Psychology in Historical Context

Theories and Debates

Richard Gross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134839254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychology, the study of mind and behaviour, has developed as a unique discipline in its brief history. Whether as it currently takes place, or how it has been conducted over the past 140 years or so since it became recognized as a separate field of study, there has been constant debate on its identity as a science.

Psychology in Historical Context: Theories and Debates examines this debate by tracing the emergence of Psychology from parent disciplines, such as philosophy and physiology, and analyzes key topics such as:

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• the nature of science, itself a much misunderstood human activity often equated with natural science;

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• the nature of the scientific method, and the relationship between data gathering and generalization;

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• the nature of certainty and objectivity, and their relevance to understanding the kind of scientific discipline Psychology is today.

This engaging overview, written by renowned author Richard Gross, is an accessible account of the main conceptual themes and historical developments. Covering the core fields of individual differences, cognitive, social, and developmental psychology, as well as evolutionary and biopsychology, it will enable readers to understand how key ideas and theories have had impacts across a range of topics. This is the only concise textbook to give students a thorough grounding in the major conceptual ideas within the field, as well as the key figures whose ideas have helped to shape it.

Chapter 1

Historical perspectives

Psychology as the study of … what?

If there’s a logical place to start one’s study of Psychology, it’s by looking at how it came to be where it is now; in other words, its history. But as we shall see below, this isn’t as straightforward as it may sound: there are different ways of ‘doing history’ and different resultant histories. Put another way, there’s more than one history of Psychology.

Some may disagree with the premise that we should start with Psychology’s past, claiming instead that the logical starting point is to decide what Psychology is about, its subject-matter. But again, this too is a matter of debate and disagreement. In terms of one of its histories, Psychology’s subject matter (its ontology) is defined differently by different schools of thought or theoretical approaches, which have developed over time (roughly, the past 140 years, albeit with considerable overlap between them). Part of this debate relates to similarities and differences between human beings and non-human animals; sometimes this is addressed directly, sometimes it’s ignored altogether.

These approaches (such as Structuralism, Behaviourism, and Cognitive Psychology) differ not only in terms of what they consider the appropriate subject-matter to be, but also in terms of the methods used (or advocated) for studying this subject-matter. This relates to the debate regarding the nature of science (in general) and the validity and appropriateness of using certain methods to investigate human beings/people (in particular).

The implication of the preceding paragraphs is that, regardless of how we view Psychology’s history, and regardless of how its subject-matter is defined, Psychology adopts a scientific approach. This, in turn, begs two major questions: (1) What do we mean by science? And (2) what kind of science is/should Psychology be? These questions relate to epistemology and methodology: the nature of the knowledge we are trying to acquire and the methods used to acquire it. These are discussed in the remainder of this chapter.

Psychology’s histories

The contribution of Wilhelm Wundt: founding father or origin myth?

BOX 1.1

KEY FIGURE: Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920)

● Wundt originally trained as a doctor, practising briefly as an assistant pathologist, before studying physiology. In between, he had conducted his own experimental research into aspects of anatomy and physiology.

● He worked at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, as assistant to the famous physiologist Hermann Helmholtz. (Helmholtz studied the speed of the nerve impulse in sensory and motor nerves, colour vision, and was the first to propose ‘unconscious inference’ in visual perception: see Gross, 2015.)

● Like Helmholtz and Fechner (see Box 1.2), Wundt was beginning to explore ways of subjecting psychological processes to experimental tests. He believed that there were now sufficient grounds for establishing a whole new field of Experimental Psychology; this could be taught in universities alongside more traditional subjects (including both the natural sciences and the humanities).

● Wundt set out this proposal in the introduction to his Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception (1862).

● On introductory Psychology courses and in introductory textbooks, the history of Psychology is often presented in terms of the emergence of a new, separate discipline during the second half of the nineteenth century from its ‘parent’ disciplines of physiology, philosophy, and biology (among others). The year 1879 is often cited as Psychology’s ‘birthday’, when Wilhelm Wundt opened the first laboratory (in Leipzig, Germany) devoted exclusively to the study of human conscious thought. The so-called laboratory was actually a small, single room used for demonstration purposes. This then became converted into a ‘private institute’ of Experimental Psychology.

Figure 1.1
Wilhelm Wundt.

Wundt aimed to explore the structure of human thought – hence, his approach is commonly referred to as structuralism; it’s also commonly referred to as introspectionism, based on his use of the method of introspection by which participants were trained to observe their own mental states. Introspection’s aim was to analyse conscious thought into its basic elements and perception into its constituent sensations (much as chemists analyse compounds into elements).

Wundt and his co-workers recorded and measured the results of their introspections under controlled conditions using the same physical surroundings, the same ‘stimuli’ (such as a clicking metronome), the same verbal instructions to each participant, and so on. This emphasis on measurement and control marked the separation of the ‘new Psychology’ from philosophy. The aim of Experimental Psychology was to systematically vary the stimuli and conditions that produce differing mental states; Wundt believed that it should be possible to manipulate and observe the facts of consciousness (conscious mental states) using introspection in a comparable way to how research is conducted in physics, chemistry, and physiology

For these reasons, Wundt (together with William James – see below) is traditionally regarded as the ‘founder’ of the new science of Experimental Psychology. As he stated in the preface to his Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874, 1974), ‘The work I here present to the public is an attempt to mark out a new domain of science’ (quoted in Fancher, 1979). People from all over the world came to visit the institute, returning to their own countries to establish laboratories modelled on that of Wundt. Wundt founded the journal Philosophische Studien (‘Philosophical Studies’), which, despite its name, was the world’s first to be primarily devoted to Experimental Psychology; this reflected the popularity and success of the ‘new Psychology’.

While this account seems straightforward and uncontroversial, there are some major problems with it. First, some have challenged the (widely held) claim that Wundt was the founder of Experimental Psychology (as described in Box 1.2).

BOX 1.2

● According to Richards (2010), Gustav Fechner’s (1860 [1966]) Elemente der Psychophysik (‘Elements of Psychophysics’) is generally regarded as the work that marks the beginning of Experimental Psychology. According to Bunn (2010), Fechner’s (1801–1887) greatest achievement was to show how Psychology could initiate a programme of systematic empirical enquiry (1) without possessing any standard units of measurement or (2) without committing the ‘Psychologists’ fallacy’, according to which the analysis of subjective experience is confused with objective reality (Leary, 1990). Fechner claimed that Psychology’s task was to search for a functional relationship between the ‘physical and the psychical that would accurately express their general interdependence’ (psychophysics).

● Building on the work of E.H. Weber, Fechner recorded the relationship between changes in the magnitude of a stimulus as measured objectively and as experienced. Weber had earlier discovered that the just noticeable difference (j.n.d) – the amount of difference needed for a change to be perceived – was a function of the size of the stimulus. Fechner proposed that sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus intensity. This generalized formula was a way of quantifying experienced, as opposed to objectively measured, size (or magnitude) (the ‘Weber–Fechner law’).

● According to Bunn (2010), this remains Psychology’s sole claim to having formulated a scientific law (although it only holds under certain conditions). Ironically, Fechner’s aim – and belief – was to help solve the mind–body (or mind–brain) problem (see Chapter 2); his legacy, instead, was the subdiscipline of Psychophysics (Richards, 2010), which remains the ‘gold standard’ for Experimental Psychology (Robinson, 2010).

Consistent with the brief description of Psychophysics given in Box 1.2, Wundt believed that introspection was only applicable to psychophysiological phenomena, that is, ‘lower mental processes’ (or immediate objects of conscious awareness), such as sensations, reaction times, and attention. Wundt’s and Fechner’s shared belief that the experimental method was restricted to the investigation of the most basic psychological mechanisms is often overlooked in accounts of structuralism and Wundt’s (claimed) pioneering research in Leipzig. These mechanisms, he argued, are amenable to study using the methods of the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences), with the experiment at their heart. However, in order to study memory, thinking, language, personality, social behaviour, myth, and cultural practices (the ‘higher mental processes’), we need to study communities of people (Volkerpsychologie). Human minds exist within human communities and are too complex to be amenable to experimental manipulation (Danziger, 1990). Instead, these higher mental processes – with language underpinning all the other collective/social processes (see the discussion of Social Constructionism below) – can only be studied using the methods of Geisteswissenschaften – social or human sciences and the humanities. (This distinction is discussed further below.)

Despite Wundt’s beliefs regarding the limitations of the experimental method, it has been portrayed as being of paramount importance in Psychology’s construction of itself as a natural science. As a consequence, Jones and Elcock (2001) believe that Wundt’s advocacy of this approach for the study of certain psychophysiological processes has become blown out of all proportion, creating what they call an ‘origin myth’ – a distorted account of how Psychology ‘began’.

According to Richards (2010), Wundt’s importance lies largely in his creation of the experimental laboratory (which included some – for the time – high-tech equipment, which helped promote the image of Psychology as a hard scientific discipline (Draa...