Principles of Psychology

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Principles of Psychology- A SYSTEMATIC TEXT IN THE SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOR by Fred S. Keller and William N. Schoenfeld. EDITORS INTRODUCTION: Psychologists have been ardent professionals, an eager, easily converted lot. No wonder the cry is often heard among them There is news in the land of Babel, meaning Here now is the psychology So it has come about that there are mechanisms of automatic defense against the asserted exclu siveness and the propaganda of behavior theorists. Chief among them is undoubtedly negative adaptation or, as the authors of this book would have it, with greater illumination, absence of reinforcement. I grant the serviceableness of such defenses in preserving common sense and healthy skepticism, yet I am sorry for the psychologist who misses this out-of-the-ordinary textbook. He may be one whose own work lies far afield. But no matter what that work may be, it would enhance his vision and build his morale to know that it has been possible already to dem onstrate, operationally and therefore beyond challenge, so much lawfulness of behavior on the single assumption that all the features of learned behavior are but the routes, straight routes and detours, down which an organism has been baited. He might quibble over the excessive use of rats and balk at the extrapolations to higher behavior, but he could not deny massive facts that stick. I especially congratulate you, the thoughtful student, whose first or early exposure to psychology is through this book. Its use as a text is a guarantee that you have an instructor who knows that the basis of every science lies not in talk and proof by say-so, but in experimental methods. At best you are going to learn psychological science by your own sciencing, in a laboratory. If circumstances deny that privilege, your instruc tor will still see to it that you get the next best by perfectly feasible demonstrations in the classroom. Finally, if this book arouses in you the tingling enthusiasm that in an earlier form it has plainly evoked in many students, you are on your way to insights of the greatest value. They will be of use to you whether you become a psychologist, teacher, lawyer, sales man, philosopher, doctor, or just a person who feels the need to see beneath the seeming chanciness of human behavior. This book is a new kind of introduction to psychology. It is different in that it represents for the first time a point of view that is coming to guide the thinking and research of an active group of psychologists in this country. The members of this group are mainly experimentalists, laboratory workers, who spend much of their time in observing and measuring the behavior of organisms rats, dogs, guinea-pigs, apes, pigeons, and, of course, human beings. They are unflaggingly on the lookout for fundamental principles of behavior principles that hold true for the white rat as well as the college student, for the dog in laboratory harness as well as the patient on the psychoanalysts couch, for the tribal savage as well as the sophisticated product of our own culture. Already they have discovered some of these principles and have brought them together in the beginnings of scientific theory. Other principles are, at present, only suspected, and the search goes on at an ever faster pace. In this book, we try to tell about the ones of which we are certain we describe some of the research they are based on and we point out the way in which they may be organized to give a meaningful picture of human conduct. We hope that something of interest and use, perhaps even something of adventure, will be found in our account...