History of Psychology

Chapter10KardasFinal.ppt

Chapter 10:
INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Zeitgeist

Introduction

Psychology makes its appearance as a scientific discipline primarily through the work of Wilhelm Wundt.

Introspection

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) Recognized as the first psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt, used introspection as one of the data collection tools at his disposal.
His main contribution, however, was in creating the psychology laboratory.
He trained many students who later went on to become early pioneers in psychology

Introspection

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920)
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.

Introspection

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920)
Wundt’s Theory of Psychology
The key to understanding how Wundt’s theory of psychology operated is to see that he was looking at consciousness, not behavior.
Wundt’s most central theoretical concept was the creative synthesis. It described how disparate mental events combined to create entirely new and unpredictable cognitions.
Apperception ― being conscious of one’s own perceptions.

Psychology After Wundt

Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927)
He eventually called his approach to psychology Structuralism in contrast to Wundt’s Voluntarism.
Structuralism ― an early approach to psychology that used controlled introspective methods to infer the elements of the mind.
Psychology for Titchener was the scientific, experimental study of the mind.

Psychology After Wundt

Titchener’s Theory of Psychology
Titchener was a strong proponent for rigorous methods in psychology.
Stimulus error reporting anything other than a quality of a sensation, image, or affect while introspecting, especially reporting things already known through experience.
After Titchener’s unexpected death in 1927, Structuralism all but disappeared from American psychology.

Psychology After Wundt

Georg Elias Müller (1850–1934)
Müller and his students were active in three main areas of research: psychophysics, vision, and memory.
Franz Brentano (1838–1917)
Franz Brentano, was an empirical psychologist, not an experimentalist.

Psychology After Wundt

Franz Brentano (1838–1917)
Papal infallibility ― the belief that the Pope, after prayer and meditation, may formally and without question reveal God’s intentions to the Church.
phenomenology ― the philosophical system that examines conscious experience itself directly, intentionally, and from one’s own point of view.

Psychology After Wundt

Carl Stumpf (1848–1936)
He knew or had worked with many prominent early psychologists including Ewald Hering, Ernst Mach, Hermann Helmholtz, and Hermann Ebbinghaus.
He helped popularize the role of phenomenology in European psychology. Eventually, and through his students, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, Gestalt psychology became popular in Europe,
Set up an institute in Berlin to study child psychology.

Clever Hans and His Effect on Psychology

Clever Hans
He was intelligent enough to learn to pair the signs that his trainer was giving him with hoof tapping.
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909)
No one before him had attempted to experiment on memory.
Invented the nonsense syllable.
Developed the forgetting curve.
He was an early worker in the development of psychological tests for children.

Photo 10.1

Figure 10.1

Clever Hans and His Effect on Psychology

Oswald Külpe (1862–1915)
Oswald Külpe, presided over a group of researchers at the University of Würzburg whose research led to the first major crisis in the young science of psychology.
They were interested in what happened in between the presentation of a stimulus and the formation of introspectable mental content.
They discovered that subjects could introspect reliably but they could not say how or why they did so.

Clever Hans and His Effect on Psychology