The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  The parapsychological community was, of course, unshaken in its beliefs by the committee’s summary of the evidence. But that was to be expected; you will recall that Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter, in their study of a cult that expected the world to be destroyed by a flood, ruefully reported that when an individual with a commitment to a belief, who has acted upon that belief, is presented with evidence that it is wrong, he “will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.”102 The human mind, that most wonderful and powerful apparatus for making sense of the world, seems equally apt at justifying its own nonsense.

  If you will surf the Web for an hour or two for documents on parapsychology , you will see that in 2007, a time when our culture is perfused by scientific psychology, and particularly the twin revolutions of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, a very sizable part of our population believes fervently in many of the phenomena of parapsychology. For some of these the believers think they have evidence, although it never meets the reasonable criterion that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” A recent meta-analysis of 380 research studies of psychokinesis would indeed have been extraordinary evidence—had the results been positive; in fact, the net effect was so minuscule and meaningless that the authors suggest it was an artifact of publication bias (a result of papers with positive results getting published and those with none or negative results being rejected).103

  But many believers are unconcerned about research evidence; they believe because they experience things best explained by parapsychology. They’re right about one aspect of the matter: Their experience is real—it’s an actual event in the brain. They’re wrong only in thinking that the subject of their experience was real. If a person sees the face of Jesus in a wet, oil-slicked street, it’s a reality—that is, the experience is; what’s in the street is something else altogether.

  As for the vast mass of papers, books, speeches, journal articles, and other forms of communication that purport to present evidence—

  Enough! This book is a history of psychology, the science of the mind; parapsychology is not psychology and not science. We have strayed off course. Let us abandon the subject and return to our story, of which there is only one more chapter.

  NINETEEN

  Psychology

  Today

  Portrait of a Psychologist

  Although most thoughtful people consider the use of stereotypes small-minded and prejudiced, we all rely on generalizations about others to enable us to behave appropriately toward them. If we are seated at dinner next to a woman we have never met and learn that she is a Presbyterian minister, we speak to her somewhat differently from the way we would if we learn she is the author of scandal-mongering unauthorized celebrity biographies. Generalized expectations, though often oversimplified and inaccurate, are necessary hypotheses about people; without them we would function no better at the dinner or in other social situations than a Korowai tribesman just arrived from the wilds of Papua New Guinea.

  So, what would come to your mind if you heard that the stranger seated next to you at a dinner is a psychologist?

  To most people, it would mean that he or she has special insight into human nature and treats troubled people. But you, having read this far, are disabused of any such erroneous generalization. You know that “psychologist” denotes not one but a broad spectrum of occupations, many of which have nothing to do with insight into human nature, and that many psychologists are scientists, not healers. No generalization, no single image, can encompass the proficiencies and activities represented by the following handful of specimens of contemporary psychologists at work:

  —In a laboratory, a young woman wearing headphones, her head inside a large scanning machine, hears a male voice uttering what she has been told are sentences; her task is to push any one of four buttons to indicate how “meaningful” each sentence is. Here are some samples of what she hears:

  “the man on a vacation lost a bag and wallet”

  “the freeway on a pie watched a house and window”

  “on vacation lost then a and bag wallet man then a”

  “a ball the a the spilled librarian in sign through fire”

  “the solims on a sonting grilloted a yome and a sovier”

  “rooned the sif into hlf the and the foig aurene to”

  The so-called sentences, some of which sound like a bad simulation of Jabberwocky, range from the “semantically congruent” (they make sense) through the “semantically random” (the individual words make sense but the sentence does not) to the “pseudo-word list” (nonwords in no syntactical order).

  The young woman’s choices of which buttons to push don’t actually matter; what the four researchers are interested in is what the fMRI scans show about her brain activity as she hears the spoken words. And in fact what they show is exciting, although the researchers, in their report, couch their findings in the usual impassive academese: “Syntactic and semantic processes engaged during sentence comprehension occur in distinct but overlapping parts of the temporal and parietal lobes. These regions make use of syntactic and semantic information in different ways.” The details, too recondite to repeat here, add up to an intriguing finding: The human brain has different specialized circuits for interpreting the semantics (meaning) and the syntax (sentence structure) of heard speech.1

  —A white-coated man, scalpel in hand, bends over a laboratory table and, slowly laying open the body of a brown Australian marsupial mouse, searches for its tiny adrenal glands. The mouse, a male, had died after many hours of continuous copulation; all males of this species, Antechinus stuartii, expire after a nonstop bout of five to twelve hours of sexual activity, which they engage in only during a two-week period of the year. Examination of the adrenals of a number of such mice leads to an explanation: The length of daylight and average temperature during the reproductive season induce extreme hyperactivity of the male mouse’s adrenals, which trigger the prolonged and stressful copulation that ends in death.2The study adds to a growing body of knowledge of seasonal influences on the behavior of mice… and men.

  —In a room designed to look like a cocktail lounge, a small group of volunteers meet, are served drinks (some get vodka and tonic, some only tonic, though what they are told they’re getting isn’t necessarily the truth). After fifteen minutes of drinking and chatting, they are shepherded into a back room where they watch a twenty-five-second video of two basketball teams passing balls back and forth, and are asked to count the number of times the white-shirted team passes the ball. During the action, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the screen, beats her chest, and walks off. When the video is over, the researchers interview each participant; they find, remarkably, that of the forty-six who took part in a dozen small sessions, only 18 percent of those who had a real drink had noticed the gorilla—and even more remarkably, that fewer than 50 percent of those who got a placebo (nonvodka) drink had noticed it. The two significant implications: Even mild intoxication strongly affects the ability to notice anything other than what one is paying attention to (passing the basketball), and even sober people are not likely to notice an unexpected and unusual object if they are paying attention to something else—a finding that could be of crucial importance to eyewitness testimony in court cases.3

  —In a psychology lab, two student volunteers stand at opposite sides of a narrow table; a central curtain hangs between them, screening them from each other, and they have been instructed not to speak. Each grasps a handle of a crank that runs under the table from one to the other. On the table is a large, flat, blue disk, with two small marks at its edge, one on each side. From above, a target area (a small white oblong) is projected onto each side of the disk. The participants can rotate the disk by means of the crank handles, and when told, they try to move the mark on the disk into the target area as quickly as possible, then wait for a new target to appear. Since each student ha
s a handle of the crank and no instructions as to how to proceed, the participants are as likely to inadvertently combat each other as to collaborate. But in fact after only a few trials they begin to work together, one partner speeding the disk toward the target, the other slowing it down to avoid overshooting. They evidently communicate wordlessly by their handling of the crank—and do better as a team than volunteers who perform the task alone. The findings, a valuable addition to “motor control theory,” illuminate how people manage to wordlessly coordinate many kinds of movements with each other—everything from moving furniture to waltzing.4

  —On a winter day, at the edge of a pond where ducks are paddling about, two bundled-up researchers stand thirty yards apart; one throws a chunk of bread into the water every five seconds, the other every ten seconds. After a few days of this feeding, twice as many ducks cluster near the five-second thrower as the other. But some days later the researchers introduce a change: The ten-second thrower tosses in chunks twice as large as the five-second thrower. At first the ducks continue to assemble as they have been doing, two to one in favor of the faster thrower, but within five minutes they have redistributed themselves and are divided equally between the two—evidence, the researchers believe, of a sophisticated innate foraging strategy in which the ducks take into account not only the rate at which edible items appear but their average size.5 The study adds to knowledge of how time and quantity are nonverbally represented in the brains of animals and humans.

  —A team of researchers gingerly positions miniature microphones inside the ear canals of a volunteer seated in the center of a circular framework on which six loudspeakers are mounted at different heights. The researchers then send white noise (a broad-spectrum hiss) through one speaker after another, rotating the apparatus 15 degrees at a time, until they have sent sound from 144 locations. Each time the volunteer identifies the position of the speaker by giving its direction and elevation in degrees. Later, using recordings of what the microphones picked up, the researchers transmit sound to the volunteer through earphones instead of the loudspeakers; he identifies the apparent directions from which the noise is coming in virtually perfect agreement with where it had come from in the actual condition. The experiment adds to knowledge of how the mind determines the direction of a sound source from the difference in time at which the sound reaches the ears.6

  To this hodgepodge of images we could add any of the scores of others that have already been described or alluded to—everything from a psychotherapist Socratically leading a patient to recognize his unrealistic beliefs to a developmental psychologist recording the eye movements of an infant watching images flashed on a screen, and from a behavioral neuroscientist injecting epinephrine into a rat that has learned a maze to see how the hormone affects its memory to a cognitive scientist painstakingly constructing the thousands of steps of a computer program that, presented with hundreds of sentences, will learn language more or less as an infant does.

  Beyond all this are many psychologists whose special interests and activities we have not taken time to explore, although some are of considerable relevance to everyday life. A few instances:

  —Some are investigating the psychology of love and mate selection. At one time this was a much-researched field; then, being deemed too “soft”—not rigorously testable—it was sidelined. In the past couple of decades, however, there has been something of a resurgence of love research based on sophisticated statistical analyses of survey data and interviews, brain scans, cross-cultural data, and neurotransmitter science. Researchers have been using all these methods to distinguish between kinds of love (passionate, romantic, intimate, companionate, and so on), how some of these interact with sexuality, and how love changes over time.7 These sound like familiar and classic topics, but some of the methods of inquiring into them are strictly contemporary and cutting-edge. An example: Helen Fisher, a psychologically oriented anthropologist, says in her latest book, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, that the feeling of love is the result of elevated levels of either dopamine or norepinephrine or both, as well as decreased levels of serotonin. She argues that this hypothesis is supported by fMRI scans of the areas of the brain that light up when subjects who are passionately in love are shown pictures of their adored one. (Still, one might interpret this as an effect of feeling romantic love rather than its cause.)

  —Teams of researchers have been conducting long-term longitudinal studies of individuals who suffer recurrent periods of depression. Typically, they track the events and changes of their subjects’ lives, correlate these with their emotional states, and statistically disentangle the influence of each possible cause of depression. Findings have lent weight to such stressful influences as childhood abuse, family conflicts, spousal abuse, and other traumas, and the counteracting force of such compensatory factors as the support of friends and relatives.8 The Stirling County Study, the longest-running of all such studies (it was started in 1948), has yielded a mass of published results. One recent example is the finding that women born after World War II are at greater risk for depressive illness than older women, possibly because many of the younger women entered the labor force and employment is a major stressor. Another finding is that men with long-term depression have far higher mortality and morbidity rates than long-term depressed women, perhaps because men are less willing to seek treatment.9

  —The nature of intelligence has been explored intensively for many decades, but in recent years some current researchers have advanced the concept that intelligence is neither overall intellectual ability nor a collection of correlated abilities but a set of different processes and strategies that may operate at different levels in the same person. As mentioned earlier, Howard Gardner of Harvard, for one, argues that each individual has seven distinct intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Robert J. Sternberg of Yale, for another, offers research data pointing to a “triarchic” structure of intelligence: the mind’s knowledge of its own abilities, its use of its accumulated experience, and its appraisal of the existing situation.

  —A good many researchers are probing deeper than ever into the sources of gender role behavior and sexual preference. Some focus on prenatal influences on brain development, some on genetic anomalies, others on familial influences, and still others on cultural factors. Each group portrays its factors as the most influential, but the emerging view is that all are involved and to varying degrees in each case; it is the specific kinds of interactions, in any individual’s history, that determine the outcome.

  —The nature of consciousness, possibly the most profound puzzle of psychology, was long set aside as either not investigable or not useful either theoretically or practically. However, since the cognitive revolution and the cognitive neuroscience revolution, it has again been seen by some investigators as a question of paramount importance, and one they believe can eventually be answered. A few years ago Francis Crick suggested that a continuous, semi-oscillatory firing of sets of neurons creates a temporary unity of neural activity in many parts of the brain; the self-activating nature of the pattern is the basis of consciousness. Philip Johnson-Laird has likened consciousness to a computer’s “operating system,” a set of instructions that direct and control the flow of information in whatever programs are running. Gerald Edelman has proposed two levels of consciousness. A low-level form arises from the interaction between the part of the brain governing internal physiological drives and the part processing information from the outside world. A high-level form arises from the interaction between the linguistic and concept-forming parts of the brain, with the ability to label things and fit them into categories, thereby freeing the mind from subservience to events in real time and enabling it to be aware of its own thoughts.

  Finally, there is “spin-mediated consciousness” theory (which you need not try to decode into comprehensible language). It holds that quantum spin is the seat of consc
iousness: In the words of one theorist, “Consciousness is intrinsically connected to the spin process and emerges from the self-referential collapses of spin states… The nuclear spins inside neural membranes and proteins form various entangled quantum states some of which survive decoherence through quantum Zeno effects.”10 Whatever.

  So much for the vain effort to stereotype the special interests and activities of psychologists. But can we not at least picture the typical psychologist as a person? We cannot. Psychologists come in both sexes and in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and levels of training and status.

  Many people envision a psychologist as white, male, a “doctor,” and, as mentioned, the possessor of special insight into human nature and a healer of the mentally ailing. The last two descriptors, having to do with insight and healing, do apply to about 60 percent of the more than 102,000 doctorate-level psychologists. But nearly a third of the 102,000 are academics and researchers who have nothing to do with healing, and smaller minorities perform various services in industry, government agencies, other service settings, and schools.11 But the first descriptor, white, is reasonably correct: Nationally, fewer than 4 percent of all employed doctorate-level psychologists are black, 3.4 percent are Hispanic, and fewer than 3 percent are Asian.12 (Within the APA, for unclear reasons, only 1.7 percent of members are black, 2.1 percent Hispanic, and 1.9 percent Asian.13)

  The second descriptor, male, once was accurate but has long since ceased to be. In 1910, only 10 percent of doctorate-level psychologists were women, but by 1938 the figure was 22 percent, and by 1990 40 percent, while today women make up 50 percent nationally (and within the APA, 53 percent).14 This shift is largely due to the growth of clinical psychology, which has always been relatively open to women. Academic psychology has not; for many decades, male psychologists all but excluded women from academic posts with the rationalization that they would abandon their research for years or permanently when they had children. Accordingly, male psychologists produced most research papers and held nearly all high-level academic and research positions. Only in relatively recent years have women come close to sharing academic appointments, but they still lag far behind as to equality in tenure; and while women’s names now appear on research papers as often as men’s, as of 2000 (the most recent year for which a report is available) they held fewer of the important chairs in psychology departments than their numbers warrant.15