ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests a psychology that departs markedly from the psychology presented in the introductory textbooks of academic psychology. A contingency-oriented psychology is concerned with effective behavior, behavior that has effects or end results. Stating the means-end structure is part of the task of psychological description. Equifinality has the consequence that acts that look the same can belong to different equifinal classes and so differ in their psychological significance. Some writers have insisted that psychologists would gain much from giving more attention to the actual content of human conduct. Academic psychology has given little attention to questions of natural history because of the experimentalist attitude that denigrates the methods and products of natural history. The exclusion of self-reports is too often for the sake of a methodological purity that serves to keep many academic psychologists away from human lives as they are actually lived.
