Wundt - history of psych

Outline

-Wundt published the first ever book on psychology

-He set up the first psychology lab in Leipzig

-He was the first to apply scientific research to the study of the mind

-he separated biology from philosophy to create psychology

-Wundt’s approach was known as structuralism to break down the basic building blocks of thought to see how they interacted he did this through → perception and thought

-later he founded introspection about the processes involved

EVAL

-difficulties research unobservable things cant be researched or could be manipulated

introspective methods were not reliably reproduced/Wundt’s difficulty with replication due to subjectivity

-controlled experiments = validity, replicability

focus on mental processes through introspection can be seen as a forerunner of the cognitive approach • discussion of the validity of introspection – many aspects of our minds are outside of our conscious awareness, eg research by Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; however, it is still sometimes used in modern scientific psychological research, eg Csikszentmihalyi & Hunter, greater contributions to the development of psychology by early behaviourists, eg Pavlov, than by Wundt, as they produced reliable findings with explanatory principles that were generalisable – much more in keeping with the scientific approach.