Origins of Psychology

• Wundt


  Opened the first ever lab dedicated entirely to psychological enquiry in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany
• Wundt's work


  • Marked the beginning of scientific psychology, separating it from its broader philosophical roots
  • Aimed to try to analyse the nature of human consciousness, representing the first systematic attempt to study the mind under controlled conditions
  • His pioneering method became known as introspection
• Wundt's introspection method

  1. Participants recorded their experiences of various stimuli

  2. Divided observations into three categories: thoughts, images and sensations
• Structuralism

  Isolating the structure of consciousness
• Wundt and his co-workers always presented stimuli in the same order and issued the same instructions to all participants
• Strengths of Wundt's work

  • Some of his methods were systematic and well-controlled (i.e. scientific)
  • All introspections were recorded in the controlled environment of the lab, ensuring that possible extraneous variables were not a factor
  • Procedures and instructions were carefully standardised
• Limitations of Wundt's work

  • Relied on participants self-reporting their mental processes, which is subjective data
  • Participants may have hidden some of their thoughts
  • Difficult to establish meaningful laws of behaviour from such data
• Wundt's early efforts to study the mind were flawed and would not meet the criteria of scientific enquiry
• Science

  Involves building knowledge through systematic and objective (unbiased) measurement, with the aim of discovering general laws
• Behaviourist approach


  • Proposed that a truly scientific psychology should only study phenomena that can be observed objectively and measured
  • Focused on behaviours that they could see, and used carefully controlled experiments
• Cognitive approach


  • Likened the mind to a computer and tested predictions about memory and attention using experiments
• Biological approach

  • Taken advantage of advances in technology to investigate physiological processes as they happen, using techniques like MRI and EEG to study live activity in the brain
• Strengths of modern psychology

  • Research can claim to be scientific, with the same aims as natural sciences - to describe, understand, predict and control behaviour
  • Learning approaches, cognitive approach and biological approach all rely on the use of scientific methods
• Limitations of modern psychology

  • Not all approaches use objective methods, with the humanistic approach rejecting the scientific approach and the psychodynamic approach making use of the case study method
  • Human beings are active participants in research, responding for example to demand characteristics