Psychology: Introduction.

 
In the thirties, there was a reaction against psychoanalysis, with the movement to establish psychology as a 'true' science with rigorously tested theories.

In fact, since 1879, Wundt had begun to investigate the mind through introspecting the thoughts and feelings of himself and his fellow workers, under controlled conditions, and attempting to define standardised measurements.

In the 1920's however, Watson asked how one could be sure that any one person's introspections were the same as another's. How could one measure the intangible?

The central theme of psychology, therefore, became that only events that can be observed and precisely measured can be admitted to the theory, in other words overt behaviours and external evidence of thought processes. It excludes the internal processes of psychoanalysis and any inborn abilities or mental processes.

The work of Pavlov and the idea of conditioned responses arising from specific stimuli, provided an ideal starting point and led to the behaviourist theories. These, however, became a dogma, which, until the fifties, obscured other work, such as that of Bowlby, a psychoanalyst, on the bond that children make with their caregivers, and even that of Piaget on child development.

In the clinic, it led to aversion therapy and other more or less stringent practices. Whatever one's feelings about behaviourism, it was a necessary starting point, and a useful model, as in the progressive desensitisation that is used today to help people with phobias, like, for instance, the fear of flying.

The Scientific Method.

How true is the statement "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics" - to which we would add "And then there are press reports."

Invariably, studies assume that the results will form a bell curve, with most people in the middle, and gradually decreasing numbers of people varying from the central figure. They look for "statistical significance," that is, that the result was not likely have occurred by chance. If it is just a matter of counting some accurately measurable physical entity, it works. The confusion surrounding most psychological and social studies comes from the fact that few attributes of human beings can be defined so precisely.

What follows then is a round of argument and counter-argument about the validity of the study and the way it has been carried out.

We intend to explore the problems further elsewhere. For the moment, we will suggest that the obsession with the central figure often leads to the variations being ignored, excluded, even being labelled as pathological. Science, whether biology or psychology, either studies individuals in terms of some hypothetical average person, or studies groups in which individual identity becomes submerged in the group behaviour.

As Eysenck and Keene⁽¹⁾ put it: "One of the most obvious weaknesses of . . . . psychology is the reluctance to take individual differences seriously." Though they are writing about cognitive psychology, it is a weakness of all the human sciences. They suggest that even though there is an analysis of variance, individual differences are discarded as error.

Social Learning Theory.

Whatever one may feel about behaviourism, it is a useful model, albeit one with limitations. We will leave the subject at this point and look at Social Learning theory which began from the same premise, insisting that all our behaviours are learned from our social environment - the inference being that they can be unlearned.

The arguments for and against inborn knowledge as against acquired learning have existed since Grecian times. Aristotle believed that we build up a mental view of the world by building up associations of ideas from our experiences, while Plato taught that we have structures and ways of thinking already within us when we are born. These two views became the associationist and rationalist schools of thought, the nature-nurture debate in another form.

Clearly the rationalist viewpoint accorded with religious dogma, and gave rise to the preformationist view of human life. Thus it was thought that the new child was carried in the sperm as a complete copy of its adult form. Inside the seed was all the component parts of the child, and the idea of original sin was an intrinsic part of this, carried from generation to generation. This became known as the preformationist view.

During the eighteenth century, the cell was discovered and this view was replaced by predetermination, which stated that development followed a natural plan, very similar to the religious notion of predestination. Remains of this, of course, persist in the more extreme biological and genetic arguments

 It was as a reaction to this, that Locke argued that the mind is born as a "white paper devoid of all characters." Although Locke was arguing that we are born with some propensities, but without any innate knowledge, it led to the idea of the tabula rasa or 'blank slate'. This, in turn, led to the idea that all people are born equal and identical, and that development was the root of all problems. This is the 'nurture' side of the argument, and it found favour with the feminist movement of the 'fifties. Perceived limitations in women's social role and their abilities were due to the restrictions placed on them by society. They rejected biological theories of innate abilities (or limitations) as taking away free will.

Cognitive Psychology.

The behaviourist idea of people's mental structures as complex networks of stimulus/response reactions seems impossibly cumbersome and limited. As long ago as 1932, Tolman had reported that his laboratory rats were not behaving in accordance with strict behaviourist principles. This, and other evidence that was appearing, led to the beginnings of cognitive psychology.

 
Stimulus/response theory predicted that, having found their way to some food, the rats could repeat their journey, on a future occasion, by simply repeating the muscle movements. The result that is often quoted is that filling the maze with water, so that the rats had to swim, did not alter their performance. This is a simplistic description, but it was another study by Tolman which originally raised doubts and led him to believe that the rats had developed an mental map of their surroundings.

 
Thus began work in investigating mental maps or 'schemas'. Much of the initial work was in visual perception, since the parameters involved are easy to measure in an unequivocal manner, but soon encompassed theories of development. Cognitive psychology's strength is that its studies can be repeated with people of many cultural backgrounds, and some of it is supported by neurological studies. Many authors have seized on it for excessively rationalist argument that "biology is destiny," notably Moir and Jessell.⁽²⁾ It is important to note that cognitive psychology itself makes no such claims. It describes mental processes which appear to develop in all human beings, but it does not, in general, attempt to discover whether they are inborn, or result from commonalities in cultural environments.

The Interactionist Viewpoint.

With the tension between the two arguments, it is hardly surprising that psychology examination questions begin with the dreaded words "compare and contrast . . . "

Social learning theory seems concerned only with the learning of gender roles. That is, the child is recognised as being of one sex or the other and certain behaviours are encouraged or discouraged, learning what sex it is in the process.

Cognitive psychology sets out to discover what boys and girls do, as they follow processes related to their sex. It assumes that they know first what sex they are, though it does not say how they know, or what form this knowledge takes

Taken to extremes, some authors assert that there is a fixed and unvarying biological path throughout life. However, in social learning theory, the child is equally at the mercy of its environment.

Psychology has moved to the interactionist viewpoint, which suggests that different children learn different things in different ways in response to pre-existing dispositions. Thus no child has exactly the same biology as another, nor the same environment. Moreover, it does not passively react, but actively explores its world, and builds up its own individual mindset.

While the associationist and rational philosophies were analysed by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781, it seems have taken science two centuries to catch up. In philosophy, this is the constructivist school of thought.

A child's learning comes from its social environment, not merely from passive imitation or imposed teaching, but from active exploration of its world. Yet there are progressive stages in its ability to learn and in what it can learn. Moreover, its individual genetic and biological inheritance may colour the way it approaches problems and the way it views the world.

Bibliography.

1. Eysenck.M.W., Keane.M.T., (1990) Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook, p500, Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (bookshelf)
2. Moir.A. and Jessell.D., (1989) Brain Sex, London: Mandarin Books.