REVIEW PAPER
Do psychologists study behaviour?
 
More details
Hide details
1
Faculty of Psychology, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Wroclaw, Poland
 
 
Submission date: 2020-05-07
 
 
Final revision date: 2020-05-14
 
 
Acceptance date: 2020-05-14
 
 
Online publication date: 2020-07-03
 
 
Publication date: 2020-07-03
 
 
Health Psychology Report 2020;8(4):385-390
 
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Although social psychology is defined as the science that explores the social behaviour of people, today’s re-search, which is devoted to this matter, is primarily (or almost exclusively) focused on highly specific behav-iours that Baumeister, Vohs and Funder wittily called “finger movements”. The point is that psychologists most often ask people to fill in various scales and questionnaires and/or to imagine that they found themselves in some situation and answer how they would behave in it. The author of the article asks a question about the rea-sons for this state of affairs, and also claims that psychology should return to examining real human reactions, and not only verbal declarations about how a person would react in a particular situation.
 
REFERENCES (19)
1.
Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Funder, D. C. (2007). Psychology as the science of self-reports and finger movements: Whatever happened to actual behaviour? Perspectives on Psychological Sci-ence, 2, 396–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745....
 
2.
Cramer, J. A. (1998). Enhancing patient compliance in the elderly. Role of packaging aids and moni-toring. Drugs & Aging, 12, 7–15. https://doi.org/10.2165/000025....
 
3.
Deutsche Bank (2014). Financial report of Poles 2014. Plans for 2015. Retrieved from https://www.deutschebank.pl/ra....
 
4.
Doliński, D. (2010). Touch, compliance, and homophobia. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 34, 179-192. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919....
 
5.
Doliński, D. (2018a). Is psychology still a science of behaviour? Social Psychological Bulletin, 13, ar-ticle e25025. https://doi.org/10.5964/spb.v1....
 
6.
Doliński, D. (2018b). Social psychology should be a science of feelings, thoughts and behaviour. Social Psychological Bulletin, 13, article e26133. https://doi.org/10.5964/spb.v1....
 
7.
Erceau, D., & Gueguen, N. (2007). Tactile contact and evaluation of the toucher. Journal of Social Psychology, 147, 441–444. https://doi.org/10.3200/SOCP.1....
 
8.
Goldman, M., Kiyohara, O., & Pfannensteil, D. A. (1985). Interpersonal touch, social labeling, and the foot-in-the-door effect. Journal of Social Psychology, 125, 143–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/002245....
 
9.
Grzyb, T. (2016). Why can’t we just ask? The influence of research methods on results. The case of “bystander effect”. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 47, 233–235. https://doi.org/10.1515/ppb-20....
 
10.
Grzyb, T., & Doliński, D. (2017). Beliefs about obedience levels in studies conducted within the Mil-gram paradigm: Better than average effect and comparisons of typical behaviors by residents of different countries. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1632. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.....
 
11.
Haynes, R. B., Taylor, D. W., & Sackett, D. L. (1979). Compliance in health care. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
 
12.
Heisenberg, W. (1927) Ueber den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Me-chanik [About the descriptive content of quantum theoretical kinematics and mechanics]. Zeitschrift für Physik, 43, 172–198. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF0139....
 
13.
Hornik, J. (1987). The effect of touch and gaze upon compliance and interest of interviewees. Journal of Social Psychology, 127, 681–683.
 
14.
Kaplan, H. R. (1987). Lottery winners: The myth and reality. Journal of Gambling Behavior, 3, 168–178. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF0136....
 
15.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: an experimental view. New York: Harper and Row.
 
16.
Motyl, M., Demos, A. P., Carsel, T. S., Hanson, B. E., Melton, Z. J., Mueller, A. B., Prims, J. P., Sun, J., Washburn, A. N., Wong, K. M., Yantis, C., & Skitka, L. J. (2017). The state of social and per-sonality science: Rotten to the core, not so bad, getting better, or getting worse? Journal of Per-sonality and Social Psychology, 113, 34–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa00....
 
17.
Ossowski, S. (1962/1967). O osobliwościach nauk społecznych [About the peculiarities of social sci-ences]. In S. Ossowski (Ed.), Dzieła [Works] (Vol. 4, pp. 125–316). Warszawa: Państwowe Wydaw-nictwo Naukowe.
 
18.
Peng, K., Nisbett, R. E., & Wong, N. Y. C. (1997). Validity problems comparing values across cul-tures and possible solutions. Psychological Methods, 2, 329-344. https://doi.org/10.1037/1082-9....
 
19.
Sabate, E. (2003). Adherence to long-term therapies. Evidence for action. Geneva: World Health Organ-ization.
 
Copyright: © Institute of Psychology, University of Gdansk This is an Open Access journal, all articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.
eISSN:2353-5571
ISSN:2353-4184
Journals System - logo
Scroll to top