Abstract
The acknowledgement of the dynamicity of psychological phenomena ®has been progressively gaining acceptance in various branches of psychology. In some of these areas (first of all the neurosciences, psycholinguistic, but also cognitive psychology, and social psychology) the theory has greatly benefited from the adoption of conceptual models and methods of investigation provided by the Dynamic Systems theory (inter alia, Salvatore, Tebaldi, & Potì, 2008). However, in other fields of psychology, authors refer to the dynamic systems in metaphorical terms, using it as a striking image to describe the irreversibility and intrinsic creativity/autonomy of the psychological phenomena under investigation. As a result of this rhetorical strategy, in various areas related to the study of intersubjectivity (work psychology, clinical, and psychodynamic psychology as well as cultural psychology and at least partially developmental psychology) there is an evident gap between the conceptualisation of the phenomena as dynamic and the empirical investigation of it as a “static” process (Lauro-Grotto, Salvatore, Gennaro, & Gelo, 2009—Chapter 1 in this book).
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Notes
- 1.
The assumption of the singleness of the population is more than an implicit assumption grounding the inferential statistic: it is an explicit central concept of it, directly expressed by the null hypothesis that the study has to decide whether or not to accept. In fact, the null hypothesis statement that the two (sets of) observations compared are equivalent corresponds to the claim that they belong to the same population—since their difference is due to the casual variability within the population. On the other hand, the alternative hypothesis statement of a significant difference between the observations compared corresponds to the claim that they belong to different populations—that is the population not affected by the effect of the independent variable and the population affected by it.
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Acknowledgement
We wish to thank the participants in the session of the Clark University’s Kitchen Seminar (10th of September, 2008) devoted to the discussion of a first draft of this text. The discussion that developed there provided meaningful feedback, helping us to bring the implications of our proposal into focus.
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Salvatore, S., Lauro-Grotto, R., Gennaro, A., Gelo, O. (2009). Grasping the Dynamic Nature of Intersubjectivity. In: Valsiner, J., Molenaar, P., Lyra, M., Chaudhary, N. (eds) Dynamic Process Methodology in the Social and Developmental Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-95922-1_8
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