A Grand Challenge for Personality and Social Psychology: Competition, Cooperation, or Co-existence?

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Gerald Matthews¹ 

[1] Institute for Simulation and Training, University of Central Florida, United States

关键词: personality;    social psychology;    methodological pluralism;    biopsychology;    social processes;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01570

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Like two rival siblings, the disciplines of personality and social psychology have common rootsbut an evolving and sometimes difficult relationship (Pettigrew and Cherry, 2012; Lanning, 2017).Both are diverse and have their own internal controversies, but, historically, the field has beendivided according to two worldviews (Cloninger, 2020). Personality trait researchers favor a naturalsciences approach, characterized by a search for general, nomothetic principles for understandingrelationships between quantitative individual-difference variables (Boyle et al., 2008). They aresympathetic to biological explanations for trait variation, expressed in studies of evolutionary bases,behavior and molecular genetics, and neuroscience. By contrast, social constructivists are attunedto qualitative, idiographic studies of the ways in which people interact within a specific socioculturalmilieu, with personality negotiated dynamically “between” as much as “within” people (Hampson,1988). They also favor a humanistic over a natural-sciences orientation, which values efforts bypsychologists to support individual flourishing and social justice (Cloninger, 2020).Neither worldview is monolithic. For example, on the trait side, variation in traits associatedwith the self has been attributed to motivational and cognitive factors rather than directneurological influences (Ryan and Deci, 2017). Experimental social psychology lends itself tonomothetic theories, such as those focused on social cognition. Nevertheless, the tension betweennatural-science and humanistic perspectives (Cloninger, 2020) threatens the unity and integrity ofthe field.

【 授权许可】

CC BY