ORIGINS OF PSYCH

• Wundt opened the world’s first psychology laboratory in 1879. He and his assistants used ‘introspection’ to try to investigate the nature of awareness and consciousness. This involved recording conscious thoughts by noting them down, then attempting to break these thoughts down into structures.
• Introspection is learning about one’s own currently ongoing mental states or processes.
• Wundt used scientific methods in his work. He gave participants the same procedure, same instructions, and tried to minimise the impact of extraneous variables. This helped move psychology away from philosophy (for example the works of Descartes and Locke) and towards the scientific method.
• Descartes developed the philosophy in the 17th century that the mind and body are separate. The mind and the body represented a dualism, and that the two interact in different ways to produce different behaviours and thoughts.
• John B. Watson began to criticise the method of introspection for being subjective, and varying too much from person to person. He suggested that it was impossible to test people’s private thoughts and that psychology should focus on studying observable behaviour. 
• The cognitive approach became popular in the 1960s, and emphasised the legitimacy of attempting to uncover though processes, which can be indirectly tested in experiments.
• The biological approach emerged in the 1980s, which can be studied through methods such as brain-scanning techniques and looking at the effect of drugs on behaviour.
• Skinner disagreed with the subjective nature of introspection, in which the findings differed greatly from individual to individual, making it difficult to establish general laws and unifying principles of behaviour and cognition.
• Introspection is an unreliable way of understanding human thought because we cannot directly observe our own mental states or those of others. We have no direct access to other peoples' minds so we must rely on their reports about what they think and feel. These reports may not always be accurate or truthful.
• Skinner’s then brought up the idea of radical behaviourism (that private events could be measured and quantified in the same way as observable behaviour) was tested using the laboratory experiment method of research.
• This allowed for the objective measurement of observable behaviour, providing reliable data through controlling and eliminating the effects of extraneous and confounding variables, by using highly controlled conditions.