Lecture 4 - The birth of Psychology Flashcards
Look at picture 1 - who is this quote from?
Berkeley
Look at picture 2 - who is this quote from?
Hume
Overview of this lecture
- Kant’s challenge
- View on man up to 1800
- tilting view on man
- the birth of psychology
- the first psychologists:
→ Freud (psychoanalysis)
→ Wundt (first psychological lab + structuralism)
→ James (Functionalism)
→ Binet (first psychological tests)
How did the study of the mind develop from philosophy?
- from Aristotle onwards, there have always been thinkers that thought about the mind (philosophy)
- 19th century: the study of men’s mind becomes a science
Christian Wolff - what is he remembered for?
- 1679-1754
- the first representation of psychology as its own field of science
- launches idea of introspection as a scientific method
- wants to describe the results of introspection mathematically (Psychometriae)
What did Wolff write? What did these represent?
- published the first books with “psychology” in the title:
~ Psychologia Empirica (1732)
→ introduced the concept of introspection (the researcher looking inside their own mind and investigating their own conciousness)
~ Psychologia Rationalis (1734)
→ formulates way in which observations can be taken and transformed into general laws or mathematical formulations
! These two publications should be taken together, and they form the basis of psychology (according to Wolff)
Introspection - what is it?
- study of the mind by the mind by “looking inside”
- through introspection we can study the properties of our mental states
→ it immediately became controversial
What are the main problems with introspection?
- the researcher and subject are the same person, and this leads to many biases
- very hard to use introspection to report processes that happen in the mind (hard to put into words)
→ now we still study the mind through introspection, but with concrete questions and quantitative psychology to be as objective as possible (e.g. asking how many times you go to parties to measure extroversion)
Kant
Kant - empiricism or rationalism?
- 1724-1804
- he was between rationalism and empiricism
→ more on rationalism side: he valued knowledge about maths, logic and physics more than other types of knowledge
Kant
What is Kant known for?
- among the firsts to consider the possibility of a scientific psychology
- proper vs improper science
- psychology can at most describe, but will have no explanatory laws (such as in physics)
Kant
What are the proper and improper sciences?
- Proper science: lawful, quantitative description in maths terms
→ every science that can be described in mathematical terms is proper - Improper science: described in normal language (not maths), categorisation, merely empirical
→ also called “systematic art”
→ e.g. psychology, chemistry (you have to observe substances, so it’s not proper science)
Kant
How does Kant explain sciences?
“A rational doctrine of nature thus deserves the name of a natural scince, only in case the fundamental natural laws therein are cognized a priori, and are not mere laws of experience…
… in any special doctrine of nature, there can only be as much proper science as there is mathematics therein…
… proper natural science requires a pure part lying at the basis of the empirical part, and resting on a priori cognition of natural things”
Kant
What is Kant’s opinion on introspection? Why?
> Kant states that introspection is problematic:
- mental states have no quantitative properties (like objects have weight or length)
- introspection can therefore not provide a mathematical description
- consciousness “never stands still”, is always in flux, and cannot be kept constant to look at it closely, and thoughts cannot be separated (cannot be experimentally manipulated)
- observing the mind automatically changes the mind (e.g. practice bias)
Comte
Arguments against introspection
- Comte: introspection is not a reliable observation because there is no distinction between the investigator and the investigated
- objectivity is impossible with introspection, because we can’t check whether what is reported corresponds to the truth
- evidence from introspection is tehrefore not public and this is a problem for scientific principles (transparency)
What two positions can be taken regarding introspection and psychology?
- we could exclude introspection from psychology, and try to find other quantitative ways to measure the mind
- we could include introspection, and establish a framework where introspection can be studied
The view of men in the past - Copernicus, Descarte and Newton
- 15th-17th century
- man is put on earth by god with a purpose, and is not really part of nature
> does not fall under the scope of natural phenomena, therefore it cannot be studied mathematically
> qualitatively different from animal, so biology has nothing to do with psychology
> human body is governed by an immaterial cartesian spirit which only makes itself known through subjective experience - science is beautiful, but it is not at all obvious that man humself can be an object of scientific studies
Why were men not studied scientifically in the past?
- it was believed that men were put on Earth by god; and they were considered not to be part of nature
- men were considered very different from all the other objects and living things on earth, and that made it difficult to study them
How did psychology evolve?
- impossible to describe psychology mathematically → possible
- humans are not animals → humans are part of natural world, and therefore can be studied
- the mind is immaterial (Descartes) → the mind is material
now we’ll go through each development
psychology as mathematically describable
What was the first step to describing psychology mathematically? what is this process called?
- Franciscus Donders
- he starts measuring the duration of mental processes:
→ gives patients two tasks (one with repetition, and one with repetition+discrimination)
→ subtracs the time taken to complete both tasks
→ result is estimate of how long the mental processes of discrimination takes
! mental chronometry (provides mathematical description of mental processes)
psychology as mathematically describable
Why couldn’t mental chronometry be invented before?
there were no stop watches!
- first stop watch was built in 1816
- before that, there was the Huygens’ pendulum
psychology as mathematically describable
Reaction time research, in present time
- Donders’ idea is the basis for the study of mental processes through reaction time tasks
→ e.g. studies of decision making, attitudes (IAT), …
! much of these mathematical processes has been developed at the UvA and in Leuven (Donders was Dutch)
psychology as mathematically describable
Just-noticeable difference - what is it?
- it is the minimum difference that can be detected by humans
- e.g. people blindfolded keep one book on each hand (books weight the same)
→ a piece of paper is added to one book, and people will not be able to tell the difference between the weight of the two books
→ a small book is added to one book; now people will be able to tell the difference in weights
→ just-noticeable difference is in this cases the smallest book added that would make people be able to tell that there is a difference in weights
psychology as mathematically describable
Who studied the just-noticeable difference?
- Weber and Fechner
- J.N.D. in perceptions (e.g. weight, sight, …)
→ among the ones that investigated psychology and men mathematically
psychology as mathematically describable
The arrival of Statistics
- another step to psychology being studied mathematically
- now focus is on larger groups of people, not on individuals
- behavior cannot be predicted accurately, but through statistics trends and general probabilities can be calculated
psychology as mathematically describable
who was one of the first statisticians?
she kinda skipped him during the lecture
-
Quetelet (Belgian astronomer and sociologist)
→ introduced the science of l’‘homme moyenne” (the average human)
→ this resulted also in quantitative sociology
psychology as mathematically describable
Francis Galton - what is he known for?
- 1822-1911
- cousin of Darwin
- main focus: heredity and intelligence
- human qualities are just as heritable as “natural” qualities
- invented regression
psychology as mathematically describable
Eugenics
- most controversial part of Galton’s ideas
- he wanted to create a society based on intelligence
→ intelligence should be leading in who procreates and who doesn’t (only smart people should reproduce)
! this was a very common idea at the time
psychology as mathematically describable
“Statistics are full of racists”
- why?
- Galton: founded regression to predict someone’s intelligence based on their parents’ intelligence
- Pearson: founded Pearson’s correlation for the same field of Eugenics
psychology as mathematically describable
“humans are stochastic”
- what does it mean?
= “random probability distribution or pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely”
→ humans can be studied statistically, but their behavior cannot be accurately predicted
psychology as mathematically describable
Now, back to Kant
- with the knowledge we have now, what can we say about Kant’s opinion on mathematical description of psychology?
- applying statistics to psychology appeared to be a great success (correlation, regression method, mental chronometry, …)
- Kant had perhaps underestimated the potential of describing humans mathematically
(picture 3)
psychology as mathematically describable
Does all of this mean that we should strive for psychology to be as mathematically describable?
- at the time of Donders (etc), reserachers worked mostly on natural sciences
- they strived to describe mathematically as much as possible, but this is not necessarily necessary
- now many branches of psychology consider psychology not to necessitate mathematical description
humans as god-sent → humans as animals
What were the steps to considering men as animals? (instead of men as different from animals, selected by God)
- Charles Darwin (1809-1882)→ evolution theory
→ man is not the king of animals - explains origin of species based on evolution
→ accidental mutation
→ natural selection (advantageous traits are passed on) - animals that are better adapted to their environment survive and reproduce more than animals less adapted
- humans developed certain advantageous traits and evolved as separate species from the apes
(picture 4)
humans as god-sent → humans as animals
What were the consequences of Evolution Theory?
- man loses its special status compared to animals
- humans and animal behavior are related
- the answer to “who are humans” now falls under the scope of sience
! Darwin encounters resistance, but what is surprising is how fast his theory was accepted
humans as god-sent → humans as animals
Evolution Theory in present times
- evolutionary psychology is currently a separate field of research
- reserach along the lines of functional psychological modules that are adaptive
- examples are inferring human emotions or detecting cheaters
immaterial mind → material mind
Mind becomes material
- in 18th-19th century, it became clear that mental functions are linked to the brain
- localization (Wernicke, Broca)
- discovery and study of reflexes introduce idea of mechanisms behind behavior
→ mind is not enchanted
(picture 5)