Summary of History and Theory of Psychology- PSY731 (Chapters 1, 3-10, 13, 15)
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Course
PSY731 (PSY731)
Institution
Ryerson University (Ru
)
This document contains a comprehensive set of detailed notes taken from the textbook for PSY 731 (History and Theory of Psychology (Chapters 1, 3-10, 13, 15). The notes summarize key concepts, theories, and findings discussed in the chapters required for the course, providing a structured and acces...
• INTRODUCTION
o Studying the History of Psychology
▪ Historiography: the study of the history of history
• Historiographers examine the variety of ways in which historians have written
history
• Most influential modern history of psychology was written by Edwin G. Boring,
about primarily the growth of the scientific, experimental side of psychology
since the 19th century
• Believed we had to place each development in historical context to fully
understand, finding it necessary to begin his history before the 19th century
▪ Person or Zeitgeist?
• Boring recognized two approaches to history
o One approach emphasized the role of the creative individual in
moving history along
▪ The history of psychology is primarily the stories of those
outstanding people who have contributed to it and changed it
o Second approach; understand each persons work I relation to the
cultural context within which it takes place
▪ This cultural context is called the zeitgeist, or ‘spirit of the
times,’ a concept that Boring attributed to Wolfgang von
Goethe
▪ Give credit to the person where it is due, as well as the role of
the Zeitgeist
• In other words, would someone else have produced the
idea anyway, given the way ideas were developing in
the 19th century
• In addition to Boring’s person-Zeitgeist distinction,
other constructs have been used to represent historical
processes…
▪ Ixion’s Wheel or Jacob’s Ladder?
• Frank Manuel called one construct the progressive versus the cyclical: ‘on one
hand the historical world seen as movement either to a fixed end, or to an
indefinite end that defines itself in the course of the progression, history as
novelty creating and always variant; on the other hand circularity, eternal
recurrence, return to the beginning of things, sheer reintegration or similar
recapitulation
• Suggested Ixion and Jacob be taken as personifications of this polarity
o Ixion was a figure in Greek mythology who was condemned to
rotate forever on a wheel of fire
o In the bible, Jacob dreamed that there was a ladder set up on earth
and the top of it reached to heaven
o Question is, whether history is like Ixion, tied to a revolving wheel,
or like Jacob, dreaming of the ladder that reaches up to the heavens
• Psychology is cyclical
o An idea may go out of fashion for a while, be forgotten, and come
back again as a “new” idea
o Debates now are hardly an original observation
History and Theory of Psychology Page 1
, o Debates now are hardly an original observation
o Possible psychology both progresses and is cyclical
▪ Ideas may keep getting rediscovered but at the same time
those ideas may be understood in progressively more
sophisticated ways
▪ A spiral may be a useful symbol of such a process in which
ideas recur, but at higher and higher levels
• Ideas will be considered again and again by people in
the present
• Accumulation of examples becomes an advantage
▪ The New History of Psychology
• Laurel Furomoto came up with the new history of psychology: emphasizing the
notion that scientists often operate in a subjective fashion, under the influence
of a variety of extra-scientific factors
o Rejected view of scientific activity as a continuous progression from
error to truth, and thus depicts scientific change as a shift from one
world view to another- world views that are linked to theoretical
commitments involving ethical and metaphysical considerations
o The New History of Science
▪ Towards the end of the 20th century, research methods were thought to emphasize
the research process; facts may not ‘speak for themselves’
▪ Pedhazur believed different theories could all be consistent with the same data
• No guarantee of the validity of a theory
▪ The process of scientific inquiry contains a subjective aspect
• Most influential was Thomas Kuhn; concluded that the development of these
disciples had not been smooth
o Scientific disciplines appeared to develop discontinuously- during
long periods almost all workers in the same discipline believed the
same beliefs about methods, data, theory, etc
o A paradigm is a set of fundamental beliefs that guide workers in a
scientific discipline
▪ New paradigms emerged and an old one would be
overthrown; including Darwin’s theory
▪ Kuhn argued that paradigms shape the scientists view of the
world
▪ Can be paradigm clashes in which different ways of
interpreting the data exist; we may see different patterns in
the same situation- each “theory” is equally consistent with
the data, however how we interpret the data may determine
how the data is seen
o Altogether, each theory attempts to explain a different range of
data, but no single theory explains all the data
o Some theories don’t overlap at all, meaning that what one theory
explains is not regarded as data by the other theory and vice versa
▪ Ex. Introspection
o Kuhn believes that the establishment of a single paradigm means
that a discipline becomes a normal science in which the workers
share a view of what constitutes the proper problems and methods
to their discipline
▪ Certain data may be regarded as illegitimate
o Feminism and the Psychology of Women
▪ Feminism is not a single point of view but has many different aspects
▪ Feminism has identified ‘distortions and biases’ in psychology
History and Theory of Psychology Page 2
, ▪ Feminism has identified ‘distortions and biases’ in psychology
▪ One figure in this domain is Naomi Weisstein, founder of Chicago Women’s Liberation
Movement
▪ Another figure was Bernstein and Russo, whom argued that ‘male bias pervades the
very essence of the profession of psychology’; contribution of women wasn’t being
acknowledged and to study the women of psychology and the psychology of women
• Furomoto called this ‘compensatory history,’ contributions of women that have
been neglected by historians
• Furomoto noted that the extension of this research is the ‘reconstructions of
women’s experiences’
▪ Kimball observed that feminist psychologists have worked within 2 traditions
• 1) one emphasizing the similarities between genders
• 2) second emphasizing the positive human characteristics that have been
undervalued because of the association with women
▪ Evelyn Fox Keller influenced the history of science and psychology; suggesting men
confused their own point of view with the absolute truth
• Believed that traditional accounts of science tended to ignore the role played by
factors such as intuition, empathy, personal engagement; characteristics
attributed to women
o Gender and science are socially constructed; so are masculine and
feminise
• She argued we need to become aware of the science-gender system by which
our conception of gender and our conception of science mutually determine
one another
o Psychology as a Social Construction
▪ The paradigm concept and feminism both imply psychology doesn’t involve
accumulation of knowledge, but is also driven by social processes
▪ Social Constructionism: people are predestined to construct and to inhabit a world
with others
• This world becomes a dominant and definite reality
• Limits are set by nature
• Once constructed, acts back upon nature
• People produce reality and therefore produce themselves
▪ A dialectical process is one which opposing tendencies shape one another
• Opposing tendencies of interest to social constructionists are ‘exogenic’ and
‘endogenic’
• Exogenic means coming from outside; stressing importance of factors external
to a person as determinants of human experience (ex. British empiricism)
• Endogenic means coming from inside; humans harbour inherent tendencies to
think, categorize, or process information
• Limitations to both the above, therefore, try to see knowledge as something
people do together, not something people possess; assume psychological
concepts are outcomes of social processes
▪ Psychological Research as a Social Construction
• Suggests that psychological research is not “objective”
• Most believe it is a social construction to some extent
• Morawski and Steele point out the importance of the social context in
understanding how experiences are done
o Negotiations about what is being observed
o What counts as an observation
• Others suggest that scientific research could both be a social construction and
still be ‘true’ in some objective sense
History and Theory of Psychology Page 3
, still be ‘true’ in some objective sense
o Many theoretical concepts and models meanings are not defined
• Kurt Danziger concluded there is no such thing as a private science
o Suggests it’s a collective access, and the objects to which the
practices of the science are directed cannot be other than social
objects constructed through the interaction of real individuals
o Reconciling the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Histories of Psychology
▪ Older histories have been guilty of presentism, which is the tendency to evaluate the
past primarily in terms of its relevance for the present
• Brought to attention by George W. Stocking
• Practitioners of the older style of the history of psychology have been criticised
for being presentist because they may have failed to understand earlier work in
its own terms
• Stocking contrasted presentism with historicism, which he called the
understanding of the past for its own sake
o Doesn’t have to be a passeist, a person who values the past more
then the present
History and Theory of Psychology Page 4
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