• DOI:10.1037/H0043943
• Corpus ID: 144287695

The two disciplines of scientific psychology.

@article{Cronbach1957TheTD,
  title={The two disciplines of scientific psychology.},
  author={Lee Joseph Cronbach},
  journal={American Psychologist},
  year={1957},
  volume={12},
  pages={671-684}
}

• L. Cronbach
• Published 1 November 1957
• Psychology
• American Psychologist

NO man can be acquainted with all of psychology today, as our convention program proves. The scene resembles that of a circus, but a circus grander and more bustling than any Barnum ever envisioned—a veritable week-long diet of excitement and pink lemonade. Three days of smartly paced performance are required just to display the new tricks the animal trainers have taught their charges. We admire the agile paperreaders swinging high above us in the theoretical blue, saved from disaster by only a few gossamer threads of fact, and we gasp as one symposiast thrusts his head bravely between another's sharp toothed jaws. This 18-ring display of energies and talents gives plentiful evidence that psychology is going places. But whither? In the simpler days of psychology, the presidential address provided a summing-up and a statement of destination. The President called the roll of the branches of psychology—praising the growth of some youngsters, tut-tutting patriarchally over the delinquent tendencies of others—and showed each to his proper place at the family table. My own title is reminiscent of those grand surveys, but the last speaker who could securely bring the whole of psychology within one perspective was Dashiell, with his 1938 address on "Rapprochements in Contemporary Psychology" (15). My scope must be far more restricted. I shall discuss the past and future place within psychology of two historic streams of method, thought, and affiliation which run through the last century of our science. One stream is experimental psychology; the other, correlational psychology. Dashiell optimistically forecast a confluence of these two streams, but that confluence is still in the making. Psychology continues to this day to be limited by the dedication of its investigators to one or the other method of inquiry rather than to scientific psychology as a whole.