Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923)

Charles H. Turner was an African-American behavioural scientist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Had he been presented with the same opportunities as European-Americans in academia, his observations and insights may have drastically influenced the field of comparative psychology.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio to a nurse and custodian, Turner grew up being an excellent pupil. He graduated as valedictorian of his high school and enrolled in the University of Cincinnati (Abramson, 2009). After receiving his bachelor’s and subsequently his Master of Science degrees in biology, he published two papers in Science and he worked as an assistant instructor in the biological laboratory. Throughout his career, he was a professor at Clark University, where he was also Chair of the science department, and Haynes Normal and Industrial Institute. In 1907,  he decided to return to school and pursued a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Chicago. After completing his doctorate, he was unable to secure a professorship at the University of Chicago due to his race. Turner spent the rest of his life teaching science at Sumner High School in St. Louis, Missouri. He published 41 papers during his 14 years there, despite not having access to a research laboratory or graduate students to help with the workload. Turner was also active in the Civil Rights Movement in St. Louis, and published papers on race relations in America, emphasizing the importance of education for improving intercultural relations. Overall, Turner published over 70 papers in his career and conducted many remarkable experimental and field studies, which provided novel insights into the behaviour of animals.

Turner’s contributions to the field of animal behaviour can be summarized by his numerous studies demonstrating that insects are not just reflexive organisms, but that they have the capacity for “learning, memory, and intentional problem-solving” (Abramson, 2009). Turner’s investigations were primarily concerned with invertebrate behaviour, studying many factors that influence behaviour, such as the differences between “sex, age, and individual differences” (Abramson, 2009). Many of his experiments involved novel techniques and apparatuses to measure learning and behaviour in several invertebrate species, such as “ants, honey bees, wasps, cockroaches, and moths” (Abramson, 2009).

Turner implemented stimulus control techniques in his experimental studies to ensure that the phenomena he was observing were the result of his experimental manipulations. One important finding from his experiments on learning and memory was that ants use landmarks to guide them home, and he extended this finding to honey bees, wasps, and caterpillars (Dona & Chittka, 2020). This demonstrated that insects are influenced by past experience as opposed to simply relying on instincts and sensory stimuli to inform their behaviour. Turner’s work also included the first controlled studies of visual perception in honey bees, where he discovered that honey bees possess colour vision and can recognize patterns (Abramson, 2009). Turner also conducted the first associative learning experiments with insects, in which he observed context-dependent learning and the potentiality of emotions in an invertebrate species. With regards to context-dependent learning, Turner found that cockroaches who learned to avoid dark chambers in one apparatus retained this behaviour in different structures that were the same shape, but not in structures that were a different shape. Concerning the presence of emotions in insects, he observed that moths can learn to associate a sound with rough handling, and argued that there is an emotional component to the behaviour.

Although Turner’s work was cited by notable animal behaviourists such as John B. Watson and Margaret F. Washburn, it could have carried even more influence had he not been limited by the racism in American institutions. Still, Charles Turner was an exceptional scientist, demonstrating superior research skills and producing novel findings in the study of insect behaviour.

References

Abramson, C. I. (2009). A Study in Inspiration: Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923) and the Investigation of Insect Behavior. Annual Review Of Entomology, 54, 343–359. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ento.54.110807.090502

Abramson, C. I. (2021, January 30). Charles Henry Turner. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Henry-Turner

Dona, H., & Chittka, L. (2020). Charles H. Turner, pioneer in animal cognition. Science, 370, 530–531. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd8754

Further Reading

Giurfa, M., & de Brito Sanchez, M. G. (2020). Black Lives Matter: Revisiting Charles Henry Turner’s experiments on honey bee color vision. Current Biology, 30(20).

Giurfa, M., Giurfa de Brito, A., Giurfa de Brito, T., & de Brito Sanchez, M. G. (2021). Charles Henry Turner and the cognitive behavior of bees. Apidologie, 52(3), 684-695.

Contributors

• Julianna Colafranceschi
• Elysa Eliopulos
• Luna Kim

Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939)

Margaret F. Washburn contributed significantly to the development of experimental psychology throughout her career through her teaching, experimental studies, editorial service, production of psychological texts, and theory development.

Washburn was born in Harlem, New York into an affluent family, and grew up enjoying reading (Woodworth, 1948). She graduated from Vassar College in 1891 and went to Columbia University to study psychology under James McKeen Cattell in the new psychology laboratory (Goodman, 1980). Columbia University, however, did not admit women as graduate students, thus, Washburn was only permitted to listen in on Cattell’s lectures. Therefore, in 1892, Washburn transferred to Cornell University, where they admitted women, and pursued her graduate studies under the direction of E. B. Titchener as his first graduate student. She completed her Ph.D. in 1894 and was the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in psychology in the United States.* After completing her doctorate, Washburn taught psychology courses at Wells College, Cornell, and the University of Cincinnati. Eventually, Washburn settled down at Vassar College in 1903, and remained there for the rest of her career. There, she held the position of Associate Professor of Psychology and head of the psychological laboratory (Kimble et al., 2003). In addition to her teaching, Washburn established Vassar’s first independent psychology department. She collaborated on 69 experimental studies with her undergraduate students, which covered a wide range of topics, including sensation and perception, emotion, memory, and animal psychology. All of the findings from these labs were published jointly by Washburn and her students in the American Journal of Psychology.

Washburn was included in Cattell’s list of the 50 most important psychologists in the United States in 1903, demonstrating her early success as an experimental psychologist. Her prominence in psychology became ever more apparent hereafter. In 1921, Washburn was the second woman to be elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), and in 1931, became the second woman to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, she served as vice president of the psychology section of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, Chair of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and president of the New York branch of the APA. In addition to her exceptional teaching abilities and rigorous experimental research, Washburn was renowned for her editorial services for several distinguished journals, such as the American Journal of Psychology, the Journal of Animal Behaviour, and the Psychological Bulletin. Washburn’s expertise in these various capacities was greatly admired by her students and colleagues. Her textbook, The Animal Mind, a Textbook of Comparative Psychology, is designated as one of her most important contributions to psychology. In The Animal Mind, Washburn provided a comprehensive summary of the studies being conducted in the field of comparative psychology, which were dispersed in a variety of academic journals up until this point. First published in 1908, this text became the standard textbook used in comparative psychology courses in American universities. With three more revisions in the following three decades, her textbook reflected the developments in theory and practice of experimental comparative psychology.

As she evolved as a psychologist, Washburn began to doubt the reductionist ideology of Titchener’s structuralism. Despite this, she steadfastly believed that the study of consciousness had an important place in experimental psychology. As a result, she acknowledged the existence of animal consciousness as a component of animal behaviour, and retained this belief while applying scientific methodology to her comparative studies. She also argued against the notions of behaviourism. Washburn acknowledged the undoubtedly essential nature of behaviourism as a component of psychology, but realized both the physical and the mental components of daily life that make up our realities, thus making it necessary to gather data through multiple methods, such as observation and introspection. For example, sensations such as colour, heat, and pitch involve both the physical, causal events (e.g., sound waves), as well as the mental processes that make such sensations possible. Nevertheless, Washburn held an epiphenomenalist view, meaning that she believed that mental events are caused by physical (neural) events, and never the other way around. Washburn incorporated these beliefs into her motor theory of consciousness, which she described in detail in her book, Movement and Mental Imagery, published in 1916. The purpose of this theory, and subsequently this text, was to establish a unified theory which incorporated elements of structuralism, behaviourism, and other schools of thought. The motor theory describes psychological phenomena in terms of physical causes, while acknowledging the role of consciousness and the importance of introspection in experimental psychology.

Margaret F. Washburn’s desire to develop a school of thought which emphasized a balance between two opposing views exemplifies critical scientific contemplation, and further augments her multifaceted impact on psychology.

*Mary Calkins also earned her doctorate in psychology in 1894 at Harvard, however, was not awarded her degree from the university.

References

Furumoto, L., & Scarborough, E. (1987). Placing women in the history of comparative psychology: Margaret Floy Washburn and Margaret Morse Nice. Historical perspectives and the international status of comparative psychology, 103-117.

Goodman, E. (1980). Margaret F. Washburn (1871–1939): First woman Ph.D. in psychology. Psychology Of Women Quarterly, 5, 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1981.tb01034.x

Margaret Floy Washburn: 1921 APA President. https://www.apa.org. (2021). https://www.apa.org/about/governance/president/bio-margaret-washburn.

“…regardless of sex or color.” Cornell University Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections (2015). https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/cornell150/exhibition/sexcolor/index.html.

Woodworth, R. (1948). Biographical Memoir of Margaret Floy Washburn. In Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol. 25, pp. 275–295).

Contributors

• Julianna Colafranceschi
• Luna Kim
• Maha Salman Cheema
• Parham Seyedmazhari
• Kristen Arnold

José Ingenieros (1877–1925)

José Ingenieros was a highly renowned psychologist, philosopher, and political activist in Argentina, and is regarded as one of the most influential psychologists in South America.

Ingenieros was born in Palermo, Italy, but emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina with his family. He received a medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1900 (Ardila, 1970). Ingenieros completed his thesis on feigned insanity*, but revised it after initial publication, and released it as two texts, entitled Simulation of Madness and Simulation in the Struggle for Life. These works hold extreme significance in the history of psychology in Argentina and Europe due to their scope and use of the scientific method. Ingenieros was awarded a gold medal by the National Academy of Medicine for this work.

In 1902, he co-founded and assumed editorship of the journal the Archives of Psychiatry and Criminology, the official journal of the Society of Criminology (Torres-Rioseco, 1926; Ardila, 1970). He contributed 90 articles of his own, remaining in this role until 1913. In 1902, Ingenieros also began lecturing at the University of Buenos Aires on neuropathology and clinical semiology, and was officially appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology in 1904. In 1905, Ingenieros took a leave from his position to travel to Europe, where he attended conferences, gave lectures and met other prominent scholars before returning to Argentina a year later. Two years later, Ingenieros was appointed Professor and Chair of Experimental Psychology** at the University of Buenos Aires and co-founded the Argentinean Psychology Society (Triarhou & Cerro, 2006). Moreover, he was elected president of the Argentina Medical Association in 1909 and the Argentinean Psychology Society in 1910. In 1910, Ingenieros also organized and published a series of his earlier papers on criminal psychopathology for the Institute of Criminology. This work covered a wide range of topics, such as “the value of psychopathology in criminal anthropology and criminal psychiatry” (Triarhou & Cerro, 2006). This demonstrated Ingenieros’ belief that criminality was a result of psychological dysfunction.

In addition to his contributions in the field of criminal psychopathology, Ingenieros attempted to establish a psychological system on the basis of biology and evolution. His ideas on biological psychology first appeared in the Archives of Psychiatry and Criminology in 1910 and were culminated in the special volume Genetic Psychology in 1911 (Triarhou & Cerro, 2006). This volume was published as a book in 1913 with the title Principles of Biological Psychology, and was translated into French and German within the next 10 years. In this work, Ingenieros asserted that all psychological processes are caused by biological processes, and that psychological functions develop with the evolution of species, societies, and individuals. Moreover, he argued that psychology must align with the principles of genetic science.

Ingenieros also contended that behavioural observation is fundamental to the study of psychological functions and all other methods are supplemental (Ardila, 1970). It is interesting to note that this systematic approach was published in 1911, two years prior to the publication of John B. Watson’s “Behaviorist Manifesto” in 1913. Other aspects of Ingenieros’ psychological system also resemble components of particular modern psychological perspectives. For example, his assertion of a neural basis of behaviour corresponds with modern Behavioural Neuroscience, and his emphasis on “phylogenic” and “sociogenetic” psychology foreshadows modern evolutionary psychology and social cognitive neuroscience (Triarhou & Cerro, 2006). This work represents Ingenieros’ last major contribution to psychology, as his professional focus shifted to philosophy and sociology. Nonetheless, his contributions to psychology were highly sophisticated and impactful.

*Feigned insanity is the deceptive simulation of mental illness (e.g., to avoid or lessen the consequences of a crime).

**Different sources have assigned this promotion to dates ranging from 1906–1908. I have chosen to align my dates with those of Triarhou and Cerro (2006) for the purpose of this excerpt given the extent of their biographical references.

References

Ardila, R. (1970). Jose ingenieros, psychologist. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 6, 41–47. doi:10.1002/1520-6696(197001)6:1<41::aid-jhbs2300060106>3.0.co;2-y

Javier, R. A., Orlievsky, D., Ruiz-Matuk, C. B., Loving, R. D., & del Castillo, C. C. (2012). Latin America and the Caribbean, history of psychology in. Encyclopedia of the history of psychological theories (pp. 619–634). Springer.

Torres-Rioseco, A. (1926). JOSÉ INGENIEROS (1877-1925). The Southwestern Political and Social Science Quarterly, 295-304.

Triarhou, L., & Cerro, M. (2006). An early work [1910–1913] in Biological Psychology by pioneer psychiatrist, criminologist and philosopher José Ingenieros, M.D. (1877–1925) of Buenos Aires. Biological Psychology, 72, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2005.08.002

Contributors

• Nicole Smith

Mary Cover Jones (1897-1987) (**SC)

Written by: Maggie Dobbin

Mary Cover Jones was a developmental psychologist, often referred to as the “mother of behaviour therapy”, who broke through the male-dominated field of the times and set the foundations of behaviourism and child development research in psychology.

Born in 1897 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Jones grew up in a family that greatly valued her education (Dewsbury et al., 2006). As an undergraduate at Vassar University, Jones enrolled in as many psychology courses as possible and completed lab work under the supervision of “professor Margaret Floy Washburn, the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in psychology” (Dewsbury et al., 2006). However, Jones’ introduction to behaviourist psychology was almost accidental. While on a trip to New York City, her friend recommended she attend a lecture given by John B Watson, where he discussed the Little Albert study, in which he conditioned a little boy named Albert to fear a rat (Dewsbury et al., 2006). Watson’s lecture “was influential in cementing her desire to pursue psychology” (Reiss, 1990, as cited in Dewsbury et al., 2006).

Jones enrolled in a Master’s program in psychology at Colombia University in 1919, where she met her husband, psychologist Harold Jones (Dewsbury et al., 2006). In 1923, Jones became a psychological research associate at the Institute of Educational Research of Columbia University Teachers College (Dewsbury et al., 2006). In 1924, a child study institute opened in Columbia, which Watson was asked to supervise (Dewsbury et al., 2006). Here, Jones would begin her work with a three-year-old named Peter, famously termed “Little Peter”. Jones wanted to use Watson’s conditioning technique to desensitize fears instead of creating them (Logan, 1980). Jones chose Peter as the participant because he was already scared of rabbits, and she slowly used exposure therapy to rid Peter of this fear (Logan, 1980). While this is now seen as one of the most influential studies in behaviourism, the study went generally unnoticed at the time (Kornfeld, 1989).

Despite her lack of recognition in the field, Jones continued producing new research in the field of child development. Jones moved to New York to complete her doctoral dissertation, where she worked with over 365 infants (Rutherford, 2001). Upon completion of her dissertation, she accepted a research assistant position at Berkeley, where she began working on the Oakland Growth Study (Rutherford, 2001). The Oakland Growth Study became one of Jones’s most influential works, allowing her to publish over 100 papers (Rutherford, 2001). The study aimed to understand adolescence by following fifth and sixth graders until they were into their late 40s. Part of the success of this study was based on Jones’s determination and relationships with the participants. This study is now often cited as a way Jones used her “femininity” as an asset, in a time when women were not respected in academic fields (Logan, 1980). Jones’s work continued to be unrecognized, and she was not given full professor status until her final year of employment at Berkeley, after working for seven years as an assistant professor.

In the 1960s psychology began to recognize Jones’s contribution in part thanks to psychiatrist and behavioural therapist, Joseph Wolpe, who dubbed her the mother of behaviourism (Rutherford, 2001). After this, Jones started to gain recognition by the broader academic community for her unique perspective on development both as a mother herself and as someone with an incredibly strong research background (Logan, 1980). This recognition resulted in the American Psychological Association giving Jones the position of President of Developmental Psychology. Jones’ contributions have continued to be acknowledged through the 1980s, as she was awarded the G. Stanley Hall Award (Rutherford, 2010).

Despite her work forming much of the basis of behavioural therapy, coverage of the mother of behaviourism is sorely lacking in modern psychology education.

References

Dewsbury, D. A., Benjamin Jr, L. T., & Wertheimer, M. (2014). Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology: Volume VI. Psychology Press.

Henley, T. (2017). Hergenhahn’s an introduction to the history of psychology (8th ed.). Texas A&M University.

Kornfeld, A. D. (1989). Mary Cover Jones and Peter case: Social learning versus conditioning. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 3(3), 187–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/0887-6185(89)90013-3

Logan, D. D. (1980). Mary Cover Jones: Feminine as Asset. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 5(1), 103–115. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1981.tb01037.x

Rutherford, A. (2001). A Laboratory Study of Fear: The Case of Peter” Mary Cover Jones (1924). Classics in the History of Psychology, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Jones/intro.htm

Rutherford, A. (2006). Mother of Behavior Therapy and Beyond: Mary Cover Jones and the Study of the “Whole Child.” In Portraits of pioneers in psychology, Vol. VI (pp. 189–204). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Rutherford, A. (2010). Profile of Mary Cover Jones. In A. Rutherford (Ed.), Psychology’s Feminist Voices Digital Archive. Retrieved from https://feministvoices.com/profiles/mary-cover-jones

B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) (**SC)

Written by: Yashar Haghighi

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist and founder of radical behaviourism, an extreme version of behaviourism that emphasizes the role of conditioning over all human actions.

Born in 1904 in the small town of Susquehanna, Pennsylvania to an attorney father and upper-class mother, Skinner was a clever and imaginative child (Bjork, 1997). Skinner enrolled at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, hopeful to achieve a career in creative writing. However, Skinner abandoned this dream after graduation in 1926, and after some time, Skinner was a Harvard graduate student studying psychology and physiology (Bjork, 1997).

Skinner’s entry into the field coincided with the early twentieth-century shift of psychology “from the study of human consciousness to . . . the study of animal intelligence” and psychology became a “study of behaviour” (Bjork, 1997). Skinner was influenced by John B. Watson’s behaviourism, which dismissed any psychological explanation based on internal, unobservable processes like consciousness. The concept of the “mind” was disregarded as a pre-scientific belief that could not be empirically tested, while behaviour and was an objective and observable phenomena that could be scientifically measured and experimented on (Bjork, 1997).

Skinner used rats as subjects for his behavioural experiments, and while studying the reflexes of rats, created the first Skinner box (Bjork, 1997). In this box, rats would press down on a lever and which would result in receiving a food pellet (Bjork, 1997). Therefore, rats would repeatedly press on the lever to receive food, and this behaviour would be the same every time in the same conditions(Bjork, 1997). The first Skinner box proved to Skinner that an animal’s behaviour can be controlled and predicted (Bjork, 1997). Skinner furthered these findings by introducing different reinforcement schedules, finding that the rate would press the lever at different rates depending on the different reinforcement schedules (Bjork, 1997).

Skinner created the term operant conditioning in 1937 “to differentiate his interest—behaviour that affects the environment—from the reflex-related subject matter of the Pavlovians” (Staddon & Cerutti, 2002). As a technique, operant conditioning describes that behaviour can be shaped through reward and punishment. Behaviour that is reinforced (rewarded) is more likely to be repeated, whereas behaviour that is penalized is less likely to do so. Skinner’s approach of training his animal subjects to perform certain behaviours using operant conditioning was ground-breaking. In the following decades, Skinner and his students identified a variety of powerful effects of reinforcement schedules, providing new tools for analyzing learning processes (Staddon & Cerutti, 2002. The two most popular types of reinforcement schedules are time-based and ratio schedules (Staddon & Cerutti, 2002). Time-based schedules have either fixed or variable intervals, meaning that either a fixed or variable amount of time must pass after reinforcement before the behaviour will be reinforced again (Staddon & Cerutti, 2002). Ratio schedules instead focus on the number of responses the subject produces before the behaviour is reinforced, and these schedules also include fixed or variable intervals (Staddon & Cerutti, 2002).

Skinner’s ability to reliably shape the behaviour of animals in his experiments led to him making some extreme conclusions about the ability to shape human behaviour. As the founder of radical behaviourism, Skinner argued that “the objective of psychology is to predict and control an organism’s behaviour based on its current sensory condition and history of reinforcement”(B.F. Skinner,n.d.). In Skinner’s utopian fantasy, “humans abandoned individual freedom in favour of an engineered human environment where behaviour was controlled systematically and to desirable ends rather than haphazardly”(B.F. Skinner, n.d.).

Although Skinner’s views were extreme, they do not eliminate his contributions to the field of psychology. Skinners’ emphasis on environmental control and the use of scientific methods set the standards for many experimental techniques used today. Overall, Skinner’s career and contributions to the field establish him as one of the most influential psychologists in our recent history.

References

B.F.Skinner.(2021). Department of Psychology. https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/b-f-skinner

Bjork, D. W. (1997). BF Skinner: A life. American Psychological Association.

Staddon, J. E., & Cerutti, D. T. (2003). Operant conditioning. Annual review of psychology, 54(1), 115-144.