Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [228]
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