Wundt's "New Psychology"

Wundt's "New Psychology" Wilhelm Wundt(1832-1920) was the first professional to call himself a psychologist. He founded one of the first psychological laboratories in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. Wundt believed the "only certain reality is immediate experience" (Blumenthal, 1975). If psychology were to be a science, then psychologists would have to collect data about experience. To do this, Wundt used procedures similar to those developed by the psychophysicists. He arranged controlled laboratory settings. He carefully administered stimulation such as sounds and sights. He gathered information about how quickly people responded to a stimulus (reaction time) and what they experienced. Wundt believed these experiments would lead to a consensus or agreement among scientists about the nature of experience. Wilhelm Wundt Wundt's approach was not unreasonable. It resembled the way most natural sciences developed in the 1800s. Science like botany and zoology began with careful observation and an effort to arrive at consensual validation (agreement among different observers). For example, biologists began with careful descriptions of plants and animals before trying to classify them. Wundt believed the same approach would work in psychology. Careful scientific observers could simply look inside themselves to see the mind in action, and they should be able to agree on the basic phenomena of psychology. After agreeing about basic observations, they could do a deeper analysis of what they had found. The technique of "looking inside" to gather data about the mind is called introspection . The problem with Wundt's program is fairly obvious to those of us in the modern world, where differences between people are taken for granted. Different people see different things when they look inside! This was not obvious to Wundt. He tended to assume that if people saw something in their minds different from what he did, under controlled laboratory conditions, they must be doing something wrong. Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) Introspection was the dominant technique in psychology for several decades, but as time went on, it showed itself to be an inadequate methodology for advancing science. There was no way to resolve differences of opinion about what people saw when they looked inside. For example, a major controversy erupted over the issue of imageless thought. Could a thought exist without an image? Some scientists looked inside and said yes, some thoughts exist without any picture or image in the mind. Others said no, there is always an image. Given such a disagreement— which always seemed to occur, with any important issue involving introspection—there was no way to arrive at a consensus about the nature of the human mind. That ultimately led to the downfall of introspection as a technique. James and Functionalism Another approach to psychology, formulated in the 1890s, was the functionalism of William James. James is often described as the father of American psychology. He regarded the mind as a process, a function of the organism. By the 1890s scientists were well acquainted with Darwin's basic idea that humans had evolved from simpler animals, and James related psychology to Darwin's theory. James argued that consciousness must have evolved because it was useful for something. In other words, it had a function. If we wanted to understand the origins and purpose of a psychological phenomenon, James suggested, we should ask what it was used for. James published Principles of Psychology (1890), which came in two large volumes, and Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892) , which came in one smaller volume. Also famous is James's work on the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) William James Because they are old enough not to be covered by copyright, books from this era can be reproduced on the web. The entire text of The Varieties of Religious Experience is on Michael Nielsen's Psychology of Religion web site at Psych Web at this URL: <http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm>. James is remembered as a great psychologist because he wrote well and because he had good judgment about what ideas would have lasting value. Many psychologists living a century or more after James found his insights "exciting" because they seemed so modern (Kimble, 1990). A reviewer of Principles of Psychology on Amazon.com called it "fresh as a morning flower." However, James himself did little research, and his examples came mostly from everyday life and from introspection, not from rigorous laboratory experiments. Witmer Starts Clinical Psychology From about 1900 to 1910, clinical psychology consisted of what we now call school psychology. Clinical psychologists diagnosed problems of school children and tried to help them. Increasing numbers of psychologists went into this field. By 1910 the most common specialty among applied psychologists was pedagogical psychology, which today would be called educational or school psychology. Lightner Witmer is often called the father of clinical psychology. Witmer started his career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1892 at the age of 25 and stayed there for the next 45 years. He founded the journal The Psychological Clinic in 1907. It was published until 1935, and during those 28 years it was the only clinical psychology journal. Witmer's first client, in 1896, was a "chronic bad speller" who turned out to need eyeglasses. After the boy was fitted with glasses, his spelling problems went away. This lesson was not lost upon Witmer, who routinely included vision and hearing tests in his tests of students. Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) Witmer was one of the many American psychologists who studied under Wundt during their formative years. The experience was not a happy one. Witmer later described himself as "disgusted" with Wundt's insistence that students repeat experiments until they came out the way Wundt expected them to. Rather than follow in Wundt's footsteps, Witmer turned to non- introspective methods, laying the way for behaviorism. At his clinic, Witmer emphasized diagnostic testing, followed by practical treatment. The treatment was not exclusively psychological. It ranged from mental testing to removing an abscessed tooth to family counseling, followed by retesting to see if there was an improvement in performance Watson and Behaviorism At the turn of the century, introspection was withering on the vine as an experimental method. By 1898 only 2.3% of psychology research articles made any mention of introspection. In 1905, William McDougall wrote a textbook defining psychology as "the study of behavior." By 1910, both structuralism (the descendent of Wundt's method) and functionalism (James's method) were widely regarded as obsolete methods for investigating psychology. Psychologists felt that their field had lost its original identity as the "science of consciousness." The time was right for a new conception of psychology, and John B. Watson, who coined the term behaviorism, provided a new identity. Watson agreed with McDougall that psychology should be defined as "the study of behavior," but Watson took a more extreme position. How common was introspectionism in psychology journals, by the turn of the century? How did Watson's position differ from McDougall's? McDougall...had no particular complaints against the old subject matter [mind and consciousness], but he thought that behavior, too, deserved attention... In 1913 Watson went a step further. Psychology should Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) study behavior, he said, and mind, the traditional subject matter, is now forbidden. (Epstein, 1987, p.333) John Watson In 1913 Watson declared he was a new type of psychologist: a behaviorist. Watson said the behaviorist would completely eliminate introspection from psychology. Psychologists could adhere to scientific method, studying only things that could be observed and measured. That, Watson suggested, would allow scientists to control human behavior as never before. Watson made a famous claim about the potential power of behaviorism: What did Watson declare in 1913? Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own special world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, beggerman and thief. (Watson, 1913) Watson was a bit of a rebel from childhood on. He fought frequently as a teenager. He referred to his hometown church baptism, performed during his adolescence, as an "inoculation that did not take." Seeking to escape the confines of a small-town upbringing, Watson pursued higher education at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. At Furman University, Watson continued his rebellious ways. One of his professors (Meyer) threatened to "flunk the first student who handed in an exam upside-down" Watson, an honor student, took the dare. He handed in his final exam upside-down. Meyer flunked him, delaying Watson's graduation by an entire year. Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer (http://www.novapdf.com) However, Meyer also helped Watson. Meyer told Watson about new and exciting developments in psychology at the University of Chicago, where Meyer had recently spent a year. Watson decided that was just what he needed. He wrote to the president of the University of Chicago, declaring he would "never amount to anything" unless he got financial support to further his education. Apparently this tactic worked, because Watson obtained a fellowship. At the University of Chicago, Watson studied physiology, then he became interested in animal research. Functionalism was in full flower at the University of Chicago. But Watson never felt comfortable with introspective research.

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