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8 PART I: General IssuesBOX 1.1PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NOBEL PRIZEEach year, the Royal Swedish Academy ofSciences awards the distinguished Nobel Prizefor researchers’ work in a variety of fields. InOctober 2002, Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., becamethe first psychologist to win this award. He wasrecognized for his research on intuitive judgment,human reasoning, and decision making in conditionsof uncertainty. His research, conductedwith his long-term collaborator, Amos Tversky(1937–1996), was honored because of its influentialrole in economic theories (Kahneman, 2003).Kahneman shared the Nobel Economics Prizewith economist Vernon Smith, who was cited forhis work in developing laboratory experiments (animportant topic in this text) in economics.Although trained in fields other than psychology,several scientists have been awarded theNobel Prize for research directly related to the behavioralsciences (Chernoff, 2002; Pickren, 2003),for example:• 1904, Physiology or Medicine: Ivan Pavlov won theNobel Prize for his research on digestion, which subsequentlyinfluenced his work on classical conditioning.• 1961, Physiology or Medicine: A physicist, Georgvon Békésy, won the Nobel Prize for his work onpsychoacoustics—the perception of sound.• 1973, Physiology or Medicine: Three ethologists, Karlvon Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Nikolaas Tinbergen,were honored with the first Nobel Prize awarded forpurely behavioral research (Pickren, 2003). Ethologyis a branch of biology in which researchers observebehavior of organisms in relation to their natural environment(see Chapter 4).• 1978, Economics: Herbert A. Simon was awardedthe Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research onorganizational decision making (MacCoun, 2002;Pickren, 2003). Kahneman, referring to his 2002 NobelPrize, cited Simon’s research as instrumental for hisown research.• 1981, Physiology or Medicine: The Nobel Prize wasawarded to Roger W. Sperry, a zoologist who demonstratedthe distinct roles of the two brain hemispheresusing the “split-brain” procedure.The achievements of these scientists andmany others testify to the breadth and importanceof behavioral research in the sciences. Althoughthere is not a “Nobel Prize for Psychology”(a distinction shared by the field of Mathematics),the work of scientists in a variety of areas isrecognized as contributing to our understandingof behavior.and Einstein not only changed the way scientists viewed their disciplines,but their ideas also changed the way people understand themselves and theirworld. Similarly, many exceptional individuals have influenced the progressof psychology (Haggbloom et al., 2002), including Nobel Prize winners (seeBox 1.1). Early in American psychology, William James (1842–1910) wrote