In connection with this problem we may again refer to the natural and biological sciences. These have obtained their results, the establishing of laws, by the use of experiment. Having isolated a problem, say the problem of heredity, they make conjectures as to what would happen under changed conditions, and consciously introduce all changes which are conceived as having a possible meaning for the problem. In these sciences the experimenter is not hindered from introducing changes by the consideration that he may spoil his materials. The chemist or entomologist expects to spoil many materials in the course of his tests. Human material is, however, so precious that the experimenter is not justified in assuming the risk of spoiling it. The child is more precious than the problem. The only field in which experiment on the human being is recognized, or rather practiced without recognition, is medicine, where the material is already threatened with destruction through sickness, and the physician introduces an experimental change, say the use of a serum, which gives a chance of preserving life and restoring health.
Nevertheless, as the result of a series of experiments on the behavior of animals, one of the psychologists assumed that similar work might be done on the newborn child with no more discomfort than he suffers in having his ears scrubbed and certainly no more damage than he receives from the strains and distortions suffered in the act of being born. I quote from the record of these experiments:
On the psychological side our knowledge of infant life is almost nil.... A prominent professor of education once said to us, “You will find when you have taught as many children as I have that you can do nothing with a child until it is over five years of age.” Our own view after studying many hundreds of infants is that one can make or break the child so far as its personality is concerned long before the age of five is reached. We believe that by the end of the second year the pattern of the future individual is already laid down. Many things which go into the making of this pattern are under the control of the parents, but as yet they have not been made aware of them. The question as to whether the child will possess a stable or unstable personality, whether it is going to be timid and beset with many fears and subject to rages and tantrums, whether it will exhibit tendencies of general over or under emotionalism, and the like, has been answered already by the end of the two year period.
There are several reasons why the minute psychological study of infant life is important.... (1) There are no standards of behavior or conduct for young infants. Our experimental work, which even at the end of two years is just beginning, has taught us that the study of infant activity from birth onward will enable us to tell with some accuracy what a normal child at three months of age can and should do and what additional complexities in behavior should appear as the months go by. Psychological laboratories in many institutions ought to be able to make cross-sections of the activity of any infant at any age and tell whether the streams of activity are running their normal course, and whether certain ones are lagging or have not even appeared. After sufficient work has been done to enable us to have confidence in our standards we should be able to detect feeble-mindedness, deficiencies in habit, and deviations in emotional life. If a proper analysis of the activity streams can be made at a very early age the whole care of the child may be altered with beneficial results.... At present we simply have not the data for the enumeration of man’s original tendencies, and it will be impossible to obtain those data until we have followed through the development of the activity of many infants from birth to advanced childhood. Children of five years of age and over are enormously sophisticated. The home environment and outside companions have so shaped them that the original tendencies cannot be observed. The habits put on in such an environment quickly overlay the primitive and hereditary equipment. A workable psychology of human instincts and emotions can thus never be attained by merely observing the behavior of the adult.... (2) By reason of this defect the study of vocational and business psychology is in a backward state. The attempt to select a vocation for a boy or girl in the light of our present knowledge of the original nature of man is little more than a leap in the dark. High sounding names like the constructive instinct, the instinct of workmanship, and the like, which are now so much used by the sociologists and the economists, will remain empty phrases until we have increased our knowledge of infancy and childhood. The only reasonable way, it would seem to us, of ever determining a satisfactory knowledge of the various original vocational bents and capacities of the human race is for psychologists to bring up under the supervision of medical men a large group of infants under controlled but varied and sympathetic conditions. Children begin to reach for, select, play with and to manipulate objects from about the 150th day on. What objects they select day by day, what form their manipulation takes, and what early habits develop upon such primitive instinctive activity should be recorded day by day in black and white. There will be marked individual differences in the material selected, in the length of time any type of material will be utilized, and in the early constructive habits which will arise with respect to all materials worked with by the infant. Without instruction one infant (eighteen to twenty months in an observed case) will build a neat wall with her blocks, with one color always facing her. If the block is turned while she is not looking she will quickly change it and correct the defect. In other children such a bit of behavior can be inculcated only with the greatest difficulty. Still another child cannot be made to play with blocks but will work with twigs and sticks by the hour. Variations in the selection and use of material are the rule in infancy, but until we have followed up the future course of such variations upon infants whose past we have watched day by day we are in no position to make generalizations about the original tendencies which underlie the vocations. (3) Finally, until we have obtained data upon the emotional life of the infant and the normal curve of instinctive and habit activity at the various ages, new methods for correcting deviations in emotional, instinctive and habit development cannot be worked out. Let us take a concrete example. A certain child is afraid of animals of every type, furry objects, the dark, etc. These fears are not hereditary. Our experiments will be convincing upon that point. What steps can we take to remove these fears which, unless they are removed in infancy, may become an enduring part of the child’s personality?[[113]]
It will be seen that the Watsons are here studying attitudes—what ones appear, in what order they appear, what ones are universal, and what ones are particular to certain children. They introduce values—the materials and influences—only as means of determining the presence of attitudes, of calling them into action, of modifying them, and of giving them application in different fields. They consciously introduce change on the basis of some hypothesis and measure the effect of the new influences on personality development. Already in this brief passage and this unfinished experiment they indicate methods of determining (1) occupational aptitudes, (2) defective mental efficiency, (3) the age levels at which influences are to be presented and the order of their presentation, and (4) the conditions of stable or neurotic personalities. Their task is the measurement of influence under conditions which they prepare and control. All scientific experimentation involves the measurement of influence. The chemist measures the influence of a material, say coal tar; the technician uses this influence in preparing a dye or a medicine. The measurement of the influence is the definition of the situation preliminary to action.
Now the world in which we live presents to the child influences comparable with those artificially prepared in this experiment, and the first task of behavior studies is to measure these influences as shown in their effect on personality development.
There are in society organized sources of influence, institutions, and social agencies, including the family, the school, the community, the reformatory, the penitentiary, the newspaper, the moving picture. These are sources of mass influence and will naturally be the main objects of study and change. But in order to supplement and make scientific these studies and to give them an adequate method it is necessary to prepare at the same time more complete records of the personal evolution of individuals. Eventually the life of the individual is the measure of the totality of social influence, and the institution should be studied in the light of the personality development of the individual. And as we accumulate records of personal evolution, with indications of the means by which the wishes seek expression and of the conditions of their normal satisfaction, we shall be in a better position to measure the influence of particular institutions in the formation of character and life-organization and to determine lines of change in the institutions themselves.
The “human document”, prepared by the subject, on the basis of the memory is one means of measuring social influence. It is capable of presenting life as a connected whole and of showing the interplay of influences, the action of values on attitudes. It can reveal the predominant wishes in different temperaments, the incidents constituting turning points in life, the processes of sublimation or transfer of interest from one field to another, the effect of other personalities in defining situations and the influence of social organizations like the family, the school, the acquaintance group, in forming the different patterns of life-organization. By comparing the histories of personalities as determined by social influences and expressed in various schemes of life we can establish a measure of the given influences. The varieties of human experience will be innumerable in their concrete details, but by the multiplication and analysis of life records we may expect to determine typical lines of the genesis of character as related to types of influence. It will be found that when certain attitudes are present the presentation of certain values may be relied upon to produce certain results.
Human experience and schemes of personal behavior are the most interesting of all themes, as is evidenced by fiction, the drama, biographies, and histories. And works of this kind contain materials which will be given a scientific value as we analyze, compare, and interpret them. Even fictitious representations are significant when viewed as showing the tendency at a given moment to idealize certain schematizations of life. The autobiography has a more positive value for the student, but usually tends to approach the model of fiction, idealizing certain situations and experiences and repressing others totally. Incidentally one of the largest and most important bodies of spontaneous material for the study of the personality and the wishes passes through the mails. The letters of the Bedford girl, for example (document No. 86, p. 172) appeal to me as the most significant document in this volume, in spite of the fact that they relate to one incident and cover a relatively short time. The short life-histories of approximately six thousand Jews printed in the New York Forward, and representing the effort to find new definitions of new situations on the part of the million and a half Jewish immigrants in New York City, and to some extent of the three million Jews in America, are a rich contribution to the study of the wishes. These records, hidden from the eye of the “goi” behind the Hebrew alphabet, have the intimacy and naïveté of personal confessions.
Another type of behavior record is now being prepared by those social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists who have to handle the problems of maladjustment in the courts, schools, and reformatories and in private practice. Under the pressure of practical needs they have already assumed the standpoint I have outlined and are studying the evolution of personal life-organization and making the record as complete as possible. They meet the individual at the point of some crisis, some experience or breakdown calling for readjustment, but from this point they work backward into the history of the case and follow its development into the future. In the beginning they over-determined the value of the psychometric test, because this was the only method psychology had put in their hands, but at present the measurement of intelligence is recognized as having a limited usefulness. “Feeble-mindedness” is partly a classificatory term for those personalities whose behavior we have not been able to conform to the usual standards because of lack of knowledge and method. We shall not know what conditions to call feeble-minded until we have determined the limits of the social influences which we can apply. Certain social workers are taking case after case pronounced subnormal by the clinicists and developing in them activities which enable them to live in a society where they could not live before, while a large proportion of those now pursuing peaceful callings would be called morons if they were rounded up and gathered into some of the clinics. The government records determined that 47.3 per cent of all Americans called out in the draft for enlistment in the war were mentally deficient. They showed the mentality of a twelve-year-old child or less.[[114]] A report of this kind really loses all significance, because it makes no provision for lack of uniformity in the social influences. There are certainly cases of constitutional inferiority, but the clinical psychologists are now realizing that these must be studied, like the cases of the maladjustment of the normal, in connection with life records showing the social influences tending to organize or disorganize the personality. These institutional records obtained by testing, observation, and inquiry should be supplemented by a life-record written by the subject. In many cases it is not difficult to obtain this, and wherever the subject of the study participates, giving the incidents of life which have been determining factors the record gains in value.