Lecture 5 - Origins of Scientific Psychology in America Flashcards
(18 cards)
Who is James Mark Baldwin?
James Mark Baldwin studied with a Scottish
realist (our experiences directly result from
perception) and with Wundt.
In 1891, he founded the first psychology lab
of the British Commonwealth at the
University of Toronto.
His appointment caused “a considerable stir”
among Toronto’s philosophers, clergymen,
and press who did not take to a “materialist”
who advocated an elemental view of mental
life.
Many former students of Wundt moved
through this lab before JMB ultimately moved
to Princeton.
Who said this?
A history of U.S. (experimental) psychology before the 1880s “would be
as short as a book on snakes in Ireland since the time of St. Patrick.
Insofar as psychologists are concerned, American was then like heaven,
for there was not a damned soul there.”
James McKeen Cattell,
first professor of
psychology in the USA
Who is William James?
William James (1842 – 1910)
- Born to a wealthy, liberal, and well-
educated New York family - Teaches physiology at Harvard in 1872
- Authors The Principles of Psychology in
1890
“No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the
book. […] a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated,
dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that
there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd
,
that W. J. is an incapable.” [letter to publisher]
In 1890 he produced his great work called the principles of psychology
- takes him 12 years to write this book
- when it is finally published it was a huge success
- Creating a narrative and structure for the field
As a young man he often felt depressed which went on for the rest of his life
Went to harvard first in chemistry and then in medicine
For the most part his psychology is self taught
What were the key ideas from James?
Key ideas from James
“Stream of thought,”
later “stream of consciousness”
When James talks about the stream of thought he is talking about all expierences not just the intellectual aspect
- He reflects on the idea that our expirences change out brain and these changes to our brain will then change
how we expirence things
- big on the stream metaphor, he claims that we cannot break consciousness into parts
- consciourness is NOT seperate peices accourding to James
Selectivity of consciousness
Consciousness “… is
interested in some parts of
these objects to the
exclusion of others, and
welcomes or rejects—
chooses from among them,
in a word—all the while”
Modern ideas: selective
attention, endowment effect
Sees consciousness about actively selecting things and not selecting other things
- We select what we attend to based on what is important to us
Argued that emotions involve both bodily
sensations and interpretation
“Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and
weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run […] The
hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of
sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not
immediately induced by the other, that the bodily
manifestations must first be interposed between.”
It is not that you meet a bear and run. You meet a bear have
a bodily sensation and then you run
What is the criticism from Walter B. Cannon of Wundt?
disagreed that you need bodily sensations to feel
an emotion (argued that you do NOT need the
bodily sensations to feel the emotion)
- Cannon did an expirement where he removed
parts of a cat (this would take away their bodily
sensations) and then saw if they would still
have a emotional response to a dog barking
James wrote that the key force in the maintenance of social order is
A. habit
C. selective attention
B. stream of consciousness
D. instinct
A. habit
What are the key ideas from James?
Habit
* Much of animal and human
behaviour is governed by instinct
- Such behaviour is modifiable by experience (Ex: instincts to prefer a soft bed, be preoccupied with women
^- but such behviour is modified by expirenece) - Learned patterns of behaviour (habits) are formed when neural
pathways become more entrenched, making it easier for energy to
pass through those pathways (!!!)
Functionalism
* A loose “school” opposing structuralism (headed by Titchener at
Cornell)
* Opposed elementalism
* Concerned with the function of mental and behavioural processes
* Darwinian
* Interested in individual differences, not just similarities
Discussion: Some 19th century psychologists felt that metaphor (e.g.,
consciousness as a stream of water) did not belong in the
science of psychology.
Wundt says of The Principles of Psychology, “It is literature, it is
beautiful, but it is not psychology.” E.W. Scripture, his student,
criticized people like James for producing “volumes of vague
observation, endless speculation and flimsy guesswork” (1895)
James in return called Scripture “a complete barbarian”
15
Rate 1-5: THERE IS A PLACE FOR POETIC LANGUAGE IN SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY
Can you think of examples of metaphor in modern psychological theory? Are they helpful
or harmful?
What did Wundt refer to Berlin as?
In 1896, a Berlin newspaper referred to
Wundt (64) as “the psychological Pope of the Old World”
and James (54) as “the psychological Pope of the New World”
These two have two different approaches and live in two
different places
James’s student, Mary Whiton Calkins, invented the paired associates
method for use in her studies of
A. emotion and habitual responding
B. perception and the psychology of beauty
C. the philosophy of religion
D. memory
D. memory
Calkins’ philosophy of psychology argued that the science of psychology
should be about the study of
A. behavior
C. consciousness
B. self
D. free will
B. self
Who is Mary Whiton Calkins?
Mary Whiton Calkins 1863-1930
Wellesley College, a private women’s liberal arts college
- Studied with William James to develop a psychology course (She was allowed to attend seminars on the condition that she is not fully enrolled in it)
- Founded the first ever psych lab headed by
a woman - Paired associates method: participants learned pairs of items in studies of
memory - Self-psychology: argued that psychology should focus on the idea of the self, not
consciousness or behaviour
(She argued that instead of focusing on behaviour and consciousness,
the focus on psychology should be on the self)
- Qualified for, but did not receive, a PhD from Harvard
- Eventually offered a PhD by Radcliffe
College, a degree-granting women’s
college at Harvard; she refused. - First woman president of the American
Psychological Association in 1905 - Her own position on women’s role was
complex (thought that the role of women was to be a wife and have children and says she pitties women that do not do this to have a career. Although she was never married
and had a sucessful career)
Calkin’s memory work is much less likely to appear in textbooks today
than that of Ebbinghaus. Why might this be?
(Recall both history & historiography)
Hall believed that the evolutionary developments in one’s animal
ancestry are repeated in the human from conception through
adolescence. This doctrine was known as the
A. theory of adolescent maturation
B. theory of recapitulation
C. survival of the fittest
D. theory of evolutionary functionalism
FIND
Who was G. Stanley Hall?
G. (Granville) Stanley Hall 1844-1924
- 1878 PhD (philosophy) with James at Harvard, then studied
with Helmholtz - Opened the first psyc lab in America at Johns Hopkins in 1883
- Believed evolution should be the foundation of science
- Taught James McKeen Cattell, John Dewey (both
functionalists), Arnold Gessell (pediatrician) - Began the Child Study Movement (Wanted to collect a lot of data on the
differences of children - he agrees with ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny - go to more animal like to more human
like as you get older) - Collected extensive questionnaire data from kindergarten students
- “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” – Haeckel. Argued:
- Primitive impulses must be expressed in childhood, lest they be carried into adulthood
- Masturbation (in boys) affects quality of future children and should be discouraged (believed that masturbation
would lead to the quality
of future children so
you should not do it) - Sex-segregated schools allow adolescent sexuality to be sublimated into social progress
- Girls should be prepared for motherhood… but he was also very supportive of women graduate students
- Adolescent religious conversion was “natural, normal, universal, and necessary” (while children, being evolutionarily less developed, are more pagan) (Had a view of development
that has a religious
component to it - idea that you are becoming
more involved as you get
older) - Thorndike’s assessment of Hall’s work was that it was
“chock full of errors, masturbation, and Jesus. He is a
mad man” (Ross, 1972, p. 385). - Pioneering life-span psychologist,
organizer, and teacher
* Founded the American Psychological
Association (1892) with 31 members
- “Hall was the Great Graduate Teacher
of American psychology” - by 1898 he
had awarded 30 of 54 American
psychology PhDs (Hall is remembered as someone who produced a lot of PhD students)
Discussion: What name do you use professionally?
What considerations might there be around this, for yourself or others?
Who is James McKeen Cattell?
James McKeen Cattell 1860-1944
“brash and arrogant”
- Wundt’s first American PhD student – reaction time studies, including some
while using drugs - Proposed to Wundt that they study individual differences in reaction time (Wundt said no)
- Post-PhD, he studied with Francis Galton (behavioural genetics, eugenics)
- At Columbia, advocated for the value of evaluating and comparing people using “mental tests”
- Identified 50 mental tests that he thought should be administered to university students, including grip strength, amount of pressure required to cause pain, reaction time, accuracy in line bisection, memory for strings of letters, etc.
- President of the APA (1895, following W. James)
- Purchased and ran Science, founded Psychological Review
- Ultimately dismissed as a professor at Columbia because of a letter he wrote opposing the mandatory WWI draft
- Major figure in functionalism; supervised Thorndike and Woodworth
Who was Francis Cecil Summer?
Francis Cecil Sumner 1895-1954
- Born 30 years after the abolishment of slavery;
access to education for African American
students was very poor - Hall’s last graduate student & the first African
American PhD in psychology - His PhD was interrupted by army service in
1918 - Shaped Howard University into a major training
center for African American psychologists; “the
Black Harvard”
Discussion:
The figures we talked about today contributed to the emerging field of
psychology in many different ways (through writing, through teaching,
through editing, by breaking ground as marginalized scholars, etc.)
Do you connect with any of these paths?
Which type of contribution is most important?
Are there other types of contribution still not recognized here?
How do today’s narratives illuminate social aspects of research and
academia?
What other aspects of the material covered this week might also be
instructive in that regard?
Do you think that the social aspect is relevant to academia and
research today?
Structuralism and functionalism are often taught as opposites.
In what ways are they similar?
When is this comparison useful? Are there ways in which it is unhelpful?
