History of Methodology in Psychology: Starting Point, Not the Goal

摘要

Current mainstream psychology is characterized by mismatch between questions asked and methods used to answer the questions. There are several important and theoretically justified methodological principles that can be found in pre-WWII (mostly continental Europe) psychology, but disappeared from current mainstream psychology. Future psychology can be built with understanding that not everything that is new is better than the old and not everything that disappeared in the history of psychology disappeared for rational reasons. Methodological thinking of several pre-WWII psychologists may have been far ahead of current mainstream psychology.