Let's bring life back to psychology, by looking at humans as if they are living things. This clear perspective put forward by Gomez-Marin and Ghanzanfar opens the gates for all.
@arjanbos @janneseshuis @matherion @warrenmansell @iapct

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2019.09.017

I welcomed our first-year psychology students. Teachers wanting to understand the difficult behaviour of their pupils. Burned-out workers wanting to understand the workings of their brain, managers wanting to improve their managing of teams.

All of them want to understand. What I fear they will get by our current curriculum is a variety of ways to describe, but not much understanding. Our current knowledge is build up from separating organism from environment, perception from action.

Endless statistical procedures are used to mask the failure of the stimulus-response and open loop models, in which the variability of behaviour is noise instead of a way for the organism to reach its own goals.

In my own experiments, I remember being annoyed by participants not adhering to the behaviors subscribed in the instructions, failing to see that they were doing exactly what any properly working organism should be doing: controlling its own perceptions.

We could make psychology a science of understanding, instead of a science of description and classification, if we allow ourselves to shift our perspective. Living organisms have purposes and act in the world to reach their goals.

Practicing psychology from a control-theory perspective allows us to rise above the replication crisis, and deliver to our students what they seek: understanding complex living systems. http://pctweb.org/ 

PCT connects perception, action and consciousness under the mechanism of control. Complex systems may be complex, but not beyond understanding https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r21sk_w6zwzuz36ddVwpSIO0bGVwRl-w/view