>What WOULD a psychology be that started from analysis of everyday
activities, (and >with the psychologist cyborged into the system of the
everyday activity)?
I think that at the beginning it would look a lot like what field
ethnographers do (and natural historians) - hanging around watching and
asking dumb questions (dumb at least from the point of view of the
observee). The problem is, of course, that our way of asking questions
is already influenced by our cultural and theoretical backgrounds. One
helpful angle might be to adopt the participant-observer approach, and
actually participate in the activity along with the people we're
watching. Another is simply that in order to find out what's going on we
have to ask the observee what he/she *thinks* they're doing - and
believing them when they tell you. The first "casualty" of this modus
operandi is of course the observer's status as privileged viewer from
outside the frame of action.
Most of the practicing research psychologists I know take it as an
article of faith that "laypeople" are ignorant, misinformed or simply
otherwise incapable of giving a veridical account of their own thoughts,
motivations, cognitive processes, etc. The idea that the researchers are
smuggling their own local culture (academia) into the experimental
situation is of course greeted with scorn. Are we really ready to doff
our protective professional armor and go out into the world without our
implicit assumption of superiority to the uninitiated?
(I'm not saying that *all* research psychologists are like this - I have
to draw on the admittedly limited sample I have at hand here in NYC.)
Rachel
_____________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com
Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]