Understanding People provides an overview and critique of current psychological assumptions about people and what differentiates them, and replaces them with a set of ideas taken from social constructionism. It begins with an examination of contemporary theories, then explores the critique of the social constructionists, before laying out the basis of an understanding of human action and behaviour, drawing on phenomenology and personal construct theory. Using everyday experience to illustrate the issues in personality theory (Is behaviour situation-specific? Why do we have a sense of self? Is there an unconscious?), this book will breathe life into an area of psychology that is so often arid, and, in the eyes of students, divorced from their world.

Auteur

TREVOR BUTT is Reader in Psychology at the University of Huddersfield, UK.

Contenu

PART I: FROM PERSONALITY TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
The Dimensions of Personality
Personality Theories 1: Trait/Biological and Cognitive/Social Approaches
Personality Theories 2: Psychodynamic and Humanistic Approaches
The Social Constructionist Critique of Personality
PART II: AN EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH
Interpretive Understanding: From Social Constructionism to Existential Phenomenonology
The Causes of Behaviour
The Sense of Self
The Unconscious
Psychological Reconstruction.