Learning & Personality

Between behaviourism’s reflex arc and psychoanalysis’s art of interpretation lies the question this folder carries: what makes a person this person — and how does that change? Allport gave personality research its vocabulary and its ground rule that motives detach from their origins; Festinger showed that we adjust our convictions to our actions and not the other way round; Bandura proved that one learns by watching, and made confidence in one’s own effectiveness the most-measured quantity in psychology.

All three files are about the same movement: from behaviour back into the person, without checking testability at the door. From them come the tools with which therapy, education and health research work today.

For the archive this folder is the test bench of the middle range: small, sharply framed claims one can repeat — and the replication crisis struck exactly here while leaving most of it standing.