Reductive psychology
Reductive psychologyWhat is reductive psychology?
I took the subway after a whole day of work. It was already 7 PM, but the heat of the severe summer of Buenos Aires didn’t dismiss the daylight yet. The subway was full. The people felt bothered by the closeness of their neighbors, sources of heat. We did our best to fight against our irrepressible wishes to shout, to push everybody else far from our reach. He didn’t. The heat, the pressure in the office, the air feeling like soup (we were the noodles), some argue with his wife on the phone that afternoon, they all made him to explode and shout to the woman beside him: “Move out! You’re bothering me!” The woman, a pregnant standing young woman, was obligated to shout back: “You are bothering me, you, @#&$**+@.” Several others, with no formal invitation, were moved by the environment to fight, so they did it shouting, complaining about the heat, and blaming the Subway Company because of the lack of oxygen that made them feel in such a bad mood.
Those people were healthy. They were responding to their environment in the proper way. They were reacting to (I don't want to use the word) their stimuli in the normal way that any human being would. If they didn’t, they would get home with this anguish in their chests, due (no doubt) to adrenaline and learned behavior patterns. They would, then, shout to their wives, husbands, children, because they needed to exonerate the pain and the anguish. “Even a physically uncomfortable environment—overcrowding, loud noise, heat—can apparently help elicit aggressive behavior” (Book, pg. 692).
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This is reductive psychology.
To understand it, we will go through some concepts and definitions.
Stimulus: Any information that gets in contact with our consciences. Note that the information can come from the outside or from our self-internal senses. So, a noise is a stimulus, and some pain in the stomach is too.
Response: Our counteraction to a stimulus. It can be physical (punch someone) or emotional (compassion). It can also be on purpose (punch someone) or a body response without our intention. In this case, it is called a reflex (leg up after the hammer of the doctor).
Free agency: “The Lord gave to man his free agency in the pre-existence. This great gift of agency, that is the privilege given to man to make his own choice, has never been revoked, and it never will be. It is an eternal principle giving freedom of thought and action to every soul. No person, by any decree of the Father, has ever been compelled to do good; no person has ever been forced to do evil. Each may act for himself. It was Satan's plan to destroy this agency and force men to do his will. There could be no satisfactory existence without this great gift. Men must have the privilege to choose even to the extent that they...
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