Origins of Psych - Wundt and Introspection

• :) Wundt moves psychology away from philosophical roots

  > used controlled environments and standardised procedures to study thoughts, feelings and sensations - used same stimulus (ticking metronome) and same standardised instructions

  > increased ability to replicate pieces of his research

  > increased psychology's status and its emergence as a science
• :( low reliability

  > introspection focuses on a person's subjective experience, so findings varied greatly from person to person, making it difficult to establish consistent general laws of human behaviour

  > it was believed that psychology should only study behaviour that could be observed and measured scientifically - the behaviourist approach emerged, which used more objective and empirical methods - increasing the scientific status of psychology - Wundt would be considered unscientific today