Psychology without People
In a recent general critique of Psychology, Catherine Raeff (2019) follows up on Michael Billig’s (2013) analysis, pointing out that psychological science, in its currently dominant style, is a science of things and not of people. In brief, it is a science–or a collection of sciences–in which people (supposedly the primary targets of investigation) are absent. By focusing on things, e.g., traits, scores, sub-personal cognitive or neural functions, we tend to construct a rather static…