Does psychology make a significant difference in our lives? 1

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...

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_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.