Title: What's Wrong with Schools of Psychology?: A Cluster Analysis of Psychological Review, 1894-1913.

 

Abstract: It is conventional to discuss American psychology around the turn of the 20th century in terms of the various "schools" that divided the discipline: structuralism, functionalism and, later, behaviorism, Gestalt, etc. Although some prominent psychologists of the era talked explicitly in terms of "schools," a great number of prominent psychologists did not fit comfortably into any of the schools. These included many perception researchers, philosophical psychologists, and investigators of pain and emotion. Is there a way to describe the psychological landscape of that time in a more inclusive way, a more empirically-driven way, and, if we do so, what will become of the traditional "schools"? To answer this question, we took every substantive article from the most important journal of the era, Psychological Review, from its inception in 1894 until 1913 and subjected the content words of each article to a series of cluster analyses. These revealed (1) which sets of articles clustered together on a year-by-year basis, and (2) what sorts of "genres" of psychology (as distinct from "schools") rose, fell, and endured over the course of the 20-year period. The results showed that the "schools" of psychology were only one part of what was going on in the discipline at the time, and that some fascinating groupings of psychologists have been overlooked by traditional descriptions of the field.