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Origins of Psychology Evaluation. - Coggle Diagram
Origins of Psychology Evaluation.
Science woop woop
Wundt’s first study of the mind was scientific and paved the way for a less philosophy centred psychology.
ie:
He recorded the introspections within a controlled lab environment.
He also standardised his procedures so that all participants received the same information and were tested in the same way.
For this reason, Wundt's research can be considered a forerunner to the later scientific approaches in psychology that were to come. Paved the way and set an example of how psychology as a science should be conducted.
Inconsistent science
A limitation is that some aspects of Wundt's research is not scientific.
Wundt relied on participants self-reporting their 'private' mental processes.
Such data is subjective and some participants may have felt uncomfortable confessing their true thoughts.
Plus, participants would not have had exactly the same thoughts every time meaning, establishing general principles would have been impossible.
Wundt's early efforts to study the mind were naïve and wouldn't have met the criteria of scientific inquiry.
It also means that his study was unreliable.
This contrasts with Pavlov and Throndlike who were already achieving reliably reproducible results and discovering explanatory principles that could be generalised to all humans.
Not all objective.
One limitation with psychology is that not all approaches use objective methods...
The humanistic approach is the polar opposite of the extremely scientific biological approach. It does not attempt to formulate general laws of behaviour.
It is concerned only with documenting unique subjective experiences.
For this reason, many claims that a scientific approach to the study of humans through and experience is impossible nor is it desirable by all.
Not just Empirical Methods.
Psychology is now accepted more as a scientific discipline and it now uses many different methods that are empirical (scientific) to investigate the human mind and human behaviour.
However, some psychologists do not believe that psychology is a science and due to this there are many different methods that are used to test behaviour and also there are many different view points.
Behaviourists.
Wundt’s approach to psychological experimentation, using the method of introspection, is idiographic
in nature.
However, this was heavily criticised by the behaviourists, as universal principles that could be
applied to explain human behaviour cannot be generated from introspection
Behaviourists suggest that a nomothetic approach to psychological investigations is more advantageous because it as it overcomes these limitations.