What is reductive psychology? I took the subway after a whole day of work. It was already 7 PM, but the heat of the severe summer of Buenos Aires didn't dismiss the daylight yet. The subway was full. The people felt bothered by the closeness of their neighbors, sources of heat. We did our best to fight against our irrepressible wishes to shout, to push everybody else far from our reach. He didn't. The heat, the pressure in the office, the air feeling like soup (we were the noodles), some argue with his wife on the phone that afternoon, they all made him to explode and shout to the woman beside him: "Move out! You're bothering me!" The woman, a pregnant standing young woman, was obligated to shout back: "You are bothering me, you, @#&$**+@." Several others, with no formal invitation, were moved by the environment to fight, so they did it shouting, complaining about the heat, and blaming the Subway Company because of the lack of oxygen that made them feel in such a bad mood.
English: Joseph Fielding Smith, Jr., the tenth pre...
English: Signature of , tenth President and Prophe...
FreudThose people were healthy. They were responding to their environment in the proper way. They were reacting to (I don't want to use the word) their stimuli in the normal way that any human being would. If they didn't, they would get home with this anguish in their chests, due (no doubt) to adrenaline and learned behavior patterns. They would, then, shout to their wives, husbands, children, because they needed to exonerate the pain and the anguish. "Even a physically uncomfortable environment-overcrowding, loud noise, heat-can apparently help elicit aggressive behavior" (Book, pg. 692).
------------------------------ This is reductive psychology.
To understand it, we will go through some concepts and definitions.
Stimulus: Any information that gets in contact with our consciences. Note that the information...