Origins of psychology.

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Wundt and Introspection.

  • In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology lab in Leipzig Germany. Because of this he adopted the name the father of psychology.
  • In the lab Wilhelm Wundt attempted to descibe the nature of the human concious.
  • As well as opening the first psychology department, Wundt also created the method of introspection ; This was examing your own mental health or emotional process. by doing this he also pioneered the method of structarilism, mapping parts of the brain.
  • Alothough Wundt's work was naive, he did create the distinction between psychology and philosophy
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Emergence of Psychology as a science.

  • In 1913, behaviourists such as John B watson argued that introspection vaired between person to person, it was subjective.
  • In 1953 Skinner brought science into psychology by focusing work on learning and using highly controlled lab experiments which adopt a lot of scientific equipment.
  • 1950s were dominated by the cognitive approach, the introduction of the cognitive revolution meant that these years until the 90s were comendated by cognitive work.
  • Finally the 90s saw the breakthrough of the biological approach due to greater improvements in science, technology was able to improve the validity of the findings of many researchers and also disqualify any research that was seen as wrong.
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Evaluations of Origins of psychology.

  • Wundt used applied early scientific methods in his experiments; controlled experiments and standardisation of all participants in the same way, this means that internal validity increases but also shows that Wundt was the innovator of science to psychology.
  • On the other hand, other aspects of Wundts study were considered unscientific and naive for example participants self reported private feelings however, many participants could have been lying to ensure their reputaton is withheld, therefore it shows that his experiments must have lacked internal validity.
  • One massive advantage is that modern psychology is viewed by many as extremely scientific, it has the same motives of science and some experiments employ high scientific methods and equipment, because of this it could be argued that modern day psychology is strict.
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