Origins of psychology

• Wilhelm Wundt

  • Published the first book on psychology (principles of physiological psychology)
  • Opened the first psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany
  • The father or psychology
  • His approach - to study the structure of The mind by breaking down behaviours into basic elements
• Introspection

  • The first systematic attempt to study the mind
  • Looking into thought processes and emotional states
  • Led to identifying the structure of consciousness into thoughts, images and sensations
  • Wundt trained his researchers to examine their feelings when exposed to a particular stimulus e.g playing a sound and writing down the first thing that came to mind
  • this provided insight into mental processes (perception and reaction times)
  • Done in a lab and researchers reported back to Wundt after examining their own feelings
• The scientific method

  • Based off of 2 assumptions - all behaviour is determined and it should be possible to predict how humans will behave in different conditions
  • Objective - doesn’t let previous ideas influence data
  • Systematic - experiments are carried out orderly allowing them to be replicable
  • Falsifiable - if results are not repeatable they aren’t reliable and cant be accepted
• Strengths

  • Aspects of Wundt are scientific - recorded introspects in a controlled lab and a standardised procedure
  • Has the same aims as natural sciences - to describe, understand predict and control
• Weaknesses

  • Wundt focused on non observable responses meaning reports were unreliable as they were subjective
  • Watson argued that introspection was extremely subjective
  • Investigator bias - because Wundt used his researchers for introspections it could be argued that they all shared the same views on introspection so data collected was subjective
  • Some psychologists argue that psychology shouldn’t be scientific as it takes the person out of psychology