Conceptual and empirical status of mental constructs in the analysis of action

Abstract

A basic methodological difficulty in the study of psychological processes is how to conceptualize and observe mental events. Part of the difficulty resides in the terminology which frequently involved implicit transitions from one, general, usage to a very specific interpretation which may not be adequate to test the proposed hypotheses. Earlier denials of the possibility of studying such events have now been replaced by an eclectic, but little analyzed and articulated, attitude. As a consequence of this state of affairs it is not uncommon to encounter cases of models being widely accepted in spite of superficial handling of some of the key concepts and a lack of pertinent data to test the models. Several examples are discussed to illustrate these general propositions, taken from psychophysics, personality, judgement, attribution theory and the study of the effects of reward on intrinsic motivation.