Until recently, I had long doubted the scientific character of the discipline of psychology.
For this reason, I did not have a very high opinion of personality tests, either.
But now? Well, not so much.
I don’t say I’ve become a wide-eyed enthusiast for the therapeutic culture. But, nowadays, I am willing to give personality tests the benefit of the doubt in a way I never was before.
What happened to make me change my mind? I will try to explain that in a moment.
But first, let me explain a little bit about why I was so skeptical of psychology—and personality tests—before.
I came of age intellectually during the early 1970s, which as it happens was the heyday of the positivist mindset in psychology—a period stretching from around 1970 until 1990 now referred to by opponents of positivism in psychology as the “Dark Age” (Revell, 2011, p. 9).
Modern positivistic psychologists publish narrowly conceived studies of micro-behavior. The results are then trumpeted as hard-won, rigorously scientific insights into some purported “mechanism” of human behavior.
The often tacit but always clear implication in such studies is that it is only a matter of time before the profusion of such mechanisms will be assembled by scientists like so many jigsaw puzzle pieces into a complete picture of the human mind down to the smallest detail.
If such a thing were truly possible, then presumably psychologists would be able to faultlessly predict—and thus manipulate—the behavior of individual human beings.
In which case—God help us all.
Of course, I did not really believe in such a possibility. On the contrary, for many years I harbored the impression that the claims reported by such studies invariably fell into one of two categories:
- If the result was robust and reproducible, then it was trivial and nothing more than what one intuitively knew anyway (commons sense).
- If, on the other hand, the result was non-trivial, then it was fragile and could not be reproduced.
However, I now realize that I made the mistake of generalizing this negative opinion to psychology in all its manifestations over the two centuries of its existence as an independent academic discipline.
The more general point, philosophically speaking, is that positivism is not essential to psychology as a social science, but only an accident of the time when I first encountered it as a young man.
The first thing to emphasize with respect to the history of thinking about human personality is that its distant historical roots lie in Greco-Roman Antiquity.
The second thing to notice is that the division between more philosophical-humanistic and more scientific-positivistic approaches to that thinking was already apparent from the beginning.
For example, already in the late-fourth century BC, Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus compiled a book called the Characters. This book consisted of pen portraits of various kinds of “characters” or personalities.
It has been claimed that the portrayals of human types contained in the Characters correspond remarkably well to the traits posited by the Big-Five model (Revell, 2011; Table 1, p. 4).
On the other hand, the origins of the positivist spirit in the study of humankind may be traced back to Democritus and the other ancient Greek atomists active more than a century before Aristotle and Theophrastus.
A more direct source of thinking about the mind, however, lies in the eighteenth century, during the revolutionary intellectual movement known as the “Enlightenment.”
During the Enlightenment, we find many humanistic approaches to understanding the mind, or soul, such as the work of the great English and Scottish thinkers Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury—the title of whose major work, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), echoes Theophrastus—Francis Hutcheson, and Thomas Reid, among others.
In France, the positivist tendency was dominant, as can be seen from such representative works as L’homme-machine [The Man-Machine] (1747) by the physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme [On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man] (1802) by the physiologist Pierre Cabanis.
The latter book contained the notorious claim that “The brain secretes thought as the stomach secretes gastric juice, the liver bile, and the kidneys urine.”
During the nineteenth century, the center of gravity of the natural sciences shifted to Germany, where the academic discipline of psychology began to hive off from “moral philosophy”—as what we would now call the “philosophy of mind” was referred to until the eve of the twentieth century.
The most important German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, had taught that there could be “no Newton of the blade of grass” (in his Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of the Power of Judgment], published in 1790)—much less a Newton of the human soul.
Partly for this reason, the majority of Kant’s immediate successors were idealists, that is, thinkers who put the mind (not matter) at the center of reality.
But as the sciences of chemistry, biology, and physiology began to develop into autonomous disciplines, it was only a matter of time until they began to consider the workings of the brain—and by extension, the mind/soul—as falling within their purview.
Actually, there were two competing streams of thought in Germany on the nature of the relationship between the mind and the brain.
On the one hand, there were the so-called “scientific materialists,” notably, the physiologist Ludwig Büchner, brother of the playwright Georg Büchner, and the zoologist Carl Vogt, whose 1846 Physiologische Briefe [Physiological Letters] (1846) echoed Cabanis by claiming that “thoughts have roughly the same relationship to the brain as bile has to the liver or urine to the kidneys.”
The “scientific materialism” movement was more in the nature of a popular publicity campaign than either a scientific theory or a philosophical doctrine. Büchner, Vogt, and their colleagues might be compared to such contemporary positivist controversialists as Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, and similar authors.
The other main current of thought within the budding science of the mind in nineteenth-century Germany was simultaneously more empirically rigorous than the scientific materialists, and also more cognizant of the limitations of psychology as a scientific discipline.
Such important investigators as Ernst Heinrich Weber, Johannes Peter Müller, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Emil Du Bois-Reymondall, to varying degrees, believed both in the importance of empirical research in understanding the brain and the functioning of the senses (“psychophysics”), and, at the same time, in the existence of human feeling and experience as a sui generis reality that transcends empirical methods.
For example, Du Bois-Reymond, who was a great advocate of rigorous scientific methodology, nevertheless famously opined that “ignorabimus”—literally, “we will never know,” meaning that the mind/soul would forever elude full scientific understanding.
Another outstanding figure—one often referred to as the “Father of Experimental Psychology”—was Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt, who explicitly spoke of the need for adhering to a “via media” between empirical and humanistic approaches to the scientific investigation of the mind/soul (Kim 2022).
Late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century, the foregoing body of work crystallized into a new, scientific discipline known as psychology.
Though the word “psychology” itself was not new, it now acquired an explicitly scientific—as opposed to philosophical—connotation, while still allowing philosophy to play a role.
While these early, non-positivistic forms of the new science of psychology were largely pioneered in Germany, we may note several important figures from other countries adopting a similar stance.
For example, in France Théodule-Armand Ribot did important empirical research on memory, especially, the phenomenon of amnesia, summarized in Les Maladies de la mémoire (1881) [Diseases of Memory]. However, he also published a study of the German idealist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as analysis of both the concept of free will and the empirical phenomena associated with it. Finally, in 1883, he published an early work on the concept of personality.
For many years, Ribot occupied the prestigious chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France. After his retirement, in 1902, Ribot was succeeded by Pierre Janet, who strongly influenced many eminent psychologists, including William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl G. Jung (for these three figures, see below).
In the US, the outstanding figure was William James, who was almost equally influential as a psychologist—he was well acquainted with the work of Helmholtz and visited Wundt’s laboratory during a stay in Germany—and as a philosopher. He may be perhaps the best representative of the new psychology’s commitment to empirical rigor in the study of the mind, without succumbing to the lure of materialist-reductionism, as is evidenced by his classic The Principles of Psychology, published in two volumes in 1890.
Finally, the Dutch philosopher Gerard Heymans—who was equally at home in the laboratory (where he conducted careful experiments on the senses of vision and hearing) and the seminar room—introduced the new psychology to the Netherlands around this same time.
With his philosophy hat on, Heymans published the notable German-language textbook, Einführung in die Metaphysik auf Grundlage der Erfahrung [Introduction to Metaphysics on the Basis of Experience] in 1905. While wearing his psychology hat, he developed an early version of personality theory known as the “Cube of Heymans,” which posited eight fundamental character types: sentimental, passionate, choleric, neurotic, apathetic, phlegmatic, sanguine, and amorphous.
With respect to the subdiscipline we now call “personality psychology”—which was long known as “differential psychology”—two German psychologists are of special historical importance: Hugo Münsterberg and William Stern. It is interesting that Münsterberg and Stern were both born in Germany but ended up teaching in the US.
Münsterberg—who is considered the founder of industrial and organizational psychology—was a believer in psychophysical parallelism, the theory that all mental events are associated with a “parallel” brain process.
Thus, Münsterberg taught that mental illnesses have a cellular and metabolic foundation. At the same time, he was explicit about the limitations of the reductionist-materialist approach to investigating the mind. His book, Psychotherapy (1909), was an exemplary effort to walk a fine line between the scientific and humanistic viewpoints.
Stern, too, did important empirical work, especially in psychophysics—notably, on the phenomenon of tone variation. However, his contribution to the development of personality (or “differential”) psychology in a humanistic vein ultimately proved to be of far greater significance.
Though Stern’s contributions were eclipsed during the heyday of positivism in American psychology from the 1930s through the 1980s, he is now being rediscovered as a major historical figure (Lamiell, 2003).
Stern summed up his own particular formulation of an anti-positivistic approach to human personality in his magnum opus, Allgemeine Psychologie auf personalistischer Grundlage (1935) [General Psychology from the Personalistic Standpoint (1938)].
It is fair to say that Münsterberg and Stern are both exemplary figures in that they pursued rigorous empirical and humanistic approaches at the same time, when and as appropriate.
To round out this thumbnail sketch of the old anti-positivistic psychology, it is worth noting that some of the most prominent figures in the new psychology veered from Wundt’s via media in the opposite direction, away from positivism towards speculation based on the interpretation of dreams, myths, and other cultural symbols, wholly unmoored from conventional empirical investigation.
Two of the most important of these early figures were the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud and the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.
Early in his career, Freud was committed to a reductionist-materialist worldview. Thus, he is famous for his “hydraulic” theory of the functioning of the human mind. However, although Freud was never primarily involved with personality psychology as such, as time went by his methodological stance in psychology shifted in a more-humanistic direction.
To be more precise, Freud shifted his focus over time onto the clinical treatment of mental illness, to which end he solicited patients’ childhood memories and dreams, invented the so-called “talking therapy,” and eventually developed the treatment technique known as “psychoanalysis.”
Despite Freud’s early scientistic orientation, it is interesting that several decades later his work came under intensive criticism for being unscientific—see, for example, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (1984) by philosopher Adolf Grünbaum.
Jung, in contrast, was always primarily interested in humanistic approaches to the mind. Like the later Freud, he based much of his work on the symbolic meanings he inferred from the mythological and religious thought of ancient and traditional cultures. Jung is probably best known for his concept of the “collective unconscious.”
In addition, Jung’s 1921 book Psychologische Typen [Psychological Types] played a foundational role in the later development of personality psychology (see this article).
The transition to the historical pathway leading to modern personality theory and testing occurred around the time of the Second World War. Two of the most important figures in this transition were the British-American psychologist Raymond B. Cattell and the German-born British psychologist Hans Eysenck, who have been discussed elsewhere on this website.
The Eysenck/Cattell tradition spawned innumerable variants and styles of self-description test, nearly all based on two-factor, five-factor, or more-complex models of the distinct, fundamental traits underlying the healthy adult personality.
For a continuation of the history of psychology that focuses just on the development of personality theory and testing, see here.
While this tradition never languished entirely, it did suffer a significant loss of prestige and influence during the period from about 1970 and 1990. These two decades represent the defeat of the earlier twentieth-century form of positivism known as “behaviorism” by new variants of reductionist materialism known by such terms as “cognitive neuroscience” and “evolutionary psychology.”
Looking back from the perspective of 2024, I feel that my earlier suspicion of psychology in all its forms was mainly based on the accident of my coming of age intellectually around the beginning of this “Dark Age.”
If I wish to be honest, however, I need to present my personal story in a bit more detail.
When I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s, I was in fact quite sympathetic to the scientistic perspective—even though I was a Classics major! (I didn’t say I had a logically consistent position at that age.)
Slowly, my primary academic interests shifted from philology to philosophy. Therefore, it did gradually become clear to me that I needed to develop some of reconciling my twin interests in science and the humanities.
Eventually, I came to a position close to what is now called “liberal naturalism.” That is, I left my positivism behind.
But, somehow, I missed out on the transformation that the science of psychology had undergone in the meantime, beginning around 1990, in a more-humanistic—or, at least, less-scientistic—direction.
It turns out that my own intellectual evolution had mirrored that of the discipline of psychology—but unbeknownst to me!
I went right on assuming that most, if not all, psychologists were still devoted to the materialist-reductionist worldview.
Obviously, many fields of psychologists, and more individual psychologists, remain wedded to scientism today. But the changes that have occurred over the last three decades or so have opened up a space within which modern personality theory and measurement instruments are now being taken more seriously.
How did I finally come to understand this?
Quite by accident.
It was being hired to write for the SuccessPortraits.com website that provided me with the occasion to do some deeper reading in the contemporary and historical literature of personality psychology and psychology, in general.
I was tasked, among other things, with taking eight different online personality tests and writing up the results (here) in comparative perspective.
What I found—to my surprise, and delight—was that while the specific theories underlying these tests vary, they all share a nucleus of insight into the unconscious traits that produce human personality and inform behavior.
Why did I come to this conclusion? Very simply because all of the tests produced similar assessments of my own personality, warts and all, which I could not but recognize as accurate.
Surely the most logical explanation for this convergence of results is that they are picking up on something objectively real about my psychic makeup.
And, obviously, if the tests work so well in my case, I must conclude they work well in the case of most other people, as well.
After this insight, I began investigating the history of psychology with a view to understanding why my impressions of the field as a young person in the early 1970s no longer jibe with the state of the discipline today.
Then, I discovered that many, if not most—and assuredly not all—of the great founders of psychology as a separate academic discipline, separate from philosophy, still retained a fundamentally philosophical (and so humanistic) orientation, which they tried in various ways to combine with a scientific methodology.
We seem to have now come full circle. The majority of today’s working psychologists apparently agree that the application of rigorous empirical techniques in psychology is necessary—to the extent possible—but by no means sufficient for understanding the human mind.
I am thinking of such contemporary figures as the personality psychologist Edwin A. Locke, author of The Illusion of Determinism: Why Free Will Is Real and Causal (2017), the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2011), and the UCLA research psychiatrist Jeffrey M. Schwartz, author of The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (2002).
Thus, present-day psychology seems to have returned to its historical roots in a humble approach to the quest for a science of the human soul. It seems to me that a figure like Gustav Fechner (Heidelberger, 2018), for example, would feel very much at home in our contemporary intellectual setting.
To finish, you might say I am a convert to the idea that personality tests are valid and useful because I have now opened my mind to the fact that I am in considerable philosophical sympathy with at least an important segment of academic psychology in its current form.
Works Cited
Heidelberger, Michael (2018) Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner And His Psychophysical Worldview. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Kim, Alan (2022) “Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman; URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/wilhelm-wundt/>.
Lamiell, James T. (2003) Beyond Individual and Group Differences: Human Individuality, Scientific Psychology, and William Stern′s Critical Personalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Revell, William, et al. (2011) “Individual Differences and Differential Psychology: A Brief History and Prospect,” in Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, et al., eds. The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Individual Differences. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell; pp. 1–38.