History’s Mysteries Demystified: Becoming a Psychologist–Historian

Abstract

More than 40 years ago, psychologist–historian Robert Watson argued that the study of history was of particular salience to psychology. In this article we explore the relationship between psychology and history and argue that the psychologist–historian plays a vital role in the discipline of psychology. We provide a brief overview of the emergence of the history of psychology as a professional subdiscipline, describe who psychologist–historians are, explain why they are needed, and detail how to join their ranks. We argue that increasing historical sophistication among psychologists will have beneficial effects on research and teaching, and we invite all psychologists to participate in the making of psychology’s history.

The Little Albert controversy: Intuition, confirmation bias, and logic.

“…A cavalier attitude toward the ease of doing history is potentially worrisome for fields like history of psychology because not all members have academic training in history. Vaughn-Blount, Rutherford, Baker, and Johnson (2009) addressed this issue by mapping out what psychologists who lack training in history could do to acquire foundational knowledge and skills needed to become psychologist-historians. They singled out the attainment of “extensive knowledge of hermeneutics, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology, and historicism” (p. 123) and the need to “acquire and understand the critical analytic and interpretative skills that can be developed through the practice or historical research” (p. 127) as pertinent, and they identified venues for mentoring, such as by joining an academic society like Cheiron and attending its conferences.…”