MY GOALS AS A TEACHER
SID PERLOE

Conceptual Goals

            My primary goal is to help students achieve an understanding of basic concepts in psychology.  This includes concepts concerning the processes or mechanisms that produce behavior and experience as well as those concerning the ways in which behavior and experience contribute to survival and reproduction.  While psychologists' concepts apply to a broad range of animals, I especially want students to grasp their application to human action and experience.
 

            Concepts are cognitive tools that enable us to discover or extract the meaning and significance of the events we experience.  Because human events are complex, they can reveal more than one kind of meaning or significance.  Our concepts are like stains that highlight particular features of events while obscuring others.  Most students approach human events with a humanistic set of concepts.  Their understanding of their own or others’ behaviors focuses either on the phenomenology of the actors involved, i.e., what they intended or how they felt, or on the evaluative implications of the actions, i.e., their relevance to some standard of good and evil.   At a more sophisticated level students may seek a hermeneutical understanding of the action, i.e., the relevance of the action to broad cultural themes.
 

            While humanistic concepts are necessary for living informed lives, they are not sufficient.  They fail to highlight the ways in which human action and experience are part of the natural world, subject to the same determinants as the rest of the universe.  Helping students locate action in the world of natural causation is the distinctive mission of teachers of psychology.  This is particularly important at Haverford, where the social sciences, with the exception of economics, usually take a humanistic approach to their subject matter.

            No perspective allows a person to discover all aspects of events.  Reliance on a single perspective produces a narrow view and makes one prone to error.  A liberal arts education should make students aware of the ways in which the concepts they use make some aspects of reality more salient than others.  They should become comfortable shifting from one perspective to another in order to see what each brings into focus or pushes to the periphery.  Without concepts that allow them to see human action as part of nature, students are unable to reflect upon the limitations of the set of humanistic perspectives they spontaneously apply to human action.  I think that this makes them susceptible to problems in their understanding of themselves as well as of social issues.

Methodological Goals

            Thinking probabilistically.  Many, perhaps most, decisions in our lives and issues in our society require us to deal with uncertainty, with probabilistic information.  There are two contexts in which teaching psychology can help students use such information effectively.  The first is statistics.  Although I do not teach statistics courses, an important part of what I aim for in my research oriented courses is helping students feel comfortable with applying statistical criteria to the evaluation of data.  This involves more than learning to use formulae or computer packages correctly.  It includes helping students to see what kinds of statements require statistical evaluation.  I also try to convey an intuitive understanding of how particular statistical procedures help us deal with probabilistic inferences more adequately than everyday common sense.

            The second context is in teaching about social cognition.  In the past 15 years, the way we spontaneously think about probabilistic information has been studied intensively.  We are often very poor intuitive statisticians; even professional statisticians fall prey to errors when thinking about everyday probabilistic problems.  I think that students can be made aware of the errors to which we are prone.  While it may be impossible to reshape our intuitive modes of thought about probabilistic information, we can learn to identify the situations in which errors are likely to occur and to apply algorithms which yield correct answers, even if they don't feel correct.

            Formulating research questions.  I also believe that it is important for students to learn about how psychologists formulate questions and do research that seeks answers to these questions.  Although undergraduates rarely get to the point where they can make independent contributions to psychological science, they can come to understand what psychological research attempts to achieve and why some research designs or procedures are more likely than others to yield reliable answers.  The latter of these two goals is probably attainable only with students who take lab courses, but an understanding of the goals of psychological research should be part of all courses.  It complements the conceptual goals discussed above.

            Teaching concepts with no attention to methods might prevent students from really appreciating what it means to treat behavior and experience as part of the natural world.  That is, because it is part of the natural world, it can be known in the same general way as other parts of this world are known, namely through the application of the scientific method.  It is the union of the focus of the humanities (humans and their works) and the methods of the natural sciences that is psychology's proper domain.  It is this domain I want to help students enter.

Practical Goals

            Even though I think that understanding psychology's concepts and principles will help students live better lives and be better citizens, I do not think that these goals should be directly addressed in a liberal arts, undergraduate psychology curriculum.  My views about this have changed over the last 20 years.

            There are two reasons for this.  Except for certain areas of interpersonal relations and the design of systems involving the exchange of information between humans and machines (human engineering), psychology has not advanced to the point where it can provide the basis of a scientific technology of human affairs.  Our capability with regard to all but a few human, personal and social problems is at about the same level as biology's capability to provide a basis for scientific biological technology (i.e., medicine) during the late nineteenth century.  Although there probably were, in those days, remedies that were effective for certain diseases, their success was more often the outcome of intuitively guided trial and error than the application of scientific knowledge.  I believe that the same is true of late twentieth century attempts to provide scientifically based solutions to human problems.  For example in the area of psychotherapy, we have some remedies that work, even though we cannot explain the source of their efficacy.

            The combination of pressing human needs and the absence of valid knowledge provide a fertile breeding ground for quackery and magical thinking.  Nineteenth century medicine and twentieth century psychology have had their share of both, although ideology has taken the place of older forms of magic in psychology's case.  It was the impossibility of disentangling my own ideological views from what I could identify as reliable knowledge that led me to stop teaching and doing research on applications of psychology to social and political issues.

            It might be instructive for students if I taught about the inadequacies of many practical applications of psychology, but I would rather concentrate on what psychology has to offer than on its shortcomings.  There was lots of good biology to teach in 1887 (e.g. Darwin's theory of evolution, the beginnings of embryology and physiology), even though these did not yet form the basis of a scientific biological technology.  In the same way, there is a lot of good psychology to teach today and I believe that it is a basis on which a more complete scientific understanding can be built, an understanding which, in the future, will allow the creation of a scientific applied psychology that parallels modern applied biology.  I should add that such a technology will create as well as solve problems, just as happened with applied biology, witness surrogate motherhood, genetic engineering, etc.  Knowledge is almost always useful for good or evil (or more likely, ambiguous) purposes.

            The gap between need and knowledge is also involved in my second reason for avoiding applications in my teaching.  When audiences with strong preconceptions are exposed to ambiguous information that contradicts or at least does not provide strong support for their views, they often come away with their preconceptions strengthened.  They extract from the ambiguous input that which is consistent with their views and jettison the rest.  What is intended as a balanced presentation is transformed into justification.  The less students know of an area, the more susceptible they become to their tendentious interpretations.  It is very difficult to wean students from the model of a debater using information to score points and help them acquire the model of a scientist using information to evaluate an hypothesis (which is not to say that scientists do not also sometimes act like debaters, but the models are quite different).

            At this point in psychology's development, I believe that an indirect approach to the solutions of problems is best, at least at the undergraduate level.  Cognitive skills are probably best developed in what the psychoanalysts call the "conflict free sphere of the ego."  Once developed, they may be able to function with more charged material.

Advising Goals

            I try to encourage students to have content-related reasons for choosing courses.  That is, I encourage them to ask why they should want to know about a particular subject matter and to consider the significance of the subject for understanding or appreciating some important intellectual or artistic domain.  Students have so few courses that they can take and so much that they ought to learn, that I think they should be serious about their choices rather than responding to fashion, convenience, relevance to issues of the hour or other ephemeral influences.

AREAS OF INTEREST

            Since my senior year in undergraduate school, I have been interested in the psychological processes that generate social phenomena, that make groups and societies work the way they do.  I saw, and for the most part continue to see, social psychology as analogous to biochemistry in the way it links two levels of analysis.  Although psychology was strongly behavioristic during my student years, I was drawn toward a more cognitive view of the processes producing behavior, a view that focused on how people perceive, categorize and make judgments about their physical and social environments.  I was also interested in human personality, especially in the psychoanalytic perspective on the interaction between motivation and emotion, on the one hand , and cognition on the other. 

            While the context and detailed expression of these interests have changed, they have remained at the focus of what I think about and teach.  Like most psychologists at mid-century, I saw little to be gained by looking into the biological aspects of the processes I studied.  To the extent that I felt it necessary to ask about why or how our cognitive processes came to work as they did.  I looked to learning as the explanation and often to learning in a culturally regulated context.  I recognized also that physiology provided useful information about motives like hunger.  However, I did not see much use for biology in understanding motives relevant to much of social behavior, e.g., the need for power, affiliation or achievement (a triumvirate that was intensively studied in the 50's and 60's).  I certainly did not see the relevance of broader biological considerations, namely, evolution.

            However, as a consequence of my teaching about emotion and social motivation, and also of my interest in how we perceive facial expressions of emotion, I began to recognize that my earlier perspective had been too narrow.  While my interests continued to focus on teaching about cognition and motivation and their roles in generating the patterned social behavior we observe in social systems, they were now part of a larger conceptual framework, the evolution of behavior.  This change took place during the middle 1970's.  It was slow in developing and in influencing my teaching.  But over the past 15 years, it has gradually affected what I teach in all of my courses as I gain more understanding of the significance of evolution for understanding the behavior of organisms and the operation of social systems.