HISTORY AND SCHOOLS

OF PSYCHOLOGY
TOPICS
1. Why Study the History of Psychology?
2. The Development of Modern Psychology
3. Historiography
4. Problems
 Imagine a man who professes over his unending love for a woman
but who knows nothing of where she was born or who her parents
were or where she went to school or what her life had been like until
he came along and furthermore does not care to learn.

 What would you think of such a person?

 Yet we appear to have an unending supply of patriots who know nothing of the history of this
country, nor are they interested.
 Pause to Ponder
 Suppose you were walking across the campus and you were approached by a person
dressed like a clown. He is wearing bright purple and yellow clothing with oversize sleeves
decorated with polka dots, red shoes, wild eye make-up, a white wig, a large red nose, and
floppy blue shoes—and he is riding a unicycle.
 A psychologist named Ira Hyman, at Western Washington University asked a student to
dress up like a clown and ride around the main campus square where hundreds of people
were walking to and from classes.
 When students reached the edge of the courtyard, trained observers asked 151 of them if
they had seen anything unusual, such as a clown.
Conclusion of the Clown Experiment
 Only half of the students who were walking by themselves said they noticed the clown.
 More than 70 percent of those walking with another person saw the clown.
 Only 25 percent of those who were talking on their cell phones were aware of the clown.
They had been so distracted by their conversations or their texting that they did not
noticed the clown.
 This experiment investigated the usefulness and effectiveness of multitasking.
 Similar results were demonstrated more than 150 years ago, in 1861, by a German
psychologist named Wilhelm Wundt.
25% 50%
• Talking on their • Walking by
cell phones themselves

70%
• Walking with another
person
 Multitasking
You probably consider it
normal to listen to music
while you write a paper,
or send a text message
while you eat, but are you
truly concentrating on
either of these activities?
Video of history of Psychology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL7GfsH
eINQ
 Why study history of Psychology ?
1. The study of the past is relevant for the present, but first we must become aware of
what was done in the past.
2. History has much to tell us about the world today, and early developments in the field
of psychology help us understand the nature of psychology in the twenty-first century.
3. Helps to avoid mistakes of past.
4. Helps to understand the present. Knowing history puts current events into a better
perspective, without knowing some history, we cannot understand current events.
5. Helps to predict the future.
Why study history of Psychology ?
6. Changes the perspective that the current time has numerous problems compared to the
“good days” of the past.
7. The history of psychology course informs the student about people behaving within their
historical context, the course provides further understanding of human behavior.
8. Many issues of concern (debates) to early psychologist are still important (nature vs
nurture)
9. By studying the history of psychology, a student gains perspective and a deeper
understanding of modern psychology.
“We sputter against the Polluted Environment—as if it had come with the age of the
automobile. We compare our air not with the odor of horse dung and the plague of flies
and the smells of garbage and human excrement which filled the cities of the past, but
with the honeysuckle perfumes of some nonexistent City Beautiful. We forget that even if
the water in many cities today is not spring-pure … , still for most of history the water of
the cities (and of the countryside) was undrinkable. We reproach ourselves for the ills of
disease and malnutrition, and forget that until recently, enteritis and measles and
whooping cough, diphtheria and typhoid, were killing diseases of childhood, … [and]
polio was a summer monster.”
Why study history?
Aware of past
Developments in the field of psychology
Avoid mistakes
Understand present
Predict future
Changes perspective
Understanding human behavior
Debates
Modern psychology
 The Development of Modern Psychology

 Psychology is among the oldest of all scholarly disciplines as well as one of the newest.
 The starting point for a study of the history of psychology would take us back to ancient
philosophical writings about problems that later came to be included in the formal
discipline we know as psychology.
 The fifth century BC, when Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers were
facing many of the same issues that concern psychologists today. These ideas include some
of the basic topics you covered in your introductory psychology classes: memory, learning,
motivation, thought, perception, and abnormal behavior.
 Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, philosophers studied human nature by
speculating (guessing possible anwser), intuiting, and generalizing based on their own
experience.
 However, a major transformation occurred when philosophers began to apply the tools
and methods already successful in the biological and physical sciences to explore
questions about human nature. Only when researchers came to rely on carefully
controlled observation and experimentation to study the human mind did psychology
begin to attain an identity separate from its philosophical roots.
 Histories of psychology were written soon after psychology itself appeared on the academic
scene and at least two of psychology’s most famous books, (E. G. Boring)Edwin Garrigues
Boring’s A History of Experimental Psychology (1929; 1950) and Edna Heidbreder’s
Seven Psychologies (1933) are histories.
 A clinical psychologist Robert I. Watson (1909–1980) wrote an article entitled “The
History of Psychology: A Neglected Area” (Watson, 1960), in which he documented the
lack of articles about history in psychology journals and urged his colleagues to renew their
interest in psychology’s history.
 Watson then mobilized a small group of like-minded psychologists within the American
Psychological Association into a “History of Psychology Group.”
 They formed professional organizations (e.g., Division 26 of the APA, other- wise
known as the Society for the History of Psychology),
 They created journals (e.g., The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences).
 They established institutional bases for the production of historical research (e.g., a
graduate program at the University of New Hampshire; the Archives of the History of
American Psychology at the University of Akron).
 Division 26 or Society The Journal of the
Philosophy (Socrates,
for the History of History of the
Plato & Aristotle)
Psychology Behavioral Sciences

Initially relied on
Robert I. Watson article Graduate program
observation

Edwin Garrigues
Adopted research
Boring (E. G. Boring) &
methods used in biology
Edna Heidbreder’s
and physics
books
 Key issues in psychology’s history
Presentism vs Historicism
• The presentist evaluates the past in terms of present knowledge and values, passing
judgements unfairly.
• The historicist tries to avoid imposing modern values on the past and tries to
understand the past from the standpoint of the knowledge and values existing in the
past.

Internal vs external history

• An internal history of psychology is a history of the ideas, research and theories
that have existed within psychology.
• An external history of psychology focuses on the historical context such as social,
political, economic conditions influenced the history of psychology.
 Example of Presentism
 In describing the alchemy interests of one of Isaac Newton’s predecessors, Paracelsus
(famous in the history of medicine), the author wrote that
“following many an alchemist in a stereotypical fixation with finding the
unattainable and achieving the impossible, [Paracelsus] traveled Europe in
search of the secrets of the ancients, squandering much of his talent and any
money he earned along the way”
 This is a good example of writing from the standpoint of knowing the outcome
(alchemy failed), while ignoring the importance of alchemy to the history of science and
the historical context that made alchemy a respected endeavor for a time.
 Alchemy: the quest to create gold from base metals.
 Example of internal and external
 Understanding the development of cognitive psychology requires
knowing not just about the difficulties encountered by behaviorism (e.g.,
language) but also about developments in the wider world (computer
science, the ’60s).
Presentism
• Looking at past events Internal
• Ideas
from today’s • Theories
perspective

Historicism
External
• Studying past events • social
from the knowledge of • Political
• economic
past
 Historiography
 Historiography refers to the process of doing research in history and writing historical
narratives.
 It rely on both primary and secondary sources of information.
 Primary source materials constitute the raw data for historians and include documents
created at or near the time of the historical event in question (diaries, letters,
photographs, university records, correspondence, speeches, minutes of the meetings of
professional organizations, and documents donated by individuals).
 Primary sources are usually found in archives.
 An archive is normally an area within a university library that holds unpublished
information.
 A secondary source is a document that has been published and includes analysis or
summary of some historical person, event, or period. These sources include books,
articles published in journals, magazines, encyclopedia etc.
 Problems with writing of history
 Although historians cannot repeat a situation to generate relevant data,
they still have significant information to consider.
 The data of past events are available to us as fragments, descriptions
written by participants or witnesses, letters and diaries, photographs and
pieces of laboratory equipment, interviews, and other official accounts.
It is from these sources, these data fragments, that historians try to
recreate the events and experiences of the past.
 However, the data fragments may be lost, distorted, or there may be
self serving bias( tendency to take credit for successful outcomes
and to deny responsibility for failures.
 Problems

Lost/ Self Serving

Distorted
suppressed Bias
 Lost or Suppressed Data
 The historical record is incomplete because data have been lost, sometimes
deliberately.
 Sometimes data have been misplaced, stolen and not recovered. Other data may be
hidden deliberately or altered to protect the reputation of the people involved.
 For example John B. Watson, burned his letters, manuscripts, and research notes,
destroying the entire unpublished record of his life and career.
 In 1983, 10 large boxes were uncovered that contained the handwritten diaries of
Gustav Fechner, who developed psychophysics.
 Sigmund Freud’s first biographer, Ernest Jones, intentionally minimized Freud’s use of
cocaine, commenting in a letter, “I’m afraid that Freud took more cocaine than he should,
though I’m not mentioning that [in my biography]”. Recently uncovered data confirm
Freud’s cocaine use for a longer period than Jones was willing to admit in print.
 An example of suppressed data
fragments.
 Thefather of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, died in 1939, and in the
more than 70 years since his death many of his papers and letters have
been published or released to scholars.
 Data Distorted in Translation
 Data have been altered in some way, through faulty translation from one language to another
or through distortions introduced deliberately or carelessly by a participant or observer
recording the relevant events.
 For example:
 Many psychologists are not fluent in the German language to read Freud’s original work. Most
people rely on a translator’s choice of the most appropriate words and phrases, but the translation
does not always convey the original author’s intent. Three fundamental concepts in Freud’s theory of
personality are id, ego, and super- ego, terms with which you are already familiar. However, these
words do not represent Freud’s ideas precisely. These words are the Latin equivalents of Freud’s
German words: id for Es (which literally translates as “it”), ego for Ich (“I”), and superego for Über-
Ich (“above-I”).
 Self Serving Bias
 Data is subject to biases of people who report it.
 People may, consciously or unconsciously, produce biased accounts to protect
themselves or enhance their public image.
 For example, the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner described in his autobiography
his rigorous self-discipline as a graduate student at Harvard University in the late 1920s:
 “I would rise at six, study until breakfast, go to classes, laboratories, and libraries with
no more than fifteen minutes unscheduled during the day, study until exactly nine
o’clock at night and go to bed. I saw no movies or plays, seldom went to concerts, had
scarcely any dates and read nothing but psychology and physiology”.
 However, 12 years after this material was published and 51 years after the events
described, Skinner denied that his graduate school days had been so difficult.