Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Wiley (GB) |
| ISSN | 0022-5061 / 1520-6696 |
| Scopus | 12002 |
| Wikidata | Q15753668 |
| OpenAlex | S143903698 |
| MAG | 143903698 |
| Website | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15206696 |
| Total publications | 2.261 |
| Coverage period | 1965 - 2026 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 1.297 |
| Impact factor | 0.273 |
| SJR | 0.225 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 1.182 |
| CiteScore | 1.4 |
| h-index | 14 |
| i10-index | 29 |
| Female authorship share | 27.8% |
The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences covers the history of psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology itself. This makes it relevant for understanding the intellectual history and theoretical development of social anthropology and cognate disciplines
History · Psychology (miscellaneous) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · Evolution and Science Education · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies
Experiment as Spectacle: The Traitors and the Cultural Afterlives of Cold War Social Psychology
This article examines the first British season of The Traitors through the cultural and historiographic afterlives of Cold War social psychology. Rather than treating the series as a simple popularization of canonical experiments, it argues that reality television operationalizes and intensifies the dramatic logics of mid‐twentieth‐century behavioral science. The studies of Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo emerged from postwar a…
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Surveying the Economic Mind: George Katona and the Institutionalization of Psychological Economics at Michigan, 1946–1981
Standard histories of behavioral economics locate the field's origins in the heuristics‐and‐biases program of the 1970s, treating earlier attempts to join psychology and economics as a prehistory that failed to take root. This article reconstructs the most sustained of those earlier attempts: the psychological economics that George Katona (1901–1981) built at the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center between 1946 and 1981. Drawing on Ka…
Voices in Dialogue: Unpublished Correspondence Between Walter Blumenfeld (Peru) and Abraham Maslow (United States)
Correspondence between two people reveals their subjectivity and promotes knowledge acquisition beyond the academic realm. Abraham Maslow is a well‐known figure in the academic world, and much has been written about his life, but little is known about his epistolary relationship with Walter Blumenfeld, a German psychologist who settled in Peru in 1935 and is considered the founder of scientific psychology in that country. This article analyzes th…
The 1965 “Gloria Films,” Then and Now
Everett Shostrom's 1965 Three Approaches to Psychotherapy films were created and used as demonstrations of how to do psychotherapy. After a brief account of how they came about, precises of the three films are presented to highlight major differences among them. These are followed by descriptions of post‐filming reactions and interactions of the participants—Gloria Szymanski, Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Albert Ellis. Consideration then is given…
From Psychologia Anthropologica to Psychotherapeutics: A Reconstruction of the Development of the Idea of Medical Psychology From the 16th to the 19th Century
The article undertakes a historical analysis of the concepts of psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy, assuming that, despite current institutional differences, they share a common interest in the soul or mind. The aim of this paper is to present an alternative path for the development of psychotherapy as a practical continuation of the concept of psychologia anthropologica introduced by Otto Casmann in the late 16th century. The text traces t…
Emotion‐Focused Therapy: A Perspective From Traditional Chinese Medicine
In clarifying that Spinoza is not the first person to share insights about the necessity of a contrary, strong emotion in transforming an emotion, the present article focuses on expounding this perspective as embedded in the classical texts of Chinese medicine, along with illustrative examples of emotion-focused therapy in the historical case records of Chinese master physicians. Key features of this kind of emotion-focused therapy include (1) de…
The Mismeasure of Learning Disability: The Contentious Career of the “IQ‐Achievement” Discrepancy
The existence of a "severe discrepancy" between measured ability and achievement has been the dominant criterion for identifying learning disabilities ("LD") in American education since its codification into federal law in 1977. In this article, I argue that the history of LD is best understood not through the emergence of a diagnostic label, but through the evolution of its methods of identification. By tracing the rise and decline of the IQ-ach…
Ethel Dench Puffer's Psychological Aesthetics and the Woman Question
This paper examines Ethel Dench Puffer's psychological aesthetics, attempting to connect her academic research with her role as Director of the Institute for the Coördination of Women's Interests at Smith College. Psychologist, educator, and active participant in the women's rights movement of the 1910s-1930s, Puffer enrolled at Radcliffe College in 1897/1898 and earned her Ph.D. in 1902. She advocated for women's desire to balance marriage and c…
Hume on the Prospects for a Scientific Psychology
In Section One of an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume distinguishes between two sorts of writing on human nature: first, one that appeals to common sense to make virtue seem attractive and, second, one that attempts to describe the principles governing the mind. Hume's defence of the second approach is in part a defence of the possibility of scientific psychology. Within the second approach, he distinguishes two parts: first, a descri…
Psychic Mechanics: The Foundational Role of Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802–1896) in the Development of Psychophysics
This paper examines the pivotal role played by Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802–1896) in the development of mathematical psychology, and his influence on the emergence of Fechner's psychophysics in 19th‐century Germany. As a key figure in the Herbartian tradition in Leipzig, Drobisch refined Herbart's initial framework for applying mathematics to psychological phenomena while also addressing the fundamental theoretical challenges inherent in measuri…
Ambivalent Tolman: Indirect Influence on Enactivism of Tolman's Sign‐Gestaltism Through Merleau‐Ponty
Edward Tolman, an experimental psychologist renowned for his research on the “cognitive map” and “latent learning” in rats, pursued his career within the tradition of behaviorisms. In the history of psychology, he is positioned as a precursor to cognitivism. This is because the concepts he introduced as intervening variables were later interpreted as having a representational nature. On the other hand, the philosophy of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty was …
The Way They Speak of Masters and Johnson”: The Rise and Disappearance of Sex Therapy, 1960–2000
A keyword search of “sex therapy” in the New York Times shows a rapid rise for articles covering the discipline in the 1970s, an equally rapid reduction in the 1980s, and further decline in the 1990s and into the 2000s. This surprising inflection, given that sex as a marketable construction did not decline in the late 20th century, opens room to examine sex therapy in the contexts in which it could and could not be successful. Sex therapy as a di…
Interdisciplinarity in Transition: The Formation and Transformation of the Committee on Human Development, 1930s–1950s
In 1929, Robert Hutchins became the president of the University of Chicago and one of his first reforms was to build the Committee on Child Development (CCD). The CCD came into existence when the nationwide Child Development Movement started waning. Hutchins and his old associates in the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial were interested in Child Development as a form of interdisciplinary social science, and their ideas greatly shaped the initial…
Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”
In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now‐canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawin…
Yang Kuo-Shu and the Indigenous Movements of Psychology in China From the Perspective of History
Yang Kuo-Shu-widely regarded as the Father of Chinese Indigenous Psychology -was the central figure in a four-decade movement that sought to reorient psychological research within Chinese societies toward culturally grounded foundations. The movement succeeded in establishing institutional infrastructures, cultivating successive generations of scholars, and producing a substantial corpus of studies attentive to local meanings and practices. Yet, …
Bulls, Crocodiles, and Other Scientific Instruments: Margaret Lowenfeld and the Alternative History of Child Psychotherapy
This article casts new light on the life and work of influential child psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld, who devised the World Technique-a unique form of play therapy using miniature toys, sand and water-during the 1920s. Lowenfeld's experimental, child-directed practice expanded significantly in the postwar period, rivaling the psychoanalytic treatment of children by better-known therapists such as Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. Lowenfeld was a di…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Pragmatist Framework for Constructing a New Humanhood
A prolific writer and social activist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) has been widely recognized as an influential American reformer and feminist thinker in the early decades of the twentieth century. However, scholars interpret her views in divergent ways. This paper focuses on Gilman's philosophy, as can be gathered from her non-fiction publications and reform proposals. It examines Gilman's work in the context of her reaction to theories…
Liberation Psychology. The Work of Antonio and Nicolás Caparrós in Spain at the End of the Franco Dictatorship
Liberation psychology was proposed by some authors in an attempt to assimilate the theories and practices of psychology to the liberation movements that developed so intensely during the seventies of the twentieth century. This paper analyzes the work of Antonio and Nicolás Caparrós, who were key figures in critical psychology both in Argentina and Spain at the time, We will focus on their critique of cultural colonization within psychology. Fina…
Spiritualism and Psychology in Argentina: The Inception of Parapsychology in the Scientific Mainstream (1948-1955)
In the mid-1940s, Argentine spiritualism faced a crisis in the context of cultural changes where they sought to install parapsychology as a valid area of inquiry within the emerging psychology as a science. The 1950s represented a transformation of the intellectual field for the so-called "conjectural sciences" and a form of psychologization of spiritualism. In fact, the appropriation of J.B. Rhine's test results in the United States proved usefu…
Intelligence Running Wild: Edward Podvoll (1936-2003) and the Unfolding of the "Contemplative Psychotherapy" Project
This paper explores the origins and development of the "contemplative psychotherapy" project in the United States, emerging around psychoanalyst Edward Podvoll and the intellectual environment at Naropa University during the 1970s and 1980s. It situates Podvoll's work within the broader dialogue between Buddhism and Western psychotherapy, highlighting how his contributions shed light on this dynamic and complex encounter. The paper begins by outl…
Pragmatism as Idealism? The Case of Mary Whiton Calkins
American pragmatism is traditionally described as a logico-philosophical movement that arose in opposition to the theological and metaphysical assumptions of the early American idealists. Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) challenges this narrative in two central ways: she presents pragmatism as encompassing psychological, logical, and metaphysical doctrines, and she characterizes "metaphysical pragmatism" as a form of idealism. This paper offers a …
Undisciplined and a Moral Danger: Fright, Idleness and Immorality as Attributions of "Imbecile Children" in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain
From the second half of the nineteenth-century treatment of "imbecile" children in Britain underwent significant change. Examining the period from 1870 to 1920 when imbecility became a discrete category, and a matter of concern in policy and practice, this paper focuses on conceptualizations around fright, idleness, morality, and parental mental state as behavioral, emotional, and psychological causes and attributions of "imbecility" in children.…
Behavioral Cetology in the 19th Century: Thomas Beale, Henry Cheever, Thomas Southwell and Their Role in Awakening a Cetacean Protection Consciousness
Although naturalists have devoted attention to cetaceans since Antiquity, it was only in the 19th century that cetology underwent a true explosion. Three key cetological works of this period are The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839) by Thomas Beale, The Whaleman's Adventures in the Southern Ocean (1850) by Henry Cheever and The Seals and Whales of the British Seas (1881) by Thomas Southwell. Importantly, these three works did not only rep…
Degenerateness, Mental Hygiene, and Spiritism: Debates in the Argentine Medical Press (1930-1946)
The disputes between spiritualists and physicians occurred in the context of hygienism and the degeneration theory, where spiritualists were considered agents requiring health care by alienists and psychiatrists. French psychiatry defended this interpretation to isolate and treat "spiritual delirium," which came to have considerable importance in the debates between spiritism and psychiatry. Specifically, pathologization and psychologization beca…
Toward a transnational history of the social sciences
Historical accounts of the social sciences have too often accepted local or national institu-tions as a self-evident framework of analysis, instead of considering them as being embed-ded in transnational relations of various kinds. Evolving patterns of transnational mobility and exchange cut through the neat distinction between the local, the national, and the inter-national, and thus represent an essential component in the dynamics of the social…
Three truth-spots
DSM-III and the revolution in the classification of mental illness
A revolution occurred within the psychiatric profession in the early 1980s that rapidly transformed the theory and practice of mental health in the United States. In a very short period of time, mental illnesses were transformed from broad, etiologically defined entities that were continuous with normality to symptom-based, categorical diseases. The third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Menta…
The evolution of the concept of medicalization in the late twentieth century
This article attempts to outline a history of the critique of medicalization that developed in the 1960s in the work of Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, Michael Foucault, and others that was applied in their work to medical and psychiatric theory and practice, the penal system, and public health systems. This article follows the development of Foucault's own work on "governmentality" that emphasized the individualization and internalization of the them…
Race, science and medicine, 1700-1960
Theodor Lipps and the shift from ?sympathy? to ?empathy
In the course of extensive philosophical debates on aesthetics in nineteenth-century Germany, Robert Vischer introduced the concept of Einfühlung in relation to art. Theodor Lipps subsequently extended it from art to visual illusions and interpersonal understanding. While Lipps had regarded Einfühlung as basically similar to the old notion of sympathy, Edward Titchener in America believed it had a different meaning. Hence, he coined the term empa…
A Child of the Empire: British Sociology and Colonialism, 1940s-1960s
British sociology was established as an academic discipline between 1945 and 1965, just as the British Empire was gearing up for a new phase of developmental colonialism backed by the social and other sciences. Many parts of the emerging sociological discipline became entangled with colonialism. Key themes and methods in sociology and the staff of sociology departments emerged from this colonial context. Historians have tended to place postwar Br…
The view from everywhere: Disciplining diversity in post-World War II international social science
This paper explores the attempt of social scientists associated with Unesco to create a system of knowledge production to provide the international perspective necessary for democratic governance of a world community. Social scientists constructed a federal system of international associations that institutionalized American disciplines on an international scale. An international perspective emerged through the process of interdisciplinary intern…
Operationism in psychology: What the debate is about, what the debate should be about
I offer an analysis of operationism in psychology, which is rooted in an historical study of the investigative practices of two of its early proponents (S. S. Stevens and E. C. Tolman). According to this analysis, early psychological operationists emphasized the importance of experimental operations and called for scientists to specify what kinds of operations were to count as empirical indicators for the referents of their concepts. While such s…
Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975
Riding natural scientists' coattails onto the endless frontier: The SSRC and the quest for scientific legitimacy
This article proposes that the postwar National Science Foundation (NSF) debate constituted a critical, transitional episode in American social science and partisan politics. I show that by responding to powerful conservative critics in the scientific and political communities, the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC's) leading scholars (re)asserted a contested scientistic strategy-to advance the social sciences by following the natural scien…
Naissance d'une science humaine: La Psychologie, Les Psychologues Et Le “Merveilleux Psychique
The emergence of sociology from political economy in the United States: 1890 To 1940
Professional sociology in the U.S. began as a field area within economics, but gradually emerged as a separate discipline. Using new data on joint meetings and the separation of departments, I track interdisciplinary relations through three phases: sponsorship (1890-1905), collaboration (1905-1940), and disengagement (post-1940). In the early years, sociology was mostly a branch of economics departments. With the formation of the American Sociolo…
Mental retardation in America: A historical reader
Minding experience: An exploration of the concept of "experience" in the early French anthropology of Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, and Lévi-Strauss
In line with the growing concern with the unexamined reliance upon the concept of "experience" in anthropology, this article explores in some detail the various usages and definitions of the concept in the work of three of early French anthropology's most influential theorists: Émile Durkheim (1858-1918), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939), and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-). With its important influence on both British and American anthropology, the ear…
In Dogs We Trust? Intersubjectivity, Response‐Able Relations, and the Making of Mine Detector Dogs
The utility of the dog as a mine detector has divided the mine clearance community since dogs were first used for this purpose during the Second World War. This paper adopts a historical perspective to investigate how, why, and to what consequence, the use of minedogs remains contested despite decades of research into their abilities. It explores the changing factors that have made it possible to think that dogs could, or could not, serve as reli…
Normalizing the Supernormal: The Formation of the "Gesellschaft Für Psychologische Forschung" ("Society for Psychological Research"), c. 1886-1890
This paper traces the formation of the German "Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung" ("Society for Psychological Research"), whose constitutive branches in Munich and Berlin were originally founded as inlets for alternatives to Wundtian experimental psychology from France and England, that is, experimental researches into hypnotism and alleged supernormal phenomena. By utilizing the career trajectories of Max Dessoir and Albert von Schrenck-…
The end of drugging children: Toward the genealogy of the ADHD subject
This genealogy of the ADHD subject will demonstrate that over the course of the twentieth century a new relation between power, knowledge, the body, and ethical practices of self-formation emerged around the ADHD-type in ways that are not captured by the received critical perspective. By examining the history of knowledge and practices surrounding the ADHD-type, this work will argue that the deviant subject that was located relative to external i…
X-rays of inner worlds: The mid-twentieth-century American Projective Test Movement
This essay begins to tell the neglected history of the projective test movement in the U.S. behavioral sciences from approximately 1941 to 1968. This cross-disciplinary enterprise attempted to use projective techniques as "X-ray" machines to see into the psyches of subjects tested around the world. The aim was to gather subjective materials en masse, pursuing data on a scope, scale, and manner rarely hazarded before in any science. In particular,…
Merton as Harvard sociologist: Engagement, thematic continuities, and institutional linkages
In this paper I explore the significance of the initial decade of Robert K. Merton's graduate and professional career, from 1931, when he entered the new doctoral program in sociology at Harvard, until 1939, when he joined the Department of Sociology at Tulane University as an associate professor and acting chairperson. Drawing on archival sources, as well as the professional literature, I examine how Merton engaged the exceptionally rich, interd…
William Dwight Whitney and the science of language
What is the canonical theory of assimilation
Throughout the past century, assimilation has been the hegemonic theory of ethnic group relations in sociology, and Robert E. Park is generally considered to be the key figure associated with the articulation of assimilation's canonical formulation. Based on a careful reading of Park's main essays on assimilation, this article argues that those who associate his position with the melting pot (with its assumption of the eradication of ethnic trait…
The Ford Foundation and the Rise of Behavioralism in Political Science
How did behavioralism, one of the most influential approaches to the academic study of politics in the twentieth century, become so prominent so quickly? I argue that many political scientists have either understated or ignored how the Ford Foundation's Behavioral Sciences Program gave form to behavioralism, accelerated its rise, and helped root it in political science. I then draw on archived documents from Ford as well as one of its major grant…
Producing Parsons' reputation: Early critiques of Talcott Parsons' social theory and the making of a caricature
This article examines the critical responses to Talcott Parsons' first major work, The Structure of Social Action (1937), and his two subsequent books, Toward a General Theory of Action and The Social System (both 1951). Because Parsons' work was the subject of such virulent debate, we cannot fully understand Parsons' impact on the discipline of sociology without understanding the source and nature of those early criticisms. I trace the responses…
The case of the female orgasm: Bias in the science of evolution
Relativity and Gestalt: A note on Albert Einstein and Max Wertheimer
Research activity in "normal" and "anomalous" areas
The historiography of psychiatry and its development: A re-evaluation
On the subjectivity of important historical dates: Leipzig 1879
Felix platter and psychiatry
J. C. Reil: Innovator and battler
The historical background for national trends in psychology: France
The historical background for national trends in psychology: United States
Victorian psychology: A biographical approach
The development of French anthropology
The historical background for national trends in psychology: On the non-existence of English associationism
The historical background for national trends in psychology: German psychology
The historical background for national trends in psychology: Remarks of discussant
Problems and methods for research in prostitution and the behavioral sciences
"Changes in the concept of "scientific literature
Masters and pupils among the German psychologists
Husserl's conception of a pure psychology
The growth of concepts relating to brain mechanisms
"A historical note to "the wild boy of Kronstadt
The psychotherapeutic statement and psychosomatic observations of Hawthorne inThe Scarlet Letter
The pneuma concept of the soul
Watson's relation to Titchener
The origins and development of the "wild beast" concept of mental illness and its relation to theories of criminal responsibility
Religion and personality in the anthropology of Henry Schoolcraft
Samuel Bailey's critique of Berkeley's theory of vision