Toward a Process Approach in Psychology
Stepping into Heraclitus' River

Offers an entirely new way of thinking about how psychology works and how it constructs knowledge, using a process-based approach.

Paul van Geert (Author), Naomi de Ruiter (Author)

9781108490900, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 July 2022

300 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.5 cm, 0.7 kg

'Van Geert and de Ruiter provide psychological scientists with a timely admonition: our discipline's mainstream research practices and assumptions have yielded a base of knowledge and view of reality wholly out of touch with the time- and context-sensitive dynamics of people and their functioning. Written with exceptional clarity, precision, and scope, this remarkable new book adds immeasurably to the growing list of scholarly works challenging science's orthodox ontology of substance in favor of a process ontology.' David Witherington, Associate Professor, The University of New Mexico, USA

Psychological science constructs much of the knowledge that we consume in our everyday lives. This book is a systematic analysis of this process, and of the nature of the knowledge it produces. The authors show how mainstream scientific activity treats psychological properties as being fundamentally stable, universal, and isolable. They then challenge this status quo by inviting readers to recognize that dynamics, context-specificity, interconnectedness, and uncertainty, are a natural and exciting part of human psychology – these are not things to be avoided and feared, but instead embraced. This requires a shift toward a process-based approach that recognizes the situated, time-dependent, and fundamentally processual nature of psychological phenomena. With complex dynamic systems as a framework, this book sketches out how we might move toward a process-based praxis that is more suitable and effective for understanding human functioning.

Introduction
1. Change, the final frontier
2. A (selected) foundation for a process approach
3. The goal of Socrates
4. Esteeming entities
5. A person acting amongst persons
6. Cliffhangers and utilitarian infants
7. Causes, kings and interventions
8. (Compl)explanation and King Alfonso's lament
9. What's in a name?
10. (Un)certainties
11. Troubled waters of Hercalitus' river?
12. Psychological science as a complex dynamic system.

Subject Areas: Child & developmental psychology [JMC], Psychology [JM], Research methods: general [GPS], Research & information: general [GP]