The evolution of experimental psychology

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 11 December 1999

The range of methods taught now would have amazed an experimental psychologist of a century ago.

Experimental psychology as taught in American universities has changed over the century from being attached to specific subject matters to being primarily methodological.

Edward B. Titchener's four-volume "Experimental Psychology," published between 1901 and 1905, blocked out the limits of experimental psychology as a subject at the time. The acceptable included sensation, perception, emotion, memory, action and similar topics. Later on, conditioning and learning would be added to the "canon" by others. Titchener organized his book around fundamental methods, which lent themselves to specific subject matters.

Titchener's book remained influential throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, though it had competition from others. The term "experimental psychology," came to stand for those fields that were then most conducive to experimental research.

When Titchener's book was finally eclipsed by Robert S. Woodworth's 1938 "Experimental Psychology," Woodworth's organization was primarily by subject matter with methodology being a somewhat secondary consideration. Woodworth's book became the "bible" of psychological researchers for decades. He popularized the concepts of independent and dependent variables in his book and lamented that developmental and abnormal psychology had not yet reached the level of genuine experimentation.

His second edition of the book, published with Harold Schlosberg in 1954, continued the traditional listing of content topics as experimental psychology. S.S. Stevens's "Handbook of Experimental Psychology," published in 1951, was perhaps the last successful one-volume compendium of all content topics within traditional experimental psychology.

In the late 1940s, social, abnormal and developmental psychology began to produce experiments that could meet Woodworth's standards. J.P. Guilford's "Psychometric Methods," published in 1936 and revised in 1954, demonstrated how psychophysics and psychometrics could be expanded into the measurement of any area of psychology. L.L. Thurstone's "Vectors of the Mind" published in 1935 had a similar influence. Kurt Lewin's research in social and developmental psychology deserves much credit for promoting an expectancy of experimental research in those fields, as does Eleanor Gibson's laboratory studies of child development.

Still, the experimental psychologies published in the 1940s and 1950s--such as those by Benton Underwood and Charles E. Osgood--emphasized content over methodology in the organization of their books.

By the 1960s, the way in which "experimental psychology" courses were taught began to change. By then the fields in psychology using the experimental method became too broad to teach in a one-semester content course. Experimental psychology became not a subject matter but a cluster of methods that could be used in any area of psychology.

Other methods that were not truly experimental were also becoming more accepted in general psychology, such as correlational methods and questionnaires, and their use needed to be taught. At the same time, the simple two-group design that had been common earlier in the century was supplanted by more complicated factorial designs.

F.J. McGuigan's 1960 text, "Experimental Psychology: A Methodological Approach," was among the first to look at the subject in a completely methodological way. Many books following the methodological approach were published in the 1960s and afterwards. By the 1970s, most "experimental psychology" courses were taught methodologically without significant presupposition of a content area. Even the names of the books began to change along with the titles of the courses. "Research Methods" and similar titles supplanted the older "Experimental Psychology" in many departments. In some cases, the course became primarily a statistics and experimental design course, but in most, methodology remained the focus.

As the century ends, an experimental methods course is among the few required courses in most psychology curricula and its range of methods would surprise experimental psychologists from the beginning of the century.

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