The Psychologist, December 2010

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1860

1860 1870

1875

1880

1884

Sully’s Outlines of Psychology promotes the new, experimental approach to psychology

1890

Wilhelm Wundt, who a year earlier had published Principles of Physiological Psychology, sets aside a room at Leipzig University for experiments in psychology. The same year, William James creates the first psychology laboratory (at Harvard University).

Gustav Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik is published

1898

1900

1903

1908 1913

J.B. Watson’s Psychology as the Behaviorist views it

Charles Myers, William McDougall and W.H.R. Rivers set up an experimental psychology laboratory on the island of Mer in the Torres Straits archipelago

1930

1935

1938

1940

J.R. Stroop’s famous task demonstrates interference in attention

The Psychological Society (British added 1906) founded. The British Journal of Psychology is launched three years later

1920

William Sealy Gosset’s t-test determines the statistical significance of the difference between two sample means

1910

I.P. Pavlov introduces to Western science the concept of the conditioned reflex

1901

1943 1946

1950

1951

Solomon Asch describes conformity in groups

1956

First meeting of the Experimental Psychology Group, later Society

Kenneth Craik’s The Nature of Explanation proposes the concept of the brain as a calculating machine

B.F. Skinner launches behavioural analysis

1958

1966 Peter Wason outlines what is to become one of the most famous tasks in the psychology of reasoning

1969 1974 1978

1980

1983

Mary Ainsworth classifies various patterns of attachment to caregivers

2000

Jaak Panksepp coins the term ‘Affective Neuroscience’, and Joseph LeDoux investigates the brain mechanisms of ‘emotional learning’

1990

1992

Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner demonstrate the age at which children develop an understanding of the beliefs of other people

1963

1970

1980

Anne Treisman and Garry Gelade review evidence for their feature-integration theory of attention

1960

1961

Albert Bandura’s ‘bobo doll’ study on the social learning of aggression

1960

George Miller on the ‘magic number’ capacity of short-term memory

Donald Broadbent’s Perception and Communication, and Harry Harlow’s ‘nature of love’ monkey experiments

Recent times

2010

The methods of experimental psychology are increasingly combined with those of brain imaging, of molecular biology and of pharmacology

forum 946 news 956 Incorporating Psychologist Appointments careers 1012 £5 or free to members of looking ahead 1022 The British Psychological Society

Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch present their ‘Working Memory’ model

Saul Sternberg introduces his Additive Factor method

Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority studies

George Sperling reveals a form of visual memory that has high capacity but lasts only a fraction of a second

150 years of experimental psychology Special issue on the anniversary of Gustav Fechner’s pivotal book

the experimental psychologist’s fallacy 964 women in early psychology 972 the misdirected quest 978 interview with Frederic Bartlett 988

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The British Psychological Society Contact The British Psychological Society St Andrews House 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR tel 0116 254 9568 fax 0116 227 1314

Welcome to The Psychologist, the monthly publication of The British Psychological

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Associate Editors Articles Vaughan Bell, Kate Cavanagh, Harriet Gross, Marc Jones, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, Wendy Morgan, Tom Stafford, Miles Thomas, Monica Whitty, Jill Wilkinson, Barry Winter Conferences Sarah Haywood International Nigel Foreman, Asifa Majid Interviews Nigel Hunt, Lance Workman History of Psychology Julie Perks

The Psychologist Policy Committee David Lavallee (Chair), Phil Banyard, Nik Chmiel, Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Jeremy Horwood, Catherine Loveday, Victoria Mason, Stephen McGlynn, Sheelagh Strawbridge, Henck van Bilsen, Peter Wright, and Associate Editors

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forum 946 including William James; Gustav Fechner; occupational debate; gender and more

THE ISSUE

news, digest and media 956 spending review; Alzheimer’s; magic and autism; graduate employment; tasty morsels from the Research Digest; and Sinéad Rhodes on ADHD in the news

A former pupil of William James, the philosopher George Santayana, once said: ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.

As someone fully immersed in the history of psychology I am in no doubt as to its importance. Yet there’s more: the history of psychology is fascinating, fresh, funny even. I hope you have enjoyed ‘Looking back’ (collated at www.bps.org.uk/lookback), and that you will find more to educate and engage in this issue marking 150 years of experimental psychology.

Throughout, we offer a new look at the innovators of change, and insights into some unusual and unsung aspects of the discipline’s past. Also, for the first time in The Psychologist’s history, you get a free poster. We hope this will be a useful addition to your department or office wall, to inspire a future generation to create their own legacy.

Julie Perks (Associate Editor)

Special issue: 150 years of experimental psychology

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Geoff Bunn introduces a special issue marking the 150th Anniversary of Gustav Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik

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Daniel N. Robinson on Fechner’s tome

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Elizabeth Valentine profiles three women in early 20th-century experimental psychology

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David K. Robinson on an important meeting of minds at Leipzig University

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Peter Lamont on how early psychologists turned to grand wizards

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Graham Richards on loss of innocence in the Torres Straits

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Philip Barnard on the work of the APU

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Frederic Bartlett speaking in 1959 on what makes a good experimental psychologist

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1950

book reviews diary drawings of mental illness; forensic psychology; ‘Aspergirls’ and more

990 1956

the E Psyc later

1958

one on one …with Chris Green

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1980

1966 Peter Wason outlines what is to become one of the most famous tasks in the psychology of reasoning

Anne Treisman and

19

19

1022

1961

Albert Bandura’s ‘bobo doll’ study on the social learning of aggression

1970

looking ahead some presentist futurology on experimental psychology, with Alan Costall

George Miller on the ‘magic number’ capacity of short-term memory

Donald Broadbent’s Perception and Communication, and Harry Harlow’s ‘nature of love’ monkey experiments

1960

society 996 President’s column; new Community Psychology Section, and a call to support the formation of a Disaster, Crisis and Trauma Section; improving work–life balance; preserving our history; and psychology at the Science Museum 1012 careers we talk to Adrian Owen about the ‘brain drain’ and more; career opportunities in the history of psychology; the latest jobs, and how to advertise

150 years of experimental psychology A special issue marking the anniversary of Gustav Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics – see main panel

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DIGEST

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Out of the Asch study With the help of five to eight ‘confederates’ (research assistants posing as naive participants), Solomon Asch in the 1950s found that when it came to making public judgments about the relative lengths of lines, some people were willing to agree with a majority view that was clearly wrong.

Asch’s finding was hugely influential, but a key criticism has been his use of confederates who pretended to believe unanimously that a line was a different length than it really was. They might well have behaved in a stilted, unnatural manner. And attempts to replicate the study could be confounded by the fact that some confederates will be more convincing than others. To solve these problems Kazuo Mori and Miho Arai adapted the MORI technique (Manipulation of Overlapping Rivalrous Images by polarising filters), used previously in eyewitness research. By donning filter glasses similar to those used for watching 3-D movies, participants can view the same display and yet see different things.

Mori and Arai replicated Asch’s line comparison task with 104 participants tested in groups of four at a time (on successive trials participants said aloud which of three comparison lines matched a single target line). In each group, three participants wore identical glasses, with one participant wearing a different set, thereby causing them to observe that a different comparison line matched the target line. As in Asch’s studies, the participants stated their answers publicly, with the minority participant always going third.

Whereas Asch used male participants only, the new study involved both men and women. For women only, the new findings closely matched the seminal research, with the minority participant being swayed by the majority on an average of 4.41 times out of 12 key trials (compared with 3.44 times in the original). However, the male participants in the new study were not swayed by the In the October issue of majority view. the International Journal There are many possible reasons of Psychology why men in the new study were not swayed by the majority as they were in Asch’s studies, including cultural differences (the current study was conducted in Japan) and generational changes. Mori and Arai highlighted another reason – the fact that the minority and majority participants in their study knew each other, whereas participants in Asch’s study did not know the confederates. The researchers argue that this is a strength of their new approach: ‘Conforming behaviour among acquaintances is more important as a psychological research topic than conforming among strangers,’ they said. ‘Conformity generally takes place among acquainted persons, such as family members, friends or colleagues, and in daily life we seldom experience a situation like the Asch experiment in which we make decisions among total strangers.’

Looking ahead, Mori and Arai believe their approach will provide a powerful means of re-examining Asch’s classic work, including in situations – for example, with young children – in which the use of confederates would not be practical.

960

Accentuating the unbelievable In the November issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology Speakers with a foreign accent are perceived as less believable than native speakers. A new study shows this isn’t just because of prejudice towards ‘outsiders’. It also has to do with the fluency effect, one manifestation of which is our tendency to assume that how easily a message is processed is a mark of its truthfulness.

Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar recruited nine speakers to utter 45 trivia facts, such as ‘A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel’. Three of the speakers were native (American) English speakers; three had mild foreign accents and originated from Poland, Turkey or Austria/Germany; and three had strong accents and were from Korea, Turkey or Italy.

Twenty-eight undergraduate participants rated the veracity of each of the spoken facts (which speakers uttered which of the facts varied from participant to participant in a balanced design). Crucially, participants were led to believe that the study was really about using intuition to judge facts. Also, it was made clear to them that the facts had been penned by the researchers – that the speakers were merely acting as messengers. To drill home this idea, the researchers also had the participants go through the charade of themselves uttering a few facts, ostensibly to be presented to other participants.

On a 0–14cm scale from ‘definitely false’ at one end to ‘definitely true’ at the other, the participants rated facts spoken

by mild and heavily accented speakers as less believable than facts uttered by native English speakers (the mean ratings were 6.95, 6.84 and 7.59, respectively – a statistically significant difference).

What if participants are made aware that the difficulty they have processing a foreign accent could be interfering with their judgements? A second study with another 27 undergrads tested this very idea. It was similar to the first but this time participants were told the explicit aim of the study.

Now, facts spoken by a speaker with a mild accent were judged to be just as credible as facts spoken by a native English speaker. However, facts spoken by a heavily accented speaker were still judged to be less true.

It seems we can override our bias for assuming easily processed utterances are more truthful – but only up to a point.

Also, it’s worth remembering that in real life, prejudice towards foreign speakers is likely to augment the effects observed here.

‘These results have important implications for how people perceive non-native speakers of a language, particularly as mobility increases in the modern world, leading millions of people to be non-native speakers of the language they use daily,’ the researchers concluded. ‘Accent might reduce the credibility of non-native job seekers, eyewitnesses, reporters or news anchors.’

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How to form a habit In the October issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology

This has nothing to do with nuns’ clothing. Habits are those behaviours that have become automatic, triggered by a cue in the environment rather than by conscious will. Health psychologists are interested for obvious reasons – they want to assist people in breaking unhealthy habits, while helping them adopt healthy ones.

Remarkably, although there are plenty of habit-formation theories, before now, no one had actually studied habits systematically as they are formed.

Phillippa Lally and her team recruited 96 undergrads (mean age 27) and asked them to adopt a new health-related behaviour, to be repeated once a day for the next 84 days. The new behaviour had to be linked to a daily cue. Examples chosen by the participants included going for a 15-minute run before dinner; eating a piece of fruit with lunch; and doing 50 situps after morning coffee. The participants also logged onto a website each day, to report whether they’d performed the behaviour on the previous day, and to fill out a self-report measure of the behaviour’s automaticity. Example items included ‘I do it automatically’, ‘I do it without thinking’ and ‘I’d find it hard not to do’.

Of the 82 participants who saw the study through to the end, the most common pattern of habit formation was for early repetitions of the chosen behaviour to produce the largest increases in its automaticity.

Over time, further increases in automaticity dwindled until a plateau was reached beyond which extra repetitions made no difference to the automaticity achieved.

The average time to reach maximum automaticity was 66 days, although this varied greatly between participants from 18 days to a predicted 254 days (assuming the still rising rate of change in automaticity at the study end were to be continued beyond the study’s 84 days). This is much longer than most previous estimates of the time taken to acquire a new habit – for example a 1988 book claimed a behaviour is habitual once it has been performed at least twice a month, at least ten times. In fact, even after 84 days, about half of the current study participants had failed to achieve a high enough automaticity score for their new behaviour to be considered a habit.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, more complex behaviours were found to take longer to become habits. Participants who’d chosen an exercise behaviour took about one and a half times as long to reach their automaticity plateau compared with the participants who adopted new eating or drinking behaviours.

What about the effect of having a day off from the behaviour? Writing in 1890, William James said that a behaviour must be repeated without omission for it to become a habit. The new results found that a single missed day had little impact on later automaticity gains, either early in the study or later on, suggesting James may have overestimated the effect of a missed repetition. However, there was some evidence that too many missed repeats of the behaviour, even if spread out over time, had a cumulative

effect, reducing the maximum automaticity level that was ultimately reached.

It seems the message of this research for those seeking to establish a new habit is to repeat the behaviour every day if you can, but don’t worry excessively if you miss a day or two. Also be prepared for the long haul – remember the average time to reach peak automaticity was 66 days.

This research has a serious shortcoming, acknowledged by the researchers, which is that it depended entirely on participants’ ability to report the automaticity of their own behaviour. Also, the amount of data made it hard to form clear conclusions about the need for consistency in building a habit.

However, the study does provide an exciting new approach for exploring habit formation and future research could easily remedy these shortcomings.

The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett.

Visit the blog for full coverage including references and links, additional current reports, an archive, comment and more.

Subscribe by RSS or e-mail at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Become a fan at www.facebook.com/researchdigest

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The experimental psychologist’s fallacy Geoff Bunn introduces a special issue marking the 150th Anniversary of Gustav Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics

I

question

What are the implications of conceptualising psychological phenomena as having more in common with ‘marriage, money, or the monarchy’ (Kusch, 1999, p.1) than with bones, stones or hormones?

resources

www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/ networks/chip/resources.asp http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Fechner/ wozniak.htm

references

Considered by some psychologists to be the ‘founding father’ of experimental psychology, Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) was, to some extent, an uncompromisingly hardnosed materialist. Yet there was also a more conciliatory and spiritual side to his thinking. In 1835, for example, in his Little Book on Life After Death, Fechner argued that consciousness can be sustained by different ontological systems. The work of many of the great psychologists has subsequently incorporated similarly antagonistic dualisms.

But these ineradicable tensions are ultimately a function not of the idiosyncrasies of individual biography but of the highly ambiguous nature of psychological knowledge itself.

Boring, E.G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Brown, S.D. & Stenner, P. (2009).

Psychology without foundations: History, philosophy and psychosocial theory. London: Sage.

Brinkmann, S. (2005). Human kinds and looping effects in psychology: Foucauldian and hermeneutic perspectives. Theory & Psychology,

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t apparently came to him in a dream.

On the morning of 22 October 1850, a middle-aged German professor of physics was lying in bed worrying about the mind–body problem. He had only recently recovered from a nervous collapse that had lasted three years and had temporarily blinded him. His most recent work had been an examination of the mental life of plants. Now he was about to publish a book called ZendAvesta, Or Concerning Matters of Heaven and the World to Come. As he later recalled, he now realised that the thing to do was to make ‘the relative increase of bodily energy the measure of the increase of the corresponding mental intensity’.

This was this insight that inspired Gustav Fechner to initiate the paradigm-shifting programme of work that became known as psychophysics.

‘One may call him the ‘founder’ of experimental psychology’, wrote historian of psychology E.G. Boring of Fechner (1801–1887), ‘or one may assign that title to Wundt. It does not matter. Fechner had a fertile idea which grew and brought forth fruit abundantly.’ (Boring, 1950, p.295). As we shall see, not only have some of these fruits proved difficult to harvest but their taste might be described as bittersweet.

In this special issue of The Psychologist we celebrate the 150-year anniversary of the publication of that ‘epoch-making work’ (Boring, 1950, p.295), the Elements of Psychophysics . Although many psychologists will know his famous law and the three basic experimental procedures he devised, few perhaps will be aware of what an intriguingly complex

15, 769–791.

Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Danziger, K. (1997). Naming the mind: How psychology found its language.

London: Sage.

Diriwächter, R. (2004). Völkerpsychologie: The synthesis that never was. Culture & Psychology, 10(1), 85–109.

person Fechner was. The empirical and philosophical issues he grappled with are still very much with us. In this special issue, expertly assembled by Julie Perks, we offer a variety of perspectives on Fechner’s legacy to psychology. Daniel N. Robinson explains how some of the philosophical and practical difficulties Fechner overcame led to the fulfilment of Kant’s prophecy in the Critique of Pure Reason (1787) that psychology would eventually have ‘an establishment of its own’. David K. Robinson shows how Fechner’s work in turn inspired Wundt’s own experimental programme. Whereas for Fechner psychophysics was nothing less than a method for discerning the relationship between matter and mind, Wundt believed that it was merely a useful way of undertaking sensory physiology.

Peter Lamont revisits research by Jastrow, Binet and Triplett to recount a little-known but telling story about psychology’s entanglements with magic. In his account of the 1898 Cambridge anthropological expedition to the islands of the Torres Strait, Graham Richards reflects on psychology’s loss of innocence and draws nine methodological lessons about the performance and write up of psychological experiments.

Liz Valentine describes the work of three female British psychologists – Beatrice Edgell, Victoria Hazlitt and May Smith – during the first half of the 20th century. At a time when it was considered unnatural for women to pursue independent careers, these women made what can be appropriately described as heroic contributions to the development of experimental psychology in Britain. What is striking about many of the essays in this special issue is the repeated finding that experiments cannot be properly understood without a knowledge of the wider social, cultural and historical contexts in which they were undertaken.

In his overview of some notable triumphs of the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge for example, Philip Barnard shows how experimental and theoretical work has always thrived on the challenge

Flugel, J.C. (1933). A hundred years of psychology, 1833–1933. London: Duckworth.

Green Musselman, E. (2006). Nervous conditions: Science and the body politic in early industrial Britain. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Hearnshaw, L.S. (1964). A short history of British psychology, 1840–1940.

London: Methuen & Co. Herle, A. & Rouse, S. (1998). Cambridge

and the Torres Strait: Centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hornstein, G.A. (1988). Quantifying psychological phenomena. In J.G. Morawski (Ed.) The rise of experimentation in American psychology (pp.1–34). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kusch, M. (1999). Psychological

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of having to confront practical problems during times of war and peace.

Barnard’s conclusion that psychology must always look ‘at how real minds behave in real domains of life’ is a sentiment that Frederic Bartlett (APU Director 1945–1951) would have vigorously agreed with. We publish in this issue, for the first time, extracts from an interview the late British Psychological

CREDIT

said Bartlett. ‘Or who fails to connect his psychological research and reflection with these other interests.’ Fechner and Wundt both embodied this sentiment, having deep philosophical commitments that went well beyond the severe confines of the experimental laboratory. Wundt devoted the last 20 years of his life to ‘Völkerpsychologie’, the study of language, myth and culture – entities that he considered to be too complex to be amenable to experimental manipulation (Danziger, 1990; Diriwächter, 2004). And with his work on art, aesthetics and the ‘golden section’, Fechner founded another subdiscipline of psychology that is still exercising the creative imaginations of experimentalists.

Wundt and Fechner would both have agreed with Bartlett’s assertion that a good psychologist ‘has to be able to distinguish strongly between problems of process, which are causal, and problems of structure, which are analytic and descriptive.

In particular the statistics adequate for the latter are not sufficient for the former.’ Alan Costall provocatively argues that one half of Bartlett’s balanced approach has lately been lost as a result of an increasingly restrictive ‘set of practices, rituals, and unexamined assumptions’ that have come to dominate experimental work. To counteract this regrettable state of affairs Costall proposes a rethinking of what a psychological experiment is, suggesting that experimental psychology could be enriched by a renewed emphasis on the

Gustav Fechner

Society archivist Jack Kenna conducted with Bartlett in 1959. ‘There never has been and there never will be a good psychologist who has not got a number of lively interests outside of psychology itself’

knowledge: A social history and philosophy. London: Routledge.

Leary, D.E. (1990). The psychologist's dilemma: To subject the self to science – or science to the self?

Theoretical & Philosophical Psychology 10(2), 66–72.

Martin, J. & Sugarman, J. (2001).

Interpreting human kinds: Beginnings of a hermeneutic psychology. Theory & Psychology, 11, 193–207.

Michell, J. (1997). Quantitative science and the definition of ‘measurement’ in psychology. British Journal of Psychology, 88(3), 355–383.

Myers, C.S. (1909). A text-book of experimental psychology. London: Arnold.

Myers, C.S., Dawes Hicks, G., Watt, H.J. & Brown, W. (1913). Are the intensity differences of sensation quantitative?

British Journal of Psychology, 6, 137–189.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

role that subjectivity plays within the dialectic of the experimental encounter between investigator and participant.

An unusual science Scholarship in the history of science has shown that the scientific revolution cannot be understood without taking human subjectivity into account (Shapin, 1994, 1996). By the end of the 17th century, an incredibly fecund mixture of metaphysical beliefs, experiments, social roles and embodied habits had enabled Kepler, Boyle, Hooke, Newton and others to formulate the scientific laws that are today associated with their names. The epistemological power of experimental methods was repeatedly demonstrated over subsequent centuries as natural philosophers progressively decoded nature’s secrets. André-Marie Ampère, Lord Kelvin and James Watt may never have met in person, but their eponymous units of measurement allowed different branches of empirical inquiry to coordinate and standardise their activities and together produce a profound knowledge of how the universe is put together.

The first generation of aspiring psychologists were rightly impressed with experimental philosophy’s ability to amass an increasingly precise knowledge of nature’s substances and properties. Would psychology be able to follow suit, perhaps by creating a psychological periodic table of elements classifying human attributes?

Although the phrenologists had produced an extensive personological lexicon useful to the character-building ethos of the Victorian era, many mid-19th-century scientists considered the association of ‘human kinds’ such as ‘amativeness’ or ‘self-esteem’ with bumps on the surface of the skull to be somewhat absurd.

Psychology’s many subsequent attempts to base psychological categories on genetic, hormonal or neuronal foundations have proved repeatedly unsuccessful (Brown & Stenner, 2009). Why is this? The answer appears to be because ‘natural kinds’ and

Roediger, H.L. (2008). Why the laws of memory vanished. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 225–254.

Rosenzweig, S. (1933). The experimental situation as a psychological problem.

Psychological Review, 40, 337–354.

Shapin, S. (1994). A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenthcentury England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shapin, S. (1996). The scientific revolution.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, R. (1997). The Fontana history of the human sciences. London: Fontana.

Smith, R. (2005). The history of psychological categories. Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological & Biomedical Sciences, 36, 55–94.

Trendler, G. (2009). Measurement theory, psychology and the revolution that cannot happen. Theory & Psychology, 19, 579–599.

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‘human kinds’ are ontologically dissimilar subjects rarely share the same entities (Brinkmann, 2005; Martin & assumptions is of secondary Sugarman, 2001; Smith, 2005). Comparing importance compared to the fact that human kinds with natural kinds is less like the subjectivities of all the participants comparing apples and oranges than it is in any psychological experiment can akin to comparing apples with never be entirely eliminated. As Saul unemployment. To confuse the analysis of Rosenzweig perceptively put it nearly subjective experience with that of objective 80 years ago, the experimental reality is to commit what William James situation is itself a psychological called ‘the psychologist’s fallacy’ (Leary, problem (Rosenzweig, 1933).

1990).

The Torres Straits researchers Fechner’s great achievement was to learned the hard way how difficult it show how psychology could inaugurate a is to control for situational and programme of systematic empirical inquiry intentional factors when without possessing either any standard experimenting on the human mind. units of measurement on the one hand, But whether experimenters should aim or without committing the psychologist’s to systematically eliminate subjectivity fallacy on the other. ‘The task did not at all is a moot point. In his work on the originally present itself as one of finding history of psychology’s engagement a unit of mental measurement;’ Fechner with magic Peter Lamont concludes wrote, ‘but rather as one of searching for ‘that experimental methods do not Charles Myers a functional relationship between the compensate for a superficial physical and the psychical that would understanding of an enormous range of accurately express their general situational practices, and that even the interdependence.’ E.H. Weber most up-to-date technology does not Society and the Mind Association held (1795–1878) had recorded the amount of necessarily provide better knowledge in a joint meeting in London to ask an change in a physical stimulus that became matters of complex human interaction’. As apparently rather fundamental question: noticeable to an experimental subject (the Bartlett put it: ‘There are no psychological ‘Are the intensity differences of sensation ‘just noticeable difference’). Fechner experiments in which the conditions are quantitative?’ (Myers et al., 1913). proposed that sensation is proportional to all under control. In which one condition Although Myers argued that ‘a thorough the logarithm of the stimulus intensity. It is can be varied independently of the rest, or familiarity with the practice of perhaps ironic that this promissory even in which the concomitant variation of psychophysical methods is essential for discovery (that is itself only true under two specified conditions alone can be reliable systematic psychological certain circumstances) remains arranged and considered. This means that investigations of any kind’, he also believed psychology’s singular claim to having every good psychologist must be wise as that ‘introspection should never be omitted formulated a scientific law. well as technically in a psychological experiment’ (Quoted in Nevertheless, as Daniel N. efficient.’ Needless Hearnshaw, 1964, p.174). On the eve of Robinson explains in these to say, while the the centenary of the publication of the “Fechner’s philosophy pages, psychophysics establishment of Elemente, a somewhat defensive Bartlett encapsulated the tension remains the ‘gold standard’ efficiency may be stated that there was ‘no compelling reason between the mind and body” for experimental a matter of why all experiments should be shaped to psychology because the employing the the conventional forms of the principles it has elucidated appropriate methods, psychophysical methods’. support mutual investigations across the acquisition of wisdom may be more In fact, not only were Fechner and a variety of scientific disciplines. elusive.

Wundt also both extremely ambivalent Psychophysics very quickly became Fechner was efficient and wise in equal about psychology’s use of the experimental immensely influential as it provided a measure. His ‘epoch-making work’ cast a method but neither wanted to create an significant impetus to the establishment long shadow over psychology. A glance at independent discipline of psychology. of psychology as an experimental science Charles Myers’ Text-book of Experimental Wundt considered the experimental (Hornstein, 1988). The initial enthusiasm Psychology (Myers, 1909) shows that 50 method to be useful only for elucidating with which psychology took up years after the publication of the Elemente very basic psychological mechanisms; psychophysical methods was perhaps der Psychophysik, psychology in some more complex psychological capacities matched only by its naivety. In 1898, quarters was virtually synonymous with he suggested required investigation by British psychologists Charles Myers, the tight focus of ‘brass instrument’ essentially qualitative methods. William W.H.R. Rivers and William McDougall psychophysics. But this is not to say that James touched on Fechner’s binary embarked on the famous Cambridge the momentary triumph of psychophysics sympathies when he described him as Anthropological Expedition to the Torres being ‘at once simple and shrewd, a mystic was unequivocal. Conceptual confusion Strait (see Herle & Rouse, 1998). One of and an experimentalist, homely and over the meaning of sensation proved the aims was to test the islanders’ daring, and as loyal to facts as to his troublesome to the nascent discipline. By perceptual abilities using the latest theories’ (quoted in Flugel, 1933, p.161). the time Wundt had opened his famous psychophysical apparatus. In his analysis Obsessed with the dialectical relationships psychological laboratory at Leipzig in 1879 of the expedition’s reports, Graham between Nachtansicht (night view) and it was widely argued that psychophysical Richards shows that psychological Tagesansicht (day view), and between measurement referred to mental experiments are embedded within ‘inner psychophysics’ and ‘outer judgements, not to sensation per se (Smith, often unarticulated frameworks of psychophysics’, Fechner’s philosophy 1997, p.505). As late as 1913 the British understanding. That experimenters and encapsulated the tension between the Psychological Society, the Aristotelean

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mind and the body. He invoked an analogy of two clocks telling the same time, not to illustrate psychophysical parallelism (the doctrine that the mind and the body operate in parallel) but to argue for panpsychism (mind is ubiquitous in nature). Body and mind according to Fechner cannot but be synchronised because both are powered by a profound universal animism.

By 1830 Fechner had published over 40 articles on physics, including important work on the quantitative measurement of electric current. He was appointed professor of physics at Leipzig when he was only 33. But after losing his sight as a result of studying afterimages by staring at the sun, he suffered what William James later diagnosed as a ‘habit neurosis’. In 1843, after three years of living with his eyes wrapped in bandages, he found his vision restored and claimed to be able to see flowers’ souls (Green Musselman, 2006, p.124). Following his recovery he became even more convinced of the limitations of scientific materialism. Over the course of his life he returned again and again to numinous themes, writing mystical tracts under the pseudonym ‘Dr Mises’. In 1825 he had argued that angels

must be spherical beings because the sphere was the most perfect geometrical form. In 1851 he published Zend-Avesta, Or Concerning Matters of Heaven and the World to Come, a book that ‘bears an ancestral relation to experimental psychology’ (Boring, 1950, p.279).

This all too brief survey of the history of psychophysics has revealed psychology to be a rather unusual science. It has no units of measurement of its own – no ‘Fechners’, ‘Wundts’ or ‘Edgells’, for example (Trendler, 2010), although Clark Hull in his Principles of Behavior (1943) proposed the wat and the pav as measures of ‘reaction potential’ and ‘inhibition’ respectively; nor has it any scientific laws to speak of, even in the experimentdominated field of memory research (Roediger, 2008). Thanks in part to Fechner, psychology’s idiosyncratic definition of measurement is quite unlike the traditional one used by the physical sciences (Mitchell, 1997). And if it is the case that psychological categories are internalised ontologically historical (i.e. social, cultural and political) entities as opposed to being part of an external universal nature (Danziger, 1997; Smith, 2005), then it is surely not meaningful to

speak of psychology being in the business of scientific ‘discovery’. Despite these eccentricities, Psychology continues to advance a systematic knowledge of what it means to be human.

More than any other area of psychology, psychophysics has confronted our chief conundrum: the nature of the relationship between the mind and the body. The history of psychophysics demonstrates, perhaps more starkly than any other area of our science, that the subjective is an ineradicable element in all psychology. As psychologists, we will always have to face an irreducible and irresolvable set of essential tensions between the mind and the body, between process and structure, between efficiency and wisdom, between the empirical and the hermeneutic, and between the quantitative and the qualitative. The way to avoid committing the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’, as all the great psychologists knew, is to accept them.

I Dr Geoff Bunn is Senior Lecture in Psychology at the Manchester Metropolitan University and Chair of the BPS History & Philosophy of Psychology Section

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Fechner’s Elemente – ‘an establishment of its own’ Daniel N. Robinson on the 150th anniversary of a text that many consider to be the first in experimental psychology

question

‘Discovering the Past: Gustav Fechner and Signal Detection Theory’ (PDF): tinyurl.com/3azdze2

references

How might psychophysics, as envisaged

by Fechner, be applied (if at all) to complex cognitive processes?

resources

Fechner’s attempt to place psychology on the firm foundations of experimental science was undertaken in a sceptical intellectual atmosphere still philosophically dominated by postKantian thought. The challenges facing Fechner included not merely the persistent issue of mind–body relations but comparably fundamental questions in philosophy of science, the nature of measurement and the essential character of theory and explanation in science. Despite these hurdles, he succeeded in outlining a ‘biophysics of mental life’ that many see as the foundation of experimental psychology.

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Cahan, D. (Ed.) (1995). Science and culture: Popular and philosophical essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fechner, G. (1966). Elements of psychophysics (Trans. Helmut Adler).

New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

(Original work published 1860) Kant. I. (2003). Critique of pure reason.

[Trans. Norman Kemp Smith). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (Original

B

eyond the tiny duchy of ‘history of psychology’, Gustav Fechner is a name in a book, and his psychophysics little more than a chapter in introductory treatments of ‘sensation and perception’. He is credited with discovering a law, though its application is restricted and in some instances (e.g. loudness) defective. But books, and especially textbooks, have a way of draining the colour from lives, overlooking the passion and the personality behind every scientific and intellectual achievement. Conventional accounts of Fechner are no exception.

Yet Fechner was, indeed, exceptional.

His defence of the perspective and the very methods of psychophysics would stand as nothing less than a defence of psychology’s membership in the community of science.

Where did matters stand during the half-century before the appearance of Elemente der Psychophysik? The second edition of Kant’s profound Critique of Pure Reason (1787) is a good point of departure.

There, near the very end of the work, Kant raises a question regarding the prospects for an empirical psychology. He has already shown, by way of his ‘Paralogisms’, that the vaunted claims of rational psychology are empty. Reason alone cannot establish the traditional claims regarding the unity, immateriality and immortality of the ‘soul’ or mental substance. But might some other means be found with which to develop a sound and practical anthropology, an empirical and scientific psychology with reliable content? That such a discipline cannot be a division of metaphysics is, on

work published 1781) Newman, J.R. (2000). The world of mathematics: Vol. II. New York: Dover Publications.

Kant’s account, established by the fact that it possesses none of the a priori and ‘pure’ elements that make up a systematic metaphysics. Perhaps, however, at least for a time, a paternalistic metaphysics might spare this psychology the hardships it surely would face elsewhere. In any case,

[t]hough it is but a stranger it has long been accepted as a member of the household, and we allow it to stay for some time longer, until it is in a position to set up an establishment of its own… (Kant, 1781/2003, p.664)

An establishment of its own. There was, however, more than one road to relative independence, and at the time Fechner was contemplating his project the two main roads were running in opposite directions. One was prepared by Hegel and his disciples, promising glimmers of the ‘Absolute Mind’. The promise here was discovery of that Mind that yields no less than a unified totality of all truth!

How the Hegelian system was understood by the scientific community is conveyed graphically by Helmholtz in an address at Heidelberg in 1862: His system of nature seemed, at least to natural philosophers, absolutely crazy. Of all the distinguished scientific men who were his contemporaries, not one was to stand up for his ideas. (Cahan, 1995, p.80)

For Fechner, already a recognised physicist and experimental scientist, the philosophical road itself had taken a twisting path away from the introspectionism of the empiricists. What they lacked – what philosophy could not supply – were experimental modes of inquiry and a commitment to measurement; a commitment to methods designed to yield systematic relationships between experience and its objects.

Trained and original as an experimental physicist, Fechner was at home with the leading scientific thinking of the age. He knew that the two ingredients essential to any scientific undertaking were a methodology and a sound system of measurement. Psychology had neither.

Fechner also understood the importance of theoretical modesty in developing a science. The right mode of inquiry begins with facts and moves cautiously toward theory. The clearest fact for any inquiry pertaining to mental life is the relationship between the stimulation of sense organs and the sensations that attend it. How is this relationship to be understood? Fechner recognised the historical attention that had been paid to this question. He seeks to dispose of it in the very first chapter of his book, under

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the heading, ‘Considerations on the Fechner accepts the ordinary relation of body and mind’. As a necessary understanding of free will. He points to first step in science, one must not the obvious fact that persons can walk surrender the entire enterprise to from here to there, on journeys long or philosophy. The mind–body problem short. But it is also the case that their as framed by Fechner is to be recast in actual movements are subject to the laws technical and perspectival terms rather of mechanics, to the conservationist than those of metaphysics. Technically, principles so recently established by one has direct, unmediated access to one’s Helmholtz, to the constraints imposed experiences, whereas access to any by weakness or illness, etc. It is the project material entity is mediated. The material of science to identify the physical and side of life, he says, is hidden by the material conditions and constraints, mental. Philosophers, instead of understanding that philosophical modes proceeding to devise the means by which of inquiry would never be sufficient. to reveal what is thus hidden, develop Fechner gives great praise to J.F. competing theories.

Herbart, Kant’s successor at Königsberg.

Fechner chooses Leibniz to illustrate In the matter of psychophysical the point. As bodily and mental events measurement, Fechner says that Herbart occur together, one may explain the ‘had this measure practically within his connection with the metaphor of a pair grasp…’ (Fechner, 1860/1966, p.46) of clocks. The clocks might be tethered Herbart had defended the project for to the same board and thereby have their scientific though not an experimental movements causally linked. Or there might psychology. He was perhaps the first to use be someone who intervenes and personally the term ‘threshold’ in the sense it would moves the hands of both synchronously come to have in psychology. Though (‘Occasonalism’). Then again the clocks Fechner picks up the account with may be expressing an original design, Herbart, it was actually Kant who laid the unique to each, such that they function foundations in that section of the Critique independently but in perfectly parallel referred to as the ‘Anticipations of fashion (‘Pre-established Harmony’). But Perception’. It is here that Kant discusses suppose, Fechner says, what has been left the a priori basis on which to determine out of such accounts is, ‘one point of view just what belongs to empirical knowledge; – the most simple possible. They can keep i.e. the property in principle that renders time harmoniously because…they are not anything a possible object of perception. really two different clocks’ (Fechner, It is in this section that Kant asserts, Every sensation…in the field of 1860/1966, p.4: all quotes taken from 1966 appearance, however small it may be, translation). What differs is the perspective, not the reality.

If one chooses, one can confine one’s observations to the relationship between stimulation and its effects on nerves and brain, thereby developing an inner psychophysics.

Alternatively, the focus can be on the relationship between stimulation and experience, yielding outer psychophysics. As Fechner notes, with a frozen brain one gets neither!

Fechner is at pains to note that human beings, if regarded as clocks, are recognised as not merely clocks. His point, of course, is that the reductive strategies essential to scientific explanation should not be understood as exhausting either the meaningfulness or the wider nature of the entities so analysed. It is Statue of Immanuel Kant at Königsberg clear, for example, that

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has a degree, that is, an intensive magnitude which can always be diminished. Between reality and negation there is a continuity of possible realities and of possible smaller perceptions. (Kant, 1781/2003, p.203)

What Kant established metaphysically, and what Herbart proceeded to develop in a strictly mathematical way, is what finally would arise in the experimental work of Weber and in the law that bears his name.

The absolute and difference thresholds, and the relative constancy of Weber’s ratio, were key ingredients as Fechner approached the problem of measurement.

Weber had shown that quantitative techniques could, indeed, be profitably applied in attempts to measure at least one aspect of the mental. Choose a standard stimulus (e.g. a weight). By how much must a comparison weight differ from the standard to be perceived as just noticeably different? What Weber discovered was that, at the point at which two stimuli are just noticeably different, the ratio of the difference between the standard and the comparison stimuli to the magnitude of the standard is constant.

So blindfold a person and give them a 1kg weight, and an increase of a few grams will not be noticed. If the mass is doubled, the threshold called ‘smallest noticeable difference’ also doubles.

However, to reach his famous law, Fechner had to overcome a problem that the laboratory could not accommodate. Weber had provided a law of discrimination and Fechner sought a law of sensation itself. Enter Herbart (in the shadow of, alas, Kant).

By regarding a given magnitude of sensation as the outcome of an indefinitely large number of indefinitely small difference thresholds, Fechner reasoned that the mathematical integration of the series was the right model for that ‘inner psychophysical’ process from which sensations arise. The result of this mathematical operation was R = k log S, Fechner’s law.

It is instructive to rehearse briefly the ingredients so skillfully assembled here. First, a trenchant defence of monism. Reality is given in two aspects – the psychic and the physical – but the science of psychophysics provides the means by which to reveal their lawful relationship. By adopting this doubleaspect perspective, Fechner removes one chief obstacle to experimental approaches to mind and mental life. His use of mathematics was pivotal in the

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development of his programme. The credit he pays to Euler, Bernoulli, Laplace and Poisson is revealing. Euler had made original contributions to the mathematical modelling of pitch. Fechner cites the probability theorists for their distinction between fortune morale and fortune physique in games of chance, finding in such work developed precedents for constructing mathematical models of complex human activities (see also Newman, 2000, pp.1155–1157). Then, with success to this point, he must offer a guarded argument to the effect that ever more complex cognitive processes should lend themselves to comparable models and modes of measurement.

Ultimately, the merging of outer psychophysics and inner psychophysics will provide a scientific understanding – by way of functional laws – of the manner in which the biological processes reveal themselves in the form of ‘mental’ life.

There is but one clock, though viewed from different perspectives. Nor will progress require the unfailing application of a given law: Even where this law ceases to be valid or strictly applicable, the principle of psychic measurement

I have outlined retains its exactness and full validity. (Fechner, 1860/1966, p.55)

In the ‘hard science–soft science’ dichotomy, candour requires psychologists to locate most of what passes under the aegis of the discipline as ‘soft’. This is not condemnatory but descriptive, and descriptive in a way that raises fundamental questions regarding the discipline’s proper subject matter and (therefore) proper modes of inquiry.

Psychophysics in this matter stands as something of the gold standard, for it is the one specialty in which functional laws are numerous, reliable, basic and crossdisciplinary. Energy at the visual threshold psychophysically established can be matched with findings at the level of electrophysiology and pigment chemistry. Research in sensory information processing, in which psychophysical methods are routine, have provided bridges to engineering, computer modelling, theories of higher levels of mental function. At its most productive, cognitive neuroscience is psychophysical in precisely the way envisaged by Fechner himself.

Perhaps it would be too generous to credit Fechner or his book with a fullfledged anticipation of all this. Yet, if he did not see all of what was in store, he might have seen some possibilities still to be redeemed. When he first turns to the ‘The Principle of Psychophysical Measurement’, attention is drawn not to human subjects in small dark rooms, but to some 15 pages devoted to kinetic energy and the conservation laws (Fechner, 1860/1966, pp.19–37). Clearly envisaged in these pages is a biophysics of mental life; a psychological science that is broadly ecological and ultimately prepared to study the dynamics of psychological processes within the context of physics proper. Thus might psychology have ‘an establishment of its own’.

Not a bad idea.

Daniel N. Robinson is in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University dan.robinson@philosophy. ox.ac.uk

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Division of Occupational Psychology Applying the science of psychology to work

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Women in early 20th-century experimental psychology Elizabeth Valentine profiles three women at the forefront of the development of the discipline

W

What role did women play in the early days of psychology in Britain?

Did they conform to the female stereotype of ‘caring’ practitioners rather than to the male stereotype of unemotional scientists? Did they show a preference for ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard topics? This article discusses the work of three women – Beatrice Edgell, Victoria Hazlitt and May Smith – who, despite being in a tiny minority with the odds stacked against them, overcame barriers, pioneered methods and made original theoretical contributions to experimental psychology. In many cases their work anticipated later developments by several decades.

omen made a significant contribution to the development of experimental psychology in Britain in the early 20th century, at a time when social mores dictated that it was unnatural for women to pursue independent careers, which generally entailed forgoing marriage and a family.

There were many barriers to obtaining qualifications and limited opportunities for employment; women faced discrimination, subordination and segregation. They were frequently barred from common-rooms and excluded from professional society dinners: properly bred women did not enter rooms where men were smoking.

questions

Is there any truth in the claim that women make better practitioners and men better scientists?

resources

Valentine, E.R. (2006). Beatrice Edgell: Pioneer woman psychologist.

Hauppage, NY: Nova Science.

Valentine, E.R. (2008). To care or to understand? Women members of the British Psychological Society 1901–1918. History & Philosophy of Psychology 10(1), 54–65.

references

Culpin, M. & Smith, M. (1930). The Nervous Temperament. Industrial Health Research Board Report 61.

London.

Cox, D. & Waters, H.S. (1986). Sex differences in the use of organization strategies. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 41, 18–37.

Edgell, B. (1903). On time judgment.

American Journal of Psychology, 14, 418–438.

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Why were there so few women in the early days of psychology and why are there so many now?

Edgell, B. (1905). Experiments on association. Journal of Physiology, 32, lxiv–lxv.

Edgell, B. (1932). Current constructive theories in psychology. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1932 (pp.169–184). London: British Association.

Edgell, B. & Symes, W.L. (1906). The Wheatstone Hipp chronoscope.

BPS VISUAL ARCHIVE

Beatrice Edgell Beatrice Edgell was born to a family who were able to offer her material and moral support when higher education was beginning to open up to women. She pursued her career with quiet determination, owing her success to courageous enterprise as well as diplomacy and discretion. Her sharp intellect was combined with charm and gaiety.

The first British woman to obtain a doctorate in psychology, Edgell studied experimental psychology under

Oswald Külpe in Würzburg. On her return she set up one of the first psychological laboratories in the country at Bedford College, London, and secured a part-time appointment at the University of London’s Physiological Laboratory.

Edgell’s quest was to determine the extent to which the mind could be measured.

Her first, original, studies concerned time judgement (Edgell, 1903) and were designed to determine the duration of sound that can be most accurately estimated; and whether the point judged to be midway between two durations is closer to their arithmetic or their geometric mean. The latter question was relevant to the issue of whether judgements of duration were similar to judgements of quality and intensity, and to the theory of psychological measurement. Edgell was the first to apply this method of ‘bisection’ to the study of duration. The intervals most accurately estimated were between 1.5 and 3.3 seconds; shorter durations were overestimated and longer ones underestimated. This is in agreement with much later studies, though the interval most accurately reproduced (and perceived) has generally been found to be shorter, about 550 milliseconds. The duration judged to be midway between two periods was closer to the arithmetic than the geometric mean, thus conflicting with Weber’s law. The exponent of the power function underlying subjective duration calculated by Eisler (1976) is very close to the values obtained by Edgell.

Edgell undertook a gruelling year-long study of the calibration of the WheatstoneHipp chronoscope, with the physiologist William Legge Symes

British Journal of Psychology, 2, 58–88.

Eisler, H. (1976). Experiments on subjective duration 1868–1975: A collection of power function exponents. Psychological Bulletin, 83, 1154–1171.

Hazlitt, V. (1919). The acquisition of motor habits. British Journal of Psychology, 9, 299–320.

Hazlitt, V. (1926). Ability. London:

Methuen.

Hazlitt, V. (1930). Children’s thinking.

British Journal of Psychology, 20, 354–361.

Hudson, L. (1966). Contrary imaginations.

A psychological study of the English schoolboy. London: Methuen.

Kay, H. (1955). Learning and retaining verbal material. British Journal of Psychology, 46, 81–100.

McDougall, W. & Smith, M. (1920). The

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effects of alcohol and some other drugs during normal and fatigued conditions. Medical Research Council Report 56. London. HMSO. Smith, M. (1916). A contribution to the study of fatigue. British Journal of Psychology, 8(3), 327–350.

Waters, H.S. & Schreiber, L.L. (1991). Sex differences in elaborative strategies.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 52, 319–335.

interactions (e.g. Cox & Waters, 1986; Waters & Schreiber, 1991). Nevertheless, we still know relatively little about sex differences in memory development and in this sense, Edgell’s work has barely been superseded.

Further work (Edgell, 1932) investigated immediate and delayed serial recall of pictures, demonstrating effects of position, confusion between semantically related items, coherence, and emotional salience. The results also anticipate Kay’s (1955) later finding of a tendency to recall not only the original stimulus but also previously attempted recalls.

Victoria Hazlitt Victoria Hazlitt, a student and subsequently a colleague of Edgell’s, was an intense, ambitious young woman, whose feminine appearance belied her tough interior.

She had a keen eye for the fundamental problems of psychology.

Tragically, she burned to death in her mid-forties at the height of her powers, as a result of cleaning a silk dress with petrol. Following graduation, she spent a year at Colorado State University. On her return to Bedford College, she first turned her attention to animal learning, in particular transfer of training, and the question of whether previous experience facilitates (or hinders) subsequent learning (Hazlitt, 1919). Pairs of mazes were used, scrubbed at frequent intervals with Jeyes fluid, and the floor and walls were covered with clean grease-proof paper for each rat in order to minimise scent cues.

Attempts were also made to control for sex, age, strain, time of day, and time of year. Learning curves (time and errors) demonstrated the superiority of practised over unpractised rats: the former ran faster and made fewer errors. The results anticipate much later work on learning sets, place vs. responses learning and the over-learning reversal effect. Hazlitt concluded that ‘rats improve with practice in their ability to acquire motor habits, and…any hindrances to learning which may be offered by the survival of old habits are more than counterbalanced by the mastery which the practised rats gain over the general situation’ (Hazlitt, 1919, p.311).

In the early 1920s Hazlitt undertook pioneering experiments in university

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selection, reported in her book Ability (Hazlitt, 1926). The aim was to predict success in arts and science degrees.

Members of the psychology department administered a battery of tests to first-year students for three years. Speed of verbal association and judgements of style predicted success in arts degrees. Drawing to directions, solving mazes, carrying out orally given directions, classification and generalisation, and grasping and expressing symbolic relations predicted success in science. Memory for different kinds of material failed to discriminate arts from science students; Hazlitt suggests that memory is necessary but not sufficient for high intelligence. High general ability predicted excellence in arts or science, but the specialised tests were better at predicting examination performance, particularly in the case of science students. These results reinforced Hazlitt’s belief in the importance of special abilities.

Her contrast between extraverts (individuals who are mainly interested in their fellows) and introverts (those who turn away from their fellows and interest themselves rather in the rest of science) foreshadows Hudson’s (1966) work on convergers and divergers.

Hazlitt was critical of Piaget’s views, and carried out a number of prescient investigations suggesting that children could grasp logical relationships at an early age. She presented a paper on children’s thinking to the British Association in South Africa in Cape Town in July 1929 (Hazlitt, 1930). A contingent of 535 people travelled from Britain, in three ships. With further proceedings in Johannesburg, and tours to various parts of what is now Zimbabwe, delegates were away for a month or more.

In one of the experiments on ‘exception’, 88 children were presented with differently coloured Russian eggs taken apart, and instructed to put them all back ‘except the green one’. The youngest child to succeed was 3 years 4 months old.

Some children subsequently succeeded if the instruction was to put the eggs all back ‘but not the green one’. Similar experiments were carried out using BPS VISUAL ARCHIVE

(Edgell & Symes, 1906). Mental chronometry was both scientifically and ideologically important: reaction times were used to make inferences about mental processes, and quantification was a hallmark of hard science, at a time when psychology was struggling to become established as a scientific discipline. The chronoscope was subject to multiple sources of error; electrical relays, dependent on batteries as a power source, could be unreliable, and different parameters governed times to make and break the current. Edgell and Symes exhaustively examined the sources and extent of errors, and advised on precautions to minimise them. They concluded that the instrument met Wundt’s goal of accuracy to within one millisecond. Their paper was still being cited 30 years later and has received recent attention from a number of authors. The accuracy of mental chronometry was not improved on for another 50 years until the advent of tube-based cascade timers and transistors.

Edgell was also greatly interested in memory and carried out a number of paired associate learning experiments.

An early report was presented to the Physiological Society (Edgell, 1905), despite the fact that women were not admitted as members until 1915. This study was later extended to over 1200 schoolchildren aged 8–12, divided into three age groups, and a small number of adults. Three conditions were compared: rote learning (the instructions being merely to attend to the stimuli, e.g. a pictured object and a number), generating a mnemonic and using a conceptual relation. Performance improved with age and was generally worst with rote learning.

In the younger groups, girls outperformed boys, whereas the reverse was true for the oldest children. Mnemonics gave superior performance in the older groups. Applying statistical analysis to the data reveals that the superiority of mnemonics occurs earlier for girls than for boys. Recent work, generally employing much smaller samples than Edgell’s, has found similar sex by age

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TOM PARKER/REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK

different materials; in one case the children were asked to formulate a rule distinguishing one set of cards from another.

A second set of experiments was carried out on ‘generalisation’, the same object being paired with a different one on different trays.

The children were asked a series of questions in order. Very few children under five answered correctly, although one aged 3 years 2 months did. Hazlitt claimed that recognition of sameness seems to come suddenly to children but not usually before the age of three and, contrary to Piaget, that recognition of sameness is possible for very young children. Experiments confirming Hazlitt’s observations were not conducted for another 30 years.

May Smith’s pioneering research found that fatigue can result in an initial phase of enhanced performance which is followed by a long phase of reduced efficiency

May Smith

BPS VISUAL ARCHIVE

May Smith had no intention of becoming an industrial psychologist, a field to which she later made a major contribution.

Originally trained as a teacher, she persuaded William McDougall to take her on as a student in his laboratory, while she was working in Oxford. Smith was outgoing and direct, with a practical, down-to-earth common sense. Her ability to relate to people of all kinds met in her work – prostitute prison-inmates, laundry workers or fellow BPS members – stood her in good stead as a psychologist.

A major piece of research undertaken was a heroic study of fatigue (Smith, 1916), induced by taking only 1½, 3½ and 5½ hours’ sleep on three successive nights.

Smith kept herself awake by reading, marking essays, knitting, and working out the results of experiments. The experiment was conducted on average five days a week for three years, apart from holidays. Smith was the sole participant, though the results were subsequently replicated on ‘other girls’. The dependent variables were performance on a pursuit rotor (McDougall’s ‘dotting machine’), serial

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word recall, the windmill illusion of reversible motion, speed of tapping and nonsense syllable learning. An initial phase of enhanced performance was followed by a long phase of reduced efficiency, from which recovery was slow. It was also accompanied by loss of effective appraisal of performance, ‘extremely bad work being not infrequently accompanied by a conviction that it is unusually good’ (Smith, 1916, p.349). Considering the implications for industrial psychology, Smith noted that the optimum time spent working depends on the nature of the work and the individual.

This work was extended to the effects of drugs (mainly alcohol and opium) (McDougall & Smith, 1920). Smith later became an investigator for the Industrial Fatigue/Health Research Board. Her study on nervous temperament (Culpin & Smith, 1930) was pioneering in design and conception. It established a correlation between clinical assessment by interview conducted by the psychotherapist Millais Culpin and performance on objective tests administered by Smith, at a time when clinical psychology was struggling to become recognised, and underlined the importance of psychoneurosis as a factor in industrial illness.

Conclusions Women, despite their small numbers and the obstacles to professional advancement, played an important role in developing psychology in Britain in the early 20th century. Indeed, the involvement of women in psychology was

unusual in comparison with other sciences (e.g. physiology). For example, women were accepted in the British Psychological Society from its inception (but not into the Royal Society until 1948 or thereabouts). Various reasons have been put forward to account for this, such as psychology being a young subject, male dominance being not yet entrenched so women could gain a foothold, or simply that they were accepted to swell the numbers.

In terms of experimental psychology specifically, it is noteworthy that women often undertook heroic experiments and pioneered new methods. They were informed about European and American work but were not afraid to be theoretically independent. A wide range of topics were investigated, with no preference for ‘soft’ over ‘hard’ subjects.

There is no evidence for the ‘territorial segregation’ i.e. separate spheres of operation for men and women, with women occupying ‘caring’ practitioner roles, and men ‘understanding’ scientist roles, that became prevalent later in the century, particularly in America, and which may account for the current predominance of women in psychology.

Elizabeth Valentine is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London e.valentine@rhul.ac.uk

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Founding fathers David K. Robinson on an important meeting of minds at Leipzig University

O

questions

Why do many historians consider Leipzig to be the birthplace of modern, experimental psychology?

resources

Boring, E.G. (1929). A history of experimental psychology. New York: D. Appleton-Century.

Heidelberger, M. (2004). Nature from within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and his psychophysical worldview (Trans.

Cynthia Klohr). Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press.

references

In terms of personalities and psychological method, Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) occupies a critical position in the history of psychology, between the pioneering sensory physiologist, Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878) and Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832-1920), father of experimental psychology. All of them taught at Leipzig University, where the two elderly professors, long retired from lecturing, were there to welcome Wundt as he arrived in 1875 and began to build the Institute for Experimental Psychology. This is their story.

Boring, E.G. (1929). A history of experimental psychology. New York: D. Appleton-Century.

Die Gustav-Theodor-FechnerGesellschaft e.V. (2001). Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), präsentiert aus Anlaß seines 200.

Geburtstages. CD-ROM. [See also www.uni-leipzig.de/~fechner] Heidelberger, M. (2004). Nature from within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and

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What were the relationships between psychophysics and early experimental psychology?

perational by 1879, the Institute for Experimental Psychology at Leipzig University functioned as the world’s first graduate programme in psychology.

According to one biographer, Fechner greeted Wundt on the occasion of the formal opening of the Institute with these words: ‘If you work on such a scale, you will be finished with all of psychophysics in a few years’ (Lasswitz, 1896, p.89). In his early career Fechner was well known for his satirical writings, and he always welcomed a good argument about science or philosophy, so it is hard to know whether this was meant as a sarcastic jest, or whether Fechner really entertained such an expectation. As it turns out, both psychophysics and Wundt’s larger projects for psychology would never be ‘finished’.

Wundt’s personal acquaintance with E.H. Weber, who is still remembered for the foundational formula that Fechner transformed into the Fechner–Weber law of psychophysics, was necessarily brief: Weber died within three years of Wundt’s arrival in Leipzig. In fact, Wundt moved into Weber’s flat in the large universityowned building at Gerberstrasse 6, where he and his family lived from 1878 to 1911 (Robinson 1987, p.66). Weber’s former apartment thus briefly (and fittingly) served as the psychological laboratory, until Wundt was given university rooms to store his instruments and materials and to put students to work with them.

Fechner, approaching 80 as Wundt settled into his professorship of philosophy at Leipzig, still had some energy to interact with emerging work in experimental psychology. At the time he was enjoying

his psychophysical worldview (Trans.

Cynthia Klohr). Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press.

Kuntze, J.E. (1892). Gustav Theodor Fechner: Ein deutsches Gelehrtenleben. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.

Lasswitz, K. (1896). Gustav Theodor Fechner. In R. Falkenberg (Ed.) Frommanns Klassiker der Philosophie: Vol. 1. Stuttgart: Frommann.

local celebrity and increased attention from the scientific world, and it was surely gratifying to Fechner that the Institute for Experimental Psychology took up some psychophysical studies. Since its publication in 1860, Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics had slowly but surely gathered a following, and attracted criticism, from a group of physiologists and philosophers, including Wundt, Hermann Helmholtz, Ernst Mach, A.W. Volkmann (brother of Fechner’s wife Clara), and others. Fechner answered critics of his classic work by publishing The Case for Psychophysics (1877) and Revision of the Main Points of Psychophysics (1882); he also published two articles on psychophysics in Wundt’s journal, Philosophische Studien (the first journal of experimental psychology). After Fechner’s death, Wundt and his associates edited and published Fechner’s largest posthumous publication, Theory of Measuring Collectives (1897), as well as a corrected edition of Elements of Psychophysics (1889), which certainly was needed, since the first printing of this classic had been limited (only 750 copies, according to Heidelberger, 2004, p.59).

Although Fechner was an exuberant participant in scientific and philosophical controversies, Wundt tended to be more cautious, but he probably had no way of avoiding one bitter controversy that broke out soon after he arrived in Leipzig. The astrophysicist Friedrich Zöllner had interested Fechner, E.H. Weber, and his brother, the physicist Wilhelm Weber, in the visiting American medium Henry Slade. Expectations of his senior colleagues virtually required Wundt to attend and evaluate Slade’s séances, held from November 1877 to January 1878. Wundt’s opinion of Slade’s psychic powers, however, was decidedly negative. Zöllner, as it happened, had been a strong advocate for experimental psychology during the controversial decision to call Wundt, a trained physiologist, to Leipzig’s chair of philosophy, so he felt betrayed and became incensed at Wundt, publishing a vehement polemic against him and others who

Megte, A. (1977). Zur Herausbildung der Experimentalpsychologie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Beitrages von Wilhelm Wundt. PhD dissertation, Sektion Psychologie, Universität Leipzig.

Robinson, D.K. (1987). Wilhelm Wundt and the establishment of experimental psychology, 1875–1914: The context of a new field of scientific research. PhD dissertation, University of California,

Berkeley.

Robinson, D.K. (2001). Reaction-time experiments in Wundt's Institute and beyond. In R.W. Rieber & D.K. Robinson (Eds.) Wilhelm Wundt in history: The making of a scientific psychology (pp.161–204). New York: Kluwer/Plenum.

Wundt, W. (1885). Der Spiritismus, eine sogenannte wissenschaftliche Frage.

Offener Brief an Herrn Prof. Ulrici in

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rejected spiritism. Fechner was characteristically more understanding.

In perhaps the only extant letter from Fechner to Wundt, Fechner thanks him for his piece on spiritism (1879/1885), adding:

only as the father of psychophysics, but also as a model of scientific and scholarly dedication, to his final days:

BPS VISUAL ARCHIVE

His small apartment in Blumengasse in Leipzig carried the stamp of an outwardly very modest, but innerly I don’t see why we should argue satisfied existence… On the walls of about this anymore; I would rather the room and in even smaller alcoves not argue with you on this subject at nearby were a few bookshelves, of all, since we are both convinced that raw wood, upon which there were few we cannot change one another’s books but large stacks of opinion on the issues at hand. You will manuscripts. Fechner was no longer continue to recognize spiritism as able to do his own reading, due to something that cannot be many years of eye disease, and investigated, that is not factual, and although he was supported by friends I will continue to say that it is factual (particularly and will try to females) who would investigate it. (Fechner read to him daily, it to Wundt, 25 June was a difficult 1879: GTFsubstitute. And so Gesellschaft, 2001) this man, who in his youth had This letter seems to mastered contradict Wundt’s later astounding reading memory of the situation: of the widest areas, he blamed the was now forced to unpleasantness on Zöllner depend on himself, and recalled that Fechner particularly on the had ‘almost involuntarily treasury of his been made witness to and memory. The book that Wundt’s research group participant in several he used the most was spiritualist meetings’ the table of logarithms… His (Wundt, 1901/1913, p.340). preferred readings were his own In the final analysis, Wundt was part manuscripts, and he was constantly of a sober generation of scientists who were revising them until he was satisfied trained after the naturphilosophisch bloom with them. He started out by writing was off the rose, but that sweet scent out his thoughts on loose quarto certainly lingered in Fechner’s nostrils as sheets, totally unreadable by others. long as he lived. To him psychophysics This draft would then be revised into a was not simply a useful methodology for more complete form, which he would approaching some problems in sensory finally put in folio, and then maybe physiology, as Wundt came to believe; revise another time or two. He wrote, it was the way to discover the true in order to ease reading, in very large connection between matter and mind letters, which he himself could (or spirit, Geist in German). Zöllner was decipher but which his readers often chasing spirits in the fourth dimension, found difficult. He never was able to recently revealed by publications on nonget used to dictating.

Euclidian geometry, but his unpleasant

behaviour won him few fans. Fechner, on the other hand, always evoked fond feelings from his younger colleagues.

Marking the centennial of Fechner’s birth, Wundt (1901/1913) remembered him not

Halle. In Essays (pp.386–416). Leipzig: W. Engelmann. (Original work published 1879) Wundt, W. (1887). Zur Erinnerung an Gustav Theodor Fechner: Worte, gesprochen an seinem Sarge am 21.

November 1887, Philosophische Studien 4, 471–478. [Reprinted in Kuntze, 1892. pp.351–361] Wundt, W. (1913). Gustav Theodor Fechner: Rede zur Feier seines

Fechner died on 18 November 1887, and three days later Wundt delivered the eulogy at his funeral (Wundt, 1887); Fechner’s nephew included it as an

hundertjährigen Geburtstages. In Reden und Aufsätze (pp.254–343).

Leipzig: Alfred Kröner. (Original work published 1901) Wundt, W. (1920). Erlebtes und Erkanntes.

Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

appendix to his biography of his uncle (Kuntze, 1892).

In Wundt’s Institute for Experimental Psychology, the study of sensory capacities and psychological processes engaged not only the Weber–Fechner law, but also psychophysical methods for (admittedly indirect) measurement of sensation: (1) the method of just noticeable differences, or limits; (2) the method of right and wrong cases, or constancy; and (3) the method of average error (Boring, 1929, p.285). Although both Boring and Megte (1977) have made a strong case that Fechner prepared the way for Wundt and experimental psychology by showing how to measure and experiment on psychological processes, Heidelberger (2004, p.233ff.) argues that Wundt himself came to realise that experimental psychology, with its ever-widening vistas, does not have its origins in the narrow methods of psychophysics, but in the broader interests of sensory physiology.

Robinson (2001) finds that reaction-time studies were more central to the work and influence of the Leipzig Institute than was psychophysics. In light of this we can perhaps better understand Wundt’s modesty in his memoirs (1920, p.38), when he considered who ‘fathered’ what: Fechner, who was a few years younger, called Ernst Heinrich Weber the ‘father of psychophysics’. I doubt whether this name fits. The creator of psychophysics was certainly Fechner himself. I would rather call Weber the father of experimental psychology…

It was Weber’s great contribution to think of measuring psychic quantities and of showing the exact relationships between them, to be the first to understand this and carry it out.

Upon his arrival in Leipzig Wundt obviously prospered in Fechner’s limelight; to him the kind old man was inspirational and encouraging. However, by the time his own career was ending Wundt realised that Fechner’s direct and ambitious approach to measuring the relationship between mind and matter had not reached the intended goal, and could not. Experimental psychology would be a much broader project, certainly something that could not be finished ‘in a few years’.

David K. Robinson is Professor of History at Truman State University, Missouri drobinso@truman.edu

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The misdirected quest Peter Lamont on how early psychologists turned to the grand wizards in an effort to transform illusions into a reality

A

question

What, if anything, can psychologists learn from magic?

resources

Lamont, P., Henderson, J.M. & Smith, T. (2010). Where science and magic meet: The illusion of a ‘science of magic’. Review of General Psychology, 14(1), 16–21.

references

Psychologists are supposed to be experts on how people think and behave. Yet magicians have always displayed a more wonderful ability to direct thoughts and actions.

Thus, every now and again, for well over a century, psychologists have tried to understand how magicians do it.

So, in their magical quest to discover the secret reality behind the illusion, how have psychologists done?

Bernhard, R. (1936). The psychology of conjuring. Stanford: Author.

Binet, A. (1894). Psychology of prestidigitation. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (pp.555–571). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Carpenter, W. (1871). Spiritualism and its recent converts. Quarterly Review, 131, 301–353.

Coon, D. (1992). Testing the limits of

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t the end of the 19th century, Hermann and Kellar were the two greatest conjurors in the world, though who was greatest depended upon whose publicity one believed. In the United States they competed over audiences and advertising space, and each considered the other his arch-rival. When Hermann died in 1896, Kellar was free to establish his reign and, aside from his notable achievements in the world of magic, he was almost certainly the inspiration for the Wizard of Oz. But before Kellar became the grand wizard, and shortly before Hermann’s death, the two great rivals agreed to compete in a quite different environment – the psychological laboratory.

This was not the first time psychologists had taken an interest in conjuring. Gustav Fechner had observed a spiritualist medium in 1878, and he had concluded that, if it was not trickery, then it was proof of a fourth dimension in space. Wilhelm Wundt, who had observed the same medium, had simply dismissed it as conjuring, though he had no idea how it was done (Marshall & Wendt, 1980).

Meanwhile, in Britain, William Benjamin Carpenter had been relying upon the writings of conjurors in an attempt to explain why tables were floating in Victorian drawing rooms (Carpenter, 1871). Thus, psychological interest in conjuring was provoked by the need to distinguish between miracles and magic, and to frame the extraordinary as nothing more than curious. The curiosity, however, had continued.

In 1893 Alfred Binet had invited five of

sense and science: American experimental psychologists combat spiritualism. American Psychologist, 47(2), 143–151.

Dessoir, M. (1893).The psychology of legerdemain. The Open Court, 12, 3599–3606.

Jastrow, J. (1896). Psychological notes upon sleight-of-hand experts, Science, 3, 1896, 685–689.

Kelley, H. (1977). Magic tricks: The

France’s most eminent conjurors to his laboratory in Paris. Binet had presented an account of how magic worked, based on the writings of conjurors, and observed some similarities to certain contemporary psychological theories. Following James Sully’s distinction between active illusions (such as hallucinations) and passive illusions (that were universally experienced), Binet had placed conjuring effects into the latter category and argued there were positive illusions (seeing what is not there) and negative illusions (not seeing what is there). Having observed some conjuring tricks, and with reference to recent experiments on letter recognition times, he had used new chronophotographic apparatus to allow him to view some basic sleight of hand tricks slowed down. In doing so, and by removing the conjurors’ commentary, he had found that the illusion was destroyed.

This, for Binet, had been a successful separation of brute sensation from mental interpretation (Binet, 1894). As it happens, Georges Melies, one of the conjurors present, would make practical use of this distinction shortly afterwards when he invented the first special effects in early cinema. Binet, of course, moved on to other topics.

The man who brought Hermann and Kellar together, however, was Joseph Jastrow, who had recently established a psychology department at the University of Wisconsin. He was interested in a wide range of psychological topics, including perception, and was the first psychologist to use the duck–rabbit illusion in a psychology article. Now he sought to make a similarly difficult distinction between two quite different beasts. His reason for conducting these curious experiments was, he claimed, that ‘the influence of special kinds of occupation and training upon the delicacy, range and quickness of sensory, motor and mental powers is an important and interesting problem’. For this reason, ‘psychological tests made upon virtuosi are desirable, even if in individual cases they suggest no very decided conclusions’. He therefore employed a range of

management of causal attributions.

Perspectives on attribution research and theory: The Bielefeld symposium.

Cambridge: Balliger.

Kuhn, G. & Land, M.F. (2006). There's more to magic than meets the eye.

Current Biology, 16(22), 950–951.

Lamont, P. & Wiseman, R. (1999). Magic in theory: An introduction to the theoretical and psychological elements of conjuring. Hatfield: University of

Hertfordshire Press.

Lamont, P., Henderson, J.M. & Smith, T. (2010). Where science and magic meet: The illusion of a ‘science of magic’. Review of General Psychology, 14(1), 16–21.

Macknick, S. & Martinez-Conde, S. (2009).

Real magic: Future studies of magic should be grounded in neuroscience, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 241.

Marshall, M.E. & Wendt, R. (1980).

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psychophysical tests that he thought ‘to be It seems to have been prompted by an related to the processes upon which their experiment on suggestibility, carried out dexterity depends’ and which he felt ‘most

by Binet. In that experiment, subjects had likely to yield definite results’ (Jastrow, repeatedly walked towards a ball hanging 1896, p.685). As it turned out, he was in front of a black background, reported wrong on both counts. when they could see it, and their distance Jastrow compared the two wizards in from the ball had been noted. They were terms of tactile sensibility, such as point then asked to walk forward again but this discrimination (both were below average), time the ball was not visible; nevertheless, weight discrimination (both were below when they got to the same point, subjects average), and length discrimination by reported seeing the ball. This, of course, touch (Kellar was below average, and Hermann average). In tests of visual perception, they were unable to divide lines equally or judge lengths any better than others, and in a test using the ‘form alphabet’ (in which the subject had 90 seconds to identify as many instances of a chosen symbol in a long string of symbols), Kellar was average and Hermann ‘did not fully comprehend what was wanted’. Both did manage to excel in rapidity of movement of finger and forearm, and in reaction time to visual and tactile stimuli. However, when the response involved some kind of discrimination, they were again below average.

Jastrow conceded that the positive results were ‘small’, that ‘any suggestions which the data seem to warrant must be put forward with great caution’, and that the methods were better adapted to statistical groups than individuals. So it was that he pioneered a trail for psychologists to study the topic and reach, to use his phrase, ‘no very decided conclusions’ (pp.686–689).

Just a few years later, Norman Triplett wrote a thesis, suggested by G. Stanley Hall, and published it in Kellar, levitating the American Journal of Psychology in 1900. This substantial article discusses the origins of deception in mimicry, and links various themes in conjuring to had been part of Binet’s work on hypnosis. contemporary associationist psychology.

Triplett’s experiment, however, was Like Jastrow and Binet, Triplett (1900) based on an illusion sometimes used by relied upon the writings of conjurors in conjurors. A demonstrator, who was sitting order to understand how conjuring behind a desk in a schoolroom, threw a worked, though he did conduct an tennis ball (though he found it worked experiment using a vanishing tennis ball. equally well with an apple or a silver dollar) about three feet in the air and caught it. He threw it a second time, slightly higher, and caught it again. He then secretly dropped the ball on his lap Wilhelm Wundt, spiritism and the and mimed throwing it a third time. When assumptions of science. In W.G. asked what happened, nearly half the Bringmann & R.D. Tweney (Eds.) pupils (40 per cent of the boys and 60 per Wundt studies: A centennial collection. cent of the girls) said they saw the ball go [pp.158–175]. Toronto: C.J. Hogrefe.

Nardi, P. (1984). Towards a social up and disappear. On the gender psychology of entertainment magic. difference, Triplett observed that Symbolic Interaction, 7, 25–42. ‘[according to Havelock Ellis] ecstacy, Triplett, N. (1900). The psychology of trance, seeing of visions, illusions of fancy conjuring deceptions. American and tendency to hallucinations, are more Journal of Psychology, 11(4), 439–510. frequent in females. Pliny tells us that

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

women are the best subjects for magical experiments, and Bodin estimated the proportion of witches to wizards at not less than fifty to one’. On the efficacy of the illusion, however, Triplett concluded that ‘these cases of suggestions of repetition cited, both from the laboratory and the stage, show plainly that the conjurer’s maxim “to first really do what you would have the audience believe you do” rests upon a physiological basis’ (pp.491–494).

Triplett’s conclusion might suggest the possibility of a scientific theory of magic, but the ‘maxim’ he cites, like all so-called ‘rules’ in magic, is little more than a common theme. There are no universal rules in magic; conjurors regularly ‘tell the audience what they are going to do’ and frequently ‘repeat a trick’. One of the reasons there has never been a scientific theory of magic is the problem of identifying general rules in a form of interaction that is specifically designed to circumvent what rules are thought to apply in a given situation. For every example in which a conjuror ‘really does’ what will then be simulated, there are countless examples of a conjuror simply doing something devious once and it being regarded as innocent.

Such actions are regarded as innocent because they are deemed natural (i.e. not suspicious) in that time and place, and so are not noticed (or are noticed but then promptly forgotten). Whether it is necessary to ‘condition’ one’s audience to an action depends entirely upon whether that particular audience at that time might regard that particular action as suspicious. The highly contingent nature of deceptive entertainment is one reason why, despite superficial appearances, there has never been a ‘psychology of magic’ in any meaningful sense (Lamont et al., 2010).

The fact that Jastrow, Binet and Triplett were writing on the topic around the same time might suggest that this was a subdiscipline of psychology (e.g Coon, 1992), but this was an illusion. These were ad hoc publications, in a variety of academic and non-academic journals, and the lack of coherence was such that Triplett was not even aware that Jastrow had recently written on the topic. Indeed, Triplett’s ball experiment was not replicated until more than a century later, when Kuhn and Land (2006) employed modern eye-tracking equipment to provide a rare example of psychology providing some insight into why a particular magic

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trick works. But the attempt to identify general rules in magic that might form the basis for a scientific theory has been in vain. When Max Dessoir, the German philosopher and psychologist, claimed that uneducated people were harder to fool (Dessoir, 1893), Triplett claimed the opposite. Neither carried out any experiments on this, but there would have been little point. Magicians can make a living from fooling children or adults (including not only academics but also fellow magicians) by employing similar methods or misdirection techniques in slightly different ways.

Thus, for over a century, psychologists have periodically wondered why magic has been neglected, and offered various theoretical frameworks, none of which is self-evidently better than the last (e.g.

Bernhard, 1936; Kelley, 1977; Nardi, 1984; Lamont & Wiseman, 1999). The most recent calls for a scientific theory are simply the latest in a long line of attempts to cut the conjuring cake; the slices are fresher, but they are no more representative. This is not to say that magic cannot provide insight into psychological processes, but to do so requires (and has always required) focused application of specific conjuring

knowledge, and a bit of historical knowledge might not go amiss either.

Indeed, some awareness of history might have curbed the enthusiasm of those who have called for a scientific theory of magic, or have proclaimed (on the basis of no experimental work whatsoever) that ‘future studies of magic should be grounded in neuroscience’ (Macknick & Matrinez-Conde, 2009).

More generally, the history of psychological interest in magic, though it has not been significant in terms of findings, nevertheless does tell us something about the how and why of psychological knowledge. For one thing, we can see why some people choose to take an interest in particular topics. After all, most psychologists who have written on the topic have had a personal background in magic, and many have been in the business of debunking psychic phenomena. Just as Carpenter often cited the writings of conjurors in his antispiritualist articles, Jastrow’s attempt to understand conjuring was directly linked to his desire to debunk mediums, and several similarly sceptical psychologists have written on the topic since, a reminder that the production of psychological knowledge is invariably

shaped by wider concerns.

What history also shows is that experimental methods do not compensate for a superficial understanding of an enormous range of situational practices, and that even the most up-to-date technology does not necessarily provide better knowledge in matters of complex human interaction. After all, so far as psychology is about understanding and predicting human behaviour, the experienced magician can demonstrate his or her ability to do so regularly (with a replication rate most psychologists would envy), and to do so in the real world.

Magicians have been able to do this for centuries, but how they have done this has changed according to the way in which people think and behave at different times and in different places. Psychologists can indeed learn from magic, but it is magicians who understand the real secrets.

Peter Lamont is Programme Director, MSc in History and Theory of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and Past President of the Edinburgh Magic Circle Peter.Lamont@ed.ac.uk

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The programme is based on a practitioner research philosophy and comprises an innovative design that seeks to integrate research and practice at doctoral level. It is open to psychology graduates who possess the Graduate Basis for Chartered Membership (GBC) as specified by the BPS, and who believe that they have the capabilities to make a significant contribution to practice based knowledge in the psychological therapies. The course offers an integrative programme of study in the theory and practice of psychological therapy, and covers both clinical and research training. It is offered over ten 3-day weekend modules during each academic year, thus allowing students to combine their broader life commitments with the demands of further study.

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Blogging on brain and behaviour

Awards A wards 2010 20 010

Winner!

W Wi inner! nner!

The British Psychological Society’s free Research Digest service: blog, email, Twitter and Facebook ‘An amazingly useful and interesting resource’ Ben Goldacre, The Guardian

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Loss of innocence in the Torres Straits Graham Richards looks at nine methodological lessons of a highly successful failure

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question

In retrospect, how could the expedition's researchers have avoided some or all of the problems identified here? Or were they actually unavoidable at the time?

resources

Herle, A. & Rouse, S. (Eds.). Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

references

How better to introduce students to the problems of psychological research than to consider the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits between Australia and Papua New Guinea?

The expedition, involving some of the finest psychologists of the era, was plagued by methodological and practical problems. From the reports, the modern experimental psychologist can learn numerous lessons.

Perhaps most interestingly, the affair can serve as a masterclass in how to produce a research report in the face of humble findings.

Berlin, P. & Kay, P. (1969). Basic color terms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Galton, F. (1883). Inquiries into human faculty and its development. London: Dent.

Haddon, A.C. (Ed.) (1901–1935). Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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n 1898 Britain’s imperial power was peaking and British experimental psychology was just getting into its stride. Led by anthropologist A.C. Haddon, the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits included, among others, Britain’s leading experimental psychologist, W.H.R. Rivers, ambitious William McDougall (still in his twenties), and young C.S. Myers, all canonical pioneer psychologists.

Publication of the full six-volume expedition report took until 1935 (Vol. 1!), covering language, culture, physical anthropology and artefacts. Luckily the first to appear (Vol. 2. Parts 1 & 2, Reports hereafter), in 1901, reported the psychological research undertaken by this trio, with anthropologist C.G. Seligman occasionally involved (mainly in Sarawak).

I have discussed this in Richards (1997, 1998), concentrating on its role in the history of psychological studies of ‘race’ differences. In this article my focus is how the expedition exemplifies so many of the pitfalls that can afflict a psychology research project, and (equally important perhaps!) how even a virtuous virtuoso like Rivers can spin the write-up to maximum effect without outright dissembling.

History’s eventual verdict was that the research (a) refuted Herbert Spencer’s hypothesis of ‘primitive’ superiority on basic psychophysical and psychological functions (except inferior pain sensitivity) due to greater energy allocation to these at the expense of ‘higher’ functions and (b) showed that, excepting a claimed deficiency among islanders in perception

Richards, G. (1997). ‘Race’, racism and psychology. London: Routledge.

Richards, G. (1998). Getting a result: The Expedition’s psychological research 1898–1913. In A.Herle & S. Rouse (Eds.) Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rouse, S. (1998). Expedition and

of the colour blue (which later proved erroneous), there were few major differences in performance compared to the ‘civilised’. Interestingly, this verdict took until about 1913 to crystallise (Richards, 1998). Spencer’s hypothesis was, implicitly, the default theoretical assumption, but none of the researchers were strongly attached to it. Fortunate though these conclusions were, close examination shows that, putting it bluntly, by current standards the findings barely proved anything. I must though stress very strongly that I am not attacking the researchers. Nobody could have done better, nor could most have done half so well. So what went wrong?

Let’s start with the briefing of the participants and ‘experimenter effects’.

Bearing in mind Spencer’s hypothesis we can see an immediate problem.

The natives were told that some people had said that the black man could see and hear, etc., better than the white man and that we had come to find out how clever they were, and their performances would all be described in a big book so that everyone would read about them.

This appealed to the vanity of the people and put them on their mettle (Reports I. p.3).

Hence, if they prove their mettle by outdoing whites Spencer’s hypothesis is supported; if they underperform them their inferiority is confirmed anyway!

This comes across strongly in McDougall’s research on pain sensitivity, in which participants, keenly exhibiting fortitude, ended up displaying only half the sensitivity of Europeans, thus confirming the ‘scientific racism’ stereotype.

Methodologically, the naivety of the participants was seen as a virtue, since unlike Europeans they would take experimental tasks at face value. The price of naivety though was that the two parties were often clearly at cross-purposes. Thus, in Rivers’ research on colour-names, many simply named things they associated with a colour in a way reminiscent of Galton’s

institution. In A.Herle & S. Rouse (Eds.) Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rivers, W.H.R. (1905). Observations on the senses of the Todas. British Journal of Psychology, I, 321–396.

Titchener, E.B. (1916). On ethnological tests of sensation and perception with

special reference to tests of color vision and tactile discrimination described in the reports of the Cambridge anthropological expedition to Torres Straits. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 55, 204–236.

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BPS VISUAL ARCHIVE

study of colours of the days of the week works under field conditions before (Galton, 1883). And when we learn that setting forth. Lesson 4: Check participants one native assistant told villagers Queen regarding physiological conditions relevant Victoria would send a man-of-war to to the phenomenon being researched. punish them if they did not respond Lesson 5: Admit defeat rather than use entirely truthfully (Reports I. p.4) the obviously unsatisfactory methods simply temptation to describe the project as in order to get some data. ‘gunboat psychology’ is hard to resist.

Returning home, ‘control’ research was To sum up then, Lesson 1: Do not brief undertaken to obtain European data for participants so as to direct them to respond comparison with the islanders’ results. in a way favouring a specific hypothesis; With island conditions varying from Lesson 2: Naive participants have their European ones along so many dimensions own assumptions and hypotheses of which it was unclear quite what one was to the researchers themselves may be control for. Even so, McDougall’s choice ignorant. of patients (if only those who had regained Next, despite all precautions the team their health) in a Cheadle convalescent were plagued by equipment mishaps and home was surely odd – particularly malfunctioning. ‘Politzer’s Hörmesser’ for regarding pain-threshold performance! measuring auditory acuity did not work.

Rivers and Myers chose groups in fairly Participants refused to insert the tubes of rural villages. Myers’ group, from near ‘Zwaademaker’s Aberdeen and olfactometer’ (for mostly children, testing smell) into showed some their nostrils. Some Scottish auditory colour-wheel discs superiority, but he simply went missing. was rightly wary of The Galton’s whistle drawing any firm proved problematic conclusions from for measuring upperhis data. Rivers’ pitch limits – Myers control-group used pipe-length data were perhaps instead, and for generally less reaction times had to problematical, employ a one-off piece but E.B. Titchener Rivers (left) with the expedition of apparatus devised (1916) argued that by a Captain E.T. his finding of Dixon. A state of the deficiency in blueart ‘Lovibond’s tintometer’ (for studying perception resulted from contrasting colour discrimination) had impurities in research conditions: a dimly lit hut versus its glass slides, so Rivers fell back on the a brightly lit laboratory. Later it was also less satisfactory Holmgren wools method. suggested that the islanders confused Myers’ auditory research was particularly colour and brightness (Berlin & Kay, afflicted: a constant background of 1969). Any control group data on this crashing waves and rustling palms, Rivers would thus, unknown to Rivers, have been (used for control purposes) suffering an irrelevant. One might also mention that ear-infection some of the time, and a high Rivers’ major follow-up research, likelihood that many participants had ear‘Observation on the senses of the Todas’ damage from pearl fishing and, among (1905), again failed to find significant older ones, a long-ago measles epidemic. differences between this southern Indian McDougall’s temperature-spot study was tribal group and Europeans in sensitivity abandoned because the skin-marking dye to visual illusions. Ironically, much of the was continually being washed off, while control group research may, in retrospect, his two-point threshold study was be seen as equally flawed and inconclusive subverted by participants happily guessing as that done in the field. Lesson 6: Make on the basis of sensation magnitude (in sure your control group and procedures contrast to sophisticated Europeans who used are plausibly comparable to the understood that two distinct sensations experimental ones in relevant respects. were the required criterion). McDougall Lesson 7 was that really this kind of blithely just lowered the criterion to research project was, for the time being, correct guessing. This reinforces Lesson 2. impractical; and indeed (bar Rivers, 1905) Additionally, research often took place several decades elapsed before before a, generally amused, audience. experimental cross-cultural research was Much more of this nature may be mined resumed, and never on a comparable scale. from the Reports, especially regarding More profoundly though, Lesson 8, sampling issues too complex to discuss certainly learned by Rivers, was that here. So, Lesson 3: Make sure equipment undertaking such research constitutes

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some kind of imposition of Western ‘scientific’ culture on another, hence biologically based differences can become inextricable from those due to sociocultural factors. This issue became a leitmotif throughout psychology’s post1920 history, currently becoming prominent in the context of debates around psychology’s globalisation and postcolonial psychology.

Finally, a more positive Lesson 9.

Mission completed, a report of the team’s findings had to be produced – that ‘big book’ promised to their participants.

Enough has been said to indicate their problem. While part of a prestigious elite project, funded principally by Cambridge University, the Royal Society, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Rouse, 1998, p.58), it had, in truth, yielded precious little by way of hard, robust, scientific findings. The expedition Reports provide a master-class in how to manage this conflict – common, if on a humbler scale, in everyday research life ever since. First, they presented apparent failure as a positive gain – in this case, a major weakening of Spencer’s hypothesis and other scientific racism assumptions followed by learned speculation on how these might possibly be salvaged, i.e. not claiming to have falsified received wisdom, merely to have left it unconfirmed, nevertheless leaving the reader pretty convinced that, as hitherto played, the game was up. Science has thus advanced. Second, confession of all the setbacks conveyed a heroic impression of knowledge gained under fortuitous difficulties. While academically sober, much of the text remained an entertaining ‘ripping yarn’ from an outpost of Empire – Boy’s Own Psychology if you like. Thirdly, the team’s credentials were only enhanced by their exemplary display of scientific humility as to what could really be concluded from their findings.

In sum, the rhetoric of writing-up is not the least of the skills a researcher needs, and the Reports are a classic of the research-report genre.

It strikes me that there was an air of innocence about the initial spirit of the whole business, which the experience itself dispelled. What more appropriate an introduction then than this tale of psychology’s loss of methodological innocence?

Graham Richards was formerly Professor of History of Psychology at Staffordshire University and Director of the BPS History of Psychology Centre gdrichards1941@yahoo.co.uk

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Choice, confusion and consciousness Philip Barnard with some experimental highlights from the influential Applied Psychology Research Unit

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question resources

Baddeley, A. & May, J. (1994). Fifty years of the MRC Applied Psychology Unit.

The Psychologist, 7(11), 513–514.

History of the Applied Psychology Unit: www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/history

Baddeley, A.D. (1966). The effect of acoustic and semantic similarity on long-term memory for word sequences. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 302–309.

Baddeley, A.D. (1986). Working memory.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, Broadbent, D.E. (1958). Perception and communication. London: Pergammon Press.

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xperiments in psychology really do matter. They are not just a force for developing better and better theories of mind, brain and behaviour. Their results can influence the conduct of war, as well as what goes on in the home, schools, government, our legal system, the workplace, transport systems and decisions made in clinical settings. Just occasionally they may change how we think about our selves, our emotions and our conscious lives. The Medical Research Council’s Applied Psychology Research Unit (APU), renamed the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in 1998 (CBU), has been a powerhouse of ideas and of results.

Over seven decades and under six directors, its output is reported in over 6000 publications and these have touched on all the topics noted above and more.

I recently read through the periodic reports to MRC from the 1940s to the present.

How on earth could I possibly select a handful of examples of empirical excellence that today’s psychologists Figure 1: The layout of sector control rooms for the Royal Air Force, should know from Mackworth & Bartlett (1950) [Crown copyright acknowledged] about, without

Card, S.K., Moran, T.P. & Newell, A. (1983). The psychology of human computer interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Conrad, R. (1964). Acoustic confusions in immediate memory. British Journal of Psychology, 55, 75–84.

Hick, W.E. (1952). On the rate of gain of information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 4, 11–26.

Landauer, T.K. & Nachbar, D.W. (1986).

Selection from alphabetic and numeric menu trees using a touch screen: Breadth, depth, and width.

ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 16, 73–78.

Mcmillen, T. & Holmes, P. (2006). The dynamics of choice among multiple alternatives. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 50, 30–57.

Mackworth, N.H. & Bartlett, F.C. (1950).

Planned seeing. Air Publications 3139b. London: HMSO.

CROWN COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGED

How relevant are laboratory-derived theories and experiments for our everyday lives?

references

Empirical research conducted in the laboratory, in the clinic or in the field naturally forms the foundations on which our practical applications of psychology are built.

Yet as theoretical frameworks change over time, as new communities of practice evolve, and as the reservoir of empirical findings becomes increasingly vast, connections between past research and current practice can all too easily get lost.

Since its formation in 1944, the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge has played a major part in shaping both theory and practice.

Its innovative and creative research culture is illustrated here by three examples from wartime to the present.

omission and bias with respect to topic or time period? What would the selection criteria be? The earliest work of the Unit contributed to the war effort, influencing personnel selection, operational procedures, equipment and workplace design. From the film The Battle of Britain many will have seen the control rooms used to direct the air defence of England: controllers looked down on symbols being moved over a map to indicate the disposition of hostile and friendly aircraft (Figure 1). Not so many are perhaps aware that experiments on aspects of this layout were carried out by APU staff but only published years later (Mackworth & Bartlett, 1950). How might that work, integral to national survival, but cited a mere 11 times in Google Scholar, compare with recent and more esoteric work on emotional Stroop effects cited close to a thousand times?

The blend afforded by producing both high-quality science and applicable output is held by many to be what gave the Unit something close to a uniquely creative and productive research culture: the demands of producing practical recommendations in new contexts inevitably exposes gaps in prior knowledge, creates needs to innovate in measurement and sets requirements to

Mandler, G. (2007). A history of modern experimental psychology: From James and Wundt to cognitive science.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Owen, A.M., Coleman, M.R., Boly, M. et al. (2006). Detecting awareness in the vegetative state. Science, 313(5792), 1402.

Owen, A.M. & Coleman, M.R. (2008).

Functional neuroimaging of the vegetative state. Nature Reviews

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Hick’s law For an empirical discipline, psychology has rather few laws – itself a topic of some interest to historians of psychology (Teigen, 2002). APU can claim parentage of one: Hick’s law. By 1950 a great deal was known about reaction times and the possible contributions of cognition time and choice time. What William Edmund Hick realised was that the key required to capture a lawful quantitative regularity lay in information theory – he hypothesised that reaction time would increase with the logarithm of the number of alternatives, or the amount of information to be processed. Using apparatus shown in Figure 2, he confirmed his hypothesis in a series of experiments that involved

Neuroscience, 9, 235–243.

Teasdale, J.D., Segal, Z.V., Williams, J.M.G. et al. (2000). Mindfulnessbased cognitive therapy for depression: A new approach to relapse prevention. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 68, 615–623.

Teigen, K.H. (2002). One hundred years of laws in psychology. American Journal of Psychology, 115, 103–118.

visually presented letters of the alphabet. collecting data from just two participants He focused his analysis on the (himself and Richard Gregory). The substitution errors in written recall with average reaction time T required to a sample of 387 trainee telephonists. choose among n equally probable Errors were relatively high within groups alternatives is approximately T = b – of letters that resembled each other log2(n + 1).

At the end acoustically (BCPTV of his classic and FMNSX) and paper Hick relatively low (1952) rather between these ruefully groups. In a separate concluded that, test, 300 Post Office while his employees simply information listened to and theory reported individual statement letters presented in might be useful white noise. Letters for practical that were confused applications, in recall were also the details of confused in the the mechanism listening test. What remained vague Conrad recognised and that was the importance speculation of qualitative about neural attributes of Figure 2: Caption Hick working on his networks was information as well as reaction time apparatus circa 1951 outside the the quantitative ones that scope of his information theory work. Some 30 emphasised. years later, Hick’s law helped forge Conrad’s initial insight was extended engineering models for human–computer in Baddeley’s later work (1966) on acoustic interaction (Card et al., 1983). It was also and semantic confusions in short- and able to characterise the choice component long-term recall. Subsequently, the idea of in the context of computer menus with speech-based coding underlying shortdifferent numbers of alternatives term resource use created a platform for (Landauer & Nachbar, 1986). It has served numerous theoretical and practical well as a stimulus for further theoretical advances in neuropsychology, for our refinement across at least five decades. understanding of healthy and delayed Broadbent (1958) and Baddeley (1986), vocabulary acquisition and reading and, among many others, make reference to of course, the wider cognitive challenges Hick’s work when formulating their more faced by the deaf (Figure 3). Conrad was advanced theories of information flow amongst the earliest to note that errors and among components mental architecture. malfunctions were vital to developing an Likewise, current generations of neural understanding the structure of mental and network models have replaced speculation neural systems. His paper is still widely with detailed implementations of cited over the last decade. In the early mechanisms (e.g. see Mcmillen & Holmes, 1960s few would have predicted that a 2006). Choice is pervasive, and anyone collaborative project with the Post Office concerned with modelling mechanisms would have had such diverse and longstill needs to know about Hick’s work. lasting effects on psychological thinking.

MRC COGNITION AND BRAIN SCIENCES UNIT ARCHIVE

chart the boundaries of any new regularities of behaviour. New regularities, in turn, need new theories to account for them. Most would agree that classic theoretical syntheses by APU staff, for example, in books by Broadbent (Perception and Communication, 1958); Baddeley (Working Memory, 1986) and Shallice (From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure, 1988), each acted to shape how whole generations of scientists thought about human attention, memory and the wider control of cognitive processing.

Indeed one recent book tracing the entire history of experimental psychology from James and Wundt to cognitive science (Mandler, 2007) draws attention to their ideas along with those of a significant number of other APU researchers.

The current CBU website (www.mrccbu.cam.ac.uk/history) provides an illustrated archive summarising all the basic and applied science topics researched at APU/CBU from 1944 to 2010. To mark this celebration of 150 years of experimental psychology, I will focus, not on the high-profile ‘director-theorists’, or on summarising work in different decades, but on three specific empirical studies that either have provided (or will provide) long-term impetus for developments in both theory and application.

Acoustic confusions In the postwar period Conrad researched a wide range of problems inspired by thinking about textile mills, our post and telecommunication systems. Across these contexts, listening to verbal material against a noisy background and holding such material in immediate memory were both important applied problems.

Successive generations of memory theorists (be they concerned with the short, long or working varieties) have built upon a seminal study by Conrad (1964). He first examined serial recall for

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Since 1995, research at the CBU has been repositioned with a focus on integrating cognitive studies with neuroscience and an emphasis on applied projects in translational medicine. I was faced with a two-choice decision about recent projects that might leave long-lasting traces like those of Hick and Conrad. One option was the development of mindfulnessbased cognitive therapy (MBCT) for recurrent depression (Teasdale et al., 2000). Evidence for the impact of this work came from how well two subsequent books (one for therapists, the other self-help oriented) fared in the

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‘bestseller’ lists. The other was the work of Adrian Owen and colleagues (2006) on conscious awareness in patients with a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state – PVS (see also The Psychologist, June 2010). While PVS affects relatively few and major Figure 3: Conrad testing a deaf child circa 1980 depression affects the lives of many, I chose the PVS study because of how it relates to of neural activity in distinct brain areas. controversies in experimental psychology Patients with a diagnosis of PVS appear that have lasted for more than a century. to be awake but show no overt signs of awareness. In a dramatic demonstration, Owen et al. (2006) gave verbal instructions Consciousness to one such patient to perform the two In the late 19th century, Wundt and imagery tasks while in an fMRI scanner. others were concerned with developing That patient’s pattern of activation of a methodologically sound science. They cortical areas was indistinguishable from opposed the Würzburg school, whose that of healthy controls. Hard data favoured method for understanding indicated that the patient could not only

MRC COGNITION AND BRAIN SCIENCES UNIT ARCHIVE

Figure 4: Adrian Owen discussing fMRI data with a colleague

thought processes involved introspective reporting of the conscious content of mental images and of so-called ‘imageless thoughts’. Owen and his colleagues, working more than 100 years later, were able to detect systematic differences in brain activation in normal healthy volunteers when asked to perform two different imagery tasks – mentally navigating around their own homes and imagining playing tennis. Systematic differences in reported phenomenological experience could be mapped on to equally systematic differences in indices

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implement the different forms of mental imagery, but also must have understood the spoken instruction, have intentionally cooperated with the experimental request, and have been able to access at least some stored representations pertinent to their own home and to the game of tennis. This particular patient and others examined since then must have been consciously ‘aware’.

Of course, findings like these will never stop philosophers and some cognitive theorists questioning whether or not we can conclude that the patient really

MRC COGNITION AND BRAIN SCIENCES UNIT

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was conscious in exactly the same way as healthy controls. But hard data of this type are of huge significance in an ethically difficult medical domain. Given this evidence, the external termination of life support without reference to patients’ own responses now ceases to be an option. Rather like the key to Egyptian hieroglyphs provided by the Rosetta stone, the imaging data offer a potential means to calibrate and train other, perhaps simpler, response indices such as EEG that can used in more normal living environments to help such patients communicate their thoughts and wishes, however minimally, on a more routine basis.

In 1952 Hick confirmed his hypothesis with a circle of 10 lamps, some relay switches and an incredibly modest number of data points. The graphs and decisions trees in his paper were hand-drawn.

Whereas Hick found an enduring and challenging regularity indexed via a quantitative attribute of information, Conrad required far more data from over 600 people to establish a qualitative one.

Owen and his colleagues required immensely expensive MRI physics, vast computer power, terabytes of storage, advanced statistical packages and graphics engines to realise images of brain activation (Figure 4). The resultant data offer a complete rethink of what it might mean to index the reportability of thought content and the qualia of consciousness (see Owen & Coleman, 2008).

Only the brave (or fools) would try to predict exactly what might follow on in future decades from the discovery of new regularities in behavioural and in imaging data. Finding out will no doubt prove to be very expensive. But the very presence of a blend of basic and applied challenges almost certainly means that it will be both exciting and revealing. Psychologists are becoming more and more specialised in increasingly localised domains of data collection and theory. Experimental work in psychology all too often finds significance primarily within the confines of self-referring paradigms. Periodically reminding ourselves about how much we have learned from refreshing what we do by looking at how real minds behave in real domains of life can only be a good thing.

Philip Barnard MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge phil.barnard@ mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

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Draft programme available by Friday 19 November

Programme timetable is available to view online

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INTERVIEW

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What makes a good experimental psychologist?

Extracts from a recording of Frederic Charles Bartlett speaking made in 1959 by John C. Kenna, the Society’s first Honorary Archivist

ight you are. So should I start now as R if I was delivering the whole thing and I’ll start with the present date; right?

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Bartlett, F.C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bartlett, F.C. (1956). Changing scene [Presidential Address]. British Journal of Psychology, 57(2), 81–87.

(Downloadable via www.bps.org.uk/presidents) Bartlett, F.C. (1961). Frederic Charles

Bartlett. In W. Wirth & R. Murchison (Eds.) History of psychology in autobiography. New York: Russell & Russell. (Original work published 1936) Broadbent, D.E. (1970). Sir Frederic Bartlett: An appreciation. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 23, 1–3. (Downloadable via www.bps.org.uk/presidents)

BPS VISUAL ARCHIVE

The date, at the moment, is the third of June nineteen hundred and fifty-nine. It’s a lovely bright, sunny, warm afternoon and I think that I would a great deal sooner be watching the University cricket match at Fenner’s against Middlesex. Cricket has been for many years one of my principal interests, and from some knowledge of cricket I think that I have gained a great deal that has been a great use in connection with both teaching and my thinking, especially in the fields of skill.

However, that’s not what I’m here for this afternoon.

On the fourth of March nineteen hundred and fifty-two I made a farewell speech to the Cambridge Psychological Society in which I tried to say something about the interesting events which had happened during the 20 years or so while I was a professor in Cambridge. As a sort of conclusion of my remarks on that occasion I tried to sum up what I consider to be the basic requirements for the scientific development of psychology and, because I believed then and continue to believe that to separate psychology from the psychologist is an entirely artificial procedure, to say what sort of a person I consider a good psychologist must be.

Now the remarks that I made on that occasion have never been published or given any kind of broadcast status, and I don’t think it’s very likely they will be

published in any other way than this one, but at any rate this is what I tried then to say.

One. There never has been and there never will be a good psychologist who has not got a number of lively interests outside of psychology itself. Or who fails to connect his psychological research and reflection with these other interests.

Similarly there never has been and there never will be a good scientific psychologist who has not got at least some specialised training outside of psychology.

Two. The first requirement is loyalty to evidence. The evidence may be sought in unprepared situations after the manner of a great many clinicians and of many social psychologists or in technical, technologically prepared situations or it may be sought in experimentally prepared situations. So long as the scientific psychologist looks straight at what he can find and is as honest about it as he can be, I do not think it matters very

much where he starts, but wherever he starts he must be prepared at some stage to make the transfer to the other cases. The man who starts with the unprepared situations must, on occasion, move over to the technologically prepared situation, especially if he becomes interested in reallife problems, and he must also be prepared to move over to the experimentally prepared situations if he wishes to be able to establish anything well founded in the way of his results from thinking.

Three. In a training period I continue to believe that the best start is with the experimentally prepared situation.

Principally because it is in this that it is

easiest to illustrate controlled variability, but there is no compelling reason why all experiments should be shaped to the

Richards, G. (2010). Putting psychology in its place (3rd edn). London & New York: Routledge.

The Sir Frederic Bartlett Archive: www.ppsis.cam.ac.uk/bartlett

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conventional forms of the psychophysical methods. In any case the psychologist must refuse to be limited by those formalised statements of scientific experiment, which grew up with the logical methodologists of the mid-19th century. There are no psychological experiments in which the conditions are all under control; in which one condition can be varied independently of the rest, or even in which the concomitant variation of two specified conditions alone can be arranged and considered. This means that every good psychologist must be wise as well as technically efficient. It is rather a lame statement because I don’t know how anybody can learn to be wise. Perhaps a way of putting it is to say that he must know where and how to look for evidence, which will enable him to advance beyond evidence and then to return once more to seek confirming evidence. There is an ineradicable clinical element in all psychological experimentation.

Four. I have come to believe strongly that once an initial training period is passed it is far the best to consider first the technologically prepared situation from which advance can be attempted to the unprepared situation, or return can be made to the experimentally prepared situation. There are two primary reasons for this. First, it is a guard against both doing experiments simply because they are likely to yield easy or easily manipulated results or because they are what a lively laboratory imagination is able to invent; and secondly, because the technologically prepared situations deal essentially with operations, activities and items of behaviour which are laid out in a succession with a direction and an inherent order.

Five. A good psychologist has to be able to distinguish strongly between problems of process, which are causal, and problems of structure, which are analytic and descriptive. In particular the statistics adequate for the latter are not sufficient for the former.

Six. It is my view that a psychologist who is really going to get anywhere must respect human behaviour. Not only in the sense of considering it a worthwhile subject to study, but in the much more important sense of being willing to reject flippant and cynical views or at least of regarding them as a not very serious kind of sport and of believing that human beings are fundamentally decent.

Seven. Since there is hardly any human interest which… is not tied up with psychological science, and since every one of them tends strongly to develop its specialised methods and its appropriate language, there is very little hope for a

psychologist who is not prepared to become an effective collaborator. This means that he must be able to give and to take incisive criticism without losing his respect either for himself or for the people and the views that he may try to upset. He has to be tolerant, but not indecisive, to be ruthless, but not unfair, to be honest about his assumptions as he is about his evidence, to ask questions when he doesn’t know and to hazard answers when he is convinced that he does, to give credit where credit is due and not to be too much worried if it seems to him that others do not always return the compliment.

I want to see a generation of psychologists who can stand alongside the best of all the other scientists, not making any pretence to having discovered the

master key to all knowledge, seeking the authority, not of rank or of position, or of title or even of bumptiousness, but only of that part of truth which in patient research they are able to find. Provided he satisfies these conditions, I believe that it is possible for anybody to become a good psychologist. In what particular directions he turns will depend, of course, upon his particular technical equipment or lack of it and upon his other interests. Whether he is also, what is called, clever doesn’t seem to me to matter very much. Perhaps it is a good thing if he is a bit clever.

This piece has been transcribed and abridged by Julie Perks, Staffordshire University. The full transcript and the original recording are held at the Society’s History of Psychology Centre, London (www.bps.org.uk/hopc).

Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett 1886 was a momentous year for psychology because it was the year that the Encyclopaedia Britannica allowed James Ward to define our subject as a distinct scientific discipline. It was also the year that Frederic Bartlett was born. He later cited Ward’s famous article ‘Psychology’ as a major influence upon his decision to study the subject (Bartlett, 1961).

Bartlett graduated BA in Philosophy in 1909, MA in 1911, was made a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge in 1917 and in 1922 became the director of the Psychological Laboratory in Cambridge.

In 1931 Fredric Bartlett was awarded the first chair in Psychology at Cambridge University. He was nominated as a fellow of the Royal Society in1932, but more importantly he also published his highly influential book Remembering that year. This book revolutionised our understanding of how people recall memories. No longer do the majority of psychologists believe that remembering is a consultative process that retrieves facts from an immutable record. Bartlett showed us that memory involves, at least to some degree, a reconstruction of events (Richards, 2010).

Bartlett was prolifically productive. His published work amounted to some 200 titles drawn from a mixture of academic and applied experimental Psychology.

Before the Second World War his papers and books were more frequently academic where as his post War output suggested a greater interest applied Psychology. In 1945 he took over the directorship of the Unit for Research in Applied Psychology (APU), which later became the Cognitive and Brain Science Unit. It had been established by the Medical Research Council only a year earlier with Kenneth Craik at its head, but after the latter’s sudden death, in a tragic cycling accident, Bartlett stepped in. In 1948 Bartlett was knighted for the work he had done, on such topics as fatigue and visual perception, with the RAF during the Second World War. Sir Fredric Bartlett was president of the British Psychological Society 1950/51. He also retired in 1951, but this was not detrimental to his productivity. He continued to carry out experimental work, give invited lectures and speak at conferences. Moreover a considerable proportion of his literary output occurred post retirement. During this period of his life he wrote two books, some 41 papers, eight book reviews, four obituaries and contributed either forewords or chapters to a further 15 books, written or edited, by other people. He died on 30 September 1969, aged 82.

People who knew Frederic Bartlett remember a man, with an enquiring mind, whose fascination with all aspects of psychology was equalled by his interest in the diverse aspects of society at large. His contact with people outside academia imbued him with stimulating ideas, which he enjoyed sharing with students and colleagues alike (Broadbent, 1970). He was one of the pioneers of experimental psychology in this country, and he blazed the trail vigorously, infecting others with his enthusiasm.

Julie Perks

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The future of experimental psychology Alan Costall engages in some presentist futurology

W

references

hen the centenary of Gustav Fechner’s publication of Elemente der Psychophysik occurred in 1960, the place of experimental research within psychology seemed secure. By 1979, the centenary of Wilhelm Wundt’s founding of a psychological laboratory in Leipzig had also arrived. But by this time the future of experimental psychology had become extremely precarious. Social psychologists criticised its artificiality and irrelevance. Radical psychologists were protesting against its objectification of human subjects, and its sinister funding links with the military. In a less strident way, even the new cognitive psychology was drawing attention to a range of alternative methodologies, such as computer simulation, Piagetian case studies, and even the Chomskyan appeal to speakers’ intuitions to determine the proper usage of language. Given all this dissent, the celebration of the Wundt centenary promised to put experimental psychology back on track, by providing a timely reminder of psychology’s true destiny as an experimental science.

Despite the upheavals of the 1970s, experimental psychology now has a dominant and seemingly insurmountable place within academic psychology. Unlike the other contributors to this historical issue of The Psychologist, I have been given the task of looking to the future.

The following commentary will not, however, be an exercise in prediction but in presentist futurology – some indications of where experimental

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Cohn, S. (2008). Making objective facts from intimate relations: The case of neuroscience and its entanglements with volunteers. History of the Human Sciences, 21(4), 86–103.

Daston, L. (1992). Objectivity and the escape from perspective. Social Studies of Science, 22, 597–618.

Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Mindless statistics.

Journal of Socio-Economics, 33, 587–606.

psychology could be going, given where it is now. This will not be celebratory futurology, however, because experimental psychology, in its current form, is not the best of places to be starting from. The problem is not experimentation as such, but experimentalism, the way that experimentation in modern psychology has settled into a rigid set of practices, rituals, and unexamined assumptions.

Beyond experimentalism The experiment has taken a wide diversity of forms within psychology, ranging from the highly controlled, single-subject research in operant psychology, to Brunswik’s ‘representative design’, and to the field of experimental phenomenology where the participant acts as a coresearcher with the investigator (Thinès et al., 1991). There is no such thing as the experimental method, any more than there is just one scientific method.

Nevertheless, a single experimental paradigm has come to dominate modern psychology. In the execution of the actual experiment, this paradigm is based upon the hypothetico-deductive method, the use of large groups of subjects, and almost exclusively laboratory-based studies. And in the treatment of the results, there is an almost exclusive focus upon averages, a disregard of other potentially important aspects of the data, and a ritual of statistical significance testing (see Gigerenzer, 2004; Neisser, 1997).

To a remarkable extent, the current

Jung, J. (1971). The experimenter’s dilemma. New York: Harper Row. Koch, S. (1999). Psychology in human context: Essays in dissidence and reconstruction. [Edited and with a preface by D. Finkelman & F. Kessel] Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Koenderink, J.J. (1998). Pictorial relief.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal

experimental ‘paradigm’ was established long ago, by the neobehaviourists. It is actually at odds with important aspects of the philosophy of the new cognitivism, not least, its emphasis upon the ‘active mind’. The standard experimental paradigm, with its imposition of experimental conditions, involves a fundamental, if implicit, commitment to stimulus–response thinking. This has led to a distorted image of ‘the active mind’ as involving no more than subcutaneous ‘responses’ to imposed external conditions – as though people were not also active, whenever possible, in selecting and shaping their circumstances! Similarly, the important claim of cognitive psychologists that individual differences under the ‘same’ conditions may reflect distinctly different ‘cognitive strategies’ is at odds with statistical techniques that treat such ‘within-condition’ variation as meaningless noise. Thus a good deal of important theory has already been built into the prevailing experimental methodologies, often by long-dead researchers with different, conflicting, and even confused scientific agendas.

Researchers need to be alert to this tacit theory, if scientific problems, experimental methods, and psychological theory, are not to keep passing one another by.

Experiments as the real thing I have been an assessor for a large number of experimental articles and grant submissions in recent years, and I have become very concerned by the way experimenters exclude any references to research conducted in real situations or conducted with non-experimental methods. More importantly, they seldom make any attempt to justify the claimed relationship between the experiments themselves and the actual phenomena they claim to be investigating.

Take, for example, theory of mind.

According to this approach, true social and communicative interactions entail intellectual or quasi-intellectual

Society of London, A, 36, 1071–1086.

Leudar, I. & Costall, A. (Eds.) (2009).

Against theory of mind. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Neisser, U. (1997). The future of cognitive science: An ecological analysis. In D.M. Johnson & C.E. Erneling (Eds.) The future of the cognitive revolution (pp.247–260). New York: Oxford University Press.

Rommetveit, R. (2003). On the role of ‘a

psychology of the second person’ in studies of meaning, language, and mind. Mind, Culture & Activity, 10, 205–218.

Thinès, G., Costall, A. & Butterworth, G.E. (1991). Michotte's experimental phenomenology of perception.

Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Watson, J.B. (1914). Behavior: An introduction to comparative psychology.

New York: Holt.

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could only occur through an intellectual inferences based upon the observed or quasi-intellectual process of inference behaviour of the other person. In real-life then, of course, that is what the situations, ‘context’ or else conditioned experiment will inevitably confirm habitual reactions may create the communication to be (see Leudar & appearance of real social interaction by Costall, 2009). children who are too young (according to the background theory) to be capable of such feats; but this (according to the Rethinking ‘objectivity’ theory) is, of course, the mere appearance Unlike most other psychological of communication, and not the real thing. researchers, experimenters try to keep And so, it is only by paring down the a distance from their subjects, so that experimental situation to eliminate the they can study them in a scientifically ‘irrelevant’ context that true detached way. They do not ‘mix’ with communication can be distilled and them. And yet, once we consider how isolated and hence investigated. But, experiments actually get done, it is in relation to the theory motivating the obvious that the psychological research, this is not empirical science, but experiment is a self-fulfilling inevitably an interfix. Once “Science is not just an subjective entrenched in situation. There such reasoning, accumulated body of is a necessary how could we facts and theories, but meeting of minds ever discover a human project” between the whether the experimenter and supposed I Alan Costall is Professor of Theoretical their participants in ‘extraneous’ Psychology at the University of Portsmouth order to enlist them factors were alan.costall@port.ac.uk and transform them not, after all, into compliant part of the experimental subjects heart of the (Cohn, 2008; Jung, 1971; Rommetveit, matter? Experimentation of this kind 2003). Experimenters, however, have is stipulative. It does not study the short memories. Once the experiment phenomenon as such, but its own begins, they forget that the participants theoretical definition of that phenomenon remain fellow subjects who are trying to as already embodied in the experimental make sense of the social situation they design and controls. have managed to get themselves into.

This is precisely what happened in the The claim that the psychological field of perceptual psychology for many experiment is ‘uniquely objective’ is, decades: …using the scientifically respectable I think, tied to a particular, and relatively paradigm of stimulus reduction one modern, notion of objectivity. As Lorraine easily shows that humans are quite Daston has argued, the ideal of objectivity unable to perceive depth relations... has taken a variety of forms within science.

Although the literature is especially ‘Aperspectival objectivity’, as Daston has rich in such reports, it remains the called it, aspires to standardisation, and case that even monocular humans the minimisation, if not elimination, of are hardly handicapped in the normal ‘subjectivity’ – of engagement with the environment. An embarrassment object of study, of judgement, and even indeed. We believe that the best of exceptional technical skill. It is a scientific intentions have led to sterile notion of objectivity that would have and indeed largely irrelevant been unthinkable to Newton or Darwin: knowledge here. (Koenderink, 1998, p.1073)

Self-confirmatory experimentation of this kind is not new, nor is it unique to psychology. And it is not necessarily vicious. But to the extent that such experimentation is regarded as the sole, or at least superior, source of scientific knowledge, it is no longer subject to scientific correction and will simply perpetuate its initial theoretical assumptions whether they are right or wrong. For example, if a study is carefully designed to ensure that communication

Aperspectival objectivity was the ethos of the interchangeable and therefore featureless observer – unmarked by nationality, by sensory dullness or acuity, by training or tradition, by quirky apparatus, by colourful writing style, or by any other idiosyncrasy that might interfere with the communication, comparison and accumulation of results. (Daston, 1992, p.609)

Science is not just an accumulated body of facts and theories, but a human project, and, once we acknowledge this,

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

any opposition of objectivity and subjectivity is untenable. Even the archbehaviourist, J.B. Watson, was prepared to concede that consciousness is ‘the instrument or tool with which all scientists work’ (Watson, 1914, p.176).

And yet many of the major figures in recent evolutionary psychology and brain science, are deeply confused about the place of subjectivity in objective, experimental research. As researchers, they find no problem in determining the true nature of reality. But, as theorists, they feel obliged, in the name of science, to saw through the branch they are sitting on. They insist that their findings demonstrate that we are all trapped within our subjectivity, incapable of distinguishing reality from illusion. But if this were true, all science would be impossible.

As far as I can see, the dualism of objectivity versus subjectivity (where any acknowledgement of subjectivity is supposed to undermine any claim to objectivity) is shared by many qualitative researchers. Rethinking this would open the way to an important reconciliation of experimental psychology and alternative qualitative approaches.

The future of psychology I am not denying an important place for experimentation in the human sciences.

I have just attended a fascinating conference in Swansea on experimental archaeology. I am sure that experimentation of various kinds has a secure future. I do not think the same can be said for psychology. Psychology, as we now know it, was very much an institutional invention of the ‘new’ university system of the late 19th century (Koch, 1999, p.125). It has already suffered important divisions, for example between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’, or around the establishment of centres of ‘cognitive science’. Many academic psychologists now see the close identification of experimental psychology with neuroscience as their best bet in the forthcoming round of research assessment. Politically, they may be right.

But, in the longer term, by going along with an unexamined notion of what is supposed to count as ‘hard’ scientific psychology, many aspects of modern psychology could be left extremely vulnerable. These would include important areas of social psychology, qualitative research, and perhaps even those fields of experimental psychology that have not fallen for the current highly fashionable displacement activity of brain localisation.

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ONE ON ONE

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…with Christopher Green Professor of Psychology at York University, Canada, and blogger on the history of psychology

One cultural recommendation The plays of Christopher Marlowe.

One Canadian perspective on the history of psychology The first permanent experimental psychology laboratory in the British Empire was founded at the University of Toronto in 1890 by an American (James Mark Baldwin).

‘This Week in the History of Psychology’ podcast series (www.yorku.ca/christo/podcasts). ‘Often, textbook history is written as though it was just there for the taking, as though no one had to work very hard to find out what happened in the past. The TWITHOP interviews enabled a number of historians to emerge from the background and speak directly about the research they had done.’

Articles on survival psychology, the Antarctic, developmental coordination disorder, and much more...

I Send your comments about The Psychologist to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573 or to the Leicester office address I To advertise in The Psychologist: psyadvert@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9552 I For jobs in the Appointments section: psychapp@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9550

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One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists It is easy to say ‘do what you love’. But that’s the kind of thing said by people who have already been successful while doing what they love. (No one asks advice from those who’ve failed while doing what they love.) Students must monitor the relationship between what they like to do, and what the reaction is from those who will, in part, determine their futures. Be honest with

One hero I wish more people knew the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. He was a deeply flawed man, in some ways, so I would not model myself after him, but he may have been the smartest man in America just before the turn Christopher Green of the 20th century. christo@yorku.ca He is best known today as a yourself about others’ philosopher, but he was also reactions. Then find a balance a working scientist and between your wants and the mathematician, and he world’s needs that you can live conducted, with his student Joseph Jastrow, among the first with. psychological experiments More answers online at published in the English www.thepsychologist.org.uk language (1885).

coming soon

One challenge History of psychology faces the challenge of figuring out the research and teaching potentials of all the new electronic technologies that are tumbling down upon us week by week. Soon we will be able to simultaneously search the contents of virtually every book and journal ever published to find out, for example, every single printed instance of the word ‘consciousness’ in history.

Then we will need to develop computational methods (or learn the methods that have already been developed) for making sense this enormous mountain of data. Most

historians are not prepared for that kind of change (nor are most psychologists).

resource

One book that you think all psychologists should read Kurt Danziger’s Naming the Mind shows us how modern psychology’s basic vocabulary of intelligence, behaviour, attitude, motivation, etc does not represent timeless ‘natural kinds’ but are, instead, categories that were constructed for particular purposes at certain points in our history. Taking that message to heart, we can see that these older aims eventually fail to serve our present needs, and the categories we created in their

wake may become obstacles to future progress. Be open to the possibility of radical change (but be wary of most individual radical proposals).

contribute

One reason I started blogging on the history of psychology Gutenberg’s movable type is grand, if you don’t have any better way to communicate.

But now, we have lots of ways to communicate that are faster, that integrate different kinds of media, that are more interactive among authors and readers. Blogging is just one of these.

One great resource on the history of psychology The Virtual Laboratory at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin: http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

Think you can do better? Want to see your area of psychology represented more?

See the inside front cover for how you can contribute and reach 48,000 colleagues into the bargain, or just e-mail your suggestions to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk

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