Franz Samelson

From "race psychology" to "studies in prejudice": some observations on the thematic reversal in social psychology.

In 1920, most psychologists believed in the existence of mental differences between races; by 1940, they were searching for the sources of “irrational prejudice.” In a few decades, a dramatic reversal of the dominant paradigm for the study of groups and group relations had occurred. Although this shift can be seen as a victory of objective-empirical research, there were other contributing factors: passage of the Immigration Restriction Law of 1924, which shifted the political problem from justification of differential exclusion to conflict resolution in this country; the influx of ethnics into the originally rather lily-white profession of psychology; the Great Depression and the leftward shift among psychologists; and finally, the need to unite the country against a dangerous enemy proclaiming racial superiority.

World War I intelligence testing and the development of psychology.

The participation of psychologists in World War I, especially through the mental testing of the Army, brought national publicity and recognition to the struggling young discipline. But while the war had contributed significantly to psychology, the practical contributions of psychologists to the fighting efficiency of the Army, as well as the scientific results emerging from the mountain of test data, turn out on closer examination to be rather equivocal.

History of Psychology: XXXIII. On Textbook Lessons from History, or How the Conditioned Reflex Discovered Twitmyer

A number of recent textbooks have claimed that the American psychologist E. B. Twitmyer discovered the conditioned reflex in 1902 independently of and even prior to Pavlov. Various explanations for the obscurity of Twitmyers discovery were offered. However, closer scrutiny of Twitmyers publications, viewed in their contemporary context, does not find much support for such speculative explanations. It is argued that Twitmyers work with the knee jerk constituted neither a knowing nor an unknowing discovery of the “conditioned reflex.” Instead a retrospective and anachronistic view of history, employing an overly simple notion of discovery and a reified concept of the conditioned reflex, had discovered Twitmyer in order to teach some “lessons from history.”

What to do about fraud charges in science; or, will the Burt affair ever end?

Shortly after the death, in 1971, of Cyril Burt, a prominent British psychologist, the authenticity of his accounts of intelligence test results from the largest reported sample of MZAs (monozygotic twins reared apart) was challenged. Charges of fraud by Burts critics and countercharges by his supporters started an acrimonious battle of words in journals, books, and the mass media that seesawed over the decades. It is still not resolved. The problematic ways in which the scientific community and its major organizations and journal editors have dealt or failed to deal with the problem are discussed.

History from the Top Down

In recent years, interest in the history of psychology seems to have grown exponentially, which may or may not be a ‘good thing’. At least, judged by the number of new titles, including texts, monographs, and essay collections on historical topics, publishers apparently expect the field to provide them with a sizeable market even if not turning into ‘big business’. Although the upcoming centennial of the founding of the American Psychological Association and allied ceremonial events may account for part of this expansion, several other developments have contributed to it. To name two among them, there was first the post-Kuhnian redefinition of the task set for a disciplinary history. Secondly, psychologist-historians discovered a new cache of data in the form of unpublished archival source material — although even today the official APA publication manual still does not allow, in its meticulous prescriptions for proper references, for the legitimate existence of such unpublished material, thus providing us with a contemporary example of what Danziger discusses as the object-constituting activities deriving from supposedly neutral but in fact quite imperialistic methodologies.