The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  In their diverse activities, these people have a common quest: the discovery of the processes by which the psychological acorn becomes a psychological oak. Specifically:

  —After inserting the opaque lens, the experimenters trained the rat to run a maze, then sacrificed it and examined its brain under a microscope. Their aim was to find out, by comparing its right and left visual cortexes, the extent to which experience increased the number of dendritic branches in the neurons. (Because the left eye was obscured, the right visual cortex did not receive messages during the maze training.)

  —The heartbeat of the pregnant woman’s fetus was being monitored, and proved to be more rapid than when the same poem was read above her abdomen by a stranger. The unborn child evidently recognized its mother’s voice.

  —The four-month-old seeing the blinking light showed surprise when the flashing became less frequent; even at that age, an infant is aware of regularity in temporal intervals.

  —The researcher who drew the curtain, hiding the toy dog, was exploring the development of infant memory—in this case, the awareness that a hidden object still exists.

  —The man asking to be taught how to play marbles—Jean Piaget, in the 1920s—was studying the development of moral reasoning in young children.

  —The mother simulating pain was collaborating with researchers in seeking to pinpoint the earliest appearance of empathy in children.

  —The researcher asking the odd questions about a green poker chip was examining the growth of logical reasoning in children.

  —The woman asking the dental student how he would handle a difficult situation was investigating the development of moral reasoning at the adult level.

  These are only a few examples of the multiform activities and interests of contemporary developmental psychologists. Their field is a very broad specialty, and in a way the quintessential one: It deals with all that makes us become what we are and with the ways in which we can influence those processes.

  Until the seventeenth century, there was little interest in this vast subject. Until then, according to the historian Philippe Ariès, the dominant view in much of Europe was that children were miniature adults, with small-scale adult traits, virtues, and vices. They were cared for until about the age of six, when they could care for themselves. Thereafter they were dressed like adults, put to work alongside them, punished like them for wrong deeds or disobedience to authority, and even hanged for thievery.

  That attitude toward childhood began to change when Locke asserted that the infant’s mind was a blank slate. But his theory of what turns it into an adult mind was rudimentary and grossly incomplete; development was believed to be due simply to the accumulation of experiences and associations.

  Two centuries later, Darwinian theory gave rise to a more sophisticated conception offered by several early psychologists. Much as evolution proceeds from simple homogeneous forms of life to complex and highly differentiated ones, they said, psychological development moves from homogeneity and simplicity to complexity and specialization of mental functions, in an inevitable upward progress from infancy to maturity.2

  Today this seems naïve; modern psychologists more realistically see development pursuing any of various routes, some distinctly undesirable. Racists, crack-addicted prostitutes, psychopathic killers, professional torturers, child abusers, genocidal religious fanatics, and the like are all end products of development. Moreover, developmental psychologists now consider that their subject extends to the later decades of life, when mental abilities wane and the incidence of the dementias of old-age illnesses rises. In dealing with so far-reaching a domain, they draw upon virtually every specialty of psychology, and with pardonable hubris consider theirs the most authentic approach to psychological knowledge. As the developmentalist Rochel Gelman put it some years ago, “We will not understand the end product unless we watch its evolution.”3 A bold statement; let us look at the evidence.

  Grand Theory and Nontheory

  “It is characteristic of a science in its earlier stages,” said the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “to be both ambitiously profound in its aims and trivial in its handling of details.”4

  That was certainly the case with developmental psychology. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the leading theory in the field scanted details and hard data in favor of a bold and sweeping concept. The Englishman George Romanes, the Russian Ivan Sechenov, and the Americans James Mark Baldwin and G. Stanley Hall all in various ways likened the developmental changes taking place during childhood to the stages of evolution from lower creatures to humankind. But this seemingly brilliant analogy was only an intellectual conceit, not an empirical finding, and it was soon swept away by the rising tide of research data that could not be contained within it. (Only psychoanalytic theory survived from this era, but unlike the evolutionary theories it did not attempt to be comprehensive; it dealt with character structure and personality, but had little or nothing to say about the growth of intellectual and social skills.)

  Hall, however, made a seminal contribution to developmental psychology. He steered what was then known as the “child study movement” toward experimentation and data gathering. Himself a diligent researcher, for many years he conducted questionnaire studies of the thinking of schoolchildren and published his data; this, rather than his effort at grand theory, set the direction of the nascent field of child psychology.

  By the 1920s, child psychology—the term “developmental psychology” came into vogue only thirty years later—was thoroughly research-oriented and largely atheoretical. This was consonant with the vogue for mental testing then sweeping the country. Much as Binet and Terman had measured intellectual achievement at each year of childhood without explaining how and why the mind grew, child psychologists from the 1920s through the 1950s concentrated on determining norms: the behavior and mental capacities infants “should” exhibit week by week, and children month by month. At Yale, Arnold Gesell compiled precise descriptions of normal behavior at every juncture of the child’s life; at Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, and elsewhere, researchers launched major longitudinal studies in which people were tested and retested from infancy to adulthood in order to learn which factors, measured early in life, were predictive (though not explanatory) of what the adult became.

  The lack of interest in developmental theory was also due in part to the dominance of the behaviorists, whose research in learning, as we have seen, consisted chiefly of determining the correlations between stimuli and responses. Behaviorist developmental theory, if it deserves that name, is epitomized in Skinner’s writing:

  The consequences of behavior may “feed back” into the organism. When they do so, they may change the probability that the behavior which produced them will occur again… When changes in behavior extend over longer periods, we speak of the independent variable as the age of the organism. The increase in probability as a function of age is often spoken of as maturation.5

  Happily, a far more sophisticated approach to developmental research and a correspondingly more profound theory would soon transform the field. These were the work of the man who asked the five-year-old boy to teach him how to play marbles.

  A Giant, and a Giant Theory

  Jean Piaget (1896–1980), most developmentalists agree, was the greatest child psychologist of the twentieth century; without him, said the distinguished British developmental psychologist Peter Bryant, “child psychology would have been a meager thing.”6 In the 1920s, when Piaget was a young man, his early contributions revolutionized child psychology in France and Switzerland, and thirty years later the products of his mature years did so in America. What made his work so influential was in part the beauty and explanatory power of his theory, and in part the many remarkable discoveries, made through painstaking research, on which he based it.

  “Painstaking” is an understatement. From the days when he was a tall, slender young man with bangs on his forehead until his eighties, when he was w
hite-haired, stooped, and portly, Piaget spent a great deal of his time watching children play and playing with them, telling them stories and listening to theirs, asking them innumerable questions about why things work the way they do (“When you go walking, why does the sun move with you?”, “When you dream, where is the dream and how do you see it?”), and inventing puzzles and problems for them to solve. Through these activities, Piaget made a number of what the developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan of Harvard has called “amazing discoveries…a host of fascinating, hardy phenomena which were under everybody’s nose but which few were talented enough to see.”7

  One of them: Piaget would show a baby a toy, then put his beret over it. Until about nine months of age, the baby would forget the toy the moment it disappeared, but at about nine months would realize that it still existed under the beret. Another: Piaget would show a child two identical wide beakers containing equal amounts of water, pour the water from one into a tall thin vessel, and then ask the child which container had more. A child under seven would almost always say the tall thin one, but a child of seven or more would recognize that although the shape had changed, the quantity had not. Piaget made many such discoveries, most of which, despite later modifications, have held up; child psychology, says Kagan, “had never possessed such a covey of sturdy facts.”8

  To account for his findings, Piaget constructed a complex theory made up of his own concepts of cognitive processes plus others from biology, physics, and philosophy. (He also explored but made little use of Freudian and Gestalt psychologies.) His basic message was that the mind, through its interaction with the environment, undergoes a series of metamorphoses. It does not merely accumulate experiences but is changed by them, achieving new and more advanced kinds of thinking, until by about age fifteen it is the sort of mind we think of as characteristically human. And so modern developmental psychology was born.

  What was he like, this man who could sit with and listen to children for sixty years but who also had the intellectual might to transform a major area of psychology?9 The unlikely answer: gentle, dignified, benign, friendly, and warm. His colleagues and co-workers all referred to him affectionately as le patron (the boss), he never aroused vicious opposition, he almost always responded mildly to criticism of his work, and none of his close associates ever broke with him. Pictures of Piaget in his later years tell no lie: the genial face, owlish behind horn-rimmed glasses, the flowing white hair escaping on both sides of the inevitable beret, the pipe jutting from the left side of the smiling mouth, all suggest a comfortable man to be with. The worst one can say of him is that he was so serious that he took almost no interest in children’s jokes and laughter.

  Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Piaget, unlike Freud, was not an outsider who had to claw his way to acceptance; unlike Pavlov, he lived through no period of economic hardship; unlike James, he suffered no breakdown; unlike Wertheimer, he experienced no epiphany. The one singular feature of his relatively uneventful formative years was that he had virtually no childhood—which may be why he spent so much of his adult life with children. His father was a meticulous and critical professor of history, his mother neurotic and, unlike her husband, exceedingly pious. The discrepancies resulted in a troubled family life, to which little Jean made a bizarre adaptation:

  I started to forgo playing for serious work very early; this I obviously did as much to imitate my father as to take refuge in both a private and a non-fictitious world. Indeed, I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother’s poor mental health.

  No fairy tales, adventure stories, or games for this sober child; by seven he was devoting his free time to studying birds, fossils, sea shells, and internal-combustion mechanics, and before ten he wrote a book on birds of the region.

  But his pride in the book evaporated when his father regarded it as a mere compilation. At ten, Piaget “decided to be more serious.” Having seen a partly albino sparrow in the park, he wrote a brief scientific report about it and sent it to a natural history journal in Neuchâtel, whose editor, unaware that the author was a boy, published it. This success emboldened Piaget to write to the director of the Neuchâtel natural history museum, asking whether he could study their collection after hours; the director went him one better by inviting him to assist in classifying and labeling his shell collection. Piaget did so twice a week for four years, learning enough to begin publishing scientific articles on mollusks in zoology journals before he was sixteen.

  About that time, he spent a long vacation with his godfather, a literary man who considered the youth’s interests too narrow and introduced him to philosophy. A larger world opened up before Piaget. He was fascinated by the subject, particularly the problem of epistemology, and by the end of the vacation decided “to consecrate my life to the biological explanation of knowledge.” He still considered himself, however, a natural scientist, not a psychologist, and at the University of Neuchâtel went through undergraduate studies and on to a doctorate, which he received at twenty-two, in the natural sciences.

  Only then did he turn to his real interest. He worked briefly in two psychological laboratories in Zürich, went to Paris and took some courses at the Sorbonne, and was recommended to Théodore Simon (Binet’s collaborator), who put him to work standardizing certain tests of reasoning on five- to eight-year-old Parisian children. For two years Piaget did that—and much more. What interested him was not just determining the age at which children could give the right answer to each reasoning problem, but why, at earlier ages, they all made similar mistakes. He engaged the children in conversations, asking them questions about the world around them, listening carefully to their explanations, and inviting them to solve little puzzles of his own invention, all of which became the core of his lifelong method of investigation. In his autobiography he jubilantly says, “At last I had found my field of research.”

  At that point, his goal for the next five years—it turned out to be closer to sixty—was to discover “a sort of embryology of intelligence.” Piaget meant it metaphorically; he did not attribute the growth of intelligence to the maturation of the nervous system but to the mind’s acquisition of experience and the transformations that this forced it to undergo.

  From then on he occupied a succession of important academic and research posts. In his twenties he was director of research at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva for five years; for the next five, professor of philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel; then back to Geneva as co-director, and later director, of the Rousseau Institute and professor at the university; later still, professor at the Sorbonne; and from 1956 on, director of the newly formed Center for Genetic Epistemology at the University of Geneva. (“Genetic epistemology,” a term of his, has nothing to do with genetics; it means intellectual development.)

  In all these posts as well as on sidewalks, in parks, and in his own home with his three children—he had married one of his students at the Rousseau Institute—Piaget conducted endless research, focusing now on one age, then on another, until eventually he had pieced together a complete picture of mental development from the first weeks of life to adolescence. In a steady outpouring of articles and books (couched, unfortunately, in exceptionally ponderous prose) he presented the world of psychology with a plethora of remarkable discoveries, a mass of valuable data, and the theory that transmuted the field of child study into developmental psychology. He became world famous, was (and still is) cited more often in psychological literature than anyone but Skinner and Freud, received honorary degrees from several great universities, and won the American Psychological Association’s award for his distinguished contribution to psychology.

  All that, without any systematic training or degree in psychology.

  Piaget amplified and modified his theory over the years, but we need look only at the final product.

  Behaviorists held that development takes place through conditioning and imitation, hereditarians that it is the automatic res
ult of maturation. Piaget differed with both. He held that mental development requires both experience and maturation but is the result of an ever-changing interaction between organism and environment. In that interaction the mind adapts to an experience, is then able to interact in a different fashion with the environment, and adapts still further, undergoing a series of metamorphoses until it reaches the adult state. An infant’s digestive system can at first handle only milk, but later, having developed thanks to the milk, can digest solid food. In similar fashion, the intellect is at first a simple structure that can absorb and utilize only simple experiences but, nourished by them, becomes more advanced, competent, and able to handle more complex ones.

  A four-month-old baby, according to Piaget’s research, does not recognize that the toy is under Piaget’s beret; at that stage of mental development, the mind has only current perceptions, not stored images, and a concealed object is as good as nonexistent. But by the latter part of the first year, after accidentally finding the toy under the beret a few times, the baby has modified the reaction to seeing it covered over.

  In another classic experiment, the child who has not yet learned to count says that six buttons spaced out in a line are “more” than six buttons bunched together in a line. When he learns to count, he discovers otherwise and his mind’s way of handling such perceptions is transformed.

  Both experiments exemplify the two crucial processes of mental development in Piaget’s theory: assimilation and accommodation. The child assimilates the experience of counting the buttons—ingests it, so to speak, as if it were like previous experiences when what looked bigger was indeed bigger. But the new experience produced by counting is discordant with that assumption; the mind, to restore its equilibrium, accommodates (reorganizes) sufficiently to incorporate the new experience, and from then on sees and interprets sets of objects in a way better adapted to reality.10