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1.2 PSYCHOLOGY DIVIDED 11

Depending on one’s viewpoint, Freud’s was a pessimis tic or realistic perspective on the human mind.

the emergence of a psychology that seemed to hold significant implications for many areas of life, espe cially among those who had a definite view as to the shape of the future. Personality psychology was borne out of these wider developments in psychology and society. SECTION SUMMARY • The concept of personality has long fascinated intellectuals, and is present throughout art, litera ture, and politics. • Books specifically on personality were published from the late 1930s, establishing the field as a sci entific discipline. • Wider afield in psychology, psychodynamic and behavioural perspectives emerged and, although they did not focus specifically on personality, they had important implications. • From its earliest days, some theorists took a biolog ical and experimental approach to understanding how and why people differ in their typical ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. • Personality psychology is a generalist area of psy chology because it entails consideration of all fac tors and processes of the whole person.

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1.1.2 IMPLICATIONS/ APPLICATIONS OF THEORIES

Many people with a political inclination saw the pros pects of a newly emerging psychological science as offering the tools necessary to socially engineer soci ety for the better, as they perceived matters, whether for humanitarian (conflict reduction) or commercial (e.g. advertising) gain. For example, from the begin ning of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Vladimir Lenin was eager to use behavioural technology to engineer the new ‘Soviet Man’ who would embody and enable the communistic manifesto—we return to this theme when we discuss the work of the pioneer of conditioning, Ivan Pavlov. In the US, behavioural tools were used to shape the consumer by ‘scientific’ marketing and advertising—we discuss this further when we consider the work of the behaviourist John B. Watson in Chapter 3. Others feared what this new science might mean for philosophical notions of free will and self-determination, and what all that meant for how human individuals were conceived and treated (e.g. human rights). What excited many was

1.2 PSYCHOLOGY DIVIDED

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Often, we achieve greater understanding of a topic by observing contrasts. This is especially true when we want to know how personality psychology differs from general psychology. To start, it is important to know that two scientific disciplines, or ‘ schools ’, have long existed to divide psychology. The first psychological laboratories, Wilhelm Wundt’s psychophysical laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, and Francis Galton’s psychometric labora tory in London, UK (Figure 1.1), established different ways of measuring psychological factors and under standing their nature. The first approach (Wundt) is based on experimental methods where average

performance is the main ( dependent variable ) focus of interest. It is concerned with testing the effects of different ‘treatments’ or ‘conditions’ (i.e. independent variables ), with variance attributable to differences between experimental participants assigned to sta tistical ‘error’, or ‘residual variance’—sometimes even called statistical ‘noise’, or ‘nuisance variance’. The sec ond approach (Galton) is specifically interested in the variance observed, reflecting individual differences between people—variance is not seen as nuisance/ noise/error but as the focal variable of interest. These separate traditions came to characterize the two dis ciplines of scientific psychology, as Cronbach (1957)

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