AO3 - Wundt

• Wundt can be praised for moving psychology away from its philosophical roots and emerging psychology as a science. He used controlled environments with a standardised procedure to study thoughts, feelings and sensations, such as using the same stimulus every time (ticking metronome) and giving the participants the same standardised instructions. This therefore increased the ability to replicate the pieces of research and increased psychology’s status and its emergence as a science.
• Wundt's research was not reliable. This is because introspection focuses on subjective experiences, meaning that findings varied greatly from person to person, making it difficult to establish consistent general principles of human behaviour. Behaviourist psychologists, like Watson, believed Psychology should only study behaviour that could be observed and measured scientifically. Therefore, the behaviourist approach was born which used more empirical and objective methods, such as controlled lab experiments, to study human behaviour, increasing the scientific status of Psychology.