Psychology, History of (Twentieth Century)

Spencer A McWilliams, California State University San Marcos, San Marcos, CA, USA
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is a revision of the previous edition article by M.G. Ash, volume 18, pp. 12399–12405, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

Twentieth-century academic psychology emerged formally in 1879, originally defined as the science of mental life, with the
goal of uncovering the facts of consciousness. Evolutionary theory expanded its emphasis on how mental processes and
behavior function to help organisms adapt to environments. The study of learning dominated the early half of the twentieth
century, with the goal of predicting and influencing behavior. Various subfields and a positivist emphasis on experimental
methods led to consolidation of the discipline by midcentury. Technological developments stimulated resurgence of the
study of cognition and neuropsychology and increased disciplinary fragmentation later in the century.

Nineteenth-Century Foundations Further research by Gustav Fechner (1801–87) confirmed

Modern academic psychology emerged during the latter part of
the nineteenth century as a way of addressing age-old questions
regarding human nature and built upon work in biology, physi-
ology, medicine, and philosophy – particularly philosophical
debates over explanations for how humans develop knowledge,
how humans represent environmental objects in conscious
awareness, and how best to account for human behavior
(Hergenhahn and Henley, 2014; also see article on the Psychology,
History of (Early Period)). Twentieth-century psychology built
upon these and other topics and branched out into a wide variety
of issues, theories, and methodologies. This article addresses
psychology as an academic undertaking, primarily in the form of
an experiment science, thus (unfortunately) omitting discussion
of the many applied areas of psychology that are covered in the
encyclopedia article on the history of clinical psychology,
including the important influences of psychoanalytic theory, other
theories of personality and psychotherapy, and psychological
testing and measurement, which also had a large impact on the
work of academic psychologists.
Hermann von Helmholtz’s (1821–94) mechanistic
approach to physiology and his contributions to under-
standing the physiology of visual and auditory perception,
along with such findings as Paul Broca’s (1824–80) and Carl
Wernicke’s (1848–1905) identification of localized brain
functions, stimulated research into the relationship among
sensations, brain processes, and conscious experience, and in
particular, the measurement of these relations. Ernst Weber
(1795–1878) pioneered the study of psychophysics – the
relationship between physical characteristics of objects and
the psychological perception of them. He asked people to
discriminate the weight differences of two objects by
comparing a target weight with a standard and determined the
relationship between the physical weight of the object and the
participant’s perception of whether the object was heavier than,
lighter than, or equal to the standard. From these data, he
derived the just noticeable difference (jnd) – the smallest
weight that the participant could discriminate – and found that
the jnd did not reflect an absolute weight difference, but rather
a ratio that is relative to the weight of the standard. This finding,
in 1834, Weber’s law, is regarded as the first ‘law’ in psychology.
and refined Weber’s law, generalized it to auditory and
visual stimuli, and, in 1860, stated it mathematically that
sensations increase arithmetically as physical stimuli increase
geometrically (Weber’s law), indicating that humans perceive
sensations relative to the background context in which they
occur. Building on Fechner’s work, Hermann Ebbinghaus
(1850–1909) studied the processes of learning and memory as
they occurred and his findings, still regarded as valid today,
demonstrated that forgetting occurs rapidly during the first few
hours following learning and then declines more slowly. He
also found that learning distributed over a period of time led to
better retention than massed repetition at a single time and that
overlearning already memorized material reduced the rate of
forgetting.
Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) theory of evolution stimu-
lated an interest in individual differences among people in
terms of intelligence and personal characteristics, based on
the assumption that such differences might account for
success in adaptation and survival. Darwin’s English cousin
Francis Galton (1822–1911) began attempts to measure
intelligence, following the British empiricist tradition, by
emphasizing innate sensory acuity as the primary way
humans come to know and adapt to the world. His work led
to statistical concepts such as the mean and correlation, which
became central to the twentieth-century psychology emphasis
on quantitative analysis and the search for general principles.
Charles Spearman (1863–1945), also in England, studied the
relation between sensory acuity and children’s success in
school and suggested that an overall inherited factor, called
general intelligence, accounted for most of intelligence, with
specific factors reflecting learning and experience. In France,
Alfred Binet (1857–1911) pursued the measurement of
intelligence from the Continental rationalist perspective by
measuring a variety of complex mental operations that re-
flected his view of intelligence as active and complex, rather
than a single ability, and that could be nurtured rather than
being fixed by inheritance. While a revised version of Binet’s
intelligence test became the most popular method for
assessing children’s intelligence in the USA, most psycholo-
gists adopted Spearman’s general factor understanding of
intelligence.

412 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 19 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03046-4

Beginnings of Experimental Psychology
Voluntarism, Structuralism, and Phenomenology
Scholars typically date Wilhelm Wundt’s (1832–1920) found-
ing of a laboratory for psychological research at the University
of Leipzig in 1879 as the formal beginning of modern
psychology. Wundt’s voluntarism, which focused on the active
processes involved in selective attention, incorporated the work
of Helmholtz, Weber, and Fechner into an organized research
program that employed scientifically controlled introspection
to determine the underlying processes involved in human
conscious awareness of environmental objects. He viewed the
goal of psychology as identifying general principles of percep-
tion and learning that applied to all normal, adult humans by
identifying how higher-order concepts derived from raw
sensory elements. Wundt built on the European Continental
rationalist tradition’s view of a structured, active mind that
transforms sensations and particularly focused his research on
selective perception, the question of what determines how,
among the entire perceptual field, people attended to specific
sensations and objects.
Following his graduation from Oxford, Edward Titchener
(1867–1927) studied with Wundt but followed his native
British empiricist tradition, which emphasized a blank mind
that passively builds up perceptions through association of
sensations. He came to the USA in 1892 and developed
a successful doctoral program in psychology at Cornell
University. His structuralist approach pursued the search for
mental elements further by attempting to identify the imme-
diate experience of raw sensations and determine the laws
through which they combine to make perceptions and more
complex mental phenomena, attempting to create a chart of
psychological elements analogous to chemistry’s period chart
of elements. Although Titchener trained many doctoral grad-
uates who became highly productive and well-known
psychologists, his structuralist approach declined, primarily
because even highly trained introspectionists could not agree
on how to describe a raw sensation, and the retrospective
nature of their descriptions hampered the attempt to study
sensory events as they occurred.
European phenomenologists, such as Franz Brentano
(1838–1917) and Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), opposed the
emphasis on raw sensory elements and championed
a phenomenological approach that attempted to understand
consciousness in terms of whole, meaningful, intact percep-
tions, mental processes rather than contents, and the functional
nature of mental acts. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) further
proposed that scientific psychology should examine the pure
phenomenology of personal subjective experience, and he
searched for mental essences and meaning. These phenome-
nological approaches influenced Gestalt psychology and exis-
tential approaches to psychology during the twentieth century.
Functionalism
The publication of William James’ (1842–1910) Principles of
Psychology in 1890 incorporated and elaborated on each of
these traditions and expanded the field to embrace any useful
topic or methodology that would shed light on the human
condition. Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, James’
Psychology, History of (Twentieth Century) 413
functionalist psychology emphasized how mental processes
serve to aid adaptation to the environment and included the
study of individual differences as well as general principles, the
application of psychology to improving the human situation,
and the study of behavior as well as consciousness. James
likened consciousness to an unbroken stream rather than
a chain of independent elements, emphasizing its personal,
continuous, and impermanent qualities and its function in
enhancing adaptation to the environment. His views on habits,
the self, emotion, volition, and cognition, along with the
importance of useful practical applied psychology, elaborated
by other functionalist colleagues such as John Dewey
(1859–1952), James Angell (1869–1949), and Harvey Carr
(1873–1954) established a foundation for the eclecticism of
twentieth-century psychology. The functionalists also
embraced a pragmatist philosophical perspective that rejected
the positivist search for independent truths and instead
proposed that the validity of ideas and theories lay in their
usefulness in solving human-defined problems and antici-
pating future events.
Behaviorism
The desire for a more objective approach to psychology, which
would avoid the subjectivity of studying conscious experience
and using introspection, led Russian physiologists Ivan
Sechenov (1829–1905), Vladimir Bekhterev (1857–1927), and
Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) to propose that psychology studies
the relationship between environmental stimuli and behavior,
both physiological and overt responses. The American
psychologist John Watson (1878–1958) adopted Pavlov’s
respondent conditioning approach and elaborated on this view
with his Behaviorist Manifesto, in 1913, which proposed that
the goal of psychology should be the prediction and control of
behavior. These approaches renewed interest in the empiricist
tradition that emphasized learning experiences as the founda-
tion of knowledge, rather than rationalist view that emphasized
the importance of innate characteristics. Although initially
resisted by most contemporaries, the behaviorist view gradu-
ally came to dominate American psychology for half of the
twentieth century, changing the definition of the discipline
from “the science of mental life” (James, 1890: p. 1) to “the
science of human and animal behavior.”
Within this behaviorist emphasis researchers differed in the
type of behavior they investigated. Some pursued Watson’s
Pavlovian emphasis on associative, reflexive, respondent
(Classical) conditioning. However, the emphasis eventually
shifted to the study of purposive, goal-directed behaviors,
which organisms voluntarily emit and which lead to conse-
quences that influence future behavior. Edward Thorndike
(1874–1949), a pioneer in the study of goal-directed behavior,
used the term ‘law of effect’ in 1898 to emphasize the role of
the consequences of behavior to explain its purposive aspects.
In 1912, William McDougall (1871–1938) emphasized
a behavioral perspective in studying purposive behavior, which
he defined as spontaneous, rather than a response to a known
stimulus, and which persists until the attainment of a goal. This
emphasis on purposive, goal-directed behavior came to char-
acterize the era of the learning theories in the USA, from the
1930s through the 1960s, which used nonhuman animals to
414 Psychology, History of (Twentieth Century)
study learning, the primary mechanism by which organisms
adapt to environmental change.
Three major approaches vied for dominance during this
period, erecting theories of learning following the logical
positivist approach to theoretical concepts (see below). Edwin
Guthrie (1886–1959) remained close to Watson’s respondent
learning approach by attempting to explain purposive behavior
in terms of the laws of associative learning; he depicted
purposive learning as a response to the most recent stimuli
associated with that response. Clark Hull (1884–1952) applied
the model of Newton’s physics to psychology, developing
a psychological theory explaining purposive behavior in
mechanistic terms. He emphasized the importance of biolog-
ical drive as motivating behavior, with reduction of the drive
serving to reinforce, or increase the probability of, the behavior
that led to it. Edward Tolman (1886–1959) attempted to
explain purposive behavior in behavioral terms, but he oper-
ationally defined concepts like purpose and cognition as
intervening variables in goal-directed behavior. His theory
sustained a cognitive emphasis that supported the resurgence
of cognitive psychology in the 1960s.
The behaviorist perspective reached its zenith in the 1960s
with B.F. Skinner’s (1904–90) operant conditioning approach,
which rejected the need for theories of learning and use of
cognitive, or mentalistic, explanations of behavior. Instead, he
analyzed the functional relationships among environmental
situations, overt behaviors, and consequences, and how these
three factors influenced the future probability of behavior.
Using evolutionary theory as a metaphor, he described how,
during an organism’s lifetime, the environment selected its
behaviors through the process of conditioning. Reinforcing
environmental consequences strengthened (increased the
probability of) behaviors, while other consequences decreased
behavioral probability through punishment or extinction.
Skinner’s radical behaviorism became widely embraced in
experimental psychology and also led to application in many
fields of human services.
Influence of Logical Positivism
Throughout the behaviorist heyday, many psychologists in the
USA, Europe, and elsewhere continued to pursue research on
psychology’s original topics such as sensation, perception,
memory, problem-solving, and other cognitive topics.
Although many investigators on these topics did not self-
identify as behaviorists, most came to accept observable
behaviors as the proper valid evidence for psychological
processes, even if these behaviors consisted of responses to self-
report questionnaires or scales. Based on the success of New-
tonian physics, the methods of the natural sciences, grounded
in the positivist belief in an absolute independent external
reality accessible to human knowing through empirical
research, emerged as psychology’s dominant methodological
approach. Twentieth-century psychologists reaffirmed natural
sciences methodology and embraced the logical positivist
argument of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s that legitimated the
use of theoretical concepts as long as they were operationally
defined. Eventually, logical positivism failed as a philosophy of
science due to its self-referential incoherence (logical posi-
tivism states that meaningful statements require empirical
verifiability, at least in principle; therefore, logical positivism
itself cannot be meaningful, by its own criterion). However,
despite strong criticism from within the field (Bakan, 1973), its
adoption by psychologists, in conjunction with the positivist
methodology of Newtonian physics and psychology’s self-
conscious focus on gaining scientific respectability, led to the
primacy of research methodology, more than content, as the
defining common identity of academic psychologists.
Subfields and Subspecialties
Gestalt Psychology
Although empirically based behaviorism dominated
psychology research in America for the first half of the twen-
tieth century, the Continental rationalist tradition remained
active in Europe, particularly in the work of the German Gestalt
psychologists, led by Max Wertheimer (1880–1943). Gestalt
psychology continued to elaborate on the rationalist view of
perception as an active process in which mental or brain
processes structure and transform sensory data. Along with
colleagues Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) and Kurt Koffka
(1886–1941), Wertheimer provided persuasive support for the
perspective that the tendency to perceive forms, structure, and
patterns dominated the perception process more than partic-
ular sensory inputs, that the whole (perception) is greater than
the sum of the parts (sensations) that generate it. Many Gestalt
psychologists found a welcome home in America immediately
before and after World War II, increasing interest in Gestalt
principles, perception, and the active role of mental processes
in America.
Social Psychology
Gestalt psychology also had an impact on the emerging
subfield of social psychology. Several of the Gestalt psycholo-
gists who immigrated to the USA focused their work on
applying the perspective to the influence of social factors,
defined as the real or imagined presence of other people, on
psychological processes. Kurt Lewin’s (1890–1947) field theory
pioneered the Gestalt approach to the study of personality and
social behaviors and its application to motivation, conflict, and
group dynamics. Lewin’s and Koffka’s student Tamara Dembo
(1902–93) contributed to the study of frustration and aspira-
tion, and Lewin’s student Leon Festinger (1919–89) became
well known for his work on social comparison and cognitive
dissonance. Solomon Asch (1907–96) studied Gestalt
psychology and taught at Swarthmore College with Köhler. He
gained recognition for his work on how humans form
impressions of others and for his research in conformity that
demonstrated that groups can influence even obvious percep-
tions. Social psychology evolved into an active field that
employed creative methodologies to study a variety of
contemporary social topics that interested the psychologists of
the time (Gergen, 1973).
Developmental Psychology
Darwin’s theory also influenced the emerging field of devel-
opmental psychology by suggesting that functional psycho-
logical processes evolve in individuals across the life span,
particularly during infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924), founder of the American

Psychological Association (APA), proposed that human
development proceeds in a manner that mirrors the increasing
complexity of organisms on the phylogenic scale, that
‘ontology recapitulates phylogeny.’ He built a strong develop-
mental psychology program at Clark University that included
Heinz Werner’s (1890–1964) pivotal role in bringing the
European, Kantian, intellectual traditions to America. Werner
elaborated the orderly directionality of developmental changes
in terms of a succession of structures that succeed each other
(Glick, 1992). The Continental rationalist tradition also guided
the work of the Swiss genetic epistemologist, Jean Piaget
(1896–1980), whose constructivist cognitive approach greatly
influenced developmental psychology and also sustained
interest in cognitive processes during the behaviorist era. Piaget
showed how a child’s experience of the environment becomes
more complex and adapted as the child articulates a cognitive
schema in the process of biological maturation. These pio-
neering developmental themes of Werner and Piaget appear in
a variety of subsequent developmental psychology models and
approaches (Kegan, 1982).
Neuropsychology
Early-twentieth-century advances in studying the relationship
between psychological and neurological processes continued
to contribute to the evolution of psychological research. Karl
Lashley (1890–1958) sought to identify the neurological bases
of conditioned reflexes as studied by the Russian physiologists
and championed by Watson’s behaviorism. He reasoned that
innate, instinctive reflexive responses to certain stimuli require
an innate neurological structure, and thus conditioned associ-
ated responses to these stimuli might also come to have
a specific neurological location. The term ‘engram’ referred to
this hypothetical location of learning and memory, and Lashley
devoted his career to attempting to find it. Ultimately, he failed
to find a single location in the brain for specific learning and
proposed that the brain operates as a unified whole rather than
with specific physical links, a principle he called mass action.
Donald Hebb (1904–85) saw the newborn’s brain as
unstructured and undifferentiated, with organized connections
among neurons occurring through experience. He surmised
that sensory organs respond to environmental objects by firing
a complex of neurons, which he called cell assemblies, as
a result of reverberating neural activity that enabled separate
neurons to establish connections while stimulated. He further
suggested that the assemblies of neurons representing an
environmental object become connected in a series of activities
that he called phase sequences. These sequences come to
represent complex trains of memories and thoughts. Hebb
articulated the neurological level of connection by positing
what came to be known as ‘Hebb’s rule’ that neurons that fire
together become wired together. These principles of mass
action and cell assemblies influenced developments in cogni-
tive science and neuroscience in the latter part of the twentieth
century.
Psychology in Midcentury
Altman (1987) described the period of 1900–60 as a major era
of consolidation of the discipline of psychology, within the
Psychology, History of (Twentieth Century) 415
various perspectives described above establishing the field’s
topics and defining its content. Methodologically, the emphasis
on experimentation, quantification, and laboratory-based
research unified the prominence of experimental method-
ology as the discipline’s standard. By reaffirming the logical
positivist perspective, the methodology supported operational
definitions of theoretical concepts, the quest for causal rela-
tionships, and the ‘discovery’ of universal laws and principles
of human and animal cognition and behavior.
Graduate students in psychology during this period typi-
cally received broad exposure to psychological theory, research,
and content that led to their identification with the discipline as
a whole. In sum, “psychology during the 1900–60 period dis-
played a general pattern of centripetality in research and theory,
philosophy of science, graduate education, and organizational
infrastructure. This centripetal pattern resulted in consolidation
and unification of the discipline” (Altman, 1987: p. 1061). This
sense of unification existed even though psychology had not
generated an agreed-upon core lexicon, or shared paradigm
(Kuhn, 1962), as was the case in other established scientific
disciplines.
Late-Twentieth-Century Developments
In the latter half of the twentieth century, two interrelated
themes influenced research into the questions and topics that
characterized this unified discipline of psychology. The waning
popularity of behaviorism and its emphasis on learned
behavior influenced a resurgence of interest in cognition and
invigorated the importance of nativist, biological explanations
of psychological phenomena. Additionally, rapid technological
improvements, which routinely stimulate advances in many
scientific fields (Pickering, 1984, 1995), had an increasing
impact on academic research on psychology’s core questions
and topics.
Resurgence of Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science
A symposium at MIT on information theory in 1956 sparked
a revival of research in cognition within the context of the
development of sophisticated computer technology, cyber-
netics, and information processing models. George A. Miller
(1920–2012) demonstrated that humans can discriminate
seven aspects of events and retain seven units of experience,
and published his landmark text Psychology: The Science of
Mental Life in 1962, reclaiming James’ original definition of
the discipline. Jerome Bruner (b. 1915) studied abstract
thinking, concept learning, and the use of active cognitive
strategies. Ulric Neisser (1928–2012) defined cognition as
any processes that transform, reduce, elaborate, store, recover,
and use sensory input, further clarifying this renewed
approach to the topics that occupied early experimental
psychology.
Subsequent developments in cognitive psychology focused
on computer programs as a metaphor for the processes of the
human mind, leading to the field of artificial intelligence,
a branch of computer science. Englishman Alan Turing
(1912–54) founded this field by asking whether a machine can
actually think, creating his famous Turing test in which
416 Psychology, History of (Twentieth Century)
participants attempt to consistently differentiate a human
responder from that of a computer. The question of whether
computers actually think like a human or only follow rules
of program received further discussion by John Searle
(b. 1932), who argued against the likelihood of valid
artificial intelligence. By the mid-1970s, Neisser criticized the
computer and information models of cognition as too sterile
and argued that cognitive psychologists should study
cognition as it naturally occurs in people’s ordinary lives and
how it functions in their purposeful activities. However,
computer modeling remained the major methodology.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, an interdisci-
plinary field of cognitive science emerged, combining the work
of psychologists with anthropologists, linguists, computer
scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. An approach
called connectionism surfaced as an active model in this field,
attempting to provide a computer-based virtual model of how
the cognitive and neurological system learns by studying the
relationship between input and output in terms of Hebb’s
rule and Lashley’s principle of mass action.
Neuropsychology, Neuroscience, and Evolutionary Psychology
Late-twentieth-century development of sophisticated neuro-
imaging measurement techniques such as functional magnetic
resonance imaging and computed axial tomography scanning,
along with advances in human genetics and electrophysiology,
enhanced the progression of mapping human emotions and
cognitions to specific neural areas, rapidly extending the earlier
work of Lashley and Hebb. These developments led to emer-
gence of the interdisciplinary field of neuroscience, including
disciplines such as biology, linguistics, mathematics, computer
science, and philosophy, as well as psychology, which studies
neural circuitry and its relationship to psychological functions.
As we have seen, Darwin’s theory of evolution influenced
many, if not most, areas of psychology. Toward the latter part
of the twentieth century, however, we see the development of
a specific approach to psychology called evolutionary
psychology. This perspective evolved from sociobiology,
founded by Edward O. Wilson (b. 1929), which proposed that
evolution has selected for humans with innate tendencies
toward social behavior, language, creating cultures, social
conventions, phobias, etc. The question of the relative strength
of these innate tendencies versus the influence of culture and
learning experiences generated a lively debate, with Wilson
suggesting that nature gives us a ‘long leash,’ enabling flexible
modes of adapting to changing environments, rather than
a ‘short leash’ that strictly determined specific behaviors.
Evolutionary psychology regards human psychological
processes as a collection of functionally specialized regulatory
structures or circuits that organize how humans interpret
experiences and create concepts and frameworks of meaning.
This evolutionary perspective recognizes the universality of
‘normal’ human behavior through the study of natural
competencies that all humans share. Leda Cosmides and John
Tooby (1997) thus define psychology as a branch of biology
that studies how brains develop programs to process infor-
mation, emphasizing the brain as a physical system that func-
tions as a computer and generates behavior appropriate to the
environment. They regard the brain’s neural circuitry as
a complex system of specialized pathways that evolved through
natural selection to assist in solving problems that the humans
encountered over the course of evolutionary history. Both
sociobiology and evolutionary psychology base their work on
the assumption that we can understand psychological
processes as selected for by their benefit in perpetuation of
copies of genes into subsequent generations.
Psychology at the End of the Twentieth Century
Irwin Altman (1987) in the USA, Theo Herrmann (2009) in
Germany, and Tommy MacKay (2001) in the United Kingdom,
each in their own way, characterized the latter half of psy-
chology’s twentieth century, in contrast to the first half, as
a time of centrifugal trends and discontinuity. They portray the
field as a proliferation of specialty areas, loss of a shared
common history (Fuchs and Viney, 2002; Samelson, 1999) and
core of mutual beliefs, and a weaker identification of its
members with the field as a whole. Graduate programs came to
focus more on specialized areas, with each field developing its
own curriculum and cohort of students, organizational struc-
tures, and separated physical quarters. Applied and profes-
sional psychology programs became distanced from the basic
science of the field, and professional schools and psycho-
therapy training programs proliferated independently of
academic research psychology.
Much of what had become the traditional content of
psychology has been absorbed into the newly emerging inter-
disciplinary specialties of cognitive science and neuroscience
(Gardner, 2009; Gentner, 2010), decreasing psychology’s
absolute claim to this territory (MacKay, 2001). The author’s
own graduate education exemplifies this trend. I completed my
PhD in the Department of Psychology at the University of
Rochester in 1971, with a major in clinical psychology and
a minor in perception. In 1995, the Department of Psychology
ceased to exist, as it split into two departments: the Department
of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology (locus of my
major field) and the Department of Brain and Cognitive
Sciences (locus of my minor field).
We can also see this fragmentation reflected in the organi-
zation structure of the discipline in the United States. The APA
originally primarily represented those involved in academic
and basic research and only slowly admitted professional
psychologists over its early developing years. By the 1980s,
however, professional psychologists came to outnumber
academics in APA, and it currently functions as an organization
serving the interests of professional practitioners. This trend led
to the establishment of an alternative organization in 1988,
The Association for Psychological Science (APS), which focuses
on research and the scientific aspects of the field. APS has
embraced an international perspective and the inclusion of the
interdisciplinary fields described above, sponsoring an inter-
national convention of psychological science in the Nether-
lands in 2015.
Although we might feel compelled to do so, we need not
regard fragmentation, discontinuity, and centrifugal trends as
harmful to the discipline. Rather, we can view them as reflect-
ing an energetic period of change and reformulation that can
imbue the discipline with new directions in methods and

theories. By regarding psychology as a relatively young disci-
pline, even characterizing it as in a medieval period (Cromwell,
2010), we can see the state of the discipline in the beginning of
the twenty-first century as providing intriguing opportunities
for new ideas and formulations.
Challenges to Twentieth-Century Conventions
Although most mainstream academic and research psycholo-
gists maintain a commitment to the scientific goal of estab-
lishing general laws of human nature through empirical
research and logical positivist theorizing, alternative
approaches began to receive growing attention by the end of
the twentieth century. Sometimes viewed as part of a broader
postmodern movement and reflecting challenges to scientific
absolutism spawned by Kuhn’s (1962) critique of the corre-
spondence theory of scientific truth, many psychologists have
begun to question the prevailing view that scientific methods
uncover objective, permanent truths. Instead, they suggest that
humans play a central role in the construction of knowledge. A
variety of approaches to psychology, including personal
constructivism (Raskin, 2002), social constructionism (Gergen,
2009), contextualism (Hayes et al., 2001), hermeneutics
(Martin and Sugarman, 1999; Slife and Christensen, 2013),
Buddhism (McWilliams, 2014), and pragmatism (Fishman,
1999), emphasize the active responsibility of human psycho-
logical and social processes in generating ever-changing
knowledge and the temporal embeddedness of these
processes in historical, cultural, and language contexts. Albert
Bandura’s (2006) social cognitive approach also came to
strongly embrace the active role of human agency in
coevolution and creating unanticipated futures in a world of
flux and change. Although not without criticism from those
committed to conventional psychological models (Held,
2007), these perspectives suggest alternative models that may
have promise for a new view of the field.
We might anticipate that as many of the topics that origi-
nally fell within psychology’s twentieth-century domain
migrate to interdisciplinary, biologically based fields,
psychology may come to focus more on the processes by which
people, personally and collectively, actively create knowledge
and meaning, including the approaches to knowledge and
meaning that we call science. Perhaps then, rather than viewing
psychology as a branch of the natural sciences, we may come to
see the natural sciences, the humanities, the arts, religion,
philosophy, and other human undertakings as the subject
matter of psychology.
See also: Clinical Psychology in Europe, History of; Clinical
Psychology in North America, History of; Cognitive
Psychology: History; Industrial–Organizational Psychology:
Science and Practice; Psychology, History of (Early Period);
Social Psychological Theory, History of; Social Psychology.
Psychology, History of (Twentieth Century) 417
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