Chapter 1

21st Century Psychology

Modified: 2023-12-26 9:34 pm CST

History and Prehistory

• 21st Century Psychology (p. 1)
  • Psychology slowly emerged from philosophy, biology, computational sciences, and social sciences
  • We will consider the older disciplines above as metaphorical "borders" that over time were crossed and a new science, psychology grew within those new borders
  • In other words, think of psychology as an expantionistic disciples gradually acquiring pieces of those older disciplines and claiming those as its own
  • This course is a history course and at the same time a psychology course
    • history: the study of events, people, and ideas from the recorded past.
• History and Prehistory (p. 2)
  • Primary materials; materials written by contemporary witnesses
  • Analysis-historians:
    • Reconstruct and interpret the past
    • Less than 10,000 years of history
  • Prehistory
    • prehistory: the period of human existence prior to the existence of recorded information.
      • Cultural artifacts
      • Biological remains
      • Longest period of human history (~4 million years)
• Zeitgeist (German word) (p.2)
  • zeitgeist: how it feels to live in a particular time or place and to experience its particular culture, morals, and intellectual surroundings.
  • "Tenor of the times" (not Enrico Caruso :-) Sorry, I'm addicted to puns
  • The time/context we live in is our zeitgeist
  • Includes: cultural, moral, and intellectual variables
  • Technology may change gradually and subtly Bullitt example trailer
    • pay phones vs radio and cell phones in 1960s (see Bullitt with a pay phone). Police communication was different then (ah! zeitgeist)
      • Have you seen a pay phone lately?
      • If you left home without your cell phone, do you go back and get it?
    • a more recent example is the slow death of the shopping mall Notice how much shopping is done online now.
  • Recent changes in zeitgeist include: role of women, racial relations, and technology (first car in Magnolia, AR)
  • Historical analysis must include facts and context
  • Part of this course will consist of having you understand those facts in their historical context
    • Here are some photographs illustrating the change in context from the Jim Crow South to the present
    • If you look hard enough you might find similar scenes in Magnolia
• Persons in History (p.4)
  • eminence: possessing superior skills, abilities, or status.
  • Eminence: elites, well-documented, mostly male
    • Women: fewer in past and today: Boadicea, Marie Curie, Molly Pitcher, Mary Whiton Calkins, Elizabeth Loftus
    • Eminent psychologists too
      • Cattell (1905) (and more on him later): American men of science...
      • Haagbloom (2002): 99 eminent psychologists (only 5 women, #1 was Elizabeth Loftus (#58)
      • Green and Martin (2017): online game rating 402 historical individuals
        • Appearing on the top 20 of Haagbloom's and Green and Martin's lists were:
          • William James, B. F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, John B. Watson, Albert Bandura, Edward L. Thorndike, Abraham Maslow, and Hans Eysenck
      • See Chapter 1 Figures and Tables for detail
• Ideas in History (p.8)
  • Hard to study because they are so abstract
  • History includes ideas such as: fire, clothing, agriculture, language, religion, time, government, education, mathematics, and science
  • Psychology is part of science and includes ideas such as: mind, evolution, morality, rationality, emotion, personality, and the unconscious
  • Ideas are part of the zeitgeist
  • Original ideas are rare and may be associated with eminent people
    • Darwin and evolution
    • Freud and the unconscious
  • Ivan Pavlov wrote: "If you want new ideas, read old books."
• Trends in History (p. 9)
  • Higher level categories that include
    • Time: Paleolithic vs Neolithic
    • Philosophy: empiricism vs rationalism
    • Processes: industrialization vs globalization
    • Trends simplify history but lose the fine grain details
  • Psychology trends include:
    • structuralism (see chapter 6)
    • functionalism (see chapter 8)
    • behaviorism (see chapter 9)
    • Gestalt psychology (see chapter 11)
    • humanism (see chapter 4)
    • cognitivism (see chapter 13)
  • isms and ologies
    • This course's nickname is "isms and ologies 101" (get ready!)
    • I count 49 words that end in "-ism" and 8 that end in "-ology"
• Presentism (p. 9)
  • We are "captives of the present" and of our own zeitgeist
  • Time travel not possible
  • Historians must avoid imposing their zeitgeist on the past (George Washington owned slaves, Yerkes would not take women as graduate students, or child labor). All those examples fit their zeitgeists but do not fit in the current one.
  • Whig History: the present is the only possible outcome of past events INCORRECT
    • Historical accidents are common (and change the course of history)
      • e.g., Hitler declaring war on USA on 11 Decemberr1941
        • Hitler did not have to do so. Had he not done so then president Franklin Roosevelt would have had a very difficult time sending US troops to Europe. World War II would have been very different
      • Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista pardoning Fidel Castro. A few years later Castro's Cuban revolution forced Batista to flee Cuba. Again, Batista did not have to release Castro and as a result Cuban history changed.
• Objectivity (p. 10)
  • Objectivity is necessary in history and psychology
  • The earliest histories were not objective
  • Historiography insures history's objectivity as will this text
  • This text is an:
    • intellectual history of psychology
    • examination of psychology's thinkers and ideas in their context
  • Why Study History? (p. 10)
    • Learn from the past: WWI and machine guns, groupthink and Bay of Pigs
    • American Historical Association's reasons (Stearns, 2008) to study history, to understand:
      • people and societies
      • how historical change led to the present
      • our own lives by comparing them to the past
      • our own moral sense
      • our own historical identity
    • Similar reasons to study history of psychology, to understand:
      • psychologists and their ideas
      • how psychology's past led to its present
      • our ideas about psychology by comparing them to past
      • the nature of morality and other questions
      • psychology's historical identity
    • History of psychology is a subfield of history
    • Large-scale historical events affect history of psychology
      • Treaty of Paris (1763): empiricism (Great Britain) vs rationalism (France)
        • Empiricism dominated philosophy in Great Britain (see chapter 5)
        • Rationalism dominated philosophy in France (see chapter 6)
      • Exodus of Jewish intellectuals from Germany (after 1933)
      • German psychologists
      • German physicists
        • Changed history of psychology
          • Many German psychologists came to USA and other countries
          • German psychology changed greatly
• 21st Century Psychology (p. 12)
  • Science and Psychology
    • science: a method of inquiry that combines empirical observations, reliable results, public dissemination, and theory to investigate the universe.
      • Let's look at present of psychology before we attempt to understand its past
      • Science: a method of inquiry that combines empirical observations, reliable results, public dissemination, and theory to investigate the universe.
      • Goldstein and Goldstein (1978), science:
        • searches for understanding
        • creates general laws and principles
        • tests those experimentally
      • Spatz and Kardas (2008), science:
        • is empirical
        • possesses methods
        • publishes results
        • creates theories
        • replicates results (e.g., APS's replication project)
        • theories: the constructions scientists create to explain and organize phenomena as well as to direct their future research.
      • Did you buy your rock hammer for this class? Of course not. Geologists use rock hammers, not psychologists.
      • Did you buy petri dishes for this class? Again no. Microbiologists use petri dishes, not psychologists.
      • Each scientific discipline has its own tools but the theory behind those tools remains the same: to explore the universe and to understand it.
      • PSYC 3153, Research Methods is our course that will expose you to the tools psychologists use.
  • Applied Psychology (p. 13)
    • Use psychology in the real world
      • Clinical
      • Counseling
      • Educational
      • Forensic
      • Many more (see graphic)
    • Scientific and applied go hand-in-hand
    • Boulder Conference (1949): scientist-practitioner model (PhD)
      • Group photo of participants

  

• That meeting formalized the scientist-practitioner model
• PhD degree (based on research)
• Universities were the sites for training in clinical psychology
• Vail Model (1973): practitioner (PsyD)
  • That meeting formalized the professional school model (e.g., similar to medical, dental, and law schools)
  • PsyD (Doctor of Psychology) degree
  • No longer linked to academic psychology departments
• Today, more practitioners come from the Vail model
• Psychology's Borders (p. 16)
  • Psychology is central to the academy (Gray, 2008) For some reason, Gray's diagram in that link is in Spanish
    • Gray's Model (here it is in English) Click on the image to make it bigger
    • Gray: “It would be impossible for people from any other department to draw a diagram nearly as elegant as mine that put their discipline in the center.”
    • Psychology, as a discipline, touches many others in the academy
  • Borders in this text (this is the central metaphor of this text)
  • These border disciplines emphasize what psychology is not. However, each has (or used to have) subtopics that are of interest to psychologists
    • Old
      • Philosophy
        • The early part of this course will cover much ground in philosophy
        • Interestingly, experimental philosophy or x-phi, is a new subtopic in philosophy attempts to use experimentation to answer philosophical questions
      • Biology
        • This is an obvious border given that biologists and psychologists study animals (including ourselves)
        • Common areas include animal behavior and the biological bases of behavior (including neuroscience)
        • But, biologists are interested in many topics that are non-psychological
      • Mathematics (Computational Sciences)
        • An old area of human interest
        • Computers and artificial intelligence (AI) have brought it closer to psychology
        • Chess, robotic buses, and expert systems are only some of the successes of AI
    • Recent
      • Social Science is a product of the mid 19th century
        • Sociology
          • Studies group behavior
        • Economics
          • Studies human economic decision making
        • Anthropology
          • Studies human origins
        • Linguistics
          • Studies language
        • Geography
        • Is both a natural and a social science
          • Human migrations are an example of geographical social science
        • Political Science
          • Studies humans and their need for power
• Definition of 21st Century Psychology (p. 18)
  • Psychology's Subdisciplines (p. 18)
    • For a SWPA meeting I prepared a graphic showing 21st century's psychological topics
    • I arbitrarily used the following higher-order topics to organize the 148 topics I found using APA's, APS's, and PsycINFO's existing lists
      • APA (N = 74), APS (N = 73), PsycINFO (N = 1) (Link to original paper)
    • 39 of the APA and APS topics are common to both lists
    • Other higher order topics could be used, of course to create different organizations. I used:
      • Developmental
      • Scientific Psychology
      • Applied Psychology
      • Cognitive Psychology
      • Social Psychology
      • Gender
    • APS uses nine higher order categories
      • biological/neuroscience
      • clinical
      • cognitive
      • developmental
      • gender
      • industrial/organizational (I/O)
      • methodogy
      • personality/emotion
      • social
    • Use these analyses as rough pictures of psychology today
• Psychology's Phenomena (from National Library of Medicine) (p. 22)
  • Psychology's phenomena provide another wide view of the current state of the discipline:
    • Mental Competency
    • Mental Health
      • Notice that these two phenomena are clearly psychological
      • They will be covered in chapter 13
    • Mental Processes
      • Mental processes include: awareness, learning, memory, and problem solving
      • The earliest psychologists defined psychology as the study of the mind
      • 21st century psychology cannot yet define what the mind is
    • Parapsychology (we will see pioneers James and Jung investigate)
      • Parapsychology includes: near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences precognition, and even UFO sightings
      • James and Jung each attended seances and attempted to understand parapsychology
      • No one has yet found any evidence supporting parapsychological claims
    • Personal Autonomy
      • Humans begin life dependent on others
      • Most people become autonomous or, at least, semi-autonomous as adults
      • Many people must give up their autonomy due to accidents or dementia
    • Psycholinguistics
      • The study of languages is central to psychology
      • Language and human cognition are nearly inseparable
    • Psychological Theory
      • Theories and theory construction are part of science
      • Successful theories generate volumes of research
      • But, theories are provisional
    • Applied Psychology
      • Applied psychology is the largest part of psychology
      • Much of psychology's success is due to the move toward applying psychological results to the real world
      • Psychologists have much to say about real world problems such as lie detection, achievement, happiness, and job satisfaction
    • Psychomotor Performance
      • Psychomotor performance includes motor skills and task performance
      • Pro athletes may earn millions of dollars because of their high level of motor skill
      • Flying a commercial airliner requires a high level of knowledge and task performance
    • Psychophysiology
      • Psychophysiologists study a wide range of phenomena including: consciousness, sensory capacities, and sleep
      • Psychophysics straddles the border between psychology and biology
    • Religion and Psychology
      • Early psychologists including William James were interested in the psychology of religion
      • More recently, the study of science and religion have diverged from each other
    • Resilience (e.g., "mental toughness" (Crust, 2008)
      • Resilience refers to how individuals differ in their responses to the same situation or stimulus
      • Mental toughness is one aspect of resilience but it is still not well defined
      • After hurricane Katrina, one psychologist used the word "mental magic" to describe the features that lead to higher resilience
    • In sum, 21st Century psychology is a vast and varied enterprise
• Are There Laws of Psychology? (p. 23)
  • Mjøset (2001): Laws of social science?
    • Argued that physical science laws such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics are not found in social science
    • Social scientists (e.g., Merton, 1949) responded by giving up hope of discovering such laws
    • One consequence is that many psychological "results must be carefully couched within disciplinary, sub-disciplinary, or finer-grained contexts."
  • Psychological Science "Laws"
    • None, really
      • Don't get the idea that psychology has yet produced laws as universal at Newton's laws of motion, or the second law of thermodynamics
    • Here, however, are two examples of law-like results in psychology
      • Ebbinghaus and memory (see chapter 6)
        • Curve of forgetting
        • Shows that most forgetting takes place early
        • Works nearly always but:
          • practice can change it
      • Shepard and Metzler mental rotation
      • Participants had to decide if two stimuli were the same or different
        • Stimuli
      • The results showed that the greater the rotation (e.g., 0 to 180 degrees), the more time it took to make the discrimination (You might ask yourself why not 360 degrees of rotation?)
      • Those two straight lines (see Results below) are data with linearity hardly ever approached in psychology
        • Results
          • Nearly linear results for angle of rotation and discrimination time

      

      • Pigeons, however) (Kohler, Hoffman, Denhardt, & Mauck, 2005) can make mental rotations from any angle, unlike humans who perform best while in a normal, upright position.
      • Shows species differences (pigeons vs humans) in mental rotations
        • Human perception is assumes an upright position
• Unified Psychology? (p. 25)
  • After reading this page and chapter 1 you might wonder if psychology really is a unified science. You are not alone.
  • In 1991 Staats complained about, psychology's "many unrelated methods, findings, problems, theoretical languages, schismatic issues, and philosophical positions."
  • It is clear that:
    • Psychology is fragmented
    • Psychology is young
    • Psychology is diverse
  • Solutions?
    • Sternberg, (2005) proposed:
      • Studying psychological phenomena using multiple methods
      • Studyinjg psychological phenomena from a variety of theoretical viewpoints
      • Abandoning narrow theoretical viewpoints
    • Gardner (2005) was an early source of the borders metaphor and argued:
      • Psychology is still young (e.g., immature)
      • Psychology interacts with other disciplines and thus is dynamic
    • Duntley and Buss (2008) offered that:
      • Evolutionary psychology unites psychology with other social science fields
      • Evolutionary psychology unites humans and other species
    • Toomela (2007) observed that psychology has several levels, with:
      • 1st level: unifying theory for science itself
      • 2nd level: commonality of subfields
      • 3rd level: finer differentiation of subfields
    • Mjøset (2001) believed:
      • Psychology will never discover laws of nature similar to the physical sciences
      • Psychologists should re-examine whether they are using the work "theory" in a sense understandable by all
• Last Words Before Departing (p. 27)
  • Chapter 2 covers 4 million years!
  • It’s almost time to begin our trip. We will be going to visit the borders between psychology and four other disciplines: philosophy, biology, the computational sciences, and the social sciences. Along the way, we will take side trips deeper into each of those disciplines in order to better understand psychology. Pack your bags, get your shots, and don’t lose your passports!
• Chapter Boxes
• Zeitgeist
  • If you think I’m using the word zeitgeist a lot here, it’s on purpose. That word is one that psychology students learn in this course. Later, I will ask you to try leaving our current zeitgeist behind and to attempt to understand the zeitgeist of other times and places. Another similar German word is ortgeist; it refers to the spirit of a place. However, most historians use the word zeitgeist to refer to changes in both time and place. This text will use the larger meaning for zeitgeist: changes in time and place.
• What is Psychological?
• Are you better able, now, to picture what psychology looks like? We have explored along its borders with philosophy, biology, the computational sciences, and the social sciences. Also, we have gazed briefly into the interiors of those neighboring disciplines in an attempt to understand them better. We have examined psychology’s subfields, and looked more closely at some psychological phenomena. Recall some of the previous psychology courses you have taken. Can you see obvious similarities in their content? Or did the content of the courses seem to be unrelated? What is your mental picture of psychology at this point? One answer is that many things are psychological, meaning behavior and mental processes are common to a wide variety of topics.
• Glossary for Chapter 1 (i.e., Margin Texts)
  • history the study of events, people, and ideas from the recorded past.
  • prehistory the period of human existence prior to the existence of recorded information.
  • zeitgeist how it feels to live in a particular time or place and to experience its particular culture, morals, and intellectual surroundings.
  • eminence possessing superior skills, abilities, or status.
  • science a method of inquiry that combines empirical observations, reliable results, public dissemination, and theory to investigate the universe.
  • theories the constructions scientists create to explain and organize phenomena as well as to direct their future research.
• Additions to Chapter (these changes are in the book)
  • The changes in chapter one in the two editions were minimal.
    • History and Prehistory
      Added sentence about cancel  culture and critical race theory (p. 2)
      Added reference to Henley, Rossano, and Kardas (2020) (p.3)
    • Culture and critical race theory have become important recently. The reference to Henley, Rossano, and Kardas (2020) presages several more references in chapter 2 from authors of that edited text.
  • Zeitgeist
    • Added sentence about how cancel culture affects zeitgeist. (p. 4)
    • Added sentence about how George Floyd’s murder may positively affect race relations in the USA. (p. 6)
    • Updated PsycINFO cell phone data hits (from 767 to 2,957)
    • All three of these updates were made to make chapter 1 more current.
  • PERSONS IN HISTORY
    • Added new reference (Green & Martin, 2017) to buttress Haagbloom et al.’s (2002) list of eminent psychologists. Green and Martin used an online game with 892 game sessions and collected 66,852 ratings. Their results were analyzed further by gender, age of respondent, and geographical region. (pp. 8-9)
    • Both references emphasize the idea idea of eminence in psychology. Green and Martin’s (2017) article contrasted with Haagbloom’s (2002) earlier data.
  • Science and Psychology
    • Added examples (petri dishes and rock hammers) to explain how the different sciences use particular methods and tools within the broader definition of science itself. (p. 16)
    • The idea here is to show that the fundamental idea of science underlies any type of scientific thinking, but that when it gets down to actually conducting science the methods are very different.
  • Applied Psychology
    • Added Dautenhahn’s (2018) analysis of clinical training models: clinical scientist, scientist-practitioner, and practitioner-scholar. (p. 18).
    • Dautenhahn (2018) was added to demonstrate more fully the competing models in clinical training beyond the historical Boulder model.
  • Psychology’s Borders
    • Added Knobe’s (2010) x-phi approach  to philosophy. (p. 16).
    • Knobe’s approach is fascinating and deserves mention here because it demonstrates a newer move from philosophy to psychology, albeit while still calling it philosophy.
  • Psychology’s Subdisciplines
    • Revised this section substantially and included more examples of the border disciplines: biology (including the opioid epidemic), cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, gender, I/O psychology, and measurement. (pp. 18-21)
    • These changes were to set up the main pedagogical structure of the book, the idea that psychology slowly emerged from philosophy, biology, computational sciences, and social sciences.
  • Psychology’s Phenomena
    • Added Couzin-Frankel’s (2018) analysis of resilience following hurricane Katrina. (p. 23).
    • I will contend that students poorly understand resilience and that additional examples might help them better see what the phenomenon consists of.
  • UNIFIED PSYCHOLOGY?
    • Added Toomela’s (2007a) comments that echoed Vygotsky’s on unification of psychology. (pp. 25-27)
    • Students and others often fail to see how the many sub-fields of psychology are, in fact, psychological. Toomela demonstrates how that observation is older than many might think.
  • Learning Objectives
    • Added six learning objectives. No learning objectives appeared in the first edition.
  • Learning Objective 1: Imagine what the zeitgeist of where you live was like 100 years ago.
  • Learning Objective 2: Examine the two tables (Tables 1.2 and 1.30  showing eminent psychologists and list the ones you are familiar with, have heard of, or have never heard of.
  • Learning Objective 3: Describe one or two events in your life that would represent “big history” or large scale events capable of altering history for many people. (Covid, duh)
  • Learning Objective 4: Compare the borders you have noticed in courses you have taken. What indicated to you that you were in a new or different territory?
  • Learning Objective 5: Reorganize the subfields of psychology shown in Table 1.5 by coming up with different higher-order headings. You may re-use some of the existing ones, but try to find other ways of categorizing psychology’s subfields.
  • Learning Objective 6: Identify at least three topics that are purely psychological and not part of another science.

GLOSSARY

• history: the study of events, people, and ideas from the recorded past.
• prehistory: the period of human existence prior to the existence of recorded information.
• zeitgeist: how it feels to live in a particular time or place and to experience its particular culture, morals, and intellectual surroundings.
• eminence: possessing superior skills, abilities, or status.
• science: a method of inquiry that combines empirical observations, reliable results, public dissemination, and theory to investigate the universe.
• theories: the constructions scientists create to explain and organize phenomena as well as to direct their future research.

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