Most psychologists would agree that psychology as an experimental science begins with Wilhelm Wundt’s establishment of the world’s first psychological research laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879. In 1979, the centennial of the Leipzig laboratory’s founding was recognized in the United States, Canada, England, France, Germany, Brazil, and Japan. The American Psychological Association issued a special minting of a gold medal bearing Wundt’s portrait on the obverse and proclaiming “a century of science” on the reverse. A safe prediction is that in 2029, the 150th anniversary of that founding will be widely recognized and celebrated by psychologists throughout the world. Who then was Wundt and how did he come to establish that laboratory? In photographs a bearded, distinguished-looking Wilhelm Wundt gazes calmly through wire-rimmed glasses. He seems the very model of a nineteenth-century German “Herr Professor.” Wundt is usually identified as the “founder of psychology” or the “world’s first true psychologist.” It is appropriate that Wundt is the first psychologist we will consider.

The aim of this chapter is to map how other comparative fields have produced a remarkable amount of research that should be of interest to comparative lawyers. It should also be noted, however, that the present account of ‘implicit comparative law’ is highly condensed and selective. Thus, while this chapter can provide a critical introduction into these areas of research, it is clear that it may well be possible to write entire books about many of its themes.

In his research conducted before, during, and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Pavlov established the paradigms of classical (respondent) conditioning and reported results that are basic to an understanding of learning. Pavlov had wide research interests. He was an important influence on the historical development of psychology. In the United States, Watson too was involved in a revolution but in his case a revolution within psychology. While his career in psychology was relatively short, Watson’s behaviorist revolution was a major influence on the development of psychology, especially in the United States. How did the conditioned reflex model provide behaviorism with an alternative way of explaining human action? Why did it displace earlier schools of psychology (structuralism and functionalism), and cause psychologists to abandon (at least temporarily) explanations of behavior that were based in descriptions of conscious experiences? In this chapter we consider that transition.

Among the foundational projects in the study of childhood and culture is the “Six Cultures” survey from the late 1960s. Observational data were collected to map children’s daily activity in six village/small town settings around the world. Only in the single US middle-class community of “Orchard Town” were children not routinely engaged in chores (Whiting and Whiting 1975: 84). Nowhere are the gerontocracy and neontocracy perspectives further apart than on the issue of work.2 Indeed, “the dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work is considered a yardstick of modernity” (Nieuwenhuys 1996: 237). While we hamstring our children to keep them from working, fearing their loss of innocence and studiousness, the norm elsewhere is to open the pathway to adulthood.

When international organizations were first established in the nineteenth century, they were largely seen as self-contained entities, performing functions for their member states but not much else. What was relevant was the set-up of each and every individual organization; nothing more, nothing less. The idea of such organizations entering into arrangements with other organizations, or even with third states, was for a long time considered anathema.

The growth and development of the United Nations as the major universal organisation has been accompanied by a no less dramatic increase in the number and range of organisations with membership drawn from the states of a particular region. Such regional organisations frequently become involved in the resolution of disputes.1 Sometimes this is because dispute settlement has been defined as a goal of the organisation. Article 4(e) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union, for example, lays down as one of its aims the peaceful resolution of conflicts between member states, and similar provisions can be found in the constitutions of other organisations. But even organisations whose primary concern is with matters of no present relevance may find themselves involved in some form of settlement activity. For bringing states together in an institutional setting provides the parties to a dispute with an opportunity to settle their differences and regional neighbours with the chance to add their encouragement, assistance and pressure as an incentive.

The present chapter, and the two that follow, will largely address the position of international organizations vis-à-vis the outside world, discussing three broad issues. First, this chapter will be devoted to whether organizations can conclude treaties, and on what basis. The next chapter will discuss with whom they enter into relations, and the subsequent chapter will analyse what will (or may) happen if something goes wrong in relations between an international organization and some other actor.

In Chapter 2 we saw that a computer performs computation by processing instructions. A computer instruction set must include a variety of features to achieve flexible programmability, including varied arithmetic and logic operations, conditional computation, and application-defined data structures. As a result, the execution of each instruction requires a number of steps: instruction fetch and decode, arithmetic or logic computation, read or write memory, and determination of the next instruction. The instruction set definition is a contract between software and hardware, the fundamental software–hardware interface, that enables software to be portable. After portability, the next critical attribute is performance, so computer hardware is designed to execute instructions as fast as possible.