The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  The title “doctor,” meaning holder of a Ph.D. or other doctorate degree, is another inaccurate component of the stereotype. True, three quarters of the APA’s 90,000 members and an even higher proportion of the 12,000 full members of the APS (Association for Psychological Science, formerly known as the American Psychological Society) do hold Ph.D.’s or, in a few cases, Psy.D.’s, or Ed.D.’s. But at a lower level of advanced training there are well over 50,000 psychologists, most of them outside APA and APS, who hold only master’s degrees but who perform useful services, including testing, counseling, psychotherapy, and various routine psychological services in industry, nursing homes, schools, clinics, government agencies, and private practice.16*

  All of which demonstrates that psychologists come in a variety of models, some as unlike others as if they had nothing in common except the generic name.

  Portrait of a Science

  What is true of psychologists and their activities is equally true of their field of interest: Although called a science, it is too heterogeneous to be defined or described in any simple, clear-cut fashion.

  The vignettes above and what we have seen throughout this history document psychology’s sprawl and diversity. But to get a still better idea of how diversified and chaotic a field psychology has become, one has only to leaf through half a dozen volumes of Annual Review of Psychology. Each year’s volume contains about a score of chapters reviewing recent work in such disparate major areas of psychology as perception, reasoning, and motor skill acquisition, others covering more recondite and remote subjects such as brain dopamine and reward, auditory physiology, social and community intervention, hemispheric asymmetry, music psychology, various applications of brain scanning, and the psychology of religion. In the course of half a dozen years the Annual covers roughly a hundred different fields, each with its own subtopics, any of which could consume a researcher’s full time and effort.

  An even clearer and more variegated picture emerges from the gargantuan programs of the APA’s conventions. Consider, for instance, this random sampling of the titles of the plenary sessions at the August 2006 meeting:

  —“Emerging Findings from Multicultural Psychiatric Epidemiology”

  —“Fear and Anxiety: Breaking News from Neuroscience”

  —“Uses and Abuses of Evolutionary Psychology”

  —“The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”

  —“Failure of Visual Awareness”

  —“How Do People Change?”

  A similarly random sampling of the vast array of addresses, sessions, and workshops at that meeting would yield a taste not of a consommé but a mulligan stew of psychological science.

  The contents page of APS’s Current Directions in Psychological Science, though research oriented—APS allows clinical material in only through a crack in the door—is just as variegated and wide-ranging; here are a few titles of articles in recent issues:

  —“Infants’ Differential Processing of Female and Male Faces”

  —“The Structure of Emotion: Evidence from Neuroimaging Studies” —“Talking and Thinking with Our Hands”

  —“Comparing Exemplar- and Rule-Based Theories of Categorization”

  —“Brain Mechanisms for Interpreting the Actions of Others from Biological-Motion Cues”

  —“Stress and Adaptation: Toward Ecologically Relevant Animal Models”

  Can any discipline so untidy, multifarious, and disorganized be called a science? Are we justified in believing that its statements about human nature and the human mind are scientific truths?

  A century ago William James, after brilliantly setting forth what psychology was at the time, ruefully said that it was not yet a science but only “the hope of a science.” We have seen how he characterized it:

  A string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them; but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced.17

  Compare that with what psychology has become: a massive accretion of facts, observations, and laboratory research findings, not raw but digested by sophisticated statistical analysis; much gossip and wrangle, but mostly about testable interpretations and theories, not mere opinions; a wealth of classifications and generalizations at the theoretical level; and a profusion of laws and propositions about our states of mind and their relation to brain events whose consequences can be, and regularly are, causally deduced and put to the proof. Psychology has long since grown beyond the hope of a science to become the reality of a science.

  But one unlike most others in perplexing and troubling ways.

  In the natural sciences, knowledge is cumulative and moves toward a deeper understanding of nature. Relativity theory did not disprove Newtonian physics but absorbed it and went beyond it to deal with phenomena Newton could not observe; modern evolutionary theory does not disprove Darwinism but adds details, exceptions, and complications that take into account evidence Darwin did not know of. Psychology, in contrast, has spawned many special theories that either were disproved or turned out to apply to so limited a range of phenomena as to provide no basis for a larger and more inclusive theory. Behaviorism is the prime example. It brilliantly explored and explained a variety of psychological processes—and completely ignored almost all of the phenomena of mind; psychology was able to progress only when it escaped from the behaviorist cage.

  Psychology, furthermore, is rife with what Jerome Kagan has called “unstable ideas”—concepts and theoretical statements that do not refer to fixed and unchanging realities but are subjective and variable. Unlike the phenomena in physics, which are events in the physical world, many of those in psychology concern the meanings of certain events to human beings; two psychologists using the same term may be speaking of quite different things, especially at different periods of time and in different sociocultural settings.

  Some years ago, Kagan, looking back at his earlier writings, said, “I realized, to my embarrassment, that I had assumed fixed meanings for ideas like maturation, memory, and continuity of mood and habit.” But with the perspective of years, he could see that the meanings of those and many other ideas in psychology vary according to how a researcher gathers evidence. One defines and studies fear as a set of biological events, another as the inner experiences of his subjects when they are feeling afraid. But the two sets of data are not coterminous; often the biological signs are missing in a person feeling fear and the emotion is absent in a person exhibiting its biological signs. The truth of supposedly scientific statements about fear depends on what one means by the term.18 The same is true of so central a subject in psychology as emotion: As we have seen, emotion has been defined and redefined, decade by decade, since the time of William James, and despite the accumulation of a plethora of data, the question of the nature of emotion is still being explored by probing analytical discourses.

  Again unlike physics, psychology has many laws that hold good only within the culture where the observations were made. In recent years psychologists have become interested in the cross-cultural validity of the laws of their science and have identified a number that appear to be universal, including some of Piaget’s observations on stage development, the sequence in which children acquire the components of language, the spontaneous human tendency toward categorization, the tendency toward social loafing, and others. But they have also found that many other laws of developmental phenomena hold good only where they were deduced or in culturally similar settings. Among these are the definitions and development of masculinity, femininity, love, and jealousy; the tendency to conform to the majority and to obey authorities; the use of logic in reasoning; and the development of feelings of kinship and belonging.19

  None of this means that psychology is not a science. But it is not a coherent science with a coherent and co
mprehensive theory; it is an intellectual and scientific jumble sale.

  Forty-odd years ago, when the cognitive revolution was breaking out of the confines of behaviorism, the profusion of possibilities was, at first sight, stimulating and exhilarating, but on closer inspection proved to be bewildering and troubling. One psychologist, David L. Krantz of Lake Forest College, has described how psychology appeared to him initially and later:

  When I first became aware of psychology, I was most excited by its enormous range and diversity…I was only vaguely aware, and largely unconcerned, that the chapters in the introductory textbook did not relate to each other. Actually, their non-overlap just heightened the freshness of discovery.

  Later in graduate school the excitement created by such variety was tempered by an increasing emphasis on specialization, a pressure to dwell on only one or two chapters in the text. I was also becoming aware that psychology’s diversity was often negatively seen as an indicator of incoherence, or even worse, as a hallmark of “non-science.”20

  That’s how it looked to him four decades ago, when he and many other psychologists were troubled by the diversity and discontinuity of their field. And they continued to be troubled for years. One commentator predicted only sixteen years ago in American Psychologist that within the next fifty years the major fields of psychology would split off, achieve separate identities, and establish their own departments in universities, and that psychology would be viewed in perspective as a temporary phase in the development of the multiple behavioral sciences.21 Other theorists were both less and yet more optimistic, holding that no unifying theory was possible and that none was needed. Sigmund Koch, who spent many years looking at the larger issues of the field, concluded over two decades ago that “the noncohesiveness of psychology [should] finally be acknowledged by replacing it with some such locution as ‘the psychological studies.’ ”22

  But others have long argued that some new conception, theory, or metaphor will be, and must be, found to unite the semiautonomous specialties of psychology; they see a desperate need for “grand unifying principles” that will prevent disintegrative fractionation.23 They feel sure that a new and unifying metaphor or conception is bound to appear. Yet how little consensus there currently is about what those principles might be we can gather from listening to big-theory suggestions by two of the most respected senior psychologists of our time.

  First, the eminent cognitive psychologist Albert Bandura: He has long espoused and continues to develop a broad and pervasive “agentic theory” that encompasses virtually all of human behavior. Bandura holds that the emergence of the human ability to symbolize the world (in language and signs) gave us the power to become agents of our own lives, not just passive products of the forces and influences acting upon us. “Psychology is the one discipline that uniquely encompasses the complex interplay among biological, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and sociostructural determinants of human functioning… The exercise of individual and collective agency is contributing increasingly, in virtually every sphere of life, to human development, adaptation, and change.”24

  Second, the Nobel laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel: He says, “Understanding the human mind in biological terms has emerged as the central challenge for science in the 21st century.” Biology, with its vast new armamentarium of knowledge and methodology, has “turned its attention to its loftiest goal: understanding the biological nature of the human mind.” Future historians, looking back, will see that “the most valuable insights into the human mind…did not come from the disciplines traditionally concerned with mind—philosophy, psychology, or psychoanalysis. Instead they came from a merger of these disciplines with the biology of the brain…”25

  There could hardly be a greater difference of opinion as to what kind of psychological Theory of Everything is about to emerge. But while nothing we have seen in this history since the onset of the cognitive revolution indicates that such a theory is imminent, in practical terms much that we have seen points to the very opposite of fractionation and noncohesiveness. Admittedly, many psychologists are working on ever-smaller, more specialized subjects—but a great deal of current research is multidisciplinary, and researchers, in pursuing almost any topic worthy of inquiry, will now draw on the insights and enrichment of cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology, computation theory, the infrastructure findings of neuroscience, and so on. As Michael Gazzaniga, the eminent cognitive neuroscientist and 2006 president of the APA recently wrote,

  As we study the mind, complex mechanisms will be common… [and] frequently, what we see will not be what we think it is. In order to chase down the true mechanisms, we will need to know many things from many fields of study. If we divide ourselves up into subsubspecialties, we will never figure things out.26

  For forty years, and especially for the last twenty, what has been taking place has been a disorderly integration, a loose, untidy interweaving, a semifusion, of the many dissimilar sciences within the broad realm of psychology. It may well be that no Theory of Everything will appear that neatly explains both the actions of neurotransmitters and the mental processes of writing a poem, both the configurations of neural networks and the course of true love. A Theory of Everything was possible in psychology when we knew very little; it may never be so again. And maybe we don’t really need one.

  Schism

  Even if the fear that psychology will break apart into shards of disconnected subdisciplines is belied by the developments of recent years, one important schism did take place almost two decades ago, the organizational split between academician-scientists and clinician-practitioners.

  Schisms between academic and applied psychologists were nothing new in the APA, the professional organization that had long represented psychology in the United States. The association was founded in 1892 as a learned society whose members were primarily teachers and researchers. From the beginning, applied psychologists were looked down on and rarely elected to important offices; their values and goals were considered venal, commercial, unscientific, and, in a word, grubby. John B. Watson was cast out of academia because of sexual scandal, but the APA ignored him for decades not for that reason but because he sold his skills to the advertising world.

  Clinicians in particular were considered by academicians a lesser breed. At the 1917 APA convention, a small group of aggrieved clinicians—there were only a handful in the APA at the time—feeling that their interests were being ignored, decided to found their own society, the American Association of Clinical Psychologists. It grew, and the APA took action. It created a clinical section of its own, announced that it would accept all members of the AACP as members of the APA, and revised its bylaws, stating that its purpose was to advance psychology as a science and as a profession. The ploy worked: The renegades came home and the AACP was dissolved.

  Similar events recurred as the number of clinical psychologists and applied psychologists in the APA grew. Each time the discontented formed another organization of their own, the APA made further changes in its structure to keep them in or bring them back. But genuinely harmonizing the interests, outlooks, and values of academics and clinicians was all but impossible. In American Psychologist in 1984, a psychologist, borrowing a concept from C. P. Snow, wrote sorrowfully of “psychology’s two cultures,” mutually uncomprehending, hostile, and alien.

  What brought the matter to critical mass was money. During the 1970s third-party payments for clinical services had been available through health insurance, but by the 1980s that source of payment began to shrink as a result of Reagan administration policies and the growth of health maintenance organizations. The clinicians in the APA—by this time nearing a majority—demanded that the organization step up lobbying and publicity on their behalf. This alarmed the academics. They feared that the APA, historically a scientific organization, was becoming a professional association with monetary and political goals, and would soon be dominated by the practitioners.

  During the mid-1980s the
board of directors of the APA sought to avert mass defections of the scientists by devising plans of reorganization to protect their interests, but all were rejected by the APA’s council of representatives. With a crisis imminent, a patchwork reorganization plan, satisfactory to neither side, was approved by the council, submitted to the membership in 1988—and rejected by an almost two-to-one margin.

  That was the decisive event. At the APA’s 1988 convention in Atlanta, a group of former presidents of the association and eminent academics, among them Albert Bandura, Kenneth Clark, Jerome Kagan, George Miller, and Martin Seligman, caucused in a hotel room and, in a spirit of defiance and rebellion, announced the formation of a new organization, the American Psychological Society, for academic and science-oriented psychologists. In the ensuing weeks hundreds of scientists resigned from the APA to join the APS, and hundreds more joined but retained their APA memberships. Within a year, the APS had 6,500 members and now has nearly 12,000 full members and over 5,000 student members. It is and always will be far smaller than the APA, which currently has nearly eight times that many members, but it is thriving. To more sharply distinguish itself and its purpose from the APA, the APS, while preserving its acronym, recently changed its name from the American Psychological Society to the Association for Psychological Science.