Gergen's Four Presumptions

The existence of a basic subject matter
- Modern psychology was designated as the science of studying the mind; it looked at attitude, motivation, emotion, and personality
- This brought up issues about the interaction between mind and body and how individuals influence or are influenced by society 
- Social constructionism rethinks the individual-society relationship and attempts to avoid these issues

The ultimate discovery of universal properties
- Modern psychology looked for universal laws and principles regarding behaviour, but a lot of these laws were due to cultural factors 
- Social constructionism wants to bring about cultural awareness to identify these taken-for-granted assumptions 
- Social constructionism assumes that all knowledge is from the perspective of an individual

An emphasis on experimental method
- Modern psychology separates the objective from the subjective; it attempts to follow the research methods of the natural sciences 
- Researchers would disregard qualitative and idiographic methods and focus only on laboratory research
- Social constructionism, on the other hand, uses methods such as interviews and discourse analysis to research the construction of realities 
- They don't claim to discover universal truths

A belief in research as progressive
- Modern psychologists claim that as more truths were revealed about the world, the better we would be able to understand it 
- Knowledge evolves through paradigm shifts 
- Social constructionists believe that there is nothing "natural" that must be revealed; everything is constructed by cultural and ideological frameworks 
- The individual is viewed as a product of the social world