GREAT EXPERIMENTS IN PSYCHOLOGY

GREAT EXPERIMENTS IN PSYCHOLOGY Henry E. GARRETT It present the student is usually taught first what is known in psychological science (factual content, as in the typical beginning course), second, how it has been found out (experimental methods and laboratory), and third, how to discover something himself (research). The student’s contacts with these three kinds of opportunity are stepwise, one after the other. This procedure is unjustified traditionalism. The honors student should be treated as a graduate student, less competent perhaps, but recognized as employing the same mental operations of criticism and research. The sophomore or even freshman student should be shown the living methods of psychology, if possible in practice. With or without laboratory facilities to draw upon, the use of a single standard text in the first course is not to be recommended. Habits of skimming, acquired in rapid reading courses in history, literature, and the like, may not affect the study habits of the student when he is up against a mathematics or physics assignment. They do undoubtedly tend to keep him from taking a ten-page psychology assignment seriously. There has long been need for a supplementary text like the present one, stressing experimental methods, giving the student some idea of how psychological facts have been discovered, who the men are who have contributed to the upbuilding of psychology, and what problems await immediate solution. Dr. Garrett’s book, used in parallel with a text of standard content, will punctuate with question-marks the stores of knowledge so authoritatively displayed and will soften the rigidity of the system–behavioristic, experiential, organismic, or what not–which we force upon the unsuspecting and all too gullible beginner. In its pages psychology appears to the student as a live, growing enterprise with a personal history and with a future to which it is not at all impossible to contribute. The plan followed in the first edition has been retained in the present book–namely, that of beginning with a classical experiment upon a fundamental psychological problem and then bringing the treatment down to date. The material of the original chapters has been rewritten, revised, supplemented, and sometimes reinterpreted. One new chapter, that on social psychology, has been added. Titles of chapters have for the most part been kept but the order of topics is somewhat more logical than before. Instead of a general bibliography, reading lists printed at the end of each chapter provide quicker and more convenient reference. The book will probably continue to find its chief use as a basic text in the first course in experimental psychology or as a supplementary book in general psychology. For many beginning students it will be their chief and perhaps only acquaintance with the experimental foundations of modern psychology. For the more advanced student it may serve as a quick review of fundamental research and as an incentive to further reading.

Write a review

Your Name:

Your Review:

Note: HTML is not translated!

Rating: Bad Good

Enter the code in the box below: