Psychology and the Future

MICHAEL WERTHEIMER
ALLAN G. BARCLAY
STUART W. COOK
CHARLES A. KIESLER
SIGMUND KOCH
KLAUS F. RIEGEL
LEONARD G. RORER
VIRGINIA LOFTUS SENDERS
M. BREWSTER SMITH
SALLY E. SPERLING
University of Colorado
St. Louis University
University of Colorado
American Psychological Association
Boston University
University of Michigan
Miami University
Framingham State College
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of California, Riverside
ABSTRACT: Nine distinguished psychologists were
asked to comment briefly on psychology and the future.
Predictions included that program evaluation research
will expand greatly; that students preparing for the
practice of psychology will increasingly seek the PsyD
degree; that psychology will be more responsive to
real-life crises such as pollution, energy resource deple-
tion, urban decay, and international conflict, and will
receive more federal support to the extent that it can
contribute to the solution of such problems; that con-
tinuing education is likely to flourish; that the discipline
of psychology will become still more fractionated; and
that the future will bring a merging of the humanistic
and the scientific orientations in psychology.
Psychology has undergone phenomenal growth in
the short century of its existence as a separate
discipline. During the two decades following World
War II, it enjoyed unprecedented popular and fed-
eral support, but the last 10 years or so have
brought sparser times, owing in part to changing
national priorities and in part to a general re-
trenchment in higher education. What does the
future hold for psychology, and what can psychol-
ogy do to enhance our future, that of our nation,
and that of the world?
This question was asked of a very diverse panel
of prominent psychologists, each with a somewhat
different perspective on the field, by the President
of Division 1, th'e Division of General Psychology.
The invited panel, held in lieu of a presidential ad-
dress to the division, was tape recorded at the 1976
convention of the American Psychological Associa-
tion in Washington, D.C.; speakers were ruthlessly
limited to no more than 10 minutes each. They
subsequently had the opportunity to edit the tran-
script of their remarks. Included here in the order
in which they were given, the presentations were
edited further and condensed slightly to reduce
repetition and to make the style more appropriate
to the printed rather than the spoken word.
SALLY E. SPERLING:
For about the past year and a half, the Board of
Scientific Affairs (BSA) has been trying to get
some information about how psychologists within
APA see psychology developing over the next ,5 to
IS years. Our endeavor should not be construed
as an admission by any member of the BSA that
he or she isn't at least as good an oracle as any
other psychologist. Rather, it came from the feel-
ing that we did not know the extent to which our
combined views of psychology's future corresponded
with those of other psychologists. And we felt we
should try to get some reliability assessment be-
cause we were receiving an increasing number of
requests from internal and external groups for pre-
dictions to use in arriving at recommendations or
decisions that would in turn affect psychology's fu-
Editorial note: This article represents an experiment in
publication for the American Psychologist. Its content is
drawn from a symposium of the bicentennial-year meeting
of the American Psychological Association, and its form
combines features of the individual essay with those of the
session transcript. It necessarily sacrifices the coherence
and capacity to explore single ideas in depth that charac-
terize the essay in order to catch the diversity and richness
of thought stimulated in a distinguished group of our col-
leagues confronted by a challenging question. The Editorial
Board would value reader reaction for the guidance it can
provide when considering unusual formats in the future.
William Sevan, Associate Editor
Requests for reprints should be sent to Michael Wert-
heimer, Department of Psychology, Muenzinger Building,
University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST JULY 1978 631
Copyright 1978 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0003-066X/78/3307-063U00.75
ture. (The recycling nature of the process is at
least as frustrating as its lack of external validity.)
So far, we have sent over 100 letters asking for
predictions of future trends from the presidents of
APA divisions, editors of APA journals, and chairs
of APA boards and committees. We received a
total of only 2 5 responses from 13 of the 36 divi-
sions, 4 replies from editors of journals, and 1 from
a board or committee chairplus 3 responses that
we did not solicit directly. So we have only a total
of 33 responses that clearly constitute neither a
random sample nor a representative sample of APA
psychologists. They are, however, the views of 33
psychologists who were interested enough and con-
cerned enough to take the time to share their per-
ceptions of psychology's future with the BSA.
Most of the letters are impressivethoughtful, ar-
ticulate, and showing substantial awareness of al-
ternatives to and implications of their predictions.
I shall try to summarize some common themes that
appear to cut across the different scientific and pro-
fessional concerns and emphases of the respondents.
The magic phrase for the fut ure appears to be
program evaluation. Most frequently mentioned
was that the area of tests and measurements will
burst forth during the next 5 to IS years with a
significance and magnitude at least comparable to
that during and after World War I. This time,
however, the emphasis will be on program evalua-
tion, and the development of new techniques and
new tests is seen as contributing primarily to the
validity of the evaluation process. Theoretical de-
velopments in this area either will keep pace with
or lag behind the rush to evaluate everything that
might be called a program; graduate students will
increasingly be trained in both the principles and
the practices of evaluation; and the results of these
evaluations, valid or not, will be the most important
factor in determining whether to continue, change,
or terminate programs.
A necessary antecedent condition for program
evaluation is, of course, the existence of programs
to be evaluated. Fortunately, our respondents also
see psychology working either with other disciplines
or alone to develop a large number of already exist-
ing or new programs. These cover a broad range.
The more familiar areas of evaluating psycho-
therapeutic methods and outcomes or personnel se-
lection procedures and employer and employee job
satisfaction are included, as are programs for career
development or change and programs designed to
develop and utilize the skills of the handicapped,
older people, and minorities. We also will be
evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of different
social systems and using these data to modify exist-
ing societies or to create new ones able to provide
more optimum fulfillment and satisfaction for their
citizens with minimal emotional and physical stress.
Substantial developments of new technologies and
techniques of education in and outside the class-
room are also seen in psychology's future, as are
significant contributions to public affairs and public
policy and to enhancing the quality of life, includ-
ing reducing environmental pollution and balancing
population size and the use of natural resources.
We also will come to a better understanding of psy-
chological factors in health and illness and of how
to decrease crime and violence. And we will im-
prove our skill in the early identification of intellec-
tually gifted and high-risk children and in their sub-
sequent education and training.
Accomplishing these goals might seem to require
full-time efforts of all current and future psycholo-
gists, but our respondents see psychology as equally
active in less directly applied or applicable areas as
well. Significant advances in our understanding of
how neural processes mediate a wide range of be-
havior are anticipated within the next S to IS years,
and research into the interactions between heredity
and environment also is seen as progressing fruit-
fully, with its emphasis expanding from early de-
velopment to include the entire life span. Thanks
to the development of new experimental methods
combining the best aspects of laboratory and field
strategies, at least some answers will be found to
the perennial questions about learning, motivation,
memory, thinking, perception, problem solving, and
decision making. And observational studies will be
greatly facilitated by a comprehensive system for
recording and analyzing ongoing, unrestricted, com-
plex behavior sequences. After years of models
and minimodels, general theories again will return
to integrate the vast amount of new data that we
shall be accumulating and to account for individual
differences as well as similarities in basic psycho-
logical processes.
Our respondents, in other words, see a very ex-
citing and productive decade and* a half stretching
before us. We don't know, of course, how valid
these predictions are, but we have some reason to
think that they may be reliable. In broad outline,
they correspond fairly well with the results of a
Delphi study using SO British psychologists that
was published in the New Scientist 2 years ago
(Smith, 1974). And perhaps those of us still
around by then can check the validity of these
632 JULY 1978 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
TABLE 1
Percentage of Respondents Agreeing and Disagreeing with the Desirability of Various Alternative Futures in
Professional Psychology
Item agreeing
%
disagreeing
Graduate enrollment should be limited
to only those numbers of students
for whom jobs may be obtained at
graduation. 23 76
Career tracks should be implemented
for those with less than a doctoral
degree in psychology who wish to
work and progress upward in status
and responsibility in professional
"clinical and applied" psychology. 81 17
There should be two clear-cut, career-
based degrees in psychology: the
PsyD will be sought by those who
go into clinical practice; the PhD
will remain for those whose interests
involve research and/or applied
evaluative pursuits. 57 37
Clinical psychologists should be
recognized as equal under the law to
psychiatrists for reimbursement for
psychotherapy. 94 2
APA should become a major force in
promoting the general public's
understanding of psychologists and
psychology. 94 1
Experimental psychologists should
devote their research time to pro-
posing and evaluating solutions for
specific social problems in our society. 22 68
A national board of examiners in
psychology should be established to
set national standards for the
licensing of psychologists in specialty
areas. 74 17
Graduate training in experimental
psychology, that is, nonclinical,
Item
%
agreeing
%
disagreeing
should emphasize the learning of
applied as opposed to theoretical
research skills. 18 74
A national board of examiners in
psychology should limit the number
of psychologists seeking jobs by con-
trolling the number of licenses issued. 2 94
APA will become a federation of
smaller associations organized around
broad interest areas. 43 51
Master's-level psychologists should be
accepted as full members of APA. 31 65
State psychological associations should
make all major policy decisions
affecting local psychologists. 15 81
The state psychological association will
take a politically active role in
affecting state legislation through
lobbying and other means. 95 1
Nonexperimental research, clinical, and
applied studies will be equally ac-
ceptable as traditional doctoral
research for completion of disserta-
tion requirements in PhD-granting
clinical programs. 88 8
State psychological examining boards
should issue limited specialty
practice certificates to master's-level
psychologists. 80 14
State boards will issue limited specialty
practice certificates to BA career-
oriented psychology programs. 13 84
APA should evaluate and accredit
master's-level graduate programs in
psychology. 75 24
Note. N =280.
views through the crystal ball by checking to see
what psychologists will be talking about at the
1991 APA convention.
ALLAN G. BARCLAY:
I too recently completed a surveyof a composite
sample of APA members, council representatives,
presidents of APA divisions and of state associa-
tions, and undergraduate psychology studentsbut
this survey was devoted less to scientific and more
to professional developments in psychology in the
future. Respondents were asked whether they be-
lieved various possible future events were desirable
or undesirable; Table 1 presents some of our find-
ings. They speak for themselves, pointing to some
future changes in professional psychology, at least
as seen through the eyes of the respondents.
These perceptions are not fully consistent with
some current developments that clearly will have
a major impact on professional psychology in the
future. In recent years, there has been a burgeon-
ing interest in enrollment in clinical programs. At
the same time, as Stanley Schneider has so aptly
pointed out in a number of places, there is a cut-
back in funding; there is a determined effort on the
part of the Administration and the Office of Man-
agement and Budget to phase out clinical training
programs at the predoctoral level. Regardless of
what your political aspirations or hopes may be,
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST JULY 1978 633
that move is something that will be very difficult
to forestall, and it produces a prediction that is
fairly clear. Support for predoctoral programs in
clinical training will come increasingly less from the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
and from other similar sources, and that will force
those in clinical training programs to look to al-
ternate sources of funding. At the same time, as
reported recently in Science, the President's Bio-
medical Panel has recommended that while they
concur that there should be a decrease in predoc-
toral funding, there should be an increase in post-
doctoral funding, apparently on the assumption
that there is more to be gained from postdoctoral
funding for more targeted research, and thus more
direct benefits to society. I think this is consistent
with the general trend that Congress and others in
government have manifested in recent months and
years.
I concur with Sally Sperling' about program
evaluation: That is going to be an increasing area
of interest and of support. This is partly related
to concern among experimentalists as well as among
clinicians about the ethical or moral question,
Should we encourage more people to become trained
than there are opportunities for? In psychology,
program evaluation and social accountability have
become and will be a continuing emphasis. NIMH
has funded some programs of this kind. I do think
that this will be an area in which more people will
and should be trained.
STUART W. COOK:
Intuitive predictions of the future are not noted for
their reliability. It was only about 20 years ago
that there was common agreement on the prediction
that we could never train PhD psychologists fast
enough to keep up with the job vacancies. And
look at the employment picture today!
What will affect the future of psychology? There
are two major influences. The first is the current
quality of the science and the intellectual difficulty
of making progress with it; the second is the nature
of society, its problems, and its willingness to use
psychologists in relation to those problems and to
support psychological research and training. Since
the early 1940s we have been pretty lucky. Dur-
ing this period we piggybacked on the mental
health movement on the one hand and the expansion
of higher education on the other, and the result has
been a remarkable development of psychological
science.
A look into the future from this first perspective,
the present quality of psychological science and
the likelihood that it will live up to what's needed
in the future, yields grounds for optimism. The
real question is what direction psychological science
is going to take.
Probably it will be more theoretical, and in the
integrated sense; that is, psychological science is
likely to develop in the direction of an integration
that Wilbert McKeachie called "cognitive behav-
iorism." On the other hand, psychological science
is also going to become less theoretical; all around,
one sees the growing emphasis upon psychologists
paying attention to the solving of practical prob-
lems in natural life.
It's going to become more quantitative and more
physiological. The computers are going to take
care of that, and the breakthroughs in genetics.
It's also going to become less quantitative: How
else can we interpret the vigor of the humanist
movement in the last few years?
Taking the second perspective, that of societal
change and society's support for psychology, re-
quires another type of speculationnamely, about
what happens in the future outside of psychology.
Four "relative certainties of the future" can be dis-
cerned. (Incidentally, to identify societal develop-
ments that have a psychological or behavioral sci-
ence component is not to say that either govern-
ment, the private sector, organized society, or the
individual citizen is able or willing to support psy-
chologists to work on the problems. One can ap-
preciate that, but in at least some of the problems,
society will have no alternative but to include psy-
chology in the efforts that sooner or later must be
made at problem solution.)
The first of these certainties is an interrelated set
of problems, the by-now-familiar mix of overpopula-
tion, food shortage, exhaustion of nonrenewable
energy sources and critical minerals, and environ-
mental pollution. Taken together, these constitute
the so-called survival crisis. With minor excep-
tions, such as the lowering of the birth rate in a
few of the developed countries of the West, little
progress is being made with those problems. This
is the kind of matter on which a major attack will
eventually be made because it involves so many
people, although perhaps too late. And, when it is
made, large numbers of psychologists are likely to
be involved.
The second problem is the economic and social
deterioration of the major urban centers. We are
close to a nationwide crisis and to the political
634 JULY 1978 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
changes that the crisis will bring about, and that
will force attention to the problem. When that hap-
pens, ready or not, psychologists will doubtless be
called upon in great numbers.
The third development is the large and accelerat-
ing growth of the after-retirement component of our
population. All signs suggest that this group will
acquire enough political power to force a heavy in-
vestment in programs that will alleviate what is
generally agreed to be the current meaninglessness
of this group's existence. These programs will in-
clude many activities in which psychologists should
be involved.
The fourth problem is intranational group con-
flict and international conflict, which is not by any
means a new problem. But it now poses a new
threat owing to the proliferation of the capacity to
produce atomic weapons. This is the problem with
the greatest immediate danger. Psychologists to
date have had little impact upon it, and I'm pes-
simistic that they will have any impact on it in the
future.
As Allan Barclay mentioned, a 1976 report of
the National Research Council to the Department
of Health, Education and Welfare recommends an
early reduction in the support of training for pre-
doctoral behavioral science personnel. The report
was based upon an analysis of the job market and
recommends a reduction to a level that is one third
of the number of predoctoral behavioral scientists
for whom training support is now being given. The
recommendations in the report were based to a con-
siderable extent upon the likelihood or timing of
anticipated vacancies in current positions filled by
behavioral scientists. Many of these positions are
filled with younger people who will not need to be
replaced for a long time. What the report did not
take into account are new, future needs for be-
havioral scientists, including psychologists. But
these needs will be encountered, certainly within the
next decade; and when this happens, the recom-
mendations of the report will show up as one of
those regrettably blind instances of extrapolating
from current trends. The implication I draw for
psychology is that we should keep our educational
capacity alive and vigorous, because we will need
it again in the near future.
CHARLES A. KIESLER:
Any prediction about psychology and psychologists
demands some assumptions about society and its
changes. It demands some assumptions about the
outcomes of current actions of psychologists, and
it demands some assumptions about whether psy-
chologists act on their own behalf, that is, whether
psychologists act to affect their own future. I be-
lieve that there are actions that psychology can and
should take now. Consider job prospects, educa-
tion, research funds, and the like as illustrations of
the alternative futures that we have before us.
There has been a great deal of discussion in psy-
chology about the shortage of academic jobs, and
we have predicted the number of academic jobs to
remain steady for psychologists at about 1,000-
1,200 a year. The number of new academic posi-
tions available has remained steady for the past
several years, but the number of new PhDs enter-
ing the job market has increased, and the real
squeeze comes from the discrepancy between those
two variables. Most people who are making pre-
dictions about the academic job market are making
assumptions about the number of people who will
be in college. Those assumptions come from
straight-line predictions from the number of people
who are in the age range from 18 to 22 at year X,
and for those already born we can predict quite
well how many will be 18 X years later. This is
where the predictions about the number of future
college students originate.
Whether those predictions come true or not de-
pends on a number of things that relate to other in-
fluences in society and the role that postsecondary
education will play in our life-style. The baby
boom after World War II with its much touted ef-
fect on enrollment in universities was really not a
baby boom. That is, most of the increase in uni-
versity enrollments after World War II was not due
to increased population but rather to changed prac-
tices of our society. About two thirds of the in-
crease in university enrollment was due to two
changes in social statistics. One was an increase in
the proportion of people who graduated from high
school. The other was the increased number of
those who graduated from high school that went to
college. Now those proportions could go up or down,
of course; but to the extent that we/ put greater
emphasis on the education of our young, we can
very well dramatically affect, and perhaps bene-
ficially affect, the enrollments in universities some
years later. I prefer to think of that variable as
the commitment of the American society to uni-
versity education and its value. Of course, future
prospects of the academic job market are partially
dependent upon the societal value we all attach to
a college education.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST JULY 1978 635
Future prospects also depend on the willingness
of Americans to get away from large university
classes. Psychology professors now, by my edu-
cated guess, teach about 30 full-time equivalent
students, a worse ratio than in high schools and
grade schools. If people who take psychology in
the university could have an opportunity to take it
in less huge classes, we could affect both the quality
of education and the number of needed psychol-
ogists.
The number of future academic positions in psy-
chology also depends on the adaptation of American
universities to the principle of moving outside of the
age range from 18 to 22, that is, to becoming an
intellectual center for society not strictly focused on
a narrow age range. Many universities are active
in continuing education programs now and are in-
timately involved in their communities, however
defined. Society would benefit dramatically from
getting people into some educational process all
their lives.
How many psychologists will be neededand this
is a touchy subject for some of usdepends partly
on whether universities are willing to work toward
equity in teaching loads in universities. About 5%
of university faculties across the country are psy-
chologists, while 15% of the juniors and seniors in
American universities are psychology majors. It
is unknown whether universities will respond to that
discrepancy in any way, but to the extent that
American universities do respond to that disparity,
more psychologists will be needed.
There are no grounds for being wildly enthusiastic
about the job market in psychology in universities,
but one should be more aware that previous predic-
tions have been straight-line and based on rather
simple assumptions that can be false, depending
on the commitment to education of the American
citizen.
To switch to a different issue in the future of
psychology, science research funds have shrunk, and
they have shrunk disproportionately to those of
other sciences. That is, an examination of the pro-
portion of federal research dollars spent in various
fields S years ago and now reveals that funds for
psychology have shrunk more than those for its
sister fields in the biological or physical sciences.
The proportion of federal research dollars allocated
to psychological research has declined. This re-
flects in a very real sense, I believe, the failure of
American psychology to educate the American pub-
lic about what it has to offer. We have to do some-
thing substantial about that. Psychology is not
seen, in the degree that we know to be true, as
having much to offer society; and I believe some of
the squeezes that we are in reflect our failure to
communicate effectively about those issues.
The future of health services appears very good,
I believe. Twenty-four states now have mandatory
laws covering reimbursement by third-party payers,
meaning that psychologists can receive payment
from third parties, and that's a welcome change.
Professional psychologists outside universities once
were concentrated in institutional settings, such as
state and VA hospitals. Now community mental
health centers are attracting a large number of psy-
chologists. Health maintenance organizations are
employing psychologists and appear eager to hire
well-trained people. Private practice is attracting
more psychologists with the advent of third-party
payments. The funds for community mental cen-
ters have grown quite a bit in the last 5 years, and
I believe psychologists have a very significant role
to play there.
We also have a role to play through our own ef-
forts in society, but specifically we need educative
efforts in Congress and in federal agencies, which
do not hold an extremely positive attitude about
psychology. I believe we should be more vigorous
in these efforts. This year, partly to see what APA
could do and partly because it was badly needed, we
spent a great deal of time working on the NIMH
research budget in Congress. The Mental Health
Liaison Groupwhich I chair and which is a group
of 17 organizations, including psychiatrists, the
American Medical Association, psychology, nurses,
hospital administrators, social workers and the like,
all the national organizationsworked this year
very actively to increase the NIMH research bud-
get. That budget was, in terms of constant dollars,
shrinking dramatically every year. The liaison
group was a nice collaboration of practitioners, ser-
vice deliverers, researchers, and citizens' advisory
groups. The Association for the Advancement of
Psychology was also very much involved. It is
gratifying to be able to report that the outcome
was the passage of the NIMH budget with a $13
million increase in research funds. This illustrates
that Congress is open to education about science
and the need for funds to support basic science, if
we are willing to make the effort.
Thirteen million dollars is a significant amount.
Total federal support for basic research in psychol-
ogy is, by extrapolation from a couple of years ago,
somewhat under $50 million. Two years ago it
was $52 million; it has gone down a bit. That is
636 JULY 1978 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
the total federal support. So figures like $10 mil-
lion or $5 million are proportionately really big
figures for us. We are relatively small in the na-
tional research picture, very small in fact, so even
modest increases can make dramatic differences in
what we are able to do in research.
Let me mention some things about what I per-
sonally believe the psychology of the future should
be like. First, psychology should be more attuned
to the future of society and how psychology can
make a contribution in areas like housing, emotional
disorders, crime, education, evaluation of national
programs, and in generally promoting a spirit of the
experimenting society, to use Don Campbell's
phrase.
We should be training students to play a broader
role in the application of psychologybut that ap-
plication should not substitute for basic science. It
is critical that psychology maintain some steady
scientific progress and keep science intertwined with
applications. We should be more attuned, as sug-
gested earlier, to educating society about what psy-
chology knows, at least what it thinks it knows
with some degree of confidence. This is a job we
have not done very well in the past, I fear, and it
has affected the public image of psychology and
the public use of psychology. We should urge our
national organization to play a leading role in a
substantial public-information effort.
Finally, we are at a fairly critical decision point
for psychology. The future of psychology in a
very real sense depends on us; we seem to de-em-
phasize the role that we can play in affecting our
own future and the roles that we have played to
bring about the present we now have. To the extent
that we can all get together to affect our future, the
future of psychology could be exciting, wide open,
and useful.
SIGMUND KOCH:
My remarks are based on interpreting our assign-
ment as bearing on psychology as a field of scholar-
ship, and they attempt an intellectual analysis on
the basis of which one might say a few general and
vague things about the future.
Futurology is a strange field. Though profes-
sional futurologists claim to be making descriptive
statements, they make strangely mixed descriptive
and normative statements. I am doing precisely
that and wish to echo the last point of the preced-
ing speakernamely, that psychology will become,
at least to some extent, what we make it. One can
hope that we would try to shape the future on a
rational basis. Whatever the constraints upon
scholarly rationality, it is conceivable that we can
learn something from the 100-year history of the
extraordinarily optimistic enterprise that is called
psychology. All psychologists are perforce futurol-
ogists, but they have a cognitive scotoma for the
distinction between wish and deed, program and
performance, squalid today and millennial tomorrow.
I have argued for some years that psychology
has been misconceived, whether as science or as any
kind of coherent discipline devoted to the empirical
study of man. That psychology can be an integral
discipline is the 19th-century myth that motivated
its 'baptism as an independent science^a myth
which can be shown to be exactly that both by a
priori and empirico-historical considerations.
On an a priori basis, nothing so awesome as the
total domain comprised by the functioning of all
organisms (not to mention persons) can be thought
the subject matter of a coherent discipline. This
would be tantamount to inviting into existence a
doppelganger for every branch of knowledge
formal or informal, actual or potentialin the en-
tire scattered and disorderly realm of human cogni-
tive concerns, and expecting that somehow the
doppelgangers would mesh. If theoretical integra-
tion be the objective, it should be considered that
such a condition has never been attained by any
large subdivision of inquiry, including physics.
When the details of the 100-year history of psy-
chology are consulted, the patent tendency is to-
ward theoretical and substantive fractionation (and
increasing insularity among the "specialties"), not
integration. As for the larger quasi-theoretical
"paradigms" of psychology, history shows that the
hard knowledge accrued in one generation typically
disenfranchises the regnant analytical frameworks
of the lastand that any new framework this
knowledge is believed to suggest typically survives
only until the next generation.
In this last connection, it is amusing that my fel-
low prophets who were asked to make predictions
about the future of psychology are happily pre-
dicting a period in which minimodels and small-
scale theories will give way to large integrations.
This is an interesting documentation of cyclical the-
ories of history. One of the movements toward
sanity that has taken place in psychology since
the early 1950s has been a growing tendency to
recognize that the large integrations that charac-
terized the neobehaviorist interval were merely
empty emulations of a misconstrued notion of the
character of physical science; in general, one of the
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST JULY 1978 637
happiest things in recent decades has been a tend-
ency to become rather modestand sometimes even
playfulabout the range of application of theoreti-
cal suggestions or "paradigms." But we have been
modest, now, for 20 years or so. Clearly psychol-
ogy must progress, and so why not have large the-
ories again? This is beautiful documentation of
the sense in which this has beenthis funny field
largely a role-playing enterprise rather than an
intellectually responsible commitment to discover
differentiated and meaningful, perhaps illuminating,
knowledge about the human condition.
In a more positive vein, my position suggests
that the noncohesiveness of psychology finally be
acknowledged by replacing it with some such locu-
tion as "the psychological studies." Students
should no longer be tricked by a terminological
rhetoric into the belief that they are studying a
single discipline or any set of specialties rendered
coherent by any actual or potential principle of
coherence. The current "Departments of Psychol-
ogy" should be called "Departments of Psychologi-
cal Studies." The change of name, which of course
is a minor thing, should mark a corresponding
change in pedagogical rationale. The psychological
studies, if they are really to address the historically
constituted objectives of psychological thought,
must range over an immense and disorderly spec-
trum of human activity and experience. If sig-
nificant knowledge is the desideratum, problems
must be approached with humility, methods must be
contextual and flexible, and anticipations of synoptic
breakthroughs must be held in check.
Moreover, the conceptual ordering devices, tech-
nical languages ("paradigms," if you will) open to
the various psychological studies arelike all hu-
man modes of cognitive organizationperspectival,
sensibility-dependent relative to the inquirer, and
often noncommensurable. Such conceptual incom-
mensurabilities will often obtain not only between
contentually different psychological studies but
between alternate but perspectivally "valid" order-
ings of the "same" domain. This follows from
patent characteristics of psychological events to
which lip service is often given by such attribu-
tions as "complexity," but which finally must be
seriously acknowledged. Psychological events are
characteristically multiply determined, ambiguous
in their human meaning, polymorphous, contextu-
ally "environed" or embedded in complex and
vaguely bounded ways, evanescent, and labile in
the extreme. This entails some obvious conse-
quences for the task of theorists or paradigm-pro-
posers and for the limits of the knowledge that they
can hope to unearth. Relative to their different
analytical purposes, predictive aims, practical ends
in view, perceptual sensitivities, metaphor-forming
capacities, and preexisting discrimination reper-
toires, different theorists (and ultimately the re-
search groups forming about them) will make asys-
tematically different perceptual cuts upon the same
domain. They will identify variables of markedly
different grain and meaning-contour, selected and
linked on different principles of grouping. The
cuts-that is, variables or conceptswill in all
likelihood establish different universes of discourse,
even if loose ones.
As a corollary to such considerations, it should
be emphasized that "paradigms," theories, or models
(or whatever one's label for conceptual ordering de-
vices) will never prove preemptive or preclusive of
alternate organizations. That is so for any field
of inquiry but conspicuously so in relation to the
psychological studies.
Because of the awesome range of the psychologi-
cal studies, different areas of study will not only
require different (and contextually apposite) meth-
ods but will bear affinities to different members of
the broad groupings of inquiry as historically con-
ceived. Fields like sensory and biological psychol-
ogy may certainly be regarded as solidly within the
family of the biological andin some reachesnat-
ural sciences. But psychologists must finally ac-
cept the circumstance that extensive and important
sectors of psychological study require modes of in-
quiry rather more like those of the humanities than
the sciences. And among these are included areas
traditionally considered "fundamental"such as
perception, cognition, motivation, and learning, as
well as such more obviously rarified fields as social
psychology, psychopathology, personology, aesthet-
ics, and the analysis of "creativity."
It is most uncomfortable to state conclusions
sans grounds. Much of what I have proposed is
grounded in an analysis of the functioning of lexical
units in natural and technical languages (which I
advance as a sensible alternative to the absurdities
of the definitional schemata of operationism and
logical positivism) on which I have been working
for 20 years. This analysiswhich promulgates a
perceptual theory of definitionshows that the psy-
chological studies must, in principle, comprise many
communities speaking parochial and largely incom-
mensurable languages, and thus that "paradigms,"
however general their intent, must remain local to
the participating adepts in given, specialized lan-
638 JULY 1978 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
guage communities. But it suggests many other
matters that strengthen and develop the present
position: for example, an analysis of the epistemic
consequences of such generally neglected matters as
leadership within language communities and of
differential competence in the use of community
language or a new view of the problems of com-
munity-language or "theory" appraisal.
KLAUS F. RIEGEL:
Let us briefly consider the psychology of the future,
in particular the concept of future itself or, more
generally, the concept of time.
When we talk about the future, we think gen-
erally about a line that runs through us from be-
hind toward the front. Behind us is the past, we
are in the present, and the future is ahead of us. In
experimental psychology, for instance, this kind of
ideawhich is essentially the idea of an absolute,
extrinsic timeis implemented when at time A you
have a subject rehearse a list of nonsense syllables;
at time B the subject relearns it or is tested on this
list; and then, on the basis of the difference be-
tween these two scores, you predict the subject's fu-
ture performance. The emphasis is on prediction.
This is the general model implied thus far in most
of psychology, including contemporary psychology.
It has also been implied in the studies and trend
analyses reported by the members of this panel.
Now fortunately we also have the clinical psy-
chologists; in particular we have the phenomenolo-
gists. They have taught us quite a different story.
Take the case of A, B, and C being ordered events
in time. If at time B you try to recollect event A,
A will be distorted, at least through the experience
of recall at time B. At time C, event A will be
doubly distorted; it will be distorted through events
B and C. In other words,' the past is never the
same: The past will always be reinterpreted from
every new moment in our life and experience.
If indeedand this goes against the traditional
concept of development in time employed by the
experimentalistspersons, for instance parents,
would recall precisely how their child was during
one of the earlier years, there must be something
very wrong with them; there will also be something
wrong with the child, and with the way they think
of the child. Real parents will change their inter-
pretations of the past as they and their children
change together toward the future.
What the phenomenological concept of time im-
pliesand let us call it "idealized event sequence"
isiindeed that we never enter into the same event
again, that we are in a continuous flux of changes.
In comparison, the experimentalist concept idealizes
the permanence of states. By and large, it is this
concept that has been dominating our thinking all
through psychology and our thinking about the
future of psychology.
The relational time concept of the phenomenolo-
gist, going back to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, rep-
resents a distortion too, however. It focuses on
idealized event sequences but does not necessarily
see the interdependence of these event sequences.
For instance, in studies of reminiscences, it may
disregard the particular historical time in which the
people lived. Consider, for instance, how your
grandmother or your mother went through school
and had to rehearse and learn every week, pages
and pages, let's say, from the Bible. When I went
to school I had to learn about two or three pages
of poetry every week. Who is doing that today?
The idealized event sequences of the phenomenolo-
gists often distort or disregard such changes in
society and history.
To summarize these issues, consider a comparison
with musical composition. The mechanistic tradi-
tion of psychologists uses the concept of absolute
time, which in music is represented by the clicks of
the metronome. The phenomenologists employ the
concept of relational time, which represents mono-
phonic sequence in music. And what we have to
learn, what the psychology of tomorrow has to do,
is to understand the complexity of musical composi-
tion, of polyphonic composition, and the time con-
cept implied by it.
A brief fictitious example involves a conductor
of an orchestra who is given a set of score sheets
and asked to conduct and to rehearse the score with
an orchestra about five minutes later. After vent-
ing justifiable frustration, the conductor is likely
to flip through the pages and to try to study how
the different instruments or the different voices, the
different event sequences, are interlaced, how they
blend into one another over time. The conductor
would, in other words, look horizontally through the
score sheets.
If you compare the conductor's performance with
that of a pianist faced with the same kind of situa-
tion, the latter would look vertically through the
pages; the pianist would look at a handful of notes
that are to be played to see how they change and
differ from one another. I claim that psychologists
have always acted like the pianist, if they have done
even that. What we have to learn is to become
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST JULY 1978 639
conductors of psychology. Here I agree, of course,
with Sigmund Koch. We have to see how through
our constructive efforts we create psychology and
the future of psychology.
For this reason I would also have to conclude that
the topic of our symposium is misleading. We can-
not and we should not even try to predict the
future. What matters is how we conduct the fu-
ture ; how can we construct a psychology that leads
us to something better, that leads us forward?
Let me give you three examples of my own ex-
perience, of what I believe should be done and what
I have been trying to do. First, the American Psy-
chologist, under the editorship of Charles Kiesler,
published (October 1976) a paper with the title
"The Dialectics of Human Development." In this
article I spelled out what I have been trying to say.
Second, I had a different experience with another
editor of an APA journal. I submitted what I still
believe is a very important paper. It deals with
temporal structure of dialogues and is very close to
the concept of time that I have been trying to de-
scribe. The editor was very intrigued and very
flattering. He told meindeed, he wrote to me
that he had planned to look at this paper only
briefly, but that once he had started he couldn't lay
it down, so he read it from the beginning to end.
However, the consultants were a different matter:
They turned it down. They turned it down be-
cause, they argued, there is no empirical foun-
dation, the ideas could not be formulated in a
manner accessible to empirical verification, the as-
sumptions were not spelled out, operationalization
was not possible, and what have you. They com-
pletely missed the theme of the article, and the
paper was flatly rejected. Nevertheless, this failure
encouraged me to incite a group of other people,
an informal group of dialectical psychologists, to
prepare a position paper directed against blind em-
piricism in psychology. This is what has to be
done; but it has not been done as yet.
Finally, in a constructive manner, I have written
a textbook that hasn't found a publisher yet. The
textbook will not be called An Introduction to Psy-
chology; it will not even be a textbook. I have
called it a countertext. What this countertext tries
to do is to bring sense back to psychology, to make
students understand what the issues in psychology
are. Rather than burying them and overwhelming
them with beautiful, multicolored, fancifully con-
structed textbooks that say everything about every-
thing but basically say nothing, we have to reedu-
cate and redirect our students toward a sense for
the significance of issues and toward an under-
standing of these issues within the historical and
social context.
This kind of orientation, this kind of implementa-
tion of thoughtsand I agree again with Sigmund
Kochrequires a commitment on the part of stu-
dents that we have to generate but that we have
failed to generate, not only in our students but in
all listeners and readers as well. I have called this
book Psychology, Man Amour and I have tried to
indicate what has to be done, though not necessarily
what will be done.
LEONARD G. RORER;
My focus will be on population, pollution, and re-
source depletion, and specifically on whether psy-
chology can change the behaviors on which our
future depends. My colleagues who spoke earlier
focused mostly on psychology itself; I would like to
go beyond that. Consider, for example, the gaso-
line shortage and embargo of the winter of 1974,
which yielded several relevant studies. One of
them (Mazur & Rosa, 1974), investigating the rela-
tionship between energy and life-style, found large
and significant correlations between energy con-
sumption and a long list of indices of the good life
but only if the correlations were calculated over a
list of 55 nations that included both developed and
underdeveloped countries. Within the group of na-
tions that might be considered developed, many of
those correlations were no longer significant. Of
those correlates that remained significant, two were
suicides per capita, which correlated with energy
consumption about .60, and the per capita rate of
divorce, which correlated .92 with the per capita
rate of energy consumptionshowing, apparently,
that it takes a lot of energy to get divorced. Be-
yond that, the correlations were low.
Roughly at the same time, the Ford Foundation
published a study (completed before the embargo)
suggesting sweeping changes in our energy policy.
As summarized in Science (Hammond, 1974), the
report recommended mandatory and gradually in-
creasing standards for automobiles, incentives for
more efficient heating and cooling, and revision of
regulatory and tax policies, so that, for example,
electric rates would no longer reward large con-
sumers.. Further, the report recommended direct
government subsidy of research into other energy
sources. The wisdom of this recommendation was
underscored by the effect of the embargo.
Some articles and comments illustrate the kinds
640 JULY 1978 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
of things that have happened since then. In Janu-
ary 197S, Philip Abelson editorialized in Science bri
the delay in tapping energy sources:
The public continues to enjoy adequate supplies of energy,
but severe shortages lie ahead. Consumption of energy goes
on unabated in spite of a recession, higher prices, and Presi-
dential appeals. But domestic reserves of hydrocarbons are
being depleted rapidly and the stage is being set for empty
gasoline pumps, cold homes, and large-scale unemployment
unless there is a drastic change in attitudes soon. (Abel-
son, 1975b, p. 17)
It is worthwhile to underscore attitudes. Abelson
went on to spell out in some detail the extent of our
energy usage at that time, and to point out that
some conservation is not enough. The Ford Founda-
tion report estimated that the effects of decreasing
our rate of growth from its present 4% or 5% to
2% would give us roughly one additional decade
for our energy reserves.
In March 1975, Science reported on a United
States Senate study that compiled forecasts of the
date of predicted oil exhaustion (Shapely, 1975).
The lowest (Hubbert) was 1998; the National
Academy of Sciences predicted 2 015; the National
Petroleum Council, 2 02 5; and the U.S. Geological
Survey gave an estimate of anywhere from 2015 to
somewhere beyond 2075.
May 30, 1975, carried another editorial in Sci-
ence (Abelson, 1975c), again pointing out that the
kinds of energy we use have changed and that with
those changes have come radical changes in society.
The parts of our country that have prospered have
depended on whether we were a coal-dependent
country, an oil-dependent country, or a natural-gas-
dependent country. Appalachia, which prospered
and then went through 20 years of depression, now
faces good prospects with the need for coal return-
ing.
A July 4, 1975, Science editorial stated:
The United States continues to drift toward some form of
drastic unpleasantness. Consumption of gasoline exceeds
that of a year ago. Domestic reserves and production of
oil and natural gas are steadily declining. Total U.S. in-
ventories of oil and its products are below those of a year
ago. Efforts aimed at liquifkation or gasification of coal
move slowly. Estimates of costs for full-scale plants climb
rapidly. . . . With its depleted resources of hydrocarbons the
United States is considerably more vulnerable to an oil
embargo today than it was in 1973. At that time Arab
production of oil was cut only 25 percent. The Arabs have
now accumulated large monetary reserves, and some could
easily forego all revenues for an extended period. In the
face of a weakening position there has been no U.S. program
to provide reserves. (Abelson, 197Sa, p. 11)
In March 1976, it was reported for the first time
that our use of imported oil exceeded our use of
domestically produced oil. In the spring (May 3,
1976), both the Wall Street Journal (Austin, 1976)
and Barren's (Bleiberg, 1976) reported on increas-
ing gasoline consumption. The head of the Federal
Energy Administration, Frank Zarb, was quoted
as follows:
We have been living on borrowed time for much too long.
. . . If the countries which sell us crude oil and petroleum
products decide to stop the clock again, we'll be in for a
crash refresher course in what life was like during the last
embargo. It will be the history of 1974 all over again.
But next time we won't just have long gasoline lines. In
fact, in some areas, we won't have any lines, because we
won't have any gasoline. And there will be other areas
regions where the generation of electricity depends on im-
ported residual oilwhere the lights may simply go out.
I want to emphasize that this is not idle doomsday talk
it is an all-too-real possibility. (Bleiberg, 1976, p. 7)
The reaction to the speech was negative. Barron's
pointed out that the stock market went down
drastically. Finally, just before I came to the con-
vention, 'Newsweek reported that Saudi Arabia has
said that it must cut its present output, which is at
the 8.5-million-barrels-a-day rate, to 5 million bar-
rels, because they do not wish to deplete their re-
sources at an unduly high rate.
The last paragraphs summarize only a few of
many similar articles. The focus in response to
these kinds of problems by the government has been
almost entirely technological. What seems signifi-
cant is that the change, from the curtailment of
energy consumption to going back to using it at
higher and higher rates, is a behavioral phenomenon
that might well be studied by psychologists. But,
in addition to this symposium, the program at this
convention includes only one paper session devoted
to behavioral technologies for conserving energy,
and one symposium that considered alternative fu-
tures. The last I knew, while the government was
spending money to develop alternative technologies,
there was no money either at the National Science
Foundation-RANN or at the Energy Research and
Development Administration for behavioral studies
to develop ways of adapting to lower energy con-
sumption.
Psychologists have not ignored the problem en-
tirely. Some of my colleagues have worked out
mathematical models showing that these kinds of
problems can be represented as w-person games, of
which the Prisoner's Dilemma Game is a special case
(Dawes, in press). The games have the following
form. I divide you into groups of eight, say, and
give you the following choice. I give you a red
chip and a blue chip, one of which you are going to
stick into an envelope, without letting anybody else
see which it is, and pass it in. If you put the blue
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST JULY 1978 641
chip in the envelope, I will pay you $20; but, if
you put the red chip in the envelope, I will pay you
$40. However, for each of the eight persons who
puts a red chip in the envelope, I will fine each per-
son $5. Clearly, it always pays you to put the red
chip in the envelope, even though the total accruing
to the group becomes less for each person who does
so. So if each of you behaves rationally in your
own interest and puts the red chip in the envelope,
you all end up losing money. That is the kind of
dilemma we face in all of the resource depletion
and pollution problems, and some experimental
work on it is now being done.
There have been some quite sensible attempts to
work out incentive systems to reduce energy con-
sumption. On the Santa Monica freeway a lane of
traffic was set aside to be used only by buses or by
automobiles with three or more people in them.
Apparently the intervention was only moderately
successful (at best) at the time of the oil embargo.
The latest reports indicate that the lane is prac-
tically unused, and that the commuters are becom-
ing progressively more frustrated and angry at not
being able to get into it with their individual cars.
It should be possible to work out some incentive
techniques for dealing with the gasoline shortage.
One could start by thinking about what people
wanted. An observer out on the highways would
come to the conclusion that what people want is to
be able to drive very fast. The "solution" that has
been adopted, namely, to cut the speed limit from
70 to 55 miles per hour (mph), goes directly in op-
position to this desire. Furthermore, the most op-
timistic kind of forecast for that limit, in terms of
savings, is something like 10%. For significant
savings, one would have to change either the auto-
mobiles that people driveone small car uses half,
or less than half, as much gasoline as one large gas-
guzzler, so that's a saving of 50% instead of 10%
or the average number of people who ride in a
carif people "doubled up," that likewise would be
a saving of 50% instead of 10%. Clearly, the maxi-
mum speed allowed should be contingent on gaso-
line consumption and the number of people in the
car. One could work out a series of variable speed
limits such that cars would be classified according to
the amount of gasoline they consume and would
then be given differential speed limits depending on
the class in which they fell, so that gas-guzzlers
would only be allowed to go 50 mph, while little
cars that don't use much gasoline would be allowed
to go 60 mph. Intermediates would be allowed 55
mph. Further, drivers could be allowed to go
faster if they had more people in the car: Perhaps
you would get another 5 mph for each additional
passenger in the car. A little car could go 70 mph
with three people in it; a gas-guzzler would have to
have five people to go this speed. In other words,
people would still be able to go 70 mph and gaso-
line consumption would be cut by something more
like 50% instead of 10%. This particular plan is
unlikely to be adopted, but it is offered in the hope
that it may stimulate others to develop plans that
will be.
My remarks have not shown how we as psycholo-
gists can solve the kinds of problems I have de-
scribed. That's because I don't know how we can
solve these problems. But I hope we will work on
them; because if present trends continue, and if
there is no significant technological breakthrough
on the energy sceneand none is on the horizon at
the momentthen the kinds of future activities my
colleagues have forecast that we as psychologists are
going to be involved in are going to seem rather
trivial and not a little irrelevant to the staggering
problems we will face.
VIRGINIA LOFTUS SENDERS:
We hear a lot these days about "the new conscious-
ness." The phrase conjures up images of young
people sitting cross-legged and chanting OM, and
indeed they are a manifestation of it, but I believe
that the new consciousness had its origins in li-
braries and laboratories as well as in ashrams, and
that it is affecting education, science, and scholar-
ship as well as the life-styles of our sons and
daughters. What is this new consciousness, where
did it come from, and where is it taking us?
We can define the new by contrasting it with the
old. Old consciousness was, in many senses, dual-
istic, and in the scientific enterprise it was charac-
terized by an unbreachable conceptual gulf between
the knower and the object of knowledge. Scientists
and other scholars studied the universe as if they
were outside of it; psychologists, whether intro-
spectionists or Watsonian behaviorists, approached
their subject as the study of "the other one." Hu-
manists talk of "the subject-object split," while
systems theorists describe the same phenomenon as
an open-loop systemthat is, a system in which in-
formation flows in only one direction, from the ob-
ject to be known to the investigator who seeks to
know.
This unverbalized, preconscious, pervasive sense
of separateness, of duality, was perhaps necessary
for the explosion of knowledge, science, and tech-
642 JULY 1978 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
nology that has characterized the last 200 years,
but it led to excesses. An early film from Pavlov's
laboratories shows a little boy from a Russian
orphan asylum with an experimentally installed
salivary fistula, drops of saliva running into a tube
where the investigator could count them. Rosalie
Raynor banged metal bars behind little Albert's
head and noted punctiliously that the fear general-
ized to Santa Claus masks. Finally, and perhaps
predictably, Nazi physicians committed unspeak-
able atrocities upon their concentration camp vic-
tims, all in the name of "science." The caricature
of the mad scientist is the reductio ad absurdum of
the detached investigator who pursues a research
problem mindless of its human consequences. The
dreams were arrogant and grand; science could
someday know everything about the universe, could,
in theory, reduce residual variance to zero, could
predict and manipulate with assurance the outcomes
of causally determined sequences of events.
The death knell to this kind of consciousness was
sounded very quietly, not in a commune but in a
laboratory. Though many of our new-consciousness
young people have never heard of it, Werner Heisen-
berg's formulation of the uncertainty principle was
(to mix a metaphor) the mustard seed that has
grown into a major scientific and cultural revolu-
tion. Of the principle and its implications, Heisen-
berg (1958) said,
This new situation becomes most obvious to us in science,
in which it turns out ... that we can no longer view "in
themselves" the building blocks of matter which were orig-
inally thought of as the last objective reality; that they re-
fuse to be fixed in any way in space and time; and that
basically we can only make our knowledge of these particles
the object of science. The aim of research is thus no longer
knowledge of the atoms and their motion "in themselves,"
separated from our experimental questioning; rather, right
from the beginning, we stand in the center of the confronta-
tion between nature and man, of which science, of course,
is only a part. The familiar classification of the world into
subject and object, inner and outer world, body and soul,
somehow no longer quite applies, and indeed leads to diffi-
culties. In science, also, the object of research is no longer
nature in itself but rather nature exposed to man's question-
ing, and to this extent man here also meets himself, (pp.
104-105)
By the symbol system we use to formulate our
questions, the questions that we ask, the values
that we bring to our search, and the instruments
with which we conduct it, we are co-creators of the
universe we study. In psychology, we are co-
creators of the behavior and mental life of our sub-
jects. We study a system of which we are a part;
we study it from within. (Incidentally, the clinicians
have known this for a long time. A Rorschach
protocol is not simply an objective datum about a
patient but a product of the interaction between
the patient and the tester. Clinicians know that it
is the interaction they record and interpret.)
Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of The
Limits to Growth (the Club of Rome Report;
Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972),
and his co-author, Lewis Perelman, refer to con-
sciousness that takes this kind of feedback into ac-
count as "ecological consciousness," "a holistic vi-
sion of on-going, worldwide life processes in syner-
getic combination" (Meadows & Perelman, 1973,
p. 12 1). In ecological consciousness, dualism gives
way to monism on many fronts. As Heisenberg
says, "The classification of the world into subject
and object, inner and outer world, body and soul,
somehow no longer applies." In systems terminol-
ogy, the feedback loop is closed; the system is
circular rather than linear.
We of my generation can understand and accept
these newer conceptions cognitively. I believe they
are becoming part of the preverbal awareness, the
way of thinking, the valuing process of people
younger than ourselves. Their numbers grow.
This shift of preverbal assumptions has occurred
not only in science but in many other academic
disciplines. I claim no direct knowledge of most of
these, but I am told that it characterizes, among
others, history, sociology, anthropology, and the
arts. Personally, I have been intrigued by the
parallelism between changes in the scientific world
view and those in theology. Do you remember the
excitement about the "death of God" some years
ago? The God who died then was an outsider God,
a God who bore to His creation a relation analogous
to that of the 19th-century scientist to his object of
study. He stood outside of His system, demon-
strating His existence by occasional violation of
His own laws to favor one or another of His human
creatures. Newer theology tends to avoid the noun
"God," but when human beings transcend the
limitations of their deterministic past, they manifest
what these new theologians see as divine. Faith
becomes horizontal rather than vertical. Humanity
co-creates itself, asserts this theology, in complete
agreement with the newer science. Incidentally,
this newer theology is much easier to reconcile with
Eastern religion than was the earlier version. Bud-
dhists thought in closed-loop systems thousands of
years before scientists invented the concept.
In summary, then, I believe that scientists and
scholars, as well as the child on the street, are
shifting to a new way of thinkinga way that is
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST JULY 1978 643
dynamic rather than static, closed-looped rather
than linear. And the process is accelerating. It is
rather as if we had been projecting a movie at the
rate of one frame per minute and were now engaged
in speeding it up. As every psychologist knows,
under these conditions there will come a critical
time at which the discrete will become continuous
and a whole new experience and new meaning will
occur.
What are the implications of this phenomenon?
Let me give some examples, one or two each from
research, therapy, and education.
In research, we are manifesting increasing con-
cern for the way we treat the people we study and
for the implications of our research. The fracas
about intelligence testing is an example of our
awakening awareness of the ways in which our
"objective" scientific findings shape our world as
well as describe it. Meadows and Perelman (1973)
point to the delayed feedback in our world system
as one of the factors leading to its inherent insta-
bility; research and program evaluation can be seen
as the scientists' contribution to decreasing the
delay in the feedback loop and thus stabilizing the
system.
Emphasis on ethical guidelines and the protec-
tion of animal and human subjects is increasing and
will continue to do so. This can hinder investiga-
gators, but it can also challenge them to develop
new methods of research within the constraints of
the new model.
I suggest, also, that we need and will see more
research on the effects of experimenter bias on re-
search outcomes, and since "we stand at the center
of the confrontation between nature and man,"
these investigations should be concerned with the
other sciences as well as with psychology.
In therapy, we took over from the past the medi-
cal model, which sees people as patientsthat is,
"passive
1
ones"and in so doing we created passive
people. The newer growth therapiesgrowth pro-
cessesassume that their participants have the
power and the responsibility to change their own
lives, and their participants accordingly manifest
the power and assume the responsibility. Therapists
and their clients increasingly become partners in the
task of growth. The status of expert will disap-
pearis disappearingand those who want growth
and health will seek out partners, co-workers, who
are good at helping them growwith or without
degrees or licenses. And I fear that our establish-
ment, guildwise, will fight them tooth and claw all
the way down the line!
In education, the duality between teacher and
learner is vanishing, as is the duality between learn-
ing and doing. We are all ignorant, we are all
knowledgeable, but in different domains. The in-
and-out-and-in pattern of education is becoming a
norm. And the young, in this rapidly changing sys-
tem, will have had experiences that their elders have
not been privileged to share. In Margaret Mead's
terms, we are shifting from a postfigurative culture,
in which the young look to the old to learn what
their life is to be, to the prefigurative culture, in
which the young must sometimes lead the old.
She says,
The development of preflgurational cultures will depend on
the existence of a continuing dialogue in which the young,
free to act on their own initiative, can lead their elders in
the direction of the unknown. Then the older generation
will have access to the new experiential knowledge, without
which no meaningful plans can be made. It is only with
the direct participation of the young, who have that knowl-
edge, that we can build a viable future. (Mead, 1Q70, p. 73)
Our future, then, is to be increasingly partici-
pant observers, participant experimenters, partici-
pant therapists, participant educators, co-creators
of our own and the world's future. And I submit
that if our questions shape our knowledge, and our
knowledge shapes our destiny, we can no longer
pretend that science is, can be, or should be value-
free. If humankind is to meet itself in its question-
ing of natureif / am to meet myselfthen I want
to like and value the self I meet.
My values? Compassion and enlightenment.
Compassion without enlightenment is little more
than well-intentioned bumbling; enlightenment
without compassion is callousness masquerading as
scientific objectivity. The future of psychology
must lie in the synthesis.
M. BEEWSTER SMITlt:
My remarks will touch on three themes. First a
few thoughts on how we think about the future,
cutting at a somewhat different angle from what we
have been hearing; second, some derivative specula-
tions about the world future and the national future,
in which whatever future psychology has will have
a place; and finally, a few speculations about the
future of psychology.
Personally I find John Platt's (1971) tripartite
way of thinking about the future a helpful starting
point. For any matter of human concern, he says,
there is a close-in future in which events that are
already in process can only just go on unfolding
what he calls the "inertial future." For the driver
644 JULY 1978 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
of a car, for example, only a very small chunk of
space-time may be involved, that in which a child
who runs out into the path of the car cannot be
avoided. For many topics, the inertial time span is
much wider; thus, the growth of the American
population is determined within a pretty narrow
range for several decades ahead by its present
structure.
At its further bound, this inertial future shades
into a contingent or conditional future, what John
Platt calls the "choice period," in which the out-
comes depend upon what we ourselves do now and
subsequently. The contingent future, in this way of
looking at things, is subject to cybernetic guidance.
It is the realm, not of soothsaying in either an ab-
solute or a probabilistic mode (this will happen, or
there is such-and-such a chance that it will happen)
but of "if-then" modes of prediction, that science
1
can help with and in which human action makes
a difference. Thus, in the example of the car and
the driver, given a little more time, the driver can
either brake the car or swerve to miss the child. If
we were to put sensible population and environ-
mental policies into effect now, we could perhaps
stabilize the human ecosystem within the next cen-
tury, but a continued no-policy of drift could lead
to irreversible deterioration in the same time span.
At its outer bound, this contingent or conditional
future shades into an uncertain future that is too
far remote from the present causally and func-
tionally for any kind of prediction, absolute or
contingent, to have a defensible theoretical or evi-
dential base. This future of uncertainty is a pro-
jection screen for our present hopes and anxieties.
We would all probably agree that psychology as
a social and a biological science should be primarily
concerned with the contingent future, the one that
we can do something about. Several of us have
been saying that psychology can indeed be martialed
to help us understand both what we want and the
"if-then" contingencies that we can then use to
produce the kind of future that we would like to
be part of. For matters that fall within the inertial
future, the best we can do is to anticipate as ac-
curately as we can what's happening and to brace
ourselves for it, try to adjust, and get ready to mop
up the consequences. But these activities are im-
portant, too. As for the uncertain future, that's
the appropriate locus for our positive and our nega-
tive Utopias. Our fantasies about the uncertain
future can be useful and important to us, especially
if they are worked out seriously as a way of getting
clear about what kind of future we really want and
what kinds we would like to avoid. This kind of
Utopian thinking, positive and negative, is po-
tentially quite helpful in guiding what we want to
do with the contingent future in which our choices
can make a predictable difference. I feel personally
grateful to Skinner (1948) for having worked out
his psychological Utopia in Walden Two, and I only
wish that more psychologists would come forward
with counter-Utopias of a different kind, equally in-
formed by psychology.
A great deal of our talk about "the shape of
things to come" deliberately confuses these three
futures, futures that we ought to distinguish be-
cause their causal-functional relationships to our
present situation, and therefore our volitional pps-
sibilities in regard to them, differ so radically. It's
a kind of rhetorical gambit of advocacy to mix up
these three futures. Thus, if our rhetoric is in the
service of positive advocacy, we overextend trend
lines out of the inertial future, where (like ballistic
trajectories) they really belong, in order to identify
what we claim to be a historical bandwagon, a wave
of the future. And, like the traditional Marxists,
we invite people to get with it and try to make the
prediction of Utopia come true. Or, in terms of
negative rhetoric, we project the present trend lines
into a horror story, like the National Safety Coun-
cil's regular predictions of highway deaths on holi-
days, or like the Club of Rome's analysis of the
limits to growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, &
Behrens, 1972 ). The implicit message here (some-
times the explicit one) is that, unless we do some-
thing, the outcome will be catastrophic. But so
long as self-confirming or self-refuting prophecies
provide the underlying rhetoric, we tend to be
lining up Pollyannas against Cassandras, and clear
thinking and intelligent decision and action are
likely to suffer.
In order to raise significant issues about the fu-
ture of our world and nation as a context for think-
ing about the future of psychology, I'd like to plug
a thought-provoking paperback by Robert Heil-
broner (1974) called An Inquiry Into the Human
Prospect. His book has been around for about 2
years, but the problems that he's talking about are
going to be around much longer. I have skimmed
through several pages of his summary chapter (pp.
127-136, passim) to extract the following quotes.
Here, I'm sounding much the same note as Leonard
Rorer, but in a broader context.
We are entering a period in which rapid population
growth, the presence of obliterative weapons, and dwindling
resources will bring international tensions to dangerous levels
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST JULY 1978 645
for an extended period. Indeed, there seems no reason for
these levels of danger to subside unless population equi-
librium is achieved and some rough measure of equity
reached in the distribution of wealth among nations, . . .
Whether such an equitable arrangement can be reached
1
at
least within the next several generationsis open to serious
doubt.
Under any and all assumptions, one irrefutable conclusion
remains. The industrial growth process, so central to the
economic and social life of capitalism and Western socialism
alike, will be forced to slow down, in all likelihood within
a generation or two, and will probably have to give way to
decline thereafter.
The myopia that confines the present vision of men to
the short-term future is not likely to disappear overnight.
. . . Therefore, the outlook is for what we may call "con-
vulsive change"change forced upon us by external events
rather than by conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than
by calculation. . . . Such negative feedbacks are likely to
exercise an all-important dampening effect on a crisis that
would otherwise in all probability overwhelm the slender
human capabilities for planned adjustment to the future.
However brutal these feedbacks, they are apt to prove effec-
tive in changing our attitudes as well as our actions, unlike
appeals to our collective foresight, such as the exhortations
of the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth.
From a period of harsh adjustment, I can see no realistic
escape. . . . We cannot reconcile the requirements for a
lengthy continuation of the present industrialization of the
globe with the capacity of existing resources or the fragile
biosphere to permit or tolerate the effects of that industrial-
ization. Nor is it easy to foresee a willing acquiescence of
humankind, individually or through its existing social or-
ganizations, in the alterations of lifeways that foresight
would dictate. If, then, by the question, Is there hope for
man?, we ask whether it is possible to meet the challenges
of the future without the payment of a fearful price, the
answer must be: No, there is no such hope.
I quoted Heilbroner at such length because I
think he identifies a relevant role for psychology
in the time to come. The seriousness of the chal-
lenges that we face, as Heilbroner argues persua-
sively, hinges on their strongly inertial components.
The stoic pessimism of his conclusion depends on
his taking a good deal of the psychology of human
nature as inertial, too, particularly what he refers
to as its myopia and its dependencypeople's
political dependency and unreadiness to take charge
of their own lives.
The crucial role of psychological assumptions and
the possible value of psychological knowledge is
highlighted when we contrast Heilbroner's pessi-
mism with John Platt's optimism, both futurolo-
gists sharing much the same view of the predica-
ment and the challenges that humankind now face.
Platt (1966) entitled an essay and the book that
contains it "The Step to Man." Writing before the
women's movement began to purge sexism from
our vocabulary, Platt used the phrase step to man to
symbolize his hope that people will rise to new
levels of humanity because they will have to. He
envisioned a revolution in culture and human na-
ture larger than the Neolithic revolution that in in-
troducing agriculture laid the basis for civilization,
saying in effect that if we are to avoid catastrophe,
this will occur because it has to occur. But he
leaves the details completely undeveloped. The
magic step remains imaginary. I see a large, clear,
important agenda for psychology in testing and per-
haps challenging Heilbroner's inertial assumptions
about human nature and in providing workable, con-
tingent, "if-then" detail that might take Platt's
optimistic assumptions out of the realm of Utopian
fantasy.
Now, what about psychology? I have several
small thoughts. One is responsive to the inertial
squeeze on academic psychology that we have all
been commenting on, coming from the passing of
the postwar baby boom and the near saturation by
the 18+ year-olds of 2-year and 4-year postsec-
ondary schools. We're all trying to adapt to that.
The facts of the academic market for 18+ year-olds
are inertial, but the impact on psychology can be
conditionalif we adopt a more proactive (not just
reactive) stance. The theme has already been
touched upon by Charles Kiesler. I think we might
take much more seriously the opportunities in con-
tinuing education, "life-long learning," making com-
mon cause here with institutions of higher education
that share our inertial squeeze and building upon
the strong public interest in psychology. The pub-
lic interest seems to be nearly insatiable, but we
have been meeting it mainly in inadequate, even ir-
responsible, ways. If we take the diagnosis of the
Carnegie Commission on Higher Education that the
4-year-college lockstep makes no good educational
sense, I think the APA and psychologists might in-
volve themselves much more vigorously in the cause
of continuing education.
The other theme I wish to pick up is one that
Virginia Senders emphasized. I wish I could see
the contingent steps more clearly than I do toward
a collaborative role for psychologists, the kind that
Leona Tyler (1973) talked about in her Presidential
Address several years ago, in which psychologists
function less as technocratic experts and more as
skilled and knowledgeable consultants and facili-
tators to ordinary citizens who are trying to solve
their own problems. Trends are discernible in this
direction, but the present financial reward system
doesn't seem very well designed to support them.
A final word before I yield the present to the
fut ure: Theorists of evolution tell us about the
adaptive advantages of heterogeneity. A heteroge-
neous population is one that does not put all its
646 JULY 1978 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
genetic eggs in one basket. There are strains in
the gene pool that are capable of rising to most un-
foreseen contingencies. If that analogy holds for
the case of psychology, psychology should be in a
remarkably advantageous position. Was there ever
a more heterogeneous discipline or profession?
(Here I am with Sigmund Koch.) We have often
tended to bemoan the fact, as it gives us trouble
in maintaining our sense of identity. I do not be-
moan it. In facing a future that will be difficult
and chancy for the world, for the human race, and
for psychology, we need to keep many options
open. We should therefore worry about bureau-
cratic pressures toward uniformity that affect our
training programs and our academic and profes-
sional practice. While we are rightly concerned
with responsibility, accountability, and standards
of quality, we know far too little and the challeges
are far too big for us to narrow our investments to
any one supposedly "true" path.
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