Understanding the Mind
William James
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Bertrand Russell remembered William James as warm and humane but rejected the wishful thinking he found in James’s ‘The Will to Believe.’ Drawing on Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug moves from James’s preference for ‘dupery through hope’ to Robert Rosenthal’s 1963 rat-maze experiment, in which students’ expectations appeared to change how supposedly ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ rats performed.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
William James is regarded as the father of American psychology. He served as a mentor of Theodore Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many other leading lights of American history. He was a beloved figure. According to Bertrand Russell, who’d met him, James was full of the warmth of human kindness.
“Yet Russell was less enamored of James’ ideas. In 1896 he delivered a talk not about the will to doubt, but ‘The Will to Believe.’ James professed that some things just have to be taken on faith, even we can’t prove they’re true.
Take friendship. If you go around for ever doubting other people, you’ll behave in ways guaranteed to make you disliked. Things like friendship, love, trust, and loyalty become true precisely because we believe in them. While James allowed that one’s belief could be proved wrong, he argued that ‘dupery through hope’ was preferable to ‘dupery through fear.’
Bertrand didn’t go in for this type of mental gymnastics. Much as he liked the man himself, he disliked James’ philosophy. The truth, he said, doesn’t deal in wishful thinking. For many years that was my motto too—until I began to doubt doubt itself.
The year is 1963, four years after Russell’s interview with the BBC.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the young psychologist Bob Rosenthal decides to try an experiment at his Harvard University lab. Beside two rat cages, he posts different signs identifying the rodents as specially trained intelligent species or dull or dimwitted rodents.
Later that day Rosenthal instructs his students to put the rats in a maze and record how long it takes each one to find its way out of the maze. What he doesn’t tell the students is that in fact none of the rats is special in any way, they are just ordinary rats.
But then something peculiar happens. The rats that students believe to be brighter and faster actually do perform better. It’s like magic. The ‘bright’ rats, though no different than their ‘dull’ counterparts, perform twice as well.
At first, no one believed Rosenthal. ‘I was having trouble publishing any of this,’ he recalled decades later. Even he had trouble understanding that there were no mysterious forces at play, and that there is a perfectly rational explanation. What Rosenthal came to realize is that his students handled the ‘bright’ rats more warmly and gently than the ‘dull’ rats. This treatment changed the rats’ behavior and enhanced their performance.
Rosenthal published an article in the American Scientist that it should not be too farfetched to think that children could become brighter when expected to by their teachers.