SECTION J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 



EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN 

 PSYCHOLOGY. 



ADDRESS BY 



F. C. BAETLETT, 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



The position whicli Psychology occupies to-day in relation to the other 

 biological sciences, both theoretical and applied, is due directly to its 

 adoption of experimental method. Yet if the psychologist is asked to 

 point out any single unshakable discovery of first-rate psychological 

 importance, based directly and wholly upon experiment, his attempts to 

 answer the question are always regarded as unsatisfactory. Moreover, it 

 is still common to find the most skilled and notable psychologists beginning 

 their careers with an enthusiastic and active belief in experimental method 

 and, as they develop, receding farther and farther from the laboratory 

 and becoming more and more attracted by the claims of systematic 

 general theory. Two reasons are assigned by everybody for these facts. 

 Bach is valid in itself ; neither is helpful nor reassuring. They are, first, 

 that experimental psychology is a recent growth, and second, that all 

 psychological problems are discouragingly complex. It would be a bold 

 thing to maintain that any method used in scientific investigation is 

 fruitful in direct proportion to its age, while the fact that all psychological 

 problems are complex is no justification for attacking them by theoretical 

 methods which are of all ways the most likely to lead to over-simplification. 

 It therefore seems worth while to attempt a survey of the use to which 

 experiment has been put in psychology, in order to show what experiment 

 has done, is doing, and what there is reasonable ground for believing that 

 it yet may do for the advancement of psychological study. Such a survey 

 may help to explain the curious fact that the very method which, more 

 than anything else, has raised psychology to something like equal status 

 with related sciences is still regarded with suspicion, both within and 

 without the borders of the subject. 



As everybody knows, the earliest experimentalists in psychology were 

 physicists and physiologists, most of them with a strong bent towards 

 philosophy in their outlook. They set up a standard which in various 

 ways has cramped and confined experimental psychology ever since. 

 When a physicist approaches a problem in which he has to state how a 

 stimulus affects any kind of response, he is bound to lay the burden of 

 explanation upon the stimulus. If this can be simplified, controlled, 

 varied determinatively, resulting differences of response can be observed 

 and explained. The stimulus also tends to be treated as outside the response 

 itself. When the physiologist approaches the same type of problem, his 

 emphasis is equally bound to be mainly upon the response side of the 



