5.9 Society and Historical context 

One outgrowth of the mental imagery research we discussed was the creation of the website aphantasia.com, where many people from across the world are creating an online community to discuss and learn more about their own extreme differences in mental imagery abilities. This is a great example of people being interested in how their own cognition works, and wanting learn to more about it. For me personally, it would be great if research into mental imagery could help me increase how much control I have over the vividness of my mental imagery. Maybe continued research on this topic will lead to discoveries on this issue. That could be a positive development for those of us interested in controlling the vividness of our mental imagery.

However, as mentioned before, research into cognitive abilities has not always had uniformly positive implications for society, and there are examples where research applications were severely destructive for some groups of people. For example, remember Sir Francis Galton? In 1880 he published the first study showing evidence for individual differences in mental imagery. Mental imagery is a fascinating topic about how people experience their own mental life. You might assume that Galton was interested in answering questions like, “how does mental imagery work?”. Perhaps this was part of Galton’s motivation for running the study. But, I have purposefully been silent so far about other reasons why Galton ran the study. He tells us the main reason at the beginning of his paper, which reads:

“The larger object of my inquiry is to elicit facts that shall define the natural varieties of mental disposition in the two sexes and in different races, and afford trustworthy data as to the relative frequency with which different faculties are inherited in different degrees.”

Galton was trying to measure differences in mental imagery between people. What was going on at the time that led Galton to ask his questions about mental imagery? How did his results and larger research program influence society? Unfortunately, I should warn you that if you do not already know the answers to these questions, you may find the history disturbing. I know I did.

I mentioned earlier that Galton was in the United Kingdom, and that some of his ideas tended to spread among psychologists in other countries. Galton is famous for many things because he made contributions in many different fields. For example, he is involved with inventing the statistical concept of correlation (Galton, 1889; Stigler, 1989). He was interested in correlation because he was interested in inheritance, especially the idea that children inherit mental abilities from their parents (Galton, 1890). And, Galton was interested in the inheritance of mental abilities because he was also the father of the eugenics movement (Galton, 1865, 1869). Eugenics became a world-wide social movement partly interested in “improving” society across generations through selective human breeding programs. For most people today, the idea of humans deciding which traits are “superior” and “desirable” and then selectively breeding for those traits is quite alarming (and scary).

So one reason Galton was measuring individual differences in mental imagery ability was to aid his eugenics movement. Mental imagery and intelligence were prized traits by Galton. One of his ideas was to create tests, like those that quantified mental imagery ability, that could be used to help classify people into having superior or inferior abilities. The results of the tests could then be used to encourage people with “superior” traits to breed together, and discourage or prevent people with “inferior” traits from breeding together. The eugenics movement thought that breeding humans in this way would produce super humans across generational time. These ideas turned into eugenics programs, promoted scientific racism, and social policies that spread around the world and caused numerous injustices, human rights violations, and other atrocities.

Most textbooks on cognition (including this one) do not review the historical background and legacy of eugenics in Psychology, perhaps because cognitive psychology and cognitive science only became established academic disciplines after the primary eugenics movements had come and gone. However, it is important to realize that the eugenics movement substantially influenced early branches of research into cognitive abilities and shaped the kinds of questions, methods, and social applications of cognitive research (see Crump, 2021, for an approachable OER discussion of this history and its implications for cognitive psychology / cognitive science).