ABSTRACT
The characteristics of the immediate post-schools era in psychology suggested that psychology was leaving its stormy adolescence and becoming more mature. There was less of the militant insistence that psychology is a science; there was less rebellion against psychology’s parent, philosophy. During the post-schools era organized US psychology faced and dealt with many complex ethical issues that psychological scholarship and practice entail, and psychology’s vigilance about these issues continued unabated into the 21st century. The institutional attention to ethical issues in psychology was insufficient for a small group of scholars early during the post-schools era, who argued that the entire psychological enterprise was flawed, in that the “scientific method with its focus on determinism, objectivity, and mechanical cause-and-effect analyses, ignores the dignity, value, and inherent goodness of human nature. Some mainstream psychologists, disturbed by humanistic attacks on verifiability, evidence, and objectivity, accused humanistic psychology of being so vague that its idealistic assertions are not verifiable and cannot be objectively tested.
