Psychology Past Paper PDF

IN 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the president of the United States, the Pony Express began delivering mail between Missouri and California, and an 18-year-old named William James (1842–1910) started worrying about what to do with the rest of his life. He had hoped to become an artist, but after stud...

IN 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the president of the United States, the Pony Express began delivering mail between Missouri and California, and an 18-year-old named William James (1842–1910) started worrying about what to do with the rest of his life. He had hoped to become an artist, but after studying for several months with a famous painter in Rhode Island, he was forced to admit that he wasn’t all that talented. At his father’s urging, he decided to go to school to study chemistry, but he soon found that chemistry didn’t interest him. He switched to physiology and then to medicine, only to find that those subjects didn’t interest him either. So William took a leave of absence from school and joined a scientific expedition to the Amazon, hoping to discover his true passion, but all he discovered was that he passionately hated leeches. He returned to school, but soon became so depressed that he was required to take another leave of absence. William James (left) started out as a restless student who didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. Forty years later (middle), he had become the father of American psychology. Throughout his illustrious career, James remained a devoted and beloved teacher who was “so vivacious and humorous that one day a student interrupted and asked him to be serious for a moment” (Hunt, 2007, p. 169). When he gave his final lecture on January 22, 1907, his classroom was packed with students, former students, colleagues, and administrators. James suffered from poor health his entire life and died in 1910, at the age of 68. Today, Harvard’s psychology department is housed in William James Hall (right). This time, instead of heading south to the Amazon, he headed east to Germany, where he began learning about a new science called psychology (from a combination of the Greek psyche which means “soul” and logos which means “to study”). After two years in Europe, William returned to America, finished his degree, and took the one and only job he could find— as a teacher at a small New England college called Harvard. And it was there, in the classroom, amidst the blackboards and the chalk, surrounded by bright students who were eager to learn about the new European science of psychology, that William finally found what he had been searching for all along. “So far,” he wrote to his brother after his first year as a teacher, “I seem to have succeeded in interesting them … and I hear expressions of satisfaction on their part.”1 Then, with characteristic understatement, he added, “I should think it not unpleasant as a permanent thing.” And a permanent thing it became: William remained a teacher at Harvard for the next 35 years, during which he taught one of the first psychology courses and created one of the first psychology laboratories in America. A publisher commissioned him to write the first American psychology textbook and gave him a year to do it. He took twelve, but The Principles of Psychology was a masterpiece. As the historian E. G. Boring (1929, p. 624) later wrote, “No other psychological treatise in the English language has in the modern period had such a wide and persistent influence.” Today, William James is considered the father of American psychology and his brilliant book is still widely read. “This is no science,” James said of psychology in 1892, “it is only the hope of a science.” And at that time, he was right. But now, more than a century later, psychology’s hope has been realized, and the book you hold in your hand is that realization (see Other Voices: Is Psychology a Science?). How did it happen? How did we get here from there? How did the psychology taught in William James’s classroom become the psychology taught in yours? This chapter tells that story. We’ll start at the beginning and examine psychology’s intellectual roots in philosophy. Next, we’ll explore some early attempts to develop a science of the mind by some of the very people whom James met when he traveled to Germany in the late 1800s. Then we’ll see how the 1900s gave rise to two utterly incompatible approaches to psychology—one born in Europe that viewed the mind as an infinitely complex mystery, and one born in America that viewed the mind as an irrelevant fiction. Next we’ll see how one of these approaches came to dominate experimental psychology in the 20th century, and how that dominance was ended by the invention of a machine. Finally, we’ll take a look at psychology as a profession, and see who these people who call themselves psychologists really are, and how they got to be that way. Psychology’s Philosophical Roots Learning Outcomes Explain the distinction between dualism and materialism. Explain the distinction between realism and idealism. Explain the distinction between empiricism and nativism. Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. The word mind refers to a set of private events that happen inside a person—the thoughts and feelings that we experience at every moment but that no one else can see—and the word behavior refers to a set of public events—the things we say and do that can potentially be observed by others. Both human minds and human behaviors have been around for quite a while, and psychologists were not the first to try to make sense of them. That distinction belongs to philosophers, who have been thinking deeply about these topics for several thousand years. Although their ideas could fill several volumes (and if you study philosophy, you’ll find that they fill many more than that), three of these ideas are especially important to understanding modern psychology. Dualism and Materialism Our bodies are physical objects that can be seen, smelled, and touched. Our minds are not. The word mind refers to a set of subjective events—perceptions and memories, thoughts and feelings—that have no actual physical presence. You can’t hear an emotion or taste a belief. The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) thought the “stuff in here” and the “stuff out there” were so different that they must be made of different substances. The body, he argued, is made of a material substance, the mind is made of an immaterial substance, and every person is therefore a physical container of a nonphysical thing—or what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949) called the “ghost in the machine.” Descartes embraced philosophical dualism, which is the view that mind and body are fundamentally different things. But if the mind and the body are fundamentally different things, then how do they interact? How does the immaterial mind tell the material body to put its best foot forward? And when the material body steps on a rusty nail, why does the immaterial mind say ouch? Descartes came up with some answers to these questions that satisfied no one, including himself, but they especially dissatisfied philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (1588– 1679), who argued that the mind and body aren’t fundamentally different things at all. Rather, the mind is what the brain does. From Hobbes’s perspective, looking for a place in the brain where the mind meets the body is like looking for the place on your phone where the picture meets the screen. The picture is what the screen does, and they don’t “meet” in some third place. The brain is a physical object whose activity is known as “the mind,” and therefore all mental phenomena—every thought and feeling, every sight and sound—is the result of some physical activity in the physical brain. Philosophical materialism is the view that all mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena.  René Descartes (left) was a dualist who believed that the mind was an “incorporeal” or nonphysical substance. “It is certain that this I—that is to say, my soul by which I am what I am—is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it,” he wrote. But Thomas Hobbes (right) was a materialist who thought the term “incorporeal substance” was a nonsensical contradiction. “Substance and body signify the same thing,” he wrote, “and therefore substance incorporeal are words which, when they are joined together, destroy one another.” So which philosopher was right? The debate between dualism and materialism cannot be settled by facts. Most human beings today believe that there is something other than the physical universe and that the body is a material container of an immaterial spirit, and there isn’t any objective evidence that requires them to change their minds. This is an issue about which people pretty much just have to make up their own minds and choose their own sides, and most of the world’s religions—from Christianity and Judaism to Hinduism and Islam—have chosen to side with the dualists and embrace the notion of a nonphysical soul. The vast majority of Americans embrace that notion as well. But most psychologists have gone the other way and have chosen to embrace materialism (Ecklund, Scheitle, & Pennsylvania, 2007). As you will see throughout this book, psychologists typically believe that all mental phenomena—from attention and memory to belief and emotion—are ultimately explainable in terms of the physical processes that produce them. The mind is what the brain does—nothing less and certainly nothing more. We are remarkably complex machines whose operations somehow give rise to consciousness, and one of psychology’s jobs is to figure out what that “somehow” is. Realism and Idealism You probably have the sense that this thing called “you” is somewhere inside your skull—not your foot or your knee—and that right now it is looking out through your eyes and reading the words on this page. It feels as though our eyes are some sort of camera, and that “you” are “in here” seeing pictures of the things “out there.” The philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) referred to this theory as philosophical realism, which is the view that perceptions of the physical world are produced entirely by information from the sensory organs. According to the realist account, light is right now bouncing off the page and hitting your eye, and your brain is using that information and only that information to produce your perception of the book in front of you. And because your eye is like a camera, the pictures it produces are generally accurate depictions of the world. In his 1781 masterpiece The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant argued that the mind comes hardwired with certain kinds of knowledge and that it uses this knowledge to create our perceptions of the world. “Perceptions without conceptions are blind,” he wrote, meaning that without prior knowledge or “conceptions” of the world, we could not see or “have perceptions” of it. This theory is simple, but philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) thought that simplicity was its major flaw. Kant suggested that our perceptions of the world are less like photographs and more like paintings. Philosophical idealism is the view that perceptions of the physical world are the brain’s interpretation of information from the sensory organs. According to the idealist account, light is bouncing off the page and hitting your eye, and your brain is using that information—plus all the other information it has about the world—to produce your perception of the book. Before you ever looked at this book, you already knew many things about books in general—what they are made of, how large they are, that the cover is heavier than the pages—and your brain is right now using everything it knows about books to interpret the information it is receiving from your eyes. It is painting a picture of what it believes is out there, and although you think you are “seeing” a book, you are really just seeing that picture. So which philosopher was right? Modern psychology has come down strongly on the side of idealism. As you will see in many of the upcoming chapters, our perception of the world is an inference—our brain’s best guess about what’s likely to be out there. Because our brains are such good guessers and such fast guessers, we typically don’t realize they are guessing at all. We feel like our eyes are cameras taking photos, but that’s only because the artist between our ears can produce realistic paintings at lightning speed. Empiricism and Nativism Here are some other things you know about books: You know that four books are more than two, that a book can’t pass through a wall, that pushing a book off the table will cause it to fall, and that when it falls it will go down and not up. How do you know all this stuff? Philosophical empiricism is the view that all knowledge is acquired through experience. Philosophers such as Locke believed that a newborn baby is a tabula rasa, or “blank slate” upon which experience writes its story. As Locke wrote in his 1690 Essay on Human Understanding: If we will attentively consider new-born children, we shall have little reason to think that they bring many ideas into the world with them…. One may perceive how, by degrees, afterwards, ideas come into their minds; and that they get no more, nor other, than what experience, and the observation of things that come in their way, furnish them with; which might be enough to satisfy us that they are not original characters stamped on the mind. In other words, you know about books—and about teacups and tea kettles and tee-shirts and tee-balls and a huge number of other objects—because you’ve seen them, or interacted with them, or seen someone else interact with them.  John Locke was a British philosopher, physician, and political theorist whose writings about the separation of church and state, religious freedom, and liberty strongly influenced America’s founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, who incorporated Locke’s phrase “the pursuit of happiness” into the Declaration of Independence. Kant thought Locke was wrong about this, too. Philosophical nativism is the view that some knowledge is innate rather than acquired. Kant argued that human beings must be born with some basic knowledge of the world that allows them to acquire additional knowledge of the world. After all, how could you learn that pushing a book off a table causes it to fall if you didn’t already know what causation was? The fact that you can acquire knowledge about what books do when pushed suggests that your mind came with at least a few bits of knowledge already programmed into it. For Kant, those few pre-programmed bits of knowledge were concepts such as space, time, causality, and number. You can’t learn these concepts, he argued, and yet you have to have them in order to learn anything else. So they must come factory-installed. Which philosopher was right? Most modern psychologists embrace some version of nativism. It is all too obvious that much of what we know is acquired through experience, and no one thinks otherwise. But research suggests that at least some of what we know is indeed hardwired into our brains, just as Kant thought. As you’ll see in the Development chapter, even newborn infants seem to have some basic knowledge of the laws of physics and mathematics. The tabula is not rasa, the slate is not blank, which leads to some interesting questions: What exactly is written on the slate at birth? How and when in our evolutionary history did it get there? Can experience erase the slate as well as write on it? Psychologists refer to these types of questions as “nature-versus-nurture” questions, and as you will see in some of the upcoming chapters, they have devised clever techniques for answering them. Build to the Outcomes 1. How does materialism differ from dualism, and which do modern psychologists favor? 2. How does realism differ from idealism, and which do modern psychologists favor? 3. How does empiricism differ from nativism, and which do modern psychologists favor? The Late 1800s: Toward a Science of the Mind Learning Outcomes Define introspection and explain how it was used in structuralism. Define natural selection and explain how it influenced functionalism. The psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1908) once remarked that “psychology has a long past but a short history.” Indeed, psychology’s philosophical roots go back thousands of years, but its history as an independent science began a mere 150 or so years ago, when a few German scientists began to wonder whether the methods of the physical and natural sciences might be used to study the human mind. Structuralism: What Is the Mind Like? During his visit to Berlin in 1867, William James sent a letter to a friend: It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to be a science…. I am going on to study what is already known and perhaps may be able to do some work at it. Helmholtz and a man called Wundt at Heidelberg are working at it, and I hope I live through this winter to go to them in the summer. Who were the people James was talking about? Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) was a physician and physicist who mainly studied the mathematics of vision, but who had taken to asking people to close their eyes and respond as quickly as possible when he touched different parts of their legs. That’s not as creepy as it sounds. Helmholtz recorded each person’s reaction time, or the amount of time between the onset of a stimulus and a person’s response to that stimulus, and discovered that people generally took longer to respond when he touched their toes than when he touched their thighs. Why? When something touches your body, your nerves transmit a signal from the point of contact to your brain, and when that signal arrives at your brain, you “feel” the touch. Because your thighs are closer to your brain than your toes are, the signal from your thigh has a shorter distance to travel. By carefully measuring how long it took people to feel a thigh touch and a toe touch and then comparing the two measurements, Helmholtz was able to do something remarkable: He calculated the speed at which nerves transmit information! But if Helmholtz’s experiments set the stage for the birth of psychology, it was his research assistant, Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), who rented the theatre. Wundt taught the first course in scientific or “experimental” psychology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany in 1867, published the first psychology textbook in 1874, and opened the world’s first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879. Wundt believed that the primary goal of psychology should be to understand “the facts of consciousness, its combinations and relations, so that it may ultimately discover the laws which govern these relations and combinations” (Wundt, 1912/1973, p. 1). Natural scientists had had great success in understanding the physical world by breaking it down into its basic elements, such as cells and molecules and atoms, and Wundt decided to take the same approach to understanding the mind. His approach later came to be known as structuralism, which was an approach to psychology that attempted to isolate and analyze the mind’s basic elements. Wilhelm Wundt (standing in the middle) taught the world’s first psychology course and published the world’s first psychology textbook, Principles of Physiological Psychology. (The word physiological simply meant “experimental” back then.) He also opened the world’s first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig. He was the advisor to a remarkable 184 PhD students, many of whom went on to become well-known psychologists, which is why a large percentage of modern psychologists can trace their intellectual lineage back to him. It is fair to say that modern psychology just Wundt be the same without him. How could these elements be discovered? Wundt’s student, Edward Titchener (1867–1927) pioneered a technique he called “systematic self-observation” but that everyone since has called introspection, which is the analysis of subjective experience by trained observers. Titchener trained his research assistants to report on the contents of their moment-to-moment experience, teaching them to report their “raw experience” rather than their interpretation of it. He presented his trained observers with a wide variety of stimuli, from patches of color to musical tones, and then asked them to describe what was happening in their minds. The observer might describe the hue and luminance of the color, the feelings he had when he heard the tone, and so on. Titchener believed that by carefully analyzing the reports from many trained observers who had been exposed to many stimuli, he would eventually discover the basic building blocks of subjective experience. This method led to some successes. For example, Wundt himself used it to identify three basic dimensions of sensation—pleasure/pain, strain/relaxation, and excitation/quiescence—and these three dimensions have, in fact, been shown to underlie the words people use to describe subjective experiences in many languages (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1967). But structuralism didn’t last, and you can probably guess why. Natural scientists had indeed been successful in understanding the natural world by breaking it into small parts, but that approach was successful only because everyone could agree on what those parts were. When two biologists looked at blood under a microscope, they saw the same blood cells. This wasn’t true of everyone who looked at the color green or heard C# played on a piano. The problem with introspection was that each person’s inner experience was an inherently private event— a 3-D movie with an audience of one. As such, there was simply no way to tell if a person’s description of her experience was accurate, and no way to tell if her experience was the same as or different from someone else’s. So one of structuralism’s problems was its method. But an even bigger problem was its competition, because while the German structuralists were busy introspecting, a young American upstart was taking a very different approach to the study of the mind—an approach that would forever consign structuralism to the history chapter of psychology textbooks. Functionalism: What Is the Mind For? During William James’s time in Heidelberg, Wundt sold him on psychology, but not on structuralism. James felt that subjective experience was less like a molecule made of atoms and more like a river—a “stream of consciousness” as he called it—and that trying to isolate its basic elements was a losing proposition. “The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks,” he wrote. James thought psychologists should worry less about what mental life was like, and more about what it was for. Together with psychologists such as John Dewey (1859–1952) and James Angell (1869–1949), James developed a new approach to psychology called functionalism, which was an approach to psychology that emphasized the adaptive significance of mental processes. What does “adaptive significance” mean? As one historian wrote, functionalism “inherited its physical body from German experimentalism, but it got its mind from Darwin” (Boring, 1929). Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was a naturalist who had recently published a book entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). In it, Darwin had proposed the principle of natural selection, which refers to the process by which the specific attributes that promote an organism’s survival and reproduction become more prevalent in the population over time. How does natural selection work? Animals pass their physical attributes to their offspring, and those attributes that are most “adaptive”—that is, those that promote the offspring’s survival and reproduction—are more likely to be passed along from one generation to the next. Over time, these adaptive attributes become increasingly prevalent in the population simply because “the population” refers to those animals that have managed to survive and reproduce.  On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin (left) is one of the most important scientific books ever written, and it had a big impact on William James and the birth of functionalism. Darwin developed his theory in the 1830s but did not write about it. A naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913, right) developed the same theory at the same time and in 1855 sent Darwin a paper describing it. The two men decided to announce the theory jointly at a meeting of the Linnean Society in 1858. The next year, Darwin published a book describing the theory, and the world pretty much forgot about good old Wallace. Darwin’s reasoning was brilliantly circular. Humans have fingers instead of flippers because at some point in the distant past, those of our ancestors who developed fingers were better able to survive and reproduce than those who did not, and they passed their flipperless fingeredness on to us. That’s the principle of natural selection at work, shaping the human body. James reasoned that if our physical characteristics had evolved because they were adaptive, then the same should be true of our psychological characteristics. In other words, natural selection should also have shaped the mind. “Consciousness,” James wrote in 1892, “has in all probability been evolved, like all other functions, for a use—it is to the highest degree improbable a priori that it should have no use.” The mind serves a function and according to James, the task for psychologists was to figure out what that function was. Other Voices Is Psychology a Science? Nobody can deny that you are taking a course in psychology, but are you taking a course in science? We think so, but not everyone agrees. Some critics say that psychology isn’t really a science, but we think those critics should have a little chat with Timothy Wilson, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. Here’s what he has to say on the subject: Once, during a meeting at my university, a biologist mentioned that he was the only faculty member present from a science department. When I corrected him, noting that I was from the Department of Psychology, he waved his hand dismissively, as if I were a Little Leaguer telling a member of the New York Yankees that I too played baseball. Timothy D. Wilson is a professor of psychology at the There has long been snobbery in the sciences, with the “hard” ones University of Virginia and the author of several popular (physics, chemistry, biology) considering themselves to be more legitimate books, including Redirect: The than the “soft” ones (psychology, sociology). It is thus no surprise that Surprising New Science of many members of the general public feel the same way. But of late, Psychological Change (2011). skepticism about the rigors of social science has reached absurd heights. The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to eliminate funding for political science research through the National Science Foundation. In the wake of that action, an opinion writer for the Washington Post suggested that the House didn’t go far enough. The NSF should not fund any research in the social sciences, wrote Charles Lane, because “unlike hypotheses in the hard sciences, hypotheses about society usually can’t be proven or disproven by experimentation.” Lane’s comments echoed ones by Gary Gutting in the Opinionator blog of the New York Times. “While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions,” wrote Gutting, “the social sciences do not. The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled experiments, which are seldom possible when people are involved.” This is news to me and the many other social scientists who have spent their careers doing carefully controlled experiments on human behavior, inside and outside the laboratory. What makes the criticism so galling is that those who voice it, or members of their families, have undoubtedly benefited from research in the disciplines they dismiss. Most of us know someone who has suffered from depression and sought psychotherapy. He or she probably benefited from therapies, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, that have been shown to work in randomized clinical trials. Problems such as child abuse and teenage pregnancy take a huge toll on society. Interventions developed by research psychologists, tested with the experimental method, have been found to lower the incidence of child abuse and reduce the rate of teenage pregnancies. Ever hear of stereotype threat? It is the double jeopardy that people face when they are at risk of confirming a negative stereotype of their group. When African American students take a difficult test, for example, they are concerned not only about how well they will do but also about the possibility that performing poorly will reflect badly on their entire group. This added worry has been shown time and again, in carefully controlled experiments, to lower academic performance. But fortunately, experiments have also showed promising ways to reduce this threat. One intervention, for example, conducted in a middle school, reduced the achievement gap by 40%. If you know someone who was unlucky enough to be arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, he may have benefited from social psychological experiments that have resulted in fairer lineups and interrogations, making it less likely that innocent people are convicted.  An often-overlooked advantage of the experimental method is that it can demonstrate what doesn’t work. Consider three popular programs that research psychologists have debunked: Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, used to prevent post-traumatic stress disorders in first responders and others who have witnessed horrific events; the D.A.R.E. anti-drug program, used in many schools throughout America; and Scared Straight programs designed to prevent at-risk teens from engaging in criminal behavior. All three of these programs have been shown, with well-designed experimental studies, to be ineffective or, in some cases, to make matters worse. And as a result, the programs have become less popular or have changed their methods. By discovering what doesn’t work, social scientists have saved the public billions of dollars. To be fair to the critics, social scientists have not always taken advantage of the experimental method as much as they could. Too often, for example, educational programs have been implemented widely without being adequately tested. But increasingly, educational researchers are employing better methodologies. For example, in a recent study, researchers randomly assigned teachers to a program called My Teaching Partner, which is designed to improve teaching skills, or to a control group. Students taught by the teachers who participated in the program did significantly better on achievement tests than did students taught by teachers in the control group. Are the social sciences perfect? Of course not. Human behavior is complex, and it is not possible to conduct experiments to test all aspects of what people do or why. There are entire disciplines devoted to the experimental study of human behavior, however, in tightly controlled, ethically acceptable ways. Many people benefit from the results, including those who, in their ignorance, believe that science is limited to the study of molecules. Wilson says that psychology is a science and we agree. But it isn’t the same kind of science that, say, physics is, and that’s okay. A penguin isn’t the same kind of bird that an ostrich is, and yet, it is a bird. What makes psychology unique is that it is an especially young science that has taken upon itself the extraordinarily difficult task of understanding the most complex object in the known universe: the human mind. As you’ll see in this chapter, it hasn’t always been clear how best to do that; and as a result, psychology has had more than its share of revolutions and counter-revolutions, lurching from one approach to another as it has tried to find the right questions to ask and the best ways to answer them. But so what? Trial and error is how rats learn, so why not psychologists? We hope to convince you in this chapter and all the others that psychology has learned a whole lot since the days of William James. Let’s see how we do. Wilson, T. D. (July 12, 2012). Stop Bullying the “Soft” Sciences. In The Los Angeles Times (Op Ed). Copyright 2012 Timothy D. Wilson and Sherrell J. Aston. Reproduced by permission. Build to the Outcomes 1. How did Helmholtz calculate the speed at which nerves transmit impulses? 2. What is introspection and how did Wundt and Titchener use it? 3. What is structuralism, and what led to its decline? 4. What is natural selection and how did it influence the rise of functionalism? The Early 1900s: Psychoanalysis and Behaviorism Learning Outcomes Outline the basic ideas behind Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Define the basic idea behind behaviorism. Give an example of the principle of reinforcement. Structuralism and functionalism were important ideas—to the hundred or so people who knew anything about them. While 19th-century academics debated the best way to study the mind, the rest of the world paid approximately no attention. But all that would change in the next century, when a restless neurologist from Vienna and a failed writer from Pennsylvania would pull psychology in opposite directions and, in the process, take their places on the public stage and eventually become two of the most influential thinkers of all time. Psychoanalysis: The Mind Does Not Know Itself While experimental psychologists were trying to understand the mind, physicians were trying to heal it. The French physicians Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) and Pierre Janet (1859–1947) became interested in patients who had an odd collection of symptoms—some were blind, some were paralyzed, and some were unable to remember their identities—but who had no obvious physical illness or injury. What’s more, when these patients were hypnotized, their symptoms disappeared, and when the patients emerged from their hypnotic trances, their symptoms returned. Charcot and Janet referred to their patients’ condition as hysteria, which is a loss of function that has no obvious physical origin. What could possibly explain it? Enter Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), a handsome young Viennese physician in his late 20s who began his career studying the effects of cocaine and the sexual anatomy of eels (though not at the same time). In 1885, Freud went to Paris on a fellowship to study with Charcot, and when he returned to Vienna he began treating patients with hysteria and other “nervous disorders.” Freud suspected that many of these patients had suffered a childhood experience so painful that they couldn’t allow themselves to remember it. These memories, he reasoned, had been hidden from consciousness and relegated to a place Freud called the unconscious, which is the part of the mind that contains information of which people are not aware. Freud felt confident that these exiled or “repressed” memories were the source of his patients’ hysterical symptoms, and he spent the next several years developing an elaborate theory of the mind known as psychoanalytic theory, which is a general theory that emphasizes the influence of the unconscious on feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Freud’s theory was complex, and you’ll learn much more about it in the Consciousness, Personality, Disorders, and Treatment chapters. But in brief, Freud saw the mind as a set of processes that were largely hidden from our view, and he regarded the conscious thoughts and feelings that the structuralists had worked so hard to identify as little more than flotsam and jetsam, bobbing on the surface of a vast and mysterious ocean. To understand the ocean, Freud suggested, you can’t just skim the surface. You have to learn to dive—and when you do, you should expect to encounter some frightening things. For Freud, those frightening things were the person’s anxieties and impulses—the fear of death, the desire to kill, forbidden sexual urges, and so on—all of which were lurking beneath the waves. Freud believed that the only way to confront these denizens of the deep was through psychoanalysis, which is a therapy that aims to give people insight into the contents of their unconscious minds. A therapeutic session with Sigmund Freud began with the patient lying on a couch and Freud sitting just behind her (probably smoking a cigar). He might ask the patient to describe her dreams or to “free associate” by talking about anything she wished or by responding quickly to a word (“What pops into your head when I say ‘mother?’”). Freud believed that his patients’ dreams and free associations offered a glimpse into the contents of their unconscious minds, and that if he could see what was there, he could heal them. Sigmund Freud’s first major book, The Interpretation of Dreams, sold only 600 copies in the first 8 years. In a letter to a friend, Freud wrote, “Do you suppose that someday a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words: ‘In this house on July 24, 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud’? At the moment I see little prospect of it.” But Freud was wrong, and today the site of that house bears a memorial plaque with precisely that inscription. Freud’s theories had little impact on some people and an astonishing impact on others. The people on whom they had little impact were the experimental psychologists. William James, for instance, admired some of Freud’s insights but thought most of his theorizing was nonsense. “I strongly suspect Freud, with his dream theory, of being a regular hallucine,” he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1909. “Hallucine” is an old-fashioned word for “lunatic,” so this was not meant as a compliment. Most experimental psychologists shared James’s assessment and paid scant attention to Freud’s ideas. On the other hand, clinicians paid a lot of attention, and within a decade, Freud’s psychoanalytic movement had attracted a virtual army of disciples, including people like Carl Jung (1875–1961) and Alfred Adler (1870–1937). Indeed, Freud’s thinking may not have influenced experimental psychology, but it influenced just about everything else in the 20th century—from history and philosophy to literature and art—which is why Freud is ranked as the 44th most influential person in human history (Skiena & Ward, 2013), which puts him a bit behind Albert Einstein but well ahead of Buddha. Behaviorism: The Mind Does Not Matter James had a somewhat dim view of Freud, but as the 20th century got rolling, another, much younger psychologist took an even dimmer view of Freud—and of James, Wundt, Titchner, and everyone else who had ever talked about the “science of the mind.” That young psychologist had been born in the tiny town of Traveler’s Rest, South Carolina, and went on to the University of Chicago to study the behavior of rats. When his interest changed to the behavior of people, his changing interest changed the world. Pavlov and Watson To John Broadus Watson (1878–1958), everything worth knowing about a rat—how it feeds and mates, how it builds its nest and rears its young—could be known just by watching it, and he wondered why human beings couldn’t be known the same way. Why should the study of human behavior require a bunch of idle speculation about the human mind? Mental life was idiosyncratic, undefinable, and unmeasurable, and Watson felt that if psychology wanted to become a real science, it should limit itself to studying the things people do rather than the things they claim to think and feel. Watson called this idea behaviorism, which is an approach to psychology that restricts scientific inquiry to observable behavior. What might a purely “behaviorist” psychology look like? Watson was impressed by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), about whom you will hear more in the Learning chapter. Pavlov studied digestion in dogs, and he knew that dogs naturally start salivating when they are presented with food. But one day Pavlov noticed something curious: The dogs in his laboratory had started salivating before their food arrived—in fact, they seemed to start salivating when they heard the footsteps of the research assistant who was coming down the hall to feed them! Pavlov suspected that his dogs had come to associate the feeder’s footsteps with the arrival of food and that the dogs were responding to the footsteps as though they were food. He devised an experiment to test this hypothesis. First, he sounded a tone every time he fed his dogs. Then, after a few days, he sounded the tone without feeding the dogs. What happened? The dogs salivated when they heard the tone. Pavlov called the tone a stimulus and the salivation a response.  These historic photos show Ivan Pavlov and one of his dogs, Baika. Both became quite famous: Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his research on digestion, and Baika was immortalized in the 1971 song “Bitch,” by the Rolling Stones (“Yeah when you call my name, I salivate like a Pavlov dog”). There is some debate about who earned the higher honor. When Watson read about this research, he quickly realized that these two concepts—stimulus and response— could be the building blocks of a new behaviorist approach. Psychology, Watson argued, should be the scientific study of the relationship between stimuli and responses—nothing less, and certainly nothing more. In his 1919 book, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, he wrote: “The goal of psychological study is the ascertaining of such data and laws that, given the stimulus, psychology can predict what the response will be; or, on the other hand, given the response, it can specify the nature of the effective stimulus.” He proudly noted that in his book “the reader will find no discussion of consciousness and no reference to such terms as sensation, perception, attention, will, image and the like” because “I frankly do not know what they mean, nor do I believe that anyone else can use them consistently.” John B. Watson was the founder of behaviorism, which revolutionized American psychology in the early 20th century.