origins of psychology

• science: discovering the physical and natural world systematically and objectively using empirical methods such as observation and experimentation
• wundt wanted to use the controlled empirical scientific research techniques used by the physical sciences to study the mind
• before wundt the study of the mind was limited to philosophy and medicine 
• Wundt:

  • set up the first psych lab in leipzig, germany 1870s
  • first person to call himself a psychologist
  • produced one of the first psych books
  • produced first academic journal that published psychological experiments
• what did wundt’s scientific methods result in?

  it helped establish psychology as an independent field of scientific research

  he trained many students that went on to be psychology professors in top unis in america, europe, russia, spreading wundt’s scientific methods
• wundts research was called structuralism

  an attempt to uncover the hidden structure of the mind by describing it in terms of its simplest definable components

  his work focused on structure of sensation and perception
• what experimental method did he use in his research?

  introspection
• introspection: the first systematic experimental attempt to study the mind by breaking up conscious awareness into basic structures of thoughts, images and sensations 
• psychology: the scientific study of the mind, behaviour and experience
• process of introspection

  • participants trained to report conscious experiences as objectively as possible
  • participants asked to focus on a sensory object, often a ticking metronome
  • participants would systematically report their experience of object by breaking thoughts into separate elements; participants would focus inward and report sensations, feelings and images
• wundt carefully controlled the experimental conditions and environment

  he also developed general theories of mental processes based on the experimental data collected
• introspection is not a direct observation of mental processes; wundt made inferences, which means making a guess or an assumption on the structure of internal mental processes based on observed behaviour
• with enough observations of people all behaving in the same way in an experiment, researchers make inferences about the processes that may be driving their behaviour

  but they are educated guesses, so researchers' assumptions may be incorrect