PSR Simplifies Moniker, Forsakes SR to Become P

Above the central elevator of William James Hall, home of the Psychology and Social Relations Department, an inscription prominently displays the words of James: "The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community."

In the hundred years since James penned the phrase, the men and women with offices on the hall's upper floors have begun to wonder about the neurological basis of that impulse. And they're using mainframe computers to do their research.

Today William James might not recognize the discipline his pioneering research helped found. There have been a lot of changes in Harvard's Psychology and Social Relations Department in recent years, and a deceptively straightforward attempt by the department to drop the last three words of its name later this month hints at some of the realignments in the field.

What's in a name? For many it only means the departure of the department's familiar acronym, PSR, but according to academics here at Harvard and to scholars across the country, complex changes in the departmen underlie the effort to simplify the moniker.

Having cleared several administrative hurdles, the move to change names awaits only the rubber stamp approval of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at its February 13 meeting.

Experts say the move will acknowledge Harvard's decades-long drift away from an interdisciplinary approach to several social sciences and toward what one department member calls a "quasi-biological" view of psychology. According to experts, the Harvard department's name change could increase other universities' emphasis on the "hard science" aspects of psychology and might fuel the trend of psychologists who emphasize the "social" in social science to look for non-traditional academic arrangements.

The competition within academia to produce fresh research--and to win comfortable life time posts--has moved the discipline toward hard science. With academic jobs harder to find during the last several decades, observers say young scholars have sought to produce tenure-copping research by scrutinizing individuals with the aid of computers and the tools of the natural sciences.

An interest in the neurological basis of behavior and the cognitive processes by which individuals understand their environments has come to the fore in psychology departments across the nation. Yale University Professor emeritus Irving L. Janis, an elder statesman of American psychology, calls growing interest in those two lines of inquiry, "the two great trends of today's psychology."

At Harvard these trends have made themselves felt. Areas of psychology that border the natural sciences have captured most of Harvard's attention in recent years. Younger faculty members, such as Professor Stephen Kosslyn and Associate Professor James R. Stellar, are not the white-coated, ink blot-bearing researchers of late-night television. They use computers to study behavior and want to discover the biological causes of human action. Older members of the department say the work of the two men would not even have been recognized as psychological research 20 years ago.

Kosslyn and Stellar offer thedepartment's more than 200 undergraduateconcentrators classes which explore the questionof whether the brain is a computer, and theregulation of internal environment, hormones andperceptual motor skills.

According to professors, the increased emphasison experimental psychology has repercussions forundergraduate education. According to ProfessorRobert F. Bales, an expert on the behavior ofsmall groups, Harvard has presented a somewhatskewed view of psychology since his generation ofscholars began to cease active work. "It has been along-time failure of our department to makesufficient appointments on the social relationsside," Bales, who retired from active serviceearlier this semester, says. "The old guard hasthinned to the point where there's no point inkeeping the name," continues the professor.

Ford Professor of Social Science David Riesman'31 also sees the name change as a recognition ofHarvard's altered emphases. "What they're nowsaying to the world is that what we now are is astraight psychology department. The name changewould say to an outsider, `We don't want to dealwith the dreams, the murky, the unclear anymore,"'explains Riesman, whose book "The Lonely Crowd" isa social science classic and who is noted for hisstudies of higher education.

At one stage in the development ofpsychology at Harvard, however, the University hada strong commitment to the "murky."

In the years following World War II, younganthropologists, psychologists and sociologistsfound their broad view of human behaviorconflicting with the political alliances andconservative outlooks of Harvard'swell-established academic departments. In 1946,they merged several disciplines of the socialsciences, launching the Department of SocialRelations.

With its broad conception of human behavior,Bales, a former member, says the department was a"huge success." According to another formerdepartment member, Riesman, the department was a"national magnet," attracting, "a great faculty,superb graduate students, and it was veryattractive to undergraduates."

But some of the same forces pushing thepsychologists of today toward greater and greaterspecialization were at work within SocialRelations, eventually causing the group tofunction like "four separate departments within alarger framework," says Edward L. Pattullo,director of the Center for Behavioral Sciences.

The Social Relations experiment gradually lostits drive, and eventually its autonomy, mergingwith the then-small Psychology Department in 1972.Psychologists say that department's expected namechange will formally acknowledge Harvard's movetoward more specialized study.

According to prominent psychologistsoutside of Harvard's William James Hall,departments at other universities will certainlynote the name change. The move, says Yale's Janis,"will certainly be taken as symptomatic of atrend." Janis believes the move will have"considerable symbolic impact for psychologistsacross the country. You might even see some degreeof following suit."

But observers, even those sympathetic to abroad conception of human behavior, are slow tomourn the passage of interdisciplinary study. Manysay, in fact, that the move might open a newchapter in the development of social psychology.Some see psychologists with a broad outlook ontheir field being forced into new academicarrangements and into roles beyond academia whichcould increase their understanding of humanbehavior.

"You can't make an adequate social psychologywithin a college setting," Bales is quick to say."You must go into the field; by the field I meanwhere there are real people and real institutions.If it's social psychology, it has to deal withreal institutions, and they are in business anddivinity and in government."

Janis shares Bales' opinion, and he believesthat opportunities in productivity-consciousbusiness and in the legal profession will allowsocial psychologists to continue expanding theirunderstandings, even if not within traditionaluniversity arrangements. Scholars also point toopportunities for academics to combine work inseveral departments--or even in severalfaculties--as a reality of the 1980s which shouldencourage social psychologists.

Last week, even as it contemplateddropping "Social Relations" from its name, thedepartment announced that one of the world'sforemost experts on social organization would becoming to Cambridge in an unprecedented jointappointment by the Psychology and Social RelationsDepartment and the Business School. R. J. Hackman,currently a professor at Yale University, isconsidered to be one of the world's foremostexperts on small group behavior. At the B-School,Hackman will be able to study the "real lifesituations" Bales considers so important. "It's astep in the right direction; it's a step towardintegration," says the elder professor.

Riesman also points to Hackman's appointment,and cites the significant number of psychologistsat the School of Education as evidence thatinterest in the synthesis of the social sciences,relatively young disciplines, continues.

There is also the larger question of exactlywhat an interdisciplinary approach to humanbehavior means in the age of the integratedcircuit. Asked what forces he feels were mostimportant in moving psychologists frominterdisciplinary study, Kosslyn, whose interestis in cognition, at first said there was no movefrom interdisciplinary work.

"I think the field is just as interdisciplinaryas ever," he responded. "There are computers andartificial intelligence."

Kosslyn's confusion does much to enlightendiscussion of psychology's development. Pattullosays it's possible that psychology has not yetdetermined its relation to other disciplines, andsays the current preoccupation with hard sciencemight be a trend that will pass. "You're still inthe stage of laying the groundwork," he says.

Kosslyn is at the cutting edge of his field,but he agrees with Pattullo. "It's not likethere's one future," he says. "There's a future toall of these fields."Third-year graduate student ALAN SOKOLOFFtries his hand at unraveling the mysteries of themind.