We fully endorse Arocha’s (2021) thesis about the fundamental importance of studying variability in real, observable processes and agree with his critique of the standard practice of psychological research. However, we regret that Arocha’s article does not acknowledge a rich body of research that has been around for almost three decades and that does exactly what Arocha recommends. This research is based on the theory of complex dynamic systems. We discuss its main implications for a research focus on concrete psychological processes, as they occur in individual cases (including real interacting groups). Variability over time is used as a main source of information about the nature of the underlying processes. Various examples of empirical studies, model building, and process-oriented methodology are discussed, and Arocha’s examples of perceptual control theory (PCT) and observation-oriented modeling (OOM) are put in the perspective of the complex dynamic systems approach, which is fully compatible with scientific realism as advocated by Arocha.

我们完全赞同 Arocha (2021) 关于研究真实、可观察过程中可变性的根本重要性的论文，并同意他对心理学研究标准实践的批评。然而，我们感到遗憾的是，Arocha 的文章没有承认已经存在了近 30 年的丰富研究，而这正是 Arocha 所推荐的。本研究基于复杂动态系统理论。我们讨论了它对关注具体心理过程的研究的主要影响，因为它们发生在个别情况下（包括真实的互动群体）。随时间的变化被用作有关底层过程性质的主要信息来源。讨论了实证研究、模型构建和面向过程的方法的各种示例，