Atari Mohammad, Henrich Joseph, Schulz Jonathan
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA.
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2025 Jun 2. doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02229-y.
Psychology's definition and scope have shifted over the discipline's short history, yet it has largely remained ahistorical and geographically narrow. Here we call for psychology to become a historical and geographical science, a transformation we term the chronospatial revolution. We list four barriers to this shift in psychology: problems in scope, data, synergy and theory. We discuss the need for psychology to adopt a more holistic lens and propose a research agenda that integrates historical processes, cultural dynamics and ecological variations into psychological inquiry. Such an integrated approach not only enriches our microscopic understanding of Homo sapiens but also draws a more telescopic map of human psychology that encapsulates the human journey. By embedding psychology within time and space, we can better account for cross-cultural psychological diversity, historical change and evolved psychological mechanisms, ultimately fostering a more globally representative, historically enriched and theoretically robust discipline.
在心理学短暂的历史中，其定义和范围不断变化，但在很大程度上，它在历史方面仍缺乏深度，且地域局限性较强。在此，我们呼吁心理学成为一门历史和地理科学，我们将这一转变称为时空革命。我们列出了心理学这一转变面临的四个障碍：范围问题、数据问题、协同问题和理论问题。我们讨论了心理学采用更全面视角的必要性，并提出了一个研究议程，该议程将历史进程、文化动态和生态变化整合到心理学探究中。这种综合方法不仅丰富了我们对智人的微观理解，还绘制了一幅更宏观的人类心理地图，囊括了人类的历程。通过将心理学置于时间和空间之中，我们能够更好地解释跨文化心理多样性、历史变迁以及进化而来的心理机制，最终培育出一门更具全球代表性、历史内涵丰富且理论坚实的学科。
