The language of psychology: APA style as epistemology.

Abstract

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (4th ed., APA, 1994) is a guide for many aspects of professional writing for psychologists. In this article, the authors propose that APA style involves more than a set of explicit guidelines for presenting information; it also incorporates a variety of unarticulated practices that reflect fundamental attitudes and values of psychologists. The authors examine some of the less obvious characteristics of APA style to show how they support the discipline's commitment to the empirical method and the discipline's view of itself as a cumulative, collaborative enterprise. Students who enter the field of psychology acquire psychology's language conventions, and in doing so they also come to implicitly endorse important values of their discipline.