Critical Review

Critical Review

Critical Review

Psychology is a modern discipline in a state of crisis. As a science still in its "pre-paradigmatic" stage of development, psychology has not yet settled on a paradigm (or model) of behavior that satisfies, even tentatively, the fundamental questions that have been raised about psychological life. This century has seen a period of proliferation of theories and methods in the social sciences, leading to a confusing state of affairs for the person who wishes to be introduced to current scientific perspectives on human nature.

 One effort to simplify matters in the social sciences has been to narrow the field to include only those viewpoints that represent a strictly "natural scientific" approach--that is, an approach that sees its subject matter as consisting of phenomena that can be documented empirically and explained ultimately by theories of "cause-and-effect." In psychology, this has given rise to such approaches as behaviorism, sociobiology, physiological psychology, and even cognitive psychology.

Contrasting to the physical sciences, where over time there has been declining numbers of contending paradigms, in the social sciences it seems that their numbers have traditionally improved. As of yet, we have no Newton having yet been hit on the noggin by some proverbial apple and seeing some unifying principle.

Underlying the continuum of theories of the human condition are indispensable differences in suppositions in the direction of the scope to which human deeds are the product of free will or determinism, nurture or nature. To what extent are social fates preprogrammed by our hereditary composition, the social order into which we are acculturated, the communal positions of our parents, the ways in which we were socialized, or by that slice of social history happening to match up with our biographies? To what degree can human behavior be in due course explained in terms of biology and biological inclinations? Predispositions of our personality types? The social roles within which we interact with others?

And what would a just right social theory even look like? In the middle of other things, it would see coming exactly who would do what as well as when and where. To even have such a theory in the social sciences would entail the non-existence of free will, the capability of individuals to settle on their own fates. The actuality that social theories, when contrasted with the theories of astronomy and chemistry, have such incomplete predictiveness can be taken as a symptom of optimism, that humans have a quantity of free will and are not pre-programmed by their genes or enculturation. But this is not to mean that there is no predictiveness. Similar to meteorology's probabilities of rain (e.g., a 30% chance of rain means three out of ten areas will experience precipitation), the intention here is to make predictions for a meticulous type or group of individuals. For instance, our theory may forecast that of those 18 to 29 years of age with less than 4 years of college experience, highly religious Catholics are twice as likely as feebly religious Protestants to ...