Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [1]
Mr. Behaviorism: John B. Watson
The Triumph of Behaviorism
Two Great Neobehaviorists: Hull and Skinner
The Impending Paradigm Shift
10 The Gestaltists
A Visual Illusion Gives Rise to a New Psychology
The Rediscovery of the Mind
The Laws of Gestalten
Out-of-Reach Bananas and Other Problems
Learning
Failure and Success
PART THREE: SPECIALIZATION AND SYNTHESIS
Introduction: The Fissioning of Psychology— and the Fusion of the Psychological Sciences
11 The Personality Psychologists
“The Secrets of the Hearts of Other Men”
The Fundamental Units of Personality
Measuring Personality
Making Order out of Chaos
Learned Personality
Body, Genes, and Personality
Late Word from the Personality Front
12 The Developmentalists
“Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”
Grand Theory and Nontheory
A Giant, and a Giant Theory
Cognitive Development
Maturation
Personality Development
Social Development
Development from A to Z
13 The Social Psychologists
No Man’s Land
A Case of Multiple Fatherhood
Closed Cases: Cognitive Dissonance, the Psychology of Imprisonment, Obedience, the Bystander Effect
Ongoing Inquiries: Conflict Resolution, Attribution, Others
The Value of Social Psychology
14 The Perception Psychologists
Interesting Questions
Styles of Looking at Looking
Seeing Form
Seeing Movement
Seeing Depth
Two Ways of Looking at Vision
15 The Emotion and Motivation Psychologists
Fundamental Question
Somatic Theory
ANS and CNS Theory
Cognitive Theory
Patchwork Quilt
16 The Cognitivists
Revolution
Revolution No. 2
Memory
Language
Reasoning
Is the Mind a Computer? Is a Computer a Mind?
New Model
And the Winner Is—
17 The Psychotherapists
Growth Industry
Freud’s Offspring: The Dynamic Psychotherapists
The Patient as Laboratory Animal: Behavior Therapy
All in the Mind: Cognitive Therapy
A Miscellany of Therapies
But Does It Really Work?
18 Users and Misusers of Psychology
Knowledge Is Power
Improving the Human Use of the Human Equipment
Improving the Fit Between Humans and Their Jobs
The Use and Misuse of Testing
Covert Persuasion: Advertising and Propaganda
Psychology in the Courtroom
Beyond the Fringe
19 Psychology Today
Portrait of a Psychologist
Portrait of a Science
Schism
Psychology and Politics
Status Report
Notes
Notes
References
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE:
Exploring the Universe Within
A Psychological Experiment in the Seventh Century B.C.
A most unusual man, Psamtik I, King of Egypt. During his long reign, in the latter half of the seventh century B.C., he not only drove out the Assyrians, revived Egyptian art and architecture, and brought about general prosperity, but found time to conceive of and conduct history’s first recorded experiment in psychology.
The Egyptians had long believed that they were the most ancient race on earth, and Psamtik, driven by intellectual curiosity, wanted to prove that flattering belief. Like a good psychologist, he began with a hypothesis: If children had no opportunity to learn a language from older people around them, they would spontaneously speak the primal, inborn language of humankind—the natural language of its most ancient people—which, he expected to show, was Egyptian.
To test his hypothesis, Psamtik commandeered two infants of a lower-class mother and turned them over to a herdsman to bring up in a remote area. They were to be kept in a sequestered cottage, properly fed and cared for, but were never to hear anyone speak so much as a word. The Greek historian Herodotus, who tracked the story down and learned what he calls “the real facts” from priests of Hephaestus in Memphis, says that Psamtik’s goal “was to know, after the indistinct babblings of infancy were over, what word they would first articulate.”
The experiment, he tells us, worked. One day, when the children were two years old, they ran up to the herdsman as he opened the door of their cottage and cried out “Becos!” Since this meant nothing to him, he paid no attention, but when it happened repeatedly, he sent word to Psamtik, who