THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY
THIS CHAPTER ISABOUT
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Early Antecedents of Psychological Thought
Structuralism
Functionalism and Pragmatism
Associationism and Behaviorism
Gestalt Psychology
Cognitivism
Biological Psychology
Psychodynamic Theory and Humanistic Psychology
2.1. Early Antecedents of Psychological Thought
A. Ancient Greece
1. Plato
a. Plato (Ca. 428—348 B.C.). an ancient Greek philosopher, believed that the mind resides in the brain.
According to Plato. reality resides not in the concrete objects of which we are aware through our bodily
senses, but in the abstract forms that these objects represent. These abstract forms exist in a timeless
dimension of pure abstract thought. Thus, reality is not inherent in any particular chair we see or touch, but
in the eternal abstract idea of a chair that exists in our minds.
b. Plato is regarded as among the first of the rationalist thinkers. Rationalists tend to prefer theory to
observation, to emphasize innate rather than acquired ideas, and to prefer to reason from the general to the
specific (deduction) rather than from the specific to the general (induction).
2. Aristotle
a.
Aristotle (ca. 384—322 B.C.), an ancient Greek philosopher and student of Plato, believed that the mind
resides in the heart. According to Aristotle, reality lies in the concrete objects of which the senses are aware.
Thus, the reality of a chair we see lies in that chair, rather than in any abstract idea of it.
b. Aristotle is regarded as among the first of the empiricist thinkers. An empiricist tends to emphasize
observation rather than theory, to emphasize acquired rather than innate ideas, and to reason from the
specific to the general rather than from the general to the specific.
B. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
During the Middle Ages. Western philosophers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas tended to
dwell more on the afterlife than on life itself, and so there was less progress than in other eras toward under
standing psychological principles. During the Renaissance, humanist thinkers such as Desiderius Erasmus
started investigating the role of humans in the world, and thus redirecting attention toward people in the
world. Francis Bacon, a Renaissance philosopher, proposed that scientific theory should be based purely on
empirical observations, and not on theory at all,
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C. The beginnings of the modern period
1. During the 1600s and early 1700s, many of the issues dealt with by Plato and Aristotle returned to
center stage. In particular, a battle ensued between rationalists and empiricists.
2. Iené Descartes (1596—1650) disagreed with Bacon’s emphasis on empirical methods. A rationalist like
Plato, Descartes proposed a view known as mind—body dualism, according to which the mind and the body
are qualitatively different and separate. Descartes believed that the dualistic nature of mind and body is what
separates humans from other animals,
3,
John Locke (1632—1704), an empiricist, believed that the interaction between mind and body is a
symmetrical relationship between two aspects of the same unified phenomenon. Whereas Descartes
believed in innate ideas, Locke believed that people are born with their minds in the form of a tabula rasa,
or a blank slate, upon which experience would write itself.
4. By the end of the eighteenth century, Inimanuel Kant (1724—1804) sought to synthesize the positions
of the rationalists and the empiricists. He redefined the mind—body question by asking how the mind and
body are related, rather than whether the mind is simply separate from the body or not. Kant suggested a set
of faculties, or mental powers: the senses, understanding, and reason. He proposed that the faculties,
working in concert, control and provide a link between mind and body, integrating the two,
5. Kant also distinguished between two forms of knowledge. A priori knowledge is knowledge that is true
regardless of human experience. A posteriori knowledge is knowledge gained from experience. For
example, the fact that 2 + 2 =4 is true a priori, but the fact that George Washington was the first president
of the United States is true a posteriori, as a result of experience.
2.2. Structuralism
A. Main ideas
1. Structuralism is generally considered to be the first major school of thought in psychology. Its goal was
to understand the structure (or configuration of elements) of the mind by analyzing the mind into its
constituent components or contents,
2. An important leader of the structuralist movement, and to some the father of experimental psychology,
was Wilhelm Wundt (1832—1920), a German psychologist. Wundt believed that psychology should focus
on immediate and direct conscious experience. For example, suppose you look at a green, grassy lawn. To
Wundt, the concepts of lawn and grass would be of no interest. Wundt would want to know exactly what
you see—your elementary sensations—for example, narrow, vertical, spiky, green protrusions of varying
lengths and widths, amassed closely together on a twodimensiona1 surface.
3.
Wundt believed that the main method through which analyses of sensations should be done is through
introspection, or the analysis of the contents of our own thoughts. Wundt and other structuralists trained
students to use this method so as to let individual biases influence their work as little as possible.
4. A student of Wundt, Edward Titchener (1867—1927), held views generally similar to those of Wundt.
Titchener, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, believed that all consciousness could be reduced
to three elementary states: sensations—the basic elements of perception; images—the pictures we form in
our minds to characterize what we perceive; and affections—the constituents of emotions such as love and
hate.
B. Critiques
Structuralism was criticized on several grounds.
1. Structuralism was viewed as static—as dealing only with structure, not with function.
2. Introspection never yielded the kind of cross-observer agreement for which the structuralists had hoped.
even after careful training of the observers.
3. The number of proposed elementary sensations grew impossibly large, suggesting that the goal of
parsimony in science was not being met.
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College Outline for Psychology
2.3. Functionalism and Pragmatism
A. Main ideas
1. Functionalism, all American-born movement, changed the basic question asked in psycholo
gy from one of the elementary contents of the human mind to one of what people do and why they
do it. Functionalists sought to understand how certain kinds of stimuli lead to certain kinds of
responses.
2.
James Rowland Angel! suggested three basic precepts of functionalism: (a) the study of mental
processes. (b) the study of the uses of consciousness, and (c) the study of the total relationship of the organ
ism to its environment.
3.
Functionalism was less unified than had been structuralism: Functionalists were united more by the
kinds of questions they asked than by the exact theories they proposed or methods the’ used.
4. An outgrowth of functionalism was pragmatism, whose followers believed that knowledge is validated
by its usefulness. The main question about psychological knowledge thus became, for pragmatists, one of
its utility.
5.
A leader in the functionalist movement was William James (1842—1910). a professor at Harvard. whose
Principles of Psychology (1890) is considered to have been among the most influential works in all
of psychology.
6.
Another leader, John Dewey (1859—1952) of the University of Chicago. contributed especially to
the study of the implications of functionalist psychology for education. Dewey argued. for example. that
motivation is extremely important in learning, and that for students to learn effectively, they need to see the
practical use of what they are learning.
B. Critiques
There were several critiques of functionalism and pragmatism.
1.
The school was vague in what it meant by a “function.”
2.
Functionalism was never really unified as a school, and so it was criticized for failing to deliver a coherent
philosophy or even point of view.
3.
Emphasizing th use of knowledge might tend to impede or diminish basic research, whose immediate
applications are often not clear but whose long-term applications are often as great as or even greater than
those of more short-term, applied research.
2,4. Associationism and Behaviorism
A. Main ideas
1. Associationism examines how events or ideas can become associated with one another in the mind, to
result in a form of learning. This focus on relatively higher level processes runs counter to the emphasis of
\Vundt, in structuralism. on elementar’ sensations.
2.
An influential German associationist was Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850—1909). the first experimenter
to apply associationist principles systematically. Ebhinghaus used himself as his only experimental
participant in order to study and quantify the relation between rehearsal—conscious repetition of
material—and recollection of that material.
3. Ebbinghaus’s ideas were elaborated by Edwin Guthrie (1886—1959), who observed animals, Guthrie
proposed that two observed events (a stimulus and a response) become associated through their close
temporai contiguity (i.e.. their occurring very close together in time. That is. a stimulus and response
become associated because they continually occur at about the same time.
4. Edward Lee Thorndike (1874l949) proposed an alternative point of viex. namel. that the
key to forming associations is reward rather than temporal contiguity. In Thorndike’s law of’ effect,
a stimulus will tend to produce a certain response over time if the organism is rewarded for that
response.
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5. Other investigators went beyond Guthrie and Thorndike to propose an even stronger and stricter
paradigm for psychological research, Behaviorism is an extreme version of associationism that focuses
exclusively on the observable relation between stimulus and response and denies the importance to
science of internal states.
6. Among the first behaviorists was John Watson (1878—1958), who disdained the importance of mental
states, and believed that he could take any baby and basically mold that baby into whatever he wanted, using
principles of learning theory.
7. In more recent times, B. F. Skinner (1904—1990) elaborated on behaviorist ideas through the
experimental analysis of behavior, Skinner believed that even complex language and problem-solving
skills could be understood in terms of emitted behavior in response to environmental contingencies Skinner
wrote a novel, Walden II, about a Utopian society based upon the principles of the experimental analysis
of behavior,
B. Critiques
1. Behaviorism, in ignoring internal states, dismissed much of what has been of greatest interest to many
psychologists.
2. Behavioristic principles never provided a fully adequate account of complex processes, such as language
acquisition and problem solving.
3.
As pointed out by Edward Tohnan (1886—1959), animals could learn things about a maze that they did not
show in their performance, suggesting that observed responses were not an adequate measure of learning.
2.5. Gestalt Psychology
A. Main ideas
1. Gestalt psychology was an attempt to understand psychological phenomena as organized, structured
wholes, rather than as individual unrelated elements, This movement was thus a reaction to associationist and
some behaviorist attempts to break down behaviors into stimulus—response units, as well as to the
structuralist attempt to analyze perceptions into constituent elementary sensations. Gestalt psychologists
were known for their belief that “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.”
2. Three leaders in this field, all originally born in Germany, were Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), Kurt
Koffica (1886—1941), and Wolfgang Köhler (1887—1968), who studied primarily perceptual and problemsolving processes. They are particularly well known for their studies of principles of perceptual
organization and for their studies of insightful problem solving.
3. Although Gestalt psychologists emphasized studies of holistic processing, they believed that all such
processing ultimately could be accounted for in terms of as yet unspecified physiological events,
B. Critiques
1. The movement tended more to label phenomena than to explain them. For example, although the
Gestaltists did a number of interesting studies of insight, they never really specified how insight took place.
2. Even the descriptions of functioning provided by the Gestaltists were often vague and more demonstrations
than they were detailed descriptions of how people function,
3. Simply saying that physiological processes underlay cognitive functioning said nothing about what form
these physiological processes took,
2.6, Cognitivism
A. Main ideas
1. Cognitivism is the belief that much of human behavior can be understood if we understand how people
think, Cognitivists are interested both in how information is represented and in how information is processed
in the mind,
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College Outline for Psychology
2. Allen Newell. Herbert Simon, and Clifford Shaw were instrumental in drawing interest to their
computer simulations, during the late I 950s. of logical theorem proving. In other words, they programmed
computers to prove fairly complex logical theorems. By 1972. Newell and Simon showed how cognitive
techniques could be applied to formulate a comprehensive theory of human problem solving.
3. George Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram were also instrumental in bringing the cognitivist
approach to the fore in their classic book, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960).
4, A road map for how the field could proceed was provided by Ulric Neisser in his 1967 text, Cognitive Psychology
which defined cognitive psychology as the study of how people learn, structure, store, and use knowledge.
B. Critiques
Cognitivism. unlike many of the other paradigms described earlier, is still actively being pursued.
Nevertheless, it has been criticized on several grounds.
1. The view of the human as processing information like a serial computer, that is, step by step. has been
criticized by individuals such as David Rumelhart and James McClelland, who have argued that the
massive parallel processing of information by the brain provides a better model for cognition than does the
serial computer.
2. Some theorists, including one of the above-mentioned founders of cognitive psychology. Ulric Neisser,
have criticized cognitivists for being insensitive to the effects of the surrounding context in which a
person processes information. For example, someone might do a task in one way in a laboratory. but in a
very different way in his or her daily life.
3. Cognitivists have also been criticized for emphasizing thought at the expense of emotion and motivation.
2,7. Biological Psychology
A. Main ideas
1. Biological psychology seeks to understand behavior by carefully studying anatomy and physiology,
especially of the brain. Its roots go back to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. who believed that the
brain controls many other parts of the body.
2. Karl Lashley tried, in the middle of the twentieth century, to isolate parts of the brain responsible for
various kinds of psychological functioning, but without much success. Later investigators found that
Lashley’s lack of success was due in large part to his not having the sophisticated equipment needed to local
ize various forms of functioning.
3. Roger Sperry (1920—1994) succeeded in showing that the two halves of the brain, often referred to as
the right and left hemispheres, function in very different ways, despite the fact that they interact with each
other. Jerre Levy, a student of Sperry. has suggested that the left hemisphere tends to process information
more analytically: the right hemisphere. more holistically.
4. Recent investigators such as Michael Posner, Michael Gazzaniga, and Stephen Kosslyn have
succeeded where Lashley failed, showing the mapping of quite specific perceptual and imaginal processes to
specific regions of the brain.
B. Critiques
1. Some have criticized biological psychologists for being too reductionist—for seeking to find ultimate
answers in biology and not in other levels of processing as well. Of course, many biological psychologists
do indeed believe that the ultimate answers to the questions of psychology will be found through the study
of the brain.
2. Biological psychology tends to deal with processes at a
very molecular level. At present. at least, it is
not yet useful for understanding more global questions. such as why one person might prefer a conservative
political candidate while another prefers a liberal political candidate.
3. Biological psychology, like cognitive psychology, has had relatively little to say about contextual
influences, such as how culture affects the behavior that biological psychologists study.
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2.8, Psychodynamic Theory and Humanistic Psychology
A. Main ideas
1. Psychodynamic theory is a theory of human motivations and behavior that emphasizes the importance
of early childhood in conthbuting to later adult adjustment. The theory originated with Sigmund Freud
(1856—1939), who is widely considered to have been one of the most original and influential thinkers in all
of the history of psychology. Freud believed that much of the most important thinking we do is unconscious
rather than conscious: We are not even aware of it ourselves. Freud also emphasized the importance of
sexual motivations in driving our behavior.
2. Neo-Freudian theorists such as Carl Jung and Erik Erikson placed less emphasis on sexual motiva
tion than did Freud. Jung, like Freud, heavily emphasized the unconscious, whereas Erikson placed more
emphasis on conscious thinking.
3. Humanistic psychologists, such as Abraham Maslow (1908—1970) and Carl Rogers (1902—1987),
emphasized conscious rather than unconscious experience in personal development, and also suggested that
people have more control over their lives than Freud had granted them. Humanistic psychology stresses the
importance of free will and of the realization of our human potentid. Rogers further believed that we
benefit, in adjusting successfully to the demands of later life, from unconditional positive regard from our
parents when we are children.
B. Critiques
1. Both psychodynamic and humanistic approaches have been criticized for being ihsufficiently specified
in order to allow adequate scientific tests of their tenets.
2. Psychoanalysis has been criticized for placing too much emphasis on the role of sexual motivation in behavior.
3.
Humanism has been criticized for lacking specificity in regard to its accounts of human behavior.
IiTLihii
1.
Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, is regarded as among the first of the rationalist thinkers,
Rationalists tend to emphasize theory, innate ideas, and reasoning from the general to the specific
2.
Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher and student of Plato, is regarded as among the first of the
empiricist thinkers. Empiricists tend to emphasize observation, acquired ideas, and to reason from
the specific to the general.
3.
During the Middle Ages, great philosophers such as St. Augustine and Si Thomas Aquinas
concentrated more on the afterlife than on life itself, Renaissance thinkers such as Desiderius
Erasmus, moved toward an emphasis on the understanding of the human in his or her lifetime.
4.
During the beginning of the modem period (1600s and early 1700s), an intellectual battle ensued
between rationalist thinkers, such as René Descartes, and empiricist thinkers, such as John Locke,
Descartes argued for mind—body dualism, the notion that the mind and body are qualitatively
different in kind, whereas Locke argued for a unified view of mind and body, and for the idea that
people are born with their minds in the form of a tabula rasa, or blank slate,
5.
Immanuel Kant sought to synthesize the positions of the rationalists and the empiricists by
proposing that both a priori knowledge, knowledge that is true regardless of human experience,
and a posteriori knowledge, knowledge that is gained from experience, are important.
6.
Structuralism is generally considered to be the first major school of thought in psychology.
Its goal was to understand the structure of the mind by analyzing the mind into the elementary
sensations it experiences. The main methodology used by structuralists was introspection, or the
analysis of the contents of one’s own thoughts.
7.
Functionalism changed the basic question asked in psychology from one of the elementary
contents of the human mind to one of what people do and why they do it. An outgrowth of func
tionalism, pragmatism, suggested that knowledge is validated by its usefulness,
college Outline for Psychology
16
8. Associationism examined how events or ideas come to be associated with one another in the mind, to
result in a form of learning. Edwin Guthrie emphasized the role of temporal contiguity in the forma
tion of associations, whereas Edward Thorndike emphasized the role of reward in his law of effect.
9. Behaviorism is an extreme version of associationism that focuses exclusively on the observable
relation between stimulus and response and that denies the importance to science of internal states.
A leading behaviorist, B. F. Skinner, suggested that all human functioning could be understood in
terms of what he called the experimental analysis of behavior.
10. Gestalt psychology was an attempt to understand psychological phenomena as organized,
structured wholes, rather than as individual unrelated elements. This movement emphasized that
the whole is different from the sum of its parts.
11. Cognitivism is the belief that much of human behavior can be understood if we understand how
people think. Cognitivists are interested both in how information is represented and in how it is
processed in the mind.
12. Biological psychology seeks to understand behavior by carefully studying anatomy and physiology.
especially of the brain, and how they relate to behavior.
13. Psychodynamic theory is a theory of human motivations and behavior that emphasizes the
importance of early childhood in contributing to later adult adjustment.
14. Humanistic theory emphasizes conscious rather than unconscious processing. and also the
importance of free will and the development of human potential.
Key Terms
a posteriori knowledge
a priori knowledge
associationism
behaviorism
biological psychology
cognitivism
empiricism
faculties
functionalism
Gestalt psychology
humanistic psychology
introspection
law of effect
mind—body dualism
neo-Freudian theorist
pragmatism
psychodynamic theory
rationalism
structuralism
tabula rasa
temporal contiguity
Solved Problems
A. Select the best response option from among the four that are given.
Immanuel Kant sought to elucidate the mind—body question by
A. postulating that the mind and body are independent constructs.
B. questioning the efficacy of science for studying innate ideas.
C. proposing how both the mind and body are related to a third construct called a tabula rasa.
D. proposing a link between mind and body through faculties, or mental powers.
2.
Introspection is
A. a scientific method used to study dreams.
B. a psychotherapeutic technique where the patient gives a running account of internal dialogues.
C. a process used to uncover symbolic representations in dreams.
D. the analysis of the contents of our own thoughts.
3.
Cognitivism has been criticized on the grounds that it
A. is vague as to the processes involved in complex problem solving.
B. is insensitive to the effects of surrounding context on how a person processes information.
C. has failed to come up with adequate models for conceptualizing perceptual processes.
D. fails to take into account the importance of how people think in understanding human
behavior.
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4. The law of effect states that
A. close temporal contiguity is the key characteristic in forming an association between stimulus
and response.
B. a response will be strengthened if the organism is rewarded for that response.
C. responses that are performed regularly become habituated.
D. responses generalize across similar surroundings.
5. Edward Tolman, who was an influential figure in learning theory, proposed that
A. learning should not be gauged only by observable responses.
B. he could take any baby and essentially mold it into whatever he wanted.
C. the mental states of animals can be quantifiably measured.
D. learning should be studied in terms of its practical relevance,
6. Humanistic theorists, such as Rogers and Maslow,
A. placed more emphasis on instinctual, sexual drives than Freud did,
B. tried to combine the behavioral and psychoanalytic traditions in an attempt to understand
human behavior.
C. emphasized the importance of infantile experiences in adult development.
D. placed emphasis on conscious experiences, free will, and the realization of human potential.
7. Gestalt psychologists sought to understand psychological phenomena as organized, structured
wholes, This approach was particularly evident in their study of
A. perceptual organization and insightful problem solving.
B. computer simulations of complex problem solving.
C. instinctual drives and unconscious motivations,
D. unrelated components of sensation.
B. Match a person associated with each school of psychology.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Behaviorism
Cognitivism
Functionalism
Structuralism
Associationism
Psychodynamic theory
Gestalt theory
Humanistic theory
Biological psychology
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
F.
G.
H.
I.
Sigmund Freud
Carl Rogers
Herbert Simon
John Watson
Wolfgang Köhler
Karl Lashley
James Angell
Wilhelm Wundt
Herman Ebbinghaus
C. Answer T (true) or F (false) to each of the following statements.
17. A difference between Aristotle and Plato is that Plato believed in inducing from the specific to the
general, and in an unconscious mind, whereas Aristotle believed in a mind that becomes formed
through acquired experiences.
18. A posteriori knowledge is knowledge that is acquired through experience.
19. Functionalism was the first Americanborn psychological movement that sought to explore not just
what structures underlie mental processes, but to what uses these structures are put.
20. Behaviorism, whose founder was John Watson, is concerned with how internal states are involved
in behavioral functioning.
21. Gestalt psychology can be considered, in some respects, to be an antithesis of structuralism,
22. Cognitivism as a school of psychology eventually subsided when recent researchers were unable
to map specific perceptual and imaginal processes to specific regions of the brain.
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College Outline for Psychology
23. Wilhelm Wundt is often credited with starting the first psychological laboratory in Germany
in 1879.
24. An outgrowth of structuralism, pragmatism, was concerned with the study of components of
consciousness and their interrelation.
25. Often considered one of the founders of American psychology, William James was an influential
figure in the study of emotion and the stream of consciousness.
1. D; 2. D;3. B;4. B;5.A;6. D; 7.A; 8.D;9. C; lO.G; 11. H; 12.!; 13.A; 14. E; 15. B; l6.F; 17. F(Plato
believed in innate ideas and in deduction—reasoning from the general to the specific); 18. T; 19. T; 20. F
(behaviorists are concerned only with behavior, not with internal states); 21. T; 22. F (cognitivism is still
alive today and has been successful in mapping specific imaginal and perceptual processes to certain regions
of the brain); 23. T; 24. F (pragmatism grew out of functionalism and was concerned with the utility of
psychological knowledge); 25. T.