To what extent has psychology been more concerned with being scientific than essentially trying to understand people. Can you recommend some appropriate sources.

-- kristel sinclair (kristelsinclair@hotmail.com), November 26, 2002

Answers

You might approach this by differentiating between academic research psychology and the applied psychology tradition. Mainline psychology in the twentieth century is primarily experimental and "scientific" but there are humanistic traditions (the "fourth force") and clinical traditions that focus on understanding. If you sit down with a good history of psychology text, or an encyclopedia of psychology, you can easily find examples of both. For the "understanding" side you have psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, existential psychology, "Verstehende Psychologie," phenomenology, as examples. All "depth psychologies" are efforts to understand people. But so, at some level, is scientific psychology-- good research findings do help us to understand others better. But understanding people shouldn't be our only goal. When I'm on an airplane, I'm much less interested in understanding the pilot than seeing research on human factors engineering applied to the design of the cockpit to make his job easier!

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), November 27, 2002.

I think scientific psychologists would argue that they have held to the scientific ideal *in order to* understand people (or more narrowly, the relations between their beliefs, desires, emotions, and behavior). Why? Because there has been a long history of telling stories about why people act as they do that turned out to be little more than cultural artefacts. In many other fields of endeavor -- physics, chemistry, biology -- science seems to have been able to cut through this veil of "doxa". The thought was, and remains, that perhaps it can do so in psychology as well. Some would argue, by contrast, that what is "cultural artefact" in "hard" science is the "real thing" when it comes to psychology -- people act on the basis of the cultures whereas the objects of physics and chemistry don't. Still others would argue that science -- whether in psychoolgy or other fields of endeavor -- is just one more cultural artefact with no more claim to truth than any other well-entrenched belief. Tell that to all the people who died of diseases that we finally learned to cure in the 20th century. :-)

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), November 28, 2002.

Hi Kristel, I don't off hand have any specific sources. I do think you will have to define your use of understanding with several examples because across several theories of science it means different things. In logical positivism it might mean a formulation like E=I*R, and to know that formula is to understand electricity. On the other hand, this explanation my not suit an idealist. Maybe begin with an encyclopedia, read up on logical positivism and idealism and empirism. This should give you some idea with regards to the extreams of "understanding." Good luck, David

-- david clark (doclark@yorku.ca), December 01, 2002.