ABSTRACT
Quite misleadingly, ‘Applied Psychology’ implies a ‘pure Psychology’ the findings of which are then subsequently ‘applied’. Psychology really arose as a discipline when society’s needs to solve practical behavioural problems encountered the more abstract scientific and philosophical enquiries about the nature of the human mind (see N. Rose, 1985; Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume). The ‘minds’ presenting themselves to Psychology, at first those of children, criminals, the insane, the ‘primitive’ and the ‘idiot’, gradually extended to those of soldiers, factory workers, parents, the impoverished, the athlete and the ‘consumer’ (to list just some major categories). As this ever-extending remit established a major role for Psychology in twentieth-century life, the ‘applied’ always confronted the ‘pure’ with concrete issues and content, yielding new methods, concepts and hypotheses which ‘pure’ psychologists adopted (even ‘motivation’ – see K. Danziger, 1997: 110-116); in D. Broadbent’s words ‘many problems which arose in the real world have been taken up by workers in the ivory tower, sometimes to the point where their origins have been forgotten’ (Broadbent, 1971: 17). The boundary is in any case blurred: ‘developmental Psychology’ for instance, usually considered a subdiscipline of a ‘pure’ kind, is inextricably interwoven historically with the ‘applied’ fields of Educational Psychology and what used to be called ‘subnormality’. Even ‘perception’ – a canonically ‘pure’ field – has been researched as much in ‘applied’ settings (like aviation) as within the ‘pure’ laboratory (see Chapter 8). ‘Applied Psychology’ is a field so diverse as to verge on granulation (see Table 14.1).
