University of California, Berkeley
Paper presented in abbreviated form at a Festschrift for Judith M. Harackiewicz, Madison, Wisconsin May 17-18, 2024.
Since then, Judy has become a leader among the
new generation of motivation researchers (Harackiewicz & Asher, 2023). Her research
represents an exemplary melding of personality and social
psychology. I
really admire the way her highly programmatic research moves
fluidly back and forth between laboratory and field settings,
basic and applied research, theory and practice. Whether in the
laboratory or the field, her research is characterized by
elegant experimental designs, including randomized controlled
trials (RCTs) conducted in field settings, and statistical
sophistication. She
does not publish until she knows she has it right, and she
replicates her findings. I
happily incorporated her research into the
motivation lectures in my Intro Psych course.
Others
in this room can speak to these accomplishments more
authoritatively than I. For
myself, I’d like to trace the deep background of Judy’s
scholarship. I’ve
always liked William James’s injunction, somewhere, that
psychology should be taught from a historical perspective, thus
linking it with the humanities.
One way to do this is to trace researchers’ academic
lineages, discovering connections between their work and their
advisors, and their advisors’ advisors – the kind of Biblical
“begats” that my wife Lucy calls "the son of the son of the son
of...".
My own work on motivation is very recent (Kihlstrom, 2019a, 2019b), and
very far from Judy’s interests, so she didn’t get any of her
inspiration from me.
Actually, though, in my undergraduate experimental methods class I worked in the laboratory of Nicholas Longo, a comparative psychologist trained by Mort Bitterman, who was then working on instrumental conditioning in goldfish (e.g., Longo & Bitterman, 1959). Bitterman himself became famous for his studies of conditioning in the octopus . In the experiment, fish who pressed a submerged paddle were rewarded with some goldfish flakes, at which time the illumination of the aquarium also brightened briefly. The fish learned to press the paddle to get food; but we were surprised to observe an increase in paddle-pressing in the control group as well, which got only the change in illumination. Having read in Intro about Harry Harlow’s studies of the manipulation drive in monkeys (Harlow, 1953; Harlow, Harlow, & Meyer, 1950) – studies that helped nail the coffin shut on drive theory and opened up the possibility of non-biological, cognitive theories of motivation centered on constructs like curiosity and interest – I thought that something similar might have been happening in the fish. But Longo didn’t pursue it, and neither did I. I don’t think I ever discussed that experience with Judy. |
With all due respect to G. Stanley Hall, psychology in America began with James at Harvard, so that seems to be an appropriate place to stop any psychologist’s academic tree. Of course, James had his own teachers -- or at least influences. One of those was C.S. Peirce (pronounced Perss), who attended Harvard at the same time as James. Peirce was a chemist and a logician, but after he joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins he collaborated with Joseph Jastrow, then a graduate student, on the very first study of what we would now call "subliminal perception" (actually, an attack on the very notion of the limen). Jastrow was the first to receive a PhD in psychology (as opposed to philosophy) from an American university, and their paper was the first piece of psychological research to be published in an American scientific journal. They invented random assignment, and introduced test statistics before Pearson and Fisher made them famous. Jastrow, in turn, was the first professor of psychology at Wisconsin. He had an interest in the unconscious, discovered the duck-rabbit reversible figure, organized the psychology exhibition at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, invented “APA Style”, and helped found the American Association of University Professors (Blumenthal, 1990). He may have introduced Clark Hull to hypnosis. |
Strengthening the Harvard connection, Jung got an honorary degree from the University in the great tercentenary celebrations of 1936, leading Freud to complain to Murray that he hadn’t gotten it instead (Roazen, 2003). In fact, Freud was the Psychology Department’s first choice; but Harvard didn’t want any no-shows at its big party, and Freud was deemed too old and frail to be able to make the trip. The others on the shortlist were Pierre Janet (Freud’s great rival, and a big influence on Prince, but who was also getting on in years); and, remarkably, Jean Piaget – whose work, though known to American psychology since the 1920s (Piaget, 1926, 1931), really didn’t capture the imagination until long after World War II (Flavell, 1963). Jung took his medical degree from the University of Basel, and then worked at the Burgholzli Medical Clinic, a psychiatric hospital, under Eugen Bleuler, who gave schizophrenia its name. Bleuler was interested in the new psychological tests, and gave Jung the Word Association Test to work on. |
As with so many of
us, Judy’s scholarly interests began before graduate school. While an undergraduate
at Cornell, she worked with Wade Boykin, an experimental
psychologist (as they were called then), on a study of epistemic
curiosity inspired by Daniel Berlyne’s (1960) theory of cognitive
complexity (Boykin &
Harackiewicz, 1981). As a Michigan graduate
student, Boykin had done research on the Head Start program (e.g., Boykin & Arkes, 1974),
and has since become a leader in research on the motivational
and structural factors underlying racial disparities in
scholastic achievement. This
undergraduate research experience foreshadowed Judy’s later
research on intrinsic motivation and interest, so let’s call her
Berlyne-adjacent.
Berlyne took his bachelor's and master's degrees from Cambridge, and taught at the University of St. Andrews. His PhD was from Yale, under Clark Hull, which links him to Jastrow and Peirce. While in New Haven, he taught at Brooklyn College before returning for several years to the UK, teaching at Aberdeen, before taking his final position at Toronto. |
|
Judy and I did a little work together at
Harvard and afterwards (Kihlstrom
& Harackiewicz, 1982, 1990), but as a graduate
student she also published with David Kenny (Kenny & Harackiewicz, 1979)
and Chick Judd (Judd
& Harackiewicz, 1980), and got much of her
statistical savvy from them (and from Bob Rosenthal). Kenny studied with Donald
Campbell at Northwestern, and you can think of Judy’s
intervention studies as consistent with Campbell’s vision of
“the experimenting society”.
Chick’s advisor at Columbia was Morton Deutsch,
who was a student of Kurt
Lewin’s at MIT – and there is nothing so practical
as Judy’s theories.
Campbell’s dissertation supervisors at Berkeley
were Harold E. Jones and Robert Tryon. While
working with Jones, he was part of the research group that
produced The Authoritarian Personality. Later, with
Donald Fiske, he invented the multitrait-multimethod
matrix for demonstrating construct validity (Campbell & Fiske, 1959). His treatises
on experimental, quasi-experimental, and unobtrusive
methods (Campbell, Stanley, &
Gage, 1963; Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest,
1966) are classics in the literature on applied
and policy research.
|
New roots can be established even after a
tree is matured, and something like this happened with the late
Paul
Pintrich, a professor of educational psychology at
Michigan. Both Judy
and Paul were interested in achievement motivation, and both
were critical of normative goal theory, which holds that mastery
and performance goals are in opposition (Harackiewicz, Barron, Pintrich,
Elliot, & Thrash, 2002; Harackiewicz & Linnenbrink,
2005). Just
as important, Pintrich encouraged Judy to reach out to other
venues, and audiences, for her work. Prior to the mid-1990s,
Judy had published almost exclusively in journals like JPSP,
which are primarily interested in the theoretical implications
of research. But
beginning in the late ‘90s she began publishing in journals of
education research, which were primarily interested in the
practical and policy implications of psychological research and
theories. In this
way, she was able to bring her basic research and theory to an
audience that would be able to appreciate its practical
implications, and put her ideas into action.
Pintrich’s advisor at Michigan was Phyllis
Blumenfeld, a UCLA graduate who studied students’
engagement with classroom and learning activities, but he was
also mentored at Michigan by Wilbert (Bill) McKeatchie. McKeachie’s classic Teaching
Tips (14th ed., 2014) has been an
essential guide for generations of college teachers since its
first appearance as a mimeographed handout in 1949 (see also McKeachie, 2003).
Newcomb was a student of Gardner Murphy at Columbia. Murphy, identified as a social psychologist, was a pioneer in parapsychological research, and also promoted a “biosocial” view of personality. His PhD was from Columbia, working under Woodworth. More tangles. |
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