Psychological Explanations

“Now” is privileged in most psychological theories, which portray their processes as proceeding from moment-to-moment. As in any science, this adherence to contiguous causation hinders an account of phenomena that involve remote events or temporally extended organization. In addition, our scientific discourse is framed by the everyday patterns we have learned in explaining our own actions and those of others, yielding a bipolar constraint of explanatory language. Thus, tripolar relations among organism, environment and behavior are reduced to cause–effect, noun–verb, agent–action. This imposes exclusionary emphases upon organism-based or upon environment-based terms as accounting for behavior. Especially with remote causation or temporal dispersion, implicitly assumed contiguous causation appears to be defended through a practice we have called “dispositioning.” Psychological Explanations: Analyzing Our Own Interpreting Philosophers and scientists often speak or write as if their explanations and understanding have transcended those of ordinary people. Accordingly, we psychologists tend to consider our formal and theoretical explanations of behavior to be more adequate than lay persons’ explanations—as specifying the variables shown to influence behavior or as identifying processes that are understood as underlying it—and thus immune to the errors we discern in ordinary-language explanations. Of course, the conceptual/analytic examination of “cause” or explanation enjoys a long and rich history, originating in philosophical writings such as those of Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Traditionally, psychologists have drawn upon that literature to evaluate, compare, or justify interpretive positions. AUTHORS’ NOTE: Douglas P. Field died in August 2001 after a summer-long struggle with an infection that proved impervious to antibiotics. At that time he held a post-doctoral position in the Department of Psychology, SUNY at Stony Brook, working with Howard Rachlin. The manuscript for this article had been a balanced collaborative effort up to that time, with the initial library research on attribution theory being the topic of Doug Field’s Preliminary Examination in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. at Temple University. During the ensuing months he generated an initial draft of the manuscript in close consultation with the second author. Please address all correspondence to Philip N. Hineline, Department of Psychology, Weiss Hall, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122; Email: [email protected]. Please do not cite or quote without permission.