Chapter 1: Variables as Obstacles to Psychological Science: Finding Humanness Beneath, Between and Beyond Conventional Categories

Mainstream psychology has been dominated by data-driven attempts at establishing the field of variables and constructs and relationships between them. However, equally forcefully, scholars have attempted to bring coherence and integration into the discipline with matched enthusiasm. In the words of Hampden-Turner (1982):

To study something in detail, science has taught us to reduce its size and scope to smaller bits of manageable information. This exercise has worked well in separating stars and substances in the physical world, and there was really no reason to doubt that it would also do the same for the social sciences. We now live in a world of science where increased specialization is the mantra for progress in all fields from medicine to astronomy.