Nigel Benson - The Psychology Book

Among all the sciences, psychology is perhaps the most mysterious to the generalpublic, and the most prone to misconceptions. Even though its language and ideas haveinfiltrated everyday culture, most people have only a hazy idea of what the subject isabout, and what psychologists actually do. For some, psychology conjures up images ofpeople in white coats, either staffing an institution for mental disorders or conductinglaboratory experiments on rats. Others may imagine a man with a middle-European accentpsychoanalyzing a patient on a couch or, if film scripts are to be believed, plotting toexercise some form of mind control.

Although these stereotypes are an exaggeration, some truth lies beneath them. It isperhaps the huge range of subjects that fall under the umbrella of psychology (and thebewildering array of terms beginning with the prefix psych-) that creates confusionover what psychology entails; psychologists themselves are unlikely to agree on a singledefinition of the word. Psychology comes from the ancient Greek psyche, meaning soul or mind, and logia, a study or account, which seems to sum up thebroad scope of the subject, but today the word most accurately describes the science ofmind and behavior.

Even in its earliest days, psychology meant different things to different people.In the US, its roots lay in philosophy, so the approach taken was speculative andtheoretical, dealing with concepts such as consciousness and the self. In Europe,the study was rooted in the sciences, so the emphasis was on examining mentalprocesses such as sensory perception and memory under controlled laboratoryconditions. However, even the research of these more scientifically orientedpsychologists was limited by the introspective nature of their methods: pioneerssuch as Hermann Ebbinghaus became the subject of their own investigations,effectively restricting the range of topics to those that could be observed inthemselves. Although they used scientific methods and their theories laid thefoundations for the new science, many in the next generation of psychologists foundtheir processes too subjective, and began to look for a more objectivemethodology.

In the 1890s, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov conducted experiments that wereto prove critical to the development of psychology in both Europe and the US. Heproved that animals could be conditioned to produce a response, an idea thatdeveloped into a new movement known as behaviorism. The behaviorists felt that itwas impossible to study mental processes objectively, but found it relatively easyto observe and measure behavior: a manifestation of those processes. They began todesign experiments that could be conducted under controlled conditions, at first onanimals, to gain an insight into human psychology, and later on humans.

The behaviorists studies concentrated almost exclusively on how behavior isshaped by interaction with the environment; this stimulusresponse theory becamewell known through the work of John Watson. New learning theories began to spring upin Europe and the US, and attracted the interest of the general public.

However, at much the same time as behaviorism began to emerge in the US, a youngneurologist in Vienna started to develop a theory of mind that was to overturncontemporary thinking and inspire a very different approach. Based on observation ofpatients and case histories rather than laboratory experiments, Sigmund Freudspsychoanalytic theory marked a return to the study of subjective experience. He wasinterested in memories, childhood development, and interpersonal relationships, andemphasized the importance of the unconscious in determining behavior. Although hisideas were revolutionary at the time, they were quickly and widely adopted, and thenotion of a talking cure continues within the various forms of psychotherapytoday.

"The first fact for us then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sortgoes on."

William James

In the mid-20th century, both behaviorism and psychoanalysis fell out of favor,with a return to the scientific study of mental processes. This marked the beginningof cognitive psychology, a movement with its roots in the holistic approach of theGestalt psychologists, who were interested in studying perception. Their work beganto emerge in the US in the years following World War II; by the late 1950s,cognitive psychology had become the predominant approach. The rapidly growing fieldsof communications and computer science provided psychologists with a useful analogy;they used the model of information processing to develop theories to explain ourmethods of attention, perception, memory and forgetting, language and languageacquisition, problem-solving and decision-making, and motivation.