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6. Putting Agency Into Psychology
- State University of New York Press
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133 Chapter Six Putting Agency into Psychology A MAJOR THEME in this book has been disciplinary psychology’s failure to develop an adequate conception of human agency because of its untenable joint commitments to an overly reductionistic science and a too facile professionalism. To create the perception of success in both these ventures, psychology has committed itself to an impossibly and wrongly detached, unsituated, and reductively automated view of the human agent.This is an agent outside of and separate from history, culture, and society and yet mysteriously able (especially with the help of psychological professionals) to cope, solve, even to dominate her or his situation and circumstances. Jointly committed to incommensurable strands of hard determinism and libertarianism through its scientist–practitioner rhetoric of reductively scientific but somehow life-relevant practice, psychology has become entangled in the determinism–free-will debate in ways that appear sensible only if one views all of this through the rose-tinted lenses of disciplinary psychology. Our major purpose in this book has been to argue for, and theorize about, a conception of agency as embedded and situated, yet also emergent within historical sociocultural contexts, which in turn are nested in the biological and physical world. This is an in-the-world agency conceptually divorced from the detached, disavowed, and devalued agency pragmatically, but incoherently, endorsed by disciplinary psychology. It is an agency that does not slide chameleon-like between the conflicting poles of hard determinism and radical freedom to suit the purposes of disciplinary psychology. It is an agency that takes its meaning and much of its constitution from its 133 134 Psychology and the Question of Agency sociocultural embeddedness, yet always is enabled and constrained by biological and physical factors, conditions, and processes. Nonetheless, while thus constituted, enabled, and constrained, it is not reducible to any of these other factors, conditions, and processes. Once emergent within its developmental trajectory, a path that is initiated ontogenetically by the birth of a human biological infant into the already existing physical and sociocultural world, it always may figure into its own determination. This intelligible self-determination is what defines agency as the always -present, even if not always-exercised, capacity for understanding and deliberative reasoning that we humans use to select, frame, choose, and execute intentional behavior in the world. It is what makes human agents both determined and determining, in the sense promised, but mostly undelivered , by previous compatibilist theorizing. It is this capacity for agentic determination that manifests in the uniquely human interpretive, reflective understanding of our personal existence that constitutes our sense of self as a core understanding from which we interpret, understand, reason, and act agentically. The complex of physical, biological, and sociocultural factors, processes, conditions, and contexts that gives rise to the human agentic condition is nested and interactive across both phylogenetic evolution and history, and within ontogenetic development. As such, but especially when considered together with the emergent human agency it fosters, this complexity is not amenable to the various reductive programs of disciplinary psychology. This much we hope to have established in the earlier chapters of this volume. What remains to be done in this final chapter is to ask what difference our conception of situated, emergent, and deliberative agency might make to our understanding of psychological research and practice and to the broader sociopolitical impact of psychology on contemporary Western society . As indicated at the end of the previous chapter, it is not our intention to offer any set of recommended methods for the conduct of such research and practice or for any social, political advocacy that might seem consistent with our views as expressed herein. As most students of psychology know, the discipline’s literature is awash in such recommendations, many of them both exacting and detailed.What we want to offer in this chapter is a series of interpretive demonstrations and suggestions that will make clear what our conception of human agency has to offer to psychological research and practice and to an understanding of interactions between psychology and its broader society.What we plan to do is illustrate the kind of reconfigurations that result when our conception of situated, emergent, and deliberative agency is assumed and brought to bear on salient programs of research and practice within contemporary psychology and society. Once such reinterpretation and reconfiguration have been achieved, methods that psychologists might use to work within these reconfigured programs will be generally apparent. [54.224.52.210...