Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [435]
That’s how it looked to him four decades ago, when he and many other psychologists were troubled by the diversity and discontinuity of their field. And they continued to be troubled for years. One commentator predicted only sixteen years ago in American Psychologist that within the next fifty years the major fields of psychology would split off, achieve separate identities, and establish their own departments in universities, and that psychology would be viewed in perspective as a temporary phase in the development of the multiple behavioral sciences.21 Other theorists were both less and yet more optimistic, holding that no unifying theory was possible and that none was needed. Sigmund Koch, who spent many years looking at the larger issues of the field, concluded over two decades ago that “the noncohesiveness of psychology [should] finally be acknowledged by replacing it with some such locution as ‘the psychological studies.’ ”22
But others have long argued that some new conception, theory, or metaphor will be, and must be, found to unite the semiautonomous specialties of psychology; they see a desperate need for “grand unifying principles” that will prevent disintegrative fractionation.23 They feel sure that a new and unifying metaphor or conception is bound to appear. Yet how little consensus there currently is about what those principles might be we can gather from listening to big-theory suggestions by two of the most respected senior psychologists of our time.
First, the eminent cognitive psychologist Albert Bandura: He has long espoused and continues to develop a broad and pervasive “agentic theory” that encompasses virtually all of human behavior. Bandura holds that the emergence of the human ability to symbolize the world (in language and signs) gave us the power to become agents of our own lives, not just passive products of the forces and influences acting upon us. “Psychology is the one discipline that uniquely encompasses the complex interplay among biological, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and sociostructural determinants of human functioning… The exercise of individual and collective agency is contributing increasingly, in virtually every sphere of life, to human development, adaptation, and change.”24
Second, the Nobel laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel: He says, “Understanding the human mind in biological terms has emerged as the central challenge for science in the 21st century.” Biology, with its vast new armamentarium of knowledge and methodology, has “turned its attention to its loftiest goal: understanding the biological nature of the human mind.” Future historians, looking back, will see that “the most valuable insights into the human mind…did not come from the disciplines traditionally concerned with mind—philosophy, psychology, or psychoanalysis. Instead they came from a merger of these disciplines with the biology of the brain…”25
There could hardly be a greater difference of opinion as to what kind of psychological Theory of Everything is about to emerge. But while nothing we have seen in this history since the onset of the cognitive revolution indicates that such a theory is imminent, in practical terms much that we have seen points to the very opposite of fractionation and noncohesiveness. Admittedly, many psychologists are working on ever-smaller, more specialized subjects—but a great deal of current research is multidisciplinary, and researchers, in pursuing almost any topic worthy of inquiry, will now draw on the insights and enrichment of cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology, computation theory, the infrastructure findings of neuroscience, and so on. As Michael Gazzaniga, the eminent cognitive neuroscientist and 2006 president of the APA recently wrote,
As we study the mind, complex mechanisms will be common… [and] frequently, what we see