Experimental psychology

Kick the tires and light the fires, problem officially solevd!

Experimental psychology is a methodological approach rather than a subject and encompasses varied fields within psychology. Experimental psychologists have traditionally conducted research, published articles, and taught classes on neuroscience, developmental psychology, sensation, perception, attention, consciousness, learning, memory, thinking, and language. Recently, however, the experimental approach has extended to motivation, emotion, and social psychology.

Experimental psychologists conduct research with the help of experimental methods. The concern of experimental psychology is discovering the processes underlying behavior and cognition.

History

Early experimental psychology

Wilhelm Wundt

Experimental psychology emerged as a modern academic discipline in the 19th century when Wilhelm Wundt introduced a mathematical and experimental approach to the field. Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. Other early experimental psychologists, including Hermann Ebbinghaus and Edward Titchener, included introspection among their experimental methods.

George Trumbull Ladd

Experimental psychology was introduced into the United States by George Trumbull Ladd, who founded Yale University's psychological laboratory in 1879. In 1887, Ladd published Elements of Physiological Psychology, the first American textbook that extensively discussed experimental psychology. Between Ladd's founding of the Yale Laboratory and his textbook, the center of experimental psychology in the USA shifted to Johns Hopkins University, where George Hall and Charles Sanders Peirce were extending and qualifying Wundt's work.

Charles Sanders Peirce

With his student Joseph Jastrow, Charles S. Peirce randomly assigned volunteers to a blinded, repeated-measures design to evaluate their ability to discriminate weights. Peirce's experiment inspired other researchers in psychology and education, which developed a research tradition of randomized experiments in laboratories and specialized textbooks in the eighteen-hundreds. The Peirce-Jastrow experiments were conducted as part of Peirce's pragmatic program to understand human perception; other studies considered perception of light, etc. While Peirce was making advances in experimental psychology and psychophysics, he was also developing a theory of statistical inference, which was published in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" (1877–1878) and "A Theory of Probable Inference" (1883); both publications that emphasized the importance of randomization-based inference in statistics. To Peirce and to experimental psychology belongs the honor of having invented randomized experiments, decades before the innovations of Neyman and Fisher in agriculture.

Peirce's pragmaticist philosophy also included an extensive theory of mental representations and cognition, which he studied under the name of semiotics. Peirce's student Joseph Jastrow continued to conduct randomized experiments throughout his distinguished career in experimental psychology, much of which would later be recognized as cognitive psychology. There has been a resurgence of interest in Peirce's work in cognitive psychology. Another student of Peirce, John Dewey, conducted experiments on human cognition, particularly in schools, as part of his "experimental logic" and "public philosophy".

20th Century

In the middle of the twentieth century, behaviourism became a dominant paradigm within psychology, especially in the United States. This led to some neglect of mental phenomena within experimental psychology. In Europe this was less the case, as European psychology was influenced by psychologists such as Sir Frederic Bartlett, Kenneth Craik, W. E. Hick and Donald Broadbent, who focused on topics such as thinking, memory and attention. This laid the foundations for the subsequent development of cognitive psychology.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the phrase "experimental psychology" has shifted in meaning due to the expansion of psychology as a discipline and the growth in the size and number of its sub-disciplines. Experimental psychologists use a range of methods and do not confine themselves to a strictly experimental approach, partly because developments in the philosophy of science have had an impact on the exclusive prestige of experimentation. In contrast, an experimental method is now widely used in fields such as developmental and social psychology, which were not previously part of experimental psychology. The phrase continues in use, however, in the titles of a number of well-established, high prestige learned societies and scientific journals, as well as some university courses of study in psychology.

Methodology

Experimental Psychologists study human behavior in different contexts. Often, human participants are instructed to perform tasks in an experimental setup. Since the 1990s, various software packages have eased stimulus presentation and the measurement of behavior in the laboratory. Apart from the measurement of response times and error rates, experimental psychologists often use surveys before, during, and after experimental intervention and observation methods. Experimental designs can be divided into three broad types: experimental, quasi-experimental and non-experimental.

Experiments

The complexity of human behavior and mental processes, the ambiguity with which they can be interpreted and the unconscious processes to which they are subject gives rise to an emphasis on sound methodology within experimental psychology.

Control of extraneous variables, minimizing the potential for experimenter bias, counterbalancing the order of experimental tasks, adequate sample size, and the use of operational definitions which are both reliable and valid, and proper statistical analysis are central to experimental methods in psychology. As such, most undergraduate programmes in psychology include mandatory courses in Research Methods and Statistics.

Other Methods

While other methods of research --- case study, interview, and naturalistic observation --- are used by psychologists, the method of randomized experimentation remains the preferred method for testing hypotheses in scientific psychology.

Criticism

There have been several criticisms of experimental psychology.

Frankfurt school

One school opposed to experimental psychology has been associated with the Frankfurt School, which calls its ideas "Critical Theory". Critical psychologists claim that experimental psychology approaches humans as entities independent of the cultural, economic, and historical context in which they exist. These contexts of human mental processes and behaviour are neglected, according to critical psychologists, like Herbert Marcuse. In so doing, experimental psychologists paint an inaccurate portrait of human nature while lending tacit support to the prevailing social order, according to critical theorists like Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas (in their essays in The Positivist Debate in German Sociology).

Critical theory has itself been criticized, however. While the philosopher Karl Popper "never took their methodology (whatever that may mean) seriously" (page 289), Popper wrote counter-criticism to reduce the "'irrationalist' and 'intelligence-destroying'" "political influence" of critical theorists on students (Karl Popper pages 288-300 in [The Positivist Debate in German Sociology]). The critical theorists Adorno and Marcuse have been severely criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre in Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and Polemic. Like Popper, MacIntyre attacked critical theorists like Adorno and especially Marcuse as obscurantists pontificating dogma in the authoritarian fashion of German professors of philosophy of their era --- before World War II --- (page 11); Popper made a similar criticism of critical theory's rhetoric, which reflected the culture of Hegelian social studies in German universities (pages 293-294). Furthermore, MacIntyre ridiculed Marcuse as being a senile revival of the young Hegelian tradition criticized by Marx and Engels (pages 18–19, 41, and 101); similarly, "critical theory"'s revival of young Hegelianism and its criticism by Karl Marx was noted by Popper (page 293). Marcuse's support for the political re-education camps of Maoist China was also criticized as totalitarian by MacIntyre (pages 101-105). More recently, the Critical Theory of Adorno and Marcuse has been criticized as being a degeneration of the original Frankfurt school, particularly the work of empirical psychologist Erich Fromm (Neil McLaughlin (1999). "Origin Myths in the Social Sciences: Fromm, the Frankfurt School and the Emergence of Critical Theory". The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 24 (1): 109–139. doi:10.2307/3341480. Template:JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3341480. ), who did surveys and experiments to study the development of personality in response to economic stress and social change (Michael Macoby's Preface to Fromm's Social Character in a Mexican Village).

References

• Boring, Edwin G. (1950). A History of Experimental Psychology (2nd ed.). Prentice-Hall. 
• Solso, Robert L. & MacLin, M. Kimberly (2001). Experimental Psychology: A Case Approach (7th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 0205410286.