Ulric Neisser
Ulric Neisser
Ulric Neisser
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perception.There is always information in the light to specify how we are moving and what we<br />
are doing - i.e., to specify what I was beginning to call the "ecological self." Recent work on<br />
perception in infancy, much of it from Eleanor Gibson's baby lab, had suggested that even very<br />
young infants are self-aware in this sense. On the other hand I had often read claims by social<br />
psychologists and anthropologists that the self is nothing but a social construction, varying<br />
greatly from one society to the next. How could these disparate views of the self be reconciled?<br />
To solve this puzzle I addressed it in the language of cognitive psychology, i.e., by<br />
thinking in terms of information. On reflection, this approach suggested that the self is specified<br />
by no less than five different types of information and hence that there are five different kinds of<br />
self-knowledge. Another way of putting it is to say that people have five different "selves" - the<br />
ecological self, the interpersonal self, the conceptual self, the remembered self, and the private<br />
self. Having drafted a theoretical paper to this effect, I began to wonder where I could publish it.<br />
That problem was resolved when I happened to meet John Rust in London: he was just then<br />
starting a new journal called Philosophical Psychology, which sounded fine to me (<strong>Neisser</strong>,<br />
1998).<br />
One day at Oxford I got an unexpected phone call from Billy Frye, the Emory Provost.<br />
The University had received a substantial grant from the Mellon Foundation; could I help them<br />
find a way to spend the money? All I could think of was an expanded version of what the<br />
Cognition Project was doing already, focused more directly on the five kinds of self-knowledge.<br />
This was not a very imaginative idea, but it seemed practical. I recruited an excellent post-doc -<br />
David Jopling, whose degree was in philosophy - and together we conducted five stimulating<br />
conferences on self-knowledge. Eventually, these became three volumes in the Emory<br />
Symposium series. I edited The Perceived Self (1993) myself, co-edited The Remembering Self<br />
(1994) with Robyn Fivush, and finally co-edited The Conceptual Self in Context (1997) with<br />
Jopling. I had high hopes that all this would have some impact on other people's theorizing about<br />
the self, but have seen little evidence of it.<br />
The APA task force<br />
Published in 1994, Herrnstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve immediately sparked a<br />
firestorm of controversy. The controversy peaked in the spring of 1995, when I happened to be<br />
serving on the American Psychological Association (APA) Board of Scientific Affairs. The<br />
Board decided that APA should establish a task force to address the issues that The Bell Curve<br />
had raised - issues of race, education, genetics, intelligence, and the like. Then, they asked me to<br />
chair it. I was chosen partly because I just happened to be there, but also because I might actually<br />
be a good person for the job. I still had some name recognition; what's more, I knew something<br />
about the topic and yet had written so little about it that no one was mad at me. At least, those<br />
were my reasons for accepting.<br />
I picked a good committee (some of the members were suggested by various<br />
constituencies) and we soon set to work, deciding on the structure of the report and who would<br />
write the drafts of various sections. I kept the "group differences" section for myself. We<br />
circulated drafts by e-mail, and found surprisingly few disagreements on substantive issues. My<br />
own position was that the Black/White differences are real and important, but that their cause is<br />
not presently known. We worked quickly; the report - "Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns"<br />
(1996) - appeared in American Psychologist only a year later. It triggered critical responses from<br />
both left and right, which I took as a sign that we had written a fair report.<br />
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