Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [94]
But within two decades at least two dozen American universities were offering instruction in psychology, three psychology journals were being published, and a professional psychology society had been founded. There were several reasons for the efflorescence: the desire of many university presidents to emulate the success of the German psychological institutes, the arrival in America of psychologists trained by Wundt, and, most of all, James’s influence, exerted through his teaching, his dozens of well-received articles, and his masterwork, Principles of Psychology.
James introduced experimental psychology to America. He began giving laboratory demonstrations to students at least as early as Wundt, and he and his students started performing laboratory experiments about the same time as Wundt and his students, if not earlier. Ironically, while James made much of the value of experimentation, he himself found it boring and intellectually confining. He usually spent no more than two hours a day in the laboratory, told a friend that “I naturally hate experimental work,” and said of the Leipzig style of laboratory work, “The thought of psycho-physical experimentation and altogether of brass-instrument and algebraic-formula psychology fills me with horror.”14
Yet he believed in it and had his students perform a broad array of experiments. They whirled frogs around to explore the function of the inner ear; did the same to human deaf mutes to test James’s hypothesis that, since their semicircular canals were damaged, they should be less subject to dizziness than normal people (he was right); carried out reflex experiments on frogs’ legs, and reaction-time and speed of nerve-conduction experiments on human subjects; and, venturing far beyond Wundtian physiological psychology, did studies of hypnosis and automatic writing.
Although James hated to do experiments, he forced himself to when it was the best way to prove or disprove a theory. While writing the chapter on memory for Principles, he wanted to test the ancient belief still held by “faculty” psychologists that memory, like a muscle, can be strengthened by exercise, and that memorizing anything would therefore improve the memory not just for the memorized kind of material but for every kind. James was skeptical and used himself as his experimental subject. Over an eight-day span he memorized 158 lines of “Satyr,” a poem by Victor Hugo, taking an average of fifty seconds a line to do so. Next, working twenty minutes daily for thirty-eight days, he memorized the entire first book (798 lines) of Milton’s Paradise Lost. If the exercise theory were correct, this prolonged effort should have greatly strengthened his memory. He then went back to “Satyr” and memorized another 158 lines—and found that it took him seven seconds longer per line than the first time. Exercise hadn’t increased the strength of his memory; it had diminished it, at least temporarily.15 (He had several associates repeat the experiment, with roughly similar results.) A psychological theory accepted for two thousand years, and believed today by many laypeople, had been disproven.
But James’s own experiments were only one source, and a minor one, of his ideas about psychology. He drew upon all his reading in both philosophical and physiological psychology; spent half a year in Europe in 1882–1883 visiting universities, attending laboratory sessions and lectures, and meeting and talking to dozens of leading psychologists and other scientists; corresponded regularly with many of them; and gathered reports and clinical studies of abnormal minds, and of normal ones under hypnosis, drugs, or stress.
He derived many of his major insights and hypotheses from another and very different source: introspection, of a kind quite unlike that practiced by Wundt and his students. In James’s opinion, any effort to seize and isolate individual elements of a thought process by means of Wundtian introspection would be doomed to failure:
As a snow-flake crystal