Psychology and More

The excellent psychology blog, Mind Hacks, has a very interesting interview with a psychologist and sex researcher, Petra Boynton. I link frequently to her blog. Here, she talks about one thing I always try to emphasize in my teaching — behavior in a historical-cultural context.

Knowing your history. You can’t study anything in social science without understanding historical and cultural issues. This is particularly the case in the study of sex where there’s a trend towards reductionism - just studying hormones, the brain or behaviour. To really understand sex you need to understand history, culture, global differences and sex as an holistic issue rather than just one issue. Otherwise it just doesn’t make sense.

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