KURT DANZIGER
Psychology for Whom?
The question I would like to address concerns the uses of psychological
knowledge. Let us grant that
psychological research and practice generates something we are prepared to
accept as knowledge. Then we are
left with the question of what all this knowledge is for.
Does it do anyone any good, and if so, how?
Would it serve as an answer to say that any knowledge is a good thing in itself?
Yes, if we were talking about a culturally isolated community entering
the modern world, but that is hardly our own case.
Our problem is one of a surfeit, at least of factual knowledge.
None of us can keep up with the torrent of new knowledge except in
relatively tiny areas. Even among
specialists the utilization of new knowledge is limited.
We know that most research papers are never referred to again after
publication, except occasionally by their authors.
And knowledge that never affects anyone or anything but its author's
career chances does not seem to be a matter of great public value.
Moreover, there is the troubling issue that is so entertainingly illustrated by
the game of Trivial Pursuit. Undoubtedly, this game is about knowledge.
But for most of us it is knowledge with very little, if any, intrinsic
value. One could, without the
slightest difficulty, construct a vast game of Trivial Pursuit from the
information to be found in the pages of psychological journals.
Perhaps it has even been done.
Perhaps it is done every time a multiple choice examination is
constructed. But of course that is
not how the production of psychological knowledge is justified.
The existence of knowledge that is fit only for games and entertainment
illustrates something quite profound, namely, that not all knowledge is on the
same level. Some of it is indeed
trivial, and when we assign some essential value to the generation of knowledge
we would presumably want to limit ourselves to non-trivial knowledge.
But then we come up against the fact that triviality is obviously relative.
For most of us the information in a game of Trivial Pursuit may indeed be
trivial, but not for all of us all the time.
For some members of some professions, e.g. journalists or people active
in the entertainment industry, some of this knowledge may be quite significant
at times. So the value of knowledge
depends on the people who can do something with it and on what it enables them
to do. Therefore, if we want to
answer the question of what a particular body of knowledge is good for, we must
look for the people who use that knowledge and then inquire what they use it
for.
What applies to existing knowledge applies equally well to its production.
Knowledge is produced, not to be scattered at random by the breeze, but
to be circulated among and applied by a specific audience.
In our society the channels for the dissemination of psychological
knowledge are highly structured and institutionalized.
There are journals with a limited and defined readership, textbooks
targeted at specific groups of students, and so on.
This means that the producer of such knowledge has a very good idea of
who the audience is going to be and what they will expect of the product.
That is bound to affect the nature of the product.
Producers of scientific knowledge never work as independent individuals
but are enmeshed in a network of social relationships.
What they initially produce is not so much knowledge as knowledge claims.
Such claims are only transformed into knowledge by an acceptance process
that involves a number of individuals, reviewers, readers, textbook writers
etc., that share certain norms and interests.
Naturally, the anticipation of this acceptance process affects the
production of knowledge from the beginning.
This social system for the production of a certain kind of knowledge is always
in process of change. There are
fashions in research as in so many other areas.
What was acceptable yesterday is no longer acceptable today and vice
versa. Beneath the ripples of
fashion, however, there are deeper currents that extend over much longer periods
and have much more lasting effects on a field.
The contemporary researcher, practitioner, or consumer of psychological
knowledge is aware of the system only as it affects his or her current work.
Typically, the demands of the system of knowledge production and
distribution are simply taken for granted, or perhaps are seen as requiring
reform in certain specific respects.
If, however, we want to understand why psychological knowledge production
has taken on the shape that it has, we will not be able to dispense with a
historical perspective. It is only
when we inquire into how our system of psychological knowledge production
originated that we will be able to understand where the forms come from that are
taken for granted today.
Let me therefore go back briefly to the early days of modern psychology.
Any new group of knowledge producers, like scientific psychologists at
the beginning of this century, must come to terms with a world that already
contains knowledge producers that make related claims, like medical
professionals, educationists, experimental physiologists, and so on. These
established groups wield a certain amount of social power, and that power is
based on their institutionalized monopoly over certain types of knowledge
product. How can a new group of knowledge producers thrive under these
conditions?
It can thrive only if it manages to form effective alliances. This it can
do by enlisting the interest of established groups in its knowledge products and
avoiding their censure, a process that has many facets.
First of all, the new knowledge products had better reflect well
established preconceptions about the forms of valuable knowledge. If
quantitative knowledge is particularly valued, then it helps to establish new
claims if one can give them a quantitative form. But established preconceptions
about the form of knowledge products automatically extend to the methods used to
generate them, for the form of the product depends directly on the nature of the
method of production. So one must be seen to be engaging in practices that
produce the right type of knowledge, even though such rituals may have more in
common with magic than with science.
More specifically, the borrowing of techniques from better established
fields provides a basis for limited alliances which link the new field and its
products to the existing network of recognized scientific knowledge.
But this kind of alliance would provide only a limited basis for the development
of a new discipline if its knowledge products were not seen as having a
significant social value of their own. They must become marketable, and that
means that there must be categories of persons to whose interests the new
product is able to appeal. The more powerful and better organized these
consumers of knowledge products are, the more successful the producers will be
in consolidating their own position. American psychologists scored some
real successes in this direction by providing knowledge products that mobilized
the interests of educational and military administrators as well as the
administrators of private foundations.
Even if the alliances so formed were often temporary, and based more on
promissory
notes than on real goods, they served an important function in establishing the
credentials of the new discipline at a critical stage in its development.
The successful establishment of a new discipline is very much a ”political”
process in which alliances have to be formed, competitors have to be defeated,
programmes have to be formulated, recruits have to be won, power bases have to
be captured, organizations have to be formed, and so on. These political
exigencies necessarily leave their mark on the discipline itself because they
largely determine what types of knowledge product can be successfully marketed
at a particular time and place.
Almost from the beginning of the twentieth century psychology ceased to be a
purely academic discipline and began to market its products in the outside
world. That meant that the requirements of its potential market were able
to influence the direction in which psychology's practices were likely to
develop. Practices which were useful in the construction of specific
marketable products were likely to receive a boost, while practices which lacked
this capacity were henceforth placed under a handicap.
Many American psychologists wanted to see their discipline transformed into a
socially useful science. But as
soon as they tried to convert this ideal into practice they had to accommodate
themselves to the specific opportunities offered by a particular historical
context. In principle the possibilities of applying psychological
knowledge might be unlimited, but the actual possibilities available here and
now are always sharply circumscribed. They depend on existing
institutional forms and on the requirements of those who can command the social
resources for putting psychological knowledge to work.
To these clients research meant something that was rather different from
academic psychologists' traditional laboratory practice. Research, to the
administrators, was an activity whose results had to be relevant to managerial
concerns. It had to provide data that were useful in making immediate
decisions in restricted bureaucratic contexts. This meant research which
produced essentially statistical information on relatively large numbers of
individuals. What was definitely excluded was research which went beyond
the given human and social parameters within which the administrators had to
make their decisions. It was, in other words, technological research that
would help in dealing with circumscribed problems defined by currently
unquestioned social goals. Not infrequently, administrators simply needed
research for public relations purposes, to justify practices and decisions which
they judged to be expedient. What
they needed were scales that measured intellectual performance and experiments
that assessed the relative effectiveness of such environmental conditions as
were potentially under bureaucratic control. The primary consumers of the
results of such research were those whose controlling position made the results
potentially useful to them, least of all the children who participated in the
research as subjects.
A significant number of psychologists quickly responded to the requirements of
this type of research. What they
did not anticipate was the fact that the attempt to apply psychology to the
requirements of educational administration would have consequences for
psychology that were far more profound than any contribution psychology was
likely to make to education. In the first place, it meant a decisive break
with the kind of educational psychology that had been envisaged by the
pioneering giants of American psychology, by James, Baldwin, Hall and Dewey.
Their broader vision was now replaced by a much narrower and purely instrumental
conception of what psychology could accomplish.
The institutional constraints which the new educational psychologists
took for granted required them to emphasize the passivity of the child and to
restrict themselves to measured performance.
Precious resources were not to be wasted on an exploration of mental
processes that had no obvious utility in terms of bureaucratic goals.
The new pattern of psychological research practice which originally crystallized
in the work of educational psychologists proved to be increasingly attractive to
other psychologists in the years that followed. It was the experience
gained in research for educational administration that made it possible for
psychologists to exploit the professional opportunities presented by the large
scale requirements of military bureaucracy in both World Wars. Without the
methods of mental measurement already tried out within an educational context
American psychologists would have had nothing immediately useful to offer the
military authorities. Virtually the
entire field of applied psychology now came to be defined in terms of
psychological knowledge that would be useful in administrative contexts. Moreover, the conviction that psychological research had to produce the kind of
knowledge that would be potentially applicable in certain practical contexts
characterized an important and growing section of academic psychologists.
What this concern with useful knowledge generally came down to in practice was
the desire for knowledge that was marketable in bureaucratic administrative
contexts.
In the broadest terms, the kind of knowledge that was most obviously useful in
such contexts was statistical knowledge. Information about individuals was
generally of interest only insofar as it pertained to the categorization of
individuals in terms of group characteristics. Dealing with individuals by
categories constitutes the essence of bureaucratic practice. In fact, the
historical origin of statistics (including the term itself) is very intimately
bound up with the practice and rationalization of public administration, and
psychological statistics are no exception. Mindful of the need to market
the products of their research, applied psychologists avoided the exploration of
individual mental life and limited themselves to assigning individual
performance a place in an aggregate of performances.
It became fashionable to refer to this new, administratively relevant,
psychology as the psychology of individual differences, and its major practical
application was the field of mental testing.
But the reference to individual differences hides more than it reveals.
The term "individual differences" taken in isolation from a specific
context is exceedingly vague and could just as easily apply to the work of the
novelist as to that of the psychologist. Clearly, when mental testing is
derived from an interest in individual differences it is not this very general
meaning that is relevant but a very specific meaning which is conveyed by the
context. It was an interest in looking at individual differences in a
particular way that found expression in the development of mental tests.
Indeed, the investigation of individual differences preceded the use of large
scale mental testing by many years. This earlier interest, however, approached
the topic of individual differences in terms of questions of individuality and
typology. What the development of
mental testing did was to redefine the problem of individual differences.
It was no longer conceived as a problem of describing individuality or of
analysing typological patterns but as a matter of specifying the individual's
position with respect to an aggregate of individuals. This meant that the
individual was now defined on the basis of the properties of an aggregate.
The characterization of the individual depended just as much on the performance
of a set of others as it did on anything she did herself. Moreover, the
whole exercise depended on the assumption that the salient qualities for
characterizing an individual were qualities which she shared with others rather
than qualities unique to herself.
These common qualities had to be thought of as constant elements whose nature
was unaffected by their co-habitation with other such elements in the same
individual. Carried to its logical conclusion this methodology for assessing
"individual differences" actually eliminated the individual by reducing him to
the abstraction of a collection of points in a set of aggregates.
While the statistics of individual differences constituted the very antithesis
of an interest in psychological individuality, they were able to speak quite
directly to another kind of concern. This was the problem of conformity.
The new psychological practice was based on the setting up of "norms" in terms
of which individuals could be assessed. In most cases these norms were
psychological only by inference; in the first place they were norms of social
performance. The categories in
terms of which individuals were graded were not generally socially neutral
categories but carried a powerful evaluative component. Because categories
like "intelligence" embodied very specific social definitions of what was
desirable the normative study of individual performance became a matter of
establishing who would most effectively conform to certain socially established
criteria. These criteria ranged all the way from the unidimensional
"general intelligence" of the eugenicists to the qualities needed in a good
salesman. But they were always criteria that only made sense in the
context of particular social interests, be they grand and ideological or
practical and mundane.
For the new style of psychological research the individual was of interest only
in terms of his or her standing in an aggregate. Research objectives
largely shifted to the comparison of such aggregates and the statistical
relationships between them. In certain practical settings ("psychological
clinics") a more individualized employment of mental tests, closer to the
original vision of Binet, did continue.
But insofar as such practice claimed to have a scientific basis, that
basis was also statistical. Even though individual patterns might be
considered, they were still patterns of performance defined in terms of common
group norms.
At this point we have to pause to remind ourselves that the activity of
psychologists was not only constrained by the available possibilities for
marketing their knowledge products but also by their concern to establish and
then improve their claim to the status of scientists. What the individual
investigator did had potential social consequences for others who shared his or
her professional identity. The kinds of research practices with which
psychologists were associated served to distinguish psychologists from certain
neighbouring disciplines and professions with which there was actual or
potential competition, and they served to draw a sharp line between experts and
laymen. Above all, however,
research practices were crucial for legitimating the scientific credentials of
the discipline.
It must be emphasized that the criteria for being recognized as scientific had
relatively little to do with how the established sciences actually achieved
their successes. That involved a set of very complex issues which remain
controversial to this day. What was socially important, however, was the
widespread acceptance of a set of firm convictions about the nature of science.
To be socially effective it was not necessary that these convictions actually
reflected the essence of successful scientific practice. In fact, the most
popular beliefs in this area were based on external and unanalysed features of
certain practices in the most prestigious parts of science. Such beliefs
belonged to the rhetoric of science rather than to its substance. They
clustered around certain unquestioned emblems of scientificity like
quantification, experimentation, and the search for universal (i.e. ahistorical)
laws. A discipline that demonstrated its devotion to such emblems could at
least establish a serious claim to be counted among the august ranks of the
sciences.
The success of psychology as a discipline therefore involved two sets of
problems with often diverging implications. On the one hand, there was the
need to develop practices whose products would answer to the immediate needs of
socially important markets. But on the other hand, there was the need to
establish, maintain and strengthen the claim that what psychologists practiced
was indeed to be counted as science. These two requirements could not
always be easily reconciled, and so it was inevitable that there was conflict
within the discipline with some of its members placing relatively more emphasis
on one or other of these directions.
But in the long run the two factions depended on one another, rather like
two bickering partners in a basically satisfactory marriage.
We can regard the products of psychological research as grounded in two sets of
knowledge interests. On the one hand, there is an interest in producing
the kind of knowledge that appears to be practically useful to certain potential
consumers of the knowledge outside the discipline. But on the other hand,
there are interests which aim at the advancement of the discipline, both in a
cognitive and a social sense. What is desired here is knowledge which will
further the cognitive and technical control of the discipline over its subject
matter and which will improve its status among the sciences.
Although an emphasis on practically useful knowledge is more salient for applied
psychology, while concern with scientific standards is primary in pure research,
the two parts of the discipline have always depended on each other.
Applied psychology thrives on professional alliances and the creation of
markets for its products. But to
survive in this competitive environment it has to maintain at least a modicum of
scientific credibility. Psychology
as a whole must have earned sufficient respect as a knowledge producing
enterprise to be a serious candidate for competition or for alliance with other
professionalized fields. That means
its products must have become clearly distinguished from the everyday or common
knowledge and belief of the lay public and achieved the status of "expert”
knowledge. There is nothing more
inimical to a field's success as a source of valued knowledge than the suspicion
that it is able to supply no more than a duplication of what "everyone" knows
anyway, or worse, a reinforcement of popular superstitions.
The "soft" areas of psychology and parapsychology have always had to
contend with this problem and have usually had to ride along on the back of the
core discipline.
However, there would have been no core discipline to be carried along by if
there had not been constant vigilance about maintaining the sharpest possible
differentiation from folk knowledge.
This was not a problem limited to some marginal areas but affected the
discipline as a whole. For does not
everyone have to rely on psychological knowledge in making his or her way
through the world? How could
anything offered by experts compete with a lifetime of experience in human
affairs? The effects of this ever
present background challenge on the investigative practices of psychologists
should not be underestimated. Whatever else they may have done these practices
also served to demonstrate a crucial "distance” from those mundane situations in
which everyday psychological knowledge was acquired.
This was achieved largely by drawing on the mystique of the laboratory
and the mystique of numbers, both of which had been well established prior to
the appearance of modern psychology.
The very artificiality of laboratory situations became a plus in
establishing the credentials of knowledge claims emanating from this source, and
the imposition of a numerical form on otherwise trivial knowledge gave it an
apparent significance with which lay knowledge could not compete.
Replacing ordinary language with jargon helped too.
Nevertheless, the relationship between expert and everyday knowledge had other
aspects. For one thing, research
practices involving human subjects were unavoidably social practices and as such
were not as clearly distinct from extra-laboratory practices as the experimental
mystique made out. In order to
generate psychological knowledge, if one was not to rely solely on
self-observation or on animal analogies, one had to set up social situations
involving clearly patterned relationships among the human participants.
These situations resembled certain more familiar social situations, not
only because they were born in already established institutional environments,
but also because the type of knowledge product desired had affinities with other
knowledge products gathered in those environments.
Clinical experiments emerged in a clinical environment that had preformed
the social relationships among investigators and their "subjects" as well as the
shape of the knowledge product that resulted from their interaction.
Similarly, mental testing mimicked the social situation of a school
examination in quite a recognizable way, and its product, the objective grading
of individual performances, represented the optimal result of an idealized
examination. In the last analysis
psychological investigative situations constituted a development of already
existing social practices.
Applications of psychological research products tended to fall along a scale
from specific applications in mundane situations to grand claims about human
nature that had profound implications for social policy.
Among the latter one would find claims about the existence and
heritability of "general intelligence" or claims about the origins and social
role of race prejudice. At the
other end of the scale there would be local decisions about individuals on the
basis of test results, or improvements in human engineering.
Now, it is easy to see that the two kinds of application differ in terms
of the distance between the investigative situation and the situation to which
the research products are to be applied.
In the case of grand applications to social policy there is a vast
distance between the situations in which the research products were generated
and the kinds of situation to which they are to be applied.
This distance has to be bridged by a host of unproven and often unspoken
assumptions, and thus the whole enterprise is essentially based on leaps of
faith. But in the case of narrow,
technical applications of psychological knowledge there is typically a
considerable degree of continuity between the investigative situation and the
situation in which the application takes place.
When one applies intelligence or aptitude test results to the prediction
of future performance in the appropriate settings, academic or otherwise, one is
essentially using a ”simulation” technique.
The more effectively the investigative context simulates the context of
application the better the prediction will be.
However, we should note that there are two ways in which the distance between
the context of investigation and the context of application can be narrowed.
Letting the context of investigation simulate the context of application
is one way, and certainly the more easily recognized way.
But in many cases of successful application of psychological knowledge
one can also detect a reciprocal process which involves a change in the context
of application so that it comes to resemble the context of investigation.
The conventional model of the application of scientific knowledge
involves a fixed context of application, but of course this is not true in the
real world. Rather, the application
involves an actual change of practices which are transferred from the artificial
laboratory setting to the world outside.
In other words, the application of knowledge is possible only insofar as
an artificial construction, derived from the investigative situation, is imposed
on the natural world. This is what happens in the construction of industrial
plants or in the adoption of sterile conditions in medicine, for example.
An analogous process operates in the case of psychological knowledge.
Applying mental tests often meant modifying some of the practices of
schools so that they resembled testing practices more closely.
Having spawned intelligence tests in the first place some school
examinations subsequently imitated their offspring in terms of such matters as
timing, question format, use of statistical norms, and so on.
Or, to take another example from a later period, the adoption of
behaviour modification programmes in institutions involved the restructuring of
the context of application so that it more closely resembled a particular
research context. Practices have
always wandered from non-research to research contexts and back again.
Genuine application of psychological knowledge depends on this, for the
bond between knowledge and the practices with which it is associated is an
extremely intimate one. Abstract
knowledge only exists abstractly; its application requires a transfer of
corresponding practices. So if the
purely ideological application of psychological knowledge in support of
particular social policies were ever to be converted into a real application
that affected its objects directly it would require an appropriate
reconstruction of society, as B. F. Skinner so clearly demonstrated in ”Walden
Two”.
The distance that separates research situations from the situations in which
their knowledge products are to be applied leads to a serious problem.
On the one hand, the rhetoric of science requires that this distance be
emphasized and magnified. Because the yield from investigative situations was
supposed to consist of universally valid generalizations (so-called nomothetic
laws) these situations were endowed with a mystique that rendered them so remote
from ordinary life that they were not even seen as social situations.
Even the idea that there might be a social psychology of psychological
experiments only arose at a late stage in the development of the discipline.
However, there remained the rather indigestible fact that the discipline's
ability to make fairly reliable predictions about human beings outside the
psychological laboratory depended to a large extent on the closeness of the
context of investigation to the context of application.
More often than not, psychological knowledge had some technical utility
only insofar as its investigative practices were continuous with relevant social
practices outside the investigative situation.
This contradiction between scientistic rhetoric and the facts of life in applied
psychology tended to maintain the separation of "pure" and "applied" research.
Politically, both the rhetoric of science and specific technical utility
were however indispensable for the rapid development of the discipline and both
continued to flourish side by side.
In this way each partner could profit from the value attributed to the
activities of the other. "Pure"
research could claim support on the basis of its ultimate practical usefulness
and "applied" research could speak more authoritatively by clothing itself in
the mantle of science. In actual
fact, "applied" research usually relied on its own practices with little or no
help from "pure" research, and "pure" research showed a distinct tendency to
adopt some of the crucial practices of "applied" research, distinguishing itself
mainly by technical sophistication and a more abstract terminology.
Here we have another illustration of the major point that has formed the basis
of these reflections: The building
of a discipline like psychology is not something that takes place in a realm of
disembodied ideas but involves the social activity of specific groups of people
who have particular interests and who have to operate in a political
environment, like everyone else. The peculiarities of their historical situation
are reflected in the kinds of practices they adopt and in the kind of knowledge
which results from these practices.
Knowledge, including psychological knowledge, is produced by and for people with
particular social identities and hence particular social interests.
In taking this position with regard to psychological knowledge I have merely
been extending some perspectives that have been opened up by recent work in the
sociology, history, and philosophy of science.
If psychology is to be counted among the sciences it cannot escape this
kind of critical scrutiny. Now,
what has tended to happen in the field of science studies is a kind of
demystification of science. There
was a time when the activity of the scientist was seen only in highly idealized
terms, but the more it has itself become the subject of systematic examination
by sociologists, historians etc., the less distinguishable it has seemed from
more mundane social activities.
Inevitably, this has affected the way in which we think about the source of
scientific achievements. No longer
are we convinced by the old heroic image of the individual investigator who
unlocks nature's secrets in single-handed pursuit of the truth.
More sceptically - and surely more realistically - we are likely to see
models of reality emerging out of the collective interaction of groups of
investigators with each other and with other groups in society.
If we apply this perspective to the development of modern psychology we are led
to a recognition of the fundamental role played by the two factors I have
emphasized here: The need to
produce administratively useful knowledge, and the need to imitate the practices
of the more prestigious sciences.
These were not the only factors involved in the construction of modern
psychological knowledge, but their crucial importance cannot be overlooked.
They have given much contemporary psychological knowledge its
characteristic shape and are responsible for its characteristic limitations.
At the present time it is not uncommon to hear proposals for the reconstruction
of psychology along lines that are meant to avoid the limitations of more
traditional models of psychological knowledge.
But from the perspective developed here it would be a mistake to regard
such a reconstruction as a purely intellectual matter.
Psychology will change only insofar as its social alliances change.
For example, institutions that are interested in psychology as a basis
for people management have not been the only consumers of psychological
knowledge. Individual consumers,
who are interested in psychological knowledge as a means to achieving
self-understanding, constitute another group.
They tend to demand and to get a very different kind of psychology, one
that is likely to rely much more on psychoanalytic or phenomenological sources.
The shape of the discipline as a whole is likely to reflect the relative
importance of different types of consumer interest in its products.
Each variety of psychological knowledge will have its own appropriate field of
application and its own limitations.
There is nothing strange about that.
What is strange is the notion of a single body of abstract psychological
knowledge that is valid in all contexts and for all purposes.
It is not by chasing after this chimera that the discipline will make a
real contribution to matters of major human or intellectual significance.
That kind of achievement is more likely to come its way if it extends its
alliances and thereby transcends the limitations inherent in everyone of its
specific incarnations.
It is possible to identify a number of possibilities in that direction which have opened up in recent years. I will briefly mention three. Firstly, some feminists have introduced novel perspectives into the field which have already enriched it. Secondly, the field of community psychology has demonstrated that the consumers of applied psychological research need not be limited to traditional bureaucratic elites. Thirdly, the spread of psychological research to societies other than those in which it originated has sometimes linked it to a new range of concerns which have revealed the cultural bias that underlies much traditional work. All these cases have this in common, that the content of psychology has become influenced by new groups whose social interests and presuppositions are very different from those which dominated the first century of the discipline's modern existence. There are certainly sections of the discipline, like physiological psychology, which are relatively impervious to this sort of effect. But the discipline as a whole, including the place accorded to areas like physiological psychology, remains firmly dependent on the preferences generated by specific social interests.
If the history of psychology teaches us anything, it is that
psychological knowledge can take different forms.
Which of these forms predominates at a particular time and place depends
on the interests, concerns and assumptions of those who have sufficient social
influence to leave their mark on the generation of psychological knowledge.
In other words, there is a political, and hence also a moral, dimension
to the process of knowledge production.
Pretending it isn't so will not alter the historical reality but will
certainly prevent us from developing an appropriate response to it.
We can discover a great deal about psychology by studying its past - but
only if we ask the right questions.
Michael Kiernan Lecture given at the University of Saskatchewan, 1987.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
Buss, A. R. (Ed.) (1979). Psychology in social context.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action.
Rose, N. (1985). The psychological complex.
Sampson, E. E. (1983). Justice and the critique of pure psychology.
New York: Plenum Press.
Sarason, S. (1981). Psychology misdirected.
Sokal, M. M. (Ed.) (1987). Psychological testing and American society
1890-1930. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.
Whitley, R. (1984). The intellectual and social organization of the sciences.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.