Individuals as Social Relationships: 18 Ways that Acting Alone can be thought of as Social Behavior

Abstract

This article argues to replace individualistic explanations of behavior with descriptions of social and historical context. Eighteen ways are outlined that playing a guitar alone in a room can be thought of as socially controlled rather than dispositionally controlled. Despite having a skin containing a body, a “person” for the social sciences is a conglomerate of social relationships or interactions that spans space and time. Thinking of people and causes as within a body shapes individualistic biases in our explanations and interventions. Rather than propose a new philosophy, this article reviews 18 concrete ways to begin thinking about people as social interactions and not agentic individuals. This changes the interventions we propose, alters how we view cultural practices, prevents some perennial problems of psychology, and leads the way to integrate psychology in the social sciences. Moving from dispositional explanations to study the historical and social context of social relationships also requires that psychology seriously adapt some of the more intensive research methods from other social sciences.