Standardizing the Subject: Experimental Psychologists, Introspection, and the Quest for a Technoscientific Ideal

Abstract

Standardizing the Subject: Experimental Psychologists, Introspection, and the Quest for a Technoscientific Ideal DEBORAH J. COON Historians of psychology have long noted the extent to which American psychologists after the turn of the century, and especially after World War I, were motivated by the progressive ideals of practicality, order, and control, ideals arising from and compatible with a rapidly urbanizing, industrializing American society.1 They have noted how early psychologists stressed the usefulness of their discipline and emphasized their ability to engineer people’s behavior Dr. Coon is an assistant professor of history in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Research for this article was partially funded by a Smithsonian Institution postdoctoral fellowship at the National Museum of American History and by a Paul S. Beer Trust minigrant from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Houghton Library at Harvard University gave permission to quote from the William James Papers. The article is an extension of earlier work done in collaboration with Merriley Borell, Hughes Evans, and Gail Hornstein. The author also wishes to thank I. Bernard Cohen, Audrey Davis, Donald Fleming, Robert J. Richards, and Barbara Rosenkrantz for guidance over the years and is grateful to P. Thomas Carroll, John Carson, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Kurt Danziger, and the Technology and Culture referees for their comments on the article. 'John C. Burnham’s Paths into American Culture: Psychology, Medicine and Morals (Philadelphia, 1988), brings together several of his seminal essays discussing the progressivist faith of early psychologists in the United States. See also John M. O’Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870—1920 (New York, 1985); Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago, 1972); Michael M. Sokal, ed., Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890—1930 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987). On the impact of industrialization on modern society, see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York, 1964). On industrialization specifically in American society in the 19th and early 20th centuries, see John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York, 1976); Robert H. Wiebe, The Searchfor Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982); Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century ofInvention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York, 1989). On the effects of industri­ alization on American science, see P. Thomas Carroll, “American Science Trans­ formed,” American Scientist 74 (1986): 466-85; and David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford, 1977).© 1993 bv the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3404-0004$01.00 757 758 Deborah J. Coon into desired channels. Behaviorism, as it was initiated by John B. Watson in 1913, and neobehaviorism, as developed by B. F. Skinner, were exemplars of this ideal. Behaviorism was explicitly designed to predict and control human behavior, and Skinner even referred to his system of behaviorism as a social technology.2 Mental testing and industrial psychology were other early offshoots of the same techno­ logical ideal, and the former especially has been a subject of intensive study by historians.3 When they have acknowledged the existence of this technological ideal, historians have generally mentioned that its roots lay slightly earlier in the history of American psychology. As examples, one can readily point to James McKeen Cattell’s address to the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science of 1904 and William James’s even earlier 1892 American Psychological Association presidential ad­ dress.4 Both of these eminent American psychologists called for a useful and practical science of psychology. Both gave preference to application of knowledge over knowledge for its own sake. While historians have recognized these effects of a technological ideal on the development of experimental psychology in the United States, I think there was another more fundamental and subtle way in which technological—or technoscientihc—ideals shaped the discipline of psychology in the United States from the 1880s onward? This had 2For example, see B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism (New York, 1974), pp. 248-50, and Science and Human Behavior (New York, 1953), p. 51. ’The...