Psychology, it’s said, has a long past but a short history. A popular version lists three stages.
First, around the turn of the 20th century, psychologists tried to capture the stream of conscious experience in the net of introspection. The behaviourists then declared the mind off limits, arguing that psychology should study observable behaviour rather than subjective experience. Finally, the emergence of computers spurred the cognitive revolution of the 1960s, which brought the mind back in from the cold, in a new science of information processing.
This narrative arc is appealing, but substantially wrong. Introspection was never a dominant method in psychology. Psychologists continued to study mental processes throughout the behaviourist dark age. And some argue the story leaves out a crucial fourth stage. Cognitive psychology may have made great strides in understanding the mind as computation – neuroscientists helping to figure out the brain’s hardware – but it failed to grasp something vital.
