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A S Winston

Publications and source records attributed to A S Winston.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

The rhetoric of experimental social psychology, 1930-1960: from caution to enthusiasm.

Between 1930 and 1960, experimentation became the premier form of knowledge generation in social psychology. In journals, texts, and handbooks, experiment was now conceived as the active manipulation of an independent variable, and the sole method for the discovery of "causes." Understanding this change requires further investigation of the fine-grained discursive strategies used to promote experimentation during the 1930s and 1940s. In this paper we use discourse analysis to contrast the cautious rhetoric used by Gardner Murphy and Lois Murphy and the more enthusiastic, unhedged arguments for experimentation employed by Kurt Lewin. We argue that analysis of changes in discourse justifying experimentation can illuminate the processes by which methodological consensus was constructed.

Historiography↗
PubMed2000

On the presentation and interpretation of international homicide data.

Whitney in 1995 argued that White groups around the world have relatively low homicide rates compared to Black groups. He used the presumed similarity of homicide rates of White groups to argue for the importance of genetic factors and the unimportance of sociocultural factors in explaining group differences. We show that for Europeans, Whitney added two categories from United Nations data: homicide and death from a variety of other causes. For the U.S. White group, Whitney presented only homicide rates, thus making it appear as if Europeans have homicide rates comparable to those in the USA, when European rates are in fact considerably lower. The importance of careful scholarship in this area is emphasized.

Black or African American↗
PubMed1998

"The defects of his race": E.G. Boring and antisemitism in American psychology, 1923-1953.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, Edwin G. Boring wrote letters of reference for Jewish students and colleagues in which he followed the common practice of identifying them as Jews and assessing whether they showed "objectionable traits" thought to characterize Jews. These practices are discussed in relation to the increasing antisemitism of the interwar period, with specific reference to Abraham A. Roback and Kurt Lewin. In Roback's case, the "defect" of Jewishness was thought to explain his undesirable personality: with Lewin, personal charm mitigated the "defect" of Jewishness. Boring's unsuccessful attempts to place Jewish students, his subsequent pessimism, and his postwar discussions of Jewish identity are examined in relation to the general issue of antisemitism in the history of academic psychology.

History, 20th Century↗