Rewilding psychology

Some commentators have recently argued that scientific psychology is overly reliant on artificial laboratory-based activities, and that it undervalues field-based investigations. However, it remains unclear how a field-based program of psychological research might be organized in a scalable way. We examine and compare two existing field-based approaches: Roger Barker’s behavior settings program and Edwin Hutchins’s distributed cognition program. Both programs prioritize observational work, and both reject the individual as the unit of analysis in favor of a community-scale unit. However, whereas the behavior settings program is concerned with structural properties of community life, distributed cognition is concerned more narrowly with the functional analysis of expert team performance. We discuss the extent to which these programs can inform a future community-scale approach to studying psychology in the wild. We conclude that the two programs are proof of concept of the possibility of a scientific psychology that rejects methodological individualism.