REVIEW PAPER
Do psychologists study behaviour?
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.
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