1.3: The development of psychology: history, approaches and questions (2023)

Learning Objectives

• Explain how psychology changed from a philosophical discipline to a scientific one.
• Name some of the most important questions that concern psychologists.
• Outline the basic schools of psychology and how each school has contributed to psychology.

first psychologists

The earliest psychologists we know of are the Greek philosophers Plato (428-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC). These philosophers (see Figure 1.3) asked many of the same questions that psychologists do today; for example, they questioned the distinction between nature and nurture and the existence of free will. Regarding the former, Plato argued on the side of nature, believing that certain forms of knowledge are innate or innate, while Aristotle was more on the side of nurture, believing that every child is born a "blank slate" (Latin for , - onetaste buds), and that knowledge is mainly acquired through learning and experience.

Figure 1.3 Early psychologists. The first psychologists were the Greek philosophers Plato (left) and Aristotle (right). Plato believed that much knowledge was innate, while Aristotle believed that every child was born as a "blank slate" and that knowledge was acquired primarily through learning and experience.

European philosophers continued to ask these fundamental questions throughout the Renaissance. For example, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) also considered the question of free will, arguing in favor of it and believing that the mind controls the body through the pineal gland in the brain (an idea that made sense at the time). but later proved to be wrong). Descartes also believed in the existence of innate natural abilities. A scientist as well as a philosopher, Descartes dissected animals and was one of the first to understand that nerves controlled muscles. He also addressed the relationship between the mind (the mental aspects of life) and the body (the physical aspects of life). Descartes believed in the principle ofdualism:that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body. Other European philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), also weighed in on these questions. The basic problem these philosophers faced was that they had few methods to determine their claims. Most philosophers did not research these questions, partly because they did not yet know how to do so, and partly because they were not sure that it was possible to study human experience objectively. But dramatic changes occurred during the 19th century with the help of the first two research psychologists: the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who developed a psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, and the American psychologist William James (1842-1910), who founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard University.

Structuralism: introspection and awareness of subjective experience

Wundt's research in his Leipzig laboratory focused on the nature of consciousness itself. Wundt and his students believed that it was possible to analyze the basic elements of the mind and scientifically classify our conscious experiences. Wundt started the field known asstructuralism,a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of psychological experience. His goal was to create a periodic table of the elements of sensations, similar to the periodic table of elements that had recently been created in chemistry. The structuralists used the method tointrospectiontry to create a map of the elements of consciousness.introspectionIt includesasked research participants to describe exactly what they experience while working on mental taskssuch as seeing colors, reading a page in a book, or solving a math problem. For example, a participant reading a book might report seeing some black and colored straight and curved marks on a white background. In other studies, structuralists used newly invented reaction time instruments to systematically assess not only what participants were thinking, but also how long it took them to do so. Wundt found that it took people longer to report which sound they had just heard than to simply respond that they had heard the sound. These studies marked the first time that researchers realized that there is a differencesensationof a stimulus andperceptionof that stimulus, and the idea of ​​using reaction times to study mental events has now become a mainstay of cognitive psychology.

Figure 1.4 Wundt and Titchener. Wilhelm Wundt (seated left) and Edward Titchener (right) helped create the structuralist school of psychology. His goal was to classify the elements of sensation through introspection.

Perhaps the best known of the structuralists was Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927). Titchener was a student of Wundt, who came to the United States in the late 19th century and founded a laboratory at Cornell University (Figure 1.4). (Titchener was later rejected by McGill University (1903). Perhaps he was ahead of his time; Brenda Milner first opened the Montreal Neurological Institute in 1950.) In their research using introspection, Titchener and his students claimed to have identified more than 40,000 sensations , including those related to sight, hearing and taste. An important aspect of the structuralist approach was that it was rigorous and scientific. The research marked the beginning of psychology as a science because it showed that mental events could be quantified. But the structuralists also discovered the limitations of introspection. Even highly trained research participants were often unable to report their subjective experiences. When participants were asked to do simple math problems, they were able to do them easily, but they could not easily answer how they did them. Thus, structuralists were the first to realize the importance of unconscious processes: that many important aspects of human psychology occur outside of our awareness, and that psychologists cannot expect research participants to be able to accurately report on all of their experiences.

Functionalism and evolutionary psychology

Unlike Wundt, who sought to understand the nature of consciousness, William James and the other members of thefunctionalism schoolsucceededunderstand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess(Hunt, 1993). For James, one's thought was relevant only to one's behavior. As he put it in his psychology textbook: "My thought is first and last and always for the sake of my action" (James, 1890). James and the other members of the functionalist school (Figure 1.5) were influenced by Charles Darwin (1809–1882).Theory of natural selection, Which oneproposed that the physical characteristics of animals and humans evolved because they were useful or functional. Functionalists believed that Darwin's theory also applied to psychological characteristics. Just as some animals have developed strong muscles that enable them to run fast, the human brain, functionalists believed, must have adapted to fill a special role in the human experience.

Figure 1.5 Functionalist School. The functionalist school of psychology, founded by the American psychologist William James (left), was influenced by the work of Charles Darwin (right).

Although functionalism no longer exists as a school of psychology, its basic tenets have been absorbed into psychology and continue to influence it in many ways. The work of the functionalists has developed withinEvolutionary Psychology,a branch of psychology that applies Darwinian theory of natural selection to human and animal behavior(Dennett, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology accepts the basic assumption of functionalists, namely that many human psychological systems, including memory, emotion, and personality, serve important adaptive functions. As we will see in the next few chapters, evolutionary psychologists use evolutionary theory to understand many different patterns of behavior, including romantic attraction, stereotypes and prejudices, and even the causes of many psychological disorders. A key component of the ideas of evolutionary psychology isphysical condition.physical conditionrefers tothe extent to which having a given trait helps the individual organism survive and reproduce at a higher rate than other members of the species who do not have the trait. Fitter organisms pass their genes on to subsequent generations more successfully, making fitness-producing traits more likely to become part of the organism's nature than non-fitness-producing traits. For example, it has been argued that the feeling of jealousy has survived over time in men because men who experience jealousy are fitter than those who do not. According to this idea, the experience of jealousy makes men more likely to protect their partners and protect themselves from rivals, thus increasing their reproductive success (Buss, 2000). Despite its importance in psychological theorizing, evolutionary psychology also has some limitations. One problem is that many of their predictions are extremely difficult to test. Unlike fossils, which are used to understand the physical evolution of species, we cannot know what psychological traits our ancestors did or did not possess; we can only speculate on this. Because it is difficult to test evolutionary theories directly, it is always possible that the explanations we employ are invented a posteriori to account for the observed data (Gould and Lewontin, 1979). However, the evolutionary approach is important to psychology because it provides logical explanations for why we have many psychological characteristics.

Psychodynamic psychology

Perhaps the most familiar school of psychology to the general publicpsychodynamic approachto the understanding of behavior, defended by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his followers.psychodynamic psychologyIt is aapproach to understanding human behavior that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings and memories. Freud (Figure 1.6) developed his theories of behavior through extensive analysis of the patients he treated in his private clinical practice. Freud believed that many of the problems his patients experienced, including anxiety, depression and sexual dysfunction, were the result of the effects of painful childhood experiences that they could no longer remember.

Figure 1.6 Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud and the other psychodynamic psychologists believed that many of our thoughts and feelings are unconscious. Psychotherapy was designed to help patients recover and confront their "lost" memories.

Freud's ideas were expanded upon by other psychologists whom he influenced, including Carl Jung (1875–1961), Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Karen Horney (1855–1952), and Erik Erikson (1902–1994). These and others who follow the psychodynamic approach believe that it is possible to help the patient whose unconscious impulses can be recalled, especially through a thorough and thorough exploration of the person's early sexual experiences and current sexual desires. These scans arerevealed through talk therapy and dream analysis in a process called psychoanalysis. The founders of the school of psychodynamics were primarily professionals who worked with individuals to help them understand and confront their psychological symptoms. Although they did little research on their ideas, and although later more sophisticated tests of their theories did not always support their propositions, psychodynamics has nevertheless had a significant impact on psychology and indeed on thinking about human behavior in general. Moore & Fine, 1995). The importance of the unconscious in human behavior, the idea that early childhood experiences are critical, and the concept of therapy as a way to improve human life are all ideas that stem from the psychodynamic approach and remain. center for psychology.

Behaviorism and the question of free will

Although different in focus, both structuralism and functionalism were essentially studies of the mind. Psychologists associated with the schoolbehaviorismThey were, on the other hand, partly responding to the difficulties psychologists encountered when trying to use introspection to understand behavior.behaviorismesa school of psychology based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore psychologists must limit their attention to the study of behavior itself. Behaviorists believe that the human mind is a black box in which stimuli are sent and responses are received. They argue that there is no point in trying to determine what is going on inside the box because we can successfully predict behavior without knowing what is going on inside the mind. Furthermore, behavioral scientists believe that it is possible to develop learning laws that can explain all behavior. The first behaviorist was the American psychologist John B. Watson (1878-1958). Watson was greatly influenced by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), who discovered that dogs salivate at the sound of a tone that had previously been associated with the presentation of food. Watson and the other behaviorists began to use these ideas to explain how events were experienced by humans and other organisms in their environment.stimuli) could produce specific behavior (response). For example, in Pavlov's researchstimulus(either the food or, after learning, the tone) would produceresponseof salivation in dogs. In his research, Watson found that systematically exposing a child to fearful stimuli in the presence of objects that did not themselves evoke fear could cause the child to respond with fearful behavior to the presence of the objects (Watson & Rayner, 1920; Beck, Levinson, & Irons, 2009). In the best known of his studies, an eight-month-old boy named Little Albert was used as a subject. Here is a summary of the results: The child was placed in the middle of a room; A white lab rat was placed near him and he was allowed to play with it. The boy showed no fear of the rat. In subsequent experiments, the researchers made a loud noise behind Albert's back by hitting a steel bar with a hammer each time the baby touched the rat. The boy cried when he heard the noise. After several pairings of the two stimuli, the child was shown the rat again. Now, however, he was crying and trying to get away from the rat. According to the behaviorist approach, the child had learned to associate the white rat with a loud noise that triggered crying.

Figure 1.7 Rails. B. F. Skinner was a member of the behaviorist school of psychology. He argued that free will is an illusion and that all behavior is determined by environmental factors.

The most famous behaviorist was Burrhus Frederick (B.F.) Skinner (1904-1990), who expanded the principles of behaviorism and also brought them to the attention of the general public. Skinner (Figure 1.7) used the ideas of stimulus and response along with the application of rewards orreinforcement, to train pigeons and other animals. And he used the general principles of behaviorism to develop theories about how best to teach children and how to create peaceful and productive societies. Skinner even developed a method for studying thoughts and feelings using the behaviorist approach (Skinner, 1957, 1972).

Behaviorists made significant contributions to psychology by identifying the principles of learning. Although the behaviorists were wrong in their belief that thoughts and feelings could not be measured, their insights provided new insights that helped improve our understanding of the nature-nurture debate and the issue of free will. The ideas of behaviorism are central to psychology and have been developed to help us better understand the role of past experience in a variety of areas of psychology.

The cognitive approach and cognitive neuroscience

Science is always influenced by the technology that surrounds it, and psychology is no exception. It is therefore not surprising that from the 1960s an increasing number of psychologists began to think about the brain and human behavior in terms of the computer that was being developed and available to the public at the time. The analogy between the brain and the computer, while by no means perfect, provided part of the impetus for a new school of psychology calledcognitive psychology.cognitive psychologyesa field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment. These actions correspond well to the processes performed by computers. Although cognitive psychology began in earnest in the 1960s, earlier psychologists had also taken a cognitive orientation. Some of the important contributors to cognitive psychology include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), who studied people's ability to remember lists of words under different conditions, and the English psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969), who studied the cognitive. and social memory processes. Bartlett created short stories that were somewhat logical, but also contained some very unusual and unexpected events. Bartlett found that people had great difficulty remembering the stories accurately, even after being allowed to study them repeatedly, and hypothesized that the stories were difficult to remember because they did not match participants' expectations to how the stories should be. The idea that our memory is influenced by what we already know was also an important idea behind the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget's (1896-1980) model of stages of cognitive development. Other important cognitive psychologists include Donald E. Broadbent (1926–1993), Daniel Kahneman (1934–), George Miller (1920–2012), Eleanor Rosch (1938–), and Amos Tversky (1937–1996).

In its argument that our thinking has a strong influence on behavior, the cognitive approach provided a distinct alternative to behaviorism. According to cognitive psychologists, it will never be enough to ignore the mind itself because people interpret the stimuli they experience. For example, when a guy approaches a girl on a date and says, "You're so beautiful," a behaviorist would likely view this as a reinforcing (positive) stimulus. And yet the girl might not be so easily fooled. She may be trying to understand why the child is making this particular statement at this particular time and wondering if he might be trying to influence her through the comment. Cognitive psychologists argue that when we take into account how stimuli are evaluated and interpreted, we understand behavior more deeply. Cognitive psychology remains hugely influential today, guiding research in areas as diverse as language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, education, human development, social psychology, and psychotherapy. The cognitive revolution has become even more vivid in the last decade as a result of recent advances in our ability to see the brain in action usingneuroimagingtechniquesNeuroimagingesthe use of various techniques to provide images of the structure and function of the living brain(Ilardi & Feldman, 2001). These images are used to diagnose brain disease and injury, but they also allow researchers to see 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 a neuroimaging technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in research focus earlier in this section, and we will discuss the use of neuroimaging techniques in many areas of psychology in the following chapters.

Sociocultural psychology

A final school which requires a higher level of analysis and which has had a significant impact on psychology can be broadly referred to associocultural approach. Field offsociocultural psychologyesthe study of how social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behavior. Sociocultural psychologists are particularly concerned with how people perceive themselves and others, and how people influence the behavior of others. For example, social psychologists have found that we are attracted to others who are similar to us in terms of attitudes and interests (Byrne, 1969), that we develop our own beliefs and attitudes by comparing our opinions with those of others (Festinger, 1954) ). ),alsowe often change our beliefs and behaviors to suit those we care about-a process known asconformity. An important aspect of sociocultural psychology issocial norms—the ways of thinking, feeling or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate(Asch, 1952; Cialdini, 1993). 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 byculturewhere we live and these cultures are studied byintercultural psychologists. INculturerepresentthe common set of social norms, including religious and family values ​​and other moral beliefs, shared by people living in a geographic region(Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Markus, Kitayama, & Heiman, 1996; Matsumoto, 2001). Cultures affect every aspect of our lives, and it is not inappropriate to say that our culture defines our lives as much as our evolutionary experience (Mesoudi, 2009). Psychologists have found that there is a fundamental difference in social norms between Western cultures (including those in Canada, the United States, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) and East Asian cultures (including those in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia). Norms in Western cultures are primarily oriented towardindividualism, which is aboutValuing oneself and one's own independence from others.. Children in Western cultures are taught to develop and value a sense of self and to a large extent see themselves as separate from the other people around them. Children in Western cultures feel special about themselves; they enjoy earning gold stars on their projects and valedictorian grades. Adults in Western cultures are geared to promote their own individual success, often in comparison to (or even at the expense of) others. Norms in East Asian culture, on the other hand, are oriented toward interdependence orcollectivism. In these cultures children are taught toFocus on developing harmonious social relationships with others.The prevailing norms relate to group cohesion and affiliation, and duty and responsibility towards family and other groups. When asked to describe themselves, members of East Asian cultures are more likely than those of Western cultures to indicate that they are particularly concerned with the interests of others, including their close friends and colleagues (Figure 1.8, “East versus West” ). .

Figure 1.8 East vs. West. In Western cultures, social norms promote a focus on oneself (individualism), while in Eastern cultures, one focuses more on families and social groups (collectivism).

Another important cultural difference is the extent to which people from different cultures are subject to social norms and customs, rather than being free to express their own individuality without regard to social norms (Chan, Gelfand, Triandis, & Tzeng, 1996). Cultures also differ in terms of personal space, such as how close individuals stand when speaking, as well as the communication styles they employ. Being aware of cultures and cultural differences is important because people of different cultural backgrounds are increasingly coming 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 example, there are many different ethnic groups, and the proportion of the population that comes from minority groups (non-white) is increasing year by year. The sociocultural approach to understanding behavior reminds us again of the difficulty in making broad generalizations about human nature. Different people experience things differently, and they experience things differently in different cultures.

The many disciplines of psychology

Psychology is not a discipline, but a collection of many sub-disciplines that share at least some common approaches and that work together and exchange knowledge to form a coherent discipline (Yang & Chiu, 2009). Because the field of psychology is so broad, students may wonder which fields are best suited to their interests and what types of careers may be available to them. Table 1.5, "Some Career Paths in Psychology," will help you consider the answers to these questions. You can learn more about these different fields of psychology and the careers associated with them athttp://www.psyccareers.com/.

Psychology in everyday life: how to learn and remember effectively

One way in which psychological research findings can be particularly useful to you is in improving your learning and study skills. Psychological research has provided a significant amount of insight into the principles of learning and memory. This information can help you perform 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 tasks. There are significant 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 spend studying is worth it. And you can learn to learn: Learning to study effectively and remember information is just like learning any other skill, like playing a sport or a video game.

To learn well, you must be ready to learn. You cannot study well when you are tired, stressed or abusing alcohol or drugs. Try to maintain a consistent sleeping and eating routine. Eat moderately and nutritiously, and avoid substances that can affect memory, especially alcohol. There is no evidence that stimulants like caffeine, amphetamines, or any of the many "memory enhancing drugs" on the market help you learn (Gold, Cahill, & Wenk, 2002; McDaniel, Maier, & Einstein, 2002). Memory supplements are generally no more effective than drinking a can of sugary soda, which releases glucose and therefore slightly improves memory.

Psychologists have studied the ways that best allow people to acquire new information, retain it over time, and retrieve information that has been stored in our memory. An important discovery is that learning is an active process. To obtain information most effectively, we must actively manipulate it. An active approach is repetition: repeating the information to be learned over and over again. Although simple repetition helps us learn, psychological research has found that we acquire information more effectively when we actively think about or elaborate on its meaning and relate the material to something else. When you study, try to expand by connecting the information to other things you already know. For example, if you want to remember the different schools of psychology, try to think about how each approach differs from the others. When comparing the approaches, determine what is most important about each and then relate this to the characteristics of the other approaches.

In a larger study demonstrating the effectiveness of elaborative encoding, Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977) found that students learned information better when they related it to aspects of themselves (a phenomenon known asself-reference effect). This research suggests that imagining how the material relates to your own interests and goals will help you learn it. An approach known asloci metodeit involves associating each piece of information you need to remember with places you are familiar with. You might think of the house you grew up in and the rooms in it. You could put the behaviorists in the bedroom, the structuralists in the living room and the functionalists in the kitchen. Then, when you need to recall the information, you will retrieve the mental image of your house and you should be able to "see" each person in each area.

One of the most basic principles of learning is known asdistance effect. Both humans and animals remember or learn material more easily when they study the material in several shorter study periods over a longer period of time, rather than studying it only once over a longer period of time. Studying for a test is a particularly inefficient way to learn. Psychologists have also found that performance improves when people set difficult but realistic goals for themselves (Locke & Latham, 2006). You can use this knowledge to learn. Set realistic goals for how much time you want to spend studying and what you want to learn, and try to stick to those goals. Do a small amount every day and by the end of the week you will have achieved a lot.

Our ability to adequately assess our own knowledge is known asmetakognition. Research suggests that our metacognition can make us overconfident, making us think we've learned material even when we haven't. To counteract this problem, don't review your notes over and over again. Instead, make a list of questions and see if you can answer them. Study the information again and test yourself again after a few minutes. If you made a mistake, read again. Then wait half an hour and test yourself again. Then test again after one day and after two days. Testing yourself by actively trying to retrieve information is better than just studying the material because it will help you determine if you really know it. In short, everyone can learn to learn better. Learning is an important skill and following the guidelines mentioned above will likely help you learn better.