With The Things That are Lost launched, I have started on an expanded edition of the "autobiographical biography" of my long-ago predecessor in St Andrews, Oscar Oeser. Papers I had not looked at for a long time have been shaken out of boxes and among them, this emerged: my laureation address for Donald Broadbent. Written twenty-five years ago, a few months before he died in April 1993. If you have read Oscar & Lucy, you will know why.
Chancellor, I have the honour to present for the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, DONALD ERIC BROADBENT.
If British psychology is flourishing - and what Vice Chancellor would deny that it is - we have in large measure Donald Broadbent to thank for it. He has, over the past forty years, defined our discipline and had an incalculable impact on research and on large areas of the curriculum. No small achievement for someone who has never held a University post.
Born in 1926, he received his education at Winchester and Cambridge: that orthodox route to unorthodoxy. At Cambridge he fell under the influence of Sir Frederic Bartlett whose work on the human problems of technology had opened up a golden age for psychology. On graduating with first class honours he took a job working for the Royal Navy on noise. This temporary post was with the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit situated in a large rambling house, complete with croquet lawn, on the outskirts of Cambridge. He spun the job out for the next twenty-five years, sixteen of which as Director, and made No 15, Chaucer Road, the best known private address in Psychology, not just in Britain, but throughout the world. To characterize "Cambridge Psychology" is to characterize Broadbent: tough-minded; mathematically sophisticated; suspicious of theory (a curious trait this in a master theoretician); and rigourous. And with a healthy respect for, and knowledge of, the forces forever massed on the flanks of the discipline: physiology, neurology, psychiatry, communication engineering, linguistics, computing and sociology. But above all else, psychology, for that energetic group of brilliant young researchers was empirical.
If we refuse to use experiment and observation on other human beings, we start to regard them as wicked or foolish. I think this is a serious danger and I have no doubt whatever that the methods of empirical psychology are morally better.
The most elegant exposition of this position is Perception and Communication: a book I hesitate to call a classic since all too often that means "never read". It is, nonetheless, a classic.
Perhaps the best that great psychologists can give us is not theories, laws, models or grand explanatory systems but powerful metaphors to live by. And Broadbent gave us one such: "A nervous system acts to some extent as a single communication channel, so that it is meaningful to regard it as having a limited capacity".
If our planes land more safely; if our working environments are generally healthier; if our interactions with machines suit us rather than them; if the human errors that led to Chernobyl do so with an infrequency that is at all tolerable, we owe this in large measure to the fruits of deceptively straightforward Broadbentian principle. Nor has this been neglected by his scientific colleagues and by the community at large. A Fellow of the Royal Society; CBE; The Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the US Academy of Sciences; Presidency of both the British Psychological Society and the Experimental Psychology Society; The Myers Lecture; The Bartlett Lecture; The William James Lectures in Harvard; and, most recently and happily, the first Broadbent Lecturer (the subject of the lecture was not recursion).
In the 1970s he began to find the administrative and bureaucratic trials of a Unit Director's life irksome. P.G. Wodehouse has defined better than I could the risks of becoming a Great Man. "The sadness of the great man's life is that he becomes surrounded by nodders. Only when the yes-men have yessed, do the nodders begin to function. They nod." It was time to move on. So, in 1974, this remarkable career took another turn - to Oxford, as an External MRC Researcher in the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, with a team of bright young doctoral and post-doctoral workers, to tackle a kind of psychological Everest: the links between psychopathology (of the everyday kind), decision processes and thought. Research the seeds of which were first sown in his monumental work Decision and Stress, and which will occupy his talents for a good few years yet.
It is presumptuous indeed to try to sum up a life's work in a few minutes. Chancellor I present to you an extraordinary man who has in several careers: learned to fly; crossed swords with Chomsky (and probably won); served on three Research Councils; nurtured a passion for motorcycles; written four books and a couple of hundred papers; and defined a humane and scholarly approach to the application of psychology which has been a challenge and an encouragement to us all. May I now invite you, Chancellor, to confer upon Donald Eric Broadbent the degree of Doctor of Laws.