Historical Shift From Traditional Faculty Psychology To Modern Experimental Psychology
Discussion
Mark Stahlman:
"Knowledge of Faculty Psychology, a topic which describes Western understanding of the psyche from 4th-century BC Aristotle's Peri Psyche through more than two millennia of commentary and application, was quickly replaced with “experimental” psychology in the 19th-century, a shift that persists through to today. In this process, many thought that the human “soul” was not suitable for empirical examination, so it was abandoned for this psychological research. As a result, psychology lost its philosophical/theological foundations and instead often turned into an effort to engineer “better” humans. New “images” of what it meant to be human were proposed and the goal of engineering a new society often became the motivation for psychological inquiry. Our view is that this shift has had mostly negative results, neither making humanity more sane nor more happy, while resulting in a society that increasingly seems consumed by chaos. Accordingly, we believe that a retrieval of Faculty Psychology is urgently needed for our current digital age.
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We will need to retrieve that earlier understanding to deal with the robots. Understanding what it means to be human has become our most compelling priority. "
The Post-WWII Mindshift
The positive vision
"In 1951, Lawrence K. Frank published his Nature and human nature: man's new image of himself. In it he rejoices that science has finally “overcome superstition” and that humanity was now on the path to “shaping its own destiny.” All we needed was a “new image,” a theme that many others would later pick up on.
The theme was continued by Fred Polak (1907-1985), a leading Dutch futurist, in his 1953 Image of the Future: Enlightening the past, orientating the present, forecasting the future.
Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993), a leading economist and Quaker “mystic” who had met Polak at the inaugural meeting of the Center for the Advanced Study of Behavior6 would publish his 1956 The Image, in which he put forward a new approach he called “Eiconics” (later to be renamed “memetics” by Dawkins in his 1976 The Selfish Gene).
After years of private circulation, The Changing Image of Man, based on a project supervised by Willis Harman (1918-1997) and conducted by Stanford Research International (SRI, initially funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education), was finally published in 1982 (with major contributions by Elise Boulding). The Introduction begins with, “In this study we attempt to discern fundamental and usually unrecognized influences on our societal problems, on our social policies, and on our hopes for the future.”
In the report's “Introduction to the Pergamon Edition,” its impact was evaluated by highlighting Marilyn Ferguson's 1980 Aquarian Conspiracy, referred to as coming from “a proponent's point of view.” Harman who would go on to head the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausilito, and also wrote Global Mind Change, played a key role in establishing the “Towards a Science of Consciousness” conferences (initially funded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, of Transcendental Meditation fame). A New Age was in the air. Suitable for a new “image of man.”
The 'Shadow' of the dream
"In 1978, Walter Bowart (1939-2007), founder of the early “underground” newspaper the East Village Other, published his Operation Mind Control,12 which pointed towards a much more sinister underlying phenomenon. He keyed in on the CIA's “Project MKULTRA,” as had recently been exposed in the 1975 Senate Church Committee hearing (also leading to today's Congressional oversight over U.S. intelligence activity), Bowart hinted at dark forces who were trying to “brainwash” us. The foreword was written by Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate (1959, later made into a 1962 political thriller, starring Frank Sinatra, plus a more recent remake). If humans could be “engineered,” then an idyllic new age wasn't the only (or even most obvious) outcome. What if they could be “programmed” to kill? Or even “enslave” themselves or, indeed, to be harnessed to make a “worse” world?"
Modern psychology also gave us psychological warfare
"H.G. Wells was hired by Fleet Street's Lord Beaverbrook to help portray the Germans as “Huns” in WWI. “Propaganda” became a major concern, leading to many efforts to try to understand its mechanisms. Events in Germany elevated the urgency. If the ostensibly well-educated/behaved Germans could be driven to such extremes, then what caused this to happen and what techniques/technology was involved? Could it be countered? Could it be taken advantage of? Could it be improved to involve the “target” in their own coercion. Stimulated by Hitler's rise to power, the Rockefeller Foundation launched its famous “Radio Research Project” in the late 1930s, initially headed by Paul Lazarsfeld, the “father of empirical sociology,” first at Princeton and then at Columbia University (1901-1976).
Lazarsfeld hired Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) for the “Project” to work on the psycho-social impact of popular music (Adorno was also a composer). They fought over the application of “statistics” to the problem and Adorno left. But he soon returned at the head of a new effort, resulting in the publishing of The Authoritarian Personality in 1952,15 long treated as the “handbook” of the burgeoning field of Social Psychology, which had absorbed many engaged in psy-war in WWII.
In it, Adorno &al proposed an “F-scale” (named after “fascism,” understandable since Adorno was affiliated with the Marxist/Freudian Frankfurt School). Adorno's 1927 habilitation thesis had been titled “The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche.” Christopher Simpson skillfully traced the history of psychological warfare transitioning into academia in his Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960.16 The dust-jacket introduces the volume by saying, “In this provocative study, Christopher Simpson demonstrates how the government-funded psychological warfare programs of the Cold War years underwrote the academic studies that formed the basis for much modern communications research.”
Like the work of Frances Stonor Saunders with her The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters17 (originally titled Who Paid the Piper?, as well as her other books, plus Simpson's and others), the focus has been on trying to find someone to blame. But, given the context that produced psy-war, tracing back to the origins of experimental psychology a century earlier, a wider view might well consider these developments to be far more “systematic.” Many more were implicated. In 1953, the Ford Foundation, which by then had taken over many of the research topics previously paid for by the Rockefeller agencies, funded an extension to the earlier Radio Research Project by awarding a $43,000 grant (roughly $400,000 in today's money) to Marshall McLuhan and the Inuit-studying anthropologist Edmund “Ted” Carpenter to research “The Changing Patterns of Language and Behavior and the New Media of Communications.”18 This was the television update to the previous study on radio and it launched McLuhan's career as a “media guru.” McLuhan was no “statistician,” like Lazarsfeld had been. He described himself as a “grammarian” (with expertise in rhetoric) and he took an expansive view of the effects of the media itself on people. Thus, “The Medium is the Message.”19 An English professor, with significant knowledge of the artistic movements which paralleled the rise of experimental psychology, beginning with French Symbolism, McLuhan had been clipping into, analyzing and lecturing on the effects of advertising for years. What would later be captured in the Mad Men television series reflected what McLuhan considered to be the greatest “art” of his times. It was a quite manipulative art, to be sure. Is advertising “psychological warfare” (or just a close cousin)? In a recent conversation with an American anthropologist who moved to Japan to work in advertising, he suggested that the goal of his industry was to “seduce the affections of 13 year-old girls, since that's when brand allegiance is formed.” Maybe child-abuse would be a better term?
Perhaps the current furor over “misinformation” and “election interference” is instructive. Overall, these concerns are, once again, superficially trying to place blame and are rooted in political motivations. But this has drawn attention to what B.J. Fogg described in his 2002 book Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.20 Underlying this relentless psychological onslaught – begun by television-based advertisers long before the Internet exploded – attempting to exploit whatever was needed to “sell” a product (once just goods and services and now spilling over into “dangerous” ideologies), was the continuing drive to “engineer” the population. Using psychology, which had transitioned from “behaviorism” to “cognitive science,” much effort was being expended to advance the creation of a “new man.”
Source
* Article: THE INNER SENSES AND HUMAN ENGINEERING. Mark Stahlman. Dianoetikon, No. 1, pp. 1-26, 2020.
More information
- see: Human Engineering