Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research

Citation

Danziger, K. (1994). Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1990)

Chapter Summary

Danziger's book is a monograph, not a survey: about 200 pages of text in eleven chapters, followed by a short appendix, notes and an index, in the series Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology. It was first published in 1990 and issued in paperback in 1994. The publisher's description states the central claim: methodology is a kind of social practice rather than simply a matter of technique, so the history of psychological research is the history of the social relations of the research situation (between experimenters and their subjects, and among investigators) rather than of theories or findings. The story runs from the nineteenth century to the emergence of the favoured styles of research in the second quarter of the twentieth.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The introduction contrasts two ways of writing the history of a science: from the inside, as gradual progress toward a better present, which tends to be celebratory, and from the standpoint of history, philosophy and sociology of science, which is more critical. Psychology's history has largely been left to psychologists, so the first kind has persisted. Danziger explains that the way a field is organised (around prominent figures, findings or theories) determines how its history is told, and the rest of the book takes the field's investigative practices as its subject.

Chapter 2: Historical roots of the psychological laboratory

Takes the founding of Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig in 1879 as a conventional, arbitrary starting date. Psychology borrowed its concepts from philosophy and physiology and adapted its methods from existing practices, so the early researchers were constrained by the traditions they knew. The chapter also notes that the laboratory institutionalised a division of labour between experimental subjects and experimenters.

Chapter 3: Divergence of investigative practice: The repudiation of Wundt

Argues that nearly everything that happened in modern psychology repudiated Wundt, explicitly or implicitly. His ideas about introspection and experiment diverged from those of his students, and the practices he mobilised passed out of his control. Out of this divergence came several different types of investigative practice.

Chapter 4: The social structure of psychological experimentation

Describes how the Leipzig research community organised itself and how the subject-experimenter division created a distinctive social system of experimentation, in which the interaction was regulated by the roles each person took.

Chapter 5: The triumph of the aggregate

Turns to the psychological journals as the channel through which local research becomes public knowledge, and to the conventions authors must follow to make knowledge claims, which carry attributions about the people studied. Of the types of practice that began modern psychology, one hardly survived the first decades and the Galtonian type achieved a dominant position in the first half of the twentieth century.

Chapter 6: Identifying the subject in psychological research

Builds on the attributions that a knowledge claim attaches to its subject, and on the difference between a subject who is an individual consciousness and one who is a population. It discusses the artificially defined collective subjects of American research, in which the abstract populations of "basic" research replaced socially defined groups and white rats could stand in for human populations.

Chapter 7: Marketable methods

Shows how psychology began to market its products outside the academy, with education as its primary market. Two techniques are analysed for their importance in making psychology socially useful: the Galtonian approach to individual differences and the experimental use of treatment groups.

Chapter 8: Investigative practice as a professional project

Argues that by the 1920s the Wundtian style seemed a deteriorating program in American psychology while the Galtonian program grew, helped by its link to a market outside the discipline. Danziger insists that the discipline did not adapt passively: it shaped its practice to protect the prestige of the enterprise.

Chapter 9: From quantification to methodolatry

Examines twentieth-century psychology's reliance on numbers: how psychological attributes had to be endowed with countable form before statistical constructions could be built on group data. It discusses early quantification by Galton and G. Stanley Hall.

Chapter 10: Investigating persons

Follows the extension of the mental test model: individual differences defined by comparison against a competitive standard, a fit to the needs of educational institutions, and the first large non-educational use of intelligence tests in the United States Army in the First World War, which appears not to have been found especially useful.

Chapter 11: The social construction of psychological knowledge

Makes explicit the model of the investigative process underlying earlier chapters, treats investigative practices as a productive work process (the "political economy of knowledge production"), and asks whether the social construction of knowledge limits its validity beyond the situations in which it was produced.

Appendix

The content analysis of empirical journal articles behind the tables in the earlier chapters: volumes of psychological journals around 1895, 1910, 1925 and 1935 were pooled to trace trends, with the American Journal of Psychology the only journal covering the whole period.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4: The laboratory and its social order

• Investigative practice: the organised way a researcher produces knowledge, the unit of history in this book.
• The subject-experimenter relationship: a social system with its own roles and rules, institutionalised in the Leipzig laboratory.
• Repudiation of Wundt: the divergence of practice from the founder's own limits on introspection and experiment.

Chapters 5–8: Aggregates, subjects and markets

• Knowledge claims: the public form of research findings, shaped by the conventions of journals.
• The collective subject and the aggregate: populations replacing individual consciousness as the object of research.
• Galtonian program: individual differences and treatment groups, linked to an outside market.
• Professional project: the discipline's active shaping of its methods.

Chapters 9–11: Numbers and knowledge

• Methodolatry: the term in the Chapter 9 title for the movement from quantification to an overriding devotion to method.
• Mental test model: individual differences measured against a competitive standard.
• Social construction of knowledge: the claim that findings are produced in specific sociohistorical situations, together with the question of how far they hold beyond them.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear organising idea. Treating methods as social practices gives the book a single argument from the Leipzig laboratory to the twentieth-century norms of aggregates and statistics, and the chapter sequence follows it.
• Reception by the profession. The publisher quotes Isis ("one of the best of the new breed" of histories of psychology and "essential reading for historians of psychology"), American Scientist, which called it the most striking achievement in historical research within psychology since Boring's History of Experimental Psychology in 1929, and Contemporary Psychology, which praised an "incisive and compelling archaeology of investigative practices."
• Evidence from the journals themselves. The appendix describes a content analysis of articles in psychology journals at four reference points, and tables in chapters 4, 5, 6 and 8 report its results; the argument therefore rests on more than anecdote.
• Relevance to current method training. Subjects, aggregates, significance testing and mental tests are the everyday tools of research methods courses, and the book explains how they became standard.

Limitations

• Period and place. The publisher says the account ends in the second quarter of the twentieth century and draws its illustration of social context from American and German developments, so later developments such as cognitive psychology are outside it.
• Specialised and argumentative. It is a monograph with a thesis, and it assumes the reader already knows the standard history of the field; readers wanting a neutral overview should start with a general history.
• Retrospective date. The book was published in 1990; scholarship since then is not part of it.
• Social constructionism. Chapter 11 itself raises the question of whether the social construction of knowledge affects its reach, and readers will want to weigh the book's answer.

Where It Fits in the Course

In this course list the book is the advanced monograph on one theme. Wertheimer and Puente's A Brief History of Psychology is a concise first text, and Fancher and Rutherford's Pioneers of Psychology tells the history through the lives of its people; Schultz and Schultz's A History of Modern Psychology is a concise account organised around schools of thought. Leahey's A Critical History of Psychology places the internal arguments of psychology alongside the social, economic and political forces that shaped them, which is the closest companion to Danziger's concerns. Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams is a primary work rather than a history.

The usual order is a general history first and Danziger afterwards. A reader who knows the sequence of schools and figures will find in Danziger an explanation of how experiments, subjects and statistics became the way psychologists work.

How to Use This Book

The book suits upper-level undergraduates and graduate students who have taken a survey course in the history of psychology and have met basic experimental and statistical methods. It is also a good supplement for research methods and philosophy of psychology courses.

A practical plan:

• Core: Chapters 1 and 11, which frame the argument and its theoretical position, then Chapters 2–5.
• Next: Chapters 6–8 for the subject, the market and the profession, the part of the book most relevant to understanding present-day psychological research.
• Optional: Chapters 9–10 for quantification and mental testing, and the appendix for readers interested in how the journal analysis was done.
• Alongside: read with a general history of psychology so the figures and schools mentioned are familiar, and with a current research methods text, asking of each procedure where it came from.