Joseph Jastrow

Introduction

Joseph Jastrow (January 30, 1863 – January 8, 1944) was a Polish-born American psychologist who helped invent experimental psychology in the United States and then spent a lifetime explaining it to the public. His scientific reputation rests on work done before he was thirty: with the philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce he ran the psychophysical experiments that introduced randomization and blinding to a repeated-measures design, a methodological innovation now taken for granted. He went on to found the psychology laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, served as the first secretary and later president of the American Psychological Association, and produced research on perception, involuntary movement and the dreams of the blind. His second career was as a popularizer and debunker. Believing that everyone holds unexamined and usually wrong ideas about psychology, he wrote a syndicated newspaper column carried by some 150 papers, broadcast on national radio, and produced a shelf of books attacking occultism, quackery and, most famously, psychoanalysis.

Early Life and Education

Jastrow was born in Warsaw, then part of Congress Poland, into a family of scholars. His father, Marcus Jastrow, was a Talmudic scholar and rabbi educated in German universities who had been banished from Poland for supporting the Polish cause against Russian rule; after several years in Germany he accepted a call to Congregation Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia, and the family emigrated in 1866. Joseph was one of seven children, and his elder brother Morris Jastrow Jr. became a noted orientalist. The classical archaeologist Elisabeth Jastrow was a cousin.

He was educated at Rugby Academy and then at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took his A.B. in 1882 and his A.M. in 1885. In 1885 he entered Johns Hopkins University to study philosophy and the new science of psychology. There he came under the influence of two very different figures: G. Stanley Hall, who had established the first American psychology laboratory, and Charles Sanders Peirce, whose work on logic and measurement shaped Jastrow's sense of what a scientific experiment should be. He received his Ph.D. in 1886 with a thesis on the perception of space by disparate senses; the degree is frequently described as the first doctorate in the United States awarded specifically in psychology, though rival claims exist.

Academic and Professional Career

Unable at first to find a teaching post in the new field, Jastrow stayed at Johns Hopkins as an honorary fellow until 1888, when the University of Wisconsin hired him as professor of experimental and comparative psychology. He established there the third psychological laboratory in the United States and built it into a department, serving until his retirement in 1927 and supervising Clark L. Hull, who later became one of the most influential American learning theorists. He taught psychology broadly and eclectically — sensation, perception, association, reasoning, and also philosophy, including aesthetics, which interested him all his life — and he belonged to no school of psychology, taking what he thought valuable from each.

The Wisconsin years were punctuated by two things that shaped his later career. The first was the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, where Jastrow headed the psychological section, mounted the first public exhibition of psychological apparatus, and ran a laboratory in which visitors could, for a small fee, be tested on sensory and sensorimotor tasks, pain sensitivity, eye-hand coordination, visual acuity, color blindness and reaction time. Thousands of people were measured. The second was a collapse in his health in 1894, brought on by a heavy teaching load combined with the exposition work; a year's leave restored him only partially, and he described his later years as full of anxiety and illness. He was one of the charter members of the American Psychological Association when it was founded in 1892, served as its first secretary, and was elected president in 1900.

After retiring from Wisconsin in 1927 he moved to New York, taught at the New School for Social Research until 1933, and devoted himself to writing and broadcasting. He had lectured at Columbia in 1910, and from 1935 to 1938 he gave a series of radio talks that made him one of the first psychologists with a national broadcast audience. He died of a coronary occlusion at the Austen Riggs Foundation in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and was buried in Baltimore. His wife, Rachel Szold, a sister of the Zionist leader Henrietta Szold, had died in 1926; the couple had no children of their own, and their adopted son was killed in the Second World War.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Method: randomization and blinding

Jastrow's most consequential contribution was methodological. Working with Peirce at Johns Hopkins, he tested whether people could detect very small differences in weight, using a procedure in which the order of stimuli was randomized and the participant — and in key respects the experimenter — did not know on any trial which stimulus was which. Peirce's target was Fechner's claim that there exists a least perceptible difference of sensation; the result, published as "On Small Differences in Sensation" in the Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, undermined the claim and, more importantly, demonstrated techniques for controlling expectation and order effects that became standard. It is an early and unusually clear instance of randomized, blinded within-subject design, which is why historians of the design of experiments still cite it.

Perception and illusion

Jastrow held that vision is not like a camera, and that what we see depends on mental processing, emotional state and context. He illustrated this with illusions, including the ambiguous rabbit–duck figure that became a staple of textbooks, and with the Jastrow illusion, in which two identical curved figures placed one above the other appear to differ in size. His point was theoretical rather than merely curious: perception is constructive, and the constructive process is visible precisely where it goes wrong. Illusions therefore served him as a route into the study of belief, since the same constructive habits that produce a misjudged arc also produce a misjudged coincidence.

Involuntary movement and dreams of the blind

To study unconscious movement, Jastrow built a machine he called the automagraph, and showed that when a person concentrates on an object the hand will drift unconsciously toward it, an effect that varies between individuals and is more erratic in children. He also investigated the mental life of people who had lost their sight, finding that those blinded after about the age of six continued to see in dreams while those blinded before about the age of five did not. He concluded that sight is not innate, that substantial mental development occurs between ages five and seven, and that hearing rather than vision is the dominant sense for blind people both waking and dreaming. He collected first-hand dream reports from blind participants, including Helen Keller, and his sensitivity to how blind people actually experience the world was unusual for its period.

Anomalistic psychology

Jastrow was a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research and resigned by 1890, convinced that its investigators were rarely trained psychologists and that their evidence did not survive scrutiny. He then became one of the leading figures of what is now called anomalistic psychology: the study of why people believe in the paranormal rather than whether the paranormal exists. Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900) dissected spiritualism, theosophy and Christian Science; The Psychology of Conviction (1918) included a chapter exposing the tricks of the medium Eusapia Palladino; Wish and Wisdom and the collection The Story of Human Error extended the analysis to superstition, coincidence, and self-deception. His recurring argument was that paranormal belief is explained by delusion, fraud, gullibility and faulty inference, and that the scientist's duty is to help the public tell truth from fiction.

The campaign against psychoanalysis

Jastrow was among the earliest academic critics of psychoanalysis, objecting that its claims were unscientific and unfalsifiable, and he devoted a book to the subject, The House that Freud Built (1932), followed by Freud: His Dream and Sex Theories. He criticized psychoanalysis as pseudoscience well before the methodological critique of Freud became mainstream, and he did so from within a profession that was largely treating the matter with caution.

Major Publications

"On Small Differences in Sensation" (1885), with Charles Sanders Peirce, Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences — the classic randomized, blinded psychophysical experiment.
The Time-Relations of Mental Phenomena (1890) — on the temporal structure of mental processes.
Epitomes of Three Sciences: Comparative Philology, Psychology, and Old Testament History (1890), with Hermann Oldenberg and Carl Heinrich Cornill.
Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900) — his major work of debunking, on occultism and pseudoscience.
The Subconscious (1906) — an early survey of unconscious processes, including the rabbit–duck figure.
The Qualities of Men: An Essay in Appreciation (1910).
Character and Temperament (1915) — on personality differences.
The Psychology of Conviction: A Study of Beliefs and Attitudes (1918) — on how belief is formed and maintained.
Keeping Mentally Fit (1928) — collected from the syndicated column of the same name.
Piloting Your Life (1930) and Effective Thinking (1931) — practical psychology for general readers.
The House that Freud Built (1932) — his critique of psychoanalysis.
Wish and Wisdom: Episodes in the Vagaries of Belief (1935) and The Story of Human Error (1936, edited) — studies of human error and credulity.

Impact and Legacy

Jastrow's institutional legacy is secure: he built a laboratory and a department, trained Clark L. Hull, helped run the American Psychological Association in its first decade, and did more than any American contemporary to bring psychology to a mass public through newspapers, magazines and radio. His methodological paper with Peirce is a genuine landmark, and the Jastrow illusion and the rabbit–duck figure are still reproduced in perception textbooks and in discussions of optical illusions. Students of anomalistic psychology regard him as a founder of the field, and his insistence that the proper object of study is the believer rather than the phenomenon anticipated how the psychology of paranormal belief is now practiced.

He was also criticized, then and since, on several identifiable grounds. His attack on psychoanalysis drew an immediate reply from Freud's supporters, who argued that Jastrow was attacking a caricature, that he dismissed clinical evidence he had not examined, and that his own alternative was thin. Historians have echoed a version of this complaint: the critique is effective as demolition and weak as construction, and Jastrow never offered a theory of personality to replace the one he rejected. His defenders note that his central objection — that psychoanalytic claims were framed so as to be unfalsifiable — has largely been accepted even by sympathetic historians.

A second criticism concerns the exposition data. Jastrow tested thousands of visitors at the 1893 World's Fair and the results were carefully recorded but never processed or published. The episode is usually read as a waste of a unique opportunity, and it illustrates a pattern in his career: he was a prolific generator of observations and a comparatively careless finisher, and several of his later popular books reuse material first written for newspapers. A third criticism is that his research methods, for all his own contributions to experimental design, were often loose by later standards: the dreams-of-the-blind findings rest on a small, self-selected sample and on retrospective self-report, and the automagraph work was open to suggestion effects that he did not fully control. Finally, psychical researchers of his own day accused him of closed-mindedness, arguing that he had decided in advance what the evidence could not show; the subsequent history of parapsychology, in which no effect has been reliably established, has made that complaint look weaker than it did in 1900.

Jastrow himself was aware of the tension in his position. He suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life, was embittered by what he saw as a lack of recognition, and thought his own later years were diminished by illness. He nevertheless kept to the program he had set out as a young man: use the experimental method to separate truth from error, and then tell the public what had been found.