Bernard Guerin - Turning Psychology into a Social Science

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 peoples 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.

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.

Exploring the environmental and social foundations of human behaviour

Series editor

Bernard Guerin

Professor of Psychology, University of South Australia

Can you imagine that everything people do, say, and think is shaped directly by engaging with our many environmental and social contexts? Humans would then really be part of their environment.

For current psychology, however, people only engage with metaphorical internal environments or brain events, and everything we do somehow originates hidden in there. But what if all that we do and think originated out in our worlds, and what we call internal is merely language and conversations that were also shaped by engaging in our external discursive, cultural, and societal environments?

Exploring the Environmental and Social Foundations of Human Behaviour is an exciting new book series about developing the next generation of ways to understand what people do, say, and think. Human behaviour is shaped through directly engaging in our diverse contexts of resources, social relationships, economics, culture, discourses, colonization, patriarchy, society, and the opportunities afforded by our birth contexts. Even language and thinking arise from our external social and discursive contexts, and so the internal and brain metaphors will disappear as psychology becomes merged with the social sciences.

The series is therefore a-disciplinary and presents analyses or contextually engaged research on topics that describe or demonstrate how human behaviour arises from direct engagement with the worlds in which we are embedded.

In this series:

How to Rethink Mental Illness: The Human Contexts Behind the Labels: Volume 1

How to Rethink Human Behavior: A Practical Guide to Social Contextual Analysis: Volume 2

How to Rethink Psychology: New Metaphors for Understanding People and Their Behavior: Volume 3

Turning Psychology into Social Contextual Analysis: Volume 4

Turning Psychology into a Social Science: Volume 5

Turning Mental Health into Social Action: Volume 6