Psychologists & Headwaiters

Practitioners of an inexact science torn by dissension, psychologists are often suspected of having an inferiority complex. If they are so afflicted, they seldom betray it in public. Last week, however, Dr. Gordon W. Allport of Harvard, retiring president of the American Psychological Association, declared that as prophets of human behavior psychologists are not in the running with statesmen, lawyers and headwaiters.

This unusual display of psychological humility occurred during the Association's meeting last week at Stanford University and University of California. The psychologists snapped back to normal with a grandiose report from their Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (of which Dr. Allport is a member) on how to keep the U. S. out of war. Findings:

1) Stress economic fallacies involved in aggressive nationalism.

2) Detect and interpret propaganda.

3) Be clear in the use of words such as patriotism, Communism, Fascism; explain the viewpoints of foreign nations, especially of those nations most disliked in the U. S.

4) Oppose monopolistic control of markets, raw materials, etc.

The Society said that, for the enlightenment of the U. S. people, it would issue a weekly analysis of war propaganda.

Other highlights of the meeting:

Dr. Harry C. Steinmetz of San Diego State College noted that, in environments where erroneous beliefs are trumpeted, something like an epidemic of paranoia (systematic delusions of persecution and grandeur) may spread, and that then large groups may become dependent on a paranoiac for their wellbeing. He mentioned, without naming, "a leading American research physician, recently returned from Germany, who tells me that a psychiatrist is in almost constant touch with the Fuhrer . . . that his Excellency suffers from paranoid manic-depression. ... It may be today that power does not so much corrupt as that the process of acquiring it maddens." Dr. Steinmetz also found paranoid symptoms in the "Moral Rearmament" movement engendered by Buchmanism.

If asked, "How many words do you know?" most educated adults will grossly underestimate their own vocabularies. Dr. Robert H. Seashore, Northwestern University, found (by judicious sampling) that average college students could recognize 61,000 basic and 96,000 derivative terms in an unabridged dictionary, a total of 157,000 words; bright students could recognize 190,000. Dr. Seashore pointed out that in the days of Shakespeare (whose working vocabulary has been given by scholars as 15,000 words) the English language was much smaller than it is now.

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