Speaker
Benjamin Zabinski (York University)
Title
Rendering Process: The Extrusion of Psychological Objects from Experiential Data
Abstract
This paper examines the ontological relationship between psychological objects and the experiences they are based on. It is argued that mainstream methods of generating psychological objects afford an ontological understanding that excludes the temporally embedded context of lived experience. While critical psychology has called for a psychological research practice that takes cultural and historical influences into account, so long as the psychological object remains outside of the same temporal context as the experience it is based on, there remains an ontological divide between the object and the subject. A process ontology of psychological objects is presented, conceptually based in part of the writings of Alfred N. Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and William James. This account is then presented in juxtaposition to a mainstream example drawn from the social-psychological methodology of Implicit Association Testing, to illustrate the difference in implied ontology of the objects and, thus, of the people whom the objects are constructed to represent.