ABSTRACT
The desire for control among adult educators (which is natural enough and quite understandable) is often linked with a particular view about the relationship between theory and practice. As a foundation discipline, psychology is viewed as providing a base of rules and principles which can be unequivocally applied to practice. The practitioner who holds such a view, however, is likely to be disappointed with what psychology can offer. The reasons for this have to do with the way in which ‘scientific psychology’ generates knowledge. As a science, psychology is very much concerned with prediction and control, and to this end seeks to identify cause-effect relationships. However, there are a number of factors which limit the direct practical application of such knowledge. First, psychological experiments which adopt the methods of natural science are
characterised by what Egan (1984) calls ‘phenomena insensitivity’. That is, while the methods are scientific, it may be at the cost of distorting and/or narrowing the phenomenon being investigated-so much that the results have little direct applicability outside the experimental context or the theoretical concerns of the experiment. This is an argument advanced by Usher (1986b) and it is neatly expressed in Harré’s (1974) critique of social psychology:
Psychologists have frequently supposed that one can divide up socially meaningful phenomena into basic non-meaningful units between which they have sought the kinds of correlations which Boyle and Hooke found between the pressures and volumes of gases. Let me give you an example. There have been studies of the development of liking between human beings. Psychologists have sought to investigate this process by identifying elementary features of the liking-generating process and studying them independently of all other features of a real situation of liking. They have isolated the frequency with which a person is confronted with another person as an element in the formation of liking between people. And then they have attempted to study the effect of frequency of meeting on the development of liking in an apparently ‘pure’ case. To this end, people were asked to report on the way in which their liking of nonsense syllables had changed with the frequency of presentation of such syllables.
