Quetelet and the emergence of the behavioral sciences

Adolphe Quetelet was one of the most prominent figures of the second half of the nineteenth century, yet in present-day histories of several social sciences the impact of his ideas is widely ignored. The first part consists of a sketch of his life and work. Astronomer and statistician, he sought to apply the mathematical tools of astronomy to create was has been called a ‘mathematics of society’. In particular he demonstrated regularities in the incidence of various social phenomena, notably crime, whose implications were widely debated. In the second part the influence he exerted on some key figures in the then emerging social sciences is traced in some detail; these figures include Durkheim, Galton, Marx, and Tylor. He also advocated the wider use of statistics and his call had a powerful impact on the then emerging fields such as administration, economics, sociology and psychology. He influenced some of his most famous contemporaries, including Florence Nightingale, Karl Marx and Francis Galton

Seventy Years of Social Psychology: A Cultural and Personal Critique

This paper traces some salient aspects of my research career, focusing largely on work in West Africa. From this lessons are drawn about the shortcomings of social psychology, especially in its laboratory version. It tends to tacitly ignore the effects of cultural influences, assuming that its findings are universally valid. Studies are mainly conducted with adults, generally college students, who are unrepresentative even of the general population of the United States where the bulk of social psychological studies are concentrated. This is justified in terms an alleged ‘psychic unity’. Social psychology pays little attention to the processes whereby children become socialized into particular cultures, which then governs their social behaviour. Methods are usually formal, and observational ones are eschewed, so that research takes place in artificial setting. This brings me to the almost complete absence of links with cognate disciplines, notably anthropology, which could greatly enrich social psychology. Suggestions are made for more wide-ranging approaches which would overcome the aridity of a great deal of current experimental social psychological research

Piéron et l'anthropologie psychologique

Jahoda Gustav. Piéron et l'anthropologie psychologique. In: Bulletin de psychologie, tome 48 n°419, 1995. Contacts de cultures. pp. 243-249

The Psychology Of Superstition

147 hal,: 19 cm.;Index