Folk Psychologies Across Cultures

Product Description Without taking a single psychology course, ordinary people learn to understand, predict, and explain one another′s actions, thoughts, and motivations. Many cognitive scientists and philosophers claim that our everyday or folk understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called folk psychology (sometimes commonsense psychology). The terms in which folk psychology are couched are familiar ones of "belief" and "desire," "hunger," "pain," and so forth. According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and of others. This book has two goals: (a) to provide a framework for analyzing folk psychologies, and (b) to describe multiple forms that folk psychologies assume in different cultures. Review ". . .mandatory reading for students hoping to be service providers and for professionals with a multicultural clientele." -- L.M.C. Abbott Trapp About the Author R. Murray Thomas (Ph.D., Stanford University) is an emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where for three decades he taught educational psychology and directed the program in international education. He began his 50-year career in education as a high school teacher at Kamehameha Schools and Mid-Pacific Institute in Honolulu, then continued at the college level at San Francisco State University, the State University of New York (Brockport), and Pajajaran University in Indonesia before moving to Santa Barbara. His professional publications exceed 340, including 46 books for which he served as author, coauthor, or editor.