Abstract
The appeal and popularity of “building blocks”, i.e., simple and dissociable elements of behavior and experience, persists in psychological research. We begin our assessment of this research strategy with an historical review of structuralism (as espoused by E. B. Titchener) and behaviorism (espoused by J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner), two movements that held the assumption in their attempts to provide a systematic and unified discipline. We point out the ways in which the elementism of the two schools selected, framed, and excluded topics of study. After the historical review, we turn to contemporary literature and highlight the persistence of research into building blocks and the associated framing and exclusions in psychological research. The assumption that complex categories of human psychology can be understood in terms of their elementary components and simplest forms seems indefensible. In specific cases, therefore, reliance on the assumption requires justification. Finally, we review alternative strategies that bypass the commitment to building blocks.
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Notes
We refrain from using “modularity” and “faculty psychology” due to association of these terms with specific debates, e.g., the degree of separation between perception and thought (Fodor 1983). The term “elementism” seems more suitable for the present discussion, both for its broader applicability and for its close association to reductionism (Danziger 1979).
Green et al. (2013, 2014) characterize this separation in terms of diverging genres of writing during late-19th and early-twentieth century. Klempe (2015) traces the separation to Early Modern period and the fundamental tension between empirical psychology (which confronts particularity), and metaphysics (which aims to achieve universality).
In using the term “structuralism”, we refer exclusively to the psychological approach advocated by Titchener, and not the approach to linguistics, and later more broadly to social sciences and humanities, which originated in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
It is helpful to remember how Titchener distanced himself from Brentano’s project (Titchener 1921a). A characteristic trait of Brentano’s psychology was his emphasis on directedness (or about-ness) of conscious states, which recognizes their functional significance (Brentano 1874; see also, Fasching 2012; Tassone 2012). Changing the meaning of objects of consciousness, in Brentano’s view, is not only a change in the quality of experience, but it is a functional change that can be expressed in behavior.
William James (1892, pp. 18-19), among others, contrasted the two approaches in terms of their starting points. The approach favored by James begins with identifying a complex process and analyzing its attributes, whereas the elementist approach begins with an artificially simple process – chosen on theoretical grounds – and proceeds to augment it incrementally.
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Acknowledgements
We are thankful to Jaan Valsiner, Hroar Klempe, Mark Solovey, and two anonymous reviewers for feedback on earlier drafts.
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This work was supported by internal Start-up Research Grants (SRG2016), from University of Macau, awarded to Davood Gozli and Wei Deng.
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Gozli, D.G., Deng, W.(. Building Blocks of Psychology: on Remaking the Unkept Promises of Early Schools. Integr. psych. behav. 52, 1–24 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-017-9405-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-017-9405-7