Psychology at Cambridge

The three most important figures associated with psychology at Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth that are relevant to the psychology/economics connection are James Ward (1843— 1925), G.F. Stout (1860-1944), and Charles Myers (1873-1946).

Ward started out studying ‘moral sciences’ at Trinity College in 1870, was elected to a Fellowship there in 1875, and was subsequently chosen as Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic at Trinity in 1897, remaining there until his death. He was a student of Henry Sidgwick (Bartlett 1925: 450). ‘Mental philosophy’ was a term that encompassed both psychology and metaphysics (Sidgwick 1876a: 245). Ward’s most important works were The Relation of Physiology to Psychology of 1875, three articles on ‘Psychological Principles’ in Mind in 1883-1887 that were later published as a book, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on ‘Psychology’ in the 1886 and later editions.

Ward did not write anything that had a direct relationship to the subject matter of economics, but he was closely involved with shaping how psychology developed in Cambridge, and had a personal link to the Keynes family. For example, at the end of the 1880s ‘the Keynes and Ward families would picnic together on the river in the summer’ (Skidelsky 1983: 69). Maynard Keynes was probably too young to have absorbed anything from Ward at this time, but his father was not. Neville Keynes enjoyed an ‘early and lasting friendship with James Ward’, and it was Ward who was ‘probably influential’ in enabling him to switch from studying mathematics to the moral sciences in 1873 (Groenewegen 1995).

Consequently, The Scope and Method of Political Economy acknowledged the ‘importance of psychological premises to certain departments of economic enquiry’ and admitted that the ‘psychological analysis of motives is important’ to understanding the laws of capital growth (Neville Keynes 1917: 91, 205). Ward also consulted with Neville Keynes regarding Cambridge lecturing appointments (Wall 2007: 146). Moreover, when Marshall decided to switch his own focus of study away from psychology in 1871-1872, it was to Ward that he wrote explaining the reasons for his change of heart (Groenewegen 1995). Lastly, Ward was also on the working party appointed in 1901-1902 to inquire into increasing the opportunities for studying economics at Cambridge (Groenewegen 1988: 643).

Regarding his approach, Ward repositioned the idea of the self at the centre of psychology and made attention the active agency of the new personality psychology that was being formulated at the end of the nineteenth century (Cook 2006). Conscious attention assumed the primary focus rather than association, and Ward saw instincts as arising from psychological habits (Hatfield 2003). He has therefore been credited as ‘establishing a Cambridge school of psychology’ that diverged from the associationist approach that had been dominant in Britain up until that time (Cook 2006).

However, as Ward’s extensive list of publications demonstrated—including work on animal locomotion (1874), the nervous system of the crayfish (1879), Fechner’s Law (1876), and naturalism (1899/1902)—he was also very interested in the link between psychology and physiology, and this would become a key element of the British approach to psychology in this period. He was particularly interested in the relation between the nervous system and the mind (Wall 2007: 136), that is, in the physiology of brain activity, although he cautioned as to whether physiological understanding was sophisticated enough to provide definitive answers (Hatfield 2003).

Stout started as a student at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1879, became a Fellow there in 1884, and then University Lecturer in the Moral Sciences in 1893 (Schaar 2013: 4), where he remained until 1896. His association with Cambridge was substantial and lasted for 17 years: he was at one point Sidgwick’s student (Wall 2007: 138). Stout’s most significant works were Analytic Psychology (1896) and Manual of Psychology (1898), the former being studied by Maynard Keynes for the civil service entrance examination in 1905-1906.

Stout saw himself as part of a wider British tradition. In Analytic Psychology, where antecedent Cambridge influences such as Ward were acknowledged, Stout referred to the ‘time-honoured procedure’ of Locke and Bain for investigating psychology and to the ‘English line of Empirical Psychology, especially to Hobbes and Hume’ (Stout 1896, volume 1: ix-xi). This English line was distinct from the Continental tradition as exemplified by Kant. Stout presented the ‘traditional English method’ of psychology as bringing systematic order to the facts of mental life by ascertaining the processes of developed consciousness, that is, it was descriptive and classificatory in nature. Kant’s a priori distinctions would have no place in such an approach.

Myers had a much more direct link to economics than was provided by either Ward or Stout, being the author of various works in the field of industrial psychology such as Mind and Work: The Psychological Factors in Industry and Commerce (Myers 1921). Myers was appointed Lecturer in Experimental Psychology at Cambridge in 1907 and became the Director of the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory. In 1918, he gave lectures to the Royal Institute on ‘Present-day Applications of Psychology, with Special Reference to Industry, Education and Nervous Breakdown’. In 1921, he created the National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) that aspired to ‘introduce the methods of psychology into industry’ (Forrester 2008: 40). He explained the focus of this work as follows:

Industrial Psychology...is concerned with the human factor throughout industry.. .[including] Industrial Physiology in so far as it is impossible to separate mental from bodily activities . Its aim is to discover the best possible human conditions in occupational work, whether they relate to the best choice of a vocation, the selection of the most suitable workers, the most effective means of avoiding fatigue and boredom, the study and provision of the most valuable incentives to work.the best methods of work and training, the reduction of needless effort and strain due to bad movements and postures.defective routing, layout or organization (Myers 1929a: 9).

Although this was a wide range of concerns, the unifying element was that the latest advances in experimental psychology would be applied to them, the aim being to improve working conditions whilst increasing production efficiency. Myers conceived of these aims as positively reinforcing each other (increased efficiency would come about partly by improved working conditions), and he structured his work under four headings: vocational guidance, work performance, movement study and skills, and management issues.

One notable aspect of Myers’s work on industrial psychology was its lack of direct or obvious influence on Cambridge economists, which is probably why not many historians of economics have considered it. Thus, there are few (if any) references to Myers’s publications in the works of Marshall, Pigou, or Keynes and vice versa: it was as if industrial psychology at Cambridge was located in an alternative institutional world to industrial economics at the same University.

However, when the approach of industrial psychology is examined in more detail, similarities with economics at Cambridge do clearly emerge. For example, Myers outlined the following regarding methodology:

Industrial Psychology seeks out causes before it recommends remedies. It deals with the worker as a living mental organism, not as a blind, lifeless machine. Its methods are fundamentally those of Biology, not those of Mechanism ... [A] given effect may be the outcome of a large number of interacting causes in different parts of the entire organism (Myers 1929a: 10-12).

It is well known that Marshall evoked biology rather than mechanics as the scientific methodology appropriate for economics. But Myers went further than Marshall in delineating the importance of psychology to industry, explaining that of the ‘four main determinants of industrial and commercial efficiency—the mechanical, the physiological, the psychological, and the socio-economic—the psychological is by far the most important and fundamental’ (Myers 1921: v).

This was because intelligence in foreseeing demand (i.e. Keynes’s entrepreneurial expectations, although Myers did not identify it as this) and a sympathetic understanding of the standpoint of others (what today is called interpersonal intelligence) were more important as factors in the industrial process ‘than mere capital or mechanical labour’ (ibid.). Myers was positing the existence of an additional factor of production apart from land, labour, and capital: this factor was psychological intelligence, a key element of the mental constitution of entrepreneurs. As will be seen, this idea had a direct equivalent in Marshall.

For Myers, the link between economics and biology was not simply abstract and metaphorical, but concrete and direct as well. As he explained in Mind and Work, the scientific study of vocational guidance ‘must undertake a careful physiological and psychological analysis of (i) the requirements of different occupations, and (ii) the individual mental and physical differences among those intending to work at them. For the groundwork of the latter task.. .we are indebted to the experimental psychology of the laboratory’ (ibid.: 77). This latter aspect had a concrete link to Cambridge, as Myers ‘anonymously gave the money to build a laboratory for psychology in Cambridge, which.. .had opened in 1913’ (Forrester 2008: 38). Although a main focus of Myers’s work at this time (i.e. before and during the First World War) was abnormal psychology, by the end of the war his interest in industrial psychology had begun to blossom.

Myers was open about exporting psychological concepts to other subjects. In 1929, he published an essay entitled ‘Psychological Conceptions in Other Sciences’, in which he highlighted how physics had recently taken a psychological turn with relativity and quantum mechanics. Moreover, he stressed the fundamentally uncertain nature of human efforts in making predictions in various subject areas, highlighting that, ‘for Physics, as for Psychology and for Biology, the past is really different from the future, that the future of any organized (or individual) unit is unpredictable, and that the passage from one side of a mathematical equation to the other is strictly and actually irreversible throughout Nature’ (Myers 1929b: 15). Thus, evolution was an essentially open-ended process in which the future never exactly resembled the past, even though it was derived from it. Again, some similarity to Marshall on time-irreversible evolution is apparent here (Egidi and Rizzello 2006: 675).

Perhaps the most obvious parallel, however, between Myers and Cambridge economists was with Keynes. Myers supported the need for government intervention in the economy that was targeted at ensuring productive employment and advocated worker participation in management processes. He argued as early as 1920 thus:

When capital has been paid a due reward for its services, the remaining profits must be equably divided among all concerned in its production. Thus capitalism and employment will come to be rigorously distinguished — employment including both management and labour. To this end we are clearly approaching, the division being no longer between management and labour, but between capitalism and employment (Myers quoted in Costall 1998: 158—159).

Although there are no references to Myers’s work in Keynes’s writings, this should not be taken to mean that Myers was not influential in wider circles. For example, Ramsay MacDonald addressed a meeting of the NIIP in 1929, where he argued (perhaps a little naively) that industrial peace could be obtained by adopting a Myers-like approach to fitting individual specialities to employee/employer needs (ibid.: 158).

To answer the question of what constituted the general Cambridge approach to the psychology/economics nexus, a wider comparison is required. As has been explained, in Britain after the First World War, the method of industrial psychology was experimental and the perspective was psycho-physiological: ‘human factors’ or fitting the person to the job. This was in contrast to the USA and Germany, where the method was psychological measurement, and the perspective was individual differences: personnel psychology or psychometric testing (Hollway 1994: 1,217—1,218). The US ‘personnel psychology’ approach reflected more the views (and needs) of the employer, whereas British industrial psychology placed the employee centre stage. As Myers was listed as the main example of the British approach, ‘British’ was used here as a synonym for Cambridge.

Another important difference was that physiology played a greater role in the British/Cambridge approach than it did in the US/German. It will be argued here that this physiological component of Cambridge psychology, expressed in the early works of Ward and in Stout’s interest in psychophysical disposition (Stout 1896, volume 2: 289), had some influence on early Cambridge economics, although the pathways of impact were mediated. In addition, Stout’s identification of an English ‘empirical’ tradition in psychology, and its corresponding associationist approach to understanding the mind, was also relevant.