Psych was a minor for me. I had had 4 years of teaching the fifth grade and I was not in the mood to work quietly in a lab in the hopes that something new would turn up there that might help teachers by the year 2250. It seemed clear to me that religious writers, thinkers and leaders, politicians, actors, tons of teachers and coaches and writers of plays and novels had a rich understanding of people and had had that grasp since the Biblical book Ecclesiastes was written, about 200 years before the birth of Jesus.
I was put off by the continual effort to model psychology after physics, usually on the grounds that physics was a successful science, whatever that means, and psychology needed to be rigorous and based on verifiable facts. We heard a great deal about Pavlov and his dogs, who clearly taught his dogs something about the meaning of a bell ringing. We learned about Thorndike and Guthrie and other Americans who toiled away in their labs. There was lots of effort put into language and symbol use that would sound scientific but often boiled down to an idea that everyone already knew and understood.
One day, we learned about E. Guthrie and backward conditioning. The dogs heard a bell and then were fed. They learned the bell meant food. We could study their little jaws and mouths and verify that. A woman wrote to E. Guthrie about her daughter who came home from school and dropped her coat in the doorway, without hanging it up. Guthrie told the woman to have her daughter go back to the doorway and put her coat where it belonged. After hearing so much about Pavlov's dogs in excruciating detail, Guthrie's backward conditioning seemed weak.
The process was just what my parents always required of me. "Billy, you dropped your coat in the doorway again. Go back and hang it up." But I didn't remember that. I thought that the girl would benefit from some sort of reminder as she walked in the door, not afterwards. We learned that getting the mind's attention after the fact was a slow process, slower than the forward bell first, then food next. But I still think of Guthrie when my brain finally remembers that the trash can is in a different place now. When I remember I have to use a new password to sign in. It is slow. Old habits are persistent. But over time, with enough repetitions, I do learn.
(copyedited by L.S.Kirby)
