Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [433]
The vignettes above and what we have seen throughout this history document psychology’s sprawl and diversity. But to get a still better idea of how diversified and chaotic a field psychology has become, one has only to leaf through half a dozen volumes of Annual Review of Psychology. Each year’s volume contains about a score of chapters reviewing recent work in such disparate major areas of psychology as perception, reasoning, and motor skill acquisition, others covering more recondite and remote subjects such as brain dopamine and reward, auditory physiology, social and community intervention, hemispheric asymmetry, music psychology, various applications of brain scanning, and the psychology of religion. In the course of half a dozen years the Annual covers roughly a hundred different fields, each with its own subtopics, any of which could consume a researcher’s full time and effort.
An even clearer and more variegated picture emerges from the gargantuan programs of the APA’s conventions. Consider, for instance, this random sampling of the titles of the plenary sessions at the August 2006 meeting:
—“Emerging Findings from Multicultural Psychiatric Epidemiology”
—“Fear and Anxiety: Breaking News from Neuroscience”
—“Uses and Abuses of Evolutionary Psychology”
—“The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”
—“Failure of Visual Awareness”
—“How Do People Change?”
A similarly random sampling of the vast array of addresses, sessions, and workshops at that meeting would yield a taste not of a consommé but a mulligan stew of psychological science.
The contents page of APS’s Current Directions in Psychological Science, though research oriented—APS allows clinical material in only through a crack in the door—is just as variegated and wide-ranging; here are a few titles of articles in recent issues:
—“Infants’ Differential Processing of Female and Male Faces”
—“The Structure of Emotion: Evidence from Neuroimaging Studies” —“Talking and Thinking with Our Hands”
—“Comparing Exemplar- and Rule-Based Theories of Categorization”
—“Brain Mechanisms for Interpreting the Actions of Others from Biological-Motion Cues”
—“Stress and Adaptation: Toward Ecologically Relevant Animal Models”
Can any discipline so untidy, multifarious, and disorganized be called a science? Are we justified in believing that its statements about human nature and the human mind are scientific truths?
A century ago William James, after brilliantly setting forth what psychology was at the time, ruefully said that it was not yet a science but only “the hope of a science.” We have seen how he characterized it:
A string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them; but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced.17
Compare that with what psychology has become: a massive accretion of facts, observations, and laboratory research findings, not raw but digested by sophisticated statistical analysis; much gossip and wrangle, but mostly about testable interpretations and theories, not mere opinions; a wealth of classifications and generalizations at the theoretical level; and a profusion of laws and propositions about our states of mind and their relation to brain events whose consequences can be, and regularly are, causally deduced and put to the proof. Psychology has long since grown beyond the hope of a science to become the reality of a science.
But one unlike most others in perplexing and troubling ways.
In the natural sciences, knowledge is cumulative and moves toward a deeper understanding of nature. Relativity theory did not disprove Newtonian physics but absorbed it and went beyond it to deal with phenomena Newton could not observe; modern evolutionary