[Xmca-l] Re: Followup on "If you want to under something, try to change it"

[mike cole]

Call it zeitgeist, Kris.
mike
PS-- Perhaps Lewin coped the idea from Leontiev who swiped it from
Dearborn? :-)
mike

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 3:27 PM, Kris Gutierrez <gutierkd@gmail.com> wrote:

> Susan Jurow and I just used this quote for our new paper   Good timing
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Jun 10, 2015, at 3:12 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Poking along with this issue I have arrived at Urie Bronfenbrenner's 1979
> > volume on the ecology of human development.
> > There, among other things, I found a passage where he links this idea to
> > the notion of formative, or as he translates it here,
> > a transformative, experiment that he takes from......
> >
> > This foreshortened theoretical  perspective [of American psychology-mc]
> was
> > first brought to my attention by Professor A. N. Leontiev of the
> University of
> > Moscow. At the time, more than a decade ago, I was an exchange scientist
> at
> > the Institute of Psychology there. We had been discussing differences in
> the
> > assumptions underlying research on human development in the Soviet Union
> and
> > in the United States. In summing up his views, Professor Leontiev offered
> > the following judgment: "It seems to me that American researchers are
> > constantly seeking to explain how the child came to be what he is; we in
> the
> > U.S.S.R. are striving to discover not how the child came to be what he
> is,
> > but how he can become what he not yet is."
> >
> >
> >
> > Leontiev's statement is of course reminiscent of Dearborn's**
> in­junction ("
> > If you want  to understand  something, try to change it."), but it goes
> much
> > further; indeed, in Leontiev's view, it is  revolutionary in its
> > implications. Soviet psychologists often speak of what they call the
> > "transforming experiment." By this they mean an experiment   that
> radically
> > restructures   the  environment,   producing a new configuration that
> > activates previously unrealized behavioral potentials of the subject.
> > (1979, p. 41)
> >
> >
> > For them what's interested.
> >
> > mike
> >
> >
> > (**Dearborn was one of UB's psych professors - as noted on xmca, this
> > notion is widely attributed to Kurt Lewin U.B acknowledged as a major
> > influence on his work)
> >
> > --
> >
> > All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes
> > you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something
> > that isn't even visible. N. McLean, *A River Runs Through it*
>
>


-- 

All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes
you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something
that isn't even visible. N. McLean, *A River Runs Through it*