Psychology Paper 2

• The success of the natural sciences had a significant influence on the emergence of psychology, particularly because the scientific methods used by sciences such as biology and chemistry were regarded as the only reliable methods for discovering reliable knowledge about the world.
• In order to be accepted and to flourish as a subject in its own right, psychology had to adopt the methods of the natural sciences.
• The adoption of scientific methods by psychology was not a straightforward process, as there was a long-standing belief that the human psyche was not amenable to scientific investigation.
• Wundt was the first person to call himself a psychologist, believing that all aspects of nature, including the human mind, could be studied scientifically.
• Despite the challenges, scientific psychology was finally born at the end of the nineteenth century.
• Wundt's approach paved the way for the acceptance of psychology as a distinct science in its own right, and experimental psychology as the preferred method of studying human behaviour.
• In his laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, Wundt studied only those aspects of behaviour that could be strictly controlled under experimental conditions, including the study of reaction time and various aspects of sensation and perception.
• Wundt's aim was to study the structure of the human mind, and he believed that the best way to do this was to break down behaviours such as sensation and perception into their basic elements.
• Wundt's approach was referred to as structuralism and the technique he used as introspection.
• Wundt originally believed that all aspects of human experience could be investigated experimentally, but he eventually came to realise that higher mental processes, such as learning, language and emotions, could not be studied in this strict controlled manner.
• These topics could instead be described in terms of general trends in behaviour among groups of people, a field referred to by Wundt as cultural psychology.
• Introspection, from the Latin meaning 'looking into, is the process by which a person gains knowledge about his or her own mental and emotional states.
• Just as our perceptual ability enables us to observe and make sense of the outer world, our introspective ability enables us to observe our inner world.
• Wundt claimed that, with sufficient training, mental processes such as memory and perception could be observed systematically as they occurred using introspection.
• Observers might be shown an object and asked to reflect upon how they were perceiving it.
• This information could then be used to gain insight into the nature of the mental processes involved in perception, reaction time, etc.
• For example, in Wundt's studies of perception, participants would be presented with carefully controlled stimuli.
• They would then be asked to provide a description of the inner processes they were experiencing as they looked at the image or listened to the tone.
• This made it possible to compare different participants reports in response to the same stimuli, and so establish general theories about perception and other mental processes.
• Psychology is held together as a discipline by its reliance on a philosophical view known as empiricism.
• Empiricists believe that knowledge comes from observation and experience alone.
• When empirical methods were first applied to the study of human beings by Wundt and his followers, psychology began to emerge as a distinct entity.
• The new 'scientific' approach to psychology was based on two major assumptions: all behaviour is seen as being caused and if behaviour is determined, then it should be possible to predict how human beings would behave in different conditions.
• The technique used to explore these assumptions became known as the scientific method.
• The scientific method refers to the use of investigative methods that are objective, systematic and replicable.
• The scientific method is objective in that researchers do not let preconceived ideas or biases influence the collection of their data, and systematic in that observations or experiments are carried out in an orderly way.
• Measurement and recording of empirical data are carried out accurately and with due consideration for the possible influence of other factors on the results obtained.
• The scientific method is replicable in that observations can be repeated by other researchers to determine whether the same results are obtained.
• If results are not replicable, then they are not reliable and cannot be accepted as being universally true.
• The research process is not restricted to empirical observation alone, but also necessitates the use of reason to explain the results of these observations.
• The development of scientific theories and the constant testing and refining of these theories through further observation completes the scientific cycle.
• A criticism of Wundt's structuralist approach, mainly from behaviourists, was that this approach relied primarily on 'nonobservable' responses.
• Although participants could report on their conscious experiences, the processes themselves were considered to be unobservable constructions.
• Wundt's approach ultimately failed because of the lack of reliability of his methods.
• Introspective experimental results were not reliably reproducible by other researchers in other laboratories.
• The early behaviourists such as Pavlov and Thorndike were already achieving reliably reproducible results and discovering explanatory principles that could be easily generalised to all human beings.
• Because of its reliance on objective and systematic methods of observation, knowledge acquired using the scientific method is more than just the passive acceptance of theories about behaviour. This means that scientific methods are able to establish the causes of behaviour through the use of methods that are both empirical and replicable. A consequence of this is that if scientific theories no longer fit the facts, they can be refined or abandoned, meaning that scientific knowledge is self-corrective.
• Not all psychologists share the view that all human behaviour can, or should, be explored by the use of scientific methods.
• If human behaviour is not subject to the laws and regularities impiled by scientific methods, then predictions become impossible and these methods are inappropriate.
• Much of the subject matter of psychology is unobservable, therefore cannot be measured with any degree of accuracy.