So I reviewed the psychometric data, trying to make a judgment as
to whether one person was wiser than another. I couldn’t find a reason
for the differences. That is, the people in this system by any
psychometric instrument were no different than the people in the other
systems. We later went on, where it was possible, back into the school
records wherever we could get a judgment of those people as to whether
one person was brighter than another. We used any method at our disposal
and we couldn’t find any differences. And yet these people in this
system simply came up with more answers, better answers . . . in less
time . . . and they didn’t seem to be any different intelligently from the other systems.
So I had to conceptualize that a sudden and almost unbelievable
change in human behavior takes place when the individual begins to
believe that psychological health should be
both expressive of self and taking care of the other human being at the
same time.
When a human being starts to think in this manner, that thinking
evidences a personality reorganization that is almost unbelievable in
character and it must be represented in this conceptualization.
So, I was now at the point of trying to get some basic way of
conceptualizing all of this crazy mix of data. The stage that I got to
simply gave birth to the conceptualizations.
Question?:
Concerning the kinds of problems that you gave to the subjects,
where did you find the materials? Who were they
developed by?
Dr.
Graves:
I developed these from the work that Norman Myer (sp?) did at the
University of
Michigan
. I took his
problems and elaborated on them such that these were problems in which,
whatever was present had to be thought of in some way other than you
would normally think of. A pair of pliers had to be either a weight or
something else by not thought of as only something to grasp. There were
problems involving the individuals using things that he used every day
in a way markedly different than he would ordinarily use them. They were
problems that required answers or solutions quite different from the
normal or usual answers or solutions.
Questions?:
Did you have other people helping you on this research?
Dr.
Graves:
I point out in the book that I am working on that there are some
very serious problems here. I was not able to get all the people
observed all the time. I was totally and entirely alone in this whole
process. No one ever worked with me until you . . . (referring to Dr.
Doug Labier) came along in the sixties. I never had anyone at all. So I
had to conceive, lay out, and with the exception of the judges who did
the collation, I had to do all the work myself. I acknowledge that there
is a danger of contamination. In the hallways there were rooms on the
side with observation booths between them in which I could look both
ways. I
could observe unbeknown to anyone since I entered the observation booth
after the students were in the groups. I might be looking to the left
and something might be happening on the right and I could have missed
things. But this is the circumstance that I was in and there
is no way around it.
Question?:
Were these taped records or just observations?
Dr.
Graves:
I used mostly observations but from time to time I used an old
fashioned military type tape recorder that used wire tape which didn’t
hold up very well. Most of the recording of data was my being able to
just keep a diary of what was going on such as: he did this, then so and
so did that. Then I would try to put it all together later. There were
no computers at this time. Most of it was my being able to just keep a
diary of what was going on in there on any day . . .he did this, she
said that and on and on. . . and then try to put this stuff together. I
had to conceive it all, with the help of the judges. It was a long
process of observing and analyzing and collating the data.