Wilhelm Wundt

• First person who wanted to document and describe the nature of the human consciousness
• opened first ever psychological lab in 1879
• recorded behaviour using introspection
• introspection was the first experimental attempt to study the mind, by breaking up conscious awareness into basic structures (thoughts, images and sensations)
• Used replication, standardised procedures and structuralism
• Structuralism: a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behaviour, culture, and experience, which focuses on relationships of contrast between elements in a conceptual system.
• Structuralism: studying the relationship among phenomenoms not just the phenomena themselves
• Renee Descartes (1500s) - mind and body are separate and independent of each other
• John Locke (1600s) - humans inherit neither knowledge or instincts
• Darwin (1800s) - Evolution and natural selection
• Subjectivity - open for opinion or interpretation, using own bias to interpret, not scientific, not consistent, not reliable
• Objectivity - factual, measurable, numerical data, scientific
• Scientific - repeat, reliable, standardised (the same), the more controls, the more scientific
• Measurable - numbers/numerical data/ quantitative units
• Applicable - is it useful, how can it be used to improve society
• Strengths of Wundt:

  1. Focus on mental processes through introspection can be seen as a starting point for the cognitive approach - a widely respected and scientific approach
  2. Introspection is still sometimes used in modern scientific psychological research e.g. Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter
• Weaknesses of Wundt

  • Subjectivity in Wundt's methods
  • Difficult to objectively study unobservable concepts such as introspection
  • Introspective methods were not widely reproduced
  • Wundt found it difficult to replicate his introspection results due to subjectivity (his own bias)
  • Issues with the validity of introspection - we are not always aware of everything in our minds e.g. the Halo effect - Nisbett and Wilson
  • Greater contributions to the development of psychology by early behaviourists e.g. Pavlov, than by Wundt (they produced reliable findings with explanatory principles that were generalisable)
• The Halo effect: discovered in court cases, an unconscious bias: judge people as good if they are attractive - in court lesser sentences - based on general appearance
• Flow and Happiness: 'Flow' = psychological term for being in the zone

  in a state of flow = happier - using process of introspection