Empirical Foundations Of Psychology

N.H. Pronko, J.W. Bowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136327087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Kunst und schöpfer-isches Vnbewusstes, which was published in 1954, as the third of a series of volumes of collected essays by Erich Neumann. They include the topics of Leonardo da Vinci; Art and Time; Marc Chagall; and creative man and transformation.

INTRODUCTION

I. THE SUBJECT MATTER OF PSYCHOLOGY

N. H. Pronko

There is great misunderstanding on the part of laymen as to the subject matter of psychology. Ordinarily, the man in the street is of the opinion that psychologists restrict their study to such bizarre phenomena as hypnotism, mental telepathy, and clairvoyance. On the contrary, psychologists study things that are found commonly in everyday life and that extend all over the earth.

But first, let us notice how the sciences have evolved. On this planet, there are a wide variety of occurrences taking place. “Things are happening,” as we say. The different sciences have arisen as the result of man’s interest in certain areas of this manifold of happenings. Thus, physicists “carved out” for their special study such “things” as water changing to ice and to steam, falling bodies, and transformation of energy (e.g., heat into power, electricity into heat, and so forth). Chemical types of changes were taken over by the chemist as his special area of investigation. But on this earth, there are also plants and animals being born, reproducing, taking materials into themselves, and growing, excreting, and moving. These events are singled out by the biologist as his special study.

Not everything that happens on the face of the earth has yet been included in the listings above.

In order to achieve a fresh viewpoint, the student might imagine himself a man from Mars come to earth for the first time. If it were morning, he would observe human beings rising and scurrying to their breakfasts and their work. Some would operate machines in factories; others would run steamships, airplanes, buses, streetcars, and bulldozers; still others would be engaged in buying, selling, preaching, writing, warring, repairing, building, painting, and composing. Should the man from Mars decide to delve further into these things, he would become a psychologist. It is these activities and, perhaps, the less complex ones of the other animals that set the stage for the psychologist’s study. The student will note certain features characteristic of all the sciences: each starts with certain facts in the world of reality. This is the beginning point—to have something to study. This something may be taken into the laboratory for more painstaking analysis later on. The important point is that men observed things happening around them. These things became the subject matter for the scientist, and the divisions of the sciences are divisions of interest and subject matter only. It would be too difficult and not so profitable for one man to study storms, economic institutions, gravitation, energy, plants, and humans. This accounts for such specialties as chemistry, physics, zoology, biology, and psychology.

FACTS VERSUS THEORIES

Because the beginning student approaches the study of psychology with certain preconceptions absorbed from those about him, he is quite likely to confuse behavioral facts with theories about those facts. For example, because for him thinking is explained in such mystical terms as mental states, he comes to doubt that people do think. We suggest that by keeping facts and the explanations of facts separate, the beginning student can enter his scientific study of psychology fully confident that he does have a very definite subject matter. His legitimate field of inquiry becomes behaving organisms, and he need have not a shadow of doubt that those organisms create symphonies, atomic theories, poems, works of art, and so on. Despite the fact that he may have difficulty in understanding or explaining such events, he may be as certain of their occurrence as he is of the occurrence of storms, volcanoes, eclipses, and magnetism, or the birth, growth, and death of living things. To prove it to himself, he need only look around and see his friends, neighbors, and himself engaging in day-to-day activities of the sort mentioned above.

But let us illustrate. Suppose that the reader has solved an algebra problem. That is a fact, or datum, with which we can begin work just as definitely as can the chemist starting with a chemical interaction or a physicist with a falling object. But how shall we explain these facts? We are now in the realm of theory where description, interpretation, or explanation plays an important part, and where discrepant “stories” may be told. For example, one explanation for the solution of the algebra problem may resort to “mental states,” another to brain conditions, and the like. Our job now is not to settle between them but only to call attention to the difference between a fact and a theory about that fact. The two must be kept separate.

Of course, not all descriptions of facts are equally valid. Science has a preference for theories that are derived from a study of the facts themselves rather than those that come from tradition or superstition. Furthermore, theories must be stated in such a way that one can predict or control the facts. The present book is an attempt to describe behavioral facts in operational terms. This means that our descriptions will be in terms that can actually be designated in the world of happenings and not in terms of “mind,” “mental states,” and “consciousness,” which cannot be operationally demonstrated.

No one can show that an “insane person” has a “twisted mind.” This is not an operational description. However, it is an operationally justified account to relate this person’s action to a condition in his surroundings, namely a fiendish father. This is something we can work or operate with, as when we remove the boy from his father and look for changes in the boy’s conduct.

Why does a child in the Soviet Union grow up to be a Communist? A possible answer would be that he “inherits Communism” from his parents. We could operationally test this explanation by importing an offspring of Communist parents into the United States and rearing him with a Republican family. At twenty-one, he is a staunch Republican. An operational account of such an incident would stick to the facts, namely that the boy’s action was related to the specific life conditions surrounding him (i.e., institutions, attitudes of his adopted parents, friends, teachers, and the like) rather than upon some “inborn tendency.” This latter would again be a nonoperational account.

It is the hope of the authors that the student will come to see his own, and his neighbor’s, fears, angers, rememberings, forgettings, likes, dislikes, dreams, ambitions, skills, abilities, and creative acts operationally as he progresses through the present textbook.

II. THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE IN PSYCHOLOGY

D. T. Herman

Just as the behaviors of a child today cannot be understood fully apart from an understanding of the particular child’s unique behavioral history, so psychology today cannot be fully understood apart from its history. While concepts of human behavior have been diverse, fairly clear trends in the change and evolution of such concepts can be traced historically. It is important that the beginning student gain some perspective in which to place both the “popular” psychology with which, wittingly or unwittingly, he begins his studies as well as the more technical concepts to which he will be introduced.

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), the ancient Greek, has a unique status. His biological training and his studies of marine biology gave him an objective observational orientation to the behaviors of organisms.¹ He noted that organisms varied in complexity of biological organization as well as in behavior. Aristotle described behavior as a functioning of the total organism. Different organisms differed in their functioning. Plant organisms functioned only by respiring, absorbing materials and excreting them, and reproducing. Animal organisms functioned by being irritable to stimuli and by locomoting. Other animals such as humans could function in still more complex ways that were called “reasoning.” Further, animals were said to vary in their functioning as a result of two classes of conditions—their unique biological conditions and their unique histories. For Aristotle, it was not possible to discuss behavior of any organism apart from these two sets of variables. Aristotle is sometimes mistakenly assumed to have made a rigid division between organisms. Such was not the case. He described all organisms as being on a direct continuum and as differing only in complexity.

Between Aristotle’s day and the beginnings of the period of modern science, great changes took place. Migrations, wars, and political and social upheavals exercised extensive influence, directly and indirectly, upon all branches of scholarly activity. For purposes of a short historical sketch, it is possible to touch only briefly on some of the changes and developments in orientation to psychology.² (The interested student will find richly rewarding readings if he chooses to sample this literature.)

René Descartes (1596–1650) is generally considered to mark the beginning of the “modern” period in psychology; to have divided off the ancient and medieval periods from the modern period. Descartes was less naturalistic than Aristotle. Man was to be regarded as uniquely different from other animals. While other animals functioned on a purely mechanical level of sense organs, nerves, and muscles, man, according to Descartes, had the additional attribute of soul which regulated his behavior. No attempt was made by Descartes to describe the properties of this added factor. It was conceived, in fact, to be unobservable but to activate, control, and guide the psychological activities of man. This unobservable and unknowable entity, derived from prescientific inference, was used as the basic explanatory factor of all human psychological behavior.

Boring³ has pointed out that Descartes in large part set the pattern of subsequent interpretations of behavior. Terminology changed, and descriptions varied in detail, but the basic orientation to psychology as being concerned with soul, mind, consciousness, and so on, each as inferred entities, persisted. Darwin’s (1809–1882) publication of his monumental Origin of Species in 1859 constituted the first fundamental blow to this pattern. It is no exaggeration to say that Darwin’s work, while primarily concerned with biology, shook the very foundation of previous psychological theory. Darwin tirelessly amassed evidence to show that no absolute differences could be drawn between man and other organisms. The view of Aristotle regarding continuity of the species was supported with clear observational evidence. Darwin further showed that it was essential to an understanding of any species to include a historical dimension as well as a picture of the life conditions of the organisms. Its adaptive behavior, as well as its structure, could be understood only on the basis of its full past and present life conditions.

The full implication of Darwin’s work was not immediately understood or accepted by all students of psychology. Many persisted in clinging to various forms of traditional doctrine. Others, however, soon caught the implications that man is an organism that can be studied and observed as a perfectly natural organism. A tremendous boost was given by Darwin to the study of all organisms, human as well as infrahuman.

In a series of papers and books beginning in 1913, J. B. Watson (1878–)⁴ crystallized the demand for an objective psychology and gave it the name “behaviorism.” It was Watson’s proposal that psychologists very deliberately break away from the traditional dualistic orientation. The dualistic theory held that man is made up of a physical body and a psychic mind as separate entities. Each was held to function according to different laws. Watson held that such a separation of the unified organism had no basis in scientific observation. Psychology was to base itself on the observational method exclusively. Psychology would thus bring itself into line with other natural sciences. That which was not observed could not be included in descriptions of behavior.

Watson’s position brings this brief historical chronicle close to our own day. Watson’s work pointed to the need for a further advance in orientation to psychological facts and markedly influenced psychologists in the direction of objectivity.

A full comprehension of the trends of psychology in the contemporary phase of its historical development would take us too far afield for our present purposes. However, two principles—relativity theory and operationism—will help to characterize psychology’s more recent developments. Both of these principles were first applied by workers in the physical sciences, but both found congenial atmosphere among those psychologists who were attempting to further psychology as a natural science.

Relativity theory, as applied to psychology, stresses that behavior must be understood as events which occur in particular frames of reference. It is not possible to understand behavior fully or to describe it accurately unless it is understood and described as an intimate part of its particular frames of reference. The operational principle has served as a healthy caution upon description of behavior. It insists that any descriptive concept used must be understood in terms of concrete performances which explicitly indicate the place of the concept in the event described. Unless the concept can be understood in terms of concrete operations, it cannot be said to hold scientific validity. It thus becomes difficult, and under the operational principle, impossible, to cover up our lack of understanding of behavior by resorting to the facile use of mind, mental states, consciousness, ego, psyche, and other vague and mystical terminologies which do not permit of operational definition. The behavior of organisms, according to the relativity and operational principles, may be studied as real and concrete happenings and not as mere outer manifestations of some unspecifiable inner entity.

III. THE METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGY

D. T. Herman

Besides differences in the subject matter of the various sciences, there is a difference in the methods employed in their study. For example, an astronomer cannot bring Jupiter into a laboratory where he can experimentally perform operations upon it. He must view it from his observatory. This makes his science a field study; i.e., he studies astronomical events as they occur in nature or in the field.

FIELD METHOD. A large proportion of the data that the psychologist studies is also found in the field; i.e., people commit murder, learn to speak English, Polish, or French, pick up drinking, smoking, or chewing habits, come to pray and vote a certain way, and develop skills and techniques in the field. Therefore, field observation will have to be used in the study of many behaviors found in everyday life. They will be studied as they occur under natural conditions.

LABORATORY OR EXPERIMENTAL TECHNIQUES. While it is relatively impossible to arrange a situation in the laboratory which would allow us to study how a person develops “insanity,” nevertheless this would be the best method for studying learning, remembering, and a variety of other responses. While such a technique would limit the range of behaviors studied, it would permit greater control of all the variables or factors involved. Thus, if we are interested in the time that it takes an individual to lift his foot from a brake pedal, we may set up apparatus to measure the time interval between stimulus and response. Various types of stimuli may be applied to determine whether these affect speed of reaction. Various conditions of the organism, such as fatigue, drowsiness, drugs, intoxication, and other factors, may be tested. In the same general manner, a wide variety of behaviors—learning, perceiving, feeling, reasoning—may be studied to answer specific questions regarding each. The laboratory technique, then, permits greater precision in the study of human organisms and even more so of the infrahuman animals. American universities have developed elaborate laboratories for the study of humans, apes, dogs, cats, rats, and even worms.

INTROSP...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Heredity and Psychology
• 3. The Reactional Biography: The Psychological Life History of Organisms
• 4. Biological Characteristics of the Organism and Early Acquisition of Behavior
• 5. Basic Patterns of Behavior
• 6. Social Behavior
• 7. Personality
• 8. Intelligence
• 9. Attention
• 10. Perception and Factors Which Affect it
• 11. Implicit or “Thinking” Behaviors
• 12. Feelings
• 13. Emotion Failure of a Stimulus-Response Coordination
• 14. Remembering
• 15. Learning
• 16. Interrelationships Between Physiology and Psychology
• Name Index
• Subject Index