Mentalities and mind-sets: The skeleton of relative stability in psychology’s closet

Abstract

Over its brief history, the discipline of psychology has seen its fair share of crises (Farr, 1991). In the grand scheme of academic scholarship, it has sandwiched itself between the natural and the social sciences. This positioning, in itself, has fuelled fierce as well as productive debates concerning the discipline's scope, its phenomenology, epistemology, and methodology (see Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). The latest crisis to afflict the discipline is the infamous 'replication crisis', precipitated by the Reproducibility Project which claimed that it was only able to find evidence for successful replication of published psychological findings in 47% of cases (i.e. less than chance, or 50%). No doubt, many expected a higher replication rate, betraying a long held but little researched assumption concerning the immutability of psychological phenomena. To put it simply, many expect psychological findings to replicate invariably across diverse sociocultural contexts in the same way that, for instance, medical diagnoses do (see Sammut, Foster, Salvatore, & Andrisano-Ruggieri, 2016). If one is diagnosed with diabetes in the US, one does not expect different insulin uptake upon migration to China. Similar expectations are levelled at psychology, based chiefly upon the discipline's claims to knowledge concerning psychopathology and personality. Like medical research, psychological scholarship here serves to typify and characterize individuals in ways that facilitate treatment of psychological symptoms, conditions, or disorders. Unlike medical research, however, psychological functioning seems to be amenable to, if not contingent upon, sociocultural influences. For instance, we are not entirely sure whether the human personality is primarily composed of the Big Five trait constellation

Worldviews and the role of social values that underlie them

“…A second domain of inquiry that requires empirical effort concerns the endorsement of worldviews and their cognitive correlates. A key question that arises in this theoretical formulation is whether worldviews are marked by individual differences in cognition that result out of inherent dispositions that incline some individuals towards a worldview more strongly than others, or whether, as Sammut [ 15 ] proposed, the worldview repertoire is accessible to all individuals with its utility exclusively contingent on situational circumstances. Sammut [ 15 ] proposes that individuals are able to change worldviews to ensure adaptation should their life conditions change.…”

“…A key question that arises in this theoretical formulation is whether worldviews are marked by individual differences in cognition that result out of inherent dispositions that incline some individuals towards a worldview more strongly than others, or whether, as Sammut [ 15 ] proposed, the worldview repertoire is accessible to all individuals with its utility exclusively contingent on situational circumstances. Sammut [ 15 ] proposes that individuals are able to change worldviews to ensure adaptation should their life conditions change. In this way, an individual pursuing a Reward worldview may, following a series of unfortunate events, emerge with a Survivor worldview that enables that individual to face adversity with grit even though there may be little to no personal gain.…”

“…Similar to Koltko-Rivera [ 10 ], we define worldviews as representations of the structure of how and what people think. We propose that their function lies in how they operate to enable subjects to adapt their responses to present ecological demands [ 15 , 16 ]. As outlined by Sammut et al [ 16 ], a number of theoretical constructs fall in line with this definition of worldviews that have employed different terms.…”

The Development of Human Personality: A Comprehensive Overview

“…It encompasses the rational and emotional processes that influence their thoughts, feelings, and actions, including their thought patterns, information processing, and judgment formation. Additionally, it encompasses a person's mindset, outlook, and way of thinking, which determines how they interpret and respond to different situations [19]. Mentality is closely related to intelligence, representing a person's mental capacity and intellectual abilities, as well as their attitude and way of thinking, which can be influenced by beliefs, feelings, and values [20].…”

The Role of Worldviews in Predicting Support for Recreational Cannabis

“…They seemed to support the policies of a Republican party whose resistance to social support programmes would seem to hurt Republican party strongholds in Louisiana more than any other location. Rather than dismissing these views as ignorance ( Sammut and Sartawi, 2012 ; Sammut, 2019 ), Hochschild spent a period of time conducting ethnographic work in these jurisdictions to understand better how these political positions were justified by their supporters. In the process, she identified five deep stories that lend validity, in their particular ways, to Tea Party support.…”