Contextualism and Understanding in Behavioral Science : Implications for Research and Theory

This book introduces contextualism, an emerging paradigm that has generated much interest and excitement in psychology, sociology, communications research, and other areas of behavioral science. Unlike behaviorism which tries to predict behavior based on a specific set of variables, contextualism asserts that human beings react and learn in a variety of situations and there is no single best kind of behavior. They challenge the man as machine view of behavior.