Wundt

Who was Wundt?

- father of psychology

What was his lab?

- first ever psychological lab in Leipzig

What is introspection?

* the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings
* the process by which a person gains knowledge about their mental and emotional states

What did Wundt believe could happen to mental processes?

* he believed that with appropriate training, mental processes such as memory and perception could be observed systematically
* he would ask people to focus on an everyday object and look inwards noticing sensations and feelings of their inner thought processes

What is structuralism?

* involved Wundt and his co-workers recording their own conscious thoughts
* with the aim of breaking these down into their constituent parts to compare and generate theories of perception

What is empiricism?

* the belief that knowledge comes from observation and experience alone
* when Wundt applied empirical methods to the study of human beings, psychology began to emerge as a science

What was psychology based off?

* two major assumptions

1) that all behaviour is caused

2) that it is possible to predict behaviour in different conditions

What is the scientific method?

* the process to explore the two psychological assumptions
* uses investigative methods that are objective, systematic and replicable.

Was Wundt scientific?

- while it may be argued that this was naive psychology
- they used extremely controlled variables by using the same stimulus (metronome)
- they used standardised instructions allowing it to be replicated

A03 - Unreliable data (w)

- since the results were gained by self reports by Wundts researchers, their own thoughts and feelings are too subjective r to be replicated

A03 - inference (w)

* introspection relies primarily on non-observable responses
* although participants can report conscious experiences, they are unable to comment on unconscious factors relating to their behaviour

A03 - introspection is not accurate (w)

* Nisbett and Wilson (1977) claim that we lack knowledge of the causes and processes underlying our behaviour and attitudes
* this is evident in the study of implicit attitudes ie. unconscious attitudes or stereotypes (eg. racism)