wundt - emergence of psychology Flashcards
who is the ‘founding father of psychology’?
Wilheim Wundt
how did psychology emerge into a science?
through paradigm shifts, psychology became scientific due to its controlled and standardised measures
when did Wundt open the first psychological lab and where?
- 1897
- Leipzig, Germany
what did Wundt aim to study?
the structure of human mind by breaking down sensation and perception
what was his study called?
introspection
what type of methods did Wundt use?
strict, scientific methods
- standardised procedures e.g. the same stimulus was used each time
- reliable and replicable
why did Wundt use introspection?
to investigate the human mind
what does introspection mean?
Latin, and means ‘looking into’
what was the process of introspection?
- ppt’s asked to reflect on their own cognitive processes and describe them (perceptions and sensations)
what was Wundt’s approach known as?
structuralism
what is structuralism?
- he used experimental methods to find the basic building blocks (structures) of thought and investigate how they interacted.
- to do this, he studied sensation and perception, breaking participants’ observations of objects, images and events down into constituent parts
how did he study structuralism?
- by studying reaction time - systematically changing the stimuli he presented to participants and measuring how long it took them to respond
- inferring that the longer it took to respond, the more mental processes must be involved.
- later developed a process called introspection to infer more about the nature of the processes involved.
S: contributed to psychology
ID: a strength of Wundt’s research is that it has contributed to the development of psychology
Q: this means that introspection is still used today to gain access to cognitive processes
EX: for example, Griffiths. used introspection to study the cognitive processes of fruit machine gamblers. he found that gamblers used more irrational verbalisations
AN: this is a strength as it has allowed researchers to develop scientific processes that we use today
W: subjective
ID: one main criticism of introspection is that it is a subjective method of experimentation, whereas scientific methods usually aim to be objective
Q: this means that introspection is subjective as it can be influenced by cognitive biases, such as religious beliefs and upbringing
EX: for example, different sets of ppt’s experiencing the same thoughts may report widely different data, making it hard to replicate, and therefore less reliable and generalisable
AN: this is a weakness as it became very difficult to establish general laws and principles
