History of Psychology

Psychology is often defined as the study of the mind, or as William James (1890) put it, “the science of mental life.” However, during the behaviorist and neobehaviorist eras, many psychologists were hesitant to make such a description. Some of B. F. Skinner’s followers tried hard to avoid using any mental terms (e.g., think), even in casual conversation, and behaviorism’s founder John B. Watson had asserted that he was not even sure what those terms meant. However, after World War II, developments both in psychology and in other disciplines led to a major change, a return to explicitly and openly studying the mental processes by which conscious and deliberate behavior emerges. This change is often known as the cognitive revolution (e.g., Gardner, 1985).1 Cognitive approaches to psychology are very popular now, to the point where they are often taken for granted. In this chapter we consider how that change came about, and then discuss some even more recent developments in the field. As you read, consider the following questions: How did advances outside of psychology lead to pushback against behaviorism and the emergence of a general cognitive perspective? What was early cognitive psychology like, and what features of behaviorism has it retained? What do cognitive perspectives look like across different areas of psychology, and what recent trends have followed in the past few decades?