August 26th, 2006 Posted in Psychology

Psychology must be post-modern

Psychology studies people. Physics and other sciences study relatively fixed phenomena that are not self aware. Psychology often aims to remove people from their context when studying them, for example by measuring some aspect of them in the laboratory. Averaging data also removes any interesting anomalies.

Most psychology attributes behaviours to internal dispositions rather than situations. This is termed the “Fundamental attribution error” by some social psychologists. People are social creatures, and the social environment plays a large part in shaping behaviour. Psychology therfore needs to study people in their natural contexts.

Due to cultural differences, these social influences will of course change depending on the group. Therefore, to avoid averaging and losing the subtleties of human behaviour and accommodate these differences, a postmodern, relativistic framework is needed.

Suitable methods include system dynamics and social constructionism. Obtaining native psychological explanations and using research from all philosophies is vital to avoid Western psychology trying to normalise the variety of behaviours that exist in the world. Traditional scientific method is not objective, as it claims to be, and even if it was, it is still ill suited to studying humans. It creates a self referential system, which invariably produce poor results.