Hold on to Scientific Experimentation in Psychology

Abstract

Like all reactionaries in history, both at home and abroad, the "Gang of Four" are a sworn enemy of science. Being fearful of science, they tried to strangle it. It is precisely because of the gang's frenzied sabotage that psychological studies in our country suffered severe damage. Yao Wenyuan, the alien-class element and literary prostitute, repeatedly laid his vicious hands on psychological studies. Resorting to his habitual despicable tricks of indiscriminately slapping political labels and coming down with the big stick upon others, he wantonly lashed out at psychology. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Yao Wenyuan (publishing a sinister article in Guangming ribao under the assumed name of Ge Mingren), (1) by quoting out of context and amputating the contents of an experimental study which we conducted on the development of children's capability of abstract generalization, took the lead in launching an attack against the "direction" and "method" of our psychological studies. Slandering psychological studies as "metaphysics," "idealism," and "antiscientific," he uttered the nonsense that such studies bear "no theoretic significance and scientific value" at all. Later he dished out a so-called "Letter of Suggestion," which labeled the entire discipline as "bourgeois psychology" and thereupon mounted a white-terror campaign of encirclement and suppression against psychological studies and the broad masses of psychological workers. As a result of this white-terror campaign, many well-known psychologists suffered unrighted wrongs and were brutally persecuted. Studies and teaching of psychology were stopped for more than ten years, and the damage was disastrous. As regards the serious crimes committed by the "Gang of Four," especially by the reactionary literary prostitute Yao Wenyuan, in devastating and strangling psychological pursuits, we must make a thorough expose and settle accounts with them.