“As his name indicates”: R. S. Woodworth's letters of reference and employment for jewish psychologists in the 1930s

Letters of reference from Robert S. Woodworth identified some psychologists as Jews and reveal an implicit stereotype of Jewish “objectionable traits.” I examine these conceptions of “Jewish character” in the context of Woodworth's general views on individual differences and in the broader context of Jewish immigration to America and enrollment at Columbia University in the early 1900s. Constructing the exclusion of Jews from academic psychology in terms of the personality and social behavior of the individual and dividing of Jews into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” allowed for a face-saving gloss on the generally antisemitic hiring practices in 1930s American academia.     

LETA STETTER HOLLINGWORTH SPEAKS ON "COLUMBIA'S LEGACY"

At the 1983 APA convention in Anaheim, CA, Divisions 1 and 26 co-sponsored a lecture series to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Edna Heidbreder's Seven Psychologies. Aimed at the general audience, Heidbreder's book described the roots of American psychology and the seven schools of thought most representative of the discipline in this country: structuralism, the psychology of William James, functionalism, behaviorism, Gestalt psychology, Freud and the psychoanalytic movement, and the dynamic psychology of Columbia's Robert Woodworth. At the 1983 APA meetings five scholars with backgrounds in one of the seven psychologies lectured as a figure from the past on the legacy of that school of thought. Stephanie Shields represented Leta Hollingworth (1886–1939), the only woman in the group. Hollingworth was charged with discussing the legacy of Columbia University for contemporary psychology. Her lecture reviews psychological research at Teachers College and Columbia University from 1911 through the 1920s and then evaluates the lasting contribution made by that research to present-day psychology. This paper is the text of that talk, with a few modifications tailored for an audience of feminist psychologists. As an historical fiction the material for this talk is drawn primarily from Hollingworth's own writings, and, insofar as it is possible, it tries to represent accurately the theoretical and ideological concerns she expressed during her career. It attempts to bring her concerns as a psychologist, as an educator, and as a feminist, to bear on the state of present-day psychology, particularly from the perspective of the testing movement between the two world wars. All of the events described here did happen or could have happened. Those that are fictional or represent inference are clearly indicated. Direct quotes from her published work appear within quotation marks.     

The golden section and American psychology, 1892–1938

The golden section has been said by many to be the most beautiful proportion. Fechner was the first to investigate it experimentally, and several late‐nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century American psychologists followed up on his work. Among these were four prominent names: Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949), Robert S. Woodworth (1869–1962), and Robert M. Ogden (1877–1959). Why did such well‐known psychologists bother with the golden section? In attempting to answer this question we discovered that the golden section was surprisingly well known during this period, not only in psychology but also in advertising and design. It would have been entirely congruent with their stature for prominent psychologists to take an interest in it. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Personality and culture,the Social Science Research Council,and liberal social engineering: The Advisory Committee on Personality and Culture, 1930–1934

The field of personality and culture was given a significant impetus during the 1930s with the establishment of the Advisory Committee on Personality and Culture (1930–1934) by the Social Science Research Council. This committee provided an early formulation of personality and culture that emphasized the interdisciplinary focus on the processes of personality formation within small‐scale social settings. The committee's formulation also coupled personality and culture with a liberal social engineering approach geared toward cultural reconstruction. Major social scientists and clinicians were involved in the activities of the committee, including Edward Sapir, W. I. Thomas, E. W. Burgess, E. A. Bott, Robert S. Woodworth, Harry Stack Sullivan, C. M. Hincks, and Adolf Meyer. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

How Robert M. MacIver was forgotten: Columbia and American sociology in a new light, 1929-1950

It is necessary to reevaluate the role of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University in the years 1929-1950. The impact of Robert M. MacIver, who played a significant role in the exchange between European and American thinkers, is examined, as well as his marginalization. It is argued that in the 1930s it was characteristic that the sociologists in the centers in Chicago and Columbia exchanged their disciplinary functions. It was MacIver's Columbia that took on the role of advocate of humanistic sociology and Mead's and Cooley's heritage.     

Improved advising ratings in an undergraduate psychology program

During the late 1990s, the psychology department of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis made investments in its undergraduate advising program in terms of additional professional personnel, a new orientation course, an experimental intrusive advising track, innovative peer activities, and expanded physical facilities. Against this backdrop of innovations, from 1995 to 2001 an exit survey of graduating seniors (N=311) showed improved evaluations of departmental counseling services. Ratings of the obtainability of advising on courses and the quality of course and career advising all showed significant upward shifts over the seven years of study. Regarding a specific innovation, students who completed a 1-hr. orientation course gave higher mean counseling ratings than those not enrolled.     

Toward Unity in Psychology: The Experimental Synthesis of Behaviour

The current state of fragmentation of psychology is discussed in the context of Kuhn's paradigms. Schools of psychology are considered analogous to paradigms, although Kuhn would not think of psychology as a paradigmatic science. Schools gave origin to systems of psychology (neo-behaviourism, neo-psychoanalysis, dialectic-materialistic psychology, and humanistic psychology). A unifying paradigm, the experimental synthesis of behaviour, is presented as a programme. It is derived from the experimental analysis of behaviour. It is not an eclectic approach, but a new paradigm with the aim of unifying psychology as a science. Its main characteristics and advantages are discussed.     

From philosopher to psychologist: the early career of Edwin Ray Guthrie, Jr

Edwin R. Guthrie rose to prominence as a psychologist in the 1930s. His theoretical outlook was behavioristic. This approach came from his conviction that an objective method could be applied to a scientific treatment of mind. Prior to becoming a psychologist, he was a philosopher of mathematics. Guthrie was initiated into psychology by Stevenson Smith, from whom he learned a psychology of adjustment informed by comparative research, Columbia functionalism, and clinical psychology. Guthrie's first step into psychology was in collaboration with Smith on Chapters in General Psychology (S. Smith & E.R. Guthrie, 1921). To synthesize their own unique position on learning from the contemporary theory and research, they used the principle of association. This articles focuses on Guthrie's origin and his development into a learning theorist.     

Shaping of scientific psychology in Japan

Japanese scientific psychology began with Y. Motora's lecture on pyschophysics at the University of Tokyo in 1888. He had just received his PhD under G.S. Hall at Johns Hopkins University, in the USA. He became the first professor of psychology in 1890 and founded the first psychological laboratory at the University of Tokyo in 1903. He studied many psychological problems, including attention, experimentally and theoretically. One of his first students, Matataro Matsumoto, founded the second psychological laboratory at Kyoto University and then succeeded to Motora's position in Tokyo. Matsumoto was interested in experimental studies of human performance and their applications. He trained many able psychologists and organized the Japanese Psychological Association in 1927. Some of his students founded more psychological laboratories in major universities of Japan. They introduced psychological tests, Gestalt psychology, and behaviourism in the 1920s and 1930s. Psychoanalysis was introduced through mainly nonacademic roots and became familiar to Japanese psychologists in the 1930s. After World War II, a strong influence of American psychology came to Japanese psychologists who had already trained in scientific methodology. The areas of research and applications have been greatly widened and the number of psychologists has increased rapidly up to the present day. Promotion of international interactions and indigenous traditions are both expected.     

Psychology and “The Babe”

Psychologists and baseball players were among those Americans who formed professional associations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Psychologists used laboratory tasks to quantify mental and behavioral processes while sportswriters and baseball organizers measured individual and team performance. The most popular baseball player of the 1920s, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, possessed superior batting skills that were evident in the statistical indices of baseball performance. In 1921, he was brought to the psychological laboratory at Columbia University to perform standard laboratory tasks in an effort to discover the basis for his success in hitting home runs and to suggest the potential of tests for identifying future baseball stars. Baseball's addiction to quantitative indices of performance was thus brought together with a new science devoted to quantitative assessment and a desire to make such assessments useful. The attempt to analyze the basis of Ruth's batting skills is part of the history of applied psychology, sport psychology, and popular interest in the science of psychology. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

American Psychology of Religion and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

It is doubtful whether there ever has been a rise‐fall‐rebirth of the psychology of religion. While the claim has marginal merit for American academic psychology, it has little application in other cultures or even within American psychology of religion outside mainstream psychology. The psychology of religion has always been and remains tied to key individuals who sustain the field. This historical fact is important in understanding the role of the JSSR in the field. Early psychologists of religion such as Hall and James set the pattern for two distinctively different approaches to the psychology of religion. Hall's approach was methodologically restrictive, inherently reductive, and came to dominate the academic psychology of religion. James ‘approach was methodological plural, receptive to the evidential force of religious experience, and quickly marginalized within American psychology. These opposing orientation continue to influence the psychology of religion in societies such as the SSR and its journal. A review of the psychologist editors of JSSR illustrates that the psychology of religion remains a marginal interest of mainstream psychology. It survives because of the interdisciplinary nature of the SSSR and its journal.     

REESTABLISHING “THE SOCIAL” IN RESEARCH ON DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES: MID‐CENTURY VOTER STUDIES AND PAUL F. LAZARSFELD'S ALTERNATIVE VISION

Voter studies conducted in the United States during the first decades after World War II transformed social scientific research on democracy. Especially important were the rapid innovations in survey research methods developed by two prominent research centers at Columbia University and the University of Michigan. This article argues that the Columbia and Michigan voter studies presented two visions for research on democracy. Where the Michigan research produced quantitative measures expressing the ‘political behavior’ of the electorate, the Columbia studies, and especially Paul F. Lazarsfeld, presented an alternative vision for qualitative research on political choice. Largely ignored by later voter studies, this vision prefigured much contemporary research on democracy that embraces a qualitative or interpretive approach. This article reconstructs Lazarsfeld's alternative vision, describes the institutional context in which scholars disregarded it in favor of formal quantitative models, and argues for its recognition as a forerunner to qualitative research on democratic processes.     

The Anatomy of Revolutionists

A questionnaire containing 62 items relating to the New Left and 28 items measuring anomia, authoritarianism, and Machiavellianism was given to 153 entering freshmen at Columbia in the fall of 1968. The five factors emerging from a factor analysis of responses to the items were labeled: New Left Philosophy, Revolutionary Tactics, Machiavellian Tactics, Machiavellian Cynicism, and Traditional Moralism. Students who had been politically active prior to coming to college scored higher than the rest of the group on New Left Philosophy, Revolutionary Tactics, and Machiavellian Cynicism, but scored lower on Machiavellian'Tactics and Traditional Moralism. In the spring of 1969, a revised set of items was given to students in introductory psychology classes at Columbia University and New York University. While the findings from these subjects replicated those found with the Columbia freshmen, they showed subtle differences which led to speculations about the radicalization process. Also discussed are the relationships between the nature of political participation and all of the factors, with special emphasis on the discrepancy between Machiavellian Tactics and Cynicism.     

Perception,meaning, and mind

Earlier versions of this paper were read in the Philosophy department at the University of Helsinki, in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, at Vanderbilt University, at the Indiana Philosophical Association, and at the Institute for Logic and Cognitive Science at the University of Houston. I am grateful for very helpful comments on each of these occasions, and I am especially appreciative to John Haugeland, Mark Johnson, and George McClure for their comments and suggestions. Thanks, too, to Robert Solomon who urged me to amplify my claims about perceptual meaning.     

Dr. Susan W. Gray

While Susan W. Gray is known primarily for her work with the Early Training Project, a pioneering early intervention program with low-income black children, she has also influenced the development of school psychology and the creation of Early Childhood Education as a discipline. In addition, in her own quiet way, she has supported the career development of a number of professional women who have had impact on child development, early childhood education, and school psychology. Four major themes are used to present Susan Gray's biography: (1) being ahead of her time in terms of thinking which allowed her to take advantage of opportunities; (2) the role of serendipity versus long-range planning of career trajectories; (3) specific influences on her as a woman; and (4) a lifetime of courage and dedication. Examples of work which was in advance of psychology included work in early intervention with low-income children, an emphasis on the use of scientific experimental methodology in field research, an eclectic approach which crossed disciplinary boundaries, a consultative approach to school psychology, and the inclusion of affective and cognitive education in inter-     

Edward Aloysius Pace

Summary Edward Aloysius Pace, pioneer of experimental psychology among American Catholics, was the first American Catholic and the first Catholic priest to study with Wilhelm Wundt. Upon his return from Leipzig, where he received his PhD in 1891, he established a psychological laboratory and department of psychology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. This department became the model for most of the early departments of psychology at Catholic colleges and universities as well as the training center of many teachers who staffed the new departments at these Catholic colleges and universities. From Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, the experimental psychology of Wundt radiated to Catholic circles throughout the United States.The best account of Pace's life is to be found in Hart C (ed), Aspects of the New Scholastic Philosophy (New York: Benziger 1932, pp 1–9); a series of philosophical essays dedicated to Pace by the American Philosophical Association on the occasion of his seventieth birthday     

Book Reviews

Wilhelm Wundts Werk: ein Verzeichnis seiner sämmtlichen Schriften. Herausgegeben von ELEONORE WUNDT. Abhandlungen der sächs. staatl. Forschungsinstitute: Forschungsinstitut für Psychologie No. 28. München, C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. 1927. Pp. [iv] 78. Price Mk. 4.00. Reviewed by E. B. Titchener.

Psychologies of 1925: Powell Lectures in Psychological Theory. By Madison Bentley, Knight Dunlap, Walter S. Hunter, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, William McDougall, Morton Prince, John B. Watson and Robert S. Woodworth. Preface by Carl Murchison. Worcester: Clark University, 1926. Pp. 412, 19 lectures. $6.00. Reviewed by John P. Nafe.

Conditioned Reflexes. By Ivan P. Pavlov. London: Oxford University Press, 1927. Pp. xv+430. 28 shillings. Reviewed by Raymond R. Willoughby.

An Introduction to the Theory of Perception. By Sir John Herbert Parsons. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1927. Pp. vi+254. $5.25. Reviewed by John P. Nafe.

A First Laboratory Guide in Psychology. By Mary Collins and James Drever. New York: Dutton, 1927. Pp. viii+108. $1.60. Reviewed by Frank A. Geldard.

Principles of Abnormal Psychology. By Edmund S. Conklin. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1927. Pp. x+457. $4.50; student edition $3.60. Reviewed by Carl Murchison.

Social Psychology Interpreted. By Jesse W. Sprowls. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1927. Pp. xii+268. $4.00. Reviewed by Carl Murchison.     

Collective fields of consciousness in the golden age

The present essay is a concise form of results obtained during many decades of research in the primeval foundations of collective social and consciousness fields. We point out that a yet unknown type of forces existed in the Golden Age, which we termed collective force. In the Golden Age mankind lived in communities which had a full unity. The communal life developed its collective forms, of which the most significant are the development of human speech, of language, share of work and the development of the communal fests. The law determining the primeval origins of mind is the cosmic law of interactions. It defines the substance of the Universe and the ways of its existence and activity. A detailed analysis is presented on the nature of the interaction there. One consequence of this fundamental principle is the general prevalence of the principle of mutuality, which plays a basic role in the understanding of the unfolding and degeneration of consciousness. The principle of mutuality determines the changes of every level of life. The laws of the generation of consciousness in the ages of evolution toward Homo and the Golden Age are analysed. Evidences were found proving the historical reality of the Golden Age, surviving in the traditions of mankind in every part of the world, and its overthrow before the Flood, which resulted in the dethronement of the primeval mind, the human consciousness of the Golden Age and the subsequent— and necessary—emergence of the superficial, rational mind.

Starting from the consideration that our mind is the imprint of history, we have recognised the phenomenon of the dual mind, the somewhat antagonistic duality of human consciousness. We think we have succeeded in solving the riddle of the dual mind and determining its substance. Our dual mind, consisting of the ‘upper’ or rational mind and the ‘underlying mind’, is the product of the two fundamental ages of mankind, that of the Golden Age and that of power domination. Therefore it reflects the duality of our history.     

PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIETY IN ISRAEL*

The development of psychology in Israel is presented as a reflection of its society's aims and needs. Until the early 50′s, the major orientation of Israel's population was geared towards achieving national and ideological goals. Scientific as well as applied psychology was not perceived as being able to fulfill or even being in line with these goals. However, starting from the early 50′s, Israel's ideological orientation as well as its practical needs changed dramatically. Mass immigration, housing problems, ethnicity, urbanization, industrialization, the emergence of underprivileged groups and a more individualistically oriented ideology raised new problems and strongly required the services of psychology. This paper tries to show how different branches of psychology - scientific as well as applied ones - developed as a direct function of the country's social needs and problems and its search for appropriate ways of dealing with them.     

为“金规则”辨

学界近年在对“己所不欲,勿施于人”这个中国式的“金规则”的议论中,存在不少误读、误解。择要言之,一是将“金规则”之“金”理解为“道德价值最高”;二是用“知道做不到”质疑、贬低“金规则”;三是以“不同”的存在否证“金规则”：四是认为“金规则”不适合现代社会。然而经过仔细辨析可以发现,这些其实都是不确之语。