Turning Psychology into Social Contextual Analysis PDF 2021

i Turning Psychology into Social Contextual Analysis 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 people’s social and societal environm...

i Turning Psychology into Social Contextual Analysis 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 people’s social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than internal and individualistic attributions. Putting the ‘social’ 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 psychology’s history to the ‘cognitive revolution’, 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 ‘in your head’ 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. Bernard Guerin has worked in both Australia and New Zealand researching and teaching to merge psychology with the social sciences. His main research now focuses on contextualizing ‘mental health’ behaviours, working with Indigenous communities, and exploring social contextual analyses especially for language use and thinking. ii Exploring the environmental and social foundations of human behaviour Series editor Bernard Guerin Professor of Psychology, University of South Australia Can you imagine that everything people do, say, and think is shaped directly by engaging with our many environmental and social contexts? Humans would then really be part of their environment. For current psychology, however, people only engage with metaphorical ‘internal’ environments or brain events, and everything we do somehow originates hidden in there. But what if all that we do and think originated out in our worlds, and what we call ‘internal’ is merely language and conversations that were also shaped by engaging in our external discursive, cultural, and societal environments? Exploring the Environmental and Social Foundations of Human Behaviour is an exciting new book series about developing the next generation of ways to understand what people do, say, and think. Human behaviour is shaped through directly engaging in our diverse contexts of resources, social relationships, economics, culture, discourses, colonization, patriarchy, society, and the opportunities afforded by our birth contexts. Even language and thinking arise from our external social and discursive contexts, and so the ‘internal’ and brain metaphors will disappear as psychology becomes merged with the social sciences. The series is therefore a-​disciplinary and presents analyses or contextually engaged research on topics that describe or demonstrate how human behaviour arises from direct engagement with the worlds in which we are embedded. In this series: How to Rethink Mental Illness: The Human Contexts Behind the Labels: Volume 1 How to Rethink Human Behavior: A Practical Guide to Social Contextual Analysis: Volume 2 How to Rethink Psychology: New Metaphors for Understanding People and Their Behavior: Volume 3 Turning Psychology into Social Contextual Analysis: Volume 4 Turning Psychology into a Social Science: Volume 5 Turning Mental Health into Social Action: Volume 6 iii Turning Psychology into Social Contextual Analysis Bernard Guerin iv First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Bernard Guerin The right of Bernard Guerin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​89810-​6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​89811-​3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​02126-​1 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Newgen Publishing UK v Contents List of figures  List of tables  Preface  Acknowledgements  A note on referencing  1 vii viii ix xi xii Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago: an erroneous turn at the fork in the Gestalt road  1 Going back to the ‘fork in the road’ and starting a fresh contextual approach  26 3 Language is a socially transitive verb—​huh?  43 4 How can thinking possibly originate in our environments?  68 Contextualizing perception: continuous micro responses focus-​engaging with the changing effects of fractal-​like environments?  89 Contextualizing emotions: when words fail us  108 2 5 6 vi vi Contents 7 The perils of using language in everyday life: the dark side of discourse and thinking  123 Weaning yourself off cognitive models: the cognitive revolution  135 Index  157 8 vi Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 The Gestalt triangle sensory experiment Early reflex arc idea Pattern of cognitive models Contextual approaches do not need internal processing chains Perceptual responses become attuned to changes in the visual array without processing Focusing is multiple events of changing perceptual and bodily responses Perceptual behaving consists of many perceptual and bodily responses Three ways in which current psychology views ‘emotions’ in scary situations A broad contextualized version of ‘emotions’ The commonly contextualized ‘emotional’ behaviours Contextualized ‘emotions’ in scary situations 2 21 21 96 101 102 103 109 109 110 111 vi Tables 1.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 Types of behaviourism Main foundations of cognitive psychology theory and how they can be replaced with a contextual or discursive account Multiple terms for engaging with the world or engaging with the world through language and therefore other people Several ‘cognitive biases’ from theories of cognitive psychology and clinical behavioural therapy, with an alternative contextual or discursive account 15 142 145 153 ix Preface As I hope the reader will discover, this series of books is not about providing a new theory of psychology, and especially not a ‘grand theory’, even though the contents might suggest that. It is also not providing a new philosophy, except in a broad sense not related to Western philosophy. The approach argues, in fact, that words do not have ‘meaning’ nor do they represent, refer to, or express anything and that argues against the whole Western tradition of philosophy. The only thing words do is to change the behaviour of other people given the right social contexts. And that is all this huge collection of words is trying to do. Most of my words that follow are therefore trying to get you, the reader, to observe the world in new ways; be sensitized to see things you did not see before, and then act in new ways on that basis where appropriate. Most of current psychology, I argue, is just looking in the wrong places for answers and explanations. Because they do not find the answers there, they invent even more abstract words and use correlations to support them, so it looks as if we have discovered something. The first book in this new trilogy goes back to before the ‘cognitive revolution’ and shows that the whole reasoning for even having a revolution was mistaken. Psychology took a wrong turn by the assumption that humans must ‘go beyond the information given’. Instead, I show how all the subsequent ideas of ‘processing information’ and ‘internal constructions and representations’ were really about the social uses of language, and all these ideas and theories can be replaced when we ‘turn psychology inside out’. Language use is shown to be externally driven by properly observing all social and societal contexts and realizing that thinking is just language use not said out loud. I then show how we can replace our ‘psychology’ with the diverse life contexts in which we are immersed, and explore how we can contextualize perception, emotion, and thinking in this way so they do not originate ‘inside our heads’. x x Preface The second book in this new trilogy shows how the other social sciences have already explored our life contexts, and once we are rid of the current abstract explanations in terms of an ‘internal’ world, we can merge ‘psychology’ into the social sciences to form a rich analysis of how humans adapt and become attuned to all of our life contexts. In particular, I explore how our behaviours are now hugely shaped by the modern worlds of capitalism, neoliberalism, and bureaucracy, and how the Marxist frameworks are incompatible with current psychology but can be merged in a contextual approach. Several of the very ‘individualistic’ ideas embedded in current psychology are then shown to arise directly from our complex social, cultural, and societal worlds, and not from ‘inside’ us. In particular, I turn the ‘psychology’ of beliefs, the self, the arts, religious behaviours, and many of the ‘individual’ phenomena of social psychology inside out, to show their external contexts of origin. The third book in this new trilogy applies social contextual analysis to the important area of ‘mental health’. The behaviours observed in ‘mental health’ issues are treated here as ordinary behaviours that have been shaped in very bad life situations to become exaggerated and trapped because alternative solutions are blocked. To support the many current attempts to stop using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), I explore all the individual DSM-​listed behaviours and show how they can be shaped by living in bad situations with no alternatives, and are not the result of any brain ‘disorders’. The types of bad life situations are explored further, and it is shown that many other behaviours are shaped in addition to the ‘mental health’ behaviours: violence, bullying, escape, alternative lifestyles, self-​harm, exploitation of other people, crime, drug taking. It is suggested that all those people involved in any of these outcomes from bad life situations, professionals, and first-​hand experiencers, should pool their expertise and integrate how we can fix the bad life situations rather than try and fix the person. Based on these conclusions, interventions for fixing bad life situations are explored, including fixing local issues, fixing those bad social situations that interfere with language use and thinking, and how we might begin to tackle those bad situations produced by our current societal contexts and that are leading to new ‘mental health’ behaviours: capitalism, neoliberalism, bureaucracy, stratifications, colonization, and patriarchy. xi Acknowledgements The books in this series are a culmination of over 45 years of thinking and researching about these issues, taking every approach seriously, and learning from all of psychology and the social sciences (especially sociology, social anthropology, and sociolinguistics). There are too many people to thank (or even remember) from whom I have learned, so I want to really thank again everyone I have acknowledged in my previous books. You know who you are, I hope. All my students from all my courses have also helped shape my writing when I have used them to try out new ideas and analyses—​many thanks. I also want to thank the staff at Routledge for their belief in this trilogy (and the previous one) and their excellent editing and production work. xi A note on referencing First, each book of the series of six is self-​contained, and I have aimed to make them readable alone. However, for those brave souls attempting to see the bigger picture, I use cross-​referencing of volume number and chapter in this way: V5.7 refers to Chapter 7 of Volume 5 in the series. Second, I wish to say upfront that this book comes from reading the work of many researchers and authors across all of psychology and all of the social sciences over many years. In my earlier books I have given hundreds of references to the work of others that has shaped my thinking, even when I disagree. However, I know that referencing slows down a lot of readers whom I would like to take something away from these books that might be of use to them. Many of my intended readers also do not have the privilege of being able to track down the references in any case. For these reasons, I am being a very bad academic in these books and mostly refer to my own summary works. This current book has been intentionally written so that it can be understood without knowing those earlier books, but to academics (real ones, not me) this causes distress because it looks like I am claiming others’ ideas when I use a lot of self-​referencing. I certainly do not intend this but having thousands of references interrupting the text causes distress to other readers. This time, I am balancing the distress the other way. You can find the references in my earlier books if needed. Obviously, where I use or rely heavily on someone’s work I cite it and academics can look up all the references if they like and find the sources. Please do not assume that because I make broad claims and then only cite an earlier summary of my own, that I originated all those ideas and claims. I did not. I am bringing all these ideas from many disciplines together so we can get a new picture of humans and what they do, say, and think. I do not xi newgenprepdf A note on referencing xiii want to interrupt the text by hundreds of references, but please do not get the idea that I believe that I originated everything here. In fact, the entire theme of this and the other books in the series is that everything we do, say, or think originates in our worlds—​our social, societal, cultural, discursive, economic, colonized, patriarchal, and stratified worlds. And that includes my writing these books! vxi 1 1  Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago An erroneous turn at the fork in the Gestalt road For a long time now, psychology has had some unchallenged but wrong assumptions. From all the pre-​psychology era and then through the first 100 years of a named ‘psychology’, the following were assumed to be obviously true by all but a few: • • • • • • • • People function both with a body and also with something else separate and hard to describe—​the mind, soul, mentality, consciousness, thoughts, experience. The two parts work together in some way but … Sometimes the second part has been said to be ‘immaterial’ and sometimes ‘embodied’ in some vague way within the body. Sensations on our sensory organs are ‘taken in’ and used to build the mind or ‘mental parts’, usually said to occur in the brain. Thinking is a private process originating deep inside us that no one else can experience. We function as individuals in this world. What we do originates ‘inside us’ as choices or decisions, usually taken to mean ‘in the brain’. Our thinking then determines what we do. There has also been a hidden history of a few people saying that all of these assumptions are wrong. Turning psychology inside out In this book I wish to bring together what is wrong with the aforementioned assumptions, and then, more importantly, spend time showing how we can still understand what people do without all that baggage. Doing this changes the whole nature of the ‘psychology enterprise’ that began in the late 1800s, and will especially change: 2 2 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago • • How ‘psychology’ needs to merge with the other social sciences (V5). How we think about and ‘treat’ the range of ‘mental health’ issues (V6). I see the Gestalt theorists, from roughly the 1920s to the 1940s, as pivotal in modern psychology, not so much by what they tried to develop but by the criticisms they raised of the current psychology of that time. Sadly, most of this has been ignored ever since except in a few little pockets of psychology. Other extremely powerful criticisms were also made by others, but were ignored in subsequent discussions of psychology (Bentley, 1935; Guerin, 2016a). The point will be that the Gestalt theorists posed difficult questions for any ‘psychology enterprise’, and there were two paths that followed from this ‘fork in the road’. I will argue that psychology took the wrong path 60 years ago, based on a mistake to be outlined later in this chapter. What can we learn from a broken triangle? As a quick rundown, there were three main characters involved initially in the Gestalt criticisms, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler, from roughly the 1920s to the 1940s. They published articles on some perceptual effects that were immediate and real, as opposed to the sensory experiments that had been taking place in psychology labs all around the world following from Wundt, Titchener, and others. Have a look at the sensory experiment shown in Figure 1.1, which is similar to the other Gestalt demonstrations. What do you see in Figure 1.1? Answer this first! Figure 1.1 The Gestalt triangle sensory experiment 3 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago 3 According to the psychology wisdom at that time and also now, light rays make sensations on our retinas of four black lines, some with angles, and our brain constructs a triangle from these sensations. But when I ask what you see, however, you see a triangle. A ragged, broken old triangle, but still a triangle. And we see it immediately, 100 per cent, without a time lag. We do not see four bits of black line and—​hey presto!—​a few seconds later, we see a constructed triangle. So, what is the big deal about this? Well, these and other demonstrations like it were all immediate and compelling (“I see a triangle”), with about 100 per cent agreement (unlike the introspective reports of ‘sensations’). From this, the Gestaltists argued that we must see in some bigger organizational units. What we do as humans is done in terms of bigger units (“I see a triangle”), but we cannot see a triangle just from the immediate sensory-​ datum of light impinging in the retina. What we ‘see’ does not appear to be the ‘raw’ units of elementary sensations. (Caveat: as a very important point that will come up later in this chapter to resolve this puzzle, notice the ambiguity of the word ‘see’ in this sentence: “We do not see four black lines we see a triangle.” Before going on, try to ‘draw’ what you ‘see’ above in Figure 1.1. I will come back to this as it shows the mistake that propelled current psychology along the wrong path.) The work of the Gestaltists started with perceptual phenomena but eventually broadened into the units of everyday social life as well (Kurt Lewin). Koffka (1935) famously used the expression, “The whole is other than the sum of the parts”, meaning that adding up all the retinal sensations from the diagram in Figure 1.1, the whole is more—​it is a triangle! Another point from the Gestalt demonstrations was that most work stemming from Wundt and Titchener would have focused on the black lines, aka the black triangle. The white ‘background’ would not have been thought about. But, the Gestaltists emphasized in their demonstrations that the background context was also important in understanding the bigger units being studied (such as triangles). They started talking in terms of ‘field’ theory, borrowing that word from physics. Answering the question “What do you see?” is not about isolated light waves hitting the retina, but of bigger units that must also include the field of other events going on at the same time (I prefer the word ‘context’ to ‘field’). But the problem I will get to next is whether the white background is enough of the context to consider? Are there even more relevant contexts in this simple example? (Spoiler: the social and discursive contexts are actually important also, even in this triangle example.) None of this meant that physiology was not important. The Gestaltists, like everyone else, made little diagrams of what the brain and neurological circuits might look like in the details of what was available at that time. But 4 4 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago for them, there needed to be bigger organizational units within the neurological circuitry. And some, like Donald Hebb in 1949, tried to conceptually do something in line with this, with what was known about brain physiology in his slightly later period. We can also take some of the criticisms further. The Gestaltists emphasized that there was no passive reception of sensory input, but that perception was an active and more complex set of events. Later in the chapter we will see James Gibson’s (1979) criticism that the majority of perception experiments had the head fixed in place and showed participants static ‘stimuli’, meaning that real perception was being prevented! This was also true, of course, for Gestalt’s own demonstrations, which were two-​ dimensional, had plain backgrounds with no texture, and were fixed. The Gestalt criticisms can also be taken even further in a way that will become important later in this book. They argued that the approach used by Wundt was flawed because the method he used of having participants ‘introspect’ on basic ‘elements’ of the senses and report their ‘experience’, was not how real perception works (like our triangle), and the ‘units’ Wundt and Titchener found were therefore flawed and not real units. Taking this further, the introspection of sensations and reporting on sensory experience, therefore, somehow artificially created the ‘elements’ that were reported. That is, Wundt’s participants had been shaped by the experimenters (they were often colleagues and students who were ‘trained’ to do this ‘properly’) and any reporting on basic sensations was artificial and any ‘elements’ or ‘patterns’ found were due to language shaping rather than seeing. What did the Gestaltists do with this? Despite the good criticisms and a shake-​up for psychology, which I will argue later in the chapter put psychology at an important but mistaken fork in the road, the Gestaltists never galvanized a solid core of theory or methods that lasted. But beyond a few small groups (ecological psychology, field psychology), this never took off in the mainstream. Most psychologists referred to Gestalt theory when making criticisms of what was being done, but without showing how to go forward until the late 1950s and 1960s. I think a problem was that they never found a way to pursue their own criticisms. They continued to carry out more traditional ‘experiments’ and not just demonstrations, and there were a lot of conceptual attempts to move psychology into a new set of practices. But having stated loudly that the field or context is important, they never went beyond a perceptual field to say what these might look like (except occasionally Kurt Lewin). What was needed was some form of analysis of the actual contexts for human behaviours. 5 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago 5 The main conceptual attempt at moving forward made by Gestaltists was to get away from the idea of behaviour as being determined by objects, units, things, and ‘stimuli’, and arguing that the whole field or context needs to be taken into account. This was sometimes called a ‘molar’ view (e.g. Brunswik, 1950), as opposed to Descartes’s push to build from the molecular upwards. This was reflected by Gestaltists in phrases such as: psychology is “the study of behavior in its causal connections with the psychophysical fields” and “behavior in its psychophysical field”. Humans do not act and behave in a geographical or microphysics field, but in a “behavioral field”. Of course, this does not help us much unless more is known about what these fields are and how to track them (what are the contexts for behaviour?). But it is reflected in the triangle in Figure 1.1—​that we do not see precisely defined black bits of a certain physical wavelength of light and a measured shape, but instead we immediately report ‘seeing’ a triangle, and the white background is part of that happening. Despite this, I believe that the impact of Gestalt ideas was crucial, and that the elements Gestalt wanted appeared later in different ways, just not in the form in which the Gestaltists of 1920–​1940 envisaged. These new additions were never labelled as Gestalt, but they could not have come about without the Gestaltists. Psychology at a fork in the road: where to from here? The question from here is about these larger, more complex organized units within which our lives are run: where does this organization of our life units take place? Inside or outside? At this point, and then over the next few decades, there were two broad responses to this question, and these were crucial for how psychology developed next. There was a fork in the road and almost all of psychology went in one direction, which I will call Pathway 1. This book is now going back 60 years and taking the other direction of Pathway 2, to fulfil the Gestaltist’s vision. Pathway 1 The complexities of our larger organizational units for living are too complex to come from, or arise out of, the world or environment, and so they must be constructed or developed inside the organism using whatever meagre ‘input’, ‘sensory data’, or ‘information’ we can get from the world. We ‘fill in’ the missing bits of the triangle inside of us in some form or another. 6 6 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago Pathway 2 The complexities or organization of our worlds or environments are already out there in our environments so we can deal, engage, or interface directly with our complex worlds and adapt. We do not need to construct anything inside us! We ‘fill in’ the missing black lines into a bigger unit (a ‘triangle’) from what is in our world already, but not in a way ever imagined by the Gestaltists (I will explain how this is done shortly). I will briefly outline these two pathways, and then come back to the mistake made by those who followed Pathway 1. Pathway 1 There are many informal observations, experiences, and gut feelings that lead people to take the first of these pathways at the crossroad. If you believe that all we know comes from the light hitting our two-​dimensional retina then it really is a puzzle as to how we report ‘seeing’ a triangle when it is broken. Even more so, how do we see the world as three-​dimensional when what hits our eyes is two-​dimensional? Cognitive psychologists later talked about the paucity of ‘information’ (a subtle word that has a long history and does strategic things to our thinking, see V5.1) that lands on our retina, and in the famous phrase of Jerome Bruner, it must be that humans “go beyond the information given” (i.e. construct inside them) to represent the complex and larger organizing units of our lives (Bruner, 1973). This Pathway 1 started early with the Gestaltists themselves (I will gradually show you how you I disagree with all that is said here and give alterative scenarios): Köhler points out that there is no direct transmission, to the perceiver, of physical Gestalt properties present in fellow-​organisms or other objects. All unity must be newly constructed in the responder in accordance with his intrinsic, “authchthonous” brain dynamics. The subject is thus seen as basically out of contact with the dynamics of the environment. (Brunswik, 1950, p. 63, my italics) Examples like the triangle in Figure 1.1 were later used to justify cognitive psychology and other ‘inside’ approaches. If we say that we see a triangle then where does this come from? The sensory environment does not shape a triangle in perception because the missing lines need to be filled in. So, it was therefore argued that we must add or originate the missing environmental 7 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago 7 information inside the person, probably in the brain somewhere. The environment alone cannot explain calling the image in Figure 1.1 a triangle, the argument went (remember that I will argue the opposite in what follows, however). (Caveat: notice the word ‘must’ in the previous Brunswik quote. This is social persuasion not logic, like “It behoves us to …” But it really means, “I cannot see how this could be otherwise”. Those taking Pathway 2 need to show that there is another way to ‘see’ things, and that Pathway 1 psychologies have just not looked hard enough.) Those going down Pathway 1, therefore, in almost all cases used their gut feeling to propose that we must have ‘representations’ of our worlds—​like a map—​before we can do anything. This trail of thinking, which arises only if you believe the organization must be done inside us, therefore requires memory of the world stored inside our heads in some way to build the organizational units like a triangle, and ways of acting to the organized units our brains have computed to do things in our worlds. We must have a ‘schema’ or ‘prototype’ of a ‘triangle’ stored inside us to ‘see’ a whole triangle when it is broken. But all these facets arise from this way of thinking, not from actual observations. I will discuss later in more detail where Pathway 1 led psychology and how we can correct this (see Chapter 8), but there were three main ways in which those driving along the Pathway 1 fork in the road proceeded, up to the current time. If the complex organizational units must be built inside the person (we get the ‘triangle’ unit from the sensory data being ‘processed’ internally), then three types of psychology can result from this line of thinking: 1. Go back again to studying what the brain does since the brain must be where these more complex organizational units are stored and constructed and so the answers will lie in the brain. 2. Since we cannot see what is going on in the brain, however, then do what the computer people were doing at that time, and build simulations, models, and theories of what might be going on internally and try and test these with whatever observable responses can be measured. 3. Just use the everyday or common language of the bigger units even if we do not know anything about their reality. Talk using the same words as ordinary people do and do not bother to analyse further. Understand what people do just in terms of how they talk about it: “I see a triangle”, “I was feeling angry so I threw a book at him”, “His marriage was frustrating his ego since he could not fulfil his boyhood fantasies”, “I can remember what my mother’s face looks like when I close my eyes”. Treat these as descriptions and explanations rather than analyse them discursively as language use in context. 8 8 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago I will refer back frequently to these three forms of modern psychology, especially when dealing with ‘mental health’ (V6.2). But to summarize: if you follow Pathway 1, that our bigger units of behaviour and experience must be constructed inside us because the environmental stimuli do not contain enough to explain, then there are three main ways to do such psychologies: • • • The units must originate in the brain and so the answers will lie there if we study it hard enough. We must build abstract models and simulations of what might be going on in the brain (to get a ‘triangle’ out of bits of black lines) and try and check these through indirect observations. Just use everyday explanations about why humans do what they do, and treat these as if they are accurate descriptions of what we need to study (cf. Graumann & Gergen, 1996). If you go carefully through any modern psychology textbook you will find that all the explanations contained therein will consist of one or more of these. It is now common to mix these as metaphors, as well as treating just one alone. For example, the following are common: • • This part of the brain is probably where the processes of my cognitive model are taking place. This part of the brain is probably where [everyday word of what humans do] takes place, e.g. “This part of the brain is probably where jealousy takes place”. Pathway 2 Almost all psychologists took Pathway 1, and this is still the dominant approach across almost all forms of psychology, however different they might look. Most current textbook accounts of psychology are a mixture of neurophysiology, cognitive models of what might be going on inside the head to organize the bigger units of human action, and the curious case of using everyday terms and words to ‘explain’ human behaviours. Freud, for instance, explained with a mix of abstract models (the id, ego, and superego), the use of common everyday words and explanations (“the client was frustrated by …”), and his own dabbling in possible brain mechanisms (a late 1800s version) for all the models of the unconscious (Freud, 1895/​1950). But there have always been a few who took Pathway 2 and argued that although the brain is important it does not originate human behaviour and 9 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago 9 is not agentive—​it is important but just an interface for the organism to interact directly with its environments. The key argument was that there is plenty of organization and complexity already out there in the environment or lived world that can control even our most complex and fine-​tuned behavioural adaptations (even triangles we will see), but psychologists have just not looked hard enough for the environmental controls over our actions, talking, and thinking. Part of the problem is that we do not ‘know’ all the environmental features that determine our behaviour, in the sense that we cannot name them all or identify them. A second problem is that it is easier to pretend that some agentive event happens inside of us so we only have to model or simulate what might be going on; it is much more difficult to research and observe the ‘agentive nature’ of our complex worlds and this requires different research methodologies. A third problem is that most of those travelling along the dirt track of Pathway 2 believe that it is by actively engaging with our environments that we learn our complex worlds, so experimenting with a constrained organism in context-​deprived environments ruins any chance of finding the controlling environments. On the other hand, those taking Pathway 2 must account for the uncanny gut experience that all this stuff takes place inside of us (I will cover this later). In the next chapter I will discuss in more detail where Pathway 2 led those who went against the mainstream psychologies (Pathway 1). There are five main approaches, but the first is as yet unfulfilled: • • • Go back again to studying what the brain does but treat the brain as an interface that is not agentive, rather than as a place where all of what we do originates. The structuring of our actions, talking, and thinking are already in the world and we are engaging with that rather than constructing a new version; unfortunately, this is mostly unfulfilled as yet. Gibson took this approach just with the study of perception, arguing that there were plenty of ways we could act and react to the environment that could lead to very complex responding, and without needing to build an internal model or representation of the world. He called this direct perception, but it requires a lot of collateral changes to the fundamentals of mainstream psychology, so it never became popular (see Chapter 5). There were a variety of approaches loosely called ‘behaviourism’, which in different ways claimed that the environment was agentive in human actions; but only one got close to really studying or describing the complete set of complex human environments; this was the behaviour analysis started by Skinner (1938). As I will go through in what 10 10 • • Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago follows, most of the other psychologies called ‘behaviourism’ were really using Pathway 1, and building abstract models of what takes place inside the organism between simple ‘stimuli’ and responses. More recently a social contextual analysis has built on Gibson’s work and the most advanced form of behaviourism, but also included all of the contextual social sciences, to try and include how all human complex environments or contexts are agentive of our actions (Guerin, 2016b). We need to go beyond the Gestaltists, and our ‘fields’ must include social, political, discursive, patriarchal, economic, cultural, and opportunity contexts or environments, not simple ‘stimuli’ devoid of context. Some discourse analyses work along similar lines with just the use of language; language must be studied as a behaviour in context and what we say depends upon our social and discursive communities as contexts, not on the way our brain works. Other discourse analyses, however, are very much Pathway 1 and even have associated cognitive models and the use of everyday terms as explanations (I have yet to see a form of discourse analysis with an associated brain model, but I am waiting). So, in the story I am putting forward that follows from the criticisms of psychology by Gestalt psychologists, there is a major division based around the following: • • Whether there is not enough in our environments to control our finely tuned and complex actions and so somewhere inside of us (usually the brain) we must originate representations or models of the world in order to behave. Or whether the determiners of human action, talk, and thinking can arise from the complex lifeworlds in which we are embedded, especially if we include social, societal, and other contexts. On both sides there are what I have been referring to as ‘gut experiences’ that their pathway is correct, so attempts by the other pathway must be able to also account for these. For example, we all have gut feelings or gut experiences that our ‘thoughts’ are not controlled by the immediate environments around us, and that our thoughts must be inside of us (that is, we cannot imagine otherwise). This does not mean Pathway 1 is correct, just that these sorts of experience make it more plausible. Which means that anyone arguing for Pathway 2 must be able to show how these gut feelings can arise in other ways (see Chapters 2 and 4). 1 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago 11 Where current psychology went wrong: back to the triangle, but from the outside So how can the ‘outside’ approaches taking Pathway 2 account for the triangle demonstration and what is found? How can saying “I see a triangle” possibly be shaped by things external to us? It turns out after 60–​70 years to be quite simple once you broaden the idea of fields or contexts! A Gestalt or contextual approach should look for what is actually being done here in all contexts (or fields), and this is where the mistake was made. There are, in fact, two behaviours from two different contexts in response to the question, “What do you see?”: 1. Imagine I had shown you the broken triangle and had first asked you, “Draw this for me”. The main field or context for responding to this particular (but still social) question is the original drawing itself of the broken triangle, and we can copy and draw that quite easily and no one adds the missing bits of the triangle. I have tried this with classes, and everyone draws the four lines and not a completed triangle. The drawing you make is shaped or contextualized by social instructions and the original ‘triangle’ picture itself with all its flaws. All external. 2. The second context and response to “What do you see?” is a social request for a verbal response. The actual external context, field, or environment for this response is not the picture and the four bits of black lines but the social relationship you have with the person who is asking. Answering this social question in our normal contexts is not about giving an accurate description of what is in front of you, unless your social context had been your art professor and you knew they were trying to trick you to get you to draw accurately. This is a bit like when we ask people “Hi! How are you?” and we are not really requesting a detailed description of how they actually are, we are just making social conversation. You would normally answer with a quick standard answer (“I’m fine, thanks”), or perhaps add a little bit of a story if, and only if, it was entertaining: “I’m fine, thanks for asking. Although I did have a problem this morning when a truck ran over my car!” This question is more like a conversation starter and the context is about maintaining your social relationship, not giving your actual health status (called ‘phatic communication’ in the social sciences). So the social contexts are very important in the Gestalt demonstrations, because you respond differently with different social or societal contexts: 12 12 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago an art professor, a friend, or an experimenter. This is no different than giving a different answer to “How are you?” if your doctor had asked you this question (of course, you still might not tell the truth!). Or, if you wanted to test a social relationship with a friend, you might give a 15-​minute monologue about your health. So, when the Gestaltists asked “What do you see?” the context or environment for answering was a casual social context, and “I see a triangle” was a perfectly acceptable social reply but not an accurate description. We are shaped by our social worlds to do this all the time. In asking “What do you see?” we have been thoroughly shaped by our (external!) social contexts to give answers like “I saw a dog”, even though we hardly saw most of the dog, we could not see the dog’s legs at all (we were above the dog), and we could not even tell you details about the dog ‘we saw’. The above provides an ‘outside’ version (Pathway 2) of why we ‘say’ we saw a triangle. If the context or field is not social in this way, we can easily ‘draw’ what is in front of us quite accurately. We do not need to construct any internal representations of triangles to do either of these behaviours, it is all happening externally as a casual social–​verbal interaction or as a request to draw four black lines in front of us. Change the black lines into a broken circle and we draw differently; have an art professor ask what you see, and you will describe four little black lines, not a ‘triangle’, so you do not get in trouble. The social contexts should not be excluded from this demonstration, and that was the mistake made. The above also highlights how the common use of everyday words in psychology to explain human behaviour can be very misleading. There are ambiguities in the word ‘see’ in the original triangle demonstrations that are missed but that lead us to imagine that we need to construct a triangle inside of us to do the behaviour of saying “I see a triangle”: • • We do not ‘see a black triangle’ in any perceptual sense, since we can easily draw the broken triangle accurately in a perceptual sense when the context is there. We can socially name “I saw a triangle” if the context is just a casual social interaction for which the four black lines are not important (in fact, you can be a ‘smart-​arse’ if you answer “four black lines” to the question when it is a casual social interaction). Both these can be accounted for by shaping from the external world, one from the black lines and one from our normal social context of answering simple questions. There never was any need for Pathway 1. 13 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago 13 A bit more about Pathway 1: neuropsychology, cognitive psychologies, and the many psychologies based on everyday terms We have seen that there were three main responses to the Gestalt criticisms, each of which kept the idea that everything that makes us do what we do happens inside us. Two of the three had been there all along in both psychology and in the general public, but the cognitive approach was new and quickly took over psychology with the rise of computer simulations: 1. Study neurophysiology more intensively as the main focus. 2. Make models, theories, and simulations of what is going on inside the head, which narrowed down to cognitive psychology. 3. Use the everyday language of internal causes to ‘do’ psychology. Pretty much everything that has happened in the last 75 years of mainstream psychology (textbooks) has come from these three responses (Brunswik, 1950, is an early attempt to integrate and ‘unify’ these approaches even prior to cognitive psychology, while not changing the main assumptions). Most academics focused on the first two, while the therapists, counsellors, and ‘soft’ academics (humanists, etc.) focused on the third. My real point is that no one was able to think in a different way. This was not a matter of following good data but of being unable to reconceptualize these three approaches. The data collected in support of the cognitive theories was extremely general and indirect, made up of averages, single observations of loose measurements, and was able to be interpreted in many other ways if the thinking to do so had been there. I am optimistic that the brain observations we already have can be rethought in terms of just an interface that also uses the head and body, rather than as creators of anything. This is also the problem for you, the reader! The alternatives I am going to present later go against your very own common ways of talking about, and ‘explaining’, why people do what they do. Most of our daily talk and the media (as well as psychology) places everything agentive in the head as the ‘explanation’. And I am hoping to show you better ways to think about your life paths and why you do what you do by getting a better idea of your nuanced external contexts. The rise and rise of neuropsychology The main change in neuropsychology has been the huge developments in understanding the brain since the early days of Wundt, Titchener, and the all 14 14 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago learning theorists, who knew little back then. So much has been discovered that is of real importance, and yet conceptual errors have crept in because of the assumptions of Pathway 1: • • • First, each new discovery of neuropsychology (which are real) has been extrapolated along the way to explain far more than it is able. Second, the trend has been to see each new development as showing how the brain originates what people do. This is achieved (wrongly) by thinking of sensory input, and treating this sensory input as something that goes ‘inside’ the organism for the brain to do its stuff on, and originate as an agent what the organism then does based on this. We need to treat the magic of the brain as an interface for acting and adapting to the world, and this means putting the world forward as the key originator and agent of what we do. As we will see and as pointed out by Gibson (1979), it is responding to changes on the retina that is important, not the ‘sensations’. The real problem here is not the neuropsychologists, on the whole, but the popular writers and lay public who now use brain discourses to supposedly ‘explain’ everything. Try going into your local bookshop and look in the psychology section. There are books about your ‘athletic brain’ and how it can improve your sporting abilities, about how when you meditate it changes your brain, how you can eat chocolate and the changes in your behaviour are because of your brain. The brain is fast becoming the only agent a person needs anymore. Apparently, everything starts in the brain! Early (and later) cognitivisms What we now call the approach of cognitive psychology had two major starting points at different times (more in Chapter 8). The first came from the frustrations of some early academics working with stimulus–​response behaviourisms, and the second from advances in computing and especially computer simulations of human behaviour. As new developments were made in computing science, these were sequentially adapted into cognitive psychology to try and explain why people do what they do, but as models. My account here differs (once again) from the typical psychology textbooks. In the latter, all forms of ‘behaviourism’ are lumped together even though they differ markedly. I will be making the division along the lines of the Gestaltists’ fork in the road, and whether what were labelled as ‘behaviourisms’ promoted that what humans do originates inside the organism or in the environment. 15 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago 15 All behaviourisms are given that title because they study what an organism does that we can see. Some did this, however, because even though they believed that what we do originates inside of us, they knew that we cannot see what is going on inside of us so, necessarily, we have to just look at what an organism can be seen to be doing. These groups are early versions of cognitivism and follow Pathway 1. They observe overt behaviours because we cannot see inside people where it supposedly all originates. The other group of ‘behaviourists’ look at what can be observed of both the organism and the environment/​context/​field within which it is embedded, and these follow Pathway 2 (they will be discussed in the next chapter) (see Table 1.1). Table 1.1 Types of behaviourism Type of ‘behaviourism’ Main reason for being behavioural What this led to later S–​R behaviourisms The origin, determining Behavioural learning nature, or agentive theories nature of what Purposive behaviourism organisms do (Tolman) primarily occurs Hull–​Spence inside the organism behaviourism But we cannot see this happening so instead we can only observe what the organism does in certain (stimulus) conditions and either guess (in everyday language) or theoretically model what is going on inside Cognitive psychology Animal cognition Some behaviour modification Radical behaviourism ideas Operant behaviourism Parts of Watsonian behaviourism Arthur F. Bentley Behaviour analysis Social contextual analysis Discourse analysis (some) The origin, determining nature, or agentive nature of what organisms do, primarily occurs outside the organism We observe both what the organism does in different environmental conditions and what the environment does when the organism acts 16 16 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago Stimulus–​response behaviourisms The stimulus–​response behaviourisms (S–​R) developed out of the reflex arc idea and the many different versions of learning theories that came from Thorndike. The idea was that ‘connections’ or ‘networks’ were formed inside the organism between stimuli and responses, and that this is where responses originated. Learning was just about building up lots of connections inside the organism. Such positions became called ‘behaviourism’ because, exactly like cognitive psychology later, they realized that they could only look at or observe what the organism did, not what it was deciding, or perceiving, or thinking. Those events could not be seen even though they were the main determining agents in what happened next according to these views. Thorndike’s laws of behaviour, for example, occurred inside the organism and could not be directly observed, and only the outward manifestations of an inside process could be observed. To highlight the later contrast to Gibson, notice that from Wundt onwards and including all the S–​R behaviourists it had always been assumed that for organisms to function they must take something in through the senses (sensory data, later ‘information’). But once something is taken in, then obviously the main action or agency will occur on the inside. However, Gibson’s model of perception and sensation, as we will see in Chapter 5, allowed that organisms could perceive and see without having to take anything inside at all. So all these problems then disappear, puff! There appeared, therefore, a whole hodgepodge of S–​R theories in the next few decades after Gestalt, which worked with this logic and thinking. Details differed, but the main gist followed what is written above. Not read by most psychologists, Arthur F. Bentley made an impressive ‘deconstruction’ of the 1930 and 1935 theories and showed how these, and other, errors were part of all these theories (Bentley, 1935; Guerin, 2016a). Tolman’s (1932) work was a strong bridge to cognitive psychology. He worked with rats and on how they learned to run in mazes. Like Thorndike, he found that they did not learn suddenly through insight but became faster over time. However, he also got frustrated because, like the Gestaltists, he could see larger patterns occurring and having to explain all this in precise and immediately present ‘stimulus conditions’ did not seem a good way forward. So, he moved (as per earlier in this chapter, discursive strategy 3, see p. 13) to use common, everyday terms for ‘explaining’ what the rats were doing ‘inside’ their brains. It became known as ‘purposive behaviourism’ because it seemed that rats developed ‘higher units’ or ‘plans’ inside them as they learned. ‘Purpose’ was the everyday term he took to be transparent, while “plan’ was used later, as we will see. 17 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago 17 Tolman’s position was put most simply and directly in the following: [The brain] is far more like a map control room than it is like an old-​ fashioned telephone exchange. The stimuli, which are allowed in, are not connected by just simple one-​to-​one switches to the outgoing responses. Rather, the incoming impulses are usually worked over and elaborated in the central control room into a tentative, cognitive-​like map of the environment. And it is this tentative map, indicating routes and paths and environmental relationships, which finally determines what responses, if any, the animal will finally release. (Tolman, 1948, p. 192, my italics) This quote shows the combination of Gestalt bigger units, everyday, and very abstract talk about internal thinking, and how internal cognitions lead to the (agentive) responses that are ‘released’ (a curious but interesting word to use). If you read this as a discursive analysis it is extremely revealing. Note the words I have put in italics. Pathway 2 says that all those words are mistaken! The beginnings of cognitive psychology By the 1960s, the seeds of cognitive psychology were in place. There was dissatisfaction that S–​R behaviourisms were not getting a grip on big units of human behaviour, the development of computers and simulation of human behaviours by computers was rapidly advancing, and the meticulous false precision (pretending to be science by having fancy equations for rat maze behaviour) from some of the S–​R behaviourisms (Hull, 1943) was getting tiresome to many. What happened next was not a breakthrough in evidence or data. It was professional acquiescence to several ideas that allowed for Pathway 1 and the three subsequent discourses to seem real (brain, abstract models, and the use of everyday language explanations). What I mean is that nothing new was ‘found out’, but academic psychologists started going along with, allowing, or acquiescing to, abstract modelling of what might be going on ‘inside’ humans, and the use of everyday terms to explain human behaviour (and even rat behaviour!). Here are the main ideas everyone went along with: • For bigger human units of behaviour we are not going to quickly get the neurophysiological evidence so instead we should use another real ‘scientific’ method of working, i.e. build models of what might be going on inside people, when we cannot observe directly (as was assumed wrongly). 18 18 Where psychology went wrong 60 years ago • The control of behaviour could not possibly come from just the environment alone, and in Bruner’s (1973) words, humans therefore “need to go beyond the information given”. The ‘stimuli’ talked about in S–​R behaviourisms were too simple for real life, but the response to this was not to study our real worlds closer and contextually, but to get more complicated models. Everything comes from a two-​dimensional image on the retina so, in order to go beyond the information given, somewhere in the brain we must construct that third dimension and build a new representation of the world. Our engagement with the world therefore becomes ipso facto our engagement with our internal representations of the world. For the computer simulations, there was an extra assumption that if a simulation output matched some observed human behaviour then that simulation must be something like what is going on inside humans (not logically correct, however). • • • • As we will see in the next chapter, all of these assumptions have been disputed but they were taken for granted in that era (professional acquiescence). On a more practical level, from the messy research with trying to make precise ‘scientific’ measurements of rat behaviour, drive states, and stimuli, researchers were given permission (professional acquiescence) to wax lyrical about possible models and theories of what might be going on in the head (using ‘modal hedges’ in discourse analysis terms). Data was typically collected as single-​point measurements abstracted from the real substance, and this was justified by another assumption (going back to Descartes!) that this was necessary and we will be progressing towards building u