Brady Wagoner

The Experimental Methodology of Constructive Microgenesis

Psychologists congratulate themselves in telling their discipline’s history as a linear progression to its present state, as if psychology was purely rational and free from all historical contingency. In so doing we close ourselves to past ideas that were unjustly left behind and which can make a significant contribution to psychology today. The word ‘experiment’, for example, has taken on a very narrow meaning in contemporary psychology. We are told that for something to be an experiment there must be an independent and dependent variable, a large random sample of participants, and a statistical analysis of scores. These requirements were foreign to psychology in the first half of this last century and only became social norms through influences outside of psychology, such as the military and education (Danziger, 1990).

Bartlett’s concept of schema in reconstruction:

The concept of schema was advanced by Frederic Bartlett to provide the basis for a radical temporal alternative to traditional spatial storage theories of memory. Bartlett took remembering out of the head and situated it at the enfolding relation between organism and environment. Through an activity of “turning around upon schemata,” humans can create ruptures in their seamless flow of activity in an environment and take active control over mind and behavior. This paper contextualizes Bartlett’s concept of schema within broader theoretical developments of his time, examines its temporal dimensions in relation to embodied action and memory “reconstruction,” shows how these temporal dynamics are later abandoned by early cognitive “schema” theories which revert to the metaphor of storage, and explores strategies by which we might fruitfully bring schema back into psychology as an embodied, dynamic, temporal, holistic, and social concept.

Narrative form and content in remembering.

Narrative is the primary medium through which experience is represented, remembered and shared with others. It has the tendency to unify experience in an abstract linear form. The degree to which this is done is designated narrative form. Mori uses a multidimensional single case analysis to explore how the form of a narrative differs between an experience of real contact with the environment and an experience communicated by another or a ‘real’ experience repeated several times in conversation. I commend Mori’s experimental setup as modeling everyday life activities and for arriving at a theory that applies to all cases. However, I argue (using data from my own experiment on narrative and remembering) that the idiographic approach can be fruitfully supplemented with (1) an analysis of the sample as a whole and (2) narrative content in addition to form.

Representations from the Past: Social Relations and the Devolution of Social Representations

Psychological life is subject to the influence of a constructed and potentially reconstituted past, as well as to future anticipated outcomes and expectations. Human behaviour occurs along a temporal trajectory that marks the projects individuals adopt in their quests of human action. Explanations of social behaviour are limited insofar as they exclude a historical concern with human purpose. In this paper, we draw on Bartlett’s notion of collective remembering to argue that manifest social relations are rooted in past events that give present behaviours meaning and justification. We further propose an epidemiological time-series framework for social representations, that are conceptualised as evolving over time and that are subject to a ‘ratchet effect’ that perpetuates meaning in a collective. We argue that understanding forms of social behaviour that draw on lay explanations of social relations requires a deconstructive effort that maps the evolutionary trajectory of a representational project in terms of its adaptation over time. We go on to illustrate our proposal visiting data that emerged in an inquiry investigating Maltese immigrants’ perspectives towards their countries of settlement and origin. This data reveals an assimilationist acculturation preference amongst the Maltese in Britain that seems incongruous with the current climate of European integration and Maltese communities in other countries around the world. We demonstrate that a historical concern with regard to this apparent behaviour helps explain how Maltese immigrants to Britain opt for certain forms of intercultural relations than others that are normally preferable. We demonstrate that these preferences rely on an evolved justification of the Maltese getting by with foreign rulers that other scholars have traced back to the medieval practice of chivalry.

The (Street) Art of Resistance

This chapter focuses on the interrelation between resistance, novelty and social change. We will consider resistance as both a social and individual phenomenon, as a constructive process that articulates continuity and change and as an act oriented towards an imagined future of different communities. In this account, resistance is thus a creative act having its own dynamic and, most of all, aesthetic dimension. In fact, it is one such visibly artistic form of resistance that will be considered here, the case of street art as a tool of social protest and revolution in Egypt. Street art is commonly defined in sharp contrast with high or fine art because of its collective nature, anonymity, its different kind of aesthetics and most of all its disruptive, “anti-social” outcomes. With the use of illustrations, we will argue here that street art is prototypical of a creative form of resistance, situated between revolutionary “artists” and their audiences, which includes both authorities and society at large. Furthermore, strategies of resistance will be shown to develop through time, as opposing social actors respond to one another’s tactics. This tension between actors is generative of new actions and strategies of resistance.

Collective memory and social sciences in the post-truth era:

The past has never been as relevant for the present as it is in today’s Post-truth world. Not just because many of our political leaders are promising to bring us back to a past that never existed – the Great America of Trump, the Lost Empire of Farage or the French Resistance of Le Pen – but because it seems more and more likely that they are bringing us back to the past as it actually happened – a past where populism successfully brought nationalist leaders to power. In this context, it seems particularly crucial to understand how we relate to our history, how we learn from it and the consequences it may have for the world we live in. These are the questions this special issue explores by adopting a cultural psychological perspective on collective memory – the lay representations of history – and proposing both theoretical and empirical contributions. In this editorial, we will try to first make the case for the political and social importance of collective memory. Second, we will argue why theoretical discussions – not just empirical research – are necessary to tackle these issues. Third, we will discuss the role we believe, cultural psychology should play in the current context and the dangers of turning it into a field disconnected from social and political realities. Finally, we will present the contents of this issue and how we hope it tackles some of the problems raised in this editorial.

Towards a cultural psychology of metaphor: A holistic-development study of metaphor use in an institutional context

This article asks the question how do we interpret the role of metaphors in human life, from the perspective of cultural psychology. Taking inspiration from two articles by Carlos Cornejo, which outline a holistical-developmental theory of metaphor in contrast to the dominant cognitive-linguistic paradigm, we provide a case study of metaphor use in relation to organisation change. The case is part of a larger study of structural changes enforced within the Danish religious organisation, Indre Mission. Case extracts from two different interviews with the same employee, in which the same metaphor is used with different meaning, are analysed in relation to context and development (on both micro- and ontogenetic levels). This analysis leads to the conclusion that a metaphor is understood through the particular complex situation in which it is used. In other words, rather than a conceptual interaction, this article proposes seeing metaphor use as a situated act of imagination in which the person experiences certain properties of the metaphor.

Culture & Psychology: The first two decades and beyond

The twentieth anniversary of Culture & Psychology offers an occasion for us to reflect on the development of ideas within the journal and the discipline of cultural psychology at large, as part of a look towards their future. In other words, we aimed in this special issue to create a ‘prospective retrospective’. This introduction to the special issue has two objectives: first, it describes the results of a survey distributed among the cultural psychology community about how they understand the discipline, its fundamental sources and questions that it should address for its future. Second, it provides a preview of the different contributions to the special issue, which themselves highlight key articles in the journal’s history and how ideas found in them can be further developed for the future of cultural psychology today. Thus, it was our intention to promote the integration of ideas through time, an ethos that Culture & Psychology has advocated since its founding 20 years ago.

From Crisis to Creativity: Towards a Psychology of Creating

Abstract The present paper argues that crisis talk has been rampant in psychology since its beginning. This is so because it serves a powerful rhetorical function – ‘if we are in crisis we must do x to get out of it’. In fact, being in crisis is the state of any progressive discipline, where new evidence is brought to light and new ideas are put on offer. This paper then turns to the specific conceptual and methodological issues facing the psychology of creativity and offers some suggestions for moving the sub-discipline forward. It proposes dropping the study of ‘creativity’ as a noun, and instead focusing on the concrete process of creating and evaluating the products of that activity.

A systemic approach to cultural diffusion and reconstruction

This chapter explores the conditions and processes through which culture is reconstructed and diffused within and between social groups. It revisits the ideas of early diffusionist anthropology, in particular, the framework developed by Frederic Bartlett in his unjustly neglected book Psychology and Primitive Culture. In his framework, culture is conceptualized as heterogeneous, systemic and changing patterns of activity mediated by both individual and group processes. Furthermore, any society must be conceptualized in time, existing in a state of tension between stability and change, conservation and construction. A major catalyst for change is ‘culture contact’, whereby new cultural elements are introduced into a social group from outside, simulating constructive efforts to integrate them into its ways of life.