The rapid growth of humanistic psychology a few decades ago was in part a
reaction against the research-oriented approaches that had come to dominatepsychology in American universities. Humanistic psychologists argued that
people cannot be reduced to a set of numbers. Scores on a battery of person-
ality tests don’ t capture a person ’s inner strength, feelings, and character.
Most important, finding a person ’s place along a trait continuum erases that
person ’s uniqueness and individuality. As the name implies, the third force in
psychology was developed to attend to the “human ”element lost in number-
crunching approaches.
Ironically, this strength also proves to be one of humanistic psychology ’s
weaknesses. Critics sometimes refer to the approach as “soft”psychology.
Flowery descriptions of a person ’s unique character are fine, but it ’s often dif-
ficult to translate these descriptions into testable hypotheses. Clinical observa-
tions and intuitive feelings may provide insights into personality and thetherapy process, but they cannot replace reliable assessment procedures. This
is not to say that humanistic psychologists don ’t conduct research. On the
contrary, Carl Rogers continually evaluated the effectiveness of person-
centered therapy, as do many other humanistic therapists (Cain & Seeman,
2002). But on the whole, advocates of the humanistic perspective have proba-
bly generated less empirical research than psychologists from the other ap-
proaches covered in this book.
Nonetheless, Rogers, Maslow, and other humanistic psychologists
introduced a number of intriguing hypotheses and concepts that have led toextensive empirical work. Although the original investigations on some of
these topics were conducted by humanistic psychologists, in most cases the
better empirical research was done by investigators outside the humanistic cir-
cle. A good example of this is research on self-disclosure, the first topic we ’ll
explore in this chapter. Rogers and other therapists argued that the act of re-vealing personal information has important psychological consequences. Thisnotion stimulated decades of research. Most of this work has been conducted
by psychologists who probably would shun the “humanistic ”label.
Nonetheless, the findings from this research have important implications for
humanistic theory and therapy.
Similarly, research on the other three topics we ’ll examine in this chapter —
loneliness, self-esteem, and solitude —was inspired in part by humanistic
writers but largely conducted by more empirically oriented academic psycholo-
gists. Of course, there is some irony in this situation. The cold, empirical ap-
proach to understanding personality once rejected by many humanistic typeshas popularized many of the concepts central to the humanistic perspective.
SELF-DISCLOSURE
Imagine you are with someone you don ’t know very well but who seems to
be a pleasant person. You both have time to kill, so you begin to talk. The
conversation starts casually with a discussion about the classes you’ re taking.
However, soon this person mentions some difficulties she ’s having with her“Facts are always
friendly. Every bit of
evidence one can
acquire, in any area,
leads one that much
closer to what is
true. ”
Carl RogersSelf-Disclosure 307