Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T00:12:12.423Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

75 - The Incredible Little Shrinking Man in the Head

from Section A - Social Cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2016

Robert J. Sternberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Susan T. Fiske
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Donald J. Foss
Affiliation:
University of Houston
Get access

Summary

My career as a psychologist began in the 1970s. It was a time of ideological ferment in the field, a period of consolidation after the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. In high school, there was Skinner on the cover of TIME magazine in 1971, his face painted blue (apparently to show what a cold unfeeling human being he was), his new book Beyond Freedom and Dignity scathingly attacked and ridiculed. The antagonism that his book provoked stirred the contrarian within me: I wanted to understand Skinner's position and why it met with such resistance.

The main battleground was the role of intentional conscious thought in producing the higher mental processes, especially social behavior. The radical behaviorists held the position that consciousness was an epiphenomenon, playing no causal role in our thoughts and lives, and that instead we were all controlled by responses automatically triggered by external environmental stimuli. The cognitive psychologists held the opposite extreme position: that hardly any higher mental processes are under the direct control of external environmental stimuli. Instead, internal, goal-directed, and conscious (intentional, aware) executive processes ran the show. In a span of just ten years – from the publication of Skinner's Verbal Behavior in 1957 to Neisser's Cognitive Psychology in 1967 – the dominant assumption had swung like a pendulum from one extreme to the other.

Back then, the assumption that the higher mental processes were all under conscious control was just that: an assumption. Neisser in his 1967 book was acutely aware that a causal vacuum existed after the removal of the behaviorist's external environment – and that replacing it with a homuncular conscious “executive” calling the shots was not a satisfactory scientific solution by any means. Thus, he explicitly called for research into the cognitive mechanisms of the higher mental processes, and for researchers to strive to shrink the homunculus until it eventually disappeared, just as The Incredible Shrinking Man did in the 1950s science fiction movie.

It was an exciting time also because cognitive psychology was starting to provide new tools that allowed us to ask these important existential questions of human beings for the first time.

Type
Chapter
Information
Scientists Making a Difference
One Hundred Eminent Behavioral and Brain Scientists Talk about Their Most Important Contributions
, pp. 356 - 359
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bargh, J. A. (2016). The devil made me do it. In Miller, A. (ed.), The social psychology of good and evil (edn.). New York: Guilford.
Bargh, J. A., & Ferguson, M. L. (2000). Beyond behaviorism: On the automaticity of higher mental processes. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 925–945.Google Scholar
Bargh, J. A., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (1994). Environmental control over goal-directed action. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 41, 71–124.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×