Looking at Behavior and Seeing as a Psychologist

Abstract

Aqreeing with recent calls for more emphasis on observation and description, it is nevertheless argued that merely tabulating behavior does not address the basic conceptual and methodological problems responsible for the lack of a viable descriptive approach in social psychology. Social psycholonists are far more adept at quantifying or countinq behavior than in explicating what is of social or psychological interest in the phenomena studied. Thus, it is argued that the more basic issue is not the counting of behavior but the articulation of a psychological perspective. Graduate education, by stressing the direct observation and study of phenomena as they are lived, could promote greater appreciation of the difference between counting behaviors and seeini as a psychologist. The mental blindness of nearly every academic social psychologist for any observable fact of human nature is so unfailing and complete as almost to compel admiration. (Edwin Bissell Holt, 1935, p.172)