The birth date of modern psychology is usually given as 1879, the year that Wilhelm Wundt (pronounced “voont”) established the first formal psychology research lab-oratory at the University of Leipzig, Germany (Benjamin, 2000). However, the roots of psychology can be traced back through centuries of history in philosophy and sci-ence. Since at least the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in ancient Greece, there has been debate about where human knowledge comes from, the nature of the mind and soul, the relationship of the mind to the body, and whether it is possible to sci-entifically study such things (Wertheimer, 2000).
The philosophy of empiricism was particularly important to the development of scientific psychology. Beginning in the seventeenth century, proponents of empiricism—especially the British philosophers John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume—challenged the claim, made by philosophers as far back as Plato, that some knowledge is innate. Empiricists argued instead that what we know about the world comes to us through experience and observation, not through imagination or intuition. This view suggests that, at birth, our minds are like a blank slate (tabula rasa, in Latin) upon which our experiences write a lifelong story. For nearly 130 years now, empiricism has guided psychologists in seeking knowledge about behavior and mental processes through observations governed by the rules of science.
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Wundt and the Structuralism of Titchener
By the mid-1800s, a number of German physiologists, including Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Fechner (pronounced “FECK-ner”), were conducting scientific studies of the struc-ture and function of vision, hearing, and the other sensory systems and perceptual processes that empiricism had identified as the channels through which human knowledge flows. Fechner’s work was especially valuable because he realized that one could study these mental processes by observing people’s reactions to changes in sensory stimuli. By exploring, for example, how much brighter a light must become before we see it as twice as bright, Fechner discovered complex, but pre-dictable, relationships between changes in the physical characteristics of stimuli and changes in our psychological experience of them. Fechner’s approach, which he called psychophysics, paved the way for much of the research described in the chap-ter on perception.As a physiologist, Wundt, too, used the methods of laboratory science to study sensory-perceptual systems, but the focus of his work was consciousness, the men-tal experiences created by these systems. Wundt wanted to describe the basic ele-ments of consciousness, how they are organized, and how they relate to one another (Schultz & Schultz, 2004). For example, he developed ingenious laboratory meth-ods to study the speed of decision making and other mental events. And in an attempt to observe conscious experience, Wundt used the technique of introspec-tion, which means “looking inward.” After training research participants in this method, he repeatedly showed a light or made a sound and asked them to describe the sensations and feelings these stimuli created. Wundt concluded that “quality”
(e.g., cold or blue) and “intensity” (e.g., brightness or loudness) are the two essen-tial elements of any sensation and that feelings can be described in terms of pleasure-displeasure, tension-relaxation, and excitement-depression (Schultz & Schultz, 2004). In conducting this kind of research, Wundt began psychology’s transforma-tion from the philosophy of mental processes to the science of mental processes.
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Edward Titchener, an Englishman who had been a student of Wundt’s, used introspection in his own laboratory at Cornell University. He studied Wundt’s basic elements of consciousness, as well as images and other aspects of conscious experi-ence that are harder to quantify (see Figure 1.4). One result was that Titchener added “clearness” as an element of sensation (Schultz & Schultz, 2004). Titchener called his approach structuralism because he was trying to define the structure of con-sciousness.
Wundt was not alone in the scientific study of mental processes, nor was his work universally accepted. Some of his fellow German scientists, such as Hermann Ebbinghaus, believed that analyzing consciousness through introspection was not as important as exploring the capacities and limitations of mental processes such as learning and memory. Ebbinghaus’s own laboratory experiments—in which he served as the only participant—formed the basis for some of what we know about memory today. Around 1912, other German colleagues, including Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler, argued against Wundt’s efforts to break down human experience or consciousness into its component parts. They were called Gestalt psychologists because they pointed out that the whole (or Gestalt, in German) of conscious experience is not the same as the sum of its parts. Wertheimer noted, for example, that if a pair of lights goes on and off in just the right sequence, we experience not two flashing lights but a single light “jumping” back and forth.
You have probably seen this phi phenomenon in action on advertising signs that create the impression of a series of lights racing around a display. Movies provide another example. Imagine how boring it would be to browse slowly through the thousands of still images that are printed on a reel of film. Yet when those same images are projected onto a screen at a particular rate, they combine to create a rich, emotional experience. In other words, said the Gestaltists, consciousness should be studied as a whole, not piece by piece.
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Freud and Psychoanalysis
While Wundt and his colleagues in Leipzig were conducting scientific research on consciousness, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) F I G U R E1.4
A Stimulus for Introspection Look at this object and try to ignore what it is. Instead, try to describe only your conscious experience, such as redness, brightness, and
roundness, and how intense and clear the sensations and images are. If you can do this, you would have been an excellent research assistant in Titchener’s laboratory.
Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) In an early experiment on the speed of mental processes, Wundt (third from left) first measured how quickly people could respond to a light by releasing a button they had been holding down. He then measured how much longer the response took when they held down one button with each hand and had to decide—based on the color of the light—which one to release.
Wundt reasoned that the additional response time reflected how long it took to perceive the color and decide which hand to move. As noted in the chapter on cognition and language, the logic behind this experiment remains a part of research on cognitive processes today.
Source: The Psychology Archive—The University of Akron
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CHAPTER 1 Introducing PsychologyTHISTRY
was in Vienna, Austria, beginning to explore the unconscious. As a physician, Freud had presumed that all behavior and mental processes have physical causes some-where in the nervous system. He began to question that assumption in the late 1800s, however, after encountering several patients who displayed a variety of physical ailments that had no apparent physical cause. After interviewing these patients using hypnosis and other methods, Freud became convinced that the causes of these people’s physical problems were not physical. The real causes, he said, were deep-seated problems that the patients had pushed out of consciousness (Friedman
& Schustack, 2003). He eventually came to believe that all behavior—from every-day slips of the tongue to severe forms of mental disorder—is motivated by psy-chological processes, especially by mental conflicts that occur without our awareness, at an unconscious level. For nearly fifty years, Freud developed his ideas into a body of work known as psychoanalysis, which included a theory of person-ality and mental disorder, as well as a set of treatment methods. Partly because they were based on a small number of medical cases, not a long series of laboratory experiments, Freud’s ideas are by no means universally accepted. Still, he was a groundbreaker whose theories have had a significant influence on psychology and many other fields.
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William James and Functionalism
Scientific research in psychology began in North America not long after Wundt started his work in Germany. William James founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard University in the late 1870s, though it was used mainly to conduct demonstrations for his students (Schultz &Schultz, 2004). It was not until 1883 that G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University established the first psychology research laboratory in the United States.
The first Canadian psychology research laboratory was established in 1889 at the University of Toronto by James Mark Baldwin, Canada’s first modern psychologist and a pioneer in research on child development.
Like the Gestalt psychologists, William James rejected both Wundt’s approach and Titchener’s structuralism. He saw no point in breaking consciousness into component parts that never operate on their own. Instead, in accordance with
William James’s Lab William James (1842–1910) established this psychology demonstration laboratory at Harvard University in the late 1870s. Like the Gestalt psychologists, James saw the approach used by Wundt and Titchener as a scientific dead end; he said that trying to understand consciousness by studying its components is like trying to understand a house by looking at individual bricks (James, 1884). He preferred instead to study the ways in which consciousness functions to help people adapt to their environments.
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Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, James wanted to understand how images, sensations, memories, and the other mental events that make up our flowing
“stream of consciousness” function to help us adapt to our environment (James, 1890, 1892). This idea was consistent with an approach to psychology called func-tionalism, which focused on the role of consciousness in guiding people’s ability to make decisions, solve problems, and the like.
James’s emphasis on the functions of mental processes encouraged North American psychologists to look not only at how those processes work to our advan-tage but also at how they differ from person to person. Some of these psychologists began to measure individual differences in learning, memory, and other mental processes associated with intelligence, made recommendations for improving edu-cational practices in the schools, and even worked with teachers on programs tai-lored to children in need of special help (Bernstein, Kramer, & Phares, 2008).
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John B. Watson and Behaviorism
Besides fueling James’s interest in the functions of consciousness, Darwin’s theory of evolution led other psychologists—especially those in North America after 1900—to study animals as well as humans.
If all species evolved in similar ways, perhaps the behavior and mental processes of all species followed the same, or similar, laws and we can learn something about people by studying animals. Psychologists could not expect cats or rats or pigeons to introspect, so they watched what animals did when confronted with laboratory tasks such as finding the correct path through a maze. From these observations, they made inferences about the animals’ conscious experience and about the general laws of learning, memory, problem solving, and other mental processes that might apply to people as well as animals.
John B. Watson, a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University, agreed that the observable behavior of animals and humans is the most important source of scientific information for psychology. However, Watson thought it was utterly unscientific to use behavior as the basis for making inferences about consciousness, as structuralists and functionalists did—let alone about the unconscious, as Freudians did. In 1913, Watson published an article called “Psychology As the Behaviorist Views It.” In it, he argued that psychologists should ignore mental events and base psychology only on what they can actually see in overt behavior and in responses to various stimuli (Watson, 1913, 1919).
Watson’s view, called behaviorism, recognized the existence of consciousness but did not consider it worth studying because it would always be private and there-fore not observable by scientific methods. In fact, said Watson, preoccupation with consciousness would prevent psychology from ever being a true science. Watson believed that the most important determinant of behavior is learning and that it is through learning that animals and humans are able to adapt to their environments.
He was famous for claiming that with enough control over the environment, he could create learning experiences that would turn any infant into a doctor, a lawyer, or even a criminal.
American psychologist B. F. Skinner was another early champion of behaviorism.
From the 1930s until his death in 1990, Skinner worked on mapping out the details of how rewards and punishments shape, maintain, and change behavior through what he termed “operant conditioning.” Through his functional analysis of behavior, he would explain, for example, how parents and teachers can unknowingly encourage children’s tantrums by rewarding them with attention, and how a virtual addiction to gambling can result from the occasional and unpredictable rewards it brings.
Many psychologists were drawn to Watson’s and Skinner’s vision of psychology as the learning-based science of observable behavior. In fact, behaviorism dominated psychological research from the 1920s through the 1960s, while the study of con-sciousness received less attention, especially in the United States. (“In Review: The Development of Psychology” summarizes behaviorism and the other schools of thought that have influenced psychologists in the past century.)
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CHAPTER 1 Introducing Psychology●
Psychology Today
Psychologists continue to study all kinds of overt behav-ior in humans and in animals. By the end of the 1960s, however, many had become dissatisfied with the limitations imposed by behaviorism (some, especially in Europe, had never accepted it in the first place). They grew uncomfortable about ignoring mental processes that might be important in more fully understanding behavior (e.g., Ericsson & Simon, 1994). The dawn of the computer age influenced these psychologists to think about mental activity in a new way—as information processing. Computers and rapid progress in computer-based biotechnology began to offer psychologists exciting new ways to study mental processes and the biologi-cal activity that underlies them. As shown in Figure 1.1, for example, it is now pos-sible to literally see what is going on in the brain when, for example, a person thinks or makes decisions.Armed with ever more sophisticated research tools, psychologists today are striv-ing to do what Watson thought was impossible: to study mental processes with pre-cision and scientific objectivity. In fact, there are probably now as many psychologists who study cognitive and biological processes as there are who study observable behaviors. So mainstream psychology has come full circle, once again accepting con-sciousness—in the form of cognitive processes—as a legitimate topic for scientific research and justifying the definition of psychology as the science of behavior and mental processes (Gallagher & Sørensen, 2006; Haynes & Rees, 2005).