Word: psychologist
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Harry Harlow is probably the most famous psychologist you've never heard of. Back in the 1960s, his work was widely covered in the press--and with good reason. Through a series of brilliant experiments, Harlow proved that love, despite what most of his colleagues believed, plays a crucial role in mental well-being. The idea that such a thing needed proving in the first place seems bizarre today. But as Deborah Blum explains in Love at Goon Park (Perseus; 336 pages), her thorough and beautifully written biography of Harlow, it made perfect sense in the context...
Your article on psychologist Steven Pinker's new book, The Blank Slate, discussed the author's views on how much of human character is shaped by genes and how much by environment [SCIENCE, Oct. 28]. I am always amazed when I hear the phrase nature vs. nurture. What about free will? For most of us, neither nature nor nurture governs our ability to choose freely, at least not in a democratic society. Genetics, environment and upbringing can powerfully influence us to choose a specific path, but we are still able to choose an alternate...
...Steven Pinker were redesigning Harvard’s core curriculum, all undergraduates would have to read three philosophers—Descartes, Locke, Rousseau—and then reject much of what they learned. In The Blank Slate, released last month, MIT’s renowned cognitive psychologist plies the tools of his discipline to dispel pervasive myths about human nature. The book’s title comes from Locke’s famous belief that a baby’s mind is a “blank page” bereft of knowledge about the world. For Pinker, this utterly...
...erudite, sharply argued, richly footnoted and fun to read. It's also highly persuasive. The view that environment is paramount began, he says, with the philosophers of the Enlightenment: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rene Descartes and John Stuart Mill. And it was reinforced in the 1950s by Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, who said that all human behavior was simply a set of conditioned responses...
...have an irrational fear of public urinals, according to a German psychologist...