New Horizons in Psychology 1. [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION This book is about scientific psychology. In the chapters that follow, it is possible to see the influences of philosophical psychology and of psycho-analysis; nevertheless, the emphasis is on rigorous observation and experiment. The sort of work reported here has been going on for only a few decades. As Professor C. A. Mace once put it, modern psychology has no history, just a past. However, it is not necessarily a shady past, and as Mace has also said, no one has yet shown that better ideas have come out of the laboratory than those which came out of the armchair. I am not sure how seriously he intended the remark to be taken, and many experimental psychologists would disagree with it; but to the general public, experimental psychology is still at a testing stage. This book can be regarded as a progress report. It is intended also to be a guide to what may be some of the exciting developments in the coming years. From this point of view the selection of topics is bound to be personal. There is, for instance, a bias to believing that the study of physiology and animals will continue to provide some of the more important growing points of psychology. Several promising kinds of research have had to be left out on the grounds that it would be necessary to take the reader through an honours degree course in psychology before he would see the point of the problems which the research sets out to solve. The scope of the book has also been narrowed by excluding most of the advances which have been made in applied psychology: there would be so much to report in such little space. Indeed, it will be noticed that authors have rarely drawn attention to the possible applications of the work they report. The editor hopes that readers may be stimulated to thinking of applications for themselves. The subject matter of psychology is the behaviour of man, and other animals, and this is taken to include man's subjective experience. It is easier to be objective about behaviour which can be observed by others, and measured or classified, but experimenters have made great progress in probing man's experiences. 7