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AnamneseArchive of Psychology

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The File Shaft

The archive's key studies, filed vertically — from Wundt's Leipzig institute to the replication crisis.

Beginnings

Laboratories instead of armchairs — experience becomes measurable.

1870
1879 — The Leipzig institute begins its work — Wilhelm Wundt. A room in the Konvikt building becomes the first laboratory of a new discipline.
1880
1885 — On Memory appears — Hermann Ebbinghaus. A single subject — the author — and a forgetting curve replicated in 2015.
1890
1890 — The Principles of Psychology appears — William James. Twelve years of work, two volumes — and the stream of consciousness gets its name.
1900
1900 — The Interpretation of Dreams is published — Sigmund Freud. Every dream fulfils a wish in disguise, shaped by the dream-work.
1903 — Pavlov presents classical conditioning — Iwan Pawlow. After pairing with food, a neutral stimulus triggers salivation on its own.
1906 — Studies in Word Association — Carl Gustav Jung. At the Burghölzli the hesitation before a stimulus word is measured — the spot is called a complex.
1910
1912 — The Seeing of Motion appears — Max Wertheimer. Two blinking lines, one seen motion — and the doctrine of elements collapses.
1917 — The Mentality of Apes — Wolfgang Köhler. Sultan joins two tubes — the solution arrives in one stroke.

Between the wars

Feuding schools and emigration — the discipline scatters across the Atlantic.

1920
1920 — Little Albert experiment — John B. Watson. After seven pairings, fear of the rat, generalised to similar things.
1930
1932 — The Psycho-Analysis of Children — Melanie Klein. A child's play as the equivalent of free association.
1936 — The dictionary study appears — Gordon Allport. 18,000 words from the lexicon — the raw material from which the five factors came.
1936 — The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence — Anna Freud. The ego's defences, ordered into a catalogue that is still professional vocabulary.
1936 — The Origins of Intelligence in Children — Jean Piaget. Three children, one cloth, six stages — object permanence becomes observable.
1938 — The Behavior of Organisms — B. F. Skinner. Variable reinforcement produces the highest rates and the greatest resistance to extinction.
1939 — The leadership-style studies appear — Kurt Lewin. Same club, different style, different climate — the field's first deliberately built social climate.
1940
1943 — A Theory of Human Motivation — Abraham Maslow. A ranking of needs: one becomes effective only once the one below it is satisfied.
1944 — Forty-four juvenile thieves — John Bowlby. Among the affectionless thieves, early and lengthy separations clustered.
1945 — Toward, against, or away — Karen Horney. Karen Horney describes neurotic conflict as rigid movement toward people, against them, or away from them.

Post-war & laboratory

Back to the lab: behaviour, conformity, the great age of experiments.

1946 — Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl. The will to meaning — against Freud's pleasure principle and Adler's striving for power.
1950
1951 — Asch's conformity experiments begin — Solomon Asch. About 37 per cent of the critical judgments followed the false majority.
1957 — Rational Psychotherapy — Albert Ellis. The ABC scheme appears in print — six years before Beck's first cognitive paper.
1957 — The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions — Carl Rogers. The therapeutic relationship predicts success — sufficient it is not.
1959 — One dollar and twenty — Leon Festinger. Whoever lied for a dollar believed it afterwards — the weaker justification works the stronger.
1960
1960 — The visual cliff — Eleanor J. Gibson. Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk make depth perception testable without any risk of falling.
1961 — The Bobo doll experiment — Albert Bandura. Children struck the doll in the model's own movements — learned by watching alone.
1963 — Behavioral Study of Obedience — Stanley Milgram. 26 of 40 — 65 per cent — went to the highest level of 450 volts.

Cognitive turn

The mind returns — thought becomes readable as information processing.

1967 — Cognitive Psychology is published — Ulric Neisser. The book gives a field its name and its order: processing in stages between stimulus and response.
1967 — Learned Helplessness — Martin Seligman. Three groups, the same shocks, one difference: control.
1969 — Attachment appears — John Bowlby. The first volume of the trilogy — attachment as a biological system, not a by-product of drives.
1970
1971 — Stanford Prison Experiment — Philip Zimbardo. Stopped on day six of a planned fourteen; first release after about 36 hours.
1974 — Misinformation effect demonstrated — Elizabeth Loftus. One verb more than doubled the reported broken glass.
1974 — Heuristics and errors of judgment — Amos Tversky. Tversky and Kahneman show how useful shortcuts can create systematic errors under uncertainty.
1977 — Therapy Beats the Pill — Aaron T. Beck. 41 patients, twelve weeks — talking treatment holds up against imipramine.
1978 — Patterns of Attachment appears — Mary Ainsworth. Twenty minutes of laboratory, three patterns — and the key lies in the reunion.
1979 — Prospect Theory — Daniel Kahneman. Losses weigh roughly twice as heavily as equal gains.
1990
1992 — Phantom Flashbulbs — Ulric Neisser. Mean accuracy 2.95 of 7 — with confidence high throughout.

Replication crisis

The field checks its own findings: what holds when you run it again?

2010
2011 — Bem publishes evidence for precognition — Social Psychology. The methods were standard, the result scientifically highly implausible.
2011 — Flourish appears — Martin Seligman. From happiness to flourishing: five components instead of one measure.
2015 — Open Science Collaboration replicates 100 studies — Social Psychology. Around a third of 100 studies could be shown again; effects came out considerably smaller on average.
This archive