Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [434]
Psychology, furthermore, is rife with what Jerome Kagan has called “unstable ideas”—concepts and theoretical statements that do not refer to fixed and unchanging realities but are subjective and variable. Unlike the phenomena in physics, which are events in the physical world, many of those in psychology concern the meanings of certain events to human beings; two psychologists using the same term may be speaking of quite different things, especially at different periods of time and in different sociocultural settings.
Some years ago, Kagan, looking back at his earlier writings, said, “I realized, to my embarrassment, that I had assumed fixed meanings for ideas like maturation, memory, and continuity of mood and habit.” But with the perspective of years, he could see that the meanings of those and many other ideas in psychology vary according to how a researcher gathers evidence. One defines and studies fear as a set of biological events, another as the inner experiences of his subjects when they are feeling afraid. But the two sets of data are not coterminous; often the biological signs are missing in a person feeling fear and the emotion is absent in a person exhibiting its biological signs. The truth of supposedly scientific statements about fear depends on what one means by the term.18 The same is true of so central a subject in psychology as emotion: As we have seen, emotion has been defined and redefined, decade by decade, since the time of William James, and despite the accumulation of a plethora of data, the question of the nature of emotion is still being explored by probing analytical discourses.
Again unlike physics, psychology has many laws that hold good only within the culture where the observations were made. In recent years psychologists have become interested in the cross-cultural validity of the laws of their science and have identified a number that appear to be universal, including some of Piaget’s observations on stage development, the sequence in which children acquire the components of language, the spontaneous human tendency toward categorization, the tendency toward social loafing, and others. But they have also found that many other laws of developmental phenomena hold good only where they were deduced or in culturally similar settings. Among these are the definitions and development of masculinity, femininity, love, and jealousy; the tendency to conform to the majority and to obey authorities; the use of logic in reasoning; and the development of feelings of kinship and belonging.19
None of this means that psychology is not a science. But it is not a coherent science with a coherent and comprehensive theory; it is an intellectual and scientific jumble sale.
Forty-odd years ago, when the cognitive revolution was breaking out of the confines of behaviorism, the profusion of possibilities was, at first sight, stimulating and exhilarating, but on closer inspection proved to be bewildering and troubling. One psychologist, David L. Krantz of Lake Forest College, has described how psychology appeared to him initially and later:
When I first became aware of psychology, I was most excited by its enormous range and diversity…I was only vaguely aware, and largely unconcerned, that the chapters in the introductory textbook did not relate to each other. Actually, their non-overlap just heightened the freshness of discovery.
Later in graduate school the excitement created by such variety was tempered by an increasing emphasis