The foundations of psychology

Chapter 1 The Role and Importance of Research

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT IN THIS CHAPTER:

· • Who does research and why

· • How research is defined and what some of its purposes are

· • What a model of scientific inquiry is and how it guides research activities

· • Some of the things that research is and some of the things that it isn’t

· • What researchers do and how they do it

· • The characteristics of good research

· • How a method of scientific inquiry guides research activity

· • The different types of research methods and examples of each

Say Hello to Research!

Walk down the hall in any building on your campus where social and behavioral science professors have their offices in such departments as psychology, education, nursing, sociology, and human development. Do you see any bearded, disheveled, white-coated men wearing rumpled pants and smoking pipes, hunched over their computers and mumbling to themselves? How about disheveled, white-coated women wearing rumpled skirts, smoking pipes, hunched over their computers, and mumbling to themselves?

Researchers hard at work? No. Stereotypes of what scientists look like and do? Yes. What you are more likely to see in the halls of your classroom building or in your adviser’s office are men and women of all ages who are hard at work. They are committed to finding the answer to just another piece of the great puzzle that helps us understand human behavior a little better than the previous generation of scientists.

Like everyone else, these people go to work in the morning, but unlike many others, these researchers have a passion for understanding what they study and for coming as close as possible to finding the “truth.” Although these truths can be elusive and sometimes even unobtainable, researchers work toward discovering them for the satisfaction of answering important questions and then using this new information to help others. Early intervention programs, treatments of psychopathology, new curricula, conflict resolution techniques, effective drug treatment programs, and even changes in policy and law have resulted from evidence collected by researchers. Although not always perfect, each little bit of evidence gained from a new study or a new idea for a study contributes to a vast legacy of knowledge for the next generation of researchers such as yourself.

You may already know and appreciate something about the world of research. The purpose of this book is to provide you with the tools you need to do even more, such as

· • develop an understanding of the research process.

· • prepare yourself to conduct research of your own.

· • learn how to judge the quality of research.

· • learn how to read, search through, and summarize other research.

· • learn the value of research activities conducted online.

· • reveal the mysteries of basic statistics and show you how easily they can be used.

Today, more than ever, decisions are evidence based, and what these researchers do is collect evidence that serves as a basis for informed decisions.

· • measure the behaviors, traits, or attributes that interest you.

· • collect the type of data that relate to your area of interest.

· • use a leading statistical package (SPSS) to analyze data.

· • design research studies that answer the question that you want answered.

· • write the type of research proposal (and a research report) that puts you in control—one that shows you have command of the content of the research as well as the way in which the research should be done.

Sound ambitious? A bit terrifying? Exciting? Maybe those and more, but boring is one thing this research endeavor is not. This statement is especially true when you consider that the work you might be doing in this class, as well as the research proposal that you might write, could hold the key to expanding our knowledge and understanding of human behavior and, indirectly, eventually helping others.

So here you are, beginning what is probably your first course in the area of research methods and wondering about everything from what researchers do to what your topic will be for your thesis. Relax. Thousands of students have been here before you and almost all of them have left with a working knowledge of what research is, how it is done, and what distinguishes a good research project from one that is doomed. Hold on and let’s go. This trip will be exciting.

What Research Is and What It Isn’t

Perhaps it is best to begin by looking at what researchers really do. To do so, why not look at some of the best? Here are some researchers, the awards they have won, and the focus of their work. All of these people started out in a class just like the one you are in, reading a book similar to the one you are reading. Their interest in research and a particular issue continued to grow until it became their life’s work.

The following awards were given in 2009 by the American Psychological Association in recognition of outstanding work.

Research is, among other things, an intensive activity that is based on the work of others and generates new ideas to pursue and questions to answer.

Susan E. Carey from the psychology department at Harvard University was honored for her contributions to the field of cognitive development and developmental psychology. The work that she did early in her career focused on understanding how children learn language, and she coined the term “fast mapping” for how children can learn the meaning of a new word with very little experience with that word.

Nancy E. Adler from the University of California won the Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology for her work in health. Her early research focused on the health behaviors in adolescence, and she explained the incredibly interesting question of why individuals engage in health-damaging behaviors and how their understanding of risk affects their choices.

Finally, one of several Distinguished Scientific Awards for Early Career Contributions to Psychology went to Jennifer A. Richeson from Northwestern University for her work on stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and inter-group conflict. This focus examined the experiences and behaviors both of members of devalued groups and of members of dominant groups.

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) also gives out awards that recognize important contributions.

The 2009 E. F. Lindquist award was given to Wim J. van der Linden for his contributions to the field of testing and measurement, including optimal test design and adaptive testing. The award is named after E. F. Lindquist, who was a founder of The American College Testing Program, and is given for outstanding applied or theoretical research in the field of testing and measurement.

AERA has an extensive award program including the Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Research Award, given to Sandra Harding from the University of California–Los Angeles in recognition of her research that helps to advance public understanding of gender and/or sexuality in the education community.

And, as with many other organizations, AERA also offers awards for researchers still early in their careers, such as the Early Career Award won by Michele Moses from the University of Colorado–Boulder and Nell Duke from Michigan State University.

What all these people have in common is that at one time or another during their professional careers, they were active participants in the process of doing research.  Research  is a process through which new knowledge is discovered. A  theory , such as a theory of motivation, or development, or learning, for example, helps us to organize this new information into a coherent body, a set of related ideas that explain events that have occurred and predict events that may happen. Theories are an important part of science. It is at the ground-floor level, however, that the researcher works to get the ball rolling, adding a bit of new insight here and a new speculation there, until these factors come together to form a corpus of knowledge.

High-quality research is characterized by many different attributes, many of which tend to be related to one another and also tend to overlap. High-quality research

· • is based on the work of others,

· • can be replicated,

· • is generalizable to other settings,

· • is based on some logical rationale and tied to theory,

· • is doable,

· • generates new questions or is cyclical in nature,

· • is incremental, and

· • is an apolitical activity that should be undertaken for the betterment of society.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

First, research is an activity based on the work of others. No, this does not mean that you copy the work of others (that’s plagiarism), but you always look to the work that has already been done to provide a basis for the subject of your research and how you might conduct your own work. For example, if there have been 200 studies on gender differences in aggression, the results of those studies should not be ignored. You may not want to replicate any one of these studies, but you certainly should take methodologies that were used and the results into consideration when you plan your own research in that area.

A good example of this principle is the tremendous intellectual and scientific effort that went into the creation of the atomic bomb. Hundreds of top scientists from all over the world were organized at different locations in an intense and highly charged effort to combine their knowledge to create this horrible weapon. What was unique about this effort is that it was compressed in time; many people who would probably share each other’s work in any case did so in days rather than months because of the military and political urgency of the times. What was discovered one day literally became the basis for the next day’s experiments (see Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, for the whole story).

Second, while we’re talking about other studies, research is an activity that can be replicated. If someone conducts a research study that examines the relationship between problem-solving ability and musical talent, then the methods and procedures (and results) of the experiment should be replicable with other groups for two reasons. First, one of the hallmarks of any credible scientific finding is that it can be replicated. If you can spin gold from straw, you should be able to do it every time, right? How about using a new method to teach children to read? Or developing early intervention programs that produce similar results when repeated? Second, if the results of an experiment can be replicated, they can serve as a basis for further research in the same area.

Third, good research is generalizable to other settings. This means, for example, that if adolescent boys are found to be particularly susceptible to peer pressure in one setting, then the results would probably stand up (or be generalizable) in a different but related setting. Some research has limited generalizability because it is difficult to replicate the exact conditions under which the research was carried out, but the results of most research can lend at least something to another setting.

Fourth, research is based on some logical rationale and tied to theory. Research ideas do not stand alone merely as interesting questions. Instead, research activity provides answers to questions that help fill in pieces to what can be a large and complicated puzzle. No one could be expected to understand, through one grand research project, the entire process of intellectual development in children, or the reason why adolescents form cliques, or what actually happens during a midlife crisis. All these major areas of research need to be broken into smaller elements, and all these elements need to be tied together with a common theme, which more often than not is some underlying, guiding theory.

Fifth, and by all means, research is doable! Too often, especially for the young or inexperienced scientist (such as yourself), the challenge to come up with a feasible idea is so pressing that almost anything will do as a research topic. Professors sometimes see thesis statements from students such as, “The purpose of this research is to see if the use of drugs can be reduced through exposure to television commercials.” This level of ambiguity and lack of a conceptual framework makes the statement almost useless and certainly not doable. Good research poses a question that can be answered, and then answers it in a timely fashion.

Sixth, research generates new questions or is cyclical in nature. Yes, what goes around comes around. The answers to today’s research questions provide the foundation for research questions that will be asked tomorrow. You will learn more about this process later in this chapter when a method of scientific inquiry is described.

Seventh, research is incremental. No one scientist stands alone; instead, scientists stand on the shoulders of others. Contributions that are made usually take place in small, easily definable chunks. The first study ever done on the development of language did not answer all the questions about language acquisition, nor did the most recent study put the icing on the cake. Rather, all the studies in a particular area come together to produce a body of knowledge that is shared by different researchers and provides the basis for further research. The whole, or all the knowledge about a particular area, is more than the sum of the parts, because each new research advance not only informs us but it also helps us place other findings in a different, often fruitful perspective.

Finally, at its best, research is an apolitical activity that should be undertaken for the betterment of society. I stress “at its best,” because too often various special-interest groups dictate how research funding should be spent. Finding a vaccine for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) should not depend on one’s attitudes toward individual lifestyles. Similarly, whether early intervention programs should be supported is independent of one’s personal or political views. And should research on cloning be abandoned because of its potential misuse? Of course not. It’s how the discovery of new knowledge is used that results in its misuse, not the new knowledge itself.

Although it should be apolitical, research should have as its ultimate goal the betterment of society. Researchers or practitioners do not withhold food from pregnant women to study the effects of malnutrition on children. To examine the stress-nutrition link, researchers do not force adults to eat particular diets that might be unhealthy. These unethical practices would not lead to a greater end, especially because there are other ways to answer such questions without resorting to possibly harmful practices.

If these attributes make for good research, what is bad research? It takes the opposite approach of all the things stated earlier and then some. In sum, bad research is the fishing trip you take looking for something important when it simply is not to be found. It is plagiarizing other people’s work, or falsifying data to prove a point, or misrepresenting information and misleading participants. Unfortunately, there are researchers whose work is characterized by these practices, but they are part of an overall minority.

TEST YOURSELF

Note: At the end of every major heading in each chapter of Exploring Research, we’ll have a few questions for you that we hope will help you understand the content and guide your studying.

Provide an example of how research is incremental in nature and what advantage is this to both future and past researchers?

Think of an example of how knowledge about a certain topic can lead to new questions about that, or a related, topic.

A Model of Scientific Inquiry

In the past 20 years, the public has been exposed to the trials and tribulations of the research process as described through hundreds of books by and about the everyday work of scientists around the world.

Regardless of the specific content of these books, they all have one thing in common. The work was accomplished through adherence to guidelines that allowed these researchers to progress from point A to point Z while remaining confident that they were on the trail of finding (what they hoped was) an adequate answer to the questions they had posed.

“Doing science” means following a model that begins with a question and ends with asking new questions.

Their methods and their conclusions are not helter-skelter because of one important practice: They share the same general philosophy regarding how questions about human behavior should be answered. In addition, for scientists to be able to trust their colleagues, in the sense of having confidence in the results produced by their studies, these scientists must have something in common besides good intentions. As it turns out, what they share is a standard sequence of steps in formulating and answering a question.

When you read in a journal article that Method A is more effective than Method B for improving retention or memory, you can be pretty sure that the steps described next were followed, in one form or another. Because there is agreement about the general method used to answer the question, the results of this comparison of Method A and Method B can be applied to the next study. That study would perhaps investigate variations of Method A and how and why they work. The research efforts of developmental psychologists, gerontologists (specialists in aging), linguists, and experts in higher education all depend on the integrity of the process.

Figure 1.1  shows a set of such steps as part of a model of scientific inquiry. The goal of this model is to find the truth (whatever that means) or, in other words, to use a  scientific method  that results in a reasonable and sound answer to important questions that will further our understanding of human behavior.

An interesting and timely topic, the effects of using social media on adolescents’ social skills, will be used as an example of the different steps followed in this model.

Figure 1.1 The steps in the research process, wherein each step sets the stage for the next.

Asking the Question

Remember the story of The Wizard of Oz? When Dorothy realized her need to get to the Emerald City, she asked Glinda, the good witch, “But where do I begin?” Glinda’s response, “Most people begin at the beginning, my dear,” is the case in almost any scientific endeavor.

Our first and most important step is asking a question (I wonder what would happen if . . . ?) or identifying a need (We have to find a way to . . .) that arises as the result of curiosity, and to which it becomes necessary to find an answer. For example, you might be curious about how the use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook affects relationships between children and their peers. You also might feel an urgency to find out how to use various types of media most effectively for educating children and adults about the dangers of using drugs.

Such questions are informally stated and often are intended as a source of discussion and stimulation about what direction the specific research topic should take. Where do such questions come from? They rarely come from the confines of a classroom or a laboratory. Rather, questions spring (in the fullest sense of the word) from our imagination and our own experiences, enriched by the worlds of science, art, music, and literature. It is no coincidence that many works of fiction (including science fiction) have a basis in fact. The truly creative scientist is always thinking about everything from solutions to existing questions to the next important question to ask. When Louis Pasteur said that chance favors the prepared mind, he was really saying, “Take advantage of all the experiences you can, both in and out of school.” Only then can you be well prepared to recognize the importance of certain events, which will act as a stimulus for more rigorous research activity.

Questions can be as broad as inquiring about the effects of social media on peer groups, or as specific as the relationship between the content of social media transactions and acceptance by peers. Whatever their content or depth of inquiry, questions are the first step in any scientific endeavor.

Identifying the Important Factors

Once the question has been asked, the next step is to identify the factors that have to be examined to answer the question. Such factors might range from the simplest, such as an adolescent’s age or socioeconomic status, to more complicated measures, such as the daily number of face-to-face interactions.

For example, the following list of factors have been investigated over the past 10 years by various researchers who have been interested in the effects of social media:

· • age and gender of the adolescent,

· • ethnicity,

· • level of family education,

· • access to types of social media,

· • number of self-identified close friends,

· • parental attitude toward social media,

· • family configuration,

· • family communication patterns.

And these are only ten of hundreds of factors and associated topics that could be explored. But of all the factors that could be important and that could help us to understand more about the effects of social media, which ones should be selected as a focus?

In general, you should select factors that

· • have not been investigated before,

· • will contribute to the understanding of the question you are asking,

· • are available to investigate,

· • hold some interest for you personally or professionally,

· • lead to another question.

It is hard enough to define the nature of the problem you want to study (see  Chapter 3 ) let alone generate questions that lead to more questions, but once you begin the journey of becoming a scientist, you are a member of an elite group who has the responsibility to contribute to the scientific literature not only by what you do but also by what you see that needs to be done.

Formulating a Hypothesis

When asked what she thought a hypothesis was, a 9-year-old girl said it best: “An educated guess.” A  hypothesis  results when the questions are transformed into statements that express the relationships between variables such as an “if . . . then” statement.

For example, if the question is, “What effects does using Facebook have on the development of friendships?” then the hypothesis could be, adolescents who use Facebook as their primary means of maintaining social contact have fewer close friends. Several characteristics make some hypotheses better than others, and we will talk about those in  Chapter 2 .

For now, you should realize that a hypothesis is an objective extension of the question that was originally posed. Although all questions might not be answerable because of the way in which they are posed—which is fine for the question stage—a good hypothesis poses a question in a testable form. Good questions lead to good hypotheses, which in turn lead to good studies.

Collecting Relevant Information

Hypotheses should posit a clear relationship between different factors, such as a correlation between number of followers on Twitter and quality of social skills. That is the purpose of the hypothesis. Once a hypothesis is formulated, the next step is the collection of information or empirical data that will confirm or refute the hypothesis. So, if you are interested in whether or not participating in social media has an impact on adolescent’s social skills, the kinds of data that will allow the hypothesis to be tested must be collected.

For example, you might collect two types of data to test the hypothesis mentioned in the previous paragraph. The first might be the number of friends an adolescent might have. The second might be the quality of those relationships.

An important point about testing hypotheses is that you set out to test them, not to prove them. As a good scientist, you should be intent on collecting data that reveal as much of the truth about the world as is possible and letting the chips fall where they may, whether you agree or disagree with the outcomes. Setting out to prove a hypothesis can place scientists in the unattractive position of biasing the methods for collecting data or the way in which study results are interpreted. If bias occurs, then the entire sequence of steps can fall apart. Besides, there’s really no being “wrong” in science. Not having a hypothesis supported means only that there are additional questions to ask or that those which were asked should be reformulated. That is the beauty of good science—there is always another question to ask on the same topic—one that can shed just a bit more light. And who knows? That bit more light might be the tipping point or just the amount needed to uncover an entirely new and significant finding.

Testing the Hypothesis

Is it enough simply to collect data that relate to the phenomena being studied? Not quite. What if you have finished collecting data and find that adolescents who spend more than 10 hours a week involved in social media have 50% fewer qualitatively “good” relationships with peers than those who spend less than 10 hours? What would your conclusion be?

On one hand, you could say the adolescents who used social media more than 10 hours per week were one-half as sociable as other adolescents or had one-half the quality of relationships of the children who used social media less than 10 hours per week. On the other hand, you might argue that the difference between the two groups of adolescents is too large enough for you to reach any conclusion. You might conclude that in order for a statement about social media use and quality of friendships, you would have to have much greater differences in the quality of relationships.

Say hello to inferential statistics (see  Chapter 8  for more), a set of tools that allows researchers to separate the effects of an isolated factor (such as time spent on Facebook) from differences between groups that might be owing to some other factor or to nothing other than  chance . Yes, luck, fate, destiny, the wheels of fortune, or whatever you want to call what you cannot control, sometimes can be responsible for differences between groups.

For example, what if some of the adolescents participating in your study went to some kind of social function where there was a particularly strong emphasis on social media methods of communicating such as texting. Or, what if one of the adolescents just was afraid to truthfully report how much time he or she spent on Facebook during study time?

The job of all the tools that researchers have at their disposal (and the ones you will learn about throughout Exploring Research) is to help you separate the effects of the factors being studied (such as amount of time spent on Facebook) from other unrelated factors (such as the number of years a family has lived at its current address). What these tools allow researchers to do is assign a probability level to an outcome so that you can decide whether what you see is really due to what you think it is due to or something else which you leave for the next study.

Working with the Hypothesis

Once you have collected the required data and have tested the hypothesis, as a good scientist you can sit down, put up your feet, look intellectual, and examine the results. The results may confirm or refute the hypothesis. In either case, it is off to the races. If the data confirm your hypothesis, then the importance of the factors that were hypothesized to be related and conceptually important were borne out and you can go on your merry way while the next scientific experiment is being planned. If the hypothesis is not confirmed, it may very well be a time for learning something that was not known previously. In the example used earlier, it may mean that involvement in social media has no impact on social skills or social relationships. Although the researcher might be a bit disappointed that the initial hunch (formally called a hypothesis) was not supported, the results of a well-run study always provide valuable information, regardless of the outcome.

Reconsidering the Theory

Finally, it is time to take stock and relate all these research efforts to what guides our work in the first place: theory. Earlier in this chapter, a theory was defined as a set of statements that predict things that will occur in the future and explain things that have occurred in the past. But the very nature of theories is that they can be modified according to the results of research based on the same assumptions on which the theory is based.

For example, a particular approach to understanding the development of children and adults is known as social learning theory, which places special importance on the role of modeling and vicarious, or indirect, learning. According to this theory, exposure to aggressive behavior would lead to aggressive behavior once the environment contains the same kinds of cues and motivation that were present when the initial aggressive model (such as particularly unkind Facebook postings) was observed.

If the hypothesis that observing such models increases lack of civility is confirmed, then another building block, or piece of evidence, has been added to the house called social learning theory. Good scientists are always trying to see what type of brick (new information) fits where, or if it fits at all. In this way, new knowledge can change or modify the way the theory appears and what it has to say about human behavior. Consequently, new questions might be generated from the theory that will help contribute further to the way in which the house is structured.

Asking New Questions

In any case, the last step in this simple model of scientific inquiry is to ask a new question. It might be a simple variation on a theme (Do males use social media in a different way than females?) or a refinement of the original question (How might the use of social media differentially affect the social relationships of males and females?). Whether or not the hypothesis is supported, good research leaves you farther along the trail to answering the original question. You just might be at a different place than you thought or intended to be.

TEST YOURSELF

Hypothesis plays a very important role in scientific research, with one of them being the objective testing of a particular question that a scientist might want to ask. What are some of the factors that might get in the way of the scientist remaining objective and what impact might that have on a fair test of the hypothesis of interest? What is the danger of not being aware of these biases?

Different Types of Research

By now, you have a good idea what research is and how the research process works. Now it is time to turn your attention to a description and examples of different types of research methods and the type of questions posed by them.

The types of research methods that will be discussed differ primarily on three dimensions: (1) the nature of the question asked, (2) the method used to answer it, and (3) the degree of precision the method brings to answering the question. One way in which these methods do not necessarily differ, however, is in the content or the focus of the research.

In other words, if you are interested in the effects of the use of social media on adolescents’ friendships, your research may be experimental, where you artificially restrict access to social media and look at friendship outcomes, or nonexperimental, where you survey a group of adolescents to determine the frequency of use of social media tools.

A summary of the two general categories of research methods (nonexperimental versus experimental), which will be discussed in this volume, is shown in  Table 1.1 . This table illustrates the purpose of each category, the time frame that each encompasses, the degree of control the different method has over competing factors, “code” words that appear in research articles that can tip you off as to the type of research being conducted, and an example of each.  Chapters 9 – 12  discuss in greater detail each of these research methods.

There is one very important point to keep in mind when discussing different methods used in research. As often as not, as research becomes more sophisticated and researchers (like you in the future) become better trained, there will be increased reliance on mixed methods models, where both experimental and nonexperimental methods are combined. Some researchers feel that this type of approach lacks clarity and precision, but others feel it is the best way to look at a phenomenon of interest from a variety of perspectives and thereby be more informative.

Nonexperimental Research

Nonexperimental research  includes a variety of different methods that describe relationships between variables. The important distinction between nonexperimental methods and the others you will learn about later is that nonexperimental research methods do not set out, nor can they test, any causal relationships between variables. For example, if you wanted to survey the social media–using behavior of adolescents, you could do so by having them maintain a diary in which they record what tools they use and for how long.

Nonexperimental research examines the relationship between variables, without any attention to cause-and-effect relationships.

Table 1.1 Summary of research methods covered in exploring research.

	Types of Research
	Nonexperimental	Experimental
	Descriptive	Historical	Correlational	Qualitative	True Experimental	Quasi-experimental
Purpose	Describe the characteristics of an existing phenomenon	Relate events that have occurred in the past to current events	Examine the relationships between variables	To examine human behavior and the social, cultural, and political contexts within which it occurs	To test for true cause-and-effect relationships	To test for causal relationships without having full control
Time frame	Current	Past	Current or past (correlation) Future (prediction)	Current or past	Current	Current or past
Degree of control over factors or precision	None or low	None or low	Low to medium	Moderate to high	High	Moderate to high
Code words to look for in research articles	Describe Interview Review literature	Past Describe	Relationship Related to Associated with Predicts	Case study Evaluation Ethnography Historical Research Survey	Function of Cause of Comparison Between Effects of	Function of Cause of Comparison between Effects of
Example	A survey of dating practices of adolescent girls	An analysis of Freud’s use of hypnosis as it relates to current psychotherapy practices	An investigation that focuses on the relationship between the number of hours of television watching and gradepoint average	A case study analysis of the effectiveness of policies for educating all children	The effect of a preschool language program on the language skills of inner-city children	Gender differences in spatial and verbal abilities

This descriptive study provides information about the content of their online behaviors but tells you little about why they may do what they do. In this type of a research endeavor, you are not trying to understand the motivation for using what online tools are used nor are you trying to manipulate their use or content of the communication or any other outcome. This is nonexperimental in nature because no cause-and-effect relationships of any type are being hypothesized or investigated.

Nonexperimental research methods that will be covered in this volume are descriptive, correlational, and qualitative. Descriptive and correlational methods will be covered in  Chapter 9 , and qualitative methods will be discussed in  Chapter 10 . The following is a brief overview of each.

Descriptive Research

Descriptive research  describes the characteristics of an existing phenomenon. The every 10-year U.S. Census is an example of descriptive research as is any survey that assesses the current status of anything from the number of faucets in a house to the number of adults over 60 years of age who have grandchildren.

Descriptive research focuses on events that occur in the present.

What can be done with this information? First, it provides a broad picture of a phenomenon you might be interested in exploring. For example, if you are interested in learning more about the reading process in children, you might want to consult The Reading Report Card (at  http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/ ). This annual publication summarizes information about the reading achievement of children ages 9, 13, and 17 years. Or you might want to consult a publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (at  http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/ ), to determine the current incidence of measles cases in the Midwest, or the Bureau of Labor Statistics (at  http://www.bls.gov/ ) to determine the current unemployment rate and the number of working single parents who have children under age 5 (about 60%). If you want to know it, there is a place to find it. Descriptive research demands this type of information.

In another example, Eleanor Hanna, Hsiao-ye Yi, Mary Dufour, and Christine Whitmore ( 2001 ) examined the relationship of early smoking to alcohol use, depression, and drug use in adolescence. They used descriptive statistics and other statistical techniques to find that in comparison with those who never smoked, or those who simply experimented, early smokers were those most likely to use alcohol and other drugs as well as have school problems and early sexual experiences culminating in pregnancy.

Descriptive research can stand on its own, but it can also serve as a basis for other types of research in that a group’s characteristics often need to be described before the meaningfulness of any differences can be addressed. And almost always descriptive data is collected but as the first step of many on the way to a more complex study. Want to describe an outcome? Learn about descriptive techniques.

Correlational Research

Descriptive and  historical research  provide a picture of events that are currently happening or have occurred in the past. Researchers often want to go beyond mere description and begin discussing the relationship that certain events might have to one another. The most likely type of research to answer questions about the relationship among variables or events is called correlational research.

What  correlational research  does, which neither descriptive nor historical research does, is to provide some indication as to how two or more things are related to one another or, in effect, what they share or have in common, or how well a specific outcome might be predicted by one or more pieces of information.

Correlational research examines the relationship between variables.

Correlational research uses a numerical index called the  correlation coefficient  (see  Chapter 9  for a complete discussion) as a measure of the strength of this relationship. Most correlational studies report such an index when available.

If you were interested in finding out the relationship between the number of hours that first-year students spend studying and their gradepoint averages, then you would be doing correlational research, because you are interested in the relationship between these two variables. If you were interested in finding out the best set of predictors of success in graduate school, you would be doing a type of correlational research that includes prediction.

For example, in a study of culture, obesity stereotypes, self-esteem, and the “thin ideal,” Klaczynski, Goold, and Mudry ( 2004 ) examined the relationships among negative stereotypes of obesity, and other variables such as perceptions of the causes of obesity and of control over weight and self-esteem. They found a negative correlation between beliefs in control over one’s weight and self-esteem.

One of the most important points about correlational research is that while it examines relationships between variables, it in no way implies that one causes changes in the other. In other words, correlation and prediction examine associations but not causal relationships, wherein a change in one factor directly influences a change in another.

For example, it is a well-established fact that as the crime rate in a community increases, so does the level of ice cream consumption! What’s going on? Certainly, no rational person would conclude that the two are causally related such that if ice cream were banned, no more crimes would occur. Rather, another variable, temperature, better explains the increased ice cream consumption and the increased crime rate (both rise when it gets warm). It might seem ridiculous that people would identify causality just because events are related, but you do not have to read far in the daily newspaper to discover that politicians can reach just such unwise conclusions.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research  methods (see  Chapter 10 ) are placed in this general category of nonexperimental methods because they do not directly test for cause and effect and, for the most part, follow an entirely different paradigm than the experimental model.

Qualitative research studies phenomena within the social and cultural context in which they occur.

The general purpose of qualitative research methods is to examine human behavior in the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they occur. This is done through a variety of tools, such as interviews, historical methods, case studies, and ethnography, and it usually results in qualitative (or nonnumerical) primary data. In other words, the qualitative researcher is more (but not only) interested in the contents of an interviewee’s speech than in the number of times (frequency) a particular comment is made.

Qualitative research is relatively new to the social and behavioral sciences and, to a large extent, its increasing popularity is due to a degree of dissatisfaction with other available research methods. Some scientists feel that the traditional experimental model is too restrictive and narrow, preventing underlying and important factors and relationships from being revealed. What’s so valuable about this set of tools is that it allows you to answer a whole new set of questions in a whole new way.

Experimental Research

You already know that correlational research can help to establish the presence of a relationship among variables, but it does not provide any reason to believe that variables are causally related to one another. How does one find out if characteristics, behaviors, or events are related in such a way that the relationship is a causal one? Two types of research can answer that question: true experimental research and quasi-experimental research.

Experimental research examines the cause-and-effect relationship between variables.

True Experimental Research

In the  true experimental research method , participants are assigned to groups based on some criterion, often called the treatment variable or treatment condition. For example, let us say that you are interested in comparing the effects of two different techniques for reducing obsessive-compulsive behavior in adults. The first technique includes behavioral therapy, and the second one does not. Once adults are assigned to groups and the programs are completed, you will want to look for any differences between the two groups with regard to the effects of the therapy on the frequency of obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Because the nature of the groups is determined by the researcher, the researcher has complete control over the factors to which the adults are exposed.

True experimental research examines direct cause-and-effect relationships.

This is the ideal model for establishing a cause-and-effect relationship because the researcher has clearly defined the possible cause (if indeed it results in some effect) and can keep very close tabs on what is happening. Most important, however, the researcher has complete control over the treatment.

In a quasi-experimental study, the researcher does not have such a high degree of control because people have already been indirectly assigned to those groups (e.g., social class, type of abuse, gender, and type of injury) for which you are testing the effects.

The distinction between experimental and other methods of research boils down to a matter of control. True experimental research designs (discussed in  Chapter 11 ) isolate and control all the factors that could be responsible for any effects except the one of most interest.

For example, Fleming, Klein, and Corter ( 1992 ) examined the effects of participation in a social support group on depression, maternal attitudes, and behavior in new mothers. As part of the experimental design, the researchers divided 142 mothers into three groups. Group 1 received the intervention, Group 2 received the no-intervention condition, and Group 3 received a special group-by-mail intervention. The key point here is the manipulation (the key word in experimental designs) of the condition for each of the three groups. This research is true experimental because the researchers determined the nature of the treatment and who is assigned to each group. As you will learn, in a quasi-experimental study, the researcher has no control over the origin of group membership (male or female, black or white, etc.). The primary difference between quasi-experimental and true experimental research is that in the former, subjects are preassigned to groups. It’s that simple.

Quasi-Experimental Research

In  quasi-experimental research , participants are preassigned to groups based on some predetermined characteristic or quality. Differences in gender, race, age, grade in school, neighborhood of residence, type of job, and even experiences are examples. These group assignments have already taken place before the experiment begins, and the researcher has no control over who is assigned to which group.

Quasi-experimental studies also focus on cause and effect, but they use preassigned groups.

Let us say that you are interested in examining voting patterns as a function of neighborhood. You cannot change the neighborhood people live in, but you can use the quasi-experimental method to establish a causal link between residence and voting patterns. In other words, if you find that voting pattern and residence are related, then you can say with some degree of confidence (but not as much as with an experimental study) that there is a causal relationship between where one resides and how one votes.

The most important use of the quasi-experimental method occurs where researchers cannot, in good conscience, assign people to groups and test the effects of group membership on some other outcome. For example, researchers who are interested in reducing the impact of child abuse cannot “create” groups of abusers, but rather have to look at already established groups of people who are abusive. That’s exactly what Mark Chaffin and his colleagues ( 2004 ) did when they assigned already (and that’s the key word) physically abusive parents to one of three intervention conditions. They found a reduction in abusive behavior by parents who were assigned to parent–child interaction therapy.

Quasi-experimental research is also called post hoc, or after the fact, research because the actual research takes place after the assignment of groups (e.g., abusive versus nonabusive, employed versus unemployed, malnourished versus nonmalnourished, and male versus female). Because assignment has already taken place, the researcher has a high degree, but not the highest degree, of control over the cause of whatever effects are being examined. For the highest degree of control to occur, the true experimental model must be followed.

Another phrase for quasi-experimental research is post-hoc, or after the fact.

TEST YOURSELF

We have briefly defined and discussed the different research methods that you will learn about later in Exploring Research in much greater detail. For now, answer this question. What determines the research method that a scientist should use to answer a question or test a hypothesis? Which research method described here best lends itself to questions you want answered?

What Research Method to Use When?

This is a beginning course and no one would expect you to be able to identify what type of research method was used in a particular study—at least not yet. You may have a very good idea if you understand what you just read about nonexperimental and  experimental research methods , but it takes some experience to become really good at the identification process.

So, here is a little jump start in the form of a “cheat” sheet (shown in  Figure 1.2 ). This is not a substitute for learning how to distinguish nonexperimental from experimental  research designs —it’s just a good way to get started and a bit of a help when you need it. Note that an alternative to any nonexperimental method is a qualitative approach (which is not shown in  Figure 1.2 ).

Basic Research Versus Applied Research

Sometimes in the research world, distinctions must be made not only about the type of research but also about the most general category into which the implications or utility of the research might fall. This is where the distinction between basic and applied research comes in. But beware! This distinction is sometimes used as a convenient way to classify research activity rather than to shed light on the intent or purpose of the researcher and the importance of the study.

The most basic distinction between the two types of research is that  basic research  (sometimes called pure research) is research that has no immediate application at the time it is completed, whereas  applied research  does. If this appears to be a somewhat ambiguous distinction, it is, because almost all basic research eventually results in some worthwhile application over the long term. In fact, the once easy distinction between the two is slowly disappearing.

Both basic and applied research are critical parts of studying and understanding a wide range of phenomena.

Figure 1.2 Research design “cheat” sheet.

For example, for every dollar spent on the basic research that supported the lunar missions during the 1960s and 1970s, $6 were returned in economic impact. Data from basic research that hypothesizes a relationship between Alzheimer’s disease in older people and Down’s syndrome (a genetic disorder) in younger people could eventually prove to be the critical finding that leads to a cure for both conditions. Another example: Who cares if some children have a more difficult time than others do in distinguishing between two very similar stimuli? You do, if you want to teach these children how to read. Many different reading programs have grown directly from such basic research efforts.

Never judge the quality of either the finished product or the worth of supporting a research project by branding it as basic or applied research. Rather, look closely at its content and judge it on its merit. This approach obviously has been used, because more and more reports about basic research (at one time beyond the interests of everyday practitioners) appear in such practitioner-oriented professional journals as Phi Delta Kappan and the APA Monitor, as well as the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Science News, and American Scientist. And the results of applied research are those that policy makers look to when formulating position papers.

TEST YOURSELF

Why are both basic and applied research essential to the scientific community as well as to the public community that it serves? What do you think an educated or informed citizen should know about how the research process works? What five questions might he or she be able to answer?

Summary

Great! You have finished the first chapter of Exploring Research, and hopefully you now have a good idea about what research is (and isn’t), what the purpose of research is, and some of the different ways in which research can be carried out. With this new information under your belt, let’s turn to the next chapter, which focuses on some “researchese,” or the language used by researchers, and how these new terms fit together with what you have learned here.

Exercises

1 .

The process of research never stands independently from the content of the research. As a student new to the field of research, and perhaps even to your own discipline (such as education, psychology, sociology, or nursing), answer the following questions:

· (a)What areas within your discipline especially interest you?

· (b)Who are some of the outstanding researchers in your field, and what is the focus of their work?

· (c)Of the different types of research described and discussed in this chapter, which one do you think best fits the type of research that is done in your discipline?

2 .

At this point in your studies, what do you find most intimidating about the research process? What is one thing you could do to make this part of the research process a little bit easier or more comfortable? In which part of conducting research are you most confident?

3 .

How do the terms “hypothesis” and “theory” differ in meaning?

4 .

Visit your college or university library and locate an article from a professional journal that describes a research study. Access it online, or as a hard copy. From the description of how scientific inquiry takes place (which you read about in this chapter), answer the following:

· (a)What is the primary question posed by the study?

· (b)What important factors are identified?

· (c)Is there a hypothesis stated? If so, what is it?

· (d)Describe how the information was collected.

· (e)How do the results of the study affect the original hypothesis?

5 .

Interview an active researcher on your campus and ask about this person’s research activities, including:

· (a)The focus of this person’s research interests.

· (b)Why this individual is interested in this area.

· (c)What the most exciting part of the research is.

· (d)What the least exciting part of the research is.

· (e)What impact the results of the research might have on this individual’s particular discipline.

· (f)What studies this individual would like to see as follow-up studies to the research.

6 .

Select a discipline within the social and behavioral sciences, such as child development, social psychology, higher education, or health psychology. For the discipline you select, find a representative study that is quasi-experimental or experimental in nature. Write a one-paragraph description of the study. Do the same for a historical study.

7 .

This chapter contains several examples of preassigned groups used in quasi-experimental research (e.g., groups based on preassignment such as gender, race, grade in school, etc.). Name three more examples of preassigned groups appropriate for quasi-experimental research.

8 .

Research questions come from imagination and can be enriched by science, art, music, and literature. Identify a book you have read or a television show or movie you have watched. What kind of research question can you pull from this work? Here are some examples to get you started:

“Pride and Prejudice” (Jane Austen): In what ways do perceptions of social status relate to choices in a relationship partner?

“Clueless” (Amy Heckerling): How does an intervention involving vocabulary lessons, a new wardrobe, and instructions on which social groups to befriend affect ratings of popularity from fellow high school students?

9 .

Find a normal part of your daily routine about which to ask an “I wonder if . . . ” question. For example, “I wonder if the amount of text messaging in the hour before bedtime affects the amount of time needed to fall asleep in adolescents.”

10 .

In a fictitious correlational study, the results showed that age was related to strength, that is, as children get older, their strength increases. What is the problem with the statements that increased strength is caused by increasing age, or that the stronger you get the older you get?

11 .

Write down your definition of science. How would your definition of science differ from a student’s in a similar class 25 years ago? How would your definition differ from that put forth by a physical (e.g., physics, chemistry) scientist, if it differs at all?

12 .

When trying to decide which scientific method to use when exploring a question, what is the best rule of thumb to go by?

13 .

Look for examples of editorials or research articles that present correlational evidence. Do the authors infer a cause-and-effect relationship in the correlation? Why might it be difficult for even seasoned researchers to avoid making this mistake?

14 .

Research often replicates findings made by others. What is the value in this process?

15 .

We live in a very complex world just filled with economic and social challenges. How can the research process help us solve or better understand some of those problems and issues?

16 .

Identify five attributes that characterize high-quality research.

17 .

A researcher who hypothesized that 6-year-old children of nonworking mothers have more advanced reading skills than those of 6-year-old children of working mothers found insignificant results. Based on this information and what you have learned about the field of research, answer the following questions:

· (a)What is a new research question the researcher could ask?

· (b)What is one step in between examining the results and asking the new research question that might point the researcher in the right direction?

18 .

Two characteristics of high-quality research are generalizability and the ability to contribute to the betterment of society. In other words, results from high-quality research, particularly applied research, can provide a meaningful answer to the question, “So What?” Read a research article and describe in one or two sentences how the research addresses the “So What?” question.

19 .

Explain the difference between historical, correlational, and quasi-experimental research.

20 .

Here’s the question . . .

What is the difference between achievement scores for a group of children born in

Peoria and a group born in Croatia?

Use  Figure 1.2  to determine the method you should use.

Online. . .

Professional Organizations

Because someday you’ll be a professional, there’s no time like the present to get information about some professional societies and join as a student—it will never be cheaper. Here are some of the largest organizations and their Internet addresses:

· • American Anthropology Association at  http://www.aaanet.org/

· • American Educational Research Association at  http://www.aera.net/

· • American Medical Association at  http://www.ama-assn.org/

· • American Psychological Association at  http://www.apa.org/

· • American Public Health Association at  http://www.apha.org/

· • National Association for the Education of Young Children at  http://www.naeyc.org/

· • American Nurses Association at  www.nursingworld.org/

· • American Association for the Advancement of Science at  www.aaas.org/

· • American Statistical Association at  http://www.amstat.org

· • American Psychiatric Association at  http://www.psych.org

· • American Pharmacists Association at  http://www.pharmacist.com

· • Council for Exceptional Children at  http://www.cec.sped.org

CHAPTER 1 ORIGINS OF A SCIENCE OF MIND

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Since it is the understanding that sets man above the rest of sensible beings, and gives him all the advantage and dominion which he has over them; it is certainly a subject, even for its nobleness, worth our labour to inquire into.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690

INTRODUCTION

The discipline of Psychology, the history of which we explore in the following pages, did not exist before the mid- to late 19th century. Thus, to begin our history, we have to understand the intellectual and practical developments that made the emergence of such a field possible. As we discuss in this and the next chapter, at least four strands of thought and practice were important for the emergence of Psychology by the end of the 19th century: philosophy, physiology, evolution by natural selection, and creation of a psychological sensibility through everyday practices. Taken together, these four strands made possible both the science and the profession of Psychology, which Graham Richards has termed “big P” Psychology to differentiate the discipline from its subject matter, “little p” psychology (Richards, 2002). The latter includes the everyday psychology that people have used, and continue to use, to make sense of their lives.

The last strand, the creation of a psychological sensibility, is explained and elaborated in the next chapter. In this chapter, we unravel the first three strands by introducing you to basic ideas from the work of philosophers René Descartes and John Locke, the development of an experimental approach to understanding the relation between mind or brain and behavior in 19th-century physiology, and Charles Darwin’s work on evolution and how it included humans within the domain of natural laws.

We take as our point of departure the early modern period, that is, from the 17th century on, as the appropriate time to begin our analyses of the events that made possible the relatively recent emergence of Psychology. In terms of place, we begin with events and people in England and western Europe. This is not to claim that people in no other place or time wrote or thought psychologically about life; as we argue in later chapters, a background of thought relevant to psychology in other cultures came to the fore nearer our own time. Rather, our aim is both pragmatic and historiographical. We are pragmatic because space is limited. Our historiographic rationale is that we think a sound argument can be made that the psychological sensibility characterizing our own time is of relatively recent origin, dating from changes in human experience and human society that were first directly noticeable in the early modern period in England and Europe, and then exacerbated by rapid social changes brought on by such macroscale events as the Industrial Revolution and the spread of Protestant religious beliefs and practices.

Lastly, we think it is useful to consider events and contributions to the development of a psychological sensibility from both elites—that is, those of the upper classes who had access to resources, education, and the power to disseminate their views—and everyday people. It is more usual in a textbook to consider only the contributions of elites, typically philosophers or “men of science”; this chapter focuses on such contributions. The next chapter examines changes in everyday life that many people encountered and incorporated to make meaning in their lives. If, as we suggested in the introduction of this book, Psychology emerged from ways of living, then it follows that we should ask questions about when and how changes in everyday life occurred. While a full set of answers is not possible, since no complete record exists of how people lived and acted in earlier periods, we can provide at least a partial description and analysis based on extant records and writing. While we have an extensive record of philosophical thought from the early modern era, which we draw on in this chapter, in the next chapter we use what is available in the historical record to suggest how nonelites contributed to the emergence of practices that are also part of the lineage that led to the emergence of Psychology.

PHILOSOPHY: DESCARTES AND LOCKE AS EXEMPLARS

The gradual emergence of thought about man in naturalistic terms occurred, paradoxically, in the context of faith, both Protestant and Catholic. Religion and conflicts about correct beliefs and the proper conduct of daily life provided a background for this thinking that held both promise and threat. Nations went to war, and humans lost their livelihoods and often their lives over these matters. Both Descartes and Locke were profoundly affected by this context of religious and political strife, and each attempted to find ways to restore certainty of knowledge and order in civil society. Importantly, their thought also contributed to the eventual emergence of Psychology.

If any one word could characterize the 17th century in England and Europe, it might well be “uncertainty.” The modern nation-state was emerging, and war among nations was endemic. Civil strife that led to civil war in England brought horrors nearly unimaginable that left their marks for generations afterward. The English civil war was directly related to religious beliefs and practices, but religion was also an important factor in changes elsewhere in Europe as the new orientation to personal faith and religious practice introduced by Martin Luther (1483–1546) in the 16th century spread unevenly across the continent. Families, as well as nations, were often divided over questions of faith, whether to follow the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church or one of the new Protestant faiths. When these faiths were linked to the power of the state, many people were persecuted and killed for their beliefs and many fled to other countries. So, on both the national and the personal levels, it was a time of uncertainty as the fabric of life was rewoven in a period of intense social upheaval.

Although no one event sparked the changes in the structure of life and thought in Europe, the assassination of the king of France, Henri IV (Henry of Navarre), in 1610, was crucial in that it made salient the need to find a new foundation for civil society. Henri IV was tolerant of religious diversity and provided guarantees for the civil rights of religious minorities, who were primarily Protestant. Powerful Catholics feared that he secretly planned to weaken Catholicism, and they arranged to have him killed. His assassination was a rejection of religious tolerance. Given the tensions between faiths across Europe and the high political stakes involved, Henri’s assassination was taken as evidence that only force could resolve religious disputes. In 1618, the Thirty Years’ War began that involved most states of Europe and led to widespread devastation and a marked reduction in population. Among the elites, those with time to reflect and write, a pressing concern became how we can find certainty for knowledge and living that religion seemingly failed to provide.

Not only was there religious conflict, but the challenges to orthodox understanding of the natural world by Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) seemed to shake the foundations of knowledge laid down by Aristotle and his 13th-century Christian interpreter, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). The calls by Sir Francis Bacon around the beginning of the 17th century for a science based on observation of the world and the collection of those observations into a coherent framework through inductive reasoning was also a challenge to orthodox thinkers. This context for the new philosophies placed the study of man within a naturalistic framework. While several philosophers were prominent, we have chosen two, Descartes and Locke, as our exemplars of the new natural philosophy. What linked these two preeminent thinkers was their quest to find a certainty that could underpin civil life.

René Descartes (1596–1650)

Descartes was 22 years old when the Thirty Years’ War began. Descartes’s mother died when he was young. He lived with his grandparents and his two older siblings because his father, a lawyer, worked some distance away. A precocious child, at age 8 he was placed in the Collège at La Flèche, a Jesuit school. When he graduated at age 16, he had probably received as excellent an education as was available at the time. He was schooled in the Aristotelian beliefs, for example, about the organic soul and the intellective soul. Only humans were blessed with the latter and its chief characteristic, reason.

Two cautions are needed as we proceed. First, Descartes was not a psychologist, nor was he a protopsychologist. He was a philosopher concerned with placing knowledge on a sure foundation and from that foundation constructing knowledge about how the Creation worked, including the human brain and body. Descartes’s worry about the certainty of knowledge was with him even as he finished school. What compounded this worry was the state of his world as a young man. As the long period of conflict that became the Thirty Years’ War continued, Descartes, along with other thoughtful people, perceived that the underpinnings of society were inadequate to support an enduring civil society. This, combined with the disputatiousness and inconclusive arguments of the leading philosophers and theologians of the day, led Descartes to seek a way to have certain knowledge.

His search led him to the method of doubt. Descartes decided to accept only those things that were so clear and distinct to him that there could be no possibility of doubt. As he later wrote, “Immediately I noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something” (cited in R. Smith, 1997, p. 129). This led him to the famous phrase, cogito ergo sum, “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” For Descartes, the rational soul, the I, was central. From that point, then, an argument was made for the existence of God and God’s perfection as expressed in natural law. These indubitable facts, Descartes argued, were the foundation stones that made certainty of knowledge possible.

Second, Descartes was very much a person of his culture, time, and place. That is, he was a Catholic who sought avidly to keep his work within the bounds of orthodox belief. His adherence to Catholicism can be seen in his insistence that the mind is immaterial and the province of God. This meant that the soul (mind) is entirely distinct from the body. The soul is the seat of reason and directly amenable to divine influence; it cannot be reduced to materiality or explained in terms of mechanics. However, the implication of this is that all that is not soul can be examined in terms of mechanics and is amenable to explanations based in natural law. Descartes proposed that many functions previously considered to be mental and immaterial should be considered properties of the body. These included memory, perception, imagination, dreaming, and feelings; all of these were properties of the body and so could potentially be understood in naturalistic terms. This is the basis of what came to be referred to as the mind–body split or mind–body dualism.

To explain these functions, Descartes relied on an understanding of mechanics derived partly from then-recent discoveries in medicine—William Harvey’s (1578–1657) articulation of the heart as a pump for the blood—and from the artists and craftsmen of his time who had refined automata. Automata are self-moving mechanical objects, such as robots. Evidence shows that automata date from early in Chinese history, but they had been refined and made newly popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. The word “automaton” was coined in the early 17th century. Some automata that Descartes would have been familiar with included dolls that seemed to play musical instruments or enact a play. He also knew the royal gardens at St. Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris. There, using hydraulic pressure activated when visitors stepped on hidden plates, statues would move seemingly on their own. Descartes used the principle of this mechanical movement as a generative metaphor for understanding the functions of the body, including memory and other properties of the nervous system. He supposed that the cavities in the brain, the ventricles, were filled with animal spirits, which could flow through (hollow) nerves to effect bodily movement, just as the water filled the pipes at St. Germain and caused the statues to move.

FIGURE 1.1 René Descartes

Still, the question remained as to how the body and soul interact. Descartes proposed the pineal gland in the center of the brain. The pineal gland, Descartes supposed, could both receive impressions of the body via the animal spirits and transmit motions to the body. This had the effect of reserving the soul as the seat of reason and the special province of divine influence. This approach fit with both the teachings of the Catholic Church and the new mechanical philosophy.

What is important about Descartes for the later development of both a psychological sensibility and the discipline of Psychology is that his work was critical for the transition to understanding humans in terms of natural law from the older conceptions that placed man at the apex of creation, a “little lower than the angels,” as the biblical psalmist had it. That is, his work was critical for a new articulation of man that placed his attributes firmly in the natural world, with what was increasingly referred to as human nature. His writings became a point of departure for many later writers who responded to his work, not always sympathetically. What emerged from his contributions was a legacy that led toward an understanding of man as fully part of nature.

John Locke (1632–1704)

How do we gain knowledge? For Locke, this was a fundamental question to which the answer was human experience. In proposing that human knowledge comes through sense experience, Locke laid the foundation for both empirical philosophy and, much later, the human sciences, including Psychology. As with Descartes, however, Locke was not a protopsychologist, nor did he seek to establish a discipline of Psychology. Locke was concerned with finding a basis for civil society that would diminish the likelihood of incessant conflict and loss of human life. For Locke, the way to do so was through helping people form clear and distinct ideas, free of the excesses of political and religious enthusiasms. Locke’s desire to find a new, less conflictual basis for human society is understandable given the political and religious context of his life.

When Locke was only 10 years old, the first English Civil War began, with the usual horrors that such wars bring. For the next 19 years, until the restoration of the monarchy in 1661, the British Isles were in near-constant conflict—political, military, or both. Religious differences were the contextual surround for the war, but political machinations between the king and Parliament were central. When King Charles I was captured and then beheaded, it marked perhaps the passing of an age in which it was thought that the monarch was God’s representative on earth. The viciousness on both sides of the war must have brought great distress to Locke. When Charles II was crowned and the monarchy restored in 1661, Locke was still a young man, making his primary living as a tutor and adviser to the Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke was engaged with the politics of his age and was drawn into the political intrigues of the time. For a period in the 1680s, Locke had to leave England and live in Holland. He was there when the Glorious Revolution occurred, which deposed King James, brought William and Mary to the throne of England, and led to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy with enhanced power for the English Parliament.

Given these events, we can understand why Locke became so committed to finding a new basis for society. His ideas developed from the 1660s to the publication of his major work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in 1690. The Essay is remarkable in many ways, but especially noteworthy is Locke’s use of mind rather than soul. In doing so, he deliberately changed the terms of the debate about human knowledge. Descartes had reserved reason as an attribute of the soul, thus always leaving a space for the operation of divine influence, especially in regard to innate ideas given by God. Locke rejected the notion of innate ideas, such as God, although he did argue that humans have an innate power to reflect on their experiences. Instead of innate ideas, Locke argued that all ideas come through experience. That is, at birth our minds are a tabula rasa (blank slate) on which sensory experiences are inscribed. The contents of the mind are those ideas that come from experiences.

FIGURE 1.2 John Locke

Knowledge, then, is a matter of the mind gathering experiences, or ideas, from the material world. Locke proposed a way in which we could understand how ideas could move from simple to complex through association. In doing so, Locke seemed to offer a model of mental life that corresponded to Sir Isaac Newton’s model of the mechanical basis of the physical world. Newton’s Principia Mathematica was published in 1687, 3 years before Locke’s Essay, and in some ways Locke’s work echoes that of Newton. Just as Newton had proposed a model of how complex substances are due to the combination of less complex materials, so Locke’s model suggested that complex ideas form from combinations of simple ideas, a position that became known as associationism. As he wrote, “As simple ideas are observed to exist in several combinations united together, so the mind has a power to consider several of them united together as one idea; and that not only as they are united in external objects, but as itself has joined them together. Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call complex; such as are beauty, gratitude, a man, an army, the universe” (Locke, 1690, p. 159). Why is this so important for us today? First, Locke, like Newton, made human experience central to knowledge. This led to subsequent emphases by philosophers on what was later called epistemology, the study of the way we know. And it placed a premium on empiricism, that is, knowledge gained through the senses, which came to characterize British philosophy and led to later developments that were crucial for a discipline of Psychology.

Beyond this, Locke’s work made individual experience gained in the material world highly important. In the political and religious context of his time, this generated great debate, with some even labeling Locke an atheist. But the practical result was the privileging of the empirical world, thus strengthening arguments for natural religion and for a society predicated upon human experience. It is this emphasis on human experience that is arguably Locke’s greatest contribution and one that had the greatest import for later developments in political and scientific, including psychological, realms.

The Legacy of Descartes and Locke for Psychology

The time from the publication of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 to the early years of the 19th century is often called the “long” 18th century. Some scholars and texts have referred to it as the Age of Enlightenment or Age of Reason. Many people contributed to the debates about intellectual and practical issues that were conducted among educated people and were central to changes in governance and the way humans in Europe related to one another. The legacy of Descartes and Locke found in these contributions and debates is that now such issues about man are framed as part of nature and that the right way to understand and discuss them is in terms of human nature. This is not to say that religious beliefs and creeds played no part in these discussions. Especially in the case of Descartes, the relationship of this new thinking to religious belief was much pondered. The outcome, however, was that man was increasingly seen as part of nature and was to be understood in terms of the natural world.

PHYSIOLOGY AND MEDICINE: THE SEARCH FOR MATERIAL EXPLANATIONS OF HUMAN NATURE

While philosophers and educated people engaged with notions of man as part of nature, efforts were also made to systematically explore what this would mean in terms of the functions of the human body, including the brain. The term “experiment” or “experimental” came into vogue to express this systematic exploration. By the end of the 19th century, the experiment became the method of discerning truth and the laboratory became the place where truth, through experimentation, was discovered. In terms of the human nervous system, this was a long and circuitous route with many points of contention and debate. The legacy of Descartes to this debate was that the higher mental powers—rationality, purposiveness, and so on—remained the province of divine influence. So while the functions of the body, including the “lower” centers of the brain and the nervous system, could be understood in naturalistic or mechanical terms, the higher powers, including the cerebrum, were off limits. The effort to extend naturalistic explanation to the higher mental powers—indeed, to equate the brain and the mind—became a major debate in the 19th century. Perhaps not surprisingly, medicine was an arena where this work first occurred.

Medicine and Naturalistic Explanation

Harvey had described the circulation of the blood in 1628, demonstrating empirically that circulation of the blood is due to the action of the heart, thus potentially understandable in naturalistic terms. After Locke, in the 18th century, physicians began to describe the actions of the mind in physiological terms, thus opening the door to experimentation as a way to potentially demonstrate this. The British physician David Hartley in his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations(1749), employed Newton’s suggestion that vibrations in nervous tissue could be responsible for some visual effects to develop a physiology of the nervous system predicated on association of ideas that could account for relations between mind and body. However, it should be noted that Hartley’s aim was religious, to inspire his fellow man to pursue God’s design for humans.

The experimentation and writing of the 18th-century British physicians Robert Whytt (1714–1766) and William Cullen (1794–1878) both facilitated the public’s understanding that mind and brain were intimately connected and offered a way to elide the old mind–body dualism that bedeviled research on mental processes. Whytt suggested in his 1751 book On the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals that an organism’s response to stimuli involved the action of volition, a function of the higher mental powers, but this volitional response was not necessarily conscious. Whytt called this the principle of sentience, whose main function was the preservation of life and the unity of the organism. Before Whytt, only two kinds of action were thought possible: voluntary (rational) and physical (mechanical). Whytt’s work proposed a third action, the action of stimuli on the organism. Thus, stimulated motion was best viewed as occurring on a continuum between voluntary and automatic, rather than as in absolute categories of free will or mechanism, and depended on the conditions necessary for preservation. The result of this stimulated motion was always to preserve the organism; thus, self-regulation was the effect. This implied the importance of function and offered an alternative to Cartesian dualism in understanding the relation of mind and body.

Why was this important for the later development of psychology? Whytt argued that the effect of a stimulus did not depend on whether it was a physical or mental event. The importance of the stimulus lay in its function. A mental event could function as a stimulus, just as a physical event could. This implied that the mind was intimately involved in bodily actions, not categorically separate as Cartesian dualism suggested. If mental and physical events were functionally equivalent, then perhaps psychological topics could be investigated without being bound by the old categories of Cartesian dualism. This, in fact, is what began to occur.

Cullen, who succeeded Whytt at the University of Edinburgh, advanced Whytt’s work with an even greater emphasis on function and the role of stimulated motion as a self-regulatory principle. Cullen replaced Whytt’s principle of sentience with the concept of energy as the vital principle. Energy was quantifiable, and the measure of excitation in the organism was possible. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), who is discussed in  Chapter 3 , drew upon this work for his later development of psychophysiology. The impact of the work of Whytt and Cullen has not often been noted in histories of psychology because of their affiliation with medicine, but their work was crucial in that they provided a language and a group of principles that placed the role of the nervous system front and center in understanding how the mind and body are related.

Relatedly, the work of Whytt and Cullen was part of a broader movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries toward emphasizing the importance of understanding the relation between the organism and the environment in terms of self-regulation. The latter principle came to the fore by the end of the 18th century in several fields, the political economy of Adam Smith (1723–1790) being a prime example with its invisible hand as the regulator of the market (see  Chapter 2 ). Here, again, we see the relation between technology and science in terms of guiding or generative metaphors. In the 17th century, we saw how Descartes drew upon the popular technology behind automata to explain how the body works. In the 18th century, the idea of a governor or self-regulator as found in the new steam engines of James Watt was employed to explain how the organism engaged in self-regulation via feedback loops between mental–physical events and their stimulation of the organism.

In Europe in this period, several physicians investigated the relationships among mind, brain, and body. Perhaps most notable was Albrecht von Haller, whose experiment-based theories suggested a way for the mind to act on the body through the nervous system. By the end of the 18th century, the Austrian physician and anatomist Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) had begun to argue that the brain was the organ of mind and that its faculties were empirically demonstrable. Gall was a major figure in what became a nearly century-long debate over the extent to which mental abilities, or the functions of the brain and nervous system, could be understood in naturalistic terms. An implication of this was the question of whether a soul or some higher power was needed to account for the most complex mental abilities, including the will. Some investigators sought to avoid the theological debate by contending that mechanical processes only extended as far as the subcortex. The cortex was reserved for the divine influence of some higher natural law. Gall’s work called that contention into question.

Gall was born in Germany and settled in Vienna, where he received his medical degree. In Vienna he made his first scientific contributions when he demonstrated that two types of substance were found in the brain: gray matter (the cell bodies of nerve cells) and white matter (sub-cortical brain areas containing nerve cell axons). He also showed that the two hemispheres of the brain were connected by commissures. However, what Gall became known for was his organology, later renamed phrenology by some of his followers. Organology was Gall’s method of discerning mental abilities by reading the bumps on someone’s skull. Gall said that these ideas began when he was a schoolboy and noticed that some of his classmates who performed better on memory tasks than he did had bulging eyes. In his adult career, Gall further developed this schoolboy insight.

FIGURE 1.3 Franz Joseph Gall

The brain, Gall argued, was composed of distinct parts, each of which had a function. Furthermore, the size of each of these parts, as observable through the examination of the skull, reflected the strength of the assigned function. Gall was not the first person to suggest that mental abilities or functions might occur at specific locales (the idea can be found in ancient medical texts), but his contention that the brain was the organ of mind and its workings could be understood entirely by empirical means did create controversy. First, it circumvented the duality of mind and body proposed by Descartes. Gall argued that all mental functions, including the higher powers reserved by Descartes as the province of divine influence, could be understood as the workings of the brain. In that sense, Gall was engaging in a philosophical argument, one that had important implications for future research. How was knowledge organized? Was it just a collection of sense impressions? Gall argued that there had to be a physical, innate foundation for organizing the knowledge that came to us through our senses. Unlike the followers of Descartes, Gall’s point was that there was no division of mind and body and no need to reserve higher mental functions for the providence of God.

Second, the search for a materialist basis for mind proved extremely important, although controversial. Perhaps the controversy helped make it important. Gall insisted that an empirical approach to the question of brain function was crucial. While Descartes had split the mind and body and set the terms for discussion of mental faculties, his approach was philosophical. As we have seen in the cases of Whytt and Cullen, investigators were increasingly seeking to account for mental abilities in terms of bodily processes. These investigators were relying on empirical rather than purely rational or philosophical methods. Their efforts were strongly resisted by some who felt they needed to allow for higher processes in terms of mental faculties that were uniquely human, for example, the will and the intellect.

But the movement begun by Descartes and Locke to study man as part of nature, to find natural laws to account for human mind and behavior, had already reset the agenda or the terms for what counted as fact. By the end of the 19th century, the investigation of the nervous system—of mind and brain—was firmly on the empirical and experimental basis on which Gall had insisted. Even those who sought to retain Descartes’s division of mind and body were constrained to provide evidence gathered empirically and experimentally.

Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens (1794–1867), a physiologist and member of the French medical and scientific establishment, was firmly committed to the Cartesian position that reserved the mind’s higher faculties as the province of divine influence. He reacted strongly to what he perceived as Gall’s materialist arguments. Flourens sought to discredit Gall and his followers by showing experimentally that no division of cerebral function existed. Using birds and a few mammalian species, Flourens systematically removed or ablated parts of the brain and then observed what happened when the animal recovered. He found no specific losses of function but rather general losses across several functions. He argued that this preserved the unity of the soul. What some critics, including Gall, pointed out was that Flourens had not been discriminate enough in carefully removing portions of the brain but had cut across several possibly distinct areas. Nevertheless, Flourens carried the day, at least among the medical and scientific establishment, because of the prestige of his social position, the compatibility of his findings with the established medical and philosophical views, and the usefulness of his results in discrediting the basis of what was now being called phrenology, which had become part of a social movement perceived as radical and antiestablishment (more on this in  Chapter 2 ). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Flourens’s use of the experimental method fit with what was becoming the scientific norm for establishing fact—man could be understood in naturalistic terms as long as the investigation was experimental and laboratory based.

FIGURE 1.4 Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens

Flourens’s championship of the unity of soul and mind and discounting of the localization of brain functions was the received view in French medicine and physiology for many years. There were dissenters such as the respected physiologist Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796–1881), who collected more than 100 clinical cases that he suggested supported localization of function. Bouillaud argued especially that language must be localized somewhere in the frontal lobes of the brain. It was the work of Paul Broca (1824–1880), however, that firmly established localization of articulate language through the case of Monsieur Leborgne, who had lost his ability to speak. Before the case of LeBorgne, Broca had already established himself as a respected scientist. Like many other scientists of his day, he was influenced by scientists elsewhere in Europe, principally Germany, who were arguing that it was necessary to break phenomena down to their most essential elements to study them. Broca thought that perhaps the best way to understand the complexity of the nervous system was to look at the building blocks of mental activity; localization of function potentially offered a way to do this. Recent mapping of the surface of the cerebrum showed its diversity of form, and Broca argued that a law of physiology was that structure or form and function were related. Thus, different parts of the cortex may have different functions. When LeBorgne died, six days after coming under Broca’s care, an autopsy revealed damage to the rear portion of the left frontal lobe. Other cases soon were found where damage to the same area, second or third frontal convolution of the frontal lobe, was found with attendant loss of speech. While these findings did not settle the debate conclusively, they did sway medical and scientific opinion toward an acceptance of some sort of localization of function.

After Broca’s work became widely known, other investigators began providing support for localization of cerebral function, thus extending naturalistic explanations to the highest levels of the nervous system. In Germany, two physicians, anatomist Gustav Fritsch (1837–1927) and psychiatrist Eduard Hitzig (1839–1907), used recent improvements in the control of electricity to stimulate what is now called the motor cortex of a dog. They found five sites that, when electrically stimulated, resulted in distinctive movements—on the opposite side of the body. Flourens had argued that the cortex had nothing to do with movement or motor control. Fritsch and Hitzig understood their work as directly contributing support to cerebral localization. Perhaps paradoxically to 21st-century students, Fritsch and Hitzig were, like Flourens, committed to a Cartesian model of divine influence on higher centers of the brain and so restricted their conclusions on localization of motor control to motor centers and reserved other parts of the cortex for the higher mental powers.

David Ferrier (1843–1928) had no such compunctions. Ferrier, later knighted, built on the work of Gall and John Hughlings Jackson, a fellow neurologist, to demonstrate experimentally the wide extent of cerebral localization. Where Fritsch and Hitzig had found five areas of motor control, Ferrier found 15. His experimental animals included fish, birds, amphibians, monkeys, and chimpanzees. Ferrier quite self-consciously referred to his work as “scientific phrenology.” The title of his book summarizing his work on localization was The Functions of the Brain, and he dedicated it to Gall. Gall had predicted 50 years earlier, in his book On the Functions of the Brain, that someone would scientifically validate his insights in the next 50 years! Together with work in sensory–motor physiology, covered in the next section, this work on localization of function helped make a science of Psychology possible.

Research in the Physiology of the Nervous System

The discovery of the distinction between sensory and motor nerves, made independently by Charles Bell (1774–1842) in 1811 and François Magendie (1783–1855) in 1822, helped create the conditions for the exploration of the psychological implications of nervous system functions. Both Bell and Magendie pointed out that each type of sensory nerve was specific to a sensory modality—vision, hearing, touch, and so on. This became in the hands of Johannes Müller the doctrine of specific nerve energies, discussed later. Two research streams were linked to this conceptualization. One was the concept of cerebral localization, already discussed. The other was work on the nervous system that led from the concept of specific nerve energies to a mechanistic model of human nervous system function. Both streams were part of the extension of a naturalistic model to encompass all of human nature. The concept of reflexes or reflex action was part of both streams. The discovery of specific sensory and motor nerves helped refine the previously ill-defined concept of reflex actions.

The concept of reflexes was not new to the 19th century. Whytt had employed the concept in his work on stimulated movement. The work of Whytt and his successor, Cullen, as noted, was critical in making it possible to link psychological questions to physiological methods. The Moravian-born physiologist Georg Prochaska employed the concept of reflexive action as part of his vis nervosa and sensorium commune. The former referred to the latent energy of the nerves that found expression in reflexes. Sensorium commune encompassed the medulla, basal ganglia, and spinal cord. Its role was to link sensory input to motor responses, without reliance on consciousness. These earlier uses of the reflex concept were typically not precise or precisely linked to physiological processes. But with the articulation of the sensory–motor distinction, the English physiologist Marshall Hall offered a specific connection between local nerve action and behavior. Hall’s use of the reflex concept meant that behavior could be described in terms of nerve action, that consciousness does not have to be involved in behavior. This challenged the mentalistic conceptions of human behavior. If the brain and soul are equivalent, and the soul directs human behavior, then neurophysiology or experimentation is unnecessary. If, however, at least some aspects of human behavior are based in stimuli and responses at the physiological level, then experimental approaches to understanding human behavior are needed. Hall’s proposal of reflex action and behavior was, at first, accepted only as accurate for the lower nerve centers. By the end of the 19th century, reflex action was extended to the highest centers of the brain, as the work of Fritsch and Hitzig and that of Ferrier showed.

The Mechanization of the Brain

Johannes Müller (1801–1858) is often referred to as the person who made physiology a truly scientific field. His work occurred when German universities were expecting from professors original research by scholars devoted to specific topics. His handbook of physiology, published in several volumes from 1833 to 1840, fostered a critical, experimental approach to investigations of bodily processes that became the norm for other scientists. Müller extended the Bell-Magendie sensory–motor distinction with his doctrine of specific nerve energies. Each sensory modality, Müller argued, is specialized to respond in ways that are unique to it. So, visual nerves when stimulated give visual sensations. For example, pressing on the eye gives a visual sensation, just as looking at an object does. The doctrine also suggests that what determines our sensory experiences are not the objects-out-there in the physical world; rather, it is the structure and function of our nervous systems that determines what we sense. In this work and in his handbook, Müller promoted the importance of laboratory-based experimental work. In doing so, Müller opened a line of research in physiology that led directly to Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt and helped make a physiologically based Psychology possible.

FIGURE 1.5 Johannes Müller

Helmholtz (1821–1894), perhaps the greatest scientist of the 19th century, made contributions that changed physics, physiology, optics, audition, and psychology. While a student with Müller, Helmholtz joined with several fellow students—Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), and Ernst Brücke (1819–1892)—in committing himself to scientific explanations that relied only on physical and chemical explanations for all phenomena. Their work over the next half century made Germany the center of first-rank scientific work in several fields. The application of their mechanistic approach by others was also vital for helping transform Germany into an industrial and military powerhouse by the end of the century. It was also the background for the later development of Gestalt and holistic theories, especially after the defeat of Germany in World War I.

The contributions of Helmholtz to psychological topics included the measurement of the nerve impulse, previously thought to occur instantaneously. This indicated the possibility of measuring aspects of mental activity, using what was soon called the reaction time method. Helmholtz also showed that the law of conservation of energyapplied to living organisms, including humans, as well as to the inorganic world. Using frogs as his experimental animal, Helmholtz showed that the energy and heat expended by a frog were equal to the calories available in the food the frog consumed. He went on to further work with these principles and eventually formulated the law of the conservation of energy: Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed from one kind to another. What this suggested was that machines, including the human machine, are devices for transforming energy from one kind to another kind. His work on optics led to a crucial distinction between sensation and perception. Sensations are, Helmholtz argued, merely the raw data that comes through our senses. These data are made meaningful by perception. In this account, perception is a psychological process that depends on the brain, prior learning, and our experiences.

FIGURE 1.6 Hermann von Helmoltz

Courtesy of the authors.

In other psychologically related work, Helmholtz argued for a trichromatic theory of color vision. Like the earlier work of the English scientist Thomas Young, Helmholtz suggested that color vision resulted from the stimulation of specific receptors in the retina. It is a trichromatic theory because there are three primary receptor types—one each for red, green, and blue-violet. Other colors result from stimulation of more than one receptor; white results if all three receptor types are stimulated. One of American psychology’s first-generation woman psychologists, Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930), traveled to Germany to work in Helmholtz’s laboratory and subsequently published her own theory of color vision that was long regarded as the best available account of both the physical processes and the psychological experience of color perception. In 1892, she presented aspects of her theory to the International Congress of Psychology in London. Helmholtz was in attendance and received her paper extremely favorably. In 1929, her book Colour and Colour Theories, which reprinted over 37 years of her work on color vision, was published. One reviewer for the Saturday Review of Literaturecharacterized Ladd-Franklin’s work as an account of the “evolution of the color sense from its beginnings to man” and proclaimed that “in the field of color and color theories she has no peer” (Helson, July 20, 1929). While not all aspects of Helmholtz’s and Ladd-Franklin’s theories have held up, both theories were, in their own time, considered quite successful in accounting for color vision.

Sidebar 1.1 Focus on Christine Ladd-Franklin

Christine Ladd was born in Windsor, Connecticut, on December 1, 1847, to a well-established New England family. When Vassar College, America’s first college for women, was established in 1865, Ladd was ecstatic. After a vigorous campaign to convince her father and aunt (her mother had died when she was 12 years old) to let her attend the college, she was admitted to the second entering class in 1866. While at Vassar, her main academic interests were science and mathematics. She was particularly influenced by the prominent astronomer Maria Mitchell who was on faculty there. She graduated in 1869 and spent the next decade teaching science and math in secondary schools throughout the Northeast. She quickly came to abhor teaching, however, and she continued to study mathematics, occasionally publishing articles in the Educational Times.

In 1878, on the strength of her articles and her Vassar degree, she applied to Johns Hopkins University to pursue graduate studies in mathematics even though the university did not admit women. Her credentials were sufficient to convince the board of trustees to let her enroll as a special student. While at Johns Hopkins, she published several articles in the American Journal of Mathematics. Under the influence of the work of Charles Peirce, who acted as her dissertation adviser, she also became increasingly interested in symbolic logic. She turned her attention specifically to a long-standing problem in symbolic logic called the transformation of the syllogism. Her solution of this problem led prominent philosopher Josiah Royce of Harvard University to remark, ”It is rather remarkable that the crowning activity in a field worked over since the days of Aristotle should be the achievement of an American woman” (as cited in Burr, June 24, 1922).

While at Johns Hopkins, Ladd also met and married Fabian Franklin, one of her graduate instructors in mathematics. In 1886 she conducted an investigation of a mathematical question concerning binocular vision, thus initiating her unfolding research on color vision. In 1891–1892, during her husband’s sabbatical year in Europe, Ladd-Franklin studied in the Göttingen laboratory of George Elias Müller and then with Helmholtz in Berlin. In 1892, she delivered a paper outlining her own theory of color vision at the International Congress of Psychology in London. She spent much of the rest of her career elaborating upon and defending this theory.

Although Ladd-Franklin had completed all requirements for her doctorate in mathematics and logic in 1882, and had earned fellowships throughout her graduate training, she was not awarded the degree until 1926 on the 50th anniversary of Johns Hopkins. Although almost 80 years old, she attended the ceremony to receive her degree. Despite her impressive accomplishments, she never held a formal, full-time academic position. Determined to change the academic situation for other women, she was instrumental in establishing research fellowships for women and campaigned tirelessly for women’s equal participation in academic life. For more on her efforts to fight sex discrimination in Psychology, see  Chapter 11 .

FIGURE 1.7 Christine Ladd-Franklin

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York.

Like Müller before him, Helmholtz’s theory placed importance on what happens within the human brain and nervous system rather than on the “real” physical properties of light waves. Again, this is part of the move toward placing all of nature, including humans in all their complex functions, within a framework of nature governed by definable natural laws. In  Chapter 3 , we show how the work in the physiological tradition of Müller and Helmholtz was directly linked to the emergence of Wundt’s physiological psychology. Later in the book, we return to some issues raised by cortical localization when we explore the rise of neuroscience. Now, we turn to the work of Darwin to examine how it finally established human nature as just that, part of nature and thus subject to lawful relationships like the rest of nature.

DARWIN, NATURAL SELECTION, AND THE LAWS OF NATURE

Charles Darwin (1809–1882), naturalist, was a careful observer and thinker who was both a person of his time and a person whose ideas transformed the course of history. His work affected many intellectual and scientific fields, including Psychology. At least four key contributions came to the development of Psychology from the work of Darwin. Perhaps most importantly, Darwin provided convincing evidence, both theoretical and practical, that humans are part of nature, subject to the same natural laws as all other creatures. Second, Darwin’s approach called attention to the importance of considering the function of attributes and behaviors, thus making even more salient the role of functional explanations begun by earlier scientists like Whytt and Gall. Third, the scope and approach of Darwin’s work created a space for the study of man in comparison with other animals (what became the field of comparative psychology) and the necessity of understanding the development of humans (what became the field of developmental psychology). Fourth, the emphasis on the role of natural selection of human variability facilitated thinking about individual differences, which became especially important in the development of American Psychology and helped create applications of differential psychology to vastly diverse populations: students, criminals, the mentally disordered, and so on.

Darwin was born in the small village of Shrewsbury west of Birmingham, England, the son of a well-to-do physician, Robert Darwin, and his wife, Susannah. Darwin was of an impressive lineage. His father, Robert, was the son of Erasmus Darwin, a well-known physician of the late 18th century and author of a poetic treatise on evolution, Zoonomia(1794–1796). His mother was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of Wedgwood china. Charles Darwin married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, in 1839.

By all accounts, Darwin was an indifferent student at the local Shrewsbury school, although he did have an insatiable appetite for nature—often going off on long hikes to collect worms, bugs, and other creatures. His father sent him to Edinburgh, Scotland, to be trained as a physician. Darwin had no stomach for the brutalities of surgery, and the medical training did not take. At last, he was sent to Christ College, Cambridge University, to become an Anglican clergyman. This seemed to suit Darwin fine, as he could easily envision himself as a country parson with plenty of free time to pursue his naturalist research.

While Darwin was not a great classroom student, his formal education was useful. He was an avid learner of those things that appealed to his interests in natural history both at Edinburgh and at Cambridge. For example, at Edinburgh, Darwin studied homologies, similarities due to a common descent, in marine animals with Robert E. Grant (1793–1874), who also espoused a theory of evolution proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). At Cambridge, where classwork was not necessarily the main engine of instruction and learning, Darwin came under the tutelage of John S. Henslow (1796–1861), professor of botany, and Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), professor of geology. Both of these men, like the other professors at Cambridge, were Anglican priests. Neither of them believed in evolution, but both were excellent instructors, not only formally but also in the many excursions and walks that Darwin participated in with them. In the summer of 1831, before he was to take Holy Orders, Darwin accompanied Sedgwick on a geological mapping tour of Wales. This experience and the close bond he had with both men were critically important in helping him move on to the next phase of his education and launch his professional life, as the onboard gentleman of science for the voyage of the HMS Beagle.

Journey to the Galapagos

In September 1831, Darwin interviewed with Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle for the position of gentleman companion to the captain for a voyage to South America. The Beagle was commissioned to map the coasts of South America, and a 2-year voyage was planned. Instead, the voyage lasted nearly 5 years and became a trip around the world. Darwin, as the naturalist on board, busied himself collecting specimens and making careful geological observations throughout the trip. He sent home, via other returning ships, more than 2,000 specimens, including the fossils of previously unknown species. He filled a large scientific diary with thousands of geological and zoological data. While on the trip, Darwin sent back to his mentors in England numerous letters filled with his observations. Material excerpted from these letters was circulated in scientific circles and made Darwin a celebrated figure in British science even before he returned.

When Darwin set out on the voyage, he was a believer in what is called the argument from design. This was the view that all species had been designed by a Divine Creator for their specific place in nature. Darwin had also been exposed to theories of evolution, especially that of Lamarck, as noted earlier. Lamarck proposed a theory of evolution in 1809 that began with the spontaneous generation of living matter from nonliving matter. Since then, Lamarck suggested, there has been a steady progression from simple forms of life to ever greater complexity. One mechanism for this progression, Lamarck posited, was the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This mechanism meant that changes in the adult organism can be passed on directly to the offspring. The well-worn example is the neck of a giraffe. According to the doctrine of inheritance of acquired characteristics, giraffes stretching their necks to reach higher leaves resulted in an increasingly elongated neck over many generations.

The implications of Lamarck’s theory were quite unsettling to many people, especially those intensely vested in and privileged by the status quo. It suggested that life was not due to divine intervention and that human beings were just animals, although perhaps more developed than other animals. Lamarck’s theory had a note of progress in it, that life and society were better characterized by change than by a static model. In the 1820s and 1830s in Britain, Lamarck’s ideas were taken up by reformers, some of whom were radical. Many of the scientific elite, including Darwin’s Cambridge instructors and his peers when he returned from his voyage, perceived these reformers as a threat to civil society and actively worked to discredit them. An extremely popular book in the 1840s, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously, created a sensation with its claims of a naturalistic origin of life. Although technically not a natural history of evolution but instead a tract espousing a progressivist notion that change was necessary to have a society with greater equality of opportunity, the book did put the word “evolution” in the mouths and on the minds of much of the rapidly expanding reading public. It was also roundly condemned by all whom Darwin held in highest esteem. So, when he was developing his theory after the voyage, this was the context for his work.

No one event or observation on the voyage of the Beagle catapulted Darwin toward his eventual theory. Rather, and this was consistent with his character, it was the accumulation of many observations and the careful pondering of what they meant that led him to slowly develop his theory over several years. However, the geological observations he made in South America, where it was clear that what had once been ocean floor or beach was now thousands of feet above sea level, and the myriad life forms on the Galapagos Islands were among the most important experiences he had. The former suggested that the earth had changed over a long period. This position was called the uniformitarian hypothesis, and it fit with the ideas of Charles Lyell, a geologist whose book, Principles of Geology, Darwin carried with him on the voyage. The uniformitarian hypothesis suggested that the physical geology of the earth was formed as a result of long, gradual processes. It contrasted with the notion that geological forms were the result of sudden, catastrophic changes, usually the result of divine intervention or handiwork—as in the biblical flood. Thus, the earth was much older than the literal reading of the Bible would suggest and allowed enough time for the gradual change in organisms that could possibly result in new species.

FIGURE 1.8 Charles Darwin

The visit to the Galapagos Islands eventually provided Darwin with the material that he would use to articulate species change. The Galapagos are a series of small volcanic islands about 600 miles west of Ecuador on the equator. Darwin collected a large variety of species there and noticed the distribution of similar species, especially birds, across the islands. At the time, he did not see that many of the birds were of the same family. After his return to England, ornithologist John Gould pointed out that many of the birds were finches, each uniquely adapted to their island environments. When Darwin returned to England and began to develop his ideas about species change, the geographical distribution of the finches would become important for the development of his theory.

The Beagle docked at Falmouth, England, on October 2, 1836, nearly five years after it left Plymouth Sound. By the time it landed, Darwin’s name was well known in British naturalist circles. His father arranged investments for him so that he could devote himself to a life of science. He soon launched a careful consideration of all data he had gathered and was puzzling over what it meant. We know from his notebooks—Darwin kept careful records of his observations and thoughts, which has proven a real boon for historians of science—that the question of species change emerged early in his puzzling.

Continuity: Humans and Natural Law

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection made humans subject to the same natural laws as other animals. This principle of the continuity of life was one of the most controversial aspects of Darwin’s work, one he did not stress in the Origin of Species (1859). Yet, by insisting on continuity, Darwin helped make it possible to think of universal laws underlying behavior. If evolution occurs through a natural selection of variations that help an organism adapt to its environment, then an important question becomes, What is the function of the characteristic under study, whether it be an elongated bird beak or human consciousness? How does the characteristic help the organism adapt and survive? We have seen that the question of function had become a topic of investigation in the research Whytt, Cullen, Prochaska, and others. Darwin made the question of function central to an evolutionary perspective. When the field of Psychology emerged some years after Darwin’s work, questions of adaptation and function and of their derivative, learning, became central, especially in the utilitarian American context.

The possibility of using animals to understand human behavior emerged from Darwin’s work and became the field of comparative psychology. Darwin himself explored this area in two books written later in life, The Descent of Man (1871), and Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). George Romanes, a protégé of Darwin’s, extended the application of Darwin’s evolutionary framework in an investigation of animal mental ability. While his writing about animals was fascinating, it suffered from a reliance on anecdotes about the supposedly amazing abilities or mental feats of various animals. It should be kept in mind that there was (and is) a long, time-honored tradition in Britain of anthropomorphizing animals (anthropomorphism is attributing human characteristics to animals). Others who followed, however, made the comparative method more rigorous, including C. Lloyd Morgan and Douglas Spalding. We explore these developments in later chapters, especially how studying animal behavior came to be used as a model for understanding how humans learn and adapt.

Darwin’s theory also provided an impetus to the study of children as a way of understanding evolution. Darwin kept a diary of the development of his first son, William, and later published an article based on it, “Biographical Sketch of an Infant” (1877). Infants and young children, some thought, allowed us to see what humans were like earlier in the evolutionary process. A more extreme version of this idea, although not espoused by Darwin, is captured in the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” That is, the development of a human, beginning with conception, displays all stages of human evolution. The study of children’s lives and how such studies help us understand human behavior was an important aspect of the early years of the development of Psychology in North America and in Europe.

Finally, the notion that variability provides the material with which natural selection works gave rise in psychology to the idea of individual differences. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton (1822–1911), was captivated by the possibility of understanding human differences within an evolutionary framework. We explore Galton’s work in a later chapter, especially in relation to the development of methods in psychology. Again, the development of Psychology in America facilitated a differential approach, and the idea of understanding different capacities (e.g., intellectual or academic) or different propensities (e.g., criminality and creativity) seemed important in managing a rapidly changing society. The idea of learning and adaptation that was inherent in Darwin’s theory lent itself to a focus on applied problems, both in research and in practice. So, especially in America, psychological expertise was viewed as having application to the diverse questions of how to improve schools and the performance of children in those schools, how to understand worker performance, and dozens of other applied questions.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we sketched a history of some principal sources of a science of mind. These sources included philosophical debates, empirical and experimental work in medicine and physiology, and the naturalist work and evolutionary theory of Darwin. We hope we have indicated how deeply these sources were linked to one another. That is, work in physiology and medicine drew upon philosophical debates about the nature of being human and questions of epistemology, and philosophers were keenly interested in developments in science, often seeking to use research results in support of their own theories. Darwin was an inheritor of much prior work that had placed questions about humans in a framework of naturalism. In turn, he interpreted the data drawn from his naturalistic observations as showing that man was a creature subject to natural law like all other animals. His work, like that of others before him, helped place great emphasis on function. When the new Psychology developed a few years later, questions about the function of behavior and the mind became crucial in the new science, especially in the United States. It would be going too far to say that by the end of the 19th century there was a consensus about human nature. What we can confidently say is that for most educated people in the Western world at the end of this era, humans were understood to be part of nature and, thus, subject to the laws of nature. By this time, the discipline of Psychology had begun (see  Chapter 3 ), and many of these new psychologists saw their work as explaining just what these laws were in regard to human thinking and behavior.

Lastly, we also sought to indicate in this chapter just how deeply embedded these origins of a science of mind were in the social and cultural context of their times. War, political struggle, economics, religion, and technological changes were all critical parts of the cultural matrix from which modern science, including Psychology, emerged. In the next chapter, we turn to the practices of everyday life in this period to examine the emergence of the Western notion of the self. This was the necessary counterpart to the developments outlined in this chapter in that the formation of an everyday psychology was needed for the psychological sensibility upon which disciplinary Psychology could rely for its subject matter.

Chapter 2 The Research Process: Coming to Terms

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT IN THIS CHAPTER:

· • The path from formulating questions to seeking and finding solutions

· • The difference between dependent and independent variables

· • What a hypothesis is and how it works

· • The importance of the null hypothesis

· • The difference between the null hypothesis and the research hypothesis

· • The characteristics of a good hypothesis

· • The importance of samples and populations in the research process

· • The definition of statistical significance

From Problem to Solution

All you need to do is to identify an interesting question, collect some data, and poof!—instant research! Not quite. The model of scientific inquiry (discussed in  Chapter 1 ) does a nice job of specifying the steps in the research process, but there is quite a bit more to the process than that.

At the beginning of this chapter, we will provide a real-life example of how the process actually takes place and how researchers begin with what they see as a problem (to be solved) and end with a solution (or the results) to that problem. Keep in mind, however, that the meanings of the words “problem” and “solution” go beyond solving a simple problem of the 2 + 2 = 4 variety. Rather, the questions that researchers ask often reflect a more pressing social concern or economic issue. In addition, the results from a research study often provide the foundation for the next research endeavor.

We will look at an interesting study entitled “Maternal Employment and Young Adolescents’ Daily Experiences in Single-Mother Families” (Duckett & Richards,  1989 ), which examines the impact of maternal employment on adolescent development. Although the study is more than 30 years old, it continues to effectively illustrate many of the ideas and concepts covered in this chapter.

One of the most creative things about this study is the way in which these researchers collected their data. They did not sit down and ask adolescents how they felt about this or that, but instead they tried to get an overall picture of their feelings outside of the laboratory setting. And as you will see, it’s an early use of technology that provides some insight into how people were using new tools (no cell phones then, but pagers) to answer interesting questions.

Duckett and Richards studied 436 fifth through ninth graders and their mothers to determine the effects of a combination of issues that continue to receive considerable attention in the media. The general goal of the research (and the problem) was to understand better some of the factors and consequences that surround the large number of working mothers of adolescents.

To narrow their investigation, the researchers set out to learn about the general nature of the adolescents’ experiences as a function of having a mother who works, as well as the quality of time that the adolescents spent with their mothers. Given that so many mothers (more than 50% of those with children under 18 years of age) from both single-parent and dual-parent families work outside the home, answers to questions like those posed by this study are becoming increasingly important in the formation of social and economic policies.

There are many different ways to answer a question, but often the simplest, most clever research plan is the best one.

To obtain their answers, the researchers compared adolescents living with two parents (382, or 88%) with those adolescents who live with only their mother (54, or 12%). However, to reach fully their goal of better understanding the effects of maternal employment, the researchers had to break down the group of children and parents even further into those children whose mothers worked part-time, those children with mothers who worked full-time, and those children with mothers who were unemployed.

When the groups were separated on these two factors (family configuration and employment status), the researchers could make a comparison within and between the six groups (all combinations of single-parent and two-parent families, with part-time employed, full-time employed, and unemployed mothers) and get the information they needed to answer the general questions posed.

Now comes the really creative part of the study. Duckett and Richards used a method called the experience sampling method previously developed by M. Csikszentmihalyi and R. Larson ( 1987 ). In accordance with this method, the adolescents participating in the study would carry electronic beepers. On an unpredictable schedule, they would receive a beep from “beep central” and would then stop what they were doing and complete a self-report form. They would do this for 1 week.

TEST YOURSELF

It’s really interesting when new technologies have been adopted by social scientists to help them collect and analyze data. For example, there are few adolescents who don’t have cell phones, and the capabilities of these cell phones are no longer limited to sending and receiving calls; cell phones are, in and of themselves, small computers that have GPS and multimedia capabilities. We’ll discuss technology and the research process later in Exploring Research, but for now, what other new types of technology can you think of that might play a role in completing research? Any ideas as to what the future might bring? What other new technology can you think of that might also play a role in research?

A signal telling the participant to stop and complete the form was sent on an average of every 2 hours between 7:30 A.M. and 9:30 P.M., with a total of 49 signals sent for the week for each participant. In the course of 1 week, 49 separate forms were completed, which provided information about how participants felt at any particular moment. For 436 participants at 49 forms each, a total of 21,364 forms were completed, which is a hefty sample of adolescents’ behavior!

What was contained on these self-report forms? The adolescents had to report on what the researchers call affect (happy–sad, cheerful–irritable, friendly–angry) and arousal (alert–drowsy, strong–weak, excited–bored). Each of these six items was rated on a scale of 1–7. For example, the participants might indicate a 4, meaning they felt “right in the middle of happy and sad at that moment in time.” These six items could be completed in a short period of time, and an accurate picture of the adolescents’ daily life could then be formed. Adolescents also had to respond to “What were you doing?” and “Whom were you with?” as well as to some questions about their perceptions of their parents’ friendliness and their feelings while they were with their parents.

Duckett and Richards had an interesting comparison (single-parent versus dual-parent mothers who are unemployed or employed part-time or full-time) and a good-sized set of reactions from adolescents on which to base their analysis and discussion. To make sense of all this information, the researchers compiled and then applied some statistical tests (you will learn more about these later) to reach their conclusions, including the following:

· • Children of working single mothers benefit in ways other than just in the provision of income.

· • Maternal employment is related to positive parent–child interactions.

· • Children of single mothers employed full-time felt friendliest toward their fathers.

This well-designed, straightforward study examined a question that bears on many issues that everyone from schoolteachers to employers needs to have answered. The study involved a more than adequate number of participants and used methods that directly focused on the type of information the researchers wanted. Although they did not answer every question about the relationship between maternal employment and adolescent development, the researchers did provide an important piece to the puzzle of understanding the effects of employment on growing children and changing families.

The researchers seemed to take a logical approach of going from a question that has some import for many groups in today’s society and articulating it in such a way that it can be answered in a reasonable and efficient manner.

The issue of how children are affected by working parents is certainly still an important one, but the results of research, such as that summarized earlier, bring us closer to a solution to some of the questions posed by such work arrangements. To be the kind of researcher you want to be, you need to know the rules of the game (and the lingo) and follow them as did Duckett and Richards. This knowledge begins with an understanding of some basic vocabulary and ideas.

TEST YOURSELF

Think about how these two scientists used technology (in this case beepers) to help them collect data. Now, think of the technology that you use every day for a variety of personal communications and to access information, and see if you can think of a way that those tools could be used in a research setting.

The Language of Research

Significance levels. Null hypotheses. Independent variables. Factorial designs. Research hypotheses. Samples. Populations. Yikes!—that’s a lot of new terms. But these and other new words and phrases form the basis for much of the communication that takes place in the research world. As with any endeavor, it is difficult to play the game unless you learn the rules. The rules begin here, with a basic understanding of the terminology used by researchers in their everyday activities. The rest of this chapter offers a language lesson of sorts. Once you become familiar with these terms, everything that follows in Exploring Researchwill be easier to understand and more useful. Each of the terms described and defined here will be used again throughout the book.

Many different terms are used in the research community, and the faster you become familiar with them, the easier the entire process will be to understand.

All About Variables

The word variable has several synonyms, such as changeable or unsteady. Our set of rules tells us that a  variable  is a noun, not an adjective, and represents a class of outcomes that can take on more than one value.

For example, hair color is a variable that can take on the values of red, brown, black, blond, and just about any other combination of primary colors as well. Other examples of variables would be height (expressed as short or tall, or 5 feet, 3 inches or 6 feet, 1 inch), weight (expressed as heavy or light, 128 pounds or 150 pounds), age at immunization (expressed as young or old, 6 weeks or 18 months), number of words remembered, time off work, political party affiliation, favorite type of M&Ms, and so on. The one thing all these traits, characteristics, or preferences have in common is that the variable (such as political party affiliation) can take on any one of several values, such as Republican, Democrat, or Independent.

However, the more precisely that a variable is measured, the more useful the  measurement  is. For example, knowing that Rachael is taller than Gregory is useful, but knowing that Rachael is 5 feet, 11 inches and Gregory is 5 feet, 7 inches is even more useful.

Interestingly, variables that might go by the same name can take on different values. You could measure height in inches (60) or in rank (the tallest), for example—or be defined differently, depending on a host of factors, such as the purpose of the research or the characteristics of the participants. For example, consider the variable called intelligence. For one researcher, the definition might be scores on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Test, whereas for another it might be scores on the Kaufman Assessment Battery. For Howard Gardner ( 1983 ), who believes in the existence of multiple intelligences, the definition might be performance in mathematics, music, or some physical activity. All of these variables represent the same general construct of intelligence, albeit assessed in different ways.

Variables are used for different purposes as well. For example, a variable such as average number of days hospitalized following surgery might be used as a measure of recovery from surgery. But, this same variable might be used to equalize initial differences in patients when the question becomes, “How much post-operative pain did patients experience?” Statistically removing (or controlling for) how long they stayed in the hospital after their surgery is a fancy and very cool technique for taking differences in length of hospital stay out of the equation.

The following paragraphs describe several types of variables, and  Table 2.1  summarizes these types and what they do.

Dependent Variables

A  dependent variable  represents the measure that reflects the outcomes of a research study. For example, if you measure the difference between two groups of adults on how well they can remember a set of 10 single digits after a 5-hour period, the number of digits remembered is the dependent variable. Another example: If you are looking at the effect of parental involvement in school on children’s grades, the grades that the children received would be considered a dependent variable.

The dependent variable is that which is examined as the outcome of an experiment or a research project.

Think of a dependent variable as the outcome that may depend on the experimental treatment or on what the researcher changes or manipulates.

Table 2.1 Different types of variables.

Type of Variable	Definition	Other Terms You Might See
Dependent	A variable that is measured to see whether the treatment or manipulation of the independent variable had an effect	· • Outcome variable · • Results variable · • Criterion variable
Independent	A variable that is manipulated to examine its impact on a dependent variable	· • Treatment variable · • Factor · • Predictor variable
Control	A variable that is related to the dependent variable, the influence of which needs to be removed	· • Restricting variable
Extraneous	A variable that is related to the dependent variable or independent variable that is not part of the experiment	· • Threatening variable
Moderator	A variable that is related to the dependent variable or independent variable and has an impact on the dependent variable	· • Interacting variable

Independent Variables

An  independent variable  represents the treatments or conditions that the researcher has either direct or indirect control over to  test  their effects on a particular outcome. An independent variable is also known as a treatment variable—it is within this context that the term is most often used. An independent variable is manipulated in the course of an experiment to understand the effects of this manipulation on the dependent variable.

The independent variable is that which is manipulated or changed to examine its effect upon the dependent variable.

For example, you might want to test the effectiveness of three different reading programs on children’s reading skills. This design is illustrated in  Figure 2.1 . Method A includes tutoring, Method B includes tutoring and rewards, and Method C includes neither tutoring nor rewards (these kids just spend some time with the teacher). In this example, the method of reading instruction is manipulated, and it is the independent variable. The outcome or dependent variable could be reading scores. This experiment includes three levels of one independent variable (method of teaching) and one dependent variable (reading score).

The direct and indirect distinction has to do with whether the researcher actually creates the levels (such as Method A, Method B, or Method C) or the levels are already naturally occurring and cannot be manipulated directly but can only be tested, such as differences in gender (we cannot very well assign that trait to people) or age groupings (we cannot make people younger or older).

So, what if you wanted to investigate whether there is a difference between males and females in their mathematics scores on some standardized test? In this example, the independent variable is gender (male or female), and the outcome or dependent variable is the mathematics score.

Or, you could look at the effects of the number of hours of weekly television-watching time (less than 25 hours for group A or 25 or more hours for group B) on language skills. Here, the amount of time watching television is the independent variable, and the level of language skills is the dependent variable.

The general rule to follow is that when the researcher is manipulating anything or assigning participants to groups based on some characteristic, such as age or ethnicity or treatment, that variable is the independent variable. When researchers look to some outcome to determine whether the grouping had an effect, then they look to the dependent variable.

In some cases, when researchers are not interested in looking at the effects of one thing on another, but only in how variables may be related, there are no independent variables. For example, if you are interested only in the relationship between the amount of time a father spends with his children and his job performance, nothing is manipulated, and, in a sense (but not everyone agrees), there are no variables that are independent of one another nor are there variables that are dependent upon others.

Figure 2.1 Research designs can take on many different configurations. Here, the researcher is examining the effects of three different methods or levels of teaching reading on reading scores. Note that in the last method neither treatment is implemented, making it the control condition.

Independent variables must take on at least two levels or values (because they are variables) and variables, by definition, vary. For example, if a researcher were studying the effects of gender differences (the independent variable) on language development (the dependent variable), the independent variable would have two levels, male and female. Similarly, if a researcher were investigating age differences in stress for people aged 30–39 years, 40–49 years, and 50–59 years, then the independent variable would be age, and it would have three levels.

Figure 2.2 Many experiments in the social and behavior sciences use more than one independent variable. In this particular example, there are three independent variables: two (what else?) levels of gender, three levels of age, and three levels of social class.

What happens if you have more than one independent variable like we just described? Look at  Figure 2.2 , which represents a factorial design wherein gender, age, and social class are independent variables.  Factorial designs  are experiments that include more than one independent variable. Here are two levels of gender (male and female), three levels of age (3, 5, and 7 years), and three levels of social class (high, medium, and low), accounting for a 2 by 3 by 3 design for a total of 18 separate combinations of treatment conditions, or cells, of levels of independent variables. You can see that, as independent variables are added to a research design, the total number of cells increases rapidly.

Here’s the key in understanding this way of noting variables and their levels.

If you see something like this . . .

3 × 4

you can rest assured there are the same number of independent variables as there are numerals separated by the “x” which stand for “times” just as in simple multiplication. You can ignore the value of the number. So, for a 3 × 4, there are two independent variables (one for the “3” and one for the “4”). For each of these independent variables, the value of the number represents the number of levels. So, for this example, there are two independent variables, one having 3 levels and the other having 4. And, the total number of separate conditions? That’s right, it’s 12 since 3 × 4 = 12.

The Relationship Between Independent and Dependent Variables

This is really important and sure to be a question on your next test or quiz.

The best independent variable is one that is independent of any other variable that is being used in the same study. In this way, the independent variable can contribute the maximum amount of understanding beyond what other independent variables can offer. When variables compete to explain the effects, it is sometimes called  confounding .

The best dependent variable is one that is sensitive to changes in the different levels of each independent variable; otherwise, even if the treatment had an effect, you would never know it.

TEST YOURSELF

Go back to the Duckett and Richards study and define what the independent and dependent variables are. According to the last paragraph in this section, why are the two independent variables a good choice?

Other Important Types of Variables

Independent and dependent variables are the two kinds of variables that you will deal with most often throughout Exploring Research. However, there are other variables that are important for you to know about as well, because an understanding of what they are and how they fit into the research process is essential for you to be an intelligent consumer and to have a good foundation as a beginning producer of research. The following are other types of variables that you should be familiar with (see  Table 2.1 ).

A  control variable  is a variable that has a potential influence on the dependent variable; consequently, the influence must be removed or controlled. For example, if you are interested in examining the relationship between reading speed and reading comprehension, you may want to control for differences in intelligence, because intelligence is related both to reading speed and to reading comprehension. Intelligence must be held constant for you to get a good idea of the nature of the relationship between the variables of interest.

An  extraneous variable  is a variable that has an unpredictable impact upon the dependent variable. For example, if you are interested in examining the effects of television watching on achievement, you might find that the type of television programs watched is an extraneous variable that might affect achievement. Such programs as Discovery, Nova, and Sesame Street might have a positive impact on achievement, whereas other programs might have a negative impact.

A  moderator variable  is a variable that is related to the variables of interest (such as the dependent and independent variable), masking the true relationship between the independent and dependent variable. For example, if you are examining the relationship between crime rate and ice cream consumption, you need to include temperature because it moderates that relationship. Otherwise, your conclusions will be inaccurate.

Hypotheses

In  Chapter 1 , a hypothesis was defined as “an educated guess.” Although a hypothesis reflects many other things, perhaps its most important role is to reflect the general problem statement or the question that was the motivation for undertaking the research study. That is why taking care and time with that initial question is so important. Such consideration can guide you through the creation of a hypothesis, which in turn helps you to determine the types of techniques you will use to test the hypothesis and answer the original question.

The “I wonder . . . ” stage becomes the problem statement stage, which then leads to the study’s hypothesis. Here is an example of each of these.

The Stage	An Example
“I wonder”	It seems to me that several things could be done to help our employees lower their high absentee rate. Talking with some of them tells me that they are concerned about after-school care for their children. I wonder what would happen if a program were started right here in the factory to provide child supervision and activities?
The hypothesis	Parents who enroll their children in after-school programs will miss fewer days of work in 1 year and will have a more positive attitude toward work as measured by the Attitude Toward Work (ATW) survey than parents who do not enroll their children in such programs.

A good hypothesis provides a transition from a problem statement or question into a form that is more amenable to testing using the research methods we are discussing. The following sections describe the two types of hypotheses—the null hypothesis and the research hypothesis—and how they are used, as well as what makes a good hypothesis.

The Null Hypothesis

A  null hypothesis  is an interesting little creature. If it could talk, it would say something like, “I represent no relationship between the variables that you are studying.” In other words, null hypotheses are statements of equality such as,

· • There will be no difference in the average score of ninth graders and the average score of twelfth graders on the ABC memory test.

· • There is no relationship between personality type and job success.

· • There is no difference in voting patterns as a function of political party.

· • The brand of ice cream preferred is independent of the buyer’s age, gender, and income.

The null hypothesis is a statement of equality.

A null hypothesis, such as the ones described here, would be represented by the following equation:

H o : μ 9 = μ 12

where:  H o = the symbol for the null hypothesis μ 9 = the symbol (the Greek letter  mu )  for the theoretical average for the population of ninth graders μ 12 = the symbol (the Greek letter  mu )  for the theoretical average for the population of twelfth graders. 

The four null hypotheses listed earlier all have in common a statement of two or more things being equal or unrelated to each other.

What are the basic purposes of the null hypothesis? The null hypothesis acts as both a starting point and a benchmark against which the actual outcomes of a study will be measured. Let’s examine each of these purposes.

First, the null hypothesis acts as a starting point because it is the state of affairs that is accepted as true in the absence of other information. For example, let’s look at the first null hypothesis stated earlier in the list: There will be no difference in the average score of ninth graders and the average score of twelfth graders on the ABC memory test. Given no other knowledge of ninth and twelfth graders’ memory skills, you have no reason to believe there will be differences between the two groups. You might speculate as to why one group might outperform another, but if you have no evidence a priori (before the fact), then what choice do you have but to assume that they are equal? This lack of a relationship, unless proved otherwise, is a hallmark of the method being discussed. In other words, until you prove that there is a difference, you have to assume that there is no difference.

Furthermore, if there are any differences between these two groups, you have to assume that the differences are due to the most attractive explanation for differences between any groups on any variable: chance! That’s right; given no other information, chance is always the most likely explanation for differences between two groups. And what is chance? It is the random variability introduced as a function of the individuals participating as well as many unforeseen factors.

For example, you could take a group of soccer players and a group of football players and compare their running speeds. But who is to know whether some soccer players practice more, or if some football players are stronger, or if both groups are receiving additional training? Furthermore, perhaps the way their speed is being measured leaves room for chance; a faulty stopwatch or a windy day can contribute to differences unrelated to true running speed.

As good researchers, our job is to eliminate chance as a factor and to evaluate other factors that might contribute to group differences, such as those that are identified as independent variables.

The second purpose of the null hypothesis is to provide a benchmark against which observed outcomes can be compared to determine whether these differences are caused by chance or by some other factor. The null hypothesis helps to define a range within which any observed differences between groups can be attributed to chance (which is the contention of the null hypothesis) or whether they are due to something other than chance (which perhaps would be the result of the manipulation of the independent variable).

Most correlational, quasi-experimental, and experimental studies have an implied null hypothesis; historical and descriptive studies may not. For example, if you are interested in the growth of immunization during the last 70 years (historical) or how people feel about school vouchers (descriptive), then you are probably not concerned with positing a null hypothesis.

The Research Hypothesis

Whereas a null hypothesis is a statement of no relationship between variables, a  research hypothesis  is a definite statement of the relationship between two variables. For example, for each of the null hypotheses stated earlier, there is a corresponding research hypothesis. Notice that I said “a” and not “the” corresponding research hypothesis, because there can certainly be more than one research hypothesis for any one null hypothesis. Here are some research hypotheses that correspond with the null hypotheses mentioned earlier.

Research hypotheses are statements of inequality.

· • The average score of ninth graders is different from the average score of twelfth graders on the ABC memory test.

· • There is a relationship between personality type and job success.

· • Voting patterns are a function of political party.

· • The brand of ice cream preferred is related to the buyer’s age, gender, and income.

Each of these four research hypotheses has one thing in common: They are all statements of inequality.Unlike the null hypothesis, these research hypotheses posit a relationship between variables, not an equality. The nature of this inequality can take two different forms: directional and nondirectional.

If the research hypothesis posits no direction to the inequality (such as “different from”), then the research hypothesis is a nondirectional research hypothesis.

If the research hypothesis posits a direction to the inequality (such as “more than” or “less than”), then the research hypothesis is a directional research hypothesis.

The Nondirectional Research Hypothesis

A  nondirectional research hypothesis  reflects a difference between groups, but the direction of the difference is not specified. For example, the research hypothesis The average score of ninth graders is different from the average score of twelfth graders on the ABC memory test is nondirectional in that the direction of the difference between the two groups is not specified. The hypothesis states only that there is a difference and says nothing about the direction of that difference. It is a research hypothesis because a difference is hypothesized, but the nature of the difference is not specified.

A nondirectional research hypothesis such as the one described here would be represented by the following equation:

H 1 : ¯ ¯ ¯X 9 ≠ ¯ ¯ ¯X 12

·  where: H 1 = the symbol for null hypothesis ¯ ¯ ¯X 12 = the average memory score for twelfth graders ≠ = the inequality symbol or the not equal symbol ¯ ¯ ¯X 12 = the average memory score for ninth graders 

The Directional Research Hypothesis

A  directional research hypothesis  reflects a difference between groups, and the direction of the difference is specified. For example, the research hypothesis The average score of twelfth graders is greater than the average score of ninth graders on the ABC memory test is directional, because the direction of the difference between the two groups is specified—one group’s score is hypothesized to be greater than the other.

Directional hypotheses can take the following forms:

· • A is greater than B (or A > B)

· • B is greater than A (or B > A)

These both represent inequalities. A directional research hypothesis, such as the one described earlier wherein twelfth graders are hypothesized to score better than ninth graders, would be represented by the following equation:

H 1 : ¯ ¯ ¯X 12 > ¯ ¯ ¯X 9

where: H 1 = the symbol for (the first of possible) research hypothesis ¯ ¯ ¯X 12 = the average memory score for twelfth graders > = the greater-than sign ¯ ¯ ¯X 9 = the average memory score for ninth graders 

What is the purpose of the research hypothesis? It is this hypothesis that is tested directly as one step in the research process. The results of this test are compared with what you expect by chance alone (reflecting the null hypothesis) to see which of the two explanations is the more attractive one for observed differences between groups.

But do beware of one thing. Beginning researchers often start out to prove a research hypothesis. As good scientists, we are not to be swayed by our own too personal beliefs and prejudices. Rather than setting out to prove anything, we set out to test the hypothesis.

Differences Between the Null Hypothesis and the Research Hypothesis

Other than the fact that the null hypothesis represents an equality and the research hypothesis represents an inequality, there are several important differences between these two types of hypotheses.

First, the null hypothesis states that there is no relationship between variables (an equality), whereas the research hypothesis states that there is a relationship (an inequality).

Second, null hypotheses always refer to the population, whereas research hypotheses always refer to the sample. As you will read later in this chapter, researchers select a sample of participants from a much larger population. It is too expensive, and often impossible, to work with the entire population and thus directly test the null hypothesis.

Third, because the entire population cannot be directly tested (again, it is impractical, uneconomical, and often impossible), you can never really say that there is actually no difference between groups (or an inequality) on a specified dependent variable (if you accept the null hypothesis). Rather, you have to infer it (indirectly) from the results of the test of the research hypothesis, which is based on the sample. Hence, the null hypothesis is indirectly tested, whereas the research hypothesis is directly tested.

Fourth, null hypotheses are always stated using Greek symbols (such as μ or mu for the average), whereas research hypotheses are always stated using Roman symbols (such as X for the average), as illustrated just a few pages ago.

Finally, because you cannot directly test the null hypothesis (remember that you rarely will have access to the total population), it is an implied hypothesis. The research hypothesis, on the other hand, is explicit. It is for this reason that you rarely see null hypotheses stated in research reports, whereas you almost always see the research hypothesis.

What Makes a “Good” Hypothesis?

Hypotheses are educated guesses. Some guesses are better than others right from the start. I cannot stress enough how important it is to ask the question you want answered and to keep in mind that any hypothesis you present is a direct extension of the original question you asked. This question will reflect your own personal interests as well as previous research.

Good hypotheses are declarative in nature and posit a very clear and unambiguous relationship between variables.

With that in mind, here are some criteria you might use to decide whether a hypothesis you read in a research report or the ones you formulate are acceptable. Let’s use an example of a study that examines the effects of after-school child-care programs for employees who work late on the parents’ adjustment to work. The following is a well-written hypothesis:

·  Parents who enroll their children in after-school programs will miss fewer days of work in one year and will have a more positive attitude toward work as measured by the Attitude Toward Work (ATW) Survey than parents who do not enroll their children in such programs.

Here are the criteria we want to apply to a “good” hypothesis:

· 1. A good hypothesis is stated in declarative form, not as a question. Hypotheses are most effective when they make a clear and forceful statement.

· 2. A good hypothesis posits an expected relationship between variables. The example hypothesis clearly describes the relationship between after-school child care, the parents’ attitude, and the absentee rate. These variables are being tested to determine whether one (enrollment in the after-school program) has an effect upon the others (absentee rate and attitude).

Notice the word “expected” in the second criterion? Defining an expected relationship is intended to prevent the “fishing-trip approach” (sometimes called the “shotgun approach”) which may be tempting to take but is not very productive. In the fishing-trip approach, you throw out your line and pull in anything that bites. You collect data on as many things as you can, regardless of your interest or even whether collecting the data is a reasonable part of the investigation. Or, put another way, you load up the guns and blast away at anything that moves. You are bound to hit something. The problem is that you may not want what you hit and, worse, you may miss what you want to hit—even worse (if possible), you may not know what you hit!

Good researchers do not want just anything they can catch or shoot—they want specific results. To get such results, researchers must formulate their opening questions and hypotheses in a manner that is clear, forceful, and easily understood.

· 3. Hypotheses reflect the theory or literature upon which they are based. As you read in  Chapter 1 , the accomplishments of scientists can rarely be attributed to their hard work alone. Their accomplishments also are due to the work of many other researchers who have come before them and laid a framework for later explorations. A good hypothesis reflects this; it has a substantive link to existing literature and theory. In the previous example, let’s assume that the literature indicates that parents who know their children are being cared for in a structured environment can be more productive at work. Knowledge of this would allow a researcher to hypothesize that an after-school program would provide parents the security they are looking for, which in turn allows them to concentrate on work rather than on awaiting a phone call to find out whether Max or Sophie got home safely.

· 4. A hypothesis should be brief and to the point. Your hypothesis should describe the relationship between variables in a declarative form and be as succinct (to the point) as possible. The more succinct the statement, the easier it will be for others (such as your master’s thesis committee members) to read your research and understand exactly what you are hypothesizing and what the important variables are. In fact, when people read and evaluate research (as you will learn more about later in this chapter), the first thing many of them do is read the hypotheses so they can get a good idea of the general purpose of the research and how things will be done. A good hypothesis defines both these things.

· 5. Good hypotheses are testable hypotheses. This means that you can actually carry out the intent of the question reflected in the hypothesis. You can see from the sample hypothesis that the important comparison is between parents who have enrolled their child in an after-school program with those who have not. Then, such things as attitude and number of workdays missed will be measured. These are both reasonable objectives. Attitude is measured by the ATW Survey (a fictitious title, but you get the idea), and absenteeism (the number of days away from work) is an easily recorded and unambiguous measure. Think how much harder things would be if the hypothesis were stated as Parents who enroll their children in after-school care feel better about their jobs. Although you might get the same message, the results might be more difficult to interpret given the ambiguous nature of words such as “feel better.”

In sum, complete and well-written hypotheses should:

· • be stated in declarative form

· • posit a relationship between variables

· • reflect a theory or a body of literature upon which they are based

· • be brief and to the point

· • be testable

When a hypothesis meets each of these five criteria, then it is good enough to continue with a study that will accurately test the general question from which the hypothesis was derived.

TEST YOURSELF

Hypotheses are absolutely critical to the scientific process, and we reviewed several reasons why and reviewed the hypothesis’ relationship to chance. What is that relationship and in general why is it important to the scientific process?

Samples and Populations

As a good scientist, you would like to be able to say that if Method A is better than Method B, this is true forever and always and for all people. Indeed, if you do enough research on the relative merits of Methods A and B and test enough people, you may someday be able to say that, but it is unlikely. Too much money and too much time (all those people!) are required to do all that research.

However, given the constraints of limited time and limited research funds which almost all scientists live with, the next best strategy is to take a portion of a larger group of participants and do the research with that smaller group. In this context, the larger group is referred to as a  population , and the smaller group selected from a population is referred to as a  sample .

Our goal is to select a sample from a population that most closely matches the characteristics of that population.

Samples should be selected from populations in such a way that you maximize the likelihood that the sample represents the population as much as possible. The goal is to have the sample resemble the population as much as possible. The most important implication of ensuring similarity between the two is that, once the research is finished, the results based on the sample can be generalized to the population. When the sample does represent the population, the results of the study are said to be generalizable or to have  generalizability .

The various types of sampling procedures are discussed in  Chapter 4 .

TEST YOURSELF

It’s important that samples be representative of the populations from which they came. Provide an example of a population and a sample from that population. How would you know that the sample is representative?

The Concept of Significance

There is probably no term or concept that represents more confusion for the beginning student than that of  statistical significance . This term is explained in detail in  Chapter 8 , but it is important to be exposed to the term early in Exploring Research because it is a basic and major component of understanding the research process.

Significance is a measure of how much risk we are willing to take when reaching a conclusion about the relationship between variables.

At the beginning of this chapter, you read a simple overview of a study wherein two researchers examined the differences between adolescents whose mothers work and adolescents whose mothers do not (as well as family status, but for this example let’s stick with the employed and not employed groups).

Let’s modify the meaning of “differences” to include the adjective “significant.” Here, significant differences are the differences observed between adolescents of mothers who work and of those who do not that are due to some influence and do not appear just by chance. In this example, that influence is whether the mothers work. Let’s assume that other factors that might account for any differences were controlled for. Thus, the only thing left to account for the differences between adolescents is whether or not the mothers work. Right? Yes. Finished? Not quite.

Because the world and you and I and the research process are not perfect, one must allow for some leeway. In other words, you need to be able to say that, although you are pretty sure the difference between the two groups of adolescents is due to the mothers’ working, you cannot be absolutely, 100%, positively, unequivocally, indisputably (get the picture?) sure.

Why? There are many different reasons. For example, you could just be wrong (horrors!). Maybe during this one experiment, differences were not due to the group the adolescents were in but to some other factor that was inadvertently not accounted for, such as out-of-home experiences. What if the people in one group were mostly adolescent boys and reacted quite differently than the people in the other group, mostly adolescent girls? If you are a good researcher and do your homework, such differences between groups are unlikely outcomes, but possible ones nonetheless. This factor (gender) and others certainly could have an impact on the outcome or dependent variable and, in turn, have an impact on the final results and the conclusion you reach.

So, what to do? In most scientific endeavors that involve proposing hypotheses and examining differences between groups, there is bound to be a certain amount of error that simply cannot be controlled.  Significance level  is the risk associated with not being 100% confident that the difference is caused by what you think and may be due to some unforeseen factor. If you see that a study resulted in significant findings at the .05 level (it looks like this in journal articles and scientific reports p < .05), the translation is that a chance of less than 1 in 20 (or .05 or 5%) exists that any differences found between the groups were not due to the hypothesized reason (the independent variable in the case of a comparison between two groups) but to some other unknown reason or reasons. This number is actually an indirect measure of chance. As you will see in  Chapter 8  new data analysis computer programs have gone a step further and rather than defining a range of probability (such as less than .05 or less than 5%), they assign a specific probability (such as .042 or 4.2%).

As a good scientist, your job is to reduce this likelihood as much as possible by accounting for all the competing reasons, other than the one you are testing, for any differences that you observed. Because this is possible in theory only and you cannot fully eliminate the likelihood of other factors, you account for these other factors by assigning them a level of probability and report your results with that caveat.

So even if you are quite sure that your findings reflect the “truth,” the good scientist is neither so arrogant nor so confident that he or she cannot admit there is a chance of error. The probability that error may occur is what we mean by significance. We get into a much more detailed discussion of this in  Chapter 8 .

TEST YOURSELF

You’re going to see the word significance a lot in Exploring Research and learn a good deal more about it. What is the relationship between a significant finding and the likelihood that the finding is due to chance?

Summary

That wraps up some vocabulary and provides you with a basic knowledge for understanding most of the important terms used in the research process, terms that you will see and use throughout the rest of Exploring Research. Being familiar with these terms will provide a foundation for a better understanding during subsequent chapters. If you are unsure about the meaning of a certain term, refer back to this chapter for a refresher course or consult the glossary at the end of the book.

Exercises

1 .

In the following examples, identify the independent and dependent variable(s):

· (a)Two groups of children were given different types of physical fitness programs to determine whether the programs had an effect on their strength.

· (b)A group of 100 heavy smokers was divided into five groups, and each group participated in a different smoking-cessation program. After 6 months of program participation, the number of cigarettes each participant smoked each day was counted.

· (c)A university professor was interested in determining the best way to teach introductory psychology and ensure that his students would learn the material.

2 .

For the following situations name at least one independent variable (and the levels of that variable) and one dependent variable.

· (a)A research project where the topic of interest is achievement.

· (b)A research project where the topic of interest is voting preferences in the presidential election.

· (c)A research project where the topic is recovery rate in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program.

3 .

What is another name for “outcome variable”?

4 .

Why is the null hypothesis always a statement of equality? Why can the research hypothesis take on many different forms?

5 .

Write the null and research hypotheses for the following description of a research study:

A group of middle-aged men was asked to complete a questionnaire on their attitudes toward work and family. Each of these men is married and has at least two children. Another group of men with no children also completed the same survey.

6 .

Write the null and a directional research hypothesis for the following description of a research study:

A pediatrician was comparing the effects of an early intervention program during children’s first 3 years of life and the impact that program might have on academic achievement on grade school competency tests.

7 .

Name two advantages of having a hypothesis that is linked to existing literature and theory.

8 .

Why is having a hypothesis with an expected outcome better practice than a “fishing-trip” approach?

9 .

No one would argue that defining variables clearly and in an unambiguous manner is critical to good research. With that in mind, work as a group and define the following variables. Keep track of how different people’s definitions reflect their personal views of what the variable represents, and note how easy it is to define some variables and how difficult it is to define others.

· (a)Intelligence

· (b)Height

· (c)Social skills

· (d)Age

· (e)Aggressiveness

· (f)Conservatism

· (g)Alcohol consumption

· (h)Street smarts

· (i)Personality

Be sure to note that even those variables that appear to be easy to define (e.g., height) can take on different meanings and definitions (tall, 5 feet 1 inch, awesome) as well.

10 .

What is statistical significance and why is it important?

11 .

A researcher spent 5 years on a project, and the majority of the findings were not significant. How can the lack of significant results still make an important contribution to the field?

12 .

A researcher interested in the use of energy in Howard County households makes survey phone calls to every 10th household listed in the county phonebook. In this example, assuming every household contacted participates in the survey:

· (a)What is the sample?

· (b)What is the population?

13 .

Indicate which of the following are variables and which are constants:

· (a)Lew’s hair color

· (b)Age in years

· (c)Number of windows in your residence

· (d)Color of the late-model car parked in front of the building

· (e)What time it is right now

· (f)Number of possible correct answers on this week’s quiz

· (g)Number of signers of the Declaration of Independence

· (h)Name of the fifth girl in the third row

· (i)Today’s date

· (j)Number of words remembered on a memory test

14 .

The principal of an elementary school wants to know how well her 600 students like the school. She hires a researcher, who gives a “satisfaction with school” survey to three different third-grade classes.

· (a)How could the use of a sample like this threaten the value of the study’s outcomes??

· (b)How might the flawed sample affect the usefulness of the results?

15 .

Two researchers complete projects looking at the relationship between the amount of time studied and performance on a science test. Researcher A’s results state that “John performed better than Lisa, who performed better than Drew.” Researcher B’s results state that “John earned a 97%, Lisa earned a 96%, and Drew earned a 71%.” Between Researcher A and Researcher B, who has the best way of measuring the dependent variable of test performance? Why?

16 .

A researcher from Louisiana hypothesizes that people living out in the country display fewer avoidance strategies under stress than do people living in large cities. To test his hypothesis, he completes research with a group of participants from New Orleans and a group of participants from Church Point, Louisiana, and finds support for his hypothesis. However, he later learns that most of the participants from New Orleans were there during Hurricane Katrina. In this example, the experience of Hurricane Katrina is considered what type of variable?

17 .

Go to the library and locate three journal articles in your area of interest which are experimental in nature (where groups are compared). Do the following:

· (a)Identify the independent and dependent variables.

· (b)For each dependent variable, specify how it is going to be measured and whether it is clearly defined.

· (c)For each independent variable, identify the number of levels of that variable. What other independent variables would you find of interest to study?

18 .

What makes a good hypothesis?

Online. . .

Seven Golden Steps

The librarians at Cornell University bring you the Seven Steps of the Research Process at  http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/research/skill1.htm . These steps are similar to those outlined in this chapter but just a bit different, and they give you another view of what’s important and why.

The Research Process Helper

The Research Process Helper at  http://www3.sympatico.ca/sandra.hughes/sandra.hughes/research/default.html  brings you Sandra Hughes’ four-step approach to the research process, including preparing, accessing, professing, and transferring information and data. It’s a nice place to begin your quest for the project that’s just right for you.

How to Conduct Research

wikiHow has outlined the research process with steps, tips, tools, and potential barriers at  http://www.wikihow.com/Conduct-Scientific-Research

Research 101

The University of Washington Libraries has created a tutorial, complete with exercises to quiz you on your knowledge about the research process. The tutorial is available at  http://www.lib.washington.edu/uwill/research101/index.html

CHAPTER 2 EVERYDAY LIFE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PRACTICES

SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT

image17

The question why men’s behavior and emotions change is really the same as the question why their forms of life change.

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, 1978

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter, we outlined several strands of thought that contributed to the emergence of a science of Psychology in the late 1800s, including philosophical debates (Descartes and Locke), empirical and experimental work in medicine (Whytt, Cullen, Flourens, and Broca) and physiology (Müller and Helmholtz), and evolutionary theory (Lamarck and Darwin). Soon after Psychology became established as a scientific field, the new psychologists began to envision how to make practical use of their new science. Among the first products of this impulse were mental tests, which we discuss in the next chapter. However, before these formal practices there existed a range of everyday practices that people used to make sense of their lives and give order and meaning to their social, family, and even business relationships. We define psychological practices broadly to mean the use of psychological knowledge in making sense of oneself and the world, as well as the practical strategies of self- and social management that arise out of this knowledge. These practices included a range of activities, from writing in a diary to engaging in the marketplace.

Psychological practices owed their possibility not only to the changing philosophical and medical discourses of the 18th and 19th centuries but perhaps more importantly to the emergence of a sense of self, comprising a sense of individuality and interiority, that is a taken-for-granted aspect of life in the 21st century. In this chapter, the origins of a sense of self or subjectivity are explored. The creation and shaping of subjectivity occurred on the level of everyday lived experience and was the crucial counterpart to the changes in philosophical discourse and physiological research that made a scientific discipline of Psychology possible.

So far, we have only written about the ideas of those whom it is fair to call the elites of their day—philosophers, physicians, and clerics. These people were fortunate to have the time to reflect on the conditions around them, the literacy skills to write about their reflections, and often the political connections to have their voices heard. It may well be that one reason for the continuing influence of these writers is the privileged positions that many of them held. Yet, the origins of both everyday psychology and disciplinary Psychology also owe a great deal to the development of new ways of thinking about the person and new practices among nonelites, that is, everyday people who were challenged to order their lives in periods of major social change.

In this chapter, we offer an account of these practices that emerged in the 17th to 19th centuries. We seek to show how such practices fostered a new sense of self and gave rise to the subjectivity that we now take for granted but upon which rested the foundation and possibility of both a science and a profession of disciplinary Psychology. At the end of the 19th century, scientific psychologists emerged as a new cadre of experts who claimed as their object of study this very sense of self and the interior processes implicated in it. They were not without competitors, however, and to this day psychologists vie with other groups for their cultural authority as experts on human subjectivity. The rendering of subjectivity into an object of scientific study was one strategy psychologists employed to strengthen their cultural authority, as well as understand their subject matter in new ways. Our point in this chapter is that the emergence of scientific psychology depended, in part, on the very existence of a certain kind of subjectivity that was itself forged from both elite and everyday practices.

We begin with the role of new technologies and indicate how such technologies facilitated changes in people’s sense of themselves. The growth of Protestant religion in this period was one of the keys to people focusing more on their interior life, and we examine the technologies that emerged to support devotion and piety, as well as self-perception and expression more generally. Many of these technologies, such as devotional aids known as conduct books and diaries, were linked to increased literacy and facilitated an increased emphasis on self-control. In this period, too, the role of the individual in everyday life came to hold a greater fascination and interest for many people. While no one factor accounts for this, contributing factors included the emergence of commercial society, the growth of print-based popular culture, and changes in the family. Specific technologies that mark this period include the diary as a record of one’s own life; the practice of letter writing to explore and express intimate experiences; the rise of the novel as an account, a narrative, of possible lives; and the invention and commercial distribution of the perfected mirror.

After examining these technologies, we turn to the macrosocial changes that gave rise to and accompanied the Industrial Revolution. As many scholars have pointed out, the Industrial Revolution remade home and work life, and it created hierarchical relations among strangers in an atmosphere of competition and struggle for advancement. Nonelites, far from being overwhelmed, demonstrated great ingenuity in creating new resources, in some cases reinventing older cultural resources to survive, and in the process creating a new middle class and new order in Western capitalist societies. Prominent among the strategies deployed were physiognomy and phrenology, practices one scholar has characterized as “reading the signs of the body” (Samuel, 1991, p. 88). We show how these practices were inextricably woven into daily and commercial life and were crucial for creating the everyday psychology, or everyday subjectivity, upon which disciplinary Psychology so successfully drew for its own authority.

The philosopher Charles Taylor asked some years ago, “What brought the modern identity about?” (1989, p. 202). Taylor then noted that this was one of the most difficult questions for historians and philosophers to answer! Clearly, we are not able to answer this question fully in one chapter. Instead, we provide an overview that will help you understand the broad outlines and a few particular points of how our modern sense of identity or self emerged, especially as they ultimately relate to the practices of Psychology.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Technologies of Devotion and Piety

Profound religious changes in western Europe and the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries contributed to a new sense of self, which was partly tied to how one viewed one’s relationship with God. When, in 1517, Martin Luther (1483–1546) nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, thus challenging many common practices of the Roman Catholic Church, he initiated what became known as the Protestant Reformation. Leaders of the Reformation such as Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin propagated a Christian faith that asserted that salvation would come by faith alone and that believers were responsible for their own relationship with God, unmediated by priests or the institutional church. This direct relationship, then, demanded that Protestant Christians pay careful attention to their inner life and devote themselves to spiritual practices (Watkins, 1972).

For our purposes, three important consequences arose from these changes. First, the emphasis on a personal, private relationship with God and its maintenance, helped facilitate a sense of inwardness, of the need to pay attention to one’s interior life, and thus increased a sense of subjectivity. Second, the practices of everyday life attained a new importance, as one’s faith was seen as much in conduct of business and management of the tasks of daily living as in church attendance. Third, technologies were developed to help Christians maintain their personal relationship with the divine. These technologies included spiritual conduct books and the personal diary. We use the word “technologies” to indicate that these devices or instruments assisted in achieving some end. Another technology, the movable-type printing press, invented by Johann Gutenberg in 1439, was crucial to all of the preceding events.

As literacy grew in Europe and England in the 17th and 18th centuries, conduct books became popular as aids to devotion. Today, for many Christians, the equivalent is the daily devotional book; for many others, the equivalent can be found among the vast self-help literature. Believers were encouraged to reflect on their own spiritual state through the maxims found in the book, which were also meant to assist people in self-improvement in their walk with God. Self-control—of thoughts, sinful impulses, and so on—was the intended outcome. To understand why this was important, we can compare this with the conception of faith in the Roman Catholic tradition as it was then practiced. Salvation, in the Catholic faith, was mediated by the church, thus the individual identity was submerged in the collective identity of church membership. This was, in part, why the threat of excommunication from the church was so feared. In Protestantism, however, each person was an individual with agency, that is, able to act in such a way as to affect personal destiny. Again, this placed a new premium on the matters of everyday life. We return to this issue when we discuss the emergence of capitalist, commercial society.

The new focus on the inward life and its sense of agency in all matters of conduct, both everyday and spiritual, found further expression in the diary. A diary is a personal record of an individual life. Again, the possibility and popularity of the diary reflects the rise in literacy in Europe. In 17th-century England, in particular, diaries became a popular way of privately recording thoughts, actions, and aspirations. Christians were encouraged to keep a diary to assist the development of self-reflection and, ultimately, to facilitate self-control.

Technologies of Self-Perception and Self-Expression

On a practical level, the modern glass mirror was an important new technology that literally allowed people to see themselves in a new way. Humans have used reflective devices for much of human history, with evidence of polished bronze and copper mirrors dating to nearly 3000 BC in Egypt. However, until the technology of the modern mirror was perfected in Venice in the early 16th century, what people saw in mirrors was a distortion of their appearance. The perfected mirror can be viewed as a technology to enable individuals to see themselves more clearly and thus to literally self-perceive, that is, to come closer to seeing themselves as others saw them. This facilitated a heightened sense of self.

In terms of technologies of self-expression, letter writing as a form of personal expression, rather than a means of formal or business communication, emerged strongly in the 18th and 19th centuries. During this period, literacy rose and more people were migrating, so families were geographically dispersed, sometimes separated by oceans. The efficiency of postal systems also improved. Thus, although humans have written letters as a method of communication for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, in the 18th and 19th centuries, an epistolary genre arose in Europe and North America that treated letters as vehicles through which personal experiences and sentiments could be expressed to others. As one historian has noted, “Around the middle of the 18th century, the reading public in England and America began to embrace new cultural ideals of letter writing. These new ideals revolved around what was called the ‘familiar letter,’ a mode of letter writing devoted to the expression of affection and duty among kin, family, and friends” (Dierks, 2000, p. 31). Thus, letters became a medium through which individuality could be asserted, and they were increasingly personalized and private.

In the first half of the 18th century, the novel appeared as a new form of literary art in England. This paralleled the emergence of the professional writer in English society. We can see this not only in the novel but also in the dramatic rise in popularity of magazines and newspapers. The novel, however, was unique. Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, 1719), Samuel Richardson (Pamela, 1740), and Henry Fielding (Tom Jones, 1749) were among the first novelists. The novel both reflected and shaped this new subjectivity. In these new literary forms, the characters had everyday names, not allegorical ones as in, for example, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (published in two parts in 1678 and 1684), whose characters have names like Christian and Evangelist. The subject matter of these novels was everyday life, the twists and turns of everyday people in recognizable situations. The thoughts and emotions of the characters were placed in the foreground in such a way that readers could identify with them; that is, they could recognize their own thoughts and emotions in the characters they read about. The net result was greater attention to the ordinary, the mundane, and the subjective.

PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF COMMERCIAL SOCIETY

Around the same time that Protestant religious practices, such as the conduct book, and new literary forms, like the novel, were helping turn individuals’ focus inward, people became aware that a new type of society was emerging. People in North American and Europe were beginning to refer to and experience what they termed commercial society. To what does the term refer? Different scholars have used the term in various ways, but when it was first used, it generally referred to an understanding that people and their relationships were defined by what they bought, sold, or produced, including their labor, capital (financial resources), and land, or even by what they owned or rented. When this sense emerged, it was thought to be a new type of society.

Why is this relevant to the development of the private self, of interiority or subjectivity? How, in other words, did the advent of commercial society foster a new sense of individuality? Broadly speaking, commercial society and its new demands helped shape a sense of the private self by creating a sense of obligation, promise, or contract among people—including strangers—by encouraging a self-auditing or monitoring of behavior. In addition, it was part of the new attention and emphasis placed on everyday matters. Because commercial society placed new demands on people’s lives and had such powerful implications for traditional human relations, including religious obligations and how nations governed their citizens, it became a focus for many thinkers and writers, including the Edinburgh philosopher and educator Adam Smith (1723–1790). Perhaps best known for his two books, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations published in 1776 and The Theory of Moral Sentiment, first published 1759 but revised many times, Smith articulated the moral implications of this new kind of society, with its emphasis on the individual and one’s own labor.

FIGURE 2.1 Adam Smith

Courtesy of the authors.

In commercial society, a person’s work, or labor, was a key aspect of self-definition. As Smith argued in Wealth of Nations, labor was so important because it had replaced agriculture as the source of a nation’s wealth. In earlier periods, individuals owed their labor and its productions to the landowner or feudal lord. Now people were increasingly likely to “own” their own labor and be able to exchange it for goods produced by some other person. Society, then, was made up of individuals who were motivated to look after their own material interests. Two things are worth noting here. One is the emphasis on material conditions, that is, the way people actually lived and worked. Second, this change suggests that a possible outcome could be disorder and unchecked greed and selfishness. Why was this not always the inevitable outcome?

Some scholars have pointed out that capitalism, or commercial society, actually encouraged a greater sense of social obligation. In a capitalist mode, individuals in the marketplace have to consider the consequences of their actions. So, if a promise is made to deliver goods or to receive them at a certain price, then failure to do so could jeopardize future relations, not only with the other party but also by reputation with future potential partners. Conscience, therefore, enters into a primary place in human relations. Conscience is both a moral and a psychological characteristic or function. That is, having a conscience or acting conscientiously is likely to increase one’s sense of subjectivity.

Part of this argument, then, is the implication of discipline and order rather than disorder and chaos. For our purposes, the key point is that the marketplace, which was and is the focal institution of commercial society, heightened an awareness of self-regulation. Smith famously used the phrase invisible hand to point out that when every person seeks personal interests, the net result is that the interests of all are served. Smith’s famous phrase has been cited to support various economic philosophies, many of which have been characterized by greed and corporate rapaciousness. However, careful reading of his work and an understanding of his era indicates that Smith was greatly concerned about the moral implications of commercial society.

For Smith, the market encouraged self-control or self-regulation because humans need functioning relationships with other people. This is what Smith called moral sentiment. Yes, Smith argued, we act for our own interests, but in doing so we are mindful of the regard of others. It is this, Smith said, that makes society possible. Self-command or self-regulation is crucial to the moral functioning of society, and the invisible hand uses this to meld interests. Thus, the emergence of the market with its demands for self-accounting was critical in reinforcing emergent self-regulation. We want to emphasize that this process was chronologically uneven across England, Europe, and North America, with such processes occurring most broadly first in England. Concurrent with these and the developments discussed earlier were changes in family life and work relations. We turn to these sites next.

CHANGES IN FAMILY LIFE

Historians of the family have documented notable changes in family life in England and western Europe around the beginning of the 18th century. The primary change involved a trend toward greater intimacy and affection within families and a movement toward a greater child orientation within the family. These changes were unevenly distributed across social classes and certainly were more noticeable first among the urban upper and professional classes and then in the urban middle class. The term “nuclear family” is often used to indicate a family unit consisting primarily of parents and children, with close ties to grandparents and, sometimes, to aunts, uncles, and first cousins. Extensive evidence shows variations on the nuclear family existed well before 1700, but at that point, at least among many urban families, the smaller, nuclear family became the primary unit. These families were marked by an emphasis on intimacy and affection. Privacy also became the norm, as the influence of the outside world waned. That is, the opinions of those outside the family came to have less influence on what happened within the family.

What contributed to these changes and what followed from them? Certainly, the developments we have been describing were all part of the evolution of family life. The influence of Protestantism on the individual’s sense of responsibility toward God was crucial. This, we have seen, influenced the turn toward private, personal life. The introspection of conduct books and diary writing, the fascination with the imagined lives of the new literary form, the novel, and the focus on the everyday formed the background for changes in families, at least among urbanites of a certain class.

Another change was a new emphasis that marriage should be based on affection. This is not to say that before this time marriages were loveless or without affection, but marriage for romantic love was the exception rather than the norm in all social classes. Issues of property, inheritance, and admission to a guild for tradesmen were all part of the marriage contract. Parents, extended family, and even fellow villagers or townspeople all played a role in mate selection and how family life was conducted. During the 18th century, this changed for many people. The autonomy and individualism that was becoming a more common aspect of life facilitated a change toward marriage being a choice, something one entered into voluntarily and with a person of one’s own choosing. Affection and love became more important as the basis for the marriage, rather than the wishes of the family. The role of the parents, relatives, and townspeople became less important as autonomy and individual choice became more important.

The corollary to this was an increased emphasis on privacy. Students today would be shocked if they could see a typical household of the 1500s. There was little or no privacy. Most people lived in small houses, often one to three rooms in size, and many people other than the nuclear family lived there as well. Apprentices, boarders, other people’s children, relatives, orphans, and others could all be found in a household. Perhaps it is worth noting the use of the term “household,” rather than “home.” Home has a more sentimental meaning to us today, but it was common for many people in the past to live in a household, that is, with other, often unrelated, people. In such a household, then, there would have been a great deal of influence from neighbors. Indeed, historians of the family have often noted that court records of earlier periods are filled with charges brought against neighbors for various complaints—ranging from adultery, to spouse abuse, to failure to provide food to strangers—all brought on the basis of what the neighbor observed or heard from one of the occupants of the household.

This began to change by the 1700s, as family life became more private. The household became more like the home of today, with only family members living in it. This meant less intrusion by the neighbors and by relatives. Over time, even the design of houses changed so that rooms had specific purposes—parlors, bedrooms, and so on—that were meant to give family members greater privacy even within the family. Again, the spread of these practices occurred unevenly across Europe and North America over the succeeding centuries. Indeed, some of the earlier forms of family life are still extant.

In this more private family life, secluded from relatives and neighbors, affection and intimacy between spouses and with children became the norm. This required a high level of personal commitment and attention that presupposed individuality and autonomy. The family consisted of individuals who chose to be together and who based their togetherness on mutual affection. This affection was then extended to their children, who became more central to family life. This is not to say that before the 1700s married people did not love each other or their children; rather, such affectional bonds took on new importance in the definition of family life. The affection and the sentiment that flowed from it came to be seen as crucial to what made life enjoyable and significant. Although this began among the wealthier strata of society, such as entrepreneurs and successful merchants, it soon spread to the middle classes and beyond. Consequently, the family came to be seen as a loving, caring social unit, separate from the rest of the world. It was made up of autonomous, self-regulated individuals who chose to form family bonds and who then socialized their children to be self-regulated individuals.

These changes all played out over time, and their chronology was shaped by place and social class. But they were well under way by the time of the great transformation of work and family life known as the first Industrial Revolution. The impact of industrial capitalism and efforts to manage the self in its wake are our last topics in this chapter.

READING THE SIGNS OF THE BODY IN THE ERA OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM

All of the developments described so far point toward an understanding of how our modern sense of the self emerged. Subjectivity, the sense of an inward private life, and what we now think of as the sensibility of an everyday psychology, grew from a range of practices and changes in social structures. Protestant beliefs and religious practices were instrumental in these changes and had the consequence of creating self-regulating individuals, mindful of their behavior across the range of everyday actions. But other, perhaps unanticipated, consequences occurred as the new emphasis on the mundane prepared the way for the novel, for self-expression through diaries and letters, and for participation in the marketplace. The demands of the latter for looking after one’s own interests in a dynamic setting facilitated the development of self-auditing and self-regulation, as the philosopher Smith articulated. As we have seen, family life also began to change in this period, with a new emphasis on intimacy and affection and with attendant demands for privacy for the family and within the family. All these changes were well under way by the mid-1700s, when the first Industrial Revolution in England created the greatest dynamic of change yet known in the modern Western world. In this context of rapid social change, self-regulation of individual behavior became paramount as individuals sought to secure their place and advancement in the intensely competitive world of industrial capitalism. It is not coincidental that out of this era the modern social sciences emerged as the foundation sciences for understanding and managing individuals in complex societies. The first sciences to promise such self-and social management were physiognomy and phrenology.

In this section, we offer a brief outline of the Industrial Revolution, covering what it was and what its consequences were for social order, and then we turn to an account of the sciences of the body, physiognomy and phrenology, that dominated popular culture among the industrial working and middle classes. With their development and popularity came an implicit message of social and individual improvement and reform.

The First Industrial Revolution

The beginnings of industrial capitalism can be traced back to the late Middle Ages and early modern period in places like Venice and Genoa in Italy, Hamburg in Germany, and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. However far back one traces its beginnings, it is clear that England in the mid-18th century became the primary location for the first large-scale, rapid industrialization of society. Once begun, industrialization spread unevenly across Europe, with some countries not really becoming industrialized until the 20th century. So, our focus is on England with the caveat that we cannot easily generalize to other European states.

Over the course of approximately a century and a half, from 1700 to 1860, England changed from being primarily an agricultural and cottage-industry state to the world’s first industrialized country. Economic historians have pointed out that this rapid change was possible because of the improvements in agricultural productivity, which, by the beginning of the period, provided an adequate food supply for the population. By this time, as well, a large pool of skilled and professional labor could be drawn upon for the emergent industries. The British Isles were also rich in coal; thus, an energy source was close at hand to literally fuel industrialization. In terms of international relations, England’s navy, both military and commercial, made it the dominant country in world trade and provided a critical part of the foundation for the industrializing process by facilitating a supply of raw materials and the export of finished goods.

The British economy experienced unprecedented rates of growth from 1760 to about 1860. In the second quarter of the 19th century alone (1826–1850), income grew more than five times as fast it had in the first half of the 18th century (1701–1750). One scholar predicted that if the rate of income growth from 1826 to 1850 had been maintained, income would have doubled every 28 years (O’Brien & Quinault, 1993). This was remarkable, especially compared to the 120 years required to double income before the Industrial Revolution. Certainly, the citizens of Britain in this period noticed the changes around them and found them remarkable. So did other European countries. By the early 1800s, and particularly after the final English victory over France in 1815, other countries were openly worried about Britain’s commercial and military power. For many, the choice was clear: They had to find a way to emulate the events in Britain.

What social changes followed in the wake of rapid industrialization? Again, we want to be careful not to make statements that are too broad. Industrialization of the workforce was uneven across England, Scotland, and Wales. Some places, in fact, have remained the bucolic pastoral backwaters so beloved of viewers of such American television programming as Masterpiece Theatre. Where industrialization did occur, changes appeared in nearly every facet of British life, from home to the market, in social relations among and within classes, and in how people understood themselves. People in such commercial and industrial settings began to view themselves as living in an increasingly competitive world. That world was progressively an urban one, as people moved from villages and towns to cities to take advantage of the new factory jobs becoming available. In general, the rate of urbanization increased dramatically with industrialization and has remained a continuing trend ever since in all parts of the world.

With urbanization, the number of cities experiencing rapid growth grew significantly. Before industrialization, about 75 percent of the English population lived in rural areas or villages. By 1850, Britain was the first country in the world where more than half the population lived in urban areas. Not only did London grow in population, but regional industrial centers such as Liverpool, Birmingham, and Manchester became large cities in their own right. Manchester, probably the most important industrial city of the 19th century, numbered more than 350,000 people in 1850. So, by the mid-19th century, millions of Britons—men, women, and children—lived in crowded, often unsanitary, dirty cities and often worked long hours in unsafe conditions. The horrors of such places are well captured in the novels of writers like Charles Dickens (1812–1870), whose fictional Coketown in Hard Times (1854) has become the dominant image of the negative social impact of industrialized life in England. Of course, for many people advantages resulted from industrialization. The standard of living, measured in economic terms such as wages and opportunity to buy goods, increased for many people. At the upper end of the economic scale, industrial capitalism increased the wealth of many entrepreneurs and investors. Finally, as noted, the workforce did not all move to large factories. Quite a few industries continued on a relatively small scale, with many “factories” employing fewer than 20 employees. Still, there were significant losses: Many women who had been employed in weaving as part of England’s vast cottage textile industry (work sites were typically in a home, where women gathered to weave cloth) lost their livelihoods.

How is this important for the emergent social sciences, particularly Psychology? In an increasingly urbanized society, where conditions of employment depended on competition among workers and advancement became based on meritocracy rather than family lineage, the need to make sense of one’s life and to understand where one stood vis-à-vis other workers became critically important. Two sciences, if we take the word “science” in its meaning at the time as systematic knowledge, came to be employed in this new world: physiognomy and phrenology.

Reading the Signs of the Body

Physiognomy and phrenology shared some characteristics. Both were based on the assumption of a link between the physical body, or some part of it, and internal qualities or abilities. There is a long history of humans across time and across cultures “reading” the physical body as a signpost toward understanding behavior and predicting possible outcomes. Palmistry, numerology, and the practice of examining stools are all ancient practices, employed for thousands of years to understand and predict human behavior. In the Western world, as the power of exact sciences grew to explain ever more natural phenomena, the reliance on these earlier systems declined, at least to some degree, among the formally educated citizenry. However, for those without access to education and formal learning, the body remained a resource for understanding self and others. This was the case in the Industrial Revolution as modes of life changed from rural–small town to urban and from farm labor or small-shop employment to factory life.

Physiognomy

Physiognomy was an ancient system of understanding human character that was revived and popularized in the late 18th century by a Swiss pastor, Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801). Briefly, in the hands of Lavater, physiognomy was a system of knowledge about human nature that claimed a direct link between the physical, outward appearance of a person and one’s inward nature or character. Lavater insisted that physiognomy was a science because it was based on careful observation (i.e., it was empirical) that made it possible to offer laws of behavior and relationships. While anyone could make such observations, Lavater insisted that only the trained person could fully and accurately describe human character based on physiognomy. His science, Lavater claimed, promised to explicate individual differences and help individuals understand their own nature and feelings, as well as those of others. Thus, it held the promise of facilitating self- and social management. Because its target was the inner life of the person, physiognomy played an important role in forming a psychological sensibility in modern Western society. That is, it was part of the everyday or practical psychology that arose in Western societies in the 18th and 19th centuries and that made the eventual discipline of Psychology possible.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804, see  Chapter 3 ), embraced physiognomy as a part of the kind of psychology he thought possible, even though he argued that psychology could never be an exact science in the manner of mathematics. In fact, Lavater’s ideas were taken up as part of the general debate about education in German-speaking states in the first half of the 19th century. This debate was part of the argument for the development of an empirical psychology that would serve the interests of education and was advanced by such educational philosophers as Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841).

FIGURE 2.2 Johann Caspar Lavate

Apart from such high-minded applications, physiognomy became extremely popular among nonelites. It gave everyday people a psychological language and rubric with which to understand themselves and their neighbors: their feelings, their similarities, and their differences. Lavater published his physiognomic system in four well-illustrated volumes (1775–1778). These volumes remained in print for over a century and were translated into French, Italian, Dutch and English. Many of these translations went into multiple editions, 20 in English alone. Despite Lavater’s insistence that a person needed training to become an expert, people in everyday life could look at the illustrations and believe they saw themselves or their loved ones and neighbors in a light that explained previously hidden characteristics. This, perhaps, helps account for the great popularity of the system and the volumes. Novelists of the time incorporated physiognomy as a shorthand for explaining their characters; the novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817), for example, are full of physiognomic references.

By the beginning of the 19th century, physiognomy was part of the cultural and popular scene, providing an interpretive framework for self-understanding in a dynamic, changing social context. Before long, phrenology had usurped its role and incorporated many of its insights into a new system. In the minds of many people, the two were not differentiated.

Phrenology

The 19th-century phrenologists claimed physiognomy was more akin to folk wisdom than science and so argued that their science provided a sounder basis for understanding the relationship between human character or abilities and the human body. What was the basis for phrenology as a systematic (scientific) explanation for human behavior or functioning? To understand it, we must review the contributions of Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) that we articulated in  Chapter 1 .

You may recall that Gall argued that human mental abilities are tied to the brain as the organ of the mind and that these abilities are innate. His point at the time, the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was that a Cartesian split between mind and body was unnecessary. Since the brain, Gall argued, is the organ of the mind, then the higher mental functions need not be separated into a category reserved for divine influence. As we noted then, Gall’s work was highly controversial, as it challenged long-held notions about the mind and how it could best be understood. Gall was decidedly in the natural law camp, that is, that man’s mental functions operated according to lawful processes and that these processes could be discovered through empirical investigation. In the world of physiology and medicine, Gall’s theories and descriptions prompted a century’s worth of empirical and experimental research that culminated in a general consensus among scientists that the human central nervous system and its actions could be understood by naturalistic means.

However, there was another side to Gall’s work: the impact and appeal his ideas had to the general public, who sought practical knowledge about themselves, their abilities, and their bodies. Gall was a master self-promoter who reached out to these people through public lectures and publications in Vienna, Paris, and many of the other cities of Europe. He called his approach the science of organology.

The basic tenets of Gall’s system were as follows. The brain was composed of many parts, and each of these parts had a distinctive function. The strength of these abilities or functions was reflected in the size of the part of the brain where they were located. Because the skull hardens over the brain in early childhood, the shape of the skull reflects the underlying organization of mental abilities, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Such abilities can be ascertained through empirical examination. Gall originally proposed 27 brain areas or organs covering a range of abilities or propensities, from acquisitiveness to the talent for architecture.

Gall, although eager to make his knowledge available to the public, was not primarily concerned with popularizing his work. He saw it foremost as a scientific system. However, his colleague and assistant Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832) saw in the public’s response to Gall’s organology an opportunity to advance his own career. Gall and Spurzheim parted company in 1813, with Spurzheim developing organology into a more elaborate and practical system that he began to call phrenology. Oddly, however, his first publication on the subject was titled The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim (1815). Spurzheim went on to become a popular lecturer and writer and was just completing a set of lectures in Boston in 1832 when he died. On one of his lecture tours to Scotland, Spurzheim met a young Edinburgh lawyer named George Combe (1788–1858). Combe, after first being doubtful of the claims of phrenology, was won over and embarked on his own career as an advocate for the new science. Combe wrote several treatises on phrenology, especially in relation to his commitment to education reform. His volume summarizing his views, The Constitution of Man (1828), became one of the best sellers in Victorian Britain. Along with his brother, Andrew Combe, he helped make phrenology a social force of considerable significance in the first half of the 19th century in Britain.

A simple recounting of some of the key figures in the early history of psychology does not give an accurate picture of the immense popularity of phrenology. In 1820, George Combe helped found the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh, which three years later began publishing the Phrenological Journal. Within a short time, phrenological societies had been established in 29 other cities. Most of them published a newspaper or some other form of public communication and held open meetings for their members and the public. Phrenology’s successful appeal across the public spectrum was widely remarked upon at the time. To what did it owe its appeal, especially to the working and middle classes?

FIGURE 2.3 George Combe

We noted earlier that industrialization in Britain had brought about new work and social relations. This was especially true in the new factory towns and cities. The mechanization of the workplace created new specific roles where tasks were well defined and performance was closely measured. The division of labor, which Smith had made much of as the necessary arrangement to maximize human productivity and so increase wealth, was also hierarchically arranged so that different status levels had attendant differences in pay levels. A person could work up such a system to become a supervisor or manager of others and thus increase status and pay. This made the workplace a site for competition among workers. Thus, a person’s ability to perform a role well had important implications for future work roles and advancement. Workers were often pitted against one another in intensely competitive conditions. Phrenology offered an insight into how to use this competition to advantage by suggesting that mental abilities are, like physical ones, divisible. That is, the phrenological system posited a division of mental labor that mirrored the division of physical labor in industry. In the competitive atmosphere of the factory, an understanding of one’s own abilities and propensities could help one advance at work. Perhaps more importantly, understanding how to read the signs of the body could help workers assess their competitors and, thus, potentially gain an advantage over them.

Being aware of one’s strengths and weaknesses did not mean that they were fixed and unchangeable. This was an aspect of phrenology that helped give it such wide appeal. In the hands of Combe and others, phrenology became part of the reform efforts in British education. Not only could phrenology provide the initial assessment of abilities, but as it was developed a secondary body of knowledge emerged in how to use phrenological readings to provide advice and guidance for self-improvement. This principle was extended from the workplace to the schoolyard.

Phrenologists argued that understanding the division of mentality, couched in the language of distinct abilities or faculties, could also help in the care and education of children. Since abilities were malleable in relation to one another and the environment, it made sense to reform education so as to give greater attention to instruction that would encourage the further development of positive propensities and lessen the impact of those considered negative.

It was these developments that gave phrenology such a broad appeal across several classes of British society, especially those who stood to gain some social or economic advantage from self-understanding and self-improvement. But phrenology’s appeal was not limited to the British Isles. It had its adherents across much of Europe. And nowhere did it have as enduring an appeal as in the new country across the Atlantic Ocean, the United States.

Phrenology in the United States

Phrenology came to America for the first time in 1820, with a lecture to the Massachusetts Medical Society by John Collins Warren. It received its critical impetus for growth in America from the first and last visit by Spurzheim to Boston in 1832. Spurzheim’s lectures on phrenology were so popular that he felt compelled to repeat them. Unfortunately, he became ill and died suddenly just as he was completing a lecture series in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Phrenology found fertile soil in America and persisted in its popular appeal for the next century. In its success we can see groundwork for the emergence of a psychology of individual differences and the provision, for a fee, of psychological services. Phrenology in America was of the practical variety. Whatever its theoretical merits or its place in arguments about the material basis of human functioning, in the United States its success was linked directly to its application to problems of daily living and adjustment in a dynamic society. America was (and is) a pragmatic society; Americans were interested in what works, what helps, and what is practical. Phrenology was just such a practical science. Not long after Spurzheim’s death in Boston, an enterprising family, the Fowlers, developed a successful business providing phrenological consultations in several major cities of the United States. These fee-based consultations offered an analysis of the person’s abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as guidance for self-improvement. For upwardly mobile clients, or for those who desired to be upwardly mobile, this service was part of the American ethos of self-improvement.

As historian of psychology Michael Sokal has shown, the popularity of phrenology in America was to be found outside the main cities in small towns and the countryside. Itinerant phrenologists, some of whom were self-trained, staked out territories that they then toured, offering counseling and guidance to the citizens. The standard mode of operation in these settings was for the phrenologist to offer a series of free or low-cost lectures in a public building. In these lectures, the virtues of the science were touted and many examples of its usefulness given. Once interest had been stirred, the phrenologist would offer private readings, for a fee, to those who could afford it. Sokal has documented the three main domains in which phrenologists offered professional advice: vocational guidance, family or marital counseling, and child rearing. Careful readings of the skull, documented in annotated charts prepared especially for such sessions, formed the basis for the practical advice then offered. If a client was strong in one area and weak in a complementary one, instructions were given as to how to balance the propensities. Marital advice was given based on a couple’s complementary and antagonistic faculties. Child-rearing advice often centered on how to encourage the development of the child’s natural propensities as indicated by the phrenological reading. It was this kind of practical advice that Americans were seeking and that helped give phrenology such a durable appeal, an appeal that lasted much longer than it did in Britain or other parts of Europe.

Sidebar 2.1 Focus on the Fowler Brothers

A pair of enterprising brothers was particularly successful in capitalizing on the popular appeal of phrenology in America. The Fowler brothers, Orson (1809–1887) and Lorenzo (1811–1896), along with their brother-in-law Samuel Wells, opened phrenological clinics in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the 1830s. The purpose of the clinics was to give phrenological examinations or readings, often in response to specific requests from clients. For example, parents might want insight into their children’s behavior problems, or engaged couples might want to assess their compatibility. Traveling phrenologists also toured the country, announcing their circuit in advance of their arrival and renting space to deliver readings to eager customers.

The Fowler brothers franchised their business by training phrenologists and selling phrenological supplies. These supplies would have included phrenological busts for display and teaching, calipers for taking head measurements, display charts for the offices, and manuals to sell to customers. More than just entrepreneurs, however, the Fowlers were concerned with the professional side of their practice as well. They started the American Phrenological Journal in 1838, which remained in existence for more than 70 years. They also founded a group called The Phrenological Cabinet which, in 1866, became the American Institute of Phrenology.

The immense appeal of phrenology, as we have shown, reflected a widespread interest in self-improvement and the cultural authority of a “science” of self-improvement. The public accepted and believed that personality and character could be studied scientifically and objectively and that with appropriate training they could also be modified. The Fowlers and other trained phrenologists provided individualized self-help manuals and eventually published a range of what we would now consider self-help books. Titles included Phrenology and Physiology Explained and Applied to Education and Self-Improvement, Phrenological Self-Instructor, and How to Read Character: A New Illustrated Handbook of Phrenology and Physiognomy, which was published by Wells in 1879. At one point there were even plans for a phrenological vending machine that would provide character analysis through a self-administered test on a coin-operated machine.

Despite the enormous popular appeal of phrenology and the efforts of the Fowlers to establish its professional legitimacy, it consistently received criticism in terms of its scientific validity. Some historians have argued that the Fowler brothers ignored this criticism and were unconcerned with phrenology’s scientific status. But a look at the contents of their journal reveals that many articles specifically attested to the scientific validity of the practice—thus indicating that this was a concern for them. It has been argued that the popularity of phrenological readings declined by the early 20th century not because of its lack of scientific validity—which had always been in question—but because different sets of tools were being developed by different sets of practitioners that came to supplant phrenology. These practitioners included applied psychologists who were developing mental tests (see  Chapter 6 ). However, the British Phrenological Society was not disbanded until 1967, and Lorenzo Fowler’s daughter Jessie Fowler continued to practice until her death in 1932. One moral of the story is that the popular appeal of psychological practices does not always vary in direct proportion to the extent that they are viewed as scientifically credible.

FIGURE 2.4 A phrenological diagram from How to Read Character: A New Illustrated Handbook of Phrenology and Physiognomy (New York: Fowler & Wells Co., 1896)

Phrenology was important in America for the later development of a psychology grounded in individual differences. Its fee-for-service basis helped prepare Americans for a practical and professional Psychology. It appealed, too, because it was a practical science that fit well with the American self-help and self-improvement ethic; it was a science of human nature that made it possible for everyone to help themselves. It was optimistic, which also fit with the American belief that change is always possible. Lastly, but certainly not least importantly, it was not intellectual; one did not need much of an education to understand its results. Thus, it was available to the “common man.” One writer has called it the first real psychology of modern life (Bakan, 1966b).

SUMMARY

Beginning from the early modern period in the Western world and proceeding to our own time, remarkable growth occurred in the sense of the self as autonomous and private. This self was and is marked by a subjective psychological sensibility different from the sensibility of earlier eras. It has now become so taken for granted that it is hard for people today to imagine how it could ever have been otherwise.

In this chapter, we indicated some practices that contributed to this subjectivity, or psychologizing, of the interior life. As you may have noticed, this is a topic that is hard to pin down, as the term “subjectivity” indicates. Unlike the writings of philosophers or the experiments of scientists, which have come down to us in published accounts, we relied in this part of our account on practices from daily life to make our arguments for the changes that occurred. Such evidence is more nebulous than the well-reasoned arguments of John Locke or the careful experiments of Hermann von Helmholtz. But the results are just as substantial in their impact on human behavior and relationships. What we can say with confidence is that the sense of personal identity has undergone a remarkable change in Western society over the last 400 years. Every facet of life, from religion to the marketplace, both contributed to this change and, of course, reflected it in an endless feedback loop.

Everyday people, typically without the resources of the elites discussed in the previous chapter, found ways to adapt to their changing worlds. This is not to portray these processes of change as anything less than wrenching; for significant numbers of individuals, they were traumatic, as large-scale change often is. We who live today in the Western world owe our sense of ourselves, as selves, to what has gone before. It is our predecessors’ adaptation over the last several centuries that created our current conditions of life and made the discipline of Psychology possible. Without a sense of self, a science of the self could never have emerged.

Chapter 3A Selecting a Problem and Reviewing the Research

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT IN THIS CHAPTER:

· • How to select a research problem

· • Defining and sorting out idea after idea until one fits your interests

· • The importance of personal experience in selecting a problem

· • The steps in reviewing the literature

· • Different sources of information and how to use them

· • How to use journals, abstracts, and indices

· • The difference between primary and secondary resources

· • Using a synthesis of literature

· • How scholarly journals work

· • Using the Internet to complete your literature review

So here you are, in the early part of a course that focuses on research methods, and now you have to come up with a problem that you are supposed to be interested in! You are probably so anxious about learning the material contained in your professor’s lectures and what is in this volume that you barely have time to think about anything else.

If you stop for a moment and let your mind explore some of the issues in the behavioral and social sciences that have piqued your interest, you will surely find something that you want to know more about. That is what the research process is all about—finding out more about something that is, in part, already known.

Once you select an area of interest, you are only part of the way there. Next comes the statement of this interest in the form of a research question followed by a formal hypothesis. Then it is on to reviewing the literature, a sort of fancy phrase that sounds like you will be very busy! A literature review involves library time online or actually there, note taking, and organizational skills (and of course writing), but it provides a perspective on your question that you cannot get without knowing what other work has been done as well as what new work needs to be done.

But hold on a minute! How is someone supposed to have a broad enough understanding of the field and spew forth well-formed hypotheses before the literature is reviewed and then become familiar with what is out there? As poet John Ciardi wrote, therein “lies the rub.”

The traditional philosophers and historians of science would have us believe that the sequence of events leading up to a review of what has been done before (as revealed in the literature) is as shown in  Figure 3A.1a . This sequence of steps is fine in theory, but as you will discover, the actual process does not go exactly in the manner shown in the figure.

The research question and research hypothesis are more an outgrowth of an interaction between the scientist’s original idea and an ongoing, thorough review of the literature (good scientists are always reading), as you can see in  Figure 3A.1b . This means that once you formulate a hypothesis, it is not carved in stone but can be altered to fit what the review of the literature may reflect, as well as any change in ideas you may have. Remember, our work “stands on the shoulder of grants.”

For example, you might be interested in how working adults manage their time when they are enrolled in graduate programs. That’s the kernel of the idea you want to investigate. A research question might ask what the effects of enrollment in graduate school and full-time work are on personal relationships and personal growth. For a hypothesis, you might predict that those adults enrolled in school and who work full time and who participate in a time management support group have more meaningful personal relationships than those who do not.

Figure 3A.1a From idea to literature review, with the research hypothesis on the way.

Figure 3A.1b From idea and literature review to research hypothesis.

Use the results of previous studies to fine-tune your research ideas and hypothesis.

You might consider the hypothesis to be finished at this point, but in reality your ongoing review of the literature and your changing ideas about the relationship between the variables will influence the direction your research will take. For example, suppose the findings of a similar previous study prompt you to add an interesting dimension (such as whether the employer subsidizes the cost of tuition) to your study, because the addition is consistent with the intent of your study. You should not have to restrict your creative thinking or your efforts to help you understand the effects of these factors just because you have already formulated a hypothesis and completed a literature review. Indeed, the reason for completing the review is to see what new directions your work might take. The literature review and the idea play off one another to help you form a relevant, conceptually sound research question and research hypothesis.

In sum, you will almost always find that your first shot at a hypothesis might need revision, given the content of the literature that you review. Remember, it is your idea that you will pursue. The way in which you execute it as a research study will be determined by the way in which you state the research question and the way in which you test the research hypothesis. It is doubtful that a review of the relevant literature would not shed some light on this matter.

This chapter begins with some pointers on selecting a problem worth studying, and then the focus moves to a description of the tools and the steps involved in preparing a review of the literature.

Selecting a Problem

People go to undergraduate and graduate school for a variety of reasons, including preparing for a career, the potential financial advantages of higher education, and even expanding their personal horizons and experiencing the sheer joy of learning (what a radical thought!). Many of you are in this specific course for one or more of these reasons.

Select a problem which genuinely interests you.

The great commonality between your course work and activities is your exposure to a wealth of information which you would not otherwise experience. That is the primary purpose of taking the time to select a research problem that makes sense to you and that interests you, while at the same time makes a contribution to your specific discipline. The selection of the area in which to work on is extremely important for two reasons. First, research takes a great deal of time and energy, and you want to be sure that the area you select interests you. You will work so hard throughout this project that continuing to work on it, even if it’s the most interesting project, may at times become overwhelming. Just think of what it would be like if you were not interested in the topic!

Second, the area you select is only the first step in the research process. If this goes well, the remaining steps, which are neither more nor less important, also have a good chance of going well.

Just as there are many different ways to go about selecting a research problem, there are also some potential hazards. To start you off on the right foot, the following briefly reviews some of these almost fatal errors.

It is easy to do, but falling in love with your idea can be fatal. This happens when you become so infatuated with an idea and the project and you invest so much energy in it that you cannot bear to change anything about it. Right away someone is going to say, “What’s wrong with being enthusiastic about your project?” My response is a strong, “Nothing at all.” As does your professor, most researchers encourage and look for enthusiasm in students (and scientists) as an important and essential quality. But enthusiasm is not incompatible with being objective and dispassionate about the actual research process (not the content). Sometimes—and this is especially true for beginning research students—researchers see their question as one of such magnitude and importance that they fail to listen to those around them, including their adviser, who is trying to help them formulate their problem in such a way as to make it more precise and, in the long run, easier to address. Be committed to your ideas and enthusiastic about your topic but not so much that it clouds your judgment as to the practical and correct way to do things.

Next, sticking with the first idea that comes to mind isn’t always wise. Every time the 1930s cartoon character Betty Boop had a problem, her inventor grandfather would sit on his stool, cross his legs (taking a Rodin-like pose), and think about a solution. Like a bolt from the blue, the light bulb above his head would go on, and Grampy would exclaim, “I’ve got it!,” but the idea was never exactly right. Another flash would occur, but once again the idea was not perfect. Invariably, it was the third time the light went on that he struck gold.

Do you like your first idea for a research study? Great, but don’t run out and place an advertisement for research participants in the newspaper quite yet. Wait a few days and think about it, and by no means should you stop talking to other students and your adviser during this thinking stage. Second and third ideas are usually much more refined, easier to research, and more manageable than first ones. As you work, rewrite and rethink your work . . . constantly.

Do you want to guarantee an unsuccessful project that excites no one (except perhaps yourself)? Doing something trivial by selecting a problem that has no conceptual basis or apparent importance in the field can lead to a frustrating experience and one that provides no closure. Beginning students who make this mistake sometimes over-intellectualize the importance of their research plans and don’t take the time to ask themselves, “Where does this study fit in with all that has been done before?” Any scientific endeavor has as its highest goal the contribution of information that will help us better to understand the world in general and the specific topic being studied in particular. If you find out what has been done by reading previous studies and use that information as a foundation, then you will surely come up with a research problem of significance and value.

Ah, then there are researchers who bite off more than they can chew. Sound silly? Not to the thousands of advisers who sit day after day in their offices trying to convince well-intentioned beginning students that their ideas are interesting but that (for example) it may be a bit ambitious to ask every third adult in New York City about their attitudes toward increasing taxes to pay for education. Grand schemes are fine, but unless you can reduce a question to a manageable size, you might as well forget about starting your research. If these giant studies by first-timers ever do get done (most of the time they don’t in their original form), the experiences are usually more negative than positive. Sometimes these students end up as  ABD s (all but dissertation). Although you may not be seeking a doctorate right now, the lesson is still a good one. Give yourself a break from the beginning—choose a research question that is doable.

Finally, if you do something that has already been done, you could be wasting your time. There is a fine line between what has been done and what is important to do next based on previous work. Part of your job is to learn how to build and elaborate on the results of previous research without duplicating previous efforts. You might remember from the beginning of this chapter that I stressed how replication is an important component of the scientific process and good research. Your adviser can clearly guide you as to what is redundant (doing the exact same thing over without any sound rationale) and what is an important contribution (doing the same thing over but exploring an aspect of the previous research or even asking the same question, while eliminating possibly confounding sources of variance present in the first study).

TEST YOURSELF

Perhaps one of the most interesting dimensions of being a scientist is how the questions they ask are modified as they review the literature and learn more about the topic they are interested in. It’s a constant give and take—hence the importance of being well informed. Ask your advisor or some other faculty how they keep themselves informed in their own field of study.

Defining Your Interests

It is always easy for accomplished researchers to come up with additional ideas for research, but that is what they are paid and trained to do (in part, anyway). Besides, experienced researchers can put all that experience to work for themselves, and one thing (a study) usually leads to another (another study).

Never disregard personal experience as an important source of ideas.

But what about the beginning student such as yourself? Where do you get your ideas for research? Even if you have a burning desire to be an experimental psychologist, a teacher, a counselor, or a clinical social worker, where do you begin to find hints about ideas that you might want to pursue?

In some relatively rare cases, students know from the beginning what they want to select as a research area and what research questions they want to ask. Most students, however, experience more anxiety and doubt than confidence. Before you begin the all-important literature review, first take a look at the following suggestions for where you might find interesting questions that are well worth considering as research topics.

First, personal experiences and firsthand knowledge more often than not can be the catalyst for starting research. For example, perhaps you worked at a summer camp with disabled children and are interested in knowing more about the most effective way to teach these children. Or, through your own personal reading, you have become curious about the aging process and how it affects the learning process. A further example: At least three of my colleagues are special educators because they have siblings who were not offered the special services they needed as children to reach their potential. Your own experiences shape the type of person you are. It would be a shame to ignore your past when considering the general area and content of a research question, even if you cannot see an immediate link between these experiences and possible research activities. Keep reading and you will find ways to help you create that link.

You may want to take complete responsibility for coming up with a research question. On the other hand, there is absolutely nothing wrong with consulting your advisor or some other faculty member who is working on some interesting topic and asking, “What’s next?” Using ideas from your mentor or instructorwill probably make you very current with whatever is happening in your field. Doing so also will help to establish and nurture the important relationship between you and your adviser (or some other faculty member), which is necessary for an enjoyable and successful experience. These are the people doing the research, and it would be surprising not to find that they have more ideas than time to devote to them and would welcome a bright, energetic student (like you) who wants to help extend their research activities.

Next, you might look for a research question that reflects the next step in the research process. Perhaps A, B, and C have already been done, and D is next in line. For example, your special interest might be understanding the lifestyle factors that contribute to heart disease, and you already know that factors such as personality type (for example, Type A and Type B) and health habits (for example, social drinking) have been well studied and their effects well documented. The next logical step might be to look at factors such as work habits (including occupation and attitude) or some component of family life (such as quality of relationships). As with research activities in almost all disciplines and within almost all topics, there is always that next logical step that needs to be taken.

Last, but never least, is that you may have to come up with a research question because of this class. Now that is not all that bad either, if you look at it this way: People who come up with ideas on their own are all set and need not worry about coming up with an idea by the deadline. Those people who have trouble formulating ideas need a deadline; otherwise, they would not get anything done. So although there are loftier reasons for coming up with research questions, sometimes it is just required. Even so, you need to work very hard at selecting a topic that you can formulate as a research question so that your interest is held throughout the duration of the activity.

TEST YOURSELF

You’d be surprised how many important scientific breakthroughs were the result of informal talk (aka “bull”) sessions between people interested in the same or similar topics. Just sitting around and talking about ideas is one of the great pleasures when it comes to learning and scientific discovery. Be a bit creative and list five ideas you have or questions you find particularly interesting about any topic. Don’t worry at this point how you would answer the question but take a few intellectual risks and see what you come up with.

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas (and What to Do with Them)

Even if you are sure of what your interest might be, sometimes it is still difficult to come up with a specific idea for a research project. For better or worse, you are really the only one who can do this for yourself, but the following is a list of possible research topics, one of which might strike a chord. For each of these topics, there is a wealth of associated literature. If one topic piques your interest, go to that body of literature (described in the second part of this chapter) and start reading.

·  aggression

AIDS

autism spectrum disorder

bilingual education

biofeedback

biology of memory

birth control

body image

central nervous system

child care

children of war

circadian rhythms

classical conditioning

cognitive development

color vision

competition

compliance

computer applications

conflict

cooperative learning

creativity

delusions

depression

déjà vu

development of drawing

diets

divorce

dreams

drug abuse

early intervention

egocentrism

elder care

endocrine system

epilepsy

ethics

exercise

fat

fetal alcohol syndrome

fluid intelligence

gender differences

Head Start

homeschooling

identity

imagery

intelligence

language development

learning disabilities

mediation

memory

menarche

mental sets

middle adulthood

motivation

narcolepsy

neural development

nightmares

nutrition

obesity

optimism

pain

parenting

perception

prejudice

public policy

racial integration

reinforcement

relaxation

REM sleep

self-esteem

violence in schools

From Idea to Research Question to Hypothesis

Once you have determined what your specific interest might be, you should move as quickly as possible to formulate a research question that you want to investigate and begin your review of literature.

Research ideas lead the way to hypotheses.

There is a significant difference between your expressing an interest in a particular idea and the statement of a research question. Ideas are full of those products of luxurious thinking: beliefs, conceptions, suppositions, assumptions, what if’s, guesses, and more. Research questions are the articulation, best done in writing, of those ideas that at the least imply a relationship between variables. Why is it best done in writing? Because it is too easy to “get away” with spoken words. It is only when you have to write things down and live with them (spoken words seem to vanish mysteriously) that you face up to what has been said, make a commitment, and work to make sense out of the statement.

Unlike a hypothesis, a research question is not a declarative statement but rather is a clearly stated expression of interest and intent. In the pay-me-now or pay-me-later tradition, the more easily understood and clearer the research question, the easier your statement of a hypothesis and review of the literature will be. Why? From the beginning, a clear idea of what you want to do allows you to make much more efficient use of your time when it comes to searching for references and doing other literature review activities.

Finally, it is time to formulate a hypothesis or a set of hypotheses that reflects the research question. Remember from  Chapter 2  the set of five criteria that applies to the statement of any hypothesis? To refresh your memory, here they are again. A well-written hypothesis

· 1. is stated in declarative form

· 2. posits a relationship between variables

· 3. reflects a theory or body of literature upon which it is based

· 4. is brief and to the point

· 5. is testable

When you derive your hypothesis from the research question, you should look to these criteria as a test of whether what you are saying is easily communicated to others and easily understood. Remember, the sources for ideas can be anything from a passage that you read in a novel last night to your own unique and creative thoughts. When you get to the research question stage, however, you need to be more scientific and clearly state what your interest is and what variables you will consider.

Table 3A.1 Research ideas and questions and the hypothesis that reflect them

Research Interest or Ideas	Research Problem or Questions	Research Hypothesis
Open Classroom and Academic Success	What is the effect of open versus traditional classrooms on reading level?	Children who are taught reading in open classroom settings will read at a higher grade level than children who are taught reading in a traditional setting.
Television and Consumer Behavior	How does watching television commercials affect the buying behavior of adolescents?	Adolescent boys buy more of the products advertised on television than do adolescent girls.
Effectiveness of Checklists in Preventing Hospital Infections	Does the use of checklists when preparing patients for surgery help reduce the level of infection in the hospital?	Those hospitals that regularly use checklists in patient preparation for surgery will have a lower rate of infection per 1,000 patients then these hospitals, which do not.
Food Preference and Organic Foods	Do consumers prefer food that i s organ i c?	There will be a difference in preference level as measured by the I ♥ Food scale between those consumers who are offered organic food and those who are offered non-organic food.
Use of Energy by Home Owners	Will a home owners’ energy usage change as a function of his or her knowledge of his or her neighbor’s usage?	Those people who know how much energy their neighbors use on a monthly basis will use less energy.
Adult Care	How have many adults adjusted to the responsibility of caring for their aged parents?	The number of children who are caring for their parents in the child’s own home has increased over the past 10 years.

Table 3A.1  lists five research interests, the research questions that were generated from those ideas, and the final hypotheses. These hypotheses are only final in the sense that they more or less fit the five criteria for a well-written hypothesis. Your literature review and more detailed discussion may mean that variables must be further defined and perhaps even that new ones will need to be introduced. A good hypothesis tells what you are going to do, not how you will do it.

TEST YOURSELF

As Pasteur said, chance does favor the prepared mind and you will never know where the best information will come from. So, even if some class seems to contain material unrelated to your specialty or your interests, you never know what insight you might gain from reading widely and discussing ideas with your fellow students. What five things might you read (that you have not) that are related to your interests?

Reviewing the Literature

Here it comes again. Today’s research is built on a foundation of the hard work and dedication of past researchers and their productive efforts. Where does one find the actual results of these efforts? Look to scholarly journals and books and other resources, which are located in the library and online.

The review of literature provides a framework for the research proposal.

Although all stages in the research process are important, a logical and systematic review of the literature often sets the stage for the completion of a successful research proposal and a successful study. Remember one of the fatal mistakes mentioned at the beginning of the chapter about selecting a research question that has been done before? Or one that is trivial? You find out about all these things and more when you see what has already been done and how it has been done. A complete review provides a framework within which you can answer the important question(s) that you pose. A review takes you chronologically through the development of ideas, shows you how some ideas were left by the wayside because of lack of support, and tells you how some were confirmed as being truths. An extensive and complete review of the literature gives you that important perspective to see what has been done and where you are going—crucial to a well-written, well-documented, well-planned report.

So get out your yellow (or recyclable white) writing pads, index cards, pens or pencils, laptop computer, or iPad and let’s get started. Also, don’t forget your school ID card so you can check out books at the campus library.

The literature review process consists of the steps listed in  Figure 3A.2 . You begin with as clear an idea as possible about what you want to do, in the form either of a clear and general statement about the variables you want to study or of a research hypothesis. You should end with a well-written, concise document that details the rationale for why you chose the topic you did, how it fits into what has been done before, what needs to be done in the future, and what is its relative importance to the discipline.

There are basically three types of sources that you will consult throughout your review of the literature (see  Table 3A.2 ). The first are  general sources , which provide clues about the location of references of a general nature on a topic. Such sources certainly have their limitations (which we will get to in a moment), but they can be a real asset because they provide a general overview of, and introduction to, a topic.

Figure 3A.2 The steps in reviewing the literature. It is a formidable task, but when broken down step by step, it is well within your reach.

Table 3A.2 What different sources can do for you in your search for relevant material about an interesting research question

Information Source	What It Does	Examples
General Sources	Provides an overview of a topic and provides leads to where more information can be found	Daily newspaper, news weeklies, popular periodicals and magazines, trade books, Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, New York Times Index
Secondary Sources	Provides a level of information “Once removed” from the original work	Books on specific subjects and reviews of research
Primary Sources	The original reports of the original work or experience	Journals, abstracts and scholarly books, Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), movies

For example, let’s say you are interested in the general area of sports psychology but have absolutely no idea where to turn to find more information. You could start with a recent article that appeared in the New York Times (a general source) and find the name of the foremost sports psychologist and then go to more detailed secondary or primary sources to find out more about that person’s work.

The second source type,  secondary sources , are “once removed” from the actual research. These include review papers, anthologies of readings, syntheses of other work in the area, textbooks, and encyclopedias.

General, secondary, and primary resources are all important, but very different, parts of the literature review.

Finally, the most important sources are  primary sources . These are accounts of the actual research that has been done. They appear as journal articles or as other original works including abstracts.  Table 3A.2 summarizes the functions of general, secondary, and primary resources and provides some examples. These three different types of sources are also covered in  Chapter 9  in a discussion of historical methods of doing research.

Before you get started, let me share my own particular bias. There is no substitute for using every resource that your library has to offer, and that means spending lots of time turning the pages of books and journals and reading their contents. In many cases, however, there’s no substitute for exploring and using electronic resources such as online databases. You’ll learn about both printed and electronic resources here, but you should remember that you won’t find everything you need online (and much of it is not verifiable), yet online is where the most recent material appears. There is even material now being posted online that will not show up in the library—a new and very interesting development owing to the appearance of online (only) journals and e-books. However, at least for now, begin developing your library as well as your online skills. The online world of literature may someday be the only world of literature, but that surely will not be the case this semester.

One last note before we get started. Your university has an absolute ton of online resources available to you and probably more than you can imagine. How do you find out what might be available? Well, you can access your library online and find out, or follow these steps:

· 1. Go to any of the libraries on your campus.

· 2. Ask for where the reference librarians sit.

· 3. Ask one for a short tour of what’s online (or enroll in one of many classes that most libraries offer at the beginning of the semester to address these skills especially).

One of the best kept secrets on any college campus is how smart and resourceful reference librarians are. Reference librarians are the original search engines. Get to know them (individually)—it will serve you very well.

Using General Sources

General sources of information provide two things: (1) a general introduction to areas in which you might be interested and (2) some clues as to where you should go for the more valuable or useful (in a scientific sense, anyway) information about your topic. They also provide great browsing material.

Any of the references discussed below, especially the indices of national newspapers and so on, can offer you 5, 10, or 50 articles in a specific area. In these articles, you will often find a nice introduction to the subject area and a mention of some of the people doing the research and where they are located. From there, you can look through other reference materials to find out what other work that person has done or even how to contact that person directly.

There are loads of general sources in your college or university library as well as in your local public library and online as well. The following is a brief description of just a few of the most frequently used sources and a listing of several others you might want to consult. Remember to use general sources only to orient yourself to what is out there and to familiarize yourself with the topic.

All of what follows can be accessed online, but the  URL  (or the Uniform Resource Locator) will differ since you may be accessing it through your university or college.

Readers’ Guide, Full Text Mega Edition is by far the most comprehensive available guide to general literature. Organized by topic, it is published monthly, covering hundreds of journals (such as the New England Journal of Medicine) and periodicals or magazines (such as Scientific American). Because the topics are listed alphabetically, you are sure to find reading sources on a selected topic easily and quickly.

New to the Readers’ Guide world is now the Readers’ Guide Retrospective, which allows access to more than 100 years of coverage from 375 U.S. magazines with indexing of leading magazines back as far as 1890 and citations to more than 3,000,000 articles. If you can’t find something about your interests or related topics here, it’s time to reassess the topic you want to focus on.

Another very valuable source of information is the Facts on File Online Databases with content first published in New York in 1940. Facts on File presents a collection of databases that include tens of thousands of articles and other resources (such as video and audio files) in a multitude of areas. The following list shows you what just some of these databases are and a brief description of each:

· • U.S. Government Online presents in-depth information on the structure and function of the U.S. government.

· • American History Online covers more than 500 years of political, military, social, and cultural history.

· • African-American History Online provides cross-referenced entries, covering African American history.

· • Curriculum Video on Demand provides a video subscription to more than 5,000 educational programs.

· • Science Online contains information on a broad range of scientific disciplines.

· • Ferguson’s Career Guidance Center provides profiles of more than 3,300 jobs and 94 industries.

· • Bloom’s Literary Reference Online contains information on thousands of authors and their works, including an archive of 38,000 characters.

· • And, the grandparent of them all, Facts On File World News Digest, which is the standard resource for information on U.S. and world events

The New York Times Index lists by subject all the articles published in the Times since 1851. Once you find reference to an article that might be of interest, you then go to the stacks and select a copy of the actual issue or view it on microfilm. The originals are seldom available because they are printed on thin paper which was designed to hold up only for the few days that a newspaper might be read.

Instead, contents are recorded on microfilm or some other medium and are available through your library. Many libraries now have microfilm readers that allow you to copy directly from the microfilm image and make a print or hardcopy of what you are viewing. The full text of many newspapers is also now available electronically (discussed later in this chapter). And, although the index is not available online, you can search through the archives of the New York Times online at  http://www.nytimes.com —most articles are free to access, but as of this writing, future users are likely to be charged (unless you subscribe to the print edition individually) and of course, probably still free at your local library or institution’s libraries.

Nobody should take what is printed as the absolute truth, but weekly news magazines such as Time( http://www.time.com/time/ ), Newsweek ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032542/site/newsweek/ ), and U.S. News and World Report ( http://www.usnews.com/ ) offer general information and keep you well informed about other related events as well. You may not even know that you have an interest in a particular topic (such as ethical questions in research), but a story on that topic might be in a current issue, catch your eye, and before you know it you will be using that information to seek out other sources.

There are two other very comprehensive electronic general source databases: Lexis/Nexis Academic (there are other versions as well) and the Expanded Academic ASAP, both of which are probably available online through your library.

Lexis/Nexis Academic is the premier database. It is absolutely huge in its coverage and contains information on current events, sports, business, economics, law, taxes, and many other areas. It offers full text of selected newspaper articles.  Figure 3A.3  shows you the results of a search on the general term “school finance.” You can print this information, e-mail it (to yourself of course if you are in the library and have no other way to record it), and sort in various ways (such as by date).

Figure 3A.3 The results of a simple LexisNexis search.

Copyright © 2007. Reprinted with the permission of LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. LexisNexis and the Knowledge Burst logo are registered trademarks of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc. used with the permission of LexisNexis.

The Expanded Academic ASAP is a multidisciplinary database for research, which provides information on disciplines such as the humanities, communication studies, social science, the arts, science, technology and many more disciplines. It covers from 1980 to the present and contains well over 18 million articles.

As the electronic world of resources and reference tools charges long, Google has shown its value in at least two different ways.

First there is Google Scholar, which provides a tool to broadly search for scholarly literature. You can search across disciplines and sources to find articles and books (and other types of publications such as abstracts) and it is the ideal way to locate works by a particular scholar. For example, if you are interested in learning more about what Ron Haskins, a noted expert on policy and families, has done, go to Google Scholar and search; you’ll find works completed by Professor Haskins as well as works in which he is referenced. What a terrific help!

Also, there is Google Books, where Google has undertaken the process of digitizing and making available for no charge millions of books in libraries and other institutions around the world. In Google Books, you can find everything from a limited preview of a book you need for class or the full text of other books that may, or may not, be in the public domain.

Google Books is an absolutely invaluable tool for any researcher, but its use is not without controversy. After all, an author’s work is appearing with no charge to the user and no benefit to the author (such as a royalty payment). The years to come will sort out how tools such as Google Books can be used and still be fair to the author as well as to the researchers.

Then, there is the wealth of information you can dig out of everyday sources such as your local newspaper, company newsletters, and other publications. Thousands of newspapers can be accessed through  http://www.newspapers.com , and newspapers often carry the same Associated Press articles as major papers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. And, please, do not forget the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), which regularly publishes thousands of documents on everything from baseball to bees, and the majority of these documents are free—your tax dollars at work. Do you want to know more about the GPO? Visit  http://www.gpo.gov  for a catalog of what is available.

Finally, there’s the hugely popular and successful Wikipedia (at  http://www.wikipedia.org/ ), an encyclopedia that is almost solely based on the contributions of folks like you and me. At this writing, Wikipedia contains over 3,000,000 articles on absolutely everything you can think of. This may be the perfect online place to start your investigations.

Trustworthy? To a great extent, yes. Wikipedia is monitored by content experts, and a recent study found that the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica had more factual errors than did Wikipedia. And, of course, the great thing about any wiki (and it is a general term for anything built on the contributions of many people and open for editing by anyone as well) is that the facts, if incorrect initially, will surely be changed or modified.

The Wikipedia site also contains other wikis, including Wiktionary (a dictionary), Wikinews, Wikiquotes, and more. Just exploring the encyclopedia and these ancillaries is fun.

Finally, one especially useful source that you should not overlook is The Statistical Abstract of the United States, published yearly by the U. S. Department of Commerce ( http://www.census.gov/statab/www ). This national database about the United States includes valuable, easily accessible information on demographics and much more.

Using Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are those that you seek out if you are looking for a scholarly summary of the research that has been done in a particular area or if you are looking for further sources of references.

Major syntheses of information such as reviews can be a terrific foundation for your review.

Reviews and Syntheses of Literature

These are the BIG books you often find in the reference section of the library (not in the stacks). Because so many people want to use them, they must always be available. The following is a summary of some of the most useful. More and more of these books are being published as encyclopedias.

A general secondary source of literature reviews is the Annual Reviews (published since 1930 by Annual Reviews in about 40 disciplines), containing about 20 chapters and focusing on a wide variety of topics such as medicine, anthropology, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, political science, psychology, public health, and sociology. Just think of it—you can go through the past 10 years of these volumes and be very up-to-date on a wide range of general topics. If you happen to find one chapter on exactly what you want to do, you are way ahead of the game. You can find out more about these volumes and see sample tables of contents at  http://www.annualreviews.org/ .

Another annual review that is well worth considering is the National Society for the Study of Education(or NSSE) Yearbooks (also available at  http://nsse-chicago.org ). Each year since 1900, this society has published a two-volume annual that focuses on a particular topic, such as adolescence, microcomputers in the classroom, gifted and talented children, and classroom management. The area of focus is usually some contemporary topic, and if you are interested in what is being covered, the information can be invaluable to you. The 2009 yearbook has as its focus “localism.”

The Condition of Education in Brief 2007 (available at  http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2007066 ) contains a summary of 20 of the 48 indicators in the Condition of Education 2007, including public and private enrollment in elementary/secondary education, the racial/ethnic distribution of public school students, students’ gains in reading and mathematics achievement through third grade, trends in student achievement from the National Assessment of Education Progress in reading and mathematics, international comparisons of mathematics literacy, annual earnings of young adults by education and race/ethnicity, status dropout rates, immediate transition to college, availability of advanced courses in high school, inclusion of students with disabilities in regular classrooms, school violence and safety, faculty salary and total compensation, early development of children, expenditures per student in elementary and secondary education, and public effort to fund postsecondary education. The files are available for downloading.

If you are interested in child development, seek out the Handbook of Child Psychology (Wiley 2006), which is often used as the starting point (for ideas) by developmental and child psychology students, early childhood education students, medical and nursing students, and many others. The four individual volumes are

· • Volume 1: Theoretical Models of Human Development

· • Volume 2: Cognition, Perception and Language

· • Volume 3: Social, Emotional and Personality Development

· • Volume 4: Child Psychology in Practice

Finally, there’s the eight-volume Encyclopedia of Psychology from Oxford University Press (2000), which includes 1,500 articles on every aspect of psychology.

Also, do not forget the large number of scholarly books that sometimes have multiple authors and are edited by one individual or that are written entirely by one person (which, in the latter case, is sometimes considered a primary resource, depending on its content). Use the good old card catalog (or your library’s computerized search system) to find the title or author you need.

Using Primary Sources

Primary sources are the meat and potatoes of the literature review. Although you will get some good ideas and a good deal of information from reading the secondary sources, you have to go to the real thing to get the specific information to support your points and make them stick.

In fact, your best bet is to include mostly primary sources in your literature review, with some secondary sources to help make your case. Do not even think about including general sources. It is not that the information in Redbook or the New Jersey Star Ledger is not useful or valuable. That information is secondhand, however, and you do not want to build an argument based on someone else’s interpretation of an idea or concept.

Get to know your library and where you can find journals related to your field of study. Most libraries offer tours on a regular basis.

Journals

Journals? You want journals?  Table 3A.3  lists journals arranged by category. This should be enough for you to answer your professor when he asks, “Who can tell me some of the important journals in your own field?” This list is only a small selection of what is available. The print version of Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory (first published in 1932) lists information on thousands of periodicals, including journals, consumer magazines, and trade publications (at  http://www.ulrichsweb.com/  and at your library as well).

Table 3A.3 A sample of the thousands of journals being published in all different fields

Psychology
Adolescence American Journal of Family Therapy American Journal of Orthopsychiatry American Psychologist Behavioral Disorders Child Development Child Study Journal Developmental Psychology Contemporary Educational Psychology Educational and Psychological Measurement Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis Journal of Autism and Development Disorders Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology Journal of Counseling Psychology Journal of Educational Psychology	Journal of Experimental Child Psychology Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and Performance Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory, and Cognition Journal of Genetic Psychology Journal of Humanistic Psychology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Journal of Psychology Journal of Research in Personality Journal of School Psychology Perceptual and Motor Skills Psychological Bulletin Psychological Review Psychology in the Schools Psychology of Women Quarterly Small Group Behavior Transactional Analysis Journal
Special Educational and Exceptional Children
Academic Therapy American Annals of the Deaf American Journal of Mental Deficiency Behavioral Disorders Education and Training of the Mentally Retarded	Journal of Learning Disabilities Journal of Mental Deficiency Research Journal of Special Education Journal of Special Education Technology Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders
Education of the Visually Handicapped Exceptional Children Exceptional Education Quarterly Exceptional Parent Gifted Child Quarterly Hearing and Speech Action International Journal for the Education of the Blind Journal for the Education of the Gifted Journal of The Association for the Severely Handicapped	Journal of Speech and Hearing Research Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness Learning Disability Quarterly Mental Retardation Sightsaving Review Teaching Exceptional Children Teacher Education and Special Education Teacher of the Blind Topics in Early Childhood Special Education Volta Review
Health and Physical Education
Journal of Health Education Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education Journal of Leisure Research Journal of Motor Learning Journal of Nutrition Education Journal of Outdoor Education Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance	Journal of School Health Journal of Sport Health Physical Educator Research Quarterly of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance School Health Review
Child Psychology
Adolescence American Journal of Family Therapy American Journal of Orthopsychiatry Child Study Journal Contemporary Educational Psychology Developmental Psychology Educational and Psychological Measurement Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis Journal of Autism and Development Disorders Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology Journal of Counseling Psychology Journal of Educational Psychology Journal of Experimental Child Psychology Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and Performance	American Psychologist Behavioral Disorders Child Development Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory, and Cognition Journal of Genetic Psychology Journal of Humanistic Psychology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Journal of Psychology Journal of Research in Personality Journal of School Psychology Perceptual and Motor Skills Psychological Bulletin Psychological Review Psychology in the Schools Psychology of Women Quarterly Small Group Behavior Transactional Analysis Journal
Special Education and Exceptional Children
Academic Therapy American Annals of the Deaf American Journal of Mental Deficiency Behavioral Disorders Education and Training of the Mentally Retarded Education of the Visually Handicapped Exceptional Children Exceptional Education Quarterly Exceptional Parent Gifted Child Quarterly	Journal of Learning Disabilities Journal of Mental Deficiency Research Journal of Special Education Journal of Special Education Technology Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders Journal of Speech and Hearing Research Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness Learning Disability Quarterly Mental Retardation Sightsaving Review
Hearing and Speech Action International Journal for the Education of the Blind Journal for the Education of the Gifted Journal of The Association for the Severely Handicapped	Teaching Exceptional Children Teacher Education and Special Education Teacher of the Blind Topics in Early Childhood Special Education Volta Review
Health and Physical Education
Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education Journal of Health Education Journal of Leisure Research Journal of Motor Learning Journal of Nutrition Education Journal of Outdoor Education Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance Journal of School Health Journal of Sport Health Library Research Lifelong Learning:The Adult Years Mathematics and Computer Education Mathematics Teacher Modern Language Journal Music Education Journal National Education Association Research Bulletin Studies in Art Education Studies in Educational Evaluation Teachers College Record Theory and Research in School Education	National Elementary Principal Negro Education Review Peabody Journal of Education Phi Delta Kappan Physical Educator Research Quarterly of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance Review of Educational Research School Health Review School Library Media Quarterly School Psychology Review School Science Review Science and Children Science Education Science Teacher Secondary School Theatre Journal Social Education Theory Into Practice Today’s Education Voc Ed Young Children
Sociology and Anthropology
American Anthropologist American Behavioral Scientist American Journal of Sociology American Sociological Review Anthropology and Education Quarterly Child Welfare Family Relations Group and Organization Studies Human Organization Human Services in the Rural Environment Journal of Correctional Education	Journal of Marriage and the Family Rural Sociology Sex Roles: A Journal of Research Social Work Sociology and Social Research Sociology of Education Urban Anthropology Urban Education Urban Review Youth and Society
Analytical Research
Administration and Society American Historical Review American Political Science Review Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Civil Liberties Law Comparative Education Review	Daedalus Economics of Education Review Education and Urban Society Education Forum Educational Studies Educational Theory Harvard Civil Rights
Nursing
AACN Advanced Critical Care Advanced Emergency Nursing Journal Advances in Neonatal Care Advances in Nursing Science - Featured Journal Advances in Skin & Wound Care:The Journal for Prevention and Healing AJN, American Journal of Nursing Alzheimer’s Care Today Cancer Nursing CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing Critical Care Nursing Quarterly Dimensions of Critical Care Nursing Family & Community Health Gastroenterology Nursing Health Care Food & Nutrition Focus Health Care Management Review The Health Care Manager Holistic Nursing Practice Home Healthcare Nurse Infants & Young Children Journal for Nurses in Staff Development Journal of Ambulatory Care Management Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing Journal of Christian Nursing Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing	Journal of Infusion Nursing Journal of Neuroscience Nursing Journal of Nursing Care Quality The Journal of Nursing Research Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing Journal of Public Health Management & Practice Journal of the Dermatology Nurses’ Association Journal of Trauma Nursing MCN, The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing Men in Nursing Nurse Educator Nursing 2010 Nursing 2010 Critical Care Nursing Administration Quarterly Nursing Made Incredibly Easy! Nursing Management Nursing Research Nutrition Today Oncology Times OR Nurse 2010 Orthopaedic Nursing Outcomes Management Plastic Surgical Nursing Professional Case Management Quality Management in Health Care

Journals are by far the most important and valuable primary sources of information about a topic because they represent the most direct link among the researcher, the work of other researchers, and your own interests.

What actually is a journal, and how do papers or manuscripts appear? A journal is a collection (most often) of research articles published in a particular discipline. For example, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) publishes more than six journals, all of which deal with the general area of research in education. The American Psychological Association (APA) publishes many journals including the Journal of Experimental Psychology and the Journal of Counseling Psychology. The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) publishes Child Development and Child Development Monographs,among others. Membership in these professional groups entitles you to a subscription to the journals as part of the package, or you can subscribe separately.

Most often, these professional organizations do not do the actual publishing themselves, but only the editorial work where the manuscripts are reviewed and considered for publication. For example, Child Development, sponsored by the SRCD, is published by Wiley Publishers/ Blackwell.

How do most respectable journals work? First, a researcher writes an article within the province of the particular journal to which it is being submitted. The manuscript is prepared according to a specific format (such as the one shown in  Chapter 14 ), and then usually three copies are submitted to the journal editor. Guidelines for preparing manuscripts are usually found on the front or back covers of most journals in the social and behavioral sciences. Often the journal requires that the author follow guidelines stated in the sixth edition of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual ( 2009 ).

The peer review process of reviewing journal submissions ensures that experts review and comment on a research manuscript before it is published.

Second, once the article has been received by the editor, who is an acknowledged expert in that particular field, the article is sent to at least three reviewers who are also experts in the field. Note that today, almost all of the submission and review process occurs online. These reviewers participate in a process known as peer review, in which the reviewers do not know the identity of the author (or authors) of the paper. The author’s name appears only on a cover sheet, which is removed by the editor. A social security number, or some other coded number, is used for identification on the rest of the manuscript. This makes the process quite fair (what is called “blind”)—the reviewer’s chance of knowing the identity of the author is greatly reduced, if not eliminated. The possibility that personalities might get in the way of what can be a highly competitive goal—publishing in the best journals—is thus minimized. Each reviewer makes a recommendation regarding suitability for publication. The options from which the reviewers select can include

· • Accept outright, meaning that the article is outstanding and can be accepted for publication as is

· • Accept with revisions, meaning that some changes need to be made by the author(s) before it is accepted (and is of course reviewed again)

· • Reject with suggestions for revisions, meaning that the article is not acceptable as is, but after changes are made the author(s) should be invited to resubmit it

· • Reject outright, meaning that the article is completely unacceptable and is not welcome for resubmission

Finally, when a consensus is reached by the reviewers, the editor of the journal conveys that decision to the author(s). If a consensus cannot be reached, the editor makes a decision or sends the article to another reviewer for additional comments. Editors work very hard to ensure that the review process and the journal publication process are fair.

By the way, you might be interested to know that the average rejection rate for the top journals is about 80%. Yes, 80% of the articles submitted never get in, but those rejected by the top journals usually find their way into other journals. Just because these articles are not accepted by the journals with the highest rejection rate does not mean they cannot make a significant contribution to the field. In fact, several studies have shown that there is little consistency among reviewers, and what one might rank high, another might rank quite low. However, in general, it’s safe to say that the better scientific reports are published by the better journals.

One more note about primary sources in general. If you know of a journal or a book that you might need and your library does not have it (and it is not available online), do not despair. First, check other libraries within driving distance or check with some of the professors in your department. They might have it available for loan. If all else fails, use the interlibrary loan system, with which your reference librarian will be glad to help you. This service helps you locate and physically secure the reference materials you want for a limited amount of time from another library. The system usually works quickly and is efficient.

Abstracts

If journals are the workhorses of the literature review, then collections of abstracts cannot be very far behind with regard to their convenience and usefulness. An  abstract  is a one- (or at most two-) paragraph summary of a journal article which contains all the information readers should need to decide whether to read the entire journal article.

Abstracts help you save the time it would take to locate potentially important sources of information.

By perusing collections of abstracts, researchers can save a significant amount of time compared with leafing through the journals from which these abstracts are drawn. Most abstracts also include subject and author indexes to help readers find what they are looking for, and abstracts of articles routinely appear in more than one abstract resource.

For example, a study on the benefits of long-distance learning might appear in PsychINFO from the International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling.

The following is a brief description of some abstract collections you might find useful.

One well-known collection of abstracts is PsycINFO (at  http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/index.aspx ). PsycINFO (for members of APA) and PsycINFO Direct (for nonmembers) provide an electronic database that contains abstracts and summaries of psychological literature from the 1800s to the present. Some facts about PsycINFO: It contains articles and abstracts from more than 2,500 journals, is updated weekly, offers chapters from scholarly books, contains material from 49 different countries, covers dissertations, and much more. No doubt—on your research travels, it is a great resource.

There is an unlimited amount of information in PsycINFO, and the online nature enables you to search electronically.  Figure 3A.4  shows you a sample PsycINFO screen for a journal article. Screens for books and chapters and dissertations look quite similar.

One other way to use PsycINFO is to look up the key word “bibliography.” Under this heading, you will find a list of bibliographies that have already been published. You might be lucky and find one that focuses on your area of interest.

One index that is especially useful is Educational Resources Information Center, or ERIC. ERIC ( http://www.eric.ed.gov/ ) is a nationwide information network that acquires, catalogs, summarizes, and provides access to education information from all sources. It currently contains more than 1.3 million education-related documents and adds about 30,000 per year. The database and ERIC document collections are housed in about 3,000 locations worldwide, including most major public and university library systems.

Figure 3A.4 The results of a PsycINFO search. Screenshot is reprinted with permission of the American Psychological Association, publisher of the PsycINFO database, All rights reserved.

ERIC produces a variety of publications and provides extensive user assistance with several different ways to search the database. As with PsycINFO, the ERIC system works with a set of descriptive terms found in a thesaurus, the Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors (see  Figure 3A.5 ), which should be your first stop. Once you find the search words or descriptors, you can use the subject index (published monthly) until you find the number of a reference focusing on what you want. Finally, you are off to the actual description of the reference, as you see in  Figure 3A.6 . Most of the time, these ERIC documents are in PDF (portable document format) and you can access the entire document. Other times, although rare, you may have to order directly from the ERIC clearinghouse. If your library has a government documents department, it might already have the document on hand. Also, you might be able to contact the original author as listed in the résumé.

ERIC has been in business since 1966 and has regional clearinghouses that archive, abstract, and disseminate educational articles and documents. Education is broadly defined, so many disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences are covered quite adequately.

Do you think that this is enough to get started? PsycINFO and the ERIC sets of abstracts are major resources, but there are others that are a bit more specialized and also very useful.

Figure 3A.5 The set of ERIC terms in the thesaurus you start with when conducting an ERIC search.

Figure 3A.6 Once you have identified areas through the ERIC thesaurus, it’s time to turn to key words that produce ERIC entries like these.

Titles of other abstracts, such as Sociological Abstracts, Exceptional Child Education Resources, Research Related to Children, and Dissertation Abstracts, reveal the wide variety of available reference material.

Finally, there’s ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (which replaces Dissertation Abstracts at many libraries) at  http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/pqdt.shtml , which contains over 2.7 million dissertations and theses dating from 1861, with full text online from 1997. More than 75,000 new entries are added every year and it contains the abstracts of over 2,000,000 dissertations from 1861 to the present, in the following areas:

· • Agriculture

· • Astronomy

· • Biological and Environmental Sciences

· • Business and Economics

· • Chemistry

· • Education

· • Engineering

· • Fine Arts and Music

· • Geography and Regional Planning

· • Geology

· • Health Sciences

· • History and Political Science

· • Language and Literature

· • Library and Information Science

· • Mathematics and Statistics

· • Philosophy and Religion

· • Physics

· • Psychology and Sociology

Indices

Journals and abstracts provide the substance of an article, a conference presentation, or a report. If you want a quick overview of where things might be located, turn to an index, which is an alphabetical listing of entries by topic, author, or both.

The widely used and popular Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index (SCI) work in an interesting and creative way. SSCI (at  http://thomson-reuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/social_sciences_citation_index ) provides access to bibliographic information, author abstracts, and citations from more than 2,400 journals in more than 50 disciplines. SCI (now part of the Web of Science at  http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/science_citation_index ) provides researchers access to over 3,700 scientific and technical journals across 100 disciplines.

Indices help you locate the sources of important information.

Let’s say you read an article that you find to be very relevant to your research proposal and want to know what else the author has done. You might want to search by subject through abstracts, as we have talked about, but you might also want to find other articles by the same author or on the same general topic. Tools like SSCI and SCI allow you to focus on your specific topic and access as much of the available information as possible. For example, do you want to find out who has mentioned the classic article “Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children,” written by Louis Terman and published in 1925? Look up Terman, L., in SSCI year by year, and you will find more references than you may know what to do with.

Finally, you can consult the Bibliographic Index Plus online (at  http://www.hwwilson.com/Databases/biblio.htm ), a compilation of bibliographies that results from a search of more than 530,000 bibliographies. Just think of the time you can save if you locate a relatively recent bibliography on what interests you.

TEST YOURSELF

What is the best use to which you can put a general, secondary, and primary source and name one of each which you might use in better understanding the most important questions in your own field of study?

Reading and Evaluating Research

Almost any research activity that you participate in involves reading research articles that appear in journals and textbooks. In fact, one of the most common faults of beginning researchers is not being sufficiently familiar with the wealth of research reports available in their specific area of interest. It is indeed rare to find a research topic about which nothing (or nothing related) has been done. You may not be able to find something that addresses the exact topic you wish to pursue (such as changes in adolescent behavior in Australian children who live in the outback), but there is plenty of information on adolescent behavior and plenty on children who live in Australia. Part of your job as a good scientist is to make the argument why these factors might be important to study.

You can do that by reading and evaluating research that has been done in various disciplines on the same topic.

Research articles and reports must always be carefully evaluated and the results never taken at face value.

What Does a Research Article Look Like?

The only way to gain expertise in understanding the results of research studies is to read and practice understanding what they mean. Begin with one of the journals in your own area. If you don’t know of any, do one of two things:

· • Visit your adviser or some faculty member in the area in which you are interested and ask the question, “What are the best research journals in my area?”

· • Visit the library and look through the index of periodicals or search online some of the resources we just identified. You are bound to find hundreds of journals, most online.

For example, for those of you interested in education and psychology and related areas, the following is a sample of 10 research journals that would be a great place for you to start:

· • American Educational Research Journal

· • American Psychologist

· • Educational Researcher

· • Educational and Psychological Measurement

· • Harvard Educational Review

· • Journal of Educational Research

· • Journal of Educational Psychology

· • Journal of Educational Measurement

· • Phi Delta Kappan

· • Review of Educational Research

Here are 10 more that focus primarily on psychology:

· • Child Development

· • Cognition

· • Human Development

· • Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

· • Journal of Experimental Psychology

· • Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

· • Journal of School Psychology

· • Perceptual and Motor Skills

· • Psychological Bulletin

· • Sex Roles

And, don’t forget our previous discussion of Ulrich’s periodical guide (over 300,000 entries).

Criteria for Judging a Research Study

Judging anyone else’s work is never an easy task. A good place to start might be the following checklist, which is organized to help you focus on the most important characteristics of any journal article. These eight areas can give you a good start in better understanding the general format of such a report and how well the author(s) communicated to you what was done, why it was done, how it was done, and what it all means.

Research articles take all kind of shapes and forms, but their primary purpose is to inform and educate the reader.

· 1. Review of Previous Research

· • How closely is the literature cited in the study related to previous literature?

· • Is the review recent?

· • Are there any seminal or outstanding references you know of that were left out?

· 2. Problem and Purpose

· • Can you understand the statement of the problem?

· • Is the purpose of the study clearly stated?

· • Does the purpose seem to be tied to the literature that is reviewed?

· • Is the objective of the study clearly stated?

· • Is there a conceptual rationale to which the hypotheses are grounded?

· • Is there a rationale for why the study is an important one to do?

· 3. Hypothesis

· • Are the research hypotheses clearly and explicitly stated?

· • Do the hypotheses state a clear association between variables?

· • Are the hypotheses grounded in theory or in a review and presentation of relevant literature?

· • Can the hypotheses be tested?

· 4. Method

· • Are both the independent and dependent variables clearly defined?

· • Are the definitions and descriptions of the variables complete?

· • Is it clear how the study was conducted?

· 5. Sample

· • Was the sample selected in such a way that you think it is representative of the population?

· • Is it clear where the sample came from and how it was selected?

· • How similar are the participants in the study to those who have been used in similar studies?

· 6. Results and Discussion

· • Does the author relate the results to the review of literature?

· • Are the results related to the hypothesis? Is the discussion of the results consistent with the actual results?

· • Does the discussion provide closure to the initial hypothesis presented by the author?

· 7. References

· • Is the list of references current?

· • Are they consistent in their format? Are the references complete?

· • Does the list of references reflect some of the most important reference sources in the field?

· 8. General Comments About the Report

· • Is the report clearly written and understandable?

· • Is the language biased?

· • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

· • What are the primary implications of the research?

· • What would you do to improve the research?

· • Does the submitted manuscript conform to the editor’s or publisher’s specifications?

Using Electronic Tools in Your Research Activities

Imagine this if you will: You are in your apartment and it is late at night. You find that you need one more citation on the development of charter schools to complete your literature review. You are tired. It is snowing. The library is about to close, and it might not have what you need anyway.

Zoom, you’re on the Internet and you’re on the way. Log on to your library and access one of their many databases to search for the information you need. In 20 seconds you have the reference to read or print. Is this for real? You bet, and since the printing of the last edition of Exploring Research (some staggering 3 years ago), online tools and databases are even more dominant forces in preparing, conducting, and disseminating research.

Both the computer as a tool and the library as a storehouse of information play different, but equally important and complementary, roles in the research process.

Whether at home, in your office, or in the confines of the library—and now using wireless technology at the mall or in front of the student union—the use of technology for completing literature searches and reviews is booming, and blooming with new databases to search becoming available each day.

In a moment we’ll start our explanation of some of this, but first a few words of “this can’t be true, but it is.” Many of you who are using this book may have never taken advantage of what your library services have to offer. You may not, for whatever reason, access these from off campus, but what is not understandable is why you are not accessing these resources on campus. All colleges and universities (and, of course, the local public library) provide free access to all these resources for students. The personal computers you can use may be located in the computer center, in the library, in academic buildings, or even in all three and more—but they are surely there for the using. It is likely that a hefty chunk of the fees that you pay each semester goes toward purchasing new equipment and paying for these services, so use them!

And just a few more words about libraries in general. We all know how easy it is to explore a library’s contents online—it’s quick, easy, and usually very reliable. But, there is also a huge benefit to actually physically visiting the library other than to take the orientation workshop we mentioned earlier in the book. Here’s the thing: What you may find in the library, incidental to what you are looking for, you may never find online. For example, you’re in the stocks exploring articles on charter schools and reading through journal articles organized by volume. Aren’t you delightfully surprised to find that the article before the one you are looking for seems to contain some very relevant information to the question you are asking? And, you take out a few more volumes, find a nice easy chair, turn off your MP3 player, and find even more—treasures that were unanticipated, but nonetheless, very valuable. Make a visit—you’ll be delightfully surprised.

Searching Online

At the University of Kansas, students can walk into Watson Library (one of the main research libraries), sit down at a computer terminal, access ERIC documents, and search through them in seconds for the references of interest—not bad. They can access a network connection that can lead them to millions of other abstracts and full-length articles from hundreds of databases “leased” by the university each year. And they can, of course, do all this from the comfort of their dorm room, apartment, or home 10 or 1,000 miles away. In fact, if they have any difficulty during their online activity, they can even Ask the Librarian—that’s right, open a new window in the  browser  and enter a question such as “Does the New York Timesstill have an index?” or “What is the leading journal on business education?” These reference librarians are not known as the original search engine for no good reason. They know lots, but most importantly, they know where to find the answers—the key to a good research foundation.

University, business, and government researchers are turning to online information providers more and more to find the key information they need, whether a specific reference or fact, such as the number of bicycles manufactured by Japan or the number of young adults who live in urban areas.

Your local public library, as well as the university’s library system, has access to the Internet as well as guides to the information available electronically.

The Value of Online Searches

Doing online searches boils down to a savings of time and convenience and in some cases, thoroughness versus a visit to the library. You can do a search using one of the online services in a quarter of the time it takes to do it manually.

Another important advantage of online searches, if your search skills are anywhere near competent, is that you are not likely to miss very much. The information providers provide access to tens of thousands of documents, either in their own databases or in others they can access. Dedicated databases have millions of pieces (such as the APA’s PsycINFO) of information. Most colleges and universities now allow access to their libraries from off campus, and an increasing number allow you access to the complete record of the article (as a PDF), not just an abstract.

Finally, and this may be the most attractive advantage, online searches are the way of the future. There is so much information out there that soon it will be close to impossible to search intelligently without the aid of a computer.

If there is any real downside (as we mentioned earlier), it’s that when you use online services, you don’t get a chance to browse among the thousands of books at the library and since books are organized by area of specialization you will very often find yourself opening books that you didn’t even know existed and finding things that can be very valuable.

The Great Search Engines

Although there is no central listing of Web sites, there are search engines that can help you find what you are interested in. For example, the most popular search engine, by far, is Google ( www.google.com ), and more about that soon. Fill in the term you are looking for and click Google Search and you are bound to find material you can use. Better yet, combine words such as “résumé nursing” to find people who have entered that phrase on their résumé. Type in “ www.yahoo.com ,” which takes you to an opening page with hundreds of links to topics in every area imaginable.

For example, let’s say you are interested in finding information on homelessness. As you can see in  Figure 3A.7 , almost 7,000,000 results came up in less than .3 of a second. Amazing.  Figure 3A.7  shows the term entered in the search area of Google and the results of that search. We’ll get to an analysis of a Google screen later in this section.

Search engines are tools that help you sift through the thousands of pages of information available on the Internet and identify the specifics of what you need.

Figure 3A.7 A sample Google search.

Google™ is a registered trademark of Google, Inc.

After the search is completed, the results will show several suggested links which you then can click on to find out the contents of the home pages that were found.

Are all search engines created equally? No. And one of the ways in which they are not created equal is what they are best suited for.  Table 3A.4  lists a variety of search engines by what they do. The URL don’t have the ubiquitous http://www as the start of each one since browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Bing can search and locate with that additional information (and keystrokes on your part).

You can also consult a search engine that, in itself, searches many different search engines. For example, search engines such as SurfWax ( www.surfwax.com ) and Mamma ( www.mamma.com  and billed, of course, “The Mother of All Search Engines®), are meta-search engines, or those search engines that return the results of exploring many search engines all at once. Let’s say that your research involves looking at the history of baseball and you need to review various major league teams. In  Figure 3A.8  you can see the results of a SurfWax search for information about the Washington Nationals where almost 70,000,000 pages were identified.

Here are some tips about using a search engine:

· • Enter the narrowest search terms and then broaden your search from there. Entering “intelligence” will find lots of stuff, most of it irrelevant; however, if you enter “intelligence” and “children” and “school,” the results will be much more manageable and closer to what you want. Remember that the fewer the words you enter, the more general the results will be.

· • If you use more than one word, join them with the conjunction “AND,” such as bilingual AND education, or use quotes, such as “bilingual education.” This is the default for some search engines but not all.

· • If a help file or function comes along with the search engine, open it and read it. It will have invaluable information that will save you time and effort.

· • When you become more accustomed to using a search engine, look for the more advanced searching techniques and use them.

· • Didn’t you get what you wanted? The simplest solution is to check your typing. Simple typos spell disaster.

The original, and still the best, search engine is your reference librarian who never crashes, is always available, tends to be helpful, and is very knowledgeable.

Table 3A.4 Different types of search engines and what they search for

If you need to do a general, all purpose search . . .
Name	URL
Alltheweb	google.com
AltaVista	altavista.com
AOL	aol.com
ASK	ask.com
Cull	cull.com
Gigablast	gigablast.com
Google	google.com
Lycos	lycos.com
MSN	msn.com
Yahoo	Yahoo.com
If you want to search for blogs about a particular topic . . .
Name	URL
Blogpulse	Blogpulse.com
Google blog search	blogsearch.google.com
LJSeek	Ljseek.com
Opinmind	Opinmind.com
Tecnhorati	Technorati.com
If you want to search for books . . .
Name	URL
Your local library!	Easy to find at your school URL
Amazon	Amazon.com
BookFinder	Bookfinder.com
Google Scholar	scholar.google.com
Google Books	Books.google.com
ReadPrint	ReadPrint.com
If you want to search for images . . .
Name	URL
Picsearch	Picsearch.com
PhotoBucket	photobucket.com
New York Public Library Digital Gallery  digitalgallery.nypl.org
Classroom Clipart	classroomclipart.com
stock .xchng	www.sxc.hu

Courtesy of Google Inc.

· • Try a synonym for the term or terms you’re looking for. There’s more than one way to eviscerate a feline (get it?).

And if you want to find out even more about search engines, go to  websearch.about.com  and Wendy Boswell’s all-informative and useful  About.com  search engine site.

More About Google

Although Google is the most popular search engine and its share of searches continues, and you may use it regularly, it is still worth exploring what it does and how it does it. It regularly catalogues millions of web pages and returns results in very short order. Since it is so popular, here are some specific tips about using this search engine, including some special features you may not know about.

Not just Google, but every search engine has its own special tips and tricks you can learn (at their Web site) to facilitate your searching activities and increase your success rate.

Figure 3A.8 Searching for information about the Washington Nationals Baseball team.

Google™ is a registered trademark of Google Inc.

Google Search Results

Figure 3A.9  shows a search conducted on the term “grade retention.” There’s more to the search results than meets the eye (not only a listing of other Web sites), and here’s a more detailed analysis on what’s in that window and how it might help you.

· 1. Across the top of the Google search results is a listing of other “tabs” you can click on to find additional information about the topic (Web, Images, Videos, Maps, News, etc.). For example, if you want to find news about the topic on which you searched, click on News. In this case, you can find related news stories that can further your understanding of this topic.

· 2. To the right of the Google search area (where you enter the terms for which you want to search) are Advanced search and Preferences options. These basically allow you to refine your searches and are easy to learn on your own but surely not necessary as you are learning to use Google and even when you are a fairly competent Google user. As we said earlier, the more refined the words you identify as search terms, the better your results will be.

· 3. In this example, there are no sponsored links (really advertisements on which Google makes a ton of money), which are usually located on the right-hand side of the page. These advertisements are located away from the results listing so that you very clearly know they are to be treated separately.

· 4. Below (and to the right of) the Google search term (in this case “grade retention”) is a tally of the results, showing that 1,460,000 “hits” accumulated in .23 second (fast!). Note that if you repeated the same search, you will get a different outcome (probably just slightly) since things change so fast.

Figure 3A.9 A Google search on the phrase “grade retention” and the results.

· 5. Right below the results line is the all-important results of the search. Most show the following:

· a. The title of the page (Grade Retention—The Great Debate). Notice how the words “grade retention” are highlighted since this is one of the original search words.

· b. Next is a brief abstract of the contents of that page, which should allow you to determine whether it is worth exploring.

· c. Next is the URL, or the Web address, for this particular page followed by the size of the page, the cache (any stored record of this page), and other pages that are similar to this one. As always, you can click on any underlined link.

Word Order and Repetition

You already know that word order matters (we talked about that earlier), but the repetition of words in the search box matters as well.

For example, you saw in  Figure 3A.8  the result of a search on grade retention. However, if we enter the search terms “grade retention retention” (we entered it twice), then the weighting of the search leans more toward retention, less toward grade. Similarly, if we entered the terms “grade grade retention,” the search would be weighted toward the topic of grades. Word repetition is not a science, but it does allow you to prompt Google to provide another set of results on the same topic.

Using the Phonebook

This may be the greatest nondocumented, and not generally known, tip and feature about using Google.

A great deal of what we all do as researchers is to find information and locate people. If you find a particularly interesting research article and want to know more about the topic, there’s just nothing wrong with searching for more information about the author of that article and contacting him and her.

For example, let’s say you want to contact this author. The first place to try is his home institution (the University for Kansas, which you can find at  www.ku.edu ). This should get you what you want. Let’s say, however, that in spite of your efforts, you have no luck.

Using the Google phonebook feature, you can enter the terms phonebook:salkind ks (notice there is no space after the colon and you have to know the state in which the listing is located), and you’ll get the contact information you need. You can reverse the process as well by entering the phone number and seeing the listing. For your information, rphonebook will search only for residential listing and bphonebook only for business listings.

Using Bibliographic Database Programs

Anyone who does research and writes about that research can tell you that one of the most tedious parts of writing a research manuscript is references, references, references—keeping track of them, entering them, and organizing them is just about the least fun anyone can have.

There are a welcome set of tools that can help you do these three things and more. Bibliographic database programs are tools that help you manage your set of references, and the best ones allow you to do things such as

· • Enter the data for any one reference using a standard form

· • Change the format to fit the manuscript requirements, such as the American Psychological Association (APA) or the Modern Language Association (MLA)

· • Search the database of references using key words

· • Add notes to any one reference which can also be searched

· • Generate a final list of references for use in the manuscript

Although one of the most tedious, time-consuming parts of creating a research document is tracking and dealing with bibliographic references, there are now several different software programs that can greatly reduce the necessary time and effort.

You can, of course, do all these by using 3″ × 5″ index cards, but entering the references only once and never having to retype them, track them, and organize them—we could go on and on, but we think you get the picture.

A bunch of such bibliographic database programs are available—some of them free and some of them commercially available. Let’s take a look at EndNote ( http://www.endnote.com ), a commercially available product. All of these tend to offer the same features—you enter information about the reference, and the tool formats it according to the format you specify. They all accomplish this goal in different ways and also offer different bells and whistles, so you should take advantage of the free download and try them out. Other commercial products that work well are ProCite ( www.procite.com ) and Biblioscape ( http://www.biblioscape.com ). Be sure that the program works on your operating system because some only work for a Windows- or a Mac-based operating system.

As you can see in  Figure 3A.10 , EndNote works by your choice of the type of references (book, journal, web page) and then entering the pertinent information. The information then appears in your “library” (we created on named “term paper”). Once finished creating the library of references, EndNote (or another application) generates the bibliography for you with a few clicks, formatted as you want or even using a custom format.

As you can see, each element of the reference (author, date, etc.) is entered in its own space. You complete a separate form for each reference (be it a journal article, a book chapter, or a presentation at a convention) and you select the entry format.

Figure 3A.10 Using Endnotes, one of many citation creation tools.

Courtesy of Google Inc.

Looking for Articles Online

This clever design from the Google People fits very well the needs of any researcher, from the most basic to the most advanced.

Researchers are in the business of finding information and using that information to lay the groundwork for their research. One might search specific sites such as the Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, or the American Psychological Association, and one would surely find material about a particular topic. But Google is an excellent tool for finding information across many different sites since it will look not only for topics that may have appeared on a particular site, but also for topics that appear secondarily to that site. For example, a search on the NYT Web site for articles on day care would result in a bunch of productive hits. But, how about a search for articles on this topic that may have appeared originally in the Times but in other locations as well? Of course, this can be done for newspapers, periodicals, magazines, journals—anywhere material might appear. How to do it?

Here are the search terms for a simple search for articles about day care in the New York Times: day care site:  www.nytimes.com .

Day care appears in quotes so Google will look for it as a set of terms and not just “day” and then “care.” This search results in 28,100 hits.

Now, if we search for the magic words copyright * The New York Times Company day care, we find 851 hits, which includes all the articles on day care from the Times, as well as all the articles used by other publications from the Times (in which they may have cited the Times).

The * in the search terms acts as a wild card so any year of copyright is searched for, and we could get rid of the site: command since the New York Times Company (which is their copyright line) serves the same purpose. Pretty cool.

Finding Tons of Directories and Lists

This is the last Google tip, but another one that could prove invaluable. Much of our job as researchers is to find information, but also collections of information. The command intitle: can serve us quite well.

For example, the search terms intitle: directory day care would return listings of directories containing information about day care. If we changed the search terms to include a wild card, such as intitle: directory * day care, we then get a much more broadly defined list since it can include elderly day care, adult day care, Miami day care, and so on—and the number of returns is much, much higher than the simple direct search we first showed you.

More About Google Than You Can Imagine

Google has a set of help centers located at  http://www.google.com/support/  where you should go if you need support about one of their products such as Gmail, Google Docs, or help on searching the Web.

Advanced Google Search Tools

Sure it’s easy to find the phone number of a researcher who lives in Wyoming, but phonebook is only one of many search operators that Google allows to help you refine what you want to do and you can find about all of them at  http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html .

For example, you can use the search operator “define:” to find the definition of a word. So, entering define:mysticism will give you huge lists of the definition of the term on various locations around the Web. If you typed in “definition of mysticism”, you would get web pages that define mysticism, but not central directory of definition. Another really useful operator is “source”, which provides a search on a particular topic limited to the source you identify. For example, if you want to search for information about iPads, but only which appeared in the New York Times, iPad source:New York Times would provide you with a nice collection of articles that have appeared. You can even search for the latest weather report (weather:losangeles) and yes, what time the movies are showing (movie:title such as movie:Greenberg Lawrence, ks) and it really works!

TEST YOURSELF

It’s really easy—and maybe too easy—to conduct your background research online without regard to that massive building in the idle of campus called the library. Do you think it is adequate to conduct your literature review online? What advantages does this strategy offer? Disadvantages?

Using the Internet: Beyond Searches

Most of you who are reading this text are very savvy when it comes to using the Internet, but there are still some of you who are not. The following material is a refresher for those who can always learn something new and an introduction to those who are unfamiliar with the Internet, how it works, and what it can do for a new researcher.

In the most basic of terms, the Internet is a  network  of networks. A network is a collection of computers that are connected to one another and can communicate with each other. Imagine all these networks being connected to one another and imagine hundreds of networks and thousands of computers of all different types attached to one another and millions of people using those computers. Now you have some idea how large the Internet is. It is growing geometrically and millions of people connect every day for work, for fun, and of course, to pursue research activities.

Research Activities and the Internet

If you are talking about information in all shapes and sizes, there is not much that you cannot do on the Internet. Here is a brief overview of how the Internet can be used for research purposes:

· • The Internet is often used for  electronic mail  or  e-mail . You can exchange postal mail with a colleague across the United States or the world, but you can also do the same without ever putting pen to paper. You create a message and send it to your correspondent’s electronic address with documents, images, and more attached. It is fast, easy, and fun. For example, if you would like a reprint of an article you find interesting, you could e-mail the author and ask for a copy and it may very well come back to you electronically. Virtually all faculty, staff, and students at educational institutions have access to e-mail. Also if you want further information about a particular person’s work, you could probably find his or her résumé online.

· • Thousands of  electronic newsgroups , often called Usenet newsgroups, are available on the Internet. These are places where information can be posted and shared among Internet users, with topics that range from space exploration to the authenticity of a Civil War–era land deed. You can “drop in” and contribute to any of these  newsgroups . For example, if you are interested in K–12 math curricula, try the k12.ed.math newsgroup. How about pathological behavior? Try the sci.psychology. psychotherapy newsgroup. We will return to them again later for a short demonstration.

· • And finally, there is the world of social media including Facebook and Twitter and these lend themselves to entirely new ways of being used for research purposes. More about these later in this chapter.

More About E-Mail

Imagine it is 1925 and you are sitting at your desk at college, writing a letter to a friend in England. You stamp the letter, mail it, and three weeks later you receive an answer. You are amazed at how fast the mail is and sit down to answer your friend’s new questions about how much you like college and what you will do after you graduate.

Now imagine it is 2012 and you are writing to a friend in England, only this time you use e-mail. From your home, you compose the message, press the send key, and your friend has it almost instantly. Not only does your friend have it, but you copied it to three other members of the research team, including your primary professor. The reply arrives within 20 minutes and “attached” to the message is well-written response to your message and a new paper on the topic of interest.

E-mail works much like conventional mail. You write a message and send it to an address. The big difference is that there is no paper involved. Rather, the messages you send travel from one computer to another in a matter of minutes or hours, rather than in days or weeks, as fast as your voice travels in a telephone conversation.

How should you use e-mail, which is the really big question here? It’s fun for social and family reasons, but it’s an indispensable part of the research process. Imagine having a question about a particular test you want to use in a research study. e-Mail the test’s author. Imagine not being able to find a critical reference. e-Mail the author of that reference (and you should know how to find that author by now given the tips we discussed throughout other parts of this chapter). Imagine not being able to understand a point your professor made in class about a particular statistical technique. With permission, e-mail your professor. This stuff really works.

One note about e-mail. It works because there are servers to which the mail is sent and then distributed. Sometimes these servers break down and mail can be delayed, for an hour or, in some cases when perhaps they have been infected with a virus, for days. Our advice is to have two e-mail addresses, one that you access from school and one of the other many free ones that are available such as those from Yahoo! ( www.yahoo.com ), Hotmail ( www.hotmail.com ), or GMail (from Google). You can always use these as a backup and receive or send mail from there. In many cases, you can even view your other mail account receipts (such as your school mail) within your secondary account.

A huge advantage of Web-based mail is that you can access your mail from any computer in the galaxy. It is always available as long as you have an Internet connection. In addition, as Web-based mailing programs become more sophisticated, they offer features that even fancy commercial mailers such as Outlook might not have, such as being able to (easily) enter a vacation message when you are away from your mail client and want people to automatically be notified. Or, you can send mail through GMail and make it appear as if it is being sent through any other account. Very handy. Many researchers create such new mail accounts for each research or writing project so they can segregate their mail and track it more effectively.

Another note: A host of roadblocks have been introduced along with the millions of e-mails that appear every day in mailboxes around the world in the form of spam, adware, viruses, and other nefarious mechanisms for unscrupulous people to gain access to your privacy. No matter how you do it, take advantage of some of the relatively inexpensive commercial products and install them on your home computer. For the most part, your college or university should be taking care of these concerns at some central location. But for you, it is critical (and almost inexcusable) to have some type of effective and current (and this is really important) way to keep your machine free of viruses and other junk.

And yet another note! In your electronic workings these days, you will see reference to the “cloud.” Cloud-based computing is coming—it’s where data, e-mail, and other information are stored on a remote computer (known as a server), so there is nothing locally available on your desktop. Everything, in other words, is Web based including applications (much like Google Docs is today).

The advantage? Clearly, you can do anything from any connected computer. No more new disk to install when applications change; rather, you would work on a subscription basis and every time a new version of Microsoft Office is released, the changes are right there the next time you open it up. It should be cheaper and more readily available (remember, being connected is everything) and, no more backing up (well, sort of). The cloud system you use stores your data in a safe place.

OK, so what’s the drawback? Although we are told otherwise, oops!—there goes the server and there goes everything you created. While cloud computing enthusiasts speak to the reliability and safety of the system—and it is there—you and I both know that someday it will fail. The lesson? It’s the future, but be sure to use whatever local backup system is available as well.

An Introduction to Usenet (News) Groups

Here’s a topic that interestingly enough many people do not know much about. It’s interesting since newsgroups are such an immense source of information and there are so many from which to select.

Imagine being able to find information on more than 100,000 topics, ranging from stereo systems to jokes (censored and otherwise) to the ethics of law to college football to astronomy. Where would you be able to find a collection of such diverse information that can be easily accessed? You guessed it—the Internet and the various newsgroup sites that ship news each day around the world. The news that fits in one category, such as college football or the ethics of law, forms a newsgroup (also called a group). A newsgroup is simply a collection of information about one topic. Once again, surprisingly, very few students are aware of and use newsgroups.

To help manage the flow of articles, news sites are managed, moderated, administered, and censored by system administrators who work for institutions such as universities and corporations. The newsgroups from which you can select news are those made available by the system administrator and more often than not, the system administrator has to give approval before you are allowed to join and contribute.

What’s in the News?

Newsgroups are named and organized based on a set of rules. The most general of these rules has to do with the name of the group itself. There is a hierarchical structure to a newsgroup name, with the highest level of the hierarchy appearing in the left-most position. For example, the newsgroup name k12.ed.tech means that within k12 (the general name for the kindergarten through twelfth-grade newsgroup), there is a subset named ed (for education) and within that another subset named tech (for technology).

Table 3A.5  is a sample of some newsgroups: what these groups are named, the general area they cover, and examples of what is in each of these groups. Originally, all newsgroups started with the .net suffix. Then, a renaming of newsgroups occurred in 1986 and there were seven main groups; .comp, .news, .sci, .rec, .soc, .talk, and .misc. Humanities (.hum) was added so that the number of primary newsgroups was finalized (for now) at eight. The suffix .alt represents all other newsgroups that do not have a clear place in any other groups (and sometimes jokingly is meant to represent Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists due to the subversive and anything goes nature of .alt newsgroups).

Newsgroups can be small or huge discussions of just about any topic.

Table 3A.5 The Big newsgroups prefixes

Newsgroup	General Area	Examples
Alt	Everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else and certainly lots of stuff out of the ordinary	· • alt.actors.dustin-hoffman (welcome back to the graduate) · • alt.amazon.women (xena, the warrior princess and more) · • alt.anything (guess)
Comp	Information about computers, computer science, computer software, and general interest computer topics	· • comp.ai (danger! will robinson!—all about artificial intelligence) · • comp.compression (a discussion of ways to compress or reduce files) · • comp.software engineering (so you want to design a new chip?)
Hum	Discussion of issues in the humanities	· • humanities.classics (more about the classic texts) · • humanities.language (discussion about languages and how they fit into the study of the humanities) · • humanities.philosophy (all about the great masters and their ideas)
Misc	A catchall of topics and ideas	· • misc.forsale (kind of like a garage sale online) · • misc.books (discussions about books and wri ters) · • misc.invest (how and where to invest your hard-earned money)
News	Information about news, newsgroups, and the newsgroup network	· • news.admin.censorships (all about what should and shouldn’t be on the Net) · • news.admin.net-abuse.email (don’t like all that junk e-mail? come here for advice) · • news.accounce.conferences (where to go to be seen)
Rec	Information about recreation, hobbies, the performing arts, and fun stuff	· • rec.sport.swimming (make a splash) · • rec.bicycles.racing (what cool stuff to buy for your bike to go faster) · • rec.skydiving (take an extra ‘chute)
Sci	Information about science, scientific research and discoveries, engineering, and some social science stuff	· • sci.astro (astronomy) · • sci.cognitive (so that’s what you’re thinking!) · • sci.skeptic (ufos do exist!)
Soc	Information about the social sciences	· • soc.couples (people getting along) · • soc.penpals (why people write to one another) · • soc.misc (stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else)
Talk	Discussion of current affairs	· • talk.atheism (about atheism) · • talk.rumor (rumor central) · • talk.radio (find out about Air America, Sean Hannity and more)

To see how a newsgroup works, let’s follow an example of someone who is interested in educational technology. Almost every browser, such as Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer, comes with its own reader built in and ready to go, but most browsers also come with a groups function that is even easier to use, as you can see in  Figure 3A.11 . These tools allow you to read existing news and to post new messages.

The first thing you need to do when you are ready to access a newsgroup is to subscribe to it. Your e-mail program or browser (such as Internet Explorer) can do this, or in some cases you may need a separate  news reader . From the list of newsgroups, you can select the ones to which you want to subscribe. Each time you go to the newsgroup, you will get the updated version of those newsgroups, including all the news that has been added to that group since the last time you opened it.

The next step would be to open the k12.ed.tech newsgroup and examine the contents, as shown in  Figure 3A.12  (we used Google as our reader). Within newsgroups, you will see a listing of topics open for discussion, each one started by an individual as a source for more information, a place to meet electronically, discuss issues, and so forth.

If someone wants to participate in a certain newsgroup, he or she can add a new topic at this level, or go into an existing newsgroup and make a contribution.

Figure 3A.11 The Opening screen for Google groups where you can search for groups, start one of your own or explore the most popular ones.

Google™ is a registered trademark of Google Inc.

Figure 3A.12 The newsgroup is a wide-open community where everyone is welcome to contribute and learn.

Google™ is a registered trademark of Google Inc.

Using Mailing Lists or ListServs

Another really neat way to use the Internet is a great source of information. You can sign up (subscribe) for a  listserv  discussion group, which is an automatic depository for information. If you subscribe, you receive everything that the list receives. A listserv is also known as a mailing list.

For example, if you belong to the K–12 educational technology mailing list, then each time someone sends mail to that list, you will receive it as well. There are more listservs than you can imagine, and it will take some exploration to find out which ones best fit your needs.

To subscribe to a mailing list, you need to send a message to the list’s administrator. As soon as you do that, a constant stream of messages will come your way. Be careful—if a list is very active, you can receive hundreds of messages in any one day. If you go even a day without checking your mail, your electronic mailbox is likely to get so full of messages that you won’t be able to read anything! Imagine your real mailbox outside your apartment or home. When it gets stuffed full, it is very difficult to pull out any one piece because the mail is packed so tightly. You would need a bigger box (more storage space), or you need to empty the box before it gets so full. Such is the case with an Internet mailing list: Either get a larger e-mail box (ask for more storage space from the system administrator) or check your mail more than once a day.

At Catalist ( http://www.lsoft.com/catalist.html ) you can find a guide to the always update list of over 500,000 lists(!), all available to you and me, and you can search by the number of subscribers, the country of origin, and, of course, the topic. Want to spend unending hours at your computer learning about everything from black holes to death rays, this is the place to start.

And, Just a Bit about Web Sites

In the last edition of Exploring Research, this section was filled with information about home pages or Web pages and what is contained on them that might be of use. There was a screen shot of the Library of Congress Web site’s opening page (which is a portal to the entire site at  http://www.loc.gov ), but times have changed, as does the information we include here.

Web sites are of course portals to more information but should a researcher use them? The most obvious way is by seeking out information contained at various sites, perhaps including links to other sites and on and on. But, as an active researcher there’s another entirely different function that Web sites can perform.

You can easily, and at little expense, create a Web site of your own, for your own research project. Unlike the early days of Web development and design, today you can create a home for your content easily, quickly, and relatively inexpensively. No need to hire the 10-year-old from down the block or some fancy firm that charges $25 per hour. And, no need to know programming languages such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Today, companies such as GoDaddy ( www.godaddy.com ) and Homestead ( www.homestead.com ) are not free, but are often ridiculously cheap (such as $4.99 per month for Homestead). And best of all, these companies and many others provide a wide variety of tools to help you drag-and-drop, modify, spruce up, and generally make your Web site quite professional looking.

What do you do once you have created it? As the home for your research activities, you can conclude such information as

· • The title of the project

· • How to get in touch with the project’s coordinator (probably you!)

· • A history of what is being done, where and how

· • Forms that may need to be completed

· • Data that may have been collected that can be shared

· • Links to similar studies, and

· • Any information that educates the viewer and may encourage him or her to participate.

Using Social Media and Blogs

There’s no end to the imagination of entrepreneurs when it comes to the use of technology to have an impact on our lives, and correspondingly, there is no end to the imagination of researchers to use that technology in their research as well.

What About Facebook and Twitter?

You know about Facebook and Twitter, but could you imagine using these tools in a research setting? There are many others, but we’ll look at just these two. Here’s how to use them.

Facebook is a social networking tool that allows users to form groups, communicate with each other, and even play games. With over 600,000,000 active users, it is an amazing way to get like-minded people together to discuss and participate in research where some common interest is maintained. You would be well suited to begin a Facebook group based on your own research interests and reach out for others who have interests that are similar to your’s.

And, of course, Facebook participants can very well become participants in a study as well. Facebook is a magnificent naturally occurring laboratory to study (mostly) young people’s ideas and actions as they exist in virtual and real-time groups. Researchers from Harvard, Indiana, and Carnegie-Melon are all using online subject samples to collect data and test hypothesis.

Twitter is another social networking tool that allows users to create 140-character messages and then allows those messages to be sent out to anyone who is following the author. Sometimes small potatoes and only 10-20 followers. But sometimes, followers number in the hundreds of thousands.

Among other ideas, you can of course follow a researcher in whose work you are interested by simply signing up to follow him on Twitter (you need a Twitter account to do any of these things). Then, each time he or she creates one of those 140 character messages, it comes to you and the hundreds or thousands of other people who signed up on his or her list.

Another way to use Twitter is to find out what is being written as people are being followed by searching on this huge and vast electronic archives that are available. For example, if you wanted to know what people were saying (or Tweeting) about nursing education, you can use Twitter’s simple search box on the main page and enter the words “nursing education” (using quotes since you would want the search to return for both terms together, not each one separately). Or, if you want to dig even deeper, go to the advanced search form (look for it under Help or at  http://search.twitter.com/advanced ) as you see in  Figure 3A.13 . And, it’s simple enough to find people—just click the Find People button on the main page.

Writing the Literature Review

It is now time to take all the information you have collected using all the tools you have learned about in this chapter and somehow organize it so it begins to make sense. This is your review of literature, and now you actually need to write it (horrors!). Here are some writing hints.

First, read other literature reviews. There is no arguing with success. Ask a student who has already been through this course or your adviser for a successful proposal. Look carefully at the format as well as the content of the literature review. Also, look at some of the sources mentioned earlier in this chapter, especially sources that are reviews of the literature, journal articles, and other review papers.

Figure 3A.13 Using Twitter help.

Second, create a unified theme, or a line of thought, throughout the review. Your review of literature is not supposed to be a novel, but most good literature reviews build from a very general argument to a more specific one and set the stage for the purpose of the research. You should bring the reader “into the fold” and create some interest in where you will be going with this research that other people have not gone.

Third, use a system to organize your materials. Most reviews of the literature will be organized chronologically within topics. For example, if you are studying gender differences in anxiety and verbal ability among adults, you would organize all the references by topic area (anxiety and verbal ability), and then within each of these topics, begin your review with the earliest dated reference. In this way you move from the earliest to the latest and provide some historical perspective.

Fourth, work from an outline even if you are an accomplished and skilled writer. It is a good idea to use this tool to help organize the main thought in your proposal before you begin the actual writing process.

Fifth, build bridges between the different areas you review. For example, if you are conducting a cross-cultural study comparing the ways in which East Indian and American parents discipline their children, you might not find a great deal of literature on that specific topic. But there is certainly voluminous literature on child rearing in America and in India and tons of references on discipline. Part of the creative effort in writing a proposal is being able to show where these two come together in an interesting and potentially fruitful way.

Sixth, practice may not always make perfect but it certainly doesn’t hurt. For some reason, most people believe that a person is born with or without a talent for writing. Any successful writer would admit that to be a class-A basketball player or an accomplished violinist, one has to practice. Should it be any different for a writer? Should you have any doubts about this question, ask a serious writer how many hours a day or week he or she practices that craft. More often than not, you will see it is the equivalent of the ballplayer or the musician. In fact, a writer friend of mine gives this advice to people who want to write but don’t have a good idea about the level of involvement it requires: “Just sit down at your typewriter or word processor, and open a vein.” That is how easy it is.

So the last (but really the first) hint is to practice your writing. As you work at it and find out where you need to improve (get feedback from other students and professors), you will indeed see a change for the better.

Summary

There’s a lot to know about this selecting a problem topic and doing the necessary background research and it just begins when you have some familiarity with your field and some experience using both online and offline resources. Finding a topic and a question that works for you (in every sense of the word) is a real challenge and often an obstacle for beginning students and beginning scientists. Take your time, talk to your colleagues and your faculty, and make it into an exploration looking for the gold that represents a topic that will carry you to a new level of intellectual growth.

Exercises

1.

Make a list of 10 research topics that you would find interesting to pursue. These can be any topics dealing with education or psychology which you might glean from newspapers, radio and television news, magazines, research journals, and even overheard conversations. Rank these various ideas by level of interest, and for each of the top five write one sentence explaining why it appeals to you.

2.

Take the idea that you ranked no.1 in exercise 1 and do the following:

· (a)Write a one-paragraph description of a study that incorporates that idea.

· (b)List the steps you could take in reviewing the specific literature relevant to this topic.

· (c)From this idea, generate three more questions derived from the original question or idea.

3.

Use the idea that you ranked no. 2 in exercise 1 and do the following:

· (a)Locate a related reference from a journal and write out the complete citation.

· (b)Locate an abstract from a study that focuses on the topic.

4.

Find ten other sources of information about any of the topics you ranked in exercise 1 and write out the complete citation for each. Try to complete a set of other sources that is as diverse as possible.

5.

Go to your library and find five journals in your field of study. After you have located the journals, examine them to determine:

· (a)What type of articles are published (reviews of literature, empirical studies, etc.).

· (b)Whether the journal is published by a professional organization (such as the American Psychological Association) or by a private group (such as Sage Press).

· (c)The number of articles in each journal and if there is any similarity in the topic areas covered within each issue of the journal.

· (d)How often the journal is published and other information about its editorial policies (e.g., guidelines, features).

6.

Select any topic that you are interested in and use three different search engines to obtain on-line information. How do the results differ? Which one gave you the most interesting and useful information? How might you revise your search terms to get the same degree of usefulness from other search engines?

7.

Visit Google Groups at  http://groups.google.com . Type in a topic of interest for you next to the “Search for a group” link and click on the link. Write down the title of the group or the group e-mail address.

8.

Find three abstracts from recent research journals. For each abstract identify the following:

· (a)The purpose

· (b)The hypothesis

· (c)The type of study (e.g., correlational, experimental)

· (d)The conclusion

9.

You have been assigned the topic of gender differences in adolescent development for a research study. Formulate five research questions that address this topic.

10 .

What are some helpful things you can do to help you figure out if your first idea for a research study is the best one?

11.

Use the Internet to find five references on any of the topics in which you have an interest (as you defined in earlier questions).

12 .

What purpose do the following search commands serve?

· (a)phonebook:

· (b)*

· (c)“blended families families” (entering one word twice)

13 .

What are some potential advantages to reading peer-reviewed journal articles instead of relying on information obtained through other online sources such as Wikipedia? What are some potential advantages to using Wikipedia?

14 .

Indicate which of the following are general, which are primary, and which are secondary sources:

· (a)Encyclopedia of Psychology

· (b)Time Magazine

· (c)Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics (textbook)

· (d)Journal of Sport Health

· (e)Facts on File

· (f)A review of Freud’s dream interpretations

· (g)Dissertation Abstracts Online

15 .

A recent study found that college freshmen who participated in an occupational engagement intervention wherein they e-mailed professors, learned ways to increase their information about careers, and wrote about their experiences of learning more about careers scored significantly higher on a measure of career decision-making efficacy than students in a control group. How might you work from or replicate this study without being redundant?

16 .

Look up the keyword phrase “test anxiety” in Google Scholar. What are the first three titles that appear?

17 .

Wang and Amato found in their 2000 study that divorce adjustment was significantly related to income levels, age, remarriage status, and previous attitude toward marital dissolution, among other variables. What are three more variables you could examine in relation to divorce adjustment?

18 .

Why is it helpful to review literature before finalizing your hypothesis?

Online. . .

The Gale Directory of Online, Portable, and Internet Databases

The Gale Database Directory at  http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bl0230.html  provides detailed information on publicly available databases and database products that are accessible through an on-line vendor or the Internet.

The GPO Database List

Want to see how a huge amount of data can be organized and made easily accessible to the online user? Check the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) database online at  http://www.gpoaccess.gov/databases.html . You can find out about everything referred to in a specific House or Senate session through the Congressional Quarterly or what bills have been passed. Best of all, this whole collection illustrates what power is possible when the Web and databases come together.

The National Library of Medicine Databases

The National Library of Medicine provides a wide variety of past and present resources related to the biomedical and health sciences at  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/index.html . The format of databases varies, including being searchable to just bibliographic citations to full text. You’ll find tons of stuff for the social and behavioral sciences researcher as well as the aspiring nuclear scientist.

Choosing the Best Search Engine for your Information Need

Noodle Tools compares different search engines and recommends the best ones based on your need (identifying a topic, narrowing a topic, finding primary sources, by topic, historical or current, etc.) at  http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html .

Ready ‘Net Go!

On this Web site, available at  http://www.tulane.edu/~lmiller/ArchivesResources.html , Tulane University exhibits a “meta index” with links to nearly every archival resource available. The site contains general search tools as well.

CHAPTER 3 SUBJECT MATTER, METHODS, AND THE MAKING OF A NEW SCIENCE

SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT

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—Psychology is to be treated as a natural science in this book. This requires a word of commentary.

William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, 1892

INTRODUCTION

Two of Psychology’s biggest challenges in the process of becoming an authoritative science in the late 19th century were (1) to delineate and define its subject matter and (2) to develop an appropriate method for the systematic study of this subject matter. For the new psychologists, one solution lay in treating Psychology as a natural science. This meant developing a rigorous method that would establish a clear break with mental philosophy (a topic we cover in the next chapter), despite overlap in the subject matter of interest to both psychologists and philosophers, such as the will, consciousness, habits, and other processes of the mind. A rigorous method would determine whether Psychology could become equivalent in scientific legitimacy to its natural science counterparts such as physics and chemistry. Underlying the search for this method was the very question of whether the study of what was called the mind, the soul, and later, conscious experience and mental processes could ever be conducted scientifically, a question we introduced in  Chapter 1 . Several major philosophers had argued that this kind of subject matter could not be subjected to rigorous scientific analysis. Their arguments were based on specific beliefs about the nature of science and the nature of mind. In the first part of this chapter, we review several of these arguments and the work that subsequently challenged these beliefs. Interestingly, it may have been those who argued againstthe possibility of a scientific psychology who actually hastened its eventual emergence by catalyzing the work that made the new science possible.

We can safely point out, without giving away the end of the story, that by the late 1800s enough researchers believed they had demonstrated that psychological subject matter could be approached scientifically for it to become a science. Germany is often identified as the birthplace of the new science, and indeed, scholars working at German universities in the mid- to late 1800s contributed much of the work that we retrospectively identify as important for the emergence of scientific psychology. We examine some contextual factors that influenced why scientific psychology emerged in such a specific time and place, thus grounding this part of our analysis in the social constructionist view we outlined in the introduction to the text.

Importantly, these new scientists of the mind settled on a method. Experimental introspection, as originally developed in Wilhelm Wundt’s psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, emerged as the method of choice in the first 30 or so years of the new Psychology. In the second part of this chapter, we explore the promise and problems of introspection in both German and American contexts and examine the role of this method in the debate over Psychology’s identity as a science. Although introspection was the wedge that opened the door for the science of Psychology, introspective methods were not to become lasting features of Psychology’s methodological arsenal in the United States.

American psychology’s gradual deemphasis of experimental introspection in favor of comparative and observational approaches was tied to several factors, which we explore in the third part of the chapter. This shift was accompanied by a distinct change in the subject matter of psychology away from consciousness and toward observable behavior. This was not a universal phenomenon, and we touch briefly on other traditions that developed in France and Germany, engaging with both the centers and the peripheries of the new Psychology. We then outline the emergence of behaviorism that took American psychology by storm in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. In the backdrop of all of these developments, from the late 1800s on, was a growing emphasis on precise control, measurement, and standardization as the ideals for scientific psychology in the United States. Combined with statistical and individual difference approaches, and embedded in the progressivist values of early 20th-century American culture, we show how Psychology embraced a technoscientific attitude that served both its scientific and its practical aims. This form of Psychology, stressing the function and practical value of psychological knowledge, was exemplified by functionalism, a fully indigenous form of American psychology. We end by discussing some early functionalists and their contributions, and we elaborate more fully on this topic in  Chapter 4 .

CAN PSYCHOLOGY BE A SCIENCE?

Although we now take the existence of the science of Psychology for granted, the possibility of its existence was not always so certain. Psychologist William James alluded to this uncertainty in the quote we chose to begin this chapter, stating that psychology, as a natural science, “requires a word of commentary” (1892, p. 1). Many scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries, in fact, felt that the subject matter of psychology—the mind, or soul—was impervious to objective, scientific study.

In the first chapter, we discussed how French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) conceived of the mind (or soul) as qualitatively distinct from the body. To summarize, although the body, like other aspects of the physical world, consisted of matter extended in space, the mind was immaterial. Descartes felt that the key to knowing the mind was rational reflection and that the mind was not amenable to objective investigation. Descartes proposed that the body without the soul would be a mechanical automaton and the mind without the body would be conscious but would contain only innate ideas. The body, through the experience of the senses and the material world, he argued, contributes to the contents of the mind. According to Descartes, these interactions of mind and body occurred in a specific part of the brain, the pineal gland. His position became known as interactive dualism. As we noted in  Chapter 1 , Descartes’s position was influential in resituating human nature as part of the natural rather than the divine order, without succumbing to a completely mechanistic or materialistic model of the mind that would have been a serious break from his religious tradition.

KANT’S CHALLENGE

German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804) argued that there were serious impediments to a natural science of the mind, but despite this position his ideas actually propelled the emergence of scientific psychology. They did so by challenging subsequent philosophers and scientists to test and refute his contentions and by providing a rationale for a new object of study. Kant proposed that there are two separate domains of reality, one inside the human mind and one external to it. The external world consists of objects in a pure state that have an existence independent of human experience. Kant called this the noumenal world. He believed that this noumenal world can never be known directly because our experience of it is always and inescapably mediated through the activity of our mind and of our senses. We can perceive it, but our perception is never a pure representation of the essence of the object because we filter it through our own mental and sensory apparatus. When the noumenal world encounters the human mind, it becomes transformed into the inner or phenomenal world. Thus, humans never directly experience the pure reality of things in themselves but, rather, experience a series of appearances (phenomena) that are created by an actively perceiving mind as it encounters the noumenal world.

FIGURE 3.1 Immanuel Kant on a German stamp

Why would this be an important idea for psychology? The implication of Kant’s position is that the mind is active, rather than passive, and that these activities of the mind might become important processes to study. His ideas suggested that the role of the mind in structuring our experience could be an important topic to investigate in and of itself. Kant believed that in transforming the noumenal world the mind uses certain rules. For example, the mind always locates phenomena in time and space. Kant called these two dimensions “intuitions.” Furthermore, he suggested that the mind has 12 categories according to which it automatically organizes phenomena. Included in these categories is the concept of causality. As humans, we always experience the world as oriented in time and space and as operating according to causal laws. This is not, Kant argued, because the world is fundamentally organized that way, but is instead because the mind is set up to structure its experience of the world in that way.

Kant’s legacy for psychology is twofold: Although he made a claim for the importance of the mind’s organizing properties, thus creating a role for psychology in terms of studying these properties and the experiences they create, Kant also insisted that mental phenomena, the mind or soul, could not be studied in the same way the natural sciences studied their subject matter. Kant based his reasoning on the fact that it is impossible to have any a priori knowledge of the human mind; it is impossible to know the nature of mind or “I” because one has to first experience one’s own mind and use this experience as the basis of all knowledge, which is an empirical process. There can thus be no pure, rational knowledge of the soul (rational psychology), and psychology can at best be an empirical science (empirical psychology). However, Kant also argued that psychology could not even be an empirical science because mental phenomena have no physical existence and are therefore not open to observation or experimental manipulation. Any attempt to observe mental phenomena would, in the act of observing them, change the phenomena themselves. This was a critique of introspection that others shared and to which we later return. The impossibility of internal observation was an irresolvable dilemma, in Kant’s thinking. Finally, he also argued that mental processes, since they exist only in time but have no spatial dimension, cannot be reduced to mathematics. Mathematics was the hallmark of pure science and the basis for the statement of a priori relationships that are required in natural science proper.

Therefore, Kant felt that psychology must always remain a historical, philosophical, and descriptive, rather than truly scientific, discipline. He advocated a form of anthropological investigation based on the external observation of interactions among people as the basis for an empirical psychology. As historian of psychology David Leary has pointed out, “Kant’s heritage to psychology was a challenge” (1978, p. 116). Subsequent generations of thinkers would take Kant’s prescriptions for natural science, i.e., that it be mathematical and experimental, and his exhortation that psychology could never measure up to these ideals, to show that they could indeed bring mental processes under the control of experiment and formulate mathematical laws to predict psychological phenomena, namely, sensation. Three figures who took up Kant’s challenge of making psychology mathematical were Johann Friederich Herbart, a philosopher; Ernst Heinrich Weber, a physiologist; and Gustav Theodor Fechner, a physicist. All were influential in creating psychophysics, a branch of study involving the physical measurement and quantification of psychological phenomena.

PSYCHOPHYSICS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF A NEW SCIENCE

Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) was an admirer of Kant’s philosophical system but took as his task the extension of this system. Specifically, Herbart took seriously Kant’s contention that psychology needed to be mathematical to be a true science. Drawing on an idea he had encountered in Kant’s writings, he proposed that numbers could be assigned to psychological experiences of different intensities (he called them “presentations”). Furthermore, he argued that these intensities could be distinguished from one another as more intense or less intense and that the degrees of intensity would vary over time. Herbart suggested that for each increase in the intensity of one presentation a corresponding decrease in the intensity of another presentation would ensue, such that one could explain psychological dynamics by means of an equilibrium model consisting of exact mathematical equations. Herbart faced a problem with his mathematical system, however. Although he could arbitrarily assign numbers to presentations of different intensities, he had no way of relating them to an objective standard. As a philosopher, Herbart was dealing in the realm of the abstract rather than in the realm of experience, and his mathematical formulations were thus deemed insufficiently empirical. He also stopped short of proclaiming that psychology could be experimental. Because of the fluidity and constant flux of mental life, he did not see how any part of it could be isolated and stabilized for experimental investigation. Although atomism, an approach that involved breaking down subject matter into its smallest elements for study, was beginning to take hold in the physical and life sciences (e.g., by 1860, the atomic theory was generally accepted as a physical reality in chemistry), Herbart stopped short of embracing this model for psychology. Importantly, however, he had shown a role for mathematics in the description of psychological phenomena.

The role of mathematics in psychology was refined by the work of physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878). Weber conducted experiments on his own sense of touch, finding that when he stimulated the tip of his forefinger or his lips with two compass points placed at varying distances from each other he could not reliably distinguish between the two points when they were less than 1/20 of an inch apart. He then tested people’s ability to distinguish accurately between weights of similar appearance but different mass. For example, when he asked participants to judge whether a second weight was lighter or heavier than a standard weight, he found that the ability to make an accurate distinction relied on the relative rather than the absolute differences in the weights. That is, heavier standard weights required that the second, compared weight be heavier by a proportion of the original, not by an absolute amount, to make an accurate sensory discrimination. Most notably, these proportions appeared to be constant and reliable and could be calculated for each sensory experience (e.g., the brightness of a light, the loudness of a sound, and the length of a line). Weber calculated the proportions and established what he called the just-noticeable difference, or jnd, for each sensory discrimination. For example, the jnd for weight discrimination was always an amount equal to 1/30th of the heavier of the weights being compared.

Weber’s work intrigued Gustav Fechner (1801–1887), who was struggling with a way to empirically demonstrate a lawful relationship between the physical and the psychological worlds. Fechner had been trained as a physician but subsequently became self-educated in physics and mathematics by translating textbooks. He made some notable contributions to the former field and then occupied the chair in physics at Leipzig University, stepping down in 1840 due to poor health. From then on, he set about elaborating his philosophy. Fechner was quite interested in life after death and the problem of man’s relationship to and place in nature. He conceived of man and nature as a unity but diverged from some of his contemporaries by insisting that all forms of life, from plants to humans, have some form of consciousness. Of central concern to Fechner was the relationship of the physical world (the physic) with the psychological (the psyche). His experimental approach to this problem came to be known as psychophysics.

FIGURE 3.2 Gustav Theodor Fechner

Although the relationship between the physical and the psychological worlds seems like a large topic, Fechner addressed it by narrowing his focus of investigation to the level of sensation, a psychological experience with a physical referent. The experimental investigation of sensation had been addressed by both physicists and physiologists since the beginning of their disciplines and philosophers had identified sensation as the vehicle through which to examine the mind–body problem, so it was a natural choice for Fechner. Building on his colleague Weber’s work on the jnd, Fechner reasoned that if the jnd was a constant fraction for each of the senses, then it could stand as a theoretical unit of measurement representing the subjectively experienced intensity of a stimulus. If one took the smallest or lowest intensity of a stimulus that could be perceived as the zero point on a scale of psychological intensities and then plotted successive jnds as a function of the increase in actual physical intensities needed to produce them, what resulted was a psychophysical curve that showed remarkable regularity across sensory experiences. The function that described the curve was a logarithmic function that could be expressed in a concise mathematical equation, which Fechner called Weber’s law, but eventually came to be known as Fechner’s law. To generate the experimental data for this work, Fechner actually lifted his arms with a weight in each hand more than 67,000 times. He carefully recorded whether he could tell a difference between the lighter and the heavier weights and then calculated the physical difference that corresponded to the subjectively perceived difference. For his painstaking work, what Fechner discovered was no less than a mathematical law allowing him to both describe and predict the relationship between the physical world and our subjective experience of that world. This proved to Fechner that man and nature are in harmony, part of a unity.

Fechner formulated his law in 1850 but spent 10 years refining it and expanding on its implications. In 1860 he published Elemente der Psychophysik, where he put forth his work publicly for the first time. As historian of psychology Gail Hornstein (1988) has pointed out, what was interesting about the reception of Fechner’s law, and psychophysical investigations more generally, was that despite serious and persistent theoretical and philosophical arguments about the very possibility of psychophysics, including a heated debate over whether a stimulus and the sensation of a stimulus could ever be meaningfully distinguished, these criticisms did nothing to slow the rate of development of the field and its methods. Furthermore, these theoretical debates have shown up infrequently in historical accounts of the importance of psychophysics and quantification in the making of the new Psychology. Hornstein has pointed out that despite these substantive critiques, psychophysics offered a compelling, reliable, and publicly verifiable demonstration that quantification had a place in psychology, and it offered a clear set of methodological procedures. For a science struggling to gain its autonomy, this latter feature was especially attractive. Thus, despite the theoretical problems with psychophysics, it offered procedures that were inexpensive, provided clear results, could be taught easily to research assistants, and appeared scientifically respectable. As she noted, “in the face of these practical benefits, the theoretical debates surrounding the meaning of the data could well have appeared to be of little relevance to individual researchers” (Hornstein, 1988, p. 8). This early disjuncture between theory and method, Hornstein argued, laid the foundation for the later view that methods are theoretically neutral tools that carry with them no implications regarding the nature of the subject matter they are used to investigate.

With the rise of psychophysics, combined with other developments recounted in  Chapter 1 , it was a short step to the establishment of the first psychological laboratory and the formalization of the new science. Before turning to this important event and the work of the figure credited with founding scientific psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, however, let us revisit an idea from the introduction and consider the following question: If context is important in understanding the emergence of psychological knowledge and practice, what contextual factors influenced the origins of the new Psychology? Many of the figures we have talked about—Hermann von Helmholtz, Kant, Herbart, Weber, and Fechner, for example—were all working in a collection of German states that would become the German Empire in 1871 (preceded by the German Confederation). Was there something about the context in which these men worked that facilitated the rise of experimental psychology?

THE GERMAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

One answer can be found in the structure of the German university system and the educational philosophy it reflected that became dominant in the 19th century. Until this time, and indeed since the Middle Ages, German universities were organized into four schools or faculties, three of which provided training for professional vocations. These professional faculties were law, theology, and medicine. The fourth faculty was the artistic or philosophical faculty, which, instead of providing training for a profession, served the other three faculties by giving courses that were required background for these vocations. The philosophical–artistic faculty had comparably lower status, and graduates received the title of magister rather than doctorate, which was reserved for lawyers, theologians, and physicians. This system was changed in the early 19th century as a result of rather extensive Prussian educational reforms. Schools and universities previously influenced by the church were instead run by the state, and the monarchy took an active interest in supporting scholarship and the university system. In 1809, King Frederick William III helped found the University of Berlin. In 1818 he also founded the University of Bonn. In a country politically beleaguered by the war with Napoleon of France (1803–1815), education and educational reform were seen as paths to national recovery.

The new system was modern, secular, and a clear break from the medieval university. Instead of law, theology, and medicine, the new universities emphasized the pursuit of higher learning rather than training for professional or civil service careers. As a result, the previously low-status Philosophical faculty took on new importance. The latest discoveries and theories in geography, politics, mathematics, and the natural sciences were also accorded new importance. The middle class used higher education and scholarship to attain improved social positions, and education was accessible to all who passed their secondary school examinations. Although modern and secular, the universities took as their goal the creation of true scholars. As one writer put it, “the most unusual figure on the European social scene during the 18th century was the German scholar, the man of pure learning” (Ringer, 1969, p. 8). German professors commanded great respect in society.

Two characteristics of German universities in this period, beginning in the early 18th century, contributed significantly to the creation of men of pure learning: Lehrfreiheit, the freedom to teach, and Lernfreiheit, the freedom to learn. The principle of freedom to teach meant that German professors were free to lecture on any topics they chose, to present them in any way they chose, and to express any views about them, without any interference or direction from university officials or others. This intellectual freedom and independence of thought was a highly prized feature not only of the universities but also of German national life. Professors often met with small groups of students in seminars instead of lecturing didactically, and these interactions with one’s professors were highly valued. Students took a comprehensive examination at the end of their university career, rather than tests at the end of each semester. The emphasis, therefore, was not on details of lectures but on synthesis, analysis, and breadth of knowledge.

Students, for their part, were allowed to choose their course of study, including what they learned, how often they attended classes, and with whom they studied. Students could move freely among universities to gain access to a range of educational opportunities, especially to learn from the best professors in their fields of interest. Freedom of learning, combined with the prizing of the pure scholar, encouraged most students to study a range of subjects and to sample freely across disciplines. Many psychologists benefited from this freedom. For instance, Wundt studied physiology at the University of Tübingen, then studied medicine at Heidelberg (where he was also Helmholtz’s research assistant), and took time out to study with Johannes Müller (1801–1858) at the University of Berlin.

It is relatively easy to imagine how this kind of educational system could give rise to numerous significant scholars, as was the case in 18th- and 19th-century Germany. However, the question remains as to why so many of these scholars contributed to the rise of the new Psychology. In addition to Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit, the German concept of Wissenschaft contributed to this development. For Germans, science was not determined by its subject matter. It was a way of looking at things, or Wissenschaften. Thus, any topic could be treated scientifically or approached in a scientific manner. In contrast, science in Britain and France was largely equated with physics and chemistry. In the broad and encompassing German view, all manner of topics could be investigated with a scientific attitude, including the human mind. Note that the notion of Wissenschaft is conceptually distinct from the debates over whether the study of the mind or soul could become an exact science using mathematics and experimentation. Relevant here is the distinction between Naturwissenschaften (loosely translated as “natural sciences”) and Geisteswissenschaften (loosely translated as “human sciences”) that has more to do with what kind of science can be conducted on what kind of subject matter. This distinction did become important somewhat later in Wundt’s work, and we return to it shortly.

Thus, the new science of Psychology that arose in Germany at the end of the 19th century can be seen as a product of this unique milieu or, in part, socially constructed. Woven from the multidisciplinary strands of physiology, medicine, physics, mathematics, and philosophy and bound with a broad scientific sensibility that facilitated the systematic investigation of a range of phenomena, German experimental psychology can be seen as a product of the Lehrfreiheit, Lernfreiheit, and Wissenschaft traditions.

At least one other contextual feature distinguished the professionalization of experimental psychology in Germany from its soon-to-be-developed American counterpart. By the end of the 19th century, the German university system was characterized by a highly respected philosophical tradition and emphasized independent research. Because of this, experimental psychologists had little reason to break away from the highly regarded philosophy, and they felt they could flourish under its expansive umbrella. By 1910, although the study of psychology was expanding, there were still only four academic positions in psychology, independent of philosophy, in the whole university system.

In the United States, however, the concept of a research university that was nonsectarian was relatively new, and the university system was expanding as population growth increased. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, which opened in 1876, was among the first of these new research universities. Initially, it was devoted solely to graduate education. Soon after its founding, Stanford University, Clark University, and the University of Chicago were established. Colleges with strong undergraduate curricula, some of which had previously used “university” in their title, such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, established programs of graduate education and research. The rhetoric of the new universities was decidedly scientistic to distinguish them from the religious colleges whose mission was to teach students moral philosophy, religious devotion, and discipline. Research, especially scientific research, would be the hallmark of this new education and necessitated a distancing from the religious and philosophical traditions of yesteryear. Thus, the new Psychology in the United States developed in tandem with these changes in the expanding university system and quickly set as its task the incorporation of scientific ideals and a divorce from philosophy and religion, both institutionally and intellectually.

WILHELM WUNDT AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY

Born near Mannheim, Germany, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was a product of the open German intellectual tradition we just discussed. Wundt’s grandfather had been a professor of history at the University of Heidelberg, and two of Wundt’s uncles were physicians and professors of physiology. Although a relatively undistinguished secondary school student, Wundt eventually hit his academic stride at the University of Tübingen, where he studied medicine and conducted experimental research.

FIGURE 3.3 Wilhelm Wundt

Wundt soon discovered that he preferred research and publishing to clinical work, and after receiving his degree in medicine at Tübingen, he became accredited by the University of Heidelberg as a lecturer. Soon thereafter, Helmholtz (1821–1894) was recruited to come to Heidelberg and set up an Institute of Physiology. Wundt became his research assistant and proceeded, independently, to conduct studies of vision and the perception of space, although these topics were of interest to both men. During his tenure as Helmholtz’s assistant, Wundt also conducted a study that built on his knowledge of his supervisor’s work on the speed of the nervous impulse but extended it to a process of the central, rather than peripheral, nervous system. For this study, Wundt built an apparatus he called the thought meter.

The purpose of the thought meter was to test the assumption that when we are exposed to two different sensory stimuli at the same time—in the case of the thought meter, seeing a pendulum pass a specified point on its trajectory and hearing a bell chime at the same instant—we are consciously aware of them at the same time. Wundt built an apparatus that delivered these two events simultaneously and then attempted to report the exact point of the pendulum swing at precisely the instant he heard the bell chime. When he attempted to do this, he found that in his judgments he reliably placed the pendulum at a point just beyond the point it actually was when the bell rang, even though he felt he was experiencing them simultaneously. He interpreted this lag (usually between 1/8th and 1/10th of a second) as the time it took to experience each sensation in consciousness, even though they had occurred at the same time.

Wundt quickly realized that his measurement of an act of conscious experience placed him in the tradition of Fechner and Helmholtz and again challenged the Kantian assumption that the mind could not be subjected to quantification and experimentation. Recognizing that by now a small tradition of similar work had arisen, Wundt wrote a text called Principles of Physiological Psychology, published in 1874. In this book, he set forth a new domain of science that would bring together physiology and psychology, combining the methods of experimental physiology with psychological introspection to study the processes of sensation and voluntary movement. Wundt thus proposed and outlined a new field he called experimental psychology. In 1879, he also established a research laboratory at his new home university, the University of Leipzig, where Fechner and Weber were still working. Students could come to the laboratory to be trained in the new science, and many did. Two years later, Leipzig designated Wundt’s laboratory and program the Institut für Experimentelle Psychologie, and increased his research space. The method of study developed by Wundt, and used in his laboratory, came to be known as experimental introspection.

Experimental introspection was distinguished from existing forms of philosophical, or armchair, introspection by the introduction of laboratory apparatus that would standardize and mechanize presentations of stimuli upon which subjects would report. Wundt saw the drawbacks to the form of introspection that involved instructing subjects to perform fairly complex cognitive tasks, such as adding a column of numbers, and then asking them to produce an introspective report outlining exactly what went through their mind in the process of adding. Wundt felt that this kind of self-observation was not useful in a scientific psychology because it conflated the act of perceiving with the act of observing by demanding the simultaneous perception, observation, and reporting of internal events. Wundt’s solution was to manipulate the conditions of internal perception so that they approximated the conditions of external perception as closely as possible through the use of experimental apparatus and by limiting introspection to the study of basic mental processes. For example, in the case of the thought-meter experiment, repeated experimental presentations of the pendulum and the chime could easily be generated so that subjects could make repeated observations of their own perceptions almost automatically, with limited need for a memory of the event and a short interval between the experimental presentation and the report. The goal was to enable subjects to be as passive, automatic, and accurate reporters of their own internal perceptions as possible—literally, to separate the subject from the object. Wundt called this method “experimental introspection.”

As historian of psychology Deborah Coon has remarked (1993), Wundt intended experimental introspection to be analogous to the observation of the natural sciences. The introduction of experimental apparatus that could provide automatic, repeated, and standardized presentations of stimuli was fully in line not only with these scientific ideals but with technological ones as well. As Germany and the United States experienced the rapid and large-scale changes wrought by industrialization, including an emphasis on standardization and mechanization, a technoscientific ideal of science itself arose and affected the new Psychology.

Wundt was also an important professionalizer of the new field of experimental psychology. He not only set up a laboratory and wrote a textbook but also published a journal, Philosophische Studien, or Philosophical Studies, which was devoted to the new science. Wundt attracted numerous students, among them several Americans who were drawn to the new science and the freedom to learn offered by the German university system. James, an important figure for the founding of Psychology in the United States, came to Germany in 1867, some years before Wundt established his laboratory and became widely known. A medical student recovering from physical and mental strain by convalescing in Europe, James heard that Helmholtz and Wundt were conducting experiments on the physiology of the senses and thought he might learn something from them. Although he was not able to meet with them in person, he read their work and was considerably influenced by it. Later, G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924), one of James’s students, was one of the first Americans to study in Wundt’s laboratory. Hall returned to the United States to establish the first formal laboratory for psychological research at Johns Hopkins in 1883.

Students in Wundt’s laboratory typically undertook investigations in one of three areas: psychophysics, studies of the time sense, and mental chronometry. Reaction-time studies were common, and elaborate devices were invented to measure and record reaction times and present standardized stimuli. Another American student, James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944), was particularly taken with the reaction-time experiment. He conducted his PhD studies in Germany and was then invited to take a position at Cambridge University in England, largely on the strength of his firsthand experience of the Leipzig laboratory. Although he only stayed for a couple of years before returning to the United States, he did set up a small laboratory there. After his return to America, Cattell devised a series of mental tests, including measures of reaction time that could be used to generate data about the distribution of individual differences. These tests bore the mark of both his Leipzig and his Cambridge experiences (see  Chapter 6 ).

Thus, Wundt was clearly a key figure in establishing the science of psychology and its institutional presence. An important caveat to this characterization is necessary, however. According to Wundt, experimental introspection was useful for the study of basic mental processes such as sensation and perception but could tell us little about complex processes such as thought and language. Thus, although Wundt has rightfully been called the founder of experimental psychology, he also saw the limits of experimentation and placed a large and important segment of psychology firmly in the Geisteswissenschaften (human science or cultural science) rather than Naturwissenschaften (natural science) tradition. In his massive multivolume Völkerpsychologie published in 1904, he expounded on this part of his psychology, in which he discussed language, myth, custom, and social behavior and the historical and comparative methods that are needed to study them.

Clearly, Wundt’s legacy is complex. To reiterate, although Wundt is considered by many to be the founder of scientific Psychology, he nonetheless felt that a large and important part of psychology could not be studied with methods of natural science. In addition, far from being hegemonic in its own time, Wundt’s experimental psychology occupied one place at a large table of alternative systems, many of which, if even mentioned, have been relegated to the periphery of historical accounts. Other German scholars formulated their own versions of psychological study that were viable institutional and intellectual alternatives to Wundt’s system. For example, in the 1870s, Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–1881), Franz Brentano (1838–1917), Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), and others developed systematic psychologies that presented different views on the subject matter and methods of psychology. Perhaps most significant was the human scientific critique of experimental psychology formulated by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911). Dilthey’s human scientific psychology took as its subject matter experience in its totality. Appropriate methods included description and analysis, with the goal of understanding. For Dilthey, the mind was the medium through which meaning was formed; thus, the content, rather than the structure, of the mind was of most interest to him.

FIGURE 3.4 Wilhelm Dilthey

Despite the appearance of linear progress toward the crowning achievement of a fully scientized study of the mind, buttressed by all the appropriate trappings of professionalization, the story of Psychology’s inception was far from that simple. Just a few decades after Wundt’s achievements, considerable controversy arose in Germany over the status of experimental psychology. For example, in 1912, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), a phenomenological philosopher, launched an organized attack against experimental psychology. He and more than 100 of his colleagues signed a petition to block the hiring of any experimental psychologists. Although unsuccessful, events such as these challenge the notion of a unified and universally accepted German discipline of Psychology.

PSYCHOLOGY IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE

Although Germany was a central site for the formation of the new Psychology, developments were also unfolding in nearby France and Britain. Developments in each of these countries were complex amalgams of imported ideas and local philosophical, intellectual, and institutional traditions. In France, Théodule Ribot (1839–1916) is traditionally named as the founder of scientific Psychology. To distance himself from the dominant position of Auguste Comte, the prominent French philosopher who argued that psychology could never be a positive science, he drew on English philosophies of evolutionism and associationism. The latter posited that the complex contents of consciousness were built from elementary sensations through several laws of association, such as contiguity, contrast, and cause and effect. Ribot also incorporated the idea, found in the work of renowned French physiologist Claude Bernard, that normal and pathological states or experiences fall along a continuum. For Ribot, then, the normal human mind could be understood by investigating malfunction. He thus formulated the pathological method, a method that was to influence the course of the new Psychology in France. One of Ribot’s students, Pierre Janet (1859–1947), would become a prime exemplar of this approach. We discussed the French clinical tradition and the Paris model briefly in the introduction, and return to it in more depth in  Chapter 5 .

In England, one of the major developments that would affect not only the course of British psychology but also the course of psychology in the United States was Francis Galton’s (1822–1911) work on statistical research practices. Unlike the German or French traditions, which focused on understanding the processes of the individual human mind (normal or abnormal), the Galtonian approach focused on the distribution of psychological characteristics in large numbers of individuals in a population. Combined with hereditarian theories of the origins of both physical and mental characteristics, and the influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory, Galton used this information to promote a eugenicist program to ensure the continued status of an educated elite (of which he was a member) in the face of a democratizing society. Galton’s brand of eugenics, termed positive eugenics because it encourages the interbreeding of eminent individuals to improve the quality of the genetic stock, can be contrasted with negative eugenics, which some psychologists also advocated. Negative eugenics involves restricting the ability of so-called unfit individuals to procreate, often through sex segregation or enforced sterilization. We return to Galton and his important, although controversial, role in psychology in  Chapter 6 .

THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY IN AMERICA

If, in the traditional account, the new Psychology can be said to have arisen in Germany in the late 1800s, it can also be said that despite its European origins it proliferated most rapidly in another context entirely: the relatively young and rapidly industrializing United States of America. One of the key figures in the development of scientific psychology in America was William James. Like Wundt, James was an important professionalizer of the new Psychology. After his visit to Heidelberg, he returned to the United States in 1868 and was offered a lectureship in physiology at Harvard. He set up a collection of experimental apparatus in a room at the university as early as 1875, although it was too informal to be called a laboratory. He taught the first American university courses in the new scientific Psychology, and he wrote an influential text, The Principles of Psychology, that was published in 1890 after 12 years of work. But like his German counterpart Wundt, James had some distinct reservations about the scientific standing of psychology and struggled to find a method that would both be rigorous and produce meaningful data about mental life.

William James and a Science of Psychology

William James (1842–1910) had an eclectic education. Born the eldest of five children into an affluent and cosmopolitan family, James spent much of his young life traveling and he received his education from private tutors and private schools from one continent to another. His home life was intellectually stimulating, and his younger brother, Henry James Jr., became a famous novelist. William James was artistically inclined, but family pressure to take up a more respectable vocation led him to the study of chemistry at Harvard. He soon switched to physiology but then took up medicine when a change in the family fortune indicated that he might need to earn a living.

FIGURE 3.5 William James

Soon after his switch to medicine, he began to experience physical health problems that, some have suggested, had psychological roots. James convinced his father that a trip to Germany would help with both his physical and his emotional recovery. As we mentioned, while there he read about the interesting work in experimental physiology by Helmholtz and others and became intrigued with the notion of mechanism, the position that all natural phenomena can be explained in terms of the causal interactions among material particles, without any reference to an external, supernatural force or agency. He was also exposed to some of the work of the young Wundt and vowed to learn more about the possibility of a scientific psychology that could connect physical changes in the nervous system with the experience of consciousness.

One aspect of the mechanistic philosophy and its application to psychology that he encountered in Germany particularly troubled James, however. Specifically, James saw that mechanism held within it a deterministic element. If conscious experience were to be studied mechanistically, did that mean that there was no room for free will in the description and explanation of mental life? James was disposed to believe in free will because it accorded with his religious and spiritual beliefs, but he felt that free will was fundamentally incompatible with the methods and aims of a science of psychology. If there were no natural laws, regularities, or environmental determinants of mental life, why apply science to studying it?

Eventually, James resolved this personal and philosophical dilemma by adopting a belief in free will for his private life while adopting a deterministic model for scientific psychology. Each belief, he reasoned, would be functional in its own domain. This was a pragmatic decision, and it invoked the function the belief would serve in each area. In his personal life, believing in free will was consistent with his personal values. In his professional life, a belief in determinism allowed him to develop his ideas about a science of psychology.

The Principles of Psychology

In his work The Principles of Psychology, written between 1878 and 1890, James grappled further with the status of Psychology as a natural science. In a chapter called “The Methods and Snares of Psychology,” James laid out what he saw as the subject matter and methods of Psychology, conceived as a natural science. In terms of subject matter, James described psychology as the “science of mental life,” consisting of the description and explanation of states of consciousness, including sensations, desires, emotions, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and volitions. He stated that the object of scientific enquiry in Psychology was to be “the mind of distinct individuals inhabiting definite portions of a real space and a real time” (James, 1890, p. 183) to distinguish it from metaphysics. Scientific psychology involved the study of conscious processes and mental activity, conceptualized as objects in a world of other objects. Therefore, James concluded, psychology should leave the metaphysical question of how we can report on the mind to the philosophers and take it as a given that we have the ability to study conscious processes objectively.

To put Psychology on the same footing as other sciences and to distinguish it from philosophy, James pointed out that all natural sciences assume a world of matter that exists independently of the human mind. Chemists and botanists, he argued, do not trouble themselves with how the mind comes to know what it knows or whether anything exists beyond what we actually experience. And so, James concluded, neither should psychologists. To acknowledge this as an important difference between psychology and philosophy, he argued, was to take a significant step toward establishing Psychology as an independent discipline and closer to the status of a natural science like chemistry or botany.

In terms of method, James privileged introspection but differed considerably from Wundt on the nature of introspection and the procedures to be followed. In fact, James outlined three methods for Psychology: introspection, experimentation, and comparison. James defined introspection, quite differently from Wundt, as “the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover” (James, 1890, p. 185). What we will discover, he asserted, are states of consciousness. James regarded this fact, that we all have states of consciousness and can observe them, as the most fundamental of all postulates of psychology.

James equated experimentation with the experimental introspection that was being conducted in Germany and was highly skeptical of what he sarcastically termed the “prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers” of the Wundtian tradition (James, 1890, p. 193). James critiqued the forms of experimental introspection that were being developed in Germany partly because he objected to what he perceived as a kind of dissection and reduction of mental life to discrete and meaningless units such as reaction times and jnds. By contrast, James theorized that consciousness and thinking had a stream-like, dynamic quality that could not be captured by an atomistic, reductionistic approach. Thus, the form of introspection that he advocated was closer to the tradition of philosophical introspection against which Wundt had developed his experimental methods, even though James was still arguing for a form of scientific psychology. Due to the broad conception of German science as Wissenschaft, Wundt could deal with the limitations of experimental introspection by confining this method to the study of sensation and perception while arguing that the rest of psychology could be approached in the human scientific tradition of Geisteswissenschaften. James, without this broad conception of science, clung to an older form of introspection so as to preserve what he saw as the complex, holistic, and dynamic nature of psychology’s subject matter. It was, however, hard to have things both ways, and James, as we show later, eventually retreated from psychology and turned to his interests in philosophy and spiritualism.

But before he withdrew from psychology, James formulated a position on the goal or objective of the new science that came to be quite influential. It was a position known as functionalism. According to James, the point of a scientific psychology was to uncover the functions of the mind, not its contents or its structure. This reflected an orientation that was prevalent in American society at the end of the 19th century and influenced by Darwinian evolutionary theory—the position that understanding should be based on an analysis of function rather than structure and that to know what something does is to understand what it is. Just as Charles Darwin (1809–1882) had emphasized that the evolution of physical characteristics could be understood by looking at the functions they served in giving the organism reproductive advantages, in psychology functionalism was used to understand how the mind and its contents had evolved by looking at the functions of different thoughts and beliefs, functions that were objectively observable in terms of actions.

As early as 1871 James had been influenced by a philosophy proposed by another Harvard-educated Bostonian, Charles Peirce (1839–1914), with whom he interacted in a gathering called the “Metaphysical Club.” Peirce’s philosophy, called pragmatism, was the position that scientific ideas and knowledge can never be certain and therefore should be judged according to the work they do in the world, or according to their degree of practical effectiveness. Under the influence of the theory of evolution by natural selection, pragmatists proposed that beliefs, too, were acted upon by a process of natural selection, with the most adaptive beliefs persisting and the least adaptive beliefs fading away. While Peirce was refining these ideas to publish a paper called “How To Make Our Ideas Clear” in 1878, James was working on his own version of pragmatism. This position meshed nicely with James’s aforementioned personal convictions, and he expanded on the philosophical implications of this approach, applying it to religious, ethical, and emotional, as well as scientific, ideas.

During the years following James’s publication of The Principles of Psychology, he devoted most of his time to philosophy, concluding that psychology was a “nasty little subject.… All one cares to know lies outside”(James, 1920, p. 2). Frustrated by the limitations and uncertainties of the subject he had so carefully laid out, he turned to philosophy and spiritualism for his intellectual sustenance. He was a founder and active member of the American Society for Psychical Research and contributed regularly to its publications. His interest in psychical phenomena seemed to peak in the late 1890s during his involvement with the prominent Boston medium Leonora Piper, whom Hall, along with his colleague and former student, was trying to scientifically discredit. In fall 1896, James conducted a series of lectures at Harvard called the Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States. In these lectures, he presented eight topics, many of which are familiar to students today: dreams and hypnotism, automatism, hysteria, multiple personality, demoniacal possession, witchcraft, degeneration, and genius. Fourteen years later, in 1910, James died in Cambridge. His New York Times obituary summed up the eclecticism of his accomplishments and interests: “William James Dies; Great Psychologist, brother of novelist, and foremost American philosopher was 68 years old. Long Harvard professor, virtual founder of modern American psychology, and exponent of pragmatism, dabbled in spooks” (New York Times, August 27, 1910, p. 7).

THE DEMISE OF INTROSPECTION IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY

Up to this point, we have been considering how psychology achieved scientific and institutional status at the end of the 19th century. We surveyed the contexts in which this process occurred, but we foregrounded work in philosophy, physiology, and psychophysics in Germany, which is often regarded as the birthplace of the discipline. As we mentioned earlier, many American students went to Germany to study the new Psychology. However, even those Americans who felt that they were importing Wundt’s methods often gave them their own idiosyncratic twist. Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927), for example, is often credited with bringing Wundt’s psychology and methods to the United States, but Titchener distorted Wundtian introspection and ignored the half of Wundt’s scientific psychology that belonged to Völkerpsychologie, often extending introspection to processes that Wundt felt were outside the realm of this kind of investigation.

Historian of psychology Michael Sokal (2006), reflecting on the rapidly divergent character of American psychology despite the preponderance of American students who made the trek to Germany, concluded that the Americans did so less to learn about psychological ideas and more to acquire the prestige of a European degree, to gain professional credentials, and to receive practical instruction in the use of instruments. They returned to a country in the throes of what historians have termed the Progressive Era, demarcated roughly as the period between 1890 and 1920. In the face of rapid industrialization, urbanization, increasing specialization in the professions, and expansion of higher education, Americans were looking for solutions to many practical and social problems and saw science and technology as the means to achieve and enact these solutions. We have already seen, in an earlier period, how quickly and powerfully phrenology took hold in the United States as a scientifically derived system of self-improvement. Scientific psychologists were working within the same ethos that prized practical knowledge. The psychology that they encountered in Germany had to be adapted to this context to earn its place not only at the academic table but also in the eyes of the public.

We have seen how James, in his adherence to pragmatism and belief in the functional objectives of scientific psychology, had already begun to shape the character of the new science in the United States. Fairly rapidly, however, even the psychology that James envisioned underwent some rather dramatic changes to bring it more in line with the technoscientific ideal we have just described. In this section we trace several developments that contributed to the rise of behaviorism in the early 1910s.

From the time of the publication of James’s The Principles of Psychology in 1890 to the appearance of John B. Watson’s behaviorist manifesto, Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It in 1913—a span of less than 25 years, the new Psychology underwent a profound reconceptualization that brought it more fully in line with the progressivist values of social order, control, and management. Significant components of this reconceptualization were the rejection of introspection and the study of consciousness by many psychologists and the introduction of a new kind of subject matter for Psychology: behavior. To understand how this transition occurred, we need to look at several developments.

Thorndike, the Animal Mind, and Animal Behavior

In the first chapter we introduced the idea that Darwinian evolutionary theory paved the way for psychologists to study the animal mind, not only for clues to human functioning but also for its own sake. In 1872, Darwin published what could arguably be considered the first work of modern comparative psychology, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Darwin had a friend and colleague named George Romanes (1848–1894) who carried on this work and published a book in 1882 called Animal Intelligence. Romanes, like many other animal psychologists of his time, used the anecdotal method, combined with the method of inference, to study his subjects. That is, he would collect descriptions or vignettes of animal behavior from many sources and then sort through them to come up with reliable inferences about the functioning of the animal mind. Although this work does not appear scientific by today’s standards, it marked a slight divergence from introspectionist approaches. Only animal behavior was observable, even though Romanes then extrapolated to the realm of the mind. In 1908, Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939), the first woman to be awarded a PhD in psychology at Cornell University (although she was not the first woman to earn a PhD, see  Chapter 1 ), wrote an influential textbook, The Animal Mind: A Text-book of Comparative Psychology, which mainly covered sensory function and learning. It was to be the standard textbook in the field for 25 years.

By the early 1900s, the anecdotal method began to evoke derision among more experimentally minded American psychologists. One of the first comparative psychologists who turned from the anecdotal to the experimental method was Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949). As an undergraduate student, Thorndike read James’s The Principles of Psychology. In 1896, when he went to Harvard for graduate study, he signed up for courses with James and eventually majored in psychology. Thorndike took up the study of learning in animals, even though Harvard had no tradition of animal psychology, and he quickly ran into the problem of where to house the chicks he was using for his research. Eventually, James came to the rescue and let Thorndike set up his chick experiments in the basement of his own house. Thorndike’s research focused on instinctive reactions on the pecking behavior of chicks. Before he could complete his dissertation, due to dwindling institutional and intellectual support at Harvard, Thorndike moved to Columbia University to study with Cattell. Here he finished his dissertation study and published it in 1898 in a work called “Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals.” Results from these famous puzzle-box experiments with cats, dogs, and chicks led Thorndike to conclude that animals learn solely by trial and error and by reward and punishment. When an animal is placed in an enclosed box, it displays various random behaviors. If an animal accidentally makes a response that opens a door so that it can escape and receive food, the next time the animal is in the box, it takes less time to emit this same response. Finally, the animal makes the response immediately upon being placed in the box. From these observations, Thorndike concluded that animals do not learn by observation, imitation, or reasoning but purely by association. Furthermore, the animal was not associating the idea or mental image of being in the box with the idea or mental image of the escape response; rather, what was being associated was a stimulus (being in a certain position in the box) and a response (pushing the pedal). In 1911, in his book Animal Intelligence, Thorndike forcefully suggested that we study animal behavior, not consciousness, and that this method be extended to humans.

FIGURE 3.6 Margaret Floy Washburn

Courtesy of the Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Akron, OH.

FIGURE 3.7 A typical Thorndike puzzle box

Thorndike’s work was criticized by other comparative psychologists who were fans of the anecdotal method and who felt that the laboratory method placed such overwhelmingly artificial constraints on an animal’s behavior that no conclusions could be reached about its actual behavior in natural settings. Wesley Mills (1847–1915), the founder of the Association for the Study of Comparative Psychology, wrote that Thorndike “placed cats in boxes only 20 × 15 × 12 inches and then expected them to act naturally. As well enclose a living man in a coffin, lower him, against his will, into the earth, and attempt to deduce normal psychology from his behavior” (Mills, 1899, p. 266). Nonetheless, the laboratory method took hold, as did the focus on behavior rather than the animal mind that had characterized earlier work.

Pavlov, Animal Learning, and the Environment

The work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) was influential in dismantling introspection in the American context partly because of its thoroughly objective, mechanistic, and materialistic orientation. Pavlov was influenced by the founder of modern Russian physiology, Ivan Sechenov (1829–1905). Sechenov had studied with Helmholtz and believed that psychology could only become scientific if it were to embrace the objective methods of physiology and ignore consciousness. Pavlov also embraced objective methods and avoided references to the mind. Through his work on the classical conditioning of reflexes in dogs, Pavlov demonstrated how the environment, or external stimuli, could come to control behavior, and he rejected “mind” as the cause of behavior. He was able to show, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, how the manipulation of environmental variables, such as ringing a bell when dogs salivated to meat powder, could produce learning. After several pairings of bell ringing and food presentation, dogs would salivate to the bell alone, without the presentation of food. Pavlov thus dispensed with mentalistic explanations and focused on how associations could be built up in consciousness. His view of thinking was atomistic and reflexive; that is, he believed that thinking consisted of elementary associations and the formation of chains of associations that could be traced to external conditions. His work influenced behaviorist Watson, to whom we shall turn shortly, as well as radical behaviorist Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990), who was just beginning his study of psychology when he encountered Watson and Pavlov.

FIGURE 3.8 One of Pavlov’s dogs

Perry and Changing Beliefs About the Nature of Consciousness

During the period under discussion, major developments also occurred in philosophical debates about the nature and functions of consciousness. Many of these debates centered on whether we have to rely on introspection to uncover consciousness and whether consciousness is a private experience or has certain shared properties. American neorealist philosopher Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957), a student and eventual biographer of James, argued that although asking someone to introspect is certainly one way of entering consciousness, theoretically, the contents of consciousness to which a person is attending could be determined if observers were present at the time when the contents were originally laid down. That is, since the contents of consciousness are produced through experience, if someone is there to witness that experience, theoretically, they would know the contents of your mind. Thus, Perry argued that the mind is not necessarily private. Even the conscious experience of one’s own internal sensations, such as headaches and stomach pains, is presumably shared by others and not unique. Although one does not have direct access to another’s subjective experience, presumably we have analogous experiences.

Perry concluded that mentalistic psychology is misguided because consciousness is not private, known only to oneself, and shared only through introspection. Rather, consciousness is a collection of sensations derived from the external world or our own bodies. Therefore, although introspection is certainly one method, since mind is always on view as behavior, psychology can become a purely behavioral enterprise. As we saw earlier, this conclusion was also being reached in animal psychology, where the study of animal mind through introspection was functionally impossible. It was in this intellectual milieu that Watson developed his career as a psychologist.

Watson and the Rise of Behaviorism

Watson (1878–1958) arrived at the University of Chicago in 1900 with $50 in his pocket. Fresh from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, where he had excelled in philosophy and psychology, an energetic Watson quickly formalized his plan of study: He would major in experimental psychology with James Angell (1869–1949), a Chicago functionalist, and Henry Donaldson (1857–1938), a neurologist who had developed the popular Wistar strain of laboratory rats. He would do minors in philosophy and neurology.

Watson was at once put off by introspectionist psychology. This was partly due to his aversion to interacting with human subjects and partly due to his own inability to perform under the conditions of introspection. When asked to introspect, he felt uncomfortable and unnatural, and he referred to the methods as mental gymnastics resulting in scientific inadequacy. Thus, he chose animals as his experimental subjects and completed his dissertation by correlating the growth and differentiation of the central nervous system with the complexity of behavior in the white rat. The work was titled “Animal Education: The Psychical Development of the White Rat.”

In 1904, Watson continued his work as an assistant to Angell, studying the sensations of maze-running rats, but he was growing frustrated with the lack of institutional support (in terms of funding and space) that he was receiving at Chicago. In fall 1907, psychologist James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934) at Johns Hopkins offered Watson a full professorship, and Watson gratefully accepted. (He had received only an instructorship at Chicago during this time.) Watson completed a great deal of important comparative work in the years immediately following his move to Baltimore and before emerging as the putative “father of behaviorism.” This included careful and physically demanding fieldwork on the behavior of noddy and sooty terns in the Dry Tortugas. It was a busy time for Watson.

Within weeks of his arrival at Johns Hopkins, Watson witnessed a fateful turn of events. A police raid on a Baltimore brothel uncovered the private activities of his senior colleague Baldwin, who was forced to resign from the university. In the process, he handed over the editorship of the journal Psychological Review to his junior colleague. Watson also became the director of the psychological laboratory at Johns Hopkins, all at the age of 30. Over the next six years, in this position of relative authority, Watson would develop the ideas that ultimately appeared in his 1913 paper, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Although it is tempting to characterize Watson as the founder of behaviorism, this paper must be seen as the product not of Watson’s independent thought but of the confluence of trends we have just outlined. It was a particularly polemical summary of a body of extant behaviorally oriented thinking that was percolating in many places at this time. Although Watson’s ideas were not necessarily original, he did emerge as a prominent systematizer and popularizer of the behaviorist position.

In 1913, after giving a talk on the subject at Columbia University in New York City, Watson published “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” in his journal, the Psychological Review. The major line of argument in Watson’s paper was as follows:

1. Human psychology has failed to live up to its natural science aspirations and has failed to address problems that vitally concern human interest.

2. The failure to replicate findings using the introspective method is a serious and irresolvable flaw in psychology’s claims to have scientific method.

3. Consequently, one must dispense with consciousness and the introspective method if psychology is to achieve a scientific status and if it is to yield useful, practical findings.

4. The behavior of animals and man can be investigated without appeal to consciousness and must be viewed as being equally essential to a general understanding of behavior.

Watson used this argument to set forth a revised conceptualization of psychology, which came to be known as behaviorism. He argued that 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.… The behaviorist… 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” (Watson, 1913, p. 158).

Behaviorism: Influential but Contested

Although many accounts of the history of American psychology have been seduced by a traditional storyline that presents Watson’s exposition of behaviorism as a sweeping reform, clearly there were both antecedents of his pronouncements and opposition to them. In the latter category was Mary Whiton Calkins’s (1863–1930) response to Watson’s polemic in a Psychological Bulletin article published later in 1913. Her reactions summed up those of many of her colleagues. She was opposed to the wholesale elimination of introspection as a psychological method and remained certain that some psychological processes could be studied only by introspection. She pointed out that introspection is itself a method for studying behavior, especially complex behavior such as that of imagining, judging, and reasoning. However, she was sympathetic to Watson’s observation that psychology had become too far removed from the problems of everyday life and criticized Titchener’s structuralism in this regard. She suggested that psychologists could continue to use introspection as a method for studying consciousness but urged that this be the study of the conscious self in relation to its environment. Calkins, herself an eminent Harvard-trained psychologist and philosopher, was working on an influential theory of the self and had served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1905. In 1918, she served as president of the American Philosophical Association.

Sidebar 3.1 Focus on Mary Whiton Calkins

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) earned her PhD at Harvard under the tutelage of such eminent figures as philosopher Josiah Royce, William James, and Hugo Münsterberg, all of whom enthusiastically endorsed her work. Despite completing all requirements for the doctoral degree, and being proclaimed by Münsterberg to be the strongest student in his laboratory since he had arrived at Harvard, in 1895 Calkins was refused her PhD by the Harvard Corporation (which continues to refuse to grant the degree posthumously) on the grounds that Harvard did not accept women. Thus, although Calkins is now recognized as one of the most important first-generation American psychologists—she established one of the first psychological laboratories in the country at Wellesley College, published four books and more than 100 papers in psychology and philosophy, and was ranked 12th in a list of the 50 most eminent psychologists in the United States in 1903—she was never awarded the doctorate she had earned.

Calkins’s dissertation research was an experimental study of the association of ideas in which she initiated the paired-associates technique of studying memory. She then spent a large part of her career developing a system of scientific self psychology to which she was ardently committed. Calkins based her system upon the conviction that the foundational unit of study for psychology should be the conscious self. On the one hand, she felt that although introspection could be used to scientifically study the self, most introspective studies of abstracted mental states or processes tended to be impersonalistic, that is, devoid of any relationship to the self. She characterized this as atomistic or idea-psychology. On the other hand, she described her brand of introspective psychology as personalistic. She defined personalistic introspective psychology as the study of conscious, functioning, experiencing selves that exist in relationship to others. For example, in her seminal 1900 paper entitled “Psychology as Science of Selves” in which she introduced her system, she described perception as a consciousness of sharing the experience of several other selves. She did not see the self as metaphysical but argued for its legitimacy, and indeed primacy, as a scientific object in psychology; she also argued for the social nature of the self. In her autobiography, published in 1930, the year of her death, she attributed her conception of the self as social to the influence of Royce and James. She also wrote, “For with each year I live, with each book I read, with each observation I initiate or confirm, I am more deeply convinced that psychology should be conceived as the science of the self, or person, as related to its environment, physical and social” (pp. 42–43).

FIGURE 3.9 Mary Whiton Calkins

Courtesy of the Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Akron, OH.

In an extended discussion of the question, “Was there a behaviorist revolution in psychology in 1913?” historian of psychology Franz Samelson (1981) concluded that there is little evidence that Watson’s paper was the cataclysmic event for psychology that many histories have portrayed it to be, and that Watson perhaps wanted it to be. Echoing Calkins, but 8 years later, Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869–1962) wrote the following in his 1921 textbook, Psychology: A Study of Mental Life:

What the behaviorists have accomplished is the definitive overthrow of the doctrine … that introspection is the only real method of observation in psychology; and this is no mean achievement. But we should be going too far if we followed the behaviorists to the extent of seeking to exclude introspection altogether, and on principle. There is no sense in such negative principles. Let us accumulate psychological facts by any method that will give the facts. (p. 13)

When viewed as a more gradual and never monolithic process, it is nonetheless true that American psychology became, over the next several decades, less reliant on introspective methods and more decidedly behavioral. For a significant period, behaviorism was American psychology in a way that introspectionist psychology could never have been. Why?

BEHAVIORISM AND AMERICAN LIFE

We stressed in  Chapter 2  how Psychology and its products, both theoretical and practical, emerge from ways of living and in turn affect how people make sense of and act upon the world. Behaviorism was in a very real sense both a creation of and a contributor to a way of living in early 20th-century America guided by the progressivist ideals of practicality, order, and control. As psychologist David Bakan noted, behaviorism was both a school of thought within Psychology and a “cultural expression” (1966a, p. 8). The late 19th and early 20th centuries were marked by intense industrialization and urbanization in the United States. Large-scale migration occurred to urban centers from rural areas, and immigration increased. The migration to cities was fueled by the need for a larger urban workforce and the mechanization of farming, and it produced a radical shift in the social fabric of American life. Whereas in the 1870s small-town life had been the norm in the United States, by the early 1900s people increasingly exchanged the agrarian rhythms and face-to-face contact of the small town for the comparatively chaotic and anonymous experience of the large city. Whereas small towns had been relatively homogeneous in terms of religion, ethnicity, and values, with the church and town hall as stable centers of religious and civic life, urban centers were heterogeneous, less centralized, and seemingly disorganized. This disorganization increased as the population influx stressed municipal services such as water, sewers, and transportation. Immigration to the United States, especially to cities, from southern and eastern Europe created large cultural gaps and, at times, intergroup conflicts that seemed threatening and dangerous.

Adding to this picture of rapid change was increased specialization in the professions and formalization of new professional and social roles. The psychologist, one of these new professionals, emerged as a scientific expert who could offer advice on ways to restore order, balance, and civility in everyday life. Psychologists were aware of this cultural opening, and many did not hesitate to step into it. Mental testing, some suggested, could be used to help quantify ability and sort children into appropriate groups in an expanding educational system called upon to serve an increasingly diverse student body. Industrial psychology emerged as an applied science to help organize the workplace, to make it more efficient, and to make workers more productive. The application of scientific principles to human behavior was key. In 1913, the same year as Watson’s behaviorist manifesto, Harvard’s Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916; recruited by James in 1892 to take over the psychological laboratory there) published Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. In this book he argued that matching the right worker to the right job was essential to maximize workplace efficiency and that psychology had the assessment tools to scientifically determine this match. He called this the psychotechnical method.

FIGURE 3.10 John Watson and Rosalie Rayner conditioning Little Albert

Courtesy of the Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Akron, OH.

Thus, when Watson asserted in his book Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, published in 1919, that “Every human individual needs the data and laws of behaviorism for organizing his own daily life and conduct” (1919/1924, pp. 8–9), he was appealing directly to a social and personal desire for increased mastery and control and a belief in the value of science to deliver them. He was even quite specific about the need for behaviorism in the face of the challenges of urban life, writing in the preface to the book, “If we are ever to learn to live together in the close relationships demanded by modern social and industrial life, we shall have to … enter upon a study of modern psychology.… One of the most recent and practical of [the] new viewpoints in psychology is that of the behaviorists” (p. xi). In a society that appeared uncontrollable and unpredictable, these were soothing words indeed.

Watson, himself a farm boy from South Carolina, was forced to leave academia soon after his book was published. His departure was precipitated by a scandal involving his affair with his research assistant, Rosalie Rayner. Watson and Rayner had just conducted their famous Little Albert experiment, in which they produced a fear of a white rat in a young infant by pairing the presentation of the rat (and other furry items) with a loud sound. Watson had a theory that humans are born with only three basic emotions, fear, rage, and love, and all other emotions are built from these three. He also stated that innate fear in infants would only be expressed in response to loud noises or a sudden loss of support. He used the innate fear of loud noises to condition Albert’s fear of a white rat, using this as support for his theory that all such fears are built through conditioning.

Despite Watson’s scholarly and professional reputation, his affair with Rayner and his unwillingness to publicly recant his behavior proved too much for conservative Baltimore society and ultimately for Johns Hopkins administrators. He was asked to leave the university. Despite this turn of events, Watson leveraged his scientific credentials, theoretical outlook, and considerable personal charisma into a successful career in advertising with the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency in New York. He married Rayner in 1920, and they had two sons. In 1928, they published Psychological Care of Infant and Child, outlining their behaviorist advice for child rearing. Just seven years later, at the age of 35, Rosalie Rayner Watson died of dysentery. Years later, as adults, the Watsons’ two sons each sought psychoanalytic help for personal and emotional problems. Psychoanalytic ideas were popular in American culture through this period, while behaviorist ideas were coming to dominate academic psychology departments.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we have shown how psychologists forged psychology’s identity as a natural science by developing methods that allowed them to treat consciousness like any other scientific object: as an observable, measurable, and even quantifiable phenomenon. While Germany can be seen as the birthplace of modern laboratory psychology due to Wundt’s work and widespread influence, we have discussed the limitations that Wundt saw in treating more complex mental functions experimentally. In addition to the complexity of his own views on the topic, we showed how Wundt’s system was certainly not the only one proposed at the time. Alternative systems, such as Dilthey’s hermeneutic, human science approach, have exerted some influence in psychology to this day. We also discussed aspects of the German university system, and distinctive features of the German intellectual and cultural tradition, that contributed to the rise of the new Psychology in this time and place. We then briefly touched on some early work in psychology in Britain and France and turned to developments in the American context.

In the United States, as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, introspective methods were deemed to be of little use in developing a practical psychology and were increasingly under attack for not being rigorously scientific. Although many American psychologists were trained in Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory, when they returned to their home country they met different institutional, intellectual, and cultural terrain. By 1913, Watson could confidently assert to his American colleagues that psychology should abandon introspection and become the study of behavior. Behaviorism offered a more authoritatively scientific and, perhaps more importantly, an eminently practical form of psychology. Although behaviorism had some impact on psychology in other parts of the world, it had its greatest influence in the United States, where it fit particularly well with the Progressive Era emphasis on using science and the scientific method to solve the practical problems of society.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

For a useful overview of many developments discussed in this chapter, consult Alfred Fuchs and Katharine Milar’s “Psychology as a Science” (2003) in the Wiley Handbook of Psychology’s first volume, History of Psychology. For an account that offers comparative analyses of the new Psychology in England, France, Germany, and the United States, see Mitchell Ash’s “Psychology” chapter (2003) in the seventh volume of The Cambridge History of Science, The Modern Social Sciences.

For material on various figures and their work, including Herbart, Kant, Fechner, Wundt, and James, we owe a great debt to Ray Fancher’s (1996) sparkling text Pioneers of Psychology (3rd edition). For material on the German philosophers Herbart, Kant, and Dilthey, as well as background information on empirical and rational psychology, we consulted The Critique of Psychology by Thomas Teo (2005). For more details on Kant and Herbart, we found David Leary’s article “The Philosophical Development of the Conception of Psychology in Germany, 1780–1850” (1978) very useful. We also consulted parts of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1998).

The contributions of Herbart, Fechner, and Wundt to the quantification of psychology are ably discussed in M. L. Zupan’s article “The Conceptual Development of Quantification in Experimental Psychology” (1976). Further discussion of the roles of psychophysics and mental testing in the rise of quantification, including our brief note about the reception of Fechner’s law, is found in Gail Hornstein’s chapter “Quantifying Psychological Phenomena” (1988). For our coverage of Wundt, especially the distinction between self-observation and internal perception, we relied on Kurt Danziger’s article “The History of Introspection Reconsidered” (1980), as well as  Chapter 3  in his book Constructing the Subject, titled “Divergence of Investigative Practices: The Repudiation of Wundt” (1990b).

The section on the 19th-century German university system is drawn from three sources: the prehistory offered in Fritz Ringer’s (1969) book The Decline of the German Mandarins; an article by Velma Dobson and Darryl Bruce titled “The German University and the Development of Experimental Psychology” (1972); and an article by Horst Gundlach, “Psychology As Science and as Discipline” (2006), which also offers an interesting discussion of the existence of a discipline of psychology starting with Christian Wolff (1679–1754) at the University of Halle. For our brief comparative look at French psychology and the work of Ribot, we used Jacqueline Carroy and Régine Plas’s “The Beginnings of Psychology in France” (2006).

We consulted several primary sources for our coverage of American psychology. William James’s classic two-volume The Principles of Psychology (1890), John B. Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919/1924), and Hugo Münsterberg’s Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913) are all extremely accessible to the contemporary reader and provide interesting glimpses into psychology at the turn of the last century. A good overview of this period of development is Michael Sokal’s “The Origins of the New Psychology in the United States” (2006). An extremely rich analysis of American psychology up to the emergence of behaviorism is John O’Donnell’s The Origins of Behaviorism. In the section on the abandonment of introspection and the turn to behavior, we relied heavily on Thomas Leahey’s organization and discussion of the rise of behaviorism in his text A History of Psychology (1997). For information on Thorndike and others who studied animal behavior in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Donald Dewsbury’s Comparative Psychology in the Twentieth Century is a useful volume. Deborah Coon’s article “Standardizing the Subject” (1993) helped contextualize experimental introspection as part of a larger movement toward standardization and automation in American society. For more information on the reception and influence of Watson’s behaviorism, see Franz Samelson’s “Struggle for Scientific Authority” (1981). David Bakan’s article “Behaviorism and American Urbanization” (1966a) provided much of the material for the section on behaviorism and American life; it also offers more interesting details on Watson’s personal background and how it may have affected his thinking. For a good full-length biography of Watson, see Kerry Buckley’s Mechanical Man (1989).

Several excellent primary and secondary sources on the life and work of Mary Whiton Calkins are available. Her own autobiographical statement is published in the Carl Murchison series A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Calkins, 1930). Historian of psychology Laurel Furumoto is an authority on Calkins. We would recommend her 1979 article for a good overview of Calkins’s life and career. For an assessment of the motivations underlying Calkins’s adherence to self-psychology, including a short but interesting discussion of her writings on ethics, see Phyllis Wentworth’s article “The Moral of Her Story” (1999).

Finally, for a social–economic–political history of the Progressive Era, with an emphasis on the effects of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration on restructuring the American experience, we used Robert H. Wiebe’s (1967) The Search for Social Order, 1877– 1920.

CHAPTER 4 FROM PERIPHERY TO CENTER: CREATING AN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY

Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does.

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

INTRODUCTION

In our last chapter, we discussed the beginnings of disciplinary Psychology and showed how it owed its emergence to particular contexts of time and place. As we noted, the time and place that became one of the first centers of the new Psychology was the laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) in the late 19th century in Germany. Students from many countries came to Germany to study with Wundt and others of the first-generation German psychologists. Especially noteworthy was the number of students, 16, from the United States who earned their doctoral degrees in Leipzig. Although the new psychological science gradually found a permanent place in Germany, its growth in the United States was nothing short of phenomenal after its introduction in the late 19th century. In fact, while Psychology in the United States began as peripheral both to American science and to American life, its indigenization was rapid and so complete that by the mid- to late 20th century American psychology was dominant within the science of Psychology and had utterly penetrated American social and cultural life.

How did this new science that emerged in a specific European context become transformed when it was exported to the United States? We began answering this question in the previous chapter by looking at the contributions of William James (1842–1910) and John B. Watson (1878–1958). Here, we take a step back to examine the distinctive American context that facilitated the work of James, Watson, and their colleagues in the new discipline. Our argument is essentially that developments in religion, education, and everyday life converged to create a cultural opening that facilitated receptivity to the new science and profession and shaped the contours of a distinctly American psychology. This approach also allows us to illustrate how the establishment of the center and periphery of a science is a negotiated and often conflictual process.

In this chapter, we first discuss the events and trends in American life, beginning in the first half of the 19th century, that helped create this cultural receptivity. In American colleges, the dominant approach to explaining human thought and behavior was a mental and moral philosophy grounded in Scottish common sense realism. This, as historians have shown, was an important and necessary precursor to disciplinary Psychology. We then turn to other events in the same period but outside the universities and colleges, where another movement was taking place that created America’s first psychology. This movement involved religion, phrenology, mesmerism, and eventually, spiritualism and New Thought. Each of these helped create a psychological sensibility, or everyday psychology, among Americans.

These antecedent events and movements were crucial in preparing the American public for the introduction of what came to be called the new Psychology. Once introduced, this new Psychology underwent a remarkable naturalization or, more accurately, indigenization. Recall that in the introduction to this text we defined indigenization as the process whereby a local culture or region develops its own form of psychology, either by developing it from within that culture or by importing aspects of psychologies developed elsewhere and combining them with local concepts. The Indian social psychologist Durganand Sinha (1998) referred to these processes, respectively, as endogenous and exogenous indigenization. We examine his work later in the book when we recount the history of psychology in India. It may seem more natural to students in North America to think of the development of psychology in India in terms of indigenization than it is to refer to American psychology as having been indigenized. Yet that is what happened in North America, and in this chapter we explain how this process unfolded.

Part of this indigenization process was the conflicted encounter between the proponents of the emergent everyday psychology—mind science, New Thought, spiritualism—and the new, graduate-trained psychologists who viewed themselves as scientists. Once the new scientific Psychology was on the scene, the older mind science and spiritualistic approaches were its competitors for professional and scientific credibility. We explain how and why it was necessary for the new, scientifically trained psychologists to distinguish themselves and their field from these other approaches. These psychologists argued that their academic credentials and professional expertise made their science superior to those of their competitors.

In the first half of the chapter, we explore how a unique psychological sensibility emerged in 19th-century American life. This sensibility was forged as Americans sought to understand and use the new sciences of phrenology and mesmerism. It is worth noting that both phrenology and mesmerism were imported from Europe and underwent an indigenization in the United States that reshaped them to fit American life. In the second half of the century, spiritualism and New Thought built on the earlier sciences in ways that many Americans found attractive.

In the second half of the chapter, we examine the growth of the new Psychology, imported from Germany and transformed by its practitioners to better fit the American context. In doing so, these new psychologists fought to make a place for themselves among the new intellectual elite. We discuss how the growth of this new Psychology was rooted in the pragmatic approach that came to be called functionalism. As functionalism became the dominant school of thought, application was not far behind. To illustrate this, we examine the application of psychology to education and business (we discuss psychology and mental health in the next chapter). In applying their expertise, psychologists made the claim that their knowledge and methods led to more successful applications to problems of American society than either the earlier mental philosophy or the mind sciences of phrenology, mesmerism, New Thought, or spiritualism.

If we are able to take a long-range view of these events, it will help us see how indigenization is a process, sometimes a conflict-ridden process, that melds different cultural traditions, bringing about something new as a result. Many students are familiar with the old adage about America as a melting pot, where people from diverse cultures and countries all blend together in a new American identity. While scholarship has shown that this is not what happens with people, perhaps it may be applicable to psychology. With regard to psychology, in the United States, this process involved a key issue that remains with us today, an issue concerning what constitutes the intellectual and practical center of the discipline and what constitutes the periphery. We hope that by the end of the chapter you will better understand that these are human processes, full of negotiation and competition, rather than inevitable outcomes dictated by some unseen hand of progress.

AMERICAN MENTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY

The story of psychology in America that we began in the last chapter relies heavily on the standard storyline that experimental psychology was born in the Leipzig laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt and was brought to the United States by a bevy of enthusiastic American students who traveled to Germany to study the new science. As the standard story goes, after bringing back what they learned in Leipzig to their native land, they combined it with the can-do, practical, functionally oriented ethos of the American context, importing some aspects of Galtonian individual-difference approaches along the way. What this account fails to elaborate are the preexisting strands of psychological thought and practice in the United States onto which these new psychologists superimposed their German experiences.

In terms of intellectual antecedents, several historians of psychology have shown that a firmly established tradition of American mental philosophy and moral philosophy clearly addressed psychological topics before the new psychologists declared their new science and of which they were often well aware because of their previous training. In typical historical accounts, American mental and moral philosophy has been presented (when referred to) as the old way of thinking from which the new Psychology was a radical departure and to which the new psychologists owed nothing. The rhetoric of the new psychologists was intended to promulgate the view that theirs was a revolution, rather than an evolution, in thinking. As several historians of psychology have persuasively argued, however, the actual process whereby the new Psychology indigenized to its local context was more like a changing of the guard than a palace revolution. As historian of psychology Al Fuchs has remarked, “The psychology that evolved in the United States was indebted not only to the laboratories of Europe but also to the mental philosophy that the first generation of the new psychologists had learned from their college texts” (2000, p. 3).

This “college text” mental and moral philosophy had a history of its own. It was heavily imbued with the Scottish common sense school represented by Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), Thomas Reid (1710–1796), and Thomas Brown (1778–1820), with some influence from the associationism of John Locke. The Scottish common sense school, formed partly in reaction to the idealism of George Berkeley and the skepticism of David Hume, stated that we perceive the world directly through our senses and that this “common sense” information is the source of accurate knowledge about real things in the world. John Witherspoon (1723–1794), a minister with the Church of Scotland, has been credited with bringing Scottish common sense realism to the United States. Witherspoon was heavily influenced by the writings of Reid, especially his An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). He adhered to the Scottish realist view that knowledge acquired by way of the senses is superior to knowledge based purely on reasoning. In this view, mental philosophy would be the study of the God-given faculties of the mind—namely, the understanding (knowing), the will (doing), and the affections (feeling)—through direct experience and inductive methods. Witherspoon was critical of the deistic views that had gained momentum among college students under the influence of Newton and Locke. Deism was the belief that although God designed the universe and set the clockwork in motion, He had no direct influence, and did not intervene, in the day-to-day affairs of humans. As a belief system, Deism derived from Enlightenment rationalism and was oriented toward the new scientific approaches to understanding nature and man’s place in it. Many forward-thinking people of this era were Deist.

In the late 1700s, on the heels of the American and French revolutions, students at American colleges were displaying unprecedented levels of atheism, deism, and materialism. This was particularly worrisome, given that almost all American colleges were affiliated with one of the Protestant Christian religions. Harvard was Unitarian, Yale was Congregationalist, and Princeton (then still the College of New Jersey) was Presbyterian. Of these branches of Protestantism, Presbyterianism was the most dominant. It was through the influence of Witherspoon that the mental and moral philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment was to change the course of American philosophy and reign in some of the worrisome student revolt by providing not just intellectual guidance but moral guidance as well. Moral philosophy was the branch of philosophy that dealt with ethics and conduct. Mental philosophy dealt with the elements and processes of the mind and how they influenced action. Most mental and moral philosophers were trained as ministers. In the United States, seminary training was the sole route to graduate education until the new research universities emerged at the end of the 19th century.

Witherspoon became president of Princeton University in 1768 and used his position to spread Scottish common sense realism throughout the curriculum. As historian of psychology Rand Evans (1984) has noted, by the 1820s, Scottish philosophy was the norm in American colleges, often taught by the president of the university in the required course on mental and moral philosophy. By the time it reached the textbooks read by the future vanguard of the new Psychology, however, it had acquired a distinctly American inflection. One of the earliest—and most influential—textbooks of American mental philosophy was written by Thomas Upham (1799–1872) of Bowdoin College.

Upham received his graduate training at the Andover Theological Seminary. He wrote Elements of Intellectual Philosophy in 1827. This work is notable in that its table of contents appears to delineate, somewhat presciently, the subjects that would come to be of interest to the later experimental psychologists. Included are sections on sensation and perception, attention, dreaming, consciousness, association, memory, reasoning, emotions, and instincts, to take just a small sample. It is systematic and heavily inductive, reflecting the immense popularity that Baconian philosophy of science enjoyed in that period; that is, it summarized, organized, and attempted to find lawful relationships among a large body of facts. In 1832, Upham retitled his book Elements of Mental Philosophy to more accurately reflect the scope of topics he covered, which included not only the intellect but the sensibilities and the will as well. His complete table of contents listed 495 topics in all.

Upham’s text, and indeed American mental philosophy generally, emphasized the active processes of the mind, or the mind-in-use, and had a distinctly functional character. Nonetheless, the American mental philosophy of the pre–Civil War period was still closely tied to the view that humans and the human mind were the unique creations of a Protestant God. Darwinian evolutionary theory, as well as the emerging research on physiological psychology, posed a materialistic challenge to this view. Some later Scottish realist mental philosophers in America, such as James McCosh (1811–1895), dealt with this by regarding evolution as an example of God’s handiwork. McCosh was elected president of Princeton in 1868, about 100 years after Witherspoon. He was remarkably open to the new developments in psychology. Although a strong Scottish realist mental philosopher, McCosh was interested in the new experimental psychology, especially the work in physiological psychology, and encouraged his students to further their studies of these topics. James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934) was one of his students. Baldwin recalled that, in McCosh’s class on natural realism, the students read Wundt and learned about the theory of biological evolution. Princeton faculty members, at the request of McCosh, gave laboratory demonstrations in the new Psychology.

FIGURE 4.1 James McCosh

Thus, historians have argued that a more accurate story of the arrival of Wundtian experimental psychology in America would emphasize the important role played by training in the experimental method but would show that within a few short years the Wundtian focus on mind-as-contents would disappear. Instead, the strongly entrenched Scottish philosophy of mind-in-use and its emphasis on mental functions would combine with the experimental method to produce a distinctly American amalgam. The new psychologists resisted explicitly acknowledging their debt to their American mental philosophy forebears, however. This was partly due to their desire to separate their new science from both philosophy and religion. In the case of religion, they walked a fine line. University administrators and the public were reluctant to embrace a new discipline that appeared to endorse godless materialism. As we show later in this chapter, several rhetorical strategies were used by professionalizers of the new science, such as G. Stanley Hall, to convince the public that psychology and religion, or science and soul, could coexist.

FORGING A PSYCHOLOGICAL SENSIBILITY: FROM RELIGION TO PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Outside the walls of the academy, exciting developments proved to be key elements in the creation of psychological sensibility. Religion played an important role in these events, especially what historian of religion Catherine Albanese (2007) has called the metaphysical stream of American religion. We explore this more later. First, we need to contextualize our story with a brief overview of 19th-century American life.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the United States was largely a rural society whose population, while not entirely homogeneous, was principally of Anglo-Saxon and Northern European descent. Over the course of the century, the country became both more urbanized and industrialized. In the second half of the century, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and China made the country more ethnically diverse, although it should be noted that these immigrants were subject to intense discrimination. Native Americans and African Americans, most of whom were brought over in the slave trade, were also an important part of the population and contributed to the events we describe in ways that historians are still seeking to understand. All of these trends reshaped American life in ways that were important to our story.

Education also underwent dramatic changes during the century. Although educational progress was slow and uneven, by midcentury the United States had the highest literacy rate in the world. This helped create a demand for printed materials of all kinds and made dissemination of new ideas easier. Americans of all classes developed an appetite for information and new knowledge, whether it was disseminated through books, newspapers, and pamphlets or via public lectures and demonstrations.

However, education for the professions and for science was decidedly mixed in the first half of the century. Until the late 19th century, one could still become a physician through an apprenticeship without any formal medical education. Scientific education and training were available only to a privileged few; until late in the century, most Americans, indeed most educated people in the Western world, understood science to be any form of systematic knowledge. It was not until 1876 that the United States had its first graduate university, when Johns Hopkins University was established in Baltimore.

A critical aspect of the events and changes we describe was the belief that every person could think and decide for themselves, whether the matter concerned religion, medicine, or any other issue. This populism grew rapidly after the American Revolution and was celebrated in the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. Jackson was a rough-and-tumble “common man” who inspired an ethos of the self-made man and a disregard for the privileges typically accorded the elites. In this antiauthoritarian environment, the canons of traditional societies with their social hierarchies were challenged, along with the received authorities of religion, science, and the professions. Many individuals asserted their own interpretations of science and religion. In one sense, this promoted an age of exploration of new ideas about human nature. The populism exemplified by Jackson was also found in religion and among religious leaders, often leading to new religious groups and idiosyncratic interpretations. This should be kept in mind as we explore the contributions to an American psychological sensibility.

We should also note that the movements and practices we describe here held immense appeal to people in all strata of American society. Phrenology, mesmerism, spiritualism, and New Thought attracted followers from among the best-educated and from among the least-educated members of the population. Each movement developed its own literature—books, magazines, journals, pamphlets—and had its own lecture circuit. In other words, these events and movements were not on the margins, but were very much in the public spotlight. At the peak of each movement, they were very much on the minds of Americans who were hungry to know more about the phenomena they described and to receive whatever benefit they promised.

Religion and Revival

From their arrival, European settlers brought their religious views and practices with them to what became the United States. Indeed, for many of them, freedom to practice religion was their motivation to immigrate to such a far shore. Since then, there have been periodic upswings in religious fervor that acted like a social contagion in its spread across great swaths of the country. New and renewed religious movements in the 18th century in German-speaking countries (the Pietists), England (the Methodists), and Scotland (among Congregationalists and Presbyterians) also had their counterparts in America. What historians call the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s was one such period marked by renewed religious fervor and conversion across New England. One facet of this awakening was embodied in the great American preacher of the time, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), who articulated a religious psychology that characterized the soul as an inseparable unity of understanding, will, and affections.

Another, more dynamic facet of the Awakening was the Methodist revivalism led in America by George Whitefield (1714–1770) and John Wesley (1703–1791). Both men preached up and down the Eastern seaboard colonies, often to open-air crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. The legacy of their work was not only many new Christian believers but also openness to deep and profound religious experiences, sometimes manifested in marked physical demonstrations, such as shouting, falling down, visions, and trance-like behaviors. As we demonstrate, this shout tradition had implications for the development of an everyday psychology in the 19th century.

In the 19th century, a new religious revival swept over the North and Midwest of America. Out of this revival, new religious and philosophical movements emerged that helped create a psychological sensibility in the United States. The religious movements included Methodism, Seventh-Day Adventism, and Mormonism. We use Methodism to illustrate the contribution to the creation of psychological understanding.

The Methodist Episcopal Church grew from the work of Wesley and his colleagues in England in the mid-18th century. By the early 19th century, it was the fastest growing denomination in the United States, doubling its membership from 1820 to 1830 to a half-million adherents. The rapid growth of Methodism reflected what historian of American religion Nathan Hatch (1989) has termed “religious populism.” Methodist meetings became known for involvement of the lay members in the services, with signs of grace and conversion often being acted out physically, much as in the traditions laid down earlier. The physical demonstrations of conversion and personal transformation came to be referred to as the shout tradition in American revivalist religion. The emotional and psychological intensity of these experiences, while religious in character, began to be perceived by some observers and participants as analogous to other psychological phenomena, especially the recently imported mesmeric practices.

Mesmerism and Religion

In the next chapter, we explore the origins of mesmerism in greater detail and trace its influence into psychiatry and the psychology of mental health. Here, we will give a brief background.

Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1805) was a Viennese physician who drew upon then current theories about the influence of various physical forces—stars, planets, magnets—to promote an understanding of health and disease based upon the balance of bodily fluids. The mesmeric state was characterized by a deep connection between the mesmerist and the subject; the connection was one of sympathy between the two. Later, this connection was thought of as the psychological characteristic of suggestibility. Once in this state, it was thought individuals could be directed to perform physical and intellectual tasks that were outside their capacity in the normal state. Often, upon being “awakened” from the mesmeric state, people could not remember what had occurred.

FIGURE 4.2 Franz Anton Mesmer

Mesmer was discredited in both Vienna and Paris, but his ideas and practices were kept alive by his followers and from the late 18th century into the 19th century were exported across Europe and England and to North America. Mesmer’s most important disciple, Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), expanded the psychological possibilities of mesmerism with his demonstration of the mesmeric trance state, which he called magnetic somnambulism. The trance state, Puységur discovered, could be induced with a series of arm movements or “magnetic passes.” In England, mesmerism became part of the reform of medical education and practice and was eventually transformed into hypnosis. In both England and the United States, mesmerism was often combined with phrenology and was part of the armamentarium of itinerant healers and lecturers. This, too, is an untold part of the history of everyday psychology in America.

Mesmerism was also perceived by some ministers as a possible way to understand the workings of the human mind normally hidden from view. Historian of psychology David Schmit (2005, 2009) has begun to explain the complex relationships among mesmerism, American religion, and spiritualism, indicating that the questions raised by mesmeric and spiritualistic practices led to attempts to scientifically or systematically investigate them for their psychological meaning. Among the practitioners of mesmerism during its most popular period in the United States in the 1840s were several ministers and former ministers, including La Roy Sunderland (1804–1885). His work was critically important in articulating a psychological view of religious experience based on insights gained from mesmerism.

Sunderland was converted and called to the Methodist ministry in the early 1820s. For 10 years, he was a Methodist revivalist preacher in the shout tradition. He then worked as a reformer and advocate for abolition of slavery for several years before leaving the Methodist ministry in the early 1840s. Sunderland then focused on developing his psychological theories and practices and embraced spiritualism for a short period in the 1850s.

What is critical about Sunderland’s involvement is that he sought to understand the religiously inspired phenomena in psychological terms. His periodical, The Magnet, was an outlet for his theorizing about the connections between the mesmeric state and the experiences of those caught up in religious ecstasies in camp meetings and revival settings. He claimed, based on his experience as a minister, that the phenomena were the same. Such naturalistic explanations placed the two states on a continuum of normality, however abnormal they may have appeared to outsiders.

In the 1840s, Sunderland, like many of his colleagues, attempted to merge mesmerism with phrenology, another recent import from Europe. We have already discussed phrenology’s trajectory in the United States (see  Chapter 2 ). As noted there, phrenology had a remarkable appeal to people in every walk of life, including those who often engaged in enthusiastic worship traditions. This phrenomesmerism did not persist, as the two approaches were based upon different premises of human functioning. By the 1850s, Sunderland had embraced spiritualism and its claim that it was possible to communicate with the spirit realm and, thus, with the dead. Although he did not remain a spiritualist, Sunderland was typical of his day among those whose interests lay in the intersection of religion and psychology.

Spiritualism

Spiritualism emerged in the mid-1800s in a time when religious enthusiasm was still pronounced and mesmerism and phrenology were accepted by a growing number of Americans. It, too, was part of the beliefs and practices that helped make Americans psychologically minded.

The link between spiritualism and mesmerism was that some practitioners, such as Sunderland, believed that the mesmeric state was like a doorway into the spirit realm, providing empirical and verifiable proof of the existence of that realm. The psychological understanding of the mesmeric state promoted by people like Sunderland and others made it appear to be a natural, rather than a supernatural, phenomenon. This naturalism of mesmerism, then, helped make communication with the spirit realm also seem natural. To many spiritualists, theirs was an experiential religion, based on a belief in the immortality of souls and an afterlife, just as in Methodism or other belief systems. Many spiritualist leaders also sought to explain their approach as scientific psychology, based on empirical evidence, and some sought the involvement of scientists in validating their claims. We discuss the role of psychologists in these matters later.

Spiritualism drew upon technological innovations, such as the wireless telegraph, to explain spiritualist phenomena. When X-rays were discovered in the 1890s, many suggested that it was only a matter of time before scientists discovered the heretofore secret energy rays that made spiritualist practices work. We should note that spiritualism enjoyed a great popularity, among all classes, especially after the American Civil War (1861–1865). So many men were killed in the war, more than 600,000, that many homes had no adolescent or adult males in residence for several postwar years. In this atmosphere, the longing to communicate with these lost loved ones helped inspire great faith in spiritualist practices. As far as much of the public was concerned in the last quarter of the 19th century, spiritualism was psychology.

New Thought

The work of Phineas P. Quimby (1802–1866) represented a bridge to new metaphysical movements that arose in the second half of the 19th century. Quimby’s work led to what became known as New Thought and influenced Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), who went on to found Christian Science. Early in his career Quimby had been a clockmaker, but he became a mesmerist and healer after hearing a series of lectures on mesmerism in the late 1830s. By the 1850s, he had developed his system of thought about the influence of one mind on another to move beyond mesmerism to a practice of psychological healing. His method was one of intense empathy with the other person so that, as he said, he could then see the false belief (about disease) that was the true cause of the illness. He could then, he claimed, correct the false belief and the person experienced healing.

Quimby’s influence was remarkable. In the charged atmosphere of the time, many embraced his psychology of health and disease. As mentioned, one person he had treated successfully, Mary Baker Eddy, went on to found the Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science). By the mid-1890s, other followers had created a body of mental science that came to be called New Thought. Many of these writers, such as Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889), drew upon evidence from mesmerism, a psychological practice, to validate their claims of spiritual senses acting independently of the body. For those who embraced New Thought, mental science and healing were solidly grounded in an everyday psychology of human experience.

FIGURE 4.3 Phineas Quimby

FIGURE 4.4 Mary Baker Eddy

Courtesy of the authors.

Psychical Phenomena

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in England in 1882 and its American counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) was formed three years later. Both societies had as their members prominent scientists, philosophers, scholars, and businesspeople. The purpose of the societies was to scientifically investigate psychical phenomena. The formation of these specialty organizations and their leadership by such prominent individuals is an indicator of how popular and widespread psychical phenomena were. Mesmerists, spiritualists, clairvoyants, mind readers, and mediums, not to mention astrologers, palmists, phrenologists, and faith healers, were doing steady business in most large cities and many towns, in addition to the itinerant healers and phrenologists.

The ASPR created committees to investigate many of these phenomena and their practitioners, including thought transference, hypnotism, telepathy, clairvoyance, and trance states. The psychologist William James was a prominent member of the ASPR and served as its president in 1894. James argued that since we know so little about these states, it was better to attempt to study them scientifically. If there was any validity to the phenomena, they would certainly lie within the province of psychological science.

As we detail later, James’s stance was extremely problematic for many of his colleagues, who saw themselves and their new science as threatened by the public’s confusion of psychical with psychological phenomena. In some ways, these psychologists were correct in identifying these other psychologies as competitors. As we have shown so far in this chapter, these practices and belief systems were psychologies for much of the American population. Psychologists, then, had to find ways to distance themselves from what they perceived as pseudoscience, without turning the public off to psychology. That is, they had to try to “own” psychology.

Before exploring this, it is worth pointing out that the phrenologists, mesmerists, spiritualists, and New Thought practitioners were instrumental in creating a psychological sensibility, or everyday psychology, among Americans from all walks of life. By the time the new disciplinary psychologists came on the scene, Americans had already begun to think psychologically and to be open to their own internal experiences. It was this sensibility that the new disciplinary psychologists were able to build on, yet this sensibility also made the mind sciences formidable competitors for the attention and allegiance of the American people and the resources needed to institutionalize disciplinary Psychology.

BOUNDARY WORK AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY: ESTABLISHING THE CENTER AND MARKING THE PERIPHERY

What strategies did the new psychologists use to own Psychology? As we alluded to earlier and in  Chapter 3 , one of the challenges faced by the new psychologists, as they established themselves in the United States, was to convince university administrators and colleagues that their new discipline was distinct from philosophy. This was accomplished, in part, by using the experimental methods they had learned in Germany to argue that Psychology was a scientific approach to studying mental processes and thus unique. They also self-consciously distanced themselves from the extant traditions of mental and moral philosophy by rhetorically declaring themselves uninfluenced by and divorced from this tradition, as we have already discussed. These strategies were successful in securing Psychology’s place in the rapidly expanding university system. Psychological laboratories sprang up across the country and were quickly filled with the latest brass instruments. Psychology journals were set up, and textbooks were written. Eventually, separate departments of psychology were established. The strategies used to secure Psychology’s place as institutionally and conceptually distinct from philosophy were, by and large, quite successful.

But a somewhat larger battle had to be waged and won in the struggle to own psychology. Psychologists not only had to create institutional space and legitimacy for their new discipline, they also had to secure their status as psychological experts in the eyes of the public. Specifically, the scientists of the mind needed to loosen the hold of psychical research and spiritualism on the public imagination. One way to characterize this is as a struggle over what should be the center of psychological theory and practice. At this time, early in the history of disciplinary Psychology, it was not clear that the new science of Psychology would gain dominance over the everyday psychologies represented by phrenology, spiritualism, psychic phenomena, and mental science. In addition, many Americans had learned to rely on these everyday psychologies to understand themselves and for practical advice in matters of health, business, and child rearing.

In the late 1800s, the psychological topics that most interested the American public were not reaction times and perceptual discriminations but whether or not they could communicate with the dead, whether mental telepathy was real, and whether psychics or seers could actually foretell the future. When the new psychologists began to ply their trade, they were often approached with questions on these subjects. Psychologist Hugo Münsterberg noted that when he first arrived at Harvard in 1892 rarely a week would go by in which he was not asked to comment on spiritual, mystic, or paranormal phenomena.

Given that most of the new psychologists felt their connection with spiritualism endangered their scientific credibility, one strategy would have been to denounce it altogether and distance themselves from these alternative psychologies, as they perceived them. Several of the new psychologists did make public statements condemning spiritualism and disavowing psychical research. But herein lay a problem: Psychical research was what the public wanted, and what the public was willing to support, when this support was particularly crucial for the fledgling discipline. In many cases, major bequests to fund journals and academic research were earmarked for psychical research. This dilemma demanded a creative solution. How could psychologists maintain their scientific credibility and capitalize on the public’s enthusiasm for the study of psychic phenomena?

In some cases, terminological obfuscation provided a way to conduct psychological research with funds designated for psychical research. In other cases, psychologists attempted to assert their authority as the only experts qualified to evaluate (and, implicitly, discredit) spiritualism by using careful, systematic, scientific methods. They could thus engage with spiritualism while still asserting their scientific authority. In one famous example, G. Stanley Hall and Amy Tanner took on the case of Leonora Piper, a famous Boston medium, and attempted to show she was a fraud. They spent several sessions administering various psychological and physiological tests while she was in a trance state, but their results were equivocal. Interestingly, in their attempts to discredit Piper, they were taking on not only Piper herself but also Hall’s former mentor and the most well-known psychologist in America: William James (1842–1910).

James, as we mentioned earlier, was one of the founders of the ASPR. He was interested in spiritualism and paranormal experiences and was not as quick as some of his scientifically minded colleagues to disavow the possibility of a spirit world. Indeed, James believed that proof of the existence of the afterlife might possibly create a new secular faith and the moral regeneration of society. He was quite aware, however, that the best arbiters of the evidence would be scientists, not only because of their objectivity but also because of their cultural authority. Among other founding members of the ASPR were psychologists Hall, Baldwin, Joseph Jastrow, and Christine Ladd-Franklin. Although all had dropped their affiliation by 1890, James remained involved. James’s dual affiliation in the public’s mind as psychologist and psychical researcher was a bête noir for his colleagues, who were desperately trying to assert the identity of the new science and combat the “malevolent ghost preventing public confidence in scientific naturalism,” as historian Deborah Coon has written (1992, p. 149).

Psychologists had to do battle on another front in their campaign for the public acceptance of scientific naturalism; they also needed to reassure a pious public (including university presidents) that theirs was not a godless science. Although the Progressive Era was marked by increased faith in science and technology and several challenges to received religious views, psychologists still had to be careful to persuade the public that their discipline would not threaten the spiritual welfare or moral propriety of its followers. In writing for the popular press, psychologists such as Hall and Edward Wheeler Scripture emphasized that training in the new Psychology would instill the moral virtues of perseverance and industriousness. As Wade Pickren has written, “It can be argued that work held a meaning almost synonymous with morality in American life” (2000, p. 1023). The new psychologists were exemplars of the Protestant work ethic and promoted the character-building qualities of their endeavor. They also commented specifically on the relationship between Psychology and religion. This relationship, far from being antagonistic, they argued, was in fact harmonious. Hall suggested that the wonders exposed by the new science, such as the functions of the brain, would simply highlight the exquisite handiwork of an all-knowing Creator. Thus, harmony between the new science and the religious worldview was maintained.

Finally, we should mention that even after the first couple of decades of their new science, psychologists were called upon to continue their boundary work in the face of the popularity of psychoanalysis. We discuss this boundary work between psychologists and psychoanalysis, as well as the impact of psychoanalytic ideas on the mental health professions in America, in  Chapter 5 .

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGISTS: ORGANIZATION AND APPLICATION

As we indicated earlier, American psychologists faced some difficult challenges in the first era of the new Psychology in the United States. In this section, we examine two other strategies that were used by psychologists to strengthen their identity and to stake their claims to a legitimate place in American society. These two strategies were to organize themselves as a discipline and to demonstrate their usefulness to society. Broadly conceptualized, both of these strategies now appear to have been integral to their indigenization in America. They also illustrate the relationship between everyday psychology and disciplinary Psychology.

Organizing for Science

In July 1892, G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924) met with a small group of men to discuss the possibility of organizing a psychological association. Although the details of the meeting are not known, the group elected 31 individuals, including themselves, to membership, with Hall as the first president. The first meeting of the new American Psychological Association (APA) was held in December 1892 at the University of Pennsylvania. Membership growth in the APA was modest in its first two decades. There were 31 members in 1892, 125 members in 1899, and 308 members in 1916. Nevertheless, APA played a critical role in making psychology a recognized science in this era.

The founders of the APA were a small group of White men interested in what was called the new Psychology, as we mentioned earlier. APA’s founding can best be understood as part of the many changes occurring in the United States at that time. The emergence of several of what are now standard academic disciplines, such as psychology, economics, political science, biochemistry, and physiology, in the last two decades of the 19th century was part of a reorganization of American knowledge production, reflecting a division of intellectual labor similar to the division of manufactory labor. Like its fellow disciplines, the new Psychology grew and prospered as it responded to the needs of American society.

Within the modern university system that emerged after the American Civil War, the new disciplines quickly developed advanced degrees that provided credentials. These validated the discipline’s members as experts in their special field. As we noted in our discussion of John B.Watson in the previous chapter, this was the era of the Progressive movement, which called for a more efficient, less corrupt, social order. The synergism of these two developments—specialized expertise and rationalized government— helped create the demand for trained personnel to fill the new professional niches created by the demands for a more efficient society. Psychology was one of the most successful of the new disciplines in making itself useful for the social management of an increasingly complex and diversified society.

Hall was one of the more colorful and controversial figures in the history of American psychology. He grew up in Massachusetts in a religious family; his mother had hopes that he would become a Christian minister. Although he did enroll in Union Theological Seminary after he graduated from Williams College in 1867, it soon became clear that ministry was not for him. Instead, after serving as a private tutor, Hall became a faculty member for two years at Antioch College in Ohio. His responsibilities at Antioch were immense: teaching four subject areas, serving as debate coach and the college librarian. In addition, Hall taught occasionally for nearby Wilberforce College, a historically Black college.

Hall, understandably, grew unhappy at Antioch and left with the idea of perhaps studying this new Psychology he was reading about. He became a student of James at Harvard and earned his doctorate with James in 1878. Hall’s dissertation was on a psychological topic, although his approach was philosophical, and he was awarded what is likely the first American degree in psychology. Although James was a good adviser to Hall, the two men were only 2 years apart in age and, in time, Hall seemed to view James as more a rival than a mentor. On the matter of psychical research discussed earlier in the chapter, for example, James advocated an open-minded stance toward psychical phenomena, while Hall took the position of dismissing it. In 1879, Hall spent the fall term in Leipzig, Germany, with Wundt and so was among the first cohort of experimenters in Wundt’s pioneering laboratory.

FIGURE 4.5 G. Stanley Hall

Hall returned to the United States but without a full-time position. Over the next couple of years, he worked hard to find a faculty job and finally landed a position at the then-new Johns Hopkins in 1882. Within a couple of years he had attracted several capable graduate students and founded the first working laboratory of psychology in the United States. But Hall had already begun showing some of the characteristics that made him a controversial person. Questions arose, for example, about how he had won the Johns Hopkins faculty position, with some evidence that he had deliberately undermined the candidacy of the other suitable applicant, Charles Peirce. Then, James McKeen Cattell, perhaps his brightest student, left Johns Hopkins over a dispute with Hall about a fellowship and went on to Leipzig, where he earned his doctorate with Wundt. Some scholars have suggested that Hall was not comfortable when he had other top-level individuals in the same working environment.

In 1887, Hall, who was then still a member of the ASPR, was approached by another member who offered substantial financial support if Hall would start a journal to report on the scientific exploration of psychical phenomena. Hall agreed to do so, took the money, but began the American Journal of Psychology, which never reported on any scientific investigation related to psychical research. However, it was America’s first scientific journal devoted to psychology and so was a crucial part of giving the new discipline a scientific identity. In the same year, a wealthy Worcester, Massachusetts, industrialist, Jonas Clark, approached Hall about helping him found a college for working-class young men. Jonas Clark left the matter in Hall’s hands, with adequate funds made available, and left for Europe. Hall thus became the founding president of Clark University. He attracted a small but distinguished faculty, most of them young and several of whom went on to worldwide fame. For example, Albert Michelson (1852–1931), one of the first winners of the Nobel Prize in physics (1907) was on faculty at Clark from 1889 to 1892, and Franz Boas (1858–1942), considered by many to be the founder of modern cultural anthropology, was at Clark until 1892. Financial problems, however, resulted in many of his stellar faculty, including Michelson and Boas, leaving for employment elsewhere. From 1890 to 1920, Clark produced more doctorates in psychology than any other institution. The range of topics was eclectic, and we return to this work later in this chapter.

It was in this context that Hall led the effort that created the APA in 1892. In some ways, the founding of APA can be seen as an attempt by Hall to keep himself in the leadership of the now rapidly growing field. But many of his peers in the field were not sure he was trustworthy, and while he was respected, he never again was one of the organizational leaders of the discipline.

Making Psychology Useful

What every educator, every jail-warden, every doctor, every clergyman, every asylum-superintendent, asks of psychology is practical rules. Such men care little or nothing about the ultimate philosophic grounds of mental phenomena, but they do care about improving the ideas, dispositions, and conduct of the particular individuals in their charge. –William James, “A Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science,” 1892

James was prescient in this 1892 passage. Perhaps he simply understood the American character: that Americans are ultimately a practical or pragmatic people who want to know how something will work or how a body of knowledge will benefit them, rather than wondering about its intellectual or philosophical basis. In America, this was exemplified in the development of a functionalist psychology. Functionalism, as you should recall from  Chapter 3 , meant that the goal of psychology was to understand how the mind and its contents had evolved by looking at the functions of different thoughts and beliefs, functions that were objectively observable in terms of actions. The implications of functionalist psychology were that it held promise of usefulness.

Certainly, James has been proven correct in his assertion that Americans wanted a psychology that was useful. In this section, we give several examples of application in this first generation of organized Psychology in the United States and argue that this trend toward application was part of the indigenization process and was an example of the interdependence of everyday and disciplinary psychologies.

Engaging the Public

As James asserted, Americans wanted a useful psychology. Evidence in support of James’s assertion can be found throughout American culture—literary, scientific, educational, and popular—in the era of the first generation of disciplinary Psychology. It is clear that Americans were expecting their sciences to improve their daily lives and to bring order and control to American society. University administrators wrote about the need for offering instruction that had both practical and social relevance. Psychologists, to secure the goodwill of the university presidents and administrators who held the strings to employment and research support and of the public who demanded some lasting good, promised to provide results that would meet these expectations.

Psychologists responded to social expectations with several publications. Even before the founding of organized Psychology in America, psychologists were writing for the popular press, hoping to explain their work, to differentiate their efforts from those of their competitors, and to advance their explanations of psychological functioning. Psychologists have continued to do so even up to our own time. The period from approximately 1890 until 1920 was a fruitful time for psychologists writing for a popular audience. Magazine circulation was going up, the urban population was increasing rapidly, and literacy rates were growing steadily. Psychologists such as Hall wrote about religion and psychology and others wrote about psychology and education, but many of the popular articles and books centered on the potential usefulness of psychology for the everyday person. In fields like education, industry, advertising, and personnel selection, psychologists promised the public that their science was up to the task of improving performance through understanding the psychology of the people involved. Münsterberg, at Harvard, wrote about the use of psychology in the court system, especially the usefulness of psychology in eyewitness testimony. He also published one of the first American books on psychotherapy, in 1908. But what he was mostly known for was his work on human relations and efficiency in the workplace. In popular magazine articles and books, Münsterberg sought to demonstrate the superiority of a psychologically informed science of work. We discuss his contributions in more detail later in this chapter.

Other psychologists also wrote for the public in this era, but our point here is not to examine these popular press materials. Instead, we simply emphasize that psychologists engaged the public both in response to public pressure for utility and in an effort to gain an audience for their work.

Education: The Pay Vein That Supports the Mine

One arena that was critical for the growth of psychology in this era was education. Hall was instrumental in making education the first real application of psychology. Even before Hall became a professor at Johns Hopkins in 1882, he was involved in what was then called the child study movement. This was a movement that began in the 1870s among physicians, parents, educators, and social workers to better understand how children learn. Hall sought to make psychology part of this movement and argued that children needed to be studied scientifically to establish developmental norms and to facilitate childcare. Hall left the child study movement for a period when he went to Johns Hopkins and then on to Clark University. However, by the mid-1890s, Hall was again involved. Many of his students at Clark, although trained as psychologists, were primarily focused on some aspect of education in their research. We discuss a few of these people and their work here.

Child study is not the same as education, although the two are related. The child study movement was a precursor to the rapid growth of psychology’s involvement with education. Why was there such growth?

As we noted before, the Progressive period, roughly 1890–1920, was a time of a reordering or rationalizing of many aspects of American life. Education was one area dramatically affected. Compulsory schooling, which means children have to attend school for a certain number of years or to a certain age, became the norm in this period. When combined with a high birth rate and a large influx of immigrants, the impact on school systems across North America was dramatic. Two statistics are worth noting to help us understand this impact. First, from 1890 to 1920, enrollment in schools increased by more than 1,000 percent! Second, the investment of state and federal money in education more than doubled in this period. With this growth came a need for the efficient management of students and appropriate training for teachers.

Psychologists believed they could provide a methodology and technology for both of these needs. The professional school administrator became a new member of the educational hierarchy, and educational psychologists were soon producing quantitative studies indicating the best ways to measure educational outcomes. It is worth noting that the work of psychologists in this new field, people like Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), was not about the process of learning and how to improve the learning process for students. It was mostly about how to place children and how to manage the institutions in such a way that they were efficient. This was a similar approach to what was happening in industry at the same time, as we explain later. This was a growth field for psychology; by 1910, more than three-quarters of all American psychologists who were involved in applied work were occupied with educational applications.

This was when psychologists also began to develop expertise with school-related problems and helping schoolchildren. In African American communities, whose schools were segregated and poorly funded by White school boards, teachers trained at one of the historically Black colleges and universities that provided an early form of child guidance. Although graduate education for African Americans, in psychology and every other field, was rare, the interest in psychology was high (Guthrie, 1998). Wilberforce in Ohio, for example, had a 40-member Psychology Club in 1914. Since graduate education was not readily available to these students, many graduates practiced as psychologists in their schools and communities with a bachelor’s degree. When the Rockefeller Foundation began awarding fellowships to African Americans and others in the 1910s, archival records show that many of the African American recipients used their fellowships to advance their education in psychology.

At Clark University, as mentioned, many students did their dissertation research on educational topics and most of these students then went on to careers in psychology and education. Henry Herbart Goddard (1866–1957) earned his PhD with Hall at Clark in 1899. After teaching in a normal school for a few years (a normal school was a college for training teachers), he became the director of psychological research at Vineland Training School for the Feebleminded in New Jersey. It was in this context, working with children who were developmentally delayed and retarded, that Goddard brought the first test used to measure intelligence to the United States from France. Lewis Terman (1877–1956) earned his PhD with Hall at Clark in 1905. Due to health concerns, he relocated to California, where he worked at the Los Angeles Normal School (now University of California, Los Angeles) and then moved up the coast to Stanford University, where he had one of the most distinguished careers in the history of American psychology. At Stanford, he revised the Binet test that Goddard had brought back from France, which became the Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. It became one of the most widely used tests in the world. Terman, like Goddard, was a key figure in the debates over intelligence and its assessment. We examine the work of both Goddard and Terman in the context of debates about intelligence and eugenics in  Chapter 6 .

In 1896, at the University of Pennsylvania, a young psychologist named Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), who had earned his PhD in Germany under Wundt, began offering services to help schoolchildren with learning problems. He called this approach clinical psychology. Much of the work was related to assessment of physical problems, such as hearing loss, that were interfering with the child being able to perform adequately. The new field of clinical psychology grew over the next 25 years to encompass a broader range of school and social problems. However, the term “clinical psychology” did not mean in this period what it came to mean after World War II, when it primarily referred to services such as psychological assessment of mental problems and the application of psychotherapy to those problems.

Psychologists in Industry

Education was a primary application for psychologists in the first generation of American psychology. But the growth of the applications of psychology to various industrial settings and problems was also remarkable. In one 10-year period, 1907–1916, more than 40 industry-funded applications of psychology could be found in the United States. This is remarkable given the relatively small number of psychologists.

The work of psychologists in industry was part of their involvement in social management. With other new professions they were engaged in the business of practically ordering human affairs. We give a couple of examples of this business: psychologists and advertising and psychologists and industrial efficiency.

First, however, we need to contextualize the application of psychology to industry by mentioning the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915). Taylor was an engineer who became convinced that business and industry could be studied scientifically and placed on a rational and orderly basis. His book, Principles of Scientific Management(1911), was a summation of work he had published earlier, and it created a sensation among business and industry leaders and spawned hundreds of imitators from various disciplines and professions. Taylor’s work, in hindsight, can be understood as part of the Progressive movement in a society that sought greater efficiency in every domain. Psychologists were among those professionals who saw in the popularity of Taylor’s ideas an opportunity to apply their work and extend the reach of their field into new areas.

Münsterberg (1863–1916) was a German psychologist who earned his PhD with Wundt in 1885 and then earned an MD 2 years later in Heidelberg. He was recruited to become director of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory by James at the First International Congress of Psychology in Paris in 1889, a position Münsterberg took up in 1892. There, he built the laboratory into a first-rank site for experimental work. At first, he was somewhat skeptical of the possibility of applying psychology. Then, influenced by his colleagues in Germany who were beginning to apply psychology to such practical problems as improving railroad performance and safety and understanding the psychology of eyewitness testimony, he became one of foremost advocates and popularizers of applied psychology. In 1908, he recounted his involvement in what was then called the “trial of the century,” the sensational case of the murder of a former governor of Idaho, allegedly by a hit man hired by the fledgling labor unions. Münsterberg took a train to the trial site, with one entire car devoted to psychological apparatus to conduct his tests. His book about the case, On the Witness Stand, brought him great notoriety as a psychological expert. The book is often noted as the first example of forensic psychology. However, Münsterberg drew upon work on the psychology of testimony done some years earlier by Alfred Binet (France) and William Stern (Germany). To further complicate matters, Münsterberg’s court testimony based on his psychological investigation, which helped to convict the defendant of the murder, was later proven inaccurate. Nevertheless, the case gained great attention for psychologists and for Münsterberg as experts on a major social need.

FIGURE 4.6 Hugo Münsterberg

Münsterberg also, as noted, wrote on psychotherapy, but a major contribution was his 1913 book, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. Despite his skepticism about applied work after he moved to the United States, Münsterberg had developed mental tests for children in 1891 and had argued for a rigorously scientific applied psychology while he was still living in Germany. According to his biographer, Matthew Hale (1980), Münsterberg was part of a new science of work that involved physiological, psychological, and psychiatric components. Münsterberg sought to improve the output of workers by understanding and alleviating problems like fatigue. Individual factors of each worker, he argued, such as personality, intelligence, training, attitude, and susceptibility to fatigue, affected individual output. The intent was to find ways to conform the worker to the task and thus improve the financial bottom line of industrial companies.

A different approach was taken by the psychologist Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1972). Gilbreth argued that it was necessary to change the working conditions to better fit the worker. She argued that humans were not machines and that personality and motivational factors had to be taken into consideration when designing workplaces and improving output. After the death of her husband, Frank, she took over the leadership of Gilbreth, Inc., and made it a global leader in a psychologically informed approach to management.

Sidebar 4.1 Focus on Lillian Moller Gilbreth

Lillian Moller was raised in an independent-minded family in Oakland, California. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature at the University of California, Berkeley. At age 26, she married Frank Gilbreth, nine years her senior and already a successful consulting engineer and contractor in Boston. Lillian became the vice president of Gilbreth Consulting and was fully involved in the business. She and Frank became experts in the new field of industrial efficiency, inventing the Gilbreth clock to measure worker efficiency and pioneering the use of film to conduct motion studies in the workplace.

Although a proponent of scientific management, Lillian grew dissatisfied with the rigid focus on conforming the worker to the job, coming to believe that psychological factors were important in understanding worker efficiency. She enrolled in Brown University and earned her doctorate in applied psychology in 1915. Under her guidance, the firm had great success with both labor and management. When Frank died suddenly in 1924, Lillian became the president of Gilbreth, Inc., and continued their successful work consulting to industry and teaching motion study methods. She became a leading figure in industrial relations in the United States and the world, serving on national and international commissions devoted to topics such as reducing unemployment during the Great Depression. A postage stamp was issued in her honor by the U.S. Post Office in 1984; she is the only psychologist to ever be honored with an American stamp.

What characterized her work was a consistent concern for workers and their environments. To make the work of the homemaker easier, for example, she invented the foot-pedal trash can, which continues to be one of the most widely used models of garbage cans in the world. She also designed kitchens for people who were disabled.

Remarkably, with all the work-related achievements of her life, Gilbreth and her husband had 12 children. The Hollywood version of their family life can be seen in the movies Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and Belles on their Toes (1952).

FIGURE 4.7 Lillian Moller Gilbreth

The applications of psychology in education and worker efficiency were notable in this period, but there were many others. For example, Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955), after earning his PhD with Wundt in 1900, supplemented his meager salary at Northwestern University with public speaking. A series of invited talks Scott gave to a group of advertising executives in Chicago helped move him to a successful career in business psychology. His books Theory of Advertising (1903), Psychology of Advertising (1908), and Increasing Human Efficiency in Business (1910) made him a leader in the new field. In his work on advertising, Scott argued that increasing desire among consumers rather than appealing to their reason was the key to sales. He parlayed his early success into a visiting position at a new program in applied psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1916 as the first “professor of applied psychology.” After World War I, he founded the Scott Company in Chicago (1919), counted by many as the first psychological consulting company.

His friend and colleague at Carnegie Tech was the applied psychologist Walter Van Dyke Bingham (1880–1952). Bingham was trained as an experimental psychologist at the University of Chicago and earned his degree there in 1908. In 1915, he accepted the offer to start a new kind of psychology program in applied psychology at Carnegie Tech. Over the next 9 years, he created a division of applied psychology comprising a talented group of young psychologists, both men and women. At Carnegie Tech, these young psychologists, joined by Scott for a year in 1916, created programs tailored for the Bureau of Salesmanship Research and the School of Life Insurance Salesmanship. They received large grants from Pittsburgh corporations to improve worker productivity, increase sales, and generate new products. It was a remarkable period of the application of psychology and bridged the surge of interest in and growth of applied psychology in the 1920s and 1930s, which we detail in another chapter.

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we have traced the complex development of the new discipline of Psychology in one national and cultural context: the United States. We have shown how American life in the 19th century helped prepare the country for the rapid indigenization of disciplinary Psychology. The Americanization of psychology had both elite and nonelite origins. Revivalist religious practices—Methodism, camp meetings, the shout tradition—were important in raising questions about the psychological nature of the religious phenomena exhibited in these practices. The indigenous self-help orientation of the American people, especially in the era after the great democratization of public life following Andrew Jackson’s presidency, also contributed to Psychology’s origins. In the first half of the 19th century, this was especially so in the emergence and widespread popularity of phrenology and mesmerism, which were often promulgated among the same portion of the population that was receptive to revivalist religion. Through the agency of such skillful practitioners as Sunderland and Quimby, millions of Americans were sensitized to an interior psychological dimension of everyday life. Organically related to the movements stirred by phrenology and mesmerism were the development of spiritualism and New Thought in the second half of the century. Thus, by the time the new Psychology was introduced to the United States in the late 19th century, an everyday psychology was already in place.

In the second half of the chapter, we saw how American society turned to science for pragmatic solutions. This was part of what was called the Progressive Era in American politics and social life. The psychologizing of education and the study of work were part of the desire to view all life on an orderly and scientific basis. This focus was not without problems and was intensely resisted both by workers, who saw it as an extension of oppression by owners, and by old-money elites, who viewed it as a deepening of the crassness of American life. Psychologists seized the opportunities offered by education and by industry to define their science and discipline as useful and, in so doing, fostered an American psychology geared to American ideals. This, we argued, was critical for the full indigenization and naturalization of psychology in the United States. In other national and cultural contexts, both process and outcome were different, as scientists and practitioners attempted to construct a psychology that fit their own context. We explore some of those contexts in later chapters.

Finally, we again make the point that the events and outcomes we described in this chapter illustrate how the center and periphery of a science is a negotiated and competitive process. When disciplinary Psychology came to the United States, it was very much at the periphery of science when compared with the centers of Germany or France. It was also peripheral to American society and in direct competition with the everyday psychologies that had grown out of a mixture of religion and mind science practices over the course of the 19th century. It was these everyday psychologies, we have shown, that actually created a psychological sensitivity among millions of Americans. Thus, the success of disciplinary Psychology depended, somewhat paradoxically, on building on the everyday psychology of its competitors. That is, disciplinary psychologists had to employ careful rhetorical and practical strategies to attract and hold the attention and eventual support of Americans who owed their psychological awareness to other sources, while at the same time drawing clear distinctions between their new Psychology and the psychology of mental science, spiritualism, and religion. The success of disciplinary Psychologists in this process enabled American psychology, over the course of the 20th century to move not only to the center of disciplinary Psychology around the world but to the center of American social life. However, even with success, this outcome was not inevitable; one can argue, as we do in a later chapter, that psychologists have never been able to gain complete cultural and intellectual authority over the subject matter of psychology. That is, as historian Roger Smith has stated, in America “everyone became her or his own psychologist” (1997, p. 577).

In this chapter, we have sought to portray these events in such a way that it will help you, as a student, see how psychological science and its applications, like all sciences, are human processes. As such, they are subject to the compromises, conflicts, and constructions that make up human society. It is this human dimension, we believe, that both gives us cause to celebrate the knowledge produced by psychologists and cautions us to take all such knowledge as provisional and contingent on time and place. The historical perspective on these events that we have offered here may help us see more clearly that historical knowledge is crucial to understanding ourselves.

CHAPTER 5 THE PRACTICE OF PSYCHOLOGY AT THE INTERFACE WITH MEDICINE

In the history of science it has often been possible to verify that the very assertion which, at first, called forth only opposition, received recognition a little later without the necessity of bringing forward any new proofs.

—Sigmund Freud, History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, 1910

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter, we described the creation of an American psychology, beginning in the 19th century and moving forward into the first two decades of the 20th century. Its creation was the product of both an everyday psychology organically grown from the soil of phrenology, mesmerism, mind science, and mental philosophy and the importation of the new laboratory-oriented science of Psychology from Europe. To flourish in the United States, we argued, the new disciplinary Psychology had to prove its usefulness, which it did through applications in education and industry. In this chapter, we turn to another critical facet of modern Psychology: its uses in problems traditionally a part of medicine.

The 19th-century medical theories of mental function and dysfunction in Europe and the United States became foundational for the 20th-century psychological theories of mind and its disorders. This medicalization of mentality came to center on notions of disordered consciousness in the work of French physicians at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, such as Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, and their followers. In Vienna, the young neurologist, Sigmund Freud, formulated a nonmedical theory of mental order and disorder and developed clinical applications based on his theory; both theory and technique were called psychoanalysis. Freud’s ideas and practices came to have worldwide influence by the time of his death in 1939. In this chapter, we use these figures and their work to offer a historical account of the development of the practice of Psychology in the delivery of mental health services. We articulate how these events were important precursors to the development of modern clinical psychology.

The background for many of these developments was the Enlightenment discourse about madness and its appropriate treatment. We begin with a brief discussion of madness in the Enlightenment and then articulate in turn two traditions of theory and treatment that developed in the 19th century, moral management and the work that followed from the techniques introduced by Franz Anton Mesmer, which were then medicalized as hypnosis. These were not the only medical theories and treatments of mental disturbance, but we use these two to show how the work of Freud both developed and became influential.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND MADNESS

In  Chapter 1 , we introduced the ideas of René Descartes (1596–1650) and John Locke (1632–1704) and suggested that as their ideas gained currency, the period that ensued came to be called the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Recently, historians have demonstrated that the 18th century was more complex than such simple characterizations indicate. Nonetheless, these terms are still useful for us. This was a period when the power of human reason to understand the world and to govern human affairs was accorded the primary place in philosophy, politics, education, and many other areas of life. Man was conceptualized as a creature of reason. The gendered term is intentional; women were typically regarded as creatures of emotion rather than reason.

In this period, when men’s rational powers to understand the world were accorded primary status, madness or lunacy, as it was often called, was an example of the failure of reason. The mad, in much of Europe, were usually kept at home or allowed to roam. When a mad person was institutionalized, and few such settings existed anywhere in Europe, treatments typically included bleeding, cold baths, or purging. The most commonly cited medical theory used to justify such treatments was the ancient theory of humors, first formulated by the Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC). Humoral theory asserted that health was regulated by the balance of the four humors in the body: phlegm, black bile, red or yellow bile, and blood. When these humors became disregulated, emotional and behavioral disturbances would ensue. Bleeding, purging, and other techniques were meant to restore this balance and return the person to health.

During the Enlightenment, madness or lunacy was reconceptualized as a problem of loss of reason. Treatments took on a new cast as reform movements that began in the late 18th century in England and France spread to other sites, including North America. In Italy, in the 1780s, Vincenzo Chiarugi (1759–1820) instituted reforms at Santa Dorotea hospital in Florence and later at Bonifacio Hospital. He outlawed the use of chains to restrain patients and introduced more humane treatment. In France, after the Revolution of 1789, Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), the newly installed director of the large Paris hospital for women, the Salpêtrière, instituted changes in the care of those thought to be mad. Pinel drew upon the writings of Locke and the French philosophers Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Denis Diderot,Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and others who were advocates of the values of the Enlightenment. He instituted a new regime of treatment in which many patients were released from their shackles and treated as reasonable humans, able, with help, to regain their faculties of reason. His program had remarkable success. While it is likely that many inmates had never been mad as, at this time, the poor, debtors, and others were all placed with the insane, Pinel’s approach still clearly marked an improvement over the earlier treatments and was gradually adopted in other houses and hospitals that had the insane or mad in their charge.

FIGURE 5.1 Hippocrates

In York, on the northeast coast of England, another remarkable experiment began in 1796, about the same time as Pinel’s work in Paris. Local Quakers, concerned about the treatment of some of their members who were suffering from mental disorders, decided to open an institution especially for other Quakers. Under the leadership of a well-to-do Quaker businessman, William Tuke (1732–1822), the York Retreat was organized with the belief that mental illness was a state from which a person could recover with the right treatment. Tuke and the Quakers used the model of the God-fearing home as the setting for their treatment. The Retreat’s staff employed an attitude of benevolence, personal care, and opportunities to engage in useful tasks to nurture their patients back to health.

FIGURE 5.2 Philippe Pinel

From the beginning, the York Retreat reported great success. Many patients treated there were able to leave the retreat and return to their homes. Although it was originally designed to serve Quakers exclusively, before long non-Quakers were also admitted. It should be pointed out that the Retreat was built to house only 30 people and actually began with only about a third of that number. The small size of the patient population, as it turned out, was vital to the success of the treatment.

The success at York led to its imitation elsewhere and was a crucial part of the reforms of the treatment of the insane throughout England, especially after Tuke testified before committees of the British Parliament that were inquiring into the appalling treatment of the insane. Word of the success at York, in Florence, and at the Salpêtrière in Paris gave rise to what was called in English moral treatment. This was treatment based on regarding patients as inherently reasonable and providing humane care that would help them return to their reason. Patients were expected to act reasonably and contribute their labor by completing household tasks.

In the United States, a positive response resulted from this approach. The physicians who led the efforts to treat the insane were called alienists. This word was used because it was believed that the cause of mental disorders was becoming alienated from one’s reason. American physician, Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), one of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence, began using treatments inspired by Enlightenment ideas, including novel forms of restraint such as the crib, in which patients had to lie still as there was no room to move. The thought was that as patients calmed down, they would gradually be restored to their senses and their reason would return.

By the 1830s, moral treatment was the standard treatment approach in most of the asylums that had begun to be built in the countryside near many American cities. At first, the patient population was small and there were many successes. Many patients were able to return to their families. With success, however, came problems. In the 1850s, Thomas Kirkbride (1809–1883), a Quaker alienist and leader of moral treatment, developed what became known as the Kirkbride Plan for the design of mental institutions and the care of their patients. For their day, these were large institutions whose orderly design was intended to restore order in the minds of the patients housed within. Again, at first these institutions had remarkable success that continued as long as the patient population was small. However, by the last third of the 19th century, such institutions began to be overwhelmed with an increase in patient population and a decrease in support from private and public sources. Moral treatment was labor intensive; it required that staff, usually nurses and orderlies, give a great deal of time and attention to the patients. With increases in patient numbers and decreases in resources, moral treatment devolved into simple palliative care where patients were fed and perhaps allowed to walk outside once a day. So, by the end of the 19th century, except in a few private and expensive institutions, the majority of asylums had become warehouses of the insane.

With the failure of moral treatment, the alienists, who were organized as the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (now the American Psychiatric Association), began desperately to search for other explanations and causes of mental disorders. Increasingly, they looked to etiologies rooted in the human body: Bad teeth, infections, and intestinal problems were among the explanations offered.

The discovery of germ theory in mainstream medicine in the second half of the 19th century, with its ability to explain cholera, typhoid, and other deadly diseases, placed mental medicine or psychiatry, as it was beginning to be called, even further from the medical mainstream. Although many theories of the etiology and treatment of mental disorder were proposed by alienists in this period, few had any major impact, leading historians of psychiatry to refer to this time as an era of therapeutic nihilism, or absence of belief in the possibility of developing effective treatment. It was in this atmosphere that psychiatrists, as they were beginning to call themselves, turned to other disciplines for help, including Psychology.

The atmosphere of therapeutic nihilism also created an opening for psychological explanations of mental disorder and a basis for treatment. This was the opening that Freud stepped into with the theory and treatment that he called psychoanalysis. To better understand Freud’s emergence and impact, however, we have to trace another thread back to the late 18th century, to the work of Mesmer. We follow the development of his technique in the clinics and hospitals of England and France and examine the formulation of what was called the clinical approach to psychological disorders among French physicians and psychologists.

FROM MESMERISM TO HYPNOSIS

The modern era of psychological healing was ushered in by a most improbable figure, Franz Anton Mesmer. He was an inventive physician and eccentric thinker, whose work centered around physical healing.… It is one of the strange ironies of history that a man who made no attempt to explain the workings of the mind set in motion a series of events that revolutionized the way we view the human psyche.

—Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 1993

We introduced Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) in  Chapter 4 . There we discussed the important conceptual contribution of his theory and practice to the emergent indigenous American psychology. Here, we explain more about him and how his ideas and practices laid the foundation for later developments in psychoanalysis. Mesmer was a Viennese physician who, during his medical studies, became convinced that just as there are tides in the ocean affected by celestial motion, so must there be tides in the human body also affected by the movement of planets and stars. He called these tides “animal magnetism” and explored how one could manipulate animal magnetism to treat illnesses. As historian of psychology Adam Crabtree points out in the preceding quote, Mesmer’s work unwittingly set in motion a series of developments that led to the acceptance of the notion of a dynamic unconscious and the possibility of altered consciousness and dissociation.

Mesmer posited a healing reservoir that stored vital fluids to which patients were connected to restore their personal harmony. Mesmer believed the human body contained a magnetic force that could be manipulated with the use of animal magnetism. This animal magnetism was capable of penetrating objects and acting on them from a distance. It could cure disorders by restoring the equilibrium between the patient’s magnetic levels and the levels prevalent in the environment. At first Mesmer claimed to reverse illness by having patients touch iron bars that were magnetized. He then came to believe that any object, not just iron, could be magnetized by his own magnetic force. Later Mesmer would touch the patients, believing that his own magnetic force would be transmitted into their bodies by his touch or even by his glance.

Mesmer was remarkably successful in Vienna and surrounding areas until the case of Fräulein Paradies, a 17-year-old pianist who had been blind since the age of three. After undergoing his treatment, Mesmer claimed that she could see, but only in his presence. Already the object of physicians’ distrust and envy, this claim proved too much for many to believe, and Mesmer was forced to leave Vienna.

He settled in Paris in 1778 and was almost immediately successful. His patients were initially drawn from aristocratic circles, including Queen Marie Antoinette. His treatment was so popular that he decided to treat several patients at once. In a typical group treatment he filled a large tub with mesmerized water. Protruding from the tub were iron bars, bent at right angles so that the patients could easily grasp them. Beautiful music played in the background and the air was filled with the fragrance of flowers. Into this scene would step Mesmer dressed in regal robes of lilac and waving a yellow wand. This ritual was designed to induce a “crisis” in the patients. During this crisis, the patient would typically sweat, convulse, and even scream. When one patient would experience such a crisis, others would soon also experience one.

His success in Paris aroused the envy and ire of the medical establishment, which accused him of being a charlatan. In response, Mesmer challenged the French Academy of Medicine by suggesting that 20 patients be chosen, 10 be sent to him and 10 to the academy, and the results to be compared. The academy refused and the clergy accused him of being in consort with the devil. In 1784, the Society of Harmony, devoted to the promotion of animal magnetism, persuaded the king to charter a Royal Commission to study the effects of animal magnetism. The commission consisted of Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, and Joseph Guillotin. The commission concluded that animal magnetism did not exist and that any positive results were from imagination. Mesmer was investigated, branded a fake, and was again forced to flee. This time he fled to Switzerland. Mesmerism, however, remained popular, especially in the United States, where it was mixed with evangelical religions such as Methodism and became a part of popular psychology, as we discussed in  Chapter 4 .

The Society of Harmony continued to operate in France, and one of its members, Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), became the advocate for a modified version of animal magnetism. Puységur discovered that magnetizing did not need to involve the violent crisis that Mesmer’s approach necessitated. Simply placing people in a peaceful, trance-like state was enough. Although the individuals appeared to be asleep, they would still respond to commands. The condition was renamed artificial or magnetic somnambulism. Puységur found many of the phenomena we know today to be characteristic of the hypnotized state: Paralysis could be moved around the body by suggestion, laughing and crying could be produced on command, and if subjects were told that a part of their body was anesthetized, they could tolerate previously painful stimuli without distress.

Although Mesmer had become a controversial figure, interest in mesmerism and hypnotism and in their practical applications continued, as we saw in  Chapter 4 . John Elliotson, an English surgeon, suggested that mesmerism be used during surgery, but the medical establishment did not support the practice (although it was done). In India, the English surgeon James Esdaile performed more than 250 painless operations on Hindu convicts, but his results were dismissed because his operations had been performed on “natives” and therefore had no relevance to England. About this time, anesthetic gases were discovered and interest in the use of mesmerism in surgery faded.

Mesmerism or somnambulism was renamed hypnotism. James Braid, a Scottish surgeon (1795–1860), studied the phenomenon extensively and in 1843 published his book, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, where he explained animal magnetism in terms of concentration and exhaustion and renamed it neurohypnology, which was shortened to hypnosis.

In France, a physician, Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (1823–1904), became convinced of the value of hypnosis and began offering it as part of treatment for free (since his patients were skeptical). He gained a collaborator in Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919) who became a major spokesperson for the view that all humans were suggestible but some were more suggestible than others. Bernheim also found that the beliefs about health practices of highly suggestible people were important for relieving their medical symptoms. The work of Liébeault and Bernheim proved important for later conceptualizations of hypnosis and the role of suggestion. It was in Paris, however, that hypnosis found its most effective advocate in Charcot.

CHARCOT: THE NAPOLEON OF THE NEUROSES

Jean Martin Charcot (1825–1893) became the director of the Salpêtrière in 1862. Trained as a neurologist and internist, Charcot has been described as one of the best-known clinicians of the second half of the 19th century. Although he interned at the Salpêtrière, his decision to return there to start his career was somewhat unusual—the hospital was not considered a prestigious post, even though some other major figures in the history of French psychiatry had previously taught there. Charcot chose the Salpêtrière because he was highly interested in the “anatomical–clinical” method. In this method, the patient’s body was examined at autopsy to determine the cause of death, and these pathological findings were then related back to the signs and symptoms recorded, before death, in the patient’s hospital chart to establish the disease’s distinctive clinical signs.

FIGURE 5.3 Jean Martin Charcot

When Charcot started his career, the method had not been employed systematically in neurology. Charcot saw in the Salpêtrière’s patient population the opportunity to try this method on the organic diseases of the nervous system. Since the Salpêtrière was a chronic care facility, most patients at the hospital would be there until they died, affording Charcot the opportunity to follow them to death and then perform autopsies.

To carry out his work, Charcot gradually converted the Salpêtrière into a research hospital. He then made a string of important contributions to the understanding of diseases of the nervous system, including mapping out the anatomical–clinical picture of multiple sclerosis. It was in this context that Charcot became interested in the disease known as hysteria. If he could map out other illnesses, why not one of the most mysterious?

Charcot believed that hysteria, a collection of neurological signs and symptoms that could not be traced to an organic cause, was nonetheless an inherited, functional disease of the nervous system. He spent a great deal of time and energy describing the symptoms of the disease and classifying the characteristics and stages of convulsive hysterical fits. He became a master diagnostician, able to discern in even the most innocuous symptoms—such as excessive yawning—the presence of hysteria. Charcot, with other physicians of his time, felt that the ovaries might play a significant role in the onset and cessation of hysterical fits, specifically, that irritations of the ovaries might bring on such fits and pressure applied to the ovaries could terminate them. Charcot did not consider ovarian irritation an explanation for hysteria per se; rather, he saw this susceptibility as a symptom of the disease. In many cases he was able to terminate hysterical fits by pressing on a patient’s ovaries, and he often used this to dramatic effect.

Charcot was a flamboyant showman, as well as a brilliant neurologist. Physicians and researchers from many countries came to study with or observe him, including Freud. Charcot began the practice of conducting public lectures one day a week during which he would invoke and resolve hysterical fits at will in a patient heretofore unknown to him. Hypnosis became an important part of these demonstrations. Because hypnosis and hysteria could produce the same symptoms, such as paralysis, Charcot concluded that hypnotizability, although it could be used to treat hysteria, also indicated its presence. This brought him into sharp conflict with the theories of Liébeault and Bernheim, who believed that hypnotizability was simply a form of suggestibility, a trait that existed in the normal population.

Charcot became highly speculative about hysteria and hypnosis. He hypothesized that trauma caused some ideas to become dissociated from consciousness and thus isolated from the restrictions of rational thought. This is how hysterical symptoms developed, such as insensibility to pain. He then speculated that hysterical symptoms such as paralysis had a psychological rather than an organic cause. According to Charcot, the sequence of events from trauma, to pathogenic ideas (that produce physical symptoms), to the symptoms themselves could only occur in individuals who were predisposed to hysteria. Those so disposed were also capable of being hypnotized. With hypnosis, the hypnotist’s suggestions created the same “annihilation of the ego” that traumatic experience did.

Charcot felt that hysteria, in theory, could occur in both women and men. He developed a theory of male hysteria that outlined identical symptoms in men. However, he remained preoccupied with the ovaries, and in practice he almost exclusively treated female patients. Hysteria and its close cousin, neurasthenia, some historians have argued, were distinctly “female maladies” in the mid- to late 19th century. In this period, various gynecological procedures were proposed and tried on female patients. Many gynecological surgeons adhered to reflex theory, in which the cause of the female patient’s emotional distress was located in her reproductive system. Proponents of this theory stipulated that organs (such as the uterus) could influence other organs (such as the brain) via nervous connections and thus engaged in various “local treatments,” such as repairing prolapsed uteri, removing ovaries, and even excising the clitoris in particularly troublesome cases, such as nymphomania. Gynecological surgeons were more likely than their alienist and neurologist counterparts to subscribe to this theory. Charcot, although he elaborated his own theory of hysteria that we have just outlined, also resorted to pressing on ovaries when a quick resolution to a hysterical fit was required.

By historical coincidence, Freud was studying with Charcot as Charcot was formulating his theory. We move next to Freud but need to point out that another of Charcot’s colleagues at the Salpêtrière, Pierre Janet (1859–1947) developed the theory of dissociation even further and soon came to study and publish on the occurrence of multiple personalities or those with co-consciousness. It was Janet’s ideas on this that had the first powerful impact on American thought, especially in the medical establishment, as well as among psychologists like William James (1842–1910). It was the French clinical tradition that initially most influenced the theory and treatment of mental disorders in the United States.

SIGMUND FREUD (1856–1939)

The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud borrowed from the theories of Charcot, Liébeault, and Bernheim and the French clinical tradition of which they were a part. He also drew upon writers and philosophers from his own excellent education in Vienna, although he was sometimes reluctant to acknowledge their contributions to his theoretical and clinical work. Freud borrowed from these theories and combined them with insights from philosophy and his own clinical work to forge what he termed psychoanalysis. In doing so, Freud, a figure of the Jewish Enlightenment, used reason to show the limits of reason (R. Smith, 1997). The theory and praxis he constructed over his long career were major influences on the forging of a psychological subjectivity in western Europe and North America during the 20th century. Although later theorists and practitioners often disagreed with his theory or methods, Freud had shown it was possible to offer a workable theory of treatment predicated upon purely psychological grounds. In this section, we place the work of Freud in its historical context and show how his work came to be so influential in the development of the practice of Psychology in the delivery of mental health services. We then examine his influence in the United States, India, and Argentina.

FIGURE 5.4 Sigmund Freud

Freud was born in what is now Pribor, a city in the eastern section of the Czech Republic. His father, Jakob, was a wool merchant, who had had two sons from a previous marriage, one of whom had his own first child just before Sigmund was born. Sigmund’s mother, Amalie, was 20 years younger than her husband, and Sigmund was her firstborn; she and Jakob eventually had eight children. When Sigmund was four years old, Jakob moved his family to Vienna, Austria, a little more than 200 miles to the west. The family’s migration was part of a general movement of Eastern European Jews to points further west, due primarily to centuries of persecution and pogroms in Eastern Europe. Vienna also represented greater opportunity for the children of the Freuds, as the restrictions on Jews were less onerous there than in Pribor or other Eastern Europe locations.

Sigmund Freud flourished in Vienna, showing strong academic skills and a voracious intellectual curiosity. His interests at school came to center on history and literature. During his last year of Gymnasium, however, he read the essay, On Nature, by the great German dramatist scientist, and intellectual, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), and decided that science would be his endeavor at university. The options available to young Viennese Jews were limited, and Freud chose medicine at the University of Vienna.

In his early years at medical school, Freud was much impressed by the young philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Brentano, a priest at the time (although he soon left the priesthood over the issue of papal infallibility), had developed an approach that he called act psychology. His 1874 volume, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, stressed the importance of motivational factors on human action and argued that human thought and action are dynamic, that is, characterized by direction, intention, and desire. Freud took five courses with Brentano and even considered earning a philosophy degree with him after he completed medical school. Although Freud ultimately did not earn a philosophy degree, it is clear that Brentano sensitized Freud to the importance of motivation and the dynamic character of human cognition and behavior.

Freud came under the influence of the physiologist Ernst Brücke (1819–1892) in his third year of medical school. Brücke, like Hermann von Helmholtz (see  Chapter 1 ), held that all physiological processes could be explained by ultimate reference to their physical–chemical properties; thus, no invisible, secret, or “vital” forces animated living beings. All events have causes, thus the principle of determinism in science. Once he came under the influence of Brücke, Freud set himself to become a great scientist. To work toward his goal, he spent six years working in Brücke’s laboratory, doing microstudies of the nervous system of fish, among other creatures. He was able to publish in his area of research but soon came to realize that a career as a researcher would not pay the bills. He finally earned his medical degree in 1881. The following year Freud met and fell in love with Martha Bernays. Due to bourgeois expectations that a man could not marry until he could show that he was capable of supporting his wife in the manner commensurate with her social standing (an issue that Freud complained about for the rest of his life), Freud then decided to become a clinician, specializing in patients with diseases of the nervous system. For several years he treated cases of cerebral palsy, aphasia, and other disorders of the “nerves.” He brought with him, then, from his education and training, a humanist’s love of learning and the ambition of a scientist to understand the underlying causes of the phenomena he investigated. Both served him well.

Freud gained clinical experience in Vienna hospitals, particularly the General Hospital, where he worked with well-known neuroanatomist Theodore Meynert (1833–1898). Meynert was intensely involved in the scientific debates about localization of brain function (see  Chapter 1 ) and argued that memories are contained in specific brain cells that are systematically connected with one another in what he called the “ego.” Under Meynert’s direction, Freud became known for his acumen in diagnosing brain disorders. To further his clinical understanding, Freud sought for and won, upon Meynert’s recommendation, a 6-month fellowship for the winter of 1885–1886 to study with Charcot in Paris.

Charcot by this time was perhaps the best-known neurologist in Europe. He had begun to treat hysterics with hypnosis a few years before Freud’s fellowship. Hysteria as a disease category had been recognized since the ancient Greeks, who used the term to describe the complaints of women (the term derives from the Greek word for uterus). By Freud’s time, it was known that both men and women could suffer from hysteria. Hysterical symptoms were characterized by a mismatch between the complaint and the known functioning of the nervous system. Thus, a patient might report being unable to move fingers, but physical examination would reveal that the nerves responsible for both sensation and movement of the hand were not damaged. The patient’s symptoms followed popular conceptions of how the body or nervous system worked rather than how it actually works. Often, when the hysteric’s symptoms were successfully treated, within a short time (i.e., hours or days) other symptoms would reappear in some other part of the body. Needless to say, established clinicians sought to avoid taking on such cases. Charcot, however, was determined to describe, classify, and understand hysteria, as we have discussed earlier. While Freud was in Paris, Charcot suggested that trauma may play a role in hysteria in that it could lead to ideas becoming dissociated from rationality.

Freud took these ideas and Charcot’s technique of hypnosis back with him to Vienna, where he began to fashion his own theory and treatments. He was finally able to marry and settle into his clinical practice. Still, as a young Jewish clinician, Freud was not in a position to dictate his patient load. As a result, he often had to take as patients individuals who were suffering from complaints, such as hysteria, that more established clinicians sought to avoid. Like Charcot, Freud decided to understand the origin of hysteria and find successful treatments. Hysteria, then, was Freud’s testing ground for what became the theory and technique of psychoanalysis.

After Freud opened his practice in 1886, he developed, over the next 15 years, the basic theoretical framework of psychoanalysis. He traveled, for example, to Nancy, France, in 1889, where he learned from Bernheim and Liébeault that the hypnotized state did not indicate pathology; rather, hypnosis could be used to treat such disorders as hysteria. Perhaps his most important collaborator in these early years was Josef Breuer (1842–1925), a neurologist some 14 years his senior. Breuer had been a friend, a confidant, and perhaps equally important, an important source of referrals to the young doctor. He related to Freud the curious case of a young woman named Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) who had come to him for treatment of hysterical symptoms in December 1880. Pappenheim, better known by her case name, Anna O., was treated by Breuer for approximately 18 months for symptoms that had arisen around the illness and death of her father, to whom she had been close. Breuer discovered that if he could induce Anna O. to talk about her emotions and her father that many of her hysteric symptoms would abate. It was Anna O. who called this her “talking cure.”

Sidebar 5.1 Focus on Bertha Pappenheim

Although Bertha Pappenheim’s private pain has become immortalized through her treatment with Josef Breuer and her place in the history of psychoanalysis, historians have also discovered the story of an incredibly accomplished and socially conscious Jewish feminist who recovered from her debilitating emotional condition and went on to devote herself to organized feminism and the social welfare of women and children. As historian of psychology Meredith Kimball has noted, in the years following her treatment, Pappenheim “actively struggled to reconstruct herself and moved successfully from her world of private fantasies into a world of political and social change” (2000, p. 31).

Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Vienna in 1859, Pappenheim received the kind of education that was typical for her gender and class at that time. She undertook both religious and secular training, the latter consisting of 10 years in a private Catholic school where she learned languages, music, and needlework. Her religious training was basic, with instruction in the running of an Orthodox Jewish kitchen and in Hebrew and Yiddish prayers but no formal education in Jewish laws and traditions. This more serious study was reserved for male children and men. Nonetheless, upon leaving school at age 16, she was fluent in English, French, and Italian in addition to her native German. Suffice it to note that upon graduation, Pappenheim, like young women of her social standing, was expected to adopt the role of the young woman-in-waiting, occupying herself with pleasant but unstrenuous domestic and social diversions until marriage. Later in her life, Pappenheim denounced the practice of restricting young women in this way, and she was joined by several prominent German feminists who had also experienced the intellectual stultification produced by these social norms.

In 1888, when she was well on her way to recovery from the symptoms that had brought her into Breuer’s care, Pappenheim and her mother moved from Vienna to Frankfurt. There she continued her reconstruction by connecting with the city’s vibrant Jewish community, which had a tradition of charity work. She went on to become a leader in this community, devoting herself to improving the lives of women and children, especially unwed mothers. In 1895, Pappenheim took a position as head of a Jewish girls’ orphanage. In 1902, she founded the organization Care by Women to bring the goals of the feminist movement to Jewish social work. In 1904, she and other Jewish feminists founded the League of Jewish Women, an umbrella organization that by the 1920s had 400 affiliates and 50,000 members. She served as the president of this organization for 20 years. In 1907, she established her own institution for unmarried Jewish mothers and their children, which, by the time it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938, had housed 1,500 people.

In this brief biographical sketch of Pappenheim and her accomplishments, we suggest that her place in the history of psychology, as Breuer’s hysterical patient Anna O., has perhaps obfuscated the richer account of an extraordinary life that moved, as Kimball has put it, beyond “private pain” into “public action” (Kimball, 2000, p. 20).

FIGURE 5.5 Bertha Pappenheim, or “Anna O”

In the early 1890s, Breuer and Freud collaborated on a book, Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, that reported five case studies of hysteria. Freud proposed a theory of hysteria based on these cases in which he argued that hysterical symptoms begin in memories marked by such powerful emotions that they then become inaccessible to our recall. Thus, the famous statement from Breuer and Freud, that “the hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences” can be understood (Breuer & Freud, 1895/1957, p. 7). The result is pathogenic ideas divorced from our rational state but that are full of the emotional energy from the suppressed memories that can then be converted into hysterical symptoms (note the similarity here to Helmholtz’s work on the law of the conservation of energy; see  Chapter 1 ). Hypnosis was the technique that Freud and Breuer used at this point to treat hysterical symptoms, which seemed to allow for the energy associated with the pathogenic ideas to be discharged.

However, Freud had already grown dissatisfied with hypnosis as a therapeutic tool. For one, not every patient could be hypnotized. His search for an alternative led him to develop the technique of free association. In this technique, the patient is instructed to recall as much as possible all thoughts and feelings associated with a symptom, without editing the flow of ideas. This became an important breakthrough for Freud, especially when he used the technique on himself.

In 1896, Freud’s father died. Freud counted this as one of the most significant events of his life and one which led him to undertake an intense self-analysis. Free association and a new approach, dream analysis, were employed by Freud in his self-analysis to help him through the crisis brought on by his father’s death. Freud analyzed his own dreams and found in them, as is often said, the royal road to the unconscious. With the use of these two techniques, he explored wishes and urges about his father that he termed the Oedipus complex, after the Greek myth of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother. His analysis revealed to him that he had wished for his father’s removal as a child so that he, Freud, could possess his mother for his own pleasure. This later was incorporated by Freud into his theory of psychological development. His analysis of dreams led him to suggest that dreams have two levels of meaning, the manifest, which is superficial and does not contain the real psychological meaning of the dream, and the latent, which is the real meaning, dressed in symbolic form. Dreams, Freud suggested, are wish fulfillments whose latent meaning is intended to disguise their socially unacceptable nature. In this way, Freud said, dreams are like hysterical symptoms in that both represent ideas or wishes that are too dangerous to be expressed in everyday life. Freud brought together all of this material in what many scholars and historians, and even Freud himself, consider his greatest book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Freud continued to develop his theory, publishing many elaborations and corrections to his ideas over the next four decades, as he constantly learned from the application of his ideas in an active clinical practice. Broadly, Freud theorized about children’s development, the origin of neuroses, the role of instinctual behavior, and the emergence and use of psychological defense mechanisms. He also wrote about the role of religion, the problematic role of the civilizing process on individual personalities, and even a psychoanalytic biography of American President Woodrow Wilson.

After 1900, a small group of Jewish intellectuals began to gather around Freud and met at Freud’s home every week as the Wednesday Psychological Society to discuss psychoanalysis. Some of these men, such as Otto Rank (1884–1939), Alfred Adler (1870–1937), and Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940), went on to become leaders themselves of the psychoanalytical movement. In 1907, Carl Jung (1875–1961) and Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966) visited from Switzerland, thus extending the geographic reach of psychoanalysis; Jung and Binswanger were also the first non-Jews to join the psychoanalytic circle. Freud’s circle of influence grew but inevitably led to splits. Adler and Jung broke from the inner circle in 1911 and 1913, respectively. In 1909, Freud made his only visit to North America, where he gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis at the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the founding of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Invited by Clark’s president, G. Stanley Hall, Freud’s lectures were a public triumph. Major newspapers of the day covered the visit and wrote favorably about Freud’s lectures. This was crucial for the spread of Freud’s ideas, or at least a version of them, in America, a topic to which we return later. While at Clark, Freud also met with American psychologists, including the ailing William James, who reportedly told Freud that the future of psychology lay with Freud’s ideas. Jung accompanied him and gave a series of lectures at Clark on the word association technique.

After World War I, in which two of his sons served, Freud revised and expanded his theories to include his now-famous structural account of the psyche: id, ego, and superego. Freud continued to revise and rework his theory and its therapeutic applications until his death. Freud had resisted leaving Vienna even after the Nazis occupied the city. Finally, under threat of death and after large sums of money had been paid to the Nazis, Freud and his family moved to London in 1938. He had suffered from cancer of the jaw for many years. He died on September 23, 1939.

FREUD’S IMPACT ON PSYCHOLOGY AS A MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSION

World War I brought validation to Freud’s theory of hysteria. The First World War was particularly brutal, with millions killed and much of the damage done at great distances. Men in the trenches witnessed their comrades next to them suddenly killed by a mortar lobbed into the trench, or thousands would be mowed down by machine guns when senselessly ordered to charge the enemy lines over terrain filled with mud, barbwire, and other obstacles. As a result, many soldiers during the war suffered from what came to be called shell shock. The symptoms displayed in shell shock resembled the symptoms of hysteria—paralyses, uncontrollable shaking, inability to speak, and many others—all without demonstrable neurological damage. Some shell-shocked soldiers were court-martialed and shot; some were forced back into battle, where they were unable to function; and many were consigned to hospitals. In England, the psychologist Charles S. Myers (1873–1946) coined the term “shell shock” to describe their condition. The anthropologist–psychologist–physician William H. R. Rivers (1864–1922) was among the first to try Freud’s talk therapy with these victims. To his surprise, it seemed to work with many of them. By the end of the war in Britain, psychoanalysis had found acceptance, at least as a niche therapy.

Freud’s visit to America in 1909 had been well received, as noted earlier. For some years, as historian Eugene Taylor (2000) has pointed out, there had already been an indigenous psychotherapy movement in America that was centered on Boston. William James was among the members of what Taylor calls the Boston School of Psychotherapy, along with several of the city’s leading neurologists, alienists (now calling themselves psychiatrists), and a few other psychologists. While their approach was different from Freud’s, there was a general willingness to provisionally accept Freud’s theory and techniques.

Over the next 20 or so years, as Freud’s ideas or at least a version of his ideas were circulated via newspapers and magazines, many educated Americans came to accept Freud’s basic tenet that humans are often motivated by irrational or unseen forces. His ideas that dreams have meanings and that sex is a critically important motivator passed into common parlance. We revisit the popularity of Freud and at least a version of his psychoanalysis in our chapter on post–World War II psychology. Now, we turn our attention to the impact of Freud and psychoanalysis on the new field of Psychology.

Therapeutic Nihilism

Recall that the 19th-century model of mental disorders and their treatment, called moral treatment or moral management, had, by the end of the century, been generally discredited. The lack of effective treatments and the inadequacy of theory helped create an atmosphere in which psychological approaches could be tried.

In addition, alienists felt increasingly isolated in their rural asylums and left behind by advances in mainstream medicine, where the development of germ theory as a cause of disease was beginning to create modern, laboratory-based, scientific medicine. The placement of medical practice on a more scientific basis led to greater success in the treatment of some diseases and raised the status of medicine in American society. These results were reciprocal with changes in medical education, especially at new institutions like the Johns Hopkins University medical school. For alienists, these changes and reforms only highlighted the increasing distance between their specialty and mainstream medicine.

A new generation of leaders among the alienists began to change the name of their specialty to psychiatry. They sought to modernize their field by aligning themselves with some of the new medical specialties, such as pathology. It was in this spirit that some leaders of the new psychiatry invited experimental psychologists to be staff members of asylums. This was a new opportunity for psychologists, who brought their skills in mental assessments and laboratory science to research on mental disorders and their treatments.

Perhaps most importantly, the crisis in psychiatry helped create an atmosphere of receptivity to psychological theories of mental disorders and to treatments based in those theories. Thus, by the time Freud visited America in 1909, there was both a scientific and cultural opening in North America for psychological ideas and treatments.

Psychologists, Psychoanalysis, and Mental Health in America

The development of psychotherapy in the United States has a complex history. American psychotherapeutics emerged in the 1890s and the early years of the 20th century. Taylor (1999; 2000) has shown that the sources for psychotherapeutics, as it was known then, were a rich mix of ideas and practices. One source was the French clinical tradition, including Charcot and Janet and the work of Alfred Binet, Théodule Ribot, and Bernheim, among others. American sources included mental science, mind cures, and psychical research, as we documented in  Chapter 4 , as well as contributions from neurology, psychiatry, and a new field pioneered by James, experimental psychopathology. Freud and psychoanalysis, introduced to America by James in the mid-1890s, also began to be influential in the first two decades of the 20th century.

The geographical center for these developments was Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston School of Psychotherapy, as it came to be called, was a group of loosely affiliated men from various professions. James, of course, was prominent. Other physicians included James Jackson Putnam, Morton Prince, Richard Cabot, and Henry Bowditch; all of these men were engaged in the private practice of psychotherapy in the Boston area, in addition to practicing their regular medical specialties. Psychologists were also involved. Boris Sidis (1867–1923), who earned his PhD under James in experimental psychopathology, wrote one of the early and most important books on abnormal states, The Psychology of Suggestion (1898). He then went on to earn his MD, developed a large private practice, and continued to write extensively about exceptional mental states. Louville Eugene Emerson earned his PhD at Harvard University in 1909 and then spent the rest of his career providing psychotherapy in both hospital and private practice settings. Another key figure in the Boston School was Elwood Worcester, the rector of Emmanuel Church (Episcopal). In 1906, together with his assistant, Samuel Mc-Comb and several physician members of the Boston School, Worcester began holding meetings open to anyone who wanted help with moral or psychological problems. The program was highly successful in attracting and treating many Bostonians. It became known as the Emmanuel Movement and spread to several cities across North America. It drew upon the theoretical and clinical ideas of the Boston School, as well as the older indigenous ideas of New Thought and mental therapeutics. Today it is primarily considered the forerunner of pastoral counseling, but more importantly for our chapter, the Emmanuel Movement was critical for making literate Americans aware of the new phenomenon of psychotherapy.

Thus, when Freud visited the United States in 1909, there was already an emergent body of psychological ideas and practices. A few psychologists had begun to work in medical settings, providing a small range of services. Most of these psychologists engaged in research as part of the effort by progressive psychiatrists to modernize the asylums. Some also offered psychotherapy, as we saw in the case of Sidis and Emerson. It was also in this era that a few psychologists began to offer diagnostic assessments of intelligence and psychopathology.

Psychologist Shepherd Ivory Franz (1874–1933) was among the first psychologists to work in an asylum setting. After earning his PhD at Columbia University in 1899 and then teaching in a medical school, he took a newly created position at McLean Hospital, a private asylum, from 1904 to 1907. While there, he conducted one of the first studies to demonstrate the therapeutic effect of exercise on depression. In 1907, he moved to Washington, DC, where he held a joint appointment at George Washington University and what was then called the Government Hospital for the Insane, now St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.

While Franz was at the Government Hospital, the medical superintendent, William Alanson White, introduced psychoanalytic theory and treatment. One of Franz’s graduate students at George Washington University, Grace Kent (1875–1973), did her doctoral work at the hospital, where she modified a word association test that had been developed by Jung to detect psychological complexes in asylum patients. The Kent-Rosanoff Test, as it came to be called because of her collaboration on the project with psychiatrist A. J. Rosanoff, was an effective, if time-consuming, tool for detecting patterns of disturbed cognition. (Kent’s involvement in this work is indicative of the growing number of women in mental health work and applied psychology more generally, which became widespread after World War I; see  Chapter 6 ). Kent spent her entire career in clinical settings. Not only was she influential through the use of her Kent-Rosanoff Test, but she also mentored several psychologists who transformed clinical psychology into its modern-day form, including David Shakow (1901–1981).

FIGURE 5.6 Danvers State Hospital, where Grace Kent served as a psychologist

Franz’s replacement at McLean was Frederic Lyman Wells (1884–1964). Wells spent his career as a psychologist working in clinical settings, first at McLean and then for many years at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. He became one of the most important individuals in the development of what is currently termed clinical psychology. An urbane, witty, articulate man, Wells was known for his keen grasp of the experimental method in psychology and his clinical abilities with patients. Wells also came to have a deep appreciation for and understanding of psychoanalysis. During the 1910s, he wrote nearly annual reports on progress in psychoanalysis in American psychology. In his work as an author and as a clinician, Wells kept psychoanalytic ideas and practices before psychologists and was influential in the application of psychology to mental health problems. In addition, he wrote influential books on mental adjustments and mental testing that served the new field of clinical psychology.

BOUNDARIES BETWEEN PSYCHOLOGY AND MEDICINE

As psychologists developed expertise relevant to medicine and mental health, the boundaries among medicine, psychiatry, and psychology had to be negotiated. First, some physicians, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts perceived psychologists as inadequately trained to participate in health-related work in medical settings, such as mental testing. Second, in the first two decades after Freud’s 1909 visit to the United States, several of the leading scientific psychologists were keen to differentiate their field from psychoanalysis. Thirdly, however, in the 1930s and beyond, sensing a new professional opportunity, some psychologists became involved in the development of a new field of medical theory and practice that drew on psychoanalytic concepts: psychosomatic medicine. In this section, we discuss three examples of psychologists negotiating boundaries with medicine.

Mental Testing

Mental testing in medical settings became controversial in this period. The difficulty arose over who was the expert—psychiatrist or psychologist. Psychologists had established themselves as testers in most settings. However, several psychiatrists in this period saw psychological testing as a potential threat. Psychologists like Wells and Franz, while respected for their laboratory research, began to be perceived as infringing on the medical domain in their use of psychological tests. This happened as well with Robert Yerkes (1876–1956) at Boston Psychopathic Hospital. What proved to be at stake was the desire of physicians to keep psychologists from being able to work independently of their supervision. Since psychiatrists and other physicians had no training in psychological assessment, they were unable to counter the test results that psychologists proffered. This conflict was eventually resolved in favor of psychologists, and by the 1930s, psychologists were more welcome in medical settings, where they were expected to provide a useful service to medicine through their testing regimes. However, to work in medical settings, psychologists had to define their boundaries with psychoanalysis. We discuss this boundary work in the next two sections.

Psychologists and the Question of Boundaries with Psychoanalysis

It is safe to say that most new scientific psychologists viewed psychoanalysis with some wariness and did not see its immediate relevance to their newly minted research-based discipline. However, as psychoanalysis made significant cultural incursions in the 1920s, psychologists realized that, as in the case of spiritualism, they could not afford to ignore it.

According to historian of psychology Gail Hornstein (1992), the new psychologists used several strategies to deal with this challenge to their cultural authority. Initially, psychologists appeared to react with amusement to Freud’s ideas, regarding them as little more than interesting and perhaps rather mystical stories about the psyche. When Freud was invited by Hall to come to Clark University in 1909 to give a talk, it seemed as though American psychologists took a merely passing interest in his theories. However, as psychoanalysis garnered more scholarly and popular attention in the 1920s, it proved to be a threat to Psychology’s status as the preeminent science of the mind. At this point, psychologists refused to accept psychoanalysis as part of their own field and retreated into scientism, claiming that psychoanalysis was unscientific and establishing ever greater distance between psychology and personal experience by inventing apparatus, designing tests, and focusing on only objective and observable aspects of the human experience. In retreating into positivism, Hornstein argues, psychologists limited the scope and the social and personal relevance of psychological science.

Another thorn in psychologists’ side was psychoanalysts’ insistence that only those who had themselves undergone analysis were fit to evaluate psychoanalytic theory. Thus, criticisms levied against psychoanalysis were simply disregarded if the critics themselves had not undergone analysis. To psychologists, this seemed incredibly cultish. Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869–1962) of Columbia University said that psychoanalysis was an “uncanny religion” and published an extensive critique of what he called “Freudism” in 1917 in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (Woodworth, 1917, p. 175).

Nevertheless, in an attempt to understand this new phenomenon, several well-known experimental psychologists embarked on analysis themselves. One of these was Edwin G. Boring (1886–1968). He entered analysis in 1934 with Hanns Sachs and received treatment for 10 months, until he eventually ran out of money (his sessions cost $10 an hour). He concluded that his own analysis had not been a success but remained open to the possibility that his experience was anomalous.

By the early 1940s, psychoanalysis had become so popular that it threatened to eclipse scientific psychology entirely in the popular mind. In response, psychologists came up with another strategy not unlike the strategy they had used in dealing with the claims of spiritualism. They decided to use their own methods—the methods of laboratory science—to examine the claims of psychoanalysis. They decided to subject psychoanalysis to the cold, objective gaze of psychological science. In the 1950s, research on psychoanalysis by psychological scientists became somewhat of a cottage industry. Two learning theorists, John Dollard (1900–1980) and Neal Miller (1909-2002), published a book called Personality and Psychotherapy in 1950 in which they translated several psychoanalytic principles into learning theory terms and tested them. Other studies included experimental investigations of defense mechanisms. In this way, psychoanalytic theory was operationalized, tested in the laboratory, and brought into the psychologists’ own expert sphere of science.

Hornstein makes the point that it mattered less whether the experiments proved that psychoanalytic theory was right or wrong than that psychoanalytic phenomena were being made subservient to empirical test—thus vindicating empiricism and psychological science and subjugating psychoanalysis to definitions of science articulated by psychologists. Even while some psychologists were seeking to discredit psychoanalysis, others sought to find ways to use their scientific work to explore psychoanalytic concepts in the emerging field of psychosomatic medicine.

Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatic Medicine

As a new approach to understanding illness, psychosomatic medicine emerged first in German-speaking countries during the 1920s. Its core principles were grounded in psychoanalytic theorizing, but its context of development was the movement in German-speaking countries to recapture the soul of German life. This movement emerged as resistance to the mechanistic view of life that had dominated German science since the time of Helmholtz in the second half of the 19th century (see Chapters 1 and 8). You may recall that Helmholtz and his colleagues in various sciences had argued that the workings of the universe, including human life, were reducible to their physical and chemical constituents. This mechanical view of life helped make Germany a world power in industry and military might, but many critics charged that it had destroyed the German soul (Seele) and diminished Germany’s rich cultural and philosophical heritage. This movement of resistance had many facets, but all of them incorporated some aspect of wholeness or holism. As we discuss in  Chapter 8 , Gestalt theory in psychology was one facet. Psychosomatic medicine as it was formulated in Germany and Austria in the 1920 was also an expression of holism.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, psychosomatic conceptualizations of illness and treatment spread to the United States, where a somewhat modest reorientation also occurred in the life and medical sciences toward organicist–holist concepts and away from reductionist approaches.

In North America, psychosomatic medicine became an approach marked by its interdisciplinarity. Contributions to research and practice were made by scientists and clinicians from various scientific and clinical fields, including Psychology, as they sought to understand the relationships among emotions, mental processes, and illness. These interrelationships were thought to be important factors in such diverse illnesses as coronary heart disease, colitis, peptic ulcers, and asthma. Two of the primary leaders in the growth of the new field were Helen Flanders Dunbar and Franz Alexander.

Dunbar (1902–1959) was a central figure in the promotion and establishment of psychosomatic medicine in America. She held both an MD and a PhD in philosophy, with an extensive background in religion and psychology. Dunbar traveled to Europe in 1929, where she worked with some pioneers in psychosomatic medicine. According to Dunbar, emotions played a vital role in maintaining or disrupting the person’s equilibrium; thus, disease was a manifestation of disequilibrium within the person and between the person and his or her environment. Her massive survey on the relation of emotion to disease, Emotions and Bodily Changes (1935), served as an invaluable resource for the establishment of psychosomatic medicine by providing a bibliographical guide to potential areas of fruitful research and by explicating what had already been discovered about the relationship of mind and body in health and disease.

Alexander (1891–1964) was the other key medical theorist and researcher. A Hungarian-born psychoanalyst, Alexander headed the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. What psychoanalysis offered, according to Alexander, was precision concerning the role of psychological factors in disease. He offered as an example his work on psychological contributions to peptic ulcer; the route to peptic ulcer lay in the identification of being fed with being loved, an identification that occurs in infancy. The emotional association that occurs at this time is the baseline for the connection in adulthood between unmet dependency needs and peptic ulcer. Alexander drew upon the work of physiologist Walter Cannon (1871–1945) on the effects of emotions on the body to argue that the physiological linkage occurred through the action of the sympathetic nervous system. Personality, Alexander argued, was the key to understanding health and disease.

Psychologists’ contributions came from a growing number of younger researchers who had begun to develop a new approach to understanding mental disorders, usually labeled experimental psychopathology, that used animal research in the laboratory to model disease. While this could not be characterized as mainstream psychological science in the 1920s and 1930s, these young psychologists were located in mainstream universities and medical settings, so they had access to communication networks and the philanthropic foundations that supported the development of psychosomatic medicine.

A leader among these younger psychologists was Saul Rosenzweig (1907–2004), who began doing research in the early 1930s on Freud’s concepts of frustration and aggression while a member of psychologist Henry Murray’s (1893–1988) research group at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Rosenzweig used the phrase “experimental psychopathology” to describe the approach. During this period, young psychologists at Yale University, Brown University, Worcester State Hospital, and other institutions delved deeply into psychoanalytic concepts as a source of hypotheses to test in the laboratory. There were studies on frustration and aggression, complementary to Rosenzweig’s research; studies on hoarding; and extensive research on the experimental induction of neuroses.

As the new field began to develop, philanthropies took an interest in the work for its perceived potential to help shed light on social order. As we discuss in more detail in  Chapter 7 , because foundation officers were positioned in such a way that they had contact with a range of trends in medicine and related sciences, they were able to bring together investigators and practitioners who might not otherwise have connected with one another. The Josiah Macy Foundation did just this in the mid-1930s when it sponsored conferences on “Problems of Neurotic Behavior” in New York City. Physicians who were oriented to psychoanalytic and psychosomatic approaches attended, along with psychologists, internists, physiologists, and several other disciplines to formulate a systematic approach to the problems exemplified by psychosomatic medicine. The immediate result of the conferences and the collaboration was the establishment of a new journal, called Psychosomatic Medicine, which began publishing in 1939, with many contributions from psychologists. The field of psychosomatic medicine grew rapidly during the 1940s and was an important source of theory and research for many years. It served as the foundation for the later development of the specialty of health psychology.

PSYCHOANALYSIS OUTSIDE EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA

In the first half of the 20th century, psychoanalysis held much popular appeal in Europe and North America, despite the resistance offered by disciplinary psychologists. Psychoanalysis also gained an audience in other countries around the world. In this section, we offer a brief account of the spread of psychoanalysis outside Europe and North America to two countries, India and Argentina. However, readers should be aware that psychoanalysis also spread to many other countries.

Psychologists, Psychoanalysis, and Mental Health in India

Psychoanalysis was pioneered in India by Girindrasekhar Bose (1887–1953), a psychiatrist and psychologist, at the University of Calcutta. Out of his work the Indian Psychoanalytical Society was formed in 1922; the society began publishing its journal, Samiksa, shortly after World War II.

Psychoanalysis in colonial India took on distinctive characteristics of theory and practice from traditional Freudian analysis. Bose’s theorization reflected the reality of the role of Hinduism in Indian family life and customs. In extensive correspondence with Sigmund Freud and his English disciple, Ernest Jones (1879–1958), Bose articulated the importance of the mother–son relationship, arguing that in India it is more important than the father–son relationship. Freud and Jones were not sympathetic to this turn and argued that the castration anxiety generated during the Oedipal state was crucial for personality development anywhere in the world.

Bose, however, developed a psychoanalysis that reflected the different forms that Indian families take and the intense relationship between mother and son characteristic of many Hindu families. The cultural reality in India, Bose insisted, was that a child was raised in a joint family system with many parent figures present. The mother–son relationship was crucial, Bose argued, because the mother had to depend on the son for status and her life and sustenance if she outlived her husband. The closeness and dependence that grew between mother and son and was encouraged by the cultural context led to the psychological dynamic of rage by the father toward both of them: his rage about the wife’s “devotion to their son, and his rage about the son’s access to the female object of desire” (Hartnack, 1990, p. 940). As Bose wrote to Freud,

I do not deny the importance of the castration threat in European cases; my argument is that the threat owes its efficiency to its connection with the wish to be female. The real struggle lies between desire to be a male and its opposite the desire to be a female. My Indian patients do not exhibit castration symptoms to such a marked degree as my European cases. The desire to be a female is more easily unearthed in Indian male patients than in European. The Oedipus mother is very often a combined parental image and this is fact of great importance. I have reason to believe that much of the motivation of maternal deity is traceable to this source. (cited in Hartnack, 1990, p. 946)

Bose nurtured the development of Indian psychoanalysis until his death; for many years, the meetings of the Psychoanalytical Society were held in his home in Calcutta. His correspondence with Western leaders was important, but Bose did not let those relationships inhibit his own theorizing and the development of a distinctive Indian psychoanalysis. Through his influence and the many people he trained, psychoanalysis remained strong in India, with such critical figures in the postwar era as Sudhir Kakar (b. 1938) and Ashis Nandy (b. 1937).

Psychoanalysis in Argentina

Psychoanalysis as a body of theory and practice eventually spread around the world. In each place, just as we saw in India and the United States, it was modified to fit the culture and the times. After World War II, psychoanalysis diversified into many distinctive expressions. In North America and much of Europe, the two decades after the Second World War marked the pinnacle of the popularity of psychoanalysis. In most countries, psychoanalysis declined in popularity after 1965, although it has remained an important source of theory in many scholarly fields.

The one exception is Argentina; psychoanalysis has remained the dominant theoretical approach in psychology there. Psychoanalysis gained a following in Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s, when a small group of mental health professionals incorporated psychoanalytic approaches into their clinical work. On a theoretical level, serious attempts were made to integrate Marxist principles with psychoanalysis, much as had been done by such European analysts as Wilhelm Reich. However, this attempted integration failed in the later 1930s as the negative pronouncements against Freud and psychoanalysis by Josef Stalin and other Soviet thinkers turned many would-be analysts away.

In the 1940s, a new movement arose that saw psychoanalysis as a way to subvert the mainstream approach and undermine the fascist government. This was also a period when many Jewish analysts fled Germany and Austria to avoid the Nazis. Several of these émigré analysts ended up in Argentina, where they had a modest influence on the further development of psychoanalysis.

SUMMARY

Psychological thought and practices have had a place in medicine since the early modern period. As concepts of mental disorders changed with the advent of Enlightenment ideas, the notion that madness may be due to loss of reason brought a new focus on the mind. Psychological principles were developed that could, it was hoped, bring not only explanation but also successful therapeutic interventions.

The initial success of such interventions, for example, moral management, seemed to only prepare the way for later disappointment and disillusionment with mental medicine. The sense of failure in understanding and treating mental disorders by the end of the 19th century can be characterized as therapeutic nihilism. In such an atmosphere, an opportunity arose for a new psychological approach. The theory and techniques developed by Freud were received by a significant number of the members of the mental health profession as it existed at the time.

The reception of Freud’s ideas by both professionals and the public had far-reaching consequences. Freud, a figure of the Enlightenment, used reason to show that there were limits to reason, and in doing so, he highlighted the critical importance of the irrational in human motivation. His work also introduced the powerful concept of a dynamic unconscious that gives shape to everyday actions and reactions. This notion contributed substantially to the rise of a psychotherapeutic ethos that continues to this day. Rather than measure the truth claims of psychoanalysis against the metric of laboratory science, it is perhaps more important to recognize that Freud’s theories gave people of the 20th century a language and a conceptual framework for understanding and describing the human condition. In this sense, Freud’s work deepened the psychological sensibility of humans in ways that psychological experiments in the laboratory could never accomplish. Freud also gave the 20th century a framework for self-exploration and a language with which people could describe their inner lives. It was his work, it is fair to say, that made the 20th century, and our own time, the age of psychology.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

An abundance of first-rate scholarship is available for the topics covered in this chapter. Roy Porter’s Social History of Madness (1989) gives an excellent account of madness in the Enlightenment and the failure of therapeutic regimes devoted to it. Nancy Tomes’s fine volume on Thomas Kirkbride, A Generous Confidence (1984) offers key insights into the American use of moral treatment. Mental Illness and American Society, 1875–1940 by Gerald Grob (1983) provides a well-researched analysis of efforts to develop a sustainable approach to caring for the seriously mental ill and why those efforts failed.

The literature on Freud is vast. Once again, Roger Smith’s (1997) essay on Freud in his Norton History of the Human Sciences provided our point of departure. Ray Fancher’s essay in the Companion to the History of Modern Science (1990) was most helpful. We also relied on Peter Gay’s Freud (1988) and Nathan Hale’s Freud and the Americans(1971). On American psychology’s response to psychoanalysis, we found the thoughtful volume written by David Shakow and David Rapaport, The Influence of Freud on American Psychology (1964), useful. Because the relationship of psychology and psychoanalysis has often been fraught with conflict and misunderstanding, we found the work of Gail Hornstein, “The Return of the Repressed” (1992), particularly helpful.

Many fascinating scholarly accounts have described the emergence and dissemination of mesmerism. We have consulted Adam Crabtree’s work, From Mesmer to Freud(1993), as well as Robert Darnton’s Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968) and Alan Gauld’s History of Hypnotism (1992). We also found Alison Winter’s (1998) book on mesmerism in England helpful.

Eugene Taylor’s scholarship on the religious and spiritual roots of psychological practices, such as psychotherapy, is first rate. He has published prodigiously on the topic. We found his book Shadow Culture (1999) and his American Psychologist article from September 2000 to be particularly useful for this chapter. Eric Caplan’s Mind Games(1998) expertly details the development of the Emmanuel Movement and American responses to psychotherapy.

For an analysis of Pappenheim’s journey from being Breuer’s patient to Jewish feminist activist and social reformer, we drew upon Meredith Kimball’s article “From Anna O. to Bertha Pappenheim” (2000).

For our section on psychosomatic medicine, we drew upon the work of Donna Haraway (1976) and the fine article by Stephen Cross and William Albury (1987). Material on psychoanalysis in India came from Christiane Hartnack’s scholarship (1990) on the development of Freudian ideas there, as well as Alan Roland’s excellent volume, In Search of the Self in India and Japan (1991). Cecilia Taiana’s work (2006) on psychology and psychoanalysis in Argentina was also helpful.