Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [335]
His revelation would not be about radical politics or radical sex, both on the rise at that time, but about his interest in the mind.
The mind? What could be subversive or disreputable about that? Wasn’t it the core concern of psychology?
No, not then, nor had it been since the beginning of the behaviorist dominion over American psychology four decades earlier. To behaviorists, the mind, invisible, nonmaterial, and conjectural, was an obsolete metaphysical concept that no experimental psychologist concerned about his career and reputation would talk about, much less devote himself to.
But Miller had become a covert mentalist over the years. Born and raised in Charleston, West Virginia, as a freshman in college he had been uninterested in and even a trifle hostile toward psychology; in a memoir he says, tongue in cheek (a frequent mode of his), that he saw drawings of the brain and other organs in a psychology textbook and, “raised by Christian Scientists, I had been trained to avoid materia medica, and I could recognize the devil when I saw him.”1
Either education or infatuation changed his outlook. In his junior year at the University of Alabama, Miller, smitten with a girl (whom he later married), went to the informal seminars in psychology she was attending, given by Professor Donald Ramsdell at his home. Miller made such an impression on Ramsdell that a couple of years later, when he completed a master’s in speech and communication, Ramsdell offered him a job teaching psychology to undergraduates, although Miller had never had a formal course in the subject. By then married and a father, Miller needed the job and took it; a year of teaching psychology made a convert of him.
He went to Harvard for graduate studies, received a solid grounding in behaviorist psychology, and so distinguished himself that after earning his doctorate he was made an instructor. For the next fourteen years, first at Harvard and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he conducted experimental studies in speech and communication. Despite his behaviorist training, this work, unlike rat-based research, forced him willy-nilly to think about human memory and other higher mental processes. He drifted still closer to mentalism after attending a summer seminar at Stanford, where he worked closely with the psycholinguist Noam Chomsky, and a sabbatical year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, where he was exposed to new ways of doing research on thinking, especially the simulation of thought processes by computer programs.
In the fall of 1960 Miller returned to Harvard a changed man. As he tells it in his memoir:
I realized I was acutely unhappy with the narrow conception of psychology that defined the Harvard department. I had just spent a year romping wildly in the sunshine. The prospect of going back to a world bounded at one end by psychophysics and at the other by operant conditioning was simply intolerable. I decided that either Harvard would have to let me create something resembling the interactive excitement of the Stanford Center or else I was going to leave.
Miller confided in his friend and colleague, the social psychologist Jerome Bruner, about his discontent and the dream of a new center devoted to the study of mental processes. Bruner shared both his feelings and his vision. Together they approached McGeorge Bundy, provost of the university, won his approval, and with funding from the Carnegie Corporation established the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies. Naming it that made Miller feel like a declared apostate:
To me, even as late as 1960, using “cognitive” was an act of defiance. It was less outrageous for Jerry [Bruner], of course; social psychologists were never swept away by behaviorism the way experimental psychologists had been. But for someone raised to respect reductionistic science, “cognitive psychology” made a definite statement. It meant that I was interested in the