We choose to begin our brief discussion with Descartes. Although there have been many potential contributors to the beginning of what is often called "modern science," the ideas of the philosopher Rene Descartes pronounced day-CART are important to science but particularly to psychology.
Descartes lived from to , and worked to answer the question "Are the mind and body the same, or different? What was particularly important about this idea is that it allowed the emerging scientists of the Renaissance and the church to co-exist. The church could still work to influence the mind of individuals, and the scientists of the day could study the body, each group having its own domain to some extent.
Descartes suggested that whereas the mind is the source of ideas and thoughts which he correctly located in the brain , the body is a machine-like structure to be studied and understood. Descartes believed in both nativism and rationalism. A nativist believes that all knowledge is innate, inborn, whereas a rationalist believes that to gain knowledge one rationalizes or discovers the truth through experience and the operation of the mind.
Descartes struggled to rationalize his own existence, trying to prove that he was real in a philosophical way. His answer to the problem was to suggest "Cognito, ergo sum" meaning "I think, therefore I am. Once the pursuit of science through sources other than philosophy was established, many disciplines and areas of study began to flourish.
Two of these disciplines that had an impact on the beginning of psychology were phrenology and psychophysics. Phrenology was one approach to the mind-body problem studied by Franz Joseph Gall and subsequently popularized by his student then colleague Joseph Spurzheim The basic tenet of phrenology suggested that one could uncover and understand someone's personality by feeling and interpreting the bumps on the head.
Although this idea may seem simplistic by today's standards, it was a popular idea at the time, and it was a concept that could be understood easily by common people. Phrenology assumed, however, that the skull was an accurate representation of the underlying brain, that the mind can be meaningfully divided and analyzed into 37 or more different functions, and that certain characteristics or qualities that we possess are found in certain precise locations in the brain.
Therefore, by feeling someone's skull and noting the location of an abnormal bump too much or indentation too little , an interpretation could be made as to whether someone possessed an overabundance or shortage of the corresponding trait.
Phrenology eventually ran its course and skeptics ran phrenologists out of business, but phrenology contributed some important ideas to psychology. First, phrenology reemphasized that the brain is the organ of the mind, and if we are to understand the mind and behavior, the brain is a central area to understand.
Second, the idea of localization of function that different parts of the brain have certain specialties is an idea that is still with us today.
While the brain is not as easy to understand as some popular writers would have us believe such as books for improving drawing skills by learning to use a particular side of your brain , particular brain structures do specialize in performing certain functions. Although phrenology's methods did not last, some of the assumptions of phrenology had great heuristic value. The area of psychophysics is probably the area of closest transition from philosophers studying behavior to psychologists studying behavior.
Hermann von Helmholtz was interested in the general area of psychophysics. Psychophysics is the study of the interaction between the behavioral capabilities and limitations of the human perceptual system and the environment. In other words, how do we literally interpret the world we live in? For example, Helmholtz is famous for his extension and additions to a trichromatic theory of color vision the Young-Helmholtz theory , explaining that the three basic colors of light, red, green, and blue, are represented in our visual system by three specialized cells in our retina called cones.
Helmholtz also worked on such topics as the speed of neuronal conduction and the perception of tones, both individually and in combination such as in harmony or dissonance.
Ernst Weber also shared this interest in psychophysics but studied the topic from a broader perspective.
Weber was interested in all the sensory systems and how they worked. It was Weber who gave psychology the concept of just noticeable difference, that is, the smallest difference between two stimuli that can be noted by a person.
This idea of just noticeable difference jnd could be applied to all sensory systems sight, sound, taste, touch, smell , and in experimenting with various sensory systems Weber found that a constant equation emerged for each. That is, for each of the sensory systems, a consistent ratio emerged to detect a jnd. For the perception of lifting weight the sense of touch , the ratio was found to be That is, the average person can tell the difference between a and a pound suitcase, but cannot tell the difference between a and a In this example, the just noticeable difference is 1 pound for every 40 pounds hence A jnd ratio was found for many of the sensory systems, and this general conceptualization has come to be known as Weber's Law.
Gustav Fechner was trained in both medicine and physics; he significantly expanded on the ideas of Weber. In fact, Fechner is said to be the founder of psychophysics, the science of the functional relationship between the mind and the body. Fechner has also been called the father of experimental psychology, and some historians CITATION suggest that the founding of psychology could be accredited to Fechner in rather than Wundt in Why ? Fechner woke up from a long sickness on October 22, and recorded something in his journal like "the relative increase of bodily energy [is related to] the measure of the increase of the corresponding mental intensity.
Not only did Fechner make the explicit connection between mind and body, but suggested that measurement is possible for both phenomena. For the first time in the study of thought the relationship between the mind and body could be measured and quantified, leading to the development of Fechner's Law.
Given the techniques from psychophysics to accomplish this task, later psychologists had the opportunity to measure behavior in much the same way as physical objects are measured.
Although this quantitative link between mind and body may not seem striking today, it was revolutionary in its time and legitimized the work of later psychologists in trying to quantify all types of behaviors. The Beginning of Psychology. Wundtian Psychology and Structuralism. Wilhelm Wundt is credited with forming the first psychology laboratory exclusively for psychological work in Leipzig , Germany in This starting date is rather arbitrary, and historians have argued that other dates and people are defensible.
We might attribute the founding to Wundt in when he published Principles of Physiological Psychology while physiological was the word used in the translation from German, a more appropriate translation would have been experimental , or perhaps the founding could be two years later in when Wundt began the first journal in psychology, Philosophical Studies you might think that Psychological Studies would have been a better and less confusing title, but there already was a journal by that name that dealt primarily with psychic forces.
Wundt was interested in studying the mind and conscious experience. He believed that a rigorous program of introspection could be used to report the processes at work in the inner consciousness. Introspection was a technique used by researchers to describe and analyze their own inner thoughts and feelings during a research experience.
Wundt and his colleagues carried out numerous research studies examining the contents of consciousness. Some of the better known results are Wundt's tridimensional theory of feeling, and his work on mental chronometry.
Thus, although mental processes themselves were not studied they were unobservable , the time a mental process took was measurable and appropriate for study. Wundt's contributions to psychology are briefly mentioned here. For the remainder of the 19th century Wundt and his laboratory were the center of psychology, and anyone seriously interested in pursuing psychology traveled to Germany to study with Wundt.
This situation changed rapidly by the beginning of the 20th century when America took a stronghold on psychology. Perhaps Wundt's greatest influence was the mentoring of students: over students an astounding number received their Ph.
One of those students was Edward Bradford Titchener, who studied with Wundt in Germany and then immigrated to Cornell University Ithaca, NY to promote his own variation of Wundtian psychology called structuralism. Structuralism , the study of the anatomy of the mind, as a system of psychology shares some common characteristics with Wundt's ideas. Both systems were interested in the mind and conscious experience, and both used introspection.
Structuralism departed from Wundt's ideas, however, in its application of introspection as the only method available for experimental inquiry, and applied much more rigorous standards in its use.
Titchener also spelled out quite clearly what structuralism was NOT interested in: applied problems, children, animals, individual differences, and higher mental processes. Titchener's goal for structuralism was to use this rigorous introspective method to discover and identify the structures of consciousness, hence the title structuralism. Once the structures were understood, the laws of association could be verified and then one could study the physiological conditions under which ideas and concepts become associated.
The ultimate goal was to understand the workings of the mind. Titchener contributed significantly to the rapid growth of psychology in America by having 54 Ph. Although the pursuit of structuralism basically died with Titchener , he provided a concrete system of psychology which would later be the subject and focus of major changes in psychology, resulting in a alternative approach to psychology: functionalism.
As you read about the history of psychology whether it is in this brief appendix or in texts fully devoted to the topic , it is startling to notice the lack of women noted for their accomplishments and contributions to psychology. Why does this situation exist? Behaviourism is a school of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behaviour itself.
Behaviourists believe that the human mind is a black box into which stimuli are sent and from which responses are received. They argue that there is no point in trying to determine what happens in the box because we can successfully predict behaviour without knowing what happens inside the mind. Furthermore, behaviourists believe that it is possible to develop laws of learning that can explain all behaviours.
The first behaviourist was the American psychologist John B. Watson Watson was influenced in large part by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov , who had discovered that dogs would salivate at the sound of a tone that had previously been associated with the presentation of food.
Watson and the other behaviourists began to use these ideas to explain how events that people and other organisms experienced in their environment stimuli could produce specific behaviours responses. In the best known of his studies, an eight-month-old boy named Little Albert was used as the subject.
Here is a summary of the findings: The boy was placed in the middle of a room; a white laboratory rat was placed near him and he was allowed to play with it. The child showed no fear of the rat. The child cried when he heard the noise. After several such pairings of the two stimuli, the child was again shown the rat. Now, however, he cried and tried to move away from the rat. In line with the behaviourist approach, the boy had learned to associate the white rat with the loud noise, resulting in crying.
The most famous behaviourist was Burrhus Frederick B. Skinner to , who expanded the principles of behaviourism and also brought them to the attention of the public at large.
Skinner Figure 1. And he used the general principles of behaviourism to develop theories about how best to teach children and how to create societies that were peaceful and productive. Skinner even developed a method for studying thoughts and feelings using the behaviourist approach Skinner, , The behaviourist research program had important implications for the fundamental questions about nature and nurture and about free will.
In terms of the nature-nurture debate, the behaviourists agreed with the nurture approach, believing that we are shaped exclusively by our environments. They also argued that there is no free will, but rather that our behaviours are determined by the events that we have experienced in our past. In one demonstration of the misperception of our own free will, neuroscientists Soon, Brass, Heinze, and Haynes placed their research participants in a functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI brain scanner while they presented them with a series of letters on a computer screen.
The letter on the screen changed every half second. The participants were asked, whenever they decided to, to press either of two buttons. Then they were asked to indicate which letter was showing on the screen when they decided to press the button. The researchers analyzed the brain images to see if they could predict which of the two buttons the participant was going to press, even before the letter at which he or she had indicated the decision to press a button.
Suggesting that the intention to act occurred in the brain before the research participants became aware of it, the researchers found that the prefrontal cortex region of the brain showed activation that could be used to predict the button pressed as long as 10 seconds before the participants said that they had decided which button to press.
Research has found that we are more likely to think that we control our behaviour when the desire to act occurs immediately prior to the outcome, when the thought is consistent with the outcome, and when there are no other apparent causes for the behaviour.
Aarts, Custers, and Wegner asked their research participants to control a rapidly moving square along with a computer that was also controlling the square independently. The participants pressed a button to stop the movement. When participants were exposed to words related to the location of the square just before they stopped its movement, they became more likely to think that they controlled the motion, even when it was actually the computer that stopped it.
Because we normally expect that our behaviours will be met with success, when we are successful we easily believe that the success is the result of our own free will. When an action is met with failure, on the other hand, we are less likely to perceive this outcome as the result of our free will, and we are more likely to blame the outcome on luck or our teacher Wegner, The behaviourists made substantial contributions to psychology by identifying the principles of learning.
Although the behaviourists were incorrect in their beliefs that it was not possible to measure thoughts and feelings, their ideas provided new ideas that helped further our understanding regarding the nature-nurture debate and the question of free will. The ideas of behaviourism are fundamental to psychology and have been developed to help us better understand the role of prior experiences in a variety of areas of psychology.
Science is always influenced by the technology that surrounds it, and psychology is no exception. Thus it is no surprise that beginning in the s, growing numbers of psychologists began to think about the brain and about human behaviour in terms of the computer, which was being developed and becoming publicly available at that time.
The analogy between the brain and the computer, although by no means perfect, provided part of the impetus for a new school of psychology called cognitive psychology.
Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment. These actions correspond well to the processes that computers perform. Although cognitive psychology began in earnest in the s, earlier psychologists had also taken a cognitive orientation.
Some of the important contributors to cognitive psychology include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus , who studied the ability of people to remember lists of words under different conditions, and the English psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett , who studied the cognitive and social processes of remembering. Bartlett created short stories that were in some ways logical but also contained some very unusual and unexpected events.
The idea that our memory is influenced by what we already know was also a major idea behind the cognitive-developmental stage model of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget Other important cognitive psychologists include Donald E. The War of the Ghosts is a story that was used by Sir Frederic Bartlett to test the influence of prior expectations on memory. Bartlett found that even when his British research participants were allowed to read the story many times, they still could not remember it well, and he believed this was because it did not fit with their prior knowledge.
One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe coming up to them. We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people.
I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama.
The people came down to the water and they began to fight, and many were killed. So the canoes went back to Egulac and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed.
They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead. Bartlett, In its argument that our thinking has a powerful influence on behaviour, the cognitive approach provided a distinct alternative to behaviourism. According to cognitive psychologists, ignoring the mind itself will never be sufficient because people interpret the stimuli that they experience.
And yet the girl might not be so easily fooled. She might try to understand why the boy is making this particular statement at this particular time and wonder if he might be attempting to influence her through the comment. Cognitive psychologists maintain that when we take into consideration how stimuli are evaluated and interpreted, we understand behaviour more deeply. Cognitive psychology remains enormously influential today, and it has guided research in such varied fields as language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, education, human development, social psychology, and psychotherapy.
The cognitive revolution has been given even more life over the past decade as the result of recent advances in our ability to see the brain in action using neuroimaging techniques. These images are used to diagnose brain disease and injury, but they also allow researchers to view information processing as it occurs in the brain, because the processing causes the involved area of the brain to increase metabolism and show up on the scan.
We have already discussed the use of one neuroimaging technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI , in the research focus earlier in this section, and we will discuss the use of neuroimaging techniques in many areas of psychology in the chapters to follow. A final school, which takes a higher level of analysis and which has had substantial impact on psychology, can be broadly referred to as the social-cultural approach.
The field of social-cultural psychology is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behaviour. For instance, social psychologists have found that we are attracted to others who are similar to us in terms of attitudes and interests Byrne, , that we develop our own beliefs and attitudes by comparing our opinions to those of others Festinger, , and that we frequently change our beliefs and behaviours to be similar to those of the people we care about —a process known as conformity.
An important aspect of social-cultural psychology are social norms — the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate Asch, ; Cialdini, Norms include customs, traditions, standards, and rules, as well as the general values of the group.
Many of the most important social norms are determined by the culture in which we live, and these cultures are studied by cross-cultural psychologists. Cultures influence every aspect of our lives, and it is not inappropriate to say that our culture defines our lives just as much as does our evolutionary experience Mesoudi, Children in Western cultures are taught to develop and to value a sense of their personal self, and to see themselves in large part as separate from the other people around them.
Children in Western cultures feel special about themselves; they enjoy getting gold stars on their projects and the best grade in the class. Adults in Western cultures are oriented toward promoting their own individual success, frequently in comparison to or even at the expense of others. Norms in the East Asian culture, on the other hand, are oriented toward interdependence or collectivism.
In these cultures children are taught to focus on developing harmonious social relationships with others. When asked to describe themselves, the members of East Asian cultures are more likely than those from Western cultures to indicate that they are particularly concerned about the interests of others, including their close friends and their colleagues Figure 1. Cultures also differ in terms of personal space, such as how closely individuals stand to each other when talking, as well as the communication styles they employ.
It is important to be aware of cultures and cultural differences because people with different cultural backgrounds increasingly come into contact with each other as a result of increased travel and immigration and the development of the Internet and other forms of communication.
In Canada, for instance, there are many different ethnic groups, and the proportion of the population that comes from minority non-White groups is increasing from year to year. The social-cultural approach to understanding behaviour reminds us again of the difficulty of making broad generalizations about human nature. Different people experience things differently, and they experience them differently in different cultures.
Because the field of psychology is so broad, students may wonder which areas are most suitable for their interests and which types of careers might be available to them. One way that the findings of psychological research may be particularly helpful to you is in terms of improving your learning and study skills.
Psychological research has provided a substantial amount of knowledge about the principles of learning and memory. This information can help you do better in this and other courses, and can also help you better learn new concepts and techniques in other areas of your life. The most important thing you can learn in college is how to better study, learn, and remember. These skills will help you throughout your life, as you learn new jobs and take on other responsibilities.
There are substantial individual differences in learning and memory, such that some people learn faster than others. But even if it takes you longer to learn than you think it should, the extra time you put into studying is well worth the effort. And you can learn to learn—learning to study effectively and to remember information is just like learning any other skill, such as playing a sport or a video game.
To learn well, you need to be ready to learn. You cannot learn well when you are tired, when you are under stress, or if you are abusing alcohol or drugs. Try to keep a consistent routine of sleeping and eating. Eat moderately and nutritiously, and avoid drugs that can impair memory, particularly alcohol.
Memory supplements are usually no more effective than drinking a can of sugared soda, which releases glucose and thus improves memory slightly.
Psychologists have studied the ways that best allow people to acquire new information, to retain it over time, and to retrieve information that has been stored in our memories.
One important finding is that learning is an active process. To acquire information most effectively, we must actively manipulate it. One active approach is rehearsal—repeating the information that is to be learned over and over again. Although simple repetition does help us learn, psychological research has found that we acquire information most effectively when we actively think about or elaborate on its meaning and relate the material to something else. When you study, try to elaborate by connecting the information to other things that you already know.
If you want to remember the different schools of psychology, for instance, try to think about how each of the approaches is different from the others. Describing a behavior or cognition is the first goal of psychology. This can enable researchers to develop general laws of human behavior. For example, through describing the response of dogs to various stimuli, Ivan Pavlov helped develop laws of learning known as classical conditioning theory.
Once researchers have described general laws behavior, the next step is to explain how or why this trend occurs. Psychologists will propose theories which can explain a behavior.
For example, classical conditioning predicts that if a person associates a negative outcome with a stimuli they may develop a phobia or aversion of the stimuli. Once psychology has described, explained and made predictions about behavior, changing or controlling a behavior can be attempted. For example, interventions based on classical conditioning, such as systematic desensitization, have been used to treat people with anxiety disorders including phobias. Kuhn argues that a field of study can only legitimately be regarded as a science if most of its followers subscribe to a common perspective or paradigm.
McLeod, S. What is psychology? Toggle navigation. What is Psychology? Saul McLeod , updated Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior, according to the American Psychological Association.
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