The Evolution of Psychology as a science

Adventures of a Psychologist by Michael Corballis 2021 published by Routledge. Available on Amazon.

I was very fortunate to have known one of our most distinguished research psychologists (Rutherford Medal, international recognition, and NZ Order of Merit). Like many others, I found Mike Corballis to be very supportive and understanding. He was always tolerant and sensitive when dealing with the failings of others. I loved his sense of humour and joie de vivre.

This book is an easy read; and beyond the first few autobiographical chapters, there is much to learn about how we think in fewer than 100 concise pages. For skeptics, an understanding of how our minds work is helpful for understanding and recognising biases.

Corballis – who sadly died late last year, was first and foremost a scientist; then also a popular lecturer and teacher. One of his distinguished and enthusiastic students (when Corballis was a professor in Canada) is prominent Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker rates him highly as a scientist and describes him as, “An admirable human being”, whose wit is worth passing on to his own students.

Michael Corballis began his academic career in mathematics. He is always curious, always prepared to say he was wrong, and very creative – all qualities that help a great deal to discover new things in the vast, multinational, and peer reviewed world of science today. His adventures take him to several countries.

In this book we learn a little of the shortcomings of the earliest clinical psychologists in New Zealand…why the behaviourists for a while held sway…and are taken back to the first psychology department here in New Zealand when psychology was literally a branch of philosophy. Michael's son Paul is now a professor of psychology at Auckland University, and is mentioned in the book. He told me that cognitive psychology is probably best described as a phase in the evolution of psychology into a science; perhaps now eclipsed by neuroscience which overlaps with psychology.

Michael Corballis made major contributions to psychology, especially with his hypothesis that human speech evolved from manual gestures rather than pre-language vocalisations. This arose from his earlier work on lateralisation of brain function, as described in his books: The Lopsided Ape, From Hand to Mouth, and The Truth About Language.

I enjoyed exploring his model of how our minds continually wander between the past, present and future. He calls that mental time travel. (More of that in another informative book I have read by Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What your mind does when you are not looking. 2015). He also describes his experiments that ingeniously reveal how our minds use both hemispheres of our brain, and what we now know about how we rotate images in our brains.

Along the way, he educates the reader about a few common misconceptions based upon uncritically received wisdom: the discredited idea of repressed, then recovered memories that probably came from Freud, the serious problems with the “mindfulness” and “left brain right brain” fads, and a few more.

He covers the Peter Ellis case, where (mostly psychiatrists rather than psychologists) failed to use good science in the court. This draws on his 2003 New Zealand Listener feature. There were a few brickbats for psychology's early forays into expert opinion for court cases. “Ouch!” he says. Of interest to skeptics is his identification here of the affirming the consequent fallacy. Nightmares and anxiety may be a consequence of abuse; but it is illogical to affirm them as strong evidence abuse has occurred. There are other more likely causes.

Perhaps of major importance too in this book, is Corballs's analysis of the enemies of science in chapter 14 (titled Anti-science). By describing what science is not (notably postmodernism), he neatly manages to give a great detail of insight into what science is. And we learn how it is that at last, psychology taken seriously, can be a science.