Ben Bradley - Darwins Psychology

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First Edition published in 2020

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I dedicate this book to:

Jane Selby, for her love, life-force, and intellectual reach

Peter Sylvester-Bradley, fossil-hunter and visionary evolutionist

Colwyn Trevarthen, mentor and inspiration

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know. 1

1 Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman(London: Gollancz, 1974), p.26.

The proper focus for psychological studies has remained in dispute from that day to this. Should mind scientists research solely the visible, measurable movements that behaviourists call responses? Or should they target mental states, consciousness, the inner life, or even the repressed conflicts glimpsed through dreams? And, if so, how could psychology ever be truly scientific? By the 1920s, the word crisis was referring to the embarrassing proliferation of incommensurable schools within the discipline: structuralism; functionalism; behaviourism; psychoanalytical; Gestalt; cultural-historical; social; personality; developmental; biological; comparative. More and more different starting-points were being invented and pursued at the same time in separate silos. Such proliferation has not slackened: humanist; ego; phenomenological; sociobiological; cognitivist; critical; discursive; dialectical; feminist; hermeneutic; postmodern; transpersonal; cognitive-behavioural; positive; and evolutionary psychologies continue to hatch and multiply.

Against this background, the need to present psychology as a coherent way of studying humans forced its adepts to bracket off discussion about starting-points and agree, instead, to agree on methods: the emblem of the laboratory; the ideal of experimentation; the importance of precisely defining variables; the careful aggregation of numerical data; and their statistical analysis.

But crises keep coming. From the 1960s on, the worm turned inwards, infecting trust in the validity of the experimental method itself. First came proof that the people upon whom psychologists experimented were far less passive than assumed, second-guessing the aims of the experiments in which they were enrolled, and then acting accordingly. This fed doubts about the relevance of research findings to anything beyond the little social drama of the particular study that gave rise to them.

Lately, we have the replication crisis. Our discipline staggers under the discovery that many of the findings produced by our most prized methods of research cannot be replicated in follow-up studies.