Examining the changes - or resistance to change - in the theorizing, research, and professional practices of German-speaking emigré psychologists after 1933 presents an important opportunity to learn about the impact of culturally conditioned scientific and professional styles in this discipline. Recent studies of historical and contemporary scientific practices have sensitized us to their rootedness in more local and situational as well as national cultural contexts. In psychology, too, conceptions of both scientific and professional subject matter and practices differed by culture, although the differences were often gradual rather than absolute, and there were local variations within each national style.

In German-speaking Europe, both limited opportunities for new disciplines in the established system of higher education and the knowledge interests of experimenting psychologists themselves made it opportune for them to compete for professorships in philosophy, which in turn influenced their research priorities toward philosophically relevant topics in human cognition. In the 1920s, philosophically oriented experimental psychology participated fully in the struggle of competing world-views characteristic of that time; it also lived in uneasy balance with varied attempts to transform the field into a science-based profession, and to expand its subject matter and methodological options accordingly.