From Empirical Observation to Social Intervention: The Marxization of Psychology in China, 1949–1958
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the Marxization of psychology in the first decade of socialist China, between 1949 and 1958. In this movement, a loose group of radical intellectuals called for the replacement of the empirical observation model popular in psychology with a social intervention model as exemplified by educators. This paradigmatic, transdisciplinary shift would encompass three epistemological–ontological nexuses. First, the radical intellectuals accused ahistorical empirical observation of failing to recognize that the Chinese mental capacity, so far impaired by class domination, could display tremendous growth in socialism. Second, they criticized experimental and naturalistic contexts of observation for revealing the human mind to be mechanistic rather than purposeful. To recognize human agency, psychologists must transform their objectivist conceptualization of reality to a sociopolitical one. Third, they denounced the ideal of value neutrality for eschewing political engagement while permitting instrumental rationality and its hidden normative judgments. The solution lay in a refocusing on mental content instead of mental process as the object of inquiry. By examining the Marxization of psychology in socialist China, this article aims to foster reflection on how Chinese and Western psychologists’ research assumptions are shaped by their sociopolitical milieux.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".