833 ·特约文章·
What Psychology Can Learn from Its History?
*Kurt Pawlik
(Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Germany)
编者按：本文作者是国际知名心理学家、德国汉堡大学的Kurt Pawlik教授，他也是国际心理学界卓越的领 导人，曾经担任过国际心理科学联合会理事长和国际社会科学理事会理事长。正如他这篇文章所指出的，心 理学在国际科学界有着独特的地位，它既是一门科学学科，又是一门连接自然科学和社会科学的桥梁学科。 国际心理学科学联合会，是国际科学理事会（ICSU）联合会会员中唯一的也是国际社会科学理事会（ICSS） 的联合会会员的学会。要这么麻烦地说，是因为这两个国际性的最高学术组织，都是由两类成员组成的，一 类是国际会员，另一类是科学联合会会员。在ICSU中，就有127个国家会员和29个联合会会员。ICSS的 情况也是类似的。Pawlik教授担任了国际社会科学理事会的理事长，是他本人学术造诣的成就，也是国际社 会科学对心理学的高度认可。就心理学自身来说，它不仅是一门研究人的意识和行为的科学学科，同时，也 已经成为一种举世瞩目的服务于人类的职业。从心理学发展的历史中，Pawlik教授总结了心理学的统一的规 律，也分析了心理学作为一门职业的特点，使我们对于心理学的科学特征、其在人类科学体系中的地位和作 用，以及如何更好地发挥这门职业都有很好的启发。
Pawlik教授应荆其诚先生的邀请，2007年到河南开封参加中国心理学会学术交流大会，并做大会报告，
本文是在大会报告的基础上完成的。荆先生一直关心着这些特邀报告的成文和发表，期望使更多的心理学工 作者和对心理学关心的人们，能够从这些大家的报告中得到更多的启示。如今，荆先生不幸突然离开我们了。 发表这些报告，实际上也成了对荆先生的纪念。
Abstract: The paper looks into regularities in the history of psychology as a science and as a profession that may
stand generalization beyond conditions and contexts. Lacking a better term they are referred to as “lessons” to be deduced from history. As to the first, the history of psychology as a science, six such regularities are proposed: (i) dual status of psychology as a scientific discipline and a “bridge” science due, integrating biological, social and cultural methods; (ii) indispensability of empiricism as methodological guideline; (iii) cross-over utility of results from basic and applied research; (iv) need of alternative heuristic scales; (v) compatibility of universality and indigenization; and (vi) disciplinary strength of psychology in scientific development. Another additional 3 regularities are proposed from a examination of psychology’s history as a profession: (i) rapidity of professionalization; (ii) need of two-way transfer between academia and practice; and (iii) lessons to be learned from cross-disciplinary give and take of expertise.
Key words: psychology; history; lesson
Learning from personal past experience is a classical, especially well researched topic of experimental psychology. The same cannot be said, however, for learning from the collective past as a topic of historical analysis. If and how we may be able to learn from history raises long-standing questions,
* Invited Plenary Lecture, 11th Congress of the Chinese Society of
Psychology, November 2007, Henan University, Kaifeng, China. E-mail: [email protected]
recurrence and correlation as learning from the personal past depends on contingency between antecedents, behavioral responses and their consequences (Hilgard, 1956).
Then the topic of my address makes it necessary to look for eventual regularities, of conditions and consequences, in the development of psychology. Or one could say: to apply to this development methods with which we are familiar with from the experimental study of individual behavior learning – with one big difference though: While data on individual behavior can be collected at high levels of (i) completeness, (ii) representativeness and (iii) psychometric reliability, data of comparable quality is not available for the development of a science or a profession. Despite a long tradition in the study of the history of psychology1, we still are lacking what might be called a ‘historiometric’ approach to historical data gathering that would meet criteria of historiography equivalent to the psychometric standards in the analysis of individual development. Furthermore, different approaches can and have been taken in studying the history of psychology that do not simply map into each other (see Pawlik and d’Ydewalle, 2006, for a taxonomy).
Therefore, the following analysis and conclusions will have to be taken cum grano salis, originating in
my personal views on - and participation for fifty years in - psychology’s development and in my intuitive search for correlations and contingencies – all this with the aim to identify regularities that may stand historical generalization. Lacking a better term I will refer such regularities as “lessons” possibly to be learned from the history of our discipline and profession. As to the usefulness of such historical reflection in psychology, I like to quote from the history-of-psychology classic by Edwin G. Boring (1929), who reminded us:
“… The experimental psychologist … needs historical sophistication within his own sphere of expertness. Without such knowledge he sees the present in distorted perspective, he mistakes old facts and old
1 Notwithstanding psychology’s long past, of more than
two-thousand years of pre-scientific thinking about human nature and behavior, we will limit ourselves here to the history of psychology as a science, that is from 1850/1860 onwards.
views for new, and he remains unable to evaluate the significance of new movements and methods. … A psychological sophistication that contains no component of historical orientation seems to em to be no sophistication at all.”
1 “Lessons” from the History of Psychology as a Science
I will take up six topics, starting with:
1.1 Psychology’s dual status: as a scientific discipline and a “bridge” science
What defines a field of scientific inquiry as a unitary science? Usually, one would think of commonalities like
● common object of study, ● common methodology,
● common theoretical basis and/or ● common professional profile.
Let us look at each of them for the case of psychology:
Clearly, human mental activity and behavior will not serve to define psychology as a unique science. We share this object of study with many other sciences: from philosophy to linguistics and cognitive science, from (neuro)physiology to anthropology and ethnology, from ergonomics to sociology and economics, etc. Nor can we expect agreement on a common theoretical basis or grounding theory for psychology at large. Behavioristic and cognitivistic theories, personality theory, or theory of mind have too little in common to identify a unique science. And the same is true for psychology’s professional profile: experimental psychology, clinical psychology and psychotherapy, organizational psychology, environmental psychology or road traffic psychology, while sharing certain methods, research results and theories, are widely specialized fields which would require extensive new training before one could switch from one to the other.
This leaves us with methodology as the only candidate commonality left for defining psychology, as many are thinking today. 2 In my view, this commonality comprises four methodological
2 Note that I am speaking of methodology in general and not of
principles, viz.:
● psychology is a rational empirical science, in which statements have no standing without proof;
● psychology’s empirical basis are observations from experimentation or field studies that
● meet accepted criteria of data quality (like reliability, validity etc.) and
● employ methods from biological, social, and cultural sciences in design, theoretical connotation and quality standard.
In this sense psychology is the multidisciplinary science of human behavior and mental activity, multidisciplinary often even within one and the same study. No other science studies the human mind and behavior with such integrative methodology. Already Wilhelm Wundt (1832~1920), founder of modern psychological science and of the first Psychological Laboratory (1880 at the University of Leipzig, Germany) emphasized such multidisciplinarity as essentially mandatory if the methodology of psychology is to match the complexity of its object of study (Wundt, 1896, 1920; see also Fahrenberg, 2008). And Wundt already followed this maxim himself: he not only authored the first textbook on physiological psychology (Wundt, 1874) but also an early 10-volume handbook on social and cross-cultural psychology (his Völkerpsychologie: Wundt, 1900/1920).
Multidisiplinarity in the study of the human mind and behavior brings psychology into a unique position also as a bridge-discipline, notably between the biological and social sciences. It qualifies psychologists for participation in transdisciplinary research in neuroscience, cognitive science, environmental science or the health sciences (Denis, 2000). And it upgrades psychology to a resource science for other disciplines like education or law, medical care, environmental design, or business administration, to name just a few. And last not least it qualifies psychology for contributions to social and societal development.
The resulting first “lesson” to be learned from this historical success story could read: Maintain and further strengthen balanced multidisciplinarity in psychology, in research, in professional service, and in the education of future generations of psychologists.
1.2 Indispensable empiricism
With a history of hardly more than 150 years psychology is still a young science. As early chemistry, for example, had to emancipate itself from pre- scientific thinking like alchemy, also early psychology had to transcend some heritage of pre-scientific conceptions. In post-Wundt German psychology of the 1920s such ideas were regrettably regaining influence, also questioning hard-core empirical research. The plaidoyer, by Wundt’s successor in Leipzig, for a ‘holistic psychology’ (Ganzheitspsychologie) to
replace ‘atomistic’ experimentation (see Krueger, 1951) or W. Dilthey’s (1894) claim that only nature can be ‘explained’ whereas the human mind has to be ’understood’ (through empathy and hermeneutics), are but two examples. Proposals to take mere consensus in subjective interpretation of psychological phenomena as a substitute for objective, experimental truth criteria followed en-suite. Deleterious effects on the development of psychology in Germany, later also in Austria, became wide-spread (Pawlik, 1994), more and more cutting it off from international mainstream that did not take part in this departure from this empirical-rational science model. Since the 1930s this was amplified in Germany still further under growing ideological pressure and grave injustice to individual scholars by the Nazi regime. Giving up the standards of an empirical-rational science as methodological guideline damages psychology in its foundations, both academically and professionally. Following World War II it took no less than fifteen years, until the early 1960s, to rebuild academic psychology in Germany.
By contrast, abandoning these standards of empirical- rational methodology proved gravely misleading also in psychological assessment: In the 1930s the Swiss psychiatrist H. Rorschach had developed an ink-blot test of visual design perception 3 (Rorschach, 1941) to test its potential validity for objective assessment of psychopathology. In the decades to follow the procedure became grossly over-interpreted by others as a ‘projective’ omnibus-test of personality, although there was and still is insufficient empirical proof of its objectivity, reliability, or validity when administered in the classical form. Yet generations of practitioners, some of them up until today, continued to employ the test in individual assessments, unmoved by profound criticism since more than fifty years (cf. Guilford, 1959). For a while this neglect of psychometric standards even backfired on psychological assessment at large (Mischel, 1968).
This leads to an important second “lesson”: As a science and its social responsibility psychology must strictly adhere to the methodological standards of rational empiricism. Subjective beliefs or so-called intuition, no matter how high in personal convincingness, must never be allowed to serve as substitute.
1.3 The unity of basic and applied psychology
The distinction between basic psychology and applied psychology can lead to misunderstanding. While differing in the source or context of a research problem, they need not differ in respective utility of results:
In so-called basic science a research problem is typically derived from within the discipline, from a theory or from results of previous research. Take these examples:
● Do the so-called ‘Big Five’ factors of personality already exhaust reliable interindividual personality variance?
3 In the classical version the testee is shown, one by one, a
series of ten symmetric ink-blot designs, some in black-and-white, some in color, showing random configurations but for left-right symmetry. After the presentation of each design the testee is asked: “What do you see?” Responses are scored according to formal, contextual, content and other categories.
● Does the heritability coefficient (percentage of genetically determined variance) in tests of general intelligence co-vary with age?
● Can training procedures of the ‘brain-jogging’ -type improve working memory performance?
In the end it will, however, depend on the research results whether they primarily enrich theoretical knowledge, as expected in basic research, or rather contribute to the solution of a practical problem. So research findings under the three sample topics may have important practical implications for
● the practice of personality assessment in different populations,
● the development of compensatory education programs at different age levels, or
● the design of neuropsychological rehabilitation training for head-brain trauma patients.
What has begun as basic research may turn out to become salient for practical application.
By contrast, so-called applied research as a rule takes its start from problems and needs identified in the ‘real world’, like:
● How does visual display reading performance of airline pilots depend on size and color of display labeling (e.g., numbers) under varying luminosity?
● How is flight-control radar-operator performance dependent on input information load?
● What is the relative efficacy of different methods of anxiety therapy for different types of anxiety disorders?
Yet research findings from these studies may in the end prove potent also for basic theory development, if they allow for a deeper theoretical understanding of
● visual pattern recognition under near-threshold viewing conditions,
● mechanisms of vigilance control, or
● the relative validity of different theories of anxiety development.
What started out as applied research can demonstrate high utility for advancing basic-science knowledge.
techniques (Wolpe, 1958), as Tulving’s (1985) model of episodic, semantic and procedural memory mechanisms proved salient for designing neuropsychological rehabilitation procedures for patients suffering from cerebral stroke. Complementary transfer of insight (in the direction ‘applied → basic’) took place, when findings on the effectiveness of different treatment methods for unilateral neglect (in patients after right-hemisphere cerebral insult) proved significant for advancing theories of attention or when techniques developed in consumer research for studying gaze direction became a standard procedure for basic vision and attention research (Rafal & Robertson, 1995).
This highlights a possible third “lesson”: Notwithstanding their respective functionality in generating research problems, the relative utility of so-called basic and so-called applied research for advancing psychological science versus psychological practice can not be classified in advance. 4
1.4 Alternative heuristic scales
In a psychological theory we start, as a rule, from the individual person (or individual organism in comparative research) as heuristic scale unit:
● her/his cognition, motives, experiences, behavior, and
● her/his environment, development or temperament.
While this may prove necessary and sufficient for a wide variety of research problems, research issues can come up which necessitate a narrowing or widening of the heuristic scale. Already we have established traditions in narrowing, for example, in biopsychology and neuropsychology for the study of individual neurons or brain regions and their function in learning and memory. There is yet less tradition in widening the heuristic scale. Here an example:
Following the discovery of the current global terrestrial climate change (so-called ‘global warming’: Bolin, Döös, Jäger and Warrick, 1986) and first investigations into its causes and effects (International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, 1989), international
4 Space does not allow to dwell on obvious consequences for the
design of the curriculum in psychology, of continuing education programs for psychological professionals, or the structure of international organizations in psychology.
social science programs were set up to study human dimensions of this climate and environment change, such as:
● which human factors (values, attitudes, behavior) contribute to this change?
● what effects will it have on human behavior and life conditions?
● what would be effective means and procedures for modifying environment-relevant human behavior?
● how would one go about to measure the effectiveness of such programs?
(International Social Science Council, 1990; Pawlik, 1991) 5.
Psychology was a participating discipline in these initiatives from the beginning (Platt, 2002) but, talking from extensive personal experience, I can testify how difficult it became, in Europe and abroad, to get psychologists to join in on such research themes. In my interpretation this is also owed to the fact that these topics necessitate a heuristic scale unit that extends beyond the individual person and encompasses macro-social contexts, mass communication processes, traditions of culture, or societal rewards and sanctions. Not that such widening of the heuristic scale would not be feasible and could not be mastered successfully (see, for example, Berry and Triandis, 2006; Nix and Spiro, 1990), yet we still need to see more of it and we need to see it implemented also into the standard curriculum in psychology.
Global (climate, environmental, social demographic or economic) change is only one field where psychological research (and professional service) is in need of heuristic widening. Another one is public health and health psychology (Taylor, 1999). According to an often-quoted World Health Organization report (World Health Organization, 1995) more than half of the so-called global burden of illness is behavior-dependent,be it due to ignorance concerning health risks, health-endangering attitudes and behavior, or simply insufficient usage of available health-care service opportunities. Here again psychological research and professional practice call for an opening up of the familiar heuristic scale.
5 For on-line reference to the current international research
So there is as a forth “lesson”: Adjustment of the heuristic scale to match a problem under study, yet without any lowering of methodological quality standards, will deserve more attention if psychology is to contribute also to broad social and societal issues.
1.5 Universality and indigenization
This complex, multi-facetted topic has given rise to much reflection, debate and even controversy (Sinha, 1980; Kagitcibasi, 2000). Can ‘one’ psychology be possible (and acceptable) world-wide as the science of mental activity and behavior of all humans? Or should psychology rather be developed from indigenous cultural grass-roots, social needs, problems and opportunities? Are methods of psychology transferable across cultures or should they be designed each time afresh, out of specifics of a social and societal context? Obviously these are not questions that would lend themselves to a simple yes-no format of answering. Answers will also depend on prior presuppositions and may only correlate in part, if at all. Covering this topic in deserved depth and breadth would go beyond the scope of this presentation. Instead I only want point out a distinction which I consider clarifying in this context: the distinction between
● a structural and procedural lawfulness of human behavior and mental activity on the one hand and
● varying content and expression of human behavior and mental activity on the other.
Evidence from experimental psychological research conducted around the globe leaves no doubt that the structural and procedural lawfulness of human behavior and mental activity is universal. For evidence of proof the reader is invited to compare textbooks from around the world on experimental psychology on perception and attention, learning and memory, or thinking and problem solving. By way of example, such universality holds, inter alia, for:
● the multiple memory systems of episodic, semantic and procedural memory and their neuropsychological base and correlates;
● the laws of classical and instrumental conditioning, of verbal and semantic learning, and of perceptual and behavioral learning;
● basic mechanisms of perception like size constancy, contrast or gestalt phenomena;
● elementary mechanisms of attention, their
capacity limitations and neuropsychological basis and even
● the factor-analytic structure of personality- differences in self-reports.6
Universal structural and procedural lawfulness does not exclude, of course, inter-individual, intra-individual (over time/age, situations, etc.) and inter-population variance in personal score and parameter profile, as has been studied by differential psychologists for more than one-hundred years. Here ‘universality’ only refers to the structural lawfulness, not to the individual make-up and content of the respective psychological processes.
By contrast, universality can not be claimed equally for the content and expression of behavior and mental activity. While episodic, semantic and procedural memory follow universal empirical laws, their content and expression will, of course, be different as conditions and contexts differ, under which they develop, are shaped by social norms and traditions, education, and life course. The international literature on culture psychology (Kagitcibasi, 2000) can serve to illustrate this and necessary cross-checks on cross-cultural parallelity in observation and data analysis for research with different populations (Berry, Segall, and Kagitcibasi, 1997).
In this distinction between structure and content, however, universality and indigenization do no longer stand in opposition to each other in psychology and can be brought together in their theoretical and methodological complementarity. This would constitute my fifth “lesson”.
1.6 The disciplinary strength of psychology
Contrary to an often quoted pessimistic prescription by the great German philosopher I. Kant (1724~1804) 7,experimental psychology has taken an unforeseeable development during the 150 years since Th. Fechner’s foundation of psychophysics (Fechner, 1860) and some 120 years since the opening of W. Wundt’s first laboratory in Leipzig. Today psychology
6 See, for example, McCrae and Costa (1997) for detailed
reference.
7 For basic heuristic limitations, said Kant, psychology “… can
is:
● well established as a science in over 70 countries 8;
● comprising more than half a million psychologists in every region of the world;
● producing an annual global publication output of more than 2,300 scientific and professional journals;
● accepted for membership in academies of science in a growing number of countries and
● held in good standing, also internationally, in multidisciplinary research programs and organizations.
Generations of psychological research scientists have succeeded in developing:
● high methodological standards in psychological data acquisition, data analysis and modeling (Estes, 2000), but also high standards for ethical conduct of psychologists (Wedding and Stevens, 2008);
● novel behavioral science technology now widely in use also outside psychology proper (like psychological tests and other assessment procedures, procedures for psychological therapy and rehabilitation) and
● even novel research approaches to problems previously considered not open to empirical study at all (like neurological correlates of consciousness, pre-natal learning or the development categories of
time and space in cognition).
In addition, psychological science has proven impressive strength in self-reorganization after periods of restraint (Pawlik, 1994). Here China is a prominent and outstanding example (Jing, 2000; Zhang, 2008):
Psychology enjoyed a rapid development in China right from the beginning of the twentieth century. The first Laboratory of Psychology was established at Peking University in 1917, and by 1942 courses in psychology were offered already at 21 universities. After the Cultural Revolution psychology was strongly developing anew in the Reform and Opening-Up Movement under the leadership of Deng Xiao Ping, also internationally. Following international scientific exchange by leading Chinese psychological scientists in 1980, a memorable Congress of the Chinese Psychological Society took again place in December 1981 in Beijing, almost to the day 26 years before this present Congress. As an invitee from abroad I felt highly privileged to meet at this 1981 Congress founders of the new Chinese psychology, notably Professors Pan Shu, Chen Li, Jing Qicheng, and Zhang Houcan, Honorary Present of this 11th Congress. The monumental historical photo of the participants in 1981 Congress may speak for itself:
The development of psychology in China documents in an outstanding way:
● straightforward self-organization:
1980: admission of the Chinese Psychological Society to the International Union of Psychological Science as its 44th Union member;
1981: first Congress of the Chinese Psychological Society, with foreign participants;
1982: first Chinese participation in an International Congress of Psychology;
8 For details and reference on this and the following points see
http://www.iupsys.org, http://apa.org/psycinfo, Rosenzweig, Holtzman, Sabourin, and Bélanger (2000), and annual upgrades of the IUPsyS Global Resource (Wedding and Stevens, 2008).
1995: First Regional Congress of the International Union of Psychological Science, in cooperation with the International Association of Applied Psychology, in Guangzhou;
2004: XXVIIIth International Congress of Psychology in Beijing;
● international acceptance: three times Chinese Vice-Presidency in the International Union of Psychological Science: Jing Qicheng, Zhang Houcan and Zhang Kan; and
● a profile of consolidated progress in:
number of psychologists: 1980s: ca. 900; 2008: over 7,000
9
number of doctoral programs: 1980s: 1; 2008: 23 This development may serve as an illustration of a sixth “lesson” to be deduced from the history of psychology as a science: Psychology evidences high degrees of disciplinary vigor and strength in self- development – to which every psychologist is invited to contribute further! I venture to add that this disciplinary vigor has one of its sources in the strong fascination psychologists often experience in pursuing their science in research and professional service and in the exponential growth of psychological knowledge and service capacity over the last fifty years..
2 “Lessons” from the History of Professional Psychology
In this second section I will take up only three points, starting with
2.1 Psychology’s rapid professionalization
First larger-scale transfers of scientific psychological insight into applied professional service took place in the first decade of the 20th century. Several of them proved already so successful that they attained kind of model status in applied psychology. Just to give two examples:
● In France A. Binet and Th. Simon developed for the school system a new form of individually administered tests of intelligence for use with school children (Binet & Simon, 1905). The tests received wide attention, went through many revisions, were translated into foreign-languages later and stayed in use for decades thereafter (e.g.,Terman and Merrill, 1960). At the same time also first group-tests of intelligence were developed in the USA by Yerkes for use with military recruits in World War I (Guilford, 1959, p. 242).
● First in Germany, then in the USA H. Münsterberg was one of the first to apply early knowledge about human motivation und group processes to practical problems in organizations and industry, thereby becoming a leader of early-day psychotechnology
(Münsterberg, 1914) and one of the founders of present-day organizational psychology.
Development of psychology as source science for applied professional service continued rapidly in the 1930s to 1950s, notably in the USA (Anastasi, 1980).
In Europe, following interruption during World War II, professional psychology saw a wide-spread rise not before the 1960s, with similar developments in many other regions. State licensing of psychologists developed first in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s and has become an important guard against unqualified offer of psychological services in many countries since (cf. footnote 10). In Germany, for example, graduated psychologists holding an ‘approbation’ in psychotherapy (after 3 to 5 years of state-accredited post-graduate training and a final exam) are entitled to offer psychological therapy in their own professional responsibility, also in private practice, with cost- coverage by public health insurance.
The proactive professional development is still continuing, giving rise to numerous new fields and specializations in professional psychology, like emergency psychology, medical and health psychology (both different from clinical psychology), environmental psychology, sports psychology, media and communication psychology, economic and market psychology or international psychology (rendering psychological service in international organizations, international diplomacy and in tasks of international cooperation and exchange; Pawlik, 2006).
Form this already a first “lesson” becomes obvious: Among the behavioral sciences, psychology has succeeded in playing a key role in bringing scientific knowledge to bear in people’s life and well-being..
2.2 Two-way transfer between academia and practice
been state of knowledge in a certain year 1 will be replaced or modified or will need to be corrected on the basis of new knowledge by the subsequent years 7~9 9. Or putting it this way: By the time a practicing psychologist will retire (in many countries approximately 35~40 years after graduation), 90% or more of the knowledge, with which s/he once left the university, may have become obsolete (not counting any personal loss of memory for what has been learned in training!). This strongly emphasizes the necessity of obligatory continuing education in psychology, as it is requested now in many countries. Having completed a curriculum in psychology does not qualify for professional practice for a professional life-time any more.
But this is only one side of the coin: Also conditions for professional practice change with time and new practical and implementation knowledge is building up in the professional arena. So academia too must recognize a need of transfer, now from practice into the research and teaching domain, notably at universities. It is common experience for many psychologists that psychological practice can offer important new problems to be taken up by research in academia, notably in such newly emerging fields like neuropsychology. And the academic scene needs feed-back from its graduates how their education has or has not proved a sufficient basis for entering into professional service.
So I propose the “lesson” that more attention will deserve to be given to issues of knowledge management and transfer at the university level and, subsequently, between academia and practice, and this in both directions.
2.3 The give and take of expertise
Research and practice alike take up problems whose content and make-up may not “respect” disciplinary boundaries as laid out in the definition of the sciences. This also holds for psychology, and psychologists have become very open in recognizing their own limits, “import” expertise from other
9 With great differences, of course, in half-time value between
different fields of psychology. As one would expect half-time values are much higher, for example, for psychological methods than for clinical psychology.
sciences, and acknowledge such “take”. Depending on the nature of a problem imported expertise will come from statistics, mathematics, or information science, from medical sciences, biology or (neuro)physiology, from anthropology, sociology, or culture studies.
In return, G. A. Miller’s often-quoted dictum of “giving psychology away” 10 has been practiced by psychologists generously: Psychological assessment, notably testing and assessment center techniques, behavior therapy and its derivatives, attention and memory rehabilitation treatment for patients suffering from brain-injury, or environmental quality appraisal are examples out of a stock of many more techniques that have been developed in psychology and placed on the “free market”. There they were taken up readily, often without source reference and at times often also without sufficient basic knowledge and training, by personnel consultants, psychiatrists and neurologists, or by architects or city planners.
Like any other science, psychology does well – and must continue - to make its knowledge and scientific achievements publicly available. In the interest of those (testees, patients, etc.) who can take personal harm from inacceptable application by non-qualified third persons, this must, however, be accompanied by a serious caveat: by stating which
individual and institutional qualifications and which quality monitoring must be met before one can apply them in professional service. Here psychology has often been too lenient or even carefree in the past, and I strongly suggest this to be taken as a third “lesson” to be learned from the history of professional psychology.
Granted, “lessons” also may have their half-time value though. So in concluding I like to encourage future historians of psychology to re-examine the development of psychological science and profession for insights one may have to deduce anew in the future from the course psychology will be taking in the years ahead.
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心理学能从自身的历史发展中学到什么？
Kurt Pawlik
(Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Germany)
摘 要 本文在将心理学视为一门学科同时也是一种职业的前提下，超越各种具体条件和内容之上对心理学
进行了总结。为此，考察了心理学在其发展中所体现的规律性，为了更好地表达，可以称之为从心理学历史
所归纳出的“经验教训”。首先，从心理学作为一门科学的历史，可以总结出6条规律：1）心理学具有双重
学科的地位。心理学既是一门科学，也是一门综合了生物学、社会学和文化学研究方法的“桥梁”学科；2）
必须以实验学作为方法学的指南；3）基础研究和应用研究成果的整合利用；4）需要接受各方面的启发；5）
全球化和本土化的相互补充；6）心理学在科学发展史中的学科力量。从将心理学视为一种职业来考察心理
学发展史，还可以看到3条普遍的规律：1）职业化的快速发展；2）需要科学研究与实际应用之间的双向交
流；3）跨学科专业知识的相互启发。
关键词 心理学；历史；经验教训
