Chapter 3: Don’t Mind the Variables

In this chapter, I will draw on Sartre´s distinction between groups and series to outline a severely limited use of the notion of variable in psychology. Karpatschof (2006) has used Sartre’s distinction to discuss basic methodological problems concerning choice of methods in psychology. When human beings are considered as parts of series, there is a legitimate use for quantitative methods and its whole apparatus of variables, but few psychological phenomena display this kind of seriality. Most psychological phenomena concern human beings as part of groups with full contextuality, and here a qualitative approach is needed. Instead of independent and dependent variables that operate causally, we have acting persons who live in a normative space of reasons. The methodological debate about quantitative and qualitative methods is really a superficial discussion with much deeper ontological questions below. The choice of methods should reflect the nature of the subject-matter, but, as Gigerenzer (1996) has argued, there is a process in scientific psychology that often turns this on its head: Methodological tools become transformed into theories about the subject-matter. We thus face a situation where a de-contextualized psychology of variables has moved from methods into the mind itself, reconfiguring it as a mechanism of interacting variables, which makes the development of an adequate psychology difficult if not impossible.