The experimental methodology of constructive microgenesis

Abstract

Psychologists congratulate themselves in telling their discipline's history as a linear progression to its present state, as if psychology was purely rational and free from all historical contingency. In so doing we close ourselves to past ideas that were unjustly left behind and which can make a significant contribution to psychology today. The word 'experiment', for example, has taken on a very narrow meaning in contemporary psychology. We are told that for something to be an experiment there must be an independent and dependent variable, a large random sample of participants, and a statistical analysis of scores. These requirements were foreign to psychology in the first half of this last century and only became social norms through influences outside of psychology, such as the military and education (Danziger, 1990). © 2009 Springer-Verlag New York.