An Interview with Professor Harvey Whitehouse

A: If by ‘skeptic’ you mean those with the pessimistic view that we’re all doomed, I fear that worldview could be self-fulfilling. We should try to sustain hope for pragmatic reasons, if for no other. But even if hope is a necessary condition for building a better future, it is not sufficient. We also need the right tools, and that includes tools which help us to understand ourselves better.Until the middle of the twentieth century much of human psychology was a “black box” — we really didn’t know much about what was going on inside. In fact, that was the explicit starting point for behaviorism — a sterile approach to human psychology that attempted to understand all human behaviour in terms of conditioned responses to the environment.

Part of the reason for behaviorism’s appeal, at the time, was that earlier efforts to dig into the inner workings of the mind had produced psychological theories that were not well supported scientifically. Think Freud, Adler, and Jung. But the invention of computers, along with new insights into the way our brains and perceptual systems worked, contributed to a revolution in the study of human cognition and to our scientific understanding of our evolved psychology.