Psychology and Common Sense

Originally published in 1974, a vigorous debate was in progress among psychologists about the fundamentals of psychology and its future. In particular, the value and reliability of the method of objective experiment in the field of behaviourism was being challenged. The distinguished psychologist R. B. Joynson was at the centre of this controversy, and in this book he argues persuasively that ordinary good sense provides an extensive and often highly reliable understanding of human nature. He maintains that academic psychology gives far too little weight to this factor, and that it raises far-reaching and difficult questions which may require a radical re-appraisal of the aims and methods of psychology.

The author notes two objections made by common sense to the conclusions of psychologists: that they frequently lack novelty, and that, alternatively, they seem to bear little relation to human nature as common sense understands it. The method of objective experiment, favoured by behaviourism, is examined, and its severe limitations are surveyed. Finally, the gradual, if frequently covert, return of psychology to the concepts of mental life is traced – a development which inevitably raises once more the perennial, unsolved problems of mind and body, and brings our everyday understanding of human nature back into the centre of the picture.

Today it can be read in its historical context.