The Origins of Psychology Flashcards
Who was William Wundt?
Known as the ‘father of psychology’, Wundt was the first to call himself a psychologist to establish an experimental psychology lab in 1879, and created the approach of structuralism through the method of introspection, to help differentiate psychology from its roots in philosophy and biology. He believed all aspects of nature, including the human mind, could be scientifically studied and so created psychology as objective, controlled research. This paved the way for the acceptance of psychology as a distinct science, and experimental psychology as the main method of studying human behavior.
What is the structuralist approach?
The structuralist approach looks to break down behaviors such as perception and sensation into its component parts and elements, in order to understand the structure of the mind. Wundt only studied aspects of behavior that could be strictly controlled under experimental conditions.
What is introspection? (used to study structural hypotheses)
Developed to study mental processes. The systematic analysis of one’s own conscious experience of a stimuli. It is when a willing participant reports a raw sensory experience and understands their reaction towards a stimuli. Wundt conducted a series of studies asking participants to describe their feelings about a certain stimuli, most commonly a metronome, to find trends in reactions too said stimuli, and therefore determining patterns in behavior. Wundt argued that with training, mental processes such as memory and perception could be systematically observed as they occurred with introspection.
How did this lead to the emergence of empiricism?
This method first introduced the idea of learning behavior and the external study of it, leading to the formation of the empiricist approach; the idea that all behavior is learned / derived through sensory experience and observation of the environment. Empiricism is usually categorized by the use of the scientific method.
What are the assumptions of empiricism?
- The human mind is born as a blank slate, and learns behavior through interactions with the environment
- All behavior is caused / determined
- Because all behavior is determined, it can be predicted in certain situations
How did this lead to the development of the scientific method?
The techniques used to test these assumptions became known as the scientific method; observable, systematic and reliable. This establishment of a scientific method in psychology would lead to the establishment of it as a scientific approach to study, and lead the way to behaviorism.
Strengths of introspection / structuralism
- Controlled methods - all introspections were recorded under strictly controlled conditions with the same stimulus every time; the same standardized instructions were issued to all participants to achieve objectivity.
- This allowed procedures to be repeated every time, which was significant in separating of modern scientific psychology from its philosophical roots
- Still used today to study and gain access to cognitive processes
e. g. Griffin (1994) used introspection to study fruit machine gamblers mental processes - he used the ‘think aloud’ method for the gamblers during their playing sessions, and found gamblers used more irrational verbalizations
Weaknesses of introspection / structuralism
- We have little knowledge of the causes of and processes of underlying behavior and attitudes; e.g. someone may be implicitly racist, influencing their reaction to people of different ethnic groups, but such attitudes exist outside of their conscious awareness and self-reports through introspection would not uncover them
- The data was subjective in that it varies with each person, so it is difficult to establish general principles; introspective results were not reliably reproducible by other researchers in other laboratories. This could be because participants can reporting their conscious experiences, the processes themselves (memory, perception) were unobservable.
Strengths of Empiricism
- The reliance on objective and systematic methods of observations means that knowledge acquired using the scientific method is more than just the passive acceptance of fact
- Because the methods rely on belief in determinism, cause and effect can be established using empirical and replicable methods
- If scientific theories no longer fit the facts, they can be refined or abandoned, meaning that the scientific knowledge is self-corrective
Weaknesses of Empiricism
- Reliance on objectivity and control can create contrived situations that tell us little about how people act in natural environments (lack of ecological validity)
- Much of what we want to study in psychology is unobservable, and can’t be measured in any degree of accuracy; it is the most inferential science as there is a bigger gap between actual data obtained in research and the theories put forward to explain this
- Not all psychologists share the view that all human behaviors can be explored through scientific methods - if human behavior is not subject to the laws implied by scientific methods, then predictions become impossible and methods inappropriate
What makes something systematic, reliable or objective?
Systematic - methods are this when observations and experiments are carried out in an orderly way. Measurement and recording of empirical data are carried out accurately and with consideration to the influence of other factors.
Objective - When researchers do not let preconceived ideas or biases influence the collection of their data.
Reliable - When results are not able to be repeated by researchers to see if the same same results are obtained - if they are not reliable, they cannot be accepted as universally true.
Dualism and Rene Descartes
the suggestion that the mind and body are independent from one another, and suggested the mind could be studied in its own right
John Locke
Proposed Empiricism - the idea experience is gained through the senses and that human beings are blank slates that inherit neither knowledge or instincts. This view would later be the basis of the behaviorism approach - the idea that the world could be understood by investigating external events that are observed and measured.
Charles Darwin
Evolutionary theory proposed survival of the fittest and the idea of human and animal behavior changing over generations; the assumption that human behaviors, such as social behavior have evolved due to their adaptive value is deeply rooted in many psychological approaches, particularly the biological approach.
