Origins of Psychology:
Wilhelm Wundt and Introspection:
● Wilhelm Wundt was known as the ‘father of psychology’
● He wanted to document and describe the human consciousness
● Wundt and his colleagues documented their own conscious thoughts, in order to break them
down into constituent parts to explain behavior
○ Isolating the structure of consciousness like this is called structuralism
● It was the first ‘scientific’ investigation → standardized instructions, strictly controlled
conditions, repetition of investigations…
● Introspection is the systematic investigation of one’s conscious thoughts
○ Wundt used introspection to investigate the human mind
■ 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
● 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 behavior
○ This produced data that was subjective, so it became very difficult to establish
general principles
■ Introspective experimental results are not reliably reproduced by other
researchers
● Introspection may not seem particularly scientific, but it is still used today to gain access to
cognitive processes
○ Griffiths (1994) used introspection to study the cognitive processes of fruit machine
gamblers
■ He asked them to ‘think aloud’ whilst playing a fruit machine into a
microphone on their lapel and found that gamblers used more irrational
verbalisations
● Evaluation of Introspection:
○ - Introspection does not explain how the mind works
○ - It relies on people describing their own thoughts and feelings
○ - Subjective data makes it hard to establish general principles
○ - Watson → focuses on ‘private mental processes’ - scientific psychology should
restrict itself to only studying phenomena that can be observed and measured
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,The Emergence of Psychology as a Science:
● When Wundt opened the world’s first experimental laboratory at the university of Leipzig in
1879, it marked a turning point → psychology’s emergence as a separate and distinct
scientific discipline
○ In doing so, he separated psychology from philosophy and biology and became the
first person to be called a psychologist
● At the beginning of the 20th century, introspection was starting to be questioned
● Wundt’s founding of experimental psychology kicked psychology into a scientific world
○ The classic movement in psychology t o adopt these strategies were the behaviorists,
who were renowned for their reliance on controlled laboratory experiment and
rejection of any unseen or subconscious forces as causes of behavior
● Behaviourist John B. Watson (1913) and later, Skinner (1953), brought language and methods
of the natural science into psychology
○ It involved learning and the use of carefully controlled lab experiments
● With the introduction of the digital computer in the 1960s, psychologists began to wonder
whether our brain worked like computers too
○ On the basis of lab tests, the cognitive approach scientifically links behavior to
cognitive processes
○ Albert Bandura’s social learning theory bridged the gap between behaviorism and
cognition
● From the 1980s, the biological approach also emphasized using science to investigate the
physiological processes in the brain
● From the 21st century onwards, cognitive neuroscience has emerged to help us further
investigate the intricacies of the human brain
● Evaluation of the Scientific Approach:
○ + Knowledge acquired using scientific methods are more than just the passive
acceptance of facts
○ + Cause of behavior can be established through the use of methods that are
empirical and replicable
○ + Scientific knowledge is self-corrective, meaning that it can be refined or abandoned
○ - Scientific psychologists create contrived situations that create artificial behaviors
○ - Not all psychologists share the view that the human behavior can be explored
through scientific methods
○ - How can we investigate an emotion or a thought scientifically?
○ Can we ever know everything about the brain?
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,Approaches:
The Behaviourist Approach:
● 3 approaches that conflict with behaviorism: biological approach, cognitive approach and
social learning theory
● Assumptions:
○ Behaviourism is concerned with observable behavior
○ Psychology is a science
○ When born, our mind is a blank slate - Tabula Rasa (the biological approach conflicts
with this assumption → no genetic influence on behavior)
○ There is little difference between the learning in animals and that in humans
○ Behaviour is the result of stimulus → response
○ All behaviour is learnt from the environment (classical or operant conditioning)
● Key psychologists:
○ Pavlov (1849 - 1936)
■ Classical conditioning
■ Research has allowed help in behavioural therapies
○ Watson (1878 - 1958)
■ Established behaviourism
■ Believed that psychology should primarily be observable scientific behaviour
■ Little Albert Study
○ Skinner (1904 - 1990)
■ Believed that the best way to understand behaviour is to look at the causes
of an action and its consequences
■ Introduced the idea of reinforcement
● Classical Conditioning → learning by association
○ Ivan Pavlov’s Dog experiment:
■ He saw how the dog salivated when food was present but did not when he
heard a bell
■ Therefore, whenever the dog was provided with food, Pavlov rang a bell
■ Eventually, the dog salivated whenever the bell was rung, even when there
was no food present
● Dog food - unconditioned stimulus (UCS)
● Salivation - unconditioned response (UCR)
● Bell - neutral stimulus (NS)
● NS + UCS = UCR
● NS → conditioned stimulus (CS)
● Salivation from bell - conditioned response (CR)
○ Watson and Rayner’s Little Albert experiment (1920):
■ A boy known as Little Albert was presented with a white rat to which he did
not react (NS)
■ They found that a hammer hitting a steel bar behind him upsets him (UCS)
■ They paired the two stimuli with Little Albert producing an upset reaction
after hearing the noise
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, ■ The rat was then presented on its own, and he was upset without the noise
■ Albert also responded with anxiety to a rabbit, a fur coat and some cotton
wool
● Operant Conditioning → learning by consequence
○ B.F. Skinner’s Box experiment (1948):
■ A hungry rat would be placed in the box.
■ Inside the box was a lever which, when pressed, would deliver a pellet of
food
■ When the rat pressed the lever, a food pellet was dropped onto the tray. The
rat soon learned that pressing the lever would result in food (a reward)
■ Skinner observed that, as a consequence of its actions (receiving the pellet),
the rat continued to display this newly learned behaviour
○ Four ways operant conditioning can occur: positive reinforcement, negative
reinforcement, positive punishment, or negative punishment
■ Positive → applies stimulus
■ Negative → removes stimulus
■ Reinforcement →increases the chance of behaviour reoccurrence
■ Punishment → decreases the chance of behaviour reoccurrence
● Strengths of the Behaviourist Approach:
○ By focusing on the measurement of observable behaviour within highly controlled
lab settings, behaviourism made psychology much more scientific and credible
○ It emphasised the importance of objectivity and replicability in research processes
○ We also can judge cause and effect relationships by using the experimental method
○ The conditioning principles have been applied to a broad range of real-world
behaviours and problems.
■ For example, due to our understanding of how phobias can be learned
through classical conditioning, we have developed successful therapies such
as Systematic Desensitisation to treat phobias
● Weaknesses of the Behaviourist Approach:
○ From a behaviourist perspective, animals (including humans) are seen as passive and
machine-like responders to the environment, with little or no conscious insight into
their behaviour, so criticism of the behavioural approach is that it is very, very
simplistic
■ It implies that we have no control over our behaviour and that our thought
processes are not important
○ Other approaches in psychology such as social learning theory and the cognitive
approach have emphasised the importance of mental events during learning
■ These processes, which mediate between stimulus and response, suggest
that people play much more active roles in their learning
■ This means that the learning theory may apply less to human than animal
behaviour
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