Origins

• Psychology as a science involves empirical (scientific) methods, knowledge based on observation and experience alone, scientific methods that are objective, systematic, and replicable, researchers not influenced by preconceived ideas or biases, accurate measurements for reliability, testing of working hypotheses
• Psychology is a relatively new scientific discipline with roots in 17th and early 19th-century philosophy, once known as experimental philosophy
• Cognitive neuroscience emerges as a distinct discipline, bringing together the cognitive and biological approaches

  Eve of the 21st century
• Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow reject the ideas favored by behaviorism and the psychodynamic approach. Humanistic psychologists emphasize the importance of self-determination and free will

  1950s
• J.B Watson rejects the vagueness of introspection and focuses on how we are a product of our learning, experience, and environment, establishing the behaviorist approach

  1913
• Psychology has become more scientific over time
• Wundt's experiments

  Recorded experiences of various stimuli, divided recordings into 3 categories - thoughts, images, sensations, presented stimuli in the same order & with the same instructions for all participants
• Around the cognitive revolution, Albert Bandura proposes the social learning theory, bridging behaviorism and cognitive psychology

  1960s
• Sigmund Freud emphasised the influence of the unconscious mind, and the psychodynamic approach is established

  1900s
• Structuralism

  • Isolating the structure of consciousness, stimuli presented in the same order & with the same instructions for all participants
• Wilhelm Wundt

  • Set up the first lab dedicated to psychological enquiry in Germany in the 1870s, featured controlled conditions, allowed for accurate measurements and replication, introspection - the examination of one's thought processes, standardized procedures
• Wilhelm Wundt opens the first experimental lab, and psychology emerges as a distinct discipline. He studied the structure of the human mind by breaking down behaviors into their basic elements

  1879
• The biological approach establishes itself as the dominant scientific perspective in psychology. Advances in technology lead to increased understanding of the brain and biological processes

  1980 onwards
• Psychologists apply the analogy of the workings of a computer to the human mind. Cognitive psychology studies the working of the internal mind in a more scientific way than Wundt's earlier investigations

  1960s
• Wundt's work enabled psychology to adopt scientific procedures and be considered a science in its own right
• Researchers in the 1980s took advantage of advances in technology to investigate physiological processes as they happen, using scanning techniques such as FMRI & EEGs to study live brain activity and new methods like genetic testing
• Determinism

  • The idea that all behavior is caused by internal or external factors alone, with no element of free will influencing a response to a stimulus
• One strength of Wundt’s work is that some of his methods were systematic and well-controlled, for example, all introspections were recorded in the lab to ensure extraneous variables were not a factor
• Modern Psychology can claim to be scientific as it has the same aims as natural sciences - to predict, understand, describe, and control behavior. Learning approaches, cognitive approaches, and the biological approach all rely on the use of scientific methods
• Assumptions explored by scientific methods

  • Determinism
  • Predictability
• Many of Wundt’s methods would be considered unscientific today, for example, introspection relied upon people recording their own mental processes which could be influenced by personal perspective
• The digital revolution of the 1950s gave a new generation of psychologists a metaphor for studying the mind by likening it to a computer, creating models and testing them using hypotheses and experiments
• Predictability

  • Human behavior, if determined, should be able to be predicted. Researchers should be able to state how humans will react in a variety of different situations
• Scientific methods allow for working hypotheses to be tested and accepted or not accepted
• Results that are not reliable cannot be accepted as true
• Behaviourists like Watson & Skinner proposed that truly scientific psychology should only study phenomena that can be observed objectively and measured
• Measurements are accurate and easily replicated in order to establish reliability
• Introspection was questioned by John Watson, a notable behaviourist, for yielding subjective data rather than objective, making it difficult to establish general laws of behavior
• Not all approaches in Psychology use objective methods, for example, the humanistic approach rejects the scientific method and focuses on the individual nature of human experience and the importance of subjective experiences