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Edited by Gardner Lindzey William M.
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American Psychological Association • Washington, DC
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Copyright © 2007 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, including, but not limited to, the process of scanning and digitization, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by American Psychological Association 750 First Street, NE Washington, DC 20002 www.apa.org To order APA Order Department P.O. Box 92984 Washington, DC 20090-2984 Tel: (800) 374-2721; Direct: (202) 336-5510 Fax: (202) 336-5502; TDD/TTY: (202) 336-6123 Online: www.apa.org/books/ E-mail:
[email protected] In the U.K., Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, copies may be ordered from American Psychological Association 3 Henrietta Street Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU England Typeset in Garamond by World Composition Services, Inc., Sterling, VA Printer: Edwards Brothers, Inc., Ann Arbor, M I Cover Designer: Naylor Design, Washington, DC Technical/Production Editors: Pam McElroy and Kathryn Funk The opinions and statements published are the responsibility of the authors, and such opinions and statements do not necessarily represent the policies of the American Psychological Association.
Printed in the United States of America First Edition
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Elliot Aronson
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Albert Bandura
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Gordon H. Bower
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Jerome Kagan
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Daniel Kahneman
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Elizabeth F. Loftus
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Walter Mischel
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Ulric Neisser
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Richard F. Thompson
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APPENDIX: CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUMES I - V I I I
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INDEX
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ABOUT THE EDITORS
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x his is Volume I X in a series that now spans more than 75 years. The distinguished and diverse contributors were selected with the assistance of many consultants, especially members of an Editorial Advisory Committee composed of Nicole Barenbaum, Ludy Benjamin, Jerome Bruner, Donald Dewsbury, William Estes, Raymond Fancher, Donald Foss, Daniel Gilbert, Alan Kazdin, David Leary, Eleanor Maccoby, Hazel Markus, Dan McAdams, Wade Pickren, Larry Smith, and Richard F. Thompson.
H i s t o r y o f This Series When Edwin G. Boring, director of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and later chair of the psychology department, was finishing his masterful A History of Experimental Psychology (1929, 1950 rev. ed.), he thought it was impossible to get important facts about individuals' scientific development except from them directly. He wrote a letter on April 10, 1928, to Carl Murchison at Clark University proposing a project involving psychologists' autobiographies. After an initial meeting at Harvard's Emerson Hall, they soon composed a committee consisting of Boring, Murchison, Karl Buhler of the University of Vienna; Herbert S. Langfeld of Princeton; and John B. Watson of New York City to invite chapters for the series. Volume I appeared in 1930 with Murchison as editor, although Boring was active behind the scenes. It included chapters by James
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Mark Baldwin, Mary Whiton Calkins, Pierre Janet, William McDougall, and others. A complete list of contributors to Volumes I through V I I I , with years of publication, is provided in the appendix at the end of this volume. In the early 1960s on a visit to Cambridge, Gardner Lindzey asked Boring whether he would be willing to participate in a revival of the series. Although ambivalent, Boring agreed to another volume "if you do all the work." When he returned to his office at the University of Minnesota, Lindzey found several typed postcards from Boring on the project, making it clear that he would not be doing all the work. Lindzey was coeditor of Volume V with Boring in 1967 and editor of Volumes V I (1974), V I I (1980), and V I I I (1989). A t a memorial service for Ernest Hilgard at Stanford University on March 24, 2002, William M. Runyan approached Lindzey and asked if another volume of the series was in the works. Lindzey said no, and he wasn't planning another one. Richard Atkinson, a member of the editorial advisory board for Volume V I I I , stopped to say hello to Lindzey, and Runyan, who had never met Atkinson, half jokingly asked if he would "lean on" Lindzey to get him to consider editing another volume. Many discussions later, Lindzey eventually said that he would coedit another volume "if you do all the work." That has not turned out to be the case, and Lindzey has been actively involved in each stage of the project since then. After various ratings and rankings, a list of about 100 names was narrowed down to a small number of psychologists who were invited to contribute autobiographies. Those invited who provided chapters are Elliot Aronson, Albert Bandura, Gordon H. Bower, Jerome Kagan, Daniel Kahneman, Elizabeth F. Loftus, Walter Mischel, Ulric Neisser, and Richard F. Thompson. Each contributor was asked to prepare an autobiography "that stressed professional aspects, relations with psychologists and other scientists and humanists, relevant social and cultural contexts, and personal values and motivations." That this can be done in a great variety of ways is illustrated in the following chapters. Different degrees of emphasis are placed on reviewing scientific theory and research; work in relation to education and career; work in relation to personal experience; or work and life in relation to wider social, political, and cultural contexts.
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Nazi Germany, World War I I , and the prevalence of anti-Semitism formed a historical context that affected many psychologists and their families and is discussed in the autobiographies of Aronson, Kagan, Kahneman, Loftus, Mischel, and Neisser. Some of the authors, although not all, draw explicitly on their own theory and research in interpreting their lives. Many authors commented that they found writing their autobiographies a valuable experience. An unusual feature of this volume is the inclusion of a eulogy for Amos Tversky (1937-1996), read at his memorial service by his close friend and collaborator Daniel Kahneman. It is evident that if death had not intervened, Tversky would have been invited to contribute an autobiography to this series and would have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
Areas o f Psychology The autobiographies in this volume, and in the series as a whole, can be used to illuminate the history of different areas of psychology. No story is more often told in the history of psychology than the shift from behaviorism to cognitive psychology and to social cognitive approaches. This is a story told both within personality and social psychology and in cognitive neuroscience. Both cognitive psychology and social cognitive approaches want to differentiate themselves from radical behaviorism—once seen as the scientific cutting edge but now seen as excessively reductionistic—and to ally with the study of cognitive processes. Autobiographies can provide a valuable perspective on the network of persons, publications, interpersonal relationships, and departmental politics out of which different traditions in psychology have been and are being formed. Although autobiographies can shed light on some of these processes and events and need to be critically evaluated, much remains unknown. Whole rooms of the castle remain shrouded in darkness. Consider, for instance, Karl Lashley (1890-1958). He was a leader in early 20th-century neuroscience and pivotally important in the study
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of learning, memory, and the "search for the engram." His interests, along with the work of many others, eventually developed into cognitive neuroscience. Lashley was invited to write a chapter for this series but declined. It seems likely that his colleague and ambivalent admirer, Edwin G. Boring, asked him more than once. Boring portrayed Lashley as the "greatest psychologist in the world" when arguing for his appointment at Harvard in 1935. Lashley's missing autobiography is mentioned as a way of directing attention to what we do have in the autobiographies in this series. The life historical strands of the transition from learning theories to cognitive psychology can be analyzed in A History of Psychology in Autobiography from 1930 to the present. The series includes autobiographies by Edward L. Thorndike and John B. Watson (both included in the 1936 volume) and autobiographies by learning theorists Edward C. Tolman and Clark H u l l (1952 volume) and B. F. Skinner (1967 volume). Reviews of these theories of learning were published by Ernest Hilgard (1948), through Bower and Hilgard (1981, 5th ed.), with Hilgard's autobiography in this series in 1974. In the present volume, Bower reviews his life and selected recent developments in learning, memory, and cognitive processes in contexts. The rise of cognitive psychology is intertwined in this series with the work and careers of Jerome Bruner and Herbert Simon (1980 volume), and in this volume, Gordon Bower, Elizabeth F. Loftus, and Ulric Neisser. The turn from social learning theory to social cognitive approaches is discussed by both Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel in the present volume. Cognitive dissonance theory is discussed in Elliot Aronson's account of his encounter with Leon Festinger. In developmental psychology, Jerome Kagan argues that it is not only objective events but the symbolic interpretation of events that needs to be understood. Although Kagan has argued for the importance of neuroscience and biological temperament, he also argues for the irreducible importance of contexts and psychological interpretation; understanding the mind requires more than understanding the brain. A History ofPsychology in Autobiography provides resources for interpreting the life historical strands of other traditions as well. For example, light can be shed on the history of social psychology with autobiogra-
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phies by William McDougall (1930 volume); Gordon Allport (1967 volume); Otto Klineberg, David Krech, and Theodore Newcomb (1974 volume); Roger Brown and Stanley Schacter (1989 volume); and Elliot Aronson (this volume.) As one additional example, autobiographical perspectives on abnormal and clinical psychology are provided in chapters by Pierre Janet (1930 volume); Kurt Goldstein, Henry A. Murray, and Carl Rogers (1967 volume); Hans Eysenck (1980 volume); Paul E. Meehl (1989 volume); and in the present volume, Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel. An article was recently published on "The 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the Twentieth Century" (Hagbloom et al., 2002). It is remarkable how many in this list of 100 have contributed chapters to this series. Of the top 25 in that list, 15 have now written autobiographies for the series, including (in order on their list): B. F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, Albert Bandura, Carl Rogers, Stanley Schacter, Edward L. Thorndike, Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Raymond B. Cattell, John B. Watson, Donald O. Hebb, George A. Miller, Clark L. H u l l , Jerome Kagan, and Walter Mischel. We are pleased that many of these articles, found in several volumes of the History of Psychology in Autobiography series, are now available to readers in APA's PsycBooks database. There are obviously many additional psychologists whose autobiographical accounts would be of value. Fortunately, there are other informative autobiographical series, including The Psychologists (Krawiec, 3 vols., 1972, 1974, 1978); Studying Animal Behavior: Autobiographies of the Founders (Dewsbury, 1985); The History of Clinical Psychology in Autobiography (Walker, 2 vols., 1991, 1993); A History of Developmental Psychology in Autobiography (Thompson & Hogan, 1996); and The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography (Squire, 5 vols., 1996 and after). W i t h contributions cutting across each of these substantive areas is Models of Achievement: Reflections of Eminent Women in Psychology (O'Connell & Russo, 3 vols., 1983, 1988, 2001). We thank the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, for their institutional support, and we particularly thank Leslie Lindzey for her invaluable assistance.
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We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. —Henry James
w hen I was a senior at Brandeis University, I heard an invited lecture by the distinguished nuclear physicist Leo Szilard. Szilard reminisced about how in the 1930s he was teaching at the University of Berlin when he gradually realized that Hitler's Germany was no place for a Jew. One day he packed a valise, hopped on a train, and left the country. The train was practically empty. The next day the train was jam-packed, and it was stopped at the border and turned back. Szilard's moral of this story was that "you don't have to be much smarter than the average person—only a little bit smarter." In this instance, only 1 day smarter. Well, maybe that is the case but my guess is that you also have to be incredibly lucky. As I see it, there are essentially two ways to write an autobiography. One is to take full credit for every good outcome: " I was smart enough to go to this university, and work with this professor, and then go to that graduate school so that I could work with that great scholar, and then I wisely accepted that wonderful job," and so on. The other way is to attribute everything to the vicissitudes of chance: "My God, I have been incredibly lucky. At every step of the way I simply happened to be in the right place at
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the right time." But both are true. In my case, most of the good things that happened to me were the result of being in the right place at the right time in my career, in my choice of a life partner, and in the friendships I formed. I also was adept at making pretty good use of the opportunities that presented themselves. My major good fortune was to fall under the influence of a series of magnificent mentors, most notably Abraham Maslow, David McClelland, Leon Festinger, and Gardner Lindzey. But my earliest mentor was my big brother Jason, 21/? years my senior. Jason was strongwilled, charismatic, and brilliant. Undeterred by all the evidence to the contrary, he saw in me a bright and talented youngster with a lot of potential. During the first 18 years of my life, he was just about the only one to think so. He taught me how to throw, catch, and hit a baseball and to dribble a basketball. He taught me that hard work could be fun and that having fun was important. He taught me to take myself seriously, but not too seriously. By example, he showed me the joy of poking fun at my own foibles and blunders and that humor could be found in anything, even in tragedy. Also by example, he taught me how to play the hand I was dealt, in poker as in life, like a mensch, that is, with a minimum of whining or complaining. I was born on January 9, 1932, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a slum city just across the Mystic River from Boston. Chelsea was brimful of junkyards, rag shops, and oil storage tanks. When I was 3 years old, my family took a huge step up and moved to the adjacent, equally slummy city of Revere, a seaside town nestled between a horse track and a greyhound racing track. Because of this location, Revere was teeming with small-time gamblers, bookies, and assorted Runyonesque characters. The saving grace of Revere was that it was on the ocean, and accordingly, it had a pretty good swimming beach and a boardwalk with a real honest-to-goodness wooden roller coaster. These proved to be extremely important to me. So my advice to young people is, if you have to live in a slum, make sure it's on the ocean. My father emigrated from Russia in 1911 when he was 8 years old. He quit school at the age of 13 and began earning his living by peddling socks and underwear from a pushcart in Boston. Eventually he earned enough money to open a small dry goods store, where he peddled socks and underwear from behind the counter. He was a compulsive gambler who would bet on anything from horses to dogs
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to baseball to how many cars would pass by a certain spot within a 3 minute period. The year I entered kindergarten was the year that my father lost his store and the bank foreclosed on our home, leaving my father unemployed and the family destitute. I have vivid memories of going to bed hungry and early so that we could ward off the cold in our unheated flat by covering ourselves with blankets and overcoats, of stuffing my shoes with cardboard to cover the holes in the soles because we couldn't afford to have the shoes repaired, and of never having new clothes but always wearing those that my older brother had outgrown. I also remember our family moving in the middle of the night because we were in arrears in our rent payment. My mother blamed our poverty on my father's gambling and never forgave him for it. My father attributed our poverty to the Great Depression and to the fact that his blue-collar customers had lost their jobs and he needed to extend them credit ("What else could I do? These were my only customers."). That was why, in his view, he eventually couldn't pay his rent and lost the store. I was never sure which account was more accurate. It was almost certainly a mixture of both. My father eventually landed a job with the W P A working on highway construction. When the war came, he got a better paying job as a semiskilled factory worker. He also worked as an agent for a small-time bookie in the numbers racket. In 1949, when I was a junior in high school, my father contracted leukemia. A few months later, just before he died, I overheard a conversation he had with my mother in which he expressed regret at dying so young and leaving the family without any money in the bank or any source of income. He particularly regretted leaving his children financially vulnerable. He said that he wasn't worried about "the big guy" (my brother Jason, whom he described as a real go-getter), but he was deeply concerned about "the little guy" (me) because I was so shy that he felt that without his support I wouldn't amount to much. He had every reason to be worried. Indeed I was a very shy child and adolescent. At family gatherings I was ignored because my uncles and aunts did not find me interesting to talk to. In school I never volunteered to speak up, and when called on I stammered and blushed and was barely able to respond to the question being asked. Ten years after my father's death I was at a going-away party that my friends were throwing for me. I had just received my doctorate in
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psychology at Stanford and was about to head east to take a position as an assistant professor at Harvard. I got drunk and walked outside. It was a particularly beautiful night—all the stars were out. I remember crying as I looked up at the stars and telling my father that he could now rest easy. This was an odd thing for me to say. I must have been awfully drunk because I don't believe in an afterlife, much less in the possibility of communicating with dead people, but I guess I was trying to communicate with myself and convince myself that I had indeed gotten on a path where I might eventually amount to something. In 1949, I agreed with my father's deathbed assessment of my shyness, yet I was confused because I wasn't shy in all circumstances. In at least one situation I was able to assert myself and behave with grace and boldness. For 3 years I had been working summers on the Revere Beach boardwalk. One of my jobs was making change at the Pokerino tables. Late one rainy night, when there were hardly any people walking on the boardwalk, the mike man stepped down from his perch and asked me if I wanted to take over until closing time. This was a fantasy come true. For 2 years I had observed the mike man, listening to his spiel over and over again until I had it memorized. Moreover, I found ways to improve on it, and I actually had spent several hours rehearsing in front of a mirror. I had somehow figured out that the only way to attract people was to make it sound as if other people had already been attracted to the game. And sure enough, a few people wandered in and began to play. W i t h i n a half hour it seemed like half of the sparse crowd wandering the boardwalk was playing Pokerino. I questioned how a shy kid like me could be so successful as a barker. In retrospect, I am tempted to conclude that I was already thinking like a social psychologist by emphasizing the situational determinants of behavior. However, it is more accurate to say that this experience foreshadowed my excitement of things social psychological. At the time, I was convinced that my shyness was a permanent social handicap: that I always had been shy and I always would be shy. My success behind the microphone surprised, delighted, and confused me, but confusing as it was, it did open the possibility that I might find a way to overcome my shyness. This was not the first time that I was puzzled by events that I later understood because of my training in social psychology.
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One of my most vivid childhood memories involved a devastating experience that led me to speculate about the nature of prejudice. When I was 9 years old, the year I started Hebrew school, we were the only Jewish family living in a tough, virulently anti-Semitic section of Revere. The Hebrew school was located in a small Jewish enclave on the other side of town so, to get there and back, I had to walk in the dark through a hostile environment. I was forever trying to find creative routes, zigzagged paths that would take me away from the greatest areas of danger. But in spite of my best efforts, I was frequently waylaid, pushed around, and occasionally roughed up by gangs of teenage tough guys shouting anti-Semitic slogans at me. After one of those incidents I remember sitting on a curb, nursing a bloody nose and a split lip, feeling sorry for myself, and wondering how it was that these kids could hate me so much when they didn't even know me. I wondered whether they had been born hating Jews or had learned it from their parents and priests. I wondered whether, if these kids had gotten to know me better (and discovered what a sweet and harmless little boy I was), they would have liked me a little more. And if they had gotten to like me more, would they then have hated other Jews less? I didn't realize it then, of course, but these were profound social psychological questions.
G e t t i n g t o College I hated high school. W i t h few exceptions the teachers were burned out and boring. None of them thought I was worth much, and I cannot blame them for that: I didn't work very hard and got mostly Cs with a few Bs sprinkled in. After my father died, Jason gave me a pep talk about working hard in my senior year so that I could stand a chance of being admitted to college. I thought it was useless because I didn't think I was smart enough, and besides, we didn't have the money to pay for it. Jason tried to convince me that I could earn a scholarship as he had done. I didn't believe him: "Not with my grades!" He said that it was certainly worth a try. When I objected, he grabbed me by the shoulders and said, "Look, schmuck, do you want to spend your life pushing a baby buggy down Shirley Avenue?"
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That was a chilling image. For years, with a mixture of sadness and fear, he and I had observed guys in their early 20s who had married their high school sweethearts, were soon saddled with children, had taken miserable dead-end jobs, and were pushing that baby buggy down one of the main streets of our town. The mere thought of becoming one of them scared me into trying a bit harder. By the middle of my senior year I had pulled my grades up a little, but only a little. The big surprise came when I took the SAT exams. I astonished my teachers and myself by getting an astronomical score. I had applied to three colleges, all in the Boston area. I received only one acceptance. Brandeis University, perhaps because it had recently opened its doors, was willing to take a chance on a kid with high SATs and mediocre grades. They offered me a 1-year full-tuition scholarship and a part-time job that allowed me to pay a part of my room and board. But I soon discovered that I had never learned how to be a student. For example, I didn't know the first thing about taking notes. I would sit in class, listen to the lecture and scribble furiously. Prior to midsemester exams, I looked at my lecture notes for the first time and found they were pure gibberish. I did poorly on those exams, but I learned something from the experience. From then on, at the end of every class, I would find a quiet nook, read over my scribbled notes, and neatly summarize them in a page or two. At the end of the semester, when it was time to prepare for the exam, I had notes that described the heart and core of the course. I had taken the first step toward mastering the art of getting to the essence of a topic. In the process, I found I was also learning to love to learn. Without quite realizing it, I was becoming a good student. In the second semester of my freshman year, I earned straight As. I was ecstatic. That summer, while I was swinging a pick with a highway construction crew, I received two letters from the dean of students. The first congratulated me on my sterling performance during my freshman year. The second informed me that the university could no longer offer me financial aid. I was crushed. But by then I was so much in love with learning that nothing could have kept me from going back. I earned enough money over the summer to pay for tuition but could not afford to pay for a dormitory room. So I spent that first semester sleeping wherever I could: in the woods in
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dry weather; when it rained, on the back seat of parked cars. I scrounged food from other students and from the snack bar where I worked. I was hanging on by my fingernails and loving it. During the fall semester, I saved enough money from my job to rent a room off campus so that I could come in from the cold during the most brutal part of the Massachusetts winter. This history is beginning to sound like some of the romantically embroidered stories my grandfather used to tell me about his walking to school barefoot through blizzards in czarist Russia. In my case, there was nothing romantic about it, but I was willing to endure these minor hardships because I loved what I was learning. I almost never cut class, even when the professor was boring. That would have been akin to working hard to earn money to buy a ticket to the theater and then not showing up. When the time came to declare a major, I thought seriously of literature or philosophy, both of which were exciting the hell out of me. But, remembering my father's despair during the Depression, I thought it might be best to concentrate on something more practical, something that might help me land a job after college. So, with reluctance, I declared economics as my major.
D i s c o v e r i n g Psychology One afternoon I was having a cup of coffee with a young woman I wanted to get to know better. Suddenly she realized that she was late for her class. I decided to walk along with her, hoping that she and I might sit in the back of the lecture hall and hold hands. (Those were innocent times.) It turned out that the class was introductory psychology being taught by some guy named Abraham Maslow. As it happened, Maslow was discussing the psychological aspects of racial and ethnic prejudice. Much to my astonishment, he was raising precisely the same questions that I had raised 10 years earlier while sitting on that curb in Revere nursing my bloody nose. U n t i l that moment, I had no idea that there was a field of study that addressed such questions. I was fascinated. So I let go of the young woman's hand and started taking notes. I lost the girl but found my calling. The next day I switched from economics to psychology.
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As a psychology major, I studied primarily with Maslow, whom I found to be both an inspirational teacher and a visionary thinker. His approach to psychology was humanistic, philosophical, and clinical; he was not a rigorous scientist. He was awfully good at speculating about the nature of prejudice but not adept at proposing research that might lead to solutions, short of offering psychotherapy to help "cure" prejudiced people. At that time, science was not important to me. Indeed, from what I was learning at Brandeis, scientific psychology seemed pretty drab— mostly rats and brass instruments. Maslow gave me many lessons that stayed with me for the rest of my life. As I look back on that time, I realize that what I learned from him was an optimistic orientation toward human beings and their potential; I learned that individuals and society could become healthier and better. From Maslow, I acquired the determination (but not the tools) to apply psychological knowledge to improve the human condition. But Maslow's greatest gift was yet to come. In my senior year, he hired me and another student to serve as assistants. The other student, his absolute favorite, was a remarkable young woman named Vera. Vera had grown up in Hungary, survived the Holocaust, and emigrated to America at the age of 17. She was not only brilliant but also gorgeous and fairly glowed with a quality that I would call serenity. During my first 3 years at Brandeis I had admired her from afar but had not gotten to know her. She was far more sophisticated than I, traveled in a different social circle, and seemed way out of my league. Besides, as you know, I was a shy young man. But after Maslow had thrown us together as his assistants, we gradually got to know each other; within a few months we had become close friends, and each became the other's favorite confidante. We studied together, took many of our meals together, and worked together on a senior honors thesis. In the process, we realized that we were falling in love and wanted to marry. But there was a roadblock; I had resolved not to get married until I had a clear idea of what I was going to do with my life, and as graduation approached, I was more confused than ever. Because Maslow had been pointing me toward a career in clinical psychology, I dutifully applied to a few graduate programs and was
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accepted. But by the spring of my senior year, I had a change of heart. To gain experience, as well as earn my keep, I had been working as an orderly in a mental institution in Boston. One of my duties was to assist with electroshock therapy by bracing the patient's shoulders and hips so that they would not be dislocated during the convulsions that accompanied the treatment. I got to know several of the patients and was happy for them when they were released from the hospital as cured and dismayed to see them return a few months later. I realized that whatever was causing their depression was not being addressed. I became disillusioned by the prospect of being a psychotherapist; I felt I could not learn enough in graduate school to be helpful to those people who needed help the most. Here it was, the spring of my senior year, I was in love, and I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And then, once again, I happened to be at the right place at the right time. Three weeks before my graduation, Maslow received a letter from David McClelland, the chairman of the psychology department at Wesleyan University. McClelland ran a small master's program to have teaching assistants for the undergraduate courses, but that year no one had applied to the program. McClelland was desperate and asked Maslow i f there were any bright graduating seniors who had no plans. Maslow tacked McClelland's letter to the bulletin board. Vera spotted it, ripped it off, and handed it to me, saying, "This is for you!" So 3 months after graduation in 1954 and 3 days before leaving for Wesleyan, Vera and I were married. She and our four children have always been the major source of joy and excitement in my life. But i f it had not been for the timing of that letter, my best guess is that I would have enlisted in the Army, gone off to fight in the Korean War, not married Vera, and drifted into a far different line of work. To borrow from Leo Szilard's story, I would have missed the train.
Finding Myself a t Wesleyan My 2 years at Wesleyan getting the master's allowed me to mature and take the time to figure out my life's direction. I knew I didn't want to be a clinician; here I began to realize what I did want to do—
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teach and do research. I was a teaching assistant for David McClelland, Joe Greenbaum, and Mike Wertheimer. Each had a different style, but each was a first-rate teacher. Wertheimer was extremely well prepared, with written-out class notes and clear, formal lectures. Greenbaum was an entertainer; he was funny and erudite and referred often to movies and literature. McClelland was casual; he would walk in without notes and chat informally but with clear expertise. I was impressed by all three of them. As a teaching assistant, I began to pay attention to teaching not from a student's consumer perspective ("Hey, am I going to understand this stuff and get a good grade here?") but from the teacher's perspective ("How can I help these students comprehend the material? How do these three professors manage to do it?"). I see now that my own teaching style became a blend of all three of these superb teachers' methods. I am so well prepared that I can afford to be casual and responsive to my audience; I keep students entertained, not with jokes but with stories—some funny, some touching—that I weave into the material; and I draw on material from life, literature, philosophy, films, and the day's news. I frequently get e-mails from former students who, some 20 years after taking my course, still remember the stories and even the psychological principles they were intended to illuminate! At Wesleyan, I got experience lecturing and teaching and I learned I was good at it. Much to my delight, my shyness vanished when I was standing in front of a class as it had when I was doing my spiel at the Pokerino tables on the Revere Beach boardwalk. McClelland also provided my introduction to scientific research. The work was not experimental—we were primarily looking for correlates of achievement motivation—but it was my first in-depth exposure to the rigors of the scientific method. My master's thesis demonstrated that people with high need for achievement (nAch) had characteristically different ways of expressing themselves in drawings from those with low nAch. What we called "graphic expression" a layperson would call "doodling." So different was that thesis from my later experimental work that years later one of my colleagues, Elaine Hatfield, came running into my office with excitement exclaiming, "Hey! Did you know there is another psychologist named Elliot Aronson? He did a study of doodling a decade ago."
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McClelland's third lesson was that there need not be a sharp line between teachers and students; they could even be friends. Vera and I lived in an army barracks that had been converted into apartments for married students, and our first child, Hal, was born while we lived there. The apartment was sparsely furnished, and McClelland generously invited me to borrow desks and chairs from the psychology department. He helped me load a heavy desk into the back of his station wagon, drove me to the barracks, and helped me carry it up two flights of stairs. I will never forget that because he was making it clear that we were colleagues working and helping each other both inside and outside of the psychology building. In the summer of my first year at Wesleyan, Dick Alpert and Ralph Haber, two of McClelland's former graduate students and then doctoral candidates at Stanford, came back to Wesleyan joining Vera and me to work closely together on one of McClelland's research projects. During that summer the four of us became close friends. (Alpert was later to spend time in India becoming an influential spiritual leader named Baba Ram Dass, but I still call him Dick.) After earning my master's degree at Wesleyan, I was offered graduate fellowships at both Harvard and Stanford. It is largely because of my friendships with Dick and Ralph that I decided to continue my graduate training at Stanford. The timing was fortuitous.
Becoming a Social P s y c h o l o g i s t Leon Festinger and I arrived at Stanford in the same year, 1956— he as a distinguished professor, I as an insecure graduate student. Leon was a young star and an enfant terrible. Only 37, he had already invented social comparison theory and was in the process of inventing the theory of cognitive dissonance, a theory that would eventually become the most important and most fruitful theory in the history of social psychology. He had also already earned a reputation for toughness, for eating tender young graduate students like me for breakfast. As is true of almost all charismatic figures, rumors about Leon abounded. The psychology building reverberated with stories about Leon from his previous academic positions, stories of broken and bleeding students who had left the program and decided to become forest
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rangers, real estate brokers, or even clinical psychologists to get as far away from Leon as possible. Most of those rumors were undoubtedly false, but we couldn't be sure. Naturally, given my own insecurity, I tried to keep out of his way. But, as fate would have it, in the spring quarter Dick Alpert challenged me into signing up for Festinger's seminar. He taunted me by saying that the lst-year kids were too scared of Leon to enroll in his seminar and were therefore missing an important educational opportunity. Because what he said about lst-year students in general was absolutely true for me, I wanted to deny it. Nobody calls me a coward, so I signed up for the course. After a few weeks, Leon assigned a term paper. I dutifully wrote it and handed it in. A few days later, as I was walking past his office on my way to the teaching assistant room, he yelled my name and beckoned me to come in. He picked up my paper from a short pile on his desk, held it disdainfully at arm's length between his thumb and forefinger as i f it were a particularly smelly piece of garbage, and said, "I believe this is yours." I was devastated, but I tried to put on a brave front. I said, "I guess you didn't like it very much." He glared at me for what seemed like a very long time. Then he turned his hands palms up, shrugged his shoulders, and a look came into his eyes that anyone who has ever worked with him would instantly recognize; it was a mixture of contempt and pity—the pity seemed to imply that he felt sorry for me because I had been born brain damaged—and he said, "That's right, I didn't like it very much." I took my paper and slunk down the corridor to my desk in the teaching assistant room. I sat there for about 10 minutes before I could gather the courage to look at the paper and read the terrible things I expected to find in the margins. When I did, I was astounded to discover that there wasn't a mark on it. What was I to make of this? I gathered my courage, marched back to Leon's office, and said, "Hey, Leon, you forgot to write any criticisms in the margins; how am I supposed to know what I got wrong?" Leon stared at me for several seconds; then, he turned his palms up, shrugged his shoulders, and that awful look of contempt and pity came into his eyes. He said, What? You don't have enough respect for your own work and your own thinking to go the extra mile to follow your own reasoning to its logical
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conclusions, and you expect me to do that for you? This is graduate school, not kindergarten. You're supposed to tell me what's wrong with it. I walked back to my desk and sat there fuming. I didn't need this kind of humiliation, and I certainly didn't need to deal with this son of a bitch. After all, I didn't come to Stanford to work with Festinger; I could simply get through this course and ignore him for the rest of my time in grad school. A t the same time, during those weeks in his seminar I had begun to realize that he was an extraordinary thinker and that I could learn a lot from him i f I had the guts to hang in there. It was an important choice point. I picked up the paper and read it carefully, trying to look at it through Festinger's eyes. I found it poorly reasoned, incompletely analyzed, and imperfectly argued, a shoddy, second-rate piece of work. For the next 48 hours, I reworked that paper until I was satisfied with it. Then I walked into Leon's office, plunked it on his desk, and walked out. To his credit, he must have dropped whatever he was doing and read it immediately because 20 minutes later he came into the teaching assistant room carrying my paper. He placed it in front of me, sat down on the corner of my desk, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "Now, this is worth criticizing." This incident turned out to be a gift of incalculable value. (Naturally, I would have preferred it if the gift had come wrapped in a gentler, kinder package.) He showed me that he was not going to accept anything from me that fell short of my best effort. By declaring that my revised paper was worth criticizing, he was telling me that it was worth his time and energy, thus welcoming me into the world of science as a valuable young colleague. Praise from Leon was the gold standard, an incredible boost to my self-confidence, precisely because I knew it did not stem from his wish to be kind or need to be liked. This was the beginning of a close and yeasty working relationship and a gratifying friendship that lasted for the next 32 years until Leon's death. Years later, I found myself using the same statement—"now, this is worth criticizing"—only with my best students. For me, Stanford was Leon Festinger. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance revolutionized the way we thought about the human mind and social influence, and it permanently changed the face of social psychology. It was a breath of fresh air at a time when reinforcement theory dominated all of psychology; it showed us that the mind is
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much more complex than simple principles of reward and punishment can predict. For example, a reinforcement theorist would predict that if a person said a dull task was interesting and was paid $20 for it, he would come to believe that lie to a greater extent than he would i f he were paid only $1 for it. Dissonance theory predicted and found just the opposite (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). Dissonance theory also taught me the great lesson of social influence that guided my thinking for my entire career as a researcher and writer: Although it's true that changing people's attitudes sometimes changes their behavior, if you want a more powerful change to take place, you want to change their behavior first; attitudes w i l l follow. For example, in the first experiment I did at Stanford, we showed that people who went through a severe initiation to join a group later liked the group better than those who went through a mild initiation (Aronson & Mills, 1959). That turned out to be one of the defining experiments of dissonance theory. We didn't try to convince people that the group they had just joined was an attractive one; rather, we set up a situation in which they convinced themselves that the group was attractive. The idea came to me in Festinger's seminar. It dawned on me that one function of the painful or embarrassing initiations required by college fraternities and other "primitive" tribes is to create a more cohesive group; likewise, people who go through the famously extreme basic training required to join the Marines develop a strong commitment to the Corps. The cognition "I went through hell and high water to get into this group" would be dissonant with any negative aspect of the group or its members. As a consequence, people would minimize the importance of these negative aspects and focus on the positive ones; those who went through the harshest initiation should therefore end up liking the group most. But people who join the Marines (or who sleep in parked cars to stay at Brandeis!) are self-selected; they might have joined the Marines or chosen Brandeis because they liked it prior to the initiation. For this reason, correlational data are inadequate to test the hypothesis. We needed to design an experiment so that we could randomly assign participants to either a severe-initiation condition or a mild one. I mentioned the hypothesis to Jud Mills, a fellow student. He was enthusiastic about it, and the two of us spent the next several days designing an experiment. It was my first experiment, and it became
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a classic (Aronson & Mills, 1959). I ran volunteers through either a severe-, mild-, or no-initiation condition to get into a group. Jud then interviewed them and got them to fill out a series of rating scales about the attractiveness of the group they had allegedly joined. I can still remember the exhilaration I felt as the data began to fall into place. I was elated by the realization that human behavior is complex but lawful i f you could only identify the law, hone it into a testable hypothesis, and invent a procedure to get at the essence of that hypothesis. Doing this experiment also showed me that I might have a knack for finding a key to unlock some of the mysteries of human behavior and discover things that no one had discovered previously. It was a great revelation. I don't think I have ever been more excited about anything in my entire life, intellectually speaking, anyway. Leon influenced me not only as a theorist but also as a methodologist. He was arguably the most creative experimentalist the field has ever known. By working with him, I learned that designing an effective experiment required a high degree of art as well as scientific knowhow. To do it right, one must embed the participant in a convincing scenario. Therefore, the experimenter had to develop the skills of a playwright, a director, and an actor. The work was both challenging and exciting. In our experiments, real things happened to real people; this enabled us to transcend the fabled artificiality of the laboratory where, in most experiments, participants sit back and calmly make guesses about how they might behave in a given situation. In our experiments, we plunked them in the middle of a situation that was so real for them that they had to respond as they would have responded outside the laboratory. What I learned from Leon was that it is possible—no, it is essential—to achieve scientific rigor without artificiality or sterility. That became my mantra as an experimenter. In those days, much of the research in social psychology consisted of either investigating trivial phenomena or observing how people who scored high or low on some personality test would behave in a variety of situations. I left Stanford with the audacious belief that as scientists we did not need to confine our research to trivial topics or easy methods. Rather, with sufficient ingenuity we could find a way to investigate just about any phenomenon in the laboratory. This could free the scientist from an overreliance on personality variables and from accepting any "trait" as a given. We could learn what causes what, because
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to fully understand what causes what, it is the experimenter who must be responsible for producing the first "what" (the independent variable), not the participant's mother or genes or childhood traumas. By the time I received my doctorate and accepted an assistant professorship at Harvard, I had all but forgotten the humanistic concerns that had initially attracted me to psychology. I was no longer thinking of doing good, I was now thinking of doing good experiments. I drove from Palo Alto to Cambridge with a car full of my loving family—3-year-old Hal now had two siblings, 2-year-old Neal and infant Julie—and a head full of research ideas. I could hardly wait to get started.
Outside H a r v a r d Y a r d "Harvard is a terrible place to be but a wonderful place to be from." So I was told soon after my arrival by some of the older nontenured faculty. What they were caviling about was this: Because Harvard was committed to excellence, it would not bestow tenure on a person without conclusive evidence that that person was the best available scholar in his or her subdiscipline. Because it was unlikely that an assistant professor who had been out of graduate school for only 5 or 6 years would meet that criterion, they warned me that tenure was a virtual impossibility. As a result, most of the senior faculty treated the junior faculty in much the same way that Parisians treated tourists—people who were passing through on their way somewhere else. Looking back, I can see that although I never really felt at home at Harvard, one of the things I liked about being there was, well, being there. I got a special kick out of teaching at an institution that several years earlier would not have dreamed of accepting me as an undergraduate. I cherished the image of the admissions committee taking a look at my GPA and the letters of recommendation from my high school teachers and proceeding to roll on the floor laughing. Indeed, during the first few weeks I did feel like something of an imposter. What was a dumb, impoverished kid from Revere H i g h School doing among the preppies and Brahmans of the greatest educational institution in the country?
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My response was to tell myself that although these undergraduates might be smarter than I, I had something important to teach them, and damn it, I was going to excite them about the things I knew and loved. So I pulled up my socks and went about my business with a high degree of energy. I worked hard preparing lectures for my first undergraduate course, "Social Influence," honing each lecture so that it told a story, adding humor and parables to clarify and enliven the complex material at hand. The student response was gratifying: Enrollment in my course went from 16 in my 1st year to over 60 in my 2nd year to well over 100 in my 3rd year. I f the undergraduates made me feel that I was worthy of teaching at Harvard, it was the graduate students who helped me feel like a true professional. I taught a graduate seminar on the experimental method in social psychology. My aim was not simply to teach about experimental design but rather to immerse the graduate students in the art of doing experiments. We discussed the process from beginning to end: getting an idea, converting that idea into a testable hypothesis, inventing a procedure that was scientifically sound without losing the complexity and poetry of the original idea, and rehearsing until the performance of experimenter and any confederates was believable. This course was a new experience for the graduate students, and they embraced it enthusiastically. Indeed, it was new for me as well. I had never taken a formal course on experimental methodology; everything I knew about it I had picked up by doing it. So my goal in this seminar was to make explicit and systematic many of the implicit lessons I had absorbed as Leon's apprentice. Leon believed, and I agree, that the best way to learn to do experiments is to do them under the supervision of a master. But I came to realize that students can learn a great deal from a seminar as well. Several years later, I carried this one step further, and in collaboration with one of my students, I wrote a chapter for The Handbook of Social Psychology (Aronson & Carlsmith, 1968) in which we attempted to spell out these implicit lessons on the printed page. It was from these seminars that I was able to select the three research assistants with whom I worked most closely during my stay at Harvard: Merrill Carlsmith, Tony Greenwald, and John Darley. How lucky can one guy get? These brilliant, hardworking young men went on to become major figures in the field. Actually, I had first met Merrill
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Carlsmith when he was a precocious undergraduate at Stanford and had enrolled i n that famous Festinger seminar. M e r r i l l had r u n the subjects i n the classic counterattitudinal advocacy experiment i n w h i c h people were paid either $1 or $20 to say that a boring task was interesting. A l t h o u g h M e r r i l l was b r i g h t , he was quite stiff, almost wooden. Leon had asked me to w o r k w i t h h i m and help h i m become an effective experimenter. I n the process, I grew to like and respect M e r r i l l a great deal. After graduating from Stanford, M e r r i l l began his graduate w o r k at Harvard i n 1958. W h e n I arrived a year later, he greeted me warmly and joked that he had been w a i t i n g a f u l l 12 months for me to arrive. H e had been disappointed, he said, complaining that there was no one for h i m to w o r k w i t h at Harvard; no one on the faculty was doing the k i n d of high-impact experimentation that he had learned to do at Stanford. I laughed and informed h i m that there were very few places i n the w o r l d where that k i n d of experimentation was being done. " A n d , " I added w i t h mock bravado, "Harvard is about to become one
of them." And so it did. In those days, most of the social relations faculty had offices in several cottages scattered around Harvard Square. These cottages functioned like fiefdoms. I had been assigned to Jerry Bruner's fiefdom at 9 Bow Street, just outside Harvard Yard. Somehow Bruner expected me to work with him on his research projects. I balked because I had research ideas of my own. When he realized I wasn't going to be working with him, he assigned me to an office in the attic. Because it was the only office up there, I felt isolated, to say the least. But then I managed to clear out a bunch of junk from an adjacent storeroom, commandeer a small table and a few chairs, and give my research assistants a place to hang out. At once, my students and I were isolated together. It proved to be an electrifying arrangement. We were forever bouncing ideas off one another, criticizing and sharpening designs and procedures, and constantly learning from each other. Whenever someone got a good idea, developed a testable hypothesis, began an experiment, completed an experiment, or finished writing up an experiment, we celebrated by going out to Saint Claire's in Harvard Square for martinis. Over the next 3 years, we consumed a lot of martinis. One of the directions for our research stemmed from a running argument that Festinger and I had been having during my last year
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at Stanford. In his initial treatise on cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957), Leon was trying to define the limits of the theory by proposing a hypothetical situation in which a man was driving late at night on a lonely country road and got a flat tire. When the man opened the trunk of his car, he discovered he didn't have a jack. Festinger maintained that although the man would experience frustration, disappointment, perhaps even fear, he would not experience dissonance. The example disturbed me. I said, "Of course there is dissonance! What kind of idiot would go driving late at night on a lonely country road without a jack in his car?" "But," Festinger countered, "where are the dissonant cognitions? What is dissonant with what?" I wasn't able to articulate it at the time, but it gradually dawned on me that the answer was going to involve the self-concept. What was dissonant was (a) the driver's cognition about his idiotic behavior with (b) his self-concept of being a reasonably smart and competent guy. This simple insight led me to the realization that the theory had been producing clear predictions only when an important element of the self-concept was threatened, typically when an individual performed a behavior that was inconsistent with his or her sense of self. Thus, in the Aronson and Mills experiment, I previously believed that the dissonance was between the person's cognition "I went through a severe initiation to get into a group" and the cognition "The group is worthless." Instead, the dissonance is between the cognition "I am a sensible, competent person" and the cognition " I went through a severe initiation to get into a worthless group." What I thought was a minor adjustment turned out to be a major revision: I transformed dissonance theory from a theory about attitudes into a theory about the self. This modification also uncovered a hidden assumption contained in the original formulation, namely, that individuals have a reasonably positive self-concept. But if an individual considers himself to be a schnook, he might expect himself to do schnooky things like go through a severe initiation to get into a group or say things that he didn't quite believe for a paltry sum of money. For such individuals, dissonance would not be aroused under the same conditions as for persons with a favorable view of themselves. Rather, dissonance would occur when negative self-expectancies were violated, that is, when the person with a poor self-concept behaved in a way that reflected positively on the self.
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N AUTOBIOGRAPHY A n d i n fact, we demonstrated that under certain conditions college
students w o u l d be made uncomfortable w i t h success and w o u l d prefer to be accurate i n confirming their expectancies, even i f i t meant setting themselves up for failure. Specifically, we found that students who had developed negative self-expectancies regarding their performance on a task showed evidence of dissonance arousal when faced w i t h success on that task. That is, after repeated failure at the task, participants who later performed successfully actually changed their responses f r o m accurate to inaccurate ones to preserve a consistent, although negative, self-concept (Aronson & C a r l s m i t h , 1962). A year and a half i n t o m y stay at Harvard, a senior colleague asked me i f I was happy there. " W e l l , " I said, " I have some great students and we are doing some terrific research . . . " H e interrupted and said, "That wasn't the question." H e was astute. I was happy w i t h m y courses, w i t h m y interaction w i t h m y students, and w i t h the excitement of the research m y students and I were d o i n g . B u t , I t o l d h i m , the t r u t h was that I could not get over feeling like an outsider. " H e l l , " he said, "everybody at Harvard feels like an outsider."
The W a r m t h o f M i n n e s o t a Early in my 3rd year at Harvard, I received an offer I couldn't refuse. Stan Schachter had decided to leave the University of Minnesota and take a position at Columbia. The university asked me if I would replace him as associate professor of psychology with tenure and become the director of the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations. The laboratory was a special place: an interdisciplinary institute with its own research budget and a long tradition of being a fruitful place for young social psychologists like Leon Festinger, Harold Kelly, and Schachter. From a purely professional point of view, the years I spent at Minnesota (1962-1965) were the happiest and most productive of my life. The social climate could not have been more different from the one I experienced at Harvard. There were no barriers between faculty members as a function of rank or tenure; newly hatched assistant professors joked freely with their most distinguished colleagues. There wasn't even any animosity between clinicians and experimental psychologists, as was true in most departments at that time, with each side feeling
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that only they were doing the important work—the clinicians in the study of real people, the experimentalists in the rigor of their science. I am convinced that a major factor underlying this atmosphere of respect was Paul Meehl. Meehl was extraordinarily smart, an excellent experimentalist, a masterful psychotherapist, a brilliant philosopher of science, and a first-rate psychometrician. When the acknowledged superstar of the department bridges all subdisciplines, how can any of the lesser stars quarrel with each other? I believe that Meehl's stature and ideas contributed to one of the major differences between Harvard and Minnesota. Whereas Harvard maintained its excellence by being extremely conservative when making a tenure decision, Minnesota maintained its excellence by making shrewd guesses about the future productivity of the young people on the faculty. I recall chatting with Meehl during my 1st year, telling him how pleased and surprised I was that they had taken a chance on me by offering me a tenured position when I was less than 3 years out of graduate school. He said this was no gamble at all, because the key professors had read my work and could see the joy in it. He added that although past productivity is a good predictor of future productivity, the surefire predictor is past productivity that exudes passion in the process. He told me he saw no reason to follow any set rule in the timing of promotions. "When people are doing good work," he said, "they should be promoted rapidly." One year later Meehl came bouncing into my office with a big grin on his face and announced that the senior faculty had unanimously voted to promote me to full professor. This promotion came as a bolt from the blue. I had not asked for it nor was it made in response to an offer from another university. They promoted me simply because they felt I deserved it. It took me several additional years in academia to realize just how rare an attitude that was. A t Minnesota, I worked closely with some excellent graduate students, most notably John Darley (who came with me from Harvard), Ellen Berscheid, and Darwyn Linder. I also collaborated with my colleagues there, primarily Elaine Hatfield (Walster) and Ben Wilierman. The lab provided plenty of research space with one-way mirrors and other gadgetry, secretarial help, and a warm atmosphere. We instituted Tuesday night research meetings where all the social psychology faculty and graduate students met at one of our homes, and
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over beer and pretzels, we served as informal consultants on one another's research ideas and experimental procedures. W e organized a faculty and student Softball team that challenged the fraternity jocks for the intramural championship. W e never missed an o p p o r t u n i t y for a party. I treated m y grad students like members of the family; they got to k n o w Vera and the kids and hung out a lot at our house. A t one of the Tuesday n i g h t meetings, m y youngest son Josh, who was about 3, was playing around w i t h some of the grad students. I t was way past his bedtime, but he was having so m u c h f u n that he refused to heed Vera's calls. Finally Vera came into the l i v i n g room and scooped h i m up i n her arms to carry h i m out. H e w r i g g l e d out of her grasp, extended his arms toward D a r w y n Linder, and cried: "Darwee, help! H e l p me!" For months after that, we all greeted D a r w y n w i t h Josh's plea. A t Minnesota I began broadening m y interests, investigating social influence and interpersonal attraction outside the domain of dissonance theory. A t that t i m e , rewards were s t i l l considered the primary incentive for attitude change and attraction. For example, Aristotle suggested that we believe only good m e n ; 2,500 years later, H o v l a n d and Weiss (1951) agreed w i t h that proposition because by g o i n g along w i t h good (trustworthy and competent) communicators, we are more likely to be r i g h t , and i t is rewarding to be r i g h t . B u t m y colleagues and I t h o u g h t that the Aristotle and H o v l a n d notion d i d not take i n t o account the subtleties of human cognition; we showed that people w i l l believe a k n o w n habitual criminal i f that person is arguing against his own selfinterest (Walster, Aronson, & Abrahams, 1966). Similarly, i n the area of attraction, reinforcement theory suggests that we w i l l like someone best who rewards us by saying nice things about us behind our backs, and the more frequently he rewards us i n this manner, the more we w i l l like h i m . B u t we showed that i f a person begins by saying nasty, unflattering things about us behind our backs but gradually becomes more positive, we like that person far better than one who expresses strong positive feelings about us f r o m the outset (Aronson & Linder, 1965). Reinforcement theory suggests that we like competent, b r i l l i a n t , graceful people, especially i f they are i n leadership roles; but our research showed that we like competent leaders m u c h more i f they show some human frailty, say by c o m m i t t i n g a clumsy blunder (Aronson, W i l l e r m a n , & Floyd, 1966). The reason that we like extremely compe-
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tent people better when they commit a blunder is that it makes them seem less distant from us, whereas when mediocre people make the same blunder, it decreases our liking for them. One of my most distinguished new colleagues was Gardner Lindzey. When I was in graduate school he had become a hero of mine because he had published two books essential to my professional training: Theories of Personality (Hall & Lindzey, 1957) and the monumental Handbook of Social Psychology (Lindzey, 1954). A t Minnesota, Gardner and I met frequently for lunch and had many stimulating discussions and strenuous arguments about research and theory in social psychology. After one of these arguments, he invited me to coedit the second edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology. I was deeply honored. Because I had always considered the handbook to be the bible of social psychology, it was like, well, being asked to edit the next edition of the Bible. But the project was also hard work and an invaluable learning experience. Gardner not only taught me the delicate art of editing chapters written by expert scholars who knew far more about their subfield than I did but also showed me how to gently but effectively ride herd on distinguished professionals who kept missing deadlines. In the course of working closely on this 6-year project, Gardner and I became close friends. In 1964 Gardner left the University of Minnesota to become chair of the psychology department at the University of Texas, with a mandate to make it into one of the strongest departments in the country. He urged me to join him and build the social psychology program. It was a difficult decision. I loved the collegial atmosphere at the University of Minnesota and was reluctant to leave. But, in the end, friendship prevailed, and we moved to Texas 1 year later.
T r y i n g t o Become a T e x a n Gardner was an excellent chair of the department. He proved to have an impeccable eye for talent, which he used to great effect as he built a first-rate psychology department in just a few years. It was an exciting time because every few weeks we were interviewing and entertaining candidates for positions in our burgeoning, flourishing department.
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N AUTOBIOGRAPHY I t was an exciting t i m e politically, too. The V i e t n a m W a r and the
civil rights movement were galvanizing many social psychologists, I among them. I t was almost impossible to be alive i n this era w i t h o u t g e t t i n g caught up i n these sweeping changes and w i t h o u t t a k i n g a public stand for what we believed. Consequently, I became more i n volved i n the w o r l d outside academia than I had been i n Minnesota or Cambridge. I helped organize antiwar marches and served as a marshal to keep the students peaceful so that they w o u l d avoid g e t t i n g roughed up by the Texas Rangers, who w o u l d have been only too glad to do i t . I n addition, m y colleague Bob H e l m r e i c h and I testified before the A u s t i n C i t y Council when a fair housing ordinance came under consideration. W e believed that students of color were reluctant to enroll at the University of Texas because they had difficulty finding housing near campus. T o influence the C i t y Council, I conducted a simple experiment. I sent students out to answer ads for housing near campus. T i m e after t i m e , when a well-dressed, well-spoken African American or Mexican American student asked to see one of the listed apartments, he or she was informed that i t had already been rented. A n hour later, I sent an A n g l o American student to the same location, and he w o u l d immediately be shown the apartment. I presented these data to the A u s t i n C i t y Council and argued forcefully for the Council to pass the fair housing ordinance so that more m i n o r i t y students could benefit f r o m attending this excellent, inexpensive, b u t mostly l i l y w h i t e university. The ordinance d i d pass by a s l i m m a r g i n . I t was the first fair housing ordinance i n any major city south of the MasonD i x o n Line. The local bigots were furious: W e received some p o s t m i d n i g h t phone calls—gravelly voiced men snarling "nigger lover" and issuing death threats. "They're probably just t r y i n g to scare you," said the police detective. "They are succeeding," I replied. Academically, I continued doing laboratory experiments on social influence and attraction, but i n a d d i t i o n , I went off i n three new directions: becoming involved i n sensitivity t r a i n i n g groups, inventing and developing the jigsaw classroom, and w r i t i n g The Social A n i m a l (Aronson, 1972/2003). I n graduate school, I had gotten so excited about doing basic research that I had set aside m y original interest i n using psychology to solve social problems. N o w I reignited that interest.
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Working With Sensivity Training Groups In 1968, my friend and colleague Michael Kahn, a clinical psychologist, was leading sensitivity training groups (T-groups) for professional psychologists, and he invited me to participate in one. T-groups consisted of 10 to 20 people who met in a situation in which they were committed to speak openly and honestly about their feelings and impressions of one another and of what was happening in the group. It was not a therapy group and was usually led not by a therapist but by a psychologist who knew something about group dynamics and interpersonal communication. The T-group was invented in 1946 by my "intellectual grandfather" (Festinger's mentor) Kurt Lewin, who produced not only a generation of experimental social psychologists, such as Festinger, but also a generation of T-group leaders, such as Ron Lippitt. To the T-group contingent, the laboratory was pallid and irrelevant. To experimental social psychologists, T-groups were too impressionistic to be of scientific value. The evaluation of the effectiveness of T-groups consisted mostly of testimonials from participants, which, understandably, was unsatisfying to a scientist. As a student of Festinger's, I was clearly in the scientist wing. But once I attended my first T-group, I was hooked. I was thrilled by the atmosphere of openness and straight talk that prevailed. After participating in a few T-groups, I decided to learn more. So I spent a few summers at Bethel, Maine (the mecca of T-groups), and eventually I became an intern at the National Training Laboratory, where I learned to lead them. For the next several years, I led something of a double life. During the week I would be conducting rigorous laboratory experiments at the university; on weekends Vera and I would lead intensive T-groups in the community. My scientific colleagues on campus could not understand why I was wasting my time leading T-groups; most of the T-group participants from the broader community could not believe how I could be doing something so sterile as to try to understand the rich complexity of human behavior by conducting laboratory experiments. However, I myself saw no disconnect: In the course of leading T-groups I learned a lot about interpersonal attraction, social influence, and effective communication. My experience as a T-group leader
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N AUTOBIOGRAPHY
enriched m y understanding and skills as an experimental social psychologist; m y skills as a scientist enhanced m y a b i l i t y i n T-groups to cut t h r o u g h bullshit to get to the core of an issue.
Devising the Jigsaw Classroom
In the autumn of 1971,1 happened to be in the right place at the right time once again. The schools of Austin were ordered to desegregate, and all hell broke loose. W i t h i n a few weeks, the schools were in turmoil. African American, Anglo American, and Mexican American youngsters were in open conflict; fistnghts broke out between these groups in the corridors and schoolyards throughout the city. The situation in Austin was typical, albeit more dramatic, of what was happening across the country. Social psychologists had predicted that desegregation would reduce prejudice and increase the self-esteem and academic success of underprivileged minorities. In fact, the data showed that our predictions were wrong—that following desegregation, prejudice frequently increased, and the self-esteem and performance of minority kids did not improve. As it happened, the assistant superintendent of schools was a close friend; he asked for my help and gave me a mandate to do anything within reason to fix the problem. I wanted to do more than slap a Band-Aid on Austin's problem; I wanted to gain some insight into why, across the nation, desegregation wasn't producing the beneficial effects we had expected. And so my students and I started by systematically observing classes in an elementary school. The one thing that leapt out at us was something that anyone who has ever attended traditional public schools simply takes for granted: The typical classroom is a highly competitive place in which students vie with one another for the attention and praise of the teacher. In Austin, as in most communities, in this competition the minority kids were virtually guaranteed to lose. The schools they had been attending were substandard, and their reading skills were approximately one full grade level behind those of the Anglo American kids. This situation confirmed and magnified the children's existing stereotypes of each other: The Anglo American kids felt that the minority kids were stupid and lazy; the
ELLIOT ARONSON
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minority kids felt that the Anglo American kids were arrogant show-offs. Our intervention consisted of restructuring the dynamics of the classroom from a competitive one to a cooperative one. We invented a technique that created small interdependent groups designed to place students of different ethnic backgrounds in a situation in which they needed to cooperate with one another to understand the material. We called it the jigsaw classroom because it resembled the assembling of a jigsaw puzzle (Aronson, 1978; Aronson & Patnoe, 1997). W i t h i n a week of instituting the jigsaw technique, we could see that the entire classroom atmosphere was changing as kids began to gain respect for one another across racial lines. The formal results confirmed our casual observations: Compared with students in traditional classrooms, students in jigsaw groups showed a decrease in their general prejudice and stereotyping as well as an increase in their liking for their group mates both within and across ethnic boundaries. In addition, they performed better on objective exams, showed a significantly greater increase in self-esteem, and liked school better. (Absenteeism was lower in jigsaw classrooms than in traditional classrooms in the same school.) Moreover, students in schools where the jigsaw technique was practiced showed substantial evidence of true integration; they were more likely to intermingle in the schoolyards than were children in traditional schoolrooms. Finally, students in the jigsaw classrooms developed a greater ability to empathize with others and to see the world through the perspective of others than students in traditional classrooms did (Aronson & Bridgeman, 1979)- We replicated these results in dozens of classrooms. I was elated. My students and I had found a way to make desegregation work the way it was supposed to work. Now my task was to give it away. Toward this end, I wrote up our findings in a nontechnical way and published an article in Psychology Today (Aronson, Blaney, Sikes, Stephan, & Snapp, 1975). I sent copies to school superintendents all over the country and offered to train teachers free of charge. Then I sat back and waited for the requests to come pouring in. How naive! I learned that it is hard to give something away if nobody wants it, and not many wanted it. When I followed up with phone calls, most of the superintendents informed us that they were doing okay and certainly didn't need anything like jigsaw. They were
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N A U T O B I O G R A P H Y
content to l i m p through the t e r m as long as their problems were not drastic or overwhelming and students weren't r i o t i n g . I had been invited to intervene i n A u s t i n only because the schools were i n crisis. I n most school systems, anything short of crisis was "doing okay." A n d so, to m y great disappointment, the jigsaw technique languished for nearly 14 years. T h e n , i n 1984, 10 years after I left A u s t i n , i n commemoration of the 3 0 t h anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. C i v i l Rights Commission named A u s t i n as a model city i n w h i c h school desegregation worked i n the manner i n tended. They gave m u c h of the credit to the jigsaw classroom, and I received requests f r o m all over the country to train teachers. By 1990 the jigsaw classroom or one of its spin-offs was i n regular use i n over 2 0 % of the classrooms i n the country.
W r i t i n g The Social Animal As a teacher, my favorite course has always been introductory social psychology. I get a great kick out of being the first teacher to awaken college freshmen and sophomores to the excitement and promise of this discipline. But by the mid-1960s, I was growing increasingly impatient with the existing textbooks. They were scholarly; they had plenty of graphs, tables, and references; but they were not addressing the problems that our students were most concerned about—the war in Vietnam, the racial divide, political assassinations, and other major events affecting their lives. As a result, my students found the texts dull and irrelevant. I'm afraid I did a fair amount of complaining about the existing textbooks because one day one of my teaching assistants, probably weary of my constant kvetching, challenged me by saying, "Why don't you write one of your own?" I dismissed the idea out of hand. It embarrasses me to admit it, but my response was somewhat snobbish, along the lines of "I'm a scientist. We scientists shouldn't be wasting our time writing textbooks." Yet I desperately wanted my students to read something that would connect our scientific research in social psychology to the important events taking place in the world and in their private lives. To fill this need, as a supplement to the formal textbook we were using, I prepared a few
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rough essays on my favorite topics. I mimeographed these essays and gave them to the students in my course. As luck would have it, a short time later I was invited to spend a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, with nothing to do but to think and write. I threw those essays into a carton along with other books, papers, and notes and had them shipped to Palo Alto. So there I was in my study at the Center without any teaching or administrative responsibilities and without any research assistants with whom to conduct experiments. I had time on my hands, so I picked up that collection of sloppy essays and started playing with them. Before I knew it, they had turned into chapters. I showed them to several publishers, who thought the writing style was far too casual and that I didn't have enough references. They were also unhappy that I was planning to have only 9 chapters, because every fool knows that all textbooks in social psychology "require" 14 or 15 chapters. But Haywood "Buck" Rogers (W. H. Freeman's editor) loved the book, and all it takes is one. Freeman published it in 1972, and much to my delight, it was an instant success. Undergraduates enjoy it largely because of its personal style and relevance to their lives. Reviewers have called it "a masterpiece" {Contemporary Psychology) and "a rare gem of a book" {Contemporary Sociology); a French journal called it "the bible of American social psychology"; the American Psychological Association gave it the National Media Award. Now, 35 years later, I am working on the 10th edition. It has been translated into 16 foreign languages. During the Cold War, it was particularly popular in Eastern European countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Naturally I love its popularity, but most gratifying of all is that whenever I attend a psychology convention, I am invariably approached by strangers who tell me that it is because of reading The Social Animal as undergraduates that they decided to become social psychologists.
S u r f i n g t o Santa Cruz Despite our deep involvement in community and political activities, Vera and I did not succeed in becoming Texans. Although we liked Austin and the university, we never quite believed that this was the
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N A U T O B I O G R A P H Y
place where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives. So when H a l entered his senior year i n h i g h school and began applying to colleges, Vera and I realized that we were at a choice point. W e have always been a close-knit family, and soon our kids w o u l d be scattering. Where could we live that w o u l d be so attractive that when our kids were f u l l y g r o w n , they w o u l d want to settle nearby? The short answer was not Texas. The longer answer was somewhere along the Pacific Coast w i t h a temperate climate. One o f the colleges H a l was most interested i n was the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). A l t h o u g h only a few years o l d , i t had already achieved a reputation as being an excellent undergraduate
institution and the most difficult of the University of California campuses to get into. And then I received an offer to teach there. So Hal and I matriculated at the same time, 1974. As an added bonus, the city of Santa Cruz had a boardwalk with a rare wooden roller coaster, much like the one I grew up with in Revere. My life was coming around full circle.
Teaching
What excited me most about UCSC was its innovative approach to undergraduate education. The university was divided into separate colleges, each containing a few faculty members from various disciplines, and each having a specific theme. Thus, the college, rather than the department, was the major administrative entity. The beauty of this system was that it brought faculty members in close contact with students who were in residence at the college and with faculty from other disciplines. For example, my office was next to a philosopher on one side and a physicist on the other; across the corridor was a historian; two doors down, a creative writer. One result of this happy proximity was that the philosopher next door to me, Ellen Suckiel, and I developed and taught a course we called "Philosophical and Psychological Foundations of the Life Cycle." Year after year, it received the highest student evaluations on campus. Each college functioned as a separate entity; yet all of the colleges together functioned as a major university. In practice, this was a
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wonderful way to teach undergraduates because i t combined the best aspects of a small private college, like Swarthmore or Reed, w i t h the facilities of a large state university. H a l blossomed there; his excitement (and mine) inspired N e a l , Julie, and Josh to follow h i m to UCSC. Unfortunately, the structure that made UCSC a great environment for undergraduates made i t difficult for me to r u n a graduate program. Because the members of the psychology department were scattered i n all corners o f the campus, there was no room for graduate students i n the colleges; most of them had offices i n an administrative b u i l d i n g . Thus, to see me, m y o w n graduate advisees usually had to schedule an appointment. After m y experiences at Harvard, Minnesota, and Texas, where m y graduate students were i n offices adjacent to mine and we could interact freely and easily throughout the day, I felt that Santa Cruz's approach was no way to r u n a graduate program. Moreover, when I arrived at UCSC, none o f m y colleagues i n social psychology were actively engaged i n research, so there was no program to speak of. Over the next few years, I was able to change this situation by persuading the department to hire T o m Pettigrew and A n t h o n y Pratkanis, t w o superb social psychologists w i t h active research interests. The three of us developed a program i n applied social psychology that attracted some talented students and produced several first-rate
professionals. The essence o f our program followed K u r t
Lewin's a d m o n i t i o n
to do t o u g h - m i n d e d
research about
tender-
hearted issues.
Research I n Texas, my work with the jigsaw classroom was a first step toward merging my interests in doing good and doing good science. In Santa Cruz, I developed a research program designed to forge a further link between my two great academic mentors, Abraham Maslow and Leon Festinger—two men who disliked each other intensely. (In 1957, when I told Maslow that I was working with Festinger, his only comment was "How can you stand that bastard?" When Festinger learned that I had studied with Maslow, his only comment was "That guy's ideas
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N A U T O B I O G R A P H Y
are so bad, they aren't even wrong.") Maslow believed that research should always be aimed at doing good. Festinger d i d n ' t give a fig about doing good; he simply wanted to understand how the m i n d worked. H e argued that we couldn't do anything, good, bad or indifferent, w i t h o u t a powerful theory and a solid methodology. I agreed, but how about applying that powerful theory and solid methodology to a serious societal problem? A t UCSC, I attempted several experiments aimed at achieving that goal. For example, take the H I V / A I D S epidemic. The problem is as m u c h social psychological as medical because the crucial task is to persuade sexually active people to practice "safer" sex by using condoms. B u t advertising campaigns aimed at convincing people to use condoms were ineffective. I knew f r o m helping to develop cognitive dissonance theory that change is greater and longer lasting when behavior precedes attitude, when people are not simply admonished to change but placed i n a situation that induces them to convince themselves to change. W i t h self-persuasion, individuals come to believe that they are m a k i n g a change not because you t e l l t h e m to b u t because they really want to (Aronson, 2000). For example, i n our i n i t i a t i o n experiment, we d i d n ' t try to convince students that the boring group they had joined was interesting. That strategy w o u l d have failed just as the ad campaigns for condoms had failed. Rather, we p u t people i n a situation (a severe i n i t i a t i o n ) that induced them to persuade themselves that the group was interesting. So how could we induce people to persuade themselves to use condoms? M y first idea was to try to get a change i n behavior through the counterattitudinal advocacy paradigm, as i n the Festinger and Carlsmith experiment. B u t counterattitudinal advocacy was not viable i n this situation because most sexually active people already know that H I V / A I D S is a serious problem and that using condoms is a solution. They just weren't using t h e m . The solution to this apparent paradox came to me i n the f o r m of a scenario: Suppose you are a sexually active college student and you do not use condoms regularly. O n going home for Christmas vacation, y o u Learn that Charlie, your 17-year-old brother, has just discovered sex and is boasting to you about his varied sexual encounters. Chances are, as a caring, responsible older s i b l i n g , you w o u l d warn h i m about
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the dangers of HIV/AIDS and urge him to use condoms. Suppose I overheard this exchange and said to you, "That was good advice you gave Charlie; by the way, how frequently do you use condoms?" This statement forces you to become mindful of the dissonance between your self-concept as a person of integrity and the fact that you are behaving hypocritically. How might you reduce dissonance? The best way would be by starting to practice what you have just finished preaching; in short, by starting to use condoms yourself. In a series of experiments, my students and I constructed a procedure that was similar to this scenario (Aronson, 1992; Aronson, Fried, & Stone, 1991; Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, & Fried, 1994). We invited sexually active college students to deliver a speech about the dangers of HIV/AIDS and the importance of using condoms. We videotaped each speech and informed the speakers that their video would be shown to high school students as part of a sex education class. In the crucial condition, after they made the videotape, we got them to talk about the situations in which they had found it impossible to use condoms, making them mindful of their own hypocrisy—that they were preaching behavior they were not practicing. The results were impressive. Students in the "hypocrisy" condition used condoms significantly and substantially more regularly than students in the control condition who made the same videotaped speech but were not made mindful of the fact that their behavior was hypocritical. Moreover, the effects of the hypocrisy induction were still apparent some 6 months later. We carried the hypocrisy paradigm a step further. When California was going through one of its periodic droughts, our campus administration urged students to take shorter showers—with little effect. So my graduate students and I intervened. We induced students to sign a poster urging everyone to conserve water by taking shorter showers. We made half of them mindful of their hypocrisy by asking them to tell us how long their own most recent showers had been. Afterward, our confederates (loitering in the field house shower room) surreptitiously timed their showers. Students in the hypocrisy condition showered less than 4 minutes, far less than those in the control condition (Dickerson, Thibodeau, Aronson, & Miller, 1992).
36
A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N A U T O B I O G R A P H Y These experiments w o u l d have delighted both Maslow and Festinger.
W e not only succeeded i n doing good but also expanded dissonance theory by creating a new paradigm.
Going B l i n d One morning in the autumn of 2000, I woke up and the world looked fuzzy. My first thought was that old age had finally caught up with me and I might need my first pair of glasses. So I went to see an ophthalmologist. After dilating my pupils, he peered into my retina and sighed deeply. "I'm afraid that glasses won't help you," he said. He sent me to a retina specialist who informed me that I had macular degeneration of a rare kind and that it was untreatable. I might lose all of my central vision, but i f I were lucky the deterioration might stop short of that. For the next 4 years, every 4 or 5 months I experienced a sharp decline in my vision. W i t h each decline, I felt an onslaught of dizziness and a loss of control as I bumped into furniture, tripped over cracks in the sidewalk, and could barely read even large print. But then, with a great deal of effort, within a few weeks I began to adjust. I would walk more slowly, pay more attention, increase the size of the font on my computer, and get used to a world that increasingly looked like a fuzzy version of an impressionist painting on a foggy day. And I would say, "Hey, I can handle this. If it doesn't get any worse than this, I will be okay." Then, a few months later, my vision would undergo another sharp decline. Again I would gradually adjust, increasing the font on my computer to the size of the E on an optometrist's chart, using a cane to help me with curbs and avoid obstacles in the path, looking into new computer technologies to help the blind, and so on. Friends and colleagues were spectacularly kind and sympathetic, offering support, advice, and news of any possible remedy or imminent breakthrough in treatment that they read about, although my kind of macular degeneration was then and still is untreatable. Finally, in 2004, my eyesight hit rock bottom. I no longer have any central vision. The good news is that it won't get any worse; the bad news is that it can't get any worse.
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I can still see a little with my peripheral vision, but I can no longer read or recognize the faces of my friends at a distance greater than 10 inches. The consequences of this visual impairment are sometimes sad, sometimes embarrassing, and sometimes humorous. For example, when my four adorable little granddaughters are visiting at the same time, I have difficulty telling them apart—a realization that never fails to break my heart. The same inability to tell people apart has gotten me in trouble at cocktail parties because I have to move very close to people to recognize them. Sometimes, thinking I am approaching a friend, I find myself standing inappropriately close to someone I've never met, to our mutual embarrassment. Ever since I was a kid, I have tried to play the hand I was dealt as well as I could. But blindness has been a particularly difficult challenge. I have been trying to meet it honestly without going into denial and yet without wallowing in self-pity. It certainly is no joke for a "shy person" like me to be lost in midtown Manhattan, being forced to approach strangers to ask them to read the street signs. It is no joke for a scholar to be unable to skim a journal article to see if it contains anything of interest, let alone to be unable to read the whole thing if it does. But humor, combined with a little dissonance reduction, has carried me through the most difficult moments. W i t h every decrement in my eyesight, part of my adjustment has involved minimizing the importance of the things I can no longer do (who likes cocktail parties and journal articles, anyway?) and focusing on the things that I can do. It is becoming easier for this shy person to accost strangers on the street because I have learned that most people—even New Yorkers— w i l l respond with patience and kindness. If I can no longer hit a tennis ball, or even see one, I still can run—as long as I do it on the beach at the water's edge early in the morning when there are few toddlers to trip over. I have always enjoyed writing on my own, as I did with The Social Animal and Nobody Left to Hate, and I have also loved my collaborative ventures, especially with Anthony Pratkanis on The Age of Propaganda and Ayala Pines on Career Burnout. Nowadays, however, because my blindness has made the mechanics of writing so arduous, collaboration is not only joyous but essential. And it is a different kind of collaboration. For example, my longtime friend Carol Tavris and I are writing
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a trade book {Mistakes Were Made, but Not by M E ) , and m y blindness
requires me to state my arguments and modifications orally and listen carefully to every sentence to edit and revise. The back-and-forth of the spoken word intensifies the exchange of ideas and language. (In fact, I now recommend that all writers listen to their words as well as read them!) In addition, my blindness has brought me three unexpected collaborators from my family. I am working on a revision of The Social Animal with my youngest son, Josh, a social psychologist, and on a revision of my more traditional social psychology text with my oldest son, Hal, a sociologist. The fun of writing with my sons is incomparable and a source of enormous pleasure and pride. And speaking of fun, pleasure, and pride, I have just published a children's book that I wrote in collaboration with my 7-year-old granddaughter, Ruth (The Adventures of Ruthie and a Little Boy Named Grandpa). I would not have been in a position to experience the delight of working with Hal, Josh, and Ruth if it hadn't been for my blindness. I am not just reducing dissonance when I say this! I am no Pollyanna and I make no attempt to gloss over the difficulty and the frustrations that I go through. The loss of eyesight is a terrible loss, but with the help of my family and friends, and even total strangers, it is a bearable one. It has slowed me down, but it hasn't stopped me. After all, it is only my eyesight I've lost, not my vision.
The R o l l e r Coaster I learned much of what I know about accepting loss from my first mentor, my big brother Jason. A t the age of 31, Jason was diagnosed with lung cancer. Six months later he was dead; but what a half year that was. Jason did not go gently, but he lived every moment intensely and died with incredible grace. Although in great pain, he chose to surround himself with those he loved most, talking with us about his thoughts on the meaning of life and the importance of living every day fully. For as long as I can remember, Jason had wisdom that far exceeded his years. When we were kids, Jason took me for my first ride on the roller coaster at Revere Beach. I was 12 years old. Although I had
ELLIOT ARONSON
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been nagging him to take me for over a year, as the ride started, I was plenty scared. Jason, a veteran of dozens of roller coaster rides, assured me that I had nothing to be afraid of. As usual, he was right; it was an exhilarating experience. When it was over, I asked him, "What's your favorite part of the ride?" He said, "What's your favorite part?" I said, " I hate when you do that!" He smiled and said, "Do what?" " I hate when you do that, too," I shouted. I was so annoyed at him I decided to give him the old silent treatment. But I was so eager to discuss the roller coaster experience that the silent treatment lasted about 34 seconds. And then I said, "My favorite part was right after we went flying down that steep drop and we suddenly curved up again. It was so exciting I could feel my heart go right up into my throat." He said, Yeah. I know what you mean. That used to be my favorite part, too. But you know what—after a few rides, it dawned on me that I wasn't enjoying the rest of the experience because I kept waiting for that part of the ride to show up. So then I played a trick on myself. I pretended that my favorite part was when we were just starting down that steep hill. But then I found myself waiting for that to occur and missing out on the enjoyment of the rest of the ride. So then I pushed it back a notch and pretended that my favorite part was when we were climbing the hill, and then it dawned on me that it's stupid to have a favorite part, that it's all the roller coaster—the ups, the downs, the climbing, the falling, the gradual turns, the sharp turns. It's all the roller coaster. My brother was only 14 years old when he said that to me. Although he may not have been fully aware of it, I can see, looking at it now, that in a Zen-like way, he might have been using the roller coaster as a metaphor for living. As I conclude this chapter, I am a 74-yearold man; my major achievements are behind me. What's my favorite part of this roller coaster I've been riding? Well, as my 14-year-old mentor taught me, there is no favorite part. Another way of putting it is that it is all my favorite part. A l l of it—the plummets of blindness and loss as well as the exhilarations that come from giving an effective lecture or making an important scientific discovery or the warmth that comes from loving and being loved by my wife, my kids, my grandchildren, and my friends. Indeed, i f I were forced to choose one favorite part, I would say, right now, but I guess I might have said that anywhere along the way.
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a h i s t o r y of psychology in a u t o b i o g r a p h y S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s by E l l i o t A r o n s o n
Aronson, E. (1958). The need for achievement as measured by graphic expression. In J. W. Atkinson (Ed.), Motives in fantasy, action and society (pp. 249-265). New York: Van Nostrand. Aronson, E. (1978). The jigsaw classroom. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Aronson, E. (1992). The return of the repressed: Dissonance theory makes a comeback. Psychological Inquiry, 3, 303—311. Aronson, E. (1998). Dissonance, hypocrisy, and the self-concept. In E. HarmonJones & J. S. Mills (Eds.), Cognitive dissonance theory: Revival with revisions and controversies (pp. 21-36). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Aronson, E. (2000). Nobody left to hate: Teaching compassion after Columbine. New York: Worth. Aronson, E. (2003). The social animal (9th ed.). New York: Worth. (Original work published 1972) Aronson, E., Blaney, J., Sikes, C, Stephan, C, & Snapp, M. (1975, February 8). Busing and racial tension: The jigsaw route to learning and liking. Psychology Today, 8, 43-50. Aronson, E., & Bridgeman, D. (1979). Jigsaw groups and the desegregated classroom: In pursuit of common goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 5, 438—446. Aronson, E., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1962). Performance expectancy as a determinant of actual performance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 65, 178—182. Aronson, E., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1963). Effect of severity of threat in the devaluation of forbidden behavior. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66, 584-588. Aronson, E., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1968). Experimentation in social psychology. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 1-79). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Aronson, E., & Cope, V. (1968). My enemy's enemy is my friend. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8, 8—12. Aronson, E., Ellsworth, P. C, Carlsmith, J. M., & Gonzales, M. H. (1990). Methods of research in social psychology (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Aronson, E., Fried, C, & Stone, J. (1991). Overcoming denial and increasing the intention to use condoms through the induction of hypocrisy. American Journal of Public Health, 81, 1636-1638. Aronson, E., & Linder, D. (1965). Gain and loss of esteem as determinants of interpersonal attractiveness. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1, 156—171. Aronson, E., & Mettee, D. (1968). Dishonest behavior as a function of differential levels of induced self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 121-127. Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of seventy of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181. Aronson, E., & Patnoe, S. (1997). Cooperation in the classroom: The jigsaw method. New York: Longman.
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Aronson, E., Turner, J., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1963). Communicator credibility and communication discrepancy as determinants of opinion change. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 31—36. Aronson, E., Willerman, B., & Floyd, J. (1966). The effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness. Psychonomic Science, 4, 227—228. Dickerson, C , Thibodeau, R., Aronson, E., & Miller, D. (1992). Using cognitive dissonance to encourage water conservation. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 22, 841-854. Festinger, L., & Aronson, E. (1968). Arousal and reduction of dissonance in social contexts. In D. Cartwright & A. Zander (Eds.), Group dynamics (3rd ed., pp. 125-136). New York: Harper & Row. Lindzey, G., & Aronson, E. (1968). The handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 1-79). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Pines, A., & Aronson, E. (1988). Career burnout: Causes and consequences. New York: Free Press. Pratkanis, A. R., & Aronson, E. (1992). The age of propaganda: The everyday use and abuse of persuasion. New York: Freeman. Stone, J., Aronson, E., Crain, A. L., Winslow, M. P., & Fried, C. B. (1994). Inducing hypocrisy as a means of encouraging young adults to use condoms. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 116-128. Walster, E., Aronson, E., & Abrahams, D. (1966). On increasing the persuasiveness of a low prestige communicator. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2, 325—342.
O t h e r Publications Cited Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203—211. Hall, C , & Lindzey, G. (1957). Theories of personality. New York: Wiley. Hovland, C. J., & Weiss, W. (1951). The influence of source credibility on communication effectiveness. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15, 635—660. James, H. (2000). The middle years. Kila, MT: Kessinger. (Original work published 1917) Lindzey, G. (Ed.). (1954). Handbook of social psychology. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley.
2
A l b e r t
B a n d u r a
i t is not uncommon for theorists to exempt themselves from the theories they develop to explain how other folks behave. The road I have traveled is very much in keeping with the agentic perspective toward human self-development, adaptation, and change, which underpins social cognitive theory. I was born December 4, 1925, and grew up in Mundare, a tiny Canadian hamlet in northern Alberta. In a venturesome move, my parents emigrated as teenagers from Eastern Europe, my father from Poland and my mother from Ukraine. My father worked laying track for the trans-Canada railroad; my mother worked in the general store in town. After they garnered sufficient savings they bought a homestead. Manually converting land that was heavily wooded and strewn with boulders into a tillable farm with virtually no mechanization was an arduous undertaking. In addition to creating a workable farm, my father supervised the layout and construction of the road system in this newly opened homestead district. The beginning of this pioneer life was a tough struggle.
A few sections in this autobiography include revised and elaborated material from Bandura (2005). For additional autobiographical information with photographic accompaniments, see the Web site http://www.abandura.com. 43
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In the 1st year, a layer of the thatched roof on the house my father built had to be dismantled and fed to the cattle because of a severe drought. Through laborious effort my father added further sections to the farm. Before long he was sporting a Model T Ford, an odd cultural novelty at the time. In social cognitive theory, I distinguish among three types of environments: the imposed, selected, and constructed. Life in this austere homestead area placed a premium on agentic capabilities for constructing most of one's life environment with meager resources and no agricultural subsidies or insurance coverage against widespread crop destruction by unmerciful hail storms, early frosts, and severe droughts. Constructionism was a vital lifestyle, not an abstract psychological theory to be debated in arcane language in learned circles. Not all was arduous labor, however. These folks worked hard in the early building of the Canadian nation, but they also knew how to party. They had many saints and religious events requiring festive celebrations. My mother was a superb cook, and my father played a sprightly violin. In another mark of constructional initiative, the folks in this area operated stealth liquor-distilling systems that helped to lubricate their communal festivities. This required considerable ingenuity to escape the ever-vigilant Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For example, one innovative farmer sectioned a portion of the boiler in his steam engine for his fermented mash so he could distill the potent brew while performing the farming activities. This is a graphic early example of "multitasking." We were a close-knit family. I was the youngest with five older sisters. Our family lost a young daughter to the flu pandemic in 1918. My mother walked from home to home helping to nurse back to health those who were fortunate enough to survive. We also lost a son in a hunting mishap with one of his friends. The Great Depression took a toll on my father's fun-loving spirit when he lost a section of land he had cultivated so laboriously. It pained him to see somebody else farming it. My parents had no schooling, but they placed a high value on the education they missed. My father taught himself to read three languages and served as a member of the school board in the district where we lived. So that we could be closer to school, my parents sold a portion
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of the farm to purchase a freight delivery business, and a livery stable in Mundare. A l l of the supplies for this town were brought in by rail, so our drayage service delivered the incoming supplies to the various businesses. The town had a huge m i l l where farmers from the region brought their grain to be milled into flour. We provided a no-roomservice bunkhouse where the farmers could bed down for the night, usually after an extended visit to the local beer parlor. We also operated a large livery stable where the farmers parked their horses. During the summer months, my father worked on the farm, and I would pitch in with the harvesting of the crops while my mother operated the businesses in town. The only school in town, which housed first grade through high school, was woefully short of teachers and educational resources. Two teachers had to teach the entire high school curriculum; they tried their best but were not always fully informed in key subject areas. We once pilfered the answer book for the trigonometry course, which brought it to an abrupt halt. We had to take charge of our own learning. Self-directed learning was an essential means of academic selfdevelopment, not a theoretical abstraction. The paucity of educational resources turned out to be an enabling factor that has served me well rather than an insurmountable handicapping one. The content of courses is perishable, but self-regulatory skills have lasting functional value whatever the pursuit might be. During summer vacations in high school, my parents encouraged me to seek experiences beyond the confines of our hamlet. I worked in a furniture manufacturing plant in Edmonton. The carpentry skills I acquired helped to support me through college in part-time work. During another high school summer break, I ventured to the Yukon, where I worked in one of the base camps. The workers prevented the Alaska highway from sinking into the infirm muskeg by continuously resurfacing it with gravel. The camp contained an interesting mix of characters fleeing creditors, probationary officers, the military, and angry ex-wives demanding alimony payments. Alcohol was their prime nutrient. They were brewing their own. One early morning they left jubilantly to distill their fermented mash only to return profoundly despondent. The grizzly bears had partied on their alcoholic mash. We were faced with animated grizzlies stumbling drunkenly in our camp. Fortunately, they were too uncoordinated to do much damage.
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Life amid this frontier, drinking, and gambling subculture elevated the survival value of personal resourcefulness and initiative. I t provided me with a uniquely broad perspective on life.
I n s e a r c h o f a b e n i g n climate, I enrolled in the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Being short of the coin of the realm, I worked in a woodwork plant in the afternoons and took a heavy course load in the mornings. I graduated in 3 years with the University Bolacan Award in psychology. There was an element of fortuity to my entry into psychology. I was in a carpool with premeds and engineers who enrolled in classes at an unmercifully early hour. So while waiting for my English class, I flipped through a course catalogue that happened to have been left on a table in the library. I noticed an introductory psychology course that would be an early time filler. I enrolled in it and found my future profession. When it came time to apply for graduate study I went to my academic advisor and asked, "Where are the stone tablets of psychology?" He replied unhesitantly, "University of Iowa, of course." This was the heyday of theoretical and experimental analyses of learning, which was the phenomenon of central interest, with the Hullian approach being the dominant theory at the time. Clark H u l l had passed on his theoretical baton to his illustrious protege, Kenneth Spence, who presided masterfully over the psychology department at Iowa. So I set my sights on the theoretical epicenter for graduate study. As I was about to leave, my advisor explained that previous applicants had found the doctoral program at Iowa to be a taxing experience. His portrayal made it clear that resilience and a tough hide would be handy survival resources. As a Canadian, I did not qualify for fellowships because of the citizenship requirement. Arthur Benton set up a fluid aid system that kept me financially afloat until he could arrange more stable funding. I dusted off my carpentry skills for construction projects at Arthur's home during this interim aid program. When Judson Brown departed for his summer consultancy at the Lackland Air Force Base, I was the keeper of his house and amiable hound. I wrote to my undergraduate advisor and informed him that the psychology department at Iowa was, indeed, an intellectually demanding place. But it was also a highly
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supportive one. I explained that my experience at Iowa reminded me of Mark Twain's comment about Wagner's music: "It is not as bad as it sounds!" Unlike the all-too-common doctoral programs run on an eclectic cafeteria style, Iowa conducted a theoretically intense program that had a strong impact on students' professional careers. It was here that students had the benefit of models of intense dedication to theoretical analyses coupled with intricately designed experiments to settle disputes between rival theories. Strong commitment to theoretical analysis and respect for incisive experimentation became the hallmark of an Iowa graduate. Diverse programs of research conducted by Kenneth Spence, Judson Brown, and Isador Farber addressed the determinants and mechanisms governing learning, motivation, and clinical phenomena from the perspective of Hullian theory. Gustav Bergmann, a relocated member of the positivist Vienna Circle, provided the philosophical foundation for this line of theorizing. Arthur Benton, who directed the clinical training program, added a cognitive neuroscience dimension long before it became in vogue. This was the era of contests between alternative grand theories. Do contingent experiences build and strengthen habits, as the Hullians contended, or create expectancies, as the Tolmanians argued? Was reinforcement necessary for learning? Experiments were designed to challenge basic tenets of the contending theories. The leading theorists differed in their conceptual orientations, but they subscribed to methodological reductionism. Elementary processes were explored mainly with animals on the assumption that the rudimentary processes verified in animal experimentation would explain psychosocial phenomena at higher levels of complexity. Although we graduate students were products of the same doctoral program, we did not worship at the same theoretical altar. This was strikingly illustrated at a meeting called by the National Institutes of Health to discuss new developments in theorizing in the field of learning. Of the seven invitees, five were Iowa doctorates. Shep White went the cognitive route, Sid Bijou and Jacob Gewirtz went the operant conditioning route, Howard Kendler represented the Hullian perspective, and I chose a social cognitive theoretical framework. We left Iowa with the values and tools to be productive scientists whatever future theoretical course our scholarly pursuits took.
48
A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N A U T O B I O G R A P H Y Kenneth Spence micromanaged v i r t u a l l y every aspect of the depart-
ment. From t i m e to time we added a b i t of levity and countercontrol to this otherwise intense doctoral program. O n one occasion, when one of the beasties drew its final breath i n its mazed w o r l d , we deposited i t i n a makeshift rodent coffin adorned w i t h reverential wreaths on the department b u l l e t i n board w i t h the sign, "This rat ran according to Tolman's theory." Kenneth was not at all amused by our ceremonial burial. Gustav Bergmann had a colorful animated lecturing style. H e w o u l d wander throughout the class chain-smoking, w i t h cigarette ash floating down on the students seated below. H e stuffed his pocket w i t h wooden matches and w o u l d l i g h t t h e m w i t h a flourish on his t h i g h . H i s lectures took on an emotive quality when he addressed theories he held i n low regard, w h i c h were quite a few. Gestalt theory was h i g h on this list. H e sought to demystify the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. H e characterized the "whole" as reflecting emergent properties that are the product not only of the aggregate properties of the constituent elements b u t also of their interactive effects. I t is reported that on one occasion, w h i l e announcing i n a dramatic crescendo, " I f the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, then the whole is a ghost," Gustav set himself on fire while vigorously slapping his match-laden pocket. The student over w h o m he was hovering at the t i m e sounded the alarm: "Professor Bergmann, you are on fire." "You're damn r i g h t I a m , " he exclaimed, t h i n k i n g the student was speaking figuratively. Blissfully oblivious to power differentials, at the end of each academic year we hosted the annual Regression Dinner, d u r i n g w h i c h we made ceremonial offerings to the faculty. For example, to the faculty member who taught the psychotherapy course from a nondirective perspective, we offered a broom handle topped w i t h hands p o i n t i n g i n every direct i o n . I n recognition of his membership i n the positivist Vienna Circle, we offered Gustav a circle of baloney. I n accepting our offering, he remarked that this was operationalism at its material best. M y graduate peers were mainly W o r l d W a r I I veterans pursuing their education on the G I B i l l . Their combat experiences under General Patton and other t o u g h commanders undoubtedly contributed to the boldness of our cohort.
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Given a lean cash flow, I opted for the same fast-track academic pace I had adopted for my baccalaureate degree and completed the doctoral program in 3 years. I left Iowa with more than a degree, however. There is much that we do designedly to exercise some measure of control over our self-development and life circumstances, but there is a lot of fortuity in the courses lives take. Indeed, some of the most important determinants of life paths occur through the most trivial of circumstances. People are often inaugurated into new life trajectories, marital partnerships, and occupational careers through fortuitous circumstances. A seemingly insignificant fortuitous event can set in motion constellations of influences that alter the course of lives. These branching processes alter the linear progression, continuity, and gradualism of life-course trajectories.
I p r e v i o u s l y d e s c r i b e d h o w a fortuitous event got me into psychology. A t Iowa I met my future wife, Virginia Varns, who was on the teaching staff in the School of Nursing, through a fortuitous event. My friend and I were quite late getting to the golf course one Sunday, so we were bumped to a later starting time. There were two women ahead of us. They were slowing down. We were speeding up. Before long we became a genial foursome. I met my wife in a sand trap! The golf connection had a trivial origin. The University of British Columbia required two physical education courses for graduation. I selected outdoor physical education, imagining it to be a communion with Mother Nature at a leisurely pace. On being instructed in the first session to run around the track to the point of exhaustion just short of cardiac arrest, I opted for archery as more to my liking. To fulfill the second requirement, I selected indoor physical ed in which, unexpectedly, they not only made us run around but climb ropes to dizzying heights. On my speedy descent I promptly switched to a more benign form of exertion—golf. Were it not for the bothersome physical ed requirement and tardiness in getting to the golf links, our lives would have taken entirely different courses. Some years later, I delivered a presidential address at the Western Psychological Convention on the psychology of chance encounters and life paths (Bandura, 1982). A t the convention the following year, an editor of one of the publishing houses explained that he had entered
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N A U T O B I O G R A P H Y
the lecture hall as i t was rapidly f i l l i n g up and seized an empty chair near the entrance. I n the coming week he w o u l d be marrying the woman who happened to be seated next to h i m . W i t h only a momentary change i n t i m e of entry, seating constellations w o u l d have altered, and this intersect w o u l d not have occurred. A m a r i t a l partnership was thus fortuitously formed at a talk devoted to fortuitous determinants of life paths! Fortuitous influences are ignored i n the causal structure of the social sciences even though they play an important role i n life courses. The physical sciences acknowledge indeterminacy at the q u a n t u m level i n the physical w o r l d . Fortuitous events introduce an element of indeterminacy i n the behavioral sciences. The separate paths i n a chance encounter have their o w n determinants, b u t they are causally unconnected u n t i l their intersection, at w h i c h p o i n t the encounter creates a unique confluence of influences that have causal impact. Fortuitous occurrences may be unforeseeable, but having occurred, the conditions they create enter as c o n t r i b u t i n g factors i n causal processes i n the same way as prearranged ones do. I took the fortuitous character of life seriously, provided a preliminary conceptual scheme for predicting the psychosocial impact of such events t h r o u g h the interaction of personal and environmental properties, and specified ways i n w h i c h people can capitalize agentically on fortuitous opportunities (Bandura, 1982, 1998). F o r t u i t y does not mean uncontrollability of its effects. People can make chance happen by pursuing an active life that increases the number and type o f fortuitous encounters they w i l l experience. Chance favors the inquisitive and venturesome who go places, do things, and explore new activities. People also make chance w o r k for them by c u l t i v a t i n g their interests, enabling beliefs and competencies. These personal resources allow them to make the most of opportunities that arise unexpectedly. Pasteur p u t i t w e l l when he noted, "Chance favors only the prepared m i n d . " Even that distinguished lay philosopher, Groucho Marx, i n s i g h t f u l l y observed that people can influence how they play the hand that f o r t u i t y deals t h e m , " Y o u have to be i n the r i g h t place at the r i g h t t i m e , but when i t comes, you better have something on the ball." Self-development gives people a hand i n shapi n g the courses their lives take.
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After receiving my doctorate, I completed a 1-year internship at the Wichita Guidance Center. I was attracted to this program for two main reasons. The center was directed by a psychologist, Joseph Brewer, which I reasoned would dampen excessive medicalization of common problems of living. This was a time when the field of clinical psychology was heavily intrapsychically oriented under the reign of psychoanalytic theory. The center was embedded in a diverse network of community services. The societal connectedness provided a broader perspective on how people live their lives. It was a year well spent. I joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1953. My first meeting with the renowned assemblage of faculty members—Bob Sears, Jack Hilgard, Quinn McNemar, Calvin Stone, Paul Farnsworth, and Doug Laurence, three of whom were former American Psychological Association (APA) presidents—was an awed experience. I had been weaned on their textbooks, so they were larger than life. My appointment was for 1 year as an acting instructor. Halfway through the academic term, I went to Bob Sears, the chair of the department, and explained that I was considering an offer in Santa Rosa, near the bucolic wine region, combining clinical work in a community service center with part-time teaching at the Santa Rosa Junior College. In his forceful response, Bob explained that I would be receiving a 3-year assistant professorship, and that in the interim, he would place me under self-protective "house arrest" to forestall an irrational decision. During this time, Stanford was in the early throes of launching an expansive transformational change under the adroit leadership of its provost, Fred Terman. He was the son of Lewis Terman, who created the Stanford-Binet test and launched the productive longitudinal study into the life courses of intellectually gifted children. Flushed with ample reserves and discretionary funds from an ambitious fundraising campaign, Fred put into overdrive his theory of "steeples of excellence." He instructed search committees in every division of the university to go for the best. Renowned faculty, he argued, would attract promising young faculty members, excellent graduate students, and plentiful research grants. He would wander into search committee meetings to be greeted, all too often, with recitals of why the foremost scholar in a given field would not be movable. Fred would remind the faculty that they were charged with finding the best candidate,
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N AUTOBIOGRAPHY
and i t was his responsibility to
figure
out how to attract
them
to Stanford. This was a period of accelerated g r o w t h i n excellence. Programs i n the humanities were being enlarged w i t h recruited distinguished professors f r o m the Ivy League universities. N o b e l laureates were added, and Stanford grew its o w n Nobelists w i t h the young scholars they brought w i t h t h e m . The psychology department was given two new billets, w h i c h brought Leon Festinger and B i l l Estes to Stanford. I n short order the department added D i c k A t k i n s o n , Gordon Bower, Eleanor Maccoby, W a l t Mischel, and P h i l Z i m b a r d o to its faculty. The medical school was relocated f r o m San Francisco to the Stanford campus to l i n k i t more closely to the basic sciences, w i t h expanded opportunities for collaborative teaching and research. Being an astute judge of innovativeness, Terman encouraged graduate students to translate theoretical ideas i n t o businesses developing new technologies, thus
laying the foundation for Silicon Valley with attractive consulting arrangements for the faculty. W i t h i n a relatively short time, Stanford was transformed into a university of the highest rank. As a visiting faculty member at Stanford in 1906, William James aptly described this wondrous place as near "utopian," where "there couldn't be imagined a better environment for an intellectual man to teach and work," with the added benefit of "perfection of weather" (James, 1906). Stanford offered a wonderful academic environment in 1953 and got even better with time. I was blessed with illustrious colleagues, gifted students, considerable freedom to go wherever my curiosity might lead, and a university ethos that approached scholarship not as a matter of publish or perish but with puzzlement that the pursuit of knowledge should require coercion. The many attractions in the spectacular San Francisco Bay area made it easy to maintain a balance in the competing priorities of life. In reflecting on their life course, people typically express regrets over the things they shortchanged in pursuit of their career. The late Senator Tsongas put it well when he remarked, "No one on their death bed ever expressed regret for not having spent more time in the office." My wife and two daughters, Mary, a clinical psychologist, and Carol, the director of a clinic for adolescent children of migrant workers and the neglected poor, made sure we kept the retrospective regrets to a
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m i n i m u m . W e hiked the Bay area ridge trails, camped amidst the stately redwoods, worked i n grassroots conservation movements, explored the regional culinary shrines, cheered the melodious operatic divas and philharmonias, applauded the baroquers at the Carmel Bach festivals, sampled the noble grape i n the bucolic Napa Valley, and explored the grandeur of the H i g h Sierras. N o t h i n g beats c o m m u n i n g w i t h the muses atop Vogelsang Peak to place petty concerns i n cosmic perspective. The reach of w o r k life has undergone transformative changes w i t h the advent of wireless technologies. People are now wired to their workplace, m a k i n g i t more difficult to keep the mobile office f r o m i n t r u d i n g i n t o family, social, and recreational life.
I r o s e T H R O U G H T H E R A N K S at Stanford, chaired the department briefly, and was awarded the D a v i d Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science i n Psychology endowed chair, named after the first president of the university. I n 1973, m y cloistered w o r k life i n academia took a sharp t u r n to an unaccustomed trajectory. One day, K e n L i t t l e , the executive officer of the A P A , called, explaining that the association's call for nominations placed m y name on the presidential ballot. I regarded this contest as p r o v i d i n g Warhol's 15 minutes of fame w i t h v i r t u a l l y no risk of electability, because I had no involvement i n the organizational activities and political machinations of the association. O n a b r i g h t Saturday m o r n i n g while I was p r u n i n g atop a mulberry tree, I was called to the phone, where K e n announced, "You're i t , " w i t h no option for a recount. This was the fastest evolutionary descent f r o m the trees to a professional boardroom. Robert's Rules of Order displaced Psychological Review as the reading of choice. This was a difficult t i m e for our profession both internally and p u b l i c l y . A media frenzy was w h i p p i n g up public fear of the l o o m i n g peril of behavior modification. I n his disaffection w i t h the social sciences, President N i x o n issued an executive order t e r m i n a t i n g psychology t r a i n i n g grants. Psychologists had no effective vehicle for speaking i n a collective voice on legislative initiatives and sociopolitical i n f l u ences that affected our discipline. T h r o u g h reluctance to engage i n public activities and fear of jeopardizing our tax status, we were accomplices to our own quiescence i n the public arena. T o remedy this lack,
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we created a separate advocacy organization, the Association for the Advancement of Psychology, to address issues affecting our profession and to b r i n g our scientific knowledge to bear on public policies and social practices that affect people's lives. This newly formed organization was q u i c k l y p u t to use to counteract efforts by the American Psychiatric Association to l i m i t the autonomy of psychologists to practice psychotherapy. The t w o associations had agreed not to infringe on each other's t u r f i n legislative matters. I n violation of this accord, they were l o b b y i n g for a b i l l i n Congress to allow psychologists to practice psychotherapy only under medical authorization, on the grounds that only medical psychotherapy can treat m i n d and body. W e defeated this professional infringement. The Department of Defense cut the budget for psychological services for dependents of veterans. The American Psychiatric Association was p r o m o t i n g a set of guidelines that w o u l d have placed l i m i t s on the use of psychology providers. W e not only defeated this effort b u t , on the basis of our congressional testimony, the chairman of the congressional committee overseeing the program i n v i t e d us to help draft the service guidelines. The m a i n thrust of m y presidency centered on creating mechanisms for b r i n g i n g psychological knowledge to bear on public policies and i n f o r m i n g the general public about the relevance of our discipline for matters of societal concern. W e established our credibility i n congressional circles as a reliable source of information, not just as promoters of g u i l d self-interests. W e testified regularly on pending bills, informed congressional staffs i n the drafting of legislative regulations, and placed psychology congressional fellows on the staffs of key senators and House members who presided over committees relevant to our field. The A P A was on the b r i n k of dissolution, w i t h festering conflict between academicians and activist practitioners seeking to gain control of the association. The commission appointed by the A P A board to consider restructuring the association recommended a federalist model, granting the constituent units a fair amount of autonomy to pursue their parochial interests w i t h a central board to address issues of common importance and to speak w i t h one voice to the public. A 2-year t r i a l , marred by distrustful machinations, ended i n divorce and the formation o f the American Psychological Society.
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M y i n i t i a l p r o g r a m o f r e s e a r c h at Stanford focused on the centrality of social modeling in human self-development and change. The prevailing analyses of learning focused almost entirely on learning through the effects of one's actions. The explanatory mechanisms were cast in terms of peripheral association of environmental stimuli to responses. I found this behavioristic theorizing discordant with the obvious social reality that much of what we learn is through the power of social modeling. I could not imagine a culture in which its language; mores; familial customs and practices; occupational competencies; and educational, religious, and political practices were gradually shaped in each new member by rewarding and punishing consequences of their trial-and-error performances. Despite the centrality and pervasiveness of social modeling in everyday life, there was no research to speak of on modeling processes until the publication of Social Learning and Imitation by Miller and Dollard in 1941. They recognized modeling phenomena but construed them as a special case of discrimination learning. A model provides a social cue, the observer performs a matching response, and its reinforcement strengthens the tendency to behave imitatively. I found this conception wanting on the determinants, mechanisms, and scope of observational learning. It seemed at odds with observational learning in everyday life, which requires neither performance enactment nor reinforcement. There were some other conceptions of modeling phenomena, but I found them lacking as well. The writings on imitation characterized modeling as mimicry of specific acts. This constricted view limited the scope of research for many years. Personality and developmental theorists conceptualized modeling as identification involving wholesale incorporation of personality patterns. The defining properties of identification were too diffuse, arbitrary, and empirically questionable either to clarify modeling processes or to guide scientific inquiry (Bandura, 1969b). I conceptualized this mode of learning as modeling. It transcended specific response mimicry in scope and was selectively and conditionally manifested rather than involving wholesale adoption of personality traits. The power of social modeling was underscored in a large-scale project I conducted with Richard Walters, my first doctoral student. We studied the familial determinants of hyperaggressive styles of behavior
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i n boys who lived i n advantaged neighborhoods that were not conducive to antisocial behavior. Robert Cairns, a newly a d m i t t e d student i n our doctoral program, was also part of this project. W e found that parental modeling of aggressive orientations played a prominent role i n the familial transmission of aggression (Bandura & Walters, 1959). T o further understanding of the determinants and mechanisms governing m o d e l i n g , we studied this mode of learning and social influence experimentally. Dorrie and Sheila Ross and Ted Rosenthal contributed m u c h to this program of research. W e analyzed social modeling as operating t h r o u g h four subfunctions encompassing attentional, representational, enactive translational, and motivational processes (Bandura, 1971). I came under heavy fire from operant conditioners for w h o m nonreinforced modeling posed a major problem for their explanatory system (Baer, Peterson, & Sherman, 1967). They contended that reinforcement of some matching responses w o u l d establish i m i t a t i o n as a conditioned reinforcer. Tests of these alternative theories demonstrated that generalized i m i t a t i o n is governed by social beliefs and outcome expectations rather than by infused reinforcement (Bandura & Barab, 1971). There were a number of entrenched misconceptions about the nature and scope of m o d e l i n g that p u t a damper on the research and social applications of this powerful mode of learning. Progress i n this area, therefore, required research designed not only to elucidate the determinants and mechanisms of social m o d e l i n g but to p u t the misconceptions to rest. One such misconception was that modeling could produce only response m i m i c r y . This misconception was dispelled by showing that m o d e l i n g involved abstracting the information conveyed by specific exemplars about the structure and the underlying principles governing the behavior, rather than simple response m i m i c r y of specific exemplars (Bandura, 1986; Rosenthal & Z i m m e r m a n , 1978). Once individuals learn the g u i d i n g principle, they can use i t to generate new versions of the behavior that go beyond what they have seen or heard. Another misconception, requiring retirement, held that modeling is antithetical to creativity. W e were able to show how innovation can emerge t h r o u g h modeling. W h e n exposed to models who differ i n their styles o f t h i n k i n g and behavior, observers rarely pattern their behavior exclusively after a single source. N o r do they adopt all the
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attributes even o f preferred models. Rather, observers combine various features o f different models i n t o new amalgams that differ from the i n d i v i d u a l modeled sources (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963). Thus, t w o observers can construct new forms o f behavior entirely through m o d e l i n g that differ f r o m each other by selectively blending different features f r o m the variant models. There is a variety i n the profusion of modeling. Innovators select useful elements from different exemplars, improve upon t h e m , synthesize them into new forms, and tailor them to their particular pursuits. Selective modeling often serves as the mother o f innovation. There was another oft-repeated misconception regarding the scope of m o d e l i n g . Many activities involve cognitive skills on how to gain and use information for solving problems. Critics argued that modeling cannot b u i l d cognitive skills because thought processes are covert and are not adequately reflected i n modeled actions, w h i c h are the end products of the cognitive operations. This was a l i m i t a t i o n of conceptual vision rather than an inherent l i m i t a t i o n of modeling. I n fact, cognitive skills can be readily promoted by verbal m o d e l i n g , i n w h i c h models verbalize aloud their reasoning strategies as they engage i n problemsolving activities. The thoughts g u i d i n g their decisions and actions are thus made observable and acquirable.
M y b a p t i s m i n p o w e r p o l i t i c s occurred early in my professional life. A t the time that I began my experiments on observational learning, there was growing public concern about the possible effects of televised violence on children. I was invited to testify before congressional committees, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence prompted by the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The Federal Trade Commission was troubled by increasing reports of serious injuries suffered by children who modeled hazardous activities in televised advertisements. The commission used our research findings on modeling to get advertisers to alter ads depicting injurious feats by children on bicycles and dune buggies, ads for headache remedies in which the characters induce splitting headaches by pounding each other on the head with mallets, and other types of ads showing children performing activities that risk serious injury.
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N AUTOBIOGRAPHY This excursion i n t o the public arena provided a sobering glimpse
into the power of the broadcast industry, some of w h i c h was directed at me personally. I got m y first i n k l i n g i n t o the exercise of this power
at a meeting convened by the National Institute of Mental Health ( N I M H ) to draft a research agenda on television's effects. Surprisingly, we met at the plush Waldorf Towers in New York rather than in Washington for what turned out to be essentially a production staged by the broadcast industry under the auspices of N I M H . After we identified the different lines of research that could advance the understanding of television's effects, the research community was invited to submit grant proposals. A review panel, meeting in a luxurious Caribbean setting, rejected my proposal. Look magazine invited me to write a piece on the social influence of television for a special issue they were publishing on youth. When it appeared, the Television Information Office, a subsidiary of the National Association of Broadcasters, sent a large packet of material to its sponsor stations explaining why my research on social modeling should be disregarded. This was just the beginning of a multipronged offense. Psychologist Ruth Hartley prepared a document commissioned by CBS in which she took me to task and criticized the relevance of other experimental studies demonstrating a positive relation between exposure to violent fare and aggressive behavior. In an article prepared for TV Guide under the title, "The Man in the Eye of the Hurricane," Edith Efron (1969) dismissed the modeling studies, complained that the research by members of the "Bandura school . . . won them center stage in Washington," and criticized the Surgeon General's office for acting "as i f Rome were burning and Dr. Bandura were a fire extinguisher" (p. 37). One evening I received a call from one of my graduate students telling me to turn on my television set to see the character playing my role undergoing a blistering cross-examination concerning my modeling studies. I wasn't doing too well! In the plotline of this televised movie, a beleaguered wife of a screenwriter defends him as he is being unmercifully victimized by a haranguing press and a vindictive mother who claims that her son's crime was prompted by a similar act in one of the screenwriter's televised plots. The crossexaminer was disputing evidence that televised violence affects aggressive behavior. As part of my program of research on selective moral
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disengagement at the social systems level, I documented how each of the mechanisms by which moral self-sanctions are disengaged from detrimental conduct was enlisted by the television industry in the production of gratuitous violence for commercial purposes (Bandura, 1973, 2004b). The self-exonerating televised movie portrayed these disengagement practices in vivid fashion. As I was being pummeled by media-commissioned critiques, paid consultants, and fictionalized dramas, I began to feel a kinship with the Bobo doll! Failure to distinguish between the diverse effects of televised violence and the appropriate methodologies for elucidating them provided a fertile ground for disputes. Different lines of research identified four major effects of exposure to televised violence. It can teach novel aggressive styles of conduct; weaken restraints over interpersonal aggression by legitimizing, glamorizing, and trivializing violent conduct; desensitize and habituate viewers to human cruelty; and shape public images of reality. The Bobo doll laboratory experiments were designed to clarify the processes governing observational learning. The methodology for measuring learning effects requires simulated rather than human targets so that viewers w i l l reveal all they have learned. To use human targets to assess the instructive function of televised influence would be as nonsensical as to require bombardiers to bomb San Francisco, New York, or some other inhabited locations to test whether they had acquired bombing skills. I had to address misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the research. The National Commission was about to release its report concluding, in the mass media section, that the empirical evidence taken as a whole was supportive of a positive relation between televised violence and aggressive behavior (National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1969). In a surprise move, Senator Pastore, a supporter of the broadcast industry (Paisley, 1972) who chaired the Communications Subcommittee, instructed the Surgeon General, with President Nixon's endorsement, to assemble a committee of experts to evaluate the effects of televised violence and to allocate a million dollars for new research on this topic. The first meeting of the evaluation committee took place at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford. Ed Parker and I were invited to sit in on the meeting. We were surprised to find that 40% of the committee membership was tied to the broadcast industry—two
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network researchers, t w o network consultants, and a former research executive at CBS. W e enlisted Senator Metcalf to obtain information on the selection procedure. H e a l t h , Education and Welfare Secretary Finch explained that each network was allowed to veto, w i t h o u t explanation, any o f the nominations on the list submitted by professional associations and the broadcast networks. I was one of eight researchers, i n c l u d i n g Len Berkowitz, Percy Tannenbaum, c h i l d psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg, and sociologists Leo Bogart and O t t o Larsen, who were vetoed. Finch provided t w o justifications for the veto procedure— precedent and objectivity. H e explained that the tobacco industry was given veto power i n the formation of the committee to evaluate the health effects of smoking. The report w o u l d have greater impact, he claimed, i f the committee members were entirely objective. Senator Metcalf was astonished to learn that the tobacco industry was also given sole veto power. H e questioned the selective privilege of veto power given to the broadcast industry and how stacking the committee w i t h folks tied to the television industry accomplished i m p a r t i a l i t y . W r i t i n g the report created headaches for the broadcast-linked m e m bers because the empirical data were not friendly to a conclusion of n u l l effects. The report by Jack G o u l d (1972) was w r i t t e n i n opaque technobabble that was better suited to confuse than to i n f o r m the public. Rose Goldsen (1972), a Cornell sociologist, dubbed the report "science i n wonderland." Before the report was released, a copy was leaked to the New York Times, w h i c h published a column on the report under the misleading headline, " T V Violence H e l d U n h a r m f u l to Y o u t h . " Researchers who conducted the studies for the committee were incensed at the misrepresentation of their findings. They protested to Senator Pastore, who then scheduled an open Senate hearing on the committee's report. After years of obfuscation, negation, and disparagement of research programs by the broadcast industry, their o w n chief researcher, Joseph Klapper, acknowledged at the hearings, "There were indications of a causal relationship. . . . The catharsis theory had no empirical support." N o U.S. network reported on the Senate hearing. Because of concern over the spillover of U.S. televised violence i n t o Canada, the F i l m Board of Canada (1972) filmed the entire Senate hearing.
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Several social scientists reported on the perversion of the scientific review process. Mathilda Paisley (1972) wrote a piece on violence done to T V violence research. In a book devoted to this controversial episode, Cater and Strickland (1975) traced the evolution and fate of the report. Science published a lead article documenting and condemning the misuse of the scientific advisory system for policy initiatives (Boffey & Walsh, 1970). The late President Johnson once remarked that politics is like sausage making. You don't want to examine what goes into it. Social scientists seek to advance knowledge that can inform public policy. As the stealthy workings of the sociopolitical forces swirling around the issue of television effects illustrate, we also need to study how politics and power, which shape public policy, determine how our knowledge is used. Policy research is difficult to conduct, and we do little of it. A growing influential source of social learning is the varied and pervasive symbolic modeling through the electronic media. The extraordinary advances in the technology of communication are transforming the nature, reach, speed, and loci of human influence. These technological developments have radically altered the social diffusion process. Video systems feeding off telecommunications satellites have become the dominant means for disseminating symbolic environments. New ideas, values, and styles of conduct are now being rapidly spread worldwide in ways that foster a globally distributed consciousness.
A s m e n t i o n e d e a r l i e r , psychodynamic theory, especially the psychoanalytic form, reigned over the fields of personality, psychotherapy, and pop culture when I entered the field of psychology. The mid1950s witnessed growing disillusionment with this line of theorizing and its mode of treatment. The theory lacked predictive power and did not fare well in therapeutic effectiveness. Following the adage that one should light a candle rather than curse the conceptual darkness, Dick Walters and I provided an alternative view of human behavior in the book, Social Learning and Personality Development (Bandura & Walters, 1963). During this period, I was teaching the psychotherapy courses at Stanford, and I became intrigued by cases in which direct modification
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of problem behavior not only produced lasting improvements i n people's lives but fostered generalized benefits i n nontreated areas of funct i o n i n g . I spent several months tracking d o w n such treatments p u b lished i n obscure journals housed i n the musty catacombs of the Stanford library. I emerged bleary-eyed but inspired to publish the article, "Psychotherapy as a Learning Process" i n the journal Psychological Bulletin (Bandura, 1961). I t was organized around six basic principles of behavioral change. The t i m e was apparently ripe for a new direction i n the conceptualization and treatment of behavior. I was flooded w i t h reprint requests f r o m home and abroad across specialties and disciplinary domains. O n the basis of this article, Eysenck invited me to contribute a chapter to a volume he was e d i t i n g , w h i c h was the first published volume on behavior therapy. The chapter kept enlarging u n t i l i t outgrew the assignment. Instead, i t turned i n t o the volume Principles of Behavior Modification (Bandura, 1969a). I t addressed the influential role of cognitive, vicarious, and self-regulatory mechanisms i n human adaptation and personal and social change. D u r i n g this t i m e , I was examining the self-regulatory mechanisms by w h i c h people exercise control over their m o t i v a t i o n , styles of t h i n k i n g , emotional life, and personal accomplishments. As part of this line of research on the development and exercise of personal agency, m y students and I were devising new modes of treatment using mastery experiences as the principal vehicle of change. T a l k alone w i l l not cure intractable problems. People w i t h intractable phobias, of course, are not about to do what they dread. W i t h the creative contributions of B r u n i R i t t e r and Ed Blanchard, we created environmental conditions that enabled people w i t h phobias to succeed despite themselves. This was achieved by enlisting a variety of performance mastery aids (Bandura, Blanchard, & Ritter, 1969; Bandura, Jeffery, & Gajdos, 1975). W e i n i t i a l l y tested the effectiveness of this enabling approach w i t h people w i t h severe snake phobias. This proved to be a powerful treatment. I t instilled a robust sense of coping efficacy; transformed attitudes toward the phobic objects f r o m abhorrence to l i k i n g ; and wiped out anxiety, biological stress reactions, and phobic behavior. These people w i t h phobias had been plagued by recurrent nightmares for 20 or 30 years. Guided mastery transformed dream activity and w i p e d out chronic nightmares. As one woman gained mastery over her snake
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phobia, she dreamt that the boa constrictor befriended her and was helping her to wash the dishes. Reptiles soon faded from her dreams. The changes endured. The people with phobias who achieved only partial improvement with alternative modes of treatment achieved full recovery with the benefit of the guided mastery treatment regardless of the severity of their phobic dysfunctions. Lloyd Williams (1990) showed that the guided mastery treatment was equally powerful with the most profound anxiety disorder—agoraphobia. The 1960s ushered in remarkable transformative changes in the explanation and modification of human functioning and change (Bandura, 2004c). Causal analysis shifted from unconscious psychic dynamics to transactional psychosocial dynamics. Human functioning was construed as the product of the dynamic interplay between personal, behavioral, and environmental influences. Social labeling practices regarding problems of living were changed. Problem behavior was viewed as divergent behavior rather than a symptom of a psychic disease. Functional analysis of human behavior replaced diagnostic labeling that categorized people into psychopathologic types with stigmatizing consequences. Laboratory and controlled field studies of the determinants of human behavior and the mechanisms through which they operate replaced content analyses of interviews. Action-oriented treatments replaced interpretive interviews. The modes of treatment were altered in the content, locus, and agents of change. W i t h i n a decade, the field was transformed by a major paradigm shift (Bandura, 2004c). New conceptual models and analytic methodologies were created. New sets of periodicals were launched for the rising stream of interest. New organizations were formed for the advancement of behaviorally oriented approaches. New professional conventions provided a forum for the exchange of ideas. Psychodynamicists branded these new modes of treatment not only as superficial but dangerous. I was invited to present my program of research at the Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco, a stronghold of psychodynamic adherents. The session began with a disparaging introduction to the effect that this young upstart w i l l tell us seasoned analysts how to cure phobias! I explained that my host's generous introduction reminded me of a football contest between Iowa and Notre Dame in South Bend. Iowa scored a touchdown, which tied the score. As the player ran on the field to kick the extra point, coach
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Evashevski turned to his assistant coach and remarked, " N o w there goes a brave soul, a Protestant a t t e m p t i n g a conversion
before
50,000 Catholics!" N o t all the critics of the psychodynamic model embraced the same theoretical framework, however. Some t h o u g h t the operant route provided the best glimpse of the promised land. Others adopted H u l l i a n theory. I took the social cognitive route, emphasizing the influential role of agentic capabilities i n self-development, adaptation, and change. Vigorous battles were fought over cognitive determinants and their scientific legitimacy (Bandura, 1995a, 1996; Catania, 1975; Skinner, 1971). The popular media were deluging the public w i t h repugnant imagery of brainwashing and the f r i g h t f u l scenarios of 1984 and Brave New World dominated by social engineers w i e l d i n g powerful methods of behavioral control. The h i t movie, A Clockwork Orange, graphically portrayed the fiendish nature of behavior modifiers physically shocking people i n t o submission. I n his movie Sleeper, W o o d y A l l e n amusingly outwits the ironclad control by despotic social engineers who reduce humans to mindless zombies. Skinner's publication, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), alarmed the public that the application of these new psychological methods w o u l d strip people of their d i g n i t y and deprive t h e m of their freedom. The unibomber targeted J i m McConnell at the University of M i c h i g a n as his first v i c t i m w i t h a tirade about the evils of behavior modification. Lyndon LaRouche, who became a perennial candidate for the U.S. presidency, branded the practitioners of behavioral approaches as "Rockefeller Nazis," formally tried some of the leading figures i n his t r i b u n a l for crimes against h u m a n i t y , stormed classes at the State University of N e w Y o r k at Stony Brook, and issued threats requiring police surveillance of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy convention i n Chicago. As i n any professional practice, there were some appalling applications of behavioral principles, especially i n coercive institutional systems, that affirmed and fueled the public's fears. A t the height of this media frenzy, I began m y t e r m as president of the A P A . A responsible social science must concern itself not only w i t h the advancement of knowledge b u t w i t h the social effects of its applications. I n keeping w i t h this dual c o m m i t m e n t , the A P A Board of Directors formed an interdisciplinary task force to examine the way
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in which knowledge on behavioral modification was being used both at the individual and institutional level. A wide-ranging analysis that was published in the volume Ethical Issues in Behavior Modification (Stolz, 1978) provided a thoughtful evaluation of existing applications and a set of standards for ethical practice that helped to dispel the frightful misconceptions propagated by the mass media. Growing applications of our knowledge for personal and social betterment not only won public acceptance but cognitive behavior treatments were being cited as the method of choice for diverse aspects of the human condition. This fascinating odyssey involved dual transformative changes—a paradigm shift in theory and practice as well as a sweeping change in public acceptance. The theoretical framework guiding my work was originally labeled social learning theory. I later relabeled the theory as social cognitive theory for several reasons (Bandura, 1986). A variety of theories founded on divergent tenets—Miller and Dollard's drive theory, Rotter's expectancy theory, Gewirtz's operant conditioning theory, and Patterson's functionalist theory—were all christened with this same appellation. This created untold confusion in the literature concerning the theory being posited and tested. Moreover, the theory under discussion had always been much broader than the initial descriptive label. It not only addressed how people acquire cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral competences but also how they motivate and regulate their behavior and create social systems that organize and structure their lives. In the more fitting appellation as social cognitive theory, the social portion of the title acknowledges the social origins of much human thought and action; the cognitive portion recognizes the influential contribution of cognitive processes to human motivation, affect, and action.
T h e a d d i t i o n o f t h e self-efficacy belief system to the agentic features of social cognitive theory was an outgrowth of our research aimed at building resilience to phobic threats. Our powerful guided mastery treatment was eliminating snake phobias of long standing in everyone in a few hours. This seemingly circumscribed phobia was not just a minor inconvenience for these people. It had seriously impaired their occupational, social, and recreational lives and had plagued them
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w i t h distressing ruminations and recurrent nightmares. H a v i n g overcome, i n a few hours, a phobic dread that had tormented t h e m for 20 or 30 years was a transforming and liberating experience. I n followup assessments, the individuals expressed gratitude for being rid of their phobia b u t explained that the treatment had a more profound psychological i m p a c t — i t transformed their belief i n their efficacy to exercise better control over their lives. They were p u t t i n g themselves to the test i n activities they formerly avoided and enjoying successes, much to their surprise. I redirected m y research efforts to gain a deeper understanding of this belief system. T o guide this new mission I developed a conceptual framework that specified the nature, structure, and function of efficacy beliefs; the means by w h i c h they can be developed; their diverse effects; the cognitive, motivational, affective, and choice processes through w h i c h they produce their effects; and how this agentic knowledge can be used for personal and social betterment. Diverse programs of research were conducted that were essential to understanding these various aspects of self-efficacy theory. This body of knowledge helped to clarify how people's beliefs i n their efficacy enable t h e m to exercise influence over the quality of their functioning and to organize, create, and manage the life circumstances that affect what they become and the courses their lives take (Bandura, 1995b, 1997). The conventional theorizing and research on human agency focused almost entirely on agentic processes operating at the i n d i v i d u a l level. T o represent more f u l l y how agency is actually exercised i n people's everyday lives, I posited triadic modes of human a g e n c y — i n d i v i d u a l , proxy, and collective agency operating i n concert. I n personal agency exercised i n d i v i d u a l l y , people b r i n g their influence to bear on their o w n functioning and on environmental events. I n many spheres of f u n c t i o n i n g , people do not have direct control over conditions that affect their lives. They exercise socially mediated agency by influencing others who have the resources, knowledge, and means to act on their behalf to secure the outcomes they desire. Many of the things people seek are achievable only by w o r k i n g together t h r o u g h interdependent effort. I n the exercise of collective agency, they pool their knowledge, skills, and resources and act i n concert to shape their future. Collective agency extended the applicability of social cognitive theory to collectivistically oriented societies. The relative weight given to i n d i v i d u a l ,
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proxy, and collective agency varies cross-culturally and by spheres of life, but one needs all forms of agency to make it through the day, regardless of where one lives. Contentious dualisms pervaded the field of cultural psychology, pitting autonomy against interdependence, individualism against collectivism, agency against communion, and human agency against social structure reified as an entity disembodied from the behavior of individuals. It was widely claimed that Western theories lacked generalizability to non-Western cultures. This prevailing belief had to be addressed empirically. Through an examination of the issue of cross-cultural generalizability, social cognitive theory distinguished between basic human capacities and how culture shapes these potentialities into diverse forms appropriate to fit different cultural milieus. For example, humans have evolved an advanced capacity for observational learning. This mode of learning is essential for their self-development and functioning regardless of the culture in which people reside. Modeling is a universalized human capacity, but what is modeled, how modeling influences are socially structured, and the purposes they serve vary in different cultural milieus. Being immobilized by self-doubt and belief in the futility of effort has little adaptive value. A growing number of studies demonstrated that the sources, structure, and function of efficacy beliefs are much the same in diverse cultural milieus (Bandura, 2002b). But how efficacy beliefs are developed and structured, the forms they take, the ways in which they are exercised, and the purposes to which they are put vary cross-culturally. These various sources of evidence supported the view that there is commonality in basic agentic capabilities and mechanisms of operation but diversity in the culturing of these inherent capacities. In social cognitive theory, universality is not incompatible with manifest cultural plurality. Cultural variations emerge from universalized capacities through the influence of social practices reflecting shared values, beliefs, and norms and from the impact of incentive systems, role prescriptions, and pervasive modeling of distinctive styles of thinking and behaving. Cultures are neither monolithic entities nor insular anymore. Growing global connectivity is shrinking cultural uniqueness, homogenizing some aspects of life, polarizing other aspects, and fostering a lot of cultural hybridization.
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theory, I undertook a program of research i n t o the nature and mechanisms of self-regulation (Bandura, 1991a, 1986). I n exercising selfreactive influence, individuals adopt standards of merit and morality, m o n i t o r their behavior, judge i t i n relation to their personal standards and situational circumstances, and react self-evaluatively to i t . Some of the studies conducted w i t h Dan Cervone, Carol Kupers W h a l e n , M i k e Mahoney, Bernard Perloff, and Karen Simon clarified how personal standards are constructed f r o m the profusion of social influences; other studies documented the regulatory power of selfreactive influence; and s t i l l others shed l i g h t on how dysfunctions i n self-regulation give rise to affective and behavioral disorders. Operant conditioners treated self-regulation as a ghostly fiction, rechristened i t as stimulus control, and located i t i n the external environment (Catania, 1975). I n rejoinders, I relocated self-management i n the sentient proactive being and documented the g r o w i n g body of evidence on the means by w h i c h individuals exercise self-directedness (Bandura, 1976). I n rational models of self-regulation rooted i n the market metaphor, behavior was said to be regulated by self-interest construed almost entirely i n terms of material costs and benefits. M y students and I demonstrated that human m o t i v a t i o n and performance attainments are governed not only by material incentives but also by self-evaluative incentives l i n k e d to personal standards. People often settled for alternatives o f marginal u t i l i t y or even sacrificed material gain to preserve their positive self-regard. Some of our studies examined self-regulation under conflictual conditions i n w h i c h individuals are rewarded for behavior they devalue or are punished for activities they personally value. Principled dissenters often find themselves i n the latter predicaments. They invest their sense of self-worth so strongly i n certain convictions that they w i l l submit to maltreatment rather than accede to what they regard as unjust or i m m o r a l . The 1970s were an inhospitable t i m e to present an agentic theory of human behavior. Psychodynamicists depicted behavior as driven unconsciously by impulses and complexes. Behaviorists depicted behavior as shaped and shepherded by environmental forces. The cognitive revolution was ushered i n on a computer metaphor. This conception stripped humans o f agentic capabilities, a functional consciousness, and a self-identity. The m i n d as a symbol manipulator i n the likeness
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of a linear computer became the conceptual model for the times. Computerized cognitivism was, in turn, supplanted by parallel distributed models in which sensory organs deliver information to interconnected, multilayered neural networks that generate the output automatically and nonconsciously. In these conceptual schemes it was not individuals but their subpersonal modules that were orchestrating activities nonconsciously. The prevailing control theories of motivation and self-regulation focused heavily on error correction driven by negative feedback loops in a machine metaphor of human functioning. I regarded regulation by negative discrepancy as telling only half the story and not the more interesting half. Social cognitive theory posited dual control in selfregulation—proactive discrepancy production in which individuals create negative discrepancies for themselves to be mastered by setting themselves challenging goals and standards accompanied by discrepancy reduction by mobilizing the efforts and resources needed to fulfill those standards.
S o c i a l c o g n i t i v e t h e o r y l e n d s itself readily to social applications. Our knowledge of self-regulatory mechanisms served as the basis for the development of new models for health promotion and disease risk reduction. The dominant health practices focus heavily on the supply side with mounting pressure on health systems to reduce, ration, and curtail health services to contain soaring health costs. The self-management models developed in collaboration with Robert De Busk and Kate Lorig at the Stanford Medical School focused on the demand side. They promote effective self-regulation of health habits that keep people healthy so they do not require costly medical care. These self-management models are now being integrated into mainstream health care systems and disseminated internationally. The interactive online formats enable people to exercise some control over their health wherever they may live. Self-regulatory mechanisms also play a key role in the exercise of moral agency rooted in self-sanctions. As another aspect of social cognitive theory, our program of research in this domain sought to clarify the nature and function of moral agency. The various lines of research examined how individuals construct moral standards from the mix of
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social influences; the processes by w h i c h people select, w e i g h , and integrate morally relevant information i n m a k i n g moral judgments; and the self-regulatory mechanisms whereby moral judgments are l i n k e d to moral conduct t h r o u g h self-sanctions (Bandura, 1991b, 2004a). This theoretical approach addressed the dual nature of moral agency—the i n h i b i t i v e f o r m manifested i n the power to refrain f r o m behaving inhumanely and the proactive f o r m expressed i n the power to behave humanely. M o r a l standards do not function as unceasing internal regulators of conduct. I n their everyday life, people often use a variety of sociocognitive means to selectively disengage moral self-sanctions f r o m detrimental conduct. T o guide research on this aspect of moral agency, the theory specifies the forms moral disengagement take and the points i n a control process at w h i c h they come i n t o play. T h r o u g h selective moral disengagement, people who i n other areas of their lives are considerate and compassionate can get themselves to support detrimental social policies, carry out h a r m f u l organizational and social practices, and perpetrate large-scale inhumanities at the social systems level (Bandura, 1999). I n nonagentic microdeterministic theories, behavior is the product of nonconscious processes i n w h i c h environmental inputs activate subpersonal neuronal modules that cause the actions. I f people's actions are the product of the nonconscious workings of their neuronal machinery and their conscious states are simply the epiphenomenal outputs of lower level brain processes, i t is pointless to hold t h e m responsible for what they do. The subpersonal workings of the biological machinery are nonethical. A theory that humans have no conscious control over what they do, i n fact, represents a position on morality. I t is one of moral nonaccounta b i l i t y that is socially consequential. W o u l d a nonagentic conception of human nature erode personal and social ethics that undergird a c i v i l society? H o w w o u l d people create and m a i n t a i n a c i v i l society i f its members are absolved of any personal accountability for their actions? Psychologists often cite examples i n the natural and biological sciences i n w h i c h knowledge pursued for its o w n sake has unforeseen human benefits. The knowledge gained f r o m the modeling experiments 4 0 years earlier and the insights f r o m the more recent self-efficacy w o r k spawned, through a collaborative partnership, unimagined global
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applications to alleviate some of the most urgent global problems (Bandura, 2006). These include stemming the soaring population growth that is destroying the ecosystems that support life and degrading the quality of life; raising the status of women in societies in which they are marginalized, devalued, disallowed aspiration, and denied their liberty and dignity; and curbing the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Some societies present unique problems that require special social themes tailored to their detrimental cultural practices such as child trafficking that sells children for slave labor under inhumane conditions and forcing women to undergo the brutal genital mutilation procedure. One morning I received a call from Miguel Sabido, a creative producer at Televisia in Mexico City. He explained that he was developing long-running serial dramas founded on the modeling principles from the Bobo doll experiments to promote national literacy and family planning in Mexico (Sabido, 1981). These televised productions dramatize people's everyday lives and the problems they have to manage. The enabling dramas inform and enable viewers, help them to see a better life, and provide them with the strategies and incentives to take the steps to realize that life. There are three major components to the evolved social cognitive approach to fostering society-wide changes: a theoretical model that specifies the determinants of psychosocial change and the mechanisms through which they produce their effects; a translational and implementation model that converts theoretical principles into an innovative operational model; and a social diffusion model on how to promote adoption of psychosocial programs in diverse cultural milieus. We often do not profit from our successes because we lack adequate systems for diffusing effective practices. In this evolving development, social cognitive theory provided the theoretical model and Sabido created the generic translational and implementational model. On the basis of the demonstrated success of this macrosocial approach, David Poindexter (2004), director of Population Communication International in New York, designed the social diffusion model. Worldwide applications in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are promoting national literacy, adoption of family planning methods in countries with soaring population growth, raising the status of women, curtailing the spread of HIV/AIDS infection,
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fostering environmental conservation, and i n other ways bettering people's lives (Bandura, 2002a). These w o r l d w i d e applications illustrate how the effectiveness of psychosocial programs can be amplified by blending different types of expertise that no one discipline can provide. I n this brief memoir, I traced the social influences that played important roles i n m y life and reviewed m y life's w o r k i n a disciplinary pursuit that has been h i g h l y f u l f i l l i n g . As I reflect on this transforming journey, i t feels like a surreal odyssey from a remote hamlet i n N o r t h e r n Alberta to the balmy palms of Stanford i n a brief 6 years. I have recently completed a half century of active academic service at Stanford and am saddled up for continued exploration into the second half. I n
my instructional activities, I am now lecturing to offspring of my former students ("Psychology Lessons That Transcend Generations," 2005). A variety of theoretical issues regarding the nature of human agency, collaboration in diverse programs of research at Stanford and abroad, and development of new models for personal and social change have kept me too busy to create a postscript to my professional career. This memoir affords me the opportunity to acknowledge my indebtedness to the many people who lightened my labors and enriched my scholarship over these many years. I also thank them for the gift of their friendship. I do so in the eloquent words of the poet Yeats: "Ask where my glory most begins, and ends. And I say my glory was I had such friends." As I reflect on my journey to this octogenarian milepost, I am reminded of the saying that it is not the miles traveled but the amount of tread remaining that is important. When I last checked, I still have too much tread left to gear down or to conclude this engaging odyssey.
S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s by A l b e r t B a n d u r a Bandura, A. (1961). Psychotherapy as a learning process. Psychological Bulletin, 38, 143-159. Bandura, A. (1969a). Principles of behavior modification. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Bandura, A. (1969b). Social-learning theory of identificatory processes. In D. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization theory and research (pp. 213—262). Chicago: Rand McNally.
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Bandura, A. (Ed.)- (1971). Psychological modeling: Conflicting theories. New York: Aldine-Atherton. Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: A social learning analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bandura, A. (1976). Self-reinforcement: Theoretical and methodological considerations. Behaviorism, 4, 135-155. Bandura, A. (1982). The psychology of chance encounters and life paths. American Psychologist, 37, 747-755. Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bandura, A. (1991a). Self-regulation of motivation through anticipatory and selfreactive mechanisms. In R. A. Dienstbier (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation: Vol. 38. Perspectives on motivation (pp. 69—164). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bandura, A. (1991b). Social cognitive theory of moral thought and action. In W. M. Kurtines & J. L. Gewirtz (Eds.), Handbook of moral behavior and development (Vol. 1, pp. 45-103). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Bandura, A. (1995a). Comments on the crusade against the causal efficacy of human thought. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 26, 179-190. Bandura, A. (Ed.). (1995b). Self-efficacy in changing societies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Bandura, A. (1996). Ontological and epistemological terrains revisited. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 27, 323—345. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman. Bandura, A. (1998). Exploration of fortuitous determinants of life paths. Psychological Inquiry, 9, 95—99Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 193-209. Bandura, A. (2002a). Environmental sustainability by sociocognitive deceleration of population growth. In P. Schmuck & W. Schultz (Eds.), The psychology of sustainable development (pp. 209-238). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. Bandura, A. (2002b). Social cognitive theory in cultural context. Journal of Applied Psychology: An International Review, 31, 269-290. Bandura, A. (2004a). The role of selective moral disengagement in terrorism and counterterrorism. In F. M. Moghaddam & A. J. Marsella (Eds.), Understanding terrorism: Psychological roots, consequences and interventions (pp. 121 — 150). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Bandura, A. (2004b). Selective exercise of moral agency. In T. A. Thorkildsen & H. J. Walberg (Eds.), Nurturing morality (pp. 37-57). New York: Springer Science & Business Media. Bandura, A. (2004c). Swimming against the mainstream: The early years from chilly tributary to transformative mainstream. Behavioral Research and Therapy, 42, 613-630.
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Bandura, A. (2005). The evolution of social cognitive theory. In K. G. Smith & M. A. Hitt (Eds.), Great minds in management (pp. 9—35). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Bandura, A. (2006). Going global with social cognitive theory: From prospect to paydirt. In S. I. Donaldson, D. E. Berger, & K. Pezdek (Eds.), Applied psychology: New frontiers and rewarding careers (pp. 53-79). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bandura, A., & Barab, P. G. (1971). Conditions governing nonreinforced imitation. Developmental Psychology, 5, 244—255. Bandura, A., Blanchard, E. B., & Ritter, B. (1969). Relative efficacy of desensitization and modeling approaches for inducing behavioral, affective, and attitudinal changes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13, 173-199Bandura, A., Jeffery, R. W., & Gajdos, E. (1975). Generalizing change through participant modeling with self-directed mastery. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 13, 141-152. Bandura A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1963). A comparative test of the status envy, social power, and secondary reinforcement theories of identificatory learning. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 527—534. Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1959). Adolescent aggression. New York: Ronald Press. Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1963). Social learning and personality development. New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
O t h e r Publications Cited Baer, D. M., Peterson, R. F., & Sherman, J. A. (1967). The development of imitation by reinforcing behavioural similarity to a model. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, 10, 405-416. Boffey, P., & Walsh, J. (1970, May 22). Study of TV violence: Seven top researchers blackballed from panel. Science, 168, 949-952. Catania, C. A. (1975). The myth of self-reinforcement. Behaviorism, 3, 192—199Cater, D., & Strickland, S. (1975). TV violence and the child. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Efron, E. (1969, November 15). The man in the eye of the hurricane. TV Guide, pp. 34-37. Film Board of Canada. (1972). The question of violence: The U.S. Senate hearings [Motion picture]. United States: Phoenix Films. (Available from Phoenix Films, Inc., 470 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016) Goldsen, R. (1972). Science in wonderland. Unpublished manuscript, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Gould, J. (1972, January 11). Violence held unharmful to youth. New York Times, p. 1. James, H. (Ed.). (1906). The letters of William James, Vol. I I . Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press. Miller, N. E., & Dollard, J. (1941). Social learning and imitation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. (1969)- Commission statement on violence in television entertainment programs. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Paisley, M. (1972). Social policy research and the realities of the system: Violence done to TV research. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Institute for Communication Research. Poindexter, D. O. (2004). A history of entertainment-education, 1958-2000. The origins of entertainment-education. In A. Singhal, M. J. Cody, E. M. Rogers, & M. Sabido (Eds.), Entertainment-education and social change: History, research, and practice (pp. 21-31). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Psychology lessons that transcend generations. (2005, July/August). Stanford Magazine, p. 30. Rosenthal, T. L., & Zimmerman, B. J. (1978). Social learning and cognition. New York: Academic Press. Sabido, M. (1981). Towards the social use of soap operas. Mexico City, Mexico: Institute for Communication Research. Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. New York: Knopf. Stolz, S. B. (1978). Ethical issues in behavior modification. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Williams, S. L. (1990). Guided mastery treatment of agoraphobia: Beyond stimulus exposure. In M. Hersen, R. M. Eisler, & P. M. Miller (Eds.), Progress in behavior modification (Vol. 26, pp. 89-121). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
3
G o r d o n
H .
B o w e r
J_ sychologists have noted that the way people narrate their life stories reveals an overarching theme, often one characterized by acts of redemption or the overcoming of childhood challenges. Consumed in my youth by the everyday strivings and concerns of a schoolboy, athlete, and young scholar, I was much too busy to attribute any such heady existential theme to my life. But as I look back now, a narrative theme emerges to explain much of who I am and what I've done. My redemption theme has been to fulfill the dreams that my father abandoned as he sacrificed for the sake of our family. My father was an educated, cultured man who got a degree in business administration from Ohio State University in 1922. He aspired to work overseas as an international business executive and, toward that end, even learned Spanish and German. After graduating, he accepted a job with an international company. Soon thereafter, however, my paternal grandfather suffered a severe heart attack, obligating my father to return to the village of Scio in eastern Ohio to take over my family's small grocery and general store. In fulfilling his filial obligations, he soon was inextricably entangled by sick parents and the financial obligations of his own burgeoning family. During the Great Depression, he became entrapped into lifelong work that bored him 77
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and exercised few of his talents. Ironically, this would-be international businessman died w i t h o u t ever traveling outside the U n i t e d States. I believe his experience spurred m e — w i t h his encouragement—to seek a profession that I enjoyed and that afforded many opportunities for foreign travel. I was born i n our home i n Scio, O h i o , on December 30, 1932, m y parents' t h i r d and last child. M y sister, Shirley, was 6 years older, and brother, Robert, 2V2 years older. W e grew up i n this small village of about 1,000 souls i n the poverty belt of eastern O h i o . O u r parents, Clyde W a r d Bower and Mabelle Sue (Bosart) Bower, were energetic, middle-class Christians and reasonably happy notwithstandi n g the Great Depression. They had owned and operated m y family's store (Bower's Merchandise M a r t ) i n Scio since m y grandfather's heart attack i n 1925. Scio existed i n sleepy isolation f r o m the bustling w o r l d outside except for a whiteware pottery factory that employed most of the town's workers. A few others worked i n nearby coal mines or on farms. W h e n inexpensive Asian dishes flooded the market i n the 1960s, the pottery factory closed, forcing many of its former workers to seek jobs i n bigger cities. The 1999 census counted only about 800 Scio residents, w i t h 1 i n 6 l i v i n g i n poverty. Like many small towns, Scio was vanishing. I t remains frozen i n m y memory as i t was 60 years ago: an i d y l l i c place for a c h i l d , yet too bucolic to contain m y adult ambitions.
Genetic Selection One of my greatest and most precocious accomplishments was my selection of parents. My father was a highly educated man whose wide interests ranged far beyond that small-town store. During adolescence, I didn't appreciate how uniquely wonderful he was. He was my first educational role model. He devoured history books and was the only person I ever knew who read encyclopedias for pleasure. (I still have his 24-volume Encyclopaedia Britannka.) He had a classical record collection that entertained us in the evenings, had a strong singing voice, and always led the church congregation in belting out hymns. He was not athletic like his sons. I never saw him deliberately exercise. Yet he enjoyed frequent country hikes with us. He would explain the
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geologic formations we encountered and was delighted wherever we discovered Indian arrowheads. I now wonder how he worked such long hours and maintained such a kindly demeanor with everyone. He sacrificed and saved for our college educations. When a baseball scholarship paid my way through college, he safeguarded my "college money," which he later gave my wife and me for a down payment on the Stanford house where we still reside. In my teenage years he developed mild symptoms of Parkinsonism and began taking medication. The drugs made him drowsy—a tragic condition for a man who so loved to read. After I left for college, my father kept in touch with letters chronicling Scio news. He died suddenly at 63 from his second heart attack. 1 regret that I never told him the enormous influence that he had on my life as an academic and family man. My mother's family believed that they descended from immigrants who came to America in the 18th century from France. (The name Bosart was likely an anglicized rendering of Beaux Art.) My mother and her 14 siblings grew up on a farm near Columbus, Ohio. A l l but 2 of these siblings lived into their 80s or beyond. Having already taught elementary school in a one-room country schoolhouse, Mother proceeded to work toward a teaching credential at Ohio State University, where she met and fell in love with my father. According to the custom of the day, she married and moved to northern Ohio with my father soon after he graduated. There she taught elementary school without ever finishing college. My mother was a warm, nurturing woman who took good care of her children and grandchildren. Besides raising the three of us, she worked with my father in the store attached to our house. She became adept at seamlessly juggling household chores and store customers. We children were expected to pitch in with the many chores. When store business was slow, my mother loved substituting in the local schools. Incredibly, she could teach practically any subject to any class. She taught reading and arithmetic to third graders, Latin to ninth graders, and algebra and civics to high school students. Even in her 90s she taught reading as a volunteer to second graders. Years later the school principal told me that Mom's versatility made her the ideal substitute. Her love of teaching undoubtedly guided me toward a career in education. My mother lived to be 98 with all her wits.
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N AUTOBIOGRAPHY B o t h m y parents were deeply religious and tried to raise their
children that way. M y agnosticism, appearing i n m y teenage years and beyond, disappointed them. Yet they never nagged me about i t , although I imagine they prayed daily for m y salvation. W i t h 13 l i v i n g siblings, m y mother had a huge family extending to m y many uncles, aunts, and cousins. Similarly, m y father had many Bower and Gordon relatives i n nearby aptly named Bowerston. W e often visited the Bowerston relatives or had b i g family reunions at m y grandmother's farm near Green Camp. I can't recall that any of these relatives, who were farmers or blue-collar workers, ever attended college. M y mother's sustaining m o t t o was this: "Whatever happens to us, we begin and end w i t h our families."
Small T o w n C h i l d h o o d a n d Sports Despite the Great Depression and W o r l d W a r I I , I spent a T o m Sawyeresque childhood w i t h m y older brother Robert as m y constant companion and plotter. W e rode bikes, fished, hunted, swam, played ball, and boxed. W e grunted t h r o u g h muscle-building exercises that promised to sculpt us i n t o the muscle men advertised i n p u l p magazines. W e even took up musical instruments at about the same t i m e . W e spent long childhood hours w a i t i n g on store customers and restocki n g the grocery shelves from supplies kept i n the basement. I worked on nearby farms d u r i n g the summer months when there wasn't enough w o r k i n the store. A l l this persuaded me to avoid careers i n business, f a r m i n g , and anything i n v o l v i n g physical labor. After seeing the movie The Lou Gehrig Story, at age 8, I resolved to become a professional baseball player. I devoted thousands of hours over the next 13 years to baseball and basketball. By age 10 I had learned to p i t c h baseball. A l t h o u g h I was not yet b i g enough to throw hard, I developed a b i g , sweeping curveball that I could deliver from four different positions—directly overhead, three quarters, sidearm, and underarm. This curveball was sufficiently devastating that by ages 11 and 12, I was recruited by Scio's adult semipro teams to p i t c h against other teams. After I h i t m y g r o w t h spurt around 13 or 14, I mastered a good fastball, yet i n doing so, I somehow lost m y sweeping,
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sweet curveball and henceforth had to base my pitching on speed rather than guile. Growing up is full of such trade-offs. Despite coming from a small, rural school, I eventually was selected for all-Ohio state teams in both baseball and basketball, with several colleges offering me athletic scholarships. Becoming an accomplished athlete taught me that skill comes from long, hard practice and that most goals worth having require persistent effort. Playing competitive sports gave me confidence that I could succeed at something that's difficult to do. I learned to ride the roller coaster of emotional highs and lows, at times as a member of a team, other times alone. Athletes learn to endure the disappointments of sudden loss and grow accustomed to the randomness of life's outcomes. The difference between a pop fly and a home run is perhaps half a centimeter on a bat. The difference between a strikeout pitch and a ball that walks in the losing run is perhaps 1 centimeter as judged by a sometimes capricious umpire. In competitive sports, I experienced the satisfaction of exercising my skills to the utmost with the occasional exhilaration of being "on" or "in the flow" at the top of my abilities. One of my most memorable days occurred playing baseball at age 16. W i t h Scio playing a rival town's semipro team, I hit home runs clear out of the park in three consecutive times at bat. Believe me, nothing compares to that. In my junior high years, I also got hooked on music, thanks to my sister Shirley, who trained as a classical pianist. Inspired by two trumpet-playing friends, I took up jazz trumpet with a passion, idolized Louis Armstrong, and later played in the high school dance band and in a blues band for local dances. Regrettably, I gave up the trumpet when I went to college and decided I didn't have time to maintain my limited musical ability. Another life lesson I learned: You can't do everything well, so devote your time to your main passion and put aside competing activities that provide insufficient reinforcement. This lesson later goaded me through evolving topics of psychological research. I was a bright student in grade school but worked just enough to maintain adequate marks. Eventually, my family and several inspiring teachers fanned my intellectual interests. My greatest inspirations were two high school teachers, Virginia and Jim Wiggins, who took an interest in my mind rather than my pitching arm. Jim was vastly educated, thoughtful, and concerned with the larger issues of national
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life; V i r g i n i a was vivacious, dazzling, b r i l l i a n t , dramatic, and cosmopolitan. They got me to take m y studies seriously, i n i t i a l l y i n chemistry, later i n psychoanalysis. I n many fireside chats we planned m y future, eventually deciding that I should become a psychiatrist. That's when I began to study the books of Sigmund Freud, Carl J u n g , and A l f r e d Adler i n earnest. V i r g i n i a W i g g i n s especially inspired me to set m y sights on h i g h intellectual achievements. Her influence had m u c h to do w i t h m y graduating i n 1950 as valedictorian of m y Scio class—of 24 pupils, no less. M y cultural interests had expanded beyond the confines of m y boyhood village, and I was eager to move up to a larger
"playing field."
U n i v e r s i t y Years Just out of high school, I turned down a few offers to play professional baseball or college basketball to accept a baseball scholarship at Cleveland's Western Reserve University ( W R U , now Case-Western Reserve). The Cleveland Indians baseball team was sufficiently interested in me to contribute to my scholarship with the understanding that they would have first option if I ever signed a professional contract. I excelled at pitching for 4 college years and in summer semipro leagues, and I was a decent long-ball hitter. I would have loved to pursue professional baseball, but my military draft board gave me only two options: continuing into graduate school or being conscripted into the U.S. Army and sent to Korea. Opting for graduate school was fortuitous. Furthermore, the failure statistics in professional baseball suggest that I might have wound up managing a bowling alley or selling used cars in Cleveland. So I learned early on to accommodate my dreams to the available options, which already greatly exceeded those imposed on my father. Going to college in Cleveland was mind-blowing for a culturestarved, small-town boy. I had a voracious appetite for jazz bars, vaudeville, museums, art lectures, union hall socialist debates, symphonies, the teeming masses, political campaigns, dramatic theatre, ballets, the Cleveland Indians, and the Cleveland Browns football team. I drank in learning, sports, and arts like a dried-out dromedary at whatever cultural trough Cleveland offered. For my first several years,
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I couldn't get enough of it. Cleveland's informal education of my developing mind exceeded that of the university. Intending to become a psychiatrist (which requires an MD), I enrolled in the premedical program. Among the required courses were two of the hardest, most mind-numbing courses I ever suffered through: comparative anatomy and comparative embryology. Both involved horrendous amounts of pure memorization of the muscles, bones, and nerves of assorted animals. After the exams, I promptly forgot most of it. My early life as a student was salvaged by the elective courses I took in literature, history, and especially psychology. Fittingly, the W R U psychology department at that time had a strong psychoanalytic bias. The head of the department, Calvin Hall, was a renowned Freudian who later wrote such books as A Primer of Freudian Psychology (1954) and the Hall and Lindzey text Theories of Personality (1957). Hall took an interest in me because of my Freudian ambitions and because he was an avid baseball fan. He tutored me on the fine points of psychoanalytic theory. Besides pitching for WRU's team, part of my agreement with the Cleveland Indians was to continue pitching during the summers in semipro city leagues. Because most games were played at night, I needed a day job. Because I had only read about "crazy people," I thought it was time to meet a few. After my freshman year, I applied for a summer job at the Cleveland State Mental Hospital. Because I was big, the administrators assigned me to be an attendant on the back wards that housed the more deteriorated patients with psychoses. There I encountered no patients who had anything in common with the upper middle class patients with neuroses who Freud and his disciples described in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Most of the inmates were impoverished, poorly educated, mildly disoriented and withdrawn, abandoned by relatives, and anxious about their fate in the hospital system. Some were too depressed to maintain even rudimentary hygiene. Their condition and that of the wards generally were disheartening to me. When some psychiatrists at the hospital learned that I was planning a psychiatry career, they invited me to sit in on their case conferences. There I noticed how often psychiatrists differed in their diagnoses of intake patients and what treatments, if any, patients should receive. This was in 1951, before psychoactive drugs were introduced on a
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large scale. The psychiatric staff was overwhelmed, and l i t t l e could be done for the patients beyond therapeutic hot baths and some electroshock. I recall wheeling patients i n and out of the electroshock room and questioning whether this could really be doing them any good.
Fleeing t h e M e n t a l Hospital W i t h my ward experience, I was hired the following year as a research assistant to the hospital psychology staff. During that year, among other chores, I helped a W R U doctoral student collect data for his dissertation, which was a reliability check on the Blacky projective test with senile patients with psychoses. My testing interviews with patients were, by turns, hilarious, stupefying, depressing, and deeply distressing. I remember thinking, "This can't really be what meaningful psychological data should look like!" As a result, I abandoned my goal of becoming a psychiatrist; my experiences at the Cleveland State Mental Hospital were simply too disenchanting. A l though I remained sympathetic to patients with mental illness, I felt that therapies based on better science were needed. As if on cue, a new W R U professor arrived that year to arouse my interest in experimental psychology. Charles R. Porter was a newly minted Yale PhD who was enthusiastic about Clark Hull's behavior theory as hard science. That orientation fit into my developing conviction that applications of psychology in clinical work required fewer clinical case studies and more experimental evidence. Psychoanalysts would say I was exhibiting reaction formation in defending against my basic wish to help people with mental illness. Porter recruited me to help him formalize Hull's theory into the language of symbolic logic and mathematics. In retrospect, it was a futile project, but it provided the kind of conversion experience that budding scientists require from their teachers. Through my association with Porter, I acquired interests in philosophy of science and methodology, topics of intense concern within psychology at that time. He also persuaded me to study higher mathematics, convinced that theoretical psychology would become more formalistic and quantitative. After graduation in 1954, I obtained a 1-year Woodrow Wilson fellowship at the University of Minnesota to further such study. Minnesota had
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the premier program in philosophy of science, and I studied with such outstanding leaders as Paul Meehl, Herbert Feigl, Wilfred Sellars, and Michael Scriven. I also took classes in mathematical statistics and stochastic processes.
Religion Throughout my late teens and early 20s, I was grappling with whether to believe any form of deism, including Christianity. This was the legacy of being brought up by God-fearing Christian parents who required me to attend stultifying church services. I resented being forced to dress up in my "Sunday finest" clothes (that were hot and scratchy) and attend services every Sunday. I was also annoyed by having to attend vacation Bible school during the summers while my buddies were outside playing baseball. So, during my first stirrings of adolescent rebellion, I decided to investigate the intellectual foundations of beliefs in deism—a quest that continued until my mid-20s. I began reading tracts on atheism that destroyed the several arguments for God, the infallibility of Biblical revelations, and the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth: I read books by Thomas Paine, David Hume, Robert Ingersoll, H. L. Mencken, Bertrand Russell, Sidney Hook— whatever I could find in the county library. Later I read more sophisticated rational (atheist) philosophers such as Ernest Nagel, Michael Scriven, A. J. Ayer, George Smith, and Anthony Flew. I pestered with skeptical questions any minister or priest who would talk to me, hoping they would somehow persuade me to believe in their God. I discovered that many of them were unfamiliar with the details of arguments for or against the existence of God(s) and, in any event, were poor at convincing nonbelievers to their view. My growing skepticism distressed my parents; they were mollified somewhat by my agreeing to at least attend church services with them while living or visiting at home. A t the University of Minnesota, the popular approach taught by the professor of theology, Paul Holmer, was religious existentialism, especially the brand associated with Soren Kierkegaard. I attended Holmer's lectures and read some Kierkegaard, but Kierkegaard's "poetic subjectivism" led me eventually to conclude that he had simply
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retreated from the battleground of reasoning: H e and H o l m e r provided no new convincing reasons for belief i n G o d ; they even decried the attempt. Rather, they argued that reason was of no use for this decision and that the matter came d o w n to a subjective leap o f faith, rather like Blaise Pascal's famous wager. I couldn't understand w h y anyone should abandon the reasoned path to enlightenment, especially on such an important and momentous claim as deism. D u r i n g this t i m e , I was also occasionally meeting for religious discussions w i t h m y Minnesota teacher, psychologist Paul Meehl, w h o became both a friend and an enigma to me. O n the one hand, Paul taught high-level seminars i n philosophy of science and methodology of psychology; on the other hand, as a result of some transforming conversion experience, he had become a seriously devout Lutheran. W e w o u l d discuss how religious truths of theology m i g h t be accommodated w i t h i n the analytic philosophy o f science we both respected. I regret that those discussions never came to any convincing conclusions and left me as skeptical as ever. I n later life, m y skepticism was sustained by a subscription to The Skeptical Inquirer. This journal publishes c o n t r i butions w r i t t e n by kindred folk w h o investigate (and usually debunk) claims to such paranormal phenomena as poltergeists, ghosts, aliens f r o m outer space, angels, spiritualism, miracles, faith healing, bleeding religious icons, dousing, the Bermuda Triangle, wheat field whorls, ESP i n remote v i e w i n g , and other mysterious quirks of human g u l l i b i l i t y .
Discovering Mathematical Learning Theory My imprinting on rigorous theorizing through mathematics derived from interactions with my W R U professor, Charles Porter, and our admiration for the writings of Clark H u l l . Although I was taking classes in higher mathematics at Minnesota, that quantitative imprinting lay dormant until I stumbled on a suitable releasing stimulus from psychology. In a class at the University of Minnesota, "Mathematics for the Social Sciences," my professor lectured on a paper by W i l l i a m Estes on statistical learning theory (Estes, 1950). The paper grabbed my interest, and I rushed to the library to read it. This was exactly the kind of theorizing that Charles Porter and I believed psychology needed. I also stumbled on some papers by Bob Bush and Frederick
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Mosteller that paralleled Estes's work; furthermore, their book, Stochastic Models for Learning (Bush & Mosteller, 1955), appeared that year to consolidate my interests. I was so taken with the approach that I conducted an informal weekly seminar on the book for interested graduate students at Minnesota. Although I enjoyed and benefited from my year at Minnesota, I always intended to proceed to postgraduate study in psychology. I received fellowship offers from Harvard (with Bob Bush and Dick Solomon) and Yale (Neal Miller). After I talked with Miller on the phone, I knew that he was the one.
Yale Graduate School In 1955,1 entered graduate school at Yale to study the psychology of learning as a research assistant to Neal Miller. I conducted collaborative research with Miller for 4 years. He was my master teacher, my guru. He was the perfect role model and father figure. He was dedicated, projected reverent values about science and its progress, had a profusely inventive mind, was deeply involved in his own research, and encouraged me with his interest in my ideas. He influenced my approach to research more than any other teacher. Although he was about 20 years my senior, we formed a close and enduring friendship. I frequently wrote or called him for advice when I was struggling with some scientific or personal issue. I was greatly saddened by his death in 2002. Nevertheless, my initial research with Miller came up empty. He and his associates had shown that injecting a tiny bit of saltwater into the ventricles of a cat's brain would cause it to drink enormous amounts of water. I f this were causing real thirst, then we reasoned that it should serve as a discriminative stimulus. So my task was to get the cats to turn one way in a T maze to get a reward (a free romp in the lab room) after they had just received a saltwater injection into the ventricles and to turn the other way after an injection of isotonic saline (same as body fluids). After struggling for many weeks to get the cats to move at all through the T maze (the romp proved insufficiently rewarding), I discovered that the saltwater injections were no longer causing excessive drinking, probably due to brain tissue damage around the injection area. So, with great relief, I was allowed to abandon
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that project. This taught me early on that i t was okay to abandon unproductive lines of research! N e x t , M i l l e r and I investigated the newly discovered reward effect from brain stimulation. J i m Olds had found that rats w o u l d press a lever avidly to get a brief, t i n y j o l t of electricity delivered to a spot i n their brains ( l i m b i c system). Miller's interest i n m o t i v a t i o n and reward prompted h i m to direct most of his lab group (15 people calling ourselves " M i l l e r Industries") to seek locations i n the rat's brain where electrical stimulation w o u l d evoke biological drives and/or rewards. D u r i n g this t i m e , I was learning how to i m p l a n t i n d w e l l i n g electrodes to stimulate different areas of the brain and how to perform histology on brain slices. M y first research publication reported the discovery of dual reward—punishment locations i n the rat's l i m b i c system. M y rats w o u l d press a lever to t u r n on the brain s t i m u l a t i o n ; but as the stimulation continued beyond 0.5 second, i t became painful and the rat w o u l d learn to make another response to t u r n i t off. Other tests proved that the continued stimulation was aversive and that the rats were not just t u r n i n g off the stimulator to initiate another joy buzz. A l t h o u g h watching these t u r n - o n , t u r n - o f f cycles was fascinating at first, I tired of t h e m long before m y rats ever d i d . E. R. Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology (1957) textbook published a photograph of Neal and me testing one of m y rats. I gave m y first speech at an American Psychological Association ( A P A ) convention on this dual reward—punishment effect. As a graduate student I was anxious because J i m Olds, the founder of that field, was speaking just after me. I was greatly relieved when after m y talk Olds popped up to say that he "could support these important observations." The deepest professional dedication is hewn f r o m such rewards, just as was m y rats' addiction to lever pressing for brain s t i m u l a t i o n . So I've made a point of always rewarding w i t h o u t delay the experimental findings o f m y o w n students. M i l l e r knew that I was more interested i n learning theory than i n rodent reward and motivational hot spots. H e encouraged me to follow m y own experimental ideas, some i n v o l v i n g his conflict theory, others applying reinforcement schedules to escape learning. So for m y 2nd year I applied for and received a N a t i o n a l Institute of Mental H e a l t h ( N I M H ) fellowship to support myself. I also worked w i t h Yale's principal learning theorist at the t i m e , Frank Logan. A b r i l l i a n t
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psychologist who received his doctorate under Kenneth Spence at Iowa, Logan developed the so-called mkromolar theory of behavior. The gist of the idea (expressed in Hullian terms) was to treat each speed or amplitude of a given response (e.g., the rat running down a runway or pressing a lever) as a distinctly different response, which could be selectively strengthened or weakened by the reinforcement contingencies for that speed or amplitude. Logan theorized that people and animals adjust the speed of their responses to maximize their net utility, denned for each response speed as the quality of the reward minus the effort or punishment involved for performing at just that speed. The micromolar theory contrasted with the popular molar theory, which held that animals' performance speed reflected the degree of arousal produced by their reward, independent of how fast they performed. I was intrigued with Logan's attempt to quantify his brand of Hullian theory. My other Yale professors were Bob Abelson (who taught multivariate statistics plus a small seminar in mathematical models), Carl Hovland (experimental design), Tom Cornsweet (carpentry shop and psychophysics), Bob Cohen and Jack Brehm (social psychologists). Fellow graduate students who I recall included Phil Zimbardo, T i m Brock, Earl (Buzz) Hunt, Don Jensen, and Lyman Porter. Because we experimentalists were expected to build our own apparatus, stimulus generators, and recording devices, the shop course proved to be extremely useful. I learned some carpentry, metal bending, soldering, electrical circuitry, and how to use power tools. These skills would allow me to build my own equipment when I set up my animal lab at Stanford.
Marriage In 1957, midway through graduate school, I married Sharon Anthony. We had met and fallen in love in the summer of 1952 at a 6-week Encampment for Citizenship gathering of about 100 college students in the upper Bronx. It was sponsored by the Ethical Culture Union, a liberal and enlightened sectarian society that established the annual encampment to teach grassroots democracy to putative future leaders of America. During our 5-year courtship, Sharon finished her undergraduate studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota
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and earned a master's degree i n theatre arts, specializing i n directing, at Northwestern University. A t the t i m e of our marriage, she was a theater director and assistant professor of dramatic arts at Louisiana State University. She relinquished her good university position and exchanged i t for three p a r t - t i m e , lousy jobs i n N e w Haven so we could be married and live together at Yale. Just as m y parents never questioned Mother's dropp i n g out of college i n 1922 to go w i t h m y dad, i n 1957 we never questioned that Sharon's choice was expected and, therefore, r i g h t . H o w attitudes about gender roles have changed for the better since those days! Fortunately, at Stanford, Sharon and I have been able to satisfy both careers: She q u i c k l y trained i n Stanford's counseling psychology program, formed a successful communication consulting f i r m , and has published three self-help books on assertiveness and overcoming public speaking anxiety. W e have remained happily married and raised three rewarding children who continue to enrich our lives: L o r i , born i n 1959; Tony, born i n 1962; and J u l i a , born i n 1964.
T h e 1957 S o c i a l S c i e n c e R e s e a r c h C o u n c i l Summer W o r k s h o p I n the summer of 1957, after m y 2nd year i n graduate school, I attended a workshop on mathematical learning theory sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) at Stanford University. There, I had the opportunity to w o r k w i t h many psychologists who became key innovators i n the mathematical psychology movement of the 1960s. A m o n g t h e m were N o r m a n Anderson, D i c k A t k i n s o n , Bob Bush, W i l l i a m Estes, Eugene Galanter, D a v i d LaBerge, Duncan Luce, George M i l l e r , Frank Restle, Saul Sternberg, and Patrick Suppes. These people were creating and testing the kinds of mathematical theories that predicted behavioral data w i t h the level of precision that I had earlier dreamed about. This was a formidable collection of intellects for a 2nd-year graduate student to move among. Because I hadn't heard of any of them except Bush and Estes, I presented m y ideas as i f I were among peers. Years later B i l l Estes t o l d me that I actually had been invited only to be a student observer and was, i n his words, "expected to sit silently and
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be enthralled by others." That role definitely did not suit me. That workshop produced a 12-chapter volume, Studies in Mathematical Learning Theory (Bush & Estes, 1959), to which I contributed two chapters. During that time I formed a close intellectual kinship with Bill Estes that resulted in a continued exchange of ideas for many years. One model I worked on that summer was the vicarious trial and error (VTE) model for choice point behavior (Bower, 1959). The term vicarious trial and error was coined by Edward Tolman to describe the way animals at the choice point in a T maze look back and forth between the two alternatives, perhaps vicariously comparing predictions about which choice will lead to reward. I formulated this as a simple random walk, with the animal starting from the neutral point, examining each of the alternatives, and making a final choice among them. Using some data I'd collected on rats learning to find food in a T maze, I was able to match this model to the probability distribution of VTEs and the choice probabilities as well as the way both indicators changed throughout learning. Estes and I later extended the VTE model to describe human choices among commodity options. Back at Yale for the next 2 years, I worked increasingly with Frank Logan on his micromolar behavior theory. I did my dissertation with Logan and Miller as coadvisors, confirming predictions of the micromolar theory about how animals learn to adjust their response speed to minimize the time before a correlated, delayed reward can be obtained. I graduated in June 1959.
Parlaying a Workshop I n t o W o r k My job at Stanford came about through my SSRC workshop acquaintance, Pat Suppes. He was an assistant dean at the time and had received SSRC funding to set up a Stanford program in mathematical modeling in the social sciences. Suppes urged the psychology head, Bob Sears, to hire me with the SSRC funds. After checking with his former Yale buddy, Neal Miller, Sears offered me an assistant professorship at Stanford 1 full year before I completed my doctoral dissertation. By sheer luck I dodged those dreaded job talks and interviews that are anathema to every job applicant. Apparently my performance at the SSRC Summer Institute, my correspondence with Estes
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about m y theories, and some k i n d words to Sears from M i l l e r d i d the trick. A t the t i m e , such executive h i r i n g decisions on college campuses were c o m m o n ; today they w o u l d set off an avalanche of l i t i g a t i o n . The summer after I completed m y doctorate, I obtained an N I M H fellowship to w o r k w i t h m y friend Larry Stein at a Pittsburgh V A hospital lab before proceeding to Stanford. W i t h Larry, I learned how to use Skinner boxes to study practically any question about animal learning or m o t i v a t i o n . These skills proved invaluable i n setting up m y animal laboratory at Stanford.
M y E v o l v i n g Research P r o g r a m a t S t a n f o r d In the fall of 1959, I began my first academic job in the Stanford Psychology Department, where I have spent my entire career. In 2005 I became an emeritus professor after 46 years of teaching and research. My Stanford research can be classified into seven categories that track successive, if overlapping, periods of my professional life. These research categories are animal learning, mathematical models of memory, memory organization and mnemonics, human associative memory, emotional influences on cognition, models of category learning, and narrative memory and mental models.
Animal Learning On arriving at Stanford, I began a program of research on conditioning and learning. I was given lab space in an old Quonset shack left over from World War I I , sharing this space with other researchers, including Douglas Lawrence. Lawrence received his doctorate under Neal Miller at Yale and did important research showing acquired distinctiveness of cues in rats. Doug Lawrence, Ernest Hilgard, Bill Estes, and Leon Festinger were four of my main supporters at Stanford. Thanks to my carpentry shop training, I was able to set up my own animal learning laboratories. I built runways, shuttle boxes, discrimination boxes, and Skinner boxes, all outfitted with elaborate electronic timing and counting circuits. I made most of this equipment from relays, variable capacitors, and stepping switches cannibalized from
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discarded pinball machines found at a junkyard. Later, N I M H grants allowed me to buy more sophisticated programming equipment for the Skinner boxes. My research at Stanford began with studies of operant conditioning with an especial interest in interactions between Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning. In addition, I studied incentive motivation, frustration caused by reduced rewards, errorless discrimination learning, correlated reinforcement scheduling, reward contrast effects (how the performance sustained by a given reward schedule varied with its relation to other reward schedules the animal received in alternate stimuli), and the value of advanced (but useless) information about an upcoming reward. There is not enough space here to summarize this research, which is referenced in my vita on my Web site: http:// psychology.stanford.edu/~gordon. Besides teaching in the mathematical models program, I also taught graduate classes in learning theory and an undergraduate lab course on conditioning and learning. In that lab course, each student was assigned a rat to put through its paces on many operant conditioning procedures. A number of those students became my research assistants, and some went on to graduate school and careers in psychology. My publications in animal learning led to early appointments as a consulting editor for the leading journals of the day: the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, and the Sk'mneri&nJournal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB). This gave me the curious distinction of being the only person to have served on the editorial boards of both JEAB and Cognitive Science—two journals that could not have been further apart in their perspectives! Among my many interests in those early years was behavior modification and behavior therapy. I taught courses in this area and lectured at behavior therapy conventions, where I became acquainted with the leading researchers of that movement. In 1976, my wife Sharon and I published a self-help book, Asserting Yourself, based on her work with clients. I t became a self-help classic and is still in print some 30 years later (Bower & Bower, 1976/1991). My work and lecturing in this field prompted my appointment as a consulting editor to a clinical journal, Cognitive Therapy and Research. I was an oddity—the only person who had served simultaneously as an associate editor for a
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clinical psychology journal and the Journal of Mathematical Psychology. However, the spectrum of my editorial jobs reflected the diversity of my research interests. By the late 1960s, my animal research was being crowded out by my interest in mathematical models for human learning—a topic I'd learned absolutely nothing about in graduate school. Because I had had many rewards from animal research, it was with sadness that I closed down my animal lab around 1969 when the Stanford department moved from Cubberley Hall into the newly renovated Jordan Hall. I nonetheless kept up with the field by revising Ernest Hilgard's Theories of Learning textbook several times (see Hilgard & Bower, 1966, 1975; Bower & Hilgard, 1981). Even as I moved into other fields, I never abandoned my roots in animal learning.
Mathematical Models of Learning In the early 1960s, B i l l Estes and Dick Atkinson joined the Stanford faculty. Estes, Atkinson, Pat Suppes, and I formed the core of our mathematical psychology program. Throughout the 1960s, our program attracted students who became major contributors to the field, including (alphabetically) Bob Bjork, Jim Hinrichs, Douglas Hintzman, Steve Link, Elizabeth Loftus, David Rumelhart, Rich Shiffrin, J i m Townsend, David Wessells, George Wolford, Jack Yellot, and Joe Young. These stellar students made those early days some of the most rewarding of my career. Along with my animal learning research, I gradually began using mathematical models to theorize about human learning, in part because I could quickly collect large amounts of learning data from humans (see below). The dominant theory at the time proposed that human learning proceeded gradually by accumulation of increments in the probability of a successful response over training trials. However, under Bill Estes's leadership, several of us began looking for all-or-none or discrete stages as training proceeds in simple learning situations. We found them in a number of cases. I started using the simplest one-step model to describe, for example, how a college student might learn a single paired associate in a list of pairs (e.g., pairing nouns arbitrarily with the digits 1, 2, or 3). The
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model assumes that subjects begin without knowledge of what number is paired with a given word; so prompted with the word, they can only guess at the correct digit, being correct with some chance probability g (.33 here). W i t h each study trial, the subject might learn this specific association with probability c, so he'll respond correctly to the word for the rest of the session. W i t h probability 1-c, he doesn't learn this pair on this occasion and so w i l l remain in the guessing state, entering his next test-and-study trial on this pair. Let me illustrate the allure of such a simple mathematical model. As noted before, I was earlier converted to the idea that psychological theories needed to become more quantitative and able to predict empirical results with far greater precision than such simple rankings as "Condition A w i l l outperform Condition B on some behavioral indicator X." Theories that deliver quantitative predictions are more readily disconfirmed and modified; conversely, when they predict the observed data correctly, they gain far more credence than would a simple qualitative ordinal prediction. I illustrate with the simple all-or-none model outlined above. Descriptively, the goal of any such model is to predict any aspect (or statistic) of a collection of data, assuming that real subjects are learning according to the process envisioned by the model. For example, suppose to test the model we recruit 30 college students to learn in one session 24 paired associates (24 words as stimuli randomly paired with the digits 1, 2, or 3 as responses). Suppose that each subject receives repeated test-then-study trials of the whole set of 24 items for 40 trials or until each subject learns (reliably stops making errors). Assuming the subjects and items are roughly comparable, we'd end up with 30 X 24 = 720 sequences, each comprised of 40 bits corresponding to correct and error responses of a single subject to a single item (28,800 in total). We can describe (but not explain) those data by many different statistics, the most common of which is the learning curve (probability of a correct response on any trial). But there are far more discriminating statistics, such as the probability distributions of (a) the number of errors before the first correct response, (b) the total number of errors per item, (c) the trial of the last error per item, or (d) the number of runs of errors of any length, say, three in a row on any item. Compared with the average learning curve, these statistics give far more revealing
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snapshots of the underlying process that is generating the 28,800 observations. The theoretical claim is that after estimating two numbers—c, the probability of learning an i t e m per study t r i a l , and g, the probability of guessing correctly before learning (probably .33 w i t h three response alternatives)—the model can explain and predict practically any statistic of the data matrix. This grandiose claim sounds preposterous— 720 sequences of correct and error responses, all captured by t w o theoretical numbers, c and g. W h a t is astounding is that i n some cases, this fantastic claim is t r u e — t h a t is, the predictions of the model are very close to a large number of the statistics of observed learning data. That, i n t u r n , validates the theory f r o m w h i c h the predictions are derived. A strong prediction of this model is that whenever a subject makes an error on an i n d i v i d u a l pair (indicating that he or she has s t i l l not learned i t ) , his or her future performance on this practiced-butfailed i t e m w o u l d be identical to that w i t h an equivalent new pair. For example, the probability of an error on the t r i a l f o l l o w i n g that error on a given i t e m should remain constant over practice trials, regardless of how many prior study trials the subject has had on this i t e m . Moreover, over trials prior to the last error, the subject's performance should remain near the chance level. I found a few cases of associative learning i n w h i c h these startling qualitative predictions were upheld. I also found that the model could be extended to describe hypothesistesting behavior of subjects learning very simple classifications (concepts) i n the standard t r i a l - b y - t r i a l procedures that overtaxed memory. This approach directly opposed the then-popular incremental learning theories of discrimination learning. M y collaborator on this concept identification research was m y first postdoc, T o m Trabasso. Together, we applied the all-or-none model to many classification learning studies, reviewing many i n our book Attention in Learning (Trabasso & Bower, 1968). It's been said that this all-or-none model was i n many respects the most simple, elegant, and powerful one of that era. These results and those provided by Estes and I r w i n Rock provoked m u c h debate f r o m subscribers to the incremental theory that postulated gradual accumulation of strength i n stimulus—response habits. O n the
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one hand, these debates unleashed a torrent of experimentation, with researchers (including me) finding that only in restricted cases was learning of the all-or-none type completed in a single random jump in an individual's knowledge about a pair. On the other hand, the incremental model that expected continuous strengthening of associations over study trials was never able to fit any quantitative data whatsoever. It was surprising, however, that in cases in which the simple all-or-none data pattern did not strictly hold, we could observe one (perhaps two) intermediate stage(s) that arose between a subject's initial complete ignorance and his or her later complete knowledge of a given item. So, as learning tasks became more complicated, we could add another stage to the theory to describe how learners overcame those added complications. These multistate models could fit in quantitative detail the data from a number of multitrial learning experiments. Clearly, my recurring theme was precision in predicting details of the behaviors of learners.
S h o r t - T e r m Memory As I wearied of the incremental versus all-or-none debate, I gladly joined a group of researchers studying short-term memory. We were trying to explain single-trial, short-term memory data collected over retention intervals of a few seconds. For example, adults typically show very poor recall of three briefly studied, unrelated words after 10 to 15 seconds of doing distracting arithmetic. The group was also impressed by Brenda Milner's famous amnesic patient, H.M., who could not learn new facts although his immediate memory was normal. Following the lead of Donald Broadbent, a group including Dick Atkinson, me, and some of our students formulated mathematical descriptions of how information might be transferred from a limitedcapacity, short-term memory store into a more permanent, longer term memory. Throughout 1963, I worked on both a time-decay queuing model and on fixed-space displacement models of how information in short-term memory might be lost (forgotten) before it could be successfully encoded into long-term memory. I presented one of these
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models at a Russell Sage conference at Princeton i n the summer of 1964. The model assumed that a presented i t e m (e.g., a w o r d or a w o r d pair) w o u l d be registered i n a sensory buffer, w i t h attention transferring i t i n t o a short-term store. Once i n the short-term store, rehearsal could maintain i t there for a while or mnemonic coding m i g h t transfer its trace to a longer-term store. I f the i t e m were not transferred to l o n g - t e r m memory w i t h i n a short t i m e , i t w o u l d decay or be bumped out of short-term memory and forgotten. The flow of a single i t e m over t i m e t h r o u g h the system could be formulated as a m o m e n t - b y - m o m e n t Markov process. This model generated consolidation and forgetting curves that showed the probable location of a single presented i t e m over t i m e since its presentation. These curves resembled those observed empirically i n numerous experimental paradigms and provided explanations for many findings on short-term memory. Unfortunately, that model was locked up i n the proceedings of this obscure Russell Sage conference, not to be published for 3 more years i n a N e w Y o r k Academy o f Sciences monograph (1967a). Ever since then, I have taught m y students: D o n ' t allow good ideas to be buried i n obscure conference proceedings. Publish your best w o r k q u i c k l y i n major journals. T h r o u g h o u t this t i m e , I benefited f r o m summer workshops discussi n g memory models w i t h psychologists D i c k A t k i n s o n , Ben M u r d o c k , D o n N o r m a n , Saul Sternberg, Nancy W a u g h , and Wayne W i c k e l g r e n . W e were all circling around the same set of general ideas. I n 1965, D i c k A t k i n s o n and Richard Shiffrin (1965, 1968) made several i m provements to the basic framework and used the model to predict quantitative results f r o m many new experiments. That model guided research on short-term memory for many years. I n 1967, I published a chapter i n w h i c h I worked out the consequences of the idea that the memory trace of an event has m u l t i p l e components connecting together many attributes or descriptors (Bower, 1967b). These descriptors or properties could serve b o t h to differentiate and to retrieve the memory trace f r o m among other memories. This notion of m u l t i a t t r i b u t e memory traces became popular among memory theorists and was later central i n the models of H i n t z m a n , Humphreys, Metcalfe, M u r d o c k , McClelland and Chappell, Rumelhart and M c C l e l land, and Shiffrin and Steyvers. I t even penetrated i n t o neuropsycholog-
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ical theories of the memory trace, as popularized in Damasio's idea of convergence zones (in the hippocampus) for different attributes of a given memory trace.
O r g a n i z a t i o n a l Factors i n Memory Most of the older work in verbal learning used lists of unrelated items as the materials to be learned. The major idea was that people use a divide-and-conquer strategy: They divide the whole set into small parts, learn the parts, and put them together again. In agreement with this philosophy, in the late 1960s memory research was following up on George Miller's ideas on chunking—that short-term memory was limited in terms of chunks, not the number of elements in the chunks. One of my chunking experiments, for example, showed that free recall of 30 familiar idioms like "kick the bucket" and "happy New Year" was as good as 30 single nouns and considerably better than if the words of the idioms were all mixed up into random triads. An attractive idea was that a person's immediate memory (allegedly of seven items) could be greatly expanded by embedding chunks inside other chunks in a hierarchy. In an experimental demonstration, my students and I showed that subjects who briefly studied 112 words organized on a page into four conceptual hierarchies recalled about 70 words; this was about three times more than control subjects recalled who saw the same words presented in a disorganized scramble. As expected, subjects who studied the hierarchical organization used it as a retrieval plan, recalling from the top down, using recalled upper level categories to cue retrieval of subcategories below them. The comparison of 70 versus 7 items in immediate recall dramatically demonstrated how conceptual hierarchies and iterative cuing help people pack and unpack their memory to recall a large collection of items. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s I attended annual summer conferences on verbal learning and memory. About a dozen of us would get together for a week at the Lake Arrowhead Conference Center near Los Angeles to present our research and have it critiqued by the group. This group included Delos Wickens, Endel Tulving, Leo
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Postman, A r t M e l t o n , D i c k A t k i n s o n , Charles Cofer, George Mandler, George M i l l e r , Rudy Schultz, Geoff Keppel, Ben Underwood, J i m Jenkins, Ed M a r t i n , and Ben M u r d o c k . Several years later, Bob Crowder, Bob B j o r k , and D o u g H i n t z m a n joined. These conferences generated much enthusiasm and camaraderie among the members. They were s t i m u l a t i n g and greatly influenced m y research. A t those conferences, Endel T u l v i n g and I struck a friendship that has been rewarding for more than 35 years. Endel's ideas made popular the study of free recall, wherein subjects attempt to recall i n any order a presented collection of unrelated items. Endel proposed that i n free-recall learning, subjects searched for subjective interconnections among items that allow them to group t h e m i n t o chunks. I t h o u g h t of this as subjects emphasizing idiosyncratic
associations
among subsets of the list words and using these clusters to cue recall of other items. One of m y supportive experiments showed that the benefit of g r o u p i n g arose only i f the groupings were kept the same over repeated study trials and were thus strengthened. Subjects hardly improved their recall i f they were induced to change their groupings of items every trial. I n other words, d i v i d i n g a large memory task i n t o parts (chunks) works w e l l only i f the parts remain the same across different study trials. So, what determines the chunks people use? I was particularly interested i n studying the perceptual conditions that promote chunki n g , or g r o u p i n g of materials commonly used i n memory experiments, such as strings of letters and digits. Following Gestalt principles, groupings of visually presented items (such as letters) can be created t h r o u g h their p r o x i m i t y i n space, similarity of size, or similarity of color. Thus, familiar abbreviations like " F B I , " " U C L A , " and " C I A " can be rendered unfamiliar i f they are grouped (by temporal pauses, visual spaces, or sizes) into unfamiliar groupings such as "FB-iucL A C - i a . " O f course, people are far better i n immediate recall of familiar as opposed to unfamiliar groupings. Moreover, i f the presentation of the same string of digits read one at a t i m e is changed by pauses, for example, altering 791-647-83 i n t o 7 9 - 1 6 - 4 7 8 - 3 , subjects' w r i t t e n recall of that d i g i t series suffers. They treat each new g r o u p i n g of the d i g i t string as a novel series. These results show how immediate memory is l i m i t e d by the number of chunks a person perceives and
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that learning accelerates when the elements are grouped into stable, familiar chunks.
Mnemonic Devices My work on mnemonic devices was closely related to that on memory organization. Mnemonic devices are mental maneuvers used by stage magicians for centuries to help them memorize impressive amounts of material quickly. Surprisingly, only a smattering of laboratory research had ever been conducted on the principles underlying these mental gymnastics. So I began laboratory studies on mnemonics. Hearing of my research, the National Mnemonics Association (comprised mainly of magicians and stage mnemonists) invited me to speak at their convention, held at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. One example of a mnemonic trick is to convert arbitrary collections of items into meaningful themes and stories. One of my laboratory studies illustrated how effective this device can be. While studying lists of 10 unrelated nouns, some college students were instructed to compose a narrative story that linked the ordered words in a meaningful manner. After studying 12 such lists, these subjects later recalled nearly seven times as much material as did uncoached controls. These results illustrate the huge benefits of mnemonic aids. Another experiment found that short-term recall soared if students were instructed to quickly convert briefly presented nonsense trigrams into meaningful phrases, for example, CHS coded as Call Home Soon. These experiments made the point that recall is greatly enhanced when learners relate novel materials to more familiar, meaningful units. This notion of elaborative encoding made its way into educational applications, such as mnemonics for teaching foreign vocabulary. Also, mnemonic techniques frequently emphasize converting learning materials into visual images. At the height of behaviorism, mental imagery was a taboo subject. Nevertheless, I wanted to see what happened when we had college students make up interactive images to learn unrelated word—word associates. We found that students who used imagery to study successive lists of paired associates recalled two or three times as many pairs as did uninstructed controls. Following
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A l l a n Paivio, I hypothesized that the advantage stemmed from the person's entering meaningful traces redundantly i n b o t h verbal memory and a coordinated imagery memory. Beyond these memory advantages of imagery, our knowledge of the functional properties of mental imagery was greatly advanced t h r o u g h many ingenious experiments by A l l a n Paivio, Roger Shepard, and Stephen Kosslyn.
Human Associative M e m o r y Having studied the mnemonic benefits produced by subjects' elaborative encoding of materials, I had no quarrel with the depth-ofprocessing proposal of Fergus Craik and Bob Lockhart (1972). However, I sought a more basic analysis of why elaborative encoding enhanced learning. That concern led John Anderson and me to propose a theory of how people use their conceptual knowledge to encode and remember new material, especially events and factual assertions. That theory was set forth in several articles and our book, Human Associative Memory (Anderson & Bower, 1973), mnemonically known as H A M . To conduct that theoretical work, I needed to learn some psycholinguistics and computational modeling. I picked up the psycholinguistics by attending a summer institute run by the Linguistic Society of America. I took classes on transformational grammar from a Chomsky disciple, on semantics from George Lakoff and Charles Fillmore, on child language acquisition from Eve Clark, and on psycholinguistics from Herb Clark. I had picked up the computational modeling component in 1963 by attending a summer institute at R A N D Corporation run by Herb Simon and Allen Newell. They gave me such a deep appreciation for computational models that I've always urged my students to become conversant in this area. I promoted such modeling as a way to avoid a common pitfall of psychological theories. Too often our informal theories fail to specify sufficient steps showing how specific predictions or explanations follow from a general theory. A complete explanation of a behavioral phenomenon should enable us to see, step-by-step, how a verbal theory implies the behavior. Computational modeling forces us to fill in those steps explicitly. (Here again is my theme of precision in theoretical predictions of behavior.)
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These summer educational excursions into computational modeling and language prepared me for the theoretical work that I did with John Anderson. We started with the ideas of a preformed, static semantic memory and question answering that Allan Collins and Ross Quillian had popularized. However, any useful theory of learning should describe the way a person's preexisting concepts support acquiring new facts and events as well as answering questions about previously learned facts. Anderson and I wanted to ground our work in association theory. We believed that people learn a new fact or episode by interassociating instances of preexisting concepts. Consider a statement (or event description) like "I met my friend John today in Vancouver." We supposed that people record that statement (or fact) in their memory using preexisting concepts from their semantic memory of friendship, meetings, John, and Vancouver. Anderson programmed a small parser that converted sentences to grammatical tree structures. We supposed that a person reading or hearing such a sentence would (a) set up a new memory unit for the underlying propositions, (b) create new instances of the preexisting concepts, and (c) link them together into subject-predicate structures. Thus, the grammar of the proposition recorded in memory tells the subject who's doing what to whom, where, and when. This information enables learners to answer specific questions about the statement (event) from memory. Anderson and I elaborated these ideas about proposition learning in our book Human Associative Memory (Anderson & Bower, 1973). We assumed that these associations would be strengthened by repetition and weakened by time decay and interference. The book reported many experiments on subjects' memory for collections of novel factual assertions and showed that the H A M model fit those data in quantitative detail. Our aim in doing so was to link results from the human learning tradition with the ideas from computational linguistics, perceptual scene analysis, semantic memory, and question answering. Walter Kintsch (1974) was working on much the same connections. The H A M theory provided a parsimonious explanation for many memory phenomena, such as interference effects, recognition memory, and the relation of explicit memory to implicit memory tests. Moreover, it showed one way of moving memory research away from experiments
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using lists of unrelated items and toward dealing more rigorously w i t h memory for coherent text. Anderson later introduced major improvements that made the theory more powerful. I n one major improvement, he introduced the concept of productions: These are the learned routines that move the cognitive system t h r o u g h its paces as i t works t h r o u g h tasks i n pursuit of its goals. Anderson and his associates have applied that theory to many cognitive tasks, typically f i t t i n g i n quantitative detail the behavioral data of people performing those tasks (e.g., Anderson & Labiere, 1998). H i s theory, dubbed A C T for "Adaptive Control of T h o u g h t , " far outstrips any other proposal as a comprehensive theory of cognition and memory.
E m o t i o n a l F a c t o r s i n Memory a n d C o g n i t i o n My work on how emotion influences cognition began with a study of emotion-state-dependent memory in 1977. I was fascinated by the phenomena of drug-state-dependent memory—the exotic idea that people can have some memories that are accessible only when they are in a particular physiological state but not otherwise. I wondered whether strong emotional states would produce state-dependent memory. Having learned hypnotic techniques from Ernest Hilgard, I knew that hypnosis could arouse strong emotions. In initial experiments, we used hypnotically induced happiness or sadness to demonstrate emotion-state-dependent memory. In our most successful demonstration, hypnotized college students learned two lists of unrelated words, one when happy and the other when sad. They then were tested for free recall of both lists when they were either happy or sad. When sad, people did better recalling the list they'd learned when they had been sad. Conversely, when happy they did better recalling the list they had learned when they had been happy. Such mood dependence occurs not only with word lists in the laboratory but also when happy or sad people recall autobiographic events from their lives (just as daily fluctuations in my mood as I write this autobiography probably cause my memory portrait to be more or less flattering!). To explain the mood and memory results, I fell back on the H A M theory and proposed a simple associative network theory. A basic
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emotion such as sadness was conceived as a biologically innate structure or unit in the brain; evolution presumably endowed us with, say, six or seven different emotion units (fear, anger, elation, disgust, etc.). A given emotion unit could be turned on either by thoughts or by learned appraisals of external events. Once turned on, the emotion unit would serve as a powerful and persisting source of activation that spreads throughout its associative network. Recall that in H A M , associative networks are set up to record events and facts about the world. I f an event like your dog's death caused you to feel sad, then the record of that episode would be recorded into memory associated with the sad emotion it evoked. Later, i f you are feeling sad and asked about your dog, the memory of your dog dying should become more available to you at that moment than would happy or neutral memories about your dog. Although we repeated the mood-dependent result three times before publishing it, later attempts by Jack Mayer and me produced spotty and sometimes null results. I was puzzled by these variable outcomes. During those disappointing days, I learned the value of a good mentor. I called Neal Miller who advised, "Keep working around the edges of the problem by trying new perspectives and variations. Eventually, the pieces of the puzzle should fall into place." And so they did. Eric Eich and I independently kept experimenting until we could reliably produce emotion dependency. Eric (Eich, 1995) figured out that you must ensure that subjects experience strong moods and involve them actively in generating the materials they must later recall. We can now produce reliable and robust mood-dependent memory. As Neal said, "The best strategy is to keep the faith and believe that future work w i l l correct the apparent discrepancies." Also, the emotion network model implies that when an emotion is aroused, it activates congruent associations, themes, and categories, making them more available to influence cognition. These moodcongruent influences on cognition have been observed consistently throughout many studies. For example, happy people remember more of the pleasant material in a mixed list of positive and negative material, whereas sad people remember more of the unpleasant material. Because themes and associations are primed by one's mood, congruency shows up in people's free associations, in the stories they compose about ambiguous human scenes, in their forecasts of future good or bad
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things, and i n their evaluations of such things as their health, career, and marriage. As expected, chronically depressed people exhibit the expected mood-congruent biases i n their memory and judgments. As I was w o r k i n g on mood-congruent memory, Australian social psychologist Joe Forgas visited Stanford. Joe helped me shift gears and extend the emotion research i n t o studies of social cognition. One of our first experiments showed how people's mood influenced their online perception of their social interactions i n a videotaped interview. People i n a bad mood perceived themselves online as e m i t t i n g more negative, antisocial acts; those i n a good mood saw themselves e m i t t i n g more positive, prosocial acts. M o o d affects people's m o m e n t - t o - m o m e n t i n terpretations of speech and ambiguous body language, even when they are describing video recordings of themselves. Despite the wide-ranging impact of mood congruence i n many demonstrations, research has also identified some conditions that m o d erate this effect. For example, mood-congruent influences are strongest when the judgments involve ill-defined, subjective considerations that come to m i n d as subjects compose their opinions on topics that they hadn't previously t h o u g h t much about. I n contrast, mood effects are weaker w i t h strongly entrenched attitudes or when a subject is m o t i vated to override his bad moods. These amendments and corrections to the mood-congruence story brought home an important lesson for me. Early reports about psychological phenomena are typically qualified as subsequent research reveals the complexities and interacting factors that moderate the i n i t i a l effect.
CONNECTIONIST MODELING OF CATEGORY LEARNING I n the late 1980s and early 1990s, research on human category learning came back into fashion, inspired i n large part by popular ideas of Eleanor Rosch. The m a i n tenets were that most natural categories as w e l l as man-made ones are fuzzy, i l l defined, and scattered around a central prototype, w i t h different instances showing a graded resemblance to the prototype. Moreover, i n classifying new instances, people were not f o l l o w i n g a rule but rather were m a k i n g a probabilistic (best guess) decision between category alternatives. Learning experiments by Rosch, Michael Posner, D o u g M e d i n , John Bransford, and many
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others persuaded researchers of the wisdom of this approach. Clearly, the simple model of category learning I had worked on in the 1960s (i.e., rule-based hypothesis testing) was inappropriate for dealing with these new data. Still, I wished to have a reasonably simple learning model that would learn ill-defined categories and show all the basic phenomena observed there. My student, Mark Gluck, and I formulated a simple connectionist model of the category learning process. Categorization tasks to which we applied the model might require subjects to learn to classify, say, 40 diagrammatic faces into two biological families based on their facial features (e.g., size of ears, nose, and chin); a different task might have subjects learn which medical symptoms of patients (e.g., body temperature or white blood cell count) were predominantly associated with one or another underlying disease. The model we proposed mimicked the learners' task: It would examine the series of stimulus patterns (facial features) one by one, predict the category for each, receive feedback about the correct category for each pattern, and then adjust the associative weights between the facial features presented on this trial and the correct category. A major assumption was that the individual weights would be adjusted trial by trial on the basis of the difference between the desired (correct) category versus that predicted by the collection of features available in the presented pattern. This idea (called error correction) came from modern work in Pavlovian conditioning from Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner. This error-correction idea contrasted with the earlier notion (called the Hebb rule) that associations only required simple contiguous occurrence of any stimulus with the desired response, independent of other stimuli that might accompany its occurrence. A second assumption of our model was that the category response the subject gave to a stimulus pattern reflected the difference in the sum of weights from each stimulus feature to each category. Gluck and I used this model to fit in quantitative detail results from several prototype-learning experiments. Among other things, the model predicted the observed learning curves and percentage correct for each stimulus pattern, and it gave graded typicality judgments with more confident responses to stimulus patterns closer to the prototypes of the categories. The model also showed (as did subjects) an unusual form of base-rate neglect, whereby rare combinations of stimulus features
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produced far less accurate category judgments than were warranted by the statistics o f the stimulus-to-category ensemble. A number of such results demonstrated that the Rescorla—Wagner conditioning rule extended to human category learning and explained some novel phenomena. W e showed that the simple model was essentially c o m p u t i n g (converging to) a least squares m u l t i p l e regression equation using the collection o f stimulus features to predict the correct categories. I t is k n o w n that such linear regression schemes cannot learn categories that depend on interactions between i n p u t features. A n example of this type of category is one based on an exclusive disjunction rule, that is, members of the category have one critical feature or another b u t not both together. T o handle all such matters, G l u c k and I proposed a simple emendation of the model, namely, to include as i n p u t to the model conjunctions o f the elementary stimulus features shown on a given trial (e.g., a f r o w n and clenched teeth m i g h t together compose a conjunctive feature). W e found that this augmented model was quite powerful i n explaining a wide range of category learning data. Unfortunately, even the augmented model encountered some major flaws (experimental data i t could not explain), leading M a r k eventually to advance to more complicated models.
Memory f o r Narratives The last area of research I investigated concerns narrative memory and mental models of narratives. Although Anderson and I had addressed the memory representation of single sentences, I wanted to understand the moment-by-moment cognitive processing by which people comprehend and remember connected sentences in a coherent text, such as a history book or a simple story. Impressed by the pioneering work of Roger Schank, Dave Rumelhart, and Walter Kintsch, my students and I began researching narrative understanding and memory. This research evolved over time. First we explored the psychological reality of story grammars, that is, showing that people's remembering of a narrative varies with how well it conforms to (or violates) norms of the ideal story grammar or story schema. Next, we examined the
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way that readers' interests and perspectives influence how they interpret characters' actions and thus bias their recall of a story. Then, we examined the inferences that readers make to connect together and make coherent different parts of a story. Influenced by the theories of Roger Schank and Bob Abelson (1977), John Black and I (Black & Bower, 1980) explored the idea that readers use their knowledge of human goals and plans to explain and understand a story's major plot. By inferring causal connections between characters' goals and actions, readers extract a causal network that courses throughout the story and explains why actions and outcomes occurred. The causal network is the gist of what people remember from a story. This causal-networking theory was developed primarily by the research of Tom Trabasso (my first postdoc) and Art Graesser. So, as always, the field was aiming at a theory that allowed us to predict with reasonable accuracy the details of behavior—in this case, which aspects (assertions) of a narrative readers or listeners would judge as most central and important and would later remember. Finally, a group of theorists led by Phil Johnson-Laird have urged researchers to examine how readers construct and use their mental model of the situation described in the story. The mental model that readers construct guides the interesting conceptual inferences that determine what they remember from a story. My postdoctoral students Mike Rinck and Dan Morrow and I studied how readers use the text moment by moment to update their developing mental model. In one line of work, we measured what happens when readers move their focus of attention within a previously constructed mental model, for example, when the narratives describe characters moving around through a well-known building. The focus of the inner eye is like a spotlight that follows the character around on an inner stage. We found, for example, that questions about objects close to the reader's focus within the mental model are quickly answered. In contrast, this priming diminishes for objects farther from the current focus and decays dramatically as the item or location fades out of the narrative focus. Readers also suppress this activation when a story describes a large gap of time between events, a large jump in story distance, or a change in the active status of the character's goal. These are stunningly quick, adaptive processes that occur outside the reader's awareness.
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The findings in this line of research can be explained by the embodied cognition theories of a former student, Larry Barsalou (2003), and related ideas of Art Glenberg (1997), Rolf Zwaan (2004), Allan Paivio (1990; Sadoski & Paivio, 2001), and their associates. They propose a sensorimotor basis for knowledge representation and suggest that understanding sentences in a story requires the reader to mentally simulate the actions and perceptual experiences of the character. In some ways this approach is returning me to the earlier research done on mental imagery in memory. By giving special prominence to the subject's perceptual-motor simulation as an avenue for his comprehension, these theories easily accommodate the findings of countless studies in the field.
Postscript For 50 years my career has taken me down these seven major highways that have traversed countless detours and diversions. Along the way I have picked up—or been picked up by—many exciting and interesting traveling companions. Looking back, this succession of research topics reminds me of learning theory itself, which constantly expands to encompass and explain more complex phenomena. Parts of my interests and knowledge have come from serving as a consulting editor for numerous professional journals and from editing for 25 years the annual Psychology of Learning and Motivation volumes. Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to receive many professional honors, including several honorary degrees and election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the American Philosophical Society. In addition, I have been elected president of the American Psychological Society, the Western Psychological Association (twice), the Cognitive Science Society, the Psychonomic Society, and the Experimental Psychology section of the American Psychological Association. I was identified as one of the 100 most important psychologists of the 20th century. In 1975, Stanford awarded me the Albert R. Lang Endowed Professorship Chair. I chaired the Psychology Department for 4 years and served as associate dean of Humanities and Sciences for 3 years. In 1992—1993, I served as chief scientific advisor to the
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N I M H director. During that time, my associates and I organized seven groups of psychologists, totaling about 50 individuals, to review significant contributions of basic behavioral research. John Kihlstrom and I edited and coauthored that report, which was presented to the U.S. Congress in the fall of 1993. I have had extraordinary good fortune in both my professional and private life. I've been at Stanford during an ideal time for my career, and I've been honored to work with many extraordinary students and colleagues. My private life has been stable and rewarding, because Sharon and I have been happy together since 1957. We've lived to see our three talented kids lead productive lives, and now we take delight in our four beautiful grandchildren. A small-town Ohio boy could hardly have imagined a better life. In retrospect, I can see that in fulfilling my life's goals, I have redeemed the broken dreams that my father abandoned, and I have done so in a manner that made my parents proud. That is a very satisfying thought. Looking back, I see my life as an unbroken string of happy memories stretching back to that kid from eastern Ohio dreaming of pitching in a crowded Yankee stadium with the bases loaded and striking out the fearsome Joe DiMaggio. I remember. Oh yes, I remember.
S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s by G o r d o n H. B o w e r Anderson, J. R., & Bower, G. H. (1973). Human associative memory. Washington, DC: V. H. Winston. Black, J. B., & Bower, G. H. (1980). Story understanding as problem solving. Poetics, 9, 223-250. Bower, G. H. (1959). Choice-point behavior. In R. R. Bush & W. K. Estes (Eds.), Studies in mathematical learning theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bower, G. H. (1961). Application of a model to paired-associate learning. Psychometrika, 26, 255-280. Bower, G. H. (1967a). A descriptive theory of memory. In D. P. Kimble (Ed.), The organization of recall (Vol. 2). New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Bower, G. H. (1967b). A multicomponent theory of the memory trace. Psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 1). New York: Academic Press. Bower, G. H. (1970). Organizational factors in memory. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 18-46. Bower, G. H. (1972). Mental imagery and associative learning. In L. Gregg (Ed.), Cognition in learning and memory (pp. 51—88). New York: Wiley.
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Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129—148. Bower, G. H., & Forgas, J. P. (2000). Affect, memory and social cognition. In E. E. Eich (Ed.), Counter-Points: Cognition and emotion (pp. 87—168). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Bower, G. H., & Hilgard, E. R. (1981). Theories of learning (5th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bower, G. H., & Miller, N. (1958). Rewarding and punishing effects from stimulating the same place in the rat's brain. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 51, 669-674. Bower, G. H., & Morrow, D. G. (1990, January 5). Mental models in narrative comprehension. Science, 241, 44-48. Bower, G. H., & Trabasso, T. (1964). Concept identification. In R. C. Atkinson (Ed.), Studies in mathematical psychology (pp. 32-93). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bower, S. A., & Bower G. H. (1991). Asserting yourself. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. (Original work published 1976) Gluck, M., & Bower, G. H. (1988). Evaluating an adaptive network model of human learning. Journal of Memory and Language, 21, 166—195. Hilgard, E. R., & Bower, G. H. (1966). Theories of learning (3rd ed.). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Hilgard, E. R., & Bower, G. H. (1975). Theories of learning (4th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Rinck, M., & Bower, G. H. (1995.) Anaphora resolution and the focus of attention in mental models. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 110-131. Rinck, M., & Bower, G. H. (2003). Goal-based accessibility of entities within situation models. In B. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 39, pp. 213-245). New York: Academic Press. Trabasso, T., & Bower, G. H. (1968). Attention in learning. New York: Wiley.
O t h e r Publications Cited Anderson, J. R., & Labiere, C. (1998). The atomic components of thought. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Atkinson, R. C , & Shiffrin, R. M. (1965). Mathematical models for memory and learning (Stanford University Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences Report No. 79). Atkinson, R. C , & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K. W. Spence & J. T. Spence (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 2, pp. 89—195). New York: Academic Press. Barsalou, L. W. (2003). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 513—562.
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Bush, R. R., & Estes, W. K. (Eds.)- (1959). Studies in mathematical learning theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bush, R. R., & Mosteller, F. (1955). Stochastic models for learning. New York: Wiley. Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671—684. Eich, E. (1995). Searching for mood dependent memory. Psychological Science, 6, 67-75. Estes, W. K. (1950). Toward a statistical theory of learning. Psychological Review, 57, 94-107. Glenberg, A. M. (1997). What memory is for. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 20, 1—55. Hall, C. S. (1954). A primer of Freudian psychology. New York: New American Library. Hall, C. S., & Lindzey, G. (1957). Theories of personality. New York: Wiley. Hilgard, E. R. (1957). Introduction to psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace. Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kintsch, W. (1974). The representation of meaning in memory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Logan, F. A. (1956). A micromolar approach to behavior theory. Psychological Review, 63, 63-73. Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97. Paivio, A. (1990). Mental representations: A dual coding approach. New York: Oxford University Press. Sadoski, M., & Paivio, A. (2001). Imagery and text: A dual coding theory of reading and writing. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Schank, R. C , & Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Tulving, E. (1962). Subjective organization in free recall of "unrelated" words. Psychological Review, 69, 344-354. Zwaan, R. A. (2004). The immersed experiencer: Toward an embodied theory of language comprehension. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 44, pp. 35—62). New York: Academic Press.
4
J e r o m e
K a g a n
T , he second week of September 1950, in New Haven, Connecticut, was warm and humid when I arrived to begin graduate study in a department that the chairman of the Rutgers University Psychology Department, a Yale graduate, had assured me was the best in the world. A career in academic psychology was not inevitable. The symbolic categories to which my self belonged—male, Jewish, middle class, American, and White—dictated that the icon to bow before when deciding how to exploit the talents, desires, and energies that genes, family history, and school experiences had cobbled together was a mind that used its talents in the service of gaining financial security and higher status. Although medicine and law were the most obvious choices, the role of university scientist seemed attractive and realizable. I remember the glittering halo my limited adolescent imagination awarded to the lifestyle of a college professor as I watched Robert Donat in the black-and-white film, Goodbye Mr. Chips. The gentleness of the setting and the opportunity to reflect and to nurture the young
Parts of this essay were excerpted from my memoir, An Argument for Mind (2006), published by Yale University Press. 115
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struck a chord in my incoherent image of the future. Even though an uncle, a lawyer in my hometown of Rahway, New Jersey (a town 20 miles from New York that had a population of 20,000 when I was born on February 25, 1929), had urged me to attend law school and later join his office, I rejected this option because the law seemed to me an arbitrary human invention. For reasons I did not understand, nature roused my feelings and still does; whereas human artifacts, whether Roman ruins, Chinese porcelain vases, jeweled swords, or the law, did not. The attraction to nature was specific to living forms and did not extend to fossils or stars. When I silently ask why, a voice, whose source seems to be midway between head and heart, whispers sexuality. One need not be loyal to Freudian ideas, of which only a few remain roughly correct a century after their announcement, to suggest that boys find the unselfishness of mothers puzzling and the female body mysterious. I wondered why women were gentler than men and what secret was hidden beneath that continuously covered mound of hair. A career in medicine, which promised economic security, status, and a deeper understanding of human bodies, seemed the perfect choice. However, this motive competed with an equally penetrating interest in human thought. I was aware of feelings of uneasiness and believed that the persona displayed to others—a good school record, loyal friendships, and passable skill at touch football—had a fragile foundation and would collapse i f challenged by the more forceful personalities of my friends. It is difficult to ignore the uneasiness that pierces consciousness in the minutes between assignments, and I wanted to know why I felt this way. What crooked thoughts produced the gnawing doubts that did not appear to burden my friends? Contemporary adolescents harboring this feeling might be told they were born with a temperamental bias. But the consensual explanation in the 1940s was that parents were the unwitting villains. My mother was protective of, and ambitious for, her firstborn son; emotionally labile and hypercritical of her husband; and remarkably effective at generating guilt. I suspect that my wish not to disappoint her contributed to a very good school record and generally obedient posture. My father, who owned a small business, was bitter over his crippling arthritis and failure to make as much money as did his younger brother and some close friends. Thus I attributed my unsureness to a mother who re-
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strained my autonomy; a father who became unpredictably angry; and the prejudicial jeers of my Christian peers, whose parents in the years before Pearl Harbor thought that Hitler might be right. The wish to understand how these events came together to create my tensions was as strong as my interest in human bodies. One more fact made psychology attractive. Despite a resentment of my mother's anxious restrictiveness, I felt confident in her love for me, and I held a deep affection toward her. She reminded me regularly that her father, whom I had never met, was always reading books concerned with human nature, and as a late adolescent returning home, she found him with an open book on his chest dead of a heart attack. The mother whom I wanted to please revered a man who was curious about human nature. I f I discovered how the mind worked, I would preserve his passion and, perhaps, replace him in her eyes. I was vulnerable, therefore, when a professor teaching abnormal psychology asked me to accompany him across the campus at the end of class because of a comment I had made. As we strolled, he remarked, "You know, you would make a good psychologist." I have forgotten my comment but not his suggestion that there was a possibility of a creative career in this profession. No one had ever told me that I might be an unusually skilled physician, chemist, lawyer, or astronomer. When a stranger who has no reason to flatter offers a heady prediction of the future, a rational analysis of the accuracy of the prophecy is foolish. One should relish it and run. Thus, it was probably inevitable that when forced to decide between graduate work in biochemistry at the University of Texas and psychology at Yale, I chose the latter. One highly improbable event contributed to the decision. I had borrowed from the town library the recently published Organization of Behavior by Donald Hebb. This small library, which served the general public, should not have had Hebb's book on its shelves because it was technical and written for a professional audience. A letter from Frank A. Beach arrived the same week saying that I had been accepted at Yale and that i f I came, I would be his research assistant. I turned to the bibliography of Hebb's book and saw with delight that the first page was full of references to F. A. Beach. The reasoning that followed was persuasive. Hebb, who appeared to be an eminent psychologist, had high respect for a scientist who had chosen me as a tutee. My future was sealed at that moment.
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The events of the prior 2 decades had also prepared me to harbor the illusion that one day I, too, might write a scholarly treatise. The most significant conditions, in my private constructions, were my good academic record, being the beloved firstborn, desiring enhanced respectability, and living in a small town. The last fact meant that I compared my talents with a relatively small number of peers and, therefore, found it easier to arrive at a self-congratulatory conclusion. I remember the salient emotion provoked by seeing my picture in the New York Herald Tribune because my high school principal had nominated me to attend a meeting of high-achieving students. I am certain that had I been raised in Chicago or New York a more talented youth would have been nominated, and my self-evaluation would have contained far more doubt. It is not an accident that a majority of the first cohort of astronauts also grew up in small towns.
Y a l e Psychology The origins of American psychology lie in the historical resolution of two conflicting 19th-century interests: a concern with character and morality, on the one hand, and an equally passionate commitment to pragmatism, technology, and a materialistic explanation of behavior, on the other. These two ideas were incompatible at the end of the 19th century. How could anyone defend an idealistic description of humans as loyal, altruistic, cooperative, and spiritual and simultaneously accept the extreme individualistic pursuit of self-interest that society demanded and biology rationalized? Most, but not all, American psychologists in the major research universities during the 1950s were loyal to one of two traditions. Although both groups asked different questions, they held the same fundamental premise, not unlike members of the fragmented Puritan sects in colonial New England. One group, the behaviorists, was a politically dominant group seeking universal truths. They wanted to understand how animals and humans learned new habits. The second group, many loyal to Freudian ideas, wanted to understand why adults differed in their abilities, capacities for anxiety and guilt, and vulnerability to the debilitating symptoms of schizophrenia, depression, and psychopathy. The two communities gathered different evidence and
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described their results with distinctive vocabularies, but both chanted the same catechism that change and variation in thought and behavior were due primarily to experience. My cohort had decided, with embarrassingly meager evidence, that experiences were the primary causes of, and potential cures for, the habits, attitudes, and feelings that produced variation in personality and psychic distress. The desire for tidiness allowed the behaviorists to ignore other conditions that induced change, especially changes provoked by historical events and the constructions thought created. However, an equally egregious error was the reluctance to award the brain any place in explanations of differences in talents or adaptation. To recognize that possibility was to diminish the autonomy of the young discipline they had chosen. This dogmatic stance prevented them from appreciating that most behaviors can be likened to a piece of homogeneously gray cloth woven from the thin black threads of biology and the equally thin white threads of experience. The exclusion of biology was made easier by the fact that it was in accord with the meritocratic ideal held by liberal Americans who looked to science to quiet a strident eugenics movement pressing for the sterilization of the retarded and federal laws restricting the European immigration that was tainting the Mayflower pedigree during the first decades of the last century.
A Pair o f Premises Two assumptions penetrated the research on conditioning and learning in the 1950s. First, any result probably had a generality that went beyond the species observed, the actions taught, and the rewarding events administered. The second premise was that no new association could be acquired unless an action was followed by a reward or reinforcement, even though it was not clear why rewarding events had a mysterious power to establish new associations and to sustain acquired actions. A few psychologists argued that the definition of reward was circular because investigators would claim that a reward had to be present whenever an animal learned a response, even i f they could not specify what it was. Neal Miller, the intellectually dominant force in the Yale psychology department, recognized this problem. In an attempt to specify the objective features of a reward, Miller borrowed a Freudian
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notion and suggested that the essential property of a reward was that i t reduced the total amount of stimulation an organism experienced. A l t h o u g h no one knew how to measure the total amount of stimulation i n most circumstances, this hypothesis could be tested under special conditions. Fred Sheffield, who had trained w i t h E d w i n G u t h r i e and was the rebel i n the Yale department, insisted that t w o events could become associated i f they occurred close together i n t i m e . N o rewarding event was necessary for an association to be established. I chose this controversy for m y dissertation i n the fall of 1953. I had learned that the penis of copulating male rats does not remain i n the vaginal canal after a penetration. Rather, the male is reflexively t h r o w n off the female after each penetration, waits a m i n u t e or t w o , mounts the female again, and after a half dozen repetitions of this sequence finally ejaculates. This odd fact of nature provided an opportun i t y to test the opposing views of Sheffield and M i l l e r . A rat had to be at a higher, rather than a lower, level of stimulation after his first penetrations o f the female. I f M i l l e r were correct, no sexually naive rat should learn to make the correct t u r n i n a maze to contact a female receptive for sexual activity because the reward resulted i n an increase i n stimulation. Sheffield w o u l d have argued that the rat w o u l d learn to make the correct t u r n because he associated the sight and smell of the female, and the stimulation that accompanied m o u n t i n g her, w i t h t u r n i n g response. M y private expectation that the rat w o u l d learn the correct t u r n was affirmed. The male rats that were p e r m i t t e d only one or two penetrations and then separated f r o m the female as w e l l as animals that could only m o u n t the female and were denied a penetration because of a surgical closing of the vaginal canal q u i c k l y learned where the female was resting. Sheffield had been validated. However, there was a thread of support for Miller's view. Across the weeks of testing, the frustrated males waited longer before they made their first approach to the female. The arousal created by the penetration or m o u n t i n g had aversive properties, as M i l l e r w o u l d have predicted. Few, i f any, psychologists entertained the contemporary view that many events that function as rewards can be characterized as unexpected changes i n s t i m u l a t i o n — p u n c t u a t i o n marks i n the stream of experience that create a brain state conducive to the construction of an association.
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My apprenticeship with Frank Beach had humorous moments. One event remains a flashbulb memory. My first assignment as his research assistant was to determine whether male dogs that had no internal source of male hormone were capable of an erection. The presumption in 1950 was that an erection was impossible. My task was to descend to their basement home at the end of the work day, masturbate each dog and measure the diameter of the penile bulb. I performed the proper fingering and made the measurements with a caliper. A l l the dogs had erections but after several days of servicing the animals it was disconcerting to hear their barks when they heard my footsteps on the stairs in anticipation of the arrival of their generous friend. I gave Beach the data and forgot the experience. Approximately 20 years later, when I was at Harvard, Beach telephoned and out of a clear blue sky asked, "How is your publication list?" I knew immediately that he was thinking of the dogs and replied, with force, that I did not want to be associated with the work. Frank said he was preparing the data for a paper and wondered if I remembered the degree of tumescence the dogs displayed. I said that my memories had faded and added that i f he did submit the paper I did not want to be listed as an author. He agreed, but added, with a laugh, that he would include a footnote that read, "The author thanks Jerome Kagan for his handiwork." I enjoyed working in Frank's laboratory because I shared his passion for unexpected observations and his dislike for experiments based on deductions from a set of unproven premises. The pleasure of a fresh discovery more closely resembles the feeling that accompanies a visit to a foreign country than the joy that follows the confirmation of a brilliant hypothesis. Despite the gratifications of the animal laboratory, I could not set aside my more profound interest in human development and knew that this domain would be the direction my career would take. The commitment to study children was accompanied by the conviction that variation in behavior, mood, and belief was caused primarily by the private constructions children created from their experiences and not the events a camera would record. This was the explanation I rehearsed for my own personality. I wanted to prove the truth of this idea as soon as I unpacked my box of books in the fall of 1954 on the campus of Ohio State University, where I had accepted my first faculty position.
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The studies I initiated at Ohio State and continued several years later at the Fels Research Institute probed the child's constructions of the concepts "male" and "female." This research was not yet in a discovery mode for I wanted to prove that the semantic concepts "male" and "female" were linked to distinct networks of symbols. I showed 6- and 7-year-olds pairs of pictures—designs, objects, and animals— in which the two illustrations differed in size or symbolic signs of strength, danger, cleanliness, or gentleness. The children were first asked which picture (in each pair) was more like their father and, on a later occasion, which one more like their mother. Size, strength, danger, dirt, darkness, and angularity were preferentially associated with the father, whereas their opposites were linked to the mother (Kagan, 1956; Kagan & Lemkin, I960). My intuition had been confirmed, even though I could not explain why most of the children called a sawtoothed design male and a curved design female. I t cannot be a coincidence that Plato thought that the invisible forms that rendered a food sour had an angular shape, whereas sweet tastes were the product of round forms. Charles Osgood and colleagues at the University of Illinois published The Measurement of Meaning in 1957, a book popular at the time but, unfortunately, not read today (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957). Adults from various cultures applied the complementary dimensions of good—bad, strong-weak, and active-passive to the names of a large number of familiar objects, animals, and people. The latter two dimensions were linked to the network for male and female. These facts widened the theoretical space between psychologists who studied humans and those who worked with animals, because the semantic networks for good—bad, male-female, strong—weak, and active-passive have no analogous processes in any species but our own. Paul Mussen was on the Ohio State faculty when I arrived, and our shared view of development was probably the reason why in 1958 he called from his office at the University of California, Berkeley, to ask me to join him and John Conger as the third author of the second edition of the text Child Development and Personality. This book enjoyed a favorable reception over its many editions because it had adopted a developmental rather than a topical approach, awarded emphasis to
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personality, and exploited the backgrounds of three psychologists whose mutual trust permitted constructive, often harsh, critiques of the contributions of each author. However, my tenure at Ohio State lasted only 6 months, because the Korean War was ongoing, and my draft board in New Jersey, having learned that my doctorate had been awarded, ordered my induction into the Army in the spring of 1955. I expected to be assigned to Korea but did not know that the Defense Department had been troubled for several years because about one third of the lst-year class at West Point resigned from the academy at the end of the 1st year. This high rate of attrition was expensive, and the generals who initiated a research project to find out why the plebes were resigning needed a psychologist with a doctorate to test the plebes. I must have been one of the few candidates available for this assignment, and my orders in the spring of 1955 were to proceed to West Point to join a research team at the U.S. Army Hospital. My wife Cele and our young infant Janet joined me after the 2 months of basic training. We eventually learned that most of the plebes who resigned came from families with limited incomes who believed that an academy education was excellent and could not afford an expensive tuition for their sons. However, the hazing of the plebes was so harsh that many decided that the psychological cost of remaining at the academy was too expensive. The plebes whose fathers were career officers rarely left the academy. One memory from the hundreds of administrations of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) given to the plebes remains crystal clear. A tall, quiet adolescent, who had been a star quarterback in high school and hoped to play quarterback for Army when he became eligible as a 2nd-year student, was the final subject to be tested one afternoon. The last item in the T A T is a blank card. The person is asked to imagine a scene and tell a story about it. The story he told struck me as reflecting an unusual degree of humility and self-abasement. This young man imagined an Army-Navy game in which Army was behind 7—6, was on Navy's 5-yard line, and there was time for only one more play. The quarterback selected the wrong play, and Army lost the game. Peter Dawkins, the young man who told that story, became an all-American quarterback for Army, a Green Beret in the Vietnam War, appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine, and was rumored to
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be on the short list for Chief of Staff of the A r m e d Forces when he resigned to become chief executive officer of Prime America i n San Francisco—not a very self-abasing career. M y interpretation of the story was not a sensitive predictor of his life story.
The T u r n i n t h e P a t h As the crimson leaves fell in the thick forests surrounding West Point and I began thinking of my return to Ohio State after my discharge, fate arranged an unexpected telephone call. Lester Sontag, the director of the Fels Research Institute located on the campus of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, asked if I would come to the institute to direct a project recently funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I had met Sontag in 1952 when he was visiting Frank Beach. The task was to assess young adults who had been members of the longitudinal population at Fels. Between 1929 and 1957, several hundred families, mainly White, middle class, and living within 40 miles of Yellow Springs, had enrolled their infants in a study of physical and psychological growth. The explicit aim of the work was to determine whether early experiences had a profound effect on children's future personalities, talents, and character. Similar studies had been established at about the same time in Denver, Colorado, and at the University of California, Berkeley. Darwin's voyage was the model for these projects. If careful observations of animals could lead to the fruitful idea of evolution through natural selection, it was reasonable to expect that equally careful observations of children's development would uncover original and useful facts. I spent several days reading the 200 to 300 pages of longitudinal descriptions on a small number of children and examined their responses to the projective and intelligence tests administered to them. The richness of this material persuaded me that this project might yield important insights. Frank Beach advised me not to accept this position because of the intellectual isolation of Yellow Springs. He warned that if I went to Fels my voice might never again be heard. But I was 28 years old, ambitious, ingenuous, and reluctant to return to Ohio State because the intellectual ambience at that time did not match my image of Mr. Chips. Heart overpowered mind, and with high hopes I told
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Sontag I would join the staff. On a cold January afternoon in 1957 my wife, 21/2-year-old daughter, and I drove into Yellow Springs, where I began a project that became a seminal influence on my future work. The sequence of problems to solve was clear: decide which concepts could be reliably extracted from the longitudinal material, select the variables to measure in the adults, put the two sets of information together, and hope that a reasonable relation between them would emerge. Any relation that made sense would be celebrated. I f nothing of interest was discovered, no one would believe that conclusion and the effort would be ignored. Thus, the promises and risks were perfectly balanced. Sontag did not tell me that two psychologists had turned down this assignment because of its ambiguity. Howard Moss, who had received his doctorate from Ohio State in 1958, joined the Fels staff that fall and began to rate the early longitudinal material while I was interviewing and testing the adults. Howard was blind to the adult information, and I was blind to the earlier descriptions. After several years, we thought we had gleaned four facts and one enticing clue. The behavioral variation observed during the first 3 years bore little relation to the variation in adulthood, but a reasonably good prediction of select features of adult personality could be made from the behaviors displayed after school entrance. However, any behavior that was inconsistent with American sex role standards during the first half of the 20th century disappeared from the persona. The fourth fact was the single exception to the lack of behavioral preservation from the first 3 years to adulthood. A small group of children consistently avoided strangers and retreated in unfamiliar situations. Today, I would have called this quality inhibition to the unfamiliar. This small group became subdued, introverted adults who found it difficult to make friends and establish relations with love objects, reported strong feelings of tension before challenges, and needed emotional support from their families. Howard and I toyed with the possibility that this cluster might have biological roots. I could not know that 40 years later my students and I would return to this result and affirm this early intuition with a large sample of Boston children. The unexpected and puzzling result was that the adults who had been rated as avoidant during their first 3 years had minimally variable heart rates when tested in the laboratory directed by John and Beatrice
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Lacey. The Laceys believed that when a person is involved i n mental w o r k , the brain tries to shut out distracting external s t i m u l a t i o n , and a decrease i n heart rate variability is one sign of that process. The fact that the dependent, introverted adults who had been avoidant 3-yearold children showed a m i n i m a l l y variable heart rate i m p l i e d that they were creating a psychological barrier between themselves and the w o r l d . Most of the t i m e , a single, unexpected result on a small sample is an artifact. Moss, the Laceys, and I t h o u g h t that an important insight, evading us at the m o m e n t , was hidden i n the relation between heart rate variability and an avoidant style. I never forgot that observation, and as eventually demonstrated, i t was not spurious. A few families i n the Fels sample, who anticipated the hippie movement of the late 1960s, lived frugally i n small houses i n a forested area called Glen Helen. The staff member who visited regularly to observe the families always called i n advance to make an appointment. W h e n the visitor knocked on the door of one of the homes i n Glen Helen and was invited i n , she was surprised to see the father having intercourse w i t h the mother w h i l e the 3-year-old g i r l , who was our subject, sat on the father's back rocking and s m i l i n g . She left at once and returned to the institute. W e had an emergency staff meeting to discuss the seriousness of this early exposure to sexuality. W e decided not to intervene but to watch the girl's development closely. A b o u t 25 years later, when I was at Harvard, the g i r l we worried about came to m y office, and we chatted for several hours. She had graduated from college w i t h an excellent record, was engaged to a man she loved, and appeared to be a remarkably well-adjusted woman. Jung's reply to a journalist who had asked h i m w h y he placed less emphasis on sex than Freud was that Sigmund was a deprived "city boy" w h o , having never witnessed the m a t i n g and b i r t h i n g of animals, failed to appreciate the naturalness o f sexuality. This project, like a buoy between the harbor and the open sea, rested midway between loyalty to a strategy of hypothesis and proof and one of discovery. I had to c o m m i t to some a p r i o r i concepts so that H o w a r d could rate the early prose material and I could conduct the interviews. B u t neither H o w a r d nor I knew what we w o u l d find. W e were open to any message nature m i g h t whisper, as long as she whispered something. B i r t h to Maturity, the 1962 book that summarized the results of this project, w o n the Hofheimer prize f r o m the American Psychiatric Soci-
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ety and brought us some degree of celebrity (Kagan & Moss, 1962). H o w a r d and I reasoned that the prize was given because the scientific c o m m u n i t y wanted to believe i n the preservation of personality traits, but no one had provided evidence sufficiently persuasive of that idea. O u r conclusion that aggressive 10-year-old boys are more likely than others to become angry men and dependent 10-year-old girls likely to be adults who require family support represented the first t i m e psychologists had used relatively objective data to find a relation, albeit modest, between an objective feature of childhood and one i n adulthood. W e had discovered what the c o m m u n i t y wanted to believe.
T h e Move t o H a r v a r d Interest in human development was burgeoning during the early 1960s, and psychology departments without programs in development were hiring faculty. The Harvard department had persuaded the dean to appoint a professor in this domain, and a search was under way when Howard and I were finishing the analyses of the Fels data. David McClelland, who was chairman of the Social Relations Department, had read one of our papers validating some of his ideas on the need for achievement. As a result, I was invited to visit Harvard for the fall term of 1961. My few lectures must have been well received, because several months later, I was invited to join the department to create a program in human development. My family and I had become attached to the gentleness of Yellow Springs and were reluctant to move. Why give up our rustic nirvana to live in a gritty, crowded city with the extrascientific demands of university life? Over a year passed and I remained ambivalent. McClelland, a bit peeved, called to say that the department needed a decision by the summer of 1963. When I told him that my family planned to vacation in Maine in August 1963, he suggested that we stop at his Connecticut retreat on our way home and give him our answer. The day of decision had arrived. Although we were only a few hours from his home we were still uncertain and decided to stop, have a glass of wine, and make up our minds. We parked in an isolated, wooded area with a very old picnic table scarred with names enclosed in crude hearts. And then we saw carved in the old wood the letters
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FELS. I f I had been a religious person I suspect I w o u l d have interpreted this improbable event as a message f r o m an omniscient force t e l l i n g me to remain i n Y e l l o w Springs. B u t we argued that i f we d i d not like Cambridge we could always return to Fels. So I accepted, and i n August 1964, we drove f r o m Yellow Springs to Lexington, Massachusetts, w i t h m y wife and 9-year-old daughter nursing a sad mood for the 14-hour journey. I arrived w i t h a research grant f r o m N I H proposing to use Robert Fantz's new methodology to explore both universals and variation i n infant behaviors presumed to be signs of attentiveness. The single a p r i o r i assumption was that longer periods of infant staring at an event reflected greater attentiveness. The most important and unexpected result was that brain maturation d u r i n g the 1st year, one component being the establishment of firmer connections between the temporal lobe and the prefrontal cortex, introduced a new cognitive a b i l i t y at about 8 to 9 months, w h i c h I called the activation of hypotheses. This f u n c t i o n , w h i c h contemporary psychologists call working memory, explains w h y 8-month-olds, but not 4-month-olds, remember where an adult h i d a toy and cry to strangers and to temporary separation from the caretaker. I argued that 1-year-olds cry when a parent leaves them alone i n an unfamiliar place because they are able to relate the caretaker's departure to their earlier representation of his or her presence, hold both representations i n a w o r k i n g memory circuit, and because they cannot assimilate the t w o ideas are provoked i n t o a state of uncertainty that can lead to a cry of distress. W e also learned that the infant's attention was prolonged by events that were moderately discrepant f r o m their acquired knowledge. F a m i l iar events that are understood immediately, as w e l l as perceptually discriminable events that bear no relation to the infant's knowledge, are studied less than events that share some elements w i t h the infant's representations (Kagan, 1971). Thus the relation between duration of attention and discrepancy is curvilinear. The interests of infants, like those of adults, are recruited by events that differ only a l i t t l e f r o m what is familiar and, therefore, are understandable w i t h some effort. A d u l t s , too, show the keenest interest i n ideas that are slightly discrepant f r o m what they k n o w and reject those that r u n too far ahead of their presumptions. Contemporary Americans hold different premises
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about the permanence of marriages and sexual fidelity than their counterparts did 100 years earlier. Over time, the mind and heart, like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower, find a fresh novelty that recruits attention to an idea that can be assimilated with effort, and in that process, become emotionally aroused. The writers, artists, and composers who win prizes understand this deep truth. In a 1964 lecture to undergraduates I suggested that Tea and Sympathy, a play and movie that year, was popular because Americans were psychologically ready for a story about the wife of a headmaster of a private school who, in a nurturant gesture, seduces an adolescent boy at the school to help him conquer his fear of girls. I then added that American society might be ready in about 20 years for a play portraying incest between a father and a daughter and that one of them should begin preparing such a script. In 1984, exactly 20 years later, a major television network aired the drama Something About Amelia that described a suburban middle-class father who was having an incestuous relationship with his daughter. The study of the infant, and the discovery of a maturational change in the middle of the 1st year, marked my first flirtation with biology, and I wanted to learn more about the development of children who had minimal contact with the ideas and artifacts of industrialized societies.
T h e Sabbatical o n Lake A t i t l a n The good fortune that motivated Sontag's telephone call in 1956 arranged my membership on an N I H site visit team evaluating a project on malnutrition and mental development in Guatemala. Robert Klein, an American with a doctorate who had recently joined the staff of the Guatemalan Institute (Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama), later showed me the beauty of Lake Atitlan and the small Indian villages that nestled along its shores. I decided to spend my sabbatical year working in one of the most isolated villages and, with support from the Foundation for Child Development, spent 1971-1972 studying children in the village of San Marcos, population 850, which had no electricity, no postal delivery, and no resident priest.
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Several months of observation revealed that the slower psychological development of the infants due to their restricted experiences i n their adobe homes was abrogated once they could leave the home to play w i t h stones, artifacts, and other children. The infants were kept i n the home because of the belief that they were temporarily vulnerable to the evil eye of strangers u n t i l they were able to walk. Because the lively 5- and 6-year-olds on the trails of the village had experienced the same restricted variety i n experience when they were infants, the obvious inference was that the retardation of the 1st year was temporary and their cognitive g r o w t h malleable. Bob K l e i n and I were surprised by the criticisms our article received after publication i n the American Psychologist (Kagan & K l e i n , 1973). Some developmental scholars were worried that this result w o u l d persuade philanthropies and the government to reduce their f u n d i n g of intervention projects designed to help infants g r o w i n g up i n economically disadvantaged environments. I reported these results at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Margaret Mead rose after the talk to ask w h y I t o l d the audience an obvious fact that all anthropologists knew. I checked m y anger and replied politely, "Professor Mead, psychologists are not as smart as anthropologists." Bob and I made one more attempt to defend our belief that the fundamental human competences were inevitable outcomes i n most rearing environments. Barbara Rogoff and Gordon Finley administered tests assessing metamemory talents to children of varying ages f r o m San Marcos; the nearby village of San Pedro w i t h better schools, electrici t y , and more regular communication w i t h the outside w o r l d ; and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The children i n all three communities improved i n their metamemory skills w i t h each year of development, but the setting determined how early a majority of children reached maximal competence. The Cambridge children d i d so by 8 years of age, the San Pedro children by 11 years, and the San Marcos children by 14 or 15 years of age (Kagan, K l e i n , Finley, Rogoff, & N o l a n , 1979)- These data persuaded us that improvement i n metamemory skills was a natural consequence of g r o w t h . A l m o s t 20 years after leaving N e w Haven, I was shedding some of the dogma acquired d u r i n g m y graduate years. I often began the first meeting of my
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graduate seminar with the confession that because much of what I had been taught when I was in their role turned out to be mistaken, they should remain skeptical of everything that I said over the next 4 months. A greater respect for the role of culture and history was a second dividend of the year in San Marcos. Alex Inkeles, a sociologist in the Department of Social Relations, took me to lunch soon after my arrival in Cambridge and in a gentle, fatherly tone chided me for assuming that events within the family were the most significant determinants of a child's future conception of self and society. I was ignoring the force of culture and history, he insisted. I began to read more extensively in these domains and came to realize the wisdom of his judgment. About a year after my return from Guatemala, I visited two students, Charles Super and Sara Harkness, who were doing their thesis research in a small village, Leldayet, in northwest Kenya. The adults in this village possessed a vitality, dignity, and pride that contrasted with the passivity, fear, suspicion, and shame of the residents of San Marcos. One reason is that the citizens of Leldayet did not regard themselves as an oppressed group, whereas the Indians of San Marcos felt inferior to the lighter skinned citizens in Guatemala City who ran the country. Historical events, not the experiences of early childhood, led one group to feel pride and the other shame. Americans are perfectly capable of fatalism, superstition, shame, and the suppression of anger. The roll of the dice that birthed them in San Francisco rather than San Marcos pulled the thread labeled individual agency from a hat holding a large number of life itineraries.
T h e Second Y e a r The success of the strategy adopted in the study of the 1st year of a child's life suggested the wisdom of using a similar design for the 2nd year. My students and I evaluated language and symbolic abilities, memory for the location of objects, inference, and quality of social play several times during the 2nd year on several samples of children. Their behaviors implied that an initial ability to infer select feelings and intentions in others, the first signs of awareness of right and wrong actions, and a primitive awareness of selfs intentions, actions, and
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power to effect change emerged d u r i n g the last 6 months of the 2nd year (Kagan, 1981). The close temporal correspondence between the emergence of speech, empathy, a moral sense, and self-consciousness i m p l i e d that a new brain organization p e r m i t t e d these properties to emerge. One component of the new organization is the degree of connectivity between the t w o hemispheres. I t cannot be a coincidence that the neurons i n the t h i r d layer of the cortex, w h i c h comprise the callosal bridge between the t w o hemispheres, display a burst of g r o w t h early i n the 2nd year. W h e n these fibers begin to t h i n , after the 6 t h or 7 t h decade, adults realize the difficulty of remembering the name of a familiar face (Kagan & Herschkowitz, 2005). The evidence suggesting that the first signs of an appreciation of the concepts " r i g h t " and " w r o n g " appear i n the 2nd year prompted more serious reflection on human morality. M y last attempt to systematize this domain argued that the development o f morality involved a set of stages that began w i t h a concept of prohibited actions and proceeded to the capacities for empathy, shame, g u i l t , and,
finally,
notions of fairness and justice (Kagan, 2005). I n a d d i t i o n , children become vulnerable to g u i l t i f they behave i n ways that are inconsistent w i t h the features of the social categories to w h i c h they believe they belong because all individuals strive to maintain a conception of self as virtuous. Most Americans have to obtain their daily supply of virtue t h r o u g h personal accomplishments, because our egalitarian ethos forbids people f r o m using their nominal social categories, such as religion, ethnicity, and gender, for reassurance. The single-minded pursuit of wealth and enhanced status is the price Americans and Europeans must pay for the greater social harmony that is the dividend of depriving select nominal categories of their g l o w i n g halo. N o goal as g l i t t e r i n g as equality of d i g n i t y can be had w i t h o u t a price. There are good reasons to celebrate the imperative of personal accomplishment, but there are no free lunches. I f a 20-year-old cannot use his or her skin color, religion, or the occupation and education of his or her parents as automatic signs of virtue and must rely p r i m a r i l y on his or her personal achievements, we w i l l have to accommodate to the excessive self-interest and lack of institutional and group loyalty that have become more characteristic of the current generation than of the one born 2 centuries earlier.
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Historical events, as Inkeles understood, have persuaded many Americans that catering to self first is a biological imperative. For those who find this command uncomfortable, or are prevented by their history or class position from taking advantage of the opportunity to enhance self s status, it is soothing to be told by evolutionary biologists that because all animals are self-interested, there is no reason to feel shame or guilt over always placing the feelings of others behind those for self. The individualism that Ralph Waldo Emerson believed would allow the human spirit to soar, like all ideas taken to excess, has become corrosive of confidence, trust, and serenity. Montaigne was right: Moderation above all is probably the best ethic. The high respect for science in the West has led to the assumption that objective facts should be the primary guide for moral decisions that affect a majority in the society—for example, the safety of day care for infants of working mothers, the legality of abortion, the advantages of affirmative action, and the utility of the death penalty for criminals. A correct judgment should take priority over an ethically virtuous one. Although the results of science have illuminated many natural phenomena, citizens who choose to ignore scientific facts when deciding what is morally preferable are neither uninformed nor irrational. A society whose laws were always in strict accord with what was scientifically true about nature would be far more disheartening than any contemporary community. Citizens are neither stupid nor intolerant when their response to scientists presenting new facts with relevance to social issues is, "Thank you for working hard to provide us with this interesting knowledge. We shall brood on it, but at the moment, we do not wish to act on its implications for our social practices." Four continuing ethical issues in America center on each person— liberty, the legal rights of homosexuals, a woman's right to an abortion, and the legitimacy of attempts to reduce racial segregation in neighborhoods and educational institutions. The arguments for and against each are supposed to be responsive to facts. But the factual information is secondary to the emotions aroused by the ethical choice. There is little in nature that affirms or refutes any one of the opposed positions in those ethical dilemmas. Science confessed at the beginning of the last century that nature has no values, and therefore, empirical evidence has minimal implications for moral controversies.
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Unfortunately, Americans were not receptive to that declaration, because they wanted a respected source o f external support for the moral decisions they had to make. Social scientists and biologists pushed the philosophers aside and stepped forward, p r o m i s i n g to resolve ethical issues by gathering objective information on issues of c o m m u n i t y concern. However, i t is not clear that psychology, sociology, anthropology, or biology can keep that promise. The foundations of the ethics of a c o m m u n i t y must come f r o m the sentiment of the majority, and those sentiments change w i t h time. A l t h o u g h science can provide evidence that disconfirms the factual foundation of an ethical premise, i t cannot supply the basis for a moral proposition. Facts prune the tree of morality, but they cannot be its seedbed. W h i l e w r i t i n g The Second Year (Kagan, 1981), the book that summarized our project on that phase of development, I realized that m y research was d r i f t i n g away f r o m the central interests of m y colleagues. A domain w i t h i n a discipline is not u n l i k e a hurricane, for the elements close to the eye possess more power than the w i n d and water on the periphery. I had moved to the periphery when I measured the child's symbolic constructions of gender, because few psychologists cared about that issue. They wanted to k n o w what actually happened to children and not their idiosyncratic constructions. I recall an interview w i t h a 16-year-old g i r l who had been locked i n a bedroom w i t h her younger sister for her first 3 years by a psychotic mother. The girls had been fed every few days by an older sister b u t had no other social contacts. W h e n the police learned of this horrific condition, they removed both girls and placed them i n a middle-class family when they were 2 V i and 3L/2 years old. B o t h girls were mute and, of course, seriously retarded when I interviewed t h e m a few weeks after their release from their home. However, 2 years later, before I left Y e l l o w Springs for Cambridge, both had made considerable progress. I returned a decade later—they were s t i l l w i t h the same adoptive f a m i l y — t o interview them. W h e n I asked the older g i r l to guess w h y her mother had locked her i n the room, her face softened and she replied w i t h empathy that her mother had had many children to care for and she and her sister w o u l d have been less of a burden i f they had been isolated i n a part o f the house. She seemed to be saying that she had forgiven her mother. I f harsh parental punishment always had malevolent consequences, most children raised i n 17th-century Puritan N e w England homes
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w o u l d have become adults w i t h insomnia, anxiety, and depression, and a John Adams w o u l d have been impossible. I recall a dream I had i n 1982 that symbolized m y feeling of distance f r o m the eye of psychology. W h i l e w a l k i n g on a beach, I came upon a group renovating an old house and asked i f I could be of help. The leader pointed to an antique cherry chest i n need of repair and told me to w o r k on i t . After many years of solitary effort I had restored the chest to its original beauty. W h e n I turned around the house was gone.
Temperament I stumbled into my last major project because Richard Kearsley, Philip Zelazo, and I had initiated a study of the effects of infant day care in the 1970s, prompted by the fact that the Congress was considering funding federally controlled day-care centers to help working mothers. We had planned to study African American infants in the Roxbury area of Boston, but a political group, the Boston Black United Front, objected to the implications of our research and demanded that we stop. The project was saved when a Chinese clergyman volunteered to protect us if we accepted in the center some Chinese American infants living in Boston's Chinatown along with a group of White infants. That decision was fortunate, because the Chinese American infants, whether attending our day-care center or being raised only at home, differed from the White children in behavior, emotionality, and heart rate. The Chinese American infants smiled and vocalized less often, were more avoidant to the unfamiliar, cried with greater intensity when their mothers left them alone during a brief separation, and displayed less heart rate variability than the White infants. Remember the 1958 result in the Laceys' laboratory (Kagan & Moss, 1962). Ethnicity was a more important determinant of the children's behavior and biology than attendance at a day-care center (Kagan, Kearsley, & Zelazo, 1978). These results, which made a deep impression on me, motivated the study of infant temperament in the late 1970s. Cynthia Garcia-Coll was searching for a thesis topic, and reflecting on the differences between the Chinese American and White infants, I suggested she
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study the two temperamental types we eventually called inhibited and uninhibited. I needed a small amount of money for this work. Fortunately, T o m James, who was president of the Spencer Foundation i n Chicago, granted me the needed funds d u r i n g a telephone call. C y n thia's w o r k was followed by the research of Nancy Snidman, who came to m y laboratory from the University of California, Los Angeles. The results of these two theses revealed one small group of children who were consistently avoidant to unfamiliar events, called inhibited, and a complementary group who consistently approached unfamiliar events, called uninhibited (Kagan, Reznick, & Snidman, 1988). The modest preservation of these t w o profiles t h r o u g h the 7 t h year p r o m p t e d a search for earlier signs of these t w o temperamental categories, because colloquia audiences reminded me that experiences d u r i n g the first 2 years could have created both the i n h i b i t e d and the u n i n h i b ited profiles. Some colleagues were unhappy w i t h our decision to concentrate only on the children who were extremely i n h i b i t e d or u n i n h i b i t e d and to ignore those i n the m i d d l e . They believed that nature intended a c o n t i n u u m f r o m extreme t i m i d i t y to u n f a m i l i a r i t y at one end to spontaneous approach at the other. B u t I interpreted the biological literature as i m p l y i n g that very different phenotypes—very short versus very tall statures, for example—often originate i n qualitatively distinct genomes. The temperature, pressure, and volume of a saucepan of water are continually measured values, b u t ice, l i q u i d , and steam are qualitatively different phenomena that emerge f r o m particular values on these properties. The physicist Pierre D u h e m , who noted that nature consists of qualitative phenomena that cannot be formed by adding quantities, asked facetiously, " H o w many snowballs are needed to heat an oven ( D u h e m , 1954, p. 145)?" The theoretical advantage of assumi n g either continuous dimensions or discrete categories depends, of course, on the scientist's purpose. Nature has no preference. I believed that our t w o temperamental types differed qualitatively i n their suscept i b i l i t y to emotional states because they inherited qualitatively different neurobiological profiles. Hence, I was attracted to categories. B u t a preference for continua or categories rests, i n the end, on the explanation the investigator favors and the mathematical assumptions that are accepted when observations are analyzed.
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H i g h - a n d Low-Reactive I n f a n t s Nancy Snidman and I began by studying 100 healthy White infants born to middle-class families. The guiding hypothesis, supported by the work of many scientists, was that the excitability of the amygdala, and its afferent or efferent connections when unfamiliar or unexpected events occurred, represented a major difference between the two groups. The frequency and vigor of limb activity and the amount of crying to unfamiliarity might provide an index of amygdalar activity, because projections from the amygdala mediate both motoricity and distress. We presented 16-week-old infants with unfamiliar but ecologically natural events: colorful, moving mobiles; tape recordings of human speech without the support of a face; and a dilute solution of butyl alcohol presented to the infants' nostrils. I took the 100 videotapes to a quiet room to watch with an open frame of mind. Because I was not certain which qualities would prove most useful, I did not first invent an a priori code and ask graduate students to put numbers on the infant behaviors. The first 18 infants showed reasonable variation in motor activity and distress. I then put the tape of the 19th infant into the recorder and within a few minutes saw a qualitatively distinct profile to the mobiles. This girl flailed her arms, lifted her back from the infant seat, and a few seconds later, when her face assumed a pained expression, she cried. This infant displayed a qualitatively different form of arousal. The next day I watched an infant lie completely still, without a fret or cry during the entire battery. The infant temperamental categories of high and low reactive were invented that week. The high- and low-reactive infants who returned to the laboratory twice in the 2nd year differed in the tendency to be inhibited or uninhibited to unfamiliar events. This evidence led Doreen Arcus, Nancy Snidman, and me to gather similar data on over 400 fourmonth-old infants, many of whom we have followed through adolescence (Kagan, 1984/1994; Kagan & Snidman, 2004). This rich corpus of evidence revealed modest preservation of a tense, avoidant, emotionally subdued quality in about one fourth of those considered high reactive but only in a small number of those classified as low reactive, and modest preservation of an exuberant, ebullient, fearless approach
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to the w o r l d i n about one t h i r d of those considered low reactive, but a small number of those classified as h i g h reactive. I suspect that the primary bases for the different profiles of h i g h and low-reactive children are distinct neurochemistries. These two groups differed, at 11 and 15 years, i n hemispheric asymmetry i n alpha power, magnitude of the fifth waveform i n the brainstem auditory evoked potential, the balance between sympathetic and vagal tone i n the cardiovascular system, and the magnitude of the event-related potential to discrepant scenes. A small number of adolescent boys who had been low-reactive infants were unique. They were extremely self-confident, i m m u n e to serious anxiety, pragmatic, realistic, and possessed a biology reflecting low cortical and autonomic arousal to challenge. A n interviewer asked 146 of these 15-year-olds what adult vocations they were considering. T w o boys replied that they wanted to be president of the U n i t e d States. B o t h had been low-reactive infants who displayed the profile described above. Unfortunately, i t is not possible to specify the neurochemistries that are the foundation for the h i g h - and low-reactive profiles. The relevant chemistries could involve variation i n the concentrations of norepinephrine, opioids, gamma-aminobutyric acid ( G A B A ) , dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and the location and density of the receptors for these molecules. One scenario, among many, speculates that a deficiency i n G A B A - e r g i c functioning i n the hippocampus m i g h t be relevant. The hippocampus, w h i c h is activated by norepinephrine projections f r o m the locus ceruleus when unfamiliar events occur, sends projections to the amygdala. I f the hippocampal activity is not modulated, the amygdala receives excessive i n p u t , w h i c h can lead, i n t u r n , to the behaviors that define h i g h and low reactivity. This speculative argument suggests that a deficiency i n the i n h i b i t o r y functions of G A B A receptors i n the hippocampus could contribute to a high-reactive temperament. B u t this is only one o f a large number o f possible scenarios. I f a genie appeared to grant me an answer to only one question, I w o u l d ask, " W h a t are the neurochemistries of the l i m b i c lobe that contribute to these two qualities?" The selection of that question is a measure of the profound changes i n m y premises over the past 5 decades. Francis Crick published a series o f lectures soon after he and James Watson described the structure of D N A . One paragraph i n the book of the lectures stated Crick's belief that brain neurochemistry
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had a major influence on human behavior (Crick, 1966). I remember writing "No" in large letters on the margin of that page. Stubborn facts have forced me, kicking and screaming, to relinquish the pleasing a priori idea that attracted me to psychology so many years ago. Environments receive high- and low-reactive infants and, through processes that are not well understood, produce distinct personality profiles that are the joint result of the initial temperamental bias and subsequent experiences. Because only one fourth of high-reactive infants and one third of low-reactive infants develop behavioral and biological features that are in accord with their original temperament and different from the profiles displayed by most adolescents, these outcomes are not inevitable consequences of their initial temperaments. Rather, the function of an initial temperamental bias is to constrain what a child w i l l become. Very few high-reactive infants became exuberant, ebullient, fearless adolescents with low cortical arousal and high vagal tone. Very few low-reactive infants became shy, subdued, anxious adolescents with high levels of cortical arousal and sympathetic tone. The principle that a temperamental bias eliminates many possibilities rather than determines a particular profile also applies to the effects of environments. I f all one knows about a group of children is that they were born to economically secure, well-educated, loving parents, one can be relatively confident that they w i l l not become criminals, high-school dropouts, or homeless beggars, but one cannot predict with confidence what they w i l l become. Interviews with these youths at 15 to 16 years of age revealed that many high-reactive adolescents who were not exceptionally shy or tense while talking with an interviewer nonetheless confessed that they felt uneasy with strangers and often experienced a penetrating feeling of tension when they anticipated entering a crowd, meeting a stranger, or traveling to a new city. A common reply was that they did not like the feeling that accompanied their inability to predict the future, phrased usually as " I don't like not knowing what's going to happen." As a result, many high-reactive youths have a strong need to be in control of their life circumstances and are risk averse. The gnawing feeling of doubt that is experienced when self feels it lacks virtue, talent, or acceptability can be the result of two different histories. The more common route is defined by experiences that create the belief that parents do not value self, peers find self an unacceptable
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companion, teachers regard self as incompetent, or selfs social categories are symbolic of impotence. The second, less frequent, mechanism is a partial derivative o f t e m perament. Youths born w i t h a biology that spontaneously and frequently generates feelings of tension produced by afferent feedback from the body search for a reason for the unexpected pulse of uncomfortable feeling. Children raised i n Western communities, w h i c h emphasize i n d i v i d u a l responsibility, accomplishment, and character, are tempted to conclude that their tension stems f r o m a failure to meet one of their personal standards. As a result, they are vulnerable to uncomfortable moments of g u i l t . W h e n self-doubt originates i n experience, w i t h o u t a strong temperamental c o n t r i b u t i o n , adults are motivated to prove their w o r t h . I f life circumstances are not severely d e p r i v i n g , they often do so t h r o u g h extraordinary achievements, near perfect loyalties, or exceptional a l t r u i s m — t h e y are the workaholics and Mother Teresas of a society. I f life is harsh and they perceive no opportunity for obtaining these goals, they t u r n angry. The group whose self-doubt originates i n a temperamental bias is at a disadvantage. Because their biology continues to generate bodily feelings that are provocations for anxiety or g u i l t , w o r l d l y success is less effective at m u t i n g self-reproach and they become vulnerable to bouts of depression. A majority o f the small number of depressed adolescent girls i n our sample had been h i g h reactive at 4 months. A proportion of adults w i t h this temperament become chronically dysphoric. John Calvin, Sylvia Plath, T. S. Eliot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are, I believe, examples of individuals who, despite talent, achievement, and acclaim, found it difficult to persuade self of its unblemished worthiness. Unfortunately, the initial temperamental bias observed at 16 weeks cannot be observed as a distinct feature in adolescents or adults because experience has sculpted the bias into one of a large number of possible forms. A drop of black ink placed in a rotating cylinder of glycerin disappears into the clear liquid within a few minutes. From that time forward the ink cannot be seen as separate from the glycerin in which it is embedded. Carl Jung noted that each adult displays one psychological face toward others, which he called a persona, and another that represents private feelings, called the anima or animus. Some adults who appear sociable and animated live with high levels of worry and
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doubt, whereas some who appear solitary, quiet, and subdued are internally serene. Roger Brown, whose insights into language development brought deserved acclaim, surprised the friends who had read his memoir, Against My Better Judgment (Brown, 1996), for Roger described behaviors and emotions that were inconsistent with the face he had shown to friends and colleagues for many years. The maxim "You can't judge a book by its cover" has a full measure of truth. That is why I have been critical of personality theories based on questionnaire data. Physics, chemistry, and biology have become mature sciences because they were able to measure phenomena beneath the easily observed surface.
The Problem W i t h Reduction The conclusion that the different developmental trajectories of highland low-reactive infants are influenced but not determined by inherited differences in brain chemistry motivated more extensive reading of the literature relating biological and psychological phenomena and a recognition of the tension between neuroscientists and psychologists. Some members of the former group believe that when the power of machines that measure brain activity is enhanced, most phenomena now described in psychological terms w i l l be summarized in sentences that refer only to neurons, molecules, receptors, and activated neural circuits. These scientists are made uneasy by the messiness of multiple vocabularies, whereas the pluralist psychologists are friendlier to the assumption that no single language could describe all we observe and wish to explain. Distinct vocabularies for mind and brain are necessary because the meaning networks for each class of events are unique. Voluntary behaviors have an intention; thoughts have meaning; speech has semantic coherence; and feelings have a quality. Because neuronal activity has none of these properties, one cannot replace the psychological terms with biological language without losing important components of meaning. One reason for this claim is that identical psychological meanings can emerge from different brain profiles. A woman at a dinner party who wants the salt shaker that is resting a foot away could say to the person sitting next to her, "Pass the salt, please"; point to the salt
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shaker; or m i m i c the shaking of salt w i t h her hand. These three communications w o u l d evoke a different pattern of brain activity i n the speaker as w e l l as her partner, but the meaning intended and apprehended w o u l d be the same. Furthermore, the same experimental manipulation of brain can result i n different behaviors and physiologies because the products of each person's history influence the consequences of a brain state. W h e n
individuals with the short form in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene, which governs the amount of serotonin in the synapse, were given a drug that promotes the release of serotonin, adults with more education and a higher income had a brisker biological reaction than those with less education and a smaller income (Manuck, Flory, Ferrell, & Muldoon, 2004). Each brain profile permits more than one inference about a person's psychological state. I f obsessive-compulsive disorder originates in an overly excitable circuit, scientists might one day discover this neuronal profile. However, the content of the obsessive ruminations— blasphemous thoughts for a religious Muslim versus thoughts of dirty underwear for a nonreligious American—is unlikely to be detectable with brain measures alone. These facts require knowing something of the individual's history, but that history, whether of strong religious indoctrination during childhood or years of an exclusively secular education, cannot be described with the words that are appropriate for brain activity. The leech's nervous system is considerably simpler than our own and easier to study. A trio of California scientists stimulated varied groups of neurons to see if they could predict whether the subsequent motor pattern would have been a swimming or a crawling movement i f the leech were in its natural state. They could not make this simple prediction 100% of the time because the reaction following stimulation of the neurons depended on the prior state of the nervous system as well as unpredictable noise in the neuronal matrix (Briggman, Abarbanel, & Kristan, 2005). There is an inherent unpredictability at the level of the neuron that resembles the uncertainty surrounding the position and velocity of an electron. If scientists with complete control of a simple nervous system cannot predict with certainty which one of two acts w i l l occur, it is highly unlikely that any future scientist with the most advanced equipment w i l l be able to predict what an individual
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w i l l feel, think, or do from peering at the evidence generated by the brain. Furthermore, as is true of quantum mechanics, the act of measurement alters the state that the scientist wishes to measure. Therefore, it is impossible to be certain of the psychological or biological state of an individual before those states are measured. Free w i l l resides in the very narrow corridor of unpredictability that nature built to frustrate those who entertain the illusion that one day they might know it all. Because neuroscientists and psychologists rely on different evidence, they often arrive at different conclusions. A woman in a quiet room is told she w i l l hear a series of sounds, for example "pa," and should strike a key the moment she hears the sound change in any way. The recorder is turned on and she hears a pa sound 20 times followed by a sound that is a very slight physical variant on the prior acoustic profile. Although the woman does not perceive any difference between this tone and the preceding 20 tones and, therefore, does not hit the key, her temporal lobe generates a distinct waveform at 250 milliseconds following the subtle change in sound (Rivera-Gaxiola, Csibra, & Johnson, 2000). I f conscious perception of a deviant tone is the evidence, it is correct to conclude that the woman did not perceive any change in sound. If the brain's reaction to the tone is the evidence, it is equally correct to conclude that her brain detected the new stimulus. The data provided by the woman's conscious state and her pyramidal neurons require different inferences. It took me too long to appreciate that the evidence that comes from verbal reports (i.e., questionnaires and interviews), observed behaviors, and biological measurements requires unique constructs. Scientists should not use predicates appropriate for one of these classes of information with any of the other two. For example, the meaning of the category "extraversion" is a set of answers on a questionnaire. This construct, which does not specify the contexts in which the trait is expressed, is far too abstract to apply to behavior and is an inappropriate label for a brain profile. This conclusion does not mean that we should ignore the contributions of biology to a deeper understanding of behavior, thought, and feeling. Every behavior is ambiguous with respect to its origins and adding biological information can illuminate the meaning of a psychological event and bring deeper understanding. A second reason for gathering biological evidence is that it can lead to rejection of an
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incorrect explanation of a psychological phenomenon. The discovery that the brains of most autistic patients are abnormal i n some way has led to a rejection of the explanation held by most psychologists and psychiatrists i n 1950 that their mothers were cold and aloof.
Specificity One afternoon in 1993, I met a retired Swiss pediatrician with a rich background in brain development who wanted to learn more about psychological growth. Norbert Herschkowitz and I spent over a decade surveying what many scientists had discovered about brain maturation and which of those facts might help to explain the times of emergence of the universal psychological properties of humans. The product of this collaboration appeared in 2005 in A Young Mind in a Growing Brain. The biological literature we read revealed a stark contrast between the extraordinary specificity in biological functions and the vague generality of many current psychological concepts. Owls provide an exquisite illustration. The average diameter of the black spots on the underside feathers of a female owl is positively related to the competence of the immune system of her offspring, but, surprisingly, the number of black spots is not (Roulin, 2004). Empirical observations force biologists to be "splitters" and to contextualize their conclusions. Psychologists and psychiatrists, by contrast, tend to be "lumpers," preferring abstract concepts that ignore species, gender, age, and setting. For example, psychologists are fond of the word stress, even though the biological reactions to an infection, malnutrition, or physical abuse are different from those evoked by worrying about an examination or a job interview. The age when young children solve a cognitive problem is often a function of tiny details in the testing procedure. For example, preschool children tested in a small room (4 feet X 6 feet) without any windows failed to use a landmark (a single blue wall) to help them locate where an adult had hidden an object. However, children of the same age did use the blue wall as a landmark i f they were tested in a larger room (8 feet X 12 feet; Learmonth, Nadel, & Newcombe, 2002). Simply changing the size of the room led to a different conclusion.
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The behavioral science faculty at Harvard was divided on this issue when I joined the Social Relations Department in 1964. The small Psychology Department located in Memorial Hall, which included S. S. Stevens and George Miller, was friendlier to the need for contextualization of concepts. And within Social Relations, the psychologists were friendlier than the sociologists and social anthropologists. The first fragmentation came when the sociologists, who had grown tired of having to defend the scientific legitimacy of their proposed faculty appointments, seceded from the department in 1970. When the social anthropologists did the same, it became obvious that the remaining small band of psychologists in Social Relations had to be joined with those in Memorial Hall to form one department. However, the latter put up a defense. They first persuaded Jerry Bruner to join them, and later George Miller asked me to bring the developmental group into psychology. His request created a conflict. If I consented, a uniform Psychology Department would be postponed. I talked with John Dunlop, the dean of the faculty, who agreed with my reason for remaining in Social Relations. And in a brilliant move, Dunlop persuaded Gardner Lindzey to come to Harvard as chairman in 1972-1973 to unite the two groups. Gardner accomplished this feat with extraordinary skill in less than a year. I was saddened by his decision to leave Harvard after his heady victory. I return to the issue of specificity. A more accurate understanding of the relation between brain and mind will require acceptance of the principle that the relation is always dependent on the context in which the person or animal is acting. Thus, the belief that psychologists must describe a domain of knowledge or ability cheek to jowl with the context of observation represents a novel view that was missing in the research Howard Moss and I conducted at the Fels Institute. The constructs we invented in 1962 were far too abstract and free of contextual constraints. Although a small number of competences are not restricted to a limited number of settings—for example, the sensory capacities for taste, smell, vision, sound, and pain; the abilities to perceive motion, shape, and pattern; and the capacity to locomote, kick, and retrieve objects—this breadth does not characterize most conceptual structures, inferences, and emotional states. The new position has the advantage of accommodating to the dramatic changes in behavior that occur over the life span. Newborns are unable to
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discriminate between a static schematic face w i t h the features placed i n their proper arrangement and a face i n w h i c h the parts are rearranged as long as the top half of the stimulus has equivalent contour. However, 3-month-olds are able to discriminate between these t w o forms. Few human competences, i n c l u d i n g speed of w a l k i n g , remain unchanged across the life span. Because many cognitive abilities and emotions are displayed i n a l i m i t e d number of settings, i t is fair to ask w h y many psychologists prefer to describe these functions as continually present i n m i n d or brain, even t h o u g h there is no sign of their presence i n settings i n w h i c h the competence should be actualized. I suspect one reason is that those who favor this view usually begin their empirical w o r k w i t h an a p r i o r i semantic concept they believe has a common referent—for example, number, intentionality, anxiety, or fear—rather than try to discover the conditions that produced a reliable observation. Investigators who begin w i t h a representation of a phenomenon, observed or imagined, rather than w i t h a semantic concept appreciate that most psychological abilities and qualities vary w i t h the context i n w h i c h the agent is observed. The experimental procedure is, of course, an essential part of the context. The powerful theoretical structure of q u a n t u m mechanics was developed because an earlier cohort tried to understand the reasons for the spectral lines an atom emitted. These physicists tried to explain a robust phenomenon rather than prove a particular theory of atoms. The attraction to decontextualized psychological processes is aided by the fact that the names for most psychological processes are predicates that can be used w i t h different classes of agents behaving i n varied settings. The predicate running can apply to a boy fleeing a bear, a g i r l racing toward a friend, or a stream of water flowing d o w n a h i l l . The absence of other English verbs to convey a roughly similar meaning tempts listeners to attribute the same core meaning to the w o r d running, even t h o u g h its sense meaning is altered when the referent changes. There is always more a m b i g u i t y surrounding the meaning of a predicate than the meaning of a noun. Psychological states such as anxious, stressed, attached, or depressed are predicates that occur i n sentences describing varied species acting i n different settings. The meanings of these words, therefore, depend on the agent, the context, and the source of evidence.
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Adolescents who had been high-reactive infants are more anxious over encountering crowds and strangers than over school performance. Low-reactive adolescents display the opposite pattern of more realistic worries. Thus, the concept "anxiety" is ambiguous u n t i l one specifies the target of worry. Many current psychological concepts fail to specify the agent—mouse, cat, monkey, infant, college student, or aging a d u l t — o r the situation i n w h i c h agents perceive, infer, decide, feel, remember, and act. I t is t i m e to replace telegraphic utterances such as "remember," "positive affect," and "regulate," w i t h f u l l sentences.
Summing Up A career in science, like the psychological development of a person, is marked by the preservation of a small number of early assumptions and the rejection of a much larger number and, i f chance is kind, the addition of a few new ideas to the network that guides the next question. I have always believed that the unexpected and the unfamiliar are primary provocateurs of activity in brain and mind. The first question brain and mind ask of any event is, "Is this event unfamiliar or unexpected?" If the answer is affirmative, special processes are engaged. I f faces with fearful expressions are unexpected, the amygdala becomes excited. But i f happy faces are unexpected, the same degree of amygdalar activation is observed. A skin conductance response or a larger than average eyeblink to the unexpected appearance of a photograph of a snake or a face with a fearful expression is more likely to reflect a state of surprise than a state of fear. I also remain convinced that the child's symbolic interpretations of experience, not the events recorded by a camera, control the most important judgments about self and others. I f this were not true most adolescents raised in 17th-century New England homes would have developed depression or psychopathy. However, observations since 1950 have allowed me to reject three deeply flawed premises that had burdened my earlier reflections. I was convinced that biology was irrelevant, that family experiences during the opening 3 years of life had permanent formative power, and that the semantic concepts in journals and conference conversations referred to real things in the world. I confess, with embarrassment,
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that I used to believe that the words ego, anxiety, and learn fit nature like a glove. These misleading notions have been replaced w i t h half a dozen new assumptions that seem to be i n closer correspondence w i t h nature's plans. A child's temperamental qualities are more potent than I had imagined; the maturation of the brain constrains the age when the universal properties of our species appear; the events of the opening years do not set the clay of personality firm; the schemata derived f r o m perception, the semantic networks behind words and sentences, and the procedural skills of sensorimotor schemes are qualitatively different forms of knowledge; the meaning and t r u t h status of every scientific concept cannot be separated f r o m the evidence on w h i c h i t was based; and finally, the economy, social structure, and values of a society d u r i n g a historical era, like a fence restraining a baboon troop at a zoo, l i m i t each person's understanding of the w o r l d to a small space i n w h i c h a life is conducted. I celebrate the extraordinary progress psychology has made over the past 50 years. Donald H e b b , Neal M i l l e r , and Frank Beach w o u l d smile i f they were able to read today's technical papers. However, there is s t i l l no consensus on psychology's fundamental entities and their associated functions. Whatever these concepts t u r n out to be, their names w i l l not be the terms used to describe the underlying brain processes necessary for their emergence. I do not question the importance of discovering the profiles of brain activity that occur when a person recalls the author of a book, imagines a f r i g h t e n i n g accident, or thinks about a loved one. B u t the brain state produced by an event is a j o i n t product of a person's past history and the event, and the former is not knowable f r o m the brain evidence alone. I cannot imagine any future technology that could reveal the perceptions and thoughts created d u r i n g the sabbatical year on Lake A t i t l a n that had such a profound effect on m y views of development. These representations, and the experiences on w h i c h they were based, must be described w i t h a psychological vocabulary. W e w i l l always require psychological terms for the semantic and schematic representations activated by D y l a n Thomas's line, " D o not go gentle i n t o that good n i g h t . " A complete understanding of brain is not synonymous w i t h a f u l l understanding
of mind.
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Six improbable events shaped m y less than auspicious journey. They were, i n chronological order: (a) g r o w i n g up a firstborn son i n the 1930s i n a small N e w Jersey t o w n that had unusually good public schools; (b) the t o w n library having Donald Hebb's book i n the spring of 1950 when I was deciding between biochemistry and psychology; (c) the rejection by t w o psychologists of Lester Sontag's i n v i t a t i o n to conduct the study at the Fels Institute; (d) the opportunity to join a group of consultants i n Guatemala; (e) the minister i n Boston's Chinat o w n w h o , i n return for rescuing our day-care project, required the enrollment of Chinese American infants; and finally, (f) the trusting generosity of T o m James, who funded Cynthia Garcia-Coll's thesis research on temperament. Equally significant was the good fortune that brought an extraordinary group of talented students and colleagues to m y laboratories over the past half century. H a d any one of these events failed to occur, m y t i n y m u r a l w o u l d be shamefully incomplete. The probability of all of them occurring is so low that this combination has to be a freak sequence.
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Arcus, D., & Kagan, J. (1995). Temperament and craniofacial variation in the first two years. Child Development, 66, 1529—1540. DiLalla, L. F., Kagan, J., & Reznick, J. S. (1994). Genetic etiology of behavioral inhibition among 2-year-old children. Infant Behavior & Development, 17, 405-412. Gortmaker, S. L., Kagan, J., Caspi, A., & Silva, P. A. (1997). Day length during pregnancy and shyness in children: Results from northern and southern hemispheres. Developmental Psychobiology, 31, 107—114. Kagan, J. (1956). The child's perception of the parent. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 53, 257-258. Kagan, J. (1971). Change and continuity in infancy. New York: Wiley. Kagan, J. (1981). The second year. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kagan, J. (1987a). The concept of behavioral inhibition to the unfamiliar. In J. S. Reznick (Ed.), Perspectives on behavioral inhibition (pp. 1-23). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kagan, J. (1987b). Perspectives on infancy. In J. Osofsky (Ed.), Handbook of infant development (2nd ed., pp. 1150-1198). New York: Wiley. Kagan, J. (1994). The nature of the child. New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1984) Kagan, J. (1994). On the nature of emotion. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59(7-24, Serial No. 240). Kagan, J. (1998a). Biology and the child. In W. Damon (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology (5th ed.,Vol. 3, pp. 177-236). New York: Wiley. Kagan, J. (1998b). Three seductive ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kagan, J. (2002a). Surprise, uncertainty, and mental structures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kagan, J. (2002b). Temperament and emotion. In R. J. Davidson & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of the affective sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kagan, J. (2003). Biology, context, and developmental inquiry. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 1-23. Kagan, J. (2005). Human morality and temperament. In G. Carlo & C. P. Edwards (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation: Vol. 51: Moral motivation through the life span (pp. 1—32). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kagan, J. (2006). An argument for mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kagan, J., Arcus, D., Snidman, N., Peterson, E., Steinberg, D., & Rimm-Kaufman, S. E. (1995). Asymmetry of finger temperature and early behavior. Developmental Psychobiology, 28, 443-451. Kagan, J., Arcus, D., Snidman, N., & Rimm-Kaufman, S. E. (1995). Asymmetry of temperature and cardiac activity. Neuropsychology, 9, 47—51. Kagan, J., Arcus, D., Snidman, N., Wang, W. F., Hendler, J., & Greene, S. (1994). Reactivity in infants: A cross-national comparison. Developmental Psychology, 30, 342-345.
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Kagan, J., & Harrison, L. E. (Eds.)- (2006). Developing cultures. New York: Routledge. Kagan, J., & Herschkowitz, N. (2005). A young mind in a growing brain. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Kagan, J., Kearsley, R. B., & Zelazo, P. R. (1978). Infancy: Its place in human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kagan, J., & Klein, R. E. (1973). Cross-cultural perspectives on early development. American Psychologist, 28, 947-961. Kagan, J., Klein, R. E., Finley, G. E., Rogoff, B., & Nolan, E. (1979). A crosscultural study of cognitive development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 44(5), 1-77. Kagan, J., & Lemkin, J. (I960). The child's differential perception of parental attributes. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 61, 440-447. Kagan, J., & Moss, H. A. (1962). Birth to maturity. New York: Wiley. Kagan, J., Reznick, J. S., & Snidman, N. (1987). The physiology and psychology of behavioral inhibition in children. Child Development, 58, 1459-1473. Kagan, J., Reznick, J. S., & Snidman, N. (1988, April 8). Biological bases of childhood shyness. Science, 240, 167—171. Kagan, J., & Saudino, K. J. (2001). Behavioral inhibition and related temperaments. In R. N. Emde & J. K. Hewitt (Eds.), Infancy to early childhood: Genetic and environmental influences on developmental change (pp. 111 — 119). New York: Oxford University Press. Kagan, J., & Snidman, N. (1991). Infant predictors of inhibited and uninhibited profiles. Psychological Science, 2, 40—44. Kagan, J., & Snidman, N. (2004). The long shadow of temperament. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kagan, J., Snidman, N., & Arcus, D. (1998a). Childhood derivative of high and low reactivity in infancy. Child Development, 69, 1483-1493. Kagan, J., Snidman, N., & Arcus, D. (1998b). The value of extreme groups. In R. B. Cairns, L. R. Bergman, & J. Kagan (Eds.), Methods and models for studying the individual (pp. 65-82). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kagan, J., Snidman, N., Arcus, D., & Reznick, J. S. (1994). Galen's prophecy: Temperament in human nature. New York: Basic Books. Kagan, J., Snidman, N., McManis, M., & Woodward, S. (2001). Temperamental contributions to the affect family of anxiety. In A. Schneier (Ed.), The psychiatric clinics ofNorth America, socialanxiety disorder'(pp. 677-688). Philadelphia: Saunders. Kagan, J., Snidman, N., & Peterson, E. (2000). Temperature asymmetry and behavior. Developmental Psychobiology, 37, 186-191. Kagan, J., Snidman, N., Zentner, M., & Peterson, E. (1999). Infant temperament and anxious symptoms in school age children. Development and Psychopathology, 11, 209-224. McManis, M. H., Kagan, J., Snidman, N., & Woodward, S. A. (2002). EEG asymmetry, power, and temperament in children. Developmental Psychobiology, 41,169—177. Mussen, P. H., Conger, J. J., & Kagan, J. (1963). Child development and personality (2nd ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
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Rosenbaum, J., Biederman, J., Hirshfeld-Becker, D. R., Kagan, J., Snidman, N., Friedman, D., et al. (2000). A controlled study of behavioral inhibition in children of parents with panic disorder and depression. American Journal of Psychiatry, 157, 2002-2010. Rosenberg, A., & Kagan, J. (1987). Iris pigmentation and behavioral inhibition. Developmental Psychobiology, 20, 337—392. Rosenberg, A., & Kagan, J. (1989). Physical and physiological correlates of behavioral inhibition. Developmental Psychobiology, 22, 253—270. Schwartz, C. E, Snidman, N., & Kagan, J. (1996). Early childhood temperament as a determinant of externalizing behavior in adolescence. Development & Psychopathology, 8, 527-537. Schwartz, C. E., Snidman, N., & Kagan, J. (1999)- Adolescent social anxiety as an outcome of inhibited temperament in childhood. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 38, 1008—1015. Smoller, J. W., Rosenbaum, J. F., Biederman, J., Susswein, L. S., Kennedy, J., Kagan, ] . , et al. (2001). Genetic association analysis of behavioral inhibition using candidate loci from mouse models. American Journal of Medical Genetics (Neuropsychiatric Genetics), 105, 226—235. Snidman, N., Kagan, J., Riordan, L., & Shannon, D. (1995). Cardiac function and behavioral reactivity during infancy. Psychophysiology, 32, 199—207. Woodward, S. A., Lenzenweger, M. F., Kagan, J., Snidman, N., & Arcus, D. (2000). Taxonic structure of infant reactivity: Evidence from a taxometric perspective. Psychological Science, 11, 296-301. Woodward, S. A., McManis, M. H., Kagan, J., Deldin, P., Snidman, N., Lewis, M., & Kahn, V. (2001). Infant temperament and the brainstem auditory evoked response in later childhood. Developmental Psychology, 37, 533-538.
O t h e r Publications Cited Briggman, K. L., Abarbanel, H. D. I., & Kristan, W. B. (2005, February 11). Optical imaging of neuronal populations during decision making. Science, 307, 896—901. Brown, R. (1996). Against my better judgment. New York: Harrington Park Press. Crick, F. (1966). Of molecules and men. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Duhem, P. (1954). The aim and structure of physical theory (P. P. Wiener, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1906) Learmonth, A. E., Nadel, L., & Newcombe, N. S. (2002). Children's use of landmarks. Psychological Science, 13, 337-341. Manuck, S. B., Flory, J. D., Ferrell, R. E., & Muldoon, M. F. (2004). Socio-economic status covaries with central nervous system serotonergic responsivity as a function of allelic varieties in the serotonin transporter gene-linked polymorphic region. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 29, 651—668. Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
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Rivera-Gaxiola, M., Csibra, G., & Johnson, M. H. (2000). Electrophysiological correlates of cross-linguistic speech perception in English speakers. Behavioral Brain Research, 111, 13—23. Roulin, A. (2004). Proximate basis for the covariation between melanin based female ornament and offspring quality. Oecologia, 140, 668—675.
5
D a n i e l
K a h n e m a n
i was born in Tel Aviv, in what is now Israel, in 1934, while my mother was visiting her extended family there; our regular domicile was in Paris. My parents were Lithuanian Jews who had immigrated to France in the early 1920s and had done quite well. My father was the chief of research in a large chemical factory. Although my parents loved most things French and had some French friends, their roots in France were shallow, and they never felt completely secure. Of course, whatever vestiges of security they'd had were lost when the Germans swept into France in 1940. What was probably the first graph I ever drew, in 1941, showed my family's fortunes as a function of time— and around 1940 the curve crossed into the negative domain. I w i l l never know if my vocation as a psychologist was a result of my early exposure to interesting gossip or whether my interest in gossip was an indication of a budding vocation. Like many other Jews, I suppose, I grew up in a world that consisted almost exclusively of people and words, and most of the words were about people. Nature barely existed, and I never learned to identify flowers or to appreciate animals. But the people my mother liked to talk about with her friends and my father were fascinating in their complexity. Some people were better than others, but the best were far from perfect, and no one was 155
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simply bad. Most of her stories were touched by irony, and they all had two sides or more. I n one experience I remember v i v i d l y , there was a rich range of shades. I t must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of D a v i d and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play w i t h a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned m y b r o w n sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was w a l k i n g d o w n an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. H e was wearing the black u n i f o r m that I had been t o l d to fear more than others—the one w o r n by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to h i m , t r y i n g to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me u p , and hugged me. I was terrified that he w o u l d notice the star inside m y sweater. H e was speaking to me w i t h great emotion i n German. W h e n he p u t me d o w n , he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that m y mother was r i g h t : People were endlessly complicated and interesting. M y father was picked up i n the first large-scale sweep for Jews and was interned for 6 weeks i n Drancy, w h i c h had been set up as a way station to the extermination camps. H e was released through the intervention of his firm, w h i c h was directed (a fact I learned only from an article I read a few years ago) by the financial mainstay of the Fascist anti-Semitic movement i n France i n the 1930s. The story of m y father's release, w h i c h I never f u l l y understood, also involved a beautiful woman and a German general who loved her. Soon afterward, we escaped to V i c h y France and stayed on the Riviera i n relative safety u n t i l the Germans arrived and we escaped again to the center of France. M y father died of inadequately treated diabetes i n 1944, just 6 weeks before the D-day he had been w a i t i n g for so desperately. Soon m y mother, m y sister, and I were free and beginning to hope for the permits that w o u l d allow us to j o i n the rest of our family i n Palestine. I had g r o w n up intellectually precocious and physically inept. The ineptitude must have been quite remarkable, because d u r i n g m y last t e r m i n a French lycee i n 1946, m y eighth-grade physical education teacher blocked m y inclusion i n the Tableau d'Honneur (the Honor Roll) on the grounds that even his extreme tolerance had l i m i t s . I m u s t also have been quite a pompous c h i l d . I had a notebook of essays
with a title that still makes me blush: "What I Write of What I
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T h i n k . " The first essay, w r i t t e n before I turned 1 1 , was a discussion of faith. I t approvingly quoted Pascal's saying "Faith is God made perceptible to the heart" ( " H o w r i g h t this is!"), then went on to p o i n t out that this genuine spiritual experience was probably rare and unreliable and that cathedrals and organ music had been created to generate a more reliable, ersatz version of the thrills of faith. The c h i l d who wrote this had some aptitude for psychology and a great need for a normal life.
Adolescence The move to Palestine completely altered m y experience of life, partly because I was held back a year and enrolled i n the eighth grade for a second t i m e , w h i c h meant that I was no longer the youngest or the weakest boy i n the class. A n d I had friends. W i t h i n a few months of m y arrival, I had found happier ways of passing t i m e than by w r i t i n g essays to myself. I had much intellectual excitement i n h i g h school, b u t i t was induced by great teachers and shared w i t h like-minded peers. I t was good for me not to be exceptional anymore. A t age 1 7 , 1 had some decisions to make about m y m i l i t a r y service.
1 applied to a unit that would allow me to defer my service until I had completed my first degree; this entailed spending the summers in officer-training school and part of my military service using my professional skills. By that time I had decided, with some difficulty, that I would be a psychologist. The questions that interested me in my teens were philosophical—the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the reasons not to misbehave. But I was discovering that I was more interested in what made people believe in God than I was in whether God existed, and I was more curious about the origins of people's peculiar convictions about right and wrong than I was about ethics. When I went for vocational guidance, psychology emerged as the top recommendation, with economics not too far behind. I got my first degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2 years with a major in psychology and a minor in mathematics. I was mediocre in math, especially in comparison with some of the people I was studying with—several of whom went on to become world-class mathematicians. But psychology was wonderful. As a
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lst-year student, I encountered the w r i t i n g s o f the social psychologist K u r t Lewin and was deeply influenced by his maps of the life space i n w h i c h m o t i v a t i o n was represented as a force field acting on the i n d i v i d u a l f r o m the outside, pushing and p u l l i n g i n various directions. N o w , 50 years later, I s t i l l draw on Lewin's analysis of how to induce changes i n behavior for m y introductory lecture to graduate students at the W o o d r o w W i l s o n School o f Public Affairs at Princeton. I was also fascinated by m y early exposures to neuropsychology. There were the weekly lectures of our revered teacher Yeshayahu L e i b o w i t z — I once went to one of his lectures w i t h a fever of 4 1 degrees Celsius (105.8 degrees Fahrenheit); they were simply not to be missed. A n d there was a visit by the German neurosurgeon K u r t Goldstein, w h o claimed that large wounds to the brain eliminated the capacity for abstraction and turned people i n t o concrete thinkers. Furthermore, and most exciting as Goldstein described t h e m , the boundaries that separated abstract f r o m concrete were not the ones that philosophers w o u l d have set. W e now k n o w that there was l i t t l e substance to Goldstein's assertions, b u t at the t i m e , the idea o f basing conceptual distinctions on neurological observations was so t h r i l l i n g that I seriously considered switching to medicine to study neurology. The chief of neurosurgery at the Hadassah H o s p i t a l , w h o was a neighbor, wisely talked me out of that plan by p o i n t i n g out that the study of medicine was too demanding to be undertaken as a means to any goal other than practice.
T h e M i l i t a r y Experience In 1954, I was drafted as a second lieutenant, and after an eventful year as a platoon leader, I was transferred to the Psychology branch of the Israel Defense Forces. There, one of my occasional duties was to participate in the assessment of candidates for officer training. We used methods that had been developed by the British Army in World War I I . One test involved a leaderless group challenge in which eight candidates with all insignia of rank removed and only numbers to identify them were asked to lift a telephone pole from the ground. They were then led to an obstacle, such as a 2.5-meter wall, where they were told to get to the other side of the wall without the pole
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touching either the ground or the wall and without any of them touching the wall. I f one of these things happened, they had to declare it and start again. Two of us would watch the exercise, which often took half an hour or more. We were looking for manifestations of the candidates' characters, and we saw plenty: True leaders, loyal followers, empty boasters, and wimps—there were all kinds. Under the stress of the event, we felt the soldiers' true natures would reveal themselves, and we would be able to tell who would be a good leader and who would not. The trouble was that, in fact, we could not tell. Every month or so we had a "statistics day," during which we would get feedback from the officer-training school, indicating the accuracy of our ratings of candidates' potential. The story was always the same: Our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. But the next day, there would be another batch of candidates to be taken to the obstacle field, where we would face them with the wall and see their true natures revealed. I was so impressed by the complete lack of connection between the statistical information and the compelling experience of insight that I coined a term for it: the illusion of validity. Almost 20 years later, this term made it into the technical literature (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). It was the first cognitive illusion I discovered. Closely related to the illusion of validity was another feature of our discussions about the candidates we observed: our willingness to make extreme predictions about their future performance on the basis of a small sample of behavior. In fact, the issue of willingness did not arise, because we did not really distinguish predictions from observations. The soldier who took over when the group was in trouble and led the team over the wall was a leader at that moment, and if we asked ourselves how he would perform in officer training or on the battlefield, the best bet was simply that he would be as good a leader then as he was now. Any other prediction seemed inconsistent with the evidence. As I understood clearly only when I taught statistics some years later, the idea that predictions should be less extreme than the information on which they are based is deeply counterintuitive. The theme of intuitive prediction came up again when I was given the major assignment for my service in the unit: to develop a method for interviewing all combat-unit recruits to screen the unfit and help allocate soldiers to specific duties. An interviewing system was already
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i n place, administered by a small cadre of interviewers, mostly young women, themselves recent graduates f r o m good h i g h schools, w h o had been selected for their outstanding performance i n psychometric tests and for their interest i n psychology. The interviewers were instructed to f o r m a general impression of a recruit and then to provide some global ratings o f how w e l l the recruit was expected to perform i n a combat u n i t . Here again, the statistics o f v a l i d i t y were dismal. The interviewers' ratings d i d not predict w i t h substantial accuracy any of the criteria i n w h i c h we were interested. M y assignment involved t w o tasks: first to figure out whether there were personality dimensions that mattered more i n some combat jobs than i n others and then to develop interviewing guidelines that w o u l d identify those dimensions. T o perform the first task, I visited units o f infantry, artillery, armor, and others and collected global evaluations of the performance of the soldiers i n each u n i t as w e l l as ratings on several personality dimensions. I t was a hopeless task, b u t I d i d n ' t realize that then. Instead, spending weeks and months on complex analyses using a manual Monroe calculator w i t h a rather iffy handle, I invented a statistical technique for the analysis o f m u l t i a t t r i b u t e heteroscedastic data, w h i c h I used to produce a complex description of the psychological requirements of the various units. I was capitalizing on chance, b u t the technique had enough charm for one of m y graduate school teachers, the eminent personnel psychologist E d w i n Ghiselli, to w r i t e i t up i n what became m y first published article. This was the beginning o f a lifelong interest i n the statistics of prediction and description. I had devised personality profiles for a criterion measure, and now I needed to propose a predictive interview. The year was 1955, just after the publication of Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction, Paul Meehl's (1954) classic book in which he showed that clinical prediction was consistently inferior to actuarial prediction. Someone must have given me the book to read, and it certainly had a big effect on me. I developed a structured interview schedule w i t h a set of questions about various aspects of civilian life that the interviewers were to use to generate ratings about six different aspects of personality (including, I remember, such items as "masculine pride" and "sense of obligation"). Soon I had a near mutiny on my hands. The cadre of interviewers, who had taken pride in the exercise of their clinical skills, felt that they were being
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reduced to unthinking robots, and my confident declarations—"Just make sure that you are reliable, and leave validity to me"—did not satisfy them. So I gave in. I told them that after completing "my" six ratings as instructed, they were free to exercise their clinical judgment by generating a global evaluation of the recruit's potential in any way they pleased. A few months later, we obtained our first validity data, using ratings of the recruits' performance as a criterion. Validity was much higher than it had been. My recollection is that we achieved correlations of close to .30, in contrast to about .10 with the previous methods. The most instructive finding was that the interviewers' global evaluation, produced at the end of a structured interview, was by far the most predictive of all the ratings they made. Trying to be reliable had made them valid. The puzzles with which I struggled at that time were the seeds of the article on the psychology of intuitive prediction that Amos Tversky and I published much later (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). The interview system has remained in use, with little modification, for many decades. And i f it appears odd that a 21-year-old lieutenant would be asked to set up an interviewing system for an army, one should remember that the state of Israel and its institutions were only 7 years old at the time, that improvisation was the norm, and that professionalism did not exist. My immediate supervisor was a man with brilliant analytical skills who had trained in chemistry but was entirely self-taught in statistics and psychology. W i t h a bachelor's degree in the appropriate field, I was the best-trained professional psychologist in the military.
G r a d u a t e S c h o o l Years I came out of the Army in 1956. The academic planners at the Hebrew University had decided to grant me a fellowship to obtain a doctorate abroad so that I would be able to return and teach in the psychology department, but they wanted me to acquire some additional polish before facing the bigger world. Because the psychology department had temporarily closed, I took some courses in philosophy, did some research, and read psychology on my own for a year. In January of 1958, my wife Irah and I landed at the San Francisco airport, where
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the now famous sociologist A m i t a i Etzioni was w a i t i n g to take us to Berkeley, to the Flamingo M o t e l on University Avenue, and to the beginning of our graduate careers. M y experience of graduate school was quite different f r o m that of students today. The m a i n landmarks were examinations, i n c l u d i n g an enormous multiple-choice test that covered all of psychology (a long list of classic studies preceded by the question, " W h i c h of the f o l l o w i n g is not a study of latent learning?" comes to m i n d ) . There was less emphasis on formal apprenticeship and v i r t u a l l y no pressure to publish while i n school. Students took quite a few courses and read broadly. I remember a comment of Professor Rosenzweig's on the occasion of m y oral exam. I should enjoy m y current state, he advised, because I w o u l d never again k n o w as much psychology. H e was r i g h t . I was an eclectic student. I took a course on subliminal perception f r o m Richard Lazarus and wrote w i t h h i m a speculative article on the temporal development of percepts, w h i c h was soundly and correctly rejected. From that subject I came to an interest i n the more technical aspects of vision, and I spent some t i m e learning about optical benches f r o m T o m Cornsweet. I audited the clinical sequence and learned about personality tests f r o m Jack Block and Harrison G o u g h . I took classes
on Wittgenstein in the philosophy department. I dabbled in the philosophy of science. There was no particular rhyme or reason to what I was doing, but I was having fun. My most significant intellectual experience during those years did not occur in graduate school. In the summer of 1958, my wife and I drove across the United States to spend a few months at the Austen Riggs Clinic in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where I studied with the well-known psychoanalytic theorist David Rapaport, who had befriended me on a visit to Jerusalem a few years earlier. Rapaport believed that psychoanalysis contained the elements of a valid theory of memory and thought. The core ideas of that theory, he argued, were laid out in the seventh chapter of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which sketches a model of mental energy (cathexis). W i t h the other young people in Rapaport's circle, I studied that chapter like a Talmudic text and tried to derive from it experimental predictions about shortterm memory. This was a wonderful experience, and I would have gone back the following summer i f Rapaport had not died suddenly
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later that year. I had enormous respect for his fierce mind. Fifteen years after that summer, I published a book entitled Attention and Effort (Kahneman, 1973), which contained a theory of attention as a limited resource. I realized only while writing the acknowledgments for the book that I had revisited the terrain to which Rapaport had first led me. Austen Riggs was a major intellectual center for psychoanalysis, dedicated primarily to the treatment of dysfunctional descendants of wealthy families. I was allowed into the case conferences, which were normally scheduled on Fridays, usually to evaluate a patient who had spent a month of live-in observation at the clinic. Those attending would have received and read, the night before, a folder with detailed notes from every department about the person in question. There would be a lively exchange of impressions among the staff, which included the fabled Erik Erikson. Then the patient would come in for a group interview, which was followed by a brilliant discussion. On one of those Fridays, the meeting took place and was conducted as usual, despite the fact that the patient had committed suicide during the night. It was a remarkably honest and open discussion, marked by the contradiction between the powerful retrospective sense of the inevitability of the event and the obvious fact that the event had not been foreseen. This was another cognitive illusion to be understood. Many years later, Baruch Fischhoff wrote, under my and Amos Tversky's supervision, a beautiful doctoral thesis that illuminated the hindsight effect. In the spring of 1961, I wrote my dissertation on a statistical and experimental analysis of the relations between adjectives in the semantic differential. This allowed me to engage in two of my favorite pursuits: the analysis of complex correlational structures and FORTRAN programming. One of the programs I wrote took 20 minutes to run on the university mainframe, and I could tell whether it was working properly by the sequence of movement on the seven tape units that it used. I wrote the thesis in 8 days, typing directly on the purple "ditto" sheets that we used for duplication at the time. That was probably the last time I wrote anything without pain. The paper itself, by sharp contrast, was so convoluted and dreary that my teacher, Susan Ervin, memorably described the experience of reading it as "wading
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through wet m u s h . " I spent the summer of 1961 i n the ophthalmology department doing research on contour interference. A n d then i t was t i m e to go home to Jerusalem and start teaching i n the psychology department at the Hebrew University.
T r a i n i n g t o Become a P r o f e s s i o n a l I loved teaching undergraduates, and I was good at it. The experience was consistently gratifying because the students were so good: They were selected on the basis of a highly competitive entrance exam, and most were easily doctoral material. I took charge of the basic lst-year statistics class and for some years taught both that course and the 2ndyear course in research methods, which also included a large dose of statistics. To teach effectively, I did a lot of serious thinking about valid intuitions on which I could draw and erroneous intuitions that I should teach students to overcome. I had no idea, of course, but I was laying the foundation for a program of research on judgment under uncertainty. Another course I was teaching concerned the psychology of perception, which also contributed directly to the same program. I had learned a lot in Berkeley, but I felt that I had not been adequately trained to do research. I therefore decided that to acquire the basic skills I would need to have a proper laboratory and do regular science; I needed to be a solid short-order cook before I could aspire to become a chef. So I set up a vision lab, and over the next few years I turned out competent work on energy integration in visual acuity. At the same time, I was trying to develop a research program to study affiliative motivation in children, using an approach that I called a "psychology of single questions." My model for this kind of psychology was research reported by Walter Mischel in which he devised two questions that he posed to samples of children in Caribbean islands: You can have this (small) piece of candy today or this (large) piece of candy in one week (196lb, p. 4), and "Let's pretend that there is a magic man . . . who could change you into anything that you would want to be, what would you want to be?" (196la, p. 546). The answer to the latter question was scored 1 if it referred to a profession or to an achievement-related trait and 0 if it did not. The responses to these
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lovely questions turned out to be plausibly correlated with numerous characteristics of the child and the child's background. I found this inspiring: Mischel had succeeded in creating a link between an important psychological concept and a simple operation to measure it. There was (and still is) almost nothing like it in psychology, in which concepts are commonly associated with procedures that can be described only by long lists or by convoluted paragraphs of prose. I got nice results in my one-question studies but never wrote up any of the work, because I had set myself impossible standards: In order not to pollute the literature, I wanted to report only findings that I had replicated in detail at least once, and the replications were never quite perfect. I realized only gradually that my aspirations demanded more statistical power and therefore much larger samples than I was intuitively inclined to run. This observation also came in handy some time later. My achievements in research in these early years were humdrum, but I was excited by several opportunities to bring psychology to bear on the real world. For these tasks, I teamed up with a colleague and friend, Ozer Schild. Together we designed a training program for functionaries who were to introduce new immigrants from underdeveloped countries, such as Yemen, to modern farming practices (Kahneman & Schild, 1966). We also developed a training course for instructors in the flight school of the Air Force. Our faith in the usefulness of psychology was great, but we were also well aware of the difficulties of changing behavior without changing institutions and incentives. We may have done some good, and we certainly learned a lot. I had the most satisfying "eureka" experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again, they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in
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general they do better the next time. So please don't tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.
This was a joyous moment i n w h i c h I understood an important t r u t h about the w o r l d : Because we tend to reward others when they do w e l l and punish them when they do badly and because there is regression to the mean, i t is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them. I immediately arranged a demonstration i n w h i c h each participant tossed t w o coins at a target behind his back, w i t h o u t any feedback. W e measured the distances f r o m the target and could see that those who had done best the first t i m e had mostly deteriorated on their second try and vice versa. B u t I knew that this demonstration w o u l d not undo the effects of lifelong exposure to a perverse contingency. M y first experience of t r u l y successful research came i n 1965, when I was on sabbatical leave at the University of M i c h i g a n where I had been invited by Jerry B l u m , who had a lab i n w h i c h volunteer participants performed various cognitive tasks w h i l e i n the g r i p of powerful emotional states induced by hypnosis. D i l a t i o n of the p u p i l is one of the manifestations of emotional arousal, and I therefore became interested i n the causes and consequences of changes of p u p i l size. B l u m had a graduate student named Jackson Beatty. U s i n g p r i m i t i v e equipment, Beatty and I made a real discovery: W h e n people were exposed to a series of digits they had to remember, their pupils dilated steadily as they listened to the digits and contracted steadily when they recited the series. A more difficult transformation task (adding 1 to each of a series of four digits) caused a m u c h larger d i l a t i o n of the p u p i l . W e q u i c k l y published these results and w i t h i n a year had completed four articles, t w o of w h i c h appeared i n Science. M e n t a l effort remained the focus of m y research d u r i n g the subsequent year, w h i c h I spent at Harvard. D u r i n g that year, I also heard a b r i l l i a n t talk on experimental studies of attention by a star English psychologist named Anne Treism a n , who w o u l d become m y wife 12 years later. I was so impressed that I c o m m i t t e d myself to w r i t e a chapter on attention for a handbook i n cognitive psychology. The book was never published, and m y chapter eventually became a rather ambitious book of its o w n . The w o r k on vision that I d i d that year was also more interesting than the w o r k I
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had been doing i n Jerusalem. W h e n I returned home i n 1967, I was, finally,
a well-trained research psychologist.
The C o l l a b o r a t i o n W i t h Amos Tversky From 1968 to 1969,1 taught a graduate seminar on the applications of psychology to real-world problems. In what turned out to be a lifechanging event, I asked my younger colleague Amos Tversky to tell the class about what was going on in his field of judgment and decision making. Amos told us about the work of his former mentor, Ward Edwards, whose lab was using a research paradigm in which the participant is shown two book bags filled with poker chips. The bags are said to differ in their composition (e.g., 70:30 or 30:70 white:red). One of them is randomly chosen, and the participant is given an opportunity to sample successively from it and required to indicate after each trial the probability that it came from the predominantly red bag. Edwards had concluded from the results that people are "conservative Bayesians": They almost always adjust their confidence interval in the proper direction, but rarely far enough. A lively discussion developed around Amos's talk. The idea that people were conservative Bayesians did not seem to fit with the everyday observation of people commonly jumping to conclusions. It also appeared unlikely that the results obtained in the sequential sampling paradigm would extend to the situation, arguably more typical, in which sample evidence is delivered all at once. Finally, the label of "conservative Bayesian" suggested the implausible image of a process that gets the correct answer, then adulterates it with a bias. I learned recently that one of Amos's friends met him that day and heard about our conversation, which Amos described as having severely shaken his faith in the neoBayesian idea. I do remember that Amos and I decided to meet for lunch to discuss our hunches about the manner in which probabilities are "really" judged. There we exchanged personal accounts of our own recurrent errors of judgment in this domain and decided to study the statistical intuitions of experts. I spent the summer of 1969 doing research at the Applied Psychological Research Unit in Cambridge, England. Amos stopped there for a
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few days on his way to the U n i t e d States. I had drafted a questionnaire on intuitions about sampling variability and statistical power, w h i c h was based largely on m y personal experiences of incorrect research planning and unsuccessful replications. The questionnaire consisted of a set of questions, each of w h i c h could stand on its o w n — t h i s was to be another attempt to do psychology w i t h single questions. Amos went off and administered the questionnaire to participants at a meeting of the Mathematical Psychology Association, and a few weeks later we met i n Jerusalem to look at the results and w r i t e a paper. The experience was magical. I had enjoyed collaborative w o r k before, but this was something different. Amos was often described by people who knew h i m as the smartest person they knew. H e was also very funny, w i t h an endless supply of jokes appropriate to every nuance of a situation. I n his presence, I became funny as w e l l , and the result was that we could spend hours of solid w o r k i n continuous m i r t h . The paper we wrote was deliberately humorous. W e described a prevalent belief i n the "law of small numbers," according to w h i c h the law of large numbers extends to small numbers as w e l l . A l t h o u g h we never wrote another humorous paper, we continued to find amusement i n our work. I have probably shared more than half of the laughs of my
life with Amos. And we were not just having fun. I quickly discovered that Amos had a remedy for everything I found difficult about writing. No wetmush problem for him: He had an uncanny sense of direction. W i t h him, movement was always forward. Progress might be slow, but each of the myriad of successive drafts that we produced was an improvement. This was not something I could take for granted when working on my own. Amos's work was always characterized by confidence and by a crisp elegance, and it was a joy to find those characteristics now attached to my ideas as well. As we were writing our first paper, I was conscious of how much better it was than the more hesitant piece I would have written by myself. I don't know exactly what it was that Amos found to like in our collaboration—we were not in the habit of trading compliments—but clearly he was also having a good time. We were a team, and we remained in that mode for well over a decade. The Nobel Prize was awarded for work that we produced during that period of intense collaboration.
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A t the beginning of our collaboration, we quickly established a rhythm that we maintained during all our years together. Amos was a night person, and I was a morning person. This made it natural for us to meet for lunch and a long afternoon together and still have time to do our separate things. We spent hours each day just talking. When Amos's first son Oren, then 15 months old, was told that his father was at work, he volunteered the comment "Aba talk Danny." We were not only working, of course—we talked of everything under the sun and got to know the other's mind almost as well as our own. We could (and often did) finish each other's sentences and complete the joke that the other had wanted to tell, but somehow we also kept surprising each other. We did almost all the work on our joint projects while physically together, including the drafting of questionnaires and papers, and we avoided any explicit division of labor. Our principle was to discuss every disagreement until it had been resolved to mutual satisfaction, and we had tie-breaking rules for only two topics: whether an item should be included in the list of references (Amos had the casting vote) and who should resolve any issue of English grammar (my dominion). We did not initially have a concept of a senior author. We tossed a coin to determine the order of authorship of our first paper and alternated from then on until the pattern of our collaboration changed in the 1980s. One consequence of this mode of work was that all our ideas were jointly owned. Our interactions were so frequent and so intense that there was never much point in distinguishing between the discussions that primed an idea, the act of uttering it, and the subsequent elaboration of it. I believe that many scholars have had the experience of discovering that they had expressed (sometimes even published) an idea long before they really understood its significance. It takes time to appreciate and develop a new thought. Some of the greatest joys of our collaboration—and probably much of its success—came from our ability to elaborate each other's nascent thoughts: If I expressed a halfformed idea, I knew that Amos would be there to understand it, probably more clearly than I did, and if it had merit he would see it. Like most people, I am somewhat cautious about exposing tentative thoughts to others. I must first make sure that they are not idiotic.
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I n the best years of the collaboration, this caution was completely absent. The m u t u a l trust and the lack of defensiveness that we achieved were particularly remarkable because both of u s — A m o s even more than I—were k n o w n to be severe critics. O u r magic worked only when we were by ourselves. W e soon learned that j o i n t collaboration w i t h any t h i r d party should be avoided because we became competitive i n a threesome. Amos and I shared the wonder o f together o w n i n g a goose that could lay golden eggs—a j o i n t m i n d that was better than our separate minds. The statistical record confirms that our j o i n t w o r k was superior, or at least more influential, than the w o r k we d i d i n d i v i d u a l l y (Laibson & Zeckhauser, 1998). Amos and I published eight journal articles d u r i n g our peak years (1971—1981), of w h i c h five had been cited more than 1,000 times by the end o f 2002. O f our separate works, w h i c h i n total number about 2 0 0 , only Amos's theory o f similarity (Tversky, 1977) and m y book on attention (Kahneman, 1973) exceeded that threshold. The special style of our collaborative w o r k was recognized early by a referee of our first theoretical paper (on representativeness), who caused i t to be rejected by Psychological Review. The eminent psychologist w h o wrote that review—his anonymity was betrayed years l a t e r — p o i n t e d out that he was familiar w i t h the separate lines of w o r k that Amos and I had been pursuing and considered both respectable. However, he added the unusual remark that we seemed to b r i n g out the worst i n each other and certainly should not collaborate. H e found most objectionable our method of using m u l t i p l e single questions as evidence, and he was w r o n g there as w e l l .
T h e 1974 Science A r t i c l e a n d t h e R a t i o n a l i t y Debate From 1971 to 1972, Amos and I were at the Oregon Research Institute (ORI) in Eugene, a year that was by far the most productive of my life. We did a considerable amount of research and writing on the availability heuristic, on the psychology of prediction, and on the phenomena of anchoring and overconfidence—thereby fully earning the label "dynamic duo" that our colleagues attached to us. Working evenings and nights, I also completely rewrote my book, Attention and
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Effort, which went to the publisher that year and remains my most significant independent contribution to psychology. At O K I , I came into contact for the first time with an exciting community of researchers whom Amos had known since his student days at Michigan: Paul Slovic, Sarah Lichtenstein, and Robyn Dawes. Lewis Goldberg was also there, and I learned much from his work on clinical and actuarial judgment and from Paul Hoffman's ideas about paramorphic modeling. Clearly, ORI was one of the major centers of judgment research, and I had the occasion to meet quite a few of the significant figures of the field when they came visiting, Ken Hammond among them. Some time after our return from Eugene, Amos and I settled down to review what we had learned about three heuristics of judgment (representativeness, availability, and anchoring) and about a list of a dozen biases associated with these heuristics. We spent a delightful year in which we did little but work on a single article. On our usual schedule of spending afternoons together, a day in which we advanced by a sentence or two was considered quite productive. Our enjoyment of the process gave us unlimited patience, and we wrote as if the precise choice of every word were a matter of great moment. We published the article in Science (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) because we thought that the prevalence of systematic biases in intuitive assessments and predictions could possibly be of interest to scholars outside psychology. This interest, however, could not be taken for granted, as I learned in an encounter with a well-known American philosopher at a party in Jerusalem. Mutual friends had encouraged us to talk about the research that Amos and I were doing, but almost as soon as I began my story, the philosopher turned away, saying, "I am not really interested in the psychology of stupidity." The Science article turned out to be a rarity: an empirical psychological article that (some) philosophers and (a few) economists could and did take seriously. What was it that made readers of the article more willing to listen than the philosopher at the party? I attribute the unusual attention at least as much to the medium as to the message. Amos and I had continued to practice the psychology of single questions, and the Science article—like others we wrote— incorporated questions that were cited verbatim in the text. These questions, I believe, personally engaged readers and convinced them that we were
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concerned not with the stupidity of Joe Public but with a much more interesting issue: the susceptibility to erroneous intuitions of intelligent, sophisticated, and perceptive individuals such as themselves. Whatever the reason, the article soon became a standard reference as an attack on the rational-agent model, and it spawned a large literature in cognitive science, philosophy, and psychology. We had not anticipated that outcome. I realized only recently how fortunate we were not to have aimed deliberately at the large target we happened to hit. If we had intended the article as a challenge to the rational model, we would have written it differently, and the challenge would have been less effective. An essay on rationality would have required a definition of that concept, a treatment of boundary conditions for the occurrence of biases, and a discussion of many other topics about which we had nothing of interest to say. The result would have been less crisp, less provocative, and ultimately less defensible. As it was, we offered a progress report on our study of judgment under uncertainty, which included much solid evidence. A l l inferences about human rationality were drawn by the readers themselves. The conclusions that readers drew were often too strong, mostly because existential quantifiers, as they are prone to do, disappeared in the transmission. Whereas we had shown that (some, not all) judgments about uncertain events are mediated by heuristics, which (sometimes, not always) produce predictable biases, we were often read as having claimed that people cannot think straight. The fact that men had walked on the moon was used more than once as an argument against our position. Because our treatment was mistakenly taken to be inclusive, our silences became significant. For example, the fact that we had written nothing about the role of social factors in judgment was taken as an indication that we thought these factors were unimportant. I suppose that we could have prevented at least some of these misunderstandings, but the cost of doing so would have been too high. The interpretation of our work as a broad attack on human rationality—rather than as a critique of the rational-agent model— attracted much opposition, some harsh and dismissive. Some of the critiques were normative, arguing that we compared judgments with inappropriate normative standards (Cohen, 1981; Gigerenzer, 1991,
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1996). We were also accused of spreading a tendentious and misleading message that exaggerated the flaws of human cognition (Lopes, 1991, and many others). The idea of systematic bias was rejected as unsound on evolutionary grounds (Cosmides & Tooby, 1996). Some authors dismissed the research as a collection of artificial puzzles designed to fool undergraduates. Numerous experiments were conducted over the years to show that cognitive illusions could be "made to disappear" and that heuristics had been invented to explain "biases that do not exist" (Gigerenzer, 1991). After participating in a few published skirmishes in the early 1980s, Amos and I adopted a policy of not criticizing the critiques of our work, although we eventually felt compelled to make an exception (Kahneman & Tversky, 1996). A young colleague and I recently reviewed the experimental literature and concluded that the empirical controversy about the reality of cognitive illusions dissolves when viewed in the perspective of a dualprocess model (Kahneman & Frederick, 2002). The essence of such a model is that judgments can be produced in two ways (and in various mixtures of the two): a rapid, associative, automatic, and effortless intuitive process (sometimes called System 1) and a slower, rulegoverned, deliberate, and effortful process (System 2; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich, 1999). System 2 "knows" some of the rules that intuitive reasoning is prone to violate and sometimes intervenes to correct or replace erroneous intuitive judgments. Thus, errors of intuition occur when two conditions are satisfied: System 1 generates the error, and System 2 fails to correct. In this view, the experiments in which cognitive illusions were "made to disappear" did so by facilitating the corrective operations of System 2. They tell us little about the intuitive judgments that are suppressed. I f the controversy is so simply resolved, why was it not resolved in 1971 or in 1974? The answer that Frederick and I proposed refers to the conversational context in which the early work was done: A comprehensive psychology of intuitive judgment cannot ignore such controlled thinking, because intuition can be overridden or corrected by selfcritical operations, and because intuitive answers are not always available. But this sensible position seemed irrelevant in the early days of research on judgment heuristics. The authors of the "law of small numbers" saw no need to examine correct statistical reasoning. They believed that including easy questions in the design would insult the participants and bore the readers. More
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generally, the early studies of heuristics and biases displayed little interest in the conditions under which intuitive reasoning is preempted or overridden— controlled reasoning leading to correct answers was seen as a default case that needed no explaining. A lack of concern for boundary conditions is typical of "young" research programs, which naturally focus on demonstrating new and unexpected effects, not on making them disappear. (Kahneman & Frederick, 2002, p. 50) W h a t happened, I suppose, is that because the 1974 paper was influential i t altered the context i n w h i c h i t was read i n subsequent years. Its being misunderstood was a direct consequence of its being taken seriously. I wonder how often this occurs. Amos and I always dismissed the criticism that our focus on biases reflected a generally pessimistic view of the human m i n d . W e argued that this criticism confuses the m e d i u m of bias research w i t h a message about rationality. This confusion was indeed common. I n one of our demonstrations of the availability heuristic, for example, we asked respondents to compare the frequency w i t h w h i c h some letters appeared i n the first and i n the t h i r d position i n words. W e selected letters that i n fact appeared more frequently i n the t h i r d position and showed that even for these letters, the first position was judged more frequent, as w o u l d be predicted on the idea that i t is easier to search t h r o u g h a mental dictionary by the first letter. The experiment was used by some critics as an example of our o w n confirmation bias, because we had demonstrated availability only i n cases i n w h i c h this heuristic led to bias. B u t this criticism assumed that our a i m was to demonstrate biases and missed the p o i n t of what we were t r y i n g to do. O u r a i m was to show that the availability heuristic controls frequency estimates even when that heuristic leads to error—an argument that cannot be made when the heuristic leads to correct responses, as i t often does. There is no denying, however, that the name of our method and approach created a strong association between heuristics and biases and thereby contributed to g i v i n g heuristics a bad name, w h i c h we d i d not intend. I recently came to realize that the association of heuristics and biases has affected me as w e l l . I n the course of an exchange of messages w i t h Ralph H e r t w i g (no fan of heuristics and biases), I noticed that the phrase " j u d g i n g by representativeness" was i n m y m i n d a label for a cluster of errors i n i n t u i t i v e statistical judgment.
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Judging probability by representativeness is indeed associated with systematic errors. But a large component of the process is the judgment of representativeness, and that judgment is often subtle and highly skilled. The feat of the master chess player who instantly recognizes a position as "white mates in three" is an instance of judgment of representativeness. The undergraduate who instantly recognizes that enjoyment of puns is more representative of a computer scientist than of an accountant is also exhibiting high skill in a social and cultural judgment. My long-standing failure to associate specific benefits to the concept of representativeness was a revealing mistake. What did I learn from the controversy about heuristics and biases? Like most protagonists in debates, I have few memories of having changed my mind under adversarial pressure, but I have certainly learned more than I know. For example, I am now quick to reject any description of our work as demonstrating human irrationality. When the occasion arises, I carefully explain that research on heuristics and biases only refutes an unrealistic conception of rationality, which identifies it as comprehensive coherence. Was I always so careful? Probably not. In my current view, the study of judgment biases requires attention to the interplay between intuitive and reflective thinking, which sometimes allows biased judgments and sometimes overrides or corrects them. Was this always as clear to me as it is now? Probably not. Finally, I am now very impressed by the observations I mentioned earlier, that the most highly skilled cognitive performances are intuitive and that many complex judgments share the speed, confidence, and accuracy of routine perception. This observation is not new to me, but did it always loom as large in my views as it now does? Almost certainly not. As my obvious struggle with this topic reveals, I thoroughly dislike controversies in which it is clear that no minds will be changed. I feel diminished by losing my objectivity when in point-scoring mode and downright humiliated when I get angry. Indeed, my phobia for professional anger is such that I have allowed myself for many years the luxury of refusing to referee papers that might arouse that emotion: I f the tone is snide or the review of the facts more tendentious than normal, I return the paper to the editor without commenting on it. I consider myself fortunate not to have had too many of the nasty
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experiences of professional quarrels and am grateful for the occasional encounters w i t h open minds across lines of sharp debate ( A y t o n , 1998;
Klein, 2000).
Prospect T h e o r y After the publication of our paper on judgment in Science in 1974, Amos suggested that we study decision making together. This was a field in which he was already an established star and about which I knew very little. For an introduction, he suggested that I read the relevant chapters of the text Mathematical Psychology: A n Elementary
Introduction, of which he was a coauthor (Coombs, Dawes, & Tversky, 1970). Utility theory and the paradoxes of Allais and Ellsberg were discussed in the book, along with some of the classic experiments in which major figures in the field had joined in an effort to measure the utility function for money by eliciting choices between simple gambles. I learned from the book that the name of the game was the construction of a theory that would explain Allais's paradox parsimoniously. As psychological questions go, this was not a difficult one because Allais's famous problems are, in effect, an elegant way to demonstrate that the subjective response to probability is not linear. The subjective nonlinearity is obvious: The difference between probabilities of .10 and .11 is clearly less impressive than the difference between 0 and .01 or between .99 and 1.00. The difficulty and the paradox exist only for decision theorists, because the nonlinear response to probability produces preferences that violate compelling axioms of rational choice and are therefore incompatible with standard expected utility theory. The natural response of a decision theorist to the Allais paradox, certainly in 1975 and probably even today, would be to search for a new set of axioms that have normative appeal and yet permit the nonlinearity. The natural response of psychologists was to set aside the issue of rationality and to develop a descriptive theory of the preferences that people actually have, regardless of whether these preferences can be justified. The task we set for ourselves was to account for observed preferences in the quaintly restricted universe within which the debate about the theory of choice has traditionally been conducted: monetary gambles
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with few outcomes (all positive) and definite probabilities. This was an empirical question, and data were needed. Amos and I solved the data collection problem with a method that was both efficient and pleasant. We spent our hours together inventing interesting choices and examining our preferences. I f we agreed on the same choice we provisionally assumed that other people would also accept it, and we went on to explore its theoretical implications. This unusual method enabled us to move quickly, and we constructed and discarded models at a dizzying rate. I have a distinct memory of a model that was numbered 37, but cannot vouch for the accuracy of our count. As was the case in our work on judgment, our central insights were acquired early, and as was the case in our work on judgment, we spent a vast amount of time and effort before publishing a paper that summarized those insights (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). The first insight came as a result of my naivete. When reading the mathematical psychology textbook, I was puzzled by the fact that all the choice problems were described in terms of gains and losses (actually, almost always gains), whereas the utility functions that were supposed to explain the choices were drawn with wealth as the abscissa. This seemed unnatural and psychologically unlikely. We immediately decided to adopt changes and/or differences as carriers of utility. We had no inkling that this obvious move was truly fundamental or that it would open the path to behavioral economics. Harry Markowitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1990, had proposed changes of wealth as carriers of utility in 1952, but he did not take this idea very far. The shifts from wealth to changes of wealth as carriers of utility is significant because of a property of preferences that we later labeled loss aversion: The response to losses is consistently much more intense than the response to corresponding gains, with a sharp kink in the value function at the reference point. Loss aversion is manifest in the extraordinary reluctance to accept risk that is observed when people are offered a gamble on the toss of a coin: Most w i l l reject a gamble in which they might lose $20 unless they are offered more than $40 if they win. The concept of loss aversion was, I believe, our most useful contribution to the study of decision making. The asymmetry between gains and losses solves quite a few puzzles, including the widely noted and economically irrational distinction that people draw between opportunity costs and "real" losses. Loss aversion also helps explain why
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real estate markets dry up for long periods when prices are d o w n , and i t contributes to the explanation of a widespread bias favoring the status quo i n decision m a k i n g . Finally, the asymmetric consideration of gains and losses extends to the domain of moral intuitions i n w h i c h imposing losses and failing to share gains are evaluated quite differently. B u t of course, none of that was visible to Amos and me when we first decided to assume a k i n k e d value f u n c t i o n — w e needed that k i n k to account for choices between gambles. Another set of early insights came when Amos suggested that we flip the signs of outcomes i n the problems we had been considering. The result was exciting. W e immediately detected a remarkable pattern, w h i c h we called reflection: Changing the signs of all outcomes i n a pair of gambles almost always caused the preference to change f r o m risk averse to risk seeking or vice versa. For example, we both preferred a sure gain of $900 over a .9 probability of gaining $1,000 (or nothing), b u t we preferred a gamble w i t h a .9 probability of losing $1,000 over a sure loss of $900. W e were not the first to observe this pattern. Raiffa (1968) and W i l l i a m s (1966) knew about the prevalence of risk seeking i n the negative domain, but ours was apparently the
first
serious attempt to make something of i t . W e soon had a draft of a theory of risky choice, w h i c h we called value theory and presented at a conference i n the spring of 1975. W e then spent about 3 years polishing i t u n t i l we were ready to submit the article for publication. O u r effort d u r i n g those years was divided between the tasks of exploring interesting implications of our theoretical formulation and developing answers to all plausible objections. T o amuse ourselves, we invented the specter of an ambitious graduate student l o o k i n g for flaws, and we labored to make that student's task as thankless as possible. The most novel idea of prospect theory occurred to us i n that defensive context. I t came late, as we were preparing the final version of the paper. W e were concerned w i t h the fact that a straightforward application of our model i m p l i e d that the value of the prospect ($100, . 0 1 ; $100, .01) is larger than the value of ($100, .02). The prediction is w r o n g , of course, because most decision makers w i l l spontaneously transform the former prospect i n t o the latter and treat them as equivalent i n subsequent operations of evaluation and choice. T o eliminate the p r o b l e m , we proposed that decision makers, prior to
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evaluating the prospects, perform an editing operation that collects similar outcomes and adds their probabilities. We went on to propose several other editing operations that provided an explicit and psychologically plausible defense against a variety of superficial counterexamples to the core of the theory. We had succeeded in making life quite difficult for that pedantic graduate student. But we had also made a truly significant advance by making it explicit that the objects of choice are mental representations, not objective states of the world. This was a large step toward the development of a concept of framing and eventually toward a new critique of the model of the rational agent. When we were ready to submit the work for publication, we deliberately chose a meaningless name for our theory: prospect theory. We reasoned that if the theory ever became well known, having a distinctive label would be an advantage. This was probably wise. I looked at the 1975 draft recently and was struck by how similar it is to the paper that was eventually published and also by how different the two papers are. Most of the key ideas, key examples, and wording were there in the early draft. But that draft lacks the authority that was gained during the years that we spent anticipating objections. "Value theory" would not have survived the close scrutiny that a significant article ultimately gets from generations of scholars and students, who only are obnoxious if you give them a chance. We published the paper in Econometrka. The choice of venue turned out to be important; the identical paper published in Psychological Review would likely have had little impact on economics. Our decision was not guided by a wish to influence economics, however. Econometrka just happened to be the journal where the best papers on decision making to date had been published, and we were aspiring to be in that company. There was another way in which the impact of prospect theory depended crucially on the medium as well as the message. Prospect theory was a formal theory, and its formal nature was the key to the impact it had in economics. Every discipline of social science, I believe, has some ritual tests of competence that must be passed before a piece of work is considered worthy of attention. Such tests are necessary to prevent information overload, and they are also important aspects of the tribal life of the disciplines. In particular, they allow insiders to
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ignore just about anything that is done by members of other tribes and to feel no scholarly g u i l t about d o i n g so. T o serve this screening function efficiently, the competence tests usually focus on some aspect of form or method and have l i t t l e or n o t h i n g to do w i t h substance. Prospect theory passed such a test i n economics, and its observations became a legitimate (although optional) part of the scholarly discourse i n that discipline. I t is a strange and rather arbitrary process that selects some pieces of scientific w r i t i n g for relatively enduring fame
while committing most of what is published to almost immediate oblivion.
Framing a n d M e n t a l A c c o u n t i n g Amos and I completed prospect theory during the academic year of 1977 to 1978, which I spent at the Center for Advanced Studies at Stanford while he was visiting the psychology department there. Around that time, we began work on our next project, which became the study of framing. This was also the year in which the second most important professional friendship in my life—with Richard Thaler— had its start. A framing effect is demonstrated by constructing two transparently equivalent versions of a given problem that nevertheless yield predictably different choices. The standard example of a framing problem, developed early in our research, is the "lives saved, lives lost" question, which offers a choice between two public health programs proposed to deal with an epidemic that is threatening 600 lives: One program w i l l save 200 lives; the other has a one-third chance of saving all 600 lives and a two-thirds chance of saving none. In this version, people prefer the program that w i l l save 200 lives for sure. In the second version, one program w i l l result in 400 deaths; the other has a twothirds chance of 600 deaths and a one-third chance of no deaths. In this formulation, most people prefer the gamble. If the same respondents are given the two problems on separate occasions, many give incompatible responses. When confronted with their inconsistency, people are embarrassed. They are also helpless to resolve the inconsistency, because there are no moral intuitions to guide a choice between different sizes of a surviving population.
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Amos and I began creating pairs of problems that revealed framing effects while working on prospect theory. We used them to show sensitivity to gains and losses (as in the lives example) and to illustrate the inadequacy of a formulation in which the only relevant outcomes are final states. In that article, we also showed that a single-stage gamble could be rearranged as a two-stage gamble in a manner that left the bottom-line probabilities and outcomes unchanged but reversed preferences. Later, we developed examples in which respondents are asked to make simultaneous choices in two problems, A and B. One of the problems involves gains and elicits a risk-averse choice; the other problem involves losses and elicits risk seeking. A majority of respondents made both these choices. However, the problems were constructed so that the combination of choices that people made was actually dominated by the combination of the options they had rejected. These are not parlor-game demonstrations of human stupidity. The ease with which framing effects can be demonstrated reveals a fundamental limitation of the human mind. In a rational-agent model, the agent's mind functions just as he or she would like it to function. Framing effects violate that basic requirement: The respondents who exhibit susceptibility to framing effects wish their minds were able to avoid them. We were able to conceive of only two kinds of mind that would avoid framing effects: (a) If responses to all outcomes and probabilities were strictly linear, the procedures that we used to produce framing effects would fail, (b) I f individuals maintained a single canonical and all-inclusive view of their outcomes, truly equivalent problems would be treated equivalently. Both conditions are obviously impossible. Framing effects violate a basic requirement of rationality, which we called invariance (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984) and Arrow (1982) called extensionality. It took us a long time and several iterations to develop a forceful statement of this contribution to the rationality debate, which we presented several years after our framing paper (Tversky & Kahneman, 1986). Another advance that we made in our first framing article was the inclusion of riskless choice problems among our demonstrations of framing. In making that move, we had help from a new friend. Richard Thaler was a young economist blessed with a sharp and irreverent mind. While still in graduate school, he had trained his ironic eye on his own discipline and had collected a set of pithy anecdotes demonstrating
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obvious failures of basic tenets of economic theory i n the behavior of people i n general and of his very conservative professors at the University of Rochester i n particular. One key observation was the endowment effect, w h i c h D i c k illustrated w i t h the example of the owner of a bottle of old wine who w o u l d refuse to sell i t for $200 but w o u l d not pay as m u c h as $100 to replace i t i f i t broke. Sometime i n 1976, a copy of the 1975 draft of prospect theory got i n t o Dick's hands, and that event made a significant difference to our lives. D i c k realized that the endowment effect, w h i c h is a genuine puzzle i n the context of standard economic theory, is readily explained by t w o assumptions derived f r o m prospect theory. First, the carriers of u t i l i t y are not states (owning or
not owning the wine) but changes (getting the wine or giving it up), and giving up is weighted more than getting, by loss aversion. When Dick learned that Amos and I would be in Stanford in 1977 and 1978, he secured a visiting appointment at the Stanford branch of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is located on the same hill as the Center for Advanced Study. We soon became friends and have ever since had a considerable influence on each other's thinking. The endowment effect was not the only thing we learned from Dick. He had also developed a list of phenomena of what we now call mental accounting. Mental accounting describes how people violate rationality by failing to maintain a comprehensive view of outcomes and by failing to treat money as fungible. Dick showed how people segregate their decisions into separate accounts, then struggle to keep these accounts in the black. One of his compelling examples was the couple who drove through a blizzard to a basketball game because they had already paid for the tickets, although they would have stayed at home i f the tickets had been free. As this example illustrates, Dick had independently developed the skill of doing "one-question economics." He inspired me to invent another story in which a person who comes to the theater realizes that he has lost his ticket (in one version) or an amount of cash equal to the ticket value (in another version). On one hand, people report that they would be very likely still to buy a ticket i f they had lost the cash, presumably because the loss has been charged to general revenue. On the other hand, they describe themselves as quite likely to go home i f they have lost an already purchased ticket, presumably because they do not want to pay twice to see the same show.
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B e h a v i o r a l Economics Our interaction with Thaler eventually proved to be more fruitful than we could have imagined at the time, and i t was a major factor in my receiving the Nobel Prize.1 The committee cited me "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science." Although I do not wish to renounce any credit for my contribution, I should say that in my view the work of integration was actually done mostly by Thaler and the group of young economists who quickly began to form around him, starting with Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein and followed by the likes of Matthew Rabin, David Laibson, Terry Odean, and Sendhil Mullainathan. Amos and I provided many of the initial ideas that were eventually integrated into the thinking of some economists, and prospect theory undoubtedly afforded some legitimacy to the enterprise of drawing on psychology as a source of realistic assumptions about economic agents. The founding text of behavioral economics, however, was the first article i n which Thaler (1980) presented a series of vignettes that challenged fundamental tenets of consumer theory. The respectability that behavioral economics now enjoys within the discipline was secured, I believe, by some important discoveries Dick made in what is now called behavioral finance and by the series of "Anomalies" columns that he published in every issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives from 1987 to 1990 and has continued to write occasionally since that time. In 1982, Amos and I attended a meeting of the Cognitive Science Society i n Rochester, New York, where we had a drink with Eric Wanner, a psychologist who was then vice president of the Sloan Foundation. Eric told us that he was interested in promoting the integration of psychology and economics and asked for our advice on ways to go about i t . I have a clear memory of the answer we gave him. We thought that there was no way to "spend a lot of money
1 From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 2002, Editor Tore Frangsmyr {Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 2003. This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The author is the sole author of the text. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. The Nobel Foundation 2002.
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honestly" on such a project, because interest i n interdisciplinary w o r k could not be coerced. W e also thought that i t was pointless to encourage psychologists to make themselves heard by economists but that i t could be useful to encourage and support the few economists who were interested i n listening. Thaler's name surely came up. Soon after that conversation, Wanner became the president of the Russell Sage Foundat i o n , and he brought the psychology—economics project w i t h h i m . The first grant that he made i n that program was for D i c k Thaler to spend an academic year ( 1 9 8 4 - 1 9 8 5 ) v i s i t i n g me at the University of B r i t i s h Columbia i n Vancouver, Canada. That year was one of the best i n m y career. W e worked as a trio that included the economist Jack Knetsch, w i t h w h o m I had already started constructing surveys on a variety of issues, i n c l u d i n g valuation of the environment and public views about fairness i n the marketplace. Jack had done experimental studies of the endowment effect and had seen the implications of that effect for the Coase theorem and for issues of environmental policy. W e made a very good team: Jack's wisdom and imperturbable calm withstood the stress of Dick's boisterous t e m perament and of m y perfectionist anxieties and intellectual restlessness. W e d i d a lot together that year. W e conducted a series of market experiments i n v o l v i n g real goods (the " m u g s " studies), w h i c h eventually became a standard i n that literature (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1990). W e also conducted m u l t i p l e surveys i n w h i c h we used experimentally varied vignettes to identify the rules of fairness that the public w o u l d apply to merchants, landlords, and employers (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986a). O u r central observation was that i n many contexts, the existing situation (e.g., price, rent, or wage) defines a "reference transaction" to w h i c h the transactor (consumer, tenant, and employee) has an entitlement; the violation of such entitlements is considered unfair and may evoke retaliation. For example, c u t t i n g the wages of an employee merely because he could be replaced by someone who w o u l d accept a lower wage is unfair, although paying a lower wage to the replacement of an employee who q u i t is entirely acceptable. W e submitted the paper to the American Economic Review and were utterly surprised by the outcome: The paper was accepted w i t h o u t revision. L u c k i l y for us, the editor had asked t w o economists open to our approach to review the paper. W e later learned that one of the referees was George A k e r l o f and the other was A l a n Olmstead,
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who had studied the failures of markets to clear during an acute gas shortage. One question that arose during this research was whether people would be willing to pay something to punish another agent who treated them "unfairly" or would in some circumstances share a windfall with a stranger in an effort to be "fair." We decided to investigate these ideas using experiments for real stakes. The games that we invented for this purpose have become known as the ultimatum game and the dictator game. Alas, while writing up our second paper on fairness (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986b) we learned that we had been scooped on the ultimatum game by Werner Guth and his colleagues, who had published experiments using the same design a few years earlier (Guth, Schmittberger, & Schwarze, 1982). I remember being crestfallen when I learned this. I would have been even more depressed if I had known how important the ultimatum game would eventually become. Most of the economics I know I learned that year from Jack and Dick, my two willing teachers, and from what was in fact my first experience of communicating across tribal boundaries. I was also much impressed by an experimental game that Dick Thaler, James Brander, and I invented and called the N * game. The game is played by a group of, say, 15 people. On each trial, a number 0 < N * < 15 is announced. The participants then make simultaneous choices of whether to "enter." Those who decide to enter announce their choice simultaneously. The payoff to the N entrants depends on their number, according to the following formula: $.25(N* — N). We played the game a few times, once with the faculty of the psychology department at the University of British Columbia. The results, although not surprising to an economist, struck me as magical. W i t h i n very few trials, a pattern emerged in which the number of entrants, N , was within 1 or 2 of N * , with no obvious systematic tendency to be higher or lower than N * . The group was doing the right thing collectively, although conversations with the participants and the obvious statistical analyses did not reveal any consistent strategies that made sense. It took me some time to realize that the magic we were observing was an equilibrium: The pattern we saw existed because no other pattern could be sustained. This idea had not been in my intellectual bag of tools. We never formally published the N * game—I described it informally
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i n Kahneman ( 1 9 8 6 ) — b u t i t has been taken up by others (Erev & Rapoport, 1998). That was the closest m y research ever came to core economics, and since that t i m e I have been mostly cheering Thaler and behavioral economics f r o m the sidelines. There has been m u c h to cheer about. As a mark of the progress that has been made, I recall a seminar i n psychology and economics that I cotaught w i t h George A k e r l o f after Anne Treisman and I had moved f r o m the University of B r i t i s h C o l u m bia to the University of California, Berkeley i n 1986. I remember being struck by the reverence w i t h w h i c h the rationality assumption was treated even by a freethinker such as George and also by his frequent warnings to the students that they should not let themselves be seduced by the material we were presenting lest their careers be permanently damaged. H i s advice to them was to stick to what he called "meat-and-potatoes economics," at least u n t i l their careers were secure. This opinion was common at the t i m e . W h e n M a t t h e w Rabin joined the Berkeley economics department as a young assistant professor and chose to immerse himself i n psychology, many considered the move professional suicide. Some 15 years later, Rabin had earned the Clark Medal, and George A k e r l o f had delivered a N o b e l lecture entitled "Behavioral Macroeconomics." Eric Wanner and the Russell Sage Foundation continued to support behavioral economics over the years. I was instrumental i n the idea of using some of that support to set up a summer school for graduate students and young faculty i n that field, and I helped D i c k Thaler and C o l i n Camerer organize the first one i n 1994. W h e n the fifth summer school convened i n 2 0 0 2 , D a v i d Laibson, who had been a participant i n 1994, was tenured at Harvard and was one of the three organizers. Terrance Odean and Sendhil M u l l a i n a t h a n , who had also participated as students, came back to lecture as successful researchers w i t h positions i n two of the best universities i n the w o r l d . I t was a remarkable experience to hear M a t t h e w Rabin teach a set of guidelines for developing theories i n behavioral economics, i n c l u d i n g the suggest i o n that the standard economic model should be a special case of the more complex and general models that were to be constructed. W e had come a long way. A l t h o u g h behavioral economics has enjoyed m u c h more rapid p r o g ress and gained more respectability i n economics than appeared possible
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15 years ago, it is still a minority approach, and its influence on most fields of economics is negligible. Many economists believe that it is a passing fad, and some hope that it w i l l be. The future may prove them right. Many bright young economists, however, are now betting their careers on the expectation that the current trend w i l l last, and such expectations have a way of being self-fulfilling.
L a t e r Years Anne Treisman and I married and moved together to the University of British Columbia in 1978, and Amos and Barbara Tversky settled in Stanford that year. Amos and I were then at the peak of our joint game and completely committed to our collaboration. For a few years, we managed to maintain it by spending every second weekend together and by placing multiple phone calls each day, some lasting several hours. We completed the study of framing in that mode as well as a study of the "conjunction fallacy" in judgment (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). Eventually, however, the goose that had laid the golden eggs languished, and our collaboration tapered off. Although this outcome now appears inevitable, it came as a painful surprise to us. We had completely failed to appreciate how critically our successful interaction had depended on our being together at the birth of every significant idea, on our rejection of any formal division of labor, and on the infinite patience that became a luxury when we could meet only periodically. We struggled for years to revive the magic we had lost, but in vain. We were again trying when Amos died. When he learned in the early months of 1996 that he had only a few months to live, we decided to edit a joint book on decision making that would cover some of the progress that had been made since we had started working together on the topic more than 20 years before (Kahneman & Tversky, 2000). We planned an ambitious preface as a joint project, but I think we both knew from the beginning that we would not be granted enough time to complete it. The preface I wrote alone was probably my most painful writing experience. During the intervening years, of course, we had continued to work, sometimes together and sometimes with other collaborators. Amos took the lead in our most important joint piece, an extension of prospect
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theory to the multiple-outcome case i n the spirit of rank-dependent models. H e also carried out spectacular studies of the role of argument and conflict i n decision m a k i n g i n collaborations w i t h Eldar Shafir and w i t h Itamar Simonson as well as influential w o r k on violations of procedural invariance i n collaborations w i t h Shmuel Sattath and w i t h Paul Slovic. H e engaged i n a deep exploration of the mathematical structure of decision theories w i t h Peter W a k k e r . Also, i n his last years, Amos was absorbed i n the development of support theory, a general approach to t h i n k i n g under uncertainty that his students have continued to explore. These are only his major programmatic research
efforts in the field of decision making. He did much more. I, too, kept busy and also kept moving. Anne Treisman and I moved to the University of California, Berkeley in 1986 and from there to Princeton in 1993, where I happily took a split appointment that located me part time in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs. Moving east also made it easier to maintain frequent contacts with friends, children, and adored grandchildren in Israel. Over the years, I enjoyed productive collaborations with Dale Miller in the development of a theory of counterfactual thinking (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) and with Anne Treisman in studies of visual attention and object perception. In addition to the work on fairness and on the endowment effect that we did with Dick Thaler, Jack Knetsch and I carried out studies of the valuation of public goods that became controversial and had a great influence on my own thinking. Further studies of that problem with liana Ritov eventually led to the idea that the translation of attitudes into dollars involves the almost arbitrary choice of a scale factor, leading some people who have similar values to state very different values of their willingness to pay, for no good reason (Kahneman, Ritov, & Schkade, 2000). W i t h David Schkade and the famous jurist Cass Sunstein, I extended this idea into a program of research on arbitrariness in punitive damage decisions, which may yet have some influence on policy (Sunstein, Kahneman, Schkade, & Ritov, 2002). The focus of my research for the past 15 years has been the study of various aspects of experienced utility—the measure of the utility of outcomes as people actually live them. The concept of utility in which 1 am interested is the one that Bentham and Edgeworth had in
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mind. However, experienced utility largely disappeared from economic discourse in the 20th century in favor of a notion that I call decision utility, which is inferred from choices and used to explain choices. The distinction could be of little relevance for fully rational agents, who presumably maximize experienced utility as well as decision utility. If rationality cannot be assumed, however, the quality of consequences becomes worth measuring, and the maximization of experienced utility becomes a testable proposition. Indeed, my colleagues and I have carried out experiments in which this proposition was falsified. These experiments exploited a simple rule that governs the assignment of remembered utility to past episodes in which an agent is passively exposed to an unpleasant or pleasant experience, such as watching a horrible film or an amusing one (Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993) or undergoing a colonoscopy (Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996). Remembered utility turns out to be determined largely by the peak intensity of the pleasure or discomfort experienced during the episode and by the intensity of pleasure or discomfort when the episode ends. The duration of the episode has almost no effect on its remembered utility. In accord with this rule, an episode of 60 seconds during which one hand is immersed in painfully cold water w i l l leave a more aversive memory than a longer episode in which the same 60 seconds are followed by another 30 seconds during which the temperature rises slightly. Although the extra 30 seconds are painful, they provide an improved end. When experimental participants are exposed to the two episodes and then given a choice of which to repeat, most choose the longer one (Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber, & Redelmeier, 1993). In these and in other experiments of the same kind (Schreiber & Kahneman, 2000), people make incorrect choices between experiences to which they may be exposed because they are systematically wrong about their affective memories. Our evidence contradicts the standard rational model, which does not distinguish between experienced utility and decision utility. I have presented it as a new type of challenge to the assumption of rationality (Kahneman, 1997). Most of my empirical work in recent years has been done in collaboration with my friend David Schkade. The current topic of our research is a study of well-being that builds on my previous research on experienced utility. We have assembled a multidisciplinary team for an
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attempt to develop tools for measuring welfare, w i t h the design specification that economists should be w i l l i n g to take the measurements seriously. Another major effort went i n t o an essay that attempted to update the notion of j u d g m e n t heuristics. That w o r k was done i n close collaboration w i t h a young colleague, Shane Frederick. The pains we took i n the choice of every w o r d came close to matching m y experiences w i t h Amos (Kahneman & Frederick, 2002). M y N o b e l lecture is an extension of that essay. One line of w o r k that I hope may become influential is the development of a procedure of adversarial collaboration, w h i c h I have championed as a substitute for the format of critique—reply—rejoinder i n w h i c h debates are currently conducted i n the social sciences.2 B o t h as a participant and as a reader I have been appalled by the absurdly adversarial nature of these exchanges, i n w h i c h hardly anyone ever admits an error or acknowledges learning anything f r o m the other. Adversarial collaboration involves a good-faith effort to conduct debates by carrying out joint research. I n some cases there may be a need for an agreed arbiter to lead the project and collect the data. Because there is no expectation of the contestants reaching complete agreement at the end of the exercise, adversarial collaborations w i l l usually lead to an unusual type of j o i n t publication i n w h i c h disagreements are laid out as part of a j o i n t l y authored paper. I have had three adversarial collaborations, w i t h T o m G i l o v i c h and Victoria Medvec ( G i l o v i c h , Medvec, & Kahneman, 1998), w i t h Ralph H e r t w i g (Barbara Mellers was the agreed arbiter; see Mellers, H e r t w i g , & Kahneman, 2001), and w i t h a group of experimental economists i n the U n i t e d K i n g d o m (Bateman, Kahneman, M u n r o , Starmer, & Sugden, 2005). A n appendix i n the Mellers et al. (2001) article proposed a detailed protocol for the conduct of adversarial collaboration. I n another case, I d i d not succeed i n convincing t w o colleagues that we should engage i n an adversarial collaboration, but we j o i n t l y developed another procedure that is also more constructive than the reply—rejoinder format. They wrote a c r i -
2 Although I did not know it, I was not the first to propose this procedure in psychology: An adversarial collaboration had been reported by Latham, Erez, and Locke (1988).
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tique of one of my lines of work, and instead of following up with the usual exchange of unpleasant comments, we decided to write a joint piece, which started with a statement of what we did agree on and then went on to a series of short debates about issues on which we disagreed (Ariely, Kahneman, & Loewenstein, 2000). I hope that more efficient procedures for the conduct of controversies w i l l be part of my legacy.
E u l o g y f o r Amos Tversky (June 5, 1996) People who make a difference do not die alone. Something dies in everyone who was affected by them. Amos made a great deal of difference, and when he died, life was dimmed and diminished for many of us. There is less intelligence in the world. There is less wit. There are many questions that w i l l never be answered with the same inimitable combination of depth and clarity. There are standards that w i l l not be defended with the same mix of principle and good sense. Life has become poorer. There is a large Amos-shaped gap in the mosaic, and it w i l l not be filled. It cannot be filled because Amos shaped his own place in the world; he shaped his life and even his dying. And in shaping his life and his world, he changed the world and the lives of many around him. Amos was the freest person I have known, and he was able to be free because he was also one of the most disciplined. Some of you may have tried to make Amos do something he did not want to do. I don't think that there are many with successes to recount. Unlike many of us, Amos could not be coerced or embarrassed into chores or empty rituals. In that sense he was free, and the object of envy for many of us. But the other side of freedom is the ability to find joy in what one does and the ability to adapt creatively to the inevitable. I w i l l say more about the joy later. The supreme test of Amos's ability to accept what cannot be changed came in the last few months. Amos loved living. Death at a cruelly young age was imposed on him, before his children's lives had fully taken shape, before his work was done. But he managed to die as he had lived—free. He died as he intended. He wanted to work to the last, and he did. He wanted
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to keep his privacy, and he d i d . H e wanted to help his family through their ordeal, and he d i d . H e wanted to hear the voices of his friends one last t i m e , and he found a way to do that t h r o u g h the letters that he read w i t h pleasure, sadness, and pride, to the end. There are many forms of courage, and Amos had them all. The indomitable serenity o f his last few months is one. The civic courage of adopting principled and unpopular positions is another, and he had that too. A n d then there is the heroic, almost reckless courage, and he had that too. M y first memory of Amos goes back to 1957 when someone pointed out to me a t h i n and handsome lieutenant, wearing the red beret of the paratroopers, w h o had just taken the competitive entrance exam to the undergraduate program i n psychology at Hebrew University. The handsome lieutenant looked very pale, I remember. H e had been wounded. The paratrooper u n i t to w h i c h he belonged had been performing an exercise w i t h live fire i n front of the general staff of the Israel Defense Forces and all the m i l i t a r y attaches. Amos was a platoon commander. H e sent one o f his soldiers carrying a long metal tube loaded w i t h an explosive charge, w h i c h was to be slid under the barbed wire o f the position they were attacking and was to be detonated to create an opening for the attacking troops. The soldier moved forward, placed the explosive charge, and l i t the fuse. A n d then he froze, standing u p r i g h t i n the g r i p of some unaccountable attack of panic. The fuse was short and the soldier was certainly about to be k i l l e d . Amos leapt f r o m behind the rock he was using for cover, ran to the soldier, and managed to j u m p at h i m and b r i n g h i m d o w n just before the charge exploded. This was how he was wounded. Those w h o have been soldiers w i l l recognize this act as one o f almost unbelievable presence o f m i n d and bravery. I t was awarded the highest citation available i n the Israeli Army. Amos almost never mentioned this incident, but some years ago, in the context of one of our frequent conversations about the importance of memory in our lives, he mentioned it and said that it had greatly affected him. We can probably appreciate what it means for a 20-yearold to have passed a supreme test, to have done the impossible. We can understand how one could draw strength from such an event, especially if—as was the case for Amos—achieving the almost impossi-
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ble was not a once-off thing. Amos achieved the almost impossible many times, in different contexts. Amos's almost impossible achievements, as you all know, extended to the academic life. Amos derived some quiet pleasure from one aspect of his record: By a large margin, he published more articles in Psychological Review, the prestigious theory journal of the discipline, than anyone else in the history of that journal, which goes back more than 100 years. He had two pieces in press in Psychological Review when he died. Other aspects of the record are even more telling than this statistic. A number of gems and enduring classics sets Amos apart even more. These include his early work on transitivity violations, elimination by aspects, similarity, the work we did together on judgment, prospect theory and framing, the Hot Hand, the beautiful work on the disjunction effect and argument-based choice, and most recently an achievement of which Amos was particularly proud: support theory. How did he do it? There are many stories one could tell. Amos's lifelong habit of working alone at night while others slept surely helped, but that wouldn't quite do it. Then there was that m i n d — the bright beam of light that would clear out an idea from the fog of other people's words, the inventiveness that could come up with six different ways of doing anything that needed to be done. You might think that having the best mind in the field and the most efficient work style would suffice. But there was more. Amos had simply perfect taste in choosing problems, and he never wasted much time on anything that was not destined to matter. He also had an unfailing compass that always kept him going forward. I can attest to that from long experience. It is not uncommon for me to write dozens of drafts of a paper, but I am never quite sure that they are actually improving, and often I wander in circles. Almost everything I wrote with Amos also went through dozens of drafts, but when you worked with Amos you just knew: There would be many drafts, and they would get steadily better. Amos and I wrote an article in Science in 197'4. It took us a year. We would meet at the van Leer Institute in Jerusalem for 4 to 6 hours a day. On a good day, we would mark a net advance of a sentence or two. It was worth every minute, and I have never had so much fun. When we started work on prospect theory it was 1974, and in about
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6 months we had been through 30-odd versions of the theory and had a paper ready for a conference. The paper had about 9 0 % of the ideas of prospect theory and quite properly d i d not impress anyone. W e spent the better part of the f o l l o w i n g 4 years debugging i t , t r y i n g to anticipate every objection. W h a t kept us at i t was a phrase that Amos often used: "Let's do i t r i g h t . " There was never any hurry or any thought of compromising quality for speed. W e could do i t because Amos said the w o r k was i m p o r t a n t , and you could trust h i m when he said that. W e could also do i t because the process was so intensely enjoyable. B u t even that is not all. T o understand Amos's genius—not a w o r d I use l i g h t l y — y o u have to consider a phrase that he was using increasingly often i n the last few years: "Let us take what the terrain gives." I n his g r o w i n g w i s d o m , Amos believed that psychology is almost impossible because there is just not all that m u c h we can say that is both important and demonstrably true. "Let us take what the terrain gives" meant not overreaching, not believing that setting a problem implies i t can be solved. The unique ability Amos h a d — n o one else I k n o w comes close— was to find the one place where the terrain w i l l yield (for Amos, usually gold) and then to take i t all. This s k i l l i n t a k i n g i t all is what made so many of Amos's papers not only classics b u t definitive. W h a t Amos had done d i d not need redoing. W h e t h e r to overreach was a source of frequent, and frequently productive, tension between Amos and me over nearly 30 years. I have always wanted to do more than could be done w i t h o u t risk of error and have always taken pride i n preferring to be approximately r i g h t rather than precisely w r o n g . Amos t h o u g h t that i f you p i c k the terrain properly, you w o n ' t have to choose, because you can be precisely r i g h t . A n d t i m e and t i m e again, he managed to be precisely r i g h t on things that mattered. W i s d o m was part of his genius. Fun was also part of Amos's genius. Solving problems was a lifelong source of intense joy for h i m , and the fact that he was richly rewarded for his problem solving never undermined that joy. M u c h of the joy was social. A l m o s t all of Amos's w o r k was collaborative. H e enjoyed w o r k i n g w i t h colleagues and students; he was supremely good at i t ; and his joy was infectious. The 12 or 13 years i n w h i c h most of our w o r k was j o i n t were years of interpersonal and intellectual bliss. Everything was interesting, almost everything was funny, and there
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was the recurrent joy of seeing an idea take shape. So many times i n those years we shared the magical experience of one of us saying something that the other w o u l d understand more deeply than the speaker had done. Contrary to the old laws of information theory, i t was common for us to find that more information was received than had been sent. I have almost never had that experience w i t h anyone else. I f you have not had i t , you don't k n o w how marvelous collaboration can be.
S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s by D a n i e l Kahneman Ariely, D., Kahneman, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2000). Joint comment on "When does duration matter in judgment and decision making." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 524-529. Bateman, I., Kahneman, D., Munro, A., Starmer, C , & Sugden, R. (2005). Testing competing models of loss aversion: An adversarial collaboration. Journal of Public Economics, 89, 1561-1580. Fredrickson, B., & Kahneman, D. (1993). Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6.5(1), 45—55. Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Kahneman, D. (1998). Varieties of regret: A debate and partial resolution. Psychological Review, 105, 602—605. Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kahneman, D. (1986). Experimental economics: A psychological perspective. In R. Tietz, W. Albers, & R. Selten (Eds.), Bounded rational behavior in experimental games and markets: Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on experimental economics (pp. 11-18). New York: Springer-Verlag. Kahneman, D. (1997). New challenges to the rationality assumption. Legal Theory, 3, 105-124. Kahneman, D., & Frederick, S. (2002). Representativeness revisited: Attribute substitution in intuitive judgment. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, D. L., Schreiber, C. A., & Redelmeier, D. A. (1993). When more pain is preferred to less: Adding a better end. Psychological Science, 4, 401-405. Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J., & Thaler, R. (1986a). Fairness and the assumptions of economics. Journal of Business, 59, S285-S300. Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J., & Thaler, R. (1986b). Fairness as a constraint on profit: Entitlements in the market. American Economic Review, 76, 728—741. Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J., & Thaler, R. (1990). Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem. Journal of Political Economy, 98, 1325—1348. Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93, 136—153.
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Kahneman, D., Ritov, I., & Schkade, D. (2000). Economic preferences or attitude expressions? An analysis of dollar responses to public issues. In D. Kahneman & A. Tversky (Eds.), Chokes, values andframes (pp. 642-671). New York: Cambridge University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation. Kahneman, D., & Schild, E. O. (1966). Training agents of social change in Israel: Definitions of objectives and a training approach. Human Organization, 25, 323-327. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80, 237-251. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decisions under risk. Econometrica, 47, 313-327. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1984). Choices, values and frames. American Psychologist, 39, 341-350. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1996). On the reality of cognitive illusions: A reply to Gigerenzer's critique. Psychological Review, 103, 582-591. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (Eds.). (2000). Choices, values and frames. New York: Cambridge University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation. Mellers, A., Hertwig, R., & Kahneman, D. (2001). Do frequency representations eliminate conjunction effects? An exercise in adversarial collaboration. Psychological Science, 12, 269—275. Redelmeier, D., & Kahneman, D. (1996). Patients' memories or painful medical treatments: Real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures. Pain, 66(1), 3-8. Schreiber, C. A., & Kahneman, D. (2000). Determinants of the remembered utility of aversive sounds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 27-42. Sunstein, C , Kahneman, D., Schkade, D., & Ritov, I. (2002). Predictably incoherent judgments. Stanford Laiv Review, 54, 1153—1216. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (197'4, September 27). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293—315. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1986). Rational choice and the framing of decisions. Journal of Business, 59, S251-S278.
O t h e r Publications Cited Arrow, K. J. (1982). Risk perception in psychology and economics. Economic Inquiry, 20, 1-9Ayton, P. (1998). How bad is human judgment? In G. Wright & P. Goodwin (Eds.), Forecasting with judgment (pp. 237—267). West Sussex, England: Wiley. Cohen, L. J. (1981). Can human irrationality be experimentally demonstrated? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 4, 317—331.
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Coombs, C. H., Dawes, R. M., & Tversky, A. (1970). Mathematical psychology: An elementary introduction. Oxford, England: Prentice-Hall. Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition, 58, 1—73. Erev, I., & Rapoport, A. (1998). Coordination, "magic," and reinforcement learning in a market entry game. Games and Economic Behavior, 23, 146-175. Gigerenzer, G. (1991)- How to make cognitive illusions disappear: Beyond "heuristics and biases." In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 83-115). Chichester, England: Wiley. Gigerenzer, G. (1996). On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A rebuttal to Kahneman and Tversky (1996). Psychological Review, 103, 592-596. Guth, W., Schmittberger, R., & Schwarze, B. (1982). An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 3, 367-388. Klein, G. (2000). The fiction of optimization. In G. Gigerenzer & R. Selton (Eds.), Bounded rationality: The adaptive toolbox (pp. 103—121). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Laibson, D., & Zeckhauser, R. (1998). Amos Tversky and the ascent of behavioral economics. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 16, 7—47. Latham, G., Erez, M., & Locke, E. (1988). Resolving scientific disputes by the joint design of crucial experiments by the antagonists: Application to the Erez-Latham dispute regarding participation in goal setting. Journal of Applied Psychology, 73, 753-772. Lopes, L. L. (1991). The rhetoric of irrationality. Theory and Psychology, 1, 65-82. Meehl, P. E. (1954). Clinical versus statistical prediction: A theoretical analysis and a review of the evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mischel, W. (1961a). Delay of gratification, need for achievement, and acquiescence in another culture. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62, 543—560. Mischel, W. (196lb). Preference for delayed reinforcement and social responsibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62, 1-15. Raiffa, H. (1968). Decision analysis: Introductory lectures on choices under uncertainty. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 3-22. Stanovich, K. E. (1999). Who is rational? Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 645-663. Thaler, R. (1980). Toward a positive theory of consumer choice. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 39, 36—90. Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84, 327-352. Williams, A. C. (1966). Attitudes toward speculative risks as an indicator of attitudes toward pure risks. Journal of Risk and Insurance, 33, 577—586.
6
E l i z a b e t h
F .
L o f t u s
If memory is a lie we tell ourselves in utter honesty, who's to be trusted? Which day hasn't been revised, which night not edited of all its mumbled fears? —Neal Bowers (1994, p. 151)
I t's human nature to want to believe that our minds are under our control, that our memories are trustworthy, and that we can reach back into the past and draw on reliable nuggets of memory to make sense of our chaotic lives. But I've spent my professional career casting shadows of doubt over these cherished beliefs. The work has not been the way to win popularity contests—I've been called evil, opportunistic, and an enemy of children and women. A t the same time, unexpected professional rewards have come my way. I began this chapter just months after being inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, accepting the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for "great ideas," and receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa in Israel. The University of Haifa experience taught me something new about memory. Even after studying it for 35 years, there is still much to learn. Memories, whether true or false, can have a powerful hold on us. In one of several speeches I delivered in Haifa, I talked about the dilemma I faced over whether to testify on behalf of John Demjanjuk, who was accused of being Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp during World War I I . I described the agonizing decision to 199
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m y audience—faculty, students, staff, and members of the board of governors. I talked about what i t was like to listen to Demjanjuk's lawyer try to talk me i n t o taking the case. I felt as i f I were being torn apart. O n the outside, assessing the facts, taking notes, and asking detailed questions, was Elizabeth F. Loftus, professor of psychology. She wanted to say, "Yes, of course, I'll take the case." After all, the police interrogation practices were questionable, and the prosecution was relying on memories that were many decades old. B u t inside I felt like one of those Russian folk toys that p u l l apart to reveal a slightly smaller version of the same figure. There I was as a child: Beth Fishman—granddaughter of four Jewish immigrants f r o m Russia and Romania. There was Beth Fishman, who at age 5 cried bitterly when a neighbor boy made f u n of her last name. There was Beth Fishman, who as an adolescent was t o l d that her boyfriend broke up w i t h her because she was Jewish and who instructed her best friend to take h i m a message, " T e l l h i m I'm only half Jewish." The Jerusalem Post wrote about the lecture, " A t once extremely cerebral and incredibly affable and down-to-earth the blond petite Loftus is k n o w n for being prone to moments of uncontrollable e m o t i o n " ( H a l k i n , 2005, p. 5).1 The Jerusalem journalist continued, "Even today she said, bursting into tears d u r i n g her speech, 'This lie makes me feel terrible. W h i c h of m y parents d i d I deny then? W h i c h half of me d i d I throw away for such a cheap price?'" (p. 5). The article commented that I then stopped momentarily i n midsentence to wipe away m y tears as I announced i n a choked voice, "Elizabeth Loftus w i l l be back i n just a moment." Eventually I t o l d the audience that I decided not to take the case and referred the lawyer to one of m y colleagues. Days after m y return f r o m Israel, I received a note i n reaction to m y talk f r o m a University of Haifa staff member who had been i n the audience:
'How odd it was for me to read that one sentence. Blond? I think of myself as a brunette, but I guess of late I have been a bit carried away with keeping away the gray. Petite? For as long as I can remember, I wished I could lose 10 pounds, but the required effort hasn't been worth it. And strenuous exercise was out of the question. Uncontrollable emotion? Okay, so I do cry every now and then when certain topics are brought up. But did she have to say it in print?
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On a personal note (I'm a secretary here), I want to tell you that hearing you speak meant a great deal to me. You touched my heart and mind, and I will never forget what you said and how you said it. W i t h those words, she "smushed" whatever awkwardness I felt about the unexpected and uncontrollable burst of tears that had momentarily interrupted my Haifa speech. The whole experience reminded me of some things that I have learned that are true about memory. Obviously, memories can stay with us for long periods of time. In some cases, the emotions they evoke can be revived at unexpected times, in unexpected places. And the impact that they can have on others is equally unanticipated. That is the power of memory. I appreciate that truth. But that's not really what I ended up studying nor is it why I ended up with a collection of enemies on the one hand and a collection of honors on the other.
B e t h Fishman Elizabeth Jane Fishman was born on October 16, 1944.1 was always called Beth as a child and didn't even realize that my formal name was Elizabeth until much later. My father, Sidney, was a physician in the Army and had been off fighting the war for many months. While he was gone, and I was still a fetus, he wrote frequently to my mother, Rebecca, and she kept precise catalogues of each letter, noting the day each was sent and the day each arrived. On October 18, he wrote, "I do hope that your cable w i l l arrive soon. This expectancy is wearing me down. I hope that my sweetheart has a very easy time with the baby, and I wish that I could be with her." He wasn't allowed to tell her where exactly he was. He did not know this, but she had written him the day before, "Dearest 'Daddy' Sidney—You've been a father now for 36 hours." She went on to say, It's silly for me to mention it, but I hope you aren't too disappointed that it isn't a boy. We can try for one later. Girls are really very cute and affectionate, and you can go on kissing them when they grow up.
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She described me to h i m i n detail: She has a pug nose, small turned up chin, nicely shaped lips, her eyes were a bit puffy and the color was sort of dark slate blue or gray, her hair (not much of it) is darkish. . . . I can't honestly say she's pretty, as babies of that age all look homely, but to me she's beautiful because she's ours. H e saved her letters, too. Dad returned f r o m the war and set up his doctor's office i n a w i n g of our home i n West Los Angeles. W h e n I was 8, we moved to a bigger house, and Dad set up practice a few miles away. M o m , who had been a librarian before her marriage, gave up w o r k i n g outside the home to raise three kids (my brothers D a v i d and Robert followed i n 2 and 5 years, so twice Dad got his wish for a boy). O u r family seemed like a m i l d l y affluent one, w i t h the kids' lives filled w i t h school, ballet, piano, and mostly good things u n t i l the worst day of my life happened. It's s t i l l hard for me to reread the diary entries I wrote before m y mother died and even worse to read the one that day: Today, July 10, 1959, was the most tragic day of my life. My dearly beloved mother, whom I had just gotten to be really close with, died. We woke up this morning and she was missing, and an hour later we found her in the swimming pool. Only God knows what happened. I know that life must go on and that we all must be brave. I try to tell myself that she is gone only physically and that her soul and her love remain with us. Now that she is gone, I realize how very much I love her and how hard it will be to carry on. I feel so empty inside, like I lost a big part of me. If my mother could hear me I would want her to know that she has all my love and always will. I was 14 years old and not sure I w o u l d ever recover. I remember t h i n k i n g about G o d , but i n this way: G o d can't exist, m y teenage m i n d decided, because, i f he d i d , he w o u l d n ' t have taken our mother away. There was m u c h a m b i g u i t y surrounding m y mother's death. The Los Angeles Times obituary said i t was accidental, whereas m y father thought i t m i g h t have been suicide. I've had to live w i t h this a m b i g u i t y all my life. After M o m died, D a d had to raise us three kids alone, and w i t h his w o r k he was pretty busy. H e worked all day, came home for dinner, and often just wanted to spend the evening i n his room reading. B u t I found a way to get h i m to talk: I asked h i m for help w i t h m y m a t h
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homework. He had been an award-winning math whiz as a kid, and math became the one thing we could talk about. W i t h the benefit of Dad's tutoring, I too would win mathematics awards. Because I was good at mathematics, a life plan started to crystallize: I would become a high school math teacher. It didn't work out that way. I began as a math major at the University of California, Los Angeles in the early 1960s. It was a different world. When I started college, no one had heard of the Beatles; we swooned over Elvis. When I started college, you could walk on a plane with box cutters, and no one would care. When I started college, we thought Russia was full of communists and was a primary promoter of terrorist attacks—rather than a fellow victim. When I started college, female students were called "girls." My math classes involved male professors teaching almost exclusively male students. For a break from equations, I spent a lot of time with my two best friends, Caron and Diana, going to these Friday things called "beer busts." We spent way too much time drinking beer, flirting with fraternity boys, and crying on each other's shoulders when one of them broke up with us. I needed some elective courses and turned to psychology. I took introductory psychology from Allen Parducci and got hooked. Nearly every elective course I took thereafter was in psychology, and when all was said and done, I had enough credits for a double major. When I heard about a field called mathematical psychology, I thought, "This sounds perfect for me," and I chose to go to graduate school at Stanford University, known to excel in that field.
The S t a n f o r d Years I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1966 when I was 21 years old. It was the first time I had ever lived away from home, and I broke into tears when my brother David dropped me off at the graduate women's housing on campus where I would be living. At least David, who was still an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, would not be too far away. I had long dark hair and often wore tailored business jackets and a pair of trademark LA sunglasses, and in a clash of image, transported myself every where on a yellow 1964 Schwinn bike. I dutifully attended
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the required Friday seminar sessions i n w h i c h fellow grad students and faculty members discussed the latest developments i n mathematical learning theory. Mathematical learning theory was dominated by men; the power players at Stanford at the t i m e included Richard A t k i n s o n , W i l l i a m Estes, Patrick Suppes, and the relatively junior professor Gordon Bower. The players and their soon-to-be star graduate students w o u l d enthusiastically discuss the equations that w o u l d explain some aspect of behavior, but I never really got passionate about the topic. One t h i n g that bothered me at the t i m e was that to keep the mathematics tractable, many s i m p l i f y i n g assumptions were made—assumptions that seemed to defy what we knew about genuine human behavior. T o keep f r o m g e t t i n g too bored d u r i n g the seminars, I frequently sat i n the back and surreptitiously hemmed m y skirts or caught up w i t h correspondence to far away family and friends. I d i d n ' t k n o w i t at the t i m e , b u t m y fellow graduate students had taken a p o l l and voted me least likely to succeed as a psychologist. The f o l l o w i n g year a handsome (early M a r l o n Brando look) Bostonian named Geoff Loftus arrived at Stanford astride his black B M W motorcycle. I had been asked to take the job of m e n t o r i n g h i m as a " b i g sister," and as Geoff later wrote, "Beth approached the job w i t h typical aplomb: W i t h i n three months she and her mentee were engaged, and the f o l l o w i n g June they were married" ( G . R. Loftus, 2 0 0 7 , p. 28) O u r honeymoon was l i m i t e d to 1 day so that I could get back to Stanford to study for the comprehensive exams. I s t i l l d i d n ' t k n o w what I wanted to do i n life. I managed to complete a master's thesis under the direction of Richard A t k i n s o n on learning spelling via computer-assisted instruction and was hard at w o r k on m y doctoral thesis under the direction of Patrick Suppes on computerassisted mathematics instruction. I looked up to these mentors and tried hard to be productive i n our collaborative research, but despite moments of wonder and interest, the w o r k never left me w i t h a strong sense of personal satisfaction. Toward the end of m y graduate school days, things changed. I took a course w i t h social psychologist Jonathan Freedman, who also had a side interest i n semantic memory. Semantic memory concerns memory for words and concepts and general knowledge about the w o r l d rather than the personal episodes of our lives. Freedman and I began to design and conduct experiments aimed at elucidating how general knowledge
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is stored in the mind and how it is retrieved when we need it. Intellectually, I began to thrive. Freedman and I approached the problem by measuring reaction times taken by subjects when they answered simple questions such as "What is the name of a fruit that is yellow?" From those reaction times, we could draw inferences about the structure of knowledge in semantic memory. We found, for example, that people were faster to produce a response if the category cue came first, faster by about 250 milliseconds, or a quarter of a second. We hypothesized that humans organize information according to categories such as fruits rather than by attributes such as yellow, and the search can get started sooner if the category cue comes first. For a number of years Freedman and I worked together on these problems, an important collaboration that continued beyond my graduate school years (see Collins & Loftus, 1975; Freedman & Loftus, 1971; Loftus & Freedman, 1972) because we had both moved to New York City (he to Columbia and I to the New School for Social Research). Geoff and I experienced a traditional dilemma that many married professional couples face, namely, that of trying to find jobs near one another. After 3 years of difficulty, mostly living on opposite sides of the country and seeing each other during school breaks, we finally found two jobs at the University of Washington. That's a story in itself. At first Washington offered Geoff a tenure-track faculty position, but all they could come up with for me was a position as a postdoc. I did not want to leave my assistant professorship in New York for a postdoc position at Washington, so we had 1 more year of living apart. The next year, Harvard offered me a job, and Washington suddenly got more interested and came through with a job offer. This was an awfully difficult career decision and taught me that approach-approach conflicts that I had read about in my learning courses were actually quite painful. Geoff wanted me to take the job at Washington where we could finally live together; I was leaning toward Harvard. Geoff said that would mean divorce. So, what to do? Washington and marriage? Harvard and divorce? I spent a week trying to get advice. "If you have to give up anything for Harvard, don't do it. You'll never get tenure," said my faculty advisors. "If you have to give up anything for that odd marriage of yours, don't do it," said some of my friends. I ultimately decided on Washington and marriage and in 1973 moved back to the West Coast.
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Before arriving i n W a s h i n g t o n , I had been t h i n k i n g about w a n t i n g to do research that had more obvious practical applications. A natural intersection between a specialization i n the study of memory and an interest i n legal issues was the study of the memory of witnesses to legally relevant events such as crimes and accidents. I wondered about the accuracy of recollection of i m p o r t a n t events such as accidents and whether the questions posed, say, by police officers m i g h t alter what people said and remembered. W h i l e other memory researchers at that t i m e were using, as experimental s t i m u l i , words or nonsense syllables or sometimes sentences and simple photos, I began showing people films
of traffic accidents. I n one early study, conducted w i t h then-
undergraduate student John Palmer, we found that questions such as " H o w fast were the cars g o i n g when they smashed i n t o each other?" led to higher estimates of speed than a more neutral question that used the verb hit. Moreover, the smashed question led more people to later falsely claim that they had seen broken glass when there was none (Loftus & Palmer, 1974). These studies were among the first to show that leading questions could contaminate or distort a witness's memory, but many others w o u l d follow (e.g., Loftus, 1975, 1977). I was fortunate to be able to spend the 1 9 7 8 - 1 9 7 9 academic year at the Center for Advanced Study i n the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. The physiological psychologist (now called neuroscientist) Richard Thompson had organized a special interest group i n learning and memory i n w h i c h he brought together for prolonged discussions i n d i viduals using either physiological or behavioral approaches to memory. A l t h o u g h i t was decades before I actually collaborated on experiments i n v o l v i n g neuroscience and memory distortion, that year at the center was valuable for another reason. The freedom f r o m routine academic responsibilities enabled me to complete m y first book on eyewitness testimony (Loftus, 1979a), w h i c h , to m y delight, w o n a N a t i o n a l Media A w a r d for a Distinguished C o n t r i b u t i o n from the American Psychological Foundation. I n i t , I summarized the field of eyewitness testimony as w e l l as what I had specifically learned f r o m m y own research on memory distortion. A l t h o u g h m y early studies on memory distortion used leading questions to attempt to distort memory, I soon began to see the leading
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questions as just one vehicle by which such distortions could be produced. Other vehicles could also produce contamination. Feeding a witness some version of an event allegedly produced by another witness or exposing a witness to news coverage about an event could produce distortions of memory i f those postevent exposures contained erroneous details or misinformation. Over the next decade or more, I conducted hundreds of experiments that showed that new postevent information often becomes incorporated into memory, sometimes adding to the memory and sometimes distorting it. The basic procedure used in this research was really quite simple: Subject witnesses first saw a complex event such as a simulated crime or accident. Later, some were exposed to misleading information and others were not. Finally, all tried to recall what they had originally seen. The typical finding was that those who had received the misinformation had less accurate memories. People remembered seeing yield signs when they had actually seen stop signs or a guy with curly hair when actually it was straight or Mickey Mouse when it was really Minnie. The impairment in memory due to exposure to misleading information became known as the misinformation effect (Loftus & Hoffman, 1989). There were many interesting questions to ask about the misinformation effect, and scores of researchers began to try to answer them. It was particularly gratifying to have other scholars taking an interest in the line of research and also doing much of the hard work to try to answer important questions. When are people particularly susceptible to the damaging influence on recollection of misinformation and when are they resistant? It turns out that if the original memory has a chance to fade, it is more susceptible to misinformation. What groups of people are particularly prone to having their recollections modified and what groups are resistant? It turns out that young children are especially susceptible to misinformation. Do people genuinely believe in the misinformation that they are reporting? It turns out that by every measure they strongly appear to genuinely believe; for example, they are frequently so confident about the memories, they are willing to bet money on them (Loftus, 1992; Schooler, Gerhard, & Loftus, 1986). One last question about the misinformation effect concerns one of the most fundamental questions one can ask about memory and that is whether memories, once stored, are permanent. Put in the context of misinformation research, the question is about what happens
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to the original memory after exposure to misinformation.
Does
misinformation actually impair a person's a b i l i t y to remember details of an event? O r does misinformation coexist w i t h the original memory? A lively intellectual debate about the permanence of memories kept me busy for many years (Loftus & Loftus, 1980). I had earlier proposed that misinformation m i g h t sometimes alter memory traces (Loftus, 1979a), but others suggested that misinformation m i g h t simply be m a k i n g the original traces less accessible w i t h o u t altering
them
( M o r t o n , Hammersley, & Bekerian, 1985). S t i l l others suggested that misinformation had no real effect on original memory whatsoever, and any reported mistakes were the product of other processes (McCloskey & Zaragoza, 1985). W e duked i t out i n the pages of some of the major journals, and I eventually published an article suggesting that perhaps all of us m i g h t be r i g h t to some extent (Loftus & H o f f m a n , 1989). I thoroughly enjoyed that intellectual battle, and after heated discussions, m y "opponents" periodically approached me for letters of recommendat i o n for their promotions or for jobs that they were contemplating. That's the way science ought to be conducted, i f you ask me. I t was a clean fight. M u c h later, i n a different battle, I learned that some people fight d i r t y . A life-changing career moment occurred i n the mid-1970s when I wrote an article for Psychology Today magazine (Loftus, 1974). I n i t , I discussed some of the laboratory studies showing how leading questions can contaminate memory, and I also talked about a court case that I had worked on w i t h an experienced public defender i n Seattle, W a s h i n g t o n . The case involved a female defendant who was accused of k i l l i n g her boyfriend, and key memory testimony had bearing on whether the k i l l i n g was or was not i n self-defense. The woman was acquitted, and w i t h i n days of the publication of m y article about her, m y phone was r i n g i n g off the hook. Lawyers wanted me to analyze the memory issues i n their cases. Other lawyers wanted me to speak at c o n t i n u i n g legal education seminars about the psychology of memory and its implications for the legal system. I gave advice, I gave speeches, and I began to consult on legal cases and to appear i n courtrooms as an expert witness on the psychological science of memory. Over the next several decades, m y professional life was filled not only w i t h laboratory and field research on memory b u t w i t h legal cases i n w h i c h memory was critical. Sometimes a legal case gave me the idea for a
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new study to conduct. Sometimes new study results made their way into legal cases as scientific evidence. Along the way, I got to meet an unusual group of people: those involved in criminal and civil cases involving human memory. I met notorious individuals such as Ted Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, and Timothy McVeigh—the Oklahoma City bomber. I met McVeigh in a federal prison in Colorado. His opening comment to me was eerie: "Tell me about yourself, Beth." I've met other famous people, such as Oliver North and Martha Stewart, who happened to get caught up in awful legal situations, and some memory aspects figured into their cases. Oliver North gave me a tour of his bulletproof vest factory, of which he was very proud. When I told him that my 90-year-old uncle, also a Marine, had been donating to his defense fund for years, he picked up the phone, called Uncle Harrold, and said, "Major Weinberger, it's Oliver North calling. I'm here with your niece. She told me that you've been donating to my defense fund. Well, sir, I just want to thank you for your steadfast support." My dear uncle, then weak and in a wheelchair, called everyone he knew to tell them about the call. I think the excitement added a few good years to his life. Martha Stewart talked with me in her lawyer's office in New York. Looking great in her blue cashmere sweater, she told me about the distractions surrounding a critical phone call so I could analyze whether there were good reasons she might not have remembered its contents clearly. When the meeting was over, I hoped we could have lunch together, but she had to get back to work on her case. Even more memorable and meaningful are the people whom I've met who were falsely accused of brutal crimes. These are people you may not have heard of—Steve Titus, T i m Hennis, and Howard Haupt. Steve was falsely convicted of rape and eventually exonerated. He died of a heart attack at the age of 35 while trying to seek justice for his ordeal through the civil justice system. T i m was convicted of several brutal murders on the basis of the flimsiest eyewitness testimony and finally given a new trial at which he was acquitted. Howard was accused of murdering a little boy in a hotel casino in Nevada and eventually acquitted. In the early 1990s, I coauthored a semiautobiographical book about these legal cases and the role that psychological science played (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991).
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"Science for justice" has been a recurring theme for me. I feel infinite passion about my role in individual court cases, especially when I believe the person is innocent. I brim over with pride when I see memory science being used to change policies that can help larger numbers of people avoid injustice. Just one example was my work on the inquiry into the wrongful murder conviction of a Canadian, Thomas Sophonow. Not only did the commissioner conducting the inquiry award millions in compensation to Sophonow for his years of imprisonment but he called for specific procedural changes, including encouraging judges to emphasize to juries the frailties of memory (Loftus, 2003a). My work had become so important to me, especially in terms of saving the lives of people who would otherwise be imprisoned, that it overtook activities that are important to most people, such as vacations and leisure. This commitment cost me my marriage to Geoff, my best friend. He later wrote, Like many people whose lives are driven by a passionate commitment to a changed world, Beth has been consumed by her work. Alas, this view was not entirely shared by her husband who was continually lobbying for,forexample, a vacation that wasn't tied to a professional convention or a continuing education seminar. (G. R. Loftus, 2007, p. 31) In 1991, unable to reconcile these differences, we divorced, but Geoff has, fortunately, remained a good and close friend to this day. Geoff was certainly right about my workaholic ways. Our marital squabbles raise many issues, both societal and personal. Our story would not have been unusual i f it had been the husband's story. Wives have long endured being taken to vacations at the convention hotel. Some of them certainly seem to enjoy it. Our marital squabbles raised another issue for me. Why was I like that? So, 40 years after my mother's death, I wrote her a letter (Loftus, 2002) in which I connected her death and the issue of my workaholism. Just as the endless crushes on teenage boys at the time of her death permitted me to escape from thoughts of what was missing in life, so being busy with work allows a similar escape. It keeps me from missing too much family-type love and closeness that I would otherwise painfully long for. That's certainly what I missed most growing up as a motherless daughter. My mother wrote my father, "Girls are really
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very cute and affectionate, and you can go on kissing them when they grow up." Words cannot express what I would give to have her around to kiss the grown-up Beth. But enough of that—back to work. During the 1970s and 1980s, most of my professional career was occupied with studies of the misinformation effect and court cases in which memory played a pivotal role. Occasionally I would dabble in other areas of research, and it usually had some legal angle, such as work on jury instructions; on the impact of expert testimony on trial outcomes; or on the impact of hypnotically refreshed witness testimony on mock juror verdicts, primarily with Edie Greene and Larry Severance. Later work concerned the interaction between cognitive psychology and survey methodology, primarily with Steve Fienberg and Judy Tanur. Although these research projects provided welcome diversity, none of them had the staying power of the long string of studies on memory distortion. About 15 years after my first study of leading questions and eyewitness memory, I was beginning to get a tad bored with the misinformation effect. I'd tackled many of the key issues (see Loftus, 2005) and was looking for some new project to sweep me off my feet. Students often wonder where ideas come from for new research. For me, they often came from court cases, and in the early 1990s an unusual court case fell into my lap and led me to a new and exciting set of studies and ultimately to a role in "the memory wars."
The Repressed Memory C o n t r o v e r s y a n d t h e Memory W a r s The unusual court case arose out of a murder that had occurred 20 years earlier. Susan Nason, 8 years old, disappeared, and a few months later her body was found—her skull had been crushed by a rock (see Loftus, 1993; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994, chap. 6). For 20 years the murder remained unsolved. Then the police charged a former neighbor of the Nason family, George Franklin, on the basis of testimony from his daughter Eileen that she had witnessed the murder but repressed her memory for 2 decades. Eileen also claimed that she repressed her memory of years of sexual abuse committed by her father. The jury was convinced by Eileen's dramatic testimony and the mental health
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professionals who bolstered i t , and George Franklin was q u i c k l y convicted. As a scholar of memory, I wondered, " D i d Eileen really repress all that brutalization and then remember?" I n m y role as a consultant and expert on the case, I investigated the evidence for such massive repression and found there was v i r t u a l l y no credible scientific support for i t . This was quite a surprise to me. The notion that traumatic events could be banished f r o m consciousness appeared i n novels i n the m i d - 1 8 0 0 s , but Freud's popularizing of the concept of repression gave i t legs and a place i n psychological t h i n k i n g . I t began to trouble me deeply that someone could be convicted of murder on the basis of v i r t u a l l y n o t h i n g other than a claim of repression and derepression. Also, I had another theory about where all the details of Eileen's " m e m o r y " could have come f r o m . Those details that gave her story such apparent credibility were widely reported i n the media and were thus available to anyone who read the papers, watched television, or listened to others talk about the murder. Perhaps she had incorporated these details i n t o her memory, creating a belief that she had witnessed them personally, just as people can hear about a yield sign or curly hair and t h i n k that they saw i t themselves. O f course i t is a b i t of a leap to go f r o m changing memory for a traffic sign or a hairdo to g e t t i n g someone to falsely believe that he or she witnessed an entire event. Can you really plant an entire event i n t o the m i n d of someone? I became eager to figure out how to do this so I could see i t happen before m y eyes. I spent considerable t i m e t a l k i n g w i t h students and colleagues to devise a way of p l a n t i n g an entire event i n someone's m i n d for something that w o u l d have been at least m i l d l y traumatic i f i t had happened. Eventually the idea came. I w o u l d try to get people to believe that they had been lost i n a shopping m a l l for an extended t i m e , that they were upset and crying, and that they were rescued by an elderly person and reunited w i t h their family (for details about this inspiration, see Loftus & Ketcham, 1994, chap. 7). I n the formal experiment, we gave subjects life stories ostensibly obtained f r o m their family members; some stories were true, but the one about being lost i n the m a l l was false. W e found that about one quarter of adults fell sway to the suggestion and adopted the belief, sometimes embellishing the reports w i t h v i v i d sensory detail (e.g., the clothes that the rescuer was wearing; Loftus, Coan, & Pickrell, 1996; Loftus & Pickrell, 1995).
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We had used relatives to help plant false childhood memories in our subjects. Other investigators picked up on this method and dubbed the technique the familial informant false narrative procedure (Lindsay, Hagen, Read, Wade, & Garry, 2004). Frankly, I found that to be too much of a mouthful and urged that we call it the lost-in-the-mall technique, which appears to have caught on in some circles (Ashmore, Brown, & MacMillan, 2005). Using the lost-in-the-mall technique, other investigators have succeeded in planting false memories of events that would have been unusual, painful, or even traumatic had they happened, such as a hospitalization or an accident at a family wedding (Hyman, Husband, & Billings, 1995; Hyman & Pentland, 1996) or nearly drowning and being rescued by a lifeguard (Heaps & Nash, 2001). They have identified individual-differences variables that are associated with greater susceptibility to suggestion, such as the extent to which a person has self-reported lapses in memory and attention (Ost, Foster, Costall, & Bull, 2005). These results, we felt, had enormous implications for the activities of some psychotherapists who were using highly suggestive methods to unearth allegedly buried sex abuse memories in thousands of patients. Were they inadvertently creating memories rather than extracting them? Evidence was revealing that suggestive psychotherapy was occurring far more often than anyone could have predicted. Patients were accusing innocent family members, and more than a few innocent people went to prison. Throughout the 1990s, memory research exploded, as researchers responded to the misguided and potentially harmful notions that had become entrenched in popular culture. We developed new ways of studying normal biases and distortions of memory. The excitement of this work brought me in contact with many fantastic students, postdocs, and visiting collaborators as we explored various ways of planting false memories. Could you plant a memory using a technique that more closely resembled the ones going on in therapy? Giuliana Mazzoni spent a number of years at the University of Washington, where we explored the role of dream interpretation in planting false memories (Loftus & Mazzoni, 1998; Mazzoni & Loftus, 1998). Can you plant bizarre and strange memories? Mazzoni and I even got people to "remember" implausible things like witnessing demonic possession in childhood (Mazzoni, Loftus, & Kirsch, 2001). Would this sort of contamination also occur with kids? Steve Ceci, Maggie Bruck, and I
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explored these issues in research that taught me a lot about the particular vulnerability of young children to these influences (Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman, & Bruck, 1994). What about guided imagination that was being used in some therapy circles? Maryanne Garry and our collaborators studied the power of imagination to produce false memories (Garry, Manning, Loftus, & Sherman, 1996). For years, Maryanne provided many experimental inspirations and clever paper titles, such as "Womb W i t h a View," which we wrote on cases of people thinking they had prenatal memories. Maryanne then had the temerity to move to New Zealand, but with e-mail and her frequent visits, our collaboration has continued (and so have the titles; e.g., "Tales From the Crib" and " I A m Freud's Brain"). Taken together, the body of research has provided solid evidence that "rich false memories," as Dan Bernstein and I called them (Loftus & Bernstein, 2005)—experiences about which a person is confident, detailed, and even emotional—can be produced in the minds of normal, healthy adults. This fantastical creative ability of our minds may be treasured when it produces War and Peace or The Sun Also Rises, but it can sometimes destroy people—their lives, their souls, their families— when applied to ordinary daily life. I had a front-row seat to such destruction, and I watched it daily for more than a decade (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994). The case of George Franklin was the case that brought the notion of repression into the forefront of my consciousness, but thousands more erupted on the scene of American culture. Many patients suddenly accused their parents and other relatives, former neighbors, and others with crimes that were vociferously denied. More than a few innocent people were jailed. Some are still in prison as I write. One unforgettable case in which I testified involved the Ramona family. Gary Ramona was sued by his daughter Holly after she "recovered" memories of being raped by her father for a decade. The "memories" came to her after she entered individual and group therapy for bulimia and depression. After being subjected to suggestive therapy that included the "truth serum" sodium amytal, she "realized" her father had raped her from age 5 to 16. On one hand, Holly's "memories" were being bolstered by the dubious testimony of a psychiatrist who was pushing a theory that children who had experienced a single traumatic event don't forget—their memories are incandescently clear,
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whereas children like Holly who are repeatedly traumatized repress memory as a coping mechanism. This defied everything I knew to be true about memory yet forced Gary Ramona into horrifying and expensive litigation. In an unusual move, Gary sued the therapists and hospital for planting false memories in Holly's mind, and he was awarded half a million dollars. Holly's original case was eventually dismissed, but Gary lost his job, his house, and his family in the process. My role in this case was to address this question: If Holly's memories were not real, where could they have come from? I explained how strong suggestion can create false memories and how the strong suggestion to which she was subjected may have done so in her case. After the case was over, I used every opportunity to recommend Moira Johnston's (1997) gripping story of the Ramona case, aptly entitled Spectral Evidence. I'm doing it again. This fine investigative journalist got it right about the hysteria and witch hunts that pervaded the 1990s. Since the Ramona case, I have consulted or testified in many searing, unsettling cases, and I felt good that I could help a few innocent people extricate themselves from a nightmare that was worse than anything even Stephen King could imagine. I sought venues for writing about these experiences and the relevant science in hopes of helping others whom I would never meet (Loftus, 1995; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994). The publicity surrounding the more notorious court cases and some of my ever newer scientific findings on false memories triggered an explosion of hostility that initially caught me by surprise. Clinicians who had been working with actual victims of sex abuse were professionally and politically threatened, as were their recovered memory patients, by research suggesting that some individuals come to recall abuse that never happened; they felt strongly that my work was undermining the validity of their clients' "accounts." I made enemies just as any scientist does when he or she jeopardizes the livelihoods of people or challenges some cherished beliefs. People wrote threatening letters. People wrote to my university complaining that I was violating ethical standards, and although no charges were ever supported, they continued to cite the allegations against me as i f they had been proven. People sent angry e-mails to all of my departmental colleagues. One blanket e-mail began, "Shame on you that you work with a person like Dr. Loftus." My enemies tried to get professional organizations to rescind their invitations to have me speak. At some universities, armed guards were
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provided to accompany me d u r i n g invited speeches after the universities received calls threatening harm i f the talks were not cancelled. People filed ethical complaints. People tried to d r u m up l e t t e r - w r i t i n g campaigns to the chair of m y department, the president of the university, and the governor of the state to get me i n trouble. A seatmate on an airplane once swatted me w i t h her newspaper when she learned who I was. That's when I learned about d i r t y fighting. The worst of i t came i n the late 1990s after I set out to correct one more injustice. N o t h i n g had quite prepared me for the O r w e l l i a n nightmare I w o u l d soon face. M y passion for science and justice unexpectedly brought me to the sad case of Jane Doe.
T h e Case o f Jane Doe a n d H e r (Probably) Innocent Mother In 1997 I read an article by psychiatrist David Corwin and his collaborator Erna Olafson, which was being widely touted as the new proof of repressed memory. Corwin had videotaped his interviews with Jane Doe when she was 6 years old and in the midst of a messy custody battle being waged by her parents. Corwin believed Jane's story of abuse by her mother, told the court so, and the mother lost custody and visitation. After 11 years, Corwin videotaped Jane as she at first did not remember sexual abuse and then later did. He published a detailed account of Jane's life, including her claims of sexual abuse, and traveled to meetings where he showed his tapes of Jane. Therapists began using the case as proof of repressed memory, and it found its way into classrooms and courtrooms as well. Even my successful former student Jonathan Schooler, with whom I had published extensively on memory distortion, was impressed with the case. He had acquired the tapes and written a favorable commentary. In fact, he once showed me the tapes with the thought that they might convert me into a believer in repression. But the case seemed terribly fishy to me. And yet, with 280 million people in America, how could I possibly find Jane Doe or her family and learn more? Using public records, social security death records, and newspaper clippings, I found the Doe family. These documents pointed strongly to the finding that Jane Doe's initial stories sounded
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coached and mechanical and suggested to us that the mother may have been railroaded. A colleague from the University of Michigan, Mel Guyer, and I talked with the mother and a few other people. A huge puzzle piece fell into place when we found Jane's former stepmother working in a grocery store. She told us about the months of efforts to wrest custody of Jane from her biological mother and proudly admitted, "That's how we finally got her—the sexual angle." Guyer and I came to believe that Jane's "memories," which over the years had come to find a central place in her life, may have been powerful to her but seemed to us to be probably false. Before we even published a word about the case, Jane Doe sent an e-mail to the University of Washington complaining that her privacy was being invaded. She did so despite having already allowed her face to be shown and the details of her life to be told publicly. In my university, where I had taught for a quarter century, someone came to my office with 15 minutes' notice and seized my files. I endured 21 months of an investigation into potential misconduct and then was exonerated. Finally freed from a gag order, my first item of business was to publish the expose of the case in hopes that it would put it to rest, prevent it from being used against other innocent people, and bring a modicum of justice to the life of Jane's mother (Loftus & Guyer, 2002a, 2002b). I had put up with the hostility from the clinicians and repressed memory patients who were still promoting recovered memory therapy; I was not prepared for the lack of support from the university that I had served so well. I felt betrayed. A dear friend and colleague, Carol Tavris (2002), chronicled the painful saga, urging readers to appreciate "the courage, persistence, and integrity of those skeptical inquirers who are still willing to 'offend' in the pursuit of truth and justice" (p. 43). My university did not see courage, persistence, or integrity, and I wanted to be at a place that did. Accordingly, 1 year after my exoneration, I accepted a position as distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine (UC-Irvine), turning down a generous counteroffer from Washington that was not accompanied by a real apology. W i t h great difficulty, I left my house with its sweeping view of Lake Washington and the neighborhood cafe where I drank morning coffee with an eclectic bunch of coffee-aholics. I left friendships built up over nearly 3 decades. I left lunches with Ilene and dinners with Jacquie and Jill
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and conversations w i t h Lonnie. I left more than a few former romantic entanglements that had blossomed i n t o meaningful friendships. I gave away half m y clothes, half m y books, half the barely used kitchen utensils, and boarded a plane for California, where the cost o f housing required some downsizing. W h e n I got to U C - I r v i n e , I landed on m y feet. I found great new colleagues. There were colleagues to talk to every day about memory and also about psychology and law. There were colleagues who were tremendously helpful and looked out for each other. After feeling persecuted and isolated d u r i n g those last years at W a s h i n g t o n , i t was tremendously g r a t i f y i n g to feel appreciated. After less than 3 years at m y new job, i n 2005, U C - I r v i n e bestowed on me the Lauds & Laurels, Faculty Achievement A w a r d for "great professional prominence" i n research, teaching, and public service; I was the n i n t h recipient i n UC-Irvine's history. As I joked w i t h friends, "Being appreciated sure beats persecution." W i t h i n 3 years of m y arrival at U C - I r v i n e , I was also, to m y utter shock, elected to the N a t i o n a l Academy of Sciences. M y new colleague, Duncan Luce, woke me at 6 a.m. w i t h news of m y election. I was so excited I rolled over the phone and h u n g i t u p , forcing h i m to call a second t i m e . Duncan later quipped about m y accidental hang u p , " I t h o u g h t she could have at least finished the conversation w i t h me before she rushed off to call some other people." I have deep appreciation for Duncan, w h o is a perfect model for how colleagues ought to treat each other and who has helped me i n countless ways. The N a t i o n a l Academy election has special meaning i n connection w i t h another important mentor i n m y life, Gordon Bower (2007). I n the years after leaving graduate school, this incredible professor to many provided important moral support d u r i n g rough times and, equally i m p o r t a n t , wrote letters of recommendation for me that were required along the way. W h e n I worried to h i m that science w i t h such obvious real-world applications m i g h t not be as respected as the "pure" k i n d , he said, This kind of applied research may not get you elected to the National Academy of Sciences, but you shouldn't care about that: What's important is that your heart is in it; you love it; and you're having a huge impact. I t was all g o i n g s w i m m i n g l y u n t i l Jane Doe (Nicole Taus) filed a lawsuit. She sued Guyer and me and others for invasion of privacy,
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even though we had never revealed her name. She sued Tavris, who had written that aforementioned essay, even though Tavris never even knew her real name until Taus sued her. And so we became part of a new and disturbing trend throughout America. Scientists were being sued simply for exercising their constitutional right to speak out on matters of grave public concern (Loftus, 2003a). The California Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, so its resolution may not come for quite some time. I was surprised by the huge public interest shown, as evidenced by lengthy articles about the case that appeared in the United States (Dolan, 2005) and abroad (Sabbagh, 2004). What advice would I give to young scholars about working in troubled waters? It can lead to the worst of times and the best. Not everyone has the stomach for a roller-coaster life. For those who do, however, this is one way to acquire personal satisfaction and a feeling that your life matters. To help cope with the slings and arrows, I created a "When Blue" file on my computer in which I save electronic communications (and an analogous manila folder for the snail-mail variety). I f the going gets tough, some say the tough go shopping, but I go to my When Blue file. Some items come from undergraduates, such as this one that arrived November 18, 2005, from Houston, Texas: Dr. Loftus, . . . . By now I have read a lot about you and I just needed to write you and let you know what a phenomenal woman I think you are! . . . To begin with you completed ALL your schooling in less time than it is taking me to complete my BA. . . . Your research on eyewitness testimony is extraordinary. That alone has changed people's lives profoundly. If my work is as imperative as yours then I would be a workaholic as well! . . . I never had a real answer when people asked who my role model was. I never really had one until now. Other items in the file come from people who are moved by something they read, such as this one from a psychologist, sent January 18, 2006, shortly after he saw a news item about Jane Doe's lawsuit: Hello, Dr. Loftus, . . . . I'm writing to simply register one more bit of support for your courageous stand for truth and justice. Is there some fund for your legal defense in your appeal? I'm not wealthy, but would like to contribute some small amount because I admire you for taking the stand you have, and because I
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have some inkling of the stress to which you are subject for trying to understand how to find the truth.
False Memories M a t t e r Despite the pressures of a drawn-out lawsuit, I was able to plunge into an engaging new line of research with postdoc Dan Bernstein after my move to UC-Irvine. Together with graduate students Cara Laney and Erin Morris, we explored the repercussions of developing a false belief or false memory. Do these false entities affect later intentions or behaviors? We came up with a plan: We would try to make people believe that as children they had gotten sick eating certain foods and then see what people claimed they wanted to eat that day. In our first study, we made people believe they had gotten sick eating hard-boiled eggs or dill pickles. We did this with a version of the false feedback technique: We gathered data from our subjects and told them falsely that a smart computer program had analyzed their data and determined that they had gotten sick on the eggs or pickles (Bernstein, Laney, Morris, & Loftus, 2005b). We found that we could make a substantial minority of subjects believe that they had had the suggested experience, and later they showed less inclination to want to eat the "offending" food when asked to imagine being hungry at an outdoor party. It was only while looking over the early results that it occurred to us, " I wonder if this would work with fattening foods? I f it did, we could be on the brink of a new dieting technique." Using a similar false feedback methodology, we found that we could plant the belief that subjects had gotten sick eating strawberry ice cream as a child. W i t h our strongest manipulation, about 40% fell for the suggestion and reported less desire to eat strawberry ice cream on follow-up questionnaires. We published these findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Bernstein, Laney, Morris, & Loftus, 2005a). Perhaps because it worked with a fattening food, perhaps because it appeared i n the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or perhaps
because of the good PR that UC-Irvine and the National Academy can garner, stories about the research appeared in the worldwide press. I got a kick out of reading the different headlines. "Losing Weight Through Suggestion" said the The Australian. "Manipulating the Mind
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to Alter the Shape of the Body" crowed the Irish Examiner. "We Can Learn to Hate Ice Cream—But Not Cookies," Scotsman.com told readers. And my favorite, "False Memories Fight Fat." Time magazine's story was entitled "The Mental Diet." In December 2005, the New York Times Magazine published a list of 78 of the "most noteworthy ideas" of 2005. One item that made the list was "The False Memory Diet," based on this research (Glassie, 2005, p. 69). A month later, our research was number 48 on Discover magazine's 100 top science stories of 2005. I was grateful that many media outlets also published our caveats. Before the "dieting" technique was ready for prime time, one at least had to show that the effects would last longer than a single experimental session and that the technique was strong enough to withstand the presence of an actual bowl of ice cream. My research team also successfully planted a positive childhood memory for a healthy food, namely asparagus, and showed that people subsequently wanted to eat it more. The false food memory work has put me in contact with a new class of the public—those who are desperate to lose weight. I wish I could be of more immediate help to these people, but I'm forced to tell them that the line of research is at its very earliest stages. Still, it is refreshing to be working on a topic that could indeed be of genuine help to people and one that is not as anger inspiring and dangerous as the topic of sex abuse.
People M a t t e r My work has benefited greatly from the efforts of those who traveled this academic journey with me. There were many undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and faculty collaborators who inspired my thinking.2 I'm sorry I haven't space to mention them all or talk in
2 People sometimes ask me for the list of doctoral students whose committees I chaired or cochaired, so here it is. In reverse chronological order, the list includes Cara Laney (2006), Jacquie Pickrell (2005), Ayanna Thomas (2001), Charles Manning (2000), Amy Tsai (2000), Danielle Polage (1999), Kelly Forrest (1998), Julie Feldman (1995), Elizabeth Fries (1992), Hunter Hoffman (1992), Brad Bell (1988), Jonathan Schooler (1987), Jane Goodman (1986), James Tousignant (1984), Edith Greene (1983), William Cole (1980), Ken Johnson (1979), and Daniel Huebner (1972).
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greater length about t h e m , but there are some things I want them to know. T o this day, I get excited when I open a journal and see that someone I worked w i t h has published something new and interesting or when I get e-mails from others t e l l i n g me about something meaningf u l that happened i n a class they taught today. I love i t when I learn that someone has accepted a chaired professorship at a top university and someone else tells me how much she loves her research scientist job at a nearby company. I am devastated when I learn someone has died, as happened while I was w o r k i n g on this chapter, w i t h the unexpected death of a former student, Liz Fries, of complications f r o m breast cancer. As when a c h i l d dies before the parent, i t upsets the natural order of things to see your student go first. That I m i g h t play even a small role i n inspiring students and others to do research that matters takes on special importance for me, perhaps given that I d i d not have biological children of m y own. By the way, that wasn't m y choice. W h e n you wait too long to start t r y i n g , you discover that parents, i n their efforts to discourage early sexual contact, exaggerated the t r u t h when they t o l d their teenage daughters that i f they got i t on their underwear they'd get pregnant. Decades later I learned that g e t t i n g pregnant can't be taken for granted. I wish I could have had the experience of being able to shower unconditional love on some l i t t l e being, but hey, no one promised us a perfect life. So I prefer to t h i n k not of what I missed but of what I have, i n c l u d i n g the many students and colleagues who connect to me and to m y work. I n 2005, a sizable group of them converged i n N e w Zealand for a "Bethschrift" organized by Maryanne Garry. As former postdoc Marzu Banaji said, after bestowing on me a t i t l e I l o v e — " W a r r i o r Scientist": "Dear Beth, I'd go to the ends of the earth for you. So here I am, i n fact, i n N e w Zealand!" (Banaji, 2007). So d i d many others go to the ends of the earth to talk about how our lives and w o r k intersected. A t times like that, one can't help but look back. One t h i n g that has been a constant i n m y life is a personal m o t t o that we can all recite b u t that has actually guided m y behavior, " N o t h i n g ventured, n o t h i n g gained." I n m y teens, that involved t r y i n g to get Dad to let me go to a slumber party on a school n i g h t . Later, i t involved t a k i n g risks o f one sort or another. I n the mid-1970s w i t h m y newly
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minted doctorate in hand, I spent a year at Harvard. I sent a note to B. F. Skinner explaining that I was an experimental psychologist at Harvard for the year and "nothing would give me greater pleasure than to have lunch with you once this year." A couple of days later my office phone rang, " H i , it's Fred Skinner. I'd be happy to have lunch." We met at a restaurant near Harvard Yard, and as we walked toward the front door he said, "Women's lib aside, let me treat this time." "Fred" and I talked about the multivolume autobiography that he was currently working on. I could not believe that there I was, having lunch with the B. F. Skinner and hearing about his autobiography before it was even finished. We had many such lunches throughout that academic year. I had ventured and gained. I gained the chance to interact with one of the most fascinating figures in American psychology (although he was much better at talking than listening) as well as gaining an anecdote that I could, 3 decades later, include in this autobiography.3 I realize I'm not like other people. The renowned Dutch filmmaker W i m Kayzer (2000) made a documentary not long ago called Beauty and Consolation in which he interviewed established scientists, scholars, musicians, and people like Leon Lederman, Freeman Dyson, Richard Dufallo, Germaine Greer, and Jane Goodall. We were interviewed individually at our homes and also met together in the Netherlands. He asked each of us what brings beauty or consolation into our lives. Some said Mozart or butterflies or their children and brought to the interview examples they loved. What could I show him during my interview? Mozart is okay and butterflies can be nice to look at, but they are not my beauty or my consolation. In the end, I brought him a falsely accused couple whom I had helped. I find incredible beauty when these suffering individuals find comfort (and sometimes even humor) in joining with others who are going through a similar experience and when they convey their enormous appreciation for
3 By the way, venturing doesn't always pan out. I spent most of a day recently traveling to meet, at his request, the film producer Brian Grazer (of A Beautiful Mind fame). My fantasy was that I might entice him to produce a film about something to do with psychology. I haven't heard from him since, but being generally an optimist, I really should say I haven't heard from him yet.
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help that I or anyone takes the t i m e to give. That's beauty and consolation for me. So what's left to do? W i t h maybe 20 good years left, I've got a lot more t h i n k i n g to do, discoveries to make, students to teach, innocent people to help, and w h i t e wine to d r i n k w i t h m y family and friends.
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S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s by E l i z a b e t h F. L o f t u s Bernstein, D. M., Laney, C, Morris, E. K., & Loftus, E. F. (2005a). False beliefs about fattening foods can have healthy consequences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102, 13724-13731. Bernstein, D. M., Laney, C, Morris, E. K., & Loftus, E. F. (2005b). False memories about food can lead to food avoidance. Social Cognition, 23, 10—33. Ceci, S. J., Loftus, E. F., Leichtman, M. D., & Bruck, M. (1994). The possible role of source misattributions in the creation of false beliefs among preschoolers. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 42, 304—320. Collins, A. M., & Loftus, E. F. (1975). A spreading activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological Review, 82, 407—428. Freedman, J. L., & Loftus, E. F. (1971). Retrieval of words from long-term memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 10, 107—115. Garry, M., Manning, C, Loftus, E. F., & Sherman, S.J. (1996). Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 3, 208-214. Loftus, E. F. (1974, December). Reconstructing memory: The incredible eyewitness. Psychology Today, 8, 116-119. Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 560-572. Loftus, E. F. (1977). Shifting human color memory. Memory and Cognition, 5, 696699. Loftus, E. F. (1979a). Eyewitness testimony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loftus, E. F. (1979b). Reactions to blatantly contradictory information. Memory and Cognition, 7, 368-374. Loftus, E. F. (1992). When a lie becomes memory's truth. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1, 121 — 123. Loftus, E. F. (1993). The reality of repressed memories. American Psychologist, 48, 518— 537. Loftus, E. F. (1995). Remembering dangerously. Skeptical Inquirer, 19(2), 20-29. Loftus, E. F. (2002, May/June). Dear mother. Psychology Today, 35, 68-70. Loftus, E. F. (2003a, Fall). On science under legal assault. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 132(4), 84-86. Loftus, E. F. (2003b). Memory in Canadian courts of law. Canadian Psychology, 44, 207-212. Loftus, E. F. (2005). A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning and Memory, 12, 361—366. Loftus, E. F., & Bernstein, D. M. (2005). Rich false memories: The royal road to success. In A. F. Healy (Ed.), Experimental cognitive psychology and its applications (pp. 101-113). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
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Loftus, E. F., Coan, J. A., & Pickrell, J. E. (1996). Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality. In L. M. Reder (Ed.), Implicit memory and metacognition (pp. 195-220). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Loftus, E. F., & Freedman, J. L. (1972). Effect of category-name frequency on the speed of naming an instance of the category. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 343-347. Loftus, E. F., & Guyer, M. (2002a, May/June). Who abused Jane Doe? The hazards of the single case history. Part I. Skeptical Inquirer, 26(3), 24-32. Loftus, E. F., & Guyer, M. J. (2002b, July/August). Who abused Jane Doe? Part II. Skeptical Inquirer, 26(4), 37-40, 44. Loftus, E. F., & Hoffman, H. G. (1989). Misinformation and memory: The creation of memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 100—104. Loftus, E. F., & Ketcham, K. (1991). Witness for the defense: The accused, the eyewitness, and the expert who puts memory on trial. New York: St. Martin's Press. Loftus, E. F., & Ketcham, K. (1994). The myth of repressed memory. New York: St. Martin's Press. Loftus, E. F., & Loftus, G. R. (1980). On the permanence of stored information in the human brain. American Psychologist, 35, 409—420. Loftus, E. F., & Mazzoni, G. A. L. (1998). Using imagination and personalized suggestion to change people. Behavior Therapy, 29, 691—706. Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585-589Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720-725. Mazzoni, G. A. L., & Loftus, E. F. (1998). Dream interpretation can change beliefs about the past. Psychotherapy, 35, 177-187. Mazzoni, G. A. L., Loftus, E. F., & Kirsch, I. (2001). Changing beliefs about implausible autobiographical events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 7, 51-59. Schooler, J. W., Gerhard, D., & Loftus, E. F. (1986). Qualities of the unreal. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12, 171 — 181.
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O t h e r Publications Cited Ashmore, M., Brown, S. D., & MacMillan, K. (2005). Lost in the mall with Mesmer and Wundt: Demarcations and demonstrations in the psychologies. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 30(1), 76—110. Banaji, M. R. (2007). Elizabeth F. Loftus: Warrior scientist. In M. Garry & H. Hayne (Eds.), Do justice and let the sky fall: Elizabeth Loftus and her contributions to science, law and academic freedom (pp. 193—198). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Bower, G. H. (2007). Tracking the birth of a star. In M. Garry & H. Hayne (Eds.), Do justice and let the sky fall: Elizabeth Loftus and her contributions to science, law and academic freedom (pp. 15—26). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Bowers, N. (1994, December). Poetry, 1650), 151. Dolan, M. (2005, June 21). Memory, pain and the truth. Los Angeles Times, pp. A l , A16. Glassie, J. (2005, December 11). False-memory diet. New York Times Magazine, p. 69. Halkin, T. (2005, June 9). False memories could alter eating habits. The Jerusalem Post, p 5. Heaps, C. M., & Nash, M. (2001). Comparing recollective experience in true and false autobiographical memories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 920-930. Hyman, I. E., Jr., Husband, T. H., & Billings, F. J. (1995). False memories of childhood experiences. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 9, 181-197. Hyman, I. E., Jr., & Pentland, J. (1996). The role of mental imagery in the creation of false childhood memories. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 101-117. Johnston, M. (1997). Spectral evidence. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Kayzer, W. (2000). Het boek van de schoonheid en de troost [The Book of Beauty and Consolation}. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact. Lindsay, D. S., Hagen, L., Read, J. D., Wade, K. A., & Garry, M. (2004). True photographs and false memories. Psychological Science, 15, 149. Loftus, G. R. (2007). Elizabeth F. Loftus: The early years. In M. Garry & H. Hayne (Eds.), Do justice and let the sky fall: Elizabeth Loftus and her contributions to science, law, and academic freedom. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. McCloskey, M., & Zaragoza, M. (1985). Misleading postevent information and memory for events: Arguments and evidence against memory impairment hypotheses. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 1 — 16. Morton, J., Hammersley, R. H., & Bekerian, D. A. (1985). Headed records: A model for memory and its failures. Cognition, 20, 1-23. Ost, J., Foster, S., Costall, A., & Bull, R. (2005). False reports of childhood events in appropriate interviews. Memory, 13, 700-710. Sabbagh, K. (2004). Seeking the truth about false memory. The Times of London, pp. 2, 10. Tavris, C. (2002, July/August). The high cost of skepticism. Skeptical Inquirer, 26(4), 41-44.
7
W a l t e r
M i s c h e l
B orn in Vienna, Austria, February 22, 1930, to Lola Leah (nee Schreck) Mischel and Salomon Mischel, who had come to Vienna from Galicia in Poland 20 years earlier and established solidly middleclass lives for themselves and their families. My father, well educated, intellectually inclined (he loved languages and even learned Esperanto, thinking it would become the international one), a kind and gentle man except for infrequent outbursts of temper when his two sons became too obnoxious, was rarely home, and appeared to enjoy the life of a reasonably prosperous businessman and dreamer especially fond of his habitual table in his special Vienna coffee house, reading and slowly sipping coffee. My mother, an intelligent and always beautiful woman, seemed, as I remember it, to have had very little to do, spending much of her time worrying, usually about her headaches and "bad nerves," reclined on the drawing room settee with an ice pack on her forehead, while Frau Braun, our grim German governess (she was supposed to teach us French but I think she knew very little), tried to deal with the pranks with which my brother, cousins, and I tortured her. I can still see her sitting sternly on the confiscated soccer ball that we then kicked out from behind her.
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As an adolescent, I saw m y father and mother becoming transformed. M y mother, who had we lived just a b i t closer to Freud's office i n Vienna m i g h t w e l l have qualified as one of his patients, metamorphosed i n America f r o m the prototype of middle-class neurasthenia-hysteria to h a r d w o r k i n g , competent caterer, w i n d o w dresser, family and business manager, and caring (albeit critical) wife and overprotective mother. As she became stronger, cheerier, and more eager and able to cope, m y father became even kinder and sweeter but m u c h sadder and more depressed, not clinically, but i n response to the new w o r l d and life i n w h i c h he found neither a decent job nor a new identity and grieved for the old ones. For those inclined to search for the roots of a scholar's central ideas and w o r k themes i n early personal experience, the changes I saw playing out i n m y parents and i n myself as the situations i n our lives changed seem likely candidates. M y sense of m y post-Vienna childhood was that there wasn't much of o n e — m y parents were too busy w o r k i n g to survive, and I was t r y i n g to be of help or staying out of the way. The concept of family f u n and together t i m e , now central i n the life of m y six grandchildren, d i d not exist for us, except that sometimes we were able to laugh rather hysterically at ourselves and some of the absurdities of our daily life. The laughter i n the endlessly j o k i n g relationship w i t h m y brother Ted kept us both g o i n g , finding what can make life funny or inventing i t .
1 felt intermittently ignored by my parents, which I generally appreciated, and overprotected by my mother exactly in the areas where I did not want to be. Her protectiveness interfered with any kind of physical sport activity, no small thing for a boy growing up in Brooklyn, where baseball and handball skills or at least interests in sports were the price of admission to socializing with peers. The fears my mother conjured up included fear of drowning from venturing near the first 2 feet of water on the beach, fear of falling and breaking limbs from running (which I did nevertheless a good deal), fears of head injuries from getting on a bike (which I didn't do then and still can't do now), and fear of getting blinded by a baseball or any other flying object. The list of fears was long but did not include fear of carrying heavy bundles. Too bad: Schlepping heavy loads of cut shoulders for lady's suits in an uncle's "garment factory," actually a small sweat shop, produced a right inguinal hernia, the only surgery I have so far needed. I t also kept me out of the Korean War. But it also was my mother
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My first memory of the earliest school years in the U.S.: Although I was 9 years old, I was assigned to kindergarten (to learn English), and remember trying to walk on my knees to not stick out from the 5-year-olds when our class marched through the corridors. My second memory: Soon after our arrival I was given an intelligence test in English, which I was just starting to learn. Later the teacher told me about her disappointment at the poor test results. I suspect that experience may not be unconnected to my more extensively documented critique of psychological testing 30 years later in Personality and Assessment (Mischel, 1968). In Brooklyn's Bensonhurst area, then a mostly lower middle socioeconomic Italian-Jewish neighborhood, with help from others, my parents opened a small "Five Cents, Ten Cents, and Up" store, with very little "Up." It was open most hours of the day, late into the night, all days of the week, rarely with a customer in it, and a much larger competitor down the street getting most of the sales, so that I spent many of my late afternoons eagerly waiting to make the rare delivery. The Brooklyn years, in retrospect, seem like a happy fantasy-filled time, many about having a different life. I think there were a few months around age 10 when I pretended to be an automobile zooming around the shabby Brooklyn streets. The self as automobile soon was supplemented by adventure stories, histories of science, Russian novels (Dostoyevsky my favorite), morbid poets (with T. S. Eliot the one I memorized most), and by much drawing and painting, a passion that has persisted all of my life. O i l colors were too expensive, but I found that Jell-O, my mother's favorite fare, mixed the right way, especially the reds, could work reasonably, and a mostly Jell-O self-portrait at age 17 still hangs unfaded and uneaten in my Manhattan apartment. Daily life also felt vibrant, filled with school and assorted odd jobs after the store days ended (stock boy in a department store, part-time elevator operator, and from office boy to buttonhole maker in a garment factory). Most of the jobs were in Manhattan, which I loved from the first moment I saw its dawn skyline as the ship from Europe docked. I relished the time in its streets during breaks or when making deliveries from the "finer furs" department to the Upper East Side and when staring at the city during daily long commutes on subways from and to Brooklyn.
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who made me feel I could accomplish in life whatever I wanted, which I almost began to believe at least some of the time, while never forgetting to urge me to be careful, which I tried to ignore. My father was the one who quietly kept providing warmth and kindness and knew how to listen when I most needed it, recognizing those moments before I did. During my early adolescence, an unexpected friend was my maternal grandmother, the wife of the man whose U.S. citizenship papers had saved the family. When Isidore died of a sudden heart attack at age 40, I am told that she had her gravestone placed next to his in Vienna with the inscription, "Here lies Emma Schreck who soon after died of grief." More than 60 years later I watched her buried in Los Angeles where she died at an age close to 100. Emma always had a reputation with her five children for being hugely demanding and self-centered, both well-known family characteristics. She demanded nothing of me when I stayed with her at her tiny apartment in Far Rockaway to escape the New York City summer heat. At night I worked in Playland, then a popular amusement park, throwing back the balls, setting up the pins, and handing out the teddy bears to the good bowlers. Emma, liberally critical of others but never of me, taught me Yiddish, told me endlessly wonderful old-country stories, Jewish fables, and weird interpretations of the Old Testament, hummed Yiddish songs, and gave extensive advice on how to deal with girls that in hindsight might not have been bad i f I had followed it. In New Utrecht, my huge and highly competitive high school replete with ambitious and smart immigrant and first-generation American adolescents struggling to "make it," I loved learning and mastering new material, almost regardless of the topic, and discovered the pleasures of the library. I suspect I also saw high school as the passport for getting out of my Brooklyn refugee life and ultimately towards Manhattan or whatever that image meant to me. In high school I was a "good student," then also called an "eager beaver,"—voted, I blush to recall, "boy most likely to succeed,"—and at graduation won all the medals except math. My valedictory address was on Franz Boas (then I think in the anthropology department at Columbia University) and his fights against prejudice. It's only in retrospect, after having attended multiple school graduations for my three daughters, that I realize that the fact that no one from my family was present was unusual even in 1947.
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W i t h scholarship help, I attended once in a while New York University for the first 2 college years at its now defunct uptown campus in the "Heights," an all-male college in the Bronx to which local boys hoping to get into medical school (rather than dental school or accounting) aspired. After a couple of organic chemistry lab sessions botching aspirin and concurrently mutilating my first and last lobster dissection outside a restaurant, I realized that I did not want to go to medical school. In my family at that time becoming a real doctor was considered the only alternative to "going into business," probably my uncle's umbrella business. This was the family expectation, in spite of the fact that on my father's side there had been a history (it might have been more of a myth) about Talmudic scholars and authors in the family. Regardless, instead of doing the pre-med curriculum I wanted to be where the girls and the poetry and painting and philosophy were— the Washington Square campus of New York University in a then (1949) very Bohemian-seeming Greenwich Village. Unlike the eager beaver I was in high school, my class work became uneven in college, with many As but some awful grades too. I now paid attention only to what interested me, feeling that I had already gotten my exit permit from the refugee life and that I could pursue what I wanted. Small seminar-like classes with poets/writers Delmore Schwartz, Alan Tate, and William Barrett, and a studio drawing/painting class with the great Philip Guston, plus an overflowing philosophy class with Sidney Hook, showed me what splendid teachers can do and hooked me on an academic life, a choice made even easier by the alternative of joining my uncle in the umbrella business. Probably my choice was guided most importantly by the model my brother Theodore (Ted) provided. Like my father, Ted considered himself an intellectual even when he was a young kid, always destined, as he saw it, to become a professor, and after earning multiple degrees, including in English literature and physics, he did become a distinguished philosopher. Beginning with the enforced closeness of the refugee years when even beds had to be shared, we bonded closely, and although our careers took us to different parts of the country as adults, it was an intimacy that continued personally and intellectually, supporting each of us,
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strengthened further by Ted's growing interest in the philosophy of science, focusing on the behavioral sciences and particularly psychology, concurrent with my own development as a psychologist. The poetry and literature and philosophy I read sharpened my disbelief at my rat-centered, lifeless introductory psychology classes at N Y U and made Freud even more intriguing. A course in abnormal psychology was a torture of memorizing classification systems for naming endless forms of bizarre behavior with little attention to their meaning, possible origins, or treatment. This confusing mess increased my curiosity about abnormal behavior, and in 1951, I entered the College of the City of New York's small master's degree program in clinical psychology. (I don't think a PhD in clinical was offered there at that time, and most of its handful of students I believe went on to advanced work elsewhere.) Inspiring people led the program: Joseph Barmack in physiological; Kenneth Clark working on the Supreme Court hearings on school integration; and Gardner Murphy, with whom I did my M.A. thesis on effects of exposure on art judgments—my first and last effort connecting my interest in psychology and painting. A t City College, the psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein's passionate, straightforward discussions of the toll of brain damage and the coping efforts of its victims were a revelation in their sensitivity, compassion, and observational precision. In contrast, solemn, carefully dispassionate lecturers from the psychoanalytic institutes in New York came to explain everything from the case of the W o l f Man to all of human behavior with a smug certainty that was unsettling even to me, who was eager to be converted. I appreciated the chance to hear the approach articulated in great detail for 2 years, but also grew uneasy when questioning the interpretations that the psychoanalysts made led them to interpret the unconscious motivations and resistance of the questioner rather than to answer them. Nevertheless, much-discussed Little Hans remained in my thoughts and in my own later lectures for decades, although he has served different purposes—first to illustrate Freud's theory of neurosis, later to document the hazards of clinical inference. The City College master's program was mostly in the evenings, and by day and on nonschool nights I worked as an uncredentialed social worker with small groups of young children, larger groups of adolescents, and very large groups of the elderly in what were then called
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the slums of the Lower East Side at the Henry Street Settlement House and the Educational Alliance. This juxtaposition of school and work underlined the discrepancy between the fascinating clinical methods and psychoanalytic theories I was taught and the experiences I was having with the people I was supposed to help. Intrigued by psychoanalytic theory and by projective testing (Ruth Munroe's lectures on the Rorschach really did make it sound like a mental X-ray machine), I tried to apply my new insights in my social work. I remember being surrounded by eagerly listening "high-risk" adolescents while I did my best to impart my new Freudian insights to interpret the anger of a particularly troublesome youngster whose brother was waiting for execution in the state prison. I felt encouraged by their attentive listening but after a few minutes realized that the back of my jacket had been set on fire by one of the kids behind me. After extinguishing it, I knew I needed more training.
O h i o S t a t e (1953-1956) Ohio State University offered the most financial support (by about fifty more dollars) toward a PhD in clinical psychology, and for that reason, in 1953 I went to it rather than to the alternatives, knowing little about the program. Fortunately, Ohio State's psychology department turned out to be a remarkable center for graduate training, especially in clinical psychology. Soon I felt I had found Utopia, getting paid for doing what I wanted, on a schedule largely in my own control, a great good fortune that has held for all my academic life and which always feels just a bit too good to be real. The intellectual tension between the social learning theory just formulated by Julian B. Rotter and the personal construct theory newly developed by George A. Kelly, each full of fresh ideas, created an atmosphere of ferment and promise for clinical psychology and personality theory. Here the excitement was about finding evidence for what worked best and understanding the reasons for it, and building new conceptions for making sense of complex human behavior. Questioning the received wisdom of the field was welcomed, and ideas were wide open to revision and subject to empirical testing in the laboratory and in the clinic. Rotter's weekly evenings with his students modeled how
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vague notions can turn into incisive ideas that become experiments and showed me for the first time how exciting and generative a lab in psychology can be. Although social modeling was not yet a topic at Ohio State, one could not help but notice how much Rotter's most admiring students looked, dressed, and acted like he did, greatly adding to the pipe smoke filling the room with tobacco that smelled like his, not unaware that I also was puffing away on my pipe like the others. Most students loyally aligned themselves unequivocally either with Kelly or with Rotter, the two major professors who had offices as far apart as possible and seemed to have little contact and zero crossreferences either verbally or in their writings. I was impressed by both their ideas and drawn strongly to both. Social learning theory seemed an appealing, refreshingly reasonable, data-based approach for designing research and suggested many potentially effective treatment and assessment strategies. Rotter's emphasis on expectancies and values in the analysis of action and prediction of individual differences was a major advance for bridging the gap between experimental and clinical psychology and made it easy for his students to generate interesting experiments. At the same time, personal construct theory, especially as illustrated in the masterful clinical approach that George Kelly modeled both with his clients and with his students, seemed an extraordinarily rich and original framework. Kelly's conviction (and he convinced many of us) that the "subjects" of psychology are no less capable of being scientists than the psychologists who study them, informed and guided everything in his approach. It made it possible, amazingly at a time when behaviorism was still predominant in psychology, to construe interpersonal problems and human characteristics in ways that respect the individual. It let us see the person as a thinking being rather than, as Kelly put it, "a victim of his biography" or a point sitting fixed, stuck on the psychologist's trait continuum. When my life or work ran into a wall, I often reminded myself of his definition of hostility, which he illustrated with the parable of the Procrustean bed. Hostility is when you keep forcing the data, whether about someone else or yourself, including your research results, to make them fit into your hypothesis or construct, even when they simply won't, rather than questioning the construct itself and maybe coming up with a better, more convenient one.
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W o r k w i t h outpatients i n the clinical practicum experiences that filled much of the O h i o State t i m e reassured me that clinical psychology was the r i g h t choice. Seeing what the inside of mental health i n s t i t u tions looked like i n 1955 was the shock. O h i o State is i n Columbus, the state capital that houses the m a i n institutions for all sorts of ills, such as the home for the "feebleminded," and the one for the "insane," as they were k n o w n , and were the sites for many of our clinical experiences. The conditions were beyond any bedlam that I could have imagined, even after having read m u c h about the state of such institutions at the t i m e and historically. Beyond the horror of the conditions and lives that were wasting w i t h i n t h e m , I was astounded by how staff, and particularly psychologists, seemed to be spending their t i m e . I was struck by this d u r i n g m y internship year on the psychiatric wards at the Chillicothe, O h i o Veterans A d m i n i s t r a t i o n Hospital. I t was the "team approach," consisting of more than a dozen people led by a physician, the psychologists and trainees, and some social workers. The psychologists, i n c l u d i n g the trainees like me, spent most of their t i m e g i v i n g the standard test battery (Wechsler I Q , Rorschach, Thematic Apperception Test [ T A T ] , clinical interview, maybe a Draw-a-Person Test, a couple of short questionnaires), much of i t s t i l l popular more than half a century later, all evidence against their u t i l i t y not w i t h s t a n d i n g . I t took hours to administer and score these and even longer to " w o r k up the results" and divine the underlying psychodynamics of each case and then more t i m e to discuss them at the weekly team conferences. Most of the dynamics sounded alike, and none of them seemed to influence the decisions that were made about the patient and the treatment, i f any, that followed. I amused myself d u r i n g the conferences that always seemed to drone on the same way, often by d o o d l i n g , sometimes by calculating the probable costs of the salaries being paid to the participants as the clock ticked on. H a l f a dozen years later, when I began to review the personality and assessment literature, I found good reasons i n the data for the doubts I had felt d u r i n g m y internship. I had come to O h i o State w i t h Frances H e n r y (we had married while s t i l l i n Brooklyn), and she applied for a predoctoral grant f r o m the Wenner Gren Foundation to do doctoral research on the cosmology, rituals, and ceremonies of Orisha, then called Shango, that practiced spirit possession i n the Caribbean. The chance to leave Columbus,
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Ohio, for travel to what were then exotic places outside the tourist routes (and still under British rule) was irresistible. Imagining an opportunity here to look for connections between what people do in their daily lives, the behaviors they enact when "possessed" during the Shango ceremonies, and the fantasies and unconscious concerns that might be revealed through projective testing, I came along eagerly. Although my clinical experiences were making me increasingly aware of the lack of utility of projective measures for making decisions in the mental hospital setting, I was still hopeful about their value for exploring what goes on at the fantasy level and thought it was worth a try. Armed with my Rorschach and T A T cards (and a sketch pad), we headed for Trinidad for several summers, from 1955 to 1958.
From T r i n i d a d a n d Shango t o D e l a y o f G r a t i f i c a t i o n We found Shango practiced in a small village in the southern tip of Trinidad and befriended its leader, Pa Neezer, who congenially welcomed us to live in one of his little houses as observers to study and understand their ceremonies and practices. The participants in Shango were cooperative and eager to please. This became clear in their responses to my projective tests on which answers sometimes had more to do with what they thought might interest me (e.g., themes from current American films playing in the next town) than with their inner lives. While the stories they spun surely had something to do with their inner states, it was beyond me to discern the connections. I soon put the tests away and started looking at what might be going on around us. In the Shango ceremonies stretching over several days and nights, laborers and domestic servants of the British by day became "possessed" at night by the mix of saints and African gods whose spirits "rode" them as they danced in hypnotized states, enacting their godlike roles, with the irresistible drums pounding and the rum bottles passing. I am an impossible dancer, never able to manage a fox trot after multiple lessons, but as I found myself struggling to resist hurling myself into the dance I realized that the participant-observer balance was tipping fast, and that while keeping my eyes glued to the scene, I needed to turn my work in other directions.
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The transition from resisting my impulse to jump into the dance to studying the ability to delay gratification began when I started talking to our neighbors in the village and listened as they discussed their lives. The inhabitants in this area of the island were of either African or East Indian background, each group living in its own enclave. It did not take much listening to note a recurrent theme in their characterizations of each other. In the eyes of the East Indians, the Africans were just pleasure-bent, impulsive, eager to have a good time and live in the moment while never planning or thinking ahead about the future. Reciprocally, the Africans saw their East Indian neighbors as just working for the future and stuffing their money under the mattress without ever enjoying today. I began to examine these observations in the local schools with young children from both ethnic groups. In their classrooms, I administered measures that ranged from such demographic descriptors as father presence-absence in the home to trust expectations, achievement motivation, diverse indices of social responsibility, and intelligence. At the end of each of these sessions, I gave them choices between little treats (a tiny chocolate bar, a small notepad) that they could have immediately or a much bigger, better one that they would get next week. This was the beginning of the studies that identified some of the main determinants of such choice behavior and temporal discounting (e.g., Mischel, 1958, 1961a, 1961b; Mischel & Gilligan, 1964; Mischel & Metzner, 1962). The findings also suggested that this type of choice behavior in early life might be a powerful predictor of consequential outcomes over the developmental course—a lead that proved to be prophetic of what we found many years later.
C o l o r a d o (1956-1958) t o H a r v a r d (1958-1962) It was the year before the Sputnik launching, and the race to beat the Russians to the moon created the great boom in the academic world. Jobs were hard to find for a new PhD, and my choice was between a Veterans Administration hospital in Gary, Indiana, or the University of Colorado. Although it was an easy choice, after a year of teaching there, wondering why I felt so alien in Boulder where everyone told me how wonderful it was, a letter from David C.
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McClelland inviting me for a visit to Harvard University opened the door for my exodus back to the East Coast as an assistant professor in the Department of Social Relations beginning in 1958. In those days, such an invitation could come more easily than now, with no advertising by the university and no application on the candidate's part. It was enough that a senior faculty member had read and liked the first couple of studies I published, and the interviews went well. In Cambridge, the world of psychology was changing fast: Behaviorism was about to drop dead after decades of dominance; cognitive science was slowly being born, and much of it seemed to be happening in the immediate neighborhood. Vivid images include a caring, thoughtful, elegant, immaculate Gordon Allport at a lunch of horsemeat at the Harvard faculty club asking me about how many major traits I thought existed—5 or 7 or 16? I don't remember my answer but do recall that the topic changed quickly, and we discussed the seminar plans and enjoyed the horsemeat. Soon after we published our findings on Shango in 1958 in the American Anthropologist, Frances and I divorced, my Trinidad adventures ended, and at Harvard I met and married Harriet Nerlove, a clinical psychology graduate student in the Social Relations Department, freshly arrived with her B.A. from Swarthmore, where she had worked with Solomon Asch on children's developing understanding of metaphor. Independent of my own early work on delay of gratification, she had become interested in issues of self-control and delay of reward, and we had much to share from the start in what became 36 years of life together. I used the early-leave term, then available to junior faculty, to prepare myself to teach a better course on personality and assessment. Harriet and I spent most of that time in Florence, Italy. When not staring at the beautiful world around us (and therefore mostly in the very early mornings and many hours when the museums and much of the city were closed), I began to review the main existing personality theories and assessment methods and looked most closely at the empirical findings. In those long-before-computer times, that literature was squeezed into the immense trunk and duffle bag that we had dragged along. Fortunately the thieves who on our arrival in Italy helped themselves to most of our luggage left the personality literature behind for us.
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I wanted to prepare a survey course on the state of personality psychology and assessment and the links between the two. B u t the more I read, the more bewildering I found i t . The texts on personality theories mostly were simplistic descriptions of the grand theories (Freud, J u n g , A l l p o r t , etc.), organized chronologically, alphabetically by author, or perhaps randomly. W h e n I compared the theories and the findings, the discrepancies became glaring between what the former assumed about personality and what the latter showed, and this seemed true for both the trait and the psychodynamic—psychoanalytic approaches that dominated the field. Many research articles and doctoral dissertations ended w i t h the same caveat, apologizing that the tests used accounted for so l i t t l e of the variance i n the behaviors being predicted and invariably a t t r i b u t i n g the poor results to limitations i n the research but leaving the key assumptions unquestioned. A l t h o u g h I had w r i t t e n a couple of hundred pages, after many rereadings I decided to trash the muddle I had produced and spent much of the rest of the leave t r y i n g to forget i t . O n m y return, m y experiences doing personality assessment research on the first Peace Corps projects, however, soon led me to face again what I was t r y i n g to ignore. The simple direct self-reports and selfratings of anxiety and attitudes to authority taken d u r i n g training modestly but statistically significantly predicted the candidates' performance when i n the field i n Nigeria. Consistent w i t h the assessment practices of the t i m e , global ratings and judgments of the trainees also were made d u r i n g their 2 - m o n t h t r a i n i n g period at Harvard University by the faculty, by the assessment board for the project, and by interviewers. These far more costly and time-consuming evaluations by expert judges agreed w i t h each other b u t failed completely to predict performance (Mischel, 1965). So I became eager again to try to make sense of the state of personality and assessment. B u t m u c h was changing rapidly i n Cambridge that delayed that effort. T i m o t h y Leary had joined the personality area, brought by D a v i d McClelland, who I t h i n k had met h i m while also on a visit to Italy and had become fascinated by some of the m i n d - a l t e r i n g states that Leary was exploring using the "magic mushrooms" that he had found on a t r i p to Mexico. I got on w e l l w i t h Leary, a charming, talented, charismatic man. Before the mushrooms, he was a personality psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and we shared
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an interest in personality assessment, but he soon moved into new areas. I realized this one morning when mattresses suddenly replaced several of the graduate student desks and large packages from Ciba chemicals in Switzerland began to arrive in the department mail. The age of "turn on, tune in, drop out" had begun. Richard Alpert, a newly minted PhD who t i l l Leary arrived had been an ambitious academic aspirant on the road for tenure, rapidly designated himself as Leary's "impresario" and devoted the rest of his life to promoting the new age counterculture, in time shedding his three-button conservative suits for white guru sheets and flowing beard to become Baba Ram Dass, the internationally famous (at the time) mystic and world-touring lecturer. My best graduate student at Harvard, Ralph Metzner, soon tuned in to the new Leary-Alpert world, dropped out of mine, and I never heard from him again. The place kept getting crazier, it was impossible to work, and the qualities that had made it appealing seemed to be vanishing, so when an invitation came from Stanford University to visit for an interview, I jumped at the chance. I left Boston in the slush and dirty ice of a February morning, greeted in the brilliant sunshine at the San Francisco airport by Leon Festinger and we whisked in his top-down red Mercedes sports coupe to the university. Stanford seemed an enchanted academic paradise with an intellectual exuberance and vigor that was immediately catching. A long evening of dining and drinking in San Francisco's Chinatown with Festinger and A l Hastorf, the department chair, was great fun. It turned into a much longer evening that became a night at Leon's house drinking and singing (sort of) our versions of Yiddish medleys about our old mamas that fortunately my grandmother Emma had taught me. My talk the next day on my early studies of individual differences in delay of gratification in Trinidad was well received. At its end, Festinger, famously considered a terror in the devastating comments he made to colloquium speakers, rose to say that as far as he was concerned individual differences were the noise of measurement, producing a deadly hush in the auditorium. My response, "Your noise is my independent variable," elicited a broad grin from him and an audible sigh of relief in the audience. The visit persuaded me, and I guess my hosts and the department, that we could be a good fit. I arrived with Harriet and our newborn first daughter, Judith, in Palo Alto that June and stayed for 20 years.
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It was an exhilarating time at Stanford, and the psychology department was a large part of the excitement. When I got there in addition to Leon Festinger and Albert Hastorf the group included Alex Bavelas, William K. Estes, Ernest (Jack) Hilgard, Douglas H. Lawrence, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Robert Sears, and Patrick Suppes, and in the younger crew Richard Atkinson, Albert Bandura, Gordon Bower, Mark Lepper, and soon after (and in random order) Lee Ross, Roger Shepard, Philip Zimbardo, Edward E. Smith, Daryl and Sandra Bern, Herbert and Eve Clark, Lee Cronbach, John Flavel, Ellen Markman, Ewart Thomas, Amos and Barbara Tversky, Brian Wandell, and many others who made the place sparkle. We shared the conviction that we were on the way to changing our fields, creating a science that would make a difference to the world, uncovering the mental processes that for half a century behaviorism had made taboo. Though most of us were too busy with our own preoccupations to spend much time listening to each other, we did talk a lot. The excitement of the discoveries came through the office and lab doors, communicated best by the students, whose enthusiasms made most seminars run well beyond their scheduled times and who typically worked with—and contributed to as well as benefited from—more than one adviser. It was an atmosphere of mutual respect and appreciation that fostered autonomy but in which bonds between seemingly incompatible people formed that endured for life. For example, as Gordon Bower noted at my Festschrift and I at his in 2004-2005, we were an unlikely pair: he, a big American athletic type from Scio, Ohio, who liked to go to ball games; I, a European-sized New Yorker who liked to go to art galleries. But sharing the golden years at Stanford brought us and many others close as colleagues and friends. One of my fond memories of that time is A l Bandura and myself, each with necks stiff from sitting at our desks too long, trying to take up weekly swimming and failing, probably looking in danger of drowning even in the shallow part of the pool, as we chewed over the problems that made a program in clinical psychology so difficult to maintain as long as the extreme incompatible demands of both clinical service and scientific productivity had to be met.
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Bandura had made a table of arrivals and departures that he shared with me on my arrival. I t showed rapid, continuous turnover among the junior faculty in clinical, because those who devoted their time to clinical work and were good at it generally did not meet the academic standards, and vice versa, so accepting a clinical position at Stanford almost guaranteed no future in the university. As a temporary solution, we turned the clinical program into one on experimental pathology. It included more experimental work and research, most of it within clinical settings and directly relevant to clinical applications. In it we also could move away from techniques that neither of us believed in and both of us were trying to change, such as costly tests with little or no validity and therapies without evidence of efficacy but on which the American Psychological Association insisted for clinical programs. It became a program that helped train many of the people who became leaders in the development of cognitive behavior modification and assessment. Students at Stanford in the whole department were exceptional, colleagues were supportive, and together we all, regardless of the area of our work, helped make a fine department into a great academic community. It became the "center of excellence" administrators love to talk about and rarely get, and sent out several generations of students that made, and still make, outstanding contributions. Administrative chores at Stanford were kept to a minimum within the department, allowing everyone to focus on the work they cared about most, and although I served as chair three times, each term was limited to 1 year. Fortunately it was possible even within such short time frames to help facilitate important decisions. The one I remember as the most important was to hire Amos Tversky with what felt like lightning speed. His presence quickly put the place into intellectual overdrive and influenced my thinking substantially as well as making life in Palo Alto more interesting personally.
A Window for Watching "Willpower" In the mid-1960s at Stanford I watched my three closely spaced daughters, Judith, Rebecca, and Linda, each change in the first few
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years of life from mostly giggling and gurgling or screaming and sleeping to become people with whom one could have fascinating, thoughtful conversations. Most amazing to me, sometimes they could even sit still for a while to wait for things they wanted that took some time or effort to get. It did not help me to think about this marvel as the passage from mostly id to more ego nor as reflecting the kinds of learning determinants that George Kelly had caricatured as the carrot and the stick. As I tried to make some sense out of what was unfolding in front of me at the kitchen table, I mused that in behaviorism as well as in economics, the explanatory keys for most human behavior, including what was happening to my children, were rewards. But I did not have a clue about how rewards enable voluntary delay of gratification and "willpower," a term that as a psychologist I still put into quotes. My research on delay of gratification (an ability that often has been extremely difficult for me), beginning in Trinidad, had looked at differences among people in their decision to forego immediate but less valuable in favor of delayed but more valuable outcomes. We had found lots of interesting determinants (trust expectations, delay interval, reward values) and even more correlates (e.g., Mischel, 1974) relevant to what later became temporal discounting. But recognizing that the decision to delay gratification (e.g., to forego dessert in the restaurant tonight), and the ability to uphold that decision when the pastry cart rolls by, are not necessarily highly correlated, the question I kept asking myself became, After the choice to delay has been made, the good intention formed and declared at least to oneself, what allows it to be realized? And how does this ability develop in the young child? To go from speculating to empiricism required a method to study delay ability when the young child begins to have it around preschool age. Happily the newly established Bing Nursery School at Stanford with its big one-way glass observation windows was the ideal laboratory. My students at that time, notably including Ebbe Ebbesen, Bert Moore, and Antonette Zeiss (but many others also played important parts), and I came up with the preschool "delay of immediate gratification for the sake of delayed but more valued rewards paradigm," in the media later called more simply, albeit incorrectly, "the marshmallow test." Briefly, the child faces a dilemma: one little treat right now
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or two if he/she waits to get it later. The child is left waiting facing both treats, and the measure is the seconds of delay before settling for the one or waiting the full time to get the two (e.g., after 15 minutes). Informal conversations and playful but serious miniexperiments with my daughters provided many of the hypotheses, and their responses much of the inspiration for this research, supplemented by hours observing children through the windows of the one-way glass while they were struggling to wait during the marshmallow test, as they waited on and on to get a more valuable treat later or rang the bell to get the less valuable one immediately. These experiments in the late 1960s and early 1970s soon made it clear that the crucial determinant of the young child's ability to delay immediate gratification was not the rewards faced in the situation, as earlier theories had suggested, but exactly how they were represented mentally (Mischel, 1974; Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989)- We saw that what mattered was what was in their heads, and that trumped what was actually in front of them: The duration of delay depended on specific types of "hot" or "cool" mental representations and the ways in which attention was deployed during the delay interval (e.g., Mischel & Baker, 1975; Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss, 1972, 1973; Mischel & Moore, 1973). This now seems evident, but at that time, when behaviorism prevailed and the cognitive revolution was in its infancy, it was startling, and it quickly made me at least as interested in self-control as in stimulus control. Reflecting and creating some of the intellectual excitement and synergy that seemed in the air at Stanford during this period, Nancy Cantor, then a graduate student, was shuttling between the cognitive and mathematical people on the third floor and me on the first floor. Upstairs, Ed Smith was working on experimental studies of a prototype theory of concepts, and Nancy and he decided that the theory had implications for psychiatric diagnostic categories, namely that such categories were better characterized by prototypes than by rules. Then Nancy came downstairs, and she and I examined trait and personality prototypes, applying developments in prototype theory to make better sense of challenges in personality psychology (Cantor & Mischel, 1977, 1979; Cantor, Mischel, & Schwartz, 1982). It also began a personal and intellectual connection for me that has endured not only w i t h
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Nancy but also w i t h E d , now m y Columbia colleague. T h i r t y years later, he and I are beginning a new collaboration on our again (or still) convergent interests.
T h e 1968 C h a l l e n g e s t o C l a s s i c Dispositional Assumptions Stanford was the perfect setting for returning to try to make sense of the discrepancies that troubled me i n Florence between what the dominant theories of personality assumed about the basic nature of personality and what the data showed. I n study after s t u d y — i n c l u d i n g mine for the Peace Corps—the results failed to support these assumptions, and always they were seen as due to poor methods, bad judges, and unreliable tests. Mainstream w o r k simply continued, w i t h some efforts to develop improved, more reliable tests and methods and reduce measurement error. The question that had not been asked was: W h a t i f the problem is not just w i t h bad methods and poor studies but also w i t h w r o n g assumptions? O n the one hand, the data indicated lack of cross-situational consistency. The gist of such findings is that the aggressive c h i l d at home may be less aggressive than most when i n school; the man exceptionally hostile when rejected i n love may be unusually tolerant about criticism of his w o r k ; the one who melts w i t h anxiety i n the doctor's office may be a calm mountain climber; the h i g h - r i s k - t a k i n g entrepreneur may take few social risks. B u t on the other hand, i n t u i t i o n and a t r a d i t i o n dating to the ancient Greeks and their " B i g Four" humors of personality (blood, bile, cholera, phlegm) as w e l l as personality psychology as a field led to the opposite conclusion. For half a dozen years, while w o r k i n g on m y 1968 monograph Personality and Assessment, I was torn between relying on the data showing variability or the i n t u i t i o n that there must be some consistency, a d i l e m m a that later became k n o w n as the personality paradox. I began to t h i n k that the data probably were r i g h t but so were the intuitions. The problem must be that the locus and nature of personality consistencies are fundamentally different from what had been assumed and that the intuitions have to be based on something behavior.
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The 1968 monograph traumatized the field of personality, because after a massive critical literature review I proposed that for a half century, researchers had been looking for personality in the wrong places, guided by untenable assumptions, and therefore could not find the expected results. The first reaction was silence. The book was briefly reviewed on a back page of Contemporary Psychology and dismissed as trivial and unjustified under the header "Personality unvanquished." In less than a year, it created a divisive debate that still reverberates and changed the field's agenda. Passionate discussions, debates, and confrontations proliferated in the journals and in the field's national and international meetings (e.g., Endler & Magnusson, 1976; Magnusson & Endler, 1977). Most personality psychologists condemned the book as trivializing the importance of personality and making the situation paramount, an assault to undo the field. Most social psychologists hailed it as proving the importance of the situation and the relative insignificance of individual differences in personality. I found it difficult to understand both reactions.
T o w a r d s an A l t e r n a t i v e Paradigm The 1968 book stirred what felt like a paradigm crisis and left many in the field demoralized but some exhilarated. In the first half of the last century, personality psychologists, following Gordon Allport's (1937) lead, deliberately disconnected themselves from the larger field, which was understandable at a time when extreme behaviorism was dominant. But by the late 1960s, the cognitive revolution was transforming psychology, and one could begin to see at least the outlines for a different view of personality, one that might integrate the data on consistency and variability of behavior I presented in the 1968 book. I proposed such an integration in the 1973 Psychological Review, "Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality." In this paper I examined how the person's encoding or construals and interpretations of the situation (i.e., its acquired meaning) and the expectations, values, and other psychological variables activated by those interpretations mediate the effects of situations on social behavior. The analysis focused on how these person—situation transactions predictably generate the kind of contextualized, conditionally
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hedged patterns of variability in behavior that the 1968 book documented and that attest to the complexity and discriminativeness of human beings. I wrote the 1973 piece in part to address what was becoming the central controversial issue in personality and social psychology, dubbed the person versus situation debate. It reflected the deeply entrenched traditional explanation of human behavior as due either to the internal character and traits of the individual or to the external situation in which the individual finds him- or herself, treating each as a mutually exclusive cause. Such explanations may have made sense as long as it could be assumed that an individual's broad character-personality traits led to consistent behavior across widely varying situations—an assumption that the 1968 book undid. The resulting crisis played out in the Person versus Situation debate, a zero-sum conception of the relationship between the situation and the person: To the degree that the person was important, the situation was not, and vice versa. It was a passionate, often angry dispute more than a reasoned debate in which personality psychologists and social psychologists were pitting the "power of the person" versus "the power of the situation" to see which was bigger. It seemed to make personality psychologists increasingly threatened about the survival of their field and social psychologists more arrogant about theirs. I thought both sides were equally wrong, emphasizing in the 1973 article that I had always refrained from asking "Is information about individuals more important than information about situations?" because phrased that way it is unanswerable and can only serve to stimulate futile polemics in which 'situations' are erroneously invoked as entities that supposedly exert either major or only minor control over behavior. To try to get beyond this, I examined what situations are psychologically and how they may be mentally represented and function in the organization and expressions of social behavior and personality, showing that the data presented in the 1968 book make sense if one sees persons as meaning makers who at least partially mentally construct the situations they experience (Mischel, 1973). Explanations of human action require understanding the person—situation conjunction rather than splitting it or trying to figure out which side of it accounts for more of the variance in behavior—an exercise that, as now has often
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been remarked, seems as futile as debating which areas of a rectangle are caused mostly by its length and which by its width. The article was widely cited as a landmark, but did not change the strong establishment reactions against the 1968 book. I gave up on the establishment, but wanted to reach the audience of young students, hoping they would be able to hear the book's message in the way in which it was intended. W i t h that aim, I wrote Introduction to Personality (1971), which 35 years later is about to go into its eighth edition. It has been gratifying to learn how many talented undergraduates who had almost given up on personality psychology entered the field because of the textbook and have become some of its leading contributors. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the factor analytic approach was brought back to resuscitate the classic trait paradigm. It was boosted by an agreement to reach a consensus about the major traits needed for a comprehensive taxonomy of personality using factor analyses based on trait ratings in the form of the "Big Five factors" (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1992). Many similar factor analytic studies and taxonomies had been done in earlier years, and their strengths and limitations had been duly noted, including in critiques like mine. The difference now was that the agreement about what those factors "really were" allowed the formulation of the Big Five with its own measurement scales, with the hope and claim that this constituted the fundamental reality about the basic structure of personality. Traditional personality psychology was back with renewed exuberance. In 1980, the field's flagship Journal of Personality and Social Psychology began describing the mission of its personality section as devoted to contributions on "personality psychology as traditionally defined"—an invitation that might surprise a reader expecting that a science would hope for ideas and research that could upset and revise its traditional definitions. It took many years before that statement was modified.
T h e C a r l e t o n C o l l e g e Study: R e s o l v i n g t h e Consistency Paradox In the Fall of 1978, Philip K. Peake, looking like a friendly farmer who had lost his way, walked jauntily into my office at Stanford,
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determined to do graduate w o r k w i t h me, and i t was the opening of a new phase towards resolving the personality paradox. O n his own initiative as an undergraduate at Carleton College, P h i l had already undertaken an extensive study of behavioral consistency i n conscientiousness and sociability i n the setting of his college w i t h his advisor N e i l Lutsky. I t yielded a w i n d f a l l of data for a direct empirical attack on the consistency problem and the personality paradox i n particular. I n the next few years, extending this research, P h i l spent endless nights at Stanford's s t i l l very p r i m i t i v e but then state-of-the-art computer center, w r i t i n g programs, w a i t i n g for hours t i l l analyses and printouts emerged, searching for ways to make sense of the massive data. W h e n he finally got to bed he was awakened b u t unsurprised when I telephoned h i m to torture h i m w i t h questions about what the latest r u n showed, and to urge new ones, usually i n misguided directions. The consistency paradox—the discrepancy between the lack of behavioral consistency across situations and the i n t u i t i v e conviction of consistency—remained the puzzle we s t i l l could not solve f r o m all the heavy data P h i l had carefully collected. O u r data showed that the pervasive and shared perception of consistency i n a personality disposit i o n was not related to cross-situational consistency i n reliably observed behavior. B u t then what were its bases? O u r answer came slowly, probably again rooted i n one of the many synergistic thoughts that developed somewhere between the t h i r d floor, this t i m e f r o m the office i n w h i c h Amos Tversky was w o r k i n g , and the entry floor where I was, w i t h P h i l often going back and f o r t h between the two of us. P h i l and I (and before that Nancy Cantor and I) were impressed that the newborn ideas of Tversky-Kahneman on the limitations that people have i n processing complex information and assessments of covariation i n their trait judgments made the consistency paradox less surprising. J u d g ments of cross-situational consistency were probably beyond the j u d g mental capabilities of most people who also had neither the t i m e nor the interest nor the data for c o m p u t i n g cross-situational consistency coefficients i n their heads. More likely the widely shared impression of trait consistency m i g h t reflect a m u c h simpler processing based on something like the h i g h l y available instances of behavior that are central to the trait category or more prototypic, as i n the image of the extravert as the fraternity man r u n n i n g around at a party w i t h a beer i n hand and a lampshade on his head (Cantor et al., 1982; Cantor &
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Mischel, 1979). Perhaps in their consistency judgments people focused on only a few vivid reliable instances of such prototypic trait-relevant behavior. The analyses revealed that peoples' perceptions of their own cross-situational consistency, on dimensions such as "conscientiousness" and "friendliness," were in fact linked strongly to the temporal stability of their behavior, but only for the subset of situation—behavior combinations judged as highly prototypic for the particular trait (Mischel & Peake, 1982). In short, the impression of personality consistency is not an illusion, but it is based on the stability of the person's specific prototypic behaviors over time, not, as had so long been assumed, on the broad consistency of behavior across many different kinds of situations. We thought that we had solved the personality paradox and read the Carleton data as more evidence for discriminativeness and adaptive contextualization of the individual's behavior and the ability of the perceiver to distill its coherence to make sense of it. Although the editor of Psychological Review at the time agreed, many personality psychologists did not and saw our paper that summarized these results (Mischel & Peake, 1982) as another trashing of personality psychology and the concept of personality itself. Regardless, the larger question remained: Are there stable patterns of regularities, distinctive for each individual, in the stream of ever-changing behaviors? I f so, what do they look like? That question drove my work for much of the next 20 years.
A R e t u r n t o New Y o r k City: 1980 a t N e w Y o r k U n i v e r s i t y In September 1976, I was settling into my office at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford for a year of writing, working, and playing in that summer-camp-like environment of the Stanford hills. I was enjoying stimulating lunches and conversations with colleagues from diverse disciplines, and participating occasionally with fake enthusiasm in the daily volleyball games that seemed mandatory for a sociable person, even if still incapable of catching a ball. In the spring of that year I had another visit with my brother Ted, then 50 years old; sharing a hotel room in New York City for a few days, visiting all
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our favorite old haunts, and renewing again, as we did several times a year, our close personal and intellectual connection. Ted was then professor of philosophy and director of the Interdisciplinary Program in the History and Philosophy of the Social and Behavioral Sciences at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He was leading attempts by philosophers and psychologists to explore jointly the interrelations between conceptual and empirical issues in the philosophical and psychological study of cognitive social behavior. The conferences and symposia he organized led to multiple volumes which he edited and to which he contributed seminal papers. They included: understanding other persons, the self, human action, cognitive development and epistemology, consciousness, intentions, and other topics at the vanguard of the two disciplines, a decade or two before most psychologists recognized their importance and relevance for building a science of psychology. The discussions we had over the years enriched my work and influenced his too, and I was happy that Harriet and I were able to participate in the conference and book on the self that was the last one he completed. During my 1976 spring visit with him in New York, he did seem to tire a bit more easily than before during our endless walks through the city. But I was unprepared, as he was, for the fact that his life would end within a few months from cancer. My brother was the main connection to my past and refugee history, as well as an anchor in the present, and knowing that I would never see him again as I said goodby to him in the hospital, I realized that my life would change greatly. Without understanding the reasons, or caring about them, I decided that I would leave Stanford, perhaps because Utopia had become too perfect for me, and I knew that I wanted to return to New York and to the grittier, less perpetually sunny life that I had been drawn to since I first saw the city as a child. An opportunity came with an attractive offer from New York University, my alma mater, and I decided to try it for a year in 1980. It was a good year personally. New York seemed more the right place for me than ever, and the challenge of starting a new academic life had its exciting aspects. N Y U and its psychologists treated me very nicely and were enthusiastic about having me join them. Even my teenage daughters fell in love with the city. But on balance, the lure of the Stanford psychology department was still too
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high to accept the permanent post at N Y U and I returned to Palo Alto and another term as department chair, trying hard to make a go of it at Stanford.
From S t a n f o r d t o Columbia U n i v e r s i t y Stanford invited input into the admissions process for new students from current graduate students, and one of them, Daniel Cervone, noted that Yuichi Shoda appeared to be an applicant who obviously was going to go to the University of California, Berkeley, to do graduate study with Jack Block, a psychologist whose views on personality frequently clashed with mine. Although there seemed no point even in screening him into the Stanford admissions process, Cervone was so certain of Shoda's potential, and his fit with the Stanford program, that he persuaded the admissions committee (or so the legend has it) to invite him for a visit. Peake and I spent much of the visit day with Shoda. I was quickly convinced that the program would be ideal for Yuichi, and he for it. Fortunately, the feeling was mutual, and his decision was clinched, he says when he read the 1973 article. It was the beginning of a colleagueship and collaboration that continues now into its 3rd decade. Good intentions to try to take root again at Stanford notwithstanding, when an offer came from Columbia University in 1982, I eagerly visited. In 1982 Columbia University and Stanford University were a sharp academic contrast. Columbia had fallen on hard times since the 1968 student revolution; Stanford was thriving and had become a great university during those years. Stanford psychology was rated as the top, while Columbia seemed to have fallen off the scale. Stanford was sleek, shiny, efficient, and "can do," in which everything seemed possible. Columbia was Byzantine, shabby, an impossible "can't do" beauraucracy entwined in its red tape. Housing and life at Stanford were safe, easy, and pleasant, even luxurious; at Columbia they were mostly difficult and often a mess, and these differences held even more for the quality of lab space and lab life in the two departments. My hosts during the visit to Columbia, far from trying to hide the warts of the place, exposed them fully, even eagerly. Robert M. Krauss, who was chair at the time, seemed to make a point of driving me through
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the worst, least safe at that t i m e areas of the city, avoiding the fancy, elegant ones, and the meals we had were strictly downscale. Nevertheless, I found the place irresistible, accepted the Columbia offer, and to the disbelief of most of m y Stanford colleagues, resigned f r o m Stanford to underline that this was a permanent move, not just a tryout as N Y U had turned out to be. I never regretted that decision. O n reflection, there actually were many reasons that I could muster post hoc to rationalize m y choice. I looked forward to being w i t h Bob Krauss, Stanley Schachter, J u l i a n Hochberg, Herbert Terrace, and w i t h many of the others, and f r o m the start found myself drawn both to the university and to the city. W h i l e Stanford also had many terrific colleagues w i t h w h o m I was close and who were hard to leave, the n o r m there was for w o r k i n isolation, often next to one's s w i m m i n g pool or i n an office w i t h the door shut. A t Columbia, "schmoozing," d r o p p i n g i n on each other to just chat, was standard, and the shabby furnishings perhaps enhanced the intellectual intimacy and sense of connection. A n d at the end of the day, Lincoln Center was only 20 minutes away, and the art galleries and museums were irresistible for a long lunch break. O n research, the l o n g i t u d i n a l studies begun at B i n g Nursery School were starting to show that the a b i l i t y to delay gratification, assessed at age 4 i n our diagnostic laboratory situations seemed to be predictive of a wide range of positive l o n g - t e r m outcomes i n adolescence and young adulthood. The findings were p r o v i d i n g a rare instance of l o n g term stability i n a crucial aspect of self-regulation, but were l i m i t e d by being confined to an 'elite' Stanford population f r o m w h i c h generalizations could be hazardous. N e w Y o r k C i t y , w i t h its distinctly nonelite public school populations had the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity needed for further l o n g i t u d i n a l w o r k on the development and implications of self-regulatory abilities. I t was possible, albeit difficult, to launch such studies i n the Bronx, and the miserable conditions i n most of the city schools offered a natural laboratory for the possibility of intervention studies to try to enhance delay of gratification ability. The prospects offered a challenge and an o p p o r t u n i t y that resparked m y clinical interests. Perhaps most i m p o r t a n t , Shoda and I were eager to w o r k on studies on the structure of behavioral consistency w i t h Jack W r i g h t i n the W e d i k o residential camp setting i n N e w Hampshire
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in which Jack was research director—a collaboration that would have been much more difficult if I had remained on the West Coast.
From 1983 o n : The Columbia U n i v e r s i t y a n d N e w Y o r k Years Initially I felt that I was moving more for New York than for Columbia. Soon I found that, surprisingly, Columbia turned out to be an excellent environment in which my work as well as my personal life felt renewed and revitalized, even though the air conditioning worked mostly in the winter, the heat came on strongest in the summer, and the mechanics of managing a lab were immensely more difficult than they had been at Stanford. It took a few years, but the turnaround in Columbia's fortunes became increasingly visible, and progressed quickly. More outstanding colleagues were hired in psychology and throughout the university, more first-rate students came, and the university revived itself and began again to thrive, as did the city. During my term as chair in the late 1980s, Geraldine Downey, Carol Dweck, and Tory Higgins were recruited into the department. It did not take long before I felt I was in the right place, both for my work and for the rest of myself. The atmosphere in the department beginning in the early 1990s felt to me, as it still does now, like the best times of intellectual energy and synergy that had made Stanford so special. For example, Ozlem Ayduk and Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, then students who later joined the University of California, Berkeley, faculty shuttled with great excitement between Geraldine Downey upstairs and Yuichi Shoda (who had come with me to Columbia) and me in the lab downstairs, and facilitated diverse collaborations, and a close colleagueship that still continues (e.g., Mendoza-Denton & Mischel, in press). Soon after the move to Columbia, Yuichi and I, with most boxes still unpacked and the air conditioning system lying in the middle of the floor of the lab rather than in its ceiling, turned to the next steps that followed directly from the Carleton study. The Carleton findings had clarified the bases for the perception of personality coherence, but did not have the data that could allow a search for patterns of regularity in behavior that might be distinctive and stable for each individual
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i n the stream o f ever changing behavior. T o identify such characteristic patterns required doing something that was the reason originally for creating the field of personality psychology, namely to study the i n d i vidual's pattern of behavior as i t unfolds across different situations and over repeated occasions, one person at a t i m e . Gordon A l l p o r t wanted the field to make such w o r k central, u r g i n g " . . . the constant return to the observable stream of behavior, the only basic d a t u m w i t h w h i c h the psychology o f personality has to work. . . . " A n d further, "Unless f u l l recognition is given to this continuous, variable and convergent character of behavior, the theory o f traits w i l l become a purely fanciful doctrine o f ' l i t t l e m e n w i t h i n the breast' . . ." ( A l l p o r t , 1937, p. 313). These hopes and warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears, or perhaps were expressed too early i n the field's development to be realized, and that may s t i l l have been true when I again raised a similar challenge and questions i n m y 1968 book. O u r goal demanded the k i n d of extremely " t h i c k description" based on direct observation of social behavior as i t unfolds naturally, sampled repeatedly, that could not be done u n t i l video cameras and adequate computers became available. W i t h these tools i n hand i n the early 1980s, at W e d i k o we conducted more than 150 hours o f direct observation for each participant as the children lived their lives across a set of different repeatedly occurring situations over 6 weeks d u r i n g the summer residential camp (Mischel & Shoda, 1995).
Behavioral Signatures of Personality: Consistency i n the Patterns of Variability The idea that the person's variability across situations, the ups and downs in the stream of natural behavior, is not simply error variance drove our search for the locus of personality consistency. I f after the random noise of measurement is removed the pattern or profile of variability still proved to be stable, thus contradicting the expectations of classic personality trait theory, it also might open a window into the underlying system that produced it: Incorporating the situation into the assessment and conception of personality we thought would be the route to finding its invariance and coherence.
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Studies of behavior across situations, again including the Carleton College study, had focused on behavior settings or environments. In a school, for example, the chemistry lab, the library, the playground, the meeting with the instructor; within a summer camp, the dining room, arts and crafts, cabin time, the waterfront. We wanted to go beyond such nominal situations to identify the psychological features of situations—the situations as encoded and construed—that activate the distinctive reactions of the individual within a variety of behavior settings. We found that when people talked about the personality of individuals at Wediko, they used conditional hedges to qualify their characterizations (Wright & Mischel, 1988). Statements like "Joe is always aggressive," often were contextualized after a few utterances with conditional qualifiers or hedges, such as "when kids tease him about his glasses." That finding in turn suggested that such i f . . . then . . . patterns might also be seen in the behavioral regularities that people display. This possibility seemed worth examining and guided our search to determine i f the actual behaviors at Wediko were characterized by the kinds of i f . . . then . . . patterns that the observers talked about. The Wediko project yielded an unprecedented archive of observations on the contextualized expressions of personality, and it took an enormous effort, mostly performed by Shoda, Wright, and other colleagues (e.g., Rodriguez, Mischel, & Shoda, 1989), both to obtain the data, and even more difficult, to make sense of them. After a half dozen years, the results began to appear (e.g., Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1993a, 1993b, 1994). How the person's behaviors went up or down in response to situations, far from disappearing with adequately reliable sampling and observation, was stable and distinctive for each person, revealing patterns of i f . . . then . . . and situation-behavior regularities, a sort of contextualized "behavioral signature of personality" (Shoda et al., 1994). There were clear and strong regularities in behavior that characterized each individual—stable, distinctive patterns of variability—and they were found by incorporating the situation into the search for consistency, not by eliminating it. While the Wediko studies were being conducted in the 1980s, our work continued to receive much attention, but much of the fame was infamy. W i t h the resurgence of the factor analytic approach to
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personality in the form of the "Big Five" beginning in the 1980s I was not infrequently described as the devil of the field who tried to destroy it. For example, the 1992 Annual Review of Psychology article on personality opened with, "The budding personologist is likely to find both villains and heroes in forging his or her own personal identity. . . . the early heroes were Henry Murray and Gordon Allport, and the first villain was Walter Mischel" (Wiggins & Pincus, 1992, p. 474). Lewis Goldberg's (1993) American Psychologist piece, which opened with, "Once upon a time, we had no personalities," attributed this temporary loss of personality to "(Mischel, 1968)." In the 1980s for the first time in my career my research grant applications were rejected by study sections with personality psychologists, but given top priorities and two sequential 10-year MERIT Awards (from the National Institute of Mental Health) by those with social and cognitive psychologists. Likewise, publications by me and/or my students in the personality sections of the prime journals were often rejected with caustic critiques that dismissed the work with little explanation, in one case by simply calling it "pseudo science." And just a few years ago a student breathlessly rushed into my office to announce that on a state licensing examination in psychology the right answer to the question, "Which psychologist does not believe in personality?" was Mischel. I calmed the student, noting that if personality is still equated with broad traits described with situation-free adjectives, as it often is to this day, the test makers got it right.
The CAPS Model The Wediko findings documented the behavioral regularities that we found, but they did not explain how they are generated and could be understood. Our next challenge was to develop the kind of model that could account for them. The CAPS (Cognitive Affective Personality System) Yuichi and I developed was intended to be a metatheory, a general framework that spells out a possible underlying structure that can produce both stable and distinctive behavioral signatures of the sort we found, as well as the average differences overall between individuals on which traditional trait theories focus (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). We were influenced by the Zeitgeist in psychology in the late 1980s that
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suggested a more brainlike or neural network information-processing architecture, in which the basic principle of operation is not logical decisions (e.g., Is X < Y ?). It is the pattern of associations that governs which mental representations become activated. This suggested perhaps the most important idea in CAPS: What underlies complex information processing in a personality system is the pattern of associations, the network, among the units within it. It thus requires taking account not only of individual differences in the availability of different units but also of the organization of their interconnections within the system. My hope for CAPS was that it would offer an alternative to the traditional trait model, facilitating the building of a personality science linked to cognitive science. We cast it in formal language (we did try hard to minimize jargon but doubt we succeeded) and drew extensively on developments in connectionist and neural network theories in cognitive psychology as well as in social cognition and other disciplines. It was grounded in heavy empiricism and supported by Shoda's elegant computer simulations. But what mattered most to me is that CAPS allowed a more complex, textured, multi-faceted view of the human being, contextualized in the social world, and rooted in a social and biological history whose effects play out in continuous interactions. And yet in spite of the multiplicity of determinants and the exquisite complexity of the organization and interactions that characterize the personality system, meaningful predictions to specific types of behavior within particular kinds of trigger situations seem possible, at least some of the time. I hoped CAPS was a step toward a view of the person that, in psychological terms and with scientific methods, could begin to capture what had excited me about human behavior and led me into psychology in the first place. CAPS is idiographic in the sense that it is about each person's distinctive organization and how it is expressed in interactions with the social world, but the model also lends itself to the nomothetic study of types of people who share common i f . . . then . . . behavioral signatures generated by similarities in their CAPS networks (e.g., Ayduk et al., 2000). The CAPS model also was extended to analyses of the interactions between hot and cool information processing during self-regulatory efforts in a collaboration with my Columbia colleague Janet Metcalfe (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999), to the conception of self with Carolyn Morf then at N I M H (Mischel & Morf, 2003), to the
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relations between culture and personality (Mendoza-Denton & Mischel, i n press), and to person perception and lay theories of personality (e.g., Chen-Idson & Mischel, 2 0 0 1 ; K a m m r a t h , Mendoza-Denton, & Mischel, 2005; Shoda & Mischel, 1993).
Delay of Gratification: Mechanisms, Long-Term Correlates—Protective Effects?
Concurrent with the Wediko studies, we continued experimental and longitudinal studies in the Columbia years on the mechanisms that enable delay of gratification, trying to demystify "willpower" and self-control, using the results also to extend the CAPS model (e.g., Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Mischel & Ayduk, 2004). The work on self-regulation was particularly important to me because it addressed the other side of the two interconnected enduring themes I see both in my work and in my life: the power of situations to influence what the person does and becomes, but equally the person's ability, at least sometimes, to transform what "hot," compelling situations do, overcoming stimulus control and automatic responding, allowing at least some self-direction and choice. In the experimental studies, we specified how cognitive appraisals and attention deployment during the effort to delay immediate gratification influence the ability to do so, and make waiting or working for delayed rewards either predictably easy or impossibly difficult for the young child (Mischel et al., 1989). We also identified the diagnostic laboratory conditions in which the child's spontaneous delay-ofgratification behavior and attention control turned out to be remarkably predictive of a wide range of developmental outcomes over many decades (Mischel, Shoda, & Peake, 1988). We followed these children into adulthood and showed that seconds of delay time in these situations waiting for such treats as two little pretzels later or one now, at age 4 years, predicted long-term outcomes that range from their SAT scores and ratings of their adaptive social and cognitive functioning in. adolescence to effective goal pursuit, positive self-concepts, wellbeing, and less cocaine and other drug use in adulthood. Follow-ups also point suggestively but still inconclusively to the possible protective effects of early self-regulatory competencies as buffers against the devel-
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opment of problems for which the individual is otherwise at high risk. For example, people highly sensitive to interpersonal rejection have been shown to be at risk to develop low self-esteem and to become either aggressive or depressed when dealing with interpersonal situations that activate their rejection concerns. But that pattern may not have to be their destiny. High-rejection-sensitive adults who in early childhood also were high in self-regulatory competencies did not develop the expected negative outcomes associated with rejection sensitivity (Ayduk et al., 2000).
L o o k i n g B a c k — a n d Ahead Perhaps my early time in clinical psychology, and even earlier experiences as a social worker, or earlier ones as a refugee boy underlie my fantasies about future applications of these findings for interventiontherapeutic goals with highly at-risk children. It seems worth seeing i f teaching the young child simple cognitive and attention control strategies that work well in our experiments might make a difference in their lives. Because that would take another lifetime, within mine I am doing things that can be done in shorter time frames. Under the leadership of Ozlem Ayduk at Berkeley, my colleagues and I are continuing with the longitudinal projects, now also studying the delay ability of the offspring of the original participants, whose children are now the right age to be waiting for two bigger treats later rather than one smaller one right away in our experiments. In ongoing collaborations I am especially eager to explore potential links to brain mechanisms, and to the influences of the genes as well as the social environment on self-regulatory competence, while quite aware that it will probably require another generation to realize such ambitions. As a Jew born in Vienna in 1930, my prognosis was terminal at birth, and it was revoked only by the fluke of finding an old citizenship document buried in stacks of papers ready to be burned. Like the terminal cancer patient whose life is unexpectedly saved, on most days it has given me an almost embarrassing Pollyannaish view of life. Of the many happy experiences and good things that my profession, colleagues, and students have given me, two recent ones stand out. Election to the National Academy of Sciences I feel is an affirmation
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of the possibility that the topics i n psychology I care about most can become part of our science. I have long hoped that the relatively "soft" areas of psychology w o u l d evolve i n t o a serious cumulative science, a hub for integrating its discoveries w i t h the converging findings and insights f r o m related disciplines w o r k i n g at different levels of analysis. I n that fantasy, at least some of us w o u l d speak to questions that we care about as h u m a n i s t s — h u m a n nature and development, personality, the i n d i v i d u a l person and i n d i v i d u a l differences, the self, choice, and the possibilities of self-directed change and f r e e d o m — w i t h the rigorous methods and discipline of science (Mischel, 2004). I t is this hope that has sustained me through many years serving on N I M H panels; on American Psychological Association publication boards; and i n editorial roles, i n c l u d i n g e d i t i n g the Psychological Review. A volume of research papers Daniel Cervone and I edited i n 2 0 0 2 , Advances in Personality Science, showed that many others seem to share the same goals and are doing m u c h to help realize t h e m . The other especially meaningful event was a celebratory fest that m y students and colleagues p u t together for me i n 2005 at Columbia w h i c h meant a great deal to me personally and professionally. As a colleague said, i t d i d not just honor me, i t honored our shared c o m m i t ment to the vocation we love. I t also allowed me to thank again the many wonderful students and colleagues whose w o r k w i t h me made m y professional life what i t became. Looking back, I am glad that at the choice point at age 18 I resisted going i n t o m y uncle's umbrella business. The route I d i d choose, or stumbled i n t o , s t i l l leaves me eager early each m o r n i n g to get to w o r k i n directions I could not have imagined at the start, w i s h i n g only for more t i m e , and not w a n t i n g to spend too m u c h of i t l o o k i n g back.
S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s by W a l t e r M i s c h e l Ayduk, O., Mendoza-Denton, R., Mischel, W., Downey, G., Peake, P. K., & Rodriguez, M. (2000). Regulating the interpersonal self: Strategic self-regulation for coping with rejection sensitivity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 776-792. Cantor, N., & Mischel, W. (1977). Traits as prototypes: Effects on recognition memory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 38—48.
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Cantor, N., & Mischel, W. (1979). Prototypes in person perception. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 12, pp. 3—52). New York: Academic Press. Cantor, N., Mischel, W., & Schwartz, J. C. (1982). A prototype analysis of psychological situations. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 45-77'. Cervone, D., & Mischel, W. (Eds.). (2002). Advances in personality science. New York: Guilford Press. Chen-Idson, L., & Mischel, W. (2001). The personality of familiar and significant people: The lay perceiver as a social cognitive theorist. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 585-596. Kammrath, L. K., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Mischel, W. (2005). Incorporating if. . . then . . . personality signatures in person perception: Beyond the person-situation dichotomy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 605—618. Mendoza-Denton, R., & Mischel, W. (in press). Integrating system approaches to culture and personality: The cultural cognitive-affective processing system (C-CAPS). In S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.), The handbook of cultural psychology. New York: Guilford Press. Metcalfe, J., & Mischel, W. (1999). A hot/cool system analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower. Psychological Review, 106, 3-19Mischel, W. (1958). Preference for delayed and immediate reinforcement: An experimental study of a cultural observation. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 56, 57-61. Mischel, W. (196la). Delay of gratification, need for achievement and acquiescence in another culture. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62, 543-552. Mischel, W. (196lb). Preference for delayed reinforcement and social responsibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62, 1—7. Mischel, W. (1965). Predicting the success of Peace Corps volunteers in Nigeria. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1, 510—517. Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. New York: Wiley. Mischel, W. (1971). Introduction to personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Mischel, W. (1973). Toward a cognitive social learning reconceptualization of personality. Psychological Review, 80, 252-283. Mischel, W. (1974). Processes in delay of gratification. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 7, pp. 249-292). New York: Academic Press. Mischel, W. (2004). Toward an integrative science of the person (Prefatory Chapter). Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 1—22. Mischel, W., & Ayduk, O. (2004). Willpower in a cognitive-affective processing system: The dynamics of delay of gratification. In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications (pp. 99—129). New York: Guilford Press. Mischel, W., & Baker, N. (1975). Cognitive appraisals and transformations in delay behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31, 254—261. Mischel, W., Ebbesen, E. B., & Zeiss, A. M. (1976). Determinants of selective memory about the self. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 44, 92—103.
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Mischel, W., Ebbesen, E. B., & Zeiss, A. R. (1972). Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 21, 204-218. Mischel, W., Ebbesen, E. B., & Zeiss, A. R. (1973). Selective attention to the self: Situational and dispositional determinants. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 21, 129-142. Mischel, W., & Gilligan, C. (1964). Delay of gratification, motivation for the prohibited gratification, and resistance to temptation. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 69, 411-417. Mischel, W., & Metzner, R. (1962). Preference for delayed reward as a function of age, intelligence, and length of delay interval. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 64, 425-431. Mischel, W., & Mischel, F. (1958). Psychological aspects of spirit possession: A reinforcement analysis. American Anthropologist, 60, 249-260. Mischel, H. N., & Mischel, W. (1983). The development of children's knowledge of self-control strategies. Child Development, 54, 603—619. Mischel, W., & Moore, B. (1973). Effects of attention to symbolically presented rewards on self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 172—179. Mischel, W., & Morf, C. (2003). The self as a psycho—social dynamic processing system: A meta-perspective on a century of the self in psychology. In M. Leary & J. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity (pp. 15—43). New York: Guilford Press. Mischel, W., & Peake, P. K. (1982). Beyond deja vu in the search for cross-situational consistency. Psychological Review, 89, 730-755. Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive—affective system theory of personality: Reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review, 102, 246-268. Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Peake, P. K. (1988). The nature of adolescent competencies predicted by preschool delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 687-699. Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. L. (1989, May 26). Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244, 933-938. Rodriguez, M. L., Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1989). Cognitive person variables in the delay of gratification of older children at risk. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 358-367. Shoda, Y., & Mischel, W. (1993). Cognitive social approach to dispositional inferences: What if the perceiver is a cognitive—social theorist? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 574-585. Shoda, Y., Mischel, W., & Wright, J. C. (1993a). Links between personality judgments and contextualized behavior patterns: Situation—behavior profiles of personality prototypes. Social Cognition, 11, 399—429. Shoda, Y., Mischel, W., & Wright, J. C. (1993b). The role of situational demands and cognitive competencies in behavior organization and personality coherence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 1023—1035.
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Shoda, Y., Mischel, W., & Wright, J. C. (1994). Intraindividual stability in the organization and patterning of behavior: Incorporating psychological situations into the idiographic analysis of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 674-687. Wright, J. C , & Mischel, W. (1988). Conditional hedges and the intuitive psychology of traits. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 454—469.
O t h e r Publications Cited Allport, G. W. (1937). Personality: A psychological interpretation. New York: Holt. Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Normal personality assessment in clinical practice: The NEO Personality Inventory. Psychological Assessment, 4, 5—13. Endler, N. S., & Magnusson, D. (1976). Toward an interactional psychology of personality. Psychological Bulletin, 83, 956-974. Goldberg, L. R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American Psychologist, 48, 26-34. Magnusson, D., & Endler, N. S. (Eds.). (1977). Personality at the crossroads: Current issues in interactional psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Wiggins, J. S., & Pincus, A. L. (1992). Personality: Structure and assessment. Annual Review of Psychology, 43, 473—504.
8
U l r i c
N e i s s e r
A , .utobiography is always a risky enterprise, but it may be especially so in my case. Whatever other people's memories may be like, my own tend to be sketchy rather than detailed; some of them are certainly wrong. As an example, I once described what seemed to be a clearly false personal memory in my book Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts (Neisser, 1982a). But in the long run the force of that example was not at all what I had expected, so maybe it can serve as a useful introduction to the present enterprise.
Remembering P e a r l H a r b o r The memory I have in mind concerns the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941. Later, as an adult, I clearly remembered how I had heard the news of that attack. It was the day before my 13th birthday; I was curled up in an armchair in the living room listening to a baseball game on the radio. The announcer interrupted the broadcast to give news of the attack, and I ran upstairs to tell my mother. Pedestrian enough, one would think, and many
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years went by before it occurred to me that no one plays baseball in December! Here, then, was a certifiably false "flashbulb memory." But how false was it? Soon after the publication of Memory Observed, several readers wrote to tell me that a professional football game had been played and broadcast on December 7, 1941. What's more, the two teams playing that game had very baseball-sounding names: the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Far from being false, then, my memory may have been correct except in one small detail, that is, mistaking football for baseball. Thompson and Cowan (1985) eventually published that interpretation under the title "A Nicer Interpretation of a Neisser Recollection." It is certainly plausible, and suggests that my memories may be more reliable than I had believed. However, where Thompson and Cowan thought that it made the whole thing uninteresting, I believe that this explanation leads to a new and useful interpretation (Neisser, 1986a). Why in the world did my memory represent me—falsely—as listening to a baseball game on that December afternoon? Baseball occupied a special position in American life when I was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s. Far more than today, it was the unchallenged ail-American game. It also occupied a special position in my own image of myself: I was a baseball fan. I knew all the batting averages, argued the merits of the players, and listened interminably to (radio) broadcasts of the games. In retrospect, one reason for my strong attachment to the all-American game may have been that it certified my status as an all-American boy. I needed some reassurance on that status, because I was not entitled to it by birth.
Becoming D i c k Neisser I was born in Kiel, Germany. My father, Hans Neisser, came from a distinguished Silesian Jewish family. (His uncle Albert had discovered the germ that causes gonorrhea, now called Neisseria gonorrhoeae.) Hans, a well-known economist, worked at a think tank called the Weltwirtscbaftsinstitut (Institute for World Economics) in Kiel. My mother Charlotte (Lotte) Neisser, a lapsed Catholic with a degree in sociology, had been very active in the German women's movement. They married
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in 1923. My sister Marianne was born in 1924 and I, Ulrich Gustav Neisser, in 1928, both by Caesarian section. "Ulrich" is a bit heavy even in German, so I was often just called "der kleiner Dickie," which means "the chubby little kid." When Hitler came to power, the Weltwirtschaftsinstitut could not long survive: Its members were all anti-Nazi Social Democrats, and most of them were Jews. Foreseeing this development, my father had already negotiated for a position at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. For safety's sake, he left Germany almost immediately; my mother and sister and I joined him in England a few months later. We sailed for the United States on the ocean liner Hamburg, arriving in New York on September 15, 1933. I was not quite 5 years old. Soon after our arrival, we settled in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, living for 7 years in a big comfortable house near my school and then for 2 more years in two other houses. (We were in the last of them on December 7, 1941.) My parents chose Swarthmore not for its college (which I came to know only later) but because it was an intellectual community with a convenient commuter train to Philadelphia. They enjoyed life there, and I did too. My father had a good academic salary; we lived well, and I had no idea that America was going through a great depression. Swarthmore is where my memories begin, at age 5. I have no recollection of my earlier experiences in Kiel, of speaking German, or even of the German governess to whom I was said to have been very attached. There is a photo of me wearing a sailor suit aboard the Hamburg, but I have no recollection of it; remembered life begins when I started kindergarten in the United States of America. Like boys everywhere, I was desperate to belong to my peer group. Becoming a baseball fan was probably part of that effort. As a player I was a dead loss, the kid who was always chosen last. (That experience may have contributed to my lifelong sympathy with the underdog: I am a committed infracaninophile.) Another part of the same effort was finding an acceptable name. "Ulrich" was excruciatingly German, and my friends couldn't even pronounce it. Luckily a common American nickname was already in place: "Dickie." I decided to stick with it, and have been Dick Neisser ever since. Later I dropped the h from
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" U l r i c h , " again to be less German. I n a further phase I briefly added a " R i c h a r d " to justify the " D i c k , " but that soon seemed stupid and I gave i t up. " U l r i c " and " D i c k " are both natural now.
Enduring High School When the war began, my father went to work for the Office of Price Administration (OPA), and for a year we lived in suburban Washington. When the job didn't work out, he quit OPA in 1943 to take a professorship at the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. The job was ideal because a number of other refugee scholars—many of them his friends—were already teaching there. We moved to a middle-class Long Island suburb called Floral Park, and I enrolled in the nearby high school. I wish I could report major intellectual developments from my 3 years at Sewanhaka Central H i g h , but in fact there were none. The courses were easy, my grades were good, and I was soon a member of the Honor Society (which in practical terms meant access to a room under the stairs where we played bridge). That was OK, but I was afraid of girls, poor at sports, and incompetent even in shop. Once I got a medal for proficiency in Latin, but what good was that? I thought of myself as an outsider, and of my few friends as weird. Maybe I was weird too. During my first 2 Sewanhaka years the war was still on, and it consumed much of my interest. W i t h Germany now the official enemy, I was even more motivated to be 100% American. Perhaps as a result, I began to distance myself from my family, not rudely and perhaps not even overtly, but with feeling. Hans and Charlotte had foreign accents, scholarly interests, European cultural values, and academic friends. I would have none of that; their ways were not for an American boy like me. This deliberate rejection was successful, and I became 100% American in thought and deed. But success came at a price: Not wanting to have anything to do with grown-up culture, I essentially wasted my adolescence. It is in high school that kids begin to read novels, play instruments, write poetry, form political identities, and fall in love. I did none of those things. I never even went to New York City, which was only an auto-plus-subway ride away from Floral
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Park. In later years I have tried to catch up on what I missed in adolescence, but I'm still a bit behind. Another factor may also have been important. I knew myself to be a smart kid, but my father the German-educated professor was even smarter. On one occasion when a school assignment required looking things up, I asked my mother why we didn't have an encyclopedia in the house as other families did. Her answer was simple: "Because your father knows everything." (Half a century later, I'm still not sure if she was joking.) One way to avoid that particular competition was to stick to things outside Hans Neisser's expertise—baseball, for example. In many other ways, however, it was a good life. As the spoiled younger brother of an older sister, I was indulged and rarely criticized. My parents never tried to indoctrinate me in anything. On the contrary, for some reason that I don't yet understand, they were surprisingly reticent. This was the 1940s, and yet there were no discussions of socialism, communism, and democracy in our house. Did I just not listen? Whatever the reason, I grew up with almost no views on such matters. An even stranger example concerns the Nazi persecution of the Jews, which had determined the course of our own lives. To the best of my recollection, we never talked about it. One consequence of this silence was that I didn't even know my father was Jewish! Thus I also didn't know that I was Jewish myself (at least by the Nazi criteria) and that I would surely have ended in a concentration camp had we not left Germany. This seems an odd thing not to know, but to the best of my recall I learned it only years later in reminiscent conversations with my mother. In contrast, I knew quite a lot about my mother. Although she had rejected Catholicism in her youth, Lotte still retained a strong religious sensibility. (Perhaps for that reason, my sister and I were formally christened just before our Atlantic voyage.) Once settled in America, she became a Presbyterian, joining a church in Swarthmore and then another in Floral Park. To please her I joined them too, although I was fairly dubious about the God hypothesis. My father never accompanied us to church; I took it for granted that he was some kind of nonchurchgoing Lutheran. As far back as I can remember, it was assumed that I would become a scientist. Where this strong conviction came from I do not know, certainly not from knowledge of science itself. I did have a chemistry
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set, but was never very interested in it. The science courses at Sewanhaka were not exciting. Popular accounts of Einstein's theory of relativity were available, but I had no real grasp of it. In my senior year I read up on atomic bombs and nuclear fission as part of a science competition, but was quite aware that I didn't really understand the material and unsurprised when I failed to win. As for psychology, I don't think I had ever heard of it. Senior year was marked by the acquisition of a first girlfriend; we smooched in a clumsy sort of way, but I was still socially awkward. Soon it was time to apply to college: Harvard was my first choice. I took the SAT and the Miller Analogies Test, getting a perfect score on the latter. I applied to the Harvard Club of Long Island for support and was interviewed by the radio commentator H . V. Kaltenborn. He must have liked me: I went to Harvard (the first Sewanhaka student to do so) with a $400 scholarship. In those days, that was full tuition.
D i s c o v e r i n g Psychology College is supposed to be a transforming experience, and it certainly was for me. I entered Harvard in 1946 with an insecure personal identity, weak social skills, few political commitments, little understanding of history or literature or culture, and no career goals beyond a vague allegiance to "science." Yet 4 years later I knew just who I was, what I cared about, and what I was going to do: become an experimental psychologist and fight the good fight against behaviorism. Meanwhile, I had also acquired a political identity, having made many friends in the Harvard Liberal Union. We picketed racist establishments, sang leftist songs, campaigned for Democratic candidates, sat through long dreary meetings, and debated current issues. I still have a happy flashbulb memory of the 1948 election that took place in my junior year. Everyone was sure that Dewey would win; the Harvard Young Republicans had rented a huge expensive hall for their victory party. We few Truman supporters gathered around a radio in a small common room for a "moral victory party" and waited for our guy to fall behind. He never did: At midnight we marched up to jeer happily at the Republican losers. Glorious!
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Being enrolled in stimulating courses on history, government, and literature, and having acquired sophisticated friends who read novels and enjoyed classical music, I soon began to value the cultural life that I had so determinedly avoided in Floral Park. I attended concerts and rallies, brooded over freshman conundrums like freedom of the w i l l , and played cards far into the night with my roommates. My only problem was the resolve that had brought me to Harvard in the first place: the commitment to become a scientist. I soon discovered that I hated chemistry and was bored by physics. What to do? E. G. Boring's introductory psychology course came to my rescue. I do not know if it rescued anyone else: Boring was not an exciting lecturer, and his syllabus—reflecting a recent bitter split between the Departments of Psychology and Social Relations—excluded every socially interesting topic. But whatever he may have excluded, the psychology that remained—mostly sensation, perception, and learning—was a young and vigorous science. One could see that it would soon be ready to address important human questions, especially with a push or two in the right direction. I said to myself, "I can do this!" and changed my major to psychology.
Parapsychology Another stimulus to my growing psychological interests was J. B. Rhine's (1947) book The Reach of the Mind, a survey of research on extrasensory perception (ESP). The topic was immediately intriguing and became more so when I made the acquaintance of S. David Kahn. Kahn, my classmate, had a sort of personal commitment to the paranormal: His family took reincarnation seriously and consulted psychics before making major decisions. It was not long before David and I began to think about doing some ESP research of our own. To make it official, we called ourselves The Harvard Society for Parapsychology. A t that time, most ESP research was based on shuffled decks of cards. This seemed problematic because it left open the possibility of errors in recording the scores, perhaps even of outright cheating. We therefore abandoned cards in favor of the standard I B M multiple-choice answer sheets (then very familiar) in which the respondent uses a pencil
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to blacken one of five spaces in each row. In our experiments one such answer sheet, filled out with the aid of a table of random numbers, was hidden away to serve as target. The subjects, given blank answer sheets and pencils, were asked to duplicate the target as best they could. Their responses were then mechanically scored against that target, eliminating the possibility of error or bias. These experiments produced surprisingly positive results, and we eventually published them in the Journal of Parapsychology (Kahn & Neisser, 1949). My interest in ESP did not last long. Kahn and I later spent a summer doing ESP research at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, but all our experiments there were failures. We couldn't even replicate the experiments we had carried out successfully at Harvard! This was discouraging, and I did not pursue the paranormal any further. It may be, however, that this early exposure to an exotic research area did influence me later on. I have long had, and perhaps still have, a soft spot in my heart for exciting but unlikely hypotheses.
Becoming a P s y c h o l o g i s t Meanwhile, I was a busy psychology major. It was probably in the history course that I was first exposed to conflicting theories, especially behaviorism and Gestalt psychology. Choosing sides immediately, I rejected the former and was strongly attracted to the latter. My antipathy to behaviorism stemmed not only from its dreary mechanical view of human nature but from the sheer fact of its dominance. I was already a committed infracaninophile, and Gestalt psychology was clearly the underdog in a department that included B. F. Skinner. I was particularly impressed by the way that Max Wertheimer and the other Gestalt theorists viewed human nature "from above" rather than mechanically "from below." Koehler's principle of psychophysical isomorphism, for example, impressed me as an important new approach to the mind—body problem. Other courses brought me up to date. I took a lab course from Fred Frick and a methods course from J. C. R. Licklider, who insisted that statistics required "vigor, not rigor." Jerry Bruner and Leo Postman
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taught a course on perception and motivation, focusing on what was then being called the "New Look." A new course on language and communication, taught by my adviser George Miller, introduced me to linguistics and information theory. Miller encouraged me to take more mathematics, especially advanced algebra; he was sure the psychology of the future would require it. I took his advice, albeit without enthusiasm. Later I was one of two seniors (the other was Marvin Minsky) enrolled in a graduate seminar that—among other things— discussed Hebb's new book The Organization of Behavior (1949). For my senior honors thesis, I needed a topic far enough out of the mainstream to be original (which was very important to me then) but not so far out as to seem crazy (i.e., nothing parapsychological). What I came up with was obscure indeed: the influence of visual stimulation on the absolute auditory threshold. A Russian psychologist had reported such an influence, but his results were not widely accepted. In my theoretically naive state, such an intermodal effect seemed attractively Gestalt-like. Miller helped me generously with this research, although he wasn't especially interested in the hypothesis. I used standard psychophysical methods for the auditory threshold measurements and manipulated visual stimulation by turning the room lights on or off. The results were negative, but I got honors anyway.
SWARTHMORE It was time to go to graduate school, and I knew just where. Wolfgang Koehler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, had fled Germany in the 1930s and was teaching at Swarthmore College. To attract Koehler, Swarthmore had also created a position for his colleague Hans Wallach and a program to provide them both with graduate assistants. The students in this program served as research assistants and teaching assistants, took the same seminars as Swarthmore honors students, and completed a master's thesis in their 2nd year. It sounded great: I applied and was accepted for the fall of 1950. My 2 years at Swarthmore were happy and valuable but not at all what I had expected. Except for one seminar, I had little contact with Koehler, who was then wrapping up his studies of direct currents in
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the visual cortex. M y real teachers were Hans W a l l a c h and Henry G l e i t m a n , from w h o m I learned two very different ways of doing psychology. As Wallach's research assistant, m y first task was to run subjects i n a study that followed up on his recent demonstration of the kinetic depth effect. The ingenuity of that demonstration made a deep impression on me: Ever since then I have been partial to clever experiments that address important questions w i t h simple apparatus, even i f they don't have m u c h by way of a theoretical basis. I n contrast w i t h the solitary conduct of Wallach's perception experiments, learning w i t h Henry G l e i t m a n was an essentially social experience. M y fellow graduate student Jacob (Jack) Nachmias and I spent many hours w i t h G l e i t m a n , an assistant professor who had just received his doctorate w o r k i n g w i t h E. C. T o l m a n at the University of California, Berkeley. W e talked psychology, graded papers, made jokes, and became friends. O u r chief theoretical concern was the life-and-death struggle between the mechanistic behaviorists, led by Clark H u l l and Donald Spence, and the Gestalt-oriented expectancy theorists, led by T o l m a n . W e had a great t i m e finding flaws i n H u l l ' s theory of extinct i o n and eventually submitted a critique of the theory to Psychological Review. O u r article ( G l e i t m a n , Nachmias, & Neisser, 1954) was accepted and we were proud of i t , although I have never heard that anyone actually abandoned H u l l ' s theory because of our arguments. M y 2nd year was even more eventful. G l e i t m a n , Nachmias, and I shared an apartment, and I developed a social life w i t h the Swarthmore coeds. Occasionally one of t h e m w o u l d keep me company while I ran rats i n m y master's experiment, a study designed to refute Spence's theory of transposition. (The rats were uncooperative and sometimes b i t me; I've never r u n another animal experiment.) I soon hooked up w i t h A n n a Peirce, an attractive freshman w i t h a family i n Maine. I t gradually became clear that she and I w o u l d stay together, even i n the next year when I w o u l d be attending a different graduate school. B u t where w o u l d that be and w i t h what emphasis? Behaviorism was out, and Gestalt psychology no longer seemed a viable alternative. The hot new idea was information theory, w h i c h I had already heard about f r o m George M i l l e r . M i l l e r himself had just moved to a new psychology department being established at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychology ( M I T ) , so I decided to go there too.
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T w o M o r e G r a d u a t e Schools Everyone at M I T was friendly, but I wasn't happy there. None of the ongoing research attracted me, and no one shared my interest in the struggle against behaviorism. I did manage to do one antibehaviorist experiment (Neisser, 1954), but it didn't lead anywhere. Anna and I were married (by the Cambridge town clerk) and had set up housekeeping, but she wasn't making any progress toward completing her education. As the academic year drew to a close, an attractive possibility that addressed all these difficulties suddenly appeared: Swarthmore offered me an appointment as an instructor! So we spent 1953-1954 back there: I taught various courses; Anna completed her sophomore year; and in April our first child, Mark, was born. In the summer of 1954 we moved back to Cambridge so I could resume my studies at M I T , but I was actually reluctant to do so. There was an alternative: Harvard was not far away, and the psychology department might still remember me. It seems that they did; in any case, they accepted me into the graduate program. I was happy to be a Harvard student again but felt that I had lost a lot of time in the intervening 4 years. To make up for this I moved quickly, taking qualifying exams in my 1st year and completing a dissertation by the end of the 2nd year. My choice of topic was not governed by any theoretical commitment—Gestalt psychology and information theory had both lost their allure by this time—but by how quickly I could do the required research. That criterion led me to yet another obscure topic: S. S. Stevens's neural quantum hypothesis of the auditory threshold. I did not have much rapport with Stevens himself, but his hypothesis made clear predictions and the necessary apparatus was already in place. I ran subjects, analyzed data, identified certain artifacts in the quantal method, and got my degree. By that time, oddly enough, I began to think that I was leaving Harvard too soon. Surely it had more to offer than I had learned in 2 hasty years! So I arranged to stay a 3rd year after all with two sources of support: a Harvard instructorship (teaching the course on sensation and perception) and a National Institutes of Health fellowship. To get the fellowship, I proposed a new technique for the measurement of pain thresholds—yet another obscure topic in which I was again not
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really interested. (The pain itself, created by focusing a beam of l i g h t on the back of the subject's hand, was not at all severe.) I n the upshot, I d i d conduct the proposed research but d i d n ' t like i t m u c h . A complex apparatus had to be b u i l t and calibrated, and I was beginning to realize that I am not very good w i t h apparatus. Other people at Harvard were m u c h better at i t . George Sperling ( I 9 6 0 ) , for example, was doing elegantly controlled tachistoscopic studies of what he called the "visual image." Later, i n Cognitive Psychology (1967), I w o u l d call i t "iconic memory."
Pattern Recognition It was time to move on, and an opportunity soon presented itself. Richard Held, with whom I had been acquainted since my Harvard undergraduate days, was now teaching at Brandeis and suggested that I apply for a job there. I don't remember my job talk now, but it must have been OK: I was appointed assistant professor at $4,000 per year. By this time Anna and I had four children (Mark, born in 1954; Julie, born in 1956; Phil, born in 1957; and Toby, born in 1958), so we certainly needed the money. We lived for a while in Boston and then built a house in Lincoln, Massachusetts; I commuted to Brandeis (in Waltham) on a motor scooter. We spent most of our summers in Maine, courtesy of my artist father-in-law Waldo Peirce. It was a strenuous domestic life, and unfortunately one in which Anna and I were increasingly at odds. Intellectually, my i V i years at Brandeis were years of development. The psychology department itself was best known for the humanistic psychology of its chair, A. H. Maslow. I liked Maslow's idealism, which reminded me of the Gestalt psychologists. I also resonated to his insistence that psychology needed a "third force," that is, a theoretical approach that was neither behaviorism nor psychoanalysis. (He hoped that the third force would be humanistic—existential psychology, but in fact it has turned out to be cognitive psychology.) Harvard was not far away, and I often attended talks at the recently established Center for Cognitive Studies there. A l l of this was intriguing, but the theorist who influenced me most was at neither Brandeis nor Harvard and was not even a psychologist: Oliver Selfridge of the M I T Lincoln Laboratory.
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Introduced by a mutual friend, Oliver and I soon found many interests in common. At his suggestion I began to spend Thursdays at his lab as a consultant, an arrangement that benefited me both financially and intellectually. Oliver had no advanced degree; nowadays he would be called a cognitive scientist, but at the time no such category existed. He was then working on the problem of machine pattern recognition, especially of patterns such as handwritten letters or Morse code. For letter recognition, he developed an ingenious parallel-processing model called Pandemonium. The model was all Oliver's, but I think it was I who suggested that we write it up for Scientific American (Selfridge & Neisser, I960). Although machine pattern recognition was intriguing, human pattern recognition was even more so. How to study it empirically? Reaction time (RT) suggested itself as a method but seemed to have a fatal flaw: Each RT includes not only the time needed to recognize the stimulus but also times for planning and executing the required responses. It was to get around that requirement that I devised a visual search paradigm. A subject who is scanning down a column of letters or numbers has to process each one to determine that it is not the target, but makes no selective response until the target itself has been reached. The scan rate (i.e., the slope of the function relating the position of the target to the search time) should reflect the time needed to make each of those determinations. This paradigm (Neisser, 1963a) was an early and unsophisticated version of what soon would become known as mental chronometry. Later studies, including several that I did with graduate students at Brandeis, used the search paradigm to explore other issues. Our most surprising result was that well-practiced subjects can search as rapidly for any of 10 targets (e.g., for a, f, h, k, m, p, u, z, 9, or 4) as for one target. I took this initially counterintuitive result as clear evidence for parallel processing in pattern recognition.
The M u l t i p l i c i t y o f T h o u g h t During all of this time, I was profoundly ambivalent about minds and computers. On one hand, computation and programming were obviously a rich source of ideas about mental processes—a source that I was using freely myself. On the other hand my most basic intuitions,
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stemming from Gestalt psychology, humanistic t h i n k i n g , and everywhere else, were offended by the suggestion that minds and brains are n o t h i n g b u t computers. T w o 1963 articles reflected this ambivalence. I n "The M u l t i p l i c i t y of T h o u g h t " (Neisser, 1963c), I used the contrast between parallel and serial processing to clarify familiar distinctions i n the literature on t h i n k i n g and problem solving: creativity versus constraint, i n t u i t i o n versus reason, productive t h i n k i n g versus b l i n d repetition, autistic versus realistic t h i n k i n g , and primary versus secondary process. I n " T h e I m i t a t i o n o f M a n by Machine" (Neisser 1963b), however, I listed three fundamental ways i n w h i c h computer processing differs f r o m human t h i n k i n g : I t does not undergo a natural course o f development, is not driven by feelings and emotions, and typically addresses a m u l t i p l i c i t y o f motives at once. One o f m y teaching responsibilities at Brandeis d u r i n g this t i m e was a course on memory. Because the standard list-learning research seemed b o r i n g , I focused on other topics such as Bartlett's notion of memory schemata and Schachtel's theory o f infantile amnesia. I t was to those ideas that I turned when T o m G l a d w i n , an anthropologist I knew slightly, invited me to address the Anthropological Society o f W a s h i n g t o n . The resulting article, " C u l t u r a l and Cognitive D i s c o n t i n u i t y " (Neisser, 1962), was widely cited.
Cognitive Psychology Sometime in the early 1960s, all of this began to jell. Perception, the span of attention, visual search, computer pattern recognition, human pattern recognition, problem solving, and remembering were all interrelated aspects of information processing. Perception and pattern recognition were input, remembering was output, and everything in between was one or another kind of processing. This was already a rather obvious idea (cf. Broadbent, 1958), but no one had put it forward clearly and effectively. I could write a book! The sensible time to write that book would be on my sabbatical, which was scheduled to begin in the spring of 1965. But where? I was in luck: My friend Martin Orne was just then moving his grantsupported hypnosis laboratory, the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry,
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from the Boston Psychopathic Hospital to the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He offered to provide me with an office there for as long as I liked, an offer that I accepted happily. For financial support, I applied for and received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. Meanwhile, my domestic life had unraveled completely. Anna and I were divorced in early 1964; I moved out of the house in Lincoln and into a two-room apartment in Somerville. I also began a relationship with Arden Seidler, who had three children of her own. These personal developments made me eager to leave the greater Boston area: It was time to start a new life. Arden and I were married—this time a real wedding—on New Year's Eve of 1964. A few weeks later we moved to Bala Cynwyd, a Philadelphia suburb. Arden's three children lived with us; my four children lived with Anna, who soon moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I visited them often. I stayed at the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry for 2V2 years; that's how long it took to write Cognitive Psychology (Neisser, 1967). Martin Orne was helpful and generous in every possible way, as was Emily Carota Orne, his wife and collaborator, who was then completing a doctorate in psychology at Brandeis. My stay at the unit also gave me an opportunity to learn something about hypnosis, which turned out to be useful at several points in the book. An adjunct position at the University of Pennsylvania provided a pleasant opportunity to teach a seminar in collaboration with my old friend and mentor Henry Gleitman. When the Carnegie grant ran out, I got a National Institute of Mental Health fellowship. In short, the enterprise that became Cognitive Psychology was supported in every possible way. The primary goal of that enterprise was to bring together what was known about a wide range of phenomena: "The term 'cognition' refers to all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used" (Neisser, 1967, p. 4). After an introduction to make this goal explicit, 10 chapters gave detailed and often technical accounts of published research: 5 on visual cognition, 4 on audition and language, and 1 on memory and thought. The tone was positive: Instead of attacking behaviorism, I just ignored its assumptions. "Cognitive processes surely exist, so it can hardly be unscientific to study them" (p. 5). This upbeat attitude may have been one
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of the reasons w h y the book was so popular. Theoretically, the argument relied heavily on the notion of constructive processes: Perception was constructive; remembering was constructive, and so forth. Cognitive Psychology legitimized and interconnected a wide range of research paradigms, b r i n g i n g them together by g i v i n g them a name. Many psychologists found themselves i n a position like that of Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, who suddenly discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life! Most were pleased by the discovery, and "cognitive psychology" soon became an indispensable rubric. I n the b l i n k of an eye, there were cognitive journals, courses on cognition, training programs i n cognitive psychology, and conferences of every k i n d . I myself was a star, now introduced everywhere as "the father of cognitive psychology." I t was a heady experience for a young man not yet 40 years o l d , and its effect on me was to create something like an illusion of omnipotence. I f I had changed the field once, perhaps I could do i t again! A n d i f I could, perhaps I should! Ever since the success of Cognitive Psychology, I have been haunted by something like a sense of personal responsibility for the future direction of the field. As one m i g h t expect f r o m a lover of the underdog, I soon developed misgivings about the book that had made me top dog instead. I n any case, one problem w i t h Cognitive Psychology soon became obvious. A l l of the phenomena discussed there are examples of information processi n g , but that doesn't mean they are all the same. I n particular, i t doesn't mean that they are all "constructive." The construction metaphor works very w e l l for remembering and moderately w e l l for i d e n t i f y i n g briefly flashed words, but i t doesn't w o r k at all for ordinary perception of the immediate environment. Because I had not thought this through clearly, the opening pages of Cognitive Psychology included some very questionable rhetoric. These patterns of light at the retina are the so-called "proximal stimuli." . . . One-sided in their perspective, shifting radically several times each second, unique and novel at every moment, the proximal stimuli bear little resemblance to either the real object that gave rise to them or to the object of experience that the perceiver will construct as a result. (Neisser, 1967, p. 3) As I was shortly to learn f r o m J . J . Gibson, this is not a good way to describe the real information on w h i c h perception is based. G i v e n that
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real information, "construction" is not needed at all. Perception is not the same as hallucination. In late 1966, when a few prepublication copies of Cognitive Psychology were already circulating, I got a call from Harry Levin in Ithaca. Would I consider joining the Cornell psychology department as full professor? Yes, indeed I would! At my job talk I liked the whole scene, although I was puzzled by some of Gibson's questions. (Why, for example, did I think that information had to be processed?) The salary offer was a princely $25,000, which I happily accepted. In 1967 Arden and I moved to Ithaca and bought a big house within walking distance of the university. Eric and the girls enrolled in the Ithaca schools, and our son Joseph was born in September.
J. J. Gibson What next? I was 38 years old and moderately famous. A l l I had to do from then on, it would seem, would be to keep up with the literature and do occasional experiments. For several reasons, this was not what happened. For one thing, my ambivalence about computers and models became ever stronger. I did not like the cognitive psychology that was now taking shape: There was too much mental chronometry in it, too many conflicting models, and too little about human nature. To be sure, I had included one or two such models in my own book, but there they had been offset (I thought) by the more humanistic notion of constructive processes. That notion no longer seemed to work. Meanwhile, I was beginning to understand what the Gibsons (J. J. and Eleanor) were up to. My teaching responsibilities included a course in perception, and two of J. J.'s students—Jim Farber and John Kennedy—were my first teaching assistants. Their reactions to my (very conventional) approach made it obvious that they knew something I didn't know, but what? It helped when I began to read Gibson's (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, a remarkable book that had come out not long before. What helped even more was to visit the lab the Gibsons had established in an old warehouse near the airport and see the ingenious experiments that were in progress.
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Conversations w i t h J . J . helped most of a l l ; there were many occasions for these, both professional and social. A r d e n and I often played bridge w i t h the Gibsons, who were d e l i g h t f u l company. J . J . Gibson was simply not interested i n the kinds of experiments that dominated the pages of Cognitive Psychology—for example, brief presentations of letter strings. H e insisted on using methods that were ecologically valid, so the perceptual systems could operate as they normally do. H a v i n g said similar things about memory myself from t i m e to t i m e , I found this claim congenial enough. I t took m u c h longer to understand what Gibson meant by saying that the visual system "picks u p " information that is already " i n the l i g h t " and need not be processed at all. W e l l yes, of course i t was i n the l i g h t : Where else w o u l d i t be? Slowly, I began to see that Gibson was r i g h t on this point too. (He really was: Many of Gibson's once-radical concepts are now commonplaces of the study of vision.) B u t where d i d that leave me? Was there some way we could both be right? Could information be picked up and processed? Other aspects of the Gibsonian approach—the c o m m i t m e n t to realism and the conception of perceivers as active seekers for i n f o r m a t i o n — were also attractive. I liked them m u c h better than the mechanical chronometric models that had been inspired by Cognitive Psychology. W h a t ' s more, the 1960s were i n the air. Some of the action was local: African American students at Cornell made national news by a r m i n g themselves and actually t a k i n g over a b u i l d i n g . Like other faculty, I felt very m u c h involved i n what was clearly a crisis for the university. (The issues at Cornell were eventually compromised, and no one was punished. I welcomed this outcome, although others viewed i t w i t h alarm.) Indeed, the whole country was i n the throes of change. Somehow, quite irrationally, this radical atmosphere seemed to increase m y interest
i n developing a new and more ecologically
committed
psychology.
Cognition and Reality Soon I was lucky again: The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, invited me to spend my sabbatical there in 1973-1974. We (Arden, Eric, Jenny, Katherine,
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Joe, and I) went eagerly, renting a house for the year in Palo Alto. We had a good time there, as almost everyone does. I myself gave talks at various universities up and down the coast, talks that are no longer memorable except for a retrospectively hilarious moment at the University of California, San Diego. The faculty proudly showed me the latest technical advance: Their computers were interconnected so they could send messages to each other! It was called "electronic mail." I didn't see much point to it, and told them I didn't think it would amount to much. Later that year, Lauren Resnick invited me to comment on the papers at a conference on "The Nature of Intelligence" that she was organizing in Pittsburgh. Some of the papers focused on artificial intelligence and others on human thinking, but it seemed to me that almost all of them were committed to an overly narrow conception of intelligence. To emphasize that narrowness, my own commentary distinguished between "academic intelligence" and "general intelligence." I thought the distinction was rather obvious, but to my surprise it was later often cited as a significant advance. A t the Center for the Behavioral Sciences, everyone has a primary project. What project should I undertake? One obvious possibility, which my publisher encouraged, was to prepare a revised edition of Cognitive Psychology. After 6 years this was a reasonable idea, so I tried to do it. Unfortunately, doing it meant reading the rapidly growing cognitive literature—a literature dominated by information-processing models and mental chronometry. My dislike of it grew apace, and a day came when I felt I couldn't read another RT study to save my life. I threw my drafts away and set to work on a different book to be called Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology (Neisser, 1976a). I started it at the center but needed 2 more years to finish. Cognition and Reality had several aims. One, perhaps prompted by my continued sympathy for underdogs, was simply to make Gibson's views better known. I thought people might take Cognition and Reality seriously because of the reputation I had gained with Cognitive Psychology, and that this would help the ecological enterprise. That aim may have been achieved. More ambitiously, I was trying to change the direction of cognitive psychology itself, to reconcile "information pickup" and "information processing" in a new theory
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of perception. The central concept was the perceptual cycle. Information is objectively available i n the optic array, but p i c k i n g i t up requires the activity of appropriate neural structures called schemata. The act of p i c k i n g up information changes the schema, enabling i t to pick up new information that i n t u r n w i l l change i t further. This cyclic activity appears i n every perceptual system, becoming more efficient
with
practice and expertise. T o pay attention to something, then, is simply to engage w i t h i t i n an appropriate perceptual cycle. B u t although this way of t a l k i n g s t i l l sounds plausible to me, i t had very l i t t l e impact on the field.
Selective L o o k i n g Bob Becklen and I illustrated this analysis with a phenomenon I dubbed selective looking. When the images of two ongoing events are shown superimposed on the same screen, viewers who follow one event soon become oblivious of the other. In our study (Neisser & Becklen, 1975), subjects visually followed the ball throwing of one group of players (on the screen) while ignoring a superimposed similar group. As they were doing this, a woman walked slowly across the scene carrying an open umbrella. One would think everyone would see such a strange intruder, but in fact few people do. This effect, now called inattentional blindness, has been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years (Most, Scholl, Clifford, & Simons, 2005). Later, Lorraine Bahrick, Arlene Walker, and I (1981) were able to show that even very young infants are capable of selective looking. It is a universal aspect of attention. Another set of experiments explored the possibility of engaging in two perceptual cycles at once, that is, of what is now called multitasking. Bill Hirst and Li2 Spelke modified a divided attention paradigm originally devised by Gertrude Stein (Solomons & Stein, 1896), in which subjects had to copy words at dictation while also reading stories. Their subjects practiced this every day for weeks: Reading slowly at first, they finally did reach a point at which copying did not interfere with reading at all. Further studies have shown that this achievement is not (at least not always) based on rapid switching and also that the
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secondary copying task does not necessarily become automatic (cf. H i r s t , Spelke, Reaves, Caharack, & Neisser, 1980).
From P e r c e p t i o n t o Memory So much for Cognition and Reality, which attracted less attention than I had hoped. There is no need to mourn its passing: Let us be happy that psychology has finally matured past the point at which such glib general theories are useful. In any case, it was time to move on. By the late 1970s (and especially after J. J. Gibson's death in 1979), I had more or less abandoned perception for other interests. My main focus was now on memory, but I was also increasingly concerned with issues of intelligence and education. My National Institute of Mental Health training grant in this area funded several years of stimulating "cognitive breakfasts" with students and postdocs; it also funded a stimulating 1983 conference on the Black—White gap in school achievement. That conference was my first opportunity to discuss these issues with Black scholars, and I learned a lot from John Ogbu, Ron Edmonds, and Wade Boykin. Later, I put together a book based on the conference, The School Achievement of Minority Children: New Perspectives, which appeared in 1986. Over the years several Black scholars have told me that the book was important for them, but I have never met a White person who claims to have read it. As far as memory was concerned, I was again fortunate. One day out of a clear blue sky I received a flyer announcing an international conference on "Practical Aspects of Memory," to be held in Cardiff, Wales. Eager to go, Doug Herrmann and I submitted a modest empirical paper. (Doug was then teaching at Hamilton College and often attended my graduate seminar.) At that time I still enjoyed some name recognition; when the conference organizers saw that I had submitted a paper, they asked me to give the keynote address as well. Seizing the opportunity to establish a genuinely ecological approach to the study of memory, I presented a talk entitled "Memory: What are the Important Questions?" The bottom line was the claim (true at the time) that "if X is an interesting or socially important aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X." The conferees loved it.
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a h i s t o r y of psychology in a u t o b i o g r a p h y J o h n Dean's Memory
Perception—at least the perception of the immediate environment— is generally reliable and accurate. This is not the case for memory: Innumerable studies of eyewitness testimony have shown that even very confident memories can be wrong. But they are not always wrong, are they? Surely some witnesses must be right. This line of thought eventually led me to a famously accurate witness: John Dean, President Nixon's White House counsel of Watergate fame. Dean's testimony before the committee investigating Watergate—testimony about conversations with President Nixon—was so rich and detailed that he was dubbed "the human tape recorder." But it later turned out (amazingly!) that a real tape recorder had been running during those same conversations; some of the transcripts were in the public domain. Intrigued by this opportunity to study a genuinely accurate witness, I set out to compare Dean's testimony with the corresponding transcripts (Neisser, 1981). The comparison did not go as I had expected: The human tape recorder failed the test. In many cases Nixon simply had not said what Dean later remembered him as saying, at least not in the context to which Dean attributed it. Yet there was also a sense in which Dean was right: There really was a cover-up; Nixon really did approve of it. What kind of memory was this, wrong on the surface but right in a deeper sense? Endel Tulving's distinction between semantic and episodic memory was then very popular, but it didn't quite fit here. Dean's recollections seemed to be episodic, but they were not. Still believing that I could coin useful new terms as I had done years before in Cognitive Psychology (e.g., iconic and echoic memory), I called Dean's memories repisodic: They represented a repeated set of events. It never caught on.
M e m o r y Observed My next step was to prepare a volume of readings and commentary that would show how interesting the ecological study of memory could be. This was Memory Observed (Neisser, 1982a), which I wrote—assembled might be a better word—during a 1980—1981 sabbatical at the Univer-
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sity of Pennsylvania. I enjoyed the whole process: picking out the selections, writing the commentaries, and putting it all together. In many ways, my goals for Memory Observed were like those that had generated Cognitive Psychology 15 years earlier. Once again, I was trying to change the direction of psychology, albeit on a smaller scale. This time, however, I had no subsequent regrets. The ecological study of memory has developed much as I hoped that it would, and indeed continues to do so. To be sure it has not been universally popular: A 1989 article by Banaji and Crowder argued that the study of "everyday memory" was "bankrupt." I was delighted to see their critique. I f someone takes the trouble to attack an enterprise in print, it must be important!
The Emory C o g n i t i o n P r o j e c t Not long after Memory Observed was published, an exploratory phone call came from Emory University in Atlanta: Would I be interested in a chaired professorship? In a major-league city? The offer was generous, and the timing was good: After 16 years at Cornell, I was ready for something new. But what would I do there? Thinking that it might be time for me to try something institutional, I asked them to fund what I would call the Emory Cognition Project. The project, which was housed in a seminar room and had a journal library, would exist chiefly to sponsor speakers and hold conferences. It was a modest request, but I couldn't think of anything else to ask for! Everything went smoothly, and Arden and I moved to Atlanta in the fall of 1983. In 13 years at Emory, I developed various new interests and organized various relevant conferences. Through Cambridge University Press, many of those conferences became books in a series entitled "Emory Symposia in Cognition." I was the editor of the first volume, Concepts and Conceptual Development: Ecological and Intellectual Factors in Categorization (Neisser, 1987b). The second was Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory (Neisser & Winograd, 1988), an attempt to reconcile the ecological and traditional approaches to memory. I had little contact with the third, Knowing and Remembering in Young Children, which was organized and edited by my Emory
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colleague Robyn Fivush (1990). Before l i s t i n g the remaining volumes here, I must describe some other developments. I n the early 1980s, an epidemic of apparent c h i l d abuse swept across the U n i t e d States: Several falsely accused day-care providers went to prison on the basis of utterly fantastic testimony given by very young children. This was soon followed by an equally crazy epidemic of memory: A d u l t s i n therapy (mostly women) suddenly "recovered" memories of how as children they had been sexually abused by members of their families. Because i t was generally thought that really v i v i d memories must be true, the desperate denials of accused family m e m bers often carried l i t t l e weight. Eventually some parents i n Philadelphia organized the False M e m o r y Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), a support group for people who found themselves falsely accused i n this way. Because I was one of the few psychologists who had actually w r i t t e n about false memories, M a r t i n Orne asked me to serve on the FMSF board of scientific advisers. I agreed immediately and indeed am s t i l l a member of that board. Because o f m y lack of clinical expertise, m y contributions to the enterprise have been l i m i t e d , but I d i d give occasional talks on the issues i n the 1980s and wrote a small paper on i t as late as 1997. Fortunately the epidemic itself has subsided, and claims of long-forgotten
sexual abuse are now
often met
with
skepticism. A different line of memory research was triggered by a single dramatic event: the unexpected explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986. W h i l e t a k i n g a shower the next m o r n i n g (at least, that's what I remember!), i t occurred to me that the occasion of hearing about such a disaster m i g h t become a flashbulb memory for many people. This was therefore an opportunity to get baseline accounts of such an occasion w i t h w h i c h later memories could be compared. I prepared an appropriate questionnaire and distributed i t to a large freshman class later that m o r n i n g . W h e n the erstwhile freshmen had become seniors, we asked 44 of them to recall how they had heard the news of the Challenger disaster 3 years before. The results were astonishing. A l t h o u g h a few subjects remembered the event fairly w e l l , a substantial number reported confident memories that were completely wrong. One of t h e m , for example, recalled that "a g i r l ran screaming t h r o u g h the d o r m shouting 'the space shuttle blew u p . ' " I n contrast,
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her original account showed that she had actually heard about it from friends at lunch. Nicole Harsch and I reported this finding in Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of "Flashbulb" Memories (Winograd & Neisser, 1992), the fourth symposium volume, which also included the Challenger research of other investigators. Our study was among the first to use this paradigm (i.e., getting an early account of what actually happened), but it was by no means the last. Nowadays, every public disaster becomes an occasion to conduct such studies. So far most of them— especially those that have interpolated long delays before testing— have confirmed our finding that entirely erroneous memories are by no means rare. I have also been involved in one other study of flashbulb memories, based on the 1989 California earthquake. The morning after the earthquake I contacted Steve Palmer at the University of California, Berkeley, urging him to get information from as many students as possible about their actual earthquake experiences. A few days later, Gene Winograd contacted Mary Sue Weldon at Santa Cruz with a similar suggestion. In Atlanta, Gene and I gave Emory students the usual questionnaires about how they had heard the news. A year and a half later, all three groups recalled their experiences. The contrast was sharp: The California subjects recalled their (direct) experiences almost perfectly; the Emory group produced the weak or incorrect memories typical of this paradigm. Direct experience makes a difference! About this time, I had one last fling with the ecological approach to perception. Several neuroscientists had recently argued that there are two distinct visual systems in the primate cortex. The dorsal where system controls space perception and movement, and the ventral what system is specialized for identification and categorization. It occurred to me that the where system is rather Gibsonian: It picks up information, tunes to the invariants specifying the layout of the environment, and controls movement. The ventral what system, in contrast, is essentially an associative network. Thus Gibson and his critics were both right, but about different systems! I gave a number of talks based on this insight (including an invited address at the 1989 meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Ann Arbor), but never felt secure enough in my mastery of neuroscience to actually
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publish i t . Given the rapid further development of neuroscience, this was a wise decision.
Self-Knowledge In 1987-1988 I had another sabbatical. We spent it in England, the first half in London and the second in Oxford. A Guggenheim award helped cover expenses. This time there was no new book to work on, but I did have two enterprises in mind. One was the "what—where" hypothesis described above. The other—much more ambitious—was a new theory of self-knowledge based in part on J. J. Gibson's insight that all perception involves self-perception. There is always information in the light to specify how we are moving and what we are doing— that is, to specify what I was beginning to call the "ecological self." On the one hand, recent work on perception in infancy, much of it from Eleanor Gibson's baby lab, suggested that even very young infants are self-aware in this sense. On the other hand, I had often read claims by social psychologists and anthropologists that the self is nothing but a social construction, varying greatly from one society to the next. How could these disparate views be reconciled? I tried to solve this puzzle by addressing it in the language of cognitive psychology, that is, by thinking in terms of information. This approach suggested that the self is specified by no fewer than five different types of information, and hence that there are five different kinds of self-knowledge. The same analysis could also be rephrased in terms of five different selves—the ecological self, the interpersonal self, the conceptual self, the remembered self, and the private self. I drafted a theoretical paper to this effect and then began to wonder where I could publish it. That problem was resolved when I met John Rust in London: He was just then starting a new journal called Philosophical Psychology, which sounded fine to me (see Neisser, 1988). One day at Oxford I got an unexpected phone call from Billy Frye, the Emory provost. The university had received a substantial grant from the Mellon Foundation; could I help them find a way to spend the money? A l l I could think of was an expanded version of what the cognition project was doing already now focused on the different kinds of self-knowledge. This was not very imaginative, but it did seem
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practical. I soon recruited an excellent postdoc, David Jopling, whose degree was in philosophy, and together we conducted five stimulating conferences. Eventually, these became three volumes in the Emory symposium series. I edited The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-Knowledge (Neisser, 1993); coedited The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative with Robyn Fivush (Neisser & Fivush, 1994); and finally, coedited The Conceptual Self in Context: Culture, Experience, Self-Understanding with Jopling (Neisser & Jopling, 1997). I had high hopes that all of this would have some impact on other people's theorizing about the self, but have seen little evidence of it.
T h e A m e r i c a n P s y c h o l o g i c a l A s s o c i a t i o n Task Force Published in 1994, Herrnstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life immediately sparked a firestorm of controversy. The controversy peaked in the spring of 1995 when I happened to be serving on the American Psychological Association (APA) Board of Scientific Affairs. The board decided that APA should establish a task force to address the issues that The Bell Curve had raised—issues of race, education, genetics, intelligence, and the like. Then they asked me to chair it. I was chosen partly because I just happened to be there but also because I might actually be an appropriate person for the job. I did know something about the topic, and had written so little about it that no one was mad at me yet. At least, those were my reasons for accepting. We put together a good committee (some of the members were suggested by various constituencies), and set to work deciding on the structure of the report and who would write the drafts of various sections. I kept the topic of group differences for myself. We circulated drafts by e-mail and found that we had surprisingly few disagreements on substantive issues. My own position was that the Black—White differences are real and important but that their cause is not presently known. We worked quickly, and the entire report, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns," appeared in the American Psychologist (Neisser et al., 1996) only a year later. It triggered critical responses from both left and right, which I took as a sign that we had written a fair report.
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a h i s t o r y of psychology i n a u t o b i o g r a p h y The Rising Curve
It was in the course of working on the intelligence report that I first learned about Jim Flynn's incredible discovery. The average IQ scores of Americans have been rising, at least since the 1930s, at a rate of some 3 points per decade! Elsewhere in the world, where there is more reliance on tests of abstract thinking like Raven's Progressive Matrices, the rate of gain is more like 7 points per decade. Herrnstein and Murray had christened this rise the "Flynn effect," naming it because they couldn't explain it. What could cause such gains? Intrigued by this mystery at the heart of basic assumptions about intelligence, I made what had by now become my habitual response: I organized a conference. It went very well, and I was especially pleased to meet Flynn himself, a charming and sophisticated political philosopher from New Zealand. It was to be my last conference at Emory: Arden and I decided we had been in Atlanta long enough. Still having many friends in Ithaca, we wondered whether I could perhaps return to Cornell. Would the psychology department be interested in giving me a half-time, nontenured, 3-year renewable appointment? The answer was yes! So in the spring of 1996,1 retired from Emory, cashed in my policy with Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, and bought a little yellow house on Lake Cayuga. My duties were not burdensome; I supervised one or two graduate students and taught one undergraduate course. In the 1st year I also edited The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures (Neisser, 1998), an APA book based on the Flynneffect conference that I had hosted at Emory. In doing so I was hoping to help Flynn (an obvious underdog!) in his challenge to the intelligence establishment. The Rising Curve has been cited fairly often, so I may have succeeded in that aim. There was still one more book to do, a second edition of Memory Observed, which by now was seriously out of date. I recruited Ira Hyman—once my graduate student at Emory and now teaching at Western Washington University—and together we decided what papers to include and to omit. In 1982, my problem had been to find enough good studies to fill a book. In 1998, Ira and I had the opposite problem: The ecological study of memory was booming, and there were far too many good candidate papers. But we made selections
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somehow, wrote the commentaries, and were generally pleased with the second edition of Memory Observed, which came out in 2000. Unlike the first, however, the second edition has not been widely used or cited. Maybe the ecological study of memory is no longer new and exciting, or maybe books of selected readings are not so needed in the Internet era. Or maybe—it seems time to say this—I may just have lost my touch.
The Remembered Self More than half a century has passed since the moment when E. G. Boring's course led me to think, " I can do this!" Was there really such a moment, or have I just created a repisodic memory a la John Dean? The good news about my Pearl Harbor memory (that it was probably right except for switching from football to baseball) encourages me to think that this one is right too. However that may be, psychology has indeed turned out to be something I could do as well as something I enjoy. Has my doing it made any difference? Even to ask such a question is to reveal a substantial degree of egotism, but that is hardly surprising. Autobiography makes dramatists of us all, and I am not the first who has occasionally been tempted to cast himself as the hero of the play. I am well aware that my role in the last half century of psychology may have been smaller than these recollections suggest. I was not really the father of cognitive psychology, only the godfather who gave it a name. The name itself was not even very original, given that the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies was already functioning. I was not a major contributor to ecological psychology either, just a propagandist in its cause. I am indeed proud of my role in getting the study of memory in natural contexts under way, but it would have happened somehow even without me. The main thing about developments such as these is not what part I played in them but that psychology has moved ahead because of them. It is a very different science now than in Boring's day or for that matter in mine: far less dependent on charismatic individuals and quarrelsome schools, more closely connected to brain science, and generally doing more research and less talking. I admire the new
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psychology greatly, but m y reaction is no longer " I can do this!" It's more l i k e , "Goodbye and good l u c k ! "
Selected P u b l i c a t i o n s o f U l r i c Neisser Bahrick, L. E., Walker, A. S., & Neisser, U. (1981). Selective looking by infants. Cognitive Psychology, 13, 377-390. Gleitman, H., Nachmias, J., & Neisser, U. (1954). The S-R reinforcement theory of extinction. Psychological Review, 61, 23-33. Herrmann, D. J., & Neisser, U. (1978). An inventory of everyday memory experiences. In M. M. Gruneberg, P. M. Morris, & R. N. Sykes (Eds.), Practical applications of memory (pp. 35-51). London: Academic Press. Hirst, W., Spelke, E. S., Reaves, C. C , Caharack, G., & Neisser, U. (1980). Dividing attention without alternation or automaticity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 109, 98-117. Kahn, S. D., & Neisser, U. (1949). A mechanical scoring technique for GESP. Journal of Parapsychology, 3, 177—185. Neisser, U. (1954). An experimental distinction between perceptual process and verbal response. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47, 399-402. Neisser, U. (1957). Response sequences and the neural quantum. American Journal of Psychology, 70, 512-527. Neisser, U. (1962). Cultural and cognitive discontinuity. In T. E. Gladwin & W. Sturtevant (Eds.), Anthropology and human behavior (pp. 354—364). Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington. Neisser, U. (1963a). Decision time without reaction time: Experiments in visual scanning. American Journal of Psychology, 76, 376—385. Neisser, U. (1963b, January 18). The imitation of man by machine. Science, 139, 193-197. Neisser, U. (1963c). The multiplicity of thought. British Journal of Psychology, 54, 1-14. Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Neisser, U. (1976a). Cognition and reality: Principles and implications of cognitive psychology. San Francisco: Freeman. Neisser, U. (1976b). General, academic and artificial intelligence. In L. Resnick (Ed.), The nature of intelligence (pp. 135-144). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Neisser, U. (1978). Memory: What are the important questions? In M. M. Gruneberg, P. M. Morris, & R. N. Sykes (Eds.), Practical applications of memory (pp. 3-24). London: Academic Press. Neisser, U. (1979). The control of information pickup in selective looking. In A. D. Pick (Ed.), Perception and its development: A tribute to EleanorJ. Gibson (pp. 201—219). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Neisser, U. (1981). John Dean's memory: A case study. Cognition, 9, 1—22.
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Neisser, U. (Ed.)- (1982a). Memory observed: Remembering in natural contexts. New York: Freeman. Neisser, U. (1982b). Snapshots or benchmarks? In U. Neisser (Ed.), Memory observed: Remembering in natural contexts (pp. 43—48). New York: Freeman. Neisser, U. (1986a). Remembering Pearl Harbor: Reply to Thompson and Cowan. Cognition, 23, 285-286. Neisser, U. (Ed.). (1986b). The school achievement of minority children: New perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Neisser, U. (1987a). Cognitive recollections. In W. Hirst (Ed.), Giving birth to cognitive science: A Festschrift for George A. Miller (pp. 81-88). New York: Cambridge University Press. Neisser, U. (Ed.). (1987b). Concepts and conceptual development: Ecological and intellectual factors in categorization. New York: Cambridge University Press. Neisser, U. (1988). Five kinds of self-knowledge. Philosophical Psychology, 1, 35-59Neisser, U. (1989). Direct perception and recognition as distinct perceptual systems. Paper presented at the meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Ann Arbor Michigan. Neisser, U. (Ed.). (1993). The perceived self: Ecological and interpersonal sources of selfknowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press. Neisser, U. (Ed.). (1998). The rising curve: Long-term gains in IQ and related measures. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Neisser, U. (2002). Adventures in cognition: From Cognitive Psychology to The Rising Curve. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Psychologists defying the crowd: Stories of those who battled the establishment and won (pp. 159-172). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Neisser, U., & Becklen, R. (1975). Selective looking: Attending to visually specified events. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 480-494. Neisser, U., Boodoo, G., Bouchard, T. J., Boykin, A. W., Brady, N., Ceci, S. J., et al. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. American Psychologist•, 51, 77-101. Neisser, U., & Fivush, R. (Eds.). (1994). The remembering self: Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press. Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Affect and accuracy in recall (pp. 9—31). New York: Cambridge University Press. Neisser, U., & Hyman, I. E., Jr. (Eds.). (2000). Memory observed: Remembering in natural contexts (2nd ed.). New York: Worth Publishers. Neisser, U., &Jopling, D. (Eds.). (1997). The conceptual self in context: Culture, experience, self-understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press. Neisser, U., Novick, R., & Lazar, R. (1963). Searching for ten targets simultaneously. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 17, 955-961. Neisser, U., & Winograd, E. (Eds.). (1988). Remembering reconsidered: Ecological and traditional approaches to the study of memory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Neisser, U., Winograd, E., Bergman, E. T., Schreiber, C. A., Palmer, S. E., & Weldon, M. S. (1996). Remembering the earthquake: Direct experience versus hearing the news. Memory, 4, ttl—^Vl.
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Selfridge, O. G., & Neisser, U. (I960, August). Pattern recognition by machine. Scientific American, 203, 60—68. Spelke, E., Hirst, W., & Neisser, U. (1976). Skills of divided attention. Cognit i o n ^ , 215-230. Usher, J. A., & Neisser, U. (1993). Childhood amnesia and the beginnings of memory for four early life events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 155-165. Wallach, H., O'Connell, D. N., & Neisser, U. (1953). The memory effect of visual perception of three-dimensional form. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 43, 360-368. Winograd, E., & Neisser, U. (Eds.). (1992). Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies of "flashbulb" memories. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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O t h e r Publications Cited Banaji, M. R., & Crowder, R. G. (1989)- The bankruptcy of everyday memory. American Psychologist, 44, 1185-1193. Broadbent, D. E. (1958). Perception and communication. New York: Pergamon Press. Fivush, R. (Ed.). (1990). Knowing and remembering in young children. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, J. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior. New York: Wiley. Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press. Most, S. B., Scholl, B. J., Clifford, E. R., & Simons, D. J. (2005). What you see is what you set: Sustained inattentional blindness and the capture of awareness. Psychological Review, 112, 217-242. Rhine, J. B. (1947). The reach of the mind. New York: Sloane. Solomons, L. M., & Stein, G. (1896). Normal motor automatism. Psychological Review, 3, 492-512. Sperling, G. (I960). The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological Monographs, 74(11). Thompson, C. P., & Cowan, T. (1985). A nicer interpretation of a Neisser recollection. Cognition, 22, 199-200.
9
R i c h a r d
F .
T h o m p s o n
T , his autobiography focuses primarily on the development of my thinking and research; additional details on my personal and professional life are included in the History of Neuroscience in Autobiography (Thompson, 2003).l In brief, I was born in Portland, Oregon, on September 6, 1930, and attended Fernwood Grade School, Grant High School, and Reed College (1948-1952) in Portland. My mother Margaret Marr Thompson was born in Canada, was a nurse, and became an American citizen after she married my father. Her family (Marr) had
I am deeply grateful for all of the federal research funding I have received over the years, beginning with my first National Institute of Health (NIH) grant in 1959 from the then National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness (B-2161). I am most grateful for the National Science Foundation grant I received, beginning at Harvard University, which provided support over many years for my search for the memory trace (IBN-9215069)- Thanks also to my current NIH grants (AG 147 51 and AG023742). I have received continuous federal research support since 1959 and am currently funded through 2011. What an extraordinary situation—the government funding me all these years to do what I enjoy the most! 1 In that autobiography, I list all of the many outstanding graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting professors, and colleagues with whom I have collaborated over the years. I thank them all profoundly. 303
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come originally f r o m Scotland before the American Revolution. M y father Frederick A . Thompson was f r o m a family that had been i n America for many generations, coming originally f r o m England. Grant H i g h had excellent m a t h courses t h r o u g h beginning calculus and superb physics courses. I took all the available m a t h and science courses as w e l l as Latin and English literature. D u r i n g this t i m e I read widely i n philosophy, both epistemology and ethics, thanks i n part to the w r i t i n g s of Bertrand Russell. I n ethics I was i n t r i g u e d by the existentialists (Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea was a f a v o r i t e — i t seemed to epitomize teen angst of that era). I was most impressed w i t h the w r i t i n g s o f Soren Kierkegaard—particularly his two-volume w o r k Either/Or. H e stated an argument that I s t i l l buy: I t is never possible to prove or disprove any religion by the scientific method. Belief i n any religion requires a leap o f faith. Somehow I always stumbled. A t Reed, I took 2 years o f m a t h and physics b u t could not decide on a major. For a t i m e I considered philosophy, b u t the w r i t i n g s of Russell and W i t t g e n s t e i n convinced me that the scientific method was the only way to gain knowledge of the material w o r l d , i n c l u d i n g of course the brain. I ended u p a psychology major, thanks i n part to t w o very impressive psychology professors, M o n t y G r i f f i t h and Fred Courts. D u r i n g that t i m e I developed m y lifelong interest i n memory and its brain bases, influenced i n large part by the w r i t i n g s o f K a r l Lashley.
Immersion I n t o N e u r o s c i e n c e I applied to several graduate programs in psychology and was offered fellowships by W . J. (Wulf) Brogden at the University of Wisconsin and by Kenneth Spence at the University of Iowa. I chose to work with Brogden, largely because of his earlier work on brain substrates of memory with W . Horsley Gantt and Elmer Culler. When I arrived at Wisconsin, I was disappointed to discover that W u l f had shifted his research to human memory and performance. Nonetheless, I greatly enjoyed my first 2 years as a graduate student working with fellow graduate students James Voss and George Briggs. I also enjoyed aspects of the social life at Wisconsin. Some of the more politically radical graduate students formed a group or clique called "neurotic nook,"
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led by an extraordinary young man, a dwarf, who made his living writing term papers for undergraduates. I was never really a part of the group, but I liked hanging out with them. During this time I made several close friends among my fellow psychology graduate students, for example, Bill Battig, Lyle Bourne, Gilbert French, Dore Gormezano, Leslie Hicks, Bill Prokasy, Allen Schrier, Joseph Sidowski, and Jim Voss. The University of Wisconsin—Madison was and is a great university. During the 1950s while I was there, the psychology department was at its peak, with, in addition to Brogden, such senior faculty as Harry Harlow, David Grant, and a number of brilliant younger scientists. It was a very heady time in both experimental and physiological psychology. William Estes had recently published his pioneering mathematical studies of learning, and Donald Hebb (1949) had recently published his extraordinary book The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. The field concerned with brain substrates of memory had fallen on hard times following Lashley's 1929 "demonstration" that memories could not be localized in the brain. Hebb revitalized the field with his notions of the "cell assembly" and of course the "Hebb synapse." In part because of my interests, W u l f arranged for us to set up an animal learning lab in Clinton Woolsey's laboratory of neurophysiology at the medical school, and we completed several studies on sensory preconditioning using avoidance learning in cats. Woolsey's laboratory was a most exciting environment. I spent more and more of my time there, completed my thesis on the role of auditory cortex in frequency discrimination, and received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellowship for 3 years in the lab. We completed a number of studies during that period, ranging from the first single-unit recording from auditory cortex (of cats) to detailed mappings of motor areas in a variety of primates, including chimpanzees. During this time, Ron Sinberg and I began our mapping studies of the auditory and association areas of the cat cerebral cortex. None of these studies really addressed my basic interest in brain substrates of memory, but they did provide me with superb technical training and expertise in neuroscience. Woolsey's laboratory was the most exciting and stimulating intellectual environment I had ever encountered. The integrative field of neuroscience did not yet exist as a discipline but did exist in the
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laboratory. People with diverse backgrounds in neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, behavior, and sensory processes worked together on problems of brain and behavior. During my time in the laboratory (1956— 1959), Clinton Woolsey, Konrad Akert, Joseph Hind, Wally Welker, and Robert Benjamin, all extraordinary scientists, were the most influential on my development. In 1959,1 accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of Oregon Medical School (UOMS) in Portland, first in the psychiatry department, chaired by George Sazlow, and subsequently in the Department of Medical Psychology, chaired by Joseph Matarazzo. I was at the UOMS from 1959 to 1967. Initially, I completed my work on association areas of the cerebral cortex (of cats; see Thompson, Johnson, & Hoopes, 1963). The most important event of these years was of course meeting and eventually succeeding in marrying my wife of 46 years, Judith Pedersen. A few words about Judith, far and away the most important person in my life. I met her soon after I joined the psychiatry department at UOMS. She was at that time a psychiatric nurse working on the ward. Actually, I first encountered Judith when Duane Denney, a psychiatry resident, and I completed a study on the patients with schizophrenia on the ward. Among other things, we gave the cold pressor test (how long a person can keep his or her hand in ice water), and we used nurses on the ward as the control group. Judith left her hand in longer than anyone else. She was also of course very lovely and charming. Judith came from Denmark at the age of 18 with a scholarship to the University of Oregon in Eugene and then completed her bachelor's degree and degree as a registered nurse in the University of Oregon School of Nursing in Portland. We were married in May I960, and in 1961 Judith entered the graduate school of nursing, obtaining her master's degree in psychiatric nursing in 1963. She was then appointed instructor at the School of Nursing. Meanwhile, our first daughter Kathryn was born in 1962 and our second daughter, Elizabeth, in 1964. Our youngest daughter Virginia was born in 1968 in Newport Beach, California, after we moved to the University of California, Irvine. Incidentally, when Judith became an American citizen in 1965, she was chosen "Citizen of the Year" by the state of Oregon, not at all surprising because she was a very beautiful young woman w i t h a charming Danish accent.
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Judith stepped out from her career to raise our children during our first time at the University of California, Irvine (1967-1973). She worked part time with me at Harvard (1973-1975) and again at Stanford (1980-1987). At the University of Southern California (USC), she began working with me full time (1987—present) and became my laboratory director. Her training in nursing and neurosurgery and her excellent background in the biological sciences were invaluable. She became expert in neuroanatomy, particularly pathway tracings. Judith, together with graduate student Jo Anne Tracey, received the D. G. Marquis Behavioral Neuroscience Award in 1999 from the American Psychological Association for the most outstanding research paper of the year, primarily for her anatomical work (see Tracy, Thompson, Krupa, & Thompson, 1998). My two closest friends at Reed had been Michael Baird (we had gone to grade school, high school, and college together, although he was 1 year behind me) and William Alden Spencer (Alden), whom I first met at Reed. Michael eventually married Alden's sister Jane. Michael's father was dean of UOMS, and I was close to the family— our homes were in the same neighborhood in northeast Portland. Michael and Alden both went to the UOMS at the same time I went to Wisconsin. Alden then did a postdoc at N I H in Wade Marshall's laboratory, where he and Eric Kandel did their now-classic neurophysiological studies on the hippocampus. After a further postdoc in Moruzzi's laboratory in Pisa, Alden accepted a position as assistant professor in Jack Brookheart's Department of Physiology at UOMS. (Alden and I initially shared a two-room basement laboratory.)
Developing a Theory of Habituation Alden and I had earlier planned a series of studies on spinal conditioning, training flexion reflexes in acute spinal animals. Thanks in large part to the work of Eccles and his many associates, much more was known at that time about the synaptic physiology of the spinal cord than other neural systems. Incidentally, the recurrent inhibitory interneuron on the motor neurons in the spinal cord, the "Renshaw" cell, was discovered by Birdsey Renshaw working at the UOMS many
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years earlier. I believe this was the first i n h i b i t o r y interneuron to be identified physiologically. A l d e n and I began our studies of spinal conditioning using the h i n d l i m b flexion reflex i n the acute spinal cat. The first problem we encountered was that when g i v i n g repeated s t i m u l i ( m i l d shock to paw or stimulation of afferent nerves), the flexion reflex kept habituating. Because this habituation was such a robust phenomenon, we decided to study i t instead. This was a very exciting t i m e for both of us—we were able to show that habituation of this simple reflex exhibited all of the properties of habituation i n intact, behaving animals (Thompson &
Spencer, 1966). Consequently, we argued, our analysis of the
neuronal—synaptic mechanisms of this elementary f o r m of learning i n our simplified preparation w o u l d hold for intact animals, i n c l u d i n g humans. I n short, we were a t t e m p t i n g to develop a simplified neuronal model of more complex behavioral phenomena. W e felt this was the first explicit attempt to develop the model system approach for analysis of neuronal mechanisms of learning and memory. The experiments were time-consuming. W e w o u l d begin the preparation i n the morning—decerebration, laminectomy, and so forth. Usually we d i d not begin to obtain good recordings (and get r i d of 60 cycle) u n t i l the evening and w o u l d continue u n t i l early the next m o r n i n g . I n the course of this w o r k , we discovered that dishabituation was actually a superimposed process of sensitization, both i n our preparation and i n intact vertebrate behavior. A t the same t i m e we analyzed sites and mechanisms of plasticity underlying short-term habituation and sensitization. For habituation, we ruled out muscle fatigue, sensory adaptation, and changes i n motor neurons and i n primary afferent
fibers.
Our
results were
consistent w i t h a process of synaptic depression i n interneurons, although we could not prove i t . Later, Eric Kandel and associates demonstrated this to be the case i n a monosynaptic system i n Aplysia, and we d i d so i n a monosynaptic pathway i n the isolated frog spinal cord (e.g., Farel & Thompson, 1976). A t the University of California, Irvine, P h i l i p Groves, a graduate student, and I elaborated all these findings
and results f r o m our spinal interneuron recordings i n t o the
dual-process theory of habituation (Groves & Thompson, 1970). The Thompson and Spencer 1966 article on the parametric properties of habituation (later a citation classic) and the dual-process theory had
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a significant impact on the field and indeed are s t i l l cited and tested to this day.
From H a b i t u a t i o n t o L e a r n i n g In 1966 I took a 6-month sabbatical in Anders Lundberg's neurophysiology laboratory at the Salgrenska in Goteborg, Sweden. At that time, Lundberg was perhaps the leading scientist in spinal neurophysiology. During the time I was there, I was fortunate to work on a project with Anders, Charles Phillips from England, and others on the patterns of monosynaptic la connections to hindlimb motor nuclei in the baboon. I learned a great deal more about intracellular recording in this project. Because baboons are of course very valuable, and the experiments were acute, the work was intensive; each preparation (and all the experimenters) continued for 36 hours or more. Judith and our daughters spent much of this time with relatives in Denmark. Together with Judson Brown and others at UOMS, we developed a doctoral program in biopsychology (now termed behavioral neuroscknce) in our little Department of Medical Psychology. As a result of teaching courses in neurophysiology and behavior to our small but very capable group of graduate students in our doctoral program in Portland, I felt the need for a modern text in physiological psychology. My goal was to explain neurophysiology to psychology students and to attempt, as far as was possible, to analyze behavioral phenomena in neuronal terms. The result was my first (and best) text, Foundations of Physiological Psychology (Thompson, 1967), written during the period 1964-1967. As it happens, this text apparently played a role in the development of the modern field of neuroscience. It was the first attempt to account for key phenomena of behavior in neural, particularly neurophysiological, terms. It seems to have been very influential for the generation of students of that era interested in neuroscience; many have told me so over the years. Beginning at Oregon and continuing at the University of California, Irvine, my students and I were able to show that classical conditioning of the hindlimb flexion reflex in the acute spinal cat was indeed a candidate model for analysis of mechanisms of associative learning (Patterson, Cegavske, & Thompson, 1973). As was true for habituation,
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for conditioning of spinal reflexes we were able to rule out changes in the cutaneous afferent terminals and changes in motor neuron excitability as mechanisms. There were some interesting differences between spinal conditioning as we studied it and conditioning in intact animals. We used the acute spinal cat preparation stimulating a cutaneous nerve as a conditioned stimulus (CS), recording from a motor nerve as the response and strong shock to the paw as the unconditioned stimulus (US). The unconditioned response (UR) to the US was of course a large reflex response in the motor nerve. We typically adjusted the CS so there was only a small response in the motor nerve before training. After training, the conditioned response (CR), the amplitude of the motor nerve response to the CS was much larger. Here, the CR was an increase in the amplitude of the original or alpha response to the CS. However, the onset latency of the alpha response—the CR—did not decrease over training, a major difference from conditioning in the intact animal. Actually in one preparation we recorded from two branches of a motor nerve—one showed a response to the CS before training but the other showed no alpha response but did develop a CR. Was this really a new CR? Although we were able to record increases in the activity of spinal interneurons during training, we could not analyze the synaptic mechanisms responsible—the necessary techniques were simply not available then. Later, Joseph Steinmetz, working then as a graduate student with Michael Patterson in Ohio (before he joined my lab as a postdoc at Stanford), showed that when the hindlimb flexion reflex was conditioned in the intact animals, there were no changes in responsiveness in the spinal circuitry. I feel this was an extremely important qualification limiting the usefulness of reduced preparations such as the decerebrate animal when attempting to model associative learning. What worked well for the much simpler nonassociative learning of habituation did not seem to work for associative learning in the intact animal.
New Models of Learning During this period at Irvine (1967-1973), I became dissatisfied with spinal conditioning as a good model of associative learning in
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intact animals for some of the reasons noted above. We tried several approaches, including classical conditioning of the relayed pyramidal response and neuronal activity of the cerebral cortex in instrumental avoidance learning, but none seemed entirely satisfactory to me. At this time, Michael Patterson was a postdoctoral fellow in my laboratory, having obtained his doctorate with I. Gormezano at the University of Iowa. (Gormezano and I had been fellow graduate students at the University of Wisconsin as I noted earlier; he worked with David Grant, a pioneering figure in the field of human eyeblink conditioning.) Patterson strongly proselytized Gormezano's preparation, classical conditioning of the nictitating membrane (NM) response in the rabbit, as a suitable preparation for analysis of brain substrates of associative learning and memory (e.g., Gormezano, Schneiderman, Meaux, & Fuentes, 1962). I was of course familiar with Gormezano's work and a great admirer of it. Len Ross and Allan Wagner had independently developed classical conditioning of the rabbit eyelid closure response as a model system; actually I believe their work preceded Gormezano's. In any event we set up a rabbit N M response preparation at Irvine. Actually, extension of the N M and closure of the external eyeblinks is one coordinated response; I refer to it here as the eyeblink response. I was indeed impressed with the high degree of behavioral control, thanks to Gormezano's many studies, the fact that the learning exhibited the basic phenomena of Pavlovian conditioning, and the very real possibilities for analysis of neuronal mechanisms. In 1967,1 accepted a professorship in the Department of Psychobiology at the University of California, Irvine. When I moved to Irvine, I was awarded a Research Scientist Career Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, which I held until I left Irvine in 1973. The period at Irvine was very productive, both in terms of research and scholarship and in terms of the growth and increasing importance of the Department of Psychobiology. I had an outstanding group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows during this period. Indeed, the graduate program we developed was one of the first and most successful programs in the broad field of behavioral neuroscience. Intellectually, it was an exciting time as we developed the graduate program and our own research programs. During the time at Irvine, I collaborated with Harry Harlow and James McGaugh in writing an introductory psychology text that emphasized the biological point of view. I
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also began e d i t i n g a series of volumes on methods i n physiological psychology. I n collaboration w i t h James Voss, I edited a book on learning and performance dedicated to W . J . Brogden and w r i t t e n by his students. W e were able to present a typescript copy of the book to W u l f at a Psychonomic Society meeting i n St. Louis before he died. A l t h o u g h i n poor health, W u l f , i n typical fashion, wrote a critique of each chapter for each author. B u t we could tell he was very pleased. I know how he must have felt. Several years ago, many of m y former students and colleagues wrote and published a book dedicated to me (Steinmetz, G l u c k , & Solomon, 2001). M y students also wrote articles for a f u l l issue of the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory ("A celebration," 2001).
P h y s i o l o g i c a l P s y c h o l o g y Comes I n t o I t s O w n A t Irvine and later at Harvard, I collaborated w i t h Gardner Lindzey and Calvin Hall in writing another introductory text in psychology. It was also during the period at Irvine that I became involved in editorial activities, beginning as editor in chief of the journal Physiological Psychology, published by the Psychonomic Society. In this context I got to know Cliff Morgan well—an extraordinary person and one of the most influential figures in the development of physiological psychology. I became one of the associate editors of the Annual Review of Neuroscience in 1981. Also in 1981, I agreed to become editor of the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology (JCPP; 1 9 8 1 - 1 9 8 2 ) published by the American Psychological Association, b u t w i t h a condition. A t that t i m e there was serious strife between comparative and physiological psychologists; their methods, approaches, and interests had become quite divergent and the journal was suffering. The J C P P had a long history as the psychological journal i n the field. M y condition was to separate i t into t w o journals, w h i c h became The Journal of Comparative Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience. I was thus the f o u n d i n g editor o f Behavioral Neuroscience (1983—1990). Several senior people i n the field were rather outraged by this change i n t i t l e , but the separation worked. Behavioral Neuroscience is now a leading journal i n the field.
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Mapping L e a r n e d Behaviors Harvard had tried earlier to hire me (I believe in 1969), but I was too much involved at Irvine. Then, when my very good friend Gardner Lindzey accepted the chair at the Harvard Department of Psychology and Social Relations he made me an offer I could not refuse. So in 1973, I moved to Harvard and held the professorship occupied before me by Karl Lashley, a very special honor for me. Harvard provided me with superb laboratory facilities and my colleagues and the intellectual atmosphere were truly outstanding. When we moved to Harvard, we established a rabbit eyeblink conditioning laboratory and obtained a National Science Foundation grant to support this work, the goal being to localize the memory traces. (One of the reviewers of the grant, who supported i t , felt we could not possibly succeed.) A t this time, we of course had no idea where the memory traces for this basic form of associative learning and memory were formed and stored. We began with an analysis of the motor neurons and nuclei that generated the reflex and learned eyeblink response. The 6th and accessory 6th nuclei are critical for eyeball retraction and N M extension and the 7th nucleus for eyeblink closure. It is all one coordinated response. The 4th nucleus acts synergistically. I t is important to stress the fact that the pathways mediating the reflex eyeblink are in the brainstem and do not involve higher brain systems such as the cerebellum and hippocampus. Specifically, there are direct projections from the trigeminal nucleus (activated by stimulation of the cornea and surrounding tissues) to the relevant motor nuclei and indirect projections relaying through the brainstem reticular system to the motor nuclei. Recordings for the relevant motor nuclei, particularly 6th, accessory 6th and 7th showed identical patterns of learning induced increases in neuronal activity. The basic logic of our approach seemed reasonable—identify the critical motor neurons involved in control of the learned response and trace the essential circuitry backward to the source, the engram. The fact that several motor nuclei showed the same pattern of learninginduced activation argued against any plasticity unique to one motor nucleus (e.g., the accessory 6th) or in fact to processes of plasticity at
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the level of the motor nuclei. Instead, i t seemed most likely that the learning-induced response i n the motor nuclei was driven from a common central source. The pattern of learning-induced increase i n the activity of neurons i n the motor nuclei i n the CS period i n paired trials and on CS alone trials (i.e., the neuronal CR) was s t r i k i n g l y similar i n f o r m to the a m p l i t u d e - t i m e course o f N M extension, external eyelid closure, and o f course the electromyogram recorded f r o m the obicularis oculi muscles. Indeed, an envelope of increased frequency of discharge of neurons i n the motor nuclei preceded i n t i m e and closely predicted the f o r m of the behavioral e y e b l i n k - N M response. This close predictive parallel was most evident w i t h u n i t cluster recordings b u t was also true for single-unit recordings i n the motor nuclei. O u r i n i t i a l l o g i c — t o w o r k backwards f r o m the m o t o r nuclei—was not as simple as i t m i g h t have seemed because of the very large number of central brain systems that project to the motor and premotor nuclei. So at this p o i n t we adopted a different strategy. I t was apparent that the a m p l i t u d e — t i m e course f o r m of the conditioned e y e b l i n k — N M response closely paralleled and followed the pattern of increased u n i t activity i n the motor nuclei. So we focused on this behavioral model of the learning-induced increase i n neural activity i n the motor nuclei and used i t as a template or model. The higher brain systems that acted to generate and drive the learning-induced neuronal C R , the model i n the motor nuclei, must show the same pattern of learninginduced activity as do the motor nuclei, and hence the a m p l i t u d e - t i m e course of the learned eyeblink—NM response. Thus, we searched t h r o u g h higher brain systems l o o k i n g for learning-induced neuronal activity that correlated closely w i t h and preceded i n t i m e the form of the learned e y e b l i n k - N M response. I n essence, we mapped the entire brain of the rabbit i n 1-millimeter steps (over a period of years), searching for neuronal models of the learned behavioral response. W e d i d not of course search b l i n d l y but rather system by system. Early on at Harvard, Theodore Berger and Bradley Alger (graduate students i n the lab) discovered the remarkable engagement of neuronal activity i n the hippocampus. The pattern of learning-induced increased frequency of discharge of neurons i n CA2 and CA3 (we showed later that the response was generated by pyramidal neurons) correlated essentially perfectly w i t h and preceded i n t i m e over trials the f o r m of the
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eyeblink-NM response (Berger, Alger, & Thompson, 1976). Furthermore, the hippocampal unit response began to develop in the US period within just a few trials of training and moved into the CS period in close association with the development of the behavioral CR. It seemed like a perfect candidate for the engram. In addition, EEG activity recorded from the hippocampus at the beginning of training predicted the rate of learning (Berry & Thompson, 1979). We characterized this learning-induced response in the hippocampus in some detail (Berger, Rinaldi, Weisz, & Thompson, 1983). Unfortunately, we knew from other work that animals could learn the basic delay conditioned NM-eyeblink response following hippocampal lesions (Schmaltz & Theios, 1972). This apparent enigma may reflect a fundamental aspect of the functions of higher brain systems in basic associative learning and memory.
Time t o R e f l e c t a n d Focus Although my wife and I liked Harvard very much, indeed—Judith began working with me in the lab there—neither we nor our daughters liked living in the Boston area, so we returned to the University of California, Irvine, and to Newport Beach in 1975. In 1977, I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the honor that pleased me the most in my career. The engagement of the hippocampal system in eyeblink conditioning was in some ways a frustrating situation. After I would present the hippocampal story in colloquia, more often than I care to remember someone would ask what happens i f you lesion the hippocampus. I would of course have to respond, "Nothing." Fortunately, Paul Solomon (visiting professor) and Donald Weisz (postdoc), working in our laboratory after we returned to Irvine, showed that i f very large bilateral lesions of the hippocampus were made before training, then learning of the trace CR (500-millisecond interval between CS offset and US onset) was markedly impaired (Solomon, Vander Schaaf, Thompson, & Weisz, 1986). More recently, Moyer, Deyo, and Disterhoft (1990) replicated these findings in detail. I return to this issue later. While at Irvine, in 1978—1979, we spent a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Gardner
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Lindzey was then director of the center and encouraged me to come. W e developed a special interest group i n learning and memory that included Leslie H i c k s , Elizabeth Loftus, and Seymore Kety. D u r i n g this year at the center, Leslie H i c k s and I , w i t h the long-distance help of V . B. Shvyrkov, wrote u p the proceedings of a joint Soviet-U.S. symposium on brain substrates of learning and memory that I had hosted at the University of California, Irvine, i n 1976. Actually, the most valuable aspect of m y year at the Center was the fact that I could step back f r o m the laboratory and t r y to decide what was most important i n m y work. W h a t d i d I really want to do? The fact that we had not yet been able to identify the critical brain systems for the basic delay conditioned eyeblink response was clearly the most important question for me. Was Lashley really correct that memory traces could not be localized and hence identified? I had always been somewhat skeptical o f the notion that memories are widely distributed i n the brain, as H e b b had argued. So when we returned to Irvine I decided t o focus the efforts o f m y laboratory on that question. J u d i t h , our daughters, and I very m u c h liked l i v i n g at Stanford and of course Stanford University. I accepted a position at Stanford University i n 1980 as B i n g Professor of H u m a n Biology w i t h a primary appointment i n the psychology department.
E f f o r t s t o I d e n t i f y t h e Memory Trace We had hints that the cerebellum might be involved in eyeblink conditioning. At Stanford, David McCormick (McCormick & Thompson, 1984) completed a detailed mapping study of the brain stem and cerebellum. Some cerebellar sites showed the same increase in unit activity that we saw in the hippocampus—increases that preceded and predicted the occurrence and form of the behavioral CR. Ronald Kettner, mapping the auditory nuclei, saw similar responses in some of his electrodes that missed the dorsal cochlear nucleus and ended up in the cerebellar interpositus nucleus. Kettner's elegant work, incidentally, using a signal detection theory approach, provided definitive evidence that the auditory relay nuclei play no role in learning and memory of the conditioned eyeblink response (Kettner & Thompson,
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1985). A brain stem lesion study by David Lavond also pointed to the cerebellum. The fact that a neuronal model of the behavioral CR developed in the cerebellum was suggestive of a memory trace, but we knew from our earlier work on the hippocampus that neuronal recordings per se could not identify the essential memory trace. Hence we began a series of lesion studies. The definitive initial lesion work was by David McCormick (McCormick et al., 1981). I will never forget the first polygraph record McCormick showed me of a rabbit with a cerebellar lesion—the CR was completely abolished. There was no response at all, even later than the CS period on CS-alone trials, and no effect at all on the reflex response. In a subsequent series of key studies, my extraordinary group of undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting professors at Stanford University succeeded in identifying the essential circuitry for this basic form of associative learning and memory (see Figure 9-1). In brief, our evidence strongly supported the following conclusions, among many other findings (for a review, see Christian & Thompson, 2003). The efferent CR pathway was the superior cerebellar peduncle and magnocellular red nucleus; the cerebellar lesion abolition of the eyeblink CR was strictly ipsilateral; the eyeblink CR never recovered at all following effective cerebellar lesions (Steinmetz, Lavond, Ivkovich, Logan, & Thompson, 1992); the interpositus lesion abolition of the eyeblink CR was due to damage to neuron somas, not fibers of passage, in an area not much larger than a cubic millimeter (Lavond, Hembree, & Thompson, 1985); the inferior olive-climbing fiber system appeared to be the critical US-reinforcing or teaching pathway (McCormick, Steinmetz, & Thompson, 1985); the pontine nuclei and mossy fiber system appeared to convey the necessary CS information to the cerebellum; interpositus lesion abolition of the eyeblink CR had no effect at all on the conditioned heart rate response in the rabbit; aging markedly impaired the conditioned eyeblink response in both rabbits and humans (Woodruff-Pak & Thompson, 1985) as did Alzheimer's disease in humans (WoodruffPak, Finkbiner, & Sasse, 1990); and electrical stimulation of sensory areas of the neocortex served as an effective CS in classical conditioning of discrete responses (e.g., Doty, Rutledge, & Larson, 1956) because it activated the cerebellar memory system (Knowlton & Thompson, 1992). Allan Wagner and associates had developed elegant
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A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY I N A U T O B I O G R A P H Y O Eichatory projections W Inhibitory projections
Ked ancient
Pontine ^nuclei
Figure 9 . 1 . Simplified schematic (most interneurons o m i t t e d ) o f the putative essential circuitry for delay classical c o n d i t i o n i n g o f eyeblink (and other discrete responses) learned w i t h an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). The sensory and motor nuclei activated depend o f course on the nature o f the conditioned stimulus (CS) and U S — t h e more central portions o f the circuit appear to be general. The reflex U S - U R (unconditioned reflex) pathway involves direct and indirect projection f r o m the t r i g e m i n a l nucleus to the motor nuclei (for the eyeblink U R and conditioned reflex [ C R ] p r i m a r i l y accessory 6 and 7). T h e tone CS pathway projects f r o m auditory nuclei to the pontine nuclei and to the cerebellum as mossy fibers. T h e US pathway includes projections f r o m the t r i g e m i n a l to the inferior olive (IO) and to the cerebellum as c l i m b i n g fibers. T h e C R pathway projects f r o m the interpositus to the red nucleus and on to premotor and motor nuclei. There is also a direct GABAergic inhibitory projection from the interpositus to the IO. Omitted from this diagram are feedback projections from the cerebellum to several afferent structures. Solid cell bodies and bar terminals indicate inhibitory neurons, open cell bodies and fork terminals indicate excitatory neurons. Stars indicate sites of plasticity on the basis of current evidence. See text for details. The essential trace is in the interpositus, and there is aLso at least one trace at Purkinje cells. From "Neural Substrates of Eyeblink Conditioning: Acquisition and Retention," by K. M. Christian and R. J. Thompson, 2003, Learning & Memory, 10, pp. 427-455. Copyright 2003 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Adapted with permission of the author.
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conceptual-computational models of classical conditioning that mapped very closely onto the circuitry we had been characterizing (Wagner & Donegan, 1989). A particularly satisfying aspect of our discovery of the essential role of the cerebellum in classical conditioning of discrete responses is the relevance of our work to the human condition. Irene Daum and associates, working in Germany, replicated in humans the fact that appropriate cerebellar damage completely prevents learning of the eyeblink CR (Daum et al., 1993). Christine Logan, a former graduate student of mine, and Scott Grafton, a neurologist then at USC, completed an extensive positron-emission tomography study of eyeblink conditioning in humans. Their results indicated significant activation in the cerebellar interpositus nucleus and several loci in cerebellar cortex, in close agreement with our recording studies in the rabbit cerebellum (Logan & Grafton, 1995). A point that is obvious from our studies but seems not to be widely understood is that our results on the role of the cerebellum in classical conditioning apply to the learning of any discrete movement: eyeblink, headturn, forelimb flexion, hindlimb flexion, and so forth (see Swain, Shinkman, Nordholm, & Thompson, 1992; shown initially in the classic study by Brogden & Gantt, 1942). Eyeblink conditioning is simply a convenient response to measure. Our findings to date seem to have identified perhaps the critical function of the cerebellum, namely the learning of discrete skilled movements, a basic notion proposed in classic theories of the cerebellum as a learning machine (see Ito, 1984). Indeed, our work constitutes a compelling verification of these theories.
B u i l d i n g a Neuroscience P r o g r a m In 1987 I accepted an offer from USC. In addition to the usual setup funds, my offer included a substantial permanent research fund, a position for Judith, and other forms of support. I was appointed Keck Professor of Psychology and Biological Science, with a light teaching load. We had rented out our house in Newport Beach when we moved to Stanford, so we moved back yet again to Newport Beach. This time, however, there was a formidable commute.
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Development of the neuroscience program at USC was due to the vision of a remarkable man, W i l l i a m Wagner, then dean of natural sciences and a physicist by t r a i n i n g . H e labeled the program N I B S — N e u r a l , Informational, and Behavioral Sciences—with a strong focus on cognitive and computational aspects of neuroscience. I agreed to become director of the program i n 1989 and set about h i r i n g . I had a budget of over $1 m i l l i o n that was designed to self-destruct. Each t i m e we hired someone for the N I B S program, that person had to have a primary appointment i n a department, and the 1st year of his or her salary came as a permanent reduction i n the N I B S budget, thereafter to be picked up by the university. So N I B S and the home departments had to agree on the appointments. I t was also the case that set-up funds for each new appointee w o u l d come f r o m m y budget and then be replaced i n m y budget the f o l l o w i n g year. I n the first several years I hired or facilitated the h i r i n g of an outstanding group of scientists: M i c h e l Baudry, Theodore Berger, I r v i n g Biederman, Roberta B r i n t o n , Mary Ellen MacDonald, M a r k Seidenberg, Larry Swanson, and A l a n W a t t s . Together w i t h Michael A r b i b and Christoff von der Malsburg, already i n the program, we were w e l l on our way to becoming an outstanding neuroscience program w i t h foci on synaptic plasticity, learning and memory, and a strong emphasis on cognitive and computation approaches. A l t h o u g h i t took some t i m e and effort, I was finally able to establish a universitywide doctoral program i n neuroscience i n 1996. This has proved to be the glue that holds the neuroscience program together. A l t h o u g h I spent considerable t i m e developing the neuroscience program (I stepped d o w n as director i n 2001), m y primary interest remained m y search for the memory trace. As noted above, at Stanford we succeeded i n identifying the entire neuronal circuitry essential for the conditioned eyeblink response and other discrete responses (see Figure 9.1).
N e w Ways t o A n a l y z e M e m o r y F o r m a t i o n Having identified the essential circuit, how could we show definitively where the memory trace was located? The interpositus nucleus was certainly the location of choice—small lesions selectively abolished
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the CR with no effect on the UR, electrical stimulation of this critical region elicited an eyeblink, and unit recordings showed increases in neuronal activity that preceded and predicted the learned behavioral CR. However, all of these facts were also true for a small critical region of the red nucleus. As a thought experiment, I applied the method of reversible inactivation during training. On the one hand, inactivation of the necessary CS pathway would of course prevent learning (and expression) of the CR. On the other hand, inactivation of the essential efferent pathway, although it would prevent expression of the CR in already trained animals, would not prevent acquisition of the CR, even though it could not be expressed until after inactivation had been removed. If inactivation of Structure X during training completely prevented learning but inactivation of the immediate efferent projection from X did not prevent learning at all, then X must be the locus of the memory trace. While at Stanford, a visiting professor (Merle Prim) attempted to develop a system for reversible inactivation by cooling but was not successful. After we moved to USC, David Lavond, with my encouragement, did develop such a system using Freon. Meanwhile, Eric Knudsen, a colleague at Stanford, suggested we use muscimol, a GABAA agonist (it shuts down neurons for a period of several hours, after which they recover fully). We also used lidocaine and Tetrodotoxin (TTX) (both cooling and lidocaine inactivate both neuron cell bodies and fibers; muscimol only inactivates neuron cell bodies; T T X is particularly effective for inactivating fibers). A l l these methods yielded the same striking result: Inactivation of the motor nuclei during training completely prevented performance of the CR (and the UR), but after inactivation was removed, learning had fully occurred. Inactivation of the red nucleus during training completely prevented expression of the CR (the UR is normal), but after inactivation had been removed, learning had fully occurred. Inactivation of the interpositus nucleus during training completely prevented expression of the CR, and after inactivation had been removed, no learning at all occurred. Finally, inactivation of the immediate efferent projection fibers from the interpositus, the superior peduncle, using T T X , during training completely prevented expression of the CR, but after inactivation had been removed, learning had fully occurred. It is important to note that infusion of an effective dose of muscimol through
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the same cannulae had no effect at all on performance of the C R , demonstrating that T T X had been acting only on fibers and not on cell bodies (for reviews, see Christian & Thompson, 2003; Thompson & K r u p a , 1994). I believe this is the first example i n w h i c h the method of reversible inactivation was used to localize a memory trace. Recently, we have presented strong evidence that l o n g - t e r m storage of the m e m ory trace remains i n the interpositus. One of the more extraordinary studies we completed d u r i n g this period was a neurobiological analysis o f the behavioral phenomenon of blocking ( K a m i n , 1969). The interpositus sends excitatory projections to the red nucleus to u l t i m a t e l y generate the behavioral CR. I t also sends G A B A e r g i c i n h i b i t o r y projections to the inferior olive (IO), part of the essential US pathway. Lesions of the critical region of the I O (the dorsal accessory olive [ D A O } ) prior to t r a i n i n g prevent learning and i n trained animals led to extinction of the C R w i t h contrived t r a i n i n g ( M c C o r m i c k et al., 1985). Furthermore, I O projections to the Purkinje neurons (complex spikes) are evoked by the US onset prior
to training but not after training. It seemed clear to us that this circuit could account for blocking. Jeansok K i m , a postdoc in my laboratory, undertook to test this hypothesis together with David Krupa ( K i m , Krupa, & Thompson, 1998). In brief, infusion of picrotoxin in the D A O (to block the inhibitory GABAergic projection from the interpositus to the DAO) completely blocked the inhibition of Purkinje cell US evoked complex spikes on CR trials in trained animals. Furthermore, picrotoxin infusion in the D A O during the 5 days of compound (tone-light) training in the blocking paradigm completely blocked subsequent behavioral blocking. This result was a most satisfying instantiation of a complex cognitive phenomenon of conditioning that we predicted as an emergent property of the cerebellar circuitry we had identified. The issue of the role of cerebellar cortex has always been unclear. Yeo, Hardiman, and Glickstein (1985) claimed that lesions limited to cortex abolished the CR, but neither we nor any other lab (including Yeo's) has been able to replicate this result (see Christian & Thompson, 2003). It is impossible to lesion all of the cerebellar cortex overlying the critical region of the anterior interpositus nucleus without damaging the nucleus. We needed another way of fundamentally removing the
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cortex. Hence the use of a mouse, in particular the Purkinje cell degeneration (pcd) mutant mouse. The cerebellum develops normally in this animal until about 2 weeks after birth, at which time all the Purkinje neurons degenerate, but for at least several months there are no other substantial abnormalities. More generally, of course, there are many mutant and transgenic mice, a number of which have cerebellar abnormalities. Thanks largely to the efforts of Jeansok K i m , Lu Chen, and Shaowen Bao in my laboratory (Lu Chen recently received a MacArthur Genius Award), we developed eyeblink conditioning in the mouse as a useful model. We adopted and modified procedures first developed by two of my former postdocs, Ron Skelton and Mark Stanton, and showed that this mouse preparation exhibited normal associative learning and memory and that the interpositus was necessary, as in other mammals (Chen, Bao, Lockard, K i m , & Thompson, 1996). Our results for the pcd mouse were clear. Without any functional cerebellar cortex, these animals were able to learn the eyeblink CR, albeit more slowly, to a lesser degree, and with less adaptive timing. Lesion of the interpositus in the pcd mouse completely prevented learning, thus indicating the learning that did occur was in the interpositus. In other studies using mutant and transgenic mice, we have shown that cerebellar cortical long-term depression (LTD) correlates well with eyeblink conditioning but not with motor coordination as measured by the rotorod (an interesting dichotomy), that the cerebellar cortex normally plays a key role in rate of learning and adaptive timing of the CR, that multiple climbing fiber innervation can lead to rapid learning but impaired motor coordination (PKCgamma KO), that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays a key role in the development of the cerebellar cortex and learning ability (stargazer and waggler), and that glial cells appear to play a key role in cerebellar learning (cerebellar gliofibrillary acidic protein K O ; e.g., Chen et al., 1995; Chen, Bao, Qiao, & Thompson, 1999; Shibuki et al., 1996). This current work is most exciting, particularly in terms of analysis of mechanisms of memory formation, and would form a chapter in itself. Several years ago, we showed that protein synthesis in the interpositus nucleus is necessary for learning (eyeblink conditioning in the rabbit; Gomi et al., 1999) and that there was an increase in expression of a particular gene in the interpositus that is normally involved in
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cell division (neurons, of course, do not divide). Using more modern techniques we are now exploring changes in gene expression of a number of genes during learning. In an important study by Kleim et al. (2002) using eyeblink conditioning in rats, a highly significant increase in the number of excitatory synapses developed in the interpositus (mossy fiber CS pathway) but no increase in inhibitory synapses (axons from Purkinje neurons) over the course of training. The story concerning the hippocampus and trace conditioning has recently become much more interesting. I noted earlier that hippocampal lesions markedly impaired subsequent learning of trace (but not delay) eyeblink CR. Jeansok K i m and Robert Clark, working in my lab at USC, showed that i f animals were first trained in the trace procedure and then given large bilateral hippocampal lesions immediately after training, the CR was abolished (Kim, Clark, & Thompson, 1995). However, if the lesions were made a month after training, the CR was unaffected. It is interesting that i f animals were trained on the standard delay procedure, the lesion (immediately after training) had no effect on the CR, but when the animals were then shifted to the trace procedure, the CR extinguished.
M o d e l i n g D e c l a r a t i v e Memory In sum, hippocampal lesions induced anterograde amnesia (impairment of postlesion learning) and marked but time-limited retrograde amnesia. These are precisely the effects that such lesions have on declarative memory in humans. Consequently, trace eyeblink conditioning would seem an excellent simplified model of the role of the hippocampus in declarative memory. In humans, declarative memory refers to memory for one's own experiences, often modeled as recognition memory in monkeys. A key aspect of human declarative memory is awareness—people are aware of the memories they can describe. Recent studies from Larry Squire's laboratory strongly support the view that trace eyeblink conditioning is indeed a model of declarative memory (Clark & Squire, 1998). Normal and amnesic humans were trained on both the standard short-delay procedure and a long (1,000millisecond) trace interval procedure. Subjects in both groups learned the delay procedure normally, although the amnesics could not recall
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(verbally describe) the experience, consistent with the early study by Weiskrantz and Warrington (1979). In marked contrast, amnesics were unable to learn the long-trace procedure. It is interesting to note that performance of the normal subjects on the long-trace procedure showed considerable intersubject variability. Normal subjects who learned the trace CR could describe the stimulus contingencies, but normal subjects who did not learn the trace CR well could not describe the contingencies. It appears that at least in humans, awareness is necessary for learning of the trace procedure. The results of the Clark and Squire (1998) studies strongly support the view that the trace eyeblink procedure in rabbits is a viable elementary model of declarative memory. This preparation would seem to have many advantages for analysis of the brain circuits and processes critical for declarative memory formation and storage because so much is known about the brain circuitry essential for eyeblink conditioning, as noted here.
Stress a n d t h e B r a i n While at Stanford, I developed a collaborative research program with my colleague in the psychiatry department, Seymore (Gig) Levine. Gig was (and is) a world authority in the field of stress. Michael Foy had joined my lab as a postdoc after receiving his doctorate with T i m Teyler at Northeastern Ohio Medical School, where he mastered the hippocampal slice and long-term potentiation (LTP). Mike had the idea that behavioral stress might be important in LTP, perhaps accounting for the variable results across laboratories in degree of LTP reported at that time. Together with another postdoc, Mark Stanton, we completed a study in which we first acutely stressed rats (immobilization and tail shock), then prepared hippocampal slices and induced LTP. Results were striking: Prior behavioral stress completely prevented the subsequent induction of LTP in the slice (CA1). When I moved to USC, Mike Foy accepted a position in the psychology department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he is now a full professor. He continues to work with us on hippocampal plasticity. A t the time I moved to USC, we were joined by a superb postdoc, Tracey Shors, who also worked on the project.
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In our ongoing project on stress and hippocampal LTP, Tracey Shors completed a lovely study showing that stress impairment of LTP is truly psychological. Animals were given shock escape training—they learned rapidly—and yoked animals were given identical shocks but could do nothing about it. The escape animals showed little subsequent impairment of LTP (hippocampal slice), but the yoked animals, who could not control the situation, showed marked impairment of LTP (Shors, Seib, Levine, & Thompson, 1989). More recently, Jeansok K i m and Mike Foy showed that behavioral stress enhanced subsequent L T D (hippocampal slice) and that both stress impairment of LTP and enhancement of L T D required N M D A receptor activation. In current work with Mike Foy and in collaboration with our colleague Michel Baudry, we discovered that acute application of physiological levels of estrogen to the bath enhanced LTP, prevented stress impairment of LTP, prevented stress enhancement of L T D , and reversed age enhancement of L T D (e.g., Foy et al., 1999).
Fear L e a r n i n g Finally, we have also been interested in that other basic aspect of associative learning: conditioned fear. We collaborated with Jean Shih in showing that monoamino oxidose-KO mice exhibit markedly enhanced conditioned fear but no change in eyeblink conditioning. W i t h Larry Swanson, we explored enhanced expression of enkephalin m R N A levels and expression of cFOS in the amygdala. In a collaborative study with my former student Laura Mamounas and a graduate student, Ingrid Liu, we found that mice heterozygous for BDNF showed no conditioned fear to context but normal fear to tone. Furthermore, context fear could be rescued by application of BDNF to the hippocampus. I return now to the cerebellar story, which is remarkable in several ways. We have shown that the essential memory trace for this basic form of association learning is indeed localized to a very specific region, the first such demonstration in the mammalian brain. Interestingly, the memory trace develops at the locus that codes the actual movement (eyeblink) in the interpositus. A similar result holds for limb flexion conditioning—the locus is in the interpositus where this movement
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is coded. So at least for the associative learning of precisely timed adaptive movements, the circuit is prewired in the cerebellum but must be strengthened (e.g., make more synapses) by training to become effective. Once we discovered that the interpositus nucleus was necessary for the conditioned eyeblink response, and knowing the circuitry for the cerebellum and its associated brain stem connections (see Figure 9.1), we were able to make a large number of specific predictions based on our model of how the system should work to yield all the properties of Pavlovian conditioning, all of which proved to be correct. Much of this work was done in collaboration with a brilliant postdoc, Mark Gluck, now a professor at Rutgers University. The essential circuitry for classical conditioning of the eyeblink response is shown in Figure 9.1, along with the site of memory trace formation in the interpositus nucleus and a putative site of plasticity in cerebellar cortical neurons. The nature of the memory is defined by this circuit; the circuit is the memory. The CS activates the sensory afferent pathways to the site(s) of trace storage in the cerebellum, which activates the efferent pathways to the motor nuclei and the learned behavior. The content of the memory, the conditioned eyeblink response, is completely denned and completely predictable from the essential circuit and the memory trace in the interpositus nucleus. We still do not know the detailed nature of the memory trace in the interpositus and how it is formed. It w i l l be necessary to identify all the steps in the causal chain from initial activation of the neurons at the beginning of training to the final form of the memory trace, from the biochemical-genetic processes to the structural changes in the synapses and neurons that code the permanent memory trace.
Conclusion In this work, I feel we have uncovered the most basic principle about how memories are formed and stored in the brain: by the strengthening of already existing connections among neurons. Synapses become stronger; more synapses are formed, but always among neurons that are already connected to one another, albeit weakly. In this sense, all memories are localized in the brain. For complex memories there
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may be many strengthened connections i n many loci, but they are s t i l l localized. The alternative, that memories are formed by the g r o w t h of entirely new neural pathways, is not supported by evidence. A l t h o u g h the formation of new neurons may play a role i n learning and memory (e.g., Shors et al., 2001), they occur at localized places i n the brain, the places where the memories are presumably being formed. This principle—memories are formed by strengthening preexisting connections—is clearly counter to Lashley's principles of mass action and equipotentiality. Prior to his classic 1929 study, Lashley actually favored what m i g h t be termed a "switchboard" theory of memory, consistent w i t h Watson's views. However, he picked a poor m o d e l — learning of very complex mazes (his principles really only appeared to apply for his Type I I I maze)—to test his notions. H e b b (1949) attempted to account for Lashley's results by developing the notion of "cell assemblies"—complex networks widely distributed i n the brain that code memories by strengthening many synapses. O u r results and conclusions strongly disagree w i t h the notion of memory networks widely distributed i n the brain. However, Hebb's view is not inconsistent w i t h memories being organized i n terms of m u c h more localized cell assemblies, for example, i n cerebellum, hippocampus, cerebral cortex, and basal ganglia. I n a general sense the " H e b b synapse," the notion that memories are stored by the strengthening of connections among neurons, is alive and w e l l today and entirely consistent w i t h our evidence. I n concluding, I w o u l d like to credit yet another major figure i n the recent history of brain and memory, Jerzy Konorski. I n his extraordinary 1948 book, Conditioned Reflexes and Neuronal Organization,
he argued that functional connections between neurons mediating conditioned responses "can be established only on the basis of preexisting 'potential connections,' formed as a result of the expression of the genetic programs during ontogenesis" (Konorski, 1948, p. 87). Konorski would be pleased by our discoveries.
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S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s b y R i c h a r d F. T h o m p s o n 2 Bao, S., Chen L., Kim J. J., & Thompson, R. F. (2002). Cerebellar cortical inhibition and classical eyeblink conditioning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99, 1592-1597. Berger, T. W., Alger, B. E., & Thompson, R. F. (1976, April 30). Neuronal substrate of classical conditioning in the hippocampus. Science, 192, 483-485. Berger, T. W., Rinaldi, P. C , Weisz. D. J., & Thompson, R. F. (1983). Single-unit analysis of different hippocampal cell types during classical conditioning of the rabbit nictitating membrane response. Journal of Neurophysiology, 50, 1197-1219Berry, S. D., & Thompson, R. F. (1979, July 13). Medial septal lesions retard classical conditioning of the nictitating membrane response in rabbits. Science, 205, 209-211. Chen, C , Kano, M., Abeliovich, A., Chen, L., Bao, S., Kim, J. J., et al. (1995). Impaired motor coordination correlates with persistent multiple climbing fiber innervation in PKCy mutant mice. Cell, 83, 1233-1242. Chen, L., Bao, S., Lockard, J. M., Kim, J. J., & Thompson, R. F. (1996). Impaired classical eyeblink conditioning in cerebellar lesioned and Purkinje cell degeneration (pcd) mutant mice. Journal of Neuroscience, 16, 2829-2838. Chen, L., Bao, S., Qiao, X., & Thompson, R. F. (1999). Impaired cerebellar synapse maturation in waggler, a mutant mouse with a disrupted neuronal calcium channel Y subunit. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 96, 12132-12137. Christian, K. M., & Thompson, R. F. (2003). Neural substrates of eyeblink conditioning: Acquisition and retention. Learning & Memory, 10, 427-455. Farel, P. B., & Thompson, R. F. (1976). Habituation of a monosynaptic response in frog spinal cord: Evidence for a presynaptic mechanism. Journal of Neurophysiology, 39, 661-666. Foy, M. R., Xu, J., Xie, X., Brinton, R. D., Thompson, R. F., & Berger, T. W. (1999). 17(3-estradiol enhances NMDA receptor-mediated EPSPs and long-term potentiation. Journal of Neurophysiology, 81, 925-929. Gluck, M. A., Allen, M. T., Myers, C. E., & Thompson, R. F. (2001). Cerebellar substrates for error correction in motor conditioning. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 314-341. Gomi, H., Sun, W., Finch, C. E., Itohara, S., Yoshimi, K., & Thompson, R. F. (1999). Learning induces a CDC2-related protein kinase, KKIAMRE. Journal of Neuroscience, 19, 9530-9537. Groves, P. M., & Thompson, R. F. (1970). Habituation: A dual-process theory. Psychological Review, 77, 419-450. Kettner, R. E., & Thompson, R. F. (1985). Cochlear nucleus, inferior colliculus, and medial geniculate responses during the behavioral detection of threshold-
2 A much more extensive list of the author's publications is given in Thompson (2003).
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level auditory stimuli in the rabbit. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 77, 2111-2127. Kim, J. J., Clark, R. E., & Thompson, R. F. (1995). Hippocampectomy impairs the memory of recently, but not remotely, acquired trace eyeblink conditioned responses. Behavioral Neuroscience, 109, 195-203. Kim, J. J., Krupa, D. J., & Thompson, R. F. (1998, January 23). Inhibitory cerebelloolivary projections mediate the "blocking" effect in classical conditioning. Science, 279, 570-573. Knowlton, B. J., & Thompson, R. F. (1992). Conditioning using a cerebral cortical CS is dependent on the cerebellum and brainstem circuitry. Behavioral Neuroscience, 106, 509-517. Krupa, D. J., Thompson, J. K., & Thompson, R. F. (1993, May 14). Localization of a memory trace in the mammalian brain. Science, 260, 989-991Lavond, D. G., Hembree, T. L., & Thompson, R. F. (1985). Effect of kainic acid lesions of the cerebellar interpositus nucleus on eyelid conditioning in the rabbit. Brain Research, 326, 179-183McCormick, D. A., Lavond, D. G., Clark, G. A., Kettner, R. E., Rising, C. E., & Thompson, R. F. (1981). The engram found?: Role of the cerebellum in classical conditioning of nictitating membrane and eyelid responses. Bulletin of the Psychonotnic Society, 18, 103—105. McCormick, D. A., Steinmetz, J. E., & Thompson, R. F. (1985). Lesions of the inferior olivary complex cause extinction of the classically conditioned eyeblink response. Brain Research, 359, 120-130. McCormick, D. A., & Thompson, R. F. (1984, January 20). Cerebellum: Essential involvement in the classically conditioned eyelid response. Science, 223, 296—299Patterson, M. M., Cegavske, C. F., & Thompson, R. F. (1973). Effects of classical conditioning paradigm on hind-limb flexor nerve response in immobilized spinal cats. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 84, 88—97. Shibuki, K., Gomi, H., Chen, L., Bao, S., Kim, J. J., Wakatsuki, H., et al. (1996). Deficient cerebellar long-term depression, impaired eyeblink conditioning and normal motor coordination in GFAP mutant mice. Neuron, 16, 587-599Shors, T. J., Seib, T. B., Levine, S., & Thompson, R. F. (1989, April 14). Inescapable versus escapable shock modulates long-term potentiation in the rat hippocampus. Science, 244, 224-226. Solomon, P. R., Vander Schaaf, E. R., Thompson, R. F., & Weisz, D. J. (1986). Hippocampus and trace conditioning of the rabbit's classically conditioned nictitating membrane response. Behavioral Neuroscience, 100, 729—744. Steinmetz, J. E., Lavond, D. G., Ivkovich, D., Logan, C. G., & Thompson, R. F. (1992). Disruption of classical eyelid conditioning after cerebellar lesions: Damage to a memory trace system or a simple performance deficit? Journal of Neuroscience, 12, 4403-4426. Swain, R. S., Shinkman, P. G., Nordholm, A. F., & Thompson, R. F. (1992). Cerebellar stimulation as an unconditioned stimulus in classical conditioning. Behavioral Neuroscience, 106, 739—750.
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Thompson, R. F. (1967). Foundations of physiological psychology. New York: Harper & Row. Thompson, R. F. (2003). Autobiography. In L. R. Squire (Ed.), History of neuroscience in autobiography (Vol. 4, pp. 520—550). New York: Academic Press. Thompson, R. F., Johnson, R. H., & Hoopes, J. J. (1963). Organization of auditory, somatic sensory, and visual projection to association fields of cerebral cortex in the cat. Journal of Neurophysiology, 26, 343—364. Thompson, R. F., & Krupa, D. J. (1994). Organization of memory traces in the mammalian brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 17, 519—549. Thompson, R. F., & Madigan, S. A. (2005). Memory: The key to consciousness. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. Thompson, R. F., & Spencer, W. A. (1966). Habituation: A model phenomenon for the study of neuronal substrates of behavior. Psychological Review, 73, 16-43. Tracy, J., Thompson, J. K., Krupa, D. J., & Thompson, R. F. (1998). Evidence of plasticity in the ponto-cerebellar CS pathway during classical conditioning of the eyeblink response in the rabbit. Behavioral Neuroscience, 112, 267-285. Woodruff-Pak, D. S., & Thompson, R. F. (1985). Classical conditioning of the eyelid response in rabbits as a model system for the study of brain mechanisms of learning and memory in aging. Experimental Aging Research, 11, 109—112.
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Baudry, M., & Lynch, G. (2001). Remembrance of arguments past: How well is the Glutamate Receptor Hypothesis of LTP holding up after 20 years? Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 284—297. Berry, S. D, & Seager, M. A. (2001). Hippocampal theta oscillations and classical conditioning. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 298—313. Beylin, A. V., Gandhi, C. C, Wood, G. E., Talk, A. C, Matzel, L. D., & Shors, T. J. (2001). The role of the hippocampus in trace conditioning: Temporal discontinuity of task difficulty? Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 447-461. Brogden, W. J., & Gantt, W. H. (1942). Interneural conditioning: Cerebellar conditioned reflexes. Archives of Neurological Psychiatry, 48, 437-455. A celebration of the scientific contributions of Richard F. Thompson. (2001). Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 225—226. Clark, R. E., & Squire, L. R. (1998, April 3). Classical conditioning and brain systems: The role of awareness. Science, 280, 77-81. Daum, I., Schugens, M. M., Ackermann, H., Lutzenberger, W., Dichgans, J., & Birbaumer, N. (1993). Classical conditioning after cerebellar lesions in humans. Behavioral Neuroscience, 107, 748-756. Doty, R. W., Rutledge, L. T., & Larson, R. M. (1956). Conditioned reflexes established to electrical stimulation of cat cerebral cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology, 19, 401-415. Foy, M. R. (2001). 17-Estradiol: Effect on CA1 hippocampal synaptic plasticity. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 239—252. Gormezano, I., Schneiderman, N., Meaux, E. B., & Fuentes, I. (1962, October 5). Nictitating membrane: Classical conditioning and extinction in the albino rabbit. Science, 138, 33-34. Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. New York: Wiley. Ito, M. (1984). The cerebellum and neural control. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Ivkovich, A., & Stanton, M. E. (2001). Effects of early hippocampal lesions on trace, delay, and long-delay eyeblink conditioning in developing rats. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 426—446. Kamin. L. J. (1969). Predictability, surprise, attention, and conditioning. In B. A. Campbell & R. M. Church (Eds.), Punishment and aversive behavior (pp. 276—296). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Kleim, J. A., Freeman, J. H., Jr., Bruneau, R., Nolan, B. C, Cooper, N. R., Zook, A., et al. (2002). Synapse formation is associated with memory storage in the cerebellum. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99, 13228-13231. Konorski, J. (1948). Conditioned reflexes and neuron organization. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
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Lashley, K. S. (1929). Brain mechanisms and intelligence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Logan, C. G., & Grafton, S. T. (1995). Functional anatomy of human eyeblink conditioning determined with regional cerebral glucose metabolism and positronemission tomography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 92, 7500-7504. Maren, S. (2001). Is there savings for Pavlovian fear conditioning after neurotoxic basolateral amygdala lesions in rats? Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 268283. Morgan, S. L., Coussens, C. M., & Teyler, T. J. (2001). Depotentiation of vdccLTP requires NMDAR activation. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 229—238. Moyer, J. R., Deyo, R. A., & Disterhoft, J. F. (1990). Hippocampectomy disrupts trace eye-blink conditioning in rabbits. Behavioral Neuroscience, 104, 243—252. Robinson, F. R., Rice, P. M., Hollerman, J. R., & Berger, T. W. (2001). Projection of the magnocellar red nucleus to the region of the accessory abducens nucleus in the rabbit. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 358—374. Schmaltz, L. W., & Theios, J. (1972). Acquisition and extinction of a classically conditioned response in hippocampectomized rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus). Journal of Comparative Physiological Psychology, 29, 328—333. Shors, T. J., Miesegas, G., Beylin, A., Zhao, M., Rydel, T., & Gould, E. (2001, March 15). Neurogenesis in the adult is involved in the formation of trace memories. Nature, 410, 372-376. Simmons, D. M. (2001). A personal reflection on knowing Richard Thompson from 1990 to 2000. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 227-228. Smith, D. M., Monteverde, J., Schwartz, E., Freeman, J. H., & Gabriel, M. (2001). Lesions in the central nucleus of the amygdala: Discrimination avoidance learning, discriminative approach learning, and cingulothalamic training-induced neuronal activity. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 403—425. Son, M. C , & Brinton, R. D. (2001). Regulation and mechanism of L-type calcium channel activation via Via vasopressin receptor activation in cultured cortical neurons. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 388—402. Song, D., Xie, X., Wang, Z., & Berger, T. W. (2001). Differential effect of TEA on long-term synaptic modification in hippocampal CA1 and dentate gyrus in vitro. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 357-387. Steinmetz, J. E., Gluck, M. A., & Solomon, P. R. (2001). Model systems and the neurobiology of associative learning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Tracy, J. A., Britton, G. B., & Steinmetz, J. E. (2001). Comparison of single unit responses to tone, light, and compound conditioned stimuli during rabbit classical eyeblink conditioning. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 253—267. Wagner, A. R., & Donegan, N. (1989). Some relationships between a computational model (SOP) and an essential neural circuit for Pavlovian (rabbit eyeblink) conditioning. In R. D. Hawkins & G. H. Bower (Eds.), Computational models of learning in simple neural systems: The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 23, pp. 157-203). New York: Academic Press.
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Weiskrantz, L., & Warrington, E. K. (1979). Conditioning in amnesic patients. Neurpsychologia, 17, 187-194. Woodruff-Pak, D. S., Finkbiner, R. G., & Sasse, D. K. (1990). Eyeblink conditioning discriminates Alzheimer's patients from non-demented aged. Neuroreport, 1, 45-48. Woodruff-Pak, D. S., Vogel, R. W., Ewers, M., Coffey, J., Boyko, O. B., & Lemieux, S. K. (2001). MRI-assessed volume of cerebellum correlates with associative learning. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 76, 342—357. Yeo, C. H., Hardiman, M. J., & Glickstein, M. (1985). Classical conditioning of the nictitating membrane response of the rabbit. I I . Lesions of the cerebellar cortex. Experimental Brain Research, 60, 99—113.
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W. Stern C. Stumpf H. C. Warren T. Ziehan H. Zwaardemaker
Volume II (1932) Carl Murchison, Ed., Clark University Press B. Bourdon K. Groos J. Drever G. Heymans K. Dunlap H. Hoffding G. C. Ferrari C. H. Judd S. I. Franz C. L. Morgan
W. B. Pillsbury L. M. Terman M. F. Washburn R. S. Wood worth R. M. Yerkes
Volume III (1936) Carl Murchison, Ed., Clark University Press J. R. Angell J. Frobes F. C. Bartlett O. Klemm M. Bentley K. Marbe H. A. Carr G. S. Myers S. De Sanctis E. W. Scripture
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Clark University Press A. Gesell C. L. Hull W. S. Hunter D. Katz A. Michotte
J. Piaget H. Pieron C. Thomson L. L. Thurstone E. C. Tolman
Volume V (1967) E. G. Boring and Gardner Lindzey, Eds., Appleton-Century-Crofts G. W. Allport K. Goldstein H. A. Murray L. Carmichael J. P. Guilford S. L. Pressey K. M. Dallenbach H. Helson C. R. Rogers J. F. Dashiell W. R. Miles B. F. Skinner J. J. Gibson G. Murphy M. S. Viteles Volume VI (1974) Gardner Lindzey, Ed., Prentice-Hall F. H. Allport O. Klineberg F. A. Beach J. Konorski R. B. Cattell D. Krech C. H. Graham A. R. Luria E. R. Hilgard M. Mead Volume VII (1980) Gardner Lindzey, Ed., Freeman A. Anastasi F. A. Geldard D. E. Broadbent E. J. Gibson J. S. Bruner D. O. Hebb H. J. Eysenck Q. McNemar Volume VIII (1989) Gardner Lindzey, Ed., Stanford University Press R. G. Barker L. M. Jurvich R. Brown D. Jameson L. J. Cronbach B. Inhelder W. K. Estes R. D. Luce F. Heider E. E. Maccoby
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Ulric Neisser and APA Task Force, 295 American Psychological Society, 54 Amnesiacs, 324-325 Amygdala, 137, 138, 147 Anderson, John, 102-104 Anima, 140 Animal learning, 92-94 Anthony, Sharon, 89-90 Anti-semitism, 7 APA. See American Psychological Association Applied Psychological Research Unit (Cambridge, England), 167-168 Arcus, Doreen, 137 Aristotle, 24 Aronson, Elliot, 2-39 anti-semitism experienced by, 7 blindness of, 36-38 Brandeis University, 3, 8-11 Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), 31 childhood, 4-7 and condom use studies, 34—35 and dissonant self-concept, 21—22 and Leon Festinger, 13-17 Harvard University, 18-22 and initiation rites, 16—17 and jigsaw classroom, 28—30 and Gardner Lindzey, 25
337
338
INDEX
Aronson, Elliot, continued and Abraham Maslow, 9—11 and David McClelland, 11-13 photograph, 2 and reinforcement theory, 24—25 and sensitivity training groups, 27-28 shyness of, 5, 6 and social activism, 26 Social Animal text, 26, 30—31, 38 Stanford University, 13—18 University of California, Santa Cruz, 32-36 University of Minnesota, 22-25 University of Texas, 25—30 Wesleyan University, 11-13 Aronson, Jason, 4, 5, 7, 38-39 Aronson, Vera, 10, 11, 13, 24, 27 Asserting Yourself(Bower & Bower), 93 Association for the Advancement of Psychology, 54 Association theory, 103 Associative network theory, 104-105 Atkinson, Richard (Dick), 52, 94, 97, 98, 204 Attention, 128 Attention and Effort (Kahneman), 163, 170-171 Attention in Learning (Trabasso & Bower), 96 Austen Riggs Clinic (Stockbridge, Massachusetts), 162-163 Austin, Texas fair housing ordinance in, 26 school desegregation in, 28-30 Availability heuristic, 174 Avoidant style, 126 Awareness, 324, 325 Ayduk, Ozlem, 263 Bahrick, Lorraine, 288 Baird, Michael, 307 Banaji, Mahzarin (Marzu), 222
Bandura, Albert, 42-72 APA president, 53-54 and behavior modification, 61—65 childhood, 43-46 and cultural influence, 67 and effects of televised violence on children, 57-61 and fortuity, 49-50 and Walter Mischel, 244-245 photograph, 42 and self-efficacy belief system, 65-67 and self-regulation, 68—69 and social cognitive theory, 69—72 social modeling, 55-57 Stanford University, 51-53, 55-57, 61-65 University of British Columbia, 46 University of Iowa, 46—49 Wichita Guidance Center, 51 Bao, Shaowen, 323 Barmack, Joseph, 235 Barsalou, Larry, 110 Beach, Frank A., 117, 121, 124 Beatty, Jackson, 166 Beauty and Consolation (documentary), 223 Becklen, Bob, 288 Behavioral economics, 183-187 Behaviorist psychology, 118, 119 Behavior modification, 61-65, 93 Behavior therapy, 93 The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray), 295 Benton, Arthur, 46, 47 Berger, Theodore, 314 Bergmann, Gustav, 47, 48 Berkowitz, Len, 60 Bernstein, Dan, 214, 220 Berscheid, Ellen, 23 Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Skinner), 64 Big Five, 251, 260 Bijou, Sid, 47
INDEX Bing Nursery School (at Stanford University), 246-247 Biopsychology, 309 Birth to Maturity (Kagan & Moss), 126-127 Black, John, 109 Blanchard, Ed, 62 Block, Jack, 162, 255 Blocking, 322 Blum, Jerry, 166 Boas, Franz, 233 Bogart, Leo, 60 Boring, E. G., vii, 275 Bower, Gordon H., 76-111, 204 adolescence, 80—82 and animal learning, 92-94 childhood, 80 and connectionist modeling of category learning, 106-108 and emotional factors, 104—106 and human associative memory theory, 102-104 and Elizabeth Loftus, 218 and mathematical learning theory, 86-87 and mathematical models of learning, 94-97 and Walter Mischel, 244 and mnemonic devices, 101—102 and narrative memory, 108-110 and organizational factors in memory, 99-101 parents as role models, 78-80 photograph, 76 and religion, 85-86 and short-term memory, 97-99 Social Science Research Council summer workshop, 90—91 Stanford University, 52, 91-111 University of Minnesota, 84—87 Western Reserve University, 82-84 Yale University, 87-89 Brandeis University Elliot Aronson at, 3, 8—11
339
Ulric Neisser at, 280-282 Brander, James, 185 Brewer, Joseph, 51 Broadcast industry, 58—61 Brogden, Wulf, 304, 305, 312 Brown, Judson, 46, 47, 309 Brown, Roger, 141 Bruck, Maggie, 213 Bruner, Jerry, 20, 145, 276 Bush, Bob, 86, 87 Cairns, Robert, 56 California earthquake (1989), 293 California Supreme Court, 219 Camerer, Colin, 186 Cantor, Nancy, 247-248 CAPS. See Cognitive Affective Personality System Career Burnout (Pines & Aronson), 37 Carleton College study, 251-253, 257 Carlsmith, Merrill, 19-20 Category learning, connectionist modeling of, 106-108 Ceci, Steve, 213 Cell assemblies, 328 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto) Elliot Aronson at, 31 Daniel Kahneman at, 180 Elizabeth Loftus at, 206 Ulric Neisser at, 286-288 Richard Thompson at, 315-319 Cerebellar cortex, 322-323 Cerebellum, 316-318, 323, 326-327 Cervone, Daniel, 255, 264 Challenger (space shuttle) disaster, 292-293 Chen, Lu, 323 Child development, second year of, 131-135 Child Development and Personality (Mussen, Conger, & Kagan), 122-123 Chillicothe, Ohio VA Hospital, 238
340
INDEX
Choice behavior, 240 Choice problems, 177, 181 Chunking, 99-101 City College of New York, 235-236 Clark, Eve, 102 Clark, Herb, 102 Clark, Kenneth, 235 Clark, Robert, 324, 325 Cleveland State Mental Hospital, 83-84 Clinical psychology, xi Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction (Meehl), 160 A Clockwork Orange (film), 64 Cognition and Reality (Neisser), 287-288 Cognitive Affective Personality System (CAPS), 260-262 Cognitive Psychology (Neisser), 283-284 Cognitive neuroscience, ix Cold pressor test, 306 Collective agency, 66 Columbia University, 255—264 Computational modeling, 102—103 Concepts and Conceptual Development (Neisser), 291 The Conceptual Self in Context (Neisser & Jopling), 295 Conditioned Reflexes and Neuronal Organization (Konorski), 328 Condom use studies, 34-35 Conger, John, 122 Conjunction fallacy, 187 Connectionist modeling of category learning, 106-108 Conservative Bayesians, 167 Consistency paradox, 252—253 Constructionism, 44 Constructive processes, 284 Cornell University, 285-286 Comsweet, Tom, 162 Corwin, David, 216 Counterattitudinal advocacy, 34 Counterfactual thinking, 188
Craik, Fergus, 102 Creativity, 56—57 Crick, Francis, 138-139 "Cultural and Cognitive Discontinuity' (Neisser), 282 Culture and cognitive discontinuity, 282 and social cognitive theory, 67 Darley, John, 19, 23 Daum, Irene, 319 Dawkins, Peter, 123-124 Daycare, effects of infant, 135-136 Dean, John, 290 De Busk, Robert, 69 Decision-making studies, 176—180, 187-188 Decision utility, 189 Declarative memory modeling, 324-325 Delay of gratification, 241, 243, 246247, 256, 262-263 Demjanjuk, John, 199-200 Dictator game, 185 Dieting technique, 220-221 Dissonance theory, 15—16, 21 Doodling, 12 Downey, Geraldine, 257 Dual-process model, 173 Dual reward-punishment effect, 88 Duhem, Pierre, 136 Dunlop, John, 145 Earthquakes, 293 Ebbesen, Ebbe, 246 Economics, 179-180, 183-187 Edwards, Ward, 167 Efron, Edith, 58 Eich, Eric, 105 Eisenberg, Leon, 60 Either/Or (Kierkegaard), 304 Electronic mail, 287 Electroshock therapy, 11, 84 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 133
INDEX Emory Cognition Project, 291—294 Emory University, 291-296 Emotion-state-dependent memory, 104-106 Emotion units, 105 Endowment effect, 182 Engram, 313, 315 Erikson, Erik, 163 Error correction, 107 Ervin, Susan, 163—164 ESP. See Extrasensory perception Estes, William (Bill) and Gordon Bower, 86, 90-91, 94 and Elizabeth Loftus, 204 at Stanford University, 52 and Richard Thompson, 305 Ethical issues, 133 Ethical Issues in Behavior Modification (Stolz), 65 Ethnicity, 135-136 Etzioni, Amitai, 162 Eugenics, 119 Evolved social cognitive approach, 71 Exclusive distinction rule, 108 Experienced utility, 188-189 Experimental design, 19 Extensionality, 181 Extrasensory perception (ESP), 275-276 Eyeblink response, 147, 311, 313-319, 323-325 Eyewitness memory, 206-211 Factor analytic approach, 251 Fair housing ordinance, 26 Fairness, 184-185 False feedback technique, 220 False food memory, 220-221 False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), 292 Familial informant false narrative procedure, 213 Farber, Isador, 47 Farber, Jim, 285
341
Fear learning, 326-327 Federal Trade Commission, 57 Fels Research Institute (Yellow Springs), 124-127 Festinger, Leon and Elliot Aronson, 13-17, 20-21, 33-34 and Walter Mischel, 243, 244 at Stanford University, 52 Fienberg, Steve, 211 Fillmore, Charles, 102 Film Board of Canada, 60 Finley, Gordon, 130 Fischoff, Baruch, 163 Fivush, Robyn, 292 Fixed-space displacement model, 97 Flashbulb memories, 292-293 Flight training program, 165-166 Flynn, Jim, 296 Flynn effect, 296-297 FMSF (False Memory Syndrome Foundation), 292 Forgas, Joe, 106 Fortuity, 49-50 Foundations of Physiological Psychology (Thompson), 309 Foy, Michael, 325-326 Framing effect, 180-182 Franklin, George, 211-212 Frederick, S., 173-174 Frederick, Shane, 190 Freedman, Jonathan, 204-205 Free-recall learning, 100 Freud, Sigmund, 162 Freudian psychology, 118 Frick, Fred, 276 Fries, Liz, 222 Garcia-Coll, Cynthia, 135-136 Garry, Maryanne, 214, 222 Gestalt psychology, 276—277 Gewirtz, Jacob, 47 Ghiselli, Edwin, 160 Gibson, J. J., 285-286, 289
342
INDEX
Gilovich, Tom, 190 Gladwin, Tom, 282 Gleitman, Henry, 278, 283 Glenberg, Art, 110 Gluck, Mark, 107-108, 327 Goldberg, Lewis, 171, 260 Goldsen, Rose, 60 Goldstein, Kurt, 158, 235 Goodbye Mr. Chips (film), 115 Gormezano, I., 311 Gough, Harrison, 162 Gould, Jack, 60 Graesser, Art, 109 Grafton, Scott, 319 Grant, David, 311 Graphic expression, 12 Greenbaum, Joe, 12 Greene, Edie, 211 Greenwald, Tony, 19 Groves, Philip, 308 Guatemala, 129-131 Guided mastery, 62-63, 65-66 Guyer, Mel, 217, 218 Haber, Ralph, 13 Habituation theory, 307-309 Hall, Calvin, 83, 312 HAM. See Human associative memory Handbook of Social Psychology (Lindzey), 25 The Handbook of Social Psychology (Aronson & Carlsmith), 19 Harkness, Sara, 131 Harlow, Harry, 311 Harsch, Nicole, 293 Hartley, Ruth, 58 Harvard University Elliot Aronson at, 18-22 Jerome Kagan at, 127-129, 145 Daniel Kahneman at, 166 Walter Mischel at, 241-243 Ulric Neisser at, 274-277, 279-280 Richard Thompson at, 313—315
Hastorf, Al, 243, 244 Hatfield, Elaine, 12, 23 Haupt, Howard, 209 Heart rate variability, 126 Hebb, Donald, 117, 277, 305, 328 Hebb rule, 107 Hebb synapse, 328 Hebrew University, Jerusalem Daniel Kahneman at, 157-158, 164-170 Amos Tversky at, 192 Held, Richard, 280 Helmreich, Bob, 26 Hennis, Tim, 209 Henry, Frances, 238-239 Herrmann, Doug, 289 Herschkowitz, Norbert, 144 Hertwig, Ralph, 174, 190 Heuristics of judgment, 171—176, 190 Hicks, Leslie, 316 Hilgard, Ernest, viii, 88, 94, 104 Hippocampus, 138, 314-315, 324-326 Hirst, Bill, 288 HIV/AIDS epidemic, 34-35, 71 Hoffman, Paul, 171 Holmer, Paul, 85 Hostility, 237 Hull, Clark, 46, 84, 278 Human Associative Memory (Anderson & Bower), 102, 103 Human associative memory (HAM), 102-103 Hyman, Ira, 296 Hypnosis, 104, 283 Hypocrisy paradigm, 35 If . . . then . . . patterns, 259, 261 Illusion of validity, 159 "The Imitation of Man by Machine" (Neisser), 282 Immigration laws, 119 Inattentional blindness, 288 Incremental theory of learning, 96—97
INDEX Infant daycare, effects of, 135-136 Inhibition to the unfamiliar, 125 Inhibitory interneuron, 307—308 Initiation rites, 16—17 Inkeles, Alex, 131 Innovation, 56-57 Intelligence, 287, 289 "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" (Neisser et al.), 295 Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 162 Introduction to Personality (Mischel), 251 Introductory Psychology (Hilgard), 88 Intuition, 173-174 Invariance, 181 Israel Defense Forces, 158—161, 192 James, Henry, 3 James, Tom, 136 James, William, 52 Jane Doe case, 216-220 Jigsaw classroom, 28—30 Johnson, Lyndon, 61 Johnson-Laird, Phil, 109 Johnston, Moira, 215 Jopling, David, 295 Judgment covariation in, 252—253 heuristics of, 171-176, 190 Jung, Carl, 126, 140 Kagan, Jerome, 114-149 childhood, 116-117 Fels Research Institute (Yellow Springs), 124-127 Guatemala sabbatical, 129-131 Harvard University, 127-129, 145 and high- and low-reactive infants, 137-141 military service, 123-124 Ohio State University, 122-123 photograph, 114 and reduction, 141-144 and second year of development, 131-135
343
and specificity, 144-147 and temperament, 135-136 Yale University, 115, 117-121 Kahn, S. David, 275-276 Kahneman, Daniel, 154-195 adolescence, 157 and adversarial collaboration, 190-191 Austen Riggs Clinic, 162-163 and behavioral economics, 183-187 Center for Advanced Study, 180 childhood, 155-157 and experienced utility, 188-189 and framing effect, 180-182 Harvard University, 166 Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 157158, 164-170 and heuristics of judgment, 170-176 military service, 158-161 and one-question studies, 164—165 Oregon Research Institute, 170-171 photograph, 154 Princeton University, 188 professional training, 164-167 and prospect theory, 176-180 and pupil dilation, 166 and reward/punishment, 165-166 and Amos Tversky, 167-170, 191-195 University of British Columbia, 184-187 University of California, Berkeley, 162-164, 186, 188 University of Michigan, 166 Kandel, Eric, 308 Kayzer, Wim, 223 Kearsley, Richard, 135 Kelly, George A., 236, 237 Kendler, Howard, 47 Kennedy, John, 285 Kenya, 131 Kettner, Ronald, 316 Kierkegaard, Soren, 85-86, 304
344
INDEX
Kihlstrom, John, 111 Kim, Jeansok, 322-324, 326 Kinetic depth effect, 278 Kintsch, Walter, 103 Klapper, Joseph, 60 Klein, Robert, 129, 130 Knetsch, Jack, 184, 185, 188 Knowing and Remembering in Young Children (Fivush), 291-292 Knudsen, Eric, 321 Koehler, Wolfgang, 277 Konorski, Jerzy, 328 Krauss, Robert M., 255 Krupa, David, 322 Laboratory for Research in Social Relations (University of Minnesota), 22 Lacey, John and Beatrice, 125-126 Laibson, David, 186 Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, 129 Lakoff, George, 102 Laney, Cara, 220 LaRouche, Lyndon, 64 Larsen, Otto, 60 Lashley, Karl, ix, 328 Lavond, David, 317, 321 Lawrence, Douglas, 92 Lazarus, Richard, 162 Learning animal, 92-94 cognitive social, 249-251 connectionist modeling of category, 106-108 fear, 326-327 free-recall, 100 mathematical learning theory, 87, 204 mathematical models of, 94—97 new models of, 310—312 observational, 67 social, 236-237 statistical, 86-87 Richard Thompson and, 309-310
Leary, Timothy, 242-243 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 158 Leldayet, Kenya, 131 Levin, Harry, 285 Levine, Seymore, 325 Lewin, Kurt, 27, 158 Licklider, J. C. R., 276 Life historical, x, xi Linder, Darwyn, 23, 24 Lindzey, Gardner, viii, 25, 145, 312, 313 Linguistic Society of America, 102 Little, Ken, 53 Liu, Ingrid, 326 Lockhart, Bob, 102 Loftus, Elizabeth, 198-224 adolescence, 202-203 Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), 206 childhood, 201-202 and John Demjanjuk, 199-200 and eyewitness memory, 206—211 and false food memory, 220-221 and Jane Doe case, 216-220 photograph, 198 and repressed memory, 211—216 Stanford University, 203-205 University of California, Irvine, 217-221 University of California, Los Angeles, 203 University of Washington, 205-217 Loftus, Geoff, 204, 205, 210 Logan, Christine, 319 Logan, Frank, 88-89, 91 Long-term depression (LTD), 323, 326 Long-term potentiation (LTP), 325-326 Look magazine, 58 Lorig, Kate, 69 Loss aversion, 177—178 Lost-in-the-mall technique, 213 The Lou Gehrig Story (film), 80 LTD. See Long-term depression
INDEX LTP. See Long-term potentiation Luce, Duncan, 218 Lundberg, Anders, 309 Lutsky, Neil, 252 Maccoby, Eleanor, 52 Mamounas, Laura, 326 "The Man in the Eye of the Hurricane" (Edith Efron), 58 Mapping learned behaviors, 313-315 Markowitz, Harry, 177 "Marshmallow test," 246-247 Marx, Groucho, 50 Maslow, Abraham and Elliot Aronson, 9-11, 33-34 and Ulric Neisser, 280 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 279 Mathematical learning theory, 87, 204 Mathematical models of learning, 94-97 Mathematical Psychology (Coombs, Dawes, & Tversky), 176 Mayer, Jack, 105 Mazzoni, Giuliana, 213 McClelland, David and Elliot Aronson, 11-13 and Jerome Kagan, 127 and Walter Mischel, 240-242 McConnell, Jim, 64 McCormick, David, 316, 317 McGaugh, James, 311 McVeigh, Timothy, 209 Mead, Margaret, 130 The Measurement of Meaning (Osgood), 122 Medvec, Victoria, 190 Meehl, Paul, 23, 86, 160 Memory(-ies) John Dean's, 290 declarative memory modeling, 324-325 ecological study of, 296—297 emotion-state-dependent, 104—106
345
eyewitness, 206-211 false food, 220-221 flashbulb, 292-293 human associative, 102—103 Ulric Neisser and, 289-291 organizational factors in, 99-101 prenatal, 214 recovered, 292 repisodic, 290 repressed, 211—216 rich false, 214 semantic, 204-205 short-term, 97-99 working, 128 Memory formation analysis, 320-324 Memory Observed (Neisser), 269, 290— 291, 296-297 Memory trace identification, 316-319 Mental accounting, 182 Mental chronometry, 281 Mental effort, 166 Mental processing, 281-282 Metamemory skills, 130 Metcalfe, Janet, 261 Metzner, Ralph, 243 Micromolar theory of behavior, 89, 91 Military service of Jerome Kagan, 123-124 of Daniel Kahneman, 158-161 Miller, Dale, 188 Miller, George, 145, 277, 278 Miller, Neal, 87-88, 91, 105, 119-120 Mills, Jud, 16-17 Milner, Brenda, 97 Mimicry, 56 Minsky, Marvin, 277 Mischel, Theodore, 234-235, 253-254 Mischel, Walter, 228-265 adolescence, 231—233 and CAPS model, 260-262 and Carleton College study, 251-253 City College, 235-236
346
INDEX
Mischel, Walter, continued and cognitive social learning reconceptualization of personality, 249-251 Columbia University, 255-264 and delay of gratification, 239-240, 246-247, 262-263 emigration to U.S., 230 Harvard University, 241-243 Introduction to Personality text, 251 and Daniel Kahneman, 164-165 New York University, 234-235, 254-255 Ohio State University, 236-239 Personality and Assessment monograph, 248, 249 and personality consistency patterns, 258-260 and personality paradox, 248 photograph, 228 Stanford University, 52, 243-253, 255 Trinidad, 239-240 University of Colorado, 240 Vienna childhood, 229 and willpower, 245-248 Misinformation effect, 207-208 Mistakes Were Made, but Not by ME (Tavris & Aronson), 38 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 279 Mnemonic devices, 101—102 Molar theory, 89 Mood, 106 Mood-congruent memory, 106 Moore, Bert, 246 Moral agency, 69—70 Morality, development of, 132—134 Morf, Carolyn, 261 Morgan, Cliff, 312 Morris, Erin, 220 Morrow, Dan, 109 Moss, Howard, 125-127, 145 Mosteller, Frederick, 86-87
Motor nuclei, 313-314, 321-322 Mullainathan, Sendhil, 186 Multiattribute memory traces, 98 "The Multiplicity of Thought" (Neisser), 282 Multitasking, 288-289 Munroe, Ruth, 236 Murdock, Ben, 98 Murphy, Gardner, 235 Mussen, Paul, 122 nAch (need for achievement), 12 Nachmias, Jacob, 278 Narrative memory, 108-110 Nason, Susan, 211 National Association of Broadcasters, 58 National Mnemonics Association, 101 Nausea (Sartre), 304 Need for achievement (nAch), 12 Neezer, Pa, 239 Neisser, Ulric, 268-298 adolescence, 212-21A APA Task Force, 295 Brandeis University, 280-282 Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), 286-288 childhood, 270-272 Cognition and Reality text, 286—288 Cognitive Psychology text, 282—285 Cornell University, 285-286 and John Dean's memory, 290 Emory Cognition Project, 291-294 Emory University, 291-296 and flashbulb memories, 292-293 and Flynn effect, 296-297 and Gestalt psychology, 276-277 and J. J. Gibson, 285-286 Harvard University, 274-277, 279-280 and memory, 289-291 Memory Observed text, 290-291 MIT graduate program, 279
INDEX and multiplicity of thought, 281-282 and multitasking, 288-289 and parapsychology, 275-276 and pattern recognition, 280-281 Pearl Harbor memory, 269-270 photograph, 268 and recovered memories, 292 School Achievement of Minority Children text, 289 and selective looking, 288 and self-knowledge, 293-294 Swarthmore College, 277-279 Unit for Experimental Psychiatry sabbatical, 282-285 Nerlove, Harriet, 241 Neuroscience, 309, 319-320 New York University, 234-235, 254-255 N * game, 185 "A Nicer Interpretation of a Neisser Recollection" (Thompson & Cowan), 270 Nictitating membrane (NM) response, 311 Nixon, Richard, 53, 290 N M (nictitating membrane) response, 311 Norman, Don, 98 North, Oliver, 209 Observational learning, 67 Odean, Terrance, 186 Ohio State University Jerome Kagan at, 122-123 Walter Mischel at, 236-239 Olafson, Erna, 216 Olds, Jim, 88 Olmstead, Alan, 184 "The 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the Twentieth Century" (Hagbloom et al.), xi One-question economics, 182 One-question studies, 165
347
One-step model, 94-95 Oregon Research Institute (ORI), 170-171 Organizational factors in memory, 99-101 The Organization of Behavior (Hebb), 117, 277, 305 ORI. See Oregon Research Institute Orne, Emily Carota, 283 Orne, Martin, 282-283, 292 Osgood, Charles, 122 Pain thresholds, measurement of, 279-280 Paisley, Mathilda, 61 Paivio, Allan, 110 Palmer, John, 206 Parapsychology, 275-276 Parducci, Allen, 203 Parker, Ed, 59 Pascal, Blaise, 157 Pasteur, Louis, 50 Pattern recognition, 280-281 Patterson, Michael, 311 Peace Corps projects, 242, 255 Peake, Philip K., 251-252 Pearl Harbor, 269-270 Pedersen, Judith, 306-307 Peirce, Anna, 278, 279 The Perceived Self (Neisser), 295 Perception, 288, 290 Perceptual cycle, 288 Persona, 140 Personal agency, 66 Personal construct theory, 237 Personality behavioral signatures of, 258—260 consistency in, 258 Personality and Assessment (Mischel), 231, 248, 249 Personality assessment research, 242 Personality paradox, 248, 252-253 Personality psychology, 258 Personality theory, 241-242
INDEX Person versus situation debate, 250-251 Pettigrew, Tom, 33 Phobias, 62-63, 65-66 Physiological psychology, 312 Pines, Ayala, 37 Poindexter, David, 71 Policy change, 210 Porter, Charles R., 84, 86 Postman, Leo, 276 Pratkanis, Anthony, 33, 37 Prenatal memories, 214 Prim, Merle, 321 A Primer of Freudian Psychology (Hall), 83 Princeton University, 158, 188 Principles of Behavior Modification (Bandura), 62 Prospect theory, 176-180, 187-188, 193-194 Psychodynamics, 63-64 Psycholinguistics, 102 Psychological services, 54 "Psychotherapy as a Learning Process' (Bandura), 62 Public policy, 61 Punitive damage decisions, 188 Pupil dilation, 166 Rabin, Matthew, 186 Ramona, Gary, 214-215 Rapaport, David, 162-163 Rationality assumption, 186 The Reach of the Mind (Rhine), 275 Reaction time (RT), 281 Recovered memories, 292 Reduction, 141-144 Reed College, 304 Reflection, 178 Reinforcement theory, 24—25 Religion, 85-86 Remembered utility, 189 Remembering Reconsidered (Neisser), 291
The Remembering Self (Neisser & Fivush), 295 Renshaw, Birdsey, 307 Renshaw cell, 307 Repisodic memories, 290 Representativeness, 175 Repressed memory, 211-216 Rescorla, Robert, 107 Rescorla-Wagner conditioning rule, 108 Resnick, Lauren, 287 Reward and behaviorism, 119-120 Daniel Kahneman and, 165-166 Reward effect from brain stimulation, 88 Rhine, J. B., 275 Rich false memories, 214 Rinck, Mike, 109 The Rising Curve (Neisser), 296 Ritov, liana, 188 Ritter, Bruni, 62 Rogers, Haywood, 31 Rogoff, Barbara, 130 Rosch, Eleanor, 106 Rosenthal, Ted, 56 Ross, Dorrie, 56 Ross, Len, 311 Ross, Sheila, 56 Rotter, Julian B., 236-237 Runyan, William, viii RT (reaction time), 281 Rust, John, 294 Sabido, Miguel, 71 Salgrenska, Sweden, 309 San Marcos, Guatemala, 129—131 Sartre, Jean Paul, 304 Sattath, Shmuel, 188 Schemata, 288 Schild, Ozer, 165 Schizophrenia, 306 Schkade, David, 188, 189-190 School achievement, 289
INDEX The School Achievement of Minority Children (Neisser), 289 School desegregation, 28-30 Schooler, Jonathan, 216 "Science for justice," 210 Scientific method, 304 Sears, Bob, 51, 91 The Second Year (Kagan), 134 Seidler, Arden, 283 Selective looking, 288 Self-concept, 21-22, 139-140 Self-efficacy belief system, 65-67 Self-expectancies, 21—22 Self-knowledge, 294-295 Self-regulation, 62, 68-69, 262-263 Selfridge, Oliver, 280-281 Semantic memory, 204-205 The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Gibson), 285 Sensitivity training groups (T-groups), 27-28 Severance, Larry, 211 Shafir, Eldar, 188 Shango people, 238-239 Sheffield, Fred, 120 Shiffrin, Richard, 98 Shih, Jean, 326 Shoda, Yuichi, 255-257, 261 Shors, Tracey, 325-326 Short-term memory, 97-99 Shvyrkov, V. B., 316 Simonson, Itamar, 188 Sinberg, Ron, 305 The Skeptical Inquirer, 86 Skin conductance response, 147 Skinner, B. F., 64, 223, 276 Sleeper (film), 64 Slovic, Paul, 188 Smith, Ed, 247, 248 Snake phobias, 62-63, 65-66 Snidman, Nancy, 136, 137 The Social Animal (Aronson), 26, 30— 31, 38 Social cognition, 106
349
Social cognitive theory, 65, 67-72 agentic perspective of, 68-69 and cultural variations, 67 evolved, 71 global applications of, 70-72 and self-regulation, 69—70 Social diffusion model, 71 Social Learning and Imitation (Miller and Dollard), 55 Social Learning and Personality Development (Bandura & Walters), 61 Social learning theory, 236-237 Socially mediated agency, 66 Social modeling, 55-57 Social psychology, xi Social Science Research Council (SSRC) summer workshop, 90-91 Social work, 235-236 Solomon, Paul, 315 Something About Amelia (TV drama), 129 Sontag, Lester, 124-125 Sophonow, Thomas, 210 Specificity, 144-147 Spectral Evidence (Johnston), 215 Spelke, Liz, 288 Spence, Donald, 278 Spence, Kenneth, 46-48 Spencer, Alden, 307-308 Sperling, George, 280 Spinal conditioning, 307-308 Squire, Larry, 324, 325 SSRC summer workshop. See Social Science Research Council summer workshop Stanford University. See also Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto) Elliot Aronson at, 13-18 Albert Bandura at, 51-53, 55-57, 61-65 Gordon Bower at, 52, 91—111 Elizabeth Loftus at, 203-205
350
INDEX
Stanford University, continued Walter Mischel at, 52, 243-253, 255 Stanton, Mike, 325 Statistical learning theory, 86—87 Statistics, 95-96 "Steeples of excellence," 51 Stein, Gertrude, 288 Stein, Larry, 92 Steinmetz, Joseph, 310 Sternberg, Saul, 98 Stevens, S. S., 145, 279 Stewart, Martha, 209 Stimulus control, 68 Stochastic Models for Learning (Bush & Mosteller), 87 Stress, 325-326 Studies in Mathematical Learning Theory (Bush & Estes), 91 Suckiel, Ellen, 32 Sunstein, Cass, 188 Super, Charles, 131 Suppes, Patrick, 91, 94, 204 Support theory, 188 Swarthmore College, 277-279 Symbolic modeling, 61 Szilard, Leo, 3 Tannenbaum, Percy, 60 Tanur, Judy, 211 TAT (Thematic Apperception Test), 123 Taus, Nicole. See Jane Doe case Tavris, Carol, 37-38, 217, 219 Tea and Sympathy (movie), 129 Televised violence, effects on children of, 57-61 Television Information Office, 58 Temperament, 135-136 Terman, Fred, 51—52 Teiman, Lewis, 51 T-groups. See Sensitivity training groups
Thaler, Richard, 180-186 Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), 123 Theories of Personality (Hall & Lindzey), 25, 83 Thomas, Dylan, 148 Thompson, Richard F., 302-328 adolescence, 304 Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), 315-319 and declarative memory modeling, 324-325 and fear learning, 326-327 Foundations of Physiological Psychology text, 309 and habituation theory, 307—309 Harvard University, 313—315 and learning, 309—310 and Elizabeth Loftus, 206 and mapping learned behaviors, 313-315 and memory formation analysis, 320-324 and memory trace identification, 316-319 and new models of learning, 310-312 photograph, 302 and physiological psychology, 312 Reed College, 304 Salgrenska, Sweden sabbatical, 309 and stress, 325-326 University of California, Irvine, 308-312, 315 University of Oregon Medical School, 306-308 University of Southern California, 319-327 University of Wisconsin, 304-306 Time-decay queuing model, 97 Titus, Steve, 209 Tobacco industry, 60
INDEX Tolman, Edward, 91, 278 "Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality" (Mischel), 249-251 Trabasso, Tom, 96, 109 Tracey, Jo Anne, 307 Treisman, Anne, 166, 186-188 Trinidad, 239-240 Tsongas, Paul, 52 Tulving, Endel, 100, 290 Tversky, Amos eulogy for, 191-195 and Daniel Kahneman, 167-170, 191-195 and Walter Mischel, 245, 252 UC-Irvine. See University of California, Irvine UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), 203 UCSC. See University of California, Santa Cruz Ultimatum game, 185 U.S. Army, 123-124 U.S. Department of Defense, 54 Unit for Experimental Psychiatry, 282-285 University of British Columbia in Vancouver Albert Bandura at, 46 Daniel Kahneman at, 184-187 University of California, Berkeley, 162-164, 186, 188 University of California, Irvine (UC-Irvine) Elizabeth Loftus at, 217-221 Richard Thompson at, 308-312, 315 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 203 University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), 32-36 University of Colorado, 240
351
University of Iowa, 46-49 University of Michigan, 166 University of Minnesota Elliot Aronson at, 22-25 Gordon Bower at, 84-87 University of Oregon Medical School (UOMS), 306-308 University of Southern California (USC), 319-327 University of Texas, 25—30 University of Washington, 205-217 University of Wisconsin, 304-306 UOMS. See University of Oregon Medical School USC. See University of Southern California Utility, 188-189 Utility theory, 176-177 Valuation of public goods, 188 Value theory, 178, 179 Varns, Virginia, 49 Veterans' services, 54 Vicarious trial and error (VTE) model, 91 Video systems, 61 Visual system, 286 VTE (vicarious trial and error) model, 91 Wagner, Allan, 107, 311, 317, 319 Wagner, William, 320 Wakker, Peter, 188 Walker, Arlene, 288 Wallach, Hans, 277, 278 Walters, Richard, 55-56, 61 Wanner, Eric, 183-184, 186 Waugh, Nancy, 98 Wediko residential camp, 256—260 Weisz, Donald, 315 Weldon, Mary Sue, 293 Welfare, measuring, 190 Wertheimer, Max, 276
352 Wertheimer, Mike, 12 Wesleyan University, 11—13 Western Reserve University (WRU), 82-84 West Point Military Academy, 123-124 "What" system, 293 "When Blue file," 219 "Where" system, 293 White, Shep, 47 Wichita Guidance Center, 51 Wickelgren, Wayne, 98 Willerman, Ben, 23 Williams, Lloyd, 63 Willpower, 245-248 Winograd, Gene, 293
INDEX Woolsey, Clinton, 305-306 Working memory, 128 Wright, Jack, 256-257 WRU. See Western Reserve University Yale University Gordon Bower at, 87-89 Jerome Kagan at, 115, 117-121 Yeats, William Butler, 72 A Young Mind in a Growing Brain (Kagan & Herschkowitz), 144 Zeiss, Antonette, 246 Zelazo, Philip, 135 Zimbardo, Phil, 52 Zwaan, Rolf, 110
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Gardner Lindzey, P h D , is director emeritus of the Center for A d vanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He was editor of the classic Handbook of Social Psychology (1954) and was coeditor of later editions. His other publications include Theories of Personality (coauthored with Calvin Hall) in 1957 and later editions. Dr. Lindzey received his PhD from Harvard University in 1949 and subsequently taught at Harvard, Syracuse, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Texas from 1964, becoming vice president and dean of academic studies. He returned to Harvard as professor and chairman of psychology (1972-1973) and was director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1975 to 1989. Dr. Lindzey's other publications include the Study of Values (with Allport & Vernon, 1951), Projective Techniques and Cross-Cultural Research (1961), History of Psychology in Autobiography (coedited with E. G. Boring, 1967; and later editions), Behavioral Genetics: Method and Research (coedited with Manosevitz & Thiessen, 1969), and Racial Differences in Intelligence (with Loehlin & Spuhler, 1975). He is also coeditor of Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology (1988). Dr. Lindzey was president of the American Psychological Association (1966-1967) and president of both the Division of Social and Personality Psychology (1963-1964) and the Division of General Psychology (1970-1971). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Institute of Medicine, and American Philosophical Society, and he was awarded honorary degrees by the University of Colorado and Rutgers University. W i l l i a m M. Runyan, P h D , is a professor in the School of Social Welfare and a research psychologist at the Institute of Personality and 353
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ABOUT THE EDITORS
Social Research of the University of California, Berkeley. H e received his P h D i n clinical psychology and public practice f r o m Harvard University i n 1975 and has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1979. D r . Runyan is the author o i L i f e Histories andPsychobiography: Explorations in Theory and Method (1982) and editor and coauthor of Psychology
and Historical Interpretation (1988). He received the Henry A. Murray Award for contributions to personality psychology in 1987 and the Role Theorist of the Year award from Theodore Sarbin in 2004. Recent publications include "History in the Making: What W i l l Become of William James's House and Legacy?" in History of Psychology (2000), "Toward a Better Story of Psychology: Sheldon White's Contributions to the History of Psychology, a Personal Perspective" in Developmental Psychology and Social Change (edited by Pillemer & White, 2005); and "Evolving Conceptions of Psychobiography and the Study of Lives: Encounters with Psychoanalysis, Personality Psychology, and Historical Science" in the Handbook of Psychobiography (edited by W . T. Schultz, 2005).
