Raymond E. Fancher - Alexandra Rutherford - Pioneers of Psychology-W. W. Norton & Company (2016) PDF

PIONEERS OF
PSYCHOLOGY
A HISTORY
FIFTH EDITION
Raymond E. Fancher
Alexandra Rutherford
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.

B New York London

W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder
Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the
adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The firm soon expanded its program
beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By
midcentury, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college texts—
were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its
employees, and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college, and
professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest
publishing house owned wholly by its employees.
Copyright © 2017, 2012 by Raymond E. Fancher and Alexandra Rutherford.

Copyright © 1996, 1990, 1979 by Raymond E. Fancher.
All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States.
Editor: Ken Barton

Project Editor: Caitlin Moran
Developmental Editor: Betsy Dilernia
Assistant Editor: Scott Sugarman
Editorial Assistant: Eve Sanoussi
Managing Editor, College: Marian Johnson
Managing Editor, College Digital Media: Kim Yi
Production Managers: Steven Cestaro and Benjamin Reynolds
Media Editor: Patrick Shriner
Associate Media Editor: Stefani Wallace
Assistant Media Editor: Alex Trivilino
Marketing Manager: Lauren Winkler
Design Director: Rubina Yeh
Designer: Anna Reich
Photo Editor: Ted Szczepanski
Photo Researcher: Elyse Rieder
Permissions Manager: Megan Schindel
Composition / Illustrations: GraphicWorld
Manufacturing: Quad / Graphics—Taunton MA
ISBN: 978-0-393-28354-9
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10110
wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street
London W1T 3QT

Again for Joëlle, and

in loving memory
of Seth
And again, for
Graham and Emily

BRIEF CONTENTS
Introduction: Studying the History of Psychology 3
1 Foundational Ideas from Antiquity 23
2 Pioneering Philosophers of Mind: Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz 59
3 Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to Penfield 99
4 he Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant through the

T
Gestalt Psychologists 135
5 Wundt and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology 173
6 The Evolving Mind: Darwin and His Psychological Legacy 209
7 Measuring the Mind: Galton and Individual Differences 243
8 American Pioneers: James, Hall, Calkins, and Thorndike 279
9 Psychology as the Science of Behavior: Pavlov,

Watson, and Skinner 317
10 ocial Influence and Social Psychology: From Mesmer to Milgram

S
and Beyond 361
11 Mind in Conflict: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Its Successors 403
12 Psychology Gets “Personality”: Allport, Maslow, and the

Broadening Field 447
13 The Developing Mind: Binet, Piaget, and the Study of Intelligence 493
14 Minds, Machines, and Cognitive Psychology 533
15 Applying Psychology: From the Witness Stand to the Workplace 573
16 The Art and Science of Clinical Psychology 613
V
CONTENTS
XVII Preface to the Fifth Edition
XXVII Time Line
XLI About the Authors
Introduction: Studying the History of Psychology 3

The Value of Studying History 3
The History of Psychology Has a History 6
Ways to Study the Past 8
Deciding Who to Include 14
Psychology vs. Psychologies 16
Our Historiographic Approach 17
Suggested Resources 20
1 Foundational Ideas from Antiquity 23

The Greek Miracle and the Presocratic Philosophers 26
The Concept of Psyche 28
Pythagorean Mathematics and Philosophical Paradoxes 29
The Hippocratics 30
The Life and Thought of Socrates 31
Plato’s Life and Philosophy 33
Platonic Idealism 34
The Platonic Legacy 36
Aristotle and Empiricism 37
Biological Taxonomy 40
On the Psyche 41
An Atomic Footnote: Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius 43
Three Islamic Pioneers 45
Al-Kindi and the Introduction of Indo-Arabic Numerals 46
Alhazen and Modern Visual Science 47
Avicenna on Medicine and the Aristotelian Soul 49
VII
VIII Contents
Europe’s Intellectual Reawakening 52

2 Pioneering Philosophers of Mind: Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz 59

René Descartes and the Mind-Body Distinction 61
Descartes’s Method and “Simple Natures” 63
Descartes’s Physics 65
Mechanistic Physiology 66
Rational Qualities of the Mind 68
Interactive Dualism 70
The Legacy of Descartes 73
John Locke and the Empiricist Tradition 74
Revolution and Tolerance 74
Political Involvements 76
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 78
Kinds of Knowledge 79
Practical Implications of Locke’s Philosophy 81
Gottfried Leibniz and Continental Nativism 83
Mathematical Discoveries in Paris 83
Serving the House of Hanover 85
Monadology 88
A Nativistic Critique of Locke 91
Lockean vs. Leibnizean Traditions 93
3 Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to Penfield 99

Franz Josef Gall: Brain Anatomist and Phrenologist 100
Pierre Flourens and the Discrediting of Phrenology 106
Localization Theory Revived: The Brain’s Language Areas 109
Paul Broca and the Case of “Tan” 110
Sensory and Motor Areas 113
Wernicke’s Theory of Aphasia 115
Memory and the Equipotentiality Debate 117
Stimulation of the Conscious Human Brain 121
Wilder Penfield and the Treatment of Epilepsy 122
Brenda Milner and the Multiplicity of Memory Systems 125
Cartesian Dualism Revisited 128
Recent Developments: Cognitive Neuroscience and
Social Neuroscience 129
Contents IX
4 The Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant Through

the Gestalt Psychologists 135
The Kantian Background 136
Helmholtz and Psychology’s Physiological Foundations 140
The Triumph of Physiological Mechanism 142
Helmholtz on Human Vision 145
Physical Properties of the Eye 146
The Neurophysiology of Color Vision 148
Visual Perception 150
Helmholtz’s Legacy 152
Fechner and Psychophysics 154
Fechner’s Early Life 154
The Invention of Psychophysics 157
Gestalt Psychology 161
The Implications and Spread of Gestalt Psychology 164
5 Wundt and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology 173

Wundt’s Early Life 175
Development as a Researcher 177
Experimental Psychology and Völkerpsychologie 178
Principles of Physiological Psychology 181
Wundt at Leipzig 182
Experimental Studies 185
Voluntaristic Psychology 189
Völkerpsychologie and Its Implications 190
Titchener’s Structuralism 193
Female Students and the Experimentalists 196
Experimenting on Higher Functions 199
Külpe and the Introspection of Complex Mental Processes 199
Ebbinghaus’s Studies of Memory 201
Wundt’s Reputation and Legacy 202
6 The Evolving Mind: Darwin and His Psychological Legacy 209

Darwin’s Early Life 210
The Voyage of the Beagle 213
Geological Discoveries 214
Biological Discoveries 216
The Return Home 218
X Contents
The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection 218

The Origin of Species 221
Darwin and Psychology 225
The Descent of Man 225
Race and Gender 226
The Expression of the Emotions 229
“A Biographical Sketch of an Infant” 230
Darwin’s Impact on Psychology and Society 232
Social Darwinism 233
Comparative Psychology and Individual Differences 234
Recent Developments: Emotions, Sociobiology, and Evolutionary
Psychology 235
7 Measuring the Mind: Galton and Individual Differences 243

The Anthropometric Laboratory 244
Galton’s Early Life and Career 246
Darwinian Theory and Hereditary Genius 250
The Normal Distribution 251
Pedigrees of Eminence 252
Adoptive vs. Biological Relatives 253
Nature and Nurture 254
Eugenics 258
The Idea of Intelligence Testing 259
Statistical Correlation and Regression 260
Other Contributions 263
Galton’s Influence and Continuing Controversies 265
Twin Studies and the Heritability of Intelligence 265
The Burt and Jensen Affairs 268
The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart 272
8 American Pioneers: James, Hall, Calkins, and Thorndike 279

James’s Early Life 280
James the Teacher 286
The Principles of Psychology 287
The Stream of Consciousness 288
Habit 289
Emotion 290
Will 291
Contents XI
James’s Later Career 292

The Philosophy of Pragmatism 293
The Varieties of Religious Experience 294
A Continuing Influence 295
Hall: Institution Building and Child Studies 296
Institutional Innovations 297
Child Study and Developmental Theory 298
An Unlikely Legacy 301
Calkins: Associative Learning and Self-Psychology 302
Graduate Education: Challenges and Accomplishments 303
Psychology at a Women’s College 305
Heidbreder and Seven Psychologies 306
Thorndike: Intelligence, Learning, and Education 308
A Puzzle Box Ph.D. 309
Functionalism 310
9 Psychology as the Science of Behavior: Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner 317

Pavlov’s Early Life and Career 319
Pavlov’s Laboratory 320
The Physiology of Digestion 321
Conditioned Reflexes 322
Generalization, Differentiation, and Experimental Neuroses 324
Pavlov’s Theory of the Brain 325
Pavlov’s Influence 327
Watson’s Early Life and Career 327
The Founding of Behaviorism 329
Watson’s Behavioristic Writings 331
Conditioned Emotional Reactions 332
Advertising and Behaviorism 336
From Little Albert to Little Peter 338
Psychological Care of Infant and Child 340
Watson’s Legacy 341
Skinner’s Early Life and Career 343
Operant Conditioning 346
Behavior Shaping and Programmed Instruction 349
Philosophical Implications of Operant Conditioning 351
Skinner’s Influence 355
XII Contents
10 Social Influence and Social Psychology: From Mesmer

to Milgram and Beyond 361
Mesmer and Animal Magnetism 362
Claims and Controversies 364
From Mesmerism to Hypnotism 367
Puységur’s Artificial Somnambulism and
Faria’s Lucid Sleep 367
Mesmeric Anesthesia to Hypnotism 369
The Nancy-Salpêtrière Controversy 371
The Salpêtrière School 372
The Triumph of the Nancy School 376
The Psychology of Crowds 377
Binet’s Experiments on Suggestion 380
The New Discipline of Social Psychology 381
Asch and Social Conformity 384
Festinger and Cognitive Dissonance 387
Milgram and the Obedience Studies 389
Ethical Concerns and Consequences 392
Social Influence Today 395
Loftus and the “Lost in the Mall” Technique 396
11 Mind in Conflict: Freudian Psychoanalysis

and Its Successors 403
The Origins of Psychoanalysis 404
Freud’s Early Life 406
Free Association 408
The Interpretation of Dreams 412
Wish Fulfillment and the Seduction Theory 415
Self-Analysis and Childhood Sexuality 415
Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Case of Dora 419
Later Psychoanalytic Theory 422
Metapsychology and the Defense Mechanisms 423
Male and Female Superegos 427
Disciples and Dissidents 429
Adler and Individual Psychology 431
Jung and Analytical Psychology 434
Freud and Academic Psychology 439
Contents XIII
12 Psychology Gets “Personality”: Allport, Maslow,

and the Broadening Field 447
Allport and Personality Psychology 449
The Emergence of “Personality” 450
Creating a Discipline 454
Personality: A Psychological Interpretation 455
Personality Psychology Comes of Age 458
Nomothetic Studies: The Analysis of Traits 458
Idiographic Approaches: Personology and Psychobiography 462
Allport’s Later Career 467
Religion and Prejudice 467
Prominent Students 468
Maslow and Humanistic Psychology 470
A Paradoxical Early Life 470
Wisconsin Psychology and the Social Behavior of Monkeys 472
New York as the “New Athens” 475
An Anthropological Mentor: Benedict 475
Neo-Freudian Mentors: Adler, Horney, and Fromm 476
Gestalt Mentors: Wertheimer and Goldstein 478
Maslow’s Theory of Human Motivation 479
Self-Actualization 480
The Hierarchy of Needs 481
A Positive Approach to Psychology 482
Establishing a Humanistic Psychology 484
Humanistic Allies: Rogers, May, and Allport 484
Maslow’s Late Writings and the Legacy of
Positive Psychology 486
13 The Developing Mind: Binet, Piaget, and the Study

of Intelligence 493
Binet’s Early Life and Career 495
Individual Psychology 498
The Binet Intelligence Tests 501
The 1905 Tests 502
The 1908 and 1911 Revisions 503
The Rise of Intelligence Testing 504
General Intelligence and Intelligence Quotients 505
Feeblemindedness and Giftedness 507
Deviation IQs and the Flynn Effect 512
XIV Contents
Piaget’s Early Life and Career 515

Genetic Epistemology and the Stages of Development 517
Sensory-Motor and Preoperational Intelligence 518
Concrete and Formal Operations 521
Piagetian Influences and Reactions 523
14 Minds, Machines, and Cognitive Psychology 533

Pascal, Leibniz, and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence 534
Babbage, Lovelace, and the Analytical Engine 537
Turing’s Machine and Shannon’s Binary Switches 541
Intelligent Machines and Information Theory 545
Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver 546
TOTE Units 548
Computer Triumphs and Limitations 549
Improbabalist and Impossibilist Creativity 550
Strong and Weak Artificial Intelligence 551
Miller and the Study of Cognition 553
Chomsky and Psycholinguistics 556
Bruner and the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies 558
A Cognitive “Revolution”? 561
Neisser and Cognitive Psychology 563
Machine Intelligence vs. Human Intelligence 564
A New Academic Subdiscipline 566
15 Applying Psychology: From the Witness Stand to the Workplace 573

Münsterberg and Psychology in the Courtroom 574
Münsterberg’s Early Life 576
Abandoning the Laboratory 577
Psychology in Business and Industry 578
Taylor and Scientific Management 578
Finding the Right Worker for the Job 580
Scott and the Psychology of Advertising 581
Marston and Popular Psychology 583
Gilbreth and the Psychology of Management 584
California Origins 585
Efficiency and the Worker 587
Spreading the “One Best Way” 588
Managing the Home and Nation 590
Contents XV
Mayo and the Hawthorne Studies: Origins of the Human

Relations Movement 591
Australian Origins 592
The Changing Workplace 593
What Happened at Hawthorne 594
Interpretations and Legacy 597
Hollingworth: Clinician, Feminist, Professionalizer 599
Early Years 600
Becoming a Psychologist 600
Pioneering the Psychology of Women 602
Professionalizer of Clinical Psychology 605
From Margin to Center: Application Takes Hold 608
16 The Art and Science of Clinical Psychology 613

Harrower’s Journey 615
From Experimentalist to Clinician 616
Rorschach Encounters 617
Researching the Rorschach 619
Becoming “Properly Clinical” 620
Shakow and the Scientist-Practitioner Model 621
Training and Credentialing 622
Critics of the Model: Albee and Eysenck 625
Making Psychotherapy Scientific 626
Rogers and Client-Centered Therapy 627
Psychotherapy Research 629
Beck and the Development of Cognitive Therapy 630
Breaking Away from Psychoanalysis 632
The Cognitive Theory of Depression 633
Making Cognitive Therapy Scientific 635
Psychotherapy Research Revisited: Treating Depression 636
Hathaway and the MMPI 639
From Inkblots to Profile Plots 642
Contemporary Issues and Debates 644
Notes A1
Glossary A33
Credits A53
Index A57
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION
BRINGING HISTORY TO LIFE

For over thirty-five years and four previous editions, Pioneers of Psychology has
brought history to life by connecting psychology’s enduring themes and debates
with the colorful figures who originated them, and the contexts in which they
lived. What better way to understand psychology—the study of mental life and
behavior—than by telling the stories behind the ideas and experiences of the pio-
neers in the field? Our commitment to reconstructing psychology’s past through
detailed explorations of individual lives in context is one of the features that sets
Pioneers apart from other textbooks for the history of psychology course.
From our own teaching experience, we know that most students are attracted
to psychology because they want to be able to understand people better. It makes
sense to us that a biographical, person-based approach is a compelling way to
relate psychology’s past and recent history. Who were the people whose ideas
and inventions have made up the field? What issues did they struggle with, what
situations were they in, and how did they shed light on some of the most fun-
damental questions about being human? We organize our narratives around a
careful selection of these questions, as we explore how individual psychologists
became intrigued by them, approached them, and ultimately formulated their
own ideas and insights.
History of psychology students today are also particularly interested in learn-
ing how psychology developed as they experience it now—a collection of loosely
interrelated subdisciplines rather than a set of abstract theoretical systems. More
than other texts, Pioneers moves beyond a focus on the handful of schools or
systems of thought that dominated psychological discourse during the early to
mid-1900s. It provides individual accounts of the history behind the major cur-
rent subdisciplines, including abnormal, social, personality, humanistic, develop-
mental, applied, and clinical psychology.
Many of these histories go back surprisingly far. We show, for example, how
modern social psychology—with its scientific studies of suggestibility, confor-
mity, and obedience—has direct intellectual roots in the colorful but scientifi-
cally suspect exploits of Mesmer and other early hypnotists in the late 1700s. We
demonstrate how modern cognitive psychology, with its focus on information
processing, has an intellectual history dating back to the revolutionary system
XVII
XVIII Preface to the Fifth Edition
of Indo-Arabic numerals, which, combined with advances in clockmaking tech-

nology, led to the first mechanical calculators or “thinking machines.” We illu-
minate how modern debates about evidence-based clinical practice and other
tensions between scientific and applied psychology were foreshadowed by psy-
chologists’ earliest attempts to modify laboratory-based mental tests for practical
use. Throughout, we emphasize the ways in which historical knowledge creates a
deeper understanding of psychology today.
Another distinctive feature of Pioneers is our attention to gender issues and the
inclusion of female pioneers. As we discuss more fully in the book’s Introduction,
until quite recently women faced many formal—and usually insurmountable—
barriers to full participation in intellectual or scientific affairs, and as a result
their names seldom appear in standard intellectual histories. Even under highly
restrictive conditions, however, talented women often made vital contributions
behind the scenes, and where information has been available we have made a
point of including it. As the twentieth century unfolded, more women were able
to enter the field. This was partly due to the ability of gifted female psychologists
in the early 1900s to break down the barriers to their participation, thereby usher-
ing in the era of more equal opportunity that prevails today. We pay attention to
these dynamics and incorporate them into our narratives.
These distinctive features of Pioneers combine, we believe, to make it a lively,
accessible, and thought-provoking text that will spark students’ interest in the
foundations of their field and the people who built it. We also note that in an
environment where textbook prices are skyrocketing and students are on increas-
ingly tighter budgets, Pioneers continues to be an outstanding value at about half
the price of market-leading competitors. The ebook, new for this edition, is an
even more affordable option.
NEW IN THE FIFTH EDITION

In response to detailed and constructive feedback from dozens of reviewers, we
have made many changes for the Fifth Edition. Readers will find greater orga-
nizational consistency across chapters, more images in each chapter, and more
accessible language. We have minimized idiomatic phrases that may not be
familiar, since the students who use Pioneers are located all over the world. Our
expanded coverage of gender issues includes more than thirty female pioneers
whose scientific and applied contributions have helped shaped the field.
Pioneers has a new Introduction, which outlines the value of studying psychol-
ogy’s history and explains the rationale for our own approach: presenting psycho-
logical ideas in the context of the lives and times of the pioneers who introduced
them. We also cover some of the major issues historians face when deciding how
Preface to the Fifth Edition XIX
to write history, such as when to start, who and what to include, and how to pres-
ent it. These are the historiographic issues that underlie all historical writing,
and in the Introduction we help students become aware of how these decisions
influence the kinds of narratives that result.
Chapter 1 is completely new. We recognize that many teachers begin their
courses with the ancient Greek philosophers, and several remarked that they
would like Pioneers to start its full coverage with them. At first we thought such a
chapter might be difficult to fill out with the kind of personal biographical infor-
mation we like to draw upon, because such material is very scarce for the major
ancient philosophers. We found, however, that when combined with the vibrancy
and interplay of their surviving writings, the few known biographical facts about
them still provided the basis for a compelling narrative. Our newly featured
pioneers in this chapter are the pedagogically linked trio of Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle, the atomic theorist Democritus, and a group of brilliant Islamic schol-
ars who kept the classical traditions alive during the period when western Europe
was neglecting or destroying them.
At the other end of the historical time scale, clinical psychology has become
by far the largest specialty area among present-day psychologists, with a distinc-
tive history of its own that tends to be overlooked in textbooks despite its great
interest to students. We remedy this omission in our new last chapter on clinical
psychology. With an abundance of biographical riches from which to choose, we
decided on several important psychologists who actively confronted the tensions
in the contrast between clinical practices and the desire to remain scientific.
New key pioneers here include Molly Harrower, David Shakow, Aaron Beck, and
Paul Meehl.
Throughout the book we have updated the previous material in response
to recent historical research, and added either brand new or significantly
expanded coverage of several pioneers. Many of the additions were inspired by
our desire to highlight the emergence of new psychological subdisciplines over
the past several decades. Among those receiving particularly significant new or
expanded coverage are Adler, Jung, Wechsler, Vygotsky, Shannon, Miller,
Chomsky, Marston, Scott, Mayo, Rogers, and Rorschach.
ENHANCED SUPPORT MATERIAL

We were ably aided by Jacy Young, a historian of psychology and teacher of the
course, in the enhancement and expansion of the Support Package for this edi-
tion. For instructors, there is a greatly expanded test bank that now includes more
than 1,300 multiple choice and matching items, as well as representative short
answer questions with sample answers. We also include assignments that build
XX Preface to the Fifth Edition
on chapter content by connecting it to material in the highly regarded open-

access digital resources Classics in the History of Psychology (http://psychclassics.
yorku.ca/) and Psychology’s Feminist Voices (http://www.feministvoices.com/) as
well as other online materials. For the classroom there is a complete set of Lecture
PowerPoint slides with lecture notes and key pioneers and terms. There is also a
set of Art PowerPoint slides with all the photographs and illustrations in the book
(which are also offered as Art JPEGs). For students, the reasonably priced ebook
version of the text works on all computers and mobile devices, and includes intu-
itive highlighting, note taking, and bookmarking features.
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
We have made each chapter comprehensible as an independent entity, so teachers
can assign chapters selectively or in a different order. We also believe, however,
that one great lesson from studying the broad history of psychological thought
from classical times to the present is that old ideas and attitudes continually
recur in new forms. Early pioneers may have lacked access to the resources and
technologies of later psychologists, but many of the fundamental questions that
intrigued them continue to spark interest today. While the issues may be phrased
differently, they reflect enduring preoccupations with some of the most central
concerns about human experience, behavior, and life. We have noted these recur-
rences when they come up, often with cross references back to the appropriate
earlier chapters.
Here are brief descriptions of the chapters in the Fifth Edition:
• I ntroduction: Studying the History of Psychology. This new opening dis-

cusses the value of studying history and outlines central historiographic
issues, including the distinction between historicism and presentism.
We provide an overview of the development of history of psychology as
an academic specialty area, and describe our particular historiographic
approach.
• Chapter 1. Foundational Ideas from Antiquity. This new chapter explores
the interlocked philosophical careers of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,
accompanied by an account of the then-unpopular atomic theory pro-
posed by their contemporary Democritus. It concludes with accounts of
three brilliant Islamic scholars who preserved and kept alive the founda-
tions of classical philosophy at the time of the Dark Age, when they were
being destroyed and condemned in Christian Europe.
• Chapter 2. Pioneering Philosophers of Mind: Descartes, Locke, and

Leibniz. This is a consolidation of the previous edition’s Chapter 1
Preface to the Fifth Edition XXI
(on Descartes) and Chapter 2 (on Locke and Leibniz). We show how
Descartes adapted and “mechanized” the Aristotelian conception of the
vegetative and sensitive psyches while arriving at his dualistic concep-
tion of body and mind as two separate “substances” requiring two dif-
fering modes of analysis. We then show how his successors Locke and
Leibniz reacted to and developed contrasting aspects of Descartes’s phi-
losophy: Locke with an emphasis on empiricism and the associationistic
basis of knowledge, and Leibniz with his conception of an independent
and creative mind that imposes its own categories and structures on
human experience.
• Chapter 3. Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to Penfield.
This chapter relates how a series of individuals firmly established the
brain as the bodily organ most central to psychology, beginning with
Gall and his colorful but largely misguided theory of phrenology and
concluding with Penfield and his electrical stimulations of the conscious
human brain. We highlight throughout the recurring issue of the extent
to which the brain functions as a unified whole, versus as a collection of
separately localized and independent organs. The chapter brings us to
the dawn of the modern era of cognitive neuroscience.
• Chapter 4. The Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant through the
Gestalt Psychologists. We trace developments in the scientific study
of sensation and perception, showing first how Kant emphasized the
centrality of the human mind in transforming raw energies from the ex-
ternal world into meaningful perceptions. We then discuss Helmholtz’s
systematic studies of vision, which revealed how physical stimulation
from light waves gets ultimately transformed into meaningful percep-
tions of distinct objects. Fechner, with psychophysics, subsequently
discovered mathematically describable relationships between the inten-
sities of physical stimuli as measured objectively and experienced sub-
jectively. The Gestalt psychologists later showed how the mind imposes
principles of organization on the arrays of stimulation it encounters.
• Chapter 5. Wundt and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology.
Building on the research of Helmholtz and Fechner and some reaction
time studies of his own, Wundt argued that enough important aspects
of psychological functioning could be studied in laboratory settings to
become the basis of a new and independent discipline of experimental
psychology. Echoing Descartes, however, Wundt believed that the high-
est mental functions could not be studied experimentally, a view that
was challenged in different ways by Titchener with his structuralism,
XXII Preface to the Fifth Edition
Külpe with his studies of imageless thought and set, and Ebbinghaus’s
invention of nonsense syllables to study memory.
• Chapter 6. The Evolving Mind: Darwin and His Psychological Legacy.
This chapter tells how Darwin revolutionized the life sciences by pro-
posing natural selection as the primary mechanism for evolutionary
development. By emphasizing the adaptive properties of inherited
physical variables, Darwin’s theory encouraged psychologists to place
greater emphasis than before on the functional aspects of psychological
characteristics, and on the importance of hereditary individual differ-
ences. Animal studies assumed new relevance because of the assumed
interrelatedness of all living species. We conclude with accounts of
social Darwinism and the more recent emergence of the contemporary
subdiscipline of evolutionary psychology.
• Chapter 7. Measuring the Mind: Galton and Individual Differences.
Galton applied his cousin Darwin’s emphasis on individual differences
to intellectual characteristics, while promoting the notions of heredi-
tary genius and eugenics. As originator of the modern nature-nurture
debate, Galton laid controversial foundations for the fields of intelligence
testing and behavior genetics, including the idea of studying twins.
The chapter concludes by describing the most important twin studies
conducted over the century since Galton’s death.
• Chapter 8. American Pioneers: James, Hall, Calkins, and Thorndike. In
America, James and his students adopted a Darwinian outlook while
promoting a pragmatic, functional, and pluralistic approach to psychol-
ogy. James’s magnetic personality and groundbreaking textbook made
psychology a popular academic subject that inspired three important
students. Hall went on to become the most important institution builder
in American psychology, while also establishing foundations for child
psychology; Thorndike pioneered the study of learning in animals and
became a leader of the functionalist movement; and Calkins overcame
tremendous obstacles as a woman while becoming a leading experi-
mental psychologist and founder of the influential psychology depart-
ment and laboratory at Wellesley College for women.
• Chapter 9. Psychology as the Science of Behavior: Pavlov, Watson, and
Skinner. The behaviorist movement arose largely through the efforts of
Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner, who promoted the possibilities of a non-
mentalistic psychology in which observable behavior replaced the mind
as its basic subject. Particularly influential in America, behaviorism pro-
vided practical prescriptions for human conduct, from raising children
Preface to the Fifth Edition XXIII
to designing community life. Behaviorism was not only a theoretical

commitment but a guide for the prediction and control of behavior.
• Chapter 10. Social Influence and Social Psychology: From Mesmer to
Milgram and Beyond. Social psychology had colorful roots in the experi-
ences of Mesmer and other early hypnotists who demonstrated the power
of suggestibility and group contagion. These topics were later pursued
by increasingly scientific investigators of social influence processes, in-
cluding Charcot, Binet, and eventually Floyd Allport, whose textbook
formally launched social psychology as a new subdiscipline. The chapter
goes on to describe the origins of Asch’s conformity studies, Milgram’s
controversial studies of obedience, Festinger’s cognitive dissonance
theory, and more recent studies of the constructed nature of memory.
• Chapter 11. Mind in Conflict: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Its Successors.
This chapter tells the story of how Freud developed psychoanalysis, be-
ginning with his discovery of free association as a technique for treat-
ing hysteria patients. This therapy, aimed at uncovering unconscious
wishes and conflicts, evolved into a general theory of the psyche, which
eventually became the centerpiece of an international movement and
attracted important followers and dissidents, including Adler and Jung.
Although first greeted with hostility by academic psychologists, psy-
choanalytic ideas gradually aroused their scientific interest and contrib-
uted strongly to the development of the subdisciplines of abnormal and
personality psychology.
• Chapter 12. Psychology Gets “Personality”: Allport, Maslow, and the
Broadening Field. This chapter opens with Gordon Allport’s promotion
of personality as a psychological subject, and on his conception of no-
mothetic and idiographic research methods as contrasting but equally
valuable approaches to it. The former led to the factor analysis of per-
sonality traits and the Big Five model of personality structure; the latter
to psychologically informed case studies and psychobiographies. The
second half of the chapter tells how Maslow, with broad training in per-
sonality and abnormal psychology, established the field of humanistic
psychology as what he saw as a “third force” to compete against the
then-dominant doctrines of behaviorism and psychoanalysis.
• Chapter 13. The Developing Mind: Binet, Piaget, and the Study of Intelli-
gence. The rise of modern intelligence testing and developmental psy-
chology is documented via the lives and works of Binet and Piaget, both
of whom were originally inspired by home observations of their own chil-
dren. Binet and Simon’s testing method, intended as means of diagnosing
XXIV Preface to the Fifth Edition
mental deficits, became the foundation of a vast intelligence testing

industry dominated by Spearman, Goddard, Terman, and Wechsler.
Impressed by qualitative differences in the ways older and younger chil-
dren solve problems, Piaget formulated genetic epistemology as a theory,
with four distinctive stages of cognitive development. Piaget’s contem-
porary Vygotsky emphasized the importance of sociocultural factors in
enhancing or hindering the pace of cognitive development.
• Chapter 14. Minds, Machines, and Cognitive Psychology. This chap-
ter uses the history of mechanical calculators and early computing
machines as a springboard for introducing the concepts of artificial
intelligence and information processing, which became central in the
mid-twentieth-century rise of cognitive psychology. Highlights include
Babbage and Lovelace’s conception of a universal computer, Turing’s
proposed test for computer intelligence, Shannon’s introduction of the
bit as the fundamental unit of information theory, and Miller’s adoption
of that theory as essential to cognitive psychology. Chomsky, Bruner,
and Neisser all collaborated with Miller in laying the formal foundations
for the new subdiscipline.
• Chapter 15. Applying Psychology: From the Witness Stand to the Work-
place. This chapter traces the emergence of applied psychology in the
work of Münsterberg and Gilbreth, who were both influenced by Taylor
and scientific management. This material is complemented with new
coverage of Scott on the psychology of advertising, Marston on poly-
graphic lie detection, and Mayo and the famous but often misrepre-
sented Hawthorne studies of industrial efficiency. Hollingworth’s early
contributions to the professionalization of clinical psychology rounds
out the chapter. Throughout, the tensions between academic and
applied interests are noted.
• Chapter 16. The Art and Science of Clinical Psychology. This new chapter
traces the development of clinical psychology after World War II. We focus
on a number of psychologists who confronted the tensions between the art
of clinical practice and the desire to be scientific, especially by developing
valid assessment tools and evaluating the effectiveness of psychotherapy.
These include Harrower, an experimentalist who turned to clinical prac-
tice; Shakow, a researcher who designed the scientist-practitioner model of
clinical training; Meehl, a psychologist who compared clinical to statistical
prediction; and Beck, who developed cognitive therapy, an evidence-based
practice that is now one of the most widely used approaches for treating
psychological problems.
Preface to the Fifth Edition XXV
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From its inception, Pioneers of Psychology has benefitted enormously from the
constructive advice and criticism of large numbers of people. We repeat our
thanks here to those who helped so much with the first three editions (some of
whom have regrettably passed on): Neil Agnew, Howard Baker, Michael Blacha,
Arthur Blumenthal, Adrian Brock, Darryl Bruce, Kurt Danziger, Maureen Dennis,
Norman Endler, Stanley Finger, Catherine Gildiner, Melvin Gravitz, Christopher
Green, Scott Greer, Norman Guttman, Walter Heinrichs, Robert Hoffman, John
Hogan, Peter Kaiser, John Kennedy, Bruno Kohn, Alex Kozulin, Gregory McGuire,
Paul McReynolds, John Meacham, Mark Micale, Hiroshi Ono, Roger Thomas,
Ryan Tweney, Michael Wertheimer, Malcolm Westcott, George Windholz, and
Theta Wolf. On the editorial side, Norton’s Donald Lamm and Donald Fusting
provided invaluable advice and encouragement throughout the preparation of
the first three editions.
Our editor for the fourth and this new Fifth Edition, Ken Barton, has gone to
great lengths in soliciting feedback on all or parts of our draft manuscripts from
scholars and teachers whose reports have been very thoughtful and constructive.
For their contributions to the previous edition we thank, once again, Virgil H.
Adams III, Elizabeth Anslow, Peter Assmann, David Baker, David Barone, Colin
Gordon Beer, Catherine Borshuk, Mary Brazier, S.M. Breugelmans, Charles L.
Brewer, Daniel Burston, Fran Cherry, J. Corey Butler, Joanie Caska, Robin Cau-
tin, Rosemary Cogan, Luis Cordón, Alex Cuc, Mary Ann Cutter, Everett Dela-
hanty, Maarten Derksen, George Diekhoff, Chris Dinwiddie, Jay Dowling, Robert
Durham, Carlos Escoto, Ingrid Farreras, Rita Fike, Samuel Fillenbaum, Barbara
Gentile, Steven Goldman, H. Alan Goodman, Arthur Gutman, Benjamin Harris,
Marshall Harth, Mark Hartlaub, Harry Heft, Graham Higgs, Robert Hoffman,
John Hogan, Herman Huber, Tammy Jechura, Patricia Kahlbaugh, Suresh Kane-
kar, Jane Karwoski, Allen Keniston, Gary Kose, Russell Kosits, Dawn Kastanek
Kriebel, Tera Letzring, Cheryl Logan, Mark Mattson, John Mavromatis, Jean
Mercer, Michelle Marks Merwin, Edward Morris, Craig Nagoshi, Ian Nicholson,
Laurence J. Nolan, David Perkins, Clare Porac, Ruth Provost, Wendy Quinton,
Darrell Rudmann, Micah Sadigh, Hank Schlinger, Lori Schmied, Duane Shuttles-
worth, Elizabeth Siemanowski, Christina Sinisi, Tod Sloan, Karel Soudijn, Jean
Strand, William Sturgill, Dennis Trickett, Stephen Truhon, Ryan Tweney, Donald
Vardiman, Dan Weber, Lawrence White, Andrew Winston, and Mark Yama.
For all or parts of the present Fifth Edition we received valuable comments
and advice from David Baker, Michael D. Barnett, Bruno Bocanegra, Kenneth
S. Bordens, Seger M. Breugelmans, Charles Brewer, Adrian C. Brock, Thomas
Brothen, Jay C. Brown, Michele R. Brumley, Frances Cherry, Sheree Dukes
XXVI Preface to the Fifth Edition
Conrad, Lee William Daffin, Jr., Maarten Derksen, Ingrid Farreras, Michael Ford,
David Funder, Leonard George, Christopher D. Green, Lisa D. Hager, Harry Heft,
Thomas E. Heinzen, Gretchen Hendrickson, Darryl Hill, August John Hoffman,
Robert Hoffman, Thomas J. Johnson, Russ Kosits, John W. Kulig, Bob Lockie,
Daniel S. McConnell, Spencer A. McWilliams, Jack Martin, Jean Mercer, Jay L.
Michaels, Ian Nicholson, Jean Nyland, Jack A. Palmer, Jennifer Perry, Karyn
Plumm, Henry L. Roediger III, Rachael Rosner, Dale Stout, Elizabeth Stroot,
Henry Schlinger, Douglas E. Trimble, Ryan D. Tweney, Lori R. Van Wallendael,
David Weissenburger, Larry White, Andrew S. Winston, and one other very help-
ful reviewer who asked to remain anonymous. We also thank Serge Nicolas and
Alexandre Klein for vital help in obtaining figures and permission to reproduce
them from the Alfred Binet Archive.
For various reasons, including our own lack of requisite expertise, we were
unable to take full advantage of some of the reviewer suggestions, but they were
extremely helpful and our book is immensely stronger for their collective input.
Any errors, of course, remain our responsibility alone.
Once again it has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with Norton’s
editorial and production teams. Our general editor Ken Barton has devoted him-
self to ensuring that Pioneers speaks to the broadest possible audience and has
been thoroughly reviewed, improved, and expanded. He has been ably assisted
in this process by assistant editor Scott Sugarman and editorial assistant Eve
Sanoussi. Our developmental editor Betsy Dilernia provided meticulous and in-
sightful reviews and edits of the entire manuscript to improve its flow, style, com-
munication, accessibility, and organization. Our book is much the better for her
efforts. Ted Szczepanski and Elyse Rieder helped enormously in finding and secur-
ing permissions for our new photographs. On the production side, Caitlin Moran,
Steve Cestaro, Ben Reynolds, and designer Anna Reich all collaborated in putting
together what we believe is a very handsome and functional finished volume.
We also sincerely thank the psychology media team of Patrick Shiner, Stefani
Wallace, and Alex Trivilino, as well as the marketing manager, Lauren Winkler.
Last, but far from least, we thank our spouses Helena and Wade for their constant
love and support as we worked our way through the revisions.
TIME LINE
KEY PIONEERS KEY EVENTS
ca. Greek philosophy begins in Ionia (Chapter 1).

600
b .c .
ca. Athenian democracy is established (Chapter 1).

500
b .c .
Socrates
(470–399 b .c .)
Plato ca. Plato writes the Socratic dialogues (Chapter 1).

(424–347 b .c .) 389–
361
b .c .
Aristotle ca. Aristotle writes On the Psyche (Chapter 1).

(384–322 b .c .) 350
b .c .
Lucretius ca. Lucretius writes De Rerum Natura (Chapter 1).

(ca. 95–55 b .c .) 55
b .c .
Al-Kindi ca. Al-Kindi introduces Indo-Arabic numerals and

(ca. 800–871) 830 algebra (Chapter 1).
Alhazen ca. Alhazen writes Book of Optics (Chapter 1).

(ca. 965–1040) 1021
1027 Avicenna comments on Aristotle in Book of the

Cure (Chapter 1).
Avicenna
(ca. 980–1037)
1088 The first European university is founded in

Bologna (Chapter 1).
XXVII
XXVIII Time Line
St. Thomas Aquinas

(1225–1274)
1255– Aquinas integrates Aristotle into Christian

1274 theology (Chapter 1).
1417 De Rerum Natura rediscovered and introduced

into Europe (Chapter 1).
René Descartes
(1596–1650)
Princess Elizabeth
of Bohemia (1618–1680)
Blaise Pascal 1619 Descartes has a dream and an inspiration for his
(1623–1662) method (Chapter 2).
John Locke 1633 Descartes writes but suppresses publication of Le

(1632–1704) Monde (Chapter 2).
1637 Descartes publishes Discourse on Method

(Chapter 2).
1639 Pascal begins building

his mechanical
calculator, the Pascaline
(Chapter 14).
1642 Descartes begins correspondence with Elizabeth

of Bohemia, resulting in Passions of the Soul in
1649 (Chapter 2).
Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646–1716)
1671 Locke starts writing An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding (Chapter 2).
1673 Leibniz exhibits his mechanical calculator in

London (Chapter 2).
Time Line XXIX
1690 Locke publishes An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding (Chapter 2).
1704 Leibniz writes but withholds publication of New

Essays on Human Understanding (Chapter 2).
David Hume
(1711–1776)
Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804)
Franz Anton 1737 Hume publishes a skeptical analysis of the notion
Mesmer of causality (Chapter 4).
(1734–1815)
Franz Josef Gall

(1758–1828)
1775 Mesmer introduces animal magnetism at

Gassner’s exorcism trial (Chapter 10).
1781 Kant writes about the innate intuitions of time

and space perception (Chapter 4).
Charles Babbage
(1792–1871)
1784 Puységur discovers the mesmeric perfect crisis
state (Chapter 10).
Pierre Flourens 1794– Erasmus Darwin publishes a speculative theory of

(1794–1867) 1796 evolution (Chapter 6).
1802 Paley publishes the argument from design in

contrast to evolution (Chapter 6).
Charles Robert 1809 Lamarck publishes the theory of evolution via

Darwin inheritance of acquired characteristics (Chapter 6).
(1809–1882)
Ada Lovelace
(1815–1852)
XXX Time Line
Gustav Theodor
Fechner
(1821–1894)
Hermann Helmholtz
(1821–1894)
Francis Galton
(1822–1911)
1824 Flourens publishes

his ablation studies
contradicting Gall
and phrenology
(Chapter 3).
Paul Broca (1824–
1880)
Jean-Martin Charcot
(1825–1893)
1831 Darwin departs on the voyage of the Beagle
(Chapter 6).
Wilhelm Wundt
(1832–1920)
Gustave Le Bon
(1841–1931)
William James
(1842–1910)
Time Line XXXI
1843 Lovelace publishes

her notes on
Babbage’s
analytical engine
(Chapter 14).
1843 Braid describes hypnotic effects in a mainstream

scientific journal (Chapter 10).
G. Stanley Hall
(1844–1924)
Christine
Ladd-Franklin
(1847–1930)
Ivan Petrovich
Pavlov
(1849–1936)
1850 Helmholtz measures the speed of the nerve

impulse (Chapter 4).
Hermann
Ebbinghaus
(1850–1909)
Frederick Winslow Taylor

(1856–1915)
Sigmund Freud
(1856–1939)
XXXII Time Line
Alfred Binet
(1857–1911)
1859 Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species

(Chapter 6).
1860 Fechner publishes Elements of Psychophysics

(Chapter 5).
1860 Helmholtz promotes the trichromatic theory of

color vision (Chapter 4).
1861 Broca reports the case of Tan, confirming the

localization of speech in the brain’s left frontal
cortex (Chapter 3).
1861 Wundt conducts his thought meter experiment

(Chapter 5).
Oswald Külpe
(1862–1915)
Mary Whiton
Calkins
(1863–1930)
Hugo Münsterberg
(1863–1916)
Edward Bradford
Titchener
(1867–1927)
Eleanor Acheson
Gamble
(1868–1933)
Time Line XXXIII
Walter Dill Scott 1869 Galton publishes Hereditary Genius (Chapter 7).
(1869–1955)
Alfred Adler
(1870–1937)
Margaret Floy Washburn 1870 James experiences a personal crisis, resolved by

(1871–1939) believing in free will (Chapter 8).
1871 Darwin publishes The Descent of Man

(Chapter 6).
Carl Jung
(1875–1961)
Edward Lee
Thorndike
(1874–1947)
Lillian Moller
Gilbreth
(1878–1972)
John B. Watson 1879 Wundt publishes the first experimental

(1878–1958) psychology textbook, The Principles of
Physiological Psychology (Chapter 5).
Max Wertheimer
(1880–1943)
Elton Mayo
(1880–1949)
XXXIV Time Line
Melanie Klein 1882 Charcot introduces the theory of grand

(1882–1960) hypnotisme (Chapter 10).
1884 Galton establishes his Anthropometric

Laboratory and prototype intelligence tests
(Chapter 7).
Karen Horney 1885 Ebbinghaus publishes On Memory (Chapter 5).

(1885–1952)
Leta Setter
Hollingworth
(1886–1939)
1888 Galton invents correlation coefficients (Chapter 7).

Floyd H. Allport
(1890–1970)
Edna Heidbreder
(1890–1985)
Karl Spencer
Lashley
(1890–1959)
1890 James publishes The Principles of Psychology

(Chapter 8).
Wilder Penfield
(1891–1976)
1892 Hall establishes the American Psychological

Association (Chapter 8).
William
Moulton
Marston
(1893–1947)
1895 Freud and Breuer publish Studies on Hysteria
(Chapter 11).
Time Line XXXV
Francis Cecil Sumner 1895 Le Bon publishes The Crowd (Chapter 10).
(1895–1954)
Jean Piaget
(1896–1980)
Lev Vygotsky
(1896–1934)
Mary Cover Jones
(1896–1987)
1896 Witmer establishes his Psychological Clinic
(Chapter 15).
Calkins publishes her Ph.D. study using the
paired-associates technique (Chapter 8).
Gordon W. Allport
(1897–1967)
1895- Titchener promotes structuralism.
1898
David Shakow 1900 Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams

(1901–1981) (Chapter 11).
Carl Rogers
(1902—1987)
Starke Hathaway
(1903–1984)
B. F. Skinner
(1904–1990)
1904 Pavlov introduces the idea of conditioned
reflexes in his Nobel Prize address (Chapter 9).
Molly Harrower 1905 Binet and Simon create the first workable
(1906–1999) intelligence test for children (Chapter 13).
Calkins becomes the first woman elected
president of the APA (Chapter 8).
Solomon Asch
(1907–1996)
Abraham Maslow 1908 Gamble takes over the Wellesley College
(1908–1970) psychology lab (Chapter 8).
Scott publishes The Psychology of Advertising

(Chapter 15).
1909- Freud’s only visit to America and publication of

1910 his lectures at Clark University (Chapter 11).
1910 Wertheimer has his inspiration for the

phi phenomenon and Gestalt psychology
(Chapter 4).
XXXVI Time Line
1911– Adler and Jung break with Freud (Chapter 11).

1912
Alan Turing
(1912–1954)
Bärbel Inhelder 1913 Münsterberg publishes Psychology and Industrial
(1913–1997) Efficiency (Chapter 15).
Albert Ellis 1913 Watson publishes “Psychology as the Behaviorist

(1913–2007) Views It” (Chapter 9).
1914 Gilbreth publishes The Psychology of

Management (Chapter 15).
Jerome S. Bruner
(1915–2016)
Claude Shannon Hans 1916 Terman introduces the Stanford-Binet
(1916–2001) Eysenck Intelligence Scale (Chapter 13).
(1916–1997)
Hollingworth and Lowie publish “Science and
Feminism” (Chapter 15).
1917 The short-lived American Association of Clinical

Psychologists is established (Chapter 15).
Brenda Milner 1919 Floyd Allport completes the first experimental

(b. 1918) social psychology Ph.D. dissertation (Chapter 10).
George A. Miller
(1920–2012)
Paul Meehl
(1920–2003)
Aaron Beck (b. 1921) 1921 Rorschach publishes his inkblot tests in
Psychodiagnostics (Chapter 16).
Time Line XXXVII
1924 Gordon Allport teaches the first university course

on “personality” (Chapter 12).
Ulric Neisser 1924 Jones deconditions Little Peter’s fear response

(1928–2012) (Chapter 9).
1927 Studies establishing the Hawthorne

effect are begun, supervised by Mayo
(Chapter 15).
Noam
Chomsky (b. 1928)
1929 Lashley publishes on cerebral equipotentiality

and mass action (Chapter 3).
1930 Freud publishes Civilization and Its Discontents

(Chapter 11).
Stanley Milgram 1933 Heidbreder publishes Seven Psychologies

(1933–1984) (Chapter 8).
1934 Penfield establishes the Montreal Neurological

Institute and begins stimulating the brains of
conscious epileptic patients (Chapter 3).
1936 Piaget publishes The Origins of Intelligence in

Children (Chapter 13).
1937 Gordon Allport publishes Personality: A

Psychological Interpretation (Chapter 12).
1937 Newman, Freeman, and Holzinger publish

the first major study of separated twins
(Chapter 7).
1937 Turing publishes an account of his Turing

machine (Chapter 14).
XXXVIII Time Line
1938 Skinner publishes The Behavior of Organisms

(Chapter 9).
Shannon publishes “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay

and Switching Circuits” (Chapter 14).
1942 Hollingworth publishes Children Above 180 IQ

(Chapter 15).
Marston’s creation
Wonder Woman makes
her comic book debut
(Chapter 15).
1943 Maslow publishes his hierarchy of needs theory

(Chapter 12).
Elizabeth
Loftus
(b. 1944)
1947 Harrower outlines the functions and training of
clinical psychologists (Chapter 16).
1949 Shakow participates in the Boulder conference

where the scientist-practitioner model of clinical
training is established (Chapter 16).
1951 Asch publishes the first results of his conformity

research (Chapter 10).
1954 Meehl publishes Clinical Versus Statistical

Prediction (Chapter 16).
1956 Milner publishes the case of H.M. (Chapter 3).
1956 Newell and Simon develop the Logic Theorist

computer program (Chapter 14).
Miller writes about the magical number seven

(Chapter 14).
1958 Inhelder and Piaget publish The Growth of

Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence
(Chapter 13).
1959 Chomsky publishes a critique of Skinner’s Verbal

Behavior (Chapters 9, 14).
Time Line XXXIX
1961 The Journal of Humanistic Psychology is

established (Chapter 12).
Miller and Bruner establish the Harvard Center

for Cognitive Studies (Chapter 14).
1963 Milgram publishes the results from his obedience

studies using a Shock Generator (Chapter 10).
1967 Neisser publishes Cognitive Psychology

(Chapter 14).
Beck publishes a book outlining his cognitive

theory of depression (Chapter 16).
1971 Skinner publishes Beyond Freedom and Dignity

(Chapter 9).
1995 Loftus publishes a study using the “lost in the

mall” technique to simulate the phenomenon of
repressed memories (Chapter 10).
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Raymond E. Fancher is a Senior Scholar and Professor Emeritus at York Univer-

sity in Toronto. A founder of York’s Ph.D. program in the History and Theory of
Psychology, he has served as editor of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral
Sciences and held executive positions with the Society for the History of Psy-
chology (Division 26 of the American Psychological Association) and Cheiron
(The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences). The
author of Psychoanalytic Psychology: The Development of Freud’s Thought and
The Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy (both published by Norton),
and nearly 100 other publications on the history of psychology, he is a recipient of
the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the History of Psychology.
Alexandra Rutherford is a Professor of Psychology in the History and Theory

of Psychology Graduate Program at York University in Toronto. Her research
interests include the history and contemporary status of feminist psychol-
ogy and the relationships between psychology and American society from the
mid-twentieth century to today. She is a fellow of four divisions of the American
Psychological Association and is author of Beyond the Box: B. F. Skinner’s Tech-
nology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s–1970s (University of Toronto
Press) and the Project Director for Psychology’s Feminist Voices (www.feminist
voices.com).
XLI
PIONEERS OF
PSYCHOLOGY
Introduction: Studying
the History of Psychology
The Value of Studying History

The History of Psychology Has a History
Ways to Study the Past
Our Historiographic Approach
A s a psychology student, you might be wondering: Why should I study the

history of psychology? How will I benefit from a knowledge of history? If
you were a physics major, you probably wouldn’t have to take a course on the
history of physics as part of your degree requirements, even though it is a fas-
cinating topic! The history of psychology, however, is often included in the psy-
chology curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate levels. It is particularly
relevant to your study of contemporary psychology for a number of reasons.
THE VALUE OF STUDYING HISTORY

Historical study, first of all, provides an opportunity to step outside the inter-
nal mechanisms of the discipline of psychology itself—the data, experiments,
methods, theories, and facts that make up the established canon of the field.
Doing so can help you see how all these elements developed in relation to spe-
cific problems that arose in individual, social, professional, and political contexts.
3
4 Introduction
For example, how and why do we use the scientific method to address psycho-
logical questions? What debates have resulted from this approach, and what
were the consequences? We can find the answers in the struggles of psychology’s
early pioneers, who saw both advantages and limitations to establishing psychol-
ogy’s scientific credentials. William James, whom you’ll meet in Chapter 8, spent
twelve years grappling with what a science of psychology would look like and
what methods were most appropriate for this scientific discipline. His efforts to
define psychology as a science reflected his own deep uncertainty about the whole
enterprise, and eventually led him to conclude that some of the most important
questions lay outside the reach of pure science and required a more philosophical
approach. Others disagreed, and as we become aware of this debate we can poten-
tially expand our current methodological horizons, and rethink the issue of what
a scientific psychology does well and where it has limits.
Why do Freud’s theories of female development take the form they do? (Hint:
Freud’s own thinking was influenced by the gender norms of his time and place.)
How did John Watson’s behaviorism arise and take hold in American psychol-
ogy? (Hint: Watson’s own discomfort with the more philosophical methods of the
time, and the need to make psychology useful to society, combined to provide
fertile ground for a new approach.) What are the roots of the nature-nurture de-
bate in psychology, and how might you evaluate contemporary claims about the
relative influence of genes versus environment? (Hint: Francis Galton’s preoccu-
pation with his own abilities relative to those of others from the same privileged
class influenced his position on the role heredity plays in personal accomplish-
ments.) These are all examples of the kinds of questions the history of psychol-
ogy can help you identify and answer—thereby enriching not only your historical
knowledge, but also your contemporary understanding of systems and questions
that circulate today.
A second benefit of learning history is that ideas we may regard today as old
or mistaken can appear reasonable when presented in their original context.
This understanding can help us evaluate current psychological findings more
astutely. For example, in the seventeenth century René Descartes conceived of
the nerves as hollow tubes through which “spirits” flowed (see Chapter 2). He
was later proven to be mistaken, but in the context of the available information
during his time, this was a completely reasonable idea to propose. Moreover,
it was a productive mistake that could be tested and later corrected. Franz
Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism” as the force producing what we
today call hypnotism may now seem outlandish (Figure I.1). In Paris during the
late eighteenth century, however, there were countless popular notions about
the powers of invisible forces, such as gravitation, electricity, or the heated
The Value of Studying History 5
air that caused balloons to rise. Magnetism seemed to be

another such force, and it was not unreasonable to specu-
late about its possible influence on human beings. Histor-
ical knowledge, therefore, enables us to more thoughtfully
assess—and not dismiss—previous ideas simply based on
what we know now.
Because the same kinds of influences that have affected
the development of psychology in the past operate today, this
historical awareness can contribute to your ability to critically
examine contemporary ideas and developments. Psychol-
ogists are still influenced by their individual, social, profes-
sional, and political contexts. To the extent that these contexts
are always changing, so does psychology. What appears abso-
lutely true and taken-for-granted today may appear just as old
or mistaken in the future, like animal magnetism does to us
now. So, to make informed choices about what to study, how to
study it, and to be able to more thoughtfully evaluate current
scientific claims, a historical, contextual overview of the dis- Figure I.1 Animal magnetism and mesmerism
cipline and its relationship to society is indispensable. At its might seem like outlandish concepts today,
but in their own time and place they were not
best, this is what history can offer.
implausible.
A third reason for studying psychology’s history is that
it helps us appreciate the “reflexive” nature of the field. Reflexivity refers to the
human ability to become aware of, and reflect upon, one’s own activities. At its
simplest level, reflexivity occurs when young children first recognize that the im-
ages they see in a mirror are of themselves; at a higher level, it occurs when we
think about our own thinking; and at its highest level it refers to the capacity for
psychological theories to change the way we understand ourselves. We will see
in upcoming chapters that this capacity for self-awareness was an important ele
ment in several philosophical systems that established foundations for modern
psychology. Early philosophers debated whether self-awareness was possible in
the absence of prior experience or sensory stimulation; later, philosophers and
psychologists pondered the difficulties of using their own minds to understand
the mind itself. How is it possible, they asked, for the agent and object of study to
be one and the same? How can the mind or consciousness become an object of
study when that same mind is the tool with which we are studying it?
The history of psychology traces the different viewpoints involved in this
conundrum, as well as the methods psychologists have devised to help them
study the mind objectively. Some psychologists felt the inherent reflexivity
of psychology made the objective study of the mind an impossible task. They
6 Introduction
suggested that we study only observable behavior, leaving the mind alone.
Others proposed, for example, that we conceptualize the mind as an information-
processing machine and built models of how the mind takes in, processes, and
then acts on information. This leads to one further, and more complex, aspect of
reflexivity: altering self-understanding.
Because many psychologists propose theories about being human, and
because humans are self-aware and can reflect on those theories, this reflection
may, in fact, lead to changes in self-understanding. As mentioned, some psychol-
ogists postulate that the brain resembles a highly complex computing machine.
Others suggest that humans are essentially irrational, driven by unconscious
motivations over which they have little control. These models of human nature
can begin to change how we think about ourselves and explain our own behavior.
The various proposals about human nature put forth by psychologists provide
a window on how people have thought about themselves and how these views
have changed over time. We believe an excellent way to understand this process
and its impact is through historical study. This historical study of changes in
self-understanding is a kind of “historical psychology.”
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY HAS A HISTORY

In addition to these compelling reasons for studying the history of psychology, it
is also, simply put, a fascinating subject. Ever since the early development of psy-
chology as a scientific discipline, psychologists themselves have been interested
in writing and studying their own history, and students have been interested in
learning about it. One of the first American texts on the history of psychology ap-
peared in 1912: Founders of Modern Psychology, by G. Stanley Hall (whom you’ll
meet again in Chapter 8). In this book, Hall wrote about six men with whom he
had studied in Germany, and presented them as some of the “founding fathers” of
experimental psychology. He included several figures who will become familiar
to you in the upcoming pages, such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Gustav Fechner,
and Wilhelm Wundt.
Another early text was Edwin G. Boring’s A History of Experimental Psy-
chology, originally published in 1929. Boring, a student of E. B. Titchener (see
Chapter 5), had a particular agenda when writing his historical account of psy-
chology up to that time. He wanted to reinforce the status of psychology as a
laboratory-based experimental science, a status he felt was being weakened
by the flourishing of what he saw as a “soft-minded” and nonscientific applied
psychology after the First World War. In part Boring was interested in history
because it could help him achieve a political aim, but he was also intrigued by
the question of how and why certain kinds of people make it into the history
The History of Psychology Has a History 7
books and others don’t. Was it sheer genius? Was it being in the right place at
the right time? Boring spent a great deal of time trying to determine the relative
influence of these factors, as well as how to define scientific eminence and how it
could be achieved. By all accounts, Boring was also insecure about his own rep-
utation and accomplishments. His interest in eminence probably stemmed from
personal as well as purely intellectual concerns. The intersection of the personal
and the intellectual is one of the guiding themes of Pioneers of Psychology.
We will return to the thorny question of who gets into the history books and
who doesn’t a bit later. Clearly, the history of psychology has been of longstand-
ing interest to psychologists themselves for a variety of reasons, and this is
reflected in the journals, organizations, and academic programs psychologists
began to develop in the 1960s. In the United States, perhaps no one was more
influential in establishing history as a recognized subfield of psychology than
Robert I. Watson. Trained as a clinical psychologist and published in that field,
Watson turned to history in 1953, writing an article entitled “A Brief History of
Clinical Psychology.” Noting somewhat wryly that this article seemed to strike a
more responsive chord than “all my other articles combined,”1 he decided, in 1959,
to devote himself exclusively to historical scholarship and identify as a historian
of psychology.
Having made this choice, Watson realized there was no organized community
for sharing ideas and stimulating historical research. Therefore, in what was argu-
ably his greatest contribution of all, he went about creating that community. He
published an article entitled “History of Psychology: A Neglected Area”2 in the
American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association
(APA), and together with two colleagues sent an invitation to anyone interested
in the history of psychology to join them at the 1960 meeting of the APA conven-
tion. One of these invitations went to Edwin G. Boring (Figure I.2). Although it
is unknown whether Boring attended, according to Watson about fifteen people
turned up. Watson later dedicated his book The Great Psychologists to Boring,
referring to him as “my teacher, under whom I never studied.”3
These modest beginnings generated several developments, most of them
spearheaded by Watson. In 1965, the original group of fifteen had expanded
enough to justify a new division of the APA devoted to history: Division 26.
Watson also founded a new journal, the Journal of the History of the Behav-
ioral Sciences, and served as its first editor. In 1967 he moved from his position
at Northwestern University outside Chicago to an intriguing new post at the
University of New Hampshire. There his job would be to build their graduate
programs, including one devoted to specialized training in the history and the-
ory of psychology. In 1967, the first graduate program devoted to the area was
8 Introduction
Figure I.2 Edwin G. Boring (left) and his “student” Robert I. Watson.
established. Only a year later, with grant support from the National Science
Foundation, Watson and his colleague Josef Brožek convened a summer institute
for teaching the history of psychology that provided the impetus for a new, inde-
pendent organization called Cheiron: The International Society for the History
of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Although the “international” status of the
group was more aspirational than actual, it nonetheless signaled growing inter-
national interest in the field. The 1970s and 1980s saw the institutional presence
of the history of psychology solidified in Canada and Europe, and today there are
communities of scholars all over the world who publish and meet in their own
specialized journals and conferences. Table I.1 provides a selective list of these
founding and international developments.
WAYS TO STUDY THE PAST

Having established the value and relevance of studying psychology’s his-
tory, let’s take a look at history as a form of inquiry that uses certain methods
and principles, just like any area of the discipline. Historiography is a collective
term for the theory, history, methods, and assumptions of writing history. His-
toriography can also refer to a body of historical work, much like discography
refers to a musician’s body of recorded music. We might say that the historio
graphy on Freud, for example, is voluminous, meaning there is a vast literature on
Freud. Or we might say certain histories of Freud are celebratory, referring to the

Table I.1 ORGANIZATIONS, JOURNALS, CENTERS, AND GRADUATE PROGRAMS IN THE
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY
Year Founding Event
1965 American Psychological Association’s Division 26, History of Psychology

Archives of the History of American Psychology, Akron, Ohio
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
1967 Graduate program in the History and Theory of Psychology at the University of New Hampshire
1968 Cheiron, the International Society for the History of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
1979 Storia e Critica della Psicologia (Italy)
1980 Revista de Historica de la Psicologia (Spain)
1981 Graduate program in the History and Theory of Psychology at York University in Toronto
1982 Cheiron Europe (now the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences)
1984 History and Philosophy of Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society
1988 History and Philosophy of Psychology Section of the Canadian Psychological Association
History of the Human Sciences journal
1989 Historical section of the German Psychological Association
Forum for the History of the Human Sciences of the History of Science Society
Psychologie und Geschichte journal (Germany)
1998 American Psychological Association establishes APA Historian position
History of Psychology, the official journal of Division 26
1999 Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines journal (France)
2000 Psychologie et Histoire journal (France)
2004 British Psychological Society’s History of Psychology Centre
2007 Theory and History of Psychology program in the Psychology Department, University College Dublin
Advances in the History of Psychology blog
2010 NUHFIP Center for the History and Philosophy of Psychology, Brazil
Psychologia Latina journal (Spain)
Cummings Center for the History of Psychology (incorporating the Archives of the History of American Psychology),
Akron, Ohio
2011 Graduate program in the History and Philosophy of Psychology at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil
2014 European Yearbook of the History of Psychology
tendency of some writers to avoid criticizing his accomplishments. (Actually,

Freud scholarship varies widely, from celebratory to intensely critical.) A celebra-
tory approach reflects the historian’s positive bias toward a figure or event, just
as a critical approach reveals a different set of assumptions. The general point
is that personal perspectives and ways of approaching a subject can sometimes
color any historian’s interpretation.
10 Introduction
What other assumptions and methods do historians use to turn facts and
events that occurred in the past into a historical narrative? Some historians
focus exclusively or primarily on the development of major ideas and their
intellectual and disciplinary contexts, neglecting the social and political fac-
tors that may have shaped them. This distinction, which is almost never rigidly
maintained, is referred to as internalism, focusing on internal factors, versus
externalism, focusing on external factors. Most historians tend to write histories
that strike a balance between the two positions, as we do in Pioneers. For exam-
ple, although the development of humanistic psychology (see Chapter 12) was
tied to the intellectual critique that mainstream psychology focused almost ex-
clusively on the negative aspects of being human, it also arose and took hold in a
period immediately after the Nazi atrocities of World War II. The ability of many
to live through these atrocities, make meaning of them, and not only survive but
flourish, also played a role in turning psychologists toward a new, positive per-
spective. As a result, humanistic and existential psychologies were not purely
internal, intellectual developments, but were influenced by—and subsequently
influenced—cultural developments as well.
Some historians adopt a Great Man approach, in which history is told through
the contributions of eminent people whose ideas have shaped the field (similar
to the celebratory approach mentioned above). Great Man histories often neglect
the external factors that may have surrounded individual contributions, such as
the networks of colleagues and peers in which so-called great men have worked,
and the social, cultural, and political systems that may have influenced them. The
premise is that contributions arise from individuals who singlehandedly change
the course of history. Of course, the wording “great man” reveals the long-held
assumption that only men made notable contributions to history. The Zeitgeist
approach takes into account the fact that what’s referred to as the “spirit of the
times” may affect the ability of a certain person, along with his or her ideas, to take
hold and become historically significant. Some historians argue that neither one
of these two approaches, by itself, is adequate to fully account for historical events.
In this book, we strike a balance between the internalist and externalist ap-
proaches, and between the Great Man and Zeitgeist approaches, by presenting
psychological ideas and applications in the contexts of the individual lives and
times of those who originated them. We avoid a straightforward, celebratory,
Great Man approach by suggesting that although individual lives are important
and often crucial, a rich, contextual understanding of these lives helps us see
the connections between a person’s thinking and his or her experiences as they
unfold over time and place. We believe this approach can make history come
alive for readers in a way that simply presenting the ideas or schools of thought
alone, with only brief reference to their originators, cannot do. We show, for
example, that for Gustav Fechner (see Chapter 4), his “psychophysical law” was
not a dry mathematical abstraction but rather proof of an underlying harmony
between the physical and spiritual worlds, providing for him the resolution of an
intense personal crisis. We explore how Francis Galton’s conviction of the innate
and hereditary nature of intelligence arose in part from his own personal sense of
intellectual frustration and failure in the context of a rigid academic curriculum
(see Chapter 7).
We examine how the industrial psychologist Lillian Gilbreth (see Chapter 15)
developed her pioneering ideas about the nature and importance of efficiency
in response to the rapid industrialization of American society and because of
the demands she faced as the working mother of a dozen children. We highlight
the influence of the practical requirements of two World Wars on the emergence
of testing, personnel selection, and other forms of applied psychology, and the
personal pressures that led one couple, Leta and Harry Hollingworth, to take up
applied work in large part because it paid well (see Chapter 15). These and many
other examples of the creative interaction of personal, biographical, contextual,
intellectual, and theoretical factors are more fully presented throughout the book.
Some historians use an approach known as presentism, viewing their sub-
ject from the standpoint of the present, explaining today’s circumstances by
emphasizing that because our predecessors overcame mistaken assumptions, we
progressed to the present state of increased, or superior, knowledge and wisdom.
Others, by contrast, adopt historicism, which attempts to recreate the past as it
was actually experienced by predecessors, without distortion by foreknowledge
of how things later worked out. Each approach has benefits and drawbacks, and
some historians have adopted a position they call sophisticated presentism.
Arguing that you can never escape the horizon of the present when writing
history, and that historical study is (and should be) motivated by a desire to better
understand contemporary issues, they do not assume that the present state of
affairs is necessarily the “right” or the “best”one.4
During the late 1960s, the prominent historian Robert M. Young critiqued
extant histories of psychology for being too presentist, repeating the same oft-
told tales, and being concerned almost exclusively with great men, great ideas,
and great dates.5 In the late 1980s, historian of psychology Laurel Furumoto sur-
veyed the field and articulated what she called the emerging new history of psy-
chology.6 Moving beyond ceremonial or celebratory aims, in which the history of
psychology is recounted as a progressive series of great accomplishments, this
new approach could also appropriately be called critical history of psychology,
or critical histories, to reflect the diversity of the genre.
12 Introduction
New, critical histories tended to be more contextual and historicist than

traditional histories, and practitioners of this approach used archival and pri-
mary documents to check the accuracy of anecdotes and accounts that tended
to pass from one textbook generation to the next. In many cases these stories
proved to be oversimplified, misleading, or completely wrong—the result of
what the historian of psychology Franz Samelson called the origin myth process.
In this process, history is selectively written to make it appear as though psychol-
ogy has progressed triumphantly from one great discovery to the next, with little
sense of the complexity, messiness, or controversy that might have occurred along
the way.7 In Chapter 9, we examine this origin myth process in the case of John B.
Watson and Rosalie Rayner’s classic study of little Albert, a study that has been
woven tightly into the origin story of behaviorism, even though its findings were
not quite as straightforward as some historical accounts suggest.
Finally, the new history tended to be more inclusive of a greater diversity of
historical actors, moving beyond the great men (who were usually white as well
as male) to consider the contributions of those who had been marginalized in
historical accounts, how they had been marginalized, and to what effects. By
highlighting how scientific theories about gender and race have at times uncrit-
ically reflected social beliefs and assumptions, we hope to remind readers that
these processes have also affected whose contributions to psychology have been
deemed important and whose have not.
***
After considering these important issues, the historian of psychology faces a

somewhat more practical, though no less difficult, question: When should I start
my history? In 1908 the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus wrote, some-
what cryptically, “Psychology has a long past but only a short history.”8 As you’ll
learn later in this book, Ebbinghaus was famous for his invention of new techniques
for the systematic and experimental study of memory (see Chapter 5). What he
meant by his statement was that psychology as he practiced it—as an experimen-
tally based scientific discipline worthy of having its own independent university
departments—had begun only a few decades earlier in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury. Therefore, it had a short history. General psychological ideas and philosoph-
ical theories about the human mind and behavior dated far back into antiquity,
however, and these constituted psychology’s “long past.”
Among historians of psychology there is considerable debate about whether
psychology’s long past is continuous with its shorter history. In other words, are
psychological ideas and concepts—such as memory, emotion, and intelligence—
timeless entities that have had the same basic meaning from ancient Greece to
the present? Or are psychological categories so dependent upon social context

and changing consensual understandings that rather than being timeless cate-
gories, they are inherently social and historical ones? For example, when Alfred
Binet developed his early intelligence scales (see Chapter 13), was he measur-
ing something Plato and Aristotle might also have recognized as intelligence, or
would the very concept have meant something different in their time and place?
Is what Gordon Allport (see Chapter 12) thought of as “personality” a construct
that can be identified in earlier eras?
Decisions about when to start the story of the “history of psychology” have
to involve the background of the terms that define our modern understanding.
Even the word psychology has a history. Disagreements over these matters
comprise what is known as the continuity-discontinuity debate. It’s pos-
sible there are certain psychological concepts, like memory, that have been
more or less stable in meaning and continuously developed. Others, like IQ
(intelligence quotient), have no identifiable ancient precursors. Concepts such
as emotions and personality are fairly modern and have acquired specific
contemporary meanings, but have identifiable precursors in terms like the
passions and character. Analyzing how these categories have changed over
time is one form of the historian’s task.
Many early ideas, questions, and attitudes dating back to psychology’s long
past, and covered in the book’s first few chapters, tend to recur in new guises up to
the present day. Although earlier pioneers did not have access to the same kinds
of resources and technologies that more contemporary psychologists have at their
disposal, and often didn’t use the same terms or language, many of the original
fundamental questions that intrigued them continue to stimulate today’s research-
ers. The questions may now be phrased somewhat differently and investigated
via different methods, but they nonetheless reflect enduring preoccupations with
some of the most central aspects of human experience, behavior, and life.
What relative roles do innate factors and biology, versus environment and
experience, play in determining who we are? Can consciousness be explained
solely in mechanistic and materialist terms, and if not, what alternative modes
of explanation are appropriate? Is there an “unconscious,” and if so, what are its
properties? How do evolutionary processes shape our psychological makeup and
interpersonal behavior? What are the psychological similarities and differences
between humans and animals? How do human beings interact with and influence
one another? What are the key components of psychological health? What is the
nature of intelligence? In exploring these and other recurring questions, we show
that important continuities exist between psychology’s long past and its shorter
history; therefore, in an important sense Ebbinghaus’s distinction between the
two is an arbitrary and artificial one.
14 Introduction
There are ongoing debates about the pros and cons of all these historiographic
approaches and methodological choices, and each one may serve its own particu-
lar purpose. It is important to be aware, however, that historians make many deci-
sions and assumptions about studying the past that influence what the resulting
history will look like, from whose vantage point it is written, and for what aims.
Deciding Who to Include

One of the most important decisions a historian faces, especially in a book that
explores psychological ideas through the lives and times of the people who devel-
oped them, is who to include and why. Until fairly recently, the field of academic
history was dominated by white men who tended to write histories that largely
involved others like them, resulting in numerous military, political, and economic
histories and biographies of great white men. Until the 1970s, most histories of
science reflected these same gendered and racialized dynamics. Naturally, it’s
easier to write history when there is adequate source material, and the availability
of such material has depended on whose contributions were deemed important
to document and preserve in the times they were made. In societies dominated
by white men, it was often their contributions that fell into this category, as they
usually had access to resources and controlled who participated in the formal
institutions of science and who did not.
The participation of women in the formal institutions of scientific scholarship
and research in seventeenth-century Europe was completely or substantially lim-
ited. European universities, with few exceptions, were generally closed to women
until the end of the nineteenth century. The female intellectual influence was most
often indirect or supporting in nature, and took place only through membership in
an aristocratic or otherwise highly privileged social class. A woman’s primary role
during these times was usually as a moderator or facilitator, rather than an origi-
nator of psychology-related discourse because of her lack of access to specialized
training compared to her male peers. Even so, recent historical research—which we
draw upon in this book—has revealed that these roles were often very important, as
when Elizabeth of Bohemia’s pointed questions about the interactions of body and
mind led Descartes to reformulate his theory of the passions, and when Elizabeth’s
niece Princess Sophie of Hanover persuaded Leibniz to write a comprehensible
account of his theory of monads (see Chapter 2).
The exclusion of women from scientific training and activity accelerated with
the founding of the major European academies of science in the seventeenth cen-
tury. Although some women had participated actively and meritoriously in the
informal scientific circles and intellectual salons that were the forerunners of these
academies, they were explicitly excluded once the academies were formalized. For
example, the Royal Society of London, established

in 1662, did not admit women until 283 years later,
in 1945 (Figure I.3).
Even after psychology was established as
an academic discipline in the late 1800s, the
suitability of higher education for women was
questioned by many laypeople, scientists, and
professionals alike. Aspects of Darwinian and
Freudian theory were often invoked to rational-
ize this position, as we describe in our book.
Nevertheless, women were able to achieve
doctoral-level training in psychology at some
institutions, starting at the inception of the field
Figure I.3 This meeting of the Royal Society in 1845 was
(although sometimes they were not officially
an all-male event. Women began to be admitted 100 years
awarded their Ph.D.’s). These women, like Christine
later, in 1945, but even today only about 5 percent of Royal
Ladd-Franklin (see Chapter 5) and Mary Whiton Society Fellows are women.
Calkins (see Chapter 8) in the United States, made
empirical and theoretical contributions that were influential in their own times.
They were in the minority, however, and psychology remained a heavily male-
dominated discipline until the gender composition began to shift during the
1980s. After World War I, during the 1920s, many women were funneled into
subfields considered congruent with traditional gender roles, such as child de-
velopment and the less-prestigious areas of applied psychology where women
could exercise their “helping tendencies.” Combined with the relative neglect of
these areas in history textbooks until fairly recently, women’s contributions to the
history of psychology have been underrepresented.
As the field of psychology matured over the course of the twentieth century
and the restrictions on female participation decreased, women took on increas-
ingly prominent roles in the discipline. In the 1970s, in tandem with the women’s
movement, a project to recognize and reinterpret women’s contributions in psy-
chology’s history began. This project has resulted in an ever-growing body of his-
torical work that continues to illuminate not only women’s accomplishments, but
the dynamics that have affected psychologists’ theories about gender and race.
As part of the general turn toward more inclusive histories of psychology,
in 1976 African American psychologist Robert Val Guthrie wrote the first his-
tory of black psychology in the United States. He drew attention not only to
African American pioneers who were absent from traditional histories, but also
exposed the racist practices of white psychologists and the counter-narratives
provided by black psychologists.9 A substantial body of historical literature on
16 Introduction
how psychological science has been used to support racist beliefs, not just in the
United States but in many other parts of the world, now exists. We make use of
these important resources throughout Pioneers.
Psychology vs. Psychologies

Over the course of the twentieth century, psychology grew from being a rela-
tively minor academic discipline into one of the largest and most popular of
all college and university subjects. In addition, psychology has proliferated
into an extraordinarily diverse collection of loosely (sometimes very loosely)
interrelated subdisciplines. This has caused many to ask: Exactly what is
psychology? Just consider the variety of psychology’s branches that are rou-
tinely covered in undergraduate courses: physiological, abnormal, social, clin-
ical, cognitive, sensory, personality, developmental, humanistic, differential,
industrial/organizational, evolutionary, behavioral, cultural, psychology of
gender—among many others. Each subdiscipline has attracted a significant
number of specialists and has by now accumulated a substantial historical
record of its own. No single textbook can possibly do justice to the totality or
complexity of these histories, so authors must make another difficult decision:
what topics to cover from psychology’s twentieth-century history, and to what
extent. Until fairly recently, textbooks have focused more on the history of
experimental and theoretical psychology, leaving out applied psychology or
exploring it only briefly. This has changed, and our book includes two chapters
on pioneers who applied psychology to society in the form of testing, assess-
ment, psychotherapy, personnel selection, consumer psychology, and human
factors psychology, among other applied areas.
Historians of psychology also grapple with the fact that psychology looks
very different in different parts of the world. There is growing attention among
historians to the ways in which the specific geographic and political contexts
of psychology have shaped its forms and functions, and American psychology
is no exception. For example, behaviorism—both theoretical and applied—was
embraced more enthusiastically in the United States than in any other part
of the world, in response to intellectual and social factors. During the first few
decades of the twentieth century, behaviorism fit the needs of an industrial-
izing, urbanizing society looking to scientific psychology for practical guid-
ance. Intelligence testing is another example. Although one of the pioneers of
the modern IQ test, Alfred Binet, was French, mass intelligence testing never
took off in France the way it did in the U.S., partly because of differences in the
education systems of the two countries. In France, an existing system of ex-
aminations provided the same kind of sorting functions that standardized tests
Our Historiographic Approach 17
(of which IQ tests were forerunners) came to provide in the U.S., so there was
little need for their widespread use. These examples represent indigenization,
the process whereby local (or national) contexts affect the development of
psychology, including how ideas from elsewhere are imported and changed in
response to local conditions.
In this book, we focus on the history of many of the main themes in psycho-
logical thought as they unfolded through the contributions of pioneers from
Europe and the United States, with a few exceptions from outside these regions.
These themes—such as the nature of consciousness, what constitutes psycho-
logical health or illness, or how we define and measure intelligence—have
recurred elsewhere. But it’s important to keep in mind that our treatment
focuses on the development of Western psychology, which is itself a form of
indigenized psychology.
OUR HISTORIOGRAPHIC APPROACH

Our general historiographic approach in Pioneers is best described as
“personalistic-contextual,” an attempt to use positive features from all the dif-
ferent approaches previously described. We have chosen to present the major
theories, questions, and applications of psychology through often-detailed
analyses of the lives and times of its major contributors. Understanding indi-
vidual lives-in-context can yield insights about how and why certain psycho-
logical ideas took the forms they did, in the times they did. We also believe
this approach brings abstract ideas to life, connecting them to the deeply per-
sonal concerns of the colorful figures who comprise the rich “family history” of
the field.
Our approach originated many years ago when we became particularly
interested in the work of three individuals: Sigmund Freud, Francis Galton, and
B. F. Skinner. We discovered that each of these men left behind not only the pub-
lished works that had made him famous, but also treasure troves of originally un-
published material: letters, notebooks and unfinished drafts, news clippings and
photographs, informal reminiscences from friends and colleagues, and countless
other items that provided the back stories and rich textures of their professional
lives. Like many historians and biographers before us, we got hooked on this
kind of material. It revealed our eminent subjects not as Olympian figures who
proclaimed their theories from exalted positions, but rather as flesh and blood
human beings who grappled with real problems and uncertainties, while doing
their best to understand complicated psychological issues in their own times
and places. Factors from their personal lives interacted with their scientific work,
causing it to veer in one direction or another.
18 Introduction
We also came to appreciate that the ideas and contributions of the pioneers of
psychology were affected not only by their personal contexts, but also by the times
and places in which they worked. For example, in the case of Descartes, the religious
beliefs and systems of seventeenth-century France influenced his thinking and the
reception of his ideas. Much later, Skinner’s conviction that his behavioral principles
should be used to improve society, and his ideas about how to do this, were influ-
enced not only by his upbringing but also by the faith in science and technology
that has colored American society throughout the twentieth century.
We have also been influenced by the historiography on women and gender
in psychology, and have provided greater coverage of women pioneers than in
previous editions of the book. Women in psychology not only faced institutional
discrimination for many decades; they also had to confront psychological the-
ories that reinforced sexist assumptions about male-female differences. There-
fore, we pay attention where appropriate to the role psychology has played in
both formulating these theories and, in some cases, debunking them (e.g., Leta
Hollingworth’s work; see Chapter 15). Psychologists have also been influenced
by, and contributed to, beliefs about race differences. We discuss the involvement
of psychologists in these beliefs in several chapters as well.
While our approach has many advantages, the fact that it requires more
in-depth treatment of individuals than usually seen in history textbooks has
influenced our choices. Our decisions were based on three criteria. First and
most obviously, each pioneer had to be important to the development of psy-
chological thought or its application. Second, we had to have enough available
biographical information to provide the basis for a compelling story. We had
to be able to discern how their background, training, and/or experience influ-
enced their work in psychology. Third, when considered collectively, the con-
tributions of our selected pioneers had to constitute a representative sampling
of the full range of psychological theorizing and application. In other words,
we wanted a group of early pioneers from psychology’s long past whose work
laid the foundation for a science of psychology, followed by a group from its
more recent history who represent the broad range of topics covered by typical
modern psychology courses.
The result is a cast of characters you should find engaging—not only because
they made important contributions to psychology, but because their curiosity
about the human condition is itself an inspiring aspect of being human. We hope
you share this curiosity.
Chapter Review 19
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
History is relevant to the study of psychology because it Great Man or Zeitgeist approach. In recent years the rigid
can provide a perspective on how the diverse ideas, theo- distinctions between these approaches have been broken
ries, methods, and facts of psychology have developed in down. Statements about the “new history” of psychology
relation to individual lives and their contexts. A historical emphasize the importance of consulting archival and other
understanding enables a critical assessment of why pre- primary sources; debunking origin myths; providing histor-
vious ideas that are now discredited may have appeared icist, contextual analysis; and including a greater diver-
legitimate in their own time. In turn, this same critical sity of historical actors. Deciding when to start the story
analysis can be applied to contemporary psychological is affected by the historian’s assumptions about whether
theories. Given the reflexive nature of psychology (as psychological concepts have developed continuously over
humans, psychologists are both the agents and the objects time, or whether more contemporary concepts like IQ are
of study; psychological study changes how humans think discontinuous, or qualitatively different, from any previous
about themselves), the study of how self-understanding concepts.
changes over time, as a result of and as reflected in psy- The historiographic approach of this book is personalistic-
chological theorizing, is itself a form of psychology. The contextual: it presents the development of ideas and prac-
intimate relationship between psychology and history can tices through an examination of individual lives in context.
help students understand psychology itself. Studying the individual lives of psychological thinkers
Several historiographic issues and assumptions affect yields insights about psychology itself, reflecting the fact
the presentation of the history of psychology. History that the pioneers and their ideas are indelibly influenced
can be written from an internalist or externalist perspec- by the times and places in which they live, and the experi-
tive, from a presentist or historicist viewpoint, and using a ences they have.
Key Terms
reflexivity, p. 5 historicism, p. 11
historiography, p. 8 sophisticated presentism, p. 11
internalism, p. 10 new history of psychology, p. 11
externalism, p. 10 critical history of psychology, p. 11
Great Man approach, p. 10 origin myth process, p. 12
Zeitgeist approach, p. 10 continuity-discontinuity debate, p. 13
presentism, p. 11 indigenization, p. 17
20 Introduction
Discussion Questions and Topics

1. Give at least three compelling reasons why understanding the history of psychology is
relevant to you as a psychology student.
2. Define historiography, and give several examples of the decisions historians have to
make when planning how to write a history of psychology.
3. What is the difference between historicism and presentism? Do you agree or dis-
agree that a purely historicist approach to history is possible and/or desirable? Why
or why not?
4. Imagine you are a historian working 100 years from now and you want to write a his-
tory of early twenty-first-century psychology. What are some of your challenges? What
approach will you take? What will you include and why?
Suggested Resources
Kurt Danziger presents a rationale for what historical analysis can offer psychology and
discusses the implications of reflexivity and indigenization for a critical history of psy-
chology in “Does the History of Psychology Have a Future?” Theory and Psychology 4
(1994): 467–484. For a detailed discussion of reflexivity as applied to the human sci-
ences, see Roger Smith, “Does Reflexivity Separate the Human Sciences from the Natural
Sciences?” History of the Human Sciences 18 (2005): 1–25. For the relevance of history
to psychology and the emergence of the history of psychology as a specialized field, see
Kelli Vaughn-Blount, Alexandra Rutherford, David Baker, and Deborah Johnson, “History’s
Mysteries Demystified: Becoming a Psychologist-Historian,” American Journal of Psychol-
ogy 122 (2009): 117–129. An overview of the organizational developments in the United
States discussed in this chapter, including Robert Watson’s leadership, can be found online
at http://www.historyofpsych.org/historyofdivision26/foundingofdivision26.html.
Franz Samelson presents a study of the origin myth process in “History, Origin Myth and
Ideology: ‘Discovery’ of Social Psychology,” Journal of Theory of Social Behaviour 4 (1975):
217–231. A sophisticated presentation of the continuity-discontinuity debate is provided by
Roger H. Smith in “Does the History of Psychology Have a Subject?” History of the Human
Sciences 1 (1988): 147–177. Janis Bohan discusses how and why women have been excluded
from traditional histories of psychology in “Contextual History: A Framework for Re-Placing
Women in the History of Psychology,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 14 (1990): 213–227.
For a specific discussion of indigenization, see Wade E. Pickren, “Indigenization and the
History of Psychology,” Psychological Studies 54 (2009): 87–95. Historian Mary Terrall of-
fers a thoughtful consideration of the productive tensions between the study of individual
scientific lives and the contexts in which they unfold in “Biography as Cultural History of
Science,” Isis 97 (2006): 306–313.
CHAPTER 1
Foundational Ideas from
Antiquity
The Greek Miracle and the Presocratic Philosophers

The Life and Thought of Socrates
Plato’s Life and Philosophy
Aristotle and Empiricism
An Atomic Footnote: Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius
Three Islamic Pioneers
Europe’s Intellectual Reawakening
W hile still in his late teens, the future philosopher Plato (ca. 424–347 b.c.)
made a momentous decision about his education. Coming from a wealthy
aristocratic family and being a prominent citizen of the democratic city-state
of Athens, he had a wide choice of private teachers to guide his development.
Most young men of his class chose to study with one of a group of highly re-
garded teachers called sophists. As strong supporters of Athenian democracy,
a relatively new form of government that extended equal voting rights to all of
its citizens, the sophists specialized in teaching the skills of rhetoric and public
speaking that would enable their students to express and promote their political
and social views most effectively. One famous sophist, a colorful figure named
Gorgias, boasted that he could persuade people to adopt any opinion on
any subject, even if he himself knew little or nothing about it. Years later Plato
23
24 1 | Foundational Ideas from Antiquity
depicted Gorgias as asking: “What is there greater than the word which per-
suades the judges in the courts, or the senators in the council, or the citizens in
the assembly, or at any other political meeting?”1
Rather than choosing someone who was highly successful in conventional
terms like Gorgias, Plato opted for a teacher much more humble in his personal
circumstances who offered his services at minimal cost and who taught from a very
different point of view. Claiming that his only special wisdom was in knowing how
much he did not know, Socrates (ca. 470–399 b.c.) wanted his students to appreci-
ate what is true and permanent as opposed to temporarily convenient and popular.
He did this by engaging his students in conversations or dialogues which encour-
aged them to discover their own innate capacities for finding truth, rather than
passing on to them predetermined ideas or lessons. Both educational approaches
had distinct virtues, and Plato’s choice resembled that facing a bright young per-
son today whether to undertake training in a practical and potentially lucrative
field like business or law, or to pursue a more impractical but idealized discipline
like philosophy. His selection of Socrates and philosophy had consequences that
still reverberate today.
Socrates himself left behind no written records of his thoughts. He opposed
the entire notion of writing things down, believing that written ideas can rep-
resent true ones only partially and imperfectly, and that relying on writing
weakens the faculties of memory and serious thinking. Fortunately for us, his
pupil Plato rejected this particular belief, and years later provided many mem-
orable written portrayals of his old teacher in what are now called the Socratic
dialogues. These works—in which Plato added his own insights and interpreta-
tions to those of Socrates—emphasized the great importance of those “higher”
capacities for rational thinking and mathematical reasoning that presumably
reside innately within the human mind. The dialogues became foundational
statements of the approaches to mental philosophy known as nativism,
emphasizing inborn as opposed to acquired properties, and rationalism,
emphasizing reason.
The wealthy and socially privileged Plato also promoted philosophical inquiry
in another, more material way. In his 30s he inherited substantial property, where
he established the Academy, a gathering place for scholars of varying ages and
interests to congregate and pursue their intellectual goals. As a center for teach-
ing and learning as well as what we today call scholarly research, the Academy
has ever since lent its name to centers for higher learning. Although Plato’s own
Socratically inspired approach was naturally emphasized, the topics pursued by
scholars at the Academy also included mathematics and astronomy, and many
diverse opinions were tolerated.
Foundational Ideas from Antiquity 25
In 367 b.c., when Plato was in his late 50s, a 17-year-old from the northern Greek
provinces named Aristotle (ca. 384–322 b.c.) arrived at the Academy. This son
of an eminent but recently deceased physician quickly established himself as
the institution’s top pupil, and then over a twenty-year period became its most
distinguished senior scholar. Around the time of Plato’s death in 347, however,
37-year-old Aristotle decided to leave Athens and the Academy. One motive for his
move may have been disappointment at being passed over as the Academy’s new
leader, and another may have arisen from some intellectual differences between
Plato and himself. Both explanations are plausible, since the non-aristocratic and
non-Athenian Aristotle would probably have been passed over for the Academy’s
leadership under any circumstances. Probably more importantly, Aristotle was
predisposed—perhaps from seeing his father’s careful observations while diagnos-
ing his patients—to place far more emphasis than his teacher did on the system-
atic observation of the natural, empirical world of the senses. Plato is said to have
lamented that Aristotle “kicked us away, the way ponies do” when establishing
their independence, and Aristotle, when writing about his break with Plato,
declared that “we must honor truth above our friends.”2
Whatever his exact reasons, Aristotle abandoned the cloistered halls of
academia and embarked on a twelve-year odyssey to the northern Greek prov-
inces where he had been born. During this period he engaged extensively
with the outside “real worlds” of natural history, politics, and pedagogy. These
experiences amplified his already existing differences from Plato. Although
he never denied the importance of certain innate rational faculties, Aristotle
became the first great proponent of empiricism, the notion that true knowl-
edge comes first and primarily through the processing of sensory experiences
of the external world.
Commenting on the difference between Plato and Aristotle, one prominent
historian of philosophy has exclaimed:
What an accident of history that two such contrasting orientations toward

the physical world, animated by two such different aesthetic sensibilities,
should have been pedagogically entangled with each other. [Plato] espies
beauty in the elegance of the mathematical proportions he is certain rule
the cosmos, [Aristotle] in the richness of sensed particularities he is certain
can be functionally explained.3
This difference in viewpoints was captured by the Renaissance artist

Raphael in his classic painting School of Athens, in which an older Plato points
upward to the higher realms of reason and ideas, while the younger Aristotle
gestures downward toward the empirical solidity of the

earth (Figure 1.1). We shall see throughout this book that
the interplay between what’s inside the mind and what acts
upon it from the outside is a continuing and major theme in
the history of psychology.
Considered together, the linked pedagogic chain of
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle established crucial philosophical
foundations for an eventual discipline of psychology, and their
individual stories will constitute the main elements of the first
part of this chapter. We then relate how the atomic theory of
matter was proposed by Democritus, a contemporary of Soc-
rates, but gained little acceptance by Greek philosophers. The
chapter concludes by describing how these and virtually all
other classical ideas were dismissed by Western European
scholars during the so-called Dark Ages, and would have been
lost completely had they not been preserved and developed
Figure 1.1 A detail from Raphael’s painting by numerous brilliant Islamic scholars between the years 700
School of Athens, depicting Plato and Aristotle. and 1200. Only after that were they rediscovered and made
essential components of the Western philosophical tradition.
As these accounts unfold it’s important to remember that no single pioneer
arose in an intellectual vacuum. All of them were products of, and builders upon,
their particular cultural and intellectual backgrounds. The principal Greek pio-
neers in this chapter were among the most luminous products of a remarkable
time and place, sometimes referred to by historians as “the Greek miracle,” and
they relied upon and further developed the earlier thought of a significant group
of philosophers collectively known as the presocratics.
THE GREEK MIRACLE AND THE PRESOCRATIC

PHILOSOPHERS
Some 400 years before Plato’s time, settlers from the Peloponnesian peninsula
of present-day Greece spread out and established scores of prosperous Greek-
speaking colonies. Magnificent sailors and enterprising traders, these settlers
populated the islands and coastlines from Ionia (present-day western Turkey)
to Sicily and southern Italy on the west (Figure 1.2). These colonies, as well as
the various city-states on the Greek mainland, developed in many different ways
and established widely varying forms of government. Some were traditional king-
doms, ruled by royal families; others were oligarchies, governed by small groups
of powerful leaders; and a few, notably the large city-state of Athens beginning
Black Sea
Adriatic Sea Thrace

Abdera
Italy Macedon
Chalcidice
Elea
Mt. Olympus Lampascus
Troy
Aegean Sea
Crolon Ionia
Euboea. Lesbos
Ionian Sea Themopylae
Chios Clazomenae
Athens
Samos Ephesus
Sicily Mycenae Miletus
Acragas Peloponnese Salamis
Sparta Delos
Syracuse
Cos
Rhodes
Mediterranean Sea Crete
Figure 1.2 A map of the ancient Greek world.
about 500 BC, became democracies in which political decisions were made
according to the collective votes of all qualified citizens.* These ancient Greeks
were also highly confrontational, and their disputes often degenerated into
outright wars—both among themselves and with outsiders.
The Greeks were united, however, in their pride for their common native
language. They coined the derisive word barbaros to describe all non-Greek-
speaking people. The syllables “bar-bar” were intended to mimic the ugly-seeming
(to the Greeks) sounds of uncultured foreign languages, and provided the origin
of our modern word barbarian. This linguistic pride was at least partially justi-
fied, in the sense that there was something about the Greek language, combined
with the temperaments of its speakers, that facilitated verbal discussions, specu-
lative arguments and theories, and the creation of abstract concepts for express-
ing their ideas. Sometimes these discussions focused on topics that in other cul-
tures were considered taboo, any speculation about which would be considered
sacrilegious. The early Greeks coined two important words. Roughly translated
as “word” or “reason,” logos has become in English the suffix indicating a study
*Although the establishment of Athenian democracy was a momentous step toward modern
Western governments, the status of citizens within it was quite restrictive. The great majority
of inhabitants, including slaves, people of non-Athenian background, and women were explicitly
denied citizenship.
of, as in such terms as geology, physiology, and psychology. Philosophia, mean-

ing literally “love of wisdom,” was their general term for discussions about the
true and ultimate foundations of the world as we know it.
The first recognized philosophers hailed from the Ionian islands and Greek-
speaking settlements located in what is now western Turkey. Their earliest pre-
occupations were observing the natural world and attempting to understand it
in terms of underlying fundamental principles: essentially the same goal as that
of modern physical scientists.* A man named Thales (ca. 624–546 b.c.) from the
city of Miletus became famous for his accurate astronomical and meteorological
observations, and promoted the idea that water was the most important element
in the physical makeup of the cosmos. Little else is known about Thales except
for an anecdote reporting that once while walking down the street and looking
up to contemplate the sky, he stumbled and fell into a well. Here was the first
recorded image of an absent-minded philosopher.
A series of later presocratic philosophers continued and modified Thales’s
attempts at physical theorizing, usually by emphasizing one of the other classical
elements (air, fire, and earth) or some combination of the four, as the ultimate
building blocks of the universe. Often these physical theories intersected with
speculations about an emerging concept the Greeks called psyche.
The Concept of Psyche

The original meaning of the Greek word psyche was simply “breath.” However,
because it was something present in a living person but absent from a dead one,
it gradually took on broader metaphorical meaning and came to signify a general
life-principle. All living things were said to possess a psyche and dead things
to lack one. The Latin translation for psyche was anima, a term that retains its
original meaning in English when used as the root for animal and animated to
describe living things, and inanimate for dead ones. When translated directly
from Greek into English, however, psyche is traditionally rendered as “soul.” In
modern English, the word has taken on a narrower meaning as a near synonym
for mind and as the root word for psychology and psychiatry.
For the most part we will use the original word psyche in the context of the
ancient Greeks, but we must keep in mind that the term had broader connota-
tions for them than it does today. The ancient philosophers became increasingly
*What we think of as science today was originally part of philosophy. The term scientist was
coined less than two centuries ago, and prior to that practitioners of science were known as
natural philosophers.
preoccupied with providing descriptions and analyses of this important concept.

Early speculation centered on its physical makeup, with some seeing air as its prin-
cipal component because of its association with breath, and others opting for fire
because of the fact that living bodies are warm while dead ones are cold. Increas-
ingly, however, philosophers began analyzing the psyche in terms of its function-
ality in controlling different aspects of life. These inquiries reached a high point in
the thinking of Plato and, especially, Aristotle, and involved the consideration of
some other intriguing issues raised by presocratic philosophers.
Pythagorean Mathematics and Philosophical Paradoxes

Pythagoras (ca. 570–495 b.c.) was born in Ionia but settled in Croton in southern
Italy. Like Socrates he left no writings of his own, and has been described as
“more myth than man.”4 One certain fact is that he attracted an important school
of followers who discovered and emphasized the wondrous regularities of mathe-
matics, and their relationship to the physical world. They discovered, for example,
that harmonious musical chords occur only when the lengths of plucked strings
(of equal tension) differ by precise numerical ratios. If one string is exactly twice
the length of the other, the result is the musical octave; a ratio of 3 to 2 gives a
pleasing chord known to musicians as a fifth. The famous Pythagorean theorem
expressed the discovery that for any right triangle (a triangle with a 90-degree
angle), the square of the long side (hypotenuse) is precisely equal to the sum
of the squares of the two shorter sides. The Pythagoreans—who persisted as a
school and were visited by both Socrates and Plato—attached a genuine religious
significance to these wonderful correspondences between abstract mathematics
and concrete experiences in the physical world.
Some other presocratics raised thought-provoking issues and paradoxes that
still give pause today. A generation after Pythagoras, Heraclitus (ca. 535–470 b.c.)
highlighted the sometimes ambiguous relationship between stability and
change when he asserted, “You can never step into the same river twice.” He
also promoted the idea of the unity of opposites, exemplified by the fact that
a road going upward is also going downward, depending on one’s relative
position and direction.
A generation later Zeno (ca. 490–430 b.c.) pondered the concept of infinity,
as, for example, in the idea that any linear distance contains an infinite number
of intermediate points between its beginning and end. He challenged his fel-
low philosophers to resolve the Achilles and the tortoise paradox—an imagined
race between a speedy Achilles and a slow tortoise, in which the tortoise starts
at some distance in front of Achilles. At one point after the race begins, Achilles
will reach the tortoise’s starting position, but the tortoise will still be some shorter
distance ahead; when Achilles reaches that second distance, the tortoise will still
be a bit ahead but by a smaller margin—and so on. Given that there are an infinite
number of intermediate points, he can never overtake or pass the plodding crea-
ture. In the real world, of course, this conclusion is ridiculous, and represents the
kind of abstract, pie-in-the-sky daydreaming that practical folks like to accuse
philosophers of undertaking. We shall see in later chapters, however, that medi-
tations on the concept of infinity have played a huge role in the development of
modern mathematics, science, and, indirectly, psychology.
Shortly before Socrates began his teaching, Protagoras (ca. 490–420 b.c.)
adopted a practical point of view and argued that it was fruitless to speculate
about big questions such as the ultimate nature and makeup of the universe, or
hypothetical paradoxes like Zeno’s. Instead, he favored a focus on purely human
experience and behavior and declared: “Man is the measure of all things.” This
idea lay behind the approach taken by sophists such as Gorgias. Instead of worry-
ing about ultimate, theoretical questions, the sophists sought to understand peo-
ple, and especially how they can be manipulated and persuaded to act according
to the purposes of those in the know. As noted, it was precisely this expediency
and relativism that attracted the opposition of Socrates.
The Hippocratics
Before we turn to Socrates himself, we must mention one more pioneer who is
often labelled presocratic, although in all likelihood he was slightly younger
than Socrates. Like Protagoras and the sophists, Hippocrates (ca. 460–370 b.c.)
dealt with everyday human concerns, but whereas the former were the lawyers
and politicians of their day, Hippocrates was a great physician. As with the life
of Pythagoras, personal details about Hippocrates are extremely scarce, except
that he hailed from the Ionian island of Cos and lived into old age. But also
like Pythagoras, he attracted a dedicated school of students and followers—the
Hippocratics—who collectively produced an extensive body of medical writings
now known as the Hippocratic Corpus. These works are notable because they
regarded diseases as natural phenomena, rather than the results of some sort of
demonic or supernatural interference with the course of normal health.
Using the limited but best available observational techniques of their time,
the Hippocratics proposed a humoral theory to explain health and illness as the
result of the balance or imbalance among four prominent liquid substances,
which they called humors, found in the human body: blood, yellow bile, black
bile, and phlegm. According to this theory, people are healthy when the four
humors exist within reasonable balance within themselves; sharp deficiencies
The Life and Thought of Socrates 31
or excesses of one or more produce various disease states, and moderate imbal-
ances lead to differences in temperament or character. Modern languages con-
tinue to echo aspects of the humoral theory in certain words describing diseases
or temperaments. The Greek word for ordinary (yellow) bile was chole, which still
appears in the disease name cholera, or the adjective choleric, meaning restless
or easily angered. Prefixing the Greek melan for black to chole yields melancholy
or melancholic. The English word sanguine (from the Latin for blood) means
optimistic or cheerful, and phlegmatic means calm or lethargic.
Like the ancient Greek physicists’ elements, the humors of the Hippocratics
have not withstood the tests of modern science, but the group’s more general
emphasis on naturalistic causes has fared much better. One famous treatise
entitled On the Sacred Disease dealt with severe convulsive epilepsy; many con-
temporaries referred to the disorder as “sacred” because of its supposed origin in
divine or demonic possession, resulting from an abnormal flow of phlegm into
the brain. Although wrong in detail, this treatise correctly attributed epilepsy to
physical causes in the brain.
In their general treatment of diseases, the Hippocratics stressed the value of
balance and moderation. Sometimes they tried to remove presumed humoral
excesses by purges and bleedings, but they equally emphasized the great impor-
tance of exercise, diet, and proper sanitation. They also favored cautious exper-
imentation to discover the therapeutic benefits of numerous herbal and other
pharmacological substances.
The Hippocratics established a basic platform for responsible, observation-
ally based medical practice that is still honored today. Newly licensed physicians
must take the Hippocratic Oath, agreeing to uphold specific ethical standards in
their own professional medical careers.
THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF SOCRATES

Only a few facts have been firmly established about the life of Socrates. He was
born in Athens in 470 b.c.; his father was a respected stonecutter and sculptor
and his mother a midwife. As a young man he adopted his father’s profession,
and also fought bravely as a soldier in three military campaigns. In middle age he
married a much younger woman, Xanthippe, who bore him three sons. Accord-
ing to unsubstantiated reports she was not pleased when Socrates abandoned
the security and moderate income of his stone-cutting profession to become an
itinerant teacher. Xanthippe became, perhaps unfairly, the symbolic stereotype
for a nagging housewife.
Socrates differed from the sophists by charging little or nothing for his
services, and dressed in worn and shabby clothing. Apart from Plato, the most
famous of his known students was Xenophon (ca. 430–354 b.c.), who went on to
become one of the first great historians. At the age of 70 Socrates was arrested by
a new and unsympathetic Athenian government and tried on a series of dubious
charges, including corrupting youth and treason against Athens. Socrates’s de-
fense of himself at the trial was ineffective— perhaps deliberately so—and he was
sentenced to death by drinking the poison, hemlock. He apparently rejected an
escape plan plotted by his admirers, and voluntarily drank the poison following a
final philosophical discussion with them.
Three of Socrates’s younger contemporaries left descriptions of him. The play-
wright Aristophanes depicted him in his satirical comedy The Clouds as a figure
who literally descends from the clouds and proceeds to sound like a sophist by
boasting he can teach anybody about anything. More like a Saturday Night Live
lampoon than an objective portrayal, this image was strongly contradicted by
two other chroniclers, who had actually been students of Socrates. Xenophon
portrayed him as a completely admirable and courageous figure, outspoken
in expressing his viewpoint. Only in his reconstruction of Socrates’s behavior
at his final trial is there any hint of the arrogant braggadocio presented by
Aristophanes. Asked at the trial what punishment he thought he should receive,
Socrates in Xenophon’s account responds sarcastically that as a benefactor
to Athens, he should receive a pension and free dinners for the rest of his life.
Xenophon portrays Socrates as reacting defiantly to a jury that he knew was
stacked and unjust. Plato’s account of the trial describes a
more dignified and resigned Socrates, who even acknowl-
edged that if one adopted the point of view of his persecu-
tors, then he really was a danger to the kind of Athens they
desired, and in that sense his sentence was just.
Neither Plato nor Xenophon was present at the trial, so
their reports are based on hearsay conditioned by their per-
sonal impressions of the man. All three informants agree,
however, that Socrates was a visible and controversial char-
acter. He was odd (some said ugly) in appearance, with a
propensity to stir people up. Most representations of him,
such as the sculpture in Figure 1.3, feature an unsmiling
and very serious face. Plato famously characterized Socrates
as a social “gadfly” who would sting his dialogue partners
intellectually, just as a horsefly can agitate a peacefully
grazing horse.
Yet in many ways Socrates was very modest. When
Figure 1.3 A bust of Socrates. told that he was regarded as the wisest man in Greece, he
responded that his only real wisdom lay in knowing how much he did not know.
He likened his role as a teacher to that of his mother as a midwife, only instead
of helping women bring forth the babies within themselves, he helped his pupils
bring out the knowledge and wisdom that already resided within their psyches.
Plato depicted this process in the dialogue Meno, where Socrates relates
a myth that the human psyche or soul is immortal and becomes repeatedly
reincarnated in new bodies following the deaths of older ones. In the process
of rebirth, each psyche’s accumulated knowledge is forgotten but under certain
conditions can be partially rearoused or “recalled.” Socrates then demonstrates
something like this process by showing an uneducated slave boy a square and
asking him how to construct a new one whose area will be precisely double that
of the first. The boy does not know, but without giving away the answer directly,
Socrates leads him through a question-and-answer process, after which the boy
concludes—correctly—that the new square must have sides that are precisely
equal to the diagonal of the original square. Since the boy had not been specifi-
cally told about this relationship but had discovered it himself, Socrates suggests
that at least in the metaphorical sense he had “remembered” it.
Taken literally, Socrates’s myth of reincarnation and recollection represents
an extreme version of philosophical nativism, in the notion that fully formed but
forgotten knowledge lies within a psyche, and just needs help from empirical
experience to bring it out. It is questionable whether Socrates himself accepted
this literal interpretation, and it certainly has not been accepted by later mental
philosophers. But in a more moderate form Socratic nativism has had greater
staying power—namely, in the assertion that the human mind contains innately
within itself features and predispositions that enable it to interpret and compre-
hend empirical experiences in ways that go far beyond their raw sensory input.
The ability to create abstract ideas, or to comprehend mathematical regularities
as the Pythagoreans did, or to formulate other “laws of nature” lies somehow
innately within the human mind. According to this view, the path to wisdom was
not simply to accumulate opinions and experiences through the external senses,
but rather to “Know thyself” and interpret those experiences in light of one’s own
innate rational faculties. This was the greatest legacy Socrates left to Plato.
PLATO’S LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY

Plato’s aristocratic family dated back two centuries to the great Athenian law-
maker Solon, whose legal reforms from two centuries earlier established many
of the foundations for eventual Athenian democracy. One interesting legend
holds that Plato’s birth name was Aristocles, but that as he grew up to be a
broad-shouldered, athletic youth who might even have wrestled in the original
Olympic games, he was given the nickname Platon (Greek for “broad”). It is nice
to speculate that he might have been one of the earliest outstanding student-
athletes. But little is known for certain about his early life, and we can only guess
at his specific reasons for taking up with Socrates, or at what his parents must
have thought when he allied himself with the notorious social gadfly.
Plato was about 25 when Socrates was tried and executed. Horrified by
the event, he fled from Athens for several years, during which he spent some
important time in Italy with the Pythagoreans. In his 30s, Plato inherited property
in Athens and ended his voluntary exile. First on his own property and then on
the nearby site of a grove of sacred olive trees he established the Academy, which
(as noted earlier) became a forum for scholars of varying ages and interests to
congregate and pursue their diverse intellectual goals. These topics included
mathematics and astronomy, as well as more general philosophical problems.
As the leader of his school for more than 40 years, Plato himself explored the
Socratic question of what is innate in the human psyche, and added the question
of what is the relationship between those innate features and the sensory experi-
ences imposed on the psyche from the external world.
Platonic Idealism
Among Plato’s most influential answers to those questions was a proposed
distinction between appearances and ideal forms. His notion of an appear-
ance (the Greek word was phenomenon) referred to a person’s actual conscious
experience of something, as when we see a particular tree, or horse, or dog. Lying
behind each transient individual appearance, Plato believed, were something
much more permanent: general and ideal forms representing the essences
of all trees, all horses, or all dogs. This general view— that there exists
something more fundamental and ultimate, or “ideal,” lying behind everyday
sensory experience—is referred to as idealism.
An interesting example is provided by the Pythagorean theorem. In Figure 1.4
we see four right triangles, which look quite different from each other. Our con-
scious perceptions of each of these are appearances. Although they all look differ-
ent, our intellect tells us first that they share in common the obvious perceptual
feature of having three sides and one right (90-degree) angle.
For the mathematically educated they also share the abstract and more “mys-
tical” commonality that the squares of their long sides are precisely equal to the
summed squares of their shorter ones. Plato took this sort of evidence as proof that
there exists in some higher realm an ideal right triangle, which is never directly or
completely perceived by the human senses, but which has an unquestioned reality
that is more permanent, perfect, and “real” than any fleeting sensory experience.
c
a
a
c b c
b
a b
a
c
Figure 1.4 Differing “appearances” of a right triangle.
For Plato this higher realm of ideal forms was more fundamental and important
than the empirical world of transiently experienced appearances.
Plato illustrated the appearance-form distinction differently in one of his most
famous works, The Republic, with his allegory of the cave. He asks the reader to
imagine a group of prisoners confined in a cave, facing its back wall (on the right
hand side of Figure 1.5). Men walk along a walled roadway just outside the cave
carrying puppets on sticks, and bright sunlight from the left casts shadows of the
puppets on the cave’s back wall. Thus the prisoners become aware of the events
behind them only indirectly and incompletely as shadows on the wall they face,
Figure 1.5 The prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave.

and not in their full reality. Metaphorically, the shadows are like Plato’s appear-
ances and the real events like his ideal forms.
As Plato’s dialogue continues, one of the prisoners is forcibly turned around
and taken out of the cave, where at first he is dazzled and pained by the bright-
ness. Gradually, however, he habituates and comes to understand the relationship
between the shadows and the real events that cause them. But when he returns to
the cave and tries to tell the others what he has learned, he is regarded with hos-
tility and disbelief. For Plato the enlightened prisoner is like the genuine philoso-
pher, whose search for true knowledge is often painful and disturbing, and whose
insights are likely to be dismissed or suppressed by the ordinary population.
Plato’s prisoners in a cave image illustrates a fundamental issue that, 2,000 years
later, would loom large in the establishment of modern scientific psychology: the
relationship between conscious experiences of the external world and the objective
nature of the physical stimuli that give rise to those experiences. Our conscious
experiences—Plato’s appearances, or phenomena—consist of sensations such as
sounds, colors, or shapes, which come to be interpreted as perceptions of meaning-
ful objects. But the actual physical stimuli that give rise to such conscious experi-
ences are now understood to be differing forms of energies, such as light or sound
waves of differing frequencies and wavelengths. As we shall see in later chapters,
analyzing exactly how the human mind converts the raw energies of the physical
world into conscious sensations and perceptions was central to the establishment of
modern psychology in the 1800s.
The Platonic Legacy

Plato’s thought extended into a wide variety of subjects, enough so that one
influential modern philosopher called the entire Western philosophical tradition
“a series of footnotes to Plato.”5 That may be an exaggeration, but his scope was
certainly broad and encompassed other topics that remain highly relevant to
modern psychology. He argued, for example, that the human psyche, or soul, has
three separate basic components that govern the appetites (needs for physical
gratification); courage (the propensity to confront difficulties with action); and
reason (the ability to appreciate the underlying realities of the world). In another
famous metaphor, he symbolically represented these three as a driver trying to
control a chariot pulled by two winged horses. One horse represents the appe-
tites and tries to pull in the direction of the fastest and most immediate physical
gratification; the other represents duty and the motivation to respond bravely
to threats to the self or society; and the charioteer represents the rational com-
ponent that must try to direct and coordinate the horses so they cooperate and
proceed in the same direction.
Plato further believed that each person’s psyche innately possesses these
three components in different proportions, giving rise to three general types, or
classes, within a society. Those dominated by their appetites constituted the ordi-
nary masses (hoi polloi, in Greek) of a civil society; those dominated by courage
became the soldiers who protected the society; and the small minority dominated
by reason—at least in an ideal society—should be the elite guardians who govern
the society.
Plato saw the relative proportions of these three functions as largely innate
and fixed within every individual, so in terms of our modern nature-nurture
or heredity-environment debate, he favored nature and heredity. Consistent
with this, and even though Plato was the product of a democratic society, he
did not believe democracy to be the best form of government. The masses,
he believed, were like those prisoners in the cave who had been unable or
unwilling to accept the acquired wisdom of the one who had been enlightened.
Decisions left to them were likely to be impulsive and dangerous. On the other
hand he did not favor a monarchy or rule by a single tyrannical power, which
posed obvious dangers to general well-being. His ideal solution would be an
oligarchy, a society ruled by the select few of elite guardians whose innate
powers of reason have been honed by rigorous training in institutions such as
his Academy.
Plato’s Academy did turn out many significant graduates, the greatest of
whom was Aristotle. We turn now to this other eminent Greek, whose more
empirically oriented philosophy would become a second pillar on which much of
future Western thought would rest.
ARISTOTLE AND EMPIRICISM

Aristotle was born in Stagira, a small city in the northern Greek kingdom of
Macedon. His father was a physician whose skills were so highly regarded
that he became the family doctor to the Macedonian King Amyntas II. There-
fore, Aristotle grew up in close proximity to royalty and very likely had been a
childhood friend of Amyntas’s son, the future King Philip II.
As a bright youngster Aristotle witnessed and absorbed some of his father’s
successful medical practices. In later life he wrote glowingly about the greatness
of Hippocrates as a physician, so probably these practices involved naturalis-
tic explanations in terms of the four humors. At the very least they emphasized
close observation followed by diagnosis, an empirical and practical approach that
Aristotle would favor throughout his life. Sadly, his father died when Aristotle was
still a youth, and his much older brother-in-law became his guardian. Little is known
about those formative years, except that Aristotle clearly showed intellectual gifts;
at age 17 he was sent to Athens and admitted to Plato’s Academy, where he rapidly
rose through the ranks.*
Although Aristotle’s family had been in close, friendly contact with royalty
and members of the aristocracy, they still represented a working class well
beneath the aristocratic status of Plato. Furthermore, during Aristotle’s years at
the Academy, Macedon had sometimes sided with the enemies of Athens and
under the rule of his boyhood acquaintance, now King Philip II, had dramatically
expanded its territory to the north. Despite Aristotle’s brilliance and intellectual
success, his northern background was therefore suspicious, and his fit at the
Academy probably became increasingly uneasy. As noted, this may have been
one factor in his decision to leave at the age of 37.
In any case, it was fortunate for posterity that Aristotle left Athens and got
involved with various aspects of the empirical, phenomenal world that Plato
had de-emphasized. He first crossed the Aegean Sea to Asia Minor, where
he had friendly family connections with, and came under the patronage of, a
local king named Hermias. In due course, Aristotle married the king’s niece
Pythias, and was joined by a gifted young native from the region named
Theophrastus (ca. 371–287 b.c.). Theophrastus had previously studied at the
Academy in Athens, where he met Aristotle and became first his student,
then his friend and lifelong confidant. The two shared a keen interest in the
diversity of life forms in the natural world, and began what would become the
first recorded and systematic observations in natural history. Aristotle con-
centrated on hundreds of animal specimens, including a large number of sea
creatures, many of which he carefully dissected. Theophrastus gave the same
attention to local plant life.
After a few years in Ionia, Aristotle was perhaps surprised to be invited by
King Philip to return to the Macedonian capital and become the tutor to his teen-
aged son Alexander. One would give a great deal to know exactly what transpired
between these two historically monumental characters, in a relationship that
lasted three years. Chances are, the relationship was usually less formal than the
one depicted in Figure 1.6, painted by a much later artist. The evidence sug-
gests that Alexander developed a healthy respect for learning and education,
and throughout his later life sent specimens and artifacts from his conquered
territories to his old tutor for study. And because Alexander showed powerful
*Annabel Lyon’s novel The Golden Mean (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009) engagingly imagines
Aristotle’s early years and describes several encounters with Macedonian royalty. Although these
accounts are consistent with the few definitively confirmed facts about Aristotle’s early life, they
are largely speculative.
Figure 1.6 An artist’s conception of Aristotle, on the right, tutoring the future Alexander
the Great.
military and political aptitudes even as an adolescent, Aristotle may have learned
something about these fields from his pupil.
At the young age of 20 Alexander inherited his father’s crown, and over the next
twelve years earned his reputation as Alexander the Great, leading his armies on
a massively successful campaign of conquest that extended from Egypt to India.
We shall later see that this had major intellectual consequences centuries after-
wards, as Greek-trained scholars migrated to many of the conquered territories
where classical writings were preserved and honored throughout the so-called
Dark Ages of Western European civilization.
After Alexander became king, Aristotle returned to Athens and became the
director of his own school, called the Lyceum.* Broader in its scope than the
Academy, the Lyceum attracted hundreds of scholars who worked and stud-
ied collaboratively in subjects ranging from what we today call the humanities
and arts through the social and natural sciences. Many of the discussions were
*Like academy, this word has endured in pedagogical history, as in the French designation of
secondary school as lycée.
conducted outdoors as the participants walked about, leading to the name

Peripatetic School (from the Greek for “walking”) for Aristotle’s institution.
Although these studies were collaborative, Aristotle himself was the primary
recorder and summarizer of the results, producing a body of treatises that is
breathtaking in its scope. One ancient biographer compiled a list of 150 books
written by him, on such diverse subjects as justice, poetics, political theory, rheto-
ric, animals and dissections, astronomy, physics, geography, botany, and even the
psyche or soul. Unfortunately much of his written work has been lost, but enough
remains to give a good sense of the range and power of his interests and intellect.
Aristotle came as close as any single person in recorded history to amassing and
describing all of the formal knowledge of the time, leading one modern historian
of philosophy to call him “Mr. Know It All.”6 We will focus here on those surviving
works and ideas that became most important for the development of Western
psychological thought.
Biological Taxonomy
Aristotle’s strong interest in natural history continued throughout his life.
Alexander assisted him by sending him and Theophrastus (who accompanied
Aristotle to Athens) new animal specimens from the far reaches of his ever-
expanding empire. The two men produced a series of works that are landmarks in
the history of biology, demonstrating in a straightforward way Aristotle’s general
approach to knowledge.
Knowledge acquisition, for Aristotle and Theophrastus, had two essential
steps: careful and extensive observations, followed by their systematic classifi-
cation into meaningful groups or categories. Their early classifications of zoo-
logical and botanical specimens marked the beginning of the biological field
of taxonomy, the arrangement of organisms into hierarchically ordered groups
and subgroups. Every biology student today learns that living organisms, both
animals and plants, are subdivided, in descending order, according to kingdom,
phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Although the classifications
Aristotle and Theophrastus proposed were less detailed and contained numerous
errors that have been detected and corrected, they provided the starting point for
an enduring biological practice. *
Although Aristotle believed that careful observation of the empirical world was
the necessary and essential starting point for knowledge, the mere accumulation
*In a separate contribution, Theophrastus applied his classifying bent to different types of human
beings in a work called Characters, credited by Allport as the earliest work explicitly defining
different personality types (see Chapter 12).
of facts was not enough. The mind or intellect also had to do something with those
facts, converting them from a disorganized jumble of sensations into a meaning-
ful system of organized ideas and abstract concepts. For Aristotle the mind was
not passive, but it functioned primarily as the organizer rather than the origin
(as Socrates and Plato maintained) of ideas and knowledge.
On the Psyche
Aristotle developed this idea in the treatise Peri Psyche, a Greek title later trans-
lated into Latin as De Anima and usually into English as On the Soul. We’ll refer
to it here as On the Psyche. Sometimes described as the first systematic work on
psychology, it was more than that since, as noted, the Greek word psyche had a
broad meaning as the general animating principle of all living things. In his treat-
ment of this extensive subject, Aristotle argued that living organisms possess
psyches with varying degrees of complexity depending upon their relative posi-
tions on the scale of nature, a hierarchical ordering bounded by simple plants at
the bottom and human beings at the top.
The lowest organisms, plants, possess two abilities that differentiate them
from dead objects: to nourish themselves and to reproduce. Therefore, accord-
ing to Aristotle, nourishment and reproduction were the two most fundamental
functions of all psyches. The two are sometimes lumped together and referred to
in English as the vegetative soul. The simplest animals possess the additional
abilities to move themselves, the function of locomotion; and to react to changing
stimuli in their environment, or the function of sensation. Higher animals show
a further capacity to remember and learn from their sensory experiences—the
function of memory. Still higher animals can anticipate the future by imagina-
tion. These four functions collectively make up, in English, the sensitive soul.
The final and “highest” function of the Aristotelian psyche, possessed only by
human beings among living things, was the ability to reason: to think logically
about their remembered or imagined experiences. Reason was the defining
function of the rational soul.
Aristotle made several specific comments about the functions of sensation
and reason that held considerable importance for the future development of psy-
chology. In describing sensation, he likened the tissues of the sensory organs to
the surface of a wax tablet, capable of receiving impressions or “imprints” from
the stimuli that strike them from the outside world. Similarly to the way a signet
ring leaves its imprint when pressed against soft sealing wax, a stimulus leaves
an imprint that replicates its essential features. These imprints, or replicas of
them, are somehow preserved and become the basis of memories, and then are
erased so the tablet once again becomes blank and ready for the reception of new
imprints. We shall see in Chapter 2 how the notion of the receptive mind as a
blank slate, or tabula rasa, became one of the important metaphors in the devel-
opment of modern psychology.
Some of Aristotle’s most important writings expounded on the special capac-
ities of the uniquely human rational soul. Many of these were pertinent to the
second component of his biological studies: the classification and organization
of empirical observations. Aristotle argued that the human psyche has an innate
set of categories into which the memories and ideas of empirical experiences are
classified and organized. These categories include substance (what something is,
such as a person, a rock, or any other object); quantity (how many, how much);
quality (what color, what shape, etc.); location; time; relation (bigger, smaller,
before, after, etc.); and activity—what it is doing (telling, hitting, etc.) or under-
going (being told or hit). Experiences organized according to these categories
enable one to make meaningful statements, which describe a subject, about
which something is predicated or asserted. In an extended series of writings
collectively called The Organon by Aristotle’s successors, he showed how vari-
ous kinds of subject-predicate statements or propositions relate to and interact
with each other according to inferred laws of logic. Aristotelian logic has, in fact,
been a fundamental aspect of Western philosophy ever since.
***
To summarize: Plato and Socrates had regarded the human psyche as a reservoir
of innate ideas and forms, which may be brought out or partially revealed by
empirical experiences. Aristotle, by contrast, emphasized empirical experiences
as the necessary “raw materials” the psyche subsequently processes by means of
its inborn categories, thereby creating the abstract concepts and “ideal” general
laws the Platonists thought were innate.
Taken together, these three philosophers laid essential conceptual foundations
for a future science of psychology. First, they made the very subject of the psyche,
including what we today refer to as the mind, the specific object of analysis and dis-
course. Second, they debated thoughtfully about the specific relationships between
that mind and the empirical stimuli that influence it from the outside world. Their
emphases clearly differed, and we shall see repeatedly throughout this book how
their debate about the relative weight given nativistic versus empirical explanation
has continued to reverberate. In Chapter 4, we shall see how the reintroduction of
the notion of innate mental categories by Immanuel Kant played a particularly
important role in the origins of the psychology of sensation and perception.
Aristotle went further than Plato by attempting to describe the psyche’s
biological and (in modern terminology) psychological functions in considerable
An Atomic Footnote: Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius 43
detail. Many of his observations were astute and precedent-setting. From a mod-
ern viewpoint, however, we cannot regard his views as truly scientific because
he regarded the functions as elemental explanatory factors in their own right,
rather than as phenomena to be explained in terms of still more basic underlying
factors. Only rarely, as in likening sensation to the imprinting of a stimulus on
a wax tablet, does he hint about the possible physical or mechanistic processes
that might underlie various functions. For the most part, he assumed that living
organisms reproduce, move, or think because they have a psyche with the appro-
priate functions—and the causal analysis largely stopped there.
As Chapter 2 will show, our modern, scientific approach to psychological
theorizing did not fully arise until 2000 years after Aristotle, when European
mental philosophers began to look seriously for underlying physical explana-
tions. Their research followed the rediscovery of a theory that had actually been
formulated in ancient Greece by a contemporary of Socrates, but which was
strongly criticized and dismissed by leading philosophers, including Plato and
Aristotle, and then suppressed for centuries largely for religious reasons. The
story of the atomic theory and its origins provides an important concluding
footnote to our discussion of Greek philosophy.
AN ATOMIC FOOTNOTE: DEMOCRITUS, EPICURUS,

AND LUCRETIUS
We have noted how several presocratic philosophers speculated on the physical
foundations of the universe, usually by invoking some combination or aspect of the
four classical elements: fire, air, water, and earth. In addition, some of them focused on
the notion of infinity, pondering the idea that physical quantities can be indefinitely
subdivided into ever smaller segments or pieces, into infinity. Both of these notions
were challenged by a slightly younger contemporary of Socrates named Democritus
(ca. 460–370 b.c.). Building on the teachings of a man named Leucippus, about whom
little information has survived, Democritus formulated an atomic theory which
held that there is a limit to the divisibility of all material objects, and that they are
ultimately composed of tiny, solid, unbreakable particles he called atoms (the Greek
word atoma means “uncuttable”). He further proposed that atoms have differing
shapes, and that the universe is entirely made up of an unlimited number of solid
atoms moving about in otherwise empty space, the void. Inevitably they collide and
come into contact with one another, and because of their differing shapes and trajec-
tories, they may cluster and coalesce in any number of combinations to make up all
of the physical substances in the universe.
On a personal level, Democritus was apparently a pleasant person who made
a good impression on others; he had a lively sense of humor and became known
as “the laughing philosopher.” Some 2000 years after the death of Democritus,
the great Dutch artist Rembrandt imagined himself to be

Democritus in a self-portrait (Figure 1.7).
Despite his congenial personality, Democritus’s atomic
theory was widely attacked because he stipulated that the
movements of atoms were random, and that all physical
phenomena were accidents created mechanistically; that is,
as a result of material atoms physically impacting and inter-
acting with one another. He believed these interactions to
be random, and in so doing contradicted the predominant
Greek assumptions about the nature of causality, which
held that every caused event had to have a purpose.
Aristotle provided the most authoritative statement of
this viewpoint by asserting that all caused events had to have
four essential components: a material cause, the stuff out of
which something is made (such as the marble of a statue); a
formal cause, the idea or plan behind the caused thing (the
sculptor’s model or image); an efficient cause, the actions
or interactions that bring the caused thing into being (the
Figure 1.7 Rembrandt’s painting The Laughing
hammer and chisel blows that shape the statue); and a final
Philosopher, a self-portrait based on the
cause, the purpose for which the thing is caused (the sculp-
reputation of Democritus.
tor’s desire to create beauty, or to commemorate someone).
This conception was clearly modeled on human creative activity, but Aristotle and
most of his contemporaries believed it also applied to the physical universe as a
whole. In other words, the material elements were presumably set into motion
and interaction according to some cosmic plan (formal cause) predetermined by
the purposes of an ultimate “unmoved mover” (final cause). For most Greeks, the
unmoved mover was interpreted to be a god or collection of gods.
Democritus’s atomic theory proposed material and efficient causes of the
universe, but denied the reality of any underlying plan or final purpose. Accord-
ingly, it was widely regarded as dangerously sacrilegious. Plato did not men-
tion Democritus at all in his known writings, but reportedly said that his atomic
works should be burned. Aristotle discussed atomic theory more seriously, but
dismissed it as outdated and “presocratic.”
It took a half-century after Democritus’s death before his theory found a
significant admirer and advocate in the person of Epicurus (ca. 341–270 b.c.).
For Epicurus, adoption of the atomic theory meant that one should not fear the
irrational or punitive whims of capricious gods, but instead should conduct one’s
life as tranquilly as possible in the pursuit of socially responsible “happiness.”
Epicurean happiness was not unbridled hedonism, but rather a self-sufficient life
free from pain and fear, in the company of friends. Temperamentally a quieter
version of Democritus, Epicurus founded a school in Athens appropriately called
the Garden that attracted a small but devoted group of followers.
The Epicureans consistently maintained that the human psyche, along with the
body and all other objects in the universe, are nothing but collections of material
atoms. This remained a distinctly unpopular, minority view and might have disap-
peared completely, except for the effect it had on an obscure Roman poet. Almost
nothing is known about the life of Lucretius (ca. 99–55 b.c.), but somehow he learned
about Epicurean philosophy and celebrated it in an extraordinary extended poem
with the Latin title De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Extending more
than 200 pages in modern translation, this poem elegantly laid out all the main
principles of Epicureanism, including its atomism, its moderate hedonism, and its
materialistic conception of the anima, or soul. It seems that the author died shortly
after the poem’s completion—or even before, as the final part ends abruptly as if not
quite finished. Although the poem was initially praised for its style, its reputedly
atheistic and hedonistic message did not sit well, and only a very few copies of it
survived, to be rediscovered and newly appreciated many centuries later.
The centuries immediately following the fall of Rome are sometimes referred
to as the Dark Age of Western Europe, because the writings of both the atomists
and all the classical Greek philosophers were condemned as pagan blasphemy by
early Christian scholars. Lucretius was a particular target, as the early Bible trans-
lator Saint Jerome spread a factually unsupported story that the poet had been an
oversexed hedonist who became insane after ingesting a powerful aphrodisiac,
and finally committed suicide. But even the less controversial classical writings
were condemned and might well have disappeared completely if their surviving
fragments had not been preserved, respected, and studied by a large number of
non-European scholars from the farther edges of Alexander’s old empire. The
most important scholars came from Arabia, Egypt, Persia (present-day Iran),
Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq and Syria), and parts of India, which constituted
the large and powerful Islamic empire.
THREE ISLAMIC PIONEERS

The burgeoning Islamic empire arose rapidly in the century after the Prophet
Muhammad’s death in 632 a.d., extending eventually from western India on the
east to Spain and Morocco on the west. It produced a series of great, multifaceted
scholars who not only preserved and translated a large portion of the classical
Greek works, but also elaborated upon them while developing new and revolu-
tionary ideas of their own. Aristotle’s works were a particular focus, and several
scholars emulated him by becoming polymaths—experts in a host of different
disciplines, ranging from the physical sciences and mathematics to music and
the arts, as well as theology and philosophy. We single out three of these great
scholars to give some idea of their breadth and ultimate importance.
Al-Kindi and the Introduction of Indo-Arabic Numerals

Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi, better known to Western scholars as simply
Al-Kindi (ca. 800–871), was born in the city of Basra in present-day Iraq, but moved
to Baghdad as a young man. There he quickly became a leader in the so-called
House of Wisdom, the equivalent of a modern research institute whose members
had led the campaign to preserve the classical Greek texts, and translate them into
Arabic. Al-Kindi became known as “the philosopher of the Arabs” for his learned
commentaries on Aristotle, whose ideas he skillfully discussed and synthesized with
the main tenets of his own Muslim faith. Like Aristotle, Al-Kindi mastered a wide
range of disciplines, from physics and medicine to astronomy and music theory.
Arguably, however, his work with the greatest worldwide and lasting impact was his
treatise, On the Use of the Indian Numerals, written when he was about 30.
In this work Al-Kindi described and promoted a mathematical numbering sys-
tem that had been developed in relative obscurity in India during the previous two
centuries. He referred to the system as Indian numerals, but it has since become bet-
ter known as Indo-Arabic numerals. This deceptively simple system led to some
of the most important and revolutionary developments in the history of civiliza-
tion. Although the Greeks and their Roman successors had developed considerable
skill in geometry, dealing with shapes and the relative sizes of objects, they lacked
a coherent system for performing precise calculations with numbers—problems in
basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division that are solved easily by
schoolchildren today. The reason for this deficiency lay in the haphazard system of
symbols they used to represent numbers. The “Roman numerals” predominant in
Western Europe from antiquity until medieval times represented numbers by com-
plicated arrangements of I, V, X, L, C, D, and M. Even a simple calculation, such as
the subtraction of 349 from 427, was mind-bogglingly difficult within a system that
represented those numbers as CCCXLIX and CDXXVII, respectively.
The introduction of Indo-Arabic numerals resolved this problem, representing
the numbers 1 through 9 with distinctive symbols and adding an all-important zero.
With its 0 symbol and ingenious method of representing increasing powers of 10
in successive columns to the left (i.e., units, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc.), the new
number symbols made possible a clearly describable and internally consistent sys-
tem for performing arithmetical calculations. The flexibility and utility of this new
system were immediately recognized by Al-Kindi and his slightly older Baghdad
colleague Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwa¬rizmi¬. Recognizing they could not only
easily do calculations, they could also represent unknown or variable numbers by
letters or other symbols, and place them in solvable equations. The Arabic name
Al-Kindi gave to these procedures was al-jabr, meaning “the reunion or restoration
of broken parts.” Here was the root and origin of the modern word algebra.
On an abstract level, the new system comprised an infinite array of numbers
that could be studied in their own right (independently of association with partic-
ular objects) and classified into logical subgroups (such as odd, even, and prime
numbers; squares; cubes). A new mathematical field of number theory arose, dedi-
cated to the study of these “pure” numbers and the often surprising interrelation-
ships among their subgroups. If Plato and the Pythagoreans were still living, they
would have rejoiced at the discovery of this fascinating realm of ideal mathemat-
ical forms existing independently of the concrete appearances of everyday life.
The new system, however, also held enormous implications for the world of
everyday life, most immediately in practical fields like accounting and finance,
but also more gradually in scientific projects that calculated the relationships
between quantitatively measured variables. Some eight centuries after Al-Kindi,
the great Italian scientist Galileo summarized the field of physics in saying, “This
grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze . . .
is written in the language of mathematics.”7 A century after Galileo, the great
French physicist Pierre Laplace noted that all of this progress depended on the
Indo-Arabic numbering system, which he described as:
[A] profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we
ignore its true merit. . . . Its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to
all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and
we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement when we remember that
it escaped the genius of . . . the greatest minds produced by antiquity.8
Quite apart from these important applications, the new system had profound
implications for theories about the mind. We shall see in Chapter 14 how the act
of calculating with Indo-Arabic numerals came to be seen as a model for the sys-
tematic manipulation of symbols in general—a process assumed to underlie all
logical reasoning. This idea directly stimulated the development first of mechan-
ical calculators and then of electronic computers, whose “artificial intelligence”
has played a role in the rise of modern cognitive psychology.
Alhazen and Modern Visual Science

About a century after Al-Kindi’s death another great scholar was born in the
city of Basra, named Ibn al-Haytham, known to later European scholars by the
Latinized translation Alhazen (ca. 965–1040). Like Al-Kindi, Alhazen was a child
prodigy who mastered many fields before moving to a larger, more important
city—in his case the Egyptian capital of Cairo. Full of youthful ambition and con-
fidence, he impressed the caliph (the supreme religious and political leader) with
a proposal to regulate the annual flooding of the River Nile by building a dam far
to the south at Aswan. Soon enough he realized that such a project was far be-
yond the technological capacities of the time (it would be nearly a thousand years
before the Aswan dam could be successfully built). This presented a dilemma
because the caliph did not take kindly to failure. According to legend, Alhazen so
feared the caliph’s anger that he pretended to go insane, and went into seclusion
for ten years until the ruler died.
Whatever the details, Alhazen did retreat from the public eye for several years
to write major treatises on astronomy, mathematical number theory, geometry,
and most importantly for modern psychology, optics and the theory of visual
perception. His seven-volume Book of Optics, based on rigorous experimental
methods and observations that continue to hold up today, remains foundational
for visual scientists.
In this work Alhazen resolved a debate that had gone on since classical times
about whether vision worked because of “probes” emitted from the eyes out to the
sensed objects, or because of signals or rays originating in the objects and impress-
ing themselves on the eyes. Alhazen decided in favor of the second alternative,
partly through experiments with a camera obscura, or pinhole camera, a prede-
cessor of modern cameras consisting of a darkened box with a small hole on one
side through which light from the external scene or object enters. When the thin
light beam enters the box, it projects a miniature and inverted image of the outside
scene onto the back wall. Alhazen recognized that something similar happens in
the human eye, when light from the outside world is refracted by the lens in front to
result in inverted images on the retina in the back. We shall see in Chapter 2 how
this phenomenon intrigued and puzzled the philosopher Descartes.
In substantial detail, Alhazen described the geometrical properties of light rays
and their reflection, the features of the eye as an optical device, the influence of
binocular (two-eyed) vision in enabling depth perception, and a number of what
are now considered psychological phenomena, including the “moon illusion”—why
the moon appears larger when rising from the horizon than when positioned high
in the sky. We shall see in Chapter 5 how the scientific investigation of visual per-
ception, including optical illusions, played an essential role in the origination of
experimental psychology in the nineteenth century. A leading modern expert on
the psychology of vision has stated that Alhazen’s book “inspired all other books
on optics from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century; . . . he used mathematics
and experimental observation to examine the human visual system more system-
atically than anyone before him or anyone after him until the nineteenth century.”9
Figure 1.8 Alhazen on an Iraqi banknote.
Alhazen is also remembered as a national hero in his native country of Iraq, and has
been pictured on several of its banknotes (Figure 1.8).
Avicenna on Medicine and the Aristotelian Soul

Our third early Islamic polymath, whose birthname was Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn
Sina but became known in the West as Avicenna (ca. 980–1037), was born in the
Persian city of Bukhara (now part of Uzbekistan) and spent most of his adult life
in what is today Iran. Fifteen years younger than Alhazen, the amazingly versatile
Avicenna came the closest of our three pioneers to assuming the full mantle of
an Islamic Aristotle.
Avicenna left behind a personal document notable for its lack of modesty
(perhaps partly due to embellishments added by the student who recorded it).
It describes young Avicenna as a prodigy who had memorized the Koran by age
10, who learned arithmetic and algebra from a local greengrocer, and was tutored
in logic by a professional teacher at age 12. Rapidly surpassing his teachers, he
continued his studies independently, focusing on translations of the early Greek
philosophers. Sometime in his mid-teens he undertook the study of medicine,
carefully observing doctor-patient interactions whenever possible and quickly
developing skills as an independent physician.
Declaring that medicine was much easier to master than mathematics or philos-
ophy, he became famous at age 18 for curing the local sultan of a mysterious illness,
and in reward was granted access to his patient’s magnificent library. He immersed
himself in and literally memorized Aristotle’s major metaphysical writings, and,
in a rare note of humility, confessed to finding them difficult until discovering a
century-old commentary on them by an earlier Persian scholar.
This opened the gates, and at age 21 Avecenna embarked on a prolific career
of analyzing and writing about basic Aristotelian themes—amounting to virtu-
ally the entire realm of recorded knowledge. Some 250 of Avecenna’s works still
survive, representing just over half the titles he is known to have produced. Two
massive works, in particular, cemented his historical reputation.
The Canon of Medicine was a five-volume compendium of everything
Avicenna had learned and practiced in what was, for him, the “easy” discipline of
healing. The first part discussed the humoral theory of the Hippocratics, and some
modifications of it that had been proposed by the famous Greco-Roman physician
Claudius Galen in the second century AD. Most of the work, however, provided
detailed empirical observations of many disease states, ranging from those spe-
cific to particular organs to those that are systemic (e.g., fevers), and described the
most effective techniques that had been developed to treat them. The treatments
included more than 700 drugs and other chemical or herbal remedies that had up
to then been tried and tested. Significantly, Avecenna did not consider this list to
be fixed and unchangeable, and prescribed proper methods for systematically
testing new remedies. Ironically, this suggestion that medicine was not a fixed
discipline but was ever-evolving and should be “evidence-based” (as modern ter-
minology puts it) was widely overlooked for many centuries, and the main body of
Avicenna’s Canon became regarded as the definitive medical textbook for many
centuries, in European as well as Arabic countries. Figure 1.9 shows Avicenna and
Figure 1.9 Avicenna (ca. 980-1037), and the title page from a Latin translation of his
Canon of Medicine.
the title page from a Latin translation of his Canon of Medicine, published more
than 500 years after his death. As we’ll see in Chapter 2, only in the latter 1600s did
John Locke and other European physicians begin to practice a medicine that was
based on evidence and experiment rather than medieval theories.
The title of Avicenna’s second monumental work is variously translated as
The Book of the Cure or The Book of Healing. Although it sounds like another
medical text, it was actually an encyclopedia covering the full range of topics
Aristotle had discussed, intended as a cure for ignorance rather than physical dis-
eases. Its coverage included philosophy (logic and metaphysics); mathematics
(encompassing astronomy and music as well as geometry, advanced arithmetic,
and algebra); natural sciences (physics, chemistry, geology); and an exposition
of the Aristotelian soul. Considered as a whole, this work more than any other
summarized and crystallized classical Greek thought and preserved it for future
study, while at the same time discussing it in light of the scientific and mathemat-
ical discoveries by Avicenna and his contemporaries.
Avicenna’s discussion of the soul included two noteworthy features. First, it
elaborated, in some significant ways, on Aristotle’s hierarchy of functions, par-
ticularly those constituting the sensitive soul. Avicenna differentiated between
what he called the “exterior” and “interior” senses. The exterior senses constituted
the basic capacities for receiving impressions via the organs of vision, hearing,
touch, taste, and smell; the interior senses all involved doing something with those
exterior sensations. The “common sense,” for example, allows impressions from
several different exterior senses to be combined into perceptions of actual
objects (such as the sight, smell, touch, and taste of an apple). “Imagination”
creates mental copies of those objects, “estimation” provides intuitions about
the possible benefits or dangers of the objects, and “memory” and “recollection”
enable the mental recreation of them when they are no longer physically pres-
ent. Most significantly, Avicenna added to these essentially receptive functions of
the traditional sensitive soul an internally originating motivating function that he
referred to as “appetition.” Whereas the “estimations” enable the soul to distin-
guish desirable or undesirable objects, the “appetites” provide the impulses and
energy to approach the former and avoid the latter. This idea was not only an
echoing of Plato’s postulation of the appetites as one of the three components of
the psyche, but also a foreshadowing of much later developments in which the role
of internally originating motives and emotions would be stressed in what we call
dynamic psychologies.
Avicenna’s second noteworthy elaboration of Aristotle concerned the ratio-
nal soul. In a famous floating man thought experiment, he asked his reader
to imagine a newly created but fully formed man suspended in space with
his sense organs blocked and limbs constrained to prevent moving or touching.
Avicenna’s question: With no prior recollected experience and with all sensory
organs blocked, would this man have any consciousness of his own soul or self?
Avicenna’s answer was a resounding yes. For him, self-awareness was an innate
capacity of the human rational soul, and evidence for the soul’s or the mind’s dis-
tinct existence independent of the body and its physical sensations. In Chapter 2,
we’ll see how Descartes came to a very similar conclusion, which had significant
consequences for the subsequent discipline of psychology.
During his lifetime Avicenna was celebrated for his brilliance as a doctor and
scholar, but his outspoken and often arrogant personal style also made enemies.
Some accused him of having an inordinate fondness for wine and women, and this
reputation may have played a role in his demise. In the late spring of 1037, while
serving as physician to a powerful Persian prince on a military campaign, he was
overcome with severe intestinal symptoms. Resisting advice from friends to stop
and rest, he reportedly said it was better to lead a short life with width than a nar-
row one with length, and carried on while prescribing for himself some powerful
medications. Possibly because an enemy tampered with these and secretly added
a poison, they failed in their purpose, and Avicenna died at the age of 57. His grave
in the Iranian city of Hamadan has remained until the present day as a much-
visited memorial to one of history’s greatest scholars.
EUROPE’S INTELLECTUAL REAWAKENING

If not for these great Islamic scholars and their numerous colleagues, the Western
intellectual world would look very different today. As previously noted, early Chris-
tian Europeans regarded the pagan Greek and Roman manuscripts with hostility
and suspicion. Left to them, the great classical works would have been deliberately
destroyed or allowed to disintegrate and disappear. Inevitably, however, by the
year 1000 there was increasing contact between the Christian and Islamic worlds.
Although at first this contact was hostile during the Crusades, things gradually
became more peaceful and civilized.
Trade was one such peaceful enterprise, and in the late 1100s a young
Italian named Leonardo Fibonacci (ca. 1170–1240) frequently accompanied
his wealthy merchant father on trips to north Africa. Interested in keeping
accounts, he learned about Al-Kindi’s system of Indo-Arabic numerals, and in
1202 wrote a book in Latin, Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation) describing its
uses and virtues. These included not just practical arithmetical operations,
but also several engaging problems in algebra and an important contribution
to number theory: He described a fascinating series of numbers, now named
after him as the Fibonacci sequence, in which each new number is the sum of
Europe’s Intellectual Reawakening 53
the two that preceded it: 1 (0+1), 2 (1+1), 3 (2+1), 5 (3+2), 8 (5+3), 13 (8+5), 21 (13+8),
and so on.
This sequence has many interesting features, including the fact that as the
sequence progresses, the ratio between each number and the one that follows
comes ever closer to a value that has come to be known as the golden ratio. There-
fore, 1/2 = .500; 2/3 = .667; 3/5 = .600; 5/8 = .625; 8/13 = .6154; 13/21 = .61905, and so
on, as each decimal fraction closes in on, but never quite reaches, a proportion
of .6180339887 . . . carried on to indefinitely many decimal places. The proportion
represented by this irrational number (i.e., one that can never be completely rep-
resented by a complete numerical fraction, like the famous pi) has proven to have
central significance in geometry, patterns of organic growth, and aesthetics.
Fibonacci’s book was an immediate hit with European scholars, and established
number-based mathematics as a major field of study.
Some peaceful mixing of cultures also took place at locations on or near the
borders of Christian and Islamic territories, such as Sicily and, especially, the
southern half of Spain. The small but cosmopolitan city of Toledo in central Spain
became a particular center for the mingling of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish
populations. During the early 1100s, a flourishing “school of translators” arose:
Arabic-speaking Christians who translated the great Arabic texts (including their
translations of the original Greek classics) into Latin.
An educated Christian class had been growing in other parts of Europe,
concentrated first in monasteries and then in church-related and explicitly
scholarly institutions they called “universities.” The first university was estab-
lished in Bologna, Italy, in 1088, followed by others in Paris, Oxford, and Modena
in the following century, and a host of other cities soon afterwards. Besides
offering training in medicine and law, the universities also became forums for
the analysis, discussion, and debate over scholarly works—and their practition-
ers became known as scholastics or “schoolmen.” At first their studies focused
on theological and other sacred writings in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but
gradually the translations from the Arabic emanating from Toledo and elsewhere
became part of their curriculum.
Although aspects of the classical works at first seemed shocking, the Islamic
commentators had gone out of their way to show how the major ideas could be har-
monized with their own monotheistic faith. Soon enough the scholastics came to a
similar conclusion. Plato’s notion of a world of perfect and ideal forms, perceived
only indistinctly by imperfect but potentially immortal souls, could be equated
with heaven as the goal for repentant sinners. Aristotle came to be particularly
esteemed by the great scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274; he was
elevated to sainthood in 1323). Aristotle’s idea of a purposeful unmoved mover as
creator of the universe could be equated with the Christian God, and Avicenna’s
conception of the Aristotelian soul could be compatible with both monotheism
and, in its rational component, immortality. Immensely influential, Aquinas
referred to Aristotle as “the Philosopher,” and established Aristotelianism as an
intrinsic part of medieval Christian doctrines.
The European rediscovery of Democritus and atomic theory would take longer.
An Italian book lover and scribe (someone who produced handwritten copies of
manuscripts) came upon the only surviving copy of Lucretius’s poem in an obscure
monastery in 1417. Recognizing its uniqueness and beauty, he produced and over-
saw the production and distribution of copies. As a result, the atomic theory was
introduced into Western Europe. Initially greeted with shock and outrage for its
apparently materialistic and atheistic implications, its conception of tiny and
interacting material particles as the fundamental elements of the physical universe
gradually and increasingly attracted the attention of serious scientific thinkers.*
Among the most important of the modern thinkers was the Frenchman René
Descartes. Trained in classical doctrines, with further appreciation of the Islamic
contributions to mathematics and science, and knowledge of the general atomic
model, he reformulated the Aristotelian psyche in a way that provided essential
foundations for an eventual science of psychology. Descartes and two of his most
important successors are the main pioneers covered in the next chapter.
*The full story of the initial obscurity and subsequent rediscovery of Lucretius is told by Stephen
Greenblatt in his prizewinning book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York:
Norton, 2011).
Chapter Review 55
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
The early Greeks invented philosophy (“love of wisdom”) further “higher” abilities to sense, to move themselves,
and first theorized creatively, if often speculatively, in such and sometimes to remember and imagine experiences to
fields as physics (Thales), mathematics (Pythagoras), and animals. Rational souls, with the ability to think logically
medicine (Hippocrates), among others. They also held and to organize experience in terms of innate abstract cat-
that every living organism possesses a psyche, a general egories, were presumably unique to human beings. As the
life-principle with various functions. Our word psychology leader of a school called the Lyceum, Aristotle compiled
derives from this Greek root, and the ancient philosophers and recorded virtually all available knowledge in subjects
raised issues that continue to be relevant to psychology ranging from the arts through science and mathematics
today. to all branches of philosophy, becoming the greatest intel-
Socrates believed the most important sources of wis- lectual authority of his age.
dom resided inside the psyches of his pupils, and that his A contemporary of Socrates, Democritus, proposed a
task was to draw knowledge out of them in conversational radical but underappreciated atomic theory of the physical
question-and-answer dialogues, rather than to impose it universe, holding that everything was composed of tiny,
through lectures promoting his own ideas. By emphasiz- indivisible atoms moving randomly in otherwise empty
ing capacities that lie innate within the mind, Socrates was space, and interacting with one another in unpredictable
the first great proponent of nativism as a philosophy of ways to create material bodies. Later adopted by Epicurus
mind. His pupil Plato expanded on this approach when and made the subject of a poem by the Roman writer
he differentiated between transient appearances, (every- Lucretius, atomism remained a distinctly minority view and
day sensations and conscious experiences we have of the was widely condemned as atheistic because of its mecha-
external world), and the eternal and abstract ideal forms nistic emphasis on random causation.
that lie behind appearances. He likened appearances to After the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity in
the shadows cast by a brightly illuminated object, reflect- Europe, classical Greek philosophy was regarded as pagan
ing only superficial and incomplete aspects of the true blasphemy and would have been completely lost had it
form, whose qualities can only be comprehended follow- not been preserved by a series of brilliant Islamic scholars.
ing deep rational contemplation. Plato thought the human Al-Kindi promoted Aristotelian philosophy and introduced
psyche has three components governing the appetites, the system of Indo-Arabic numerals, which revolutionized
courage, and reason, which occur in unequal proportions computational mathematics and made possible most of
within different individuals. modern science. Alhazen refined classical theories about
Plato’s student Aristotle placed greater emphasis on light and the optical properties of the eye, laying impor-
empiricism, the observation and classification of those tant foundations for modern visual science. Avicenna
sensory experiences Plato had dismissed as mere ap- codified medical knowledge and amplified Aristotle’s con-
pearances. Aristotle initiated the field of biological tax- ceptions of the soul while also showing that they could be
onomy by meticulously observing countless animal and compatible with the monotheistic religion of Islam. After
plant specimens and organizing them into a hierarchy the hostilities of the Crusades waned, Christian and Islamic
of groups and subgroups. In his work Peri Psyche (On scholars interacted so that classical learning was reintro-
the Soul ), he attributed just the elementary functions of duced into Europe and integrated into the curriculum of
nutrition and reproduction to the psyches of plants, and medieval universities.
Key Pioneers
Plato, p. 23 Protagoras, p. 30 Al-Kindi, p. 46
Socrates, p. 24 Hippocrates, p. 30 Alhazen, p. 47
Aristotle, p. 25 Xenophon, p. 32 Avicenna, p. 49
Thales, p. 28 Theophrastus, p. 38 Leonardo Fibonacci, p. 52
Pythagoras, p. 29 Democritus, p. 43 Thomas Aquinas, p. 53
Heraclitus, p. 29 Epicurus, p. 44
Zeno, p. 29 Lucretius, p. 45
Key Terms
sophist, p. 23 rational soul, p. 41
nativism, p. 24 categories, p. 42
rationalism, p. 24 Aristotelian logic, p. 42
the Academy, p. 24 atomic theory, p. 43
empiricism, p. 25 causality, p. 44
psyche, p. 28 material cause, p. 44
Hippocratic Corpus, p. 30 formal cause, p. 44
humoral theory, p. 30 efficient cause, p. 44
humors, p. 30 final cause, p. 44
appearance, p. 34 De Rerum Natura, p. 45
ideal form, p. 34 Islamic empire, p. 45
idealism, p. 34 Indo-Arabic numerals, p. 46
allegory of the cave, p. 35 camera obscura, p. 48
Lyceum, p. 39 Canon of Medicine, p. 50
taxonomy, p. 40 The Book of the Cure (The Book of
scale of nature, p. 41 Healing), p. 51
vegetative soul, p. 41 floating man thought
sensitive soul, p. 41 experiment, p. 51

1. Choose three of the presocratic philosophers whose ideas you find most interesting.
Describe their ideas, and explain why they interest you. What were the implications for
future psychology?
2. Describe and compare the ways Plato and Aristotle regarded empirical, sensory
experience and its relationship to innate characteristics of the mind.
3. What are the most important features of the human psyche or soul, as conceptualized
by Plato, Aristotle, and Avicenna? What are the most important similarities and differ-
ences among those conceptions?
4. If Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus got together for an extended conversation,
what would they be most likely to talk about, and how would the conversation go?
Chapter Review 57
Suggested Resources
An entertaining introduction to the history of philosophy is provided by Peter Adamson in
his extensive series of podcasts, “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps,” available online
at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Printed versions of his earliest lectures, covering Greek phi-
losophy from Thales through Aristotle and his immediate successors, are available in Peter
Adamson, Classical Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). His extensive
coverage of Islamic philosophy is in the podcasts (not yet in print).
Christopher Green and Philip Groff discuss the specific relevance of ancient thought
to psychology in Early Psychological Thought: Ancient Accounts of Mind and Soul
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). R. M. Hare’s Plato (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
1996) and Jonathan Barnes’s Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2000) provide useful summaries of their subjects’ philosophies. Ian P.
Howard presents an appreciative account of Alhazen’s importance for the psychology of
vision in “Alhazen’s Neglected Discoveries of Visual Phenomena,” Perception 25 (1996),
1203–1217. For the interesting story of how Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, with its poetic
account of Democritean atomic theory and its revolutionary scientific implications, came to
be lost and then rediscovered in the early 1400s, see Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How
the World became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011).
CHAPTER 2
Pioneering Philosophers of
Mind: Descartes, Locke,
and Leibniz
René Descartes and the Mind-Body Distinction

John Locke and the Empiricist Tradition
Gottfried Leibniz and Continental Nativism
A round the year 1615, a troubled young man named René Descartes took up
solitary residence in the quiet Paris suburb of St. Germain. The wealthy
son of a minor aristocrat, René had been the best student at the best school in
the country. Yet now, in the midst of what today we might call an identity crisis,
he felt his elite education didn’t count for much and belittled the value of his
academic subjects. The classics were occasionally interesting, but they overval-
ued the past at the expense of the present. Literature, he complained, “makes
us imagine a number of events as possible which are really impossible.” He dis-
missed mathematics because, despite the pleasing certainty of its results, in
Descartes’s jaded view it had never yet been applied to the solution of important
practical problems. Philosophy, despite centuries of study, had never “produced
anything which is not in dispute and consequently doubtful and uncertain.” He
lamented that “from my childhood I lived in a world of books, [believing] that by
their help I could gain a clear and assured understanding of everything useful
59
60 2 | Pioneering Philosophers of Mind: Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz
in life.” But now, having finished his formal studies, “I found myself so saddled
with doubts and errors that I seemed to have gained nothing in trying to edu-
cate myself unless it was to discover more and more fully how ignorant I was.”1
Besides this self-report we know one more thing about Descartes’s sojourn in
St. Germain. While there he noted with interest a series of intricate mechanical stat-
ues, similar to the one in Figure 2.1, that had been constructed by the queen’s foun-
taineers in grottoes in the banks of the River Seine. When visitors stepped on plates
hidden in the floor, water flowed through pipes and valves in the statues and caused
them to move. As one approached a statue of the goddess Diana bathing, for exam-
ple, she retreated modestly into the depths of the grotto; upon further approach, a
statue of the god Neptune came forward waving his trident protectively.
Several years later, after Descartes had resolved his crisis and become an en-
thusiastic philosopher himself, he offered the statues as simplified but accurate
models of the way living bodies sense, react to, and move about in their environ-
ments. In doing so he became one of the first influential thinkers to suggest fully
mechanistic explanations for the traditional functions of the Aristotelian sensi-
tive psyche or soul. As we have seen, the traditional view held that living things
sensed, reacted, and moved because they had sensitive souls, and the analysis
went no further. Now, the psychic functions themselves became things to be
explained, in terms of more fundamental mechanistic processes.
Descartes set an important limit to this kind of explanation, exempting from
it the highest functions of the Aristotelian rational soul. He described the human
Figure 2.1 A water driven mechanical statue in St. Germain, Paris.

mind and body as two interacting but distinctly different entities, each requiring
its own kind of analysis and explanation. His speculations about this mind-body
distinction reignited debates dating back to Plato and Aristotle about the relative
virtues of empiricism, nativism, and rationalism.
After his death, different aspects of Descartes’s thought were further devel-
oped by two important successors, the Englishman John Locke and the German
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Collectively these three men promoted crucial ideas
in mental philosophy that ultimately combined and coalesced in the nineteenth
century as the foundations for a modern discipline of scientific psychology.
RENÉ DESCARTES AND THE MIND-BODY DISTINCTION

René Descartes (1596–1650) was born near the small town of La Haye in northeast-
ern France. As an intellectually precocious 10-year-old he was sent by his father, a
prosperous lawyer, to the best and most progressive school in France, the College
at La Flèche. The curriculum there included the traditional “scholastic” doctrines
on theology and philosophy, with heavy emphasis on Aristotle as reinterpreted
by Aquinas and Avicenna (see Chapter 1). But pupils also studied literature,
languages, algebraic mathematics, and some science which probably included
Alhazen’s theories of light and vision. Often the science was strongly tinged with
theology, as when the astonishing discovery, by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642), of previously unknown moons revolving around the planet Jupiter was
duly noted but explained as the miraculous creation by God of new “stars” to mark
the recent death of France’s King Henri IV.
Descartes absorbed all of this while becoming the top student at his school.
According to legend, he convinced his teachers that he did his best thinking
while meditating in bed, earning the extraordinary privilege of resting there
during the early mornings while other students were already doing chores.
This story may be mythical, but in later life Descartes actually did a good
deal of serious thinking while in bed, jotting down notes on paper kept on
his bedside table.2 In any case, when Descartes left La Flèche at age 16 he was
a top graduate from the best school in the country, and he exaggerated only
slightly when claiming to have learned everything that could be learned from
the books existing at the time.
Independently wealthy and without adult supervision, he migrated to Paris
where at first he gambled and engaged in other mild forms of misbehavior. He
gradually came under the wholesome influence of Marin Mersenne, an older
La Flèche alumnus and a Franciscan monk. With broad contacts throughout the
scholarly world, Mersenne took Descartes under his wing and provided both
intellectual and personal support. Too soon, however, Mersenne had to leave
Paris, and an unmoored Descartes retreated to St. Germain. Under circumstances
that remain unknown, he decided in 1618 to end his self-imposed isolation and
see whether the “real world” could offer more satisfying knowledge than the aca-
demic ivory tower: he would become a soldier.
Europe was on the brink of the Thirty Years War, which pitted Catholic against
Protestant armies in an outgrowth of the Lutheran Reformation. Although a
Catholic, Descartes first joined the Protestant forces billeted in the Dutch city of
Breda. Fighting had not yet begun, and after a few months of boredom Descartes
found “nothing there to satisfy me. . . . just about as much difference of opinion
as I had previously remarked among scholars.”3 Things changed after a chance
meeting with an expert mathematician named Isaac Beeckman who was visiting
Breda. Surprised to find a soldier who knew mathematics, Beeckman befriended
young Descartes, and like Mersenne in Paris, became a mentor. With his encour-
agement Descartes wrote his first serious scholarly work, an essay on music.
When Beeckman had to leave Breda, Descartes had no strong reason to
remain there either. With little personal commitment to the Protestant cause, he
decided to try life with the Catholic forces then gathered in southern Germany.
His renewed intellectual interests remained strong, however, and on his mean-
dering journey south he had two major insights.
The first occurred while he was meditating in bed at his inn one morning and
noticed a fly buzzing in the corner of his room. In a flash of inspiration he realized
that the fly’s position at any instant could be precisely defined by three numbers,
representing the fly’s perpendicular distances from the two walls and the ceiling.4
Generalizing from this, he recognized that any point in space could similarly be
defined by its numerical distances from arbitrarily defined lines or planes, and
further that the shape of a moving point’s course could be defined by a sequence
of such numbers. Here was a potential method for integrating geometry (the
study of shapes) with algebra (numerical calculations)—the founding idea for a
new discipline of analytic geometry, which has since become a standard part of
the mathematical curriculum. In Descartes’s honor the distances of a point from
the perpendicular x- and y-axes (the abcissa and ordinate) of the standard graph
are known as the Cartesian coordinates.
Although pleased with this new expansion of mathematical applications,
Descartes still strongly doubted that mathematical-like certainty could ever be
achieved in other areas of inquiry. His doubts became oppressive as he proceeded
south to the German city of Ulm, where he rented a heated room. There, on a
November evening when most of the city’s residents celebrated a holiday, Descartes
had a second surprising insight. It obsessed him for several hours until he collapsed
exhausted on his bed, and proceeded to have a series of vivid dreams. Initially
they were violent and panic-filled, until a terrific lightning flash filled the room with
sparks and then his sleep and dreams became calm. He dreamed of an engraved book
of poetry containing the line “What path in life shall I follow?” The book vanished,
and then reappeared, decorated with new and better engravings. Descartes woke up
with the feeling that the improved book at the end of his dream symbolized a bene-
diction on his new insight: the idea for a new method of obtaining true knowledge.
Descartes’s Method and “Simple Natures”

Fittingly, the inspirational idea behind Descartes’s new method enabled him to
make a virtue out of precisely the attitude that had plagued him so much—his
propensity for skepticism and doubt. Now his “first rule” for acquiring knowledge
would be “never to accept anything as true unless . . . . it presented itself so clearly
and distinctly in my mind that there was no reason or occasion to doubt.”5 He
would now doubt everything— including the pronouncements of authorities and
presumed “experts”—deliberately and systematically until hitting a bedrock of
absolutely unchallengeable ideas.
Descartes believed that after discovering a set of clear, distinct, and unques-
tionably real entities he could use them as the starting points in a geometry-like
mode of reasoning in many different fields of knowledge. Geometry starts with a
small number of self-evident and certainly true axioms, such as the assertion that
a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. It then links them to-
gether in small but logically correct steps to arrive at complex but also certainly
true conclusions or theorems. Descartes now planned to use systematic doubt to
arrive at foundational concepts that, like geometrical axioms, would be the start-
ing points for deductive reasoning in all sorts of nonmathematical fields.
With this inspiration, Descartes gave up the idea of being a soldier and began
applying his method to a host of important intellectual questions. Previously a
reclusive and personally troubled young man drifting aimlessly through life, he
now became a man with a mission. Because of his independent wealth, he was
able to work privately and in obscurity for nine years following his inspiration in
Ulm. During this time he wrote, but did not publish, “Rules for the Direction of the
Mind,” an early attempt to apply his method to the analysis of the physical world.
He started by arguing that the most elementary and fundamental properties
of physical phenomena, which he called simple natures, had to be those whose
existence could not be analyzed or doubted. The vast majority of our sensory
impressions may seem vivid and obvious, he noted, but they may be mislead-
ing. For example, a stick partially immersed in clear water appears to be bent,
but when removed it is actually straight. As had been noted by Alhazen and
other ancients, there are many compelling optical illusions in which a vivid and
convincing visual impression is inaccurate.
After systematically doubting all of his sensory experiences, Descartes con-

cluded that just two physical properties qualified as simple natures: extension,
the space occupied by a physical particle or body, and motion, the movement
of an extended particle or body throughout space. All physical phenomena, he
believed, could be explained in terms of just these two properties. Light, heat,
sound, and all other sensory impressions presumably resulted from the motions
and interactions of extremely small but still extended material bodies or particles.
As Descartes was developing these ideas, he may have known that Galileo in
Italy had proposed something very similar when he distinguished between what
he called the primary and secondary qualities of physical matter. For Galileo,
physical reality depended ultimately on the interactions of material particles hav-
ing the three primary qualities of shape, quantity, and motion. Everything in the
universe arises from these qualities, including not only the objects we perceive but
also our sensory organs that do the perceiving. And when the primary qualities of
the perceived objects interact with the primary qualities constituting the sensory
organs, the result is the creation of secondary qualities, such as sights, sounds,
smells, and feelings. In other words, our conscious experiences of the world are
secondary to, and of a completely different order from, the elemental primary
qualities that ultimately cause them. These “modern” theories of Descartes and
Galileo, of course, represented a blending of the ancient atomic theory of indivis-
ible atoms, or particles, in motion and the Platonic distinction between appear-
ances and the ideal forms that underlie them (see Chapter 1).
The reclusive Descartes did not publicize his emerging ideas for many years,
until he happened to attend a public lecture on chemistry and the lecturer failed
to appreciate the concept of simple natures. Descartes spoke up to correct him,
and strongly impressed an influential clergyman in the audience who befriended
the shy philosopher and urged him to publish a systematic account of his views.
Descartes decided to write a major book synthesizing his ideas on what he called
“mechanics” and “medicine”: in today’s terms, physics and physiology. It took
him five years to complete a long manuscript in French with two parts entitled
Traité de la Lumière (Treatise of Light) and Traité de l’Homme (Treatise of Man).
Just as he was about to send the work to the printer, however, he was shocked
to learn that Galileo had recently been condemned by the Catholic Church for
supporting the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun, not
vice-versa. The Church had previously tolerated this idea when labeled a hypo
thesis and not a fact, but now declared its very description to be a crime. Galileo
had publicly recanted upon threat of torture. Descartes’s book also hypothesized
a sun-centered universe, and even though he was living in Protestant Holland
and out of personal danger, he wanted his work to be acceptable in the Catholic
universities of France. He withdrew his book from the printer but fortunately pre-
served the manuscript, which his followers published soon after his death.
The first treatise, with a new and broader title Le Monde (The World) when
first published, described Descartes’s basic conception of the physical makeup
of the universe, before giving special attention to the subjects of light and vision.
In published form the second treatise was simply called L’Homme (Man), and
in it—momentously for the future of biology and psychology—Descartes applied
his physical principles to an analysis of living bodies.
Descartes’s Physics
Descartes’s approach to physics resembled Democritus’s in that it accounted
for the material world on the basis of extended particles in motion, but differed
from it by denying that they move about in a void or vacuum. Descartes saw the
entire universe as completely filled with three different kinds of material particles
in different kinds of motion. When one particle moves, he argued, it leaves no
empty space behind because that space is instantaneously refilled, the same way
a moving fish’s space is refilled with water as it swims.
More specifically, Descartes hypothesized three kinds of particles correspond-
ing to the classical elements of fire, air, and earth. He conceptualized the fire or
heat particles as almost unimaginably tiny so that when aggregated they consti-
tuted “a virtually perfect fluid” capable of filling up space of any shape or size.
These particles had presumably “sifted” through all the other larger particles in
the universe, with most of them congregating in the exact center to form the sun.
Here was his version of the now-forbidden Copernican theory.
Air particles, though larger than fire or heat particles, were still too small to
be individually perceived. More numerous than all other particles, they com-
pletely filled the spaces between objects and, like the water in a fish pond, instan-
taneously moved into the spaces vacated by moving objects. All solid material
objects, including the planets and comets as well as the earth and the things on
it, were presumably composed of accretions of earth particles, the third and
heaviest variety in Descartes’s hypothetical universe.
As its original title suggested, much of The World dealt with light and vision.
Descartes proposed that between any two points there exists a perfectly straight
column of air particles that form the material basis of light rays. When one looks
at an object, a straight column of air particles extends directly between it and the
eye and functions, he argued, similarly to a blind person’s stick: when the tip of the
stick encounters an object, the jolt of its contact is transmitted back to its holder’s
hand. Similarly with vision, vibrations from the particles in the looked-at object
are transmitted along the column of air particles extending between it and the eye.
The eye thus receives direct vibratory impressions of the looked-at object, which
in turn can set off mechanistic responses in the physical structures of the eye.
Here Descartes’s physics intersected with his physiology. He conceptualized
both the eye and the nervous system to which it was connected as physical mech-
anisms operating according to normal physical laws. This was but a part of his
grand project in his second treatise devoted not just to the “man” of its title, but
to living animals in general.
Mechanistic Physiology
A few others before Descartes had begun to explain living bodies mechanisti-
cally. Galileo, for example, had analyzed the body’s bones and joints as if they
were a system of physical levers, and the British physician William Harvey had
described the heart as a physical pumping mechanism in support of his
revolutionary theory that the blood constantly circulates throughout the body.
Descartes’s unique contribution to this movement lay in the scope of the
functions to which he applied mechanistic analysis, described in his treatise. He
analyzed the digestion of food, the circulation of blood, the nourishment and
growth of the body, breathing and respiration, sleeping and waking, sensation
of the external world, imagination, memory, the appetites and emotions, and the
movements of the body. All of these, he declared, occur mechanically, “no more
nor less than do the movements of a clock or other automaton.”6
Descartes’s analyses relied on some primitive but pioneering anatomical
studies. Human dissections being illegal, he haunted butcher shops for informa-
tion about animal bodies and dissected some carcasses himself. He was particu-
larly interested by the branching system of nerves, originating in the brain and
spinal cord and terminating in the various muscles and glands of the body. He
noted that the brain contained cavities, or ventricles, filled with a clear yellowish
liquid he called animal spirits (today known as cerebrospinal fluid). In addition,
on the basis of observations conducted without the benefit of a microscope, he
convinced himself (falsely, we now know) that the long nerves were hollow, and
contained within themselves extremely fine fibers or filaments.
Descartes speculated that the animal body, with a supply of liquid animal spir-
its and a network of hollow, fiber-containing nerves running throughout it, could
be construed as a mechanism similar to a St. Germain statue. Sensory stimulation
in the form of vibrations impacting on the sensory organs could initiate tugs and
pulls on the filaments inside the nerves. Those tugs could then open valves in the
brain, allowing animal spirits to flow back down the nerves and into muscles or
glands, causing them to move or secrete. Figure 2.2 shows how he illustrated this
sequence. Vibrations from a hot fire (A) stimulate sense receptors in the foot (B),
thus pulling a fiber in the long nerve (cc), which

tugs open a valve in the brain (de). Animal spirits
contained in the brain cavity (F) then enter the
long nerve and travel back down through it, result-
ing in the withdrawal of the foot from the fire.
Although some of the anatomical assump-
tions were incorrect, Descartes’s general point
of emphasizing the centrality of the brain and
nervous system in the initiation and control of
behavior marked the modern origin of the field
of neuropsychology. Although he did not use
the exact term, his diagram above illustrates a
fundamental neurophysiological principle now
known as a reflex—a sequence in which a spe-
cific stimulus from the external world (heat from
the fire) automatically elicits a specific response
(pulling away).
A reflex in which the response occurs involun- Figure 2.2 Descartes’s illustration of a reflex.
tarily, and in the same organ that senses its stim-
ulus, is referred to by psychologists today as an unconditioned reflex. Other ex-
amples are an eyeblink in response to a puff of wind, the extension of a knee
when tapped by a doctor’s mallet, or salivation in response to food in the mouth.
Descartes’s model also accounted for another, more complicated type of reflex, in
which the stimulus elicits a different kind of acquired response as a product of
experience and learning. He thought this was possible because nerves from all
parts of the body terminated in the brain where they supposedly had openable
“pores” exposed to the reservoir of animal spirits. Via a shunting mechanism
Descartes did not specify, a stimulus arriving from one nerve might be transmit-
ted to the valve opening the pore of a completely different one. For example, after
repeated experience the auditory stimulus from a dinner bell may elicit an antici-
patory mouthwatering response. In Chapter 9 we’ll see how, long after Descartes,
the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov would make the study of these conditioned
reflexes the foundation of a major chapter in psychology’s history.
Descartes recognized that behavioral responses may also be influenced by
internal emotional factors, and these he explained as the result of localized
“commotions”— currents or eddies—that arise in the pool of animal spirits in
the brain. In anger, for example, the spirits become highly agitated and flow with
particular force toward the nerve openings to result in violent responses; in anxi-
ety or fear, the currents are weak and so are the responses. A body’s responses are
therefore determined by a combination of external stimulation acting on it, and the

internal, “emotional” preparedness of the animal spirits to respond in particular ways.
A related line of reasoning underlay Descartes’s account of the difference
between wakefulness and sleep. In wakefulness the ventricle is maximally filled
and expanded with animal spirits, stretching the surrounding brain tissue and
exposed nerve fibers into a state of tautness and maximum sensitivity to external
stimulation. In sleep the ventricle partially empties and the fibers become flaccid
and incapable of transmitting signals. Only occasionally during sleep do random
eddies in the depleted reservoir of spirits cause isolated parts of the brain to
expand and stretch taut a few nerve fibers, giving rise to the isolated and discon-
nected experiences of dreams.
In sum, Descartes replaced the Aristotelian concepts of vegetative and sen-
sitive souls with mechanistic explanations. Then in one of his most notoriously
controversial pronouncements, he argued that all nonhuman animals could be
completely understood in these mechanistic terms, as automata. Their mech-
anisms were vastly more complicated than those of humanly manufactured
devices, containing more pipes more intricately interconnected with each other,
but in principle they were the same. He summarized metaphorically to a friend,
“The soul of beasts is nothing but their blood.”7
Turning to human beings, Descartes argued that we too have bodies operat-
ing like machines, but with additional capacities for rationality, consciousness,
and free will—the functions of the traditional Aristotelian rational soul. It seemed
obvious to him that his own actions often occurred because he wanted them to,
or because he freely chose them following rational deliberation. He could imag-
ine no mechanistic explanation for this supremely important, subjective side of
human experience, and therefore attributed it to a qualitatively different and
immaterial soul or mind,* which interacts with the bodily machine. His most im-
portant work in the later part of his career dealt with the features of this rational
mind and its interactions with the mechanistic body.
Rational Qualities of the Mind

Even before he developed his ideas about the physical world and the mechanistic
bodies within it, Descartes had given serious attention to the immaterial mind.
In his most famous work, the semi-autobiographical Discourse on Method, he
described how, when he first began to systematically doubt, everything seemed to
*In his original French writings Descartes used the word âme, traditionally translated as soul, spirit,
or mind. Here, when discussing qualities that are most clearly “mental” in current English discourse,
we will translate the term as “mind.” We will use “soul” when Descartes seems to refer to a broader
agency more akin to Aristotle’s rational psyche (see Chapter 1).
be uncertain, including the most obvious and vivid of sensory impressions. It was
always possible that these could be dreams, rather than actual experiences. But as
he continued to doubt, he eventually came upon one idea that seemed absolutely
unquestionable. After deciding to suppose that nothing he thought about was
more real than a dream, “I soon noticed that while I thus wished to think every-
thing false, it was necessarily true that I who thought so was something [real].”8
Although he could doubt the reality of his senses, or even the material exis-
tence of his body and the physical world, he could not doubt the subjective reality
of his own doubting mind. He could not doubt that he was doubting, and so, par-
adoxically, the act of doubting provided Descartes with evidence of the certainty
he desired. He summarized his conclusion with the simple statement “I think,
therefore I am,” whose Latin version—Cogito ergo sum—has become one of the
most famous catchphrases in the history of philosophy.
Descartes concluded that this thinking, rational soul or mind whose absolute
reality could not be doubted “has no need of space nor of any material thing or
body. . . . [It] is entirely distinct from the body and. . . . even if the body were not,
the soul would not cease to be all that it is now.”9 Descartes reflected further that
this soul—this sense of himself as a distinct entity or ego—never appeared directly
or completely in consciousness, like a sensory experience. Although he was abso-
lutely certain it existed, he never experienced its totality as an entity all at once.
This train of thought led him to identify other ideas that, while “real,”
also seemed incapable of being represented by a single sensory experience:
“perfection,” “unity,” “infinity,” and the geometrical axioms came to mind.
Descartes concluded that these ideas, independent as they are of specific sen-
sory experience (but capable of being suggested or alluded to by experience),
must derive from the nature of the thinking soul itself. Accordingly, he called
them the innate ideas of the mind. Although he tended not to acknowledge the
work of his predecessors, his conception of an independent and self-aware ratio-
nal mind showed clear echoes of Avicenna’s floating man and Plato’s notion of a
psyche equipped with innate ideal forms (see Chapter 1), both of which he would
have been exposed to in the course of his education.
Descartes’s belief in innate ideas provided a foundation for much of the rest of
his philosophy. The presumably innate idea of “perfection,” combined with his cer-
tainty of the reality of his own mind, suggested to him that there must exist a God
who embodies all aspects of perfection. Now certain of the existence of a perfect
God as well as of his conscious soul, Descartes felt that properly acquired know
ledge from his senses could be trusted. This was not because the knowledge was
inherently certain itself, but because the integrity of the mind that perceived it, and
the perfection of the God that created both matter and mind, were certainly real.
Interactive Dualism
Because of his sharp distinction between the body and the mind, Descartes is re-
ferred to as a dualist. We have seen that philosophers had differentiated between
a perishable body and an immortal soul, so this general idea of psychophysical
dualism was already established. But Descartes added something new by empha-
sizing the extent to which important phenomena are the result of neither body nor
mind acting alone, but rather of the many possible kinds of interactions between
the two. Sometimes the two agencies work together harmoniously, as when ratio-
nal thought guides the body in meeting its survival needs, or when certain bodily
actions help promote rational thinking. But other times the two conflict with each
other, as when emotions overcome rational restraint, or conscious thoughts and
doubts impede the direct satisfaction of bodily needs. For this reason, Descartes’s
position is commonly referred to as an interactive dualism.
Throughout the 1640s, Descartes developed his dualistic ideas in an extensive
correspondence with a remarkable royal person, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia
(1618–1680; Figure 2.3). Elizabeth’s mother was the daughter of England’s King
James I, and her father was Elector Frederick V, one of eight German princes enti-
tled to elect the Holy Roman Emperor. Briefly the King of Bohemia, Frederick lost
the throne in the political turmoil of the times and retreated to Holland. His large
family included Elizabeth and her younger sister Princess Sophie (1630–1714),
who would later help further the career of Descartes’s successor Gottfried
Figure 2.3 René Descartes (1596–1650) and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680):

philosophical correspondents.
Leibniz. Conveniently, Descartes had also moved to Holland in appreciation of

the (relatively) liberal intellectual climate there.
Although women at that time were denied formal roles in scholarly affairs, the
Elector’s daughters received excellent private education in mathematics, philoso-
phy, and several languages. Elizabeth’s mastery of the classics led her to be nick-
named La Grecque (“The Greek”). She read philosophy avidly and came upon some
of Descartes’s early writings. Living nearby, Descartes learned of her interest and
arranged a meeting. This began a strong intellectual friendship, maintained by an
extensive correspondence in which they discussed both personal and philosophical
issues. Recent historical analysis of this correspondence has revealed Elizabeth as
a significant philosopher in her own right. In particular, she posed important ques-
tions about how, specifically, a material body could interact with an immaterial mind
or soul.10 Descartes’s letters to Elizabeth on the subject became the basis for his last
important book, the 1649 Treatise on the Passions of the Soul.
Descartes’s responses repeated his argument that any body without a soul
would be an automaton, completely under the mechanistic control of external
stimuli and its internal hydraulic condition, and completely without conscious-
ness. Conversely, a soul without a body would have consciousness, but (like
Avicenna’s floating man) only of its own existence and its innate ideas. It would
lack the sensory impressions and ideas of material things that occupy normal
human consciousness most of the time. The body, therefore, adds richness
and complexity to the contents of the mind’s consciousness, while the mind adds
conscious rationality and volition to the causes of behavior.
From today’s perspective, some of Descartes’s strangest theorizing discussed
how the mind gets information from the body’s senses. Aware of Alhazen’s discov-
ery that the front-facing lenses of the eyes project miniature, upside-down images of
external objects onto the retinas at the backs of the two eyeballs, he was troubled by
the fact that the mind somehow manages to consciously experience a single, upright
and full-sized object. Accordingly he believed there must be some specific location
in the body where the double impressions from the eyes “unite before reaching the
soul, and so prevent their representing to it two objects in place of one.”11
Descartes expected this location to be somewhere in the brain, but again was
troubled because the brain was symmetrically divided into two distinct hemi-
spheres. Then he learned about the pineal gland, a small, pinecone-shaped struc-
ture near the center of the brain and extending partially into a large ventricle.
Because the pineal gland seemed to be undivided, Descartes speculated that
here is where sensations from the divided body are reunified for presentation to
the soul. Figure 2.4 shows his diagram of how this process supposedly worked.
The upright arrow (ABC) in the outside world is represented first by miniature,
inverted images of itself on the retinas of the two eyes, which in turn excite nerves
3
a 2
P b 1 B
c
3
2
1
C
Figure 2.4 Descartes’s conception of visual perception.
to project an upright and merged single image (abc) onto the pineal gland (P).
There the soul can perceive and bring to consciousness a unified and accurate
image of the arrow. At this point the soul may also exercise its free will and cause
the pineal gland to move about within its strategic location in the pool of animal
spirits. This response results in enhancing, inhibiting, redirecting, or otherwise
modifying the flow of fluids toward or away from particular nerves, and thereby
influencing reflexive behavioral responses with reason.
The pineal gland’s strategic location within the spirit-filled ventricle also meant
that it was ideally placed to sense the commotions, or eddies, of the animal spirits
that he presumed were the cause of emotions. Descartes called the mind’s conscious
experiences of these commotions the passions—the conscious awareness of feel-
ings such as love, anger, fear, or desire. Following such awareness, the mind may
then attempt to influence the emotion’s effect by initiating movements in the pineal
gland that enhance, inhibit, or redirect the flow of animal spirits—such as splash-
ing even more spirits into the nerves initiating anger responses, or tempering such
responses by moving the gland in a way that partially blocks the flow of spirits.
The specifics of this theory bewildered many of Descartes’s friends and
admirers. Princess Elizabeth was skeptical about the very notion of an immate-
rial agency such as the soul having a direct mechanistic impact on the material
body. She wrote: “It would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to
the soul, than the capacity of moving a body, and of being moved, to an imma-
terial being.”12 Her puzzlement has continued to resonate with many to the pres-
ent day. As we shall see repeatedly throughout this book, questions about what
consciousness, subjectivity and volition are, and how they relate to the physical
functioning of the brain and nervous system, have continued to be hotly debated.
In the view of most, the answers remain inconclusive.
The Legacy of Descartes

Descartes’s life in the 1640s was marked by conflict, change, and tragic irony.
He was devastated when two of his books elaborating on ideas from Discourse
on Method were banned by some religious authorities. A man of sincere if unor-
thodox religious faith, Descartes subsequently sent only the short Passions of the
Soul to the printer and confined the rest of his written thought to unpublished
manuscripts and discursive letters to a few trusted individuals, such as Princess
Elizabeth.
In 1649 another, more powerful royal figure, Queen Christina of Sweden,
invited him to move north and become philosopher-in-residence at her court.
Improbably and ultimately tragically, the shy philosopher agreed to give up his
Dutch anonymity in favor of the fashionable life of a nordic courtier. At the royal
court he was required to spend part of his valuable time writing frivolous verses
to celebrate Christina’s accomplishments. Worst of all, the queen scheduled her
philosophy lessons from Descartes at 5:00 in the morning. Forced to abandon his
meditational bed long before sunrise during the bitter Swedish winter, Descartes
contracted pneumonia. On February 11, 1650, just four months after arriving in
Sweden, he died at the age of 53.
Like several other mental philosophers, including the two we’ll meet next,
Descartes never married. He fathered and briefly provided for one illegitimate
daughter, but she died in childhood so he had no biological descendants. Few
people, however, have ever left a greater intellectual legacy. Besides his contribu-
tions to mathematics, philosophy, and the physical sciences, he provided many
inspirational ideas for a new science of psychology. Although his mechanistic
analyses of the body were wrong in many specifics, his general approach was
both correct and productive. The nervous system and brain truly are the con-
trol centers that regulate behavior, and they operate according to specifiable
physical laws. The general concept of the reflex as a stimulus-response sequence
performed by the nervous system remains a fundamental neurophysiological
principle. In recognizing the importance of emotions and passions as internal in-
fluencing factors that interact with both external stimulation and the constraints
of reason, Descartes anticipated an important tenet of modern psychologists
such as Sigmund Freud, who emphasized the importance of intrapsychic conflict
as an inevitable aspect of human psychology (see Chapter 11).
Descartes’s more general philosophy of mind, with its diverse aspects of
nativism, rationalism, and interactive dualism, has been just as influential, inspir-
ing his successors to react in a variety of creative ways. Two of the most impor-
tant of these, Locke and Leibniz, established strongly contrasting psychological
traditions that continue to the present day.
JOHN LOCKE AND THE EMPIRICIST TRADITION

In 1690 the English philosopher and physician John Locke (1632–1704) pub-
lished his important book, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which
attracted the attention of Gottfried Leibniz in Germany. The two eminent schol-
ars had never met personally, so Leibniz jotted down some reactions to the book
in a short paper, which he asked a mutual friend to transmit to Locke along with
the assurance that “it is not possible to express in a letter the great character
Monsieur Leibniz has of you.” Locke reacted coolly to this overture, however, and
did not condescend to reply. He told a friend, “Mr. L’s great name had raised in me
an expectation which the sight of his paper did not answer.”13
Upon learning that Locke had not fully appreciated his criticisms, Leibniz
expanded on them in a book-length manuscript. In New Essays on Human
Understanding (Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement Humain), a fictional
representative of Locke engages in Platonic-style dialogue with a mouthpiece
for Leibniz himself. Unfortunately, Locke died just as the work was finished, and
Leibniz, not wanting to dispute with a dead author, put his manuscript aside and
it remained unpublished until a half-century after his own death.
It was a shame that these two great philosophers never engaged in real
dialogue, for both had important points to discuss and Locke’s replies to Leibniz
would have been illuminating. And despite their intellectual differences, the two
had much in common. Both had extremely broad interests and had rejected op-
portunities to pursue academic careers in favor of participation in the “real world”
of politics and public affairs. Born outside the wealthy aristocracy, both of these
middle-class men had become courtiers, working for aristocratic patrons who
valued but sometimes restricted their activities. And both had been profoundly
influenced by the earlier work of Descartes, though in quite different ways.
Locke adopted many of Descartes’s basic ideas regarding physics and physiol-
ogy and used them as the foundation for an empiricist theory of knowledge. He
did not accept, however, Descartes’s conception of a constantly active conscious
mind, with a ready-made supply of innate ideas. Leibniz, by contrast, took excep-
tion to aspects of Descartes’s physics, while accepting the reality of an active con-
scious soul with its own important role in creating our experience of the world.
In doing so he advocated a philosophy emphasizing the nativist and rationalist
tendencies of Descartes. These two philosophers initiated major, and often com-
peting intellectual traditions that shaped the development of modern psychology.
Revolution and Tolerance

Born in southern England, Locke experienced an early life dominated first
by the prelude to the English Civil War, and then its actual unfolding during
the 1640s (Figure 2.5). In that conflict his lawyer father strongly supported
the anti-monarchist Puritan Roundheads against the

Royalist Cavaliers, who asserted King Charles I’s divinely
given right to political and religious authority. On the
winning side, the elder Locke was rewarded by an appoint-
ment for his teenaged son to the prestigious Westminster
School in London. John’s fellow students came from many
backgrounds and the school’s remarkable headmaster,
who had personally favored the Royalists, urged students
to think for themselves and to be wary of anyone who tried
to influence them by mere propaganda. In this tolerant at-
mosphere, Locke learned the lasting lesson that there are
two (or more) sides to most viewpoints.
After Westminster, Locke won a scholarship to Oxford
University, which would remain his home for many years.
There he continued to befriend others with differing reli-
gious and political views, and was untroubled in 1660 when
Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth failed and the monar-
chy was restored with King Charles II on the throne. In the Figure 2.5 John Locke (1632–1704).
meantime, Locke was influenced by an intellectual atmo-
sphere that was in transition. Although the official Oxford
curriculum was restricted to classical and medieval texts,
some members of the faculty privately practiced and pro-
moted an observational approach to science and medicine.*
The physician Thomas Willis, for example, studied the brain
in unprecedented detail and made several fundamental ana-
tomical discoveries (see Chapter 3). While earning a degree
in classics, Locke studied on the side with Willis and some
other progressive physicians, attaining the skills— although
not the official degree—of an effective doctor.
Locke also became a follower and friend of the eminent
chemist Robert Boyle (1627–1691; Figure 2.6). Boyle had
previously conducted famous experiments demonstrating
what became known as Boyle’s law: the fact that the volume
of a gas varies inversely with the pressure exerted upon it.
Sociable as well as scientifically ingenious, Boyle regularly
invited colleagues to his Oxford home for scientific discus-
sion in convivial social gatherings. Locke participated so Figure 2.6 Robert Boyle (1627–1691).
*Actually this approach was not so much new, as a long-delayed return to the “evidence-based”
practices advocated by Avicenna several centuries earlier.
actively in these discussions that one irritated member complained that while ev-
eryone else “wrote and took notes from the mouth of their master, [Locke] scorned
to do it. . . . [and] would be prating and troublesome.”14 Boyle himself, however,
enjoyed Locke’s shows of independence and became a lifelong mentor and friend.
During the same period when he was learning the practical elements of sci-
ence and medicine, Locke read Descartes’s works, which reinforced his growing
belief that nothing should be taken on mere authority and gave him “a relish
of philosophical studies.”15 From these varied influences, by his early 30s Locke
had become reasonably expert in classical scholarship, medicine, science, and
philosophy. While each subject had its attractions, none had really gripped him
as the basis for a permanent vocation. At this point fate intervened, and he had a
fortuitous meeting with one of England’s most important political leaders.
Political Involvements
Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621–1683) had been a prominent member first
of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth government, and then, after that failed, of
the new restoration parliament where he became a favorite of King Charles II.
The king named him first Lord Ashley, a baron, and then in 1672 the still higher
Earl of Shaftesbury (Figure 2.7). When Locke met him in 1666, he was still Lord
Ashley, but on his way toward becoming the most influen-
tial politician in the kingdom.
The meeting occurred because Lord Ashley, suffering from
a liver cyst, visited Oxford to drink medicinal waters from a
nearby spring. The doctor who normally provided the water be-
came ill, Locke filled in for him, and the rest, as they say, was his-
tory. Ashley found Locke to be an intelligent and broadly edu-
cated gentleman as well as a skillful physician, and Locke found
in Ashley a mature political mentor whose diverse interests and
tolerant political attitudes meshed perfectly with his own. When
Ashley invited his new young friend to move to London as his
personal physician, Locke happily accepted. Soon after that
Ashley’s cyst became dangerously inflamed and older doctors
despaired of his life. More familiar with recent surgical tech-
niques, Locke took the radical step of inserting a silver drain-
age tube into the cyst through an abdominal incision. Ashley
recovered well, and soon after had Locke replace the silver tube
with a gold one that remained in place for the rest of his life.
Figure 2.7 Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper Locke became a political as well as medical advisor
(1621–1683). after Ashley became the leader of eight wealthy developers
of the wild Carolina territory in America (named after Charles, Carolus in Latin,
and encompassing modern North and South Carolina). Ashley’s role is reflected
today in the names of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers that surround Charleston,
South Carolina, the first and most important city in the new territory. Locke was
entrusted with writing the legal code, or Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Very
liberally by the standards of Locke’s time, if not by ours, the code granted freedom of
worship to all groups who believed in God except for Roman Catholics (an aftermath
of King Henry VIII’s separation of the Church of England from the Church of Rome).
It also granted the democratic right to vote to all landowners of 50 acres or more.
Property rights were strongly safeguarded, including the right to own slaves whose
labor was essential to the Carolina economy from its earliest beginnings.16
Locke found London life stimulating in many other ways. Having recently
moved there, Boyle founded an expanded version of his Oxford group, now called
the Royal Society of London; it quickly became Britain’s most important scientific
organization. As one of its earliest Fellows, Locke kept up with the most significant
new ideas and became friends with important scientists, including Isaac Newton.
He also developed the habit of meeting regularly with friends for informal discus-
sions of diverse political, religious, and philosophical issues.
One of these meetings had momentous consequences when Locke and his
friends discussed the vexing issue of differing moralities and religions. With equally
sincere groups professing different and sometimes mutually exclusive beliefs, the
question arose as to how one might rationally choose among them. After some
inconclusive discussion, it occurred to Locke that “before we set ourselves upon
enquiries of that nature it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what
objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with.”17 Locke accordingly
proposed to examine the nature of knowledge itself, and of the mind or “understand-
ing” that acquires that knowledge, in order to discover exactly what it is possible to
know and, just as important, not to know, with certainty. He optimistically thought
he could resolve this preliminary issue in a page or two of analysis and then move
on to resolving the original religious and moral questions. In fact, it took nearly two
decades of reflection before he was satisfied, as his page or two expanded into his
great book, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Part of the Essay’s long delay occurred because Locke joined his patron
Ashley, who had been elevated to the rank of Earl of Shaftesbury, in a polit-
ical battle regarding the succession to the English throne. Charles II had no
legitimate offspring, and under prevailing laws his younger brother James—a
Catholic—would succeed. Fearing that a Catholic king would owe undue al-
legiance to a non-English power, the pope, Shaftesbury urged Parliament to
pass a law to disqualify Catholics from the succession. An angered Charles
insisted on his brother’s divine right to succeed him, and in the ensuing crisis
Shaftesbury was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Although even-
tually freed he emerged a broken man, fleeing to Holland where he died soon there-
after. Locke himself had come under unfriendly surveillance by the king’s agents,
so he too fled to Holland in 1684. He remained there for five years, assuming the
false name Dr. van der Linden and moving frequently to avoid being traced.
Secretiveness was already part of Locke’s character. For years he had kept
notes in secret codes and shorthand, and he sometimes used invisible ink in corre-
spondence. A handsome bachelor, he had exchanged romantic letters with women
he addressed as Scribelia and Philoclea, calling himself Atticus and Philander.
And although his close friends knew he had fled to Holland for political reasons,
he stated publicly (perhaps with a wink) that it had been mainly for the beer. Qui-
etly, Locke made friends with several liberal Dutch scholars and, more importantly,
found enough leisure time to complete the manuscript for An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, as well as two treatises on the theory of government.
Meanwhile in England, Charles II was succeeded by his Catholic brother
James II, but after three years James was overthrown and replaced by his own
Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. Locke re-
turned to England openly and in triumph, as part of the new queen’s personal
party. Back home under a friendly regime, he felt safe sending his recently com-
pleted manuscripts to a publisher. They appeared as books in 1690, and quickly
made Locke the best known philosopher in England.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Locke began this most famous of his works modestly by stating that although he
himself could never be a master scientist like Boyle or Newton, for him “it is am-
bition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little,
and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge.”18 Believing
that the recent discoveries of such scientists represented the pinnacle of human
knowledge, he saw their methods of systematic observation and experiment as
models for how the human mind operates best.
As his starting point Locke invoked Aristotle’s conception of the inexperienced
mind as a tabula rasa—a blank slate—or, in Locke’s terms, a “white paper void of all
characters.” In answer to the question “How comes this blank slate to be furnished?”
he replied: “in one word, from experience; in [which] all our knowledge is founded.”19
Locke saw the mind essentially as a receptacle for information from the outside world,
and often a passive one. With a touch of sarcasm, he denied Descartes’s conception
of the mind as constantly active: “I confess myself to have one of those dull souls, that
doth not perceive itself always to contemplate ideas; nor can conceive it any more
necessary for the soul always to think, than for the body always to move.”20 He further
disputed Descartes’s notion of innate ideas, arguing that such things as infinity and
perfection do not occur in inexperienced or enfeebled minds, but actually result as
abstractions acquired only in minds that have already had a considerable amount of
experience. They seemed to Locke, in fact, the very opposite of innate.
In terms of the kinds of experiences the mind has, Locke proposed there
were just two: sensations of objects in the external world, and reflections of the
mind’s own operations. These experiences produce representations or ideas in
the mind that become recallable in the form of memories after leaving immediate
consciousness. An inexperienced infant’s earliest sensations and reflections pre-
sumably produce the most basic simple ideas: notions such as redness, round-
ness, loudness, coldness, hardness, and sweetness from the basic senses; and of
states such as wanting, seeing, liking, and disliking from inner reflections. With
repeated experience, simple ideas get combined by the mind in varying ways to
produce complex ideas. For example, redness, roundness, and sweetness may
combine to produce the complex idea of an apple; the notions of an apple and
desiring may combine to produce part of the still more complex idea of hunger.
Although some complex ideas may represent things that do not exist in real-
ity, Locke insisted that all the simple components of such ideas must have been
previously experienced concretely. For example, we can have the idea of a green
horse without having seen such a creature, but not without previous experience
of horses and greenness. Without a concrete basis in simple ideas, even the most
obviously “true” of complex ideas are impossible.
Locke’s friend William Molyneux (1656–1696) provided a famous illustration
of this point in the hypothetical case of a man blind from birth who had learned
to distinguish a ball from a cube by the sense of touch. Molyneux asked whether,
if suddenly granted vision, the man would be able to tell the two apart without
touching them. Molyneux and Locke were certain the answer would be no, be-
cause the ideas created by the newly experienced visual sensations could not be
parts of the complex ideas of a cube and a sphere until being connected with the
older ideas based on touch. Their opinion has been generally confirmed in more
recent times, as surgeons have been able to remove congenital cataracts and
grant sight to patients who were blind from birth. Such patients quite literally
had to learn how to see—a prolonged and sometimes difficult process.
Kinds of Knowledge
After describing the basic nature of ideas, Locke turned his attention to the
nature of knowledge, which he defined as “the perception of the connexion and
agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas.”21 A very few
such perceptions are immediate and irresistible, such as recognizing the differ-
ence (disagreement) between something black and something white, or between
a circle and a triangle. Locke referred to this as intuitive knowledge. Less imme-
diate but equally certain is demonstrative knowledge, exemplified by geometric
or logical reasoning in which a stepwise series of deductions involving axioms
results in a conclusion that is not obvious but definitely true. But for Locke the
largest proportion of human knowledge was neither intuitive nor demonstrative,
but rather sensitive knowledge, created by the particular patterns of sensory
experiences people have.
Sensitive knowledge is questionable because any one person’s experience of
the world is incomplete, and to a large extent random. Locke introduced the term
association of ideas to denote the linking together or combining of ideas, and
noted that although some combinations have “a natural correspondence and con-
nexion with one another,” others, “not at all of kin,” come to be connected “wholly
owing to chance or custom.”22 The first category of “natural” associations in-
cludes the redness and roundness of apples and (especially) the relationships de-
fined in the scientific “laws” recently discovered by researchers such as Boyle and
Newton. The second category includes all of one’s “accidentally” linked ideas,
such as customs dictated by culture rather than nature, superstitions, and one’s
idiosyncratically connected experiences. Although only the natural associations
constitute truly valid knowledge, both kinds can seem equally compelling. For
example, a child who is repeatedly told that goblins inhabit the dark may come to
accept the association between darkness and goblins, just as strongly as the one
between the redness and roundness of apples.
Locke did not specify exactly how ideas come to be associated. His examples,
however, suggest the importance of the factors of contiguity, the experiencing of
two or more ideas either simultaneously or in rapid succession, and the similarity
of two or more experienced ideas. After Locke’s death, his successors introduced
the terms law of association by contiguity and law of association by similarity
to formalize these two principles.
Locke himself expanded on the best way to discover the natural associa-
tions and thus obtain the most valid sensitive knowledge. Echoing Galileo and
Descartes, he distinguished between “primary” qualities inherent in perceived
objects and “secondary” qualities imposed on objects by the senses. He declared
that objects in the material world have the primary qualities of solidity, exten-
sion, figure, and mobility; that is, they are composed of solid and shaped particles
moving about space and interacting with one another.
The secondary qualities are conscious impressions—such as sounds, colors,
temperatures, tastes, and odors—that result when the primary qualities of the
sensed objects interact with those of the sensory organs that perceive them.
The sound of a bell and the taste of an apple, for example, reside as much in the
perceiving ear and tongue as in the bell and apple. Ideas produced by second-
ary qualities have much less certainty than those from primary qualities. If you
immerse one hand in cold water and the other in hot for a minute or so, then
place both hands in tepid water, the tepid water “may produce the sensation of
heat in one hand and cold in the other, whereas it is impossible that the same
water. . . . should at the same time be both hot and cold.”23
Locke concluded, therefore, that “true” sensitive knowledge required the
explanation of secondary qualities in terms of the more basic primary ones. A
bucket of water’s “true” temperature lies not in secondary qualities of warmth or
cold, but in the speed of vibration of its particles—which will seem fast to a hand
whose own particles have been slowed down by prior insertion in icewater, but
slow to the one previously speeded up by hot water. Explanations like this were
similar to the ones coming from the great physical scientists whose work Locke
admired so much.
Practical Implications of Locke’s Philosophy

Recall that Locke’s entire quest to explore the nature and limits of human knowl-
edge was stimulated by a discussion about how to resolve moral, religious,
and political disagreements. The essential message of An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding—that most knowledge comes from experience but that
no single person’s experience is sufficient to establish a complete and error-free
understanding of the world—had obvious implications for that quest. Because no
individual could claim absolute wisdom or exclusive access to truth, tolerance
was needed on religious questions, and wide participation was desirable in the
affairs of government.
Locke spelled out these implications in Two Treatises of Government, pub-
lished at the same time as his Essay. Here he modified and elaborated on a theory
earlier introduced by his countryman Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) to account
for the origins and purposes of civil government. Hobbes saw human beings as
innately aggressive, self-centered, and predatory. Left on their own in the state
of nature, people’s lives would inevitably be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short.”24 Self-interest thus led our ancestors to establish a social contract, join-
ing together in groups, with supreme authority invested in centralized powers
to organize defenses against other groups and to curtail wanton aggression
within themselves. For Hobbes, survival itself required absolute obedience to a
centralized authority, and accordingly he supported the absolute powers of the
monarchy, or of any other already established government.
Locke accepted the notion of a social contract, but he held a more positive
view of basic human nature. His theory postulated an innate ability to learn (how-
ever imperfectly) from experience, and to profit from the combined experiences
of groups of people. Scientific organizations, such as the Royal Society, provided
a perfect example of the collective benefits of sharing experiences and informa-
tion. Accordingly, Locke saw the establishment of the social contract as a rational
choice, bringing real advantage to people by investing protective and regulatory
functions in a centralized authority. Under normal circumstances, reason and
concern for the common good dictate that citizens obey that authority.
Locke further argued, however, that governments could and sometimes did
exceed the reasonable limits of their authority. He saw the contract as being
reciprocal; if an authority grossly violated its subjects’ interests, those subjects
had a “natural” right to be heard and, in extreme cases, to rebel and establish
a new authority. Here was justification for the recent upheavals in England, as
well as the philosophy of government later explicitly adopted by the founders
of the fledgling United States. Their system of participatory democracy, with
checks and balances among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, were
expressly designed to enshrine the values implicit in Locke’s analysis.
***
John Locke spent the final years of his life quietly, as a paying guest on the
large estate of Sir Francis and Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659–1708).
Lady Masham, the daughter of the distinguished Cambridge philosopher Ralph
Cudworth, was also an accomplished philosopher and the Philoclea of Locke’s ear-
lier romantic correspondence. The details of their prior relationship are unknown,
but while Locke had been in exile in Holland, Damaris Cudworth married Sir
Francis Masham and the couple had a son. After Locke became a guest, they all
lived harmoniously under the same roof, and the aging philosopher took an inter-
est in the growing boy and his education. In 1693 Locke published Some Thoughts
Concerning Education, a short work advocating education based on experience
and scientific observation, as opposed to the memorization of Greek and Latin.
He also produced four moderately revised editions of his Essay. Shortly be-
fore his death in 1704 he composed his own epitaph, which stated: “He devoted
his studies wholly to the pursuit of truth. Such you may learn from his writings,
which will also tell you whatever else there is to be said about him more faithfully
than the dubious eulogies of an epitaph.”25
During Locke’s final decade, Lady Masham anonymously published a book on
the philosophy of religion, which praised Locke’s recommendations on education
and pointed out that they were particularly overlooked in the education of most
women. She also corresponded with several foreign philosophers, including Leibniz
in Germany. She could not persuade her famous tenant to do the same, however, so
as noted earlier, Locke died without responding to the brilliant commentator who
would provide another pillar upon which modern psychology would eventually stand.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ AND CONTINENTAL NATIVISM

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716; Figure 2.8) was born in Leipzig, Germany,
the son of a philosophy professor at the city’s famous university. As a true child
prodigy, Gottfried mastered most of the contents of his father’s library by age 12,
and at 14 was admitted to the University of Leipzig. After finishing the standard
classical curriculum, by age 19 he had also completed all the requirements for a
doctorate in law. Informed that he was too young to receive his formal degree and
would have to wait another year, he left Leipzig for the smaller University of Altdorf,
submitted a dissertation, and got his degree within six months. The impressed
Altdorf authorities offered him a professorship, but Leibniz had had enough of uni-
versity life. In an age when paid positions for intellectuals outside universities or
the church were rare, he began his lifelong quest for work that would support him
financially, while also satisfying his voracious intellectual appetite.
After working briefly in Nuremberg, Leibniz migrated
to the city of Mainz, where, in the pattern of Descartes and
Locke, a chance meeting changed his life. He impressed an
important baron who worked for the Elector of Mainz. Much
as Lord Ashley had taken to John Locke a few years earlier,
the baron recognized Leibniz’s great promise and secured
him a position as legal advisor to the Elector. Leibniz now
began his lifelong career as a courtier, earning his keep by
meeting the demands of a series of aristocratic patrons,
while also trying to find time for his own interests.
Mathematical Discoveries in Paris

His early years of service for the Elector were probably the
happiest of Leibniz’s life. He worked with full support on
the development of a new method for teaching law, a cata-
loging system for libraries, and a system for reviewing new
scholarly books. He also began studying the history and
culture of China, a subject that would remain a lifelong in-
terest. Best of all, in 1672 he was sent to Paris as a diplomatic
envoy. He loved the city and made full use of its resources Figure 2.8 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).
for his own projects, while also carrying on his official duties. He befriended many
leading French mathematicians and philosophers, and through them gained access
to Descartes’s unpublished as well as published works, which he studied intently.
Leibniz became deeply interested in mathematics and made three different,
and very important, contributions to that field. The first was mechanical; he
invented a mathematical calculating machine far superior to anything previously
developed, a precursor of modern computers (see Chapter 14). His second con-
tribution was the description and elaboration of binary arithmetic, the repre-
sentation of all numbers with just ones and zeroes. Although this technique had
no obvious practical significance in the 1670s, three centuries later it became the
standard basis of calculation in electronic computers and ultimately had signifi-
cant implications for the development of artificial intelligence.
Leibniz’s third great mathematical discovery, the infinitesimal calculus, did have
immediate practical implications. Without knowing that Isaac Newton in England
had privately and secretly developed the calculus a few years earlier, Leibniz con-
ceived the idea independently and became the first person to publish on the subject.
(Today the two men share credit for the great discovery.) The calculus represented
a great advancement on Descartes’s analytical geometry, which was limited to a
relatively small class of curves and shapes known as conic sections. Leibniz and
Newton now provided a technique for subjecting many more kinds of shapes, curves,
and continuously varying quantities to precise calculation, including the motions
of pendulums, the vibrations of musical strings, and the orbits of planets.
The calculus worked by returning to a concept that had fascinated philos-
ophers since Zeno in ancient Greece: infinitesimals. When a car starts from a
standing stop and accelerates steadily from a speed of zero to 100, it passes
through every intermediate speed but remains at each one for only an infinitesi-
mal instant. At some point its speed has to be exactly 50, for example, but because
of constant acceleration, that point in time is infinitely brief. Conventional math-
ematics could not deal with such an instant, because speed equals the distance
traveled divided by the time elapsed, and here the time elapsed is zero; division
by zero is not possible in standard arithmetic. Newton and Leibniz devised new
methods that enabled mathematicians to calculate the sums of infinite series of
such infinitesimals (the integral calculus), as well as to extract the properties of
individual infinitesimal instants from given curves (the differential calculus).
Apart from its scientific and practical importance, for Leibniz the calculus
suggested two general ideas that profoundly influenced his subsequent philoso-
phy. First, the calculus dealt with variables undergoing constant and continuous
change, and Leibniz would ever after see the linked phenomena of continuity
and change as essential features of the world in general. Second, in a literal sense
the infinitesimals employed in the calculus were mental “fictions” that could not
be concretely experienced in reality, yet they figured as fundamental elements
in mathematical equations that did mirror and predict concrete reality. Leibniz’s
philosophy reflected these ideas by positing a universe undergoing constant
development in stages that imperceptibly merge with each other, like those in
a living organism. He would challenge the assertions of Descartes and Locke
that the most fundamental elements of the physical world had to be concrete,
extended—and lifeless—material particles in motion.
Leibniz’s productive sojourn in Paris ended all too soon, when his patrons died
in 1676 and he was unable to find another position in the city. Reluctantly, he
accepted a post as court councilor to the ruling family in the small north German
state of Hanover. On his way there, he stopped in Amsterdam, where he had two
significant experiences. First, he met and discussed philosophy with Benedict
Spinoza (1632–1677), a brilliant Jewish scholar who had been excommunicated
from his synagogue for promoting a view we now call pantheism—the notion
that God is not an independent being who controls the universe but rather that
God is the entire universe. Next he met Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723),
the lens grinder who developed the modern microscope, and who used it to show
an impressed Leibniz that a drop of pond water contained a population of minute,
swimming microorganisms. We shall see how these ideas later coalesced for
Leibniz in a comprehensive vision of the entire cosmos. Before he fully developed
such thoughts, however, he had to establish himself in Hanover.
Serving the House of Hanover

Things briefly went well as Leibniz’s new patron, Duke Johann Friedrich, valued
and respected his advice; but the Duke soon died and was succeeded by his much
less intellectual younger brother, Ernst August. Fortunately for Leibniz the new
Duke was married to Sophie the Countess Palatine (1630–1714), the youngest
sister of Descartes’s philosophical confidante Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.
Sharing her sister’s intellectual inclinations, Sophie became Leibniz’s staunch
friend and supporter and was joined in later years by her daughter Sophie
Charlotte (1668–1705). This mother-daughter team (Figure 2.9) became the
first audience for Leibniz’s philosophizing, and his letters to them, like those of
Descartes to Elizabeth, provided the basis for much of his most important work.
Leibniz’s relations with his masculine superiors and contemporaries at Hanover
were more mixed. Some of his contributions were valued, as when he promoted a pub-
lic health system and fire-fighting service, street lighting, and the establishment of a
state bank. As a legal advisor in later years, he assisted in negotiations concerning
succession to the British throne. The shortage of Protestant heirs in England raised
Figure 2.9 Sophie the Countess Palatine (1630–1714) on the left, and her daughter,
Sophie Charlotte (1668–1705).
a strong possibility that the monarchy might eventually pass to Ernst August and
Sophie’s eldest son Georg Ludwig, who was a great-grandson of England’s James I.
Leibniz also had some spectacular failures, including a plan to use wind-
mill power to drain water from the ruling family’s mines. Promised a lifetime
pension if it succeeded, Leibniz overestimated the wind speeds for the region
and obsessively kept proposing newer and “improved” windmill designs until
he became a major nuisance and the object of a satirical book, Foolish Wisdom
and Wise Folly. Finally his exasperated patron insisted that, for his pension,
he would have to abandon windmills and instead write an extended history of
the House of Hanover’s family. This carried the fringe benefit for Leibniz of
justifying travel to archives throughout Europe, but still the task hung over him
like a black cloud for the rest of his life. He would produce nine volumes of the
family history before he died, but these told only a fraction of the full story he
intended to relate.
Typically dressing in ornate clothing and wearing a large black wig,
Leibniz struck many who saw him in public as an outlandish, almost ridicu-
lous character. In private, however, he was deeply contemplative as well as in-
tellectually energetic, and is better represented without a wig, as in Figure 2.10.
He undertook hundreds of activities both practical and visionary, and was
sometimes naively bewildered when others did not share his enthusiasm.
A recent biographer described him as “dominated by

an unachievable ambition” to succeed in virtually every
field of intellectual and practical activity:
The wonder is not that he failed so often, but that he

achieved as much as he did. His successes were due to
a rare combination of sheer hard work, a receptivity to
the ideas of others, and supreme confidence in the fer-
tility of his own mind. . . . On the other hand, his desire
to produce monuments to his genius, which would be
both complete and all his own work, made it impos-
sible for him to finish anything.26
As part of his universal quest for knowledge, Leibniz

conducted a vast correspondence. A staunch believer in the
Figure 2.10 A bust of Leibniz without his wig.
importance of information exchange, he revived his youth-
ful interest in China and corresponded extensively with
some Jesuit missionaries to that country. He published their replies in a volume
titled Novissima Sinica (News from China). Remarkably for a person of his times,
Leibniz was open-minded and not ethnocentric. He said Chinese customs
“should not be judged by ours,”27 and that China and Europe had a good deal to
teach each other; China was superior in the arts of civility and harmonious living,
while Europe excelled in science and technology. He saw interesting connections
between the two cultures, including the fact that Chinese hexagrams in the an-
cient Book of Changes were constructed of just two basic elements (the yin and
yang), which bore significant similarity to the binary arithmetic he had invented.
In general, he promoted openness and cultural sensitivity, and an awareness
that non-European cultures could have valuable lessons to teach. In doing so he
anticipated by three centuries the advent of scientific interest in non-Western
psychologies and modern cultural psychology.
Most of Leibniz’s contemporaries saw only fragmentary evidence of the scope
of his thought, and he was often ridiculed. One of his Hanoverian masters called
him “an archeological find” likely to be mistaken for a clown by those unfamiliar
with him.28 The French writer Voltaire satirized him as the ludicrous philosopher
Pangloss in his popular novel Candide. Only in the years after Leibniz’s death did
scholars begin to sift through his enormous correspondence and unpublished
private papers, and to appreciate him fully. Therefore, the final two decades of
Leibniz’s life were marked by significant but unrecognized intellectual achieve-
ment, as well as controversy and disappointment.
His relationships with intellectuals in Britain became particularly touchy

after mathematicians there, using false evidence and questionable testimony
from the secretive Newton, accused him of plagiarism in inventing the calculus.
After trying to be conciliatory, Leibniz responded with some unseemly slanders
of his own, and the result was an unfortunate and longstanding feud between
English and continental mathematicians.*
Leibniz’s fall from grace in England was ironic, because in 1714 Georg Ludwig
of Hanover (his final patron following the deaths of Ernst August and Sophie) in
fact became King George I of England. Leibniz had helped negotiate this event
and hoped to follow George to England as the official historian. Fearing that
Leibniz’s presence in England could produce diplomatic disaster, George insisted
that he remain home and finish the Hanover family history. Leibniz tried to ac-
quiesce while carrying on with his philosophical writing, but he soon became ill
and died at the age of 70. The younger Sophie had also predeceased him, and no
one of importance attended his funeral. Another half-century would pass before
publication of his manuscripts and private papers revealed the true scope of his
genius, as well as the full dimensions of a philosophy of mind that set the stage
for the emergence of scientific psychology in Germany.
The most important of Leibniz’s posthumously published psychological works
was his extended response to Locke’s Essay, the “New Essays” on human under-
standing. This work reflected a general world view that Leibniz had developed,
partly in reaction to Descartes’s philosophy but also conditioned by his mathemat-
ical background and his early experiences with Spinoza and van Leeuwenhoek in
Amsterdam. He had previously communicated these ideas in his correspondence
with the two Sophies, and in a short work published shortly after his death called
The Monadology.
Monadology
Like Descartes with his mechanical statues, Leibniz had made a crucial early
observation that profoundly affected his later view of life and its place in the
universe. The effect could not have been more different, however, for Leibniz’s
observation was not of dead mechanisms but rather the teeming population
of microorganisms within the drop of pond water he had viewed through van
*English mathematicians were the long-term losers, as they continued for a century to use the
relatively clumsy notation system devised by Newton instead of the more flexible one originated
by Leibniz. Consequently, mathematics developed much faster on the continent than in Britain.
Leeuwenhoek’s microscope in Amsterdam. The image remained vivid in his

memory when he wrote in The Monadology:
In the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living

beings. . . . . Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full
of plants, and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each
member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts, is also some such
garden or pond. . . . Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing
dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusion save in appearance.29
Simply stated, Leibniz conceived of the universe as a vast hierarchy of

living organisms residing within other, larger organisms. In an implied re-
buke to Descartes, he remarked that although a living body is “a kind of divine
machine,” it “infinitely surpasses all artificial automata” because each of its com-
ponent parts is not a piece of brass or other dead matter, but rather another living
organism, which in turn contains other living parts ad infinitum.30
Leibniz further disagreed with Descartes’s (and Locke’s) assumption of a
universe whose most fundamental or “ultimate” units are inanimate, material
particles in motion and interaction with one another. The infinitesimal calcu-
lus clearly showed the value of assuming that any measurable material object is
potentially divisible to infinity, and because of this Leibniz argued that one
can never arrive at a tiny piece of extended matter and say “here is a real
ultimate being.”31 Motion, detectable only as changes in the relative positions of
nonultimate physical bodies, logically could not be ultimate either. For Leibniz,
neither Descartes’s simple natures nor Locke’s primary qualities could be the most
foundational elements from which the universe is constructed.
But while denying that matter in motion considered by itself could be
ultimate, Leibniz did believe that “the force or proximate cause” of such
motion might be.32 He concluded, therefore, that the ultimate units of the
world had to be dynamic entities—energies and forces capable of caus-
ing the continuous yet lawful changes he had analyzed in the calculus. Fur-
thermore, because those changes were not random but followed lawful pat-
terns, their causes had to be directed or “purposive” in nature. In addition,
in order to act purposively, an agent must have some awareness or per-
ception of the effectiveness of its activity. For Leibniz, then, the ultimate
components of the universe had to be energetic and purpose-laden enti-
ties with some capacity for awareness. He named them monads—a term
derived from the Greek monos, meaning “unit.”
03_POP_28354_ch02_058-097.indd 89 18/10/16 3:28 PM

Leibniz also believed monads must differ in their capacities for conscious aware-
ness, and proposed a hierarchy of four general classes. The most numerous class,
bare monads, had only the faintest capacity for awareness, comparable to that of
a person in deep, dreamless sleep. When clustered together in large quantities, the
bare monads somehow formed the basis of the physical bodies of material objects.
One level higher in Leibniz’s hierarchy were sentient monads, with capacities
for the conscious sensation and perception of material objects and for the memory
of those experiences. When a sentient monad became joined to a physical body (an
assemblage of bare monads), it became the dominant monad or soul of an animal.
Higher still were rational monads, which could occupy assemblages of sentient
monads to become the soul or mind of human beings. The consciousness of ratio-
nal monads went well beyond simple perception to include a higher process Leibniz
called apperception, in which an impression or idea is not simply “registered” in
consciousness, but is further interpreted, studied and rationally analyzed in terms
of underlying principles and laws. Apperception also involves the reflexivity, the
subjective sense of “I-ness” or “self” that Descartes and Avicenna had noted. When
we apperceive something, we quite literally and consciously “think about it” with
full attention. In a general sense, Leibniz’s sentient and rational monads had mental
capacities similar to those of Aristotle’s sensitive and rational souls.
Consistently with his microscopic vision in Amsterdam, Leibniz saw these be-
souled monads as nested hierarchically, lower ones within higher. And at the very
top, he believed, was a single supreme monad, equated with God, whose purposes,
perceptions, apperceptions, and even higher degrees of awareness controlled and
contained everything else in the universe. Aware of and the cause of the purposes
and activities of every single lower-order monad, this supreme soul understood
and controlled everything but was itself apprehensible only incompletely, if at
all, by the three lower classes of monads. Humans with their apperceptions may
appreciate some of these supreme and comprehensive purposes, but only dimly
and incompletely—roughly to the extent that a pet dog may partially but incom-
pletely comprehend the purposes and motives of its human owner.
In sum, Leibniz’s universe was more an organism than a mechanism, com-
posed of an infinitude of nested and hierarchically organized, soul-like substances
called monads, with varying capacities for the apperception or perception of
subordinate levels of monads. Each monad had its own innate purposes and
destiny, but all were coordinated by the largely unknowable purposes and all-
encompassing consciousness of the single, perfect, and supreme monad. The
idea of the all-encompassing supreme monad owed a debt to Spinoza’s equation
of “god” with the totality of nature, while also echoing Aristotle’s ancient notion of
a purposeful “unmoved mover” as provider of the “final cause” of the creation and
development of the universe.
Leibniz’s proposal of nonmaterial monads as the ultimate components of the

material universe is not easy to grasp. It poses some of the same dilemmas as
Descartes’s postulation of an immaterial soul interacting with a purely mechanis-
tic physical body. Still, Leibniz was correct in his assertion that another nonma-
terial entity, the infinitesimal, could be used in the mathematical analysis of many
concrete physical problems. And if Leibniz, Locke, and Descartes could somehow
view the state of physics today, in which atoms are believed to be composed of a
multitude of subatomic particles and forces (such as quarks, hadrons, and bary-
ons, held together by strong and weak forces but never directly or independently
observable), Leibniz would likely be the least surprised of the three. He would also
probably be least surprised by the enormous increase in the size of the observ-
able universe today, including the countless microscopic discoveries of microbes,
viruses, chromosomes, DNA, genes, and even beyond.
Leibniz’s visionary theorizing about the nature of the cosmos and humanity’s
role within it was characteristic of his wide-ranging and highly imaginative in-
tellect. The more practically minded Locke had not been concerned with such
issues, aiming instead to understand the empirical world in a comprehensible
mechanistic way, and to draw lessons from that for how best to manage practi-
cal and social affairs. Unsurprisingly then, Locke and his followers saw much of
Leibniz’s approach as impractical, pie-in-the-sky imaginings, while Leibniz saw
Locke’s approach as limited and incomplete. He expressed these reservations in
his New Essays on Human Understanding.
A Nativistic Critique of Locke

Written in French because Leibniz lacked fluency in English, the Preface to New
Essays on Human Understanding likened part of Leibniz’s difference from Locke
to the much older one between Aristotle and Plato. After noting that Aristotle and
Locke adopted the metaphor of the mind as a blank slate until experience impresses
its sensations upon it, Leibniz allied himself with the more nativist doctrine of Plato:
namely, that “the soul inherently contains the sources of various notions and doc-
trines, which external objects merely rouse up on suitable occasions.” 33
As examples of innate mental capacities, Leibniz cited the rules of arithmetic,
the geometric axioms, and the rules of logic. Although we feel certain about their
absolute correctness, such correctness is not proved by concrete experience but
only instanced or demonstrated by it. Leibniz’s preferred metaphor for the mind
was not a neutral, blank slate but rather a veined block of marble whose internal
fault lines predispose it to be sculpted into some shapes more easily than others.
Such shapes pre-exist in the marble, even though a sculptor’s work is required to
expose and clarify them. For Leibniz, “ideas and truths are innate in us. . . . as incli-
nations, dispositions, tendencies, or natural potentialities, and not as actions.”34
Leibniz called all of these innate ideas and predispositions necessary truths;
in his larger scheme, they were prime tools in the process of apperception as
opposed to simple perception.*
Leibniz saw his ideas as not directly contradicting Locke but rather as filling in de-
tails on points the Englishman had left implicit or unspoken. He conceded that nonhu-
man animals, lacking a dominant rational monad with inherent necessary truths, may
in fact function in much the way described by Locke. Lacking the innate necessary
truths required for logical reasoning, animals cannot grasp the underlying reasons for
the empirical regularities they perceive. Leibniz concluded, “what shows the existence
of inner sources of necessary truths is also what distinguishes man from beast.”35
Leibniz also noted that Locke had proposed both sensations from the external
world and subjective reflections on the mind’s own operations as the two sources
of ideas, but had said little about the reflections. Self-awareness and other reflexive
aspects of apperception that Leibniz emphasized were implicit in Locke’s notion
of reflection. Further, Locke’s intuitive knowledge and demonstrative knowledge,
with higher degrees of certainty than sensitive knowledge, depended on precisely
those innate “necessary truths” that Leibniz proposed for rational monads. In sev-
eral places Leibniz summarized Locke’s position as holding that there is nothing
in the mind that was not first in the senses, to which he would simply add except
the mind itself. Locke seemingly took for granted the mind’s own activity in pro-
cessing its sensations, combining and minimizing a large number of important
and interesting features under the general category of reflection. Leibniz chose to
emphasize and elaborate on those features.
Another difference, however, was more difficult to reconcile. Locke had
insisted that the mind is not constantly active and can sometimes be with-
out thoughts, just as the body can sometimes be without movement. Leibniz
argued that the mind is constantly active, even during such states as dream-
less sleep. This conviction derived from his notion of monads as constantly
active and striving entities with varying levels of awareness. His theoretical
continuum of consciousness ranged from the clear and distinct apperceptions
of rational monads, through the more mechanical and indistinct perceptions
of sentient monads, and terminated in what he called minute perceptions in
bare monads. While real, these minute perceptions never individually enter
consciousness: “At every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions,
unaccompanied by awareness or reflection. . . .[Minute perceptions are] altera-
tions of the soul. . . . of which we are unaware because these impressions are
*Some of Leibniz’s necessary truths closely resemble Aristotle’s categories as the innate organiz-
ing principles of the rational psyche (see Chapter 1), making it clear that Leibniz’s philosophy had
Aristotelian as well as Platonic elements.
either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they are not
sufficiently distinctive on their own.”36
Occasionally minute perceptions can rise to the level of full awareness, as
when we shift our attention to a previously undetected background noise, but
usually they are too vague and indistinct to be consciously perceived at all. The
sound of an individual drop of ocean water is undetectable by itself, for example,
but its reality is demonstrated when it combines with all the other drops consti-
tuting a wave to produce the roaring sound of the sea.
Leibniz described minute perceptions as “more effective in their results than
has been recognized,” adding “that je ne sais quoi, those flavours, those images of
sensible qualities, vivid in the aggregate but confused as to the parts.”37 For exam-
ple, our sense of continuity as individual, distinctive selves is maintained by minute
perceptions and unconscious memories of our previous states. Although some of
them may sporadically rise to consciousness, most remain in a subconscious state.
In a brief but significant anticipation of his nineteenth-century successors,
Leibniz also saw minute perceptions as playing a telling role in human motiva-
tion, when he wrote they “determine our behaviour in many situations without our
thinking of them, and [thus] deceive the unsophisticated.”38 He likened them to “so
many little springs trying to unwind and so driving our machine along,” and thus
“we are never indifferent, even when we appear to be most so.” Even a seemingly
random choice results from “these insensible stimuli, which, mingled with the ac-
tions of objects and our bodily interiors, make us find one direction of movement
more comfortable than the other.”39 We shall see in Chapter 11 how Freud and oth-
ers would later elaborate extensively on unconsciously motivated behavior; Leibniz
was ahead of his time in calling attention to the possibility.
The differences between Locke and Leibniz arose largely because of their
different purposes. Locke wanted to determine the limits of knowledge, and to
establish rules for solving political and everyday practical problems. His primary
position was that of an empiricist, focusing on the events of the external world
and how to best predict, understand, and control them. The mind itself interested
him only secondarily, as a passive recording instrument necessary for produc-
ing sensory knowledge. The more nativist Leibniz, by contrast, saw the active
mind itself, with its central organizing principles and innate necessary truths, as
a primary subject of interest in its own right.
Lockean vs. Leibnizean Traditions

The Lockean point of view has, in general, been particularly influential in the
English-speaking countries where Locke was a founder of the psychological tradi-
tion called British associationism. After him, the Irish bishop George Berkeley
(1685–1753) applied Locke’s association principles to the systematic analysis of
visual depth perception, arguing that the ability to see things in three dimen-
sions is not innate, but rather the result of learned associations between visual
impressions of objects at different distances and sensations of muscular move-
ments in the eyes and body as one moves toward or away from the objects. A
generation later the Scotsman David Hume helped formalize the laws of associ-
ation by contiguity and by similarity (mentioned earlier), and, more importantly,
used them in a skeptical analysis of the concept of causality. We shall describe
this analysis, and its momentous impact on the German philosopher Immanuel
Kant, in Chapter 4. Hume’s contemporary David Hartley (1705–1757), a physician,
argued that ideas are the subjective results of minute vibrations in specific loca-
tions of the brain that become interconnected, or associated with each other, by
nerve networks. Here was another early attempt at neurophysiolology.
Later in the nineteenth century, father and son James Mill (1773–1836) and John
Stuart Mill (1806–1873) claimed that the most important individual differences in
personal character, conduct, and intellect result from associationistic principles—
that is, from differences in experiences and associations, as opposed to genetic
makeup. Others, notably Francis Galton (see Chapter 7), strongly disagreed, thus
giving rise to the nature-nurture debate that has inspired so many psychological
discussions and recent developments. In the early twentieth century many associa-
tionistic and Lockean ideas came together, although stripped of their “mentalistic”
terminology, in the movement known as behaviorism (see Chapter 9). The behav-
iorist psychologists explained all learning as the acquisition and interconnection—
association—of various neurological stimulus-response reflexes, emphasizing how
people’s behavior can be conditioned by their experiences.
The Leibnizean tradition, with its focus on the properties and activities
of the mind itself, has historically been more dominant in continental
Europe. Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Wundt in Germany, for example, adopted
generally Leibnizean perspectives while establishing the very idea of psychol-
ogy as an independent intellectual discipline (see Chapters 4 and 5). Leibniz’s
ideas about unconscious influences on behavior are echoed in the theories
of pioneering European hypnotists (see Chapter 10) and in Freud’s psycho-
analysis (see Chapter 11). The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget analyzed the
growth of intelligence in children as an organic, biologically based sequence
of developmental stages in an active mind—a conception following directly
in the tradition of Leibniz (see Chapter 13). And near the end of the book
we’ll return to Leibniz himself, detailing how his Parisian inventions of
binary arithmetic and a mechanical calculating machine were important
in the history of artificial intelligence and modern cognitive psychology
(see Chapter 14).
Chapter Review 95
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
Descartes’s comprehensive system of mental philosophy with experience develops first simple ideas or impressions,
originated after he developed a method of doubting every- which later combine to create complex ideas, which in turn
thing, in his quest to discover what was ultimately certain become linked according to the laws of association to con-
and true. The one thing he could not doubt was the reality of stitute knowledge or understanding. Because everyone’s
his own act of doubting, and therefore the existence of his experiences are unique and limited, their knowledge bases
own thinking mind, or soul, was unquestionably real. Apply- differ and often contradict one another. Concerned with the
ing his method to the physical world, he held that the most practical problem of deciding which ideas are truest, Locke
fundamental simple natures constituting it are extended ma- advocated the systematic observations and experiments of
terial particles in motion and interaction, and hypothesized scientists as the way to gain knowledge, and the sharing of
a universe in which the smallest fire particles concentrate in experiences in groups to compensate for the limitations
the center to form the sun, the largest earth particles form of any single person’s experiences. Applying the same ideas
the material bodies, and transparent air particles fill all the to government, Locke advocated democratic discussion and
spaces in between. More importantly for future psychology, decision making, and tolerance for multiple points of view.
he concluded that all animal bodies, including humans, could Leibniz accepted that some knowledge occurs as Locke
be explained as physical mechanisms, similar to but more described, but likened the mind at birth not to a blank
complicated than the mechanical statues he had observed slate but rather a veined block of marble predisposed to
as a young man. He provided mechanistic explanations for respond to a sculptor’s chiseling by breaking along certain
all the functions of the Aristotelian vegetative and sensitive inherent fault lines. He believed the mind has an innate ca-
psyches, laying the foundation for modern neurophysiol- pacity for apperception, going beyond simple perception
ogy, including the concept of the reflex. While explaining by enabling both self-awareness and the ability to orga-
the body mechanistically, he could not do the same for the nize and interpret experience in terms of certain necessary
human rational soul, or mind, with its capacities for ratio- truths, such as the laws of logic and mathematics. In con-
nality, free will, consciousness, and self-awareness, as well trast to Descartes and Locke, Leibniz conceptualized the
as certain innate ideas he believed existed independently of universe as ultimately composed not of material particles
sensory experience. He saw the mind and body as separate interacting mechanistically, but of monads—infinitesimal,
but interacting entities, a position known as interactive dual- energy-laden, purposeful entities with some capacity for
ism. How and to what extent mental functions can be mech- awareness. The universe for him was a vast, organic hierar-
anistically (neurophysiologically) explained, as opposed to chically nested monads, dominated by a supreme monad
requiring some separate form of analysis, remain central whose purposes and knowledge are as unknown to
questions throughout the history of scientific psychology. humans as are the apperceptions of humans to animals.
Locke agreed with Descartes that the ultimate units, The empiricist, Lockean tradition has been particularly
or primary qualities, of the physical universe are extended influential in the development of psychology in English-
particles in motion and interaction, and proposed that their speaking countries, emphasizing the role of experience
impact on sensory organs leads to secondary qualities, such in forming the mind and promoting theories of learning
as sights, sounds, smells, and other conscious sensations focused on the practical manipulation of the external en-
that are sometimes deceptive or illusory. A strong empir- vironment. The Leibnizean tradition has been stronger in
icist, he rejected Descartes’s innate ideas, concluding that continental Europe, placing relatively greater emphasis
everything we know arises from experience. For Locke the on understanding the innate controlling and organizing
mind at birth is like Aristotle’s tabula rasa or blank slate, and functions of an active mind.
Key Pioneers
René Descartes, p. 61 Thomas Hobbes, p. 81 Sophie the Countess
Galileo Galilei, p. 61 Lady Damaris Cudworth Palatine, p. 85
Princess Elizabeth of Masham, p. 82 Sophie Charlotte,
Bohemia, p. 70 Gottfried Wilhelm p. 85
John Locke, p. 74 Leibniz, p. 83 George Berkeley, p. 93
Robert Boyle, p. 75 Benedict Spinoza, David Hartley, p. 94
Sir Anthony Ashley p. 85 James Mill, p. 94
Cooper, p. 76 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, John Stuart Mill, p. 94
William Molyneux, p. 79 p. 85
Key Terms
analytic geometry, p. 62 complex ideas, p. 79
simple natures, p. 63 intuitive knowledge, p. 80
primary qualities, p. 64 demonstrative knowledge, p. 80
secondary qualities, p. 64 sensitive knowledge, p. 80
animal spirits, p. 66 association of ideas, p. 80
reflex, p. 67 law of association by contiguity, p. 80
stimulus, p. 67 law of association by similarity, p. 80
response, p. 67 social contract, p. 81
Discourse on Method, p. 68 binary arithmetic, p. 84
innate ideas, p. 69 infinitesimal calculus, p. 84
interactive dualism, p. 70 pantheism, p. 85
pineal gland, p. 71 monads, p. 89
passions, p. 72 bare monads, p. 90
An Essay Concerning Human sentient monads, p. 90
Understanding, p. 74 rational monads, p. 90
New Essays on Human apperception, p. 90
Understanding, p. 74 supreme monad, p. 90
sensations, p. 79 necessary truths, p. 92
reflections, p. 79 minute perceptions, p. 92
simple ideas, p. 79 British associationism, p. 93

1. Discuss why, although most of Descartes’s specific ideas about the ways the human
body and mind work have been discarded, the general issues they raise remain relevant
for modern psychology.
2. Descartes believed that there are some innate concepts or ideas, such as perfection or
unity or infinity, that can never be directly or completely experienced in the empirical
world. Do you agree? How do you think we come to an appreciation of these common
concepts?
Chapter Review 97
3. When you compare the conceptions of mind promoted by Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz,
what are the most important differences and similarities you see in their ideas?
4. Did you feel any particular preference for the ideas of Locke over Leibniz, or vice versa?
Explain why, or why not if you had no preference.
5. Outline how the ideas of each of the three main pioneers in this chapter have had
enduring significance for psychology.
Suggested Resources
A slightly dated but very readable biography of Descartes is Jack R. Vrooman’s René
Descartes: A Life (New York: Putnam’s, 1970); for more detailed coverage, see Stephen
Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995).
His Treatise of Man has been translated and published with a useful introduction and
facsimile of the original French edition by Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1972). Andrea Nye describes Descartes’s relationship and correspon-
dence with Princess Elizabeth in The Princess and the Philosopher (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield, 1999).
For Locke’s detailed life, see Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London:
Longmans, 1957); for Leibniz’s, see E. J. Aiton, Leibniz: A Biography (Bristol, UK, and
Boston: Adam Hilger, 1985). An extended account of the philosophical disagreements
between Locke and Leibniz appears in Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz and Locke: A Study
of the New Essays on Human Understanding (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Leibniz’s specific influence on later psychology is elaborated in Raymond E. Fancher
and Heather Schmidt, “Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz: Underappreciated Pioneer of Psychol-
ogy,” in G. Kimble and M. Wertheimer, eds., Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, vol. 5
(Washington, DC: APA Press, 2003).
The major primary works by Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz, including Discourse on
Method, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, The Monadology, and New Essays
on Human Understanding, are available for free on an invaluable website originated by
Jonathan Bennett and now maintained by Peter Millikan and Amyas Merivale at Oxford
University: http://www.earlymoderntexts.com.
A developing digital resource on women in philosophy, which includes a profile of
Lady Damaris Cudworth Masham and selections from her correspondence, is available at
http://projectvox.library.duke.edu/pg/.
CHAPTER 3
Physiologists of Mind: Brain
Scientists from Gall to Penfield
Franz Josef Gall: Brain Anatomist and Phrenologist

Pierre Flourens and the Discrediting of Phrenology
Localization Theory Revived: The Brain’s Language Areas
Memory and the Equipotentiality Debate
Stimulation of the Conscious Human Brain
Recent Developments: Cognitive Neuroscience and Social Neuroscience
T oday, we take it for granted that the bodily organ most responsible for our
intelligence and higher mental abilities is the brain. An intelligent person
is said to “have brains” or “be a brain,” while the opposite case is a “lamebrain.”
The assumption seems so obvious that it may surprise you to learn that it has
been universally accepted by scientists only for the past 200 years or so. Before
that, scholars disagreed widely about the nature of the brain and its importance
for the functions of the mind or soul.
Aristotle, the greatest biological thinker of ancient Greece (see Chapter 1),
downplayed the importance of the brain because of some accurate but mislead-
ing observations. Although richly supplied with blood in life, the brain’s vessels
rapidly drain after death. The physical brain struck Aristotle as unimpressive
in appearance, nearly uniform in its bloodless, grayish color and spongelike
99
100 3 | Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to Penfield
consistency. Moreover, he knew of soldiers whose brain surfaces had been ex-
posed by battle wounds and who had reported no sensation whatsoever when
their brains were touched. Aristotle found it hard to believe that what appeared
to be a bloodless, insensitive, and generally uninspiring mass could be the seat of
the highest human faculties. He assigned that role to the heart, seeing the brain
as a relatively minor organ serving as a “condenser” of the vapors emanating
from overheated humors that presumably rose to the top of the body. The cere-
brospinal fluid in the ventricles, which Descartes called animal spirits, was for
Aristotle the product of the brain’s condensations.
While the brain did have some supporters, Aristotle’s dismissive assessment
of it continued to be echoed in various forms by other influential investigators
for 2,000 years. In ancient Chinese culture, the spirit and soul were said to reside
in the heart. Accordingly, when early texts were translated by Chinese scholars,
mental philosophy was translated as the study of the heart and spirit.* We saw in
Chapter 2 how in the seventeenth century Descartes localized some important
functions in the brain but did not believe a perfect and unified entity like the
rational soul could be housed in a divided structure like the brain. And while
the pineal gland—his nominee for the most likely point of interaction between
body and mind—was physically in the brain, it constituted but a very small part
of the total structure. One hundred years after Descartes’s death, the brain would
become the center of considerable attention as researchers attempted to under-
stand its role in mental life. Many were especially intrigued by the question of
whether it operated as a unified whole or as a coordinated set of separate parts,
each with a specific purpose.
FRANZ JOSEF GALL: BRAIN ANATOMIST

AND PHRENOLOGIST
Among the first scientist to regard the entire brain as a complex organ respon-
sible for higher mental functions was the controversial German physician Franz
Josef Gall (1758–1828; Figure 3.1). Early in his career Gall established a repu-
tation as a brilliant anatomist of the brain, building on earlier work by Locke’s
old Oxford teacher, the physician Thomas Willis (1621–1675). In 1664 Willis pub-
lished the first accurate and detailed description of the brain’s complex physical
shape, illustrated with plates by the celebrated architect Christopher Wren. In
speculating about how the brain functions, Willis emphasized the substance of
the brain’s various structures rather than its spaces and the fluids that filled them.
*One of the first texts so translated was Joseph Haven’s “Mental Philosophy” by Chinese scholar
Yan Yongjing in 1889. He was actually working with a Japanese translation of the original text.
He observed that brain tissue was not undifferentiated, as

Aristotle had thought; it consisted of two kinds of sub-
stances: a pulpy gray matter occupying the outer surface of
the brain, the inner part of the spinal cord, and several dis-
crete centers within the brain; and a fibrous white matter
in the other regions. Willis speculated that the white matter
consisted of narrow canals whose function was to distribute
“spirits” generated in the gray matter. Willis also accurately
described the blood vessels of the brain, firmly establishing
that the living brain was far from a bloodless organ.
Other physicians after Willis discovered that localized in-
terruptions to the brain’s blood supply could cause apoplexy,
today known as strokes. These sudden and often devastat-
ing attacks left some patients without the power of speech,
others partly paralyzed, or with other sensory disabilities. By
the early 1700s, physicians further recognized that injuries
to one side of the brain often produced paralysis or loss of
feeling somewhere on the opposite side of the body.
Gall built upon these findings while becoming, in many
Figure 3.1 Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828).
minds, the greatest brain anatomist since Willis. Using new,
delicate dissection techniques, he confirmed and developed many of Willis’s
basic findings regarding gray and white matter. He showed that the two halves
of the brain are interconnected by stalks of white matter (nerve tissue) called
commissures, and that other, smaller tracts of white fibers cross over from each
side of the brain to connect with the opposite sides of the spinal cord. This last
finding helped explain how damage to one side of the brain could result in paral-
ysis, or other types of dysfunction, to the opposite side of the body.
Gall’s anatomical findings laid the groundwork for the later discovery that
the brain and spinal cord are composed of billions of nerve cells called neurons,
each with an electrochemically active cell body, or nucleus. Neurons are inter-
connected by branchlike dendrites, which receive signals from other neurons;
long, fibrous axons transmit signals to other neurons. The axons tend to cluster
together to form the brain’s white matter, while the cell bodies and dendrites
constitute the gray matter.
Gall was also the first great comparative brain anatomist, as he carefully exam-
ined the similarities and differences among the brains of various animal species,
as well as differing human types (children, elderly people, and brain-damaged
patients, as well as normal, healthy adults). In a general but convincing way, these
studies showed that higher mental functions correlated with the size and health
of the brain in question, particularly its outer surface or cortex. We shall later
see that the correlation is imperfect and can give rise to some misleading as-
sumptions about intellectual differences within an adult human population. But
Gall documented an undeniable tendency for animals with larger brains to man-
ifest more complex, flexible, and intelligent behavior. More than any other single
argument, this demonstration convinced scientists once and for all that the brain
was in fact the center of higher mental activity.
These contributions should have earned Gall a secure and respected place in
the history of science. Unfortunately for his reputation, however, he embedded
these credible ideas within another doctrine his followers labeled phrenology,
literally meaning science of the mind (from the Greek phrenos, “mind”). Not con-
tent to stop at the assertion that the higher functions resided generally within
the brain, Gall believed discrete psychological “faculties” were localized within
specific parts of the brain. Moreover, he believed the bumps and indentations on
the surface of an individual skull reflected the size of the underlying brain parts,
and therefore of the different faculties.
A curious mixture combining a few astute observations with some fanciful
logic, phrenology never won the respect of the most orthodox scientists. And
when Gall failed to win over the professionals, he appealed increasingly to the
general public. Phrenology became very popular, earning Gall and a host of fol-
lowers a good living; but its popularity only increased the disdain with which it
was regarded by many scientists. One prominent figure labeled phrenology a
“sinkhole of human folly and prating coxcombry.”1
Gall’s controversial theory had an appropriately idiosyncratic origin in his
childhood experience. As a schoolboy he was irritated by some fellow students
who, while less intelligent than himself (or so he judged them), nevertheless got
higher grades because they were better memorizers. As he thought about these
exasperating rivals, he realized they all had one prominent physical characteristic
in common: large and bulging eyes.
At that time, people commonly associated particular facial characteristics
with specific psychological qualities. The art of physiognomy, the reading of a
person’s character in his or her physical features, had been effectively promoted
during the 1770s by the Swiss mystic and theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater
(1741–1801), and it remained a popular pastime throughout the 1800s.* But Gall’s
*In 1831 the youthful Charles Darwin was almost rejected for the post of naturalist aboard H.M.S.
Beagle because the ship’s captain thought his nose inappropriately shaped for a seafarer (see
Chapter 6). Later in the century the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso presented an influen-
tial physiognomic theory of the “criminal type,” part of which still persists today in the myth that
evildoers must have shifty eyes and irregular features.
physiognomic observation took on a new and different significance when he

recalled it as an adult, in the context of his emerging view of the brain.
Already convinced that the higher intellectual and psychological faculties were
associated with large brains in a general way, Gall next speculated that perhaps
specific parts of the brain were the seats of specific functions or faculties. If a
certain part happened to be unusually large and well developed, then the specific
function it housed should be unusually strong. For example, people with especially
good “verbal memories,” like his schoolboy rivals, might have particularly well-
developed “organs of verbal memory” somewhere in their brains. And Gall believed
he knew exactly where this was: in the region of the frontal lobes directly behind the
eyes, where the pressure of the enlarged brain caused the eyes to protrude.
After tentatively localizing verbal memory in one part of the brain, Gall nat-
urally began to look for other faculties in other locations. Of course, in an era
before brain scans and other modern techniques, he had no direct way of observ-
ing a living person’s brain and therefore had to make an important but question-
able assumption. Just as the brain part responsible for verbal memory causes
the eyes to protrude, he argued, so will the shape of the rest of the brain cause
corresponding irregularities in the skull that surrounds it. Through craniometry,
the measurement of the physical dimensions of the skull, Gall hoped to draw con-
clusions about the shape of the brain beneath. He thus sought a correspondence
between particular bumps and depressions on the skull and the psychological
characteristics of the people who had them.
Once embarked on this search, Gall quickly developed other hypotheses. One
of his patients, a woman whose strong erotic inclinations earned her the title of
“Gall’s Passionate Widow,” once conveniently collapsed into his arms in such a
way that his hand supported the back of her neck. Gall could not help but notice
that her neck and the base of her skull were unusually thick, leading him to sus-
pect that her cerebellum, the structure at the base of her brain, was unusually
well developed. Observations of other people with strong sexual drives convinced
Gall that they, too, had well-developed necks and skull bases, and that led him to
localize the personality characteristic of “amativeness” in the cerebellum.
Gall’s continuing explorations led him to befriend a gang of lower-class boys
who ran errands for him. After gaining their confidence, he found that the boys’
attitudes toward petty theft varied greatly—some expressing a distaste for it, and
others openly engaging in it, even bragging about it. Gall measured the boys’
heads and found that the committed thieves had prominences just above and in
front of their ears, while the skulls of the honest boys were flat in that region. As
a result, Gall hypothesized an “organ of acquisitiveness” in the brain beneath.
He justified this hypothesis with more cases, including a man with an unusually
large bulge who had been repeatedly jailed for theft until he came to understand
his acquisitive nature. Gall reported that when the man realized he could not
resist temptation, he decided to become a tailor so “he might then indulge his
inclination with impunity.”2
Gall did not justify his slander of tailors (who must have had a reputation
for fleecing their customers), but he made similar derogatory judgments about
some other professions after identifying another region just above the ear as
the organ of a faculty he called “destructiveness.” After noting that this part of
the skull was particularly well developed in carnivorous animals, he described
two striking examples of men with large prominences there. One was a phar-
macist who changed his career plans to become an executioner, and the other
was a student “so fond of torturing animals that he became a surgeon.”3
Through similar observations of other people with outstanding character-
istics, Gall localized the qualities of veneration, benevolence, and firmness in
separate areas on the top of the brain, love of food and drink just below the or-
gan of acquisitiveness, and a host of other qualities in other regions. While it is
easy today for us to laugh at this phrenological theorizing, it did have a certain
naive plausibility and was properly “scientific” in being derived from direct (if
ultimately misleading) empirical observation. The
major weaknesses of Gall’s theory lay in three other
factors.
First, Gall incorrectly assumed that the shape of
one’s skull accurately reflects the shape of the un-
derlying brain. However, while recognition of the
incorrectness of this “fact” obviously invalidated
the phrenologists’ practical claims to be able to read
character in head shapes, it did not discredit their
more basic hypothesis of a relationship between
brain shapes and character.
A second and more fundamental weakness of
phrenology lay in Gall’s choice of specific psy-
chological qualities to localize within the brain—a
collection of twenty-seven “faculties” located in
specific brain areas called “organs.” These facul-
ties referred to qualities such as “mirthfulness,”
“secretiveness,” and “philoprogenitiveness” (pa-
rental love), in addition to the ones discussed so
Figure 3.2 The phrenological organs and their far. Gall’s followers quickly added more, yielding
corresponding faculties. complex configurations like the one in Figure 3.2.
Phrenologists saw these particular faculties as basic to human character, the

elemental building blocks out of which all significant personality variations are
constructed. However, their arbitrary list included complex qualities that were
themselves the result of many different interacting factors. The question of just
what the basic dimensions of personality variation really are remains in some
dispute today (see Chapter 12), but the faculty solution was unquestionably over-
simplified. And as long as phrenology lacked an adequate classification of psy-
chological characteristics, its attempts to localize those characteristics in the
brain were doomed.
Phrenology’s third and fatal flaw lay in the unreliable methods by which its hy-
potheses were often tested. Gall always maintained that his theory was grounded
in observation, a claim literally true but unreflective of the selectivity and ar-
bitrariness of many of the observations. Further, with twenty-seven or more in-
teracting faculties to work with, it became almost ridiculously easy to explain
away apparently discrepant observations. When confronted with a huge organ of
acquisitiveness in a highly generous person, for example, Gall could claim that
a large organ of benevolence (or some other convenient faculty) counteracted
the acquisitive tendencies that would otherwise show clearly. Or he could claim
that certain organs of the brain became selectively or temporarily impaired by
disease, accounting for intermittent alterations in people’s behavior. Between
the presumably counterbalancing effects of several faculties and the “illnesses”
that arbitrarily interfered with some faculties but not others, Gall explained away
virtually any observation that ran counter to his theory.
If Gall himself was casual in his interpretations of evidence, he attracted some
followers who raised that tendency to an art form. When a cast of the right side
of Napoleon’s skull predicted qualities markedly at variance with the emperor’s
known personality, one phrenologist replied that his dominant side had been the
left brain—a cast of which was conveniently missing. When Descartes’s skull was
examined and found deficient in the regions for reason and reflection, some phre-
nologists retorted that the philosopher’s rationality had always been overrated.
Such tactics, and the promise of easy but “scientific” character analysis, helped
phrenology retain a hold on the public imagination throughout much of the nine-
teenth century—in much the same way that astrology, biorhythm analysis, and
psychic readings do today. Some practicing phrenologists undoubtedly helped
some of the clients who flocked to them for readings, using their general knowl-
edge of people (rather than any specific phrenological theories) to offer shrewd
advice. We shall see in Chapter 7 how a phrenologist’s advice helped convince
Francis Galton to become an African explorer, an important step in launching his
career. In the United States, where practical phrenology was particularly popular,
traveling phrenologists would set up shop in local hotels

and, for a fee, offer detailed readings resulting in vocational
guidance, marital counseling, and even child-rearing ad-
vice.4 But in contrast to the general public, most in the estab-
lished scientific community regarded phrenology as a joke;
as told in one widely circulated story, Gall’s own skull, when
examined after his death, turned out to be twice as thick as
the average.
PIERRE FLOURENS AND THE DISCREDITING

OF PHRENOLOGY
The prevailing attitude reflected not only the scientists’
disdain for phrenology but also their respect for a series
of experiments conducted in the early 1800s by the young
French scientist Pierre Flourens (1794–1867; Figure 3.3).
Flourens’s investigations ran counter to several of Gall’s
specific hypotheses, thereby starting a classic contro-
Figure 3.3 Pierre Flourens (1794–1867). versy about the nature of the brain that remains alive
today.
In style and personality, as well as in the course of his
career, Flourens contrasted dramatically with Gall. Whereas Gall was regarded
suspiciously by orthodox scientists, Flourens epitomized the man of the es-
tablishment. Born near Montpellier in the south of France, he graduated from
that city’s famous medical school at age 19. He had already published his first
scientific article, and after moving to Paris he became the special protégé of
Georges Cuvier, the most celebrated scientist in France, known appropriately
as the “Dictator of Biology.” Cuvier’s endorsement guaranteed that Flourens’s
work would be greeted respectfully—although it was in fact good enough to
stand out on its own.
Appalled by the undisciplined observational strategies of the phrenolo-
gists, Flourens decided to study the functions of the brain strictly according to
experiment—that is, he would deliberately and systematically manipulate spe-
cific variables and carefully observe the resulting effects. To do so, he used the
technique of ablation, the surgical removal of specific small parts of an animal’s
brain, in order to observe any resulting changes in behavior or function. Be-
lieving that brain tissue does not regenerate after removal, when he observed
specific functions to be permanently missing or altered following an ablation,
Flourens hypothesized that the excised brain parts must normally be involved in
producing those functions.
Pierre Flourens and the Discrediting of Phrenology 107
Flourens did not actually invent the brain ablation experiment, but he refined
it considerably. Showing great surgical skill, he removed more precisely defined
areas from the small brains of animal subjects than his predecessors had been
able to do, with a higher survival rate. After creating these ablations, or lesions,
he always carefully nursed the animals back to as healthy a state as possible be-
fore drawing any conclusions, to avoid confusing the transient effects of surgical
shock or postoperative complications with the permanent effects of the surgery.
Flourens tested Gall’s hypotheses by ablating brain regions associated with
particular phrenological faculties. Since he worked with animals, he could di-
rectly investigate only those few faculties presumably shared by animals and hu-
mans. Sexual responsiveness obviously qualified, so some of Flourens’s earliest
and most influential experiments involved ablations of the cerebellum—Gall’s
“organ of amativeness.” His ablations produced alterations of behavior all right,
but scarcely of the type that phrenological theory predicted:
I removed the cerebellum in a young but vigorous dog by a series of deeper

and deeper slices. The animal lost gradually the faculty of orderly and reg-
ular movement. Soon he could walk only by staggering in zigzags. He fell
back when he wanted to advance; when he wanted to turn to the right he
turned to the left. As he made great efforts to move and could no longer
moderate these efforts, he hurled himself impetuously forward, and did not
fail to fall or roll over. . . . [N]evertheless he was perfectly well. . . . He had all
his intellectual faculties, all his senses; he was only deprived of the faculty
of coordinating and regularizing his movements.5
This classic description of a cerebellar lesion, originally published in 1824,

has scarcely been improved on to the present (though such an experiment would
not be allowed today for ethical reasons). Flourens clearly established the cere-
bellum’s major role in the integration and “programming” of the countless small
muscular movements that make up any organized behavior. Even a simple act
like walking requires the proper ordering of thousands of discrete movements,
and the cerebellum helps achieve this ordering. Flourens observed that his exper-
imental subjects often moved about as if drunk—and we now know that persistent
and heavy alcohol use can in fact produce degenerative changes in the cerebel-
lum, leading to the odd and clumsy walking style of many chronic alcoholics.
The cerebellum is also believed by current researchers to be somehow involved
in Parkinson’s disease. In sum, Flourens proved that the cerebellum was indeed
the center of a specific function—but unfortunately for Gall and phrenology, that
function bore little relation to “amativeness.”
Flourens’s ablation studies of the cortex—the brain’s surface area implicated

by Gall in most of the higher faculties—seemed at first even more damaging to
phrenology. As Flourens removed progressively larger sections of cortex from
birds, they gradually lost the use of all of their senses and their capacity for
voluntary action. One pigeon, with its entire cortex removed, was kept alive by
force-feeding and other measures, but it became completely insensitive to visual
or auditory stimulation and never initiated a movement on its own. Only when
prodded or physically disturbed would it move, to resume its customary resting
position. In describing this bird’s state, Flourens imagined it had lost all capacity
for consciousness: “Picture to yourself an animal condemned to perpetual sleep,
and deprived even of the faculty of dreaming during this sleep.”6 In his view, the
animal had lost its will along with its cortex.
Flourens believed his findings demolished phrenology. Although he had
demonstrated localization of a sort, with different functions attributed to the cer-
ebellum and cortex, he believed these separate functions were evenly distributed
within each organ. As increasingly larger sections of cortex were removed, for
example, all the various sensory and voluntary functions seemed to disappear
together. Flourens argued that if the phrenologists were right and the cortex
housed many different specific organs, then small ablations should have removed
some organs while leaving others intact, producing more specific effects than he
had actually observed.
Flourens was skating on thin ice, though, since by his own description he had
ablated progressively deeper slices of cortex. Any slice, no matter how shallow,
very likely interfered with many cortical regions at once, thus producing an ap-
parently general effect. Gall, who contemptuously referred to all brain ablators as
“mutilators,” eagerly seized on this point: “[Flourens] mutilates all the organs at
once, weakens them all, extirpates them all at the same time.”7 With hindsight, we
know that Gall was at least partially correct and that Flourens did miss important
effects of cortical localization.
More enduring, however, have been some of Flourens’s other conclusions
regarding the cortex’s flexibility and plasticity. For example, he observed that
sometimes (though not always) ablation-caused deficits improved over time, par-
ticularly if the animal was young and the ablations were relatively small. The fact
that the lost brain tissue did not regenerate suggested that intact parts of the
brain must somehow have been able to take over functions previously performed
by the ablated portions. The exact limits and conditions of such brain plasticity
continue to be explored by neuroscientists today.
Flourens’s investigations of the brain also highlighted the state of integration
and harmony that normally prevails among its separate parts. While he conceded
a certain “action propre” (“specific action”) for the cerebellum and cortex con-
sidered separately, he also emphasized the cooperation and communication be-
tween the two brain parts. Actions initiated by the “will” in the cortex had to
be put together and integrated by the cerebellum, and the loss of coordination
caused by damage to the cerebellum had to be dealt with by voluntary reactions
in the cortex. In Flourens’s terminology, the actions propres of the parts were
subject to an overall “action commune” (“common action”) of the brain acting as
a whole. In a conception somewhat reminiscent of Descartes, Flourens saw the
brain as the seat of an integrated and harmonious soul.
Flourens’s views seemed more scientifically respectable than phrenology, and
they were generally accepted by the scientific establishment throughout the mid-
1800s. In the 1860s, however, new findings suggested that Flourens’s meticulous
experiments had failed to detect some important localized functions in the cor-
tex, and the fact that he had overemphasized the unity of the brain’s functioning
overall.
LOCALIZATION THEORY REVIVED: THE BRAIN’S

LANGUAGE AREAS
During the height of Flourens’s influence, one particular phrenological local-
ization continued to attract some interest and support from a vocal minority of
doctors: the placement of verbal memory in the brain region directly behind the
eyes. These physicians studied the loss of speech that resulted from strokes and
other brain injuries. Several such cases had been well documented, including
that of the famous English author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift. Following
a stroke the year before he died, Swift became unable to speak normally, even
though he seemed to understand everything that was said to him, and he could
sometimes utter highly emotional commands or exclamations. For instance, he
once angrily shouted at a servant trying to break up a large piece of coal: “That
is a stone, you blockhead!” Another time when upset with himself, he bitterly
exclaimed, “I am a fool!” In circumstances calling for ordinary conversation, how-
ever, Swift remained completely mute.8
A similar case reported in 1843 involved a priest who suffered a stroke that left
him without speech except for the ability to give forth “the most forceful oath of
the tongue, which begins with an ‘f,’ and which our Dictionaries have never dared
to print.”9 The emotion-laden exclamations by Swift and the priest demonstrated
that the muscles necessary for producing speech could still function, even though
they had somehow lost the capacity for regular speaking.
Gall knew about cases like these, and he explained them as being the result of
injury or disease to what he called the organ of verbal memory, the region behind
the eyes involved in his first phrenological hypothesis. There was one striking
supporting case in his own practice, a soldier who had suffered a sword wound to
the brain behind the left eye. Afterward, this soldier could no longer easily name
things or people, and resorted to vague phrases like “Mr. Such-a-one” in referring
even to people he knew very well. Gall’s description was probably the first pub-
lished observation of a specific correlation between a speech deficit and injury
to the left frontal lobe of the cortex.
Though largely ignored in the general devastation following Flourens’s at-
tack on phrenology, Gall’s hypothesis was kept alive by his former student Jean
Baptiste Bouillaud (1796–1881). Bouillaud eventually rejected much of phrenol-
ogy, but he felt there was some truth to the notion of an area that controls lan-
guage in the frontal region of the cortex, and he published whatever evidence he
could find on the issue. This evidence was scanty, however, because it wasn’t con-
sidered important to perform autopsies on the brains of deceased patients who
had suffered from speech losses. Nevertheless, Bouillaud spoke out at medical
meetings and offered to pay 500 francs to anyone who could demonstrate a case
of severe frontal lobe damage unaccompanied by speech disorder. Apparently, no
one took him seriously enough to accept his challenge.
One physician did have to take Bouillaud seriously: his
son-in-law, Ernest Aubertin (1825–1893). Aubertin found
one very interesting patient whose symptoms supported
Bouillaud’s theory. A soldier wounded by gunshot on the
left front of his head had recovered completely except for
a soft spot in his skull at the point of the wound. When the
spot was gently pressed, he lost his otherwise normal power
of speech. This case posed obvious opportunities for con-
scious or unconscious faking by the patient, and it failed to
impress skeptics. But Aubertin believed in the patient’s sin-
cerity and mounted a defense of his father-in-law’s theory
himself. When he presented his views at the Paris Anthro-
pological Society in 1861, he precipitated one of the critical
incidents in the history of brain science.
Paul Broca and the Case of “Tan”

Paul Broca (1824–1880) was the chief of surgery at a major
Parisian hospital (Figure 3.4). Through his surgical work,
he had become interested in variations in people’s skeletal
structures, particularly their skulls, and he invented sev-
Figure 3.4 Paul Broca (1824–1880). eral instruments for measuring them. In 1859 he founded
the Paris Anthropological Society to bring together other people with similar
interests. (In today’s terminology, this area of study would be considered part of
physical as opposed to cultural anthropology.) Several experts on head and brain
anatomy joined, including Aubertin.
Most of these experts accepted Flourens’s general argument about the brain
and regarded Aubertin’s contrary view with skepticism. However, Aubertin
announced to the Society that he had found an incurably ill patient who had pre-
viously lost his speech while retaining his full ability to understand language.
Aubertin planned to autopsy the patient’s brain after his death and declared that
if the frontal areas were intact, he would renounce his position on the importance
of that brain area to speech.
A few days later, an event occurred that led to Aubertin’s patient being
largely forgotten, along with Aubertin himself. A patient with similar symptoms
turned up on Broca’s surgical ward, terminally ill with gangrene of the right leg.
Twenty-one years earlier Louis Victor Leborgne had lost his speech but had re-
mained otherwise healthy and intelligent. Unmarried and having no immediate
family members to help support him, he was hospitalized. The hospital staff ob-
served that despite his inability to speak normally, he could understand what was
said to him, point correctly to named objects, and answer numerical questions
by holding up the appropriate numbers of fingers. His only vocalization was the
syllable tan, which he repeated rhythmically when he wanted to speak; this led to
his being nicknamed “Tan.”10
Ten years after Tan’s speech loss, his right arm and leg gradually became par-
alyzed. Then early in 1860 he began to go blind and took to his hospital bed
almost constantly; he became a solitary and pathetic creature. When an infection
developed in his insensitive right leg, neither he nor the hospital staff noticed
until it became gangrenous and he was sent to Broca’s surgical ward. Lacking
modern antibiotics, Broca immediately saw the case as hopeless. He summoned
Aubertin to ask if Tan fit the requirements for a test of his hypothesis; Aubertin
replied that he did.
When Tan died a few days later, Broca autopsied the brain and brought it to
the Anthropological Society. An egg-sized portion of the left frontal hemisphere
had clearly been damaged, with its center very close to Gall’s organ of verbal
memory (Figure 3.5). Though it could not be proved, it seemed likely that Tan’s
speech problem had begun with progressive brain deterioration starting at that
center; his other symptoms developed as the degeneration spread.*
*Tan’s brain has been preserved and is still available for specialized investigation at the Musée
Dupuytren in Paris.
Figure 3.5 The brain of M. Leborgne, otherwise known as Tan.
One confirming case could not prove a theory, of course, and Broca re-
served judgment until he found more. This task was more difficult than one
might think, because he could not deliberately create experimental brain
lesions (injuries or ablations) in humans as Flourens had in animals, and cases
of patients who had had both speech deficits and brain autopsies were rare.
Therefore, while Broca may have been lucky to steal Aubertin’s thunder in
producing the first demonstration case, he proved his true worth as a scientist
by collecting more supportive evidence. Over the next few years, he found au-
topsy information from several more cases of speech loss. While the extent of
brain damage varied considerably, it almost always included the same region
of the frontal lobe. A surprise finding, for Broca and everyone else, was that
in right-handed patients the damage invariably occurred on the left side. The
crucial region, shown in Figure 3.6, came to be known as Broca’s area. After
some debate, the speech debility resulting from damage to that area came to
be called aphasia, after the term used by Plato to denote the state of being at
a loss for words.
With his investigations of aphasia, Broca became the first establishment fig-
ure seriously and effectively to challenge Flourens’s conception of the undifferen-
tiated or unified cerebral cortex. His findings ushered in a new period of interest
Motor Strip
Sensory Strip
Wernicke’s
Area
Primary Visual
Area
Broca’s Area
Primary Auditory Area Cerebellum
Interpretive Cortex
Figure 3.6 The left side of the human brain.
in the localized functions of the brain, and those who were sometimes called the
“new phrenologists” discovered many more important localizations. In a more
dubious achievement, Broca also became known for promoting the idea that dif-
ferences in brain size correlated positively with differences in intelligence; and
further that white European males, with allegedly larger-than-average brains
than all women and males of other racial backgrounds, were consequently in-
nately superior to all other groups. Although these beliefs were widely accepted
for a time (mainly by other white European males), neither one has been con-
firmed by later rigorous research.
Sensory and Motor Areas

In 1870, two young German physiologists, Gustav Fritsch (1837–1927) and
Eduard Hitzig (1838–1907), had the bright idea that the brain might not be the
totally insensitive organ Aristotle had thought, and that it might respond to
direct electrical stimulation. Recent discoveries about the electrochemical
nature of nerve signals made this idea plausible. In addition, electricity in general
was a fashionable and exciting scientific topic of the day, and its potential appli-
cations were being explored in many fields. Working together, Fritsch and Hitzig
surgically exposed the cortex of a dog and applied mild electrical stimulation
to various specific points with a penlike electrode.
Conducted with makeshift equipment on an unanesthetized animal in
Hitzig’s house, the experiment partly resembled a scene from a Gothic novel
and would certainly not be approved by ethics committees today. But the
results revolutionized brain science, for Fritsch and Hitzig discovered that
stimulation to specific points in the region now known as the motor strip
elicited specific movements on the opposite side of the body (see Figure 3.6).
Stimulation to one particular point on the right motor strip always produced a
flexion of the left forepaw, for example, while stimulating a neighboring point
caused extension of the left hind leg. Here was evidence for a previously un-
suspected kind of localization in the brain, as well as a new experimental tech-
nique for studying it.
Many other scientists quickly followed Fritsch and Hitzig’s lead, none more
skillfully than a young Scottish neurologist named David Ferrier (1843–1928).
Throughout the 1870s he demonstrated the presence of several other function-
ally distinct “centers” in the cortex, to accompany Broca’s area and the motor
strip. When he electrically stimulated the occipital lobe at the back of a mon-
key’s brain, for example, the animal’s eyes moved rapidly and synchronously, as
if looking at something. Ablation of the same region produced blindness but no
deficiency in any other sense. Therefore, the occipital cortex contained a visual
area (see Figure 3.6). Ferrier also discovered an auditory area in the temporal
(side) lobe and a strip immediately behind the motor strip associated with sen-
sory functions for the same body parts. Ablations of this sensory strip produced
a loss of sensitivity in specific parts of the body, while ablations of the bordering
motor strip caused paralysis.
While these findings confirmed the reality of cortical localization, they also
conclusively undermined the old phrenology, even in the popular view. Although
Broca’s area resembled Gall’s organ of verbal memory in some ways, all the other
newly discovered localizations differed greatly from phrenological structures in
that they were associated with elementary sensory or motor functions, instead
of complex and highly developed faculties. One diehard phrenologist tried to
claim that the leg movements in response to electrical stimulation of the “organ
of self-esteem” were really rudimentary acts of strutting, but such desperate
rationalizations generally received the contempt they deserved. Very quickly,
an entirely new conception of brain function came into vogue, attempting to
explain not only the most recent discoveries but also the
numerous “blank” areas on the cortical map—those areas
whose stimulation or ablation produced no clear-cut ob-
servable effects in animal subjects.
According to this conception, the brain receives sensory
information at the various sensory centers, then stores it
in the surrounding regions. Visual memories are, therefore,
presumably stored in specific locations surrounding the
visual area, auditory memories around the auditory area,
and so on. (Animal subjects could not talk about their
memories, of course, so stimulation or ablation of these
memory areas did not yield any clearly observable effects.)
Further, all these localized memories were hypothesized to
be potentially interconnected with one another by fibers of
white matter. Brain parts particularly rich in white matter
were referred to as association areas. The frontal lobes of
the human brain—very large compared to other species
and also particularly rich in white matter—were speculated
to contain the large association areas responsible for hu-
mans’ superiority over other animals in thoughtfulness and
Figure 3.7 Carl Wernicke (1848–1905).
intelligence.
Wernicke’s Theory of Aphasia

In 1874, the young German neurologist Carl Wernicke (1848–1905; Figure 3.7)
used this new conception of the brain as the basis of an influential theory of apha-
sia. He started by noting that Broca’s area lay directly in front of the part of the
motor strip responsible for movement of the mouth, tongue, and face—precisely
where one would expect to find memories of the movements involved in speech.
It followed, therefore, that localized damage to Broca’s area alone (without ex-
tending onto the adjoining motor strip) should theoretically afflict the memory
for spoken words but not the physical capacity for speaking. This could account
for cases like Tan and Jonathan Swift.
Wernicke went on to describe a group of ten patients he had discovered with a
very different sort of language disorder, which he called sensory aphasia to con-
trast with the motor aphasia previously investigated by Broca. These patients
could speak fluently with correct grammar, but their understanding of spoken
language was severely impaired; in addition, their speech was marked by numer-
ous peculiar words and mispronunciations, which Wernicke called paraphasias.
The speech of such patients sounded like something from the Theater of the
Absurd, as in the following responses of a modern patient with sensory aphasia

to the question of what brought him to the hospital:
Boy, I’m sweating, I’m awful nervous, you know, once in a while I get caught
up, I can’t mention the tarripoi, a month ago, quite a little, I’ve done a lot
well, I impose a lot, while on the other hand, you know what I mean, I have
to run around, look it over, trebbin and all that sort of stuff.11
Wernicke showed that patients with sensory aphasia had suffered lesions to a
part of the left temporal lobe close to the auditory area—precisely where the audi-
tory memories for words should theoretically be stored. This finding made sense,
because as long as the auditory regions themselves remain intact, such patients
should hear what is said to them and recognize when they are being engaged in
conversation, but without being able to remember what the heard words mean. If
Broca’s area also remains intact, such patients should retain the motor memories
of words necessary for fluent spoken responses, and they may try to reply out
of social habit. But since they have not understood what was said to them, their
responses seem bizarre to the listener. Wernicke observed that such patients are
likely to be misdiagnosed with a psychotic mental illness if their brain injuries
go undetected.
Wernicke explained his patients’ mispronunciations, or paraphasias, as result-
ing from those same lesions. Normally, he argued, people listen to themselves as
they speak, constantly monitoring and correcting themselves as they go along. If
they start to mispronounce a word, they rapidly stop, correct themselves, and be-
gin again with scarcely a break in their sentence. Because sensory aphasics lack
comprehension of their own as well as others’ spoken words, however, they also
lack this self-correcting ability and utter many paraphasias.
The brain region implicated in sensory aphasia has come to be known as
Wernicke’s area (see Figure 3.6). Wernicke’s terms, motor aphasia and sensory
aphasia, are still commonly used, although the two conditions are also known as
Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia, respectively.
In a final impressive theoretical achievement, Wernicke successfully predicted
the existence of still another kind of aphasic speech disorder, previously unde-
scribed and undetected by doctors. He reasoned that an intact brain must con-
tain association fibers connecting the sensory speech memories in Wernicke’s
area with the motor ones in Broca’s area; these connections make possible the
silent monitoring and correcting of one’s own speech. If these association fibers
become damaged while Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas remain intact, a condition
Wernicke called conduction aphasia should occur—marked by paraphasias
because of the loss of self-monitoring, but with comprehension and general flu-
ency unimpaired. Such cases should be rare, as damage to the small connect-
ing region would usually be accompanied by injury to the nearby Broca’s or
Wernicke’s area, producing motor or sensory aphasia. In addition, the predicted
symptoms of conduction aphasia would be relatively mild, making it likely that
many cases would be overlooked.
Once placed on the alert by Wernicke, neurologists everywhere went on the
lookout for cases of conduction aphasia and soon found several. In addition to
paraphasias, these patients had a striking inability to repeat aloud things that
were said to them. Though not specifically predicted by Wernicke, this was an-
other effect that was consistent with his theory. Without connections between
their auditory and motor word memories, the patients lacked a mechanism for
modeling their own speech after something they had just heard.
This remarkable vindication of Wernicke’s theory indicated that brain science
had entered a new era of sophistication. Previously, work had been largely de-
scriptive and nontheoretical, directed simply toward the empirical localization
of functions in the cortex. Most of these functions turned out to involve elemen-
tary sensory and motor reactions, rather than complex faculties. Wernicke used
that information to construct a theory of one complex function—language—as
the result of an interaction among several simple sensory, motor, and associative
factors. Following his lead, scientists no longer looked for high-level faculties lo-
calized in the brain, but sought instead to demonstrate how complex psychologi-
cal processes might be created collectively from the basic elements of sensations,
movements, and their memories.
MEMORY AND THE EQUIPOTENTIALITY DEBATE

As Wernicke and others were demonstrating the power of the new localization
theories, a partially contrasting line of evidence regarding the brain’s storage
of memory was developing, and came to prominence in the United States in
the early 1900s. In 1902 a young American psychologist, Shepherd Ivory Franz
(1874–1933), published a study of the effects of cortical ablations on cats that had
previously been trained to escape from a “puzzle box.”12 This study was very much
in the tradition of Flourens—except that instead of looking at the generalized ef-
fects of ablation as Flourens had, Franz was interested in the effects on a specific,
learned response. His innovation was to combine ablation with animal training.
If the memories for the learned responses were localized in specific small re-
gions of the cortex, then only those ablations involving those particular regions
should have affected the responses. Franz’s study, however, found localization
only of a highly general sort, in that lesions of the frontal cortex caused the
responses to be lost, while lesions elsewhere did not. Even

more significant, it seemed to Franz, was the fact that the
frontally ablated animals were sometimes able to relearn
the escape response quite easily and quickly. Obviously
then, if the removed regions had been somehow responsi-
ble for the original learning, altogether different brain parts
were able to perform highly similar functions in the relearn-
ing. This finding led Franz to distrust the strong localization
theory, and to recall and respect Flourens’s old dictum that
the brain functions as a relatively undifferentiated whole.
Franz spent much of his subsequent career in hospital
settings and remained highly impressed by this plasticity
and flexibility of the brain. He observed that human pa-
tients suffering with lost functionality from localized brain
damage sometimes managed to reacquire those functions,
either partially or completely. The recovery was likely to be
greatest in young patients. Infants and children with exten-
sive left-side damage, for example, regularly acquired lan-
Figure 3.8 Karl Lashley (1890–1958). guage functions normally even though their Broca’s and
Wernicke’s areas had been destroyed. Franz concluded,
“Everything tended to show that there are not the definite
and exact functions for parts of the cerebrum which were posited [by the most en-
thusiastic localizationists], but that there is rather a possibility of substitution.”13
In 1915, Franz gained an ally and colleague for further animal research—Karl
Spencer Lashley (1890–1958; Figure 3.8). Although his Ph.D. was in genetics,
Lashley had been attracted to psychology through his friendship and collabora-
tion at Johns Hopkins University with John B. Watson, the charismatic founder of
the behaviorist movement (see Chapter 9). Watson and the behaviorists ruled out
any experimental methods involving introspection or reports of conscious states,
and concentrated on the strictly observable and “objective” behaviors of their
subjects. Animals such as tame white rats were favored subjects because they
could be easily observed, their environments could be controlled, and they obvi-
ously could not mislead the experimenters with unverifiable subjective reports.
Typical experiments studied the ability of animals to learn how to solve such
problems as the running of mazes. They demonstrated that hungry white rats
could gradually learn to solve complicated mazes if rewarded with food when-
ever their trial-and-error explorations brought them to the ends of the mazes. The
number of false turns or “errors” tended to decrease with each succeeding trial,
thereby providing objective measures of the animals’ learning ability.
When Lashley met Franz, the two decided to pool their expertise. Lashley trained
white rats on a maze and another simple learning task, and Franz performed selective
brain ablations. As they expected, given Franz’s earlier work, they found little exper-
imental evidence for localization, and they said so in a pair of papers in 1917. Subse-
quently Lashley, on his own, now trained by Franz on ablation techniques, conducted
a more extensive series of studies. He trained large numbers of white rats on a wide
variety of mazes and other tasks, followed by systematically varying ablations.
His highly detailed findings, recounted in the classic 1929 book Brain Mech-
anisms and Intelligence and summarized by the graph in Figure 3.9, seemed
to firmly refute the localization-of-memory hypothesis. The graph shows the
1440
Errors
Maze III
aze
of M
66
lty
ficu
Maze II
Dif
40
Maze I
1–10 11–20 21–30 31–40 41–50 51
Percent Ablation of the Cortex
Figure 3.9 The results of Lashley’s ablation studies.
numbers of errors made by rats running mazes of three levels of difficulty, follow-
ing six degrees of ablation. On the whole, the specific locations of the ablations
made little difference at all. Of much greater importance were absolute sizes of
the ablations, and the difficulty levels of the mazes involved. In general, large ab-
lations impeded performance on all mazes more than small ablations did, and the
effect was much more marked on the difficult mazes than the easy ones. These
results indicated that memories seemed to be contained within the entire cortex,
and not selectively localized in small parts of it.
Just as Broca, Ferrier, and Wernicke had revived the localizationist argument,
Lashley now harkened back to Flourens’s notion of the brain’s common action (action
commune), although for Lashley it was memory rather than the will that seemed evenly
distributed throughout the cortex. In summarizing his results, Lashley contributed two
new terms of which Flourens would undoubtedly have approved. He said the brain is
marked by equipotentiality, which he defined as “the apparent capacity of any intact
part of a functional brain to carry out . . . the [memory] functions which are lost by the
destruction of [other parts].” In other words, the brain has sufficient neural plasticity so
that when one part of it is injured, other parts can potentially take over in providing the
same functions. Sometimes, however, the brain’s equipotentiality may be offset by the
law of mass action, “whereby the efficiency of performance of an entire complex func-
tion may be reduced in proportion to the extent of brain injury.”14 Simply put: the more
extensive the brain injury, the less the opportunity for equipotentiality to operate.
In sum, Lashley’s systematic experiments seemed to rule out any simple the-
ory of memory localization in the brain, and toward the end of his life he wryly
expressed his own frustration with the problem: “I sometimes feel in reviewing
the evidence on the localization of [memory]. . . that the necessary conclusion is
that learning just is not possible. It is difficult to conceive of a mechanism which
can satisfy the conditions set for it.”15
The exact mechanisms of memory remain something of a mystery today.
Some of Lashley’s successors have suggested that his original theory oversimpli-
fied the problem, and that even elementary maze learning actually involves much
more than the coupling of single sensory stimuli with single motor responses.
In learning to run a maze, a rat must inevitably associate many different stimuli
(involving touch, smell, and hearing as well as vision) with the various “correct”
motor responses. Even if localized stimulus-response connections really do un-
derlie learning and memory, there should be many of them in many different
parts of the brain for any single completed act of maze learning. Damage to just
a small part of the brain would remove just a few of these and would have a small
effect on overall learning; damage to larger areas would remove a larger portion
of the total, and produce a larger decrease in performance.
04_POP_28354_ch03_098-133.indd 120 18/10/16 3:39 PM

The so-called redundancy hypothesis offers a related explanation, suggesting

that each individual memory gets stored in several locations throughout the cortex,
with the number increasing as the memory becomes better established and more
widely associated with other memories. Ablation of an isolated brain area would be
expected to remove some but not all of the traces of any particular memory.
Despite the plausibility of these ideas, a definitive theory linking memory to
specific brain activities has yet to be established. When it happens, it will almost
certainly rely on new techniques that were perfected in the decades following
Lashley’s research involving not the ablation, but rather the electrical stimulation
of the conscious human brain.
STIMULATION OF THE CONSCIOUS HUMAN BRAIN

Attempts to stimulate the human brain electrically got off to a poor start in 1874,
shortly after Fritsch and Hitzig’s experiments on living animals. A develop-
mentally disabled young woman with a cancerous lesion of the scalp and skull
came under the care of the Cincinnati doctor Roberts Bartholow (1831–1904).
Bartholow later reported that, because part of her brain was visible through the
opening in her skull, he “supposed that fine needles could be introduced with-
out material injury to the cerebral matter.”16 Following Fritsch and Hitzig’s lead,
Bartholow connected his needles to a mild electrical supply and stimulated the
exposed surface, producing involuntary muscular contractions on the opposite
side of the body. When the needle was inserted deeper, the patient complained of
an unpleasant tingling in her arm. Then, in order to elicit a stronger response, he
increased the current. The results were extremely unfortunate:
Her countenance exhibited great distress, and she began to cry. Very soon
the left hand was extended as if taking hold of some object in front of
her;. . .her eyes became fixed, with pupils widely dilated; her lips were blue,
and she frothed at the mouth;. . . she lost consciousness, and was violently
convulsed on the left side. The convulsion lasted five minutes, and was
succeeded by coma.17
The patient’s general condition worsened after the experiment, and she died
before Bartholow could carry out a planned repetition. He examined her brain at
autopsy and concluded that “although it is obvious that even fine needles cannot
be introduced into the cerebral substance without doing mischief, yet the fatal
result in this case must be attributed to the extension of [her original cancer].”18
Despite Bartholow’s attempt to minimize the harmfulness of his procedures, the
grisly experiment created such an outcry that he soon had to leave Cincinnati.
Wilder Penfield and the Treatment of Epilepsy

Several decades passed before the next stimulation exper-
iments were performed on conscious human subjects. The
Montreal-based American neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield
(1891–1976; Figure 3.10) had much greater ethical justifi-
cation, and his studies yielded more valuable scientific re-
sults. Penfield began in the 1930s by seeking new surgical
treatments for unmanageable cases of severe epilepsy, a
disease which he knew to be caused by the abnormal activa-
tion of cerebral neurons beginning at a small “focus,” then
spreading over larger areas of the brain. When the abnormal
activation spreads far enough, patients lose consciousness
and have convulsions. In many cases, patients experience
peculiar subjective warning signs just before the convul-
sions called auras. Varying widely from patient to patient,
they include sensations such as particular smells, tinglings,
or other feeling in certain parts of the body; intense but in-
explicable feelings such as strangeness or familiarity (déjà
vu); or the unexplained arousal of emotions such as rage,
guilt, depression, or elation. One famous epileptic, the great
Figure 3.10 Wilder Penfield (1891–1976). Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, experienced two con-
trasting kinds of emotional auras. One was a feeling of irra-
tional guilt, the conviction that he had committed some unknown but unspeak-
able crime; the other was “a feeling of happiness such as it is quite impossible to
imagine in a normal state, . . . for a few seconds of such bliss, one would gladly
give up ten years of one’s life.”19
Penfield hypothesized that an aura results from the earliest activation at the
focus, before it spreads far enough to cause the convulsions and the epileptic
seizure. Further, he thought the specific content of an aura might depend on the
location of the focus; an aura of tingling in the left arm, for instance, might be
associated with a focus in the right sensory strip. This suggested a daring exper-
imental treatment, to be tried only on the small proportion of epileptic patients
whose seizures could not be controlled by standard medication.
Using a local anesthetic, Penfield surgically exposed the brains of his fully
conscious, volunteer patients. He then gently stimulated different locations with
an electrode, seeking specific spots whose stimulation would cause his patients
to experience their auras. He often found such spots, and he concluded that they
marked diseased brain tissue responsible for the epilepsy. He then surgically re-
moved the suspect areas, unless they happened to lie near a language region
whose ablation might produce aphasia. Most patients reported a subsequent

lessening of their epilepsy that justified any side effects from the procedure.
Apart from its therapeutic use, Penfield’s remarkable procedure provided in-
valuable information about localization of function in general. While searching
for aura-producing spots, Penfield naturally stimulated many normal regions of
the cortex and observed the effects on fully conscious, intelligent, and coopera-
tive individuals. Some of these effects were predictable from earlier localization
studies. Stimulation of the motor strip, for example, produced movements on the
opposite side of the body—movements that surprised the patients themselves
because they occurred involuntarily. When Penfield stimulated the sensory strip,
his patients reported sensations such as tingling, quivering, or pressure in var-
ious parts of the body. Stimulation of the visual area produced flashes of light,
color, and abstract patterns, while the auditory area yielded clicks, buzzes, chirps,
rumbles, and other sounds.
There were also many surprises. When Penfield stimulated the regions sur-
rounding the primary visual and auditory areas, for example, patients experi-
enced full visual or auditory hallucinations with associated meanings, as opposed
to the contentless flashes, clicks, and buzzes produced by the primary regions
themselves. For example, stimulation of one patient’s secondary visual region
(as Penfield called this surrounding area) led the patient to say, “Oh gee, gosh,
robbers are coming at me with guns.” He actually saw the robbers coming, from
behind and to the left.20 When Penfield stimulated another patient’s secondary
auditory region, one spot produced the sound of a mother calling a child, and
another a Beethoven symphony. So real and surprising was the latter sensation
that the patient accused Penfield of secretly turning on a radio.*
Stimulation of the temporal lobe, the area of the cortex above the ear, produced
the most surprising effects of all. Apart from the relatively small auditory region
and Wernicke’s area, the temporal lobe had previously been a blank zone on the
brain localizationists’ map, not involved in any of the functions they knew about.
But Penfield found what he called the interpretive cortex (see Figure 3.6), a tem-
poral region whose stimulation produced two kinds of “psychical responses.” The
first were interpretive responses, in which patients suddenly and inexplicably
saw their immediate situations in new lights. Depending on the points of stim-
ulation, interpretive responses included such feelings as déjà vu, the opposite
sensation that everything was suddenly alien or absurd, senses of foreboding
*Sitting under the surgical tent during Penfield’s stimulation sessions and recording patient
responses was a young psychologist, Molly Harrower, whose remarkable career is covered in
Chapter 16.
and fear, or sudden euphoria and exhilaration. These interpretive sensations du-
plicated some patients’ epileptic auras (Dostoyevsky’s, for example), which now
became understandable for the first time as the results of abnormal activations
originating at focal points in the interpretive cortex. In this way Penfield demon-
strated that highly specific emotional and orienting attitudes are localized in the
brain, just as sensations and movements are.
Penfield’s stimulation of other parts of the interpretive cortex produced
experiential responses, described by his patients as hallucinatory “dreams” or
“flashbacks” of real events from the past, usually with unremarkable content. For
example, one patient reported: “Oh, a familiar memory—in an office somewhere.
I could see the desks. I was there and someone was calling to me—a man leaning
on a desk with a pencil in his hand.” Other typical responses included “A scene
from a play; they were talking and I could see it,” and “A familiar memory—the
place where I hang my coat up—where I go to work.”21 Unlike normal “memories,”
however, these scenes were vividly experienced subjectively with full sights and
sounds, not just thought about.
Penfield’s exciting findings actually raised more questions than they answered.
They demonstrated new and unexpected localized functions of some sort, but the
real nature of those functions remain in some doubt. At first thought, for example,
it may be tempting to argue that Penfield’s experiential responses provided the
long-sought evidence for the localization of memories. Their vivid detail sug-
gests that even inconsequential experiences may become permanently recorded
in specific brain cells, potentially available for exact recall. But Penfield himself
hesitated to equate these responses with memories.
He noted that patients described their experiential responses as being quali-
tatively different from normal memories—more like vivid dreams than ordinary
thoughts or recollections. The normal functioning of memory, therefore, must
involve a mechanism other than the specific stimulation of neurons artificially
produced by Penfield. He himself thought the electrical stimulations initiated
a “scanning” of experiences recorded in the brain that is part, but not all, of the
normal memory process.
Penfield further cautioned that no one understood the exact effects of artificial
electrical stimulation on the cerebral neurons. He suspected that electrical stimula-
tion and epileptic seizures both tend to inhibit rather than activate the normal func-
tions of the neurons involved. Therefore, interpretive and experiential responses
may really be caused by the operation of unknown parts of the brain whose functions
are normally opposed by the neurons of the interpretive cortex. When the cortical
neurons are temporarily knocked out of commission by artificial electrical stimula-
tion or epileptic activity, the opposed functions are permitted to express themselves.
Penfield also observed that experiential responses are

much more like moving pictures than still pictures, indi-
cating that cerebral neurons must somehow represent the
“flow” of experience and not just stationary images of it. He
concluded that much more must be involved than the sim-
ple storage of individual static “ideas” in single neural cells.
Brenda Milner and the Multiplicity

of Memory Systems
Our understanding of the brain’s complex role in memory
was further advanced by another remarkable case study
performed by one of Penfield’s younger colleagues and
her associates. Brenda Milner (b. 1918; Figure 3.11) was a
graduate student in psychology at Cambridge University
in England in the 1940s when her studies were interrupted
by World War II. Like that of many other psychologists, her
research was redirected to the war effort. In 1944, she immi-
grated to Montreal with her husband, an electrical engineer
who had been invited to initiate a program of atomic energy
research in Canada. Once established in Montreal, Milner
Figure 3.11 Brenda Milner (b. 1918).
used her proficiency in French to secure a teaching position
at the newly formed Institut de Psychologie at the Université
de Montréal.
In 1947, Donald O. Hebb (1904–1985) arrived at Montreal’s McGill University
with the draft manuscript of his book The Organization of Behavior. Published in
1949, this book related learning and other behavior to the hypothetical function-
ing of “neurological networks” in the brain that he called cell assemblies, and it
became an instant classic. Milner attended weekly seminars where each chapter
of the draft was discussed and debated, and she quickly decided to register in the
Ph.D. program under Hebb. Recognizing Milner’s promise as a student of brain
and behavior, Hebb recommended that she do her dissertation research with the
renowned Penfield at the nearby Montreal Neurological Institute. There, she be-
came particularly interested in the effects of temporal lobe damage and earned
her Ph.D. with a dissertation on that subject in 1952.
Over the course of their work together, Milner and Penfield became aware of
the potential importance in brain functioning of the hippocampus,* a structure
*The word hippokampos means “seahorse” in Greek; it was adopted for this structure by early
brain anatomists because its shape seemed to resemble that animal.
lying beneath the temporal lobe that was sometimes incidentally involved in
deep lesions and ablations of that lobe. In particular, they observed and studied
two cases in which hippocampal injuries had seemingly caused the impairment
of memory for recent events, and they presented these cases in a paper at a 1955
conference. In what would become a historic unfolding of events, the neurosur-
geon William Scoville, of Yale University, read their paper and telephoned Pen-
field about a patient he had just operated on who displayed a similar memory
impairment. Penfield relayed the information to Milner, who traveled to Con-
necticut to pursue the fascinating case of H.M.—which became perhaps the most
famous case study in the history of memory research.
H.M. had begun to experience minor seizures at the age of 10 after an ap-
parently insignificant fall, but they escalated into major seizures by age 16.
Occurring without warning, the seizures included tongue biting, urinary inconti-
nence, convulsions, and loss of consciousness followed by prolonged sleepiness.
Despite extensive anticonvulsant therapy, the major seizures continued to occur
about once a week, and less severe ones almost hourly. By the age of 27, H.M. had
become completely disabled.
Because of the severity of H.M.’s illness, and because EEG readings showed
diffuse abnormalities in both sides of the brain, Scoville, his surgeon, decided
to undertake a “frankly experimental operation,”22 in which a probe was inserted
into the brain and large sections of the hippocampus and surrounding tissue on
both sides were destroyed. Although substantially relieved of his seizures, H.M.
immediately experienced profound memory deficits. In particular, he developed
a severe form of amnesia in which he was unable to retain any new memories
of events or experiences that occurred after the operation. He could clearly re-
member his identity and details of his life from times before the surgery, but any
new learning or information remained with him only briefly and fleetingly. For
example, if he read the newspaper, fifteen minutes later he wouldn’t be able to
recall doing so or remember any of the information he had read. Milner reported
that she would have lunch with H.M., then ask him a half-hour later what he had
eaten. He was unable to name a single item of food, or even remember that he
had taken a meal.
Much like Broca had done after Tan, Scoville and Milner next sought to find
other cases that would support their hypothesis about the role of the hippocam-
pus in memory. They undertook a comparative case study of H.M. and nine other
patients who had undergone variations of the epilepsy surgery, differing only
with respect to how much of the hippocampal region was destroyed. Patients like
H.M. with the most extensive excisions of the hippocampus showed the most pro-
found loss of recent memory. Some other patients, whose hippocampal regions
were spared significant damage, showed completely intact memory. Scoville and
Milner concluded that the ability to form recent memories somehow resided
within this particular brain structure.23
Milner, assisted by her colleagues and students, continued to study H.M. for
thirty years. Interestingly, despite severe incapacitation, his personality and gen-
eral intelligence remained largely unchanged. Even on a digit span test, in which
he was asked to repeat back a series of numbers that had just been read to him,
he performed normally. This finding led Milner to conclude that H.M.’s deficits
did not involve immediate short-term memory, since he was able to retain the
numbers briefly in what’s referred to as working memory. What he could not do
was transfer the information from there into long-term memory. Memory tasks
on which there was a delay between learning and recall, especially if the delay
was filled with a distractor task, were impossible for him. Milner proposed that
this provided evidence for two separate memory processes: one a primary mental
process with rapid decay, the other an overlapping secondary process through
which long-term storage is achieved.
She was also able to show that H.M.’s impairment did not hold for every
type of task. For example, when H.M. was tested on a mirror-drawing task, in
which he had to trace the outline of a star while looking only at its reflection in
a mirror, his performance improved substantially over successive trials. When
asked if he remembered performing the task, however, he replied no. In other
words, his declarative memory, the ability to remember and verbally describe
his experience, was impaired, but his procedural memory, the ability to benefit
from practice and repeat newly learned actions, was not. Milner’s hypothesis
that there are distinct and multiple memory systems was a major new idea. The
investigation and detailed analysis of these systems on a psychological level
became essential components of the emerging discipline of cognitive psychol-
ogy (see Chapter 14).
In the early 1960s, Milner was joined in her study of H.M. by a younger McGill
University Ph.D. student, Suzanne Corkin (1937–2016), who went on to become
Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Corkin
studied H.M. for the rest of his life. In 2013, she published a popular account of
her experiences in a book titled Permanent Present Tense, a phrase that must
surely have captured H.M.’s subjective experience of his brain dysfunction. Five
years earlier, at the age of 82, H.M. had died of respiratory failure at his nursing
home in Connecticut. (His real name, Henry Gustav Molaison, was not revealed
until after his death.) With his prior consent, his brain has been preserved for fu-
ture study. In life and in death, H.M.’s legacy to our understanding of the human
memory system has been immense.
Cartesian Dualism Revisited

Toward the end of his career, Penfield published a surprising opinion on the
extent to which understanding the neurological bases of cognitive functioning
can help explain the mind. He admitted that his own work had originally been
inspired by the assumption that the mechanisms of the brain account for the
phenomena of the mind. He assumed that once the brain was fully understood,
all mental and psychological phenomena would be explained as a result. But by
1975, he had doubts. Certain elements of experience—particularly the conscious
willing or deciding to do something, or believing in something—had never been
produced by electrical stimulation or any other mechanistic process. Penfield
now doubted that they ever would be, and he wrote:
Because it seems to me certain that it will always be quite impossible to

explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain, and be-
cause it seems to me that the mind develops and matures independently
throughout an individual’s life as though it were a continuing element, . . .
I am forced to choose the proposition that our being is to be explained on
the basis of two fundamental elements.24
In other words, Penfield came to regard “brain” and “mind” as two independent
though interacting entities, each with its own separate level of explanation. He
thus finally opted for a dualism not very different (except in detail) from that of
Descartes. Penfield admitted he could not prove this opinion, and many contem-
porary brain scientists continue to search for the neural basis of the subjective
experience of “will.” In 2009 a group of neuroscientists in France used Penfield’s
technique to stimulate parts of the cortex in seven patients. This stimulation
resulted in reports of a will to move and a desire to move, without any physical
movement (or corresponding brain activity) actually taking place.25 These findings
challenge the dualistic view that assumes both will and intention arise in a non-
physical realm and are then conveyed to the brain to cause action. In showing that
the brain can produce a feeling of will or desire in advance of the action itself, these
researchers suggest that even the mind can be explained at the level of the brain.
As we shall see in Chapter 14, similar questions about the nature of conscious-
ness have arisen out of work on the artificial intelligence of sophisticated computer
programs. Can a machine that simulates humanlike intelligent behavior perfectly
ever have the subjective experiences of consciousness, belief, and free will? If hu-
mans are just very complicated machines, as some argue, then perhaps the answer
is yes. Descartes’s issue obviously remains very much alive, and it will continue to
engage psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers well into the future.
Recent Developments: Cognitive Neuroscience and Social Neuroscience 129
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

AND SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE
Despite disagreement over whether the mind-brain relationship will ever be
fully understood and what form that understanding will take, the assumption of
a strong connection between the two has been highly productive. It stimulated
the work of Penfield and Milner in the first place, and continues to generate fas-
cinating explorations to more fully explain the most human of all capacities: the
awareness of our own consciousness. The prominent psychologist and neuro-
scientist V. S. Ramachandran has called the effort to understand how the brain
gives rise to the mind, thus accomplishing an awareness of itself, the “holy grail”
of neuroscience.
This search for the holy grail has been steadily advancing, in part through
the use of increasingly powerful imaging techniques that have enabled detailed
observations of the brain structures and neural activities that accompany specific
mental processes. Many of these techniques fall under the general category of
tomography, the imaging of objects as collections of sections, or slices, created
by various kinds of penetrating waves. The most common types of images, or
scans, are from CT (computed tomography), based on X-rays, and MRI (magnetic
resonance imaging), which uses radio waves to produce images of magnetically
aligned atoms within the object. When the object being observed is a living or-
gan such as the brain, positron emission tomography (PET) can also be done, to
detect concentrations of injected radioactive “tracer” molecules, which indicate
metabolic activity in different parts of the brain. Less invasive and more efficient
fMRI (functional MRI) procedures can provide images of blood oxygenation (an
indirect measure of blood flow) to reflect neural activity in specific brain regions.
Along with these technological developments, a shift was occurring in the field
of academic psychology that is sometimes referred to as the cognitive revolution.
The word resurgence is more appropriate, because cognitive functions—those re-
lating to such processes as thinking, reasoning, memory, and perception—had
long been considered an important domain of psychology. During much of the
early and mid-twentieth century, however, the movement known as behaviorism
became dominant, particularly among English-speaking academic psychologists.
Behaviorists declared that only directly and “objectively” observable behavior
was appropriate subject matter for scientific psychology. Anything not directly
and objectively observable, including subjective introspections, thoughts, rea-
soning, and so on, was ruled off limits. Chapters 9 and 14 will discuss these top-
ics in detail, but for now we simply note that throughout the latter half of the
twentieth century, psychologists increasingly returned to cognitive processes as
major subjects for their investigations and analyses. As noted earlier, the work of
Milner and her colleagues revealing some of the complexities of memory is one
example of this trend.
Perhaps inevitably, technological advances in brain imaging and revived in-
terest in cognition came together, as cognitive psychologists, as well as investi-
gators from diverse disciplines who were interested in neuroscience, began using
the new techniques to learn what actually goes on in different parts of the brain as
various cognitive activities are performed. This localization research was in the
same tradition as that described throughout this chapter, but with a previously
undreamed-of precision. In the late 1970s the pioneering cognitive psychologist
George Miller and the younger neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga called the new
interdisciplinary field cognitive neuroscience. Both the field and its name took
off, and initial accomplishments included PET studies of brain activity during
varying states of attention and memory by the psychologist Michael Posner and
neurologist Marcus Raichle in the 1980s. The psychologist Stephen Kosslyn used
fMRI technology to show that the brain activities that accompany mental imag-
ery are not unified or localized in a single region; they occur in diverse regions,
each responsible for different aspects of the imaging process. Too diverse and
complex to be summarized here, the main accomplishments of the new field have
been summarized by Gazzaniga and two colleagues in their book Cognitive Neu-
roscience: The Biology of the Mind.26
The excitement generated by these increasingly sophisticated methods for
“seeing” inside the brain and uncovering the neurological correlates of human
behavior has also extended into traditionally “soft” areas, such as social psychol-
ogy (see Chapter 10). Researchers combining their interest in understanding how
the brain processes social information with advanced imaging techniques refer
to the field as social neuroscience, or social cognitive neuroscience. Their aim is
to explore the neural mechanisms underlying social thought and behavior and
they have established new journals for the area, such as Social Neuroscience and
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. The journal Social Neuroscience,
founded in 2006, stated its goal to “publish empirical articles that . . . further our
understanding of the role of the central nervous system in the development and
maintenance of social behaviors.”27 Studies reporting behavioral data in isola-
tion, the journal editors noted, would not be considered. Although the American
Psychological Association declared 2000–2010 to be the Decade of Behavior, it
seems certain that research efforts to understand behavior will become increas-
ingly tied to neuroscience as the field moves further into the twenty-first century.
Chapter Review 131
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
There has been a long history of debates over localization removed. This demonstrated what Lashley called the law
of function in the brain. In the early 1800s, Gall proposed of mass action, and temporarily turned opinion away again
that the brain is composed of many localized “organs,” each from a strict localizationist position.
associated with a psychological “faculty” whose strength The next approach to studying brain function was re-
could be assessed by measuring the overlying bumps and search on the direct electrical stimulation of the conscious
indentations of the skull. Gall’s theory of phrenology was human brain, especially by Penfield in his work with epilep-
challenged by Flourens; from surgical ablations of parts of tic patients in the 1930s. Depending on the area stimulated,
the brain, he came to believe that separate functions were Penfield found he could artificially produce a great variety
evenly distributed within each organ. Localization theory of sensory, experiential, and interpretive impressions in the
was revived, however, with the discovery of specific lan- patient, some of which seemed like hallucinatory reliving
guage areas by Broca and Wernicke, using brain autop- of past memories. Penfield noted that these experiences
sies from patients with unusual expressive and receptive differed from normal memories in various ways, and urged
language impairments. More evidence for localization of a more research before drawing conclusions about the cor-
different kind came from Fritsch and Hitzig; using electri- tical localization of memories. Milner advanced Penfield’s
cal probes to stimulate exposed areas of the brain’s cortex, views with the intensive study of H.M., an epileptic patient
they identified motor and sensory strips associated with whose hippocampus had been ablated to provide relief
specific movements or bodily sensations. Ferrier subse- from intractable seizures. H.M. showed a distinctive pat-
quently used similar techniques to identify cortical regions tern of strengths and weakness that led Milner to postu-
responsible for vision and hearing. late the existence of separate systems for declarative and
In the early twentieth century attention shifted to the procedural memory, as well as separate storage areas for
subject of learning and memory, and researchers won- working memory and long-term memory.
dered whether specific memories might be “stored” in By the 1970s, technological advances in brain imaging
specific regions of the brain. Franz doubted this idea after combined with a resurgence of interest in cognitive pro-
observing the apparent plasticity of the brain of many pa- cesses. The two came together in the interdisciplinary field
tients recovering from major injuries or ablations. When of cognitive neuroscience, the aim of which is to identify
one area was damaged its function appeared, at least and understand the neural processes underlying thinking,
sometimes, to be compensated for by another. Franz col- memory, language, and many other mental capacities. The
laborated with Lashley on studies of the impact of brain interest in brain processes has extended to other areas of
ablation on previously acquired maze learning in rats. The psychology, with scientists now working to understand the
amount of learning loss turned out not to depend on the neural underpinnings of social thought and behavior, as
location of the ablations, but on the total amount of tissue well as many other areas of human functioning.
Key Pioneers
Franz Josef Gall, p. 100 Ernest Aubertin, p. 110 Karl Spencer Lashley, p. 118
Thomas Willis, p. 100 Paul Broca, p. 110 Roberts Bartholow, p. 121
Johann Kaspar Lavater, Gustav Fritsch, p. 113 Wilder Penfield, p. 122
p. 102 Eduard Hitzig, p. 113 Brenda Milner, p. 125
Pierre Flourens, p. 106 David Ferrier, p. 114 Donald O. Hebb, p. 125
Jean Baptiste Bouillaud, Carl Wernicke, p. 115
p. 110 Shepherd Ivory Franz, p. 117
Key Terms
gray matter, p. 101 paraphasias, p. 115
white matter, p. 101 Wernicke’s area, p. 116
commissure, p. 101 Broca’s aphasia, p. 116
neuron, p. 101 Wernicke’s aphasia, p. 116
cortex, p. 102 conduction aphasia, p. 116
phrenology, p. 102 equipotentiality, p. 120
physiognomy, p. 102 law of mass action, p. 120
cerebellum, p. 103 redundancy hypothesis, p. 121
ablation, p. 106 interpretive cortex, p. 123
Broca’s area, p. 112 interpretive responses, p. 123
aphasia, p. 112 experiential responses, p. 124
motor strip, p. 114 cell assemblies, p. 125
visual area, p. 114 hippocampus, p. 125
auditory area, p. 114 tomography, p. 129
sensory strip, p. 114 cognitive neuroscience, p. 130
sensory aphasia, p. 115 social neuroscience, p. 130
motor aphasia, p. 115

1. Although Gall’s phrenological system appears somewhat ridiculous to us now, in what
ways might his work be considered scientific, at least by the standards of his own time?
2. Choose several pioneers from this chapter and describe their views in the localization-
of-function debate, as well as the research they have used to support their position.
3. Wilder Penfield came to regard “brain” and “mind” as two independent though inter-
acting entities, each with its own separate level of explanation. The implication of this
position is that a thorough explanation of the functioning of the brain may not be equiv-
alent to a complete understanding of the mind. Does this sound similar to the views of
pioneers described in previous chapters of this book? Do you agree or disagree with
Penfield? Why?
Chapter Review 133
4. The pioneers discussed in this chapter have used an array of techniques, methods, and
kinds of subjects for studying how the brain functions. Describe three or four tech-
niques. Which ones are still used today? What new techniques have been added?
5. What role has technology played in the research on the structure and function of the
brain? Give specific examples from the chapter in your response.
Suggested Resources
John van Wyhe has created an informative and profusely illustrated “History of Phrenology
on the Web” at http://www.historyofphrenology.org.uk. For more traditional scholarly ac-
counts, see Owsei Temkin, “Gall and the Phrenological Movement,” Bulletin of the History of
Medicine 21 (1947): 275–321; Byron Stookey, “A Note on the Early History of Cerebral Local-
ization,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 30 (1954): 559–576; David Krech,
“Cortical Localization of Function” in Psychology in the Making, ed. Leo Postman (New
York: Knopf, 1962); and Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth
Century (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1970).
Appreciative accounts of Wernicke and Lashley appear in Norman Geschwind, “Wern-
icke’s Contribution to the Study of Aphasia,” Cortex 3 (1967): 448–463; and Darryl Bruce,
“Integrations of Lashley,” in Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, eds. G. A. Kimble et al. (New
York: Erlbaum, 1991), 306–323. For an encyclopedic, scholarly, and engaging survey of the
history of brain science from antiquity through modernity see Stanley Finger’s Origins of
Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994). Lashley cogently summarized his own findings in his book Brain Mechanisms
and Intelligence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), as did Penfield in Wilder
Penfield and Lamar Roberts, Speech and Brain-Mechanisms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1959).
For a comprehensive survey of the historical evolution and contemporary status of the
cognitive neuroscience of memory, including Milner’s work with H.M., see Brenda Milner,
Larry Squire, and Eric Kandel, “Cognitive Neuroscience and the Study of Memory,” Neuron
20 (1998): 445–468. Suzanne Corkin has also written an informative summary and update
of research findings (to 2002) on her famous patient and research participant titled “What’s
New with the Amnesic Patient H.M.?” in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 3 (2002): 153–160.
Penfield’s late doubts about ever being able to account for the “mind” totally in terms of
brain function are expressed in his The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1975). Michael Gazzaniga has written an engaging account of his life in neuro-
science in Tales from Both Sides of the Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).
CHAPTER 4
The Sensing and Perceiving
Mind: From Kant Through the
Gestalt Psychologists
The Kantian Background

Helmholtz and Psychology’s Physiological Foundations
Helmholtz on Human Vision
Fechner and Psychophysics
Gestalt Psychology
I n the late 1700s a secluded German philosopher at the University of

Konigsberg arose from what he called his “dogmatic slumbers.” Trained in the
Leibnizian tradition of German philosophy, he had previously written respected
but unspectacular works on topics such as the existence of God and the differ-
ence between absolute and relative space. But now, stimulated by a challenge
from one of Locke’s successors in the British associationist school, he embarked
on a program of “critical philosophy” that subtly but crucially refashioned the
German view of humanity and nature. Among its other consequences was a
climate of opinion conducive to the scientific study of the mind and the devel-
opment of a new and experimental psychology.
135
136 4 | The Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant Through the Gestalt Psychologists
THE KANTIAN BACKGROUND

The aroused philosopher was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804; Figure 4.1a) and his
intellectual awakener was the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776;
Figure 4.1b). Hume had formalized the laws of association by contiguity and
similarity (see Chapter 2), and, more significantly for Kant, had used them in
questioning the logical status of the concept of causality—the belief that certain
events are directly “caused by” certain other preceding events. When one billiard
ball strikes another, for example, we naturally interpret the motion of the sec-
ond as having been directly caused by the impact of the first. Normal scientific
theories assume that specific prior events cause specific and predictable conse-
quences. These uses of the word cause imply a necessary sequential relationship
between certain causing and caused events, and suggest that we automatically
appreciate this necessity when we perceive the events.
Hume questioned this assumption. All we can ever really know, he argued, is
that certain regular sequences of events have occurred in the past, leading us to
expect their repetition in the future. The conviction that one billiard ball’s motion
has been caused by its impact with another really amounts to the recollection
of associated impact-movement sequences from the past and the assumption
that such cause-effect actions will continue in the future. “Causality” is nothing
more than that. The presumed necessity of the connection between the events is
never directly perceived, and causality thus has only a probabilistic instead of
an absolute basis. As Hume summarized: “ ‘Tis not, therefore, reason, which is
a b
Figure 4.1 (a) Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). (b) David Hume (1711–1776).

the guide of life, but custom. That alone determines the mind, in all instances, to
suppose the future conformable to the past.”1
From a practical point of view, of course, these considerations make no differ-
ence. We fare best in the real world by anticipating regularities in nature, whether
their causation be real or merely assumed. But to a philosopher like Kant, con-
cerned with the essential nature of human knowledge, the issue was crucial. If
one could not actually “know” causality in nature, the logical underpinnings of
science and the entire structure of knowledge seemed to him to be challenged.
Kant responded to this challenge with a variation on the nativist theme we
have encountered before. He argued that because causality cannot be proven to
exist in the external world but nevertheless seems an inescapable part of our ex-
perience, it must represent an innate contribution of the mind. He postulated
two separate domains of reality, one completely inside the human mind, the
other completely outside. The external or noumenal world consists of “things-
in-themselves”—objects in a “pure” state independent of human experience.
Although presumed to exist and to interact with the human mind, this nou-
menal world can never be known directly because as soon as it impacts on a
human mind it becomes transformed by that mind into the inner or phenome-
nal world. Phenomenon had been Plato’s original Greek term for “appearance,”
and in many ways Kant’s phenomenal world resembled Plato’s world of every-
day experiences. But whereas Plato thought the underlying “true” world of ideal
forms could be at least partially or indirectly understood, for Kant the ultimate
reality of his noumenal world was completely unknowable. What he did believe
to be knowable, however, were many of the major characteristics of the mind that
actively creates its phenomenal experiences.
To start, Kant argued that the mind automatically and immediately localizes
its experience in space and time—dimensions he referred to as the two intuitions.
Next, he adopted Aristotle’s terminology (see Chapter 1) and argued that the
mind further organizes its subjective experiences automatically and involuntar-
ily in terms of categories that define their qualities, quantities, and relationships
to one another. Within the relationships category was the concept of causality. In
other words, human beings inevitably experience the world as organized in time
and space, and as operating according to causal laws—not because the noumenal
world is necessarily or “really” that way, but because the mind can do nothing else
but structure its phenomenal experience that way.
The importance of these ideas, which Kant developed in an influential series
of books written between 1781 and 1798, lay not so much in his specific list of
intuitions and categories as in his general insistence that the mind itself contrib-
utes importantly to our experience of external reality, in ways that are capable of
systematic analysis and description. In the Kantian context, the inherent

properties of mind assumed a crucial new importance, worthy of study in their
own right.
Ironically, however, after staking a claim for the importance of the study of the
mind’s organizing properties, Kant went on to assert that such study would never
achieve the status of a true science like physics. He argued that mental phenom-
ena, in contrast to the physical objects investigated by physical scientists, (1) have
no spatial dimension, (2) are too transient to pin down for sustained observation,
(3) cannot be experimentally manipulated, and perhaps most importantly of all,
(4) cannot be mathematically described or analyzed. For these reasons Kant thought
psychology must always remain a philosophical rather than a scientific discipline.
Throughout the century after Kant, however, a number of dedicated scientific
investigators began seriously studying human sensory processes, focusing atten-
tion on many situations in which conscious experience is clearly different from, or a
transformation of, the “objective” external stimuli giving rise to the experience. In the
wake of Kant’s philosophy, these transformations seemed interpretable as the effects
of an active, creative agency—similar to, if not identical with, the Kantian mind.
Among the simplest and most obvious of these situations were optical illu-
sions, in which one’s conscious impression of a visual stimulus differs demon-
strably in some respect from its objective properties. In Figure 4.2, for example,
measuring with a ruler will show the two horizontal lines are exactly the same
length. The simple imposition of seven converging lines, however, makes the top
line appear markedly longer than the bottom one. The experienced difference in
length, of course, lies not in the lines themselves; it has somehow come from the
mind’s perceptive process.
In another important development, neurophysiologists in the early nine-
teenth century discovered the so-called law of specific nerve energies, assert-
ing that each sensory nerve in the body conveys one and
only one kind of sensation. First proposed by the Scottish
scientist Charles Bell in 1811, the law’s implications were
most fully explored in the 1830s by the German physiolo-
gist Johannes Müller. The full development of this law in
Germany was no historical accident, for Kant’s philosophy
had created a receptive intellectual climate there for appre-
ciating its implications.
The law of specific nerve energies challenged the tradi-
tional concept of a sensory nerve as something like a hol-
low tube, capable of conveying light, sound, pressure, or any
Figure 4.2 An optical illusion. other kind of stimulation introduced into it. Instead, the law
suggested that each sensory nerve produces only one type of sensation—for ex-
ample, visual, auditory, or tactile—regardless of how it becomes stimulated. A
simple experiment demonstrates the visual specificity of the optic nerve, which
leads into the brain from the retina at the back of the eye. In normal vision, the
optic nerve becomes stimulated by photochemical reactions of light on the retina
and transmits signals to the brain that result in conscious visual sensations of
light. If, however, you turn your eyes as far to the right as you can, close your eyes,
and then press gently on the left side of your left eyeball, you will see a spot of
colored light in the right side of your visual field. You have stimulated the retina and
hence the optic nerve with tactile pressure rather than the normal light rays—but
the effect is still a visual one. You have literally seen the pressure on your eyeball,
because the stimulated optic nerve can convey no other sensations except visual
ones. The same sort of specificity characterizes the other sensory nerves.
The law of specific nerve energies seemed especially interesting in the general
context of Kantian philosophy, with its contention that subjective phenomenal
sensations cannot be taken as infallible representations of noumenal “reality.”
Seeing a particular pattern of light, for example, now only meant that the visual
nerves had somehow been stimulated—and while the stimulation might have orig-
inated in light rays from a real external object, there could be no guarantee of the
fact. The immediate source of sensory experience was revealed to be not the exter-
nal world alone, but a sensory nervous system that has interacted with the external
world and added its own contribution to the contents of consciousness.
Further, physical scientists had increasingly demonstrated the usefulness of
conceptualizing the physical world as ultimately composed of various forces,
waves, and energies, which, like Kant’s things-in-themselves, are not directly per-
ceivable by the senses. Light, sound, or heat waves, for example, constantly im-
pact on the nervous system, but instead of being perceived as waves they become
transformed into the phenomenal experiences of color, sound, and warmth or
cold. But although the wavelike qualities of the external world were not directly
perceivable by the human senses, they became increasingly so indirectly thanks
to new techniques of scientific measurement and analysis. Physicists devised
apparatuses to give them precise, numerical values for the wavelengths and fre-
quencies of light or sound waves, for instance. The nineteenth-century physicists’
external world therefore remained like Kant’s noumenal world in being only in-
directly knowable by the senses, but it increasingly differed from that world by
being describable in mathematical and other scientific terminology.
Two nineteenth-century Germans helped psychology gain recognition as a
genuine science—Kant notwithstanding—by investigating and discovering law-
ful relationships between these newly specifiable aspects of the physical world
and the ways they are consciously experienced by people. Hermann Helmholtz,
a student of Müller working in what he explicitly saw as the tradition of Kant,
carried the doctrine of specific nerve energies to far-reaching conclusions while
becoming one of the most famous scientists of his time. Gustav Fechner laid
the groundwork for a mathematically based experimental psychology by study-
ing how differences in the physical intensities of stimulation are perceived psy-
chologically. In a further development of these ideas, during the early 1900s the
founders of Gestalt psychology uncovered still other important ways in which
an active and creative mind molds important aspects of conscious perceptual
experience.
HELMHOLTZ AND PSYCHOLOGY’S PHYSIOLOGICAL

FOUNDATIONS
Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894; Figure 4.3a) was born in the Prussian town
of Potsdam near Berlin. His father, a high school teacher with a strong interest
in Kantian philosophy, encouraged Hermann’s early enthusiasm for science.
Physics became the boy’s consuming passion from the moment he found some
old textbooks in his father’s library. He worked on optics diagrams beneath his
school desk when he should have been studying Latin, spoiled the family linen
with chemistry experiments, and in due course became the most promising
young scientist in town.
At that time, however, a young person had to show more than promise in or-
der to practice science seriously. Although the educated classes were beginning
to appreciate the importance of science, job opportunities were scarce and the
pursuit of “pure science” as a vocation was an option only for those who were
independently wealthy—a small group that did not include the Helmholtz family.
Fortunately, however, the Prussian government had instituted a program offering
free medical training in Berlin for poor but talented students in exchange for
eight years of service as army surgeons after graduation. While not as appealing
to young Helmholtz as physics, medicine at least involved science; he applied at
age 17 and was accepted. According to his letters home, he did little for the next
year but study medicine, relieved only occasionally by playing the piano, reading
Goethe and Byron, and “sometimes for a change the integral calculus.”2
During the second year of the program, Helmholtz began to study physiology
with Johannes Müller (1801–1858; Figure 4.3b), whom we previously noted as
the major promoter of the law of specific nerve energies. He also became friends
with a brilliant group of fellow students, including Emil du Bois-Reymond
(1818–1896), who would later collaborate with Helmholtz in establishing the phys-
ical nature of the nerve impulse; and Ernst Brücke, who would eventually become
a b
Figure 4.3 (a) Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894) as a young man. (b) His teacher Johannes
Müller (1801–1858).
the favorite teacher of Sigmund Freud. Helmholtz shone even among this excep-
tional group, largely because of his unusual grasp of the concepts from physics
that Müller frequently used in accounting for physiological processes. For exam-
ple, Müller analyzed the eye as an optical device like a camera and the ear as a
propagator of sound waves through solid and liquid media.
Even with his respect for physics, however, Müller still clung to an old phys-
iological doctrine known as vitalism, according to which all living organisms
have within themselves a nonphysical “life force” that is essential for them to be
alive and that is not analyzable by scientific methods. This view was not quite as
extreme as the ancient Greek notion of the psyche, and Müller agreed that many
ordinary physical and chemical processes take place within living organisms. But
he also believed these processes had to be somehow harnessed and controlled
in living organisms by the life force. He thought that with death, the life force
departs and physiochemical processes can run free, leading to the rotting of the
body, rather than its maintenance. Belief in vitalism implied that there was a limit
to a complete scientific understanding of physiological processes, because the
life force itself presumably lay beyond scientific analysis.
Although respectful of their famous teacher, Helmholtz and his friends re-
fused to accept this implicit limitation on science. To them, the gains from using
physical principles in physiology had been so great that it seemed foolish to pos-
tulate any limits to the approach. Accordingly, they rejected vitalism and adopted
the doctrine of physiological mechanism, declaring all physiological processes
to be potentially understandable in terms of ordinary physical and chemical prin-
ciples. The processes might be highly complex and beyond current comprehen-
sion, but ultimately they must be subject to the same universal physical laws
as inanimate processes. Physiological mechanism became an article of faith
among the students, which they duly solemnized by composing and swearing
to a formal oath, declaring that “No other forces than the common physical-
chemical ones are active within the organism.” In cases currently unexplained,
“one has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the
physical-mathematical method, or to assume new forces . . . reducible to the force
of attraction and repulsion.”3
The students’ avowal of physiological mechanism led them to differ from their
teacher more in emphasis and attitude than in the actual methods of research. No
“ultimate experiment” could be done to choose between vitalism and mechanism,
and Müller was quite happy to apply physical principles to physiology as far as
they would go. He disagreed with his students only in his assumption that a limit
to mechanism would be reached at some point, when the life force entered the pic-
ture. Nevertheless, this difference subtly influenced the kinds of problems selected
for investigation. Müller, for example, believed that the deepest mysteries of nerve
functioning probably involved the life force and would remain resistant to scien-
tific understanding. He believed nervous impulses passed through nerve fibers
with infinite or near-infinite speeds, probably because of their close involvement
with the life force. Accordingly, he did not seriously contemplate research into pos-
sible chemical properties of nerve signals. Helmholtz and his mechanistic friends
operated under no such constraint, and as a result they revolutionized physiology.
The Triumph of Physiological Mechanism

At 21, Helmholtz received his medical degree and began his eight-year military
obligation. As an army surgeon, he found his official duties tedious but scarcely
all-consuming of his time, so he built a small physiological laboratory in his bar-
racks where he studied metabolic processes in frogs. Conceived and conducted
within the framework of physiological mechanism, his experiments demonstrated
that the amount of energy and heat generated by frog muscles was roughly equal
to the amount of energy released by the oxidation of the food it consumed. In
other words, he showed that ordinary chemical reactions were capable of produc-
ing (though not necessarily that they did produce) all of the physical activity and
heat generated by a living organism.
Young Helmholtz now turned his attention to a related idea that was just then
being debated by physicists: the law of conservation of energy. According to this
then-hypothetical notion, all the kinds of forces in the universe—heat, light, grav-
ity, magnetism, and so on—are potentially interchangeable forms of a single huge
but quantitatively fixed reservoir of energy. Energy can be transformed from one
state to another, but never created or destroyed by any physical process. The total
amount of energy in the universe is constant and conserved. According to this hy-
pothesis, a machine is simply a device for transforming energy from a less useful
to a more useful kind. A steam engine, for example, transforms the heat from a fire
into the motion of steam molecules, whose energy is transformed into the motion
of pistons, which in turn activates the usefully moving parts of the engine. The frog
muscles Helmholtz studied were physiological machines that transformed the po-
tential chemical energy stored in food and oxygen into movement and body heat.
Several scientists had promoted the conservation of energy hypothesis in the
early 1840s, but Helmholtz approached the topic in a unique way, which turned
out to be particularly influential. He argued that a perpetual-motion machine, if it
could be successfully built, would necessarily violate the conservation of energy
principle. Any machine with moving parts that touch one another must inevitably
generate heat by friction, which would represent a loss of total energy in the sys-
tem. According to the conservation principle, motion could never be “perpetual”
but had to be maintained by the constant input of new energy or fuel from the
outside, to compensate for the energy lost as heat. Helmholtz proceeded to show
that a successful, conservation-violating perpetual-motion machine had not and
could not be built, according to the accepted laws of gravity, heat, electricity, mag-
netism, and electromagnetism. This demonstrated that the conservation of en-
ergy must hold for each of those forces. After discussing these subjects from the
domain of physics, Helmholtz concluded that all organic processes previously
studied had also seemed governed by the conservation of energy, thereby imply-
ing that the range of this physical principle extended into physiology.
Recognizing his brilliant potential, the Prussian government shortened
Helmholtz’s military obligation and in 1849 named him professor of physiology
at Kant’s old university in Königsberg. There he conducted a study with major
implications for both neurology and psychology, concerning the speed of the
nerve signal, which Müller and other authorities had taken to be instantaneous,
or at least the same as the speed of light. During the 1840s, however, Helmholtz’s
mechanist friend du Bois-Reymond had studied the chemical structure of nerve
fibers and speculated that the nerve signal might be an electrochemical wave
traveling along the nerve at a slower rate than anyone had imagined. Helmholtz
now thought it might even be slow enough to be measured in a laboratory.
To test this startling idea, Helmholtz devised an ingenious instrument using

the degree of deflection of a galvanometer needle to record smaller fractions of
seconds than were detectable by existing timepieces. Knowing that the electri-
cal stimulation of a severed frog’s leg would cause its foot to twitch, he devised
an apparatus in which an electrode could apply current to various points on the
leg, and the resulting foot twitch would turn the electricity off. The electrical
circuit also passed through the time-calibrated galvanometer, so the extent of
its needle deflection recorded the fraction of a second the current had flowed.
Helmhotz discovered that the elapsed times were measurably longer when the
electricity was applied to points on the leg farther away from the foot: extra time
because the nerve impulse had to travel farther. Using these measures he calcu-
lated that the nerve signal traveled at a speed of about 57 miles (92 kilometers)
per hour. Although this was fast, it was certainly far from instantaneous or the
speed of light.
Helmholtz next turned to human subjects, whom he trained to press a but-
ton whenever a stimulus was applied to their legs. Subjects took slightly but
measurably longer to respond when the toe was stimulated as opposed to when
the thigh was stimulated. Assuming that the nerve signal had to travel from the
point of stimulation to the brain to initiate the response, Helmholtz estimated
its speed in the human leg was faster than in a frog’s leg, but still definitely finite
and measurable. This was one of the earliest recorded studies of variations in hu-
man reaction time: the measured time that elapses between the presentation of
a stimulus and the performance of a specified response. We shall see in Chapter 5
how reaction-time experiments were later expanded and developed in the earliest
laboratories devoted explicitly to experimental psychology.
At first, most scientists failed to appreciate the significance of Helmholtz’s
experiments because of his dense literary style. His friend du Bois-Reymond
chided: “Your work, I say with pride and grief, is understood and recognized by
myself alone. You have . . . expressed the subject so obscurely that your report
could at best only be an introduction to the discovery of method.” Helmholtz’s
father attended a lecture and found his son “so little able to escape from his
scientific rigidity of expression . . . that I am filled with respect for an audience
that could understand and thank him for it.”4
Some of the implications of Helmholtz’s research, however, seemed just too
surprising to be easily believed. We generally experience mental processes sub-
jectively as occurring instantaneously, and physiologists naturally assumed that
any neurological events responsible for them must be nearly instantaneous too.
Yet Helmholtz’s experiments suggested that a whale receiving a wound to its tail
could not become conscious of the injury until a full second had passed to allow
an impulse to travel from tail to brain, and that another second would pass before
a message triggering defensive reaction could be relayed from brain back to tail.
Such long reaction times truly are characteristic of large animals, but many
scientists in the 1850s found that hard to believe.
Despite their initial implausibility, Helmholtz’s experimental results gradually
gained acceptance and greatly strengthened the general case for physiological
mechanism. His biographer noted: “The unexpectedly low rate of propagation in
the nervous system was incompatible with the older view of an immaterial or im-
ponderable [vitalistic] principle as the nervous agent, but quite in harmony with
the [mechanistic] theory of motion of material particles in the nerve substance.”5
Such results showed mechanism to be more productive than vitalism, suggest-
ing important experiments and ideas that vitalism discouraged. Had Helmholtz
and du Bois-Reymond not been mechanists, they would never have considered
trying their experiments. In the wake of their success, a “new physiology” came
into vogue, and scientists began to focus on accounting mechanistically for ever
more complex processes in the brain and nervous system that presumably under-
lay higher mental functioning.
Helmholtz would have won a place in the history of psychology for his exper-
iments on nerve signal transmission alone. Yet he followed them with an even
more important series of studies of vision and hearing, which became a founda-
tion for the modern psychology of sensation and perception. While at the uni-
versities of Königsberg, Bonn, and Heidelberg between 1853 and 1868, he not
only conducted much original research in these fields but also personally rep-
licated all the major experiments of other scientists to ensure their accuracy. In
his Handbook of Physiological Optics (1856–1866) and the ponderously titled The
Theory of the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music
(1863), he attempted to summarize all the available knowledge about the senses
of vision and hearing. By most accounts he nearly succeeded, and both books
remained in regular use for over a century. We’ll illustrate his approach by
describing his treatment of human vision.
HELMHOLTZ ON HUMAN VISION

Helmholtz began his analysis of vision by dividing the subject into primarily
physical, primarily physiological, and primarily psychological categories, while
recognizing that they were all interrelated. Physical studies regarded the eye as
an optical instrument, examining the processes by which light from the external
world comes to be focused into an image on the retina. The physiological analy-
ses concerned the problem of how an image on the retina conveys signals to the
brain that result in conscious sensations of light. Psychological analysis followed
the process a step further, asking how sensations of light become converted into
meaningful perceptions of discrete objects and events.
Helmholtz’s distinction between sensations and perceptions bears elabo-
ration. Sensations are the “raw elements” of conscious experience, requiring
no learning or prior experience. In vision, they include the spatially organized
patches of light with varying hues and brightnesses that fill one’s visual field, in-
dependently of any meaning. Perceptions, by contrast, are the meaningful inter-
pretations of sensations. As you look out a window, for example, your sensations
might include patches of blue and white in the upper field of vision, with green,
brown, and yellow areas below. Your perceptions of the same scene might be of a
landscape, with sky and clouds above trees and fields.
For Helmholtz, the conversion of an image on the retina of the eye into con-
scious sensations of light and color was a physiological process, carried out by
neurological mechanisms between the eye and the brain. The further conversion
of sensations into perceptions was a psychological process involving activities
in the brain, but also dependent on the learning and experience of the individual.
Because both processes transform input of one kind into conscious output of
another, however, Helmholtz regarded both as examples of the sort of creative
activities of the human mind that had been postulated by Kant.
Physical Properties of the Eye

Helmholtz’s physical analysis described the eye as if it were a manufactured optical
instrument, such as a microscope or camera. The eye has a curved, transparent sur-
face called the cornea, in front of a transparent, elliptically shaped lens (Figure 4.4).
Because of its curvature, the cornea-lens system refracts, or bends, incoming light
rays so that a miniature and inverted image of the external object is projected
onto the light-sensitive retina, analogous to the film in a non-digital camera,
A
Retina
Lens
Image
b
a
Cornea
B
Object
Figure 4.4 The eye’s lens as an optical instrument.

at the back of the eye. This was a more detailed physical explanation for the
inverted retinal images previously noted by Alhazen and Descartes.
In a camera, the images of nearby or distant objects can be brought into sharp
focus by altering the distance between the lens and recording medium (which
was film in older cameras, but is a digital sensor in newer ones). The eye achieves
the same end, but by a different mechanism in the lens itself known as accom-
modation: the lens assumes a relatively flat shape for sharply focusing distant
objects on the retina, and it bulges in the middle to focus nearby objects.
Helmholtz also observed, however, that virtually all of the eye’s physical fea-
tures have “defects” or imperfections that would be considered unacceptable in
a high-quality camera, telescope, or other manufactured optical instrument. The
eye’s field of maximum sharpness is very small, for example, consisting only of
that part of the image that falls on the fovea, a tiny section of the retina. You can
appreciate the fovea’s size by extending your arm fully and focusing on the nail
of your forefinger; the image of the nail completely fills the fovea, whose size rela-
tive to the retina is thus the same as the size of the nail’s image relative to the rest
of your visual field. Visual sharpness within the fovea is excellent, and a normal
observer can distinguish images on it that are separated by less than 1 percent
of its diameter. Such sharpness decreases rapidly for images falling outside the
fovea, however, and images at the edge of the visual field are very imprecise. A
photograph providing an image like the ones recorded by the eye would be un-
satisfactory, because everything but the very center would be blurred. We do not
notice the situation, however, because of the ability of our eyes to scan a scene,
shifting focus quickly and flexibly from one part of the visual field to another.
Helmholtz observed other defects in the eye’s physical features. For example,
colors are imperfectly reproduced on the retina, because the fluid in the eyeball is
not perfectly colorless and because the lens refracts the relatively longer rays of
red light less than the shorter rays at the blue-violet end of the spectrum. A com-
mon visual distortion known as astigmatism results from the imperfect align-
ment of refractive surfaces in the eyes. Perhaps the most dramatic defect of all is
the blind spot, a small part of the retina where the optic nerve exits and therefore
it contains no light-sensitive cells. To demonstrate your own blind spot, draw two
X’s on a sheet of paper, side by side about three finger-widths apart. Then hold
the paper at arm’s length, close your left eye, and focus on the left-hand X with
your right eye. Now slowly draw the paper toward your eye; at some point the
right-hand X will suddenly disappear as its image falls on your blind spot.
For Helmholtz, these visual defects had philosophical as well as practical
significance, supporting what he regarded as a Kantian interpretation of experi-
ence. He argued that even at the level of the eye, the registered image of external
reality on the retina is not a perfect reproduction of the external stimulus. A

certain amount of change and distortion inevitably takes place because of the
physical features of the eye. And at the next physiological level of processing,
as the image on the retina becomes converted into conscious visual sensations,
the transformations and distortions increase. Conscious visual sensations are not
exact reproductions of the physical objects that give rise to them, or even of the
images on the retina. Nothing better illustrates this point than Helmholtz’s influ-
ential treatment of the subject of color vision.
The Neurophysiology of Color Vision

A century and a half before Helmholtz’s birth, Isaac Newton discovered that the
“white” light from the sun is more complicated than it seems. He shined a narrow
band of ordinary sunlight through a transparent crystal prism, as shown at the
left in Figure 4.5. He observed the light to emerge on the right as the elongated,
multicolored band known as the solar spectrum, with red at the top followed by
orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet at the bottom.
Newton explained his observation by hypothesizing that the different spectral
colors represent light of different wavelengths, and that the white light of the
sun is composed of all of the wavelengths mixed together. When the mixture
of sunlight passes through the prism, shorter waves get bent, or refracted, more
than longer ones; the emerging light rays get spread out in the order of their
wavelengths, with the relatively long red light having been bent less far than the
shorter blue-violet. Something very similar happens when sunlight strikes a bank
of water droplets at a certain angle, creating a rainbow.
Red
Orange
ht
nlig Yellow
Su
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet
Prism
Light of different wavelengths is refracted
at slightly different angles
Figure 4.5 The solar spectrum as discovered by Newton.
At first thought, then, it might seem that our color sensation is simply a means
of differentiating the various wavelengths of light we encounter. When we see
orange, for example, we are encountering light whose waves are shorter than red
but longer than yellow. This idea is oversimplified, however, holding true only in
certain circumstances. Experiments with color mixing reveal the true situation
as more complex, because the human visual sense sometimes responds to mix-
tures of wavelengths in exactly the same way it does to individual colors in the
spectrum. For example, if a red light and a yellow light are superimposed upon
each other, the visual result is a sensation of orange indistinguishable from the
orange of the spectrum. Similarly, a blue and yellow mixture produces a sensa-
tion of green. Even more strikingly, there are certain pairs of colors— such as
a particular red mixed with a certain blue-green, or a yellow when mixed with
blue-violet—that create a sensation of white light indistinguishable from full
sunlight. These white-producing pairs are referred to as complementary colors.
Color-mixing experiments—the most detailed of which were reported by the Scot
James Clerk Maxwell just as Helmholtz was beginning his own studies of color
vision in 1855—showed that widely differing physical stimuli (defined in terms
of the wavelengths of light striking the eye) can produce identical conscious
sensations of color.
In another striking discovery, one particular combination of three colors from
the spectrum—a certain red, a green, and a blue-violet—not only produced white
when mixed equally together, but also could be mixed in various other combina-
tions so as to produce any other color. These three, which seemed to be building
blocks for all of the kinds of color sensation, came to be known as the primary
colors. Helmholtz theorized that the retina contains three different kinds of light-
sensitive receptor cells, each one responding most strongly to light waves of one
of the three primary colors and with diminishing strength to light waves increas-
ingly different from it. Nerves attached to the receptor cells presumably transmit
messages to the brain whenever they are stimulated. Here was a refinement of
Müller’s law of specific nerve energies, suggesting that individual nerves transmit
sensory messages not only of a specific kind (visual, auditory, tactile, and so on)
but also of a specific quality (red, green, or blue-violet). Helmholtz acknowledged
that the English scientist Thomas Young had suggested a similar idea in 1802, so
the name Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory is commonly used for it.
The trichromatic theory usefully explained many facts of color vision and mix-
ing. A sensation of white light occurs whenever all three kinds of receptors are
stimulated at the same time. Sunlight, consisting of all the wavelengths of light,
naturally stimulates all three receptor types. Complementary colors do the same.
In the combination of red and blue-green, for example, red light stimulates the
red receptors and the blue-green light simultaneously stimulates both the green
and the blue-violet receptors; in the combination of yellow and blue-violet, yellow
simultaneously stimulates the red and green receptors, while blue-violet stimu-
lates the third.
Helmholtz and his colleagues showed that our conscious sensations of partic-
ular colors tell us little about the “objective” physical properties of the light waves
that produce them. He summarized: “The inaccuracies and imperfections of the eye
as an optical instrument . . . now appear insignificant in comparison with the incon-
gruities we have met with in the field of sensation. One might almost believe that
Nature had here contradicted herself on purpose in order to destroy any dream of
a pre-existing harmony between the outer and the inner world.”6 And since colors
were now seen more as products of the human sensory system than as properties
of physical reality, Helmholtz explicitly recognized their consistency with Kantian
philosophy when he wrote: “That the character of our perceptions is conditioned
just as much by our senses as by the external things is of the greatest importance.
. . . What the physiology of the senses has demonstrated experimentally in more
recent times, Kant earlier tried to do . . . for the ideas of the human mind in general.”7
Visual Perception
When Helmholtz turned his attention from visual sensation to perception—from
physiology to psychology, according to his scheme—he agreed only partly with
Kant’s point of view. He recognized that as sensations are interpreted and given
meaning by the perceptual process, they undergo further transformations worthy
of a Kantian “mind.” Sometimes, in fact, the mind imposes features on its per-
ceptions that contradict the raw sensations that give rise to them, as in optical
illusions, such as Figure 4.2. The two parallel lines are exactly the same length but
you consciously perceive the top line as longer as your mind makes a mistake in
its interpretation of visual sensations.
Helmholtz’s disagreement with Kant concerned the origins of many perceptual
processes, including optical illusions. Kant’s theory implied that spatial percep-
tion was mainly determined by innate intuitions and categories. Helmholtz, while
regarding the processes of sensation as innate, gave greater emphasis to the role of
experience and learning in perception. Of course, no one denied that some percep-
tual processes are acquired by experience. Locke had already successfully argued
that a person born blind and granted sight later would still literally have to learn
how to see, would have to have concrete experiences connecting specific ideas of
objects to the new and initially bewildering visual sensations. The question separat-
ing empiricist from nativist—Helmholtz from Kant—was not whether any perceptual
processes were acquired through experience, but how many and to what extent.
Helmholtz conceded that he could never conclusively disprove nativism, but

he chose as a matter of strategy to regard all perception as acquired through ex-
perience (much as he had earlier adopted physiological mechanism as a matter
of strategy). He then demonstrated the usefulness of his strategy by showing
that many observed facts about perception could be explained on the basis of
experience and learning.
One classic series of experiments demonstrated how spatial perception could
be altered by experience. Helmholtz fitted subjects with spectacles that systemat-
ically distorted the visual field by shifting the images of objects several degrees
to the right of their normal locations. When subjects were asked to look at an
object, then close their eyes and reach out to touch it, their first responses were
invariably to the right—toward the apparent rather than the real position. But if
they were given a few minutes to handle objects while looking at them through the
glasses, something Helmholtz called perceptual adaptation occurred. At first the
subjects had to instruct themselves consciously to place their hands to the left of
the apparent objects they saw, but soon this action became natural, automatic, and
unconscious. Now they could easily perform their original task and could touch
remembered objects with their eyes closed. However, when the spectacles were
removed, they began to make errors once again, but this time to the left instead of
to the right. So complete and automatic had their perceptual adaptation become
that it took them a minute or two to resume their normal spatial orientation.
Helmholtz theorized that perceptual adaptation and other perceptual phenom-
ena result from a process he called unconscious inference. Visual experience—
such as the manipulation of objects while wearing distorting spectacles—might
lead to the unconscious adoption of certain rules that operate like the major prem-
ises in logical syllogisms. For example, experience might teach that an object that
fills a very small part of the visual field is farther away than a similar object filling
a larger part. This would produce a rule or major premise that could operate as in
the following syllogism:
Major premise: The size of an object’s image varies inversely with its distance
from the eye.
Minor premise: The size of the image of a ball currently in my visual field is
getting smaller.
Conclusion: The ball is moving away from me.
The difference between perception and syllogistic reasoning lies in the fact
that perception occurs instantly and effortlessly, while the working out of a
syllogism may be laborious and time consuming. Helmholtz accounted for this
difference by assuming that the major premise of a perception has become so

well learned as to be automatic and unconscious.
But just as syllogisms may lead to false conclusions if based on false premises,
so may unconscious inferences sometimes lead to faulty perceptions, such as
optical illusions. In Figure 4.2, for example, the mistake may be blamed on the
incorrect premise that converging straight lines indicate depth. In three dimen-
sions the premise is valid, because the images we see of parallel lines (such as
the two sides of a straight road lying ahead) do in fact appear to converge with
increasing distance from the eye. In two dimensions, however, the converging
lines give the false impression that the top horizontal line is farther away than the
bottom one. Because the retinal images of the two lines are equal but the top one
is interpreted as being farther away, the top line is also perceived as being longer.
Since all of these inferences are unconscious, however, their result—the perceived
difference in length—comes to consciousness directly and irresistibly, more like
an intuition than a rational thought.
Helmholtz’s Legacy
Even as he studied sensation and perception, Helmholtz retained his original
passion for physics and found spare time to write occasional articles on that
subject. At last in 1871 he realized his childhood ambition by being appointed
professor of physics at the University of Berlin. From then on, physiology and
psychology became sidelights as he focused his research mainly on thermody-
namics, meteorology, and electromagnetism. He wound up earning his great-
est fame as a physicist and in 1882 was elevated by the emperor to the ranks of
nobility; Hermann von Helmholtz became his legal name. Following his death in
1894, von Helmholtz was mourned at home and abroad as one of the world’s most
respected scientists.
Although best known as a physicist, Helmholtz was one of psychology’s most
important pioneers for two major achievements. First, he helped show how the
neurological processes underlying mental functions, previously thought to be
not directly observable or measurable, could be subject to rigorous laboratory ex-
perimentation. Second, he helped develop a scientific conception of the Kantian
“mind” with his integrated physical, physiological, and psychological studies of
vision and hearing. No longer just a metaphysical entity, the sensing and perceiv-
ing mind was shown to operate by lawful and mechanistic principles as it created
its phenomenal reality.
Many of Helmholtz’s ideas and theories are still accepted today, much as he
originally presented them. The trichromatic theory of color vision has been am-
ply confirmed by modern research. The retina is now known to contain millions
of color receptor cells called cones, of three varieties, each one containing a chem-
ical pigment that maximally absorbs light of one of the three primary colors. The
absence of one or more of these pigments, or irregularities in their distribution,
cause the types of visual defects commonly known as color blindness.
It is also accepted today, however, that color processing does not end with the
cones on the retina. Even during Helmholtz’s lifetime, his younger contemporary
Ewald Hering (1834–1918) had emphasized the importance of color afterimages.
For example, if you stare fixedly at a red stimulus and then shift your gaze to a
neutrally colored background, you will see an afterimage of the same stimulus,
only in the complementary color of blue-green. Such phenomena, Hering argued,
suggest the existence of some sort of “opponent processes” in the visual system,
causing it to respond in an either/or fashion. It is now recognized that receptor
cells responding in just such a way and residing in the brain itself add a further
level to the processing of visual signals, after they have left the retina. These find-
ings do not invalidate Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory, but show that it did not
tell the complete story of human color vision.
In general, Helmholtz’s ideas on perception and unconscious inference have
been modified more than those on sensation. No one denies that many aspects of
perception are learned, but Helmholtz’s relatively extreme empiricism has been
challenged by experiments conducted by the American psychologist Eleanor
Jack Gibson (1910–2002) and her colleague Richard Walk at Cornell University
in the 1950s. These experiments were prompted by Gibson’s
observations of baby goats; born with the ability to stand up
and walk, they seem to show an innate ability to avoid tum-
bling over steep slopes. Using a platform with a transparent
glass floor set above a visual cliff, the researchers showed
that extremely young animals, and human babies, systemati-
cally avoided walking or crawling on the parts of the platform
with no visible surface directly below (Figure 4.6). These
studies suggested that depth perception occurs even in ex-
tremely young subjects who lack the sorts of experiences that
Helmholtz believed were necessary for learning the “major
premises” involved in unconscious inference.
Despite these elaborations and partial contradictions,
Helmholtz’s perceptual theories have had a continuous
influence on the experiments psychologists perform. Per-
ceptual adaptation is still studied, often with distorting
spectacles much like Helmholtz’s originals. And even with Figure 4.6 A baby exploring Gibson’s visual
the altered terminology and interpretations of some of the cliff.
modern work, Helmholtz’s basic ideas are still relevant, and he would feel very
much at home in a modern perception laboratory.
FECHNER AND PSYCHOPHYSICS

Like Helmholtz, Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887; Figure 4.7) started with
broad interests in physics and physiology, and came to psychology by study-
ing the relationship between external “physical reality” and one’s conscious or
phenomenal experience of that reality. Also like Helmholtz, Fechner determined
some of the apparent laws by which the human sensory system converts exter-
nal physical stimulation into conscious sensation and perception. But while both
men contributed to the same general problem, they did so in different styles and
for different reasons, and they reacted in opposite ways to some of the major
intellectual currents of their day.
Fechner’s Early Life

Fechner was born into a family of Lutheran ministers in eastern Germany. His
father and grandfather were both pastors and when his father died in 1806, young
Gustav went to live with an uncle, another clergyman. His father apparently ap-
preciated science as well as religion, for he is reported to have startled his congre-
gation by installing a lightning rod on his church’s steeple, declaring that the laws
of physics had to be honored just as those of God. He created
another stir by preaching in the manner he insisted Jesus
must also have done—without the then-customary minister’s
wig. Although Gustav’s father probably died too soon to have
had much direct influence on the molding of his character,
these stories were known to him and must have encouraged
his own sense of independence and nonconformist thinking.
Fechner grew up with strong philosophical and broadly
religious interests but felt no inclination to follow in his
family’s vocational tradition. At first medicine seemed ap-
pealing, so he entered the University of Leipzig’s medical
school at the early age of 16, but he never started a prac-
tice after completing medical studies in 1822. In fact, even
while a student he had begun publishing satirical attacks
on the medical profession under the pen name of Dr. Mises.
One of these, “Proof That the Moon Is Made of Iodine,” ridi-
culed a then-current medical fad for that substance. Another
portrayed a doctor who amputated the wrong leg of a pa-
Figure 4.7 Gustav Fechner (1801–1887). tient and then proposed a new theory of medicine in which
all treatments are best applied to the opposite side of the body from the one
afflicted. Over the rest of his life, Fechner would publish several more times as
Dr. Mises, retaining that pen name for much of his speculative, philosophical, or
nonscientific writing.8
After rejecting medicine, Fechner had to find another way to make a living, so
he began translating French textbooks on physics and chemistry. This tedious
and poorly paid work at least had educational benefits, enabling Fechner to be-
come thoroughly absorbed in the physical sciences. He learned enough to con-
duct his own research on electricity, which got him appointed as a lecturer on
physics at the University of Leipzig in 1824. Over the next few years his reputa-
tion as an expert on electricity grew until he was made a full professor of physics
in 1833.
While becoming an accomplished physicist, Fechner also indulged his more
speculative side by studying Naturphilosophie (“philosophy of nature”), a partly
mystical, semi-scientific movement then popular in Germany. Part of the Roman-
tic development of Leibnizean and Kantian philosophy, this movement regarded
the entire universe as an organic entity complete with consciousness and other
animate functions; at death, one’s individual consciousness presumably merges
with the “over-consciousness” of the whole universe. And throughout the phe-
nomenal universe as we know it in this life, the essential wholeness and organic
unity of things is sometimes revealed in the observable parallels and symmetries
in nature.
Fechner recognized that some nature-philosophers carried their search for
mystical regularities to ludicrous extremes, and as Dr. Mises he satirized them
in an article titled “The Comparative Anatomy of Angels.” He argued, tongue in
cheek, that spheres are perfect shapes and angels are perfect beings, therefore an-
gels are spherical like planets—in fact, they are living planets. But even as he rec-
ognized certain excesses in nature-philosophy, Fechner also believed it offered
an antidote to the rising tide of materialism that accompanied the increasing
acceptance of physiological mechanism and its associated mechanistic world-
view. While appreciating the potential scientific power of mechanistic analysis,
Fechner also felt oppressed by its implications. Of a very different temperament
from Helmholtz and his cohorts, Fechner saw unbounded mechanism not as a
means for liberating physiology, but as a philosophically deadening and depress-
ing doctrine. (We shall see in later chapters that he was not alone in this reaction.)
Fechner was upset by the apparent “two-facedness” of nature: the fact that the
immutable materialistic laws governing the physical, external side of the world
seemed to contradict, or be irrelevant to, the impression of free will that one
actually experiences in consciousness. He became obsessed with the question
“Does Nature or the world have a soul?” As Dr. Mises, he wrote a series of works
depicting two alternative conceptions of the universe, each suggesting a different
answer to his question.9 The materialist conception, which he called the Nachtan-
sicht (“night view”), regarded the universe as essentially a dead entity, with life and
consciousness occurring only as incidental and fully predetermined by-products
of mechanistic laws. The contrasting Tagesansicht (“day view”) had roots in
Leibniz’s monadology (see Chapter 2) and took consciousness itself as the funda-
mental characteristic of a “besouled” universe, of which mechanistic laws offered
only a partial, “external” view of reality. As his choice of names implies, Fechner
found the brighter day view more appealing than the gloomy night view, though he
harbored some doubts about its truth.
For several years, Fechner fought a mental war between his night and day views,
even as he successfully pursued his career in physics. In 1839, near the peak of
his powers, he suffered a major breakdown. The exact circumstances are unclear,
though a severe eye injury caused by staring too intently at the sun played some
part. Emotional and philosophical factors undoubtedly aggravated the situation, as
conflicts between the night and day views—and the Gustav Fechner and Dr. Mises
aspects of his own personality—became increasingly acute. Eventually Fechner be-
came a complete invalid, often unable to speak or even eat. He had to resign his
professorship, and retreated into a poverty-stricken isolation for several years.
He gradually solved his eating problem after following a mystic’s advice to
subsist entirely on a diet of fruit, strongly spiced ham, and wine—and also began
to engage in mystical speculation himself. Under his real name he published the
weirdly titled Nanna, or on the Soul-life of Plants, followed by Zend-Avesta, or
on the Things of Heaven and the Beyond. Understandably, these works did not
enhance Fechner’s scientific reputation.
One day in October 1850, while lying in bed meditating, Fechner had an idea
that eventually brought him back into the scientific mainstream—and to a posi-
tion as one of the fathers of modern experimental psychology. He was reflecting
on the relationship between the material and mental worlds—the same general
problem that preoccupied Helmholtz. But while Helmholtz emphasized the dif-
ferences between the two worlds, writing about the “inaccuracies and imperfec-
tions” of the eye as an optical instrument and of the “incongruities” imposed
by the color-sensing apparatus, Fechner was suddenly struck by a previously
unappreciated and partly hidden example of harmony between the two worlds.
Joyfully, he took his insight to be a confirmation of the day view, signifying the
basic oneness of the physical and mental worlds. His inspiration involved the
relationships between the subjectively experienced intensities of various kinds of
stimuli, and their actual objective strengths as measured physically.
The Invention of Psychophysics

Some simple, everyday observations about hearing and vision can serve to illus-
trate the interesting issue that now preoccupied Fechner. With hearing, we take
it for granted that a very slight sound will be drowned out by a lot of background
noise, yet easily audible when the background is “so quiet you can hear a pin
drop.” And similarly with vision, a single lit match is highly noticeable in a dark-
ened room but not in a brightly lit one, and the stars are easily visible against the
dark night sky but are overwhelmed by the greater brightness of daylight.
These apparently obvious facts have some interesting implications. They indi-
cate that conscious sensations of stimulus intensity do not perfectly reflect physi-
cal reality, because the same stimuli create different impressions of their strength
under different circumstances. A dropped pin, a particular star, or a lighted match
always emit sound waves or light waves of exactly the same intensity, yet those
waves are perceived differently depending on the background stimulation—some-
times being highly noticeable, sometimes dimly so, and sometimes completely
unnoticeable. These are further examples of the general Kantian point of this
chapter—namely, that the sensory system processes and transforms impressions
from physical stimuli before bringing them to consciousness.
Helmholtz would probably have interpreted these reactions to stimulus inten-
sity as further “distortions” or “incongruities” imposed by the senses, consistent
with his general perspective. Fechner, however, thought it might be possible to
measure the perceived as well as the physical intensities of sensory stimuli and
then determine the mathematical relationships between the two measures. His
sudden intuition in 1850 told him the relationships would turn out to be harmoni-
ous, and illustrative of the basic underlying unity of the psychological and phys-
ical worlds. Here was the inspiring idea for what Fechner called psychophysics,
the study of relationships between the objectively measured intensities of vari-
ous stimuli and the subjective impressions of those intensities.
Fechner’s immediate practical problem was exactly how to measure the sub-
jective intensities of stimulation. The yardsticks, scales, and light meters used to
measure physical intensities could not be placed inside people’s heads to mea-
sure their subjective responses. As previously noted, Kant had argued against
the possibility of psychology’s ever becoming a true science precisely because it
wasn’t feasible to measure, or quantify, subjective mental phenomena.
Fechner saw a solution to this problem, as well as a strong hint about what
his final results would look like, in some previously underappreciated work
by his Leipzig friend and colleague, the physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber
(1795–1878). Several years before, Weber had investigated people’s ability to dis-
tinguish between objects that looked the same but had different weights. He
found that accurate discrimination depended on the relative rather than the
absolute weight difference. The finest distinctions always involved weights that
differed by at least 3 percent. For example, a weight of 100 grams could be reli-
ably detected as different from ones of 97 or 103, but for a 200-gram standard
the second weight had to be less than 194 or more than 206. Weber concluded
that the just noticeable difference (jnd) for this particular discrimination task—
the minimum amount of difference between two weights necessary to tell them
apart—was always an amount approximately equal to 0.03 of the first of the two
weights being compared.
Weber observed similar regularities for other kinds of sensory discriminations,
although the specific fraction for the jnd differed with each sense. In comparing
the length of lines, for example, the jnd value was always about 0.01; a line of
99 millimeters could be differentiated from one of 100, one of 198 from one of
200, and so on. For musical pitches, the jnd seemed to be about 0.006 of the
vibrations per second. Weber suspected, though he did not prove, that a constant
fraction could be determined for all of the other senses as well.
Weber’s findings suggested a new way of looking at the phenomena discussed
earlier. The sound waves created by a dropped pin are noticeable only if the ratio
of their intensity to that of the background noise exceeds the critical fraction for
the jnd. Of course, that ratio will be higher, and more likely to exceed the critical
fraction, when the intensity of background noise is lower.
This work gave Fechner a crucial clue as to how he might empirically
demonstrate an intrinsic harmony between the physical and the psychologi-
cal. If one accepted that the jnd was in fact a con-
stant fraction within each of the senses, then the
jnd itself could be taken as the unit of measure-
100
ment for subjective, psychological intensities of
stimulation. One could then take the smallest
80
intensity of a stimulus that can be perceived at
Physical intensity (P)
all, a value Fechner called the absolute thresh-

60
old, as the zero point on a scale of psychological
40
intensities. On a graph, successive jnd fractions
above the threshold could be plotted against the
20 measured increases in physical intensities nec-
essary to produce them. Weber’s findings sug-
gested that the resulting graph should always
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
show a striking mathematical regularity, as il-
Subjective intensity (S) in jnd units
lustrated by the following hypothetical example
Figure 4.8 Fechner’s psychophysical curve. and in Figure 4.8.
Assume the absolute threshold for a sense has been shown to be 8 units of
physical intensity and that the jnd fraction has been determined to be 0.5. When
the subjective intensity of the stimulation (abbreviated S) is at the starting point,
or 0, the corresponding intensity of physical stimulation (P) is 8. To get 1 jnd
above the threshold, the physical intensity must increase by 0.5, or 4 units, thus
becoming 12; to increase 1 jnd further requires an increase of half of 12, or 6, so
the physical intensity now must be 18. Another jnd beyond that requires 9 further
units of P for a total of 27, and so on.
The graph depicts a regular curve with a constantly increasing slope. Any of
the sensory functions discussed so far would yield a graph of the same general
shape because their characteristic feature is an ever-increasing number of units
of P to produce each succeeding jnd. The rate of increase varies from sense to
sense, according to its particular jnd fraction; but for every sense, some increase is
required, and thus its curve will show the gradually accelerating upswing shown
in Figure 4.8. Note that if there were a perfect, one-to-one relationship between
P and S—that is, if every unit of increase in physical stimulation produced an ex-
actly corresponding unit of increase in subjective intensity—the graph would not
be a curve, but a straight line.
Fechner recognized that these observed relationships between physical and
subjective stimulus intensities for many different senses could be expressed by
the single, general mathematical formula stating that the subjective intensity
(S) of a stimulus measured in jnd units will always equal the logarithm of its
physical intensity (P) times some constant (k) which will vary for each sense but
which may be experimentally determined. Fechner modestly called this equation,
S = k log P, Weber’s law when he first published it, but it is now customarily called
Fechner’s law instead.*
Nearly ten years passed between Fechner’s crucial insight in 1850 and the pub-
lication of his law in the 1860 book Elements of Psychophysics. During that time
he developed methods for measuring the jnd for senses that had not been inves-
tigated by Weber, and he reflected deeply on some implications of his work. On
the one hand, of course, the lack of perfect correspondence between subjective
(psychological) and physical stimulus intensities provided another example of
the way human senses “distort” their representations of the physical world. On
the other hand, these distortions occurred in a regular, lawful way, expressible
*A number’s logarithm is the power to which some base number must be raised to produce it; for
example, in base 10 the logarithms for 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000 are 1, 2, 3, and 4. The point to
note is that every increase in the logarithms is associated with a proportionately larger increase
in the number it represents; a graph of the relationship assumes the same general shape as the
curve in Figure 4.8.
in a beautiful mathematical equation. To Fechner, this provided evidence of an

underlying harmony between the “two faces” of nature—the psychological and
physical worlds.
Fechner’s book and its mathematically defined law aroused great interest, and
some criticism. Critics pointed to studies showing that the equation was accu-
rate only approximately and tended to break down at the extremes of high and
low sensory intensities. They found that absolute thresholds differed somewhat
from person to person, or even within the same person from time to time. Some
objected theoretically to the use of the jnd as a unit of measurement, since it was
not intuitively obvious that the first jnd above the threshold and, say, the twenty-
first were identical to each other in the same way that the first and the twenty-first
inches or centimeters on a measuring stick are.
Another disputed point centered on the proper mathematical form of the psy-
chophysical law. This issue came to a head many years after Fechner’s death when
the American psychologist S. Smith Stevens (1906–1973), at Harvard University,
found that for a few kinds of stimulation, the subjective intensities increased at a
faster rate than the physical intensities—the opposite of what Weber and Fechner
had emphasized. When a subject experiences increasing levels of electric shock
to the finger, for example, small increases in voltage are relatively unnoticeable
when the total current is weak, but strongly noticeable at higher intensities.
Stevens recognized that such cases were not covered by Fechner’s law, and
that a more general mathematical equation with broader applicability was
needed to account for a wider range of sensations. The power law, or Stevens’
law, asserts that S is a function of P raised to a particular power times a constant:
S = kPn. When the power represented by the exponent n is less than 1, this equa-
tion becomes mathematically equivalent to Fechner’s law and accounts for the
traditional cases. But if the exponent is greater than 1, the equation applies to
stimuli such as electric shock, whose subjective intensities increase at a faster
(exponential) rate than their physical intensities.
Like Fechner’s law, the power law provides only a rough approximation, hold-
ing most accurately for the middle ranges of physical stimulation and subject
to certain fluctuations across individuals and situations. But it still confirms the
general robustness of Fechner’s original inspiration—that certain sensory judg-
ments can be at least approximately quantified and shown to relate in a mathe-
matically describable way to events in the physical environment
Considered together, Helmholtz and Fechner proved it was possible to study
at least some of the phenomena of the mind in the same way the material world
was studied, in terms of general physical laws (Helmholtz) or mathematically
specifiable ones (Fechner). In doing so they demonstrated the promise for a
new discipline of experimental psychology—a promise that was soon fulfilled

by a younger colleague of both Helmholtz and Fechner named Wilhelm Wundt
(see Chapter 5). To complete this chapter, however, we turn to another important
group of successors to Helmholtz and Fechner, who worked more directly in the
fields of sensation and perception.
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
The approach that became known as Gestalt psychology focuses on the ways
the mind organizes experiences and perceptions into organized wholes that are
more than the sums of their separate parts. The closest English equivalent to the
German word Gestalt is “form,” but English-speaking psychologists have custom-
arily left the term untranslated.
In 1890 the Austrian psychologist Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) wrote
of certain perceptual Gestaltqualitaten or “form qualities” that could not be in-
trospectively broken down into separate sensory elements, but instead resided
in the overall configurations of objects or ideas. The “squareness” of a square, for
instance, and the melody of a musical piece reside not in their separate parts, but
in their total configurations. A square may be constructed out of any group of
four equal straight lines, as long as they are arranged in the proper relationships
with one another. The tune of a song retains its distinctive and recognizable qual-
ity regardless of the key in which it is sung or whether it’s played in the highest
register of the piccolo or the lowest of the tuba. Its melody lies not in its specific
notes, but in the relationships among its notes.
The implications of these Gestalt qualities remained unexplored until 1910,
when a former student of Ehrenfels named Max Wertheimer (1880–1943;
Figure 4.9a) had an inspiration while waiting for a train to take him on summer
vacation. He abandoned his vacation to conduct research at the University of
Frankfurt with the assistance of two younger colleagues, Kurt Koffka (1886–1941;
Figure 4.9b) and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967; Figure 4.9c). The three of them
subsequently founded a movement that they called Gestalt psychology.
Wertheimer’s inspiration was to study the optical illusion of apparent move-
ment: the perception of continuous motion that occurs when observing a suc-
cession of slightly varying still images. This illusion had recently received much
attention following the invention of nickelodeons and early motion picture
technology. Wertheimer decided this interesting effect could be studied system-
atically in a laboratory, using simple visual stimuli. With a tachistoscope, a de-
vice that projects images on a screen for measured fractions of a second, he and
his colleagues flashed light alternately through two slits, one vertical and the
other tilted by thirty degrees. When the interval between the flashes exceeded
a b c
Figure 4.9 (a) Max Wertheimer (1880–1943). (b) Kurt Koffka (1886–1941). (c) Wolfgang
Köhler (1887–1967).
one-fifth of a second, observers of the projected light images saw the “true” state
of affairs: two rapidly alternating but clearly separate lights. When the interval
was less than one-hundredth of a second, both of the slits appeared to be illumi-
nated constantly. But when the interval was intermediate between those values,
and especially at about one-twentieth of a second, observers had an irresistible
and distinct impression of a single slit of light “falling over” from the vertical to
the inclined position, then rising back up again. Wertheimer named this apparent
movement—a simplified version of a motion picture—the phi phenomenon.
Wertheimer went on to show that an observer, presented with randomly distrib-
uted examples of real movement and comparable apparent movement, could not dis-
tinguish one type from the other. Here was one more perceptual situation in which
differing physical stimuli can produce subjectively identical conscious experiences.
When we observe actual movement, light images literally sweep across our retinas,
falling on all the receptor cells lying in their path. With the phi phenomenon, only
the retinal receptors lying at the beginning and at the end of the “sweep” become
physically illuminated. Yet both of these differing physical states produce the same
perception of continuous motion. These findings indicated that some of the pro-
cesses responsible for the perception of movement must take place at a neurological
level deeper than the retina, and that the perception of movement is something that
may be imposed on stationary images by the higher brain processes.
After studying apparent movement, the three young psychologists concluded
that human perceptual processes impose their own order and dynamic organiza-
tion on the individual components or “elements” of physical sensation. Meaningful
perception, they argued, entails far more than the simple addition of sensory ele-
ments, or even Helmholtz’s unconscious inferences of logical relationships among
those elements. They emphasized how the mind tends to organize the elements of
experience into wholes, whose significance is much

greater than that of their summed individual parts.
Ehrenfels’s Gestalt qualities were prime examples.
Squares, melodies, and phi phenomena were all dy-
namic entities on their own whose parts are defined
by their relationship to the whole. Wertheimer sum-
marized: “There are wholes, the behavior of which is
not determined by that of their individual elements,
but where the part processes themselves are deter-
mined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. It is the
hope of Gestalt theory to determine the nature of
such wholes.”10 Unlike many scientists who start
by trying to isolate the simplest elements of their
Figure 4.10 Faces or a vase: a figure-ground reversal.
subject and then show how they combine to cre-
ate wholes, the Gestalt psychologists started with
the wholes themselves and then tried to describe
the functions of the parts within those wholes.
From this perspective, the Gestalt psychologists pointed out that perception
always occurs in a “field” divided into what’s known as figure and ground. The
figure is the whole entity that is consciously observed, and the ground is the neces-
sary backdrop against which the figure is defined. According to the Gestalt concept,
figure cannot exist without ground; for example, the printed words you’re reading
cannot be perceived (as figure) except against the lighter background of the page
(or screen). Figure and ground can never both be in consciousness at the same time,
because then both would be part of the figure, but under some conditions they may
reverse. Figure 4.10 is a famous figure-ground example suggested by the Danish
psychologist Edgar Rubin, which may be seen either as a white vase against a
black background or two black faces profiled against a white background—but
never both at the same time because that would constitute two figures with no
ground. Therefore, the whole figures (or Gestalts) in your perceptual field constantly
change, but each always appears as only a part of the entire field, standing out
against the background.
Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler also empha-
sized that Gestalts tend to simplify and organize
the perceptual fields in which they occur. Rela-
tively complicated collections of stimuli inevitably
become organized into simpler groups accord-
ing to principles of contiguity and similarity. On
the left in Figure 4.11, for example, the spacing Figure 4.11 Gestalt principles of organization.
(contiguity) leads most people to perceive three groups of circles rather than
seventeen scattered circles, which is more complicated to grasp quickly. On the
right, most people use similarity cues to perceive alternating rows of circles and
dots more readily than five columns of mixed circles and dots.
These same Gestalt principles seem to apply in other senses besides vision. Per-
ceived sounds, for instance, must always be heard against a relatively neutral back-
ground. Auditory figure-ground reversals can easily occur, as when nervous airplane
passengers “listen” for the ominous periods of silence that may punctuate the dron-
ing of a faulty engine. Complex temporal sequences of sounds may be organized
into simpler groups or patterns, as in the perceived regularities of a drummer’s beat,
and they may be grouped by similarity, as when the sound from the violin section is
clearly discerned against the background of the rest of the orchestra.
In general, then, the young Gestalt psychologists significantly expanded the
list of known situations in which the human mind imposes an order of its own
making on the objects of its perception. They extended and clarified the Kantian
notion of a creative, transforming mind to a greater and different extent than
Helmholtz and Fechner had, and they supported their arguments with impressive
empirical evidence. Furthermore, they promoted a general way of thinking about
psychological facts, emphasizing their organization into wholes and fields.
The Implications and Spread of Gestalt Psychology

During the late 1920s and the 1930s, the three Gestalt pioneers foresaw some
of the horrors that were to come in Nazi Germany and fled to new posts in the
United States. This was of great benefit to American psychology, as all of them
made important contributions to the developing field. Koffka, from his new posi-
tion at Smith College in Massachusetts, became a strong promoter of the general
Gestalt perspective as a counterweight to the atomistic behaviorism that domi-
nated most of psychology in the U.S. at the time (see Chapter 9). His 1935 book,
Principles of Gestalt Psychology, remains the most comprehensive and system-
atic statement of the broad Gestalt viewpoint.11
Köhler and Wertheimer expanded Gestalt principles from the realms of sensa-
tion and perception to those of learning and thinking. From his observations of
chimpanzee behavior while stationed in the Canary Islands during World War I,
Köhler concluded that learning often involves insight. Rather than arising grad-
ually from multiple trial-and-error efforts, as many learning theories of the time
emphasized, new and adaptive responses often arose suddenly, following a com-
pletely different organization of the perceptual field. A chimp in a cage, for exam-
ple, in a sudden flash of insight perceived a stick on the floor not as an incidental
object, but as a tool for dragging a banana in from outside the cage.
Wertheimer, from his new position in New York City, analyzed creative human
thinking in similar terms. He strongly criticized educational methods that em-
phasized rote associationistic memorization and favored those that involved free
exploration, and encouraged flexibility and the generation of insights. He sum-
marized these views in an influential, posthumously published book, Productive
Thinking.12 During his final years in New York, Wertheimer befriended, and had a
profound influence on, the young American psychologist Abraham Maslow. The
story of their relationship and its influence on Maslow’s subsequent pioneering
of humanistic psychology will be recounted in Chapter 12.
Köhler settled at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania where, in the tradition
of Helmholtz and Fechner, he attempted to integrate psychological findings with
current developments in physics. He noted that in physics the old Newtonian
mode of explanation was proving inadequate, as many electrical, magnetic, and
gravitational phenomena could not be explained in terms of isolated material
particles acting upon one another. Instead, entire distributions of forces, or force
fields, had to be hypothesized. To take a simple example from physics, the fate
of a single charged particle cannot be predicted in isolation, without reference to
the entire electrical field in which it happens to be. Köhler summarized by assert-
ing that the modern physicist “begins with a given ‘whole’ and only then arrives
at the parts by analysis, while the [traditional] procedures are founded on the
principle of beginning with the parts and building up the wholes by analysis.”13
These were clear echoes of the earlier Gestalt definition of the perceptual field as
the overall environment in which figure-ground and other Gestalt effects occur,
and of Wertheimer’s description of Gestalt psychology as commencing with the
whole before deducing the roles of its parts.
Köhler traced out these ideas and their implications in a series of popular lec-
tures delivered shortly before his death in 1967 and published posthumously un-
der the title The Task of Gestalt Psychology.14 He emphasized, for example, that
perceptual and physical force fields are alike in that each tends to organize it-
self over time into increasingly simpler configurations. Just as electrical charges
tend to distribute themselves increasingly evenly, so complex stimulus arrays
become simplified when grouped into Gestalts by similarity and contiguity, or
when disjointed images fuse into continuous and smooth motion according to
the phi phenomenon.
In a more speculative vein, Köhler noted that the organ of perception, the
brain, is itself a physical system that distributes and processes electrical charges.
He speculated that the similarities between physical and perceptual fields might
be more than coincidental, and proposed the hypothesis of psychophysical
isomorphism, according to which “psychological facts and the underlying events
in the brain resemble each other in all their structural characteristics.”15 This idea
did not mean that perceptual and brain processes had to be identical with one
another, but they would share the same structural and relational properties simi-
larly to the ways a map resembles the terrain it depicts. Under this principle, the
brain should be studied as an organized, whole system, not just a conglomeration
of separate individual components.
This general idea was strongly supported by the German neurologist Kurt
Goldstein (1878–1965), who had been impressed by Gestalt principles and had
been one of the founding editors of Psychologische Forschung (Psychological
Research), the original German-language journal explicitly devoted to Gestalt
psychology. He emigrated to America, where as an expert on the treatment of
brain injuries he promoted a “holistic-organismic” theory according to which the
brain should be regarded as a whole, acting as a unified entity to promote the
well-being or “self-actualization” of the entire organism. (We’ll see in Chapter 12
that Maslow explicitly borrowed this term for the goal of successful living, as part
of his humanistic psychology.) If one part of the brain is injured, the functions
previously performed by its particular neurons are compensated for by others—
although often with less speed, efficiency, and adequacy. In thus bringing Gestalt
principles to bear in their theories of brain functioning, Köhler and Goldstein
carried on, in modified form, the anti-localizationist tradition established by
Flourens, Franz, and Lashley (see Chapter 3).
A younger Gestalt-trained psychologist, Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), came to
America with his mentors and extended the perceptual field concept in yet a dif-
ferent direction. Lewin argued that every individual person resides in a unique
psychological field, or life space, which is the totality of his or her psychological
situation at any given moment. The life space includes one’s physical and social
environments, as they are perceived, as well as the person’s constantly changing
motives and actions, or locomotion within the life space. All of these combine
to create forces, or “vectors,” within the field, which combine to determine the
person’s behavior.
A man of great versatility and broad interests, Lewin also became interested
in the functioning of other kinds of psychologically relevant systems. To promote
a greater awareness of the perceptions of others within interpersonal networks,
he conducted sensitivity training groups, or “T groups”, which were precursors
to the encounter groups that became popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Turning
to larger social units, Lewin studied the comparative effects of democratic
versus authoritarian leadership styles on group behavior; this was one of the
earliest experimental studies in social psychology, to which we shall return in
Chapter 10. We shall also see there that another major pioneer in American social
psychology, Solomon Asch with his classic studies of suggestibility, had been
a graduate student under Wertheimer before becoming Köhler’s colleague at
Swarthmore.
Chapter 12 will highlight the role of Gestalt psychology not just on Maslow
and humanistic psychology, but also on Gordon Allport as he established the
foundations for the new field of personality. And we’ll see in Chapter 14 how Ulric
Neisser, often regarded as the father of modern cognitive psychology, worked
as a graduate student with Köhler at Swarthmore and vigorously supported the
Gestaltists in what he saw as a “war” against the behaviorists. Among the various
psychological movements and “schools” that are often emphasized in history of
psychology textbooks, the influence of Gestalt was unusually broad and perva-
sive, expanding from its specialized roots in visual perception into many other
branches of modern psychology.
* * *
Students at the outset of their introductory psychology course sometimes com-

plain about the early coverage of sensation and perception, and may even ques-
tion what these topics have to do with “real” psychology. We hope this chapter
has addressed that question, showing how increasing knowledge about the ways
in which physical stimuli become converted into conscious experiences provided
the first scientific evidence of a creative “mind,” worthy of study in its own right.
We shall see in Chapter 5 how the work of Helmholtz and Fechner directly stimu-
lated the establishment of the first textbooks and programs explicitly devoted to
experimental psychology. In the same way, we’ll see in Chapter 14 how increas-
ingly sophisticated studies, rebranded as research on information processing
(the complex sequence of activities by which stimuli are received, recognized,
categorized, and recorded in memory), lay at the heart of the new discipline of
cognitive psychology.
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
The problem of how experience of the external world is proposed a trichromatic theory of color vision that is con-
processed through the sensory and perceptual systems sidered largely accurate to this day. He also demonstrated
of an active mind provided the main starting point for an the importance of experience, learning, and what he called
empirical science of psychology. In the late 1700s Kant, unconscious inference in the conversion of raw sensations
after being stimulated by Hume’s skeptical analysis of the into meaningful perceptions.
concept of causality, distinguished between the noumenal In founding the field of psychophysics, Fechner studied
world, consisting of “things-in-themselves” that exist inde- the relationship between the intensities of physical stimuli
pendently of direct experience or consciousness, and the as measured objectively and the way they are experienced
phenomenal world as subjectively experienced, after being subjectively. Using the jnd (just noticeable difference) to
processed and transformed by the senses and the mind’s represent subjectively experienced intensity, he showed
intuitions and categories. While suggesting what some of that these related to objectively measured intensities in
those processes might be, he did not believe they could be a general logarithmic function that became known as
quantified or studied scientifically. Fechner’s law. Here was another demonstration that a
Helmholtz took up this challenge, first by helping subjective, psychological quality could be subject to quanti-
establish the case for physiological mechanism as opposed fication and scientific analysis.
to vitalism, and then by showing that the speed of the The Gestalt psychologists Wertheimer, Koffka, and
nerve signal, previously thought to be infinite, was mea- Köhler demonstrated further ways in which the mind ac-
surably finite; this led to the discovery that reaction times tively organizes its perceptions of the world. The phi phe-
are variable and can be studied scientifically. In exhaustive nomenon, figure-ground reversals, and the innate tendency
studies of sensation and perception, Helmholtz showed to organize complex aggregates of stimuli into clusters or
how the energies from the physical world, when conceived groups were all examples of this transformative and creative
in their most elemental senses such as the frequencies and function of the mind. The Gestaltists emphasized the impor-
wavelengths of light and sound, are analogous to Kant’s tance of wholes as being more than the sums of their parts,
noumenal world. These energies are processed by first and of fields analogous to the physicists’ force fields as the
physical, then physiological, and finally psychological sys- organizing environments for psychological events. Their
tems to produce conscious sensations and perceptions influence was pervasive in the subsequent development of
that correspond to Kant’s phenomenal world. Helmholtz social, personality, humanistic, and cognitive psychology.
Key Pioneers
Immanuel Kant, p. 136 Eleanor Jack Christian von Ehrenfels,
David Hume, p. 136 Gibson, p. 153 p. 161
Hermann Helmholtz, p. 140 Gustav Theodor Max Wertheimer, p. 161
Johannes Müller, p. 140 Fechner, p. 154 Kurt Koffka, p. 161
Emil du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Heinrich Wolfgang Köhler, p. 161
p. 140 Weber, p. 157 Kurt Goldstein, p. 166
Ewald Hering, p. 153 S. Smith Stevens, p. 160 Kurt Lewin, p. 166
Chapter Review 169
Key Terms
noumenal world, p. 137 perceptual adaptation, p. 151
phenomenal world, p. 137 unconscious inference, p. 151
intuitions, p. 137 color afterimage, p. 153
categories, p. 137 visual cliff, p. 153
law of specific nerve energies, p. 138 psychophysics, p. 157
vitalism, p. 141 just noticeable difference (jnd), p. 158
physiological mechanism, p. 142 absolute threshold, p. 158
law of conservation of energy, p. 143 Fechner’s law, p. 159
reaction time, p. 144 power law, p. 160
sensations, p. 146 Gestalt psychology, p. 161
perceptions, p. 146 apparent movement, p. 161
blind spot, p. 147 phi phenomenon, p. 162
complementary colors, p. 149 figure and ground, p. 163
primary colors, p. 149 psychophysical isomorphism, p. 165
Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory, p. 149 life space, p. 166

1. For the development of modern psychology, what were the major advantages and
disadvantages of Kant’s distinction between noumenal and phenomenal worlds?
2. What is the distinction between vitalism and physiological mechanism, and why was the
triumph of physiological mechanism important for the eventual emergence of scientific
psychology?
3. Fechner faced the problem of how to “get inside the heads” of people to measure their
subjective experience of physical sensory stimuli (e.g., heat, brightness, loudness). Can
you think of any other subjective experiences that are of great interest to psychologists?
What methods have they devised to measure them?
4. Describe some of the applications of Gestalt principles to fields outside their origins in
sensation and perception.
Suggested Resources
A web search for “optical illusions” brings up links to a veritable treasure trove of exam-
ples of these fascinating psychological phenomena. One particularly rich resource is avail-
able at “Brainbashers”: https://www.brainbashers.com/opticalillusions.asp For a discussion
of Kant’s influence on the development of psychology, see “The Kantian Background,” in
D. B. Klein’s A History of Scientific Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1970), Chapter 15.
The classic description of the development of the law of specific nerve energies appears
in Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1957), Chapters 2 and 5.
A good sampling of Helmholtz’s work—including his paper on conservation of energy,

a brief autobiographical sketch, and popularized accounts of his theories of vision and
hearing—has been collected and edited by Russell Kahl in Selected Writings of Hermann
von Helmholtz (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). The standard biography of
Helmholtz is Leo Koenigsberger’s Hermann von Helmholtz, translated by Frances A. Welby
(New York: Dover, 1965). Wikipedia entries are constantly subject to revision and correction
and should be regarded with some caution, but they are often useful places to get started
on a subject, and their entry on “Color Vision” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision)
illustrates and amplifies many of the points made in this chapter. For a recent commen-
tary on Eleanor Gibson’s visual cliff studies, see Elissa Rodkey, “The Visual Cliff’s Forgotten
Menagerie,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 51 (2015), 113–140.
David J. Murray provides a lucid account of the origins of psychophysics in A History
of Western Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Prentice Hall, 1988), 176–185. William R. Wood-
ward, “Fechner’s Panpsychism: A Scientific Solution to the Mind-Body Problem,” Journal
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8 (1972): 367–386, usefully discusses the relation-
ship between Fechner’s philosophical and scientific concerns. For a full-length intellectual
biography, see Michael Heidelberger’s Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His
Psychophysical Worldview (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
Christopher Green’s invaluable Classics in the History of Psychology website contains
important original works by Fechner, Köhler, and Wertheimer; go to the index site at http://
psychclassics.yorku.ca=index.htm, click on “Author” for an alphabetical list, and then on the
appropriate name.
CHAPTER 5
Wundt and the Establishment
of Experimental Psychology
Wundt’s Early Life

Wundt at Leipzig
Titchener’s Stucturalism
Experimenting on Higher Functions
Wundt’s Reputation and Legacy
I n 1861, the young German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt wanted to test the
common assumption that when two different stimuli strike our senses at the
same time, such as hearing a person speak and simultaneously watching his
lips move, we become consciously aware of both stimuli at the same instant.1
He devised a simple but clever home experiment, by rigging his own pendu-
lum clock into a “thought meter.” As Figure 5.1 shows, the clock’s pendulum,
labeled B, swung above the calibrated scale M. Wundt attached a knitting
needle (S) to the shaft of the pendulum so it would strike a bell (g) at precisely
the instant the pendulum reached the extremity of its swing (position b).
When Wundt tested his own reactions, however, he discovered something un-
usual. As he looked at the swinging pendulum and judged the spot it seemed to
occupy the moment he heard the bell, he found it was never exactly at position
b but always somewhere on the swing away from that spot. By his calculation,
the time necessary for the pendulum to swing this extra distance was between
173
174 5 | Wundt and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology
one-tenth and one-eighth of a second. He concluded that

he had not consciously experienced the auditory and
visual stimuli simultaneously, even though they had actu-
ally occurred together. Instead, separate acts of attention
had apparently been required—first to register the bell in
consciousness, then to note the position of the pendulum.
Each act of consciousness had presumably taken up a tenth
to an eighth of a second.
This result had important implications for the young
scientist. As Helmholtz’s assistant at the University of
Heidelberg, Wundt knew all about his superior’s pioneer-
ing studies measuring the speed of the nerve signal (see
Chapter 4). Those studies, however, had been restricted to
the speed of neural events on the periphery of the nervous
system—that is, impulses in the sensory and motor nerves,
transmitting messages to or from the brain. Wundt’s new
study demonstrated how the reaction-time experiment could
be refined to measure the exact duration of a central process,
Figure 5.1 Wundt’s thought meter.
carried out by neurological activity within the brain itself,
and responsible for the psychological reaction of attention.
Wundt also recognized he had now joined Helmholtz and Fechner (whose
Elements of Psychophysics had just been published) in subjecting a clearly
psychological process to experimental study. He was struck by the fact
that suddenly several experimental approaches to mental phenomena had
been developed, contrary to Kant’s influential opinion that such a feat was
impossible. In fact, Wundt concluded that there were now sufficient grounds
for establishing a whole new field of experimental psychology, as a basis
of study, exploration, and research in the universities, along with more
traditional subjects.
Wundt proposed this possibility in the introduction to his 1862 book, Contri-
butions to the Theory of Sensory Perception, and worked for many years to make
it a reality. Finally, in 1879, he established an official institute at the University of
Leipzig, where graduate students could come specifically to earn a Ph.D. degree
in experimental psychology. Students came from around the world, and many
returned to their home countries to develop experimental psychology programs
there. By 1900, over 100 psychology laboratories had been established worldwide,
and psychology was widely recognized as an important and independent aca-
demic subject. Today, less than 150 years after Wundt’s pioneering efforts, psy-
chology is one of the most popular topics of study in Western universities. In
honor of his contributions, Wundt is often regarded as the founder of modern

experimental psychology.
Children don’t always turn out exactly as their parents might wish, of course,
and this was true of Wundt’s intellectual offspring. The strong-minded founder
held very clear notions about what psychology should and should not be, and
despite his advocacy of experimental methods, he also retained a strong sense
of their limitations. Many important psychological problems, he believed, could
only be approached using nonexperimental techniques. Not all of Wundt’s stu-
dents and immediate successors agreed with him, and some promptly pushed
the fledgling science further and in different directions than he thought appro-
priate. Wundt also felt strongly that psychology should exist within philosophy,
a highly respected discipline in the German context. Elsewhere, new experimen-
tal psychologists attempted to differentiate themselves from philosophy to the
point of establishing separate departments and distancing themselves from their
philosophical forebears. As these trends gained popularity, Wundt developed a
reputation for being an old-fashioned parent, one who got things started but then
lacked the vision or modernity to carry his ideas to fulfillment. One historian of
psychology in 1964 went so far as to characterize Wundt’s
psychology as “an interruption in the development of a
natural science of man.”2
More recent historians, however, have rehabilitated
Wundt’s reputation. Many of his views turn out to have been
misinterpreted, or misrepresented by his successors, and at
least some of his cautions about experimentalism now seem
better founded than they once did. In telling the story of
Wundt’s life, including his foundational work in experimental
psychology, we take up issues that continue to resonate today.
WUNDT’S EARLY LIFE

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920; Figure 5.2) was born near
Mannheim, Germany, in a small village where his father
was an Evangelical pastor. The family had solid academic
connections, for his father’s father had been a professor of
history at the University of Heidelberg, and two of his moth-
er’s brothers were physicians and professors of physiology.
One of them would play a particularly important role in his
later life.
As an infant Wilhelm contracted malaria. His worried
parents, who had already lost two children in infancy, moved Figure 5.2 Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920).
to less lucrative but climatically healthier parishes in farming villages near

Heidelberg. They sent their only other surviving child, 8-year-old Ludwig, to
live with an aunt and attend school in Heidelberg. As a result, Wilhelm grew up
essentially as an only child, in small rural communities.
Wundt’s earliest memory was of falling down a staircase, his head striking
painfully on every step. A similar depressive tone pervaded most of his other
childhood reminiscences. A clumsy and unathletic youth saddled with the social
stigma of being a pastor’s son, he was ostracized and frequently bullied by the
rough-and-ready country boys who were his only peers. In his loneliness he be-
came a chronic daydreamer, and while he liked to imagine himself as a prolific
author of scholarly tomes on comparative religion, the habit severely interfered
with his schoolwork. Once his father visited his school and became so incensed
at Wilhelm’s inattentiveness that he slapped the boy publicly.
One moderately happy interlude began when he was 8, and his father’s assis-
tant pastor became Wilhelm’s private tutor. Wilhelm idolized this kindly young
man, who taught Latin skillfully and mathematics less so. Independent read-
ing in his father’s library aroused lifelong interests in literature and history.
Wilhelm continued to daydream, however, and the habit brought disaster once
again when he had to go to high school at age 12. In this “school of suffering”
he was constantly humiliated by students and teachers alike, and he completely
failed his first year.
Wundt’s despairing parents sent him to Heidelberg to live with his aunt and
brother Ludwig, now a university student. In this cosmopolitan university town,
he found not only a studious older brother to emulate but also some new school-
mates with interests similar to his own. Under these improved circumstances, he
curbed his daydreaming and graduated at 19 with a respectable academic record.
Having not done well enough to win a university scholarship, however, he had no
occupational goal except to avoid the ministry. His family had just enough money
to finance four years of university study, but they worried it might be wasted on
him. At this point his Uncle Friedrich—Philipp Friedrich Arnold, a physician and
professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Tübingen—emerged
as a role model. Wundt enrolled in medical school at Tübingen, and became
inspired as never before by his uncle’s course on brain anatomy.
The next year Arnold became professor of anatomy at Heidelberg, and Wundt
followed his uncle back home to complete his training. Still inspired and now work-
ing industriously, he enjoyed genuine academic success for the first time in his life.
He finished first in his class in several subjects and after three years passed his final
medical examinations with high honors. Even more importantly, he had begun to
experience the pleasures of conducting his own experimental research.
Development as a Researcher
Wundt’s first independent experiment at Heidelberg was supervised by Robert
Bunsen, the eminent chemist whose name is still memorialized in many labora-
tories for his invention, the Bunsen burner. Wundt studied the influence of salt
deprivation on the composition of his own urine, and in 1853 reported the results
in his first scientific publication. The next year he studied the effect of the vagus
nerve on respiration. Working at home with the loyal assistance of his mother,
he severed the vagus nerves on experimental animals, observed the effects, and
submitted a report to the Heidelberg faculty. This effort won a gold medal from
the university and publication in Müller’s prestigious journal of anatomy and
physiology. Wundt evidently found real-life authorship to be just as rewarding as
it had seemed in his childhood daydreams, for these student papers marked the
beginning of an extraordinarily prolific publishing record that eventually totaled
almost 60,000 printed pages.
After earning his degree, Wundt briefly practiced medicine as an assis-
tant pathologist, but then went to Berlin to study physiology with Müller and
du Bois-Reymond (see Chapter 4). Finding he enjoyed research and academic
pursuits more than medical practice, he returned to Heidelberg and became
accredited by the university as a Privatdozent, or lecturer. This lowest position
in the academic hierarchy was an unpaid position, but it authorized him to
offer courses privately while he enhanced his reputation by doing research.
Wundt’s first course, taught in his home on experimental physiology, attracted
only four students and was prematurely terminated when Wundt contracted
mild tuberculosis. He used his convalescence period to write his first book, a
not very original treatise on the physiology of muscular movement, published
in 1858.
That same year, thanks largely to Uncle Friedrich’s efforts, the young but
already famous Hermann Helmholtz came to Heidelberg to establish an Institute
of Physiology. Wundt became Helmholtz’s assistant—a low-paying position that
included responsibility for much of the actual teaching of physiology at the uni-
versity. (Like some eminent professor-scientists today, Helmholtz tended to stay
in the laboratory and avoid the classroom.) Wundt held this post for six years,
although he buried himself in private research and kept his distance from both
Helmholtz and his fellow assistants.
Wundt later suggested, ironically, that he and Helmholtz never became close
because of the similarity of their research interests. While one might expect the
opposite to occur, Wundt was no ordinary young scientist. He had developed a
fierce drive for independence and dominance, a desire to be a leader rather than
a follower in his chosen field. Although he was unquestionably influenced by
Helmholtz in his choice of subjects to investigate, Wundt kept to himself when

conducting his research.
During this time, Wundt studied and wrote about vision and the perception
of space. He also conducted his crucial thought-meter experiment described at
the beginning of this chapter. This study had clear connections with Helmholtz’s
prior work on the speed of the nerve signal. Wundt knew his study also had roots
predating Helmholtz’s work, for certain aspects of the reaction-time problem
had long concerned astronomers. In 1796, the English Astronomer-Royal Nevil
Maskelyne had discovered that his own “transit readings” for stars—that is, the
precise times he noted when stars under observation crossed grid lines in his
telescope—regularly differed by more than half a second from those of his assis-
tant, Kinnebrook. As often happens when an employee differs with an employer,
Kinnebrook was fired. But twenty years later, the German astronomer Friedrich
Wilhelm Bessel (1784–1846) showed that astronomical observers generally dif-
fered in their transit readings in consistent ways; some tended to mark the tran-
sits reliably earlier or later than others. With knowledge of all of their personal
equations, as these consistent individual differences came to be called, astrono-
mers could render their readings mutually equivalent.
Helmholtz’s research on nerve signals suggested that some of the varia-
tions among the personal equations of observers could be explained by differ-
ent lengths of their sensory and motor nerves, or in the speed with which those
nerves transmitted signals. Wundt reasoned that the variations might also partly
result from different speeds of central processing in their brains. By demonstrat-
ing with his thought-meter experiment that a measurable amount of time was
required for one such central process—the shifting of attention from one stimulus
to another—Wundt added to the plausibility of his hypothesis and contributed to
the longstanding debate about personal equations.
Although Wundt’s study connected with earlier work in physiology and as-
tronomy, it also carried implications for a future science of psychology. In detect-
ing and following up on these implications, Wundt at last established his own
originality and began to make the name he sought for himself.
Experimental Psychology and Völkerpsychologie

As we have seen, Wundt’s thought-meter experiment highlighted the importance
of central as opposed to peripheral processes—events in the core of the nervous
system, the brain, and which occur between the reception of stimuli by the sensory
nerves and the activation of responses by the motor nerves. Stimuli were not sim-
ply received by the senses and responded to instantaneously and mechanically
by motor nerves; they were first registered in conscious attention as indicated by
the time lapse between receiving a stimulus and responding to it. Wundt believed
this finding supported the general philosophical tradition of Leibniz rather than
Locke, because it indicated the importance of the receptive and creative proper-
ties of the mind itself, beyond the automatic association of external stimuli.
Wundt also believed the time needed for other central processes besides at-
tention could be studied by refinements of the reaction-time experiments. He
called this program of study mental chronometry: once the speed of information
processing was measured, inferences about the basic elements of consciousness
and other central processes would follow. This approach could join Fechner’s
psychophysics and Helmholtz’s studies of sensation and perception to form the
basis of a new science of experimental psychology. As noted earlier, Wundt ex-
pressed this idea publicly in the preface to his 1862 book, Contributions to the
Theory of Sensory Perception, a work whose main body reprinted his recent arti-
cles on vision, unconscious inference, and reaction time.3
Even as he proposed this new science, however, Wundt firmly believed ex-
perimentation could never be the only method for psychology as a whole. He
thought experimental methods would have to be confined to the study of indi-
vidual consciousness—that they could not be readily applied to mental processes
that were essentially collective or social in nature. Prominent among the collec-
tive human processes was language, and because language seemed crucial to
all the higher mental functions, including thinking and reasoning, Wundt saw
those functions as inappropriate for experimental investigation. Accordingly,
he proposed a second and complementary branch of psychology that would
use comparative and historical methods rather than experiments; he called it
Völkerpsychologie.
Wundt borrowed this name from a new journal, the Zeitschrift fur Völkerpsy-
chologie und Sprachwissenschaft. Zeitschrift translates easily as “journal” and
Sprachwissenschaft as “linguistics,” but Völkerpsychologie itself has no clear
English equivalent. German volk refers to “people, nation, tribe, or race,” so the
term has sometimes been translated as “ethnic psychology,” “folk psychology,” or
even “social psychology,” but none of these is totally accurate. Basically, Wundt
meant to signify a type of nonexperimental psychology that explores the commu-
nal and cultural products of human nature: religions, mythologies, customs, and,
above all, languages and their derivative higher processes. For Wundt, examining
these cultural products was a means to an end; it would lead to a better under-
standing of the collective mind.
After formulating the two branches of psychology, Wundt began actively
pursuing both. In the summer of 1862 he offered a new course of lectures on
the experimental side, for students in physiology and medicine, titled Psychology
from the Standpoint of Natural Science. At the same time he started writing Lec-
tures on the Human and Animal Mind, a two-volume work published in 1863 and
1864, covering issues such as the origin of speech, as well as sensual, aesthetic,
intellectual, and religious feelings.4 Although Wundt would later refer to this
book as a “youthful indiscretion,” it started him on the path to his mature
Völkerpsychologie.
But even with these accomplishments, Wundt had to struggle to earn a
decent living. In 1865 he resigned as Helmholtz’s assistant, under conditions
that remain unclear. According to one rumor, Helmholtz found Wundt lack-
ing in mathematics and physics and dismissed him. Wundt denied this, claim-
ing his duties did not involve mathematics or physics, and scoffing at the idea
that Helmholtz required “assistance” in those fields in any case. For whatever
reason, Wundt lost his only steady source of income with his resignation. The
university granted him a new title of assistant professor, but it was an unpaid
position and left him even more dependent on privately paying students at his
lecture courses.5
Wundt’s three published books to this point were all on highly specialized top-
ics and had sold poorly. Deciding that at least temporarily he must write to make
money, he wrote three more popular books in three years: a textbook on human
physiology, a handbook of medical physics, and a philosophical analysis of the
physical basis of causality. These books did sell reasonably well, and the last had
the great advantage of helping establish Wundt’s credentials in philosophy—a
field in which he had taken only one undergraduate course as a student.
Wundt continued teaching his private courses in psychology, and the subject
returned to the forefront of his consciousness in early 1867 with an invitation
to write an article surveying recent developments in the field of physiological
psychology for a new interdisciplinary journal. In response he wrote a 33-page
review of recent work on visual space perception and mental chronometry, and
he promised a further work in which he would explore the connections between
physiology and psychology. This article aroused more attention than anything he
had previously written and convinced many that a new scientific psychology was
truly on the horizon. Among those so convinced was a young American named
William James, who read it and wrote:
It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to
be a science—some measurements have already been made in the region
lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of
consciousness (in the shape of sense perceptions), and more may come of
it. . . . Helmholtz and a man named Wundt at Heidelberg are working on it.6
As we shall see in Chapter 8, James went on to become the major promoter of

the new experimental psychology in the United States.
This enhanced international recognition did little to help Wundt’s position at
Heidelberg, however. When Helmholtz left for Berlin in 1871, Wundt was passed
over as his replacement in favor of a rival five years younger than he. The de-
feat stung badly, for the intensely ambitious Wundt had already gone overboard
in his zeal to succeed. He had engaged in some unbecoming priority disputes
with other scientists and had labeled himself as “Professor” on the title pages
of his books while omitting the important modifier “Assistant.” Nevertheless, he
had also worked enormously hard, producing seven books and scores of articles
in several fields. He had also been politically active, serving a term as elected
representative to the Baden legislative assembly and acting as president of the
Heidelberg Workers’ Educational Association. Yet for all his effort and real ac-
complishments, he approached the age of 40 still holding a minor and poorly
paid academic position.
Principles of Physiological Psychology

Wundt’s fortunes improved markedly after 1874, when he fulfilled the promise
in his 1867 paper and completed the two volumes of Grundzüge der Physiologis-
chen Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology).7 In this landmark book
Wundt not only defined a “new domain of science,” the goal of which was the
joining of the previously separate areas of physiology and psychology, but also
provided detailed examples of how the task could be accomplished. By publish-
ing the first genuine textbook for the new field, Wundt emphatically established
himself as its leader.
In this work, Wundt observed that physiology investigates living organisms
“by our external senses,” while psychology examines things “from within” and
tries to explain those processes that emerge from this internal perception. Phys-
iological psychology was to be the discipline in which the methods of experi-
mental physiology would be applied to the perception of internal sensations so
they could be observed as systematically and reliably as external ones. This inner
perception would thus go “hand in hand with the methods of experimental phys-
iology.”8 These methods included repeated exposure to standardized stimulus
presentations (such as the thought meter), with the requirement that the observ-
ers report immediately on their perceptions. The aim was for the observation of
internal perceptions to be as objective and reliable as the observation of external
sensations. The observers themselves played a role here as well, as they could be-
come increasingly precise at this task with practice. Because this “physiological
psychology” used experimental techniques along with inner perception, Wundt
suggested it could also be called “experimental psychology,” the name he had

used before 1867.
Enthusiastic reviewers observed that Principles of Physiological Psychology
“corresponds exactly to the need for a specialized scientific treatment of the ac-
tual relations between body and consciousness”9 and that it “fills a [gap], and
circumscribes in a very convenient way all those phenomena of human life which
can be studied both by introspection and by objective investigation.”10 Even
though Wundt himself had not done a great deal of actual research in the new
experimental psychology, as its definer and documenter he became the person
most closely identified with it.
Wundt now found himself in unanticipated but highly pleasing professional
demand. In 1874 he won a full professorship in philosophy at the University of
Zurich, despite the fact that he had taken only one philosophy course during
his own education. A year later he accepted an equivalent position at Leipzig—
one of the largest and most prestigious of German universities and home of the
aging but still active Gustav Fechner and E. H. Weber. Here, in due course, Wundt
created the first full-fledged program of study in experimental psychology.
WUNDT AT LEIPZIG
Despite the promise of Wundt’s new position, physiological psychology had a
slow start at the University of Leipzig. He had accepted the job assuming the uni-
versity would provide storage space for his large collection of apparatus, which
he’d used over the past ten years for demonstrations in his experimental psychol-
ogy lectures. Unfortunately, the space was not available during Wundt’s first year,
and his initial courses were on language, anthropology, and logic rather than on
experimental psychology.*
Another difficult situation marred Wundt’s early years at Leipzig, although
in a very different way. He became involved in a disagreeable controversy with
Johann Zöllner, a Leipzig colleague who had previously been an enthusiastic
supporter. An astrophysicist by training, Zöllner had also done research on opti-
cal illusions, was a close friend of the psychophysicist Fechner, and had warmly
welcomed Wundt as the leader of the new experimental psychology.
*History of psychology textbooks sometimes mistakenly report that Wundt and William James
shared priority for establishing the first psychological demonstration laboratories in 1875, James
at Harvard and Wundt in his new position at the University of Leipzig. Actually Wundt was pre-
vented from doing experimental demonstrations in 1875 because of the unavailability of his equip-
ment, but he had already begun the practice a decade earlier in his Heidelberg courses. Therefore,
Wundt actually preceded James by several years but ironically was unable to continue his practice
the very year James began his.
Zöllner became estranged from Wundt after an 1877 visit to Leipzig by the
American psychic medium Henry Slade. Slade had already confessed to fraud
in America but still found eager audiences for his séances in Europe. At the
time, many people believed in paranormal or occult powers and were willing to
pay those who claimed to have them; then as now, a few trained scientists were
among the believers. Slade held séances for several leading Leipzig scientists,
including Fechner, Zöllner, and Wundt. At these events Slade caused tables to
tip, produced knots in a taut piece of string, and purported to receive messages
“from a departed spirit,” which he wrote down in broken German on a slate board.
Fechner was impressed but noncommittal about the performance, while Zöllner
became enthusiastically convinced of Slade’s genuineness. Wundt viewed the
proceedings skeptically, however, and published an article entitled “Spiritualism
as a Scientific Question” that can still be read today as a model challenge to many
claims for the paranormal.11
Wundt pointed out that the effects he observed occurred only when Slade had
the opportunity to cheat. Everyone had to sit in a tight circle around a table, and
Slade permitted no one to observe from outside. Slade’s hands, and the slate on
which he wrote the “spirit messages,” were frequently out of sight beneath the
table. Most of these messages had nonsensical content, and they came in English
or poor German, even though the presumed senders and all the sitters except
Slade were German. Wundt added that scientists, despite their reputations for
brilliance, are probably very poor judges of the reality of psychic phenomena; as
devoted pursuers of truth, they don’t expect deceit in others and are ill equipped
to detect it.
Wundt’s article greatly offended Zöllner, who was apparently becoming men-
tally unbalanced at this time. This former ally wrote a sarcastic and insulting re-
ply, claiming that Wundt should be jailed for five years for lying, and calling him
a “suckling child” who had directly copied skeptical and materialistic opinions
from his “lord and master” Helmholtz and “the Berlin vivisectionist” du Bois-
Reymond. Wundt, perhaps realizing Zöllner was no longer fully mentally compe-
tent, refrained from replying. He reprinted his article a few years later, however,
and added an introduction stating that belief in the paranormal, while unfounded,
perhaps filled a useful social purpose “like beer and tobacco.” As a form of super-
stition, it was likely to recur from time to time in “epidemics” and “like pain and
illness, to disappear from earth only with humanity.”12
Despite his early problems, Wundt gradually established himself very well
in Leipzig. In 1876 he got his storage space and resumed teaching experimen-
tal psychology, and by 1879 he had several students clamoring to do research
under his supervision. Late that year, two German students, Max Friedrich and
06_POP_28354_ch05_172-207.indd 183 18/10/16 3:41 PM

Ernst Tischer, joined with the visiting American G. Stanley Hall (see Chapter 8) to
work on a reaction-time study that Friedrich later presented as his Ph.D. disser-
tation. For this reason, 1879 is traditionally given as the date of the first working
research laboratory explicitly devoted to experimental psychology, and Friedrich
is credited with earning the first Ph.D. in the subject.
From this modest start, the discipline grew rapidly. In 1881 Wundt founded
the journal Philosophische Studien (Philosophical Studies) to publish research
results from the new lab. Wundt had considered calling the journal Psycholog-
ical Studies, but he abandoned the idea because a journal with a similar name
(Psychische Studien, or Psychic Studies) had already been founded. Moreover,
that journal covered the investigation of the “little known phenomena of men-
tal life,” including hallucinations, premonitions, dreams, spiritualism, as well as
other psychical subjects Wundt disliked. Wundt also genuinely believed that
psychology should exist within philosophy, a subject that was accorded great
esteem in German culture, and wished to emphasize that fact in the title of his
new journal.13
Two years later, after threatening to move to Breslau, Wundt was rewarded
with a quadrupling of his working space and a 40-percent salary increase at
Leipzig. The university now officially designated his laboratory and program as
the Institute for Experimental Psychology, lending them enhanced prestige and
prominence in the academic catalog. So popular was the institute that it had to be
physically enlarged again in 1888, 1892, and 1897.
Wundt’s institutional and organizational accomplishments were aptly summa-
rized by one of his earliest American students in 1888:
Professor Wundt, by the publication of his Physiologische Psychologie

in 1874 and the establishment of a psychological laboratory at Leipzic
[sic] in 1879, has made himself the representative of the efforts to intro-
duce experimental methods into psychology. Weber, Lotze, Fechner and
Helmholtz . . . had cleared the way, but their books and researches remained
to a certain extent isolated attempts, until Wundt directed toward one cen-
tre the divergent lines, and persuaded men of science on the one hand and
students of philosophy on the other to accept the new science.14
For these achievements alone, Wundt could have earned the title of founder
of modern experimental psychology. But he also played a major role as designer,
supervisor, and sometimes subject in the many experiments conducted in his lab.
He usually assigned research topics to his students, and in rare cases let those
who were more mature propose their own. Taking a keen interest in every project
and all his students, Wundt helped them prepare for their oral exams, and some
reported that he seemed as nervous about the exams as they were. In addition,
the results of many student experiments influenced some of his later theoretical
writings about psychology.
Experimental Studies
Early experimental research at the University of Leipzig fell into three general
areas: psychophysics, studies of the time sense, and mental chronometry. The
psychophysical studies tested Fechner’s general law on previously uninvesti-
gated sensory stimuli, such as the loudness or pitch of sound and the brightness
of light. Although not terribly original in conception, these studies often required
ingeniously constructed apparatus; in addition, they helped fill out the psycho-
physical program by confirming the general (although not perfect) accuracy of
Fechner’s law in a variety of new situations.
Studies of the time sense investigated the time intervals required between two
or more stimuli in order for them to be detectable as distinct. Visual stimuli, for
example, had to be separated by at least one-tenth of a second, or else they would
fuse together into a single continuous impression, an effect the inventors of
motion picture cameras eventually exploited (This sensation of apparent move-
ment was later characterized by the Gestalt psychologists as the phi phenome-
non; see Chapter 4.) For sound and touch, the smallest detectable intervals were
much shorter. And when stimuli for two different senses were presented (such
as a sound and a touch), intervals ranging from one-twentieth to one-sixth of a
second were necessary before subjects could accurately say which one occurred
first. As with the psychophysical studies, these findings had little theoretical
importance, but they contributed to the growing body of detailed information
about the senses.
The studies of mental chronometry were closest to Wundt’s heart, because
they not only provided new factual observations, but directly related to his own
innovative psychological theory. Most of these studies used the subtractive
method, a technique originally developed in 1868 by the Dutch physiologist
F. C. Donders (1818–1889). Donders first measured simple reaction times, in
which a subject responded to a single visual stimulus as quickly as possible.
He then complicated the experimental task by randomly presenting two kinds
of visual stimuli while instructing the subject to respond to only one of them.
Reaction times became somewhat longer than for the simple situation, presum-
ably because the subject required extra time to differentiate one stimulus from
the other. Donders subtracted the average simple reaction time from the aver-
age for the complex task and concluded that the difference—about one-tenth of a
second—had been the time required for a mental act of

discrimination. Friedrich expanded Donders’s study for
his thesis research, and many other subtractive studies fol-
lowed. The most systematic and extensive of these were
done by Wundt’s American student James McKeen Cattell
(1860–1944; Figure 5.3).
Like many other successful pioneers in experimental psy-
chology, Cattell showed great ingenuity in designing equip-
ment. He invented the instrument shown in Figure 5.4a
to present various kinds of visual stimuli in reaction-time
studies.15 The stimulus for any trial would initially be hid-
den behind the sliding black metal screen, suspended at the
top of the apparatus by an electromagnet. To start a trial, the
experimenter would turn off the magnet, causing the screen
to drop and to reveal the stimulus. At precisely the instant
the stimulus was uncovered, the falling screen would trigger
a switch starting a chronoscope, or timing device. The sub-
ject would then make a response to turn off the chronoscope,
whose reading accurately reflected the full reaction time.
Figure 5.3 James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944). Most reaction-time experiments before Cattell’s required
the subject to respond by pressing a simple finger-key, but
Cattell also invented keys activated by movement of the lips (Figure 5.4b), or
by sound vibrations from the subject’s voice. As a result, he could measure the
reaction times for verbal responses as well as for ordinary finger presses. These
methods enabled him to measure reaction times more accurately, and in a wider
and more interesting variety of situations, than ever before.
Subjecting just himself and one fellow student to this procedure, Cattell doc-
umented thousands of reaction times under varying conditions.* In the simplest
situation, in which the revealed stimulus was always a blank white patch and
the response a press of the finger-key, reaction times averaged about fifteen-
hundredths of a second. In the first complication, two kinds of stimuli were ran-
domly presented—such as a red patch and a blue one—and the subject was told
to respond to only one of them. As in Donders’s study, reaction times increased
by about one-tenth of a second—the time presumably required for discrimination.
When the subject had to perform a separate response to each stimulus—say,
*In a typical Wundtian experiment, what we would now call the “experimenter” and “subject” roles
were interchangeable, and investigators were typically interested in studying their own responses
to the experimental situation.
press a right-hand key for red and a left-hand key

for blue—average reaction times increased by
another tenth of a second. Wundt believed the
subject had to make a voluntary decision to move
either the right or the left hand, and he referred to
this increment as the “will time.” Cattell preferred
the more neutral term “motor time.”
Some of Cattell’s most interesting findings oc-
curred when he presented verbal stimuli, such as
letters or words, and required spoken responses
rather than finger presses. When letters and colors
were presented as stimuli and named in response,
average reaction times were three-hundredths to (a)
four-hundredths of a second longer for the letters.
The times also varied surprisingly from letter to
letter, however, with the relatively common E re-
quiring considerably longer than the less common
W. When short words were presented as stimuli,
reaction times were only negligibly longer than
for single letters. This important finding led to
Cattell’s conclusion: “We do not therefore perceive
separately the letters of which a word is composed,
but the word as a whole.”16
(b)
Cattell measured verbal “association times”
by presenting verbal stimuli and requiring words Figure 5.4 Cattell’s stimulus-presenting apparatus (a)
associated with them as responses. For example, and lip-key (b).
subjects reacted to German words with their
English translations, or to the names of cities with their countries, or to famous
author names with their written languages. These diverse association tasks re-
quired reaction times ranging from 0.35 to 1.0 second—a good deal longer than
the simple and nonverbal reactions. The range indicates clear variations, how-
ever, not only across tasks but also between the two subjects. Sometimes Cat-
tell, and at other times his colleague, was much faster on a particular type of
task. In speculating on the implications of these differences, Cattell sug-
gested some people may have generally quicker association times than oth-
ers. If so, he believed the quick reactors not only would think faster but also
would literally experience more ideas in the same objective period of time,
and thus “live so much the longer in the same number of years.”17 Here was
a suggestion that variations in people’s average reaction times might reflect
differences in their intelligence—a notion Cattell and others would later pursue,
and that we’ll return to in Chapter 7.
Following shortly after Cattell’s thesis, another student performed another
reaction-time experiment that greatly interested Wundt. In 1888, Ludwig Lange
(1863–1936) compared simple reaction times when the subject’s attention was
focused on the expected stimulus versus the response. In other words, in one case
the subject paid particular attention to what he was about to see, and in the other
case to what he was about to do. Reaction times in the first case were about one-
tenth of a second longer than those in the second.
In interpreting these results, Wundt adopted Leibniz’s distinction between the
processes of simple perception and apperception (see Chapter 2). In perception,
he argued, one simply responds to a stimulus automatically, mechanically, and
“thoughtlessly.” In apperception, one’s full attention is focused on the stimulus,
and it is consciously recognized, interpreted, and “thought about.” As an exam-
ple, compare a local person’s reaction to the street sign Main Street with that of
a stranger trying to find an unfamiliar address. To the local, the sign is a familiar
landmark on a well-known route, and on encountering it he turns right on his way
home without giving it a thought. He has perceived the stimulus and responded
to it, but without deliberation. To the stranger, however, the Main Street sign is
something he has been carefully looking for, because his directions tell him to turn
right to get to his destination. At that point, the sign fully enters and occupies his
attention—in Wundt’s language is apperceived—at least for a brief period of time.
Wundt believed Lange’s subject merely perceived the stimulus when he was
concentrating on the response; although fast, this “thoughtless” reaction was also
relatively error-prone and liable to be triggered by inappropriate stimuli. By con-
trast, the subject concentrating on the stimulus apperceived it, requiring an extra
fraction of a second for its full registration in consciousness.
Apperception became a major concept in Wundt’s psychology, both experi-
mental and theoretical. His students conducted experiments to measure the span
of apperception—that is, to determine the number of separate stimuli that can
be fully grasped in consciousness at once. Arrays of random numbers, letters, or
words were flashed on a screen for one-tenth of a second (the time presumably
necessary for a single act of apperception), and subjects were asked to recall as
many of them as they could. The number of correctly recalled stimuli was almost
always between four and six, regardless of the level of complexity of the stimuli.
Therefore, if a four-by-four array of random letters was flashed, subjects typically
apperceived four to six out of the sixteen; if the array comprised sixteen random
words of six letters each, subjects recalled four to six words, for a total of twenty-
four to thirty-six individual letters.
This result reinforced Cattell’s earlier finding that familiar words could be
reacted to as quickly as single letters, and his contention that such words are
responded to as wholes rather than as collections of individual letters. In these
cases, subjects did not “see” all the letters of the words, but apperceived the com-
plete words as independent entities. Of course, if unfamiliar words were flashed,
apperception was reduced to the level of individual letters. While typical English-
speaking subjects would easily apperceive familiar words such as taller with little
more than a glance, they would have trouble with its equally long Polish equiva-
lent, wyzszy, being able to remember it only as a collection of six letters.
Voluntaristic Psychology
As previously noted, the concept of apperception took a central place in Wundt’s
theoretical writings. He likened it to the events occurring in the very center of
the visual field. In normal vision, many stimuli may be present in the field, but
only those few whose images fall on the fovea in the retina are sharply focused.
Because the eye is extremely mobile, however, it constantly shifts its sharpest
focus from object to object. As you read this page, for example, your eye move-
ments constantly bring new words into sharp focus as previous ones fade into the
periphery. Wundt argued the same sort of thing happens with consciousness in
general. At any given moment, a maximum of approximately six ideas are apper-
ceived in direct attention, while many others may be perceived peripherally and
indistinctly. Like visual focus, attention can shift rapidly from one small group of
ideas to another.
Wundt further believed that perceived and apperceived ideas are subject to
different rules of organization and combination. Perceived ideas organize them-
selves mechanically and automatically, based on the associations a person has
experienced in the past. Apperceived ideas, however, may be combined and orga-
nized in many ways, including some that have never been experienced before. In
Wundt’s terminology, a creative synthesis takes place at the center of attention.
Let’s consider a simple example of a person’s conscious response to a card
on which the numeral 1 has been printed immediately above the numeral 2. If
the stimulus is merely perceived, it will elicit a straightforward reaction, the idea
most strongly associated in the person’s mind with past experience—perhaps the
number 3, since the stimulus resembles an elementary arithmetic problem. But
later, if apperceptive attention becomes focused on the stimulus, a host of new
and creative responses might occur: the idea of “minus 1,” or 12 or 21, or notions of
a secret code or cipher, or anything else depending on the person’s imagination.
Theoretically, if one knew a person’s complete history in advance, one could
predict that person’s reactions to perceived stimuli with complete accuracy. But
Wundt believed reactions to apperceived stimuli are not predictable, because

they’re subject to unobservable, internal influences, including motives, innate
predilections, emotions, and the indefinable effects of the will. Accordingly, he
argued that an entirely different order of causality determines apperceptive as
opposed to merely perceptive processes—a psychic causality whose rules are
not reducible to the purely mechanistic processes of physical causality. In a
sense, Wundt rejected the complete mechanism of the Helmholtz school in favor
of Descartes’s old contention that at least some central mental processes closely
connected with consciousness and will require an altogether different kind
of analysis.
Wundt did not deny the power and usefulness of mechanistic physiology
for explaining events on the periphery of conscious experience, but he insisted
something more was needed to fully explain that experience itself. Believing that
this something—responsible for apperception, creative synthesis, and psychic
causality—closely involved the conscious experiences of will and voluntary ef-
fort, Wundt often referred to his entire approach as a voluntaristic psychology.
He also believed mental processes determined by psychic as opposed to phys-
ical causality could not be explored by laboratory experimentation. Here was
another strong argument for the development of a nonexperimental Völkerpsy-
chologie, and he devoted the final years of his career to that project.
Völkerpsychologie and Its Implications

Higher and central mental processes, including apperception and thinking, had
been experimentally demonstrated to exist by mental chronometry, and a few
of their features, such as the span of apperception, had been measured in the
laboratory. But Wundt believed their most essential characteristics would always
resist experimental analysis, and therefore would have to be studied as they oc-
curred in the real world by comparative and historical rather than experimental
methods. Wundt himself tried to do this between 1900 and 1920, publishing his
results in the ten large volumes of his Völkerpsychologie, in which he addressed
the collective products of human culture: myth, religion, custom, and—the heart
of his analysis—language.
Several theorists had already equated thought with language, arguing that
even silent thinking was a sort of low-level talking to oneself. Wundt believed
otherwise, however, and cited some common situations in which people’s
words apparently do not accurately or uniquely represent their thoughts. Some-
times, for example, we suddenly realize our speech is not expressing our thoughts
properly and exclaim something like, “That’s not what I meant to say; let me start
over again.” Other times we listen to someone else speak and recognize a point of
disagreement before we can put it into words; we interject a “What?” or “No!” or

“Wait a minute!” long before we can actually describe what it is that disturbs us.
Or again, we can often repeat the gist of ideas or messages in words totally differ-
ent from those of their original speaker. The fact that we frequently have to work
to put our thoughts into words, and that the same thoughts can be represented by
different patterns of words, suggested to Wundt that words and thoughts cannot
be exactly the same thing.
Wundt concluded that the most basic unit of thought is not the word or an-
other linguistic element, but rather a “general impression” or “general idea”
(Gesamtvorstellung) that is independent of words. The process of speaking be-
gins with an apperception of the general idea, followed by its analysis into lin-
guistic structures that represent it more or less adequately. In listening, we first
apperceive the language and then connect it with some appropriate general idea.
In analyzing language itself, Wundt argued that the fundamental linguistic
unit is not the word but the sentence, the overall structure that somehow “con-
tains” a complete thought or general idea. When we use language, our atten-
tion is focused not only on specific words but also on the role of each word in a
structured sentence—as subject, object, or verb. As we listen, we automatically
assign each word to a vacant place in our awaiting thought structure. Wundt thus
described the sentence as a structure that is at once simultaneous and sequential:
It is simultaneous because at each moment it is present in consciousness

as a totality even though individual subordinate elements may occasionally
disappear from it. It is sequential because the configuration changes from
moment to moment in its cognitive condition as individual constituents
move into the focus of attention and out again one after the other.18
As this discussion shows, Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie made use of, and was
consistent with, concepts derived from his experimental psychology. Appercep-
tion of words, sentences, and general impressions all presumably followed the
rules of speed and capacity that had been demonstrated in the lab. But a full
understanding of thought and language also involved the comparative study
of many languages to determine what they had in common and thus what was
presumably universal in human speech. It also involved the analysis of natural
speech processes, which Wundt believed were too complicated to be examined
experimentally.
In this way, Wundt actually practiced the two-sided approach to psy-
chology he had used early in his career. He was among the first to apply the
emerging mechanistic, deterministic, and experimental approaches of the “new
psychology” to central psychological processes. But he also believed these ap-

proaches were useful mainly in studying the relatively simple and peripheral
aspects of psychological functioning: sensation, muscular activation, and the
times required for mental processes to occur. For studying the complex and
central functions—those at the farthest remove from easily observable sensory
and motor interactions with the physical world—Wundt relied on nonexperi-
mental techniques and proposed a nonmechanistic psychic causality.
Not all of Wundt’s students and immediate successors agreed completely
with his conception of psychology, and two lively debates arose during the later
part of his career. Both of them focused partly on the role of introspection—
the observation and reporting of one’s own inner experience—in psychologi-
cal experiments. Because Wundt saw psychology as the science of conscious
experience, he considered introspection (which he actually called internal
perception) to be the most direct source of much psychological data. On the
basis of introspection, he described the contents of consciousness as being
composed of varying combinations of specifiable sensations and feelings.
He believed sensations could be categorized according to mode (visual,
auditory, tactile, etc.); qualities (visual colors and shapes, auditory pitches and
timbres); intensities; and durations. Wundt classified feelings according to
the three basic dimensions of pleasantness-unpleasantness, tension-relaxation,
and activity-passivity.
While accepting introspective analysis of consciousness as a useful de-
scriptive tool, Wundt firmly expressed two kinds of reservations. Both of these
reservations led to debates, which in turn led to developments that endure in
modern psychology. First, he warned that the introspectively revealed dimensions
of consciousness should not be considered as “elements” analogous to chemical
elements—that is, units capable of combining to form complex psychological
states in the same way chemical elements combine to create physical com-
pounds. He noted that chemical elements—such as hydrogen, oxygen, and
carbon—can actually exist and be seen in their pure states, while the dimen-
sions of sensation and feeling only exist in combination with each other, and are
abstractions rather than concrete conscious experiences. One of Wundt’s most
influential students, Edward Bradford Titchener, came to disagree with this view,
and to develop an experimental psychology whose major goal was the atomistic
analysis of the elements of consciousness. Titchener’s atomism in turn aroused
considerable opposition, most strikingly from the Gestalt psychologists.
Wundt’s second reservation about introspective psychology in general was
the fact that the reporting of one’s inner states was often retrospective, and
memory often distorts the accurate recollection of these states. For that reason,
he limited the use of introspection (or internal perception)

in experiments, restricting it to simple and immediately re-
callable situations, or to the generation of hypotheses that
could be tested by nonintrospective methods. To Wundt, the
higher mental processes seemed much too complicated to
be accurately recalled—part of the reason they could never
be studied experimentally. In contradiction to Wundt’s be-
lief, his former student Oswald Külpe supervised a series of
experiments at the University of Würzburg in which several
of the higher processes were in fact approached introspec-
tively. And in Berlin, Hermann Ebbinghaus devised a non-
introspective but still experimental approach to studying
memory—one of the higher processes Wundt had ruled off
limits to experimental methods of any kind.
TITCHENER’S STRUCTURALISM
An Englishman who had absorbed the outlook of his native
empiricist and associationist tradition before studying with
Wundt, Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927; Figure 5.5)
completed his Ph.D. in 1892 and then moved to Cornell Uni- Figure 5.5 Edward Bradford Titchener
(1867–1927).
versity in New York.* While there was, at the time, no sep-
arate department of psychology (he was appointed to the
Sage School of Philosophy), Titchener’s task was to complete and expand a small
laboratory that had been started by his predecessor and teach courses in the new
experimental field. He did so, and in 1895 was also successful in founding a sep-
arate department. There he ruled with an iron hand, lectured in academic robes
(which he reputedly said gave him the right to be dogmatic), and quickly built the
largest psychology Ph.D. program in the United States.
Titchener staunchly advocated an introspective approach to psychology he
called structuralism. He chose this name because he believed the first task of ex-
perimental psychologists should be to discover the structure of the phenomena
they were investigating, before concerning themselves with functions—following
the example of biologists, learning anatomy in order to understand physiology.
As Titchener put it, the experimental psychologist’s first task is “to discover, first
of all, what is there [in the mind] and in what quantity, not what it is there for.”19
*Titchener would have liked to remain in England, but there were limited opportunities for him
to pursue experimental psychology, which had an established presence in only a couple of
universities.
(Titchener’s structuralism has no relationship with the movements of the same

name associated with figures important to cognitive psychology, such as Piaget,
Chomsky, and Lévi -Strauss.)
Titchener represented himself as a loyal student of Wundt, and in the absence
of translations of most of the German’s work, structuralism came to be accepted
in English-speaking countries as synonymous with Wundtian psychology. In fact,
however, Titchener had adopted only part of Wundt’s psychology and rejected
much that was essential to it. He agreed with his teacher that introspection must
be used carefully and only under precisely controlled conditions. But he did not
share Wundt’s distrust of the chemical element analogy, and even argued that the
primary goal of experimental psychology was the introspective analysis of con-
scious experience into its most basic elements of sensation and feeling.
Titchener himself had strong visualizing tendencies, holding very concrete
images even for abstract terms. He literally saw the concept of “meaning,” for
example, as “the blue-grey tip of a kind of scoop which has a bit of yellow above
it . . . and which is just digging into a dank mass of . . . plastic material.”20 Predis-
posed as he was toward such vivid imagery, it’s not surprising that he believed
all conscious experience could be reduced to introspectively accessible sensory
images—if only one knew how to introspect properly.
For Titchener, introspection was no casual inner pondering, but rather a rigor-
ous procedure that required careful training. Introspectors had to reduce all their
mental contents into the most basic elements, while working hard to avoid what
Titchener called the stimulus error—the imposition of meaning or interpreta-
tion on their subject. In the language introduced in Chapter 4, all perceptions
would have to be reduced to the concrete sensations that underlie them. Titchener’s
own mental image of “meaning” would not qualify as a proper introspective
report because it contained such higher-level terms as “scoop” and “digging.” To
qualify, the image would have to be further reduced to its pure sensory elements:
minutely described patches of light with different colors, shapes, intensities, and
durations. These descriptions could become so painstaking that introspectors
might give a fifteen-minute report on a stimulus presented to them for a mere
two seconds!
Titchener’s introspection attempted to cut through the learned categories
and concepts that define everyday experience, to arrive at the building blocks of
consciousness from which everything presumably begins. From such meticulous
introspections, Titchener estimated there are more than 43,000 distinguishable
elements of sensory experience, more than 30,000 of which are visual, and 11,000
of which are auditory. He found just four specifiable elements involved in taste,
and three in the sensations of the digestive tract.
Notably absent from that list is the sense of smell, which

posed some difficult problems for introspectors. Titchener
assigned the study of smell to one of his best early Ph.D.
students, Eleanor Acheson McCulloch Gamble (1868–1933;
Figure 5.6). Gamble had come to Cornell after graduating
from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, a new institution
exclusively for women that would play an important role in
American psychology (see Chapter 8). In a densely packed
doctoral thesis, published under the title “The Applicabil-
ity of Weber’s Law to Smell,” Gamble struggled heroically
with the problem of how to define and measure the count-
less types of sensations we experience through our nose.21 A
major challenge was the fact that most smells involve the
blending of different aromatic substances whose contribu-
tions cannot be differentiated. In addition, odors tend to
dissipate rapidly in the air, vastly complicating the task of
presenting smells with consistent and stable intensities for
standard psychophysical studies like those conducted by
Weber and Fechner for other senses. In the end, Gamble was
unable to isolate individual smells that could be considered
elements the same way as visual shapes or auditory tones,
Figure 5.6 Eleanor Acheson McCulloch
but she was able to estimate a just noticeable difference for
Gamble (1868–1933).
her roughly measured objective intensities of smells.
Gamble’s research motivated Titchener to introspectively
analyze his own smell sensations and images. He found he could not voluntarily bring
remembered smell sensations to consciousness the same way as imagined visual or
auditory memories. Smell images, he reported, occurred only “sporadically and invol-
untarily,” or had to be somehow triggered by a real smell. A dedicated smoker and
collector of fine cigars, he discovered that “I can smell out, from the scent of a good
cigar, a large number of flower perfumes . . . [But if] I try without any olfactory cue
to recall the smell of violets, I get to the verge of the smell . . . but I do not attain it.”22
Despite his difficulties in classifying smell sensations and images, Titchener
believed he had found an elemental sensory base for almost everything else he
analyzed introspectively, including Wundt’s key process of attention. Attention,
he argued, was a matter of the clarity with which something is imagined or per-
ceived, accompanied by a vague sense of concentration arising from sensations
of the tiny facial movements that occur simultaneously with a thought. To Wundt,
this view distorted the essential nature of attention, which he saw as much more
than the sum of a set of basic elements.
Titchener’s goal of avoiding the stimulus error, and of stripping experience

of its meaning, ran counter to Wundt’s general approach to psychology. It also
ran opposite to the holistic approach that was concurrently being developed by
the Gestalt psychologists (see Chapter 4). Titchener’s view also opposed Freud’s
psychoanalytic approach, which used an introspective method of free association
precisely for the purpose of uncovering the symbolic meanings of ideas, rather
than removing the meaning from them. We’ll see in Chapters 11 and 12 how
first Freud, and then Allport and Maslow, all had uncomfortable personal en-
counters with Titchener, which reinforced their determination to establish
perspectives very different from structuralism. Structuralism, along with all other
introspection-based psychologies, also came under severe attack from the power-
ful behaviorist movement that came to dominate much of American psychology
in the mid-twentieth century (see Chapter 9).
Despite the decline of structuralism, Titchener nonetheless had an important
influence on American psychology. Under his direction Cornell University be-
came a leading American producer of Ph.D. holders in psychology. He super-
vised fifty-six doctoral students himself between 1894 and 1927.23 Like Gamble,
many of these were women—a surprising and somewhat ironic fact in light of
Titchener’s other strenuous attempts to establish experimental psychology as a
rigorously “masculine” field.24
Female Students and the Experimentalists

In the early 1890s, the opportunities for women to pursue advanced study in psy-
chology were extremely limited. We’ll see in Chapter 8 how Mary Calkins stud-
ied with and strongly impressed William James at Harvard, but despite James’s
support was denied any official recognition by the university. In New York,
Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939) audited Cattell’s graduate courses at
Columbia University and won his respect, but the higher authorities denied her
official credit. Cattell advised her to apply to Cornell, which as a publicly funded
land-grant institution was one of the few American universities of the time
obligated to award Ph.D. degrees to women and, even more unusually, to offer
them access to fellowships.* Titchener, whom Cattell knew because both were
former students of Wundt, arrived at Cornell around the same time Washburn
was in need of training. He was open to the notion that women could become
accomplished scientists and was willing to admit them and supervise their work.
His attitude may have been partially shaped by two doting aunts who helped
*Land-grant institutions were also prohibited from using race as an admission criterion.
raise him. One of these he referred to as a “walking encyclopedia” because she

immediately had the answer to every question he could pose; many of Titchener’s
students would later refer to him in the same way.
Washburn became Titchener’s first graduate student, and he was the official
supervisor of her independently conceived thesis investigating the relationship
between vision and touch. Titchener sent the thesis to Wundt, who published it
in his famous Philosophische Studien—a great honor, as Wundt usually declined
to publish any but his own students’ work. In 1894, Washburn became the first
woman to be officially awarded a Ph.D. in psychology and went on to have a dis-
tinguished academic career. She authored the definitive comparative psychology
textbook The Animal Mind,25 edited several journals, and in 1921 was elected
President of the American Psychological Association.
Washburn was followed at Cornell by Gamble and a succession of other tal-
ented women. One of them, Lucy Day, met and then married a fellow graduate
student also supervised by Titchener—the future historian highlighted in this
book’s Introduction, Edwin G. Boring.
Titchener’s support of individual women was impressive for the time. He en-
couraged their research by publishing it in journals over which he had editorial
influence, and recommended them for jobs. Those jobs, however, were not at the
high-prestige institutions offering graduate degrees, but undergraduate women’s
colleges (which had fine students but limited research facilities) or “normal col-
leges” devoted to teacher training. Unfortunately, despite this support, Titchener
became better known for a less progressive position based on some of his more
traditional gender biases. He notoriously established the Society of Experimental
Psychologists, known simply as the Experimentalists during his lifetime, which
explicitly banned women from membership.
The Experimentalists began in the late 1890s when Titchener and a number
of other experimental psychologists became disillusioned with the composition
and emphasis of the APA. Feeling that various applied topics were dominating
at the expense of a truly experimental science of the mind,26 Titchener estab-
lished a small, invitation-only group of researchers who met once a year to
discuss work in progress, engaged in experimental demonstrations, and had free-
wheeling discussions that served to socialize younger researchers in the field.
Smoking, frank language, and critiques were encouraged, and because Titchener
did not regard these as appropriately feminine activities, women would not be
admitted, whatever their scientific credentials. Boring, in a retrospective account
of his first experience with the group as a graduate student in 1911, described
how his future wife and fellow graduate student Day was left to eavesdrop on the
meeting from the next room, to hear what “unexpurgated male psychology was
06_POP_28354_ch05_172-207.indd 197 18/10/16 3:41 PM

like.”27 Although there is some evidence that a handful of the

male psychologists Titchener invited to the Experimental-
ists at least questioned his policy of excluding women, none
dared to directly challenge it.28
One woman who did vigorously challenge Titchener’s
membership policy was Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930;
Figure 5.7). Twenty years Titchener’s senior, Ladd-Franklin
was a highly respected mathematician and vision researcher
who had earned her Ph.D. in 1882 as a special student at
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland (although
the degree was not officially awarded until many years later).
There, under the direction of Charles Sanders Peirce, she
became interested in symbolic logic and focused on a long-
standing problem called the transformation of the syllogism.
When she solved this thorny problem, Harvard philosopher
Josiah Royce noted how remarkable it was that the crowning
Figure 5.7 Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930).
achievement in a field that had been explored since Aristotle’s
time should be attributed to an American woman.
After graduation, Ladd-Franklin worked on a mathematical question underly-
ing a theory of binocular vision and became interested in theories of color vision.
In the early 1890s she studied with Helmholtz and others in Germany, and in 1892
delivered a paper outlining a novel theory of color vision at the International
Congress of Psychology in London. She spent much of the rest of her career elab-
orating and defending this theory, which hypothesized that the red-green recep-
tors in the human visual system had evolved at a later stage than the blue-yellow
ones (see Chapter 4).
Based solely on her scientific credentials, Ladd-Franklin was clearly qualified
to join the Experimentalists, and at first she may have considered it a simple
oversight that she had not been invited. In 1912, however, she came face to face
with Titchener’s stubborn refusal to admit women to his club. After writing to
express her desire to present a paper at the upcoming meeting of Titchener’s
group at Clark University, she received a negative response that both surprised
and incensed her. Her reply to Titchener emphasized the irrationality as well
as the sexism underlying his position. Titchener, however, stood firm. Two
years later, when the meeting was held on Ladd-Franklin’s home turf, at Columbia
University, she was allowed to attend one session but was unsuccessful in con-
vincing Titchener to reverse his general policy. Despite Ladd-Franklin’s repeated
appeals that the policy was medieval and unscientific, it was not changed until
two years after Titchener’s death in 1927. Even so, only four women—Margaret
Floy Washburn, June Etta Downey, Eleanor Gibson, and

Dorothea Jameson—were elected to membership by the
1970s.* In assessing the impact of Titchener’s sexist practice,
one historian of psychology has argued that the exclusion of
women from this elite group was an effective act of social
ostracism that took “a heavy toll on women’s participation
and advancement in experimental psychology.” 29
EXPERIMENTING ON HIGHER FUNCTIONS

Titchener was not the only one to challenge Wundtian psy-
chology. As might be expected in any evolving field, when
students learned the principles and methods of Wundt’s sys-
tem, they took his pioneering work in different directions.
Wundt did not always approve. Here we explore some of the
ways Wundt’s ideas were modified by his student Oswald
Külpe and his colleague Hermann Ebbinghaus.
Külpe and the Introspection of Complex Mental

Processes
Figure 5.8 Oswald Külpe (1862–1915).
Oswald Külpe (1862–1915; Figure 5.8) earned his Ph.D. with
Wundt in 1887. He then remained as his chief assistant for
seven years. In 1894, however, Külpe established his own psychology laboratory
at the University of Würzburg and soon began supervising students in introspec-
tive studies, the nature of which Wundt did not approve. Most of the experiments
involved setting relatively complex mental tasks for subjects to perform, and then
asking them to recall what they had consciously experienced as they solved the
tasks. Subjects reported two kinds of experiences that Külpe thought important
but Wundt found arguable.
The first kind of experience involved imageless thoughts. After associating
to stimulus words, or judging the relative heaviness of different weights, Würz-
burg introspectors recalled that they had experienced certain transitory states
that were not definable in terms of specifically identifiable sensations or feelings.
They said they had been aware of their own processes of associating or judg-
ing, but that these experiences had seemed vague and without definable con-
tent. Wundt refused to accept these findings, on grounds that the experimental
*The Society of Experimental Psychologists continues to this day. According to its website it has
about 230 members. Although there are proportionately more women than in previous decades,
it remains male-dominated.
conditions had not been sufficiently controlled, and because he believed the men-
tal processes involved were too complex to be reliably introspected and recalled.
The second kind of experience involved directed association. These studies,
conducted by Külpe’s Scottish student Henry J. Watt (1879–1925) and his junior
colleague the German Narziss Ach (1871–1946), posed an even more direct chal-
lenge to Wundt’s experimental psychology. Watt asked his subjects to associate
to stimulus words in a highly specific rather than “free” manner; that is, he gave
them instructions about the kind of associations he was looking for. He asked
them to name, for example, the first superordinate or subordinate concepts that
came to mind in response to the stimulus word bird. In this case associations
such as “animal,” “creature,” and “living thing” would be appropriate superordi-
nate concepts, while “canary,” “robin,” and “hawk” would be acceptable subordi-
nate replies. In Ach’s experiment, subjects were asked to add, subtract, multiply,
or divide, and were then presented with pairs of numbers on which to perform
one of these tasks. A card with a 4 over a 3 might elicit responses of 7, 1, 12, or 1.33,
depending on previous instructions to add, subtract, multiply, or divide.
In all these situations, subjects gave correct replies easily and with negligi-
ble differences in reaction time. And when they introspectively recalled their
experiences, they said that the instructions, after having once been heard and
registered in consciousness, played no further conscious role in the process of
associating. The subjects instructed to subtract responded “one” to the stimulus
above just as quickly, automatically, and “thoughtlessly” as they replied “seven”
when asked to add. It seemed that the instructions, or in Watt’s language the task
set by the experimenter, predetermined the subjects’ associational patterns in
different ways before the experiment began. Ach wrote that the instructions
established different mental sets, or preliminary orientations to the stimuli,
that did not consciously enter into the subjects’ associational processes, but that
guided them in particular directions before the experiments began.
In one way these results correlated with Wundt’s voluntaristic psychology, for
the task and resulting mental set were precisely the kind of central, directive, and
motivational variables involved in apperception. But Külpe, who had been suspi-
cious of many mental chronometry experiments even before he left Leipzig, saw
the Würzburg results as undermining the logic of Wundt’s subtractive method.
Külpe argued that subjects in the more complicated situations did not perform
mere aggregates of simple reactions (perception plus apperception plus dis-
crimination plus association, and so on) but instead operated under mental sets
completely different from those of subjects in simpler situations. Külpe there-
fore thought the logic of the subtractive method grossly oversimplified the true
process of thinking and reacting. Although Wundt protested, Külpe’s argument
proved generally persuasive. The Würzburg experiments on directed association
are still considered to be classic demonstrations of the

predetermining influence of motives on association and
thought.
Ebbinghaus’s Studies of Memory

A different and even more influential challenge to Wundt’s
conception of experimental psychology came from his
younger compatriot Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909;
Figure 5.9). After completing history and philosophy
degrees at the University of Bonn, Ebbinghaus fought in the
Franco-Prussian War and then spent seven years in travel
and independent study, earning his keep by tutoring. Dur-
ing the late 1870s he came across a secondhand copy of
Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics in a London bookshop.
The book impressed him greatly, and he decided to see
whether he could apply the same sort of experimental math-
ematical treatment that Fechner had given sensation to the
new subject of memory. Wundt had just published his Phys-
iological Psychology, declaring that higher processes such
as memory could not be studied experimentally. However, Figure 5.9 Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909).
Ebbinghaus evidently took this as a challenge rather than
a deterrent, and proceeded completely on his own to conduct one of the classic
research programs in experimental psychology.
Serving as his own subject, Ebbinghaus investigated the amount of time
he needed to study material before being able to remember it perfectly. The
major problem was finding appropriate material to memorize. He knew that
stimuli differed greatly in terms of ease of memorization, and he believed most of
this variability occurred because of prior associations. Based on previous experi-
ence, a person finds some stimuli but not others to be particularly familiar, mean-
ingful, and memorable. To counteract this familiarity effect, Ebbinghaus tried
to find a large number of stimuli to be memorized that were equally unfamiliar
at the outset.
He created nonsense syllables by systematically going through the
alphabet and constructing more than 2,000 consonant-vowel-consonant
combinations—such as taz, bok, and lef—that could serve as originally neutral
or meaningless stimuli to be memorized in his experiments. He randomly as-
sembled these nonsense syllables into lists, usually between twelve and sixteen
syllables long, and set about memorizing them under fixed conditions. Typi-
cally he read aloud through a list at a fixed rate of speed, over and over again
until he thought he had memorized it perfectly. Then he would test himself,
and if he made any mistakes, he would try again. For each list, he recorded
the amount of learning time he’d needed before the first perfect recollection.
On average, he perfectly memorized a single sixteen-syllable list in just over
twenty minutes.
Having once memorized his lists, Ebbinghaus tested himself on retention un-
der varying conditions. He always had to restudy a list to get it right again, but
for a shorter period of time than at first. After an interval of twenty-four hours,
for example, he usually relearned lists of sixteen syllables in fourteen minutes
each—a reduction in learning time of almost one-third compared to the previous
day. Ebbinghaus used this fractional “savings” in learning time as a quantitative
measure of his memory strength.
When Ebbinghaus calculated his average savings for various periods of time
between the original and the second memorizations, he was not surprised to
find that savings decreased as the interval increased. More surprisingly and de-
lightfully, however, the rate of decrease was not constant but fell on a regular
forgetting curve, in which memory declined rapidly immediately after the ini-
tial learning but then almost leveled off. For example, when he retested himself
on one typical series of lists, the savings were 58 percent after twenty minutes,
44 percent after an hour, 36 percent after eight hours, 34 percent after one day,
25 percent after a week, and 21 percent after a month. Ebbinghaus noted that the
shape of this forgetting curve approximated a mathematical function similar to
that in Fechner’s psychophysical law (except that Fechner’s curve increased at
a progressively slower rate, while his own decreased). In sum, he demonstrated
that memory could be studied experimentally and yield mathematically regular
results. Wundt’s limitation on experimental psychology to exclude higher func-
tions such as memory, it seemed, had been too extreme.
Ebbinghaus’s memory research has remained for over a century one of
the most cited and most highly respected studies in all of experimental psychol-
ogy. Wundt could (and did) argue that nonsense syllables stripped of all
meaningfulness could not stand in for normal mental stimuli and claimed that
Ebbinghaus had only studied an artificial sort of memory. But even though
Wundt had a point, it was largely overlooked by later generations of experimental
psychologists who seized upon Ebbinghaus’s methods as a model for their
research on human verbal learning.
WUNDT’S REPUTATION AND LEGACY

Wundt remained fully intellectually engaged until the very end of his long life.
He retired from teaching in 1917 at age 85, having taught thousands of students
over the course of his career. In 1914, reportedly in deference to the changing
Wundt’s Reputation and Legacy 203
times, he even supervised the work of a woman, Anna Berliner. Berliner was the
only woman to be awarded the Ph.D. from his Leipzig laboratory. She applied
the principles of visual psychology to optometry. In 1936 she and her husband,
being Jews, were forced to flee Germany and went to the United States. Berliner
eventually became the chair and only member of the psychology department at
the Northern Illinois College of Optometry.30
Wundt continued to write his Völkerpsychologie. He completed his autobiog-
raphy just eight days before his death in 1920. He left behind 60,000 pages of
published works, many of which are still being examined by scholars.
In general, however, historians have been unkind to Wundt, particularly
in English-speaking countries. This attitude developed partly because of
his mistaken association with the ultra-introspectionist, structuralist school
of Titchener, which turned out to be particularly out of tune with the emerg-
ing American movement toward practicality, “objectivity,” and, eventually,
behaviorism (see Chapter 9). In addition, Wundt’s personal and stylistic qual-
ities were unappealing to James, the influential leader of academic psychol-
ogy in the United States (see Chapter 8). These intellectual and attitudinal
differences were aggravated by the political antagonisms of World War I,
and the ardent German patriot Wundt was easily dismissed in England and
America. Unread and largely untranslated, he came to be caricatured as the
founder of an ineffective experimental psychology, a dogmatic tyrant who
suppressed everyone else’s point of view, and an indefatigable author of
boring tomes.
In more recent times, however, some English-speaking historians have in-
vestigated what Wundt really said and have found much to update our under-
standing of his work and its significance.31 Psychology’s present preoccupation
with central cognitive processes represents a clear return to Wundtian interests.
Although experimental techniques and terminologies have changed since
Wundt’s day, he would likely feel at home with modern cognitive psychologists
who study such phenomena as information processing, selective attention,
and perceptual masking. He would also be comfortable with clinical psycholo-
gists studying schizophrenia as a disease that interferes with attention and the
apperceptive processes, or with psycholinguists who comparatively analyze
languages according to the “transformational grammar” theory of Chomsky.
Increasing numbers of psychologists today join Wundt in questioning whether
the purely “objective” and “detached” techniques of the laboratory experiment
can ever do full justice to the complexity of human experience. In sum, there
seems good reason to believe that Wundt’s significance—both historical and
contemporary—will continue to evolve.
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
Wundt developed an approach to studying basic mental the basic elements of consciousness—sensations and
processes that built on the German tradition of Fechner’s feelings—through a rigidly defined introspective method,
psychophysics and Helmholtz’s studies of sensation and and for many years this approach was considered by
perception. His program of mental chronometry exam- English-speaking psychologists to be a literal translation
ined the time it took to perform basic attentional tasks. of Wundt’s position. However, Titchener’s structuralism
He established the first large-scale laboratory explicitly ignored many important aspects of Wundt’s voluntaristic
for experimental psychology, and founded the first jour- psychology, including apperception, creative synthesis,
nal focusing on experimental psychology research. He and psychic causality.
also argued that higher mental processes such as apper- Külpe, another Wundt student, challenged his teacher’s
ception and language, as well as the products of culture assumption by applying experimental introspective
such as religion, myth, and custom, could not be studied methods to certain higher mental processes, such as im-
experimentally. For these, he proposed a nonexperimental, ageless thought and directed association, at his laboratory
voluntaristic approach he called Völkerpsychologie, using in Würzburg. Ebbinghaus further challenged Wundt by
comparative, qualitative, and historical methods instead. conducting an experimental analysis of the higher pro-
Cattell, a student of Wundt, worked extensively on cess of memory using his technique of nonsense syllables.
reaction-time studies, devising instruments to measure Disagreements between Wundt and his critics on the ap-
different response times under highly varying conditions. propriate scope of the experimental approach continued
Titchener, another of Wundt’s students, brought struc- the debate started by Descartes about the limits of
turalism, a somewhat idiosyncratic brand of Wundtian scientific analysis in psychology. Many aspects of Wundt’s
psychology, to the United States; at Cornell University he thinking that were formerly unexplored are now being
trained dozens of men and women in the new experimen- examined by historians, and may have renewed relevance
tal psychology. Titchener’s primary goal was determining for psychology today.
Key Pioneers
Wilhelm Wundt, p. 175 Eleanor Acheson Henry J. Watt, p. 200
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, McCulloch Gamble, Narziss Ach, p. 200
p. 170 p. 195 Hermann Ebbinghaus,
F. C. Donders, p. 185 Margaret Floy Washburn, p. 201
James McKeen Cattell, p. 196
p. 186 Christine Ladd-Franklin,
Edward Bradford Titchener, p. 198
p. 193 Oswald Külpe, p. 199
Chapter Review 205
Key Terms
personal equations, p. 178 sensations, p. 192
mental chronometry, p. 179 feelings, p. 192
Völkerpsychologie, p. 179 structuralism, p. 193
subtractive method, p. 185 stimulus error, p. 194
apperception, p. 188 imageless thought, p. 199
creative synthesis, p. 189 directed association, p. 200
psychic causality, p. 190 mental set, p. 200
voluntaristic psychology, p. 190 nonsense syllable, p. 201
introspection, p. 192 forgetting curve, p. 202

1. The kinds of studies Wundt and his students performed in his laboratory under the name
of the new experimental psychology differ in many ways from how such experiments
are designed and conducted today. What are some of the features of the contemporary
psychological experiment? Were any of these features present in Wundt’s lab studies?
2. Discuss the various factors—cultural, intellectual, and contextual—that may have
prevented Wundt’s entire system (including his Völkerpsychologie) from being fully or
accurately represented, until recently, in psychology’s history.
3. For what reasons is it justifiable to portray Wundt as the founder of modern experimen-
tal psychology? What reasons can you think of that complicate this designation?
4. What were some of the barriers to the early participation of women in the new dis-
clipline of experimental psychology? Are there any contemporary barriers to women’s
full participation in scientific fields? If so, what are they?
5. Describe how the work of Külpe and Ebbinghaus challenged Wundt’s assumptions
about the scope of experimental psychology.
Suggested Resources
Arthur Blumenthal initiated the modern revival of interest in Wundt with his book Language
and Psychology: Historical Aspects of Psycholinguistics (New York: Wiley, 1970) and his
paper “A Reappraisal of Wilhelm Wundt,” American Psychologist 30 (1975): 1081–1088. The
100th anniversary of Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory in 1979 inspired two excellent collections
of invited articles, containing extensive biographical as well as analytical material: Wundt
Studies: A Centennial Collection, edited by Wolfgang G. Bringmann and Ryan D. Tweney
(Toronto: Hogrefe, 1980), and Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology,
edited by Robert W. Rieber (New York: Plenum, 1980). Of particular biographical interest
are Solomon Diamond’s “Wundt before Leipzig,” in the Rieber volume and two articles by
Wolfgang Bringmann et al. in the Bringmann and Tweney collection: “Wilhelm Maximilian
Wundt, 1832–1874: The Formative Years” and “The Establishment of Wundt’s Laboratory: An
Archival and Documentary Study.” For an interesting firsthand account of Wundt’s Leipzig
laboratory by his student Cattell, see An Education in Psychology: James McKeen Cattell’s
Journal and Letters from Germany and England, 1880–1888, edited by Michael M. Sokal
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).
Kurt Danziger has written several important interpretive articles on Wundt and his
contemporaries, including “The Positivist Repudiation of Wundt,” Journal of the History of
the Behavioral Sciences 15 (1979): 205–230; “The History of Introspection Reconsidered,”
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 241–262; and “Origins and
Basic Principles of Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie,” British Journal of Social Psychology 22
(1983): 303–313. Most recently, Saulo de Freitas Araujo has reinterpreted the relationship
between Wundt’s philosophy and his psychology in his book Wundt and the Philosophi-
cal Foundations of Psychology: A Reappraisal (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International
Publishing, 2016).
More information on Titchener’s structuralism can be found in Christopher Green’s
“Scientific Objectivity and E. B. Titchener’s Experimental Psychology,” Isis, 101 (2010):
697–721. Deborah Coon describes the introspective method in “Standardizing the Subject:
Experimental Psychologists, Introspection, and the Quest for a Technoscientific Ideal,”
Technology & Culture 34 (1993): 757–784. On Titchener’s support of female students, see
Robert W. Proctor and Rand Evans, “E. B. Titchener, Women Psychologists, and the Exper-
imentalists,” American Journal of Psychology 127 (2014): 501–526.
A rich digital resource on the emergence and development of experimental, laboratory-
based psychology, including many drawings and photos of early lab equipment, is Max
Planck’s The Virtual Laboratory: http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/index_html. A short, lively
video on the founding of the psychology laboratory at Wellesley College, by Jennifer Bazar,
is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTeG-V0MKps&feature=youtube.
CHAPTER 6
The Evolving Mind: Darwin and
His Psychological Legacy
Darwin’s Early Life

The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection
Darwin and Psychology
Darwin’s Impact on Psychology and Society
I n early September 1831, the young Cambridge graduate Charles Darwin went
to London for the most important interview of his life. Unexpectedly recom-
mended for the post of naturalist aboard the survey ship H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin
had already had some difficulty convincing his father it would be a good thing
to do. Now he faced a crucial meeting with Captain Robert FitzRoy, the ship’s
formidable commander, to determine if he would be accepted for the job.*
A direct although illegitimate descendant of King Charles II, FitzRoy was a
veteran surveyor and ship’s captain at age 26. He now planned a multiyear voy-
age to survey the coasts of South America, and then proceed around the world.
He was looking for a congenial gentleman who would not only make geological,
mineralogical, and biological observations, but also share his table and cabin and
be his personal companion on the voyage. The post was unpaid, and some expe-
rienced naturalists had already declined it before the inexperienced but wealthy
Darwin had been suggested.
*There is actually some confusion over whether Darwin interviewed for the position of naturalist
or was simply being considered for the post of companion to the captain. Regardless, he soon
earned the title.
209
210 6 | The Evolving Mind: Darwin and His Psychological Legacy
At first the interview went badly, partly because of polit-

ical differences between the liberal Darwin and the aristo-
cratic, archconservative captain—but mainly because of the
shape of Darwin’s nose! FitzRoy subscribed to the theory
of physiognomy, which held that a person’s facial features
reflect his or her character, and Darwin’s nose had a shape
supposedly associated with a lack of energy and determina-
tion.* Darwin’s modest academic record did little, in fact, to
contradict that interpretation. As the interview proceeded,
however, Darwin’s great geniality and charm gradually
won the captain over and encouraged him to take a chance.
Darwin spent the next five years on one of the most scientif-
ically consequential voyages of modern times.
Departing raw and untrained, Darwin returned home
Figure 6.1 Charles Darwin (1809–1882). from the voyage an accomplished and respected geologist
and collector of biological specimens. Even more impor-
tantly, he had made some crucial observations that started him toward develop-
ing the theory of evolution by natural selection, a revolutionary biological theory
with vast implications for psychology.
DARWIN’S EARLY LIFE

Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882; Figure 6.1) was born in Shrewsbury,
England, the fifth and next-to-last child in a wealthy and distinguished family.
(Coincidentally, Darwin was born on the same day as the future American pres-
ident Abraham Lincoln.) His father, Robert Darwin, ranked among the most
highly paid of all English physicians outside London; his mother, born Susannah
Wedgwood, came from the famous chinaware-producing family. His grandfather
Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) had been one of the most famous intellectual fig-
ures of his day: a doctor, inventor, poet, and general man of science. He had even
formulated an early theory of evolution, expressing it colorfully although without
the range of supporting evidence necessary for it to be taken seriously by most
scientists of his time.
Educated first at home and then at the nearby Shrewsbury School, young
Charles was an indifferent scholar in the then-standard classical curriculum. He
recalled, “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind. . . .
The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.” He failed to im-
press his schoolmasters and once led his exasperated father to declare, “You care
*As noted in Chapter 3, the theory of physiognomy, originally promoted by the Swiss mystic
Johann Lavater, was a precursor of phrenology.
for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to
yourself and all your family.”1
Despite his father’s dramatic (and amusingly inaccurate) prediction, young
Darwin already had two qualities that eventually served him well. First was a
strong curiosity and love of nature that drove him to spend countless hours
observing, collecting, classifying, and experimenting in the natural world. He
collected plants, shells, and minerals, and his explosive experiments in a home
chemistry laboratory earned him the nickname Gas. Although unrewarded in
school, these activities provided excellent training for a scientist.
Second, Darwin showed from youth onward a warm and sympathetic person-
ality that made him almost universally liked. This quality later commended him
to Captain FitzRoy and won him the job on the Beagle. In addition, his sympathy
extended to animals as well as people, predisposing him in a peculiar way to appre-
ciate the functional, adaptive value of many animal behaviors that seemed incom-
prehensible or off-putting to others. This emphasis on function and adaptation
was a key insight in his evolutionary theory, and would later prove important in
developing a psychology attuned to the adaptive value of human behaviors as well.
Darwin’s academic situation improved slightly at age 16, when his father
released him from classical study and sent him to medical school at the Univer-
sity of Edinburgh, Scotland. There he learned the art of taxidermy (the preser-
vation and preparation of deceased animals for scientific study or display) and
presented his first scientific papers, reports on local marine life, to the student
scientific society. But medicine proved unappealing as a focus of study. As
Darwin noted, one professor “made his lectures on human anatomy as dull as
he was himself, and the subject disgusted me”; another teacher’s early morning
classes were “something fearful to remember.” And worst of all, Darwin witnessed
two live operations performed without anesthesia, one on a child: “I rushed away
before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any induce-
ment would have been strong enough to do so; this being long before the blessed
days of chloroform.”2
Darwin’s physician father understood, for he, too, hated the sight of blood and
maintained that he practiced medicine only out of economic necessity. He proposed
yet another change: that Charles move to Cambridge University and prepare to be-
come an Anglican clergyman. Attracted by the prospect of becoming a country par-
son and pursuing natural history as an amateur, Charles accepted the plan.
At Cambridge, Darwin joined “a sporting set, that sometimes drank too much,
with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards.” His dining society, officially called
the Gourmet Club but appropriately nicknamed the Glutton Club, was notorious
for its “devouring raids on birds and beasts which were before unknown to human
palate. . . . [It] came to an untimely end by endeavouring to eat an old brown owl.”3
The academic curriculum at Cambridge emphasized mathematics as well as

classics, and although Darwin enjoyed geometry, he was described by a fellow
student as having “a special quarrel” with elementary algebra.4 Darwin never
bothered to compete for honors, but “went out in the poll” with an ordinary or
pass degree in 1831. He mastered enough geometry, classics, and natural theol-
ogy to graduate tenth out of the 178 nonhonors students in his class.
Although respectable, Darwin’s formal academic career at Cambridge could
not have predicted that his alma mater would one day name a new college after
him. He stood out only in extracurricular activity, with his passion for nature
study. “No pursuit at Cambridge . . . gave me so much pleasure as collecting bee-
tles,” he recalled, and he offered the following “proof of my zeal”:
One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one
in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose,
so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas
it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was
forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.5
Darwin’s enthusiasm for natural history and his genial personality attracted
the attention of Cambridge’s more scientifically minded faculty, particularly John
Stevens Henslow (1796–1861; Figure 6.2) and Adam Sedgwick, professors of bot-
any and geology, respectively. Both were ordained Anglican
clergymen who earned no salary for their professorships and
offered no formal courses in their fields, for the university still
considered the sciences to be distinctly minor subjects. They
did, however, give occasional lectures and sponsor extracur-
ricular excursions into the countryside for the small number
of interested students. Darwin participated enthusiastically
and became known as “the man who walks with Henslow.”
Although Henslow and Sedgwick were knowledgeable in
their fields and reasonably good teachers, both men’s scien-
tific views were colored by High Church conservatism. Darwin
could not avoid noticing that they were particularly antagonis-
tic to speakers who occasionally came to Cambridge espous-
ing evolutionary ideas; in fact, they went so far as to use their
influence to destroy the reputation and career of anyone dar-
ing to promote such a radical doctrine.
Darwin profited greatly from the teaching and friendship
Figure 6.2 John Stevens Henslow (1796–1861). of these men, and the association paid off immediately after
his graduation in 1831. He accompanied Sedgwick on a summer geological tour

of north Wales, which kindled a real interest in a science he had found rather dull
at Edinburgh. On returning home to Shrewsbury, another surprise awaited him in
the form of a letter from Henslow, who had just been offered the naturalist’s post
on Captain FitzRoy’s Beagle but had declined because of family commitments.
He told Darwin:
I have stated that I consider you to be the best qualified person I know who
is likely to undertake such a situation—I state this not on the supposition
of your being a finished Naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting,
observing, and noting anything worthy to be noted in Natural History. . . .
The Voyage is to last 2 years and if you take plenty of Books with you, any
thing you please may be done. . . . In short I suppose there never was a finer
chance for a man of zeal and spirit.6
Darwin’s father, who would have to pay his son’s expenses on this venture, at
first called it a “wild scheme” that would interfere with a clerical career. Charles
wrote Henslow regretfully declining the offer and went off to console himself on
a shooting expedition with his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood. Fortunately, however,
Robert Darwin had also said that if Charles could find someone with reliably
common sense who would advise him to go, he would reconsider his objections.
Uncle Josiah, universally regarded as a man of eminent common sense, thought
the offer a wonderful opportunity. Instead of hunting, uncle and nephew together
confronted the elder Darwin, who relented with good grace. To console his father,
the often extravagant Charles noted wittily that he would have to be very clever
to overspend his allowance while he was aboard the Beagle. Robert answered
with a resigned smile, “But they all tell me you are very clever.”7
This brings us to Darwin’s fateful interview with FitzRoy, in which his amiable
manner triumphed over the weak shape of his nose and won him the position.
Learning the news, a Glutton Club crony wrote a congratulatory letter saying:
“Woe unto the Beetles of South America, woe unto all tropical butterflies.”8
Although Darwin would, in fact, collect thousands of insect specimens on what
became a very long voyage, these specimens would hardly be the most important
of the journey’s outcomes.
The Voyage of the Beagle

Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle began ominously in December 1831, as fierce
gales in the Bay of Biscay left the former landlubber constantly seasick. As he
lamented, “Nobody who has only been to sea for 24 hours has a right to say that
sea-sickness is even uncomfortable. I found nothing but lying in my hammock

did me any good.”9 But when the seas calmed slightly, Darwin found he could read
and work. He devised a specimen-catching bag to drag behind the ship, captur-
ing thousands of marine creatures that he studied and classified. He read widely
on geology, geography, and biology, and kept a detailed journal of his observa-
tions and thoughts. With his good humor he soon became a favorite of the crew,
who affectionately called him “Philosopher.” FitzRoy wrote of him: “I never saw
a ‘shore-going fellow’ come into the ways of a ship so soon and so thoroughly.”10
It was fortunate Darwin became accustomed to life aboard ship, because the
projected two-year voyage stretched to five. After two years only the east coast
of South America had been surveyed, and the Beagle spent another two years
on the west coast before finally starting the long westward voyage home via the
Galápagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and the Cape of Good Hope.
Figure 6.3 maps the entire voyage.
Geological Discoveries
During his first months at sea, Darwin read the recently published first volume
of The Principles of Geology, by the English geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875).
This book promoted a controversial theory called uniformitarianism, which
held that the Earth’s major features have resulted from gradual processes occur-
ring over vast stretches of time and continue in the present much as they have in
the past (hence the “uniform” nature of geological development). Lyell disputed
the then-predominant alternative theory of catastrophism, according to which
geological features arose because of a few sudden and massive cataclysms on
the Earth’s surface. Part of catastrophism’s appeal lay in its compatibility with a
literal interpretation of the Bible, with Noah’s flood representing the most impor-
tant geological cataclysm. Catastrophism also correlated with the then widely
accepted estimate of the Earth’s age as only about 6,000 years, as calculated by
the Irish archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656). Ussher arrived at this number
by adding up the ages of the Old Testament patriarchs after Adam and Eve, ac-
cording to the Bible. Uniformitarianism, however, required an immensely longer
period of time for gradual processes to have built mountains and worked their
other cumulative effects.
Before Darwin’s departure, Henslow and Sedgwick had encouraged him
to read and think about Lyell’s book, but not to believe it. But as he read and
thought, and then observed the geological features of the exotic places he vis-
ited, he became increasingly impressed. For example, he found seashells em-
bedded in rock high in the Andes, then witnessed an earthquake in Chile that
left coastal features a few feet higher above sea level than they had been before.
Plymouth sailed
Dec. 27, 1831
Falmouth landed
Oct. 2, 1836
Azores landed
Sep. 20, 1836 Off Tenerife
Jan. 6, 1832
unable to land
because of
quarantine
St. Paul’s Rocks
landed Feb. 16, 1832
Cape Verde Is.
0
Galápagos Is. Fernando de Noronha landed Jan. 16, 1832
landed Sept. 16, 1835 landed Feb. 20, 1832 landed Aug. 31, 1836
sailed Oct. 20, 1835 Cocos Keeling Is.
0 landed Apr. 2, 1836
Ascension I.
landed landed July 20, Mauritius landed
Feb. 28, 1832 1836 Apr. 30, 1836
Callao landed Bahla landed
July 20, 1835 Aug. 1, 1836
Rio de Janeiro
St. Helena
landed Apr. 5, 1832
Tahiti landed landed July 8, 1836 Sydney
New
Nov. 15, 1835 landed Jan. 12,
Zealand
Cape Town 1836
King George’s Sound landed
Valparaiso Montevideo landed June 1, 1836
landed Mar. 7, 1836 Dec. 21,
landed July 23, 1934 landed July 28, 1832
1835
Hobart
Falkland Is. landed Feb. 5,
Passed out of landed Mar. 1, 1833 1836
Strait of Magellan landed Mar. 10, 1834
June 10, 1834
Shipped a great sea
Jan. 13, 1833
Figure 6.3 The route of the voyage of the Beagle, 1831–1836.

Although terrible for those caught in it, this earthquake was not a catastrophe
of the magnitude prescribed by the older geological theory. But similar events
occurring over vast periods of time, as in uniformitarianism, could easily have
produced a gradual raising of land from sea level in the distant past to a current
mountainous height.
After examining the geology of several oceanic islands and atolls (ring-
shaped islands formed of coral), Darwin became convinced that these, too,
could be accounted for by gradual uniform processes, such as lava flows from
undersea volcanoes, coral growth, and the slow rising and subsidence of the
ocean floor. He wrote about all this to Henslow, who passed his letters on to
Lyell and other geologists. Although Darwin did not know it at the time, these
communications earned him a reputation in England as a gifted geological
observer and helped shift informed scientific opinion in favor of uniformi-
tarianism. Even more important, Darwin began in his own mind to accept
a very ancient age for the Earth—a necessary precondition for his later theory
of evolution.
Biological Discoveries
The now-seasoned collector also found and shipped home thousands of biological
specimens, and FitzRoy wrote of “our smiles at the apparent rubbish Darwin fre-
quently brought on board.”11 Many of the specimens, however, got immediate sci-
entific recognition in England. Among them were the fossilized remains of sev-
eral large extinct creatures found embedded in the stratified cliffs of Argentina.
The megatherium, for example, had the skeletal structure of a modern sloth, but
the size of an elephant. Bones from a giant armadillo, a wild llama the size of a
camel, and a strange, rhinoceros-sized but hornless creature called the toxodon
also fascinated the English naturalists.
Such fossils were relevant to the uniformitarianism-catastrophism debate
when the question naturally arose as to how and when they came to be embedded
in rock. Aboard the Beagle, the devoutly religious FitzRoy offered a catastrophist
explanation: the extinct species represented animals that had not made it onto
Noah’s ark and therefore succumbed in the deluge. Darwin privately doubted
this, but for the time being kept a discreet silence on the issue.
Darwin also collected and described thousands of living plant and animal
species, many previously unknown to scientists. While reflecting on his biolog-
ical findings, he adopted two general lines of thought. First, he habitually asked
himself about the possible functions of all animal characteristics. When he saw
an octopus change color to match its background, the camouflage value of such
a reaction seemed obvious. And even when a marine iguana in the Galápagos
behaved in a repetitive and seemingly “stupid” way, Darwin still could imagine
a function:
I threw one several times as far as I could into a deep pool left by the retiring
tide; but it invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood. . . .
As often as I threw it in, it returned. . . . Perhaps this singular piece of ap-
parent stupidity may be accounted for by the circumstance, that this reptile
has no natural enemy whatever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall a
prey to the numerous sharks. . . . . [U]rged by a fixed and hereditary instinct
that the shore is its place of safety, whatever the emergency may be, it there
takes refuge.12
While an ordinary observer would simply have remarked on the oddity of such
behavior, Darwin wanted to understand its usefulness. This sensitivity to the
functional adaptiveness of all biological phenomena later helped lead him to
his theory of evolution. Darwin’s focus on function influenced the thinking of
early psychologists about human behavior as well, especially in the United
States.
A second important line of thought began almost casually, when Darwin
began noting the geographical distributions of species. He saw that many en-
tirely different animals existed on either side of the Andes, for example, even
though climate and other conditions were generally similar. His most surprising
observations of this kind came in the Galápagos Islands, 600 miles (1000 km)
off Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean. These geologically recent volcanic islands
supported many animals who closely resembled species found on the South
American continent and whose predecessors had presumably originated there.
But despite the resemblances, the Galápagos creatures had developed distinc-
tive characteristics of their own, some of which even varied discernibly from
island to island within the chain. (Notably, the islands are divided by strong sea
currents, which further discourages much migration among them.) For instance,
giant tortoises (whose Spanish name had given the islands their name) showed
slight but characteristic differences in the shapes of their shells that enabled an
experienced observer to know on which island they had been born. And several
populations of common brown finches differed only in the shape and size of
their beaks: on some islands they were long, pointed, and well suited for digging
out insect prey, while elsewhere they were short but powerful, capable of crack-
ing open hard nuts and seeds. These casual observations later assumed great
importance when Darwin began thinking about the possible origins of different
animal species.
The Return Home

During the long voyage home, Darwin’s eagerness to return increased when fam-
ily and friends wrote to tell him that his name was already becoming well known
in scientific circles. His shipped specimens had been well received, and Henslow
had excerpted geological passages from his letters in a pamphlet published by
the Cambridge Philosophical Society—Darwin’s first scientific publication. He
could hardly wait to enter English scientific life more formally.
The Beagle docked at Falmouth, England, in October 1836, and Darwin took the
first coach to Shrewsbury. Arriving in the middle of the night, he stayed at an inn
and appeared the next morning at home. A delighted Robert Darwin exclaimed
to his daughters, “Why, the shape of his head is quite altered.”13 In fact, Charles
Darwin, at age 27, was a mature and transformed person, now ready to begin some
momentous theorizing about the significance of his Beagle observations.
THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION

Darwin was elected to the London Geological Society in 1836, and to the still
more prestigious Royal Society in 1839. That year he also married his cousin
Emma Wedgwood and published his first book, the edited journal from his voy-
age. Despite its long title—Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural
History of the Various Countries Visited during the Voyages of the H.M.S. Beagle,
under the Command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N., from 1832 to 1836—this lively book
became an immediate bestseller and established Darwin as a leading popular
naturalist and travel writer.
Even more significant events occurred privately, for in 1837 Darwin had begun
reflecting on the implications of his Beagle observations, recording his thoughts
in a series of notebooks.14 In them he deliberately and specifically addressed one
of the most puzzling and controversial questions in all of biology, sometimes
called “the mystery of mysteries”: how the millions of different species that
inhabit the Earth originally came into being.
The traditional answer held that each species was created at a single time, as
a complete, distinctive, and unchangeable entity. This view was summarized by
one of Darwin’s leading contemporaries as follows:
I assume that each organism which the Creator educed was stamped with
an indelible specific character, which made it what it was, and distinguished
it from everything else, however near or like. I assume that such a character
has been, and is, indelible and immutable; that the characters which distin-
guish species from species now, were as definite at the first instant of their
creation as now, and are as distinct now as they were then.15
Upholders of this traditional view claimed support from the first chapter of
Genesis, which states that on the fifth day of creation God created every living
creature. On more scientific grounds, they cited the so-called argument from
design, articulated by the philosopher and theologian William Paley (1743–1805).
According to Paley, the marvelously complicated organs of various species—the
delicate but strong hinge muscles of a bivalve shellfish, for example, or the eyes
of mammals—are so perfectly constructed and adapted that they must have been
designed as finished products by some powerful and knowledgeable creator.
Paley saw “an invisible hand, . . .the hand of God,” in these adaptive wonders and
said that to study the structure of an eye was “a cure for atheism.”16
Darwin knew very well that a rival theory of gradual species evolution had
already been promoted by his grandfather. For a time Erasmus Darwin had
even had the half-joking Latin motto E conchis omnia (“Everything from shells”)
painted on the side of his traveling carriage, but he removed it after some of his
patients and neighbors found it sacrilegious. He also knew that in 1809, the year
of his own birth, the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) had
proposed that species evolve and change by inheriting physical features result-
ing from the voluntary use or disuse of specific body parts. The giraffe, for exam-
ple, had probably begun as a short-necked animal that browsed off tree foliage
above its head, stretching its neck muscles; the strengthened, extended muscles
of each generation were subsequently inherited by its successor generations,
until eventually the modern long-necked giraffe evolved.
Although Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin helped bring the idea of evolved
species to scientific awareness, their views were not widely accepted. The elder
Darwin had proposed no plausible mechanism by which evolution might occur,
and Lamarck’s mechanism, the use or disuse of particular parts of the body, could
not account for the evolution of nonvoluntary or passive characteristics, such as
protective coloration. In addition, the notion of evolution contradicted the literal
account of separate creation of all species in Genesis, then strongly upheld by
the Church of England. As we have noted, those bold enough to argue publicly
for evolution were dealt with harshly by establishment figures such as Henslow
and Sedgwick. Therefore, when Darwin returned from his voyage, although the
concept of evolution was stirring in the intellectual atmosphere, it was still con-
sidered unrespectable and had not yet been proposed in a form that could be
taken seriously as an alternative to the argument from design.
In the months following his return, however, Darwin concluded that the idea
of the evolution or “transmutation” of species had to be taken seriously. The stag-
gering number of different species in nature, often varying from each other only
slightly and subtly, seemed more compatible with a longstanding and ongoing
process of species creation than with a separate creation of individual species.

He had personally observed extinct fossil species that resembled modern spe-
cies in all but size, and Galàpagos finches whose slight but distinct differences
in beak structure suggested that gradual changes over generations were in fact
possible.
Darwin also knew breeders had been able to produce strikingly different vari-
eties of domestic animals by careful selection of parental stock over many gener-
ations. For example, bulldogs, sheepdogs, and dachshunds had all been created
by the selective breeding of originally similar canine stock. No domestic breed
had ever become a genuinely separate species, however, capable of breeding only
with members of the same species. Purebred dogs can all interbreed, or mongre-
lize, with other breeds, producing fertile offspring who lack the distinctive char-
acteristics of the purebred parents. By contrast, genuine species in a state of na-
ture maintain their distinctive qualities automatically, by breeding successfully
only within their species.
In the autumn of 1838, Darwin thought of a plausible mechanism for the grad-
ual evolution of countless stable species in a state of nature. He later recalled
that he had been reading, “for amusement”, the rather gloomy economic theories
of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). Malthus believed most humans are destined to
live in poverty because their capacity to increase population greatly exceeds their
capacity to increase food production. When a small population settles in a fer-
tile region, prosperity may persist for a while, but eventually population growth
will inevitably outstrip food production, leading to a general state of scarcity and
poverty. Then disease, famine, and the other effects of poverty will act as a check
on future population growth, resulting in a stable population living at a bare sub-
sistence level. This scenario becomes the “normal” outcome of human social and
economic existence.
The idea of a naturally occurring check on population growth seized Darwin’s
imagination. In any species, he reasoned, countless individuals will be conceived
in every generation but only a proportion of them will survive their environmen-
tal challenges and live to reproduce. Those who survive will disproportionately
tend to be the ones best adapted to overcoming the rigors of their own partic-
ular environments. And if their adaptive characteristics are inheritable, their
offspring will also tend to have them and to survive and reproduce in greater
numbers than their less advantaged fellows. Here was a mechanism for the
evolution of species!
Consider the Galápagos finches, all of whose ancestors presumably arrived
from South America with slightly varying but generally medium-sized beaks.
Assume that one group arrived at an island rich in nuts and seeds but lacking
in crevice-hiding insects. Here, individual birds with relatively strong and stout
beaks for breaking open and eating the seeds would have a slight survival ad-
vantage. These birds must have survived and reproduced at a somewhat higher
rate than their slim-beaked relatives, producing a second generation with slightly
stouter beaks than the first, on average. After many generations of the same pro-
cess, a stable population of broad-beaked birds would have evolved. A second
group of finches, arriving in an island environment poorer in seeds and nuts but
richer in concealed insects, presumably underwent the opposite process. In their
case the advantage would have lain with slender beaks for digging out insects,
and a population equipped that way would gradually have evolved.
Darwin therefore hypothesized that different environments inevitably and
constantly impose a natural selection on their inhabitants, disproportionately
favoring certain kinds of individuals to survive and reproduce. Just as the origi-
nal breeders of basset hounds, for instance, selected only animals with floppy ears
and other desirable basset characteristics to be their breeding stock, so nature—
the environment—constantly selects the individuals best suited to survive and
reproduce. The selective effects of nature go on for countless generations, far
longer than the efforts of any domestic animal breeder, leading to the creation of
stable species rather than unstable varieties or breeds, whose features may easily
be lost or diluted by intermating with other breeds. This was Darwin’s theory of
evolution by natural selection.
Darwin saw nature—that is, the presence or absence of food, competitors, pred-
ators, and all the other demands imposed by the environment—as not only placing
checks on the unrestricted increase of any species’ population, but also selecting
which individuals, with which inheritable characteristics, will tend to survive and
reproduce. Acting over vast periods of time (and here the new uniformitarian ge-
ology suggested a time span in at least millions rather than thousands of years),
changes in the natural environment must have caused various selection pres-
sures, leading to the gradual evolution of countless different species. In this way,
natural selection provided the “engine” or mechanism theoretically necessary to
support an evolutionary process.
The Origin of Species

Darwin knew his new theory would not gain easy acceptance, for it challenged
a long-held view of the origin of animal species and also carried disturbing
implications for the role of human beings in nature. The Bible story placed hu-
manity in a category separate from animals—formed separately on the sixth and
final day of creation, in God’s own image, and granted dominion over the rest
of Earth’s inhabitants. But Darwin recognized that humans, with their evident
anatomical similarities to many animals, would logically have to be included

in any consistent evolutionary system. Animals and humans “partake from our
origin in one common ancestor, so we may be all netted together,” he wrote in an
early notebook.17
Recognizing his theory’s disturbing implications, Darwin tried to seriously
consider every possible objection to it. He adopted a personal “golden rule”
that whenever he encountered a fact or argument that challenged his theory,
he would “make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found
by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from
the memory than favourable ones.”18 He realized, for example, that the “perfect”
mammalian eye cited in the argument from design posed difficulties for the the-
ory of evolution. Only after reading Helmholtz’s discussion of the eye’s optical
imperfections (see Chapter 4) did he feel fully comfortable about describing
the eye as an evolved (and evolving) organ, rather than as a finished product of
deliberate design.
For years Darwin proceeded cautiously, collecting more and more evidence
regarding his theory while keeping it mainly to himself. In 1842 and 1844 he
wrote summaries of the theory but never published them. He told just a handful
of trusted friends, including the geologist Lyell and the botanist Joseph Hooker,
about his belief in evolution, and even then very cautiously;
“it is like confessing a murder,” he confided to Hooker.19
Only in 1856—eighteen years after his original inspiration—
did Darwin feel he had enough evidence to publish his the-
ory. He now finally began a work entitled Natural Selection,
which he expected to reach 3,000 pages.
In the spring of 1858, however, Darwin was rudely inter-
rupted by a letter and manuscript from the naturalist Alfred
Russel Wallace (1823–1913; Figure 6.4). While recovering
from malaria in the East Indies, Wallace had thought of a new
theory of evolution, written it up in a short paper, and sent it
to Darwin, whom he knew by reputation as one of the most
amiable as well as generally knowledgeable naturalists in
Britain. A shocked Darwin now read a brief outline of essen-
tially his own theory, independently conceived by Wallace.
Unsure how to respond, he sent the manuscript to Lyell and
Hooker, both of whom had long been warning him to publish
his theory before someone else beat him to it.
His friends arranged an honorable compromise: excerpts
Figure 6.4 Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). from Darwin’s unpublished summary of 1844 and Wallace’s
new paper would be read, in the absence of both authors, at the next meeting of
the prestigious Linnean Society, an organization devoted to the study and clas-
sification of plants and animals. In this way priority for the public presentation
of the theory of evolution by natural selection was jointly shared by Darwin and
Wallace in July 1858. Ironically, however, the session attracted little attention, and
the Linnean Society’s official report for 1858 declared that the year had not pro-
duced “any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak,
the department of science on which they bear.”20
That judgment shows Darwin had been correct in assuming his theory would
not receive serious attention until buttressed by a tremendous amount of sup-
porting evidence. But now his secret was out, and he wanted to get a solid expla-
nation of natural selection quickly into the public eye—less substantial than the
projected 3,000 pages of Natural Selection, perhaps, but long enough to illustrate
the theory’s power. He spent a year feverishly writing On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle
for Life, a 490-page “abstract” of the theory, which was published at the end of
1859. When published and read by other men of science, this detailed, systematic,
and plausible presentation of an evolutionary theory demanded to be taken seri-
ously, and in fact it created the sensation Darwin had both expected and feared.
Although The Origin of Species dealt almost exclusively with plants and
animals, debate immediately raged over its implied question of whether
human beings are a separate and special creation of God or are “descended
from the apes.” The noncombative Darwin shrank from the ensuing debates
himself, but he attracted one particularly outspoken advocate in biologist
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), an expert on primate anatomy. Huxley’s
first thought after appreciating the Origin’s central idea was, “How extremely
stupid [of me] not to have thought of that!” He immediately wrote to Dar-
win pledging willingness “to go to the stake” in support of the theory, adding
“I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness” against “the curs which
will bark and yelp.”21
Appropriately nicknamed Darwin’s bulldog, Huxley defended natural selec-
tion spectacularly in an 1860 debate with Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of
Oxford, at a public meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science. Although lacking scientific training, the smooth-talking Wilberforce
had been coached to present some of the strongest apparent scientific argu-
ments against evolution. Unwisely, however, he resorted to sarcasm during
the debate and asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his
grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey. Hearing this, Huxley
reportedly whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,” then
expertly countered Wilberforce’s scientific objections before turning to him

to say:
If the question is put to me, “would I rather have a miserable ape for a grand-
father, or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means
of influence, and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the
mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion”—
I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.22
Confronting a bishop in public was highly unusual, to say the least, and
Huxley’s retort created a sensation. The popular magazine Vanity Fair printed
caricatures of the two participants, shown in Figure 6.5. Most observers, particu-
larly the undergraduates in attendance, felt Huxley had been justified, and, more
importantly, had effectively defended Darwin and evolution.
Figure 6.5 The Oxford evolution debate opponents: Samuel Wilberforce (left) and
T. H. Huxley (right).
The following year, in 1861, two new scientific discoveries further advanced
the case for evolution. First, fossil remains of the extinct archeopteryx, the most
ancient of birds, were found in Bavaria. Although feathered, this creature had
“fingers” on its wings, and vertebrae and tail like a reptile’s. Darwin had spec-
ulated that birds might have evolved from reptiles in the distant past, and here
was a transitional form fully consistent with that unlikely seeming idea. Second,
an African explorer recovered the skulls and stuffed bodies of an animal previ-
ously unknown to Western science: a massive, longhaired ape quickly named
gorilla from an ancient Greek word for “hairy person.” Anatomically similar to
humans, the gorilla had several features previously argued by anti-evolutionists
to be exclusively human and therefore proof of humanity’s biological uniqueness.
Although neither of these finds alone could “prove” the case for the evolution and
interrelatedness of species, they offered dramatic evidence of the plausibility of
that view. Further evidence rapidly accumulated, and within a very few years the
Origin’s general case was accepted by the overwhelming majority of knowledge-
able scientists, and even much of the British clergy.
DARWIN AND PSYCHOLOGY

Although Darwin largely ignored his theory’s implications for human beings,
The Origin of Species did include one short and prophetic paragraph near the
end of the book suggesting that human mental qualities would eventually be
understood as the results of evolution:
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches.
Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary
acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be
thrown on the origin of man and his history. 23
For the next decade, Darwin left the public interpretation of this idea to others.
Privately, however, he never ceased to think about human issues, and in the 1870s
he published three seminal works about them: The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex (1871), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872),
and “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant” (1877). All of these works reveal Darwin’s
contributions to understanding human psychology, including our relationship to
animals, racial and gender differences, emotions, and even child development.
The Descent of Man

In writing The Descent of Man, Darwin finally overcame his reluctance to express
the most controversial implication of his theory. He argued explicitly and pub-
licly that human beings have descended from animal ancestors. He opened his
argument by noting the structural similarities between humans and other mam-
mals with respect to bones, muscles, blood vessels, nerves, internal organs, and
most importantly, the brain: “Every chief fissure and fold in the brain of man has
its analogy in that of the orang[utan].”24 In addition, humans share many diseases
with animals, possess certain “rudimentary organs” (such as projecting points on
the ear) that have considerable importance in other animals, and pass through
stages of embryological development in which they closely resemble other ani-
mals. All of these features plausibly located Homo sapiens within the domain of
physically evolving species.
Next, Darwin tried to show “that there is no fundamental difference between
man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”25 He cited cases of ani-
mals showing “higher” qualities such as courage (in defending themselves, their
young, or their human masters) and kindness (sometimes taking in and caring
for orphaned members of other groups and species). He argued that dogs show
that they experience many of the same emotions as humans, including jealousy
(when a rival pet receives its master’s attention), pride (when carrying the master’s
basket, with head held high), shame (when reprimanded), and even a basic sense
of humor (when playfully and repeatedly running off with a ball or stick, just
before the master can get it). Animals obviously demonstrate memory, attention,
and curiosity, and since dogs seem often to dream when they sleep—twitching,
quietly yelping, and breathing irregularly exactly as if imagining themselves in
some exciting situation—they must have the capacity for imagination.
Darwin also argued that animals demonstrate the rudiments of reason—the
only faculty of the soul Descartes had reserved exclusively for human beings.
Nonhuman animals profit and learn from experience, communicate with each
other by sound and gesture, and appreciate “beauty” through distinctive mating
preferences for various body markings and adornments. After considering many
of these examples, Darwin concluded categorically: “The difference in mind be-
tween man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and
not of kind.”26
Race and Gender

Also in The Descent of Man, Darwin touched on the subjects of race and gen-
der. Although he was generally cautious in both cases, his comments eventually
stirred up considerable controversy.
The Victorian period in Britain was notable for extreme differences in atti-
tudes and beliefs about race and the causes of ethnic differences. Believers in
polygenesis argued that non-European “savage” peoples represented a distinctly
different species of being. Supporters of monogenesis, on the other hand, believed

in the common ancestry and relatedness of all human groups, although they also
entertained widely varying theories about the observed differences among them.
Some attributed those differences primarily to environmental and cultural vari-
ables, while others believed the African groups were descended from the biblical
Noah’s son Ham whose offspring had been cursed by God and condemned to be
enslaved by the children of Noah’s other sons.
In Descent, Darwin firmly supported the monogenist viewpoint. “All the races
agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental pecu-
liarities,” he wrote, “that these can be accounted for only by inheritance from a
common progenitor.”27 Darwin also had no doubt that environmental and educa-
tional variables were extremely important in producing human individual differ-
ences, and that the institution of slavery, in particular, had had horrible effects
on its victims. As a young student at Edinburgh, he had been skillfully trained
in taxidermy by a freed slave named John Edmondstone, who had prospered
in his freedom and whom Darwin admired for both his pleasantness and his
intelligence.28 On his Beagle voyage, Darwin had been appalled at the relations
between masters and slaves on Brazilian plantations, concluding that the slaves’
character was generally superior to that of their white masters, the “polished
savages” who oppressed and belittled them.29
Even though he accepted the biological unity of all people, however, Darwin
also believed that exposure to diverse environmental conditions would inevitably
create differing selection pressures among various groups. Such pressures might
help account for the evolution, over time, of slight differentiations across races or,
in Darwin’s words, “sub-species.”30 Skin color variations, for example, were natu-
ral adaptations to different exposures to direct sunlight.
An elaboration of this theory held that the struggle for survival in harsh
northern climates promoted the development of inventiveness and creativity,
thereby leading to a presumed intellectual superiority of the so-called Nordic
races. This view overlooked the facts that equatorial climates involve harsh chal-
lenges of their own, and that other ethnic groups besides European “Nordics”
managed to survive and thrive in cold conditions. This idea was more strongly
supported by some of his contemporaries and followers than by Darwin himself,
although he never explicitly refuted it. Two prominent historians have concluded
that Darwin’s personal, ambiguous position regarding evolution and race is less
significant than the fact that his theory “was stripped of nuance and appropriated
[by others] to serve a scientific racism that aimed to prove comparative differ-
ences in mental abilities.”31 As we shall see in later chapters, this area has been a
problematic one ever since.
The full title of Darwin’s book was The Descent of Man, and Selection in Rela-
tion to Sex, and the second part of the title relates to another controversial subject:
differences between males and females. Darwin hypothesized a variant of natural
selection that he called sexual selection —the gradual selection and evolution of
characteristics that are specifically favorable for reproductive success. To pass on
their genetic material (their genes, although that term was unknown in Darwin’s
time), individuals must not only survive physically but also mate and reproduce.
Darwin argued that within a particular species, females and males come to prefer
certain qualities in their mates and to select their partners on that basis, thus cre-
ating a pressure for a particular type of attractiveness to evolve. Classic examples
are birds, whose male members have evolved spectacular colors and ornamenta-
tion to signal their desirability to potential mates, while the females remain drab
to make them inconspicuous to predators while tending their nests.
Darwin believed sexual selection had also influenced human evolution, resulting
in some characteristic mental as well as physical differences between the sexes:
Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her

greater tenderness and less selfishness. . . . Owing to her maternal instincts
[she] displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent degree;
therefore it is likely that she would often extend them towards her fellow
creatures. Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this
leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. . . . With women
the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are
more strongly marked than in man.32
Darwin’s belief in the different emotional dispositions of men and women

reflects his acceptance of the Victorian notion of the complementarity of the
sexes. This was the widely held belief that men and women had evolved to have
different, but complementary, psychological characteristics. For example, women
were more likely to be virtuous, sensitive, and nurturing, for their roles as wives
and mothers. Men, it was believed, were more likely to be competitive, passionate,
and ambitious, suiting their roles as breadwinners, soldiers, and public leaders.
Despite his apparent evenhandedness in attributing some positive mental quali-
ties to women, Darwin was clear on the issue of intellectual power:
The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown
by man’s attaining to a higher eminence . . . than can woman—whether
requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the
senses and hands.33
Like most of his Victorian male contemporaries, he simply assumed a general

masculine intellectual superiority.34
On a related issue, Darwin argued that across all species, including human
beings, males have been more modified by evolution than females and con-
sequently there is more variability within their own gender. According to this
variation hypothesis, as it has come to be known, in populations of adult males
and females, the range of heights between the tallest and the shortest males is
greater than that for females. Darwin stated the cause was unknown, and he did
not explicitly apply the idea to intellectual gender differences. But others sub-
sequently did, asserting that a large population of men will contain more ex-
treme cases of very high intellectual ability (counterbalanced by more cases of
extremely low intelligence) than a comparably sized group of women, who will be
more closely clustered at an average height. Here was a potential “explanation,”
of course, for the great preponderance of males among the eminent figures in
history, as well as a rationalization for restricting education for the presumably
highly “gifted” to boys and young men.
The Expression of the Emotions

Darwin devoted a whole book to the subject of emotions, as it was too large a
topic to be included in The Descent of Man. In The Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals he argued that human emotional expressions are inherited
and evolved characteristics, best understood as the consequences of reactions
that had adaptive or survival value.
The functional origins of many emotional expressions seemed straightfor-
ward. The wide staring eyes of surprise, for example, presumably began as a way
of seeing the surprising object more fully and clearly. The bared teeth of rage
naturally accompanied a fighting and biting posture, while the curled lip of a
sneer may have originated in a wrinkling of the nose in response to an unpleas-
ant smell.
Other emotional expressions presumably arose because they were the oppo-
site of functional reactions. A dog expressing affection or playfulness, for exam-
ple, assumes a posture that’s opposite to its angry or aggressive posture. Instead
of walking upright with hair and tail erect and teeth bared, the affectionate ani-
mal crouches, wiggles its forward body, lowers and wags its tail, and relaxes its
lips (Figure 6.6).
Darwin believed other emotional expressions occur as side effects to the gen-
eral activation of the nervous system that accompanies emotional arousal. In
states of fright, flight, and anger, for example, the arousal of the body into an
active, excited state has adaptive value. Darwin felt that sometimes this excess
Figure 6.6 A dog in an aggressive posture, and its opposite, a playful and affectionate
posture, from Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
excitation “spills over” into the body, causing trembling, grimacing, or contortion
as a side effect. He concluded that all of these general principles could account
for all emotional expression in humans and nonhuman animals alike.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin had argued that animals possess the rudi-
ments of human mentality. In The Expression of the Emotions, he made the cor-
responding case that humans possess many remnants of “animality.” Not always
guided by conscious and rational thought, people often betray unconscious and
instinctive signs of their long animal ancestry. Other theorists, including Freud,
would soon expand on the implications of that point (see Chapter 11).
Finally, Darwin noted that human emotional expressions tend to be similar
throughout all known human groups. Smiles and laughter, weeping and shrieks
of rage, contortions of pain, cringings of fear—all of these emotional manifesta-
tions are universally recognized. Darwin argued that this similarity of expres-
sion points to the common descent of all human groups from the same earlier,
pre-human ancestor:
It seems to me improbable that so much similarity, or rather identity of

structure, could have been acquired by independent means. . . . It is far more
probable that the many points of close similarity in the various races are
due to inheritance from a single parent-form.35
“A Biographical Sketch of an Infant”

Five years following the publication of The Expression of the Emotions, Darwin
made his final specific contribution to psychology. After reading an article de-
scribing the acquisition of language by a young child, Darwin recalled that he’d
kept a detailed log on the development of his own firstborn, thirty-seven years
earlier. He now reexamined those notes, and wrote them up in an article entitled
“A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” which was published in the journal Mind in
1877. This modest, ten-page work still stands as a landmark in the history of child
psychology—among the very first in the genre of baby biography.
Darwin’s notes on his son William, or Doddy, began during the first week of
life with the observation that numerous reflexes, including sneezing, yawning,
stretching, sucking, and screaming, were
well performed by my infant, . . . the perfection of these reflex movements

show[ing] that the extreme imperfection of the voluntary ones is not due to
the state of the muscles or the coordinating centres, but to that of the seat
of the will. 36
In his first successful voluntary movements, William moved his hands to his
mouth at the age of about 40 days. Over the next several months he acquired
several more complex intentional movements, the first ones involving the hands
and arms, and later the legs and trunk.
William’s earliest obvious emotional expression was startle or fear, after hear-
ing a loud sudden sound during his earliest weeks. Anger first appeared at ten
weeks, when William frowned after being given unwarmed milk. By four months
the baby could become excitable by small causes, such as dropping a lemon he
was playing with.
Clear evidence of associating ideas, or reasoning, first appeared at five months
when William became angry after being dressed in his hat and coat but not being
taken immediately outdoors. At seven months he showed that he recognized his
nurse’s name when he heard it, but didn’t spontaneously utter a meaningful word
of his own until twelve months, when he used “mum” to indicate food. The baby
acquired other words rapidly thereafter, and sometimes creatively combined
them—as when he coined “black-shu-mum” (“shu” was his version of sugar) for
licorice. An early indication of a moral sense came at just thirteen months, with
signs of discomfort at being scolded for not kissing his father. At twenty-seven
months, however, “he gave his last bit of gingerbread to his little sister, and then
cried out with high self-approval ‘Oh kind Doddy, kind Doddy.’ ”37
In a small way, Darwin’s paper dealt with the grand themes he had developed
in his other works: the role that instinctive reflexes, habits, emotions, and other
sensibilities play in adapting to one’s environment. He saw his son’s develop-
ment as the gradual strengthening and combining of simple and separate ten-
dencies. William started using language, for instance, only after emotional and
associative development had enabled him to connect names with things or peo-
ple important to him, such as his nurse. Only after hearing and understanding
words for some time did William begin to invent and utter meaningful words
himself. Darwin observed that this sequence—understanding words and inter-

preting them as signals before making them up and using them—“is what might
have been expected, as we know that the lower animals easily learn to understand
spoken words.”38
Darwin was suggesting that an individual’s development proceeds along
roughly the same lines as the previous evolution of the species to which it belongs.
In acquiring language, the child William rapidly traversed the same stages it had
presumably taken his pre-human ancestors countless generations to reach through
natural selection. Darwin had earlier noted something similar in the developing
human embryo, passing through stages in which it resembles increasingly com-
plex life forms. This idea became known as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”:
an individual’s earliest development copies, in a much shorter time frame, the pre-
vious evolutionary pattern of its species. It was later popularized and raised to the
level of dogma by Darwin’s German follower Ernst Haeckel. In modified form it also
became central to the psychology of the American G. Stanley Hall (see Chapter 8).
For Darwin himself, however, the idea remained a suggestive generalization rather
than a literal truth: All organisms indeed retain traces within themselves of their
evolutionary history but not necessarily exact copies of it as proposed by Haeckel
and Hall. Subsequent research has largely confirmed Darwin’s view.
DARWIN’S IMPACT ON PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIETY

In 1842, while considering how to publish his theory of natural selection, Darwin
and his family had moved to Down House, a lovely country house not far from
London, in Downe, Kent.* He invested his substantial inheritance shrewdly
enough to become an independently rich man, and his large home provided
privacy and freedom from the distractions of the big city that he cherished for
the rest of his life. In his comfortable, secluded study, he wrote a succession of
important books. In addition to the works already discussed, he produced major
studies of orchids (1862), vines and climbing plants (1865), plants and animals
under domestication (1868), the power of movement in plants (1880), and the
effect of worms in producing vegetable mold (1881). Although these were special-
ized topics, each of them helped build the case for evolution and consolidated
Darwin’s reputation as the foremost naturalist of his day.
The rural Down House was an ideal environment for raising William and the
nine other lively children who followed him. Although Darwin’s privacy for work
was always respected, the family interacted happily in many ways, ranging from
*Restored to its same state as when Darwin lived there, the house is currently open to the public
as a museum.
nature walks to games. In one charming example,

after The Origin of Species was published Darwin
donated the pages of his handwritten first draft
to his children so they could practice their art-
work on the reverse sides. Figure 6.7 shows the
reverse side of one sheet on which his son Francis
drew two opposing mounted soldiers, one riding
an eggplant and the other a carrot. Historians are
delighted that Darwin’s family preserved these,
for both the intellectual interest of the manu-
script and the personal interest of the drawings.
While his family, his fortune, and his reputation
and influence all grew steadily, Darwin suffered
chronically from a mysterious digestive malady of
uncertain diagnosis. The once-intrepid world trav-
eler became something of a recluse, never again
venturing out of Britain, and seldom even going to
London for scientific gatherings. He did maintain
Figure 6.7 A drawing by Darwin’s son Francis on the
a vast correspondence, however, and when phys- reverse side of a page from the first draft of The Origin of
ically able, he served as a congenial host to the Species.
many friends and admirers who came to see him
at home.
Despite the original outcry that had greeted Darwin’s theory in 1859, the British
religious establishment rapidly accommodated to it. Darwin died in April 1882 at
the age of 73, from a heart ailment rather than the intestinal malady (Figure 6.8).
The Church consented to his being buried in Westminster Abbey, next to Isaac
Newton. There the pair still rests today—the two greatest and most influential
scientists England has produced.
Social Darwinism
Shortly after Darwin’s death, a new movement known as social Darwinism
became popular. Despite its name, this viewpoint owed as much to the pro-
lific philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) as to Darwin himself, and in
fact contained some ideas Darwin did not endorse. A supporter of Lamarck’s
theory of evolution even before Darwin’s The Origin of Species was pub-
lished, Spencer had written about the general importance of an evolution-
ary viewpoint for psychology in an 1855 text, Principles of Psychology. After
Darwin published his theory of natural selection, Spencer contributed the
phrase “survival of the fittest” to summarize its effective principle. Darwin
somewhat reluctantly adopted the phrase, and it quickly

caught on in the public mind. In addition, Spencer’s own
ideas, which had previously not attracted great attention,
gained new respect and popularity because of their asso-
ciation with Darwin’s theory.
In an ambitious program Spencer called “synthetic phi-
losophy,” he attempted to give an evolutionary foundation
to the diverse disciplines of biology, psychology, sociology,
and anthropology. According to social Darwinism, individ-
ual organisms, species, political systems, and entire soci-
eties are alike in their tendency to evolve from relatively
simple entities into complex ones. Spencer believed such
evolution constituted highly desirable “progress,” result-
ing primarily from unbridled competition among individ-
uals in which only the fittest survive and perpetuate their
kind. Progress of all types should be maximized by societies
and governments that allow free competition in all spheres
of activity. This idea resonated with both the laissez-faire,
noninterference approach then popular in Britain and the
capitalistic spirit of the United States. In the U.S., Spencer’s
doctrine of social Darwinism became tremendously popu-
Figure 6.8 Darwin in his later years. lar and was seen as justification for a system of unregulated
free enterprise. Virtually any business practice, however
exploitative, could be rationalized as beneficial because it presumably contrib-
uted toward the survival of the fittest and the subsequent evolution of society.
Darwin had reservations about Spencer and his synthetic philosophy, writing
that “his fundamental generalisations . . . partake more of the nature of defini-
tions than of laws of nature.”39 Had he lived to see them, Darwin would have
deplored the excesses of unregulated capitalism committed in the name of
social Darwinism. And in fact those excesses soon enough became widely
evident. Notably, enthusiasm for social Darwinism subsided rapidly with the
widespread economic collapse of the late 1920s and the Great Depression of the
1930s. Clearly, it seemed to many, the system of free enterprise had its limits.
Comparative Psychology and Individual Differences

In addition to Darwin’s direct writings on psychological issues, there were sev-
eral indirect but important influences within the developing discipline. Given the
evolutionary interrelatedness of all species his theory proposed, human psycho-
logical functions could no longer be viewed as isolated or unconnected from their
07_POP_28354_ch06_208-241.indd 234 18/10/16 3:43 PM

animal counterparts. As a result, in Darwin’s wake the study of animal behavior

assumed a new importance because it was placed on a continuum with human
behavior. Shortly before his death, he granted full access to his voluminous notes
on animal behavior to a younger friend, George J. Romanes (1848–1894). Expand-
ing Darwin’s notes with his own research, Romanes published two groundbreak-
ing books: Animal Intelligence (1882) and Mental Evolution in Animals (1883).40
Romanes described his work as constituting a comparative psychology —a
name chosen by analogy to the established discipline of comparative anatomy.
Romanes argued that studying the similarities and differences in the psycholog-
ical functions of various animals could shed light on their human counterparts
in the same way previous studies of their physical structures had done. Although
Romanes’s work was subsequently criticized for being too anecdotal and for at-
tributing humanlike states of consciousness to lower animals, the specialty of
comparative psychology has remained an important branch of the general field.
Within human psychology, Darwin’s theory demanded that the brain, the
mind, and behavior in general could no longer be looked upon as fixed, separate
entities merely to be described and analyzed. All of them had to be understood
both as functional components helping the individual adapt to the environment
and as potentially changeable phenomena that can be modified or replaced in re-
sponse to ongoing selective pressures. Within the field of visual color sensation,
for example, Christine Ladd-Franklin (see Chapter 5) introduced a Darwinian
perspective by hypothesizing that the differing “opponent processes” of color
pairs arose at differing points of evolutionary development: black-white first,
then blue-yellow, and finally red-green.
Since evolution proceeds by the natural selection of inheritable variations
within breeding populations, the general issue of variation and individual differ-
ences among people assumed great importance; such variation and differences
presumably constitute the basis for the future evolution of humanity. There-
fore, after Darwin, human psychology inevitably became more “functional” and
“differential”—that is, more concerned with the uses and adaptive significance
of psychological phenomena and more focused on questions of variability and
differences among people, as opposed to their generality or similarity. We’ll see
in Chapter 7 how Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, laid many of the more specific
foundations for the new functional and differential psychology.
Recent Developments: Emotions, Sociobiology,

and Evolutionary Psychology
Darwinian evolutionary theory has continued in recent times to have a profound
influence on many aspects of psychologically related research. Within the field
of emotion research, for example, work by American psychologist Paul Ekman

has empirically validated Darwin’s contention in The Expression of the Emotions
that there are indeed “emotional universals”— remarkable cross-cultural agree-
ment on the facial expressions that indicate fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and
enjoyment. Different aspects of expression, however, appear to be culture-specific,
and large individual differences exist in the details of the facial expressions asso-
ciated with these emotions.41
Like any scientific theory, evolution by natural selection has inevitably been
challenged by certain problematic issues regarding its details, which scientists
continue to debate. For example, biologists have recently been divided over the
question of whether evolution always proceeds gradually by minutely small
steps, as Darwin believed, or whether genetic mutation can produce sudden and
dramatic jumps in the evolutionary succession.
The explanation of altruistic behavior is another debatable issue for evolu-
tionary theorists. Individuals who jeopardize their own well-being for the sake of
others—sometimes even sacrificing their lives—would logically seem to be at a
selective disadvantage when compared to completely self-centered individuals.
So the question arises as to why altruism, an apparently “maladaptive” character-
istic, does not disappear as a result of natural selection. One suggested answer
sets the unit of evolution as the group, rather than the individual; that is, groups
of interbreeding individuals with many altruistic members might be expected
to survive and prosper better than groups without them. Another idea, stimu-
lated partly by increasing knowledge about the structure of DNA, is that the
basic evolutionary unit is the individual gene. Because altruistic acts are most
often performed in the service of individuals who are genetically similar to the
actor, the net effect of such acts would be to favor the survival and propagation of
genes like one’s own. Applied to a wide range of social behaviors, this viewpoint
came to wide public prominence with the publication of American biologist E. O.
Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975 and British biologist Richard
Dawkins’s bestseller The Selfish Gene in 1976.42 This basic approach, attempting
to account for social behavioral traits as the result of individual but interacting
genes tending to replicate themselves throughout successive generations, came
to be known as sociobiology.
Sociobiology aroused considerable controversy, partly because it was seen by
some as implying an excessive biological determinism of many social behaviors,
and a corresponding neglect of cultural and social factors. Within the biolog-
ical community, work has continued on the group-selection hypothesis, which
remains a plausible alternative or complement to gene selection for many char-

acteristics. Among psychologists, a field known as evolutionary psychology has
developed whose practitioners go beyond sociobiology and freely use all aspects
of modern evolutionary theory to devise empirically testable hypotheses about
human behavior. In developing their hypotheses, evolutionary psychologists
have emphasized the argument that the environment most humans live in now
differs strongly from the environment of our ancestors. Therefore, one must con-
sider how human behavioral and psychological traits might have been adaptive
in the past, and not just whether they are adaptive now.
Many evolutionary psychologists further suggest that the mind is not a single
unified entity but rather a diverse collection of independently evolved “modules”
acquired by the brain, each one an adaptation to a particular set of evolution-
ary pressures. The capacity for language, the tendency to avoid incest, and pho-
bic reactions to snakes and spiders are examples of such modules. Given their
independence of each other, and changes in the environments that originally
produced them, these modules may sometimes come into conflict or lose their
adaptive values. Evolutionary psychologists have also acknowledged that a broad
and flexible intelligence is among the most important of human evolved adapta-
tions, and that the particular behavior generated by a module may be influenced
by cultural and educational factors. The general case for this extremely broad
field was made in the 1992 book The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and
the Generation of Culture, edited by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John
Tooby. Stephen Pinker’s bestselling How the Mind Works brought the approach
to wide public attention in 1997.43
Sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and evolutionary scientists con-
tinue to debate and study many questions. Despite their disagreement and un-
certainty about many details, however, they overwhelmingly agree with Darwin’s
general conclusion that evolution by natural selection did occur, and that it is
responsible for the vast proliferation of life forms on Earth. Certain self-styled
“creation scientists” still try to exploit the technical uncertainties of evolutionary
theorists, while promoting an echo of the old argument from design that pre-
vailed before 1859. The creationist view remains unconvincing, however, because
it leaves many more important problems unsolved than Darwinian theory does.
The evolutionary perspective remains an essential and vibrant aspect of modern
psychological research and theorizing.
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has had son’s early developmental milestones suggested support
a very broad impact, not only in many scientific disciplines for the position that individual development proceeds
but in the way we think about ourselves as human beings, through the same stages as that of the species, and con-
our relationships with each other, and our society. Darwin’s stituted one of the earliest baby biographies, the basis of a
systematic observations of features of the natural world research method used later in developmental psychology.
during his voyage on the Beagle, combined with previous Several aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution by nat-
exposure to his grandfather’s theories and the work of ural selection influenced the form and content of scientific
Lamarck, Lyell, and Malthus, led to his proposal of a mech- psychology. The theory’s general emphasis on adaptation
anism by which evolution could occur: natural selection. and function especially appealed to early psychologists
He suggested that local conditions constantly select the in the United States. The importance of variation as the
individuals best suited to that specific environment to sur- raw material for evolution provided the foundation for the
vive and reproduce. Changes in the natural environment psychological study of individual differences, and Darwin’s
over successive generations have produced countless contention that animals and humans are related on an evo-
variations in selection pressures, leading to the gradual lutionary continuum provided a rationale for comparative
evolution of thousands of species. psychology. Finally, Darwin’s theory itself has spawned the
Darwin also proposed that humans are descended from field of evolutionary psychology, in which using his ideas
animal ancestors, and that certain human emotions betray to explain current behaviors, attitudes, and characteristics
our evolutionary animal past. His careful observations of his has become a thriving academic enterprise.
Key Pioneers
Charles Robert Darwin, James Ussher, p. 214 Alfred Russel Wallace,
p. 210 William Paley, p. 219 p. 222
Erasmus Darwin, p. 210 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Thomas Henry Huxley,
John Stevens Henslow, p. 219 p. 223
p. 212 Thomas Malthus, Herbert Spencer, p. 233
Charles Lyell, p. 214 p. 220 George J. Romanes, p. 235
Chapter Review 239
Key Terms
uniformitarianism, p. 219 complementarity of the sexes,
catastrophism, p. 219 p. 228
argument from design, p. 219 variation hypothesis, p. 229
natural selection, p. 221 social Darwinism, p. 233
polygenesis, p. 226 comparative psychology, p. 235
monogenesis, p. 227 sociobiology, p. 236
sexual selection, p. 228 evolutionary psychology, p. 237

1. Describe some of the observations Darwin made during his voyage on the Beagle that
contributed to the formulation of his theory of evolution by natural selection.
2. Why would Darwin’s theory have been controversial in its time? In what ways does it
remain controversial for some people today?
3. After publishing The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote several other books and articles
that had direct relevance for psychology. Describe these works and Darwin’s psycholog-
ical contributions.
4. As the discipline of psychology developed, several aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolu-
tion by natural selection were important for the new field and led to a number of new
subdisciplines. Describe and discuss these developments.
5. Describe some of the ways Darwin’s writings and theories touched upon the sensitive
issues of racial and gender differences among human beings. Do these same issues arise
in contemporary psychology? If so, how?
Suggested Resources
Darwin’s published journal for the Beagle voyage and The Origin of Species are both highly
recommended and are available in several paperbound editions. A good, representative
collection of excerpts from his major writings is found in Mark Ridley, ed., The Darwin
Reader (New York: Norton, 1987). For Darwin’s own account of his life, see The Autobiog-
raphy of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, edited by his granddaughter Nora Barlow (New York:
Norton, 1969).
For a biography with details not only about Darwin’s life but also about the intellectual
and social environment in which he created his theory, see Adrian Desmond and James
Moore, Darwin (New York: Norton, 1993). For the most complete biography, see the two
volumes by Janet Browne: Charles Darwin: Voyaging (New York: Knopf, 1995) and Charles
Darwin: The Power of Place (New York: Knopf, 2002).
Howard E. Gruber’s Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity
(London: Wildwood House, 1974) provides an excellent discussion of Darwin’s psycholog-
ical ideas. In 2009 the American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psy-
chological Association, published a special issue with nine articles on “Charles Darwin and
Psychology” to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (vol. 64, no. 2).
Several digital resources on Darwin provide direct access to his published and unpub-
lished work. The Darwin Correspondence Project has digitized more than 7,500 of Darwin’s
letters. They can be searched and read at www.darwinproject.ac.uk. A special module
of this site on Darwin and Gender (www.darwinproject.ac.ok/darwin-and-gender-intro)
features Darwin’s correspondence with over 150 women and reveals his views on gender
and education, gender and intelligence, and many other issues. The Darwin Manuscripts
Project, www.amnh.org/our-research/darwin-manuscripts-project, a joint venture between
the American Museum of Natural History and Cambridge University includes a full-color
photo gallery of Darwin’s children’s drawings, among other resources. John van Wyhe edits
the site Darwin Online, darwin-online.org.uk, a heavily consulted resource that includes a
complete collection of Darwin’s published works, as well as private papers.
CHAPTER 7
Measuring the Mind: Galton
and Individual Differences
The Anthropometric Laboratory

Galton’s Early Life and Career
Darwinian Theory and Hereditary Genius
Nature and Nurture
Eugenics
Galton’s Influence and Continuing Controversies
L ondon’s International Health Exhibition of 1884 featured a curious exhibit

which attracted many spectators. Partially visible behind a trellised wall,
it consisted of several strange-looking instruments laid out on a long bench.
As spectators watched, a volunteer subject would enter the enclosed space and
manipulate a device at one end of the bench while consulting with an attendant.
After a minute or two, the attendant wrote something down on two small cards,
and the subject moved on to the second instrument. The procedure continued
at each stop along the bench, and at the end, the attendant filed one of the cards
away and gave the other to the person to keep. Participants invariably left study-
ing their cards with keen interest, and by the close of the exhibition, more than
9,000 spectators had been sufficiently intrigued by what they saw behind the
trellis to pay a small fee and become subjects themselves.
For their time and money, participants received the gratification of contribut-
ing to science, as well as some comparative information about themselves.
243
244 7 | Measuring the Mind: Galton and Individual Differences
THE ANTHROPOMETRIC
LABORATORY
The exhibit was called the Anthropometric
Laboratory, and each of its devices measured
or tested the subjects in some way (Figure 7.1).
The participants’ personal results, as well as the
averages from prior subjects, were recorded on
the cards. Scores reflected their head size and
basic physical measurements, and most impor-
tantly their performance on a reaction-time test,
and measures of sensory discrimination for sev-
eral stimuli, including colors, weights, auditory
pitches, and line lengths.
Figure 7.1 The Anthropometric Laboratory Surprisingly to us today, these tests were
thought of as mental tests, measuring aspects of
what we now think of as intelligence. We take it for granted that intelligence in-
volves “higher” mental processes such as thinking, reasoning, and logic, and we
may find it hard to see how neurophysiological variables, such as reaction time
and sensory discrimination, could possibly be thought of as measuring intelli-
gence. Yet the Laboratory’s creator did have a plausible, if ultimately mistaken,
rationale for them.
The Laboratory’s creator was Francis Galton (1822–1911; Figure 7.2), a
younger cousin of Charles Darwin who had become captivated by the idea of
identifying human psychological variables that were potentially inheritable and
therefore relevant to future evolution. Among the most important of these, he
thought, was “natural ability,” defined as “those qualities of intellect and disposi-
tion” that enable a person to excel in civilized society.1 He reasoned that people
with the highest natural intellectual abilities would also have the most powerful
and efficient brains and nervous systems. Assuming that the power of a person’s
brain would probably be related to its size, his first and simplest test of presumed
natural intelligence was to measure head size (which presumably reflected the
size of the brain within). Postulating that neurological efficiency must be related
to the speed with which people can respond to stimuli, he included a test of reac-
tion time. And he defended his tests of sensory discrimination by arguing:
The only information that reaches us concerning outward events appears

to pass through the avenue of our senses; and the more perceptible our
senses are of difference, the larger the field on which our judgement and
intelligence can act.2
The Anthropometric Laboratory 245
He continued this argument by sharing two incorrect but

widely held prejudices of his time that seemingly indicated
a rough correlation between sensory discrimination and in-
telligence. First, he believed mentally handicapped people
were deficient in their senses as well as their intellect. Using
the now-derogatory term for those with severe mental dis-
abilities, he wrote: “The discriminative faculty of idiots is
curiously low. . . .They hardly distinguish between heat and
cold, and their sense of pain is so obtuse that some of the
more idiotic seem hardly to know what it is.”3
Second, Galton held the sexist belief shared by many
(but not all) of his Victorian male contemporaries that
women were, on average, not only less intelligent than men,
but also less acute in their senses. Otherwise, how could one
explain the fact that women seldom held jobs requiring fine
sensory discrimination, such as piano tuning, wool sorting,
or wine tasting? Ungallantly, he wrote: “Ladies rarely dis-
tinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table, and though
custom allows them to preside at the breakfast-table, men
think of them on the whole to be far from successful makers Figure 7.2 Francis Galton (1822–1911).
of tea and coffee.” He felt justified, therefore, in trying to
4
assess mental ability by measuring people’s relative abilities to bisect a line,

discriminate weights and colors, and hear high-pitched sounds.
These earliest tests of presumed mental ability involved measures and
phenomena that had been very important in the recent rise of experimental
psychology—only with a new twist. Fechner’s psychophysics had explored the
limits of sensory discrimination, and Wundtian mental chronometry experi-
ments had carefully measured reaction times. But these earlier studies focused
on establishing general psychological principles, applicable equally to all peo-
ple, while evading or dismissing issues of individual variations in sensitivity or
reaction time. Galton, by contrast, operated within the new Darwinian framework
that emphasized variability and adaptation. For him, individual differences on
his tests were not “errors” or “irregularities” to be smoothed over or avoided, but
the very machinery of evolution and therefore objects of prime interest. Galton’s
Anthropometric Laboratory was a major early milestone in the development of a
new approach that became known as the psychology of individual differences:
a discipline that focuses on the measurement and study of variations among
people on a psychological characteristic, rather than the general qualities of that
characteristic.
As a young man Galton had inherited a substantial fortune that enabled him
to devote his entire life to his personal interests. Typical of many other wealthy
Victorian men, he often demonstrated an insensitivity to the position of women
and others less privileged than himself. In other respects, however, he was extra-
ordinarily atypical. An energetic, humorous, and above all curious individual, he
had been a noted explorer, geographer, meteorologist, and biological researcher
before turning his lively attention to the measurement of intelligence and other
psychological characteristics.
Many of Galton’s psychological ideas turned out to be incorrect or oversimpli-
fied. Some of them played a role, after his death, in social movements and policies
that were controversial at best and that at worst provided a rationale for the later
atrocities of Nazi Germany. But these negatives do not obscure the fact that
Galton was one of modern psychology’s great pioneers, and his theories provided
several positive foundations on which others could build. He also left behind
some enduring ideas and controversies that continue to engage—and sometimes
to enrage—psychologists today.
GALTON’S EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

Francis Galton was born in 1822 in Birmingham, England. His father was a wealthy
banker descended from the founders of the Quaker religion and his mother was a
Darwin—the younger half-sister of Charles Darwin’s father. Receiving his earliest
education at home from an older sister, Francis seemed to be a child prodigy, as
he could read and write before the age of 3, knew some Latin and arithmetic by 5,
and quoted knowledgeably from the Iliad and the Odyssey by 6. Figure 7.3 shows
the first page of a letter he wrote the day before his fifth birthday. At age 5, he said
his life’s wish was to win university honors, a goal denied earlier generations of
Galtons because as Quakers they could not take the Anglican vows then required
at Oxford and Cambridge. Raised as an Anglican, Francis would not face that
restriction.
After examining records of Galton’s childhood left behind by his family, the
prominent psychologist Lewis Terman estimated in 1917 that if he had been given
a standard test, his IQ would have been an astronomical 200.5 This led to Galton’s
widespread reputation as a genius. But despite his sharp mind and promising
early start, Galton was no happier or more successful than Darwin had been when
sent to traditional schools that emphasized discipline, rote learning, and the clas-
sics. His schoolboy diaries described floggings, canings, punitive assignments,
fights with local boys, and general hell-raising—but contained hardly a single
reference to a scholarly or intellectual idea. He did well only at mathematics, a
subject then considered to be less important than classics.
At 16, Galton was removed from school (to

his great satisfaction) and enrolled as a medical
student at Birmingham General Hospital. Like
Darwin, he experienced the horrors of operations
without anesthesia and confronted disease and
death daily. But unlike his cousin, he lacked con-
fidence that his father would support him in yet
another change of plans, so he gritted his teeth
and adapted to the situation. He recalled in his
autobiography: “The cries of the poor fellows
who were operated on were . . . terrible, but only
at first. It seemed after a while as though the cries
were somehow disconnected with the operation,
upon which the whole attention became fixed.”6
For the rest of his life Galton had a tendency to
“objectify” other people—seeing them as cases to
be studied or examples to be counted, rather than
fellow human beings who deserved his sympathy.
This tendency probably contributed to some of the
weaknesses, as well as the strengths, of his later
psychological theorizing. Figure 7.3 The first page of a childhood letter written
Medical training gave Galton ample opportu- by Galton.
nity to indulge his exceptionally lively curiosity.
Required to prepare medications in the pharmacy, he could not resist trying out
small quantities of his creations on himself. Samples of poppy seed and herbal
licorice were quite delightful, while a tea brewed from quassia wood chips proved
to be extremely bitter. He started taking small doses of all the medicines listed in
his textbook, beginning with the letter A. As he wrote in his autobiography sixty
years later, he found this to be
an interesting experience, but it had obvious drawbacks. . . . I got nearly

to the end of the letter C, when I was stopped by the effects of Croton oil.
I had foolishly believed that two drops of it could have no notable effects
as a purgative and emetic, but indeed they had, and I can recall them now.7
At 18, Galton interrupted medical training to attend Cambridge University,

where he hoped to fulfill his childhood wish and earn high honors in mathemat-
ics. He became involved in Cambridge’s intensely competitive exam system, the
culminating event of which was the Mathematical Tripos Examination, held each
January for that year’s graduating class. This weeklong ordeal consisted of 44
hours of exam-writing in an unheated room at the coldest time of year, with more
questions than anyone could complete. Marks were awarded for one’s quantity
of correct answers, which could add up to the thousands. Results were precisely
ranked from first to last, with the top forty or so finishers earning the title of
“wranglers.” Keen interest always focused on who would take the top or senior
wranglership, with university personnel often placing bets on the outcome as if
it were an athletic contest.
Galton, a better mathematician than a classicist, entered Cambridge with
hopes of emerging as a high wrangler. Taking an interest in the university’s
exam procedures, he noted approvingly that the tripos grading system sharply
differentiated the top scorers. In one class ahead of his, for example, the first and
second wranglers had been “very far superior to the rest, for the second wrangler
was 1000 marks ahead of the third wrangler, and the getting of 500 marks only
entitles a man to be a wrangler.”8 This observation suggested to Galton that the
very best people in a given field tend to be far ahead of the rest, virtually in a class
by themselves—an impression he held for the rest of his life.
Galton obsessively compared his own performance on some early nonhon-
ors exams with that of his classmates, and at first he did well enough to keep
his hope alive for an eventual wranglership. A mediocre result at the end of his
second year, however, led to an emotional breakdown in which “a mill seemed to
be working inside my head. I could not banish obsessing ideas; at times I could
hardly read a book, and found it painful even to look at a printed page.”9 Recovery
came slowly, and only after Galton had given up all thought of competing for
honors. He graduated from Cambridge in 1844 with an ordinary, or poll, degree,*
like Darwin’s, and then resumed medical study in London. His spirit seemed bro-
ken, however, and when his father died in 1845 and left him a substantial fortune,
Galton abandoned academic life forever.
For the next several years, Galton was a member of the idle rich. He hunted
and gambled, tried the dangerous sport of ballooning, and traveled exten-
sively from Scandinavia in the north to Egypt and the Sudan in the southeast.
Such aimless activity failed to satisfy him, however, and finally in April 1849 he
consulted a London phrenologist for a reading of his “natural” abilities, aptitudes,
and inclinations. The shrewd phrenologist, undoubtedly relying on more than
just the shape of Galton’s head, reported that brains constituted like his innately
lacked “much spontaneous activity in relation to scholastic affairs” but were
ideally suited for more vigorous activity. “It is only when rough work has to be
*The word poll was Cambridge jargon derived from the ancient Greek hoi polloi, meaning “the
masses” of common people.
08_POP_28354_ch07_242-277.indd 248 18/10/16 3:52 PM

done that all the energies and capacities of minds such as this are brought to
light,” he advised.10
This judgment probably comforted Galton, who could now attribute his medi-
ocre academic record to a lack of innate scholarly ability, rather than lack of effort
or moral fiber. And the assurance that he had natural strengths in more practical
fields stimulated Galton positively. Since he enjoyed traveling and could afford it
in a major way, he decided to become an African explorer.
After consulting with the Royal Geographical Society in London, Galton
left England in 1850 and returned two years later after exploring previously
unmapped territory in the part of southwest Africa that is present-day Namibia.
Showing a talent for taking precise measurements, he used various surveying
instruments to take readings for a highly detailed and accurate map of the
country.
During his exploration Galton encountered one native African group whose
habits and character he praised and he recognized wide differences among
individuals, but the majority of his descriptions of native Africans were decid-
edly Eurocentric and, by today’s standards, racist. Although he was not the only
Victorian explorer to express such views, they were by no means universal, and
they reflected Galton’s tendency to emphasize innate as opposed to acquired or
learned differences in character.11
For his detailed map and measurements of the country, Galton won the Royal
Geographical Society’s gold medal for 1853. That same year he published an
entertaining book about his expedition that first put him in the public eye. His
cousin Darwin, whom he had not seen in several years, wrote a note of congrat-
ulation: “I last night finished reading your volume with such lively interest that
I cannot resist the temptation of expressing my admiration. . . . What labours
and dangers you have gone through!” Darwin, who at this time had formulated
but not yet published his groundbreaking theory of evolution, added a typically
modest personal note: “I live in a village called Downe . . . and employ myself in
zoology; but the objects of my study are very small fry, and to a man like you ac-
customed to rhinoceroses and lions, would appear infinitely insignificant.”12 The
cousins remained in friendly contact thereafter, but Galton would have to await
publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 before learning the exact nature of
Darwin’s “infinitely insignificant” studies.
Galton’s successful expedition gained him entry into the governing councils
of the Royal Geographical Society, and for ten years he busied himself produc-
tively with geography, travel, and meteorology. He helped plan many of the epic
African expeditions to locate the source of the Nile, developed new and improved
instruments for geographical measurement, and in 1855 wrote a handbook for
travelers in the wild, The Art of Travel.13 This classic guide, revised over the course
of eight editions, offered practical advice on such diverse subjects as pitching a

tent in the sand, avoiding the rush of an enraged animal, and preventing one’s
asses from braying all night.
In the early 1860s Galton turned to another subject of great interest to travel-
ers, and everyone else: the weather. He had the bright idea to collect simultane-
ous weather information from many different places and represent it on some of
the world’s first weather maps. From his early maps, he discovered the alternat-
ing patterns of high-pressure and low-pressure systems now known to determine
weather changes.
For these diverse geographical and meteorological accomplishments, Galton
as a young man earned an honorable place among Victorian scientists. But as he
entered middle age his attention went in yet another direction—with momentous
consequences for the sciences of biology, genetics, statistics, and psychology.
The stimulus for this shift was the bombshell publication of The Origin of Species.
DARWINIAN THEORY AND HEREDITARY GENIUS

As surprised as the rest of the world by Darwin’s great work, after reading it
Galton immediately wrote his cousin:
Pray, let me add a word of congratulations on the completion of your

wonderful volume. . . . I have laid it down in the full enjoyment of a feeling
that one rarely experiences after boyhood days, of having been initiated
into an entirely new province of knowledge which, nevertheless, connects
itself with other things in a thousand ways.14
For a considerable time, however, Galton was also troubled by the book. His previ-
ously orthodox religious faith and literal belief in the Bible were shattered, and for
several years he experienced symptoms of another severe emotional breakdown.
But gradually, some implications of Darwinian theory combined with his own
ideas to create a guiding vision that Galton pursued for the rest of his long life.15
Although Darwin had not discussed human beings in The Origin of Species,
Galton quickly grasped the implication that humans must be constantly evolving
like all other species. Moreover, he believed the most distinctive human variations,
and those most likely to form the basis of future evolution and development, were
intellectual and psychological in nature—although presumably caused by small
hereditary differences in the structure of the brain and nervous system.
Galton’s personal experience had already led him to believe that individual
differences in intellectual ability must be primarily innate. He himself had had
high academic aspirations and had come from a wealthy family and good en-
vironment, yet despite these advantages had been unable to win the honors he
wanted at Cambridge. Therefore, he believed, those who performed better must

have had superior innate natural ability for academic success.
Galton had also observed that intellectual achievement tends to run in families.
His own family had produced two scientific superstars in Erasmus and Charles
Darwin, along with many other figures of lesser but still substantial distinction. Other
notable families—such as the Bachs in music, the Brontës in literature, and the Pitts
in politics—easily came to mind. After reading Darwin’s book, Galton decided to
approach the problem statistically, using his expertise for measuring and counting.
After studying biographical dictionaries listing people famous for their achieve-
ments, he calculated that these individuals represented a proportion of about one in
4,000 from the normal population. Galton next examined the family trees of these
figures and found that about 10 percent had at least one close relative also suffi-
ciently accomplished to be included in a biographical dictionary. Even accounting
for the fact that each person has many relatives, this percentage represented a far
greater number of eminent relatives than would be expected by chance. Here was
concrete evidence of a statistical tendency for eminence to run in families.
Galton recognized that such evidence alone could not logically prove that
the ability necessary for eminence is inherited, because members of a family
tend to share similar environments as well as similar heredity. One could argue
that these were the more effective causes—and indeed this general heredity-
environment debate remains strongly alive today. But Galton was predisposed
from the outset to see heredity as more important, and he emphasized the
hereditarian side of the discussion. When he presented his statistical findings of
eminent families in the 1869 book Hereditary Genius, he boldly stated: “I propose
to show in this book that a man’s natural abilities are derived from inheritance,
under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of
the whole organic world.”16 Galton’s book presented three new arguments in
support of this idea, based on the normal distribution of intellectual qualities, the
specific patterns of eminent relatives Galton most frequently observed, and an
elementary comparison of adoptive versus biological relatives.
The Normal Distribution

In the first part of his case, Galton argued that measures of intellectual ability tend
to fall into statistical distributions similar to those of inheritable physical traits.
The Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) had earlier shown that
measurements such as height and weight, when collected from large populations,
invariably fall into bell-shaped, normal distributions like the one in Figure 7.4, in
which many more measurements fall in the middle ranges than at the extremes. In
these distributions, individual scores are closely bunched together in the middle
and increasingly widely separated from one another at the two extremes or “tails.”
Number of People
58 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84
Height in Inches
Figure 7.4 A normal distribution: height measurements for a large sample of adult men.
The greater dispersal of measurements in the tail of a normal distribution re-

minded Galton of Cambridge tripos examination results, in which top wranglers
had scored far higher than anyone else. To further test this observation, he ob-
tained the raw scores for the top 100 candidates in two successive Cambridge tri-
pos exams and showed that these ranged from a high of 7,634 to a low of 237; the
highest score exceeded the second highest by more than 2,000, while more than
half the population fell in the range from 500 to 1,500 total points. The scores
did in fact approximate the right-hand (higher) portion of a normal distribution.
Galton assumed that most of those whose ability would have placed them in the
lower portion would not have even qualified for taking the honors exam. Mathe-
matical ability, at least as measured by the Cambridge examinations, seemed to
fall in a distribution closely resembling the known distributions of inheritable
physical variables such as height and weight.
Of course, resemblance does not prove identity, and today it’s well estab-
lished that normal distributions characterize many variables that are not heredi-
tary. Galton’s study had still been worth doing, because had the distribution not
turned out to be normal, that result would have counted against his hypothesis.
But once again his observations were merely consistent with his thesis, without
offering positive proof of it.
Pedigrees of Eminence
Galton’s second new line of argument for the hereditarian perspective had a
similar limitation. He examined the family trees of twelve separate groups of
historically famous people, including statesmen, military commanders, writers,

scientists, musicians, painters, and athletic champions. To start, he discovered
that the famous relatives of these famous people tended to be close rather than
distant. First-degree relations (sibling or parent-child) appeared four times more
frequently than second-degree relations (grandparents, grandchildren, nephews-
nieces, or uncles-aunts), who were in turn four times more likely than third-degree
relations (great-grandparents, cousins, etc.). Even third-degree relations, how-
ever, occurred more frequently than would have been expected by chance. This
pattern closely duplicated what occurs with inherited physical variables; fathers
and sons resemble each other in height more than grandfathers and grandsons
do, and they in turn are more similar than average cousins.
Galton also found an imperfect but clear tendency for relatives to excel in
the same fields. Accomplished relatives of eminent writers were most likely to
be writers too, although they also gained recognition in other occupations with
greater than chance frequency. This would be expected, Galton argued, if the
required natural ability for each particular field were some complex combina-
tion of physical, mental, and emotional characteristics, each one separately and
partially inherited. Each offspring of an eminent parent would then inherit some
proportion of the qualities for achievement in that same field, but not necessarily
all of them.
Of course one might expect similar patterns of results if the major familial
advantages leading to eminence were environmental rather than hereditary.
Close relatives share environments to a greater degree than distant relatives do,
and any specific environmental factors conducive to success in particular fields
should presumably be found in some families more than others.
Adoptive vs. Biological Relatives

Galton acknowledged the possible role the environment played, and he sug-
gested it could be addressed by comparing the similarities between adopted
children and their adoptive parents with similarities between natural children
and their biological parents. His only attempt to apply this method in Heredi-
tary Genius was to note that there had once been a tendency for Roman Catholic
popes to adopt young boys to be brought up in their own privileged households
as “nephews” who shared an environmental but not a genetic association with
their hosts. While admitting he hadn’t studied these relationships in great detail,
Galton concluded that “the very common combination of an able son and an able
parent, is not matched, in the case of high Romish ecclesiastics, by an eminent
nephew and an eminent uncle.”17 On the basis of this flimsy and undocumented
evidence, and perhaps reinforced by his own mediocre academic performance
despite his social advantages, he concluded that environmental advantages “are

incompetent to give eminent status to a man of moderate ability.”18
Galton’s general and basic idea of comparing similarities between adoptive
and biological relatives was a good one that has been used productively by many
later generations of genetic researchers. His own use of the idea here, however,
left much to be desired. Not only did he fail to give the same statistical attention
to this analysis that he did elsewhere, but he also confined his study to a small
and unusual sample.
In general, Galton’s major lines of evidence in Hereditary Genius were con-
sistent with his argument for heredity, but failed to prove it conclusively. Never-
theless, the book presented the thesis clearly and coherently, and eventually it
would have to be taken seriously by hereditarians and environmentalists alike.
It also cemented a professional relationship with his cousin Darwin, who wrote
him to say: “I do not think I have ever in my life read anything more interesting
and original.”19 Publicly, in the second edition of The Descent of Man, Darwin
stated: “We now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton, that genius
which implies a wonderfully complex combination of high faculties, tends to be
inherited.”20
NATURE AND NURTURE

The well-known Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle
(1806–1893; Figure 7.5) responded to Galton’s book more
fully than Darwin did. Like Galton, de Candolle came from
an old and distinguished scientific family, and he had been
listed, along with his father and grandfather, among the
prominent families in Hereditary Genius. Unlike Galton,
however, he was highly impressed with the importance of
environmental and cultural factors in perpetuating success-
ful families like his own.
To support his view, de Candolle studied the biographies
of more than 300 eminent European scientists, and analyzed
them statistically in his 1873 book entitled (in translation)
History of the Sciences and Scientists over Two Centuries.
He concluded that heredity plays a certain role in scientific
excellence, but he also showed clearly that eminent scien-
tists came disproportionately from small to medium-sized
countries with moderate climates, democratic governments,
tolerant religious establishments, and thriving commercial
Figure 7.5 Alphonse de Candolle (1806–1893). interests. His own native Switzerland was a prime example
of these countries, so his personal experience had probably sensitized him to

these issues. In any case he provided concrete evidence for several environmen-
tal effects, and explicitly contrasted his findings with Galton’s: “My accounts
of the men of science have been gathered in a different manner from those of
Mr. Galton. I employed more complete biographical documents . . . and thus
flatter myself to have penetrated farther into the heart of the question.”21
An annoyed but intrigued Galton wrote de Candolle complaining of “the in-
justice you have done to me” but also confessed to being impressed by the depth
and originality of the research. “I feel the great service you have done in writing
it,” he generously concluded, “and shall do what I can to make it known, as it
ought to be, in England.”22 De Candolle responded with a conciliatory letter of his
own, expressing respect for Galton’s “talent for investigation” but adding:
I have had the advantage of coming after you, and while it was not difficult
for me to confirm with new facts the influence of heredity, . . . I never lost
sight of the other causes [which seem to me] . . . generally more important
than heredity.23
De Candolle’s book and letters stimulated Galton to carry out his own fur-
ther study of scientists, to try to sort out the effects of heredity and environment
in their backgrounds. He distributed an extensive questionnaire asking for de-
tailed personal information to 192 distinguished scientists who were Fellows of
the Royal Society of London. He thus became the first to use the now common-
place self-questionnaire method, the distribution of a standard set of questions
to a large sample of respondents, to investigate a major psychological issue. The
questionnaire covered topics ranging from the social, religious, and political
backgrounds of the respondents and their parents, to their hair color and the size
of their hats. Respondents rated themselves and their relatives on psychological
qualities such as “energy of mind,” “retentiveness of memory,” and “studiousness
of disposition.” They described their educational experiences, with special em-
phasis on factors that had led them to science. And they answered three ques-
tions Galton regarded as particularly important, asking them to trace the origins
of their interests in science, to estimate the degree to which their scientific tastes
had been innate, and if they had been influenced by events in later life to describe
those events.
Galton received completed forms from 104 subjects, a majority of whom
declared their taste for science as innate. Typical replies: “As far back as I can
remember, I loved nature and desired to learn her secrets,” and “I was always
observing and inquiring, and this disposition was never checked or ridiculed.”24
These responses, naive and unsubstantiated though they might seem to a sup-
porter of environmental influences, satisfied Galton that most of the scientists
had been born with the requisite tastes and aptitudes for their craft. He therefore
concluded that the predominant causes must have been hereditary.
But some other responses led Galton to make an important concession to
de Candolle. Many scientists cited experiences or influences that presumably
strengthened or reinforced their scientific inclinations: Darwin’s opportunity
to travel on the Beagle, for example, or Huxley’s youthful apprenticeship to
a doctor. In addition, more than a chance proportion of the eminent scientists
were Scottish, and the Scots were more likely than the others to cite their formal
education as a positive factor. Here was evidence for an environmental cause,
since Scottish public education was notably broader and less focused on classics
than its English counterpart. As a result, Galton moderated his hereditarian
thesis slightly, maintaining that inherited tastes and aptitudes were necessary
but not sufficient causes of scientific talent, requiring at least a degree of support
from the environment before being fulfilled.
In writing up this study, Galton contributed incidentally but importantly to
the language of science. Searching for a pair of simple terms to denote the sep-
arate effects of heredity and environment, he first referred to them as “race” ver-
sus “nurture.” While analyzing his questionnaire data, however, Galton recalled a
short section of de Candolle’s book that criticized many popular uses of the word
nature, and argued that one of its few legitimate usages was as an opposite of art
or artifice. Soon thereafter Galton proposed the phrase nature and nurture as
a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the
innumerable elements of which personality is composed. Nature is all that
a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence that
affects him after his birth.25
The phrase caught on, and biologists and psychologists have used it ever since
to differentiate innate developmental factors from environmental ones. Galton
himself used it in the subtitle of his 1874 book describing the questionnaire study
results: English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture.
After coining his phrase, Galton also recognized that nature and nurture can
often interact with each other in complicated ways, and tried to devise methods
for sorting out their separate effects. One significant result was a study he
reported in an 1875 article entitled “The History of Twins, as a Criterion of the
Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture.”26 Galton was aware of the recent dis-
covery that there are two biologically different types of twins. Some twin pairs
develop from the separate fertilization of two eggs by two sperm, while others are
produced when a single fertilized egg splits in half and the two halves develop
into separate embryos. The first type, today called fraternal (dizygotic) twins,
bear the same genetic similarity to each other as ordinary brothers and sisters,
with an average of 50 percent of their genes in common. The second type, iden-
tical (monozygotic) twins, are genetically identical to each other. Galton—who
himself had a pair of identical twins as nephews and a fraternal pair as an aunt
and uncle—decided to conduct a broader survey of different twin pairs.
He developed another questionnaire, this one targeted at adult twins. He
asked for details about their backgrounds and upbringing, and about the simi-
larities and differences in their personal characteristics over the course of their
lives. He sent these to all the same-sex twin pairs he could locate, and received
responses from more than 100. He was particularly impressed by two general
categories of their responses. Several twin pairs, including his nephews, had
gone through life showing marked similarity to each other psychologically as
well as physically, in spite of having experienced quite different life circum-
stances. Another sizable group of pairs showed the opposite pattern, growing
up to be markedly different from each other despite having been deliberately
treated alike by their parents. Many other twin pairs, unsurprisingly, grew up to
be alike when they had been raised under highly similar conditions, or different
if they had been raised differently.
Although he lacked direct evidence for the biological type of the first two twin
groups, Galton reasoned that they were exactly what would be expected if charac-
ter and physique had been strongly determined by heredity and less so by envi-
ronment. Under that hypothesis genetically identical monozygotic twins should
develop similarly regardless of differences in their nurture, while fraternal twins
should differ as ordinary siblings do, even when raised alike. He therefore de-
cided his first category must have been composed of monozygotic twins, and his
second category of dizygotic twins. Although none of this was absolutely certain,
he confidently wrote:
There is no escape from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously

over nurture when the differences in nurture do not exceed what is com-
monly to be found among persons of the same rank in society and in the
same country.27
Galton did not address the possibility that genetically identical twins who look
alike may consequently be treated alike more than twins who differ in appear-
ance, so their similarities might logically have been produced by nurture as well
as by nature. Nor did he note that any differences that do occur between identical
twins cannot be attributed to heredity, since they are identical in that respect.
And because some differences occurred even between the most highly similar
pairs, here was positive proof of an environmental effect of some kind.
Galton’s twin study introduced an ingenious, but still inconclusive, approach
to the complex issue of nature versus nurture. The twin study method, broadly
defined, examines the similarities and differences that develop between different
categories of twin pairs, such as identical versus fraternal, or those reared in sim-
ilar versus dissimilar environments. We shall see later in this chapter that more
elaborate and sophisticated replications of the technique were performed by later
generations of scientists, with interesting results. However, environmentalists
and hereditarians continue to differ about the proper way to interpret twin stud-
ies, and in several respects the nature-nurture debate remains almost as unsettled
today as when Galton and de Candolle argued about it in the 1870s.
EUGENICS
From the very beginning of his involvement with Darwinian theory, Galton had
held a utopian vision, whose ultimate feasibility depended on the correctness of
his hypothesis about hereditary ability. He clearly, if crudely, expressed his idea
in the opening paragraph of Hereditary Genius when he declared that just as it is
easy for animal breeders
to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted

with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so would it be
quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious mar-
riages during several consecutive generations.28
A few years later, Galton coined the term eugenics for this project of improving
the human race through selective breeding.
We have seen how Galton convinced himself (if not everyone else) that hu-
man ability is in fact strongly inheritable. This belief meant to him that eugenics
should be workable in reality. For the second half of his long life, eugenics be-
came Galton’s consuming passion—a substitute for the orthodox religious faith
he had abandoned after reading Darwin’s challenge to the literal interpretation
of the Bible. Almost everything he did related in some way to this central vision,
and with great imagination and versatility he developed dozens of ideas, many of
which had implications beyond their original eugenic purposes. Two of the most
important for the history of psychology were intelligence tests and the concept
of statistical correlation.
Eugenics 259
The Idea of Intelligence Testing

To create a eugenic society, Galton believed it was necessary to encourage the
most highly able young men and women to intermarry and have children at a
greater rate than parents of lesser abilities. But how could one identify these eu-
genic parents? Ideally, Galton thought they should be men and women like those
he had studied in Hereditary Genius, whose concrete accomplishments and con-
tributions to society had marked them for eminence. But those kinds of achieve-
ments usually occurred in middle age or later, and Galton sought a means of
identifying potentially successful people at a younger age, while still in their best
childbearing years.
As early as 1865, Galton had imagined the development of competitive eugenic
exams to be administered by the state to all young men and women of prime mar-
riageable age. He half-humorously described a future awards ceremony in which
a high government official would address “ten deeply-blushing young men” to
congratulate them on having received the highest scores on an exam measuring
“those qualities of talent, character, and bodily vigour which are proved, on the
whole, to do most honour and best service to our race.”29 Ten young women would
also have been tested and selected and, should these young paragons agree to
marry each other, the Queen herself would give away the brides at a state wed-
ding. These select couples would be encouraged to have many children, whose
care and education would be generously subsidized by the state. In this fanciful
scene, we find the first published statement of the basic idea for intelligence test-
ing, although not yet the name.
Of course, it was one thing to imagine the existence of valid examinations of
hereditary ability and something else again to develop them in reality. Galton
devoted intermittent attention to the problem for many years, and eventually
developed the series of tests used in his Anthropometric Laboratory, described
in the opening of this chapter (see Figure 7.1). As noted there, he believed the
test results would reveal inheritable differences in people’s brains and nervous
systems, which presumably would result in differing degrees of intelligence or
natural ability.
Galton’s tests were eventually found not to correlate with meaningful, real-life
intellectual accomplishment, and the first successful intelligence tests had to
await the development of different procedures by the French psychologist Alfred
Binet, based on assumptions very different from Galton’s (see Chapter 13). For
now, it is sufficient to note that Galton originated the idea of intelligence testing
in a eugenic context and made it seem an important scientific project worthy of
attention by others. Ever since then, the general issue of intelligence testing has
often been connected with genetics, eugenics, and the nature-nurture debate.
Statistical Correlation and Regression

Galton’s concern with heredity and eugenics led to another important innovation
when he sought a way to quantify the relative strengths of various hereditary re-
lationships. He knew that tall parents tend to have tall children, for example, but
rarely are their heights identical. Between grandparents and grandchildren the
average resemblance is even less, although it is still greater than chance. Galton
wanted to find an exact way of expressing and comparing these cases of partial
or imperfect association between variables. He wound up inventing the basic
techniques of statistical correlation: a mathematical process for measuring the
strength of the association between two imperfectly related variables.
His solution began, characteristically, with obtaining, measuring, and counting
some large samples of data. He planted peas of varying sizes and compared the sizes
of the offspring peas with those of the parents. In his Anthropometric Laboratory, he
solicited families to come in so successive generations could be measured on height,
weight, and several other physical traits, in addition to the tests described earlier.
After examining the data for countless hours, Galton developed the habit of
recording them on a grid in the form of a scatter plot such as the one shown in
Figure 7.6, in which the two variables are the heights of 314 adult children plot-
ted against the average heights of their two parents. Each cell of Galton’s scatter
plot records the number of cases for that particular combination. The 1 in the
Children’s Heights (Mean = 68.0”)

63” 64” 65” 66” 67” 68” 69” 70” 71” 72” 73”
72”
1 2 2 2 1
71”
Parents’ Heights (Mean = 68.1”)
2 4 5 5 4 3 1
70”
1 2 3 5 8 9 9 8 5 3
69”
2 3 6 10 12 12 2 10 6 3
68”
3 7 11 13 14 13 10 7 3 1
67”
3 6 8 11 11 8 6 3 1
66”
2 3 4 6 4 3 2
65”
Mean Height
67.2 67.3 67.4 67.6 67.9 68.2 68.4 68.8 69.1 69.3
of parents in
Each Column
Figure 7.6 One of Galton’s scatter plots.

Eugenics 261
upper-right cell indicates there was one child between 72 73

and 73 inches tall with parents whose two heights averaged 72
between 71 and 72 inches; the 3 diagonally adjacent signifies 71
three children between 71 and 72 inches with parental aver- 70
Parents’ Heights
ages between 70 and 71 inches; and so on. 69
From scatter plots Galton noticed a pattern he called 68
regression toward the mean—the tendency for extreme
67
scores on one of the compared variables to be associated
66
with less extreme scores on the other. Consider the eleven
65
pairs of scores represented in the far left-hand column of
Figure 7.6. The children all fall between 63 and 64 inches, 64
so their mean (or average) height may be estimated as

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73
63.5 inches; this value is 4.5 inches shorter than the average Children’s Heights
(68.0 inches) for all 314 children. The number at the bottom
of that column shows that the two parents of those eleven Figure 7.7 The regression line for the data in
Figure 7.6.
children had a mean height of 67.2 inches (calculated by av-
eraging two cases of 65.5 inches, three of 6.5 inches, and so
on up the column); this value is only 0.9 inch shorter than the overall parents’
mean of 68.1. Therefore, those parents’ heights differed from the overall mean in
the same direction as their children’s (both groups were shorter than average),
but not as far; the parents’ scores showed “regression” toward the population
mean. The pattern repeats for all of the columns in the plot.
Galton recognized another mathematical quality of scatter-plotted data. If
the means of each of the columns are represented by X’s across a graph, they
array themselves into an approximately straight line he called a regression
line. Figure 7.7 shows the regression line plotted from the data on children’s
and parents’ heights in Figure 7.6.
Galton also realized that the steepness of any regression line will vary accord-
ing to the strength of the relationship between the two variables. This becomes
clear after considering two “ideal” cases: a perfect association between the vari-
ables, and a completely random one. The left-hand graph in Figure 7.8 shows the
regression line for a hypothetical perfect relationship, which would occur if every
child’s height turned out to be exactly the same as his or her parent’s; the line
would form a perfect diagonal, with a mathematical slope of 1.0. But if children’s
heights bore a completely random relation to parental stature, then all groups of
children—short, average, and tall—would have parents whose average height was
close to the mean for the overall parents’ group. The regression line in this case
would be perfectly horizontal, like the one in the right-hand graph in Figure 7.8,
with a mathematical slope of 0.0.
73
72
71
Parents’ Heights
70
Parents’ Heights
69
68
67
66
65
64
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73
Children’s Heights Children’s Heights
Figure 7.8 Two idealized regression lines.
Despite his mediocre academic record at Cambridge, Galton was a gifted

intuitive mathematician. He saw that for all positively but imperfectly related
variables the regression lines’ mathematical slopes would always lie somewhere
between the values of 0 and 1 that we see in Figure 7.7. He also realized in a bril-
liant insight that if all the scores were transformed from their raw forms (e.g.,
the inches, pounds, centimeters, or kilograms of the original measurements) into
standardized statistical units, such as the standard deviations familiar to stu-
dents of elementary statistics (numbers that reflect each of the scores’ relative
positions within a normal distribution), the mathematical slope of any regression
line based on them can be directly and uniformly interpreted as what Galton
called a coefficient of correlation—a numerically precise value of the strength of
the relationship. If the value lies close to 1—say, .8 or .9—it indicates a very strong
correlation; a value near .5 signifies a moderate degree of association, and one
close to 0 shows a weak correlation.
After Galton presented the basic ideas behind statistical correlation and
regression in a short 1888 paper, the young mathematician and future Galton
biographer Karl Pearson (1857–1936) refined them and developed a convenient
formula for computing “product moment correlation coefficients” and extend-
ing their range to cover negative relationships (in which high scores on one
variable are associated with low scores on the other). Pearson’s r, as this statis-
tic is known, has become one of the most widely used of all statistical tools in
psychological, biological, and sociological research. Its application extends far
beyond the biological and hereditary relationships originally investigated by
Galton to literally any situation involving the degree of association between two
measurable variables. Some modern investigators regard Galton’s pioneering
Eugenics 263
discussions of statistical correlation and regression as his greatest contribution

to science.
Ironically, one of these extended applications of correlation ultimately
demonstrated the relative failure of Galton’s own approach to intelligence test-
ing as pioneered in his Anthropometric Laboratory. When Pearson’s r’s were
calculated between scores on Galton’s tests and real-life measures of intellec-
tual ability such as academic grades, they turned out to be very low. As previ-
ously mentioned, different types of tests, which produced higher correlations,
had to be developed before intelligence testing could be taken seriously as a
practical reality.
Other Contributions
Over the course of his life, the versatile and inventive Galton conducted numer-
ous other inquiries that related directly or indirectly to his consuming passion
for eugenics. Some of these, too, had important consequences. He was one of
the first serious investigators of fingerprints, for example, which he hoped would
prove to have an inherited basis. He developed the method of classifying prints
into “loops,” “arches,” and “whorls” that was first adopted by Scotland Yard and
remains in standard use in law enforcement worldwide today.
More relevant to psychology was a questionnaire Galton devised to study
individual differences in mental imagery. He asked subjects to imagine var-
ious scenes and then describe their mental images in detail, including their
qualities such as brightness and color, distinctness, apparent location, and
so on. He found wide variations, with some subjects literally “seeing” their
mental images with almost the same distinctness as a real scene, and others
reporting only abstract “thoughts” that had no visual properties at all. Galton’s
questionnaire became a standard instrument for studying mental imagery for
many years. His major finding—that normal people vary dramatically in the
frequency, intensity, and vividness with which they imagine things—has been
widely replicated.
Another important study focused on mental associations that are established
by experience—one of Galton’s few explicit investigations of the nurture side of
the nature-nurture debate. Galton developed the word-association technique,
in which he recorded the first reactions that come to mind when seeing a list of
stimulus words. He wrote down seventy-five different stimulus words on paper
slips. Using himself as his subject, he drew words at random and recorded the
first two or three thoughts that came to his mind in response to each one. After
going through the list four times, he discovered that many of his associations
recurred repeatedly and often dated from events in childhood. He did not find the
08_POP_28354_ch07_242-277.indd 263 18/10/16 3:52 PM

rich variety of associations he had expected, and commented, “The roadways of

our minds are worn into very deep ruts.”30 He also found that many of his associ-
ations dealt with embarrassing or anxiety-inducing topics, so that the task itself
was often distasteful and difficult. Therefore, he did not publish his associations
verbatim, noting simply that “they lay bare the foundations of a man’s thought
with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy with more vividness
and truth than he would probably care to publish to the world.”31
Although Galton himself never carried these ideas further, the journal in
which they appeared in 1879 was read by the young Viennese doctor Sigmund
Freud, and Galton’s study was probably one of many sources of Freud’s later
development of the important therapeutic technique he called free association.
In the early 1900s, Freud’s younger colleague Carl Jung developed the word-
association test as a diagnostic tool, for the explicit purpose of exposing the
mental life of his patients. We’ll return to these topics in Chapter 11.
Many of Galton’s other studies were less consequential, but they still re-
flected his curiosity and inventiveness. He developed a system of “composite
portraiture,” in which facial photographs of family members or members of
the same groups (such as criminals, mentally disturbed people, or tuberculo-
sis patients) were superimposed upon one another in an attempt to identify
and accentuate the features all held in common. He made “beauty maps” of
the British Isles, according to which the best-looking inhabitants (by Galton’s
subjective assessment) came from London, the least attractive from Aberdeen.
He conducted a statistical study of the efficacy of prayer (which found, among
other things, that highly prayed-for individuals such as kings and queens had
statistically shorter-than-average lives), investigated the effects of influenza on
imagination, tried (unsuccessfully) to do arithmetic by using only the sense of
smell, and experimented with different techniques of tea making. He pursued
all of these endeavors with the same enthusiasm and energy he had shown as
a young man.
Galton’s lively writings earned him a considerable reputation, and in 1909 a
knighthood. At age 87, Sir Francis found the idea of being a knight on horseback
highly amusing and joked: “A precious bad knight I should make now. Even seven
years ago it required some engineering to get me on the back of an Egyptian don-
key!”32 But still the honor pleased him, and the elderly Galton looked back on just
one major life disappointment. Despite the fact that he had married according
to the best eugenic principles, to an able woman from a family nearly as distin-
guished as his own, they had been unable to have children: an ironic stroke of fate
his eugenic science could not have predicted. His consolation would have to be
the prospering of his intellectual—if not his biological—descendants.
Galton’s Influence and Continuing Controversies

Galton influenced an exceptionally broad range of disciplines, including geog-
raphy, meteorology, biology, statistics, criminology, behavior genetics, and, of
course, psychology. In fact, he remains one of the most important pioneers in
the history of psychology. Twin studies, self-report questionnaire studies, cor-
relational studies, and investigations of mental imagery and word association all
continue to appear with regularity—not to mention the vast industry concerned
with intelligence testing.
Galton and his ideas have also continued to be highly controversial. The
nature-nurture debate is ongoing; even though almost everyone agrees that both
factors are significant, heated discussions about the relative contributions of each
one still occur. Unfortunately, race has sometimes become a confusing, bitterly
disputed issue in the controversy. Galton himself contributed to this, as his writ-
ings frequently expressed crudely racist opinions. Although these were shared
by many of his Victorian contemporaries, others, including Darwin, were much
more moderate in their views. His book Hereditary Genius included a section
entitled “The Comparative Worth of Different Races,”33 and ranked Europeans at
the top, substantially higher than Asian and, especially, African groups.34
Another unfortunate controversy accompanied the issue of how to implement
eugenic ideas. Galton’s original vision, as we have seen, was for a positive eugen-
ics: the implementation of measures that would increase the proportion of gifted
people within the population. By the early 1900s, however, some of Galton’s follow-
ers, including Pearson, became alarmed by what they saw as a dangerous influx of
supposedly inferior mental stock into civilized society, the result of increasing im-
migration and urbanization. The phrase “menace of the feeble-minded” became a
rallying cry, reflecting the fear that mentally inferior people would outbreed their
superiors and eventually swamp the population. This gave rise to various negative
eugenics programs in Britain and the United States involving restrictive immi-
gration policies and, in some places including several American states, the invol-
untary sterilization of individuals deemed mentally deficient. The unspeakable
low point occurred long after Galton’s death, when these negative eugenic ideas
were adopted and further perverted by self-proclaimed “race hygienists” in Nazi
Germany and used to justify the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Twin Studies and the Heritability of Intelligence

On the scientific front, statistically minded researchers carried on Galton’s quest
to separate and compare the relative contributions of nature and nurture to
important individual difference characteristics, including intelligence. By the
1920s they developed a statistical measure called heritability, the percentage of
08_POP_28354_ch07_242-277.indd 265 18/10/16 3:52 PM

a characteristic’s variability within a population that is determined by genetics.

The remaining percentage is presumably caused by environmental and miscel-
laneous error factors in the measurement. At first heritability might seem like
a definitive number, indicating that if, for example, its value for height is 0.9, a
person’s adult height is 90 percent determined by his or her genes. But this is a
serious misinterpretation, for two reasons.
First, heritability percentages refer not to single individuals but to populations
of people, so heritabilities can vary considerably for the same characteristic when
assessed across different groups. The American psychologist Richard Herrnstein
created a stir in 1971 when he applied this consideration to the heritability of in-
telligence test scores.35 Acknowledging that people tested for intelligence come
from a broad range of environments, from highly privileged to deeply deprived,
he noted that these differences unquestionably have an effect on the scores. He
then noted that if we could successfully level the playing field by improving the
educational environments of the severely deprived, then the differentiating effect
of environment will decrease and heritability—the relative proportion of variabil-
ity due to heredity—must inevitably go up. Relatedly, if the same characteristic is
measured in a population with a restricted range of environments, its heritability
will be higher than for a population with a broader range.
The second reason for misinterpretation is that heritability refers only to
the variability of a characteristic and not to its complete makeup. Consider a
hypothetical population that benefits from a nutritional improvement that adds
2 inches to the heights of all its children as they grow up, or another that suffers
some environmental catastrophe resulting in a decrease in heights across the
board. In both cases the environmental effect—what some researchers refer to as
the “malleability” of the trait36—would be enormous, but as long as the variability
among the grown children’s heights remained the same, so would its measured
heritability.
When interpreted cautiously with these limitations in mind, heritability can
still be an instructive concept, and by the 1920s several scientists realized that a
refined variation of Galton’s twin research—a separated twin study—could po-
tentially provide a statistically pure measure of it. The basic idea was to identify
an adult group of unquestionably monozygotic twins, who would share identical
genetic makeups but who also would have been separated at birth and raised in
randomly different adoptive environments. When measured for various charac-
teristics in adulthood, the statistical correlations between their scores would be
perfect measures of the heritability of those characteristics.
Such a study is far easier to imagine than to do, beginning with the prob-
lem of finding an adequate sample of twins. In reality the condition of complete
separation and random foster home placement is virtually impossible. Adoption

agencies always try to keep siblings, and especially twins, as close together as
possible, and in most cases if they must be separated they are placed in different
branches of the same families, or in similar families in close enough proximity
that the twins can have contact with each other. Therefore, truly and completely
separated twins are rare, and those few that have been sharply separated might
not even know about each other or be identifiable for research. In addition, agen-
cies make every effort to ensure that adoptees are not placed in impoverished or
obviously troubled homes. In the vast majority of cases that have been available
for study, the twins have been only partially separated, and the range of envi-
ronments in which they have been raised is nonrandom, and considerably more
restricted than in the general population.
Despite these limitations, an ambitious and informative study of partially
separated twins was conducted in the 1930s in Chicago by the American team
of Horatio Newman (1875–1957), a biologist; Frank N. Freeman (1880–1961), a
psychologist; and Karl Holzinger (1893–1954), a statistician.37 After a strenuous
search they identified and studied nineteen pairs of identical twins who had been
reared in separate households, although with varying degrees of contact with
each other. Among the study’s most prominent results, the correlation of these
twin pairs’ intelligence test scores turned out to be .67—strongly positive, but far
from absolute. Because the twins’ degree of separation and random placement
had been less than perfect, their environments were not perfectly independent,
so the correlation undoubtedly inflated the heritability estimate to some degree.
The study’s main interest and charm, however, lay not in its statistical results
but in its detailed case studies, complete with photographs, of all nineteen pairs.
“Ed” and “Fred” were one pair who “discovered” each other after a friend of Fred’s
spotted Ed in a distant city from his home and mistook him for his friend. Acting
on this hint, and with distant childhood memories of having a twin brother, the
two got together and subsequently volunteered to be part of the study. They had
been born in a New England town and adopted by different local families of sim-
ilar social status but who did not socialize with each other. For a short time they
attended the same school before both families moved away to different states. On
rediscovering each other in early adulthood, they found they had led very simi-
lar academic, occupational, and social lives—both even having a pet dog named
Trixie. When tested for intelligence, their IQs were within a point of each other.
Another interesting but quite contrasting case was that of “Reece” and “James,”
who were adopted shortly after their births by distinctly different branches of
their biological parents’ families. One of them lived in an impoverished, iso-
lated mountain community and did not communicate with the other, who was
raised in a solidly middle-class, small-town family. James,

in the mountaineer family, grew up to have a poor academic
record, little occupational success, and several scrapes with
the law. Reece fared much better in all areas, and as a young
adult had an IQ some 20 points higher than that of his quite
similar looking identical twin (Figure 7.9).
Examination of all nineteen case histories demonstrated
that those twin pairs who had been placed in the most ob-
viously dissimilar environments, such as Reece and James,
showed the largest differences in their adult IQs. Here was
Figure 7.9 Separated twins: James (left) and clear evidence for an environmental effect of some sort,
Reece at age 26.
complementing or modifying the equally clear evidence
for a genetic effect. The authors summarized their results by saying that anyone
who had hoped their project would provide a “definitive solution of the general
nature-nurture problem . . . in terms of a simple formula, [was] destined to be
rather disillusioned. . . . We feel in sympathy [with the] dictum that what heredity
can do environment can also do.”38
This conclusion was generally supported by two other well-conceived separated
twin studies conducted in the early 1960s, one in the UK and the other in Denmark,
with larger numbers of cases and more sophisticated test measures. Their results
were similar to those of the Chicago group: intelligence test correlations in the .60s
and .70s but with few cases of complete twin separation and a positive association
between the degree of separation and difference in the twins’ IQs.39 For a time in
the late 1960s, however, this consensus seemed to be overturned by results reported
in publications by one of England’s most famous psychologists.
The Burt and Jensen Affairs

Cyril Burt (1883–1971) was the son of a country doctor whose patients had in-
cluded the aging Galton. Burt openly regarded Galton as his intellectual hero and
role model as he became Britain’s first professional educational psychologist. A
strong supporter of the new intelligence testing methods developed in France
by Binet and his successors (see Chapter 13), Burt successfully promoted a new
system in which English schoolchildren were rigorously tested at age 11 and then
“streamed” into schools geared toward either eventual university admission or
the ordinary workforce. As a gifted mathematician he also contributed signifi-
cantly to statistical theory, and shortly before his retirement from University
College London, he was knighted.
During his retirement in the 1950s and 1960s, Burt continued to publish
often. He produced several theoretical and statistical papers echoing Galton by
emphasizing the influence of heredity in determining intelligence. Several of

these papers mentioned in passing that, with the assistance of a former student
and associate he was amassing a growing sample of separated identical twins
whose intelligence test scores were correlating in the high .70s. He provided few
details, however, and although his correlations were at the high end of those in
the better established studies, they did not seem particularly significant.
This changed abruptly in 1966 when the 83-year-old retiree published an arti-
cle claiming not only that his sample had grown to fifty-three pairs and thus was
the largest yet to be studied, but also that his twins had been far more completely
and adequately separated at very early ages than anyone else’s.40 Although he
provided no individual case details, Burt included a table indicating his twins had
been placed into a full range of socioeconomic environments, in a completely
random way. No other twin study had come close to meeting such scientifi-
cally ideal placement criteria, so his reported heritability correlations clustering
around .8 seemed to provide strong evidence that nature overwhelmingly out-
weighed nurture in producing the differences in test scores.
Burt’s article particularly impressed the American educational psychologist
Arthur Jensen (1923–2012). During the late 1960s, Jensen was studying the
effectiveness of Operation Head Start, a series of federally funded compensatory
education programs for inner-city children from poor environments. These were
intended to enrich their cultural and educational experiences, thereby helping
to raise their intelligence and academic achievement test scores. In a long arti-
cle entitled “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Jensen
summarized his findings in a blunt opening sentence: “Compensatory education
has been tried and apparently it has failed.”41 The hoped-for intelligence test
gains had been minimal to nonexistent.
In interpreting this result Jensen leaned heavily on Burt, whom he had met
and would later describe as “a born nobleman” who as a scientist had assembled
“larger, more representative [twin] samples than any other investigator.”42 Jensen
deemed Burt’s recently reported findings as essential for intelligence researchers,
providing “the most satisfactory attempt” to estimate the relative effects of na-
ture versus nurture on test scores.43 And since these findings suggested a vastly
more important influence of heredity than environment, Jensen concluded the
urban children failed to improve primarily because they were genetically unfit
to benefit from the programs. Those who continued to argue that nature was not
more powerful than nurture, he declared, were engaging in “ostrich-like denial.”44
Even more provocatively, Jensen noted the majority of the Head Start children
were African Americans, and on the average, African American IQ scores lagged
behind those of white Americans. Most investigators emphasized the large
environmental and socioeconomic differences between the populations when

discussing these results, but Jensen, using the racial terminology current at the
time, now declared that it was “a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors
are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference.”45
Jensen’s statement triggered an immediate outcry, and a great deal of debate
that generated more heat than light. Supporters of nurture were disturbed by
the likelihood that Jensen’s argument would weaken efforts to improve impover-
ished environments, but they initially flailed when trying to dispute the evidence
given by the distinguished and celebrated Sir Cyril Burt. However, in the early
1970s Leon Kamin (b. 1927), an experimental psychologist at Princeton Univer-
sity with little previous interest in intelligence testing, was asked by his students
if he would look into the scientific literature behind the controversy. An expert in
the statistical analysis of complex data, he started by reading Burt’s 1966 article
and was immediately suspicious. The reported results were “so incredibly patly
perfect and beyond . . . challenge, that I just couldn’t believe it.” In addition, al-
though the reported results were clean, the method was not clearly described: “He
didn’t even name the IQ test used, no case histories, no information about the sex
composition of the sample, or the times they were tested.”46
Kamin then began to systematically examine all of Burt’s papers referring to
separated twins dating back to the 1940s, and noted that certain crucial details
had never been adequately reported. The highest correlations were consistently
based on what Burt called “adjusted assessments” of unnamed intelligence tests.
In sum, none of the essential methodological information included in all other
separated twin studies had been provided by Burt. Even more suspiciously, many
of Burt’s reported correlations had remained identical to the third decimal point,
even as his supposed sample size was increasing from twenty-one to fifty-three
over the years. Although one would expect approximate similarity, such exact
equality over changing sample makeup was extraordinarily improbable.
Kamin announced his findings in a series of well-publicized lectures in the
early 1970s. In his 1974 book The Science and Politics of I.Q., after fully describing
Burt’s twin studies he concluded: “The numbers left behind by Professor Burt are
simply not worth our current scientific attention. We pass on now to more serious
work.”47 He then described the earlier Chicago and other separated twin studies,
praising the diligence of the researchers, but emphasizing the limitations and
ambiguities noted above. Closely examining individual case reports, Kamin saw
clear evidence that those twins who had been most definitively separated and
placed in contrasting environments, like James and Reece, showed the largest
and most significant differences in IQ scores. This was undisputable evidence,
he argued, for a strong environmental effect. He showed that in some of the cases
in which the twins had reported the most amazing coincidences and similarities
(having dogs of the same breed with the same names, for example), their separa-
tion had not been as complete as originally reported. This suggested that a note
of caution is in order when interpreting coincidences of this type, as humorously
portrayed in the cartoon in Figure 7.10.
In a strategy that may have weakened the long-term acceptance of his case,
Kamin subjected the studies to an exacting analysis, pointing out every single
factor that might possibly have gone wrong. He concluded “there is no reason
to reject the hypothesis that I.Q. is simply not heritable” (emphasis added).48
Kamin did not say here that intelligence was not partly hereditary, or even that
he believed it wasn’t. But he did assert that it could not be absolutely confirmed
by the available evidence. His mention of the remote possibility of zero heritabil-
ity, however, left him open to the accusation by nature proponents that he was a
radical extremist not to be taken seriously.
Figure 7.10 Separated at birth, the Mallifert twins meet accidentally.

Jensen, in the meantime, had read a copy of Kamin’s early lecture and was
stimulated to undertake his own analysis of Burt’s complete work. In an article
published just before Kamin’s book came out, he conceded that Burt’s reported
correlations “strain the laws of chance,” “can only mean error,” and “are useless
for hypothesis testing.”49 Jensen’s paper mentioned Kamin’s lecture in a footnote,
but since it appeared in print shortly before Kamin’s book, it technically was the
first published discrediting of Burt.
In substantial scientific terms the Burt controversy ended here, and the pre-
vious status quo was restored. Burt had died in 1971 and could not respond to
his critics, but the voluminous papers he left behind included not a scrap of data
about twins, or any evidence of collaboration or meetings with the former student
who had purportedly helped him. Whether his twin study had been a deliberate
fraud, or the result of wishful thinking by an aging Galtonian, or the impression-
istic recollection of imprecisely kept and subsequently lost records—no one could
take it seriously scientifically, and it is no longer mentioned by behavior geneti-
cists except as a footnoted historical aberration.
Jensen followed this pattern in his 1998 book, The g Factor, where his footnote
about Burt ungenerously omitted all mention of Kamin and credited himself as
the first to bring the Burt data into question. He continued to argue the case for
nature, however, and added that including Burt’s data in the pool of firmly estab-
lished studies “would make little difference” to the calculated average of twin
correlations.50 He significantly neglected to mention that what had made Burt’s
study exceptional, and what gave the strongest apparent support for nature over
nurture, was not the magnitude of its correlations, but the fact that its reported
sample had been placed more randomly and in a more scientifically ideal range
of foster homes than those in any other study.
The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart

The largest and most impressive post-Burt study of separated twins is the
Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, or MISTRA, conducted at the Univer-
sity of Minnesota by Thomas Bouchard and numerous colleagues from several
different disciplines. Starting in 1979 with a single case study, over the next twenty
years the group identified and closely studied a total of eighty-one monozygotic
(identical) and fifty-six dizygotic (fraternal) twin pairs who had been reared in
separate families. All 137 case studies have not yet been published in full, and
some scholars will withhold final judgment until they are. There is no doubt that
they do exist and will at some point be made available to scholars, however, and
the extensive summary results that have been published hold considerable interest.
An extended summary and discussion of the major results appears in Nancy
Segal’s 2012 book, Born Together—Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin
08_POP_28354_ch07_242-277.indd 272 18/10/16 3:52 PM

Study.51 Segal describes several fascinating case studies and group comparisons
showing that the separated fraternal pairs showed significantly less similarity
to each other than the identical pairs. The medical, dental, and other health
histories of the monozygotic twins were strikingly similar despite their different
upbringings. On several quantitatively measured personality traits, the heritabil-
ity correlations reached the low .80s—slightly higher than those for a series of dif-
ferent measures of cognitive ability and intelligence. Segal’s summary statement
about the intelligence results deserves quotation in full:
Approximately 70 percent of the population variance in intelligence in

middle-class, industrialized societies could be linked to genetic factors
[emphasis in original]. This finding would not apply to impoverished or
underprivileged individuals for whom severe conditions may not support
normal development. None of our reared-apart twins came from such ad-
verse backgrounds. This finding also did not imply that intelligence could
not be enhanced by educational or remedial interventions.52
Segal further condemns the “misuse” of the MISTRA findings by a Louisiana poli-
tician who posted them in support of a genetic explanation for racial differences in
intelligence, declaring that such differences “were never addressed” by their research.53
The Minnesota researchers’ conclusion that nature contributes more than nur-
ture to intelligence variability in middle-class, industrialized societies closely echoes
Galton’s previously quoted statement from the end of his own much earlier twin
study: namely, that nature prevails over nurture “when the differences in nurture do
not exceed what is commonly to be found among persons of the same rank in soci-
ety and in the same country.”54 Clearly, if the complete range of environments had
been represented in the MISTRA sample, including a proportionate number of those
poverty stricken and culturally disadvantaged households that are common in poor
urban and rural areas, the heritability estimate would have been substantially lower.
***
From our historical account we can conclude that decisions about what rela-
tive weight to assign to nature versus nurture actually depend on the reference
group one is interested in. If on the one hand, like Galton, one is primarily inter-
ested in selecting from the very top level of high-performing individuals who
have received superior education and training, then genetic background will as-
sume substantial importance. On the other hand, if one’s interest is in society as
a whole, including its least privileged members, then there is ample room for
environmental and educational improvements to help level the playing field.
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
Galton introduced several important concepts about the by intelligence tests and encouraged to intermarry and
nature and measurement of intellectual ability that behave many children. From Galton’s time to today, the whole
came the focus of later research and applications in psy- issue of intelligence testing has been inextricably linked
chology. He theorized that such ability must be related to with genetics, eugenics, and the nature-nurture debate,
the strength, efficiency, and size of the brain and nervous sometimes with quite unfortunate consequences.
system. His anthropometric tests measured head size, re- The versatile Galton also made notable contributions to
action time, and several kinds of sensory discrimination, statistical analysis, including the notions of scatter plots, re-
which he felt would reflect individual variations in intel- gression toward the mean, regression lines, and coefficients
lectual ability. Although this underlying theory proved in- of correlation to visually and mathematically convey the
correct, these measures were the first serious attempt to strength of association between variables. These innovations
develop what became known as intelligence tests. enabled Galton’s follower Pearson to develop a formula for
After reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Galton computing correlation coefficients that extended their range
concluded humans must be constantly evolving like other to cover negative relationships. Known as Pearson’s r, it has
species, and that the human variations most likely to influ- become one of the most widely used of all statistical tools in
ence future evolution and development were intellectual psychological, biological, and sociological research.
and psychological. To support his belief in the innate na- Following Galton’s work, later researchers studied the
ture of these qualities, he cited the normal distribution of similarities and differences between pairs of separated
intellectual attributes in the population, the tendency for identical twins, to determine the heritability of intelligence
intellectual superiority to run in families, and the greater and other psychological characteristics. Heritability is a
similarities between biological than adoptive relatives. He statistical measure of genetically determined variability of
pioneered the twin study method and other techniques to a characteristic within a population, and except for a single
assess the relative impact of genetics and environmental study ultimately dismissed as fatally flawed, all the rep-
factors that in more refined forms became foundations for utable investigations were restricted to twins raised in
the field of behavior genetics. middle-class environments. Those studies yielded heri-
Although Galton recognized the existence of envi- tability estimates for intelligence of about 70 percent, a
ronmental factors and popularized the phrase “nature figure that would have been much lower had the samples
and nurture” to denote the interactions of heredity and included a wider range of environments. The fact that
environment, he largely disregarded the importance of separated but genetically identical twins show some signifi-
nonhereditary influences. Convinced of the supreme im- cant differences whose sizes are related to the degree of
portance of heredity, he envisaged a program of eugenics differences in their adoptive environments is evidence for
in which the most gifted young people would be identified the power of nurture in interaction with nature.
Key Pioneers
Francis Galton, p. 244 Karl Pearson, p. 262 Cyril Burt, p. 268
Adolphe Quetelet, p. 251 Horatio Newman, p. 267 Arthur Jensen, p. 269
Alphonse de Candolle, Frank N. Freeman, p. 267 Leon Kamin, p. 270
p. 254 Karl Holzinger, p. 267
Chapter Review 275
Key Terms
Anthropometric Laboratory, p. 244 scatter plot, p. 260
psychology of individual differences, regression toward the mean, p. 261
p. 245 regression line, p. 261
normal distribution, p. 251 coefficient of correlation, p. 262
self-questionnaire method, p. 255 Pearson’s r, p. 262
nature and nurture, p. 256 mental imagery, p. 263
fraternal (dizygotic) twins, p. 257 word-association technique, p. 263
identical (monozygotic) twins, p. 257 heritability, p. 265
twin study method, p. 258 separated twin study, p. 266
eugenics, p. 258 Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart
intelligence test, p. 259 (MISTRA), p. 272
statistical correlation, p. 260

1. Even though most scientists would concede that both environment and heredity influ-
ence intellectual ability, it is clear that important social consequences arise out of each
side of the nature-nurture debate. Describe the social implications of the extreme hered-
itarian view and the extreme environmentalist view of human intelligence.
2. Galton made several contributions unrelated to intelligence testing that were taken up
in psychology. Describe these contributions and their significance.
3. Describe some of the ways in which Galton’s personal experiences, life situation, and
cultural-historical context influenced his views on intelligence.
4. Galton proposed the selective breeding of positive characteristics, such as high intel-
ligence, to improve the human race. Our knowledge of genetics is now vastly greater
than in Galton’s time. Can you think of any contemporary practices that may be broadly
conceived of as eugenic?
5. Citing examples from the chapter, discuss the value of twin studies to an understanding
of the relationship between nature and nurture. Why must caution be exercised in inter-
preting the results of twin studies conducted so far?
Suggested Resources
Two websites provide invaluable resources for anyone wishing to study Galton further.
Thanks to editor Gavan Tredoux, facsimilies of most of Galton’s publications are available
online at www.galton.org. The Wellcome Library’s digitized archives of the “Makers of
Modern Genetics” presents superb access to Galton’s unpublished papers, including much
of his correspondence and fascinating documents dating from his early life. Go to:
http://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/makers-of-modern-genetics/
digitised-archives/francis-galton/#?asi=0&ai=129&z=0%2C-0.2155%2C1%2C1.2215.
Hardcopy editions of Galton’s works include Hereditary Genius (Gloucester, MA: Peter
Smith, 1972) and English Men of Science (London: Frank Cass, 1974). Many of his important
shorter works, including his studies of twins, anthropometric tests, association, and mental
imagery, are reprinted in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (New York:
Dutton, 1907). Galton’s highly readable autobiography is Memories of My Life (London:
Methuen, 1908); for more on his life and work, see D. W. Forrest, Francis Galton: The Life
and Work of a Victorian Genius (London: Elek, 1974), and Nicholas W. Gillham, A Life of
Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001). Further discussion of Galton and his influence, including an account
of twin studies and controversies, is found in Raymond E. Fancher, The Intelligence Men:
Makers of the IQ Controversy (New York: Norton, 1985).
CHAPTER 8
American Pioneers: James, Hall,
Calkins, and Thorndike
James’s Early Life

James’s Later Career
Hall: Institution Building and Child Studies
Calkins: Associative Learning and Self-Psychology
Thorndike: Intelligence, Learning, and Education
T he well-attended Third International Congress of Psychology, held in

Munich in 1896, signified that psychology had fully arrived on the world
scene as a respectable scientific and academic discipline. Strangely, however,
the two men who had been most responsible for the new science’s growth,
and had been informally proclaimed the “psychological popes” of the old and
the new worlds, stayed away from the conference.1 The old-world pioneer was
Wilhelm Wundt (see Chapter 5) and his new-world American counterpart was
the Harvard professor William James. James had taught the first American
university courses on the new scientific psychology, and in 1890 had vibrantly
summarized the field in an acclaimed textbook, The Principles of Psychology.
Less of a program builder but more of a popular communicator than Wundt,
James helped create an intellectual climate in America highly receptive to the
new science. Thanks largely to the efforts of Wundt and James in their home
countries, Germany and the United States led the world in the numbers of estab-
lished psychologists and psychological laboratories.
279
280 8 | American Pioneers: James, Hall, Calkins, and Thorndike
Ironically, the two pioneers did not value each other’s work very highly. Wundt
found little new or original in James, except for a style that he judged overly
personal and informal. “It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology,”
he grumbled about James’s Principles.2 Part of his dissatisfaction doubtlessly
arose from James’s treatment of his own work, for after praising the innova-
tive features of Wundtian experimental psychology, the American had added
acidly that it “could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be
bored. . . . There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and
chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry.”3
In a private letter to a friend, James wrote even more cuttingly:
Wundt aims at being a sort of Napoleon of the intellectual world. Unfortu-

nately he will never have a Waterloo, for he is a Napoleon without genius
and with no central idea which, if defeated, brings down the whole fabric in
ruin. When his critics make mincemeat of some one of his views by their
criticism, he is meanwhile writing a book on an entirely different subject.
Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls; there is no vital center in
his mental medulla oblongata, so that you can’t kill him all at once.4
Just possibly, a touch of envy colored James’s outburst about Wundt’s great
literary productivity. A slow writer himself, he had labored for twelve years on
Principles of Psychology.
Obviously, a vast difference in personality style separated the mercurial James
from the professorial Wundt, thereby explaining much of their antagonism. But
their varying temperaments also correlated with a difference in the substance
of the psychology each promoted. And for all of their individuality, Wundt and
James were both broadly representative of the diverse intellectual climates of
their respective countries. The psychology that James fostered, and that flour-
ished in America after him among his students and successors, had a character
quite distinct from its continental counterpart. More personal and focused on the
individual, and more practical than theoretical in its goals, the discipline of psy-
chology in America still retains much of this distinctive character today.
JAMES’S EARLY LIFE

William James (1842–1910) was born in New York City, the eldest child in a
family made very wealthy through a shrewd investment in the building of the
Erie Canal. During his boyhood and adolescence, William and his family moved
frequently throughout America and Europe, as his unconventional father sought,
but never found, the ideal place for bringing up his five children.
William’s father, Henry James Sr., had led a materially privileged but spiritu-
ally troubled life. After attending Princeton Theological Seminary for two years,
he’d felt oppressed by the stern religious doctrines and dropped out. Despite a
substantial inheritance, he had worried about his lack of a meaningful vocation,
especially during the years following his marriage to Mary Walsh in 1840. His life
reached a dramatic crisis—one that would later be echoed by his eldest son—in
1844. The father vividly remembered his own crisis as follows:
One day, . . . having eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the

table after the family had disappeared, idly gazing at the embers in the
grate, thinking of nothing, and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a
good digestion, when suddenly—in a lightning flash, as it were—fear came
upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. . . . The thing
had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck; that is, reduced from
a state of vigorous, joyful manhood to one of the most helpless infancy.5
Doctors could do nothing to help, and for two years Henry James Sr. remained
prone to anxiety attacks and a constant sense that the foundations of his exis-
tence had been pulled out from under him. Then he learned that the Swedish
mystical philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg had written about conditions like his,
calling them “vastations.” The elder James now read everything he could find by
or about Swedenborg, and somehow this pursuit brought him the assurance he
needed to recover from his breakdown. Moreover, he at last found his vocation
and spent the rest of his life trying to communicate Swedenborgian philosophy
to others in rather obscure lectures and books.*
Now he developed another consuming interest: the education of his children.
William had been followed in turn by Henry Jr. (the future great novelist), Garth
Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice. Determined that they should have the best
possible education, Henry Sr. could never quite decide what that was. Conse-
quently, he led them on an educational odyssey from private school to private
tutor, from one continent to another and back again. Nothing ever worked out
quite as he hoped. Throughout these numerous transitions, only the stimulating
intellectual atmosphere of the James home remained an educational constant.
Everyone was encouraged to engage in active discussion, to express opinions
freely, and to defend them against lively familial opposition. Guests observed
*His dense literary style hindered sales of his books and became something of an open joke
among family and friends. Following publication of his book The Secret of Swedenborg, a friend
quipped that he had not only found the secret, but also kept it.
with amusement that the children, in the heat of dinner-table discussion, would
sometimes leave their seats to make dramatic gestures or to invoke humorous
curses on their father, such as that “his mashed potatoes might always have
lumps in them.”6
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this vagabond and intellectually boisterous lifestyle
produced mixed effects. All five children became very worldly and proficient in
several languages, and the two oldest boys went on to become famous intellectual
figures. The two younger sons seem to have felt intimidated and overshadowed
by their elders, however, and despite early promise they grew up prone to neu-
rotic illness and alcoholism. Alice, the youngest child and only daughter, suffered
worst of all. Although extremely gifted, she was denied educational opportunity
because she was female. And partly because so many of her male contemporar-
ies were killed in the Civil War, she was unable to do what her Victorian father
thought women ought to do: marry and raise a family of her own. She grew up
to become a chronic invalid, plagued by bouts of hysterical incapacitation and
breakdowns. She produced a fascinating diary before her early death from cancer
at age 43, and was unquestionably a prime victim of the restrictive gender atti-
tudes of her time.
Even the ultimately famous oldest sons had problems. Henry Jr., born just fifteen
months after William, was old enough to be a companion but young enough to feel
perpetually overshadowed. Unable to match the adventurous antics and aggres-
sive wit of his brother, he retreated into a world of books and literature. William
himself, the oldest and thus the prime subject of his father’s educational experi-
ments, was always “out front” and under constantly shifting paternal pressure. He
wound up having just as much difficulty as his father in finding a vocation.
As a teenager, William showed considerable talent and inclination for draw-
ing and art—activities his father did not see developing into a suitable profes-
sion. Exerting pressure to discourage his son’s artistic interests, he moved the
family away from William’s art teacher and hinted he might even commit sui-
cide if his son persisted in an artistic direction. Finally in 1861, William was sent
to Harvard University to study chemistry—another field in which he had shown
some interest and talent. But while Henry Sr. saw science as preferable to art
as a career for his son, he also worried that it would lead William to adopt a
strict materialism and lose sight of the spiritual values he himself found so im-
portant. Unsurprisingly, William absorbed much of his father’s ambivalence and
indecision, ultimately devoting much of his own scholarly attention to spiritual-
ity and religious experience.
Once at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, William quickly shifted his
interest from chemistry to physiology, a science just then making great strides
under the mechanistic doctrines of scientists such as Müller, Helmholtz, and
du Bois-Reymond. Soon afterward, the James family fortune

showed its first signs of running out, and William was forced
to consider ways of eventually earning a living. In 1864 he
enrolled in Harvard’s Medical School.
A year later he interrupted his medical studies to go
on a specimen-hunting expedition to the Amazon led by
Louis Agassiz, the respected Harvard biologist and Amer-
ica’s most outspoken critic of Darwin’s recently published
The Origin of Species (Figure 8.1). James responded to the
southward sea journey with seasickness to rival Darwin’s on
the Beagle. He wrote his family, “No one has a right to write
about the ‘nature of Evil,’ or to have any opinion about evil,
who has not been at sea.”7 His job in Brazil—the collecting
and crating of jellyfish—failed to cheer him up before he
came down with smallpox. Deciding he was not cut out to be
a field biologist, he returned home to resume medical study.
Now he suffered from a residual eye weakness from small-
pox that made it difficult to read, and a lower-back condition
that made it painful to stand. Worse still, he felt oppressed
by his family, who had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Figure 8.1 Young William James in Brazil.
and insisted he live with them. Privately he contemplated
suicide, but in April 1867 he succeeded in convincing his father that he should go
to Germany—for both its mineral spring baths for his back and the opportunity to
perfect his familiarity with scientific German.
James stayed in Germany for a year and a half, where his eyes improved more
than his back and enabled him to meet at least his second goal. He read extensively
in the German physiological literature, attended lectures by du Bois-Reymond,
and became even more impressed by the explanatory power of the new mecha-
nistic physiology. He also read a long article by a then little-known Heidelberg
physiologist named Wilhelm Wundt, on “Recent Advances in the Field of Physi-
ological Psychology.” As noted in Chapter 5, this reading led him to report enthu-
siastically to a friend:
It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to
be a science—some measurements have already been made in the region
lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of
consciousness. . . . I am going to study what is already known, and perhaps
may be able to do some work at it. Helmholtz and a man named Wundt at
Heidelberg are working at it, and I hope I live through this winter to go to
them in the summer.8
James’s weak back prevented travel to Heidelberg, so both his first meeting
with Wundt and his personal antagonism toward him were postponed for sev-
eral years. He returned home and went through the motions of completing his
medical degree, outwardly full of enthusiasm but inwardly in despair. The new
German mechanistic physiology had powerfully impressed him intellectually,
but it discouraged him spiritually with its deterministic philosophical implica-
tions. The death of a favorite cousin further saddened him, and in the spring of
1870 he suffered an existential crisis that he later described as follows:
I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some

article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warn-
ing, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence.
Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient
whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin,
who used to sit all day on one of the benches, . . . moving nothing but his
black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear en-
tered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt,
potentially. . . .There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my
own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something
hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of
quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether.9
This crisis remarkably resembled his father’s “vastation” of twenty-six years

earlier. Like Henry Sr., William had been chronically worried about finding a
vocation, and felt oppressed by deterministic doctrines. And like his father, his
attitude was instantaneously transformed by a sudden awareness of “that pit of
insecurity beneath the surface of life” that left him feeling utterly exhausted and
unable to work.
Again like his father, William experienced a gradual recovery and found a new
purpose in life, partly through the chance exposure to some philosophical writ-
ings. In 1870, he read an essay on free will—precisely the agency that seemed
to be denied by mechanistic physiology—by the French philosopher Charles
Renouvier (1815–1903). The next day he confided in his diary:
I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I . . . see no reason why [Renou-
vier’s] definition of free will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose
to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion.
At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illu-
sion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. . . . Hitherto, when
I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, . . . suicide
seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step
further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my
individual reality and creative power.10
While James’s decision to believe in free will occurred suddenly, a more grad-
ual element in his recovery came from reading the British philosopher and psy-
chologist Alexander Bain (1818–1903) on the subject of habit. In his 1859 book
The Emotions and the Will, Bain had stressed the importance of the voluntary
repetition of morally desirable actions if they are to become habitual and auto-
matic.11 Only after many repetitions, he argued, do permanent neural connections
become established between the sensory impressions created by a given situa-
tion and a particular desirable response to it. Therefore, desirable actions such
as getting out of bed early in the morning may be difficult to perform at first, but
after they have been repeated many times they become permanently impressed
into the nervous system, and automatic. Bain emphasized the moral danger of
allowing exceptions to occur while a habit is being formed, as they could quickly
undo any progress made towards acquiring it. Combining the advice of Renou-
vier and Bain, James tried to will himself to think more optimistic thoughts. He
found that with repetition, the initially difficult reactions did become habitual.
His trial adoption of a belief in free will lasted not just to the end of the year, but
to the end of his life. In a curious way, by adopting this most unmechanistic of
beliefs he freed himself of his intellectual inhibitions. This freedom allowed him
to explore the implications of the new mechanistic physiology and psychology
more calmly and thoroughly than before.
James found he could entertain mechanistic ideas and take them seriously
scientifically, without fully accepting them personally. In his personal life it was
useful to think and behave as if he had free will, while as a scientist it was useful
to accept mechanistic determinism. Both views were essentially articles of faith,
incapable of absolute proof or disproof. In the absence of any absolute criterion
for judging their “truth,” or validity, James decided to evaluate ideas according
to their utility, or usefulness, within specified and limited contexts. By that logic,
since free will seemed a useful concept in personal life, he would accept it as
“true” there; determinism, useful scientifically, could be equally “true” when he
functioned as a scientist. The evaluation of ideas according to their usefulness in
varying situations eventually became a hallmark of James’s general philosophy,
which he later called pragmatism.
In the immediate aftermath of his crisis, however, James was still far from ad-
vancing a coherent philosophy. Although he had completed his medical training
and had read widely in the new physiological and psychological sciences, he had
never held a real job or completed a major independent project. Nearing 30 years
of age, he still lived with his parents and remained dependent on them.
At last in 1872 he received a crucial vocational opportunity when Harvard’s
president, Charles Eliot, a Cambridge neighbor, invited him to teach half of a
newly instituted physiology course. After much deliberation he accepted and did
well enough to be asked to take over the entire course. He was on his way to
becoming one of Harvard’s most outstanding and legendary teachers.
James the Teacher

An enthusiastic communicator and educator, James treated his students as
intellectual equals engaged in a common quest for knowledge. Unlike many of
his authoritarian colleagues, James regularly walked to and from class with his
students, constantly involved in animated conversation. Noting his casual and
informal manner, one visitor to his class thought him more like a sportsman than
a professor.
Genuinely interested in his students’ reactions to his classes, James solic-
ited their written course evaluations many years before that became a common
practice. Perhaps his most celebrated teaching episode involved the soon-to-be
famous writer Gertrude Stein, one of his best students while a Radcliffe under-
graduate. (Harvard College did not admit women.) After looking at James’s final
exam questions, she wrote, “Dear Professor James, I am sorry but really I do not
feel like an examination paper in philosophy today” and left the exam room.
James responded, “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel; I often
feel like that myself” and awarded her the highest mark in the class.12 (Stein’s ploy
is not recommended for students less secure in their professor’s esteem than she
obviously was.)
James clearly succeeded as a teacher because of his personalized and lively
approach to subject matter. Not content with presenting abstract ideas, he always
tried to make the material relevant to daily life. Having found philosophical and
psychological ideas useful in resolving his own problems, he tried to make them
seem personally relevant to his students, too.
James regularly changed the subject matter of his courses as his own interests
changed, teaching himself first and then transmitting the new information to his
students. Initially hired to teach physiology and anatomy, he soon altered his
course’s title to “The Relations between Physiology and Psychology.” Between
1878 and 1890, as he worked on his book The Principles of Psychology, he dropped
traditional physiology altogether to focus exclusively on psychology. And as he
became increasingly involved with philosophy after 1890, psychology in turn
gradually disappeared from his course offerings. But while James’s tenure as a
“psychologist” was temporary and brief, it was highly influential. In his lectures,
articles, and textbooks—particularly The Principles of Psychology—he made the
new science come alive. Wundt had brought psychology to the university for spe-
cialists; James made it a living subject for anyone who chose to read or listen
to him.
The Principles of Psychology

In 1878, just as James began to teach courses exclusively devoted to psychology,
he contracted with the publisher Henry Holt to write a comprehensive textbook
of the field. Already familiar with most of the German, French, and English litera-
ture on the subject, he confidently promised to finish it in two years. But by 1880
he had scarcely begun, and the project began to seem like a dark cloud destined
to hover over him indefinitely. Over the next several years he managed to write
several journal and magazine articles on psychological subjects, and as the 1880s
ended he realized he could shape these into chapters of his textbook. At last, in
January 1890, he sent Holt the first 350 pages of manuscript, with assurance that
the remaining 1,400 pages would soon follow. He thought Holt might wish to
begin setting it in type immediately and seemed surprised when the publisher
decided to wait for the rest before proceeding! But this time James was true to
his word and actually completed the long manuscript within the next few months.
By now thoroughly sick of the project, which he characterized to his publisher
as “the enormous rat which . . . ten years gestation has brought forth,” James
showed that he could treat himself and his own work with the same caustic
disdain he had directed at Wundt:
No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book. No subject
is worth being treated of in 1000 pages! Had I ten years more, I could re-
write it in 500; but as it stands it is this or nothing—a loathsome, distended,
tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st,
that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is
an incapable.13
Two aspects of this self-critique were partly correct: the book was huge, and
it did reveal psychology as unsystematic and incomplete. But it also revealed
James as a master of English prose rather than “an incapable,” and once pub-
lished it quickly became the leading psychology text in English. The book suc-
ceeded for the same reasons his teaching succeeded: it emphasized the personal
usefulness of psychological ideas, expressed in a natural and honest style.
James’s great text resists easy summarization. In twenty-eight chapters and

nearly 1,400 pages, it touched on all the major topics in the scientific discipline
of psychology at that time, including brain function, habit, the stream of thought,
the self, attention, association, memory, sensation, imagination, perception, in-
stinct, the emotions, will, and hypnotism. Here we’ll consider a few of these sub-
jects, to give the flavor of James’s approach.
The Stream of Consciousness

James’s most famous psychological metaphor occurs in a chapter devoted to the
stream of consciousness, in which he argues that the contents of human con-
sciousness are more like a stream than a collection of discrete elements or ideas—a
stream of thought. As we noted in Chapter 1, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus had
observed that one can never step into the same river twice, for its fluid contents
change constantly even while its banks and course remain much the same. Sim-
ilarly, James believed, one can never have exactly the same sensation, idea, or
other experience twice. Every new experience is inevitably molded and framed
by all the old experiences that have gone before, and because this background
constantly changes and expands, no two experiences can ever be precisely alike.
Further, James believed that conscious thoughts and a stream share the qual-
ity of continuousness. Even when gaps occur in consciousness, brought on by
anesthesia, epileptic fits, or sleep, a subjective sense of continuity is maintained.
The remembered experiences immediately before and after the periods of uncon-
sciousness—“the broken edges of sentient life,” as James put it—seem to
meet and merge over the gap, much as the feelings of space of the opposite
margins of the “blind spot” meet and merge over that objective interruption
to the sensitiveness of the eye. Such consciousness as this, whatever it be
for the onlooking psychologist, is for itself unbroken. It feels unbroken.14
James warned that because of its streamlike quality, it’s foolish to try to
analyze thinking introspectively in terms of static elements, such as particular
sensations or feelings. An actual thought can never be “frozen” and studied ana-
lytically without doing damage to its essential nature:
Let anyone try to cut a thought across the middle and get a look at its sec-
tion, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation . . . is. The
rush of the thought is always so headlong that it almost always brings us
up at the conclusion before we can arrest it. Introspective analysis is in fact
like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas
quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.15
James privately referred to psychologists such as Titchener (see Chapter 5),

who persisted in trying to break consciousness down into static elements, as “bar-
barians.” For James, psychology entailed the study of dynamic and constantly
changing conscious processes.
Habit
In his famous chapter on the subject of habit, James stressed the enormously
important influence of habitual responses for the maintenance of society:
Habit is . . . the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conser-

vative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance,
and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.
It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being
deserted by those brought up to tread therein. . . . It dooms us all to fight out
the battle of life upon the lines of nurture or our early choice, and to make
the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we
are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.16
After emphasizing the power and inevitability of human habits, James

characteristically proceeded to draw a lesson. Echoing the ideas of Bain that
had so influenced his own life, he noted that the laws of habit formation are
impartial, capable of producing either morally good or bad actions. And once
a good or bad habit has begun to be established, it is difficult to reverse the
course:
Every smallest stroke of virtue or vice leaves its never so little scar. The
drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses himself for every fresh
dereliction by saying, “I won’t count this time!” Well! he may not count it,
and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted up none the
less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it,
registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next tempta-
tion comes.17
James believed his university student audience still had just enough youthful
flexibility left to counteract old bad habits and foster new good ones. He there-
fore urged them to decide on some desirable behavior, and then practice it de-
liberately and repeatedly. Doing so would enhance their chances for success in
both life and career. “If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he
may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on
waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his
generation.”18 Of course, this advice was the prescription James himself had fol-
lowed in dealing with his personal crisis of 1870, when he willed himself to think
undeterministic, free, and cheerful thoughts.
Emotion
James’s chapter on emotion also derived directly from his own crisis and its res-
olution, and it introduced one of his few original theoretical contributions to psy-
chology. According to James, an emotion is actually the consequence rather than
the cause of the physiological effects associated with its expression; this was a
reversal of the common view:
Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry, and weep; we meet a
bear, are frightened, and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry, and strike.
The hypothesis here to be defended says this order of sequence is incorrect,
that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the
bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more
rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we
strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble
because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.19
The Danish physiologist Carl Lange (1834–1900) published a similar view around
the same time. To honor both men, the idea that emotions represent the percep-
tion of bodily responses has traditionally been called the James-Lange theory
of emotion.
As usual, James tried to derive practical lessons from his theorizing, including
a technique for dealing with emotional distress. If emotion followed the percep-
tion of bodily changes and reactions, then it followed that engaging in certain
physical movements or activities might cause changes in emotional experience.
James recommended to his readers that they engage in the behaviors, or “out-
ward movements” associated with the frame of mind, or attitude, they wanted to
achieve. As he put it:
Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand,

sit all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal
voice, and your melancholy lingers. There is no more valuable precept in moral
education than this, as all who have experience know: if we wish to conquer
undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves we must assiduously, and in
the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those
contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate. [Emphasis in original.]20
James himself had done precisely this to overcome depression during his
youthful crisis. After repeatedly willing himself to think that he was free and
cheerful, he began actually to feel that way. He had also followed this prescrip-
tion after his parents’ deaths in 1882, willing himself to act more cheerfully than
he really felt until his grief gradually passed. The James-Lange theory is now
recognized to have limitations, but despite its oversimplicity, it can still usefully
account for many aspects of emotional experience.
Will
James’s personal experience shone clearly through in one other chapter on the
subject of will. In it he dealt openly with the question that had troubled him dur-
ing his crisis: whether free will exists. He started by defining an act of will as one
accompanied by some subjective sense of mental or attentional effort: “The most
essential achievement of the will, . . . when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to ATTEND
to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. . . . Effort of attention is thus
the essential phenomenon of will.”21 Then he asked whether the subjective sense
of effortful attention is a completely mechanistically determined consequence
of the thought process, or whether it introduces certain nonmechanistic and un-
predictable influences of its own. Scientific psychology assumes the former to be
true, while personal, subjective experience suggests the latter.
James believed that a true science has to be based on complete determinism—
the position that the causes of phenomena and events can be found entirely
in the material world—because under indeterminism, science cannot proceed.
Modern psychology’s most impressive gains had occurred via the assumptions
of mechanism and determinism. As long as he was writing as a psychologist
and a scientist, James would accept the tenets of determinism and push them
as far as possible. “Psychology will be Psychology, and Science Science, as
much as ever . . . in this world, whether free will be true in it or not. . . . We
can therefore leave the free will altogether out of our [scientific] account.”22
He hastened to add, however, that science offered only one way of generating
knowledge about the world. For James, science was enveloped in a wider order,
which might very well be beyond a deterministic understanding. Science and
psychology did not and could not contain all the answers for James. When he
was not functioning as a psychologist, but as moral philosopher or simply as a
feeling, willing, and socially responsive human being, he would adopt a belief
in free will.
Such was the essence of James’s psychology: neither a finished system nor a
provider of absolutely certain conclusions, but a collection of vivid and informed
personal reflections on all the major areas of the emerging science. Students who
read James not only learned the major facts in the new psychology; they were
also challenged to think about them in useful and creative ways.
JAMES’S LATER CAREER

After 1890, James felt increasingly frustrated by the limitations and uncertain-
ties of the science he had so brilliantly outlined. He complained to a colleague
that psychology was “a nasty little subject; . . . all one cares to know lies outside.”
His son recalled how he occasionally chafed at being personally identified as a
“psychologist”:
In June, 1903, when he became aware that Harvard was intending to con-
fer an honorary degree upon him, he went about for days before Com-
mencement in a half-serious state of dread, lest, at the fatal moment, he
should hear President Eliot’s voice naming him “Psychologist, psychical re-
searcher, willer to believe, religious experiencer.” He could not say whether
the impossible last epithets would be less to his taste than “psychologist.”23
James exaggerated his feelings in a typically colorful way, for he still carried
out many activities involving psychology. He twice accepted the presidency of
the American Psychological Association (in 1894 and 1904) and continued to
write on the subject. In 1892 he abridged his textbook into
a single volume titled Psychology: Briefer Course. Infor-
mally called “Jimmy” as opposed to its longer predecessor
“James,” it also had great success. By 1909, he had remained
sufficiently interested in psychology to travel to Clark Uni-
versity at considerable expense to his failing health, to see
what Freud was like when the founder of psychoanalysis
made his only visit to America. James had been the first
American to call favorable attention to Freud and Breuer’s
early work on hysteria, in 1894 (see Chapter 11). At Clark
he was still impressed, but with reservations. Freud’s ideas
“can’t fail to throw light on human nature,” he wrote to a
friend, “but I confess that he made on me personally the im-
pression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas.”24
Psychology did, however, become less prominent among
James’s activities after 1890 (Figure 8.2). In 1892 he brought
the German psychologist and former Wundt student Hugo
Münsterberg to Harvard to assume major responsibility for
scientific psychology (see Chapter 15), while he turned his
Figure 8.2 James in Maturity. own primary attention to other subjects.
One of them was psychical research, a topic much in the news of the time
as several self-proclaimed “mediums” claimed the ability to communicate with
departed spirits. Unlike the skeptical Wundt, who disdained such phenomena as
unworthy of serious attention, James became a leader in an organization devoted
to the scientific investigation of “spiritistic” phenomena: the American Society
for Psychical Research. James openly hoped to find convincing positive evidence
for paranormal phenomena, but time and again his hard data proved inconclu-
sive or worse. Once a hidden observer detected that Eusapia Paladino, a famous
medium in whom James had invested particularly high hopes, produced her
“psychic manifestations” through contortionist-like movements of her foot. Her
séance came to a humiliating end when the observer seized her foot, inspiring
one of James’s friends to compose a poem:
Eeny, meeny, miney mo,

Catch Eusapia by the toe,
If she hollers, then you know,
James’s theory is not so.25
James took the jibe in good spirit, and shortly before his death confessed that
despite devoting twenty-five years to psychical research, he had drawn no deci-
sive conclusions about the validity of such phenomena. While they could not be
completely dismissed based on available evidence, neither could their genuine-
ness be firmly established.
The Philosophy of Pragmatism

During the final decades of his life, James focused his attention on philosophy.
As a young man he and some Cambridge friends formed what they called “The
Metaphysical Club” to discuss philosophical questions. There Charles Sanders
Peirce (1839–1914) promoted a view he called pragmatism, according to which
scientific ideas and knowledge can never be absolutely certain, but only subject
to varying degrees of “pragmatic belief.” In other words, ideas worked with vary-
ing degrees of effectiveness in adapting to the world. Peirce and the other Meta-
physical Club members enthusiastically adopted the new Darwinian worldview,
in which no adaptation to the world should be considered perfect or permanent
but always subject to evolution or replacement by a better competitor. Peirce ex-
trapolated this perspective to ideas and knowledge. Just as a biological trait that
is adaptive in one environment may prove ineffective or dangerous in another,
or just as a once-successful species may be surpassed and overrun by a new and
better-adapted one, so may ideas gain or lose their value depending on their par-
ticular “environments” and “competitors.”
This attitude meshed nicely with James’s own convictions following his per-
sonal crisis; his decision to believe in free will was pragmatically adaptive and
“correct” because it worked. Later, he had applied the pragmatic criterion to
psychological theories in The Principles of Psychology. Never interested in facts
for their own sake, or theories in isolation, he always stressed their usefulness
(or lack thereof) in specific contexts.
James expanded on the philosophical implications of this approach in numer-
ous articles and books, including Will to Believe and Other Essays (1897), Prag-
matism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and The Meaning of Truth (1909).26
Although he adopted Peirce’s term pragmatism to define his philosophy, he
extended it to include emotional, ethical, and religious ideas as well as scien-
tific theories. Peirce disagreed with this elaboration of his own view and tried to
rename it “pragmaticism” to differentiate it from James’s. This disagreement led
one of James’s biographers to declare, “The movement known as pragmatism is
largely the result of James’s misunderstanding of Peirce.”27
The Varieties of Religious Experience

Under the influence of his Swedenborgian father, James retained a lively interest
in the significance of spirituality and religious experiences in human life. This
interest was given full expression when he was asked to deliver the Gifford Lec-
tures on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. The
twenty lectures were published shortly thereafter as The Varieties of Religious
Experience. It became one of James’s best known and most widely read books,
and a classic in the contemporary field of the psychology of religion.28
In pragmatist fashion (many of the ideas in The Varieties were echoed a few
years later in Pragmatism), James did not concern himself with the validity
of any specific religious beliefs or creeds, but outlined characteristics of the
religious life and the purposes, or functions, of religious belief. Acknowledging
that he was neither a theologian nor a historian of religion, James examined
religious feelings, impulses, states of mind, and other subjective phenomena as
a psychologist. In chapters on the reality of the unseen, conversion, saintliness,
and mysticism, for instance, James connected his fascination with altered states
of consciousness to the psychology of religion. In his typical accessible style, he
offered evidence from personal experience, literature, and philosophy, but also
from ordinary people. For example, the conversion experience of an “unlettered
man” 29 named Stephen Bradley is related in detail, serving as an entry point for
a close “survey of the constituent elements of the conversion process.”30
Following his chapters on conversion, James next discussed saintliness,
posing the question: “What may the practical fruits for life have been, of such
movingly happy conversions as those we have heard of?”31 He went on to explore
the effects of conversion in producing grace, harmony, purity, charity, asceticism,

and the ability to see oneself as part of a higher purpose—a set of characteristics
he collectively termed “saintliness.” After providing some concrete examples of
these characteristics from religious literature, James returned to the question of
the value of saintliness. Again assuming a pragmatic stance, he suggested that
its value depended on the criteria being used, and the environment being con-
sidered. Although from a biological perspective martyrdom was obviously a fail-
ure, the inspiration provided by such altruistic acts was clearly of great historical
value. Economically, the group of qualities comprising saintliness, James noted,
was “indispensable to the world’s welfare.”32
In his conclusion to The Varieties, James reprised the relationship between
science and religion. Contrasting science as objective, general, and impersonal
with religion as subjective, individual, and personal, he clearly supported the
religious side:
You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures,
and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in
religion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded in
feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character,
are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making
and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
Compared with this . . . , the world of generalized objects which the intellect
contemplates is without solidity or life.33
Finally, after devoting twenty lectures and over 400 pages to the topic, James was
quick to point out the unfinished and provisional nature of his work.
A Continuing Influence
Despite his relatively brief, ambivalent tenure as a full-time psychologist, as well
as the unsystematic, incomplete nature of his psychological work, James had
a huge impact on American psychology. His influence differed markedly from
that of his fellow pioneer Wundt, however; rather than building a school or a
specific theoretical orientation to psychology, he created a general atmosphere
about the subject that made it seem interesting and worthwhile to pursue. In-
stead of training “followers” to carry forth with a “Jamesean” psychology, he in-
spired many students to develop their own individual approaches. Because he
treated so many subjects as interesting, but open, and did not presume to offer
more than “pragmatic” solutions to the problems he posed, his writings seem
more relevant than those of his contemporaries, and can still be read for pleasure
and stimulation.
Three American pioneers who were all students of James went on to make
important experimental, theoretical, and professional contributions of their own
during this early period in American psychology. G. Stanley Hall encountered
James at the very beginning of his teaching career. Nearly James’s age, and with
an already established agenda of his own, Hall was not so much taught by James
as assisted by him in the launching of his career. Hall would become something
James was not: a major institution builder for the new science in America.
Mary Whiton Calkins, by contrast, met James just after the publication of The
Principles of Psychology and got her real introduction to psychology from that
work. As one of the first women to seek a career in psychology, Calkins faced
appalling discrimination. James provided moral as well as intellectual support,
and she would become a president of the American Psychological Association,
among other accomplishments.
Edward Lee Thorndike went to study with James after being inspired by Prin-
ciples. James encouraged Thorndike to start a study of animal learning that sub-
sequently became his Ph.D. thesis at Columbia, and one of the most cited papers
in the history of American psychology. After James’s death, Thorndike replaced
him as the best-known psychologist in the country.
HALL: INSTITUTION BUILDING AND CHILD

STUDIES
G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924; Figure 8.3) was born near
Ashfield, Massachusetts, the son of an educated farmer
who had also taught school briefly and had served a term
in the Massachusetts state legislature. His deeply religious
mother had also been a schoolteacher and was pleased
when her son entered Union Theological Seminary in New
York after graduating from Williams College in 1867. She
was less pleased when he found the secular stimulation of
the big city, and the popular yet controversial Darwinian
theory, more appealing than theology. Hall recalled that
after he preached his trial sermon to faculty and students
at the seminary, the president did not offer a customary
critique and commentary but instead knelt and prayed for
the salvation of Hall’s soul. Realizing his prospects must lie
elsewhere, Hall borrowed money for three years of indepen-
dent study in Germany, where he concentrated on philoso-
phy and also studied physiology with the great mechanist,
Figure 8.3 G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924). du Bois-Reymond.
Running out of funds before he could earn a degree, Hall returned to the United
States in 1871. After losing one position because of his Darwinian sympathies, he
finally won a junior appointment teaching philosophy and religion at Antioch
College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. While there he read Wundt’s newly published
Principles of Physiological Psychology and decided that the new experimental sci-
ence of the mind was for him. He left Antioch in 1876 intending to go to Wundt in
Leipzig, but en route he stopped off at Harvard and was offered an instructorship
in English. He accepted, and although he found his duties difficult, he also met
James, who was starting as a teacher. James encouraged Hall to do an experi-
ment on the role of muscular cues in the perception of space, which could serve
as a Harvard Ph.D. dissertation. Hall did so, and although awarded nominally in
philosophy, his degree actually represented the first American Ph.D. based on
research in experimental psychology.
In 1878, James’s first Ph.D. student carried out his plan to study in Leipzig and
arrived just as Wundt’s institute was getting established. Hall became Wundt’s
first American student, although a postgraduate one. He stayed just long enough
to serve as a subject in some of the early Ph.D. research at Leipzig, thereby
winning Wundt’s recommendation for any future openings in the new discipline
of psychology in America.
Upon returning home in 1880, however, Hall found no permanent jobs were
available. He went back to Cambridge and was invited by Harvard’s president to
deliver a series of Saturday morning lectures on the subject of education. This
opportunity proved crucial to Hall in two ways. First, it turned his serious atten-
tion for the first time to problems of developmental psychology and pedagogy—
topics that would dominate the rest of his professional life. Second, the popular
success of his lectures attracted the attention of Daniel Coit Gilman, president
of the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. A position at Johns Hopkins
enabled Hall to begin a series of activities that mark him as one of the most influ-
ential institution builders in American psychology.
Institutional Innovations
Established in 1876, Johns Hopkins was the first American university to be mod-
eled deliberately on the German system. It was intended primarily to be a graduate
institution that specialized in research training for the Ph.D. With positive recom-
mendations from both Wundt and James, Hall won the new university’s first pro-
fessorship of psychology and pedagogy in 1884. Hopkins also provided a research
laboratory for Hall to direct, the first such lab in the United States. And in 1887, Hall
established the American Journal of Psychology, the first English-language period-
ical explicitly devoted to publishing studies on the new experimental psychology.
In his quest to raise funds to start the journal, Hall attracted the interest of a
wealthy member of the American Society for Psychical Research who donated
$500, under the assumption that Hall would be favorable to this line of research.
Hall was certainly not intending to publish psychical studies, being critical of the
whole endeavor and intent on making the new journal rigorously scientific and
empirical. Nonetheless, he accepted the money. To what extent he misled the
donor is unknown, but he did develop a reputation for opportunism that stayed
with him throughout his career.
Following these administrative successes, in 1888 Hall was appointed the first
president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts—another institution
originally devoted exclusively to graduate study. He remained there for the rest
of his life, despite some difficult times due in part to Clark’s limited financial re-
sources, but also due to Hall’s rather high-handed administrative style. He contin-
ued to teach psychology and pedagogy, and throughout the 1890s his institution
produced more than half of all the new American Ph.D. graduates in psychology.
The entrepreneurial Hall also founded the journal Pedagogical Seminary in 1891,
a periodical still published today as the Journal of Genetic Psychology.
In the midst of all this activity, Hall suffered a great personal tragedy; as he
reached the end of his first year at Clark University, he became ill with diphtheria
and withdrew to his childhood home in Ashfield to recover. When he returned to
his family in Worcester, he discovered his wife and 8-year-old daughter had died
of accidental asphyxiation. Only his 9-year-old son was spared. After a summer
of deep depression and guilt, Hall threw himself into his work to help cope with
his grief.
Soon thereafter, Hall achieved one of his most influential institutional accom-
plishments. In 1892, he took the lead in organizing a national professional society
for psychologists by inviting a group of men interested in the new psychology
to come to Clark. A more formal meeting was held in December of that year at
the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Psychological Association was
born. Hall was elected the APA’s first president. Starting with thirty-one mem-
bers at its founding, by 1900, there were 127 members. Numbers have increased
exponentially ever since, with a high of over 90,000 members reported by the first
decade of the twenty-first century.
Child Study and Developmental Theory

As American psychology’s most important founder—of laboratories, depart-
ments, journals, and professional societies—Hall resembled Wundt more than
James. In his research, however, he clearly belonged in the functional and
practical American tradition pioneered by James. His most innovative work
arose out of his combined interests in psychology, pedagogy, and evolution-

ary theory.
In the early 1880s he began a large series of questionnaire studies of
kindergarten-aged children, designed to find out what they knew and thought
about a great variety of things, including their bodies, games and stories, ani-
mals, the sun and stars, and religion. Hall published his findings in an 1893 work
whose title—The Contents of Children’s Minds on Entering School—suggests its
partly practical goal of informing teachers of what to expect in dealing with their
young charges.34 With this and subsequent work, Hall became one of the cen-
tral figures in the child study movement, a late-nineteenth and early twentieth-
century effort to gather systematic information about children for the purpose
of guiding more effective educational practices.
Hall and his students also issued questionnaires to older children, and in 1904
he summarized these results in his most famous book: Adolescence: Its Psychol-
ogy and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion
and Education.35 This book brought the previously unusual word adolescence
into popular use, and fully documented for the first time the emotional turbu-
lence associated with that phase of life. The book also reflected Hall’s interest in
developmental issues, along with his conviction that children must be regarded
as constantly growing and changing individuals, who have different kinds of
knowledge, emotions, and intellectual characteristics at varying stages through-
out their lives.
Hall proposed a theory of child development, based on Darwin and recapitu-
lationism, according to which the stages of each person’s intellectual, emotional,
and psychological development pass through the same ones as our pre-human
ancestors. This idea had been hinted at in Darwin’s essay on his infant son,
and was more explicitly endorsed by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel (see
Chapter 6). Hall carried the idea further still, arguing that a child’s progress from
crawling on all fours to walking upright, and through successive stages of social,
playful, and artistic activity, essentially repeats the evolutionary sequence lead-
ing to modern humanity.
Hall’s version of recapitulationism also incorporated some of his beliefs
about race and gender. In literally reliving the evolutionary stages of the human
race, children would reach a point, typically at puberty, when “Blood from many
different ancestral stocks is poured into the veins at once.”36 Dealing with this
influx of ancestral traits, which were more numerous in children of “mongrel”
stock (e.g., Americans, as opposed to their purer European counterparts), led to
the emotional turbulence characteristic of adolescence. But here Hall’s thinking
took another interesting turn. Highly concerned about what he perceived as the
ineffective, even overcivilized state of American manhood, Hall recommended

that educators encourage and support boys, especially Caucasian boys, to sys-
tematically relive all the racial strains of their diverse ethnic heritage in order
to reach the highest stage of evolution. This necessitated a prolonged adoles-
cence in which boys would express their “savage” origins and pass through them,
eventually creating a race of “super-men” who would reach their full evolutionary
potential. They would then pass this advanced stage of development on to their
sons through a form of Lamarckian inheritance (see Chapter 6).
Also according to Hall, however, this process would only upfold for Caucasian
boys. Other races, he felt, did not have the advanced final stages of evolutionary
development in their ancestral past, so there was no reason to prolong their ad-
olescence, at which point they were destined to fall behind their white peers in
terms of educational potential and achievement.
Hall also believed in the then-prominent variation hypothesis that males were
the carriers of greater variability in physical and mental traits due to their need
to compete with other males for access to the more sexually passive (and less
variable) females (see Chapter 6). Males were the carriers of this variability and
therefore the only ones who could pass it on to the next generation. Although
females might be able to relive their primitive evolutionary heritage, they would
be unable to develop advanced traits that could be passed on to their offspring.
In fact, it was widely believed that prolonging the education of young women
during puberty could damage their reproductive organs by diverting blood from
their reproductive systems to the brain. Hall thus advocated a different, less intel-
lectually strenuous, education for women.
Needless to say, Hall’s recapitulationist views are not generally accepted to-
day, and some of his ideas were debated in his own time. However, like many of
his contemporaries, Hall based his “scientific” views on the beliefs about race and
gender that circulated in his cultural environment. And despite holding these
general views, Hall nonetheless worked individually with female students and
supervised the first African American man to be awarded a Ph.D. in psychology.
Significantly, his work also marked the beginning of a general interest in devel-
opmental psychology, and Clark University remains a major center for that field.
Hall’s work on adolescence inevitably involved him with many of the same
issues of emotional turbulence and sexuality being investigated at the same time,
but in a different way, by the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Among the
first to recognize Freud’s importance, Hall invited him to speak at Clark Univer-
sity’s twentieth anniversary celebrations in 1909. The event—Freud’s only visit
to America—proved a great success and effectively introduced his ideas to the
new world. His lectures were published afterward in Hall’s American Journal of
Psychology and have since remained one of the most popular and effective short
introductions to psychoanalytic theory.37 (The fuller story of Freud’s American
visit will be described in Chapter 11.)
An Unlikely Legacy
Unfortunately, the rather haughty Hall was often difficult to get along with and
wound up alienating Freud, along with many others. Sometimes he even turned
against his mentors; in a published review of The Principles of Psychology he
sarcastically called the James-Lange theory of emotion the “sorry because we
cry theory,” claiming it stood in the way of psychology’s future progress. In 1912
Hall published a critical account of Wundt’s life and work, alleging, among other
things, that the young Wundt had been fired as Helmholtz’s assistant because
of mathematical incompetence. Wundt labeled Hall’s work “a biography of me
which is invented from the beginning to the end.”38
America’s first historian of psychology, Edwin G. Boring wrote of Hall
and James: “Each appreciated the other’s qualities, but they were on different
tracks. . . . Hall was a comet, caught for the moment by James’s influence, but
presently shooting off into space never to return.”39 Yet for all the bitter distance
Hall placed between himself and his teachers, he also genuinely promoted their
new contributions. Thanks to the institutions, journals, and organizations Hall
founded, the ideas of Wundt, James, Freud, and countless others found a much
larger, more receptive, and better-educated audience in America than would have
been the case otherwise.
Four years before Hall died in 1924, he supervised his last Ph.D. student,
Francis Cecil Sumner (1895–1954). Sumner was the first African American to
receive a Ph.D. in psychology, receiving his degree in 1920 following the suc-
cessful defense of his dissertation, “Psychoanalysis of Freud and Adler.” After a
short tenure at West Virginia Collegiate Institute, Sumner became head of the
psychology department at Howard University in Washington, DC, a post he held
from 1928 until 1954. There, he wrote on a variety of subjects, but he was espe-
cially interested in the psychology of religion. He attended the First International
Congress for Religious Psychology at the University of Vienna in 1931, where he
presented a paper on mental hygiene and religion, establishing connections with
many leading European psychologists. He taught courses on the subject during
the 1940s and prepared a massive manuscript entitled The Structure of Religion:
A History of European Psychology of Religion.
Also at Howard, Sumner supervised the most famous African American couple
in psychology’s history to date: Mamie Phipps Clark (1917–1983) and Kenneth B.
Clark (1914–2005). The Clarks conducted the famous studies investigating the
09_POP_28354_ch08_278-315.indd 301 18/10/16 3:58 PM

development of racial identity in black and white children

that were cited in a brief submitted to the 1954 U.S. Supreme
Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This was
the first Supreme Court case in United States history to use
social science data in its deliberations, ultimately rendering
a decision that made it illegal to segregate public schools
on the basis of race. Unfortunately, Sumner would not live
to see this historic decision so influenced by his former stu-
dents; he died of a heart attack while shoveling snow at his
home in Washington, DC, in January 1954.40
CALKINS: ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING AND

SELF-PSYCHOLOGY
A later and more consistently friendly student of James
was Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930; Figure 8.4). The
eldest child of a Presbyterian minister, Calkins was born in
Hartford, Connecticut, grew up in Buffalo, New York, and
Figure 8.4 Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930).
moved with her family to Newton, Massachusetts, at age 17.
Her mother had suffered a physical and mental collapse, leaving her daughter
with much of the responsibility for raising a younger sister and three brothers.
Calkins also assumed increasing responsibility for the care of her mother, re-
maining unmarried and in the parental home for the rest of her life.
Still, she grew up in an intellectually stimulating early environment. Her par-
ents had lived in Germany before her birth and deliberately spoke only German
to each other as their daughter was learning to talk; Calkins thus became fluent
in German as well as English. Unusually supportive of education for daughters
as well as sons, her father sent 17-year-old Calkins to study at Smith College in
Northampton, Massachusetts, shortly after the family’s move to Newton. Founded
in 1875 as one of America’s first women’s colleges, Smith provided young Calkins
with excellent training in English and classics.
After graduation Calkins planned to offer private Greek tutoring in Newton
but was unexpectedly offered a position in the Greek department of nearby
Wellesley College—another new women’s college founded the same year as
Smith. Unlike Smith, however, Wellesley hired only women for its faculty. The
pool of highly trained candidates being small, Wellesley often recruited prom-
ising but relatively untrained scholars like Calkins, and supported their further
study even while they themselves were teaching undergraduates.
Calkins accepted the position. After just one year of teaching Greek, she was
considered for the job of introducing experimental psychology into Wellesley’s
curriculum. Her only qualification was an interest in the subject; the one psy-
chology course she’d taken and enjoyed at Smith had been in the philosophical,
speculative tradition. No better qualified candidate appeared, so in 1890 Calkins
was offered an instructorship in psychology contingent on her completing a year
of advanced study in that field. The only question was: Where could she go to get
this training?
Graduate Education: Challenges and Accomplishments

In terms of appropriateness and location, both Harvard and Clark University
would have been top choices for Calkins. Unfortunately, neither admitted women
(Clark would change this policy in 1900). The number of graduate schools in the
entire world that admitted women was very low, and they were inconveniently
located for Calkins, who needed to stay closer to her family. She finally contacted
Josiah Royce, Harvard’s professor of mental philosophy, about the possibility of
studying with him at the Harvard Annex, an unofficial program of private courses
offered by a few of the Harvard faculty. She impressed Royce, who recommended
instead that she attend the regular seminars offered by himself and James, who
did not teach at the Annex. After interviewing Calkins, James enthusiastically
agreed.
At first, Harvard’s president, Eliot, refused to support this plan, arguing that
the two sexes ought to be educated separately. Royce called the decision an im-
penetrable mystery to anyone who was not “accustomed to the executive point
of outlook”; and James told Calkins: “It is flagitious [shamefully wicked] that
you should be kept out. Enough to make dynamiters of you and all women.”41
James was similarly mystified by this official position and both professors con-
tinued to press Eliot, aided by a long petition from Calkins’s father. He noted
that all that was being asked for was postgraduate instruction for one who was
already a member of a college faculty, so his daughter’s acceptance would not
open doors for other women. Eliot finally relented, and in October 1890 the Har-
vard Corporation reluctantly allowed Royce and James to admit Calkins to their
seminars with the stipulation that she could not officially register as a student
of the university.
Calkins began to study with James. When the other members of the semi-
nar dropped out (for unexplained reasons), Calkins found herself and her teacher
“quite literally at either side of a library fire. The Principles of Psychology was warm
from the press, and my absorbed study of those brilliant, erudite, and provocative
volumes, as interpreted by their writer, was my introduction to psychology.”42 She
soon proved to be a pupil who could teach her teacher, for during the first year
she wrote a paper on the subject of association, suggesting an elaboration and
09_POP_28354_ch08_278-315.indd 303 18/10/16 3:58 PM

modification of James’s published treatment of that topic. Saying her paper gave
him “exquisite delight,” James encouraged Calkins to revise and publish it; it
became her first professional publication in 1892.43 When soon after he revised
his chapter on association for his Briefer Course, James referred approvingly to
the article by Calkins.
While studying with James, Calkins also got unofficial but expert advice on
how to equip a psychological laboratory from Edmund C. Sanford (1859–1924), a
young Johns Hopkins Ph.D. whom Hall had brought with him to Clark the year
before. Although another ten years would pass before Clark University officially
admitted a female student, Sanford agreed to help Calkins plan a laboratory for
Wellesley. As he was then preparing the lab manual that for years remained the
standard in its field, Sanford was arguably the best-qualified person in the world
for that job. And like James, he found a valued collaborator as well as pupil in
Calkins; they worked together on an experimental study of dreams that was even-
tually published in Hall’s American Journal of Psychology.
After this productive year of study, Calkins returned to Wellesley to teach psy-
chology from her small but well-equipped laboratory—the very first at a women’s
college in the United States. Immediately, however, she felt she needed further
graduate study. After considering several possibilities, she applied to con-
tinue at Harvard with James’s newly arrived protegé, the German psychologist
Münsterberg. He enthusiastically supported her application, and the Harvard
Corporation again grudgingly gave permission “to attend the instruction of pro-
fessor Münsterberg in his laboratory as a guest, but not as a registered student
of the University.”44
Once again Calkins justified her teacher’s confidence, as she originated the
paired-associates technique while conducting an important experimental study
of associative learning. She presented subjects with stimuli consisting of numer-
als paired with colors. After varying numbers of presentations, she showed the
colors alone and tested for recall of the paired numerals. She showed that numer-
als associated with vivid colors were remembered somewhat better than those
with neutral colors, but that the single most important determinant of remem-
bering was simply the frequency of exposure to each pair. This study—far more
original and extensive than most Ph.D. theses of the time—appeared in print as a
monographic supplement to Psychological Review in 1896.45
The year before, Calkins had requested and been given an unofficial Ph.D.
examination. James described her performance as “much the most brilliant ex-
amination for the Ph.D. that we have had at Harvard.” Münsterberg petitioned
the Harvard Corporation to reconsider and admit Calkins to official degree
candidacy, calling her superior to all the male students and “surely one of the
09_POP_28354_ch08_278-315.indd 304 18/10/16 3:58 PM

strongest professors of psychology in the country.”46 The Corporation promptly

refused.
Calkins returned to Wellesley in 1895 having exceeded the requirements of
a Harvard Ph.D., but without the title. And so she would remain for the rest of
her life. In 1902 she was offered a Radcliffe Ph.D.—Radcliffe College having been
founded in 1894 as Harvard’s corresponding institution for women. But Calkins
declined on the grounds that Radcliffe was exclusively an undergraduate school
that hadn’t even existed during much of her period of study, and that a Rad-
cliffe degree wouldn’t reflect the reality of her academic work at Harvard. Rather
than agree to this deception, she would forgo the degree she had earned. There
followed periodic attempts to persuade the Harvard Corporation to reconsider
its position and retroactively grant Calkins her degree, such as a 1927 petition
signed by Christian Ruckmick, a University of Iowa psychologist, and thirteen
Harvard graduates, including R. S. Woodworth, R. M. Yerkes, and E. L. Thorn-
dike. More recently, e-mail petitions and websites have revived interest in the
cause. Despite these repeated efforts and Calkins’s impressive credentials, so far
it seems unlikely that Harvard will reverse its stance.
Psychology at a Women’s College

Calkins went on to a predictably distinguished professional career at Wellesley.
Her well-received textbook, Introduction to Psychology, was published in 1901.47
Throughout the early 1900s, she developed and advocated an influential psychol-
ogy of the self. Calkins saw the self as active, guiding, purposeful, and present in
all acts of consciousness. She regarded the conscious self to be the basic subject
matter of psychology and defended this position against behaviorist and Gestalt
formulations (see Chapter 4). Although couched in the terms and procedures of an
introspective experimental psychology that are no longer common today, Calkins’s
self-psychology anticipated in some ways the influential personality theory later
developed by the Harvard psychologist Gordon W. Allport (see Chapter 12).
In 1903, Calkins and two other women, Christine Ladd-Franklin and Margaret
Floy Washburn (see Chapter 5), were identified by a poll of their peers as ranking
among the fifty most important American psychologists, worthy of having their
names starred in the biographical dictionary American Men of Science.* Two
years later, in 1905 Calkins was elected president of the American Psychological
Association—the first woman to be so honored.
*In making their outstanding careers, all of these women had had to overcome countless dis-
criminatory obstacles because of their gender. This is partially reflected in the exclusionary title
of the dictionary, which was not changed to American Men and Women of Science until the
1960s.
After these accomplishments, she followed the model of her teacher James
by gradually giving up psychology in favor of philosophy. Just as James had
passed the directorship of the Harvard laboratory on to Münsterberg when his
own psychological interests waned, Calkins passed on the directorship of the
Wellesley lab to her colleague, Eleanor Gamble (see Chapter 5). At the time
Gamble took over in 1908, the lab had expanded to seven rooms and students
were actively involved in experimental studies. Gamble supervised both gradu-
ate and undergraduate students, generating a dozen master’s theses and almost
fifty undergraduate studies on topics such as motor dexterity, attention, word
reaction, mental tests, and consciousness of self. These studies were published
both in journals and in a series of edited volumes entitled Wellesley College Stud-
ies in Psychology. Gamble was such a beloved member of the Wellesley College
community that six years after her death in 1933, a memorial window was installed
in the campus chapel in her honor. The Gamble window depicts two figures; one
is a robed woman holding a pen and book, symbolizing wisdom, and the other is
the patron saint of animals, St. Francis of Assisi. Gamble was an animal lover and
had great affection for her cocker spaniels. The inscription on the window reads,
“Wisdom, expressive of the great Teacher.”
Heidbreder and Seven Psychologies

Another woman would soon join the Wellesley College psy-
chology faculty: Edna Heidbreder (1890–1985; Figure 8.5).
Published in 1933, Heidbreder’s Seven Psychologies estab-
lished her as one of the most astute thinkers and clearest
writers about the systems of psychology that had domi-
nated the field to that time.48
A native of Illinois, Heidbreder graduated from Knox
College, having taken the only psychology course available,
even though she had no special interest in the field. She was
fascinated by epistemology, the study of how we come to
acquire knowledge. After teaching high school for a couple
of years, she earned her master’s degree in philosophy at
the University of Wisconsin. There, she took the required
course in experimental psychology and began to see how in-
vestigating human thinking experimentally could address
some of her philosophically based questions about how we
acquire knowledge. She pursued her Ph.D. in psychology at
Columbia University in New York (in part because she liked
Figure 8.5 Edna Heidbreder (1890–1985). the idea of being in a large, stimulating city), and graduated
in 1924; her dissertation was entitled “An Experimental Study of Thinking.” She
then taught at the University of Minnesota for ten years, where she continued to
do experimental work on concept formation and developed a reputation as an
excellent and inspiring teacher. She once commented that she couldn’t bear to
see students bored.
At Minnesota, Heidbreder taught a course on the schools and systems of psy-
chology. The course was so popular that students asked the head of the depart-
ment to encourage Heidbreder to write a book on the subject. With the support
of her students and the department head, Heidbreder put pen to paper and wrote
Seven Psychologies. Given that she had long before stopped using lecture notes
because she felt they were a barrier between her and her students, authoring a
textbook was a major undertaking.
When Seven Psychologies appeared, it got immediate acclaim. From structur-
alism to self-psychology to psychoanalysis, Heidbreder not only provided an ele-
gant description of each system, but also took on the deeper question: What is a
system of psychology? She then analyzed each system’s relationship to previous
ones, its unique contributions, and the conceptual advances it offered. The extent
of Heidbreder’s accomplishment can be measured by the fact that the book was
not only highly praised at the time it was published, but continued to be widely
read and admired for decades afterwards.
In 1934, Heidbreder moved from Minnesota to Wellesley College. Like
Gamble before her, at Wellesley she became a beloved teacher and continued to
publish her experimental research on concept formation. She was also extremely
active professionally, serving as the editor of two journals, the president of the
Eastern Psychological Association, and the head of the Section on Psychology
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In an interview
conducted a couple of decades after her retirement from Wellesley in 1955,
Heidbreder reflected on being a woman in psychology in a period between two
waves of feminist activism. She surmised that women of her generation were
aware that there was gender discrimination in the field, but dealt with it by res-
olutely forging ahead and doing the best work possible. By proving the worth of
their work, she believed, women could help minimize the gender stereotypes that
fueled unequal treatment.
Heidbreder’s observations were based on her perspective from a fifty-year
career in a variety of different institutions, with the last two decades at a prominent
women’s college. For many women before her, teaching at a women’s college was
one of the only viable academic career paths. Wellesley was unusual because it
hired women faculty exclusively, and had opportunities for supervising postgrad-
uate students, but only at the master’s level. This, combined with the pioneering
psychology laboratory established by Calkins, made Welles-

ley a particularly supportive and influential institution for
women psychologists.
THORNDIKE: INTELLIGENCE, LEARNING,

AND EDUCATION
Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949; Figure 8.6) was the
son of a Methodist minister. He grew up in a succession
of New England towns, and at age 17 entered Wesleyan
University in Middletown, Connecticut. There he edited
the college newspaper and won his class tennis champion-
ship while compiling a brilliant academic record. He dis-
liked his only psychology course, taught from a traditional,
philosophically oriented textbook. But in preparing for an
optional prize examination (which he subsequently won),
he had to read parts of James’s recently published text, The
Principles of Psychology. He liked it so much that he bought
both volumes for his personal library—the only books out-
Figure 8.6 Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949). side of literature he purchased voluntarily during his entire
Wesleyan career.
Thorndike went to Harvard for graduate study in English and French litera-
ture, but during his first semester he also took one of James’s psychology courses.
It so fascinated him that he took two more the second semester and changed his
field of concentration to psychology. Deciding to become a teacher of psychol-
ogy, he sought the quickest possible route to a Ph.D. In the meantime, the English
biologist and comparative psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan had visited Harvard
and described some experiments he had done on the ability of chickens to dis-
tinguish among different-colored corn kernels. Although James and Harvard had
no tradition in animal psychology, Thorndike evidently decided that a study of
learning in chickens would provide a relatively quick dissertation topic. James,
who didn’t understand exactly what he was getting into, accepted Thorndike’s
proposal. Thorndike recalled:
I kept these animals and conducted the experiments in my room until

the landlady’s protests were imperative. James tried to get the few
square feet required for me in the laboratory. . . . He was refused and with
his habitual kindness and devotion to underdogs and eccentric aspects
of science, harbored my chickens in the cellar of his own home for the
rest of the year.49
To the delight of James’s children, Thorndike built a series of pens inside a larger
enclosure that contained his chicken flock. He placed individual chickens in the
pens and observed how, and how quickly, they learned to find the exit to the pen and
rejoin the flock. At first, a chicken would typically peep loudly and run around in
obvious distress, until finally finding the exit. With successive trials, however, both
the signs of distress and the time required to find the exit diminished markedly.
At this point, Thorndike began to think of leaving Harvard. For all of James’s
charisma and helpfulness, he had not built a strong program in psychology.
Münsterberg had left Harvard in 1895 after a three-year stint, and although he came
back in 1897, his continuing presence could not yet be counted on. James’s own
main interests were shifting to philosophy, so he taught relatively few courses in
psychology. Several other graduate students Thorndike knew had come to Harvard
and been inspired by James, before going elsewhere to complete their doctorates.
In 1897, prompted further by a distressing personal situation, Thorndike too
followed this route. He had proposed marriage to a young woman from a nearby
town and had been rejected. Wishing to leave the scene of his disappointment,
Thorndike applied successfully (and with James’s blessing) for a graduate fellow-
ship under James McKeen Cattell at Columbia University (see Chapter 5).
A Puzzle Box Ph.D.

Thorndike moved into a New York apartment along with “the most-educated hens
in the world” and briefly led his neighbors to believe he was “an animal trainer,
sort of a P. T. Barnum lion-trainer.”50 But Cattell soon proved more successful than
James at finding laboratory space for the animals on campus, and after adding
cats to his collection, Thorndike was set to perform his soon-to-become famous
research in a proper institutional setting.
Shifting his main emphasis from the chickens to the cats, he built about fifteen
makeshift “puzzle boxes” that an enclosed animal could escape from only by
making a specific response, such as pulling a string or pressing a button or lever.
In more difficult boxes, the cats had to make two responses in sequence in order
to escape—for example, first pull a loop and then slide a latch. In his experiments,
he placed hungry cats in the boxes and observed their behavior as they tried to
get out and obtain food (Figure 8.7).
Like Thorndike’s chickens, the cats originally responded with a great deal of
apparently random trial-and-error behavior until accidentally making the correct
response. On successive attempts, the behavior gradually decreased, and the an-
imals escaped more quickly and smoothly each time. Thorndike called this pro-
cess of exhibiting random behavior that was occasionally successful, gradually
becoming more precise, trial-and-error learning.
1 The cat is placed in 2 After several attempts to get 3 The cat is put back
the box, and food is out, the cat accidentally in the box and more
placed outside where presses the lever, the door quickly presses the
the cat can see it. opens, and the cat eats. lever to get out.
String
Trapdoor
Lever
Figure 8.7 Thorndike’s puzzle box.
In discussing these results in his doctoral dissertation, Thorndike suggested

that various specific stimuli and responses became connected to or dissociated
from each other in predictable ways. According to what he called the law of
effect, when particular stimulus-response sequences are followed by pleasure,
those responses tend to be strengthened, or “stamped in” the subject’s repertoire;
responses followed by annoyance or pain tend to be weakened, or “stamped out.”
When a cat first encountered the stimulus of being inside a particular puzzle box,
it made many responses that kept it inside. This situation presumably produced
“annoyance,” thereby reducing the likelihood of those unsuccessful responses
being repeated. The successful response, once finally made, presumably led to
immediate pleasure with escape, and so became stamped in and rendered more
likely to be repeated in the future.
Within sixteen months of arriving at Columbia, Thorndike had completed his
study, presented it to the APA and the New York Academy of Sciences, written it
up as a successful doctoral dissertation, and published it as a monographic sup-
plement to the Psychological Review.51 He had not only finished quickly but also
made a lasting contribution to the literature on animal intelligence and learning.
And to cap the year off, the young woman he had left behind in Massachusetts
found that absence had made her heart grow fonder, and she accepted Thorn-
dike’s proposal of marriage.
Functionalism
After spending one year teaching at the Women’s College of Western Reserve
University in Cleveland, Ohio, Thorndike returned to New York for a position
at Columbia Teachers College, where he remained for the rest of his academic
career. Promptly upon his return, he collaborated on an important study with
his friend Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869–1962), a fellow James student at
Harvard who had also come to Columbia to finish his Ph.D. under Cattell. In 1899
they began to investigate the so-called transfer of training—the effect of instruc-
tion and exercise in one mental function on performance in a different one. Ac-
cording to the then-popular doctrine of formal disciplines, such transfer did occur,
providing a rationale for instructing students extensively in subjects like the clas-
sics. The focus and concentration acquired in such study presumably transferred to
all other areas of mental functioning, thus preparing students for almost anything.
Thorndike and Woodworth tested this notion by first training subjects in var-
ious tasks, such as estimating weights or geometrical areas, and then looking
for improvement on other tasks more or less similar to those on which training
had occurred. Transfer turned out to be very slight, as the authors reported in
a major Psychological Review paper of 1901.52 These results seemed consistent
with Thorndike’s theory of learning from his dissertation— namely, that learning
consists of the stamping in or stamping out of highly specific stimulus-response
connections. Thorndike and Woodworth’s research helped undermine the doc-
trine of formal disciplines in education in favor of more specifically task-oriented
educational practices.
For the rest of his long career Thorndike remained concerned with human
subjects rather than animals, and most of his work had an applied, functional
orientation. Consistent with his early research, he maintained that intelligence
was not a single quality but rather a combination of many specific skills and ap-
titudes. Accordingly, he developed intelligence tests that measured skills on sep-
arate functions, such as arithmetic, vocabulary, and direction following, rather
than general intelligence. He also believed these components of intelligence
to be largely hereditary and strongly agreed with the eugenics ideas of Galton
(see Chapter 7; for more on intelligence testing, see Chapter 13). Interested in
how children could better be taught to spell and read, Thorndike made extensive
counts of the frequencies with which 20,000 different English words were used in
various kinds of writing, and he constructed dictionaries based on the principle
that words should always be defined by using terms simpler and more common
than themselves.
All this work led Thorndike to become identified as a leader of the loosely de-
fined movement in American psychology known as functionalism. In contrast to
Titchener’s structuralism, which sought only to define and describe the contents
of conscious experience (see Chapter 5), functionalism focused attention on the
utility and purpose of behavior, and was a direct outgrowth of Darwinian thinking
(see Chapter 6). This general orientation was implicit in the pragmatic, utilitarian
approach of James, and was taken up enthusiastically by the American psychol-

ogists who followed him. Other leading functionalists of Thorndike’s generation
included Woodworth at Columbia and James Rowland Angell, Harvey Carr, and
John Dewey at the University of Chicago.
Thorndike also wrote several textbooks on educational and general psychol-
ogy, including a 1905 introductory text that featured a warm and generous intro-
duction by James. His texts enjoyed such success that in 1924 his author royalties
amounted to five times his professor’s salary. For his varied accomplishments,
Thorndike was elected APA president in 1912, and in 1917 he became one of the
first psychologists admitted to the National Academy of Sciences. A poll of psy-
chologists in 1921 ranked Thorndike first among those recommended for starred
listing in American Men of Science. He came to occupy a position at the head of
American psychology comparable to that of James a generation earlier.
Of course, Thorndike was not James, and his lasting influence and reputa-
tion have been somewhat less. Thorndike’s books lack the literary flair of those
of his teacher, and they’re no longer in print. His theories of learning, educa-
tion, and hereditary intelligence were eventually regarded as oversimplified,
and the structuralism-functionalism debate lost urgency as the new movement
of behaviorism swept American psychology in the 1920s. Thorndike is proba-
bly best remembered among psychologists today for his very first publications
about trial-and-error learning in cats and the law of effect, which provided a
starting point for some of the American behaviorists. The primary significance
of Thorndike’s intellectual contributions may be that they provided a bridge
between functionalism and the full-fledged behaviorism that came to influence
academic psychology in the United States for the next several decades.
Chapter Review 313
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
builder. He was the founding president of the American Psy-
Arguably the most important founder of academic
chological Association, the editor of the American Journal
experimental psychology in America, James established
of Psychology, and he established America’s largest gradu-
a laboratory at Harvard in 1875. After years of effort and
ate program in the new psychology at Clark University.
soul-searching, he published his immensely successful
As a woman in the early 1900s, Calkins had to over-
textbook, The Principles of Psychology in 1890. In describ-
come many obstacles before studying under James at
ing his concept of the subject matter, methods, and aims
Harvard but quickly became a prize student. She devel-
of the new psychology, he included chapters on a diverse
oped an influential self-psychology and pioneered the
array of topics. He proposed the notion of the stream of
paired-associates technique to study learning and mem-
consciousness—the idea that thought has a fluid, dynamic,
ory. She set up the experimental psychology laboratory at
continuous quality that cannot be studied by breaking it
Wellesley College but, like her mentor, increasingly turned
down into its separate elements. He presented what has
to philosophical questions as her career progressed. She
become known as the James-Lange theory of emotion,
was succeeded at Wellesley by two accomplished women.
which states that emotions are the consequence, not the
Gamble took over the directorship of the lab and super-
cause, of physiological responses. He also wrote famously
vised numerous students in experimental studies. The year
about free will, asserting that a true science of psychology
after her death, Heidbreder arrived at Wellesley having just
had to be predicated on complete determinism, although
published her highly acclaimed work Seven Psychologies.
outside science a belief in free will was completely adap-
Thorndike began his graduate work with James at
tive. He also noted that a science of psychology would
Harvard and set up a small laboratory to study learning
itself have certain limits, and in many ways the rest of
in chickens in James’s basement. After transferring with
his career reflected his interest in topics that lay outside
James’s approval to the better facilities at Columbia Uni-
psychology thus defined. He had a longstanding interest
versity, he constructed his famous puzzle boxes, demon-
in psychical research, elaborated a philosophy known as
strating that trial-and-error behavior led to learning that
pragmatism, and published a widely read set of lectures
could be explained by the law of effect. He later turned his
on religious experience.
attention to human subjects and studied transfer of train-
James influenced many students who became leaders of
ing with Woodworth. Most of Thorndike’s research had an
the new discipline of psychology. Hall, the first person in the
applied, functional cast that was becoming characteristic
United States to earn a Ph.D. with a dissertation in exper-
of a distinctly American approach to psychology known as
imental psychology, made important contributions in the
functionalism.
areas of pedagogy, child study and development, and evo-
lutionary theory, while also becoming a leading institution
Key Pioneers
William James, p. 280 Francis Cecil Sumner, Edna Heidbreder, p. 306
Charles Renouvier. p. 284 p. 301 Edward Lee Thorndike,
Alexander Bain, p. 285 Mamie Phipps Clark, p. 301 p. 308
Carl Lange, p. 290 Kenneth B. Clark, p. 301 Robert Sessions
Charles Sanders Peirce, Mary Whiton Calkins, Woodworth, p. 311
p. 293 p. 302
G. Stanley Hall, p. 296 Edmund C. Sanford, p. 304
Key Terms
stream of consciousness, p. 288 self-psychology, p. 305
James-Lange theory of emotion, p. 290 trial-and-error learning, p. 309
pragmatism, p. 293 law of effect, p. 310
recapitulationism, p. 299 transfer of training, p. 311
paired-associates technique, p. 304 functionalism, p. 311

1. James’s and Wundt’s approaches to psychology in many ways mirrored their own
personalities but also broadly represented the intellectual climates of their respective
countries. Describe how the psychology that flourished in America was different from its
German counterpart. How might such regional or national differences persist in shaping
psychology in various parts of the world?
2. Describe the position known as functionalism, and give some examples of research that
could be thought of as functionalist in character.
3. Justify this statement: William James was the founder of American psychology.
Conversely, describe the aspects of his thought and career that do not agree with this
designation.
4. Outline Hall’s theoretical and professional contributions to psychology.
5. Calkins was one of the early academic women in psychology who faced challenges
during her career at Wellesley College. Why was taking a position at a women’s college
both advantageous and limiting?
Suggested Resources
Historian of psychology Christopher Green has produced two documentaries about the
origins and development of functionalist psychology in the United States: Toward a School
of Their Own, Part I (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAZ-Q35-fOI) and A School of
Their Own, Part II (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7sIc8RXspk).
For more on James’s life, see Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (New York:
Collier Books, 1967), and Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984). Biographical information is interspersed with delightful examples of
James’s correspondence in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2 vols. (Boston:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920). A group biography of the entire James clan is R. W. B. Lewis’s
The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Anchor Books, 1991). James’s relationship with
other American psychologists is discussed in Daniel W. Bjork, The Compromised Scientist:
William James in the Development of American Psychology (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983). Francesca Bordogna situates James’s work at the boundaries between psy-
chology and philosophy, the academic and the popular, in her book William James at the
Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge (Chicago: University
Chapter Review 315
of Chicago Press, 2008). James’s own The Principles of Psychology, Psychology: Briefer
Course, and The Varieties of Religious Experience all remain in print in various editions, and
are still well worth reading today.
For biographies of Hall and Thorndike, see Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychol-
ogist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), and Geraldine Joncich, The
Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1968). The stories of Calkins and her fellow female pioneers are told in Elizabeth
Scarborough and Laurel Furumoto, Untold Lives: The First Generation of American Women
Psychologists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). For details of Calkins’s self-
psychology, see Phyllis Wentworth’s article, “The Moral of Her Story: Exploring the Philo-
sophical and Religious Commitments in Mary Whiton Calkins’ Self-Psychology,” History of
Psychology 2 (1999): 119–131. For a multimedia online biography of Calkins, go to http://
www.feministvoices.com/mary-whiton-calkins/, and for Edna Heidbreder, see http://www.
feministvoices.com/edna-heidbreder/.
CHAPTER 9
Psychology as the Science
of Behavior: Pavlov, Watson,
and Skinner
Pavlov’s Early Life and Career

Conditioned Reflexes
Watson’s Early Life and Career
Watson’s Behavioristic Writings
Skinner’s Early Life and Career
Philosophical Implications of Operant Conditioning
A round the turn of the twentieth century, the eminent Russian physiolo-
gist Ivan Pavlov felt troubled. He had just completed a monumental set
of studies on the physiology of digestion, and he was seeking new scientific
challenges. Some observations he had made while studying digestion sug-
gested one possibility, but Pavlov questioned whether it fell truly within the
domain of science.
His idea was to study a type of salivary reaction he called “psychic secretions.”
His earlier research had focused on innate salivary responses in dogs, such as
those that occurred involuntarily whenever food or a mild acid solution was
placed in their mouths. But Pavlov had also noted that after dogs became accus-
tomed to laboratory routine, their mouths watered when merely placed in the
apparatus for testing their salivation. These “psychic” salivary responses were
obviously learned—the result of experience rather than innate reflexes.
317
318 9 | Psychology as the Science of Behavior: Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner
Pavlov had already developed apparatus and procedures for exploring these
psychic secretions with the same precision he had achieved for innate salivary
responses. But he worried about the scientific company he might have to keep
in such a venture. The study of psychic secretions seemed obviously within the
domain of psychology, and Pavlov disliked the unreliable and introspection-based
procedures most of his contemporary academic psychologists used. As he wrote,
it is “open to question whether psychology is a natural science, or whether it
can be regarded as a science at all.”1 Pavlov thought of himself as a rigorous,
completely scientific physiologist, and he feared being associated with the soft-
minded psychologists.
Pavlov finally resolved his dilemma after recalling Reflexes of the Brain, a
book written in 1863 by his compatriot Ivan Sechenov.2 Sechenov had tried
to account for all behavior—-including such higher functions as thinking,
willing, and judging—in terms of an expanded reflex concept. The higher
functions theoretically occurred when acquired reflexes localized in the
brain became inserted between the sensory and motor components of innate
reflexes. Descartes had long before proposed a similar idea in Treatise of
Man (see Chapter 2), but Sechenov stated the case in up-to-date physiolog-
ical language that provided the framework Pavlov needed to conceptualize
learned reflexes in an appropriately scientific manner. Pavlov decided that
his dogs’ psychic secretions could be redefined in the pristine physiological
terminology of the reflex, thereby avoiding the need to invoke subjective
psychological states. He spent the rest of his long life studying how reflexes
come to be learned, secure in his belief he was not a psychologist but a
physiologist.
Others who did consider themselves psychologists eventually took an
interest in Pavlov’s work. Foremost among them was John Watson, who,
like Pavlov, grew suspicious of the unverifiable and “unscientific” nature
of introspective psychology. In 1913 Watson stunned many American psy-
chologists by asserting an approach to psychology known as behaviorism,
according to which the proper subject matter of psychology was not the tra-
ditional mind and consciousness, but rather objective, observable behav-
ior. Citing Pavlov’s model of the learned reflex as a basis for objective and
nonmentalistic theorizing, Watson went on to vigorously promote this ap-
proach and show how it could be applied to many practical problems. After
Watson, the American psychologist B. F. Skinner became behaviorism’s
most prominent proponent and one of the most acclaimed psychologists in
psychology’s history to date.
PAVLOV’S EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936; Figure 9.1) was born
in the ancient Russian town of Ryazan. Although his
father was the local priest and his mother the daughter of
a priest, both parents had to work in the fields all day as
peasants in order to put food on the table. At age 10 Ivan
suffered a serious fall that required a long recovery in the
care of his godfather, the abbot of a nearby monastery.
He encouraged Ivan to read, and insisted that before the
enthusiastic boy tried to talk about his reading, he must
first write down his observations. This strategy not only
bought the busy abbot some undisturbed time, but also
taught young Pavlov a lifelong habit of systematic obser-
vation and reporting.
This habit proved useful in school and helped Pavlov
benefit from the liberal educational reforms recently insti-
tuted by Czar Alexander II. As a poor but gifted student who Figure 9.1 Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936).
had done well in school, he won a government-supported
scholarship to the University of St. Petersburg. Pavlov’s choice of major sub-
ject there followed his chance reading of a popular book on physiology that
contained a diagram of the digestive tract. “How does such a complicated sys-
tem work?” the fascinated Pavlov asked himself, and he enrolled in the natural
science program.3 This began a scientific quest that would eventually culmi-
nate in a Nobel Prize.
At the university, Pavlov absorbed the new mechanistic physiology that
was then popular. He became a meticulous researcher and organizer, and
qualified as a teaching assistant for the advanced students. Using assis-
tantships to support himself through graduate medical training, Pavlov
was named director of one internal medicine laboratory while he was still a
student. He helped many doctoral candidates get their degrees even before
he completed his own in 1883.
Pavlov had excellent credentials after graduation, but good jobs in research
were scarce. He had to make do, and support a wife as well, on a series of sub-
ordinate and poorly paid positions until he was past 40. In 1890, however, he
finally won appointment as a professor at St. Petersburg’s Military-Medical
Academy. At last he was free to create and staff his own laboratory and pur-
sue his long-standing ambition: the experimental study of the physiology of
digestion.
Pavlov’s Laboratory
Pavlov habitually showed two different faces to the world, depending on whether he
was outside or inside his lab. Outside, he was sentimental, impractical, and absent-
minded—often arousing the wonder and amusement of his friends. He became
engaged while still a student, spending much of his meager income on luxuries for
his fiancée, such as candy, flowers, and theater tickets. Only once did he buy her a
practical gift: a new pair of shoes to take on a trip. When she arrived at her desti-
nation she found only one shoe in her trunk, accompanied by a letter from Pavlov:
“Don’t look for your other shoe. I took it as a remembrance of you and have put it on
my desk.”4 Following marriage, Pavlov often forgot to pick up his pay, and once when
he did remember he immediately loaned it all to an irresponsible acquaintance who
could not pay it back. On a visit to America in 1923, he carried all his money in a
conspicuous pocketbook, which was stolen as he boarded a train in New York.
If sentimentality and impracticality characterized Pavlov’s personal life, those
traits never showed when he was inside his laboratory. In pursuing his research
he overlooked no detail. While he lived frugally at home, he fought hard to ensure
that his lab was well equipped and his experimental animals well fed. Punctual
in keeping hours at the lab and perfectionistic in his experimental technique,
he expected the same from his workers. During the Russian Revolution he once
disciplined an assistant who showed up late because of having to dodge bullets
and street skirmishes on the way to work.
The most remarkable aspect of Pavlov’s laboratory was its organization. He
ran a large and efficient scientific enterprise that any administrator might envy.
Experiments were performed and repeated systematically by the hundreds, ac-
cording to a simple but clever scheme. New workers in the lab were never assigned
to new or independent projects; they were required to replicate experiments that
had already been done. In a single stroke, the initiates learned firsthand about
work in progress and provided Pavlov with a check on the reliability of previous
results. If the replications succeeded, those results were confirmed and the new
lab assistant was ready to move on to something else; if they failed, another repli-
cation by a third party would be ordered to resolve the discrepancy.
When he was an old and famous man, Pavlov wrote the following advice in an
article for Soviet youth:
This is the message I would like to give the youth of my country. First of all,
be systematic. I repeat, be systematic. Train yourself to be strictly system-
atic in the acquisition of knowledge. First study the rudiments of science
before attempting to reach its heights. Never pass to the next stage until
you have thoroughly mastered the one on hand.5
Someone who only knew Pavlov outside the lab might have been surprised to
hear such advice coming from him. Those who worked inside, however, knew that
he accurately described the secret of his own success.
The Physiology of Digestion

Pavlov spent the first decade in his new laboratory attacking the topic that had
originally attracted him to science: the complicated workings of the digestive
system. Digestion had long resisted direct physiological study because the organs
involved were both well concealed and highly susceptible to surgical trauma.
When surgically exposed, the digestive organs of experimental animals ceased to
function normally, so direct observations were of limited scientific value. Pavlov’s
great contribution was to observe normal digestive functions in experimental
animals by imitating an almost incredible natural experiment that had occurred
earlier in the century.
In 1822, a young French-Canadian trapper named Alexis St. Martin suffered
a gunshot wound to his stomach. His doctor, William Beaumont, thought the
wound would be fatal but patched him up as best he could. Surprisingly, however,
St. Martin gradually recovered and returned to normal—except for the remark-
able fact that the hole in the wall of his stomach never fully closed but remained
as a “window” on whatever happened within. Beaumont seized this opportunity
and persuaded St. Martin to serve as a subject for studies of digestion. Beaumont
directly observed the stomach as it digested food, inserting instruments to col-
lect, measure, and analyze the substances it secreted. Until Pavlov, Beaumont’s
observations of St. Martin provided the best available knowledge about normal
digestive processes.
Pavlov decided to replicate Beaumont’s observations, but on a more selective
and controlled basis. He surgically created openings in the digestive tracts of
dogs. Others had tried this before and failed, but Pavlov succeeded for two major
reasons. First, he was an unusually skillful surgeon who disliked the sight of
blood and therefore minimized the surgical trauma experienced by his subjects.
Second, he was among the first to appreciate the importance of surgery that was
free from contamination. At a time when human patients often died from infec-
tions contracted in unsanitary surgical wards, Pavlov went to extreme lengths
to assure the antiseptic cleanliness of his animal operations. Even though the
digestive tract was a particularly dangerous source of infection and most of his
predecessors’ animals died after surgery, the majority of Pavlov’s animals com-
pletely recovered from their operations.
He first created permanent openings in various parts of the dogs’ diges-
tive tracts, and then conducted hundreds of experiments in his systematic
way. After feeding the animals different substances, for example, he collected,
measured, and chemically analyzed the resulting secretions from the various
digestive structures. These studies won him the Nobel Prize for physiol-
ogy in 1904, and they are still cited today in textbooks on the physiology of
digestion.
Among the digestive responses Pavlov studied was salivation, and he learned
very early that a splash of mild acid on a dog’s tongue immediately produced
a large secretion of saliva. Then he incidentally noticed the psychic secretions
of animals that had become accustomed to the lab routine; they would begin to
salivate even before the acid was splashed on their tongues, as they went through
the preliminary process of being placed in their experimental apparatus. With
these observations, Pavlov had begun his study of conditioned reflexes.*
CONDITIONED REFLEXES
Pavlov publicly introduced the idea of conditioned reflexes in his Nobel Prize
address of 1904, and then studied them for the rest of his life.6 Conducted with
the assistance of nearly 150 collaborators and assistants, his studies involved the
systematic manipulation of the various components involved in establishing a
conditioned reflex. Using his new, nonpsychological terminology, he named the
components: the unconditioned stimulus, the unconditioned response, the con-
ditioned stimulus, and the conditioned response. An unconditioned stimulus
(US) is a stimulus that causes an automatic reaction. For example, if you were to
put your hand down accidentally on a hot stovetop, the heat (US) would cause
you to automatically withdraw your hand. The automatic response to an uncon-
ditioned stimulus is the unconditioned response (UR). An unconditioned stim-
ulus and unconditioned response together constitute an unconditioned reflex,
the innate and automatic reaction that must exist prior to any conditioning
or learning.
Descartes had described one unconditioned reflex, although he did not call
it that, when he wrote of the heat from a fire (US) producing the automatic
withdrawal of a foot (UR) that has been brought too near (see Chapter 2).
Pavlov’s earlier research had focused on unconditioned digestive reflexes, such
as when mild acid was splashed in the mouth (US) and salivation (UR) automat-
ically followed.
*The more precise translation of Pavlov’s name for these reflexes is conditional reflexes, even
though conditioned reflexes has become the more common term in English, and the form we
will use.
Pavlov noted that a typical conditioned stimulus (CS) starts out by being
neutral and eliciting no strong response at all, but it subsequently acquires the
property of eliciting a response after being paired with an unconditioned stim-
ulus a number of times. For his dogs, the sight of their keeper at mealtime, or
the experience of being placed in their experimental apparatus, became a con-
ditioned stimulus regularly followed by the unconditioned stimuli of food or
acid in the mouth. Soon, these originally neutral stimuli aroused salivation all by
themselves. This salivation was now a conditioned response (CR) , because it
was aroused in the absence of the original, unconditioned stimulus. Pavlov called
these new stimulus-response connections conditioned reflexes, in which a pre-
viously neutral stimulus (CS) acquires the ability to elicit a response (CR) when
it is paired with an unconditioned stimulus. This process by which conditioned
reflexes were acquired came to be called classical conditioning, or Pavlovian
conditioning.
Conditioned reflexes were an ideal subject for the sort of research program
Pavlov was so good at supervising. He and his associates could systematically
vary the types of stimuli, the numbers of pairings, and the conditions under
which they occurred, and then observe the strengths of the resulting conditioned
reflexes. The following example illustrates one of the earliest but most fundamen-
tal classical conditioning experiments.
The sounding of a tone served as the conditioned stimulus, followed im-
mediately by the unconditioned stimulus of mild acid on the tongue. The
experimenters varied the number of pairings of these two stimuli before present-
ing the tone without the acid, to see how many were necessary for conditioning to
occur. Dogs received 1, 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 pairings before the test; their response
magnitudes were measured by the number of drops of saliva secreted, and re-
sponse latencies by the number of seconds between the presentation of the tone
and the first observable salivation:
Number of Pairings Response Magnitude Response Latency
1 0 —
10 6 18
20 20 9
30 60 2
40 62 1
50 59 2
As you can see, the conditioned reflexes became progressively stronger, with
response magnitudes regularly increasing and latencies decreasing, over the first
thirty or so pairings; after that, the strength of the conditioned reflex leveled off.
Other early experiments that varied the time interval between the CS and US
showed that the strongest and quickest conditioning occurred when the inter-
val was short. If the conditioned stimulus followed the unconditioned stimulus,
however—even by a very short interval—no conditioned reflexes were produced
at all. Another series of basic studies demonstrated higher-order conditioning,
in which a strong conditioned salivary reflex was first established in response
to one stimulus, such as the sound of a tone, which then served as the uncondi-
tioned stimulus in a further series of pairings with another conditioned stimulus,
such as a flash of light. For instance, the tone was first paired with a mild acidic
solution, then the light was paired with the tone, and the animals became condi-
tioned to salivate to the light.
Generalization, Differentiation, and Experimental Neuroses

Another important series of experiments showed that conditioned reflexes
could be elicited by stimuli similar, but not identical, to the original conditioned
stimulus—a phenomenon Pavlov called generalization. When a tone of one pitch
served as the CS during training and the test was made with a slightly higher
or lower tone, a conditioned reflex still occurred, but with somewhat diminished
magnitude. The greater the dissimilarity between the conditioned and test
stimuli, the weaker the generalized response.
If the dissimilar stimulus was then presented repeatedly, but never reinforced
by a succeeding unconditioned stimulus, another kind of learning occurred that
Pavlov called differentiation. For example, a dog was first conditioned to sali-
vate to an image of a circle flashed on a screen. Then, the circular stimulus was
randomly alternated with an oblong, elliptical figure of about the same size; each
presentation of the circle was followed by a splash of acid on the tongue, while
the ellipse was never so reinforced. At first, generalization occurred and the dog
salivated copiously to the ellipse; but after repeated trials, the response to the
ellipse decreased in strength and finally disappeared altogether. A differentiation
had occurred.
Some of the Pavlov laboratory’s most surprising experiments tested the
limits of his animals’ ability to differentiate. In the circle-ellipse differentiation,
for example, they started with a very oblong ellipse. When the dog stopped
salivating to that image, the researchers shifted to another one that was
slightly less oblong and more circular. After the animal successfully differen-
tiated that image from the circle, they tried one that was more circular still,
and so on, progressively reducing the difference between the stimuli. When
the nonreinforced stimulus became almost circular, with its height to width
in a 9 to 8 ratio, a sudden and dramatic change came over the dog’s behavior.
Previously calm and docile, the animal now made frantic efforts to escape from
its apparatus, and remained agitated long afterward. In fact, animals forced to
confront this ambiguous stimulus for very long continued to be disturbed for
weeks or months after the experiment. When retested on some of the easier
differentiations they had mastered before the crucial trial, the dogs failed.
Likening this behavior to stress-induced breakdowns in humans, Pavlov called
these reactions experimental neuroses.
Pavlov theorized that experimental neuroses were likely to occur whenever
animals were confronted by unavoidable conflicts between two strong but
incompatible conditioned response tendencies, such as to salivate or to suppress
salivation at the sight of the ambiguous ellipse. From this basic idea, he deduced
a new theory of brain functioning.
Pavlov’s Theory of the Brain

As a self-identified physiologist, Pavlov tried to account for his conditioning
results in terms of a physiological theory. Following Sechenov, he argued that un-
conditioned reflexes are based in connections between sensory and motor nerves
in the spinal cord and the lower brain centers. Conditioned reflexes presumably
occurred when nerve pathways in the cortex became part of the circuitry, con-
necting stimuli with responses in new combinations. Consistent with the recent
discoveries of cortical localization described in Chapter 3, Pavlov reasoned that
different conditioned stimuli must excite different specific locations on the cor-
tex, with the locations for similar stimuli lying closer together than those for dis-
similar stimuli. He speculated that two different kinds of processes must occur
in these locations to produce conditioning; excitation presumably leads to the
acquisition or generalization of conditioned responses, while inhibition causes
an already acquired response tendency to be suppressed.
Pavlov suggested that excitatory processes arise in a cortical area when the
stimulus represented there is reinforced by the presentation of an unconditioned
stimulus. Inhibitory processes arise when such reinforcement fails to occur. He
further argued that excitation and inhibition must irradiate, or spread out in a
wavelike fashion over surrounding locations, with their strength weakening as
they get farther away from their center. Cerebral irradiation had never actu-
ally been observed (and still has not), but he noted that this could theoretically
account for the phenomena of generalization, differentiation, and experimental
neurosis.
In generalization, the presentation of a similar alternative stimulus presum-

ably arouses a wave of excitation in a cortical center close to that for the original
conditioned stimulus. As the irradiation spreads, it soon reaches and excites the
location of the original stimulus, which has acquired (by conditioning) connec-
tions to the salivary response apparatus. A salivary response is thereby initiated,
although it is somewhat diminished in strength because the excitation at the
location of the CS has weakened through irradiation.
In differentiation training, the cortical centers representing nonreinforced
stimuli presumably begin to send out waves of inhibition instead of excitation.
Stimuli immediately surrounding these centers correspondingly lose the ability
to arouse generalized conditioned reflexes. If many surrounding stimuli are sys-
tematically nonreinforced, the entire cortex surrounding the center for the true
conditioned stimulus becomes a field for inhibition rather than excitation. As the
American psychologist George Miller observed:
When a differentiation is firmly established, only a small region of the

brain corresponding to the conditional stimulus will produce a response.
Inhibition lies over the rest of the brain like winter over the empty plains of
central Russia, limiting all activity to the lonely stockades.7
The winter snow metaphor is somewhat misleading, however, because it

suggests that inhibition-irradiated areas of the cortex are inert. To the contrary,
Pavlov thought of them as fields of great potential energy, which under the con-
ditions of experimental neurosis can dramatically influence behavior. Pavlov
hypothesized that experimental neurosis occurs whenever a stimulus that can-
not be avoided arouses very strong excitation and inhibition at the same time; its
cortical location lies exactly on a boundary between powerful excitatory and in-
hibitory fields. When this location is strongly stimulated, the boundary may liter-
ally rupture, so the entire cortical region becomes flooded with a mixture of both
excitation and inhibition. These two forces now intermix wildly and produce the
disorganized behavior of experimental neuroses. In studying these neuroses in
dogs, he noticed individual differences in symptoms. Dogs with active tempera-
ments became more active in the expression of their neuroses, while more pas-
sive dogs developed more depressive symptoms. Pavlov related these patterns to
corresponding levels of innate excitatory or inhibitory energy in the dogs’ brains.
In 1929, the 80-year-old Pavlov began to focus on the implications of this the-
ory for human psychopathology. He attempted to account for the varieties of psy-
chiatric illness in terms of an excess or deficiency of excitation and inhibition, the
weakening of cortical neurons, and other variables associated with experimental
neuroses he’d observed in dogs. He devised physical therapies for these presumed
deficiencies, intended to rest or exercise the defective brain cells, or restore them
to health by the application of chemicals. In doing so he established a strong
tradition of biologically based psychiatric treatment in the Soviet Union.
Pavlov’s Influence
Pavlov worked vigorously on his psychiatric projects until early in 1936, when he
fell ill after a full day’s work. As his symptoms rapidly worsened into pneumonia,
Pavlov characteristically made systematic observations of his mental state. A few
days later he told his doctor: “My brain is not working well; obsessive feelings and
involuntary movements appear; mortification may be setting in.”8 An hour after
making this final scientific observation, the 86-year-old Pavlov died.
By the time of his death, Pavlov was a Soviet national hero, and a new town was
named after him. Pavlov’s influence had also spread to the United States, where
his nonmentalistic approach appealed to a group of young scientists who called
themselves behaviorists. But unlike Pavlov, who steadfastly insisted he was not a
psychologist but a physiologist, the behaviorists changed their definition of psy-
chology to accommodate their nonmentalistic orientation. Less concerned than
Pavlov about the neurological basis of conditioning, the behaviorists used tech-
niques like his to establish behavioral principles about stimuli and responses
that did not refer to physiology. For them, psychology became transformed from
the science of consciousness or the mind to the science of behavior. We turn now
to the story of the major founder of American behaviorism.
WATSON’S EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

John Broadus Watson (1878–1958; Figure 9.2) was born
near Greenville, South Carolina, the son of a wayward father
and a deeply religious mother. Named after John Broadus,
a local fundamentalist minister, and constantly steered in a
religious direction by his mother, young Watson nonethe-
less developed a fierce rebellious streak that became a per-
manent part of his character. His youthful aggressiveness
earned him the nickname Swats, and as a teenager he got
arrested for fighting and for firing a gun inside city limits.
He recalled that at school “I was lazy, somewhat insubordi-
nate, and . . . never made above a passing grade.”9
Still, Watson at 16 was admitted to Greenville’s Furman
University, where his mother hoped he would prepare for
a career as a clergyman. He almost did, succeeding in his Figure 9.2 John Broadus Watson (1878–1958).
courses and applying to Princeton Theological Seminary. However, a peculiar,

and characteristic, episode during his senior year prevented him from going.
His philosophy and psychology professor, Gordon Moore, had warned that any
student submitting a paper with the pages in reverse order would automatically
flunk. Although he’d been an honor student all year, Watson, as he put it, “by
some strange streak of luck, I handed in my final paper . . . backwards.”10 Moore
kept his word, and Watson had to return for an extra year at Furman instead of
enrolling in seminary. As partial compensation, he graduated from Furman in
1899 with a master’s rather than a bachelor’s degree.
During that extra year, Watson’s mother died, so he no longer faced family
pressure to become a minister. He now made an adolescent resolve to upstage his
professor by earning a Ph.D. (which Moore did not hold) and one day inducing the
older man to come to him for training. Moore genuinely appreciated Watson’s raw
ability and helped him get admitted to the still-undivided philosophy-psychology
department at the recently founded University of Chicago in 1900. (A dozen years
later, Moore actually did apply to study with Watson but sadly had to abandon
the plan because of failing eyesight.)
Watson went to Chicago expecting to work with the department’s eminent
chairman, and leader of American functionalism, John Dewey (see Chapter 8).
Ever the maverick, he found Dewey’s approach unsatisfying: “I never knew what
he was talking about then, and unfortunately for me, I still don’t know,” Watson
recalled. Equally unappealing were the introspective methods required for much
of the traditional psychological research conducted in the department: “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.”11 A fellow student remem-
bered that Watson never learned to give consistent introspective reports that
agreed with those of others.12
But if the philosophical and introspective aspects of psychology did not come
easily, Watson found an emerging area at Chicago in which he truly excelled:
animal psychology. As a country boy comfortable with animals, Watson felt at
home in this field. He was particularly attracted by the work of two department
members. Jacques Loeb was a mechanistic biologist who had introduced the con-
cept of tropism to explain plant and animal movement. Henry Donaldson was
a neurologist who studied the nervous system of white rats. Donaldson proved
supportive to Watson, both practically and intellectually; he hired the financially
pressed graduate student to tend his colony of experimental rats. As Watson
became familiar with the behavior of these tame creatures, he realized they
would make suitable subjects for his own doctoral thesis research. Under the joint
supervision of Donaldson and psychologist James Angell, Watson demonstrated
that the increasing complexity in the behavior of developing young rats strongly
correlated with detectable neurological changes.
Despite his difficulties with traditional psychology, Watson the animal psy-
chologist had become an academic star—the youngest Ph.D. yet turned out by
the university, with the second-best final examination in his department’s history.
Still, Watson was plagued by an inferiority complex. His supervisors reminded
him that a previous doctoral student, Helen Bradford Thompson, had graduated
with higher honors than Watson and had turned in a superior performance at her
examination. Watson later noted, “I wondered then if anybody could ever equal
her record. That jealousy existed for years.”13 Watson also had to hold several jobs
to support himself, and overwork contributed to an emotional breakdown. He
could not sleep without a light on and suffered anxiety attacks that subsided only
after taking 10-mile walks. He later hinted that sexual concerns may have been
involved, when he reported that his breakdown “in a way prepared me to accept
a large part of Freud.”14
This emotional crisis coincided with complications in Watson’s personal life,
following his rejection by one young woman and his subsequent engagement to
the 19-year-old student Mary Ickes. Mary’s brother Harold was a rising figure in
Chicago politics who would later become President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secre-
tary of the Interior. Considering Watson unreliable, he strenuously opposed the
match with his sister. Watson and Mary married secretly in December 1903 but
lived apart and did not publicly declare their status until the fall of 1904.15
Professionally, Watson’s life began to improve. As an expert in the newly
emerging area of animal psychology, he was in demand and received several job
offers. Deciding to stay at Chicago as an instructor, where four years later he
would become promoted to assistant professor, Watson was offered an associ-
ate professorship at Johns Hopkins University, with the comfortable salary of
$2,500 per year. When he hesitated, hoping Chicago would match the position,
Hopkins increased its offer to a full professorship at $3,500. Although Watson
liked Chicago, it was more than he could refuse. He set off for Baltimore at age 29
to assume an important position at one of America’s major universities.
The Founding of Behaviorism

At Hopkins, Watson’s professional advancement continued. A year after he
arrived, his department chair, James Mark Baldwin, was arrested in a house of
prostitution and resigned in the ensuing scandal, although the exact circum-
stances surrounding the arrest are somewhat unclear.16 As the department’s only
remaining full professor, Watson inherited its leadership as well as the editor-
ship of an important journal, Psychological Review. From his position of authority
Watson immediately began pressing the university president to separate psy-

chology from philosophy and to forge new ties between psychology and biology.
For a while, he maintained an uneasy alliance with traditional academic
psychology and taught courses along the lines of James and Wundt, while
conducting his own research on animals. But he bristled when people asked
what his research had to do with “real” psychology—which they took to be the
study of conscious experience. “I was interested in my own work and felt it was
important,” he complained, “yet I could not trace any connection between it and
psychology as my questioner understood psychology.”17 With characteristic
boldness, Watson decided to stop trying to adapt to the traditional definition
of psychology; instead, he proceeded to redefine psychology so it gave his spe-
cialty a dominant position. In fact, several other psychologists were doing work
similar to Watson’s, within a behaviorist rather than an introspectionist frame-
work. Their position needed an articulate spokesperson, and Watson, as it turned
out, filled the bill.
He started to promote behaviorism in 1913, with the article “Psychology as the
Behaviorist Views It,” published in Psychological Review. The opening paragraph
clearly defined the alternative “behavioristic” psychology he envisioned:
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental

branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control
of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the
scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they
lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behavior-
ist, in his attempts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes
no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of
its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist’s total
scheme of investigation.18
Watson was declaring independence from traditional psychology in three

ways. First, he asserted that a properly behavioristic psychology must be com-
pletely objective and rule out all subjective data or interpretations in terms of
conscious experience. While traditional psychology used objective observations
to complement or supplement introspective data, for Watson they became the
sole basis of psychology.
Second, Watson stated that psychology’s goal was not to describe and explain
conscious states, as the traditionalists would have it, but rather to predict and
control overt behavior. Behavioristic psychology was to be highly practical, much
more concerned with concrete effectiveness than with theoretical understanding.
Third, Watson denied the traditional psychological distinction between

humans and other animals. Drawing on Darwin’s demonstration of the common
ancestry of all animal species, Watson argued that psychological similarities
among species are just as important as differences. Studies of the behavior of
apes, rats, pigeons, and even flatworms should interest psychologists because of
the continuity of life forms.
WATSON’S BEHAVIORISTIC WRITINGS

After declaring the general principles of a behavioristic psychology, Watson
faced the problem of actually putting them into practice. His first attempt, a
1914 textbook entitled Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology re-
printed “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” as its first chapter and went on
to summarize the field of animal psychology.19 The book was well received as a
comprehensive account of that field, and enhanced Watson’s reputation as he
successfully ran for president of the American Psychological Association. But
despite the radical prescriptions of its opening chapter, the book had little to say
about human psychology and as a whole did not seem revolutionary.
Although Watson had condemned introspection, he had not yet been able to
replace it, and he candidly admitted as much in the opening of his presidential
speech to the APA in 1915:
Since the publication two years ago of my somewhat impolite papers

against current methods in psychology I have felt it incumbent upon me
before making further unpleasant remarks to suggest some method which
we might begin to use in place of introspection. I have found, as you easily
might have predicted, that it is one thing to condemn a long-established
method, but quite another thing to suggest anything in its place.20
Now, however, Watson saw the beginnings of an answer, since his younger
colleague Karl Lashley had introduced him to recent Russian writings on the
conditioned reflex.* He learned about Pavlov’s conditioned salivary reflexes
and the related work of Pavlov’s compatriot Vladimir M. Bechterev (1857–1927).
Bechterev had extended Pavlov’s technique to study muscular responses such
as the withdrawal of a dog’s paw when electric shock was administered as the
unconditioned stimulus. He had also tried conditioning human subjects, an idea
that Lashley and Watson pushed further. Lashley devised a removable tube that
*Lashley went on to become a leading neuropsychologist and conducted studies on the cerebral
localization of memory (see Chapter 3).
could be fitted inside the cheek of human subjects to measure their salivations,
and Watson constructed an apparatus that administered mild shock to a human
subject’s finger or toe and measured the strength of the subsequent withdrawal
reflex. After pairing neutral conditioned stimuli with shock, he was able to obtain
and measure conditioned withdrawal responses.
Watson believed the main significance of these studies lay not in the fact that
people and dogs could both be conditioned to salivate to, or withdraw their toes
from, inherently neutral stimuli, but in their implications for broader conditioning
experiments. Pavlov, as a physiologist, had been more interested in the brain than
the behavior of his subjects; and for making physiological inferences, one type of
response—salivation—had been as good as any other. But Watson sought a general
principle to explain many different kinds of behavior and seized on the conditioned
reflex as a model for a wide variety of responses. In his presidential address he
suggested that human emotions might be considered as glandular and muscular
reflexes which, like salivation, readily become conditioned. If so, then Pavlovian-
style conditioning offered a properly behavioristic, nonintrospective avenue for
studying one of the most important and complicated subjects in human psychology.
Conditioned Emotional Reactions

In 1917, shortly after his APA address, Watson’s plan to extend behavioristic meth-
ods into human psychology had to be postponed when the United States entered
World War I. Doing military service as a major in the Signal Corps, he selected
and trained aviators. Predictably, he disliked the authoritarian atmosphere, and
let his contempt for his superiors show. They, in turn, recommended “that he be
not allowed to serve his country in his scientific capacity, but be sent to the line.”
Only the war’s quick end in 1918 spared him from assignment to a highly danger-
ous intelligence mission.21
Safely returned to civilian life at Johns Hopkins, Watson took up where he had
left off and in 1919 published Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist.22
While his first book focused on comparative and animal psychology, this one
aimed at being a general text concentrating on human behavior—covering such
subjects as thought, language, child development, and emotion. Research on
conditioned reflexes played a large part in the book, especially the discussion of
emotions.
Watson began by asking which human emotional responses are innate and
unconditioned. In his answer he described his observations of human infants
who presumably had not yet acquired any conditioned reflexes. (Infants made
excellent behavioristic subjects because they could not talk and contaminate the
experiments with subjective or introspective reports.) Having presented various
stimuli to infants to see what sorts of reactions they elicited, he concluded there
were three kinds of unconditioned emotional responses, each one produced by
only a small number of stimuli.
First, Watson observed an apparently innate fear response, defined behav-
ioristically as “a sudden catching of the breath, clutching randomly with the
hands, . . . sudden closing of the eyelids, puckering of the lips, then crying.”23 Only
two kinds of stimuli seemed to produce this reaction in very young infants: a
sudden, unexpected loud sound and a sudden loss of support, as when the infant
was suddenly dropped (and then caught without any physical harm being done).
Infants did not react in a fearful or any other dramatic way when confronted with
darkness or other stimuli commonly regarded as fear-provoking by older people.
Second, Watson observed an emotional reaction in infants he called rage, in
which “the body stiffens and fairly well-coordinated slashing or striking move-
ments of the hands and arms result; the feet and legs are drawn up and down;
the breath is held until the child’s face is flushed.”24 Just one kind of stimulus—
the physical hindering of movement—produced this reaction in a newborn. As
Watson described it, the newborn could be hindered in its movement by holding
its arms tightly to its sides, or placing its head between cotton pads.
Third, Watson saw evidence for a third unconditioned emotional response in
infants that he provisionally called love:
The original situation which calls out the observable love response seems
to be the stroking or manipulation of some erogenous zone, tickling, shak-
ing, gentle rocking, patting and turning on the stomach across the atten-
dant’s knee. The response varies. If the infant is crying, crying ceases, a
smile may appear, attempts at gurgling, cooing, and finally, in older chil-
dren, the extension of the arms, which we should class as the forerunner of
the embrace of adults.25
Watson believed these three responses, and the minimal range of stimuli that
produced them, made up the entire complement of innate human emotional
reactions. He saw everything else, including such supposedly “natural” reac-
tions as fear of the dark and love for one’s mother, as the results of Pavlovian-
style conditioning: “When an emotionally exciting object stimulates the subject
simultaneously with one not emotionally stimulating, the latter may in time
(often after one such joint stimulation) arouse the same emotional reaction as the
former.”26 All the complications and complexities of adult emotional experience
were presumably nothing more than conditioned responses built on three rela-
tively simple unconditioned emotional reflexes.
When he wrote his textbook in 1919, Watson had

no real empirical support for this theory. It seemed
plausible, but he had never observed the actual cre-
ation of a conditioned emotional reaction. In 1920 he
attempted to remedy this by research conducted with
his graduate student Rosalie Rayner (1899–1935).
Published under the title “Conditioned Emotional
Reactions,” the Watson-Rayner study of Little
Albert remains one of the most famous and contro-
versial in the psychological literature (Figure 9.3).
They conditioned Albert B., the 11-month-old son
of a wet nurse in the hospital adjacent to their in-
Figure 9.3 John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner with
Little Albert. fant laboratory, to fear a white rat—a stimulus that
initially evoked the infant’s interest and pleasure
rather than fear. For their unconditioned stimulus, they loudly struck a steel bar
with a hammer just behind Albert’s head. They described the first trials as follows:
1. White rat suddenly taken from the basket and presented to Albert. He
began to reach for the rat with left hand. Just as his hand touched the
animal the bar was struck immediately behind his head. The infant
jumped violently and fell forward, burying his face in the mattress. He
did not cry, however.
2. Just as the right hand touched the rat the bar was again struck. Again
the infant jumped violently, fell forward and began to whimper. In
order not to disturb the child too seriously no further tests were given
for one week.27
When Albert first saw the rat the next week, he kept his distance from the
animal but did not cry. Then, on five separate occasions, the experimenters delib-
erately moved the rat close to Albert and clanged the bar behind his head. After
this, the rat alone produced what they interpreted as a full-fledged fear response:
The instant the rat was shown the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he
turned sharply to the left, fell over on his left side, raised himself on all fours
and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before
reaching the edge of the table.”28
Five days later Albert still responded to the rat with whimpering and withdrawal.
Watson and Rayner tested for generalization of the conditioned response by
presenting other furry stimuli: a rabbit, a dog, a seal coat, cotton wool, and a Santa
Claus mask. Each produced a noticeable but weakened avoidance reaction. Then
Watson put his own hair—which was showing streaks of white—near the child, and
got a poetically just response: “Albert was completely negative. Two other observ-
ers did the same thing. He began immediately to play with their hair.”29
Later, Watson and Rayner decided for some unstated reason to “freshen”
Albert’s generalized response to the rabbit and dog, and clanged the bar after
presenting each stimulus. The white rat was similarly freshened, and then Albert
was presented with all three stimuli in a room different from the conditioning
room. Albert actively feared them all in this new setting. After another month
with no trials at all, Albert was retested with the Santa mask, the fur coat, the rat,
the rabbit, and the dog. All of them still produced fear responses.30
And that was the last Watson and Rayner saw of Little Albert! Irresponsibly—
from the standpoint of today’s research ethics—they let him leave the hospital
without trying to decondition the fear reactions they had produced. They only
added a section to their paper describing what they would have done:
Had the opportunity been at hand we should have tried out several methods,
some of which we may mention. 1) Constantly confronting the child with
those stimuli which called out the responses in hopes that habituation
would come in. . . . 2) By trying to “recondition” by showing objects calling
out fear responses (visual) and simultaneously stimulating the erogenous
zones (tactual). We should first try the lips, then the nipples and as a final
resort the sex organs. 3) By trying to “recondition” by feeding the subject
candy or other food just as the animal is shown. . . . 4) By building up “con-
structive” activities around the object by imitation and by putting the hand
through motions of manipulation.31
Watson and Rayner further stated that the fear responses “in the home envi-
ronment are likely to persist indefinitely, unless an accidental method for remov-
ing them is hit upon.”32
These words must have brought no comfort to Albert’s mother. In a piece
of retrospective detective work undertaken almost 90 years later, a team of
psychologist-sleuths attempted to uncover Little Albert’s true identity. Their
conclusion, based on a seven-year scavenger hunt involving archival and
genealogical research, plus analysis of photographic evidence, was that Little
Albert was probably Douglas Merritte, son of Arvilla Merritte of Baltimore. If
this was true, he apparently developed hydrocephalus in 1922, as a likely result of
meningitis. Three years later, at the age of 6, Douglas died.33
But the story doesn’t end there. When another group of psychologists read the
published piece of detective work and took another look at the film of the Little
Albert study, they began to suspect that the infant had not become ill after his
encounter with Watson and Rayner, but may have actually suffered from a neu-
rological impairment from birth. On the basis of this clinical intuition, combined
with frame-by-frame analysis of the Little Albert film and the discovery of addi-
tional medical records, they proposed that Watson and Rayner had experimented
on an infant who was known to be ill and had possibly concealed this fact in a
startling breach of ethics, claiming him to be a normal, healthy child. As a result,
the validity and significance of the study would have to be reconsidered—and
Watson’s ethics brought into even more serious question.34
In a final plot twist, a third group of researchers who were unconvinced by
this new evidence took up the case once more and emerged with an even like-
lier candidate for his true identity: an infant named Albert Barger. Barger, they
noted, was much closer in recorded weight to the child in the film and was indeed
healthy and normal as Watson and Rayner reported him to be. In addition, as was
common practice at the time, Albert’s name also matched the name used by the
researchers to refer to him in their written reports: Albert B.35
Watson and Rayner, as noted, had no contact with Little Albert after he left
the hospital, and could therefore only guess that perhaps his fears would per-
sist in the home environment. If Albert Barger was indeed Little Albert, as now
strongly appears to be the case, there is no conclusive evidence that the condi-
tioning Watson and Rayner gave him resulted in long-term harm. Watson and
Rayner, however, were soon involved in controversy in their personal lives. They
fell in love, had an affair, and were discovered by Watson’s wife Mary. Encouraged
by Harold Ickes, who still despised his brother-in-law and had once even hired a
private detective to uncover damaging information about him, Mary divorced
him. Although such an event would make little news today, both the Rayners and
the Ickeses were socially prominent families, and Baltimore newspapers gave the
story full play. Johns Hopkins University had just become coeducational, and
its administration, particularly sensitive to scandal at that time, forced Watson’s
resignation. He happily married Rayner but suddenly found himself in need of a
job. A new and entirely different phase of his career was about to begin.
Advertising and Behaviorism

Watson moved to New York, where he soon received job offers from the New
School for Social Research and the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency—
the latter at a salary of $25,000 per year, four times his previous professor’s pay.
Choosing advertising over academia eased his sense of loss, and he plunged
into his new career with typical vigor. He started by getting practical experience
in the field. He conducted door-to-door surveys in the rural South to determine
the market for rubber boots, peddled Yuban coffee in Pittsburgh, and worked
part time as a clerk in Macy’s department store in New York to study consumer
attitudes. Then, back in the main office, he helped plan many innovative and
successful advertising campaigns. In one of the first uses of celebrity testimo-
nials in advertising, he persuaded Queen Marie of Roumania to endorse the
beauty-enhancing qualities of Pond’s cold cream. He hired pediatricians to vouch
for the infection-fighting properties of Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder, and
pretty models to suggest that it was fine for women to smoke as long as they
brushed their teeth with Pebeco toothpaste. As Watson later put it, “I began to
learn that it can be just as thrilling to watch the growth of a sales curve of a new
product as to watch the learning curve of animals or man.”36 By 1924 he was a vice
president of the ad agency.
He still kept a hand in psychology, however, lecturing part-time at the New
School and in 1924 publishing those lectures as a book entitled Behaviorism.
Using his new communication skills, Watson wrote engaging and flamboyantly;
the book sold well and was acclaimed by a New York Times review as marking
“a new epoch in the intellectual history of man.”37 While that evaluation may have
been exaggerated, the book did present the behaviorist viewpoint with flair and
completeness.
He also turned his behaviorist’s eye toward one of the most popular and
controversial concepts of psychoanalysis: unconscious thought. In a chapter of
Behaviorism entitled “Do We Always Think in Words?” Watson suggested that
unconscious thought indeed exists, but not as the mysterious metaphysical
entity he accused the psychoanalysts of fostering.38 He started by defining con-
scious thought as a series of vocal or subvocal verbal responses; in other words,
conscious thinkers literally talk to themselves. Each verbal response presumably
serves as a stimulus that can trigger one or more new responses, so thinking
proceeds in a chainlike fashion. All the newly elicited responses need not be ver-
bal, however; they can also be visceral or kinesthetic, and can include emotional
reactions. These nonverbal reactions can serve as links in the chain of thought,
triggering their own verbal or nonverbal responses. They thus function as impor-
tant and sometimes emotion-laden parts of the thought process, but since they
are nonverbal, they are not experienced as “conscious” by the thinker.
In Behaviorism, Watson also strongly presented a case for radical environ-
mentalism, the view that environmental factors have overwhelmingly greater
importance than heredity or a person’s physical constitution in determin-
ing behavior. Of course, his theory of emotions had suggested that the great
variety of human emotional responses derives from the conditioning of just

three, relatively simple innate reflexes. He now suggested it was much the same
for all other aspects of personality—that innate factors are so quickly modified
and developed by conditioning and experience as to become virtually negligible
in accounting for individual differences in human adults. He wrote:
We draw the conclusion that there is no such thing as an inheritance of

capacity, talent, temperament, mental constitution, and characteristics
[emphasis in original]. These things . . . depend on training that goes on
mainly in the cradle. . . . A certain type of structure, plus early training—
slanting—accounts for adult performance.39
He continued, in one of his most famous passages, to emphasize the degree

of control caretakers could potentially exert over the development of children, if
only they systematically applied the principles of conditioning:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified 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,
merchant-chief and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his tal-
ents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.40
If Watson heard the ground rumble beneath his feet as he wrote that passage,
it was perhaps the ghost of Francis Galton rolling over in his grave.
From Little Albert to Little Peter

During the brief period when Watson had officially left academia but stayed in-
volved in psychology, he had another chance to scientifically test the principles
of radical environmentalism, this time by removing rather than creating emo-
tional reactions. In 1924, Columbia University Teachers College in New York City
received a large grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) for
research on child development and parent education. Watson, with his estab-
lished reputation for practical, applied work, was hired as a research consultant.
One of his first tasks was to oversee the work of an LSRM fellow, Mary Cover
Jones (1896–1987; Figure 9.4), a graduate of Vassar College who had been a
classmate and friend of Watson’s wife, Rosalie Rayner.41 In fact, Jones had be-
come acquainted with Watson several years earlier when she attended one of his
public lectures in New York. The lecture inspired Jones to pursue psychology in-
stead of pediatrics, and she became intrigued by the notion that if a fear could be
created through conditioning, then perhaps it could also be

removed.
Jones, supervised by Watson, had an opportunity to test
her idea when she was appointed associate in psychologi-
cal research at the Institute of Educational Research during
her graduate training. As part of this appointment, Jones
worked at the Heckscher Foundation, a home for children
who had been abandoned by, or temporarily separated
from, their parents. To facilitate her research, Jones (and
her young family) moved into Heckscher House, where she
encountered the 3-year-old boy whom she would subse-
quently dub “Albert, grown a little bit older.”42 Jones noted
that the child, given the pseudonym Peter, had a strong fear
of rabbits.
Building on Watson and Rayner’s recommendations
from the abruptly terminated Little Albert study, Jones
tested the idea that Peter’s fear could be eliminated by
presenting a pleasant stimulus (candy) at the same time
as the rabbit, which was introduced at a distance that did
not evoke a fear response. The rabbit was then brought
closer and closer to Peter, always in the presence of the
pleasing stimulus, until he was able to tolerate the rab-
Figure 9.4 Mary Cover Jones (1896–1987).
bit and even hold it in his lap and play with it for several
minutes at a time. She called this procedure direct condi-
tioning, and subsequent researchers would rename the technique systematic
desensitization. Other children who were not afraid of the rabbit were also
brought in as positive role models throughout the process. Jones noted in a
subsequent publication that of several fear removal methods tried on a sample
of infants, only direct conditioning and social imitation (which were combined
in the Little Peter study) achieved “unqualified success” in eliminating the
infants’ fear responses.43
Watson was heavily involved in the Little Peter study. Jones later noted that
he “faithfully followed Peter’s progress, reverses, and final freedom from his
fear . . . [and] paid us a professional visit on most Saturday afternoons through-
out the conduct of the therapeutic sessions.”44 In this capacity, Watson saw the
Little Albert study to its logical conclusion, although obviously not with Little
Albert himself. Although he would no longer work in the laboratory, it must have
been gratifying for Watson to witness Jones’s demonstration of the power of the
environment to make an infant less fearful.
Psychological Care of Infant and Child

During the 1920s, Watson’s writings became more focused on psychological
topics that appealed to the general public, and they appeared more often in pop-
ular magazines than in scholarly journals. Many had catchy titles, such as “The
Weakness of Women,” “What about Your Child?” and “Feed Me on Facts,” and
dealt with practical issues in childrearing. Assisted by his wife, Watson published
Psychological Care of Infant and Child in 1928, a how-to book on childrearing
that achieved considerable popular success.
Consistent with Watson’s radical environmentalism, this book urged parents
to take direct and frankly manipulative control of their children’s environments—
an approach contrary to the permissive “progressive education” advocated by
Dewey, Watson’s old teacher and nemesis. Dewey, said Watson, espoused a
“doctrine of mystery” according to which “there are hidden springs of activity,
hidden possibilities of unfolding within the child which must be waited for until
they appear and then be fostered and tended.” Watson argued that, in reality,
“there is nothing from within to develop.”45 Parents need only to control their
children’s environments properly, in order for the most adaptive conditioned re-
flexes to develop.
Elaborating on Watson’s theory of emotions, the book offered practical
advice on avoiding the creation of inappropriate conditioned emotional reac-
tions. The home should be set up to minimize the occurrence of banging doors
and other random loud sounds that would frighten the child and establish in-
appropriate fear reactions. Clothing should always be loose enough to allow
free movement and prevent unnecessary rage. And above all, Watson recom-
mended that children should never be stimulated into “love” responses when
they ought to be developing self-reliant behavior. Nothing drew his scorn more
than the coddling of children, which he saw as the rewarding of ineffective
behavior with hugs, kisses, or other obvious signs of concern. “When I hear
a mother say ‘Bless its little heart’ when it falls down, stubs its toe, or suffers
some other ill,” he grumbled, “I usually have to walk a block or two to let off
steam.”46 He recommended that parents treat children as though they were
young adults and refrain from displays of strong affection. Instead of hugs and
kisses, Watson felt a firm handshake and a pat on the head for a job well done
should be sufficient.
Few child-care experts today would endorse this approach (which was not uni-
versally accepted even in 1928), and virtually all would say a lot of physical affec-
tion is necessary. But Watson also recognized there is no single ideal way to raise
children, and that behavior considered to be desirable may vary widely from time
to time and from culture to culture. And the book’s general point—that parents
can exert much more purposeful control over the upbringing of their children
than was commonly supposed—-probably helped many parents a great deal.
Watson’s Legacy
Despite the success of Watson’s popular writings, this work was never more than
a sideline as he became increasingly absorbed in the advertising business. When
he revised Behaviorism in 1930, it marked the end of his professional career in
psychology. He continued to practice his behavioristic principles, however, in
advertising and together with his wife in the raising of two sons, born in 1922 and
1924. The boys were trained to be practical, self-reliant, fearless, and masculine,
with expressions of affection or emotional tenderness strictly curbed.
The outcome of Watson’s home childrearing experiment must be interpreted
cautiously, because tragedy intervened when Rosalie Watson died prematurely in
1935, leaving her young sons motherless. They were subsequently sent to boarding
school, and the deeply shaken Watson had only sporadic contact with them af-
terward. After some initial difficulty adjusting to school, both of them went on to
successful academic and occupational careers—one becoming a psychiatrist and
the other an industrial psychologist and vice president of a major food company.
But they were also plagued by severe depression as adults; one attempted suicide
before being helped by psychoanalytic therapy, and the other—the psychiatrist—
actually did take his own life in 1963. The surviving son, while recognizing his
father’s virtues, placed much of the blame on his childrearing practices:
I have some unhappy thoughts about . . . the effects of behavioristic princi-

ples on my being raised into an adult. . . . In many ways I adored my father
as an individual and as a character. He was bright; he was charming; he was
masculine, witty, and reflective. But he was also conversely unresponsive,
emotionally uncommunicative, unable to express and cope with any feel-
ings of emotion of his own, and determined unwittingly to deprive, I think,
my brother and me of any kind of emotional foundation. . . . He was very
rigid in carrying out his fundamental philosophies as a behaviorist.47
Of course, many other factors, including the premature death of their mother,
could have contributed to the sons’ difficulties. But Watson’s view of emo-
tional development, like many other aspects of his theory, was unquestionably
simplistic. He habitually made his points by exaggeration and overstatement, so
his ideas have subsequently had to be toned down.
Most would now agree on several points: that children are not so easily con-
ditioned into becoming anything one might want; that emotional development
involves far more than conditioning on just three basic reactions; that language
and thought are more than simple chains of verbal, visceral, and kinesthetic
reflexes; and that radical environmentalism underestimates the effects of physi-
cal constitution and heredity. Pavlovian or classical conditioning, while still rec-
ognized as an important form of learning, has proved insufficient to account for
the more active ways animals, including humans, learn to manipulate and control
their environments.
Despite these shortcomings Watson’s ideas contained an element of good
sense that continues to impress many psychologists. Some still define their sci-
ence as the study of behavior, and most still insist that their basic data must be
observable and “objective,” at least to a degree. The prediction and control of
behavior remain the focus of countless researchers, and the study of learning and
conditioning in animals, as well as humans, is still an important subdiscipline.
In his autobiography, written long after he had left psychology, Watson assessed
his contribution by saying, “I still believe as firmly as ever in the general behav-
ioristic position I took in 1912. I think it has influenced psychology.”48 He was not
being immodest.
Perhaps the most immediate and visible form of Watson’s influence was the
rise of various forms of neobehaviorism and their dominance in North Amer-
ican academic psychology departments from the 1920s through the 1950s.
Psychologists such as Edward Tolman and Clark Hull followed Watson’s lead
in terms of viewing conscious experience as outside the purview of direct
psychological investigation. However, under the influence of a philosophy
known as logical positivism, they attempted to derive and test theories about
behavior that translated nonobservable constructs (such as motivation) into
observable ones.
Edward Chace Tolman (1886–1959) is best known for his experimental work
with rats in mazes, in which he demonstrated the concept of latent learning—
learning that can occur incidentally and without immediate reinforcement. In
one study, Tolman and his team placed one group of rats in a maze and let them
wander around freely. A second group of rats were also allowed to wander freely,
but each successful navigation of the maze was rewarded with food. A third group
were allowed to wander freely with no reward, but a reward was introduced on
the eleventh day of the experiment. If latent learning had taken place, as Tolman
hypothesized (which put him in opposition with other neobehaviorists, such as
Hull, who favored a more associationistic view), the rats in the last condition
should have shown a drastic decrease in navigational errors as soon as the reward
was introduced, thereby motivating them to demonstrate their latent learning of
the maze.
This is indeed what occurred. During the first ten days, the rats in the eleventh-
day reward condition showed error rates similar to the rats allowed to wander
freely with no reward. Rats in the second (reward) condition gradually reduced
their errors over the course of the ten days. When the reward was introduced
in the last condition, the rats quickly exceeded their compatriots in the second
group in terms of accuracy of maze running. Tolman used experiments such as
these to support his theory of purposive behaviorism—the idea that all behavior
serves a purpose or is goal-directed.
Clark Hull (1884–1952) developed a complex theoretical position sometimes
called mechanistic behaviorism—the idea that learning could be conceptual-
ized in terms of mathematical laws that specified relationships among a host
of variables, such as habit strength, drive strength, and stimulus intensity. A
typical Hullian equation might define the probability that an organism will
produce a response r to a stimulus s (written as sEr, which was itself defined
in terms of the relationship between habit strength and drive strength) as the
function of nine different constructs, each of which would be operationally
defined with its own mathematical equation. Although his theoretical apparatus
became extremely complicated and abstract (and has not
persisted in psychology), Hull was nonetheless interested,
as were most behaviorists, in the practical applications
of psychology. He directed research on many human and
social problems at the Institute of Human Relations at Yale
University from 1929 until his death in 1952.49
Another pioneer significantly influenced by Watson came
to adopt quite a different position from the neobehaviorists.
A struggling young writer, he first encountered behaviorism
at a low point in his literary career and decided his future
lay in psychology rather than literature. We conclude this
chapter with his story.
SKINNER’S EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990; Figure 9.5)
was born in the small railroad town of Susquehanna,
Pennsylvania. His father, a self-taught lawyer who never
attended college and passed his bar exam after one year
at law school, was a persuasive speaker and author of a
well-regarded textbook on workmen’s compensation law.
Skinner described his mother as “bright and beautiful”—a
Susquehanna native like her husband who had been Figure 9.5 B. F. Skinner (1904–1990).
popular, a good singer, and the second-ranked student in her high school class.
Concerning her strict notions of proper conduct, Skinner wrote: “I was taught
to fear God, the police, and what people will think. As a result, I usually do what
I have to do with no great struggle.”50
As a boy in Susquehanna, Skinner showed musical, mechanical, and literary
aptitudes. He enjoyed listening to opera on the family’s phonograph, played the
piano and saxophone, and earned pocket money throughout high school by play-
ing in a dance band. His mechanical creations included a contraption reminding
him to keep his room neat:
A special hook in the closet of my room was connected by a string-and-

pulley system to a sign hanging above the door to the room. When my
pajamas were in place on the hook, the sign was held high above the door
and out of the way. When the pajamas were off the hook, the sign hung
squarely in the middle of the door frame. It read “Hang up your pajamas.”51
Skinner published his first literary work at age 10, a poem titled “That Pessi-
mistic Fellow,” in the Lone Scout magazine. Unpublished works written during
high school included a morality play featuring the characters Greed, Gluttony,
Jealousy, and Youth, and a melodramatic novel about a young naturalist’s love
affair with the daughter of a dying trapper. Skinner did well academically, and
in 1922 he became the first in his family to attend college, entering Hamilton
College in Clinton, New York.
At Hamilton, Skinner took some biology courses and one philosophy course
taught by a former student of Wundt’s, but no psychology. He majored in English
and wrote regularly for the college newspaper, literary magazine, and humor
magazine—occasionally adopting the pen name of Sir Burrhus de Beerus. A die-
hard practical joker, he helped spread a false rumor that Charlie Chaplin was going
to speak on campus. After a large crowd gathered for the event and was sorely dis-
appointed, Skinner wrote a satirical editorial in the school newspaper declaring, of
his own behavior, “No man with the slightest regard for his Alma Mater could have
done such a thing.”52 As a senior, Skinner publicly parodied the speech teacher,
subverted the traditional oratory competition by submitting a farcical speech, and
decorated the hall for class day exercises with caricatures of the faculty.
But he also showed a more serious side and worked hard to improve his writ-
ing skills. The summer before his senior year, he attended a writer’s workshop
whose faculty included the acclaimed poet Robert Frost. Frost delighted and
encouraged Skinner by telling him, “You are worth twice anyone else I have seen
in prose this year.”53
After graduation Skinner moved into his parents’ home in Scranton,

Pennsylvania, built a study in the attic, and tried to settle in and write profession-
ally. There he underwent what he later called his “Dark Year,” as he experienced
loneliness, depression, and, worst of all, a profound case of writer’s block. He read
great literature, but found little to say about it. He tried to write about writing,
but that seemed empty. As he later put it, “The truth was, I had no reason to write
anything. I had nothing to say, and nothing about my life was making any change
in that condition.”54 He considered consulting a psychiatrist, but he finally found
some distraction when his father set him up with a paid job summarizing several
thousand legal decisions for Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Board of Conciliation.
Gradually, Skinner consoled himself with the thought that even the best litera-
ture could tell only a part of the truth about human nature. He pondered a critic’s
comment about one of the novelist William Thackeray’s characters, to the effect
that “Thackeray didn’t know it, but she drank,” and decided that good writers
might be able to describe how people behave, but offered little insight as to why
they do so. At this crucial point in his life, Skinner encountered behaviorism.
He read a book in which the philosopher Bertrand Russell, one of his favor-
ite writers, discussed Watson’s recently published Behaviorism critically but
seriously. “I do not fundamentally agree with Watson’s view,” wrote Russell, “but
I think it contains much more truth than most people suppose, and I regard it
as desirable to develop the behaviourist method to the fullest possible extent.”55
Intrigued, Skinner read Watson as well as the recently translated Pavlov, liked
what he read, and began to suspect that behavioristic analyses might just be able
to account for many of those “whys” of behavior that were missing in literature.
A symbolic turning point occurred when Skinner read an article by H. G. Wells
about Pavlov and the famous British writer George Bernard Shaw. The testy and
colorful Shaw had greatly disliked Pavlov’s writings and had sarcastically de-
scribed the Russian as a scoundrel and vivisectionist with the habit of boiling
babies alive just to see what would happen. Wells expressed admiration for both
men and posed a hypothetical question: Pavlov and Shaw are drowning on oppo-
site sides of a pier and you have but one life belt to throw in the water; to which
side would you throw it? Skinner instantly knew that his own choice would be
for Pavlov, and he resolved to go to graduate school and become a behavioristic
psychologist. He applied and was accepted at Harvard, for the fall of 1928.
Although hardly a stronghold of behaviorism, Harvard’s psychology depart-
ment was tolerant and intellectually stimulating. Skinner found a few fellow grad-
uate students who shared his interests, and faculty who let him go his own way.
During the eight years between 1928 and 1936—first as a graduate student, then
as a postdoctoral fellow, and finally as a junior fellow in Harvard’s prestigious
Society of Fellows—Skinner laid the groundwork for a whole new kind of behav-
ioristic analysis.
Operant Conditioning
Skinner’s accomplishments followed his invention of an ingeniously simple piece
of equipment he called an operant chamber, an apparatus that allowed him pre-
cise control over the reinforcement of a response and the conditions under which
such reinforcement would occur (Figure 9.6). This chamber, commonly known
as a Skinner box, became for him what the salivary reflex apparatus had been for
Pavlov. Skinner has told the story of how he came to invent this box in a delight-
fully tongue-in-cheek article, “A Case History in Scientific Method.”
According to this account, four “unformalized principles of scientific practice”
led to success. First, his box was the result of a long series of partly completed ex-
periments that had been abandoned in midcourse; thus, his first principle: “When
you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.” Second,
the box was highly automated and required little work by the experimenter once
an animal subject was placed inside; hence “Some ways of
doing research are easier than others.” Further, some of his
most interesting results occurred accidentally or when the
apparatus malfunctioned, illustrating principles three and
four: “Apparatus sometimes breaks down,” and “Some peo-
ple are lucky.”56
Besides following these unformalized principles, Skinner
was also inspired by a major guiding idea. He had admired
the precision Pavlov brought to the study of conditioned
reflexes, and he appreciated Watson’s attempts to extend
the concept of conditioned reflexes into explanations of
emotions. But still, something seemed lacking: “I could
not . . . move without a jolt from salivary reflexes to the
important business of the organism in everyday life.”57
Learning in everyday life involves more than the passive
acquisition of reflexive reactions to stimuli that are
presented to the organism from the outside; normal or-
ganisms also learn to actively manipulate, control, and
“operate upon” their environments. Thorndike’s chickens
and cats had demonstrated this type of learning when
they escaped confinement in his famous experiment of
Figure 9.6 Skinner conditioning a rat in an 1898 (see Chapter 8). Skinner called this type of active
operant chamber, or Skinner box. learning operant conditioning, in which organisms act
on, or operate on, their environments, and then encounter

various consequences for their actions. He devised his box
to enable him to study actively acquired learning even more
systematically. Screen
Skinner’s operant chamber was essentially a cage for a Light
white rat with a lever-bar mounted on one wall near a food Lever
tray (Figure 9.7). The lever-bar was connected to a mecha- Water
nism that dropped a food pellet into the tray when the bar was Food Tray
pressed. Each press of the bar also caused a pen mechanism

touching a constantly moving roll of paper to rise by a small
fixed amount, thereby recording a permanent, cumulative Figure 9.7 A diagram of a typical Skinner box.
record of all of the rat’s bar presses.
Figure 9.8 illustrates one typical cumulative record, for an animal that made
its first response after being in the box about 14 minutes and its second at about
25 minutes, and that then began to respond at an increasingly rapid rate. Such
cumulative records resembled mathematical curves whose steepness reflected
the rates of responding. When rates were low there were few pen rises and
the record remained flat, as in the left-hand portion of Figure 9.8; higher rates
produced curves with steeper slopes, as on the right.
Figure 9.8 typifies the cumulative records Skinner obtained with hungry but
untrained rats when first placed in the box. At first, bar-pressing responses oc-
curred infrequently and accidentally as the animal explored its new environment.
After the first few presses were reinforced with food, however, the rate increased
dramatically and continued high as long as the rat remained hungry.
In further experiments, Skinner varied the contingencies of reinforcement—
the specific conditions under which the responses were reinforced or not with
food pellets. One experiment occurred by chance when the food dispenser
jammed after an animal had already been regularly reinforced and established a
steady response rate. The ensuing cumulative record showed an extinction curve
like the one in Figure 9.9. At first, the animal responded at a very high rate,
partly because it was no longer pausing between re-
50
sponses to eat and partly because of an “emotional”
Bar Pressing
or “frustrated” activation of the response. After a

Responses
few minutes, however, the rate slowed down except

for a series of progressively diminishing, wavelike
“bursts” of response. Finally, the curve flattened out
0 15 30
almost completely, indicating that the response was
Time in Minutes
almost never repeated; in other words, extinction
had occurred. Figure 9.8 An example of a cumulative record.
100 In other experiments Skinner varied the contingencies of

reinforcement by providing food pellets only intermittently,
Responses
50 according to four main types of reinforcement schedules.

On a fixed-interval reinforcement schedule, only the first
response was reinforced, following a predetermined period
0 30 60 of time, regardless of how many responses had been made in
Time in Minutes the interim. After an acquisition period in which cumulative
records generally resembled those for regular reinforcement,
Figure 9.9 A curve showing the extinction of an
the records assumed a characteristic and highly regular scal-
operant response.
lop shape, shown in Figure 9.10 for a three-minute interval
schedule. After each reinforced response, the response rate
decreased for a minute or two and then increased sharply as the end of the
interval (and reinforcement) approached.
On a fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule, reinforcement always followed
Responses
a preset number of responses—after every fourth response, every tenth, or any

other number Skinner decided on. Although it took longer for response rates
to stabilize under these conditions, eventually they leveled off at about the
same steady slope as for regular reinforcement. Skinner found he could speed
things up by increasing his ratios gradually, starting off by reinforcing every
0 30
second response, then every fourth, and so on—doubling the ratio each time
Time in Minutes
the response rate stabilized. In one experiment, a rat so conditioned pressed
Figure 9.10 Conditioning industriously at the bar when only every 192nd response was reinforced. Obvi-
with a fixed-interval ously, under the proper conditions animal subjects could be induced to work
reinforcement schedule.
harder and harder for progressively diminishing rewards—a principle perhaps
(Vertical slashes represent
already familiar to unscrupulous employers of human workers.
reinforced responses.)
In the case of a variable-interval reinforcement schedule, Skinner ran-
domly varied the time between reinforcements, such as after one minute,
then three minutes, then two minutes, and so on, no matter how many responses
occurred during this time. On a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule,
reinforcement would occur after a randomly varied number of responses with a
constant average value. These variable schedules resembled the irregular pattern
of payoffs dispensed by slot machines in gambling casinos. As casino owners
well know, such schedules can produce very high rates of response that are re-
markably resistant to extinction. After being placed on such schedules, Skinner’s
animals responded for much longer after reinforcement was cut off altogether
than they would have if the original schedule had been regular. It was as if the
irregular reinforcement nurtured a constant hope that the “next” response would
be rewarded. Rats and casino players alike became hooked and responded well
past the point of diminishing returns.
Skinner saw the rats’ bar-pressing behavior as representing a whole range of

learned behaviors, by animals and humans, operating in the real world to achieve
specific goals. When he published these results in his first book, The Behavior of
Organisms (1938), he established operant conditioning as a kind of learning dis-
tinctly different from the Pavlovian conditioned reflex, but equally as important.58
He referred to the general Pavlovian type of learning (classical conditioning) as
respondent conditioning and contrasted it with operant conditioning on sev-
eral dimensions. Respondent conditioning creates completely new connec-
tions between stimuli and responses, while operant conditioning strengthens
or weakens response tendencies that already exist in the organism’s behavioral
repertoire. In respondent conditioning the response is elicited by the conditioned
stimulus, whereas in operant conditioning it must be emitted by the subject
before conditioning can take place. In respondent conditioning both conditioned
and unconditioned stimuli may be precisely defined, while in operant condition-
ing one can never say with certainty which stimuli initially trigger the response.
And the strength of respondent conditioning is typically measured in terms of
response magnitude or latency, while that of operant conditioning is measured
by response rate. In sum, Skinner had demonstrated a controlled and properly
behavioristic method for studying a whole new range of learned responses.
Behavior Shaping and Programmed Instruction

After laying the foundations for the study of operant conditioning at Harvard,
Skinner taught at the University of Minnesota and the University of Indiana
for twelve years before returning permanently to Harvard in 1948. He gradually
attracted a growing number of followers who sought to apply the techniques and
findings of operant conditioning to a wide variety of experimental and real-world
situations. Skinner himself became increasingly concerned with the practical
applications and philosophical implications of operant conditioning.
In the 1940s, for example, he extended operant-conditioning techniques to
behaviors considerably more involved than bar pressing. Hypothesizing that
complex behaviors could be thought of as chains of simple ones, he developed
methods for building up complicated sequences of simple responses in animals
using a process he called shaping. First, he needed a reinforcer that could be
easily administered to animal subjects without interfering with the flow of their
behavior. He began by using respondent conditioning to pair the sound of clicks
from a toy clicker with a strong primary reinforcer, such as food. After a while,
the clicks by themselves became effective secondary reinforcers, as demon-
strated by the fact that animals would maintain high rates of responding in a
Skinner box when reinforced only by clicks unaccompanied by food.
Skinner now used this secondary reinforcer to progressively shape, or build

up, increasingly complicated or difficult chains of responses. When he wanted to
train a pigeon to peck a certain small spot on the wall, for example, he began by
clicking each time it made a partial turn in the spot’s direction. Once the animal
was constantly oriented in the right direction, Skinner withheld reinforcement
until the pigeon extended its head toward the spot. When this response was es-
tablished, reinforcement was withheld until a peck occurred. And after this highly
specific response was emitted and reinforced the first time, repetitions followed
much more quickly. Using such patient shaping procedures, Skinner trained
pigeons to perform some amazing feats, such as rolling a ball back and forth to
each other across a table in a simple game of ping-pong.
Skinner saw no reason that the same basic techniques he used to teach pigeons
to play ping-pong could not serve as models for human education. Inspired by a
visit to his daughter’s fourth-grade class in 1953, he launched the development of
programmed instruction—an educational technique in which complicated sub-
jects such as mathematics are broken down into simple, stepwise components
that may be presented to students in order of increasing difficulty. The beginning
student answers an easy question about the simplest component, and immedi-
ately learns whether the response was right or wrong. If right, that knowledge
presumably serves as a secondary reinforcer, so the correct response is strength-
ened. In a carefully designed program, this correct response should also provide
the basis for responding correctly to the next, slightly more difficult question, and
so on. When incorrect answers occur, they are followed by reviews and supple-
mentary instructions providing the small amount of new information necessary
for success on the next try. In this way, Skinner argued that students may gradu-
ally be shaped into becoming proficient mathematicians, just as his pigeons were
shaped into becoming ping-pong players.
When it was popular during the 1950s and early 1960s, programmed instruction
was administered via a device called a teaching machine to thousands of students
in the United States. Some critics argued that this kind of mechanized instruction
stripped away the most important element of effective teaching and learning: the
teacher-student relationship. Others praised the efficiency of this new system, and
accepted Skinner’s argument that programmed instruction with teaching machines
would not replace teachers but free them up to concentrate on more complex prob-
lems with individual students. Today, operant teaching programs have actually
been developed for many subjects, at difficulty levels from preschool through grad-
uate school. Although it doesn’t replace the traditional student-teacher relation-
ship, programmed instruction has proved to be a valuable addition to the educa-
tional toolkit, especially with the development of online programs.
PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS
OF OPERANT CONDITIONING
Skinner thought and wrote about the philosophical as well as the practical
implications of his theory. He concluded very early that if negative reinforce-
ment is considered along with positive reinforcement then virtually all be-
havior must be controlled by the contingencies of reinforcement. In negative
reinforcement, the probability of a behavior is increased when it is followed
by the removal of an aversive stimulus, such as silencing an unbearably loud
noise. Positive reinforcement occurs when a behavior that is followed by a
reward increases in frequency. Skinner believed that since these types of envi-
ronmental contingences were responsible for almost all behavior, the notion of
behavioral freedom or free will must be an illusion. Skinner argued that when
we believe we are acting freely, we are merely free of aversive stimuli or their
threat, and are therefore fully liberated to pursue things that have reinforced us
positively in the past. When we feel that other people are behaving freely, we
are simply unaware of their complete reinforcement histories and of the contin-
gencies that have shaped their behavior.
Skinner dramatized these ideas in his 1948 utopian novel, Walden Two, which
described an ideal society in which positive reinforcement has been adopted
as the sole means of social control. Children are reared only to seek the posi-
tive reinforcement that comes from their behaving in a socialized and civilized
manner. Inevitably—so the novel claims—they grow up to be cooperative, intel-
ligent, sociable, and happy. The society’s justification and rationale are summa-
rized in the following dialogue between Frazier, the novel’s hero, and a skeptical
visitor named Castle:
“Mr. Castle, when a science of behavior has once been achieved, there’s no
alternative to a planned society. We can’t leave mankind to an accidental
or biased control. But by using the principle of positive reinforcement—
carefully avoiding force or the threat of force—we can preserve a personal
sense of freedom. . . .”
“But you haven’t denied that you are in complete control,” said Castle.
“You are still the long-range dictator.”
“As you will,” said Frazier, . . . “When once you have grasped the principle
of positive reinforcement, you can enjoy a sense of unlimited power. It’s
enough to satisfy the thirstiest tyrant.”
“There you are, then,” said Castle. “That’s my case.”
“But it’s a limited sort of despotism,” Frazier went on. “And I don’t
think anyone should worry about it. The despot must wield his power for
the good of others. If he takes any step which reduces the sum total of
human happiness, his power is reduced by a like amount. What better
check against a malevolent despotism could you ask for?”59
Walden Two aroused considerable controversy, and many readers condemned

its happy but controlled society as totalitarian. Others responded more positively
to Skinner’s vision, and a few even tried to create real communities based on
his principles in the 1970s. Although these utopian attempts could not provide
systematic tests of the underlying principles of Skinner’s system, the few com-
munities that remain are nonetheless interesting real-life examples of behavioral
experimentation in pursuit of the “good life.”60
Skinner often reported that epistemology, the branch of philosophy that inves-
tigates the nature and origin of knowledge, was his first love.61 The most complete
statement of his position can be found in his 1957 book Verbal Behavior.62 To
understand Verbal Behavior and Skinner’s views on language and epistemology
more generally, one must adopt the behaviorist position that a theory of know-
ing is a theory of behaving, and that language is one form of behavior. As the
behaviorist philosopher Gerald Zuriff has written, in a behavioral epistemology,
knowledge is conceptualized “in terms of the behavior of the knower.”63 There-
fore, how we come to know can be analyzed and indeed explained by the science
of behavior itself.
According to Skinner, the only way we acquire knowledge is through the expe-
rience of contingencies of reinforcement in the environment. We do not generate
internal copies of external objects or experiences in order to perceive and know
them; rather, we act as if we know them when these acts have been reinforced by
the environment. And the only way we demonstrate this knowledge is through
behavior, which is often—especially in response to private events—verbal behav-
ior. In Skinner’s words, “The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought
is simply behavior [emphasis in original]—verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt.”64
For Skinner, generating an analysis of verbal behavior was akin to generating a
theory of knowledge.
In 1959, Noam Chomsky, then a young linguist at the Massachusetts In-
stitute of Technology, published a scathing critique of Verbal Behavior.65
Chomsky, who had himself published a book on language in 1957 called
Syntactic Structures, 66 not only objected to the specifics of Skinner’s theory
of language, but was also opposed to the entire behaviorist agenda. His
critique was long, thorough, and intense, and one of his main arguments
was that behaviorist theories were inadequate to account for the many
10_POP_28354_ch09_316-359.indd 352 18/10/16 4:00 PM

theoretical levels in which grammatical structure is represented. Chomsky

himself posited both surface and deep structure, invoking the phrase
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” to indicate that a sentence that is
meaningless on a deep or semantic level nonetheless has an intact and
immediately recognizable surface or syntactic structure that all speakers
can immediately recognize. He further argued that only human infants can
acquire language because only they, and no other species, have the innate
knowledge of its fundamental structure. Chomsky also criticized behavior-
ists for invoking mentalistic constructs but cloaking them in behaviorist
terms, thus violating their own philosophical position. Although Skinner
reportedly never read Chomsky’s critique in its entirety (realizing from
the outset that they held fundamentally different and likely irreconcilable
positions), its publication has sometimes been considered the turning point
at which behaviorism began to lose its disciplinary dominance in favor of
cognitive psychology (see Chapter 14).
Meanwhile, Skinner continued to speak out provocatively about the desir-
ability of social control based on positive reinforcement. His bestselling 1971
book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, argued that the assumption of “autono-
mous man,” upon which so many of Western society’s institutions are based, is
false and has many damaging consequences.67 According to this assumption,
we “credit” people more for doing good deeds “of their own free will” than for
doing them because they have to. But the only real difference, argued Skinner,
is that in the first case we do not know the contingencies that produced the
behavior, and in the second we do. And the darker side of this position is that
if people are to be “credited” for unexplained good behavior, then they must be
blamed and punished for their “freely” produced bad behavior. The assumption
that people are free requires that punishment or its threat be constantly used to
control behavior, and therefore that society must constantly invoke this threat
to maintain order.
Since free will is only apparent, however, the winning of personal credit
seemed to Skinner very small reward for the constant exposure to punish-
ment. In addition, his experiments had suggested that positive reinforce-
ment is more effective than punishment in producing lasting conditioning
effects. He therefore argued that we should abandon our illusory belief in
behavioral freedom, accept the inevitability of control, and deliberately
start to design real environments like Walden Two in which behavior is
shaped toward socially desirable ends by the exclusive use of positive
reinforcement.
Skinner’s theory did not address the political question of exactly who should
design the environments and seize the control, but he argued that once the power
of operant conditioning becomes well known, someone will surely do so. And
since he believed psychologists are likely to have attitudes just as enlightened
as other groups (or more so), he urged them not to be shy about participating in
the project.
These assertions about the ubiquity of environmental control, and the
desirability of openly seizing it, made Skinner simultaneously the most fa-
mous and most controversial of American psychologists. He was listed in
The 100 Most Important People in the World and was shown in a 1975 sur-
vey to be the best-known scientist in the United States. But recognition did
not always imply approval, and Skinner frightened or enraged some people
with his pronouncements. He was made aware of his darker reputation one
evening after attending an enjoyable concert. The musicians were young
and their music delightful—precisely the sort of event Skinner envisioned
as part of the good life in a Walden Two. As he was leaving he praised the
young conductor who had done so well. His companion, who knew the con-
ductor, remarked, “You know, he thinks you are a terrible person. Teaching
machines, . . . a fascist.”68
Unpleasant and unfounded rumors also circulated about Skinner’s per-
sonal and family life. When his younger daughter was an infant, he designed
a temperature-controlled, glass-enclosed crib for her which he first play-
fully called an Heir Conditioner and later patented
and marketed (not terribly successfully) as the Aircrib
(Figure 9.11). This device’s sole purpose was to provide
a comfortable and safe environment for infants, and it
compared favorably on both scores to traditional cribs or
playpens. Yet inaccurate stories began to circulate that
Skinner had raised his children like rats “in a box,” and
that they had suffered grievously as a result. Perhaps
confusing Skinner’s children with Watson’s, some people
started rumors that they became mentally ill or committed
suicide. In fact, one of Skinner’s daughters became a suc-
cessful professor of educational psychology, and the other
became an artist whose work has been exhibited at
London’s Royal Academy.
Negative and unfair publicity was perhaps the
Figure 9.11 Skinner’s daughter Deborah in inevitable price Skinner paid for raising, and tak-
her Aircrib. ing a stand on, difficult questions. A more principled
and knowledgeable reaction was also expressed against some aspects of

Skinner’s ideas and behaviorism in general, which we shall refer to in later
chapters. But for all the attacks, legitimate or otherwise, that Skinner suffered,
he also had the satisfaction of knowing that many psychologists, educators,
and other workers regularly applied his ideas in their everyday research and
practice.
Skinner’s Influence
Although behaviorism in general, and Skinnerian behaviorism specifically, no
longer features prominently in most academic psychology departments, the
community of researchers and practitioners who use Skinner’s approach – now
known as behavior analysis—remains vibrant. Multiple journals are devoted to
publishing a wide range of scholarly work in the Skinnerian tradition, including
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Journal of Applied Behav-
ior Analysis, The Behavior Analyst, and Behavior and Social Issues. The As-
sociation for Behavior Analysis International is the Skinnerian community’s
main scholarly and professional organization; there are over 5,500 members
and multiple international affiliates, from Brazil to India to New Zealand. The
Association hosts a lively annual conference in a major American city, featur-
ing presentations on the experimental, applied, and philosophical branches of
Skinner’s system.
Skinner’s ideas have been applied to treating developmental disabilities,
especially autism, in which applied behavior analysis is widely accepted as
one of the most effective treatment approaches. In education, an area close
to Skinner’s heart, behavioral principles are used to help children with atten-
tion deficit disorder and learning disabilities perform better in the classroom,
and a number of popular online reading programs, such as Headsprout, have
been developed using the principles of programmed instruction. Finally, in
the field of animal training, Skinnerian shaping techniques are used exten-
sively, not only to train dogs to sit, heel, and even become service dogs, but
also to train a wide variety of animals for work in the entertainment indus-
try. Clearly, applications of Skinner’s principles have extended far beyond the
academy, and he would undoubtedly have been pleased with the broad range
of his influence.
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
In the early twentieth century several important figures previously shown no fear, such as a white rat. Soon the
changed their definition of psychology from the study of presentation of the rat alone elicited a fear response in the
the conscious mind to the study of observable behavior. young subject. A few years later Watson supervised a study
Pavlov helped initiate this transition with his conviction that involving the deconditioning of an already-established fear
explanations of reflexive behavior must be expressed in response in a young infant, conducted by Jones. In his later
terms of objective physiological and behavioral indicators. career Watson left academia but applied his behavioral
Building on his earlier work on the physiology of digestion principles in the advertising world. He also wrote popular
and the reflexive responses of salivation in dogs, Pavlov articles and an influential book on childrearing based on
conducted meticulous studies of conditioned reflexes, using his behavioristic outlook.
the procedures of classical conditioning. Among the many Watson’s behaviorism was a significant influence on
phenomena his lab investigated were discrimination, gen- Skinner who, like Watson, felt behavior could be explained
eralization, and the production of experimental neuroses in by external factors, not internal processes. Going further,
animals confronted with too-difficult discrimination tasks. Skinner developed the theory of operant conditioning.
Watson extended many of Pavlov’s ideas to human Operant conditioning places less emphasis on reflexive
psychology. Although Pavlov had pursued a neurologically behaviors and more on those that are emitted by an
based theory to account for his findings, Watson empha- organism, showing how they are a function of the con-
sized the environmental factors that lead to the acquisition ditions that both follow and accompany them. Skinner
of behavior. He insisted that if psychology were to be a believed that behavior can be increased or decreased in
true science, it should abandon the introspective method, frequency by manipulating its contingencies. When the
study only observable behavior, and adopt the goals of consequences following a response increase the prob-
prediction and control. Largely as a result of Watson’s ability that that response will occur again, it is said to
efforts, behaviorism was brought to the forefront of have been reinforced. He took this simple idea, which he
American psychology. Watson demonstrated the potential demonstrated with animals, and applied it to a range of
value of this approach by using a classical-conditioning human concerns, such as how to help students learn more
model to suggest that with a few basic exceptions, such efficiently and how to develop better social systems. In
as fear in response to a loud, unexpected noise, all emo- Walden Two, Skinner described a utopian society based on
tions are built up through conditioning. In his famous Little his favored behavioristic principles. For this work and what
Albert study, conducted with Rayner, he repeatedly many regarded as his overly deterministic outlook, Skinner
paired a loud noise with stimuli to which Little Albert had became a polarizing figure in American society.
Chapter Review 357
Key Pioneers
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Vladimir M. Bechterev, Edward Chace Tolman,
p. 319 p. 331 p. 342
John Broadus Watson, Rosalie Rayner, p. 334 Clark Hull, p. 343
p. 327 Mary Cover Jones, p. 338 B. F. Skinner, p. 343
Key Terms
behaviorism, p. 318 operant conditioning, p. 346
unconditioned stimulus (US), p. 322 cumulative record, p. 347
unconditioned response (UR), p. 322 contingencies of reinforcement, p. 347
unconditioned reflex, p. 322 extinction, p. 347
conditioned stimulus (CS), p. 323 fixed-interval reinforcement
conditioned response (CR), p. 323 schedule, p. 348
conditioned reflex, p. 323 fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule, p. 348
classical conditioning, p. 323 variable-interval reinforcement
higher-order conditioning, p. 324 schedule, p. 348
generalization, p. 324 variable-ratio reinforcement
differentiation, p. 324 schedule, p. 348
experimental neurosis, p. 325 respondent conditioning, p. 349
fear response, p. 333 shaping, p. 349
rage, p. 333 reinforcer, p. 349
love, p. 333 primary reinforcer, p. 349
radical environmentalism, p. 337 secondary reinforcers, p. 349
systematic desensitization, p. 339 programmed instruction, p. 350
latent learning, p. 342 negative reinforcement, p. 351
purposive behaviorism, p. 343 positive reinforcement, p. 351
mechanistic behaviorism, p. 343 grammatical structure, p. 353
operant chamber, p. 346 behavior analysis, p. 355

1. Describe the different kinds of reflexes Pavlov identified. Why was this concept so
important to him, especially when he applied it to studying what he called psychic
secretions?
2. One of the appeals of behaviorism at the time of Watson and beyond has been its
obvious potential for practical applications. Describe several examples of applied
behaviorism that have been mentioned in this chapter.
3. Behaviorism has always had its critics, even when it was the dominant theoretical posi-
tion in American academic psychology. Outline the shortcomings of behaviorism as an
approach to psychology. Also describe its strengths, especially as they may have been
perceived in Watson’s time.
4. What are some of the philosophical implications of Skinner’s operant-conditioning ap-
proach? Discuss why these implications may have seemed sinister to some, yet hopeful
and useful to others.
5. Do you think a whole society could be engineered with the use of positive reinforce-
ment? What problems might you encounter in designing such a society?
Suggested Resources
For coverage of Pavlov’s life, see Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); B. P. Babkin, Pavlov: A Biography (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1949); and Elizabeth and Martin Sherwood, Ivan Pavlov
(Geneva: Heron Books, 1970). On his laboratory, see George Windholz, “Pavlov and the
Pavlovians in the Laboratory,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 26 (1990):
64–74; and Daniel P. Todes, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Labo-
ratory Enterprise (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Pavlov’s own most
important works on conditioned reflexes are found in his Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes
(New York: Liveright, 1928) and Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Activity of the
Cerebral Cortex (New York: Dover, 1960).
Watson’s short, lively autobiography appears in the third volume of Carl Murchison, ed.,
A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1936).
A thorough and scholarly account of his life and work is Kerry W. Buckley’s Mechanical
Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism (New York: Guilford Press,
1989). Any of Watson’s writings cited in the notes are recommended, although his reprinted
Behaviorism (New York: Norton, 1970) is particularly readable. Jones’s life and work are
covered in Alexandra Rutherford, “Mother of Behavior Therapy and Beyond: Mary Cover
Jones and the Study of the ‘Whole Child,’ “ in Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, vol. vi,
edited by Donald Dewsbury, Ludy T. Benjamin, and Michael Wertheimer (Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association, 2006), 189–206.
Skinner’s brief autobiography appears in History of Psychology in Autobiography,
vol. 5, edited by E. G. Boring and Gardner Lindzey (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1967). He amplifies this material in the three volumes of his full autobiography: Particulars
of My Life (1976), The Shaping of a Behaviorist (1979), and A Matter of Consequences
(1983), all published in New York by Knopf. In B. F. Skinner: A Life (New York: Basic
Chapter Review 359
Books, 1993), Daniel Bjork comments aptly on Skinner’s life and work from the stand-
point of a social historian. Skinner describes his early studies with the Skinner box in The
Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1938); later developments are taken up in Science and Human Behavior (New York:
Macmillan, 1953). For the social-philosophical implications of his theories, see his novel
Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1962) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York:
Bantam/Vintage, 1971). For a contextual, historical account of the applied aspects
of Skinner’s system as they developed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, see Alexandra
Rutherford’s Beyond the Box: B. F. Skinner’s Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to
Life, 1950s–1970s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
CHAPTER 10
Social Influence and Social
Psychology: From Mesmer
to Milgram and Beyond
Mesmer and Animal Magnetism

From Mesmerism to Hypnotism
The Nancy-Salpêtrière Controversy
The New Discipline of Social Psychology
Milgram and the Obedience Studies
Social Influence Today
I n the fall of 1775, the prince-elector of Bavaria appointed a commission to

investigate the activities of Johann Joseph Gassner, a priest who claimed to
cure many difficult illnesses through a simple technique called exorcism. After
making sure that his patient was a Roman Catholic and was participating in the
exorcism process willingly, Gassner would command any “demons” present in the
patient’s body to cause symptoms immediately and intensely. If nothing happened,
he declared the patient physically ill and sent him to an ordinary doctor. But if the
symptoms did appear—as they often did, with the patient convulsing, twitching,
or crying out in pain—Gassner concluded that demons really were at work and
proceeded to “tame” them by commanding them to move about in the body and
produce different symptoms. These suggestions were often effective, as paralyses
and pains moved about to different parts of the body, accompanied by groans
and expressions of extreme emotion. Finally, having established control of the
demons, Gassner would order them to depart from the body altogether.
361
362 10 | Social Influence and Social Psychology: From Mesmer to Milgram and Beyond
Many patients reported improvement, or even cure, after Gassner’s exorcisms,

but his activity created controversy both inside and outside the church. Although
exorcism was an accepted ritual, many churchmen thought Gassner carried it too
far and used it too frequently. Unsurprisingly, many doctors felt he infringed on
medical territory. He also had defenders, however, and the resulting controversy
led to an investigative commission. The testimony from the commission’s star
witness became the first link in a surprising chain of events that finally led to the
scientific study of social influence and suggestibility—and the modern discipline
of social psychology.
MESMER AND ANIMAL MAGNETISM

The commission’s primary witness was a Viennese physician named Franz
Anton Mesmer (1734–1815; Figure 10.1). Mesmer was called because he
reportedly could cure patients in ways somewhat similar to Gassner’s, except
that he invoked a naturalistic force as his therapeutic agent instead of a
supernaturalistic exorcism. Mesmer duplicated many of Gassner’s effects for
the commission, commanding patients’ symptoms to move about their bodies
and even disappear; but he explained these effects as the result of a strong
magnetic force concentrated within his own body. He therefore provided a
naturalistic and apparently “scientific” explanation for results like Gassner’s.
Partly thanks to Mesmer’s testimony, Gassner was banished to a country
parish and forbidden from practicing further exorcisms.
He died in obscurity a few years later.
Mesmer’s own fame was starting to grow, although his
role as a representative of enlightened “science” was both
temporary and ironic. This paradoxical figure had made
some important discoveries about the phenomenon now
known as hypnotism, the process of inducing mental
concentration, resulting in a state of high suggestibility, and
had tried to explain them in a scientific way. His investiga-
tions of what we now call social influence processes—the
various ways people shape and are shaped by the behaviors,
attitudes, and beliefs of other people and situations—
anticipated many developments in modern social psy-
chology. But his flamboyant methods, grandiose claims,
and indirect manner soon got him into trouble with the
scientific establishment. In 1784, Mesmer himself became
the subject of a royal commission’s inquiry, and he fared
Figure 10.1 Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). no better than Gassner had. His story, however, provides a
good introduction to the modern history of hypnotism, social influence, and the
emergence of social psychology.
Little is known about Mesmer’s life before 1766, when he received a doctorate
in medicine from the University of Vienna; his dissertation was entitled “On
the Influence of the Planets.” Largely copied from a publication by an English
follower of Isaac Newton, it argued that planetary gravitational influences
directly affect biological organisms on Earth. Although that idea sounds like
unscientific astrology today, it had certain plausibility in the wake of Newton’s
discovery of the law of universal gravitation, which held that planets and stars
could influence each other’s orbits from great distances. One of Mesmer’s few
original passages outlined a force he called “animal gravitation” as the agent of
the planets’ presumed biological influence.1
Mesmer’s plagiarism went undetected in his lifetime and did not hinder his
career. After graduation he married a wealthy widow and became an active
socialite. A good amateur musician, he befriended several musical celebrities
including Leopold Mozart and his prodigy son, Wolfgang Amadeus. Wolfgang’s
short opera Bastien und Bastienne, written when he was 12, premiered in a
theater Mesmer had built in his own luxurious gardens. When Benjamin Franklin
invented the glass harmonica, a musical instrument played by rubbing damp
fingers against a rotating glass drum, Mesmer got one and became a virtuoso
performer. Mozart later wrote a glass harmonica concerto especially for him,
and he included a comic character clearly modeled after Mesmer in his opera
Così fan Tutte.
Although Mesmer practiced medicine only sporadically, he kept up with
current scientific developments. When a local priest named Maximilian Hell
became enthusiastic about the subject of magnetism, Mesmer frequently talked
with him about how this seemed to be one of a group of several invisible and
mysterious “fluids” with potentially marvelous consequences: gravitation, the
recently discovered electricity, and the gases that could make balloons miracu-
lously rise to the sky being other examples.
These conversations proved crucial in 1773, when Mesmer began to treat
a young relative of his wife’s who suffered from periodic attacks marked by
“convulsions, spasms of vomiting, inflammation of the intestines, inability to
make water, agonizing toothache and earache, despondency, insane halluci-
nations, cataleptic trance, fainting, temporary blindness . . . and other terrible
symptoms.”2 At first, Mesmer wondered if these episodes coincided with the
gravitational phases of the moon, but then he recalled his conversations with
Father Hell about magnetism and decided to test the therapeutic properties of
this new force.
After having his patient swallow a medicine containing iron, he applied

specially designed magnets to various parts of her body. Soon she said she felt a
force flowing with her, then entered a “crisis state” with twitching, convulsions,
and intense pain in the location of each of her symptoms. When the crisis sub-
sided, her symptoms disappeared for six hours. Mesmer repeated the treatment
several times until the cure seemed complete and permanent. Leopold Mozart
had seen the patient in her sickest, most emaciated state; when he saw her again
six years later, he reported admiringly, “On my honor, I hardly recognized her, she
is so large and fat. She has married and has three children, two girls and a boy.”3
Mesmer repeated the therapy with other patients. With a clear idea of what
to expect, he suggested to them that they would fall into a crisis state when the
magnets were applied. Several patients reacted as he expected. Then he tried
the treatment without magnets, merely passing his hands over patients’ bodies
while asserting they would fall into crisis—and this method worked too! Instead
of deciding magnetism had nothing to do with his cures, however, Mesmer
concluded that his own body must be a strong source of an internal force or
energy he called animal magnetism, which could act therapeutically just like
a real magnet. He speculated further that every person’s body was filled with,
and surrounded by, a magnetic force field that sometimes became misaligned
and weakened, leading to the symptoms of illness. The application of a strong,
external magnetic force presumably realigned and restrengthened the field,
similar to the way a strong magnet can magnetize a nail, thereby removing the
symptoms. This practice, in which patients were induced through suggestion
and the application of magnetic force to enter a crisis state, came to be called
mesmerism in honor of its originator.
Claims and Controversies

This was Mesmer’s theory and treatment when he appeared before the Gassner
commission. He testified that Gassner cured people because he was, like himself,
a person naturally strong in animal magnetism; in fact, Mesmer modestly allowed
that Gassner might have been filled with even more magnetism than he was.
Here, in crude form, was an origin of one persistent but mistaken belief that the
secret of hypnotic phenomena lies in some mysterious power within the hypno-
tist, rather than in the receptivity of the subject.
Back in Vienna, Mesmer became involved in two nasty controversies. When he
publicized his magnetic therapy, Father Hell claimed credit for the idea. Mesmer
responded ungenerously and somewhat dishonestly. He said he had known about
the therapeutic power of magnets for years. Why else would he have regularly
prescribed medicines with iron in them? He also said he had postulated a force
of animal magnetism in his doctoral dissertation (although the phrase he’d used
was animal gravitation). After a flurry of exchanges, Father Hell’s claims were
largely dismissed.
A second controversy—with more serious consequences for Mesmer—followed
his treatment of a teenaged piano prodigy named Maria Theresia Paradis, who
had been blind since the age of three. Mesmer claimed to have restored the girl’s
sight by magnetism, until her parents prematurely removed her from his care and
she became blind again. Her parents, supported by orthodox physicians, called
Mesmer a charlatan and charged him with improper conduct. Mesmer responded
that the parents were upset only because Maria Theresia’s celebrity value
decreased when she gained normal vision. We cannot know for sure what really
happened; it’s possible she suffered from a psychologically caused blindness that
Mesmer really did relieve temporarily. Whatever the truth, he found it necessary
to flee Vienna for Paris.
In its unstable state on the eve of the French Revolution, Parisian society was
prone to fads and crazes. Promoted by the flashy Mesmer, animal magnetism
was particularly suited to become a popular fad. Although his heavily accented
French was hard to follow, and he charged hefty fees, he soon attracted more
clients than he could handle individually. In response to this demand, he devised
his famous baquet (French for “tub”) as a means of
mass-producing magnetic cures.
Mesmer’s baquet was a covered wooden tub,
filled with water and magnetized iron filings, with
metal rods inserted into it with handles protruding
outside. Patients entered the treatment room in
groups and sat around the tub grasping its handles
while Mesmer, in an adjoining room, played soft
music on his glass harmonica to help set the mood
(Figure 10.2). After the patients were in a suitable
state of anticipation (most of them already had a
good idea of what to expect), Mesmer emerged
dressed in a flowing, lilac-colored robe and began
pointing his finger or an iron rod at the afflicted
parts of the patients’ bodies. Invariably one or two
passed into a crisis state and served as models for
the others. Soon the room was full of convulsing,
crisis-ridden patients, the most violent of whom
were carried by Mesmer and his assistants to a
clearly marked chambre de crises (“crisis room”) Figure 10.2 A scene around Mesmer’s baquet.
for individual attention. Not all patients experienced a complete crisis, but
even some of these partial responders found their symptoms improved after the
session was over.
The baquet may seem absurd today, but in the 1780s, it made plausible scien-
tific sense to store an invisible magnetic “fluid” in some sort of receptacle. The
so-called Leyden jar, which presumably stored charges of electrical fluid (and was
in fact an effective early battery) served as one model for Mesmer. And lighter-
than-air balloons—a craze that thrilled the French public with their flights—also
worked their magic by containing and storing an invisible but powerful fluid
substance (hot air). Therefore, when Mesmer placed magnetized iron filings and
water in a covered wooden tub, he and his contemporaries could sincerely believe
it would fill up with an invisible but therapeutic magnetic fluid.
By treating people in groups, Mesmer increased not only his profits but also
the strength of response emitted by his patients. His baquet clients demon-
strated two effects modern social psychologists call social contagion and social
facilitation. Social contagion is the spread of ideas, attitudes, or behavior pat-
terns in a group through imitation and conformity. If the strength or intensity
of an act or behavior increases when performed within a social or group setting,
the effect is known as social facilitation. Mesmer’s early responders essentially
showed the others what they were expected to do, and thus began the contagion.
As more and more members of the group entered crisis, the intensity of their
responses became more extreme.
Despite—or perhaps because of—his popular and commercial success, Mesmer
was regarded suspiciously by the mainstream medical and scientific authorities,
and in 1784 they persuaded the king himself to appoint a blue-ribbon scientific
investigation committee. It was led by Franklin, the American ambassador (and
inventor of the glass harmonica), and included several luminaries from French
science and medicine. When the commissioners submitted themselves to
Mesmer’s magnetic induction procedures, they were not affected. In addition,
they discovered Mesmer’s responsive subjects fell into crisis when presented
with something they merely believed was magnetized but really was not. The
commissioners unanimously concluded, “On the question of the existence and
the utility of animal magnetism, that there is no proof of its existence, that this
fluid without existence is consequently without utility.”4 Although they did
not deny that some patients were sometimes affected, they attributed this to
the influence of suggestion or imagination, rather than a physical force. And
while that concession may seem significant today, at the time it was generally
interpreted to mean that the effects had been simulated—a sham. Essentially,
the commission branded animal magnetism as bogus science, and discouraged
11_POP_28354_ch10_360-401.indd 366 18/10/16 4:09 PM

legitimate scientists and doctors from taking it seriously. For many years, the
subject lay in the hands of amateurs.
From Mesmerism to Hypnotism

During the height of his fashionability, Mesmer founded a series of mystical,
quasi-religious schools called Societies of Harmony, where wealthy students were
taught how to magnetize patients. Although Mesmer himself disappeared into
relative obscurity after 1784, one of his nonprofessional but enthusiastic students
kept the practice of magnetism alive and made some discoveries that propelled
the field into a new phase. These discoveries also proved foundational for later
developments in the study of social influence and social psychology.
Puységur’s Artificial Somnambulism and Faria’s Lucid Sleep

The French aristocrat Amand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, better known as the
Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), was made uncomfortable by the convulsive
and often violent nature of the crisis state patients typically entered during the
practice of magnetism. He must have conveyed this attitude while magnetizing
one of his male servants who, instead of becoming crisis-ridden, entered a
peaceful, sleeplike trance. Unlike a truly sleeping person, however, he continued
to respond to Puységur’s voice, answering questions and even performing
complicated activities when told to, such as dancing happily to imagined music.
He “awoke” with no recollection of these events, although on being remagnetized
and resuming the trance, he promptly remembered them. Puységur found he
could reproduce this state in many other patients and bypass the crisis altogether,
simply by suggesting a state of peaceful sleep in the course of induction. He
first referred to the new state as a perfect crisis but later called it artificial
somnambulism because of its apparent similarity to sleepwalking.
In artificially somnambulistic subjects, Puységur and his colleagues soon
discovered many effects that remain well known to modern hypnotists. They
confirmed that a markedly enhanced suggestibility characterized the state, and
that if they asserted something was so, subjects would behave as if it were in fact
true. By suggestion, they could produce paralyses and pains that moved about in
the subjects’ bodies upon command, as well as authentic-seeming emotional re-
actions, such as joyful laughter or bitter weeping. Also, and strikingly, they found
that their simple suggestions could produce losses of feeling in specific parts
of the body; a subject with an anaesthesized hand, for example, calmly tolerated
pinpricks or the close approach of a lighted match with no sign of pain or distress.
Like Puységur’s servant, many other subjects also seemed to forget the trance
experiences upon awakening but remembered them when re-magnetized—an
11_POP_28354_ch10_360-401.indd 367 18/10/16 4:09 PM

effect called posthypnotic amnesia today. Puységur also demonstrated what is

now known as posthypnotic suggestion, in which subjects in trance are told
they will perform a certain act after awakening—scratch their left ear when the
hypnotist coughs, for example—but will forget that they had been instructed to
do so. Many subjects will comply with such suggestions and when asked why,
fabricate some plausible but incorrect explanation, such as saying that they had
a sudden itch.
Puységur’s observations led him to one further belief that has become part of
the popular mythology about hypnotism, but has not held up to full scrutiny—that
somnambulistic subjects can be induced to do things they would find completely
impossible normally. In fact, hypnotized subjects will sometimes do things they
think are impossible in the waking state, such as make their bodies so rigid that
they can remain suspended—lying down, face-up—with only one support beneath
the head and another under the heels. In reality, most people can easily do this
in their normal, non-hypnotized state as long as they remain confident and calm.
Hypnosis can sometimes make people more relaxed and confident about their
abilities, thereby helping them to concentrate. It does not, however, add miracu-
lously to their normal abilities or powers.
In sum, Puységur’s efforts led to an important modification of the mesmeric
crisis state, converting it into something similar to the modern hypnotic
trance. Soon another amateur, the Portuguese priest José Custódio de Faria
(1746–1819), addressed the important question of why all people did not
respond equally well to the magnetists’ induction procedures. Mesmer himself,
of course, had attributed the secret to his cures to some kind of magnetic force
concentrated within himself. His teachings within the Societies of Harmony
purportedly enabled his pupils to concentrate and use their own powers and
thereby influence their patients. The question remained, however, of why
different patients responded so differently to this theoretically universal,
magnetic-like force. Like the Franklin commissioners, Faria became highly
skeptical about the general magnetic theory, but unlike the comissioners, he
was strongly impressed by the apparent genuineness of the mesmeric effects
on at least some of the patients. Therefore, in his own attempt to explain the
phenomena, he shifted his emphasis from the powers of the magnetizer to the
susceptibilities and predispositions of the subjects.5
To make his points, Faria first demonstrated that trance states could be
induced without using magnetic equipment or terminology. Typically, he asked
seated subjects to fixate their gaze on his hand as he slowly moved it toward
their face, while commanding them to sleep. Other times he simply had them
close their eyes and concentrate on his voice as he authoritatively instructed
them, “Sleep.” About one person in five responded to these procedures by

falling into a deep trance state identical to Puységur’s artificial somnambu-
lism; Faria named it lucid sleep. To remove them from the state, Faria simply
instructed them to wake up. These are essentially the procedures still followed
by most hypnotists today.
Faria further showed that virtually anyone, even a child, could success-
fully induce lucid sleep in predisposed subjects using the simple procedures
above. In short, he showed that the secret of mesmeric phenomena lay not in
the mysterious powers of the operator, but in the predispositions and suscep-
tibilities of the subjects. Unfortunately, this important finding received scant
attention from his contemporaries. Following his death in 1819, Faria’s ideas
were overlooked, and hypnotic practice returned to the hands of scientifi-
cally unrespectable mesmerists who continued to speak of their activities in
terms of magnetism and other occult fluids supposedly concentrated within
themselves. Nearly a generation passed before Faria’s ideas were rediscovered,
after mesmerism began to gain a semblance of scientific respectability when a
few unorthodox doctors in Great Britain became interested in its potential as
an anesthetic.
Mesmeric Anesthesia to Hypnotism

Traveling mesmerists, who typically performed at fairs and other public
gatherings, produced artificial anesthesias in their demonstrations. Subjects
would be told that parts of their bodies had lost feeling, and then when normally
painful stimuli were applied, they would show no distress. These performances
lacked full credibility because most of the subjects were hired assistants to
the mesmerists, but their apparent indifference to pain inevitably caught the
attention of a few progressive-minded physicians and surgeons. Chemical
anesthetics were unknown at the time, so surgery was an excruciating ordeal;
patients had to be strapped to the operating table for restraint. Surgeons made
their reputations by speed rather than delicacy, and prolonged operations were
impossible. Conservative medical opinion held that pain was actually necessary
for a successful recovery, but a few pioneers hoped to find some means of
lessening the agonies of surgery.
The first of these, a physician named John Elliotson, observed a mesmerist
on stage in 1837, was intrigued by what he saw, and made plans to investigate
the anesthetic properties of mesmerism from his hospital post at University
College London. Unfortunately, his conservative colleagues learned of his
plan and passed a resolution banning any such practice within the hospital.6
Elliotson resigned in protest and never got the opportunity to test mesmeric
anesthesia on patients. He occasionally used mesmerism in his medical

practice, however, and in 1843, he founded a new journal to carry articles on
“cerebral physiology and mesmerism, and their applications for human wel-
fare.”7 His journal lasted only a few years and was never widely read, but still
it marked the start of a formal information exchange for scientists interested
in this practice.
Meanwhile, in 1842, the English surgeon W. S. Ward actually performed a leg
amputation on a mesmerized patient and reported to the Royal Medical Society
that the patient experienced no pain. One listener typified the Society’s response
when he charged that the patient had been an imposter. Another contended that
even if Ward’s account were true, which he doubted, “still the fact is unworthy of
consideration, because pain is a wise provision of nature, and patients ought to
suffer pain while their surgeons are operating; they are all the better for it and
recover better.” The Society’s best response, according to this expert, would be to
expunge all record of Ward’s report from the minutes, as if it had never occurred
at all.8
The much more extensive experiments of James Esdaile (1808–1859), a
Scottish physician practicing in India, were similarly dismissed. Esdaile trained
his assistants to mesmerize patients before their operations and became the first
person to use mesmeric anesthesia on a large scale and tabulate his results. He
performed more than 300 such operations in the late 1840s, many of them for the
removal of scrotal tumors. Among his mesmerized patients, the mortality rate for
this dangerous operation dropped from its normal 50 percent to 5 percent. Sadly,
however, his impressive results were widely minimized on the racist grounds that
highly suspect “native” patients had been used, mesmerized by equally suspect
“native” assistants. The patients actually liked to be operated on, it was said, and
merely acted to help Esdaile.9
Despite being dismissed by the medical establishment, these experiments
rank historically among the first successful cases of surgical anesthetics to be
tested by Western surgeons. The practice was slowly gaining ground and would
probably have earned general acceptance if not for the independent discovery
of effective chemical anesthetics. The American dentist Horace Wells extracted
teeth painlessly from patients put to sleep by nitrous oxide in 1844; within the
next three years, the successful uses of ether and chloroform were discovered.
These chemical anesthetics were much more understandable to traditionally
trained doctors than mesmerism, and they were also more reliable and univer-
sally applicable. After a brief flurry of excitement, then, the idea of mesmeric
anesthesia faded into the background, and this apparently promising avenue to
scientific respectability became closed.
A more effective step toward respectability was taken by

the Scottish physician James Braid (1795–1860; Figure 10.3),
who had been impressed after a traveling mesmerist let
him personally examine an entranced subject. Convinced
that the responses were genuine and not faked, Braid un-
dertook his own experiments, which confirmed the basic
findings of Puységur and Faria. In his most consequential
contribution, Braid argued that these phenomena deserved
a more appropriate and scientific name than mesmerism
or animal magnetism, both of which had acquired negative
connotations. Noticing similarities and differences between
the trance state and normal sleep, he sought a name that
would reflect that. He probably knew that some French
writers in the early 1800s had occasionally used such terms
as hypnotique, based on the Greek hypnos for “sleep,” to
describe certain aspects of the mesmeric situation.10 Braid
felt that mesmeric sleep differed from normal sleep because
of an altered arousal of the nervous system, so he con-
nected hypnos with the Greek neuro (“nervous”) in propos-
ing “neurohypnology” to designate the study of mesmeric
Figure 10.3 James Braid (1795–1860).
phenomena. He was also the first to define hypnotism as
the practice of inducing a mesmeric trance, and it has been
the standard term in English ever since.
More conventional than Elliotson, Braid maintained ties to the medical estab-
lishment and published his studies in standard scientific journals. Although he
discovered little that was new, he took mesmerism out of the disreputable medical
netherworld in which it had traditionally been practiced and brought it, as hypno-
tism, into the scientist’s laboratory. Braid thus paved the way for the more com-
plete scientific rehabilitation of hypnotism, which occurred in France during the
final quarter of the nineteenth century. This happened in the context of a lively
controversy about the nature of hypnotism between two competing “schools,”
one centered in the provincial city of Nancy and the other in the capital, Paris.
THE NANCY-SALPÊTRIÈRE CONTROVERSY

The so-called Nancy School of hypnotism began with a modest country doctor
named Ambroise Auguste Liébeault (1823–1904). As a medical student, he had
been fascinated by an old book on animal magnetism. After establishing a suc-
cessful conventional practice just outside Nancy, he decided to experiment with
hypnotic therapies by offering his patients an unusual bargain: They could be
treated hypnotically for free or by established methods for standard fees. After a
slow start, the experimental technique’s success and popularity grew enough to
endanger the doctor’s livelihood. Good Father Liébeault, as he came to be known,
finally had to encourage voluntary donations from his grateful patients.
Liébeault used a simple, straightforward treatment method, telling each
patient to stare deeply into his eyes while he repeatedly gave instructions to
sleep. As soon as the patient fell into a light trance, Liébeault confidently said
the symptoms would soon disappear. Often they did, showing once again the
extent to which physical complaints could be manipulated by psychological and
suggestive factors.
The modest Liébeault publicized his work in an obscure book almost nobody
read, but his local reputation aroused the interest of Hippolyte Bernheim
(1840–1919), a younger and more ambitious doctor from Nancy. Originally
skeptical, Bernheim visited the hypnosis clinic and was so impressed that he
returned repeatedly to learn the older doctor’s methods. Soon he abandoned his
conventional practice to become a full-time hypnotherapist, treating hundreds
of patients and—in his most important contribution to the new field—carefully
noting and analyzing their widely varying responses to the procedure.
Agreeing with Faria and Braid that the most important hypnotic factors
lay in the subject rather than the hypnotist, Bernheim compared the charac-
teristics of strong versus weak responders. His most important conclusion
was that all people vary on a general trait of suggestibility, which he defined
as “the aptitude to transform an idea into an act.”11 Bernheim believed his
strongly hypnotizable patients ranked high on this general tendency, and that
they might be successfully treated by straightforward persuasion techniques
as well as by hypnotism. If only patients could be made to believe they would
be cured, often they really would.
Bernheim elaborated these ideas in numerous publications, including the 1886
book, De la Suggestion et de ses Applications à la Thérapeutique (On Suggestion
and Its Therapeutic Applications).12 The title expressed the main belief of the
Nancy School: that hypnotic susceptibility is one aspect of suggestibility, a charac-
teristic that varies widely from one person to another within the normal population.
The Salpêtrière School

As Bernheim was developing his theory in Nancy, a radically different ex-
planation for hypnotizability was being promoted in Paris by the neurologist
Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), the famous director of Paris’s Salpêtrière
Hospital. As a struggling medical student, Charcot had spent some required
time at the vast hospital, which housed several thousand poor and ill women in
more than forty buildings. A comparable institution for men, the Bicêtre, had
been established in a separate location. Although not yet a prestigious insti-
tution, the Salpêtrière struck young Charcot as a potential source of countless
cases for neurological research. He resolved to make his fortune first, and then
return to the Salpêtrière as senior physician. Following the tradition of Mesmer,
he married a wealthy widow who facilitated his participation in Parisian high
society, and supported his early practice specializing in the diseases of the rich.
In 1862 with his financial security assured, Charcot returned to the Salpêtrière
in a position of authority.
He quickly established a reputation as a master clinician, conducting or
directing important work on epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, poliomyelitis, and other
organic diseases. A commanding and often autocratic personality, he demanded
rigorous devotion from the many students and junior doctors who came to work
with him, leading to his common designation as the “Napoleon of the Neuroses.”
He also gave public lectures in which he or his assistants imitated the symptoms
of various neurological diseases, and engaged patients in dramatic interviews—
sometimes having them wear hats with long feathers whose different vibrations
illustrated different kinds of tremors. These lectures gradually became popular
events, attracting large audiences of actors, writers, and other celebrities, as well
as philosophers and doctors.
Charcot’s popularity peaked in the 1880s after he turned his attention to
hysteria, an “unfashionable” condition that most other physicians dismissed as
unworthy of serious study. Hysterical patients displayed a wide and bewildering
variety of symptoms that superficially resembled the effects of organic
neurological disorders: paralyses, memory losses, convulsions and fits of violent
emotion, for example. But unlike ordinary neurological symptoms, these seemed
to have no underlying organic causes, and they frequently violated known facts
about the nervous system. A paralysis might be confined to a sharply delineated
area, such as the part of the hand and wrist normally covered by a glove—a loca-
tion that didn’t make anatomical sense because the nerves of the hand and wrist
have no such sharp boundaries. In general, hysterics suffered from symptoms
that resembled ordinary neuropathology but did not conform to the accepted and
understood rules of neurology.
The ancient Greeks had first described and named hysteria, believing it to
be an exclusively feminine disease caused by the physical displacement of the
uterus (whose Greek origin was hystera) to inappropriate parts of the body where
it caused irregularities in the flow of the humors (see Chapter 1). When Charcot
began to study the condition many centuries later, mainstream thinking about
it had not significantly advanced. Many physicians still regarded it as feminine,
possibly caused by some unknown disturbance of the reproductive system but

also widely dismissed as a form of malingering, or faking symptoms in order to
get attention or avoid responsibility.
The Salpêtrière housed many patients diagnosed with hysteria, and when
Charcot examined them he concluded their symptoms caused too much genuine
distress to be faked. He had also examined several men outside the Salpêtrière
who showed similar symptoms. He decided that hysteria was real and definitely
worthy of serious study. At the same time, he noticed another condition at the
fringes of scientific respectability that seemed to have much in common with
hysteria: susceptibility to hypnotism. Responsive hypnotized subjects commonly
experienced paralyses, insensitivity to pain, and memory losses, and performed
consciously inexplicable acts (as responses to posthypnotic suggestions) much
as hysterical patients did. Hypnotism and hysteria both produced physical and
mental anomalies that made little sense anatomically, and that seemed beyond
the conscious control of the subject or patient. Moreover, many of Charcot’s hys-
terical patients at the Salpêtrière turned out to be highly hypnotizable, and their
symptoms could be manipulated and moved about in their bodies by hypnotic
suggestion.
Based on this coincidence, Charcot concluded that hypnotic susceptibility
and hysteria were essentially the same thing, and that the former was in fact a
symptom of hysteria. Because of his prestige, Charcot’s identification of hypno-
tism as a genuine phenomenon worthy of serious scientific attention completed
the scientific rehabilitation of the subject that had been begun by Braid and
Bernheim. Ironically, however, Charcot went on to promote a peculiar theory
about the causes of both hypnotism and hysteria that ultimately led to ridicule
and disrepute.
Feeling certain that hysteria must have some organic or neurological
cause, but in the absence of any specific abnormalities associated with
neurological diseases, Charcot speculated that the problem must originate
in a generalized degeneracy of the nervous system, which interferes with
the normal integration and interconnection of memories and ideas. In other
words, memory clusters that would normally have associative links become
dissociated and do not connect with each other, as when a recently hypnotized
subject in the waking state cannot recall the events previously experienced
during the trance.
Charcot further believed that the hysterical and hypnotic states resem-
bled the oldest known neurological symptoms—epileptic seizures—by occur-
ring either in a pure or “major” form, or in an incomplete “minor” one. The
classical grand mal (French for “large bad”) epileptic seizure occurs in three
stages, beginning with an aura, a characteristic

sensation that signals the onset of an attack; fol-
lowed by a tonic phase, in which the body goes
rigid and the patient falls (hence the ancient des-
ignation of epilepsy as “the falling sickness”);
and culminating in a clonic phase, in which the
body convulses spasmodically. In contrast to this
dramatic and major form of epilepsy, petit mal
(“small bad”) seizures consisted only of inexpli-
cable brief “spells” or fainting sensations.*
Charcot and his assistants soon found a small
number of Salpêtrière patients whose hysterical
Figure 10.4 Charcot lecturing on Blanche Wittmann.
attacks and entrance into the hypnotic state
followed a stagelike sequence resembling that
of a grand mal seizure. Charcot believed these patients manifested the pure
forms of the conditions, grande hystérie and grand hypnotisme, and that
they were worthy of particularly intensive study. They became the stars of his
public lectures, which attracted large audiences; Charcot and his assistants put
the patients through the paces of demonstrating the spectacular symptoms of
hysteria and hypnotic susceptibility. One attractive young woman, Blanche
Wittmann (1859–1913), earned the nickname Queen of the Hysterics with her
dramatic performances (Figure 10.4).
One of the assistants who worked intensively with Wit (as Wittmann was
called in Charcot’s published reports) was Alfred Binet (1857–1911). This
wealthy young man had an avid interest but no formal education in psychology,
and he had come to the Salpêtrière to learn from the master. Binet and another
young assistant named Charles Féré probed the limits of what this famous
patient could do while in the state of grand hypnotisme. Harkening back to
Mesmer, they reintroduced a magnet into their research. After inducing pa-
ralyses or other effects on one side of her body, they reversed the magnet’s
polarity and the effects immediately transferred to the other side. In another
experiment, after telling the hypnotized Wit that she felt very sad, Binet and
Féré transformed her sobs into laughter with a simple flick of their magnet. In
their enthusiasm the young researchers suggested here was an experimental
*As noted in Chapter 3, epileptic seizures were later recognized as resulting from an abnormal
spreading wave of excitation from a particular focus whose location determines the nature of the
aura. If the wave remains small and localized, it causes a petit mal seizure, but when it expands
more substantially, it results in the more severe grand mal features.
technique for discovering pairs of “complementary emotions” analogous to

the complementary colors that characterized color vision. While admitting
that these results seemed implausible, Binet and Féré assured their readers
the effects had been “entirely unexpected” and had “issued from nature
herself . . . showing an inflexible logic.”13
The Triumph of the Nancy School

Because of his reputation, Charcot brought visibility and legitimacy to the study
of hypnotism. As his theory became widely known, however, it attracted the critical
attention of Bernheim in Nancy. He and Liébeault had hypnotized hundreds of
subjects from a broad, normal population, as opposed to the select, hospitalized
handful at the Salpêtrière. Although a small percentage of Bernheim’s patients
might also have suffered from hysterical symptoms, hysterical predisposition
had not seemed a necessary precondition for hypnotizability. In fact, as we
have seen, he concluded that hypnotic susceptibility was a variable but normal
characteristic related to variations in suggestibility. Bernheim therefore attacked
Charcot’s theory, charging that grand hypnotisme was a unique product of the
highly peculiar Salpêtrière setting.
In this dispute between a little-known doctor from the provinces and
the grand Parisian Charcot, most scientific observers naturally leaned at
first toward the Salpêtrière side. Eventually, however, a respected Belgian
physiologist, Joseph Delboeuf (1831–1896), visited the Salpêtrière to see
things for himself. He later published a vivid portrait of Binet and Féré’s
interaction with “the placid and ‘appetizing’ Alsacienne Wit . . . not only
wearing a complacent look, but finding visible pleasure in getting ready
to do anything that should be asked of her.” 14 When the young hypnotists
began their demonstration, Delboeuf observed that Wit was extremely
responsive to the slightest hints. The hypnotists dealt with her “as if playing
upon a piano. . . . A light touch . . . made Wit . . . contract any muscle, even
in her ear.” 15 The magnet was large and waved openly before the subject,
and the hypnotists spoke aloud about her expected responses as if she
were not there. When Delboeuf asked why they didn’t try to disguise their
expectations, the hypnotists said it was unnecessary because Charcot had
taught them that patients were oblivious to such cues while deeply in the
state of grand hypnotisme.
A suspicious Delboeuf returned to Belgium and replicated the Salpêtrière
experiments on his own—but with adequate precautions against transmitting
expectations to his subjects. He concluded that not only magnetic effects, but
also the entire enactments of grand hypnotisme, were the results of patients with
great investment in their roles as prize subjects responding to suggestions from

their examiners. After Delboeuf published these findings, the tide began to turn
decisively in favor of the Nancy School.
By 1891, even the Salpêtrière participants admitted they had been wrong. Binet
(whom we’ll meet again in this chapter and Chapter 13) learned a particularly
bitter but valuable lesson from the experience. As he went on to become both a
productive experimental psychologist and the inventor of modern intelligence
testing, he would take great pains to guard against unintentional suggestion in
his research. Equally important, we shall soon see how he made intentional sug-
gestion the explicit subject of some of his research, thereby helping launch the
discipline of experimental social psychology.
Charcot, too, admitted his errors, and shortly before his death in 1893
predicted that his theories of hysteria and hypnotism would not long survive
him. He was correct, and by 1899, all that remained of grande hystérie were a few
former patients who would reenact its symptoms for a fee. Wittmann was not
among them, for soon after Charcot’s death, she was declared sane and hired as
an assistant in the new X-ray department at the Salpêtrière. In due course, she
worked for the great physicist Marie Curie, in her Nobel Prize–winning research
on radiation. Tragically, both of these gifted women ultimately succumbed to the
then-unknown ravages of radiation poisoning.
For all his mistakes, Charcot was among the first to explore the interactions
between emotional and physical factors, and to raise the subjects of hysteria and
hypnosis to scientific respectability. His important students included not only
Binet but also Sigmund Freud, who remembered him with respect as a master
clinician who identified important problems that Freud went on to pursue in his
own way (see Chapter 11). Problem finders can be almost as important as problem
solvers, and Charcot filled that role admirably.
Two very different but equally important developments occurred in the
immediate aftermath of the Nancy-Salpêtrière controversy. One was the
conversion of Binet from an uncritical follower of Charcot’s presumed authority
into a skeptical and rigorous promoter of experimental methods to study
suggestion and social influence (as shall be discussed further below). The other
was the adoption of hypnosis-related ideas by a controversial and politically
minded amateur in an influential analysis of crowd behavior.
The Psychology of Crowds

The behavior of crowds was a subject of particular public interest in
late-nineteenth-century France. After the French Revolution in the late
1700s, there were many social upheavals marked by crazes and episodes
of mob hysteria. Following the wide publicity of the

Nancy-Salpêtrière controversy, some striking similarities
between the irrational behavior of hypnotized subjects
and that of people in crowds were noted by the energetic
and ambitious Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931; Figure 10.5).
He vividly described these observations in his 1895 book
La Psychologie des Foules (The Psychology of Crowds,
but translated into English as simply The Crowd).16
Although this book lacked subtlety or scholarly depth
(and therefore was an early example of what we today call
pop psychology), it nevertheless raised issues that have
continued to engage social psychologists ever since.
Le Bon asserted that the most fundamental social
responses of any person derive from unconscious ideas
and motives. Posthypnotic suggestions and amnesias
dramatically highlighted such unconscious processes,
but Le Bon believed they pervaded many nonhypnotic
situations as well. Most prominent among these, he
Figure 10.5 Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931). argued, was being in the midst of an enthusiastic crowd.
Here people tend to abandon both individuality and
rationality and assume a kind of collective mind that can impel them to
do things they would never dream of while alone. Le Bon conceded that
people in close-knit groups or crowds sometimes perform heroic or noble
acts, as in warfare or team sports, that as isolated individuals they would
be too timid to attempt. He also felt, however, that these occasional heroic
products of the group mind are more than counterbalanced by responses
of a more destructive nature. Staunchly conservative in his politics, Le Bon
particularly feared the kind of mob excesses that had occurred in the French
Revolution.
In trying to explain the behavior of people in a crowd, Le Bon noted first that
they consciously sense both the power of their numbers and the anonymity of
their individual selves. Their power enables them to do things that would be
impossible for individuals, and their presumed anonymity helps them disregard
conventional assumptions of personal responsibility for their actions. More
importantly, however, “an individual immerged for some length of time in a
crowd in action soon finds himself . . . in a special state, which much resembles
the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself.”17 Le Bon
went on to emphasize the effect of suggestibility as enhanced by the power of
social contagion:
11_POP_28354_ch10_360-401.indd 378 18/10/16 4:09 PM

As in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that certain
faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation.
Under the influence of suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of
certain acts with irresistible impetuosity . . . [which] is the more irresistible
in crowds than in that of the single hypnotic subject, from the fact that, the
suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the crowd, it gains in
strength by reciprocity.18
Le Bon made more connections between hypnosis and crowd phenomena

when he examined the qualities of effective leaders of crowds. The most effective
(and dangerous) crowd leader, he believed, is unreflective, single-minded,
irrational, and fanatical—someone who “has himself been hypnotized by an idea,
whose apostle he has since become. . . . The multitude is always ready to listen to
the strong-willed man, who knows how to impose himself upon it.19
Shrewd leaders increase their influence by applying three techniques that
are also used by hypnotists. First is simple affirmation; effective leaders always
accentuate the positive about their causes, denying opportunity for doubt and
avoiding complicated reasoning. Simple slogans that can be shouted in unison,
are easy to remember, and are direct in their appeals to action and belief are
the typical tools of a crowd leader. Second is constant repetition of the affirma-
tions; as the slogans get repeated over and over, they finally become part of the
followers’ unconscious ideas. Third is social contagion; effective leaders make
sure that a few enthusiastic supporters of their causes are planted in audiences
beforehand, to start a favorable current of opinion that spreads through the crowd
by social contagion. Needless to say, the principles of affirmation and repetition
had long been familiar to hypnotists, who typically repeated positive statements
such as “Sleep!” or “Your eyelids are getting heavier and heavier” while inducing
hypnosis. Ever since Mesmer’s baquet, they had also been aware of the power of
social contagion in enhancing the magnetic response.
The Crowd was politically biased, unscholarly, and often sensationalistic in
tone, but it did address many fundamental social psychological issues that had
arisen in the previous century: the power of social influence and suggestion, the
qualities and techniques of leaders who exert such influence, the complementary
characteristics of the people influenced, the characteristics of crowds, and the
behavior of individuals who are members of groups or crowds. Le Bon’s book
marked the culmination of what we may characterize as the “preexperimental”
phase of the discipline of social psychology. Many important social phenomena
were discovered and studied, but usually in the context of clinical or medical
settings; they sometimes drew on the mystical, the exotic, or the abnormal.
Around the same time Le Bon published his book, however, Binet had decided
that many of these same social phenomena could be investigated systematically
and experimentally, in laboratory settings. His efforts created a historical bridge
to the establishment of a new discipline of experimental social psychology.
Binet’s Experiments on Suggestion

Embarrassed by Delboeuf’s exposure of the flaws in his Salpêtrière investigations
of hypnotism, Binet came to characterize unintentional suggestion as “the
cholera of psychology.”20 He also concluded, however, that although unintended
suggestion posed great dangers, carefully controlled and intentional suggestion
might be systematically explored in a laboratory.
From his position as the unpaid director of a new psychology lab at the
Sorbonne in Paris, in 1894 Binet collaborated with his student Victor Henri
(1872–1940) on the first published study of that kind.21 They devised a simple
and easy test of visual memory for schoolchildren, in which subjects were
briefly shown a single straight line and were then asked to choose the one
of its same length from a pair of unequal lines. After determining that
normal children could perform this task with nearly perfect accuracy, the
experimenters tried to manipulate the responses with differing kinds of sug-
gestion. Sometimes they established “preconceived ideas” by making the top
(or bottom) line of the test pair correct for several consecutive trials and then
switching. Other times they asked leading questions, such as “Are you sure?
Mightn’t it be the other line?” And sometimes the subjects were tested in
groups, in which previously identified “leaders” had been instructed to give
deliberately incorrect responses to see whether the others would follow. All
these manipulations had measurable effects, somewhat greater on younger
children than older ones, and with individual differences in the children’s
suggestibility at all age levels.
In a later study, Binet showed children a poster with various stimulus items
attached to it, including an uncanceled stamp, a coin, a photograph, and a
drawing. Afterward he asked his subjects to recall details of what they had seen,
with varying types of questions. Directly misleading questions, such as “Wasn’t
the stamp canceled?” produced a large number of incorrect responses, but even
indirect or neutral wording such as “Was the stamp canceled?” also led to several
mistakes. Children responded most accurately when simply asked to provide
open-ended descriptions of what they had seen. Binet concluded that to derive
the maximum accuracy in children’s testimony, “do not pose questions to them,
even questions devoid of precise suggestions, but simply ask them to describe
everything they recall and leave them with paper and pencil.”22
Binet’s studies showed clearly how social phenomena such as conformity,

suggestibility, and children’s eyewitness testimony could be usefully studied
in a controlled lab setting, and they strikingly resembled some later, more
famous research. They did not, however, arouse immediate interest among his
contemporary psychologists. This was partly because Binet soon turned his
attention to the problem of intelligence testing (see Chapter 13) and then died
at a relatively young age. Binet is better described as an “anticipator” than as
a “founder” of modern experimental social psychology—that is, someone whose
research preceded and closely resembled later developments but did not provide
the immediate stimulus for them.23
A similar designation is appropriate for Norman Triplett (1861–1931), an
American psychologist who was both an avid bicyclist and an investigator of
motor development in children. Noticing that bike racers went faster when in
head-to-head competition than when competing against themselves in individual
time trials, he conducted systematic studies of children given the task of winding
fishing reels both alone and in pairs. Some children significantly increased their
reel-winding speed in the presence of a partner while others slowed down, thus
demonstrating either social enhancement or inhibition of their performance.
Triplett’s 1898 account of his research in Hall’s American Journal of Psychology
has been described as the first published, English-language study in experimental
social psychology.24 It marked the transition from a pre-experimental to an
experimental approach to understanding social psychological phenomena.
Like the earlier Binet studies, however, Triplett’s experiment failed to inspire
immediate follow-up work by himself or by others.
THE NEW DISCIPLINE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

An organized discipline of experimental social psychology was eventually
established when more favorable institutional conditions occurred in the early
1920s in the United States. A young Harvard graduate student was allowed to
complete a doctoral dissertation devoted to an experiment in social psychology,
after which he ensured that a respectable journal would be open to submissions
in the new field and, as with Wundt and general experimental psychology, wrote
the first textbook explicitly dedicated to it.
Floyd H. Allport (1890–1978; Figure 10.6) was the elder of two brothers
whose Harvard Ph.D. dissertations became landmarks in the establishment of
new subdisciplines in psychology. His brother Gordon’s role in personality psy-
chology will be covered in Chapter 12. Following a suggestion from his teacher
Münsterberg (see Chapters 8 and 15), Floyd studied and compared the perfor-
mances of individuals acting alone versus being members of groups, on a series
of simple timed tasks. He reported his results in his 1919 doc-

toral thesis, which he characterized as an experimental study
of the effect of the group on individual mental processes.25
The subjects in Allport’s group situation—like Triplett’s
fishing reel winders—performed a greater quantity of work,
although the quality was no better (and in a few situations
was somewhat worse). Allport explicity referred to this
increase in energy or intensity of work when in the presence
of others as “social facilitation.” Allport also discovered that
when the tasks involved making judgments of qualities, such
as the pleasantness/unpleasantness of an odor or the heavi-
ness of a weight, subjects in the group setting avoided the ex-
tremes of the judgment scales to a greater extent than when
alone. He conceptualized this restriction of responses as the
result of a “conformity-producing tendency” in the group.
As an instructor at Harvard after earning his Ph.D.,
Allport met and impressed Morton Prince (1854–1929), a
Figure 10.6 Floyd H. Allport (1890–1978). prominent Boston neurologist who had become interested
in the European work on hypnosis and its association
with psychopathology. In 1906 Prince had founded the Journal of Abnormal
Psychology—the first American periodical specifically devoted to that subject—
and in 1921 invited Allport to become his co-editor. Allport’s influence was
obvious in a quick decision to rename the periodical the Journal of Abnormal
Psychology and Social Psychology. An editorial justifying the new title cited a
recently increased interest in the study of social phenomena, and added, “It
is doubtful whether this stage of interest and importance would have been
attained but for the contemporary development of a sister science, abnormal
psychology. Psychopathologists have in recent years delved deeply into the
dynamics of human nature.”26 Allport was therefore instrumental in providing a
journal that explicitly solicited articles on experimental social psychology, while
openly acknowledging the historical connection between social and abnormal
psychological phenomena. In 1925, the title was shortened to the Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology, and for the next 40 years JASP remained the
premier publishing outlet for American social psychologists.*
*In 1965, the journal reverted to its original title as just the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and
confined its focus to clinical and psychopathological subjects. At the same time the American
Psychological Association created a new periodical, the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, to focus on those two subject areas.
Allport then left Harvard for a teaching position at the University of North
Carolina, where he wrote the first successful textbook for the new field, simply
titled Social Psychology.27 Although stronger on theory than actual experimental
results (which were largely confined to Allport’s own doctoral studies), the book
clearly laid out guidelines for a new discipline. Strongly influenced by Watson’s
behaviorism, which was starting to dominate American experimental psychology
in general (see Chapter 9), Allport asserted that social psychology should focus
exclusively on objectively observable responses made by individual subjects in
specifiable social situations. In doing so, he strenuously rejected what he called
the group fallacy—the notion that people in groups or crowds can collectively
create and be influenced by a “group mind”, that is, a super ordinate entity that is
more than just the sum of their individual reactions.
In sum, Allport promoted a new social psychology that would be experimental,
objective, and focused on the reactions of individual subjects in controlled social
situations. Slowly but surely, this program became a reality, and it focused on
increasingly relevant social and political issues. In 1937 Allport’s North Carolina
colleague John Dashiell observed that although the basic formats had been
established for several kinds of experiments on social influence, none of them
had yet been fully exploited. What was still lacking, he noted, was
not so much the need for discovering new concepts and points of
view, . . . [as] a demand for more and ever more repetition and checking
of the pioneer studies that have been made, and the introduction of
experimental manipulation of the many variables involved in all such
work.28
Dashiell’s call to experimental social psychologists resembled Pavlov’s earlier

advice to researchers on conditioned reflexes: namely, that they be systematic
and thorough in their approach.
Meanwhile, sociopolitical storm clouds were gathering in Europe, with
the rise of Hitler and anti-Semitic policies that were making life unbearable
there for Jewish scholars. Consequently, many eminent scientists migrated
to the United States, including Albert Einstein in physics and, in psychology,
the founders of Gestalt psychology Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and
Wolfgang Köhler. A somewhat younger member of their school, the brilliant
and versatile Kurt Lewin, also came to join them (see Chapter 4). Besides
enhancing the quality of American universities, these émigré psychologists
naturally brought with them interests in the social and political issues that
were dominating Europe.
Lewin was especially struck by the contrasting effects on the general popula-
tion of the authoritarian Nazi leadership in his native Germany and the democratic
government of the U.S., his adoptive home. While at the University of Iowa in 1939,
he and two colleagues conducted a study in which clubs comprising 11-year-old
boys were led, on a randomly assigned basis, by adults who deliberately assumed
an authoritarian leadership style (in which the leader made all decisions unilat-
erally, without discussion) or a democratic style (in which decisions were made
by group consensus, after discussion). The groups were given a series of tasks
to perform, and their behavior was observed. Although the two leadership styles
produced similar results on the tasks themselves, the boys strongly preferred the
democratic leaders and they behaved more aggressively under the authoritarian
leadership.29 Lewin promoted further research on group dynamics and attracted
several gifted graduate students to work with him on the subject, both at Iowa and
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whereto he moved in 1944.
In the post–World War II era, experimental social psychology finally came of
age in the United States with a series of studies that combined the programmatic
rigor that had been prescribed by Dashiell with the social relevance of Lewin’s
leadership study. One of the primary investigators in this area was Solomon Asch.
Asch and Social Conformity

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Solomon Asch (1907–1996) emigrated to the United
States as a teenager. He studied at City College in New York and then Columbia
University under Wertheimer, and finally joined the faculty of Swarthmore College
in Pennsylvania, where he became a colleague of Köhler. Sharing the Gestalt
psychologists’ social concerns, he was particularly interested in a very timely
subject. The atrocities of the Holocaust, in which ordinary people had seemingly
obeyed orders to commit horrific acts, along with the compliance of German
citizens with government rules during the Nazi regime, showed that the tendency
to conform was not confined to atypical individuals but was perhaps a universal
inclination influenced by powerful situational factors. Social scientists and phi-
losophers began to wonder about the social conditions affecting conformity and
obedience, and they began to study the phenomenon of social conformity.
At the same time, in the United States public concern was growing about the
seemingly conformist nature of 1950s American society—a general and some-
times unsettling tendency to “go along with the crowd.” This tendency was quite
at odds with the pioneering, individualistic, self-reliant image of the American
character that was central to the national identity and necessary for entrepre-
neurial success in a capitalist society. As the Cold War escalated, the concern
about a tendency toward conformity was clearly embedded in a host of much
larger social and political concerns. Asch decided to study

this tendency with full scientific rigor in the laboratory.
In a popular summary of his research, Asch traced the
notion of suggestibility back to Bernheim and the Nancy
School, and added that all too often, the term was taken to
suggest a kind of passive and uncritical acquiescence to
social pressure.30 Asch wondered, however, whether the sub-
jects actually believed everything the suggestor told them
or were merely going along with the suggestions while
knowing they were literally untrue. Did they experience
conflict? And what about those who resisted the sugges-
tions and didn’t go along? Asch wanted to investigate these
questions systematically.
In his original study Asch brought together small groups of
male undergraduates for what was described as an experiment
in “visual judgment.” The visual task harkened back to Binet 1 2 3
(although Asch for some reason failed to credit him). The sub-
jects first looked at a card with a single “standard” line on it
and then at another card with three lines, only one of which Figure 10.7 The cards in Asch’s social
was the same length as the standard, as shown in Figure 10.7. conformity experiments.
The subjects were asked to say, out loud, which lines they
thought were the same length. Prior testing had shown this to be an extremely easy
task for subjects when alone, as they responded with nearly 100 percent accuracy.
In the experiment, however, only one person in each group was the true sub-
ject, and he was positioned to announce his decision’s after others had previ-
ously responded. The others were confederates of the experimenter; they gave
their responses according to a prearranged script. In a typical session, all the
confederates gave correct responses on the first two trials and the subject natu-
rally agreed; it seemed like everyone was in for a boring and very easy visual test.
On the third trial, however, the confederates deliberately gave the same incorrect
answer, and continued to do so on many of the subsequent trials (occasionally
giving correct responses to reduce the possibility that the true subject would be
suspicious). Asch described the typical subject this way:
[H]e finds himself unexpectedly in a minority of one, opposed to a unanimous

and arbitrary majority with respect to a clear and simple fact. Upon him we
have brought to bear two opposed forces: the evidence of his senses and the
unanimous opinion of a group of his peers. Also, he must declare his judg-
ments in public, before a majority which has also stated its opinion publicly.31
Figure 10.8 A puzzled subject (middle) and confederates in one of the Asch conformity
experiments.
How did subjects respond to this conflict? There were wide individual
differences, but all subjects showed at least some signs of surprise and discomfort
(Figure 10.8). On the first trial, nearly 20 percent gave incorrect responses that
conformed to the majority, and on subsequent trials that percentage nearly
doubled. Only 25 percent of the subjects remained completely independent and
never agreed with the false majority, and a slightly smaller percentage went along
with the majority at all times; the largest group showed intermediate degrees of
conformity.
In post-experiment interviews, some of the independent subjects said they
had simply stayed with their own judgments, while others said they believed
the majority might have been correct but that it had been their duty to say what
they saw. Some of the conforming subjects believed privately that the majority was
incorrect, but they went along so as not to spoil the experiment; others attributed
the discrepancy to some perceptual deficiency in themselves. In short, there was
a wide range of individual reactions to the experimental situation, although all
subjects found it at least mildly disturbing.
In follow-up experiments, Asch systematically varied the size of the group
of confederates. When confronted with just a single “opponent” in a group of
two, subjects agreed with false judgments less than 4 percent of the time; with
two opponents the rate rose to 14 percent, and with three to nearly 32 percent.
The effect peaked with seven opponents at 37 percent conformity, and it actually
decreased slightly to 31 percent—perhaps a small “overkill” effect—with large
groups of 15 opponents. In another experimental variation, one of the confederates
was instructed to respond truthfully, so the subject was confronted not just with
a majority who disagreed with him but also with a supporter. In this situation,
subjects gave incorrect, conforming responses less than 10 percent of the time.
Surprisingly, an almost equal effect was produced when one of the confederates
differed from the majority but chose the second of the two incorrect lines. The
mere presence of a fellow dissenter—even if his dissent was obviously incorrect—
was sufficient to free many subjects from the power of the group pressure.
Through these and other controlled variations on the experiment, Asch and
his colleagues revealed many of the precise effects of group pressure on indi-
vidual social responses. This work established a standard for much subsequent
research, setting the stage for a wide variety of innovative programs. Among the
most noteworthy was a research program promoted by a student of Lewin.
Festinger and Cognitive Dissonance

Leon Festinger (1919–1989) did his early graduate work with Lewin at Iowa and
then followed his mentor to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where
he became an important member of Lewin’s group dynamics research institute.
After teaching at the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota, where he became
an acknowledged authority on research methodology in social psychology, Fest-
inger moved to Stanford University in California. There he conducted his most
famous research on what he called cognitive dissonance, a subject that merged
experimental social psychology with the growing interest among psychologists
in cognitive processes such as thinking, reasoning, and believing.* Cognitive
dissonance arises when a person simultaneously holds two or more ideas or
beliefs that actively conflict with each other. When the person becomes aware
of these conflicts, he or she experiences an uncomfortable state of cognitive
dissonance and becomes motivated to relieve it.32
Festinger’s early interest in this state was aroused by an intriguing case study in
group dynamics. A group of cult members from Chicago had become convinced
that the world was going to be devastated by a vast flood on a particular midnight
in 1954, but that they alone could be rescued and carried off in a flying saucer if
they gathered at a certain place on that day. As “true believers,” many of them
had left jobs and families behind and sold their belongings in preparation for
this catastrophic event. Needless to say, Festinger and his research team (which
included his younger colleagues Stanley Schachter and Henry Riecken) did not
share this belief. But after reading about the group in the media, they thought it
*Chapter 3 noted the parallel events in the rise of cognitive neuroscience during the same period,
and the fuller story of the “cognitive revolution” will be told in Chapter 14.
would be interesting to directly observe its members as the prophecy failed to

materialize. The psychologists managed to pass themselves off as fellow believ-
ers and infiltrated the group. They reported their firsthand observations of how
the group behaved when the predicted disaster failed to happen in their classic
1956 book, When Prophecy Fails.33
Midnight struck and the flood had not occurred. The group seemed stunned,
and after four hours its leader began to break down and cry. Soon, however, she
received a “message from God” that the group had shown such faithfulness that
the catastrophe had been called off. As word of this turn of events spread among
the group, spirits rapidly improved. Instead of feeling humiliated or foolish, they
became exultant; in the subsequent days, they actively sought publicity and
began to enlist new followers.
According to Festinger’s analysis, this situation created conflicting ideas
in the group’s members. They had believed the world was going to end, they’d
made considerable personal sacrifices to prepare for it, and yet the predicted
catastrophe had not occurred. Their initial thoughts in reaction to the failed
prediction—that they had been foolishly mistaken—added more dissonance to the
mix. Festinger reasoned that the alternative idea—that they’d actually saved the
world by their beliefs and actions—resolved that dissonance. He also felt group
dynamics played a role in this situation; the dissonance-resolving idea gained
increasing credibility as it was adopted by more and more members of the group.
Here was a modern example of the social contagion that had been observed and
exploited by Mesmer a century and a half earlier.
In a later experimental study conducted jointly with James Carlsmith,
Festinger clearly and ingeniously demonstrated the effects of dissonance in a
more individualized, controlled setting. The subjects first had to spend an hour
performing two tedious tasks (repetitively placing spools in a tray and turning
the pegs in a large pegboard by a quarter of a rotation). Next, each subject had
to brief the next subject—actually a confederate of the experimenters—about
the nature of the experience, according to a script that described the work as
extremely interesting and enjoyable. Some of the true subjects were paid one
dollar for their participation, while others got twenty dollars (a substantial sum in
the 1950s). Finally, all subjects were asked to fill out a rating form indicating how
enjoyable, interesting, and important they actually thought the task had been.
The main result was that subjects who had been paid only one dollar to tell the
confederate the experience was enjoyable rated the experience significantly more
positively than those who were paid twenty dollars to tell the same “fib.” The rea-
son, Festinger and Carlsmith argued, was that those in the one-dollar condition
experienced more cognitive dissonance because they had given a falsely positive
11_POP_28354_ch10_360-401.indd 388 18/10/16 4:09 PM

report about an experience that had actually been unpleasant, and for a rather
small fee. The twenty-dollar subjects, by comparison, had at least been well paid
for telling the lie, providing justification for their behavior. The one-dollar sub-
jects reduced their dissonance by raising their actual opinion about the nature of
their experience.34
There was a practical lesson from this demonstration. To alter the opinions
and attitudes of other people in a particular direction, convince them to engage
in some overt act that is consistent with the desired opinion but has a small
reward. They will tend to actually change their opinion in that direction. Here
was a potential technique for social influence and control that could be added to
those emphasized by Le Bon and other group theorists.
Festinger and others continued to develop and refine the theory of cognitive
dissonance throughout the 1960s. Related experimental approaches to social
influence began to emerge. In particular, a series of experiments on obedience by
Stanley Milgram came to be regarded as some of the most famous in the history
of social psychology.
Milgram and the Obedience Studies

Asch spent the 1955–1956 academic year as a visiting lecturer at Harvard, where
the young graduate student Stanley Milgram (1933–1984; Figure 10.9) was
assigned to assist him. Milgram was inspired to develop several refinements to
Asch’s experimental procedures, which became the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation
research.
He began by automating the experimental conformity situation. An auditory
instead of a visual discrimination task was tape-recorded along with the scripted
responses of the confederates. The subject was placed last in a row of closed
booths after being told the others were already
occupied by fellow subjects. Milgram added a
new experimental condition, telling some sub-
jects that the study results would be used in
designing safety signals in airplanes—thereby
placing a premium on the importance of provid-
ing accurate responses. Finally, interested in pos-
sible differences in “national character,” Milgram
conducted his studies on subjects in Norway and
France. He found that the Norwegian subjects con-
formed slightly more frequently than the French,
an apparent demonstration of the greater social
cohesion of the former and individualism of the Figure 10.9 Stanley Milgram (1933–1984).
11_POP_28354_ch10_360-401.indd 389 18/10/16 4:09 PM

latter. He also discovered that the “aircraft condition” produced about a 10- percent
reduction in incorrect conforming responses—statistically significant but not
overly impressive.35
Milgram’s formulation of the aircraft condition reflected his concern with
what he felt was the most significant limitation of the Asch experiments: the
relative triviality of the experimental task. As a new assistant professor at Yale
after receiving his Ph.D., Milgram wondered how he might study behavior
that was even more consequential. Having grown up as a Jew in wartime New
York, Milgram had been horrified by the compliant behavior of many German
citizens who collaborated in the atrocities of the Hitler era. The subject was
much in the news because of the capture, trial, and eventual execution in Israel
of Adolf Eichmann. Charged with crimes against humanity for organizing the
deportation and mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust, Eichmann claimed
in defense that he had been merely following orders. Eichmann’s very public
trial—it was televised all over the world—prompted grave concerns about what
Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt came to call “the banality of evil.” She
covered the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker magazine and subsequently
wrote a book titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,
in which she argued that the overwhelming majority of Nazi war crimes were
committed by people who were “terrifyingly normal.”36 If Nazi war criminals
were indistinguishable from “normal” people, could almost anyone be induced
to commit such atrocities? Milgram now conceived of a conformity study in
which the subject behavior would be obedience to an instruction to inflict
punishment or pain.
Following the pattern of Binet and Asch, Milgram wanted first to test
individuals acting alone to establish the base rate for obedience, and then
determine how group pressure might increase the compliance levels. His new
experiment featured a rectangular box labeled Shock Generator, Type ZLB, with
a row of thirty switches marked in 15-volt intervals from 15 volts on one end to
450 volts on the other. Beneath the switches were descriptive labels ranging from
“slight shock” at the low end, through “strong shock” and “intense shock” in the
middle, to “Danger, severe shock,” and then just three red X’s at the high end.
Subjects were recruited for an experiment described as a study of memory;
each one was paid four dollars. Upon arrival at the laboratory, they were met by
the experimenter and by a confederate posing as a second subject. Told that
they would draw lots to determine who would be the “teacher” and who the
“learner” in the experiment, each subject drew a slip of paper labeled “teacher.”
But the confederate always said he’d drawn the learner’s role, and he was there-
fore placed in a booth where he was not visible by the subjects, but where he
could still communicate with the teacher. An electrode, said (falsely) to be

connected to the Shock Generator, was attached to the learner’s arm. In the
experiment, the teacher read a list of word pairs and then tested the learner
by reading the first from each pair and asking the learner to recall the second.
The teacher was instructed to administer a shock after each incorrect response,
starting at the low end of the scale and increasing its intensity by one switch
after each successive mistake.
Needless to say, the learner was pre-instructed to give many incorrect
responses, and the experiment’s only purpose was to see how far the teacher
would go in inflicting punishment. At specified points on the scale, the learner’s
script called for him to grunt in pain, to bang on the wall, to complain about a
heart condition, and at the end to cease responding at all. Whenever the teacher
hesitated or questioned the experimenter about going on, the experimenter
responded with one from a set of increasingly authoritative commands: “Please
continue,” “The experiment requires that you continue,” “It is absolutely
essential that you continue,” and if none of those worked, “You have no other
choice, you must go on.”
Before the first experiment, Milgram described it to a group of colleagues and
graduate students and asked them to predict how far a typical subject would go before
refusing to continue. Overwhelmingly, they predicted that most subjects would stop
after the first sign of obvious distress from the learner, and few would carry on until
the final 450-volt shock. Not one of these presumed experts came close to predicting
the results of the experiment, which seemed extraordinary in two ways.
First was the degree of obedience shown by the subjects. Virtually all con-
tinued to administer shocks after the learner’s first cries of protest, even as the
Shock Generator labels increased into the “strong” and “intense” categories. And
nearly two-thirds of the subjects continued all the way to the end of the scale;
even though they raised questions, they were successfully prodded by the experi-
menter’s flat-voiced commands that the experiment must be continued.
Proceeding systematically, Milgram conducted numerous variations on
his original experiment, such as holding it in a more modest storefront set-
ting, bringing the learner into closer proximity to the teacher, and, as in the
original plan, introducing multiple teachers to see whether there was a con-
formity effect. Some of these conditions produced measurable reductions in
the obedient responses, but none came close to matching the original low pre-
dictions of the experts. Conclusively and dramatically, Milgram’s experimental
results indicated that normal subjects would obey instructions from a credible
(or semi-credible) authority to inflict pain to a surprisingly and distressingly
high degree.
Here is Milgram’s second extraordinary finding (in his words):
The procedure created extreme levels of nervous tension. . . . Profuse

sweating, trembling and stuttering were typical expressions of this emo-
tional disturbance. One unexpected sign of tension—yet to be explained—
was the regular occurrence of nervous laughter, which in some [subjects]
developed into uncontrollable seizures.”37
In one “characteristic” case: “I observed a mature and initially poised busi-

nessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he
was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching
the point of a nervous collapse.”38 Milgram’s description of his subject’s dis-
tress was in keeping with his flair for the dramatic, but was hard to reconcile
with his later reassurance that these were mere “momentary” reactions of no
ethical concern. In his unpublished notes he pondered whether the obedi-
ence studies—with their elaborate deception, careful casting of roles, and
scripting—were more theater than science.39 However, there is no question
that many of his obedient subjects experienced great stress even as they were
obeying.
Ethical Concerns and Consequences

Milgram’s published accounts and the film he made showing his experiment cre-
ated a public as well as a professional sensation. The study, he claimed, had major
ramifications in terms of what it showed about human nature. It also tested the
methodological limits, provoking important questions about what kinds of exper-
iments psychologists should be allowed to perform.
The Milgram obedience studies marked the apex of a long series of
demonstrations of the power of certain situations to profoundly influence the
social behavior of individuals, causing them to behave quite differently than if
left on their own. Mesmerism, hypnotism, crowds, and group membership had all
been shown to influence behavior in some dramatic ways. Now here was evidence
that most normal people would inflict severe punishment on others merely on
the instructions of a presumed authority, such as a psychology professor, and
despite their personal reservations about doing so. True, there were some defiant
subjects who refused to administer extreme shocks and left the experiment, in-
dicating that personality differences were not completely irrelevant. But still, the
fact that a strong majority of subjects stayed to the end suggested that the power
of the situation, and its corresponding social expectations, could very often out-
weigh personal predispositions.
This general point was soon reinforced by the Stanford Prison Experiment,
conducted by Milgram’s friend Philip Zimbardo (b. 1933). In this study, twenty-
four Stanford undergraduates, selected for their psychological “normality,” were
randomly assigned to play the roles of either prisoners or guards and live in
a mock prison. Many of the subjects fell into their roles with such intensity—
several of the “guards” manifested genuinely sadistic behavior and some of the
“prisoners” became highly traumatized—that Zimbardo had to end the experi-
ment prematurely after just six days. This was another demonstration of the ease
with which ordinary people could be induced by situational factors to engage in
extraordinary, aggressive, and antisocial behavior. Zimbardo has recently estab-
lished a website that presents the original prison study and explores how we can
use this work to understand recent real-life events, such as the mistreatment of
Iraqi prisoners by American guards in the notorious Abu Ghraib jail.40
Drawing such implications from laboratory studies, however, has been con-
troversial. Recently, some scholars have challenged the validity of generalizing
findings from the Milgram obedience studies to explain the behavior of Nazi war
criminals, such as Eichmann. Based on unpublished observations made during
the experiments, these critics argue that some subjects coooperated precisely
because they knew they were participating in a psychology experiment: it was
not real life. Their awareness of this artificiality may have led them to proceed to
higher levels of shock because they believed they weren’t doing any real harm.
If true, then arguing that the “power of the situation” can be extended to our
understanding of the extermination of millions of Jews in the Holocaust seems
implausible. These scholars have provided compelling evidence that Eichmann
and others knew very well that their actions had horrifying life-and-death conse-
quences, and were eager to continue killing even in the absence of direct orders
to do so.41
The Milgram studies also generated ethical and procedural concerns. Milgram
has argued that he did his best to ensure that the emotional distress suffered by
some of his subjects was temporary, and to provide relief during post-experimental
debriefings. These sessions included reassurance that their responses were nor-
mal as well as extremely valuable in advancing knowledge about an important
phenomenon. The majority of the subjects said they were glad to have partici-
pated. However, Milgram’s graphic descriptions of his subjects’ distress, and the
fact that in the subsequent Stanford Prison Experiment Zimbardo had to pre-
maturely halt the study to prevent psychological damage, raised doubts about
whether adequate protection for the subjects had been in place.
More recently, scholars have also debated whether Milgram himself acted as
ethically as he claimed. For example, questions have arisen about the extent to
which he ensured his subjects’ distress was temporary. Although he repeatedly

defended this position in his published reports, archival evidence has revealed a
different version of the story. Because the study was conducted in a small town
and Milgram had to maintain the deception over its entire course, several of his
subjects were not debriefed immediately and actually suffered considerable psy-
chological upset over an extended period of time—in one case, possibly leading
to a heart attack.42
The Milgram and Zimbardo studies focused attention on the ethics of using
deception in experiments—either directly or indirectly misleading subjects about
the true purposes of their studies. The debate extended beyond the boundaries of
psychology, also focusing, for example, on a study by the military that recorded
the responses of recruits aboard an airplane they were falsely led to believe was
about to crash.
The major result of this debate—and the concern over the ethics of human
subject research in general—was the eventual requirement across the sciences
and medicine that all subjects in institutionally sponsored research must give
their informed consent before participating; that is, they must be told about the
actual purposes and procedures of the experiment, and give their consent before
proceeding. To ensure conformity with this requirement, all research proposals
involving human participants are subjected to strict scrutiny from, and must be
approved by, institutional review boards (IRBs) prior to any actual experimenta-
tion. Needless to say, experiments like Milgram’s could no longer be performed
in the same way today.
Milgram himself went on to conduct several ingenious experiments that met
the new ethical guidelines. In the “lost letter” study, for example, he left large
samples of stamped and addressed letters on car windshields, with a scrawled
note saying “Found near car.” All letters had the same address—actually a post
office box maintained by Milgram—but differed in the names of their addressees,
which typically contrasted in their social or political implications. One study’s
letters were addressed to “Equal Rights for Negroes” versus “Council for White
Neighborhoods,” and another’s, “Friends of the Communist Party” versus “The
Medical Research Council.” Milgram wondered how many of each kind of
envelope would actually be mailed back to him, how many would be opened or
tampered with, and so on, and he found that the results provided quite sensitive
measures of public opinion.
In another famous study, Milgram gave the name and address of a target
person in Boston—a stockbroker there—to a random group of people in Nebraska
and asked them to contact the target directly if they knew him personally (which
never happened), and if not to pass along the same instruction to the people
they knew who they felt would be most likely to know the target. Most of the
subsequent chains wound up close to the stockbroker in Boston, and more than
25 percent actually reached him, with an average of just six intermediaries. This
result, known as the small world phenomenon, was the origin for the common
assertion that any two people in the world are interconnected by no more than
“six degrees of separation” (if one knows how to identify them). During the 1970s
and early 1980s, Milgram also conducted many innovative studies in urban psy-
chology from his base at the City University of New York, before he died prema-
turely from a heart condition at the age of 51.43
SOCIAL INFLUENCE TODAY

In January 2009 the American Psychological Association’s flagship journal,
American Psychologist, devoted an entire special issue to the subject “Obedience—
Then and Now.” Reflecting on Milgram’s obedience studies a half-century after
their occurrence, the issue included a partial replication (which got IRB approval
because it ended at the point where the learner first complained about the pain-
ful shock) with results very similar to Milgram’s.44 It also included a thoughtful
assessment by two historians of psychology, Ludy Benjamin and Jeffry Simpson,
who emphasized the previously made point that Milgram’s obedience studies
represented a pinnacle in demonstrating the power of situations as determinants
of human behavior, often overshadowing the influence of the internal charac-
teristics of individuals. The field of personality psychology, as a result, began to
shift its focus from individual and presumably stable traits to the interactions of
different combinations of situations and traits.
Within social psychology, a significant change occurred in the types of situa-
tions that could be studied experimentally, because high-impact situations, such
as those investigated by Milgram and Zimbardo, could no longer be set up and
manipulated in laboratory settings. Those situations that could be investigated
experimentally now had to be much more mundane in their implications and
their impact on participants. High-impact situations had to be investigated via
more naturalistic, nonexperimental methods, such as by interviewing and study-
ing people who had already gone through traumatic experiences in the real world.
Benjamin and Simpson concluded: “The rise of research studying people in their
natural lives and environments may be one of the most important legacies of the
IRB changes informed by Milgram’s obedience research.”45
During the 1970s, some social psychologists feared the new constraints had
contributed to a crisis in their field. Despite the development of increasingly
sophisticated research designs and statistical methods, the resulting studies too
often appeared to have little social relevance. In describing this presumed crisis,
the prominent social psychologist Muzafer Sherif looked back almost nostalgically
on Milgram’s original obedience study with its “embeddedness in historical reality”
and its “clean cut simple instrumentation that does not degenerate into the hollow
front of technical embellishments and devious and cute cleverness in design.”46
Despite Sherif’s concerns, several more recent social psychologists have found
ways to conduct “historically embedded” experiments on highly relevant topics,
while still meeting the rigorous demands of IRBs. There is no better example,
nor one more appropriately suited to conclude this chapter, than the “Lost in the
Mall” study by Elizabeth Loftus and her student Jacqueline Pickrell.
Loftus and the “Lost in the Mall” Technique

Elizabeth Loftus (b. 1944; Figure 10.10) began investigating memory in the 1970s.
In the first of what would become a long series of influential studies, she and a
colleague demonstrated that when subjects viewed a short film of a car accident,
their estimate of the speed at which the cars were travelling was significantly
higher when the word smashed was used to describe the accident than when the
word collided, bumped, or hit was used. Even more surprisingly, when the viewers
were asked a week later to recall whether they’d seen any broken glass, those in the
“smashed” condition were more likely to say yes, even though
no broken glass appeared in the film.47 This was a clear
demonstration that subjects could be influenced, by leading
questions, to recall details that simply did not exist. Loftus’s
work challenged the reliability of eyewitness testimony, and
lawyers began to ask her to give expert testimony in cases
that included eyewitness reports.
By the 1980s, Loftus was involved in an intense debate—
not about the accuracy of eyewitness reports, but about
whether memories for traumatic events could literally
be “implanted” by suggestion. At this time, a heated con-
troversy had arisen about the truthfulness of so-called
recovered memories of childhood abuse. These previously
repressed memories were increasingly being reported by
some psychotherapists’ patients. At first these recollections
were uncritically accepted by some prosecutors and juries
as true, resulting in the conviction and imprisonment of
alleged perpetrators of the abuse. Loftus, as an expert on
the “reconstructive” as opposed to “photographic” nature
of memory, regarded these recollections skeptically, as
Figure 10.10 Elizabeth Loftus (b. 1944). possible reconstructions that had been directly or indirectly
11_POP_28354_ch10_360-401.indd 396 18/10/16 4:09 PM

suggested in the therapeutic session. As part of her research, she and Pickrell
conducted an experiment in which they showed how false memories, or mem-
ories for events that had not occurred, could be deliberately created. For ethical
reasons and to satisfy IRB requirements, they could not try to induce truly horrific
recollections. Instead, they devised a scenario for a hypothetical childhood event
that would have been mildly traumatic and memorable, but without lasting
negative consequences.
Their subjects were young adults whose families were interviewed for infor-
mation about the participants’ childhoods. The experimenters constructed four
brief stories for each subject, three of which described real events that had actu-
ally occurred. The fourth was always a fictitious account of having been lost in a
home town mall for an extended period before being rescued by a kindly older
person and reunited tearfully with parents. All subjects were presented with
the four stories, told that they were based on interviews with their families, and
asked to provide their own personal recollections of the events. Although most
of the subjects “remembered” the false story with somewhat less clarity than
the true ones, nonetheless they accepted it and provided further details and
embellishments, such as describing the rescuer’s clothes. Then, after hearing
that one of the stories was false and having to choose which one it was, nearly
25 percent of the subjects chose one that was actually true and accepted the
false “lost in the mall” experience as having been real.48
This result would not have surprised Alfred Binet, who a century earlier had
already demonstrated that children’s testimony and memories could be signifi-
cantly influenced by the merest of suggestions that something might or might
not have been true. But Loftus added several experimental refinements, and her
study took on particular resonance because of its relevance to the “memory wars”
that were raging at the time. One positive consequence was that alleged recov-
ered memories of criminal abuse, no matter how sincerely related and recalled,
now require much more extensive corroboration and validation before being ac-
cepted as legitimate evidence.
***
Starting with Mesmer, proceeding through the early hypnotists and crowd leaders,
and concluding with the work of social psychologists such as Asch, Milgram,
Zimbardo, and Loftus, we have seen dramatic demonstrations of the power of
social influence to affect behavior, belief, attitude, and even memory. The further
study of these influences, and the particular conditions and situations in which
they work, will undoubtedly continue to be a major goal of social psychology.
11_POP_28354_ch10_360-401.indd 397 18/10/16 4:09 PM

CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
The modern history of the investigation of social influence bringing the important subjects of hysteria and hypnosis
processes begins with several pioneers who developed out of scientific obscurity. The more general subjects of
the techniques of mesmerism and hypnotism. From the suggestibility and crowd behavior received wide publicity
eighteenth-century exploits of Mesmer, who promoted by the flamboyant theorist Le Bon.
a theory of animal magnetism, through his student Binet studied suggestibility experimentally in the
Puységur’s work on artificial somnambulism, to Faria’s laboratory, and Triplett did the same with social facil-
concept of hypnotic susceptibility, the notion that peo- itation in the early 1900s. Both of these pioneers are
ple respond to social influence of various kinds has been considered anticipators of the field of experimental
exploited for a number of positive and negative purposes. social psychology, which began more formally in the
Among the most useful was inducing hypnotic trance as a United States with Allport’s Ph.D. dissertation on so-
form of anesthesia during surgical procedures, pioneered cial facilitation and his 1924 textbook, Social Psychol-
in India by Esdaile in the mid-nineteenth century. The ogy. This text called for a social psychology focused
Scottish physician Braid lent the subject of hypnotism on objectively observable responses made by individ-
some scientific respectability by confirming its effects ual subjects in objectively specifiable social situations.
and publishing them in recognized periodicals. The more important lines of research that evolved as
Hypnotism in the medical context was explored by this approach took hold included Asch’s conformity
Charcot in his studies of hysteria patients at the Salpêtrière studies, Festinger’s research on cognitive dissonance,
Hospital in Paris, where he attributed hypnotic suscepti- Milgram’s obedience studies, and Zimbardo’s prison
bility to the presence of the same neuropathological con- experiment. The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments
dition that presumably underlay hysteria. This put him at raised questions about the ethics of using deception
odds with physicians of the Nancy School, who believed in psychology investigations, and the importance of
hypnotic trances could be induced in normal subjects informed consent. More recent research by Loftus and
and were brought on by ordinary suggestibility. The de- others has confirmed the profound influence that sug-
bate was eventually decided in favor of the latter position, gestibility can have on memory, including memory for
although Charcot’s enormous prestige was essential in traumatic events.
Chapter Review 399
Key Pioneers
Franz Anton Mesmer, Hippolyte Bernheim, Victor Henri, p. 380
p. 362 p. 372 Norman Triplett,
Marquis de Puységur, Jean-Martin Charcot, p. 381
p. 367 p. 372 Floyd H. Allport, p. 381
José Custódio de Faria, Blanche Wittmann, Morton Prince, p. 382
p. 368 p. 375 Solomon Asch, p. 384
James Esdaile, p. 370 Alfred Binet, p. 375 Leon Festinger, p. 387
James Braid, p. 371 Joseph Delboeuf, Stanley Milgram, p. 389
Ambroise Auguste p. 376 Philip Zimbardo, p. 393
Liébeault, p. 371 Gustave Le Bon, p. 378 Elizabeth Loftus, p. 396
Key Terms
hypnotism, p. 362 suggestibility, p. 372
social influence processes, hysteria, p. 373
p. 362 grande hystérie, p. 375
animal magnetism, p. 364 grand hypnotisme, p. 375
mesmerism, p. 364 group fallacy, p. 383
baquet, p. 365 social conformity, p. 384
social contagion, p. 366 cognitive dissonance, p. 387
social facilitation, p. 366 Milgram’s obedience studies, p. 392
artificial somnambulism, p. 367 Stanford Prison Experiment, p. 393
posthypnotic amnesia, p. 368 informed consent, p. 394
posthypnotic suggestion, p. 368 small world phenomenon, p. 395
lucid sleep, p. 369 false memory, p. 397

1. The history of human suggestibility and social influence involved several pioneers of
psychology working from the eighteenth century to today. Describe how the history
of suggestibility in the French tradition came to be connected to the history of social
influence in the American context.
2. Milgram’s obedience studies are some of the best known and most controversial
in the history of psychology, in part because of Milgram’s use of deception. Discuss
the conditions under which you think the use of deception is justified in psychology
research, and when it is not justified.
3. What has the history of social influence taught you about the concept itself? What has
modern research confirmed and disconfirmed about earlier theories and beliefs?
4. Describe, using examples from this chapter, how the experimental study of social
influence has practical applications.
Suggested Resources
For Mesmer’s biography, see Vincent Buranelli, The Wizard from Vienna (New York:
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975), and for an excellent account of his movement’s
role in prerevolutionary France, see Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the
Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Useful
general histories of hypnotism are Alan Gauld’s A History of Hypnotism (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992); Chapter 2 of Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery
of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Frank Pattie, “A Brief History of
Hypnotism,” in Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, ed. Jesse E. Gordon
(New York: Macmillan, 1967); Chapter 1 of Peter W. Sheehan and Campbell W. Perry,
Methodologies of Hypnosis: A Critical Appraisal of Contemporary Paradigms of
Hypnosis (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1976); and Chapter 9 of Gregory Zilboorg, A History of
Medical Psychology (New York: Norton, 1967).
Biographical material on Charcot appears in Chapter 2 of Ellenberger, cited above, and in
George F. Drinka, The Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady and the Victorians (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1984). Freud’s reminiscences of Charcot appear in his 1893 obituary, “Charcot,”
reprinted in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. III (London: Hogarth, 1962). Mark S. Micale’s “The Salpêtrière in the Age of Charcot:
An Institutional Perspective on Medical History in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal
of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 703–731, presents a vivid picture of the setting for
Charcot’s work.
Le Bon’s readable if sometimes outrageous The Crowd is available in paperback
editions. For discussion of the context and importance of Le Bon’s work, see Gordon
W. Allport, “The Historical Background of Modern Social Psychology,” in The Handbook
of Social Psychology, vol. 1, ed. Gardner Lindzey and Elliott Aronson (New York:
Addison-Wesley, 1968).
Chapter Review 401
For details about Binet’s work on hypnotism and suggestion, see Theta Wolf, Alfred
Binet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) and Raymond Fancher, “Alfred Binet:
General Psychologist,” in Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, vol. III, ed. Gregory Kimble
and Michael Wertheimer (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998), 67–84.
For a readable, although largely uncritical, account of Milgram’s background, life, and
work, see Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley
Milgram (New York: Basic Books, 2004). A more critical account can be found in Gina
Perry, Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology
Experiments (New York: The New Press, 2013). For a first-person account of Loftus’s entire
research program and her role in the false memory controversy, see “Elizabeth F. Loftus,”
in Gardner Lindzey and William McK. Runyan, A History of Psychology in Autobiography,
vol. IX (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007): 198–227.
CHAPTER 11
Mind in Conflict: Freudian
Psychoanalysis and Its
Successors
The Origins of Psychoanalysis

Later Psychoanalytic Theory
Disciples and Dissidents
Freud and Academic Psychology
“B ut Doctor, I’m not asleep, you know; I can’t be hypnotized.” Those words,
half apologetic yet half taunting, rang in the ears of a young Viennese
physician one afternoon in 1892. The doctor felt sure he could cure this patient of
her troublesome symptoms if only he could hypnotize her. And yet, in spite of his
repeated assertions—“You are feeling drowsy; your eyelids are heavier and heavier;
soon you will be fast asleep!”—the patient remained disconcertingly awake.1
The patient suffered from hysteria, a condition that irritated or baffled most
other doctors at that time because its symptoms had no apparent physical basis.
Most doctors minimized the condition’s importance, sometimes even dismissing
hysterical patients as idlers or fakers, trying to avoid their responsibilities through
imaginary illnesses. This doctor knew otherwise, however, because he had studied
in France with Charcot, who taught that the symptoms were real and worthy of
serious attention; and with Bernheim, who’d had some success in treating hysteria
by hypnotizing patients and then simply and directly suggesting that the symp-
toms disappear (see Chapter 10).
403
404 11 | Mind in Conflict: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Its Successors
Now, in his own practice, the young doctor confirmed the partial success of
direct hypnosis but also learned about an even more effective technique that
used hypnosis indirectly. A major problem, however, was that too many patients
like the one above remained unresponsive to hypnotic induction. The search
for a different method, applicable to almost everyone, became an essential step
in the development of the world-altering theory that would become known as
psychoanalysis.
THE ORIGINS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

The Viennese physician was Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). As he began his
practice, he was supported, both financially and intellectually, by his older
friend and mentor Josef Breuer (1842–1925). As a successful conventional
physican Breuer seldom treated patients with hysteria, but he made one
exception for a family friend: a remarkable young woman named Bertha
Pappenheim (1859–1936; Figure 11.1). While nursing her terminally ill
father in the early 1880s, Bertha developed a bewildering array of hysterical
symptoms. Somehow, working and talking together virtually as collaborators,
the doctor and patient developed a process that alleviated her symptoms.
Figure 11.1 Josef Breuer (1842–1925) and his patient Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936).
In this treatment, known as the cathartic method, Breuer would hypnotize

Pappenheim and then ask her to think about one of her symptoms and try to recall
the first time she experienced anything like it. Often, a previously “forgotten” but
highly emotion-laden memory would occur to her, followed by her expression of
the previously suppressed emotion. After this emotional catharsis, the symptom
improved or even disappeared. For example, a severe and involuntary squinting
of the eyes was associated under hypnosis with an occasion when she had sat by
her dying father’s bed, highly distressed, with tears in her eyes. Her father had
suddenly roused himself and asked for the time. Trying to hide her upset, Bertha
had had to squint to see her watch and reply. Afterward, memory for the incident
disappeared but the squint remained as a symptom. But after remembering the
scene and expressing its associated emotion, her eyesight became normal again.
As the treatment progressed, however, a complication arose when Pappenheim
became increasingly and openly attached to Breuer emotionally—a development
that disturbed the proper doctor greatly, and his wife even more so. At the
earliest possible moment he terminated treatment and could never be persuaded
to accept another hysteria patient. Over the next several years, Pappenheim
gradually recovered from both her infatuation with Breuer and her hysteria.
She moved to Frankfurt and became one of Germany’s first social workers and
a feminist leader—accomplishments that led to her being commemorated on a
German postage stamp in 1954 and recognized as an important historical figure
in her own right.2
Although Breuer never treated another hysteria patient, he told his young
colleague Freud about the case; Freud remembered it years later when he began
treating his own patients. He tried the cathartic method himself and found it
worked better than direct hypnosis on some of his patients. In 1895 he persuaded
Breuer to collaborate in writing Studies on Hysteria, a book describing the
cathartic method, using as the first main example the Pappenheim case (dis-
guised as the case of “Anna O.”).
Freud and Breuer’s book offered the startling general hypothesis that
“hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.”3 They referred here to memories of
emotionally charged experiences that have been forgotten and placed beyond the
reach of consciousness, to become disease-causing pathogenic ideas. Because
the emotional energy from pathogenic ideas could not be expressed and thereby
gradually reduced in the normal way, it presumably remained bottled up. Stimuli
that would usually trigger the memory now activated the repressed emotional
energy instead, which “discharged” into the muscles, causing a hysteria symptom.
Freud and Breuer referred to many such symptoms as conversions of emotional
into physical energy. With hypnotic assistance, however, patients could regain
conscious access to their pathogenic ideas and therefore to the normal expres-
sion of their bottled-up emotional energy. The causes of their symptoms could
thus be removed.
Unfortunately, this promising cathartic method of treatment worked only
with people who could be deeply hypnotized, and Freud had found that many
patients could not be. Instead of falling into a sleeplike state in which their
memories became exceptionally fluent, they remained puzzled, anxious, or even
defiant. Freud’s efforts to solve this problem led to an expanded and ambitious
theory—not just of hysteria, but of human nature in general. But his remarkable
solution did not emerge suddenly, nor was it simply the result of his own isolated
efforts. Developing over a period of several years, the theory that Freud called
psychoanalysis integrated and synthesized many ideas he had been exposed to
during his rich educational and personal experiences.
Freud’s Early Life

Sigmund Freud (Figure 11.2) was born in 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia (now called
Prîbor, in the Czech Republic). In 1860 his family moved to Vienna, where Freud
remained until the Nazi menace forced him to London in
1938, for the final year of his life. Freud’s father, twenty years
older than his mother, had had two sons by a previous wife,
and one of them had a son of his own just before Sigmund
was born. Being the first of his mother’s eight children, he
grew up as the oldest child in his immediate household,
but with half-brothers as old as his mother and a nephew
older than himself. This unusual family constellation may
have particularly sensitized Freud to the vagaries of family
relationships, which he emphasized in his later theories.
Young Sigmund became an outstanding student at
the top of his secondary school class. He also developed
independent talents, such as teaching himself Spanish so
he could read Don Quixote in its original language. His early
interests in history and the humanities drew him toward a
career in law, until a chance reading of an inspiring essay
aroused more scientific ambitions. On an impulse, the
17-year-old Freud enrolled in the University of Vienna’s
medical school in 1873.
He encountered several outstanding teachers, beginning
Figure 11.2 Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) as a with the philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917). In 1874,
young man. the year of Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology,
Brentano published his own important book, Psychology from an Empirical

Standpoint.4 He promoted what he called act psychology, an approach that
differentiated the basic nature of psychology’s subject matter from that of the
physical sciences. While the physical sciences study objects, for Brentano the
fundamental unit of psychological analysis was an act that always refers to or
“contains” an object. For example, while a unit of physical analysis might be an
atom, a psychological unit would be an act such as thinking about an atom, or
believing that a particular kind of atom must exist, or wanting such a kind of
atom to exist. Brentano named this quality of “aboutness” that all mental acts
have intentionality: their referring to, and taking attitudes of belief and/or desire
toward, their objects. Intentionality is a purely subjective quality, detectable only
through introspection, and we’ll see in Chapter 14 how some modern researchers
of artificial intelligence debate the question of whether a highly sophisticated
computer or other machine can ever experience it.
Brentano further taught that any adequate psychological theory must
be “dynamic,” or capable of accounting for the influence of ever-changing
motivational factors on thought. He also distinguished sharply between the
“objective reality” of physical objects and the “subjective reality” of private
thought, and he skeptically but seriously examined the literature on unconscious
thought. Brentano thus introduced the young Freud to several issues that would
preoccupy him in his later career.5 Freud took five elective courses with Brentano
and might have abandoned medicine for philosophy had he not encountered, in
his third year, an even more influential teacher.
Ernst Brücke (1819–1892), director of the university’s Physiological Institute,
had been a classmate under Müller with Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond; with
them, he had promoted the new physiological mechanism that rejected vitalism
and sought mechanistic explanations for all organic phenomena (see Chapter 4).
Captivated by Brücke and his mechanistic physiology, Freud began devoting all
his spare time to volunteer research, even delaying progress toward his medical
degree. By 1880 he published several articles on neuroanatomy and hoped for a
career in that field.
As a Jew in an anti-Semitic society, Freud’s chances for that kind of career
were limited, however, and following his engagement in 1882 to Martha Bernays
he realized he would have to find a paying job relatively quickly. He began the
practical training at Vienna’s General Hospital that would qualify him for a
private medical practice.
At the hospital, Freud gravitated toward specialties connected with
neurophysiology and worked primarily with the famous brain anatomist
Theodor Meynert. Meynert had previously taught Wernicke, whose pioneering
work on brain localization and aphasia was covered in Chapter 3. Freud became
another prize pupil, developing particular skill in the diagnosis of localized
brain injuries. In 1885 Meynert sponsored Freud for a traveling grant to study in
Paris with the celebrated Charcot, just then at the height of his influence. Freud
impressed the French master well enough to win permission to translate some
of his writings into German. He returned to Vienna with sufficient credentials
to begin a private practice in the treatment of neurological diseases.
Things started slowly, however, and when Freud reported favorably on
Charcot’s opinion that men as well as women could be hysterics, he lost favor
with the Viennese medical establishment and felt he had become an outsider.
Although he published some substantial works on aphasia and cerebral palsy, he
found he could not make a living by treating only ordinary neurological cases.
Almost by default he decided to augment his income by accepting patients with
hysteria. Because he was one of the few Viennese doctors with the background
and willingness to take their symptoms seriously, several patients came to him
for help. Quite unintentionally then, Freud arrived at his position at the begin-
ning of this chapter, seeking a more widely applicable substitute for hypnosis in
the cathartic treatment of hysteria.
Free Association
Freud took a first step toward solving his problem after recalling an incident
from his visit to the clinic in Nancy. A recently hypnotized subject had shown
a typical posthypnotic amnesia until Bernheim, the hypnotist, placed a hand on
the man’s forehead and said, “Now you can remember.” The subject immediately
recalled his entire hypnotic experience in detail. Wondering whether a simi-
lar technique might enhance his patients’ memory for pathogenic ideas while
not under hypnosis, he experimented with what he called a pressure technique.
Patients would lie on a couch with their eyes closed as for hypnosis, remaining
normally awake while being asked to recall their earliest experiences of their
symptoms. When blockages inevitably occurred, Freud simply pressed their
foreheads with his hand and confidently assured them that further memories
would follow. Sometimes they did, and sometimes after repeated tries some ap-
parently genuine pathogenic ideas emerged, followed by emotional catharsis
and symptom relief.
At first Freud applied pressure often, whenever it seemed to him that memories
were flowing in an unpromising direction. But he soon learned it was impossible
to distinguish unpromising from promising; trains of thought that initially
appeared to be dead ends could lead to highly charged and pathogenic material
if allowed to go on longer.
Gradually Freud learned he did not have to apply physical pressure at all in
order to stimulate the memory. He finally adopted a technique he called free
association. As with hypnosis, he still asked his patients to lie on his soon-
to-be-famous couch and close their eyes (Figure 11.3). But instead of making
direct suggestions, he asked them to let their thoughts run free and to report
fully and openly whatever came to mind, even if it seemed irrelevant, silly, em-
barrassing, or anxiety-provoking. He also learned that he, as the therapist, would
have to restrain himself from interrupting or interfering in the patient’s train of
thought, even when it seemed to be going in an unproductive direction. Although
more difficult to completely follow in practice than the word free suggests, free
association became Freud’s standard method of treatment, and he abandoned
hypnosis altogether.
With his new technique, Freud became increasingly attuned to several subtle
but important phenomena that had been masked by his previous reliance on
hypnosis. With the old method, any peculiarity or difficulty in the treatment
was too easily explained away as some deficiency of the hypnosis, such as the
shallowness of the trance. But now, with attention more focused on the patient’s
associations and on the therapeutic relationship, Freud observed several new and
interesting features of hysteria.
Figure 11.3 Freud’s original psychoanalytic couch.

He noticed that the pathogenic ideas recalled under free association lacked
the one-to-one relationship with particular symptoms that were typical in patients
like Pappenheim. Instead, a whole series of pathogenic ideas seemed to lie behind
each hysterical symptom. A patient with hysterical hand tremors, for example,
eventually associated three different emotion-laden memories with her symptom:
one of being struck on the hand as a childhood punishment, another of being badly
frightened while playing the piano, and still another of being asked to massage her
father’s shoulders. The only common feature these memories had was that they all
involved her hands; but with each recollection, and the expression of the emotion
connected with it, her symptom’s intensity decreased. In Freud’s new terminology,
this was an example of overdetermination, in which one symptom was caused
not by a single factor but by two or more acting together. He came to believe that
most hysteria symptoms were similarly overdetermined.
Patients’ attempts to recover memories through free association led Freud to
another important insight, as he became increasingly convinced that pathogenic
ideas were not simply “forgotten” like unimportant details. Instead, these
ideas seemed to have been subjected to a willful and active—although largely
unconscious—process of repression. He noted, for example, that his patients
invariably resisted the free-association process somewhere along the line, and in
widely differing ways. Often they would interrupt their associations suddenly and
at crucial points, just as important and emotion-laden memories seemed likely to
be recalled. Sometimes they showed obvious signs of anxiety or embarrassment
and directly admitted that what had come to mind was too ridiculous or
obnoxious to be expressed. More often, however, their resistance was indirect and
unconscious. Their minds suddenly and mysteriously went blank, for example,
or they subtly changed the subject or decided to question Freud’s medical
credentials and the justification for his unorthodox treatment methods. From the
regularity of such direct and indirect resistances, Freud concluded his patients at
some level did not want to recall some of their pathogenic ideas, although often
they remained consciously unaware of that fact.
This unconscious resistance suggested to Freud that his patients had
complicated attitudes about their illnesses, and the emotion-laden and often
painful memories that lay behind them. It seemed that a conscious part of each
patient wanted to face the problem and be cured, while another, unconscious part
dreaded the emotional pain of addressing the memories and tried to sabotage
the process. In short, Freud detected intrapsychic conflict in his patients, with
different aspects of each personality clamoring for mutually exclusive goals. Later,
he would come to see intrapsychic conflict as extending far beyond hysteria and
pervading virtually all human activity.
A further and highly controversial hypothesis emerged when Freud observed

that many of the most strongly resisted memories and ideas seemed to involve
sexual experiences from childhood. Several patients reluctantly recalled scenes
of early sexual mistreatment, often by parents or other close relatives. The
patient with the hand tremor, for example, eventually recalled that her father had
sexually accosted her following the shoulder massage. After several such reports,
Freud speculated that repressed sexual experiences may have been necessary
for hysteria to begin, thereby being the most important pathogenic ideas that in
some way began the entire repressive pattern.
In 1896 Freud publicly adopted this seduction theory of hysteria. All hysterics,
he now asserted, must have undergone sexual abuse as children. At that time
Freud believed the capacity for genuinely sexual feelings arises only after puberty,
so the children presumably did not immediately experience their seductions as
actually sexual. But with the onset of puberty and the natural arousal of the sex
drive, the memories of those experiences presumably became sexualized upon
later recall. As the memories became increasingly and unexpectedly emotionally
charged, Freud proposed, they were more likely to be repressed. So now, instead
of consciously remembering their seductions and experiencing new and
uncomfortable emotions along with the memories, the patients unconsciously
produced hysterical conversion symptoms as a substitute. The symptoms
thus functioned as defenses against the now-disturbing sexualized memories,
appearing in consciousness as the lesser of two evils: unpleasant perhaps, but
causing less anxiety than the pathogenic ideas.
Perhaps understandably, Freud’s seduction theory was poorly received by
most of his medical colleagues, who regarded him as something of a crank
and stopped referring patients to him. Still worse, Freud himself soon found
that despite the sincerity with which the seduction scenes were recalled and
reported, the accounts did not always stand up to credible independent evi-
dence; in such cases the seductions seem to have been imagined rather than
real. In 1897, Freud ruefully confessed to a friend that he no longer believed
in his theory.
But if these seduction scenes were not real memories, what were they? Freud
was haunted by this question for many months. He could not accept that his
entire approach to hysteria was wrong. His therapy often helped, and it still made
sense to regard symptoms as defenses against pathogenic ideas of some kind,
even if they were not actual memories. Sexuality must have been important in
some way, or else why would so many patients report scenes of childhood seduc-
tion in their free associations? The seduction theory was clearly wrong in detail,
yet promising in its general direction. Freud’s eventual answer to these questions
came in an unexpected way after he undertook the investigation of a new and

seemingly unrelated subject: the meaning and nature of dreams.
The Interpretation of Dreams

Freud became interested in dreams partly because his teacher Meynert had
noted some similarities between dreams and certain psychiatric conditions, and
his patients occasionally brought up dream material in the course of their free
associations. More importantly, however, Freud himself was a “good” dreamer—
someone who frequently retained vivid recollections of his own dreams. He began
explicitly asking his patients to free-associate to their dreams, while doing the
same thing himself. When he did so, he found that the free associations suggested
a surprising new explanation for these perplexing nighttime experiences. In
1900 he described this in The Interpretation of Dreams, a long book commonly
regarded as the most important of all his works.6
Freud distinguished between the consciously experienced content of a dream,
which he called its manifest content, and a hidden or latent content, which
originally inspired the dream but emerged in consciousness only after free
association. The manifest content, typically marked by disjointed chronology
and fantastic images, often seemed unintelligible and failed to make sense in
terms of the dreamer’s normal waking experience. But the latent content—those
ideas and memories recalled after extensive free association to the manifest
content—seemed to have the greatest personal significance for the dreamer. In
addition, dreamers often resisted the uncovering of this latent content, much as
hysteria patients resisted the recollection of their pathogenic ideas.
Freud’s associations to his own “Dream of Irma’s Injection” exemplified his
general findings. In this dream, Irma, one of Freud’s real-life patients, had fallen
ill and was given an injection of the chemical propyl by one of his medical
colleagues. Then Freud vividly hallucinated the letters and numbers making
up the formula for trimethylamin, yet another chemical substance. This strange
manifest content made little immediate sense to Freud, for neither propyl nor
trimethylamin was a real medicine, and a propyl injection would in fact have been
dangerous.
But free association led to several ideas that did make sense. For one, Freud
thought with relief that at least it was not he himself who had administered the
ridiculous injection, so his colleague would have to bear responsibility for any
unfavorable outcome. And he remembered that in real life Irma’s nose had been
operated on by his best friend, who had neglected to remove all the surgical
packing, and the patient, legally under Freud’s care, had nearly died. Though
Freud made excuses for his friend and had been unwilling to blame him for
negligence, he now had to admit to feelings of anger and reproach. Finally, he

remembered a recent conversation with this same friend about the chemistry of
sex, in which the substance trimethylamin had been mentioned. This led to the
idea that Irma’s illness must have been sexual in nature and, more dimly, to
the thought that she was an attractive woman.
This fragmentary analysis illustrates several essential relationships between
latent and manifest content, which Freud came to believe held true generally.
He argued that a dream originates with a series of latent thoughts which the
sleeping mind transforms into manifest content by means of three processes
he referred to collectively as the dream work. First, because the latent content
invariably included thoughts that triggered more anxiety or conflict than those
of the manifest content, Freud concluded that the manifest content symbolizes
the latent content in a relatively “safe” way, with images less distressing than
the unvarnished latent content. In his language, a process of displacement
occurs, with the emotional energy of the highly charged latent content being
deflected or displaced onto the related but emotionally more neutral ideas of
the manifest content. Displacement thus serves a defensive purpose, enabling
the dreamer to experience images less disturbing than the thoughts that
originally inspired them.
In the second process of the dream work, several latent thoughts may be
symbolized by a single image or element of the manifest content. In Freud’s
Irma dream, for example, trains of thought involving both sexuality and Freud’s
troublesome relationship with his friend were associated with the single image
of trimethylamin. Freud called this process condensation, based on the notion
that two or more latent thoughts sometimes condense onto a single manifest
dream image.
The third process Freud observed was that the manifest content typically rep-
resents latent ideas by means of concretely experienced sensations, or hallucinations.
Dreams are not subjectively experienced as mere thoughts, but as sights, sounds,
feelings, and so on. Freud argued that the latent dream thoughts receive concrete
representation in the subjectively real sensations of the manifest content.
Significantly, these three processes of the dream work closely resembled pro-
cesses Freud had already observed in his hysteria patients: several emotion-laden
and resistance-causing pathogenic ideas were indirectly and “defensively” sym-
bolized by a single and highly concrete physical sensation: the overdetermined
symptom. The unconscious “meaning” of a symptom—that is, its originating
pathogenic ideas—could only be determined by free association, just like the
latent content that gave meaning to dreams. Freud saw both dreams and hysteria
symptoms as resulting from similar unconscious symbolic processes.
Freud further reflected that these processes were directly opposite to those
involved in logical or scientific thinking. There, one uses terms that refer to con-
cepts explicitly, rather than indirectly. Those concepts have precisely limited
rather than surplus meanings, and thought progresses from concrete particu-
lars to abstract generalizations, rather than the reverse. In addition, in logical or
scientific explorations, the various steps are available to consciousness and are
subject to some degree of voluntary control. In dream or symptom creation, by
contrast, the processes of displacement, overdetermination or condensation, and
concrete representation all occur unconsciously, and the dreams or symptoms
finally seem to appear involuntarily and out of nowhere as far as the dreamer or
patient is concerned.
Freud hypothesized two idealized and contrasting modes of thought, one
unconscious and associated with dream and symptom formation, the other
conscious and responsible for rational thinking. Because he believed infants are
born with the capacity for dreams but have to learn how to think rationally, he
labeled the unconscious mode of thought the primary process and the conscious
mode the secondary process. Freud saw adult dreams and hysteria symptoms as
instances in which mature, secondary-process thinking is abandoned in favor of
the developmentally earlier primary process—where a “regression” to earlier and
more primitive ways of thinking has occurred.
Freud later came to believe that primary-process thought was not restricted to
states such as dreaming and hysteria but could also play a positive role in creative
and artistic thinking. He noted that artists and poets use symbols to make points
indirectly by allusion (displacement); produce works that may be interpreted
on several different levels of meaning (overdetermination or condensation);
and often symbolize abstract ideas by means of concrete scenes and images
(concrete representation). In addition, creative people often say their inspirations
occur involuntarily—just the way dreams and hysteria symptoms intrude into
consciousness. In these cases, the “regression” to the primary-process modes of
thought serves a positive functional purpose.
With all these ideas, Freud did not “discover” the unconscious. He knew from
his study with Brentano that many predecessors, starting with Leibniz and his
“minute perceptions” (see Chapter 2), had already postulated the existence of
unconscious psychological activity. But Freud broke new ground by hypothesizing
specific rules for the unconscious, describing it as a lawful phenomenon. This
conceptualization of the primary process as an unconscious mode of thought
characterized by overdetermination, displacement, condensation, and concrete
representation was an important step in the study of unconscious psychological
processes.
Wish Fulfillment and the Seduction Theory

Freud’s growing appreciation of the primary process in dreams helped him arrive
at an apparent solution to his dilemma about hysteria and the seduction theory.
As he and his patients analyzed their dreams by free association, in virtually
every case at least some elements of the latent content seemed to include
significant though often conflict-laden wishes, even when the manifest con-
tent did not correspond. One patient, for example, dreamed of the death of her
favorite nephew—the very opposite of a wish fulfillment. But her free associations
included recollections of an old boyfriend she still felt strongly attracted to, whom
she had last seen at the real funeral of her nephew’s older brother. Her dream
therefore expressed a latent wish for a chance to see this desirable man again. On
the basis of many similar experiences, often when the patient’s expressed wishes
emerged only after considerable anxiety and embarassment, Freud formulated
his wish fulfillment hypothesis: the idea that the latent content of every dream
includes a wish of some sort, which is the most important motivator for the dream
itself. Often the wishes were disagreeable to acknowledge, like the pathogenic
ideas of hysteria patients.
Freud found himself in an interesting logical position. Manifest dreams and
hysteria symptoms had striking similarities in that both symbolized unconscious
and anxiety-arousing ideas via the processes of displacement, overdetermina-
tion or condensation, and concrete representation. They differed strikingly only
in their presumed causes, with dreams apparently being stimulated by latent
wishes, symptoms by sexual memories.
But here, of course, was precisely where the seduction theory erred! Many
of the sexual experiences so distinctly “remembered” by Freud’s patients had
never actually occurred. Freud now saw a possible explanation. Perhaps dreams
and symptoms were similar in their origins as well as in their structure, and the
sexual scenes reported by hysterical patients indirectly reflected wishes rather
than actual experiences. Such wishes would contradict the polite and consciously
adopted values of his patients, who would deny and repress them. But maybe the
wishes were still active; perhaps they demanded at least partial and symbolic
expression in their symptoms, through the unconscious primary process. This
idea, shocking as it seemed at first, gained unexpected reinforcement when Freud
seriously examined his own free associations during a personally difficult time in
the late 1890s.
Self-Analysis and Childhood Sexuality

After hypothesizing that hysterics’ pathogenic ideas typically represented
disguised sexual wishes, Freud had to do some hard thinking about the nature
of human motivation. It appeared that his patients, while outwardly proper and
morally virtuous, secretly and unconsciously harbored sexual ideas and fantasies
that respectable society would not tolerate. Furthermore, these ideas seemed to
originate as far back as childhood. As noted earlier, Freud initially shared the
common belief that the normal human sexual instinct arises with the onset of
puberty. Probably at first he was tempted to speculate that hysteria resulted from
an abnormally precocious sexuality—that hysterics were people with a strong
sexual instinct that arose prematurely, thereby triggering the extreme defensive
reactions that produced their symptoms.
While this idea may have seemed plausible at first, Freud soon rejected it for
personal and painful reasons. In autumn of 1896, his elderly father died after
a lingering illness. Though he had been expecting it for some time, Freud was
severely shaken by his father’s death, and for months he felt depressed, anxious,
and unable to work productively. Finally, he decided to regard himself as a
patient and subject his own dreams and symptoms to systematic free association.
He found some disturbing things in his self-analysis, which led him to see his
hysteria patients in a new and more sympathetic light.
As part of this exploration, Freud examined the recurrence of a vivid childhood
dream. “I saw my beloved mother, with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression
on her features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with birds’
beaks and laid upon the bed.”7 His associations to this highly condensed manifest
content included many significant and disturbing latent thoughts. The beaked
figures resembled pictures of Egyptian burial gods young Sigmund had seen in
the family Bible, and the expression on his mother’s face was exactly like the
one on the face of his dying grandfather shortly before the original dream. These
death-related images concerning his mother and grandfather led to the thought
of a dying father, and Freud concluded with a shock that one of his dream’s latent
wishes must have been for the death of his father. In childhood, he apparently
had harbored unconscious hostile wishes toward his consciously beloved father.
Equally disturbing sexual associations soon followed when Freud recalled that
the German slang for sexual intercourse (vögeln) derived from the word for “bird”
(vogel). He had first learned that word from an older boy named Phillip, and the
family Bible with the beaked figures was an edition known as Philippson’s Bible.
Therefore, notions of sexuality were strongly associated with the image of his
sleeping mother, and Freud felt forced to conclude that even as a child he must
have had sexual thoughts about her.
Freud interpreted his recurring childhood dream as expressing two repugnant
yet deeply felt wishes: for his father’s death, and for his mother’s sexual attention.
“Death” and “sexuality” had not meant the same things to him as a boy that they did
as an adult, with death implying simply absence or removal, and sexuality meaning
any kind of sensual, physical gratification. But Freud concluded that these were
logical precursors to the adult concepts. And now he interpreted his peculiarly
intense adult reaction to his father’s death as the result of the fulfillment of his
conflict-laden childhood wish. The conscious, conventional side of his personal-
ity had understandably rejected this wish, creating severe internal conflict and the
eruption of his symptoms. Freud’s admirers have suggested that it took consider-
able courage to uncover and acknowledge such distressing truths about himself.
Soon, however, Freud came to believe he was not alone, and that virtually
anyone who openly subjected himself or herself to analysis by free association
would discover traces of similar uncomfortable childhood wishes. Popular myths
and legends, as well as ordinary dreams, seemed to corroborate Freud’s findings
with hysteria patients and himself: the childish desire to obtain sensual pleasure
from the opposite-sex parent, and for the disappearance of the same-sex parent
as the major rival for such attentions. Oedipus Rex, the classic Greek tragedy
by Sophocles, portrays a story in which these events occur: The hero, Oedipus,
unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. Freud therefore named this
apparently universal constellation of unconscious wishes the Oedipus complex.
Further observations of his own and his patients’ free associations
suggested to Freud that these Oedipal feelings about parents were often
accompanied by disturbing memories involving their own bodies. Disgusting
and “perverted” ideas involving the mouth, anus, or genitals were reluctantly
expressed. Freud concluded that these, too, represented childhood wishes—
wishes that were regarded with horror and repressed from normal awareness
by the mature and civilized side of the personality, but that remained active
and sought to find expression indirectly in dreams, symptoms, and other
primary-process activities. Freud elaborated on these ideas in a radically new
theory of both childhood and sexuality in his 1905 book, Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality.8
In the early 1900s, childhood was conventionally viewed as a period of
innocence and purity, completely devoid of sexual feelings and lasting until
the physiological changes of puberty. When the sexual instinct did arise, it was
assumed to be highly specific, pointing toward the single goal of propagating the
species through heterosexual intercourse. Freud’s new theory flatly contradicted
this popular view. From the apparent universality of repressed, disturbing
childhood memories, he inferred that sexuality profoundly influences every
child’s mental life. The sexuality of childhood, however, was apparently much
broader than adult sexuality, involving all kinds of sensual gratification, including
many that were considered abnormal from the adult perspective.
Freud’s new theory asserted that every baby is born in a state he called
polymorphous perversity, and is capable of taking sensual pleasure from
the gentle stimulation of any part of the body. Over the course of normal
development, however, certain parts of the body become erogenous zones,
specific areas of intense satisfaction and sensual pleasure. An infant’s primal ex-
perience of nursing causes the mouth or oral zone to predominate as the location
of heightened sensitivity. When toilet training begins and the child starts to find
pleasure in the voluntary control of bodily functions, the anal zone assumes
particular importance. Once the child has developed fuller bodily control, the
stimulation of the genital zone becomes a major source of sexual pleasure.
Freud believed social factors within the family strongly interact with these
psychosexual developments. Because many pleasurable activities lead to
parental disapproval, the child learns that only certain gratifications are socially
acceptable, and gradually he or she channels sexual impulses into just those forms.
Typically (although not universally) by late adolescence sexual expression results
in the socially conventional heterosexual-genital orientation. Freud emphasized,
however, that this “normal” expression of sexuality was not a biologically
fixed consequence of a fixed instinct, but just one of the many possible results
of a complicated developmental channeling of the initial drive for physical
gratification.
In sum, Freud argued that the conventional wisdom had things backward.
Children are not innocents who become corrupted sexually by the evils of the
world; instead they are born with primitive, undisciplined, and (from an adult
perspective) perverted tendencies they must learn to curb as they mature. Only
after pushing the memories of their Oedipal and childish sexual impulses into
the unconscious do individuals become “civilized” and sexually normal.
Freud emphasized, however, that these highly charged memories are never
destroyed but are merely repressed. They persist beneath the surface of conscious-
ness, seeking indirect or disguised forms of expression. Dreams are one natural
and usually benign outlet; hysteria symptoms a more extreme and harmful one.
And highly significantly for his broader theory, Freud soon came to believe that
variations in childhood sexual experiences lead to some distinctive individual
personality traits in adulthood.
While believing that all childhood sexual experiences follow the same gen-
eral sequence, focusing first on the oral, then the anal, and finally the genital
regions of the body, Freud also noted that in the course of their free associations,
patients differed in their emphasis on the three stages. Some reported particu-
larly intense images and experiences dating back to toilet training and the anal
period of their development. He speculated that the parents of these individuals
must have been relatively strict in their enforcement of toilet training, leading
to an overemphasis or fixation of infantile sexuality at the anal stage. Freud also
detected a particular pattern of adult personality characteristics in these patients;
they tended to be relatively orderly in arranging their affairs, thrifty in managing
their money and resources, and obstinate in many of their interpersonal interac-
tions. This triad of traits became the prime markets for what Freudian theorists call
the anal character.
Freud and some of his followers soon observed certain character types
resulting from fixations at the other stages. The oral character, which presumably
results from relative overindulgence or underindulgence in the earliest years,
was marked by a continuing interest throughout life in such oral activities as
eating, drinking, smoking, and even talking. If overindulged in childhood, adults
were likely to be cheerful and optimistic; if underindulged, they were envious,
acquisitive, and pessimistic. The phallic/genital character, by contrast, seemed
marked by adult traits of curiosity, competitiveness, or exhibitionism.
Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Case of Dora

Even as Freud theorized about normal people’s character, dreams, and the
psychology of children, he continued to earn his living as a psychotherapist
for disturbed adults. And like his general theories, his therapeutic technique
changed and developed over the years.
At first, Freud saw his therapeutic task as simple and straightforward. All
he had to do, it seemed, was encourage free association until the repressed
pathogenic ideas became conscious and the symptoms became unnecessary.
But he increasingly found his patients’ unconscious resistance to the treatment
could be very subtle, and he often had to accept modest improvement rather than
complete cures. Sometimes treatments that began promisingly ended disastrously,
as in the instructive example of Ida Bauer (1882–1945), a gifted but troubled young
woman referred to in Freud’s published account as the case of Dora. Suffering from
mild hysteria, 18-year-old Ida was brought to Freud by her father after threatening
suicide. Intelligent and verbal, she took quickly to free association and seemed to
understand Freud’s early interpretations of her associations in terms of infantile
sexuality. After just a few sessions, Freud wrote confidently to a friend that “the case
has opened smoothly to my collection of picklocks.”9
Ida’s conflicts arose from her relationships with her parents and their close
friends, a couple Freud called “Herr and Frau K.” Ida’s father was often ill and
in need of nursing, a service more often provided by Frau K. than by Ida’s
mother, whom she described as a drab and unaffectionate woman obsessed
with housecleaning. As Ida entered adolescence, she recognized that Frau K.
had become her father’s mistress as well as his nurse. Herr K. apparently made
no fuss about his wife’s affair with his friend but contented himself with amorous
adventures with his servants. As Ida grew into an attractive young woman,
however, he also turned his attention toward her. He presented her with an
expensive jewel-case and once tried to kiss her—an act Ida said disgusted her
because of the strong smell of cigar smoke on his breath.
This unfortunate situation reached a climax shortly before Ida saw Freud, when
her family shared a vacation house with the Ks. Herr K. openly complained to her
that he got nothing from his wife and propositioned her directly. Ida indignantly
refused but said nothing to her parents. Then every night for two weeks she had
the same vivid nightmare, after which she insisted on accompanying her father
on a business trip away from the vacation house. On the trip she told her father
about Herr K. and her nightmare ceased, although she began to experience
hysterical symptoms. After they worsened and she threatened suicide, Ida’s
father brought her to Freud.
During psychoanalysis with Freud, Ida’s dream recurred, with this manifest
content:
A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me
up. I dressed myself quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case;
but father said: “I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the
sake of your jewel-case.” We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was out-
side I woke up.10
Ida’s fluent free associations to this dream made Freud initially optimistic.
Herr K. was obviously involved through associations to the jewel-case and the
fire, which recalled the smell of tobacco smoke on his breath. Ida remembered
she had always dressed quickly in the vacation house, as in the dream, because
her bed was in an exposed hall and she feared being seen partially undressed by
Herr K. The fire also seemed to symbolize the sexual stirrings Ida admitted she
was beginning to feel. She finally acknowledged a certain attraction to Herr K.,
along with her fear and repugnance.
Freud was not surprised when Ida also produced associations to childhood
sexuality. The fire led to thoughts of water, which in turn recalled childhood mem-
ories of bedwetting. After Ida remarked that her father used to wake her up at
night and take her to the bathroom to prevent the bedwetting, Freud felt sure he
understood the major latent wish expressed by the dream.
He believed the dream had substituted Ida’s original Oedipal attraction to her
father for her current, conflict-laden attraction to Herr K. He summarized: “She
summoned up an infantile attraction for her father so that it might protect

her against her present affection for a stranger.”11 The wish expressed by the
dream was to run away with her father and to be protected by him from the
disturbing impulses of her maturing sexuality, just as she had been protected
by him from her bedwetting as a child. When Ida went with her father on the
business trip, she fulfilled that wish in reality and the dream consequently
ceased to recur.
Ida seemed to accept this interpretation, lending Freud added confidence
that she would soon have full insight into her problems and be cured. Shortly
afterward, however, she stunned him by announcing that she had had enough
of his treatment and would return no more, even though many of her problems
remained unresolved. She kept her word and never returned.
In retrospect, Freud realized he had been insensitive to one whole
dimension of the case, and that he had failed to carry his interpretation
of the dream as far as he should have. Although he had explained why the
dream had originally occurred at the vacation house, he had not asked why
it recurred during the course of the treatment. Its reappearance, he now
believed, signified not only Ida’s previous complicated feelings toward
Herr K. but also her current ambivalence toward Freud himself. He too was a
heavy cigar smoker, and he had frequently used the expression “There can be
no smoke without fire” in their sessions. And while he was not a philanderer
like Herr K., he did openly discuss highly charged sexual topics with her.
Therefore, her dream was once again useful in expressing complex feelings
about her emotional entanglement with a “stranger” and her wish to flee to
the relative safety of her father—only this time the stranger was Freud and
not Herr K. And just as Ida fulfilled the first wish by fleeing from Herr K., so
she now fled from Freud.
This experience, reinforced by similar if less dramatic exchanges with other
patients, convinced Freud that therapy sessions were inevitably complicated
by what he called transference feelings. In the process of transference,
patients would transfer onto him, as the therapist, attributes of the important
people from their past lives who were involved in their neurotic symptoms.
Regardless of what Freud was actually like as a person, his patients often
reacted to him as if he were like their mothers, fathers, or other emotion-
charged figures, such as Herr K. All too easily, as with Ida, transference feelings
could become part of the resistance and hinder therapeutic progress. In short,
Freud learned that for therapy to proceed optimally, he and his patients would
have to pay just as much attention to the transference occurring between
themselves as to the symptoms.
Individual symptoms now seemed less important to Freud. He saw them as

relatively superficial manifestations of underlying emotional conflicts, each
one capable of expressing itself in many ways, including dreams, symptoms,
character traits—and also in the transference. Symptoms were not independent
entities, and the disappearance of a single one signified little because the
conflict that had caused it might recur in another, equally harmful substitute.
Any enduring cure therefore required the uncovering and analysis of the entire
complex network of underlying conflicts—a process likely to take months or
even years to finish.
To judge when an analysis approached successful completion, Freud now
attended more to the transference relationship than to the symptoms. Both
symptoms and transference reflected the same disturbances, but the transference
lay closer at hand for constant scrutiny. When Freud could sense a patient was
beginning to respond to him more as he really was and less as if he were a
shadowy figure from the past, he judged that the long psychoanalytic process
was coming to an end.
Ultimately, Freud did not provide the quick and specific cures for hysteria
symptoms he had originally hoped for. Instead, he provided psychoanalysis—a
long and often difficult process of self-examination that offered symptom relief
almost as an incidental consequence of increased insight into one’s unconscious
mental life.
LATER PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

Until he was nearly 50, Freud practiced and theorized primarily on his own,
and his writings were directed toward a broad educated readership. For many
scholars today, these remain his most fundamental and important works, laying
the basis for such concepts as unconscious motivation, the inevitability of
intrapsychic conflict, and the importance of such primary-process mechanisms
as overdetermination, displacement, condensation, and concrete representation
as means of dealing with that conflict.
Beginning in about 1905, his work began to attract the admiration of a small
but growing number of other physicians and intellectuals. Gradually psychoanal-
ysis was transformed from being the creation of a single person into a movement.
While it continued to be dominated by Freud, it also involved many disciples,
collaborators, and eventually dissidents. From this point on, many of his writings
would become more technical and aimed at a more specialized audience.
Although less fundamental than his earlier work, several attracted considerable
attention and/or controversy.
Metapsychology and the Defense Mechanisms

From the beginning of his career, Freud occasionally tried to place his clinical
discoveries within a broader theoretical context, by focusing on the general
features of the human mind that enabled it to produce the symptoms, dreams,
and transferences he observed in his patients and himself. He referred to his
theoretical models of the mind (or psyche, as he sometimes called it), as his
metapsychology. His earliest metapsychological theorizing occurred in the
1890s when he proposed neurological structures and mechanisms capable of
producing the dreams and symptoms of hysteria he saw in his psychotherapy
practice. He sketched his ideas in 1895 in a long draft manuscript never intended
for publication; it was found by his editors after his death and published as Project
for a Scientific Psychology.12
This incomplete and sometimes obscure manuscript has proven extraordinarily
interesting to Freud scholars. It played an important role in the development of
his ideas about dreams and primary-process thinking, but was limited by the
rudimentary state of knowledge about the nervous system at that time. Believing
the nervous system was too poorly understood to enable him to specify detailed
mechanisms for all the psychological phenomena that interested him, Freud
decided to avoid neurological technicalities by expressing his metapsychology
in completely psychological terms. Keeping his concepts consistent with but
not dependent upon current scientific knowledge, he hoped future neurological
discoveries by others would suggest precise mechanisms to explain his ideas. As
he wrote in 1900:
I shall entirely disregard the fact that the mental apparatus with which we
are . . . concerned is also known to us in the form of an anatomical prep-
aration, and I shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine psychi-
cal locality in any anatomical fashion. I shall remain upon psychological
ground.13
Freud’s most famous descriptions of “psychical localities” appeared in a

short 1923 work entitled The Ego and the Id.14 Here he argued that the psyche
is constantly influenced by three different kinds of demands that inevitably
conflict with one another. First are the instincts: biologically based urges aris-
ing from within the body, for nourishment, warmth, sexual gratification, and
so on. A second kind of demand is imposed by external reality; in order to
survive, a person must learn to manipulate the environment to avoid physi-
cal dangers and obtain proper resources for satisfying the instincts. From his
earliest metapsychological writings onward, Freud had emphasized situations

in which reality-based demands conflicted with instinctual urges, whose satis-
factions had to be delayed, modified, or abandoned because of the constraints
of the real world.
Third, Freud recognized that moral demands influence the mind independently
of the instincts and external reality. Sometimes people refrain from satisfying
their impulses because they think it would be wrong, even if there is nothing
in the physical environment to prevent them from doing so. They might ignore
the dangers of external reality and risk their lives in the service of a moral ideal.
Because moral demands could motivate people in directions contrary to both
the instincts and the demands of external reality, Freud believed a complete
model of the human psyche would have to make an important and separate
place for them.
Freud’s 1923 model proposed three separate systems representing the three
kinds of psychic demands. He postulated the id as the origin and container
of unconscious, powerful impulses and energies from the instincts. Then he
hypothesized a “perception-consciousness system,” abbreviated as pcpt.-cs.,
that conveys information about external reality to the psyche. This system not
only produces immediate consciousness of whatever is being perceived, it also
leaves behind memories that remain open to future consciousness in a region
of the psyche Freud described as “preconscious.” Moral demands, arising inde-
pendently of instincts and external reality alike, presumably originated from a
separate part within the psyche that Freud called the superego.
The id, the pcpt.-cs. (external-perception system), and the superego all intro-
duce differing and conflicting demands into the psyche, which must sort them
out and achieve some sort of compromise. Specific responses must be devised
and executed that will permit some degree of instinctual satisfaction but that will
not endanger the individual from the real world or violate the dictates of con-
science. Freud’s term for the part of the psyche that governed these compromises
was the ego.*
While recognizing that graphical representations of abstract concepts may not ap-
peal to everyone, Freud drew a simple sketch of his psychic structures (Figure 11.4).
The id lies open to the instincts from the body at the bottom of the diagram, while
the pcpt.-cs. is perched like an eye on the top, oriented to the external world. The
*In his original German publication, Freud used the common words Es (“it”), Ich (“I”), and Uber-Ich
(“over-I”), which his English translators for some reason converted into the Latin terms id, ego,
and superego. Some have argued that the Latinizations make Freud’s writings appear unfortu-
nately more technical and abstract in English than they are in the original German.
superego is contained within the psyche to one side. Squarely (External World)
in the middle, where it functions as mediator of all the conflict-
pcpt.-cs.
ing demands, is the ego.
Consistent with its central location in Freud’s diagram,
the ego attracted much theoretical attention during the
latter part of his career. He came to see virtually everything
a person does as the result of some sort of compromise
among conflicting demands, and therefore a product of O preconscious
I D EGO
the ego. Some of the ego’s compromises favor one kind
SUPERE
of demand over others, and some are more beneficial than
others. Hysteria symptoms represent relatively harmful
compromises, in which considerations of external reality are ed
ignored and the wishful pressures of the id are confronted e ss
pr
mainly by the superego; thus, the id impulses receive re
disguised rather than overt expression. Dreams are similar,
although not as harmful because they occur in a sleeping unconscious
state in which the consequences of ignoring reality are
not as severe. These dramatic kinds of compromises, of
course, had been the starting points for Freud’s analysis
of intrapsychic conflict.
Increasingly, however, the older Freud saw everyday life as
dominated by other, less dramatic ego compromises he called (Body)
defense mechanisms. Collaborating in this theorizing was
Figure 11.4 Freud’s model of the psyche.
his youngest daughter Anna Freud (1895–1982; Figure 11.5).
The only one of his several children to follow in his footsteps,
Anna became a pioneer in the psychoanalysis of children. Her book The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense provided the definitive descriptions of the major defense
mechanisms15.
One of these was displacement (the same term Freud used for an aspect of
dream work). As a defense mechanism, displacement is the redirection of an
impulse toward a substitute target that resembles the original in some way but
is psychologically safer. A woman who suffers the taunts of her boss in silence
might displace her anger by yelling at her husband and children when she gets
home, for example. Repressed Oedipal impulses from childhood are presumably
displaced when people fall in love with partners who resemble their opposite-
sex parents in some significant way—a very common occurrence, according to
the Freuds.
The defense mechanism of projection occurs when one does not directly
acknowledge one’s own unacceptable impulses, but attributes them to someone else
instead. If you become angry at someone but have a superego

that interprets the feeling as morally wrong, you may project
your anger onto that person and see him or her as being an-
gry and hostile toward you instead. You might then act aggres-
sively toward your target but believe your action is self-defense
or retaliation rather than unprovoked hostility. In intellectu-
alization, an emotion-charged subject is directly approached,
but in a strictly intellectual manner that avoids emotional in-
volvement. An adolescent beset by sexual urges might read
technical literature on sexuality, for example, while avoiding
any direct sexual entanglements. Academics and professors
may demonstrate intellectualization when they become tech-
nical experts in subjects associated with their personal emo-
tional conflicts. A somewhat related defense mechanism is
rationalization, in which people act because of one motive
but explain the behavior (to themselves as well as to others)
on the basis of another, more acceptable one. For instance, a
father may get a certain amount of anger relief from spanking
his child but argue and believe afterward that, according to
some expert, it had all been “for the child’s own good.”
The defense mechanism of identification, the uncon-
scious adoption of the characteristics of some other emo-
Figure 11.5 Anna Freud (1895–1982) with tionally important person, acquired considerable theoretical
her father. importance in Freud’s later writings. He suggested that in
the process of mourning, for example, a bereaved person
may unconsciously keep a lost loved one alive by “internalizing” and taking on
his or her characteristic behaviors and attitudes. More consequentially, Freud
argued that identification can be a way of dealing with someone who is feared—a
process he believed to be central in the creation of a child’s superego.
Born without an innate sense of conscience, children learn from experience
that certain acts and impulses will cause parental disapproval and might lead to
punishment. As previously noted, Freud believed that in early childhood a sequence
of broadly sexual experiences and feelings unfolds, including Oedipal feelings to-
ward the parents that are unacceptable from an adult perspective. He also believed
such impulses and feelings become particularly intense at age 5 or 6, along with an
acute recognition that all-powerful parents strongly disapprove of them. The seeth-
ing cauldron of childish sexuality becomes a source of intense anxiety, to which
the children presumably respond by unconsciously identifying with the parents,
internalizing their moral rules and prohibitions. Following this identification and
internalization, the moral demands for restraint come from within, and the new part
of the psyche that contains the internalized parents is the superego.
Male and Female Superegos

Further considerations about the superego led to one of the most controversial
and bizarrely fanciful episodes of Freud’s career (which occurred during a partic-
ularly difficult time in his personal life). Freud became convinced, on the basis of
some fragmentary free associations from his patients, that there is an important
difference between men’s and women’s typical superegos.
He came to believe that during the Oedipal period that immediately precedes
superego formation, little boys and girls become acutely aware of the major
obvious anatomical difference between them: the presence or absence of a penis.
This observation gives rise, he argued, to a castration complex which takes
different forms for boys and girls. For boys, the predominant response is suppos-
edly enhanced anxiety: now knowing that there are people without penises, they
irrationally but intensely fear that their fathers might castrate them too if they
openly revealed their Oedipal wishes. Girls, who by contrast have already been
“castrated,” presumably respond not with anxiety but with envy, an unconscious
wish to be like a boy and have a penis. A major consequence of this difference,
Freud concluded, is that boys have a greater burden of Oedipal anxiety and
therefore need a stronger and more severe internalization of parental restraint to
deal with it. In other words, boys develop stronger superegos than girls.
When Freud described his concept of the castration complex in a short 1925
paper, he candidly admitted that it was based on just “a handful of cases” and
excused its early publication because he believed “the time before me is limited.”16
But he went on to state, quite provocatively:
I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for
women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in
men. Their superego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent
of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. Character traits which
critics of every epoch have brought up against women—that they show less
sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great
exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced in their judgements
by feelings of affection or hostility—all these would amply be accounted
for by the modification in the formation of their superego which we have
inferred. . . . We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclu-
sions by the denials of the feminists, who are anxious to force us to regard
the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.17
Predictably, Freud’s outspoken statement caused a great deal of controversy

both within and outside the psychoanalytic movement. There was surprise, too,
because throughout his career Freud had been unusually (for his time) open to
the participation of women in the psychoanalytic community he created. Both
before and after his inflammatory article, he corresponded with and referred
important patients to several female analysts, and he took particular pride in the
professional development of his daughter Anna into a leadership role in the psy-
choanalytic movement. The noted feminist scholar Juliet Mitchell, while highly
critical of the male-dominated society of which Freud was both a part and a prod-
uct, also observed that “Psychoanalysis must be one of the very few scientific pro-
fessions that, from its inception, exercised no discrimination against women.”18
Despite the absence of institutional discrimination against her, the prominent
German psychoanalyst Karen Horney (1885–1952; Figure 11.6) became an out-
spoken critic of Freud’s new theory of the castration complex. One of the first
women to have earned a medical degree in Germany, she joined the psychoan-
alytic movement in 1920 and soon became respected as one of its most gifted
practitioners and writers. Freud himself had cited her “valuable and comprehen-
sive studies” in his controversial 1925 paper.19 Brushing aside the compliment,
Horney argued that Freud’s conception of female sexual-
ity was excessively biased by his male point of view and
misrepresented the actual physiological and psychological
experience of being female. In a comprehensive and theo-
retically sophisticated rebuttal to Freud, she stated that the
penis takes on particular symbolic importance only in soci-
eties dominated by male privilege and power, and argued
that boys and men should rightfully envy women, because
they miss out on the creative joy and “blissful conscious-
ness” of pregnancy and childbirth.20
A few years later the American psychoanalyst Clara
Thompson (1893–1958) built on Horney’s work and further
disputed Freud’s position that female inferiority was rooted
in women’s lack of a penis and an underdeveloped superego.
She argued instead for a culturally and historically based
analysis of women’s experiences, especially as they were
affected by views about male superiority. Thompson
emphasized that the socially conditioned negative attitudes
toward women’s sexuality and sexual organs, rather than
some innate inadequacy of the organs themselves, led to
Figure 11.6 Karen Horney (1885–1952). women’s feelings of inferiority. She also pointed out that
Freud’s theories about the psychology of women were artificially influenced by

the particular cultural and historical position of the female patients he happened
to treat.21
During his final years, Freud wrote speculatively and often pessimistically
about a number of broadly philosophical issues, and in a somber 1930 work enti-
tled Civilization and Its Discontents, he returned to reflections on the superego.22
Haunted by memories of the catastrophe of World War I and now disturbed by
the growing popularity of Hitler in Germany, Freud had speculated that humans
are often driven by an aggressive “death instinct” that he called Thanatos, which
vies for control with the life-giving sexual instinct he now called Eros. He further
theorized that a major vehicle for the expression of the death instinct’s aggressive
energy was the superego—sometimes by producing self-destructive feelings of
excessive guilt, and other times by displacing the aggressive impulses outward.
In the name of moral values such as patriotism, religion, and justice, all sorts of
acts of murder and carnage could be committed and approved by the superego.
With the rise of the technologies of war, even before the atomic bomb, Freud
feared that these tendencies threatened the very survival of the human species.
In this new context, the hypothetically weak feminine superego—“never so inex-
orable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to
be in men” (as quoted earlier)—does not come across as so inferior. Freud himself,
however, never explicitly emphasized this rather obvious point.
As Freud’s fears came true and Hitler’s rise made Vienna increasingly danger-
ous for Jews throughout the 1930s, he and his immediate family finally fled to
London in June 1938. His four elderly sisters were denied exit visas and stayed
behind, later to perish in the Nazi gas chambers. Perhaps fortunately, Freud him-
self never learned of this, for he succumbed to cancer on September 23, 1939, as
Europe lay on the brink of World War II.
DISCIPLES AND DISSIDENTS

By 1905, Freud’s works had begun to attract the attention of a growing
group of admirers. The first of these came from his native Vienna, and they
began meeting regularly at his home for psychoanalytic discussions, calling
themselves the Wednesday Psychological Society. Prominent early members
included the physician Alfred Adler and the young student Otto Rank, who
had greatly impressed Freud with an essay on the psychology of the artist.
The group quickly outgrew its local roots, and in 1906 it was visited by the
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, followed shortly afterwards by the Berlin-based
Karl Abraham and the Welsh neurologist Ernest Jones, among many others.
By 1910 the members had begun participating in formal meetings in different
European cities, and they changed the group’s name to the International
Psychoanalytic Association (IPA).
All these figures became prominent during subsequent decades—some as
faithful disciples of Freud himself, others as dissidents who established their own
competing schools of psychological theory. Among the former, Rank became a
close personal friend to Freud and extended the theoretical emphasis on child-
hood back to the birth experience, which he believed could leave lasting uncon-
scious psychological effects. Abraham elaborated significantly on the effects
of childhood sexual experience on character development, and Jones became
a close family confidant and, eventually, Freud’s first serious biographer. From
1912 to 1924, these three joined with four other disciples to create a secret and
protective inner circle around Freud—a development precipitated by the angry
defections of Adler and Jung.
In the years following Freud’s death several younger therapists—while still
considering themselves Freudian—proposed modifications to psychoanalysis.
Anna,, who had accompanied her father to London, extended psychoanalytic
therapy to the treatment of young children, while maintaining Freud’s emphasis
on the centrality of the Oedipus complex in their development. Also in London
was Hungarian-born Melanie Klein (1882–1960), a protégé of Abraham and Jones
who also specialized in child analysis. Gradually she came to believe that Anna
Freud overemphasized the Oedipal period and that by far the most crucial forma-
tive relationship was the very first one, between the infant and mother. With its
greater emphasis on the child’s relationship to its first “love object,” Klein’s the-
ory generated an offshoot movement that became known as the object relations
school of psychoanalysis.
Another approach to child psychoanalysis was developed by Erik Erikson
(1902–1994), the son of Danish parents but raised in Germany, who studied with
Anna Freud in Vienna before emigrating to the United States. Although he
accepted the orthodox Freudian theory of childhood sexuality, he postulated a
complementary series of psychosocial stages to parallel the psychosexual events
Freud proposed. Erikson extended the developmental analysis by postulating the
“identity crisis” as characteristic of adolescence, and writing about early adult-
hood and even later stages of the life cycle.
The previously mentioned Horney emigrated to the United States in 1930,
where she continued to promote feminist issues while downplaying the impor-
tance of sexual factors and emphasizing social adaptation. As we shall see in
Chapter 12, she became an important influence on the future humanistic psy-
chologist Abraham Maslow. Horney, by coincidence, was joined in New York by
Adler, another Jewish emigré who also influenced Maslow, but whose break from
Freud had been much earlier and more dramatic than hers.
Adler had been Freud’s most prominent early supporter,
and also the first to publicly break from him. Adler, closely
followed by Jung, became the most famous of the Freudian
dissidents.
Adler and Individual Psychology

Alfred Adler (1870–1937; Figure 11.7), like Freud, grew up in
a large, lower middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. The two
boys’ circumstances were quite different, however. As the
oldest child in his immediate family, and also intellectually
precocious, young Freud was treated as a shining star and
given special privileges by his parents. Adler, by contrast,
was a second son with an active and popular older brother
(named Sigmund, coincidentally). Crippled by a severe case
of early childhood rickets (a softening of the bones now
known to be caused by vitamin D deficiency), young Alfred
at first could not possibly keep up. He developed a keen
Figure 11.7 Alfred Adler (1870–1937).
determination to overcome his handicap, however, and after
much hard work and a presumably healthier diet, he suc-
ceeded. He became strong and popular in his own right—and highly competitive
in his relationship with his brother.
Like Freud before him, Adler earned a medical degree from the University of
Vienna. He began his career as an eye doctor before switching to general practice
in a poor section of Vienna. In both of those capacities he encountered patients
with a wide variety of organic disabilities, and provided counselling on how to
deal with them. In the early 1900s Adler read The Interpretation of Dreams; when
Freud somehow learned of the young doctor’s interest, he invited him to join his
new Wednesday Psychological Society. Adler immediately became the group’s
most active participant and, after Freud, its leader. Gradully, however, tensions
arose, partly because of theoretical disagreements based on their differing medi-
cal backgrounds, and also due to personality differences.
Both men believed that a “complex”—a constellation of highly charged and
conflict-laden issues dating from childhood—plays a central role in both nor-
mal and abnormal psychological development. Freud naturally emphasized
the Oedipus complex, with its tangled network of “perverse” sexual attitudes
and impulses, directed mainly toward the parents. Adler, however, was more
impressed by the omnipresence of inferiority feelings during childhood. In his
own case, these feelings had focused intensely on his frail physical condition,
relative to the strength and vigor of his older brother. But all human children,
he recognized, come into the world in a state of extreme general inferiority,
incapable of fending for themselves and completely dependent on others for
survival. Adler believed the deepest source of human motivation lies in the
attempt to overcome this inferiority and to become independent masters of our
environment.
While Adler believed the general feeling of inferiority is universal, he also
argued that every child will experience a unique inferiority complex: an indi-
vidual’s most basic pattern of inferiority feelings and attitudes, determined by
a combination of innate and environmental factors from childhood. Some com-
plexes, like Adler’s own, are built upon early physical defects or disadvantages
that a child is strongly motivated to overcome. Adler was fond of citing historical
cases like the ancient Greek politician Demosthenes, who was born with a severe
speech impediment which he overcame so well that he became the most famous
orator of his time. Although such physical inferiorities are obviously important,
their role in a particular complex is modified by the child’s environment; in
Adler’s case, the constant presence of his older and stronger brother brought his
own physical weakness into sharper relief. Adler also emphasized the importance
of the child’s subjective assessment of personal inferiority. A gifted child who
is raised in an extremely demanding environment, for example, may develop a
much sharper sense of intellectual inferiority than an average child from whom
much less is expected.
By 1911 Adler’s divergences from Freud became serious enough that he
formally broke from the psychoanalytical group and created his own school of
theory and therapy. Although the concept of inferiority would be its dominant
theme, Adler’s conviction that everyone experiences and reacts to inferiority in
his or her unique way led him to name his system individual psychology.
Adler and his followers continued to probe memories from early life for the
sources of symptoms and conflicts, and to investigate dreams and fantasies to
bring to light unconscious or deeply suppressed memories and ideas, similar to
Freud’s approach. Unlike Freud, however, Adler did away with the analytic couch
and seated his patients in a chair directly facing him, symbolically treating them
as equals, thereby minimizing any sense of the inherent inferiority relative to the
therapist. The therapeutic conversations in Adlerian therapy had quite a different
focus from Freud’s. Whereas Freud probed the deeply personal and private roots
of the patients’ problems, Adler focused on their social contexts. For Freud, the
social conscience or superego was not an innate psychic feature, but something
acquired following an emotionally fraught repression of Oedipal and sexual
wishes. Adler saw humans as innately social, with an inborn motive or capacity
he called social interest: a desire to relate harmoniously and constructively with

fellow humans.
Consistent with his emphasis on socialization, Adler focused more attention
than Freud on the full dynamics within a child’s family, and on the birth
order effect. Without claiming universality, Adler theorized that different
types of inferiority feelings, and compensations for them, are typical for
children according to their birth order. Oldest children, for example, spend
their earliest years as only children who bask in the undivided attention of
their parents, whose approval assumes great importance. But when a younger
sibling arrives, they are supplanted as the prime object of attention, and as
a result their inferiority complexes will often entail feelings of vulnerabil-
ity, of never being completely exempt from displacement by an unforeseen
rival. Only children never get supplanted, but grow up without other children
in their immediate environment and have to cope with often being alone.
Second or middle children have older and more competent siblings to con-
tend with, and so, like Adler himself, may develop compensatory competitive
strivings. Youngest children in large families face the burden of being last in
a large group, but this may be moderated if they are pampered or treated as
special. None of these outcomes is automatic, and individual variations are
inevitable. But Adler believed a child’s role in his or her family constellation
was bound to be important in some way, and it was invariably discussed in
Adler’s therapy sessions.
Another feature of Adlerian therapy developed after he read a book by the
German writer Hans Vaihinger entitled (in translation) The Philosophy of “As If,”
which argued that many behavioral patterns are based on assumptions that are
actually false but are accepted as if they are true.23 Adler detected something
similar in many of his patients: they ran their lives according to what he called
guiding fictions—partially or completely incorrect ideas about the self, often
dating from childhood, that are believed to be true and may consciously or
unconsciously influence behavior. Sometimes their effects may be positive, as
when the fiction that “I can do anything I want as long as I put my mind to it” in-
spires someone to complete a difficult task. But sometimes they can be negative,
as when the childhood idea that “I am physically weaker than my older brother
and will never be able to keep up with him” leads to either helpless depression or
exaggerated and harmful competitiveness.
Much of Adlerian therapy attempted to uncover not the dark and deeply
repressed memories and impulses said to inhabit the Freudian unconscious,
but rather fictions and misconceptions about the self. Rightly or wrongly, these
kinds of ideas were regarded by Freud as less deeply repressed than his own
theory’s pathogenic ideas. Freud acknowledged that Adler’s

techniques were all right as far as they went, but added that
ultimately they were superficial, scratching only the surface
of the psyche. Adler was content to remain relatively close
to the surface, and numbered among his successful cases
several patients who had previously undergone full psycho-
analysis but still remained unhappy and uncured.
In 1932 Adler emigrated to New York, where he attracted
a strong following among younger psychologists. Although
never as universally famous as Freud, his basic therapeutic
and theoretical ideas have been continuously maintained
and developed in the Journal of Individual Psychology, and
by the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology,
which has several local affiliates.
Jung and Analytical Psychology

Freud’s second great disciple-turned-dissenter, Carl Jung
(1875-1961; Figure 11.8), grew up in the northern German-
speaking region of Switzerland, the son of a poor pastor in
Figure 11.8 Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). the Swiss Reformed Church and a mentally unstable mother.
His mother, Jung recalled, could seem relatively normal
during the day but was haunted by visions at night, and had to be hospitalized
for several months during his boyhood. Young Carl seemed to have inherited
or acquired some of his father’s scholarly and philosophical attitudes and his
mother’s more mystical and sometimes destabilizing tendencies. At one point
he had a fantasy of being two people: a schoolboy of his own time and a digni-
fied gentleman from the past. For a time he experienced fainting fits resembling
epilepsy. Throughout his life, he was fascinated with his own inner experiences.
His autobiography, written late in life, dealt less with documented facts and more
with recollections of his fantasies, dreams, and highly subjective reactions to
events from childhood onwards. The book was appropriately entitled Memories,
Dreams, and Reflections.24
Jung overcame his early emotional difficulties sufficiently to become an out-
standing student, and at age 20 he began medical training at the University of
Basel. There his attention was captured by a textbook on the newly named field
of psychiatry, and in 1900 he went to work at the large Burghölzi Hospital in
Zurich with the most famous psychiatrist of his time, Eugen Bleuler. Bleuler had
recently coined the diagnostic term schizophrenia for severe mental disturbances
marked by delusions, hallucinations, and other breaks with objective reality.
Under Bleuler Jung gathered considerable experience with schizophrenic and

other severely disturbed patients, becoming fascinated by their often strange
trains of association.
Bleuler had been impressed by Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and recom-
mended it to Jung. An intrigued Jung combined the ideas of Freud’s free asso-
ciation with Galton’s earlier invention of the word-association technique (see
Chapter 7) and developed a more formal version. Jung’s word-association test
consisted of a list of words presented to subjects with instructions to respond to
each “as quickly as possible [with] the first word that occurs to your mind.”25 The
examiner would record each response verbatim, as well as the amount of time
the subject took before producing it, and note any signs of anxiety or confusion.
As a more formally standardized approach to obtaining the data of Freudian free
association, the test provided clues to the nature of possible psychic “complexes,”
as Jung referred to them.
In 1906 Jung sent Freud a complimentary letter along with a copy of his
word-association test, and the next year accepted an invitation to visit Freud
at his home in Vienna. Jung completely charmed both Freud and his family.
Freud quickly concluded that this young and charismatic figure should be-
come his successor; not only was he clinically gifted, but as a non-Jew from
Switzerland his prominence in the movement would ensure that psychoanalysis
was not dismissed only as a special creation of Viennese Jewish culture. The
two corresponded with each other regularly and in 1909, after Freud was invited
to visit America, he persuaded his host G. Stanley Hall to invite Jung as a fellow
participant.
In the following few years Jung increasingly chafed under Freud’s affectionate
but sometimes overbearing attitude and demand for total loyalty. More impor-
tantly, Jung was starting to believe that although Freud’s theory was correct for
some cases, it told only part of the full story. He agreed that there is a “personal
unconscious” with major sexual content, but came to feel it could contain other
kinds of wishes and conflicts as well. Freud used the term libido to denote the
specifically sexual energy that activates the unconscious; Jung used the term
to represent psychic energy in general, with sexuality being just one variety of
it. Tensions came to a head in late 1912, leading Jung to follow Adler’s example
and formally break from the psychoanalytic group and create his own movement
called analytical psychology.
Underlying Jung’s break was a fundamental philosophical difference from
Freud. From his own dreams and those of his patients, and from other sources
such as mythology, the artwork of children, and decorative art from various
cultures, Jung concluded that there are certain archetypes—universal images,
themes, and ideas—that originate not out of personal experience but rather from
an innate collective unconscious. In some ways resembling Plato’s ideal forms
and Descartes’s innate ideas, Jung’s archetypes included the basic inspirations
for dreams or myths concerning the mother, the father, the “trickster,” or cultural
memories of a great flood.
Many of Jung’s presumed archetypes were visual, and one that he particu-
larly emphasized was the image of a mandala (Sanskrit for “circle”), a spiritual
and ritual symbol representing the universe. Examples of mandalas ranged
from a simple radiating sun in children’s drawings, to highly elaborate rose
windows in cathedrals or the beautiful circular designs found in Buddhist art.
In addition to symbolizing the totality of the universe, for Jung the mandala
represented the potential unity and wholeness of the human psyche. The
ideal psychological condition, he believed, was one of balance among many
tendencies, some of them diametrically opposed, and the mandala symbolized
this sense of harmony.
The notion of balance remained a constant theme throughout Jung’s theo-
rizing. He famously proposed a personality dimension he called extroversion-
introversion, denoting a person’s relative orientation toward the outer world or
the inner world. In current popular usage, these terms have assumed a primarily
social connotation. Extroverts tend to be gregarious, talkative, and most com-
fortable in groups; introverts prefer reflective solitary activities, such as reading
and writing, and often feel shy in large groups. For Jung, the terms signified a
more general tendency to be temperamentally oriented either externally toward
the objective, outside world, or internally toward one’s own deeply subjective
experiences. Significantly, he saw this as a major differentiator between Freud
and himself.
Freud, Jung believed, saw the inner world as essentially a seething mass of
largely unconscious and sexual impulses (the id) striving for satisfactions in the
external world, and in the service of that goal the psyche’s “eye” (the pcpt.-cs. on
top in Figure 11.4) is firmly pointed toward the external world. Jung, by contrast,
saw the unconscious with its inherited collective features as much larger than
Freud did, with its archetypes containing germs of potential insight and wisdom.
As Jung summarized in his autobiography:
[Freud] was blind to the paradox and ambiguity of the contents of the
unconscious, and did not know that everything which arises out of the
unconscious has a top and a bottom, an inside and an outside. When we
speak of the outside—and that is what Freud did—we are considering only
half of the whole.26
For Jung, the ideal psychic condition was to achieve ER WORLD

OUT
a balance between extroversion and introversion, or
an ability to alternate voluntarily between the two.
RSON A
PE
As Jung went on to elaborate his own model of ss Co
e
the psyche, shown in Figure 11.9, the notion of bal-
ns
n
us
cio
EGO
c io
ance was further emphasized. The top half, oriented
usn
Cons
ess
toward the outer world, closely approximates the
totality of Freud’s version (see Figure 11.4). Jung’s Personal SELF Unconscious
top half is dominated by an ego that attempts to re-
solve the conflicting demands arising from external
Colle
ous
s ci
reality and those from the body and the personal
ctiv
S H AD O W
on
e
unconscious. It creates the compromises and de-
nc
U
fenses that result in one’s overt and public behavior. AN
IMUS ANIMA
-
Jung used the term persona (Greek for “mask”) to
denote the public face or appearance that one presents
to the external world. INNE
R WORLD
The bottom half of Jung’s model, oriented toward
that inner world to which the extroverted Freud was Figure 11.9 Jung’s model of the psyche.
presumably blind, was essentially a mirror image of
the top. Drawing on the collective as well as the personal unconscious, it is
dominated by the shadow, a structure that is essentially the inverse of the ego,
containing representations of all of the conflict-reducing decisions not made
by the ego. Deepest within the shadow lies the opposite of the public persona
one presents to the world. Perhaps reflecting the gender-role stereotypes of his
time, Jung referred to this as either the animus (signifying the repressed mas-
culine characterisitics of someone with a feminine persona) or the anima (the
reverse for someone with a masculine persona).
Central in Jung’s model was something he called the Self, representing a
person’s subjective awareness and appreciation of the coexistence of his or her
ego and shadow. Jung thought that during childhood, while the ego and persona
are developing into their early adult forms, the Self remains relatively small. As
a person ages, however, Jung thought it desirable for the Self to expand, at least
to acknowledge, and at best to partially express, those qualities that had been
relegated to the shadow. Freud, for all of his courage and skill in probing the
personal unconscious, was for Jung an extreme extrovert who never achieved this
desirable state: “He remained the victim of the one aspect [of his personality] he
could recognize, and for that reason I see him as a tragic figure.”27.
These concepts represent a high level of abstraction. In concrete Jungian
analysis, the traditional techniques of free association to dreams and fantasies
would be applied, but with a focus on extracting meaning not so much from
repressed sexual experience as from the more philosophical and “spiritual” issues
emphasized by Jung. The main goal was helping the patient achieve balance in
his or her psychic life.
Although Jungian psychology never achieved the same level of fame and
popularity as psychoanalysis, it attracted considerable favorable attention from
people with strong interests in cultural history and the arts. Among Jung’s
wealthy clients were Paul Mellon of the famous banking family and his wife Mary
Conover Mellon, who in 1945 established the Bollingen Foundation, named after
Jung’s country home in Bollingen, Switzerland. The Foundation supported the
publication of a uniform edition of Jung’s own collected works, plus more than
200 other volumes on broadly Jungian topics, including the history of art and
mythology, and symbolism in the arts.
In 2009 Jung scholarship was enhanced with the publication of an annotated
facsimile edition of his Red Book, a large red leatherbound notebook in which
Jung privately recorded his most intimate thoughts and reflections, illustrated
with many hand-drawn mandalas and other images, over a period of fifteen years.28
Although much less accessible to a general reader than his Memories, Dreams,
and Reflections, this volume reveals the personal origins of many of his ideas, as
well as the highly introverted and introspective side to his own personality.
In the universities, several early twentieth-century psychologists acknowledged
Jung’s word-association procedure as an early example of an objective psycho-
logical test, and more significantly, his concept of extroversion-introversion
was eagerly adopted by pioneering researchers in the new field of personality
psychology (see Chapter 12). In the early 1920s, Jung expanded this concept
in his theory of psychological types, in which he proposed two additional
dimensions defining a person’s preferred mode of perception and mode of
judgement. In perception, he argued, a person’s conscious experiences arise pri-
marily through sensations from the external world or from intuitions arising
from within. Judgments about those perceptions then occur along a dimension
ranging from a coldly rational thinking process to a highly emotionalized feel-
ing about them. Although few people lie at the far extremes of any of these
dimensions, Jung believed that most would show general preferences for one
or the other. Therefore, any person could be classified as one of eight possible
types: introverted or extroverted in basic attitude, senser or intuiter in percep-
tion, and thinker or feeler in judgment. In the 1940s a slightly modified version
of these dimensions became the basis for a highly successful personality test,
the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, developed by the mother and daughter team
of Catherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers.
FREUD AND ACADEMIC PSYCHOLOGY

Like Jung, Adler, and most of the other pioneers in this chapter, Freud was
primarily a clinician, and although his work involved psychological issues, his
direct contact with academic psychologists was limited. As noted, he studied
briefly with Brentano while a young university student, and his early writings
made occasional and usually fleeting reference to the work of Fechner and
Wundt. But his primary emphasis was clinical, and his German-language works
attracted little attention from academic psychologists until 1906. That year
a few Boston psychiatrists published a short article on new approaches to the
treatment of hysteria, concluding with “Remarks on Freud’s Method of Treatment
by ‘Psycho-Analysis.’”29 This appeared in the very first issue of the new Journal
of Abnormal Psychology, created by Prince and Allport, and directed at psycholo-
gists interested in psychopathology (see Chapter 10).
Among the psychologists who read the article was the formidable G. Stanley
Hall, President of Clark University and director of America’s largest graduate
program in psychology. As described in Chapter 8, Hall had also popularized
the word adolescence. Newly alerted to Freud’s growing significance, Hall
noted that the psychoanalyst’s recently published Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality suggested the two shared common interests in children’s development
and sexuality. Seeing Freud as a potentially important ally, Hall invited him to
participate as a speaker at Clark University’s twentieth-anniversary celebration,
joining a group that included several distinguished experimental psychologists.
Freud agreed, and also convinced Hall to invite his then-protégé Jung to accom-
pany him and be the youngest speaker.
At that event in the autumn of 1909, Freud delivered five informal lectures
in German, telling the chronological story of how he had arrived at the main
points of his theory and technique. Although Freud was not the only distin-
guished speaker, Hall made sure his lectures received wide coverage in the
popular press. More importantly, Hall persuaded Freud to reproduce his lec-
tures in writing, which he promptly had translated into English and published
in the American Journal of Psychology under the title “The Origin and Devel-
opment of Psychoanalysis.” These articles vividly and clearly presented Freud
to the English-speaking world, and they remain excellent introductions to his
thought.30 The success of this publication opened the gates for English trans-
lations of Freud’s longer works, with The Interpretation of Dreams appearing
in 1913, followed by translations of most of his major works, many appearing
almost immediately after their publication in German.
The Clark conference marked Freud’s only venture to the United States, and
his only personal interaction with the country’s academic psychologists. The
Figure 11.10 Participants at the 1909 Clark University conference.
famous photograph in Figure 11.10 shows all the conference participants. Hall
is the tall figure in the center of the front row, with Freud to his right and Jung
next to Freud. E. B. Titchener is second left in the front row, with William James
to the right of him.
Hall’s positive reaction to Freud was not shared by most of the other psychol-
ogists. Freud’s method of free association ran directly counter to Titchener’s
rules for scientific and objective introspection (see Chapter 5). Titchener insisted
that introspectors must be rigorously trained to strip subjective meanings
from their analyses and to reduce consciousness to its most elemental sensa-
tions; free association aimed to discover the subjective meaning of apparently
meaningless dreams and fantasies. Therefore, when Freud first met Titchener at
the conference’s opening reception he remarked, “Oh, you are the opponent!”—to
which Titchener replied that he was less an opponent than someone who could
“translate” Freud’s theories “into modern psychological terms.” Freud responded
that if Titchener would only spend some time with him, he would see that all
modern psychology needed to be “revolutionized” along psychoanalytic lines.
Titchener reportedly thought but refrained from saying aloud: “Revolutionised,

ye gods! That means, set back just about two generations.”31
A frail William James, ailing with a serious heart condition, visited Clark for
just one day “to see what Freud was like.” The two had a polite private conver-
sation, in which James impressed Freud with his fortitude in the face of severe
illness but which left James unconverted. He remarked privately that Freud
seemed to be a “regular halluciné” and “a man obsessed with fixed ideas.” He
admired Freud’s sincerity, however, and hoped the psychoanalysts “would push
their ideas to their utmost limits.”32
As Freud’s translated works became increasingly prominent in the popular
media, however, other mainstream American psychologists showed less restraint
and began publicly treating psychoanalysis with contempt. Knight Dunlap, who
was John B. Watson’s senior colleague at Johns Hopkins, described psychoanal-
ysis as waging “an assault on the very life of the biological sciences,” an attempt
to “creep in wearing the uniform of science, and to strangle it from the inside.”33
As noted in Chapter 9, Watson himself took a sarcastic swipe at Freud in the
case report of Little Albert by portraying a fictional psychoanalyst twenty years
later investigating Albert’s continuing fear of furry objects and “teas[ing] from
him a dream which upon their analysis will show that Albert at three years of
age attempted to play with the pubic hair of the mother and was scolded vio-
lently for it.”34 The powerful James McKeen Cattell publicly described Freud at
a 1923 psychology convention as someone “who lives in the fairyland of dreams
among the ogres of perverted sex.”35 Consistent with these attitudes, most con-
ventional psychology textbooks throughout the 1920s paid little or no attention
to psychoanalysis.
These objections ran against the tide of popular culture, however, as the poten-
tial relevance of psychoanalysis to everyday issues made Freud’s name a house-
hold word in America. By the early 1920s he had been featured on the cover of
Time magazine, and the lyrics of a popular song declaimed, “Don’t tell me what
you dream’d last night, For I’ve been reading Freud!”36 As Freud’s popularity grew,
the words psychology and psychoanalysis became increasingly confused with
each other in the public mind.
By the early 1930s, the tide began to turn. Some younger psychologists began
arguing that psychoanalytic ideas should not be dismissed but instead they
should be regarded as hypotheses to be investigated experimentally in labo-
ratory situations. Among the first of these was Saul Rosenzweig (1907–2004),
whose doctoral research at Harvard investigated the memory for completed
versus incompleted or interrupted tasks. Previous research by Lewin’s student
Bluma Zeigarnik had shown that when subjects were asked to remember a series
of tasks they had performed, some of which had been interrupted before their
completion, their recall of the uncompleted tasks was significantly greater than
for the completed tasks. Rosenzweig’s new twist was to deliberately lead some
of his subjects to interpret the incompletion of their tasks as a personal failure,
telling them that most people found the tasks very easy to complete. Under
this condition Zeigarnik’s results were reversed, as the incompleted, “failed”
tasks were more likely to be forgotten than the completed ones. Rosenzweig
interpreted these results as an experimental demonstration of repression, the
motivated forgetting of negative events.
When Rosenzweig sent Freud a copy of his study, the reply was unenthusiastic:
“I cannot put much value on these confirmations because the wealth of reliable
observations on which [psychoanalytic] assertions rest make them independent
of experimental verification,” he wrote, but “still it can do no harm.”37 From the
beginning, Freud had been indifferent to the results of laboratory investigations
of his theory, believing that they inevitably lacked the real-life authenticity of
actual clinical cases.
Despite Freud’s condescension, however, Rosenzweig’s study showed that at
least some psychoanalytic concepts could be brought into the lab, and it initiated
a new strategy for many psychologists. Instead of ignoring or denigrating
Freudian ideas, they would design controlled experiments to determine validity.
In the words of historian Gail Hornstein, they would presumably establish
themselves “as arbiters of the mental world, able to make the final judgement
about what would and would not count as psychological knowledge.” The extent
to which they actually achieved that goal may be debatable, but Hornstein
documented how research by psychologists on psychoanalytically related ideas
quickly exploded into a growth industry.38 Empirical studies of topics such as
dreams, childhood experience and character development, stages of sexual
development, the role of conflict in learning, and the development of neurotic
and psychotic responses proliferated in the psychology journals, with more
than 400 published in the 1940s and 1950s and at least a thousand more by the
mid-1970s.
Many of these studies, including those inspired by the theories of Jung, Adler,
and other neo-Freudians, played an important role in the development of a new
subdiscipline of personality psychology that began to flourish in the 1930s (as
shall be described in Chapter 12). Today, personality psychology is taught in the
psychology departments of virtually all colleges and universities. Ironically, how-
ever, many of these courses and their textbooks fail to acknowledge the formative
role of Freudian and other psychoanalytical concepts in establishing the field.
Chapter Review 443
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
Freud developed the technique of free association, which Metapsychology was Freud’s term for his broad the-
encouraged patients simply to let their thoughts run free, oretical models of the mind, the most famous of which
as a nonhypnotic method of revealing the pathogenic ideas divided the psyche into the id, ego, and superego. The ego
of his hysteria patients. This led him to appreciate the im- attempts to find compromises in response to conflicting
portance of intrapsychic conflict, repression, overdetermina- instinctual demands from the id, moral demands from the
tion, and unconscious sexual ideas. Following a self-analysis superego, and reality demands from the external world.
of his own dreams, he concluded that both dreams and Late in life he hypothesized, very controversially, that the
hysteria result from a similar primary process, in which un- female superego is weaker than the male’s.
conscious wishes of an anxiety-arousing and often sexual After 1905 psychoanalysis became a movement that
nature are transformed into the consciously experienced attracted both supporters and influential dissidents. Among
manifest content of the dream, or the physical conversion the latter, Adler developed individual psychology, which
symptoms of hysteria. Following his self-analysis Freud pos- featured the inferiority complex, guiding fictions, and social
tulated the Oedipus complex as a nearly universal conse- interest. Jung established analytic psychology, featuring
quence of childhood development and proposed a theory a collective unconscious, the concept of extroversion-
of childhood sexuality in which a child first experiences an introversion, and the importance of balance in a theory of
undifferentiated state of polymorphous perversity and then psychological types. As psychoanalysis became increas-
passes through oral, anal, and genital stages before arriving ingly well known and popular, academic psychologists,
at adult heterosexuality. Fixations during any of these stages after initially treating it with contempt, gradually began to
can result in character traits in the adult personality. From test some of its concepts in laboratory situations. This out-
the unsuccessful but instructive case of Dora, Freud learned come helped lay the groundwork for a new subdiscipline
that patients often unconsciously transfer feelings about of personality psychology.
important figures in their past lives onto the analyst.
Key Pioneers
Sigmund Freud, p. 404 Ernst Brücke, p. 407 Melanie Klein, p. 430
Josef Breuer, p. 404 Ida Bauer, p. 419 Erik Erikson, p. 430
Bertha Pappenheim, Anna Freud, p. 425 Alfred Adler, p. 431
p. 404 Karen Horney, p. 428 Carl Jung, p. 434
Franz Brentano, p. 406 Clara Thompson, p. 428 Saul Rosenzweig, p. 441
Key Terms
cathartic method, p. 405 phallic/genital character,
pathogenic idea, p. 405 p. 419
conversion, p. 405 case of Dora, p. 419
psychoanalysis, p. 406 transference, p. 421
act psychology, p. 407 metapsychology, p. 423
intentionality, p. 407 id, p. 424
free association, p. 409 pcpt.-cs., p. 424
overdetermination, p. 410 superego, p. 424
repression, p. 410 ego, p. 424
intrapsychic conflict, p. 410 defense mechanism, p. 425
seduction theory, p. 411 displacement, p. 425
The Interpretation of Dreams, projection, p. 425
p. 412 intellectualization, p. 426
manifest content, p. 412 rationalization, p. 426
latent content, p. 412 identification, p. 426
dream work, p. 413 castration complex, p. 427
displacement, p. 413 Thanatos, p. 429
condensation, p. 413 Eros, p. 429
concrete representation, p. 413 object relations, p. 430
primary process, p. 414 inferiority complex, p. 432
secondary process, p. 414 individual psychology,
wish fulfillment hypothesis, p. 432
p. 415 social interest, p. 433
Oedipus complex, p. 417 birth order effect, p. 433
polymorphous perversity, p. 418 guiding fiction, p. 433
erogenous zone, p. 418 word-association test, p. 435
oral zone, p. 418 analytical psychology, p. 435
anal zone, p. 418 archetypes, p. 435
genital zone, p. 418 collective unconscious, p. 436
fixation, p. 419 mandala, p. 436
anal character, p. 419 extroversion-introversion, p. 436
oral character, p. 419 psychological types, p. 438
Chapter Review 445

1. One of the criticisms of psychoanalysis by academic psychologists was that, as a theory,
it had not been subject to rigorous experimental testing. Freud had developed his
theory largely from observations of patients and their clinical case material. What are
the strengths and limitations of each approach to theory development?
2. Although Freud’s theories are not accepted by all, identify and describe a number of
Freudian concepts or ideas that occur in everyday language and continue to shape our
experience.
3. Horney and Thompson were two female analysts who disagreed with aspects of Freud’s
theory of female development. What were some of their criticisms? What were their
alternative proposals?
4. Important differences among the theories of Freud, Adler, and Jung arose partly because
of their varying backgrounds and personalites. Describe some specific differences you
would cite in support of that argument, and explain why.
5. In what ways do Freudian concepts influence how you interpret your own behaviors,
and those of others?
Suggested Resources
The website http://www.freudfile.org/resources.html includes links to many useful online
resources on Freud. There is no better introduction to Freud’s thought than his own The
Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis (his 1909 Clark University lectures) which is
available for free on Christopher Green’s Classics in the History of Psychology website at
http://www.psychclassics.yorku.ca. Jung’s original articles describing his word-association
test and his theory of psychological types are also available at that website.
Freud’s complete psychological works have been translated, edited, and fully
documented in twenty-four volumes by James Strachey in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974). For
a sympathetic and comprehensive biography, see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time
(New York: Norton, 1988). For a more detailed chronological account of Freud’s works than
could be presented in this chapter, see Raymond Fancher’s Psychoanalytic Psychology:
The Development of Freud’s Thought (New York: Norton, 1973). Gail Hornstein provides an
excellent account of Freud’s complex reception by academic experimental psychologists
in “The Return of the Repressed: Psychology’s Problematic Relations with Psychoanalysis,
1909–1960,” American Psychologist 47 (1992): 254–263.
The standard introduction to Adler and his works is H. Ansbacher and R. Ansbacher, eds.
The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Systematic Presentation in Selections from His
Writings (New York: Basic Books, 1956; Harper Torchbooks, 1964). Although some of its fac-
tual details have been questioned, Jung’s autobiographical Memories, Dreams, and Reflections
(New York: Vintage Books, 1965) provides an engaging first-person portrait of the man and his
way of thinking. Sonu Shamdasani’s extended Introduction to C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber
Novus: A Reader’s Edition, ed. S. Shamdasani, trans. M. Kyburz, J. Peck, and S. Shamdasani
(New York: Norton, 2009) provides a good summary of recent Jung scholarship.
12_POP_28354_ch11_402-445.indd 445 18/10/16 4:03 PM

CHAPTER 12
Psychology Gets “Personality”:
Allport, Maslow, and the
Broadening Field
Allport and Personality Psychology

Personality Psychology Comes of Age
Allport’s Later Career
Maslow and Humanistic Psychology
New York as the “New Athens”
Maslow’s Theory of Human Motivation
Establishing a Humanistic Psychology
I n April 1921, the young Ph.D. student Gordon Allport nervously awaited his
chance to deliver a three-minute summary of his dissertation research at
the annual meeting of Titchener’s Society of Experimental Psychologists. As
noted in Chapter 5, Titchener had created this exclusively male organization
to promote a scientific approach to psychology, such as that represented by his
theory of structuralism, which reduced all conscious experience to its most
elemental sensations and feelings. At these meetings, select students were
invited to deliver summaries of their research, after which—it was hoped—
the powerful Titchener would express his approval. For many budding male
experimental psychologists, this was considered a major rite of passage into
professional respectability.
447
448 12 | Psychology Gets “Personality”: Allport, Maslow, and the Broadening Field
Titchener had also been the main opponent to Freud at the 1909 Clark
University conference and had set the tone for most academic psychologists in
their subsequent antagonism toward psychoanalysis (see Chapter 11). Allport’s
invitation to the meeting may have been a mistake, because his dissertation
research focused on the new psychological topic of “personality.” Although not
explicitly psychoanalytic, it was still a “soft” subject that had some relevance
to psychoanalysis. It contrasted markedly with the “hard” subjects of the other
student research, mainly on sensory topics such as the perceived brightness
of different metals. Titchener’s reaction was predictably negative, and Allport
recalled that his report was “punished by the rebuke of total silence from the
group, punctuated by a glare of disapproval from Titchener,” who subsequently
asked his Harvard supervisor Herbert Langfeld why he had permitted a student
to work on such an unscientific problem.1
Any disappointment Allport felt was only temporary, however, as the kindly
Langfeld consoled him by saying, “You don’t care what Titchener thinks,” and
soon after that, Allport recalled, “I found that I did not.”2 In fact, the episode
marked a turning point at which the narrow introspective experimentalism rep-
resented by Titchener was about to decline in influence, and academic psychol-
ogy would undergo a significant broadening of its scope. Allport would be at the
forefront of this movement. Within three years he began teaching the first uni-
versity courses explicitly devoted to the psychology of personality, and tirelessly
promoted the field as an important new area of specialization.
Another small but significant sign of the new intellectual climate occurred
six years later when a bright young Cornell University undergraduate named
Abraham Maslow enrolled in what would be Titchener’s final offering of
his introductory psychology course before his death in August of that year.
Although enthusiastic about the idea of psychology, Maslow found Titchener’s
rigorous course was “awful and bloodless and had nothing to do with people,
so I shuddered and turned away from it.”3 Fortunately, Maslow soon transferred
to the University of Wisconsin, where he encountered several more substantial
and socially relevant approaches to psychology, and wound up completing an
innovative dissertation on the social behavior of monkeys.
Allport and Maslow were alike in writing groundbreaking doctoral
dissertations that stretched the boundaries of acceptable topics for psychological
research. They shared a further similarity in their immediate postgraduate years,
by significantly expanding their outlooks after being exposed to important
European psychologists. Allport traveled to Germany where he encountered
and embraced Gestalt psychology in several of its forms. And Maslow, located
in New York City in the late 1930s, met and befriended several of the eminent
emigrés who had collected there after fleeing Nazism, including several promi-
nent Gestalt psychologists and neo-Freudian psychoanalysts.
With their enriched backgrounds, both of them went on to pioneer important
new domains within academic psychology. For Allport it was the extremely diverse
field of personality psychology, which uses methods ranging from individual
case studies through the large-scale statistical analysis of the interrelationships
of various personality traits. Maslow, after writing an early book on abnormal
psychology, became increasingly interested in the topic of what enables people
to be normal or healthy. He formulated a new theory of human motives arranged
in a hierarchy and promoted a new “third force” in psychology, after behaviorism
and psychoanalysis, that became known as humanistic psychology.
Needless to say, neither Allport nor Maslow operated in a vacuum as they
developed their ideas, being joined and supported by many others within a recep-
tive intellectual climate. Their individual stories, however, illustrate an important
stage in the development and evolution of modern academic psychology into the
diverse and inclusive discipline it remains today.
ALLPORT AND PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY

The youngest of four accomplished brothers, Gordon W. Allport (1897–1967)
grew up in suburban Cleveland, Ohio. His father, an entrepreneurial doctor, and
his mother, a retired schoolteacher with a strong religious sensibility, provided a
home life “marked by plain Protestant piety and hard work.”4 An excellent high
school student, Gordon was accepted in 1915 at Harvard, where his older brother
Floyd had already received his bachelor’s degree and was currently working on
his pioneering Ph.D. in experimental social psychology (see Chapter 10). Gordon
soon became an honor student in the areas of social ethics and psychology. While
studying social ethics, he became involved in many volunteer activities and “got
a tremendous kick out of doing good.”5 He remained a committed social activist
for his entire life.
His classroom introduction to psychology came from the German Hugo
Münsterberg, James’s successor at Harvard whose contributions to applied
psychology will be discussed fully in Chapter 15. Although Allport found aspects
of Münsterberg’s German-accented lectures mystifying, he was fascinated by
his teacher’s argument that there are two legitimate but fundamentally differ-
ent kinds of psychology: one causal and objective, emphasizing the determin-
istic and mechanistic links between specific stimuli and the responses they
produce; and the other purposive and subjective, requiring psychologists to enter
into and share their subjects’ particular thought processes and points of view.
Allport recalled that “the blank page dividing the two corresponding sections
of [Münsterberg’s] textbook intrigued me,” and although he could not fully

grasp the differences between them at the time, he wondered, “Could they not be
reconciled and fused?”6
Münsterberg’s dual conception of psychology represented a general attitude
more common among continental European than English-speaking theorists.
We have seen how continental thinkers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and
Wundt—each in their own distinctive ways—emphasized that mechanistic expla-
nations could not completely account for the highest mental functions and the
subjective qualities of consciousness and will. While acknowledging an impor-
tant role for the mechanistic view, each felt there were limits to that approach,
and that some sort of complementary, nonmechanistic mode of understanding
was also required. Intrigued by Münsterberg’s version of this idea, Allport would
later visit Germany and explore it more thoroughly.
Following Münsterberg’s class, Allport was exposed to a more typically
American vision of psychology. Initiated earlier by James, Harvard psychology
tended to be broadminded, pluralistic, and oriented toward pragmatic goals.
One strong promoter of this approach was Gordon’s older brother Floyd, who
at that time was conducting his groundbreaking dissertation research on social
facilitation (see Chapter 10). Although socially relevant in its subject matter, this
research also reflected the behavioristic requirement of Watson and others that it
should be framed in terms of strictly observable, objective stimuli and responses
(see Chapter 9). Gordon served as one of the subjects in Floyd’s study and, more
significantly, engaged in long discussions with him about the importance of
proper methods and aims for psychology. As a top student in both psychology
and social ethics, Gordon received his Harvard bachelor’s degree on the same
day in 1919 that Floyd received his doctorate in psychology (Figure 12.1).
The Emergence of “Personality”

After graduation Allport taught English and sociology for a year at a small
American-operated school in Turkey before accepting a fellowship offer from
Harvard to return for a Ph.D. in psychology. On his way home he stopped in
Vienna to visit another older brother who was working there. Freud, who was just
then getting famous in the English-speaking world, lived there too, and Allport
later recalled: “With a callow forwardness characteristic of age twenty-two,
I wrote to Freud that I was in Vienna and implied that no doubt he would be
glad to make my acquaintance.” Surprisingly, Freud invited him to his office,
and Allport found himself in the uncomfortable position of having wrangled an
interview without knowing what he would talk about. Grasping for something to
say, he impulsively told Freud about a small boy he had recently observed who
had loudly and publicly expressed great anxiety about get-

ting dirty. Hoping Freud might be interested in this account
of a juvenile dirt phobia, Allport was “flabbergasted” when
Freud “fixed his kindly therapeutic eyes upon me and said,
‘And was that little boy you?’”7
Those who knew Allport personally have noted that he
was in fact fastidious about his own appearance and
cleanliness, displaying at least some of the traits of a
well-adjusted Freudian anal character. In addition, as the
youngest of four brothers he may have been especially
sensitive to being characterized as a “little boy.”8 In retro
spect Allport himself acknowledged that in a therapeutic
setting Freud’s comment might have been appropriate, but
felt that in this more casual context, therapy was not at issue.
Freud had apparently failed to appreciate his “manifest
motivation”—a “sort of rude curiosity and youthful am-
bition.” The experience suggested to Allport that “depth
psychology”—his general term for psychologies like Freud’s
or Jung’s that emphasize unconscious motvation—has its
merits but at times “may plunge too deep, and . . . psychol-
ogists would do well to give full recognition to manifest
motives before probing the unconscious.”9 Figure 12.1 Gordon (left) and Floyd Allport on
Allport held this attitude for the rest of his life. He always graduation day at Harvard, 1919.
acknowledged the importance of psychoanalysis and did
much to promote its acceptance by academic psychologists. But he also insisted
that when dealing with normal people in everyday situations, this approach
should always be preceded and complemented by an understanding of their
more conscious assessments of themselves.
Once back at Harvard, Allport sought a dissertation topic that would be
socially relevant like psychoanalysis, but more attuned to everyday life and
social normality. He was helped here by Floyd, who had recently accepted a
junior faculty position at Harvard while also becoming co-editor of the renamed
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (see Chapter 10). Floyd made Gordon
his editorial assistant, so the young graduate student was in a privileged position
to learn about new developments in a broad range of psychological areas. Among
the emerging new topics was personality, a word that was gradually assuming a
new meaning for psychologists. Derived from the Greek word persona, desig-
nating the mask worn by an actor in early drama that defined a particular role or
character, the term had taken on some medical connotations during the 1800s
13_POP_28354_ch12_446-491.indd 451 18/10/16 4:04 PM

as psychiatrists began writing about “alterations of personality” or “personality

disorders.” During the early 1900s, the term gained further meaning as a rough
substitute for the traditional psychological word character, indicating a set of
qualities or traits that make a person distinctive (i.e., that are characteristic of her
or him). The word also carried evaluative or moral connotations, however, in the
sense that a person’s character is often thought of as being either good or bad.
As psychologists strove to make their field more objective, a more neutral term
seemed desirable. Individual variations in character were increasingly relabeled,
and seen in a broader and less moralistic context, as differences in “personality”.10
Also in the early 1900s the development of psychological tests was well under
way. The most prominent of these were intelligence tests (as we’ll see in more
detail in Chapter 13), but at the same time, a few psychologists became interested
in measuring some “nonintellective” characteristics with instruments that soon
became known as “personality tests.” The University of Wyoming psychologist
June Etta Downey, for example, used features of handwriting analysis in 1919 to
obtain scores on personal traits such as impulsivity, carefulness, and forcefulness
in her Individual Will-Temperament Test. That same year Columbia University’s
Robert Woodworth published the Personal Data Sheet, a series of questions to
be answered yes or no, intended as a test of emotional stability to screen out
soldiers who were psychologically unfit for active duty in World War I. Although
completed too late to be used in the war, it was one of the first attempts to develop
an objective, self-report personality test.
Significantly, these developments occurred just as Freudian and other psycho-
dynamic clinical theories were becoming widely known, providing new catego-
ries of character or personality differences for description and analysis. Freud’s
anal and oral characters, described in Chapter 11, were obvious examples. More
immediately influential was Jung’s formulation of extroversion-introversion as a
fundamental dimension of temperamental difference, and its associated theory of
psychological types (see Chapter 11).
These ideas about personality were all very much in circulation in 1921,
but the Allport brothers realized that to this point they had been expressed in
isolated studies, and no one had yet provided a systematic overview of what they
called an “elusive term.” The unifying concept of personality studies, they con-
cluded, was their focus on individual differences in traits: habitual patterns of
behavior, temperament, intelligence, sociality, and emotion that differentiate one
person from another. They co-wrote an article entitled “Personality Traits: Their
Classification and Measurement,” which was conveniently promptly published
in the journal they co-edited.11 They proposed a general model for the composi-
tion of personality, consisting of four groups of traits under the general headings
of Intelligence, Temperament, Self-Expression, and Sociality. Temperamental

traits included emotional breadth and strength, self-expressive ones included
extroversion-introversion and ascendance-submission, and sociality highlighted
social participation and susceptibility to social stimuli.
Gordon’s dissertation research, which displeased Titchener a short time
later, was essentially a pilot study to empirically assess the promise of the new
model. From fifty-five Harvard undergraduates he obtained both self-ratings and
ratings from close friends on ten nonintellective personality traits from the
model. The results, based on a small sample of subjects from a restricted pop-
ulation and using new and unvalidated measures, were suggestive rather than
conclusive. Sometimes the friends’ ratings disagreed with each other, or con-
flicted with the self-ratings. The various trait measures did not correlate with
one another in consistent patterns. The most suggestive findings occurred when
the subjects’ results were represented on a graph, making it easy to distinguish
individualized “profiles” (such as introverted or extroverted, with high or low
social interests and high or low emotionality). This seemed a promising but
as-yet unvalidated avenue for summarizing individual personalities. In gen-
eral, then, Allport’s dissertation demonstrated the potential for a systematic
approach to research on personality—potential that he and others would try hard
to fulfill in the years ahead.
After completing his Ph.D. Allport won a fellowship for postgraduate study
in Germany where some of the mystery he had earlier perceived in Münster-
berg’s division of psychology began to dissipate. In Berlin, where Wertheimer
and Köhler were young professors, he learned about a new concept he had not
heard of: Gestalt psychology. Unlike the behavioristic and atomistic psychology
that prevailed in America, in which the whole organism was conceived of as the
sum total of all its separate response tendencies, here was a “top-down” approach
in which a unifying whole could be much more than the sum of its parts (see
Chapter 4). Allport later described this as a “kind of psychology I had been
longing for but did not know existed.”12
Moving from Berlin to Hamburg, Allport found a mentor who had adopted
a Gestalt-like approach to the study of personality. The versatile and prolific
William Stern (1871–1938; Figure 12.2) promoted a personalistic psychology in
which the central concept was the individual and the main goal was understanding
each person’s individuality. Stern argued that there are two ways to approach this
goal. One was to investigate what he called relational individuality, defined by
the subject person’s relative or statistical positions on a large variety of separately
measured traits. When the number of traits is large, no two people are likely to
have exactly the same pattern of scores, even though they may be the same on
a small number of the traits. Allport’s dissertation research

results illustrated this kind of individuality, as no two of his
subjects wound up with exactly the same graphic profile
across all of the ten traits he measured. More important to
Stern than relational individuality, however, was what he
called real individuality, a Gestalt-like conception of each
person’s unique and unified self that is more than the sum
of its individual characteristics. Real individuality must
be approached not by statistical comparisons with other
persons but by examining the relationships of qualities
within each person, primarily through the close analysis of
individual life histories or case studies.13
Creating a Discipline
Allport returned from Germany to take an untenured posi-
tion at Harvard, where he taught what were almost certainly
the first university courses explicitly devoted to personality
psychology. He continued the practice during a four-year
break at Dartmouth College, before returning permanently
to Harvard in 1930. He nurtured the idea of writing a big,
Figure 12.2 Allport’s German mentor William
synthesizing book on personality, but during these early
Stern (1871–1938).
years as an untenured faculty member he felt he had to
establish quick credentials in a prestigious department that was notoriously vol-
atile in its treatment of junior faculty. Therefore, he focused research attention
on more quickly publishable projects, two of which were particularly significant.
Together with Philip Vernon, a young psychologist visiting from England, he
developed the Allport-Vernon Study of Values, a test asking subjects to rank their
relative preferences for statements written to reflect six different types of values:
economic, aesthetic, theoretical, political, social, and religious. It quickly became
widely used both in personality research and in educational and vocational guid-
ance programs, helping steer students towards courses and occupations closely
aligned with their particular value patterns. It was one of the earliest commer-
cially successful personality tests.
In another collaborative effort, Allport returned to his original interest in
the concept of personality traits and, with his student Henry Odbert, published
“Trait Names: A Psycholexical Study.”14 They scoured dictionaries and identified
some 18,000 different words used to describe personal characteristics or traits.
They discovered that only a small proportion of these terms describe dimen-
sions or dispositions that, like “intelligence” are applicable to nearly everyone
and are potentially measurable. The vast majority of trait names were not univer-
sally applicable; they applied to some but not all people, or to people in certain
highly specific situations. Other traits tended to be quite similar to each other
(e.g., “outgoing” and “gregarious”) or polar opposites (“active” versus “passive”)
and suggestive of a dimension. Conducted without the benefit of computers or
modern statistical techniques, this study marked the origin of a still-ongoing
project in personality psychology to systematically study the interrelationships
and “clusterings” of trait names that constitute the most fundamental dimensions
of personality structure. We shall return to this subject shortly.
Allport secured his tenure at Harvard and became department chairman
in 1937. In that banner year he also became editor-in-chief of the Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology and finally published the big book that had
been cooking in his head since 1930: Personality: A Psychological Interpreta-
tion.15 Coincidentally, another textbook, entitled Psychology of Personality, also
appeared in 1937, by the younger psychologist Ross Stagner at the University
of Akron in Ohio.16 Stagner had corresponded with and received some advice
from Allport, but his main interest was family influences on personality traits,
and his approach was more behavioristic and practical. Independently written,
both of these “first” textbooks on personality were successful. Allport’s was the
more influential, however, because it reflected his longer involvement in the
field and covered it more comprehensively, incorporating European as well as
American viewpoints.
Personality: A Psychological Interpretation

Allport’s book opened by declaring that “the outstanding characteristic” of
humans is their individuality, and that the major goal of personality psychology
is the understanding and appreciation of that individuality. Pursuit of this goal
poses an apparent problem for scientific psychology, however, because, as a
Latin expression put it, Scientia non est individuorum (“Science is not about
individuals”).17 Normally, science seeks to identify generalizations—regularities
and uniformities characteristic of whole classes of objects. In his long, dense
textbook, Allport tackled this apparent contradiction—first by exhaustively
tracing the history of the concept of personality and summarizing the earliest
approaches to its study, and then by defining the new field as one that should
use the widest possible variety of methods and orientations. He presented his
suggested resolution of two troublesome issues he had encountered earlier in
his career: the “blank page” dilemma he had perceived separating Münsterberg’s
two kinds of psychology, and the problematic role of psychoanalysis and other
clinically based approaches in studying normal personalities.
In addressing the two-psychologies issue, Allport identified two contrasting

research styles, which he designated nomothetic and idiographic. Nomothetic
methods study people in terms of general dimensions or characteristics on
which they vary to quantitatively specifiable degrees. Idiographic methods
investigate and describe what it is that makes a given person unique, an approach
that’s more likely to be qualitative than quantitative. Nomothetic research
was used in pursuing Münsterberg’s causal, objective type of psychology and
Stern’s “relational” individuality; idiographic research was more appropriate for
Münsterberg’s purposive psychology and Stern’s search for “real” individuality.
Allport approved of both kinds of research. He himself had conducted
nomothetic studies for his Ph.D. dissertation, in developing the Study of Values
test with Vernon, and in his work with Odbert identifying trait dimensions for
rating people comparatively. He noted that the vast majority of personality
studies conducted up to 1937—most of which involved some type of test—had
been nomothetic in nature. There was obviously nothing wrong with this kind
of approach.
Consistent with his German mentors, however, Allport insisted that nomoth-
etics were not sufficient to produce a complete psychology of personality. He
noted that most dictionary trait names did not lend themselves to nomothetic
scale building; they applied, instead, to some but not all people, or to people in
certain specific situations. He further argued that the peculiar qualities of indi-
viduality that set each person apart from everyone else must inevitably escape
nomothetic analysis. For a complete, idiographic understanding of a personality
it was necessary to closely examine the subject person’s unique life history and
the interrelationships of his or her major traits.
In a central methods chapter of his book, Allport designated the preparation
of a life history, or case study, as potentially the most revealing method of all. It
provided “a framework within which the psychologist can place all his observa-
tions gathered by other methods; it is his final affirmation of the individuality and
uniqueness of every personality.”18 Within a case study, one can describe the sub-
ject’s specific scores and results on various nomothetic measures—but integrated
within a narrative that includes the individual details and subjective reports pro-
vided by the subject himself or herself. Allport also noted that the value of a case
study “does not cease with its synthetic treatment of a single personality. By com-
paring and analyzing many such studies, it is possible to pass to the construction
of psychological laws and to new hypotheses.”19 As an example he cited Freud’s
use of individual case studies in deriving his more general psychoanalytic ideas.
But the Freudian example also illustrated—at least for Allport—some of the cau-
tions required in the interpretation of such derived generalizations.
Acknowledging the great popularity of psychoanalysis, Allport observed that

“before Freud there was in general a fatal neglect of impulsive emotion and its
subterranean workings,” and praised psychoanalysis for correcting “the short-
comings of traditional intellectualistic psychology.”20 He also said that some
psychoanalytic concepts can be useful for studying personality “provided they
are kept in perspective.” He felt they were primarily derived “from the inductive
study of unbalanced (anxious) personalities [so] they are not able, taken collec-
tively, to provide a well-proportioned account of the normal course of develop-
ment.”21 Freud’s generalizations from his case studies might have been valid, but
their validity was largely restricted to the abnormal population from which they
were drawn.
In sum, Allport derived two provisional lessons for personality psychology from
his own personal encounter with Freud. First, he argued that when dealing with nor-
mal personalities, a psychologist should always take seriously, and at face value, the
conscious self-reports of the subjects. If you want to know something about people,
ask them first and don’t immediately assume their responses have been distorted
by unconscious factors. The second lesson was to avoid rushing to “pathologize”
normal adult behavior by attributing it to motives and fixations dating from child-
hood. Freud made both of these mistakes, Allport believed, when he asked, “Was
that little boy you?” in response to his report of a dirt-phobic child.
Allport agreed with Freud that many traits, such as cleanliness and orderli-
ness, may originate in childhood experiences like toilet training, but they’re
maintained or even strengthened in the mature personality because they have
become reinforcing or rewarding in their own right. In one of his most significant
theoretical contributions, Allport suggested that such traits come to manifest a
functional autonomy from their childhood origins; for a full understanding of
the mature, normal person, he insisted that this ongoing functionality was more
important than those distant origins. Coincidentally, at this same time some
influential young psychoanalysts were promoting an ego psychology asserting
that, with normal development, many of the functions of the Freudian ego become
independent of their distant origins in impulses from the id. They spoke explic-
itly of an “autonomous” ego and cited Allport among several other sources.22
Immediately following the publication of his book, Allport, as the editor of
the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, continued to encourage psychol-
ogists to study seriously—but not to overemphasize—psychoanalysis and other
similar approaches. He organized and published a symposium of nine articles
written by psychologists who had themselves undergone personal psychoanal-
ysis, and oversaw the publication of many other articles on topics that had been
directly or indirectly brought to prominence by Freudian psychology.
PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY COMES OF AGE

Allport’s book promoted a new field of personality psychology as a broad
enterprise, embracing the widest possible variety of methods and theoretical
approaches. Over the remaining thirty years of his highly productive career, he
practiced many of these in his own research and teaching. Just as importantly, he
directly stimulated others to carry out two highly influential research programs—
one nomothetic and the other idiographic.
Nomothetic Studies: The Analysis of Traits

In many ways the easier aspect of Allport’s personality program to fulfill was
the nomothetic part, because it was consistent with the prevailing practices of
experimental psychologists favoring measurement and objectivity. Allport had
laid the foundation for a nomothetic personality psychology with his earliest
work on the trait as a measurable variable of individual differences, followed
by his investigation with Odbert of the thousands of different trait names in
the English language. Their classification of these terms had been subjective,
but the emergence of new statistical tools enabled a more precise analysis, and
the resulting categorization of traits became one of the foundations of modern
personality theory.
Although not a statistical expert himself, Allport lobbied
Harvard in 1941 to hire the young English psychologist
Raymond B. Cattell (1905–1998; Figure 12.3; no relation
to the American James McKeen Cattell). Cattell had been
trained at the University of London in the emerging tech-
nique of factor analysis, a set of statistical procedures in
which the intercorrelations of large numbers of individual
variables can be reduced to smaller factors, clusters, or
principal components. This approach had been particu-
larly successful in evaluating intelligence test results. We
shall see in Chapter 13 how modern intelligence tests had
evolved as an enormously diversified collection of individ-
ual items and questions relating to aspects of what we think
of as intelligence. And while there was a tendency for all
items to be generally correlated with each other (i.e., some-
one scoring high on vocabulary questions was likely to do
well on memory, logical reasoning, or spatial visualization),
factor analysis could show that certain kinds of items clus-
tered together particularly strongly. Intelligence, therefore,
Figure 12.3 Raymond B. Cattell (1905–1998). could be conceptualized not just as a single entity but as
a combination of specific factors, such as verbal comprehension and fluency,

associative memory, abstract reasoning, and perceptual speed.
The idea bringing Cattell and Allport together was that a similar kind of fac-
tor analysis might be applied to the huge array of measurable personality traits
Allport and Odbert had identified, to see if they might resolve themselves into
a smaller groups. Certain combinations seemed intuitively obvious, such as that
people scoring high on friendliness would be expected to also score high on out-
goingness and gregariousness, for example. But who knew what patterns and
clusters would emerge from analyzing the interrelationships of a broad range of
personality trait measures?
In the pre-computer 1940s, this represented an enormous computational chal-
lenge. To perform a factor analysis, the intercorrelations of every pair of trait tests
or scores are calculated, each one an extended computational task; as the number
of traits to be considered increases, the number of intercorrelations increases ex-
ponentially. For example, if there are just 5 traits (A, B, C, D, and E,) the number of
possible intercorrelations is just 10 (AB, AC, AD, AE, BC, BD, BE, CD, CE, DE); if
10 traits, the possible intercorrelations becomes 45, and at 20 traits, it rises to 180.
Allport and Odbert had identified several thousand names of individual traits, so
the number of all possible intercorrelations was astronomical.
Cattell approached the problem by selecting from the trait list a subsample
of 35 that seemed to be generally representative of the total, and proceeded
to get measures of these traits from populations of university students. Even
with this reduced trait list, the intercorrelations numbered nearly 600. Under-
standably, Cattell was lured away from Harvard to the University of Illinois in
1945 by the promise of one of the first major electronic computers, the Illiac I,
to assist in carrying out the project. According to legend, while still working
without the help of computers, Cattell had to reserve the Illinois basketball
court in order to find a floor large enough to systematically lay out all of his
early calculations.23
Cattell’s first significant results suggested that the personality characteristics
represented by the 35 trait names could be reduced to 16 more basic “personality
factors,” each one defined as a set of strongly intercorrelated traits. Each factor
represented a dimension on which individuals vary from one extreme to
another. On the “warmth” factor, for example, high scorers were described by
such terms as warm, outgoing, attentive to others, and affectionate; low scorers
by cold, cool, distant, aloof, detached, and the like. Other factors included
such general dimensions as social boldness-timidity, liveliness-passivity,
concreteness-abstractness in thinking, emotional stability–changeability,
and trustingness-suspiciousness. Cattell and his colleagues developed the
Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF, for short), an easily admin-

istered multiple-choice test for measuring these factors, which has undergone
several successful revisions.24
Recognizing that the collection of 16 personality factors might themselves
be factor-analyzed Cattell conducted more studies showing that they had a
statistical tendency to cluster together into just 5 even broader categories.
For example, primary factors of warmth, social boldness, liveliness, and
affiliative tendencies intercorrelated in a more general cluster the Cattell group
called extroversion-introversion. Cattell noted, however, that although these
higher-order factors were significant statistically, the same global ratings on
them could be achieved with differing contributions from the four components.
Therefore, the higher-order factors held theoretical interest, but he argued that
the full profile of a person’s scores on all 16 primary factors was more powerful
for predicting actual behavior.
A different point of view was promoted by another influential London-
trained psychologist, the prolific and argumentative Hans J. Eysenck (whom
we’ll meet again in Chapter 16). Eysenck acknowledged Allport as the “patron
saint” of personality psychology, but vigorously rejected his promotion of
idiographic methods and insisted that the field should be exclusively nomo-
thetic. “To the scientist,” he argued in 1952, “the unique individual is simply
the point of intersection of a number of quantitative variables.”25 Eysenck
wanted to reduce the number of basic personality components to the lowest
possible number. He conducted studies indicating that the massive number
of individual traits could all be clustered into not merely 16 or 5 as Cattell
had done, but just 3! One of these he called extroversion-introversion, defined
similarly to the Cattell group’s factor. Another he labeled neuroticism, because
its component traits all related to a general tendency to experience or to be
free from anxiety. The third was psychoticism, a tendency, either voluntary or
involuntary, to overlook the boundaries of everyday or commonsense reality.
Eysenck argued that by far the most powerful information one can have about
an individual personality is his or her relative standing on these three general
dimensions—often said to constitute the PEN model of personality (based on
their initial letters).
As this discrepancy between Cattell and Eysenck suggests, despite the
mathematical precision of statistical calculations, there is a substantial amount
of arbitrariness in conducting factor-anayltic trait studies. This begins with
choosing the population of subjects for testing and the pool of specific traits
to be measured. In addition, technical statistical decisions must be made about
the degree to which the resulting factors, or “principal components,” are to be
independent of one another, versus collectively accounting for the maximum

amount of statistical variability.
As these issues were being debated during the 1970s and early 1980s, the entire
field of personality research was involved in a broader controversy about the
relevance of the very concept of traits. The debate was started by Walter Mischel
(b. 1930), a Stanford University psychologist who had previously been Allport’s
junior colleague at Harvard, in his 1968 textbook Personality and Assessment.26
The person-situation controversy, as it became known, addressed the question
of whether a person’s behavior in a given situation is more strongly determined
by his or her pre-existing personality traits or dispositions, or by the demands
of the particular circumstances. Mischel was writing in the wake of Asch’s and
Milgram’s influential studies of suggestibility and obedience, indicating that
subjects with widely varying personalities were all powerfully influenced by
the experimental situations (see Chapter 10). And although he did not deny
personality influences altogether, Mischel now suggested that situational factors
in general are the more important determiners of behavior. Shortly after his
textbook was published, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment reinforced the
case for powerful situational effects (see Chapter 10).
For several years the controversy dominated the attention of many person-
ality psychologists. Not unlike the nature-nurture debate, it attracted strong
support on both sides, but finally by general consensus was resolved by an
“interactionist” perspective recognizing the mutual influence of both factors:
In relatively extreme or unusual situations like those in the social influence
experiments, those factors may predominate, but in many others, personality
consistencies shine through.
As this controversy continued being debated, a subgroup of researchers were
developing and refining factor-analytic trait studies. Gradually a consensus
arose in favor of five as the ideal number of personality factors, and the model
that gained considerable support was called the Big Five.27 One of the main
proponents, Louis Goldberg, felt its acceptance took far too long and wrote an
article on its history impolitely entitled “What the Hell Took So Long?”28 His pro-
posed answer was that personality psychologists were too obsessed for too long
with the person-situation controversy to attend to this more important subject.
A recent historical analysis suggests that various methodological disputes
and unresolved issues within the factor-analytic community may have been an
equally or even more important reason.29
Whatever the reasons for its delay, the Big Five became firmly established
in personality research and textbooks by the late 1980s. With minor variations,
this model posited the five major personality dimensions of openness (versus
narrowness or shallowness), conscientiousness (versus carelessness or care-

freeness), extroversion (versus introversion), agreeableness (versus coldness or
quarrelsomeness), and neuroticism (versus calmness and stability). The word
ocean, capturing the first letters of the five dimensions, is often used as a mem-
ory aid. Table 12.1 presents the results for one typical study involving a group of
280 California university students, showing how ratings on 53 individual traits
clustered together in each of the Big Five dimensions.
Idiographic Approaches: Personology and Psychobiography

Allport’s endorsement of idiographic methods received less enthusiasm
from his experimentally oriented colleagues than his nomothetic prescrip-
tions. Allport himself did not conduct a great deal of idiographic research,
his only major project being analysis and publication of a series of evoca-
tive letters written by a woman he called Jenny. 30 In his teaching, however,
he and his students regularly addressed the question of how individual life
histories might best be written, and in his most significant contribution he
strongly supported the idiographic research of an initially highly controver-
sial Harvard colleague.

Table 12.1 TRAITS ASSOCIATED WITH THE BIG FIVE
PERSONALITY DIMENSIONS
Extroversion Agreeableness Conscientiousness Neuroticism Openness
Positive Correlates
Talkative Sympathetic Organized Tense Wide interests

Assertive Kind Thorough Anxious Imaginative
Energetic Appreciative Planful Nervous Intelligent
Outgoing Affectionate Efficient Moody Insightful
Dominant Softhearted Responsible Worrying Curious
Enthusiastic Warm Touchy Sophisticated
Negative Correlates
Quiet Fault-finding Careless Stable Commonplace

Reserved Cold Disorderly Calm Narrow interests
Shy Unfriendly Frivolous Contented Simple
Silent Quarrelsome Irresponsible Unemotional Shallow
Withdrawn Hard-hearted Slipshod Unintelligent
Note: These items were correlated with total factor scores in ratings by psychologists of 140 men and 140 women
studied at the University of California, Berkeley.
Source: Adapted from David Funder, The Personality Puzzle, 5th ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 245.
Henry A. Murray (1893–1988) was born into a wealthy New York family
and led a privileged early life. As an undergraduate at Harvard he excelled in
athletics and socializing, but was an indifferent student. His interests sharpened
as a young man, however, as he became a medical doctor and earned a Ph.D. in
biochemistry. More importantly, he became fascinated by the recently published
works of Jung and traveled to Switzerland to meet personally with him, first as a
patient and ultimately as a friend. He was accompanied by Christiana Morgan
(1897–1967), a younger married woman with whom he would continue to collab-
orate as the two carried on an extramarital love affair that lasted until Morgan’s
death.31 Now interested in Freudian as well as Jungian psychology, and coinci-
dentally captivated by his reading of Herman Melville’s great novel Moby Dick,
Murray arrived back in Boston at a fortuitous moment.
The aging neurologist Morton Prince, whom we met in Chapter 10 as the
founder of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (and supporter of
Floyd Allport), had recently met privately with Harvard’s president. Prince
offered to fund a small psychological clinic there, of which he would serve as
director. Murray, conveniently nearby and with an endorsement from Jung, would
be assistant director. In 1927 the small Harvard Psychological Clinic was estab-
lished, without any prior consultation with the university’s official psychology
department. The clinic’s purpose was to conduct research and to teach courses on
abnormal psychology. After Prince died in 1929, Murray was named his successor
and granted the first of a series of three-year contracts as assistant professor of
psychology by the Harvard administration. This, too, was independent of the offi-
cial psychology department, most of whose members did not approve.
Allport, however, was just getting established in the early 1930s, and he did
become a friend and supporter of Murray. His own course on personality and
Murray’s on abnormal psychology became very popular, and were rated more
favorably by undergraduates than the more traditional and experimentally
oriented courses offered by the psychology department. Their relationship solidi-
fied as Murray began an ambitious and unusual research program at the clinic—a
program that became the closest real-life approximation of Allport’s prescrip-
tions for idiographic research and case studies in personality.
Murray’s fascination with Melville played a role, as he delved deeply into
the complex relationship between the novelist’s life and work. Murray’s explo-
ration of the theories of Freud, Jung, Adler, and other psychodynamic theo-
rists had led him to the conclusion that “every man knows something about
himself that he is willing to tell; he knows something about himself that he’s
not willing to tell; and there’s something about himself that he doesn’t know
and can’t tell.”32 The ideal goal of a case study should be to elucidate all three
of these domains, he believed, using as wide a variety of tests, interviews, and

other methods as possible. This approach, later to be extended to the study of
women as well as men, came to be referred to by both Murray and his followers
as personology.
Murray’s study of Melville convinced him that one useful personological
approach was to look for hints in a person’s imagination. Therefore, he
collaborated with Morgan, who had joined him in Boston in developing the
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a series of 32 black-and-white pictures or
photographs depicting ambiguous but potentially dramatic scenes (for example,
one with a young boy gazing pensively at a violin; another of a young woman
with an older hooded woman looking over her shoulder; another depicting a man
and woman in the midst of some sort of dramatic interaction). Subjects had to
make up a story about each picture, including a description of what is happening,
what led up to it, and how the situation turned out. The TAT quickly became
a popular type of projective test, a test that provided ambiguous stimuli upon
which subjects would project their preoccupations, anxieties, needs, and values,
both conscious and unconscious. For more on this, see Chapter 16.
Most important to the success of Murray’s clinic was his ability to attract a
gifted group of young researchers to join him in the intensive study of Harvard
undergraduates who were subjects over the years. Each researcher pursued his
or her own particular interest, such as hypnotizability, learning or imaginative
ability, childhood history, musical reveries, or responses to the Allport-Vernon
Study of Values or other personality tests that were then being developed. Each
subject wrote an extended personal autobiography, and was interviewed by a
clinic researcher on such topics as family relations and childhood memories,
present concerns and dilemmas, sexual development, and aspirations for the
future. All the information about the participants was available to the entire re-
search group. They met regularly to discuss the full records for each subject,
thereby constructing the most comprehensive and informative set of case studies
that had yet been assembled.
Murray’s research was jeopardized in 1936. A new Harvard administration,
upon the urging of the experimental psychologists in the department who
had never accepted Murray as properly rigorous and objective, threatened
not to renew his contract and to close the clinic. Fierce debate followed, with
the young but increasingly prominent Allport acting as Murray’s defender.
After receiving an attractive offer for himself at Clark University, Allport threat-
ened to leave if Murray was not retained. In a close decision that ultimately led to
the departure of the department’s most prominent experimentalist, Allport won
out and Murray stayed at Harvard.33
Figure 12.4 Murray’s certificate of gratitude presented to Allport.
A grateful Murray presented an appreciative certificate to Allport (Figure 12.4).

Murray and his group were able to continue their research. They published
Explorations in Personalty in 1938, a ground breaking book detailing their
procedures and including a complete reproduction of the case material on
one of the studied subjects.34 Murray’s group included several people who
would be rising stars in the future development of personality and clinical
psychology.
The book also described a conceptual scheme in which individuals were
seen as motivated, often unconsciously, by twenty-seven psychogenic needs,
which become aroused in various ways by environmental “presses.” These
needs also motivate different people to varying degrees, thereby constituting
important personality differences. Among the more notable were the need
for achievement (to overcome obstacles in the service of attaining personally
important goals), for affiliation (to have frequent and positive contact with
others), for power (having control or domination over others), and for autonomy
(the ability to be independent of others). The TAT was found to be particularly
useful in detecting themes and issues in people’s stories that reflected these
psychogenic needs.
This concept of motivational needs was subsequently pursued in a more
nomothetic direction by David McClelland (1917–1998). During the 1950s and
1960s, McClelland and his students developed quantitative scoring systems for
measuring the frequencies with which themes relating to achievement, affiliation,
and power appeared in participants’ TAT stories. They then showed that these
fantasy-based scores measuring “n-Ach,” “n-Aff,” and “n-Pow” correlated with
overt behavior and personality traits in theoretically logical ways; for example,
successful entrepreneurs scored high on n-Ach, executives and military com-
manders scored high on n-Pow, and so on.35
In the early 1980s and in a more directly idiographic vein, a group of former
students and admirers of Murray’s work united to form the Personology Soci-
ety, an organization to develop and promote Murray’s case study method, as
well as answer Allport’s question about how psychological life histories should
be written. This group established guidelines for the responsible writing of
psychobiography—the use of psychoanalytic and other psychological personal-
ity theories to interpret and illuminate an individual’s life story. One of the first
examples of this genre had been The Mind of Adolf Hitler, written during World
War II by Murray’s former student and Explorations in Personality contributor
Walter Langer. The book correctly predicted Hitler’s eventual suicide. Prepared
secretly, it was not published until 1972, long after the war ended.36
Although Langer’s work was in many ways a success, the psychobiographical
approach was vulnerable to abuse and misuse. For example, in his old age Freud
had ill-advisedly added his name as co-author to former diplomat William
Bullitt’s Psychological Study of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.37 Attributing
many of Wilson’s political actions to an unproven psychopathology, the work
was widely criticized. Several other self-defined psychobiographical works
were criticized too; it was too easy for undisciplined authors to speculate about
factually unsupported “neuroses” and other disorders as causing behaviors
of which they did not approve. Several members of the Personology Society
collaborated in 2005 to produce a Handbook of Psychobiography, with guidelines
for the responsible writing of psychobiography, including appropriate examples
with case studies of several prominent psychologists, as well as figures from the
arts and politics.38
One notable chapter in the Handbook, “What Psychobiographers Might Learn
from Personality Psychology” by the Northwestern University personologist
Dan McAdams, argues that an individual life can be most profitably approached
and conceptualized at three separate but complementary levels. The first level
emphasizes the person’s standing on the broad, relatively stable dispositional
traits, exemplified by the Big Five personality dimensions. The second level
considers more particularized characteristic adaptations—the person’s more
specific goals, motives, needs, and values as measured by the standardized tests
and techniques developed by personality researchers, but all contextualized in
terms of that person’s life experiences. The third level explores the individual’s
integrative life story, the personal narrative of his or her life that ties it all
together, focusing on consistent themes that give meaning to the other material
and provide an estimation of the person’s unique identity or self.39 This pro-
posed integration of the nomothetic and idiographic surely would have pleased
Allport.
ALLPORT’S LATER CAREER

For thirty years following the publication of his landmark book Personality: A
Psychological Interpretation, Allport pursued a variety of subjects related to
social psychology as well as to personality. Many of these were associated with
the mounting European crisis in the late 1930s, and World War II. With the rise
of Hitler and anti-Semitism in Germany, he also became aware of the casual
anti-Semitism that pervaded his own academic culture. During the 1930s he
helped find employment in the U.S. for imperiled Jewish psychologists from
Europe. While he was successful in some cases, including that of his former
teacher Stern, too many other times he was unsuccessful. These experiences
inspired a growing professional interest in what he saw as the related subjects of
religion and prejudice.
Religion and Prejudice

Raised in a socially conscious and pious household, Allport had a broad reli-
gious commitment throughout his life. Unusually for a psychology professor,
he gave occasional talks in the Harvard Memorial Chapel and maintained
membership in the Episcopal Church. He firmly believed that some kind of
religious sensibility is an important, even essential aspect of a normal, healthy
personality. At the same time, however, the terrible events surrounding World
War II made him intensely aware of the great damage often perpetrated in
the name of religious beliefs. Religious arrogance and intolerance manifested
themselves in many other ways, as well, leading Allport to posit a sharp distinc-
tion between immature and mature religion. Immature religion is a religious
attachment adopted largely for self-aggrandizing reasons; it is unreflective,
literal-minded, bigoted, and intolerant of other beliefs or ambiguity. Mature
religion, by contrast, is belief in a spiritual reality while simultaneously accept-
ing an inevitable unknowableness and mystery regarding ultimate questions.
Mature religion encourages humility, self-questioning, and tolerance for the
viewpoints of others. Allport expressed these views comprehensively in a book,
The Individual and His Religion, published in 1950.40 As we shall see later in
this chapter, similar views were shared by several founders of the humanistic
psychology movement.
Allport observed that practitioners of immature religion tended to share

the characteristic of prejudice against those with different views. This general
topic became the subject of one of his most influential books, The Nature of
Prejudice, in which he defined prejudice as “an antipathy based upon a
faulty and inflexible generalization.”41 He went on to describe an ascending
scale of its strength within a person or society. The lowest stage is one in
which the members of a majority, or in group, make derogatory jokes about a
minority, or other “out group.” Although often seen by its perpetrators as harm-
less, this behavior can lead to the ascending stages of avoidance of the out
group, followed by active discrimination against them, finally rising to active
aggression and, in extreme cases like Nazi Germany, extermination of the
out group.
As a means of reducing the poisonous effects of prejudice, Allport proposed
the contact hypothesis: the suggestion that prejudice between groups can be
reduced if in-group and out-group members are placed in situations where they
must interact collaboratively and with equal status in pursuing a common goal.
Some overriding governmental or institutional authority may also be needed to
overcome the initial avoidance tendencies and support integration. The grad-
ual but successful desegregation of the armed forces during the latter stages
of World War II was one example of the successful application of the contact
hypothesis.
Allport’s social activism extended into the realm of institution building.
In 1936 he was a leader in the creation of the Society for the Psychological
Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and one of its earliest presidents. Originally
inspired by the social and economic calamities of the Great Depression
and the rising threat of Nazism, this group remains today an important
independent organization for socially concerned psychologists and other
social scientists. It promotes the goal of applying psychological knowledge
to the problems of today’s world. A decade later Allport collaborated with
colleagues from the psychology, sociology, and anthropology departments
at Harvard to create a new Department of Social Relations, in which
students were encouraged to pursue interdisciplinary and socially relevant
approaches to their research.
Prominent Students
During his long teaching career, Allport influenced many students who went
on to highly distinguished careers. Stanley Milgram, whose important stud-
ies of conformity and obedience are discussed in Chapter 10, was one of
them, and he repeatedly expressed his indebtedness to Allport for his early
support. Thomas Pettigrew (b. 1931) came to study prejudice with Allport in the
mid-1950s, accompanying him on a field trip to South Africa and later becom-
ing a full Harvard colleague and one of the leading experts on black-white race
relations in the United States and elsewhere. He has published extensively
on Allport’s contact hypothesis, and wrote a moving tribute to his mentor
that appeared in the Journal of Social Issues (the flagship journal of the SPSSI)
in 1999.42
Gardner Lindzey (1920–2008) came to Harvard in 1946 as one of Allport’s
first graduate students in social relations. In 1951, after completing his Ph.D.
and becoming an assistant professor in the department, he proposed to his
mentor the idea of producing a Handbook of Social Psychology, which would
comprehensively describe the field. Allport supported the project by helping
solicit eminent contributors and agreeing to write the opening chapter on the
historical background of modern social psychology. The Handbook quickly
became the definitive reference in the field and has been regularly updated
with new editions.43
Lindzey also contributed to the status of personality psychology by
co-authoring, with his former teacher Calvin Hall, the important textbook
Theories of Personality.44 Allport again strongly sup-
ported this project, reading and commenting on the draft
chapters and using them in his undergraduate personality
class. This text presented a theory-oriented approach to
personality, beginning with chapters on Freud and Jung
and proceeding to describe the approaches of some dozen
others, including Lewin, Cattell, Eysenck, the learning
theorists, Murray, and Allport himself. An enormous suc-
cess, this text sold over a million copies in several editions
and for many years was the standard introduction to the
subject.
As a senior figure (Figure 12.5), Allport continued to
emphasize the importance of studying psychological nor-
mality and health. Along with his endorsement of broad
research methodologies, he found that his views meshed
very well with the ideas of several other psychologists who
were just then promoting a “third force” in the field—after
behaviorism and psychoanalysis—that they called human-
istic psychology. Although Allport never officially partic-
ipated in this new movement, his work had helped lay its
foundation, and he strongly supported its efforts. Figure 12.5 Gordon Allport in his later years.
Maslow and Humanistic Psychology

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970; Figure 12.6) was the first-
born child of Jewish immigrants to New York City from
Russia. Ironically, this future founder of a “positive psychol-
ogy,” known for his genial and kindly personality, always
recalled his childhood as miserably unhappy.
A Paradoxical Early Life

In adulthood Maslow declared that his father, whose in-
come as a barrel maker was modest, “misunderstood me,
thought me an idiot and a fool.” His mother he disliked “not
only [for] her physical appearance, but also her values and
world view, her stinginess, her total selfishness.” Making
fun of his large nose and skinny physique, his parents led
him to believe as an adolescent that there wasn’t “anyone
yet who is so ugly or unhandsome” as he was.45 He himself
“always wondered where my utopianism, ethical stress,
humanism . . . and all the rest came from.”46
Maslow’s younger siblings recalled their parents more
Figure 12.6 Abraham Maslow (1908–1970). fondly, so he probably exaggerated their faults. At the very
least, they recognized his strong intellectual interests, and
although they could not fully understand them, supported them to a certain
degree. Young Abe also had some more positive influences outside the house-
hold. Still, there was often a certain “edge” to Maslow’s writings, especially his
private ones, where his positivity was tinged with darker overtones. In general,
his story clearly demonstrates the fact that psychological theories linking child-
hood unhappiness to future negativity are valid only in a statistical sense, and
that there will always be individual variations. It also confirms Allport’s argument
that every personality has individual quirks, which require idiographic analysis.
Among the most important and unquestionably positive influences in
Maslow’s early life was a close friendship with his cousin Will Maslow. More
outgoing than Abe but sharing his intelligence and values, Will became an
inseparable companion as they jointly pursued broad interests in literature,
music, politics, and athletics—becoming known by their classmates at the
demanding Boys High School of Brooklyn as the “Gold Dust twins.”47 They grad-
uated with similar records: mainly excellent grades and strong achievements in
extracurricular activities.
At that time Cornell University was the only Ivy League school that accepted
more than a small number of Jewish students, and the school offered a special
13_POP_28354_ch12_446-491.indd 470 18/10/16 4:04 PM

scholarship examination for those with limited financial resources. Abe thought
his less than perfect academic record would automatically disqualify him and
chose not to compete, but the more adventurous Will did try and in fact won a
scholarship. The two then separated, as Will went to Cornell and Abe embarked
on a diverse and at first erratic undergraduate career. He started with a year of
liberal arts courses at the publicly funded City College of New York, and the next
year added some part-time law courses at his father’s urging. But feeling offended
by the absence of moral concerns in legal arguments, he quit in disgust following
a discussion of the subject of “spite fences” (fences built deliberately to block off
or annoy neighbors).
Because he could afford to transfer to Cornell, Abe joined Will in Ithaca,
New York, in the winter of 1927 and, as previously noted, took Titchener’s
introductory psychology course. Despite disliking the course, he earned a
respectable B grade and did comparably well in several other classes. He
was uncomfortable at Cornell, however, because of the open anti-Semitism
demonstrated by wealthier students toward those who, like him, had to wait
tables to earn their tuition. After just one term Maslow returned home to
resume classes at City College. Getting away from home still appealed to
him, though, and that spring he learned that the University of Wisconsin in
Madison had a liberal educational philosophy and was affordable as a publicly
funded institution. Impressed by its catalog, he applied and was accepted for
the following September.
During the intervening summer of 1928, he happened to read The
Psychologies of 1925, a book recommended by one of his City College
teachers.48 This collection of essays by the leading psychologists of the day,
describing their personal approaches to the field, included one by John B.
Watson advocating his behaviorist vision. This, Maslow recalled, “really
turned me on . . . In the highest excitement I suddenly saw unrolling before
me into the future the possibility of a science of psychology [emphasis in
original], a program of work which promised real progress, real advance, real
solutions of real problems.”49
If it seems strange that the future father of humanistic psychology was
originally attracted to the psychology of a staunch behaviorist, recall that
Watson was an effective communicator who exuded optimism about the
potential of behaviorism. Watson also argued that behaviorist techniques could
be effective tools for promoting social improvement and reducing bigotry and
racial prejudice. Here was promise of a psychology far different from the “blood-
less” and socially irrelevant doctrines that had been promoted by Titchener. As a
result, Maslow arrived at Wisconsin filled with enthusiasm.
Wisconsin Psychology and the Social Behavior of Monkeys

Wisconsin provided a congenial setting for Maslow. The university fostered
progressive values, and its small psychology department treated its students
cordially and with individual attention. During his first year Maslow married his
cousin Bertha Goodman, and the young couple socialized regularly with faculty
as well as their fellow students. Among his student friends was Ross Stagner, who
would later become a personality researcher, author of the 1937 personality text-
book mentioned earlier, and a founding member of the SPSSI.
The psychology faculty were friendly and approachable, and to Maslow’s plea-
sure there were several who were “almost evangelistic in their excitement about
the behaviorist promise.”50 Best known and most senior among them was Clark
Hull, who had earned his Ph.D. at Wisconsin in 1918 and remained as a faculty
member. In 1928 he was in the early stages of developing his mathematically
based mechanistic behaviorism, which he would famously promote soon after
moving to Yale (see Chapter 9). Maslow arrived at Wisconsin just in time to enjoy
Hull’s course on behavioristic experimental psychology.
More directly important for Maslow were two younger psychologists just
beginning their careers. William Sheldon (1898–1977) was developing an
approach combining behaviorist methodology with a theory about physical body
types, which he classified as being predominantly ectomorphic (thin and lightly
muscled), endomorphic (relatively high in body fat), or mesomorphic (muscular).
Sheldon investigated the relationships between each body type and different
personality characteristics, an approach that was later discredited. At the time,
however, Sheldon was a supportive advisor who taught Maslow not just psychol-
ogy but also how to buy a suit that would fit his ectomorphic frame.51
In 1930, just as Maslow was accepted into Wisconsin’s graduate program, a
new Stanford Ph.D. named Harry Harlow (1906–1981) joined its faculty. Having
studied learning in rats for his dissertation research, Harlow was charged with
developing a new animal laboratory for the department. In order to include
animals more humanlike than rats, he joined forces with the local zoo and estab-
lished the soon-to-be-famous Primate Laboratory. When Harlow began his first
studies of the social behavior of monkeys, Maslow was appointed his assistant
and in due course became his first doctoral student.
Maslow was happy to study monkeys for several reasons. As a committed
behaviorist he knew that his research should be objective and free of
contamination by subjective or introspective reports. Watson had justified his
own early research partly on the grounds that animals could not provide such
reports, and in that sense were ideal behavioristic subjects. Primates, being close
to humans on the evolutionary scale, were of great interest because they shared
some important social characteristics with humans. In particular, Maslow noted

that in their colonies they engaged frequently in behavior that could be classified
as either sexual, or as related to status on a dominance hierarchy.
Coincidentally, Maslow had become interested in some of Freud’s works, as
well as the contrasting writings of Freud’s one-time disciple Alfred Adler (see
Chapter 11). Adler promoted the idea that all children develop strong motives
to cope with and overcome their own perceived inferiorities, and therefore to
achieve mastery, power, and dominance over their environment.
Noting that Freud stressed sexuality while Adler emphasized dominance,
Maslow wondered whether systematic observation of monkey behavior might
help explain the relative importance of the two factors. Would sexual behavior
be strongly determined by a monkey’s position in the dominance hierarchy,
or would social dominance be largely a function of sexual dominance? In the
first phase of his dissertation research, he spent many hours unobtrusively
observing and recording the spontaneous social behavior of the primates in
the local zoo. He identified specific behaviors that reflected dominance, such
as denying food to others, bullying, and staring down competitors. Cringing,
running away, or remaining passive under aggression reflected submission.
Maslow observed that sexual behavior went on almost constantly, between
both heterosexual and homosexual pairs and from a variety of physical
positions.
In a second, more experimental phase of the research, he placed pairs of hun-
gry and similarly sized monkeys together in a single small chamber and tossed
in food treats. He then observed and classified the monkeys’ behavior according
to his previously established criteria for sexuality and dominance.
Maslow concluded that although sexual and dominance behaviors sometimes
occurred independently, they more often interacted with each other—and when
they did, he thought dominance predominated. Sexual behavior was frequently
used as a means of establishing dominance, and in groups where a female was
highly dominant the males avoided approaching her sexually at all. Maslow saw
his results as more favorable to Adler than Freud, and it was no coincidence that
his first publication summarizing his results appeared the Adlerian periodical,
the International Journal of Individual Psychology, followed a year later by a
longer account in the mainstream Journal of Genetic Psychology.52
These publications established young Maslow as a pioneering primate re-
searcher. His supervisor Harlow, who would soon become internationally famous
as an investigator of the effects of social isolation and maternal deprivation in
monkeys, said of Maslow’s research: “To say that [it] was ahead of its time is an
understatement of magnificent magnitude.”53 One of the most significant ways
it was ahead of its time was in its attempt to assess the relative importance of
different motive systems—a theme Maslow would go on to develop in human
psychology in a few years.
Having completed his dissertation Maslow had to find a job—difficult for
anyone during the Great Depression and especially for Jews.54 Widespread
anti-Semitism existed in most psychology departments, and because of that
fact Maslow’s supervisor had legally changed his last name from its original
Israel to Harlow (even though he wasn’t Jewish). Some of Maslow’s teachers
urged him to change his own first name to something less Jewish-sounding
than Abraham—a suggestion he vigorously rejected. And so, despite his excel-
lent qualifications all of Maslow’s early applications for teaching appointments
were rejected.
Finally, Maslow presented his research in a symposium chaired by the eminent
Edward Thorndike at the 1935 meeting of the American Psychological Association
in Michigan. Thordike was so impressed that he offered Maslow a postdoctoral
fellowship to work as his assistant at Columbia University Teachers College on
a large project he called Human Nature and the Social Order. Thorndike was
a pioneering animal behavior researcher (see Chapter 8) who had now become
more interested in human than animal research, and a major goal of this project
was to determine the relative contributions of heredity and environment in
producing a variety of social behaviors.
Overjoyed to have employment back in his home city of New York, Maslow
nonetheless soon became uncomfortable in his new position. Accustomed to
being his own boss while conducting research, he began stealing time from his
assigned duties to carry out his own projects. In one of these he tried to follow
up his monkey study by interviewing some human subjects about their sexual
and dominance behavior—a potentially scandalous subject in the 1930s. He also
developed doubts about Thorndike’s conceptualization of the nature-nurture
debate, and took the bold step of sending his superior an extended written
critique of it.
Belatedly realizing he had been impulsive and fearing he might get fired,
Maslow found Thorndike’s response to be “practically angelic.”55 Although he did
not particularly like the interview research or agree with the critique, Thorndike
added that Maslow had achieved some of the highest scores ever recorded on
the aptitude tests he took at the beginning of his fellowship and declared: “I’ll
assume that if I give you your head, it’ll be the best for you and for me—and for
the world.”56 Maslow would be free to work completely on his own for the two
years he remained at Columbia, and Thorndike would support his applications
for full-time teaching jobs.
NEW YORK AS THE “NEW ATHENS”

Thorndike’s confidence in Maslow was not much help in the face of the pervasive
anti-Semitism of the time but finally, in 1937, Maslow obtained a poorly paid, low-
level position at Brooklyn College. The job had a crucial fringe benefit, however,
because it enabled him to stay in New York. He later recalled:
It’s fair to say that I have had the best teachers, both formal and informal, of
any person who ever lived, just because of the fortunate accident of being
in New York City when the very cream of European intellect was migrating
away from Hitler. . . . There has been nothing like it since Athens.57
Maslow’s experience in the “new Athens” served him well, much as Allport’s
German sojourn had done for him, fifteen years earlier—broadening and modi-
fying his original behavioristic views with a variety of alternatives. On his own
initiative Maslow established personal friendships with several neo-Freudian
psychoanalysts and Gestalt psychologists who had recently arrived from Europe,
along with an important American anthropologist.
An Anthropological Mentor: Benedict

Maslow’s wife had studied anthropology at Wisconsin, and her teacher moved
to New York to become chair of the anthropology department at Columbia.
Through him the couple got to know several other anthropologists, including
Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), who particularly impressed Maslow with both her
personal and her professional qualities.
Benedict had overcome the twin handicaps of being partially deaf and being
a woman in a male-dominated field. In 1934 she published the groundbreaking
book Patterns of Culture, in which she promoted the idea that culture—a term that
previously had a restricted, technical use within anthropology—could be thought
of as analogous to the idea of personality within psychology: “personality writ
large,” as the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead put it in the book’s Preface.58
Benedict’s book described three ethnic groups whose institutions and customs
promoted distinctively different styles of culture. An “Appolonian” culture
promoted behavior that was generally rational and restrained; “Dionysian”
societies were exuberant, emotional, and relatively unrestrained; and members
of “Paranoid” cultures tended to be distrustful and antagonistic. Here was a clear
connection between anthropology and psychology that fascinated Maslow.
Coincidentally, at just the time he was absorbing these ideas, his old Wisconsin
friend Stagner was writing his textbook on personality—the one that appeared
almost simultaneously with Allport’s in 1937. Stagner persuaded Maslow to write
a concluding chapter for the book on the relationship between psychology and
anthropology; it was called “Personality and Patterns of Culture.”
In 1938 Benedict convinced Maslow to spend several weeks living within
a Blackfoot First Nations community in western Canada. There he gained a
firsthand appreciation of the interrelated notions that (1) cultural factors set
important conditions within which specific personality traits are more or less
likely to occur, and (2) all people share a basic humanity and basic needs that
can and sometimes do override their cultural differences. He expressed his con-
clusion in words that echoed Leibniz’s view two centuries before (see Chapter 2)
that experience shapes but does not create the mind, which has a preexisting
structure: “It would seem that every human being comes at birth into a society
not as a lump of clay to be molded by society, but rather as a structure which
society may warp or suppress or build upon.”59
Neo-Freudian Mentors: Adler, Horney, and Fromm

Among the prominent European emigrants Maslow got to know and learn
from were three neo-Freudian psychoanalysts. Adler, whose writing had
helped inspire Maslow’s dissertation research, now lived in New York and
held informal evening seminars at his home. Maslow attended these eve-
nings regularly and soon became a friend and dining companion. In these
sessions Adler stressed the notion that a person’s original sense of inferior-
ity can often have a positive outcome by establishing a powerful motive to
overcome it. As noted in Chapter 11, Adler emphasized cases like that of the
ancient Greek Demosthenes who overcame a childhood speech impediment
and went on to become the greatest orator of his age; or of the American
President Theodore Roosevelt who overcame a frail and sickly childhood
to become the embodiment of vigorous physical activity and accomplish-
ment. He might also have mentioned to Maslow his own personal case, where
he successfully overcame his childhood feelings of inferiority to his older
brother.
Adler further impressed Maslow with his theory that all people have an innate
sense of social interest, an impulse to cooperate productively and even altruis-
tically with their fellows. Although this tendency may be thwarted or distorted
by unfortunate early experiences, Adler argued that it was something “primary”
that had to be blocked by negative factors to inhibit its expression. He contrasted
this view to Freud’s, which posited a “selfish” search for personal gratification
and pleasure as primary, having to be diverted by education and experience into
socialized behaviors and interests. On this point, the two theories were diametri-
cally opposed.
Maslow also became friendly with the former Freudians Karen Horney and
her younger colleague and friend Erich Fromm. Horney originally clashed with
Freud on his theory of female psychology (see Chapter 11). After emigrating
to New York in 1934, she deviated from him even more by de-emphasizing
infantile sexuality in favor of the view that the child’s needs for security are
more important. Feelings of insecurity often go hand in hand with those of
inferiority, so her theory complemented Adler’s in many ways. Also deeply
impressed by Benedict and the other New York anthropologists, Horney
strongly emphasized the role of culture in determining normal and abnormal
behavioral patterns. In a course called Culture and Neurosis, she extended her
critique of Freud’s theory by arguing that it is male-dominated culture rather
than anatomy that primarily determines the typical differences between mas-
culine and feminine personalities.
Although trained as a Freudian analyst, Erich Fromm (1900–1980; Figure 12.7)
had also been exposed to the neo-Marxist social theories prevalent at the
University of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, where he worked prior to
emigrating to New York. During the early years of his friendship with Maslow
Fromm was working on his first book, the hugely successful Escape from
Freedom, published in 1941.60 Among the ideas he was developing was the con-
viction that human beings are unique among animals by
their relative freedom from domination by their instincts.
Born helpless and then dependent on others during a pro-
tracted childhood, they eventually learn how to manipu-
late their environment and make conscious decisions from
countless possible alternatives.
Expanded freedom and consciousness come at a price,
however, in the awareness of what Fromm later called “exis-
tential dichotomies”—unsolvable problems that are an inev-
itable part of the human condition. Choosing freely to do or
to be one particular thing, for example, inevitably rules out
the alternatives: the “road not taken” situation memorial-
ized by the poet Robert Frost. One person can achieve only
a small fraction of possibilities that open up to him or her.
In addition, human intelligence brings with it a conscious
knowledge of mortality and the fact that one lives and dies
as an isolated individual, while in a society populated with
fellow humans. The struggle to retain one’s individuality
within a society can pose difficulties, particularly in societ-
ies whose institutions and customs promote harmful ways Figure 12.7 Erich Fromm (1900–1980).
of “escaping from freedom.” Writing as a European emigrant in the late 1930s,

Fromm was especially concerned about those totalitarian and fascist societies in
which individuality was suppressed by rigid authoritarian controls. He also saw
potential dangers in democratic societies, however, with their pressures for con-
sumerism and conformity. In his later writings Fromm increasingly emphasized
these dangers in his adoptive homeland.
Through his friendly interaction with these diverse theorists, Maslow devel-
oped not so much a confirmed or unified theoretical view of human nature, but a
sense of the diversity and complexity of human motivation. He came to see that
people are energized not by a single dominant motive but by a complex network
of biological, personal, social, and cultural factors.
Gestalt Mentors: Wertheimer and Goldstein

Like Allport, young Maslow had his psychological views transformed by
personal experience with the German Gestalt psychologists. After attending
lectures by Max Wertheimer at the New School for Social Research, Maslow
made a point of getting to know him personally. Particularly impressive to Maslow
was Wertheimer’s extension of the Gestalt point of view from its original focus
on perception to the general subjects of learning and creativity. Wertheimer ar-
gued that the most important kind of learning does not occur by the gradual and
laborious trial-and-error process emphasized by many American behaviorists,
but in sudden flashes of insight, in those “Aha!”
moments that are often reported by creative
people. The experience is somewhat akin to the
sudden perception of a Gestalt in the classic demon-
strations, as when the figure and ground suddenly
shift and a pair of black profiles become replaced in
consciousness by the perception of a white vase, or
vice versa (see Chapter 4). Wertheimer argued that
something similar occurs in complex problem situ-
ations when suddenly, in a flash, the components of
a puzzling situation are put together in a novel way.
Informal and congenial in manner, Wertheimer,
like Benedict, impressed Maslow personally as well
as professionally. An almost father-son relation-
ship developed between them, as Wertheimer took
an active interest in the younger man and encour-
Figure 12.8 Wertheimer and Maslow sharing the lecture aged him in ways that his real father never could
stage at Brooklyn College, New York, in the 1930s. (Figure 12.8). In doing so he imparted two related
ideas, or lessons, that would prove crucial to Maslow’s later career. First, he
emphasized the strong feelings of joy and other positive emotions that of-
ten accompany those “Aha!” moments, when suddenly the world is perceived
in a new and appreciative way. Maslow would later refer to these as peak
experiences and attempt to study them systematically. Second, Wertheimer
argued that traditional psychology placed too much emphasis on illness and
maladjustment and not enough on the positive aspects of human experience.
Maslow would later take this lesson particularly to heart—and become famous
for doing so.
Through Wertheimer Maslow became friendly with the Gestalt-oriented neu-
rologist Kurt Goldstein. As noted in Chapter 4, Goldstein had applied Gestalt
concepts in his analysis of brain-injured soldiers, observing that the brain as a
whole seemed to try to take over the functions affected by damage to its specific
smaller parts. He referred to this tendency to maintain integrity and wholeness
in the face of injury as a motive toward achieving “self-actualization.” Maslow
would later adopt that term in his own motivational theory—although in a some-
what different sense from Goldstein’s, of which the older neurologist did not fully
approve.
* * *
In sum, while still a young psychologist in New York, Maslow received

an informal but remarkable postgraduate education that expanded his outlook
in many ways. From the anthropologists he learned that human nature is consid-
erably broader than most psychologists assumed; from his neo-Freudian friends
he learned that a multiplicity of motives might explain human behavior, many
of them social and impelling people toward positive goals (not just the avoid-
ance of negative states or circumstances); and from the Gestaltists he learned to
emphasize creativity and positivity in the thought processes.
MASLOW’S THEORY OF HUMAN MOTIVATION

Assigned to teach abnormal psychology at Brooklyn College, Maslow became
popular with students, several of whom came to him for informal counseling.
During those sessions he put many of the ideas of his mentors to the test.
Influenced by Wertheimer’s emphasis on positivity, and probably also by
Allport’s recently published view that depth psychology is not always appropriate
for explaining well-adjusted individuals, Maslow saw the need for a new course
dedicated to the normal, healthy personality. He began offering such a course
in 1940. In collaboration with the psychiatrist Bela Mittleman, Malsow also wrote
one of the very first university-level textbooks on abnormal psychology, in which

he included an extended opening chapter on psychological normality and health.
This was presented as a counterpoint to the material about maladjustment and
illness that followed it.61
Self-Actualization
Maslow’s interest in psychological health had been stimulated by his personal
interactions with his New York mentors, particularly Benedict and Wertheimer.
He later recalled that his investigations began not as research but rather
as the effort of a young intellectual to understand two of his teachers whom

he loved, adored and admired and who were very, very wonderful people.
I . . . sought to understand why these two people were so different from the
run-of-the-mill people in the world . . . They were puzzling. They didn’t fit. It
was as if they came from a different planet.62
Although Maslow may have idealized them to some degree, these men-
tors were unquestionably productive and creative, sociable and altruistic,
and seemed not to be driven by any of the deprivation-based motivational
systems posited by most clinical theories. Their most prominent needs and
urges apparently came from within themselves and were minimally derived
from the environmentally based rewards and punishments emphasized by the
behaviorists.
In trying to put a summarizing descriptive label on these extremely
healthy individuals, Maslow seized on the term Goldstein had used in a
different context. For Goldstein, self-actualization had referred to efforts
of brain-damaged people to regain or retain their sense of integrity and
wholeness. For Maslow, self-actualization was the tendency of psychologi-
cally healthy people to fulfill their potential. In his words, self-actualization
occurs when
the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music,
an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What
a man can be, he must be. . . . This tendency might be phrased as the desire
to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is
capable of being. 63
This definition appeared in the 1943 Psychological Review article “A

Theory of Human Motivation,” where Maslow embedded it within his most
famous theoretical contribution to psychology: the concept of a “hierarchy”

of needs.
The Hierarchy of Needs

Having developed the concept of self-actualization, Maslow considered the ques-
tion of how it interacts with, or is influenced by, the more primal, basic urges that
dominate behavior in less highly functional people. His brilliantly simple solu-
tion was the hierarchy of needs. He began his argument by noting that under
conditions of extreme deprivation, the motives of hunger and thirst are unques-
tionably paramount:
It is quite true that man lives by bread alone—where there is no bread. . . . But

what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and his belly is
chronically filled? . . . At once other (and “higher”) needs emerge and these,
rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these
in turn are satisfied, again new (and still “higher”) needs emerge and so on.
This is what we mean by saying that the basic human needs are organized
into a hierarchy of relative prepotency [emphasis in original].64
Borrowing a term from Henry Murray, Maslow went on to propose five general
categories of needs, arranged hierarchically. The most elemental ones, including
food and shelter, whose lack of satisfaction is physically catastrophic for the indi-
vidual and which dominate every other concern if unmet, are the physiological
needs. When these needs are met (as they usually are within modern civilized
society), the next ones to arise are the safety needs: the requirement to be pro-
tected from threats by predators, criminals, extremes of climate and tempera-
ture, or other hazardous environmental circumstances. Maslow noted that these
needs, too, are routinely satisfied in civilized societies, apart from episodic and
“accidental” crisis situations. They do, however, manifest themselves clearly in
children, who frequently and openly express their fears about real or imagined
dangers, and also strikingly in the symptoms of some psychiatric patients—for
example, irrational phobias and other expressions of unjustified anxiety.
Once physiological and safety needs have been satisfied, the belonging and
love needs become prominent—strong desires for affection, friendship, and a
sense of belonging within a social group. These needs can interact with, but are
essentially independent of, the more physiologically based sexual urge. Maslow
believed that frustrations in the satisfaction of love needs are common in modern
society, noting that “practically all theorists of psychopathology have stressed
the thwarting of love needs as basic in the picture of maladjustment.”65 If these
needs have been satisfied, however, what Maslow called esteem needs rise to the
surface. These needs involve the “desire for a stable, firmly based, (usually) high
evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of
others. . . . [T]hwarting of these needs produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness
and of helplessness.”66
Only when these first four levels of needs have been adequately satisfied do
the highest needs for self-actualization come strongly into play. The entire hier-
archy is frequently represented as a pyramid, with each higher level resting on a
broader foundation of the lower satisfactions (Figure 12.9). Maslow’s paragons
of psychological health, then, were people sufficiently satisfied in their “lower”
needs that they were free to pursue the full creative potential within themselves.
A Positive Approach to Psychology

In the years immediately following the publication of this theory, Maslow
became increasingly upset by what he saw as mainstream psychology’s
overemphasis on the lower needs, and their focus on abnormality and defi-
ciency. Clinically oriented theories of human psychology were “based upon
Living to
full potential,
achieving personal
Self-actualization dreams and aspirations
Good self-opinion,
accomplishments, reputation
Esteem
Acceptance, friendship
Belonging and love
Security, protection, freedom from threats
Safety
Hunger, thirst, warmth, air, sleep
Physiological
Figure 12.9 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid.

the study of men at their worst,” and behavioristic research on animal learn-
ing was no help because “even the greatest human genius could not show his
intelligence” on even the most difficult of mazes or other standard learning
problems.67
In response to these concerns, Maslow began to examine the life histories
of people he considered to be self-actualized, starting with Benedict and
Wertheimer whom he knew personally, then extending to the biographies of
famous figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt,
and the African American scientist George Washington Carver. He also
tried to identify a group of college students who could be described as
self-actualized. He presented his main results in his 1954 book, Motivation
and Personality.68
Maslow characterized his older self-actualized subjects as being unusually
objective and efficient in their perceptions of reality, arriving at accurate
judgments about people or situations quickly and with minimal distortion
from their emotions. They also showed unusually high acceptance, both of
themselves and of others as inevitably imperfect human beings. They were
spontaneous and natural rather than artificial or pretentious, were problem-
centered and not easily distracted from their tasks at hand, and showed a
vibrant but nonhostile sense of humor. Virtually by definition they were
creative, and independent in their judgments. They also showed a capacity
to satisfy two apparently opposing motives at the same time, such as be-
ing unselfish in fostering the welfare of others but selfish in finding great
personal gratification and meaning in the act of doing so.
Self-actualized people also frequently experienced various forms of those
peak experiences originally called to his attention by Wertheimer. Some-
times these were moments of overwhelming joy upon arriving at a specific
new discovery or insight, but others were described by their subjects as
more “mystical” in nature: sudden, overwhelming sensations of beauty,
harmony, and oneness with the world. Maslow concluded his description of
self-actualizers by saying that “Healthy people are so different from average
ones, not only in degree but in kind as well, that they generate two very differ-
ent kinds of psychology.”69
Maslow concluded his book by referring to the new and more universal
discipline he envisioned as “positive psychology,” and briefly discussed
the major traditional content areas (e.g., learning, perception, motivation,
intelligence, social psychology, and personality), offering suggestions for
researching each area with greater emphasis on the positive efforts of the
best and most creative individuals, rather than on the stumbling blocks.
In learning, for example, behaviors and skills acquired via curiosity or an

internal desire for knowledge could be the focus, as opposed to trial-and-error
learning motivated by hunger or other deprivations. In social psychology,
traditional topics such as suggestibility, prejudice, obedience, and power
could be supplemented by studies of altruism, individualism, freedom, and
democratic tolerance.
Maslow’s hierarchical theory had been widely cited from its first publication
in 1943. As his reputation grew, and as institutional anti-Semitism began to
ease after World War II, he received numerous job offers. In 1951 he accepted
one from the new Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, to become
the founding chair of its psychology department. Although Jewish-sponsored
and named after the eminent Jewish Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis,
the school was intended from the beginning to be nonsectarian in its hiring
and admissions policies. Albert Einstein and the composer and conductor
Leonard Bernstein were among the famous sponsors and fundraisers, so here
was a potentially prestigious institution that promised to practice the kind of
tolerance and nondiscrimination Maslow believed in. He was given a free hand
in selecting the key faculty for the new department.
Instead of mainly hiring psychologists who shared his personal views, he
brought together a diverse faculty with widely differing orientations. These
included behaviorists and experimentalists, as well as clinicians from various
schools and his former mentor Goldstein. Among his notable later appointments
was a young Ulric Neisser, whom we’ll meet in Chapter 14 as a pioneer in the new
field of cognitive psychology.
ESTABLISHING A HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

At the same time he was building his large, diverse department at Brandeis,
Maslow was forging professional alliances with psychologists from other
institutions who shared his general outlook. They collaborated in a broad
movement to establish a new third force in psychology (after behaviorism and
psychoanalysis) that came to be called humanistic psychology. Two of his prin-
cipal collaborators were psychotherapists who had developed their own dis-
tinctive methods, and a third was an eminent elder statesman we met earlier in
this chapter.
Humanistic Allies: Rogers, May, and Allport

Six years older than Maslow, Carl Rogers (1902–1987; Figure 12.10) had
preceded him at Wisconsin where he studied agriculture and religion before
finally obtaining a counseling degree from Columbia Teachers College.
Working first as a child therapist and then as an advisor

for university students, Rogers was a professor and
director of the counseling center at the University of
Chicago from 1945 through 1957 when Maslow got to
know him well.
From his experience with bright but troubled young
adults, Rogers gradually abandoned the Freudian and neo-
Freudian techniques in which he had been trained while
developing his own unique therapeutic method. He called
his approach client-centered therapy, and described it
fully in a 1951 book.70 Traditionally, the therapist would
periodically interrupt the patient’s free associations or other
accounts to interject interpretations of the material based
on the therapist’s own theoretical system. A Freudian, for
instance, would interpret in terms of repressed childhood
sexuality, an Adlerian in terms of perceived inferiorities,
and so on. Rogers, by contrast, believed that the validity of
any particular insights should be determined not by their
Figure 12.10 Carl Rogers (1902–1987).
conformity with the therapist’s pre-existing views but by
his clients themselves. Rogers deliberately chose the word
“client” instead of “patient” to indicate a greater sense of equality in the thera-
peutic relationship.
Consistent with this perspective, Rogers developed a “nondirective”
counseling approach characterized by a technique he called reflection—the
mirroring back to the client the substance of what he or she just said using
different words. The reflection is intended to demonstrate that the therapist
is genuinely listening and trying to understand what is being said, while
encouraging further exploration of the issue under discussion. In addition,
the therapist must respond with a highly accepting and empathic stance,
attempting to see things from the client’s point of view. In this nonjudgmental
setting clients are encouraged to rediscover their own internal inclination
toward growth, or their “actualizing tendency.” In his language, as well as his
conviction that people should be approached by emphasizing the positive,
Rogers was very much in agreement with Maslow.
Rogers also strongly believed that the therapeutic process itself should be
subject to rigorous scientific study, with its sessions recorded and retrospectively
analyzed. These contributions will be more fully described in Chapter 16.
The American psychologist and therapist Rollo May (1909–1994; Figure 12.11)
promoted a slightly different but complementary point of view to that of Rogers
and Maslow. Trained first at Union Theological Seminary

where he earned a bachelor of divinity degree, May then
spent three years confined to a sanatorium with a serious
case of tuberculosis. Confronting the very real possibility
of an early death, he read deeply the writings of existential-
ist philosophers, under the guidance of his former theology
professor Paul Tillich. After recovering he obtained a clin-
ical psychology degree from Columbia, and went on to de-
velop an existential psychotherapy that emphasized the
quest for meaning in life as the paramount issue for modern
humanity. Although somewhat more somber in its implica-
tions than the theories of Maslow and Rogers, this quest
for meaning was similar to their drive for self-actualization.
The three were therefore natural allies in promoting a non-
reductionistic third force in psychology that would empha-
size the attainment of positive goals and self-fulfillment.
The group found a natural elder statesman for their
movement in Gordon Allport, who participated in many of
Figure 12.11 Rollo May (1909–1994). the same conferences with them. Although never a ther-
apist, Allport had famously and for many years empha-
sized the importance of studying normality and of taking
people’s own accounts of themselves seriously. Together with his promotion
of nonreductive idiographic methods, these ideas resonated strongly with the
younger third-forcers’ basic inclinations.
By 1961 the third force idea had gained enough sympathizers that a new
Journal of Humanistic Psychology was established, with Maslow as co-editor
and May, Fromm, and Goldstein among the members of a distinguished editorial
board. The journal attracted enough subscribers to encourage the creation of
a new formal organization, the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Thanks
partly to a grant obtained by Allport, the group held its first organizational
meeting in 1963. The following year a special invitational conference was held in
Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where the philosophy, aims, and themes for the new
association were discussed by a distinguished international cast of participants.
This event established humanistic psychology as a distinct and legitimate sub-
discipline in the public consciousness.71
Maslow’s Late Writings and the Legacy of Positive Psychology

Maslow contributed several articles to the new journal. One of the most influen-
tial presented the results of a thought experiment, in which he imagined the kind
of community that would be produced by a thousand self-actualizing people and

their families stranded together on a desert island. Calling this utopian society
eupsychia, he tried to imagine institutions that would encourage maximum free-
dom for people to realize their full potential. In an interesting aside, he noted that
all previous depictions of utopian societies had been written by men, and that
his eupsychia would differ from them by including the interests and values of
self-actualized women.72
As the 1960s progressed Maslow became internationally famous, and was
often mentioned in the popular media as a representative of a new and “liberated”
psychology. His notion of eupsychia was adopted by some influential organiza-
tional psychologists in attempts to develop management strategies that promoted
self-actualization. And to his surprise and pleasure, he was formally recognized
by mainstream psychologists when elected president of the American Psycho-
logical Association in 1968.
Also throughout the late 1960s, however, his health was gradually failing.
Perhaps more than coincidentally, his work on a revised edition of Motivation
and Personality showed a subtle but significant darkening of his mood. Parts
of the new edition, including his outline for a positive psychology, remained
unchanged from the first. But while the first edition had expressed optimism
about identifying and fostering future self-actualizers in the university student
population, the second edition declared this situation to be virtually impos-
sible. The full criteria for self-actualization required time and maturation to be
fully met, and many of the most promising of the college students Maslow stud-
ied in the early years had sadly failed to realize their potential. Maslow came
to believe that “growth is often a painful process” in which many things can go
wrong. Consistently with this revised thinking, he now asserted that a thorough
knowledge of psychopathology and psychoanalysis is a necessary safeguard
against overly optimistic illusions, and that “Freud is still required reading for
the humanistic psychologist.”73
In the same vein he insisted in a 1969 article that the third force of human-
istic psychology must not be thought of as antagonistic to psychoanalysis but
rather as including and building upon it. He coined the term “epi-Freudian”
to describe his attitude—epi, the Greek word for “upon”—to avoid the “sopho-
moric, two-valued, dichotomized orientation . . . of being either pro-Freudian or
anti-Freudian.”74
In another cautionary note Maslow’s second edition emphasized that the
state of self-actualization, while highly desirable, does not bring with it con-
stant happiness. Perhaps drawing from his personal experience, he now pro-
posed a “grumble theory”: the notion that any happiness, even of the highest
self-actualizing sort, is temporary. Quickly enough something else inevitably

comes up and demands satisfaction. Although genuine happiness “does come
and is obtainable and is real,” it also has an “intrinsic transience . . . [and] is
episodic, not continuous.”75
In June 1970, shortly after these words had been written but before they were
published, Maslow died of a sudden heart attack; he was 62 and at the peak of his
reputation and mental powers. Like Allport, he had significantly broadened the
field of psychology and left an enduring legacy. The institutions Maslow created
never quite achieved the mainstream status within psychology that he originally
hoped for, but they still exist under slightly different names as the Society for
Humanistic Psychology (Division 32 of the APA) and its affiliated journal The
Humanistic Psychologist. On the conceptual level, his hierarchical motivational
theory is still widely taught, and the term self-actualization has entered the pop-
ular psychological vocabulary.
Some distinctly Maslovian ideas have moved very much into the mainstream
with the recent movement officially called positive psychology, promoted by
Martin Seligman (b. 1942) and his associates. Early in his career Seligman
introduced the influential concept of “learned helplessness” as a major factor
in depressive conditions—a factor that could often be overcome through
cognitive behavioral therapy (see Chapter 16) . During the late 1980s he had a
revelation, whose nature is captured in the title of the article about him, “Martin
Seligman’s Journey from Learned Helplessness to Learned Happiness,”76 as
well as that of his own 1991 book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind
and Your Life.77
In an explicit echo of Maslow, Seligman argued that mainstream psychology
has focused on understanding and overcoming pathological and abnormal
conditions, at the expense of studying psychological positivity, health, and the
circumstances that promote happiness. Elected president of the APA in 1998,
Seligman designated positive psychology as the organization’s official theme for
his presidential year. At his base at the University of Pennsylvania, Seligman
and his colleagues established a Positive Psychology Center, described on its
website as promoting “the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that
enable individuals and communities to thrive.”78 Besides sponsoring an extensive
research program, the center also offers a master’s-level training program in
applied positive psychology. The movement attracted worldwide attention,
culminating in 2007 with the establishment of the International Positive
Psychology Association (IPPA), an organization that has grown to thousands of
members from more than 70 countries.
13_POP_28354_ch12_446-491.indd 488 18/10/16 4:04 PM

Chapter Review 489
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
Allport’s Ph.D. dissertation on the emerging concept of conduct in-depth studies and psychobiographies of in-
personality proposed that the trait was the most important dividual lives.
unit. Impressed by the Gestalt psychologists and the Like Allport, Maslow focused on the normal, healthy
personalistic psychology of Stern, Allport taught the first personality. After studying sexual and dominance-related
American university courses on personality psychology. In motives in monkeys, he was strongly influenced by a
1937 he published the first comprehensive and systematic series of New York mentors, including the anthropologist
textbook in the field, which emphasized the limitations Benedict; the neo-Freudians Adler, Horney, and Fromm;
of psychoanalytic theory for understanding the normal and the Gestalt psychologists Wertheimer and Goldstein.
personality, and argued that sometimes motives originally Becoming interested in not just normality but also the
developed in childhood may become rewarding, or func- conditions leading to superior psychological functioning,
tionally autonomous, in later life. He distinguished between Maslow hypothesized a state of self-actualization as the
nomothetic and idiographic research methods, believing epitome of psychological health. He also proposed a five-
both are necessary to produce a complete psychology of level hierarchy of needs (physiological, safety, belonging
personality. and love, esteem, and self-actualization), in which each level
The nomothetic approach to studying traits was sub- becomes dominant only when all the needs below have
sequently developed, using factor analysis, by Cattell, Ey- been satisfied.
senck, and more recent promoters of the Big Five model Concerned that psychology was excessively focused on
of personality dimensions, all proposing that the large abnormality and deficiency, Maslow explored the qualities
number of individual trait terms can be reduced into a inherent in a self-actualized personality. He studied the
small number of closely intercorrelated clusters. During lives of people who seemingly achieved self-actualization,
the 1970s and early 1980s, Mischel raised the person- and proposed an approach to psychology that would
situation controversy, challenging the relative impor- focus on the growth-enhancing, positive aspects of human
tance of traits versus situations in determining behavior; motivation, as opposed to the more pessimistic and de-
the debate was resolved by recognizing an interaction terministic views of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. This
and mutual influence of the two factors. Idiographic re- approach became known as the third force or humanistic
search entailing in-depth case studies and going by the psychology, Maslow was joined by Rogers, May, and All-
name of personology was conducted by Murray and port in establishing humanistic psychology as a new area.
his colleagues at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. That It continues today and has been complemented by the
tradition is represented today by psychologists who related contemporary movement of positive psychology.
Key Pioneers
Gordon W. Allport, p. 449 David McClelland, p. 465 Ruth Benedict, p. 475
William Stern, p. 453 Thomas Pettigrew, p. 469 Erich Fromm, p. 477
Raymond B. Cattell, p. 458 Gardner Lindzey, p. 469 Carl Rogers, p. 484
Walter Mischel, p. 461 Abraham Maslow, p. 470 Rollo May, p. 485
Henry A. Murray, p. 463 William Sheldon, p. 472 Martin Seligman,
Christiana Morgan, p. 463 Harry Harlow, p. 472 p. 488
Key Terms
personality psychology, p. 449 psychogenic needs, p. 465
humanistic psychology, p. 449 psychobiography, p. 466
traits, p. 452 immature religion, p. 467
personalistic psychology, p. 453 mature religion, p. 467
relational individuality, p. 453 contact hypothesis, p. 468
real individuality, p. 454 peak experience, p. 479
nomothetic methods, p. 456 self-actualization, p. 480
idiographic methods, p. 456 hierarchy of needs, p. 481
functional autonomy, p. 457 physiological needs, p. 481
factor analysis, p. 458 safety needs, p. 481
Sixteen Personality Factor belonging and love needs, p. 481
Questionnaire (16PF), esteem needs, p. 482
p. 460 third force, p. 484
PEN Model, p. 460 client-centered therapy, p. 485
person-situation controversy, p. 461 reflection, p. 485
Big Five, p. 461 existential psychotherapy, p. 486
personology, p. 464 eupsychia, p. 487
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), p. 464 positive psychology, p. 488

1. Allport asserted that a complete understanding of personality requires both idiographic
and nomothetic research methods. Define these two approaches, and give an example
of work undertaken in each of these traditions.
2. Allport and Maslow distinguished their views from Freud’s in several ways, while
also finding some points of agreement. Discuss and compare these similarities and
differences.
3. Allport and Maslow made important institutional and theoretical contributions to the
fields of personality psychology and humanistic psychology, respectively. What are
some of these institutional contributions, and what role might they play in establishing
the legitimacy of a new field?
4. How did Allport’s religious commitment influence his work? How did Maslow’s identity
as a Jewish man influence his professional life?
Chapter Review 491
Suggested Resources
Several important articles by Allport, and Maslow’s classic paper “A Theory of Human
Motivation,” are accessible online at the website Classics in the History of Psychology
(http://www.psychclassics.yorku.ca/).
Allport’s short autobiography, along with several other of his very readable later articles,
appears in his book The Person in Psychology: Selected Essays (Boston: Beacon Press,
1968). His early life and career are described in more detail in Ian Nicholson’s Inventing
Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood (Washington, DC: American Psy-
chological Association, 2003), a work that also captures the more general intellectual and
cultural climate that gave rise to personality psychology. For several interesting essays
about Allport and other personality psychology pioneers, see Kenneth H. Craik, Robert
Hogan, and Raymond N. Wolfe, eds., Fifty Years of Personality Psychology (New York:
Plenum Press, 1993). Allport’s first textbook, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1937), may seem dense to the casual reader, but he
provides a more accessible account of most of his central ideas in the later Pattern and
Growth in Personality (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961).
Edward Hoffman’s revised edition of The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham
Maslow (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999) presents a full and sympathetic account of Maslow’s
life and work. Maslow’s posthumously published Motivation and Personality, 2nd ed.
(New York: Harper & Row, 1970) is interesting for its presentation of his basic ideas, as well
the changes in his thinking during the latter part of his career.
CHAPTER 13
The Developing Mind: Binet,
Piaget, and the Study
of Intelligence
Binet’s Early Life and Career

The Binet Intelligence Tests
The Rise of Intelligence Testing
Piaget’s Early Life and Career
Genetic Epistemology and the Stages of Development
Piagetian Influences and Reactions
D uring the late 1880s, the young psychologist Alfred Binet took pleasure in
closely observing the behavior of his two daughters, Madeleine and Alice.
As an outspoken promoter of Charcot’s recently discredited theory of grand
hypnotisme (see Chapter 10), Binet had come under professional attack at work.
At home, however, he was enchanted by the growing abilities of his young girls,
and he couldn’t resist trying out on them several new psychological tests he had
read about. These home experiments yielded data for three scientific publica-
tions and produced some important new attitudes in Binet about the nature and
measurement of intelligence.1
Some of the tests measured reaction time and sensory discrimination, follow-
ing the recent model of Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory (see Chapter 7).
493
494 13 | The Developing Mind: Binet, Piaget, and the Study of Intelligence
Galton hypothesized that innate, hereditary intelligence would be associated

with powerful, efficient nervous systems. His tests were intended primarily for
young adults, but Binet tried them on his much younger daughters and was sur-
prised at what he found. When they paid attention to the task of reaction time,
the girls responded just as quickly as adults. When they didn’t pay attention,
however, they had slower average reaction times than adults. But Binet thought
this finding signified a difference between children and adults in attention, not in
underlying neurological reactivity or sensitivity. On tests of the sensory discrim-
ination of variously sized angles or the matching of colors, 3-year-old Alice did
almost as well as adults, and 5-year-old Madeleine actually scored slightly better.
Tests that did show major differences between children and adults required
skills largely untapped by Galton’s measures. Binet’s daughters could not name
the colors printed on strips of paper as quickly as adults, for example, even
though they could discriminate and match the same colors by sight just as well.
And when asked to define ordinary objects, the children did not offer proper def-
initions as adults would, but responded by describing immediate actions or pur-
poses. For example, a knife “is to cut meat,” a box “is to put candies in,” and a snail
was, simply and emphatically, “Squash it!”2
At this point in his career, Binet was not concerned with measuring different
levels of intelligence, as Galton and some others had been attempting. But the
experiments left him with a permanent distrust of Galton’s whole approach to test-
ing. When young children with undeveloped intellects could compare favorably
or even match the performance of adults, such measures did not seem promising
indicators of intelligence between adults or anyone else. Much more promising
would be tests involving “higher” and more complex functions, such as language
and abstract reasoning. A decade and a half later, when Binet finally did turn his
attention to the specific problem of developing an intelligence test, these ideas
would enable him to succeed where Galton and many others had failed.
Binet was not the only pioneer investigator of intelligence to learn from chil-
dren in his family. Thirty years after Binet’s first experiments with Madeleine and
Alice, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget closely observed something interest-
ing in the behavior of his 13-month-old nephew Gérard playing with a ball. When
the ball rolled under an armchair where Gérard could still see it, he crawled after
it and retrieved it. Later the ball disappeared from his sight under a fringed sofa
on the other side of the room. After just a quick glance at the sofa, Gérard crossed
the room to the armchair and searched for the lost ball in the place he had found
it the time before. From this “irrational” reaction, Piaget inferred that the baby
Gérard lacked an adult’s sense of the ball as a distinct and permanent “object,”
independent and separate from himself and his perception of it.
Later, as Piaget’s daughter Jacqueline passed through infancy, he carefully

studied her developing acquisition of this knowledge that objects continued
to exist independently, even when she couldn’t see them. During her earliest
months she acted as if objects ceased to exist as soon as they left her immediate
awareness. For example, when Piaget placed a toy in front of her she reached to
get it, but she stopped as soon as he blocked her view of it with his hand or a
screen. When he placed a cloth over the toy, in full view, she made no attempt
to remove the cloth and recover the toy. By 11 months she would search actively
and successfully for such hidden objects, while still showing a limitation reminis-
cent of Gérard. When Piaget placed a toy parrot under bedcovers to Jacqueline’s
immediate left, she promptly retrieved it; but when he next made it obvious he
was hiding it under covers on her right, she looked for it where she had been suc-
cessful before, on the left.3
By 21 months, however, she was fully capable of locating such hidden objects,
and could now conceive of objects as entities themselves, with an existence sepa-
rate from her own immediate experience of them. And only now, Piaget reasoned,
could she logically be expected to attach names to stable and meaningful object
concepts, and begin the sort of verbal behavior and thought that characterizes
mature intelligence. This reinforced his hypothesis, already established on other
grounds, that the intelligence of a child is not simply a miniature or less powerful
version of the adult’s. Instead, the child’s intelligence operates in qualitatively
different ways from that of an adult, and must go through a series of distinctively
different developmental stages before maturing into the adult form.
Binet’s and Piaget’s observations of their children constituted a small but
important part of their overall investigations, which established that a full
understanding of the adult mind requires prior understanding of the child’s. In
the stories of these two pioneers, we shall see the foundations of two different but
equally influential approaches to the study of intelligence.
BINET’S EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

Alfred Binet (1857–1911; Figure 13.1) was born in Nice, France. His wealthy
parents separated soon after his birth and he was raised in Nice and Paris mainly
by his amateur artist mother. His physician father figured in at least one cru-
cial childhood experience, however, when in an attempt to cure Alfred’s timidity,
Dr. Binet forced him to touch a cadaver. The “treatment” served only to increase
the boy’s anxieties, and its memory haunted him thereafter.
After a respectable and uneventful secondary-school experience, Binet earned
a degree in law but decided against pursuing a practice. Then he tried medical
school, where the horrors of the operating theater evidently brought flashbacks to
his childhood trauma. He suffered a severe breakdown and

withdrew without a degree. At age 22, dispirited, emotion-
ally exhausted, and having no direction, he began passing
time by reading extensively in Paris’s great library, the Bib-
liothèque Nationale. There he discovered books on the new
experimental psychology, became fascinated, and believed
he had at last found his vocation.
Binet plunged into this new field enthusiastically but
without discipline. He read a few studies of the “two-point
threshold”; when two points are simultaneously pressed
against the skin, they must be separated by some minimum
distance that varies both with individuals and with the parts
of the body stimulated in order to be correctly perceived as
two rather than one. After experimenting briefly on himself
and some friends, he wrote an article proposing a “new” the-
ory of this phenomenon, which appeared in 1880 as his first
scientific publication. His pleasure at seeing his work in print
quickly changed to embarrassment, because of the response
of the Belgian physiologist Delboeuf (see Chapter 10). Binet’s
Figure 13.1 Alfred Binet (1857–1911).
experiments had flaws, and the “new” theory had already
been published years before by Delboeuf himself.4
Binet next became enthusiastic about the associationistic psychology of John
Stuart Mill, one of Locke’s major successors in promoting the role of experience
and education in shaping human character (see Chapter 2). In a second published
article, Binet made the extreme claim that “the operations of the intelligence are
nothing but diverse forms of the laws of association: all psychological phenom-
ena revert to these forms, be they apparently simple, or recognized as complex
[emphasis added].”5 Although associationism clearly had merits (and Binet’s
appreciation of them would eventually help him succeed where the hereditarian
Galton had failed in devising a workable intelligence test), this statement went
much too far. Work on hypnosis and abnormal psychology had already clearly
demonstrated that ideas can become disassociated or disconnected from each
other, and psychologists such as Brentano (see Chapter 11) had emphasized that
a given stimulus can lead to totally different trains of association under different
motivational conditions. Laws of association could not easily account for these
phenomena, and Binet was fortunate to escape a second public rebuke.
Perhaps realizing this, Binet next volunteered to work as an unpaid assistant
with the eminent Charcot, who was just then developing his theories of grande hys-
térie and grand hypnotisme at Paris’s Salpêtrière Hospital (see Chapter 10). Binet
remained with Charcot for nearly eight years, becoming one of the Salpêtrière
School’s most prolific authors. He published three books and more than twenty
papers on topics ranging from mental imagery to sexual fetishism (a term he
originated, to denote cases in which patients invest objects or body parts such as
feet or ears with sexual significance).
Binet’s most publicized work at the Salpêtrière involved the hypnotic reactions
of Charcot’s prized “major hysterics.” As noted in Chapter 10, Binet and his col-
league Feré produced astonishing results in deeply hypnotized subjects merely
by reversing the polarity of a horseshoe magnet in their presence. Symptoms
moved from one side of the body to the other, for example, and emotions turned
into their opposites. These implausible results aroused the skepticism of Binet’s
former critic Delboeuf, who visited the Salpêtrière and saw the young research-
ers’ carelessness in openly expressing their expectations to the hypnotized sub-
ject. Delboeuf’s criticism helped turn scientific opinion against Charcot’s entire
theory of grand hypnotisme in favor of the less flamboyant Nancy School.
At first Binet responded to Delboeuf by arguing that the Nancy School could
not reproduce the Salpêtrière findings only because they lacked access to the
crucial cases of “major hysteria”—found more easily in the big city than in the
provinces. Delboeuf responded sarcastically to Binet’s claim,
that Paris alone had access to “profound hypnotism,” while we—we had only
“le petit hypnotisme,” a hypnotism of the provinces! It would be difficult to
find in the history of the sciences another such example of an aberration
perpetuating itself in this way by pure overweening pride.6
Finally Binet himself recognized the terrible truth: that he had placed too much
faith in Charcot’s name and prestige and had accepted the master’s theories too
uncritically. Humbled, he admitted publicly that his earlier hypnotic studies
present a great many loopholes for error. . . . One of the chief and constant
causes of mistakes, we know, is found in suggestion—that is to say, in the
influence the operator exerts by his words, gestures, attitudes, even by his
silences, on the subtle and alert intelligence of the person he has put in the
somnambulistic state.7
By this time Binet had learned a hard but invaluable lesson about how psycho-
logical experiments should not be conducted. Never again would he blindly trust
an unproven authority or go out on a limb for a position he had not tested thor-
oughly himself.
Just when the hypnosis debate was coming to its

climax, Binet began his series of experiments at home
with his daughters (Figure 13.2). Besides suggesting to
him the weakness of Galton’s approach to mental test-
ing, his observations of Madeleine and Alice reinforced
one positive thing he had learned from Charcot and the
Salpêtrière. In conducting intensive studies of relatively
few cases, Charcot had always emphasized the essential
individuality of all subjects in psychological study. Binet
found ample further evidence of individuality in his two
daughters.
A proud and doting father, Binet saw both of his girls
as bright and capable. But from earliest childhood onward,
they demonstrated their intelligence in characteristically
different ways—the elder Madeleine always proceeded cau-
tiously and deliberately, while the younger Alice behaved
Figure 13.2 Binet’s daughters, Madeleine (left) with greater enthusiasm and imagination. For example, in
and Alice. learning to walk, Madeleine held onto a chair or table for
support and directed herself “with great seriousness and
in perfect silence.” Alice, by contrast, was a laughing, active child who plunged
“without the slightest hesitation to the middle of an empty part of the room. . . .
[S]he advanced staggering like a drunken man, and could not take four or five
steps without falling.”8
Such stylistic differences recurred in countless other situations, leading Binet
to characterize the deliberate Madeleine as “the observer” (“l’observateur”)
and the more impulsive and fanciful Alice as “the imaginer” (“l’imaginitif”).
For the rest of his career, Binet would respect the great individuality of every
person’s intelligence, lending his mature psychology a particular down-to-
earth quality.
Individual Psychology
By 1891, the 34-year-old Binet had learned enough positive and negative lessons
at the Salpêtrière and at home to become a first-rate experimental psychologist,
but he lacked a formal laboratory or workplace. Understandably, he didn’t want
to stay at the Salpêtrière after his humiliation, and other institutions were not
coming to him with offers. Late in the year, however, he had a chance meeting
in a railroad station with Henri Beaunis, a physiologist and the director of the
newly created Laboratory for Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Beaunis had favored the Nancy School against Binet and Charcot in the hypnosis
controversy and must have seemed an unlikely ally. Nevertheless, Binet sum-
moned his courage and offered to work without pay in the new lab.
With a small budget, Beaunis perhaps felt he had little to lose. In any case, he
appointed Binet as his unpaid assistant and got a wonderful bargain. Binet soon
gained recognition as France’s leading experimental psychologist and succeeded
Beaunis as director of the laboratory in 1894. The following year he founded
L’Annee Psychologique, the first French journal explicitly devoted to experimen-
tal psychology. He remained at the Sorbonne, without pay, the rest of his life.
Among the first topics Binet studied from his new Sorbonne base was suggest-
ibility, the characteristic that had ruined his hypnosis experiments and that he
now called the “cholera of psychology.”9 His controlled experiments on suggest-
ibility in children, as described in Chapter 10, helped set the stage for modern
experimental social psychology.
Binet summarized these experimental results statistically, giving average
numbers of correct and incorrect responses for groups of subjects under the var-
ious conditions. But as he did so, he also recalled the positive lesson of individu-
ality he had learned from Charcot and from his own daughters. “Mere numbers
cannot bring out . . . the intimate essence of the experiment,” he warned. He felt
uneasy about expressing all of the variations of thought “in a simple, brutal num-
ber, which can have only a deceptive precision. . . . It is necessary to complete this
number by a description of all the little facts that present the full picture of the
experiment” [emphasis added].10
Consistent with this appreciation for individual details, Binet also conducted
in-depth case studies of unusually talented people, including several of France’s
most famous authors and two “lightning calculators”—men who could quickly
and accurately perform complicated mathematical operations entirely in their
heads. He learned that those who share the same special ability often go about
exercising it in entirely different ways. One calculator always saw the numbers
in his imagination as he worked, for example, while the other always heard them
instead. Some authors worked best during intense, intermittent periods when
they felt spontaneously inspired, while others—with equally good results—wrote
methodically and systematically for shorter periods every day. Different people
used different intellectual strategies to arrive at similar extraordinary results.
So impressed was Binet by this fact of individuality that in 1895, he and his
younger colleague Victor Henri launched a program they called individual psy-
chology (not to be confused with the approach of the same name promoted by
Adler, described in Chapter 11). They hoped to develop a series of short tests that
could be administered to one person in less than two hours, that could provide
information comparable in richness, complexity, and comprehensiveness to that
obtained from the many hours of intensive analysis traditionally devoted to an

individual case study. Ideally, a short summary of these test results would serve
as an adequate substitute for the sort of extended case reports Binet had written
about his extraordinary subjects.
In trying to develop such tests, Binet continued to experiment with his
daughters Madeleine and Alice. Throughout their adolescence they served as
subjects on scores of tasks designed to test their memory, judgment, imagina-
tion, and general personality. Some of these were early examples of projective
tests, in which the girls were shown ambiguous inkblots, pictures, or objects and
asked what they saw in them or thought about them. In later years, Hermann
Rorschach would further develop this technique in his famous inkblot test
(see Chapter 16), and Murray and Morgan would do the same with their TAT
(see Chapter 12).
Binet summarized the results of twenty such tests in his 1903 book L’Étude
Experimentale de l’Intelligence (The Experimental Study of Intelligence),
regarded by some psychologists as Binet’s most creative work.11 This book
repeatedly showed how the two girls had continued to manifest their “intelli-
gence” in characteristically different ways—Madeleine as the sensible observer
and Alice as the imaginer. Consider, for example, the two teenage girls’ contrast-
ing responses when their father asked them to write something about a chestnut
tree leaf. Notice the formal, complex vocabulary Madeline uses, compared with
Alice’s more common and fanciful language:
Madeleine: “The leaf was gathered in the autumn, because the folioles are
all almost yellow except for two, and one is half green and yellow. . . . The
folioles are not of the same size; out of the seven, four are much smaller
than the three others. The chestnut tree is a dicotyledon, as one can tell by
looking at the leaf, which has ramified nervures.”
Alice: “This . . . has just fallen languidly in the autumn wind. . . . Poor leaf,
destined now to fly along the streets, then to rot, heaped up with the others.
It is dead today, and it was alive yesterday! Yesterday, hanging from the
branch it awaited the fatal flow of wind that would carry it off, like a dying
person who awaits his final agony. But the leaf did not sense its danger, and
it fell softly in the sun.”12
Although Binet’s attempts to realize the goals of individual psychology pro-

duced some interesting isolated results, he was forced to conclude in 1904 that
the program as a whole had not succeeded as hoped. No short combination of
tests had emerged that could satisfactorily substitute for an extended case study.
Binet concluded:
It is premature to look for tests permitting a diagnosis during a very limited

time (one or two hours), and . . . much to the contrary, it is necessary to study
individual psychology without limiting the time—especially by studying
outstanding personalities.13
The most significant concrete results of individual psychology remained his

extended case studies of his daughters and of a few prominent literary figures.
Although they were technically unsuccessful, Binet’s testing experiments in
individual psychology helped pave the way for his most famous achievement.
He had gained valuable experience by trying out many tests of various faculties,
including memory, imagination, comprehension, attention, and suggestibility, as
well as the aesthetic and moral senses. He had confirmed his belief that only
relatively direct tests of higher, complex mental processes revealed significant
intellectual differences. When Binet began in 1905 to seek a test of “intelligence”
in a narrower and more specific context than he had been concerned with before,
these explorations helped him succeed where Galton and other predecessors
had failed.
THE BINET INTELLIGENCE TESTS

During the first years of the twentieth century, Binet and many other psycholo-
gists became increasingly interested in the problem of mental subnormality. The
recent passage of universal education laws in France and elsewhere had brought
a new public awareness of mentally handicapped children. Previously, most such
children had either dropped out of school at an early age or never attended at all.
Now they were required by law to attend school—and since they usually could not
keep up with an ordinary curriculum, they required special attention and special
schools.
In 1904, Binet was appointed to a government commission charged with in-
vestigating the state of the mentally subnormal in France. He quickly concluded
that an accurate diagnosis of subnormality posed the most pressing problems. “It
will never be a mark of distinction to have passed through a special school,” he
remarked, “and those who do not merit it must be spared the record.”14 Therefore,
with Théodore Simon (1873–1961), a young physician who had come to study
psychology with him in 1899, Binet set out to develop a test to identify children
whose mental handicap rendered them permanently unable to benefit from an
ordinary education.
The 1905 Tests

Binet and Simon started out with few theoretical assumptions about the “intel-
ligence” whose deficiency they hoped to measure. They started empirically, by
identifying groups of children who had been clearly diagnosed as either sub-
normal or normal by their teachers or doctors, and then testing them on many
specific measures. They avoided tests that relied heavily on reading, writing,
and other school-related skills, not wanting to confuse lack of intelligence with
mere lack of schooling. But they did not hesitate to try items that assumed a
basic familiarity with everyday French life and culture, many of which Binet had
already used in his earlier studies of his daughters and their friends.
At first Binet and Simon were frustrated because, while the normal and sub-
normal groups showed differences in average performance on most items, no
item came close to being a perfect discriminator. At least a few of the normal
children failed on every item, while some subnormal children passed. But soon a
key insight dawned—one that seemed obvious once recognized, even though pre-
vious researchers had neglected it. The ages of the subjects had to be considered;
normal and subnormal children might both learn to pass the same tests, but nor-
mal children invariably did so at a younger age. Binet and Simon summarized: “It
was almost always possible to equate subnormal children with normal children
very much younger.”15 Following this insight, it became common for many years
to describe the subnormal population as mentally “retarded.”
This idea enabled Binet and Simon in 1905 to construct the first test of intelli-
gence that actually worked, consisting of thirty separate items of increasing diffi-
culty. The first item simply tested whether subjects could follow a lighted match
with their eyes, demonstrating the elementary capacity for paying attention that
is essential for all intelligent behavior. Next, subjects had to grasp a small object
placed in their hand, unwrap and eat a piece of candy, shake hands with the exam-
iner, and comply with a few simple spoken or gestured requests. Normal children
could do all of these things by the age of 2, but the most profoundly subnormal of
any age could never do some of them.
Intermediate problems, passable by normal 5- or 6-year-olds but by none of
the moderately deficient, required them to state the differences between pairs of
objects such as “paper and cardboard” and “a fly and a butterfly,” and to memo-
rize and repeat sentences such as “I get up in the morning, dine at noon, and go
to bed at night.” The more difficult items, which defined the upper borderline of
subnormality, required subjects to find rhymes for the French word obéissance
(obedience); to construct a sentence containing the three words Paris, river, and
fortune; and to figure in their heads what time it would be if the hands of a clock
were reversed (for example, twenty past six would become half past four). Most
normal children of 11 or 12 could pass these items, but few subnormal subjects of
any age could.
The 1908 and 1911 Revisions

The Binet-Simon test of 1905 marked a turning point in the history of psychology,
for it truly made useful discriminations among lower degrees of intelligence. But
it focused primarily on the very deficient and the very young, while many of the
most difficult educational decisions involved older children close to the border-
line of normality. Therefore, Binet and Simon extended and refined their pool of
items, producing revised intelligence tests in 1908 and 1911. On these, each item
was specifically designated according to the age at which a sample of normal chil-
dren had first been able to pass it. Each item at the 6-year level, for instance, had
been passed by a minority of normal 5-year-olds, about half of the 6-year-olds, and
a majority of older children. The 1908 revision contained fifty-eight items located
at age levels between 3 and 13; its 1911 counterpart had five questions for each age
between 5 and 15, and five more in an “adult” category. A few examples follow.
At the 3-year level, children had to name common objects in a picture, correctly
repeat a six-syllable sentence, and point to their eyes, nose, or mouth upon re-
quest. At 6, they were expected to state the difference between morning and eve-
ning and count thirteen coins. At 10, they normally could reproduce several line
drawings from memory, answer questions involving social judgment (e.g., why
people should be judged by their acts rather than their words), and detect and
describe the logical absurdities in statements such as “The body of an unfortu-
nate girl was found cut into eighteen pieces; it is thought that she killed herself.”
Items at the 15-year level asked subjects to correctly recall seven digits and to deal
with such problems as: “My neighbor has been receiving strange visitors. He has
received in turn a doctor, a lawyer, and then a priest. What is taking place?”
With age-standardized items such as these, Binet and Simon provided a means
of calculating a single score or intellectual level for each child who took the test.
Questions were always asked in ascending order of difficulty, until five in a row
were missed. Then the examiner took the highest year for which all five items
had been successfully passed as the base, then added one-fifth of a year for each
subsequent correct answer to compute the child’s intellectual level. For example,
a child who answered all the questions at the age-7 level, four at age 8, and two at
age 9 would be assigned an overall intellectual level of 8.2 years.
In diagnosing degrees of mental subnormality, Binet compared each child’s
tested intellectual level with his or her actual age. He collected statistics sug-
gesting that children whose intellectual levels trailed their ages by less than two
years could usually manage in the regular school system, while those who showed
greater discrepancies (about 7 percent of the subjects tested) usually had trouble.
Therefore, he proposed a guideline that children with intellectual levels more than
two years behind their actual ages be seriously considered for special education.
Binet also counseled caution, however. He still denied the ability of “brutal”
numbers to adequately summarize any complex quality, and emphasized that dif-
ferent children could achieve identical intellectual levels by correctly answering
widely varying patterns of specific questions. He also recognized that no score
could be valid for a child who was poorly motivated to take the test, or who had
been raised in a culture other than that of the sample of children he had used to
standardize his questions.
In addition, Binet, the early proponent of Mill’s associationism, still strongly
believed the intelligence his test measured was not a fixed quantity but some-
thing that grows naturally with time and, at least within limits, may be increased
by training. He developed a program he called mental orthopedics, with exer-
cises such as the game of Statue, in which children had to freeze in position
upon hearing a signal, and Concentration, in which they had to remember sev-
eral objects that were briefly removed from a box and then
re-hidden. Children whose deficits stemmed from an inabil-
ity to sit still or to concentrate often benefited from these
exercises, increasing not only their intellectual levels, as
measured by Binet’s tests, but also their intelligent behavior
in real life.
THE RISE OF INTELLIGENCE TESTING

At the height of his career when he developed mental or-
thopedics and his revised intelligence tests, Binet had little
time to enjoy his accomplishments. His wife suffered from
an undiagnosed ailment that inhibited social life, and Binet
himself seemed susceptible to gloomy thoughts. These were
expressed in a series of macabre plays he co-authored with
André de Lorde, a popular dramatist known as the “Prince
of Terror” (Figure 13.3). The main characters included a
released psychiatric patient who murders his brother, a de-
ranged father who kills his infant son after being denied
admission to an asylum, and another father who performs
ghoulish experiments trying to restore his dead daughter to
life.16 All too soon the ultimate tragedy occurred in real life,
Figure 13.3 Cover page to a script by Binet as Binet himself suffered a stroke and died in 1911, at the
and de Lorde. early age of 54.
As his most enduring legacy, Binet left behind the basic technology that still
underlies modern intelligence tests. Some psychologists still hope to find mea-
sures of innate intelligence that are “culture-free” and closely tied to neurophys-
iological processes. However, the most practically useful tests developed so far
still rely on items basically like Binet’s—questions involving a variety of higher
and complex functions, such as memory, reasoning, verbal facility, and practical
judgment. But while Binet might feel comfortable about the item content of most
modern intelligence tests, he probably would have reservations about some other
aspects of their interpretation and use, which began to appear almost immedi-
ately after his death.
General Intelligence and Intelligence Quotients

One such development concerned the general conception of “intelligence”
assumed to be measured by the test items. Binet had adopted a flexible and
pragmatic definition, seeing intelligence as a rather loose collection of separate
capacities for memory, attention, reasoning, and the like, all tied together by a
faculty he simply called “judgment” or “good sense.” A contrasting view was
strongly promoted by the English psychologist Charles Spearman (1863–1945)
soon after Binet’s death.
Spearman first observed and emphasized a fact that has been repeatedly con-
firmed ever since. When coefficients of correlation are computed (see Chapter 7),
all the various items and submeasures used on intelligence tests tend to be posi-
tively and hierarchically intercorrelated. People who do well on vocabulary tests,
for example, also tend to score high on solving arithmetic problems, detecting
similarities, assembling painted blocks into specified patterns, remembering dig-
its, and so on. In addition, while all the subtests tend to intercorrelate positively,
some of them achieve higher overall levels of correlation than others. Subtests
involving abstract reasoning (such as similarities), for instance, intercorrelate
more strongly than measures of rote memory with the other items in the total
array of subtests. To explain these findings, Spearman theorized that all intellec-
tual tasks must involve the exercise of a single common factor he called general
intelligence, abbreviated as g. He also proposed that each individual type of item
required an ability specific to itself, an s factor; his theory is accordingly called
the two-factor theory of intelligence.*
*Spearman’s conception of the two kinds of factors is often considered the origin of the statistical
method of factor analysis, previously described in Chapter 12 for its use in the classification of
personality traits.
Writing metaphorically, Spearman went on to liken a person’s g capacity to

an overall supply of mental energy or power, capable of driving any number of
specific neurological “engines” required for performing different tasks (thereby
constituting the material basis for the individual s factors). Performance on any
task is theoretically a joint function of the overall energy or g available, as well as
the efficiency of the particular s engine involved. The hierarchical nature of the
correlations suggested that some tasks, such as abstract reasoning, depended rel-
atively much on g and relatively little on s; for rote learning the proportions were
reversed. But even tasks relatively “unsaturated” with g—such as rote learning—
required some degree of mental energy. For Spearman, the single most important
fact to know about any person’s intelligence was his or her general intelligence
level, or overall mental power.
Spearman’s theory quickly attracted support from many (but not all) psychol-
ogists. Suggesting that intelligence is less a loose collection of varying functions
and aptitudes and more a network of engines all driven by a common energy
source, the two-factor theory fostered attitudes toward testing quite different
from Binet’s. While Binet believed different intelligence levels could be repre-
sented only approximately and inadequately by numbers, Spearman’s theory
suggested that a single figure representing each person’s g level, or overall “men-
tal horsepower,” would be the most important thing to know about that person’s
intelligence.
A means of calculating such single numbers from Binet’s intelligence tests
was proposed in 1912 by the German personality psychologist William Stern
(see Chapter 12). Stern had worried over experimental findings showing that the
discrepancy between a child’s actual or chronological age and the tested men-
tal age (the term he substituted for Binet’s “intellectual level”) often increased
over time. When retested after exactly one year, children whose scores were be-
low average the first time usually gained less than one year in mental age, while
those who had been above average gained more than a year. Binet’s suggestion
to adopt a two-year discrepancy between chronological and mental age as diag-
nostic of subnormality seemed imprecise, because it implied different standards
for different age groups. Many children’s discrepancies inevitably grew from less
than two at an early age to more than two later on, making diagnoses of subnor-
mality relatively more frequent at later ages.
To correct this inequality, Stern suggested taking not the absolute discrepancy
between mental and chronological age as the measure of deficiency but rather
the ratio of mental age to chronological age—a fraction Stern called the intelli-
gence quotient. For example, a 5-year-old with a mental age of 4 would have an
intelligence quotient of 4 divided by 5, or 0.80; to achieve the same quotient, a
10-year-old would have to get a mental age of 8, two years rather than one behind
the chronological age.
While perhaps simplifying the problem of diagnosis, Stern’s innovation had
one effect of which Binet would certainly have disapproved. As a final, sum-
mary score of test results, the intelligence quotient was one of those “brutal”
numbers he had disliked because it was even farther removed from the actual
details of the test than the simple mental age or intellectual level. Binet had
complained because the same mental age could be produced by different pat-
terns of specific answers; now the problem was compounded because identical
intelligence quotients could be produced by different combinations of mental
and chronological ages.
Feeblemindedness and Giftedness

In the 1910s and early 1920s, Binet’s intelligence tests achieved their greatest
prominence—not in Binet’s native France, but in the United States under the
leadership of two psychologists with contrasting interests: the lower levels of
intelligence and the highest levels. The first was Henry H. Goddard (1866–1957),
who had trained at Clark University under Hall before becoming director of
research at the Training School for the Feebleminded in Vineland, New Jersey. At
that time, feeblemindedness was a common term for intellectual subnormality,
and the institution was populated by children and adults exhibiting the full range
of disabilities that had been assessed by Binet and Simon. Therefore, Goddard
was interested in the questions that had originally inspired the French investi-
gators. How can one accurately diagnose the different levels of intellectual sub-
normality? How can one separate those at the upper end who still need special
education from those at the lower end of “normality” who do not?
Initially a skeptic, Goddard translated the Binet tests and was surprised by how
well they worked. Soon he was their greatest English-language advocate, distrib-
uting thousands of copies to colleagues and supervising the English translation
of Binet and Simon’s theoretical papers.17 Goddard made one lasting if ultimately
distasteful contribution to English in translating Binet’s French term for those
subjects at the high end of subnormality: les débiles (“the weak ones”). Goddard
coined the new word moron (from the Greek moros for “dull” or “foolish”)—a term
that promptly entered popular usage as a derogatory label for a stupid person.
Goddard had particular interest in morons, arising from his commitment
to the negative eugenics movement that had become prominent in the early
1900s. As described in Chapter 7, Galton had emphasized a positive eugenics,
encouraging a high birth rate for couples with high degrees of intelligence
or natural ability. In the early 1900s, however, fears arose in many circles that
civilized populations might become “swamped” by overbreeding among the

genetically inferior—a potential situation that Goddard and others referred to
as “the menace of the feeble-minded.”18 Goddard also believed feebleminded-
ness was a single, diseaselike condition caused by a single defective gene—
both assumptions now known to be incorrect. Therefore, for Goddard the sim-
plest way to combat the menace was to prevent the feebleminded from having
children.
Identifying feebleminded people was the initial step. This was quite easy for
the severely or moderately afflicted who typically showed obvious physical or
behavioral signs of their disabilities. For higher-level individuals, however, the
problem was more complicated because they often looked like completely normal
people. Goddard illustrated this fact with the photograph of “Deborah Kallikak”
in his bestselling 1912 book, The Kallikak Family.19 Kallikak was a pseudonym—
based on the Greek kalos for “good” and kakos for “bad”—for some families fre-
quently encountered in the region around Vineland who shared a last name but
fell into two sharply divided categories: one highly respectable and even promi-
nent, the other marked by poverty and vice. Goddard believed all these families
were descended from an original “Martin Kallikak,”
a revolutionary war soldier from a prominent fam-
ily who fathered an illegitimate son with a feeble-
minded tavern servant before he “straightened up
and married a respectable girl of good family.”20
The bad side presumably all descended from his
first liaison, the good side from his marriage.
Deborah, born into one of the bad families,
was brought to the Training School as a child and
raised there. Within that sheltered environment
she learned basic housekeeping skills and grew
up to be an attractive and normal looking young
woman (Figure 13.4). Despite her appearance,
however, her mental age on the Binet test never
advanced beyond 9 years. Goddard declared that
if this young woman were to leave the insti-

tution, she would at once become prey to the
designs of evil men or evil women and would
lead a life that would be vicious, immoral or
criminal, although because of her mentality
Figure 13.4 “Deborah Kallikak” in her early 20s. she herself would not be responsible.21
Unmentioned but implied was the suggestion that an unsupervised Deborah

would probably also bear children with the gene for feeblemindedness.
For Goddard, the Binet test was a marvelous new tool for detecting the often
invisible taint of feeblemindedness, and by successfully promoting it as such,
he became involved in one of the more discreditable episodes in the history of
psychology. According to negative eugenics, it was necessary to prevent the
newly diagnosed feebleminded from reproducing. Goddard himself was rela-
tively moderate in his recommendations, suggesting that they should be main-
tained in supervised but humane institutions such as Vineland. Others were not
as moderate, however, and as eugenic ideas gained popularity throughout the
1920s, involuntary sterilization of those diagnosed as mentally deficient became
widespread. In the end, thirty-three states in the U.S., two provinces in Canada,
and several European countries (including Switzerland, Sweden, and Finland)
enacted laws under which tens of thousands of diagnosed “mental defectives”
were involuntarily sterilized. Such measures were rejected in the Netherlands
and the UK, despite, in the case of Britain, strong support from influential figures,
such as Winston Churchill. The lowest point of this movement occurred in Nazi
Germany, where forced sterilizations were but the first step in a horrifying esca-
lation that extended, in the name of “race-hygiene,” to other designated groups,
including all Jews, and in which sterilizations were replaced by “mercy killings”
and finally the abominations of the death camps.22
Long before these events occurred, Goddard had changed his opinions. In
1918 he left Vineland and began studying juvenile delinquency for the state
of Ohio. These studies convinced him of the important role the environment
played in producing delinquency. He also realized he had conceptualized
feeblemindedness too rigidly. In 1928 he acknowledged that hereditary influ-
ences on intelligence were more flexible than he had previously argued, and that
strict institutionalization was less often required. “I think I have gone over to the
enemy,” he ruefully conceded.23
Still, Goddard had done much to advance the cause of intelligence testing—a
cause that was even further promoted by attempts to demonstrate that high
test scores were indicative of superior intellectual power. In 1920 this was not
a foregone conclusion. Binet himself had experimented briefly on children with
advanced mental ages, been disappointed with the results, and had concluded
that “the most valuable applications of our scale will not be for the normal sub-
ject, but instead for the inferior degrees of intelligence.”24
One ambitious but ultimately inconclusive early attempt to demonstrate
otherwise occurred during World War I, when tests adapted for group admin-
istration were given to nearly two million U.S. Army recruits. The results were
intended not only to screen out mentally deficient recruits but also to help select
high-scoring individuals for officer training. But while this program represented
a spectacular organizational accomplishment for psychologists and helped ele-
vate intelligence testing in the public awareness, the war ended before the tests’
validity in predicting positive performance could be accurately or fully evaluated.
In fact, there were many glaring deficiencies and inequalities in the way the test-
ing program was run.25
The second psychologist, after Goddard, to significantly advance the prom-
inence of Binet’s intelligence tests in the United States was Lewis Terman
(1877–1956; Figure 13.5). While Goddard’s interest was in lower levels of intel-
ligence, Terman wanted to diagnose superior intelligence. A Stanford Univer-
sity professor, he had worked on the U.S. Army program. In 1916, he introduced
the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale, an extensive English-language
reworking of Binet’s test adapted for American subjects and standardized on a
much larger sample of children. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (as it came
to be known) quickly became the most widely used individual intelligence test in
North America. When introducing it, Terman had endorsed Stern’s intelligence
quotient concept and further suggested that the fraction be multiplied by 100 to
eliminate decimals, with the result being abbreviated as the IQ. Ever since, an
exactly average level of intelligence has been denoted by an IQ of 100.
Terman’s major interest, however, was in giftedness, which he defined as the
intelligence level of children whose IQs were much higher than 100. Perhaps
partly because of his own experience as something of a child prodigy who passed
through school much faster than most, he suspected that advanced children in
general tended to grow up to be unusually capable adults. To test his hypothe-
sis, he followed two complementary strategies. First he examined the childhood
records of famous intellectuals from the past, starting with Galton (see Chapter 7).
Galton’s recently published biography suggested, with some exaggeration, a
youthful mental age at least double his actual age, or an IQ of 200. Terman then
had his graduate student Catharine Cox (1890–1984; Figure 13.5) examine the
childhood biographies of some 300 other eminent historical geniuses (including
Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Darwin). Although data were often scanty, every
case showed convincing evidence of childhood accomplishments in advance of
their years. Terman and Cox argued that if Binet-type intelligence tests had been
available in the past, most people who turned out to be intellectually prominent
in adulthood would also have achieved high IQ scores as children.26
Terman’s second strategy for relating high childhood IQs to high adult
achievement led to his most extensive and famous research program. In the early
1920s his students tested more than 250,000 California schoolchildren to identify
Figure 13.5 Lewis Terman (1877–1956) and his student Catherine Cox (1890–1984).
a group of 1,528 gifted children with IQs above 140, and then proceeded to
investigate all aspects of their lives at regular intervals as they grew up. Terman’s
successors continued to study the survivors of this group into old age, in per-
haps the most extensive longitudinal study of a single group ever conducted by
psychologists. Terman named the overall series in which his reports appeared
Genetic Studies of Genius, contributing unintentionally to a popular tendency
to equate high IQ with genius —a word more appropriately reserved for people
of truly extraordinary ability and accomplishment, such as Newton, Mozart, and
Einstein. Terman’s individual books and articles, however, describe the high-IQ
children more accurately as “gifted” rather than as geniuses.27
How well did these gifted children do as they grew up? Statistically speaking,
they did extremely well. Compared to a random sample, a high proportion en-
tered the professions, with many earning national or international reputations.
More than thirty became eminent enough to be listed in Who’s Who. Taken as a
whole, the group attained more education, earned more money, and in general
led healthier and apparently happier lives than the national average. At the same
time, however, the studies showed that high IQ alone did not guarantee success.
Some failed to lead successful lives, and the group contained relatively few who
were accomplished in the creative arts (as opposed to the professions). None won
the Nobel Prize or approached the level of an unquestioned “genius” in the sense
described previously.28
In many other studies since Terman’s, IQ scores in the general population
have been found to correlate strongly although not perfectly with variables such
as academic grades, number of years of completed education, and salary levels
in adulthood. In general, high IQs have turned out to be good—but far from
infallible—predictors of intellectual success.
In general, Terman and other advocates made “high IQ” a popular phrase
and synonym for superior intelligence, and a vast testing industry developed.
Terman’s Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, in various versions, became standard
for testing children’s intelligence, but had obvious limitations for the testing of
adults. Research showed that performance on the items generally peaked when
subjects reached early adulthood or sometimes even before. It was nonsensical
to apply the ratio formula when the subjects’ chronological ages were 40, 50, or
even 80 or 90!
Deviation IQs and the Flynn Effect

The person who most successfully addressed this problem was the Romanian-born
American immigrant David Wechsler (1896–1981; Figure 13.6). As a Columbia
University graduate student, Wechsler was a young assis-
tant in the previously mentioned World War I project to test
the intelligence of U.S. Army recruits. Despite the project’s
limitations, Wechsler was impressed by the fact that the test
designers developed items for two groups of soldiers: those
who could read and respond to written questions, and those
(a substantial proportion) who were illiterate and could not.
After completing his Ph.D. at Columbia, Wechsler took
a position at New York City’s Bellevue Psychiatric Hospi-
tal, and became chief psychologist in 1932. In that position
he became acutely aware of the need for a better test than
the Stanford-Binet for the intellectual qualities of his adult
population—one that would also provide a more sensitive
breakdown of a subject’s intelligence than just a single IQ num-
ber. He led a massive research project that resulted first in 1939
with the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, a test whose
all-white standardization sample was substantially broadened
for its 1955 revision, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
(WAIS). With periodic updates, the WAIS has remained the
Figure 13.6 David Wechsler (1896–1981). gold standard for assessing adult intelligence ever since.29
Wechsler’s first innovation focused on tabulating the scores. Although he

kept the term IQ, the final scores were not literal mathematical quotients but
are better defined as deviation IQs: indications of where subjects stand on
normal distributions of previous results from people of their own age. (See
Chapter 7 to review normal distribution and standard deviation.) By definition,
anyone scoring at the exact average for his or her age group was assigned an
IQ of 100. Other subjects’ IQs were based on how many standard deviations
their scores were above or below their groups’ means, with one standard devi-
ation arbitrarily set at 15. A result one standard deviation above the mean (at
about the 84th percentile) would be scored 115; two standard deviations above
(about the 98th percentile) would be 130. Therefore, on the Wechsler tests a
25-year-old and a 60-year-old, each with an IQ of 100, stand at the exact aver-
age of people in their age groups, while IQs of 80, 110, and 135 always stand
respectively at about the 9th, 74th, and 99th percentiles for the age group in
question.
Wechsler’s tests did more than provide global IQs, because its items and
their results were classified into two general groups he described as being either
verbal or performance in orientation. The verbal subtests were further divided
into categories such as vocabulary, informational knowledge, the detection of
abstract similarities, memory for digits, and basic arithmetic calculations. The
performance tests, which were roughly inspired by the army’s attempts to as-
sess illiterate soldiers, involved such skills as assembling red and white blocks
into specified designs, detecting the missing elements from pictures of objects
or situations, and detecting as rapidly as possible specified symbols or shapes
embedded within a visual display.
Wechsler’s test construction methodology proved to be beneficial for research
on the nature of intelligence. His collection of standardizing data from differ-
ent age groups, for example, enabled researchers to see that the early rise and
then gradual decline of test performance throughout adulthood was not uniform.
Verbal subtests, such as vocabulary and information, showed little if any decline
with age, while performance tests dependent on speedy correct reactions deteri-
orated relatively quickly. The pattern of subtest results for individual subjects or
patients could also be very revealing. If someone achieved much lower relative
scores on vocabulary and information than on memory for digits or block design
assembly, for example, an examiner might speculate about possible educational
or other cultural deficits in the subject’s background. And certain kinds of organic
or brain injuries were shown to affect some subtests more than others. In general,
Wechsler’s realistic assessment of intelligence as a complex and multifaceted
entity was consistent with Binet’s earlier view.
Another interesting aspect of intelligence testing arose from the fact that
the Wechsler tests, as well as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale and other
related instruments, have been periodically revised and had their scores stan-
dardized on new populations of subjects over the past several decades. In 1984
the New Zealand psychologist James Flynn (b. 1934) revealed a striking fact
about these revisions and their standardizations, now commonly called the
Flynn effect.30 The term refers to the fact that over the past century, as the new
revisions of tests have been developed, subjects have been getting “smarter”
(as measured by average performance on intelligence test items) at an impres-
sively steady rate. When people take two different tests that have been devel-
oped and standardized at two different times, average IQ scores are invariably
lower on the more recent test. Therefore, the standards required to show av-
erage intelligence have become more difficult each time the test is revised or
updated. The rate of change in standards over the past seventy or eighty years
has amounted to approximately 3 IQ points per decade.31 That means, for exam-
ple, that the level of responding that earns an IQ score of 100 today would have
produced 115 by the standards of a half-century ago.
The reasons for the Flynn effect have been debated. The genetic makeup of
the populations involved are essentially unchanged, so the reason must be an
environmental or cultural product of some kind. Huge developments in radio,
television and computer technology over the past century have vastly increased
the accessibility and amount of information available to the general population—
which would certainly have a positive effect on subtests for information or
vocabulary. But the improvement has also extended to tasks involving reasoning,
abstract thinking, and the speed of response. Analyzing and explaining the exact
nature and cause of the Flynn effect remain important ongoing projects for psy-
chologists studying intelligence.
If he were alive today, Binet would probably be pleased to see that his basic
testing techniques have retained their usefulness, and that psychologists such
as Wechsler have revived his original conception of intelligence as a multifac-
eted assortment of abilities and aptitudes. He would probably be pleased but
also unsurprised by the Flynn effect, which bears out his original belief in the
potential for the improvement of a person’s basic intelligence. He would also
be satisfied to know that in 1920 his younger colleague Simon, as the director
of one of Binet’s old laboratories, hired the young Swiss psychologist Piaget
to work on a project that would lead to a new approach to the development of
intelligence in children—one that was quite different from Binet’s, but also com-
plementary to it.
Piaget’s Early Life and Career 515
PIAGET’S EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

Jean Piaget (1896–1980; Figure 13.7) was born in Neuchâtel,
Switzerland, the son of a prolific author of works on medieval
literature and local history. Piaget recalled his mother as
being intelligent and kindly, but also prone to emotional
disorders that often made the domestic atmosphere un-
comfortably tumultuous. To cope with the tumult, he said
he identified with his father and buried himself in serious
intellectual work. He began writing extensively as a child,
and continued throughout his life to publish at a rate similar
to Wundt’s (see Chapter 5). When asked as an adult how he
could write so much, Piaget frankly replied, “Fundamentally
I am a worrier whom only work can relieve.”32
As a young boy Piaget produced a handwritten booklet
entitled Our Birds, and then became launched as a pub-
lished writer when a local naturalists’ magazine accepted his
hundred-word note describing an albino sparrow he had ob-
served. Soon thereafter he became the voluntary assistant to
the director of Neuchâtel’s natural history museum, a man
who specialized in the study of mollusks. Piaget learned this Figure 13.7 Jean Piaget (1896–1980) as a
field too, and between the ages of 15 and 19 he published young man.
twenty-one papers on the subject in assorted international
journals. One reader, not knowing his age, offered Piaget a curator’s job in Geneva
that he had to decline because he still had two years of high school remaining.
This background in scientific observation and methodology helped Piaget get
through an emotionally difficult late adolescence, when he was plagued by reli-
gious preoccupations and what he called “the demon of philosophy.” Particularly
troubling was the question that had absorbed predecessors such as Descartes
and Locke: how, and under what conditions, is it possible to know true things
about the world? A turning point occurred after his godfather suggested that
philosophical and even theological concerns could be brought into connection
with biology. This led Piaget to “one evening of profound revelation” in which
“the identification of God with life itself was an idea that stirred me almost to
ecstasy because it now enabled me to see in biology the explanation of all things
and of the mind itself. . . . It made me consecrate my life to the biological expla-
nation of knowledge.”33
Piaget now immersed himself in philosophical works that tried to integrate bi-
ology and epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and
scope of knowledge. He was particularly impressed by the writings of the French

philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson’s theory of creative evolution divided the
universe into two fundamental substances: living matter and inert matter. Living
matter evolved constantly in order to operate freely within the inert matter. But
while impressed by Bergson’s notion of mind as progressively adapting to, and
understanding, external reality, Piaget felt dissatisfied by the lack of solid exper-
imental support provided for the argument. “I discovered a need that could be
satisfied only by psychology,” he later remembered.34
At that point he had no idea what formal psychology was, but his interests
had combined to create his life’s ambition: the construction of an empirically and
experimentally based theory explaining how people come increasingly to know
about their world. His goal was similar to Locke’s in his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, but in conceptualizing the human mind as a biologically given,
organic, and evolving entity, Piaget would also follow in the tradition of Locke’s
great rival, Leibniz (see Chapter 2).
Before he could actively pursue that goal, however, Piaget became ill and had
to spend his twentieth year recuperating in the mountains. During this time he
read a little psychology, but concentrated mainly on writing a philosophical novel
entitled Recherche (literally, “search” or “quest”), in which he criticized Bergson
and some other prominent contemporary philosophers.35 Although the book got
published in 1918, it was poorly reviewed and Piaget himself was later embar-
rassed by it, and omitted it from his personal publication list for many years.
After recovering from his illness, he enrolled in the doctoral program at his home
University of Neuchâtel, where psychology was not offered. Instead, Piaget took
courses in biology, geology, chemistry, and mathematics, while writing a thesis
on local mollusks. He received his Ph.D. in natural history at age 22. Now he was
ready to begin formal training in psychology.
At first he went to Zurich, where he studied briefly with Freud’s former follower
Jung and started learning about abnormal psychology. Then, seeking something
more experimental, Piaget went to Paris and the Sorbonne where he had his
chance meeting with Simon, who had taken over the directorship of Binet’s old
teaching laboratory. Simon wanted to standardize the French translations of a
series of reasoning tests recently developed by Cyril Burt, a rising young English
psychologist and strong supporter of the Binet-Simon approach to testing.* Im-
pressed by Piaget, Simon offered him the job of supervising this project. Despite
some reservations about the project’s highly quantitative approach to studying
*Years later in old age Burt would come under suspicion of fabricating the results from a large
separated twin study (see Chapter 7). In his younger years, however, he was highly respected.
intelligence, Piaget decided the opportunity to be his own master in an estab-

lished laboratory seemed too good to refuse. He soon found that the seemingly
dull task of standardizing children’s intelligence tests could lead to unexpected
and exciting findings, which he later summarized this way:
I noticed that though Burt’s tests certainly had their diagnostic merits,
based on the number of successes and failures, it was much more inter-
esting to try to find the reasons for the failures [emphasis added]. Thus
I engaged my subjects in conversations patterned after psychiatric ques-
tioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning pro-
cesses underlying their . . . wrong answers. I noticed with amazement that
the simplest reasoning task involving the inclusion of a part in the whole . . .
presented for normal children up to the age of eleven or twelve difficulties
unsuspected by the adult.36
By careful questioning of individual children, Piaget attempted to cut through

the simple, “brutal” numbers (as Binet had called them) that normally stood as
intelligence test scores, in order to reveal the children’s underlying thought pro-
cesses. Piaget’s findings, however, pointed to a perspective on intelligence quite
different from Binet’s.
Binet’s testing approach assumed that intelligence grows with age in primarily
a quantitative sense. Using similar types of items for many age levels, it showed
that older children could perform more tasks more quickly than younger children
of comparable intellectual rank—suggesting that intelligence increases with age
in much the same way that height and weight do. By focusing on the reasoning
processes underlying incorrect answers, Piaget concluded that this represents
only one aspect of intellectual development. He found evidence that older chil-
dren do not just think “faster” or “more” than younger ones; they also think in
entirely different ways, using cognitive abilities and structures that enable them
to understand some problems and concepts younger children cannot. In short,
intelligence develops qualitatively with age, as well as quantitatively.
GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE STAGES

OF DEVELOPMENT
Piaget saw that the systematic study and description of qualitative developments
in maturing children’s intelligence could provide an approach to the epistemo-
logical problem that interested him so much. By learning how children under-
stand the world, and how their thought processes gradually mature and become
more like those of adults, he felt he could comprehend the nature of knowledge
itself. His new view of intelligence also showed promising comparisons with the
biology he thought fundamental to any worldview. Just as a growing embryo
gradually develops new organs from basic tissues, and these new structures
make possible the performance of new functions, so the intellect presumably de-
velops in gradual stages that allow the emergence of new ways of thinking. To
emphasize this possible link between the biological and the intellectual, Piaget
created the name genetic epistemology for his project to study the development
of children’s ways of knowing about the world. (He used the word genetic to mean
“developmental,” not hereditary.)
Piaget spent the rest of his life tirelessly pursuing this project, moving to
Geneva to become director of research at the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in
1921 and remaining affiliated with that institution until his death in 1980. His work
attracted students from around the world, and he developed intense collabora-
tions that resulted in hundreds of studies in genetic epistemology. This research
reshaped the way psychologists think about both childhood and intelligence.
Piaget’s many publications describe children of different ages working at
simple but ingeniously devised tasks in widely diverse areas, including rattle
play, language use, moral judgment, the conception of numbers, space percep-
tion, algebra, the description of dreams and fantasies, and cognition in general.
Piaget and his collaborators found evidence of sequential stages of development,
periods marked by qualitative differences between the ways younger and older
children conceptualized and solved problems and performed the tasks in each
area. This vast body of work cannot be summarized briefly, but its general nature
may be illustrated by some of the specific findings regarding the stage theory
of cognitive development. This theory hypothesizes the existence of four major
sequential stages between infancy and late adolescence, each one involving the
acquisition of new strategies and ways of thinking that permit the solution of
previously unsolvable problems.
Sensory-Motor and Preoperational Intelligence

Piaget’s conception of the first sensory-motor stage, which he saw as the period
from birth to approximately age 2, derived from observations of his own nephews
and children. “I learned in the most direct way,” he recalled, “how intellectual
operations are prepared by sensory-motor action, even before the appearance
of language.”37 As the name indicates, a child’s “intelligence” during this period
involves basic sensory and motor activities and has nothing to do with abstract
thought in the adult sense. Before one can think about objects in any abstract way,
one must first learn how they strike the senses and how they can be manipulated—
the general goal of the sensory-motor stage.
More specifically, the sensory-motor child must achieve the sense of what
Piaget called object constancy: the knowledge that objects continue to exist
even when they’re not within immediate sensory awareness. His observations
of Gérard and Jacqueline, described in the chapter’s introduction, illustrate
various stages in the development of object constancy. Piaget noted that it
arises gradually, as infants gain increasing mastery over their bodies and learn
to manipulate objects and their appearances. As they do so, they take great
delight in games such as peekaboo, where the repetitive disappearance and
reappearance of familiar faces and objects hold particular fascination. Only
after children learn to make many objects come and go through their own
efforts do they acquire the sense of a stable environment with continually exist-
ing objects independent of themselves. And only after objects are recognized
as permanent does it become possible to name them, thereby signifying and
securing their constant identity.
After acquiring these basic language skills, when children can express and
symbolize the continuing existence of specific objects in the world, they move
to the second developmental stage, which lasts from about age 2 through 7.
Although these children can recognize that an object continues to exist even if
they can’t see it, they fail to understand the fact that certain properties of objects,
such as quantity or volume, remain the same—or, in Piaget’s language, are
“conserved”—regardless of changes in their appearance. The key to appreciating
such consistency, which children must acquire before progressing to the next
stage, is recognizing that certain manipulations or operations upon an object can
transform it, from one state to another, and then re-transform it back again. For
this reason Piaget called this developmental period, between ages 2 and 7, the
preoperational stage.
The first serious research on the preoperational stage
was conducted by Bärbel Inhelder (1913–1997; Figure 13.8),
a 20-year-old Swiss student in Piaget’s lab. Following a sug-
gestion by Piaget, she dropped a cube of sugar into a glass
of water and asked children between the ages of 5 and 11
what was happening as the cube dissolved and disappeared.
She found that they changed their interpretations of the fate
of the sugar cube. The youngest children thought the sugar
had completely disappeared (although sometimes noting
that the water may have become sweeter), while the oldest
ones believed the weight and volume of the sugar had stayed
the same but the sugar had broken up into bits so small they Figure 13.8 Piaget with Bärbel Inhelder
were impossible to see. Some of the older children reasoned (1913–1997).
further that if those bits were reassembled, they would yield the same quantity of
sugar as before.38
Inhelder originally planned to follow up on this experiment for her doctoral
thesis. She was surprised, however, when Piaget casually suggested that they col-
laborate on a much more comprehensive, book-length project on what he called
the “construction of quantity.” Inhelder later remembered:
I felt some regret at abandoning my project for a thesis, but was excited by
the idea of taking part in a major scientific enterprise. At the time, I certainly
did not think this would lead to a long-lasting, fascinating collaboration.39
In fact, she ended up becoming Piaget’s lifelong colleague, co-authoring nine

books with him and succeeding him as chair of genetic and experimental psy-
chology at the University of Geneva in 1971.
Piaget and Inhelder’s first collaboration, published in 1941, was titled (in trans-
lation) The Child’s Construction of Quantities: Conservation and Atomism.40 In
impressive detail, it showed how children advancing out of the preoperational
stage gradually recognized that the overall amounts of objects or substances can
remain the same even if their shapes or presentations change. In the authors’ lan-
guage, the children developed a sense of the conservation of quantity—a term
best understood with the help of two examples.
In the first example, children were shown two lumps of clay and instructed to
carefully remove small bits from the larger one until both were exactly the same
size. Then the experimenter broke up one of the equal lumps into many pieces,
placed them in a pile and asked each child which had more clay—the remaining
single lump or the new pile. All the preoperational children were deceived by the
different appearances of the two choices. Most noted that the pile took up more
space and looked bigger, and therefore chose it; a minority emphasized the small-
ness of the pieces in the pile and therefore chose the single large lump.
In the second example, children were shown two identical glasses of a liquid
and asked what happened when the contents of one were poured into a taller and
thinner glass. Most of the preoperational children judged that the new glass now
held more than the original ones because the liquid rose higher in its new con-
tainer; a few said the liquid became less because its column was thinner. In both
cases a misjudgment was made because of the liquid’s differences in appearance.
The children failed to appreciate that its quantity was conserved even as it was
transformed from one shape into another.
Besides showing that young children may be tricked into thinking they have
more or less of objects or substances just by changing their presentation, these
simple experiments beautifully illustrate a central insight of Piaget’s research

program. Older children and adults think about abstract properties, such as
quantity, in different ways from young children. Not just better with numbers or
capable of handling larger amounts, they make judgments about quantity on a
completely different basis. Younger children judge according to the way things
immediately look. Older children have learned that by reversing operations, they
can remake a pile of clay pieces into its originally sized lump, or repour the tall,
thin column of juice into its original shape in the original glass. They can men-
tally go beyond the immediate appearance of things and recognize that the same
quantity may manifest itself in many different ways.
In an extension of this work to a new population (and to satisfy her thesis
requirements), Inhelder used some of the same previously described tasks to
investigate the intelligence of mentally subnormal children. She found that, in
general, they followed the same developmental sequence as normal children, but
more slowly and with a tendency to shift between different levels of performance.
Concrete and Formal Operations

By the age of 7 or so, after most normal children have gained experience manip-
ulating objects in their environment and frequently reversing operations with
them, they enter what Piaget called the concrete operations stage. By now they
have gained an appreciation of abstract concepts such as quantity and volume,
which are conserved even as substances undergo changes in appearance. But
concretely operational children remain tied to their immediately given situation
in still other ways, which Piaget and Inhelder described in another book, The
Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence.41 Only at the age of 11
or 12 do they enter the formal operations stage, and become capable of fully ma-
ture experimental or inductive reasoning, and analyzing problems systematically.
Inhelder and Piaget nicely illustrated the difference between these two stages
with an experimental task requiring children to manipulate some chemicals. They
were presented with four flasks, numbered 1–4, and a smaller container labeled
“g” (not to be confused with Spearman’s g for general intelligence). Each con-
tainer was filled with an identical-looking transparent liquid. The experimenter
explained that adding a few drops of g to a certain combination of liquids from
the flasks would produce a chemical reaction, turning the entire mixture yellow.
The children were then invited to experiment with the liquids and discover the
right combination.
In actuality, g was potassium iodide, a chemical colorless by itself but one
that produces a yellow coloration when mixed with oxygenated water (water to
which extra oxygen has been added under pressure) in an acid solution. Flask 1
contained a mild acid and flask 3 contained oxygenated water, so the combi-
nation of g 1 1 1 3 yielded the desired result. Flask 2 contained plain water,
which had no effect on the reaction, but flask 4 held a dissolved chemical that
neutralizes acid. So g 1 1 1 2 1 3 also produced the color, but g 1 1 1 2 1
3 1 4 did not.
Although both concretely and formally operational children could solve this
problem, they typically went about doing so in different ways, and with important
different consequences. The younger, concretely operational children usually
proceeded by trial and error, trying random mixtures until finally hitting on one
that worked. As far as they were concerned, the problem was solved at that point.
Formally operational children, by contrast, could see at once that there were only
a limited number of possible combinations, and that these could be investigated
systematically and completely—a process that yielded not just the proper combi-
nation, but also valuable information about the nature of the chemicals. There-
fore, some started out by adding g to each of the four liquids by itself, discovering
that no single chemical produced yellow with g. Then they tried each of the six
possible combinations of two chemicals with g (1 1 2, 1 1 3, 1 1 4, 2 1 3, 2 1 4,
and 3 1 4), until discovering the one that worked.
Even after finding an answer, however, formally operational children often
continued to experiment with the five remaining untested combinations: the four
possible combinations of three (1 1 2 1 3, 1 1 2 1 4, 1 1 3 1 4, and 2 1 3 1 4),
and all four mixed together. Following this complete set of trials, they could gen-
eralize about the nature of the chemicals, recognizing that the contents of flask 4
could counteract the crucial 1 1 3 combination, while adding flask 2 made no
difference. In being able to conceptualize all the possible combinations at the
outset, and then to test them systematically, the formally operational children
were able not only to solve the specific problem, but also to extract the maximum
amount of information about the individual chemicals.
***
In sum, Piaget, Inhelder, and their collaborators demonstrated that rational,

adult, scientific thinking and the knowledge that proceeds from it represent the
end point of extensive developmental processes. At the beginning of life, chil-
dren’s thoughts are tied to the sensory and motor experiences of the immedi-
ate present. Only gradually do children start thinking about imagined rather
than immediately experienced concepts: first the memories of objects when
they are no longer physically present, then abstract properties such as quantity
14_POP_28354_ch13_492-531.indd 522 18/10/16 4:05 PM

and volume that may remain constant through a variety of changing forms, and
finally the entire range of combinations of possibilities in problems like the
chemistry experiment.
In summarizing the implications of his work in 1970, Piaget emphasized the
active nature of these developmental processes:
I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality. . . .

I believe that knowing an object means acting upon it [emphasis added],
constructing systems of transformations that can be carried out on or with
this object. Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations
that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.42
Piaget and Inhelder’s work represented and integrated several respected

themes in the history of mental philosophy. Like Locke, they sought to under-
stand the nature and limits of human knowledge. But like Descartes, they saw the
rational mind as an active rather than passive participant in the creation of that
knowledge. Like Leibniz, they stressed the organic and biological nature of that
active mind. And in seeing knowledge as a series of transformations of external
reality produced by the mind, involving developing conceptions of space, num-
ber, causality, and the like, they continued the tradition of Kant.
PIAGETIAN INFLUENCES AND REACTIONS

As Piaget’s theories and findings became better known internationally during
the 1950s, they naturally attracted the attention of educators interested in im-
proving the quality of teaching. Piaget was unenthusiastic about applying his
developmental theory to pedagogical techniques. Admitting that he was not a
professional teacher, he suggested schools could best improve their teaching
by always providing pupils with problems and challenges appropriate to their
stages of intellectual development. It would be inappropriate, for example, to try
to instruct preoperational children in the formal reasoning processes of mature
scientists, but both possible and desirable to help such children develop conser-
vation of quantity by giving them opportunities to manipulate and transform the
shapes and appearances of various objects and substances. Piaget advised: “It is
a matter of presenting to children situations which offer new problems, problems
that follow developmentally on one another. You need a mixture of direction and
freedom.”43
As we noted, Piaget’s inspiring vision as a young man had been that the human
capacity for knowledge was a biological process, and he saw his developmental
stages as proceeding in much the same manner as physical

maturation. Therefore, while intellectual growth in a child
may presumably be nurtured and facilitated like physical
growth, it cannot be accelerated beyond certain natural, bio-
logical limits. Piaget argued that appropriate mental devel-
opment must come first, before higher-level teaching can
be effective.
During the same time that Piaget was formulating his
basic ideas, a contrasting view was being developed in
Soviet Russia by his contemporary, Lev Vygotsky (1896–
1934; Figure 13.9). Vygotsky came of age during the tu-
multuous years following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917,
and during his early 20s he actively supported the socialist/
communist ideology of the new regime. A gifted but ini-
tially unfocused student, he had briefly studied medicine
and law before finally shifting his major attention to psy-
chology and teaching. Without a formal degree he began
teaching psychology in his provincial home town, and in
1924 he attended a national neuropsychology conference
Figure 13.9 Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934).
in Leningrad. Soon he was invited to become a research fel-
low at the Psychological Institute in Moscow. A long essay
he had written on the psychology of art was accepted as a dissertation, and he
was awarded his doctoral degree in that field.
Starting in his late 20s Vygotsky was afflicted with tuberculosis, including
attacks that required extended hospitalization and threatened his life. During his
healthy periods he wrote extensively and became the nominal leader of an influ-
ential group of Soviet psychologists known as the Vygotsky Circle. He did little
experimental work and his writings were primarily theoretical, but they engaged
with traditional psychological issues in ways generally consistent with the social-
ist views of the new Soviet government.
In particular, Vygotsky promoted an approach to developmental psychology
that has been described as sociocultural. Its main argument is that everything in a
child’s mental development must occur first on a social level before it can become
internalized and “individual.” Language, for example, occurs first as a means of
social interaction, and only then can a child begin “talking to him/herself” as the
original form of private, individual thought. An important practical corollary to
this view is that a child’s interpersonal educational environment is supremely
important, and should be taken into consideration whenever describing his or
her developmental level.
14_POP_28354_ch13_492-531.indd 524 18/10/16 4:05 PM

More specifically, Vygotsky proposed the concept of a zone of proximal devel-

opment (zpd), to describe the difference between what a person is intellectually
capable of on his or her own, and what is possible with the guidance of someone
who is more capable. The word proximal means “next to” or “very close,” and
Vygotsky’s term refers to those intellectual abilities a person is close to attaining
but has not yet reached—somewhat like a bud just at the point before it becomes
a flower. Some American scholars have translated Vygotsky’s term as the zone of
potential development.44
Vygotsky illustrated his concept with the hypothetical example of two
10-year-old children who both test at the 8-year-old level on a Binet-type in-
telligence test. A mental age of 8 represents what Vygotsky called their actual
developmental level, their maximum level of performance when acting on their
own. The tester then shows them several ways of approaching problems, such
as by solving them partially or completely himself as they watch, or by offering
leading questions. When they take the test again, one of them might immedi-
ately improve to as much as the 12-year level, while the other might improve
only to 9. The original intelligence levels of the two children were therefore
not really the same, because the first one’s zpd was much broader than that of
the second.45
Vygotsky’s concept provides a new way of looking at the children who bene-
fitted from Binet’s mental orthopedics exercises, their gains in intelligence now
attributable to the existence of their zpds. It added a component of individual
differences, however, with its assumption that different children’s responses
to the training will vary according to the breadth and receptiveness of their
individual zpds.
In sum, Vygotsky’s conception of intelligence included three closely inter-
related ideas. First, he saw it as an inherently social characteristic, with origins
in the development of language, part of which gradually becomes internalized
and private. Second, he believed any complete assessment of a person’s intelli-
gence must evaluate not only his or her actual abilities, as measured by standard
intelligence tests or other developmental scales, but also the person’s poten-
tial or readiness for quick improvement if exposed to guidance by a more ex-
pert teacher. Third, although this was not emphasized in the example above, the
qualities of the teacher are important because certain techniques for enhancing
development may be generally better than others, or may work better for some
individuals than others.
Tragically, Vygotsky died from tuberculosis at the young age of 37 and was
unable to push his theories to their fullest extent. After his death his works came
under political suspicion during the repressive Stalinist era, and were largely
suppressed or ignored for two decades in the Soviet Union; untranslated from
the Russian, they remained largely unknown elsewhere during that period.
This situation began to change in the 1950s, partly because of the Cold War
raging between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies. The two
sides were then engaged in fierce technological competition to build and send
into orbit the first artificial space satellites. Initially overconfident, American
scientists became increasingly uneasy as hints of progress on the other side
began to appear, and they nearly panicked in 1957 when the Soviets successfully
launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into Earth’s orbit. Motivated by fear that
their students were lagging behind those in the Soviet Union, American educa-
tors sought new and innovative ways to improve the teaching of mathematics
and science.
An important leader in these efforts was the versatile American psychologist
Jerome Bruner, whose role in establishing cognitive psychology as a new sub-
discipline will be described in Chapter 14. Familiar with the work of Piaget and
Inhelder, Bruner believed the rapid attainment of formally operational thinking
would be a vital step in the education of scientists and mathematicians. He also
knew Piaget was skeptical about the possibility of accelerating cognitive devel-
opment beyond relatively fixed biologically determined limits, but he also had
become aware of Vygotsky’s more optimistic views about the potential power
of education. Bruner became a strong advocate for the translation into English
and publication of Vygotsky’s works, and began developing a new “theory
of instruction” that integrated major elements of the ideas of both Piaget and
Vygotsky.
According to this theory, an ideal technique for teaching new material is to
move the student smoothly through three modes of representation—different
ways of conceptualizing, or mentally representing, the material. Those modes
correspond in a general way with what happens during a child’s progression
through Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. A student begins by doing
something with the material under study, representing it and “getting to know it”
in the enactive mode. Next he or she focuses on its perceptual qualities, using
the iconic mode of representation, before finally appreciating its abstract qual-
ities in the symbolic mode. Within Piaget’s system, enactive representation
is dominant during the sensory-motor stage, iconic during the preoperational
stage, and symbolic during the two operational stages (concrete and formal). But
even already mature individuals often have to progress through all three of these
modes when encountering new objects. One’s first thought when seeing some-
thing completely new and different is: “What am I supposed to do with this?”
Next comes an exploration of its perceptual qualities, and then finally an attempt
to understand its qualities more abstractly.
Bruner and his colleagues used this theory of instruction to develop a pro-
gram for teaching some topics in mathematical number theory to young chil-
dren. In one exercise, the children were given random handfuls of beans and
told to count them and then arrange them in patterns of horizontal rows and
vertical columns that would form perfect rectangles; that is, with columns of per-
fectly equal heights. From repeated experience the children learned that about
half of their handfuls could be arranged into two exactly equal columns, and
were told that these handfuls contained even numbers of beans. Some of those
even-numbered handfuls could also be arranged into other rectangles; for exam-
ple, 12 beans could be arranged into 3 by 4 (or vice versa), or 24 into either 3 by
8 or 4 by 6. Therefore the children learned that some but not all numbers may be
divided into perfect numerical factors.
From experiences with those handfuls not perfectly divisible into two equal
columns—representing the odd numbers—the children discovered some could be
made into rectangles (e.g., 9 could be divided into 3 by 3, 15 into 3 by 5) but others
(5, 7, 11, 13) could not be so divided. This last group, they were told, represented prime
numbers. These children learned about different kinds of numbers by representing
them first enactively (arranging the beans into different patterns), then iconically
(observing the shapes and other visual features of the patterns), and finally symbol-
ically (after being told the formal names of the patterns they had created).
A slightly more complex exercise taught children the basic principles of qua-
dratic equations. To begin, the children were given a set of cut-out pieces of three
shapes labeled X2 for a large square, X for a narrow rectangle whose long side was
equal to the large square’s side, and 1 for a small square whose sides were equal to
the width of X (Figure 13.10a). The children were encouraged to play with these
forms, putting them together to create different shapes. As they did so, patterns
such as those shown in parts (b) and (c) of Figure 13.10 emerged. They came to
“know” the pieces enactively and iconically, in terms of what to do with them and
their appearance in different patterns.
As they did this task, while also incorporating the labeled names of the differ-
ent pieces, the children learned how to represent the relationships symbolically.
From Figure 13.10b, for example, they learned that a new square whose sides
are X 1 1 long contains one X2, two X’s, and one 1, a relationship that can be
expressed mathematically as:
(X 1 1)2 5 X2 1 2X 1 1
X2 X
(a) (b) (c)
Figure 13.10 Materials from Bruner’s system for teaching young

children mathematics
From further constructions like Figure 13.10c they could see that (X 1 3)2 5
X2 1 6X 1 9. From the total experience with several constructed squares, many of
the children as young as 8 were able to learn the formula for quadratic equations:
(X 1 a)2 5 X2 1 2aX 1 a2
Bruner’s applications of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theory were one illustration

of the growing importance of developmental psychology, and of insights about
the nature of intelligence, in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the next
chapter we shall see how these ideas, and several of the same people, played
important roles in the rise of the new subdiscipline of cognitive psychology.
Chapter Review 529
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
Binet and Piaget were both concerned with how the in- diagnosing feeblemindedness, which he believed to be a
tellectual capacities of the mind develop in children. hereditary trait. Terman multiplied Stern’s intelligence quo-
Binet’s observations of his daughters, and in-depth case tient by 100 to yield the IQ, and emphasized unusually high
studies of unusually talented people, convinced him that IQs as indicators of giftedness. In the 1930s Wechsler de-
intelligence manifests itself in many different ways. His veloped deviation IQ tests as most appropriate for adults,
attempts to establish individual psychology, a program where someone at the exact average for his or her age
of short tests that would reveal individual qualities with was assigned a score of 100; besides providing an overall
the same richness as individual detailed case studies, full-scale IQ, his WAIS tests gave separate results for ver-
proved disappointing but his experience with many dif- bal and performance items. Flynn showed in the 1980s that
ferent procedures led to his most famous achievement: as tests were revised periodically, the standards for devi-
the Binet-Simon intelligence test. Intended as a means of ation IQs became increasingly difficult, suggesting that in
diagnosing subnormal young children who were incapable some sense the population is getting smarter.
of learning from a standard elementary school curriculum, Piaget observed that older children do not just think
this test was based on the discovery that although sub- “faster” or “more” than younger ones, they also think in
normal children can pass many of the same subtests as entirely different ways. His system of genetic epistemol-
normal ones, they learn to do so at a significantly older ogy, developed in collaboration with Inhelder, subdivided a
age. Binet’s tests revealed an intellectual level or mental child’s intellectual development into four successive stages:
age for each subject, which could be compared with the sensory-motor, preoperational, concrete operations, and
actual or chronological age. Binet’s mental orthopedics formal operations. Each stage was increasingly power-
program produced limited but real improvements in sub- ful and abstract in terms of solving problems. Vygotsky
normal children’s intelligence scores. emphasized the social nature of a child’s intelligence and
After Binet’s death, Stern defined the ratio of men- argued that any assessment of it must include a zone of
tal age to chronological age as the intelligence quotient, proximal development, or potential for immediate improve-
which Spearman interpreted as a rough measure of gen- ment with appropriate guidance from a teacher. Bruner
eral intelligence (g), a factor he likened to a person’s gen- combined Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s ideas in developing a
eral mental horsepower. Goddard translated Binet’s tests theory of instruction based on three modes of representa-
into English and promoted them actively as a way of tion: enactive, iconic, and symbolic.
Key Pioneers
Alfred Binet, p. 495 Lewis Terman, p. 510 Jean Piaget, p. 515
Théodore Simon, p. 501 Catharine Cox, p. 510 Bärbel Inhelder, p. 519
Charles Spearman, p. 505 David Wechsler, p. 512 Lev Vygotsky, p. 524
Henry H. Goddard, p. 507 James Flynn, p. 514
Key Terms
individual psychology, p. 499 Flynn effect, p. 514
projective test, p. 500 genetic epistemology, p. 518
intellectual level, p. 503 stage theory of cognitive
mental orthopedics, p. 504 development, p. 518
general intelligence (g), p. 505 sensory-motor stage, p. 518
two-factor theory of intelligence, p. 505 object constancy, p. 519
chronological age, p. 506 preoperational stage, p. 519
mental age, p. 506 conservation of quantity, p. 520
intelligence quotient, p. 506 concrete operations stage, p. 521
feeblemindedness, p. 507 formal operations stage, p. 521
The Kallikak Family, p. 508 zone of proximal
IQ, p. 510 development (zpd), p. 525
giftedness, p. 510 modes of representation, p. 526
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale enactive mode, p. 526
(WAIS), p. 512 iconic mode, p. 526
deviation IQ, p. 513 symbolic mode, p. 526

1. Describe some of the ways Binet’s ideas about the nature of intelligence and how to
measure it changed as subsequent psychologists further developed his methods. Which
developments would he have approved of, and of which would he have been more skep-
tical? What is your own opinion about those developments?
2. Piaget said he learned much more about the intelligence of children by asking them the
reasons for their mistakes and wrong answers, than from their correct ones. Describe
some of the major kinds of mistakes he observed, and the conclusions he drew from them.
3. Both Binet and Piaget emphasized the importance of different kinds of intelligence, or
ways of coming to know the world. Other psychologists, such as Spearman, promoted
a much more unitary view of intelligence. Describe the evidence for and against each
perspective. What are the practical implications of each one?
4. Imagine that Binet, Piaget, and Vygotsky get together for a friendly discussion and
debate about the nature and measurement of intelligence. What major subjects would
they talk about, and in what ways would they differ from and agree with one another?
Chapter Review 531
Suggested Resources
The best English-language study of Binet’s life and work is Theta H. Wolf, Alfred Binet
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). An abbreviated account is provided in
Raymond E. Fancher, “Alfred Binet, General Psychologist,” in Portraits of Pioneers in Psy-
chology, vol. 3, eds. Gregory Kimble and Michael Wertheimer (Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association, 1998), 67–84. Binet and Simon’s articles introducing their intelli-
gence tests of 1905, 1908, and 1911 appear in English translation in A. Binet and T. Simon, The
Development of Intelligence in Children (The Binet-Simon Scale), reprint edition (New York:
Arno Press, 1973). An online English version of their first 1905 article and test is available at
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Binet/binet1.htm.
For a fuller account of Binet and his successors in the intelligence-testing field, including
Spearman, Goddard, Terman, Wechsler, and Flynn, see Raymond E. Fancher, The Intelli-
gence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy (New York: Norton, 1985). An insightful analysis
and discussion of the various social and political meanings of intelligence testing in France
and the United States through World War II is provided in John Carson, The Measure of
Merit (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2007).
The Jean Piaget Society has created a website with a short, interesting article entitled
“About Piaget”: http://www.piaget.org/aboutPiaget.html. Piaget’s autobiography appears
in Richard I. Evans, Jean Piaget: The Man and His Ideas (New York: Dutton, 1973), along with
transcripts of an informative interview and Piaget’s general article, “Genetic Epistemol-
ogy.” An interesting detailed study of his early life is Fernando Vidal’s Piaget Before Piaget
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Piaget’s observations of object constancy
in his nephew and daughter are included in his book The Construction of Reality in the Child
(New York: Basic Books, 1954).
Many of the most important observations of later intellectual development appear in
Bärbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Ado-
lescence (New York: Basic Books, 1958); originally published 1955. Inhelder’s autobiography
appears in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 8, ed. Gardner Lindzey (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 209–243. Alex Kozulin’s Vygotsky’s Psychology: A
Biography of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) is an excellent source
on Vygotsky’s life and work. Bruner’s method for teaching quadratic equations is fully
described in Chapter 24 of his Beyond the Information Given (New York: Norton, 1973).
CHAPTER 14
Minds, Machines, and
Cognitive Psychology
Pascal, Leibniz, and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence

Babbage, Lovelace, and the Analytical Engine
Turing’s Machine and Shannon’s Binary Switches
Computer Triumphs and Limitations
Miller and the Study of Cognition
Neisser and Cognitive Psychology
I n 1651 the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whom we met in Chapter 2 as

originator of the social contract concept, considered the relationship between
a person’s ability to perform mathematical calculations, and his or her reasoning
faculty in a more general sense. His surprising conclusion:
[Wherever] there is place for addition and subtraction, there also is place
for reason, and where these have no place, there reason has nothing at all to
do; for reason is nothing but reckoning (that is the adding and subtracting
of consequences) [emphasis added].1
The statement raises three interrelated issues that lie at the heart of this
chapter. First, Hobbes was concerned here with analyzing the properties and
533
534 14 | Minds, Machines, and Cognitive Psychology
processes underlying the human rational faculty. The ability to learn about, and
to know certain things about, the relationships among objects in the world was
a major attribute of human rationality, and Hobbes was addressing the general
question of how the mind obtains this knowledge.
His proposed answer raised a second, more specific issue. Ever since ancient
times philosophers considered the ability to appreciate and use mathematics
as one aspect of human rationality, but here was the dramatic suggestion that
mathematical calculation and logical reasoning are essentially one and the same
thing. In the centuries since Hobbes, as the domain and power of mathematical
analysis have extended dramatically beyond the basic functions that he knew
about (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing), the issue of the relation-
ship between mathematics and logical, rational thinking in general has contin-
ued to interest both philosophers and cognitive psychologists.
Third, by 1651 the adoption of Indo-Arabic numerals (see Chapter 1) had
turned mathematical calculation into a routine process governed by the formu-
laic application of just a few simple and fixed rules for borrowing and carrying.
Therefore, Hobbes’s statement had a further implication because by 1651, engi-
neering technology in fields like watchmaking and clockmaking had progressed
to the point where it became possible to invent and build machines that could
perform the basic steps of arithmetical calculations. In doing so, they could
be characterized—and in fact were characterized by many who saw them—as
“thinking machines.”
The question of whether, how, and to what extent mechanical devices can
duplicate human reasoning processes has continued to be debated and dis-
cussed ever since Hobbes’s day. A description of that history provides a good
introduction to our consideration of the first two issues raised by his statement.
PASCAL, LEIBNIZ, AND THE ORIGINS

OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, inventor, and philosopher.
As a child, he often watched his tax-collector father spend laborious hours calcu-
lating complicated accounts by hand, and as a youth he was sometimes recruited
to help out. This work was not only disagreeable but also subject to frequent errors
when the human calculators got tired. A mathematical prodigy who at age 12 had
worked out many principles of Euclidean geometry without formal instruction,
Pascal now had a more practical inspiration: to design a calculating machine that
would be easy to use and not prone to fatigue.
Building on the improved seventeenth-century technology for making clocks,
Pascal’s invention consisted of a row of ten-toothed cogwheels, arranged so that
Pascal, Leibniz, and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence 535
each complete revolution of a wheel on the right

produced a rotation of one tooth (one-tenth of a
revolution) in the wheel to its left. He called his
machine a Pascaline (Figure 14.1). The “addition”
of ten units of movement in any wheel resulted in a
“carry” of one unit on the wheel to its left. Numerals
attached to the wheels enabled the reading and
recording of the results. This is the same basic
mechanism used in many modern devices, such
as automobile odometers and gas, electricity, and
water meters.
Pascal spent years building various models of
his calculator, a task that severely tested the avail- Figure 14.1 A Pascaline, an early calculator built by
able technology for manufacturing precision parts. Pascal.
Even his best machines sometimes jammed, and

there were frequent breakdowns. But when they functioned properly, they aroused
reactions of wonder and astonishment, and were viewed as genuine thinking
machines. One observer remarked that Pascal had been able “to animate cop-
per and give wit to brass”; another wrote that he had “reduced to mechanism a
science which is wholly in the human brain.”2 Pascal himself said his new machine
“produces effects which approach nearer to thought than all the actions of ani-
mals.”3 Historically, the Pascaline stands as one of the first machines deliberately
designed and built to exhibit what we now call artificial intelligence (AI), the
capacity of a mechanical device to perform operations that replicate or imitate
human thought processes and other intellectual behaviors. Today the mechanical
devices are computers running highly complex software programs, but the Pasca-
line was a starting point in their development.
Although Pascal was impressed by the intelligent calculating abilities of his
machine, he also emphasized that it “does nothing which can allow us to say that
it has will.”4 Therefore, he went on to declare in one of his most famous state-
ments: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. . . . We know the
truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”5 For Pascal, matters of emotion and
the will, operating independently of, and sometimes antagonistically to, the cold
voice of reason, became the main differentiators between minds and machines.
In various forms, this reservation continues to be expressed today by some of the
participants in the field of artificial intelligence.
Pascal’s first great successor was Leibniz, the multifaceted pioneer we met in
Chapter 2. His first contribution was to improve upon Pascal’s machine, which
could only add and subtract. Multiplication or division required repeated acts of
addition or subtraction, such as the entering (addition) of the number seven five
successive times to multiply five times seven. Here was a source of both tedium
and error, which young Leibniz solved in the early 1670s by inventing a new kind
of gear that allowed his calculator to multiply and divide in single operations.
Somewhat immodestly, Leibniz thought his calculator should be commemorated
by the motto “Superior to Man.”6
As he developed his machine, Leibniz had a related visionary idea. He imagined
a general way in which calculating machines might one day surpass humans in
solving not only arithmetic problems, but also problems in the classical philosoph-
ical subjects of logic and even ethics. To accomplish this, he thought it necessary
to develop a new universal language for philosophy, whose terms and characters
would go beyond national linguistic differences in the same way mathematical
symbols do.
This new language would be partly based on the fact that many concepts
“contain” or “include” one another in various logical hierarchies, such as the
way in which the concept of a living thing contains that of an animal which in
turn includes a human being. Human being is therefore contained or included
in both of the other concepts, but more deeply in living thing than in animal. In
a complete universal language, such hierarchies could be fully elaborated with
higher, lower, and other intermediate concepts, and the relationships expressed
numerically. For example, animal might be two steps lower than living thing, and
three higher than human being.
Other important relationships between concepts can be expressed as “exclud-
ing” one another, as when the hypothetical proposition “No just person can be
unhappy” is translated as “The concept of the just person excludes the concept
of the unhappy person.” Noting that the operations of including and excluding
are similar to addition and subtraction, and also that the degrees of inclusion
would be potentially quantifiable in the new language, Leibniz thought people
from all different national backgrounds could use it not only to reason with each
other in common terms, but also to calculate the solutions to many of the prob-
lems that divide them.7 And because machines like Leibniz’s own could perform
calculations more reliably than humans, people confronting complicated logical
or even ethical dilemmas could solve them simply by setting the dials and turn-
ing the handle.
Leibniz’s dream of a universal language never came true, and after his death
the subject of logic followed a different course from the one he envisioned.
Instead of logic becoming essentially reduced to arithmetic, both classical logic
and traditional mathematics came to be seen as examples of a still more general
symbolic logic, to which we shall turn shortly. Before doing so, however, we must
mention one more invention of Leibniz’s that would also play a major role in
future computer developments.
While he was inventing his calculator and developing the infinitesimal calculus
(see Chapter 2), Leibniz also came up with the idea for binary arithmetic—the repre-
sentation of all numbers by just ones and zeroes. In this system, successive digits to
the left represent increasing powers of two instead of the ten in the standard arabic
decimal system. In binary, the numbers from zero through ten are written 0, 1, 10, 11,
100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, and 1010. Arithmetic in binary, as in decimal, is straight-
forward and follows easily specifiable rules—but it also involves much longer rows
of numerals than the decimal system, and more carrying or borrowing. For these
reasons binary arithmetic did not lend itself to easy mechanical simulation by the
gear-and-cogwheel technology used in the early calculators. So even though Leibniz
developed binary arithmetic and his mechanical calculator at the same point in his
life, the possibility of combining the two ideas into a binary-based calculator—or
of finding any practical application at all for binary arithmetic—never occurred to
him. We shall see, however, that such a possibility was finally taken seriously in the
twentieth century, and with momentous consequences.
BABBAGE, LOVELACE, AND THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE

The next pioneer in developing intelligent machines was a true intellectual heir
to Leibniz in more ways than one. Charles Babbage (1792–1871), the precocious
son of a wealthy English banker, studied German and mathematics on his own
and as a teenager mastered Leibniz’s German-language presentation of the calcu-
lus. He recognized the great superiority of Leibniz’s notational system to that of
Newton, which was the only one then taught in English universities. Later as
a Cambridge University undergraduate, Babbage led a successful student move-
ment to add Leibnizean calculus to the curriculum, thereby bringing English
mathematics out of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.
During his time at Cambridge, Babbage also began developing the idea for a
cog-and-gear-based calculating machine more advanced than Leibniz’s, one that
would not just add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but that could also compute the
sums and differences of complex sequences of squared numbers. Such a machine
could solve complex equations whose solutions were necessary for preparing
many important tables and charts, such as those listing the logarithms of num-
bers, the astronomical positions of stars, and the timing of tides. The existing
tables were based on the laboriously hand-calculated and notoriously error-prone
solutions to thousands of equations.
Babbage’s imagined machine, which he called a difference engine, had great
potential for practical usefulness. A few years after graduating from Cambridge
he built a small working prototype, which interested the British government

sufficiently to award him a substantial grant to construct a full-scale version of
the machine. The technical challenge was enormous, however, and after eleven
years of further investment by both the government and Babbage personally, an
exasperated official sarcastically declared that the only use of such a machine
would now be to calculate the vast sums that had been squandered on it.8 External
support ended and Babbage became embittered, knowing that his idea was right
if only he had time and resources to fulfill it.
Fortunately, Babbage’s bitterness did not prevent him from continuing to
dream and design. He conceived an even more visionary device that he called the
analytical engine. Although his difference engine was potentially more powerful
than any of its predecessors, it was limited to the single task of solving complex
equations. Babbage’s new idea—an inspired one that turned out to be propheti-
cally correct—was for one machine capable of performing virtually any type of
calculation. It would be fed not only the basic data to be processed but also a set
of instructions for the kinds of processing it should undergo, and in what order.
The instructions, like the data, could be changed from one operation to another.
Babbage conceived of his analytical engine as a “universal machine,” or what we
call today a programmable computer.
Babbage’s analytical engine design had five main components. The input
system, for the data and instructions, was modeled after an earlier invention by
the French weaver Joseph Jacquard. He had used a set of stiff cards, each one with
a different pattern of punched holes, to regulate his looms for weaving various
intricate patterns. The holes selectively permitted
rods to pass through and activate different threads
in the loom; for each successive throw of the loom,
a new card would enter the control position. The
“program” for any desired complex pattern would
be written in a properly sequenced deck of cards.
The second component of Babbage’s analytical
engine, which he called the mill, would perform the
actual calculations (Figure 14.2). Using components
similar to those of a difference engine, the mill was
under the direction of a third control mechanism
that recorded instructions from the input system and
ensured that the prescribed calculations occurred
in the proper sequence. Fourth, a memory store was
Figure 14.2 The mill, part of the model for Babbage’s required, to retain not only the original data fed to the
analytical engine. machine, but also, crucially, the results of calculations
previously performed, for possible use in still further computations. And fifth,
Babbage proposed an output device for presenting the final results of the analytical
engine’s series of calculations. These five main components still define the major func-
tional units of a modern computer.
The practical problems involved in building a difference engine may have
been daunting, but for the analytical engine they were overwhelming. The
smallest of imprecisions in a part could hinder smooth functioning, an effect
that increased geometrically with the number of parts. Babbage’s difference
engine prototypes were small enough to be cranked by hand, but a completed
analytical engine, by comparison, would have been the size of a small locomo-
tive, and like a locomotive it would require the power of a steam engine to drive
it! Unsurprisingly, Babbage received no government or other official support
for his analytical engine.
Although he became notorious for his bitter grumblings about the govern-
ment and official organizations, the wealthy Babbage was also a very sociable host
of large parties at his mansion that attracted many famous people of the time,
including Charles Darwin and the novelist Charles Dickens. Another guest at one
of his early parties in 1833 was the 18-year-old Ada Byron, the daughter of the
famous but scandalously behaved poet Lord Byron and a sternly moral mother,
Anne Isabella Milbanke. The couple had separated after Ada’s birth and Anna,
fearing her daughter had inherited her father’s wild temperament, saw that her
private education avoided poetry and emphasized the discipline of mathematics.
Ada proved to be mathematically gifted, and when she first attended Babbage’s
party and saw a displayed model of the difference engine, she immediately under-
stood exactly how it worked. This began an unlikely intellectual friendship with
Babbage that lasted as long as she lived. In 1834 she married the aristocrat William
King, who soon after was named the Earl of Lovelace. She officially became Ada,
the Countess of Lovelace, but was best known as simply Ada Lovelace (1815–1852).
Babbage and the much younger Lovelace corresponded regularly over the
years, about mathematical issues and also his plans for the new analytical engine.
Their relationship intensified after Babbage gave one of his rare public lectures
on the machine during a visit to Italy in 1840. A young engineer named Luigi
Menabrea (who later became Prime Minister of Italy) took notes at the event,
and after corresponding about it with Babbage published an account of the
engine in a French-language journal. Lovelace translated the article into English,
and with Babbage’s approval added long explanatory footnotes that amounted
to nearly three-quarters of the resulting published document. “Sketch of the
Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage” appeared in 1843 in the
journal Scientific Memoirs, with Lovelace’s extensive notes signed simply by her
initials, A.A.L. A later reprinting added to the title the words “with Notes upon
the Memoir by the Translator, Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace.”9 This work
stands as a classic, the first systematic account of the nature and potential of a
programmable computer.
Lovelace’s commentary described the analytical engine metaphorically as a
mathematical loom that “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom
weaves flowers and leaves.”10 And as an up-to-date mathematician, she knew that
the boundaries of algebraic analysis were expanding rapidly, potentially enabling
the engine to attack a surprisingly wide variety of problems:
Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds

in the science of harmony and musical composition were susceptible
of mathematical expression, the engine might compose elaborate and
scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.11
In this and other ways, Lovelace correctly predicted that the applications of a
universal calculating machine would someday go well beyond the traditional
domains of mathematics.
Even as she appreciated the analytical engine’s potentially great versatility, how-
ever, Lovelace also foresaw a clear limitation in that it “has no pretensions what-
ever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.
It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any relations or truths
[emphasis in original].12 Although an analytical engine might one day produce a
musical composition, it could only be one that follows predetermined and precisely
defined rules. Anything that breaks or modifies
the previously established rules—as happens in
cases of genuine human creativity—would require
a human as opposed to a purely mechanical touch.
Known as the Lovelace objection, this constraint
has been expressed in more modern terms as:
“Computers can only do what they have been pro-
grammed to do.”
When Ada Lovelace died prematurely in 1852,
only in her thirties, Babbage lost his most impor-
tant intellectual and moral support. Their relation-
ship has become almost legendary, however, and
they are pictured together on one of the pages of
Figure 14.3 Charles Babbage (1792–1871) and the United Kingdom passport (Figure 14.3). They
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), depicted in the UK passport. also are featured in a 2015 bestselling graphic novel,
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the
First Computer.13
After Lovelace’s death Babbage’s grumpiness increased, sometimes to a comical
degree. His friend Darwin recalled, “One day he told me he had invented a plan
by which all fires could be effectively stopped, but added—‘I shan’t publish it—
damn them all, let all their houses be burnt.’”14 Of course he had some real reasons
to feel discontent, having produced mechanical designs that were truly valid but
too far ahead of their time to be realized during his lifetime.
Babbage did live long enough, however, to see the realization of his and Lovelace’s
prediction that the domain of algebra could be greatly expanded. In 1854 the largely
self-taught Englishman George Boole (1815–1864) introduced the concept of
symbolic logic, arguing that all of traditional mathematics should be thought of as
just one of many possible forms of systematic symbol manipulation. In this new dis-
cipline, mathematics would no longer be just the science of number and magnitude,
but “a method resting upon the employment of Symbols, whose laws of combination
are known and general, and whose results admit of a consistent interpretation.”15
Among the other fields considered to be “mathematical” under this expanded def-
inition was logic. Just as symbols could denote specific numerals and arithmetical
operations, so could they be used to represent specific logical operations or proper-
ties, such as and, or, if, and so on. Boole translated much of the content of traditional
logic into this formal, mathematics-like terminology, using procedures now appro-
priately referred to as Boolean algebra. In creating the new discipline of symbolic
logic, Boole went far towards fulfilling Leibniz’s dream of formally uniting the fields
of logic and computational mathematics.
TURING’S MACHINE AND SHANNON’S BINARY SWITCHES

Boole’s contributions and their subsequent development during the early 1900s
raised the possibility that a universal machine capable of performing all kinds of
mathematical or algebraical calculations in the traditional sense might also be
applied to solving any appropriately symbolized problem in logic and reason-
ing. Two brilliant young graduate students, one English and the other American,
helped realize this possibility in the 1930s.
The son of a member of the Indian Civil Service, Alan Turing (1912–1954)
showed an early aptitude for mathematics and science, which was not particu-
larly rewarded at his classically oriented secondary school. Once he was admit-
ted to Cambridge University, however, his great gift for theoretical mathematics
flourished, and he continued there for graduate study. While pondering his thesis
topic (a complex issue in number theory), he had the idea for designing a new
kind of machine that could perform any kind of calculation on any set of symbols
capable of being manipulated in the Boolean

sense, according to any set of formally specifi-
HE
AD
A P
able and self-consistent rules.
T
This imagined device, which came to be
E
called a Turing machine, involved just two
essential components (Figure 14.4). First
was a tape, divided into squares each of
which may be blank or may contain a single
symbol from the set of computable symbols.
Second was a head, which rides above the
tape and “reads” the squares one at a time.
After reading each square, the head performs
Figure 14.4 A schematic diagram of a Turing machine. a specific operation depending on which
symbol or blank it has read, and its own inter-
nal state. Each operation has three possible outcomes: (1) It can “overwrite” the
symbol with a new one or a blank, or keep it the same; (2) it can move the tape one
square to the right or to the left (bringing another symbol to be read and operated
on), or it may halt; and (3) it can alter its own internal state or keep it the same.
Turing’s groundbreaking contributions were presented in a 1937 paper with
the main title, “On Computable Numbers.”16 Here he formally proved not only
that such a simple-seeming machine could be “programmed” to perform any
specifiable kind of calculation, but also more importantly, that it would be pos-
sible to create instructions for a “universal” Turing machine, capable of copying,
move for move, the operations of all other simpler and more specific machines.
Although with a completely different internal mechanism or “architecture,” a
Turing machine could have the same potentially universal calculating power as
Babbage’s analytical engine.
The year after Turing’s paper appeared, Claude Shannon (1916–2001), an
American graduate student in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology, proposed the basic idea for an even simpler type of computer
architecture. Growing up in Michigan as an avid model builder and admirer of
his distant cousin, the great inventor Thomas Edison, Shannon had earned bach-
elor’s degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering from the University of
Michigan before going to MIT. There while studying Boolean algebra and sym-
bolic logic he had a great insight, which became the basis of a short work that
ranks among the most important master’s theses ever written, “A Symbolic
Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.”17
Shannon demonstrated, first, that all kinds of calculations in the expanded
realms of Boolean algebra and symbolic logic can be performed using notations
in binary code—combinations of ones and zeroes. In fact, binary code proved to

be particularly convenient for representing fundamental logical constructions,
such as true-false and either-or. Next, Shannon pointed out that all binary codes
could be represented mechanically by sequences of electrical switches that could
only be open or closed. In other words, networks of simple binary switches
in either “on” or “off” states could represent the patterns of ones and zeroes
constituting the binary code, which in turn could represent complex compu-
tational problems. Leibniz would surely have been thrilled to see his ideas for
binary arithmetic and the mechanical calculation of logical problems brought
together in such a powerful new way.
Coincidentally, during World War II Turing and Shannon were both assigned
to high-security codebreaking programs in their respective countries. They met
during a two-month period when Turing was in the U.S. for a consultation confer-
ence between the two nations’ teams. These two pioneers appear as young men
in Figure 14.5.
Turing’s role in the war was popularized in the 2014 movie The Imitation
Game (with predictable oversimplifications and exaggerations). He was one of
several important leaders in the top-secret British effort to break German codes
that were generated by a complex machine called Enigma and believed by the
Germans to be indecipherable. The team developed a series of increasingly fast,
O
FP
Figure 14.5 Alan Turing (1912–1954) and Claude Shannon (1916–2001).

single-purpose calculating machines that could receive coded messages via

punched paper tape, and then substitute letters and numbers for the symbols in
random patterns until finding, by trial and error, some that yielded comprehen-
sible messages.
The calculating machines benefitted from Shannon’s insight by using
networks of binary switches as their main components. At first these were bulky
and clunky electric telephone-type relays, later replaced by electronic vacuum
tubes (or valves, as they were commonly called in Britain). The most powerful
machine, nicknamed Colossus, contained 2,000 tubes that could process input
from punched tape at the then-amazing rate of 5,000 characters per second.
Not always, but often enough, these machines produced the correct decoding to
provide invaluable information about strategic German fleet and troop move-
ments. Historians credit them with helping to shorten the war. In addition, the
machines’ electronic circuitry and speed of operation foreshadowed future devel-
opments in the design and manufacture of modern computers.
In 1946, American scientists at the University of Pennsylvania unveiled the
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), which not only used
vacuum tubes but also incorporated a new design feature in which frequently
used computational sequences, or subroutines, were permanently stored in the
computer’s memory as separate modules. With approximately a thousand times
the speed and calculating power of its predecessors, ENIAC was an early exam-
ple of the exponential increases in computer speed and efficiency that would
continue to the present day.
While ENIAC was being conceived and built, another provocative article
appeared, co-authored by the respected American neurophysiologist Warren
McCulloch and his 20-year-old student Walter Pitts, entitled “A Logical Calculus
of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.”18 The authors conceptualized the
brain and nervous system as a vast nervous network of interconnected neurons,
each one capable of being either activated or not (“on” or “off”) and of allowing
or blocking the transmission to its neighbors in a manner directly analogous to
a network of binary switches. Although far from conclusive, this idea suggested
the possibility that brains and computers might both operate via similar “digital”
mechanisms.
Therefore, by the early 1950s a new intellectual context had been created for
mechanical calculators. It was now known that universal machines of several types
were possible, and while those based on Babbage’s or Turing’s early models could
not be built with available technology, those using electronic circuitry to represent
binary-coded and modularly stored instructions were achievable. Shannon had
demonstrated how problems in logic, as well as traditional calculation, could be
mechanically represented by networks of binary switches, and McCulloch and

Pitts had conceptually linked exactly this kind of organization with the structure of
the human brain. So now one could consider the possibility that machines might
perform acts that not only resembled, but to some degree might be the same as
thought processes in humans.
Intelligent Machines and Information Theory

The issue of machine as mind (and conversely of mind as machine) had now as-
sumed a new level of prominence. Turing addressed it in a 1950 paper, “Computing
Machinery and Intelligence,” which raised the question “Can machines think?”19
Turing proposed “the imitation game” as offering one answer. He suggested a
situation in which external observers would communicate by impersonal means
such as typewritten messages, either with real people in a separate room or with
a computer programmed to respond to the messages. The observers’ task would
be to determine, through asking questions and receiving answers about some
topic requiring intelligence, whether the respondent is a person or a machine.
Can a computer program produce responses that are consistently and reliably
mistaken as being produced by an intelligent human being? For Turing this ques-
tion replaced the original “Can machines think?”20
In essence, what has come to be called the Turing test assesses the “intelligence”
of a machine according to its ability to perform some complex task requiring gen-
uinely intelligent behavior, in a manner outwardly indistinguishable from that of a
person. Although Turing himself was intensely interested in the “internal states”
of the machines involved, the test named after him focused only on their directly
observable inputs and outputs. Such a test was consistent with the restrictive prin-
ciples of behaviorism then dominant among psychologists (especially in America),
and we shall see that it eventually raised controversy for that reason. Nevertheless,
in the wake of Turing’s paper the term artificial intelligence came into wide use
among researchers whose goal was to develop machines and software programs
capable of at least imitating, and sometimes surpassing, skilled humans in the
performance of various complex intellectual tasks.
Unfortunately, Turing did not live to participate fully in the postwar develop-
ment of intelligent machines. A gay man living in an era when homosexuality
was a major crime in Britain, he was arrested in 1952 and given a choice of going
to prison or a year of probation with hormonal castration treatments. He opted
for the latter, but still lost his security clearance. Britain and the world were
denied the services of a brilliant scientist who had helped win the war—and who,
as much as anyone, was responsible for initiating the computer age. On June 8,
1954, he was found dead from cyanide poisoning with a half-eaten apple by his
side. It is generally believed that he committed suicide, while contriving the

circumstances to lead his mother to believe it had been an accidental poisoning.21
Like Turing, Shannon continued to be highly influential in the postwar years,
from his position in the research laboratory of the communications giant Bell
Telephone Company. In 1948 he published a dense, two-part article entitled “A
Mathematical Theory of Communication.”22 Applying his system of binary logic
to communication issues such as speech recognition, the work became an instant
classic and initiated the modern field of information theory. According to this
view, any communication or signal can be analyzed in terms of a fundamental
unit Shannon called the bit, the amount of information that can be conveyed by
the open or closed status of a single binary switch (one or zero).* This concept
provided a way of quantifying the degree of complexity —the precise amount of
information contained—in any symbol or symbolic combination.
Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver

Among the first to use the new technology and attempt the computer simula-
tion of complex human reasoning—to pass a version of the Turing test—were
Allen Newell (1927–1992) and Herbert Simon (1916–2001) at the Rand
Corporation in California. Looking for an achievable and interesting symbol-
manipulation task to simulate, they considered chess playing but settled
instead on a project with almost poetic appropriateness: the reproduction of
formal proofs for some of the theorems that lay at the heart of symbolic logic.
They called their program Logic Theorist (LT) and ran it in 1956 on the most
powerful computer available.
The program contained representations in its memory of five basic axioms and
three permissible operations for transforming (translating) the terms of a newly
introduced statement into other terms that were logically consistent with it. LT
followed a strategy of “backward reasoning” in constructing its proofs. Instead
of starting with the axioms and proceeding in a forward direction to produce a
proof, it began with the proposed theorem itself and attempted to work backward
and “decompose” it into axioms. Despite its limited memory of permissible oper-
ations, LT successfully generated valid proofs for several of the theorems. Noting
that backward reasoning characterizes many human problem-solving activities,
*The inventive Shannon also had a lively sense of humor, illustrated by his own rival to the Turing
machine, which he called his “ultimate machine” and kept on his workdesk. It was a plain looking
wooden box with an upright electrical switch on the top facing a closed trap door. When the
switch was pushed forward to start the machine, the door opened and a wooden bar emerged to
push the switch back to off. The machine’s only (and truly “binary”) function was to turn itself off!
It has been featured in some YouTube videos.
Simon announced to one of his university classes: “Over Christmas Allen Newell
and I invented a thinking machine.”23
Newell and Simon recognized that LT had some glaring limitations when
compared to a human thinker. In particular, it worked by testing the results of
all possible transformations of all possible terms in a specified order. Such an
exhaustive and systematic search is appropriate and practical only when the possi-
bilities are relatively few. It worked well for LT with its limited numbers of axioms
and transforming operations, just as it worked for Piaget’s formally operational
children as they systematically tested all the various chemical combinations in
trying to produce colored and colorless liquids (see Chapter 13). But for the ma-
jority of real-life intellectual problems, there are virtually countless possible solu-
tions. In playing chess, for example, an average game consists of about forty pairs
of moves and countermoves by the two players. Each move represents one out of
thirty to thirty-five possibilities, to which the opponent has a comparable number
of options for a countermove. Therefore, a complete testing of all possibilities for
just one pair of moves would involve about a thousand combinations; extending
the analysis to two pairs would mean a thousand times a thousand, with another
thousandfold increase for each successive level. The number of possible combi-
nations in a typical game of forty moves is 10 to the 120th power (1 followed by
120 zeroes)—a figure far greater than all the atoms in the known universe.
Playing chess is just one of several intellectual tasks routinely performed by
humans in which such a combinatorial explosion occurs if one tries to system-
atically consider all possible outcomes. Conversational language—the activity
proposed by Turing for his original Turing test—is another. Assuming that any
genuinely conversational machine would have to have a vocabulary of several
thousand words at its disposal, the number of possible grammatical sentences it
could construct is astronomical. In conversation as in chess, a strategy like that of
LT is neither appropriate nor even possible. Instead, some principles of preselec-
tion must guide the search for solutions, suggesting hunches or best guesses that
seem likely to lead to success. In the language of Newell and Simon, a more ad-
vanced artificial intelligence would have to incorporate heuristics: shortcut tech-
niques that would limit the computer’s “search space” to be explored for solutions.
Newell and Simon attempted to build heuristics into a new and more
ambitious AI program, which they called General Problem Solver (GPS). The
details were complex, but the program embodied an important general strategy
developed after observing human subjects and asking them to think out loud as
they worked on a variety of problem-solving tasks. Following hints from these
human models, they designed GPS to use a means-ends analysis as a heuristic
technique to limit the search options. The current state of a problem situation is
examined (for example, the positions of key pieces on a chessboard), compared

with the most desirable end state, or goal, and the distance (difference) between
the two states is analyzed and measured. The program then calculates the effects
on that distance of a series of possible operations or “means” (such as a subset of
chess moves) that in the past have been successful for problems of the type under
analysis. After finding and enacting the operation, or means, that best reduces
the original distance, the new distance from the desired end is calculated and the
process is repeated until finally—perhaps!—the distance becomes zero and the
problem is solved.
Once fully developed, GPS succeeded in solving several problems in chess
strategy and some other logical puzzles with a semblance of human efficiency.
Although it often failed, Newell saw it in retrospect as an important step, offering
“a series of lessons that give a more perfect view of the nature of problem solving
and what is required to construct processes that accomplish it.”24 In other words,
GPS provided a simplified but possibly valid model of real human intellectual
functioning, one that demonstrated some genuine attributes of “intelligence”
while “thinking” in the same general way people do.
TOTE Units
In one sense Newell’s conclusion was not surprising, because GPS had orig-
inally been developed following observations of humans in problem-solving
situations. But with their means-ends analyses, Newell and Simon had pin-
pointed a specific problem-solving technique that attracted the attention of
some prominent psychologists. In particular, George Miller, Eugene Galanter,
and Karl Pribram, while serving together as Fellows at Stanford University’s
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, held a yearlong discus-
sion of the implications of the Newell-Simon project. Educated in behavior-
istically oriented psychology, all three of them were impressed by the poten-
tial importance of the AI program and were disturbed by the inadequacy of
behaviorism’s traditional stimulus-response concept as the fundamental unit
for explaining it. Inspired by GPS’s means-ends strategy, they co-authored Plans
and the Structure of Behavior, a short 1960 book that proposed the TOTE unit
as a new central concept in the analysis of thinking and reasoning.25 The letters
in TOTE stand for the sequence test, operate, test, exit, and the book stated
that problem solving typically begins with a first test, comparing the present
situation with the desired outcome, followed by an operation to reduce the
difference, and then another test. If the new difference is zero then the program
exits; if a difference still exists, another operation and test will follow and the
process continues until finally the condition for exit is met.
As they discussed the usefulness of the TOTE unit concept, the three psychol-
ogists came to a surprising conclusion about themselves. As rigorously trained
behaviorists believing that only objectively observable stimuli and responses
were appropriate for psychological study, they were now theorizing about
processes that were actually internal and therefore observable only privately and
subjectively. They joked about the thought that they’d become “subjective behav-
iorists,” a concept that seemed to them as paradoxical as “black whiteness” or a
“square circle.”26 They also noted, however, that although TOTE activity could not
be directly observed within the human mind or brain, such activity could be objec-
tively described before being programmed into a computer, and those effects could
be directly observed and described. In a sense, then, they had directly observed the
processes immediately behind the unobservable inner state of problem solving.
Modern computers, they declared, have given psychologists “the tools required to
re-enact, or simulate, on a large scale, the processes they want to study.”27 In other
words, a successful computer program can potentially amount to an acceptable
psychological theory or model of the process of human problem solving.
The publication of Plans and the Structure of Behavior was a significant and
symbolic event in American psychology’s transition from a strongly behavioristic
orientation to an increasing focus on inner, cognitive processes (to which we’ll
return shortly). The idea of a thinking machine was now a reality. The mechan-
ical simulations of human reasoning that Newell, Simon, Milller, Pribram, and
Galanter had formulated also prompted philosophical questions. Were these
programs more than simulations? Could they be thought of as equivalent to
human thinking?
COMPUTER TRIUMPHS AND LIMITATIONS

Despite the inspirational value of GPS for some psychologists, and its success in
solving certain kinds of intellectual problems, that success turned out to be quite
limited—restricted to “closed” logical problems expressible in formal symbols
and susceptible to clear-cut “correct” solutions. Other important kinds of prob-
lems, such as learning to navigate in a new territory or acquire a new skill, were
beyond the program’s capacity. Another drawback was that GPS could only detect
those differences and use those operators that had been preprogrammed into it
by its human creators. The hard parts—formulating the problems, specifying the
search spaces to be explored, and plotting the strategies to be followed—had to
be done by humans. Like Babbage’s analytical engine, GPS’s creative intelligence
lay much more in its human originators than in the program itself.
In the years since GPS, the powers of “intelligent” computer programs have
increased dramatically. As recently as the 1990s there was serious doubt about
whether computers could ever defeat champion chess players. Not only have
computers accomplished that feat, they have also defeated the best participants
on quiz shows such as American television’s Jeopardy.
Much of this progress has been due to the development of smaller but
immensely faster and more powerful computer processors. The electronic vac-
uum tubes of early computers were replaced first by transistors and then by
increasingly tiny nanochips. As of this writing (2016), a microprocessor barely
larger than a postage stamp can hold several billion switches—making possible
millions of individual calculations almost instantaneously.
The computer’s increased speed and power have been accompanied by a new
type of programming. The earliest programs, including LT and GPS, worked by
performing specified sequences of operations on specified sets of symbols, both
of which have been stored in specific memory locations. This type of computer
programming is known as serialist (symbolic) processing. Since then computer
scientists developed a different strategy known as connectionist processing, also
referred to as parallel distributed processing, which detects patterns of activity that
go on throughout the whole system, rather than symbols in specified locations.
By detecting and then storing in memory specific patterns of activity, connection-
ist programs have shown a superior potential ability to learn from experience and
modify future responses on that basis.
Despite the clear success of modern computer programs in matching or
surpassing humans on many activities requiring intelligence, two important
questions have remained. The first pertains to the Lovelace objection: the
question of whether computers can independently produce something that is
genuinely creative and original, going beyond what they were programmed
to do by a human. The second question asks whether the type of intelligence
demonstrated by computers is the same as, or even resembles, the intelligence
of human beings.
Improbabalist and Impossibilist Creativity

The British psychologist Margaret Boden has addressed the Lovelace objection
by distinguishing between two kinds of creativity.28 Improbabilist creativity
involves putting already familiar ideas or components together in new and
useful or interesting combinations, according to rules that have already been
established. Constructing a previously unspoken sentence from the words in
our vocabulary, according to the rules of English grammar, is an example.
Impossibilist creativity, by contrast, involves changing the rules themselves—
in Boden’s terms, effecting a “transformation of conceptual space.” Einstein
produced such a transformation in physics when he rejected the classical
Newtonian assumptions of absolute and uniform dimensions of space and time,

and substituted the assumptions of relativity.
Boden argues that AI programs have clearly demonstrated elements of
improbabilist creativity, showing a capacity not only to create new combinations
but also to “map” and “explore” conceptual spaces according to preset rules.
Some of them can even change their rules, although they must do so according to
the instructions with which they have been programmed. Boden’s response to the
ultimate Lovelace objection, then, is “probably no” if one is requiring impossibilist
creativity; but for related questions such as “Can a computer appear to be cre-
ative?” and “Can computational concepts help one understand creativity?” —she
answers with a resounding yes.
Strong and Weak Artificial Intelligence

Creativity issues aside, the question remains as to whether the intelligence shown
by modern computers is the same as, or even resembles, human intelligence.
Computers have quite easily passed the Turing test by solving Euclidean geom-
etry problems, recognizing and describing tonal harmony and “expressiveness”
in music, diagnosing medical conditions, assembling haiku poems and short
stories out of preprogrammed elements, drawing line figures, and analyzing
chemical compounds. As noted earlier, however, the Turing test is “behavioristic”
in the sense that it focuses exclusively on the observable stimuli and responses
that define the machine-human interactions. But even as they succeed in pro-
ducing coherent and convincing responses, are these modern machines really
demonstrating a truly humanlike intelligence?
The philosopher John Searle (b. 1932) addressed this issue by suggesting a
provocative thought experiment known as the Chinese room.29 Searle, who does
not speak or understand Chinese, imagined himself isolated in a room into which
Chinese speakers could pass slips of paper with questions or comments written
in Chinese. Although he would not understand a thing about the meaning of
these “squiggles,” he would have at his disposal a detailed rulebook with precise
instructions for responding to any query. He would look in the book for the same
pattern of squiggles as those on the “input” questions and find an appropriate
pattern of squiggles to send out in response. With a complete rulebook com-
posed by people who really understood Chinese, that response would seem intel-
ligible and logical to any Chinese interrogator, even though Searle himself would
know nothing about what it meant.
Searle equated his imagined situation in the Chinese room to that of a computer
programmed to read and respond to a formal system of symbols: both would be
responding “mechanically” and without real understanding. By contrast, a genuine
Chinese speaker (or Searle himself if conversing in his native English rather than
Chinese) would have an appreciation of the actual meaning of the symbols. Searle’s
distinction between these two kinds of responding echoes the one made by Freud’s
teacher Brentano in 1874 between physical and psychological phenomena (see
Chapter 11). For Brentano, physical phenomena involved objects in lawful interac-
tion with one another, while mental phenomena were acts that “contained” objects
and lent meaning to them in the form of beliefs about them or desires regarding
them. This “aboutness” or intentionality of genuinely mental acts is what Searle
saw as missing from his own or a computer’s purely mechanical responses in the
Chinese room, but as characterizing the responses of a genuine Chinese speaker.
Searle’s argument has provoked much debate. Some critics have pointed out
that the intentionality and understanding would lie in the system of Searle as
responder, combined with the makers of the rulebook. It can also be argued, how-
ever, that this is similar to asserting that intentionality resides in the system of
the computer combined with its programmer—and this is far from demonstrating
that either the computer or the program by itself possesses intentionality. Other
critics have suggested that when and if sufficiently complex programs are ever
written to pass a strict form of the Turing test, intentionality will somehow arise
as a sort of “emergent” property. But this possibility has been challenged on the
grounds that intentionality and the capacity for consciousness are qualities that
have developed throughout the long evolutionary history of the human species,
and they cannot be casually built into any computer program, however complex
it might be. This debate remains unresolved, and Searles’s opinion is a modern
version of Descartes’s centuries-old contention that the mind or soul is a qualita-
tively different substance from that which constitutes the body.
Searle and his critics do agree on one important point: that computer mod-
eling can be a useful tool for studying and understanding facets of the process
involved in human reasoning, even if it doesn’t exactly reproduce that process.
Boden made this point in arguing that computer models can demonstrate aspects
of the creative process and help explain creativity, even if they are not creative
in the impossibilist sense. Searle defined the ability of computers to solve prob-
lems using processes that resemble, and may serve as models for, certain aspects
of human thinking, but without accompanying attributes such as intentionality
and subjective consciousness, as weak AI. Strong AI, in his terms, would have to
be indistinguishable in all respects from human intelligence. Searle affirmed his
belief only in the weak form.
For psychology, it’s clear that the assumptions of weak AI have been useful and
influential. During the 1940s and 1950s when behaviorism was dominant, espe-
cially in America, mainstream psychologists tended to emphasize the relationships
between objectively observable stimuli and their resulting

responses, while paying little or no attention to the interven-
ing processes that go on within the behaving organism to
produce these relationships. As computer scientists began to
develop “intelligent” programs, however, some psychologists
took note, including the three previously mentioned TOTE
unit theorists who tentatively described themselves as
“subjective behaviorists.” One of those three theorists went on
to carry the movement further, becoming a leader in a new
approach to psychology that he and his colleagues defined as
“cognitive.”
MILLER AND THE STUDY OF COGNITION

George A. Miller (1920–2012; Figure 14.6) was the son of
a West Virginia steel executive and Christian Scientist who
did not believe in the effectiveness of modern medicine.
After an uneventful high school career George enrolled at
the University of Alabama, where an interest in drama led
him to the speech department. There he earned his bache-
lor’s degree, followed by a master’s in speech pathology. An Figure 14.6 George A. Miller (1920–2012).
attraction for a young psychology undergraduate led, almost
accidentally, to his attending informal seminars held at the home of her psychol-
ogy professor, Donald Ramsdell. Miller later recalled:
Ramsdell surrounded himself with bright young people [and]. . . had a talent
for provoking them. Never before had I heard that kind of conversation—
complex arguments over points I would never have thought to question,. . .
rapid deployment of richly suggestive analogies, the easy movement from
warmth to heat and back again. . . . I discovered the intellectual life in
Donald Ramsdell’s living room.30
Miller continued to attend the seminars, impressing both the young woman
who agreed to marry him, and the professor himself, who helped get Miller hired
to teach an introductory psychology class. He performed well, and Ramsdell, a
recent Harvard Ph.D., recommended that Miller should apply to Harvard; he did,
and was accepted in the department of psychology.
Arriving at Harvard in the early years of America’s involvement in World
War II, Miller was supervised by S. Smith Stevens, who had developed the power
law of psychophysical relationships (see Chapter 4). Because of his background
in speech and communications, Miller’s research subject became the masking

or “jamming” of voice communication. Based on its potential usefulness in
disrupting German wartime communications, this research was supported by the
military and declared top secret. When he finished a study that his Harvard
superiors agreed to accept as his doctoral dissertation, his oral exam was unusual
in that only two of the examiners had the necessary security clearance to actually
read Miller’s thesis. He still passed easily, and with Stevens’s support stayed at
Harvard as a junior faculty member.
In 1948 Stevens alerted Miller to Shannon’s article, “A Mathematical Theory of
Communication,” with its suggestion that a binary bit, potentially represented by
the on or off state of a binary switch, could be taken as the most elementary unit
of information. Miller later recalled that his life “was never the same again” after
this encounter with Shannon’s “beautiful theory.”31 Just as a Shannon paper a
decade earlier had helped usher in a new computer architecture and a revolution
in data processing, now a later one inspired in Miller and other psychologists a
new appreciation for the importance and usefulness of information processing as
a psychological concept.
Miller first used information theory in a continuation of his wartime research
on the masking of voice communication, although with a reverse twist. Rather
than asking how communication could be disrupted, he now investigated how
and under what conditions meaningful speech could be recognized when embed-
ded in varying degrees and kinds of background noise. In a major project that
lasted several years, Miller painstakingly investigated the phonemes of spoken
English—the smallest sound components, such as the initial b or c in bat or cat—
and showed how these could be analyzed as the basic units or bits of information.
Although this work firmly established Miller as a leading psycholinguist, it was
highly technical and fully appreciated only by fellow experts. Even his excellent
student Ulric Neisser remembered Miller’s writings on the subject only as “all full
of ‘bits’ and ‘phonemes’ and the like.”32
Having made his reputation as a specialist, Miller burst onto the broader
psychological scene in 1956, following an invitation to give an hourlong description
of his research at a meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association. He was work-
ing on two different studies at the time, and recalled that “the stylist in me refused to
give two 30-minute talks having nothing to do with one another.”33 Nearly at the last
minute, he thought of a seemingly coincidental numerical similarity, which gave rise
to one of the most frequently cited papers in the history of experimental psychology;
it was devoted to what he called the magical number seven, plus or minus two.
Miller began by stating that for seven years he had been “persecuted by an
integer,” a number that “has followed me around, . . . has intruded in my most
private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals.”34
One group of situations in which the assaults occurred were tests of subjects’
immediate memory for lists of random numbers or letters they have just heard.
Typical subjects recalled sequences of up to seven items correctly, but made
mistakes for longer lists. In other experiments, patterns of dots whose numbers
ranged from 1 to 200 were flashed on a screen for just two-tenths of a second
each, and subjects reported how many dots they thought there were in each stim-
ulus. Their responses were nearly perfect for stimuli with seven or fewer dots, but
increasingly inaccurate for larger patterns.
In yet another series of experiments subjects first listened to, and were asked
to remember, a series of reference tones that varied in either pitch or intensity.
Then single tones were randomly presented, and subjects judged which one of
the reference tones each one matched. When the original reference tones num-
bered seven or less the responses were quite accurate, but when more than that,
accuracy fell off markedly.
Miller’s paper also addressed the interesting finding that the number seven
plus or minus two sometimes held true even as the complexity of the stimulus
items increased. For example, when asked to recall a sequence of short common
words, subjects did nearly as well as when the stimuli were just single letters
(a finding that had been anticipated much earlier by Cattell in Wundt’s Leipzig
laboratory; see Chapter 5). Miller interpreted this as the result of what he called
“recoding” or chunking: a process by which people learn to organize simple
stimuli into higher-order concepts.
He concluded his paper by noting the frequency with which the number seven
appears in such cultural phenomena as the days of the week, the notes of the musi-
cal scale, the wonders of the world, the ages of man, and even the deadly sins and the
levels of hell. He playfully asked (but did not answer) the question of whether this
regularity suggested there is “something deep and profound beneath all of these
sevens,” or whether it is “only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence!”35
In his autobiography, Miller expressed puzzlement over why the paper
became so famous, concluding only that chunking became a standard concept,
and that the paper’s central message—“that the human mind is limited”—“may
please some people for reasons of their own.” He added, however, that the article
appeared at just the moment when many people “were looking for new ways to
look at [psychology].”36 Over the next decade Miller had close personal contact
with several of those people, and would come to look at his own science very
differently. Particularly important to him were a brilliant young linguist, a slightly
older Harvard colleague, and a bright student who would formalize the new ways
of thinking in a groundbreaking textbook.
Chomsky and Psycholinguistics

Noam Chomsky (b. 1928; Figure 14.7), whom we met in Chapter 9
as a critic of Skinner’s theory of verbal behavior, was the son of
highly educated Jewish immigrants who came from Europe to
Philadelphia. His father became the principal of a Jewish religious
school and a published scholar of medieval Hebrew. Noam
learned Hebrew in childhood and later developed a fascination
with Arabic—the beginning of his eventful involvement with
languages. A brilliant student, he was accepted at age 16 by the
University of Pennsylvania where he specialized in theoretical
linguistics, writing theses on Hebrew phonetics for both an honors
B.A. and a master’s degree. In 1951 he was admitted to Harvard’s
prestigious Society of Junior Fellows, a highly selective program
that identified young scholars of exceptional promise and gener-
ously subsidized their research.
Although Skinner (a former Junior Fellow) and Miller were both
present at Harvard, Chomsky had little or no contact with them for
Figure 14.7 Noam Chomsky (b. 1928). several years while he composed a massive and dense manuscript
entitled The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. When sub-
mitted for publication in 1955, it was rejected for being too unconventional. One
reviewer commented it should be resubmitted only if the author should become
famous—something that a few years later did actually happen.
Linguistic theory differentiates between semantics, which involves the mean-
ings of words used in a communication, and syntax, which involves the logical
relationships among words as governed by the grammar of the language being
used. Chomsky’s unorthodox views concerned syntax. In particular, he noted
the ease with which children of all cultures and languages effortlessly acquire a
sense of what kinds of sentences make sense grammatically (see Chapter 9). In
English the rules of grammar depend heavily on word order, so even a young
person can recognize that a sentence such as “Colorless green ideas sleep furi-
ously” is correct grammatically even though it is nonsense semantically. Put the
same words in another order, such as “sleep ideas green furiously colorless,” and
their sentence quality is immediately lost.
The syntax of some other languages relies more heavily on word endings or
other variations, but these too are effortlessly understood by very young children
brought up in the particular language. Chomsky believed this capability could
not be learned by trial and error, as was hypothesized by the most influential lin-
guistic theories of the time. He proposed—controversially—that there was an in-
nate “universal grammar” hard-wired into the human brain (and only the human
brain, as no other animals possess comparable linguistic skill) whose specific

features are brought out by experience. This was a modern-day example of what
Leibniz referred to as an innate necessary truth (see Chapter 2).
While still a Junior Fellow at Harvard, Chomsky submitted a summarizing
chapter of his long manuscript to the University of Pennsylvania, where it was
accepted as a Ph.D. thesis in 1955. Around the same time, he summarized his
main ideas in a much shorter manuscript called Syntactic Structures, which was
published in 1957.37 In 1956, he finally met Miller, when the two participated in a
symposium on information theory at MIT.
At that time Miller held a view more consistent with Skinner’s than Chomsky’s,
believing a child’s acquisition of syntax was the result of a gradual learning pro-
cess based on the probabilities of words (or their component bits and phonemes)
following one another in specific sequences. Despite this theoretical difference,
the two men liked each other and began having serious discussions. In an inter-
esting twist of fate, Chomsky loaned the only copy of his long Logical Structure
manuscript to Miller, who happened to be reading it in his office when the entire
building caught on fire. Fortunately, it was one of the few items he managed to
rescue from the flames, and a few years later, after Chomsky actually became very
famous, the manuscript was still available to be published.38
During their early friendship Chomsky became openly critical of the behav-
ioristic analysis of language, and in 1959 he published his scathing review of
Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior. As we noted in Chapter 9, this critique high-
lighted the inability of behavioristic learning theory to account for the virtually
universal acquisition by children, in all cultures, of the grammatical rules govern-
ing their language. Skinner reportedly never read or paid attention to Chomsky,
but Miller certainly did, and he later described how he became converted to the
nativist argument:
Noam convinced me that [my learning-based theory] could never converge

on English. . . . I became persuaded when I calculated that a childhood of six
to eight years is too brief for anyone to master the full set of [grammatical
issues] involved in generating sentences of twenty words or less.39
Miller’s conversion to the belief that language acquisition involves innate

internal processes occurred at the same time he was thinking about GPS and
TOTE units, and therefore was another step in his evolution away from behavior-
ism. As he later put it, although they are important psychologically, grammatical
rules are not themselves behavior but rather “mentalistic hypotheses” about the
underlying processes that give rise to verbal behavior.40
15_POP_28354_ch14_532-571.indd 557 18/10/16 4:07 PM

Chomsky’s association with Miller and psychology was quite brief, and almost
a sidelight to his broader career. He went on to be regarded as a giant not only
in the fields of linguistics and philosophy, but also, arguably, as America’s most
famous social activist. His outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War earned him
a prominent place on President Nixon’s infamous enemies list. He has continued
as a controversial and highly visible advocate of many unorthodox and radical
political views, attracting both vigorous condemnation and energetic support.
Bruner and the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies

Miller forged a more enduring and explicitly psychological collaboration with his
slightly older Harvard colleague Jerome S. Bruner (1915–2016; Figure 14.8). We
met Bruner in Chapter 13 as the developer of a neo-Piagetian technique for teach-
ing mathematics to children. His parents had emigrated from Poland to New York,
where his father became a highly successful watchmaker. Bruner recalled that
unlike many of his peers, he never had financial worries, and even after his father’s
early death, he was left with an ample trust fund to cover education and much else
besides.41 Young Bruner used the fund to indulge what became a lifelong passion
for deep-water sailing, and to finance a higher education at Duke University.
Bruner entered Duke thinking he would probably study law, but instead he
found a “new identity” in psychology. “That this happened,” he recalled, “was
partly the place, partly the people, partly the times.”42 The re-
cently established psychology department was staffed with
a diverse group of energetic young professors who encour-
aged bright students like Bruner to work with them, and he
quickly got caught up in the atmosphere.
The first psychological problem to engage his attention
concerned the explanation for how cats learned to escape
from puzzle boxes. In his classic early experiment, Thorndike
had interpreted such learning as a gradual trial-and-error pro-
cess, in which his cats behaved randomly until “accidentally”
pulling a string dangling from the ceiling, which released the
door (see Chapter 8). One of Bruner’s young teachers, Donald
Adams, designed a different experimental box in which the
cats could see that the string was attached to the door latch—
and in that situation their behavior was much less random
and more focused. Adams argued that psychologists could
design their experiments in such a way as to make the animals
seem either “stupid,” as in Thorndike’s box, or “insightful”
Figure 14.8 Jerome S. Bruner (1915–2016). as in his own.43 This earliest experience with psychological
theory no doubt helped predispose Bruner, many years later, to appreciate

Vygotsky’s emphasis on the importance of the broader social and educational
contexts, and the zone of proximal development, that can hinder or facilitate intel-
lectual development (see Chapter 13).
Bruner remained at Duke until 1939, earning both bachelor’s and master’s
degrees and recieving broad training in experimental psychology, while also con-
ducting neurophysiological research on the effect of the thymus gland on the sex-
ual behavior of the rat. His mentors urged him to apply for Ph.D. training at Yale
and Harvard, and he was accepted at both places. Feeling an urge to focus more on
human psychology, and with an appreciation of Gordon Allport’s recent textbook
on personality (see Chapter 12) and Harvard’s humanistic tradition dating back to
William James (see Chapter 8), he decided to go there.
When Bruner arrived at Harvard, Allport was greatly concerned about the war
that had just begun in Europe and the growing menace of Hitler. He encouraged
Bruner to study the nature and effects of German propaganda, and the resulting
Ph.D. thesis on the subject led to Bruner’s appointment in the latter stages of the
war as a member of the Anglo-American Psychological Warfare Division. There
he made many high-level government and military contacts, who continued to
call on him as a consultant after the war was over.
Also at war’s end, Bruner returned to Harvard as a faculty member. He pro-
ceeded to collaborate with students and colleagues on a famous series of stud-
ies demonstrating what became known as the “new look” in perception. These
studies showed how a variety of nonobjective factors can systematically influ-
ence the process of perception. In one study, for example, children were shown
two different visual arrays: one of differently valued coins, and another of wooden
disks exactly the same sizes as the coins. Afterwards the children were asked to
estimate how large the various objects had been. The coins were recalled as being
larger than they actually were, while the disk sizes were recalled quite accurately.
In addition, the higher-value coins were overestimated to a greater degree than
those of lower value, and the overestimations of poor children were greater than
those of wealthy children. In sum, the study showed that perceptual exaggeration
was more pronounced for valued or desirable objects than for neutral ones.44
In another study Bruner conducted with his colleague Leo Postman, subjects
identified playing cards flashed before them for varying but very brief fractions
of a second. Some cards were standard ones, while others had the normal suits
and colors reversed with clubs and spades in red, diamonds and hearts in black.
At first, subjects required much longer exposures before correctly identifying the
mismatched cards, presumably because their expectations, or pre-existing mental
sets, had facilitated their accurate perceptions of the standard cards, while the
unexpected, surprising ones took longer to be accurately recognized. Once aware

of the new kinds of cards, however, the subjects were able to recognize the mis-
matched ones just as easily as the standard ones.45
These studies partially recalled the introspective demonstrations of set and
determining tendencies that had been conducted in Külpe’s Wurzburg lab-
oratory in the early 1900s (see Chapter 5). With his students and some junior
colleagues, Bruner followed them up in the mid-1950s with studies of concept for-
mation: the ways in which subjects created abstract categories or concepts after
being exposed to large numbers of stimuli with varying characteristics. He called
his whole program of research the Cognition Project.
During the late 1950s, Bruner became friends with Miller. Because they had been
graduate students during different years and Bruner had been away from Harvard
during the war, they’d had little early contact with each other. And they were in
different departments—Bruner in the recently created social relations department
and Miller in the older experimentally oriented psychology department. Both were
uneasy about the split, however, as Miller recalled that Bruner “was a social psy-
chologist deprived of experimental colleagues. . . [and] I was an experimentalist
deprived of social colleagues.” One evening following an after-dinner “bottle of
port or madiera, we’ve never agreed which,”46 Miller proposed that they collaborate
and establish an independent institute at Harvard to pursue broad interdisciplin-
ary projects that would satisfy both of their general interests.
Bruner agreed. He drew on his strong establishment contacts to obtain
outside funding for the institite from the Carnegie Foundation. Then the two
prominent professors convinced their Harvard dean to grant them the use of a
campus building. In naming their new venture, Miller recalled, “we simply
changed [Bruner’s program] from a project to a center.”47 This was the origin of
the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies.
The words cognition and cognitive derive from the Latin cognoscere, “to get
to know or to learn about” (not, as is sometimes suggested, from cogitare, which
means simply “to think”). For general use, cognition is defined as the mental pro-
cess of acquiring knowledge and understanding. In the early 1900s some philos-
ophers used cognitive as a technical term to define problems that were solvable
by logical analysis or “knowable,” in contrast to noncognitive ones that primarily
involved emotional or moral judgments.48 Psychologists, however, had seldom used
the word cognition in any technical sense until the mid-1900s, when it began to
creep into their language—similar to the appearance of personality a few decades
earlier (see Chapter 12). In 1948 the purposive behaviorist Tolman (see Chapter 9)
suggested that his laboratory rats developed “cognitive maps” of the mazes they
learned to run.49 Soon thereafter, Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance
to describe the uncomfortable mental state caused by holding two contradictory

beliefs (see Chapter 10). In addition, the work of Piaget and Inhelder highlighted
the concept of cognitive development in children (Chapter 13). Bruner, of course,
had already used the word to generally describe his own research. In 1960 Miller
saw that his own interests in how language is acquired and used, and how the work-
ings of internal processes such as TOTE units can lead to problem solving and
knowledge acquisition, could also be described as cognitive.
With ample funding and its prestigious location, the Harvard Center for
Cognitive Studies was an immediate success, attracting many distinguished
visiting lecturers and sabbatical fellows who took up temporary residence at
Harvard. Piaget’s collaborator Inhelder was one of the first participants, cement-
ing a relationship between Bruner and the Geneva group that led to his innovative
teaching technique (see Chapter 13). Experts in language and psycholinguistics
also gathered there, attracted by both Miller and his MIT and Harvard-based col-
league Roger Brown, who conducted important studies on the acquisition and
development of grammatical skills in children.
Some psychologists and historians regard the Harvard Center’s founding as
marking the formal launch of a cognitive revolution in psychology—a dramatic
turning of the discipline’s primary focus in a significant new direction. The Center’s
creation was certainly a milestone in the establishment of a new cognitive approach
within the discipline, but the question of whether or not that approach was “revolu-
tionary” is more complex.
A Cognitive “Revolution”?
Miller recalled that for him personally, as a former strict behaviorist, the adoption
of the word cognitive in 1960 was “an act of defiance.” Having been “raised to
respect reductionistic science, ‘cognitive psychology’ made a definite state-
ment. It meant I was interested in the mind—I came out of the closet [emphasis
added].”50 In his own case, then, adopting a cognitive approach to psychology
certainly seemed at first very much like a revolutionary act.
Miller also realized, however, that psychologists trained in subdisciplines such
as social, personality, and developmental psychology—including his colleague
Bruner—“were never swept away by behaviorism the way experimental psycholo-
gists had been.”51 He also came to appreciate that even among experimental
psychologists, Europeans had been much less behavioristic than their North
American counterparts. On a visit to England, he repeated a colloquium talk he
had given in the U.S., the first half of which was a criticism of the behaviorist
approach to language, followed by an endorsement of the Chomskian approach.
Afterwards a friendly listener asked him why he bothered with the behaviorism
part, adding “there are only three behaviorists in England and none of them were
here today.”52
British psychology, in fact, had always been less behavioristic than American,
and its most famous experimentalist, Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969), had prac-
ticed an approach that could clearly be described as cognitive. His most famous
book was Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.53
Bartlett demonstrated how memory is not “objectively” reproductive, but is
powerfully shaped by culturally and socially established predispositions he called
schemata. Instead of following the tradition of using nonsense syllables as memory
objects, Bartlett presented his subjects with more complex stories, told them to re-
member them as accurately as they could, and then tested that recall at various times
afterwards. His results showed that over time, the recalled stories became shorter,
with many details corrupted and made more consistent with the subjects’ own cul-
tural backgrounds. In remembering an American First Nations folk story, for exam-
ple, Bartlett’s English students were likely to remember canoe or kayak voyages as
having been made in European-style boats.
Late in his life, Miller suggested that the cognitive movement be characterized
as a counter-revolution against the geographically limited behaviorist revolution
of earlier figures, such as Watson and Skinner, who rejected the introspective
and mentalist methods of their predecessors, including Wundt, Titchener, and
James. Therefore, depending on one’s background and viewpoint, the new cogni-
tive approach to psychology could be seen as a revolution, a counter-revolution,
or simply a renewed emphasis on topics that had been there all along beneath
the radar of the temporarily dominant behaviorists. Miller ultimately concluded
that although objective behavioral observations will always be crucial to scien-
tific psychology, mentalistic concepts are also necessary to integrate and explain
them. He added that in 1960, “We were still reluctant to use such terms as ‘mental-
ism’ to describe what was needed, so we called it cognition instead. Whatever we
called it, the cognitive counter-revolution in psychology brought the mind back
into experimental psychology.”54
***
We have noted several times in Pioneers of Psychology the important role played
by the appearance of a new textbook in formally establishing a new academic dis-
cipline or subdiscipline. Wundt’s Physiological Psychology and James’s Principles
of Psychology are early examples, followed by Floyd Allport’s Social Psychology
and his brother Gordon Allport’s Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. In the
early 1960s a growing number of psychologists had investigated topics or used
approaches that could rightfully be defined as cognitive, but

there had not yet been an integrative textbook defining a self-
contained field that could be called cognitive psychology. This
void was filled in 1967 by a former student of Miller’s, who
borrowed important concepts from artificial intelligence and
information theory in forging his view of the new field.
NEISSER AND COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Ulric Neisser (1928–2012; Figure 14.9) was born in Germany,
the son of a distinguished Jewish economist who anticipated
the looming Hitler disaster and emigrated with his family
to the United States in 1933. While growing up, young Ulric’s
goal was to fit in and succeed in the American environment,
and two of his most defining attitudes derived from child-
hood experiences regarding baseball. One was a vivid mem-
ory of learning about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in
a newsflash that interrupted his listening to a baseball game
on the radio. Here was an example of what he would later
call a flashbulb memory, a vividly recalled image of exactly
where one was and what one was doing when some particu- Figure 14.9 Ulric Neisser (1928–2012).
larly momentous event occurred.
Despite the vividness of this memory, however, Neisser later learned it could
not be accurate because the attack occurred in December when no baseball was
being played. He also learned, however, that a professional football game had
been played on that day between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers,
names identical to those of two baseball teams. So he probably had been listening
to football but remembered it as baseball, which lay much closer to his heart.55
Here was a compelling demonstration—which would have come as no surprise
to a psychologist like Bartlett—that memory is not a photo-perfect replica of past
experience but rather a construction based on that experience but modified and
processed by numerous emotional and other complex mental factors.
Neisser also remembered that his enthusiasm exceeded his skill in playing
baseball, so he was usually among the last ones chosen to be on his childhood
teams. These experiences gave him a “lifelong sympathy with the underdog,”
and he became a committed “infracaninophile” (a Latinized term he made
up meaning “underdog-lover”).56 This attitude prevailed years later when he
majored in psychology at Harvard in the late 1940s. As he learned about the con-
trasting approaches of behaviorism and Gestalt psychology, he immediately
preferred the latter:
My antipathy to behaviorism stemmed not only from its dreary mechan-

ical view of human nature but from the sheer fact of its dominance. I was
already a committed infracaninophile, and Gestalt psychology was clearly
the underdog in a department that included B. F. Skinner.57
Although there were no self-identified Gestaltists at Harvard, Miller was just

beginning to develop his cognitive inclinations, and he became Neisser’s super-
visor for an undergraduate thesis on perception. He also supported Neisser’s ap-
plication to the master’s program at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where
the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler was on the faculty (see Chapter 4).
Once there, Neisser was impressed by Köhler, but he had more important in-
teractions with the new assistant professor Henry Gleitman. Later to become a
prominent teacher and textbook author, Gleitman had just completed his Ph.D. at
the University of California, Berkeley, under Tolman, who had recently proposed
cognitive maps while also emphasizing “intervening variables” with certain
Gestalt-like properties that come between a stimulus and a response. Neisser
enthusiastically joined Gleitman in what he saw as “the life and death struggle
between the mechanistic behaviorists, led by Clark Hull. . . , and the Gestalt-
oriented expectancy theorists, led by Tolman.”58
After finishing his master’s degree at Swarthmore Neisser returned to Harvard
for his Ph.D. In 1960, he accepted a teaching position in Maslow’s psychology
department at Brandeis University. As noted in Chapter 12, Maslow had encour-
aged broad psychological horizons and wanted to establish a new “third force”
to contrast with the two dominant schools of behaviorism and psychoanalysis.
Although Maslow personally hoped that third force would turn out to be his own
brand of humanistic psychology, his new hire Neisser conceived of something
quite different after forging a close collaboration with Oliver Selfridge, an inno-
vative young computer scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.
Machine Intelligence vs. Human Intelligence

Selfridge had been a prominent early advocate of machine intelligence and
had helped organize the first conference at which the term artificial intelli-
gence was formally introduced. Working on the problem of machine pattern
recognition—an AI project to develop computer programs capable of respond-
ing to different written letters or Morse code symbols—Selfridge had created
the playfully named Pandemonium program. In his general scheme, several
subroutines or miniprograms he called “demons” worked independently on
separate aspects of the problem but all at the same time, and with successful
combinations of activity being recorded in the computer’s memory. In one of
the first important demonstrations of the power of connectionist processing,

Selfridge showed that the Pandemonium program could improve its perfor-
mance over time, or learn.
Neisser became a trusted part-time consultant in Selfridge’s lab, and as a
graceful writer he was welcomed by Selfridge as the co-author of an accessible
account of the Pandemonium project for the magazine Scientific American.59
More importantly, Neisser became interested in the question of how human
subjects tackle these same kinds of problems, and he began his own research on
the subject. He came to believe that human pattern recognition was much more
intriguing than that of machines, and also developed “profoundly ambivalent”
feelings about the mind-as-machine metaphor:
Computation and programming were obviously a rich source of ideas

about mental processes—a source that I was using freely myself. . . . On the
other hand my most basic intuitions, stemming from Gestalt psychology,
humanistic thinking, and everywhere else, were offended by the suggestion
that minds and brains were nothing but computers.60
In a 1963 paper entitled “The Imitation of Man by Machine,” Neisser argued that
computerized “thinking” is less flexible than the human variety, does not undergo
a normal course of development, and is not driven in the same way by multiple
and interacting motives and feelings.61
During the early and middle 1960s, all of Neisser’s interests, predispositions,
and influences gradually began to merge around one central idea:
Perception, the span of attention, visual search, computer pattern recog-

nition, problem solving, and remembering were all interrelated aspects of
information processing [emphasis added]. Perception and pattern recogni-
tion were input, remembering was output, and everything in between was
one or another kind of processing.62
Neisser knew that his teacher Miller had promoted the importance of
information processing several years earlier, and that other psychologists
besides himself had been taken with the idea. He also realized, however,
that nobody had written a thorough textbook explicitly devoted to the
subject, and this recognition was the inspiration for Cognitive Psychol-
ogy.63 The publication of this 1967 volume would effectively launch a new
academic specialty area.
15_POP_28354_ch14_532-571.indd 565 18/10/16 4:07 PM

A New Academic Subdiscipline

Neisser’s general approach in Cognitive Psychology, emphasizing the mind’s
processing of its sensory inputs, was a modern updating of the earlier con-
ceptions by Leibniz and Kant of the human mind as an active, transformative
agency. Although Neisser was unwilling to fully equate human mental pro-
cesses with those of machines, he nonetheless borrowed important concepts
and language from the emerging computer technology. His very notion of
information processing as a sequence that started with input, followed by cen-
tral processing, and resulting in a final processed output, echoed Babbage’s
model for the functions of a universal engine. The word processing was itself
borrowed from computer terminology, which designated the crucial compo-
nent of a computer the central processing unit. In general, Neisser’s book con-
solidated many intellectual currents already in the psychological atmosphere
during the 1960s, while reconnecting them with some of psychology’s most
foundational ideas.
We noted earlier the general definition of cognition as the mental process by
which we acquire knowledge and understanding. Neisser’s textbook expanded
on that, defining cognition as “all the processes by which the sensory input is
transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.”64 Neisser compre-
hensively summarized the recent research on those processes, involving subjects
such as visual pattern recognition, audition and language, memory, and problem-
solving thought. Little of this content represented new or original research by
Neisser himself, but by being brought together between two covers, it defined a
new discipline. In Neisser’s words:
Cognitive Psychology legitimized and interconnected a wide range of

research programs, bringing them together by giving them a name. Many
psychologists found themselves in a position like Molière’s Monsieur
Jourdan, who suddenly discovered that he had been speaking prose all his
life! Most were pleased by the discovery, and “cognitive psychology” soon
became an indispensible rubric. In the blink of an eye, there were cognitive
journals, courses on cognition, training programs in cognitive psychology,
and conferences of every kind.65
Following the publication of Neisser’s textbook, cognitive psychology rapidly

became accepted as an important and independent subdiscipline in academic
psychology, formally defined as the study of the important mental processes that
intervene between an activating stimulus and a final adaptive response. The field
incorporates topics such as perception, attention, language development and
use, memory, and problem solving—all typically analyzed in terms of information

processing.
As cognitive psychology became a growth industry in the following years,
Neisser participated in a number of ways. An opportunity to pursue his original
interest in memory occurred after the transcripts of disgraced President Richard
Nixon’s tape-recorded conversations were published, and could be compared
against his counsel John Dean’s testimony about them during the Watergate
hearings in the early 1970s. Dean’s highly detailed accounts had earned him a
reputation as a “human tape recorder,” but the actual recordings showed that
he was incorrect on many details and had several contexts mixed up. Still, he
had been absolutely correct in the more general sense that a real cover-up of the
Watergate crime had taken place with the president’s explicit approval. This
example was similar in many respects to Neisser’s own memory of learning about
the Pearl Harbor attack: memory sometimes could be “wrong on the surface but
right in a deeper sense.”66
Later, Neisser directly investigated the flashbulb memories of student subjects
relating to two disasters: the explosion and crashing of the spacecraft Challenger
in 1986, and the 1989 earthquake near San Francisco. Immediately after both
events, he had first-year university students write descriptions of exactly what
they had been doing when they heard the news. Two or three years later he asked
them to recall the events once again and compared the two accounts. In many
cases the second accounts differed dramatically from the presumably more ac-
curate, immediate recollections. He also found, however, that students who had
actually experienced the California quake—as opposed to merely hearing about
it—were more accurate in their secondary recollections.67 All these findings dove-
tailed nicely with the work being done by other memory researchers, including
Elizabeth Loftus (see Chapter 10), demonstrating the reconstructed nature of
memory—and would hardly have surprised earlier memory pioneers, such as
Binet and Bartlett.
Neisser became involved in several other cognitive psychology projects in
the 1980s and 1990s, including the chairperson’s role for an APA Task Force on
the status of intelligence testing. By then, the new cognitive approach had ex-
tended its reach into countless areas of investigation signified by terms such as
cognitive neuroscience, cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive developmental
psychology, and many more. In assessing his personal role in promoting these
developments, Neisser was modest:
I was not really the father of cognitive psychology, only the godfather who
gave it a name. The name itself was not even very original, given that the
15_POP_28354_ch14_532-571.indd 567 18/10/16 4:07 PM

Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies was already functioning. . . . The main
thing about developments such as these is not what part I played in them
but that psychology has moved ahead because of them.68
***
Neisser was surely justified in touting the genuine advances in knowledge pro-
duced by cognitive psychology. We now know a great deal more about how
people sense, perceive, remember, and think than we did before the emergence
of cognitive psychology, and there is reason for optimism about the future.
Advances in neuroimaging technology now allow us to see inside the head and
the brain in ways that were unimaginable to philosophers and scientists not too
long ago. These advances may bring us closer to directly observing those mental
processes that have long fascinated and frustrated psychologists.
It seems appropriate to conclude this chapter by noting that this technologi-
cal progress represents the latest stage in a tradition dating back to Descartes—
applying the best available mechanistic models to explanations of psychological
phenomena, while exploring the limits of such explanations. Descartes himself
drew the line at consciousness, will, and rationality. Pascal and Hobbes anticipated
modern AI by bringing aspects of rationality under the mechanistic perspective,
but Pascal emphatically denied that a machine could ever manifest will. Leibniz
and Wundt excluded apperception from any mechanistic or deterministic anal-
ysis, and Lovelace denied that even a universal machine could ever be original.
The issue has been highly charged emotionally for many people, as Helmholtz
and his fellow nineteenth-century “new physiologists” actually swore an oath to
embrace mechanism and reject vitalism. Fechner and James, while appreciating
the explanatory power of the new mechanistic physiology, both suffered break-
downs triggered by the philosophical implications they drew from it.
Following the behavioristic phase, the new breed of cognitive psychologists
restored attention to the internal states and processes that underlie psychologi-
cal reactions by adopting language and concepts from computer technology and
AI research. Even as they make great progress, however, they continue to debate
whether phenomena such as consciousness, will, and intentionality can ever be
explainable in purely mechanistic terms, reproducible in machines, or visible
on an fMRI scan. The only certainty is that they will never know if they do not
try, and the results of their efforts will be valuable, and certainly controversial,
whether or not they succeed.
Chapter Review 569
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
Pascal’s Pascaline was considered by many as a thinking by incorporating means-ends analysis as a more flexible
machine because it could add and subtract. Leibniz in heuristic. Inspired by this concept, Miller, Galanter, and
vented a machine that could also multiply and divide, and Pribram proposed the TOTE unit as a basic concept in their
envisioned a similar machine that could solve philosophical analysis of human problem solving.
problems in logic, following the development of a universal Increasingly successful AI programs in the decades
language whose fundamental terms would resemble mathe since GPS have passed the Turing test in many different
matical symbols. Babbage designed a difference engine ways, and have defeated human champions in chess and
that could calculate complex equations, and an analytical other challenging tasks. These achievements followed the
engine, a universal machine whose components became adoption of connectionist programming strategies, carried
the prototypes for those of a modern programmable com out by machines with greater computing speed and power.
puter: input system, mill, control, memory store, and out In the context of the Lovelace objection, Boden con
put device. Lovelace anticipated the usefulness of such a cluded that they have demonstrated improbablilist but not
machine in many different fields, while objecting that it impossibilist creativity. Citing his Chinese room thought
could never be genuinely creative. Boole’s invention of experiment, Searle further argued that a computer pro
Boolean algebra and symbolic logic expanded the range of gram can never replicate the qualities of intentionality and
mathematics, enabling the calculation of solutions to tradi consciousness that accompany human intelligence and
tional problems in logic. reasoning.
Turing designed a universal machine that potentially After using Shannon’s information theory to study
could function like Babbage’s analytical engine but with a language, Miller adopted Chomsky’s theory of an innate
simpler structure. Shannon demonstrated that notations in grammatical sense and rejected the behaviorist theory
binary code could represent problems in Boolean algebra of language acquisition. After studying aspects of human
and symbolic logic, and that binary codes could be rep information processing, he estimated that the typical stor
resented mechanically by sequences of open and closed age capacity of the mind was limited to about seven units
electrical switches. Shannon also defined the amount of at one time. After Bruner revealed the importance of inter
information conveyed by a single on or off binary switch nal factors such as expectations and motives in perception,
as a bit, which became the fundamental unit of analysis Miller joined him in establishing the Harvard Center for Cog
in the new field of information theory. These ideas were nitive Studies. The word cognitive referred to mental events
incorporated in modern digital computers, which became that occur when a person processes information about ex
enormously more efficient and powerful with increasingly ternal stimuli and acquires knowledge about them. Because
smaller switches on microchips. behaviorists had denied such directly unobservable inner
The Turing test defined artificial intelligence as a com states could be studied scientifically, the new interest shown
puter’s ability to perform some complex task requiring in them was sometimes referrred to as the cognitive revo
intelligent behavior with results that matched those of a lution. As cognitive research grew, Miller’s student Neisser
human. Newell and Simon’s Logic Theorist was an early AI summarized and consolidated it in his textbook Cognitive
program that could generate mathematical theorems but Psychology, defining a new and separate academic subdis
was limited to problems requiring relatively limited search cipline focusing on the mental information processing that
space. Their later General Problem Solver improved on this occurs between a stimulus and an individual’s response to it.
Key Pioneers
Blaise Pascal, p. 534 Claude Shannon, p. 542 Noam Chomsky, p. 556
Charles Babbage, p. 537 Allen Newell, p. 546 Jerome S. Bruner, p. 558
Ada Lovelace, p. 539 Herbert Simon, p. 546 Sir Frederic Bartlett, p. 562
George Boole, p. 541 John Searle, p. 551 Ulric Neisser, p. 563
Alan Turing, p. 541 George A. Miller, p. 553
Key Terms
artificial intelligence (AI), p. 535 TOTE unit, p. 548
binary arithmetic, p. 537 serialist (symbolic) processing, p. 550
difference engine, p. 537 connectionist processing, p. 550
analytical engine, p. 538 improbabilist creativity, p. 550
Lovelace objection, p. 540 impossibilist creativity, p. 550
symbolic logic, p. 541 Chinese room, p. 551
Boolean algebra, p. 541 weak AI, p. 552
Turing machine, p. 542 strong AI, p. 552
binary switches, p. 543 magical number seven, plus or
Turing test, p. 545 minus two, p. 554
information theory, p. 546 “new look” in perception, p. 559
bit, p. 546 Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, p. 560
Logic Theorist (LT), p. 546 cognition, p. 560
heuristics, p. 547 cognitive revolution, p. 561
General Problem Solver (GPS), p. 547 flashbulb memory, p. 563
means-ends analysis, p. 547 cognitive psychology, p. 566

1. Hobbes suggested in 1651 that human reasoning, or rational thinking, is nothing but the
application of computational, mathematics-like procedures to everyday problems. State
your own opinion about this, citing examples from the chapter.
2. Various technological innovations were essential in the efforts to build thinking ma
chines. Describe some of the specific technologies that facilitated the construction of
mechanical models of human reasoning.
3. What were some of the major issues that led to the abandonment of strict behaviorism
in favor of a cognitive orientation in the mid-1900s? To what extent would you define
the change as a revolution?
4. The question of whether a machine can be built to imitate human thinking and even
demonstrate creativity generates further questions about the nature of what it is to be
human. Pick three pioneers from this chapter and discuss where they stand on the issue
of whether humans can be conceptualized as complex machines. What kinds of philo
sophical implications might follow from this belief?
Chapter Review 571
Suggested Resources
For readable general histories of computing devices and artificial intelligence, see Howard
Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic
Books, 1985); John Haugeland, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1985); and Vernon Pratt, Thinking Machines: The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence
(New York and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987). Many key papers in modern AI history, including
those by Turing, Searle, and Newell and Simon, are reprinted in The Philosophy of Artificial
Intelligence, ed. Margaret A. Boden (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990); also see
Boden’s The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990).
For an engaging introduction to Babbage and Lovelace see Sydney Padua’s graphic novel,
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First
Computer (New York: Pantheon, 2015).
Original papers by Lovelace on the analytical engine, Miller on the number seven, Bruner
on the “new look” in perception, and Tolman on cognitive maps are all available online at
Christopher Green’s http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/index.htm.
Miller, Bruner, and Neisser have all written informative short autobiographies: “George
A. Miller,” in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 8, ed. G. Lindsey (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); “Jerome S. Bruner,” in A History of Psychology in
Autobiography, vol. 7, ed. G. Lindsey (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980); “Ulric Neisser,
Autobiography,” in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 9, eds. G. Lindsey and
W. M. Runyan (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007).
For a brief overview of general developments behind modern cognitive psychology, see
Robert Hoffman, “American Cognitive Psychology” in A Pictorial History of Psychology, eds.
W. G. Bringmann, H. E. Luck, R. Miller, and C. Early (Chicago: Quintessence Publishing, 1997).
CHAPTER 15
Applying Psychology: From the
Witness Stand to the Workplace
Münsterberg and Psychology in the Courtroom

Psychology in Business and Industry
Scott and the Psychology of Advertising
Marston and Popular Psychology
Gilbreth and the Psychology of Management
Mayo and the Hawthorne Studies: Origins of the Human
Relations Movement
Hollingworth: Clinician, Feminist, Professionalizer
From Margin to Center: Application Takes Hold
O n a warm day in late June 1907, Hugo Münsterberg, one of the most fa-
mous psychologists in America, left the leafy quadrangle of Harvard
Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and boarded a train for Boise, Idaho, where
a dramatic murder trial was unfolding.1 The accused was Harry Orchard, a
one-time organizer for the emerging labor union, Industrial Workers of the
World. He had been arrested for the assassination of the former governor
of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, a firm opponent of organized labor. Orchard
initially denied his guilt, but under the influence of Steunenberg’s widow,
he later confessed to having committed the murder in collusion with at least
573
574 15 | Applying Psychology: From the Witness Stand to the Workplace
sixteen others, evidently at the request of a small group of union insiders.

Foremost among those Orchard implicated was well-known labor leader Big Bill
Haywood. Haywood’s lawyers declared that Orchard’s confession was a lie
in exchange for a reduced sentence, and they asserted Haywood’s innocence.
The trial triggered both pro-union and anti-union sentiments across America.
If Haywood were found guilty of Orchard’s accusations, the future of organized
labor in the western part of the United States would be at stake. 2
After a four-day journey, Münsterberg arrived in the Boise courtroom, armed
with a suitcase full of psychological apparatus, in time to see Orchard deliver his
final testimony. What could a Harvard professor contribute to these courtroom
proceedings?
MÜNSTERBERG AND PSYCHOLOGY IN THE COURTROOM

As a prominent popularizer of psychology, Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916;
Figure 15.1) had been commissioned by a magazine to write an article about
the murder trial. He had become well known for promoting the application of
psychological knowledge to many areas of life. Insisting that scientific psy-
chology was superior to common sense, he believed its methods and findings
should be used to improve the judgments of ordinary people. In addition,
Münsterberg had become intrigued by the impact of emo-
tion, suggestion, and dissociation on perception, and felt
these faculties had implications for the psychology of testi-
mony and the detection of deceit. Psychological expertise,
he was convinced, could be applied in the courtroom.
Münsterberg arrived in Boise to gather material for
his article and try out some of his psychological tests and
hypotheses. After Orchard’s final testimony, the governor of
Idaho drove the ambitious psychologist from the courtroom
to the prison where Orchard was being held. Over the course
of seven hours, Münsterberg administered almost 100 tests to
try to uncover the truth of Orchard’s claims. One of them was
a version of a word-association test, a procedure pioneered by
the Swiss psychiatrist Jung (see Chapter 11). By presenting
Orchard with loaded words like revolver, blood, and pardon
and recording both the content of his responses and the time
it took to produce an association, Münsterberg believed he
could discover whether Orchard was lying or telling the truth.
As it turned out, Orchard’s performance on the tests
Figure 15.1 Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916). did satisfy Münsterberg that he was telling the truth,
and that it was actually Haywood and his cronies who had masterminded the
murder. Convinced that his tests were both useful and infallible, Münsterberg
returned to Boston to write his article, which he anticipated would appear after
the trial ended.
When he arrived in Boston he was caught off-guard by a persistent newspa-
per reporter and prematurely revealed his confidence in Orchard’s truthfulness.
The next morning newspapers across the country reported Münsterberg’s ver-
dict. Münsterberg explained how his conclusion was based on the results of his
tests. He refrained, however, from actually publishing those results. Meanwhile, a
young colleague wrote an extensive article for a prominent newspaper in which
he described a number of the instruments that were used in the laboratory to
measure physiological responses that might indicate lying, such as the pneumo-
graph, which recorded breathing rate, and the sphygmograph, which recorded
heart rate. Although Münsterberg had not actually used these instruments with
Orchard, further distortions of fact led one newspaper to report that Münsterberg
had invented a “lying machine.” An undergraduate student of Münsterberg’s,
William Moulton Marston, subsequently developed, and aggressively promoted,
a set of techniques for the detection of lying. Like Münsterberg, Marston also
engaged enthusiastically with the popular press and was devoted to extending
psychology into the world beyond the lab, as we’ll describe below.
Despite Münsterberg’s ill-timed pronouncement of Orchard’s innocence,
Orchard was charged with murder and sentenced to hang. (His sentence was
later changed to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in 1954.) Regardless of
his apparent “mistake,” Münsterberg collected several of the articles he had writ-
ten on the psychology of testimony, confessions, and the influence of suggestion
and published them in a popular book, On the Witness Stand: Essays in Psychol-
ogy and Crime, in 1908.3 It was a bestseller and established his reputation as an
applied psychologist and a popular, if somewhat sensationalistic, writer. In the
book’s introduction, Münsterberg wrote proudly of his own scientific laboratory
at Harvard, describing its twenty-seven rooms “overspun with electric wires and
filled with chronoscopes and kymographs and tachistoscopes and ergographs.”4
But he quickly drew his readers’ attention to the necessity of a rigorous applied
psychology. Applied psychology, he noted, related to experimental psychology
as engineering related to physics. The time for the application of psychology
to education, medicine, art, economics, and law, according to Münsterberg, was
almost here.
By the 1880s, psychology’s pioneers had laid a scientific foundation for their
field by opening laboratories, developing apparatus, and running experiments.
By the 1890s, they were starting to imagine how their practices and findings could
be used outside the lab. This move toward application was controversial. Many
believed psychology was not yet developed well enough as a science to support
application. Others regarded application as a lower-status endeavor compared
to basic research and were reluctant to become involved. However, the allure
of applying psychological know-how to the problems of everyday life would
prove irresistible, and we’ll see in this chapter how applied psychology expanded
in a society hungry for expert solutions to a wide range of challenges. Even
Münsterberg, who would eventually come as close as any psychologist to earning
the title “founder of applied psychology,”5 was initially hesitant about it. But as
his involvement deepened, he would dramatically change his views. How did this
young German, trained in Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory, become one of America’s
most famous pioneers in this field?
Münsterberg’s Early Life

Münsterberg was born in Danzig, Germany (now called Gdansk, part of Poland).
His father was a Jewish businessman who married into a prosperous family of
lumber merchants. Hugo was his father’s third son, but the first by his second
wife, Anna. One more son followed, but Anna died tragically in 1875. Upon her
death, Hugo went out of his way to please his father. He became a diligent
student, took up physical activities of which his father approved, and educated
himself through travel and public lectures. In 1880, his father died suddenly at the
age of 55. Now it was just the four brothers.
In 1881, Hugo completed his rigorous course of studies at the Academic
Gymnasium in Danzig with distinction. His oldest brother, Otto, was in charge of
administering Hugo’s inheritance. At first Hugo traveled to Switzerland to study
French at the University of Geneva. He fully immersed himself in Genevan society,
and wrote home about not only the satisfaction of his studies but also the fashion-
able people and social events that interested him. Alarmed by the frivolity he per-
ceived in some of Hugo’s reports, Otto was skeptical about his younger brother’s
proposal to extend his travels the following year to Paris, where he would suppos-
edly write a “major history of culture.”6 After some negotiations, it was decided that
Hugo would go to the University of Leipzig to continue his studies in medicine.
In the summer of 1883, Hugo enrolled in a lecture course taught by the eminent
Wilhelm Wundt (see Chapter 5). Excited by the prospect of an academic career
and by the subject matter of the new experimental psychology, Münsterberg com-
pleted a doctorate in psychology under Wundt in 1885 before finishing his formal
education with an M.D. from Heidelberg University two years later. He then started
an unpaid position as an instructor, or Privatdozent, at the University of Freiburg,
where his research and publishing career in psychology began.
One of Münsterberg’s first publications was a report in which he challenged

his teacher Wundt’s conception of the will, arguing that one experienced “will”
not as a direct feeling, but as the awareness of physiological changes produced
in response to stimuli.7 This article attracted the favorable attention of Wundt’s
American rival William James, who had proposed a somewhat similar theory
(see Chapter 8). Münsterberg also established a laboratory at his home in
Freiburg, which began to attract students from the United States. He became well
known for promoting the scientific character of the new psychology and the need
for rigorous research. When he received an invitation from James to come to
Harvard for a three-year appointment as director of the psychological laboratory,
Münsterberg leapt at the chance. He and his family set sail for New York in the
fall of 1892.
Münsterberg’s three years at Harvard were a success. He quickly became
fluent in English and was a popular lecturer. James and others found him con-
genial, and he attracted many students to the laboratory. Favorites among
these early students were Mary Whiton Calkins (see Chapter 8) and the writer
Gertrude Stein.8 In spring 1895 when Münsterberg returned to Freiburg where his
leave of absence was running out, he had an offer from Harvard. It allowed him to
take two years to decide whether he would return on a permanent basis. Initially
uncertain about what to do, he finally did accept the offer. Cutting his ties to
Germany, he returned to the United States at age 34 to become professor of exper-
imental psychology at Harvard. Little did he know that he would end up spending
the rest of his illustrious, but relatively short, career so far from his homeland.
Abandoning the Laboratory

After his return to Harvard, Münsterberg spent only a few more years actively
directing the laboratory and conducting research in experimental psychology.
Increasingly, his interests were turning to application. For a while, he had pub-
licly dismissed applied efforts, especially those of his Clark University colleague
G. Stanley Hall, who was using psychology in education (see Chapter 8).9 How-
ever, Münsterberg eventually reversed his position, ultimately writing dozens of
books and articles on applied topics, including a piece entitled “Psychology and
the Teacher.”10 The reasons for this change of heart are somewhat unclear, but
Münsterberg was known for his opportunism, his inconsistency, and his sensation-
alism. All of these factors may have played a role in his switch from champion of
the laboratory to leader of applied psychology, especially as this latter work assured
him a prominent place in the public eye. By 1906 he had abandoned the lab entirely.
Over the remaining ten years of his life, between 1906 and 1916, he dedicated
himself to writing about applied psychology. Although many psychologists, in
16_POP_28354_ch15_572-611.indd 577 18/10/16 4:15 PM

the United States at least, persisted in devaluing applied work compared to the
“pure” work of the experimentalist, the goal of making psychology useful to the
public was attractive to many and served the important purpose of communicat-
ing psychology to a wide audience. This was also an audience that was increas-
ingly looking to scientific experts for advice on the management of daily life.
Psychologists took advantage of this interest.
One of Münsterberg’s first encounters with both applied psychology and
the popular press was his work on legal testimony. In his book On the Witness
Stand, in addition to writing about the detection of truth and falsehood through
the use of word-association methods (as mentioned earlier), Münsterberg also
wrote about the power of suggestion in creating memories and the fallibility of
eyewitness recall. Subsequent research in social psychology on these important
topics would cite Münsterberg (see Chapter 10).
PSYCHOLOGY IN BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY

Among Münsterberg’s many and varied interests, a dom-
inant one was the application of psychology to business
and industry, an approach known in the United States,
Germany, and elsewhere as psychotechnics. Although
Münsterberg originally intended psychotechnics to refer to
all aspects of applied psychology, it quickly became associ-
ated with the workplace, particularly in terms of selecting
personnel.11 Before turning to the specific contributions of
Münsterberg (and others) to this area, we’ll describe some
general developments that profoundly affected psychol-
ogists’ opportunities to apply their expertise to the world
of work.
Taylor and Scientific Management

Münsterberg’s America was marked by rapid urbanization
and industrial expansion, and included the mechanization of
factories and other technological advances. To help address
these changes, the American engineer Frederick Winslow
Taylor (1856–1915; Figure 15.2) developed a system called
scientific management, with the goal of increasing worker
efficiency and productivity in the newly mechanized factories.
After abandoning his previous plan to become a lawyer like
Figure 15.2 Frederick Winslow Taylor his Princeton-educated father, Taylor began his career as a
(1856–1915). machinist. After a four-year apprenticeship, he took a job
16_POP_28354_ch15_572-611.indd 578 18/10/16 4:15 PM

Psychology in Business and Industry 579
at a steel manufacturing plant. He quickly rose through the ranks and became
machine shop foreman, researcher, and eventually chief engineer.
During his time on the factory floor, he noticed a phenomenon called
soldiering—working below one’s normal capacity or speed. Since workers at that
time were paid according to whether they reached the average level of output
expected of them, it was to their benefit to intentionally lower the average out-
put by working at the slowest pace they could without being penalized. Taylor
observed this behavior and wanted to overcome it by instituting a different
payment scheme. In the differential piece-rate system he developed, a standard
time was set for each task a worker had to do. Any worker who completed the
task in that time or faster got a higher rate of pay; anyone who did not meet the
standard time was penalized.
Taylor soon realized, however, that to set the standard time for each task,
managers would have to know much more about the work they were supervis-
ing. Typically, managers left the details of the execution of tasks to foremen
and workers themselves. Taylor felt this needed to change in order to increase
factory efficiency and productivity. He was also convinced that the careful
application of scientific rather than “rule-of thumb” methods was essential
for improving efficiency. One of the changes Taylor promoted was breaking
down skilled labor into standardized tasks through a careful analysis of indus-
trial work, a practice that came to be called de-skilling. Each task a worker
performed was broken down into the specific movements it required, and
each movement was timed by an observer. These recorded times would form
the scientific basis for the standard time required for each task. The goal of
Taylor’s time study was to increase rates of production through increased
efficiency; in practice, this meant figuring out how to enable workers to do
more in less time by giving them quick, repetitive, menial tasks, often on an
assembly line.
Although initially quite successful, Taylor’s scientific management system
was met with resistance from workers and their unions for a number of reasons.
Taylor’s lack of experience with knowing how workers might respond to his
system, and his dislike of organized labor, no doubt fueled some of this resis-
tance. Many workers reacted unfavorably to what they perceived as Taylor’s
overly mechanistic methods and his tendency to treat people like machines.
They were also dismayed to learn they had no input into the process whereby
their work was made more efficient. As a result, a number of strikes occurred in
factories where Taylor’s system was used. The U. S. Congress actually passed
legislation banning some of its key elements in government work, such as using
stopwatches to time workers’ performances.
Finding the Right Worker for the Job

Münsterberg admired Taylor’s system of scientific management, which was also
referred to as Taylorism. He embraced the main principles of expert analysis,
increased efficiency, and the objective analysis of the workplace. Such analysis,
Münsterberg argued, should extend from the work itself to the workers, and this
is where psychologists could play a key role. Münsterberg therefore devoted
much of his time and energy to developing tests that would match workers’
aptitudes and skills to appropriate jobs. This practice came to be known as
personnel selection. Ultimately, for the success of any personnel selection pro-
cedure, tests that could reproduce the mental and physical skills necessary for the
job had to be devised.
To better understand the nature of factory work, Münsterberg sent question-
naires to industrial manufacturers and visited several facilities. In 1911 he was
approached by a director for the Hamburg-American shipping line to devise
a test that could be used to screen out unqualified potential ship captains.
Münsterberg came up with a card-sorting task he felt would reveal the ability
to make complex decisions quickly and accurately. (It’s not clear whether the
company used the test or whether it was successful.)
Demand for Münsterberg’s expertise increased—as did his popular reputation.
The next spring he was contracted by the American Association of Labor Legisla-
tion to research the mental traits that might predispose potential trolley car drivers
to accidents, and conversely, the skills required for safe driving. Münsterberg deter-
mined that the ability to sustain attention and concentration, to resist distraction,
and to anticipate the movements of pedestrians and vehicles were all important for
the job. He then developed a test that was much more complex than the card-sorting
task he had previously devised for the ship captains. For this test, he constructed
miniature approximations of the actual dilemmas trolley car drivers would encoun-
ter in their work by simulating a roadway with a piece of cardboard. A heavy line
down the middle of the road represented the trolley car line, and the rest was divided
into color-coded blocks. Each block contained a digit representing a pedestrian, a
horse, or an automobile that would move a set number of blocks at a given speed.
The trick was to determine when any of these three would collide with the prog-
ress of a hypothetical trolley car running along a central line. Using the test scores,
Münsterberg ranked the job applicants. He also ranked successful and unsuccessful
drivers, and compared the applicants’ scores with those of the successful operators
to eliminate those not suited to the job.
In 1913 Münsterberg’s book Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, first written
in German, was published in English.12 For a brief period it was on the nonfiction
bestseller list. In it, he described many of the tests he had devised to help match
Scott and the Psychology of Advertising 581
workers to industrial, technical, and even sales positions. In 1915 he published

Business Psychology.13 With these two books, Münsterberg firmly established
his professional and popular reputation as a pioneer applying psychology
to problems of business and industry, a field that would later become known
as industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology.
Psychotechnics was gaining momentum in other parts of the world as well.
The need to appropriately match workers to jobs, especially technical military
tasks, was fueled by the demands of war. As World War I unfolded in Europe
during 1914–1918, psychologists found many opportunities to apply their exper-
tise. In Germany, where the term psychotechnics had originated, psychologists
Walther Moede and Curt Piorkowski created laboratory driving simulations to
screen army motorcar drivers, and eventually extended these tests to railroad
personnel throughout the country. In England, psychologists studied the effects
of fatigue on workers in munitions factories, and in France tests were devised to
assess the emotional stability of war plane pilots. In the United States, World War
I was a critical turning point for the application of psychology to business and
industry, but Münsterberg would not live to see it.
As the First World War began and the United States considered entering the
war against Germany, Münsterberg’s outspoken German nationalism became
increasingly problematic, both professionally and personally. He had traveled a
long way from his laboratory beginnings and the commitment to scientific psy-
chology that had originally secured his position at Harvard. He had also traveled
a long way from his native Germany to advance his reputation and realize his pro-
fessional ambitions. In some respects, however, Münsterberg’s heart had always
remained in his homeland. As American sentiment turned against Germany,
he was shunned by many of his American colleagues and friends, and at one
point he even received death threats. The stress from this situation may have
contributed to his premature death. In 1916, at the beginning of a class to
Radcliffe students, Münsterberg collapsed at the lecture podium. His almost
instant death, at the age of 53, was caused by a cerebral hemorrhage.
Although he would not live to see the expansion of applied psychology during
the war and in the decades after, Münsterberg had left the field in good hands.
We turn now to a colleague and a student, each of whom, in different ways, built
on Münsterberg’s legacy.
SCOTT AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADVERTISING

Like Münsterberg, the American Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955; Figure 15.3)
earned his doctorate in Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory. A few years younger than his
German colleague, Scott became involved with applied psychology very early in
his career. In 1901, at the request of a magazine advertising

manager who had been turned down by Münsterberg (who
was still in his anti–applied psychology phase), Scott reluc-
tantly agreed to give a talk to members of the Agate Club in
Chicago on how psychology might be useful in advertising.
His initial hesitation was likely due to the poor reputation
of applied work compared to the “higher calling” of experi-
mental, laboratory research. He was comfortably established
as an instructor and soon-to-be professor of psychology
and pedagogy at Northwestern University. However, he saw
the interest in psychology from the advertising community
as an opportunity to test some of his theories about the
roles of involuntary attention and suggestion in influencing
behavior.
Scott quickly resolved his ambivalence about applied
psychology and began to conduct scientific studies of adver-
tising in earnest. He published many of these studies in a
magazine founded by a prominent Chicago advertising
Figure 15.3 Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955). executive who had heard Scott’s original talk at the Agate
Club. These magazine columns formed the basis for two
books, The Theory and Practice of Advertising and, a few years later, The Psychol-
ogy of Advertising.14
The second volume brought the words psychology and advertising together in
a book title for the first time. It covered a number of topics that would have been
familiar to Scott’s scientific psychology colleagues in the early 1900s. These
included memory, feelings and emotions, sympathy, instinct, suggestion, the
will, habit, and attention. Scott showed how the principles established by psy-
chologists in each of these areas could be useful to advertisers. He believed the
processes of association and suggestion were the most valuable. One reviewer of
his book explained association in this colorful way: “The dainty, ethereal ladies
appearing in the advertisements of Nabisco wafers are effective in associating
this food with daintiness and elegance, while a promiscuous abundance of fruit
appearing in a Wheatlet advertisement is repulsive.”15 Aside from contemporary
readers’ confusion over why the pairing of fruit and the breakfast cereal Wheatlet
would be considered distasteful, this passage conveys a sense of how Scott was
presenting psychological principles to advertisers. By 1915, he had produced six
books and over 100 articles, many on applied topics.
As noted above, World War I was a turning point for applied psychology—
by accelerating its development and by improving its image. Scott’s work was
16_POP_28354_ch15_572-611.indd 582 18/10/16 4:15 PM

Marston and Popular Psychology 583
influential in both areas. When the U.S. got involved in the war in 1917, Scott
was among a group of psychologists who came together to plan how they could
contribute to the war effort. There were two primary outcomes of this meeting.
One was the establishment of the Committee for the Psychological Evaluation
of Recruits, headed by the president of the American Psychological Association,
Robert Yerkes. This committee developed and administered group intelligence
tests to almost two million army recruits in order to identify, and eliminate, those
who were mentally incapable of military service.
The second outcome was the formation of the Committee for the Classification
of Personnel in the Army, headed by Scott. This committee focused on assessing
aptitudes and skills for certain tasks, rather than innate ability or general intel-
ligence. Scott’s approach and aims were somewhat more practical than those of
Yerkes. His group collected detailed information about dozens of military jobs—
from navigators to instrument makers to machinists. They developed selection
tests to evaluate the necessary skills, and eventually devised more than 100 tests
for eighty different jobs. Scott’s committee assessed more than 3.5 million soldiers.
This grand personnel selection exercise was deemed a success by the military, and
Scott was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by the U.S. Congress for his
contributions in the war—the only psychologist to be so honored.
MARSTON AND POPULAR PSYCHOLOGY

When the war ended in 1918, applied psychologists were poised to spread psy
chology into every aspect of daily life. Following in his teacher Münsterberg’s
footsteps, one of the most colorful popular-
izers of psychology between the two world
wars was William Moulton Marston (1893–1947;
Figure 15.4). As an undergraduate student of
Münsterberg’s at Harvard, Marston was heavily
influenced by his professor’s work in lie detec-
tion. Marston subsequently claimed that he had
invented the lie detector in 1913, while still an un-
dergraduate; he called it the Marston Deception
Test. Whether or not this was true (Marston was
somewhat prone to overstating, or even lying
about, his accomplishments), he did conduct a
series of studies in the 1920s on detecting decep-
tion through the measurement of systolic blood
pressure. In 1923, he attempted to have evidence Figure 15.4 William Moulton Marston (1893-1947)
based on the lie detector admitted into a court administering a lie detector test.
of law, but was unsuccessful due to the method’s lack of

acceptance among scientific authorities.16
Marston was not alone in his claims to have invented the
lie detector. Also in the 1920s, Leonarde Keeler developed
a similar test that he then packaged and aggressively
promoted. Known as the Keeler Polygraph, it became widely
used in police investigations and was depicted frequently in
the media. Ultimately, however, the polygraph proved to be
more spectacle than science, as heightened responses to it
were shown to reveal only physiological arousal or anxiety—
neither of which is a unique or universal indicator of lying.
Although it is still used, mainly in the United States, as an
interrogation tool, its proponents never convinced legal
authorities of its scientific validity. To this day, polygraph
evidence remains inadmissible in criminal cases.
In a further extension of his expertise to popular audi-
ences, in the 1940s, writing under the pen name Charles
Figure 15.5 Wonder Woman with her Golden
Lasso of Truth.
Moulton, Marston created the comic book superheroine
Wonder Woman, who used her Golden Lasso of Truth to force
unsuspecting villains to divulge their lies.17 Marston’s development of Wonder
Woman (Figure 15.5) and her adventures was closely tied to his theory of emotion,
but it also reflected his commitment to a version of feminism in which women’s
unique and superior emotional strength would eventually enable them to create
a more just, loving, and equitable society. Wonder Woman’s debut during World
War II led to many storylines involving battles against German military leaders.
Wonder Woman’s arch-enemy Dr. Psycho was Marston’s fictional rendering of
his Harvard professor, Münsterberg. The two men had held opposing views on
women’s rights; Marston was a supporter while Münsterberg was a critic, despite
his support of individual women. Münsterberg, for example, believed women
were too suggestible to be allowed to vote in political elections but, paradoxically,
were too mentally stubborn to be good jury members. In Marston’s rendering of
Dr. Psycho, Münsterberg appears as both a fascist and an enemy of women.
Given this stance, it is perhaps ironic that the one psychologist who might rival
Münsterberg’s claim to be the founder of industrial psychology was a woman.
GILBRETH AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MANAGEMENT

When Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1972; Figure 15.6) published The Psychology
of Management, she used only her initials, L. M., because her publisher believed
the book wouldn’t sell well if it was obviously written by a woman.18 She had
completed all the requirements for her Ph.D. in psychology at

the University of California, Berkeley—except one. Although
her dissertation, which became the book, was accepted, her
degree was denied at the last minute because she hadn’t met
the requirement of spending her last year of study in residence.
A partner in her husband’s engineering business, Gilbreth
had not stayed behind in her native California when the com-
pany, and her large family, moved east to accommodate a new
contract. Denied her degree from Berkeley, she promptly en-
rolled at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, which
had one of the earliest programs in applied psychology. She
earned her Ph.D. there in 1915. Her second dissertation, Some
Aspects of Eliminating Waste in Teaching (unpublished),
applied the principles of scientific management to the work
of classroom teachers. According to some historians of psy-
chology, Gilbreth’s was the first Ph.D. awarded in the field of
industrial psychology.19 Three days after she earned her doc-
torate, she gave birth to her seventh child.
Lillian and her husband, engineer Frank Bunker Gilbreth
(1868–1924), would have a total of twelve children, six boys
Figure 15.6 Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1972).
and six girls. The logical title of the bestselling first account
of the Gilbreth family exploits was Cheaper by the Dozen (1948). It was written by
two of the children and later made into a Hollywood movie. It was followed by a
second memoir, Belles on Their Toes (1950), which chronicled the family’s life af-
ter the death of Frank Gilbreth in 1924. Although she was mythologized as a wife
and mother in Cheaper by the Dozen (in both book and movie), Lillian Gilbreth’s
professional career and her contributions to applied psychology rank among the
most impressive in the history of the field.
California Origins
Lillian Moller was born in Oakland, California, the eldest of nine children. Her
parents were of German descent and the family was quite affluent. They were
also close-knit and traditional. Daughters were expected to learn domestic tasks
and stay close to home. When Lillian, a serious, straight-A student, graduated
from high school and decided she wanted to go to the University of California,
Berkeley, to study literature, her father was strongly opposed. Believing that
college was only suitable for women who had to learn how to earn their living,
usually by teaching, he felt his daughter should devote herself to her interests
in music, reading, and travel instead. In fact, he insisted none of his daughters
should have to work. Lillian had a rather unconventional aunt who, following a
divorce (which was uncommon at the time), pursued a medical education and
became a practicing psychiatrist, moving to Vienna where she studied with
Freud. There were examples, therefore, of highly educated women in Lillian’s
family, and several of her cousins were already students at the university. She was
determined to join them.
Reluctantly, her father gave in, and Lillian enrolled at Berkeley to study
English literature. She graduated in 1900 and was the university’s first female
commencement speaker. Prior to her speech, she was advised by the university
president to be “womanly” in her presentation, to wear a dress with ruffles, and
not try to imitate a man.20 Lillian took his advice to heart and gave a successful
speech, evidently impressing her father so much that he agreed to her plan to
pursue a master’s degree.
One of her college professors recommended Columbia University in New
York City, so she headed east and enrolled at Columbia’s Barnard College. Lillian
was soon involved with her studies. When winter descended on the city, however,
the native Californian was unprepared for the cold weather and quickly fell ill.
Relatives alerted her father and he arrived unannounced, then took her back
to the warmth and safety of California. When she recovered, she continued her
courses at Berkeley, completing a thesis on Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew’s Fair, for
which she immersed herself in Elizabethan history and literature.
After completing her master’s degree at the University of California in 1902,
Lillian embarked on a tour of Europe with three other young women and a
chaperone. They stopped first in New York to visit relatives, then continued to
Boston to board the ship for their trans-Atlantic crossing. The trip was event-
ful and exciting for a number of reasons. Foremost among them was Lillian’s
introduction, in Boston, to her chaperone’s cousin, Frank Bunker Gilbreth. An
extroverted, energetic man several years older, Frank Gilbreth owned a construc-
tion company and made no secret of the fact that work was his main focus. His
interest in Lillian, however, soon became quite apparent as well. The feeling was
mutual, and in 1904, they were married.
Frank Gilbreth immediately began sharing his knowledge of his chosen trade
with his wife and partner, as they began their life together. Without a college
degree himself, Frank heartily supported his wife’s continued education, but he
encouraged her to pursue something practical. Becoming increasingly inter-
ested in engineering and management, and being influenced by Taylor, Frank
began to apply scientific management principles to tasks such as bricklaying.
Lillian was helping him develop his ideas as she returned to school and worked
on her Ph.D. in an appropriately practical field: applied psychology. By 1915 she
had earned her degree and was a full partner

in the construction company, bringing her
psychological training to bear on problems
of the workplace.
Efficiency and the Worker

The Gilbreths were advocates of Taylor’s
system of scientific management and built
on the idea that work could be made more
efficient by careful analysis. They devel-
oped what they called motion studies to
identify the most efficient way to get a task
done. Using a movie camera to document
the detailed movements required to per-
Figure 15.7 A cartoon of a “Taylorized kiss,” parodying the
form tasks, they analyzed many different
emphasis on efficiency in Taylor’s system, in Life magazine, 1913.
kinds of activities—from manufacturing
to surgery to athletics. They identified eighteen basic motions of the hand and
called these units therbligs, an anagram of Gilbreths. Part of their philosophy
was that efficiency should reduce fatigue, and motion studies should reveal how
to design machinery and methods to make workers’ movements both easier
and more efficient. Their approach was published in 1911 in a book entitled
Motion Study.21
They characterized their method as the “quest for the one best way” to get
a task done. During surgical operations, for example, they noticed that
surgeons often spent a considerable amount of time searching for instru-
ments. Their analysis and recommendations resulted in the now-standard
practice of having a surgical nurse place the instrument in the surgeon’s
hand as requested. The emphasis on efficiency, shared by both Taylor’s and
the Gilbreths’ systems, was parodied in the popular press, as shown in
Figure 15.7.
Unlike Taylor, however, the Gilbreths were interested in how the most efficient
motions affected the individual worker. They hoped to use this information to
design work that was both highly efficient and individually rewarding. The
Gilbreth philosophy was captured in Lillian’s 1914 monograph:
The outline here given as to how men must, ultimately, under Scientific
Management, be selected, serves to show that, far from being “made machines
of,” men are selected to reach that special place where their individuality can
be recognized and rewarded to the greatest extent.22
This combination of psychology and management represented a departure

from strict Taylorism and reflected Lillian Gilbreth’s humanistic outlook. Her
training in psychology, rather than engineering, inclined her to see the indi-
vidual person as the most important element in industry and the well-being of
the worker as central in the design of the workplace. Believing in the need to
improve communication among workers, foremen, and managers, she advocated
for the role of workers in critiquing methods of operation. As those most directly
involved in and affected by the work itself, workers, she believed, should be con-
sulted and receive recognition for the ideas they generated. She even suggested
that workers should share in any profits that might result from their increased
efficiency.
This participatory attitude carried over into all areas of her life, including the
running of her large and boisterous household. Although, like her husband, she
saw the benefit (and even necessity!) of using their management principles to
organize family life, this didn’t mean that children were reduced to interchange-
able parts in the domestic machine. Two of her children, Frank and Ernestine,
contrasted their mother and their father this way:
Mother saw her children as a dozen individuals, a dozen different person-

alities, who eventually would have to make their ways separately in the
world. Dad saw them as an all-inclusive group, to be brought up under one
master plan that would be best for everybody. What was good for Anne, he
believed, would be good for Ernestine, for Bill, for Jack.23
Spreading the “One Best Way”

Together with Frank, and continuing after his death, Lillian Gilbreth spread their
method beyond the realm of industrial production to such fields as homemaking
and vocational rehabilitation for the physically handicapped.24 After World War I,
the Gilbreths became concerned with the plight of the thousands of soldiers who
had become physically disabled from their war injuries. They used motion stud-
ies to identify the kinds of work these men could do and the accommodations
they would need. They also began to train managers and professors in their tech-
niques, running summer workshops in their home in New Jersey for many years.
These workshops were especially important to Lillian after Frank’s untimely
death from a heart attack in 1924. Faced with the challenge of being the sole
breadwinner for eleven children on the cusp of their college educations (one of
the twelve had died of diphtheria in 1912), Gilbreth planned how to continue the
consulting business on her own. Only three days after her husband collapsed
on a commuter train platform while talking to her on the phone, she called a
family meeting and laid out their options. They could move to California where
her own mother had offered to take them in; they could stay on the East Coast,
where friends had offered to adopt some of the children; or they could try to stay
together in their own home. This last option would require Gilbreth taking over
the business full-time and was surely a gamble. The decision was unanimous:
she would take that gamble. The next day, Gilbreth boarded a steamship and
traveled to London and Prague, to the First International Management Con-
gress, where she delivered the talks she and her husband had jointly authored.
The work of the management consulting company Gilbreth, Inc., and the unity
of the Gilbreth family, would continue.
Unsure whether her clients would renew their contracts with the company now
operating under the sole direction of a woman, Gilbreth reinstituted the sum-
mer workshops she and Frank had developed. These consisted of sixteen-week
courses in which she trained students in time and motion methods at her home
laboratory. Students came from as far away as Germany, Belgium, England, and
Japan to be trained. As her reputation grew, she received new requests for her
consulting services. She was hired by Macy’s department store in New York City
to study and improve the performance of saleswomen. In order to fully under-
stand the nature of the job, Gilbreth worked in the store herself. Her recommen-
dations for how to increase job satisfaction and reduce fatigue included employee
suggestion boxes, newsletters, a three-point employee advancement plan, hourly
rest periods, and aptitude surveys. Her expertise was also used by Sears, Roebuck
& Company and Johnson & Johnson. In some cases, her services included not
only management consulting but market research as well. For example, she
carried out studies for Johnson & Johnson on the psychological effects of various
kinds of sanitary napkin packaging.
Gilbreth’s wide-ranging work, as well as her agility and flexibility as a con-
sulting psychologist, were similar to the career demands of many women and
men during this early period of applied psychology. For example, Elsie Oschrin
Bregman (1896–1969) earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1922. While
still a student, Bregman was hired by Macy’s. Her task was to improve personnel
processes in their sales and clerical divisions. Specifically, Bregman conducted
research on recruitment, selection, training, management, and the design of jobs
in these areas. In one study she correlated scores on thirteen psychological tests
with the actual sales records of retail saleswomen to see if the tests could be used
to predict performance; this was an innovative approach at that time.
Marion Almira Bills (1890–1970) earned her Ph.D. in 1917 from Bryn Mawr
College in Pennsylvania, where she studied the impact of lighting on visual
sensation. She then worked on employee selection procedures at the Division of

Applied Psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. She
spent the majority of her career at the Aetna Life Insurance Company, where she
was a pioneer in research on factors affecting job permanency, or what is now
called employee retention. She also developed wage incentive systems for cler-
ical positions and developed and implemented a job evaluation program. Early
applied psychologists were called upon to extend their expertise and training in
scientific methods to a wide range of tasks to make their science useful in the
world of work.
Managing the Home and Nation

In the late 1920s, Gilbreth turned her attention to making the work of the home-
maker more efficient. Eventually she was hired by most of the major appliance
manufacturing companies to adapt kitchen design and individual appliances to
the needs of the users. Her innovations included the shelves inside refrigerator
doors and the foot-pedal trash can. Her studies resulted in the design principle of
the kitchen triangle, which minimizes the motions needed to move between the
kitchen’s three major work areas.
In designing the physical environment to better fit the homemaker, Gilbreth
contributed to the new field known as human factors psychology that emerged
after World War II. The Gilbreths’ time and motion studies are still used today
by professionals in the human factors field to design comfortable and efficient, or
ergonomic, workstations. In 1927, she published The Homemaker and Her Job.25
The next year, she encouraged the sharing of domestic responsibilities in Living
With Our Children.26 Every housewife and mother, she wrote, needs to be an
effective manager.
By 1929, Gilbreth had quit teaching at home and became a full-time consul-
tant. As the Great Depression worsened in 1930, President Herbert Hoover called
for an emergency committee to study the problem of unemployment. He asked
Gilbreth to be a member, and she devised a federal program called Share the
Work to stimulate the creation of new jobs. During World War II, in which five
of her six sons served (fortunately, all survived the war), Gilbreth, by then in
her mid-60s, served as a consultant at war plants and military bases. Over the
course of her career she would serve on committees under Presidents Roosevelt,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson on issues ranging from civil defense, to
aging, to the rehabilitation of the physically handicapped.
Gilbreth remained professionally active until her death in 1972, at the age
of 94. In 1966, she became the first woman awarded the Hoover Medal for distin-
guished public service by an engineer. During the period 1928–1964, she received
16_POP_28354_ch15_572-611.indd 590 18/10/16 4:16 PM

Mayo and the Hawthorne Studies: Origins of the Human Relations Movement 591
twenty-three honorary degrees. In 1984, as a result of a campaign by the women’s

division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, she was featured on
a commemorative United States postage stamp. To date, she is the only psychol-
ogist to receive this honor.
MAYO AND THE HAWTHORNE STUDIES: ORIGINS

OF THE HUMAN RELATIONS MOVEMENT
While Gilbreth was extending the application of the “one best way” beyond
purely industrial settings, her ideas about the importance of worker well-being
were coming under scientific scrutiny at the Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric
Company outside Chicago. There, during the 1920s and 1930s, a series of stud-
ies revealed the power of the interpersonal environment to influence employee
satisfaction and behavior. Subsequently called the Hawthorne studies, the
research undertaken at Hawthorne demonstrated that physical and economic con-
ditions alone were not sufficient to explain productivity in the workplace. Psycho-
logical and social factors were also important.
Most psychology students have encountered one of the major findings from
the Hawthorne studies at some point in their coursework. The Hawthorne effect,
as it is known, refers to the impact, on performance or behavior, of being aware
that you are a participant in a study. The research at Hawthorne revealed that
when employees knew they were being studied, the psychological effects of this
awareness influenced their satisfaction and productivity. But much more went
into—and came out of—the Hawthorne studies than this simple statement reveals.
The human relations movement was a shift in research focus to the social
and psychological factors influencing performance and satisfaction at work, and
some people trace its start, as well as the birth of the field of organizational be-
havior management, to the Hawthorne studies. Others argue that the Hawthorne
experiments were so methodologically flawed and politically motivated that
the findings should be seriously questioned. Despite the mythic status of the
Hawthorne effect in psychology, there are other ways of interpreting the findings
from the studies. As one scholar remarked, “The interpretations of the experi-
ments are now so varied that many would agree with the discouraging observa-
tion of one writer on management theory that ‘we shall never know exactly what
happened at Hawthorne.’”27
Debates about the meaning of the Hawthorne studies started almost immedi-
ately after the death of the man most closely associated with them: Elton Mayo
(1880–1949; Figure 15.8). The debates have been intertwined with questions
about Mayo’s personal values, motivations, and even level of involvement in
designing and interpreting the research. Was Mayo a champion of the worker,
bringing a humanistic element into the workplace

to counter the mechanistic vision of Taylorism? Or
was Mayo pro-management, simply using human-
istic strategies to bring submissive, suggestible
workers more firmly under management’s thumb?
Although today Mayo is often referred to as a
psychologist, he never earned a Ph.D. in the field.
In 1926 he was awarded a master’s degree from
his undergraduate institution in Adelaide, Australia,
on the basis of his industrial research at a Phil-
adelphia textile mill. The reason for this hasty
credentialing was a job offer from Harvard’s pres-
tigious business school just four years after Mayo
Figure 15.8 Elton Mayo (1880–1949). first went to the United States. From his position
at Harvard, Mayo and his research team directed the most famous studies in the
history of industrial psychology.
Australian Origins
Born in 1880 in Adelaide, Australia, Mayo was the second of seven children in a
solidly middle-class family. Home-schooled by a governess until the age of 12, he
was encouraged by his parents to pursue medicine, following family tradition,
but he failed or dropped out of medical schools in Adelaide, Edinburgh, and
London. He then traveled briefly in West Africa, securing a position at the Ashanti
Mining Company. His employment was cut short when he contracted dengue
fever. Recovering at the home of relatives in London, he remained depressed after
yet another failed career venture. His spirits improved when he took a short-term
teaching job at the Working Men’s College in London. His popularity with his
pupils helped him regain some self-confidence. This success, combined with the
sympathetic counsel of his sister Helen (who did become a physician), helped
persuade him to return home to his family in Australia.
Upon his return his father set him up as a partner in a printing firm. Though he
worked hard, business was not his calling. His savior from yet another unsuc-
cessful venture came in the figure of Professor William Mitchell, a prominent
philosopher at the University of Adelaide. Mitchell had earlier taught Elton’s
sister Helen and quickly came to see her brother’s promise. Under Mitchell’s
influence Elton enrolled again at the University of Adelaide, graduating in 1911
with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.
With this degree and a hearty endorsement from his mentor, Mayo began
his first academic post at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Teaching
a heavy course load, he applied himself diligently to university and community

life. He also met his future wife, the daughter of a prosperous local landowner
and businessman. The couple married in 1913 and had two daughters. In the face
of the daunting task of fatherhood, Mayo turned to psychology. Influential to
him were the writings of Jung, and he frequently used Jung’s word-association
test in his later work (see Chapter 12).
Mayo had a longstanding interest in politics, and World War I convinced him
that existing political systems were irrational. He wrote a short treatise on social
and political organization called Democracy and Freedom, published in 1919.28
He argued that society, rather than being a collection of individuals organized
through their relationship to the state, with political party affiliation defining this
relationship, should be seen as a cooperative collection of social relationships
that had evolved historically. Foremost among these relationships were those
organized around work. Democratic political organization in its current form,
Mayo believed, had encouraged labor unrest and social disintegration. Polemics
and blind allegiances had produced dangerous leaders who incited irrational
mobs to disorder and violence. Mayo emphasized the importance of enlightened
leadership by educated administrators who would facilitate cooperative relation-
ships among people at work. He wrote that work provided an important sense of
one’s social identity because it involved participation in social customs, inherited
traditions and skills, and assigned roles. Here we see the basis of Mayo’s interest
in the worker and the workplace.
At the conclusion of the war, Mayo’s reputation as a professor and public lec-
turer was on the rise. With this recognition, however, came overwork coupled
with significant frustration with university politics. Mayo began to plot his
escape from Brisbane. He was granted a study leave and decided to make a
lecture tour in the United States, starting in California. In July 1922, leaving his
family behind in Australia, Mayo boarded a ship bound for San Francisco to seek
his fortune. He would never again return to his native country.
The Changing Workplace

When Mayo arrived in America in the 1920s, he encountered a society that had
undergone rapid industrial expansion. For example, at Western Electric, the com-
pany where the Hawthorne studies took place, the entire workforce had increased
from 400 workers in 1879 to 31,000 workers in 1927.29 In this context, the influence
of Taylorism was strong but not unchallenged. Many workers felt that Taylor’s
efficiency engineers had taken away any control they may have had over the
content, pace, and organization of their work. Differential piece-rate systems
that promised financial gains for productive workers seemed to be manipulated
by management such that when productivity went up, piece-rates often fell,
leaving the worker earning almost the same amount as before. As one might
expect, unions were heavily opposed to piece-rate systems, and strikes were
common. The labor movement grew, and important labor laws were passed,
including workers’ compensation, mandatory factory inspection, and protections
for women and children. Social reformers focused on improving the living and
working conditions of the industrial worker. As a result, companies felt some
pressure to “win over” not only workers, but also journalists, reformers, and poli-
ticians. Conditions of the workplace, and the relationships between workers and
management, ranked high in the public consciousness.
Mayo was introduced to a community of academics and intellectuals in the
San Francisco area and began delivering public lectures. One day, during a lunch
arranged by one of his wife’s relatives, he met a member of the National Research
Council to whom he expressed his thoughts about the psychological factors
determining labor strikes, and how social science research could help control
them. Favorably impressed, Mayo’s colleague organized a series of professional
introductions for the visiting professor. These resulted in Mayo being offered a
two-week lecture series in the industrial research department at the prestigious
Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. The two weeks
turned into four years, and Mayo was able to give up his position at Queensland,
where he had been on leave without pay. Having neither conducted actual indus-
trial research, nor published any articles on the topic, Mayo now faced a serious,
although stimulating, challenge.
Over the next three years, Mayo undertook studies of industrial fatigue in sev-
eral Philadelphia-area factories, the most well-known (and the one earning him
his master’s degree) at a textile mill. Mayo was then invited to go to the Harvard
Business School and continue his research largely free of the constraints of class-
room lecturing and administration. Two years after his arrival at Harvard, Mayo
and his colleagues became involved in the Hawthorne studies.
What Happened at Hawthorne

Well before Mayo’s involvement at Hawthorne, studies were underway at the
plant to test the effects of lighting on worker productivity. The illumination stud-
ies revealed that changes in the level of lighting on the factory floor appeared to
have no systematic relationship to productivity. Evidently, in some conditions of
lowered lighting, productivity actually increased somewhat. This observation led
researchers to believe that factors other than those in the physical environment
of the workers might be worth investigating experimentally, thereby setting the
stage for subsequent studies.
In 1927, building on the idea of applying experimental methods to the study of

factory workers, Mayo and his Harvard colleagues, along with officers at Western
Electric, designed a second set of experiments to investigate the effects of rest
periods and length of the workday on worker behavior. This set of three experi-
ments is commonly reported as having established the Hawthorne effect, stated
earlier. Six young women were selected to take part in the first Relay Assembly
Test Room (RATR) experiment. They were removed from their regular depart-
ments and reported to a separate room where they worked for the duration of the
two-year study. Their job was to assemble telephone relays, a task that could be
done by hand, without mechanical help. Worker output could be easily and objec-
tively measured in terms of numbers of relays assembled.
The researchers were originally interested in six questions: (1) Do employees
actually get tired out? (2) Are rest pauses desirable? (3) Is a shorter working day
desirable? (4) What are the attitudes of employees toward their work and toward
the company? (5) What is the effect of changing the type of working equipment?
(6) Why does work fall off in the afternoon?30 In addition to numerical records of
productivity, documentation of everything that happened in the test room was
undertaken by an observer-supervisor who was in the room at all times with the
workers. These activity logs would reveal some of the test room dynamics that
were later emphasized by Mayo’s critics.
After establishing baseline levels of productivity for each of the young work-
ers, Mayo and the team of researchers began to introduce changes to determine
their effects on productivity. A series of rest periods was given at various times
in the day. In addition to rest periods, a shorter workday was introduced; then the
Saturday shift was eliminated. Researchers then maintained the rest periods, but
went back to the regular working day and the Saturday shift. In period III of the
experiment, the workers were put on a separate wage incentive system from the
rest of the factory. The small group in the test room became its own production
unit, so that wages were more clearly and closely tied to the productivity of indi-
viduals. The women also received regular physical checkups. Toward the end of
the study, they were interviewed extensively.
What were the results of this grand experiment? The answer, as one evaluator
of the research put it, was “an almost unbroken rise, period after period, in aver-
age hourly and total weekly, productivity.”31 Physical fatigue appeared to have
very little effect on output. What else could be going on? To find out, the research-
ers turned to the interviews with the women themselves and to the log of their
activities.
It appeared that changes in the workers’ interrelationships and their attitudes
toward the company had accompanied rises in productivity. Based on quotes
from the women, Mayo and his colleagues saw that the workers enjoyed the
increased freedom they had in the separate room, they felt pleased to be con-
sulted about various aspects of the study, and they were aware that other workers
were envious of their special position. In addition, they seemed to socialize more
with one another—both at work and outside the factory. The psychological and
social climate of the test room was markedly different from the factory floor, and
it was this climate, rather than the experimentally manipulated conditions, that
seemed to account for their productivity.
However, to test the possibility that wage incentives might have also affected
these results (since they had not been systematically separated from the other
factors), a second series of experiments was conducted involving a different set
of workers. Instead of being taken out of their regular work environment, they
were stationed next to each other, and were aware that their pay would be based
on the productivity of this small group, rather than the whole department. When
only wages were manipulated, but no other special treatment was given, produc-
tivity did go up, although it remained below the level that had been accomplished
in the original experiment. The researchers concluded that wage incentives
alone could not fully account for increases in productivity.
With a final experiment, researchers attempted to isolate the effects of rest
periods from wage incentives by recruiting a group of workers who were already
on individual piece-rate systems and manipulating only rest periods. The results
were somewhat confusing. After an initial increase in productivity, the group
became less productive as the rest periods became more frequent. Mayo and his
colleagues emerged from this set of experiments puzzled by the results, but con-
cluded overall that neither rest periods nor wage incentives were systematically
related to productivity. Were the increases purely the effect of a different style of
supervision in the test room? Or was it the changes in the total social situation
in which the women worked? In the absence of any firm answers, the researchers
decided they needed to find out more about employees’ attitudes and interests.
About halfway through the RATR experiment, and independently of it, an
interviewing program with employees had been implemented at Hawthorne to
provide material for training purposes. The interviews explored eighty different
topics, from opinions about the cafeteria to feelings about advancement oppor-
tunities in the company. Mayo and his colleagues thought the information could
provide valuable insight about worker attitudes and values, but in reviewing the
interviews they concluded that a more open-ended and less structured interview-
ing approach might yield more meaningful data. This nondirective, nonauthori-
tarian interviewing style included listening in a friendly and interested manner,
and refraining from giving advice or asserting authority. The final third stage
of the Hawthorne studies drew on some of the insights from these interviews to
investigate the group dynamics of workers involved in the same task in a shared
environment.
This study, the Bank Wiring Observation Room experiment, took place over
five months. During this time fourteen men were brought together and observed
as they wired and soldered banks of terminals. Since the group dynamic and its
effect on productivity was of interest to the researchers, no experimental changes
were made to the working conditions over this period. Reduced amounts of work
due to the Great Depression of the early 1930s, however, did result in dramati-
cally shorter working hours over the course of the study, and it was clear the men
were worried about keeping their jobs.
The main finding from this study was that the men developed a strong sense
of group solidarity around the amount of work to be accomplished in any given
day. There were intense social pressures to maintain this level rather than exceed
it, despite potential financial rewards for higher productivity. The study was dis-
continued when there was not enough work to sustain employment. As of 1932,
the Hawthorne studies were officially over. But the “Hawthorne hysteria,” as one
observer referred to it, was just about to begin.
Interpretations and Legacy

The meaning, significance, and even scientific legitimacy of the Hawthorne
studies have been vigorously debated ever since Mayo’s death in the late 1940s.
However, textbooks have been fairly consistent in downplaying the details of the
experiments and asserting that the studies at Hawthorne conclusively demon-
strated the importance of the social situation over physical and economic condi-
tions in explaining productivity in the workplace. This “proof” of the importance
of the human element over material conditions is often cited as the insight that
inspired the human relations movement. The Hawthorne studies are notorious
because it is not at all clear that the results completely supported the conclusions
that Mayo, and others, drew from them.
Critics have cited the inconsistencies among the studies and the fact that wage
incentives clearly did have an impact on productivity as evidence that Mayo and
his Harvard colleagues were interested in downplaying this finding and empha-
sizing psychological and social factors. Other critics have claimed that Mayo’s
view of worker behavior as essentially irrational, and of workers themselves as
easily manipulated, influenced his conclusions. If workers could be coddled by
intelligent supervisors to believe management cared about them, all other fac-
tors could be ignored. Some of Mayo’s previous writings appear to support this
criticism; Mayo clearly did not favor labor unions. But neither was he a supporter
of a blind allegiance to management. The charge of a pro-management bias has

been refuted by those who point out that the research team did not present the
working conditions at Hawthorne as particularly enlightened, and in fact pre-
sented a rather negative portrait of the company overall. As one historian put
it, “the consistent portrayal of the Hawthorne Works as a thoroughly unpleasant
workplace hardly suggests a pro-management whitewash.”32
Other critics have delved into the records of the first RATR experiment and
discovered that social relationships in the test room were definitely not conflict-
free. In fact, two of the original six workers were dismissed from the study when
they apparently failed to conform to the demands of the observer-supervisor.33
They were replaced by at least one worker whose extremely high level of output
may have encouraged the other workers in the group to improve their perfor-
mance. If the original members had stayed, would productivity have increased
consistently?
In the Bank Wiring Observation Room experiment, the apparent “unwilling-
ness” of the workers to increase their output because of group solidarity has also
been noted by those who perceive a condescending attitude in the researchers’
portrayal of worker behavior. The researchers reported that workers did not seem
to understand the piece-rate system, so their actions were not based on a ratio-
nal evaluation of their work or economic situation. In fact, comments from the
workers themselves indicate that they were very aware that increased individual
productivity might mean the layoffs of their fellow employees, especially as the
employment situation at Hawthorne worsened. Given these data, group solidar-
ity reflected a true concern for their fellow workers, not an irrational appraisal of
the incentive system.
Out of all this confusion, one thing is clear. No matter what actually happened
at Hawthorne, the field of human relations in the workplace did take off. Just a
few years after the conclusion of the studies, a system of personnel counseling
was instituted at Hawthorne that used many of the principles Mayo and his team
had developed. The method of nondirective, nonauthoritarian interviewing
was used extensively, as were other psychological techniques, including group
work. A few years later, the influential American psychologist Carl Rogers noted
the similarities between his client-centered approach to psychotherapy (see
Chapter 16) and the interviewing techniques developed at Hawthorne.34
The Hawthorne studies convinced many that the subjectivity of the workers
and their interpersonal relationships—what one scholar has called the “emotional
life of the factory”— could not be ignored.35 Referred to as the psychologiza-
tion of work, or the interpretation of work in psychological terms, it was part of
the increasing tendency to see almost every aspect of life from a psychological
perspective. Part of this process was the development and

spread of clinical psychology.
HOLLINGWORTH: CLINICIAN, FEMINIST,

PROFESSIONALIZER
To many contemporary students of psychology, the field
of clinical psychology seems both familiar and well estab-
lished. When one thinks of a psychologist, the image that
most often comes to mind is a mental health practitioner—
often a therapist. But it was not until after World War II
that the profession of clinical psychology became formally
organized along the lines that seem so familiar today (see
Chapter 16). Only then did it become more common for
clinical psychologists to engage in psychotherapy, for exam-
ple. The original clinical psychologists were mental testers,
and testing was the focus of the field through the first half
of the twentieth century. At that time, psychologists were
using mental tests in a number of applied settings, including
Figure 15.9 Leta Stetter Hollingworth
schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. Leta Stetter Hollingworth (1886–1939)
(1886–1939; Figure 15.9) was one of them.
Hollingworth earned her master’s degree at Columbia Teachers College in 1913.
She continued her graduate studies while working at the New York City Clearing
House for Mental Defectives, where, like most of her clinical colleagues—many of
them also women—she administered mental tests. While psychology was initially
a scientific discipline, and women entered the field as scientists (see, for exam-
ple, the careers of Christine Ladd-Franklin, Chapter 5, and Mary Whiton Calkins,
Chapter 8), as application and testing spread, female students were often advised
to become testers, especially with children. This role was seen as compatible with
their natural aptitudes and interests. It also gave them career opportunities at a
time when academic positions were few in number and were usually given to men.
During her time at the Clearing House, Hollingworth administered the
recently translated Binet tests of intelligence to “mentally inferior” individuals so
that legal decisions could be made about their treatment and confinement in in-
stitutions. She then worked at New York’s Bellevue Hospital and was offered the
position of director of a laboratory to be established there, just as she was awarded
her Ph.D. She declined this offer and instead took a faculty position in educational
psychology at Columbia Teachers College, while continuing to do direct clini-
cal work until 1920. Unlike many of her female clinical colleagues, Hollingworth
did successfully enter the academy and stayed there for the rest of her career,
often using her clinical experiences to generate research questions. Her career
trajectory, however, was not a smooth one. Without her determined disposition,
keen intellect, supportive spouse, and the Coca-Cola Company, Hollingworth
might never have realized her professional ambitions.
Early Years
Born in a dugout house on the Nebraska frontier in 1886, Hollingworth was truly
of pioneering stock. Her father was a migrant farmer and preacher with an out-
going, boisterous personality. Her mother gave birth to three daughters, Leta
being the eldest. Interestingly, upon Leta’s birth, her mother, although no doubt
preoccupied with household and childrearing duties, bought a small, red, leather-
bound notebook in which she kept a diary of her firstborn’s experiences and
development over her first year of life. The account is written from the point of
view of the infant herself. Given that her mother died soon after Leta’s last sister
was born, when Leta was only about 3, the red notebook eventually became one
of her prized possessions.
After their mother’s death, the three Stetter daughters moved to their grand-
parents’ farm and attended a one-room schoolhouse. This relatively happy
period came to an end with the remarriage of their vagabond father, who, with his
new wife, reclaimed his daughters and moved the newly reunited family into his
house in Valentine, Nebraska. By all accounts, their stepmother was not a kind
person, and she prevented the girls’ beloved grandparents from visiting. When a
family servant left, their stepmother often made Leta and her sisters do hours of
chores before leaving for school in the morning. At this time, Leta began to refer
to her home life as the “fiery furnace,” and later remarked sarcastically in a letter,
“There’s no place like home—thank God.”36
Leta did well in high school and earned a reputation as a creative writer
and poet. After graduating at the age of 16, she enrolled at the University of
Nebraska in Lincoln. There, in addition to studying English literature, she met her
future husband, Harry Hollingworth. When Leta graduated in June 1906, she had
completed seventy-one credits in languages and literature and eleven credits in
psychology. She had also completed the University Teaching Course and was
qualified to teach in any of the public schools in the state of Nebraska, special-
izing in English and English literature. She had aspirations to become a profes-
sional writer. And she was engaged to Harry.
Becoming a Psychologist
In September of her graduating year, Leta Stetter moved to De Witt, Nebraska,
her fiancé Harry’s hometown, and took a position as assistant principal of the
high school. After a year there, she moved to a better position in a larger town
and spent a year and a half there before joining Harry in New York City, where he
had begun his doctoral studies in psychology at Columbia University. The couple
reunited in the city with the expectation that Leta would get a job as a teacher
while Harry finished his degree. They were married on New Year’s Eve, 1908.
Unfortunately, Leta soon ran into a rather large roadblock. In 1908 married
women were barred from teaching in New York public schools. With this pro-
fessional outlet closed to her, and her husband’s modest salary barely enough
to support them, Hollingworth found herself confined for several years to the
domestic realm—namely, the couple’s tiny Manhattan apartment. During these
years, she described her main activity as “staying at home eating a lone pork
chop.”37
In 1911 the fortunes of the young couple dramatically improved, thanks to an
unlikely source: the Coca-Cola Company. Harry Hollingworth (1880–1956) had
received his Ph.D. in 1909 and was working as an instructor at Columbia’s Barnard
College, but finances were still tight, and living in New York City was expensive.
The Coca-Cola Company had recently been charged with violating the Pure Food
and Drug Act because the levels of caffeine in their product were considered
harmful to health. In order to prepare the case to defend their product, company
lawyers were looking for a psychologist who would study the behavioral effects
of caffeine. When others turned the job down, the company approached Harry. In
need of income and confident that he could conduct an objective, unbiased inves-
tigation despite being paid by the company with a vested interest in the study’s
results, Harry accepted the contract. He asked Leta to direct the studies, since he
was working full-time at Barnard.
Over the course of two months, Harry and Leta designed and conducted
an intensive and elaborate series of experiments with ten male and six female
subjects chosen to be representative of the cola-drinking market. The experi-
ments took place in a six-room Manhattan apartment rented specifically for the
study. During the day, three experimental groups and one placebo-control group
undertook multiple series of tests under varying conditions to evaluate the
effects of caffeine on mental and motor abilities, as well as sleep. During the eve-
nings, after the subjects had gone home, the data were analyzed with the help of
several graduate students from Columbia. By the end of the study, over 64,000
individual measurements had been taken.38
The Hollingworths traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for the Coca-Cola
trial, where Harry used the results of their experiments to argue that the levels
of caffeine in the soft drink did not impair either mental or motor performance.
After several rounds of legal strategy and appeals, the company eventually
reduced the amount of caffeine by 50 percent, and the case was dropped.
However, the Hollingworth study was important for a number of reasons. First,
it was a pioneering study applying scientific psychology to an industrial or
business problem. Second, it was much more methodologically sophisticated
than most psychological studies at the time. Because of the use of blind and
double-blind procedures, neither the participants nor the researchers knew which
groups received caffeine, and at what level, and which didn’t. Finally, and perhaps
most important for the Hollingworths, it paid extremely well. As Leta remarked
in a letter to her cousin at the conclusion of the studies, “We did a big experiment
for the Coca-Cola company and made quite a ‘wad’ of money.”39 This money was
Leta’s ticket to a graduate education and Harry’s reluctant introduction to the
world of applied psychology.40
Despite a self-professed disinterest in applied work, Harry Hollingworth’s
career, or at least his reputation, came to be dominated by it. In 1913 he published
a collection of lectures he had delivered to the Advertising Men’s League of New
York City; the book was called Advertising and Selling: Principles of Appeal and
Response.41 Like his colleague Scott (discussed earlier), Hollingworth encoun-
tered great interest in psychology from the advertising industry. Also like Scott,
Hollingworth attempted to apply basic psychological principles of memory,
attention, suggestibility, and association to designing effective advertisements.
For Hollingworth, however, it seems that applying psychology to practical prob-
lems held more financial than intellectual appeal:
I became an applied psychologist in order to earn a living for myself and

for my wife, and in order for her to be able to undertake advanced graduate
training, for which she was just as eager as I had been.42
Pioneering the Psychology of Women

Leta Hollingworth enrolled in Columbia Teachers College in 1911 and began her
studies with E. L. Thorndike (see Chapter 8). Although Thorndike would later
be associated with an environmentalist stance on intellectual ability and male-
female differences, at the time Hollingworth encountered him he was still heavily
under the influence of his more traditional mentor, James McKeen Cattell (see
Chapter 5). Like many other scientists of the time, Cattell felt men and women
had inherently different intellectual capacities, and that men alone were capable
of the highest levels of achievement in any field. Both Thorndike and Cattell were
proponents of the variation hypothesis, a widely held belief that men were more
variable than women in both physical and psychological characteristics, and
therefore were more likely to occupy the lower and upper ends of the distribution
of any trait (see Chapter 6). According to this theory, women were confined to
mediocrity, whereas men drove the engines of natural selection and evolutionary
progress. Thorndike, although a proponent of this view, was also open to empiri-
cal data bearing on the issue. Hollingworth would soon supply it.
When she began her job as a clinical psychologist at the Clearing House for
Mental Defectives, she seized the opportunity to test the variation hypothesis.
She examined 1,000 cases of “mental defect” diagnosed during 1912 and 1913
and concluded that, in absolute terms, men did outnumber women. This fact
supported one aspect of the hypothesis: that men were more likely to occupy
the lower end of the distribution of mental ability, as evidenced by their higher
institutionalization rates. However, she noted an interesting bias in the data. As
age at the time of admission increased, the proportion of women to men ad-
mitted increased as well. Hollingworth interpreted this as evidence that while
developmentally disabled men might be detected early because of their inabil-
ity to meet social expectations for male achievement, women were more likely
to avoid institutionalization until later in life because their social roles allowed
them to remain in the home, caring for small children and doing menial tasks. A
few years later, the results of another study of institutional admissions, which she
conducted, confirmed the same interpretation.
Along with physician Helen Montague, Hollingworth did a separate study
examining variability in anatomical traits in a sample of 2,000 infants—1,000
males and 1,000 females—at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.
Although male babies were, on average, slightly larger than female babies in all
anatomical traits, there were no differences in variability between the genders.
In a 1914 article in which she reviewed the available evidence for the variation
hypothesis, Hollingworth concluded forcefully that one reason male achieve-
ment had historically outranked female achievement was that women’s lives
were consumed with childbearing, raising a family, and doing domestic tasks. As
she wrote:
Surely we should consider first the established, obvious, inescapable,

physical fact that women bear and rear the children, and that this has
always meant and still means that nearly 100 per cent of their energy is
expended in the performance and supervision of domestic and allied tasks,
a field where eminence is impossible [emphasis in original]. . . . Men of sci-
ence who discuss at all the matter of woman’s failure should thus seek the
cause of failure in the most obvious facts. . . . Otherwise their discussion is
futile scientifically.43
For her dissertation research, Hollingworth investigated another unfounded

assumption about women: that they became physically and mentally impaired
during their menstrual periods, a belief known as functional periodicity.
Although untested, this view was often invoked to claim women’s unsuitability
for certain types of work and responsibilities, such as voting. Scientists were just
as likely as nonscientists to hold this misperception. Hollingworth wrote:
[T]he tradition emanating from the mystic and romantic novelists, that
woman is a mysterious being, half hysteric, half angel, has found its way
into scientific writing. Through the centuries gone those who wrote were
men, and since the phenomenon of periodicity was foreign to them, they
not unnaturally seized upon it as a probable source of the alleged “mystery”
and “caprice” of womankind.44
Borrowing methodologically from her experience on the Coca-Cola proj-

ect, Hollingworth designed two separate studies. The first study compared the
performances of six women and two men on a series of mental and motor tasks
presented daily for four months. In the second study, she monitored a group of
seventeen women for thirty days to see if their performance on the same tasks
varied as a function of their menstrual cycles. Her data led her to an unambig-
uous conclusion: “Careful and exact measurement does not reveal a periodic
mental or motor inefficiency in normal women.”45
Hollingworth was awarded her Ph.D. in 1916. That year, she and co-author
Robert Lowie, a cultural anthropologist, published an article in Scientific Monthly
entitled “Science and Feminism.”46 Clearly expressing the relationship between
their scientific and feminist commitments, they pointed out that empirical data
were needed to justify feminist objectives. They wrote, “Feminism demands the
removal of restrictions placed on woman’s activity,” noting that opponents of
feminism justified these restrictions because of “the alleged unfitness of women
to undertake certain forms of activity.”47 Lowie and Hollingworth then reviewed
anthropological, anthropometric, and psychological research for any evidence
supporting the unsuitability of women for work on the basis of innate differences
in ability or intellect, and found none.
Hollingworth also reported her own and others’ research, which had revealed
absolutely no demonstrable differences in variability between the two genders.
She stated about the variation hypothesis, “The theory exists, but the evidence
does not.”48 Subsequently she took on the superstitions surrounding the func-
tional periodicity of women:
A long and patient search through this literature brings to light a veritable
mass of conflicting statements by men of science, misogynists, practitioners,
and general writers, as to the dire effects of periodicity on the mental and
physical life of women; but the search reveals scarcely a single fact.49
With this research, Hollingworth firmly established herself as a pioneer in

an area that would, by the 1970s, become formally known as the psychology of
women. The empirical investigation of sex differences (of all kinds) remains a
central focus of this field.
Professionalizer of Clinical Psychology

On the basis of her research training, Hollingworth was offered an academic post
in educational psychology at Columbia Teachers College, a job left vacant on the
death of Naomi Norsworthy, the first female Ph.D. at Columbia, who had secured
a faculty position there. As we have mentioned throughout this chapter, one of
the defining tensions of the early decades of applied psychology was resistance
to application within the academic ranks. Some academic psychologists looked
down on attempts by their colleagues to apply their science, arguing that the
theories were undeveloped and the techniques unsupported by empirical evi-
dence. As the number of psychologists doing applied work increased during the
first two decades of the twentieth century, they began to experience opposition
within their own discipline and from other fields, such as psychiatry. This opposi-
tion seemed to increase as the popularity of applied psychology itself grew.
Sensing competition from these nonmedically trained practitioners, psychi-
atrists began to turn a critical eye on clinical psychology, specifically the work
of those who were employed in the traditionally medically dominated settings
of hospitals and clinics, such as Hollingworth. The role of the clinical psycholo-
gist in those settings was becoming more familiar. Two notable examples were
Grace Fernald and Augusta Fox Bronner, both of whom worked at the Juvenile
Psychopathic Institute in Chicago, where they performed detailed assessments
of delinquent youths. Using the title “clinical psychologist,” these women were
also involved in research and test development. In a 1916 report by the New York
Psychiatric Society, the following judgment was handed down by a committee
investigating the activities of psychologists in clinical settings:
We recommend that the Society express its disapproval of psychologists

(or those who claim to be psychologists as a result of their ability to
apply any set of psychological tests) undertaking to pass judgment upon
the mental conditions of the sick, defective, or otherwise abnormal persons

when such findings involve questions of diagnosis, or affect the future care
and career of such persons.50
Under such attack by their psychiatric peers, applied psychologists responded

by forming, in 1917, their own association separate from the American Psycholog-
ical Association (APA) called the American Association of Clinical Psychologists
(AACP). Three main factors played a role in the founding of AACP. The first
factor involved the upsurge of testing jobs in the public school system during
the 1910s. Immigration, urbanization, and mandatory schooling legislation in
the United States had led to a public school system in which large numbers of
children of highly varying abilities were being thrown into classrooms together.
The services of testers were in demand to help categorize and place students into
appropriate programs according to level of ability. In addition, the profile of test-
ing was heightened in the period leading up to and following World War I, when
thousands of U.S. Army recruits were given psychological tests. As a result, test
development and administration was a growing industry.
In this rush toward testing, many unqualified individuals, lacking the appro-
priate academic background and training, were put in charge of assessing and
diagnosing mentally and educationally exceptional children throughout the
country. Concerned psychologists wanted to establish some control over the
qualifications and standards needed for professional work, and one of them was
J. E. Wallace Wallin (1876–1969). In a 1913 article in Science, Wallace attempted
to delineate the exact nature of clinical psychology, the aims of clinical work, the
kinds of cases clinical psychologists could handle, and how clinical psychology
was different from other closely related professions. He concluded with a state-
ment that reflected his colleagues’ concerns about appropriate credentialing:
Clinical work, both in psychology and medicine, requires clinical training.

The assumption that any psychologist or educationist is qualified to do suc-
cessful psycho-clinical work after learning how to administer a few mental
tests, is preposterous and fraught with the gravest consequences.51
The second factor motivating clinical psychologists to create their own organi-
zation had to do with their low professional status, both within their own profession
and in the view of physicians and psychiatrists, as noted above. By establishing
a professional organization and formal credentialing procedures, clinical psychol-
ogists sought to elevate their status above mere technicians and emulate more
established professions, such as medicine and engineering.
The third main factor in the founding of the AACP was that clinical psycholo-
gists did not feel their needs were being met by the APA, whose bylaws clearly in-
dicated the exclusive goal of the association: to advance psychology as a science.
At the 1917 APA meeting in Pittsburgh, a roundtable discussion about a new
organization was held, and the participants decided to form the AACP to define
and establish standards in the field of clinical psychology. Among them were
Wallin, who worked in the public school system with developmentally delayed
children, and the newly minted Ph.D. clinical psychologist, Hollingworth.
In 1918, as a member of the AACP, Hollingworth published her recommenda-
tions for a course of training for clinical psychologists. She suggested that the
APA compile a list of academic departments of psychology where appropriate
clinical training was being offered, and that these universities be recognized
as official training sites. She argued forcefully that the minimum requirement
for clinical practice should be a doctoral level degree, noting that the creation
of a master’s-level assistant psychologist position would not only represent
inadequate training, but would confuse the public and serve to undercut practi-
tioners who had earned a Ph.D. Hollingworth also recommended the formation
of a professional degree that would emphasize practical training, the doctor of
psychology.
Although not adopted at the time, these recommendations indicated that even
in this early period, many of the same professional issues that would challenge
clinical psychologists in the post–World War II period were already emerging
(see Chapter 16). In 1919 the AACP formally dissolved and became the Section
on Clinical Psychology of the APA. Members of the new section asked the APA
to consider issuing certificates to clinical psychologists as an early form of pro-
fessional credentialing. Though a few certificates (about twenty-five) were issued,
the effort was not successful and the certification program was dropped.
Hollingworth continued to conduct clinical work, becoming increasingly in-
terested not in diagnosing subnormal children but in identifying and helping
highly gifted children who were having educational and emotional difficulties.
She published two books on subnormal children in the early 1920s, but then
devoted much of the rest of her career to two major projects studying the abil-
ities and experiences of gifted children. In one of these projects she helped
design a curriculum to optimize learning and development that was geared
to the strengths and weaknesses of individual students. Her 1926 book Gifted
Children became a standard reference work in schools of education for many years.52
She also developed her interest in the exceptionally gifted child, defined as the
child who scores above 180 on IQ tests. Having completed a study of twelve such
children, she reported her results in 1942 in Children Above 180 IQ.53
The book, which is still widely read by educators, was published posthumously
by Harry Hollingworth. Three years earlier, after a long struggle with cancer that
she managed to conceal even from her beloved husband, Leta Hollingworth died
at the age of 53. Months before, the couple had traveled back to their native state
to receive honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska. At that otherwise
happy time, Leta had urged Harry, who was still unaware of her illness, to help
her pick out their final resting place.
FROM MARGIN TO CENTER: APPLICATION TAKES HOLD

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the pioneers of applied psychology
often had to contend with the attitude that their efforts would damage the scien-
tific respectability of their discipline. Today’s industrial, school, consulting, and
clinical psychologists have no such concerns; they are fully integrated into the
profession and have, in fact, come to dominate it. When members of the public
think of a psychologist, they most likely think of someone who does applied work
rather than research. We have shown how important World War I was for the
development and image of applied psychology, especially in the United States.
Another major turning point was World War II. The war provided increased
demand for the expertise of applied psychologists in a wide range of tasks, includ-
ing personnel selection for both the army and the navy, the testing of thousands of
soldiers for their capacities for specialized jobs, such as intelligence work, and the
design of instrumentation for military aircraft and vehicles.54 Perhaps most signifi-
cantly, World War II pushed psychologists in greater numbers into providing new
clinical services, like psychotherapy, a topic we discuss more fully in Chapter 16.
Münsterberg, Scott, Gilbreth, Bregman, Bills, Mayo and many other pioneers
of what is now known as industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology may never
have guessed how diverse their field would become. Today, I/O psychologists
can be found from the witness stand to the workplace, from the factory to the
boardroom, and almost everywhere in between. Just as early applied psychol-
ogists responded to the need for the new experimental psychology to prove its
practical worth, today’s applied psychologists continue to expand their profes-
sional involvement in response to the needs of an ever-changing population
in an ever-changing marketplace. If the history of applied psychology reveals
anything, it is that psychologists are highly effective in devising services that
meet the demands and needs of the market.
One of these demands in the period following World War II, as Hollingworth’s
early efforts predicted, was for more practitioners who could provide clinical ser-
vices. Psychologists were ready to expand their expertise into this domain, but
their efforts to do so—although ultimately successful—would be challenged.
Chapter Review 609
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
Soon after the new psychology was established as an ex- and Gilbreth were early pioneers of industrial/organiza-
perimental discipline, psychologists turned their attention tional psychology, among their many accomplishments.
to practical applications. Münsterberg, although initially Mayo and his work on the controversial Hawthorne
known for his strong experimental laboratory background, studies in the late 1920s and early 1930s expanded the
eventually became one of the first prominent advocates of focus of I/O psychology to aspects of the social and
applying psychology to business and industry; this was re- interpersonal environment that would affect worker sat-
ferred to broadly as psychotechnics. He published popular isfaction and productivity. Findings from these studies
books on the use of psychology in the courtroom, the psy- generated a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne effect,
chology of education, and business psychology. He also a change in participants’ performance from knowing they
devised tests of vocational skills to help companies select are part of a study. Mayo and his colleagues argued that
workers for various jobs, an area that became known as the special treatment their experimental group received
personnel selection. Scott, a colleague of Münsterberg’s, may have been responsible for their increased productivity
conducted a large-scale personnel selection exercise aside from economic and physical factors, such as wage
with army recruits during World War I, and also applied incentives and rest periods. This finding, although heavily
psychological principles to advertising. Marston, one of disputed by subsequent critics, directed attention to the
Münsterberg’s students, became a prominent popularizer psychology and sociology of the workplace, resulting in
of applied psychology between the wars, promoting his the human relations movement in business and industry.
own version of the lie detector and creating the comic One of the primary roles of early applied psychologists
book superheroine Wonder Woman. was to administer psychological tests in a variety of set-
Lillian Gilbreth, who received one of the earliest doctor- tings, including hospitals and clinics. Hollingworth began
ate degrees in applied psychology, began her career col- her career doing this work, but eventually held an academic
laborating with her husband Frank, a self-trained engineer. position that allowed her to do research as well. She con-
Initially influenced by the principles of scientific manage- ducted pioneering research on exceptional children at both
ment devised and promoted by Taylor, the Gilbreths soon ends of the ability spectrum, and became well known for
developed their own distinctive approach to efficiency in her studies of gifted children. Hollingworth was also an early
the workplace. They conducted elaborate motion studies contributor to the debates on the appropriate training and
of individual tasks to determine the “one best way” to do professional credentialing of clinical psychologists. Her rec-
a job efficiently and easily for the worker. After her hus- ommendations, although not taken up at the time, foreshad-
band’s death, Gilbreth expanded her expertise to design- owed many of the issues concerning the professionalization
ing appliances and kitchens that would minimize strain of clinical psychology that would resurface after World War II.
on the homemaker, and she made recommendations to Hollingworth’s empirical research on the psychology of
employers to help them create more enjoyable and pro- women also anticipated the formal establishment of this
ductive workplaces for their employees. Both Münsterberg important field, which did not occur until the 1970s.
Key Pioneers
Hugo Münsterberg, p. 574 Lillian Moller Marion Almira Bills, p. 589
Frederick Winslow Gilbreth, p. 584 Elton Mayo, p. 591
Taylor, p. 578 Frank Bunker Leta Stetter
Walter Dill Scott, p. 581 Gilbreth, p. 585 Hollingworth, p. 599
William Moulton Elsie Oschrin Harry Hollingworth, p. 601
Marston, p. 583 Bregman, p. 589 J. E. Wallace Wallin, p. 606
Key Terms
psychotechnics, p. 578 motion studies, p. 587
scientific management, p. 578 therbligs, p. 587
soldiering, p. 579 Hawthorne studies, p. 591
differential piece-rate system, p. 579 Hawthorne effect, p. 591
de-skilling, p. 579 human relations movement, p. 591
time study, p. 579 psychologization, p. 598
personnel selection, p. 580 variation hypothesis, p. 602
industrial/organizational (I/O) functional periodicity, p. 604
psychology, p. 581

1. Discuss the ways in which each pioneer in this chapter practiced his or her own form of
applied psychology. What assumptions about human nature informed their practices?
2. Although women now outnumber men in most areas of applied psychology, Lillian
Gilbreth and Leta Hollingworth both experienced certain professional disadvantages
because of their gender. Describe some of these disadvantages and the ways these two
women overcame them.
3. The Hawthorne effect has achieved practically mythic status in psychology, even though
the actual Hawthorne studies themselves were quite complex and the findings some-
what unclear. Can you think of any other studies in psychology that have also become
mythic? What might be some of the reasons?
4. Describe the tension between basic experimental and applied research in psychology.
What do you see as the relationship between the two? Which comes first, the research
or the practical problem?
5. Many historians of applied psychology observe that psychologists have been much
more likely to work on problems on behalf of managers and companies than on behalf
of workers. Examine this claim using material from the chapter. Do you think this is a fair
claim? Why or why not?
Suggested Resources
An overview of the development of applied psychology, from school to counseling, to clin-
ical, to industrial/organizational, is David B. Baker and Ludy T. Benjamin, From Séance to
Science: A History of the Profession of Psychology in America, 2nd ed. (Akron, OH:
Chapter Review 611
University of Akron Press, 2014). For a history of the use of social science in industry, with an
emphasis on psychology’s social management role, see Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1960). A history of the profession of psychol-
ogy in America, focusing on mid-century and immediate post–World War II developments,
appears in Donald Napoli, Architects of Adjustment (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press,
1981). The volume edited by Laura L. Koppes, Historical Perspectives in Industrial and Organi-
zational Psychology (Mahwah, NJ, and London: Erlbaum, 2007) contains numerous chapters
on the many branches of this complex field.
Matthew Hale’s biography of Münsterberg, Human Science and the Social Order
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980) places his work within the wider devel-
opments in applied psychology that characterized the early twentieth century. For a
detailed treatment of Münsterberg’s psychotechnical vision as it was implemented in var-
ious collaborations, including one with Paramount Pictures, see Jeremy Blatter, “Screen-
ing the Psychological Laboratory: Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotechnics, and the Cinema,
1892–1916,” Science in Context 28 (2015): 53–76. For more on Marston and the history
of the lie detector, see David Lykken, A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie
Detector (New York: Plenum, 1998). Gilbreth’s life and work are captured in a number
of sources. Her autobiography, written in 1941, is entitled As I Remember (Norcross, GA:
Engineering and Management Press, 1998). She is also the subject of a full-length bio
graphy, Jane Lancaster’s Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth—A Life Beyond “Cheaper by
the Dozen” (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004). For further information about
early women pioneers of I/O psychology, see Laura Koppes, “American Female Pioneers
of Industrial and Organizational Psychology During the Early Years,” Journal of Applied
Psychology 82 (1997): 500–515.
A sensitive biography of Mayo is by Richard C. S. Trahair, The Humanist Temper: The Life
and Work of Elton Mayo (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984). The Hawthorne
studies get a comprehensive treatment in Richard Gillespie’s Manufacturing Knowledge: A
History of the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
For the argument that the Hawthorne studies systematically reflected the researchers’ class
bias and pro-management orientation, see Dana Bramel and Ronald Friend, “Hawthorne,
the Myth of the Docile Worker, and Class Bias in Psychology,” American Psychologist 36
(1981): 867–878. For a response to their argument, see Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, “Shedding
Light on the Hawthorne Studies,” Journal of Occupational Behavior 6 (1985): 111–130.
Hollingworth’s life is recounted by her husband in Leta Stetter Hollingworth: A
Biography (Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, 1990; original edition, University of
Nebraska Press, 1943). Her distinguished contributions to the psychology of gifted children
are featured in Ann G. Klein, A Forgotten Voice: A Biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth
(Scottsdale, AZ: Great Potential Press, 2002). Her contributions to the psychology of
women are analyzed by Stephanie Shields in “Ms. Pilgrim’s Progress: The Contributions of
Leta Stetter Hollingworth to the Psychology of Women,” American Psychologist 30 (1975):
852–857. Ludy T. Benjamin has amended and reprinted an autobiographical statement by
Harry Hollingworth in his chapter, “Harry Hollingworth: Portrait of a Generalist,” in Portraits
of Pioneers in Psychology, vol. 2, eds. Gregory A. Kimble, C. Alan Boneau, and Michael
Wertheimer (Washington, DC: APA, 1996). The full version, edited by Ludy T. Benjamin and
Lizette Royer Barton, appears as From Coco-Cola to Chewing Gum: The Applied Psychol-
ogy of Harry Hollingworth (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2012).
CHAPTER 16
The Art and Science of
Clinical Psychology
Harrower’s Journey
Shakow and the Scientist-Practitioner Model
Making Psychotherapy Scientific
Beck and the Development of Cognitive Therapy
Psychotherapy Research Revisited: Treating Depression
Hathaway and the MMPI
Contemporary Issues and Debates
I n 1955, Paul Meehl, a rising star from the University of Minnesota’s psychol-
ogy department, stepped up to the podium at a meeting of the Midwestern
Psychological Association to deliver his presidential address. After his talk,
which he felt was well received by both clinicians and nonclinicians in the
audience, he was invited by a prominent experimental psychologist to continue
the conversation with a small group. Over drinks, his experimentalist peers
congratulated him on giving the clinicians “a good beating”—a reaction he
found somewhat unsettling. He later recalled:
My Midwestern Presidential Address led to an episode which puzzled and

troubled me at the time as reflecting a serious problem in the profession.
613
614 16 | The Art and Science of Clinical Psychology
Though aware of the tension between clinical practitioners and academic

experimental psychologists, I was surprised by its emotional intensity and
was not skillful at defusing it.1
Meehl had every right to be puzzled. Evidently, on the basis of his impres-
sive credentials as a laboratory researcher and his rigorous scientific training at
Minnesota, his colleagues had misinterpreted his talk’s message. A clinician as
well as a scientist, Meehl had based his address on his recently published book,
Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the
Evidence.2 In this book he did argue for the general superiority of empirical data
over clinical judgment in making predictions about behavior. As the basis for
psychological diagnosis and treatment planning, statistical data seemed to have
more predictive value than a therapist’s accumulated wisdom. However, he also
pointed out that there were certain kinds of clinical data, such as the material
uncovered during dream analysis, that could be very useful but were hard to
study empirically. Meehl had spent many hours on the couch of a Vienna-trained
analyst himself and was a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist.
When he revealed his more moderate position with his drinking companions,
the previously jovial spirit of the discussion cooled. Here is how Meehl described it:
A well-known experimental psychologist became suddenly hostile. He

glared at me and said, “Now, come on, Meehl, how could anybody like you,
with your scientific training at Minnesota, running rats and knowing math,
and giving a bang-up talk like you just gave, how could you think there is
anything to that Freudian dream shit?”3
This comment vividly conveys the tension between the laboratory and the clinic
that was characteristic of the time, and to which we turn our attention in this chapter.
Although the quoted experimentalist clearly looked down on “that Freudian
dream shit” (we will return to Meehl and his story later), the 1950s has been
referred to as the Golden Age of psychoanalysis in the United States.4 Its popu-
larity was strengthened by the success of psychoanalytic techniques in treating
unprecedented numbers of psychiatric cases following World War II, and the
enthusiasm for psychoanalytic ideas in the general population. The demand for
professionals who could treat mental disorders created a significant opening for
psychologists, and it was during this time that clinical psychology, as the aca-
demic discipline and profession we recognize today, took shape.
Certain aspects of the practice of clinical psychology had already been estab-
lished, but in different forms. As we know from Chapter 15, Leta Hollingworth, a
member of the American Association of Clinical Psychologists, had suggested

instituting a doctorate in psychology for those who wanted to specialize in
testing and other kinds of application. Even earlier, in 1896, University of
Pennsylvania psychologist Lightner Witmer had been the first to physically and
methodologically bridge the laboratory and the clinic. In a physical space he
called the Psychological Clinic, children with educational problems, including
behavioral and mental difficulties, were assessed using an approach he referred
to as the clinical method, involving a medical exam and extensive psychologi-
cal testing. Testing encompassed various cognitive tasks, some of which were
imported directly from the lab. Results led to a detailed plan for each child, specif-
ically developed to address his or her particular challenges. Believing in a close
relationship between research and application, Witmer was clear about his status
as an applied psychologist. Others, as we saw in the last chapter, were not as
enthusiastic.
Although the clinical method and the title “clinical psychologist” had been
recognized very early in the twentieth century, the field we now call clinical
psychology was, in several ways, quite different from its predecessors. It was
influenced, in part, by a specific set of factors in the immediate postwar context.
For example, what was the relationship between experimental and clinical psy-
chology? How should clinical psychologists be trained and how would they be
different from other mental health professionals, such as psychiatrists? Given
the demand for psychotherapy, how could psychology reconcile its identity as
a scientific discipline with its role as a provider of therapy—a practice that was
ill-defined and, at that time, largely unsupported by scientific research? Finally,
were clinical activities, like assessment and psychotherapy, actually susceptible
to scientific scrutiny, or were they more art than science?
HARROWER’S JOURNEY
Following World War II, there was a serious shortage of professionals who were
trained to treat mental health problems, especially difficulties resulting from the
trauma of combat. Psychologists had been increasingly called upon to deliver
therapy during the war, when psychiatrists could not meet the demand to restore
soldiers to mental health so they could resume their duties. When the war ended,
psychologists were poised to expand their services beyond testing and compete
with psychiatrists in the psychotherapy marketplace. In the United States, there
was major federal funding for new training programs in clinical psychology to
help produce more professionals to meet the mental health needs of the nation.
However, there was no agreed-upon definition of clinical psychology and no
consensus about how clinical psychologists should be trained. The tension
between the laboratory and the clinic, and the nature of their
relationship, had yet to be resolved.
In 1947, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation sponsored a small meet-
ing of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers to discuss
the functions of the clinical psychologist and appropriate train-
ing. Participating in the meeting was Molly Harrower (1906–1999;
Figure 16.1). A psychological consultant at the U.S. Depart-
ment of State, Harrower had begun a parallel career as a clinical
psychologist in private practice a couple of years earlier in New
York City. Up to that time, private practice had been the strong-
hold of psychiatrists who generally delivered psychoanalysis to
wealthy clients. Harrower was possibly the first psychologist in
private practice in New York.
In her published contribution to the Macy conference proceed-
ings, Harrower wrote about the state of clinical psychology at the time:
[W]e have in the field a relatively small group of individuals,

Figure 16.1 Molly Harrower (1906–1999).
grounded in theory and experimental techniques, who have
exposed themselves to dynamic psychiatry, immersed themselves in some
medical atmosphere, and faced the question of therapy through personal
analysis, but who have achieved these indispensables by diverse methods
and often with great difficulties.5
Harrower’s small group included psychologists like Meehl. She had also
provided a perfect description of her own career path. Having begun as an
experimentalist, she found her way into the world of clinical psychology through
a diverse and rich set of experiences and continued to conduct research as she
saw patients. The issues she encountered moving between the lab and the therapy
office symbolized the problems facing the emerging profession at mid-century.
From Experimentalist to Clinician

Harrower arrived at Smith College in Massachusetts in the late 1920s to study
with Koffka and his group of Gestalt psychologists (see Chapter 4). She had stud-
ied psychology at Bedford College, University of London, where she was mentored
by Beatrice Edgell, the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in experimental psychol-
ogy in Great Britain. Edgell was a positive influence and Harrower became inter-
ested in pursuing graduate work in the field. At Smith, she learned the techniques
of experimental psychology to test Gestalt principles and conducted research on
visual perception. Earning her doctorate in experimental psychology in 1934, she
then taught at the New Jersey College for Women with “the personal blessings of
Koffka, Köhler, and Wertheimer to go forth and teach the gospel of experimental
psychology from the Gestalt point of view.”6
But then something happened. When a close friend underwent a drastic
surgery and emerged a changed person, Harrower’s interests took a turn:
At this moment the water-tight world of perception, color contrast, and

visual acuity collapsed, and there was born the need to seek a place—a
hospital perhaps—where a person, a patient, rather than a retina, could be
studied, and perhaps helped.7
She had the idea, unusual at the time, that she would like to study the psycholog-
ical effects of surgery.* Harrower applied for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship
to work with patients at the Montreal Neurological Institute in Canada. Her
application was accepted, and as a nonmedical professional she was encouraged
to become more familiar with the hospital environment by spending some time
with the Gestalt-oriented neurologist Kurt Goldstein (see Chapters 4 and 12)
at Montefiore Hospital in New York. With Goldstein at Montefiore she became
comfortable relating to patients in a medical environment and worked closely
with doctors and psychiatrists.
Following her six months with Goldstein, Harrower moved to Montreal and
began what would become a historic assignment working with acclaimed neuro-
surgeon Wilder Penfield. Recall from Chapter 3 that Penfield pioneered a technique
for treating severe epilepsy involving stimulation of the brains of fully conscious
patients and recording their responses. When he stimulated a spot that produced
the characteristic aura preceding a seizure, he removed that small portion of the
brain and successfully reduced the severity of the patient’s illness. Required to
observe the surgeries, Harrower painstakingly recorded the patients’ reactions. She
later recalled that the work was so exhausting that after her first nine-hour shift she
returned home to her apartment and fell asleep while her bath was running. Her
first encounter with her landlady was to apologize profusely for the flooding!
Rorschach Encounters
While at Montreal, Harrower also developed her interest and expertise in the
Rorschach projective technique, also known as the Rorschach inkblot test,
originated by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922). In 1921
*This was unusual because few people believed surgery had psychological effects. The main focus
was on the physical rehabilitation of patients following a surgical procedure.
he outlined the technique in his book Psychodiagnostics.8

Rorschach was primarily interested in the effects of mental
states on perception, which he defined as being made up
of three processes: sensation, memory, and association. To
study these processes, he devised a method of showing
patients a series of unstructured stimuli—symmetrical
inkblots, such as the one in Figure 16.2. Upon presenting
each inkblot, the tester would ask “What might this be?”
Patients were free to give any responses they would like.
Figure 16.2 An inkblot from the Rorschach This was the response phase of the technique. Of particular
projective technique. interest to Rorschach was not the content of his patients’
responses (although this was scored and interpreted) but
their perceptual processes and how these were related to their mental states or
neurological conditions. How many responses did they give to each inkblot, and
with what delay in reaction time? Did they use only the form or shape of the blot
to describe their responses, or did they also use color, shading, or texture, and
did they see movement? Did they respond to the inkblot as a whole, giving a re-
sponse that encompassed the entire blot, or did they focus in on parts or details?
After all responses were recorded, the tester would ask, for each response,
“What made it look like that to you?” During this inquiry phase of the technique,
the tester would uncover which of the determinants (color, form, shading,
texture, or movement) patients had used in formulating their responses. In
his original study, Rorschach administered a series of ten inkblots to over
400 people. In his sample were people classified as “normal” as well as those
with “psychopathic personality,” schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy,
dementia, and several other conditions. He then presented the scoring methods
and analysis of the Rorschach responses of this group, as well as word-for-word
reproductions of all the responses and determinants used by a number of his
patients.
At the end of Psychodiagnostics, Rorschach considered the possibility that the
technique could be used for diagnostic purposes, even though, despite the title
of his book, that had not been his original aim. In a passage that may seem odd
given subsequent criticisms of the test as more art than science, Rorschach wrote:
It might be said that the tests would reduce the difficult art of diagnosis
to a mechanical [technique] and that, eventually, every laboratory diener*
could produce psychograms by following certain instructions just as he
*An old-fashioned word for laboratory worker or technician.

stains tubercle bacilli. Such an objection would be untenable. To be able to

draw conclusions from the scoring of so large a number of factors requires
a great deal of practice in psychological reasoning and a great deal of expe-
rience with the test.9
In other words, Rorschach was worried that his test and scoring method would
appear too mechanical, thereby undermining the role of clinical knowledge and
experience in the “art of diagnosis.” As we shall see, objections to the Rorschach
projective technique actually took quite a different form, with critics claiming
that it relied too heavily on clinical experience and intuition and had not been
rigorously validated. One well-known psychologist claimed in 1948 that those
who gave the Rorschach test were doing “tricks.”10
As it happened, Rorschach would not live to hear this objection; he died
suddenly in 1922 of a ruptured appendix. The Rorschach technique was taken up
by subsequent generations of practitioners and changed to suit their purposes.
An increasing emphasis was placed by some on the projective hypothesis, the
idea that in the absence of any obvious structure, responses to the inkblots could
be read as representations of the patient’s unconscious conflicts and motivations.
This led to a focus on content interpretation, emphasizing the substance of the
responses rather than the features of the blot used to formulate them.
Researching the Rorschach

During her time at Montefiore Hospital, Harrower had met the German psychol-
ogist Bruno Klopfer, a well-known interpreter of the Rorschach projective tech-
nique. Now, at Montreal, she became quite interested in it and decided to combine
this interest with her desire to investigate the psychological effects of surgery.
Using the Rorschach technique, she began some studies to try and detect person-
ality changes in patients who had undergone brain surgery for cerebral tumors
and epilepsy. She noted that there were differences of opinion about whether the
removal of brain tissue inevitably caused psychological changes. Many patients
who had such surgery appeared unchanged, while others emerged considerably
altered. In cases where the patients seemed post-surgically intact in terms of
intelligence and general psychological functioning, would the Rorschach be
able to pick up subtle personality changes, if they existed? Harrower was also
interested in finding out whether the method was reliable enough to detect
personality changes due to physical causes in the absence of any other clinical
information. Could the Rorschach technique detect the presence of brain tumors?
After detailed examination of numerous test protocols, she concluded that the
Rorschach results of patients with tumors did, in fact, differ from those of patients
without tumors. In general, the responses of tumor-afflicted patients were more

limited in terms of the number and kinds of determinants they used. For example,
while someone without tumors might give responses that used form, shading,
and color, patients with tumors might consistently report using only the form or
shape of the inkblot to describe their response. In terms of personality function-
ing, patients with tumors appeared to cope with their impairment by simplifying
their approach to the environment and clinging to strategies that seemed to work
for them. As Harrower put it, this resulted in a
flattening out of psychic potentialities, . . . [and a] diminishing of the indi-

vidual aspects of the person. . . . It is as if the patient had lost interest in all
the finer details of the business of living and held only to a few necessary
guideposts of normality.11
Harrower’s Montreal years were marked by another important innovation. In

response to a challenge by the Canadian National Research Council to adapt the
Rorschach projective technique for use in Canada’s war effort, Harrower devel-
oped a highly influential group administration approach. The Canadian govern-
ment was interested in using the inkblot test as a screening tool for soldiers who
might be psychologically unfit for combat, and to assess the recovery of those
who had been rehabilitated for a return to the front. Clearly, given the numbers
involved, individual administration of the test was impossible. Harrower therefore
devised a procedure in which the ten inkblots were projected onto a large screen,
and the subjects wrote their responses in a booklet. She was able to demonstrate
that the changes in conditions did not affect the validity of the test. In addition, it
was possible to collect a very large number of protocols in a short period of time
for research purposes. For a while, all entering freshmen to the McGill University
medical school were required to participate in a group Rorschach test!
Becoming “Properly Clinical”

After several productive years in Montreal, Harrower returned to the United
States, where she spent the remainder of the war traveling around the country
administering and teaching the large-scale Rorschach projective technique. By
the end of the war in 1945, Harrower began to see private patients for psycho-
logical evaluation and psychotherapy in New York City. In 1947, she participated
in the Macy conference described above on the function and training of clinical
psychologists. At this conference, Harrower considered the stages of personal
and professional evolution a psychologist would have to pass through to be
considered “properly clinical.”12
Psychologists, she explained, would have to openly acknowledge that

their academic training had not prepared them to practice psychotherapy. To
become qualified as clinicians, they would have to undertake personal analysis
and encourage their trainees to do so as well. The issue of how to train psychol-
ogists in psychotherapy and the role of personal therapy in this training would
become controversial. She also noted that to become properly clinical, psycholo-
gists would have to stop measuring the value of their work only in relation to its
perceived worth by psychiatrists, and not be afraid to openly disagree with them.
With this recommendation Harrower anticipated the professional tensions
between psychologists and psychiatrists that we’ll discuss further below. In
defining the nature of the clinical psychologist’s expertise, Harrower highlighted
that diagnosing mental disorders was only one narrow function. She pointed
out that psychologists should be able to provide a total picture of the person,
including strengths and resources as well as deficits. This function would set
psychologists apart from psychiatrists.
Finally, Harrower remarked that to become properly clinical, psychologists
would have to relax their “experimental rigidity” and adopt a more flexible and
receptive approach to gathering clinical data and providing
treatment. In her words, a clinical psychologist would need
to be “willing to replace the demanding quantitative deity
who he has worked for as an experimenter and at whose feet
he has poured endless libations of statistics, by the humble,
qualitative hunch.”13 Did clinical psychology involve science
or hunches—or both?
SHAKOW AND THE

SCIENTIST-PRACTITIONER MODEL
The conference where Harrower presented her views on
the evolution of a clinical psychologist was one of several
meetings at which psychologists and others discussed the
emerging identity and appropriate credentialing of this new
professional. The need for more mental health practitioners,
including clinical psychologists, was a national concern in the
U. S., as we have noted, and this need led to the passage of the
National Mental Health Act in 1946. Funds would be directed
toward increased training efforts in four professions: psychia-
try, psychology, psychiatric social work, and psychiatric nurs-
ing. In psychology, David Shakow (1901–1981; Figure 16.3)
was chosen to participate in the Committee on Training Figure 16.3 David Shakow (1901–1981).
established by the Act and emerged as a key leader in designing a standardized

clinical psychology graduate program.
Shakow, like Harrower, had been thoroughly trained in research, conducting
experimental studies of attention in schizophrenia patients, while working as
the chief psychologist and director of psychological research at Worcester State
Hospital in Massachusetts. There, he developed a clinical psychology training
program that served as a model for other institutions and laid the groundwork
for his subsequent views. Unlike Harrower, Shakow actually began his career in a
medical environment; his term at Worcester was undertaken for financial reasons
before he had actually earned a Ph.D. He became involved in the medical culture
over the eighteen years he worked there. When he was awarded his doctorate
from Harvard in 1942 for his experimental studies of schizophrenia, Shakow was
ready to take on other challenges.
He moved to Chicago and became a professor of psychiatry at the University
of Illinois Medical School, as well as a psychology professor at the University of
Chicago. Over the next several years Shakow led efforts to develop a national
training model for clinical psychology. That experience marked him as the most
influential architect of postwar clinical psychology in the United States. He also
began a fascinating—though largely unsuccessful—attempt to study psychoan-
alytic therapy objectively. Both of these endeavors reveal the extent to which
Shakow, like Harrower, embodied both the scientist and the practitioner in his
vision of clinical psychology.
Training and Credentialing

As chair of the clinical psychology subcommittee of the Committee on Training
in the late 1940s, Shakow faced a daunting task. Clinical psychology remained an
ill-defined field. In addition, there was tension within the American Psychological
Association between “pure” experimentalists and their more applied colleagues
(see Chapter 15). The latter felt their needs were not being adequately met by
their national professional association.
Psychologists also encountered external opposition. Psychiatrists and other
medical personnel felt that the increasing range and variety of psychologists’
clinical activities were invading their professional territory and threatening their
authority. For example, providing psychotherapy, especially in private practice,
had long been the exclusive domain of psychoanalytically oriented and trained
psychiatrists, yet psychologists were becoming psychotherapists as well.
With these issues in mind, along with the federal mandate to figure out how
to train more clinical psychologists, Shakow and seventy-two colleagues met in
Boulder, Colorado, in 1949 at a historic conference. In fifteen days this group
mapped out almost every aspect of clinical psychology training and credential-
ing, from student selection, to standards of training, to program accreditation,
to professional licensure. Many of their decisions bore the distinct stamp of
Shakow’s experience and the views he had acquired as a psychologist function-
ing in a medical setting.
Out of the Boulder conference came a consensus that the doctoral degree was
the appropriate required credential of the clinical psychologist. This would place
clinical psychologists on equal professional footing with psychiatrists in terms of
level of training, because a Ph.D. was considered comparable in status to a psychi-
atrist’s medical degree. Reflecting Shakow’s orientation, three primary functions
of the clinical psychologist were named: diagnosis, research, and therapy.
While today we think of diagnosis as the identification of a patient’s dis-
order based on symptoms, Shakow’s meaning was somewhat broader.* He
emphasized determining both the nature and the origin of a patient’s condi-
tion, especially its underlying psychological dynamics and potential outcomes.
He advocated the careful development, administration, and interpretation of
psychological tests as a way to avoid a completely subjective approach, while
recognizing that evaluating the patient as a whole person was the ultimate aim
of diagnosis. Just as Harrower had emphasized the need for an assessment of a
person’s strengths and resources in addition to deficiencies, Shakow envisioned
the role of the psychological diagnostician as much broader than the technical
act of labeling a patient with a particular condition.
The second of Shakow’s trio of functions was research. Shakow saw conducting
research as the clinical psychologist’s main role. Rigorous training in scientific
methodology, research design, and statistical analysis would set clinical psychol-
ogists apart from other mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, most
of whom were not systematically trained to do clinical research. This scientific
training would give psychologists a distinctive role, and would also allow them to
put clinical practice on a foundation of sound science. Shakow outlined a number
of different kinds of research clinical psychologists could undertake, including
patient-oriented applied research and basic research.
The third function, therapy, was the one Shakow felt should be given the least
prominence. Despite the example of Harrower, who effectively combined research
and private practice, Shakow felt that focusing on psychotherapy would distract
*In 1949 there was not yet an effort to formalize psychiatric diagnoses. The first Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, was published by the American Psy-
chiatric Association in 1952, and even this bore very little resemblance to later editions because it
emphasized psychodynamic conceptualizations over symptom descriptions.
psychologists from their research function, thereby weakening their identity

as “scientist-practitioners.” He did, however, see psychotherapy as a legitimate
topic for applied research. In fact, in the 1950s Shakow directed a unique research
program in which he attempted to subject an entire course of traditional psycho-
analysis to objective study. In 1954, as head of the new Intramural Laboratory of
Psychology at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Maryland, he
supervised the construction of a special room that would allow researchers to
record therapy sessions on film with minimal intrusiveness. He hoped this would
create an objective record that could be studied by researchers. Shakow and his
team selected a therapist and a patient, a middle-aged woman named Anna, who
agreed to undergo classic psychoanalysis consisting of four or five sessions per
week on the couch.
Over the course of a four-year analysis producing 632 filmed sessions, one
of the tasks of the research team was to develop and agree on a coding scheme
to describe the processes unfolding in therapy. In this task, the team was spec-
tacularly unsuccessful. Issues such as the team members’ own reactions to
the analyst and the patient, debates over the extent to which the analyst was
administering proper psychoanalytic therapy, and variations in the tech-
niques over individual sessions made the goal of achieving objectivity remote.
The sheer volume of material was also burdensome, and the rate of analysis
extremely slow; it took the team over four months to study only a small portion
of the first therapeutic hour. It was clear that “Shakow’s folly,” as the research
became known, would not yield the research findings for a scientific under-
standing of the processes and effectiveness of psychoanalysis.14 The study
had, in fact, highlighted the difficulties of investigating something as com-
plex as psychotherapy from an objective standpoint, an issue to which we will
return shortly.
Shakow’s vision and experience provided the foundation for the scientist-
practitioner model of clinical training that is implemented today, with slight
variations, in most North American clinical psychology Ph.D. programs. The
major emphasis of this model, as its name indicates, is to combine scientific,
research training, with training in practical applications, such as assessment and
therapy. The original training model involved two years of graduate study, with
the first year devoted to systematic foundational knowledge in psychology and
the second focused on problems of clinical psychology. The third year involved
a full-time clinical internship, which Shakow envisioned as being undertaken in
a hospital setting where students could learn from, and interact with, colleagues
in other disciplines, including psychiatrists and other physicians. The final year
would be devoted to the completion of a research-based dissertation. Although
most Ph.D. programs now take the clinical psychology student longer than four
years to complete, the essentials of this model are still largely upheld.
Critics of the Model: Albee and Eysenck

Although implemented widely, the scientist-practitioner model forged at Boulder
has been criticized. George Albee (1921–2006), for example, argued that clinical
psychology under Shakow’s influence was too heavily steeped in the medical model
of mental illness, in which individual diagnosis and treatment were emphasized
instead of social-learning approaches and prevention. Albee was a pioneer in com-
munity psychology, a field that studies the social and environmental factors that
contribute to mental health and illness in communities. Community psychologists
focus more on the structures that affect individuals, rather than targeting individ-
uals directly for treatment. Arguing that clinical psychology had “sold its soul to
the devil”—the medical model of mental illness—Albee wrote: “Things might have
been different with the choice of a national training committee chair steeped in
learning theory and education rather than in hospital psychiatry. The course of
psychological history would have been completely different.”15 Another line of crit-
icism was that although the idea of training students in both research and practice
was commendable, there simply was not time to do both well.
Around the time of the Boulder conference, the London-based psycholo-
gist Hans Eysenck (1916–1997), known for the PEN model of personality (see
Chapter 12), visited the United States to get a sense of the training developments
there. Having been asked to design a clinical psychology training program for
the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in London, he expressed his
ideas in an article entitled “Training in Clinical Psychology: An English Point of
View.”16 In his usual provocative style, Eysenck condemned the inclusion of psy-
chotherapy as a function of the clinical psychologist. According to Eysenck, the
practice of psychotherapy should be considered “alien” to clinical psychology.
He attacked the notions that clinical experience and research should neces-
sarily influence each other, and that in order to practice psychotherapy clinicians
should undergo therapy themselves. He wrote:
To say that research in therapy cannot be carried out at all by persons who
are not themselves therapists appears to us to take the concept of research
in this field right out of the realm of science into the mystical regions of intu-
ition, idiographic “understanding,” and unrepeatable personal experience.17
He also suggested that proper training in diagnostic testing and research

would occupy a student’s available time. He added, however, that in his experience
the kind of person attracted to research and the kind of person attracted to therapy
had two very different sets of strengths and concerns. He then presented an alter-
native model that would cut psychotherapy out of clinical psychology training
altogether, although he suggested that a separate profession of psychotherapist
could be established.
Eysenck’s rejection of psychotherapy as a proper function of the clinical
psychologist resurfaced again a few years later when he published an influential
critique of psychotherapy’s effectiveness.18 In this frequently cited article, Eysenck
reviewed nineteen published studies of the outcomes of strictly psychoanalytic
and other forms of psychotherapy, and compared them to his estimate of the rate
of spontaneous recovery among neurotic patients who had received monitor-
ing but no therapy. He concluded that there was actually an inverse relationship
between psychotherapy and recovery, with more psychotherapy leading to less
recovery. Without any psychotherapy at all, the recovery rate for neurotic patients
was about 66 percent, Eysenck estimated. The percentage recovered in the psy-
choanalysis group was a mere 44 percent. Eysenck again used the opportunity to
criticize clinical psychology training models that included psychotherapy, a skill
he claimed was “unsupported by any scientifically acceptable evidence.”19 Given
Shakow’s subsequent frustration trying to conduct an objective study of psycho-
analysis at the NIMH, the architect of the scientist-practitioner training model
may very well have secretly empathized with Eysenck’s position.
Making Psychotherapy Scientific

Despite these concerns, there was no stopping clinical psychologists from adding
psychotherapy to their professional toolkit. It expanded their range of services,
provided another revenue stream, and increased their comparability to psychia-
trists, whom they saw as their professional rivals. Some psychiatrists were quite
displeased by this development, feeling that their exclusive expertise was being
assumed by upstart, ill-trained psychologists. But in order to “own” psychother-
apy, psychiatrists had to provide both a clear definition of what psychotherapy
actually was, and a compelling rationale for why they alone were qualified to
deliver it. It turned out that they were able to do neither. As one participant at
the Boulder conference commented ironically in 1950, psychotherapy remained
an “undefined technique applied to unspecified problems, with unpredictable
outcomes. For this technique we recommend rigorous training.”20
Even psychologists, however, were unclear about what this rigorous psycho-
therapy training should involve, and most clinical psychologists got their therapy
training by jumping in and doing it, rather than studying it. Arguably, they re-
ceived somewhat more exposure to theories of personality and psychopathology
17_POP_28354_ch16_612-650.indd 626 18/10/16 4:08 PM

in their coursework than their psychiatric colleagues. At least in the immediate

postwar period, psychiatrists received little direct training in psychotherapy to
earn a medical degree, and their education in psychopathology was heavily bi-
ological. Advanced training was available largely in psychoanalytic institutes or
specialized training schools. Therefore, neither group could claim that, whatever
training they’d had, it was necessarily superior in extent or kind to that of the
other. Most distressingly perhaps, no one could systematically define what
psychotherapy was or scientifically demonstrate whether and how it worked.
Eysenck’s 1952 article, no matter how flawed, had established new terms for this
debate. To claim the effectiveness of psychotherapy, one would have to scientifi-
cally demonstrate it.
As Shakow’s failed attempt at an objective study of psychoanalysis had
revealed, psychotherapy research was no straightforward enterprise. But as
psychologists began to deliver psychotherapy they also began to develop their
own theories and practices, and to conduct psychotherapy research. The domi-
nance of psychoanalysis began to wane.
Rogers and Client-Centered Therapy

One of the earliest psychologists to both empirically study the process of psy-
chotherapy and develop a new approach was Carl Rogers (1902–1987; see
Chapter 12). A decade before Shakow’s folly, Rogers had seen the value in
recording therapy sessions for both training and research. In his work at Ohio
State University between 1940 and 1944, he began the practice of making
phonographic records of entire therapy sessions and studying them intensively.
As he put it, the use of recorded interviews in research offered “the first opportu-
nity for an adequate study of counseling and therapeutic procedures, based upon
thoroughly objective data.”21
Rogers moved to the University of Chicago in 1945 and continued to use
recordings to identify and reflect on the change processes that took place in suc-
cessful therapy. When and how did clients experience change? How did therapists
facilitate this change? The intent of his work was clear: to come to an empirical,
rather than an assumed, understanding of the conditions under which effective
psychotherapy took place. Rogers and his team constructed measures of various
personality and attitudinal variables and had clients fill them out before and af-
ter courses of therapy. They studied successful therapeutic sessions, defined as
those in which clients had changed the most, to understand when and how shifts
had occurred. In this way, Rogers formulated his client-centered therapy, a new
nondirective approach that emphasized the importance of a number of aspects of
the therapeutic encounter.
As mentioned in Chapter 12, Rogers’s theory included what he called the

actualizing tendency, one’s internal inclination toward growth. He suggested
that psychological problems arise when this tendency becomes disrupted, such as
when we repeatedly encounter what he referred to as conditions of worth. These
include messages that others will accept us only under certain conditions, or only
if we behave in ways that might not correspond to our actualizing tendency. To
address such problems and restore psychological health, Rogers felt clients would
require a particular kind of therapeutic encounter maintained over a period of time.
This encounter would include several components. First, there must be psy-
chological contact between an incongruent (anxious, vulnerable) client and a
congruent (or integrated) therapist. Incongruence was defined as the discrep-
ancy between a client’s physical experience of a situation and his or her self-
representation in that situation. For example, if a student feels she should not be
anxious when taking tests but actually does feel very anxious, she is in a state of
incongruence. To say that therapists strive for congruence means that they strive
to experience and express genuine and authentic feelings in relation to their
clients and the therapy.
Second, therapists must strive to communicate unconditional positive regard
for their clients—in his words, “a warm acceptance of each aspect of the client’s
experience as being a part of that client.”22 He described this as a valuing of the
client in the absence of any conditions. Finally, therapists must express an accu-
rate empathic understanding of the client’s inner world. In other words, therapists
must be able to sense a client’s experience as if it were their own, but without
actually becoming too involved in that experience. In this way, the therapist can
help highlight aspects of the client’s feelings of which he or she might be only
dimly aware.
In outlining these therapeutic factors, Rogers was clear that each could be
operationally defined and measured. An operational definition of empathic
understanding, for example, might be the number of times a therapist accurately
described the patient’s feelings during a session. Trained observers could rate
this by listening to session recordings. Rogers was careful to present his approach
as a series of hypotheses in this form: “If A, B, and C are present, then changes X,
Y, and Z should occur.” He was not interested in postulating vague qualities that
should be present for some vague result to occur.
Rogers clearly articulated the importance and value of the scientific method
for the development of his theory of therapy, and he remained open to discon-
firming evidence. He also invited his fellow psychotherapists to join him in this
scientific endeavor, while recognizing there would be some resistance. As he put
it, encouragingly:
Though the verbalized reasons for their reluctance are many, a basic
motive often appears to be the fear of giving up the security of dogmatic
knowledge of therapy, for the frightening plunge into the unknown fluidity
of scientific investigation of therapy. To such we would merely say, in the
best tradition of the old swimming hole—“Come on in! The water’s fine!” As
a matter of fact, it is also invigorating.23
Psychotherapy Research
In his insistence on the empirical study of the factors required for therapeutic
change, Rogers was a pioneer in the field of psychotherapy research, the scien-
tific study of the processes and outcomes of therapy. With Eysenck’s 1952 chal-
lenge, attempts to demonstrate whether, and how, psychotherapy was effective
increased. As new theories and approaches were developed, researchers were
called upon to show exactly which aspects of therapy were leading to improve-
ments, and whether those techniques were unique to their approach or common
to all forms. A growing body of literature seemed to indicate that there were a
number of common factors shared by almost all types of therapy that could
account for a large portion of therapeutic change. These common factors were
largely relational, such as the patient or client feeling understood, supported,
respected, and cared for by the therapist.
If true, these research findings had important implications. They suggested
that almost any relatively intuitive, caring person could be an effective thera-
pist. Hans Strupp (1921–2006), another pioneer of psychotherapy research, con-
ducted a study in which he compared therapy delivered by college teachers
selected for their warmth and popularity to therapy delivered by experienced
clinicians. Each group provided time-limited therapy for anxious and depressed
male college students. Results indicated that the two groups of students did
about equally well, suggesting that common factors were more important than
specific techniques.
In perhaps the first attempt to directly compare the processes and outcomes of
two distinct therapeutic approaches, in the 1960s a group of researchers affiliated
with Temple University in Philadelphia designed a study to compare the recently
developed behavior therapy with more psychoanalytically oriented therapy.
Several of these researchers had trained with Eysenck at the Maudsley Hospital
in London. By this time, Eysenck had modified his view on whether psycholo-
gists should provide therapy, and had actually carried out laboratory studies of
behavior therapy. This was an approach developed first in the laboratory by
Joseph Wolpe (1915–1997) based on the classical conditioning model described
in Chapter 9. In behavior therapy, the focus is on changing observed behavior

rather than internal mental processes. Systematic desensitization, a technique
in which relaxation exercises are paired with graded exposure to a feared stimu-
lus, is an example of behavior therapy.
Wolpe’s experimental approach fit well with Eysenck’s scientific worldview and
the two found they had much in common, including their distaste for psychoanal-
ysis. Wolpe joined Eysenck’s protegés in their research team at Temple. The re-
searchers randomly assigned patients to either time-limited behavior therapy or
psychoanalytic therapy. They then compared these two groups to each other and
to a group that had received minimal therapy. The two therapy approaches were
about equally successful, and both were more effective than minimal therapy. The
researchers also noted that successful patients in both therapy groups reported
that the single most important part of their treatment was their personal relation-
ship with the therapist. Once again, it was impossible to know whether this, over
any other specific aspect, was the mechanism of change.
Beck and the Development of Cognitive Therapy

The emphasis in clinical psychology on psychotherapy research gradually
began to spread to psychiatry. Some psychiatrists were becoming disillusioned
with psychoanalysis and were seeing the value and excitement of this new
research enterprise. One such psychiatrist, who had close ties with clinical psy-
chologists throughout his training, was Aaron Beck (b. 1921; Figure 16.4). The
story of Beck’s shift away from psychoanalysis is also the story
of this increasing disillusionment, as well as a turning toward
“the experimental way of being” that would eventually also affect
psychiatry.24
In some ways, Beck was an unlikely originator of the therapy
that would come to rival, if not replace, psychoanalytic approaches
as one of the most widespread forms of psychotherapy today.
He began as a psychoanalyst. Having earned his medical degree
at Yale University, he continued his psychiatry training at the
Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts. There he encountered sev-
eral clinical psychologists who were engaged in the study of psy-
choanalysis. David Rapaport, already well known for his work on
diagnostic psychological testing, had just published a book on the
psychoanalytic theory of thinking and was developing the theory
of ego psychology (see Chapter 12). Ego psychologists promoted
Figure 16.4 Aaron Beck (b. 1921). the idea that with normal development, many of the functions of
17_POP_28354_ch16_612-650.indd 630 18/10/16 4:08 PM

the ego become independent of their origins in the murky, unconscious, id. This
idea certainly resonated later with Beck as he began his depression research.
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, who was also at Austen Riggs, was the first psy-
chologist (and non-physician) to receive full clinical and research training as a
psychoanalyst in the United States at a time when many of the American psy-
choanalytic societies were still closed to non-physicians. Brenman-Gibson did
pioneering work using hypnosis to treat psychiatric casualties during World
War II. She also became a noted psychohistorian, applying psychoanalytic
theory to the interpretation and writing of history. Erik Erikson, whom we intro-
duced briefly in Chapter 11, had just arrived at Austen Riggs from California. It
was in this rich, creative, and interdisciplinary environment that Beck began his
education as a psychoanalyst.
He also entered the training institute of the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic
Society, and in 1954 he began his lifelong faculty appointment in the depart-
ment of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. There he joined another
remarkably close-knit multidisciplinary group of clinicians and researchers. In
1956 he emerged from the Psychoanalytic Society as a full-fledged analyst. Over
the next thirteen years Beck’s exodus from the world of psychoanalysis would
gradually unfold. His departure was brought about not only by intellectual fac-
tors, but also by political conflicts and large-scale changes in the self-fashioning
of psychiatry throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
One of Beck’s first research projects was undertaken in collaboration with
Marvin Hurvich, a graduate student at Penn and one of Beck’s patients at the train-
ing institute. The fact that Hurvich was simultaneously a collaborator, graduate
student, and therapy patient shows how cohesive this community was. Beck was
interested in testing Freud’s classic psychoanalytic conceptualization of depres-
sion as hostility turned inward, or the wish to turn anger back on oneself. He and
Hurvich designed an inventory to detect the presence of hostility in the dream
content reported by Beck’s depressed patients. However, instead of hostility they
found themes of loss and rejection. Initially, Beck characterized this as masochism,
or self-punishment, and began a larger study to investigate the role of unconscious
masochism in depression. To do this, he developed a measure of depression based
on observable criteria, which eventually became the Beck Depression Inventory—
today one of the most widely administered self-report measures of depression used
in research and therapeutic practice. It is essentially a symptom inventory, in which
respondents report the frequency and severity of the emotional, cognitive, physio-
logical, and behavioral features of depression they experience.
Results again suggested to Beck that the “anger-turned-inward” theory of
depression that Freudians had committed to for decades was not quite right.
Based on his research and clinical experience, he was becoming more and more
convinced that depression involved systematic biases in thinking, and that the
psychoanalytic theory of depression needed to be revised. As he explored his
patients’ dreams and examined their free associations, he found themes of loss
and self-blame that were echoed in their conscious verbalizations. To further sug-
gest that unconscious processes were unimportant, however, was to break dra-
matically from psychoanalytic conventions. This was a seriously risky move for a
young psychoanalyst, and Beck had no desire at this point to be an outcast from
his department. That situation would soon change.
In 1961, the chair of Beck’s department decided to step down, and a highly
unpleasant and divisive debate about his replacement followed. The controversy
was essentially about a changing of the guard. Would the department maintain
its psychoanalytic orientation, or would it open up and accept other, increasingly
fashionable approaches in psychiatry, such as neurobiology? In sorting this out,
Beck ultimately positioned himself against the established order. This position-
ing created considerable personal distress and professional tension, and Beck
decided to take a sabbatical in 1962 to distance himself from the departmental
politics and focus on his research, his private practice, and his family. Over the
next five years he would gradually move away, intellectually and institutionally,
from psychoanalysis.
Breaking Away from Psychoanalysis

As a result of this time away, Beck saw more clearly than ever
how much he had accommodated himself to the unwritten
psychoanalytic rules, especially the rule that theory should
always have priority over data. What might a theory of ther-
apy built on data actually look like? What if one paid atten-
tion to what could be observed, rather than what was hidden
in the Freudian unconscious? With these questions in mind,
along with his ideas about the role thinking plays in depres-
sion, Beck began to reach out to psychologists. He read Piaget
(see Chapter 13). He read studies coming from the recently
established Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, including
the work of Bruner and Miller (see Chapter 14).
Perhaps most importantly, Beck became acquainted with
Albert Ellis (1913–2007; Figure 16.5), a psychoanalytic drop-
out who was developing a new form of therapy. Ellis had
become disillusioned with psychoanalysis when he began
Figure 16.5 Albert Ellis (1913–2007). his clinical practice as an analyst in training. In his practice,
he had two treatment streams. One group received traditional psychoanalysis.

The other group, seeking help for marital and sexual problems (a special interest
of Ellis’s), received a more active and directive form of treatment. Ellis became
convinced that delving deep into the past for insights about current problems
worked for only a tiny percentage of individuals. Actively teaching his clients to
change their attitudes and beliefs seemed much more effective, and he called this
new approach rational emotive therapy (RET) .
In RET, Ellis proposed what he called the A-B-C model. In this model, a
person’s response to an activating event or adversity (A) is rarely directly
related to the adversity itself but is affected by the person’s beliefs, assumptions,
and worldview. These beliefs (B) influence the emotional and behavioral con-
sequences (C) of the adversity. The therapist challenges the patient to examine
and refute what Ellis called musterbatory beliefs, such as the irrational belief that
the patient must be loved by everyone, or that she must always be successful.
Ellis eventually named four categories of irrational beliefs related to emotional
disturbance: demands (shoulds, oughts, and musts); catastrophizing statements;
low-frustration-tolerance thinking (“I can’t stand this,” “I will not survive”); and
global evaluations of worth. Although Beck made his observations about the
important role of thinking in depression independently of Ellis, by the late 1960s
he acknowledged the extent to which their two approaches were similar, and they
established a longstanding relationship.
In the early 1960s, Beck had published some research in which he identified
thinking, or cognition, as the central mechanism of depression. In a person
who is depressed, the normal ability to think rationally and objectively—
that is, like a scientist—is disrupted. A return to normality required a return
to accurate, logical thinking. This focus on thinking (and in Beck’s therapy,
acting) like a scientist signaled his break from psychoanalysis on two levels.
At the conceptual level he was rejecting the centrality of the Freudian un-
conscious, which could not easily be subjected to scientific study. On a more
personal level, by emphasizing the rationality, objectivity, and openness of
science, Beck was also rejecting the dogmatism and cult-like allegiance to the
psychoanalytic community that he had personally experienced as oppressive
and limiting.
The Cognitive Theory of Depression

In 1967, Beck published a significant book in which he outlined his cognitive
theory of depression: Depression: Clinical, Experimental, and Theoretical
Aspects.25 In 1970, he described his approach, and over the next decade he would
empirically test the therapeutic interventions arising from his theory.
Beck constructed his cognitive theory of depression on several conceptual

building blocks. A foundational concept is the cognitive schema, a core belief
structure that organizes information about the self, the world, and the future.
These appraisals of the self, the world, and the future comprise what Beck calls
the cognitive triad. In depression, clients have developed schemas that filter or
shape these appraisals in consistently negative ways. For example, a client might
have a negative core belief or schema that he is a worthless person. This appraisal
will then affect how he perceives and interprets information about himself, his
world, and his future in ways consistent with the schema. He might discount any
positive feedback he gets about himself and focus only on the negative. He might
believe that he will always be worthless, and there is nothing he can do to change.
These kinds of cognitive distortions, Beck observed, were characteristic of his
depressed clients’ thinking patterns. They were often unable to see any middle
ground between two extremes, known as all-or-nothing thinking. Or they could
see only the negative aspects of a situation and none of the positives, a cognitive
distortion referred to as discounting the positive. The schemas and associated
distortions were so powerful and pervasive that they influenced thinking in
automatic ways.
Beck identified what he called negative automatic thoughts that tend to lead
to a depressed mood. These are thoughts that arise almost instantaneously and
are fed by a person’s underlying assumptions and core beliefs. Beck postulated
that emotion, behavior, and cognition are all interrelated, with changes in one
causing changes in the others. In his theory, however, cognition, or thinking,
was the primary mechanism of depression and therefore the target of therapy. If
a client could become aware of these automatic thoughts, connect them to
underlying assumptions, and systematically challenge them with contradictory
evidence, positive emotional change would follow. This process was akin to
empirically testing one’s beliefs against reality. Eventually, with practice, the core
beliefs driving the negative thoughts and emotions can be broken down and
replaced with healthier or more realistic ones.
To help his depressed clients improve, Beck developed cognitive therapy,
an approach that was distinctive by being deliberately directive and time-
limited. The focus would be on the here-and-now of the client’s experience, not
on the early development or childhood history of the problem. The directive role
of the therapist would be to help clients uncover the core beliefs underlying their
depression and to challenge and change them. Identifying the automatic
thoughts that triggered a depressed mood, the situations that gave rise to them,
and the resulting consequences (emotional and behavioral) would require train-
ing. This training would occur both in the therapy sessions and in homework
assignments carried out between sessions. Clients would keep thought records,
to track their thoughts and emotions and generate evidence for and against their
core beliefs. Standard therapy could be expected to take about sixteen sessions
to have demonstrable effects, rather than the years on the couch required of psy-
choanalysis. To achieve change, active interventions were required.
One of them, a behavioral experiment, involved helping a client challenge her
beliefs directly through behavior. For example, a client may believe that if she
attends a party she will be socially rejected. As a result, she may avoid social
situations at all costs and never take the opportunity to actually test her belief.
In a therapy session, the client would be instructed to state her belief in con-
crete, behaviorally-specific terms. For example, “If I go to this party and approach
three people, not one person will want to talk to me and I will feel horrible.” The
therapist would tell her to go to the party, strike up a conversation with three
people, record how many people actually talk to her, and how that made her feel.
Over time, with enough attention to evidence that contradicts her previous belief
about herself, she might develop a more accurate, less distorted self-appraisal.
Making Cognitive Therapy Scientific

During the 1970s, Beck worked with several colleagues to test the efficacy of cogni-
tive therapy with depressed patients. Several important developments had occurred
in the psychiatric treatment of depression, however, since Eysenck had first issued
his challenge to demonstrate the effectiveness of psychotherapy in the early 1950s.
As psychologists like Rogers and Ellis were developing and testing new forms of
therapy, psychiatry was being transformed by the discovery of medications to treat
mental illness, in what some historians have called a pharmacological revolution.
In 1952, chlorpromazine became the first drug for treating schizophrenia. In 1958,
the first drug to specifically treat depression was introduced: imipramine.
While psychotherapy continued to increase in popularity, many psychia-
trists turned to the new drug treatments for a number of reasons. First, they were
extremely promising. They were producing remarkable—sometimes miraculous—
improvements, especially in people suffering from severe mental illnesses like
schizophrenia. Second, as psychologists and others became competitors in the
psychotherapy marketplace, psychiatrists needed a new and exclusive therapeu-
tic service: drugs. Only medical doctors could prescribe them. Finally, as psycho-
analysis —the approach most closely associated with psychiatry during the 1950s
and 1960s—was increasingly attacked as dogmatic and unscientific, psychiatry
was searching for a new identity. With the promise of drugs came the promise of
scientific respectability and a new science of psychiatry grounded in the workings
of the human brain.
When Beck set out to test the effectiveness of cognitive therapy to treat
depression, he did not compare it to client-centered therapy or even RET. He and
his colleagues tested it against antidepressant medication, by that time the stan-
dard psychiatric treatment for depression. In what became the first randomized
controlled trial (RCT) to show the effectiveness of any psychotherapy compared
to antidepressants, the researchers randomly assigned forty-one patients who had
been carefully screened and matched on a number of variables (such as severity
of depression) to receive cognitive therapy or drug treatment (imipramine). Clini-
cians administering the cognitive therapy were instructed to follow a standardized
treatment manual developed for the study. What did they find?
Patients in both treatment groups showed significant decreases in depressive
symptoms. Notably, more patients from the drug group dropped out of the study
than from the therapy group, mostly because of lack of improvement. Among
those who completed the study, cognitive therapy resulted in larger improve-
ments than drug therapy based on self-reports of symptoms. Although this was
a promising beginning, the results of subsequent studies would not be as clear.
However, Beck and his colleagues applied themselves diligently to testing the
effectiveness of their therapy and extending it to other mental disorders. In the
decades since this first RCT, cognitive therapy has become one of the most widely
used and heavily researched therapies available.
PSYCHOTHERAPY RESEARCH REVISITED:

TREATING DEPRESSION
By the end of the 1970s, there were a number of broad developments in psychiatry,
psychotherapy research, and health policy in the United States that influenced
how the effectiveness of treatments for mental disorders would be evaluated. In
1980, psychiatric diagnosis underwent a large change. The third edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) was published
by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM outlined all the major mental
disorders to be used for psychiatric diagnosis. The first edition, published in 1952,
was a slim volume that provided elaborate psychoanalytic formulations of a rela-
tively small number of neurotic and psychotic reactions, as they were called. The
second edition was only lightly revised, with the term reactions removed from the
text. The third edition, however, marked a substantial shift in approach.
In the DSM-III, each disorder was defined strictly in terms of its symptoms,
including their overall frequency and severity. It was atheoretical, meaning
there was no reference to theories about what might be causing the symptoms or
how they had developed. It also introduced a new multiaxial system, by which
patients would be assessed on several different axes, or areas of functioning, that
Psychotherapy Research Revisited: Treating Depression 637
were considered to be of clinical importance. Most mental disorders (such as

depression and anxiety) were placed on Axis I. Personality disorders and mental
retardation (as it was called then) were placed on Axis II. Other medical con-
ditions, psychosocial and environmental factors, and a general assessment of
functioning comprised the other three axes. In addition to this shift in approach,
the DSM-III included a much larger number of disorders. As psychiatry became
increasingly research-oriented and medicalized, it required a classification sys-
tem that would serve these aims.
With a standard definition of depression to guide diagnosis, researchers could
now more reliably classify research subjects into diagnostic categories. The ran-
domized controlled trial (RCT), described above in the context of Beck’s work,
was increasingly held up as the “gold standard” method in biomedical research,
and this attitude was incorporated into psychotherapy research.
While the clinical efficacy of psychotherapy had been under scrutiny for
decades, by the 1970s the related issue of cost-effectiveness also became a
concern. Which psychotherapies were most effective in the shortest amount of
time? In the U.S., the NIMH made treatment assessment research a high prior-
ity and allocated several million dollars to that effort. Researchers who applied
for the money found they were required to use the DSM-III categories and the
RCT method if their studies were to get funded. In addition to this general pool
of funding, a special budget was created for an NIMH-sponsored multiple-site
collaborative study that would compare four treatments for depression: two kinds
of psychotherapy, antidepressant medication, and an inactive drug plus clinical
management. This massive study became known as the Treatment of Depression
Collaborative Research Program (TDCRP).26
Between 1978 and 1980, psychologists Morris Parloff, head of the NIMH section
that sponsored the study, and Irene Elkin, whom he appointed as TDCRP coor-
dinator, selected the therapies to be compared, chose neutral locations where the
sessions would be conducted, and established an advisory group to help design
the study. They chose for comparison two forms of psychotherapy that had shown
promise in treating depression in earlier, smaller-scale RCTs. One of these was
Beck’s cognitive therapy, referred to in this study as cognitive behavior therapy
(CBT). The other, interpersonal psychotherapy (ITP) , was developed by psychi-
atrist Gerald Klerman and epidemiologist Myrna Weissman in the early 1970s as
a short-term treatment for depression. In IPT, the focus is on social and interper-
sonal processes associated with the onset and continuation of depression. Both
CBT and IPT had been manualized, meaning that therapists provided treatment
according to a standardized set of procedures. This ensured that patients were
actually receiving the type of therapy intended.
The TDCRP had two clear goals: (1) evaluating the feasibility of conducting a
multisite collaborative RCT of psychotherapy, and (2) comparing the two forms
of psychotherapy for their effectiveness in treating depression. The drug group
was considered the standard treatment reference, because the clinical benefits of
imipramine had already been established.
Two-hundred and fifty patients were randomly assigned to receive one of
four sixteen-week treatments: interpersonal psychotherapy, CBT, antidepressant
medication (imipramine) plus clinical management, and an inactive drug plus
clinical management. Results indicated that all three active treatments—CBT,
IPT, and antidepressants—were relatively equal in their efficacy and better than
clinical management alone, especially for patients with depression that was
moderate to low in severity. The imipramine drug treatment yielded a slightly
stronger result among the most severely depressed patients. The two psychother-
apies, when compared to each other, seemed to work about equally well. What
was the legacy of the study?
Perhaps the major outcome of TDCRP was the demonstration that psycho-
therapy research could be undertaken with the same kind of scientific rigor
as biomedical research. The NIMH researchers had come a long way from
Shakow’s folly. However, many psychotherapists were intensely critical of the
study and its methods—and of the whole psychotherapy research enterprise.
In fact, Parloff himself expressed many reservations. He cautioned that the
results of RCTs could never be directly transferred to the practice of psycho-
therapy in the real world, where therapists rarely adhered strictly to manual-
ized procedures and were free to pick and choose among various techniques
and approaches as needed. Was it even possible to manualize all forms of ther-
apy? What about those common factors that continued to exert their effects
across all forms of therapy? Parloff was also critical of the idea that the NIMH
might use results from such studies to formulate reimbursement policies
outlining which therapies should be used for which disorders and by whom,
although he clearly saw the direction in which these results could be taken.
These kinds of policy decisions, Parloff noted, seemed to overreach the man-
date of the NIMH.
In the end, Parloff’s concerns may have been misdirected. Despite the mul-
tiple problems and complexities involved in studying psychotherapy scientifi-
cally, psychologists themselves (not just insurance companies) have upheld and
embraced the idea that practice should be guided by scientific evidence of its
effectiveness. Due to many factors, including ongoing political and profes-
sional guild issues, the idea that psychotherapy should be more science than art
remains at the core of clinical psychology’s identity.
HATHAWAY AND THE MMPI

As new forms of psychotherapy emerged and were subjected to scientific testing
throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the art and science of clinical assessment was
also being scrutinized. We began this chapter with Meehl’s presidential address
on the value of statistical data over clinical judgment in predicting behavior.
His review of the scientific literature confirmed the superiority of statistical data
in making accurate predictions. Key to this approach, then, would be objective
personality measures that could generate the kind of statistical data that Meehl
argued was so powerful. Through Harrower’s work we introduced the Rorschach
projective technique, noting that despite its popularity among clinicians and
some attempts to establish its predictive validity, most experimentalists viewed
it as more mystical art than hard science. What kind of assessment tool would
meet the challenge of supporting a science-based profession? The tool to which
Meehl had devoted his Ph.D. work was the most likely candidate: the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) , a statistically derived measure of
personality factors relevant to understanding psychopathology, or mental disor-
ders. Almost the exact opposite of the Rorschach inkblot test, the MMPI proved
to have the scientific credentials, if not the same level of popular appeal, to
elevate assessment from art to science.
To tell the story of the development of the MMPI, we return to World
War II (1939–1945) and the emerging interdependence of psychology and
psychiatry prompted by the practical demands of wartime.
As the United States prepared to enter the war, a group
of researchers at the University of Minnesota, including
psychologist Starke Hathaway (1903–1984; Figure 16.6),
received federal funding to develop a specialized psycholog-
ical test to measure the extent of various forms of psychopa-
thology for the purpose of screening recruits. While a similar
need during the First World War had produced a couple of
personality inventories, such as Woodworth’s Personal Data
Sheet (see Chapter 12), they mostly focused on personality
traits that were common to some degree in all people,
as opposed to assessing deviations. Other tests seemed
superficial, because they only revealed what could easily be
observed in a short interview. As Hathaway put it, “It seemed
a little silly during a case conference on a patient to say that
the Bernreuter neurotic scale showed him to be neurotic; for
many patients that would be the first thing they themselves
would say.”27 Figure 16.6 Starke Hathaway (1903–1984).
Hathaway’s position as a hospital-based psychologist shaped the kind of test

he envisioned. Like Shakow, Harrower, and others of his time, Hathaway was
trained as an experimental psychologist. He earned his Ph.D. at the University
of Minnesota in 1932 with interests in statistics, physiology, and neuroanatomy.
Here he was introduced to the psychiatrist and anatomist J. Charnley McKinley.
Upon graduation, Hathaway became an instructor in the department of psychology
at Minnesota. There, in the mid-1930s, he encountered the newly arrived
B. F. Skinner (see Chapter 9), with whom he had stimulating debates about the
role of neurophysiology in behavior. Skinner of course took the position that
data from neurophysiology were unnecessary for understanding behavior, while
Hathaway felt that findings from both neurophysiology and behavioral psycho
logy would need to be integrated. They agreed, however, in their emphasis on
data and resistance to theory.
In 1936, the hospital associated with Hathaway’s university acquired funds
to add a sixth floor that would be, in essence, a small psychiatric ward. Due to
his acquaintance with McKinley and his background in physiology and neuro-
anatomy, Hathaway was invited to move to the new hospital and become a staff
psychologist. He would work with McKinley on research but also play a part in
the day-to-day functions of the ward. In order to help define his new position,
Hathaway visited other psychologists who had similar roles. When he visited
Shakow at Worcester State, he found an appealing model in which psychologists,
psychiatrists, physiologists, and pathologists worked together on a common set
of problems and communicated freely with one another, more or less as equals.
Hathaway attempted to introduce this model at Minnesota, but may have been
somewhat hampered by his idiosyncratic personality. As Meehl, who was one
of his students, later recalled, Hathaway came across as eccentric and absent-
minded. He dressed in unusual outfits and had a shock of white hair. Many of his
students referred to him (hopefully affectionately) as “Starke raving.”
When Hathaway began his hospital position, he imagined what he, as a
psychologist, could contribute to an understanding of the clinical problems he
was encountering. He felt that psychologists’ expertise in psychometrics, the
theory and techniques of test construction, could be put to good use in develop-
ing more efficient ways to evaluate patients. He also felt that existing assessment
materials were most deficient in what he called “personality diagnostic and prog-
nostic needs.”28 There was, of course, the Rorschach. Hathaway took a short course
on the method with Klopfer (who had also influenced Harrower), and had exten-
sive conversations with him about the use of the test. Through this experience
Hathaway came to the conclusion that interpreting Rorschach inkblot results was
most often based not on the responses (data) themselves, but on material from
the patient’s history, or from pre-existing theories combined with observations

of the patient during testing. Since interpretation so often proceeded without the
use of the actual data, Hathaway completely abandoned his review of the scoring
and frequency studies of the Rorschach and told his students to focus on clinical
appraisals and observations!
Unsatisfied with existing evaluation tools, Hathaway identified a number of
characteristics he felt a new tool should have. It should be relevant for under-
standing clinical problems, and therefore should assess personality variables
related to psychopathology. It should add substantial information to what one
might gather in a short interview. It should be efficient to administer, simple to
score and interpret, and highly objective. Hathaway had also noted that when
patients came in for their interviews, some were eager to discuss every symptom
while other patients were more guarded. The test should be designed to detect
and account for various kinds of self-presentation, such as when patients might
be trying to minimize, or conversely maximize, their distress.
With these principles in mind, his psychometric expertise, his access to
patient groups at the hospital, and funding from the federal government,
Hathaway began developing what became known as the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory. He decided the items on the MMPI should be written as
first-person declarative statements, often in the form of “I am. . .” or “I have. . . ,” to
which the respondent would answer “True,” “False,” or “Cannot say.” He examined
several sources for possible items, including psychiatric textbooks and earlier
personality inventories, and came up with a large pool of items, making sure the
language was accessible to average test-takers. Examples of items that ended up
on the final test were: “I brood a great deal”; “I never worry about my looks”; and
“I get mad easily and then get over it soon.”
The entire pool of items was given to psychiatric patients at the university
hospital who had been diagnosed with various conditions, including depression,
hypochondriasis, and schizophrenia. A small sample of people who came to the hos-
pital for non-psychiatric reasons also took the same test. Based on these responses,
Hathaway then examined the response frequencies for each group identified with
a particular psychiatric diagnosis, and called it the criterion group. He compared
these frequencies with those of non-psychiatric patients. His goal was to identify
items that reliably distinguished between the criterion group and all others. An item
was included on a clinical scale only if test-takers with that diagnosis responded to
that item differently than other groups, regardless of the content. Sometimes the
items had no obvious relationship to psychopathology at all. This purely empirical,
objective, statistical approach to psychological test construction was known
as the criterion-group method. Using this procedure, Hathaway produced an
inventory with 566 items encompassing 10 clinical scales: hypochondriasis,

depression, conversion hysteria, psychopathic deviate, masculinity-femininity, para-
noia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, hypomania, and social introversion.
Another innovation of the MMPI was that it could reveal different patterns
of response that might invalidate the test or inform its interpretation. The L or
Lie scale was developed to detect attempts to present oneself in an unrealisti-
cally favorable light. If a subject answered “False” to the item “I do not always tell
the truth,” for example, he or she would get a point on the L scale. Haphazard
responding, indicating an uncooperative test-taking attitude or poor concentra-
tion or attention was detected by the F or Frequency scale. This scale revealed
response patterns that were extremely atypical among non-psychiatric test-
takers. The K scale, designed by Meehl while he was a doctoral student working
with Hathaway on the MMPI, provides a correction for a test-taking attitude that
is overly guarded or overly candid.
From Inkblots to Profile Plots

When Paul Meehl (1920–2003; Figure 16.7) began working with Hathaway, he
recalled that there was no pressure to do a dissertation on the MMPI. In fact,
his original research ideas involved the Rorschach projective technique and the
Thematic Apperception Test (see Chapter 12). He finally settled on a study of the
phenomenon of false positives on the MMPI, response patterns that indicated
psychopathology when in fact the test-taker was psychiatri-
cally normal. As Meehl later reported, one of the reasons he
became interested in this issue was that several of his friends
and relatives had taken the test, and some of their responses
indicated false positives. As he put it, “I knew these people in-
timately enough to be confident that while they may have had
their problems in the psyche, they did not have a diagnosable
mental disorder.”29 Maybe a correction could be made for this
tendency, and this was the work that led to the K scale.
Meehl also became interested in the validity of profile
analysis, the standard MMPI practice of examining patterns
of scale scores, rather than individual scores in isolation, to
generate diagnostic recommendations. When patients took
the test, their scores on each scale were plotted on a graph gen-
erating a profile clearly showing the pattern of high and low
scale scores. Meehl suggested that the profile pattern, rather
than a single scale score, would better predict a patient’s diag-
Figure 16.7 Paul Meehl (1920–2003). nostic situation, and he got favorable results when he tested
this hypothesis. His first doctoral student, Donald Peterson, used one of Meehl’s
profile rules to diagnose a particular patient group as schizophrenic, even though
they were diagnosed by psychiatrists as anxious/neurotic. On follow-up several
years later, the MMPI proved to be right more often than psychiatrists, as judged
by the rate at which this group of “anxious neurotics” was actually hospitalized
for schizophrenia.
Meehl and Hathaway ran with the idea of profile analysis and in 1951 pub-
lished an atlas for the clinical use of the MMPI, in which they carefully matched
profile codes with case history data, psychiatric diagnoses, and other psycholog-
ical information to produce personality descriptions for each profile.30 Meehl’s
curiosity was piqued by the idea that codes could be used predictively, and he
went on to write his famous book on clinical versus statistical prediction men-
tioned in the introduction to this chapter.31
Did the success of the MMPI overwhelm the seemingly more subjective
approaches like the Rorschach? As one scholar has put it, would clinical psy-
chologists embrace inkblots or profile plots?32 Or could the two co-exist in the
psychologist’s toolbox?
As it turns out, both inkblots and profile plots had something to offer cli-
nicians in the postwar period. While the allure of the MMPI was great, espe-
cially among research psychologists, it was a long, hard test to ask patients to
take, despite the relative ease with which it could be scored. Many of the items
inquired about physical symptoms and bodily processes, such as sexual and
bowel function, that test-takers were uncomfortable reporting. Although partially
envisioned as a psychiatric screening tool, when used this way during the war,
it did not prove particularly successful. Profile analysis, focusing on personality
descriptions associated with particular profile codes, gradually replaced diagno-
sis as the function of the test. Clinical psychologists, rather than psychiatrists,
gravitated toward it and began to develop specialized MMPI language and prac-
tices as they consolidated their professional standing in relation to psychiatry.
The names of clinical scales were replaced by numbers, with two-point or three-
point-codes, such as 5-7-2, indicating the highest scale scores comprising a pro-
file. This moved the scale even farther away from its psychiatric connotations,
as there was no need to refer to scores on a depression or hypochondria or
schizophrenia scale.
The Rorschach inkblot test also maintained and gained popularity among
clinical psychologists during the immediate postwar period. Its popularity was
tied to the rise of psychoanalytic influence, which was at a high point in psychi-
atry and in popular culture. Clinical psychology, in emulating psychiatry, for a
time became psychoanalytic as well. The Rorschach seemed to offer clinical data
that could not be discerned in any other way, some going so far as to liken it to an
X-ray of the soul. Many clinicians found that administering the Rorschach was a
way to relax patients, many of whom responded to it as though it were a fun game.
With Meehl’s 1954 book and other developments in test standardization and eval-
uation, projective techniques like the Rorschach eventually did come under attack
as unscientific. Although the inkblots had been subject to decades of research, the
research literature was uneven, unsystematized, and did not conform to the stan-
dards of evaluation that were being set for psychological tests more generally. The
existence of multiple coding and interpretation systems also complicated things.
In academic psychology, most personality researchers were convinced by Meehl’s
arguments, and the MMPI surpassed the Rorschach in 1961 as the most frequently
researched test, as documented by annual publications.
Clinicians, however, were not that eager to discard the Rorschach, a test that
had generated both professional legitimacy and considerable clinical utility.
Unlike the MMPI, the Rorschach test relied on a skilled, craft tradition that gave
experienced practitioners a level of authority and expertise that could not quickly
be acquired or delegated. Part of its appeal was its status as an art, and the artist
had a status that the merely technical MMPI code analyzer could not equal. But
like many types of creative endeavor, Rorschach interpretations took a long time
to produce. To code and analyze a single protocol might take an experienced
clinician four or five hours.
Over time, with the declining popularity of psychoanalysis, combined with
the need for more labor-efficient tools, the Rorschach came to be seen as an
outmoded product of a bygone era. By the end of the 1960s, clinical use of the
Rorschach inkblots test only marginally surpassed that of the MMPI. It received
a bit of a boost in the 1970s when a new standardized scoring and interpretation
approach called the Exner system was developed. But by the 1980s, the MMPI
became the most widely used personality test in the United States.
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES AND DEBATES

Many of the central issues in clinical psychology today are directly related to
those that arose earlier in its history. Psychotherapy research continues to flour-
ish and has become increasingly sophisticated. The field has moved substan-
tially beyond its original concern with demonstrating the overall efficacy of
psychotherapy toward investigating the specific processes and mechanisms of
change that unfold during therapy, one of Rogers’s original questions. The body
of psychotherapy process research that has followed provides a nuanced under-
standing of how clients actually experience change, and exactly how therapists
facilitate those positive changes.
Researchers have also devoted more attention to the question of which spe-
cific therapies work best for which kinds of clients, and further, which treat-
ments work best for which disorders. Ultimately this has given way to a focus
on evidence-based practice (EBP), the use of treatments that have been
scientifically tested for their appropriateness and effectiveness for a specific
disorder. EBP was imported into psychology from medicine in the 1990s. In the
medical establishment, there was a growing concern that clinical practice and
training were not being informed directly enough by findings from medical re-
search. As physicians and researchers began to talk about the need to close this
gap, the term evidence-based medicine arose. Reviews of research were under-
taken to establish best practice guidelines for the treatment of various medical
disorders.
Clinical psychologists quickly perceived this trend in medicine as a potential
threat to their own ability to provide services. With these kinds of guidelines in
place, third-party payers (private corporations and government agencies that pro-
vide health care insurance coverage for individuals) were beginning to make reim-
bursement claims contingent on complying with such guidelines. Clinical decisions
made without reference to an empirical database were not deemed reimbursable.
After some initial stumbling with terminology, the American Psychological Asso-
ciation set up a Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice in 2005. A primary goal was
to clarify what “evidence” actually meant in the context of psychotherapy practice.
Was proper evidence the result of a randomized controlled trial, or could it encom-
pass clinical observations and other forms of more qualitative data?
Reactions to the EBP movement among psychologists have been diverse.
Some view it positively, heartily endorsing the need to base clinical practice on
the findings of empirical research. Others are more skeptical. Some echo the
apprehension of Parloff that we noted earlier, arguing that the way psychotherapy
is delivered and evaluated in research settings cannot be transferred to the way
therapy proceeds in practice. Similarly, other practitioners question the validity
of applying general findings to specific individuals, especially since there has
been relatively little psychotherapy research undertaken with culturally diverse
samples. All these issues reflect the ongoing struggles to make psychotherapy
scientific.
Another debate in clinical psychology over the past couple of decades con-
cerns whether psychologists should seek to acquire prescription privileges. As
the number of psychiatrists continues to be inadequate to meet the need for their
services, and as the demand for drug treatments continues to accelerate, there
is a case to be made that another professional group should be licensed to
prescribe medication for psychiatric conditions. Some psychologists welcome
the opportunity, with additional training, to be able to provide another treatment

option for their patients, especially those in underserved areas. Others feel that
prescribing drugs for psychological and emotional disorders would represent
a wholesale adoption of the medical model of mental illness, and completely
undermine the psychological enterprise. Despite such objections, in 2014
Illinois became the third state in the United States after New Mexico and
Louisiana to authorize prescription privileges for psychologists. Currently
there are voices on both sides of the debate, and it is unclear how many clinical
psychologists will take advantage of this opportunity to expand the range of their
clinical services.
A final contemporary issue is the debate about the validity and use of the
Rorschach test. In 2009, images of all ten Rorschach inkblots, along with
common responses to the blots, were posted at the Wikipedia website by a
Canadian physician. He was reacting to the outcry among psychologists
when Wikipedia had posted an image of just one of the inkblots—a response
he found ridiculous. Psychologists argued that the public availability of the
inkblots, and common responses to them, compromised their ability to use
the Rorschach in a valid manner. Patients could easily “look up” responses in
advance and thus “game” the test; no more X-rays of the soul. Others argued
that it didn’t really matter, as there was no way to game a test that has no right
or wrong answers. Perhaps this episode reveals not whether clinicians can con-
tinue to use the Rorschach or not, but the fact that so many of them clearly still
are. Despite ongoing debates about its scientific validity, it continues to be
used in clinical practice.
It has also captured the popular imagination more strongly than any other
psychological test in history. In 1986, DC Comics published the graphic novel
miniseries Watchmen that featured a character named Rorschach. In the series,
when Walter Joseph Kovacs becomes the vigilante Rorschach, he dons a mask of
a constantly shifting black-and-white inkblot to reflect his black-and-white view
of morality. Cartoons featuring Rorschach-like inkblots abound in the popular
press (Figure 16.8).
***
It seems appropriate to end the current edition of Pioneers with some of the on-
going issues and debates that animate the profession of clinical psychology.
Compared to any other subfield whose history we cover, clinical psychology now
attracts the most students. The clinical psychologist is also the dominant image
O
FP
Figure 16.8 The character named Rorschach from Watchmen (left) and a cartoon
featuring a Rorschach-like inkblot.
of a psychologist in the public’s mind. But as we saw in the previous chapter on

applied psychology, there have been longstanding tensions within the field about
the rise of application, and there remains considerable unease about psychology’s
apparent loss of identification with science. Psychologists who conduct research
on basic brain processes often now identify as neuroscientists rather than psycholo-
gists. Separate organizations, such as the U.S.-based Association for Psychological
Science, have formed to concentrate exclusively on psychology as a science and
not become overwhelmed by professional issues. We believe that to more deeply
understand and appreciate these contemporary developments, an understanding
of psychology’s history is indispensable. The past is always with us, and history
continues to unfold. We look forward to introducing you to the next pioneers of
psychology in the years ahead.
CHAPTER REVIEW
Summary
The professionalization of clinical psychology accelerated therapy based on his careful study of the therapeutic
after World War II because of a number of factors, includ- factors that seemed to produce successful outcomes.
ing the need for more trained mental health practition- Beck, the originator of cognitive therapy, also based
ers to treat the war’s psychiatric casualties. In the United his theory and therapy on research he conducted with
States, one response to this need was federal funding to depressed patients. Originally trained as a psychoanalyst,
help establish training programs for this new profession. Beck moved away from this approach when his research
Central to discussions about the appropriate training suggested that depression was caused by distorted think-
model for clinical psychology was the role scientific ing rather than anger-turned-inward, as psychoanalytic
research would play. theory proposed. His emphasis on cognition was shared by
Harrower, one of the first psychologists to take up the Ellis, who developed a related approach, rational emotive
private practice of psychology, was a clinician who initially therapy. The desire to understand which forms of psycho-
trained as an experimentalist and continued to conduct therapy were most effective led to a number of large-scale
research while seeing patients for both diagnostic eval- research studies, one of the most important of which was
uations and psychotherapy. She developed the group the Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Pro-
Rorschach projective technique and contributed to national gram coordinated through the National Institute of Mental
forums about the professional roles of the clinical psychol- Health in the United States.
ogist, especially in relation to psychiatry. Shakow was also Useful and valid assessment tools for the profes-
trained as a researcher but worked in a hospital setting sion were also being created. The Minnesota Multiphasic
early in his career. There, his outlook on clinical psychology Personality Inventory (MMPI) was originated by Hathaway
training was shaped by his interactions with medical per- at the University of Minnesota, and later developed fur-
sonnel. He suggested three roles for clinical psychologists: ther by his student Meehl. Although projective measures of
diagnosis, research, and therapy. His scientist-practitioner personality, such as the Rorschach, were already popular
model was adopted as the official training model for clinical and widely used, the MMPI seemed to offer a more objec-
psychologists in the United States. tive approach that relied purely on statistical data and not
As more psychologists began to practice psychother- on clinical judgment. Debates over the right tools for a
apy, new approaches and techniques were developed and science-based profession again reflected the extent to
questions about what made psychotherapy effective arose. which the identity of clinical psychology was tied to its roots
One of the first psychologists to conduct psychother- in psychological science. Today, these debates take contem-
apy research was Rogers. He developed client-centered porary form in the evidence-based-practice movement.
Key Pioneers
Molly Harrower, p. 616 Hans Eysenck, p. 625 Albert Ellis, p. 632
Hermann Rorschach, p. 617 Carl Rogers, p. 627 Starke Hathaway, p. 639
David Shakow, p. 621 Joseph Wolpe, p. 629 Paul Meehl, p. 642
George Albee, p. 625 Aaron Beck, p. 630
Chapter Review 649
Key Terms
Rorschach projective technique, p. 617 rational emotive therapy (RET), p. 633
determinants, p. 618 cognitive theory of depression, p. 634
scientist-practitioner model of clinical cognitive distortions, p. 634
training, p. 624 cognitive therapy, p. 634
medical model of mental illness, p. 625 randomized controlled trial (RCT), p. 636
community psychology, p. 625 interpersonal psychotherapy (ITP), p. 637
client-centered therapy, p. 627 Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
actualizing tendency, p. 628 Inventory (MMPI), p. 639
common factors, p. 629 criterion-group method, p. 641
behavior therapy, p. 630 profile analysis, p. 642
systematic desensitization, p. 630 evidence-based practice (EBP), p. 645

1. Is clinical psychology more of an art than a science? Choose several pioneers from this
chapter and explain how they would respond to this question. Consider the roles of
clinical judgment and empirical data in formulating your responses.
2. Describe the scientist-practitioner model of clinical training. What were some of the
criticisms of this model? What are some of the advantages?
3. Outline the primary features of client-centered therapy, cognitive therapy, and rational
emotive therapy. In each case, what is proposed as the cause of emotional distress, and
what must be done in therapy to help the client make positive changes?
4. Imagine you have developed a new form of therapy and are now required to prove its
effectiveness. Think through how you would design a study to do such an evaluation.
What difficulties might you encounter? How would you measure client improvement?
5. What are the differences between an objective measure of personality and a projective
measure? Do you think projective measures should be used in psychological assess-
ments? Why or why not?
Suggested Resources
For an overview of clinical psychology in the United States, see Donald K. Routh, Clinical Psy-
chology Since 1917: Science, Practice, and Organization. (New York: Plenum, 1994). Detailed
studies of the evolution of clinical psychology training models under the auspices of the
National Institute of Mental Health are included in W. E. Pickren and Stanley F. Schneider,
eds., Psychology and the National Institute of Mental Health: A Historical Analysis of Science,
Practice, and Policy (Washington, DC: APA, 2005). The two editions of the encyclopedic
History of Psychotherapy have a wealth of information about clinical science, practice,
and training, see Donald K. Freedheim, ed., History of Psychotherapy: A Century of Change
(Washington, DC: APA, 1992), and John C. Norcross, Gary R. Vandenbos, and Donald K.
Freedheim, eds., History of Psychotherapy: Continuity and Change, 2nd ed. (Washington,
DC: APA, 2011). For an exploration of the relationship between the laboratory and the clinic
in this formative period, with a focus on Eysenck’s work at the Maudsley Hospital in London,
see Maarten Derksen, “Science in the Clinic: Clinical Psychology at the Maudsley,” in Psychol-
ogy in Britain: Historical Essays and Personal Reflections, eds. G. C. Bunn, A. D. Lovie, and
G. Richards (Leicester, UK: BPS Books, 2001), 267–289.
Biographical information, photos, and video interviews with Harrower can be found at
http://www.feministvoices.com/molly-harrower/. Rebecca Lemov offers a lively account
of the projective test movement in “X-Rays of Inner Worlds: The Mid-Twentieth Century
American Projective Test Movement,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47
(2011): 251–278. Roy José Decarvalho provides an overview of Carl Rogers’s thinking in
his volume The Founders of Humanistic Psychology (New York: Praeger, 1991). Beck is the
subject of a biography by Marjorie Weishaar in the Key Figures in Counselling and Psycho-
therapy Series; see Aaron T. Beck (London: Sage, 1993). Rachael Rosner has explored the
psychoanalytic roots of Beck’s cognitive theory in “Aaron T. Beck’s Drawings and the Psy-
choanalytic Origin Story of Cognitive Therapy,” History of Psychology, 15 (2012): 1–18. Albert
Ellis contributed an autobiographical chapter “My Life in Clinical Psychology,” to The History
of Clinical Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 1, ed. C. E. Walker (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/
Cole, 1991), 1–37. For classic videos from the 1965 series “Three Approaches to Psychother-
apy” of Rogers and Ellis working with a real client, named Gloria, see https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=24d-FEptYj8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odnoF8V3g6g.
For further information on the MMPI, see Roderick Buchanan, “The Development of
the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral
Sciences 30 (1994): 148–161. For more on the tensions between psychologists and psy-
chiatrists over defining psychotherapy, see Roderick Buchanan, “Legislative Warriors:
American Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Competing Claims Over Psychotherapy in the
1950s,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 39 (2003): 225–249.
NOTES
Introduction. Studying the History of Psychology 5. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free
Press, 1978), 39.
1. Graham Richards, “Of What Is History of Psychology a
6. Adamson, Classical Philosophy, Chapter 29.
History?” British Journal for the History of Science 20
7. Quoted in Galileo’s Il Saggiatore in Bartlett’s Familiar
(1987): 201–211; quotation from 203.
Quotations, 14th ed., ed. Emily Morrison Beck (Boston:
2. Robert I. Watson, “Working Paper,” in The Psychologists,
Little, Brown, 1968), 211.
vol. I, ed. T. S. Krawiec (New York: Oxford University
8. Quoted in John de Pillis, 777 Mathematical Conversation
Press, 1972), 275–297; quotation from 287.
Starters. (Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of
3. Robert I. Watson, “History of Psychology: A Neglected
America, 2002), 286.
Area,” American Psychologist 15 (1960): 251–255.
9. Ian P. Howard, “Alhazen’s Neglected Discoveries of
4. Watson, “Working Paper,” 289.
Visual Phenomena,” Perception 25 (1996), 1205.
5. Thomas Teo, The Critique of Psychology: From Kant to
Postcolonial Theory (New York: Springer, 2005).
6. Robert M. Young, “Scholarship and the History of the Chapter 2. Pioneering Philosophers of Mind:
Behavioural Sciences,” History of Science 5 (1966): 1–51.
Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz
7. Laurel Furumoto, “The New History of Psychology,” in
The G. Stanley Hall Lecture Series, vol. 9, ed. I. S. Cohen 1. René Descartes, “Discourse on Method” in Discourse
(Washington, DC: APA, 1989), 9–34. on Method and Meditations, ed. and trans. L. J. Lafleur
8. Franz Samelson, “History, Origin Myth and Ideology: (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1960), 5, 7–8.
‘Discovery’ of Social Psychology,” Journal for the Theory of 2. William R. Shea, The Magic of Numbers and Motion:
Social Behaviour 4 (1974): 217–232. The Scientific Career of René Descartes (Canton, MA:
9. Translated from Hermann Ebbinghaus, Abriss der Watson Publishing International, 1991), 127.
Psychologie, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Veit, 1908), 7. 3. Descartes, Discourse, 9.
10. Robert Val Guthrie, Even the Rate Was White: A 4. The fly anecdote is recorded in Charles Singer, A Short
Historical View of Psychology, 2nd ed. (Needham History of Scientific Ideas to 1900 (London: Oxford
Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998/1976). University Press, 1970), 226.
11. Stephen Leacock, “A Manual for the New Mentality,” 5. Descartes, Discourse, 10.
Harpers (March 1924), 471, emphasis added. 6. René Descartes, Treatise of Man, trans. Thomas Steele
Hall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 113.
7. Quoted in John Morris, Descartes Dictionary (New York:
Chapter 1. Foundational Ideas from Antiquity Philosophical Library, 1971), 15.
1. Quotation from http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias 8. Descartes, Discourse, 24.
.html. 9. Quoted in ibid., 24, 25.
2. Quoted in Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy: A 10. See Andrea Nye, The Princess and the Philosopher
History of Philosophy without any Gaps, vol. 1 (Oxford, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); and Deborah
UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 208. Tollefson, “Princess Elizabeth and the Problem of Mind-
3. Rebecca Goldstein, “Bodies of Knowledge.” Review of Body Interaction,” Hypatia 14 (1999), 59–77.
M. Leroi, The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. 11. René Descartes, Passions of the Soul, excerpted in Descartes:
New York Times Book Review, November 2, 2014, 15. Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Norman Smith (New
4. Adamson, Classical Philosophy, 24. York: Modern Library, 1958), 265–296; see 275–276.
A1
A2 Notes
12. Quoted in Margaret Atherton, ed., Women Philosophers 2. Quoted in A Source Book in the History of Psychology, ed.
of the Early Modern Period (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, Richard J. Herrnstein and Edwin G. Boring (Cambridge,
1994), 21. MA: Harvard University Press), 212.
13. Quoted in Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography 3. Quoted in Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience: A
(London: Longmans, 1957), 417. History of Explorations into Brain Function (New York:
14. Ibid., 76. Oxford University Press, 1994), 33.
15. Ibid., 100. 4. For more on practical phrenology in the United States, see
16. Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, SC: Michael M. Sokal, “Practical Phrenology as Psychological
University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 42–43. Counseling in the 19th-Century United States,” in The
17. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understand- Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century
ing, 5th ed. (London: Dent, 1965/1706), vol. 1, xxxii. Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science, ed. C. D.
18. Ibid., xxxv. Green, M. Shore, and T. Teo (Washington, DC: American
19. Ibid., 77. Psychological Association, 2001): 21–44.
20. Ibid., 81. 5. Quoted in J. M. D. Olmsted, “Pierre Flourens,” in Science,
21. Ibid., vol. 2, 133. Medicine, and History, vol. 2, ed. E. A. Underwood (New
22. Ibid., vol. 1, 356. York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 296.
23. Ibid., 108. 6. Ibid., 293.
24. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford, UK: Oxford 7. Quoted in Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, 61.
University Press, 2012), XIII, 9. 8. Walther Riese, “Auto-Observation of Aphasia Reported
25. Quoted in Cranston, Locke, 482. by an Eminent Nineteenth- Century Medical Scientist,”
26. G. Macdonald Ross, Leibniz (New York: Oxford Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 28
University Press, 1984), 26. (1954): 241.
27. G. W. Leibniz, Writings on China, trans. and ed. D. J. Cook 9. Quoted in Finger, Origins of Neuroscience, 379.
and H. Rosemount, Jr. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 70. 10. For details about the life and identity of Louis Victor
28. Ross, Leibniz, 26. Leborgne, see Cezary W. Domanski, “The Mysterious
29. G. W. Leibniz, The Monadology; online at http://oregonstate ‘Monsieur Leborgne:’ The Mystery of the Famous Patient
.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/leibniz/monadology.html, in the History of Neuropsychology Is Explained,” Journal
paragraphs 66–67, 69. of the History of the Neurosciences 22 (2013): 47–52.
30. Ibid., paragraph 64. 11. Quoted in Howard Gardner, The Shattered Mind (New
31. Quoted in Mary W. Calkins, The Persistent Problems of York: Knopf, 1975), 68.
Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 76. 12. S. I. Franz, “On the Functions of the Cerebrum II: The
32. Ibid. Frontal Lobes in Relation to the Production and Reten-
33. G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, tion of Simple Sensory-motor Habits,” American Journal
trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett of Physiology 8 (1902): 1–22.
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 48. 13. Quoted in Finger, Origins of Neuroscience, 343.
34. Ibid., 52. 14. Karl S. Lashley, Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence
35. Ibid., 51. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 24–25.
36. Ibid., 55. 15. Quoted in Keith Oatley, Brain Mechanisms and Mind
37. Ibid., 54–55. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), 145.
38. Ibid., 56. 16. Roberts Bartholow, “Experimental Investigations into the
39. Ibid., 166. Functions of the Human Brain,” American Journal of the
Medical Sciences 67 (1874): 30–313; quotation from 309.
17. Ibid., 311.
18. Ibid., 312.
Chapter 3. Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists 19. Quoted in Peter Nathan, The Nervous System
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969), 241.
from Gall to Penfield
20. Ibid., 239.
1. Quoted in Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation 21. Wilder Penfield and Lamar Roberts, Speech and
in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, Brain-Mechanisms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
1970), 10. Press, 1959), 45–47.
Notes A3
22. William Beecher Scoville and Brenda Milner, “Loss of 11. Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (London:
Recent Memory After Bilateral Hippocampal Regions,” Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1935).
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 20 12. Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking, expanded
(1957): 12. edition, ed. Michael Wertheimer (New York: Harper,
23. Ibid. 1959); originally published 1945.
24. Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton, NJ: 13. Wolfgang Köhler, The Task of Gestalt Psychology
Princeton University Press, 1975), 80. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 60.
25. Michel Desmurget, Karen T. Reilly, Nathalie Richard, 14. Ibid.
Alexandru Szathmari, Carmine Mottolese, and Angela 15. Ibid., 66
Sirigu, “Movement Intention After Parietal Stimulation
in Humans,” Science 324 (2009): 811–813.
26. M. S. Gazzaniga, R. B. Ivry, and G. R. Mangun, Cognitive
Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, 4th ed. (New Chapter 5. Wundt and the Establishment of
York: Norton, 2013). Experimental Psychology
27. From the journal’s website: http://www.informaworld
.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g909176135~tab 1. Wilhelm Wundt, “Die Geschwindigkeit des Gedankens,”
=summary. Gartenlaube (1892): 263–265.
2. Erwin A. Esper, A History of Psychology (Philadelphia:
Saunders, 1964), vi.
3. Wilhelm Wundt, Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinne-
Chapter 4. The Sensing and Perceiving Mind: swahrnehmung (Contributions to the Theory of Sensory
Perception) (Leipzig und Heidelberg: C. F. Winter, 1862).
From Kant through the Gestalt Psychologists
4. Wilhelm Wundt, Vorlesungen u¨ber die Menschenund
1. Quoted in J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Thierseele (Lectures on Human and Animal Mind)
Western Intellectual Tradition (New York: Harper & (Leipzig: Vob, 1863/1864).
Row, 1960), 474. 5. See Saulo Araujo, “Bringing New Archival Sources to
2. Quoted in Leo Koenigsberger, Hermann von Wundt Scholarship: The Case of Wundt’s Assistant-
Helmholtz, trans. Frances A. Welby (New York: ship with Helmholtz,” History of Psychology 17 (2014):
Dover, 1965), 17. 50–59.
3. Quoted in Siegfried Bernfeld, “Freud’s Scientific 6. Letter from William James to Thomas W. Ward,
Beginnings,” American Imago 6 (1949): 171. November 1867, in The Letters of William James,
4. Quoted in Koenigsberger, Hermann von Helmholtz, vol. 1, ed. Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly
64, 75. Press, 1920), 118–119.
5. Ibid., 90. 7. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der Physiologischen
6. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Recent Progress in the Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology)
Theory of Vision,” in Selected Writings of Hermann von (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1974).
Helmholtz, ed. Russell Kahl (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan 8. Quoted in “Selected Texts from the Writings of Wilhelm
University Press, 1971), 192. Wundt,” trans. and ed. Solomon Diamond in Wilhelm
7. Quoted in Nicolas Pastore, “Re-evaluation of Boring on Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, ed.
Kantian Influence, Nineteenth Century Nativism, Gestalt R. W. Rieber (New York: Plenum Press, 1980), 5, 157, 158.
Psychology and Helmholtz,” Journal of the History of the 9. Quoted in S. Diamond, “Wundt Before Leipzig,” in
Behavioral Sciences 10 (1975): 387. Wilhelm Wundt, ed. R. W. Rieber, 59.
8. See William Woodward, “Fechner’s Panpsychism: A 10. William James, “Review of Wundt’s Principles of Physio-
Scientific Solution to the Mind-Body Problem,” Journal logical Psychology,” reprinted in Wundt Studies: A Centen-
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 10 (1975): nial Collection, ed. W. G. Bringmann and Ryan D. Tweney
367–386. (Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, 1980), 116, 120; originally appeared
9. Ibid. unsigned in North American Review 121 (1875): 195–201.
10. Quoted in Thomas H. Leahey, A History of Psychology: 11. The article appeared in English as Wilhelm Wundt,
Main Currents in Psychological Thought, 2nd ed. “Spiritualism as a Scientific Question,” Popular Science
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 197. Monthly 15 (1879): 577–593.
A4 Notes
12. Quoted in Marilyn E. Marshall and Russell A. Wendt, in American Psychology, ed. J. G. Morawski (New Haven,
“Wilhelm Wundt, Spiritism, and the Assumptions of CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 104–105.
Science,” Wundt Studies (1980): 169–171. 29. Ibid., 108–109.
13. See Andreas Sommer’s “Spirits, Science and the Mind: 30. For more on Berliner, see http://www.apadivisions.org
The Journal Psychische Studien, 1874–1925.” Blog post, /division-35/about/heritage/anna-berliner-biography
Dec. 17, 2013 at https://forbiddenhistories.wordpress .aspx.
.com/2013/12/17/spirits-science-and-the-mind-the 31. See Saulo Araujo’s Wundt and the Philosophical
-journal-psychische-studien-1874-1925/ Foundations of Psychology: A Reappraisal (New York:
14. James McKeen Cattell, “The Psychological Laboratory Springer, 2016).
at Leipsic,” Mind 13 (1888): 37–51.
15. James McKeen Cattell, “The Time Taken Up by Cerebral
Operations,” Mind 11 (1886): 220–242, 377–392, 524–538.
16. Ibid., 387. Chapter 6. The Evolving Mind: Darwin and His
17. Ibid., 534.
Psychological Legacy
18. Quoted in Arthur L. Blumenthal, Language and Psy-
chology: Historical Aspects of Linguistics (New York: 1. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,
Academic Press, 1975), 21. ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1969), 27, 28.
19. Quoted in E. B. Titchener, “The Province of Structural 2. Ibid., 47, 48.
Psychology” in The Great Psychologists: A History of 3. Ibid., 60.
Psychological Thought, 5th ed., ed. R. I. Watson and 4. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin,
R. B. Evans (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 398. vol. 1, ed. Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith
20. Quoted in Thomas H. Leahey, A History of Psychology: (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 160,
Main Currents in Psychological Thought, 2nd ed. note 1; 181, note 4.
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 189–190. 5. Darwin, Autobiography, 62.
21. Eleanor Acheson McCulloch Gamble, “The Applicability 6. Henslow to Darwin, August 24, 1831, in Darwin,
of Weber’s Law to Smell,” American Journal of Psychol- Correspondence, vol. 1, 128–129.
ogy 10 (1898): 82–142. 7. Darwin, Autobiography, 72.
22. E. B. Titchener. “Organic Images,” Journal of Philosophy, 8. Frederick Watkins to Darwin, September 18, 1831, in
Psychology and Scientific Method 1 (1904): 36–40; Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 1, 159.
quotation from 38. 9. Darwin to R. W. Darwin, February 7, 1831, ibid., 201.
23. See the list of Titchener’s doctoral students appended 10. Quoted in Alan Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle
to the end of E. G. Boring’s obituary of Titchener: Edwin (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 47.
G. Boring, “Edward Bradford Titchener: 1867–1927,” 11. Ibid., 86.
American Journal of Psychology 38 (1927): 489–506. 12. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York:
24. Attempts that heavily influenced his devoted student, Bantam Books, 1972), 335.
Edwin G. Boring; see Alexandra Rutherford, “Maintaining 13. Quoted in Moorehead, Darwin and the Beagle, 247.
Masculinity in Mid-Twentieth Century American Psychol- 14. These notebooks, which have been published, provide
ogy: Edwin Boring, Scientific Eminence, and the ‘Woman an extraordinary inside look at the thought processes
Problem,’” Osiris 30 (2015): 250–271. of one of the world’s greatest scientists. See Charles
25. Margaret Floy Washburn, The Animal Mind: A Textbook Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation
of Comparative Psychology (New York: MacMillan, 1908). of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett
26. See C. James Goodwin, “On the Origins of Titchener’s et al. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Experimentalists,” Journal of the History of the Behav- 15. Quoted in P. H. Gosse in Lynn Barber, The Heyday of
ioral Sciences 21 (1985): 383–389. Natural History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), 247.
27. Edwin G. Boring, “Titchener’s Experimentalists,” Journal 16. Quoted in Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man (London:
of the History of the Behavioral. Sciences 3 (1967): 315–325; Wildwood House, 1974), 234–235.
quotation from 322. 17. Quoted in Ronald W. Clark, The Survival of Charles
28. See Laurel Furumoto, “Shared Knowledge: The Experi- Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea (New York:
mentalists, 1904–1929,” in The Rise of Experimentation Random House, 1984), 76.
Notes A5
18. Darwin, Autobiography, 123. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, UK: Oxford
19. Quoted in Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, 84. University Press, 1976).
20. Ibid., 109. 43. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds.,
21. Huxley quotations from Francis Darwin, ed., The Life The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the
and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University
Appleton, 1888), vol. 1, 551; vol. 2, 27. Press, 1992); Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (New
22. Quoted in Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin, York: Norton, 1997).
142–143. Clark also gives some slightly differing versions
of the Oxford confrontation.
23. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races Chapter 7. Measuring the Mind: Galton and
in the Struggle for Life (London: Murray, 1859), 488.
Individual Differences
24. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (London: Murray, 1879), 6. 1. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (Gloucester, MA:
25. Ibid., 66 (emphasis added). 1972) 77; originally published 1869.
26. Ibid., 126. 2. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its
27. Ibid., 608. Development, 2nd ed. (New York: Dutton, 1907), 19.
28. Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (Princeton, NJ: 3. Ibid., 20.
Princeton University Press, 1995), 66. 4. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 198. 5. Lewis M. Terman, “The Intelligence Quotient of Francis
30. Darwin, Descent, 608. Galton in Childhood,” American Journal of Psychology
31. Stephanie Shields and Sunil Bhatia, “Darwin on Race, 28 (1917): 209–215.
Gender, and Culture,” American Psychologist 64 (2009): 6. Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (London: Methuen,
113. 1908), 55.
32. Darwin, Descent, 563. 7. Ibid., 37.
33. Ibid., 564. 8. Quoted in Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours
34. See Stephanie Shields, “Passionate Men, Emotional of Francis Galton, 3 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Women: Psychology Constructs Gender Difference in University Press, 1914–1930), vol. 1, 164.
the Late 19th Century,” History of Psychology 10 (2007): 9. Galton, Memories, 55.
92–110. 10. The full phrenologist’s report is held in Folder 81 of
35. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man the Galton Papers in the Library of University College
and Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, London; online at http://wellcomelibrary.org/player
1965), 360; originally published 1872. /b2062427x#?asi=0&ai=1&z=-0.2624%2C0.118%2C1.6463%
36. Charles Darwin, “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” 2C1.0509
Mind: Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 2 11. For further details, see Raymond E. Fancher, “The Con-
(1877): 285. cept of Race in the Life and Thought of Francis Galton,”
37. Ibid., 292. in Defining Difference: Race and Racism in the History
38. Ibid., 294. of Psychology, ed. Andrew Winston (Washington, DC:
39. Darwin, Autobiography, 108–109. American Psychological Association, 2004), 49–75.
40. George J. Romanes, Animal Intelligence (New York: 12. Pearson, Life of Galton, vol. 1, 240.
D. Appleton & Company, 1892; originally published 13. Francis Galton, The Art of Travel (London: David &
1882); George J. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals Charles, 1971); originally published 1872.
(London: Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co., 1883). 14. Quoted in Pearson, Life of Galton, ibid.
41. Paul Ekman, “The Argument and Evidence About 15. For details about his breakdown and its eventual resolution,
Universals in Facial Expressions of Emotion,” in see Raymond E. Fancher, “Eugenics and Other Secular
Handbook of Social Psychophysiology, ed. H. Wagner Religions,” in The Transformation of Psychology: Influences
and A. Manstead (Chichester, UK: Wiley), 143–164. of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology and Natural
42. E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis Science, ed. C. Green, M. Shore, and T. Teo (Washington,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); DC: American Psychological Association, 2001), 3–20.
A6 Notes
16. Galton, Hereditary Genius, 45. 41. Arthur R. Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and
17. Ibid., 82. Scholastic Achievement?” in Environment, Heredity
18. Ibid., 80. and Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational
19. Quoted in Galton, Memories, 290. Review, 1969), 2.
20. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in 42. Arthur R. Jensen, “Obituary of Sir Cyril Burt,” Psycho-
Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (London: Murray, 1879), 28. metrika 17 (1972): 116.
21. Translated from Alphonse de Candolle, Histoire des 43. Jensen, “How Much,” 52.
Sciences et des Savants depuis Deux Siècles (Geneva: 44. Ibid., 28.
Georg, 1873), 93–94. 45. Ibid., 82.
22. Quoted in Pearson, Life of Galton, 135, 136. 46. Interview of Leon Kamin by Raymond Fancher, Dec. 9,
23. Quoted in ibid., 137. 1982; reported more fully in Raymond E. Fancher, The
24. Francis Galton, English Men of Science: Their Nature Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy (New
and Nurture (London: Frank Cass, 1970), 148–150; York: Norton, 1985), 207.
originally published 1874. 47. Leon Kamin, The Science and Politics of I.Q
25. Ibid., 12. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 71; originally
26. F. Galton, “The History of Twins, as a Criterion of published 1974.
the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture,” Fraser’s 48. Ibid., 100.
Magazine 12 (1875): 566-576. 49. Arthur R. Jensen, “Kinship Correlations Reported by Sir
27. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Cyril Burt,” Behavior Genetics 4 (1974): 24.
Development, 2nd ed. (New York: Dutton, 1907), 172. This 50. Arthur R. Jensen, The g Factor: The Science of Mental
volume reprints Galton’s original 1875 article on twins, Ability (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 198–199.
from which the quotation taken, as well as many other of 51. Nancy L. Segal, Born Together—Reared Apart: The
his important shorter writings. Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Cambridge MA:
28. Galton, Hereditary Genius, 45. Harvard University Press, 2012).
29. Francis Galton, “Hereditary Talent and Character.” 52. Ibid., 110.
Macmillan’s Magazine 12 (1865): 157–166, 318–327, 165. 53. Ibid., 114.
30. Galton, Inquiries, 138. 54. Galton, Inquiries, 172.
31. Ibid., 145.
32. Quoted in Forrest, Francis Galton, 281.
33. Galton, Hereditary Genius, 392–404. Chapter 8. American Pioneers: James, Hall,
34. For more details, see Fancher, “The Concept of Race in
Calkins, and Thorndike
the Life and Thought of Francis Galton.”
35. Richard Herrnstein, “IQ.” Atlantic Monthly 228 1. Kurt Danziger, “On the Threshold of the New
(September 1971): 43–64. Psychology: Situating Wundt and James,” in Wundt
36. D. Wahlsten, “The Malleability of Intelligence Is Not Studies: A Centennial Collection, ed. Wolfgang G.
Constrained by Heritability,” in Intelligence, Genes and Bringmann and Ryan D. Tweney (Toronto: Hogrefe,
Success, ed. B. Devlin et al. (New York: Copernicus & 1980), 363–379.
Springer Verlag, 1997), 71–87. 2. Quoted in Arthur L. Blumenthal, Language and Psychol-
37. Horatio Newman, Frank Freeman, and Karl Holzinger, ogy: Historical Aspects of Psycholinguistics (New York:
Twins: A Study of Heredity and Environment (Chicago: Wiley, 1970), 238.
University of Chicago Press, 1937). 3. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New
38. Ibid., 362. York: Dover, 1950), 192–193; originally published 1890.
39. For the combined results of all separated twin studies up 4. William James to Carl Stumpf, February 6, 1887, in
to 1980, see Susan Farber, Identical Twins Reared Apart The Letters of William James, vol. 1, ed. Henry James
(New York: Basic Books, 1981). (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 263.
40. Cyril Burt, “The Genetic Determination of Differences 5. Quoted in F. O. Mattheissen, ed., The James Family:
in Intelligence: A Study of Monozygotic Twins Reared Including Selections from the Writings of Henry James
Together and Apart,” British Journal of Psychology 57 Senior, William, Henry & Alice James (New York: Knopf,
(1966): 137–153. 1961), 161.
Notes A7
6. Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (New 35. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its
York: Collier Books, 1967), 67. Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex,
7. James, Letters, vol, 1, 58. Crime, Religion and Education (New York: Appleton &
8. James to Thomas W. Ward, c. November 1867, in James, Co., 1904).
Letters, vol. 1, 118–119. 36. G. Stanley Hall, “Pedagogical Methods in Sunday School
9. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Work,” Christian Register 74 (November 1895): 719–720.
Study in Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 1982; origi- 37. Sigmund Freud, “The Origin and Development of
nally published 1902), 160. James attributed this passage Psychoanalysis,” American Journal of Psychology 21
to an anonymous French correspondent, but it has since (1910): 181–218.
been identified as autobiographical. See Mattheissen, 38. Quoted in Norma J. Bringmann and Wolfgang G.
The James Family, 216–217. Bringmann, “Wilhelm Wundt and His First American
10. James, Letters, vol. 1, 147–148. Student,” in Wundt Studies, ed. Wolfgang Bringmann
11. Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London: and Ryan Tweney (Toronto: Hogrefe, 1980), 178.
John Parker & Son, 1859). 39. Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology,
12. Allen, William James, 305. 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), 519.
13. James to Henry Holt, May 9, 1890, in James, Letters, 40. Robert Val Guthrie, Even the Rat Was White: A Histori-
vol. 1, 293–294. cal View of Psychology, 2nd ed. (Needham Heights, MA:
14. James, Principles, vol. 1, 237–238. Allyn & Bacon, 1998), Chapter 8.
15. Ibid., 244. 41. Elizabeth Scarborough and Laurel Furumoto, Untold
16. Ibid., 121. Lives: The First Generation of American Women Psychol-
17. Ibid., 127. ogists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 29.
18. Ibid., 123–127. 42. Mary Whiton Calkins, “Autobiography,” in A History of
19. Ibid., vol. 2, 449–450. Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 1, ed. Carl Murchison
20. Ibid., 463. (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1930), 31.
21. Ibid., 561–562. 43. Mary Whiton Calkins, “A Suggested Classification of
22. Ibid., 576. Cases of Association,” Philosophical Review 1 (1892):
23. James, Letters, vol. 2, 2–3. 389–402.
24. James to Theodore Flournoy, September 28, 1909, ibid., 44. Scarborough and Furumoto, Untold Lives, 42.
327–328. 45. Mary Whiton Calkins, “Association: An Essay Analytic
25. Poem by Josiah Royce, quoted in Allen, William James, and Experimental,” Psychological Monographs 1 (1896):
471. 1–56.
26. William James, Will to Believe and Other Essays (New 46. Scarborough and Furumoto, Untold Lives, 44–46.
York: Longmans, Green, 1897); Pragmatism (New York: 47. Mary Whiton Calkins, An Introduction to Psychology
Longmans, Green, 1907); A Pluralistic Universe (New (New York: MacMillan, 1901).
York : Longmans, Green, 1909); The Meaning of Truth 48. Edna Heidbreder, Seven Psychologies (New York:
(New York : Longmans, Green, 1909). Appleton-Century, 1933).
27. Quoted in Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William 49. Edward Lee Thorndike, “Autobiography,” in A History of
James (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 301. Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 3, 264.
28. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A 50. Geraldine Joncich, The Sane Positivist: A Biography
Study in Human Nature (New York: Collier Books, 1961); of Edward L. Thorndike (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
originally published 1902. University Press, 1968), 105–106.
29. Ibid., 160. 51. Edward L. Thorndike, “Animal Intelligence: An
30. Ibid., 163. Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in
31. Ibid., 211. Animals,” Psychological Review Monograph Supple-
32. Ibid., 297. ments 2 (1898): 1–109.
33. Ibid., 389. 52. E. L. Thorndike and R. S. Woodworth, “The Influence of
34. G. Stanley Hall, The Contents of Children’s Minds on Improvement in One Mental Function Upon the Efficiency
Entering School (New York and Chicago: Kellogg & of Other Functions,” Psychological Review 8 (1901):
Co., 1893). 247–261.
A8 Notes
Chapter 9. Psychology as the Science 24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 201.
of Behavior: Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner
26. Ibid., 214.
1. Ivan Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of 27. John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner, “Conditioned
the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex (New Emotional Reactions,” Journal of Experimental
York: Dover, 1960), 3. Psychology 3 (1920): 4.
2. Ivan Sechenov, Reflexes of the Brain (Cambridge, MA: 28. Ibid., 5.
MIT Press, 1965); originally published 1863. 29. Ibid., 7.
3. Boris Petrovich Babkin, Pavlov: A Biography (Chicago: 30. For an analysis of the mythical status of the Little Albert
University of Chicago Press, 1949), 214. study in psychology, see Benjamin Harris, “Whatever
4. Ibid., 37. Happened to Little Albert,” American Psychologist 34
5. Ibid., 110. (1979): 151–160.
6. See Daniel Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science 31. Watson and Rayner, “Conditioned Emotional Reactions,”
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). 12–13.
7. George A. Miller, Psychology: The Science of Mental Life 32. Ibid., 12, 14.
(New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 189. 33. Hall Beck, Sharman Levinson, and Gary Irons, “Finding
8. Quoted in W. Horsley Gantt, Introduction to I. Pavlov, Little Albert: A Journey to John B. Watson’s Infant
Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry (New York: Laboratory,” American Psychologist 64 (2009):
International Publishers, 1941), 35. 605–614.
9. John Broadus Watson, “Autobiography,” in A History of 34. A. J. Fridlund, H. P. Beck, W. D. Goldie, and G. Irons,
Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 3, ed. Carl Murchison “Little Albert: A Neurologically Impaired Child,” History
(Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1936), 271. Also of Psychology 15 (2012): 302–327.
see Kerry W. Buckley, Mechanical Man: John Broadus 35. Russell A. Powell, Nancy Digdon, Benjamin Harris,
Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism (New York and Christopher Smithson, “Correcting the Record
and London: Guilford Press, 1989). on Watson, Rayner, and Little Albert: Albert Barger
10. Watson, “Autobiography,” 272. as “Psychology’s Lost Boy,” American Psychologist 69
11. Ibid., 274, 276. (2014): 600–611.
12. Walter Van Dyke Bingham, “Autobiography,” in A 36. Watson, “Autobiography,” 280.
History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 4, ed. 37. Quoted in Richard J. Herrnstein, Introduction to John B.
E. G. Boring, H. S. Langfeld, H. Werner, and R. M. Yerkes Watson, Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative
(Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1952), 7. Psychology (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
13. Watson, “Autobiography,” 274. 1967), xxii.
14. Ibid. 38. John B. Watson, Behaviorism (New York: Norton,
15. Buckley, Mechanical Man, 49–50. 1970), 94.
16. Robert H. Wozniak and Jorge A. Santiago-Blay, “Trouble at 39. Ibid., 104.
Tyson Alley: James Mark Baldwin’s Arrest in a Baltimore 40. Ibid.
Bordello,” History of Psychology 16 (2013): 227–248. 41. Mary Cover Jones, “Albert, Peter, and John B. Watson,”
17. John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views American Psychologist 29 (1974): 581–583.
It,” Psychological Review 20 (1913): 159. 42. Mary Cover Jones, “A Laboratory Study of Fear: The
18. Ibid., 158. Case of Peter,” Pedagogical Seminary 31 (1924): 309.
19. John B. Watson, Behavior: An Introduction to Compar- 43. Mary Cover Jones, “The Elimination of Children’s
ative Psychology (New York: Henry Holt & Company, Fears,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 7
1914). (1924): 390.
20. John B. Watson, “The Place of the Conditioned Reflex in 44. Jones, “Albert, Peter, and John B. Watson,” 582.
Psychology,” Psychological Review 23 (1916): 89. 45. John B. Watson, Psychological Care of Infant and Child
21. Watson, “Autobiography,” 278. (New York: Norton, 1928), 40–41.
22. John B. Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a 46. Ibid., 81–82.
Behaviorist (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919). 47. Quoted in Mufid James Hannush, “John B. Watson
23. Ibid., 200. Remembered: An Interview with James B. Watson,”
18_POP_28354_notes_A1-A20.indd 8 18/10/16 2:23 PM

Notes A9
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 23 Chapter 10. Social Influence and Social
(1987): 137. Psychology: From Mesmer to Milgram and
48. Watson, “Autobiography,” 281. Beyond
49. For more on Hull’s work at Yale, see Jill G. Morawski,
“Organizing Knowledge and Behavior at Yale’s Institute 1. Frank Pattie, “A Brief History of Hypnotism,” in Hand-
of Human Relations,” Isis 77 (1986): 219–242. book of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, ed. Jesse E.
50. B. F. Skinner, “Autobiography,” in A History of Psy- Gordon (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 13.
chology in Autobiography, vol. 5, ed. G. E. Boring and 2. Quoted in Vincent Buranelli, The Wizard from
Gardner Lindzey (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Vienna (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan,
1967), 407. 1975), 59.
51. Ibid., 396. 3. Ibid., 67.
52. B. F. Skinner, Particulars of My Life (New York: Knopf, 4. Pattie, “Brief History,” 21.
1976), 237. 5. For details about Faria, see Peter Sheehan and Campbell
53. Ibid., 249. Perry, Methodologies of Hypnosis: A Critical Appraisal
54. Ibid., 264. of Contemporary Paradigms of Hypnosis (New York:
55. Ibid., 298. Erlbaum, 1976), 21ff.
56. B. F. Skinner, “A Case History in Scientific Method,” in 6. Gregory Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology (New
Psychology: A Study of a Science, vol. 2, ed. Sigmund York: Norton, 1967), 352.
Koch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). 7. Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology,
57. Ibid., 362. 2nd. ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950), 121.
58. B. F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms (New York: 8. Zilboorg, History of Medical Psychology, 352–353.
D. Appleton & Company, 1938 9. Boring, History of Experimental Psychology, 123–124.
59. B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 10. Melvin Gravitz and Manuel Gerton, “Origins of the
1962), 264. Term Hypnotism Prior to Braid,” American Journal of
60. For more on the evolution of one of these communities, Clinical Hypnosis 27 (1984): 107–116.
as recounted by one of its founders, see Kat Kinkade, 11. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious
Is It Utopia Yet? (Louisa, VA: Twin Oaks Publishing, (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 87.
1994). Also see Hilke Kuhlmann, Living Walden Two: 12. Hippolyte Bernheim, De La Suggestion and de ses Appli-
B. F. Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia and Experimental cations à la Thérapeutique (Paris: Octave Doin, 1891).
Communities (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois 13. Alfred Binet and Charles Féré, “La Polarisation
Press, 2005). Psychique.” Revue Philosophique 19 (1885), 375.
61. B. F. Skinner, A Matter of Consequences (New York: 14. Theta Wolf, Alfred Binet (Chicago: University of
Knopf, 1983), 395. Chicago Press, 1973), 50.
62. B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton- 15. Ibid.
Century Crofts, 1957). 16. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
63. Gerald E. Zuriff, Behaviorism: A Conceptual Reconstruc- (New York: Viking, 1960; originally published 1895).
tion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 255. 17. Ibid., 31–32.
64. Skinner, Verbal Behavior, 449. 18. Ibid.
65. Noam Chomsky, “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal 19. Ibid., 118–119.
Behavior,” Language 35 (1959): 26–58. 20. Wolf, Alfred Binet, 158.
66. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: 21. A. Binet and V. Henri, “De La Suggestibilité Naturelle
Mouton, 1957). Chez Les Enfants,” Revue Philosophique 38 (1894):
67. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: 337–347.
Bantam/Vintage, 1971). 22. Translated from A. Binet, La Suggestibilité (Paris:
68. For a review and analysis of these reactions, see Alexandra Schleicher, 1900), 294.
Rutherford, “B. F. Skinner’s Technology of Behavior in 23. This distinction between anticipators and founders
American Life: From Consumer Culture to Countercul- was proposed in G. Sarup, “Historical Antecedents of
ture,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 39 Psychology: The Recurrent Issue of Old Wine in New
(2003): 1–23. Bottles,” American Psychologist 33 (1978): 478–485.
A10 Notes
24. Norman Triplett, “The Dynamogenic Factors in Pace- 41. Allan Fenigstein, “Milgram’s Shock Experiments and the
making and Competition,” American Journal of Psychol- Nazi Perpetrators: A Contrarian Perspective on the Role
ogy 9 (1898): 507–533. of Obedience Pressures During the Holocaust,”Theory &
25. His thesis results were subsequently published in Floyd Psychology, 25 (2015): 581–598.
H. Allport, “The Influence of the Group Upon Associa- 42. See Gina Perry, Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold
tion and Thought,” Journal of Experimental Psychology Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments
3 (1920): 159–182. (New York: The New Press, 2013). For a critical analysis
26. Morton Prince and Floyd H. Allport, “Editorial An- of the “Milgram Machine,” see the entire issue of Theory
nouncement,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology and & Psychology devoted to the topic, Augustine Brannigan,
Social Psychology 16 (1921): 1–2. Ian Nicholson, and Frances Cherry, eds., “Unplugging
27. Floyd Allport, Social Psychology (Boston: Houghton the Milgram Machine,” Theory & Psychology 25(5) (2015):
Mifflin, 1924). 551–689.
28. John Frederick Dashiell, “The Need and Opportunity for 43. Details on Milgram’s life and work are given in Blass,
Experimental Social Psychology,” Social Forces 15 (1937): The Man Who Shocked the World.
492. 44. Jerry M. Burger, “Replicating Milgram: Would People
29. K. Lewin, R. Lippitt, and R. K. White, “Patterns of Still Obey Today?” American Psychologist 64 (2009):
Aggressive Behavior in Experimentally Created ‘Social 1–11.
Climates,’ “ Journal of Social Psychology 10 (1939): 45. Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr., and Jeffry A. Simpson, “The Power
271–299. of the Situation: The Impact of Milgram’s Obedience
30. Solomon E. Asch, “Opinions and Social Pressure,” Studies on Personality and Social Psychology,”
Scientific American 193 (1955): 31–35. American Psychologist 64 (2009): 17.
31. Ibid., 31. 46. Muzafer Sherif, “Crisis in Social Psychology: Some
32. The general theory is presented in Leon Festinger, A Remarks Towards Breaking Through the Crisis,”
Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, IL: Row Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 3 (1977): 371.
Peterson, 1957). 47. Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer, “Reconstruction
33. Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the
When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study Interaction Between Language and Memory,” Journal of
of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13 (1974): 585–589.
of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 48. E. Loftus and J. Pickrell, “The Formation of False
Press, 1956). Memories,” Psychiatric Annals 25 (1995): 720–725.
34. Leon Festinger and James M. Carlsmith, “Cognitive
Consequences of Forced Compliance,” Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58 (1959):
203–210. Chapter 11. Mind in Conflict: Freudian
35. Stanley Milgram, “Nationality and Conformity,” Scien-
Psychoanalysis and Its Successors
tific American 205 (1961): 45–52. Also see Thomas Blass,
The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of 1. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria
Stanley Milgram (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 51–53. (originally published 1895) in The Standard Edition of
36. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). vol. 2, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press,
37. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” 1953–1974), 108.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963): 2. See Meredith M. Kimball, “From ‘Anna O.’ to Bertha Pap-
371. penheim: Transforming Private Pain into Public Action,”
38. Ibid., 377. History of Psychology 3 (2000): 20–43.
39. Ian Nicholson, “Torture at Yale”: Experimental 3. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 7.
Subjects, Laboratory Torment, and the “Rehabilitation” 4. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,
of Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority,” Theory & ed. O. Kraus and L.McAlister, tr. A. Rancurello (Atlantic
Psychology 21 (2011): 737–761. Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1973, originally
40. See http://www.prisonexp.org/ published 1874.
Notes A11
5. For more on Brentano’s probable influence on Freud, see 26. Jung, Memories, 152–153.
Raymond E. Fancher, “Brentano’s Psychology from an 27. Ibid., 153.
Empirical Standpoint and Freud’s Early Metapsychol- 28. C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. S. Shamdasani,
ogy,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13 trans. M. Kyburz, J. Peck, and S. Shamdasani (New York:
(1977): 207–227. Norton, 2009); a Reader’s Edition, containing all the words
6. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (originally but omitting the numerous illustrations, was simultane-
published 1900) in Standard Edition, vols. 4 and 5. ously published by Norton.
7. Ibid., vol. 5, 583. 29. J. J. Putnam, “Recent Experiences in the Study and
8. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Treatment of Hysteria at the Massachusetts General
(originally published 1905), in Standard Edition, vol. 7. Hospital, with Remarks on Freud’s Method of Treatment
9. Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psycho-Analysis (New by ‘Psycho-Analysis,’_” Journal of Abnormal Psychology
York: Basic Books, 1954), 325. 1 (1906): 26–41.
10. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case 30. Sigmund Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psy-
of Hysteria” (originally published 1905), in Standard choanalysis,” American Journal of Psychology 21 (1910):
Edition, vol. 7, 64. 181–218.
11. Ibid., 86. 31. R. B. Evans and W. A. Koelsch, “Psychoanalysis Arrives
12. Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” in in America: The 1909 Psychology Conference at Clark
Standard Edition, vol. 1, 293–387. University,” American Psychologist 40 (1985): 942–948;
13. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 536. quotations from 944–945.
14. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (originally published 32. Quoted in Saul Rosenzweig, The Historic Expedition to
1923), in Standard Edition, vol. 19, 3–66. America (1909): Freud, Jung and Hall the King-maker
15. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (St. Louis: Rana House, 1994), 174.
(New York: International Universities Press, 1967); origi- 33. Knight Dunlap, Mysticism, Freudianism and Scientific
nally published 1936. Psychology (St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1920): 8.
16. Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the 34. J. B. Watson and R. Rayner, “Conditioned Emotional
Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (originally Reactions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 3
published 1925), in Standard Edition, vol. 19, 248–258); (1920): 14.
quotations from 249, 258. 35. J. M. Cattell, “Some Psychological Experiments,” Science
17. Ibid., 257–258. 63 (1926): 5.
18. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New 36. J. C. Burnham, “From Avant-Garde to Specialism: Psy-
York: Pantheon, 1974), 322. choanalysis in America,” Journal of the History of the
19. Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences,” 258. Behavioral Sciences 15 (1979): 129.
20. Karen Horney, “The Flight from Womanhood: The 37. Quoted in D. Shakow and D. Rapaport, The Influence of
Masculinity Complex in Women as Viewed by Men and Freud on American Psychology (Cleveland, OH: World
by Women,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 3 Publishing Company, 1968), 131.
(1926): 324–339. 38. Gail Hornstein, “The Return of the Repressed: Psy-
21. See Clara Thompson, “Cultural Pressures in the Psychol- chology’s Problematic Relations with Psychoanalysis,
ogy of Women,” Psychiatry 5 (1942): 331–339; and 1909-1960,” American Psychologist 47 (1992): 254–263;
Clara Thompson, “Some Effects of the Derogatory quotation from 258.
Attitude toward Female Sexuality,” Psychiatry 13 (1950):
349–354.
22. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in Stan-
dard Edition, vol. 21; originally published 1930 Chapter 12. Psychology Gets “Personality”:
23. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As If, tr. C. K. Ogden
Allport, Maslow, and the Broadening Field
(London: Keegan Paul, 1924); originally published 1911.
24. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections (New 1. Gordon W. Allport, “An Autobiography,” in The Person in
York: Vintage Books, 1965). Psychology: Selected Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968),
25. C. G. Jung, “The Association Method,” American Journal 385.
of Psychology 31 (1910): 220. 2. Ibid.
A12 Notes
3. Quoted in Edward Hoffman, The Right to Be Human: Donald W. Fiske , eds. P. T. Shrout and S. T. Fiske
A Biography of Abraham Maslow, rev. ed. (New York: (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 29–43.
McGraw-Hill, 1999), 23. 29. Ian Davidson, “‘The Era of Skepticism’: Disciplinary
4. Allport, “Autobiography,” 379. Controversy and Crisis as Detour to the Big Five,”
5. Quoted in Ian Nicholson, Inventing Personality: Gordon Thesis for the Degree of Master of Arts (Toronto: York
Allport and the Science of Selfhood (Washington, DC: University, 2015).
American Psychological Association, 2002), 34. 30. Gordon W. Allport, Letters from Jenny (New York: Harcourt
6. Allport, “Autobiography,” 380. Brace, 1965); originally published anonymously in 1946.
7. Ibid., 383–384. 31. See Forrest Robinson, Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry
8. Alan Elms, “Allport’s Personality and Allport’s Personal- A. Murray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
ity,” in Fifty Years of Personality Psychology, ed. Kenneth 1992); and Claire Douglas, Translate This Darkness:
H. Craik et al., (New York: Plenum, Press, 1993), 39–55. A Life of Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung’s
9. Allport, “Autobiography,” 383–384. Circle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
10. For details, see Nicholson, Inventing Personality. 32. Quoted in Robinson, Love’s Story Told, 176.
11. Floyd Allport and Gordon W. Allport, “Personality Traits: 33. Nicholson, Inventing Personality, 183–188.
Their Classification and Measurement,” Journal of 34. H. A. Murray and the workers at the Harvard Psycholog-
Abnormal and Social Psychology 16 (1921): 6–40. ical Clinic, Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and
12. Allport, “Autobiography,” 386–387. Experimantal Study of fifty Men of College Age (New
13. Nicholson, Inventing Personality, 112–113. York: Oxford University Press, 1938).
14. Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert, “Trait Names: A Psycho- 35. See, for example, David McClelland, The Achieving
lexical Study.” Psychological Monographs: General and Society (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1961); also
Applied 47 (1, Whole No. 211): 171–220. McClelland, The Roots of Consciousness (Princeton, NJ:
15. Gordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Inter- Van Nostrand, 1964).
pretation (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1937). 36. Walter Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret
16. Ross Stagner, Psychology of Personality (New York: Wartime Report (New York: Basic Books, 1972).
McGraw-Hill, 1937). 37. Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow
17. Allport, Personality, 3. Wilson: A Psychological Study (Boston: Houghton
18. Ibid., 389. Mifflin, 1966).
19. Ibid., 395. 38. William T. Schultz, ed., Handbook of Psychobiography
20. Ibid., 181. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
21. Ibid., 183. 39. Dan McAdams, “What Psychobiographers Might Learn
22. For example, see David Rapaport, Organization and from Personality Theory,” in Schultz, Handbook of
Pathology of Thought: Selected Sources (New York: Psychobiography, 64-83.
Columbia University Press, 1951). 40. Gordon Allport, The Individual and His Religion (New
23. David C. Funder, The Personality Puzzle, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1950).
York: Norton, 2010), 242. 41. Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, MA:
24. For details, see R. B. Cattell, Personality and Motivation: Addison-Wesley, 1954), 9.
Structure and Measurement. (New York: World Book, 1957). 42. Thomas Pettigrew, “Gordon Willard Allport: A Tribute,”
25. H. J. Eysenck, The Scientific Study of Personality (New Journal of Social Issues 35 (1999): 415–428.
York: Macmillan, 1952), 18. 43. The most recent of these is S. T. Fiske, G. T. Gilbert and
26. Walter Mischel, Personality and Assessment (New York: G. Lindzey, eds., Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th ed.
Wiley, 1968). (New York: Wiley, 2010).
27. Several research groups contributed significantly to the 44. Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey, Theories of
five-factor consensus; see, for example, J. M. Digman, Personality (New York: Wiley, 1957).
“Emergence of the Five-Factor Model,” Annual Review of 45. Quotations from Maslow’s unpublished writings
Psychology 41 (1990): 417–440. reproduced in Hoffman, Right to Be Human, 1–9.
28. L. R. Goldberg, “What the Hell Took So Long? Donald W. 46. Quoted in Ian Nicholson, “Giving Up Maleness:
Fiske and the Big-Five Factor Structure,” in Personality, Abraham Maslow, Masculinity and the Boundaries of
Research, Methods, and t\Theory: A Festschrift Honoring Psychology,” History of Psychology 4 (2001): 81.
Notes A13
47. Hoffman, Right to Be Human., 11. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association,
48. Carl Murchison, ed., The Psychologies of 1925 2000).
(Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1925). 72. Hoffman, Right to Be Human, 240.
49. Hoffman, Right to Be Human, 30. 73. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 2nd ed., xiii.
50. Ibid., 37. 74. A. M. Maslow, “Toward a Humanistic Biology,”American
51. Ibid., 36. Psychologist 24 (1969): 724.
52. Abraham Maslow, “Individual Psychology and the 75. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, xv.
Social Behavior of Monkeys and Apes,” International 76. Rob Hirtz, “Martin Seligman’s Journey from Learned
Journal of Individual Psychology 1 (1935): 47–59; A. H. Helplessness to Learned Happiness, The Pennsylvania
Maslow, “The Role of Dominance in the Sexual and Gazette, 1999, available online at http:// www.upenn
Social Behavior of Infra-human Primates: Observations .edu/gazette/0199/hirtz.html.
at the Vilas Park Zoo,” Journal of Genetic Psychology 77. Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change
(1936): 261–277. Your Mind and Your Life (New York: Knopf, 1991).
53. Quoted in Hoffman, Right to Be Human, 57. 78. Quotation from the IPPA website: http://www.ippanetwork
54. For details about the extraordinary difficulties Jewish .org.
applicants faced during this period, see Andrew
Winston, “The Defects of His Race: E. G. Boring and
Anti-Semitism in American Psychology, 1923-1953,” Chapter 13. The Developing Mind: Binet, Piaget,
History of Psychology 1 (1998): 27–51.
and the Study of Intelligence
55. Hoffman, Right to Be Human, 788
56. Ibid., 66. 1. The papers appeared in French in 1880 but may be found
57. Ibid., 80. in English translation in R. H. Pollack and M. W. Brenner,
58. Margaret Mead, Preface to New Edition in Ruth Benedict, eds., The Experimental Psychology of Alfred Binet:
Patterns of Culture (New York: Mentor Books, 1959), v. Selected Papers (New York: Springer, 1969) under the
59. Quoted in Hoffman, Right to Be Human, 117. titles “The Perception of Lengths and Numbers in Some
60. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar & Small Children” (79–92), “Children’s Perceptions (93–126),
Rinehart, 1941). and “Studies of Movements of Some Small Children”
61. A. H. Maslow and B. Mittleman, Principles of Abnormal (156–167).
Psychology: The Dynamics of Psychic Illness (Norwalk 2. Binet, “Children’s Perceptions,” 120.
CT: Harper, 1941). 3. Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child
62. Quoted in Hoffman, Right to Be Human, 139, 141. (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 79.
63. A. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psycholog- 4. See Alfred Binet, “De la Fusion des Sensations Sembla-
ical Review 50 (1943): 382. bles,” Revue Philosophique 10 (1880): 284–294; and J. L.
64. Ibid., 375. R. Delboeuf, “Note” in Revue Philosophique 10 (1880):
65. Ibid., 381. 644–648.
66. Ibid., 382. 5. Translated from Alfred Binet, “Le Raisonnement dans
67. Quoted in Hoffman, Right to Be Human, 172. les Perceptions,” Revue Philosophique 15 (1883): 412.
68. A. H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 2nd ed. (New 6. Quoted in T. H. Wolf, Alfred Binet (Chicago: University
York: Harper & Row, 1970), 179–180; originally published of Chicago Press, 1973), 61.
1954. 7. Alfred Binet, “Alterations of Personality,” in Significant
69. Ibid., 281. Contributions to the History of Psychology, Series C, vol. 5,
70. Carl Rogers, Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current ed. D. W. Robinson (Washington, DC: University Publica-
Practice, Implications and Theory (Boston: Houghton tions of America, 1977), 76; originally published 1891.
Mifflin, 1951). 8. Binet, “Studies of Movements of Children,” 157.
71. For details, see C. Aanstoos, L. Serlin, and T. Greening, 9. Quoted in Wolf, Alfred Binet, 158.
“History of Division 32 (Humanistic Psychology) of the 10. Translated from Alfred Binet, La Suggestibilité (Paris:
American Psychological Association,” in Unification Schneider, 1900), 119–120.
through Division: Histories of the Divisions of the Amer- 11. Alred Binet, L’Étude Experimentale de l’Intelligence
ican Psychological Association, vol. 5, ed. D. Dewsbury (Paris: Schleicher, 1903)
A14 Notes
12. Translated from Ibid., 218–219. Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses (Stanford, CA:
13. Quoted in Wolf, Alfred Binet, 140. Stanford University Press, 1926).
14. Translated from Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, “Sur 27. The series began with L. Terman and others, Genetic
la Necessité d’Établir un Diagnostic Scientifique d’États Studies of Genius, Vol. 1, Mental and Physical Traits of
Inferieurs de l’Intelligence,” L’Année Psychologique 11 a Thousand Gifted Children (Stanford, CA: Stanford
(1905): 164. University Press, 1926) and continued through L. Terman
15. Translated from Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, and M. H. Oden, Genetic Studies of Genius, Vol. 5, The
“Applications des Méthodes Nouvelles au Diagnos- Gifted Group at Mid-Life ((Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
tique du Niveau Intellectuel chez les Enfants Normaux sity Press, 1959).
et Anormaux d’Hospice et d’École Primaire,” L’Année 28. See Daniel Goleman, “1,528 Little Geniuses and How
Psychologique 11 (1905): 320–321. They Grew,” Psychology Today (February 1980): 28–43;
16. See Theta H. Wolf, “A New Perspective on Alfred Binet: also Katherine Duggan and Howard Friedman, “Life-
Dramatist of Le Théatre de l’Horreur,” The Psychological time Biopsychosocial Trajectories of the Terman Gifted
Record 32 (1982): 397–407. Children” in The Wiley Handbook of Genius, ed. Dean
17. A. Binet and T. Simon, The Development of Intelligence K. Simonton (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
in Children (The Binet-Simon Scale), tr. Elizabeth Kite 29. See David Wechsler, The Measurement and Appraisal
(Vineland, NJ: Publications of the Training School of Adult Intelligence, 4th ed. (Baltimore, MD: Williams &
at Vineland, 1916), Reprint Edition (New York: Arno Wilkens, 1958) for a description and account of the early
Press, 1973)., versions of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale and
18. For example see H. H. Goddard, “The Menace of the the WAIS.
Feeble-Minded,” Pediatrics 83 (June 1911): 350-359. 30. James R. Flynn, “The Mean IQ of Americans: Massive
19. H. H. Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Gains 1932 to 1978,” Psychological Bulletin 95 (1984):
Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Macmillan, 29–51.
1912). 31. Ulric Neisser, “Rising Scores on Intelligence Tests,”
20. Ibid., 29. American Scientist 85 (1997): 440–447.
21. Ibid., 11-12. 32. Jean Piaget, “An Autobiography,” in Jean Piaget: The
22. For details see Paul Weindling, Health, Race and Man and His Ideas, ed. Richard I. Evans (New York:
German Politics between National Unification and Dutton, 1973, 105-143), 138n.
Nazism 1870-1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 33. Ibid., 111.
University Press, 1989). 34. Ibid.
23. H. H. Goddard, “Feeblemindedness: A Question of 35. Jean Piaget, Recherche (Lausanne, Switzerland: La
Definition,” Journal of Psycho-Asthenics 33 (1928): Concorde, 1918).
219-227, 224. 36. Ibid., 118–119.
24. Translated from Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, “Le 37. Ibid, 128.
Developpement de l’Intelligence Chez les Enfants,” 38. Bärbel Inhelder, “Observations sur le Principe de
L’Année Psychologique 14 (1908): 85. Conservation dans la Physique de l’Enfant,” Cahiers de
25. For accounts of the army testing program, see Daniel Pédagogie Expérimentale et de Psychologie de l’Enfant 9
Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence: Psychol- (1936): 1–16.
ogists and the Military in World War I,” Journal 39. “Bärbel Inhelder,” in A History of Psychology in Auto-
of American History 55 (1968): 565–581; and Franz biography, vol. 8, ed. Gardner Lindzey (Stanford, CA:
Samelson, “World War I Intelligence Testing and the Stanford University Press, 1989), 209–243.
Development of Psychology,” Journal of the History of 40. Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, The Child’s Construc-
the Behavioral Sciences 13 (1977): 274–282. Stepen Jay tion of Quantities: Conservation and Atomism (London:
Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, Routledge, 1974; tranlsated from the French edition of
1981) documents the many deficiencies and biases that 1941).
marred the testing program. 41. Bärbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, The Growth of Logical
26. Lewis Terman, “The Intelligence Quotient of Francis Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence: An Essay on
Galton in Childhood,” American Journal of Psychol- the Construction of Formal Logical Structures (New York:
ogy 28 (1917):209–215; and Catherine Cox, The Early Basic Books, 1958); originally published 1955.
Notes A15
42. Jean Piaget, Genetic Epistemology (New York: Norton, 13. Stanley Padua, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and
1970), 15. Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer
43. Quoted in Evans, Jean Piaget, 53. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015).
44. J. S. Bruner, “Jerome S. Bruner,” in A History of Psychol- 14. Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,
ogy in Autobiography, vol. 7, ed. Gardner Lindzey (San 1809–1882 (New York: Norton, 1952), 108.
Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980), 126. 15. Quoted in Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, 2nd ed.,
45. Example described in Lev S. Vygotsky, “Interaction rev. Uta C. Merzbach (New York: Wiley, 1989), 578.
between Development and Learning,” in Readings on 16. A. M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Appli-
the Development of Children, 2nd ed., eds. Mary Gauvain cation to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the
and Michael Cole (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997), London Mathematical Society 42 (1937): 230–265.
29–36. 17. C. E. Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Switching and
Relay Circuits,” Transactions of the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers 57 (1938), 1–11.
18. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus
Chapter 14. Minds, Machines, and Cognitive
of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of
Psychology Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115–133.
1. Quoted in S. L. Jaki, Brain, Mind and Computers 19. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
(Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1989), 24. Mind 49 (1950).
2. Quoted in Morris Bishop, Pascal: The Life of a Genius 20. Ibid., 454.
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 31; and Ernest 21. For details see Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The
Mortimer, Blaise Pascal: The Life and Work of a Realist Enigma of Intelligence (London: Burnett Books, 1983).
(London: Methuen, 1959), 66. 22. C. E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communica-
3. Quoted in J. Bronowski and B. Mazlish, The Western In- tion,” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379–423,
tellectual Tradition from Leonardo to Hegel (New York: 623–656.
Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 240. 23. Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the
4. Ibid. Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 146.
5. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma (London: Dent, 24. G. Ernst and A. Newell, GPS: A Case Study in Generality
1973), 57, 59. and Problem Solving (New York: Academic Press, 1969),
6. G. M. Ross, Leibniz (Oxford, UK: Oxford University 2.
Press, 1984), 12. 25. G. Miller, E. Galanter, and K. Pribram, Plans and the
7. For a full discussion of Leibniz’s approach to logic, see Ver- Structure of Behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart &
non Pratt, Thinking Machines: The Evolution of Artificial Winston, 1960).
Intelligence (New York and Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 26. Ibid., 210, 212.
1987), Chapter 3. 27. Ibid., 213.
8. Christopher Evans, The Mighty Micro: The Impact of the 28. Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and
Computer Revolution (London: Gollancz, 1979), 28. Mechanisms (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990).
9. “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Char- 29. John Searle, “Minds, Brains and Programs,” Behavioral
les Babbage by L. F. Menabrea, with Notes upon the and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 417–424.
Memoir by the Translator, Ada Augusta, Countess of 30. G. A. Miller, “George A. Miller,” in A History of Psychol-
Lovelace,” in Charles Babbage and his Calculating ogy in Autobiography, vol. 8, ed. G. Lindzey (Stanford,
Engines, eds. P. Morrison and E. Morrison (New York: CA: Stanford University Press 1989), 390–418, 391–392.
Dover, 1961), 225–295. An online version of this work 31. Ibid., 396.
with a summary of its publication history is provided 32. Quoted in M. A. Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of
in Christopher Green’s Classics in the History of Cognitive Science, vol. 1 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Psychology website: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/ Press, 2006), 287.
Lovelace/menabrea.htm#f3 33. Miller, “George A. Miller,” 401.
10. Morrison and Morrison, eds., “Sketch,” 252. 34. G. A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus
11. Ibid., 249. Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Infor-
12. Ibid., 284. mation,” Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97.
A16 Notes
35. Ibid., 96. 65. Neisser, “Autobiography,” 284.

36. Miller, “George A. Miller,” 402. 66. Ibid., 290.
37. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: 67. E. Winograd and U. Neisser, eds., Affect and Accuracy
Mouton, 1957). in Recall: Studies of “Flashbulb” Memories (New York:
38. Miller, “George A. Miller,” 405. Cambridge University Press, 1992).
39. Ibid., 404. 68. Neisser, “Autobiography,” 297.
40. G. A. Miller, “The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical Per-
spective,” Trends in Cognitive Science 7 (2003): 141–142.
41. J. S. Bruner, “Jerome S. Bruner,” in A History of Psy- Chapter 15. Applying Psychology: From the
chology in Autobiography, vol. 7, ed. G. Lindzey (San
Witness Stand to the Workplace
Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980), 77.
42. Ibid., 80. 1. This claim about Münsterberg’s status is made in
43. Ibid., 80–81. Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo
44. J. S. Bruner and C. Goodman, “Value and Need as Orga- Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology
nizing Factors in Percepton,” Journal of Abnormal and (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 3.
Social Psychology 42 (1947): 33–44. 2. Details of Münsterberg’s involvement in the Orchard
45. J. S. Bruner and L Postman,”On the Perception of case are drawn principally from Hale, Human Science
Incongruity: A Paradigm,” Journal of Personality 18 and Social Order, and Margaret Münsterberg, Hugo
(1949): 206–223. Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: Appleton
46. Miller, “George A. Miller,” 410. and Company, 1922).
47. Miller, “The Cognitive Revolution,” 142. 3. Hugo Münsterberg, On the Witness Stand (New York:
48. See Christopher Green, “Where Did the Word ‘Cogni- Doubleday, 1908).
tive’ Come From, Anyway?,” Canadian Psychology 37 4. Ibid. 3.
(1996): 31–39. 5. Anne Anastasi, a noted expert on testing and psycho-
49. Edward C. Tolman, “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,” metrics, called Münsterberg “the first all-round applied
Psychological Review 55 (1948): 189–208. psychologist in America” in her book Fields of Applied
50. Miller, “George A. Miller,” 411–412. Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 4.
51. Miller, “George A. Miller,” 411. 6. As noted in Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging: German-
52. Ibid., 412. American Intellectuals and the First World War
53. Frederic Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimen- (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 13.
tal and Social Psychology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 7. Hugo Münsterberg, Die Willenshandlung: Ein Beitrag zur
University Press, 1932). physiologischen Psychologie (Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr).
54. Miller, “The Cognitive Revolution,” 142. 8. Keller, States of Belonging, 27.
55. Ulric Neisser, “Autobiography,” in A History of Psychology 9. As described in Ludy T. Benjamin, “Hugo Münsterberg:
in Autobiography, vol. 9, eds. G. Lindzey and W. M. Runyan Portrait of an Applied Psychologist,” in Portraits of
(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, Pioneers in Psychology, vol. 4, eds. G. A. Kimble and
2007), 269–270. M. Wertheimer (Washington, DC: APA, 2000), 113–129.
56. Ibid., 271. 10. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and the Teacher (New
57. Ibid. York and London: Appleton and Company, 1909).
58. Ibid., 278. 11. Peter van Drunen, Pieter J. van Strien, and Eric Haas,
59. O. G. Selfridge and U. Neisser, “Pattern Recognition by “Work and Organization” in A Social History of Psychol-
Machine.” Scientific American 203 (1960), 60–68. ogy, eds. J. Jansz and P. van Drunen (London: Blackwell,
60. Neisser, “Autobiography,” 281–282. 2004), 143.
61. Ulric Neisser, “The Imitation of Man by Machine,” 12. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
Science 193 (1963): 193–197. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913).
62. Neisser, “Autobiography,” 282. 13. Hugo Münsterberg, Business Psychology (Chicago:
63. Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York: Lasalle Extension University, 1915).
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967). 14. Walter Dill Scott, The Theory and Practice of Advertising
64. Ibid., 4. (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1903) and The
Notes A17
Psychology of Advertising (Boston: Small, Maynard & 32. Jeff Sonnenfeld, “Clarifying Critical Confusion In the
Company, 1908). Hawthorne Hysteria,” American Psychologist 37 (1982):
15. W. K. Wright, “Review of The Psychology of Advertising,” 1397–1399; quotation from 1398.
Psychological Bulletin 5 (1908): 396–398; quotation 33. Apparently even this interpretation has been questioned
from 397. by scholars who report that the other workers disliked
16. Geoffrey C. Bunn, “The Lie Detector, Wonder Woman, these two women and the workers themselves requested
and Liberty: The Life and Work of William Moulton their dismissal. See Sonnenfeld, “Clarifying Critical
Marston, History of the Human Sciences 10 (1997): Confusion.”
91–119. 34. See Kevin T. Mahoney and David B. Baker, “Elton Mayo
17. For a highly entertaining account of Marston’s life and and Carl Rogers: A Tale of Two Techniques,” Journal of
the development of the Wonder Woman comic, see Jill Vocational Behavior 60 (2002): 437–450.
Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New 35. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the
York: Knopf, 2014). Private Self, 2nd ed. (London: Free Association Books,
18. L. M. Gilbreth, Psychology of Management (New York: 1999), 71.
Sturgis and Walton, 1914). 36. Harry L. Hollingworth, Leta Stetter Hollingworth: A
19. Robert Perloff and John L. Naman, “Lillian Gilbreth: Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
Tireless Advocate for a General Psychology,” in Portraits 1943), 33.
of Pioneers in Psychology, vol. 2, eds. G. A. Kimble, C. 37. Ibid., 73.
A. Boneau, and M. Wertheimer (Washington, DC: APA, 38. For a description of the study and subsequent trial
1996), 107–116. and its significance in the history of applied psy-
20. Lillian M. Gilbreth, As I Remember: An Autobiography chology, see Ludy T. Benjamin, Anne M. Rogers, and
(Norcross, GA: Engineering & Management Press, Angela Rosenbaum, “Coca-Cola, Caffeine, and Mental
1998), 73. Deficiency: Harry Hollingworth and the Chattanooga
21. Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Motion Study: A Method for Trial of 1911,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral
Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman (New York: Van Sciences 27 (1991): 42–55.
Nostrand, 1911). 39. Ann G. Klein, A Forgotten Voice: A Biography of Leta
22. L. M. Gilbreth, The Psychology of Management (New Stetter Hollingworth (Scottsdale, AZ: Great Potential
York: Sturgis & Walton, 1914), 32. Press, 2002), 72.
23. Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, 40. Harry’s reluctance to engage in applied psychology is dis-
Cheaper by the Dozen (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1948); cussed in Ludy T. Benjamin, “Harry Hollingworth: Portrait
quotation from the First Perennial Classics Edition (New of a Generalist,” in Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, vol.
York: HarperCollins, 2002), 52. 2, eds. Gregory A. Kimble, C. Alan Boneau, and Michael
24. Shortly after her husband’s death, Lillian Gilbreth wrote Wertheimer (Washington, DC: APA, 1996), 119–135.
his biography, The Quest of the One Best Way: A Sketch 41. Harry Hollingworth, Advertising and Selling: Principles
of the Life of Frank Bunker Gilbreth (Chicago: Society of of Appeal and Response (New York and London: Apple-
Industrial Engineers, 1925). ton and Company, 1913).
25. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, The Homemaker and Her Job 42. Benjamin, “Harry Hollingworth: Portrait of a Generalist,”
(New York: Appleton and Company, 1927). 134.
26. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, Living With Our Children (New 43. L. S. Hollingworth, “Variability as Related to Sex Differ-
York: W. W. Norton, 1928). ences in Achievement: A Critique,” American Journal of
27. Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of Sociology 19 (1914): 528.
the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 44. L. S. Hollingworth, “Functional Periodicity: An Ex-
University Press, 1991) 3–4. perimental Study of the Mental and Motor Abilities
28. Elton Mayo, Democracy and Freedom (Melbourne, of Women During Menstruation,” Teachers College,
Australia: Macmillan & Co., 1919). Columbia University, Contributions to Education 69
29. Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge, 12. (1914), 94.
30. Henry A. Landsberger, Hawthorne Revisited (Ithaca, NY: 45. Ibid., 95.
Cornell University Press, 1958), 8. 46. Robert H. Lowie and Leta Stetter Hollingworth, “Science
31. Ibid., 10. and Feminism,” Scientific Monthly 3 (1916): 277
18_POP_28354_notes_A1-A20.indd 17 18/10/16 2:23 PM

A18 Notes
47. Ibid., 277. 9. Ibid., 121

48. Ibid., 283. 10. L. L. Thurstone, “The Rorschach in Psychological
49. Ibid., 283. Science,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43
50. Cited in L. S. Hollingworth, “Activities of Clinical Psy- (1948): 471–475; quotation from 472.
chologists,” Psychological Bulletin 14 (1917): 225. 11. M. R. Harrower-Erickson, “Personality Changes Accom-
51. J. E. Wallace Wallin, “Clinical Psychology: What It Is and panying Cerebral Lesions: Rorschach Studies of Patients
What It Is Not,” Science 37 (1913): 902. with Cerebral Tumors,” Archives of Neurology and
52. Leta S. Hollingworth, Gifted Children Their Nature Psychiatry 43 (1940): 859–890; quotation from 887.
and Nurture (New York: Macmillan, 1926). 12. Harrower, “Evolution,” ibid.
53. Leta S. Hollingworth, Children Above 180 IQ (Yonkers-on- 13. Ibid., 25.
Hudson, NY: World Book, 1942). 14. For more on Shakow’s NIMH film study, see Rachael
54. This work was another aspect of applied psychology, I. Rosner, “Psychotherapy Research and the National
human factors psychology, that had started before Institute of Mental Health, 1948–1980,” in Psychology
World War I throughout Europe and North America and and the National Institute of Mental Health: A Histori-
has continued in various forms, including ergonomics cal Analysis of Science, Practice, and Policy eds.
and task analysis. See Robert R. Hoffman and Laura W. E. Pickren and S. F. Schneider (Washington, DC:
G. Militello, Perspectives on Cognitive Task Analysis: APA, 2005), 113–150.
Historical Origins and Modern Communities of Practice 15. George W. Albee, “The Boulder Model’s Fatal Flaw,”
(Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2009), American Psychologist 55 (2000): 247–248; quotation
Chapters 2–3. from 258.
16. H. J. Eysenck, “Training in Clinical Psychology, an
English Point of View,” American Psychologist 4 (1949):
173–176.
Chapter 16. The Art and Science of Clinical 17. Ibid., 174.
Psychology 18. H. J. Eysenck, “The Effects of Psychotherapy: An
Evaluation,” Journal of Consulting Psychology, 16 (1952):
1. Paul Meehl, “Autobiography,” in A History of Psychology 319–324.
in Autobiography, vol. 8, ed. G. Lindzey (Stanford: 19. Ibid., 323. For a discussion of the reception of this article
Stanford University Press, 1989), 337–389; quotation compared to the reception of Meehl’s work on clinical
from 354. versus statistical prediction in the same period, see
2. Paul Meehl, Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Roderick Buchanan, Playing With Fire: The Controversial
Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence Career of Hans Eysenck (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954). Press, 2010), 191–196.
3. Paul Meehl, “Autobiography,” 354. 20. Victor C. Raimy, ed., Training in Clinical Psychology (New
4. Nathan Hale, The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis York: Prentice-Hall, 1950), 93.
in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 21. Carl R. Rogers, “The Use of Electrically Recorded Inter-
1917–1985 (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford views in Improving Psychotherapeutic Techniques,”
University Press, 1995). American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 12 (1942): 429–434;
5. Molly Harrower, “The Evolution of a Clinical Psychol- quotation from 433.
ogist,” Canadian Psychology, 2 (1949): 23–27; quotation 22. Carl R. Rogers, “The Necessary and Sufficient
from 23. Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change,”
6. Molly Harrower, “Changing Horses in Midstream: An Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21 (1957): 95–103;
Experimentalist Becomes a Clinician,” in The Psychol- quotation from 98.
ogists, vol. 3, ed. T. S. Krawiec (Brandon, VT: Clinical 23. Carl R. Rogers, “A Coordinate Research in Psycho-
Psychology Publishing, 1978), 89. therapy: A Nonobjective Introduction,” Journal of
7. Ibid. Consulting Psychology, 13 (1949): 149–153; quotation
8. Hermann Rorschach, Psychodiagnostics, 4th ed. (Berne, from 153.
Switzerland: Verlag Hans Huber, 1942); originally pub- 24. Rachael I. Rosner, “The ‘Splendid Isolation’ of Aaron T.
lished 1921. Beck,” Isis 105 (2014): 734–758.
Notes A19
25. Aaron T. Beck, Depression: Clinical, Experimental, and 29. Paul Meehl, “Autobiography,” in A History of Psychology
Theoretical Aspects (London: Staples Press, 1967). in Autobiography, vol. 8, ed. G. Lindzey (Stanford: Stanford
26. Rachael I. Rosner, “Psychotherapy Research and the University Press, 1989), 337–389; quotation from 350–351.
National Institute of Mental Health, 1948–1980,” in Psy- 30. Starke R. Hathaway and Paul E. Meehl, An Atlas for the
chology and the National Institute of Mental Health: A Clinical Use of the MMPI (Minneapolis: University of
Historical Analysis of Science, Practice, and Policy, eds. Minnesota Press, 1951).
W. E. Pickren and S. F. Schneider (Washington, DC: APA, 31. Meehl, Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction, ibid.
2005), 113–150. 32. Roderick Buchanan, “Ink Blots or Profile Plots: The
27. Starke R. Hathaway, “Through Psychology My Way” Rorschach vs. the MMPI as the Right Tool for a
in The Psychologists, vol. 2, ed. T. S. Krawiec (New York: Science-Based Profession,” Science, Technology, and
Oxford University Press, 1974), 105–123; quotation Human Values 22 (1997): 168–206.
from 114.
28. Ibid., 113.
KEY PIONEERS
Ach, Narziss (1871–1946) A German psychologist who Aristotle (ca. 384–322 B.C.) A Greek philosopher who
performed directed-association studies that revealed the promoted the empiricist view that knowledge derives
importance of mental sets on subsequent reasoning; this from experience and observations of the external world,
work is a classic demonstration of the predetermining which are organized into categories in the mind; wrote
influence of motives on association and thought. the first systematic and highly influential treatises on the
Adler, Alfred (1870–1937) An Austrian psychotherapist and functions of the psyche; a great polymath and compiler of
early follower of Freud, who dissented and started his knowledge in many fields.
own school of individual psychology, emphasizing the Asch, Solomon (1907–1996) A Polish-born Gestalt-oriented
inferiority complex, social interest, and the importance of American social psychologist who conducted famous
guiding fictions. experimental studies of social conformity and suggestibil-
Albee, George (1921–2006) An American community psy- ity in groups.
chologist who was highly critical of the medical orientation Aubertin, Ernest (1825–1893) A French physician, son-in-law
of the scientist-practitioner model of clinical training; he of Bouillaud, whose theory of speech localization based
advocated a social-learning, prevention-oriented approach on a case study of a brain-injured soldier brought renewed
to mental health problems. attention to this idea.
Alhazen (ca. 965–1040) An Iraq-born Islamic scholar and Avicenna (ca. 980–1037) A Persian Islamic scholar who wrote
scientist whose work on optics and visual perception laid Canon of Medicine, a definitive medical text for many
foundations still recognized today; original name Ibn centuries, and also Book of the Cure (Book of Healing), a
al-Haytham. monumental exposition of and commentary on Aristotle
Al-Kindi (ca. 800–871) An Iraq-born Islamic philosopher who that profoundly influenced the scholastic philosophers in
helped translate classical Greek writings into Arabic, thus medieval Europe; original name Abu Ali al-Husayn Ibn
preserving them; introduced and promoted the revolution- Sina.
ary system of Indo-Arabic numerals; original name Ibn Babbage, Charles (1792–1871) An English mathematician
Ishaq Al-Kindi. and inventor who helped introduce Leibnizean calculus
Allport, Floyd H. (1890–1978) An American psychologist into English mathematics, invented a difference engine
and founder of experimental social psychology; he wrote that could solve complex equations, and designed an ana-
the first American doctoral dissertation in the field (on lytical engine that could hypothetically perform any kind
social facilitation), co-edited the first journal devoted to it, of calculation and is considered a prototype for modern
and wrote its first major textbook programmable computers.
Allport, Gordon W. (1897–1967) An American psychologist Bain, Alexander (1818–1903) A Scottish philosopher and
who was instrumental in establishing the field of per- psychologist who, in the mid-1800s, was among the first
sonality psychology; he promoted both nomothetic and to write psychology textbooks that integrated neural
idiographic research methods and also made important physiology and psychology; influenced James with his
contributions as a social psychologist with studies of writings on habit.
religion and prejudice. Bartholow, Roberts (1831–1904) An American physician
Aquinas, Thomas (1225–1274) A medieval scholastic phi- who was one of the first to conduct electrical brain stimu-
losopher who reintroduced into Europe Aristotelian and lation experiments on a conscious human subject.
other classical Greek ideas after encountering them in Bartlett, Sir Frederic (1886–1969) An English psychologist
translations of Avicenna; integrated them with Christian whose book Remembering emhasized social, cultural, and
theology and was sainted posthumously in 1323. motivational factors in the shaping of memories.
A21
A22 Key Pioneers
Bauer, Ida (1882–1945) Freud’s patient, called Dora in his Boolean algebra, and established the new field of symbol-
published account, from whom he learned the importance iclogic.
of transference in psychoanalysis. Bouillaud, Jean Baptiste (1796–1881) A French physician
Bechterev, Vladimir M. (1857–1927) A Russian physiolo- who argued in favor of a language and speech area local-
gist who studied conditioned responses in animals and ized in the brain’s frontal cortex, while rejecting localized
humans and influenced Watson’s work on conditioned functions elsewhere in the brain; influenced his son-in-law
emotional reactions. Aubertin..
Beck, Aaron (b. 1921) An American psychiatrist who Boyle, Robert (1627–1691) A seventeenth-century advo-
developed cognitive therapy, which focuses on correcting cate of the new experimental approach to science who
the distorted thinking and irrational thoughts that are strongly influenced Locke, established the Royal Society
presumed to underlie psychological problems, such as of London, and conducted a famous experiment demon-
depression. strating what came to be known as Boyle’s law, which
Benedict, Ruth (1887–1948) An American anthropologist holds that the volume of a gas varies inversely with the
whose book Patterns of Culture suggested the idea that pressure upon it.
“culture” within anthropology was analogous to “personal- Braid, James (1795–1860) A Scottish physician who
ity” within psychology; an important influence on Maslow. confirmed Puységur’s and Faria’s research on mesmeric
Berkeley, George (1685–1753) An Irish bishop who applied techniques; he coined the term hypnotism and helped the
Locke’s associationistic principles to the systematic anal- practice achieve scientific respectability.
ysis of visual depth perception, arguing that it is a learned Bregman, Elsie Oschrin (1896–1969) An American industrial/
capability. organizational psychologist who conducted research on
Bernheim, Hippolyte (1840–1919) A French physician who personnel recruitment, selection, training, management,
was influenced by Liébeault’s work with hypnotism; a and the design of work at Macy’s department store in New
founder of the Nancy School, which argued that suscepti- York City.
bility to hypnosis is a normal human characteristic akin to Brentano, Franz (1838–1917) A German philosopher and
general suggestibility. teacher of Freud known primarily for his theory of act
Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm (1784–1846) A German astron- psychology and intentionality.
omer who showed that when astronomical observers Breuer, Josef (1842–1925) An Austrian physician who
recorded telescopic measurements, their reaction times treated Pappenheim (Anna O.) for hysteria; collaborated
differed in consistent ways according to their own with Freud in writing Studies on Hysteria.
personal equations. Helmhotz and Wundt explained Broca, Paul (1824–1880) A French surgeon who seriously and
such differences with reference to the nervous system, effectively challenged Flourens’s conception of an undif-
a key step toward linking psychological experience and ferentiated cerebral cortex; starting with the brain of his
physical systems to create a new science. famous patient Tan who suffered from sensory aphasia,
Bills, Marion Almira (1890–1970) An American industrial/ he localized speech functions in a left frontal brain region
organizational psychologist who conducted research on now known as Broca’s area.
employee selection procedures at the Carnegie Institute Brücke, Ernst (1819–1892) A German mechanistic physi-
of Technology; at the Aetna Life Insurance Company she ologist who studied under Müller with Helmholtz, and
studied factors affecting employee retention and devel- became one of Freud’s most influential teachers during his
oped wage incentive systems for clerical workers. medical school years.
Binet, Alfred (1857–1911) A French psychologist who Bruner, Jerome S. (b. 1915) An American psychologist
promoted a faulty theory of hypnosis while working for whose “new look” in perception studies demonstrated the
Charcot, before going on to conduct pioneering experi- influence of motives and expectations on perception; he
mental studies of suggestibility in children. Later in his also conducted studies on concept formation and collab-
career, along with Simon, he developed the first successful orated with Miller in establishing the Harvard Center for
tests of intelligence in children, based on the concept of Cognitive Studies; later developed a neo-Piagetian teach-
intellectual level or mental age. ing program emphasizing modes of representation.
Boole, George (1815–1864) An English mathematician who Burt, Sir Cyril (1883–1971) A British psychologist who
expanded the definition of mathematics in creating represented himself as Galton’s intellectual successor and
Key Pioneers A23
promoted intelligence testing in England; he published a Cox, Catharine (1890–1984) An American psychologist,
now-discredited twin study that suggested an extremely Terman’s student and colleague, who analyzed childhood
high heritability for intelligence in the nature-nurture biographies of eminent historical geniuses and concluded
debate. they would have scored high if tested on modern IQ tests.
Calkins, Mary Whiton (1863–1930) An American psychol- Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–1882) An English natural-
ogist and philosopher and one of the first women to ist whose travels to the Galápagos Islands in the 1830s
overcome gender discrimination and establish a career guided him toward developing the theory of evolution by
in psychology. A student of James, she developed the natural selection, which profoundly influenced all of the
paired-associates technique for studying memory, and an life sciences, as well as psychology.
influential system of self-psychology. She was president Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802) One of the most famous
of the American Psychological Association and the intellectual figures of his day: a doctor, inventor, poet,
American Philosophical Association. and general man of science who had theorized about
Cattell, James McKeen (1860–1944) An American exper- evolution; the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis
imental psychologist who studied under Wundt and Galton.
created instruments to measure reaction times to make de Candolle, Alphonse (1806–1893) A Swiss botanist who
inferences about apperception. collected biographical information on more than 300 em-
Cattell, Raymond B. (1905–1998) An English psychologist inent European scientists, focusing on the importance of
recruited to America by Allport to pursue factor analy- environmental and cultural factors in their backgrounds;
sis studies of personality traits; developed the Sixteen he argued that Galton had overstated the importance of
Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF). heredity in the nature-nurture debate.
Charcot, Jean-Martin (1825–1893) An eminent French Delboeuf, Joseph (1831–1896) A Belgian physiologist
neurologist whose theories about hysteria and hypnosis, who became a strong supporter of the Nancy School of
although proven false, brought those subjects into the hypnosis after disconfirming the magnetic theories of
scientific mainstream; he founded the Salpêtrière School Binet and Féré.
and mentored Freud. Democritus (ca. 460–370 B.C.) A Greek philosopher and
Chomsky, Noam (b. 1928) An American psycholinguist contemporary of Socrates who promoted the atomic
whose conception of the innate grammatical sense in theory, the notion that the material universe is composed
humans contradicted behaviorist theories of verbal of tiny indivisible atoms interacting in space; popularly
behavior; he strongly influenced Miller and helped lay the known as the laughing philosopher.
foundation for cognitive psychology. Descartes, René (1596–1650) A French philosopher and
Clark, Kenneth B. (1914–2005) An African American mathematician who promoted an interactive dualism
psychologist who, along with his wife Mamie Phipps between the material body and the immaterial mind or
Clark, studied the effects of race and racial prejudice on soul. Going beyond Aristotle, he proposed mechanistic
personality development. Their findings contributed to explanations for most bodily functions, but insisted that
the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board the highest functions of rationality, consciousness, free
of Education to make the segregation of public schools by will, and self awareness were nonmechanistic attributes
race illegal in the United States. of a rational soul, with a store of innate ideas. Laying the
Clark, Mamie Phipps (1917–1983) An African American foundation for the modern distinction between body and
psychologist who, along with her husband Kenneth B. mind led to the question of the extent to which mechanis-
Clark, studied the effects of race and racial prejudice on tic analysis can explain higher psychological processes.
personality development. Their findings contributed to Donders, F. C. (1818–1889) A Dutch physiologist who de-
the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board vised the subtractive method and used this mathematical
of Education to make the segregation of public schools by formula to measure reaction times and make inferences
race illegal in the United States. about the speed of mental processes.
Cooper, Sir Anthony Ashley (1621–1683) A powerful du Bois-Reymond, Emil (1818–1896) An early mechanistic
English politician who became he patron, friend, and chief physiologist and colleague of Helmholtz’s who proposed
supporter of Locke; in later life he was named the first Earl the electrochemical nature of the nerve impulse and en-
of Shaftesbury. couraged Helmholtz to study its speed of transmission.
A24 Key Pioneers
Ebbinghaus, Hermann (1850–1909) A German physiologist Flourens, Pierre (1794–1867) A French scientist whose
who devised an experimental approach to studying mem- ablation studies in animals contradicted Gall’s phrenol-
ory using nonsense syllables. ogy and suggested that the brain’s cortex functions as
Ehrenfels, Christian von (1859–1932) An Austrian who a unified whole; he also revealed the importance of the
introduced the concept of Gestalt qualities such as the cerebellum in coordinating and integrating movements.
squareness of a square and the melody of a song; prefig- Flynn, James (b. 1934) A New Zealand psychologist who
ured important aspects of Gestalt psychology. discovered that intelligence test standards have become
Ellis, Albert (1913–2007) An American psychologist who increasingly more difficult over time, so that the abso-
developed rational emotive therapy at around the same lute intelligence levels as indicated by the test items are
time that Beck was developing cognitive therapy. higher today than in previous years; this finding is now
Epicurus (ca. 341–270 B.C.) A Greek philosopher who ac- referred to as the Flynn effect.
cepted the atomic theory of Democritus and founded the Franz, Shepherd Ivory (1874–1933) An American psycholo-
Garden school, where he promoted a lifestyle marked by a gist who trained Lashley and studied the effects of cortical
moderate and socially conscious hedonism. ablations on cats; he innovated the method of combining
Erikson, Erik (1902–1994) Born in Germany to Danish surgical ablation with animal training.
parents, a child psychoanalyst who expanded Freud’s Freeman, Frank N. (1880–1961) An American psychologist
concept of psychosexual stages of personality develop- who, along with Newman and Holzinger, conducted the
ment to include psychosocial factors. first major study of separated twins in the 1930s.
Esdaile, James (1808–1859) A Scottish physician who Freud, Anna (1895–1982) Freud’s daughter and an early child
practiced in India and demonstrated that mesmeric tech- psychoanalyst, who further developed her father’s theory
niques could induce anesthesia during surgery. of defense mechanisms.
Eysenck, Hans (1916–1997) A German-born London-trained Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939) An Austrian physician who
psychologist who created the PEN model of personality created the therapy and general psychological theory that
based on three dimensions (psychoticism, extroversion- became known as psychoanalysis.
introversion, and neuroticism); he conducted a famous Fritsch, Gustav (1837–1927) A German physiologist who,
study demonstrating the ineffectiveness of psychotherapy along with Hitzig, discovered the cortical motor strip
and argued against the inclusion of psychotherapy in the through electrical brain stimulation experiments.
practice of clinical psychology. Fromm, Erich (1900–1980) A German neo-Freudian analyst
Faria, José Custódio de (1746–1819) A Portuguese priest whose 1941 book Escape from Freedom and later works
who showed that hypnotic phenomena, such as induc- emphasized the importance of social and cultural factors
ing a deep trance state he called lucid sleep, are more in shaping personality.
dependent on the susceptibility of the subjects than on the Galilei, Galileo (1564–1642) An Italian astronomer, natural
powers of the hypnotist. philosopher, and physicist who discovered the moons of
Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801–1887) A German scientist Jupiter, analyzed living bodies in terms of their physical
whose work on the measurement of the relationship be- characteristics, and promoted a theory of primary and
tween subjective and physical stimulus intensities showed secondary qualities similar to Descartes’s theory of simple
the possibility of a mathematically based experimental natures, around the same time.
psychology, thus creating the field known as psychophys- Gall, Franz Josef (1758–1828) A German physician who
ics. demonstrated the general importance of the brain for all
Ferrier, David (1843–1928) A Scottish neurologist who, higher human functions, while also originating the popu-
throughout the 1870s, demonstrated several functionally lar nineteenth-century movement known as phrenology.
distinct “centers” in the cortex, in addition to Broca’s area Gamble, Eleanor Acheson McCulloch (1868-1933)
and the motor strip. Titchener’s Ph.D. student who investigated sensations of
Festinger, Leon (1919–1989) An American social psychol- smell before becoming a prominent professor at Wellesley
ogist who studied with Lewin and later developed the College for women.
theory of cognitive dissonance. Galton, Francis (1822–1911) A versatile English scientist and
Fibonacci, Leonardo (ca. 1170–1240) An Italian trader and cousin of Charles Darwin, who promoted the notions of
mathematician who encountered the system of Indo- hereditary intelligence and eugenics; he laid the foun-
Arabic numerals in north Africa and introduced it dations for modern intelligence testing and the field of
into Europe. behavior genetics, including research on twins.
Key Pioneers A25
Gibson, Eleanor Jack (1910–2002) An American psychol- relating learning and other behavior to the hypothetical
ogist whose visual cliff studies resulted in the idea that functioning of neurological networks in the brain that he
depth perception occurs innately or extremely early in called cell assemblies.
development, without prior learning. Heidbreder, Edna (1890-1985) An American psychologist
Gilbreth, Frank Bunker (1868–1924) An American self- who studied concept formation and wrote the highly
taught engineer who was influenced by Taylor’s system of acclaimed text, Seven Psychologies, published in 1933, that
scientific management. With his wife Lillian, he created covered the major systems of psychology to that time,
motion studies to examine the movements involved in addressing their relationship to previous systems and
a variety of work tasks, ultimately seeking the “one best conceptual advances.
way” to get a job done. Helmholtz, Hermann (1821–1894) A German scientist and
Gilbreth, Lillian Moller (1878–1972) An American industrial/ student of Müller who helped establish physiological mech-
organizational psychologist who wrote The Psychology anism and the law of conservation of energy, demonstrated
of Management. With her husband Frank, she created the finite speed of nerve signal transmission, and studied the
motion studies to research the efficiency of factory work- physical, physiological, and psychological aspects of sen-
ers, and consulted with businesses on a range of employee sation and perception. He promoted the Young-Helmholtz
and workplace issues using their motion study approach. trichromatic theory of color vision, and the concepts of
Goddard, Henry H. (1866–1957) An American psychologist perceptual adaptation and unconscious inference.
who translated the Binet-Simon Intelligence tests and Henri, Victor (1872–1940) A student and collaborator of
promoted their use for diagnosing feeblemindedness, Binet’s who worked with him on studies of suggestibility
which he believed to be an undesirable hereditary trait in children and on developing the program of individual
that could be eliminated by negative eugenic measures; psychology.
he later retracted this view. Henslow, John Stevens (1796–1861) An English clergyman
Goldstein, Kurt (1878–1965) A German neurologist who and Cambridge botany professor who recommended
applied Gestalt principles to brain injuries, arguing that that Darwin become Captain FitzRoy’s naturalist on the
they should be assessed holistically. He coined the term voyage of the Beagle.
self-actualization, later adopted by Maslow. Heraclitus (ca. 535–470 B.C.) A presocratic Greek phi-
Hall, G. Stanley (1844–1924) The first American to earn losopher who emphasized the ambiguous relationship
a Ph.D. in experimental psychology under James. He between stability and change; asserted “You can never
founded many important institutions, including the Amer- step into the same river twice.”
ican Psychological Association and numerous journals, Hering, Ewald (1834–1918) A contemporary of Helmholtz
and also became a leader in child study and developmen- who theorized about color afterimages and promoted the
tal psychology, popularizing the word adolescence. opponent theory of color vision.
Harlow, Harry (1905–1981) An American primate researcher Hitzig, Eduard (1838–1907) A German physiologist who,
who became famous for his work on the social behavior along with Fritsch, discovered the cortical motor strip
of monkeys and the biological need for love; Maslow’s through electrical brain stimulation experiments.
dissertation supervisor. Hippocrates (ca. 460–370 B.C.) A Greek physician whose
Harrower, Molly (1906–1999) An experimental psychol- school of followers, the Hippocratics, collectively
ogist trained in Gestalt theory who became a clinician; produced the naturalistic humoral theory in a body of
she developed the group Rorschach projective technique writings known as the Hippocratic Corpus.
and opened one of the first private practices in clinical Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679) An English philosopher who
psychology in New York City. promoted the notion of the social contract and the idea
Hartley, David (1705–1757) A British physician who that human reasoning is a form of mathematical-like
attempted to integrate associationism with neurophysiol- calculation.
ogy by arguing that specific “ideas” are caused by minute Hollingworth, Harry (1880–1956) An American psycholo-
vibrations in specific locations of the brain and nerves. gist and husband of Leta Hollingworth, who was hired by
Hathaway, Starke (1903–1984) An American psychologist the Coca-Cola Company to study the behavioral effects of
best known for developing the Minnesota Multiphasic caffeine; he made significant contributions to the psychol-
Personality Inventory with the psychiatrist McKinley. ogy of advertising.
Hebb, Donald O. (1904–1985) A Canadian neuropsycholo- Hollingworth, Leta Stetter (1886–1939) An American clini-
gist who published The Organization of Behavior in 1949, cal psychologist who conducted pioneering studies of the
A26 Key Pioneers
psychology of women, developed and oversaw programs Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961) A Swiss psychiatrist and
for gifted children, and advocated for higher degree train- early follower of Freud, who dissented and established
ing for clinical psychologists, thereby professionalizing his own school of analytic psychology; developed the
the field. word-association test, promoted a collective unconscious
Holzinger, Karl (1893–1954) An American statistician who, populated with inherited archetypes, coined extroversion-
along with Freeman and Newman, conducted the first introversion, and the theory of psychological types.
major study of separated twins in the 1930s. Kamin, Leon (b. 1927) An American experimental psycholo-
Horney, Karen (1885–1952) A Viennese feminist psychoana- gist with statistical expertise who examined the Burt twin
lyst who disputed Freud’s conception of female superego, study and uncovered flaws that invalidated its results; he
seeing it as the product of a male-dominated culture. In became an outspoken supporter of the environmental
the 1930s she emigrated to New York and promoted a influence on intelligence in the nature-nurture debate.
theory and therapy that emphasized cultural and social Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) A German philosopher whose
rather than biological factors. program of critical philosophy emphasized the role of an
Hull, Clark (1884–1952) An American psychologist best active mind in creating the phenomenal or subjectively
known for his development of a mathematically based experienced world in terms of innate intuitions and cat-
mechanistic behaviorism. egories, after interacting with an ultimately unknowable
Hume, David (1711–1776) A Scottish philosopher who noumenal world; this created a rationale for a separate
formalized the laws of association by contiguity and sim- discipline of psychology.
ilarity, and whose application of Lockean empiricist and Klein, Melanie (1882–1960) A Hungarian child psychoana-
associationistic principles led him to question the concept lyst practicing in London who emphasized the importance
of causality, thus stimulating Kant to develop his critical of the earliest mother-infant relationship in psychological
philosophy. development; laid the foundation for object relations
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–1895) An English biologist theory.
who supported Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural Koffka, Kurt (1886–1941) A German psychologist, one of
selection and defended it publicly; he became known as the founders of Gestalt psychology, with Wertheimer and
Darwin’s bulldog. Köhler; wrote Principles of Gestalt Psychology, long con-
Inhelder, Bärbel (1913–1997) A Swiss psychologist and sidered the standard exposition of that movement.
Piaget student who became his most important collab- Köhler, Wolfgang (1887–1967) A German psychologist, one
orator, particularly in developing the stage theory of of the founders of Gestalt psychology, with Wertheimer
cognitive development. and Koffka; studied insight learning in chimpanzees and
James, William (1842–1910) An American Harvard-based promoted the idea of psychophysical isomorphism.
professor who established the first psychology laboratory Külpe, Oswald (1862–1915) A former student of Wundt who
in America and created an intellectual climate receptive later promoted introspective experiments on several of
to the new field with his 1890 textbook The Principles the higher processes, thus contradicting Wundt’s view
of Psychology. His work emphasized the usefulness of that this was not possible. This research led him to pro-
psychological ideas, consistent with a philosophical view pose the existence of imageless thoughts.
he called pragmatism. Ladd-Franklin, Christine (1847–1930) An American
Jensen, Arthur (1923–2012) An American educational mathematician and vision researcher who promoted an
psychologist who noted the apparent ineffectiveness evolutionary theory of color receptors; she unsuccessfully
of compensatory education programs for poor urban challenged Titchener’s policy of banning women from his
children and, relying heavily on Burt’s data, attributed the invitation-only group, the Experimentalists.
results to genetic factors; he cited a possible genetic role Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste (1744–1829) A French zoologist who
in racial differences in IQ scores and remained a strong proposed that species evolve and change by inheriting
proponent of heredity in the nature-nurture debate even physical features resulting from the voluntary use or
after discrediting Burt. disuse of specific body parts.
Jones, Mary Cover (1896–1987) An American psychologist Lange, Carl (1834–1900) A Danish physiologist who, like
who, under the supervision of Watson, conducted the first James, hypothesized that emotions are caused by bodily
study using systematic desensitization as a fear removal reactions rather than the reverse, creating the James-
procedure. Lange theory of emotion.
Key Pioneers A27
Lashley, Karl Spencer (1890–1958) An American psychol- memory demonstrated the reality of false memories and
ogist known for his study of learning and memory; his the fallibility of eyewitness accounts.
ablation studies on animals suggested that memories are Lovelace, Ada (1815–1852) An English mathematician
not localized in one part of the brain but rather are distrib- who promoted Babbage’s analytical engine and
uted throughout. anticipated its potential uses; she asserted the Lovelace
Lavater, Johann Kaspar (1741–1801) A Swiss mystic and objection: that computers can only do what they have
theologian who promoted the art of physiognomy, or been programmed to do and therefore never become
reading character from the physical signs of the body, genuinely creative.
usually the face. Lucretius (ca. 99–55 B.C.) A Roman writer who celebrated
Le Bon, Gustave (1841–1931) A French psychologist who the atomic theory and Epicureanism in the extended
wrote about the behavior of crowds, likening it to the poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things).
effects of hypnosis. Lyell, Charles (1797–1875) An English geologist who pro-
Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van (1632–1723) A Dutch lens moted the theory of uniformitarianism in relation to geo-
grinder who developed the modern microscope and logical development, which strongly influenced Darwin.
influenced Leibniz’s theory of the cosmos by showing him Malthus, Thomas (1766–1834) A British political economist
microorganisms swimming in pond water. and demographer whose writings on population growth
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716) A German phi- influenced Darwin’s development of the theory of evolu-
losopher and contemporary of Locke who proposed a tion by natural selection.
system for understanding the world as being composed of Marston, William Moulton (1893–1947) An American
dynamic entities called monads. He differed from Locke in psychologist, popularizer of applied psychology, and early
likening the human mind not to a blank slate at birth, but promoter of the polygraphic lie detector test; he was also
rather a veined slab of marble predisposed to be sculpted the creator of the Wonder Woman comic book series.
into some shapes more than others. His invention of Masham, Lady Damaris Cudworth (1659–1708) An ac-
binary arithmetic and promotion of the idea that logical complished philosophical and theological scholar who
processes can be performed by a calculating machine was a friend of Locke’s and hosted him as a paying guest
were both formative influences on the development of at her estate in England during his last years. She also
computers. corresponded with other leading philosophers, including
Lewin, Kurt (1890–1947) A Gestalt-trained German-American Leibniz.
psychologist whose field theory proposed that each person Maslow, Abraham (1908–1970) An American psychologist
resides in a unique psychological field or life space, the who developed the concept of self-actualization and the
totality of his or her psychological situation at any given hierarchy of needs theory of human motivation; he became
moment. He also became a pioneering experimental social a major founder of humanistic psychology.
psychologist, promoter of action research, and investigator of May, Rollo (1909–1994) An American psychologist who
group dynamics. developed existential psychotherapy, which focused on
Liébeault, Ambroise Auguste (1823–1904) A French doctor the quest for meaning in human life; he became a founder
who successfully treated his patients with direct hypnotic of humanistic psychology.
suggestion; a founder of the Nancy School of hypnosis. Mayo, Elton (1880–1949) An Australian psychologist best
Lindzey, Gardner (1920–2008) An American student and known for his role in the Hawthorne studies, which
colleague of Allport’s who edited the first Handbook of demonstrated the importance of the social situation over
Social Psychology and co-authored the influential physical and economic conditions in explaining produc-
textbook Theories of Personality. tivity in the workplace; one of the founders of the human
Locke, John (1632–1704) An English philosopher and con- relations movement in business and industry.
temporary of Leibniz who theorized that the human mind McClelland, David (1917–1998) An American psychologist
was like a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth and that the noted for his work on motivation, particularly the needs
vast majority of human knowledge comes through experi- for achievement, affiliation, and power as measured by
ence, a position known as empiricism. He was a founder of Thematic Apperception Test results.
the movement known as British associationism. Meehl, Paul (1920–2003) An American psychologist
Loftus, Elizabeth (b. 1944) An American social psychologist and trained psychoanalyst known for his work on the
whose research program on the reconstructive nature of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and for his
A28 Key Pioneers
book on the predictive superiority of statistical data over Münsterberg, Hugo (1863–1916) A German industrial
clinical judgment. psychologist, and former student of Wundt, brought to
Mesmer, Franz Anton (1734–1815) A Viennese physician Harvard by James in 1892 to direct the Harvard psycho-
who proposed the theory of animal magnetism to explain logical laboratory. He became well known in the United
phenomena now called hypnosis; the term mesmerism States for his development and promotion of applied
was derived from his work. psychology.
Milgram, Stanley (1933–1984) An American social psychol- Murray, Henry A. (1893–1988) A Harvard psychologist
ogist best known for his studies on conformity and obe- who promoted a personological approach to psychology,
dience in the 1960s, in which subjects were told to deliver involving the intensive study of relatively small numbers
electric shocks to a confederate to test their willingness to of individual cases; developed a projective personality
obey the orders of an authority. test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), along with
Mill, James (1773–1836) A British philosopher who was a Morgan.
proponent of empiricism and associationism; he strongly Neisser, Ulric (1928–2012) A German-born American
influenced his son John Stuart Mill. psychologist whose integrative textbook, Cognitive
Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873) The son of James Mill; a Psychology, is regarded as the launching event for the new
British philosopher and political theorist who claimed that academic subdiscipline; he conducted research focusing
the most important individual differences among people on information processing, cognition, intelligence, and
arise from associationistic and empiricist principles, memory.
rather than from innate factors. Newell, Allen (1927–1992) An American computer scientist
Miller, George A. (1920–-2012) An American psychologist and developer, with Simon, of the early AI programs Logic
and major founder of the the cognitive movement; he Theorist and General Problem Solver.
introduced information theory into the study of language Newman, Horatio (1875–1957) An American biologist who,
and promoted Chomsky’s nonbehavioristic theory of along with Freeman and Holzinger, conducted the first
grammar, proposed the “magical number seven” as the major study of separated twins in the 1930s.
highest number of items immediately storable in memory; Paley, William (1743–1805) An English philosopher and
and cofounded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies theologian who promoted the argument from design as an
with Bruner. objection to theories of gradual evolution.
Milner, Brenda (b. 1918) A British neuropsychologist known Pappenheim, Bertha (1859–1936) A patient treated for
for her case study of the brain-injured patient H.M. who hysteria by Breuer and called Anna O. in publications by
lost the capacity for short-term memory; she established Freud and Breuer; she collaborated with Breuer in creating
the role of the hippocampus in forming recent memories, the cathartic method of treatment.
proposed the idea of two types of memory systems (work- Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662) A French mathematician, inven-
ing and long-term memory), and distinguished declarative tor, and philosopher who developed the Pascaline, one
from procedural memory. of the first mechanical calculators; he believed machines
Mischel, Walter (b. 1930) An American psychologist who could reproduce rational, but not emotional, human
started the person-situation controversy, challenging the processes.
relative importance of personality traits as opposed to Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (1849–1936) A Nobel Prize–winning
situations in determining behavior. Russian physiologist who, after studying digestion and
Molyneux, William (1656–1696) An Irish scientist whose reflexive salivary responses, established the concepts of
question whether a congenitally blind person, suddenly unconditioned and conditioned responses; his principles
granted vision, would immediately be able to distinguish of classical conditioning became foundational for behav-
a cube from a sphere only by sight, stimulated Locke. iorism in psychology.
Morgan, Christiana (1897–1967) An American lay psy- Pearson, Karl (1857–1936) A British mathematician who
choanalyst and Murray’s collaborator in developing the refined Galton’s method of calculating the coefficient of
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a projective person- correlation (Pearson’s r); became Galton’s disciple and
ality test. biographer.
Müller, Johannes (1801–1858) A German physiologist who Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914) An American philoso-
promoted the law of specific nerve energies while retain- pher and mathematician, colleague of James, who wrote
ing a belief in vitalism; Helmholtz’s teacher. on semiotics, pragmatism, and symbolic logic; supervised
Key Pioneers A29
the doctoral work of Ladd-Franklin at Johns Hopkins physical data, such as height and weight, invariably fell
University. into bell-shaped or normal distributions.
Penfield, Wilder (1891–1976) A Montreal-based American Rayner, Rosalie (1899–1935) A research assistant with
neurosurgeon who used brain stimulation on conscious Watson on the Little Albert experiment in which they
human patients to seek new surgical treatments for conditioned an infant to fear a white rat and other furry
intractable cases of epilepsy. He discovered the interpre- stimuli; she later married Watson and collaborated on
tive cortex and showed how the stimulation of other brain Psychological Care of Infant and Child.
areas were associated with different types of sensations Renouvier, Charles (1815–1903) A French philosopher
and memories. whose writings about free will influenced James.
Pettigrew, Thomas (b. 1931) A student and later colleague Rogers, Carl (1902–1987) An American psychologist who
of Allport’s who studied prejudice and became a leading developed client-centered therapy and collaborated with
expert on the social psychology of race relations. Maslow in establishing humanistic psychology; an early
Piaget, Jean (1896–1980) A Swiss developmental psychol- advocate and practitioner of scientific research on the
ogist who created genetic epistemology, a stage theory process of psychotherapy and its outcomes.
of cognitive development in children, emphasizing the Romanes, George J. (1848–1894) A British naturalist and
qualitative differences in reasoning that characterize each younger friend of Darwin’s who used Darwin’s data on
stage. animal behavior while establishing the modern field of
Plato (ca. 424–347 B.C.) A Greek philosopher and founder comparative psychology.
of the Academy who promoted rationalism, idealism, and Rorschach, Hermann (1884–1922) A Swiss psychiatrist who
nativism; distinguished between the empirical, sensory developed the Rorschach projective technique using
appearances of things, and the abstract, ideal forms that inkblots to assess perceptual processes associated with
underlie them. emotional and neurological conditions.
Prince, Morton (1854–1929) An American neurologist who Rosenzweig, Saul (1907–2004) An American psychologist
founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the first whose study of motivated forgetting, which he interpreted
American periodical specifically devoted to that subject. as repression, was probably the first laboratory-based
He published early articles on Sigmund Freud and hired experimental investigations of a psychoanalytic concept.
Floyd Allport as co-editor when the journal expanded to Sanford, Edmund C. (1859–1924) An American psychologist
cover social psychology. at Clark University who advised Calkins on how to equip
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680) The grand- her experimental psychology laboratory at Wellesley
daughter of England’s King James I, she had an impor- College.
tant intellectual friendship and correspondence with Scott, Walter Dill (1869–1955) An American psychologist
Descartes, questioning how an immaterial soul could who wrote about the psychology of advertising and
interact with a physical body. headed the Committee for the Classification of Personnel
Protagoras (ca. 490–420 B.C.) A Greek philosopher in the Army during World War I.
who argued for concentration on strictly human Searle, John (b. 1932) An American philosopher who
issues and problems; asserted “Man is the measure formulated the Chinese room thought experiment
of all things.” to challenge the existence of strong AI, the idea that
Puységur, Marquis de (1751–1825) A French aristocrat and computers can have humanlike intelligence; he accepted
student of Mesmer whose induction of perfect crises and weak AI, the notion that computer simulations can be
artificial somnambulism in patients led to the discovery useful in understanding, but are not the same as human
of many now standard hypnotic effects; original name intelligence.
Amand Marie Jacques de Chastenet. Seligman, Martin (b. 1942) An American psychologist and
Pythagoras (ca. 570–495 B.C.) A legendary presocratic APA president who strongly promoted the development
Greek philosopher and mathematician who emphasized of the positive psychology movement.
the mystical-seeming correspondence between mathe- Shakow, David (1901–1981) An American psychologist
matics and worldly experiences; the Pythagorean school who studied schizophrenia and attempted to design an
influenced Socrates and Plato. objective study of psychoanalytic therapy; best known as
Quetelet, Adolphe (1796–1874) A Belgian statistician who the architect of the scientist-practitioner model of clinical
discovered that measurements from large populations of training that was adopted in the United States in 1949.
A30 Key Pioneers
Shannon, Claude (1916–2001) An American electrical engi- function, thus accounting for stimuli such as electric
neer who theorized that patterns of electrical switches in shock, whose subjective intensities increase at a faster rate
on or off positions could be used to represent information than the objective ones.
in binary code; initiated the field of information theory, Sumner, Francis Cecil (1895–1954) An American psychol-
with the bit as its fundamental unit. ogist and the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in
Sheldon, William (1898–1977) An American psychologist, psychology, at Clark University, in 1920. He studied the
and Maslow’s teacher, who combined behaviorist method- relationship between psychology and religion and served
ology with a theory about predisposing body types. as the chair of the psychology department at Howard
Simon, Herbert (1916–2001) An American computer scien- University.
tist and developer, with Newell, of the early AI programs Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1865–1915) An American
Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver. engineer who developed the theory of scientific manage-
Simon, Théodore (1873–1961) A French physician who col- ment; his ideas influenced the emerging field of industrial
laborated with Binet in developing the first useful test of psychology through objective analysis of factory workers
intelligence in children. and the workplace.
Skinner, Burrhus Frederic (1904–1990) An American Terman, Lewis (1877–1956) An American psychologist who
psychologist and outspoken behaviorist well known for introduced the term IQ and developed the Stanford-Binet
the development of operant conditioning and for his ap- Intelligence Scale to measure it; he studied gifted
plication of the principles of reinforcement to education children, as measured by high IQ.
and even social design. Thales (ca. 624–546 B.C.) Widely regarded as the earliest
Socrates (ca. 470–399 B.C.) A Greek philosopher and teacher presocratic Greek philosopher; emphasized water as the
of Plato who emphasized the nativist view that genuine most basic element in the universe.
knowledge resides within the individual and needs to Theophrastus (ca. 371–287 B.C.) A younger colleague and
be brought out by skillful questioning; adopted “Know friend of Aristotle; his work on plant classification comple-
thyself” as a primary goal. mented Aristotle’s on animals.
Sophie the Countess Palatine (1630–1714) The youngest Thompson, Clara (1893–1958) An American physician and
sister of Descartes’s intellectual confidante Elizabeth of psychoanalyst who focused on the psychology of women,
Bohemia, who became the major friend and supporter of and criticized Freud’s theory as being the product of its
Leibniz at Hanover. particular and limited cultural context.
Sophie Charlotte (1668–1705) The daughter of Sophie the Thorndike, Edward Lee (1874–1949) An American com-
Countess Palatine who was an intellectually sophisticated parative psychologist who studied with James and went
friend and self-described disciple of Leibniz. on to become the country’s best-known psychologist
Spearman, Charles (1863–1945) An English psychologist after James’s death. He was famous for his studies of
who proposed the notion of general intelligence (g), and trial-and-error learning and formulation of the law of effect,
the two-factor theory of intelligence. and his studies with Woodworth on the transfer of training.
Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903) An English philosopher who, Titchener, Edward Bradford (1867–1927) One of Wundt’s
after Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, con- most influential students and leader of the structuralist
tributed the phrase “survival of the fittest” and promoted school at Cornell University, he believed the main goal of
social Darwinism. experimental psychology was the discovery and analysis
Spinoza, Benedict (1632–1677) A Dutch philosopher who of the basic elements of consciousness, via a rigorous
promoted a view known today as pantheism, the idea process of introspection.
that God is not an independent being that controls the Tolman, Edward Chace (1886–1959) An American psychol-
universe, but rather that God is the entire universe; he had ogist best known for his experimental work with rats in
an unacknowledged influence on Leibniz. mazes that led to the formulation of the concepts of latent
Stern, William (1871–1938) A German psychologist whose learning and cognitive maps: a position known as purpo-
personalistic psychology emphasized the individual as sive behaviorism.
a central Gestalt-like concept that strongly influenced Triplett, Norman (1861–1931) An American psychologist
Allport; also an investigator of children’s intelligence, who who conducted one of the first controlled studies of social
introduced the idea of the intelligence quotient. facilitation.
Stevens, S. Smith (1906–1973) An American psychologist Turing, Alan (1912–1954) An English mathematician
who modified Fechner’s law from a logarithmic to a power whose conception of the Turing machine as a universal
Key Pioneers A31
computer, as well as the Turing test, profoundly influ- replacing standards based on mental ages with like-aged
enced the development of the fields of computer science population-based deviation IQs.
and artificial intelligence. Wernicke, Carl (1848–1905) A German neurologist who used
Ussher, James (1581–1656) An Irish archbishop who, by localization theory as the basis of an influential theory
adding up the ages of the Old Testament patriarchs after of aphasia. He identified the brain area associated with
Adam and Eve according to the Bible, estimated the the comprehension of speech, which became known as
Earth’s age as only about 6,000 years, which correlated Wernicke’s area.
with catastrophism theory. Wertheimer, Max (1880–1943) An Austro-Hungarian-born
Vygotsky, Lev (1896–1934) A Russian psychologist who pro- psychologist, former student of Ehrnefels, whose studies
moted a sociocultural theory of intellectual development, on optical illusions, apparent movement, and the phi phe-
emphasizing the social origin of intelligence; he proposed nomenon helped found the field of Gestalt psychology,
the concept of a zone of proximal development, describ- along with Koffka and Köhler. He promoted a theory of
ing the potential for intellectual growth with appropriate productive thinking and became a mentor to Maslow.
guidance or instruction. Willis, Thomas (1621–1675) A British scientist who studied
Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823–1913) A British naturalist who brain anatomy in unprecedented detail and made the
independently conceived a theory of evolution by natural fundamental differentiation between gray matter and
selection, which prompted Darwin to publish his similar white matter; published the first accurate Anatomy of
work on the theory. the Brain in 1664, illustrated with plates by the architect
Wallin, J. E. Wallace (1876–1969) A psychologist who was Christopher Wren.
concerned about the lack of qualifications and profes- Wittmann, Blanche (1859–1913) A patient of Charcot’s
sional standards in the area of clinical psychology. whose spectacular performances of the stages of grande
Washburn, Margaret Floy (1871–1939) The first American hysterie and grand hypnotism earned her the nickname
woman to be officially awarded a doctorate in psychology Queen of the Hysterics.
under the supervision of Titchener. She studied learning Wolpe, Joseph (1915–1997) A South African physician who
and mental processes in animals and wrote an influential developed behavior therapy, an approach based on classi-
comparative psychology text, The Animal Mind. cal conditioning principles.
Watson, John Broadus (1878–1958) An American psycholo- Woodworth, Robert Sessions (1869–1962) An American
gist and primary promoter of behaviorism, who asserted student of James and Cattell who investigated the transfer
that psychology’s proper subject matter is observable of training theory with Thorndike and created an early
behavior and that the goal of psychology is the prediction personality test called the Personal Data Sheet.
and control of behavior. Wundt, Wilhelm (1832–1920) A German physiologist who
Watt, Henry J. (1879–1925) A Scottish student of Külpe established the first experimental psychology laboratory
who developed the method of directed association, in at the University of Leipzig in 1879 and whose research,
which subjects associated words in a highly specific journal, and textbooks helped develop scientific psy-
rather than free manner; this work demonstrated how chology as a discipline. Maintaining that higher mental
associations and thinking could be influenced by predeter- functions such as language and reasoning could not be
mined motives, challenging the logic of the subtractive adequately studied in the lab, he proposed Völkerpsychol-
method. ogie as a separate branch of psychology to study these
Weber, Ernst Heinrich (1795–1878) A German physiol- topics using nonexperimental methods.
ogist and colleague of Fechner who discovered that Xenophon (ca. 430–354 B.C.) A student of Socrates who
accurate discrimination of stimulus intensities depends provided one of the few first-hand accounts of his teacher,
on the relative rather than absolute differences between and went on to become a famous historian.
them; inspired Fechner to establish the just notice- Zeno (ca. 490–430 B.C.) A presocratic Greek philosopher
able difference ( jnd) as the unit of subjective weight famous for describing paradoxes deriving from the
discrimination. concept of infinity.
Wechsler, David (1896–1981) A Romanian-born American Zimbardo, Philip (b. 1933) An American social psychologist
psychologist whose Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale known for his research on obedience to authority and his
(WAIS) facilitated the measurement of adult IQs by creation of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
GLOSSARY
ablation The technique of surgically removing small parts of personal unconscious, and focused more on sociocultural
an organ, such as the brain, and observing the aftereffects; archetypes; emphasized the importance of balance in
used by Flourens and Lashley to study localization in mental life.
animal brains. anal zone In Freudian theory, the second erogenous zone as
absolute threshold Fechner’s term for the smallest intensity a focus of satisfaction for children, as they find pleasure
of a stimulus that could be perceived, classified as the in the voluntary control of their bodily functions during
zero point on his psychophysical scale of psychological toilet training. See also genital zone, oral zone.
intensities. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke’s major
Academy The school established by Plato where scholars work outlining his empiricist theory of how knowledge is
congregated to discuss and teach such subjects as philos- acquired.
ophy, mathematics, and astronomy. animal magnetism Mesmer’s term for an internal magnetic-
act psychology Freud’s teacher Brentano’s theory that the like force or energy field that he believed existed within
units of psychological analysis were acts that “contain” people and caused illness when misaligned or weakened;
objects; it emphasizes that associations are influenced by the application of strong external magnetism presumably
motivational factors as well as previous experience. realigned the field and cured the symptom, an effect now
actualizing tendency In Rogers’s theory, the internal attributed to hypnotism.
inclination toward psychological growth. animal spirits Descartes’s term for the clear yellowish liquid
allegory of the cave Plato’s metaphor of prisoners confined in that fills the brain’s ventricles; known today as cerebrospi-
a cave with their backs to the opening so they can see only nal fluid.
shadows of objects and events occurring outside; shadows Anthropometric Laboratory Galton’s exhibit at London’s
are to actual events as appearances are to ideal forms. International Health Exhibition of 1884, where volunteer
anal character In Freudian theory, the result of fixation dur- participants were tested on neurophysiological variables
ing the anal stage of psychosexual development, leading such as reaction time and sensory discrimination, to
to adults who may be orderly in arranging their affairs, measure mental performance, and therefore, indirectly,
thrifty in money management, and obstinate in inter- intellectual ability; though ultimately unsuccessful, these
personal relationships. See also fixation, oral character, were the earliest prototypes for modern intelligence tests.
phallic/genital character. aphasia Any of a group of speech disorders resulting from
analytic geometry A mathematical discipline pioneered damage to specific areas of the brain.
by Descartes combining algebra with geometry, in apparent movement The illusion of continuous movement
which shapes and the positions of moving objects created by rapidly presented still images; the basis of
are represented numerically by their relationships to motion pictures and, in simplified form, Wertheimer’s
coordinates on a graph. phi phenomenon.
analytical engine Babbage’s never-completed “universal appearance Plato’s concept of an immediate, conscious
machine,” capable of performing any type of calculation; experience of something; less fundamental than an ideal
with its basic components of an input system, a calculat- form. See also ideal form.
ing mill, a memory store for instructions and intermediate apperception (1) For Leibniz, a process higher than simple
results, and an output device, it is considered a prototype perception and made possible by necessary truths in the
for the modern programmable computer. mind, in which an idea is subject to focused attention
analytical psychology Jung’s psychological school, which and rational analysis accompanied by self-awareness.
differed from Freud’s by positing a collective as well as a (2) In Wundt’s laboratory, a separately measured stage
A33
A34 Glossary
in reaction-time experiments in which the meaning of a behaviorism A school of psychology that rules out
stimulus is accurately registered in consciousness. See subjective, introspective reports in favor of objectively
also necessary truths. verifiable observation, and that suggests learning is
archetypes Jung’s term for universal images, themes, and based on acquiring associations through various forms
ideas that originate not out of personal experience but of conditioning.
rather from an innate collective unconscious. behavior therapy Wolpe’s therapeutic approach, based
Aristotelian logic The systematic and logical analysis of on the principles of classical conditioning, focusing on
associations among meaningful subject-predicate state- behavior change.
ments, related in an extended series of Aristotle’s writings belonging and love needs The third level in Maslow’s
known as The Organon. hierarchy of needs; the motive to obtain affection, friend-
argument from design Paley’s idea that because humans ship, and a sense of belongingness. See also hierarchy
and the various species of animals were so complex and so of needs.
perfectly constructed and adapted, they must have been Big Five A contemporary factor-analytically derived model
designed as finished products by God. of personality structure, emphasizing the five dimensions
artificial intelligence (AI) The capacity of a mechanical of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeable-
device to perform operations that replicate or imitate ness, and neuroticism as the major building blocks of
human thought processes and other intellectual behav- personality; often abbreviated with the acronym ocean.
iors; first demonstrated by early calculating machines, the birth order effect Adler’s emphasis on the influence of birth
term was formally adopted by twentieth-century develop- order in determining the kinds of inferiority feelings
ers of programmable computers running sophisticated children typically will experience, thereby influencing
software. See also strong AI, weak AI. their inferiority complexes and subsequent personality
artificial somnambulism Puységur’s term for a peaceful characteristics.
state that could be induced in mesmeric therapy, similar binary arithmetic The representation of all numbers by ones
to sleepwalking and less strenuous than Mesmer’s crisis and zeroes only; first proposed by Leibniz, it later became
states; essentially the same as the modern hypnotic state. the basis of modern digital computing.
Also called perfect crisis. binary switch An electrical or electronic switch capable of
association of ideas Locke’s term for the linking together, being only in an on or off position; proposed by Shannon
or combining, of ideas such that the thought of one as providing a mechanical represention of either one
tends automatically to bring another to mind. See also or zero, so networks of switches can represent all pat-
law of association by contiguity, law of association by terns in the binary code; this became the fundamental
similarity. mechanism of modern digital computers. See also binary
auditory area A functionally distinct area of the brain’s arithmetic, bit.
temporal lobe responsible for the processing of auditory bit The fundamental unit in Shannon’s information theory, the
stimuli. amount of information that can be conveyed by the open or
atomic theory The idea, promoted by Democritus and later closed status of a single binary switch (one or zero).
by Epicurus and Lucretius, that the material universe is blind spot A small part of the retina where the optic nerve
composed of tiny indivisible atoms interacting in other- leaves the eye, containing no light-sensitive receptor cells
wise empty space. and thus producing a blank area in the visual field.
bare monads In Leibniz’s conception, the lowest and most Book of the Cure (Book of Healing) Avicenna’s compre-
numerous class of monads, with minimal capacity for hensive exposition of and extended commentary on Aris-
awareness; when clustered together, they form the bodies totle, with an influential discussion of the rational soul.
of all matter. See also rational monads, sentient monads, Boolean algebra Boole’s translation of much of the content
supreme monad. from traditional logic into the formal mathematics-like
baquet A covered wooden tub, part of the apparatus in terms of symbolic logic.
Mesmer’s magnetic therapies that would be filled with British associationism A school of mental philosophy based
water and magnetized iron filings. in Great Britain that built upon Locke’s empiricism and
behavior analysis The contemporary discipline that devel- emphasized the associations among empirically originat-
oped from Skinner’s theoretical contributions; includes ing ideas.
experimental, applied, and philosophical branches. Broca’s aphasia See motor aphasia.
Glossary A35
Broca’s area The area of the brain’s frontal lobe where abla- like a computer, would not demonstrate intentionality or
tion causes impairments in expressive speech, a condition strong artificial intelligence. See also strong AI.
known as Broca’s aphasia or motor aphasia. chronological age A child’s actual age, compared in a ratio
camera obscura A pinhole camera, or darkened box with to intellectual level or mental age in calculating an intelli-
a small opening on one side through which light can gence quotient.
enter, resulting in a projected and inverted image on the classical conditioning The learning process by which a
opposite side. previously neutral stimulus (CS) acquires the ability to
Canon of Medicine Avicenna’s compendium of medical elicit a response (CR) when it is repeatedly paired with
knowledge, accepted as definitive for several centuries. an unconditioned stimulus (US). Also called Pavlovian
case of Dora Freud’s published name for the case of his conditioning. See also operant conditioning, respondent
patient Ida Bauer, from whose prematurely terminated conditioning.
treatment he learned the importance of transference in client-centered therapy Rogers’s nondirective psychothera-
psychoanalytic therapy. peutic approach, emphasizing the centrality of the client’s
castration complex In Freudian theory, a controversial point of view, avoiding interpretation in terms of the
aspect of the childhood Oedipus complex in which boys therapist’s preconceived theories in favor of reflection; it
are believed to irrationally fear their father might castrate emphasizes the importance of several therapeutic factors,
them, while girls have an unconscious wish to be like boys including congruence, unconditional positive regard, and
and have a penis. empathic understanding.
catastrophism A predominant nineteenth-century theory coefficient of correlation A numerically precise value, first
holding that the geological features of the natural world developed by Galton and Pearson, that ranges between 1
were caused by sudden and massive cataclysms, such and –1 and represents the strength of the positive or nega-
as in the biblical description of Noah’s flood. See also tive relationship between two variables.
uniformitarianism. cognition The mental process of acquiring knowledge and
categories (1) Aristotle’s term for innate organizing understanding; derived from the Latin cognoscere, “to get
principles in the human psyche (rational soul) by which to know or to learn about.” Redefined in information-
sensory experiences are classified according to substance, processing terms by Neisser as the collective processes by
quantity, quality, location, time, relation, and activity. which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated,
Categories enable subject-predicate statements that make stored, recovered, and used.
logical analysis possible. (2) Kant’s term for the mind’s cognitive dissonance Festinger’s term for holding two
innate organizing principles pertaining to the qualities, or more incompatible or contradictory beliefs, thereby
quantities, and relationships of all subjectively experi- producing an uncomfortable mental state that one is
enced phenomena. motivated to relieve.
cathartic method A treatment for hysteria originated by cognitive distortions Beck’s term for ways of thinking about
Breuer with Anna O, and further developed by Freud, in the self, the world, and the future that are unrealistic or
which the patient recalled suppressed but emotion-laden irrational.
memories under hypnosis, thereby allowing expression of cognitive neuroscience An interdisciplinary field that
those emotions. coalesced in the 1970s around the study of the mind-brain
causality (Aristotle) The ancient Greek idea that all caused relationship; contributors include psychologists, biolo-
events have a purpose; Aristotle held that a caused event gists, neurologists, and philosophers who research how
requires four components: material cause, formal cause, the functions of the brain and nervous system are related
efficient cause, and final cause. to information-processing activities, such as awareness,
cell assemblies Hebb’s term referring to the neurological perception, and reasoning.
networks that underlie learning and memory. cognitive psychology A subdiscipline in academic psychol-
cerebellum The structure at the base of the brain, discovered ogy initiated by Neisser’s textbook, focusing on the study of
by Flourens to be responsible for balance and the control important mental processes that intervene between an ac-
and coordination of movements. tivating stimulus and a final adaptive response; covers and
Chinese room Searle’s thought experiment comparing a integrates topics such as perception, attention, language
native Chinese speaker with one who responds perfectly development and use, memory and problem solving, all of
but mechanically with the aid of a book of rules; the latter, which are analyzed in terms of information processing.
A36 Glossary
cognitive revolution A term used by some psychologists operations stage. See also conservation of quantity, stage
to describe the rejecting of strict behaviorism in favor theory of cognitive development.
of including mental processes, such as problem solving concrete representation One of three processes in Freud’s
and information processing, as legitimate research dream work; the symbolic representation of wishes and
subjects; better described, according to Miller, as a abstract ideas by hallucinated but concrete sensory expe-
counter-revolution against an earlier and geographically riences. See also condensation, displacement.
restricted behaviorist revolution. condensation One of three processes in Freud’s dream work,
cognitive theory of depression Beck’s theory that distorted the condensing of two or more latent thoughts onto a
thinking and irrational beliefs are the main mechanisms single manifest dream image; similar to overdetermina-
of depression. tion. See also concrete representation, displacement.
cognitive therapy An active, collaborative therapeutic ap- conditioned reflex Pavlov’s notion of a physiological reflex
proach, developed by Beck, focusing on changing the core that has been learned; consists of a conditioned stimulus
beliefs associated with negative emotions and behaviors. and a conditioned response. See also unconditioned reflex.
collective unconscious Jung’s concept of an innate and conditioned response (CR) The learned response in a
nonpersonal unconscious mind, containing ideas or Pavlovian conditioned reflex; the response triggered by a
archetypes that are universal. previously neutral stimulus that has been paired with an
color afterimage As described by Hering, the visual impres- unconditioned stimulus, such as the presentation of food.
sion of a color’s complementary color after staring at it See also conditioned stimulus.
(such as seeing red after staring at a blue-green object). conditioned stimulus (CS) An originally neutral stimulus
commissure A bundle of nerve tissue (white matter) that (such as a tone) in a Pavlovian conditioned reflex that,
connects the two sides, or hemispheres, of the brain. after being paired with an unconditioned stimulus
common factors Relational factors that are common to (such as food), triggers a conditioned response. See also
all forms of psychotherapy, such as feeling understood, conditioned response.
supported, respected, and cared for by the therapist; these conduction aphasia A type of speech disorder that occurs
may account for significant therapeutic change. when the association fibers between Broca’s area and
community psychology A field of psychology that studies Wernicke’s area are damaged, resulting in a loss of self-
the social and environmental factors related to mental monitoring, but with comprehension and general fluency
health and illness, such as poverty, prejudice, and unimpaired.
discrimination. connectionist processing An AI computer programming
comparative psychology A subdiscipline of psychology strategy that operates by detecting patterns of activity
focusing on the similarities and differences among going on throughout the whole system, rather than
various animals’ psychological functions to shed light on symbols in specified locations. Also called parallel
these processes in human beings. distributed processing. See also serialist (symbolic)
complementarity of the sexes A widely held Victorian processing.
era view that men and women evolved to have different conservation of quantity Piaget’s term for the knowledge
but complementary psychological characteristics, men that the overall amounts of objects or substances (e.g.,
having intellectual superiority and women having moral volume or weight) remain the same even if their shapes
superiority. or presentations change; gained through the systematic
complementary colors Pairs of specific spectral colors (such reversing of operations and beyond the grasp of children
as red with a certain blue-green, or yellow with blue-violet) in the preoperational stage. See also stage theory of
that, when mixed together, create a sensation of white cognitive development.
light indistinguishable from sunlight. contact hypothesis Allport’s notion that prejudice between
complex ideas Locke’s term for ideas produced when simple groups can be reduced if in-group and out-group members
ideas are combined by the mind. See also simple ideas. are placed in situations where they must interact collabo-
concrete operations stage Piaget’s third stage of ratively and with equal status in pursuing a common goal.
development, in which children after age 7 have learned contingencies of reinforcement In Skinner’s operant
about reversing operations and can successfully solve conditioning, the specific conditions under which
most conservation of quantity problems; they still lack the responses/behaviors are reinforced or not. See also nega-
ability to analyze problems systematically as in the formal tive reinforcement, positive reinforcement.
Glossary A37
continuity-discontinuity debate The continuity view: determinants In the Rorschach projective technique, fea-
Psychological constructs (memory, intelligence, emotion, tures of an inkblot that elicit a content response; examples
etc.) have had roughly the same meaning across time and are form, color, movement, shading, and texture.
place and are therefore considered historically equiva- deviation IQ An intelligence test score based not on the
lent to earlier related constructs. The discontinuity view: ratio of mental age to chronological age, but on a person’s
Psychological constructs have had qualitatively different standing on the normal distributions of previous results
historically contingent forms and should not necessarily from people of the same age group. See also Wechsler
be considered equivalent across time. Adult Intelligence Scale.
conversion Freud’s term for the transformation of repressed difference engine Babbage’s mechanical calculator for solv-
emotional energy associated with pathogenic ideas into ing complex equations. See also analytical engine.
the physical energy that initiates the physical symptoms differential piece-rate system Taylor’s payment scheme
of hysteria. for factory workers in which a standard time was set for
cortex The outermost and largest layer of the brain; plays each task; any worker who completed the task in that
a key role in memory, attention, perception, thought, time or faster got paid more, and anyone who did not
language, and consciousness. meet the standard time was penalized. See also scientific
creative synthesis Wundt’s theory that apperceived ideas management.
may be combined and organized in many ways, including differentiation A phenomenon that occurs in Pavlovian
some that have never been experienced before. See also classical conditioning when dissimilar stimuli are
apperception, psychic causality. presented repeatedly but never reinforced by a succeed-
criterion-group method A method of psychological test ing unconditioned stimulus.
construction in which any item that reliably distinguishes directed association A task used by Watt, a student of
one diagnostic group from any other, regardless of the Külpe, in which subjects associated to stimulus words
item’s content, is included on the scale for that diagnosis. after receiving specific directions, such as to reply with
critical history of psychology A genre of historical writing subordinate or superordinate concepts, rather than freely
that exposes the ways in which social contexts and associating to them.
assumptions about human nature come to influence the Discourse on Method Descartes’s autobiographical account
scientific process; avoids celebratory aims for a more of the origins of his philosophy.
contextual, historicist understanding. See also new history displacement (1) One of three processes in Freud’s dream
of psychology. work, the deflecting of highly charged latent content onto
cumulative record In Skinner’s operant conditioning exper- the related but emotionally more neutral ideas of the man-
iments, the graphical representation of rates of response ifest content, enabling the dreamer to experience images
under different reinforcement schedules generated by an less disturbing than the thoughts that originally inspired
automated recorder. them. See also concrete representation, condensation.
defense mechanisms In psychoanalytic theory, uncon- (2) A Freudian defense mechanism; the redirection of
sciously generated psychological strategies the ego uses an impulse toward a substitute target that resembles the
to reach compromises among conflicting demands from original in some way but is psychologically safer.
the id, superego, and external reality. dream work In Freudian theory, the three processes by
demonstrative knowledge Locke’s term for certainly true which latent content becomes transformed into manifest
but not immediately obvious knowledge obtained by step- content: displacement, condensation, and concrete
wise logical deduction based on more obvious but also representation.
certainly true fundamentals, such as geometric axioms. efficient cause The actions or events that bring a caused
See also intuitive knowledge, sensitive knowledge. event into being; one of four components in Aristotle’s
De Rerum Natura Lucretius’s long poem expounding the conception of causality. See also final cause, formal cause,
atomic theory and Epicurean philosophy; its rediscovery material cause.
in the 1400s reintroduced atomic theory into Europe; ego In Freud’s model of the psyche, the part that produces
translated as On the Nature of Things. compromises from conflicts among the instinctual
de-skilling The practice of breaking down skilled labor into demands of the id, the demands of external reality, and
standardized tasks that can be performed in the shortest the moral demands of the superego. See also id, pcpt.-cs.,
amount of time. See also scientific management. superego.
A38 Glossary
empiricism A philosophical position emphasizing the externalism An approach to writing history focusing on the
importance of experience and observation of the contextual, extradisciplinary influences on the develop-
objective, external world in the acquisition of knowledge. ment of ideas. See also internalism.
See also nativism, rationalism. extinction In operant conditioning, the reduction in re-
enactive mode Bruner’s first mode of representation, in sponse rate that occurs when reinforcement is withdrawn.
which things are known in terms of the actions that are extroversion-introversion Jung’s personality dimension
appropriate to them. See also iconic mode, symbolic denoting a person’s relative orientation toward the outer,
mode. objective world versus the inner, subjective one; also de-
equipotentiality A form of neural plasticity, first identified by scribes people who are socially gregarious and outgoing
Flourens and revisited by Lashley, in which healthy versus those who are reflective and shy.
areas of the brain have the ability to take over the functions factor analysis A set of statistical procedures in which the
of damaged areas. See also law of mass action. intercorrelations of large numbers of individual variables
erogenous zones In Freudian theory, specific areas of the can be reduced to smaller factors, clusters, or principal
body that are sources of intense satisfaction and sensual components.
pleasure. See also anal zone, genital zone, oral zone. false memory A recollection of an event, especially with
Eros In Freud’s later theorizing, his term for the life-giving traumatic or emotion-laden overtones, that never oc-
and broadly sexual instinct, which operates in conflict curred; Loftus and others have shown experimentally how
with the death instinct, Thanatos. such memories can be created in suggestible subjects.
esteem needs The fourth level in Maslow’s hierarchy of fear response For Watson, one of the three innate emotional
needs; the need for self-respect and personal achievement reactions in infants, elicited by sudden and unexpected
that arises once physiological, safety, and belonging and loud sounds or the sudden loss of support; the other two
love needs have been met. See also hierarchy of needs. innate emotions are rage and love.
eugenics A term coined by Galton to describe his project for Fechner’s law In psychophysics, the assertion that the rela-
improving the human race through selective breeding. tionship between physical (P) and subjective (S) stimulus
eupsychia Maslow’s term for an imagined utopian society intensities for many different senses can be expressed by
that would be created by a thousand self-actualized people the single general mathematical formula S = k log P. See
stranded on a desert island. also power law, psychophysics.
evidence-based practice (EBP) The use of treatments, such feeblemindedness A term commonly used in the early
as medication and psychotherapy, that have been scien- 1900s for intellectual subnormality, incorrectly believed
tifically tested for their appropriateness and effectiveness by Goddard and others to be the inherited result of a sin-
for a specific disorder or condition. gle gene, and best diagnosed with Binet-type intelligence
evolutionary psychology A broad subdiscipline of psy- tests.
chology that draws on all aspects of modern evolutionary feelings In Wundt’s system, one of the two major categories
theory to devise empirically testable hypotheses about of the contents of consciousness (along with sensations);
human behavior. he classified them according to the dimensions of pleas-
existential psychotherapy A form of psychotherapy, pro- antness-unpleasantness, tension-relaxation, and activity-
moted by May, that emphasizes the quest for meaning in passivity.
life as the paramount issue for modern humanity. figure See figure and ground.
experiential responses Hallucinatory or dreamlike figure and ground A Gestalt principle that a perceived
flashbacks of events from the past produced in Penfield’s object always appears against a necessary background
epileptic patients by electrical stimulation of certain or ground, such as the white page upon which words are
locations in the interpretive cortex of the brain’s temporal written. Under some circumstances the figure and ground
lobes. See also interpretive responses. may reverse, but both can never be in conscious aware-
experimental neurosis A dramatic behavioral change, simi- ness at the same time.
lar to stress-induced breakdowns in humans, that occurred final cause The purpose for which an object or event is
in some of Pavlov’s animal subjects when they were forced caused; one of four components in Aristotle’s conception
to confront an ambiguous or impossible differentiation of causality. See also efficient cause, formal cause, material
task. cause.
Glossary A39
fixation Freud’s term for the blockage of a child’s develop- reinforcing or rewarding in their own right and are there-
mental progress at the oral, anal, or phallic/genital stage fore independent of their earliest origins.
of psychosexual development. functionalism A term used to denote the broad approach
fixed-interval reinforcement schedule An operant condi- adopted by many early American psychologists who
tioning schedule in which responses are reinforced only focused attention on the utility and purpose of behavior;
after the passage of specified periods of time. often used in contrast to Titchener’s structuralism, which
fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule An operant condition- sought only to define and describe the contents of con-
ing schedule in which responses are reinforced only after scious experience.
a preset number of specified responses have been made. functional periodicity A commonly held social and scien-
flashbulb memory Neisser’s term for a vividly recalled (but tific belief that women become physically and mentally
not necessarily accurate) image of exactly where one impaired during their menstrual periods; it was empiri-
was and what one was doing when a momentous event cally tested by Hollingworth (and others) and found to be
occurred. without validity.
floating man thought experiment Avicenna’s contention general intelligence (g) Spearman’s concept of a single
that a newly created but fully formed man, floating in common factor of generalized mental power, applicable
space with no exposure to sensory stimulation, would still in some degree to all intellectual tasks. See also two-factor
have a conscious awareness of his own rational soul; he theory of intelligence.
suggested the image to support the notion of mind and generalization A phenomenon that occurs in Pavlovian
body as independent entities. classical conditioning when conditioned reflexes can be
Flynn effect The historical increase in intelligence levels, elicited by stimuli similar but not identical to the original
as measured by correct responses to earlier versus later conditioned stimulus.
versions of IQ tests; with each new revision of a test, the General Problem Solver (GPS) An artificial intelligence
standards become higher, making it more difficult to computer program designed by Newell and Simon for
attain an average IQ. solving a broader and more complex range of problems
forgetting curve Ebbinghaus’s term for the observed pattern than Logic Theorist, by using means-ends analysis and
of forgetting, over time, learned lists of nonsense syllables; other heuristics to limit the search options. See also heu-
initially there is a rapid decline in correct memory, fol- ristics, means-ends analysis.
lowed by a gradual leveling off. genetic epistemology Piaget’s term for his project to study
formal cause The conceptual model or plan behind a caused the biologically based and qualitatively different stages of
event; one of four components in Aristotle’s conception development in children’s ways of thinking and knowing
of causality. See also efficient cause, final cause, material about the world. See also stage theory of cognitive devel-
cause. opment.
formal operations stage Piaget’s fourth stage of develop- genital zone In Freudian theory, the third erogenous zone;
ment, beginning around age 11 or 12, and characterized by the genital area becomes the main focus of sexual plea-
the emergence of experimental or inductive reasoning, the sure. See also anal zone, oral zone.
ability to analyze problems systematically and therefore to Gestalt psychology An approach to psychology, anticipated
extract the maximum possible information from them. See by Ehrenfels and developed by Wertheimer, Koffka, and
also stage theory of cognitive development. Köhler, that emphasizes the ways the mind organizes
fraternal (dizygotic) twins Twins who develop from the experiences and perceptions into wholes and fields
separate fertilization of two eggs by two sperm and whose that are more than the sums of their separate parts;
genetic resemblance is the same as that of ordinary broth- had broad implications for many subdisciplines of
ers and sisters. See also identical (monozygotic) twins. psychology.
free association Freud’s technique, replacing hypnosis, in giftedness A term used by Terman indicating the intellec-
which a patient recalls, openly and honestly and without tual qualities of children with very high IQs; sometimes
editing, all of the thoughts and ideas that come to mind. confused with, but actually just one aspect of, genius.
functional autonomy Gordon Allport’s term for the state grammatical structure A set of rules, considered innate by
achieved by motives that may have originated in child- Chomsky, that govern the composition of sentences and
hood but are maintained because they have become phrases in any given language.
A40 Glossary
grand hypnotisme Charcot’s discredited concept of the they are physiological needs, safety needs, belonging and
major form or type of hypnotism, characterized by passing love needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization.
through a number of stages. higher-order conditioning The type of learning that occurs
grande hystérie Charcot’s discredited concept of the major in Pavlovian classical conditioning when a conditioned
form of hysteria, characterized by a progression of stages reflex is first established to one stimulus, which then goes
resembling the stages of a grand mal epileptic seizure. on to serve as the unconditioned stimulus in a further
gray matter A pulpy gray tissue occupying the outer surface series of pairings.
of the brain, the inner part of the spinal cord, and several hippocampus A brain structure lying beneath the temporal
discrete centers within the brain; composed primarily of lobe that is important for memory.
the nuclei of neurons. See also white matter. Hippocratic Corpus The collected medical writings of
Great Man approach A historiographic approach that Hippocrates and his followers promoting the naturalistic
presents the historical narrative as a celebration of the humoral theory to explain health and illness.
contributions of great people, usually great men. See also historicism The practice of taking the historical standpoint
new history of psychology, Zeitgeist approach. of a specific time and place in order to understand issues
ground See figure and ground. as they appeared at the time. See also presentism.
group fallacy Floyd Allport’s term for what he believed to historiography A body of historical work and/or the theory,
be the mistaken idea that people in a crowd or group can history, methods, and assumptions of writing history.
collectively create, and be influenced by a group mind, a humanistic psychology A “third force” in psychology, after
kind of superordinate entity that is more than just the sum behaviorism and psychoanalysis, initiated by Maslow
of individual reactions. in conjunction with others, including Rogers and May;
guiding fiction Adler’s term for a literally incorrect idea that focusing on positive motivation, the potential for growth,
is assumed to be true and influences behavior: people and the need for self-actualization.
act as if something is true, with results that may be either human relations movement A research focus on the study
positive or negative. of human behavior in groups, such as the workplace;
Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies An interdisciplinary emphasizes the importance of social and psychological
institute established by Bruner and Miller to promote factors, not just physical and economic conditions, in
research on cognitive processes; cited by some as marking worker satisfaction and performance.
the start of the cognitive revolution. humoral theory A theory proposed by the Hippocratics to
Hawthorne effect A change in worker behavior observed explain health and illness by the balance or imbalance
in the Hawthorne studies; participant performance was within the body of the four humors (blood, yellow bile,
seemingly affected simply by knowing they were part of a black bile, and phlegm).
study. See also Hawthorne studies. humors The four liquid substances—blood, yellow bile, black
Hawthorne studies A series of studies conducted at a man- bile, and phlegm— proposed by the Hippocratics in the
ufacturing plant that examined interpersonal and group humoral theory to underlie states of health and illness,
factors affecting employee behaviors and productivity; as well as basic types of temperament. See also humoral
they demonstrated the importance of the social situation theory.
over physical and economic conditions in explaining hypnotism The process of inducing mental concentration
productivity in the workplace. and relaxation, resulting in a state of high suggestibility;
heritabilty The percentage of a characteristic’s variability the name eventually replaced animal magnetism, mesmer-
within a population that is determined by genetics; it ism, and artificial somnambulism.
refers to populations, not individuals. hysteria A psychological disorder characterized by physio-
heuristics Shortcuts that limit the search options in the logical symptoms, such as fits of violent emotion, paraly-
process of solving complex problems, relying on best sis, and amnesia, without obvious organic causes.
guesses based on previous experience in solving similar iconic mode Bruner’s second mode of representation, in
problems; used in AI programs such as General Problem which things are known primarily in terms of their percep-
Solver. tual qualities. See also enactive mode, symbolic mode.
hierarchy of needs Maslow’s idea that motives exist in a id In Freud’s model of the psyche, the origin and container
hierarchical structure, with higher ones arising only after of unconscious, powerful impulses and energies from the
lower ones have been satisfied; from lowest to highest, instincts. See also ego, pcpt.-cs., superego.
Glossary A41
ideal form Plato’s concept of an abstract but ultimate and Indo-Arabic numerals Introduced by Al-Kindi, a system with
permanent reality underlying the imperfect appearance symbols representing numerals 0 through 9, arranged in
of something as immediately experienced. See also columns representing successive powers of 10; it enabled
appearance. precise arithmetic calculations impossible with the old
idealism In philosophy, the notion that something more fun- system of Roman numerals, and led to number theory and
damental, permanent, and ultimate lies behind everyday the invention of algebra.
sensory experiences. industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology A field focus-
identical (monozygotic) twins Twins who develop fol- ing on the application of psychological principles and
lowing the split of a single fertilized egg and who thus analysis to behavior in the workplace and to problems in
are genetically identical to each other. See also fraternal business and industry.
(dizygotic) twins. inferiority complex In Adler’s theory, the inevitable result
identification A Freudian defense mechanism; the uncon- of every young child’s helpless and dependent state, in
scious adoption of the characteristics of another emotion- which certain deficiencies and inferiorities will be empha-
ally important person. sized over others; determined by a combination of innate
idiographic methods Gordon Allport’s term for personality and environmental factors, the result is an individualized
research methods that study individual cases and involve pattern of perceived deficiencies and motives to overcome
qualitative rather than quantitative analyses, with the them; a central concept in Adler’s individual psychology
aim of describing what makes people distinct from one which he contrasted with Freud’s Oedipus complex.
another. See also nomothetic methods. infinitesimal calculus A form of mathematics created by
imageless thought A transitory state, discovered by Würz- Leibniz and Newton that works by conceptualizing any
burg introspectors, that was not definable in terms of continuously varying quantity as an infinite series of
specific sensations and feelings. imperceptibly changing instants, or infinitesimals.
immature religion Allport’s concept of a religious attach- information theory Shannon’s concept of analyzing commu-
ment adopted largely for self-aggrandizing reasons; it is nications or signals using the bit as the fundamental unit;
unreflective, literal-minded, bigoted, and intolerant of it provided a way of quantifying the precise amount of
other beliefs or ambiguity. See also mature religion. information contained in any symbol or symbolic combi-
impossibilist creativity Boden’s concept of a computer’s cre- nation. See also bit.
ativity (not yet realized and probably not realizable) that informed consent A person’s agreement to participate in a
would change the fundamental rules of a discipline and study, after having the purpose and procedures explained,
effect a transformation of conceptual space comparable to and understanding the possible aftereffects.
Einstein’s transformation of the laws of physics. See also innate ideas Descartes’s conception of a group of ideas (such
improbabilist creativity. as perfection, infinity, and unity) that exists in the rational
improbabilist creativity Boden’s concept of a computer’s human mind or soul prior to any empirical experience.
capacity to assemble familiar ideas or components in new, intellectualization A Freudian defense mechanism; directly
useful, or interesting combinations, according to estab- approaching a conflict-laden subject rationally and ab-
lished preset rules. See also impossibilist creativity. stractly but without emotional involvement.
indigenization The process whereby the local context intellectual level A literal translation of Binet’s French term
affects the development of psychology by drawing on for the result of his intelligence tests, later somewhat mis-
ideas within that context as well as importing ideas from leadingly translated by his successors as mental age.
elsewhere and combining them with local traditions and intelligence quotient Stern’s term for the ratio of mental age
practices. to chronological age, as a quantitative result of a Binet-
individual psychology (1) Adler’s term to differentiate his type intelligence test. See also IQ.
own school’s approach from psychoanalysis, emphasiz- intelligence test A set of measures for assessing intellectual
ing the inferiority complex, guiding fictions, and social ability, first promoted by Galton in his Anthropometric
interest as opposed to repressed sexuality. (2) For Binet Laboratory; the relative failure of his approach led to an
and Henri, an unsuccessful program to develop a series of alternative age-based scale by Binet in France, which
relatively short tests that would yield information about became the prototype for the modern IQ test.
a person comparable in richness and complexity to an intentionality Brentano’s term for the subjectively expe-
in-depth case study. rienced “aboutness” of all mental acts; their quality of
A42 Glossary
referring to, and taking attitudes of belief and/or desire James-Lange theory of emotion The assertion that emo-
toward, their objects. tion is a consequence, rather than a cause, of the bodily
interactive dualism Descartes’s idea that the body and mind changes associated with it.
not only are different and separate, but they interact with just noticeable difference (jnd) The minimum amount of
each other, sometimes cooperatively and sometimes difference between two stimulus intensities necessary for
antagonistically. an observer to tell them apart; a concept introduced by
internalism An approach to writing history often adopted Weber and later used by Fechner as the basis of his scale
by insider specialists, focusing on developments that of psychophysical intensities.
occurred strictly within their particular discipline rather latent content In Freudian theory, the original but uncon-
than on the broader contexts in which these developments scious ideas and wishes that become transformed by the
have occurred. See also externalism. dream work into the manifest content. See also dream
interpersonal psychotherapy (ITP) A form of short-term work, manifest content.
psychotherapy developed in the 1970s focusing on social latent learning Tolman’s term for learning that can occur
and interpersonal processes associated with the onset and incidentally and without immediate reinforcement,
continuation of depression. becoming obvious only at a later time.
interpretive cortex Penfield’s term for the area of the brain’s law of association by contiguity The notion that ideas that
temporal lobe that, when electrically stimulated in a con- are experienced either simultaneously or closely together
scious patient, produced what he called interpretive and in time will become associatively linked. See also associa-
experiential responses. tion of ideas, law of association by similarity.
interpretive responses Involuntary responses in which the law of association by similarity The notion that ideas having
immediate situation was suddenly seen in a new light similar properties will become associatively linked. See
(such as inexplicably seeming familiar or unfamiliar, also association of ideas, law of association by contiguity.
anxiety-arousing or pleasant, dangerous or reassuring) law of conservation of energy The idea, promoted by
produced in Penfield’s epileptic patients by electrical stim- Helmholtz, that energy can be transformed from one state
ulation of certain locations in the interpretive cortex of the to another but can never be created or destroyed by any
brain’s temporal lobes. See also experiential responses. physical process.
intrapsychic conflict Freud’s term for the disturbance caused law of effect Thorndike’s assertion that when certain stimu-
by the mind being constantly confronted with competing lus-response sequences are followed by pleasure, they are
demands from internal sensations, the external world, and strengthened, while responses followed by annoyance or
the moral sense or conscience. pain tend to be weakened.
introspection The systematic observation and reporting of law of mass action Lashley’s notion that the efficiency of a
one’s own subjective inner experience during psychology mental function, such as memory, will be reduced in pro-
experiments. portion to the degree of cortical injury affecting the areas
introversion See extroversion-introversion. responsible for that function. This occurs despite the abil-
intuitions Kant’s term for the human mind’s automatic ity of unaffected areas of the brain to take over some of the
ordering of all phenomenal experience in terms of space functions of the damaged area. See also equipotentiality.
and time. law of specific nerve energies The idea that each sensory
intuitive knowledge Locke’s term for knowledge that is nerve in the body conveys one and only one kind of sensa-
immediately and obviously true, such as that black is tion, such as visual, auditory, or tactile.
different from white. See also demonstrative knowledge, life space Lewin’s concept of a unique psychological field,
sensitive knowledge. the totality of a person’s physical, social, and psychologi-
IQ Terman’s term for his revised definition of the intelligence cal situation, at any given moment.
quotient, in which the ratio of mental age to chronological Logic Theorist (LT) An artificial intelligence computer
age is multiplied by 100. See also intelligence quotient. program designed by Newell and Simon that reproduced
Islamic empire Following the Prophet Muhammad’s death formal proofs for basic theorems in symbolic logic using
in 632, territory that eventually extended from India to backward reasoning, starting with the final proof and
Spain; produced many brilliant scholars who preserved working backward to decompose it into axioms.
and developed classical writings when they were being love For Watson, one of three innate emotions (along with
destroyed and lost in Christian Europe. rage and fear); produced in infants by tickling, shaking,
Glossary A43
gentle rocking, or patting, or by stroking an erogenous medical model of mental illness An approach to diagnosing
zone. and treating mental disorders as diseases that have under-
Lovelace objection Lovelace’s belief that Babbage’s analyt- lying physical causes.
ical engine, despite its great computational power, could mental age The result of a Binet-type intelligence test, in
only follow predetermined and precisely defined rules, which a particular child’s intelligence level is expressed
and was not capable of genuine creativity; commonly as the average age at which a group of normal children
expressed today as: computers can only do what they have were able to achieve the same result; when divided by
been programmed to do. the child’s actual or chronological age, it yields his or her
lucid sleep Faria’s term for a form of artificial somnambu- intelligence quotient.
lism characterized by a deep trance state. mental chronometry The measurement of various types
Lyceum The school established by Aristotle in Athens, of reaction times, to indicate the speed of information
where scholars worked collaboratively on a broad range processing and make inferences about the basic elements
of subjects, often holding discussions while walking and of consciousness and other central processes; one of the
therefore called peripatetics. major research strategies in early experimental psychology.
magical number seven, plus or minus two Miller’s term mental imagery A subject studied by Galton, who found
defining seven as the approximate upper limit for the wide individual differences in people’s ability to summon
number of simultaneously present stimuli the mind can up visual images of remembered scenes; some reported
retain in consciousness, remember, or process. vivid images with realistic details, while others reported
mandala One of Jung’s most important archetypes; elabo- only abstract thoughts with no visual properties.
rate circular patterns symbolizing the notions of balance mental orthopedics A program of mental exercises devel-
and harmony. oped by Binet to increase the intellectual levels of subnor-
manifest content In Freudian theory, the actual images, mal children, especially by helping them concentrate and
thoughts, and content of a dream as consciously experi- pay attention.
enced by the dreamer; a transformation of the precipitat- mental set According to Ach, a preliminary orientation
ing but more psychologically dangerous latent content. to the stimuli in an introspective experiment that does
See also dream work, latent content. not consciously enter into the subject’s associational
material cause The substance out of which something is processes, but nonetheless guides these processes in
made; one of four components in Aristotle’s conception particular directions.
of causality. See also efficient cause, final cause, formal mesmerism A name once given to the practice pioneered by
cause. Mesmer and based on his theory of animal magnetism, of
mature religion Allport’s concept of a belief in a spiritual using suggestion and the application of magnetic force
reality while simultaneously accepting an inevitable to induce a crisis state in a patient, which would result in
unknowableness regarding ultimate questions; it en- symptom relief; now known as hypnotism.
courages humility, self-questioning, and tolerance for the metapsychology Freud’s term for his general theoretical
viewpoints of others. See also immature religion. model of the mind or psyche as a whole consistent with
means-ends analysis A problem-solving heuristic for his clinical theories but going beyond them.
limiting the search options, incorporated by Newell and Milgram obedience studies A series of studies demonstrat-
Simon into General Problem Solver; involves comparing ing and measuring the compliance of many subjects with
the desired end state for a problem to the current state, instructions from a perceived authority figure to adminis-
calculating the distance (difference) between them, as well ter supposedly painful and/or dangerous electric shocks
as the effectiveness of various operations, or means, in re- to a fellow research participant (actually a confederate of
ducing that distance; the best of those is enacted, the new the experimenter).
distance calculated, and the process repeated until the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) An
distance becomes zero. See also General Problem Solver, objective, self-report measure of personality factors
heuristics, TOTE unit. related to psychopathology developed by Hathaway in
mechanistic behaviorism Hull’s idea that learning could be the 1940s.
conceptualized in terms of mathematical laws that speci- Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA) The
fied relationships among several specified variables, such largest study of separated twins to date, suggesting a
as habit strength, drive strength, and stimulus intensity. heritability of about 70 percent for intelligence and several
A44 Glossary
other characteristics, but within a restricted population “new look” in perception A series of studies conducted by
that excluded extreme environments. Bruner and his colleagues demonstrating how a variety of
minute perceptions The lowest level of awareness in nonobjective factors, such as motives or expectations, can
Leibniz’s continuum of consciousness, characteristic of systematically influence the process of perception.
bare monads; the basis of his early postulation of uncon- neuron A nerve cell, the core unit of the nervous system;
scious mental processes. found in the brain and spinal cord; composed of a nucleus,
modes of representation Bruner’s term for three ways of dendrites, and axons.
mentally representing things, corresponding generally to New Essays on Human Understanding Leibniz’s most
those that occur during a child’s progress through Piaget’s extensive response to Locke, arguing for greater apprecia-
stages of cognitive development. See also enactive mode, tion of innate capacities of the mind.
iconic mode, symbolic mode. new history of psychology In contrast to the Great Man
monads Leibniz’s concept of the ultimate units making up approach, a more contextual and historicist perspective,
the universe; dynamic entities characterized by purposive- inclusive of diverse historical actors, and based on
ness and the ability to perceive and register impressions archival and primary sources. See also critical history of
of their environments; classified hierarchically according psychology; Great Man approach.
to their qualities and functions as bare monads, sentient nomothetic methods Gordon Allport’s term for personality
monads, rational monads, and the supreme monad. research methods that study people in terms of general
monogenesis A Victorian era theory suggesting that all dimensions or characteristics that are quantitatively
human groups shared a common ancestry. See also measurable; examples are tests measuring specific traits
polygenesis. and the factor analysis of trait measures to reveal patterns,
motion studies An approach by the Gilbreths, using movie such as the Big Five. See also Big Five, idiographic
cameras to record the physical movements required to per- methods.
form certain tasks in work environments, to reveal how to nonsense syllable A meaningless consonant-vowel-
design machinery and equipment to maximize efficiency. consonant combination used by Ebbinghaus to study
motor aphasia A speech disorder resulting from damage to memory; they served as neutral stimuli to be memorized.
a specific part of the brain’s left frontal lobe, characterized normal distribution The pattern of data points, collected
by an inability to vocalize fluent speech while comprehen- from large populations, in which scores fall into a bell-
sion remains intact. Also called Broca’s aphasia. shaped array, with more data in the middle than at the
motor strip A functionally distinct area on the brain’s cortex, extremes; emphasized by Galton as characteristic of a
discovered by Fritsch and Hitzig, where electrical stimu- wide range of psychological and biological variables.
lation produced specific movements on the opposite side noumenal world Kant’s concept of the ultimately unknow-
of the body. able external world of “things-in-themselves,” existing
nativism The notion that properties exist innately within a in a pure state independently of human perception or
mind or individual. See also empiricism, rationalism. consciousness. See also phenomenal world.
natural selection The theoretical mechanism postulated object constancy In Piagetian theory, the realization that
by Darwin and Wallace suggesting that those organisms objects continue to exist even after they have disappeared
best adapted for a particular environment will survive and from one’s sight or other immediate senses; a concept that
reproduce, thus passing on their characteristics through has to be learned by very young children. See also stage
the generations. Also called theory of evolution by natural theory of cognitive development.
selection. object relations A school of psychoanalysis inspired by
nature and nurture A phrase popularized by Galton to con- Klein that places major importance on the mother-infant
trast the innate effects of heredity (nature) with the effects bond in human development.
produced by environment and upbringing (nurture). Oedipus complex In Freudian theory, a constellation of
necessary truths Leibniz’s term for innate human mental childhood wishes to be the sole love object of the oppo-
capacities, such as the ability to appreciate geometric site-sex parent, and for the elimination of the same-sex
axioms and the rules of logic, as well as to engage in parent; although the wishes undergo repression, they
self-reflection and apperception. See also apperception. continue to exert an unconscious influence.
negative reinforcement A contingency of reinforcement in operant chamber Skinner’s experimental apparatus
which the probability of a response is increased when it is for studying schedules of reinforcement in animals;
followed by the removal or reduction of an aversive stimulus. allows researchers to precisely control the delivery of
Glossary A45
reinforcement and the conditions under which delivery Pearson’s r A coefficient of correlation computed accord-
will occur. Also called Skinner box. ing to a formula developed by Karl Pearson, based on
operant conditioning Skinner’s term for the conditioning variables measured in standard deviation units; now the
that occurs when organisms learn to actively act on, or standard measure of statistical correlation in most fields.
operate on, their environments after encountering rein- See also coefficient of correlation.
forcing consequences; contrasts with Pavlovian classical PEN model Eysenck’s personality model, derived by factor
conditioning by relying on subjects producing a response analysis, that describes personality in terms of the
before conditioning can take place. See also classical three primary dimensions: psychoticism, extroversion-
conditioning, respondent conditioning. introversion, and neuroticism.
oral character In Freudian theory, the result of a fixation at perceptions The learned interpretations of pure sensations
the oral stage of psychosexual development, leading to as meaningful concepts or objects.
adults with strong tendencies to emphasize eating, smok- perceptual adaptation A natural adjustment to having the
ing, drinking, talking, or other oral activities. See also anal visual field systematically altered, such as by spectacles
character, fixation, phallic/genital character. that shift images to the left or right of their normal loca-
oral zone In Freudian theory, the first erogenous zone, tions; the brain gradually adapts to the new perspectives
the mouth, which is the earliest location of heightened and responds to them as normal.
sensual pleasure for an infant, typically via breastfeeding. personal equations Correction factors introduced by early
See also anal zone, genital zone. astronomers, after noting consistent individual differ-
origin myth process The retrospective selection of great ences in the reaction times of different observers when
thinkers and classic experiments to reinforce the impor- taking measurements of star transits.
tance of present views and impart a sense of continuity personalistic psychology An approach to psychology pro-
and tradition about the development of psychology. moted by Stern in which the central concept is the entire
overdetermination Freud’s term for a psychological event person viewed as an individual.
being caused by two or more separate ideas, wishes, or personality psychology A subdiscipline pioneered by
motives acting together; comparable to condensation in Gordon Allport that explores the nature of human
the creation of dreams. individuality, using methods ranging from intensive case
paired-associates technique Calkins’s method for studying studies through large-scale statistical analyses of the in-
associative learning and memory in which two stimuli, terrelationships of measurable personality traits. See also
such as a word and a color, are repeatedly presented idiographic methods, nomothetic methods.
together; the memory task involves presenting only one personnel selection An area of applied psychology involv-
stimulus in the pair and asking the respondent to recall its ing the development and use of tests to match the skills of
associated stimulus. potential employees to appropriate jobs.
pantheism The view promoted by Spinoza that God is personology Murray’s approach to constructing individual
equated with the totality of the universe; influenced case studies using a variety of methods to discover what
Leibniz’s conception of the supreme monad. subjects know and are willing to reveal about themselves,
paraphasias A group of speech disorders, due to brain what they know and prefer not to reveal, and other impor-
damage, characterized by the use of peculiar words and tant factors of which they are unaware.
mispronunciations. See also sensory aphasia. person-situation controversy A debate initiated by Mischel
passions Descartes’s term for the conscious awareness of about whether a person’s behavior in a given situation
emotions. is more strongly determined by pre-existing personality
pathogenic idea In Freudian theory, an unconscious and traits or by the immediate demands of the situation.
emotion-laden memory, wish, or idea that causes hysteria phallic/genital character In Freudian theory, the adult
or other symptoms until brought to consciousness. character traits of curiosity, competitiveness, or exhibi-
pcpt.-cs. In Freud’s model of the psyche, the “perception- tionism that may result from fixation during the phallic/
consciousness system,” which conveys information about genital stage of psychosexual development. See also anal
external reality to the ego. See also ego, id, superego. character, fixation, oral character.
peak experience According to Maslow and Wertheimer, phenomenal world Kant’s term for the world as subjectively
a strong feeling of joy or other positive emotion that experienced, after being processed and transformed via
often accompanies an “Aha!” moment, when the world is the senses and the mind’s intuitions and categories. See
suddenly perceived or appreciated in a new way. also noumenal world.
A46 Glossary
phi phenomenon A perceptual illusion of apparent move- particular power times a constant; S = kPn; proposed as a
ment and simplified form of a motion picture studied by more general replacement for Fechner’s law, covering a
Wertheimer, in which alternating slits of light, one vertical broader range of sensations. Also called Stevens’ law. See
and the other tilted, appear to continuously fall over and also Fechner’s law.
rise back up, under certain combinations of timing. pragmatism A term originated by Peirce and adopted by
phrenology A doctrine originated by Gall that localizes James to describe the evaluation of ideas according to
psychological faculties or qualities in specific parts of the their usefulness in varying situations; this approach even-
brain; bumps and indentations of the skull were assumed tually became a hallmark of James’s general philosophy.
to reflect the size of the underlying brain regions. preoperational stage Piaget’s second stage of development,
physiognomy The interpretation of a person’s character, ages 2–7, in which children gain an appreciation of object
or psychological qualities, according to the individual’s constancy but are still unable to appreciate concepts such
physical features, especially of the face; originally pro- as the conservation of quantity. See also object constancy,
moted by Lavater. stage theory of cognitive development.
physiological mechanism A doctrine, promoted by Helm- presentism The practice of viewing history from the stand-
holtz and his colleagues, stating that all physiological pro- point of the present, often emphasizing the great progress
cesses are potentially understandable in terms of ordinary made by correcting the mistakes of predecessors; the
physical and chemical principles; contrasts with vitalism. present is seen as the pinnacle of superior knowledge and
See also vitalism. wisdom. See also historicism.
physiological needs The lowest, most elemental level in primary colors A certain red, green, and blue-violet from the
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; the need for food, shelter, spectrum which, when combined in various ways, can pro-
and physical satisfaction. See also hierarchy of needs. duce all the other different colors; the three different types
pineal gland A small cone-shaped structure near the center of cone cells in the eye respond most strongly to the three
of brain that Descartes believed was the main location of colors. See also Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory.
mind-body interactions. primary process Freud’s conception of the way the psy-
polygenesis A theory arguing that differing human ethnic che unconsciously creates such phenomena as dreams,
groups represent distinct and different biological species; neurotic symptoms, and in some cases creative products;
commonly used in the nineteenth century to denigrate characterized by displacement, overdetermination or
non-European “savage” peoples as representing a lower condensation, and concrete representations of abstract
species of being. See also monogenesis. thought; generally the opposite of the conscious second-
polymorphous perversity Freud’s term for the presumed ary process. See also secondary process.
state of a newborn infant in which any part of the body is a primary qualities (1) For Galileo, the primary qualities
potential source of sensual pleasure; the original manifes- residing inherently in matter were shape, quantity, and
tation of the child’s sexual instinct. motion. (2) For Locke, they were solidity, extension, figure,
positive psychology An area of modern psychology pro- and mobility, which constitute the fundamental units for
moted by Seligman in reaction against mainstream psy- constructing a true picture of the world. See also second-
chology’s focus on pathology and abnormal conditions; ary qualities.
characterized by the scientific study of psychological posi- primary reinforcer In operant conditioning, a reinforcer that
tivity, health, and the conditions that promote happiness. does not require pairing with another stimulus to function
positive reinforcement A contingency of reinforcement in as a reinforcer, such as food, water, sleep, or sex.
which the probability of a response is increased when it is profile analysis The practice of using patterns of scale
followed by a desired consequence or reward. scores, rather than individual scores in isolation, to
posthypnotic amnesia The forgetting of events from a hyp- generate diagnostic conclusions or recommendations;
notic state after awakening from it. employed particularly with the Minnesota Multiphasic
posthypnotic suggestion The carrying out of a suggested Personality Inventory.
hypnotic effect after awakening from the hypnosis, often programmed instruction Skinner’s educational technique
with no recollection of the original suggestion. in which complicated subjects such as mathematics are
power law A relationship proposed by Stevens asserting broken down into simple, stepwise components presented
that the subjective intensity of a stimulus (S) is a function to students in order of increasing difficulty, so they are
of the physical intensity of a stimulus (P) raised to a positively reinforced for each response.
Glossary A47
projection A Freudian defense mechanism; the attribut- stimuli, and the subjective impressions of those inten-
ing of one’s own unacceptable feelings and impulses to sities as measured in jnd units. See also just noticeable
someone else. difference.
projective test A test using responses to unstructured or psychotechnics The application of psychology to business
ambiguous stimuli, such as inkblots or pictures, to assess and industry, an approach that was the focus of Münster-
underlying and often unconscious motives and other berg’s work.
mental processes. See also Rorschach projective tech- purposive behaviorism Tolman’s assertion that all behav-
nique, Thematic Apperception Test. ior serves a purpose or is goal-directed, and should be
psyche The distinctive characteristic of all living organisms, analyzed in those terms.
from the Greek for “breath;” translated as Latin anima and radical environmentalism Watson’s view that environmen-
English soul; described as having hierarchical purposes tal factors have an overwhelmingly greater importance
by Plato and Aristotle; root word for psychology. See also than heredity in determining behavior.
rational soul, sensitive soul, vegetative soul. rage For Watson, one of three innate emotions (along with
psychic causality Wundt’s notion that there are different love and fear); produced in infants by restricting their
rules in place for apperceptive processes that do not movement.
follow the same mechanistic causality that distinguishes randomized controlled trial (RCT) A research design used
perceptive processes. See also apperception, creative extensively in medical experiments and incorporated into
synthesis. psychotherapy research; participants are randomly as-
psychoanalysis Freud’s term for both his therapeutic method signed to one of several treatment groups for comparison,
and the more general psychological theory he developed including active treatments and one group that receives
emphasizing the inevitability of intrapsychic conflict and minimal or no treatment.
the unconscious. Psychoanalysis as a therapy uses free rational emotive therapy (RET) Ellis’s therapeutic ap-
association, dream analysis, and other methods to bring proach, in which clients are actively challenged by the
the patient’s unconscious conflicts to light. therapist and taught how to change their attitudes and
psychobiography A form of writing biography that uses beliefs.
psychoanalytic or other psychological personality theo- rationalism The philosophical position holding that questions
ries to interpret and illuminate a person’s life story. about nature, knowledge, and truth can be answered pri-
psychogenic needs Murray’s concept of twenty-seven primarily by reason and logic. See also empiricism, nativism.
mary and sometimes unconscious motives, including the rationalization A Freudian defense mechanism; the
need for achievement, affiliation, power, and affiliation, denial of one’s true motivation and substituting a
which consititute personality differences. plausible-seeming but false excuse or explanation.
psychological types Descriptions based on Jung’s theory rational monads In Leibniz’s conception, entities higher
that individuals can be classified into eight different than bare or sentient monads, having the capacity for
types, based on their standing on the three dimensions apperception and self-awareness, corresponding to the
of extroversion-introversion, sensation-intuition, and conscious souls or minds of human beings. See also bare
thinking-feeling. monads, sentient monads, supreme monad.
psychologization The interpretation of any aspect of life in rational soul The highest component of Aristotle’s concep-
psychological terms. tion of the psyche or soul, unique to humans and provid-
psychology of individual differences A discipline that fo- ing the capacities for reason and self-awareness. See also
cuses on the measurement and study of variations among sensitive soul, vegetative soul.
people on a psychological characteristic, rather than the reaction time In experimental psychology, the measurable
general qualities of that characteristic. time between the introduction of a stimulus and the com-
psychophysical isomorphism Köhler’s idea that conscious pletion of a specified kind of response to it.
perceptions and brain processes share similar structural real individuality Stern’s Gestalt-like conception of each
and relational properties, or fields, and should be studied person’s unique and unified self that is more than the
as organized, whole systems rather than conglomerations sum of its individual characteristics. See also relational
of separate components. individuality.
psychophysics Fechner’s term for the study of relationships recapitulationism The idea that the stages of a person’s
between the objectively measured intensities of various intellectual, emotional, and psychological development
A48 Glossary
pass through the same ones as our pre-human ancestors; safety needs The second level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs;
endorsed by Haeckel and then by Hall to support his the need to be safe from threats by predators, criminals,
views on adolescence. extremes of climate and temperature, or other hazardous
redundancy hypothesis The idea that each individual mem- environmental circumstances. See also hierarchy of needs.
ory gets stored in several different locations throughout scale of nature Aristotle’s notion that living organisms
the brain’s cortex, the number of locations increasing as have a hierarchical order of complexity, from the simplest
the memory becomes better established and more widely plants at the bottom to rational human beings at the top.
associated with other memories. scatter plot The representation of data for two compared
reflection Rogers’s nondirective psychotherapeutic tech- or correlated variables on a grid, showing the numbers of
nique involving mirroring back to the client the substance cases for each combination of scores.
of what he or she says, using different words that encour- scientific management Taylor’s system for increasing
age deeper exploration of the issues expressed. See also efficiency and productivity in factories by having workers
client-centered therapy. to do more in less time on quick, repetitive, menial tasks,
reflections For Locke, impressions created by one’s own often on an assembly line. Also called Taylorism. See
mental activity; along with sensations, one of the two also de-skilling, differential piece-rate system, soldiering,
major sources of knowledge. time study.
reflex An involuntary neurophysiological response to a stim- scientist-practitioner model of clinical training Shakow’s
ulus from the external world. See also response, stimulus. model for the education of clinical psychologists involv-
reflexivity In psychology, the capacity for self-awareness ing a combined emphasis on scientific, research training
and reflection; the status of the agent and object of study and training in professional applications, such as assess-
being one and the same; the capacity of psychological ment and therapy.
knowledge to change self-understanding. secondary process Freud’s conception of the modes of
regression line The line on a graph created from calculating thinking associated with conscious rationality and
the means (averages) of each column in a scatter plot; abstract thought; generally the opposite of the uncon-
the data points fall into an approximately straight line, scious primary process. See also primary process.
the slope of which reflects the strength of the correlation secondary qualities As formulated by Galileo and Locke,
between two variables. the conscious sensations (such as light, sound, and touch)
regression toward the mean A statistical term referring to that occur after the primary qualities of an external object
the tendency for extreme scores on one compared variable impact on the sensory organs. See also primary qualities.
to be associated with less extreme scores on the other secondary reinforcer In operant conditioning, a reinforcer
variable. that acquires power only after having been paired with
reinforcer In operant conditioning, a consequence that re- another primary reinforcer. See also primary reinforcer.
sults in an increase in a desired behavior. See also primary seduction theory An early theory proposed by Freud and
reinforcer, secondary reinforcer. then abandoned, suggesting that all patients with hysteria
relational individuality Stern’s term for a person’s relative or must have undergone sexual abuse as children and subse-
statistical positions on a variety of separately measured quently repressed the memories.
personality traits. See also real individuality. self-psychology Calkins’s idea that the conscious self should
repression In Freudian theory, the prevention or expulsion be the subject matter of psychology, and that in contrast to
from consciousness of anxiety-arousing or psychologi- behavioristic interpretations, the self was active, guiding,
cally dangerous thoughts or memories. purposeful, and present in all acts of consciousness.
respondent conditioning A term used by Skinner to define self-actualization The positive tendency of psychologically
Pavlovian classical conditioning in contrast to operant healthy people to fulfill their potential, freed from the
conditioning; in respondent conditioning a response constraints of lower needs; the highest level in Maslow’s
is elicited by a conditioned stimulus (CS), whereas in hierarchy of needs. See also hierarchy of needs.
operant conditioning a response must be emitted by the self-questionnaire method A research method involving
subject before conditioning can take place. Also called the distribution of a standard set of questions to a large
Pavlovian conditioning or classical conditioning. See also sample of respondents; pioneered by Galton for collecting
operant conditioning. biographical, demographic, and personal information
response A muscular or glandular reaction to a stimulus; the from eminent scientists and from twins. See also twin
final component of a reflex. study method.
Glossary A49
sensations (1) The major source of ideas and sensitive in specific memory locations. See also connectionist
knowledge in Locke’s empiricist theory. (2) For later scien- processing.
tists such as Helmholtz, the “raw elements” of conscious- sexual selection A variant of Darwin’s natural selection
ness, requiring no learning or prior experience and having suggesting that factors influencing mate selection play
no initial meaning; exemplified by pure experiences an important role in the transmission of characteristics
of light, sound, odor, and touch; after experience and favorable for reproductive success.
learning, sensations may become the basis of meaningful shaping In operant conditioning, the process by which a
perceptions. (3) In Wundt’s system, along with feelings, complex behavior is built up through the progressive rein-
sensations were the primary contents of consciousness, forcement of a sequence of simpler responses that lead to
categorized introspectively according to mode, qualities, the final behavior.
intensities, and durations. simple ideas Locke’s term for the most basic ideas estab-
sensitive knowledge Locke’s term for knowledge based on the lished in early life, recording the most basic sensations
associations of ideas from sensations of the empirical world; and reflections. See also complex ideas.
it is the least certain kind of knowledge because it depends simple natures According to Descartes, the only two prop-
on the particular patterns of sensory experiences a person erties of physical phenomena that cannot be analyzed
happens to have, which may be random or misleading. See or doubted: extension (the space occupied by a physi-
also demonstrative knowledge, intuitive knowledge. cal particle or body) and motion (the movement of an
sensitive soul In Aristotle’s conception of the psyche or soul, extended particle or body throughout space); similar to
animals and humans possess the functions of locomo- primary qualities, as proposed by Galileo and Locke. See
tion, sensation, memory, and imagination, referred to also primary qualities.
collectively as the sensitive soul. See also rational soul, Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) A
vegetative soul. personality scale developed by Cattell measuring sixteen
sensory aphasia A condition in which speech is fluent and primary factors, derived from factor analysis of the inter-
grammatical, but comprehension of spoken language is correlations among many measures of individual traits.
severely impaired and speech is marked by peculiar words small world phenomenon Milgram’s term for his finding
and mispronunciations. Also called Wernicke’s aphasia. that most randomly chosen pairs of people are intercon-
See also motor aphasia, paraphasias. nected through a small chain of mutual acquaintances,
sensory strip A functionally distinct area of the brain, bor- summarized by the phrase six degrees of separation.
dering the motor strip, responsible for processing sensory social conformity A social phenomenon studied by Asch,
functions from various parts of the body. Milgram, and other social psychologists, in which individ-
sensory-motor stage Piaget’s earliest stage of development, uals in group settings respond to pressure to conform to
from birth to age 2, in which a child’s intelligence involves the ideas, opinions, and/or behaviors of their fellow group
sensory and motor activities and is unrelated to abstract members.
thought in the adult sense. See also stage theory of cogni- social contagion The spread of ideas, attitudes, or behavior
tive development. patterns in a group through imitation and conformity;
sentient monads In Leibniz’s conception, entities higher manifested in Mesmer’s baquet settings and emphasized
than bare monads but lower than rational monads, and in Le Bon’s analysis of crowd behavior.
comprising the souls of living organisms with the capacity social contract A theory proposed by Hobbes and modified
for ordinary perception. See also bare monads, rational by Locke and others, to the effect that human society was
monads, supreme monad. created when individuals voluntarily came together in
separated twin study A study of populations of identical groups and submitted to a centralized authority for pur-
twins who have been raised in separate environments; if poses of mutual protection.
separations were early and complete, and the environmen- social Darwinism The view, originated primarily by Spencer,
tal placements random, their test score correlations could that political systems and societies, like biological species,
accurately indicate heritability; studies so far have met evolve by natural selection; therefore social and political
those conditions only partially. systems should encourage a ruthlessly enforced survival
serialist (symbolic) processing An AI computer program- of the fittest; in the United States, this doctrine was used
ming strategy that operates by performing a specified to justify a system of unregulated free enterprise.
sequence of operations on a specified set of symbols; both social facilitation The strengthening of a behavior or act
the operations and the symbols are previously stored when performed in a social or group setting.
A50 Glossary
social influence processes The many different ways in introspections conducted according to his structuralist
which behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs are shaped by other theory. See also structuralism.
people and social situations; a major topic in the develop- stream of consciousness James’s term for the streamlike,
ment of social psychology. fluid, and continuous quality of conscious thought, which
social interest Adler’s term for what he believed to be an makes it impervious to analysis by breaking it down into
innate human desire to relate harmoniously and construc- separate static elements. Also called stream of thought.
tively with others. strong AI Searle’s term for a computer intelligence that
social neuroscience A newly emerging interdisciplinary would be indistinguishable in all respects, including
field that studies the neurological underpinnings of social the capacity for intentionality and consciousness, from
thought and behavior using a variety of imaging tech- human intelligence. See also weak AI.
niques. Also called social cognitive neuroscience. structuralism A term coined by Titchener to define his ap-
sociobiology A recently developed interdisciplinary proach to experimental psychology, emphasizing first and
approach, hypothesizing that the fundamental unit in the foremost the discovery of the basic structure of mental
evolution of social behavior is the individual gene, rather phenomena as collections of sensations and feelings,
than the entire organism or a group. before considering their function.
soldiering In industrial psychology, a term that signifies subtractive method Donders’s technique of measuring
working below one’s normal capacity or speed; in the reaction times with differing degrees of complexity; the
context of the behavior of factory workers being paid average time for a simpler task is subtracted from that
according to whether they reached the average level of for one more complex task, with the conclusion that the
production, they would establish the lowest average pos- difference is the time needed for a higher mental function,
sible by working at the slowest pace they could without such as discrimination.
being penalized. See also scientific management. suggestibility A tendency to be influenced and guided
sophist A name applied to influential private teachers in by the thoughts and behavior of someone else; a major
ancient Athens who specialized in rhetoric, the art of subject of study in social psychology.
persuasion, and enabling students to excel in public argu- superego In Freud’s model of the psyche, the part that pro-
ment and debate; opposed by Socrates and Plato. duces moral demands that are independent of instincts
sophisticated presentism The practice of writing history to and external reality; theoretically arising from an uncon-
understand contemporary concerns with an awareness of scious identification with the same-sex parent. See also
the ways in which time and place have shaped that history. ego, id, pcpt.-cs.
See also historicism, presentism. supreme monad In Leibniz’s conception, the highest and
stage theory of cognitive development Piaget’s concep- ultimately unknowable supreme entity equated with God,
tion of a biologically determined sequence of devel- whose purposes, perceptions, and awareness controlled
opmental periods marked by qualitative differences in and contained everything in the universe. See also bare
the ways younger and older children conceptualize and monads, rational monads, sentient monads.
solve problems and perform tasks. The four stages are symbolic logic A general field established by Boole, in which
the sensory-motor stage, preoperational stage, concrete traditional mathematics and algebra are treated along
operations stage, and formal operations stage. with logic as part of the same system in which symbols are
Stanford Prison Experiment Zimbardo’s study of social in- manipulated and calculated according to specified formal
fluence in which subjects living in a mock prison took on, rules.
with great and sometimes disturbing intensity, the roles symbolic mode Bruner’s third and most powerful mode of
and behaviors of prisoners or guards. representation, in which things are known symbolically
statistical correlation A mathematical process pioneered and abstractly, and can be subject to logical analysis and
by Galton and Pearson for measuring the strength of the thought. See also enactive mode, iconic mode.
association between two imperfectly related variables. systematic desensitization A deconditioning technique
stimulus The source of external excitation that acts on a first developd by Jones in which a pleasant stimulus is
sensory organ, initiating a response such as a perception presented at the same time as a fear-evoking stimulus,
or a reflex. the latter at a level that does not trigger a full-blown fear
stimulus error Titchener’s term for the inappropriate impo- response; over repeated exposures, the fearful response is
sition of meaning or interpretation onto the contents of gradually eliminated. See also behavior therapy.
Glossary A51
taxonomy Pioneered by Aristotle and Theophrastus, the easily be transferred to other areas of mental function;
arrangement of biological organisms into hierarchical largely disconfirmed by the experiments of Thorndike and
groups and subgroups, such as the modern categories of Woodworth.
kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. transference Freud’s term for a patient’s recreating, or trans-
Thanatos In Freud’s later theorizing, his term for the aggres- ferring, unconscious feelings about important people from
sive death instinct, which operates in conflict with the life their past onto the analyst in a therapeutic relationship.
instinct, Eros. trial-and-error learning Thorndike’s term for the process
The Interpretation of Dreams Freud’s most famous book, whereby initially random behavior gradually becomes
introducing his wish fulfillment hypothesis of dreams, more precise as a subject accidentally makes responses
along with many of the most basic elements of his psycho- that lead to positive consequences, such as escape from an
analytic theory. enclosed environment.
The Kallikak Family A popular but oversimplified and Turing machine Turing’s hypothetical “universal” computer,
ultimately discredited book by Goddard intended to capable of manipulating any set of numbers or symbols
illustrate the presence or absence of a gene for feeble- according to some set of formally specifiable and self-
mindedness within two different branches of a large New consistent rules; would have same capabilities as
Jersey family. Babbage’s analytical engine, but with simpler architecture.
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) A projective personality Turing test Turing’s suggestion that computer intelligence
test, created by Murray and Morgan, for assessing uncon- be assessed according to its ability to perform some
scious motives; subjects respond to a series of standard- complex task requiring intelligent behavior, with results
ized pictures and construct stories about them. indistinguishable from those of a human. See also artifi-
therbligs A term coined by the Gilbreths, from an anagram cial intelligence.
of their name, to define the eighteen independent motions twin study method A research method pioneered by
of the hand they discovered with their motion study Galton that examines the similarities and differences that
research. See also motion studies. develop between different categories of twin pairs, such as
third force Maslow’s term for his new, humanistic, and pos- identical versus fraternal, or those reared in similar versus
itive approach to psychology, contrasting with the older dissimilar environments.
behaviorism and psychoanalysis. two-factor theory of intelligence Spearman’s theory that
time study In the scientific management of factory work, the the performance of intellectual tasks requires both a
practice of recording the amount of time taken to do each single common factor, which he called general intelli-
movement in a task, in order to establish a standard time gence (g), and a specific factor (s) unique to each of the
for that task, with the goal of increasing productivity. See individual tasks.
also de-skilling, scientific management. unconditioned reflex Pavlov’s term for an innate and auto-
tomography The technique of imaging the body as col- matic reaction that must exist prior to any conditioning or
lections of sections or slices created by various kinds of learning; consists of an unconditioned stimulus (US) and
penetrating waves; common types are CT (computed unconditioned response (UR). See also conditioned reflex.
tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), and unconditioned response (UR) The response component in
PET (positron emission tomography). a Pavlovian unconditioned reflex; the response automati-
TOTE unit A central concept in the analysis of problem- cally triggered an unconditioned stimulus, such as saliva-
solving proposed by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram and tion at the sight of food. See also unconditioned stimulus.
inspired by the General Problem Solver’s means-ends unconditioned stimulus (US) The stimulus component in
analysis; the letters stand for test, operate, test, exit; its a Pavlovian unconditioned reflex; a stimulus, such as the
adoption was seen by its originators as a break from rigid presentation of food, that evokes an automatic response,
behaviorism’s denial of inner mental concepts. See also such as salivation. See also unconditioned response.
General Problem Solver, means-ends analysis. unconscious inference Helmholtz’s idea that perceptual
traits Habitual personality characteristics relating to pat- phenomena, like accurate depth perception, arise after
terns of behavior, temperament, intelligence, sociality, and certain rules (such as a receding object getting progres-
emotion that differentiate one person from another. sively visually smaller) become so well learned that they
transfer of training The notion that the positive effect of act automatically and unconsciously like the major prem-
instruction and exercise in one discipline of study can ises in logical syllogisms.
A52 Glossary
uniformitarianism A geological theory promoted by Lyell the capacity for intentionality and consciousness. See also
holding that the Earth’s major features resulted from strong AI.
gradual processes occurring over vast stretches of time, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Wechsler’s
rather than according to the then-predominant alternative intelligence test for adults, providing deviation IQ scores
theory of catastrophism. See also catastrophism. indicating where subjects stand relative to normal distri-
variable-interval reinforcement schedule An operant butions of previous results from people of their own age
conditioning schedule in which responses are reinforced groups. See also deviation IQ.
only periodically after randomly varying intervals of time; Wernicke’s area The area of the brain’s temporal lobe where
typically produces a high rate of response. damage causes impairments in the comprehension of
variable-ratio reinforcement schedule An operant con- language, a condition known as Wernicke’s aphasia or
ditioning schedule in which reinforcement occurs after sensory aphasia.
a number of responses that varies randomly but has a Wernicke’s aphasia See sensory aphasia.
constant average value; typically produces a high rate of white matter The fibrous white tissue that occupies the inte-
response. rior layers of the brain; composed primarily of the axons of
variation hypothesis The idea advanced by Darwin and oth- neurons. See also gray matter.
ers that across all species, including humans, males have wish fulfillment hypothesis Freud’s theory that the latent
been more modified by evolution than females and tend to thoughts underlying dreams are usually unconscious,
show more variability within their own gender. conflict-laden, and repressed wishes.
vegetative soul In Aristotle’s conception of the psyche or word-association test A test developed by Jung to reveal
soul, the two lowest functions, nutrition and reproduction, psychic conflict; respondents give their first associations
are possessed even by simple plants and are referred to to a standard list of words, while the examiner notes reac-
collectively as the vegetative soul. See also rational soul, tion times and signs of anxiety. See also free association,
sensitive soul. word-association technique.
visual area A functionally distinct area of the brain’s occipi- word-association technique A method pioneered by
tal lobe responsible for the processing of visual stimuli. Galton in which a subject responds to a series of stimulus
visual cliff An apparatus devised by Gibson, a platform with words by reporting the first few thoughts that come to
a glass floor, for determining whether very young children mind; may have partially inspired Freud’s free-association
or animals will avoid crawling or walking over its edge. technique and Jung’s word-association test as a diagnos-
vitalism A school of thought suggesting that all living organ- tic tool. See also free association, word-association test.
isms are animated by an immaterial life force that gives Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory The theory that the
them their vitality and that is not analyzable by scientific eye contains three types of color receptor cells, respond-
methods; contrasts with physiological mechanism. See ing most strongly to each of three primary colors, and
also physiological mechanism. whose excitation in varying combinations produces the
Völkerpsychologie A nonexperimental branch of psy- effects of color mixing. See also primary colors.
chology proposed by Wundt devoted to studying the Zeitgeist approach A historiographic approach emphasiz-
communal and cultural products of human nature, such as ing the zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, proposing that the
religion, mythology, customs, and language, using histori- uptake and impact of individual contributions is depen-
cal and comparative analysis. dent on the receptivity of the places and times in which
voluntaristic psychology Wundt’s general term to describe they are produced. See also Great Man approach.
his psychology, encompassing the study of apperception, zone of proximal development (zpd) Vygotsky’s term for
creative synthesis, and psychic causality, which were the difference between what a person is intellectually
associated with the will and voluntary effort. capable of on his or her own, and what is quite easily
weak AI Searle’s term for a computer’s ability to solve possible with the guidance or coaching of someone who is
problems using processes that resemble, and may serve as more capable.
models for, certain aspects of human thinking, but without
CREDITS
Timeline Collections, Purdue University Libraries; p. xxxiii: Granger

Page xxvii: Godong/UIG via Getty Images; p. xxvii: Ken Collection, NYC; p. xxxiii: AP Photo; p. xxxiv: Bettmann/
Welsh/Getty Images; p. xxvii: Everett Collection Historical/ Corbis via Getty Images; p. xxxiv: The Drs. Nicholas and
Alamy: p. xxviii: Album/Art Resource, NY; p. xxviii: Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology,
Bettmann/Corbis via Getty Images: xxviii: Granger Collec- The University of Akron; p. xxxiv: Wellesley College Archives;
tion, NYC; xxviii: Georgios Kollidas/Alamy Stock Photo; p. xxxiv: The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center
xxix: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy Stock for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron;
Photo; p. xxix: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy; p. xxix: p. xxxiv: Notman & Son/McGill University Archives, PR010146;
The National Library of Medicine, Bethesda; p. xxix: Lebrecht p. xxxv: Granger Collection, NYC; p. xxxv: Nina Lee/The LIFE
Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy; p. xxix: Press Asso- Picture Collection/Getty Images; p. xxxvi: Neuro Media
ciation via AP Images; p. xxx: Science & Society Picture Services, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University;
Library/Getty Images; p. xxx: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; p. xxxvi: Harvard University Archives; p. xxxvi; Courtesy of
p. xxx: Images from History of Medicine, National Library of University of Minnesota Archives, University of Minnesota-
Medicine, Bethesda; p. xxx: The Phrenological Journal and Twin Cities; p. xxxvi: Courtesy of the Perelman School of
Life Illustrated’ by Samuel R. Wells 1875; p. xxx: Mary Evans Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; p. xxxvii: Photo
Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; p. xxx: INTERFOTO/ by Sandra Condry; p. xxxvii: Courtesy MIT Museum; p. xxxvii:
Alamy Stock Photo; p. xxx: akg-images; p. xxx: Mary Evans From the film Obedience, ©1965 by Stanley Milgram and
Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; p. xxxi: Alamy; p. xxxi: distributed by Alexander Street Press; p. xxxviii: Sabena Jane
Images from History of Medicine, National Library of Med- Blackbird/Alamy Stock Photo.
icine, Bethesda; p. xxxi: Columbia University Rare Book and
Manuscript Library; p. xxxi: National Library of Medicine;
Introduction
p. xxxi: The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for
Page 5: Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector/Getty
the History of Psychology, The University of Akron; p. xxxi:
Images; p. 8: (left) Harvard University Archives, HUP Boring,
Everett Historical/Shutterstock; p. xxxii: Images from History
Edwin (5), (right) Milne Special Collections, University of
of Medicine, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda; p. xxxii:
New Hampshire Library, Durham NH; p. 15: Mary Evans
The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the
Picture Library/Alamy.
History of Psychology, The University of Akron; p. xxxii:
Wellesley College Archives; p. xxxii: Hugo Münsterberg,
Grundzüge der Psychologie, Leipzig J. A. Barth 1918; Chapter 1
p. xxxii: Granger Collection, NYC; p. xxxii: Wellesley College Page 26: Godong/UIG via Getty Images; p. 27: Fig. 1.2: From
Archives; p. xxxiii: Northwestern University Archives, Early Psychological Thought: Ancient Accounts of Mind and
Evanston, IL; p. xxxiii: Granger Collection, NYC; p. xxxiii: Soul by Green, Christopher. Reproduced with permission of
Hulton Archive/Getty Images; p. xxxiii: The Miriam and Ira Greenwood Publishing Group in the format. Republish in a
D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photog- book via Copyright Clearance Center.; p. 32: Ken Welsh/Getty
raphy Collection, The New York Public Library. (1860 - 1920). Images; p. 35: tc_2/Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images; p. 39:
Dr. Edward Thorndike, Columbia University. Retrieved from Everett Historical/Shutterstock; p. 44: Rembrandt Laughing
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4fd1-a3d9- (Getty Museum). Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (http://www
e040-e00a18064a99; p. xxxiii: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith .getty.edu/art/collection/artists/469/rembrandt-harmensz
College (Northampton, Massachusetts)/MSP 7, The Frank -van-rijn-dutch-1606-1669) (Dutch, 1606-1669). Digital image
and Lillian Gilbreth papers, Courtesy of Archives and Special courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program; p. 49:
A53
A54 Credits
Audrius Tomonis/www.banknotes.com; p. 50: (left) Everett Chapter 5

Collection Historical/Alamy, (right) Wellcome Library, Page 174: Wikipedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
London. Wellcome Images/CC BY 4.0. File:Die_Gartenlaube_(1862)_b_264.jpg); p. 175: INTER-
FOTO/Alamy Stock Photo; p. 186: Granger Collection, NYC;
p. 187: from ‘The Time Taken Up By Cerebral Operations’,
Chapter 2
James McKeen Cattell (1886a) First published in Mind, 11,
Page 60: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art
220-242; p. 193: Granger Collection, NYC; p. 195 Wellesley
Resource, NY; p. 67: INTERFOTO/Alamy; p. 70: (left) Album/
College Archives; p. 198 Columbia University Rare Book and
Art Resource, NY, (right) Philip Mould/The Art Archive at Art
Manuscript Library; p. 199: The Drs. Nicholas and Doro-
Resource, NY; p. 75: (top) Bettmann/Corbis via Getty Images,
thy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, The
(bottom) © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth Reproduced by
University of Akron; p. 201: The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy
permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees/Bridgeman
Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, The Univer-
Art Library; p. 76: National Portrait Gallery London - www.npg
sity of Akron.
.org.uk; p. 83: Georgios Kollidas/Alamy Stock Photo; p. 86: (left)
Ashdown House, The Craven Collection (acquired by H.M.
Treasury and transferred to The National Trust in 1968). Photo: Chapter 6
Derrick E. Witty. National Trust Photo Library/Art Resource, Page 210: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy;
NY, (right) Sophie Charlotte von Preussen, c.1690 (oil on p. 212: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy; p. 222: The Natural History
canvas), Romandon, Gedeon (c.1667-97)/Maerkisches Museum, Museum/Alamy; p. 224: (left and right) Mary Evans Picture
Berlin, Germany/Bridgeman Images; p. 87: Gottfried Wilhelm Library/Alamy; p. 230: (left and right) Universal History
Leibniz Bibliothek. Archive/Getty Images; p. 233: Cambridge University Library,
DAR 185.109.f6v; p. 234: Library of Congress.
Chapter 3 Chapter 7
Page 101: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy; p. 104: The Page 244: Science and Society Picture Library/Getty Images;
Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated by Samuel R. Wells p. 245: Images from History of Medicine, National Library of
1875; p. 106: The National Library of Medicine, Bethesda; Medicine, Bethesda; p. 247: The Galton Papers, UCL Library
p. 110: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; p. 112: Services, Special Collections; p. 254: The Natural History
Dronkers NF, Plaisant O, Iba-Zizen MT, Cabanis EA. Paul Museum/The Image Works; p. 268: From Twins: A study
Broca’s historic cases: high resolution MR imaging of the of heredity and environment by Horatio H. Newman, Frank
brains of Leborgne and Lelong. Brain. 2007 May;130, Fig.3a, N. Freeman, and Karl J. Holzinger, 1937, The University of
p.1436 (Pt 5):1432-41. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awm042. By permis- Chicago Press, p.308; p. 271: © 1981 Charles Addams With
sion of Oxford University Press; p. 115: Max Glauer/ http:// permission Tee and Charles Addams Foundation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carl_Wernicke.JPG; p. 118: The
Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History Chapter 8
of Psychology, The University of Akron; p. 122: Notman & Page 283: Houghton MS Am 1092 1185 William James in
Son/McGill University Archives, PR010146; p. 125: Neuro Brazil 1865; p. 292: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy Stock
Media Services, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill Photo; p. 296: Images from History of Medicine, National
University. Library of Medicine, Bethesda; p. 302: Wellesley College
Archives; p. 306: Wellesley College Archives; p. 308: The
Chapter 4 Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and
Page 136: (left) Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/ Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public
Alamy Stock Photo, (right) David Hume, 1766 (oil on canvas), Library. (1860 - 1920). Dr. Edward Thorndike, Columbia
Ramsay, Allan (1713-84)/Scottish National Portrait Gallery, University. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.
Edinburgh, Scotland/Bridgeman Images; p. 141: (left) Hulton nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4fd1-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.
Archive/Getty Images, (right) Science & Society Picture
Library/Getty Images; p. 153: TopFoto/The Image Works; Chapter 9
p. 154: Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images; p. 162: Page 319: National Library of Medicine; p. 327: The Drs.
(left, center, right) Granger Collection, NYC. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of
Credits A55
Psychology, The University of Akron; p. 334: The Drs. Nicholas Chapter 13

and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, Page 496: Images from History of Medicine, National Library
The University of Akron; p. 339: The Drs. Nicholas and of Medicine, Bethesda; p. 498: With the courtesy of La Société
Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, Binet-Simon; p. 504: With the courtesy of La Société Binet-
The University of Akron; p. 343: ©B.F. Skinner Foundation; Simon; p. 508: frontispiece, The Kallikak Family A Study
p. 346: Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness by Henry Herbert
p. 354: ©B.F. Skinner Foundation. Goddard, Ph.D. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1912;
p. 511: (left) Images from History of Medicine, National
Library of Medicine, Bethesda, (right) The Drs. Nicholas and
Chapter 10 Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology,
Page 362: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy The University of Akron; p. 512: Image courtesy of The Lillian
Stock Photo; p. 365: Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris/The and Clarence de la Chapelle Medical Archives at NYU; p. 515:
Bridgeman Art Library; p. 371: Wellcome Library, London; Archives Jean Piaget; p. 519: Archives Jean Piaget; p. 524:
p. 375: The National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Mary- Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.
land; p. 378: akg-images; p. 382: Floyd Henry Allport Papers,
Syracuse University Archives; p. 386: ‘Opinions and social
pressure’. Asch, Solomon E. Scientific American, Vol 193(5),
Chapter 14
Page 535: Granger Collection, NYC; p. 538: Alamy; p. 540:
1955, 31-35. Reproduced with permission, Copyright ©1955
Press Association via AP Images; p. 543: (left) Granger Col-
Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved; p. 389: From the
lection, NYC, (right) Courtesy MIT Museum; p. 553: Harvard
film Obedience, ©1965 by Stanley Milgram and distributed
University Archives; p. 556: Courtesy MIT Museum; p. 558:
by Alexander Street Press; p. 396: Elizabeth Loftus.
History of Psychology, The University of Akron; p. 563: Photo
Chapter 11 by Sandra Condry.
Page 404: (right) Ullstein Bild via Getty Images, (left) Mary
Evans Picture Library/Alamy; p. 406: Everett Historical/ Chapter 15
Shutterstock; p. 409: Bjanka Kadic/Alamy; p. 426: Pictorial Page 574: frontispiece, Hugo Münsterberg, Grundzüge der
Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo; p. 428: Bettmann/Corbis via Psychologie, Leipzig J. A. Barth 1918; p. 578: Ullstein Bild via
Getty Images; p. 431: The Granger Collection, NYC; p. 434: Getty Images; p. 582: Northwestern University Archives,
Hulton Archive/Getty Images; p. 437: Fig. 11.9: From The Evanston, IL; p. 583; AP Photo; p. 584: Sabena Jane Blackbird/
Psychology of C.G. Jung: An Introduction with Illustrations, Alamy Stock Photo; p. 585: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith
by Jolande Jacobi, © 1962 Jolande Jacobi. Reprinted with College (Northampton, Massachusetts)/MSP 7, The Frank
permission from Yale University Press. p. 440: Clark and Lillian Gilbreth papers, Courtesy of Archives and Special
University Archives. Collections, Purdue University Libraries; p. 587: Collection
of author; p. 592: AP Photo; p. 599: The Drs. Nicholas and
Chapter 12 Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology,
Page 451: Robert Allport, Courtesy Victoria Allport; p. 454: The University of Akron.
History of Psychology, The University of Akron; p. 458: Chapter 16
“Portrait of Raymond B. Catell,” (ID 0000950), Record Series Page 616: The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center
39/1/11, courtesy of the University of lllinois at Urbana- for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron;
Champaign Archives; p. 465: Robert Allport, Courtesy p. 618: Spencer Grant/Science Source; p. 621: Edward A.
Victoria Allport; p. 469: Granger Collection, NYC; p. 470: Hubbard/NIH; p. 630: Courtesy of the Perelman School
Courtesy of the Robert D. Farber University Archives & of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; p. 632: AP
Special Collections Department, Brandeis University; p. 477: Photo/Jim Wells; p. 639: Courtesy of University of Minne-
Bettmann/Corbis via Getty Images; p. 478: Brooklyn College sota Archives, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; p. 642:
Archives; p. 485: Carl Rogers Collection, Department of Spe- Courtesy of University of Minnesota Archives, University of
cial Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Minnesota-Twin Cities; p. 647 (left) Warner Bros./Photofest,
Santa Barbara; p. 486: Hulton Archive/Getty Images. (right) Steve Smeltzer/Cartoonstock.com.
INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to Agassiz, Louis, 283 Allport-Vernon Study of Values (test),
illustrations. agreeableness (Big Five model), 454, 456
462 altruistic behavior, 236
A AI (artificial intelligence), see artificial American Association for the
AACP (American Association of Clinical intelligence (AI) Advancement of Science, 307
Psychologists), 606–607, 615 Albee, George, 625 American Association of Clinical
ablation Alexander II, Czar of Russia, 319 Psychologists (AACP),
definition of, 106 Alexander the Great, 38–40, 39 606–607, 615
Ferrier and, 114 Alhazen, 47–49, 49 American Association of Labor
Flourens and, 106–109 Al-Kindi, 46–47 Legislation, 580
Franz and, 117–118 allegory of the cave, 35, 35–36 American Journal of Psychology, 297,
Lashley, 118–120, 119 Allport, Floyd H., 381–383, 382, 439, 300–301, 304, 381, 439
Abraham, Karl, 429–430 449–453, 451, 463 American Men (and Women) of
absolute threshold, 158–160 Allport, Gordon W. Science, 305, 312
academic psychology, 439–442, 448 Allport-Vernon Study of Values test, American Psychological Association
the Academy (school), 24–25, 34, 37–38 454, 456 (APA)
accommodation, 147 Bruner and, 559 contemporary issues and
Ach, Narziss, 200 Cattell and, 458–459 debates, 645
achievement (psychogenic need), on Characters, 40n on Decade of Behavior, 130
465–466 existential psychotherapy and, 486 founding of, 298
Achilles and tortoise paradox, 29–30 Freud and, 450–451, 456–457 Maslow presentation at meeting
act psychology, 407 idiographic methods and, 456, of, 474
actualizing tendency, 628 462–467 presidents of, 197, 292, 296, 298, 305,
Adams, Donald, 558 Köhler and, 453 312, 331, 487, 583
The Adapted Mind (Barkow et al.), 237 life and career, 167, 305, 381, 447–454, publications of, 7, 382n, 395, 623n,
Adler, Alfred, 429–434, 431, 463, 473, 476 451, 467–469, 469 636–637
Adler, Sigmund, 431 Lindzey and, 469 tensions among disciplines, 606, 622
Adolescence (G.Hall), 299 Milgram and, 468 American Psychologist ( journal), 7, 395
advertising Mischel and, 461 American Society for Psychical
behaviorism and, 336–338 Münsterberg and, 449–450, 455 Research, 293, 298
psychology in, 581–583 Murray and, 463–465 American Society of Mechanical
Advertising and Selling (H. Hollingworth), nomothetic studies and, 456, Engineers, 591
602 458–462 amnesia, posthypnotic, 368, 378, 408
affiliation (psychogenic need), 465–466 personality psychology and, 167, 305, Amyntas II, King of Macedonia, 37
affirmation (crowd phenomena), 379 381, 449–467 anal character, 419, 452
African Americans Pettigrew and, 469 analytical engine, 538, 538–540
Hall’s students, 300–302 prominent students of, 468–469 analytical psychology, 434–438
Jensen studying IQ scores among, Titchener and, 447–448, 453 analytic geometry, 62
269–270 Wertheimer and, 453 anal zone, 418
psychologist pioneers among, 15–16 writings of, 452–457, 467–469 Angell, James Rowland, 312, 328
A57
A58 Index
animal experiments in business and industry, 578–581 association of ideas, 80

Bruner and, 558–559 in the courtroom, 573–578 Athenian democracy, 26–27
Ferrier and, 114 Hollingworths and, 11, 599, 599–608 atomic theory, 43–45, 54, 64
Flourens and, 106–109 human relations movement and, atomism
Franz and, 117–118 591–599 Inhelder on, 520
Fritsch and, 114 in management, 584–591 Piaget on, 520
Hitzig and, 114 Münsterberg and, 449, 577–578 Titchener on, 192
Lashley and, 118–120 popular psychology and, 583–584 Aubertin, Ernest, 110–111
Pavlov and, 317–327 turning point in, 608 auditory area, 113, 114, 123
Skinner and, 346–350 women’s contributions to, 15 August, Ernst, 85–86
Thorndike and, 296, 308–310, 474 Arabic numerals, 46–47, 534 auras in epilepsy, 122–124
Watson and, 328–332 archetypes, 435–436 “autonomous man,” 353
Wundt and, 177 Arendt, Hannah, 390 autonomy, 457, 465
Animal Intelligence (Romanes), 235 argument from design, 219, 222 Avicenna, 49–51, 50
animal magnetism, 4–5, 5, 364–366 Aristophanes, 32
The Animal Mind (Washburn), 197 Aristotelian logic, 42 B
animal psychology Aristotle Babbage, Charles, 537–541, 540
Thorndike and, 296, 308–310 on atomic theory, 44 backward reasoning, 546
Watson and, 328–332 Avicenna and, 49–50, 54 Bain, Alexander, 285, 289
animal spirits (cerebrospinal fluid), on brain, 99–100 Baldwin, James Mark, 329
66–68, 72, 100 on causality, 44 Bank Wiring Observation Room
animus (Jungian model), 437, 437 Leibniz and, 90, 92n experiment, 597–598
L’Annee Psychologique (journal), 499 life and contributions of, 25, 26, 29, baquet, 365, 365–366
Anthropometric Laboratory, 243–246, 37–43, 39 “barbarians,” 27, 289
244, 260, 263, 493 Plato and, 25–26, 26, 38 bare monads, 90
anti-Semitism, 467, 471, 474–475, 484 Thomas Aquinas and, 53–54 Barger, Albert, 336
APA (American Psychological writings of, 41 Barkow, Jerome, 237
Association), see American Arnold, Philipp Friedrich, 176 Bartholomew’s Fair (Jonson), 586
Psychological Association (APA) artificial intelligence (AI) Bartholow, Roberts, 121
aphasia Boden on, 550–551 Bartlett, Sir Frederic, 562
Broca’s, 116–117 definition of, 535 Bauer, Ida, 419–421
conduction, 116–117 intentionality and, 407 Beagle, H.M.S., 209–211, 213–218, 215,
definition of, 112 Newell-Simon project and, 546–548 227, 256, 283
motor, 115–117 origins of, 534–537 Beaumont, William, 321
paraphasias, 115–116 Selfridge and, 564–565 Beaunis, Henri, 498–499
sensory, 115–117 strong, 551–553 Bechterev, Vladimir M., 331
Wernicke’s theory of, 115–117, 408 usage as term, 545 Beck, Aaron, 630–636, 636
apoplexy (strokes), 101, 109–110 weak, 551–553 Beck Depression Inventory, 631
apparent movement, 161–162, 185 artificial somnambulism, 367–368 Beeckman, Isaac, 62
appearances (phenomena), 34–36, 137 The Art of Travel (Galton), 249–250 Behavior: An Introduction to
apperception Asch, Solomon, 167, 384–387 Comparative Psychology
definition of, 90, 188 Aspects of Eliminating Waste in (Watson), 331
Leibniz on, 90, 188 Teaching (Gilbreth), 585 behavior analysis, 355
Thematic Apperception Test, association areas, 115 The Behavior Analyst ( journal), 355
464–466 Association for Behavior Analysis Behavior and Social Issues
Wundt on, 188–190 International, 355 ( journal), 355
appetites, 36–37 Association for Humanistic behaviorism
applied psychology Psychology, 486 advertising and, 336–338
in advertising, 581–583 associationism, 496 Chomsky on, 353
Index A59
cognitive psychology and, 353 Binet, Alice, 493–494, 498, 498–500 Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence
definition of, 318 Binet, Madeleine, 493–494, 498, (Lashley), 119
on learning, 94 498–500 Brandeis, Louis, 484
Locke’s influence on, 94 biographical dictionaries, 251, 305, 312 Bregman, Elsie Oschrin, 589
mechanistic, 343, 472 “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant” Brenman-Gibson, Margaret, 631
neuroscience and, 129 (Darwin), 225, 230–232 Brentano, Franz, 406–407, 414, 439, 496
Pavlov and, see Pavlov, Ivan biological determinism, 236 Breuer, Josef, 292, 404, 404–405
Petrovich birth order effect, 433 “A Brief History of Clinical
purposive, 343 bit, 546, 554 Psychology” (R. Watson), 7
Rayner and, 12 black psychology, 15–16 Briggs, Catherine Cook, 438
on response, 94 Bleuler, Eugen, 434–435 British Association for the
Skinner and, see Skinner, B. F. blind spot, 147 Advancement of Science, 223
Thorndike and, 312 Boden, Margaret, 550–551 British associationism, 93–94
Watson, J. and, see Watson, John body types, 472 Broca, Paul, 110, 110–113
Broadus Bollingen Foundation, 438 Broca’s aphasia, 115–116
Behaviorism (Watson), 337, 341, 345 Book of Changes, 87 Broca’s area, 112–113, 113, 114, 118
The Behavior of Organisms Book of Optics (Alhazen), 48 Bronner, Augusta Fox, 605
(Skinner), 349 The Book of the Cure (The Book of Brown, Roger, 561
behavior shaping, 349–350, 355 Healing) (Avicenna), 51 Brown v. Board of Education of
behavior therapy, 630 Boole, George, 541 Topeka, 302
Bell, Charles, 138 Boolean algebra, 541–542 Brožek, Joseph, 8
Belles on Their Toes (film), 585 Boring, Edwin G., 6–7, 8, 197, 301 Brücke, Ernst, 140–141, 407
belonging and love needs, 481, 482 Born Together—Reared Apart (Segal), Bruner, Jerome S., 526–528, 558, 558–561
Benedict, Ruth, 475–478, 483 272–273 Bullitt, William, 466
Benjamin, Lucy, 395 Bouillaud, Jean Baptiste, 110 Bunsen, Robert, 177
Bergson, Henri, 516 Boyle, Robert, 75, 75–76, 80 Burt, Cyril, 268–270, 272, 516
Berkeley, George, 93–94 Boyle’s law, 75 business and industry, psychology in,
Berliner, Anna, 203 Bradley, Stephen, 294 578–581
Bernays, Martha, 407 Braid, James, 371, 371 Business Psychology (Münsterberg), 581
Bernheim, Hippolyte, 372, 376, 385, brain Byron, Ada, 539–541
403, 408 Aristotle’s studies of, 99–100
Bernstein, Leonard, 484 comparison to computers, 544–545 C
Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm, 178 Darwin’s theory on, 235 Calkins, Mary Whiton
Beyond Freedom and Dignity Descartes’ studies of, 66–68 graduate education, 303–305
(Skinner), 353 epilepsy and, 31 James and, 196, 296, 303–304, 306
Big Five model, 461 Flourens’ studies of, 106–109 life and contributions of, 15, 302,
Bills, Marion Almira, 589–590 Gall’s studies of, 100–106 302–303, 599
binary arithmetic, 84, 87, 537 Galton’s studies of, 244 Münsterberg and, 304, 577
binary switches, 543–544, 554 language areas of, 109–117 psychology at a women’s college,
Binet, Alfred localization of function, 109–117 305–306
Charcot and, 375, 377, 496–497 memory and equipotentiality, 117–121 writings of, 304
early life and career, 493–498, 496 Pavlov’s theory of, 325–327 Cambridge Philosophical Society, 218
experiments on suggestion, 380–381, Penfield on mind and, 128 camera obscura, 48
385, 397 recent neuroscience developments, Canadian National Research
individual psychology, 498–501 129–130 Council, 620
intelligence tests and, 13, 16, 268, 381, sensory and motor areas, 113–117 Candide (Voltaire), 87
501–514, 599 size differences, 113, 244 Canon of Medicine (Avicenna), 50–51
life and career of, 375–377, 504 stimulation of, 121–129 Carlsmith, James, 388–389
writings of, 380, 496–497, 499–500 Willis’ studies of, 75 Carr, Harvey, 312
A60 Index
Carver, George Washington, 483 Chinese room thought experiment, commissures, 101
“A Case History in Scientific Method” 551–552 common factors in psychotherapy
(Skinner), 346 Chomsky, Noam, 203, 352–353, 556, research, 629
case of Dora, 419–421 556–558 community psychology, 625
castration complex, 427 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 73 “The Comparative Anatomy of Angels”
catastrophism, 214, 216 chronological age, 506 (Fechner), 155
categories, 42, 137 Churchill, Winston, 509 comparative psychology, 234–235
cathartic method, 405 Church of England, 77, 219 complementarity of the sexes, 228–229
Cattell, James McKeen, 186, 186–189, Clark, Kenneth B., 301–302 complementary colors, 149–150
196, 309, 441, 602 Clark, Mamie Phipps, 301–302 complex ideas, 79
Cattell, Raymond B., 458, 458–461 classical conditioning, 323 composite portraiture system, 264
causality classifications of specimens, 38, 40 computers
definition of, 44, 136 client-centered therapy, 485, 627–629 Babbage’s early models and, 537–539
Hume on, 94, 136 clinical psychology Boden and, 550–551
Kant on, 136–137 Beck and, 630–636, 636 human brain comparison, 544–545
psychic, 190 contemporary issues and debates, Leibniz’s calculating machine,
Wundt on, 180, 190 644–647 535–537
cell assemblies, 125 Harrower and, 615–621 Lovelace and, 539–541
cerebellum, 103, 107, 109, 113 Hathaway and, 639, 639–644 Newell and, 546–548
cerebrospinal fluid (animal spirits), Hollingworth, L. and, 599–608 origins of artificial intelligence,
66–68, 72, 100 making psychotherapy scientific, 534–537
characteristic adaptations, 466 626–630 Shannon and, 542–546
Characters (Theophrastus), 40n psychotherapy research and, 636–638 Simon and, 546–548
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 372–377, 375, 403, Shakow and, 621, 621–626 TOTE unit concept, 548–549, 553, 561
408, 493, 496–498 Watson, R. and, 7 triumphs and limitations, 549–553
Charles I, King of England, 75 Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction Turing’s early models, 541–542, 545
Charles II, King of England, 75–76, 209 (Meehl), 614 concrete operations stage, 521–522
Cheaper by the Dozen (film), 585 The Clouds (Aristophanes), 32 concrete representation, 413–414, 422
Cheiron: The International Society Coca-Cola Company, 600–602, 604 condensation, 413–414, 422
for the History of the Social and coefficient of correlation, 262 conditioned reflexes, 322–327, 331, 346
Behavioral Sciences, 8 Cogito ergo sum, 69 conditioned response (CR), 323,
children cognition, 560 334–335
Chomsky’s language theory cognitive dissonance, 387–389, 560–561 conditioned stimulus (CS), 323–325
and, 556 cognitive distortions, 634 conduction aphasia, 116–117
Hall’s study of, 298–301 cognitive neuroscience, 130, 387n conformity, social, 384–387, 385–386,
intelligence tests on, 494–495, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of 389–392, 468
510–512, 517 the Mind (Gazzaniga et al.), 130 connectionist processing, 550
Klein’s study of, 430 cognitive psychology, 167, 193, 353, conscientiousness (Big Five model),
Piaget studies of, 517–523, 561 563–568 462
sexuality of, 415–421 Cognitive Psychology (Neisser), conservation of energy, law of, 143
Triplett’s study of, 381 565–566 conservation of quantity, 320
Watson-Rayner study of Little Albert, cognitive revolution, 129, 561–563 contact hypothesis, 468–469
12, 334, 334–336, 441 cognitive theory of depression, 634 contagion, social, 366
Watson’s study, 338 cognitive therapy, 630–636 The Contents of Children’s Minds on
Children Above 180 IQ (L. Hollingworth), Cold War, 384–385 Entering School (G. Hall), 299
607 collective unconscious, 436–437, 437 contiguity, law of association by, 80,
The Child’s Construction of Quantities color afterimages, 153 94, 163
(Piaget and Inhelder), 520 color vision, 148, 148–150, 198 contingencies of reinforcement,
child study movement, 298 Colossus machine, 544 347–348, 352
Index A61
continuity-discontinuity debate, 13 Darwin, Francis, 233 Dewey, John, 312, 328, 340
Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Darwin, Robert, 210, 213, 218, 246 Dickens, Charles, 539
Perception (Wundt), 174, 179 Darwin, William, 231–232 dictionaries
conversion of energy, 405–406, 411 Dashiell, John, 383–384 biographical, 251, 305, 312
Cooper, Sir Anthony Ashley, 76, 76–77 Dawkins, Richard, 236 word, 311, 454, 456
Corkin, Suzanne, 127 Day, Lucy, 197 difference engine, 537–538
cortex Dean, John, 567 differential calculus, 84
ablation studies of, 108–109, De Anima (On the Soul) (Aristotle), 41 differential piece-rate system, 579,
117–118, 119 de Candolle, Alphonse, 254, 593–594
definition of, 102 254–256, 258 differentiation, 324–326
electrical stimulation of, 113–114 declarative memory, 127 digestion, physiology of, 321–322
interpretive, 113, 123 defense mechanisms, 425–426 direct conditioning, 339
speech loss and, 110 Delboeuf, Joseph, 376–377, 496–497 directed association, 200–201
Cosmides, Leda, 237 de Lorde, André, 504, 504 Discourse on Method (Descartes),
courage, 36–37, 226 Democracy and Freedom (Mayo), 593 68–69
courtroom, psychology in the, 573–578 Democritus, 26, 43–44, 44, 54 displacement, 413–414, 422, 425
Cox, Catharine, 510, 511 demonstrative knowledge, 80 dispositional traits, 466
creative evolution, 516 Demosthenes, 432, 476 dizygotic (fraternal) twins, 257, 272–273
creative synthesis, 189 dendrites, 101 dominance, Maslow studies on, 473–474
criterion-group method, 641 depression Donaldson, Henry, 328
critical history of psychology, 11 cognitive theory of, 634 Donders, F. C., 185–186
Cromwell, Oliver, 75 treating, 636–638 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 122, 124
The Crowd (Le Bon), 378–379 Depression: Clinical, Experimental, and Downey, June Etta, 199, 452
crowds, psychology of, 377–380, 383 Theoretical Aspects (Beck), 633 dreams
CT (computed tomography), 129 De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), 45 Calkins on, 304
Cudworth, Ralph, 82 Descartes, René Darwin on, 226
cumulative record, 347, 347 on camera obscura, 48 dream work, defined, 413
Curie, Marie, 377 Elizabeth of Bohemia and, 70–71 experiential responses as, 124
Cuvier, Georges, 106 examination of his skull, 105 Freud on, 412–415
on interactive dualism, 70–72 latent content, 412–413, 415
D Leibniz and, 85, 89, 91 manifest content, 412–413
Dark Ages, 26, 39, 45 life and contributions of, 54, 59–63, primary process, 414–415, 422
Darwin, Charles Robert 70, 73, 510 Sanford on, 304
Babbage and, 539, 541 Locke and, 78–79 secondary process, 414
biological discoveries, 216–217 on mechanistic physiology, 66–68 dualism, Descartes on, 70–72
Galton and, 235, 244, 249–254 on nerves, 4 du Bois-Reymond, Emil
geological discoveries, 214–216 on passions, 14 Brücke and, 407
impact of, 232–237 on physics, 65–66 Hall and, 296
life and career, 102n, 209–214, 210, on rational qualities of the mind, James and, 283
232–233, 234, 510 68–69 life and career of, 140–141, 143–145
psychology and, 225–232 on simple natures, 63–65 Wundt and, 177
scientific inclinations of, 256 writings of, 63–65, 68–69, 71, 73, 318 Zöllner and, 183
theory of evolution by natural The Descent of Man (Darwin), Dunlap, Knight, 441
selection, 218–225 225–230, 254
voyage on the Beagle, 209–210, desensitization, systematic, 339, 630 E
213–218, 215, 227, 256, 283 de-skilling, 579 Eastern Psychological Association,
writings of, 218, 221–233, 236, 250, determinants, 618 307, 554
254, 283 determining tendencies, 560 Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 12, 193, 199, 201,
Darwin, Erasmus, 210, 219, 251 deviation IQs, 512–514 201–202
A62 Index
EBP (evidence-based practice), 645 ENIAC computer, 544 Heidbreder and, 306–308
E conchis omnia, 218 Enigma machine, 543 James and, 181
ectomorphic body type, 472 environmentalism, radical, 337–338, 340 Pavlov and, 319–327
Edgell, Beatrice, 616 Epicurus, 44–45 Wundt and, 161, 173–206
Edison, Thomas, 542 epilepsy The Experimental Study of Intelligence
Edmondstone, John, 227 Charcot on, 374–375 (Binet), 500
effect, law of, 310, 312 Hippocratics on, 31 Explorations in Personality (Murray
efficient cause, 44 Penfield treatment of, 122–125 et al.), 465–466
ego epistemology The Expression of the Emotions in
Freud on, 424–425, 425 genetic, 517–523 Man and Animals (Darwin), 225,
Jung on, 437, 437 Heidbreder and, 306 229–230, 230, 236
The Ego and the Id (S. Freud), 423 Piaget and, 515–516 extension (simple nature), 64
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Skinner and, 352 externalism, 10
Defense (A. Freud), 425 equipotentiality, 120–121 extinction, 347, 348
ego psychology, 457, 630–631 Erikson, Erik, 430, 631 extroversion-introversion
Ehrenfels, Christian von, 161 erogenous zone, 418 Big Five model on, 462
Eichmann, Adolf, 390, 393 Eros, 429 Jung’s definition of, 436–437, 452
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 390 Escape from Freedom (Fromm), 477 PEN model on, 460, 625
Einstein, Albert, 383, 483–484, 511, 550 Esdaile, James, 370 eyes, physical properties of, 146,
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 590 An Essay Concerning Human 146–148
Ekman, Paul, 236 Understanding (Locke), 74, 77–79, eyewitness accounts, 381, 396, 578
Elements of Psychophysics (Fechner), 81, 516 Eysenck, Hans, 460, 625–626
159–160, 174, 201 esteem needs, 482, 482
Eliot, Charles, 286, 292, 303 eugenics F
Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia, 14, 70, definition of, 258 facilitation, social, 366, 450
70–72, 85 Galton on, 258–265, 311, 507 factor analysis, 458–459
Elkin, Irene, 637 Goddard on, 509 false memories, 397
Elliotson, John, 369–370 Nazi Germany and, 265, 509 Faria, José Custódio de, 368–369
Ellis, Albert, 632, 632–633, 635 Thorndike on, 311 fear response, 333–335, 339
emotion eupsychia, 487 Fechner, Gustav Theodor
cathartic method, 405 evidence-based practice (EBP), 645 Freud and, 439
conditioned reactions, 332–336 evolutionary psychology, 237 Hall on, 6
Darwin on, 226, 228–231, 236 evolution by natural selection, 210, life and contributions of, 154,
Descartes on, 14, 72 216–225, 299 154–156, 182
Ekman on, 236 existential dichotomies, 477 psychophysics and, 11, 157–161, 245
in epilepsy, 122 existential psychotherapy, 486 Slade and, 183
James-Lange theory of, 290–291, 301 exorcism, 361–362 writings of, 154–156, 159–160, 174, 201
Skinner on, 346 experiential responses, 124 Fechner’s law, 159–160
Watson on, 332–336, 340 Experimentalists (Society of feeblemindedness, 507–510
The Emotions and the Will (Bain), 285 Experimental Psychologists), feeling
empiricism 197–199, 199n, 447–448 definition of, 192
Aristotle and, 25, 37–43 experimental neuroses, 325–327 in epilepsy, 122
definition of, 25 experimental psychology inferiority complex, 431–432
Locke and, 74–83 Alhazen and, 48 Titchener on, 194
enactive mode, 526 Binet and, 496 Wundt on, 180, 192
endomorphic body type, 472 Boring and, 6–7 Féré, Charles, 375–376, 497
energy, conversion of, 405–406, 411 Calkin and, 302–306 Fernald, Grace, 605
English Men of Science: Their Nature Hall and, 297–298 Ferrier, David, 114
and Nurture (Galton), 256 Harrower and, 616–617 Festinger, Leon, 387–389, 560
Index A63
Fibonacci, Leonardo, 52–53 on animality, 230 Galton, Francis

Fibonacci sequence, 52–53 Bernheim and, 403 Anthropometric Laboratory, 243–246,
figure and ground, 163, 163 Brentano and, 407 244, 260, 263, 493
final cause, 44 Breuer and, 405 Darwin and, 235, 244, 249–254
fingerprinting, 263 Brücke and, 141, 407 de Candolle and, 254–256, 258
First International Management Bullitt and, 466 on eugenics, 258–265, 311, 507
Congress, 589 case of Dora, 419–421 on hereditary genius, 250–254
FitzRoy, Robert, 209–211, 213–214, 216, 218 Charcot and, 377, 403, 408 influence and continuing
fixation, 419 on childhood sexuality, 415–419, 452 controversies, 265–273
fixed-interval reinforcement schedule, disciples and dissidents, 429–438 intelligence tests and, 245, 258–259,
348, 348 on dream work, 412–414 263, 493, 496, 510
fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule, 348 on female development, 4 life and contributions of, 105, 235,
flashbulb memory, 563, 567 on free association, 264, 409–412 245, 246–250, 247, 435
floating man thought experiment, 51–52 Hall and, 300, 435, 439–440, 440 on nature-nurture question, 4, 94,
Flourens, Pierre, 106–109, 109 on intrapsychic conflict, 73 254–258
Flynn, James, 514 James and, 292, 300–301, 440, 440–441 statistical correlation and, 245,
Flynn effect, 514 Jung and, 429–431, 435 258–259
fMRI (functional MRI), 129–130 life and career of, 404–408, 406, 409, writings of, 17, 249–254, 256, 258,
Foolish Wisdom and Wise Folly, 86 426, 431 264–265
force fields, 165 Maslow and, 473, 476, 487 Gamble, Eleanor Acheson McCulloch,
forgetting curve, 202 metapsychology and defense 195, 195–196, 306
formal cause, 44 mechanisms, 423–427 the Garden (school), 45
formal operations stage, 521–522 Meynert and, 407–408 Gassner, Johann Joseph, 361–362, 364
Founders of Modern Psychology Murray and, 463 Gazzaniga, Michael, 130
(G. Hall), 6 Rosenzweig and, 442 gender
Franklin, Benjamin, 363, 366 self-analysis and, 415–417 Darwin on, 228–229
Franz, Shepherd Ivory, 117–119 on sexuality, 411, 415–421, 427–429, Hall on, 299
fraternal (dizygotic) twins, 257, 272–273 452, 473 Heidbreder on, 307
Frederick V, King of Bohemia, 70 on superego, 427–429 general intelligence (g), 505
free association Titchener and, 440, 440–441, 448 generalization, 324–326, 455
Beck and, 632 Watson and, 441 General Problem Solver (GPS),
Freud and, 264, 408–413, 415–420, writings of, 17, 405, 407, 412–414, 417, 547–548, 550
427, 440 422–423, 431, 435, 439 genetic epistemology, 517–523
Jung and, 435, 437 Friedrich, Johann, 85 Genetic Studies of Genius (Terman), 511
Rogers and, 485 Friedrich, Max, 183–185 genital character, 419
Titchener and, 196, 440 Fritsch, Gustav, 113–114 genital zone, 418
Freeman, Frank N., 267 Fromm, Erich, 477, 477–478, 486 genius, 511
free will Frost, Robert, 344, 477 George I, King of England, 88
Descartes on, 68, 72 functional autonomy, 457 Gestalt psychology, 161–167, 185, 383,
Fechner on, 155 functionalism, 311–312 453–454, 478–479, 616–617
James on, 284–285, 291–292, 294 functional periodicity, 604 The g Factor (Jensen), 272
Skinner on, 351, 353 Furumoto, Laurel, 11 Gibson, Eleanor Jack, 153, 199
French Revolution, 365, 377–378 Gifted Children (L. Hollingworth), 607
Freud, Anna, 425–426, 426, 430 G giftedness, 510–512
Freud, Sigmund Galanter, Eugene, 548–549 Gilbreth, Ernestine, 588
academic psychology and, 439–442 Galen, Claudius, 50 Gilbreth, Frank Bunker, 585–588
Allport and, 450–451, 456–457 Galilei, Galileo, 47, 61, 64, 66 Gilbreth, Lillian Moller, 11, 584–591, 585
American visit, 292, 300–301, Gall, Franz Josef, 100–106, 101, Gilman, Daniel Coit, 297
439–440, 440, 448 109–110, 114 Gleitman, Henry, 564
A64 Index
Goddard, Henry H., 507–510 Wundt and, 6, 184, 297–298 Hereditary Genius (Galton), 251–254,
Goldberg, Louis, 461 Handbook of Physiological Optics 258, 265
The Golden Mean (Lyon), 38n (Helmholtz), 145 Hering, Ewald, 153
Goldstein, Kurt, 166, 479–480, 484, Handbook of Psychobiography, 466 heritability, 265–268
486, 617 Handbook of Social Psychology Hermias (king), 38
Goodman, Bertha, 472 (Lindzey), 469 Herrnstein, Richard, 266
Gorgias, 23–24, 30 handwriting analysis, 452 heuristics, 547
grammatical structure, 353 Hanover, House of, 85–88 hierarchy of needs, 481–484
grande hystérie, 375, 377 Harlow, Harry, 472–474 higher-order conditioning, 324
grand hypnotisme, 375–376, 493, Harrower, Molly, 123n, 615–621, hippocampus, 125–127
496–497 616, 640 Hippocrates and Hippocratics, 30–31,
grand mal seizures, 374–375 Hartley, David, 94 37, 50
gray matter, 101 Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, Hippocratic Corpus, 30
Great Man approach, 10 560–561 Hippocratic Oath, 31
The Great Psychologists (R. Watson), 7 Harvey, William, 66 historicism, 11
Greece and presocratic philosophers Hathaway, Starke, 639, 639–644 historiography, 9–10
about, 26–28 Haven, Joseph, 100n A History of Experimental Psychology
concept of psyche, 28–29 Hawthorne effect, 591 (Boring), 6
Hippocratics, 30–31 Hawthorne studies, 591–599 history of psychology
philosophical paradoxes, 29–30 Haywood, Big Bill, 574–575 American pioneers, 279–315
Pythagorean mathematics, 29–30 Headsprout reading program, 355 applying psychology, 573–611
Greenblatt, Stephen, 54n Hebb, Donald O., 125 clinical psychology, 613–650
group fallacy, 383 Heckscher Foundation, 339 cognitive psychology, 533–571
The Growth of Logical Thinking from hedonism, 44–45 establishment of experimental
Childhood to Adolescence (Piaget Heidbreder, Edna, 306–308 psychology, 173–206
and Inhelder), 521 Hell, Maximilian, 363–365 evolving mind, 209–240
grumble theory, 487–488 Helmholtz, Hermann as fascinating subject, 6–8
guiding fictions, 433 Brücke and, 407 foundational ideas from antiquity,
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 109 Hall on, 6 23–57
Guthrie, Robert Val, 15 on human vision, 145–154, 222 humanistic psychology, 470–488
James and, 283 measuring the mind, 243–276
H Ladd-Franklin and, 198 mind in conflict, 403–445
habit, 289–290 legacy of, 152–154 personalistic-contextual approach,
Haeckel, Ernst, 232, 299 life and contributions of, 140–145, 141 17–18
Hall, Calvin, 469 physiological mechanism and, personality psychology, 447–469
Hall, G. Stanley 142–145, 282 physiologists of mind, 99–133
Boring on, 301 physiological psychology and, pioneering philosophers of mind,
child study and developmental 140–145 59–97
theory, 298–301 writings of, 145 psychology as science of behavior,
on early development, 232 Wundt and, 174, 177–180 317–359
Freud and, 300, 435, 439–440, 440 Young-Helmholtz trichromatic sensing and perceiving mind,
institutional innovations, 297–298 theory, 149–150 135–170
James and, 296–298, 301 Zöllner on, 183 social influence and social
legacy of, 301–302 Henri, Victor, 380, 499 psychology, 361–401
life and career of, 296, 296–297, Henri IV, King of France, 61 study of intelligence, 493–531
304, 439 Henry VIII, King of England, 77 table of organizations, journals,
Münsterberg and, 577 Henslow, John Stevens, 212, 212–214, centers, and graduate programs, 9
Triplett and, 381 216, 218–219 value of studying, 3–6
writings of, 6, 299 Heraclitus, 29, 288 ways to study the past, 8–17
Index A65
“History of Psychology: A Neglected definition of, 362 The Individual and His Religion
Area” (R. Watson), 7 Freud and, 405–406 (Allport), 467
History of the Sciences and Scientists Le Bon and, 378–379 individual differences, psychology
over Two Centuries (de Candolle), Leibniz and, 94 of, 245
254–255 lucid sleep and, 369 individuality
“The History of Twins” (Galton), 256 Nancy-Salpêtrière controversy, Charcot on, 498
Hitler, Adolf, 383, 390, 429, 466–467, 559 371–381 Fromm on, 477–478
Hitzig, Eduard, 113–114 posthypnotic amnesia, 368, real, 454
H.M., case of, 126–127 378, 408 relational, 453–454, 456
Hobbes, Thomas, 81, 533–534 posthypnotic suggestions, 368, 378 individual psychology, 431–434,
Hollingworth, Harry, 11, 600–602, 608 hysteria 498–501
Hollingworth, Leta Stetter, 11, 599, Binet’s work with, 497 Individual Will-Temperament Test, 452
599–608, 614 Breuer’s work with, 404–405 Indo-Arabic numerals, 46–47, 534
Holt, Henry, 287 Charcot’s work with, 377, 403 industrial/organizational (I/O)
Holzinger, Karl, 267 definition of, 373 psychology, 581, 585, 608
The Homemaker and Her Job Freud’s work with, 408–412, 415, inferiority complex, 431–432
(Gilbreth), 590 419–422 infinitesimal calculus, 84, 88
L’Homme (Man), 65 James on, 292 information theory, 546, 554
Hooker, Joseph, 222 informed consent, 394
Hoover, Herbert, 590 I Inhelder, Bärbel, 519, 519–523, 561
Horney, Karen, 428, 428, 430, 477 Ickes, Harold, 329, 336 innate ideas, 69, 79
Hornstein, Gail, 442 Ickes, Mary, 329, 336 insight, learning and, 164
House of Wisdom, 46 iconic mode, 526 Institute of Educational Research, 339
“How Much Can We Boost IQ and id, 424–425, 425 institutional review boards (IRBs),
Scholastic Achievement?” ideal forms, 34–35 394, 396
(Jensen), 269 idealism, 34–36 integral calculus, 84
How the Mind Works (Pinker), 237 ideas integrative life story, 467
Hull, Clark, 343, 472, 564 association of, 80 intellectualization, 426
human factors psychology, 590 complex, 79 intellectual level, 503
The Humanistic Psychologist Darwin on, 231 intelligence
(journal), 488 hysteria and, 374 brain size and, 113, 244
humanistic psychology, 449, 468–474, innate, 69, 79 general, 505
484–488 James on, 288 as personality trait, 453–455
human motivation, 479–484 latent content of dreams, 412 two-factor theory of, 505
human relations movement, 591–599 pathogenic, 405–406, 410–411, intelligence quotient (IQ), 506,
Hume, David, 94, 136, 136–137 415, 434 510–514, 607
humoral theory, 30–31, 50 simple, 79 intelligence tests
humors, 30–31 identical (monozygotic) twins, 257, Binet and, 13, 16, 268, 381, 501–514
Hurvich, Marvin, 631 267–268, 272–273 development of, 452
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 223–224, identification, 426 Galton and, 245, 258–259, 263,
224, 256 idiographic methods, 456, 462–467 265–268, 494, 496
hypnotism imageless thought, 199–201 Goddard and, 507–510
animal magnetism and, 4 The Imitation Game (film), 543 heritability of, 265–268, 268
artificial somnambulism and, “The Imitation of Man by Machine” Hollingworth and, 599
367–368 (Neisser), 565 Terman and, 510–512
Binet and, 497–498 immature religion, 467–468 Thorndike and, 311
Braid naming, 371 impossibilist creativity, 550–551 Wechsler and, 512–514
Charcot and, 374–377 improbabilist creativity, 550–551 intentionality, 407
crowd phenomena and, 377–380 indigenization, 17 interactive dualism, 70–72
A66 Index
internalism, 10 establishing laboratory, 182n Journal of the History of the Behavioral

International Journal of Individual Freud and, 292, 300–301, 440, Sciences, 7
Psychology, 473 440–441 Jung, Carl
International Positive Psychology Hall and, 296–298, 301 Freud and, 429–431, 440, 440
Association (IPPA), 488 Helmholtz and, 283 life and career of, 434, 434–438
International Psychoanalytic James-Lange theory of emotion, model of the psyche, 436–437, 437
Association (IPA), 430 290–291, 301 Murray and, 463
interpersonal psychotherapy (ITP), 637 later career, 292, 292–296 Piaget and, 516
The Interpretation of Dreams (S. Freud), Müller and, 283 on psychological types, 438, 452
412–414, 431, 435, 439 Münsterberg and, 306, 449, 577 word-association test, 264, 435, 574,
interpretive cortex, 113, 123 on psychology, 4, 180–181, 286–292 593
interpretive responses, 123 Thorndike and, 296, 308–309, 312 just noticeable difference ( jnd), 158,
intrapsychic conflict, 73, 410, 422 writings of, 279–280, 286–292, 158–159
Introduction to Psychology 294–296, 301, 303–304, 308
(Calkins), 305 Wundt and, 203, 279–280, K
introspection, 192–194, 199 283–284, 295 The Kallikak Family (Goddard),
intuitions James I, King of England, 70, 86 508–509
Jung on, 438 James II, King of England, 78 Kamin, Leon, 270–272
Kant on, 137 James-Lange theory of emotion, Kant, Immanuel, 42, 94, 136, 136–140,
intuitive knowledge, 80 290–291, 301 150, 510
IPA (International Psychoanalytic Jameson, Dorothea, 199 Keeler, Leonarde, 584
Association), 430 Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute, 518 Kennedy, John F., 590
IPPA (International Positive Jefferson, Thomas, 483 Al-Kindi, 46–47
Psychology Association), 488 Jensen, Arthur, 269–270, 272 Klein, Melanie, 430
IQ (intelligence quotient), 506, Jeopardy (tv show), 550 Klopfer, Bruno, 619, 640
510–514, 607 Jerome, Saint, 45 knowledge
IRBs (institutional review boards), Johnson, Lyndon B., 590 demonstrative, 80
394, 396 Jones, Ernest, 429–430 intuitive, 80
Islamic empire Jones, Mary Cover, 339, 339–340 Locke on, 79–81
early history, 45–46 Jonson, Ben, 586 sensitive, 80
Indo-Arabic numerals, 46–47 Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 616 Koffka, Kurt, 161–164, 162, 383,
medicine and Aristotelian soul, 49–52 Journal of Abnormal and Social 616–617
modern visual science, 47–49 Psychology, 382, 439, 451, 455, Köhler, Wolfgang, 161–163, 162, 166–167,
isomorphism, psychophysical, 165–166 457, 463 383–384, 453, 564, 617
ITP (interpersonal psychotherapy), 637 Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Kosslyn, Stephen, 130
355 Külpe, Oswald, 193, 199, 199–201
J Journal of Genetic Psychology, 298, 473
Jacquard, Joseph, 538 Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 486 L
James, Alice, 281–282 Journal of Individual Psychology, 434 Ladd-Franklin, Christine, 15, 198, 198,
James, Garth Wilkinson, 281 Journal of Personality and Social 235, 305, 599
James, Henry, Jr., 281–282 Psychology, 382n Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 219, 233, 300
James, Henry, Sr., 281–284 Journal of Researches into the Geology land-grant institutions, 196n
James, Robertson, 281 and Natural History of the Various Lange, Charles, 290–291, 301
James, William Countries Visited during the Lange, Ludwig, 188
Boring on, 301 Voyages of the H.M.S. Beagle Langer, Walter, 466
Bruner and, 559 (Darwin), 218 Langfeld, Herbert, 448
Calkins and, 196, 296, 303–304, 306 Journal of Social Issues, 469 language
du Bois-Reymond and, 283 Journal of the Experimental Analysis of ancient Arabic, 47
early life of, 280–292, 283 Behavior, 355 ancient Greece, 27–28, 31
Index A67
Chomsky on, 203, 352–353, 556–558 Plato and, 92n London Geological Society, 218
Darwin on, 230–232 serving House of Hanover, 85–88 Lone Scout magazine, 344
phrenological localization and, writings of, 74, 87–89, 91 long-term memory, 127
109–117 Wundt and, 94 Lost in the Mall technique, 396–397
Skinner on, 352–353 Lewin, Kurt, 166, 383–384, 387 love, 72, 333, 481–482
Vygotsky on, 524 Leyden jar, 366 Lovelace, Ada, 539–541, 540
Laplace, Pierre, 47 Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation) Lovelace objection, 540, 550–551
Lashley, Karl Spencer, 118–119, 118–121, (Fibonacci), 52–53 Lowie, Robert, 604
331–332 Liébeault, Ambroise Auguste, lucid sleep, 369
latent content (dreams), 412–413, 415 371–372, 376 Lucretius, 45, 54
latent learning, 342–343 lie detector tests, 575, 583, 583–584 Ludwig, Georg, 86, 88
The Laughing Philosopher life space, 166 Lyceum (school), 39–40
(Rembrandt), 44 Lincoln, Abraham, 210 Lyell, Charles, 214, 216, 222
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Lindzey, Gardner, 469 Lyon, Annabel, 38n
(LSRM), 338 Linnean Society, 223
Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 102, 210n “Little Albert,” Watson-Rayner study of, M
law of association by contiguity, 80, 12, 334, 334–336, 441 machine pattern recognition, 564–565
94, 163 Little Peter study, 339 magical number seven, plus or minus
law of association by similarity, 80, Living With Our Children two, 554–555
94, 163 (Gilbreth), 590 magnetism
law of conservation of energy, 143 localization of brain function animal, 4–5, 364–366
law of effect, 310, 312 Broca and, 110–113 Binet and, 375
law of mass action, 120 Flourens and, 106–109 Mesmer’s work with, 363–368
law of specific nerve energies, 138–139 Penfield and, 122–125 Puységur’s work with, 367
learned helplessness, 488 in phrenology theory, 100–106, Malthus, Thomas, 220
Learned Optimism (Seligman), 488 109–110 management, psychology of, 584–591
learning sensory and motor areas, 113–115 mandala, 436
behaviorism on, 94 Wernicke and, 115–117, 408 manifest content (dreams), 412–413
insight and, 164 Locke, John Marie, Queen of Roumania, 337
latent, 342–343 Descartes and, 78–79 Marston, William Moulton, 575, 583,
Le Bon, Gustave, 378, 378–380 on kinds of knowledge, 79–81 583–584
Leborgne, Louis Victor (Tan), Leibniz and, 74, 85, 89, 91–94 Mary II, Queen of England, 78
111–112, 115 life and contributions of, 74–76, 75 Masham, Lady Damaris Cudworth, 82
Lectures on the Human and Animal Newton and, 77 Masham, Sir Francis, 82
Mind (Wundt), 180 political involvements of, 76–78 Maskelyne, Nevil, 178
Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van, 85 practical implications of his Maslow, Abraham
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm philosophy, 81–83 Adler and, 473, 476
Aristotle and, 90, 92n romantic interests, 78, 82 Freud and, 473, 476, 487
Descartes and, 85, 89, 91 writings of, 74, 77–79, 81–82, 516 Fromm and, 477–478
developing calculating machine, Loeb, Jacques, 328 Goldstein, 479
535–537 Loftus, Elizabeth, 396, 396–397 Horney and, 430, 477
life and contributions of, 70–71, 74, 83, logarithms, 159n on humanistic psychology, 484–488
83–91, 87, 188, 414, 510 “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas on human motivation, 479–484
Locke and, 74, 85, 89, 91–94 Immanent in Nervous Activity” life and career, 470–474
Marshams and, 83 (McCulloch and Pitts), 544 mentors of, 475–479
mathematical discoveries of, 83–85 The Logical Structure of Linguistic Neisser and, 564
on monads, 14, 88–91, 156 Theory (Chomsky), 556–557 on positive psychology, 486–488
Newton and, 88 Logic Theorist (LT), 546–547, 550 on social behavior of monkeys, 448,
Piaget and, 516 Lombroso, Cesare, 102n 472–474
A68 Index
Maslow, Abraham (continued) Freud’s work with, 408–412 Milgram’s obedience studies,
Stagner and, 475–476 hysteria and, 374 389–395, 468
Thorndike and, 474 Lashley’s work on, 117–121, 331n Mill, James, 94
Titchener and, 448, 471 long-term, 127 Mill, John Stuart, 94, 496
Wertheimer and, 165, 478, 478–479 Lost in the Mall technique, 396–397 Miller, George A., 130, 326, 548–549,
writings of, 470, 473, 475–476, Milner’s work on, 125–127 553, 553–565
479–484, 486–488 procedural, 127 Milner, Brenda, 125, 125–127, 129–130
Maslow, Will, 470–471 short-term, 127 mind
mass action, law of, 120 verbal, 103, 109–111, 114 Darwin on, 226, 235
material cause, 44 working, 127 Descartes on mind-body distinction,
materialism, 155, 282 Menabrea, Luigi, 539 61–73
“A Mathematical Theory of “menace of the feeble-minded,” 265 Helmholtz on, 152
Communication” (Shannon), Meno dialogue (Plato), 33 Kant on, 94, 137–138
546, 554 mental age, 506 Leibniz on, 92
mature religion, 467 mental chronometry, 179–180, 185–186, Locke on, 92
Maxwell, James Clerk, 149 190, 245 Penfield on brain and, 128
May, Rollo, 485–486, 486 Mental Evolution in Animals Mind ( journal), 230–231
Mayo, Elton, 591–598, 592 (Romanes), 235 The Mind of Adolf Hitler (Langer), 466
Mayo, Helen, 592 mental imagery, 263 Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
McAdams, Dan, 466 mental orthopedics, 504 Inventory (MMPI), 639–644
McClelland, David, 465–466 mental philosophy Minnesota Study of Twins Reared
McCulloch, Warren, 544–545 Descartes and, 59–73 Apart (MISTRA), 272–273
McKinley, J. Charnley, 640 Leibniz and, 61, 83–94 minute perceptions, 92–93, 414
Mead, Margaret, 475 Locke and, 61, 74–83 Mischel, Walter, 461
The Meaning of Truth (W. James), 294 “Mental Philosophy” (Haven), 100n MISTRA (Minnesota Study of Twins
means-ends analysis, 547–548 mental sets, 200 Reared Apart), 272–273
mechanisms Merritte, Arvilla, 335 Mitchell, William, 592
defense, 425–426 Merritte, Douglas, 335 Mittleman, Bela, 479
physiological, 142–145, 155 Mersenne, Marin, 61 MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic
mechanistic behaviorism, 343, 472 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 4, 362, 362–368, Personality Inventory), 639–644
mechanistic physiology, 66–68, 388 Moby Dick (Melville), 463
282–285, 319 mesmerism modes of representation, 526
medical model of mental illness, 625 anesthetic properties of, 369–370 Moede, Walter, 581
Meehl, Paul, 613–614, 616, 640, 642, artificial somnambulism and, Molyneux, William, 79
642–644 367–368 The Monadology (Leibniz), 88–89
Mellon, Mary Conover, 438 Braid’s work with, 371 monads, 14, 88–91, 156
Mellon, Paul, 438 claims and controversies, 5, Le Monde (The World) (Descartes), 65
Melville, Herman, 463 364–367 monkeys, social behavior of, 448,
Memories, Dreams, and Reflections lucid sleep and, 369 472–474
(Jung), 434 posthypnotic amnesia, 368, 378 monogenesis, 227
memory posthypnotic suggestions, 368, 378 monozygotic (identical) twins, 257,
Darwin on, 226 mesomorphic body type, 472 267–268, 272–273
declarative, 127 Metaphysical Club (Cambridge), 293 Montague, Helen, 603
Ebbinghaus’ work on, 193, 201–202 metapsychology, 423–427 “moon illusion,” 48
emotional catharsis, 405 Meynert, Theodor, 407–408 Moore, Gordon, 328
equipotentiality and, 117–121 Midwestern Psychological Morgan, C. Lloyd, 308
experiential responses as, 124 Association, 613 Morgan, Christiana, 463, 500
false, 397 Milbanke, Anne Isabella, 539 motion (simple nature), 64
flashbulb, 563, 567 Milgram, Stanley, 389–395, 468 motion studies, 587–590
Index A69
Motion Study (Gilbreth and Gilbreth), natural selection, evolution by, 210, Nixon, Richard, 567
587 216–225, 299 Nobel Prize, 319, 322, 377
Motivation and Personality (Maslow), nature-nurture question nomothetic methods, 456, 458–462
483, 487 definition of, 256 nonsense syllables, 201–202
motor aphasia, 115–117 Galton on, 4, 94, 254–258 normal distributions, 251–252, 252
motor strip, 113, 114 Plato on, 37 North American Society of Adlerian
Moulton, Charles, 584 Thorndike on, 474 Psychology, 434
Mozart, Leopold, 363–364 The Nature of Prejudice (Allport), 468 noumenal world, 137
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 363, 511 Naturphilosophie movement, 155 Novissima Sinica (News from China)
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), Nazi Germany, 265, 384, 390, 468, 509 (Leibniz), 87
129 necessary truths, 92, 557 number theory, 47
Müller, Johannes, 138, 140–142, 141, 177, negative reinforcement, 351
282, 407 Neisser, Ulric, 167, 554, 563–568 O
Münsterberg, Anna, 575 nerves obedience studies, 389–395, 461, 468
Münsterberg, Hugo Descartes on, 4 object constancy, 519
Allport, F. and, 381 Helmholtz’s studies on, 143–145, object relations, 430
Allport, G. and, 449–450, 455–456 174, 178 OCEAN acronym (Big Five model), 462
applied psychology and, 449, 577–578 law of specific nerve energies, Odbert, Henry, 454–456, 459
Calkins and, 304, 577 138–139 Oedipus complex, 417, 430–431
Hall and, 577 optic, 139 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 417
James and, 306, 449, 577 neuroanatomy, 407 oligarchy, 37
life and career of, 292, 309, 455–456, neurohypnology, 371 The 100 Most Important People in the
574, 576–577 neurons, 101 World, 354
Marston and, 583–584 neurophysiology, 94, 148–150, 407, 640 On Suggestion and Its Therapeutic
psychology in the courtroom, neuroscience, 129–130 Applications, 372
573–578 neuroses On the Origin of the Species by Means
on scientific management, 580–581 experimental, 325–327 of Natural Selection (Darwin),
Stein and, 286, 577 Horney on, 477 223–225, 233, 233, 250, 283
writings of, 575, 577–578, 580–581 neuroticism On the Sacred Disease, 31
Wundt and, 576–577 Big Five model on, 462 On the Use of the Indian Numerals
Münsterberg, Otto, 575 PEN model on, 460, 625 (Al-Kindi), 46
Murray, Henry A., 463–466, 500 Newell, Allen, 546–549 On the Witness Stand (Münsterberg),
Myers, Isabel Briggs, 438 New Essays on Human Understanding 575, 578
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, 438 (Leibniz), 74, 88, 91 “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” 232
new history of psychology, 11 openness (Big Five model), 461–462
N “new look” in perception, 559 operant chamber, 346–347, 346–347
Nachtansicht (night view), 156 Newman, Horatio, 267 operant conditioning
Nancy School of hypnotism, 371–372, Newton, Isaac definition of, 346, 346–347
376–377, 385, 497–498 burial site of, 233 philosophical implications of,
Nanna (Fechner), 156 calculus and, 84, 88 351–355
National Academy of Sciences, 312 on color vision, 148 Skinner and, 346, 346–349
National Institute of Mental Health intelligence of, 511 Operation Head Start, 269
(NIMH), 624, 637–638 Leibniz and, 88 optical illusions
National Mental Health Act Locke and, 77 Alhazen on, 63
(1946), 621 scientific laws and, 80 definition of, 138, 138
National Research Council, 594 on universal gravitation, 363 experimental psychology and, 48
National Science Foundation, 8 New York Psychiatric Society, 605–606 Helmholtz on, 150, 152
nativism, 24, 33, 151 NIMH (National Institute of Mental Wertheimer on, 161
Natural Selection (Darwin), 222–223 Health), 624, 637–638 Zöllner on, 182
A70 Index
optic nerve, 139 PEN model, 460, 625 phenomenal world, 137
oral character, 419, 452 perception Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Society,
oral zone, 418 Bruner on, 559 631
Orchard, Harry, 573–575 definition of, 146 Philip II, King of Macedonia, 37–38
organizational behavior management, Helmholtz on, 146, 153, 179 Philosophische Studien ( journal), 184,
591 Jung on, 438 197
The Organization of Behavior (Hebb), Kant on, 42, 150–152 The Philosophy of “As If” (Vaihinger),
125 Leibniz on, 92–93, 188, 414 433
origin myth process, 12 minute, 92–93, 414 phi phenomenon, 162, 185
Our Birds (Piaget), 515 “new look” in, 559 phrenology
overdetermination, 410, 414, 422 syllogistic reasoning and, 151–152 Bouillaud on, 110
visual, see visual perception definition of, 102, 104
P Wundt on, 181, 189–190 Flourens on, 106–109
paired-associates technique, 304 perceptual adaptation, 151 Gall on, 102–106, 109–110, 114
Paladino, Eusapia, 293 Peripatetic School, 40 Galton and, 246–247
Paley, William, 219 Peri Psyche (Aristotle), 41 physiognomy and, 102–103, 210n
pantheism, 85 Permanent Present Tense (Corkin), 127 physiognomy, 102–103, 210n
Pappenheim, Bertha, 404, 404–405, 410 perpetual-motion machines, 143 physiological mechanism, 142–145, 155,
Paradis, Maria Theresia, 365 persona (Jungian model), 437, 437 282–283
parallel distributed processing, 550 Personal Data Sheet (Woodworth), 452, physiological needs, 481, 482
paraphasias, 115–116 639 physiological psychology
Paris Anthropological Society, 110–111 personal equations, 278 Binet and, 498–499
Parloff, Morris, 637–638 personalistic psychology, 453–454 Helmholtz and, 140–145
Pascal, Blaise, 534–535 Personality: A Psychological principles of, 181–182
Pascaline (calculator), 535 Interpretation (Allport), 455–457, Wundt and, 180–182
passions, Descartes on, 14, 72 467 physiology
pathogenic ideas, 405–406, 410–411, Personality and Assessment (Mischel), of digestion, 321–322
415, 434 461 James and, 282–285
Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 475 personality psychology, 167, 305, 381, mechanistic, 66–68, 282–285, 319
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich 448–469 Pavlov and, 321–322, 327
on conditioned reflexes, 67, 322–327 personality traits psychology and, 140–145, 180–182
early life and career, 317–322, 319 Allport’s development of, 452–458 Wundt on, 180–182
influence of, 327 definition of, 452–453 Piaget, Jacqueline, 495
laboratory organization, 320–321 idiographic approaches, 456, 462–467 Piaget, Jean
Nobel Prize and, 319, 322 Maslow’s studies on, 476 child studies of, 94, 494–495,
physiology of digestion, 321–322 nomothetic studies, 456, 458–462 517–523, 561
Skinner and, 345–346 “Personality Traits: Their Classification early life and career, 514, 515,
theory of the brain, 325–327 and Measurement” (Allport and 515–517, 519
Watson and, 331 Allport), 452–453 genetic epistemology and,
Pavlovian conditioning, 323 personnel selection, 580–581 517–523
pcpt.-cs., 424–425, 425 personology, 464 influences and reaction, 523–528
peak experiences, 479 Personology Society, 466 writings of, 515–516, 520–521
Pearson, Karl, 262, 265 person-situation controversy, 461 pineal gland, 71–72
Pearson’s r, 262–263 perversity, polymorphous, 418 Pinker, Stephen, 237
Pedagogical Seminary (journal), 298 PET (positron emission tomography), Piorkowski, Curt, 581
pedagogy, Hall and, 297, 299 129–130 Pitts, Walter, 544–545
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 198, 293–294 Peterson, Donald, 643 plagiarism
Penfield, Wilder, 122, 122–126, Pettigrew, Thomas, 469 Leibniz and, 88
128–129, 617 phallic character, 419 Mesmer and, 363
Index A71
Plans and the Structure of Behavior programmed instruction, 350, 355 psychology
(Miller, Galanter, and Pribram), Project for a Scientific Psychology academic, 439–442, 448
548–549 (S. Freud), 423 act, 407
Plato projection, 425–426 analytical, 434–438
on appearance, 137 projective hypothesis, 619 animal, 296, 308–310, 328–332
Aristotle and, 25–26, 26, 38 projective tests, 500 applied, see applied psychology
on atomic theory, 44 Protagoras, 30 black, 15–16
Leibniz and, 92n psyche (soul) clinical, see clinical psychology
life and contributions of, 23–25, 29, Aristotle on, 40–43 cognitive, 167, 193, 353, 563–568
33–37 definition of, 28–29 community, 625
Socrates and, 24, 26, 32–34 Descartes on, 60 comparative, 234–235
writings of, 24, 33 Epicureans on, 45 of crowds, 377–380, 383
A Pluralistic Universe (W. James), 294 Freud on, 424–425, 425 Darwin and, 225–232
polygenesis, 226 Jung on, 436–437, 437 ego, 457, 630–631
polymorphous perversity, 418 Plato on, 34, 36–37, 42 evolutionary, 237
popular psychology, 583–584 Socrates on, 33, 42 experimental, see experimental
positive psychology, 483, 486–488 psychic causality, 190 psychology
positive reinforcement, 351 psychic phenomena/research, 183, 293 Gestalt, see Gestalt psychology
Posner, Michael, 130 “psychic secretions,” 317–318 history of, see history of psychology
posthypnotic amnesia, 368, 378, 408 psychoanalysis human factors, 590
posthypnotic suggestions, 368, 378 Allport on, 457 humanistic, 449, 468–474, 484–488
Postman, Leo, 559 definition of, 406 individual, 431–434, 498–501
power disciples and dissidents, 429–438 of individual differences, 245
Adler on, 473 Freud and academic psychology, industrial/organizational, 581, 585,
male privilege and, 428 439–442 608
as psychogenic need, 465–466 Freud’s lectures on, 300–301 James and, 4, 180–181, 286–292
power law, 160, 553 later psychoanalytic theory, personalistic, 453–454
pragmatism, 285, 293–294 422–429 personality, 167, 305, 381,
Pragmatism (W. James), 294 Leibniz and, 94 448–469
prejudice, religion and, 467–469 male and female superegos, physiological, see physiological
preoperational stage, 519–520 427–429 psychology
presentism, 11 metapsychology and defense positive, 483, 486–488
pressure technique, 408–409 mechanisms, 423–427 of religion, 301
Pribram, Karl, 548–549 object relations school of, 430 social, see social psychology
primary colors, 149, 153 origins of, 404–422 voluntaristic, 190
primary process (dreams), 414–415, 422 personality psychology and, 448 of women, 605
primary qualities, 64, 80–81 psychobiography, 466–467 at a women’s college, 305–306
primary reinforcer, 349 Psychodiagnostics (Rorschach), 618 Psychology: Briefer Course (W. James),
Prince, Morton, 382, 439, 463 psychogenic needs, 465 292, 304
The Principles of Geology (Lyell), 214 psycholinguistics, 554, 556–558, 561 Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
Principles of Physiological Psychology Psychological Care of Infant and Child (Münsterberg), 580–581
(Wundt), 181–182, 201, 297, 406 (Watson), 340 “Psychology and the Teacher”
Principles of Psychology (Spencer), 233 Psychological Research ( journal), 166 (Münsterberg), 577
The Principles of Psychology (W. James), Psychological Review ( journal), 304, Psychology from an Empirical
279–280, 286–292, 294, 296, 301, 310–311, 329–330, 480 Standpoint (Brentano), 407
308 Psychological Study (Bullitt), 466 Psychology from the Standpoint of a
procedural memory, 127 psychological types, 438, 452 Behaviorist (Watson), 332
Productive Thinking (Wertheimer), 165 The Psychologies of 1925, 471 The Psychology of Advertising (Scott),
profile analysis, 642 psychologization, 598–599 582
A72 Index
The Psychology of Management Helmholtz and, 144–145 “Remarks on Freud’s Method of

(Gilbreth), 584 Wundt and, 174, 179, 184–186, 245 Treatment by ‘Psycho-Analysis,’”
Psychology of Personality (Stagner), real individuality, 454 439
455, 472, 475–476 reason Rembrandt (artist), 44
psychopathology, 326, 382, 439, 466 Aristotle on, 41 Remembering (Bartlett), 562
psychophysical dualism, 70 Darwin on, 226, 231 Renouvier, Charles, 284–285
psychophysical isomorphism, 165–166 Plato on, 36–37 repetition (crowd phenomena), 379
psychophysics, 11, 157–161, 179, 245 recapitulationism, 299–300 repression, 410, 442
psychotechnics, 578–581 “Recent Advances in the Field of respondent conditioning, 349
psychoticism (PEN model), 460, 625 Physiological Psychology” response
purposive behaviorism, 343 (Wundt), 283 behaviorism on, 94
Puységur, Marquis de, 367–368 Recherche (Piaget), 516 conditioned, 323, 334–335
Pythagoras, 29 Red Book (Jung), 438 definition of, 67
Pythagorean theorem, 29, 34–35 redundancy hypothesis, 121 Descartes on, 67
Pythias, 38 reflection, 79, 485 experiential, 124
reflexes fear, 332–335
Q behaviorism on, 94 Gilbreth, L. on, 11
quantitative scoring systems, conditioned, 67, 322–327, interpretive, 123
465–466 331, 346 Lange on, 188
quantity, conservation of, 520 Darwin on, 231 Münsterberg on, 449
Quetelet, Adolphe, 251 definition of, 67, 67 Pavlov on, 322–324
Pavlov on, 318, 322–327 Rorschach inkblot test, 618
R unconditioned, 67, 322, 325 Thorndike experiments and,
race Reflexes of the Brain (Sechenov), 318 310–311
Darwin on, 226–227 reflexivity, 5, 90 unconditioned, 322, 332–333
Galton on, 265 regression line, 261–262, 261–263 RET (rational emotive therapy), 633
Hall on, 299 regression toward the mean, retina (eye), 145–149
radical environmentalism, 337–338, 340 261–263 Riecken, Henry, 387
rage, 229–230, 333 reinforcement Rockefeller Foundation, 617
Raichle, Marcus, 130 contingencies of, 347–348, 352 Rogers, Carl, 484–486, 485, 598,
Ramsdell, Donald, 553 fixed-interval reinforcement 627–629, 635
randomized controlled trial (RCT), schedule, 348, 348 Romanes, George J., 235
636–638 fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule, Roosevelt, Eleanor, 483
Rank, Otto, 429–430 348 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 329, 590
Rapaport, David, 630 negative, 351 Roosevelt, Theodore, 476
Raphael (artist), 25–26 positive, 351 Rorschach, Hermann, 500, 617–622
rational emotive therapy (RET), 633 variable-interval reinforcement Rorschach projective technique,
rationalism, 24 schedule, 348 617–620, 618, 640–644, 646–647, 647
rationalization, 426 variable-ratio reinforcement Rosenzweig, Saul, 441–442
rational monads, 90 schedule, 348 Royal Geographical Society, 249
rational soul, 41 reinforcers, 349–350 Royal Medical Society, 370
Rayner, Rosalie, 12, 334, 334–336, relational individuality, 453–454, 456 Royal Society of London, 15, 15, 77, 82,
338, 341 Relay Assembly Test Room (RATR) 218, 255
RCT (randomized controlled trial), experiment, 595–596, 598 Royce, Josiah, 198, 303
636–638 religion Rubin, Edgar, 163
reaction-time experiments immature, 467–468 Ruckmick, Christian, 305
Binet and, 493 mature, 467 “Rules for the Direction of the Mind”
Cattell and, 186–188 prejudice and, 467–469 (Descartes), 63
Galton and, 244–245 psychology of, 301 Russell, Bertrand, 345
Index A73
S Freud on, 413 on operant conditioning, 346,

safety needs, 481, 482 Gamble on, 195 346–349, 351–355
“saintliness,” 294–295 Helmholtz on, 146, 153, 179 Pavlov and, 345–346
salivation, 322–323 James on, 288 on programmed instruction, 349–350
Salpêtrière Hospital, 372–377, 496–497 Kant on, 42, 138–139 Thorndike and, 346
Samelson, Franz, 12 Locke on, 79 Watson and, 345–346
Sanford, Edmund C., 304 Titchener on, 194 writings of, 17, 344–346, 349, 351–353,
scale of nature, 41 Wundt on, 181, 192 557
scatter plots, 260–261, 260–261 sensitive knowledge, 80 Skinner, Deborah, 354, 354
Schachter, Stanley, 387 sensitive souls, 41 Skinner box, 346–347, 346–347
schizophrenia, 434–435, 622, 635, 643 sensory aphasia, 115–117 Slade, Henry, 183
School of Athens (Raphael), 25–26, 26 sensory-motor stage, 518 sleep
“Science and Feminism” (L. Hollingworth sensory strip, 113, 114 Descartes on, 68
and Lowie), 604 sentient monads, 90 hypnotism and, 371
The Science and Politics of I.Q. (Kamin), separated twin study, 266–268 Leibniz on, 90
270 serialist (symbolic) processing, 550 lucid, 369
Science magazine, 606 set tendencies, 560 small world phenomenon, 395
Scientific American magazine, 565 Seven Psychologies (Heidbreder), smell sensations and images, 195
scientific management, 578–581, 306–307 Social Cognitive and Affective
585–588 sexuality Neuroscience ( journal), 130
Scientific Memoirs (journal), 539 Freud on, 411, 415–421, 427–429, 473 social conformity, 384–387, 385–386,
Scientific Monthly magazine, 604 Maslow on, 473 389–392, 468
scientist-practitioner model of clinical sexual selection, 228–229 social contagion, 366, 378–379, 388
training, 28n, 621–626 shadow (Jungian model), 437, 437 social contract, 81–82
Scott, Walter Dill, 581–583, 582, 602 Shakow, David, 621, 621–626, 640 social Darwinism, 233–234
Scoville, William, 126–127 Shannon, Claude, 542–544, 543, social facilitation, 366, 450
Searle, John, 551–552 546, 554 social influence processes, 362
Sechenov, Ivan, 318, 325 shaping, 349–350, 355 social interest, 433
secondary process (dreams), 414 Share the Work program, 590 sociality (personality trait), 453
secondary qualities, 64, 80–81 Shaw, George Bernard, 345 social neuroscience, 130
secondary reinforcers, 349–350 Sheldon, William, 472 Social Neuroscience ( journal), 130
The Secret of Swedenborg (H. James), Sherif, Muzafer, 396 social psychology
281n short-term memory, 127 animal magnetism, 362–367
Sedgwick, Adam, 212–214, 219 similarity, law of association by, 80, mesmerism, 367–371
seduction theory, 411–412, 415 94, 163 Nancy-Salpêtrière controversy,
Segal, Nancy, 272–273 Simon, Herbert, 546–549 371–381
Self (Jungian model), 437, 437 Simon, Théodore, 501–503, 514, 516 new discipline of, 381–389
self-actualization, 479–483, 482 simple ideas, 79 obedience studies, 389–395
self-awareness, 5, 52, 92 simple natures, 63–65 social influence today, 395–397
self-expression (personality trait), 453 Simpson, Jeffry, 395 Triplett and, 381
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins), 236 Sixteen Personality Factor Social Psychology (F. Allport), 383
self-psychology, 305 Questionnaire (16PF), 460 Societies of Harmony, 367–368
self-questionnaire method, 255 Skinner, B. F. Society for Humanistic Psychology,
Selfridge, Oliver, 564–565 on behaviorism, 318 488
Seligman, Martin, 488 on behavior shaping, 349–350 Society for the Psychological Study of
sensations Chomsky and, 352–353, 557 Social Issues (SPSSI), 468–469, 472
Aristotle on, 41 early life and career, 343, 343–346 Society of Experimental Psychologists
definition of, 79, 146, 192 Hathaway and, 640 (Experimentalists), 197–199, 199n,
in epilepsy, 122 influence of, 355 447–448
A74 Index
sociobiology, 236–237 conditioned, 322–325 T

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis definition of, 67 tabula rasa (blank slate), 41, 78
(Wilson), 236 Galton experiments and, 244–245 Tagesansicht (day view), 156
Socrates, 24, 26, 31–34, 32 Lange and, 188 Tan, case of, 111–112, 115
Socratic dialogues (Plato), 24 Münsterberg on, 449 The Task of Gestalt Psychology
solar spectrum, 148 Pavlov on, 322–324 (Köhler), 165
soldiering, 579 Rorschach inkblot test, 618 TAT (Thematic Apperception Test),
Solon (lawmaker), 33 Thorndike experiments and, 310–311 464–466, 500
Some Thoughts Concerning Education Titchener on, 194 taxidermy, 211, 227
(Locke), 82 unconditioned, 322, 324 taxonomy, 40–41
somnambulism, artificial, 367–368 Wundt experiments and, 173–174, 178, Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 578–581,
Sophie Charlotte, 85, 86, 88 181, 185–186 585–588
Sophie the Countess Palatine, 14, 70, stimulus error, 194, 196 Taylorism, 578–581, 587
85, 86 stream of consciousness, 288–289 TDCRP study, 637–638
sophisticated presentism, 11 strokes (apoplexy), 101, 109–110 temperament (personality trait), 453
sophists, 23 strong AI, 551–553 Terman, Lewis, 246, 510–512, 511
Sophocles, 417 structuralism, 193–199 Thackeray, William, 345
soul, see psyche (soul) The Structure of Religion (Sumner), 301 Thales, 28
Spearman, Charles, 505–506 Studies on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer), Thanatos, 429
speech, loss of, 101, 109–112 405 “That Pessimistic Fellow” (Skinner),
see also aphasia subtractive method, 185–186 344
Spencer, Herbert, 233–234 suggestibility Thematic Apperception Test (TAT),
Spinoza, Benedict, 85, 90 artificial sonnambulism and, 367 464–466, 500
“Spiritualism as a Scientific Question” Asch on, 167, 385, 461 Theophrastus, 38, 40
(Wundt), 183 Bernheim on, 372, 376 Theories of Personality (C. Hall and
SPSSI (Society for the Psychological Binet on, 380–381, 397, 499, 501 Lindzey), 469
Study of Social Issues), 468–469, Hollingworth on, 602 The Theory and Practice of Advertising
472 hypnotism and, 362 (Scott), 582
St. Martin, Alexis, 321 Le Bon on, 378 The Theory of the Sensation of
stage theory of cognitive development, Sumner, Francis Cecil, 301–302 Tone as a Physiological Basis
518–521 superego, 424–425, 425, 427–429 for the Theory of Music (Helmholtz),
Stagner, Ross, 455, 472, 475–476 supreme monad, 90 145
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, 510, “survival of the fittest,” 233–234 therbligs, 587
512, 514 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 281, 294 thinking machines, see computers
Stanford Prison Experiment, 393–395, The Swerve: How the World Became third force, 469, 484, 564
461 Modern (Greenblatt), 54n Third International Congress of
Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Swift, Jonathan, 109, 115 Psychology (1896), 279
Scale, 510 syllogism, transformation of the, 198 Thirty Years War, 62
statistical correlation, 258, 260–263 syllogistic reasoning, 151–152 Thomas Aquinas, 53–54
Stein, Gertrude, 286, 577 “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Thompson, Clara, 428–429
Stern, William, 453–454, 454, 456, Switching Circuits” (Shannon), 542 Thompson, Helen Bradford, 329
506–507, 510 symbolic logic, 198, 541–542, 546 Thorndike, Edward Lee
Steunenberg, Frank, 573 symbolic mode, 526 Calkins and, 305
Stevens, S. Smith, 160, 553–554 symbolic (serialist) processing, 550 Cattell and, 309
Stevens’ law, 160 Syntactic Structures (Chomsky), Hollingworth and, 602
stimulus 352–353, 557 James and, 296, 308–309, 312
behaviorism on, 94 synthetic philosophy, 234 life and career of, 308, 308–309
Cattell experiments and, 186–188, 187 systematic desensitization, Maslow and, 474
color afterimages and, 153 339, 630 Skinner and, 346
Index A75
trial-and-error learning, 309–310 Triplett, Norman, 381–382 visual cliff, 153, 153
writings of, 310–312 Turing, Alan, 541–544, 543 visual perception
thought Turing machine, 542, 546n Alhazen on, 48
Brentano on, 407 Turing test, 545, 547, 551–552 Descartes on, 71–72, 72
Freud on, 414 twin study method, 257–258, 265–268, Gestalt psychology on, 267, 616
imageless, 199–201 268, 516n Harrower on, 616
James on, 288 two-factor theory of intelligence, 505 Helmholtz on, 150–152
Watson on, 337 two-point threshold, 496 Wundt on, 180
Wundt’s beliefs about, 190–193 Two Treatises of Government vitalism, 141, 145
thought meter of Wundt, 173–174, 174, (Locke), 81 Völkerpsychologie, 178–181, 190–193
178, 181 Voltaire (writer), 87
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality U voluntaristic psychology, 189–190
(S. Freud), 417, 439 unconditioned reflex, 67, Vygotsky, Lev, 524–525, 525, 559
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace 322, 325
and Babbage, 541 unconditioned response (UR), 322, W
Time magazine, 441 332–333 WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence
time study, 579, 590 unconditioned stimulus (US), Scale), 512
Tischer, Ernst, 184 322, 324 Walden Two (Skinner), 351–352
Titchener, Edward Bradford unconscious inference, 151 Walk, Richard, 153
Allport and, 447–448, 453 unemployment, 590 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 222
Boring and, 6 uniformitarianism, 214, 216, 221 Wallin, J. E. Wallace, 606
female students and, 196–199 Ussher, James, 214 Walsh, Mary, 281
Freud and, 440, 440–441, 448 Ward, W. S., 370
James on, 289 V Washburn, Margaret Floy, 196–199, 305
life and career of, 193, 193–194 Vaihinger, Hans, 433 Watchmen graphic novel series, 647,
Maslow and, 448, 471 variable-interval reinforcement 647–648
structuralism and, 193–199 schedule, 348 Watson, John Broadus
Wundt and, 192 variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, advertising and, 336–338
Tolman, Edward Chace, 342–343, 560, 348 on behaviorism, 4, 12, 318, 329–331,
564 variation hypothesis, 229, 602–603 450, 471–472
tomography, 129 The Varieties of Religious Experience Dunlap and, 441
Tooby, John, 237 (W. James), 294–295 early life and career, 327, 327–329, 334
TOTE unit, 548–549, 553, 561 “vastations,” 281, 284 Freud and, 441
“Training in Clinical Psychology” vegetative soul, 41 Lashley and, 118, 331–332
(Eysenck), 625 Verbal Behavior (Skinner), legacy of, 341–343
“Trait Names: A Psycholexical Study” 352, 557 Little Peter study, 339
(Allport and Odbert), 454–456 verbal memory, 103, 109–111, 114 Pavlov and, 331
traits, personality, see personality traits Vernon, Philip, 454, 456 Skinner and, 345–346
transference, 421–422 vision Watson-Rayner study of Little Albert,
transfer of training, 311 Alhazen on human visual system, 48 12, 334–336, 441
transformational grammar theory, 203 color, 148, 148–150 writings of, 331–341, 345, 471
transformation of the syllogism, 198 Descartes on visual perception, Watson, Mary Ickes, 329, 336
Treatise of Light (Descartes), 64–65 71–72, 72 Watson, Robert I., 7–8, 8
Treatise of Man (Descartes), 64–65, 318 Helmholtz’s studies on, 145–154, 222 Watson, Rosalie Rayner, 12, 334,
Treatise on the Passions of the Soul Ladd-Franklin’s studies on, 198, 235 334–336, 338, 341
(Descartes), 71, 73 optic nerve ad, 139 Watt, Henry J., 200
trial-and-error learning, 309–310, 312 physical properties of eyes, 146, weak AI, 551–553
trichromatic theory, Young-Helmholtz, 146–148 weather maps, 250
149–150, 152–153 visual area, 113, 114, 123 Weber, Ernst Heinrich, 157–159, 182
A76 Index
Wechsler, David, 512–514 educational opportunities for, Münsterberg and, 576–577

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale 196–199, 282, 302–305 physiological psychology and,
(WAIS), 512 Freud on, 4, 427–429 181–182
Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Galton on intelligence of, 245 reputation and legacy, 175, 202–203
Scale, 512 Hall’s students, 300 Scott and, 581
Wedgwood, Emma, 218 Marston on rights of, 584 Slade and, 183
Wedgwood, Josiah, 213 psychology of, 605 Titchener and, 192–199
Wedgwood, Susannah, 210 scientific scholarship and, 14–15 at University of Leipzig, 182–193
Wednesday Psychological Society, sexual selection and, 228 Völkerpsychologie and, 178–181,
429, 431 variation hypothesis and, 602–603 190–193
Wellesley College Studies in Wonder Women (comic book heroine), voluntaristic psychology, 189–190
Psychology, 306 584, 584 writings of, 174, 177, 179–183, 190–191,
Wells, H. G., 345 Woodworth, Robert Sessions, 305, 201, 203, 283, 297, 406
Wells, Horace, 370 311–312, 452, 639
Wernicke, Carl, 115, 115–117, 407 word-association technique, 263–264, X
Wernicke’s aphasia, 116 435 Xanthippe, 31
Wernicke’s area, 113, 116–118 word-association test, 264, 435, 574, 593 Xenophon, 32
Wertheimer, Max, 161–165, 162, 383, 453, word dictionaries, 311, 454, 456
478, 478–479, 483, 617 working memory, 127 Y
“What the Hell Took So Long?” Wren, Christopher, 100 Yan Yongjing, 100n
(Goldberg), 461 Wundt, Ludwig, 176 Yerkes, R. M., 305, 583
When Prophecy Fails (Festinger et al.), Wundt, Wilhelm Young, Robert M., 11
388 development as a researcher, 177–178 Young, Thomas, 149–150
white matter, 101 du Bois-Reymond and, 177 Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory,
Wilberforce, Samuel, 223–224, 224 establishing laboratory, 182n 149–150, 152–153
will, see free will experimental psychology and, 161,
Z
William of Orange, 78 178–181
Zeigarnik, Bluma, 441–442
Willis, Thomas, 75, 100–101 experimental studies, 185–189, 245
Zeitgeist approach, 10
Will to Believe and Other Essays experimenting on higher functions,
Zeitschrift fur Völkerpsychologie und
(W. James), 294 199–202
Sprachwissenschaft, 179, 190–191,
Wilson, E. O., 236 female students and, 196–199
203
Wilson, Woodrow, 466 Freud and, 439
Zend-Avesta (Fechner), 156
windmill power, 86 Hall and, 6, 184, 297–298
Zeno, 29–30
wish fulfillment hypothesis, 415 Helmholtz and, 174, 177–180
Zimbardo, Philip, 393–395, 461
Witmer, Lightner, 615 James and, 203, 279–280, 283–284,
Zöllner, Johann, 182–183
Wittmann, Blanche, 375, 295
zone of proximal development (zpd),
375, 377 Külpe and, 199
525, 559
Wolpe, Joseph, 629–630 Leibniz and, 94
Zuriff, Gerald, 352
women life and career of, 173–176, 175, 279

Raymond E. Fancher - Alexandra Rutherford - Pioneers of Psychology-W. W. Norton & Company (2016) PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Raymond E. Fancher - Alexandra Rutherford - Pioneers of Psychology-W. W. Norton & Company (2016) PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

﻿

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.

Copyright © 2017, 2012 by Raymond E. Fancher and Alexandra Rutherford.

All rights reserved.

Editor: Ken Barton

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Again for Joëlle, and

Introduction: Studying the History of Psychology 3

1 Foundational Ideas from Antiquity 23

2 Pioneering Philosophers of Mind: Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz 59

3 Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to Penfield 99

4  he Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant through the

5 Wundt and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology 173

6 The Evolving Mind: Darwin and His Psychological Legacy 209

7 Measuring the Mind: Galton and Individual Differences 243

8 American Pioneers: James, Hall, Calkins, and Thorndike 279

9 Psychology as the Science of Behavior: Pavlov,

10  ocial Influence and Social Psychology: From Mesmer to Milgram

11 Mind in Conflict: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Its Successors 403

12 Psychology Gets “Personality”: Allport, Maslow, and the

13 The Developing Mind: Binet, Piaget, and the Study of Intelligence 493

14 Minds, Machines, and Cognitive Psychology 533

15 Applying Psychology: From the Witness Stand to the Workplace 573

16 The Art and Science of Clinical Psychology 613

XVII Preface to the Fifth Edition

XXVII Time Line

XLI About the Authors

Introduction: Studying the History of Psychology 3

1 Foundational Ideas from Antiquity 23

Europe’s Intellectual Reawakening 52

2 Pioneering Philosophers of Mind: Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz 59

3 Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to Penfield 99

4 The Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant Through

5 Wundt and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology 173

6 The Evolving Mind: Darwin and His Psychological Legacy 209

The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection 218

7 Measuring the Mind: Galton and Individual Differences 243

8 American Pioneers: James, Hall, Calkins, and Thorndike 279

James’s Later Career 292

9 Psychology as the Science of Behavior: Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner 317

10 Social Influence and Social Psychology: From Mesmer

11 Mind in Conflict: Freudian Psychoanalysis

12 Psychology Gets “Personality”: Allport, Maslow,

13 The Developing Mind: Binet, Piaget, and the Study

Piaget’s Early Life and Career 515

14 Minds, Machines, and Cognitive Psychology 533

15 Applying Psychology: From the Witness Stand to the Workplace 573

Mayo and the Hawthorne Studies: Origins of the Human

16 The Art and Science of Clinical Psychology 613

BRINGING HISTORY TO LIFE

of Indo-Arabic numerals, which, combined with advances in clockmaking tech-

NEW IN THE FIFTH EDITION

ENHANCED SUPPORT MATERIAL

on chapter content by connecting it to material in the highly regarded open-

• I ntroduction: Studying the History of Psychology. This new opening dis-

to designing community life. Behaviorism was not only a theoretical

mental deficits, became the foundation of a vast intelligence testing

KEY PIONEERS KEY EVENTS

ca. Greek philosophy begins in Ionia (Chapter 1).

ca. Athenian democracy is established (Chapter 1).

Plato ca. Plato writes the Socratic dialogues (Chapter 1).

Aristotle ca. Aristotle writes On the Psyche (Chapter 1).

4 he Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant through the

9 Psychology as the Science of Behavior: Pavlov,

10 ocial Influence and Social Psychology: From Mesmer to Milgram

12 Psychology Gets “Personality”: Allport, Maslow, and the

4 The Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant Through

10 Social Influence and Social Psychology: From Mesmer

11 Mind in Conflict: Freudian Psychoanalysis

12 Psychology Gets “Personality”: Allport, Maslow,

13 The Developing Mind: Binet, Piaget, and the Study

• I ntroduction: Studying the History of Psychology. This new opening dis-