Foreword to the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, Seventh Edition

WILLIAM DAMON

The Handbook's Developing Tradition

Development is one of life's optimistic ideas. It implies not just change but improvement, progress, forward movement, and some sense of positive direction. What constitutes improvement in any human capacity is an open, important, and fascinating question requiring astute theoretical analysis and sound empirical study. So, too, are questions of what accounts for improvement; what enhances it; and what prevents it when it fails to occur. One of the landmark achievements of this edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science is that a full selection of top scholars in the field of human development have offered us state-of-the-science answers to these essential questions.

Compounding the interest of this edition, the concept of development applies to scholarly fields as well as to individuals, and the Handbook's distinguished history, from its inception more than 80 years ago to the present edition, richly reveals the development of a field. Within the field of human development, the Handbook has had a long and notable tradition as the field's leading beacon, organizer, and encyclopedia of what's known. This latest Handbook edition, overflowing with insights and information that go well beyond the scientific knowledge available in previous editions, is proof of the substantial progress made by the field of human development during its still-short (by scholarly standards) history.

Indeed, the history of developmental science has been inextricably intertwined with the history of the Handbook. Like many influential encyclopedias, the Handbook influences the field it reports on. Scholars-especially younger ones-look to it to guide their own work. It serves as an indicator and as a generator, a pool of received findings, and a source for generating new insight.

It is impossible to imagine what the field would look like if Carl Murchison had not assembled a ground-breaking collection of essays on the then-almost-unknown topic of child study in his first Handbook of Child Psychology. That was 1931, at the dawn of a scholarly history that, like every developmental narrative, has proceeded with a combination of continuity and change. What does this history tell us about where the field of developmental science has been, what it has learned, and where it is going? What does it tell us about what's changed and what has remained the same in the questions that have been asked, in the methods used, and in the theoretical ideas that have been advanced to understand human development?

The First Two Editions

Carl Murchison was a star scholar/impresario who edited the Psychological Register, founded important psychological journals, and wrote books on social psychology, politics, and the criminal mind. He compiled an assortment of handbooks, psychology texts, and autobiographies of renowned psychologists, and even ventured a book on psychic phenomena (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were among the contributors). Murchison's initial Handbook of Child Psychology was published by a small university press (Clark University) in 1931, when the field itself was still in its infancy. Murchison wrote:

Experimental psychology has had a much older scientific and academic status [than child psychology], but at the present time it is probable that much less money is being spent for pure research in the field of experimental psychology than is being spent in the field of child psychology. In spite of this obvious fact, many experimental psychologists continue to look upon the field of child psychology as a proper field of research for women and for men whose experimental masculinity is not of the maximum. This attitude of patronage is based almost entirely upon a blissful ignorance of what is going on in the tremendously virile field of child behavior. (Murchison, 1931, p. ix)

Murchison's masculine allusion is from another era; it might supply good material for a social history of gender stereotyping. That aside, Murchison was prescient in the task that he undertook and the way that he went about it. At the time this passage was written, developmental psychology was known only in Europe and in a few forward-looking U.S. labs and universities. Nevertheless, Murchison predicted the field's impending ascent: "The time is not far distant, if it is not already here, when nearly all competent psychologists will recognize that one-half of the whole field of psychology is involved in the problem of how the infant becomes an adult psychologically" (Murchison, 1931, p. x).

For this first 1931 Handbook, Murchison looked to Europe and to a handful of American research centers for child study-most prominently, Iowa, Minnesota, University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, and Clark-many of which were at the time called field stations. Murchison's Europeans included a young "genetic epistemologist" named Jean Piaget, who, in an essay on "Children's Philosophies," cited data from his interviews with 60 Genevan children between the ages of 4 and 12 years. Piaget's chapter would provide U.S. readers with an introduction to his soon-to-be seminal research program on children's conceptions of the world. Another European, Charlotte Bühler, wrote a chapter on young children's social behavior. In her chapter, which still is fresh today, Bühler described intricate play and communication patterns among toddlers-patterns that developmental scientists would not rediscover until the late 1970s. Bühler also anticipated critiques of Piaget that were to be again launched during the sociolinguistics heyday of the 1970s:

Piaget, in his studies on children's talk and reasoning, emphasizes that their talk is much more egocentric than social.that children from three to seven years accompany all their manipulations with talk which actually is not so much intercourse as monologue.[but] the special relationship of the child to each of the different members of the household is distinctly reflected in the respective conversations. (Bühler, 1931, p. 138)

Other Europeans include Anna Freud, who wrote on "The Psychoanalysis of the Child," and Kurt Lewin, who wrote on "Environmental Forces in Child Behavior and Development"-both would gain worldwide renown in coming years.

The Americans that Murchison chose were equally notable. Arnold Gesell wrote a nativistic account of his twin studies-an enterprise that remains familiar to us today-and Stanford's Lewis Terman wrote a comprehensive account of everything known about the "gifted child." Harold Jones described the developmental effects of birth order, Mary Cover Jones wrote about children's emotions, Florence Goodenough wrote about children's drawings, and Dorothea McCarthy wrote about language development. Vernon Jones's chapter on "children's morals" focused on the growth of character, a notion that was to become mostly lost to the field during the cognitive-developmental revolution, but that has reemerged in the past decade as a primary concern in the study of moral development.

Murchison's vision of child psychology included an examination of cultural differences as well. His Handbook presented to the scholarly world a young anthropologist named Margaret Mead, just back from her tours of Samoa and New Guinea. In this early essay, Mead wrote that her motivation in traveling to the South Seas was to discredit the claims that Piaget, Lévy-Bruhl, and other "structuralists" had made regarding what they called animism in young children's thinking. (Interestingly, about a third of Piaget's chapter in the same volume was dedicated to showing how Genevan children took years to outgrow their animism.) Mead reported data that she called "amazing": "In not one of the 32,000 drawings (by young 'primitive' children) was there a single case of personalization of animals, material phenomena, or inanimate objects" (Mead, 1931, p. 400). Mead parlayed these data into a tough-minded critique of Western psychology's ethnocentrism, making the point that animism and other beliefs are more likely to be culturally induced than intrinsic to early cognitive development. This is hardly an unfamiliar theme in contemporary psychology. Mead offered a research guide for developmental field workers in strange cultures, complete with methodological and practical advice, such as the following: (1) translate questions into native linguistic categories; (2) do not do controlled experiments; (3) do not try to do research that requires knowing the ages of subjects, which are usually unknowable; and (4) live next door to the children whom you are studying.

Despite the imposing roster of authors that Murchison had assembled for this original Handbook of Child Psychology, his achievement did not satisfy him for long. Barely 2 years later, Murchison put out a second edition, of which he wrote: "Within a period of slightly more than 2 years, this first revision bears scarcely any resemblance to the original Handbook of Child Psychology. This is due chiefly to the great expansion in the field...