COMPARISON OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Comparison of the Social Sciences

Comparison of the Social Sciences

Thesis Statement

“Behaviorism is the philosophy behind the science of behavior. This philosophy includes determining whether a science of behavior is possible.”

Introduction

In contemporary psychology and anthropology, each discipline's mainstream has come to adopt distinct theoretical orientations for the explanation of human behavior and the human condition, and these divergent orientations have led to mutual critique. Note that the description that follows temporarily sidelines the interdisciplinary efforts that are designed specifically to either overcome or answer these mutual critiques, in an effort to draw out in high relief the different types of scientific and social explanations that tend to be offered in each discipline. These interdisciplinary efforts and their work will be discussed subsequently.

Discussion

Centrality of Individual Psyches

Brent Slife and his colleagues have written extensively on the taken-for-granted assumptions in contemporary psychology in order to analyze the theoretical approaches in the field and offer alternatives to the normative stances. Their work is useful in understanding how these assumptions vary from those normative assumptions that one might find among anthropologists. Perhaps one of the most relevant analyses in this comparison is atomism. Atomism can be applied to separate levels of psychological analysis, from individuals to individual constructs, but for present purposes one could say that atomism assumes that individuals are akin to hermetically sealed units, self-functioning and self-contained. In other words, under this assumption, an individual's psyche is perceived to be a self-contained unit that can be studied under a microscope, as it were, by itself, in order to discover its nature. This assumption makes the context in which the psyche develops or operates from day to day less important, since the psyche is perceived to contain all of the necessary characteristics or attributes worthy of its investigation. Thus, the individual becomes the primary unit of analysis for mainstream psychology.

This assumption becomes clear in a consideration of prominent Western psychological conceptions of personality. The “big five” personality enterprise, for example, is built around the notion of five salient factors that are said to be descriptive at the highest level of personality traits located in individual psyches. Since the emergence and psychometric validation of this model, much psychological research has been devoted to explaining individual psychological differences in many domains and how these variations relate to these personality traits, including the advocating of job selection and training according to individual personality profiles. Importantly, this entire conception rests on the explanatory value of individual psyches and their “content.” The way that culture often factors into these explanations is on the order of affecting the personality trait outcomes in individuals. Within such a framework and in mainstream psychology in general, culture is primarily conceived of as an explanatory variable for individual psychological variation. This can be juxtaposed to the conceptions of culture in anthropology, as well as the interdisciplinary efforts to integrate psychological and cultural phenomena in research agendas. Suffice it to say that the assumption of atomism and the resulting conception of individuals as hermetically ...