Understanding People provides an overview and critique of current psychological assumptions about people and what differentiates them, and replaces them with a set of ideas taken from social constructionism. It begins with an examination of contemporary theories, then explores the critique of the social constructionists, before laying out the basis of an understanding of human action and behaviour, drawing on phenomenology and personal construct theory. Using everyday experience to illustrate the issues in personality theory (Is behaviour situation-specific? Why do we have a sense of self? Is there an unconscious?), this book will breathe life into an area of psychology that is so often arid, and, in the eyes of students, divorced from their world.

TREVOR BUTT is Reader in Psychology at the University of Huddersfield, where he teaches a variety of courses including personality and social psychology, personal construct psychology and social constructionism. He has published widely on the relationship between personal and social constructionism, and, with Vivien Burr, wrote Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology. He is currently chair of the Psychotherapy section of the British Psychological Society.