PSYC 511
History of Psychology

Early Journals Assignment
Due March 3

The assignment is simple but not necessarily straightforward. It is to find an article from the early days of psychology (before 1925) that you feel is especially interesting and to explain why.

There are two reasons I am asking you to do this. The first is to give you some exposure to the early history of empirical psychology. It is often said that graduate students rarely read anything older than five years, and while that may be a slight exaggeration in essence it is true for most graduate students. We do, of course, move beyond the past in significant theoretical and methodological ways, and in that sense we do "over-write" the past with better research from the present. On the other hand, this evolution is far from straightforward, and it does not inevitably produce greater wisdom. Moreover, psychology is intellectually given to fads and often focuses on what problems are easily solved with current technologies. That means that interesting questions and important theoretical statements may get abandoned for fairly superficial reasons and then get lost. Speaking personally, I never read the "old" journals without coming away with an idea or two that could stand resurrection. So the spirit of the assignment is to encourage you to spend a couple or three hours skimming and reading some of the old papers in our field.

A second purpose, is to give you some sense of how far we have come in some ways. You will inevitably find the forms of data analysis primitive to non-existent, and if you read non-empirical articles you may come away with a greater appreciation for the clarifying and purifying virtues of well-collected data. It may be humbling to discover how interesting some of this early work was without our modern insights and techniques. On the other hand, you may come to have a greater appreciation of how far we have come. Actually these lessons are not as mutually exclusive as they may seem. The point is to get a sense of what kinds of advances we have made and why. Just do keep in mind that students 70 years from now will be reading the work you publish with about the same attitudes as you read work from the 1920 and before. That's always a sobering thought.

You have some considerable freedom in what you write. A particularly instructive way to approach the assignment may be to find an article that proposes an idea or a research problem that you feel could be studied today. So for example, you might describe what the authors did and how you might improve their message with modern experimental methods. You may actually want to search out early papers in your own area if its history goes back that far. Or you might contrast an early theory with a more modern version. My preference is that you focus on an empirical paper, but go in the direction that interests you the most. You may find it easiest to find papers in your own area of study, and that will be hard for those of you who are I/O students and even harder for Human Factors people. But "cognitive" psychology (such as it was then) was often surprisingly applied in its focus early on, and I/O students could certainly learn from the rich early work in personality and social psychology.

The paper you do will not be graded, and it should be whatever length is appropriate. In any event, you shouldn't need over 4 or 5 pages to make your case, and you may need less.