Exploring the Environmental and Social Foundations of Human Behaviour
6 total works
Based on the author’s forty years of experience in psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences, How to Rethink Psychology argues that to understand people we need to know more about their contexts than the dominant modes of thinking and research presently allow. Drawing upon insights from sources as diverse as Freud, CBT, quantum physics, and Zen philosophy, the book offers several fascinating new metaphors for thinking about people and, in doing so, endeavors to create a psychology for the future.
The book begins by discussing the significance of the key metaphor underlying mainstream psychology today – the ‘particle’ or ‘causal’ metaphor – and explains the need for a shift towards new ‘wave’ or ‘contextual’ metaphors in order to appreciate how individual and social actions truly function. It explores new metaphors for thinking about the relationship between language and reality, and teaches the reader how they might reimagine the processes involved in the act of thinking itself. The book concludes with a consideration of how these new metaphors might be applied to practical methods of research and understanding change today.
How to Rethink Psychology is important reading for upper-level and postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of social psychology, critical psychology, and the philosophy of psychology, and will especially appeal to those studying behavior analysis and radical behaviorism. It has also been written for the general reading public who enjoy exploring new ideas in science and thinking.
This groundbreaking book shows how we can build a better understanding
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.
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’.
Developed from the author’s long teaching career, How to Rethink Human Behavior aims to cultivate practical skills in human observation and analysis, rather than offer a catalogue of immutable ‘facts’. It synthesizes key psychological concepts with insights from other disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, economics, and history.
The skills detailed in the book will help readers to observe people in their contexts and to analyze what they observe, in order to make better sense of why people do what they do, say what they say, and think what they think. These methods can also be applied to our own thoughts, talk and actions - not as something we control from ‘within’ but as events constantly being shaped by the idiosyncratic social, cultural, economic and other contexts in which our lives are immersed.
Whether teaching, studying, or reading for pleasure, this book will help readers learn:
- How to think about people with ecological or contextual thinking
- How your thinking is a conversation with other people
- How to analyze talk and conversations as social strategies
- How capitalist economies change how you act, talk and think in 25 ways
- How living in modern society can be linked to generalized anxiety and depression
How to Rethink Human Behavior is important interdisciplinary reading for students and researchers in all fields of social science, and will especially appeal to those interested in mental health. It has also been written for the general reading public who enjoy exploring new ideas and skills in understanding themselves and other people.
This book attempts to ‘shake up’ the current complacency around therapy and ‘mental health’ behaviours by putting therapy fully into context using Social Contextual Analysis; showing how changes to our social, discursive, and societal environments, rather than changes to an individual’s ‘mind’, will reduce suffering from the ‘mental health’ behaviours.
Guerin challenges many assumptions about both current therapy and psychology, and offers alternative approaches, synthesized from sociology, social anthropology, sociolinguistics, and elsewhere. The book provides a way of addressing the ‘mental health’ behaviours including actions, talking, thinking, and emotions, by taking people’s external life situations into account, and not relying on an imagined ‘internal source’. Guerin describes the broad contexts for current Western therapies, referring to social, discursive, cultural, societal, and economic contexts, and suggests that we need to research the components of therapies and stop treating therapies as units. He reframes different types of therapy away from their abstract jargons, offering an alternative approach grounded in our real social worlds, aligning with new thinking that challenges the traditional methods of therapy, and also providing a better framework for rethinking psychology itself. The book ultimately suggests more emphasis should be put on ‘mental health’ behaviours as arising from social issues including the modern contexts of extreme capitalism, excessive bureaucracy, weakened discursive communities, and changing forms of social relationships.
Practical guidelines are provided for building the reimagined therapies into clinics and institutions where labelling and pathologizing the ‘mental health’ behaviours will no longer be needed. By putting ‘mental health’ behaviours and therapy into a naturalistic or ecological social sciences framework, this book will be practical and fascinating reading for professional therapists, counsellors, social workers, and mental health nurses, as well as academics interested in psychology and the social sciences more generally.
The world of mental illness is typically framed around symptoms and cures, where every client is given a label. In this challenging new book, Professor Bernard Guerin provides a fresh alternative to considering these issues, based in interdisciplinary social sciences and discourse analysis rather than medical studies or cognitive metaphors.
A timely and articulate challenge to mainstream approaches, Guerin asks the reader to observe the ecological contexts for behavior rather than diagnose symptoms, to find new ways to understand and help those experiencing mental distress. This book shows the reader:
- how we attribute ‘mental illness’ to someone’s behavior
- why we call some forms of suffering ‘mental’ but not others
- what Western diagnoses look like when you strip away the theory and categories
- why psychiatry and psychology appeared for the first time at the start of modernity
- the relationship between capitalism and modern ideas of ‘mental illness’
- why it seems that women, the poor and people of Indigenous and non-Western backgrounds have worse ‘mental health’
- how we can rethink the ‘hearing of voices’ more ecologically
- how self-identity has evolved historically
- how thinking arises from our social contexts rather than from inside our heads.
Offering solutions rather than theory to develop a new ‘post-internal’ psychology, How to Rethink Mental Illness will be essential reading for every mental health professional, as well as anyone who has either experienced a mental illness themselves, or helped a friend or family member who has.