The First Century of Experimental Psychology

Elliot Hearst, Eliot Hearst, Elliot Hearst, Eliot Hearst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367426002
• eBook ISBN: 9781000767414
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Experimental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume, originally published in 1979, sponsored by the Psychonomic Society (the North American association of research psychologists), commemorates the centennial of experimental psychology as a separate discipline – dated from the opening of Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig in 1879. Each major research area is surveyed by distinguished experts, and the chapters treat historical background and progress, experimental findings and methods, critical theoretical issues, evaluations of the current state of the art, future prospects, and even practical and social relevance of the work. Writing in a lively style suitable for non-specialists, the authors provide a general introduction to the history of experimental psychology. Illustrated by many photographs of leading historical figures, this book blends history with methodology, findings with theory, and discussion of specific topics with integrated assessments of what has truly been accomplished in the first hundred years of experimental psychology.

1 One Hundred Years: Themes and Perspectives

Eliot Hearst
Indiana University

I. INTRODUCTION

One of the first times that William James mentioned his growing belief that psychology could be a science was in a letter he wrote from Germany in 1867 to his friend Thomas Ward. James was then 25 years old.

It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to be a science—some measurements have already been made in the region lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of consciousness …. (in the shape of sense perceptions), and more may come of it. I am going on to study what is already known, and perhaps may be able to do some work at it. Helmholtz and a man named Wundt at Heidelberg are working at it [James, 1920, pp. 118–119].

Twenty-five years later, James had extensively “studied what is known,” and had completed his monumental two-volume textbook, The Principles of Psychology (1890). Many psychological laboratories and institutes had opened in Europe and America. However, sad to say, James was not particularly enthusiastic about the development of psychology as a natural science. In the short version of Principles (1892) he described the “New Psychology” as follows:

A string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them: but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced. We don’t even know the terms between which the elementary laws would obtain if we had them. This is no science, it is only the hope of a science…. Something definite happens when to a certain brain-state a certain “sciousness” corresponds. A genuine glimpse into what it is would be the scientific achievement, before which all past achievements would pale. But at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all reactions. The Galileo and the Lavoisier of psychology will be famous men indeed when they come, as come they some day surely will, or past successes are no index to the future…. Meanwhile the best way in which we can facilitate their advent is to understand how great is the darkness in which we grope, and never to forget that the natural-science assumptions with which we started are provisional and revisable things [p. 468].

One of the main goals of this book is to summarize and assess the major findings and theories that have accumulated since psychology was self-consciously declared an independent, experimental discipline in the 1870s. Many solid and provocative results will be presented that would undoubtedly have impressed and delighted James, even in his most critical moments. We can now point with pride to some well-established functions and laws enabling fairly precise quantitative predictions in diverse areas of psychological science (see Estes, Chapter 14). Clear progress has been made concerning the physiological bases for certain sensory and perceptual processes and for some very specific aspects of motivation, emotion, memory, and attention. Numerous practical applications of laboratory results have been developed and are now a part of the technology of the late twentieth century.

Despite the undeniable accomplishments that appear in the pages of this volume, we will also encounter “wrangles about opinions,” bits of “gossip,” and a variety of “strong prejudices”—all expressed since James offered his unenthusiastic evaluation of scientific psychology near the end of the nineteenth century. Although some experimentalists working on topics in fields related to psychology have won Nobel Prizes for their contributions, the Galileo or Lavoisier of psychology has failed to materialize: No one has successfully proposed any principle or general framework that serves to unify or encompass many different areas of scientific psychology. In fact, a large number of contemporary experimental psychologists seriously doubt whether psychology is a field that will ever see the emergence of truly global principles of the kind that Galileo or Lavoisier identified or that Darwin bequeathed to biology. Because we still grope in the darkness about so many aspects of behavior, perception, and cognition, bands of skeptics today contend that the scientific approach to psychology has failed to meet reasonable standards of progress in the 100 years it has had to prove itself. Therefore, not everyone agrees with Boring’s opinion that “the application of the experimental method to the problem of mind is the great outstanding event in the history of the study of mind, an event to which no other is comparable,” or with G. Stanley Hall’s almost religious faith that scientific research, whether in psychology or other fields, is a “sacred quest.”Devotion to pure science would inevitably produce valuable practical results, Hall believed; understand the basic principles and “their applications are relatively easily and quickly learned (see Ross, 1972).”

If this book achieves its stated goals, readers should be able to decide for themselves how successful experimental psychology has been in its first century and what its prospects are for future valuable contributions to mankind’s scientific knowledge, self-understanding, and technology. On these questions, none of our authors is either a total optimist or a dire pessimist. All of them would agree, I think, that significant advances have occurred but that the challenges are as great as ever. The potential discoveries and benefits appear worth the inevitable trips up blind alleys, the “blank” periods or plateaus when little progress is apparently being made, and the time occasionally spent justifying to others the value of basic research in psychology.

This introductory chapter is intended to set the stage for the historical reviews and assessments of work in specific areas that constitute most of the book. Especially directed at nonpsychologists and students in the field, the chapter presents a brief panorama of the early history of experimental psychology—some of its antecedents, its most influential “schools” or systems and their beliefs—and accentuates several themes and issues that will repeatedly arise in subsequent chapters. Before that, however, some general comments seem appropriate concerning the scope and assumptions of experimental psychology and the value of knowing something about its history.

II. EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY: ITS SCOPE AND ASSUMPTIONS

One hundred years ago, only a handful of people in the world held a Ph. D. in psychology,¹ and G. Stanley Hall had just received the first one awarded in America (see Cairns & Ornstein, Chapter 11, this volume). No one was a professor of psychology, and there were no institutions that offered undergraduate majors in the subject. Nowadays, each year finds a quarter of a million American students majoring in psychology (see McKeachie, 1976), most of whom read about or actually receive explicit training in experimental methods as applied to many different subareas of the discipline. There are more than 5,000 scientists who have received doctoral degrees in various fields of experimental psychology and perform basic research in their particular specialties. Scores of journals are published that cover material of general and specific relevance for scientific psychologists.

1 Readers interested in the origin and evolution of the word “psychology,” and its first users, should consult Lapointe (1970, 1972).

Experimental psychologists now work on a large variety of topics, including the study of vision, audition, and touch—areas already popular in the psychophysical investigations of 1879. Some contemporary workers test the memory of children and adults for different prose passages, and others analyze the reaction times of humans and pigeons as they search rapidly for a specific symbol in an array containing many different symbols. There are researchers who examine in various social contexts the effects of drugs that produce physiological reactions like those typically present during certain emotions in humans. Scientists working with animals investigate the ease of establishing associations between unusual tastes or smells and subsequent gastrointestinal illness, or they compare methods for removing learned fear responses. Experts in “animal behavior” study the persistent tendency of ducklings to follow a moving object that they were exposed to (imprinted on) during the first day of their lives. Experimental social psychologists analyze the facilitation or suppression of a college student’s performance depending on whether or not other people are present, or examine the factors that make human beings obey an instruction or conform to judgments that they might have been expected to defy. Researchers are performing exciting work revealing the abilities of chimpanzees to learn a variety of “languages” constructed by human beings. Physiological psychologists study electrical changes occurring in the brain during presentation of various external signals and the effects of chemical stimulation of specific parts of a rat’s hypothalamus on its eating and drinking behavior. Experimental psychopathologists compare schizophrenics with other groups of patients in terms of the details of their linguistic output, distractibility, or logical reasoning. Other psychologists focus on such diverse topics as possible genetic bases for maze learning in fruit flies and the apathy or depression shown by “helpless” human and animal subjects that cannot control the occurrence of various important environmental events.

As in any science, relatively sophisticated instrumentation is an important part of the experimental psychologist’s arsenal, not only to precisely control and change certain aspects of the environment, but also to enable reliable recording and timing of the subject’s responses. Revolving memory drums or electronic displays present words for human subjects to memorize, and devices called tachistoscopes flash to-be-recognized words or letters on a screen for a small fraction of a second. Tiny electrodes are attached to single cells in the brain or other parts of the visual system of cats to record their responses to various orientations of a line or directions of its movement. Both massive and miniature computers program the presentation of complex stimuli and simultaneously collect and analyze the subject’s responses. Infant monkeys share cages with surrogate “mothers” made out of cloth or wire. Experimental settings have been constructed to study the operant conditioning of subjects varying in size from goldfish and honey bees to elephants and dolphins. When building theories or just planning future experiments, experimentalists often range far from conventional psychology in their search for suitable quantitative techniques and model systems. The use of procedures or frameworks adapted from mathematics, computer science, or physics is not at all rare.

Thus we see that experimental methods are applied in almost every sphere of psychology and have not been limited only to special types of organisms, kinds of behaviors, and sorts of situations. Of course, the historical reviews in this book will demonstrate that particular men had very narrow views about what constitute permissible and appropriate environments, organisms, topics, or responses for experimental psychology to study. However, those who have considered themselves experimental psychologists generally share certain basic beliefs and follow certain basic procedures or strategies that differ from the methods employed not only by the “mental philosophers” who studied the mind and its contents long before the advent of the “new” psychology, but also by contemporary philosophical analyses of the mind. The pre-experimental students of the mind based their conclusions and speculations almost exclusively on introspection, on reasoning from their own past individual experiences, and on their knowledge of the experiences, observations, and writings of other human beings.

In place of this kind of approach—which of course led to important, though often not easily verifiable, insights about principles of psychology—the experimentalist, typically a believer in the methodological unity of all the sciences, demanded actual investigations conducted in a well-controlled environment arranged to yield concrete, recordable responses from a subject. In most cases the ideal experiment was conceived to be one involving the method of “varied conditions,” in which all the factors except for the one or two variables systematically manipulated by the experimenter—the independent variables—were held constant while the subject’s reactions (the dependent variables) were observed or measured or transcribed. Over the history of experimental psychology the subjects’ reactions have ranged from lengthy verbal introspections supplied by well-practiced subjects describing their conscious experience during presentation or manipulation of certain external stimuli, to more objectively measurable and more easily quantifiable actions such as simple “Yes-No” answers, depressions of a key or switch, reflex knee jerks or eye blinks, correct or incorrect entries made by a rat into the sectors of a maze, words recalled from a list shown to the subject minutes or hours before, and sequences of group members’ verbal statements to the other people present in a social situation.

In the early days of the new psychology, William James and some of his colleagues spoke disparagingly of the “brass-instruments” and simple “curves and graphs” its practitioners used, with the implication that technical matters captured too much of their attention and pride. According to the critics, these experimentalists were investigating relatively minor, even “boring” topics in artificial, unnatural situations, instead of concentrating on the formulation and examination of significant psychological questions and on the search for universal, general laws that epitomize a mature science. Later in the history of experimental psychology, and even today, we hear similar complaints. Some psychologists are described as method- rather than problem-oriented: Their research is said to focus mainly on the extensive, relatively nontheoretical analysis of a specific, well-accepted methodology—for example, the variables affecting a pigeon’s key-pecking behavior in a Skinner Box, the numerous factors controlling serial learning of unrelated words or syllables presented on a memory drum, or the effects of various procedural details on children’s performance of a task devised by Jean Piaget. In such cases, study of the “method” seems almost to become an end in itself; virtually forgotten may be the need for relating the research to significant problems for psychology. With justification, one can argue that a generally preferable strategy would include experiments in which different theoretical mechanisms or alternative explanations are pitted against each other and, by appropriate design, “resolved” in favor of one or the other. Although basic and indispensable, the validation or collection of mere facts and observations is not the ultimate goal of science; as Charles Darwin remarked, science consists of grouping or organizing facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

The experimental psychologist’s confidence in the definite value of controlled observation, careful manipulation of independent variables, and, most important, the search for “causal” explanations and general laws has usually been accompanied by the assumption or faith that not only simple or basic psychological processes like sensory discrimination can be profitably studied in the laboratory, but also a great variety of other topics—ones that critics might argue cannot be brought into a laboratory without establishing conditions so contrived and unnatural that the results would be virtually useless. The skeptics would say, for example, that a monkey placed in a barren chamber, where it must choose between lifting a circular or a square block to obtain food pellets, is being studied in a situation resembling none that it would encounter in real life, just as is the case for a human subject recalling lists of unrelated words on index cards or bargaining with others in a laboratory setting designed to simulate the conditions under which real-life executives must reach difficult decisions. Others who are dissatisfied with an experimental approach to psychological problems insist that the phenomena of psychology are determined by so many interacting factors that experimental isolation of the crucial ones is virtually impossible; and, even when the approach is seemingly successful, the final conclusions may be strongly lacking in generalizability to new situations. In addition, as Estes (Chapter 14) points out, organisms are continually in a state of change as their lives progress, and the steady-state conditions that other sciences often can achieve appear difficult, if not impossible to obtain for many psychological problems. Thus, the argument goes, much experimentation may merely add up to an academic exercise.

These paradigmatic objections to experimental psychology—as well as either reasonable or rash complaints about the ethics of certain kinds of experimentation, and vaguer criticisms such as “science misses the central reality of human nature and life itself” because science is necessarily deterministic—are about as old as experimental psychology itself. At least we no longer have to rebut several of the accusations hurled at experimental psychologists of the nineteenth century. Some German academicians, besides thinking experimental psychology a temporary fad, opposed the work done with well-practiced human subjects in Wundt’s laboratory because they believed that excessive examination of the mind could cause insanity. And Cambridge University refused to permit the establishment of a psychophysics laboratory because study of such a topic would “insult religion by putting the human soul on a pair of scales.”

In the long run, the success of experimental psychology itself, and the validity of the more reasonable general objections to its value—the supposed artificiality of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Half Title
• Frontispiece
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Illustration Credits
• Preface
• The First Century of Experimental Psychology
• 1. One Hundred Years: Themes and Perspectives
• 2. Social and Intellectual Origins of Experimental Psychology
• 3. Sensation and Perception
• 4. Comparative Psychology and Ethology
• 5. Animal Learning and Behavior Theory
• 6. Motivation
• 7. Emotion
• 8. Human Learning and Memory
• 9. Cognitive Science
• 10. Physiological Psychology
• 11. Developmental Psychology
• 12. Social Psychology
• 13. Psychopathology
• 14. Experimental Psychology: An Overview
• Name Index
• Subject Index