Browsing by Subject "Distributed cognition"
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- PublicationOpen AccessRewilding psychology(The Royal Society , 2024-08-07) Baggs, Edward ; Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; FilosofíaSome commentators have recently argued that scientific psychology is overly reliant on artificial laboratory-based activities and undervalues field-based investigations. However, it remains unclear how a field-based programme of psychological research might be organized in a scalable way. We examine and compare two existing field-based approaches: Roger Barker’s behaviour settings programme and Edwin Hutchins’s distributed cognition programme. Both programmes prioritize observational work, and both reject the individual as the unit of analysis in favour of a community-scale unit. However, whereas the behaviour settings programme is concerned with structural properties of community life, distributed cognition is concerned more narrowly with the functional analysis of expert team performance. We discuss how these programmes can inform a future community-scale approach to studying psychology in the wild. We conclude that the two programs are proof of concept of the possibility of a scientific psychology that rejects methodological individualism. This article is part of the theme issue ‘People, places, things and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the 21st century’.