Essay About Study Of Behaviorism Dates And Wundts Early Students

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Psych Two Take-Home Essay
The study of Behaviorism dates can be traced back to the classical Greek philosophers,
and goes into the nineteenth and twentieth-century psychology. Below is a list of
fundamental psychologists and their contributions.
* Greeks
Philosophers and psychologists have been intrigued with the human thought process for
thousands of years, with one of the first being the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He
presented some of the first operational methods in how human learning and memory are
formed. He also emphasized the importance of mental imagery.
* Wundt
William Wundt is considered the father of Psychology when he opened his laboratory in
Leipzig, Germany. With this done, Wundt separated the disciplines of philosophy and
physiology and psychology emerged as a new and separate discipline. G. Stanley Hall was
one of Wundts early students, and was important in that he contributed to psychologys
rapid growth in America.
Hall opened Americas first psychological research lab at John Hopkins University in
1883. A few years after that, Hall launched Americas first Psychology journal. Finally,
in 1892, he pushed to establish the American Psychological Association (APA), and was
elected as the first president. Today, the APA is the worlds largest organization that
strives to further psychological research, and has over 14,000 members.
Wundt also proposed that psychology should study mental processes via a method called
introspection. Introspection is where trained observers would pay careful attention to
their own sensations and try to report them as subjectively as possible. The observers
were encouraged to describe the sensations they felt, rather than the stimuli that
produced it.
Wundt worked hard for fifty years to promote his introspection technique through various
conferences and journals. His techniques have been incorporated into todays research on
cognitive processes. Wundt also emphasized the importance of replications, where the
phenomenon in experiments would be tested under different conditions. Although Wundts
methods are similar to todays methods in cognitive research, he wrote that introspection
could not investigate higher level mental processes such as thinking, language, and
critical thinking.
On a final note about Wundt and his colleagues, they subscribed to the school of
structuralism, which was based on the belief that the goal of psychology is to analyze
consciousness into basic elements and investigate how these elements relate. The end goal
of structuralists was to identify and examine the fundamental components of living, like
sensations, feelings and images–in a way, an early study of cognition.
* Ebbinghaus/Calkins
Hermann Ebbinghaus was another German psychologist that was around at the time of Wundt,
but he decided not to subscribe to Wundts philosophy of introspection. He devised his
own methods for studying human memory where he devised over 2000 nonsense syllables and
tested his own ability to learn these stimuli. He devised these nonsense syllables in
order to prevent past experience/knowledge from interfering with the subjects
performance levels. Ebbinghaus also examined the factors that might influence performance
like the time delay between the lists of presentations.
Meanwhile in America, Mary Whiten Calkins, who was also the first woman to be president
of The American Psychological Association, was also conducting similar experiments in
memory research. Calkins also reported a phenomenon now known as the recency effect,
which referred to recalling items in memory.
These two and others made a bigger impact on cognitive psychology then Wundt did with his
introspective techniques. For example, Ebbinghauss use of nonsense syllables encouraged
other research psychologists to use meaningless material to study how memory works. Also,
unlike introspection, later researchers conducted experiments in where testing how
selected variables influenced memory rather then to describe and report the sensations
produced by the stimulus.
Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Cognitive Psychology
* William James
A competitor to Wundts concepts of introspection/structuralism was William James, and
his school of thought, functionalism. Functionalism was based on the belief that
psychology should study the function and purpose of consciousness, instead of its
structure.
While James formal training was in medicine, he quickly became bored of it, with it
being not intellectually challenging enough. James was highly