Biographical

The Victorian biologist and early social philosopher Herbert Spencer was a great rival of Charles Darwin's. His theory of evolution preceded Darwin's own, but was soon overshadowed because of the absence of an effective theory of natural selection - although it was Spencer, and not Darwin, who popularized the term "evolution" itself and coined the now-ubiquitous phrase, "survival of the fittest". Although no longer influential in biology, his extension of his theory of evolution to psychology and sociology remains important. His "Social Darwinism" was particularly influential on early evolutionary economists such as Thorstein Veblen, but, more contemporaneously, it was adopted with gusto by American apologists such as William Graham Sumner and Simon Nelson Patten.

Charles Darwin did not come up with the idea of evolution, he was merely the first to come up with an explanation for how evolution worked that explained what he and other biologists saw in the world. Darwin came up with the idea of Natural Selection. This is the idea that the environment an organism lives in helps to determine which organisms survive and produce young, and which do not.

While Müller ended his life as the experimentalist, he did not start out as one. His second doctoral subject was experimental physics (taught by Wilhelm Weber), but his dissertation of 1873 and his habilitation of 1876 (Müller, 1878a) would today be book-length versions of a Psychological Review articles, since there is no original data in either one. In the Habilitation, he defined much of the standard psychophysics that has been passed down to students (Haupt, 1995); recommended using both ascending and descending methods of limits to limit bias and the method of constant stimuli, which he extensively developed with the Müller weights, would seem to be another method designed to improve the usefulness of a threshold, but he did not provide any new experimental data. In the early papers on memory by Müller and Schumann, he seems to have originated a number of important procedural controls for the study of association. Kroh (1935, p. 155) puts Müller in the same group (first generation of psychologists) with Stumpf and Külpe, for which the transition to being an experimentalist was a significant step; a step that was not required for anyone trained as a physicist (Fechner) or physiologist (Wundt).

Galton and subsequent investigators find wide divergences in people's subjective reports of mental imagery. Such individual differences might be taken to explain the peculiarly irreconcilable disputes over the nature and cognitive significance of imagery which have periodically broken out among psychologists and philosophers. However, to so explain these disputes is itself to take a substantive and questionable position on the cognitive role of imagery. This article distinguishes three separable issues over which people can be "for" or "against" mental images. Conflation of these issues can lead to theoretical differences being mistaken for experiential differences, even by theorists themselves. This is applied to the case of John B. Watson, who inaugurated a half-century of neglect of image psychology. Watson originally claimed to have vivid imagery; by 1913 he was denying the existence of images. This strange reversal, which made his behaviorism possible, is explicable as a "creative misconstrual" of Dunlap's "motor" theory of imagination.

This site includes biographical profiles of people who have influenced the development of intelligence theory and testing, in-depth articles exploring current controversies related to human intelligence, and resources for teachers.

"The basic thesis of gestalt theory might be formulated thus: there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clearcut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole." Max Wertheimer, Gestalt theory.
Social Research, 11 (translation of lecture at the Kant Society, Berlin, 1924).

Knight Dunlap (1875-1949) has been called the "forgotten man" of American psychology. While some behavior therapists associate his name with "negative practice," he is probably unknown to the majority of psychologists. Although it is highly unlikely that Dunlap will ever be a household name, this page attempts to redress the neglect of Dunlap's many contributions to the history of American psychology.

Few figures have had so decisive and fundamental an influence on the course of modern cultural history as Sigmund Freud. Yet few figures also have inspired such sustained controversy and intense debate. Freud's legacy continues to be hotly contested, as demonstrated by the controversy attracted by this exhibition even before its opening. Our notions of identity, memory, childhood, sexuality, and, most generally, of meaning have been shaped in relation to--and often in opposition to--Freud's work. The exhibition examines Freud's life and his key ideas and their effect upon the twentieth century.

These pages are devoted to the presentation and promotion of the Rorschach method, concentrating on the way it has been practiced within the classical European tradition - from Hermann Rorschach himself in 1921, via Ewald Bohm in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, and to the contemporary workers in the Rorschach-Bohm tradition. You can here find basic information about Hermann Rorschach, about the different Rorschach traditions and the essential differences between them, and about the current scientific debate about the Rorschach test. There are also some links to other Web pages devoted to the Rorschach method.

SOCIAL psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order.
-- from Mind, Self and Society from the Perspective of a Social Behaviorist