Psychology and the Question of Agency by Jack Martin


Psychology and the Question of Agency
Title : Psychology and the Question of Agency
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0791457265
ISBN-10 : 9780791457269
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 196
Publication : First published May 1, 2003

Disciplinary psychology has failed to achieve a coherent conception of human agency. Instead, it oscillates between two differing conceptions of agency that are equally untenable: a scientistic, reductive approach to choice and action, and an instrumental approach that celebrates a romantic notion of free will. This book examines theoretical, philosophical psychology and argues for a historically and socioculturally situated human capacity for choosing and acting in ways not entirely determined by culture and/or biology. The authors present a detailed developmental theory of how agentic capability emerges from the pre-reflective activity of humans in a real physical and social world.

Psychology and the Question of Agency Reviews

  • Timothy Darling

    This is not a book for the easily bored or anyone who fears getting in over their head. I do highly recommend it to anyone well versed in psychology ... and I do mean well versed.

    The biggest drawback to my reading it is that I am not. However, the authors work hard to draw attention to the fact that the psychological community largely gives credibility back to the idea of personal agency. The meaning of agency seems relatively simple: the idea that we have freedom of choice.

    We are not absolutely free, that is, our freedom is not the only element in the mix. The authors posit that out of the infant development of memory and imagination inexplicably emerges the ability to decide. That decision is mitigated by biological and sociological influences but is, nevertheless individual and ultimately unpredictable.

    Human agency both effects and is effected by sociocultural forces placing the humanity of humanity squarely in a social context. In other words in their model, it is impossible to fully understand a person aside from their culture, family, and political, or indeed from the biological forces that interact with human personality. But what psychology needs to account for is the irreducible choice. They go a long way to keep it from being mystical, so they wrap it in terms like irreducible and emergent.

    Not everyone will agree with the necessity of the quasi-collectivist angle, but the withdrawal from the pretensions of the psychological community that, according to the authors, tries to treat as if they are a conspiracy to dehumanize their science. It is true that the effort to reduce humanity to deterministic, non-sentient chemistry and physics deserves its own has to have something to offer.

  • Austin Miller

    This book is very cleanly written and clearly organized but it is slow to get its point(s) across. The book spends pages and pages explaining certain background topics. Maybe it is because I am a Psychology major and have heard lots of this before, or perhaps because I am LDS and agency can be explained in one simple page that I find this book to be way too lond and repetitive and slow. I love the Gospel: it is amazing how such simple truths are known to even infants in the church and yet academic experts struggle for millenia to try and explain it with science.