Mayo’s Beacon: How Hawthorne, Logical Positivism, and Psychology Shaped Social Exchange Theory

Logical positivism & Vienna Circle

Logical positivism (later and more accurately called logical empiricism) is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism, the idea that our knowledge includes a component that is not derived from observation. It grew from the discussions of the so-called "First Vienna Circle" that...

The Philosophy of Logical Positivism

Classicism, Positivism and Social Defense

Contextualism versus Positivism in Cross-cultural Psychology

I shall to discuss the power of theories to shape our conceptuali>ation of psychological issues. I will contrast two theories: contextualism and positivism. I argue that the ontological principles of contextualism are more helpful than positivism for conceptuali>ing what culture is, and the relation between culture and psychology. Moreover, the ontological principles of contextualism lead to ep...

Social Psychology and Complexity Theory

Whatever our specific substantive interests, I think that most of us in and around social psychology are continually intrigued by some of the almost magical phenomena that occur within our theoretical purview. Take " emergence, " for example. It still interests me, and sometimes amazes me, how individual behaviors emerge from the substrate of neurological and cognitive processing; how interpers...