Recently, my bride Laura and her coauthor John Cacioppo launched their first project together. It was an introductory psychology textbook entitled: Discovering Psychology – the Science of Mind. It is a fascinating and a remarkable peek into a dynamic changing field.
Now, I know very little about the writing of textbooks, but for me the experience was something akin to trying to escape second hand smoke; you can’t do it. I was Laura’s ‘minion’: fetch her coffee or fix a platter of cheese and crackers and in one bazaar episode I even was asked to paint my tongue blue and take a picture of it for their book. Depending on how you measure this project, it started somewhere between 7 and 10 years ago. Neither John nor Laura wanted to begin a project if it was just going to be like everything else in the field of psychology. However, John had observed that the field of psychology was evolving and that a textbook addressing this natural evolution was needed.
Psychology, like so many very large fields of study, had been chopped up into pieces for 50 years to aid analysis. Experts developed in the new fields of Physiological, Clinical, Social, Developmental, Cognitive among others… and each defended their territory religiously from the intrusions of other disciplines. However, as multidisciplinary and Transdisciplinary teams began to define how modern solutions to academic and social challenges were being met; it seemed quaint for scientists to limit their expertise to a narrow field. Psychology among other hub sciences were reaching out to other disciplines and pulling together the disciplines of psychology at the same time to help address the big questions of our day.
We’ve all seen buildings designed by architects who forget that people have to live in them, business offices that create unhealthy social environments, and engineers that fail to introduce the human equation to designing solutions to structural challenges. I think this textbook models the right approach and it is a first step in the right direction.
Congratulations John and Laura.