Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences最新文献

{"title":"When Criticism Fails: An Answer to Kelly (2026) on Debunking When Prophecy Fails","authors":"Stéphanie Baggio,&nbsp;Rémy Amouroux","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70076","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70076","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In his recent article, Kelly (2026) accuses Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter of intentionally misrepresenting their 1956 foundational study, <i>When Prophecy Fails</i>. While we acknowledge Kelly's contribution to the literature, we contest the interpretative leap from documenting misrepresentation to alleging intentional misconduct. To illustrate this point, we analysed Kelly's interpretation of Henry Riecken's role, showing how the same archival material can be used to support alternative plausible interpretations. In the absence of clear archival evidence directly supporting the allegation of intentional misconduct, we believe that the move from distortion to misconduct is insufficiently warranted. Our main concern with Kelly's article is therefore that it treats archival materials as if they could support the kind of interpretative closure associated with experimental proof. In doing so, his article risks limiting the very methodological dialogue the psychological humanities seek to foster. A historically reflexive and psychologically informed critique should preserve space for alternative explanations, especially where researchers' theoretical commitments may influence their interpretation of evidence. Allegations of intentional misconduct therefore require strong evidence and serious engagement with such alternatives. In the case of <i>When Prophecy Fails</i>, we believe that this standard has not been met.</p>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13660376/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149185152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Experiment as Spectacle: The Traitors and the Cultural Afterlives of Cold War Social Psychology","authors":"Chris Babits","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70072","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70072","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article examines the first British season of <i>The Traitors</i> through the cultural and historiographic afterlives of Cold War social psychology. Rather than treating the series as a simple popularization of canonical experiments, it argues that reality television operationalizes and intensifies the dramatic logics of mid-twentieth-century behavioral science. The studies of Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo emerged from postwar anxieties about authoritarianism, social cohesion, and moral responsibility under conditions of surveillance and pressure. Although the empirical authority of these experiments has been unsettled by ethical and methodological critique, their symbolic power has endured through textbooks, film, and mass media. <i>The Traitors</i> reanimates three tropes—conformity, obedience, and role internalization—within a competitive entertainment format structured around deception and elimination. Using a cultural-historical methodology that combines close textual reading with historiographic analysis, the article situates the program within a broader transformation in the governance of human experimentation. While ethical controversies in psychology contributed to the institutionalization of oversight through institutional review boards and principles of consent and participant protection, reality television operates under contractual neoliberal regimes that aestheticize rather than regulate risk. This comparison reveals how techniques once justified as instruments of knowledge production reappear as mechanisms of spectacle. By tracing these continuities, the study reframes reality television as a site where the ethical tensions and authority dynamics of Cold War social psychology are replayed for mass audiences.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149018226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Member News","authors":"Heather Murray","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70071","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70071","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148991843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Surveying the Economic Mind: George Katona and the Institutionalization of Psychological Economics at Michigan, 1946–1981","authors":"Aras Yolusever","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70070","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70070","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Standard histories of behavioral economics locate the field's origins in the heuristics-and-biases program of the 1970s, treating earlier attempts to join psychology and economics as a prehistory that failed to take root. This article reconstructs the most sustained of those earlier attempts: the psychological economics that George Katona (1901–1981) built at the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center between 1946 and 1981. Drawing on Katona's published writings, the institutional record of the Michigan surveys, and the contemporary debates they provoked, the article argues that Katona's program, although theory-driven and abductive in method, building theory inductively from survey observation and testing its predictions deductively, was institutionalized by its hosts and received by economics not as a body of theory but as a measurement apparatus: the Surveys of Consumers and the Index of Consumer Sentiment. This mode of institutionalization explains both the program's durability and its disciplinary marginality. Because psychological economics lived in an interdisciplinary survey organization rather than in economics departments, it survived the theoretical hostility of postwar economics; because that discipline admitted only theory deduced from the postulates of rational choice, it could evaluate the program's predictions but never its theory; and because the program's survival never depended on winning that evaluation, it failed to reproduce itself as an economic specialty, and its data outlived its ideas. The Michigan case, the article concludes, shows that the disciplinary fortunes of psychology within economics have turned as much on instruments, institutions, and rival logics of inquiry as on arguments.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148931561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America By Madeleine Baker, Harvard University Press, 2025. 337 pp. $35 (cloth); $25.95 (paper); $19.25 (ebook). ISBN: 9780674293601","authors":"Mike Rifino","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.70069","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148849160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evolutionary Theories of Emotion in Italian Psychophysiology: Reception, Critique, and Influence, 1880–1920","authors":"David Ceccarelli,&nbsp;Stefano Canali","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70068","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70068","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines how Italian psychophysiologists engaged with Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory of the emotions (ETE) between 1880 and 1920. Darwin's work on the natural history of emotions converged with a vibrant tradition of experimental psychophysiology that embodied Italian Positivism's scientific ambitions. The article investigates how the reception of Darwin's ETE in post-unification Italy intersected with the local construction of “emotion” as a physiological and experimental object. It first traces the dissemination of Darwin's ideas through key venues such as the <i>Rivista di Filosofia Scientifica</i>, which mediated between evolutionary biology and emerging psychological research. It then examines how Italian researchers operationalized emotion as a physiological object, employing experimental methods to study its somatic expressions. Finally, it analyzes the critiques directed at Darwin's model—particularly its limited account of autonomic functions and its reliance on historical reconstructions—and shows how these reflected a shift toward anatomo-functional approaches and disciplinary autonomy.</p>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jhbs.70068","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148833313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sex Isn't Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary, By Beans Velocci, Duke University Press, 2026. 308 pp. ISBN 978149033028","authors":"Peter Hegarty","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.70067","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148753645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shameful Sciences: Eugenics and Social Darwinism in American Psychology By \u0000 Oksana Yakushko, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026. 218 pp. $40.95. ISBN: 978-1-53-815491-5","authors":"Nadine Weidman","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.70066","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;It is a vital but usually thankless task to get the American Psychological Association (APA) to own up to the cruelties that psychologists have helped to propagate. APA-sanctioned histories prefer to dwell on the organization's progressive legacy rather than on, say, psychologists’ decades-long involvement in the torture and abuse of political prisoners. In her new book, the clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Oksana Yakushko takes up this necessary task by turning the spotlight on psychology's support of eugenics over the past century or more. To historians acquainted with the rich and voluminous historical literature on eugenics and on scientific racism and sexism, Yakushko's book will not come as news. But to the clinicians, psychology students, and psychotherapists who seem to be the book's likely audience, her examination of these “shameful sciences” (a phrase she borrows from Frantz Fanon) may well be revelatory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book begins by defining eugenics as the application and operationalization of the Social Darwinist ideal of “survival of the fittest.” Eugenics aimed to “expedite” human evolution by controlling reproduction through a variety of means: forced sterilization, segregation and institutionalization of the “unfit,” marriage restriction and anti-immigration legislation. But beyond this strict definition Yakushko often broadens the term to refer to any hereditarian, evolutionary, or Darwinian claim applied to human beings, or to any attempt to predict and control human behavior. (Thus, sociobiology is “rebranded eugenics,” p. 48.) Such an expansive definition underscores the ubiquity of evolutionary claims and assumptions in psychology in its bid to be considered a “real science,” but the broad-brush approach sidesteps two questions that have engaged historians. First, what do we mean when we call something “eugenics”: what do we gain and what do we conceal by calling a practice “eugenics” (see Paul &lt;span&gt;1998&lt;/span&gt;)? Second, have psychologists been more eugenically inclined than other scientists such as geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists, and if so, why should this be (see Winston &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;, 730–749)? Yakushko neither raises nor answers these questions. Instead, she wants to persuade her readers that “eugenics,” in this broad sense, was foundational to American psychology in its first 50 years (1890–1940) and is still present in the science even into the 21st century—and not just in its lunatic fringe, but in the work of the most celebrated and central contributors to the discipline. This is history as outraged critique, with little room for nuance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book is divided into seven somewhat repetitive and uneven chapters. Chapter one attacks the ideology of “scientism”—the “commandment” never to question science, which Yakushko observes is endemic in psychology. Her critique is an important one, though it is problematic at present, when the current US regime has eviscerated science funding and has m","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jhbs.70066","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148615428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Voices in Dialogue: Unpublished Correspondence Between Walter Blumenfeld (Peru) and Abraham Maslow (United States)","authors":"Tomás Caycho-Rodríguez,&nbsp;Ramón León,&nbsp;Gonzalo Salas,&nbsp;Walter L. Arias Gallegos,&nbsp;Arturo Orbegoso-Galarza,&nbsp;Nicole Oré-Kovacs","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70063","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70063","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Correspondence between two people reveals their subjectivity and promotes knowledge acquisition beyond the academic realm. Abraham Maslow is a well-known figure in the academic world, and much has been written about his life, but little is known about his epistolary relationship with Walter Blumenfeld, a German psychologist who settled in Peru in 1935 and is considered the founder of scientific psychology in that country. This article analyzes the content of the 13 letters that Maslow and Blumenfeld wrote to each other between 1955 and 1959. It begins by presenting the life and work of each of them, and then reviews the letters in chronological order. This analysis reflects the personal and academic motivations of the two correspondents, who never met in person. They shared common interests, despite coming from different schools of thought (although not polar opposites), as they agreed on their holistic and molar perspective of psychology.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148449782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Psychologia Anthropologica to Psychotherapeutics: A Reconstruction of the Development of the Idea of Medical Psychology From the 16th to the 19th Century","authors":"Piotr Artysiewicz,&nbsp;Jan Kornaj","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70064","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70064","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The article undertakes a historical analysis of the concepts of psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy, assuming that, despite current institutional differences, they share a common interest in the soul or mind. The aim of this paper is to present an alternative path for the development of psychotherapy as a practical continuation of the concept of <i>psychologia anthropologica</i> introduced by Otto Casmann in the late 16th century. The text traces the conceptual evolution from the first appearances of the term <i>Psychologia</i>, Otto Casmann's two-volume treatise (<i>Psychologia anthropologica</i>, 1594, 1596), through the conception of the idea of medical psychology, to the emergence of the term <i>Psychotherapy</i> in the 19th century. Unlike existing studies that analyze the history of these categories separately, this article considers them within a single, coherent developmental process. The analysis is framed within the perspective of the history of ideas and focuses on the intellectual continuity between theoretical psychology and practical medical psychology, thus revealing the long-term transformation of ideas from the 16th to the 19th century.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2026-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148425335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}