Stories
We were supposed to take courses at the Yale Graduate program in psychology, but I soon convinced myself that I knew more than any of my professors (with a few exceptions including Burt Rosner and John Flynn who did not teach any courses).
The most famous professor at the time was Neal Miller, whose book on the experimental psychological basis of psychoanalysis had attracted me to Yale. His lab was called "Miller's Industries" because there were several dozen researchers dedicated to getting him a Nobel Prize in physiology. My friends, who worked in his lab, were unable to find the results that he wanted: the operant conditioning of blood pressure. But then a newly-arrived post-doc, Leo DiCara, announced that he had obtained the data that Miller wanted. Miller was delighted and went to his lab to see, but DiCara said no. Miller could co-publish with him, but he would not allow him into the lab. He said it was to keep Miller from stealing the data and publishing alone, but we suspected it was because the data were fraudulent. Miller should have insisted on proof, but his ambition won out and he published with DiCara without seeing the procedure work, including a famous article in Scientific American. DiCara then got a professorship and a new million-dollar laboratory at another major university. But then when the work could not be replicated, he killed himself. All this became the subject of a New Yorker expose, but since then people seem to have forgotten and accept the data as if they were true. As Mark Twain would have it, "the truth is quickly forgotten, but a well-told lie lasts forever."
At one point in a weekly research seminar, I made a rather elaborate critique of some of the work that Miller was publishing. At the end, he stood up and in his gruff, Nebraskan voice, he said. "I have to go now, but I don't want you to think that I'm leaving because it's been boring, because it certainly hasn't been boring!"
Neal Miller would continue to cross my life in years to come. In 1972 he was one of the founders of the International Society for Research on Aggression in which I would later be active. In 1977, when our paper on human estrus was rejected by Science, I wrote to him as a member of the Editorial Board of Science to appeal the rejection. He tried to help, but to no avail. And in 1980, after meeting up again at the physiological congress in Budapest, Miller helped me with work to get recognition for the beginning of the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica and with preparations for the Seville Statement on Violence. See his photo in the section on the UNUP.
The professor of statistics, Fred Sheffield, was an especially nice person, but I didn't feel I needed to hear him lecture so I never went to class and simply took the exam at the end and passed with a high mark. On the other hand, he served as a reader on my thesis and was quite helpful.
As far as I recall, I did not take any course with Irving Janis, who was in the process of getting fame as a social psychologist with his concept of "groupthink." I did, however, run a study group for his research, involving my roommate Peter Kobrak (later a professor at Western Michigan who has written on American democracy), and others from political science and economics departments at Yale, in which I tape-recorded and wrote up the personal interactions of the group as we worked on economic conversion from military to civilian production. It is interesting now to read over the analysis I gave Janis of the "groupthink", as well as the papers we wrote on topics that are still very relevant today. One of the other participants, Don Nichols, was the young man who wrote much of President Johnson's War on Poverty program. Another, Brian Glick, is a law professor at Fordham who has done important work for civil rights. Another, David Barkin, is now in Mexico where he is a professor and advocate for a peoples' economics to confront globalization. The funniest thing that I remember about Janis was that he visited me in my hospital bed where I was recovering from appendicitis. At first I thought it was quite remarkable, but then I saw that he came with a book he had written about recovering surgery patients, on which he wanted my opinion!
The course on sensory processes with Professor Burt Rosner had only three students, myself, Nina Relin and her boyfriend at the time, John Chimienti. I wrote a paper there that laid out a model for research on behavior, which I would follow in my subsequent scientific career. And a year later, Nina and I decided to get married, each of us on the rebound; Nina from her break-up with John and me from my break-up with her former college roommate, Joanie Faber.
I spent all my time in Flynn's lab and in the library. In Flynn's lab I undertook an initial study on the nature of brain stimulated attack in cats, and then my dissertation which is described in full on another page.
In the library I undertook an exhaustive survey and analysis of the observations of aggression in wild primates. This was "breaking news" as for the first time scientists were making proper observations of primates under truly natural conditions. I wrote a paper that provided the model for my later comparisons of the behavior of rats and monkeys, and that would enable me to generalize data from rats to humans. I got no help from anyone at Yale for this work. There was a fine mural of the early primatologist, Robert Yerkes, in the entry-way to the Institute of Human Relations where I studied, but there was nobody on the faculty that knew about these matters.
One year I was in charge of the Graduate Student speakers' program which gave me a budget to invite important psychologists to speak. This was a great opportunity and I took full advantage of it. I invited Irven DeVore from Harvard who was one of the primatologists I had come to know about through my library work on aggression in wild primates. I invited the famous psychologist Ernest Hilgard who spoke on his extensive research on hypnosis and his one positive finding that hynotisability correlates with the feeling that one is still in a cinema film after leaving the theatre (which is my case). One of my speakers was Jose Delgado from Yale, who was doing brain stimulation of primates, and I told of his remarks in a seminar I took with him, in a heavy Spanish accent: "You must study ze hypothalamus, for zat is zee seat of love and emotion!" Years later I would work with him on the Seville Statement on Violence and its presentation at the World's Fair in 1992 back in Seville.
 |
Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme