ABSTRACT
Modern American experimental psychology requires a minimalist cast of actors, taking what appear to be precisely defined roles. From the 1930s onward, the “experimenter” and “subject” served as its principal actors, for a long period holding the abbreviated titles “E” and “S” in experimental reports. Excepting the introduction of “confederates and machine-technology substitutes” (Bayer, 1998; Morawski, 1998), these prescribed roles have endured. Subjects were rendered anonymous and purportedly passive actors whose thoughts and behaviors have been represented almost exclusively through experimenters’ terms or numeric systems, and they were “run” through the factory-like operations of the experiment. By eliminating the participant’s subjective observations, dropping the misnomer of calling him or her an “observer,” and using the controls of precise laboratory procedures, experimenters
aimed to remove subjectivity from the experiment. According to J. F. Kantor, “objectivity, that is, making psychological data into autonomous facts to be observed and described,” must include “objectifying attitudes.” Kantor affirmed a purportedly incontrovertible distinction between observer and object, consequently insisting that “psychology studies the ‘other one’” (1922, p. 431). Indeed, Max Meyer (1921) titled his introductory text The Psychology of the Other One. Such codification of scientific participants (in terms of capacities for objectivity) was but one of the techniques for standardizing experiments; other techniques include quantification, scales and tests, and aggregate statistical methods.
