Key Thinkers in Psychology

Rom Harre

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781412903455, 9781412903448
• eBook ISBN: 9781446200070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

`For anyone that has spent years rowing off into convoluted estuaries, and would like an entertaining and useful chart to remind them of River Psychology as a whole, I thoroughly recommend this book? - The Psychologist

`This is a highly enjoyable, erudite and beautifully written manuscript. It conveys a rare depth of understanding and ability to strike at the core debates. The lively style, concentration on the biopic, use of text features such as links between names, and formal division of each sub-section will all appeal.… I have taught History of Psychology for nearly 6 years. This text will prove for more palatable to students than any of the competitors? - Dr Steve Brown, Loughborough University

`This book is well-written. It is clever, flowing and engaging. The balance between biography and contribution is excellent and makes it almost un-put-downable? - Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London

The 20th Century was rich in attempts to characterize and explain psychological phenomena and so to understand the human mind. These projects were undertaken by a huge and diverse list of characters from B F Skinner to James Gibson, from Gordon Allport to Hans Eysenck. It is important for every student of psychology, wherever they might be in the world, to understand the classic scholars, the classic studies, and the subsequent generations of people and ideas that have come to define the broad discipline that is `psychology?.

This book achieves this in the most accessible and engaging manner possible. Rom Harré presents a unique textbook orientation, combining the biopic with the significance of the major protagonists of the last century, organized by `schools of thought?, yet with cross-references throughout the text.

PART ONE

From Behaviourism to Cognitivism

1

The Behaviourists

During the first half of the 20th century a radical shift appeared in the very conception of what a scientific psychology ought to encompass. From the time of the British empiricists of the 17th and 18th centuries to the German experimentalists of the 19th century, the legitimacy of people’s reports of their subjective states was hardly ever questioned. However, in the 1920s the role of conscious states and processes as the prime sources of explanations of publicly observable behaviour was called into question. Not only were there doubts about the reliability of incorporating private experiences among the data of psychology, but, beginning with J. B. Watson (1919), the opinion began to spread that such data were redundant. Public behaviour could be explained by identifying the stimulus that triggered it.

However, in the first instance, human behaviour was far too complex to be studied by looking for stimulus-response patterns. Animals could serve as models for the study of behaviour in general. Not only were animals readily accommodated in experimental programmes, but it was presumed that their more primitive repertoires of responses could be analysed into simple elementary stimulus and response units. This presumption facilitated a certain kind of programme of experimental research.

The experimental study of stimulus-response patterns could be accomplished, it was assumed, by identifying elementary states of the environment and elementary responses and treating these as independent and dependent variables. An experiment would consist in manipulating the independent variable and observing the changes in the dependent variable. Show a dog some food and it will salivate. Thus we have an experimentally confirmed ‘psychological’ unit: food as stimulus elicits salivation as response.

During the first half of the 20th century a great many experiments based on this paradigm were carried out. Watson did little himself. The major figures behind a great deal of this work were Ivan Pavlov (pp. 8–15) and Burrhus Frederick Skinner (pp. 15–24). Both worked with animals – dogs, rats and pigeons. Both made systematic use of the methodology of independent and dependent variables. They differed on whether this route would lead to a comprehensive scientific psychology. However, both were willing to generalize their findings to the case of Homo sapiens.

In this way the programme of behaviourism was born. It flourished in the United States, particularly as it was developed by Edward Tolman (1932) and others. It had little influence in Europe, where anthropology and other descriptive approaches to understanding human life were generally more important at that time. We can see this in the work of Frederic Bartlett (pp. 47–54) and of William McDougall (pp. 191–194).

In eschewing any reference to mental processes behaviourists quite naturally began to see the stimulus-response patterns extracted from experiments in causal terms. Stimuli cause the emission of behaviours. The human being as active and responsible agent is implicitly expelled from psychology.

As the school of behaviourist psychology developed into a paradigm for a scientific psychology, it absorbed another trend that at first might seem alien to the very idea of a psychology. Influenced by the demands of the military and by business studies, psychologists began to subject their results to statistical analysis, requiring a population of subjects to take part in experiments (Danziger, 1990).

Long after behaviourism as a general psychology had been abandoned, the methodology of behaviourist research programmes continued and soon became an almost ubiquitous paradigm, practically defining what a scientific psychology should be. The three components – a causal metaphysics, an experimental methodology based on independent and dependent variables applied to a population and the use of statistics as the main analytical tool – made up a conception of psychology sometimes identified as the Old Paradigm. For the most part psychologists were simply unaware that the natural sciences they hoped to emulate made very little use of Old Paradigm methodology. The challenges to that methodology that emerged in the 1970s as the New Paradigm were partly animated by the idea of applying the actual methodology and metaphysics of physics and chemistry to the problems of psychology. Concepts like ‘activity’ and ‘structure’ made their appearance. Model making began to take precedence over experiments.

In this chapter we look closely at the lives and work of the pioneers of two versions of behaviourism, Ivan Pavlov and Burrhus Frederick Skinner.

References

Danziger, K. (1990) Constructing the Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tolman, E. C. (1932) Purposive Behavior in Animals and Man. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Watson, J. B. (1919) Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936)

By the beginning of the 20th century sufficient was known about the human brain and nervous system to support the idea of a psychology based on that system alone. La Mettrie’s dream of a materialist and all embracing human science seemed to be a real possibility. At this time the key concept on which this hope was based was the ‘reflex arc’. Sensory stimuli were carried to the brain, where they were processed, and appropriate neural instructions were sent to the muscles and other organs involved in behaviour. Could this ‘arc’ be the basis of the complex patterns of thought, feeling and action of the mature human being? Ivan Pavlov was the first to try to answer this question affirmatively.

Who was Ivan Petrovich Pavlov?

He was born on 26 September 1849 in the small town of Ryazan in Russia. His father was a priest, a man of some education. Ivan was the eldest of 11 children. When he was seven he fell from a balcony onto his head. He was severely injured and in consequence suffered from difficulties with his sight. He had trouble concentrating on ‘academic’ matters. In the event he had no formal schooling until he was 11. Helping his father in the garden, he learned a good deal of natural history. Assisting his mother in the house, he acquired an unusual range of manual skills for a young boy. In later life he put down his enthusiasm for the experimental aspect of physiology to the chores that fell to his lot as a child.

In 1860 he entered the Ryazan Theological Seminary. The teachers were mostly liberal in outlook and encouraged Ivan’s interest in natural science. In later life Pavlov recalled Father Orlov in particular. The works of the most progressive thinkers of the time were in the local town library and Pavlov immersed himself in their writings, particularly the radical Russian author Dmitrij Ivanovich Pisarev (1840–1868) and the Englishman Samuel Smiles (1812–1904). Pisarev’s political vision was dominated by the idea of the amelioration of society’s ills by the use of science. From Smiles young Pavlov seems to have picked up the idea of a disciplined, almost moral attitude to the work of science. Both enthused young Ivan Petrovich with the idea of science as the major influence on social and political progress.

In 1870 he hoped to begin his studies at St Petersburg University to pursue his passion for science. However, his mathematical skills were weak. Somehow, he avoided the test in mathematics and passed his matriculation ordeal satisfactorily. His inclinations led him to study in the natural history section in the school of physical sciences. At this time he was as much filled with the idea of a science-led transformation of society as he was with enthusiasm for scientific knowledge for its own sake. His private reading led him to the Englishman George Lewes’s popular works, particularly on biology, long passages from which he learned by heart.

His formal studies were dominated by the teaching of the great physiologist Ilya Fadeyevich Tsion (1842–1910), whose influence on Pavlov was lifelong. Under Tsion’s supervision he carried out a detailed study of the pancreatic nerves, for which he was awarded a gold medal. Already he had been drawn into the idea of the nervous system as the main, indeed for a while he believed the only, means by which the internal organs were stimulated to perform their various functions. Picking up an old conceptual distinction, he distinguished between his ‘nervic’ theory of the management of the internal organs and the ‘humoric’ theory of chemical influences.

Taking his first degree in 1875, he was able to enter the Academy of Medicine, intending to pursue his physiological studies rather than to qualify as a doctor. He continued to work under Tsion’s wing, and thus, fatefully for him, he became involved in one of the great academic scandals of the era. Tsion decided to end the custom of giving a pass mark to everyone who attended the Academy, the ‘gentleman’s C’ grade. The subsequent student unrest was only put down by armed force, and a vicious campaign, fueled by anti-semitism, forced Tsion to resign. Pavlov resigned as well. Thus began a period of extreme poverty, shared by his new wife, Serafina Vassilievna Kartatievskaya, whom he married in 1881. She had known him as a student and has left a vivid memoir of his enthusiasm for intellectual debates.

Sergei Botkin, a student of Claude Bernard (1813–1878), the great French physiologist, became the director of the Veterinary Institute, and shortly thereafter Pavlov joined as his assistant. Scientific research was not well supported, and Botkin had very little to offer him. The salary was barely enough to live on, and there was scarcely anything for the expenses of research. Their laboratory was a tumbledown shed. Yet, in those 10 years, Pavlov not only brought 15 doctoral projects to fruition, but continued his own studies into neurophysiology. He describes his time there with characteristic generosity and enthusiasm. His duties to the clinic itself were minimal. Though he enjoyed working with the students on collaborative projects, he said later: ’from our discussions I gained the habit of “physiological reasoning” [later to emerge as a distrust of mentalistic explanations]. I progressed until no laboratory technique held any secrets for me.’ During his years with Botkin, Pavlov worked on the pancreatic nerves, the nervous control of the heart, and began an interest in the control of gastric secretions. In 1883 he submitted his doctoral thesis, on the nerves of the heart, a development of Tsion’s discovery of the accelerator nerve.

Though he now had a job that suited him, he and his wife could not afford an apartment, and while she stayed with relatives, he slept under the laboratory bench. Their first child, Mirtnik, was sickly and Serafina took him to relatives in the south. Ivan and his brother just managed to get together enough money for the fare. Unfortunately the child did not thrive and eventually died. Once, when Pavlov was utterly destitute, his students collected a fund for his everyday needs, but he spent the money on experimental animals (Cuny, 1964: 35). His second son happily survived. Notorious for the long hours he spent in the laboratory, nevertheless he disciplined himself to take proper vacations, taking up gardening with enthusiasm.

During this period his sense of his life project underwent a major change. As a youth he had been inspired by the political scientism of Pisarev, who had argued for a strict materialism, implying the dominance of physical science over all other disciplines. Pavlov had also taken up the ideas of Samuel Smiles, whose advocacy of honest work and personal industry affected him throughout his life. Now, a passion for science itself, rather than for any of its myriad consequences or its social uses, dominated his view of his own career. He returned again and again for inspiration to the writings of George Lewes, and to the essays of Claude Bernard. It seems fair to say that as Pavlov became more enthusiastic for the practice of science, he became indifferent to the political tides of the times, even to so extraordinary a series of events as the revolution of 1917.

His doctoral thesis was very well received. Not only did he win a second gold medal, but he was awarded a scholarship for study in Germany, spending the years 1884 to 1886 there. Carl Ludwig’s laboratory in Leipzig was the Mecca of neurophysiologists the world over. And there he spent the major part of his two years abroad.

His maturing surgical skills enabled him to prepare experimental dogs in a remarkable way. He created fistulas (external permanent openings) to obtain samples from the salivary glands, the stomach, the liver, the pancreas and even the small intestines. This enabled him to follow the process of digestion in extraordinary detail, particularly to make exact measurements of the quantitative relationships between stimuli and gastric responses. The American army surgeon William Beaumont (1785–1853) had been able to begin serious work on the processes of digestion, through the chance of finding a servant with a fistula into the stomach, the result of a poorly healed wound.

In 1895 Pavlov’s goal of a Chair in Physiology at St Petersburg was finally realized when, after various vicissitudes, he was appointed to the chair of physiology in the Military Medical Academy. Shortly afterwards he took on the direction of the physiology division of the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine.

His work was attracting considerable international attention. In 1904 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his researches into the neural mechanism by which the secretion of gastric juices was stimulated. However, in his Nobel speech he devoted a good deal of space to his investigations of the conditioned (-al) reflex, which had only just begun. It was this work which was to prove so influential in psychology.

In St Petersburg, he drew around him a team of highly skilled and devoted assistants. Pavlov’s bluff honesty was legendary, but so too was his willingness to acknowledge hasty judgements. The discovery of secretin by Bayliss and Starling in 1902, a chemical agent in the control of digestive secretions, threw his principle of exclusive neural control into doubt. He ordered his assistants to repeat the experiments. When they turned out to confirm the discovery, he accepted the finding, despite the complications it brought into the understanding of the nature of the system of digestive controls.

After the revolution of 1917, he gave his general but critical support to the new regime. In so far as it had emphasized the advancement of science it had his full commitment. However, he seems to have stood back from the ‘social engineering’ of the early Bolshevik regime that eventually went so tragically wrong. Over the years he had moved away from the dogmatic materialism of his youth, though he never ceased to be vigorously opposed to any idea of the mind as a mental substance, separate and detachable from the body.

A great many dogs were sacrificed in Pavlov’s pursuit of knowledge. Strongly and publicly opposed to ‘crude vivisection’ of animals, he was a foremost defender of their humane use in scientific studies. He set up a memorial to his dogs on which he put the following inscription:

The dog, man’s helper and friend from prehistoric times, may justly be offered as a sacrifice to science, but this should always be done without unnecessary suffering.

Thanks to a generous donation from Alfred Nobel in 1893, he was able to erect a purpose built set of laboratories in which to carry on the researches he had laboured to perform in the straitened conditions of his early years. However, as sometimes happens, despite the excellent conditions, the spark was no longer there, though his legendary industry lived on. In his later years he did not add to his scientific accomplishments in any major way. He died in 1936, still active in neurophysiological research.

What did he contribute?

As early as 1863, Ivan Sechenov had suggested that the apparent subjective worlds of animals and people alike are explicable physiologically. Pavlov came to very much the same conclusion, in his studies of what he called ‘psychical excitation’. Here is an example he found particularly striking. If some pebbles are put in the mouth of a dog there is no salivation, but if the pebbles are ground up into sand, then there is a copious production of saliva. It almost seems as if the dog is assessing the situation and making a choice as to the best response. Yet, it is entirely a physiological phenomenon which takes place independently of the will or intentions of the subject. This example shows how wary we must be in attributing thought to animals in situations in which there is a neurophysiological explanation to hand.

Salivation is a natural reflex. Pavlov’s great contribution was to introduce the concept of a conditional or artificial reflex, extending the domain of neurophysiology to cover non-natural responses. All organisms, including plants, respond to situations in the environment in some degree. However, those with complex nervous systems display a range of responses specific to the nature of the environmental conditions, as perceived by the animal in question. These are the natural reflexes. For example, a human being will blink when something approaches the eye. Why are these responses called ‘reflexes’? The name comes from a hypothesis about the structure of the nervous system. A signal from the environment enters the nervous system along a certain pathway. This signal activates a centre in the brain from which emanates a signal to the relevant musculature, producing a movement. Thus, we have a natural or unconditional ‘reflex’ process in the nervous system. We now know that this picture of the nervous control of muscular movement is greatly oversimplified.

However, with higher animals and man, the nervous system is sufficiently complex to permit a range of responses to any given stimulus, and a range of stimuli will elicit any given response. What fixes these into established...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: A Sketch of Some Historical Trends
• PART ONE FROM BEHAVIOURISM TO COGNITIVISM
• PART TWO FROM INDIVIDUALS TO GROUPS
• PART THREE FROM THEORY TO REALITY
• Name Index
• Subject Index