Situated Psychology: A Sketch

Abstract

This article—and this special issue—focuses on situated psychology. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief theoretical outline of what situated psychology is. If the reader wonders why they are not immediately familiar with the term ‘situated psychology,’ there is a simple explanation: it is a new concept (except for Phillip Cushman’s argument that psychology should be “historically situated” (Cushman, 1990). However, despite the novelty of the name for the concept, it draws on a wide range of psychological traditions—ecological psychology, situated learning theory, 4E cognition, critical psychology, and more. The ambition of this article is thus to unfold a multifaceted theoretical perspective that understands situatedness as involving environment/culture/relations/context, but also as something other than just a framework within which human behavior unfolds.