Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [260]
In late middle age and beyond, many people complain of failing memory, and recent studies do show a gradual decline in memory in most people after fifty. Although this alarms many of those who experience it, it is normal and does not usually indicate Alzheimer’s disease, remains minor until the eighties, and in most cases can be ameliorated by the use of mnemonics and other techniques and by the elimination of overmedication.
Developmental psychology may seem now to be fully mature. It encompasses the entire life of the human being, takes a broad view of the causes of change, and has sound evidence that development proceeds stage by stage.
For all that, the field is in a disorderly condition. There is not one stage theory; there are at least a dozen major and some minor ones. They agree on certain points, disagree on others. Life-span developmental psychology is not actually a theory so much as a way of looking at the subject, an approach in which different theories can be integrated or considered simultaneously. It may never be more than that; as noted more than once during this chapter, developmental psychology is so vast a field that it may require a cluster of theories rather than one encompassing theory.
This is not to discredit developmental psychology; physics, the queen of the natural sciences, suffers the same limitation. Many physicists are convinced that there is a single theory that can account for the four forces of physics (the strong force within atomic nuclei, the weak force holding certain particles together, electromagnetic force, and gravitation), but nobody has been able to formulate one. There may be none. Or perhaps any unifying explanation is beyond the range of the mind’s eye even as radio waves are invisible to the eye itself. When psychology was the province of philosophers, theories seemed to explain everything; when it became a science, overarching theories were harder to construct. Certainly, that is the case with developmental psychology.
* Piaget, early in his career, studied the moral development of the child (Piaget, 1948 [1932]), but this work dealt only with the pre-adolescent years and children’s attitudes toward rules, lies, and the like. It is his later work on cognitive development that deals with morals and justice.
* Michael Lewis et al. put the appearance of empathy later, but the discrepancy may lie in whether empathy is defined as distress at seeing distress (an early development) or as an attempt to help (a later development).
* The evolutionary psychologist David Buss bypasses Kohlberg altogether, explaining the moral emotions as adaptive devices acquired by our ancestors, built into us, and evoked by environment and experience (Buss, 2004: 386–388).
THIRTEEN
The Social
Psychologists
No Man’s Land
Q: What busy and productive field of modern psychology has no clear-cut identity and not even a generally accepted definition?
A: Social psychology. It is less a field than a no man’s land between psychology and sociology, overlapping each and also impinging on anthropology, criminology, several other social sciences, and neuroscience. Ever since the emergence of social psychology, its practitioners have had trouble agreeing on what it is. Psychologists define it one way, sociologists another,* and most textbook writers, seeking to accommodate both views and to cover the field’s entire gallimaufry of topics, offer nebulous definitions that say everything and nothing. An example: “[Social psychology is] the scientific study of the personal and situational factors that affect individual social behavior.” A better definition: “Social psychology is the study of the ways in which thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motives, and behavior are influenced by interactions and transactions