Turning Psychology into Social Contextual Analysis: Exploring the Environmental and Social Foundations of Human Behaviour

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.