Question

psych question:

pick any two psychologists from this list, and alter some of their biographical details [race, ethnicity, gender, ability status, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, geographic location, etc.]. Provide a short description of their new identity, and then unpack how these changes would have influenced their ability to contribute to/participate in psychology, their inclusion in the historical record, the content/substance of their contribution, and the responses to their work. Be attentive to the historical and political context in which each (real) person lived when thinking through these questions.

List:

-B. F. Skinner

-Floyd Allport

-Marie Jahoda

-Reginald Jones

-Henry A. Murray

-Joseph White

-Lillian Moller Gilbreth

-Hans Eysenck

-Aaron Beck

Answer 1

B. F Skinner: 20th century, many of the images that came to mind when thinking about experimental psychology were tied to the work of Burrhus Frederick Skinner. The stereotype of a bespectacled experimenter in a white lab coat, engaged in shaping behavior through the operant conditioning of lab rats or pigeons in contraptions known as Skinner boxes comes directly from Skinner’s immeasurably influential research.Although he originally intended to make a career as a writer, Skinner received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1931, and stayed on as a researcher until 1936, when he departed to take academic posts at the University of Minnesota and Indiana University. He returned to Harvard in 1948 as a professor, and was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology from 1958 until he retired in 1974. Skinner was influenced by John B. Watson’s philosophy of psychology called behaviorism, which rejected not just the introspective method and the elaborate psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung, but any psychological explanation based on mental states or internal representations such as beliefs, desires, memories, and plans. The very idea of “mind” was dismissed as a pre-scientific superstition, not amenable to empirical investigation. Skinner argued that the goal of a science of psychology was to predict and control an organism’s behavior from its current stimulus situation and its history of reinforcement. In a utopian novel called Walden Two and a 1971 bestseller called Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he argued that human behavior was always controlled by its environment. According to Skinner, the future of humanity depended on abandoning the concepts of individual freedom and dignity and engineering the human environment so that behavior was controlled systematically and to desirable ends rather than haphazardly.In the laboratory, Skinner refined the concept of operant conditioning and the Law of Effect. Among his contributions were a systematic exploration of intermittent schedules of reinforcement, the shaping of novel behavior through successive approximations, the chaining of complex behavioral sequences via secondary (learned) reinforcers, and “superstitious” (accidentally reinforced) behavior.Skinner was also an inveterate inventor. Among his gadgets were the “Skinner box” for shaping and counting lever-pressing in rats and key-pecking in pigeons; the cumulative recorder, a mechanism for recording rates of behavior as a pen tracing; a World-War II-era missile guidance system (never deployed) in which a trained pigeon in the missile’s transparent nose cone continually pecked at the target; and “teaching machines” for “programmed learning,” in which students were presented a sentence at a time and then filled in the blank in a similar sentence, shown in a small window. He achieved notoriety for a mid-1950s Life magazine article showcasing his “air crib,” a temperature-controlled glass box in which his infant daughter would play. This led to the urban legend, occasionally heard to this day, that Skinner “experimented on his daughter” or “raised her in a box” and that she grew up embittered and maladjusted, all of which are false.B.F. Skinner was ranked by the American Psychological Association as the 20th century’s most eminent psychologist.

Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, to Grace and William Skinner. His father was a lawyer. He became an atheist after a Christian teacher tried to assuage his fear of the hell that his grandmother described.[18] His brother Edward, two and a half years younger, died at age sixteen of a cerebral hemorrhage.[19]

Skinner's closest friend as a young boy was Raphael Miller, whom he called Doc because his father was a doctor. Doc and Skinner became friends due to their parents’ religiousness and both had an interest in contraptions and gadgets. They had set up a telegraph line between their houses to send messages to each other, although they had to call each other on the telephone due to the confusing messages sent back and forth. During one summer, Doc and Skinner started an elderberry business to gather berries and sell them door to door. They had found that out when they picked the ripe berries, the unripe ones came off the branches too, so they built a device that was able to separate them. The device was a bent piece of metal to form a trough. They would pour water down the trough into a bucket, and the ripe berries would sink into the bucket and the unripe ones would be pushed over the edge to be thrown away.[20]

He attended Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. He found himself at a social disadvantage at Hamilton College because of his intellectual attitude.[21] While attending, he joined Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. Hamilton was known for being a strong fraternity college. Skinner had thought that his fraternity brothers would be respectful and would not haze or mistreat the newcomers, instead helping out the other boys with courses or other activities. Contrary to his expectations, at Lambda Chi Alpha, freshmen were called “‘slimers’” who had to wear small green knit hats and greet everyone that they passed for punishment. The year before Skinner entered Hamilton, there was a hazing accident that caused the death of a student. The freshman was asleep in his bed when he was pushed onto the floor, where he smashed his head, resulting in his death. Skinner had a similar incident where two freshmen captured him and tied him to a pole, where he should have stayed all night, but he had a razor blade in his shoe for emergency and managed to cut himself free.[20] He wrote for the school paper, but, as an atheist, he was critical of the traditional mores of his college. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1926, he attended Harvard University, where he would later research, teach, and eventually become a prestigious board member. While he was at Harvard, a fellow student, Fred Keller, convinced Skinner that he could make an experimental science from the study of behavior. This led Skinner to invent his prototype for the Skinner Box and to join Keller in the creation of other tools for small experiments.[21] After graduation, he unsuccessfully tried to write a great novel while he lived with his parents, a period that he later called the Dark Years.[21] He became disillusioned with his literary skills despite encouragement from the renowned poet Robert Frost, concluding that he had little world experience and no strong personal perspective from which to write. His encounter with John B. Watson's Behaviorism led him into graduate study in psychology and to the development of his own version of behaviorism.[22]

Skinner received a PhD from Harvard in 1931, and remained there as a researcher until 1936. He then taught at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and later at Indiana University, where he was chair of the psychology department from 1946–1947, before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. He remained at Harvard for the rest of his life. In 1973, Skinner was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.[23]

In 1936, Skinner married Yvonne (Eve) Blue. The couple had two daughters, Julie (m. Vargas) and Deborah (m. Buzan).[24][25] Yvonne Skinner died in 1997,[26] and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.[27]

Skinner's public exposure had increased in the 1970s, he remained active even after his retirement in 1974, until his death. In 1989, Skinner was diagnosed with leukemia and died on August 18, 1990, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ten days before his death, he was given the lifetime achievement award by the American Psychological Association and gave a talk in an auditorium concerning his work.[28]

A controversial figure, Skinner has been depicted in many different ways. He has been widely revered for bringing a much-needed scientific approach to the study of human behavior; he has also been vilified for attempting to apply findings based largely on animal experiments to human behavior in real-life settings.

Aaron Beck: Aaron Temkin Beck born July 18, 1921) is an American psychiatrist who is professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is regarded as the father of both cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. His pioneering theories are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression and various anxiety disorders. Beck also developed self-report measures of depression and anxiety, notably the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) which became one of the most widely used instruments for measuring depression severity.Beck is noted for his research in psychotherapy, psychopathology, suicide, and psychometrics. He has published more than 600 professional journal articles, and authored or co-authored 25 books.[5] He has been named one of the "Americans in history who shaped the face of American Psychiatry", and one of the "five most influential psychotherapists of all time"[6] by The American Psychologist in July 1989. His work at the University of Pennsylvania inspired Martin Seligman to refine his own cognitive techniques and later work on learned helplessness.Beck is currently the President Emeritus of the non-profit Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy which he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. BeckBeck was born in Providence, Rhode Island, US, the youngest child of four siblings to Russian Jewish immigrants. Beck was married in 1950 to Phyllis W. Beck, who was the first woman judge on the appellate court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.[9] They have four adult children: Roy, Judy, Dan, and Alice.[10] Beck's daughter Judith is a prominent cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) educator and clinician, who wrote the basic text in the field. She is President of the non-profit Beck Institute.After completing his medical internships and residencies from 1946 to 1950, Beck became Fellow in psychiatry at the Austen Riggs Center, a private mental hospital in the mountains of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, until 1952. At that time it was a center of ego psychology with unusually cross-disciplinary work between psychiatrists and psychologists, including David Rapaport.Beck then completed military service as assistant chief of neuropsychiatry at Valley Forge Army Hospital in the United States Military.

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