Ethogenics

Ethogenics (/ˌiːθəˈdʒɛnɪks/; "the study of behavior as generated by persons who exhibit a character, an ethos", from Greek ἦθος ethos, "custom, character" and γένος genos, "birth, generation") is an interdisciplinary social scientific approach that attempts to understand the systems of belief or means through which individuals attach significance to their actions and form their identities by linking these to the larger structure of rules (norms) and cultural resources in society. For Rom Harré, the founder of ethogenics, it represents a radical innovation in traditional psychology, even a completely "new psychology" that should take its place. (Harré et al., 1985: 129).

The origins of ethogenic social science are in microsociology and symbolic interactionism: in particular, Erving Goffman's dramaturgical sociology and Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. Both Goffman and Garfinkel looked at the particular ways in which social actors manage authenticity and construct social order through their performances. Therefore, microsociologists working in this tradition are concerned with the presentation of self in everyday life.

Ethogenicists argue that the unified self (or 'I') emerges through everyday discourse and is enabled through metaphors. Rom Harré states:

All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us and perhaps idiosyncratically transformed. The structure of our thinking and our feeling will reflect, in various ways, the form and content of that conversation. The main thesis of this work is that mind is no sort of entity, but a system of beliefs structured by a cluster of grammatical models. The science of psychology must be reformed accordingly (1983: 20).

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