Joseph Jastrow

Template:Short description Template:Third-party Joseph Jastrow (January 30, 1863 – January 8, 1944) was a Polish-born American psychologist renowned for his contributions to experimental psychology, design of experiments, and psychophysics.Template:Sfn He also worked on the phenomena of optical illusions, and a number of well-known optical illusions (notably the Jastrow illusion) that were either first reported in or popularized by his work. Jastrow believed that everyone had their own, often incorrect, preconceptions about psychology.Template:Sfn One of his ultimate goals was to use the scientific method to identify truth from error, and educate the general public, which Jastrow accomplished through speaking tours, popular print media, and the radio.Template:Sfn

Biography

Jastrow was born in Warsaw, Poland. A son of Talmud scholar Marcus Jastrow, Joseph Jastrow was the younger brother of the orientalist, Morris Jastrow, Jr. Joseph Jastrow came to Philadelphia in 1866 and received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.Template:Sfn During his doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, Jastrow worked with C. S. Peirce on experiments in psychophysics that introduced randomization and blinding for a repeated measures design.Template:Efn Though Peirce had to leave the university due to a personal scandal, Jastrow continued to advance his own research despite Peirce’s departure. From 1888 until his retirement in 1927, Jastrow was a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he advised Clark L. Hull.Template:Sfn He was a lecturer at the New School of Social Research from 1927 to 1933.Template:Sfn

Jastrow was head of the psychological section of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893,Template:Sfn where he collected "psychophysical and reaction time data" from thousands of attendees.Template:Sfn He was one of the charter members of the American Psychological Association, and eventually became the president in 1900.Template:Sfn

Jastrow was noted for his outreach in popular media, making psychological research accessible to a wider audience.Template:Sfn He gave public lectures, and was published in popular magazines, including Popular Science, Cosmopolitan, and Harper's Monthly.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He also wrote Keeping Mentally Fit, a syndicated column that appeared in 150 newspapers.Template:Sfn Jastrow also gave radio talks from 1935 to 1938 through the Philadelphia Public Ledger Syndicate.  

Jastrow also suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life.Template:Sfn He died in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His wife was Rachel Szold, a sister of Henrietta Szold.Template:Sfn Elisabeth Jastrow, the classical archaeologist, was a cousin.

His former home was in Madison, Wisconsin, which is now located in the Langdon Street Historic District.

Psychical research

Jastrow was one of the founding members of the American Society for Psychical Research for study of the "mesmeric, psychical, and spiritual".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The early members of the society were skeptical of paranormal phenomena; Jastrow took a psychological approach to psychical phenomena, believing that it was foolish to separate "... a class of problems from their natural habitat ...".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn By 1890 he had resigned from the society, and he became an outspoken critic of parapsychology.Template:Sfn Psychical researchers were rarely trained psychologists, and Jastrow thought their research lacked credibility.Template:Sfn Given the lack of evidence of psychical phenomena, he believed psychologists should not prioritize disproving claimed psychical phenomenon.Template:Sfn In his book The Psychology of Conviction (1918) he included an entire chapter exposing what he called Eusapia Palladino's tricks.

Anomalistic psychology

Jastrow was a leading figure in the field of anomalistic psychology. His book Fact and Fable in Psychology (1900) debunked claims of occultism including Spiritualism, Theosophy and Christian Science.Template:Sfn He approached the occult in a scientific manner.Template:Sfn He wanted to understand why people were attracted to it, how it gained a foothold in society, and what evidence its supporters used.Template:Sfn He wrote that many people considered coincidence, dreams, and premonitions as sources of information above science,Template:Sfn and said the role of the scientist was to help the public understand truth from fiction, and to prevent the spreading of erroneous beliefs.Template:Sfn

Jastrow studied the psychology of paranormal belief and viewed paranormal phenomena as "totally unscientific and misleading", being the result of delusion, fraud, gullibility and irrationality.

Other research

Use of analogy in society

Jastrow thought that analogies represented a more primitive way of interpreting the world.Template:Sfn He gave many examples of cultures that acted analogously, including the "Zulu chewing a bit of wood to soften the heart ...", and the "Illinois Indians making figures of those whose days they desire to shorten, and stabbing these images in the heart."Template:Sfn He wrote about cultures that ate animals to gain their physical attributes;Template:Sfn he said this tradition still persisted in his day, through superstitions, rituals, and folk medicine.Template:Sfn The underlying motivation for this mentality, Jastrow wrote, was that "one kind of connection ... will bring it to others."Template:Sfn

Optical illusions

File:Duck-Rabbit illusion.jpg

Chick bunny

Jastrow was interested in perception, especially eyesight. He thought that eyesight was more complex than a camera, and that the mental processing of images was central to interpretation of the world.Template:Sfn He illustrated this through optical illusions, including the rabbit–duck illusion.Template:Sfn He believed that what people saw also depended on their emotional state and their surroundings.Template:Sfn

Involuntary movement

File:PSM V40 D766 The automatograph.jpg

The automatograph

To detect unconscious movement of the hand, Jastrow invented a machine he called the automagraph.Template:Sfn He found that when a subject was asked to concentrate on an object, their hand moved unconsciously in that direction.Template:Sfn The magnitude of the effect varied across individuals, especially in children, where the movement was more random.Template:Sfn

Dreams of the blind

Jastrow found that people who had lost their eyesight after age six still were able to see in their dreams, and that people who had lost their eyesight before the age of five could not.Template:Sfn This same difference in perception and age was true for people with partial vision loss.Template:Sfn Jastrow concluded that sight was not innate, and that significant mental development occurred between ages five and seven.Template:Sfn He noted that hearing, not sensation, was the primary sense of the blind, in both waking and dream.Template:Sfn He collected first-hand accounts of dreams from visually impaired people, including Helen Keller.Template:Sfn

Criticisms of psychoanalysis and Freud

As early as 1913, at the congress of the German Psychiatric Association held in Breslau, Joseph Jastrow criticized psychoanalysis as unscientific and pseudoscience. He published a book (The House that Freud Built.) about it in 1932.

Publications

Jastrow's publications include:

• "Charles Peirce as a Teacher" in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, v. 13, n. 26, December, 723–726 (1916). Google Books and text-string search.

External links

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• Rabbit-Duck Illusion
• Mind Tricks for the Masses, On Wisconsin magazine article
• Joseph Jastrow's biography at University of Wisconsin - Madison's Psychology Department