Joseph Jastrow
1863–1944 · American experimental psychologist of Polish birth
Joseph Jastrow (Warsaw, 1863 – Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1944) was an American experimental psychologist of Polish birth, one of the pioneers of psychophysics and of experimental design in the United States. He is also remembered for his efforts to bring psychology to a general audience and for his criticism of parapsychology and psychoanalysis.
The son of the Talmud scholar Marcus Jastrow, he came to Philadelphia in 1866 and studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University he worked with Charles S. Peirce on psychophysical experiments that introduced randomization and blinding into a repeated-measures design. From 1888 until his retirement in 1927 he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he advised Clark L. Hull.
He also studied optical illusions, including the one that bears his name, and visual perception, which he thought far more complex than a camera. He was a founding member of the American Psychological Association and its president in 1900. His book Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900) examined occult beliefs such as Spiritualism and Theosophy with a scientific approach, and his popular writing, lectures and syndicated column aimed to bring research to a wide public.
Key ideas
- Truth versus error: scientific psychology should separate what is true from what people merely assume out of intuition or habit.
- Active perception: vision depends on mental processing, not only on the light reaching the eye, and also on emotional state and surroundings.
- Anomalistic psychology: paranormal beliefs are explained by psychology, illusion, fraud and credulity rather than by real phenomena.
- Analogical thinking: analogies are a more primitive way of interpreting the world, still visible in superstition and folk medicine.
- Criticism of psychoanalysis: Jastrow regarded it as unscientific and devoted a book to it in 1932.
Books to read
- Fact and Fable in Psychology EnglishEPUB 329 KBRead online
Curiosities
Experiments with Peirce
During his doctorate he worked with Charles S. Peirce, although Peirce had to leave the university because of a personal scandal.
Dreams of the blind
He collected accounts of dreams from visually impaired people, including Helen Keller, and found that those who lost their sight after age six still saw in their dreams.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.