In this book, we explore research, theory, and practices in psychology with the purpose of identifying ways of doing psychology that are based on a view of human beings as socially and culturally situated persons. The book builds on ideas and strategies that we, together with many colleagues, have developed for navigating the wealth of psychological information and knowledge that is available in modern societies today. Such strategies for navigation are helpful because finding one’s way around contemporary psychology can otherwise be a daunting task: first, because of the sheer number of theories, research studies, and practices, and second, because there are very few unshakeable and universal truths about human psychology. In this, psychology differs from the natural sciences, where many discoveries and theories are universally valid. Psychological theories and practices, to the contrary, have varied across historical time, and they vary today across cultural settings in different parts of the world. A reason for this is that people vary, over time and across the world, because their living conditions and cultural settings vary. Furthermore, psychologists – researchers as well as clinicians – are also people who live and work in a variety of social and cultural contexts. Their lives in these different contexts provide them with different experiences and assumptions about humans which will inevitably influence how they approach and think about those they study or treat. One should therefore not expect to find any single view of humans, or any one fact about psychological properties, to be always and everywhere valid.
What we have just written means that there are no neutral positions for psychologists to write from. Psychologists are always doing their research and carrying out their psychological practice while situated in some cultural, political, and organizational settings, and belonging to some social, sexual, and ethnic categories. There is no neutral position from which to observe and work. And there are no universal humans to study and draw universal conclusions about. The psychology discipline and, therefore, psychologists as a profession have been increasingly criticized for ignoring these facts and writing from an unacknowledged “Western” platform as if it were neutral and universal. Psychologists have also been criticized for misrepresenting some categories of people, whether consciously or not. This critique is currently doing much to reform many ingrained “Western” ideas and practices in psychology internationally. But, of course, we should remember that the critics are just as culturally and politically, and so on, situated as those they criticize. The critics bring in new essential perspectives, but those perspectives are also partial. This is also true of us who have written this book.
We are clinically and academically trained psychologists and have spent most of our working lives in the academy, doing research and teaching psychology undergraduates, master’s students, and doctoral candidates. One of us (Eva) is Swedish and has worked mainly in Sweden and the Nordic countries. The other (Jeanne) is American and has worked mainly in the USA and Southern Asia. One of our common interests as psychologists and researchers has been the psychology of women and gender, which both of us began studying, writing about, and teaching in the 1970s. This interest brought us together in the early 1990s, and since then, we have collaborated on several writing projects. Our interest in questions about gender also very soon and very naturally led to a deepening engagement with more general questions of culture in psychology: the inevitable sociocultural situatedness of individuals and the impact of this situatedness on individual psychology. This is what inspired us to write this book.
In this book, we take seriously what we wrote already about the influence of different cultural contexts on psychologists’ assumptions about humans as psychological beings. Strategies for informed reflection upon these assumptions and ways to identify their consequences had high priority for us when we wrote the book. Just as important was the view of human beings as persons (more about this soon). We therefore have two main ambitions with the book:
- We want to convey strategies and tools for scrutinizing and navigating among psychological theories and practices (research practices and/or clinical practices). The purpose is to give our readers tools with which to judge whether a theory or practice makes it possible to take people’s social and cultural situatedness into account. This is the first ambition.
- The strategies for scrutiny that we describe are based on a perspective on psychology that brings into focus the social and cultural contexts in which persons are embedded. The second ambition is for the book to serve as an introduction to such psychologies.
In the rest of this chapter, we first briefly describe our view of culture and of persons. We then introduce our strategies for informed reflection on psychological theories, methods, and practices. This is followed by the roadmap for the rest of the book.
Culture and Cultural Contexts
In our view, culture is one of the foundational conditions for there to emerge and exist something like what one means by words such as “person,” “humans,” or “humanity.” But at the same time, of course, culture is something that humans have created. This means that there is a kind of circularity regarding culture that might seem confusing: put briefly, culture is both human-created and human-creating. One way of thinking about culture is, therefore, first, as a human-created web of meanings that exists outside of the individual and is part of collective ways of thinking about the world. Secondly, an individual who is a member of a cultural community is, therefore, by definition, as it were, suspended in this local web of meanings (Geertz, Reference Geertz1973). It is this cultural web that provides the conventions, habits, and norms that this individual will encounter from early in life and therefore likely will live by. This, then, means that this cultural web of meanings will be integrated into that individual’s psychological life, as the individual becomes integrated into the community. These webs of meanings differ among communities across the world, and they change with changing circumstances.
However, and this is just as important as what we have just said about webs of meaning: human individuals are no cultural dopes. A human individual is always something more than the surrounding cultural context and rules, just as a human individual is always something more than their biological functions. Human individuals are persons.
Persons
The concept of a person is central to this book. A person is, by definition, part of a sociocultural milieu and is regarded as having certain rights there, as well as certain duties and obligations. Persons can reason, decide on goals, and make choices, and they can reflect on their goals and choices, take actions consonant with them, and change their goals if necessary. And persons are held morally accountable for their choices and actions. However, there is no unanimity, either among psychologists or in other disciplines, about what the word “person” should mean. So, for instance, several understandings of “person” are evoked or implied in contemporary debates on questions about “mind,” “self,” and “consciousness,” as well as debates about the relations between brains, bodies, and individuals. We take up such questions in the book. For instance, in Chapter 4, we consider the many vexed debates about what “mind” is and what its relation is to the person, and what this might mean for psychology. And in Chapter 5, we discuss the equally vexed and long-debated questions about the relations between brains, bodies, and persons, including what can be learned about brain functions in real life from studies done under typically very restricted experimental conditions.
When writing this book, we settled on a definition of “person” that is congenial with the view of culture that we sketched previously and with a view of human beings as socially and culturally situated. The British philosopher Peter Hacker has offered a definition of person that captures what we mean:
While human being is a biological category, person is a moral, legal and social one. To be a person is, among other things, to be a subject of moral rights and duties. It is to be not only an agent, like other animals, but also a moral agent, standing in reciprocal moral relations to others, with a capacity to know and to do good and evil. Since moral agents can act for reasons, and can justify their actions by reference to their reasons, they are also answerable for their deeds. To be a human being is to be a creature whose nature it is to acquire such capacities in the course of normal maturation in a community of like-natured beings.
In our reading, the crucial elements in Hacker’s definition are as follows: Person is a moral, legal, and social category. A person stands in reciprocal moral relations to other persons. A person has the capacity to know and do good and evil, to act for reasons, and to be answerable for their deeds in a community of like-natured beings. To be a person is therefore (at least potentially) to have certain physical and psychological capacities (the individual aspect). It is also to take part in certain kinds of activities and interactions (the interactional aspect). And it is to belong to a social and cultural infrastructure that enables personhood (the social and cultural aspect) (Schechtman, Reference Schechtman2014).
If one wants to understand a particular person and that person’s life, it is therefore not enough to limit one’s studies to the person’s physical and psychological capacities. Neither is it enough to settle for the person’s activities and interactions. One must also take into account the background structures, practices, institutions, and local and general norms that make the other aspects possible; that is, the social and cultural aspects. Different background structures and practices will enable different kinds of personhood; therefore, these structures and practices are as essential as the individual’s physiological and psychological capacities for there to be persons at all. Just as the existence of the social infrastructure depends on the capacities of the humans who built it and keep it going, the capacities of those humans depend on the social infrastructure. The sophisticated cognitive and agential capacities of humans could exist and be developed only within some organized social-cultural setting (Schechtman, Reference Schechtman2014).
Now we should ask who qualifies as a person. A fairly common criterion of personhood is the possession of the sophisticated cognitive and agential capacities that we just mentioned (Wagner, Reference Wagner2019). However, applying this criterion strictly would exclude a substantial number of human beings from being considered persons: very young children, those with dementia, and perhaps also comatose individuals on life support. In our experience, most people do not actually apply this stringent criterion in practice. Therefore, we have chosen other criteria of personhood.
Inspired by Marya Schechtman (Reference Schechtman2014), a US philosopher, and Nils-Frederic Wagner (Reference Wagner2019), a German philosopher, we argue that social embeddedness is the key aspect of personhood. Naturally, this embeddedness could not at the start of a human life be based on any higher-order or sophisticated cognition. Human infants have a long period of dependence on caretakers, and it is through interactions with these caretakers that the infant’s basic cognitive capacities are gradually developed into the capacities associated with full personhood. This means that social embeddedness precedes – and is a prerequisite for – the development of higher-order cognition. Now, as developmental psychologists have shown in recent decades, human babies from birth engage in social interaction; they are social. This sociality is a constant in humans, and it is an essential part of what it means to be a person. Sociality and social embeddedness are therefore unavoidable parts of a person’s life before, and independent of, higher-order cognition (Schechtman, Reference Schechtman2014; Wagner, Reference Wagner2019).
In this view, a baby would qualify as a person, although not as a person who, on their own, could make all the necessary decisions about life. The baby would qualify as a person who is enmeshed with others – its caretakers – who are prepared to act as the baby’s scaffoldings while supporting them in developing increasingly complex cognitive and moral capacities. What about those with dementia or comatose individuals on life support? Should we see them as persons, or have they ceased to be persons? In the view we suggest here, they are still persons. Again, as with babies, think about the attitudes of the people on whom they depend: The loved ones of someone struck by dementia certainly still think about them as a person. It will necessarily be as a person with limited capacities, but still a person. The same is true of someone struck by long-term coma and medical life support. Just as with young children, the person with dementia and the person on life support are scaffolded by others in their social networks. But they are scaffolded while being seen as, and treated as, persons.
This quote from the British psychologist and historian Roger Smith nicely summarizes our view of persons:
…a human mind, whatever its architecture, has concrete existence only in the life and language of a particular time and place – in a particular culture. Whatever the biological arguments, understanding the psychology of a person, from this viewpoint, requires knowledge of what a “‘person” signifies within a language or symbol system. People exist as living social realities not as abstract biological entities.
We share the view of humans as socially situated persons with many others. This view can be found, for instance, in the fields of the psychologies of gender, of racial issues, and of queer theory, in some parts of social psychology, and in the increased interest in decolonial movements among many psychologists, as well as in the recovery movements among and for sufferers of psychiatric disorders. All these fields and movements share the view of human beings as socially and culturally located persons, and they are developing psychological theories and practices that integrate this view in both research and practical psychological work (Allesøe et al., 2025). One tool that enhances this development is the practice of informed reflections on psychology.
Reflecting on Psychology: From the Inside and from the Outside
One of our starting points when writing this book was the insight that to really know psychology as a discipline and as a set of practices, it is necessary to reflect on psychology not just from the inside of the discipline but also, and especially, from its outside. The “inside” is what is provided by textbooks written by psychologists about common psychological topics. Reading such literature is, of course, a good way to learn about psychology. But this insider learning does not reach far enough for our purposes here. One also needs to look in on psychology from the outside. One then asks questions based, for instance, on the philosophy of science, the history of psychology and science, and cultural studies. These questions enable one to find out from where psychological theories and practices emanate, historically and socially, and what have been the social and historical consequences of the theories and practices. For us, one overarching purpose of asking such questions is to help in finding out about the conceptions of human beings that prevail in different parts of psychology and to aid in determining whether or not a theory or practice is compatible with a view of humans as socially and culturally situated persons.
In the book, we offer strategies and tools for informed reflections on, and scrutiny of, subfields, topics, and contested issues in contemporary psychology. Our aim is to help readers choose between existing schools and theories, including research, theory, and practice, by considering how well they fit with a view of persons as socially and culturally situated beings.
It Is Essential That Psychologists Be Prepared to Criticize Their Discipline
We have directed our scrutiny at the kinds of psychologies that are taught and practiced in the “Western” parts of the world. We have done this because these theories and practices have dominated large parts of the world scene of psychology for several decades. Some of them have, on the assumption of universal validity, been exported to very different cultural settings from those in which they were developed. In recent decades, these assumptions of universal validity have come under increasing pressure and critique, and several efforts to move beyond such assumptions have been made. We see this book as part of these efforts. Such developments will inevitably lead to tension and debate – and this is a good thing.
We agree with an increasing number of colleagues in many countries in the world that large parts of contemporary psychology have long been riddled with problematic research practices and theories. At a minimum, by failing to account for the diversity of the world’s peoples, such problematic practices and theories risk making the discipline as well as the profession of psychology less than relevant for most of the world’s population. At worst, such theories and practices risk imposing the psychological measuring sticks, values, and norms of middle-class people in rich “Western” industrialized countries on people who are not “Western.”Footnote 1 However, and just as bad, they also risk imposing the same norms on people in “Western” countries who are not middle class or who do not belong to the dominant ethnic group (Apicella, Norenzayan, & Henrich, Reference Apicella, Norenzayan and Henrich2020; Ibanez, Reference Ibañez2022; Sanches de Oliveira & Baggs, Reference Sanches de Oliveira and Baggs2023). Further, we should not imagine that all “Western” countries share the same values, norms, and measuring sticks. This means that if most psychological research and theory are produced in a very small number of Western countries, all of this research may not be applicable, or accepted as valid, in the other Western countries. While writing this book, we became increasingly aware of these issues and discrepancies. We therefore decided that, in order to give a sense of the origins of the ideas that we incorporate and discuss in our book, we provide the localities (usually countries of origin) of those whose ideas we have found especially interesting and inspiring.
Moreover, beyond these critiques of cultural myopia, several critics have also argued that many ways of doing psychology have long been riddled with logical and conceptual problems, such that they lack conceptual clarity in their uses of central scientific concepts, and thereby also in their research practices. These critics delve into the discipline’s foundational assumptions about humans and about science and question several taken-for-granted practices and ideas (cf. Slaney & Maraun, Reference Slaney and Maraun2007; Slaney, Reference Slaney2023). The works of critics like these have been an important inspiration to us while writing, and the questions that they have posed appear in several places in the book.
The Roadmap of the Book
Part I: Resources for Investigating Psychology
In Chapter 2, Thinking Styles in Psychology, we present a way to reflect upon and scrutinize psychological theories and practices. We use the framework of thinking styles (or thought styles), which was developed by the microbiologist and philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck in the 1930s. A thinking style is the preparedness to see, act, and think in a particular way that characterizes members of cohesive work groups, such as colleagues in a clinic or a research setting. In this view, thinking, acting, and seeing are thoroughly social phenomena that cannot be fully understood without taking context into account. Thus, thinking styles are, by definition, the property of some community of people: a thought collective. Becoming skilled in a field of knowledge includes becoming increasingly socialized into the ways of seeing, acting, and thinking that characterize the thinking style of one’s thought collective. In the chapters that follow, we use this framework as a tool when we describe and critically reflect on subfields, topics, and practices in the psychology discipline.
In Chapter 3, Culture, Communities, and Persons, we present different views of “culture” in the social sciences. We also present several examples that illustrate how cultural habits and life patterns, and even understandings of what it is to be human, vary across the world. And we point to examples of how psychologists in high-income countries have sometimes, without grounds, assumed the universal validity of theories developed by such psychologists, and suffused by Western (usually middle-class) cultural values. On the contrary, these theories may be inapplicable outside Western contexts, as well as in Western contexts outside the well-educated middle classes and dominant ethnic groups. We draw conclusions about the need for psychologists to be aware of how their own locations and national and other identities may shape what they can see and say.
Part II: Exploring Psychological Subfields, Topics, and Techniques
In Chapter 4, Minds in Psychology, the topic is the concept of “mind” and its uses in psychology and philosophy throughout history and today. A reason why it is important to investigate how “mind” is understood in psychology is that, in order to evaluate psychological research, one needs a clear image of the conception of mind that underpins that research. We describe the historical background of the concept itself, as well as changes over time in how the word “mind” has been used, and some differences across languages and cultures today. We identify four historical and contemporary thinking styles – that is, different ways of conceiving of “mind.” We discuss the issues and problems connected with each of these styles.
In Chapter 5, Human Brains and Psychology, we first describe important attributes of human brains such as their complexity, flexibility, and plasticity. We also consider how cultural habits and traditions influence how brains come to be understood. We look at the many metaphors that have been used, and are still being used, to make sense of the brain. Especially interesting is the computer metaphor, which has developed over time but has accrued increasing debate and critique in recent years. Further, we scrutinize how psychologists and neuroscientists talk and write about brains; for instance, we look closely at ideas about what people’s brains are doing when people are doing things: Should brains be seen as active agents that “think,” “feel,” and so on, or should such agency be reserved for humans? We also discuss the use of brain-focused reductionist explanations of human behavior. Finally, we identify and discuss contemporary styles of thinking about brains.
Chapter 6, Thinking Persons, begins by reviewing how thinking has been conceptualized throughout history. We then present two contemporary ideas of how to think about thinking. According to the first idea, thinking takes place in the brain, which is seen as a computational and representational system, often in analogy to how digital computers function. Connected to this view are debates about how thoughts and other mental activities and properties can be represented in people’s minds or brains. According to the second idea, thinking takes place in an interactive and dynamic system that includes the individual’s body and surroundings. These two ideas are based on different definitions of what “thinking” is: Is it something that could only occur inside a person’s brain, or something that may include tools, other people, and other things outside the person? The chapter ends by comparing how different thinking styles about thinking fit with a view of human beings as socially contextualized persons.
Chapter 7, Language and Psychology, begins with a review of theories about the evolution of human language, focusing on biolinguistic and usage-based theories. The body of the chapter is devoted to the study of contemporary language use: How people use words to do things, usually things that involve other people. Such study is often based in the so-called action tradition in language studies. It focuses on language use as arising in people’s joint activities, including how meaning is typically negotiated and determined through both linguistic and nonlinguistic social interactions. Central concepts in these studies are joint activities, coordination, interactive repair, common ground, and social accountability. The chapter also contains a discussion of two ways of conceiving of how words get their meanings: the classical view and the anthropological view. After a discussion of different styles of thinking about language, we end the chapter by presenting suggestions for the psychological study of people’s talk and language use in social situations.
In Chapter 8, Social and Historical Perspectives on Psychological Suffering, we consider people’s experiences of psychological distress and dysfunction. The forms they take, the meanings they are given, the remedies available, and ultimately, the prognosis for recovery all vary widely. We first turn our attention to questions of diagnosis and categorizations of psychological suffering, focusing on the 75-year endeavor to produce a satisfactory version of the DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and some of the conceptual and practical problems it has engendered. We also examine the manifold ways in which mental health diagnoses have permeated everyday conversations, and how they are utilized by many social institutions. The next part of the chapter offers a chronology of treatments, not a few of which would now be regarded as dangerous and destructive. We conclude by describing contemporary consumer-centered approaches that support persons coping with severe psychological distress and their families.
In Chapter 9, Critical Perspectives on Psychologists’ Research Practices, the topic is psychology as a research discipline and what can be learned from intra-disciplinary debates about its research methods. As an example, we use the debates about the recent failures to replicate a number of research findings in psychology. These debates can be seen as a sign of psychologists’ commitment to establish and maintain secure foundations for their research methods. Some suggested explanations for the replication failures are: “p-hacking” and other questionable research practices (QRPs); unreflective and misguided uses of conventional methods, especially statistics; and a lack of conceptual and epistemological knowledge among psychologists. We then look closely at the assumptions that form the basis of the psychological research practices implicated in the replication debates and discuss whether some of those assumptions are problematic.
Part III: Exploring Debates in and about Psychology
Chapter 10, Disagreements and Debates in Psychology’s History, elucidates how theories and practices in psychology are influenced by historical and cultural circumstances and modes of thought. First, we look back to the nineteenth century, when some psychologists were influenced by evolutionary theory and adopted the eugenic framework, with ideas of selective breeding of “good” types of humans. We then give a brief account of psychology and evolutionary theory today. This is followed by a discussion of the history of psychological measurement, and of how, eventually, a wide-ranging imperative to use quantitative methods was established in the discipline. Next is the history of operational definitions. We then take a short tour of the histories of psychology’s words – where they come from, how they change, and the importance of being aware of these changes. In the final subsection, the topic is the history of psychological theories and practices regarding women and gender, and the debates about them.
Chapter 11, Contemporary Debates among Psychologists, covers some issues that are currently being debated in psychology. One message of the chapter is that psychologists should debate foundational issues – debates are necessary in a scholarly endeavor. The first section describes methodological circles: when a research method has built-in assumptions about that which is studied, and therefore always produces data that confirm these assumptions. We then discuss the logical problems of research that uses group averages as a basis for formulating theories about individuals. Then we look into the uses of “variables” in psychology and discuss problems accompanying some of these uses. The widespread practice of statistical significance testing is the next issue we discuss. It has been increasingly criticized over several decades but has remained in place. We end by discussing two ways of understanding and using the concept “concept” in psychology and recommend one of these ways.
Chapter 12, Explanations in Psychology. We begin the chapter with a description of psychological phenomena and the temptations to think of them as “things.” We then discuss whether psychological categories should be seen as natural or human-made. Next, we look at psychological explanations of people’s behavior and experiences and describe contextualized explanations focusing on reasons and interpretations, causal explanations, and abduction, sometimes called inference to the best explanation. We describe and discuss the most important features of these explanatory strategies. We examine some of the limitations of causal explanations built on reductionist assumptions and the seemingly almost inevitable consequence of assuming determinism when using such explanations. We also discuss explanatory strategies that tempt psychologists to reify psychological phenomena such as behaviors or experiences. This means imagining that such phenomena are “entities” inside people’s minds or brains, even though one only has access to the observed behaviors or recounted experiences.
Part IV: Taking Persons Seriously
Chapter 13, Being a Discerning Reader of Psychology. In this chapter, we present ways to scrutinize psychological theory, research, and practice in order to identify those theories and practices that work well and those that are problematic in one or more ways. We first describe conceptual analysis, an investigative strategy borrowed from philosophy. Conceptual analysis enables one to examine the conceptual bases of theories and practices, focusing on logical inconsistencies in the uses of words and concepts. Such analysis is essential because inconsistencies in a theory must be resolved before one begins empirical work. If unresolved, such problems will eventually hamper scientific progress. The second part offers ten questions that are based on the principles of conceptual analysis and aimed at supporting beginners in psychology. Reflecting on these questions is helpful when reading to get acquainted with a field of knowledge and also when planning a study.
In Chapter 14, Studying the Psychology of Persons: Methods, Assumptions, and Commitments, we describe the general characteristics of research methods that are based on a view of people as socially situated persons. These methods go by different names, such as interpretative research, qualitative research, and, in some cases, ethnographic research. We describe the steps in such research: developing a knowledge interest and useful, researchable questions; selecting participants and composing a group to study; deciding how to gather data; and choosing methods for analysis. We discuss common assumptions and commitments in these approaches, such as an interest in what is specific and contextualized in human life, and an interest in people’s language use. The final part of the chapter contains a discussion of what it would mean for psychologists to change their theoretical thinking to such a degree that they need to change their thinking styles, as well as suggestions for how to initiate such changes.
