|
| |
|
By Philip G. Zimbardo -
Stanford University
|
The intellectual tension between the virtues of basic versus
applied research that characterized an earlier era of psychology is
being replaced by an appreciation of creative applications of all
research essential to improving the quality of human life.
Psychologists are positioned to “give
psychology away” to all those who can benefit from our wisdom.
Psychologists were not there 35 years ago when American Psychological
Association (APA) President George Miller first encouraged us to share
our knowledge with the public. The author argues that psychology is
indeed making a significant difference in people’s lives; this article
provides a sampling of evidence demonstrating how and why psychology
matters, both in pervasive ways and specific applications. Readers are
referred to a newly developed APA Web site that documents current
operational uses of psychological research, theory, and methodology (its
creation has been the author’s primary presidential initiative):
www.psychologymatters.org.
Does psychology matter? Does what we do, and have done for a hundred
years or more, really
make a significant difference in the lives of individuals or in the
functioning of communities and nations?
Can we demonstrate that our theories, our research, our professional
practice, our methodologies, our way of thinking about mind, brain,
and behavior make life better in any measurable way? Has what we have
to show for our discipline been applied in the real world beyond
academia and
practitioners’ offices to improve health, education, welfare, safety,
organizational effectiveness, and more?
Such questions, and finding their answers, have always been my major
personal and professional concern.
First, as an introductory psychology teacher for nearly six decades, I
have always worked to prove relevance as well as essence of psychology
to my students. Next, as an author of the now classic basic text,
Psychology and Life (Ruch & Zimbardo, 1971), which claimed to wed
psychology to life
applications, I constantly sought to put more psychology in our lives
and more life in our psychology (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2004; Zimbardo,
1992). To reach an even broader student audience, I have coauthored
Core Concepts in Psychology (Zimbardo, Weber, & Johnson, 2002) that
strives to bring the excitement of scientific and applied psychology
to students in state and community colleges.In order to further expand
the audience for what is best in psychology, I accepted an invitation
to help create, be scientific advisor for, and narrator of the
26-program PBS
TV series, Discovering Psychology (1990/2001). For this general public
audience, we have provided answers—as viewable instances—to their “so
what?” questions. This award-winning series is shown both nationally
and internationally (in at least 10 nations) and has been the
foundation
for the most popular telecourse among all the Annenberg CPB
Foundation’s many academic programs (see www.learner.org). Finally, as
the 2002 president of the American Psychological Association, my major
initiative became developing a compendium of exemplars of how
psychology has made a significant difference in our lives.
This Web-based summary of “psychology in applied action” has been
designed as a continually modifiable and updateable repository of
demonstrable evidence of psychological knowledge in meaningful
applications. In a later section of this article, the compendium will
be described
more fully and some of its examples highlighted. I was fortunate in my
graduate training at Yale University (1954 –1960) to be inspired by
three exceptional mentors, each of whom modeled a different aspect of
the relevance and applicability of basic psychology to vital issues
facing individuals and our society. Carl Hovland developed the Yale
Communication and Attitude Change
Program after coming out of his military assignment in World War II of
analyzing the effectiveness of propaganda and training programs (Hovland,
Lumsdaine, & Sheffield, 1949). He went on to transform what was at
that time a complex, global, and vague study of communication and
persuasion into identifiable processes, discrete variables, and
integrative hypotheses that made possible both experimental research
and applications.
Neal Miller always straddled the fence between basic and applied
research, despite being known for his classic experimental and
theoretical formulations of motivation and reward in learning and
conditioning. His World War II experience of training pilots to
overcome fears so that they could return to combat was an applied
precursor of his later role in developing biofeedback through his
laboratory investigations of conditioning autonomic nervous system
responses (N. E. Miller, 1978, 1985, 1992). The last of my Yale
mentors, Seymour Sarason, moved out from his research program on test
anxiety in children into the community as one of the founders of
Community Psychology (Sarason, 1974). It was a daring move at that
time in a field that honored only the scientific study of individual
behavior. Psychology of the 50s was also a field that honored
basic research well above applied research, which was typically
accorded second-class status, if not denigrated by the “experimentalists,”
a popular brand name in that era.Psychology at many major universities
aspired to be “soft physics,” as in the heady days of our Germanic
forebears,
Wundt, Fechner, Ebbinghaus, Titchner, and others (see Green, Shore, &
Teo, 2001). Anything applied was seen at best as crude social
engineering by tinkerers, not real thinkers. Moreover, behaviorism was
still rampant, with animal models that stripped away from learning
what nonsense
syllable memory researchers had deleted from memory—merely the context,
the content, the human meaning, and the culture of behavior. The most
prominent psychologist from the 50s through the 80s, B.F. Skinner, was
an anomaly in this regard. Half of him remained a Watsonian
radical behaviorist who refused to admit the existence of either
motivation or cognition into his psychology (Skinner, 1938, 1966,
1974). Meanwhile, the other Skinner side applied operant conditioning
principles to train pigeons for military duties and outlined a
behaviorist utopia in Walden Two (Skinner, 1948).
Philip Zimbardo
1.To be continued...
Read
_part two
|
Authorized publication
Copyright 2004 by the American Psychological Association
Vol. 59, No. 5, 339–351
Psicolinea November 2005 |
Philip G. Zimbardo
is an internationally recognized
scholar, educator, researcher and media personality, winning numerous
awards and honors in each of these domains. He has been a Stanford
University professor since 1968, having taught previously at Yale, NYU
and Columbia. Zimbardo's career is noted for giving psychology away to
the public through his popular PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology,
along with many text and trade books, among his 300 publications. He
was recently president of the American Psychological Association.
|
|
