Origins of Psychology

• Rene Descartes (1650) suggested the mind and body are separate from each others and therefore the mind should be studied in its own right
• John Locke (1704) suggested humans experience everything through their senses and we can understand the world by observing and measuring it
• Charles Darwin (1892) proposed evolutionary theory which suggests human and animal behaviour has changed over time to adapt to our environment. Features which help us survive are passed down through our genes to the next generation which suggests human behaviours exist because they’re adaptive in some way. This has influenced aspects of the biological approach
• Psychology emerged as a distinct subject, and as a science, through the work of William Wundt, widely considered to be ’the father of psychology’ and he was the first person to be called a ‘psychologist’
• Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated solely to psychological research at Leipzig University in Germany in 1879
• Wundt’s laboratory aimed to study aspects of human behaviour that could be controlled in experimental conditions as well as to document and describe human consciousness with the method introspection
• To begin with, Wundt and his coworkers tried to record their own conscious thoughts and had to reflect on their thought processes and then describe them in terms of feelings, emotions and sensations.
• Wundt would present ps with carefully controlled stimuli and they would then be asked to describe the inner processes they were experiencing when they were exposed to the stimulus
• This made it possible to compare different ps’ reports in response to the same stimuli and so establish general theories about perception and other mental processes
• For each introspection trial the same stimulus was used and the same standardised instructions were given to each participant meaning the procedure could be replicated. This increases the reliability of Wundt’s methods
• Hunter et al (2003) used introspection to investigate happiness, by giving ps a buzzer that would go off at random times throughout the day. The buzzer going off would mean ps had to record their thoughts and feelings at the moment before the beep. This shows that introspection is a useful way to measure some elements of perception and emotion
• Wundt’s work couldn’t be reliably replicated by other researchers. The thought processes people were being asked to reflect on weren’t observable. This is a weakness because as one person could experience them, the interpretation of them were subjective
• Wundt used very few ps. Typically, each trial would contain only one or two ps. This presents issues for generalisability, as findings can’t be accurately applied elsewhere
• Wundt was the first person to use empirical methods to study behaviour and conscious experience
• Introspection can be said to be empirical because Wundt used standardised methods, with every participant being exposed to the same stimuli and instructions. This makes the method replicable which is a key feature in science
• This use of empirical methods was the beginning of psychology, and the beginning of it being viewed as a science
• Over time, as other schools of thought have emerged about how behaviour can be explained, psychology has developed as a distinct science in its own right