ABSTRACT
Social scientists have yet to provide knowledge to the helping professions equivalent to that which natural scientists provide to engineers and technologists. Psychology was to be for human challenges what physics or chemistry was for engineering challenges: the deliverer of knowledge that could transform nature; specifically, human nature. Psychologists were to find out what made humans ‘tick’ when it came to important activities like learning. Unsurprisingly, most psychologists historically turned to the same principles and practices of science as did their natural science counterparts (Teo, 2005). Behaviourist and cognitive psychologists, up to present-day neuroscientists, base their science on a Newtonian view that humans, like other aspects of the natural world, are knowable and tinkerable machines (cf. Dolnick, 2012). To really know humans and how they addressed their challenges was a step towards technologically addressing such challenges – helping and pedagogical practices included. Learn the psychological and social mechanisms and apply relevant formalised knowledge of them went the logic. The lab-coated scientist of the 1950s and 1960s – whether in psychological or electronics labs – was a repository of hope for how society could move forward (Shapin, 2008). Clark Hull (1943) had theorised laws of learning and motivation, but related labwork was needed. In Sputnik era Euro-America, a zeitgeist of psychological inevitability loomed large in the public imagination when it came to psychological research outcomes engineering human responses to challenges like learning.
