The Origins of Psychology

Psychology is a Science with Lots of Theories and Few Facts:

  • Psychology is ‘The scientific study of the mind and behaviour’. This basically means that psychologists look at what people and animals do, why they do it, and how they feel

  • A lot of psychology sounds like common sense, but it’s a science, so everything’s got to be investigated. You’ve got to come up with a theory about something and then scientifically test it

  • It’s difficult to prove things in psychology, so there are loads of disagreements and many theories that sound rubbish. But you can’t just say they’re rubbish in your exam- that’d be too easy. No, you’ve got to use other theories and experiments to support your answer

  • The different schools of thought are called approaches. Each approach has its own explanation for why we do what we do. You’ll be looking at the behavioural, cognitive, biological, psychodynamic and humanistic approaches

Wundt was the Father of Experimental Psychology:

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

  • In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt opened an Institute for Experimental Psychology in Germany. He separated psychology from philosophy and focused on studying the mind in a much more structured and scientific way. Using structuralist and reductionist approaches, Wundt used methods such as introspection to try to uncover what people were thinking and experiencing

Introspection involves looking into your mind:

  • Introspection is a psychological method which involves analysing your own thoughts and feelings internally

  • In the 1800s, there were no brain scans or computers to enable people to explore the inside workings of the brain. So, as a way to investigate people’s consciousness, Wundt used introspection to study sensation and perception. Participants were asked to describe their experiences when presented with a set of stimuli, and often their reaction times were recorded

Problems with introspection:

  • It doesn’t explain how the mind works. It relies on people describing their thoughts and feelings, which usually isn’t objective

  • It doesn’t provide data that can be used reliably. Because people are reporting on their experiences, their accounts can’t be confirmed

  • Even though Wundt’s method of introspection wasn’t that objective, his experimental approach to psychology did influence either area of the subject. These include the beginnings of the behavioural, cognitive and biological approaches

Wundt believed in Reductionism:

  • Reductionism is the idea that things can be reduced to simple cause-and-effect processes. Wundt came from a biological background, and so he believed that the underlying structure of human experience could be broken down into smaller, measurable parts. He used introspection to measure these parts

But is Psychology a science?

Wundt’s founding of experimental psychology kicked psychology into the scientific world. It could now be taken much more seriously. However, there is still a lot of controversy around the idea that it is a true science.

Several features which make something a science:

  1. Objectivity- scientific observations should be recorded without bias and not influenced by any other factors or any other people

  2. Control- scientific observations should take place under controlled conditions

  3. Predictability- scientists should be able to use the results and knowledge gained from experiments to predict future behaviour

  4. Hypothesis testing- theories generate predictions (hypotheses) which can be tested to either strengthen the support of the theory or else disprove it

  5. Replication- each experiment should be able to ask to be replicated so people can have confidence in the results

There are arguments For and Against psychology as a science:

The debate around whether psychology can be called a science continues to the present day.

Arguments For:

  • Allport (1947) said psychology has the same aims as science- to predict, understand and control

  • Behaviourist, cognitive and biological approaches to psychology all use scientific procedures to investigate theories. They are usually controlled and unbiased

Arguments Against:

  • There are other approaches in psychology which don’t use objective methods- e.g. interview techniques which can be biased and interpreted differently by different researchers

  • It’s very hard to get a representations sample of the population for a study, so