Psychology Exposed (Psychology Revivals)

Or the Emperor's New Clothes

Paul Kline

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317444565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Experimental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1988, in this personal review of the state of academic psychology, Paul Kline draws attention to the way in which his peers at the time studiously avoided such threatening matters as human feelings and emotions, unconscious 'complexes' – in short anything that could be called the human psyche. His erudite, amusing, and provocative text outlines the crucial influence of the development of scientific method before examining key experiments within cognitive psychology and cognitive science, psychometrics, social psychology, and animal behaviour. Is most of experimental psychology trivial, redundant, and irrelevant? The academic subject cannot continue to ignore its critics, he argued, and must solve its problems by means of radical solutions. Whether they support or refute Professor Kline's arguments, students and professionals alike will still enjoy this original book.

Chapter one

The problem

The problem which constitutes the core of this book is the disjunction of experimental psychology as a science and the nature of man. It will be argued that as it has now been developed experimental psychology is unable to come to grips With what is essentially human and that the further it appears to progress, the further away in fact it flees from what should be the natural objective of psychology. As a result of this, modern psychology is not only valueless, but actually corrosive, destroying any possibility of insight into human behaviour.

To demonstrate this point it will be necessary to examine the nature of experimental psychology, in all its manifold branches, and, of course, the nature of man. Clearly all psychological methods have to be judged against the criterion of man’s nature and this is the main topic of this introductory chapter.

The nature of man

One of the difficulties which psychology has always to face is that there are so many views of man which, if accepted, lead to methods and approaches in psychology which have little in common. There is the religious view in which man is unique, lit by a divine spark and, perhaps, tainted by Original Sin. Such a viewpoint given the dominance of Roman Catholicism and the Muslim religion is still probably that of the majority of people. In direct contrast to this, as was the case at the time of Darwin, is what might be called the evolutionary position in which man is regarded as another animal, more highly evolved in respect of cortical function than any other but still an animal; possibly, judging from his history, the worst animal in the world. This is the viewpoint of ethologists, who study behaviour as it naturally occurs, and of animal psychologists who investigate their subjects in the laboratory. However, as I shall demonstrate, interesting and fascinating as this work may be in its own right, it is not possible to generalize from animals to man, even if their evolutionary unity is accepted. Obviously, it goes without saying, those who believe in the Divinity of Man will not bother with animal psychology as a guide to man’s behaviour.

However, even if it is agreed that the only route to understanding man is to study man, there are still so many viewpoints underpinned by so many different assumptions that no approach is beyond dispute. In the Skinnerian view, for example, man is essentially a plastic organism shaped by his environment. He learns what he is reinforced to learn. Obviously here the central study of psychology must be learning. This kind of psychology is discussed in Chapter 7, as is the animal work with its implication that man and animals are one.

A view that is clearly, but not entirely, opposed to this is the genetical view of human behaviour which, as the name suggests, argues that much of human behaviour is largely genetically determined although environmental interaction is always allowed for. This is an ancient doctrine and in its modern form is embodied in psychometrics which has isolated a number of important factors in human behaviour, factors which show a high hereditary determination. Intelligence and extraversion are two such factors. This work is fully discussed in Chapter 4.

One view of man stands out in the twentieth century, the Freudian psychoanalytic view which indeed changed the Zeitgeist. Man once seen through the psychoanalytic lens never looks the same again. Experimental psychology has dismissed this viewpoint as hopelessly unscientific and therefore to be ignored, despite its enormous influence on the way we think. This refusal to take this model of man into account is one of the root causes of the evils of experimental psychology, as I demonstrate throughout this book.

Perhaps because psychoanalysis has failed to live up to the exaggerated claims of its adherents, for it is no cure for the ills that beset our society, and because of the constant sniping of scientists, in scientific circles psychoanalysis is not what once it was. Today Freud would not be elected into the Royal Society. In its place among the scientific cognoscenti a new approach or model of man has become the rage. This is man the computer. Based upon this approach departments of artificial intelligence and cognitive science have sprung into being attracting huge funds, a sign stimulus for scientists. In this model man is seen as an information processing machine, as is the computer; a Turing machine, as specified in the 1930s. The flaws and errors in this approach which has recently informed cognitive psychology as well, I deal with in Chapter 6, and in Chapter 2 cognitive models are dealt with which are implicitly rather than explicitly computational.

On entirely different dimensions, cutting right across these approaches which I have discussed, is the old dispute between introspective and behaviourist schools of psychology. Here the argument was whether science had to be concerned with observable public events or could deal with the inferences and constructs necessary if mental processes were to be discussed. At one point in British psychology, at least, it seemed as if behaviourism had the upper hand and this was the basic assumption of learning theoretic accounts of behaviour. However, computational and cognitive psychology are clearly not behaviourist in this traditional sense. The behavourist approach was closely bound up with the conception of science and scientific method current at that time – a univariate rather than a multivariate concept of science.

The emphasis of behaviourism on science, and thus the psychological laboratory, led to the development of social psychology which very sensibly argued that as behaviour always occurs within some context, and it is obvious that the context influences what we do and say, behaviour and its context must be studied together. This is what social psychology attempts to do in a scientific and experimental way. It is this work I examine in Chapter 5: man the social animal.

Since I am arguing that the diverse views of man strongly affect the psychological research that is done and held to be important there is a view of man which must be mentioned, certainly as influential as that of Freud in the twentieth century and one which ostensibly has profoundly affected the lives of millions of people throughout the world. This is, of course, the Marxist view of man, economic man, motivated by financial gain, although in the Marxist argument this is the result of the conditioning of capitalist society. It is fair to say that in American and European society these views have not influenced experimental psychology, although I suppose that the study of reinforcers might be related to it.

Finally one other approach to psychology should be briefly discussed. This is the reductionist or physiological approach which seeks to understand human psychology in terms of its underlying physiology. For example, in the study of the perception of straight lines and curves individual edge detectors have been found in the visual cortex (work that has won the Nobel Prize) and how these are used in visual perception has been impressively hypothesized. However, I should like to make two points here. The first is that this work is really physiology. It describes the physiology of vision, how we see. However, in perception there must be corresponding physiological changes, yet these changes are not identical with perception. The experience of these perceptions, not these physiological changes, constitutes the psychology and to this by definition, physiology can have nothing to say. This is the reason I regard these often brilliant studies of perceptual phenomena as physiology rather than psychology and for this reason they fall beyond the purview of my book.

I think that I have written sufficient to show that there are indeed a diversity of views of man and that each produces in its train a particular view of what is worthy of study and in some instances of how it should be studied. I have dealt with this problem in two ways which together, I hope, largely overcome it. In the first instance I ignore this problem, examining man from a viewpoint that is relevant to psychology. I look at those activities which universally seem important. By so doing this almost defines the nature of man. However, since experimental psychology stems from views of man, as I have discussed, which are different from this and depend on various assumptions, I also examine these different branches of psychology in later chapters of the book. I do not want to fall foul of the perfectly reasonable argument that my definition of man is such that all experimental psychology must fail to deal with the subject matter.

Nevertheless, despite this complication, I think that defining man by listing what is important to him gives us a clear idea of what experimental psychology should be concerned with. I shall now simply list, therefore, a number of activities which almost all individuals do and which, by common agreement in most cultures of the world, seem important to them.

Human activities

Although I suppose that a truly exhaustive list of human activities would have to include all verbs in all languages, a sample which I and my friends enjoy is illuminating enough: eating, drinking and having sex – the basic biological necessities together with breathing, excreting and defecating which are enjoyed especially by certain groups, as is alleged in psychoanalysis. Then there are the more social pleasures of laughing and talking, exercising, running, swimming, competing, sleeping and dreaming, weeping. Writing, making music, playing chess or bridge, feeling drunk, skiing, driving fast, being pampered, being mothered, mothering, giving orders and being ordered, listening to music, watching cricket, bird-watching – but enough is enough. This tiny vignette of what a person may do indicates, at least, the richness of human behaviour, its diversity and scope and already I can hear readers note the cultural, university bias – what about football and cooking, playing bingo and betting, eating fish and chips from a newspaper, reading bad books, pornography, adultery.

This virtually random list, activities which spring to mind as constituting the pleasure of life and sometimes its woes, is extensive and variegated; nevertheless there are other human pursuits which are virtually universal. Life is, to quote Sweeney, but birth, copulation, death. In virtually all societies children have to be reared; individuals have to learn the mores of their society (being educated) and have to work to earn their living. Language is universal with all that implies for self-expression. Joy and woe is the human condition, as a response to which arises religion or its modern substitute of a political philosophy.

Such a list as this reveals perhaps an academic psychological or behaviouristic bias in that the description of man has been conceptualized or realized as activities. This, however, would give a false impression. It was intended to adumbrate the scope and diversity of human behaviour, a breadth which any experimental psychology should capture. However, as we all know, there is more to life than acting. Sometimes I just sits and thinks, and then again sometimes I just sits. This always raises a laugh of some kind, and one could well ask why. What is amusing about just sitting? I think that it is its difficulty. Many of us would love to be able to just sit, to banish the painful contents of our heads but, alas, we cannot. Hence the humour of the phrase, the simpleton doing what we, so much wiser, would like but cannot do. This is the humour, therefore, of juxtaposition and the humour of the expression of a longed for desire.

I raise this because it demonstrates that behaviour, overt activity, can never wholly describe a person. Thoughts and feelings are often the most important thing in life. Loving, being in love, to many this is all that matters. The content of popular songs, of poetry and the arts is love, and with love goes hate, and with hate aggression and violence. Feelings, then, must constitute a part of any psychology of man. A list of feelings or emotions is indeed revelatory. Love and hate I have mentioned, rage, anger, anxiety, sadness, and grief, joy, happiness, depression, and the Black Dog that lopes behind our lives. No, it is obvious that a psychology of behaviour alone is inadequate. A psychology of feeling is a necessity.

Another approach to gaining some insight into the diversity of human behaviour and the complexity of the psyche is to examine the content of newspapers. Some of what may be discovered has been, naturally enough, discussed in the paragraphs above, and it would be very odd if that were not the case. Different ways of looking at human beings should show some agreement. Newspapers, given that there is any truth in their reports, must show two things. They indicate what people actually do, and they indicate what editors believe people like to read about (and it is not much, given the content of many papers). If we assume that people do like reading the popular press (and are not the gullible persons of capitalistic advertising as Marxists would have us believe – how odd that advocates of the working man have so low an opinion of him) newspaper content is thus a useful indicant of human behaviour. On these criteria murder, sex, observing the Royal Family at play, wars, disasters, and accidents vicariously experienced, rape and crime are all of immense human significance. So too is astrology, parapsychology, and the occult. In the sense of what people do, the subject matter of the press, killing especially in the name of religion, fanatical religious belief, and violence of every sort familial and for the sake of drugs and drink, adultery, these are what people do and these are the things in which people are interested. This interest, indeed, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, strongly suggests that, since the majority of what are conveniently called decent people do not indulge these activities, many people would like so to do.

What the more thoughtful and intellectually aspiring sections of the media concern themselves with is also of significance for this broad delineation of human behaviour, in its widest sense embracing thoughts and emotions as well as ‘observable behaviour’, the chimera of academic psychology. Here we find coverage of such psychological questions as the nature and cause of mental illness and its treatment, the psychological aspects of physical disease, the question of racial differences, whether they exist and if they do their provenance in genes and culture. Indeed the very nature of man is examined. Is he religious? How can he be controlled or persuaded? Is he inevitably flawed? Original sin is still a fundamental issue.

I do not think that there can be much doubt that all the concerns and deeds of humanity that I have listed in this simple delineation of what it is to be human constitute an accurate picture of what people do and what people enjoy and like to understand. Nor is this term ‘understand’ chosen lightly or by accident, for the very existence of the media and institutions of learning, indeed the very presence of language in man, I take as evidence for a faculty which is of enormous significance, and that is a wish or need to understand the world, which may be learned or may be built in, an evolutionary advantage in the terms of sociobiology, a product of man’s huge cortex.

Academic psychology

Such, then, is the subject matter of psychology, if this is to be the study of man. Yet as I indicated in the opening lines of this chapter, there is a terrible disjunction. Scientific psychology, as it is now conceived in universities in the west and almost throughout the world, barely seems to touch upon these issues.

Let me exemplify the point by examining the titles of papers in journals and conferences. I shall not here make the kind of detailed search of all journals and all conferences that a careful academic would demand, in order to prove this point. At this juncture I shall scrutinize two recent conferences. The first was concerned with developmental psychology, the second with personality, both topics surely relevant to life and not the province of esoteric science as perhaps might be justified in the study, say, of the biochemistry of nerve conduction.

Some titles of conference papers

I shall take first the 1985 Annual Conference of the Developmental Section of the British Psychological Society. There were approximately 100 papers in the programme. I will examine a few of the papers, for instance, ‘The development of classificatory behaviours of language concepts and visual shapes among high and low socio-economic status children’. Apart from the incomprehensibility of the title, the research itself raises a number of fundamental issues. Why take high and low socio-economic class children? The fact that a child’s parents have a good or bad job tells us, per se, nothing about the way they rear their children. Even if differences between the groups are observed, it is psychologically meaningless unless what these parents do or do not do is related to the development of classificatory behaviours. Thus the topic is bound to yield no information. Furthermore, so narrow is the development of classificatory behaviours of language concepts and visual shapes, that generalizability is impossible. Again one could ask, what is a visual shape? What shape is not visual? Perhaps even more significant than these severe weaknesses of the research topic, is the limited narrow scope of the subject itself. This topic was not to be found in our delineation of the nature of man.

The next paper in this session on cognitive development was entitled ‘Children’s understanding of the conservation experiment: content, capacity, and causal attributions’. In this case the limited topic is a clear example of my claimed disjunction. This paper is a study of the ‘Conservation Experiment’, an experiment first performed by Piaget to demonstrate that at a certain stage of intellectual development, children had no grasp of capacity – that amounts of, say, water remain the same when put in tall thin jars or broad jars. Before the development of conservation children are deceived by appearances. Although interesting and perhaps ingenious, the conservation experiment would not appear to be one of the more significant aspects of human behaviour. Remember that psychologists choose their experiments. They could study anything they like.

After coffee, on the first day, a paper, ‘Children’s recall strategies in collaborative working arrangements’ (presumably working together), was presented. However well executed, it could not be argued that such a subject could add much to knowledge of human behaviour. To the question of why one might want to discover such knowledge, a meaningful answer would be difficult.

After tea, two papers were programmed, one on ‘Vegetable equilibrium: Piaget and plant psychology’, and a second entitled ‘Spontaneous metric measurement in five year olds’. The former was not entirely serious, the author informs me, but it is certainly of little interest to students of human behaviour as it has been delineated earlier in the chapter. It is not, per se, particularly funny either, although this must be a matter of personal values. Nor would the second paper appear to impinge on many of the subjects deemed to be of wide significance. It is obvious, and it would be wearisome to continue the case, that these papers are not concerned with topics in psychology that non-psychologists, at least, consider to...