Replications of Historical Psychological Studies

Ryan TweneyThe March 2008 issue of the journal Science & Education, guest edited by Ryan Tweney, reports replications of five historically significant psychological practices and studies that were conducted by graduate students at Bowling Green State University where Tweney is an emeritus professor of psychology.

The replications include: (a) Gertrude Stein’s study of automatic writing, (b) Egon Brunswik’s experiments showing the superiority of perception to reasoning in estimating an object’s size, (c) an 1896 study of the effects of sleep deprivation, (d) the practice of phrenology, (e) Wundt’s study of the scope of consciousness using a metronome. The issue also includes an introduction by Tweney and an article by Michael Andrew Ranney (U. California, Berkeley) discussing the “pedagogical technique of employing historical replications of psychological experiments with graduate students in psychology.”

Tweney is a prominent historian of psychology, best know for co-editing a volume of Wundt Studies (1980), for several articles on the history of statistical analysis in psychology, and for his cognitive-historical work on the research processes of Victorian physicist Michael Faraday.

About Christopher Green

Professor of Psychology at York University (Toronto). Former editor of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Creator of the "Classics in the History of Psychology" website and of the "This Week in the History of Psychology" podcast series.

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