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ZEITGEIST
The Scientific Laboratory
The chemistry laboratory at the University of Giessen in 1824 was the first ever in science. Many others followed.
The founding of Wundt’s psychology laboratory in 1879 traditionally marks the beginning of psychology as a discipline and science.
Soon after, students from Wundt’s laboratory quickly founded other similar laboratories around the world.
By 1900, 25 had been founded in the United States, 10 in Germany, and 12 more in ten countries including Japan and China (Harper, 1950).
Benjamin (2000, p. 318) noted that one of the most important aspects of the new psychology laboratory was “the community of scholars who conducted collaborative research in pursuit of scientific explanations of mind.”
In the United States, the laboratory and at least one laboratory course became the standard for undergraduate psychology training (Benjamin, 2000). (PSYC 3153 Research Methods at SAU!)
Psychology, finally, staked its claims to an intellectual territory wrested from philosophy, mathematics, biology, and social science.
PREVIEW
Wundt’s psychology was characterized by the advent of the psychology laboratory and its equipment.
The research at early psychology laboratories was very different than psychological research today. Those concentrated on the scientific study of the mind and consciousness.
Wundt’s research topics included Voluntarism, apperception, reaction time studies, and the creative synthesis.
Titchener promoted Structuralism, introspection, and the stimulus error.
Memory was the focus for Ebbinghaus.
Müller and his colleagues extended Ebbinghaus’s work using new equipment and stronger experimental methods.
Brentano’s act psychology linked perceivers to the act of perceiving and argued against systematic experimentation.
Phenomenology was the focus of Stumpf’s work; it anticipated Gestalt psychology’s later anti-elementistic stance.
The debunking of Clever Hans’s cognitive powers was a huge step for early psychology and brought it wide public attention to the field.
The research coming out of the Würzburg School (imageless thought and cognitive set) demonstrated the problems with introspection as a reliable research method.
INTRODUCTION
Psychology finally made its appearance as a scientific discipline primarily through the work of Wilhelm Wundt.
His contributions were central, although as other chapters will show 21st century psychology had many other parents.
Wundt was a philosopher who saw the need for a new experimental methodology to study the human mind.
His work in psychology emphasized empirical results derived from laboratory experiments.
Later in his life he also studied psychological topics that he believed could not be approached by laboratory methods.
His definition of psychology had two main parts.
One part was lab based, Voluntarism. It centered on how humans chose to attend to particular stimuli. The other part, völkerpsychologie (usually labelled “folk psychology” in English), was unapproachable experimentally (see below) and Wundt spent the last years of his life studying its components.
His influence upon the new science was magnified by his voluminous written output and the large number of students he trained.
Of all of his contributions, however, the psychology laboratory was the one most adopted by others. Only recently have psychologists become re-engaged with the topics subsumed under völkerpsychologie (Damböck, Feest, & Kusch, 2020).
Edward B. Titchener was one of Wundt’s early students.
Titchener was English but spent the majority of his career in the United States.
At Cornell University, he modified Wundt’s approach and cataloged the many elements of the human mind.
Titchener called his approach to psychology Structuralism.
He assiduously avoided any attempts to make psychology more applied or to include animal research. While highly influential during his lifetime, his Structuralism all but disappeared following his death.
In Europe Wundt’s psychology inspired many others to become psychologists.
Georg E. Müller created a laboratory that rivaled Wundt’s.
The work coming out of that laboratory emphasized psychophysics, vision, and memory.
Another contemporary of Wundt’s was Franz Brentano.
His approach was decidedly different in that he put much less emphasis upon systematic experimentation. Instead, he searched for crucial experiments, ones that were designed to answer a scientific question once and for all.
Brentano called his approach Act Psychology.
Unlike Wundt, he wrote little and trained only a handful of students, minimizing his ultimate historical influence.
Carl Stumpf brought his lifelong interests in music to the psychology laboratory.
His early analyses of musical melody contradicted much of the elemental approach to psychology promoted by Wundt and Titchener.
Two of Stumpf’s students, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, would cofound Gestalt Psychology (along with Max Wertheimer, see chapter 12).
Another German, Oskar Pfungst, demonstrated that the famous horse, Clever Hans, was unable to compute simple mathematical expressions.
Hermann Ebbinghaus was inspired to study memory using the new experimental methods of psychology.
His work on human memory is still covered in all psychology textbooks.
Finally, Oswald Külpe, Wundt’s second assistant, broke with him over the issue of imageless thoughts and cognitive sets.
Külpe and his colleagues showed that human participants reliably gave similar answers to mental problems but could not introspect as to why they had. Their work was the death nell to the early introspective methods in psychology. How did Wundt and others use introspection?
Defined psychology as the study of: sensory psychophysics, the personal equation, brain localization
Eventually moved to University of Leipzig (as a philosopher)
He thought psychology was part of philosophy
Psychology had two parts: one was experimental, nearer to biology and psychophysics; the other was völkerpsychologie and was closer to history and anthropology (e.g., studied "language, art, myth, and customs")
Wundt defined psychology as consisting of two parts: one was lab based, experimental and nearer to biology and psychophysics, the other part, his völkerpsychologie, could not be studied that way. It was nearer to the social science disciplines of history and anthropology.
1879
the traditional date for psychology's birth
Single-room PSYCHOLOGY laboratory at Leipzig
Soon expanded to several rooms and became an "Institute"
Focus of experiments was on self-observation (via introspection)
All researchers played all three roles: subject, experimenter, observer
Psychology was to study consciousness scientifically WITHOUT materialistic explanations or recourse to associationism
Founded a journal: Philosophische Studien
Wundt's Theory of Psychology
Study of consciousness (NOT behavior)
Consciousness was a process (NOT a thing)
Reversed rival positions, for Wundt movements were slow, at first, because they were not automatic
Perceptions were general and vague
Apperceptions were focused
Creative Synthesis
Taken from chemistry
But, not the same, products could not be predicted beforehand
Brain required: must be "awake, conscious, and attentive"
Complex and difficult theories
NOT a structuralist (see below)
He was a voluntarist (FYI, nearly every modern psychology text gets this wrong, calling him a structuralist)
Wundt's theorizing did not travel well to the United States
Wundt's experimental techniques persisted
Trained many students who broadcast his methods worldwide
Psychology After Wundt
Had many American students
His laboratory methodology was greatest influence
Edwin Boring (Titchener's student) mischaracterized Wundt's psychology and created a false history, mislabelling Wundt as a structuralist
Voluntarism-the system of psychology developed by Wundt that emphasized the role of unconscious and conscious choice of certain parts on consciousness based upon personal feelings, history, and motivations.
apperception-being conscious of one's own perceptions.
Learning Objective: Appraise the factors that led to Wundt becoming the first psychologist.
THEN AND NOW
Automaticity
Interestingly, that observation of his survives still in modern psychology as the concept of automaticity.
Wundt argued that early in learning, driving a car for example, people pay more attention to the details of driving such as steering, changing lanes, speeding up or slowing down.
Later, however, drivers accomplish all of those tasks seemingly without thinking.
Moreover, they do so while eating a sandwich, toying with the audio, or talking to passengers.
Titchener was trained as British associationist, unlike Wundt
Titchener used more introspection than Wundt
Titchener id not include Wundt's völkerpsychologie in the definition of psychology
Narrower and more restricted definition of psychology
Psychology was the scientific and experimental study of the mind
Did not include animal behavior, child studies, abnormality, applied areas
Wanted to nurture a young science by only concentrating on core areas
Psychology, physics, and biology were the three main sciences
Created borders with with physics and biology
The laboratory (e.g., similar to Wundt) was the center of psychology
Titchener's Theory of Psychology
Stimulus error
I use a blackboard eraser to explain the stimulus error in class. If I say it's an eraser I have committed the stimulus error because it was not my introspection that tells me it is an eraser; I learned that at another time. To introspect properly I must only assess its weight, texture, odor, and taste.
stimulus error-reporting anything other than a quality of a sensation, image, or affect while introspecting, especially reporting things already known through experience.
Introspection
Sensations: quality, intensity, duration, and extensity for sights and sounds
Images: report mental images
Affects (feelings): pleasantness or unpleasantness
Ended up naming
44,000+ elements! (What is wrong with that?) Hint: it's way too many
Personality and work habits
Aloof and distant
Wife screened his calls
Never joined American Psychological Association (APA) even when it met in Ithaca
Founded the "Experimental Psychologists" (now the Society of Experimental Psychologists)
Women were not allowed originally
But, Titchener awarded 20 PhDs to women (out of 54 total)
Studied under Brentano at University of Würzburg and Lotze at University of Göttingen
Taught at Würzburg and combined his interests in psychology and music
Eventually ended up at University of Berlin
Became lifelong friend of William James and many other early, prominent psychologists
Cofounded new journal to compete with Wundt's
Journal of Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs
Trained Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler (cofounders of Gestalt psychology) (see chapter 11)
Sent Köhler to Tenerife to conduct research on apes. (see chapter 11)
Supervised commission that investigate Clever Hans (see below)
Provided anti-elementistic alternative to Wundtian psychology
His analysis of music played a role
Melody was more than a succession of notes; it was a thing in itself (see chapter 11)
Melody experience. The back story to the links below comes from an elevator ride I took a very long time ago. You may have heard of elevator music provided by the Muzak company. I was listening to the music and suddenly realized I was listening to a Beatles's song, Eleanor Rigby. But, it was far from the original version and had no vocals. I had recognized the melody albeit in quite another form.
Inspired him to add the study of memory to psychology
Began to research memory using himself as a subject
Use the savings method
learned a list, forgot it, and learned it again. The "savings" was the fact that it took him less time to learn the list the second time
Nonsense syllables
in order to be able to forget the lists, he invented the nonsense syllabe or CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant). CVCs could not be words. Examples: GAT, BEP, or PIK
The "high road" to memory
In other words, he attempted to study memory abstractly
The "low road" to memory studies the phenomenon in natural contexts
FYI: "Where did I leave the car keys."
BTW: I keep a picture of my keys on my phone. I left them at a store once for a week. I discovered that simply asking, "Did you find a set of keys?" was not a good question to ask. Apparently, many lose their keys all the time.
my keys, now I can ask, "Have you seen these keys?"
His book: Concerning Memory catapulted him to fame
As I noted in chapter 1, his discovery of the process of forgetting has stood the test of time
Learning Objective: Illustrate how introspectors could not explain the source of their own thoughts
GLOSSARY
gymnasium: the most academically advanced level of secondary education in Germany, roughly equivalent to the college preparatory track of American high schools. Voluntarism: the system of psychology developed by Wundt that emphasized the role of unconscious and conscious choice of certain parts of consciousness based upon personal feelings, history, and motivations. Structuralism: an early approach to psychology that used controlled introspective methods to infer the elements of the mind. stimulus error: reporting anything other than a quality of a sensation, image, or affect while introspecting, especially reporting things already known through experience. papal infallibility: the belief that the Pope, after prayer and meditation, may formally and without question reveal God’s intentions to the Church. phenomenalism: the philosophical system that examines conscious experience itself directly, intentionally, and from one’s own point of view.
