Psychology "still in its infancy"?

I'm in complete agreement with Adam (see the NB Benefits and Hazards thread)about the former reasonableness of speculating about additonal sensory channels, and the present un-reasonableness of same. Psychology has come a long way in the last century or so.

But this brings up another point.

How many times, I ask you, how many times -- <pause for dramatic effect> -- have we not heard Rand's comment repeated (often without attribution) that psychology as a science is "still in its infancy"?

Adam, or anyone, can we really reconcile these remarks -- about it being known conclusively that there are no additional sensory channels and psychology being "in its infancy"?

Personally, I'd really like to dump the latter. But maybe there's still a good reason for continuing to regard psychology as a baby science, not on the par with, say, biology.

By the way, when did biology become an "adolescent" or "adult" science? Was it when DNA was discovered to be the basis of life? Or much earlier, when the taxonomy of the plant and animal kingdoms was settled on? Or when? And why? And can we analogize to when and how psychology would become a mature science?

Please put on your philosopher of science hats. This has been bugging me for some time, and I'd appreciate some thoughtful input on it. Thanks!

REB

Post 1

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 11:08am

Roger,
I'd put adolescence roughly around the time of Mendel's experiments, and young adulthood around the time of the discovery of the structure of DNA with increasing maturity since.

The reason is that these are verifiable, objective experiments, subject to quantification. You, why do I believe this I wonder, will [likely] have a different view.
[And, I should add -- in editing -- they give us causal information about living entitites that help to explain the more obvious, observed characteristics.]

I make no judgment about the level of maturity of Psychology. Of course, the popular stuff isn't anywhere close to science but I wouldn't want to tar the entire profession with that brush.

(Edited by Jeff Perren on 12/04, 11:15am)

Post 2

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 11:25am

Jeff Perren wrote:

I'd put adolescence roughly around the time of Mendel's experiments, and young adulthood around the time of the discovery of the structure of DNA with increasing maturity since.

The reason is that these are verifiable, objective experiments, subject to quantification. You, why do I believe this I wonder, will have a different view.

Not really. It sounds about right to me.

Could we speculate that psychology will have a similar level of maturity when researchers have analyzed the physical basis of consciousness and discovered the necessary molecular or cellular or electro-chemical structures or processes that are distinctive to consciousness? Are we close to that now, with work in process on neural nets, etc.?

I make no judgment about the level of maturity of Psychology. Of course, the popular stuff isn't anywhere close to science but I wouldn't want to tar the entire profession with that brush.

I think that most of pop psychology focuses not on the "DNA" level of consciousness, but on the behavioral level. Just as some biologists study not the molecular basis of life, but forms of behavior and function (and dysfunction) of living things, so do some psychologists study things like personality, cognitive functioning, and their dysfunctions, etc., a la Freud, Jungs, et al. Along come their legions of followers, imitators, etc., and inevitably, some have attempted to simplify and/or popularize those and other ideas, in order to help pass along healing techniques and/or make a buck. On this level of psychology, we are still very much in the descriptive, trial-and-error stage.

I think that Nathaniel Branden's work is a noteworthy exception to this, and that his The Psychology of Self-Esteem and The Disowned Self are landmark books in the understanding of the human psyche. Ironically, his work has made self-esteem a staple of pop psychology.

REB

Post 3

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 11:51am

It could be that psychology is considered in its "infancy" because the subject of psychology, "the mind", is still not fully understood or well defined. Like chemistry evolving from alchemy, psychology was the evolution of religion's care for "the soul." Once the soul was conceded not to "exist", we switched to "psyche", which meant "breath" :

1647, "animating spirit," from L. psyche, from Gk. psykhe "the soul, mind, spirit, breath, life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body" (personified as Psykhe, the lover of Eros), akin to psykhein "to blow, cool," from PIE base *bhes- "to blow" (cf. Skt. bhas-). The word had extensive sense development in Platonic philosophy and Jewish-infl. theological writing of St. Paul. In Eng., psychological sense is from 1910.

We went from psysche to mind, but without a clear definition of the mind. Some think its a manifestation of the brain, some think it's a manifestation of language, Szasz claims its a metaphor, etc.

When we know for sure, we'll move from adolescence to adulthood?

Post 4

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 1:07pm

I'm not an expert, or anything close, in that field. But from an amateur's perspective it does not inspire confidence when those who are can not seem to agree about anything -- not even whether or not the subject of their study (the mind exists. (Though the behaviorists seem to have largely disappeared.) If this is caricature, I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.

That the so-called science that still divides itself into 'schools' is one strong piece of evidence, I suppose, that it is still in it's infancy. But, then, measuring the degree of maturity of a science is not itself an exact science, is it?

I suppose similar complaints could be lodged against Philosophy but only a small number of its practitioners claim to be 'doing science'.

Post 5

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 4:19pm

I'm going to make a couple of broad comments, btw, I really appreciate this thread opening up!

First, if I may, I'd like to throw out Ken Wilber's AQAL model, which, as NB has said, is "quite useful" :)

One reason I'm doing this is because I have become convinced that the topic is one that requires a holistic approach in order to get any kind of decent toehold on it, it involves consciousness. If you are unfamiliar with the model, here is a good, complete, readable one (which amazingly hits no. 1 on a google for AQAL): http://www.formlessmountain.com/KW-WTC/footnotes/aqal.html

I think that psychology is definitely not in its adolesence, and it hasn't been for a long time. All I had to do was look at what was out there when my wife was completing her degrees in psych, then organizational behavior. I do agree with Wilber when he talks about different schools of psychology having an incomplete picture (Jungian psychologists centering on primordial symbols, for instance, which, while important, are not the alpha and omega of what is a whole mind).

It is also interesting to me to look at how seemingly unrelated threads end up going to the same questions. Art, music, religon, psychology threads end up going to a lot of the same core questions. To me, all roads lead to the subject of awareness.

I heartily agree with Roger's comment about NB's work, it is clearly a milestone in psychology. In a way, it is fitting that it has never been fully embraced by the academic community. That's probably because he never seemed to have much interest in doing the kind of academic publishing that they seem to need in order to gain "acceptance". Basically, he took it to the front line, and I'm glad he did.

In the thread that gave birth to this one, it got to the discussion on sensory organs. I am suprised that it didn't progress to the topic of evolutionary psychology (Which, once again I say, while significant, will not stand alone. It seems like in non-psychology forums, talk always splits into a free-will vs. determinism battle, and I've surely had enough of that).

Last, I think it is important to emphasize that in clinical psychology, it seems very clear that the name of the game is to have many, many tools available, because in therapy it is often required to have more than one tool at hand. Again, it points to a more holistic approach. Of course, if I say "holistic" too often, I run the risk of attracting a pomo lynch mob, and from what I can tell, the pomo lynch mobs, while they surely have plenty of cannon fodder (it's always easy to find cannon fodder), have about the same level of granularity with postmodern thought as they do with mysticism.

Folks like to have everything all neat and tucked away, and I don't think life really works that way all the time.

best to all,
rde

Post 6

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 6:37pm

Am glad you mentioned 'evolutionary psychology'... indeed, what should be focused is also the issue itself of the evolutionary process - ours senses evolved as specializations for survival, evolved from the initial primal reaction mechanism which itself evolved into the 'pleasure/pain' divisions... all the senses, as such, are specialized variations on 'touch', or the sense of pressure, which can be refined as sensitivity to certain energy levels [since matter at its core is concentrated energy], which in turn specialized as survival matters of practicality into the various senses we possess - touch, taste, smell, hear, see...

These are the senses - and they are such for all the living organisms, for the same reason - they are the practical enhancements to survival... but - within these senses are variations, 'bell curves' if you wish - which extend for some the length of the particular sense, or reduce as being of little usefulness, in relation to its need of surviving within the specific area in which the particular sense first viably existed...

Note I said viably - it is the conditional of evolving processes... there are always many attempt of mutating, most of which are not viable and disappear, either within the organism or the organism itself...

The only difference of humans to the rest of living organisms is the issue of self-awareness, that is, of being aware of its surroundings and being able to shift from being a passive to the viscitudes of the world to altering the world to increase its own survivability - and to the extent of the development of cognitive ability, to the flourishing as humans...

Occam's Razor precludes needing or having in development another sense... but - what it also precludes is a disregard of understanding the extents of the senses possessed... including those anomalies such as crossed wiring of the brain so that indeed some do possess capacity to 'seeing' music in colors, others to greater sensitivity to processes more used in lesser organisms from which we evolved, such as magnetic sensitivity, or even the ability of seeing further into the outer ranges of sight in the same manner as say wolves or some birds do...

Or further, sensing in the manner, perhaps, as elephants do to sub sonic vibrations that travel over long ranges - or making use of sound sensitivity in the manner as bats do [which, as an aside, do so in the manner of the brain treating the sound as a form of 'sight', indicating that the primalness of sight is of greater survival usage in the brain whether from the eye or ear]... and, of course, the list could be extended...

None of which in any manner indicate anything in the way of 'non-sensory perception', even as at first glance seem so...

Remember, these senses and their variations exist solely for the practicalness of survival of the respective organisms which possess them... nothing more, nothing less... wishfulness of any primacy of consciousness wanting something for nothing is just that - believing without foundation... all that is necessitated for the survival of being human is within us, as practical matter, and nothing further as such need concern us - only the further exploring and understanding of what is, not what is desired or wanted...

Post 7

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 8:35pm

OK - back to the topic of this thread.

Psychology was still in its infancy when Rand first said so, and it remained for the most part in its infancy as long as behaviorism remained the dominant paradigm. With human infants, the infant is said to become a toddler when it learns to walk on its own. It took a "cognitive revolution" for psychology to abandon the force-fitting of methods from the physical sciences and develop a methodology of its own. That started with the discovery of the Hicks-Hyman Law in 1954, but such was the dominance of behaviorism that Hyman's paper was published in an IEEE journal. The first time that cognitive psychologists gained control of an academic psychology department was in 1970 - the year Wayne Wickelgren was hired at Oregon (I followed him there to do my PhD dissertation with him.) Oregon already had Hyman, Attneave, Posner, and Dawes. They were there because Oregon used to be academic Siberia, the place psychologists went when they did not get tenure at universities dominated by behaviorists. By the time I got my PhD in 1974, Oregon had become the most exciting psychology department in the world, the "cutting edge" psychology department of the Cognitive Revolution.

The three decades since the "Cognitive Revolution" have given psychology enough time to go through its adolescence and early adulthood. It is still the youngest of the sciences, but already adult, very much on its own in having a methodology appropriate to the science of Man's organ of survival, his mind, the organ of knowledge.

Post 8

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 9:05pm

Joe M:

The mind does have a specific definition. The mind is the set of attributes of a conscious organism by virtue of which that organism is conscious of whatever it is conscious of, plus those attributes that result from its being conscious. This set of attributes includes the ability to acquire information and process it - to validate information into knowledge.

Scientific psychology is the study of consciousness, and its requisites and consequences, qua objective facts of reality. It does not include mere reports on the content of consciousness, but it does include the study of the content of consciousness - when the content of consciousness is studied by methods appropriate to an objective discipline studying the facts of reality. Robert Efron's articles on the epistemology of objective psychology are a good place to look for more detail.

And, as is something of a given in the nihilistic intellectual atmosphere of today's academia, most of what claims to be psychology today is nothing of the sort.

Post 9

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 9:06pm

Adam,
I've not read widely in the subject, only having read some of Aaron Beck's work. What is actually known, i.e. provable, grounded in observation, measurable, etc, in Psychology?

Post 10

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 9:43pm

There is more than 30 years of solid results that meet all of your criteria. Hundreds of specific laws, starting in 1954 with the Hick-Hyman Law. Where do you want to start?

On second thought, this is a wrong time for me to be saying "where do you want to start." Could you wait until Robert Campbell recovers, so he can share the load?

(Edited by Adam Reed
on 12/05, 12:03pm)

Post 11

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 5:02am

Adam, in post #7 you give the Hick-Hyman Law as a major factor in psychology outgrowing its infancy and weakening the dominance of behaviorism. What about Jean Piaget's work and influence in academia in the U.S.?

Here is a link for other readers curious about the Hick-Hyman Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick%27s_law

Post 12

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 6:27am

Adam,
I wasn't being facetious, just curious. You are the expert, start wherever you think appropriate. I'm not expecting a book, nor a recapitulation of hundreds of experiments and papers, just a few references and some sound basic principles. You should be able to reel those off the top of your head and type them within a few minutes.

Post 13

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 7:29am

Jeff Perren asks, of Adam Reed, "What is actually known, i.e. provable, grounded in observation, measurable, etc, in Psychology?"

Psychology is vast, vast. Jeff, if you are looking for a collection of articles that focus on 'science and pseudoscience,' I recommend a very useful book: "Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology," Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, Jeffrey M. Lohr (Editors). New York: Guilford Press, 2004. ISBN: 1572308281 (hardcover) $48 ISBN: 1593850700 (paperback) $25. 474 pages.

I've included a blurb below (and you can read a CSICOP review here).

If you are looking for solid research in psychology, you may have to narrow your focus, as the field is so broad and somewhat intimidating: where does your interest extend?

WSS

+++++++++

[both excerpts from the amazon.fr site: http://tinyurl.com/ajdoj]
This book offers a rigorous examination of a variety of therapeutic, assessment, and diagnostic techniques in clinical psychology, focusing on practices that are popular and influential but lack a solid grounding in empirical research. Featuring chapters from leading clinical researchers, the text helps professionals and students evaluate the merits of novel and controversial techniques and differentiate between those that can stand up to scientific scrutiny and those that cannot. Reviewed are widely used therapies for alcoholism, infantile autism, and ADHD; the use of EMDR in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder; herbal remedies for depression and anxiety; suggestive techniques for memory recovery; and self-help models. Other topics covered include issues surrounding psychological expert testimony, the uses and abuses of projective assessment techniques, and unanswered questions about dissociative identity disorder. Offering a balanced, constructive review of available research, each accessibly written chapter concludes with a glossary of key terms.

---

About the author[s]
Scott O. Lilienfeld, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychology at Emory University. He has authored or coauthored approximately 100 articles and book chapters, serves on the editorial boards of several major journals, and is founder and editor of [i]The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice[/i]. Dr. Lilienfeld is past president of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology and a recipient of the David Shakow Award for Early Career Contributions to Clinical Psychology from Division 12 (Society for Clinical Psychology) of the American Psychological Association.

Steven Jay Lynn, PhD, ABPP (Clinical, Forensic), is a licensed clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. A former president of the American Psychological Association's Division 30 (Psychological Hypnosis), he is a recipient of the division's award for distinguished contributions to scientific hypnosis. Dr. Lynn is a fellow of many professional organizations and an advisory editor to a number of professional journals. He is the author of 11 books and more than 200 articles and chapters.

Jeffrey M. Lohr, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at the University of Arkansas/n-/Fayetteville. He has been a licensed psychologist in Arkansas with a part-time independent practice since 1976. Dr. Lohr's research interests focus on anxiety disorders, domestic violence, and the efficacy of psychosocial treatments.

Post 14

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 8:50am

William,
I thought I was reasonably clear in my post prior to yours. Please don't interpret my tone as hostile, I'm not. But if someone were to ask me "why is Physics a mature science?" I would not have to reply : "Where do I begin? Physics is so vast, vast." I could describe a few simple experiments, or I could point to some basic principles, or provide some references that were both accurate and accessible to the layman, if they were willing to exert some mental effort and expend a modest amount of time.

This doesn't mean the content nor method of Psychology must be those of Physics and I'm not suggesting that they should be. Nor am I disparaging the practictioners in that field. But after all the voodoo that has passed as psychology in the last hundred years, one needs a little more than a Wiki showing a mathematical equation that purports to measure the time the average person consumes in making a choice, interesting as that is. I'll look into the reference you cite.

As the saying goes: I'm from Missouri. Show me.

Post 15

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 12:02pm

Jeff,

Yes, Piaget's work would be right at the top of real knowledge in psychology. Then Wickelgren on articulatory coding in auditory memory for speech. Hick-Hyman Law, as mentioned earlier. Gibson on affordances. Norman on application of affordances. Loftus on integrative ("reconstructive") recall. And of course I'm partial to my own work on the time course of recognition....

Psychology is not at the top for me at this time, and there is a lot of good, objective cognitive psychology out there. I again suggest waiting until Robert Campbell is fully recovered and posting again.

Post 16

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 2:02pm

I agree with Roger�s:

I think that Nathaniel Branden�s � The Psychology of Self-Esteem and The Disowned Self are landmark books in the understanding of the human psyche.

and when Roger says:

How many times, I ask you, how many times � have we not heard Rand�s comment repeated (often without attribution) that psychology as a science is �still in its infancy�?

I cannot help but observe that AR said this in 1971, just two years after The Psychology of Self-Esteem (1969) came out, and that The Disowned Self was published the year she said it. In the first case, she had just split with Nathaniel Branden and would surely not have hailed his work no matter what its value. Her �infancy� observation may have been meant as a pointed barb at NB, since much of the book had already seen print under her imprimatur (she called its projected publication plagiarism). In the case of The Disowned Self, the nature of her own views on emotion and reason would have precluded any appreciation on her part, and would have made it all the more unlikely that she would concede the importance of the earlier book.

As far as I am concerned, what Branden was doing is what the science of psychology is all about. Rat experiments and the like, while they can yield related knowledge, are off the focus of psychology as such.

An understanding of the truths and principles in Branden�s two books is, in fact, necessary for objectively judging the events of 1968. I may write on this in the future.

Post 17

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 4:34pm

Jeff, great to hear from a "Show Me" Missouran! I'm going to go back and read more of your contributions to RoR. Thank you for the cordial tone.

I agree with a general contention that Psychology is in its childhood, if not its infancy, agree with Adam Reed that "most of what claims to be psychology today is nothing of the sort," but disagree that psychology has had "enough time to go through its adolescence and early adulthood."

Who could possibly know or fix some benchmark stage the enterprise is in? If forced, I would guess late childhood. Precocious childhood, with fits of stark genius, sure, but even this stretches an analogy past usefulness, to my mind. To reify psychology in this way is a mistake. There is no unified body of Psychology in the sense that there is Physics.

Physics could be said to have led to fungible products, and proven technologies to exploit its principles; can we say the same of Psychology (IQ Tests, marketing departments? fMRIs? VA psychiatrists)? Perhaps, but examples seem marked by a difference in valence and scale and mode of action.

I have no problem designating Psychology, in general, a very "soft" science (with spines of "hard" bits therein). Unlike Physics, it has more than a few ghostly forces animating its practice (who is the Freud of Physics?), unlike Physics, one cannot as easily point to space-rockets, atom-smashing and materials science to exemplify precise understanding of the forces of reality (then again, IQ tests, marketing departments), unlike physics, there are vibrant dollar-sucking offshoots that are staggeringly nonsensical (EFT, Therapeutic Touch, Nursing Science, etc.).

One can seek and capture psychological findings that might correspond in some way to the Physics laws and regularities that undergird the physical universe, but this is not productive at all levels, in my opinion, because of the difference in scale. Make no mistake, "laws" abound in psychology, from the "Yerkes-Dobson Rule" to the astonishing collection of regularities that neuropsychology has garnered. But one needs to critically examine the relevant literature to interpret any such rules.

Further, alongside these good and true rules and notions are as many, if not more, flabby and unsupported items, from 'Repression' to 'the Unconscious.' The force of these notions live on and guide practice in the real world, even thought they may be faulty or wrong.

Thus, I had meant by my "vast, vast" note, not to frustrate a clear answer to your query, but to discover what you were looking at, what you were seeking. I don't know what you have read or studied, what party of psychology you find the weakest or strongest, what questions you would like the study of behaviour [or mind] to answer. I put forward Lilienfeld et al's brilliant collection as an example of the critical focus that is found in one part of the octopus, the arm of the monster we call Clinical Psychology (is there a Clinical Physics?). We need all the evidence-based rigour of Lilienfeld to better answer your query, understood by me as "Where's land? I see an ocean of mush."

Anyhow, if you want to read some attempts at Grand Unified Theories, I heartily recommend Pinker ("How the Mind Works" & "The Blank Slate") and Damasio ("The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness"). These two gents will take you places, Jeff, most of it on solid track, well-illustrated by experiment and clinical data, with profound understanding of "hard" psychology.

To completely avoid even discussion of the pseudoscientific clutter, I tend to contemporary neuroscience -- the "hardest" spine of psychology. You might like to glance at the OHSU Neurological Sciences Institute's pages on Theoretical Neuroscience. The work on 'laws of learning' in the Mormyrid (electic fish) is wonderfully illustrated. They seem to have figured out how the fish learn their brains to navigate.

I agree with your stance of skepticism, Jeff. In answer to your "where is psychology 'hard'" all I can say is "stick yer arm in there, you'll hit something."

I do also agree with one thrust of Adam Reed's argument: psychological science has made further soundings since the death of Rand.

The universe has given up many of its secrets, among them secrets of the human line, but plenty secrets of human evolution, of mind/brain/sense/behavior, remain.

WSS

Post 18

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 6:55pm

William - you write, "Physics could be said to have led to fungible products, and proven technologies to exploit its principles; can we say the same of Psychology?"

Indeed we can. Most of today's software engineering, including object-oriented programming, is a product of cognitive and developmental psychology - Alan Kay designed the first complete object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk, based on principles discovered by Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert. Earlier approaches, based on mathematics without psychology, were disastrous failures.

"Windowing" computer interfaces, without which computers would have remained limited to technical users, resulted from Donald Norman's application of Gibson's psychological studies of affordances. Gibson's results have been used very widely to improve the usability of just about everything people use.

Elizabeth Loftus' studies of recall have led to substantive improvements in the gathering and validation of eyewitness testimony in criminal courts, leading to much more accurate investigations and verdicts.

I could go on, but I think those are enough to convey the point.

Post 19

Monday, December 5, 2005 - 10:20pm