Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [428]
If you will surf the Web for an hour or two for documents on parapsychology , you will see that in 2007, a time when our culture is perfused by scientific psychology, and particularly the twin revolutions of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, a very sizable part of our population believes fervently in many of the phenomena of parapsychology. For some of these the believers think they have evidence, although it never meets the reasonable criterion that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” A recent meta-analysis of 380 research studies of psychokinesis would indeed have been extraordinary evidence—had the results been positive; in fact, the net effect was so minuscule and meaningless that the authors suggest it was an artifact of publication bias (a result of papers with positive results getting published and those with none or negative results being rejected).103
But many believers are unconcerned about research evidence; they believe because they experience things best explained by parapsychology. They’re right about one aspect of the matter: Their experience is real—it’s an actual event in the brain. They’re wrong only in thinking that the subject of their experience was real. If a person sees the face of Jesus in a wet, oil-slicked street, it’s a reality—that is, the experience is; what’s in the street is something else altogether.
As for the vast mass of papers, books, speeches, journal articles, and other forms of communication that purport to present evidence—
Enough! This book is a history of psychology, the science of the mind; parapsychology is not psychology and not science. We have strayed off course. Let us abandon the subject and return to our story, of which there is only one more chapter.
NINETEEN
Psychology
Today
Portrait of a Psychologist
Although most thoughtful people consider the use of stereotypes small-minded and prejudiced, we all rely on generalizations about others to enable us to behave appropriately toward them. If we are seated at dinner next to a woman we have never met and learn that she is a Presbyterian minister, we speak to her somewhat differently from the way we would if we learn she is the author of scandal-mongering unauthorized celebrity biographies. Generalized expectations, though often oversimplified and inaccurate, are necessary hypotheses about people; without them we would function no better at the dinner or in other social situations than a Korowai tribesman just arrived from the wilds of Papua New Guinea.
So, what would come to your mind if you heard that the stranger seated next to you at a dinner is a psychologist?
To most people, it would mean that he or she has special insight into human nature and treats troubled people. But you, having read this far, are disabused of any such erroneous generalization. You know that “psychologist” denotes not one but a broad spectrum of occupations, many of which have nothing to do with insight into human nature, and that many psychologists are scientists, not healers. No generalization, no single image, can encompass the proficiencies and activities represented by the following handful of specimens of contemporary psychologists at work:
—In a laboratory, a young woman wearing headphones, her head inside a large scanning machine, hears a male voice uttering what she has been told are sentences; her task is to push any one of four buttons to indicate how “meaningful” each sentence is. Here are some samples of what she hears:
“the man on a vacation lost a bag and wallet”
“the freeway on a pie watched a house and window”
“on vacation lost then a and bag wallet man then a”
“a ball the a the spilled librarian in sign through fire”
“the solims on a sonting grilloted a yome and a sovier”