How Benjamin Franklin's private writings reveal a proto-modern psychology?

Long before Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and self-help books, Benjamin Franklin was experimenting on himself. He developed elaborate programs to modify his own behaviour, noting his impulses, failures, and triumphs in letters no one intended to read. This is consequential because not until two centuries later that this became a discipline in modern psychology.

Benjamin Franklin, also known as “The First American", was a printer and publisher, author, inventor, scientist, and diplomat. He was one of the most influential of the Founding Fathers of America and helped draft the “Declaration of Independence” in 1776. Among all his achievements, some of the least known were his private letters.

What were Franklin's private writings?

Franklin was a prolific writer, many believing he wrote more than 8,000 letters, which still survive. Some of them were about scientific experiments, observations about society and politics, personal reflection, habit tracking, moral conditioning and philosophical advice. Some letters also involved communication with a secret society group, “Freemasonry”, a fraternal, intellectual, and moral organisation, which till today embroils in conspiracy theories.

Benjamin Franklin treated the self as a malleable subject which can be reshaped and disciplined through systematic observation. His “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection” can be found in Part II of his Autobiography, which is clearly written as a model that others would do well to imitate. His other private writings, such as personal letters, habit and virtue tracking, notebooks and drafts, have traces of modern behavioural psychology.

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Franklin's Private writings and project of moral perfection

Franklin put together a list of 13 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility. He then focused on each and repeated the cycle four times a year. He maintained a visual ledger, where he would record "daily integrity report," marking black spots in the grid whenever he failed.

Franklin came up with a phenomenon that is now used to manage the cognitive dissonance effect. Cognitive dissonance is the effect when we encounter two mutually exclusive and opposing beliefs, and the discomfort that arises from it. He devised a simple effect that is now known as the Benjamin Franklin effect- “When someone does not like you, ask them for a favour? If they help you, then their brain will rationalise that they must have liked you or why else they would have helped". These are some methods nowadays used in CBT in modern psychology.

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He is also credited with the discovery of the placebo effect or the blind trial. From his private notes and personal letter, it was found that patients' improvements came from themselves rather than external sources, just by the power of suggestion. Something that is the foundation of clinical psychology. In his personal correspondence with family and friends, he mentions identity as a public construct. He would deliberately soften his tone to practice "modest persuasion," and not to trigger defensiveness in others.

He was not perfect; he himself owned slaves and engaged in the slave trade. But in later life, he became a vocal advocate of the abolition of slavery. Which shows a pattern of always evolving; in essence, his writing presents a legacy. Through self-actualisation, systematic self-observation, reflection, and structured improvement, he tried to achieve moral perfection. When he sat down, during the last twenty years of his life, to write his autobiography (a work written in four different spurts), he crafted an account of himself and his life which seems intended to serve as a model for every American, then and now: He addressed his audience as “Dear Son”.