Lecture 4 Flashcards
What is Wndt’s Legacy in Psychology?
Wundt’s Legacy -65 year career -Head of the best lab in the world -Wrote a lot (50000 pages) BUT -No influential theories or seminal findings His writing was hard to understand and contradictory Relatively small impact on psychology.
Who is Titchner and is he considered important today?
How did his Introspection differ from Wundt’s?
Considered important historically but his work is not influential today.
Taught at Cornell and was the head of the structuralist school. He thought experimental psychology’s goal was to identify the basic elements that made up consciousness.
Wundt argued against this. Titchener presented himself as the student of Wundt but in reality, was against Wundt’s ideas. Wundt felt that consciousness could not be broken down. Dimensions of consciousness do not exist without each other. Feelings cannot exist without sensations.
Titchener does not agree. Titchener is really in the associationism camp. Like Locke – all of our thoughts can be decomposed into simple ideas and then back to experience. Titchener thinks you can go in the other direction. Complex thought to experience which should be at the base.
What is Titchener using introspection for?
Did Titchner agree with Kant?
Titchener thinks that via introspection, we can find the basic elements of consciousness and the mind.
Titchener opposes Kant because he says that inner observation can be separated and combined at will.
What is Structuralism?
What does introspection come up with?
What is the purpose of introspection for a structuralist?
Structuralism: Decomposing the mind into its component parts. Draws an analogy with anatomy and physiology – the same way you need to understand the structure of the eye before studying it, you need to do this for the mind before studying what the mind is for.
Comes up with very weird, exotic stuff. General idea is to trace everything back to experiences.
What does Titchener say TRAINED introspectors can do?
What is the stimulus error?
To avoid it, what do you need?
According to him, trained introspection can reach conclusions that can be considered scientific.
This training allows people to avoid the stimulus error: describing the object rather than one’s experience of the object. Judging the stimulus outside of you but not focusing on your own experience if the stimulus.
To avoid this error, you require a specialised vocabulary. Should be transparent, clear what it means. Not too familiar as these bring with them associations but not so unfamiliar that their assimilation would be difficult. Hard to read from the present perspective, proved to be a dead end.
Titchener and vocabulary
He listed thousands od sensory experience, 30k visual, 11k auditory, 4 taste, 3 sensations od the digestive tract and died before he figured out olfaction.
He then tried to make a more parsimonious theory but died before this.
How did Boring carrry on his work and why did this give Titchener a good place in th ehistory of psychology?
His most famous student, Boring carried on. He was also the first ever historian of psychology and so gave Titchener a nice place in the history of psychology.
Boring tried to simplify the theory. 4 Main dimensions of consciousness. Quality – the 43k e.g. quality. Intensity extensity (space) and propensity (duration).
Why did Titchener want to come to McGill?
Titchener wanted to teach in the Empire. No psych labs in the UK. Cornell was the best he could do. Tried to grab a slot at McGill.
What was Tithener’s impact on psycholgy?
limited impact on psychology? – mostly he features as a punching bag for those that come later
Who was Oswald Kulpe?
Oswald Kulpe - Student of Wundt and founder of the “Würzburg School,” who promoted introspective experiments on several of the higher processes, thus contradicting Wundt’s view that this was not possible.
What did the Würzburg Schools say about introspection?
- introspection did not intuitively give rise to the experience of elementary sensations.
- Wurzburg school: there are a lot of things happening in our mind that we cannot report on. people do weird associations without knowing why
(we have limited awareness of the causes of the contents of our minds).
- « imageless » thoughts.
How did Kulpe disagree with Wundt?
Wundt thought introspection could only be done for basic processes – higher = analyse culture.
Kulpe thought that this could be done retrospectively
What is retrospection and how does it compare to introspection?
What are imageless thoughts?
What were these the first example of?
Retrospection vs introspection: introspection interferes with the process that is being observed. Too hard to do a process while doing introspection. But maybe can do it retrospectively.
Kulpe found that many thought processes were hard to describe. E.g., familiarity, you don’t remember where you know someone from but they FEEL familiar.
He calls these Imageless thoughts: many thought processes are hard to describe, e.g. recognition without recollection.
Might be the first realisation of unconscious properties that impact on behaviour.
What was directed association and what did it uncover?
Directed association—Studies conducted by Watt, a student of Külpe, and Ach in which subjects were asked to associate to stimulus words in a highly specific, rather than “free,” manner. Word association that was not free. People had to name the super and supra ordinate groups. When participates did this, after a while it became easy, and people do not need to think about it. It has become automatic. He called these implementation of these unconscious rules, mental sets
What is mental sets and who came up with them?
Mental sets—The idea put forth by Ach that introspective instructions do not consciously enter into the subjects’ associational processes but rather predetermine them in particular directions before the experiments begin: a lot of thought is unconscious. Once you get into the habit, it is unconscious. Most of the time we interact with the world, we use these mental sets.
What was Titchener’s response to the idea of mental sets?
- Titchener replies that trained individual can become aware of these thoughts (but then problem of demand characteristics). If you are trained, you can do this. In other words, this might not ever work for anybody else but him.
What did Functionalists think of Titchener?
/Functionalists like James were studying more interesting questions such as: « how could psychology advance the conditions of individuals and of the American society ». This is very applicable stuff.
- By contrast, in his textbook An Outline of Psychology (1896), Titchener puts forward a list of more than 44,000 elemental qualities of conscious experience.
Did the Gestalt Psychologists think Titchener was cool?
Who were the main proponents?
Failed to convince the researchers who remained interested in the contents of consciousness and perception, but he did not convince them. This was mostly the gestalt psychologists.
- They believed that it doesn’t make sense to try to understand the human mind by trying to break it down to its « atoms », it would be like trying to understand a chord by the sum of its individual tones.
- Gestalt Psychology: « the whole is different from the sum of its parts »
- Main proponents were the Germans Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), Kurt Koffka (1886-1941), and Wolfgang Kohler (1887-1967). Also included the Danish Edgar Rubin (!886-1951), and the Swede Gunnar Johansson (1911-1998).
William James
Who was he?
What book did he write?
Was he a program builder?
Taught the first American university course on the new scientific psychology at Harvard.
Considered the father of American Psychology. Probably not of all psychology as he was inspired by Wundt to consider psychology am science.
-To go along with this course, he decides to write a textbook; 1878-1890: The Principles of Psychology
-He had to rewrite chapters as they progressed and writing this took ages.
-Very well written and comprehensive for this time period.
-More a communicator than a program builder. Did not do much research, graduated a few students and then later, he quit psychology all together and went into philosophy.
Did Wundt like James?
Wundt was not impressed: « It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology » James (about Wundt’s psychology: « It could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored… There is little of the grand style - - - - about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry » - the German way of approaching psychology is boring according to James.
In James’ time, what is the difference between European and American psychology?
-Psychology in America is more personal and focused on the individual, and more practical than theoretical in its goals. Which is a big advantage.
James’ background
Did he belive in Free will?
Whgat philosphy did he found?
- He was more into physiology
- Studied medicine but was not happy – he was prone to recurrent depression
- Went specimen hunting in Brazil to improve his mood
- Feels like his family is oppressive – moves to Germany: he can get near to physiologists and escapes family
- Reads Wundt’s paper and realises that psychology can be a science
- Physiological Psychology ». 1870: In the context of an “existential crisis”- probably depression, he decides to believe in free will, even though the scientists he has interacted with teach that this is not so
- And manages to build a habit of thinking more positive thoughts. You can see this as positive psychology. Habits become an important aspect of his psychology
- Since « free will » seemed a useful concept in personal life, he would accept it as true there; and determinism, useful scientifically, would be equally true when he functioned as a scientist.
- I.e., scientifically free will seems impossible but its useful for me so when im working, there is none but when I am outside of home, I will believe in it.
- Will later found pragmatism in philosophy (> 1900) There are no absolute truths, what determines the value if a truth is their practical impact
How good at experiments was James?
James may have never have ran an experiment. He only ever really did his great book. Chapters on many things that are really still present in psychology.
What did James write in his book about the methdology of psychology at the time?
- Chapter 1 The Methods and Snares of Psychology
- Snares – considered Wundt’s methodology boring
- Although it has limitations, introspection is still the best available method.
- He uses this more open mindedly than Wundt, more in the “armchair style” that Wundt did not like.
- Precursor to phenomenology: not « imposing a set of prior categories on experience », but « by observing experience itself and letting experience dictate the categories »
- In the methods section, says Minds are objects in the natural world – no dualism: there is a correspondence between « the succession of states of consciousness and the succession of total brain processes ». More kind of causal reductionism – events caused by activity in the brain.
- Didn’t like experimental methods, considered all the psychology experiments like time perception, mental chronology etc. to be extremely boring (especially German experiments).
- Wundt used constrained introspection with prior categories. James says you should let it go and be open.
- He was extremely open: spiritism
- Also open to comparing between things like other species – a lot of American functionalism is due to Darwin
- James does not see a clear break between humans and animals, thought animals had some of our processes