56 Nick Atlas
phenomenon of inattentional bias (Meyers & DeWall, 2015), but also wish
to avoid rocking the boat so as to maintain business as usual.
Case in point, Meyers and DeWall (2015) casually define
consciousness as “our awareness of ourselves and our environment” (p.
92). They note that at its onset in the late-1800s, psychology was
essentially devoted to “the description and explanation of states of
consciousness” (Ladd, 1887). During this period, introspection—a
technique pioneered by Wilhelm Wundt, widely considered the father of
modern psychology—relied on experimental self-observation to study the
workings of the mind and was considered a viable, albeit tenuous method
of investigation. With the rise of the scientific method and psychology’s
yearning to be taken seriously as an empirically-grounded discipline on par
with the natural sciences (e.g., biology and physics), introspection and
similar, first-person methods were chastised in favor of strict, repeatable,
third-person observation. This shift led to the rise of behaviorism and
psychology’s new role as “the science of behavior.” During this period,
which lasted roughly from the 1930s through the 1960s, at which point
behaviorism was joined by cognitive science (and, ultimately, cognitive
neuroscience) as the two major forces in scientific psychology, the study of
consciousness suffered a setback from which it has yet to fully recover.
According to Meyers and DeWall, “today’s science explores the biology of
consciousness” (2015, p. 92) and their vague definition of consciousness
presages a chapter devoted almost entirely to this theme.
Similarly, Pastorino and Doyle-Portillo (2016, p. 130) define
consciousness as “the feelings, thoughts and aroused states of which we are
aware,” and quickly launch into an examination of the “levels or
gradations” of consciousness, also referred to as states of consciousness.
Not surprisingly, they take up the topic primarily through biological and
sociological lenses as well, tending toward descriptions of neural activity
during wakefulness and sleep (e.g., pp. 134-138), for example, as well as
by providing statistical averages across largely Euro-American
demographics (e.g., p. 132).
Griggs (2017) restricts his conversation on consciousness to five pages
at the end of a chapter on Neuroscience, and further confines it to a