Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [442]
A similar answer applies to the old question about where our ideas come from: They are the product of experience and learning as filtered through and shaped by built-in neural propensities. Language acquisition is a case in point. The child’s brain has specialized areas that are able, with little help, to perceive syntactical patterns, extract meaning from speech, and group related objects into abstract categories. When the built-in wiring is defective, learning is difficult or impossible. One who is innately low in verbal ability cannot deal with difficult abstractions, no matter how much experience he or she has.
We need not restate contemporary psychology’s answers to certain other ancient questions: how perception works; how the mind solves problems; how we reason and why we often reason invalidly; how and when our actions are determined by emotions, conscious judgment, and the interplay of the two; and how selfish or altruistic, hostile or kindly patterns of behavior are constructed out of latent tendencies by familial and social experiences.
Certain other questions, however, have been called “luxury problems.” Ignorance of them does not impede scientific progress or affect the daily routine of research; seeking to answer them therefore seems unnecessary, and most psychologists, accordingly, ignore them. The nature of consciousness is one such; its use or function in human psychology is unclear, and for many years most researchers, including cognitive psychologists, neglected it and paid attention to more manageable phenomena. But as we have seen, consciousness is now receiving attention in several quarters, and this suggests that as psychology probes ever deeper into cognitive processes, it will find that consciousness plays a major role in mental phenomena and that it can no longer be considered a luxury problem. As has often been pointed out, the most sophisticated computer is vastly inferior in important ways to any ordinary person precisely because it is not conscious of itself as an entity.
Even freedom and will, two concepts all but missing from psychology for some decades, have lately come back into view. Behaviorists had swept them aside as mentalist illusions, and even cognitive psychologists had avoided them because a freely willed act seems an uncaused act—a concept anathema to science. But cognitive psychologists have been unable to sidestep or ignore choice—a meaningless concept if one insists that past and present forces determine what the individual chooses, and yet an inescapable and observable phenomenon.
An answer now proposed by a number of psychologists is that the operating system of the mind can run in a self-reflective mode, examining its own thoughts and behavior, deliberately evaluating the outcomes of various actions and possible actions, deciding which is the best, and intentionally choosing to carry it out. When we do not pursue this process, we make choices for less conscious reasons—the condition Spinoza referred to as human bondage. When we choose on the basis of self-reflection and evaluations, we approximate human freedom. Albert Bandura has made much the same point time and again. In his therapeutic research on “self-efficacy,” he has argued that freedom should not be conceived of negatively as the absence of external coercion but positively as the exercise of self-influence: “Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences…By the exercise of [self-regulation] they help to determine the nature of their situations and what they become.”41 This is the very core of his current agentic theory, mentioned above: “The evolutionary convergence of advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and made them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the courses their lives take. In this conception, people are