(Excerpt from Readings in General Psychology
Such a volum...)
Excerpt from Readings in General Psychology
Such a volume has an advantage over a library reserve shelf in that the students will not be discouraged by being unable to reach their assignments when and where they find it convenient to study. It has an advantage over a second textbook in that it contains more than another, Often conflicting, system Of description.
In those cases where the instructor is interested in presenting his own system, this volume will furnish reading materials which will be useful without coming into constant conflict with the lectures. While we do not believe that differences Of Opinion should be hidden from the student, we are convinced that constant conflict between instructor and text is very bad from a pedagogical standpoint.
We have chosen these readings for the beginning student, and we hope that few of them will be beyond his comprehension. Now and again terms appear in the readings which have not previously been defined. Usually where the meaning Of such terms cannot be inferred from the context, we have defined them in footnotes. It is no dis advantage, however, ii the student is occasionally forced to use a dictionary.
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Edward Stevens Robinson was an American psychologist
known for his books Factors Determining the Degree of Retroactive Inhibition, 1920. Practical Psychology, 1926. The Behavior of the Museum Visitor, 1928. Association Theory Today, 1931. Man As Psychology, Sees Him, 1932. Law and the Lawyers, 1935
Background
Edward Stevens Robinson was born in Lebanon, Ohio, United States, the younger in a family of two sons of Clinton Cooke and Carrie Isabella (Stevens) Robinson. His father was a traveling salesman of shoes and later a manufacturer of shoe boxes; the family lived comfortably in the Cincinnati suburb of Norwood.
Education
After attending public school there, young Robinson went to the University of Cincinnati, where he edited the college paper, managed the football team, won the McKibben medal awarded to the senior best exemplifying the highest ideals of a scholar and a gentleman, and graduated in 1916. He had majored in psychology, serving as an undergraduate assistant to Prof. Burtis B. Breese. With Breese's encouragement he went on to graduate work at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pa. , where applied psychology was flourishing under Prof. Walter V. Bingham. He received his master's degree there in 1917, and then took further work at the University of Chicago under Harvey A. Carr and James Rowland Angell, receiving the Ph. D. degree from Chicago in 1920, after a year as an instructor at Yale.
Career
He returned as an assistant professor to Chicago in 1920, became an associate professor in 1923, and remained on appointment there until 1927, when he accepted a professorship at Yale, where he spent the rest of his career. Robinson's primary interest was in scholarship, and he left behind a record of six books and fifty-seven journal articles. His contributions fall into three major areas: learning and memory, work and fatigue, and the applications of psychology to personal and social problems. Much of his earlier experimental work, including his doctoral dissertation, was in the laboratory study of memorization and retention. Each of the investigations he conducted or directed was marked by simplicity and cogency in relation to some theoretical issue. His concurrent interest in work and fatigue resulted in clear formulations of the principles of decrement in performance with repetitive work. In his later years, after moving to Yale, Robinson largely abandoned his earlier laboratory interests in favor of the problems of social psychology. One aspect of his interest in social psychology grew out of his studies of the museum visitor, beginning at Chicago as a study of "museum fatigue. " As he reflected upon the kind of training needed by museum docents and curators, who are responsible for making museums both inviting and instructive, he perceived the inadequacy of the usual graduate school training. After a tryout period, in which he brought professional museum workers to Yale for a year of specialized studies designed for them, he developed at Yale a division of general studies within the graduate school. This division provided special training for park directors, librarians, conductors of community forums, and the like, who needed a kind of training that doctoral courses in the graduate school did not provide. Robinson was made director of this division in 1935. The second aspect of social psychology to which Robinson devoted himself was the psychology of the law. When the Institute of Human Relations came into being at Yale in 1929 and the youthful law dean, Robert M. Hutchins, encouraged a relationship between law and the social sciences, an atmosphere was created that was very congenial to Robinson's breadth of interests. He was subsequently invited to join with Thurman W. Arnold in giving a course on legal ethics, in which together they made a plea for empiricism and naturalism in the science of law. Two companion volumes, Robinson's Law and the Lawyers and Arnold's Symbols of Government (both 1935), emerged from their collaboration. Despite his very important and able contributions to other fields, Robinson's attempt to introduce a social psychology of the law will probably be longest remembered. Robinson threw himself enthusiastically into whatever he was doing, and his colleagues accepted him as a leader. He served in the division of psychology and anthropology of the National Research Council and was chairman of the psychology section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the time of his death. From June 1930 to December 1934 he edited the Psychological Bulletin. In several of his research projects Robinson collaborated with his wife, Florence (Richardson) Robinson, a psychologist in her own right. She had received her doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1908 and was an assistant professor of psychology there at the time of their marriage, on June 11, 1921.
Florence (Richardson) Robinson, a psychologist in her own right. She had received her doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1908 and was an assistant professor of psychology there at the time of their marriage, on June 11, 1921. They had no children. Robinson died in New Haven in his forty-fourth year, three days after a brain concussion received when he was knocked over by a bicycle while crossing the street in front of the graduate school quadrangle at Yale. His wife had died less than three months before.