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Kurt Salzinger, PhD
Executive Director, APA Science Directorate |
(This article was first published in the Winter 2002 issue of the APAGS
Newsletter.)
I am quite sure that as graduate students you must be marveling at the
variety of subjects covered by the word "psychology." I suspect that
to be equally true of those of you who are practitioners in training because
even here there are so many different kinds of therapists—behavior therapists,
cognitive behavior therapists, cognitive therapists, psychoanalysts, gestalt
therapists, etc.
But I want to discuss the diversity that is present among scientist
psychologists (including, of course, scientist practitioners)—in some way we
are all represented in the various divisions that are harbored by the APA and
each of those can be divided into groups with many different interests as well.
Take Division 1—General. Well all right, I’m cheating. General seems to
cover all. In fact, when you think about it carefully, you realize that it is
still another specialty. How about Division 2, Society for the Teaching of
Psychology? Clearly, you can teach each of the branches of psychology from
clinical to social to experimental to comparative to physiological to cognitive
to learning to memory to industrial organizational to applied experimental to
statistical or quantitative and so on. I’m quite out of breath and I haven’t
even mentioned introductory psychology, which covers them all.
Ok, what about Division 3, Experimental Psychology? To what behaviors can you
apply experimental procedures? To what can’t you apply experimental procedure?
What, you can’t apply it to thinking? You just haven’t thought hard enough.
Just set up a problem for someone and measure how long it takes to solve it.
Change the wording of the mathematical problem and then measure how long it
takes to solve that problem. What? You are bothered by the fact that thinking is
inferred rather than actually observed. You can, of course, follow Herbert Simon
who followed the procedure first used by the behaviorist John B. Watson. What
you do is perfectly simple. You instruct your subject (I know you’re supposed
to say "participant" but the Pub manual does not mandate it, it simply
"prefers" it, and I think that the word "participant"
implies something about the subject that is simply not true, namely that he or
she somehow had something to say about the design of the experiment or its
analysis, or its conception, etc.). But let me return to the subject (!) at
hand, namely how to study thinking. If you follow Simon and his predecessor,
Watson you simply ask the subject to "think aloud," that is, to speak
while solving the problem.
You can, of course, study thinking also by measuring the subject’s brain
activity by measuring his or her evoked potential by placing an electrode on his
scalp and another on his earlobe (as a ground) and determine whether you get a
reaction that is different when the subject is thinking of a problem that you’ve
set for him or her, as opposed to say watching Madonna. When you measure brain
activity, however, you are often labeled a physiological psychologist rather
than an experimental psychologist. And when you do problem solving with a rat,
you are called an animal psychologist or a comparative psychologist, even though
you are doing an experiment. When you experiment with groups of subjects, you’re
called a social psychologist. My point is that the labels we use are to some
degree misleading because they point only to one aspect of your work. That is
important because the labels might well make you think that your skill or talent
or knowledge is limited to what that label describes or connotes. The
fact is that when you learn how to do an experiment or design a study in which
you observe methodically a situation that you cannot manipulate, you still have
the requisite knowledge to move from one area of psychology to another. That is
only one of the attributes that makes being a psychologist such a delight in
allowing us to leap from one area to another without having to leave all our
skills and knowledge back where we started from.
Being a scientist, in other words, allows you to study violent behavior in
adolescents as well as auditory thresholds in the goldfish. To be sure, you must
in each case take the time to study the organism of interest, its habitat, its
typical behavior, the variables that control its behavior, the events that
reinforce it, and so on. But once you have learned those very important aspects
of the organism of interest, you can apply the same general principles of study
to discover what makes each one tick.
My point is that in your graduate days, you should be very careful to take a
large enough variety of courses outside your specialty and teach yourself the
critical skill of reading in various areas of psychology so that you will be
able to switch easily to another of the many different areas that constitute
psychology. There is but one psychology and it is science. Learn that and you
are free to explore its many different aspects.
Which brings me to the Science Directorate in the APA and to ask whether you
are making full use of what we are offering. In most cases the clear answer is
"NO." So please listen to me and immediately go to the URL www.apa.org/science/
to see all the things that you can do if only you prepare yourself to be a
scientist psychologist.
