Psychology as a Historical Science

Abstract

Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that the roots of cross-cultural variation often lie in the past. Therefore, to understand not only how but also why psychology varies, we need to grapple with cross-temporal variation. The traces of past human cognition accessible through historical texts and artifacts can serve as a valuable, and almost completely unutilized, source of psychological data. These data from dead minds open up an untapped and highly diverse subject pool. We review examples of research that may be classified as historical psychology, introduce sources of historical data and methods for analyzing them, explain the critical role of theory, and discuss how psychologists can add historical depth and nuance to their work. Psychology needs to become a historical science if it wants to be a genuinely universal science of human cognition and behavior. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 72 is January 5, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Perceived Prototypicality of Asian Subgroups in the United States and the United Kingdom

“…Through all these formal and informal learnings that spotlight or minimize certain groups over others, people can come to construct these prototypical imageries (Fryberg & Eason, 2017). Although we cannot definitively conclude that historical contexts caused such divergent prototypical representations of Asians in the UK and US, history nevertheless provides a rich insight into social psychological theories (Gergen, 1973;Kawakami et al, 2020;Muthukrishna et al, 2021;Trawalter et al, 2020).…”

Pandemics Initially Spread Among People of Higher (not Lower) Social Status: Evidence from COVID-19 and the Spanish Flu

“…As such, the study also highlights the potential of adding a historical perspective to derive insights into pandemic processes (Hatchett et al, 2007) and showcases the potential of social data science to scrutinize such historical data at a large scale (Kosinski & Behrend, 2017). Overall, by combining large-scale contemporary data and historical data, our work reaches an overall level of diversity that is exceptional in psychological research (Muthukrishna et al, 2021).…”

Perceived prototypicality of Asian subgroups in the United States and the United Kingdom

“…Although we cannot definitively conclude that historical contexts caused such divergent prototypes of Asians in the UK and US, history nevertheless provides a rich perspective into social psychological theories (Gergen, 1973;Muthukrishna et al, 2021;Trawalter et al, 2020).…”

“…We achieve this by grounding our prototype frameworks within historical contexts. Given the particular ahistorical approach of our field (Gergen, 1973;Muthukrishna et al, 2021;Trawalter et al, 2020), this research demonstrates that cultural histories can inform basic social processes (Kawakami et al, 2020).…”