The present study provides a turn-of-the-century status report on the teaching of the history of psychology in colleges and universities in the United States. The data indicate that the course is offered regularly in most departments of psychology and is frequently required of majors; these findings are consistent with earlier research. Most instructors teach the course largely out of personal interest and self-taught expertise with their primary teaching and research commitments to other areas of psychology. Few instructors engage in publication of research and scholarship in the history of psychology, although there are 2 journals in the field that provide an outlet for scholarship. The few positions that allow for primary commitment to teaching and research in the history of psychology is a possible cause of concern for the future of the course and for its place in the education of psychologists in the 21st century.
An experiment was conducted to investigate attitudes toward punishment in relation to beliefs in free will and determinism. College students responded to two questionnaires; one designed to assess attitudes toward punishment and one designed to assess strength of belief in free will or determinism. It was found that subjects who scored higher in belief in determinism recommended more punitive measures for behavioral deviations than those who scored higher in belief in free will. A possible explanation for these results emphasized the burdensome moral responsibility which punishment may represent to those who believe in free will. Such responsibility would demand that punishment be administered with scrupulous attention to fairness and justice.
Perceptions of sexual harassment were investigated as a function of perpetrators' and recipients' gender. Undergraduate students (100 women, 98 men) were presented 34 scenarios of men and women interacting at work. Participants were asked to read carefully each scenario and indicate on a scale anchored by 1 (strongly disagree) and 7 (strongly agree) their opinions as to whether the scenario represented an incident of sexual harassment. Analysis indicated that women rated "hostile environment" scenarios as more harassing than men, and male perpetrators were rated as more harassing than female perpetrators. Even though some scenarios were rated as more harassing than others, the full range of the 7-point scale was used on every scenario, indicating a lack of agreement on what constitutes harassment. This lack of agreement highlights the debate within the legal community about whether the "reasonable person" or the "reasonable woman" standard should be used to judge sexual harassment in the workplace.
Responses of 85 male and 56 female undergraduates to a scale designed to measure beliefs in free will or determinism were correlated with responses to an internal/external locus of control questionnaire. Analysis gave only a low-order correlation between scores on the scales, and factor analysis led to the conclusion that beliefs in free will or determinism are not necessarily related to beliefs in internal or external locus of control. Explanations were offered for why those who believe in free will might nevertheless believe in many external constraints upon behaviors and why determinists might believe in the so-called internal locus of control.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.