The Story of Psychology (98 page)

For yet another, cognitive psychology had to devise a modern equivalent of will to account for the phenomenon of decision making, observed in innumerable studies of thinking and problem solving. Artificial intelligence experts refer to the “executive functions” of programs that simulate thinking; that is, the parts of such programs that weigh the results achieved at any point and determine what steps to take next. Some theorists say that the human mind, likewise, has executive machinery that makes decisions. But the decisions made by an AI program are fully predictable, while predictions of decisions of a human being are often wrong. Why? Is there, after all, some area of freedom within human choice, some kind of free will within voluntary control? We will look further into this enigma in the final chapter; for now, it is enough to note that whether one views decision making as a fully predictable executive process or as a voluntary act, its motivation is of cognitive origin.
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Murray suggested in the 1930s that social factors are often a source of motivation, but the suggestion lay fallow; in the 1950s, with the growth of social psychology and humanistic psychology, psychologists became interested in “social motivation.”
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This was an important component of an integrated theory of motivation put forward in 1954 by Abraham Maslow, the leader of the humanistic psychology movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Maslow (1908–1970) was a complex, enthusiastic, and thoughtful man whose life had well fitted him to the task of theorizing about human motivations. One of seven children of an immigrant family in Brooklyn, he was an unhappy, neurotic child, and a chronic outsider. This motivated him to school achievement of a high order, largely overcoming his unhappiness and isolation. Moving upward through the academic ranks at Teachers College, Brooklyn College, and Brandeis, he worked closely with a variety of colleagues—behaviorists, animal psychologists, a leading neurologist, Gestaltists, and psychoanalysts (he himself underwent analysis)—seeking to understand human motivations and to fit all that he learned into a comprehensive scheme. He died of a heart attack at sixty-two, but not before completing that task.

Maslow pictured human needs and the motivations arising from them as a hierarchy or pyramid. Its broad base, on which all else rests, consists of the physiological needs; the next higher layer, of the safety
needs (for security, stability, freedom from fear, and so on); still higher, of the psychological needs, which are largely of a social nature (the needs for belonging, love, affiliation, and acceptance; the needs for esteem, approval, and recognition); and finally, at the pinnacle, of the “self-actualization needs” (the need to fulfill oneself, “to become everything that one is capable of becoming”).
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Research by others on social motivation explored many of these topics and spelled out how social motivation is tied into personality traits. Insecure people, for instance, have a strong need for approval; as a result, they consistently strive to convey socially desirable traits. On personality tests they will lay claim to sentiments that are admirable but rarely true, such as “I have never intensely disliked anyone,” and deny others that are socially undesirable but generally true, such as “I like to gossip at times.” Most people seek a degree of social approval in this fashion, but those with a particularly strong need for approval do so to such an extreme that others see them as sanctimonious and unlikable.
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Many other aspects of social motivation were hot topics in the field from the 1960s to the 1980s—more, indeed, than can be included in this brief account. Social motivation is so broad a topic that our sampling has given us only a taste of it. But we cannot spend more time here; there have been so many developments and discoveries in the field of emotion and motivation in the past generation, especially the past fifteen years, that we must hasten on to wander through a veritable sideshow of recent psychological curiosa.

We have come a long way from half-starved rats scurrying across an electric grid for a morsel of food, and from Cannon’s cats, hissing with rage at barking dogs although their viscera had been disconnected from their brains.

As we followed the story, it may have seemed that early theories were disproved by later research and discarded in favor of new ones, but the reality is far more complicated: Still later evidence has often revalidated old theories without invalidating the newer ones. Once more it appears that in psychology few theories are ever proven dead wrong; rather, they are shown to be limited and incomplete but to have value when pieced together with other theories in an inclusive, if untidy, patchwork quilt of theory.

The James-Lange theory is the prime example of an early one that still occupies a place in the quilt. It seemed to be outmoded by Cannon’s work, which located the source of emotion in the thalamus, and by the Schachter-Singer experiment, which found it to be in the mind, but in 1980 Robert Zajonc, a distinguished researcher and scientific provocateur, revived it in new form on the basis of his own finding that feeling states occur prior to cognitive evaluation.

Zajonc (pronounced “zye-onts”) was born in Poland, and in 1940, when he was seventeen, fled from the German invaders; his life disrupted, he did not complete his doctorate until he was thirty-five. But despite the late start, he performed a great deal of significant research, especially in social psychology, and won a number of honors. The possessor of a restless mind, he has always preferred to look into questions that he has said “irritate him,” answer them in bold outline, and move on, leaving the details to others.

In the late 1970s Zajonc conducted a number of experiments on the “mere-exposure effect”; this is the human tendency to develop a preference for a stimulus with which we become familiar, even though it has no meaning or value for us. Zajonc showed volunteers a number of Japanese ideographs, some only once, others up to twenty-seven times. He then displayed the ideographs again, asking the volunteers which they recognized and which they liked best. They preferred those they had seen most often, even though the symbols meant nothing to them—and even though they did not recognize them.

Aside from the disturbing implications of the finding—that we can be swayed to like and prefer products or persons merely through the repeated exposure of their names or images—Zajonc saw in it something of scientific import. Affective reactions (feeling states) can occur without cognition, can precede cognitive evaluation, and are more responsible for what we do than cognition. In an article in
American Psychologist
, which he titled—provocatively, by his own admission—“Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” he came out flatly for the primacy of the physical source of the emotions:

The article exasperated many cognitive psychologists and created lively controversy. Richard Lazarus, of the University of California at Berkeley, became Zajonc’s chief opponent and vigorously disputed Zajonc’s thesis. In the same journal he offered an array of contrary evidence, the most salient being his own data on how the emotions aroused in volunteers by motion pictures could be altered by versions of the soundtrack that gave different information. Lazarus had used a film of Australian aborigines performing subincision, the ritual slitting of the underside of the penis of a male adolescent with a sharp stone. The film distressed viewers greatly when the soundtrack emphasized its pain and cruelty but far less when the soundtrack stressed how the adolescents looked forward to undergoing the ritual and thereby earning the status and benefits of adulthood. Lazarus’s conclusion:

In fact, he later came to take “the strongest position possible” on the role of cognition in emotion, namely, that it is both a necessary and sufficient condition. “
Sufficient
means that thoughts are capable of producing emotions;
necessary
means that emotions cannot occur without some kind of thought.”
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Zajonc and Lazarus continued their debate for some time, but the work of others indicated that both were right and their findings not incompatible.

One such indication is the finding of the developmentalist Michael Lewis and his colleagues, discussed earlier, that six primary emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and surprise) appear at or shortly after birth, but that six others (embarrassment, empathy, envy, pride, shame, and guilt) do not appear until the child develops cognitive capacity and self-awareness.
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Lewis and his team did not discuss the Zajonc-Lazarus
debate, but their observations make room for both noncognitive and cognitive interpretations of emotion. (Carroll Izard’s infant photos document much the same development of emotions and their expression.)

Social psychologist Ross Buck said that the resolution of the controversy lay in the recognition that there is more than one sort of cognition: “knowledge by acquaintance,” or direct sensory awareness, and “knowledge by description,” the cognitive interpretation of sensory data, a distinction expounded some decades ago by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Feelings may occur first, said Buck, but are transformed by the mind’s knowledge into cognitive judgments about the information they convey—which then modify the feelings. The process is a continuing interaction. “Feeling, expression, physiological responding, cognition, and goal-related behavior are interrelated processes, playing integrated and interacting roles in motivation and emotion.”
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Robert Plutchik identified the Zajonc and Lazarus views as only parts of a larger whole. He defined an emotion as a chain of events in a complex feedback-loop system. A stimulus starts the process, but from then on there is an interplay between cognitive evaluations, feelings, and physiological changes, impulses to action, and overt actions, the results altering their own causes in a continuing process.
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Plutchik interpreted both the Zajonc and Lazarus data as products of research methods that look at single events rather than the whole process:

The ancient theory that emotions are a major source of motivation that often overpowers the better judgment of the mind seemed to be made obsolete by the Darwinian evidence that emotions are signals and cues calling forth behavior with survival value. Yet how could the Darwinian view be reconciled with the ample evidence that we are often governed by useless or harmful emotions—panic, depression, jealousy, self-loathing, persistent grieving for a lost love, phobias, and even more crippling and tormenting emotional disturbances?

The question is quicksand; tread upon it and you may never escape. Let us be cautious; let us only look at it from afar and for an instant.

Although there is nothing like general agreement, a number of leading
figures in the field hold a generally neo-Darwinian view of the emotions. They regard them as a source of information that enables us to appraise situations and judge what actions to take to achieve valued goals.
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But the classic antagonism of emotions and intellect has largely vanished; in the light of cognitive psychology, it has come to appear that emotions and cognition serve the same end, self-preservation. Robert Plutchik has argued that in simple animals, emotions are the cues to actions with survival value, and in more complex animals, including humankind, cognitive capacity performs the same function, correcting or amplifying the predictions of the emotions—though we still need their power to produce the behavior: