Ch. 9 Early Psych Flashcards
Wundt used methods used by blank to study blank
Donders, reaction time
Wundt: describe his concepts
Voluntarism: will is central to all psych problems. People choose what to attend to and perceive.
- The Will and creative synthesis
Volkerpsychologie: Wundt proposed a scientific study of the basic elements of psych like reaction time. This could be studied immediately. HOWEVER: the complex elements of human mental experience have to be analyzed and deduced after the fact using historical analysis and naturalistic observation. Deduced from cultural products like: religion, literature, myths, language, customs, law, history.
- Wundt studied this for the last 20 years of his life; wrote a 10 volume “vokerpsychologie”.
- Basically, social psych/anthropology/sociology
Mental chronometry: Used Donder’s reaction time methods to try to analyze the time for mental processes to occur; experimentally investigating the mind.
- He abandoned these because they were just too unreliable across subjects, tests, etc…These started again in the 60s with the rise of cognitive psych
Principles COH
Physical vs psychological causation:
- Physical events can be predicted on the basis of antecedent events. Psych events cant because they occur due to “The Will/creative synthesis”
- Principle of heterogony of ends (goal-directed activity rarely achieves its goal and nothing else): also makes it impossible to predict psych events.
Principle of contrasts: Opposite experiences intensity one another. (sweet is more sweet after a sour taste, hot and cold, etc…)
Principle toward the development of opposites:
- tendency to seek the opposite experience after a prolonged time with one experience. Also applies to history (rationalism emphasis of the enlightenment leads to emotional emphasis of romanticism)
What did Wundt think of the approach to psych vs. other sciences
mediate vs. immediate
Mediate: other sciences get data mediated by recording tools.
Immediate: psych should be based on immediate experience (introspection)
What were Wundt’s goals for psychology as a science?
- Discover the basic elements of thought
- Discover the laws by which mental elements combine into more complex mental experiences.
What was a big part of Wundt’s Volkerpsychologie as in “the essence of social interaction?
Language and verbal communication. Has 3 stages
- Speaker apperceives his general impression
- Speaker chooses words and sentence structure to express the general impression
- Listener hears the words and must apperceive the general impression.
- We remember the general impression long after we forget the specific words they used.
Did Wundt think that psychological processes can be predicted? Explain why or why not
Principle of heterogony of ends
The will/creative synthesis
Wundt was a determinist.
T or F
Explain
True.
- The contents of consciousness and mental laws determine our volitional acts.
- These laws are complex, unconscious, unknowable through introspection or experimentation. But they are still laws and their products are lawful.
These laws can only be studied after the fact, like a historian (Volkerpsychologie)
Describe Wundt’s use of introspection
248
Describe Wundt’s thoughts on perception and emotion
Mental experience is 2 things:
Sensations, feelings
Sensations (sense organ stimulated and signal reaches brain)
- modality (quality)
- intensity
Feelings
Tridimensional theory of feeling
Pleasantness, excitement, strain (and opposites)
248
Describe the principles of Newtonian science?
- Classification is not explanation. ex. dogs chase cats doesn’t tell you why.
- Aristotle’s final causes/teleology rejected
- Natural laws: no exception, the universe works according to laws
- Deism
- Occam’s Razor. Parsimony
space, time, matter, force: explains all - Probabilities: we have to accept probabilities because our understanding of laws is incomplete
CANDOP
Describe the principles of Baconian science? Compare it to someone
Induction.
without bias: 4 idols TTMC
Practical: experiments of light(causal relationships) vs fruit (practical applications)
Different from Galileo (pythagorean-platonic)
Gal: Deduction. Predicting events from a general principle/law once you figure out the law. Galileo liked to express laws mathematically.
Bacon: Induction: Observation first then generalization.
No theories, math, or deductions.(preconceived notions)
ie. Radical empiricism. Anti-rationalism
Who did Bacon use as an example of a biased researcher?
Aristotle. Began with the idea of final causes. He found them.
What sources of error did Bacon think could creep in?
Tribe: human nature. imagine, will, hope
Theater: viewpoint (team bias)
Marketplace: semantics
Cave: Personal bias from personality
TTMC
Which modern thinker continued Bacon’s approach to science?
Skinner
- Practical application (theory of fruit)
- without theory. Skinner didn’t feel he needed theory- just performed experiments and observed, then follow what showed promise. Skinner wrote an article “are theories of learning necessary? His answer: no/
Explain the Cartesian method to finding truth?
T of F
Descartes is a naive realist
- Start from a certainty and move on to find other certainties.
- 4 steps to solving a problem
1. Avoid prejudgement 2. Divide hard issues into parts 3. Begin thinking from easy to complex problems 4. Finally, analyze broad info get everything
True
- If sense info is clear and distinct then god wouldn’t deceive us.
Know world through intuition and deduction:
Intuition: unbiased mind finds an idea that can’t be doubted
Note- Descartes’ method returns primacy to subjective experience unlike Galileo.
