Turning Psychology into a Social Science

Bernard Guerin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000094763
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Behavioural Management

This radical book explores a new understanding of psychology based on human engagement with external contexts, rather than what goes on inside our heads. 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.

By showing that we engage directly with our complex social, political, economic, patriarchal, colonized, and cultural contexts and that what we do and think arises from this direct engagement with these external contexts, Bernard Guerin expertly demonstrates that Western ideas have systematically excluded the 'social' but that this is really where the major determinants of our behaviour arise. This book works through many human activities that psychology still treats as individualized and internal and shows their social and societal origins. These includes beliefs, the sense of self, the arts, religious behaviours, and the new and growing area of conservation psychology. The social structures found by sociology, anthropology and sociolinguistics are shown to shape most 'individual' human actions, and it is shown how the main points of Marxism and Indigenous knowledges can be better merged into this new and broader social science.

Replacing the 'internal' attributions of causes with external contextual analyses based in the social sciences, this book is fascinating reading for academics and students in psychology and the social sciences, and provides exciting new ways to conceptualize and observe human actions in new ways and to resist the current individualistic thinking of 'psychology'.

1The opposite of rational is social, not irrational or crazy

How the ‘social’ got squeezed out of Western history

One of our main ways of changing other people’s behaviour is to use language to convince them. This might be to convince them about social relationships (“I’m so glad to have a friend like you!”) or about the world (“If we cannot slow the rate of global warming, all life will die out by the end of this century!”). We can convince people in many different ways (Guerin, 2003, 2016a) but the two broad strategies are to convince by naming consequences:

1.Using the consequences of our social relationships (“I would love it if you helped me”, “Please don’t let me find out that you did not help”).

2.Using the consequences of the world (“Helping people improves your health”, “If you help people then good things will happen to you”).

The aim of this chapter is to show that the history of Western ‘civilization’ has been to get rid of (1) and only use (2). Doing this has been really good for science and understanding the non-social environment, but a disaster for anything and everything to do with understanding human behaviour. It has stopped psychology from being a social science since it has tried, in pretending to be a good ‘science’, to purge the ‘social’.

Some background

A few centuries ago, one form of language use to persuade people became predominant in many areas of Western life—rational argument or logic. It is not that people could not use this before, but it had been mixed in with other ways to convince people as well—primarily through being in social relationships. The Dialogues of Plato from ancient Greece, for example, are a mixture of logical and rational argument with some persuasion through utilizing social relationships—sometimes put together into the term ‘rhetoric’ or a competitive social form of persuasion called ‘dialectic’ (using yes/no questions; see Ryle, 1971).

Socrates (in Plato) typically used social methods of persuasion, including competition and bullying, to get acceptance of his premises, and then used logic on these premises to force a conclusion. We will see later that getting the premises accepted is the major hurdle and the downfall in logic, so Socrates did this through any form of persuasion he could (see Chapter 7). It is a soft form of verbal bullying to get agreement on weak and vague premises that then, through ‘pure logic’, reach a conclusion the listener must agree with socially. So pure logic, rhetoric, and the dialectical methods of persuasion were mixed in together (Ryle, 1971). Box 1.1 gives some idea of this. Try and follow this through as a social interaction (or discourse analysis) rather than as an interplay of ideas (in fact, there is little ‘interplay’).

Box 1.1 The Socratic form of discourse

Socrates: In this way: He says, does he not? “That which appears to each person really is to him to whom it appears.”

Theodorus: Yes, that is what he says.

Socrates: Well then, Protagoras, we also utter the opinions of a man, or rather, of all men, and we say that there is no one who does not think himself wiser than others in some respects and others wiser than himself in other respects; for instance, in times of greatest danger, when people are distressed in war or by diseases or at sea, they regard their commanders as gods and expect them to be their saviours, though they excel them in nothing except knowledge. And all the world of men is, I dare say, full of people seeking teachers and rulers for themselves and the animals and for human activities, and, on the other hand, of people who consider themselves qualified to teach and qualified to rule. And in all these instances we must say that men themselves believe that wisdom and ignorance exist in the world of men, must we not?

Theodorus: Yes, we must.

Socrates: And therefore they think that wisdom is true thinking and ignorance false opinion, do they not?

Theodorus: Of course.

(Plato, 1997, p. 527)

The differences between logic and rationality on the one hand, and social persuasion such as rhetoric or using social consequences on the other, are important to understand, even though they are mixed in real life except for the ‘civilized’ cases we will see in what follows (Guerin, 2016a).

All talk works (or not) because of the social relationships and what people do, but these outcomes can eventually arise from the world itself (the aim of pure rationality) or from our social relationship patterns (social persuasion) and either can be used for persuasion and belief, and also mixed up.

I can persuade you because of what the world will do for you (at least that which my talk suggests) or because of what our social relationship will do. For example: suppose I wanted to get you to buy me some bread from the store.

•Rationality: if you buy me some bread I will give you the money and give you $5 extra. If you buy me bread you can walk to the store and get some exercise. If you buy me bread I will give you money and you can have half the bread as well.

•Social 1: if you buy me some bread I will be so thankful to you. If you buy me some bread I will tell your mother how wonderful you have been. If you buy me some bread I will repay you another day for your kindness.

•Social 2: if you don’t buy me some bread I will be so mad at you. If you don’t buy me some bread I will tell your mother how nasty you have been. If you don’t buy me some bread I will never do anything for you ever again.

•Rhetoric: could you please do me a favour and buy me some bread. I would absolutely love it if you went out of your way and bought me some bread, any sort will do, and you would be my hero. I know you believe in kindness and you are a loving and caring person, so would you please, please, pretty please buy me some bread?

•Ancient dialectic (also see Chapter 7): it is good to help others, right? (“Yes”). And helping others is also good for the one being helpful, is it not? (“Yes”). And would it be good for someone if their friend did not help them? (“No, of course not”). So, would you help me and buy some bread at the store? (“Errr …”)

Notice the differences between these, even though the two social rationales and the rhetoric are mixed up and complex (as is the use of money that is treated as non-social when it is not). Rationality is based on stating outcomes for the listener from the non-social world—what is in it for them, what are the immediate consequences from the world for the recipient (promised). The others are actually also about stating or hinting at the consequences, but those consequences are now social outcomes for the recipient—social relationship consequences not connected to the bread itself (V4.7). If they get the bread then there is nothing in this act itself that is good for them from the world itself, but there are social events (usually afterwards), or a lack of socially punishing events for Social 2, that are the consequences, but they come from the speaker not the bread itself.

This might seem trivial, but it is a huge problem. Getting rid of using social outcomes in life (see Table 1.1) either results in a weakening of our life social relationships or else it directly causes this weakening! And because it is all presented in language, it is all actually social anyway and so the ‘social’ will always seep into the purely ‘rational’ events anyway (V4.3).

We can also see the same for getting someone to believe or agree with something we say (see Chapter 4):

•Rationality: cats are better pets than dogs because you do not have to clean as much. Cats are better pets than dogs because they make less noise. You have to walk dogs a lot.

•Social 1: I would love it if you were like me and thought that cats are better pets than dogs. If we could agree that cats are better pets than dogs everything would be so harmonious between us.

•Social 2: I am sure we can agree that cats are better pets than dogs, since I have always kept cats and love them. I would hate to think that you preferred dogs to cats. I cannot abide people who do not think that cats are better pets than dogs.

•Rhetoric: surely no one but an idiot could imagine that cats are not better pets than dogs. If there is one thing I want you to get right in your tiny brain, it is that cats are better pets than dogs.

•Dialectic: it is not good to spend your time cleaning up someone else’s mess, right? (“No, of course not”). And keeping a peaceful and quiet home is also good for everyone, is it not? (“Yes”). And so, if you had a choice between something both noisy and messy and something both quiet and clean, the latter would be preferable, would it not? (“Yes, clearly”). So, it would be preferable to have a cat over a dog, would it not follow? (“Absolutely! I’m off now to the animal rescue shelter to get a cat”).

This lecturing is not to teach you about the complexities of analysing conversations and discourses (Guerin, 2016a), but to get across one main point, with which you can hopefully agree after all I have just said; that there are differences between ‘rational’ uses of languages and social uses (see what I did there in that sentence?).

This is not a clear or strong division, certainly not in real life, but it tries to make a distinction between how we use language that describes either non-social or social consequences for the listener (whether this is to get them to do or believe something). The fact that the distinction is not very good or clear will actually become important. I will come back to this later, since we will find a constant slippage or seepage between the two when Western rationality attempts to exclude the social. And given that language only has effects no matter what because of social relationships and their consequences, the social is always going to leak into any discourses that try to exclude it, unless we get rid of language altogether (Zen, praxis, just doing things; V4.7).

People could certainly use reasoning and logic prior to their huge rise, but what happened during the (so-called, ironically) Enlightenment was that social forms of persuasion and getting people to do things became actively excluded from many discourses, leaving rationality as the dominant or sometimes exclusive discourse (Foucault, 1970). Rationality and logic were available prior to this, but they became more prevalent; not because people began believing in their superiority initially, but because other forms were excluded as social r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A note on referencing
• 1 The opposite of rational is social, not irrational or crazy: How the ‘social’ got squeezed out of Western history
• 2 How are our behaviours shaped by societal ‘systems’ and ‘structures’?
• 3 The societal ecologies of modern life are our ‘psychology’
• 4 Contextualizing beliefs as everyday language strategies
• 5 Self, identity, consciousness, and meaning as social actions in context
• 6 A new look at Marxism, psychology, and social contextual analysis
• 7 Contextualizing the arts
• 8 Contextualizing religion and religious behaviours
• 9 Weaning yourself off social psychology
• Index