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This paper attempts to introduce the idea of an Open Source theory of human behavior; a theory emerging out of the capabilities and possibilities offered to humans through activities on the Internet. The Internet offers new types of connections and links between distributed human thinking that can transcend traditional boundaries and hierarchies. Open Source activities began in limited hacker/programming communities, the most famous of which is the Linux development project. These communities began to develop activity trajectories and ethical perspectives that stretched beyond programming—including the importance of sharing information early and often and inviting participants to be co-owners in the developing project. Open Source theory has the potential to play a role in our understanding of the evolution of the human mind as a separate, uniquely human phenomenon, acting as a counterweight to the more biologically oriented explanations offered by much of evolutionary psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With point of departure in a phenomenological analysis of the body as it is described and conceptualized in the diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, this paper argues that the diagnosed behavior associated with bodily movement exposes an often-neglected expressive aspect of the body. Beyond the pre-reflective dimension of the experiential body, it is argued that the expressive dimension of the body is associated with movement as a utopian or an incorporeal aspect immanent to the body. In this perspective, the phenomenological notion of the body is critically connected to a fundamental question of the materiality of sensation, which calls for a rethinking of the Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder-diagnosed body that gives privilege to the aesthetic and expressive aspects of sensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of psychology commonly maintain that early American functional and behaviorist psychology was based upon two materialist achievements of the 19th century: the neurophysiological location of psychological faculties and the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet early American functional and behaviorist psychology was based less upon these achievements than upon the principle of strong psychological continuity associated with them, according to which the psychology and behavior of humans and animals differ only in degree but not kind. This paper charts the historical development of the association between materialism and principles of strong continuity, noting that the neurophysiological location of psychological faculties and the theory of evolution by natural selection did not provide especially good reasons for preferring theories committed to strong psychological continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although freedom has been of grave concern to people for centuries, it has surprisingly not been a central topic in psychology. The goal of this article is to begin constructing a theoretical framework for addressing freedom issues in terms of free action, which is generally defined as doing as one sees fit without coercion or constraint. Insofar as free action is a form of human action, it is first necessary to conceptualize action. The paper begins by conceptualizing action from a systems perspective in terms of interrelated individual, social, and cultural processes. Next, free action is conceptualized as a form of action that involves particular ways of structuring individual, social, and cultural processes. The article ends with some implications of this conceptualization of free action for continued theory building and research on the psychology of free action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arocha (2021) discusses the "replication crisis," arguing for models that allow a greater complexity in the relationship between variables and processes. In this comment, we identify a more fundamental issue: the impossibility of eliminating interpretation issues with operational definitions and increased rigor in the measurements of variables and processes. Interpretation is at the core of (a) human action and (b) scientific endeavor. First, considering Vygotsky, we argue that all higher mental processes are sign mediated, influencing psychological research with humans. Second, that the understanding of research results also involves sign mediation and, therefore, it is nonneutral. We suggest two alternative approaches. There needs to be an increase in research that delivers a detailed description of psychological phenomena. Additionally, it is necessary to increase the elucidation of contextual-embeddedness research. Taking into account the two levels of meaning will underline psychology as a scientific discipline of complex phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of schema was advanced by Frederic Bartlett to provide the basis for a radical temporal alternative to traditional spatial storage theories of memory. Bartlett took remembering out of the head and situated it at the enfolding relation between organism and environment. Through an activity of “turning around upon schemata,” humans can create ruptures in their seamless flow of activity in an environment and take active control over mind and behavior. This paper contextualizes Bartlett’s concept of schema within broader theoretical developments of his time, examines its temporal dimensions in relation to embodied action and memory “reconstruction,” shows how these temporal dynamics are later abandoned by early cognitive “schema” theories which revert to the metaphor of storage, and explores strategies by which we might fruitfully bring schema back into psychology as an embodied, dynamic, temporal, holistic, and social concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neoliberalism reaches beyond economic policy and material conditions and reformulates the subject and psychological life and therefore is best understood as an attitude toward science, knowledge making, and subjectivity. In a neoliberal climate, markets give us truth and individuals are encouraged to be self-concerned agents rather than members of a polis. Thus, at the very moment that neoliberal policies transfer responsibility to individuals, there is a simultaneous increase in surveillance in order to reinstall certain patterns of human behavior. Mental health research and practice risk becoming commodities dedicated to enforcing this logic. In this article, we explore medical neoliberalism in some of its recent manifestations: global mental health interventions, routine depression screening, and the monitoring of social media to assess mental health. We also consider the ways in which popular reforms in the mental health field are founded on neoliberal assumptions and may be abetting these ideological aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike biology textbooks, psychology textbooks do not present autonomous facts of psychology but introduce students to the need for evidence in accounts of psychological knowledge. This paper concerns the range of ways in which textbooks deal with areas where there is knowledge in many sites in addition to academic psychology, using four examples from stress and health. Type A behaviour pattern is presented in detail in textbooks but not as established psychology; coping and health in students are dealt with by a change of genre which allows the readers' concerns and knowledge to be placed outside science; stress is given origins in the psychological laboratory with other origins diminished, and then treated as an established entity; only post-traumatic stress disorder is taken for granted and not questioned, that is, it is given entity status without origins being provided and has no history of making within the textbooks themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an interdisciplinary communication-theoretical perspective to evaluate the impact on the self of acute communicative complexity. Here, complexity is seen as a factor of the contingency (or risk) which is embedded in constructions which social actors make in a multifaceted social environment. Without recourse to transcendental models, the aim here is to examine the references of the self and its relationship with cognitive autonomy (as distinct from social freedom). Such referentiality and autonomy are contingent in the sense that they differ in each actor and in each environment. This cognitive autonomy must also he located in an environment with reference to other actors. Meaning is conceptualized as a temporarily stabilized social semantic which is 'constructed' by means of communications between cognitively autonomous actors in an environment known as society but without contact with an objective world 'beyond' it. Such contingent communications cannot establish direct 'contact' with a putatively stable reality or horizon common to all, but operate by means of complex fictions which are in turn temporarily constructed and require constant revalidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the insights of Leendert P. Mos regarding the recurring issues in the history of psychology. Reformation of psychology as a science of the brain; Proposal on the attempts to disentangle the study of the brain and behavior from ancient speculations; Provision of information through the objective studies of behavior in relation to the concepts of survival value.

In response to Lamiell’s (2018) commentary arising from my claim that both character and personality belong to “the discourse of individual differences” (Banicki, 2017, p. 56) some further clarifications are provided. At first, an interdisciplinary project lying behind my original article is sketched and the phrase “individual differences” elucidated as having a non-technical meaning far broader than that connected with individual differences as a specific psychological research paradigm. Then, in turn, Lamiell’s criticism of the notion that the latter can serve as a sole ground for personality psychology is briefly summarised. An attempt is made to simultaneously emphasise the conceptual and logical depth of this criticism and to put into question some of its far-reaching consequences concerning the applicability (or lack thereof) of population-level data at the level of the individual. Finally, a concise remark is made about a specifically philosophical (rather than technically psychological or even psychometrical) approach to the situationism debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use and teaching of experimentation in psychology ought to accompany a discussion of what is within and what is beyond the reach of the method. I address this question by outlining the necessary restrictions that are prerequisite for conducting an experiment. The restrictions include establishing a fixed goal, the fulfillment of which represents successful participation in the experiment, a finite set of possible expressions for satisfying the goal, and a fixed assignment between each possible expression and how it should be performed. These restrictions entail rules that determine what counts as good participation (evaluation), and rules that determine whether a behaviour counts as participation at all (inclusion). Participants’ conformity to the rules makes experimentation possible and, more importantly, maintains the experimenter’s attention on features of performance. This selective attention, in turn, neglects participants’ capacities for adopting and violating rules, and possible alterations in their goals and interpretations. While these capacities fall beyond the scope of experimental psychology, their recognition is necessary for encountering what is not already understood at the start of a research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose conviction narrative theory (CNT) to broaden decision-making theory in order to better understand and analyse how subjectively means–end rational actors cope in contexts in which the traditional assumptions in decision-making models fail to hold. Conviction narratives enable actors to draw on their beliefs, causal models, and rules of thumb to identify opportunities worth acting on, to simulate the future outcome of their actions, and to feel sufficiently convinced to act. The framework focuses on how narrative and emotion combine to allow actors to deliberate and to select actions that they think will produce the outcomes they desire. It specifies connections between particular emotions and deliberative thought, hypothesising that approach and avoidance emotions evoked during narrative simulation play a crucial role. Two mental states, Divided and Integrated, in which narratives can be formed or updated, are introduced and used to explain some familiar problems that traditional models cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exercise of self-control is of great significance in people’s daily lives and in the organization of social institutions. The reasonableness of the self-control concept, however, has been challenged by recent developments in cognitive, behavioral, and neurosciences that identify human behavior as a result of complex automatic processes generated by people’s environments. Collating more data on self-control and developing new theoretical approaches is crucial to meeting this challenge. Still, this article argues that a conceptual analysis of the meaning of self-control is also needed. Reflecting on recent work in philosophy, it discusses how self-controlled behavior is characterized not only by distinct causal mechanisms, but also by fundamental normative evaluations. Four conceptualizations of self-control will be presented to highlight why the corresponding self-control failures are essentially also normative failures. Furthermore, it discusses how the normativity of self-controlled behavior can contribute to further theorizing in social psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the traditional branches of Western practical philosophy, Marxist practical philosophy, is still the mainstream philosophy in contemporary China. It provides not only a new understanding of human nature, mind, behavior, and environment, but also an alternative perspective for the study of psychology. It is from this perspective that activity theory in the former Soviet Union and “practice” discussions in China try to integrate Marxist practical philosophy with psychology. Based on these attempts, we advocate the introduction of “practice” into psychology and the understanding of all psychological problems as starting from “practice.” First, “practice” is defined as people’s creative activity and a way of human existence. The structure of “practice” is then divided into three hierarchies: reflexive practice, cognitive practice, and social and cultural practice. Finally, two examples are chosen to explain how to research psychology from the viewpoint of Marxist practical philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the pervasive, but insufficiently examined assumption of instrumental rationality in psychology. Instrumental rationality has five characteristics: there is a sharp separation between means and ends; ends are subjective preferences and means are strategies or tools; the effectiveness of means is central; means are dispensable when ineffective; and actors are independent of the means. Psychology's almost exclusive reliance on means-ends explanations of human behavior is called instrumentalism. Instrumentalism encourages perceiving everything as means toward one's ends, adopting an exploitive stance toward persons and the environment, and becoming alienated from others and the world, and it effectively obscures and distorts non-instrumental activity. A constitutentends framework is presented in which ends are inseparable from means and actors identify with or embody means rather than use them in pursuing goals, which confers meaning, coherence, and cumulativeness on the activities. The article concludes that instrumental action is subordinate to constitutive action in optimal human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Fishbein and Ajzen's theory of reasoned action has been a leading theory in social psychology for the last few decades, it also has been an object of criticism for much of that period and subject to definitional issues about what an attitude is. One of the main recent criticisms is that the theory is not falsifiable. In contrast, I argue not only that the theory makes risky predictions, and hence is falsifiable under reasonable standards of falsification, but also that at least one of its assumptions has actually been falsified. This specific argument is used to set up a more general argument that psychologists tend to subscribe to a naïve falsificationist viewpoint, invalidly use this viewpoint to evaluate theories, and thereby prevent important empirical research from being performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positioning theory opens up a new dimension in the psychology of interpersonal encounters, through explicit attention to the role of rights and duties in the management of action. People are positioned or position themselves with respect to rights and duties to act within evolving storylines, and on the basis of claims about relevant personal attributes, the discursive process of prepositioning. Some recent applications of positioning theory are presented, ranging from simple interpersonal encounters, through positioning in a complex public but limited legal struggle, to the positioning techniques used to justify civilian causalities in warfare, to the analysis of examples of the discourses by which large-scale social entities position themselves in relation to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we contend that many of the problems delineated in this special issue on positive psychology stem from an unexamined philosophical premise--its ontology. The world of 'ontology' is vast and somewhat ill defined, but here we mean simply assumptions of what is ultimately real and fundamental, especially regarding the self. We first clarify and compare two major ontologies of the self, one that we argue underlies and spawns problems for positive psychology and one that we will describe as a promising alternative for the project of positive psychology. We focus on three important features of this project: (1) commitment to an ideal of the 'disinterested observer'; (2) emotional satisfaction as a key conception; and (3) the tendency to view human phenomena as decontextualized from culture, history, and even physical situations. These features will display both how one set of ontological premises has underlain mainstream positive psychology and how the alternative offers a fresh perspective that addresses many issues within the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Character is central to positive psychology's efforts to understand and promote human flourishing. Despite the importance of character and ubiquitous references to Aristotle, virtue theory remains underdeveloped in positive psychology. This article elaborates three key aspects of virtue ethics for understanding flourishing: goodness, the unity of character, and character types. Positive psychologists have not developed a substantial concept of what is good, which is essential because virtues are defined as the enduring personal qualities necessary for pursuing particular goods. Positive psychologists present virtue in a fragmented manner, focusing on a few 'signature strengths,' whereas virtue ethicists generally emphasize the unity of character and the development of a full range of virtues. Because positive psychologists have not recognized the four character types in addition to virtuous character, they often misconstrue the continent character as virtuous, and many of their descriptors of the good life do not differentiate well between the virtuous and the vicious character types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Bickhard's interactivism along with philosophical hermeneutics, we outline a plausible ontology of human action and development that might serve as a metatheory for positive psychology. Our nondualistic metatheory rests on a distributed notion of agency. The kinds of morally imbued social practices that are identified by hermeneutic theorists constitute one level of agency. At the first level of agency, persons are already committed, at least by implication, to folk psychologies that cover positive emotion, positive traits, and positive institutions. Higher levels of agency and knowing emerge through the process of development. The higher knowing levels incorporate the capacity for conscious self-reflexive awareness, which permits the person to consciously deliberate and form theories of the good person and the good life. These more consciously formed positive folk psychologies are always in a dialectical relationship with the more implicit and embodied understandings of the good life as manifested in social practices, emotional experiences, and habitual thoughts. We suggest that this framework helps to account for the 'diversity of goods' that underlie our lives and to clarify the relationship that the professional positive psychologist will have with his or her native folk psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of constructionism's chief pragmatic goals is to facilitate relationships that have transformative potential. According to Kenneth Gergen, one important theoretical tool towards that end is relational theory, the construing of human behavior in terms of dialogic processes. We trace the meaning of 'dialogic' and 'transformative' through different constructionist traditions and argue that these terms are used in a relatively narrow sense, as compared to an alternative approach we are suggesting. Moreover, we propose that the usual narrow construal of these concepts has the unintended consequence of undermining the central constructionist goal of facilitating transformative relationships. We present an empirical example that illustrates (1) how people's conception of their self as a collection of social scripts draws their attention to and reinforces the accretion of scripts; (2) how this accretion can get in the way of transformation; and (3) how a broader conception of a 'dialogic' self can open up more direct, transformative relational possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]