Has Psychology a Future?

Abstract

I consider that psychologists have a duty to explore their own field, to create hypotheses about the behavior of animals, especially human, and to test these and look for possible causal relationships at the level of acting, thinking, perceiving humans in their environmental context Our agenda should be at this level, not one that depends on waiting for reductionist theories at some other level, be it neural, genetic, nuclear, or especially artificial To go about this work, a developmental approach, in a systems setting—the organism-environment system—holds great promise and has the dignity of successful precedents in other sciences All of behavior—perceiving, acting, problem solving, communicating with others—should be our province The hallmarks of human behavior can and should be studied in all of these areas It is their development that offers a road to understanding We should continue to look for theories of considerable generality, however elegant a model may be in a tiny realm If we cannot find universal laws, we may still come up with unifying principles Not so long ago, in another keynote address, George Miller told us that it was time to “give psychology away” (Miller, 1969) I am afraid that that is exactly what we are doing, though not in the sense that Miller intended Let us keep psychology, and recapture the old excitement, looking for the causes in behavior itself, and not giving up on the grand unified theory