The Explanatory Versus Predictive Approach in Psychology

Carol Cleolens: I think that part of my interest in psychology is I was looking for the explanations of human nature and they are usually in the particulars. So literature does such a good job of going into the particulars of whole lives and so on, whereas psychology right now is trying to look at means, determine laws, determine laws averages. And it's really important both to be able to drop down into the level of experience and evidence and kind of concrete things and the realm of history and literature where you have these very individual stories which can't be abstracted. But then also understand the most kind of abstract physical laws and things like that that are at the opposite end of the spectrum