An Academic Pack Rat

I was reading Mischel's column in the November APS Observer. In that column, Mischel speculated about why psychologists reviewing grants are so tough on each other. He noted that it is relatively easy to judge the methodology of a study, but that it is a lot more difficult to judge the importance of the work within the larger context.

Mischel referenced a 1973 American Psychologist article by Cartwright, Determinants of scientific progress. So, I walked out of my office into the lounge where we keep our American Psychologists and picked up Volume 23, Number 3 (March, 1973) and opened it up to page 222. Our in-house collection goes back to 1955 and is largely complete. It represents the personal collections of several faculty over many years.

Next, I read Cartwright's article which is about the risky shift and how it became an important topic in social psychology. Cartwright wrote (p. 223), "Interest in the field [the risky shift] was heightened further by the publication of a popular social psychology text by Brown (1965), which devoted an entire chapter to this research and proposed an ingenious explanatory scheme to account for the major results known at the time."

It just so happens that when I took social psychology in 1970 as my second-ever psychology course, Brown's text was the one used. I walked over to my bookshelf, picked up the volume and found the chapter, Group Dynamics, and read the several pages on Stoner's original research on what is now called the risky shift.

Then, I went to my one of my file cabinets and retrieved my notebook from that 1970 class. On May 4, 1970 we discussed in class what Brown called Stoner problems in the text. Certainly, I did not recall that class or our discussion. A few pages later, I noted Stoner's name among the others the class was supposed to know for the final exam. (The other names for that chapter were Sherif, Asch, and Bales.)

While scanning my old notebook I was struck by how many topics that had been covered in that class were now totally familiar to me: Calhoun's rat crowding study, LeBoeuf's elephant seals, Harlow's attachment research, Heider's balance theory, Gestalt psychology, the founding of the Royal Society, and many more.

When I first read Mischel's column and Cartwright's article, I wondered what I was doing in March, 1973. I recall I was a senior finishing up my undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Baltimore. Certainly, I was not thinking about what makes a particular piece of scientific research important. The other thing I thought of was how nice it is to have old materials at hand. It reinforces my pack rat tendencies.