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Home , Behaviorism, Introspection

Wundt's "New "

Wilhelm Wundt(1832-1920) was the first professional to call himself a . He founded one of the first psychological laboratories in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. Wundt believed the "only certain is immediate " (Blumenthal, 1975). If psychology were to be a science, then would have to collect data about experience. To do this, Wundt used procedures similar to those developed by the psychophysicists. He arranged controlled laboratory settings. He carefully administered stimulation such as sounds and sights. He gathered information about how quickly people responded to a (reaction time) and what they experienced. Wundt believed these experiments would lead to a consensus or agreement among about the nature of experience.

Wilhelm Wundt

Wundt's approach was not unreasonable. It resembled the way most natural sciences developed in the 1800s. Science like botany and began with careful and an effort to arrive at consensual validation (agreement among different observers). For example, biologists began with careful descriptions of plants and animals before trying to classify them. Wundt believed the same approach would work in psychology. Careful scientific observers could simply look inside themselves to see the in action, and they should be able to agree on the basic phenomena of psychology. After agreeing about basic , they could do a deeper analysis of what they had found. The technique of "looking inside" to gather data about the mind is called .

The problem with Wundt's program is fairly obvious to those of us in the modern world, where differences between people are taken for granted. Different people see different things when they look inside! This was not obvious to Wundt. He tended to assume that if people saw something in their different from what he did, under controlled laboratory conditions, they must be doing something wrong.

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) Introspection was the dominant technique in psychology for several decades, but as time went on, it showed itself to be an inadequate methodology for advancing science. There was no way to resolve differences of opinion about what people saw when they looked inside. For example, a major controversy erupted over the issue of imageless . Could a thought exist without an image? Some scientists looked inside and said yes, some exist without any picture or image in the mind. Others said no, there is always an image. Given such a disagreement— which always seemed to occur, with any important issue involving introspection—there was no way to arrive at a consensus about the nature of the mind. That ultimately led to the downfall of introspection as a technique.

James and Functionalism

Another approach to psychology, formulated in the 1890s, was the functionalism of . James is often described as the father of American psychology. He regarded the mind as a process, a function of the organism. By the 1890s scientists were well acquainted with Darwin's basic that had evolved from simpler animals, and James related psychology to Darwin's theory. James argued that must have evolved because it was useful for something. In other words, it had a function. If we wanted to understand the origins and purpose of a psychological phenomenon, James suggested, we should ask what it was used for. James published Principles of Psychology (1890), which came in two large volumes, and Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892) , which came in one smaller volume. Also famous is James's work on the , The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) William James

Because they are old enough not to be covered by copyright, books from this era can be reproduced on the web. The entire text of The Varieties of Religious Experience is on Michael Nielsen's Psychology of Religion web site at Psych Web at this URL:

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James is remembered as a great psychologist because he wrote well and because he had good judgment about what would have lasting value. Many psychologists living a century or more after James found his "exciting" because they seemed so modern (Kimble, 1990). A reviewer of Principles of Psychology on Amazon.com called it "fresh as a morning flower." However, James himself did little research, and his examples came mostly from everyday life and from introspection, not from rigorous laboratory experiments.

Witmer Starts From about 1900 to 1910, clinical psychology consisted of what we now call . Clinical psychologists diagnosed problems of school children and tried to help them. Increasing numbers of psychologists went into this field. By 1910 the most common specialty among applied psychologists was pedagogical psychology, which today would be called educational or school psychology.

Lightner Witmer is often called the father of clinical psychology. Witmer started his career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1892 at the age of 25 and stayed there for the next 45 years. He founded the journal The Psychological Clinic in 1907. It was published until 1935, and during those 28 years it was the only clinical psychology journal. Witmer's first client, in 1896, was a "chronic bad speller" who turned out to need eyeglasses. After the boy was fitted with glasses, his spelling problems went away. This lesson was not lost upon Witmer, who routinely included vision and hearing tests in his tests of students.

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) Witmer was one of the many American psychologists who studied under Wundt during their formative years. The experience was not a happy one. Witmer later described himself as "disgusted" with Wundt's insistence that students repeat experiments until they came out the way Wundt expected them to. Rather than follow in Wundt's footsteps, Witmer turned to non- introspective methods, laying the way for . At his clinic, Witmer emphasized diagnostic testing, followed by practical treatment. The treatment was not exclusively psychological. It ranged from mental testing to removing an abscessed tooth to counseling, followed by retesting to see if there was an improvement in performance

Watson and Behaviorism

At the turn of the century, introspection was withering on the vine as an experimental method. By 1898 only 2.3% of psychology research articles made any mention of introspection. In 1905, William McDougall wrote a textbook defining psychology as "the study of ." By 1910, both structuralism (the descendent of Wundt's method) and functionalism (James's method) were widely regarded as obsolete methods for investigating psychology. Psychologists felt that their field had lost its original as the "science of consciousness." The time was right for a new conception of psychology, and John B. Watson, who coined the term behaviorism, provided a new identity. Watson agreed with McDougall that psychology should be defined as "the study of behavior," but Watson took a more extreme position.

How common was introspectionism in psychology journals, by the turn of the century? How did Watson's position differ from McDougall's?

McDougall...had no particular complaints against the old subject matter [mind and consciousness], but he thought that behavior, too, deserved ... In 1913 Watson went a step further. Psychology should

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) study behavior, he said, and mind, the traditional subject matter, is now forbidden. (Epstein, 1987, p.333)

John Watson

In 1913 Watson declared he was a new type of psychologist: a behaviorist. Watson said the behaviorist would completely eliminate introspection from psychology. Psychologists could adhere to scientific method, studying only things that could be observed and measured. That, Watson suggested, would allow scientists to control as never before. Watson made a famous claim about the potential power of behaviorism:

What did Watson declare in 1913?

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own special world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, beggerman and thief. (Watson, 1913)

Watson was a bit of a rebel from childhood on. He fought frequently as a teenager. He referred to his hometown church baptism, performed during his , as an "inoculation that did not take." Seeking to escape the confines of a small-town upbringing, Watson pursued higher education at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

At Furman University, Watson continued his rebellious ways. One of his professors (Meyer) threatened to "flunk the first student who handed in an exam upside-down" Watson, an honor student, took the dare. He handed in his final exam upside-down. Meyer flunked him, delaying Watson's graduation by an entire year.

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) However, Meyer also helped Watson. Meyer told Watson about new and exciting developments in psychology at the , where Meyer had recently spent a year. Watson decided that was just what he needed. He wrote to the president of the University of Chicago, declaring he would "never amount to anything" unless he got financial support to further his education. Apparently this tactic worked, because Watson obtained a fellowship.

At the University of Chicago, Watson studied physiology, then he became interested in animal research. Functionalism was in full flower at the University of Chicago. But Watson never felt comfortable with introspective research. As Watson later recalled:

How did Watson feel about doing introspective experiments?

"I never wanted to use human subjects. I hated to serve as a subject. I didn't like the stuffy, artificial instructions given to subjects. I was always uncomfortable and acted unnaturally." (in Boring, 1936)

An associate at Chicago recalled that Watson "used to have trouble making consistent introspective reports." Instead, Watson turned to animal research. Yet even there he found introspectionism. Descriptions of consciousness were used in animal research at the time. To Watson, this seemed absurd and unnecessary. How could a human know what was going on in the head of a non-human animal? The very idea of "" seemed dubious. Besides, an observer could speculate about animal consciousness only after observing the animal's behavior. Why not just describe the behavior and leave it at that?

Soon Watson questioned the need for discussing consciousness at all, in animals or humans. He suggested to his mentor James Rowland Angell that there could be a discipline of psychology without consciousness or introspection. Angell cautioned him against pursuing this controversial idea. However, others were coming to the same conclusion. In fact, today's

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) scholars say Watson did not really invent behaviorism, he just gave it a name and publicized it. "Behavioral" studies such as running rats through mazes were performed over 20 years before Watson wrote Psychology as the Behaviorist Sees It in 1913. Watson, however, was the person who gave behaviorism a name and presented it to the world.

Watson's opportunity to advance his ideas came when J. M. Baldwin hired him at Johns Hopkins University. Baldwin had just founded the prestigious journal and was its first editor. Barely two weeks after Watson arrived, Baldwin was caught in a scandalous situation so embarrassing that he immediately left town for Mexico. He handed over the editorship of his new journal to his bright young student, Watson. Suddenly Watson had a way to publicize his views.

As an animal researcher, Watson was aware of a major plus for behaviorism: it opened psychology to organisms that had no to describe their inner thoughts. Hilgard (1980) says it is wrong to think Watson was trying to narrow the scope of psychology. "Watson was not trying to narrow psychology; instead he was trying to broaden it." With behavioral methods, psychology could be applied to animals, mental patients, retarded people, or infants—all groups that were unable to provide reliable introspective reports of mental activity.

Mid-Twentieth Century Behaviorism

Behavioral psychologists at mid-century (1930s to 1950s) hoped to find powerful laws that would do for psychology what E=MC-squared had done for . They hoped psychology would be able to explain and control all human behavior, just as Watson promised. In order to follow the example of physics (and leave behind the problems of introspectionism) behaviorists thought it was very important to study only measurable things. They believed that (as in physics) they would find mathetmatical laws that could be tested in the laboratory. For this , psychologists were said to suffer from "physics envy," a playful reference to a Freudian theory.

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) I observed how this rigor was enforced, in a first-year graduate course. The professor announced that in classroom discussions he would allow us to refer only to things a researcher could measure directly. When we talked about animals or humans, we were to refer only to . Students were not to use words like "mind" or "think" or "feel" or anything else that did not refer to observable behavior.

A student in my class slipped up and referred to a rat "deciding" to do something. The professor stopped her and said, "The rat WHAT?" The student looked startled and rephrased her statement. "The rat made a decision to..." but she was interrupted by the professor, who shouted, "WHAT??" The student fell silent, looking embarrassed, and the professor explained that we should speak only about behavior, not about thoughts, decisions, or any other inferred mental activity. He was trying to get us to act like good behavioral psychologists, at least while we were in his class.

As we saw on the previous page, Watson apparently felt he had all the tools he needed to create geniuses or criminals out of any baby, as early as 1913. However, the behaviorists of mid-century recognized that Watson had been over-optimistic, and they had an explanation. Watson had only used Pavlov's laws of learning () and a few other principles such as learning. By the mid-twentieth century, there was another, complementary system that seemed to make behavioral psychology even more potent: the approach of B.F. Skinner.

B.F. Skinner is the most cited (referenced) researcher in psychological literature. We discuss his theory in Chapter 5 (Conditioning). Skinner emphasized the role of and in learning. By the 1940s and 1950s Skinner was joined by many American and British and South African psychologists who embraced behavioral psychology. Clark Hull, for example, set out to explain all behavior of all animals using only a few behavioral and formulas. His theory of is discussed at the beginning of Chapter 9 (Motivation). Hull's work established the stereotype of the experimental psychologist as a lab-coated figure running rats through mazes.

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) By the 1970s, behaviorism had dominated for 50 years. The dramatic advances promised by people like Watson and Hull had not occurred. Behavioral psychologist had defined an effective set of procedures for training animals and modifying human behavior, popularly known as , but they were far from attaining Watson's dream of total control over human behavior. Nevertheless, their rhetoric or "hype" continued to be extreme.

For example, Professor James V. McConnell, who taught a course in behavior modification at the University of Michigan, became notorious for an article published in Psychology Today titled, "Prisoners can be Brainwashed Now!" If people bothered to read the article, they discovered that McConnell was proposing something very reasonable: a positive reinforcement system for encouraging prisoners to learn society's rules. However, following the example of famous behaviorists like Watson, Skinner, and Hull, McConnell exaggerated the power of behaviorism and (in the title at least) made the techniques sound powerful and, so some people, sinister.

Eventually, people outside the field of psychology started to believe the hype about behaviorism, and they became frightened by it. One day in 1971, as I was walking through a campus building at the University of Michigan, I spotted several copies of a poster announcing a forum to denounce behavior modification.

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I thought, "This is interesting...someday it will show my students how people misunderstood the term 'behavior modification'" so I removed one of them. I had taken Professor McConnell's class titled Behavior Modification, and I knew he emphasized only positive reinforcement and other benign techniques, not punishment or drug adminstration. Yet the poster erroneously equated behavior modification with "electric shock, solitary confinement with sensory deprivation, and forced administration of such drugs as LSD...."

I wondered how much of the misunderstanding was due to behavior psychologists own self- promotion. They had talked about their goal of "controlling human behavior" for so long that people were starting to equate behavior modification with any technique that changed behavior, no matter how drastic.

Later I heard that McConnell had attempted to speak at the forum, to correct the misinformation, but he was shouted down before he could be heard. Other psychologists, at

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) other schools, started to notice that the term "behavior modification" was being seriously misunderstood. Within several years behavioral scientists largely abandoned that label in favor of less tainted terminology like operant conditioning and applied behavior analysis, terms we use in Chapter 5.

By the end of the 1970s, extreme forms of behaviorism were disappearing. Only a few decades earlier behaviorism had seemed utterly dominant in experimental psychology. In fact, many psychologists were dissatisfied because it seemed that psychology was offering students and researchers only two alternative theories. If you wanted to do therapy, you had to study Freud's rather eccentric theory (described in Chapters 11 and 13). If you wanted to do research, you had to endorse behaviorism. Given these two alternatives, many psychologists hungered for a third alternative. Out of that concern was born "the third force" or .

The Third Force

At mid-century, there were two dominant theories in psychology: the behavioral approach carried forward by Hull and Skinner, and the highly speculative theories of the Viennese psychiatrist .

Freud is discussed in detail in Chapter 11 (Personality Theories). He believed that psychological problems could often be traced to childhood sexual conflicts over such issues as breastfeeding, toilet training, and sexual jealousy centered on the . Psychologists still teach about Freudian theory because it played an important role in the , inspiring many different opposing theories. However, a 1999 review article by Robins, Gosling, and Craik (1999) found that Freudian theory itself had almost disappeared from mainstream psychology journals. Freud's works are best considered literature and history at this point, not modern psychology

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Faced in the 1940s and 1950s with a choice between (1) Freudian theory, with its emphasis on unconscious sexual motives, and (2) behaviorism, which refused to deal with mental processes, increasing numbers of American psychologists chose neither. They began looking for a third alternative.

In the early 1960s, , , and several other psychologists proclaimed an alternative to the two main theories then dominating psychology (Freudian theory and behavioral theory). They called it "third force" psychology, also known as humanistic psychology.

Although we do not have a chapter titled "Humanistic Psychology," Part Three of Chapter 9 (Motivation) is devoted to Maslow's theory, and Part Two of Chapter 13 (Therapies) includes the ideas of Carl Rogers. Both were key figures in the Third Force movement.

Humanistic or Third Force psychology focuses on inner needs, fulfillment, the search for identity, and other distinctly human concerns. It is less concerned with doing research on human behavior than with describing its and purpose. Phrases like human potential and self actualization are associated with humanistic psychology.

Humanistic psychology should not be confused with secular , the anti-religious philosophy often attacked by evangelical Christians. Humanistic psychologists respected religious , although they often embraced Eastern and other systems that were unusual for the West in the early 1960s.

In some respects humanistic psychology peaked in the 1960s. Maslow published an influential book about humanistic psychology, Toward a Psychology of Being, in 1962. In 1967, Maslow was elected president of the APA (American Psychological ). Today, graduate schools of psychology specializing in humanistic psychology still exist, but they are not as common as they were in the 1960s and 1970s. is a modern version of humanistic psychology, dealing with existential issues that go beyond the individual human

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) being. Other intellectual descendents of humanistic psychology exist mostly outside of academic psychology. Examples are the human potential and movements, as well as the holistic medicine movement.

Psychologists are divided on the merits of the human potential and holistic medicine movements. Gibbons (1979), who started the APA's Division of Humanistic Psychology, referred to his disappointment with "hucksters and charlatans" in the human potential movement, while approving of scholars who followed in Maslow's tradition.

The Third Force movement was successful in an important way: its core values, such as respect for human dignity and the importance of personal growth, became shared by almost all psychologists, not just those who called themselves humanistic psychologists. The ideas are also popular with large segments of the public. Theories such as Maslow's form the basis of many popular books about how to live a happier and more fulfilling life.

Modern Trends

If humanistic psychology was a third force in the 1960s, then today there are fourth and fifth forces: and neuroscience. Cognition emphasizes information processing within humans, while neuroscience emphasizes the of the brain and .

Cognitive psychology has roots going back to the mid-1800s but re-emerged as an important part of psychology in the 1960s and early 1970s. In their analysis of trends in psychology, Robins, Gosling, and Craik (1999) found that over the past few decades " has sustained a steady upward trajectory" of influence.

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) Robins, Gosling, and Craik used various measures. One was the number of published research studies in various areas of psychology. In cognitive psychology, the numbers were going up quickly. Another important statistic was the number of citations of those studies (i.e. references to them in other publications) by scientists and news writers outside the discipline of cognitive psychology. That number was also high, showing that people outside the specialty were interested in cognitive psychology research.

Another measure of a subdiscipline's vigor is the number of want ads for new PhD psychologists. Do universities want to hire people in that research area? For cognitive psychology, the answer is Yes. In the back pages of the APA Monitor, a place where many colleges and universities advertise, ads for cognitive psychologists are relatively common, and that has been true for years.

The most important stimulus to the comeback of cognitive psychology was the advent of the computer. Computers made it obvious that scientists could analyze mental processes without resorting to mystical speculations. Previously, during the peak of behaviorism in the mid-20th Century, the mind had often been called a "" that was impenetrable, because its processes could not be observed or analyzed. Computers introduced a new way to analyze mental processes, by treating them as flows of information to accomplish a task, much as occurs in a computer.

Chapter 7 (Cognition) discusses the information processing approach as well as AI (artificial ), an offshoot of computer science. The term is now used to refer to any form of research that involves scientific explanations of intelligent behavior, including the fields of linguistics, , portions of philosophy, portions of , and cognitive psychology.

Cognitive science overcame the objections of behaviorists, who said mental processes could not be studied scientifically. In certain areas of research, such as the study of (Chapter 6), the cognitive or information processing perspective led to burst of new and interesting research. By the early 1970s many psychologists were talking about a "."

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) Such talk was irritating to some behaviorists. The term "revolution" as used by Thomas Kuhn in his classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) seemed exaggerated and a bit hostile when applied to the situation in psychology. It implied that the old monarch behaviorism was about to be overthrown and replaced, the way geocentric (earth-centered) models of the solar system were replaced by Galileo's sun-centered view of the solar system, an example Kuhn used. In psychology, no revolution of that sort occurred. Behaviorism never went away. Behavioral techniques remain very useful to this day, and we will discuss many of them in Chapter 5 (Conditioning).

Cognitive psychology did take over as the dominant point of view in experimental psychology, a term that covers non-clinical laboratory research in psychology. In animal research, behavioral techniques remain essential to this day. In therapy, the walls between behavioral and cognitive perspectives came down when behavioral psychologists started treating inner speech as a behavior that could be modified. A 2007 survey showed that over 90% of therapists in the U.S. use a type of therapy called "cognitive behavioral therapy" with some of their clients. That would have seemed astonishing in the 1960s or earlier, when cognition and behaviorism were assumed to be opposites. We discuss cognitive behavior therapy in chapter 13 (Therapies).

Neuroscience

If the 1970s was the decade in which cognitive approaches started their big comeback in psychology, then the 1980s was the decade when the neuroscientific approaches suddenly became more important. A hot research area in neuroscience is brain imaging. As we will see in Chapter 2 (p.72), neuroscientists employ a variety of scanning techniques that reveal brain structures and activity. Such research played an important role in the return of mind and consciousness as topics of study in psychology (Posner, 1993). They are shedding light on topics such as the nature of human emotional responses (Ruksznis, 1999).

In fact, any psychological process that people can do inside a brain imaging machine—solving a problem, translating a language, recognizing a face, listening to music, telling or listening to a joke, doing arithmetic, praying, imagining a visual scene—can be correlated with activity in

Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) specialized areas of the brain. One consistent finding is that imagining something (such as music) produces much the same large-scale brain pattern as actually perceiving it or doing it. Such a strong correlation between subjective experience and objective, observable data makes it clear that the patterns of brain activity see in brain scans are meaningful. Brain imaging does indeed give us a window on mental activity, to some degree.

The future

In the future, it is safe to say, there will be greater specialization in psychology, as an "inevitable consequence of increasing specialization of " (Bower, 1993). However, specialization need not imply fragmentation. At the same time specialties are narrower, one can perceive clear integrative trends in psychology. Fields such as psychoneuroimmunology and are explicitly integrative, cutting across the old boundaries between different specialties. is "hot" in the 2000s and provides an integrative framework for psychology as well as all the other natural sciences.

Chapter 14 (Frontiers of Psychology) is all about cross-disciplinary approaches: Psychology and Medicine, Psychology and Law, and .

What seems to be fading away in modern psychology is the conflict between biological, behavioral, humanistic and cognitive approaches. Unlike their predecessors, many young psychologists do not feel compelled to take sides or choose between different approaches to psychology. Researchers of today typically focus on problems or particular topics rather than philosophies. They feel free to use any perspective that sheds light on the issue they investigate. Typically they value a variety of approaches to psychology and feel free to combine them.

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