Strengthening the scientific standing of psychology - summary of chapter 5 of Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K (second edition)

Foundations of psychology
Chapter 5
Strengthening the scientific standing of psychology

The USA began to rule psychology in the twentieth century.

• Sheer amount of research
• Textbooks

The perception of psychology in the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century

The expansion of psychology around the start of the twentieth century

As well as laboratories, in 1892 the American Psychological Association (APA) was founded, giving psychology researchers a forum to meet and discuss their findings.
Two journals were established that would dominate the field and that still exists today.

• American journal of psychology
• Psychological review

The first American psychology: functionalism

As psychology in the USA expanded, it got moulded by the expectations and preoccupations of American society.

• A strong interest in Darwin’s evolutionary theory
  • Inheritance
    America was one of the first countries where eugenics had a strong impact
    Eugenics: social philosophy claiming that the fate of a nation can be improved by selective breeding of the inhabitants
• Positive eugenics: encouraging people with desirable features to have more children
• Negative eugenics: improve society by preventing people with undesirable features from entering the country and/or having children
  • Adaptation to the environment
    Americans were convinced that human characteristics and achievements were not solely due to inheritance but depended on the environment as well.
    One could change and control human actions for the better

There was a mistrust of intellectualism, knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
America was a nation of common-sense businessmen, not interested in abstract science, but in practical accomplishments that at the same time made money, revealed God’s glory, and advanced the American dream.
If psychology were to prosper, it had to subscribe to American values, which it readily did.

Part of the attraction to the functionalist approach to the Americans was that Wundt’s experimental research programme ran into problems in 1880s.

Psychology and its position within universities

Most psychology laboratories were set up within philosophical and theological institutes.
Staff members were not always happy with this.
On other occasions experimental psychologists were told not to stay too far from good old psychology as developed in philosophical writings.

Trying to win over the public

Phrenology

Phrenology: view that mental functions are localised in the brain and that the capacity of a function corresponds to the size of the brain part devoted to it; gave rise to personality assessment by means of analysing bumps on the skull; initiated by Gall and Spurzheim at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Gall was one of the first to hypothesize that different functions were controlled by different parts of the brain.
He conjectured that the well-developed functions were supported by the parts of the brain with larger volume.

Phrenology was part of a wider and earlier belief that an individual’s personality could be deduced from his or her physical appearance, in particular from the head and the face.

Mesmerism

Mesmerism became popular in America after the Parisian Charled Poyen in the 1830-40s gave a series of lectures.
Poyen rapidly had a string of followers who took up the practice.
Demonstrations of mesmeric powers were presented as ‘psychological experiments’, to be surveyed by honourable gentlemen form the audience.

Spiritualism

Spiritualism: the belief that the spirits of the dead could be contacted by mediums.
Belief in spiritualism spread rapidly the more so because the raging Civil War claimed many lives.
By the end of the nineteenth century, spiritual sessions were a common feature in social and cultural life and scholars were invited to investigate them.

• The first psychologists were called upon to examine the scientific value of these phenomena

Informing the public about the ‘new psychology’

In an attempt to turn the tide, the ‘new psychologists’ (as they called themselves) published hundreds of articles about the new, scientific psychology in popular magazines.
The psychologists also held thousands of popular speeches, ‘reaching out to the public’.
Unfortunately, their impact was limited, because the topics they talked about failed to capture the public’s imagination to the same degree as phrenology, mesmerism and spiritualism.

Interim summary

• Scientific psychology expanded rapidly in the USA: many laboratories were established at universities, the APA was founded, and two important journals were initiated.
• Meanwhile psychology changed to address concerns prevalent tin American society (adaption to the environment, practical usefulness). This led to functionalism
• At the same time, the position of the psychology laboratories were precarious. They were mostly part of philosophical institutes (rather than science faculties), and the public at large did not associate psychology with science but with phrenology, mesmerism and spiritualism. This created pressure to enhance the scientific status of psychology.

Making a science of behaviour

Inspiration form animal research

Researching the preservation of races in the struggle for life

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
A central person in the dissemination of the evolutionary theory.
He wrote an essay on evolution two years before Darwin published his Origin of species.

As a result of Darwin’s and Spencer’s writings, many learned individuals became interested in animal behaviour and started to interpret it in terms of the struggle for life.
They looked to similarities between human and animal behaviour to place the different species on the evolution scale, and they searched for evidence of intelligent behaviour that had been passed from generation to generation.

Early research: trying to understand the animal’s mind

In the beginning much of the evidence gathered was anecdotal and based on the interpretation of the underlying reasoning by the animal.
According to Briton George Romanes (1848-1894), the approach combined observations of behaviour with inference of the animal’s adaptive capacities.
These capacities were considered to be the result of a mind that resembled that of humans.

• The mental processes in animals were thought to be of the same sort as you would expect to find after introspection of your own consciousness

Anthropomorphic interpretation: interpreting behaviour of non-humans living creatures by attributing human motives and human-like intelligence to them.

Thorndike’s puzzle box

Thorndike proposed the study of instinctive and intelligent behaviour in chickens.
Thorndike was forced to keep the chickens in his apartment.
He made a puzzle box.

• He did not rely on anecdotal evidence, but on careful observation of animals put in controlled environments
• He based his conclusions on the animal’s behaviour, not on what was supposedly went on in their minds

He put animals in a box, and outside the box food was presented which the animal could reach if it managed to solve the puzzle and open the door.
Thorndike noted how long it took the animal to get out of the box.
Law of effect: behavioural law introduced by Thorndike to refer to the fact that behaviours followed by consequences are strengthened and more likely to be repeated.

Learning in animals did not involve the animal solving the problem by associating ideas of actions and rewards.
Instrumental conditioning: name introduced by Thorndike to refer to learning on the basis of the law of effect; called operant conditioning by Skinner.

Much later, Thorndike’s claim against social learning in animals is proven wrong.

Thorndike’s work had an enormous impact on animal research, because his approach was much more in line with the research methods in the natural sciences than the previous anecdotal and anthropomorphic attempts.
Comparative psychology: study of behaviour of animals, usually with the intention to shed light on human functioning within the framework of the evolutionary theory.

Pavolov’s research on classical conditioning

Ivan Pavolov (1849-1936)
Classical conditioning: form of learning discovered by Pavlov in which an association is made between two events in the environment; usually studied with a stimulus that elicits a reflex-like response to which a second, initially neutral stimulus is coupled.
Pavlov’s research brought research on animal behaviour into the realm of natural sciences.

Interim summary

• The evolutionary theory led to an increased interest in animal behaviour
• Initially animal behaviour was studied by focusing on anecdotes of intelligent behaviour. These were explained by assuming the same reasoning processes in animals as in humans
• Thorndike introduced a different approach. Animals were put into a controlled environment and conclusions were drawn on the basis of the animals’ behaviour
• The focus of animal behaviour was further strengthened by Pavlov’s work on classical conditioning
• Together the changes resulted in a research method that much more resembled the methods used in the natural sciences. Watson started to make the claim that the method would also be good for the study of human functioning

The 1913 behaviourist manifesto

Watson used his position as editor of Psychological Review to promote the case for animal research.
In 1913 he published a scathing article against the lack of scientific rigour in the ongoing investigations in most psychological laboratories.
This article would be the beginning of behaviourism.
Behaviourism: movement in psychology arguing that observable behaviours are the most important aspect of human functioning to be understood; denies to various extents the relevance of information processing going on in the mind; particularly strong in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century.

• An element that played a role in the shift from introspection to observation was the impact of evolutionary theory on American psychology.
  Survival in a context of natural selection primarily depends on how the animal acts, not on what it ‘thinks’.
• Introspection turned out to be a very counter-intuitive and difficult procedure for students to use in their participants.
  • It was much easier simply to observe what others were doing

Interim summary

• In 1913 Watson used his position as editor of Psychological Research to launch the behaviourist manifesto
• Psychology was defined as a purely objective experimental branch of natural science, based on the prediction and control of behaviour
• In the manifesto Watson argued that previous research on introspection into consciousness had failed significantly
• In the manifesto Watson left an opening for later study of more complex behaviour. In his later writings he came to deny the importance of such behaviour

The influence of the philosophy of science

Positivism

Watson’s attempt to increase the scientific standing of psychology was embedded within a wider movement to make science the cornerstone of human progress.
Positivism: a movement which saw science as the motor of progress.

The appeal to positivism was due to the triumphant writings of scientists and scientifically-minded authors, who used the scientific achievements to try to convince society that scientific knowledge was superior to humanists knowledge.

• Because science is based on observation and experimentation, its findings are always true
• Scientific theories are summaries of the empirical findings. Therefore, they are always true as well
• Because scientific knowledge is infallible, it should be the motor of all progress

Given the positivist tenet that the natural sciences were the most successful development in human reasoning, philosophers and scientists started to examine what exactly was the core of the scientific approach.
Philosophy of science: branch of philosophy that studies that foundations of scientific research, to better understand the position of scientific research to other forms of information acquisition and generation.

• The importance of mathematical laws to describe reality.
  • This was not enough

Requirement of operational definitions

From the writings about the philosophy of science, the behaviourists distilled three ideas that were important for the further development of scientific psychology and behavioural sciences in general

• You had to be able to represent the elements of a mathematical law as numbers
  • The numbers had to represent the essence of the variable
  • Represent the variables in therms of how they had been measured
    Operational definition: definition of a variable in terms of how the variable has been measured; allows the description of the variable in quantitative form.
• A distinction had to be made between independent variables and dependent variables
  • Independent variables were characteristics of the environment and/or the participant that might have an impact on the behaviour and that could be manipulated by the researcher
  • Dependent variables were behaviour features that could be measured to see whether the independent variable had an effect
• The necessity of verification in science
  Verification: principle that up to the 1950s formed the core of the scientific method; a proposition was meaningful (scientific) if its truth could be empirically verified.

Interim summary

• Behaviourism was part of a wider movement within Western society to make science the cornerstone of human progress
• The philosophers of science tried to define the qualities of a true science. In addition to the ideal of mathematical laws, behaviourists took three ideas from them
  • Operational definitions are necessary
  • There is a distinction between independent variables and dependent variables
  • Science relies on verification

Further developments in behaviourism: Skinner versus Tolman

Skinner and radical behaviourism

Watson’s legacy was continued by three heavyweight successors

• Clark Hull
• Burrhus Frederic Skinner
  Well known for his research on operant conditioning and radical behaviourism
• Edward C. Tolman

Radical behaviourism: strong version of behaviourism, defended by Skinner, which denies the relevance of information processing in the mind and holds that all human behaviour can be understood on the basis of S-R associations.
Skinner denied the relevance of information processing in the mind.
All that happened was the direct activation of responses on the basis of stimulus input.

One of Skinner’s views was that humans have much less control over their actions than they assume.
They simply respond to events in the environment and do not take initiative themselves.
Skinner’s strong stance eventually did behaviourism more harm than good.

Tolman and purposive behaviourism

Tolman thought that operant conditioning could not be understood in simple S-R terms and he devised several experiments to show this.

In Skinner’s view, animals acquired behaviours because the association between an environmental cue and a particular behaviour was strengthened by subsequent reinforcement.
If this reasoning was true, Tolman argued, animals who were not reinforced would not learn.
But this was not what he observed.
Latent learning: the acquisition of knowledge that is not demonstrated in observable behaviour.
On the basis of these and other findings Tolman stated that animal and human behaviour was motivated by goals.
Purposive behaviourism: version of behaviourism, defended by Tolman, which saw behaviour as goal-related; agreed with other behaviourists that psychology should be based on observable behaviour.

Interim summary

• After Watson’s departure from academic life, behaviourism was continued by three heavyweight neo-behaviourists: Hull, Skinner and Tolman
  • Hull: mathematical equations with operationally defined variables that allow detailed predictions of behaviour in specified circumstances
  • Skinner: radical behaviourism
  • Tolman: purposive behaviourism

Adding cognitions to behaviour

Shortly after World War II voices against behaviourism grew louder and a new movement became visible, cognitive psychology.

Mathematical and technological advances questioning the behaviourist tenets

The most important factors in the developments of the 1940s were technological advances outside the psychological laboratories.
Before and during World War II the new spearhead of technology became information handling.
Whereas behaviourism denied information processing inside the human head, the scientific world outside became very much centred on information handing in machines.

Information can be represented as logical operations

By the beginning of the twentieth century it became clear among mathematicians that any mathematical operation, and indeed any type of information, could be expressed by means of logical operations involving the values 0 and 1. this are Boolean operations.
Turing proved in 1936 that extremely basic machines working on the basis of Boolean logic would be able to simulate the performance of much more complex and powerful machines working on the same principles.
Turing machine: basic (hypothetical) machine operating on the basis of Boolean logic and able to simulate the processing of more complex machines operating according to these principles.
By the end of World War II, the first practical applications of the new computers became visible.

The brain can do Boolean operations

In 1943 a neurophysiologists, Warren McCulloch, and a logician, Walter Pitts, published an article in which they argued that the human brain could be thought of as a Boolean device as well.

• Under certain assumptions the operations of a neuron and its connections with other neurons could be modelled in terms of Boolean logic.
  • This meant that the human brain was capable of storing and transforming information in the same way as computers.

Strings of S-R connections cannot be used to represent human thinking

Once it was realised that a Turing machine on the basis of Boolean logic could simulate all types of information processing, including human thinking and language, researchers started to examine whether the same was true for the S-R models postulated by the behaviourists.
These models accepted only a subset of operations.
Karl Lashley was the first researcher to question the viability of the behaviourist S-R models.

Interim summary

After World War II experimental psychologists came to include mental processing in their models. This was due to the following developments:

• Mathematicians proved that all information could be represented by a Turing machine, working on the basis of binary units and Boolean operations.
• This information is to a large extent independent of the device on which it is implemented
• Neurophysiologists presented evidence that the brain could be considered as a Turing machine
• It was argued that the S-R chains proposed by the behaviourists were not powerful enough to be Turing machines and hence to simulate human behaviour

The liberating metaphor of the computer

Three further ways in which the availability of computers changed research for psychologists

A new explanation of the purposiveness of behaviour

A problem that had faced psychologists from the start was how to account for the fact that people appear to have clear goals in their life which they deliberately choose and which direct behaviour.
This seemed to require the existence of a homunculus.
Homunculus: word (meaning ‘little man’) used to refer to the difficulty of explaining goal-oriented behaviour without making use of an ultimate intelligent (human-like) control centre

Computers showed intelligent functioning that could be described as goal-directed.
Information feedback: mechanism in which the current performance level is compared to the desired end-state and the discrepancy is used to bring the performance closer to the end-state aimed for.
This was important for psychology because it explained a great deal of goal-directed behaviour that previously seemed to require a homunculus explanation.
Although informational feedback did not solve the whole homunculus problem, it drastically increased the similarity between man and machine.

Simulation of human thinking

Computers could start to simulate the hypothesised psychological processes in computer programs, with the ideal being a computer program that would pass the Turing test.
Turing test: test described by Alan Turing, which involves a human interacting with a machine and another human without being able to discriminate the machine from the human; machines that pass the Turing test are seen as the goal of artificial intelligence.
The comparison of human and computer functioning gave rise to a new research field, artificial intelligence (AI).

Psychologists as software engineers

Computers gave psychological researchers a better idea of their role relative to that of other scientists.
They were programmers working on the software of humans.

• This could be done to a large extent independently of the electronic circuits in the machine (anatomy)
• Psychologists could think of information in terms of algorithms that were run on the input
  Algorithms: lists of instructions that converts a given input, via a fully defined series of intermediate steps, into the desired output

Interim summary

The existence of computers provided psychologists with a new metaphor to understand the mind and the nature of their own research

• The computer made it easier to understand how an organism can seem to be goal-directed, without there being a homunculus who sets the goals and checks the progress
• Computers allowed psychologists to simulate human functioning
• Computers needed programmers who dealt with the information processing, independently of the ways in which the processes were carried out in the machine

The emergence of cognitive psychology

Because of the above developments, behaviourism came under increasing pressure

Miller’s article on the limits of short-term memory

George Millder
Wrote an article on the limits of human short-term memory.
Up to the publication of that article, new ideas had largely been ‘imposed’ on psychology from the outside.
What psychologists missed were psychological experiments that would convince them of the potential of the new movement.

In his publication, Miller reviewed the experimental evidence indicating that humans could report only seven unrelated items presented at a rate of about one stimulus per second.
This finding was the first empirical evidence that the human mind could be considered as a computer with limited ‘working memory’.

Neisser’s (1967) Cognitive psychology

Ulric Neisser.
Published a book with the title Cognitive Psychology.

• Summarised the evidence in favour of information processing in the mind
• Helped to establish the name of the new movement

By the mid-1970s academic psychologists identified themselves predominantly with cognitive psychology and not with behaviourism.
Cognitive psychology: movement ins psychology arguing that observable behaviours are the result of information processing in the mind; started in the 1950s and currently the dominant form of mainstream psychology.

Interim summary

Major steps in the emergence of cognitive psychology:

• Miller’s 1956 article on the limits of short-term memory, showing that the human brain could be conceptualised as a computer with a limited capacity.
• Neisser’s 1967 book Cognitive psychology: review of the evidence and important for establishing the name

Specific features of cognitive psychology

The fledgling cognitive psychology differed in two important ways from its predecessors

• It accepted a separate level of mental representations to which algorithms were applied
• It introduced more complex information manipulations than the simple associations that had formed the basis of human knowledge since the days of empiricism and associationism
• And, it insisted on verifiable predictions and experimental tests of the hypothesised mechanisms

Information processing on the basis of mental representations

Thinking of information as bits (0 and 1) made it possible to think of information as a separate realm, independent of the transmission device and also separate from the outside world.

Mental representation: information pattern in the mind representing knowledge obtained through observation of the application of an algorithm; forms a realm separate from the brain and could in principle be copied to another brain.
Mental representations not only became a layer different from the outside world and the brain.
Psychologists started to examine how information could be transformed by means of algorithms.
Information processing: encoding mental representations, transforming them by means of algorithms, and integrating them with existing knowledge; forms the core of cognitive psychology
Two approaches were taken

• Make use of information-processing diagrams.
  Boxes-and-arrows diagrams: flowchart outlining the different information stores (boxes) and information transformations (arrows) involved in the execution of a particular task with observable input and output; used by cognitive psychologists to detail the information-processing involved in the task.
• Write a computer program that actually performed the various transformations assumed to occur
  By trying to implement the various routines and procedures, psychologists had to be much more specific about the precise mechanisms involved, and the model guaranteed that the proposed solution worked as predicted.
  Computational models: computer program simulating the human information processing assumed to be involved in the execution of a particular task; requires researchers to be much more precise about what is going on than in a boxes-and-arrows diagram.

More complex procedures were needed than foreseen and top-down processes had to be introduced

While trying to make their computer programs work, psychologists were soon confronted by the fact that they had seriously underestimated the complexity of the information processing involved.
One of the new elements the cognitive psychologists had to introduce in their information-processing models was the existence of top-down processes.
Top-down processes: processes by which information from a higher processing stage is fed back to previous processing stages and influences the processing at these stages; found to be a helpful (and even essential) element in many computational models.

Verifiable predictions and experimental tests of the hypothesised processes

To investigate information processing in humans, cognitive psychology gratefully relied on the experimental expertise gathered by the behaviourists.
They noticed that other sciences also investigated imperceptible processes and did so by examining the influences of these processes on perceptible phenomena.
There was nothing wrong with postulating non-observable information algorithms, as long as their impact could be verified in a valid way.

Interim summary

Specific features of cognitive psychology are

• The acceptance of a separate level of mental representations, to which transformation algorithms apply
• Information processing on the mental representations captured by boxes-and-arrows diagrams and computational models
• Models designed to lead to predictions that can be verified in experiments making use of performance measures

Focus on: Has behaviourism been replaced by cognitive psychology just like behaviourism defeated structuralism and functionalism?

Elements that radical behaviourism still has to offer to psychology

• Cognitive psychology sees humans too much as ‘agents’ of the behaviour, rather than as ‘hosts’
  Cognitive psychologists tend to overlook the fact that much behaviour is the result of environmental factors
• Radical behaviourism promotes an inductive scientific method, rather than a hypothetico-deductive method.
• Radical behaviourism sees the environmental influences on behaviour as direct and not mediated by invisible cognitive or physiological factors
• Cognitive psychologists are too much interested in the average data of groups, whereas radical behaviourism is interested in the behaviour of individuals, with their unique history of interactions with their environment.

Interim summary

• Behaviourism and cognitive psychology are often depicted as revolutions that radically altered psychological research
• This is only true to some extent, because neither behaviourism nor cognitive psychology has been all-encompassing. This view also hides the fact that various approaches in psychology are not entirely incompatible with each other and represent different ideas of how scientific research should be done.