o-song replied to your post: Rock-bottom explanations
I reckon your answer is social psychology, which is naturally methodologically individualist - trying to find psychological reasons for social things.
Interesting — I think Watts draws on some social psychology in the book. One major argument, though, is that understanding an individual’s behavior, or even a group of individuals’ behavior, often doesn’t translate to the macro contexts of group behavior. He pretty much argues that there sometimes aren’t “psychological” reasons for social things, but rather that predictable psychological tendencies can cluster and aggregate in extremely complicated (and unpredictable) ways.
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o-song said:
I agree - there’s a big gap of unknown between social psychology and sociology. It’s inevitably a bit complicated to come up with laws about how 8 billion people, each with 100 billion neurons, interact!
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cureforbedbugs posted this
