Pragmatic Nihilism is a perspective on (health) psychology that facilitates dynamic theoretical integration, eclectic behavior change research and practice, and aims to help develop more effective behavior change interventions.
The paper is part of a debate, with very interesting and valuable commentaries. Unlike the original paper, these are not 'Gold Open Access', but those that have been made available through the green route (i.e. self-archived by the authors) will be linked to here. The original paper as well as the commentaries have been published in Health Psychology Review.
- The original paper: Peters & Crutzen (2017) Pragmatic nihilism: how a Theory of Nothing can help health psychology progress
- Commentary: Gruijters (2017) The Reasoned Actions of an Espresso Machine (self-archived version available at ResearchGate)
- Commentary: Trafimow (2017) Why I Am Not a Fan of Pragmatic Nihilism
- Commentary: Fried (2017) What are psychological constructs? On the nature and statistical modeling of emotions, intelligence, personality traits and mental disorders (self-archived version available at Open Science Framework)
- Commentary: De Vries (2017) Thinking is the best way to travel: towards an ecological interactionist approach; a comment on Peters and Crutzen (self-archived version available at ResearchGate)
- The rebuttal: Peters & Crutzen (2017) Confidence in constant progress: or how pragmatic nihilism encourages optimism through modesty (self-archived version available at PsyArXiv and at ResearchGate)
Pragmatic Nihilism has been extended to behavior change methods/techniques as well. In this perspective, Evolutionary Learning Processes (ELPs) have been proposed as the foundation of behavior change. These ELPs have a lower level of psychological aggregation than Behavior Change Techniques (BCTs) or Behavior Change Methods (BCMs), representing the smallest presently known components of behavior change interventions (the closest thing to irreducible components of interventions, so to speak). This paper is now also available:
- Crutzen & Peters (2017) Evolutionary learning processes as the foundation for behaviour change
