Constructing the Subject traces the history of psychological research methodology from the nineteenth century to the emergence of currently favored styles of research in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Kurt Danziger considers methodology to be a kind of social practice rather than simply a matter of technique. Therefore his historical analysis is primarily concerned with such topics as the development of the social structure of the research relationship between experimenters and their subjects, as well as the role of the methodology in the relationship of investigators to each other in a wider social context. The book begins with a historical discussion of introspection as a research practice and proceeds to an analysis of diverging styles of psychological investigation. There is an extensive exploration of the role of quantification and statistics in the historical development of psychological research. The influence of the social context on research practice is illustrated by a comparison of American and German developments, especially in the field of personality research. In this analysis, psychology is treated less as a body of facts or theories than a particular set of social activities intended to produce something that counts as psychological knowledge under certain historical conditions. This perspective means that the historical analysis has important consequences for a critical understanding of psychological methodology in general.

Near the turn of the century, younger psychologists like Külpe, Titchener, and Ebbinghaus began to base their definition of psychology on the positivist philosophy of science represented by Mach and Avenarius, a development that was strongly opposed by Wundt. Psychology was redefined as a natural science concerned with phenomena in their dependence on a physical organism. Wundt's central concepts of voluntarism, value, and psychic causality were rejected as metaphysical. For psychological theory this resulted in a turn away from Wundt's emphasis on the dynamic and central nature of psychological processes toward sensationalism and processes anchored in the observable periphery of the organism. Behaviorism represents a logical development of this point of view.

The term “introspective psychology” is misleading in that it covers a variety of diverging positions on the theory and practice of introspection. From the beginning there was a basic discrepancy between the British and the German philosophic tradition, w77th the former relying more exclusively on introspection than the latter. Wilhelm Wundt's advocacy and use of introspection was extremely circumscribed and essentially limited to simple judgments tied to external stimulation. During the first decade of the twentieth century some experimental psychologists, notably E. B. Titchener and the Würzburg School, greatly enlarged the scope of introspection, ushering in the brief vogue of “systematic introspection.” The latter never gained wide support in North America and was supplanted in Germany by developments that do not constitute “introspective psychology” in any precise sense.

The history of psychology tends to be accorded a purely pedagogical role within the discipline rather than being seen as a possible source of substantive contributions. This reflects a type of mobilization of tradition that is characteristic of the natural rather than the human sciences. The shallow history of the scientific review helps to organize consensus while critical history represents a threat to the moral community of researchers. However, there are developments which provide a more favourable context for critical historical scholarship. These include: the emergence of a somewhat disenchanted view of science; the rise of feminist scholarship; and the international diversification of psychology. The potential effects of critical historical studies on conceptions of the subject-matter of psychology, on the understanding of its practices and on the nature of its social contribution are briefly discussed.

The historical emergence of a field devoted to the experimental investigation of effects identified as "social" required a radical break with traditional conceptions of the social. Psychological experimentation was limited to the investigation of effects that were proximal, local, short-term, and decomposable. A viable accommodation to these constraints occurred in the closely related programs of Moede's experimental crowd psychology and Floyd Allport's experimental social psychology. Later, Kurt Lewin attempted to provide a different conceptual foundation for the field by drawing on certain precepts of Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of scientific experimentation developed by Ernst Cassirer. These ideas were poorly understood and were soon replaced by a methodological regime in which a new generation of statistical procedures and experimental design shaped implicit conceptions of the social in social psychological experiments through such procedures as randomization and the additive combination of variables. ᭧ 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.1. This use of "programmatic," like the closely related "research tradition," derives from the practice, frequently adopted in science studies, of taking, not specific experiments, but interlinked sets of experiments as the unit of historical analysis. The rationale for this usage was provided by Imre Lakatos' (1978) critique of falsificationism, which pointed out that the historical fate of a scientific theory depended, not on unique experimental outcomes, but on the general trend of "research programs." The existence of such programs is not a matter of rhetoric but of practice. Rhetoric may or may not play a role in establishing practice in specific cases. Thus the "explicit announcement of a new program" is not a criterion for establishing the existence of a research program, as Samelson's (2000) comments imply.