Oral Presentation by Irina Mironenko¹
¹ St.Petersburg University, Russia
TIME: Wednesday, 15 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 1
Session: 9
Abstract
The mainstream international socio-psychological science is currently experiencing a paradigm shift. The “decolonization” of social sciences has undermined the creed of the 20th c psychological “grand theories” and the crisis of replicability has called into question the very heart of the crumbling dominant paradigm - the trust in statistical validation of empirical research. The need for a radical renewal is obvious. In seeking a possible solution, I follow the ontological principle. That is, first of all, to focuse on the actual reality which we study, without replacing it with old theoretical models enshrined in concepts and measurement methods. This presupposes a critical approach to the scientific legacy, since, in my opinion, radical changes have occurred in recent decades and are currently going on in the core subject of psychology—the human personality and the human world. This requires a rethinking of the entire methodological apparatus, ensuring its relevance to current reality. The crumbling paradigm, dominant from the post-war period until the mid 1980s, was based on a homeostatic view of social life, like that is presented by the World Society Theory. The liberal democratic model of social organization was seen as the pinnacle of social development already achieved by humanity, and personality characteristics of individuals in Western democratic societies were considered universaly human. The most obvious, to me, is now the need to abandon this implicit creed of an “universal” human with its “universal” human qualities. The human has changed in the past decades and is changing now, and the increasing speed and the unpredictable character of these changes require a transition from homeostatic theoretical models of self-regulating systems, dominant in the third quarter of the 20th c theory and methodology, to those of self-developing systems, from the nonclassical to the post-nonclassical science of the 21st c (Stepin, 2009). In search for turn-around points to support the quest, I appeal to the legacy of Russian psychology, primarily the Activity Theory (Mironenko, 2013). I would like to bring to my colleagues’ attention some methodological developments aimed to explore bifurcation points in human development that largely stay obscure outside of the Russian-language psychological discourse, particularly the individual-typical approach (Mironenko, 2025).