psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

, mentalism refers to those branches of study that concentrate on perception and thought processes, for example:

mental imagery A mental image is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of 'perceiving' some object, event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses. There are ...

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

and

cognition Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

, as in

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...

. The term ''mentalism'' has been used primarily by

behaviorist Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual' ...

s who believe that scientific psychology should focus on the structure of causal relationships to

reflexes In biology, a reflex, or reflex action, is an involuntary, unplanned sequence or action and nearly instantaneous response to a Stimulus (physiology), stimulus. Reflexes are found with varying levels of complexity in organisms with a nervous s ...

and

operant Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where behaviors are modified through the association of stimuli with reinforcement or punishment. In it, operants—behaviors that affect one's environment—are c ...

responses or on the functions of behavior. Neither mentalism nor behaviorism are mutually exclusive fields; elements of one can be seen in the other, perhaps more so in modern times compared to the advent of psychology over a century ago.

Classical mentalism

Psychologist

Allan Paivio Allan Urho Paivio (March 29, 1925 – June 19, 2016) was a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario and former bodybuilder. He earned his Ph.D. from McGill University in 1959 and taught at the University of Western Ontario fro ...

used the term ''classical mentalism'' to refer to the

introspective ''Introspective'' is the third studio album by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys, released on 10 October 1988 by Parlophone. It received generally positive reviews from critics. Background The album was unusual in that it reversed the typi ...

psychologies of

Edward Titchener Edward Bradford Titchener (11 January 1867 – 3 August 1927) was an English psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt for several years. Titchener is best known for creating his version of psychology that described the structure of the min ...

and

William James William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the lat ...

. Despite Titchener being concerned with

structure A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as ...

and James with

function Function or functionality may refer to: Computing * Function key, a type of key on computer keyboards * Function model, a structured representation of processes in a system * Function object or functor or functionoid, a concept of object-oriente ...

, both agreed that consciousness was the subject matter of psychology, making psychology an inherently subjective field.

The rise of behaviorism

Concurrently thriving alongside mentalism since the inception of psychology was the functional perspective of behaviorism. However, it was not until 1913, when psychologist

John B. Watson John Broadus Watson (January 9, 1878 – September 25, 1958) was an American psychologist who popularized the scientific theory of behaviorism, establishing it as a psychological school.Cohn, Aaron S. 2014.Watson, John B." Pp. 1429–1430 in ''T ...

published his article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" that behaviorism began to have a dominant influence. Watson's ideas sparked what some have called a

paradigm shift A paradigm shift, a concept brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Even though Kuhn restricted t ...

in American psychology, emphasizing the objective and experimental study of human behavior, rather than subjective, introspective study of human consciousness. Behaviorists considered that the study of consciousness was impossible to do, or unnecessary, and that the focus on it to that point had only been a hindrance to the field reaching its full potential. For a time, behaviorism would go on to be a dominant force driving psychological research, advanced by the work of scholars including

Ivan Pavlov Ivan Petrovich Pavlov ( rus, Ива́н Петро́вич Па́влов, , p=ɪˈvan pʲɪˈtrovʲɪtɕ ˈpavləf, a=Ru-Ivan_Petrovich_Pavlov.ogg; 27 February 1936), was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist, psychologist and physiol ...

Edward Thorndike Edward Lee Thorndike (August 31, 1874 – August 9, 1949) was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to the theory o ...

, Watson, and especially

B.F. Skinner Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. ...

The new mentalism

Critical to the successful revival of the mind or consciousness as a primary focus of study in psychology (and in related fields such as

cognitive neuroscience Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental proces ...

) were technological and methodological advances, which eventually allowed for

brain mapping Brain mapping is a set of neuroscience techniques predicated on the mapping of (biological) quantities or properties onto spatial representations of the (human or non-human) brain resulting in maps. According to the definition established in ...

, among other new techniques. These advances provided an objectively experimental way to begin to study perception and consciousness, effectively nullifying the main criticism of mentalism half a century earlier. However, the cognitive revolution did not kill behaviorism as a research program; in fact, research on

operant conditioning Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where behaviors are modified through the association of stimuli with reinforcement or punishment. In it, operants—behaviors that affect one's environment—are c ...

actually grew at a rapid pace during the cognitive revolution. In 1994, scholar Terry L. Smith surveyed the history of

radical behaviorism Radical behaviorism is a "philosophy of the science of behavior" developed by B. F. Skinner. It refers to the philosophy behind behavior analysis, and is to be distinguished from methodological behaviorism—which has an intense emphasis on ...

and concluded that "even though radical behaviorism may have been a failure, the operant program of research has been a success. Furthermore, operant psychology and cognitive psychology complement one another, each having its own domain within which it contributes something valuable to, but beyond the reach of, the other."

Classical mentalism

The rise of behaviorism

The new mentalism

See also

References

Further reading