AQA A level Psychology notes - Year 2, the approaches. I am currently in my second year of the A-level course, with my exams in May. I have wrote/used these notes throughout the course and have consistently got A*s. I have used my teachers powerpoints (who has been an examiner for the course for 10...
In contrast to the natural sciences, Psychology is a relatively new scientific discipline.
It has its roots in 17th and early 19th century philosophy and was once known as experimental
philosophy.
The work of John Locke and his concept of empiricism, the belief that all knowledge is
derived from sensory experience and can be studied using the scientific method also had an
influence on the emergence of psychology as a science.
Wilhelm Wundt
In 1873 Wilhelm Wundt published the first book on psychology (‘Principles of Physiological
Psychology’) and in 1879 opened the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. He is
often considered to be ‘the father of psychology’
His approach to psychology was to study the structure of the human mind, by breaking
down behaviors into their basic elements, hence his approach became known as
structuralism.
Introspection
Wundt used introspection to investigate the human mind.
Introspection comes from Latin and means ‘looking into’.
Participants were asked to reflect on their own cognitive processes and describe them.
Wundt established psychology as a science by using the scientific method – his ideas would
lead to multiple different psychological perspectives.
What is the ‘Scientific Method’?
Wundt’s new ‘scientific’ approach to psychology was based on two major assumptions.
1. All behaviour is seen as being caused (determined)
2. If behaviour is determined, then it should be possible to predict how human beings would
behave in different conditions (predictability)
This technique used to explore these assumptions became known as the scientific method
Introspection
Introspection relies primarily on non-observable responses and although participants can
report conscious experiences, they are unable to comment on unconscious factors relating
to their behaviour.
Introspection produced data that was subjective (varied greatly from person to person), so it
became very difficult to establish general principles. This means that introspective
experimental results are not reliably reproduced by other researchers.
In contrast, the early behaviourists such as Pavlov were achieving reliably reproducible
results and discovering explanatory principles that could be easily generalised to all human
beings.
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