PS210 Unit 6 Social History Seminar Reflection Example

Who Was Allowed to Do Psychology: A PS210 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on the Field's Social History

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS210: History of Psychology

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer and classmates are composite; the historical figures, events and sources are real.

What I Thought Before

Until this seminar, I had been reading psychology's history as a story of ideas: one school answering another, each adding something to modern therapy. I knew, in a general way, that early psychology was mostly practiced by white men, but I thought of that as background, a fact about the time rather than part of the story.

The Figures We Discussed

The session opened with Mary Whiton Calkins, who completed all requirements for a doctorate at Harvard in the 1890s, studying with William James, and was refused the degree because Harvard did not grant doctorates to women. She went on to run a psychology laboratory at Wellesley and in 1905 she was elected to lead the American Psychological Association, the first woman to hold the office (Schultz & Schultz, 2016). A classmate who is a teacher pointed out that the refusal did not stop her work, but it shaped where she could do it and who trained with her, and it meant that for decades her name rarely appeared beside James's in textbook accounts of his era.

We then discussed Francis Cecil Sumner, who earned a doctorate in psychology at Clark University in 1920, the first Black American to do so, and later built the psychology department at Howard University, where Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark trained. The Clarks' studies of how Black children viewed dolls of different skin colors were cited by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Guthrie (2004) argues that standard histories long left such figures out, and the title of his book, Even the Rat Was White, captures how the field's research subjects and its researchers were assumed to be white.

The field's history is also a history of who was allowed to do the work and who was studied without being asked.

The Part That Was Hardest

The hardest part of the seminar concerned intelligence testing. Early psychologists adapted Binet's tests, which had been designed to identify French children who needed help in school, into tools that ranked people and groups. Henry Goddard used tests to classify immigrants, and Army tests during the First World War were later used to argue for restricting immigration. Psychologists' testimony supported eugenic sterilization laws, which the Supreme Court upheld in Buck v. Bell in 1927. In 2021 the American Psychological Association issued a formal apology for its role in promoting and perpetuating racism and human hierarchy (American Psychological Association, 2021).

How This Changes My Thread

I have been tracing cognitive behavioral therapy back through the schools. The seminar made me ask a question I had not asked: who were the first clients these methods were tested on, and who was left out? Little Albert was an infant whose mother had no meaningful say in what happened to him. Many early therapy studies used white, middle-class participants, and therapists today work to adapt cognitive behavioral therapy for clients from other cultures because the original assumptions did not always fit them.

A Disagreement in the Room

Not everyone in the seminar agreed on how to judge the past. One classmate argued that we should evaluate early psychologists by the standards of their own time, since many of them believed they were doing science for the public good. Another answered that people at the time, including some psychologists, objected to the testing claims and the sterilization laws, so the standards were not uniform even then. I found the second argument more persuasive. Understanding the context explains why harm happened; it does not make the harm smaller, and the people who resisted it at the time show that other choices were possible.

What I Will Do Differently

In my remaining papers I will name who conducted and who participated in the studies I describe, and I will look for contributions from people standard histories tend to skip. For the humanistic psychology unit, for example, I want to find out whether the early client-centered research included anyone other than university counseling clients. I also want to read the APA's apology in full rather than relying on a summary, including the specific actions it commits the association to, so I can judge whether those commitments are being kept. Finally, when I write my closing paper on the roots of cognitive behavioral therapy, I will include a section on how the therapy has been adapted for clients whose backgrounds differ from those of the people it was first tested on.

References

American Psychological Association. (2021). Apology to people of color for APA's role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy in U.S. https://www.apa.org/about/policy/racism-apology

Guthrie, R. V. (2004). Even the rat was white: A historical view of psychology (2nd ed.). Pearson.

Schultz, D. P., & Schultz, S. E. (2016). A history of modern psychology (11th ed.). Cengage Learning.