A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

where the adjectives outside the brackets mean simply what we have already stated them to mean. When once the initial attitude has been taken, and the world to be explored has thus been determined, the methods are the same. The beginner in psychology will however find, again and again, that his common-sense self stands in the way of disinterested observation; and as the word introspection contains a reference to this self, he may prefer to drop it altogether.

So much for observation in general! When we come to particulars, we find that science, wherever possible, has recourse to experiment. This does not mean that science renounces observation. For an experiment, if we push our definition back to fundamentals, is simply an observation that may be repeated, that may be isolated, and that may be varied. See the advantages! Repetition gives us plenty of time for observation; we need not mind overlooking something now, since we shall have the opportunity of picking it up later; and we can go on, observing and observing, until our description of the phenomenon is as complete as it can be made. Isolation makes our task easier; disturbing influences are ruled out; our attention is not distracted; we can give ourselves wholly to the matter in hand. Variation—the substituting of one factor for another in successive observations, or the emphasising in one observation of a factor that was obscure in another—helps us to clear up doubtful points; to distinguish what is universal from what is only accidental in the phenomenon we are observing; and to bring this phenomenon into relation with kindred phenomena. Repetition saves hurry and worry; isolation prevents distraction; variation keeps us from jumping at conclusions. These are the advantages of experiment; and all experiments, in physics, in chemistry, in biology, everywhere, fall under this definition.

Psychology needs the experimental method for both the reasons noted above: because the observed phenomena are elusive and slippery processes, and because the observer is warped and biassed by common sense. We may therefore show by an example how psychological experiment is possible. Suppose that we wish to find out how a printed word is perceived,—whether we read it letter by letter, or take in its form as a whole, or take in certain letters clearly and the general form vaguely. We first prepare our material. We print upon cards, or photograph upon lantern slides, a large number of words. We employ different printing types; different groups of letters; different lengths of words; single words and groups of words; words properly spelled, and words altered by mutilation or omission of particular letters at different parts of the word. Every one of these classes of stimuli, as the words may be technically called, is represented by a number of cards or slides. The stimuli are mixed in haphazard order, and are thrown upon the screen by a reflectoscope or projection lantern in an otherwise dark room; a pneumatic shutter before the lantern makes it possible to show them for a brief time, say, a fifth of a second. All this apparatus is put in the charge of an experimenter. When the material is ready, and the whole arrangement works properly, an observer is called in. He works for a limited time, at the same hour every day, and only after a certain time has been allowed for his eyes to accustom themselves to the dark. The stimuli are presented at regular intervals. The observer reports what he perceives at every exposure of a stimulus, and the experimenter writes down what he says.

It is plain, now, that these observations may be repeated. For one thing, there is a group of like cards in every class; and for another thing, the observer himself (since he works every day at the same time and under the same circumstances) is a fairly constant quantity. Besides, the observations may also be made by other observers, in other laboratories, under precisely the same circumstances; they may be repeated in just the same sense that a physical observation may be repeated. Secondly, the observations are isolated; they are made in a dark and quiet room, free from outside disturbance. No doubt, the observer’s thoughts may wander in the intervals between observations. For this reason, the experimenter gives a preconcerted signal, or calls out Now, a second or two before a word is shown; this signal warns the observer to pull himself together and to free himself from any such distractions. Thirdly, the observations are varied; for we employ all sorts of words, both normally printed and variously changed; and the stimuli may be presented for various lengths of time. Here, then, is a true psychological experiment; and if many observers, after many observations, give the same account of their perceptive experience, that account may stand as established psychological fact.

Not all mental phenomena can be subjected to experiment so neatly as this particular perception; and the psychologist must still fall back, more often than he likes, upon casual observation or imperfect experiments. The reason is that psychology has only recently become an experimental science. Common-sense psychology is very old: we have a complete treatise in Greek from the hand of Aristotle, and a text-book in Pali compiled by some Buddhist sage, both dating from the fourth century B.C. But while it is in the sixteenth century of our era that the physicist abandons scholastic speculation and begins to study nature by experiment, it is not till the last quarter of the nineteenth that the psychologist follows suit. In or about the year 1875 the late Professor James, then instructor in anatomy and physiology at Harvard, had a single room devoted to psychological apparatus and experiments; and in 1879 Professor Wundt opened at the University of Leipsic, in a very modest way, the laboratory which has since become the most famous in the world. It is true that experiments in psychology had been made by individuals long before laboratories were thought of; but the same thing is true of physics and chemistry; and we may remember, when we come to the weak places of psychological exposition, that laboratory research and instruction are not yet fifty years old.

[§ 6]. Process and Meaning.—Science, we said on p. 4, does not deal with values or meanings or uses, but only with facts; and we have just seen how words, which in everyday life are practically all meaning, may be made the objects of psychological experiment. Still, in their case, after all, we were simply ignoring meaning; so far as the observer was able to read words at all from the stimuli flashed on the screen, he read words which had a meaning, and a meaning that the experimenter might have discovered if he had been interested in it. We have not offered any evidence that mental processes are not intrinsically meaningful, that meaning is not an essential aspect of their nature; we have just assumed that they may be treated, scientifically, as bare facts. Let us now see whether meaning is essential to them or not. There are several heads of evidence.

First, meaning may be stripped from the mental process to which it normally belongs. Repeat aloud some word—the first that occurs to you; house, for instance—over and over again; presently the sound of the word becomes meaningless and blank; you are puzzled and a morsel frightened as you hear it. The same loss of meaning is observed in pathological cases; there are patients who can hear and see words as plainly as you can, but who are unable to understand what they hear and see; the bare perception is there, but it is bereft of its meaning.

Secondly, a meaningless experience may take on a meaning. A friend shows you a card, upon which is scrawled a tangle of lines; you cannot make head or tail of it. He tells you to look at the back; you see the date there written; you think at once of a great earthquake; you realise that the scrawl is a seismographic record. Meaning has thus been attached or added to a bare perception. Similarly, in learning a new script or a new language, you attach meaning to what was at first meaningless. The first experiments in the teaching of the blind deaf-mute Laura Bridgman “were made by pasting upon several common articles, such as keys, spoon, knives, and the like, little paper labels on which the name of the article had been printed in raised letters.” These meaningless feels, as they were at the outset, came presently to mean the objects with which the teacher had connected them.

Thirdly, an experience and its meaning may be disjoined in time. We often ask, in conversation, to have a remark repeated; we have heard without understanding; but before the speaker has time to repeat, we ourselves begin to reply; the meaning has come, but comes after an appreciable interval. So we may have to wait a little while before we can recall the meaning of some foreign word that nevertheless, as we say, we know perfectly well. This disjunction is also found in pathological cases. A patient “with slight stupor could not answer questions except very slowly. She was constantly saying: ‘I see everything, but I don’t know anything.’ It took her five minutes to tell the time when she was shown a clock.”

Here the experience comes first, and the meaning follows after. This order may, however, be reversed. You want to know the German of the proverb ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire’; you have the meaning, but you cannot think of the words; and presently the words leap to mind, aus dem Regen in die Traufe, out of the rain into the roof-drip. Or you know what you want to say, but you cannot get this meaning into words. An author who is very definitely aware of the meaning he wishes to convey to his reader may nevertheless have to write a paragraph ten or twenty times over before the sight and sound of his own words give back that meaning to himself. Or again, you may anticipate, in listening to a lecture, the meaning of what the lecturer is going to say, and yet you may be surprised at the words which he actually uses.