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Shifting Focus

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Experimental Psychology and Human Agency

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Abstract

Experimental psychology tends to lose contact with the broader context of human concerns. This loss of contact is not accidental. It is an outcome of a rhetoric that preserves the status of the discipline as a natural science concerned with laws and universal regularities. What can connect the work of experimenters to a broader context is in the space of activity shared by the researchers and the research participants. This space of activity corresponds to aspects of the research method that are generally downplayed and relegated to the background. Bringing those activities into view results in (1) appreciating the place of research findings within the domain of everyday experience and (2) seeing the ambiguities of the findings and their openness to alternative interpretations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Taipa, Macao

    Davood Gozli

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  1. Davood Gozli
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Gozli, D. (2019). Shifting Focus. In: Experimental Psychology and Human Agency. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20422-8_1

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