Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
The Origins of Psychology - Coggle Diagram
The Origins of Psychology
Wilhelm Wundt
He took a scientific approach.
1879: opened 1st psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany.
1873: wrote his 1st book on psychology, 'Principles of physiological psychology'
He used introspection to investigate the human mind.
Introspection
Participants were asked to reflect on their own cognitive processes and describe them.
Seen as the 1st scientific process.
His participants used standardised procedures and the lab experiment controlled confounding variables.
Griffiths (1994)
used introspection to study the cognitive processes of fruit machine gamblers. He asked them to speak aloud whilst playing a fruit machine into a microphone.
This method is unscientific, unfalsifiable and non-objective.
Issues with Introspection
Unreliable as people don't always say what they think.
People may get inappropriate / irrelevant thoughts so they filter what the say which makes it invalid.
People may think subconsciously.
Thoughts come and go faster than you can speak.
Emergence of psychology as a science
1900s: early behaviourists rejected introspection.
Watson argued introspection was subjective. Scientific approaches argue that there should only be 1 phenomena that can be observed and measured.
1930s: behaviourist approach dominated psychology.
Skinner brought natural sciences into psychology. Behaviourists focus on learning and lab studies which are much more scientific.
1990s: Biological approach introduced technological advances.
Taken advantage of recent technological advances like scanning techniques and genetic research.
1950s: cognitive approach used scientific procedures to study mental processes.
Even though mental processes are private, psychologists can make inferences on how these work on the basis of lab experiments.