Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [329]
In the 1950s and beyond, experimental evidence gathered by developmental psychologists supported Freud’s ego-development theory. Walter Mischel and his collaborators, for example, offered children the choice of an immediate small reward or a delayed larger one. At seven, most children chose the immediate reward; at nine, most of them chose the delayed larger one.64
Meanwhile, the writings of the psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann had been bringing about a change in the focus of psychodynamic psychology. The ego was found to be more powerful and influential, the id less so, than had been thought. To psychologists who were psychodynamically oriented, this meant that in large part the human adult is motivated by conscious wishes, ego defense mechanisms, and values. By the 1950s, therefore, psychotherapists and academic psychologists were actively exploring positive cognitive forces used by the ego to combat stress, in particular hope to counteract anxiety when facing uncertainties, and coping mechanisms to deal with problems rather than irrational reactions and self-defenses.65
III
Most twentieth-century psychologists across the spectrum from Freud to Skinner were determinists. As scientists, they believed that human behavior, like all events in the real world, is caused; every thought and act is the result of antecedent events and forces. This premise seemed to them essential to the status of psychology as a science. In this view, if individuals could behave as they chose—if some or much of their behavior were determined by their will, operating freely, rather than by past experiences and present forces—there could not be a body of rigorous laws concerning behavior. Accordingly, the term “will” had largely disappeared from psychology by midcentury and ever since has not even been mentioned in passing in most textbooks, although an excellent current one does list it in the index as “will, illusion of conscious.”66
But the concept has refused to die; it lives on in altered form and under other names, and for good reason.
For one thing, the goal of psychotherapy is to liberate the patient from the control of unconscious forces. This can only mean that the patient becomes capable of consciously weighing and judging the alternatives and deciding how to behave. But what is a decision if not a volitional act?
For another, developmental psychologists had found that a crucial feature of children’s mental development is the gradual appearance of “metacognition”—awareness of their own thought processes and ability to manage them. Children slowly discover that there are ways to remember things, to formulate problem-solving strategies, to categorize objects; they begin to exercise conscious and voluntary control of their own thought processes.67
For yet another, cognitive psychology had to devise a modern equivalent of will to account for the phenomenon of decision making, observed in innumerable studies of thinking and problem solving. Artificial intelligence experts refer to the “executive functions” of programs that simulate thinking; that is, the parts of such programs that weigh the results achieved at any point and determine what steps to take next. Some theorists say that the human mind, likewise, has executive machinery that makes decisions. But the decisions made by an AI program are fully predictable, while predictions of decisions of a human being are often wrong. Why? Is there, after all, some area of freedom within human choice, some kind of free will within voluntary control? We will look further into this enigma in the final chapter; for now, it is enough to note that whether one views decision making as a fully predictable executive process or as a voluntary act, its motivation is of cognitive origin.68
IV
Murray suggested in the 1930s that social factors are often a source of motivation, but the suggestion lay fallow; in the 1950s, with the growth of social psychology and humanistic psychology, psychologists became interested in “social motivation.