David R. Williams

Emeritus Professor of Psychology

E-mail:

drw@psych.upenn.edu

Phones:

215-898-6947 (office)
215-724-7327 (study at home)

Office Address:

D16 Solomon Lab Building
Department of Psychology
3720 Walnut Street
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6196
fax: 215-726-4043

useful local links

Research Interests:

• General Statement

  ---

• click here for a chapter with Jacques Barber on the topic of psychotherapy and human freedom.

  It will appear in Ciprut, Jose V. (ed.) FREEDOM: Reassessments and Rephrasings MIT Press, forthcoming, 2008.

  • It is the first of several chapters I've written in a group that comes to grips with the reality of personal experience.
  • It is written from the point of view of the experiencing individual--whether patient, client, or therapist.
  • It is not about behaving organisms that can be observed "objectively," but about behaving human beings as you and I know them "subjectively."

  Facts are stubborn things, and the fact of the personal experience of freedom is too important to overlook!

  ---

• click here for the next invited chapter in this series, titled "Personhood, Peoplehood, and Polity."

  • It characterizes the experiencing individual in existential and humanistic terms.
  • It focuses on the experiencing individual in the domain of social, particularly political, relationships.
  • It raises the possibility that Learning Module technology might help establish an emergent political structure that is constructive, sustainable, and humane.

  Each person is Sovereign over a single human life.

  ---

• click here for the final invited chapter in this series, titled "Ego and Ethos."

  • It contributes to the volume's reexamination of ethics by developing a point of view based on three familiar features of ordinary human experience: sentience, volition, and the belief that others' conscious experience resembles one's own.
  • It develops a concept human social evolution based on Robert Wright's insights in his remarkable Nonzero: the logic of human destiny (2000)
  • It proposes a working ethical principle based on Erik Erikson's culminating Stage 8 of human development, "Ego Integrity vs. Despair".

  "Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death."

  ---

• The Learning Module, described in the "Personhood, Peoplehood, and Polity" chapter above, is undergoing a thorough revision.

• click here to check out the existential/humanistic "Process of Living Inventory".

I am interested in uniting two century-old traditions of psychology that have contributed much to me but little to each other.

• One is Learning Theory: rooted in the work of Darwin, Pavlov, and Skinner, this tradition aims to explicate the mechanisms underlying things that organisms do. The goals of "prediction" and "control" form the basis of its experimental paradigms. The more recent "cognitive" sciences, whose models take advantage of digital computing and mathematical logic, have adopted Learning Theory's mechanistic commitment and vastly extended it without compromising the emphasis on prediction and control.

• The other is Personality Theory: derived from a broad range of clinical procedures, it never developed core paradigms that could make its central concepts experimentally real. Personality Theory still consists largely of the abstractions of psychotherapists like Freud, Jung, Frankl and Rogers, expressed in metaphoric support structures designed to provide concreteness and plausibility. Its empiricism is literal but not experimental--an empiricism based primarily on the encounters of human beings related through social roles like "therapist", "patient", and "client".

Personality Theory generalizes from encounters that are intended to liberate people from needless self-imposed limitations, not to predict or control them further.

My research is aimed at exploring a new paradigm that makes experimental work in Personality Theory a realistic possibility for interested scientists, regardless of their interpersonal skills or fundamental beliefs about human nature. This new paradigm is expressed in web-based interactive teaching programs that provide an authentic introduction to core principles of the existential/humanistic branch of Personality Theory. It aims to uncover and support human freedom rather than control it.

Successful implementation of the tutorial program would be demonstrated in two ways. Relative to controls without experience of the tutorial program, those who complete it would be expected to show:

• More individual variance and less predictability in experiments involving causal attributions, moral decision-making, attitude change, and conformity.

• Increased well-being in everyday life resulting from better uses of personal freedom in the ordinary process of living.

• An enhanced desire and capacity to contribute to the well-being of others.

Within the new paradigm, nurturing the exercise of liberty in pursuit of the subjective goal of happiness provides a natural complement--not a competitor--to the emphasis on prediction and control that characterizes behavioral and cognitive science. It is a necessary complement as well, if experimental psychology is to approach the phenomenon of human freedom and creativity as more than a scientific embarrassment. As I gain experience implementing the teaching method, I intend to include other realms of Personality Theory as well, until the full range of its concepts--the psychodynamic as well as the existential/humanistic--becomes accessible to experimental analysis.

There is complexity as well as irony in this undertaking. The complexity arises because Personality Theory's principles are "holistic": formulated for "top-down" application, they first define the entities and attributes whose dynamics they proceed to explain. The irony arises from redirecting an outlook originally developed for the experimental analysis of predictable behavior to the task of supporting cognitive and behavioral freedom.

Beyond the complexity and irony is an exciting possibility: understanding human nature as something not just mechanical but animated as well; not just computational but also creative; and not just rational but also free. Working in two traditions of psychology has helped me understand my own human nature this way. I hope in my research to bring a similar understanding to others, and to introduce it into the science as a whole.