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Hull (In both applied work and general scientific work, psychology requires combined, not parallel, labors from our two historic disciplines. The organism which adapts well under one condition would not survive under another. But the aptness of an attempt in this direction will be apparent to all who heard Selye's address to the APA last year. Factor analytic studies have gained a fresh vitality from crossbreeding with classical learning experiments (e.g., In the beginning, experimental psychology was a substitute for purely naturalistic observation of man-in-habitat. Chemistry was once only a descriptive catalogue of substances and analytic techniques. It establishes the experimental method as a proper and necessary means of validating tests. His question is: what present characteristics of the organism determine its mode and degree of adaptation?Just as individual variation is a source of embarrassment to the experimenter, so treatment variation attenuates the results of the correlator. No response measure, however, is an adequate measure of a psychological construct. He regards individual and group variation as important effects of biological and social causes. Consider the physical sciences as a parallel. Kept independent, they can give only wrong answers or no answers at all regarding certain important problems. It is now commonplace for a student to get his PhD in experimental psychology without graduate training in test theory or developmental psychology, and the student of correlational branches can avoid experimental psychology only a little less completely. At the turn of the century, theory ranged far ahead of experiment and made no demand that propositions be testable. This calls for the joint application of experimental and correlational methods.INTERACTION OF TREATMENT AND INDIVIDUAL IN PRACTICAL DECISIONSGoldine Gleser and the writer have recently published a theoretical analysis (The decision maker has to determine what treatment shall be used for each individual or each group of individuals.
The goal guides activities ranging from the sober to the bizarre: from E. L. Thorndike and Skinner, hunting the one best sequence of problems for teaching arithmetic, to Rudolf Flesch and his admirers, reducing Obviously, with every inch of success the engineer has, the tester must retreat a mile. Psychology continues to this day to be limited by the dedication of its investigators to one or the other method of inquiry rather than to scientific psychology as a whole.A stream of thought is identified by many features: philosophical underpinnings, methods of inquiry, topical interests, and loci of application. It is shortsighted to argue for one science to discover the general laws of mind or behavior and for a separate enterprise concerned with individual minds, or for a one-way dependence of personality theory upon learning theory. The predictor -- though valid -- is useless. No doubt the tendency of correlationists to ignore experimental developments is explained by their absorption in the wonders and complexities of the phenomena their own work was revealing. They were, we might say, estimating the standard deviation while general psychologists were estimating the central tendency.The correlation coefficient, invented for the study of hereditary resemblance, transformed descriptive differential research into the study of mental organization. The two sets of dimensions together determine a payoff surface. The prediction must help to determine a treatment every individual.Even when there are just two treatments, the pay-off functions have many possible relationships. And premature enthusiasm[In former days, it was the experimentalist who wrote essay after anxious essay defining his discipline and differentiating it from competing ways of studying mind. But whither?In the simpler days of psychology, the presidential address provided a summing-up and a statement of destination. There is a payoff function relating outcome (e.g., achievement in science) to aptitude dimensions for any particular treatment. Psychological data help a college, for example, select students to be trained as scientists.

Everyone knows what experimental psychology is and who the experimental psychologists are. We admire the agile paper-readers swinging high above us in the theoretical blue, saved from disaster by only a few gossamer threads of fact, and we gasp as one symposiast thrusts his head bravely between another's sharp toothed jaws. In this common labor, they will almost certainly become one, with a common theory, a common method, and common recommendations for social betterment. My message is my belief that the conflicting principles of the tester and the experimenter can be fused into a new and integrated applied psychology.
Ultimately we should design treatments, not to fit the average person, but to fit groups of students with particular aptitude patterns. The President called the roll of the branches of psychology -- praising the growth of some youngsters, tut-tutting patriarchally over the delinquent tendencies of others -- and showed each to his proper place at the family table. A united discipline will study both of these, but it will also be concerned with the otherwise neglected interactions between organismic and treatment variables (There was a time when experimental psychologists concerned themselves wholly with general, nonindividual constructs, and correlational psychologists sought laws wholly within developmental variables. The individual is seen as inherently self-directing and creative. A slight reduction in information rate, accomplished once, reduces forever the validity and utility of a test of ability to process data. %��������� As a result, the whole theoretical picture in such an area as human abilities is changing. Thurstone had taken the first firm stride in the opposite direction:The personality, social, and child psychologists went one way; the perception and learning psychologists went the other; and the country between turned into desert.During the estrangement of correlational and experimental psychology, antagonism has been notably absent.

Dashiell optimistically forecast a confluence of these two streams, but that confluence is still in the making. << /Length 5 0 R /Filter /FlateDecode >> More and more, nowadays, their investigations are coming to bear on the same targets.