mgm
New Member
Posts: 21
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Post by mgm on Oct 27, 2017 18:53:20 GMT
Traditional psychology has always been focused on finding direct links between human behaviour and their specific causes and it has operated under the assumption that the causes of these behaviours are ‘within’ each individual. For example, if I act out aggressively towards someone then there is clearly something going on inside of me which has caused this behaviour. In this way traditional psychology could be considered very ‘individualistic’, because it focuses on individuals in isolation, and also ‘reductionist’ in the sense that it is breaking down or reducing a behaviour into a direct cause-effect relationship and searching for those discrete internal causes.
Social constructionism takes a different approach that is somewhat opposed to the traditional perspective, in that it doesn’t consider behaviour as resulting from a direct cause-effect relationship originating within each individual, but rather as a product of the influence of the complex system of norms and values that we as a society have constructed and continually perpetuate. So instead of looking at individuals in isolation when attempting to explain behaviour, social constructionists are more inclined to look at society as a whole and its normative patterns to try and determine how various factors may have combined to influence behaviour in a given situation.
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