Thinking as “Thinging”: Psychology With Things
By Lambros Malafouris. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2019
98 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We live and we think inside a world of things made and found. Still, psychological science has shown little interest in understanding the exact nature of the relation between cognition and material culture. As a result, the diachronic influence and transformative potential of things in human mental life remains little understood. Most psychologists would see things as external and passive: the lifeless objects of human consciousness, perception, and memory. On the contrary, my main argument in this article is that things matter to human psychology and should be taken seriously. Although things usually pass unnoticed, they are anything but trivial. Things have a special place in human cognitive life and evolution. We think “with” and “through” things, not simply “about” things. In that sense, things occupy the middle space in between what are usually referred to as mind and matter. Material-engagement theory provides a way to describe and study that middle space where brain, body, and culture are conflated.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2f0868d037d4fe126682dfd44b594082ecceab9
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Citations in the corpus
- A Sociocultural Theory of Creativity: Bridging the Social, the Material, and the Psychological (2020, background): “Given that sociocultural psychology is a highly interdisciplinary endeavor, building on insights from a variety of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and philosophy, its theories of creativity can also open up the field to new paradigms, from material engagement theory (Mala”