Piagetian Theory and the Psychogenetic Development of Humankind Throughout History. Towards a General Theory of the Human Being

J. Piaget wanted to study children to find a key to understanding history of mind, culture, science, and philosophy. The new theory program, called the structural-genetic theory program, developed by the author of this article, is an off-spring of Piagetian theory and follows Piaget's main idea concerning the study of parallels between ontogenetic and historical developments. It maintains the full identity of the child's psyche and that of the adult archaic human being concerning traits and features of the preoperational stage and partially the concrete operational stage, thereby evidencing the total sally of the formal operational stage in the minds of archaic people. The identity of the stage structures is not partially given but rather entirely and implies even the smallest details. The article exemplifies this identity concerning several central issues, such as logic, physical understanding, categories such as causality and chance, animism, personification of plants and animals, belief in magic, metamorphosis, ghosts, and understanding of dreams and myths. Accordingly, there is no difference between ontogenetic stages and the psychogenetic development of humankind throughout history. Historically, humankind has gone through the same stages as children do. The new theory program presents the fundamental theory of the human being as he or she existed in history and peopled archaic, ancient, and medieval societies. Consequently, the world history of culture, mind, worldview, politics, law, science, philosophy, morals, religion, and arts must be reconstructed in terms of stages, a task already accomplished by the new program, at least to a certain extent.

Conceptualising personhood, agency, and morality for African psychology

One of the functions of psychological science is to develop concepts for thinking about people and their well-being. Since its establishment as a scientific discipline in the late 19th century, psychology has developed concepts that are essentially rooted in the specific spatio-temporal context of Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. There is a growing ontological and epistemological awareness that psychological science and practices from WEIRD cultural spaces cannot be exclusively representative of the African experience. I draw from interpersonal violence research to discuss the concepts of personhood, agency, and morality from an African perspective and highlight their theoretical and practical utility for psychological science. Based on African communalism, I argue that an understanding of personhood, agency, and morality as culturally contextualised and socially intentioned phenomena is foundational to the advancement of heterogeneous practices of knowledge production in diverse contexts.

Systematic Replication of Saunders' (1968) Attitude Factors

A replication of a factor analyzed questionnaire on science and UFOs was carried out. 10 factors were obtained, two of which were similar to the previous ones: Belief in Extraterrestrial Visitation, Belief in the Occult, Psychological Explanations, Disbelief in Contactees, Witnessing, Belief in Possibilities, Reluctance to Report a Sighting, Skepticism of UFOs, Belief in Extraterrestrial Life, Extrapolations of Nature. A second major goal of the study, aside from actual replication, was the relating of a Science factor to the above factors, insofar as in recent years the popularity of science and technology has reportedly declined, with an increase in advocacy of pseudoscience. However, the Philosophy of Science factor from the original study did not replicate.

Transkeian Students' Locus of Control and Academic Achievement

Whether the locus of control of Transkeian students enrolled in a teachers' programme is related to their academic performance and whether there is a sex difference in locus of control were explored. There were 148 subjects (72 women and 76 men), with mean ages of 21.6 yr. for women and 23.3 yr. for men. Rotter's Locus of Control scale was given and scores students obtained on tests and a final examination in an educational psychology course were recorded. Transkeian students' performance on the Locus of Control scale is comparable to that observed in the USA. Also, internally oriented subjects outperformed the externally controlled ones on the examination. Men were mote internally oriented than women.

From Dissonance to Tolerance: Toward Managing Health in Tropical Cultures

Against a backdrop in which in which psychology is being increasingly criticised for failing to meet the pressing needs of Third World' peoples, we report findings from Malawi relevant to the management of health services in the tropics. Surveys of beliefs regarding malaria, schistosom iasis, epilepsy and psychiatric symptomatology have all revealed a remarkable "tropical tolerance "forboth modern medical and traditional forms of health service: belief in the "medical" consistently does not preclude belief in the "traditional", and vice versa. This paper presents reliable psychological evidence which may refute the universality of the dissonance reduction process, while supporting the integration of "traditional" types of health care into the predominantly "medical" and extremely understaffed Malawian health care system We derive hypotheses from this newly appreciated the oretical axis which may also have applications in other developing societies.

Social Psychology in Malawi: Historical or Developmental?

It is now over two decades since Gergen (1973) argued that social psychology is historical, and this paper re-examines his arguments in the light of more recent social changes in Tropical Africa. Malawi has experienced major sociopolitical upheavals and from the outside, with much of the agenda based on foreign historical foundations, Gergen's hypothesis implies that social psychology should be radically inappropriate. From the inside, however, the discipline has garnered substantial student enrolments, sustained by four possible modes of applied re search in addition to cross-cultural refutation ( for instance, similarity-attraction), namely, rejuvenation (of observer bias, among aid donors), realisation (that "aid" is transactional), reconstitution (into a principle of incremental improvement), and restatement (of competitive motives, reflecting clashes with collectivist peers and security conscious superiors). In contemporary Malawi, social psychology is "developmental" rather than "historical", casting doubt on the universality of Gergen's historicity hypothesis.

Superstitions Among Certain Groups of Lebanese Arab Students in Beirut

This study is partly exploratory to assess the extent to which superstitious beliefs and behavior are common among different groups of high school and university Lebanese Arab students in Beirut. Class level, sex, high school science achievement, and major were the main variables that were investigated as to their relevance to superstitiousness. More than 600 students in the 8th and 11th high school grades and university sophomores answered 59 items relating to superstitions with respect to acquaintance, belief in, and influence on behavior. It was found that superstitiousness significantly decreases with increasing level of education. Among the other variables investigated, the major findings were that among the university sophomore students, females and arts students were respectively more superstitious than males and science students.

More than we Need to Know about Culture, but are Afraid Not to Ask

"Culture" needs no sharpening. It works well as a global term, designating the many diverse material and ideational phenomena that social scientists traditionally perceive as cultural. Pleas and attempts to define culture anew, however well-meaning and creative, are irrelevant to the conduct of cross-cultural research.

Locus-of-Control Attribution

Although considerable evidence has accumulated from studies in North America that locus of control is multifactorial, little cross-cultural confirmation has emerged, particularly from Africa. Anthropological data suggest that African subjects should be influenced by supernatural beliefs in making attributions about reasons for events, but in a complex way involving powerful others in their social environment. A questionnaire with systematically balanced combinations of event type and explanations for the events was presented to male and female black and white students in Zambia and Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. The scale performed well psychometrically and partly confirmed the hypotheses, though the factorial structures were remarkably similar across cultures. Two orthogonal factors provided the optional simple structure for both blacks and whites; they comprised items referring to (I) personal effort and attributes, and (II) chance and the supernatural. The roles of interpersonal and societal influences were unclear, and there was ambiguous support for the hypothesis of greater importance of supernatural attributions for blacks.

Genital-Shrinking Panic in Ghana: A Cultural Psychological Analysis

The present article applies the theoretical framework of mutual constitution (MC)—the dialectical process by which ‘culture and psyche make each other up’—to analyze an occurrence of genital-shrinking panic (GSP). Although media reports promote interpretation of this event in terms of ignorance and superstition, the MC framework affords a less pathologizing analysis. The first part of this analysis, one that resonates with classic ethnographic perspectives, emphasizes the cultural grounding of psychological experience: how episodes of GSP make sense given local constructions of reality. However, an adequate analysis requires attention not only to cultural realities in which incidents of GSP make sense, but also to the role of psychological activity in reproducing, maintaining and extending those realities. Accordingly, the second part of this analysis emphasizes the less articulated, dynamic-construction side of the MC framework: the role of psychological activity in the reproduction of cultural worlds.

Pacific Asia Psychology: Ideas for Development?

Focussing on health and management needs, an applied “psychology for development” is emerging in the African literature, and we aimed to explore its wider application to the development of countries in Pacific Asia. “Psychology for development” has made use of some distinctive pathways, from (a) realizing that development policy may contain mistaken assumptions about the psychology of the people involved, to (b) reconstituting, (c) restating, (d) refuting, or (e) rechannelling psychological concepts devised for western conditions. Applied psychological phenomena so far identified include (a) a “pay me!” reaction to aid (recipients demanding money for their participation); (b) “double demotivation” (salary differentials between local and expatriates demotivating both groups); (c) the “pull down” motive (the perception that others will sabotage high self-achievement); (d) “cognitive tolerance” (the ability to value at the same time both modern medical and traditional beliefs about health); and (e) the revitalised importance to health care of concepts such as “source credibility”. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these pathways and applied concepts may have a future in Pacific Asia, and we recommend empirical research to develop awareness of their viability in this region.

Understanding genital-shrinking epidemics in West Africa: koro, juju, or mass psychogenic illness?

A small-scale epidemic of genital shrinking occurred in six West African nations between January 1997 and October 2003. This article presents a summary and analysis of 56 media reports of these cases. A clinical formulation of these cases considers a variety of explanations from theory and research in social and cultural psychology, psychopathology, and anthropology. Of particular interest is a comparison of genital-shrinking distress in West African settings with koro, a culture-bound syndrome involving fears of genital retraction that is prominent in Southeast Asian settings. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the role of culture in both the experience of genital-shrinking distress and conceptions of psychopathology.

The Cultural Grounding of Personal Relationship: Enemyship in North American and West African Worlds

Three studies investigated the implicit constructions of reality associated with cultural differences in enemyship (personal relationship of hatred, malice, and sabotage). Results of interview (Study 1; N = 98) and questionnaire (Study 2; N = 166) research indicated that enemyship was more prominent among Ghanaian participants than among U.S. participants. Additional evidence located a potential source of these differences in different constructions of relationship. Responses linked the prominence of enemyship to constructions of relationship as inherent, enduring connection (interdependent models). Responses linked the sense of freedom from enemyship to constructions of relationship as the discretionary product of atomistic selves (independent models). An experiment among Ghanaian participants (Study 3; N = 48) provided evidence that increasing experience of inherent connection can be sufficient to increase accessibility of enemyship. Results help to illuminate the cultural grounding of personal relationship and other phenomena that are typically invisible in mainstream theory and research.

Attributions for admission to Zomba Mental Hospital: implications for the development of mental health services in Malawi

Within Malawi, as in many other African countries, a variety of traditional and modern attributions exist regarding the cause of a person's mental disturbance, or their admission to a 'mental' hospital. It is argued that a good mental health service should consider the beliefs of the patients it seeks to serve. Consequently we studied 103 consecutive admissions to Zomba Mental Hospital in order to find out how patients explained their own admission to the hospital. Traditional attributions were the most common, followed by medical and then psychological attributions. Some patients explained their admission to the hospital by combining traditional, medical or psychological ideas. Content analysis of traditional attributions identified examples of "Tropical Tolerance" and the "Pull Down" phenomenon. The possible interactive nature of traditional, medical and psychological processes is discussed and it is suggested that traditional healers should be incorporated into 'modern' Malawian mental health services.

Managing the AIDS crisis in Africa: in support of pluralism

Although substantial evidence is now accumulating that some African peoples readily accept advice and help about health from both modern medical and traditional sources, this has not yet happened with--what is arguably the major health problem in many part of Africa--AIDS. We asked 175 of Malawi's undergraduates what sources they judged to be credible with regard to information on preventing and clinically managing AIDS. While traditional healers were seen on average to be less credible than modern health professionals (doctors and nurses), there was no correspondence between credibility of traditional healers and modern health professionals. Thus a strong belief in the credibility of modern health professionals was not associated with low credibility ratings for traditional healers. Our findings provide further support for "tropical tolerance", especially as regards a pluralistic (modern and traditional together) approach to the prevention of AIDS. Given the over-stretched health services in Malawi and many other African countries, a pluralistic approach to AIDS prevention could be a credible and economic use of indigenous human resources.

Rotter Internal-External Scale in an African Context: Problems of Construct and Equivalence

It is argued, in relation to the cross-cultural equivalence of personality measures, that of the three phases of test development namely construction, establishment of reliability and of validity, the second tends to receive too little attention. Accordingly, Rotter I-E Scale data from black and white students in Zambia and Rhodesia were compared with each other and with data collected in other countries. It is concluded that the Rotter I-E Scale is not a reliable instrument even for American groups; that responses may reflect manifest item content more than underlying cognitions about control; and that while locus-of-control seems a valuable and perhaps valid construct for cross-cultural personality and motivation research, we need better scales to measure reliability.

Belief in supernatural phenomena and locus of control

It is hypothesized that Rotter's I-E variable mediates individual differences in supernatural and superstitious beliefs, with externals exhibiting more positive attitudes toward such phenomena. An approximately equal number of male and female introductory psychology students were selected as externals ( N = 20) and internals ( N = 23) from upper and lower quartiles of the Rotter I-E scale. All Ss were administered an attitude questionnaire assessing beliefs toward several paranormal, occult, and pseudoscientific phenomena. Analysis via a 2 × 2 (I-E Control × Sex) analysis of variance strongly confirmed the hypothesis ( p < .01). Although not predicted, females, regardless of I-E status, were much more favorably disposed toward such phenomena than males ( p < .01). Differences in more general attitudes toward both religion and science are suggested as mediating the over-all I-E and sex differences.