Plot, Plight, and Dramatism: Interpretation at Three Ages

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Abstract
There is a good deal of interest today in cultural psychology and its central forms of thought, which are interpretive or meaning making rather than computational or algorithmic. At the same time, there is a good deal of concern that such a focus is incompatible with the praxis of empirical or scientific psychology. The research described in this article is an attempt to exemplify one way that a scientific study of interpretive processes might proceed. Three age groups were read the same short story. Their responses to interpretive questions were taken as texts and analyzed for age-distinctive word usage. Characteristic forms of talk were found, and age-specific patterns of interpretive thinking were derived from them. In simple summary, when 10-year-olds saw a plot, adolescents saw a plight, and adults a dramatistic pattern.

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