Word: andreski
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...escapes Andreski's critical eye. He believes that experimental psychologists like Harvard's B.F. Skinner are seriously misinterpreting human nature: "When the psychologists refuse to study anything but the most mechanical forms of behaviour-often so mechanical that even rats have no chance to show their higher faculties-and then present their most trivial findings as the true picture of the human mind, they prompt people to regard themselves as automata, devoid of responsibility or worth, which can hardly remain without effect upon the tenor of social life." Freud, Adler and Jung? Although psychoanalysts "offer many fundamental insights...
...Andreski is most impatient with the "quantified trivialities," which are characteristic of the social sciences. He believes that the really significant traits of people can never be measured, and that most of what can be counted and tabulated-answers to the questionnaires so often distributed by sociologists, for instance-is inconsequential...
Some behavior experts use "pseudo-mathematical decorations" to make their work look scientific, Andreski says. In analyzing myths, for example, Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss portrays a fight between two animals by writing "jaguar = anteater (-1)." If that sign is interpreted in its mathematical sense, the sentence means that a jaguar equals one divided by an anteater-a conclusion that Andreski describes as "phantasmagoric." Yet such signs work like "hallucinogenic incantations, inducing fantasies that the mind has been expanded to computer-like dimensions...
...stands for the word need. Thus Harvard Psychologist David McClelland, for one, writes n Ach when he wants only to convey a person's need to achieve great things, or n Aff to express the urge to affiliate with or belong to a group. Some of his colleagues, Andreski writes, must in turn be moved by n Bam, the need to bamboozle...
...that many social scientists are often less devoted to truth than to money and academic status, both of which may be too readily available. In the social sciences, "utterly ignorant and barely literate individuals find it quite easy to become researchers and professors." To substantiate his charge of illiteracy, Andreski cites a vocabulary test on which English social science students scored lower than everyone else, including engineers and physicists...