You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a brief, modest, and extremely stimulating account of an empirical investigation into the processes of perception and reasoning conducted over ten years with a class of senior medical students. As a teacher of zoology Dr Abercrombie observed with disappointment that learning about science did not necessarily have the effect of teaching her students to think scientifically, and in particular to make that sharp distinction between observation and inference on which scientific thought is based. Her research project was aimed at elucidating the factors underlying the failure to make this distinction and to discover if the technique of group discussion, developed by Dr S. H. Foulkes as a method of psychotherapy, could be used to promote the development of scientific habits of thought.
Dr Abercrombie's book falls naturally into two parts. In the first she summarizes and discusses the work of psychologists such as Ames, who have investigated the processes of perception and judgement by experimental methods, particularly projection tests. In the second part she describes the methods of group discussion she used in her project and evaluates the results obtained.
This is a book which can be read quickly, for the evidence it presents is authoritatively marshalled and easy to grasp. It is also one which should be read widely, for the implications of this evidence are extremely far-reaching. Some of the experimental work described must surely make any psychoanalyst uncomfortably aware of how open his clinical observations are to distortion by 'hidden persuaders', not least by those hidden in his metapsychological preconceptions and his clinical jargon.