Turning Psychology into Social Contextual Analysis
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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 fi nd 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.
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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.
