Psychological experiment

“ The foregoing simple study illustrates the procedure of psychology in all experimentation. A psychological experiment is an attempt to find out the truth in regard to some aspect of human nature. In finding out this truth, we must throw about the experiment all possible safeguards. Every source of error must be discovered and eliminated. In the above experiment, for example, the work must be done at the same time of day, or else we must prove that doing it at different times of day makes no difference. Nothing must be taken for granted, and nothing must be assumed. ”

“ Give your man perhaps a hundred words and let him speak the very first word which comes to his mind when he hears the given ones. You call rose, and he may say red or flower or lily or thorn; you call frog and he may answer pond or turtle or green or jump, and if you choose your hundred words with psychological insight, his hundred answers will allow a full view of his mental make-up. This is an experiment which does not require any instruments at all but a man's subtle analysis of the replies. That is not seldom sufficient to secure the diagnosis of complex mental variations. ”

“ You are engaged in a very complex experiment with the human brain, registering its waves and emanations in relation to thought, emotions and purely psychological relations. You've got a degree in psychology, another in psychiatry, a third in biology. ”

“ He who considers the complicated processes of the higher mental life or who is occupied with the still more complicated phenomena of the state and of society will in general be inclined to deny the possibility of keeping constant the conditions for psychological experimentation. Nothing is more familiar to us than the capriciousness of mental life which brings to nought all foresight and calculation. ”

“ It is to be expected that the knowledge so laboriously gained by the psycho-analytic method of investigation would prove of great value in the attempt to solve the psychological problems concerned with the obscurer motives of human action and desire. ”

“ Our plan was to illustrate the possibility of applying psychological experiments to the selection of fit applicants also in cases in which not one characteristic mental function stands out, but in which a large number of relatively independent mental activities are in play. I choose as an illustration of such cases the work of the employees at the telephone switchboard. ”

“ This theory limits itself rigidly to empirical facts, and traces back complexes to their antecedents and their elemental factors. It regards the psychological life as being only an effect, a reaction to the environment, and accords the greatest rôle and the largest place to sensation. ”

“ The psychologist in order to succeed and obtain more efficient and valuable results must keep in mind clearly the fact that the psychic process is a form of life in general, its phenomena are naturally related to the province of biology, and that of the highest part of it. The methods of psychological investigation must follow the line not of the physical, but of the biological sciences. ”

“ It is evident that everywhere in the world where the psychological laboratory turns to natural science, the experiments deal mostly with sensation, perception, and reaction; while those laboratories which keep their friendship with epistemology emphasize the higher mental functions, experimenting on attention, memory, association, feeling, emotion, thought, and so on. ”

“ Such a definite substitution of physiological for psychological hypotheses is pretty evidently the goal which the modern “experimental Psychology” has set before itself, and which it is constantly trying to persuade itself it has reached, in respect of some parts at least of its subject. ”

“ To accomplish this analysis requires direct psychological study carried to a high pitch of perfection; it being necessary, among other things, to investigate the degree in which mental character is created by circumstances, since no one supposes that cerebral conformation does all, and circumstances nothing. ”

“ There is little doubt but that the further advance of psychological science will reveal more intimately the working of those mechanisms with which we have here been dealing, and of whose nature and importance we are now beginning to gain some rough preliminary understanding. ”

“ Whatever value, then, psycho-analysis may ultimately prove to possess in solving the peculiar difficulties of psychological research, the evolution of it marks a very definite advance in principle and shows that it is the product of a mind determined by whatever effort to get to close quarters with the facts. ”

“ Working speculatively with psychological material there is a risk of being sacrificed to the general misunderstanding which bestows the value of an objective theory upon the line of psychological evolution thus elaborated. ”

“ The problems considered, however, belong equally to normal psychology in that they are problems of psycho-physiological functions and mechanisms. I have made no attempt to develop any particular school of psychological theory but rather, so far as may be, to gather together the knowledge already gained and lay a foundation which can be built upon by any school for the solution of particular problems, especially those of special pathology. ”

“ During the last thirty years, psychological laboratories, aided by physiology, through oft-repeated experiments conducted with newly-invented weighing and measuring instruments of marvelous accuracy, have put us in possession of an array of facts unknown to students of earlier periods, who sought the "why and the how" of man's erratic actions as a social animal. ”

“ If the problems of Psychical Research, or that portion of the problems in which investigation seems profitable, are ever to [55] be illuminated and exhibited in an intelligible form, it will only come about when they are investigated by the same methods and in the same spirit as are other psychological problems, when they are studied in connection with and as a part of other general problems of normal and abnormal Psychology. ”

“ By far the larger number of neurotics show a pronounced tendency to cover up their intimate affairs in impenetrable darkness, even from the doctor, so that the doctor finds it very difficult to form a proper picture of the patient’s psychology. In such cases I am greatly assisted by the association experiment. When the experiment is finished I first look over the general v course of the reaction times. ”

“ Our fundamental conceptions of the external world are therefore derived from and are built up out of the data of our exertional Activity combined with the interruptions which that Activity perpetually encounters, and in which sensations arise. It would indeed be a useful work of psychological analysis if the conditions of exertional action were carefully and systematically investigated—much more useful than most of the trifling experiments to which psychological laboratories are usually devoted. ”

“ As against the introspectionist, then, the behaviorist is justified in his contention that psychological procedure must be objective and experimental in character.274 The danger to which he has exposed himself is the failure to differentiate his problem from that of physiology and physics. It is only by a proper recognition of both the objective and the distinctive character of conscious behavior that psychology can free itself of the reproach which is heaped upon it by members of its own household and take the place that rightfully belongs to it in the community of the sciences. ”

“ There is at present an epidemic of practical or applied psychology. People however will wake up from their psychological dreams and will realize that applied psychology is nothing but a nightmare. I am fully aware of the fact that my present protest will draw on me the ire and severe attacks of many a psychologist, but I sincerely hope that some of the more earnest psychologists will sustain me in my present contention. ”

“ For this reason psychological hypotheses are, in the present state of knowledge, an indispensable mediating link between actual experience and physiological theory, and if ever they should come to be finally superseded by purely physiological descriptions of human conduct, we may be sure that the triumphant physiological theories will themselves first have been won by the process of establishing psychological formulæ and then seeking their physiological analogues. ”

“ A third principle will be to search for criteria, whereby instinctive impulses or their derivatives arising in the mind can be distinguished from rational motives, or at any rate motives in which the instinctive factor is minimal. Thus will be furnished for the method the objective standard for the judgment of mental observations which is the one indispensable requirement in all psychological inquiries. ”

“ If, on the other hand, it is the exclusive business of psychology to analyse and trace the development of individual experience as it is for the experiencing individual, then—however much neurological evidence may be employed as a means of ascertaining psychological facts—the facts themselves must be scrupulously divested of all physical implications, the psychophysical method takes a secondary place, and the objective reality of “sensory” presentations stands unimpeached. ”

“ And so I think we confuse our problems when we attempt to explain empirical psychological phenomena in philosophical or ultimate terms. We must treat our psychological elements—ideas, wishes, emotions, etc,—as the chemist treats atoms and molecules. But, just as the latter may take up ultimate problems as a special field of investigation so may we do, if we like, but we must not treat them as psychological problems. ”

“ The subject of Psychoanalysis is much in evidence, and is likely to occupy still more attention in the near future, as the psychological content of the psychoses and neuroses is more generally appreciated and understood. ”

“ Whereas the generally accepted view of man's mind, usually implicit and frequently explicit in psychological writings, regards it as an interplay of various processes that are for the most part known to the subject, or are at all events accessible to careful introspection on his part, the analytic methods of clinical psychology have on the contrary decisively proved that a far greater number of these processes than is commonly surmised arise from origins that he never suspects. ”

“ From a psychological standpoint our own mental life and that of our neighbor, that of the man and that of the child, that of the normal and that of the insane, that of the human being and that of the animal, are to be considered as a series of mental objects. They are to be analyzed, and to be described, and to be classified and to be explained, just as we deal with the physical objects in the outer world. How are these objects of the psychologist different from the objects of the physicist, from the pebbles on the way and the stars in the sky? ”

“ That is why I am convinced that the real end of analysis is reached when the patient has acquired adequate knowledge of the method to remain in contact with the unconscious, and sufficient psychological knowledge to be able to understand approximately his ever-changing life-line; otherwise he is not in a position to follow the direction of the libido currents in the unconscious, and thereby to gain conscious support in the development of his individuality. Every serious case of neurosis needs this weapon in order to maintain the cure. ”

“ Under the psychological come the qualitative and quantitative modifications of instincts, feelings, conceptions, and mental processes in general, which occur in creatures having more or less intelligence, when certain of their conditions are changed. ”

“ It cannot be successfully maintained that a scientific observation of the most unique sort, one which is accepted for the time being simply as a happening in this or that scientist's experience, is as such a psychological datum, for the data in psychological text-books have reference to psychological problems. Psychology deals with the consciousness of the individual in its dependence upon the physiological organism and upon those contents which detach themselves from the objects outside the individual and which are identified with his inner experience. ”

“ But the psychological method has obvious and inherent limitations. Like any other natural science, psychology is limited to description and causal explanation of the phenomena of its special field, which in this case is states of consciousness. ”

“ But if we examine the real purposes and presuppositions of the various sciences, we must recognize that the human experience can be looked on from two entirely different points of view. Only from one of the two does it present itself as psychological material and as a fit object for psychological study. ”

“ The whole procedure of psycho-analysis is calculated to bring into play the agencies of faith and suggestion. Thus, the patient had been assured from his first attempt at psycho-analysis that the recovery of a forgotten experience of childhood would effect a cure. ”

“ For, indeed, experiment simply gives an enormous increase of reach and accuracy to introspection, making it, what unassisted it rarely is, trustworthy. The real contrast in method is between subjective psychology, on one hand, whether carried on with or without instrumental aid, and objective psychology, on the other hand, embracing child, animal, and folk psychology. ”

“ This science has hitherto mainly dealt with the intellectual side of mental life and has paid far too little attention to the emotions. Students of certain aspects of mind, and especially those engaged in the study of social psychology, were coming to see how greatly psychologists had over-estimated the intellectual factor. ”