Precursors to Psychology

Question 1

Individualisation in Western society

Answer 1

Emergence of surnames.
Increased control by the state.
Individuality promoted by Christianity.
New inventions - mirrors, books and letters.
End of middle ages.

Question 2

Rationalism

Answer 2

Existence of innate knowledge.
Reason is the source of knowledge.
Deductive reasoning is main research method.
Logic and mathematics are the main applications.
Main proponents are Plato, Descartes and Leibniz.

Question 3

Empiricism

Answer 3

No innate knowledge.
Perception is the source of knowledge.
Main research methods are observation, experimentation and inductive reasoning.
Main applications are natural sciences.
Main proponents are natural philosophers, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

Question 4

Kant

Answer 4

Psychology isn’t a proper science, because introspection changed the state of the mind, inner observations could not be separated and recombined at will, and could not be formulated in mathematical laws.

Question 5

Comte

Answer 5

Introspection as a scientific method was flawed and the human mind could only be studied scientifically by focusing on physiology (done by biologists) and on the products of the human mind (done by sociologists).

Question 6

Medical practice in 18-19th century

Answer 6

Most care done by practitioners who learned as apprentices; university-educated doctors, trained often in only theoretical knowledge.
Effective medicines lacking— often resorted to bloodletting, laxatives and purgatives.
Later, movement emerged; saw the practitioner as a GP listening to their patients and giving advice about how to cope with illnesses “patient-as-a-person movement”.

Question 7

The Quantitative Imperative

Answer 7

Mathematics could not be applied to internal phenomena and therefore was not within the domain of psychology.

Question 8

Weber

Answer 8

Weber’s law - as the magnitude of the comparison stimulus increased, a larger and larger difference was required for a difference to be ‘just’ noticeable.

Question 9

Fechner

Answer 9

Fechner realised that there could be a Newtonian mathematical function connecting the magnitude of the sensation (percept) to the magnitude of the stimulus.
Fechner extended Weber’s findings to describe the “scaling function”—the same magnitude of perceived difference is signalled by a greater magnitude difference in stimulus intensity, and this relationship is logarithmic.
Psychophysics—branch of psychological research that attempts to quantify the relationship between physical stimuli and their subjective correlates (corresponding sensation).

Question 10

Human perception

Answer 10

The level of detail humans can discern (Hooke).
The influence of other factors on this capacity (Mayer).
The detection of just noticeable differences between stimuli (Weber, Fechner) and the formation of a psychophysical theory based on them (Fechner).

Question 11

Reaction time, and speed of transmission in nerves

Answer 11

Astronomers varied in their estimates of the timing of events (personal equation) and showed variability in them.
Von Helmholtz measured nerve transmission speed in frogs (and humans).
Donders measured the time needed for simple mental operations (mental chronometry).

Question 12

Quetelet

Answer 12

Discovered that, whereas individual data points were impossible to predict, such prediction was possible when the analyses were based on the means of hundreds of observations.

Question 13

Fisher

Answer 13

Further showed how researchers could adapt their methods so that the influence of confounding variables could be factored out in statistical analyses.