Psychological research as a social practice

NÉSTOR ROSELLI

Cape Town

Congreso; XXX International Congress of Psychology; 2012

International Union of Psychology Science

This presentation aims to claim for a concrete and situated view of the psychological research, looking at it as a social activity. Researchers, as social actors, work in different settings interacting with colleagues in order to produce knowledge and to spread it in the scientific community and beyond into society where this knowledge is used as technology. In that way, science is a social institution, that is, a social activity submitted to institutional regulations, as any other social activity. These social regulations concern not only a simple and outlying organization of the activity, but, in a deeper level, a particular logic of power distribution and a kind of relationship between actors. In fact, psychology is not only an epistemological object, but a social activity, and the scientific community can be viewed as a social system. It is important to analyze the narrow interactions, which are not easy to depict, between both epistemic and social dimensions. The presentation begins with an analyze of the micro-social systems of psychological research, but it focus specially on the macro-systems, as the international scientific community. In all social system there are three aspects that must be analyzed: the social interactions, the norms and cultural values, and the psychological identity. In the international social system an aspect is specially important: the philosophical cultural traditions supporting theoretical and methodological traits of the research activity.