Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [432]
Finally, there is “spin-mediated consciousness” theory (which you need not try to decode into comprehensible language). It holds that quantum spin is the seat of consciousness: In the words of one theorist, “Consciousness is intrinsically connected to the spin process and emerges from the self-referential collapses of spin states… The nuclear spins inside neural membranes and proteins form various entangled quantum states some of which survive decoherence through quantum Zeno effects.”10 Whatever.
So much for the vain effort to stereotype the special interests and activities of psychologists. But can we not at least picture the typical psychologist as a person? We cannot. Psychologists come in both sexes and in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and levels of training and status.
Many people envision a psychologist as white, male, a “doctor,” and, as mentioned, the possessor of special insight into human nature and a healer of the mentally ailing. The last two descriptors, having to do with insight and healing, do apply to about 60 percent of the more than 102,000 doctorate-level psychologists. But nearly a third of the 102,000 are academics and researchers who have nothing to do with healing, and smaller minorities perform various services in industry, government agencies, other service settings, and schools.11 But the first descriptor, white, is reasonably correct: Nationally, fewer than 4 percent of all employed doctorate-level psychologists are black, 3.4 percent are Hispanic, and fewer than 3 percent are Asian.12 (Within the APA, for unclear reasons, only 1.7 percent of members are black, 2.1 percent Hispanic, and 1.9 percent Asian.13)
The second descriptor, male, once was accurate but has long since ceased to be. In 1910, only 10 percent of doctorate-level psychologists were women, but by 1938 the figure was 22 percent, and by 1990 40 percent, while today women make up 50 percent nationally (and within the APA, 53 percent).14 This shift is largely due to the growth of clinical psychology, which has always been relatively open to women. Academic psychology has not; for many decades, male psychologists all but excluded women from academic posts with the rationalization that they would abandon their research for years or permanently when they had children. Accordingly, male psychologists produced most research papers and held nearly all high-level academic and research positions. Only in relatively recent years have women come close to sharing academic appointments, but they still lag far behind as to equality in tenure; and while women’s names now appear on research papers as often as men’s, as of 2000 (the most recent year for which a report is available) they held fewer of the important chairs in psychology departments than their numbers warrant.15
The title “doctor,” meaning holder of a Ph.D. or other doctorate degree, is another inaccurate component of the stereotype. True, three quarters of the APA’s 90,000 members and an even higher proportion of the 12,000 full members of the APS (Association for Psychological Science, formerly known as the American Psychological Society) do hold Ph.D.’s or, in a few cases, Psy.D.’s, or Ed.D.’s. But at a lower level of advanced training there are well over 50,000 psychologists, most of them outside APA and APS, who hold only master’s degrees but who perform useful services, including testing, counseling, psychotherapy, and various routine psychological services in industry, nursing homes, schools, clinics, government agencies, and private practice.16*
All of which demonstrates that psychologists come in a variety of models, some as unlike others as if they had nothing in common except the generic name.
Portrait of a Science
What is true of psychologists and their activities is