Psychology has struggled for a century to make sense of the mind

Summary

Bruce Bower, who writes on the Behavioural sciences, begins this article with the explosive statement: 

‘One of the most infamous psychology experiments ever conducted involved a carefully planned form of child abuse.’ 

The 1920 study involved psychologist John Watson and his graduate student Rosalie Rayner who conditioned a nine-month-old baby boy to fear animals. The two researchers viewed their experiment as a step toward being able to control behaviour. They wanted to see if the infant could be conditioned in the same way as ‘Pavlov’s dogs’—an experiment in which Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained dogs to associate the clicks of a metronome with being fed. Experimental psychology originated in Germany in 1879. Watson’s notorious study foreshadowed a confrontational approach that has played out over the past 100 years. Over the past century, different researchers have promoted very different ideas about how people think and behave. These groups have struggled for dominance in the social sciences. Many prominent psychiatrists have influenced social-psychology over the past century. Sigmund Freud, for example, exerted a significant influence on the treatment of psychological ailments, but his ideas later became viewed as unscientific due to his methods of analysis. Today, there is no unified theory of mind and behaviour that unites psychologists.

References

Dec 2020 APS Breakthroughs and Discoveries in Psychological Science: 2020 Year in Review

Jan 2021 Australian Psychological Society Australian psychology in a post-pandemic world: The future of education, regulation and technology