I thought I would know how to be an engineer but I didn’t.  In 1947 my sophomore year my grades were low.  Engineering drawing was the worst – penmanship again.  Math was integral/differential calculus which private-school boys learned in high school.  Not me.  I also feared failing organic chemistry.  It crossed my mind that I might be stupid.  But as long as a book was open I could get anything right but I couldn’t memorise what I needed.  Was there a science somewhere that could help me?  In the 1940s, Psychology, a not-required elective for engineering students, was unknown to the general public, considered an upstart by “liberal arts” faculty, and pretty much ignored by the established sciences.

The introductory course at Princeton was taught by Prof. Herbert S. Langfeld, a dapper, well-travelled co-author of the text-book who seemed personally connected with important names in its bibliography.  He parked his Lincoln Continental (in 1948) on the lawn outside Pine Hall and was exactly five minutes late to each lecture.  Rumour had it he’d married a rich wife but even that was impressive: I knew no engineer suave enough to marry a rich wife.  Presenting himself at the podium in a bespoke sport jacket with hand-knotted bow tie, he instructed us in a precise but casual manner.  Relevant personal anecdotes accompanied important events and discoveries.  In addition to psychology, Langfeld informed us about psychologists – nothing too deep or deprecatory, entertaining if trivial.

Psychology focused on subjects my father and his physicist friends tried to avoid like human error and abnormalities.  It had fascinating things to say about the human condition but its conclusions were usually tentative.  Only when it borrowed from other sciences did psychology achieve rigour.  However when it came to mental testing based on inferential statistics, I thought I’d found the holy grail – the science of exams! Psychologists evaluated exams!  And they paid people to write test items.  I went to the dean to request switching from Engineering.

The Dean, observing my grades, was unsympathetic to my plight.  But the Engineering School had an escape clause in its guidelines.  Students could move to Liberal Arts but not vice versa.  I persisted.  The Dean relented.

Despite Langfeld’s nonchalance, I could detect Psychology had a problem.  An immature discipline was trying to establish itself.  Psychology had rationale but lacked proof.  Science was not my forte but trying to be a scientist was something I understood.  I’d spent my whole young life striving to show potential.  Psychology needed promising research.  Anyone at all who actually performed good experiments would be welcomed.  If Jungle Boy were to submit the right paper, it would get published.

The subject-matter could sound trivial as long as research rules were carefully adhered to and all operations precisely described so as to be repeatable.  I was sure I could do original work and write a research paper.  All I had to do was nail down a fact, shed light or cast doubt on some belief or conviction through a little experiment yielding real data.  Re-analysing someone else’s data was another route.  Making a contribution, being the first to publish, was more important than memorising existing facts – after all, there weren’t many.

I began to perform and publish experiments while still a student.  The best journals prided themselves on being non ad hominem and withheld author details.  My bi-line was the same as my return address, just Charles Slack, Princeton University.  Mail got delivered to my student box.  Psychology in 1950 was like physics in 1900.  What you did was far more important than who you were.  (Albert Einstein was a clerk in the patent office when he published e=mc².)

However, psychological experiments had to be properly designed for results to be valid.  Experimental design was an authoritative discipline often honoured in the breach.  It was easy to make mistakes.  Though my designs had flaws, editors and peer reviews didn’t always spot them.  I was far from the only delinquent experimenter: quite a few classic experiments by renowned investigators are now known to contain embarrassing defects.

Although I couldn’t see my own flaws I became keenly aware of something missing in the discipline of Experimental Design itself.  Human experiments like mine were made up of what were called “trials” and these had not yet been systematically dealt with.

Essentially tiny self-contained experiments, trials were repeated over and over within the same experiment in order to get enough data to rule out various kinds of error. Experimental Design was the study of how to do this properly so as not to be misled.  What I noticed was that nobody had yet systematically listed all the possible potential types of trials.  Experimental Design was a kingpin of psychological research but trial design was missing from the textbooks and journals.  Trial type was unimportant to design experts: their principles applied across the board for any type of trial.  Yet the way a trial was designed determined the type of experiment being conducted.  A learning experiment had one type of trial, a perception experiment another type and so on.  I proposed a simple model of the permutation of events within the trial.  Maybe it was too simple.  Simplicity is almost always acceptable in science but a new discipline must avoid “simplistic”.  I figured callow psychology would never risk appearing simple-minded.  I didn’t submit Trial Design in Human Experiments until 1958.  By that time it was accepted for publication in the Psychological Review.

The beauty part of being immature is that you are free to fool around.  When you are ignored and overlooked, you can do fun things.  Many psychological experiments were cute and clever.  Inkblots and art works were employed as “stimuli”.  Visual illusions, dreams and slips of the tongue were subjects of intense investigation.  Furthermore, some psychological theory developed a cheeky sub-text, disproving social myths, exposing human weaknesses and disturbing the establishment.  All of this I loved.

Physics and engineering were powerful but cut-and-dried.  Engineers, with some exceptions, were equally cut and dried.  Psychology may have been weak and unproven, but psychologists were fascinating characters.  Professor Hadley Cantril, Princeton’s social psychologist, knew Orson Wells and had written a book analysing Wells’ Invasion from Mars radio broadcast.  I think he also knew President Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller.  Clinical Psychologist, Sylvan Tomkins, not only knew theatre celebrities; he knew them better than they knew themselves because he gave them personality tests.  Not that he breached confidentiality.  He was careful never to reveal identities.  Still, you knew he knew, and the mystery was intriguing.

Shortly before Tomkins came to Princeton, Lt. Gustave Gilbert PhD lectured in abnormal psychology.  Gilbert was an expert on the most abnormal people of the century, Nazi war criminals, Goering, Hess, von Ribbentrop, Speer, Streicher and the rest.  Gilbert was the prison psychologist at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.  His book, Nuremberg Diary became a feature motion picture (love story added).  Because he spoke German and was available at the right time, Dr. Gilbert had answers to the question on everyone’s lips: why did they do it?  At one of his lectures I heard a couple of strange new words soon to enter the popular lexicon, “psychopath” and “sociopath”.  I was also to learn that Goring was a morphine addict and that the High Command swallowed loads of uppers and downers.  The synthetic opioid methadone was invented by the Germans when poppies became unavailable.  Likewise the first amphetamine, Benzedrine, was developed to keep troops awake and the high command at attention for all-night rallies.  Although he couldn’t prove it, Gilbert strongly suspected that long-term Benzedrine use caused “ethical deterioration”.

In addition to science-striving, psychology also was desperate to become a recognised fee-for-service profession like psychiatry.  The two goals, scientific purity and professional status are not necessarily compatible.  Some of the best science in all fields has been done by amateurs.  When the foundations of psychology were being laid, there were no professional psychologists, at least no certified ones.  The same is true in every science, philosophy and religion.  It’s debatable whether Darwin was actually a Darwinist or Marx a Marxist (or Christ a Christian).  A fee-for-service profession like counselling must respond to client needs and demands.  Science may be equally opportunistic but it exploits an entirely different set of opportunities.  Professional concerns caused psychology to disregard and discount some of its most outstanding research results.

All in all, I spent ten years in Princeton and loved everything except the snobbery.  An oddball among the jocks, playboys and “grinds”, I needed all the psychology I could get.  But during and after WW2 Princeton became far more than a rich-boy’s college.  Along with MIT and Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill New Jersey, Princeton mathematicians were busy generating the theory behind the IT age.  The Institute for Advanced Study founded in the nineteen thirties by Louis Bamberger was the academic home of Albert Einstein and other mathematicians and physicists such as John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing and Paul Dirac.  Visitors to the Institute included nearly every available theorist and experimentalist.  The word “genius” acquired its modern definition.  It was said that there were more geniuses on the bus to Fuld Hall at the Institute than anywhere else in the world.

And these masterminds were, for the most part, highly accessible.  There was no snobbery among the brainy and no security guarding the famous.  Not just the public oeuvre but the private worldviews of great minds were widely known and discussed.  Was there ever a time with so little social distance between mastermind and callow youth?  I sat next to Niels Bohr at seminars (he stuttered badly).   I took statistical data-analysis problems to John Tukey the founder of Exploratory Data Analysis and definer of the unit of information (bit -, binary digit).  Though I had few lengthy conversations with Albert Einstein, my psychoanalyst’s wife played in his string quartet and my Social Psych teacher live next door and discussed social issues with him at length.  The girlfriend of a close friend paid Einstein in jelly beans to tutor her in arithmetic.  Everybody knew his views on God, Gandhi and grooming.  Because Einstein thought so highly of Gandhi and because Hadley Cantril thought so highly of Einstein, my Social Psychology class read Louis Fischer’s Life of Gandhi.[i]

After majoring in psychology, I went on to graduate school to get a Ph.D. four years later.  Then I became an instructor.  As a grad student, even before I got my Ph.D. I had developed into the quintessential psychologist, an atheist, situational ethicist, sceptic, reductionist, Darwinian, materialist, logical positivist.  I believed in relativity of moral values, survival of the fittest, and empirical tests for everything.  Because of Junior Achievement in my teens, I resisted socialism and communism.  Anyway I was too self-oriented to deify any social class.  I did believe however that the scientific method could eventually solve social problems, mental illness, crime, and man’s inhumanity to man.  I thought the scientific method could improve government and make people happy.  I was a hopeful, true believer in science and, like most of my professors, a sceptic about everything else.  I was ready to be a top experimental psychologist.  I was already doing the research.  All I lacked was an appropriate grade average to graduate.

Due to my weak performance on exams and tests, the professors were divided as to my prospects for the Ph.D.  Tomkins, the clinical psychologist and personality theorist, thought I showed promise.  Cantril, the social psychologist, supported me lukewarmly.  Dr. E. G. Wever, the physiological psychologist, kept his views to himself.  Departmental Chairman, Carroll Pratt, approved of me but had the reputation of approving everybody.  However, the psychometric expert, Professor Harold Guliksen didn’t like me.  I had some creative ideas and did some good experiments but I had flunked too many of his exams.  He viewed my trying-to-be-a-scientist as a fake-it-til-you-make-it ruse.  One strong negative vote was enough to get me dismissed with a “terminal masters.”  Unless something dramatic happened, there was a good chance I wouldn’t make Ph.D.

Then in the spring of 1952 on a Sunday evening with the Qualifying Exam less than a week away, I did something that changed my life forever and even impacted the profession of psychology a bit.  The event took place in Eno Hall, the psychology building, and consumed less than a total of five minutes.  It was actually a “simple chain” stimulus-response sequence and although it was a first-time, one-off response, it emerged from my behaviour repertoire without a hitch.

It began with an uneasy gut-feeling that unless a miracle happened I might fail the upcoming exam and come to the end of my beloved career before it began.  I arose from my bench and walked to the stair.  Eno Hall was the smallest science building on campus and my cubicle was on the first floor near the entrance.  At dusk only the hall light was on.   My door was always open so I knew the building was empty.  I’d been studying there for hours.  Everybody who had come in had also gone out.  The only sound eminated from the stairwell, the wail of a cat in a cage in the basement where Wever did his vivisections on the inner ear of animals.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor, turned left and walked a few steps to the door of the Departmental Secretary, Miss Helen Orr.  The department was all males in those days and Helen Orr was its mother, its only administratively capable person.  She didn’t like everybody but she liked me because I wrote poetry, something no one else in the department did.  Helen had a long and amenable liaison with the famous literary critic, Richard Blackmur.  He liked me.  I had a poem published in Poetry Magazine and won the poetry prize in my senior year.  I was a lot better at poetry than I was at psychometrics.  Helen didn’t care for psychometrics.  Helen’s office door was supposed to be locked but when I pulled hard, it opened.  Inside was nothing, complete neatness.  The hall light shone through the open doorway.  Helen’s typewriter was empty.  Her ashtray looked washed, her desk clean.  Pencils in a holder.  She was organised.  I’d had coffee in her kitchen and that was neat as a pin.

To my right beside the door was her wastebasket.  I took a step to look into the wastebasket.  These were the days before Xerox.  To make copies, typists slipped “carbon paper” between each sheet of bond and then banged hard on their mechanical Royals or Remingtons.  In Helen Orr’s wastebasket were some of these carbon sheets.  I lifted them from the bin and took them out of the office.  Back in my cubicle, I held the sheets up to my desk lamp.  They contained the questions for the upcoming qualifying exam.

I scored so high on my Qualifying Exam that I silenced critics and became, at age 26, an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at Harvard, perhaps the youngest in Harvard’s history.  It was effectively a perfect crime.  I didn’t believe in God so I was the only one who could be certain I was not a genius myself.