Download Marketable methods - University of Alberta

1
Marketable methods
Education as psychology’s primary market
The fact is that from the beginning of the 20th c. psychology moved away from being a
“pure science” to marketing its products. This meant that the market was able to
influence the direction of the discipline’s investigatory practices. Practices that were
useful in the construction of specific marketable products were more likely to receive a
boost than those which did not produce such products.
Of course, the fact is that the discipline also had the resources to produce marketable
products. Most notably,
(1) the Galtonian approach to individual differences and
(2) the use of experimental treatment groups.
Both methodologies made psychology into a socially relevant discipline.
Of course, the availability of these two resources for socially relevant research also
depended on the historical availability of institutions that would in fact avail themselves
of these resources because they found them to be useful. One such institution was the
field of education. It was the Herbartians of the 19th c. who laid the groundwork for this
relationship between psychology and education (even though the Herbartians had little
direct effect on the development of psychology). Charles Judd who was to have a
prominent place in American educational psychology recalls, in1989 when he returned
from Wundt’s lab and had been appointed professor at the School of Pedagogy at New
York University, lecturing enthusiastically on Weber’s law to a class of teachers when he
was interrupted by one gray-haired teacher auditor who asked “Professor, will you tell us
how this law can in principle help us to improve my teaching of children”. Judd had no
answer!
What was it that educationists (and the institution of public education) required?
Given the enormous differences in educational institutions and the social demands placed
on schools in different countries, there was considerable national divergence in
schooling. However, in the US the alliance between education and psychology was
especially prominent even though what teachers required and what school administrators
required was very different. Yet this link between psychology and education made
psychology socially relevant. It should be noted of course that in the 1890s when
psychologists like G. Stanley Hall became interested in child development, psychology’s
contribution was fairly crude, restricted to a kind of psychological census taking, given
the limited scientific background of teachers. Yet the important point was that there was
established a conceptual link, even if very vaguely between psychology and education.
After the turn of the century, psychologists’ relationship with teachers became
increasingly overshadowed by a new generation of professional educational
2
administrators. This group took control of the educational systems adapting education to
suit the changing order of corporate industrialism. The expansion of the American public
educational system was nothing short of astonishing. Between 1890 and 1920 there was
one public high school built each and every day and enrollment increases were of the
order of 1000%. Between 1902 and 1913 public expenditure on education more than
doubled and between 1913 and 1922 it tripled. In fact, professional educational
administrators had little in common with classroom teachers. Indeed, this profession of
educational administrators distanced itself from frontline classroom teachers (teaching
was deemed to be a transient, unrewarding, unprofessional and female task) and
established their own university curricula, journals, etc., and by 1914 became what we
might call CEOs of educational systems. It was this profession rather than teachers which
was psychology’s first market.
Of course, professional educational administrators were not interested in psychology’s
traditional experimental laboratory practices. Research for these professional
administrators had to be relevant to their managerial concerns. This meant that research
had to yield comparable quantitative data on the performance of large numbers of
individuals (students) under restricted conditions (i.e., in schools). Occasionally, these
professional administrators simply needed to justify the managerial decisions which they
judged expedient for enhancing and maintaining the institution of public education. In
fact, early educational administrators very frequently made use of an industrial metaphor:
“education is a shaping process as much as the manufacture of steel rails”. Elaborate
analogies were drawn between stockholders and parents, general managers of factories
and superintendents of schools, foremen and principles, and industrial workers and
teachers. Within that framework there was a natural carry-over from industry to
education – both could be scientifically managed, which included:
1. measurement and comparison of comparable results,
2. analysis and comparison of the conditions under which the results were secured –
especially the means and time it took to get the results,
3. the consistent adoption and use of those means to justify themselves most fully by
their results, abandoning those that fail.
Obviously, this scheme assigned a very important role to research, especially points 1 and
2, above, in order that appropriate action might be taken and justified in point 3 above.
Today we call this “outcome-driven research”.
Psychologists quickly responded to this scheme which required the kind of research that
was very different from laboratory experimental studies or even the simply census-taking
that characterized developmental psychology of child study by way of questionnaire. By
1910 a new Journal of Educational Psychology was established by Thorndike at
Columbia Teachers College which saw a few traditional experimentalists like Carl
Seashore and Edmund Sanford join the psychology devoted to “administration”. Sanford
writes: “so long as the science must be financed by appropriations and endowments, the
new psychology is called upon to furnish an effective defense against ignorant and hostile
criticism and provide a tangible excuse for investment of institutional capital”.
3
What Sanford did not anticipate was that this alliance between psychology and
educational administration would have consequences for psychology more profound than
any contribution that psychology was likely to make to education. Thus
1. In the first place it broke with the kind of educational psychology that had been
envisioned by the pioneering giants of American psychology such as William
James, Baldwin, Hall and Dewey. These psychologists had envisioned a
psychology of child study (of the child “mind”) but the new educational
psychology demanded the management of (passive) children on the basis of
performance measures so as to justify the allocation of financial resources.
2. But the new educational psychology proved popular because it could be extended
to other domains as well, most notably the military administration during WWI.
The methods of “mental” (test) measurement could be extended readily to the
military. The entire field of applied psychology was now devoted to usefulness in
administrative contexts. During the 1920 and 1930s large numbers of
psychologist sought to produce psychological knowledge in service of practical
contexts so much so that one prominent psychologist Woodworth spoke of
psychology changing affiliation from philosophy to education. What this shift in
allegiance came down to was that if knowledge is to be practically useful it was
so in marketable administrative contexts.
3. The links between social (economic-political) administration and psychology
affected both. Psychological practices had social repercussions but the demands
of administration also affected psychological investigation. Thorndike for
example held that the science of education (administration) will contribute
abundantly to psychology! The demands of the market profoundly affected the
research practices of psychology such that research could produce the kind of
knowledge that was useful to the administration and education, military, business
and industry.
4. This kind of knowledge was obviously statistical. Thus it was not the individual
(mind) that was of interest but rather the individual’s performance relative to the
performances of groups of individuals (i.e., “statistically constituted collective
subjects”). Dealing with individual in terms of categories was the essence of
administrative practices.
5. But the demand of administration was more specific than this. It also wanted
methods for comparison of conditions and the measurement of results. E. C.
Sanford, President of Clark University and a distinguished psychologist
researcher, identified three methods that psychology could contribute to education
and any rationalized social practice:
(a) the standard laboratory study exemplified in German investigations of say
memory by Ebbinghaus (a generation after Wundt),
(b). the work on individual differences as exemplified by the method of mental
testing (Galton), and
4
(c) the classroom experiment (pioneered by W. H. Winch in England, see below)
in which school children matched in mental ability would be exposed to different
method of instruction (conditions/interventions) and their performance would be
assessed before and after the intervention (say, different instruction formats). So
that children were assed prior to the introduction of the intervention and then a
again after the introduction of the intervention – pre and post intervention design.
The first (laboratory) and third methods (classroom experiment) compared the
efficiency of different techniques of learning and instruction, the second method
could be used to select individuals for certain programs (rather than the other way
around).
6. If we examine these methods, we can begin with the second (individual
differences – Galton) and third (classroom) methods: both individual differences
and classroom experiments which depended heavily and directly on the
educational market. I will examine the first experimental method later.
Mental testing (individual differences)
The too-ready marketability of mental tests profoundly affected the shape of
psychological research (and the discipline of Psychology). After WWI there was an
enormous expansion in the use of mental tests. This work had so little relation to the
more traditional forms of psychological experimentation that eventually it seemed as if
there were two distinct disciplines of psychology: one experimental and the other based
on correlational statistics used in mental testing. (the “experimental” versus the
“psychometric” or correlational traditions).
Mental testing flourished because of interest in individual differences. However it should
be obvious that the phrase “individual differences” is vague (it can refer to novelist’s
work as readily as the psychologist’s) and indeed interest in individual differences
preceded the work on mental testing (e.g., reaction time studies, somato-typing,
physiognomy of the face, anthropomorphic measurements, and phrenology). What
distinguished mental testing was not its interest in individual differences or its preference
for quantitative methods, but rather the fact that the medium of mental tests severed the
ancient link between psyche and soma and proposed to assess individual differences
entire by measuring function. In practice this meant measuring performances in
restricted situations. (Note no longer an interest in mind but in functional performances
meaning performances in restricted situations to restricted response categories.)
This amounted to a redefinition of the object of investigation; thus, psychological
differences were now defined in terms of differences in measures of individual
performance. It was performance at uniform set tasks that counted psychologically
(and not for example facial expression or artistic style). On this somewhat restricted basis
a broadly conceived study of individual differences was entirely possible.
In fact, during the earlier periods prior to the quantitative study of individual differences
(i.e., early in the 19th c.), most investigators were not interested in comparing individual
5
performances as such, but in characterizing psychological types and human
individuality. Thus, before Alfred Binet developed IQ tests, Binet worked on “individual
psychology” where psychological performance measures were used to assess an
individual’s style of functioning. William Stern distinguished between the study of
human variety and the study of individuality and accorded the latter a much higher status.
James Mark Baldwin had criticized Wundt’s experimental psychology for ignoring
individual style which Baldwin too conceived of in typological terms.
What the development of mental testing did was to redefine the problem of individual
differences (not in terms of typology or types but in terms of comparison of individual
performances. Thus, the quality of a performance was no longer used to characterize the
individual in terms of some universal type instead an individual’s performances measure
was used to specify an individual’s position relative to an aggregate of individual
performances. But in comparing an individual score to a group norm (mean) implies that
characterizing an individual depends as much on the individual as it does on the group.
The whole idea was that whatever individual characteristics were being measured these
characteristics belonged to all individuals albeit in different quantities. Here is where we
have the notion of a variable (as a universal characteristic that can be quantified in terms
of different people’s values on the variable) and, ironically, rather than measuring the
individual as different from other individuals, this method of mental testing actually
eliminated individuals by reducing them to the abstraction of a collection of points in a
set of aggregates.
So that the statistical measurement of individual differences really constituted the very
antithesis of psychological individuality, even as it also served to express directly a very
different concern namely the problem of conformity. The practice of setting up norms in
terms of which individuals could be assessed was however only “psychological” by
inference since the norms were those of social performances and therefore carried
powerful evaluative significance. Thus it was not an interest in the mental capacities that
motivated the study of individual differences in performance but rather a way of
assessing the individual who would most effectively conform to socially established
criteria – ranging from “general intelligence” of the eugenicists to qualities needed to
become a good salesman – all this was blatantly ideological and very practical.
Throughout the 19th c. individual differences were of interest because (1) individuals in
liberal democracies could advance themselves in competition with others, and (2)
industrial and administrative institutions depended on categories of individuals to manage
their businesses. With enormous rise of industrialization and bureaucratically
managed/administered institutions in the19th c. there were two phenomena of particular
interest to psychological practice: education and the management of social deviance. To
way to deal with these there were two corresponding forms of “examination”: medical
and academic. The latter was dealt with the selection of senior administrators, the former
with dealt with psychiatric patients or criminals who were assessed for moral fitness
(mental hygiene). Later in the 19th c. this distinction became blurred (the social category
of “fitness” became a psychological category of “ability”), and given the Darwinian
6
influence the entire population was thought of as biologically fixed members of one class
(everyone could be assessed/tested in terms of ability or some other psychological trait).
Psychology exploited and was exploited to contribute the scientific classification of these
“examinations” and did so through the expanded use of the “collective subject” involving
large scale natural (e.g., “age” and “sex”) and psychometrically (e.g., “IQ” or “good
learners”) defined groups. Individuals were of interest only as representatives of
aggregates. In “psychological clinics” there still remained some interests in individuals
(as in Binet’s original effort to determine individual children who needed special
educational opportunities to succeed) but insofar as this practice was to have a scientific
basis it required statistical norms (of the collective subject). The gap between
understanding the individual mind and understanding the individual in terms of statistical
norms seemed unbridgeable.
Marketable mental testing ensured the dominant place in psychological research for a
style of investigative practice that had been pioneered by Galton. This applied to the
social construction of the investigative situation where some features of Galtonian
anthropometry were exaggerated to the point of bizarre caricature in mass testing
methods developed in the military and school systems (today this practice continues in
university psychology departments). It also applied to the way in which statistical
techniques were used to create the “objects” (collective subjects) that where in fact the
real focus of the research (i.e., statistical distributions of scores contributed by a mass of
individuals).
The ready adoption of the Galtonian model by a significant section of American
psychology is not surprising if one considers the parallels between the situation faced by
Galton and by early 20th c. American psychologists. Galton wanted to establish a social
science of human heredity (which one could never do so through controlled experiments
and so used statistical comparison of group attributes). American psychologists were
interested in promoting socially relevant science involving aspects of human conduct and
performance that was also not accessible to precise experimental study under controlled
laboratory conditions. The emerging psychometrics (biometrics) offered a statistical
technique (initiated by Galton and Pearson) which promised a way around the problem
(of not being able to experiment). Something that looked like a science could apparently
be created through statistical rather than experimental means.
Obviously, there is a problem about trying to establish knowledge claims on the basis of
the Galtonian model. In the classical experiment the aim was to establish functional
relationships between a (stimulus) variable under the experimenter’s control and the
observers report (or later, when introspection was abandoned, the animal or human
“response”), and therefore there was a fundamental asymmetry in evaluating functional
relations was essential for making causal attributions (whether to the subject, stimulus
effect, or both).
However, the situation is very different in the Galtonian model. Here the experimenter
must make attributions in a situation over which he has no control. That is, the
7
experimenter does not attempt to influence (intervene in) the situation and hence
whatever functional relations there are (between different tests and test scores) are
symmetrical in the sense that no cause can be attributed to any of the variables that are
being tested. All that can be managed is to get a “covariance” (concomitant) measure
(two things go together –a co-relation). The descriptive statistics of the Galton-Pearson
school provide such measures. Thus, the co-relation constituted the functional
relationship between variables. In contrast, in the traditional experimental model,
statistics were only used to ensure reliability of observations.
Hence, American psychology became bifurcated in the kinds of knowledge claims it
offered. At first this produced a great deal of confusion. Only gradually there emerged a
kind of official doctrine: the ideal of research practice is one that combined the
manipulative aspects of the experimental model with statistically constituted objects of
investigation.
What was not noticed until much later that this “mix” deprived the experimental
manipulation of its original rationale which was the production of some causal process
in the individual psychophysical system. Interest had shifted to the statistical outcome of
experimental trials as manifested in differences between individuals.
This was quite acceptable to many psychologists who saw their research as developing
methods of social control of individuals (control enabled prediction and vice versa). Such
a psychology had to use measurements in order to make predictions about future effects
that could be taken into account by administrators, etc. In principle such predictions
(reliably expected on the basis of previous measurements) could of course be made on a
purely statistical basis. But that would require large-scale research consuming extended
time. Psychology would have to be far better established as a discipline before it could
muster the resources for such research. Even then the social organization of research
especially individual professional academic career patterns favored small studies in brief
time.
It is therefore not surprising that the Galtonian method did not establish its claim to social
relevance on the basis of sophisticated long-term statistical studies. Of course, there was
a highly effective short-cut available – namely to hitch the wagon to the prevailing
preconceptions regarding causation in human affairs. Those preconceptions prescribed
that human interaction was to be interpreted as an effect of stable, inherently causal
factors characterizing each and every separate individual. The most important of these
were defined as psychological in nature, intelligence and temperament to begin with.
Such factors were causal in the sense that they set rigid limits for individual action and
were themselves unalterable. We see here the link between hereditarian dogma and the
whole motivation for the eugenics program.
We see this in the reliance on the normal distribution which was thought to be the
distribution of biological traits - the same in everyone except that everyone has slightly
different values of the biological variables. Even where the hereditarian preconception
8
was dropped in favor of the environment (e.g, with Watson’s behaviorist declaration), the
distribution of psychological characteristics commitment remained in place.
The transformation of the old psychology of group differences by Galton resulted in an
important development in the nature of groups that were carriers of psychological
attributes. Originally, psychology had simply adopted the social categories (age and sex),
but Galtonian use of statistics greatly facilitated the artificial creation of new groups
whose defining characteristic (usually IQ performance) was based on the performance on
some psychological test. A score on a mental test (these tests could be based on any
category whatever from IQ to self-esteem to extroversion etc. etc.)) conferred
membership in an abstract collectivity created for the purposes of psychological
research. This opened up untold vistas for such research because psychologists could
create these kinds of collectivities ad infinitum and then explore the statistical
relationships between them.
Origins of the treatment group
I noted in the first half of the 20th c. psychology came to rely increasingly on the
construction of “collective subjects” for generating knowledge claims. Such constructed
collectivities were not found outside psychological practice but depended on the
intervention of the investigator. Three types of artificial collectivities were distinguished.
1. Those that were the result of averaging the performance of individuals subjected
to similar experimental conditions. This first type represented an outgrowth of the
traditional experiment procedures (Wundt etc.).
2. Those that were constituted from scores obtained by some use of psychometric
testing. This type owes its existence to the demands placed on psychological
practice by the market place education and industry).
3. Those that were produced by subjecting groups of individuals to different
treatment conditions – and this type also appear to have been produced by the
market.
We have seen that for example educational administrators (efficiency experts)
expected that (a) psychological research could provide methods of measurement that
would permit the comparison of results (comparing the performance of the individual
to that of the group). This was fulfilled in “mental tests”. But they also expected that
(b) psychology could evaluate the effects of various kind so intervention (say
different teaching strategies or programs). To evaluate the efficiency of these
different interventions, what was needed was a way of comparing the individuals who
were the recipients of these different interventions. Traditional experimental
psychology was of little help here because it focused on the individual mind alone.
Here the pioneering work of W. H. Winch in England was important. Winch was a
school inspector and he was interested in assessing the effectiveness of various
classroom conditions on such factors of mental fatigue and transfer of training in
students. To do this, he subjected equivalent groups of children to different
9
conditions, and taking relevant measures before and after the intervention (pre-post
test design or quasi-experimental designs). There was nothing surprising about this
method. Schools were under great pressure and individual students were not
important compared to the overall effective functioning of the classrooms.
What is interesting about these early classroom studies is that they took place in an
institutional environment that allowed for the easy manipulation of intervention
conditions. Thus, studies of work efficiency (in industry) readily took on
experimental form. This work assessing the effects of varying work conditions on
outcome productivity provided strong incentive for combining the use of group data
with the experimental method. Treatment group approaches to research (the group
defined by the treatment or intervention it was given) quickly became popular in the
research journals. But unlike the educational classroom studies (which were restricted
to the classroom and work at school), the work efficiency studies were concerned not
just fatigue in the particular situation of the classroom but with fatigue and learning
in general or in the abstract (in any situation).
The history of the treatment group methodology ran somewhat differently in applied
psychology than it did laboratory research. By the 1920s the treatment group
procedure was being sold in the US as the “control experiment” and as the best way
to evaluate the effects of various conditions of work efficiency. It also became the
textbook method of educational psychology: “experimentation pays in terms of cash”.
Technically the treatment method of defining groups became quite sophisticated
expounding on randomization and complex experimental designs some two years
before R. A. Fisher (1925) published his well-known text on the topic.
Yet in spite of these promising beginnings, the history of the treatment group
methodology was not exactly a success (as judged by the number of studies reported
in J of Educational Psychology or the J of Applied Psychology between 1915 and
1936). For one thing there was almost no demand for this kind of methodology
outside the educational context, for another the research occurred in institutional
setting that allowed for little variation conditions of intervention. There was also
disappointment with the results, and the claims made for the quantitative and
experimental method had been wildly optimistic. Moreover, the shape of this kind of
research was always at the mercy of bureaucracies and institutional requirements, and
once the “cult of efficiency” was over, the expansion of this kind of research
declined.
More generally there were always limits on the use of the experimental approach in
institutions that were geared to practical goals and interests. Not only can
measurement be a practical nuisance in these contexts but it also can be seen as a
threat to vested interests and traditional practices of the established power groups.
Although psychologists could help in selecting individuals for pre-established
programs, and could also help in the selection of different programs, the former was
clearly the safer bet (or else risk upsetting the power that be).
10
Obviously this situation is very different in the laboratory where experimentation
could be safely used as the preferred method. Thus, in the safety of the university
laboratory, the kind of experimentation that had emerged in the applied setting could
evolve into a vehicle for the fantasy of an omnipotent science of human control (as
some saw psychology). Moreover, in its eagerness to become an autonomous science,
American psychology was not inclined to humbly serve the educational or industrial
work settings as so serve as “psychological technicians”; rather, they saw what
children or workers did in school or factory as merely an instance of the operation of
“generalized laws of learning” etc. that manifested themselves in all of human
behavior. Thus, the treatment group methodology became, in the hands of an
ambitious science, a methodology for providing the basis for universal laws of
human behavior. By 1936, 35% of the J of Experimental Psychology used this
methodology.
Thus, academic psychology was not interested in assessing the effect of specific
interventions in specific institutional contexts (what we today might refer to as
“quality control research”); rather, academic psychologists were interested in
interventions or treatments that affected all human behavior in all conceivable
contexts. Here we have the pretentious claim that practical efforts to enhance
performance was like “engineering” whereas the science of psychology sought the
universal effects of intervention/treatment on all behavior and as such was like
“physics”. The abstract laws of learning (during the heyday of behaviorism in
the1920-1950s) were deemed to be like the laws of physics. Of course physics had to
solve the problem of the variability of observations and the uniformity of laws but
this was done by showing that errors (individual differences) in observation obeyed
statistical regularities (relegated to “error variance”). This assumption allowed
psychologists to retain their faith in the existence of abstract universal laws even as
they were daily confronted by human and animal variability.
The faith in universal laws produced an interpretation of variability in observations in
terms of an assumption that individual behavior varied continuously on a common set
of dimensions (a common “human nature”). This gave rise to a distinction between
genuine laws of behavior and mere generalizations based on statistical observations.
If this distinction could be avoided – and it certainly was – then the variability in
observations could be turned into an advantage. Groups could be assessed in terms of
the mean and standard deviation which made it terribly easy to produce
generalizations (every experiment finds some “effects”!) which could then be
expressed as “laws” (provided one lived in an academic culture that did not
distinguish between statistical and psychological laws, of course). This accounted for
the popularity of group experiments in “pure” (versus applied) psychology….
This pure psychology was really an abstract form of the practice of controlling the
performance of large numbers of individuals by way of environmental intervention.
Thus, the fundamental laws were relationships between these environmental
interventions and changes in response to such interventions. Obviously for a science
that aspired to laws between environment and response, treatment group methodology
11
in practical contexts served very well indeed. In transferring this kind methodology to
the laboratory one can construct a model of the kind of world that is presupposed by
the laws of the new science (bells of scientific materialism!). It is a world wherein
individuals are stripped of their identity (their historical existence as individuals) and
then become vehicles of the operation of totally abstract laws of
behavior/environment defined over abstract collective subjects.
Thus, the treatment group method was ideally suited for establishing knowledge
claims about the relationship between abstract external influences and equally
abstract organisms.
Taking the same group of subjects through the same set of environmental variations
could be used for this purpose (and was) but this approach provided subjects with a
bit of history (even though it was only specially constructed experimental history)
and this meant that the results could not be unambiguous interpreted. Only the
treatment group could provide a practical construction that the so-called pure science
of behavior required. As the use of treatment groups increased, the empirical basis for
questioning the prevailing shape of psychological theory became narrower. That is,
treatment group gave the kind of results that the theory of universal laws
presupposed, namely that there are lawful relations between treatment intervention
(environment) and behavior/response.