Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2022
Like any choice, my decision to go into the field was shaped by both internal and external forces. Internal, because I knew I wanted to be a psychologist as early as eight years old, with a clear memory of announcing this fact to my mother in our kitchen. Not to be a therapist, because I didn’t yet know what those were, but to study people and try to figure them out. External, because current events and random occurrences played a major role in the particular area, and the specific questions, I’d spend my career studying. The Zeitgeist blew strong in the early 1970s, in the direction of free will and personal autonomy. I was in high school taking the one psychology class when B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity was published to great fanfare. Skinner was on the cover of Time magazine – his face and skin painted in blue, implying how cold and heartless he was to claim we had no free will. Our class debated his claims for a good part of the school year. I took Skinner’s side mainly to be contrarian and argue back against my classmates who naturally hated it.
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