ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLOGY

• Psychology


  The scientific study of the human mind and its functions
• Psychology


  • Has its roots in philosophy
  • Existed in the form of experimental philosophy
  • Towards the end of the 19th century scientific psychology was finally born
• Empiricism


  Objective experience based on the five senses (opinion is not empirical)
• History of psychology


  1. Experimental philosophy

  2. Wundt founded the first experimental psychology lab in Germany

  3. Watson - behaviourist approach

  4. Freud - psychodynamic approach and psychoanalysis

  5. Maslow and Rogers - Humanistic approach

  6. Cognitive approach

  7. SLT

  8. Biological approach
• Wundt


  • First person to call himself a psychologist
  • Often referred to as the father of psychology
  • Moved psychology from its philosophical roots to controlled, objective research
  • Studied all aspects of nature scientifically
  • His approach paved the way for the acceptance of psychology as a distinct science
• Wundt's experiments using standardised procedures


  1. Recorded experiences of different objects and sounds

  2. Looked inwards (introspection) to analyse/describe the mental experience in terms of its parts (structuralism)

  3. Stimuli presented were always presented in the same order and with the same instructions to all participants
• Introspection


  Systematic analysis of our own conscious experience of a stimulus / the method of looking into your mind about your thoughts and feelings about a particular object and analysing them
• Structuralism


  The idea that the mind has a structure (thoughts, feelings, and images)
• Wundt's contributions


  • Set up the first psychology laboratory
  • Aimed to study the structure of the mind by breaking down behaviours into basic elements (structuralism)
  • Promoted the method of introspection (looking into the mind)
  • Laid down the foundations that were to come and led to others investigating human mind and behaviour
• Evaluation of Wundt's methods


  • Methods were controlled and systematic - standardised procedures
  • Real world application - still used today in therapy and experiments
  • Unscientific - relied on participants self-reporting their experiences so data may be subjective or unreproducible
• Science


  A means of acquiring knowledge through systematic and objective investigation with the aim to discover general laws
• New scientific approach in psychology


  • Based on two assumptions:
  • All behaviour is caused (determined)
  • If behaviour is determined, then it should be possible to predict behaviour
• Scientific method


  The use of investigative methods that are objective, systematic and reliable
• How psychology evolved as a science


  1. 1900s behaviourist approach - rejected introspection and only studied observable and measurable behaviours

  2. 1950s cognitive approach - compared the human mind to the workings of a computer to explain human behaviour and processes

  3. 1950s biological approach - advanced scientific scanning techniques have advanced psychology to help find the relationship between psychological processes and brain activity
• Evaluation AO3:

  ✅ Scientific as it relies on scientific methods such as lab studies to study behaviour in a controlled and objective manner.

  ❌ Not all approaches use scientific methods – humanistic approach focuses on individual and subjective experiences and psychodynamic approach focuses on case studies that are not representative of the wider population.

  ❌ Kuhn said that for a subject to be scientific it should have a paradigm – a set of principles, laws, theories, and knowledge that all people in that field agree on or share - many disagreements in the field.