Is Observing Behaviour the Best Way to Understand Behaviour?
Open Access
- 29 May 2018
- journal article
- Published by Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) in Social Psychological Bulletin
- Vol. 13 (2), e26076
- https://doi.org/10.5964/spb.v13i2.26076
Abstract
Dolinski (2018, this issue) argues that Social Psychology may hardly be considered a science of behaviour anymore, given the rarity of published studies in which the dependent measures involve behaviours other than the completion of surveys, pressing of keys on a computer keyboard, or clicking a mouse. In the present, we comment on this void of empirical studies in which “real” human behaviours are examined to put forward the following points: i) Key-pressing can be a human behaviour as meaningful as any other more complex behaviour (i.e., behavioural complexity is not a good criterion for meaningfulness), ii) Lessons learned from past research in social psychology have shown us that studying “real” behaviour introduces a number of well-known complications, iii) Improvement in the comprehension of human behaviour depends more on a strong theoretical lens constrained by results obtained via rigorous experimentation than on the complexity of people’s observed actions.Keywords
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