In his science fiction classic, The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov foresaw the emergence of a powerful new scientific discipline: psychohistory.
In the future, Asimov imagined, humans would travel widely across the galaxy and inhabit many different planets. The number of peoples and their worlds, combined with the long historical record, would allow for the scientific understandings of our past -- and our possible futures.
A reader beginning the Trilogy follows a young mathematician who has traveled to the capitol planet of the Empire, Trantor, to study with psychohistory's founder, Hari Seldon.
The young man and his mentor-to-be, Dr. Seldon, are arrested almost immediately after the young mathematician's arrival.
Dr. Seldon, it seems, has made a prediction unpopular with the current galactic regime. He based his prediction on an approximate mathematical model of the Empire in his present-day.
Seldon then extrapolated the model into the future, adjusting it according to such psychopolitical events as the likelihood of feuds among ruling families, assasinations of imperial figures, periods of economic depression, the impact of planetary over-specialization and the gradual disappearance of a sense of social responsibility.
In the courtroom, Seldon is questioned:
Q. ...Would you repeat, Dr. Seldon, your thoughts concerning the future...?
A. I have said, and I say again, that Trantor will lie in ruins within the next five centuries.
Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one?
A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.
Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth?
A. I am.
Seldon, a minister of the Empire, believed that the human universe was about to be plunged into a new Dark Age. Only through his creative actions could he foreshorten the time civilization would stagnate.
Asimov published the Trilogy in 1951. Sigmund Freud and others already had argued that ancient and historical minds could be analyzed scientifically, but their attempts to do so often elicited substantial criticism from others. It was still about 22 years before the founding of the Journal of Psychohistory in 1973, and the gradual emergence of more trustworthy scientific procedures in the area.
Even today only a few psychologists devote their research careers more-or-less full time to the field. Others participate as part-timers waiting for the field to develop further.
The challenges to such studies are many. Asimov's character Hari Seldon could sample a lengthy human history over many planetary worlds. The facts today remain that human beings still live on one world and share one history, the record of which is brief, extending back more-or-less comprehensively only to 1300 CE or so, with tendrils of written records shooting back to 3500 BCE.
There is much that can be inferred from this historical record, but matters of psychological relevance often must be carefully culled by researchers, who must often proceed document by document.
Still, psychologists and historians have begun to assemble some studies of our psychology over history.
For example, the works by David Winter, Dean Keith Simonton, and others on presidential psychology represent careful attempts to use the personalities of US Presidents to understand and predict their relative successes and failures in office, most recently with an examination of President Obama.
Works by Dean Keith Simonton examine how stressful events in an historical person's life, predict the leader's psychiatric relapses and consequent decision making (e.g., King George III). Other studies reflect how psychiatric symptoms such as mania predict an eminent musician's rate of compositions (see Kay Redfield Jamison on Tchaikovsky).
Other studies include recent works on the rise of such personality attributes as narcissism or of intelligence (the Flynn effect) over the 20th century.
Methodological innovations in psychobiography, cross-cultural psychology, and the study of personality-at-a-distance represent further important developments relevant to the field.
It is a long way still from today's beginnings to the certainty with which Hari Seldon could predict the future of the Empire.
When I think of the difference between Asimov's imagined psychohistory and its reality today, I am optimistic -- and fascinated. What psychological secrets still might be found in our historical documents -- and what might these suggest about our future?
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Notes: Asimov, I. (1951). The foundation trilogy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company. Seldon's description of his model are first presented on pp. 15-16. The courtroom question and answer are from p. 23.
Simonton wrote about Mad King George in Simonton, D. K. (1998). Mad King George: The impact of personal and political stress on mental and physical health. Journal of Personality, 63, 443-466.
Copyright © 2009 John D. Mayer
