The Sociocultural Turn in Psychology

The Contextual Emergence of Mind and Self

Suzanne Kirschner, Jack Martin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231519908
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

The sociocultural turn in psychology treats psychological subjects, such as the mind and the self, as processes that are constituted, or "made up," within specific social and cultural practices. In other words, though one's distinct psychology is anchored by an embodied, biological existence, sociocultural interactions are integral to the evolution of the person.

Only in the past two decades has the sociocultural turn truly established itself within disciplinary and professional psychology. Providing advanced students and practitioners with a definitive understanding of these theories, Suzanne R. Kirschner and Jack Martin, former presidents of the American Psychological Association's Division of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, assemble a collection of essays that describes the discursive, hermeneutic, dialogical, and activity approaches of sociocultural psychology. Each contribution recognizes psychology as a human science and supports the individual's potential for agency and freedom. At the same time, they differ in their understanding of a person's psychological functioning and the best way to study it. Ultimately the sociocultural turn offers an alternative to overly biological or interiorized theories of the self, emphasizing instead the formation and transformation of our minds in relation to others and the world.

Part I

Discursive and Constructionist Approaches

1 Public Sources of the Personal Mind

Social Constructionism in Context

ROM HARRÉ

Social constructionism has emerged as the generic name for a cluster of ways of conceptualizing the projects of psychology and sociology. It includes certain recommendations about the methodology appropriate to attaining an understanding of the mental and social lives of human beings, by human beings. While it shares some insights with postmodernism, there are important ways in which the social constructionist viewpoint is very different. Two, in particular, stand out. It is no part of the social constructionist approach to deny that there are any universal aspects of human life, or that, in a certain sense, there are some essential attributes of persons and processes. Nor is it any part of the social constructionist approach to deny that there are better and worse representations of the social world and of human psychology. In short, social constructionism, while at a very great remove from positivistic mainstream psychology, is not radically relativist.

Social Constructionist Contributions
to Developmental and Cognitive Psychology

There are major social constructionist contributions to two different but interconnected domains of psychology, developmental and cognitive. The way the social constructionist thesis is applied and developed is rather different in each. In the former, the results of construction are fairly long-term and stable attributes of individual persons. In the latter, the results of construction are ephemeral attributes of the flow of jointly created sequences of meaningful actions. There is a link: only if the individuals who are members of a certain social/cognitive world are so formed as to be capable of certain kinds of joint action are collective expressions of psychological phenomena possible. There can be a winning goal only if the members of the club can play football, and that requires that football be a culturally recognized activity.

The Social Construction of Minds

In the context of developmental psychology, we can easily discern a movement one might call “psychologists against biological determinism.” Whence come our cognitive skills, emotional propensities, and repertoires of personality displays? Following Vygotsky, social constructionists believe that it has already been empirically demonstrated that such cognitive skills as remembering, deciding, and such social propensities as the tendency to put on an angry display in certain situations, to organize one’s sense of individual identity in a certain way, and so on, are appropriated and privatized by individuals from patterns of intimate social interactions. There are both local and universal features of social processes from which higher mental functions are appropriated.

The first basic thesis of the social constructionist point of view is simply stated: individual psychological skills and capacities are derived from participation in collective psychological phenomena, in the manner described by Vygotsky (1962). Insofar as social practices are culturally and historically diverse, there will be local variations in such individual skills. As Wittgenstein (1953) emphasized, there is a human form of life, however various are the tribal variations on it. A person is necessarily embodied, though what forms of embodiment are regarded as acceptable vary widely.

According to social constructionists, the human brain is one of the tools people use to accomplish their cognitive projects, just as a spade is one of the tools people use to accomplish their horticultural projects. As Luria (1981), Tsunida (1985), and others have demonstrated, the brain is shaped up for the tasks it is used to perform.

There are two kinds of constraints on the kinds of minds that Vygotskian processes can induce in a human being. The human brain does have an inherited architecture, the importance of which has become very clear against the background of attempts to construct machines capable of artificial intelligent action. The way vast amounts of data are maintained in each type of system is evidently completely different. While human beings, confined to using their brains as the computational device, cannot perform certain kinds of information processing that are performed by machines, it has proved impossible so far to build a machine that performs creative cognitive tasks as a human being does. The other limiting factor is set by the history of a culture. What kinds of cognitive practices and affective reactions are implicit in the legitimate practices of a social order? There are limits to the sort of being that can be created by Vygotskian appropriation from this cultural and anatomical here-and-now.

The Social Construction of Psychological Phenomena

In the context of cognitive psychology and the psychology of emotional displays and feelings, there is another movement, one we could call “psychologists against radical individualism.” The origin of this movement is different from that of the Vygotskian developmentalist school. It arises from asking the question: Are cognitive and emotional phenomena all and only attributes of individual persons? For the phenomenologically inclined, psychological phenomena might be sequences of mental states, or even, for some reductionists, sequences of material states of the brains and nervous systems of individual organisms. Commonsense reflection on what ordinary psychological descriptive terms refer to can start one thinking along constructionist lines. Do we not sometimes come to a decision in the course of a public conversation? Surely jealousy is often part of a complex pattern of interpersonal actions and relationships? The theoretical identification of a domain of psychological phenomena that are neither patterns of large-scale collectivities, such as revolutionary movements, nor attributes of individuals, such as disloyal thoughts kept to oneself, has been a major achievement of authors like Shotter (1990). In this sense, psychological phenomena are socially constructed.

Once this idea has taken root new research dimensions are opened up. Studies of remembering as an interpersonal phenomenon have proliferated in recent years; these include the work of Middleton and Edwards, reported in their Collective Remembering (1990), and the remarkable studies by Dixon (1996) on the difference in success levels in recalling events by older people when they are required to recall individually, from their success in similar tasks when carried on collectively. In the collective condition older people fared as well as younger folks. These studies have shown empirically that the constructionist point of view is certainly vindicated for the psychology of remembering. Mapstone (1996) has explored the patterns of problem-solving techniques that are to be seen in joint action when two people collaborate in attacking a challenge.

Further developments along these lines have forged a close link between discourse analysis and psychology. If some substantial part of our cognitive activities is conducted collectively, the natural place to look for evidence of this is in conversations. A valuable methodology has emerged from taking up Austin’s (1962) performative account of language use and the various analytical concepts he developed, such as the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of saying as doing. Since narrative conventions often shape conversations into stories (Bruner 1990), there is a good case for merging narratological analysis and cognitive psychology, for example in studying how patterns of reasoning are rendered more or less acceptable, and how beliefs are induced (Harré, Brockmeier, and Mühlhäusler 1999).

Social and Semantic Conventions Replace Laws

The social constructionist take on such topics as the psychology of the emotions is just one of the paradigm shifts that follow from a fundamental change of theoretical orientation. For nearly a century psychologists framed their theories, their methodologies, and their interpretative and explanatory discourses exclusively in terms of cause and effect. For the most part this was not the concept of “causality” as it is used in the natural sciences, but a philosophical innovation from the eighteenth century, causality as regular concomitance; this is the analysis proffered by David Hume (1748). A sequence counts as causal in the natural sciences only if a causal mechanism can be found or, when unobservable, plausibly modeled. Correlations are not causes! Physicists postulate active agents, such as charges, as the sources of dynamic processes. Positivists, determined to eschew anything that seemed speculative, gave a new impetus to the use of the Humean conception of causality in the first half of the last century. The most important step in the move to a social constructionist point of view has been to drop the Humean causal metaphysics of the positivist school in favor of normative explanations. This means that psychological processes are to be interpreted largely as the result of the management of meanings in accordance with the rules and conventions of the relevant practice. Intentionality (meaning) and normativity (conformity to rules and conventions), not cause and effect, need to be adopted as the framing concepts of psychological studies. This leads us back again to the root metaphor of cognition as conversation.

These points have been made many times in recent years, notably by Billig (1987), Edwards and Potter (1992), Moghaddam (1998), Nightingale and Cromby (1999), Radden (1996), Searle (1995), Shotter (1990), and a number of others. Such is the power of selective filtration in defense of a dying paradigm, however, that it is only a mere caricature of social constructionism that has been taken up and then rejected by many psychologists, comfortably established in the old paradigm. The fault is not only with the defenders of the old scientistic paradigm, however. Some authors have interpreted social constructionism as being more or less identical with postmodernism. While both movements are set against positivism in any form, and rightly suspicious of the scientistic character of a good deal of mainstream psychology, the positive claims of social constructionism fall short of the radical relativism of postmodernism.

What Social Constructionism Is Not

What anchors a social constructionist analysis? Surely a great many storylines could be offered as hypotheses about the possible organizing principles of some stretch of social interaction? Which is the correct one? Before that question can be asked, or even made intelligible, the very idea of alternatives presupposes that something is common to both. What criteria determine that two or more narratological analyses of what happens when some people getting together at some time and place are in fact referring to something that retains its identity through different interpretations? If the phenomena are the meanings, and the meanings are the products of interpretations, does not the diversity of actual and possible interpretations entail that a like diversity of phenomena could be created at that time and place?

Even if a good account of what the common bearer of different interpretations is could be given, another conundrum would emerge. Bearing in mind that the analysis offered by a social psychologist of some incident—say, by using the concepts of cognitive dissonance—is also a story, on what basis can this claim to be a privileged account? Surely the accounts offered by the actors are equally worthy of our attention? What then becomes of the idea of “scientific truth” and of the best representation of the phenomena and their mode of genesis?

Postmodernists would say that no account available from whatever source is more worthy of the attention of those who study social life than any other. Social constructionists, for the most part, would say that some accounts capture psychological reality better than others, all the while conceding that more than one psychological reality may be created in some sequence of actions, and that each of these can nevertheless be psychologically and socially real. On what would such a claim be based? Choice among putative explanatory storylines can be made only through attention to the further unfolding of psychologically relevant social interactions. For example, how do we decide which version of the past is the more robust for a family, given that several versions of the past are offered by differently situated family members? What the family does next will throw light on that question, even though what they do next is as much a product of interpretative procedures as anything else. The range of interpretations is constrained by all sorts of factors, one of which is the collectively arrived-at version of the past. “Going to the match” may have all sorts of interpretations, but “visiting Florida Disneyland” is not one of them.

An ingenious observer could discern many possible storylines in some strip of life. However, the people living that strip may take themselves to be following only one. Mere ingenuity of interpretation does not inflate psychological reality; however, in any given strip of life there may be more than one reality produced. It is important to emphasize the insight that the same sequence of actions, for which certain criteria of identity can be drawn on, may be the bearer of more than one psychological reality. The action of kissing can be used to perform all sorts of acts, from displays of affection to betrayal in the garden of Gethsemane. Actions and acts are not in one-to-one correspondence. If meanings—that is, acts—are constitutive of social and psychological reality, then the same action sequence may be the bearer of more than one act sequence, and so of more than one social and psychological reality.

Illustrations of Social Constructionist Research

In the remainder of this paper I shall set out the Vygotskian thesis in more detail, and follow up with some illustrations of researches into the social construction of some common psychological phenomena. It will become evident, I hope, that neither the simplistic universalism of “mainstream” positivistic psychology nor the extreme relativism of some recent distorted expositions of the constructionist point of view can be sustained. Psychology is a hybrid science in two ways. First, it must find metaphors for bringing together the exploration of the intentionality of human action, be it private or public, with studies of the neurophysiology of the human brain and nervous system, by means of which such action is accomplished. It must also seek the universal in the local and the particular, without achieving a false generality by developing concepts of a higher and higher order of abstraction, and without elevating the local and the particular to the exclusive status of all that there is.

The Paradox of Statistical Methods

One of the problems with the old-paradigm psychology that social constructionist theory and its associated analytical methodology replace is the use of statistical methods, applied to mass data. It is close to a necessary condition for the publication of a psychological study in the majority of journals that there be a statistical analysis of “results,” as a proof of a psychological hypothesis. This is very strange.

Why? The basic metaphysics of old-paradigm psychology requires that psychological processes be attributes of individuals, and that sequences of states, actions, or whatever be interpreted within a cause-and-effect framework. As mentioned above, the causal concepts that seem to be in use in most published interpretations of results are dominated by a long-abandoned philosophical theory, the regular concomitance theory of David Hume.

Enter statistics (Danziger 1990). A statistical analysis is supposed to reveal the most likely causal hypothesis, that is, the best-supported corr...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• The Sociocultural Turn in Psychology: An Introduction and an Invitation
• Part I: Discursive and Constructionist Approaches
• Part II: Hermeneutic Approaches
• Part III: Dialogical Approaches
• Part IV: Neo-Vygotskian Approaches
• List of Contributors
• Index