Abstract
Dariusz Doliński’ (2018, this issue) analysis strongly suggests that social psychologists are no longer interested in studying real human behavior and have switched their attention to internal cognitive processing and its interplay with motivational and affective phenomena. I propose to call this phenomenon ‘the mentalization shift’. In my commentary three issues are addressed: (i) Why has this phenomenon occured? (ii) Is it really so that we have ceased to study behavior, or rather we still do that, albeit differently? (iii) And, finally, is the mentalization of present-day social psychology something that is uniformly bad, or just a sign of the field’s maturing process? Nobody would oppose that modern social psychology offers more and more sophisticated instruments for explaining rather than for predicting and controlling human behavior. However, at an inevitable cost incurred by the advancement of our theoretical thinking, this is a sign of an increasing maturity of social psychology as a science rather than symptom of its deterioration.
Highlights
Dariusz Doliński’s (2018, this issue) target article raises an important issue regarding the extent to which present day social psychology is still a science of human behavior
Dariusz Doliński’ (2018, this issue) analysis strongly suggests that social psychologists are no longer interested in studying real human behavior and have switched their attention to internal cognitive processing and its interplay with motivational and affective phenomena
At an inevitable cost incurred by the advancement of our theoretical thinking, this is a sign of an increasing maturity of social psychology as a science rather than symptom of its deterioration
Summary
While trying to explain the described mentalization shift, in general, one may attribute this to a cognitive revolution in psychology, in social psychology. Kofta meant that human behavior was no longer approached as a ‘thing in itself’, but as a way of expressing meaning and intention According to this assumption, we cannot even identify what behavior is without taking into account its mental premises (thoughts, beliefs, expectations, ideas, intentions, personal values and norms). Researchers took it for granted that, to understand human social behavior, we must postulate the existence of an agentic force within the human mind allowing the integration of individual experience and the generation of intentions. This internal mechanism – the self-structure – was in turn thought to account for stable, individualized, and personalized patterns of social behavior. Studying overt behavior in the real-life context has lost its priority, and is no longer the major task for the social psychologist
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