| Abstract: | Societies today are undergoing drastic social, informational, and technological changes. The revolutionary advances in electronic technologies and globalization are transforming the nature, reach, speed, and loci of human influence. These rapidly evolving realities place increasing demands on the exercise of personal and collective agency to shape personal destinies and the national life of societies. There is growing unease about progressive divestiture of different aspects of psychology to biology and subpersonal cognitive science. It is feared that as we give away more and more psychology to disciplines lower on the food chain, there will be no core psychological discipline left. Contrary to divestitive oracles, psychology is the integrative discipline best suited to advance understanding of human adaptation and change. It is the discipline that uniquely encompasses the complex interplay between intrapersonal, biological, interpersonal, and sociostructural determinants of human functioning. With the growing primacy of human agency in virtually all spheres of life, the field of psychology should be articulating a broad vision of human beings—not a reductive fragmentary one. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
