where the data used to test hypotheses comprise original documents (often in languages other than English) examined by the historian's critical eye.     

Policy and Financing of the Professional Psychology Workforce

The federal government has played a significant role in the financing the education of healthcare professionals since the introduction of Medicare in 1965. However, professional psychology's limited ability to argue the critical nature of its services to the welfare of the nation, and its lack of national workforce information and policy, has hindered its inclusion in Medicare's Graduate Medical Education (GME) program. This paper discusses the evolution and current status of healthcare workforce policy in the United States, and the implications for psychology and the training of future professionals. Also described are recent efforts by the American Psychological Association (APA) and a few psychologists to include professional psychology in the GME program. The importance of organized psychology's sustained involvement in national health policy is emphasized.     

Dialectical pluralism: A theoretical conceptualization of pluralism in psychology

A theoretical conceptualization of pluralism in psychology called dialectical pluralism is proposed in this paper. It is argued that this approach provides an effective and efficient basis for scientific progress in psychology. Three primary components of dialectical pluralism are developed. First, drawing on Royce's constructive dialectics, it is contended that tension between competing theories should be sustained in the hope of producing evaluative or integrative solutions. Second, the unity-disunity debate in psychology is reframed as a continuum and it is argued that oscillating periods of convergent and divergent pluralism would provide a productive model for scientific progress. Finally, intercontextualism is discussed as the underlying philosophical foundation for dialectical pluralism. This alternative to both mainstream psychology's positivist-empiricist foundations, as well as competing positions that may be more contextualist in orientation, is expounded as the justification for this new conceptualization. In particular, the limits of a methodological unity based on positivist-empiricist foundations, as well as of a pragmatic pluralism based on contextualist foundations, are both addressed by intercontextualism. As a result, dialectical pluralism may provide a middle ground between these two distinctive factions within psychology, while alleviating the fragmentation of the discipline.