A Novel History of Psychology

BOOK REVIEW: Vanessa L. Ryan, Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)

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Science and (the study of) literature are growing closer together.

From Stanford's Literary Lab and a recent New York Times piece on the Digital Humanities to reading Austen in an MRI machine and so-called "Literary Darwinism," there's both controversy and a certain cache (and maybe even a little cash) in bringing scientific techniques and the study of literature closer together.

This is your brain on Austen (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/images/mri_reading_news.jpg)

So what about the study of science and the study of literature? History of science, say, and literary history? The short answer is that it's happening in English departments, but not so much in History. Why? More on that below.

Work on the interplay between science and literature has been dominated by scholars of the Victorian novel. Gillian Beer, George Levine, Nicholas Dames, Judith Ryan – all are Victorianists who put literature into dialogue with contemporaneous scientific ideas ranging from natural history to experimental psychology.

Now, with Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel—just out from Johns Hopkins University Press—Vanessa Ryan adds a new voice, and a new emphasis on the (pre-Freudian) unconscious, to the mix.

Source: http://payload56.cargocollective.com/1/4/138891/3422143/thinkingwithoutboth.jpg

Claiming to recover "a Victorian prehistory of neural science largely forgotten by cognitive scientists today" (2), Ryan sinks her teeth into both received ideas about the Victorian novel and disciplinary histories of the rise of the "New Psychology." Its roster will be familiar to both literary scholars—Eliot, Meredith, James—and historians of science—Carpenter, Spencer, the other James.

Of course, part of the reason it's scholars like Ryan examining the tangled literary-scientific web of the Victorian period—and not, or at least not nearly as much, historians—is that criticism takes training. Ryan's attention to style and form has no parallel in books by historians (of science). Sure, historians will gripe that history takes training, too, and that Ryan plays fast and loose in certain places. I, for one, found the claim that the "new psychology" was "anxious to embrace opposed and less reputable opinions" (41) a little confusing.

But overall, I think the critics clearly win the day in the literary-historical treatment of the relationship between science and literature—a state of affairs that wouldn't have been obvious a quarter-century ago. With the rise of "New Historicism" and the impact of the "Linguistic Turn" in the 1980s, critics and (intellectual) historians crossed paths on the terrain of language and meaning. Today, literary history is going strong, while (intellectual) historians who mention tropes—or read novels—are few and far between.

Source: http://ianhesketh.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/history-and-theory1.jpg

It's what makes me grateful for books like Ryan's. But even if historians never take up literature in a sustained way, not all of Thinking Without Thinking is off limits as an exemplar. It's when Ryan finds a Victorian psychologist, James Sully, writing about George Eliot in the journal Mind that the book comes closest to history (of science).*

As Ryan sees it, Sully's essay on Eliot "is an early form of the current interest in 'what novels do,' as opposed to 'what a novel is.'" Novelists like George Eliot are interesting, as both Sully and Ryan see it, "not just for the way in which they narrate the mind but also for the way they seek to engage the psychology of the reader" (165).

We're not far from Leah Price's How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, and indeed much of the sharp edge of historicism as it's currently practiced in English departments is something historians of science (and pragmatists) can get behind. After all, we moved beyond demarcation to sensible effects ourselves—and, insofar as we're now returning to the demarcation problem, we've done so in terms of the stakes and sensible effects of "what a science is."

Another way to cast Ryan's accomplishment—one to which she seems amenable herself—would be to say that she has historicized a hundred-year-old version of the science-literature hybrid with which I began this post. Today, (some) scholars are asking what novels do by scanning readers' brains and/or telling evolutionary just-so stories; this is, in a sense, the analogue of Sully's reading of Eliot in terms of the prevailing psychological theories of his own day.

Let me conclude my thoughts on Ryan's excellent book with something that caught my eye the moment it arrived. Ryan's title rang a bell and I wasn't sure why—until I Googled it. In this day and age, I have to assume that books don't share (parts of) titles with international bestsellers by chance. As I suggested in a previous post, books on brains have fared well in the market defined by Malcolm Gladwell.

Source: http://www.gladwell.com/media/large/mtg_bw.jpg

So, what gives? Well, per my penultimate point, we might see Ryan's book as unpacking a previous moment in which the purveyors of psychological theories interacted with authors, critics, and the market for their work. It's no surprise, in an era in which (certain) sciences sell, that we've turned to the past lives of those sciences and those of their past liaisons that parallel our own.

But I think we might go even further. When Ryan takes seriously the interaction between psychological theory, literary criticism, and Victorian novels, she shows how all three mutually built and defined a shared vocabulary of method with respect to the mind and its potential. Both science and fiction were imagined as "experimental," different means of what Darwin once described as "attacking the citadel."

The popularity of authors like Gladwell and Gilbert, the funding of major initiatives like Europe's Human Brain Project, and the ubiquity of fMRI suggest that mental theory's in a moment of foment. That prominence can help explain the attention scholars and historian are paying to the history of mental science, but that work can help us reflect back on our present obsessions in turn.

HBP-videoverview from Human Brain Project on Vimeo.

We might keep an eye out, as Ryan does, for Victorian convergences that look like what we're seeing today, asking questions about the motives that produced them and the vocabularies that resulted. But we might also ask Victorian questions of our own time. Specifically, how might the emergence of "neurocriticism" be impacting—negatively or positively, for better or for worse—the practices of literary production today?

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*In fact, an earlier version of this chapter of Ryan's book was published in the Journal of the HIstory of Ideas in 2009. 

Advertising Psychology—or an Advertising Psychologist?

A funny thing happened during the Super Bowl. No, not that thing. Yes, the 34-minute power outage brought a lot of issues into focus—issues linked to the "Sandy Studies" Lee proposed in the hurricane's wake (and is now teaching). But I have a different sense of power in mind—the power of (academic) science in the marketplace.

On Sunday, Prudential aired a thirty-second spot (that could've cost up to $4,000,000!) advertising its retirement planning services. The ad featured a "real-life experiment" (their term, from the video's description) emceed by a real-life academic scientist: social psychologist, bestselling author, and Harvard Professor Daniel T. Gilbert.

Details of the proceedings are fleshed out in both the one-minute and behind-the-scenes expansions of the original spot. Some folks—though surprisingly few on Twitter, and comments are disabled for the video—might be curious why Gilbert got involved. This is certainly the first academic I've seen in a pretty straightforward network advertisement (and a Super Bowl one, no less).* 

But for those of us interested in the authority (and marketability) of science, the "why" question matters more with respect to Prudential than Gilbert. If you're a company, why run such an "experiment"? Why this "experiment"? And why film it, rather than use it behind the scenes?

Because it's not an experiment—at least not in the sense it seems to be. 

So what's going on here? In the voiceover for the "behind the scenes" version of the ad, the company gives an account of the motivation and setup for the conceit: 

Today's generation is living seven years longer than the previous one. So how do you get people to start thinking about living longer, and what it means for their retirement? Well, we built an eleven-hundred square foot wall and conducted an experiment. With the help of Professor Daniel Gilbert, and the city of Austin, Texas, we asked people to place a sticker next to the age of the oldest person they've known. And they did. 

When all the stickers were up, participants were asked how they felt about "this longer life that lay ahead of them." The responses were predictable. "It's really really true: people can expect to live to be a hundred," said one, while another felt the display gave him "every reason to believe" he'd hit 100 himself. "I need to start thinking about retirement like, now," said another.

And that was the hook: "We're living longer than ever," the ad concluded, "and yet the official retirement age hasn't changed. This is the challenge—and opportunity—of living longer, and this is where Prudential can help." But was all of this demonstrated ("brought to life," as they put it) by the "experiment" Gilbert and Prudential conducted?

The easy answer is: "No."

The experiment itself provides no evidence that "we're living longer than ever," nor does it furnish the sort of data about average lifespan or life expectancy with which we might reasonably make decisions about our own savings and investments. Would the results of such a survey have been any different a century ago, when the average lifespan was considerably lower? Maybe, maybe not—we have no idea.

Rather than excluding outliers, Gilbert's setup celebrates them. And that's the point. Prudential isn't interested in furnishing data for making informed decisions. As they put it themselves, they just want "people to start thinking about living longer, and what it means for their retirement." If you think you might live to a hundred, you'll sock more away (with Prudential) today. And remembering Grandma's 93rd birthday puts us in that frame of mind. 

That's how Gilbert sees it, too. Here's how he described what they were up to in his plug for the video on Twitter:

Source: https://twitter.com/DanTGilbert/status/298231269957976065

Temporal discounting is what accounts for our failure to invest in Prudential save for retirement. It's something academics like Gilbert know a good deal about—and something companies like Prudential are increasingly interested in. This is where we start to understand how these two parties came together in a Super Bowl ad—to put scientific ideas about discounting to work in a very real sense.

What's at issue is the fact that we don't discount the future in the simple, exponential manner that rationality seems to dictate and economists used to assume. Rather, we behave irrationally—and, since the 1970s, economists, decision theorists, and cognitive scientists have been coming together under the banner of "behavioral economics" (and, more recently, "neuroeconomics") to figure out why. (Here's a great, recent overview of the field.)

Since Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published the work that eventually won a Nobel Prize, scholars have continued to show that we tend to value (and undervalue) things in ways that are both irrational and—and this is the key—predictable. This is the idea behind behavioral economist Dan Ariely's bestselling book, Predictably Irrational, and it's the sort of reasoning that gives the counterintuitive punch to Freakonomics et al.

What does all this have to do with Gilbert and the Super Bowl? Well, this is the world Gilbert lives in. His bestselling book, Stumbling on Happiness, provides similarly fascinating stories about how we so often fail to understand what makes us happy (and behave in ways you wouldn't expect). And its based on the well-regarded research on "affective forecasting" that got him a job at Harvard.

Source: http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/gilbert/

And, as it turns out, there's an increasing market for that kind of knowledge. Perhaps the most obvious way to sell it is in book-form, which is what "the Gladwell industry" I wrote about a few months ago (in connection with Jonah Lehrer) is all about. And who blurbed Gilbert's book? Who do you think? There's a lot of money—and lecturing—in behavioral economics. And a lot of fun!

Another interested group includes "non-profits, governments and international agencies," and some academics—like Harvard's Sendhil Mullainathan and his "ideas42" project—are providing them with expertise on how psychology and economics interact. The policy relevance of behavioral economics (in the form of Nudge) was another one of the topics I covered when I wrote about Jonah Lehrer. 

The last (and to some, most pernicious) market is the business community. When Kahneman gave a two-day "Master Class" in Napa on the topic of "Thinking about Thinking," the list of participants was a who's-who like no other—"a microcosm of the recently dominant sector of American business," as the organizer billed it. Predicting how people will spend their money is, it turns out, of great interest to the founders of Amazon and Google.

Notable Kahneman fans (Source: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kahneman07/kahneman07_index.html)

None of this is new. A 1996 article by our friend Malcolm Gladwell—tellingly titled "The Science of Shopping"—makes that clear: "The practice of prying into the minds and habits of American consumers," he wrote, "is now a multibillion-dollar business." Behavioral economics has never been hotter, and that extends to all the markets mentioned above. 

But putting an academic in an advertisement – that seems new. So why do it? This is where it matters that the experiment in the ad wasn't what it seemed. Prudential doesn't care how old people's grandparents are, and, if they did, they wouldn't hire Gilbert—a psychologist—to figure it out. What they care about is what people think about getting older—and how we can make them think about it in such a way as to invest more in preparation for it. 

And that, as it turns out, is something Gilbert's an expert at. As he told Business Insider last month: "The single best way to make predictions about what you're going to want in the future isn't to imagine yourself in the future," says Gilbert. "It's to look at other people who are in the very future you're imagining." So an ad that celebrates anomalously old people might steer us toward imagining ourselves in their shoes—and wanting to be ready for it. 

But still: why do it as an experiment? This is pure speculation, but—since we can assume every part of that ad was market-tested and focus-grouped—it seems to say that experiments sell. And not just as data: it seems like the process itself—design, setup, participation, analysis—is a marketable move (maybe as long as it features a diverse group of attractive people in a sunny environment?). Prudential's experiment, then, was an experiment in marketing.

Is this a new window onto the relationship between (academic) science and capitalism (as we've discussed here before)? I'm not sure. Is it a good sign (or a bad one, for that matter?) for the marketability and authority of academic science more generally? Again, no idea. But it seems worthy of note that behavioral economics and social psychology—long a staple of both bestseller lists and corporate board-rooms—had a prominent (if brief) methodological moment in the sun. 

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*Can anyone think of other examples, either product endorsements or primetime promotions? 

Dragons in the Museum

In Berlin, they keep dragons in the museum. Right next to the lions. And the aurochs.

See for yourself.

(The dragons are the strange-looking cat creatures....)

I recently* viewed the displays at the Pergamon Museum (named for the enormous alter in its first room, more on that later), and found them, once again, entrancing. Only the British Museum's artifacts compare with the Pergamon treasures.

I arrived at the museum with some new mental baggage and ended up enjoying my visit all the more. Keep reading for more Babylonian aurochs, a king's bodyguards, a few gods, and a tip to try on your next museum excursion.



Here's a closer look at one of those aurochs.

Beautiful, right? And well preserved for something from the sixth century B.C.

But, as it happens, this auroch doesn't only hail from sixth century B.C. Babyon. It's also a mid-twentieth century creature---one built from old remains, but updated with contemporary (German) skill and creativity.

Here, without such updating, and preserved behind glass, is a more fully sixth century auroch.

Not so sharp, nor so saturated with color, and flaky in a literal sense, but still the same animal.

Undoubtedly some will see these two and think: what a shame that the original wall has been perverted by modern hands (by its reconstruction, first, and then by subsequent touchings up). And they will have a point. There is, as a historian of archaeology who I know argues, a very real beauty in the unbuilt wall---in the boxes of wall bits not reconstructed, but carefully organized and labeled in an effort to faithfully document the past. Those bits have a stronger claim on us as mechanically objective, as being less skewed or altered by interpretation and handling.

But I must admit that I found the 'perversions' to be one of the most exciting parts of those aurochs and their neighbors. Here I stood, gazing from the twenty-first century at a hybrid of the twentieth century C.E. and the sixth century B.C. What a glorious confusion of times!

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I don't have many tricks when it comes to museum visits, but the few I have I stick to. First, I never listen to pre-recorded guides and seldom follow human guides---there's no good reason for this. I'm just stubborn: I'll find my own way though the museum, thank you. Yet I prefer to go museums with at least one friend. I first came to love art museums when an old college roommate taught me his trick: in every room, you have to choose a painting (sculture, artifact, what have you) that stirs your passions, and then you have to share your choice. Choosing to love (or hate) a precious museum piece proved empowering. Once I had the capacity to dislike "art," I became capable of loving it. I have since passed this trick along to many others.

Looking at those aurochs, I realized I had stumbled onto a new trick: look for curators' and scientists' hands in the museum, and enjoy their work alongside the work of those responsible for the original artifacts. We've been talking about museums on the blog in the last few months (here and here), and I owe my new trick to Lukas, but not because of his blog entries.

Last September's issue of Isis featured Lukas' "Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life." In that article, Lukas argues that dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History ought to be understood as mixed-media displays, meant to awe and attract crowds with their sculptural "iconicity" while also exhibiting the bones (objective artifacts) themselves. It's a lovely essay, complete with a fascinating section on the way that AMNH curators used the bones to test out theories of dinosaur structure and consider the question of dinosaur's distant progeny (birds or reptiles). But what I loved most was the way that thinking about the objects as mixed media turned the focus back on the curators, and on the work of science (and art and invention) that necessarily goes along with museum work.

So when I see these guys (some of my all time favorites),

I can appreciate them all the more, as hybrids, derived from this guy, but enhanced modern hands (the German wikipedia page has more detail on exactly what those modern hands did):

The Pergamon museum also featured another impressive reproduction, this one by Yadegar Asisi, the latest of many attempts to complete the "Great Frieze" of the Pergamon Altar.

Thus Asisi began with these gods at war:

And created a full-fledged battle scene:

In such efforts, the artist/scholar/scientist stands out. We even know his name. What I find particularly delightful, however, is the realization that many skilled, clever, thinking hands fill museums with many, many other hybrids too, just waiting for us to discover them anew.


*Well, it was a couple months ago now, but that's recent in historical terms.