Analyze The Influence Of Genius And Zeitgeist In Groundbreaking Psychological Studies
For this task you will examine the experiments of Loftus and Gardner. Describe and analyze each of these experiments. You will prepare two separate analyses; for each analysis, include the following:
A brief summary of the study
A one paragraph explanation of the background in the field leading up to the study, and the reasons the researchers carried out the project.
The significance of the study to the field of psychology
A brief discussion of supportive or contradictory follow-up research findings and subsequent questioning or criticism from others in the field
A summary of at least one recent experiment (within the past two years) that is related to the seminal experiment (Hint: Excellent sources for recent research summaries are the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology and the Association for Psychological Science).
Your own evaluation of whether the breakthrough experiments of Drs. Gardner and Loftus were examples of genius, the zeitgeist, or some other factor. Use their own autobiographical accounts as well as your analyses of their experiments and personal stories to support your opinion.
Length: 3 – 3.5 pages
Your paper should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts that are presented in the course and provide new thoughts and insights relating directly to the topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards. Be careful to adhere to Northcentral’s Academic Integrity Policy.
Howard Gardner
utobiographers have numerous choices. It is not difficult for anyone so approached to conjure up a number of stories. One can give an account of Pilgrim’s Progress, where steady work and virtuous behavior are ul- timately rewarded. One can offer humble pie, either denying success altogether or attributing it largely or wholly to others or to fate. One can allude to the sudden breakthrough (the road to Damascus), the series of insights (lucky batting streak or good eye), or regular plugging away (99% perspiration). One can say it was all in a day’s (or night’s) work. Or one can depict oneself as struggling against mighty and per- haps malevolent forces.
Without attempting to characterize my path, I’d like to give the au- tobiographical account that seems most authentic and that might be help- ful to others. In what follows, I give a brief chronology of my youth and mention six major influences on my early career. I then mention those lines of my own work that I consider most significant. I conclude by drawing some general lessons, which I hope will prove helpful to others.
Youth and Training
I am quite certain that I did not have a passion for psychology as a child, nor do I think that psychology was necessarily the destined career choice for me. As a youngster growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the 1940s and 1950s, I assumed that I would become a lawyer or perhaps a teacher. At Harvard College in the early 1960s, I toyed with a number of careers, ranging from law to medicine to teaching.
Ultimately, I was attracted to the social sciences, probably because of the powerful influence of an eclectic collection of brilliant professors
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My Way
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/10483-005 Psychologists Defying the Crowd: Stories of Those Who Battled the Establishment and Won, edited by R. J. Sternberg Copyright © 2003 American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
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80 [ H O W A R D G A R D N E R
in the Social Relations Department, an interdisciplinary social sciences department that included David Riesman, Talcott Parsons, Gordon All- port, Henry Murray, David McClelland, Laurence Wiley, and Erik Erik- son, just to name a few. Erikson’s work and his charisma drew me to developmental psychology. When I worked on a summer educational project with Jerome Bruner, I discovered that I was more interested in cognitive than in personological or affective facets of development. Reading Jean Piaget and getting my hands involved in empirical work with Bruner, Roger Brown, and Jerry Kagan as gadflies, I soon found myself in the ranks of empirical developmental psychology, a contrib- utor to journals like Child Development and Developmental Psychology (the chief publishing outlets at the time).
Six Career Influences
Many of my graduate student cohort at Harvard and elsewhere ended up as writers and editors of such influential gatekeeping journals. I found myself taking quite a different path. Reflecting on my strengths and on historical accidents, I can point to six factors that influenced my career choice.
MY INTEREST IN THE ARTS
As a youngster I was a serious pianist, and as an adolescent, I becams an aficionado of several art forms. Turning to psychology, I was surprised to discover that the arts were virtually invisible in most texts. I noted that Piaget, along with other developmental theorists, saw “scientific knowledge” as the end-state of cognition. My initial attempts to publish articles about artistic cognition and development were routinely thwarted. Ignoring signals from “the field,” I was determined to pursue the nature of creation, particularly in the arts, and searched for oppor- tunities to do so. My first scholarly monograph, The Arts a n d H u m a n Development (1973/ 1994), was an effort to examine the processes of h u – man development using the artist, rather than the scientist, as the end- state toward which development was directed.
NELSON GOODMAN AND PROJECT ZERO At the end of my first year in graduate school (spring 1967), I learned that a distinguished philosopher, Nelson Goodman, was planning to start a research project in artistic cognition at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I knew almost nothing about Goodman (or the Education
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School) but was intrigued by the idea. With David Perkins and several others, I became a founding member of Harvard Project Zero, and in 1972, I joined Perkins as a codirector of that institution. I have now been affiliated with Project Zero for more than a third of a century and have found it to be a stimulating intellectual home. Working at Project Zero has allowed me to pursue my interest in the arts and cognition as well as many other related (and not-so-related) issues with valued col- leagues, many of whom have become friends, one of whom became my wife (Ellen Winner). At Project Zero, I conducted a long series of studies of the development of artistic capacities in children (style sensitivity, understanding of metaphor, story production, and comprehension; Gardner, 1980, 1982) and collaborated on an ambitious study of sym- bolic development in children, more generally (Gardner 6 Wolf, 1983). I also had the pleasure of helping to launch others in careers in research; younger colleagues like Winner, Dennie Wolf, Mindy Kornhaber, Tom Hatch, and Mara Krechevsky have contributed significantly to our un- derstanding of knowledge, particularly in the arts.
PASSION TO WRITE Since primary grade school, I have been an enthusiastic reader and writer. I edited my high school newspaper and continued to write stead- ily in college and graduate school. I discovered that, although I liked writing articles, the book was really my preferred form of communica- tion, and, with little talent in the creation of fiction, my genre became the social sciences book. In graduate school, I coauthored a textbook in social psychology (with the now anachronistic name M a n a n d M e n ; Gros- sack 6 Gardner, 1970) and also drafted two other monographs: the aforementioned scholarly tome, The A r t s a n d H u m a n Development (19731 1994), and a popularized account of French structuralism, T h e Quest for M i n d : Piaget, Levi-Strauss a n d the Structuralist Movement ( 1973 I 1 98 1 ). My teachers and fellow students looked somewhat askance at this nonem- pirically oriented writing facility-”write books after you get tenure, Howard,” they advised-but some 20 books later, it is clear that writing has been an important part of my professional identity.
It has been noted that many of my books have the word m i n d in them. That choice of word is overdetermined, but my four children tease me by saying that my last book should be Never M i n d .
INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY (AKA READILY BORED BY REMAINING WITH A SINGLE TOPIC) In graduate school, one of my professors was criticized because he went on to a new branch of psychology every decade or so. Without having
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82 I H O W A R D G A R D N E R any such master plan in mind, I find that I also have moved o n at regular intervals to new areas, both within and beyond psychology. In college and graduate school, I regularly audited courses in various fields. I read widely although not systematically; last time I counted, I subscribe to and at least skim more than 30 publications. Most of those are not even in psychology! I marvel at those scholars who probe the same topic, deeper and deeper, for many years. Whereas I can certainly trace a continuity in my own intellectual and professional development, it includes excursions in many directions-quite possibly in too many di- rections. At present, I am deeply involved in a collaborative study on professional ethics (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, & Damon, 200 1 ) . Cer- tainly, I could never have predicted this particular career turn 10 years ago.
A CHANCE MEETING WITH THE NEUROLOGIST NORMAN GESCHWIND As a graduate student, I happened to attend a session given by Norman Geschwind, a brilliant behavioral neurologist and equally brilliant stu- dent of the history of neurology. Geschwind’s approach to problems fascinated me, and I undertook postdoctoral work with him at Harvard Medical School and the Aphasia Research Center at the Boston Univer- sity School of Medicine and the Boston Veterans Administration Medical Center. My 20-year excursion into neuropsychology constituted my most steady (and probably most significant) input to the experimental psychology literature (Gardner, 1975). Whereas most researchers were focusing on the left hemisphere, with its dominance in linguistic and conceptual matters, my colleagues and I investigated the right hemi- sphere’s role in language and in artistic activities and published some 60 empirical articles (e.g., Gardner, Brownell, Wapner, 6 Michelow, 1983). My work at the Aphasia Research Center also gave me enough familiarity with the brain that I have been able to continue following discoveries in the neurosciences and to chronicle the area of cognitive science, including cognitive neuroscience, in my book The Mind’s N e w Science (1985). At present, I am helping to launch a new area of study, which we at Harvard call M i n d , Bruin, a n d Education.
SUPPORT WAS AVAILABLE FOR UNUSUAL LINES OF RESEARCH It is difficult for individuals my age (born 1943) or younger to appreciate that there was little or n o support for empirical social sciences until the 20th century and that significant government grants became available only in the 1960s. Because of government grants, I was able to attend
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graduate school, to secure postdoctoral support for several years, and to carry out empirical work in developmental psychology and neuropsy- chology during the first crucial years of my career. That joint work even- tually led to the positing of the theory of multiple intelligences (Frames of M i n d , 1983/1993b), the work for which I am most widely known. I did not teach regularly until 1987 and could therefore dedicate two decades largely to research and writing.
By the 1980s, it became more difficult to secure support for the issues that I had become interested in. However, by this time I had become better known, and I was able to attract support from private foundations and, more recently, from generous individuals. My career could not have been possible without this continuing support, and I have gratefully acknowledged that support in all of my writings. Being a tad superstitious, I have never tried to tote up the amount of money that I have received for research, but I am sure that I would be quite affluent if I had kept it all for myself! I can categorically say that I am far happier that the sum went into research.
Three Contributions to Psychology
To the best of my reconstruction, those six factors catalyzed whatever modest success I have enjoyed. If asked to list my contributions to psy- chology, I would say that I have sought to broaden our conception of what the human mind is, to determine what the mind at its best can accomplish, and to outline how the young mind might be better edu- cated.
BROADER CONCEPTION OF THE HUMAN MIND Perhaps because their backgrounds are in the hard sciences, perhaps because they aspire for psychology to become a hard science, most psy- chologists in the United States have thought of cognition as the forms of thought of the scientist. From the beginning of my work, I have sought to broaden that conception, and in particular, to include artistic and creative thought as central to the functions of the mind. This mis- sion impelled my propounding of the theory of multiple intelligences. It also accounts for my predilection to bring to bear insights from a variety of fields, ranging from the study of unusual populations, to the examination of the effects of brain damage, to the inclusion of evidence from different cultures and eras (Gardner, 1989).
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