Notes on Early Psychology: James, Structuralism, Functionalism, and Intellectual Humility

James authored a textbook on the new science of psychology after a contract offer from Henry Holt following his writings.
He began work in $1878$ , initially apologizing for needing two years to finish the writing, but the project ended up taking $12$ years.
The resulting work, Principles of Psychology ( $1890$ ), became an enduring staple that introduced psychology to the educated public with notable brilliance and elegance.

In $1890$ , at a time when women in the U.S. did not yet have the vote, James admitted Mary Whiton Calkins into his graduate seminar despite objections from Harvard's president.
When Calkins joined, the other students (all men) dropped out; James tutored her alone.
She completed all Ph.D. requirements, but Harvard denied her the degree and offered a doctorate from Radcliffe College, its undergraduate sister school for women. Calkins resisted the unequal treatment and refused the degree.
She nevertheless became a distinguished psychologist and went on to become the first female president of the American Psychological Association (APA).

Edward Bradford Titchener ( $1867$ – $1927$ ) used introspection to search for the mind's structural elements.
Structuralism aimed to classify and understand the mind's elements (sensations, images, feelings) through self-reflective reporting as people experienced stimuli (e.g., a rose, a metronome, a scent, a tasted substance).
The method asked participants to report their immediate experiences and how these elements related to one another.
Limitations: introspection proved unreliable because it required verbal fluency, and reports varied across individuals and contexts; as introspection waned, structuralism waned.
The approach was likened to trying to understand a smartphone by examining its disconnected parts rather than studying the system as a whole.

Functionalist perspective: James sought to go beyond labeling inner thoughts and feelings by considering their evolved functions (functionalism).
Analogy: smelling is what the nose does; thinking is what the brain does, but why these functions exist is key.
Under the influence of Charles Darwin, James assumed thinking developed because it was adaptive, helping our ancestors survive and reproduce.
Consciousness serves a function: it enables us to consider our past, adjust to present conditions, and plan for the future.
To explore the mind's adaptive functions, James studied emotions, memory, and the moment-to-moment stream of consciousness.

Two early schools of psychology emerged: structuralism (focused on elements of consciousness via introspection) and functionalism (focused on the functions and adaptiveness of mental processes).

Throughout the book, information sources are cited in parentheses with researchers' names and the publication date, e.g., (Erlandsson et al., $2018$ ).
Every citation is linked to an end-of-book References section with full APA-style documentation.
Example citation: (Erlandsson et al., $2018$ ).

Humility predicts helpfulness and realistic academic confidence (Erlandsson et al., $2018$ ).
A nine-country study surveyed $40{,}000$ teens to assess familiarity with $16$ math concepts.
Researchers inserted three fake terms: “proper number,” “subjective scaling,” and “declarative fraction.”
Those who arrogantly claimed to know the nonexistent concepts were often men from advantaged backgrounds (Jerrim et al., $2019$ ).
Takeaway: Knowing what we don't know enables generosity and intellectual humility, which in turn supports a healthy democracy.
Fathali Moghaddam ( $2019$ ) notes that democratic citizenship begins by accepting that one could be wrong, requires critical questioning, and involves revising opinions as evidence requires.

The transcript places these themes within Module 1, tying historical developments to the ongoing scientific status of psychology and to ethical, practical, and democratic implications.