Jr. In this interview for Connections, the second in a series highlighting Hood faculty, David Hein talks with Robert W. Boyle, Jr., associate professor of psychology and chair of the Department of Psychology. In the last 10 years, psychology has been one of the top three choices of majors at Hood, which is comparable to other schools similar to ourselves. Clearly, students wonder why people think the way they do, do the things they do. Psychology is the formal discipline that addresses these matters.
Psychology is a very broad-based major.
We cover all the major areas within the discipline, including all the requisites necessary for graduate school. My training was in Piagetian psychology, looking at thought structures as they develop, from childhood to adolescence in particular. Next year, while I am on sabbatical, I'm going to look at Piaget's theory from the point of view of formal mathematical theory. Piaget is a very difficult writer to understand. His thought processes are extremely complex and the translation problem is a difficult one.