Motives and Mechanisms

An Introduction to the Psychology of Action

Rom Harré, David Clarke, Nicola De Carlo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138947764
• eBook ISBN: 9781317364153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

As the first introductory statement of the 'new psychology', Motives and Mechanisms, originally published in 1985, aims to bring the study of human action to the forefront of the subject. Like any science, the practice of psychology is very much influenced by the hidden assumptions of its practitioners. The argument put forward in this important text shows how these assumptions can be brought out by comparing psychology with the natural sciences and with common-sense understanding.

In pursuing the integration of traditional research methods with a new style of investigation, the basic principle is that social structures and mental structures are in reciprocal relation with one another because each is involved in the creation of the other. By adopting this principle social structures become the basis for research into the cognitive and emotional organization of mind. The authors devote two key chapters to the central question that underlies this stance: are human actions and human actors' products of internal processes, such as those described by Freud, or of external social forces, of the kind described by Mead?

1 WHY DO WE NEED A ‘NEW PSYCHOLOGY?

In this book we shall try to explain why much of contemporary psychology is unsatisfactory. We shall offer an alternative, an approach that, we hope, will help to overcome some of the difficulties to which we draw attention and at the same time will preserve the real advances that have been made by academic psychology. However, one might object, are there not already a great many ‘psychologies’ available? Even in this century we have had associationism, the remnants of classical behaviourism, the gestalt approach, psychodynamics and more recently cognitive psychology (see Margolis 1984). Why do we need yet another ‘-ism’ or ‘-ology’? There are many people who would go further. Since we already have many ways to understand the human heart and mind – literature, history, ethics, logic, jurisprudence and anthropology, for instance – why do we need psychology at all? Neither of these questions can be answered in a phrase, but we hope that by the end of this study they will have been adequately dealt with. There is a place for a scientific study of thought, feeling and action, but for a variety of reasons none of the existing attempts to create such a study has succeeded or, indeed, could succeed.

We begin with a discussion of the limitations of much contemporary psychology, scientism, individualism, universalism and causalism. This leads us into an examination of the relation between psychology and the natural sciences on the one hand, and psychology and common sense on the other. We show how the relation between academic psychology and the ordinary means by which human beings manage their daily lives is different from the relation between the natural sciences and common sense. Common sense must be incorporated into, and not superseded by, scientific psychology, since it is the system by which one important level of human action is managed.

Some problems of contemporary psychology

Our first task will be to set out four main vices to which we believe contemporary psychology is particularly prone. They are: scientism, the use of a misleading vocabulary and associated methods of enquiry drawn mainly from the physical sciences; individualism, the assumption that each person is a psychological unit in which all important processes occur; universalism, the tendency to report the results of studies of the people of one’s own ‘tribe’ as if these results were true of all mankind; causalism, the attempt to explain all psychological phenomena as the effects of causes. Discussion of these problems leads us to examine the relation of psychology to the biological sciences on the one hand and to common sense on the other. Psychology is not a branch of the natural sciences, though the mechanisms of the production of thought, feeling and action in human beings are at least in part physiological. Nor can psychology ignore common sense, since it is in accordance with commonsense principles and understandings that we live. Yet there can be a scientific psychology which is something more than organized common sense.

Broadly speaking, we have three ‘psychologies’ in play in contemporary western Europe and North America. There is the cluster of sometimes incompatible theories and practices used by psychiatrists, social workers and others who deal with various kinds of personal disturbances and miseries. Then there is the laboratory-dominated but highly volatile ‘academic’ psychology of the universities. Finally there are the unofficial doctrines of the fringe psychologies which dominate the popular imagination and which still have strong connections with religion and magic. These three are set against the background of daily life, where the forces implicit in ordinary language and material practices shape our thoughts and feelings into the forms permitted by our local culture.

This book is about academic psychology and its relation to the languages and practices of everyday life. In this chapter we hope to bring out some of the reservations and doubts that have emerged as criticisms of much of contemporary academic psychology have mounted. In the end we hope to have made clear why yet another ‘new psychology’ must be promoted to redress some of the more obvious errors of the immediate past.

The tendency to scientism

Much of the style of recent psychology has come from a self-conscious attempt by psychologists to borrow from the methods – or rather from what they took to be the methods – of the physical and biological sciences. We shall call the effect of this influence on the activities of psychologists scientism. It appears not only in the adoption of certain methods of enquiry but also in the use of a characteristic vocabulary borrowed from the physical sciences. For example, the use of such terms as ‘measure’ or ‘variable’ for talking about emotions, attitudes, friendship, and so on, is a case of scientism. In the physical sciences these terms have a well-established usage that is closely related to the techniques of experiment and the use of mathematics to represent physical laws. It is by no means obvious that the appropriate conditions for valid usage are well established in psychology.

A scientistic vocabulary usually appears in the first instance as a replacement for a set of common English terms (and to a lesser extent French and German ones). These terms are in everyday use for expressing our working psychological judgements and theories. In a scientistic transformation of this vocabulary ‘affect’ is used instead of ‘feeling’ and/or ‘emotion’, ‘helping behaviour’ instead of ‘helping’, and so on. Scientism in psychology has two opposite but unfortunately non-cancelling effects. Sometimes all the nuances of the ordinary-language terms which the scientistic terms have replaced are carried over into psychology, including ambiguities. Just as the term ‘help’ covers both aid (assisting someone who is competent in some measure to tackle a job) and succour (assistance for someone who is incapable of managing at all), so it seems from the literature does the term ‘helping behaviour’. But, whereas in ordinary language the distinction between these species of helping is incorporated in the semantic rules for the use of the term ‘help’, there are no given semantic rules for the neologism ‘helping behaviour’. Not only is it ambiguous, like ‘help’, but we are not even sure how the ambiguities are to be resolved. On the other hand, there may be a gross impoverishment caused by such a substitution of terms. ‘Affect’ seems to be used both for ‘emotion’ and for ‘feeling’, and these are not synonyms in English. If we have only the term ‘affect’, we may find – as indeed has occurred in academic psychology – that the important distinction between emotion and feeling has been mislaid.

Furthermore, there may be serious inaccuracies in the implications of a word which was introduced as a scientistic substitute for an English term for describing the psychology of another culture. The vocabulary of a foreign language never exactly matches that of the language of academic psychology, scientistic English. The way the apparently corresponding terms of a foreign language are used reflects features of the psychology of that culture. Cross-cultural displacement of terms must take account of the fact that psychological phenomena in the exotic culture usually resemble the phenomena of Anglo-American mental life only in some respects. For instance, it is part of the logical grammar of emotion words in English that they can properly be applied to someone who is solitary. It seems that this feature of grammar reflects a psychological phenomenon of western culture that is not found among Eskimos: emotion terms are applied to people only when they are with others. Therefore, to use the term ‘affect’ of Eskimos can subtly influence the psychological hypotheses about them. It may suggest that the com-munality of Eskimo emotion is somehow a ‘repression’ of individual or ‘natural’ emotion; but there may be no ‘natural’ human emotions among Eskimos or anyone else. Heelas (Heelas and Lock 1981) has gone so far as to suggest that it may be misleading to use the term ‘emotion’ or any of its scientistic substitutes for describing the way certain peoples manage their feelings, since they may deal with them in ways that involve cognitive and social processes very different from ours.

Ironically, scientistic terminology tends to perpetuate the assumptions of commonsense psychology by eliminating those terms that, if carefully analysed, would reveal those assumptions. Sometimes there are features of the use of commonsense terms that are of great importance to a truly scientific psychology. For instance, if we preserve the commonsense vocabulary for identifying and classifying the emotions, we can quickly become aware of how far moral assessments enter into the emotions we feel. The emotion of anger is not just a worked-up feeling; it also involves the moral assessment of that which has made us angry. We are angry when our adrenalin has been set flowing by some event we regard as a transgression of our rights, status, and so on. The fact that we do not get angry with our dentist for hurting us can be explained by the fact that we do not regard it as any kind of morally reprehensible interference. We make over to our dentist certain rights to interfere with us in ways that would be unacceptable from others.

Scientism is not just a matter of borrowing a vocabulary from the physical sciences; it may also involve taking over methods or techniques of enquiry that have grown up in the sciences of inanimate nature. The most obvious borrowing has been that of the technique of experiment, which has sometimes been advocated as the exclusive method of empirical enquiry. We shall be discussing the problems that beset the old psychology on account of this in Chapter 6.

Finally, we must note yet another effect of the use of scientistic vocabulary as rhetoric in psychology. Ordinary-language terms bring with them a great variety of implicit theories about how this or that kind of action is produced. These theories range from explanations in terms of habits, where personal agency is at a minimum, through to those which, by using action terms and mentioning intentions, encourage us to see what people do as explicit acts of reasoning and judgement. The distinction between a science that sees what people do as actions based upon beliefs and intentions and a science that sees what people do as behaviour caused by a stimulus will emerge ever more strongly as we proceed. The trouble with scientism is that it leads us to adopt the second of these versions of psychology without a thorough examination of the propriety of abandoning the first.

In order to reject scientism, it will be necessary to show that the tacit presuppositions that slip in with the borrowed vocabulary are at best over-restrictive and at worst false. To test these presuppositions we must always be willing to turn to other cultures to check our results, though that is not always easy. By slipping into an apparently ‘neutral’ scientific vocabulary, scientists can slide into ethnocentrism – the fallacy of supposing that what is typical of their own culture is typical of all mankind.

However, one cannot just uncritically adopt ordinary language as the technical vocabulary for a truly scientific psychology. Though the phenomena of the mental life are defined by the ordinary languages of mankind, it is by no means the case that the processes by which those phenomena are produced can always be dealt with in the same way. In Chapter 2 we shall explain why a scientific psychology must invoke processes of which the actors are unaware, at least in the course of the action, some of which are social and some of which are individual. Just as do the physical sciences, psychology must make use of analogical reasoning and metaphorical developments of language to find ways of describing those processes which the actors, for one reason or another, cannot observe.

Individualism

A second feature of contemporary psychology, more influential even than scientism, is a general assumption of individualism: the tendency to assume that the subject matter of psychology is individual thought and action; that cognitive processes like remembering and reasoning can occur only in individuals. Typically, experimenters require each subject to perform their allotted tasks by themselves. For example, in moral-developmental psychology the subjects are each asked to write out a solution to a moral dilemma – for example, the problems for the boy Heinz, who is torn between family loyalty and obedience to the law. Then the answers are analysed one by one and, depending on the satisfaction of various criteria, the individuals who took part are each assigned to levels of moral development: conventional, post-conventional, and so on. But this technique, which seems to echo that of the school examination, presupposes that moral reasoning is typically performed by each individual separately. In fact, as we all know, most moral decisions are made in the course of conversations, discussions about what should or should not be done, or perhaps what is and what is not one’s duty. Moral reasoning is, more often than not, a collective activity. In psychology generally, we must take account of the fact that remembering, reasoning and expressing emotions are part of the life of institutions, of structured, self-regulating groups, such as armies, monasteries, schools, families, businesses and factories.

Can a universal psychology be assumed?

Most of the psychological experiments that have ever been performed have used British or American college students as subjects. The results of such experiments have been published as if they were comparable to those achieved in the physical sciences. Yet there is good reason to think that we cannot assume that the ways in which such young people think and act are universal features of the psychology of all mankind. Anthropological research suggests that there may be very different ways of thought among peoples elsewhere. For example, the work of anthropologists such as Catherine Lutz (1981) shows how diverse are the repertoires of human emotions characteristic of different cultures. We shall look in detail at the psychology of the emotions in Chapter 7. There is also evidence that even so basic a psychological phenomenon as the perception of space and time and the way people reason about spatial and temporal problems may not be the same everywhere.

It seems reasonable to suppose that all human infants are born with much the same potential (those differences in intellect, personality and style that seem to loom so large are minuscule when compared with how human beings differ from their closest primate relatives). Many features of human psychology will be universal. If there are differences in the psychologies of different tribes, they must therefore arise from different ‘schedules’ by which infants are transformed into the kind of people that a culture favours. One way of testing the hypothesis that the differences in behaviour, in thought patterns and in moral assumptions in various cultures are deep enough to be reckoned differences in ‘psychology’ would be to make a very careful comparison between the ways in which people are ‘manufactured’. It may even be the case that different cultures, by emphasizing one sort of emotion rather than another, may produce people whose physiological systems differ one from another. There are cultures that encourage fear in the face of danger, others that try to suppress it. This is certainly true of human anatomy, where different cultural conventions covering diet and exercise can cause people, originally of the same stock, to have very different physiques.

Above all, however, the differences in human language might be examined for the sources of differences in the psychologies of mankind. It was thought at one time that language determined thought, so that the absence of a certain word precluded the formation of a corresponding thought. This was the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which is now generally agreed to be much exaggerated. Common experience with our own language is enough to prove that the limits of what can be expressed are not fixed by vocabulary. We can formulate a new thought in more roundabout ways. The Eskimo language, Intuit, has a great many words for ‘snow’, each picking out a different variety; but those varieties can easily be conveyed in English by using descriptive phrases. In this book we shall be making use of a much weaker hypothesis about the relation between language and thought. The linguistic resources available to a thinker facilitate some ways of thinking rather than others. We shall follow Vygotsky (1962) in adopting the idea that the learning of language ‘shapes’ the mind so that thought and feeling become organized in ways that are specific to and characteristic of each major human culture.

Despite our emphasis on the need to take into account the possibility of there being very local ‘psychologies’, much of our psychology must respect the general conditions of human life, some certainly set by our biological nature and the kind of environment within which the human race has developed. It would be very surprising indeed if these conditions were not reflected in some general features of human psychology, the most obvious of which would be in the psychology of perception. The work of child psychologists such as Tom Bower (1982) and Jerome Bruner (1972) has shown how sophisticated are the perceptual abilities of new-born babies; for example, an 8-hour-old baby can imitate its mother’s facial expressions. Yet some apparently obvious universals of human thought turn out to be rather local. It would seem obvious to people like ourselves that there must be a universal distinction between the psychologies of children and of adults, but this is not so. The idea that children should be treated as if their modes of reasoning, their repertoire of emotions and their capacity to make moral judgements were different from those of adults is a very recent innovation. According to the French historian Ariès it is scarcely 300 years old (see Ariès 1962).

Perhaps the most famous universalistic theory in psychology has been Noam Chomsky’s view that all human languages have a common basic syntactic structure. Most linguists would now regard this theory as mistaken, seeing syntax as a cultural phenomenon, perhaps even as inessential to the basic forms of language (see Harris 1980). There have been many other theories based upon universalistic hypotheses. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1968) made a very subtle and persistent effort to demonstrate that there were basic thought forms, built up on binary classifications, such as raw/cooked, honey/ashes, etc. These could be transformed in various ways to appear in all sorts of features of a culture, including myths and systems of classification. At this moment in the developing history of psychology there is a tendency to emphasize the local and historically ephemeral aspects of human thought and feeling, and to play down universal. We shall try to strike a balance between an emphasis on the un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Why do we need a ‘new psychology’?
• 2 What must a ‘new psychology’ be like?
• 3 How does an explanatory science work?
• 4 Why is cognitive psychology not enough?
• 5 What methods will be needed to bring an adequate psychology into being?
• 6 Can some traditional techniques be salvaged?
• 7 Can some new research domains now be identified?
• Bibliography
• Further reading
• Index of names
• Index of subjects