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Conceptual and Historical Issues II: History of Psychology (Lite!)

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

Practice exam questions:

Q1. Who would you associate with a critique of Psychology as a science?

A.  Wilhelm Wundt

B.  Edward Titchener

C.  Rod Cooper

D.  Gustav Fechner

Practice exam questions:

Q1. Approaching the mind to ascertain its elements is the ________approach

A.  introspective

B.  psychophysical

C.  empirical positivist

D.  structuralist

Impossible to do in an hour

Enough material for a book in 1808!

Why study history?

1. Where are we going, where have we been?

2. Binds different types of psychology together

3. Ideas! e.g. Carey & Allan 1996

4. “Present-ist” bias in current publications--is newer better?

5. Setting your own research into context

Behaviour, humans as animals

Human uniqueness; consciousness; the soul

Behaviours are all innate

Behaviours are all learned

Biology, microbiology, genetics, genomics

Sociology, politics, anthropology (parts of)

Cognition and neuro Applied, social, developmental

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Psychophysics-attempts to quantify the lawful relationships between physical stimuli and their perceptual consequences e.g. j.n.d., mathematical functions relating percepts to stimuli, etc.

The origins of experimental psychology

e.g. Weber (1795-1878)

* first two factor repeated measures design on weight discrimination--led to “Weber’s Law” which holds true in most sense modalities

* developed experimental paradigms later used by Wundt, Fechner and other early experimental psychologists

Psychophysics Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) * Elements of Psychophysics (1860)

“Psychophysics is an exact theory about the functional relationships between body and soul and between the bodily, mental, somatic and psychological worlds” (1860)

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) * his first publication was a study on himself--he deprived himself of any salt to see its effect on the content of his urine!

* published his first book “Contributions Toward a Theory of Sense Perception” in 1862. He outlined his plans for psychology--a science which examined the nature of consciousness. Two more books followed in 1873 and 1874 on “physiological psychology”

credited with establishing the first experimental psychology laboratory in the world--Leipzig, 1875? 1879?

example experiment: vision of a swinging pendulum slightly ahead of the sound it makes

* he began a journal called “Philosophical Studies” (1881) which he wanted to call “Psychological Studies” but the title was taken!

• Wundt endorsed two psychologies: a natural science part of psychology which dealt with sensation and perception, memory, attention etc. and a “folk psychology” which was more descriptive and cultural: he wrote extensively on religion, language, culture, law and art

• This latter kind of psychology could not be studied usually traditional methods of science such as the experiments done by Wundt and the Psychophysicists Weber, Fechner, and others

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

Edward Titchener (1867-1927) * psychology as a study of the structure of mind/consciousness: what are its elements? His approach is called “structuralism” * “introspection” is a perfectly reasonable method for psychology * three basic elements of consciousness: sensations, images and affections (feelings) * concluded that there were at least 44,000 different sensations (32,000 + visual and 12,000 auditory, but only 4 taste)

His approach is an example of structuralism: studying the mind in order to classify its constituents, or elements

According to Titchener, Psychology could be just like biology- the structure of an organ like the liver can be considered separately from its function—to filter toxins out of the blood. If we just do the latter (e.g. what is memory for) we fall back into philosophising in our armchairs.

So in early days, psychology should deal with the parts of the mind – we could work our how they work and what they are for LATER.

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Charles Darwin (1809-1882) •  read works by Malthus on population growth and food production * Ships naturalist on H.M.S. Beagle •  Catalogues many species on a three year voyage to Central and South America •  Galapagos islands NB-different species of tortoise and finch on separate islands clearly had common ancestors but different specialisations for their environment

•  massive influences on psychology: 1. Behaviours can be inherited and selected for (e.g. Francis Galton) (Darwin calls them “instincts”) 2. Inspired much comparative psychology (e.g. animal intelligence)

Induction 1: Organisms have an enormous capacity to overproduce.

Induction 2: Populations (with a few exceptions) remain remarkably stable.

Deduction 1: There must be a struggle for survival.

Evolution by Natural Selection: The Theory

•  Induction 3: Individuals differ in their characteristics and many of these differences are heritable (e.g. horse breeding).

•  Deduction 2: Those individuals who possess adaptive characteristics will reproduce more successfully than those who don’t and will pass on these characteristics to their offspring.

•  This second deduction is, effectively natural selection

Natural Selection: The Theory

Francis Galton (1822-1911) • heavily influenced by Darwin

• individual differences N.B.—what is the range of variation in human ability?

• interested in “eugenics”--led to his measurement of 9,337 people at the London Exhibition in 1884

• popularised phrase “nature versus nurture” with English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874)

• applied the normal curve (astronomy!) to human test data: mental characteristics are inherited just like physical ones

• first questionnaire (?) To 200 Fellows of the Royal Society in response to a critique of his book by a Swiss botanist

* developed correlation techniques

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Functionalism •  approaching the mind in terms of how it works, not what its elements are

•  interactions with the environment are crucial; not just static innate structures that we are born with

•  Darwinian natural selection as an important guiding principle

•  roots in the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain: “a belief is just that upon which a man is willing to act”

* William James (1842-1910) consciousness is not just the steam of the activities of the brain, it must have evolved to do something, to have some function: e.g. seeing in advance the best course of action, inhibiting “hair trigger “reflexes. “Consciousness is a fighter for ends”

John Dewey (1859-1952); “the reflex arc” stimulus->sensation->response as a coordinated whole rather than as separable, analyzable component

Functionalism

* William James (1842-1910) consciousness is not just the steam of the activities of the brain, it must have evolved to do something, to have some function: e.g. seeing in advance the best course of action, inhibiting “hair trigger “reflexes. “Consciousness is a fighter for ends”

John Dewey (1859-1952); “the reflex arc” stimulus-> sensation->response as a coordinated whole rather than as separable, analyzable component

Functionalism •  approaching the mind in terms of how it works, not what its elements are

•  “Psychologists have hithero devoted the larger part of their energy to investigating the structure of the mind. Of late, however, there has been manifest a disposition to deal more fully with its functional and genetic phases. To determine how consciousness develops and how it operates is felt to be quite as important as its constituent elements”.

James Roland Angell (1904)

Functionalism •  approaching the mind in terms of how it works, not what its elements are

Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949) psychology should be the study of stimulus-response (S-R) connections. Lots of work with animals and early learning theory

* Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) worked with dogs on classical conditioning John B. Watson (1878-1958) • worked with white lab rats for his Ph.D at University of Chicago

• “Psychology as the behaviorist views it” (1913): “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Intropsection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientitfic value of the data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.” (p.158)

* e.g. thinking should be studied by recording the subtle movements of the larynx

Out of functionalist approaches and frustration re: all this waffle about consciousness, thought, feeling etc. comes BEHAVIOURISM

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B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) • developed the “Skinner Box” while a Ph.D student at Harvard

•  defined what would become known as “operant” conditioning, worked on shaping, schedules of reinforcement

• “Project Pigeon” during WWI worked on turning pigeons into guidance systems against enemy planes!

* Walden Two (1948) fictional account of a utopian society built on behaviourist principles (much later Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) nonfictional account on same subject)

Although everyone fusses about behaviorism…

“functionalism was critically important, not only to the launching of behaviorism in America, but also to much of the psychological testing industry and various other branches of applied psychology that are with us to this very day”.

Green (2008). Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 44(3), 286-289 (book review and author’s response)

The histories of psychology tend to be about experimental psychology.

Then The Cognitive “Revolution”:

“As Chomsky remarked, defining psychology as the science of behavior was like defining physics as the science of meter reading. If scientific psychology were to succeed, mentalistic concepts would have to integrate and explain the behavioral data (Miller, 2003)

Although interested in behavior, cognitive psychologists use it to make inferences about unobservable constructs like memory, attention, object recognition, semantics, etc.

They liken the mind (and brain) to a series of information processing systems (with structuralist but some functionalist undertones Carey thinks), and computer metaphors dominate (networks, parallel processes, modules).

Then “The Cognitive Revolution”:

“As Chomsky remarked, defining psychology as the science of behavior was like defining physics as the science of meter reading. If scientific psychology were to succeed, mentalistic concepts would have to integrate and explain the behavioral data (Miller, 2003, Trends in Cogn Sci)

Foreshadowed by Frederick Bartlett (1886-1969) in UK

Learning lists of nonsense syllables is too artificial to tell you much about human memory

Thinking isn’t just subvocal speech

Noam Chomsky (1928-)

Rejuvenated linguistics in psychology; argued against learning models for human language acquisition

Universal grammar underlying all human language

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Jerome Bruner (1915-)

ideas related to educational methods and cognitive growth

People are great categorisers and categorising is crucial to learning

•  Learning objectives:

1.  Know what psychophysics and behaviourism are 2.  Know what structuralism is 3.  Know what functionalism is 4.  Know how Darwin and functionalism both contributed to

behaviorism 5.  Know that Skinner and Watson are the two key figures

associated with behaviorism 6.  Know that Chomsy, Bruner, and Miller are key names

associated with the cognitive revolution 7.  Associate computer science metaphors with cognitive

psychology 8.  Know that Carey is really a behaviourist, born 25 years too

late. But some of his best friends are coggies!