Origins in psych

• Wundt

  1879 opened the first lab entirely dedicated to psychological enquiries.

  Its significant as it marks the start of scientific psychology.

  AIM: to analyse the human consciousness , thus represented the first systematic study to study the human mind under controlled conditions.

  This is known as introspection.
• Standardised procedure:


  OBJECTIVE: He and his co-workers wanted to develop theories about the mental processes such as language.

  They recorded their experience when being presented with different stimuli such as different sounds

  They divided these experiences into three categories:

  1. Thoughts
  2. Sensations
  3. Images
• Structuralism:

  Isolating the structure of the consciousness in this way is called structuralism.

  The stimuli Wundt and his co-workers experienced were always given in the same order and the same instructions was read out to all the pp's
• AO3:

  STRENGTH:

  • Some methods were systematic and well controlled
  • All introspections were recorded in a highly controlled environment of the lab ensuring all extraneous variables were not a factor.
  • Procedures and instructions were carefully standardised, all instructions were the same and all pp's were tested in the same way.
  • Suggests that Wundt's research can be considered a forerunner to later scientific approach in psych
• AO3:

  LIMITATIONS:

  • Other aspects of Wundt's research would be considered unscientific today.
  • Wundt relied on pp self reporting their mental processes.
  • Such data is subjective (Influenced by personal perceptive)
  • pp may have hidden their thoughts as they may be embarrassed
  • it is difficult to establish meaningful ' laws of behaviour'
  • General laws are useful to predict future behaviour, one of the aims of science
  • Suggests that some of this methods were flawed and would not meet the scientific enquiry today