Appraising the Human Developmental Sciences: Essays in Honor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

19. Historical Lessons: The Value of Pluralism in Psychological

19 Historical Lessons The Value of Pluralism in Psychological Research Elliot Turiel 290 The history of psychology includes a characteristic that I think has not served us well. I am referring to a tendency for scholars to proclaim that a particular perspective, theoretical orientation, worldview , or attention to a set of topics is the wave of the future that will transform psychology in the right and necessary direction and move it from its erroneous ways. More often than not, such proclamations have involved proselytizing, in that there are calls for everyone to see the truth of the position, abandon outdated approaches, and embrace research agendas that are within the new perspective. They warn too that the entrenched powers will actively resist the new truths. As a historical example, behaviorists made such proclamations early in the 20th century. John Watson (1924) boldly asserted that behaviorism was a movement that would replace the prescientific thinking of the great mass of people, which was part and parcel of the ideas of psychologists of the time. He pointed to Wilhelm Wundt, William James, the functionalists, and the Gestaltists, whose concepts , such as consciousness and mind, only paralleled folklore that embraced ideas such as the soul. He also proclaimed the obvious truth of many behaviorist positions, including the environmentalism that he asserted had been neglected in efforts to identify inherited traits—which led him to the famous statement that he could train any healthy infant to become a “doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even beggar-man and thief regardless of his talents, penchants , tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors” (1924, p. 104). In Watson’s perception of the world of the time, behaviorist ideas were not accepted but actively resisted. The resistance was akin to the resistance that had “appeared when Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ was first published” (p. v), and because “behaviorism is treading on the hoof of somebody’s sacred cow . . . it is threatening the established order of things” (p. vi). One of Watson’s predictions turned out to be correct for a period of time. Behaviorism became the dominant perspective, at least in American psychology, during the first half of the 20th century. Unlike Darwin’s Origin of Species, however, Watson’s Behaviorism and other behaviorist writings did not stand the test of time or evidence . It is fortunate, I believe, that the functionalists, Gestaltists, structuralists, and even psychoanalysts did not fold their tents in the wake of the behaviorists’ proclamations. Alternative perspectives, theoretical orientations, and research agendas were pursued and, in their offshoots, have proved longer lasting. An interesting question is whether the dominance of behaviorism is attributable to the evidence provided by their research or to the influence of proclamations about the wave of the future. I suspect that the answer is both. Behaviorists did emphasize experimental work and provided a wealth of data (much of it with nonhumans) that influenced many. However, much of the research, especially as it applies to humans, appears to be flawed (see Chomsky, 1959). It is, of course, extremely difficult to estimate the influences of proselytizing by scholars like John Watson. The types of proclamations and proselytizing evident in Watson ’s writings continued in the latter part of the 20th century. We have seen it among some proponents of evolutionary psychology and cultural psychology—a contemporary version of the debates about heredity and environment regarded as settled by the behaviorists . Consider proclamations from proponents of each approach. A number of years ago the leading proponent of sociobiology (a precursor to evolutionary psychology), E. O. Wilson (1975), predicted that the social sciences and the humanities would become branches of “neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory.” Although that prediction has not panned out in the way Wilson stated so confidently, some evolutionary psychologists claim that matters regarding the evolutionary and genetic bases of many social and personality traits are settled (see Wright, 1994). They assert that many aspects of social relationships , individual dispositions, and morality are based on evolutionary processes. For instance, altruism, conscience, and the sense of justice “can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis” (Wright, 1994, p. 12). As a means of conveying the universality of behaviors and social relationships, they also claim that evolutionary psychologists are demonstrating that there is a “psychic unity” to The Value of Pluralism in Psychological Research 291 Elliot Turiel 292 humankind. These claims come with the familiar warnings: “The...