Towards Exiting the Gyre: A Novel Coherent Paradigm for Psychology

Psychology cannot linger indefinitely in a state of foundational fragility, conceptual stagnation, and methodological aporia. Existing paradigms are unintelligible, ambiguous, unverifiable and/or fail upon experimental verification. A new paradigm is an existential imperative for the field. This paper succinctly proposes the following: (1) a grand theory that explains human dynamics on the basis of a triadic relationship among intelligence, cognition, and behavior, in which intelligence is defined as the information technological ability, cognition is defined as the brain’s innate, auto-generated, self-developed, and assimilated algorithms to interact with milieu exterior, and the scope of behavior is confined to its overt domain; (2) a client-centric approach that serves to improve brain’s ecological intelligence’s aspects of seeking and processing data and/or information, and rectify, develop, and/or optimize cognition; and (3) the development of a diagnostic manual that advocates reverse engineering of existing exigencies, rather than imposing arbitrary frameworks on clients and manufacturing artificial imperatives.