Hermann Ebbinghaus

Hermann Ebbinghaus (January 24, 1850 — February 26, 1909) was a German
psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for
his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first
person to describe the learning curve.[1] He was the father of the eminent Neo-
Kantian philosopher Julius Ebbinghaus.

Early life

Ebbinghaus was born to Lutheran merchants in Barmen, a German town later

incorporated into the city of Wuppertal. At age 17, he entered the University of
Bonn, where he was first drawn to the study of philosophy. His studies were
interrupted in 1870 by the Franco-Prussian War, in which he served with the
Prussian army. Prior to the War, he had also briefly attended the universities of
Berlin and Halle, but then had returned to the University of Bonn, where he
completed his dissertation on Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the
Unconscious. He received his doctorate in 1873 at the age of twenty-three.

Professional career

After acquiring his PhD, Ebbinghaus moved to Berlin, where he spent several
years before leaving to travel in France and England for the next three years. In
England, he may have taught in two small schools in the South of the country
(Gorfein, 1985). In London, in a used bookstore, he came across Gustav
Fechner's book Elements of Psychophysics which arguably spurred him to
conduct his famous memory experiments. He began his work in 1879, but he
may have performed his first set of experiments on several students from the
English schools he had taught at. In 1885, the year he published his monumental
work Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology he was accepted as a
professor at the university of Berlin. In Berlin, he founded the Psychological
journal Zeitschrift für Physiologie und Psychologie der Sinnesorgane (The
Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs). He also founded two
psychological laboratories in Germany. His very sparse contributions to
academic writing eventually cost him the seat of head of philosophy department
at the university of Berlin, which ended up going to Carl Stumpf. Nevertheless, he
was described as an excellent teacher and eloquent speaker. Eventually, he had
begun to drift away from his colleagues, and left to join the University of Breslau
(now Wrocław, Poland) in 1894. While in Breslau, he published a successful
elementary textbook of psychology in 1908, and had also begun working on his
next piece of writing Die Grundzuge der Psychologie (Fundamentals of
Psychology). Before completing his third work, Ebbinghaus died of pneumonia in
1909 at the age of 59. At a conference later that year, prominent American
psychologist Edward B. Titchener called Ebbinghaus’s death a great loss to
psychology.

Pioneering research on memory

In his work on memory, Ebbinghaus was determined to show that higher mental
processes are not hidden from view, but instead could be studied using
experimentation. In order to simplify the procedure, Ebbinghaus wanted to use
simple acoustic encoding and maintenance rehearsal for which a list of words
could have been used. However, Ebbinghaus knew that prior knowledge affected
learning, and people’s understanding of the words, and the easily formable
associations between them would interfere with his results. He thus had to look
for something that could be easily memorized but without any previous cognitive
“baggage” attached. For these purposes he used something that would later be
called “nonsense syllables”. A nonsense syllable is a consonant-vowel-
consonant combination, where the consonant does not repeat, and the syllable
does not have any prior meaning. BOL (sounds like ‘Ball’) and DOT (already a
word) would then not be allowed, but syllables like DAX, BOK, and YAT would all
be acceptable. After creating the possible combinations and eliminating the
meaning-laden ones, Ebbinghaus wound up with 2,300 resultant syllables.
Nevertheless, it was quickly found that we may impose meaning on nonsense
syllables to make them more meaningful, which would make nonsense syllable
PED (which is the first three letters of the word ‘pedal’) less nonsense than a
syllable like KOJ; the syllables are said to differ in association value[2]. It appears
that Ebbinghaus recognized this, and only referred to the strings of syllables as
“nonsense” regarding the syllables as possibly having meaning. Once he had his
syllables, he would pull out a number of random syllables from a box and then
write them down in a notebook. Then, to the regular sound of a metronome, and
with the same voice inflection, he would read out the syllables, and attempt to
recall them at the end of the procedure. It is important to note that Ebbinghaus
used himself as the only subject, attempting to regulate his daily routine in order
to maintain more control over his results. He may have kept himself as the sole
subject not out of convenience or ignorance but rather, because he did not want
to subject anyone else to the tedious experiments. One investigation alone
required 15,000 recitations.

Contributions to memory

In 1885, he published his groundbreaking Über das Gedächtnis ("On Memory",

later translated to English as Memory. A Contribution to Experimental
Psychology) in which he described experiments he conducted on himself to
describe the processes of learning and forgetting.

Ebbinghaus made several findings that are still relevant and supported to this
day. First, arguably his most famous finding, the forgetting curve. The forgetting
curve describes the exponential curve that illustrates how fast we tend to forget
the information we had learned. The sharpest decline is in the first twenty
minutes, then in the first hour, and then the curve evens off after about one day.

A typical representation of the forgetting curve

The learning curve, which was described by Ebbinghaus, refers to how fast we
learn information. The sharpest increase occurs after the first try, and gradually
evens out, meaning that less and less new information is retained after each
repetition. Like the forgetting curve, the learning curve is also exponential.

Ebbinghaus had also documented the serial position effect, which describes how
the position of an item in the list affects the likelihood of said item being recalled.
The two main concepts in the serial position curve are the recency and primacy
effects. The recency effect refers to the fact that we remember the most recent
information better because it is still stored in short-term memory. The primacy
effect is remembering the first items in a list better due to increased rehearsal
and commitment to long-term memory.
The other important discovery is that of savings. Savings refers to the amount of
information retained in the subconscious even after this information had been
completely forgotten (cannot be consciously accessed). To test this, Ebbinghaus
would memorize a list of items until perfect recall and then would not access the
list until he could no longer recall any of its items. He then would relearn the list,
and compare the new learning curve to the learning curve of his previous
memorization of the list. The second list was generally memorized faster, and
this difference between the two learning curves is what Ebbinghaus called
“savings”.

Ebbinghaus also described the difference between involuntary and voluntary

memory, the former occurring “with apparent spontaneity and without any act of
the will” and the latter being brought “into consciousness by an exertion of the
will”.

The bulk of the work on memory prior to Ebbinghaus’s contributions centered

primarily on observational description and speculation, with most of this work
undertaken by philosophers. For example, Immanuel Kant used pure description
to discuss recognition and its components and Sir Francis Bacon claimed that
the simple observation of the rote recollection of a previously learned list was “no
use to the art” of memory. This dichotomy between descriptive and experimental
study of memory would resonate later in Ebbinghaus’s life, particularly in his
public argument with former colleague, Wilhelm Dilthey.

Ebbinghaus’s effect on memory research had been almost immediate. With very
few works published on memory in the previous two millennia, Ebbinghaus’s
work on memory spurred memory research in the United States in the 1890s,
with 32 papers published in 1894 alone. This research was also coupled with the
growing development of mechanized mnemometers – various devices that aided
in the recording and studying of memory, which illustrates the progress that was
launched from Ebbinghaus’s work.

The reaction to his work in his day was mostly positive. Noted psychologist
William James called the studies “heroic” and said that they were “the single
most brilliant investigation in the history of psychology”. Edward B. Titchener also
mentioned that the studies were the greatest undertaking in the topic of memory
since Aristotle.

Although Ebbinghaus is generally considered the one who popularized

experiments in psychology it is important to note that he was not the first one to
conduct experiments in psychology. Johann Andreas Segner, more than a
century before, had invented the “Segner-wheel” to see the length of after-
images by seeing how fast a wheel with a hot coal attached would have to move
in order for the red ember circle from the coal to be complete. (see iconic
memory)
Other contributions

Ebbinghaus can also be credited with pioneering sentence completion exercises,

which he developed in studying the abilities of schoolchildren. It were these same
exercises that Alfred Binet had borrowed and incorporated into the Binet-Simon
intelligence scale. Sentence completion had since then also been used
extensively in memory research, especially in tapping into measures of implicit
memory, and also has been used in psychotherapy as a tool to help tap into the
motivations and drives of the patient. He had also influenced Charlotte Buhler,
who along with Lev Vygotsky and others went on to study language meaning and
society.

The Ebbinghaus Illusion. Note that the orange circles appear to be of different
size, even though they are equal

Ebbinghaus is also credited with discovering an optical illusion that is now known
after its discoverer – the Ebbinghaus illusion, which is an illusion of relative size
perception. In the best-known version of the illusion, two circles of identical size
are placed near to each other and one is surrounded by large circles while the
other is surrounded by small circles; the first central circle then appears smaller
than the second central circle. This illusion is now used extensively in research in
cognitive psychology, to find out more about the various perception pathways in
our brain.

Ebbinghaus is also largely credited with drafting the first standard research
report. In his paper on memory, Ebbinghaus arranged his research into four
sections: the introduction, the methods, the results, and a discussion section.
This clarity and organization of this format was so impressive to contemporaries
that it has now become standard in the discipline and all research reports follow
the same standards laid out by Ebbinghaus.

Unlike notable contemporaries like Titchener and James, Ebbinghaus did not
promote any specific school of psychology nor was he known for extensive
lifetime research, having only done three works. He had never attempted to
bestow upon himself the title of the pioneer of experimental psychology, did not
seek to have any “disciples”, and left the exploitation of the new field to others.
Discourse on the nature of psychology

In addition to pioneering experimental psychology, Ebbinghaus was also a strong

defender of this direction of the new science, as is illustrated by his public dispute
with University of Berlin colleague, Wilhelm Dilthey. Shortly after Ebbinghaus left
Berlin in 1893, Dilthey published a paper extolling the virtues of descriptive
psychology, and condemning experimental psychology as boring, claiming that
the mind was too complex, and that introspection was the desired method of
studying the mind. The debate at the time had been primarily whether
psychology should aim to explain or understand the mind and whether it
belonged to the natural or human sciences. Many had seen Dilthey’s work as an
outright attack on experimental psychology, Ebbinghaus included, and he
responded to Dilthey with a personal letter and also a long scathing public article.
Amongst his counterarguments against Dilthey he mentioned that it is inevitable
for psychology to do hypothetical work and that the kind of psychology that
Dilthey was attacking was the one that existed before Ebbinghaus’s
“experimental revolution”. Charlotte Buhler echoed his words some forty years
later, stating that people like Ebbinghaus "buried the old psychology in the
1890’s". Ebbinghaus explained his scathing review by saying that he could not
believe that Dilthey was advocating the status quo of structuralists like Wilhelm
Wundt and Titchener and attempting to stifle psychology’s progress.

Some contemporary texts still describe Ebbinghaus as a philosopher rather than

a psychologist and he had also spent his life as a professor of philosophy.
However, Ebbinghaus himself would probably describe himself as a psychologist
considering that he fought to have psychology viewed as a separate discipline
from philosophy.

Influences

There has been some speculation as to what had influenced Ebbinghaus in his
undertakings. There do not appear to be any professors that had rubbed off on
him, nor are there suggestions that he was affected by his colleagues. Von
Hartmann’s work, that Ebbinghaus did his doctorate on, did suggest that higher
mental processes were hidden from view, which probably spurred Ebbinghaus to
attempt to prove otherwise. The one influence that has always been cited as
inspiring Ebbinghaus was the second-hand Fechner book that he had picked up
in England. It is said that the meticulous mathematical procedures impressed
Ebbinghaus so much, that he wanted to do for psychology what Fechner had
done for psychophysics. This inspiration is also evident in that Ebbinghaus
dedicated his second work Fundamentals of Psychology to Fechner, signing it “I
owe everything to you”.

There has also been speculation surrounding the question of how much
Ebbinghaus’s love of poetry also influenced the direction of his work. One of the
studies Ebbinghaus performed looked at how memorizing his string of nonsense
syllables compared to memorizing a passage from Don Juan, suggesting that
perhaps his own attempts to memorize poetry inspired him to study memory in
general.
Leon Festinger

Leon Festinger (pronounced Feh-sting-er) (New York City, May 8, 1919 – New
York City, February 11, 1989), was an American social psychologist, responsible
for the development of the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Social comparison
theory, and the discovery of the role of propinquity in the formation of social ties
as well as other contributions to the study of social networks.

Festinger is perhaps best known for the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, which
suggests that inconsistency among beliefs and behaviors will cause an
uncomfortable psychological tension. This will lead people to change their beliefs
to fit their actual behavior, rather than the other way around, as popular wisdom
may suggest.

Festinger was also responsible for Social Comparison Theory, which examines
how people evaluate their own opinions and desires by comparing themselves
with others, and how groups exert pressures on individuals to conform with group
norms and goals.

Festinger also made important contributions to social network theory. Studying

the formation of social ties, such as the choice of friends among college
freshmen housed in dorms, Festinger (together with Stanley Schachter and Kurt
Back) showed how the formation of ties was predicted by propinquity, the
physical proximity between people, and not just by similar tastes or beliefs, as
laymen tend to believe. That is, people simply tend to befriend their neighbors.

Earlier in his career, Festinger explored the various forms that social groups can
take and showed, together with Schachter and Back, "how norms are clearer,
more firmly held and easier to enforce the more dense a social network is."
Career
Festinger earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the City College of New
York in 1939, and proceeded to receive a Master from University of Iowa in 1942,
where he studied with Kurt Lewin, another pioneer in social psychology. Over the
course of his career, Festinger was a faculty member in the University of Iowa,
the University of Rochester, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the
University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the
New School for Social Research.

Born to self-educated Russian-Jewish immigrants Alex Festinger (an embroidery

manufacturer) and Sara Solomon Festinger in Brooklyn, New York, Leon
Festinger attended Boys' High School and received a bachelor's in science at
City College of New York in 1939. He received a Master's in psychology from the
University of Iowa in 1942 after studying under prominent social psychologist
Kurt Lewin, who was working to create a "field theory" of psychology (by analogy
to physics) to respond to the mechanistic models of the behaviorists.

The same year, he married pianist Mary Oliver Ballou with whom he had three
children (Catherine, Richard and Kurt[10]) before divorcing.

Lewin created a Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology in 1945 and Festinger followed, becoming an assistant
professor. Lewin died in 1947 and Festinger left to become an Associate
Professor at the University of Michigan, where he was program director for the
Group Dynamics Center.

In 1951, he became a Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota.

His 1953 book Research Methods in the Behavioral Sciences (with Daniel Katz)
stressed the need for well-controlled variables in laboratory experiments, even if
this meant deceiving the participants.

In 1955, Festinger moved to Stanford University. Finally, in 1968 he became a

Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York
(chair endowed by Hermann Staudinger). He remarried the following year to
Trudy Bradley, a Professor at the New York University School of Social Work.
They had no children.
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term which describes the
uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts at the
same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs. More
precisely, it is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, where
"cognition" is defined as any element of knowledge, including attitude, emotion,
belief, or behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance states that contradicting
cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent
new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to reduce the amount
of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions. Experiments have attempted to
quantify this hypothetical drive. Some of these examined how beliefs often
change to match behavior when beliefs and behavior are in conflict.

In simple terms, it can be the filtering of information that conflicts with what one
already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one's
beliefs. In detailed terms, it is the perception of incompatibility between two
cognitions, where "cognition" is defined as any element of knowledge, including
attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance states
that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to
acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to
reduce the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions. Experiments
have attempted to quantify this hypothetical drive. Some of these have examined
how beliefs often change to match behavior when beliefs and behavior are in
conflict.

Social psychologist Leon Festinger first proposed the theory in 1957 after the
publication of his book When Prophecy Fails, observing the counterintuitive belief
persistence of members of a UFO doomsday cult and their increased
proselytization after the leader's prophecy failed. The failed message of earth's
destruction, purportedly sent by aliens to a woman in 1956, became a
disconfirmed expectancy that increased dissonance between cognitions, thereby
causing most members of the impromptu cult to lessen the dissonance by
accepting a new prophecy; that the aliens had instead spared the planet for their
sake.

Maintaining conflicting principles (e.g. logically incompatible beliefs) or rejecting

reasonable behavior to avoid conflict can be increasingly maladaptive (non-beneficial) as
the gap being bridged widens, and popular usage tends to stress the maladaptive aspect.
Cognitive dissonance is often associated with the tendency for people to resist
information that they don't want to think about, because if they did it would create
cognitive dissonance, and perhaps require them to act in ways that depart from their
comfortable habits. They usually have at least partial awareness of the information,
without having moved to full acceptance of it, and are thus in a state of denial about it.
This "irrational inability to incorporate rational information" is perhaps the most common
perception of cognitive dissonance, and this or another example of extreme maladaption
would appear to be underlying many conceptions of the term in popular usage.
Example of cognitive dissonance
Main article: When Prophecy Fails

Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological

consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of
dissonance was reported in the book, When Prophecy Fails (Festinger et al.
1956). Festinger and his associates read an interesting item in their local
newspaper headlined "Prophecy from planet clarion call to city: flee that flood."

Festinger and his colleagues saw this as a case that would lead to the arousal of
dissonance when the prophecy failed. They infiltrated Mrs. Keech's group and
reported the results, confirming their expectations.