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Big data is a commanding presence in psychology today, yet it also has an extensive history within the discipline. This article outlines shifting frameworks of big data from the earliest years of scientific psychology. From the 1880s, American Psychological Association founder G. Stanley Hall's extensive undertakings with questionnaires were a key means of collecting mass data. Although these efforts produced descriptive data that were difficult to manage, later innovations in scaled questionnaires by psychologists L. L. Thurstone and Rensis Likert rendered mass data numerical and therefore more amenable to synthesis. In the context of ongoing and ever more massive big data initiatives in psychology, this article raises questions about the historical and current place of the individual in big data.KEYWORDS: big data, history of psychology, questionnaires, the public, the individual, If data is king, big data is God. It is all too easy to think that this is a new state of affairs brought about by the emergence of sophisticated [...]

Sexual harassment has received unprecedented attention in recent years. Within academia, it has a particularly reflexive relationship with the human sciences in which sexual harassment can be both an object of research and a problematic behavior amongst those engaged in that research. This paper offers a partial history in which these two are brought together as a common object of social psychology's culture of sexual harassment. Here we follow Haraway in using culture to capture the sense-making that psychologists do through and to the side of their formal knowledge production practices. Our history is multi-sited and draws together (1) the use of sexual harassment as an experimental technique, (2) feminist activism and research which made sexual harassment an object of knowledge in social psychology, and (3) oral history accounts of sexual harassment amongst social psychologists. By reading these contexts against each other, we provide a thick description of how sexual harassment initiates women and men into cultures of control in experimental social psychology and highlight the ethical-epistemological dilemma inherent in disciplinary practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]