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      Not by Behaviour Alone: In Defence of Self-Reports and ‘Finger Movements’

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      Social Psychological Bulletin
      PsychOpen

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          Abstract

          Abstract

          We agree that it is important to study behaviour in psychology but warn against putting behaviour on a scientific pedestal. We argue that this would be problematic for at least three reasons. First, behaviour should not be seen as disconnected from thoughts and feelings; moreover, quarantining different domains of responses does not help to explain human psychology comprehensively. Second, because behaviour hardly ever speaks for itself, it is essential to gather other responses from participants (including self-reports and “finger movement responses”) to understand what their behaviour really means. Finally, and most importantly, we observe that the main response to the crisis in social psychology has consisted of calls to change our empirical practices. Here this call takes the form of arguing for studying one particular dependent variable: behaviour. Even though we agree that there is value in measuring behaviour, promoting such practices is not going to be a silver bullet that overcomes the key challenges that social psychology as a discipline is currently facing. To do that, a more fruitful avenue would be to focus on the theory that needs to underpin and inform that empirical work. Indeed, without a proper theoretical framework to guide the study of behaviour, developing a “science of behaviour” is in our view rather futile.

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          Opinions and Social Pressure

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            Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority.

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              Psychology as the Science of Self-Reports and Finger Movements: Whatever Happened to Actual Behavior?

              Psychology calls itself the science of behavior, and the American Psychological Association's current "Decade of Behavior" was intended to increase awareness and appreciation of this aspect of the science. Yet some psychological subdisciplines have never directly studied behavior, and studies on behavior are dwindling rapidly in other subdisciplines. We discuss the eclipse of behavior in personality and social psychology, in which direct observation of behavior has been increasingly supplanted by introspective self-reports, hypothetical scenarios, and questionnaire ratings. We advocate a renewed commitment to including direct observation of behavior whenever possible and in at least a healthy minority of research projects.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Social Psychological Bulletin
                Social Psychological Bulletin
                SPB
                PsychOpen
                1896-1800
                2569-653X
                2018
                29 May 2018
                : 13
                : 2
                : e26196
                Affiliations
                [1 ] University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia University of Queensland Brisbane
                Author notes
                Corresponding author:

                Jolanda Jetten (School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St. Lucia 4072, Brisbane, Australia. E-mail: j.jetten@ 123456psy.uq.edu )

                Article
                10.5964/spb.v13i2.26196
                96bac616-19ba-443f-af95-8911a0dc8185
                Jolanda Jetten, S. Alexander Haslam

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 1 March 2018
                Categories
                Forum Paper
                Social Psychology

                Psychology
                Psychology

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