I. Introduction
As psychology was a very young discipline at the time this book was written (1917), the author first explores the notion of science.
For many, science is about information - but information that is correlated and arranged into a system that provides understanding. For example, one may gather information about plants and their various parts - leaves, roots, flowers, seeds, etc. - but to have a science of botany one must understand plants in terms of how the parts relate to one another and function as a system and draw comparisons and distinctions among the various kinds of plants. The information is not shapeless, but organized in a meaningful way.
Said another way, the enthusiast may be aware of many facts about a topic that he finds fascinating, but he does not see how they are related to one another. He has no system, no model. He observes that things are thus, but no sense of the reason. The scientist seeks to understand the reason - to explore the causal relationship that exists between facts, and generally with the purpose of making a prediction. If he recognizes that a result occurs from certain events, he then knows when he can anticipate the result and even, in some instances, when he can cause the result to occur. The scientist finds order in the chaos of the world, whereas the enthusiast merely observes the chaos such as it is.
And so, the scientific mind sees things in context, and with an interest in causes and effects. He has a grasp of their meaning and purpose - generally in one aspect of the world: zoologists study animals, astronomers the stars and planets, and so on.
Observations, Theories, and Laws
The means by which science seeks to discover causal relationships is observing phenomena, proposing and testing of theories, and ultimately attempting to define scientific laws. A law, in science, indicates the result that can be predicted to occur resulting from certain events in well-defined situations. (EN: And this is a very important and often misunderstood concept - that a law defines what is expected, not what is certain, and depends on conditions.)
As an example, consider the law of falling bodies:
- Observation - We may notice that they tend to fall about sixteen feet in a second and forty-eight feet in two seconds
- Theory - We recognize that the speed at which an object falls is not constant, but increases
- Experimentation - We may then drop a number of things from various heights, and record the speed at which they fall
- Law - If our results are consistent, we may develop a law that things accelerate at a rate of 32 feet per second when they are falling
In the course of so doing, we may observe that this is not constant: that certain objects (such as a feather) are caught by the wind and fall at a slower rate. However, because the majority of objects fall at a predictable speed, we may still declare the discovery of a law and later ponder its exceptions (when we learn of wind resistance) and the various filigree (the rate must be adjusted at higher altitudes because gravity is weaker).
Scientific laws enable us to predict the customary outcome of events, and gives us a sense of confidence that events will occur under certain conditions. It acknowledges exceptions - conditions being different, the law may not apply - and may often leave it to future inquiries to investigate some of the finer points. In general, we can depend upon scientific laws to predict outcomes in the majority of instances. As science improves, our knowledge becomes more complete, and scientific laws become more reliable.
The Science of Psychology
How does psychology conform to the characteristics and methods of science?
First, we have said that each branch of science concerns itself with some particular aspect of the world. Psychology concern itself with human behavior that is motivated by thought. Biology and medical science concern themselves with the physical aspects of the human being and proposes theories that suggest that our behavior is the cause of the mechanical components - muscles, nerves, bones, and organs - as a result of their physical and chemical properties. Psychology concerns itself with the intangible and invisible aspects of the thoughts.
Psychology also concerns itself with an individual's behavior in reaction to certain stimuli. It combines sensations from the external world (which biology may explain by the sensory functions of they eye, ear, skin, etc.) that reach in combination with the inner world of the mind to evoke emotional and rational responses that, in turn, result in actions - whether customary or unusual.
Biology recognizes two separate functions of the body - the reactive and the proactive. The reactive state results when the body responds to some sensation it receives from the outside world and the proactive is an action that is taken when motivated internally. Biology fails to adequately explain these internal motivations - and this is a gap that psychology seeks to address.
The biological studies of the brain have shown to be inadequate in explaining human thought and behavior. The brain's physical structure provides some clues, but much of the function of the brain is unknown and cannot be studied without disrupting or destroying the organ, causing it to deviate from its natural function. It is not like a muscle tissue that simply contracts and relaxes or a blood vessel that permits fluids to travel from one place to another. Its function as an organ is largely unfathomed by science.
(EN: Even a century later, this remains true. In spite of technology that monitors the electric currents and chemical actions, we still have a very superficial and primitive sense of the way in which the brain functions as an organ and yields things such as thoughts, emotions, and memories.)
Psychology studies physical behavior and explores theories about the inner workings of the mind, as it is generally accepted that the majority of man's actions are not simple reflexes or pre-set patterns (such as animal instincts), but are the result of a cognitive process. It is only by examining behavior that these processes can be recognized, analyzed, and explored to determine the laws that govern human behaviors. In smaller words, psychology guesses what's happening in the mind from the actions that can be observed.
Applied Psychology
In the early stages of inquiry, there is not sufficient knowledge to draw conclusions, and as such pre-scientific inquiry merely focuses on gathering and categorizing information to understand the properties of its subject. But before long, a scientist begins to observe tendencies and principles, and becomes curious as to whether this knowledge can be put to some practical use. At this point, the science becomes "applied" to a specific purpose.
As an example, education is an area to which psychology is plainly applicable: the process of teaching involves introducing new information to be stored in the mind of the student - which is a psychological process. Another example is personnel management, in any field of endeavor, as it requires and individual to gain knowledge and adopt behaviors that are geared to accomplish a specific purpose. Yet a third is the legal system, particularly the courtroom, in which witnesses must be convinced to provide testimony and jurors must be led to believe one of two conflicting arguments.
The Science of Education
Of all the applications of psychology, Pyle is most interested in education, as it involves the most fundamental processes of psychology and in general is used to have a beneficial outcome.
The purpose of education is straightforward: people wish to guide the development of students to equip them with the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful at a variety of things: to make them competent workers and active citizens of the community. A student who is successfully educated has a perspective about the world and how to behave to achieve certain outcomes.
It is also noteworthy that education is most often directed at children, who have not had much experience to form their ideas and habits. The value of education is in equipping them with a store of knowledge that will serve them, but also to temper their minds to process new knowledge in a particular manner.
Finally, education is not simply a matter of offering knowledge - there are effective and ineffective methods of teaching, much of which is still in the process of being discovered. There are some methods of teaching students information and skills that are more effective than others, and it stands to reason that through experimentation the methods of teaching can be improved upon.
The methods of education were haphazard without a scientific structure - and while psychology was a half-century old when the book was written (1917), educational psychology had been defined as a topic of inquiry for less than held that time - so there is much progress and many discoveries to be made.
In particular, educational psychology investigates:
- The nature of the child's mind
- The methods by which information is received
- The methods in which memories are created
- The methods by which skills are learned.
There are many other phenomena that are largely subordinate to those four, as well as the special concerns of dealing with abnormal children (whether subnormal or supernormal)
The Method of Psychology
The methods of psychology are similar to that of other sciences: we observe human behavior in everyday life, notice patterns, form theories, and refine theories by collecting evidence that supports, modifies, or discredits them.
But because psychology studies human behavior, there often is no laboratory. We use ourselves as test subjects, but we are not always honest with ourselves. We observe the behavior of others, but they are not always genuine. And in this sense, psychology is more difficult than chemistry: human behavior cannot be distilled to a pure form, but must be regarded with a critical eye.
Experimentation is applicable in some instances, and in the environment of the laboratory we can control stimuli, making changes in certain factors, and assuming any difference we see in human behavior is attributable to those changes. Through multiple repetitions we can identify the common reactions.
(EN: The inherent problem, of course, is that those in a laboratory are generally aware that they are being observed, even if they do not know the specific thing the experiment is investigating, and alter their behavior. As such the laboratory itself taints the observations - though we can know how people behave in the lab, it does not necessarily correlate to how they behave in the field.)
He gives an example of an experiment which is not really psychological - subjects are asked to make as many marks as they can upon a piece of paper using a pencil. Averaging the results of several subjects gives us a sense of standard performance. Varying the conditions - giving them a softer pencil, a different kind of paper, setting the desk at various types - and then repeating the experiment gives us a sense of how these variations affect performance. We can then form an idea of what factors best support human performance at this task, with an eye toward applying this knowledge to a real-world situation in which it is desirable to improve performance.
Granted, this is a bit frivolous, but it was merely a simple example that should help to explain the experimental methods that can be used to draw conclusions about human behavior and test ways in which it can be modified. Real experiments tend to be more meaningful and more intricate, but the methodology is the same.
(EN: The introduction ends here. I'd expected that it would tell more about the remainder of the book, but that is a convention in publishing that had not yet been established at the time this book was written.)