Did Joy Paul Guilford and Cecil Alec Mace ever meet? The case for historical framing and LLMs

Psychology is an enigmatic topic which most people have an interest in and an opinion about. Often during coffee or dinner meetings, I hear people bring up anecdotes which have associations to psychology. But [also] often, people tend to have an obscure understanding about psychology. Our understanding depends on framing. Many people think of Freud as a founder of psychology, but in reality, he was a psychiatrist. Current psychology points to goal-oriented behavior as the central aspect of what makes us human. Other people who influenced the field of psychology are Ricord, Bain, Darwin, Guilford and Mace. In modern psychology, Minsky, Kahneman and Tversky. Minsky was probably instrumental in the development of AI/LLM, which can be used to establish an understanding about how people like Guilford and Mace interacted with one another. Or rather not. 4 pages.

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Psychology is an enigmatic topic which most people have an interest in and opinion about. Often during coffee or dinner meetings, I hear people bring up anecdotes which have associations to psychology. But [also] often, people tend to have an obscure understanding about psychology. That includes references. One such reference is Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939). But what was Sigmund Freud's profession? That depends on framing.

In 1981, psychologists Amos Tversky (1937 – 1996) and Daniel Kahneman (1934 – 2024) conducted one of their famous studies – The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. They simply demonstrated how you can change people's viewpoint by manipulating the description of a scenario (Tversky and Kahneman, 1981).

For many people, Dr. Freud was a psychologist and the founder of psycho-analysis. But in reality, Freud was a physician by training, and because of his interest in how the mind operates, it's fair to describe him, not as a psychologist, but as a psychiatrist. What's the difference?

Cognitive scientist and Artificial Intelligence researcher – Marvin Minsky (1927 – 2016) - coined the following sentence:

“The mind is what the brain does”.

Accordingly, Psychology is defined as the study of the mind and behavior:

American Psychological Association (APA. Note, this APA is about psychology).

Psychiatry, on the other hand, is defined as:

“the branch of medicine focused on the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mental, emotional and behavioral disorders” (American Psychatric Association (APA. Note this APA is about psychiatry)).

This implies on the one hand a clear distinction between psychology and psychiatry, and on the other, a distinction between the “hardware” – the brain – and the “software” – the mind. It is of course challenging to call a soft tissue made up of fat hardware. A more appropriate description would perhaps be to call the brain observable software and the mind latent (not observable) software.

But If Freud wasn't a psychologist, Who can be considered to have been the leading figures in the development of psychology as a discipline?

There are of course no clear answers to that question, but Elisabeth Ricord (1788 – 1865), Alexander Bain (1808 – 1903) and Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) contributed to insights into how the mind works. Ricord (1840) and Bain (185x) each formulated theories of combinatorial thinking, and Darwin (1872) about emotions.

Darwin's work on emotions was re-discovered by Silvan Tomkins (1911 – 1991), and has then been validated by Paul Ekman. My own bachelor thesis in emotional psychology has been used as course literature at Uppsala university. Emotions aside, goal-oriented behavior has shown to be the central aspect of what makes us human (Barkley, 2001; Gilbert och Wilson, 2007; Pluck, Cerone and Villagomez-Pacheco, 2023; Suddendorf, Bulley, and Miloyan, 2018; Tomasello et al. 2005).

But it's unclear which stance Ricord and Bain had on combinatory thinking. Because of the zeitgeist, it's possible that they referred to retrospect and the present, but probably not intentional thinking forward in time. Neither had access to modern tools, like statistics.

That changed in 1935 when Cecil Alex Mace, an industrial psychologist at Cambridge University in England, published the first known paper on intentional thinking forward in time. Mace tested, and verified, how goal-setting influenced people's performance. And he used statistics (Mace, 1935). But Dr Mace was ahead of his time; because of his use of statistics, the management of Cambridge university claimed his work was obscure – non-scientific (Phillips, 1991). It took fifteen years before statistics formally became part of academic psychological science; in 1950, Joy Paul Guilford was assigned to become president of American Psychological Association (APA; the psychologocal APA). His address was published in The American Psychologist, but here's where things also went wrong. Guilford's paper was about how factor analysis can be used to discriminate latent structures from one another. Guilford used creativity and intelligence as examples. But for some reason, the headline of his paper doesn't read factor-analysis but creativity (Guilford, 1950).

Did Guilford and Mace ever meet?

Part of the answer includes war; during the first part of the 20th century, two world wars raged, which also redrew the scientific map. Scientists fled the Baltic states, Poland and Germany to England and the USA. Examples include the gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker (1903-1940), the physicist Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) and the mathematician Jacques Hadamard (1865 – 1863). German was replaced by English.

In order to answer that complex question, Marvin Minsky's, and others, work on Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes in handy. A few years ago, after decades of research into Artificial Intelligence, new types of computer applications, Large Language models (LLM), which can index existing information on the internet, were launched. One such LLM is Microsoft's co-pilot. I asked the Co-pilot if Guilford and Mace ever met. Co-pilot answered:

I also asked if they ever referred to each other's work:

Conclusion. Our understanding depends on framing. Many people think of Freud as a founder of psychology, as psycho-therapy, but Freud was a physician by training, and therefore likely a psychiatrist. Current psychology points at goal-oriented behavior as the central aspect of what makes us human. Other people who influenced the field of psychology are Ricord, Bain, Darwin, Guilford and Mace. In modern psychology, Minsky, Kahneman and Tversky. Minsky was probably instrumental in the development of AI/LLM, which can be used to establish an understanding about how people like Guilford and Mace interacted with one another. Or rather not.

Also read: Why Finland may not be able to reverse the negative trend: The case for illusion of information adequacy

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