[FRIAM] Turning Psychology into a Social Science

[Steve Smith]

On 1/24/23 3:55 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> I am currently browsing the millions of books in the Berlin state 
> library. They have so many books that they are a "closed stack" 
> library where you have to order every book you want to read (unlike 
> most open-stack university libraries). One of the books I have 
> stumbled upon today is named "Turning Psychology into a Social 
> Science" by Bernard Guerin, a professor of psychology at the 
> University of Southern Australia in Adelaide.
You can't just ask chatGPT the question "what does Bernard Guerin have 
to say about Turning Psychology into a Social Science?" ?   I'm guessing 
OpenAI *hasn't* ingested that work so it would have derive it's answer 
from reviews or synopses and quotes and references from other works?
> The idea in his book is to focus on the social interactions that 
> determine the behavior and shape human actions. Similar to the 
> fundamental idea we have discussed earlier that subjective experience 
> can be understood by the particular slice of the world someone has 
> perceived.
>
> IIRC it was this discussion that made me think that cinemas are just 
> machines to solve the hard problem of consciousness: they show us what 
> it is like to be someone else by revealing us all the essential social 
> interactions and contexts that shaped the behavior of a person.

I really like this way of characterizing it.

Mary and I discuss often the value and utility of literature in a 
general education.  She and I have somewhat complementary tastes in 
literature and non-fiction but we both appreciate the others' and gain 
something from the discussions/readings/quotes we share from one 
another.    For example, Mary has a strong fascination with various 
forms of social abuse and in particular political incarceration.   For 
example, she just finished Gustaw Herling's memoir " A World Apart"...  
a Pole who was put into the Soviet prison system *before* the start of 
WWII with Germany...  as a Pole, he was fighting their (then ally) 
Germany and therefore considered an "enemy of the (Soviet) state".

I have also held the un(der)founded opinion that a great deal of what we 
consider to be a *mental* illness is actually a *social* illness:  the 
cognitive dissonance experienced with one's social context can be 
something "wrong" with both/either the individual or their context.