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A Brief History of Psychology

The history of psychology is a fascinating journey that spans thousands of years, exploring the development of our understanding of the human mind and behavior.

Today, psychology has become a common field of study. Academic professionals and curious amateurs now regularly ponder the inner workings of the mind, searching for answers and explanations.

Table of Contents

What is the Brief History of Psychology?

You could argue that the history of psychology starts with ancient medicine and philosophy, as the great thinkers wondered where our ideas came from, and why we all make different decisions.

The Ebers Papyrus , a medical textbook from 1500 BC Egypt, contained a chapter called “The Book of Hearts,” which describes several mental conditions, including the description of a patient whose “mind is dark (melancholic?), and he tastes his heart.”

READ MORE: Ancient Egypt Timeline: Predynastic Period Until the Persian Conquest

Aristotle’s De Anima , or “On The Soul,” explores the concept of thinking as separate from sensation, and the mind as separate from the soul. From Lao Tsu to the Vedic Texts, religious works from around the world influenced psychology by challenging ideas about human nature and decision-making.

The first leap forward in treating the mind as a focus of scientific study came during the Enlightenment period of the 17th Century. Famous philosophers such as Kant, Leibniz, and Wolff were particularly obsessed with understanding the concept of the mind, with Kant specifically establishing psychology as a subset of anthropology.

The Importance of Experimental Psychology

By the middle of the 19th century, philosophy and medicine were moving further and further apart. Within that gap was found psychology.

However, it was not until Gustav Fechner began to experiment in 1830 with the concept of sensation that academics began to devise experiments to test their theories. This crucial step into experimentation is what cements psychology as a science, rather than simply a genre of philosophy.

European universities, especially those in Germany, were excited to develop further experiments and more medical schools offered lectures in “psychology,” “psychophysics,” and “psychophysiology.”

Who is the Main Founder of Psychology?

The person best considered the founder of psychology was Dr. Wilhelm Wundt. While other doctors and philosophers had already been exploring the topics that would come to be known as psychology, Wundt’s formation of the first experimental psychology laboratory earns him the title “the father of psychology.”

Wundt was a medical doctor who graduated from the famed University of Heidelberg in 1856, before immediately moving into academics. As an associate professor of anthropology and “medical psychology,” he wrote Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception , Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology , and Principles of Physiological Psychology (considered the first-ever textbook of psychology).

In 1879, Wundt opened the first lab dedicated to psychology experiments. Set up at the University of Leipzig, Wundt would dedicate his free time to creating and performing experiments outside of the classes he was teaching.

Who Were the Early Psychologists?

While Wundt is considered the founder of psychology, it is his students that properly cemented the science as distinct from psychiatry, and important enough to treat on its own. Edward B. Titchener, G. Stanley Hall, and Hugo Münsterberg all took Wundt’s findings and set up schools to continue the experiments in Europe and America.

Edward B. Titchener took Wundt’s studies to produce a formal school of thought sometimes known as “structuralism.” With the goal being to quantify thoughts the same way we can objectively measure compounds or movement, Titchener believed all thoughts and feelings contained four distinct properties: intensity, quality, duration, and extent.

G. Stanley Hall returned to the US and became the first president of the American Psychological Association. Hall was most fascinated with child and evolutionary psychology, and how people learned.

While many of his theories are no longer considered sound, the role he played as the promoter of science in America, and bringing both Freud and Jung to lecture in the country, has helped him hear the title of “the father of American psychology.”

Hugo Münsterberg took psychology into the realm of practical application and often butted heads with Wundt as to how science should be used. The first psychologist to consider the application of psychological principles to business management and law enforcement, Münsterberg was also informally interested in the overlap between psychology and entertainment. His book, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study , is considered to be one of the first books on film theory ever written.

The Etymology of the Term “Psychology”

The term “psychology” comes from combining the Greek words “psyche” (meaning breath, life, or the soul) and “logos” (meaning “reason”). The first time the word was used in English was in 1654, in “New Method of Physik,” a science book.

In it, the authors write “Psychologie is the knowledge of the Soul.” Before the 19th century, little difference was given between “the mind” and “the soul,” and early uses of the term appeared in contexts that might today use other terms like “philosophy,” “medicine,” or “spirituality.”

READ MORE: History’s Most Famous Philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and More!

What is Psychology?

Psychology is the scientific discipline of the mind and its relationship to its environment developed through observing and experimenting with how we behave and react to others.

While most definitions of “psychology” speak specifically to mental perception, this is not always the case. “Psychology” studies not just rational thought, but also emotions, sensation, and communication. By “environment,” psychologists mean both the physical world the person is in, but also the physical health of their body and their relationships with other people.

Breaking it down, the science of psychology involves:

• Studying behavior and finding ways to record it objectively.
• Developing theories about the universal influences of behavior.
• Finding ways in which behavior is controlled by biology, learning, and the environment.
• Developing ways in which to change behaviors.

What is the Difference Between a Psychologist and a Psychiatrist?

There is a lot of overlap between psychiatry and psychology, so it may be difficult to fully appreciate the differences. Psychiatrists are medical doctors and are primarily interested in biological psychology. They are often interested in how our physical health affects our thinking and prescribe medication.

Psychologists (especially psychotherapists) are more interested in how we can change behavior without physically changing our bodies through drugs or medical procedures. They cannot prescribe medication.

All the founding fathers of psychology were doctors first, and it was not until the mid-20th century that one could study or practice psychology without a medical degree. Most of today’s psychiatrists are also trained to some degree in psychology, while many clinical psychologists take courses in biological psychology. For this reason, the sciences remain overlapped to the benefit of everyone.

What are the Seven Main Schools of Psychology?

As humanity entered the 20th Century, psychology began breaking off into many schools. While the psychologists of today have a superficial understanding of all schools, they often develop an interest in one or two in particular. To properly understand the modern history of psychology, one should know the seven main schools and the people who influenced their current forms.

The Seven Schools of Psychology are:

• Biological psychology
• Behaviorist psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology
• Psychoanalytic psychology
• Humanistic psychology
• Existential psychology

What is Biological Psychology?

Biological psychology, sometimes referred to as “behavioral neuroscience” or “cognitive science,” studies how thoughts and behaviors interact with biological and physiological processes.

Said to have originated with the works of Broca and Wernicke, early practitioners relied on a detailed examination of people with behavioral issues and the later autopsy of their bodies.

Today’s neuropsychologists use imaging such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (or MRI) to map how the brain acts while someone is thinking about something specific, or undertaking tasks.

READ MORE: Who Invented MRI? The Pioneers Behind Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Behavioral psychologists rely on animal studies as well as human trials. Today, neuropsychologists are an important part of teams working in the cutting-edge area of neural-linking technology, such as Elon Musk’s “Neuralink,” and as part of researching the effects of stroke and brain cancer.

Who Were Broca and Wernicke?

Pierre Paul Broca was a 19th-century French anatomist and anthropologist who studied the brains of patients who had language processing difficulties when alive.

Specifically, these patients had no trouble understanding words but could not say them. Discovering that they all had trauma in a similar area, he realized that a very specific section of the brain (the lower left of the frontal lobe) controlled our ability to turn mental processes into words we could say out loud. Today this is known as “Broca’s Area.”

Only a few years later, based on the research of Broca, German physician Carl Wernicke was able to discover the area of the brain that translated words into thoughts. This area is now known as “The Wernicke area,” while patients that suffer from the two forms of language processing issues are said to have “Broca’s Aphasia” or “Wernicke’s Aphasia” as appropriate.

What is Race Psychology?

An unfortunate byproduct of biological psychology has been the rise of “Race Psychology,” a pseudoscience closely connected with the Eugenics movement.

Carl von Linnaeus , the famous “father of taxonomy” believed that different races had biological differences that caused them to be smarter, lazier, or more ritualistic. As greater experimentation and more robust use of the scientific method has been used, the works of “race psychologists” have been completely debunked.

What is Behaviorist Psychology?

Behaviorist psychology is built on the tenet that most, if not all, behavior is learned rather than biologically induced. Early researchers in this field believed in “classical conditioning,” and therapy known as “behavioral modification.” 

The father of classical conditioning was Ivan Pavlov (the man with the famous dogs), whose 1901 experiments earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology.

Later behaviorists developed the early ideas into a field known as “operant conditioning.” The works of B.F. Skinner, a pioneer in this area and famous for his work in educational psychology, are still used in the classrooms of today.

Who Were Pavlov’s Dogs?

Pavlov used over 40 dogs in his experiments. Despite this, the psychologist became attached to one specific collie called Druzhok. Druzhok retired from experiments to become his pet.

The famous “Pavlov’s dogs” experiment is a well-known tale with a darker one following it.

Pavlov noticed that, when introduced to food, dogs would salivate more. He even went so far as to operate on live dogs and measure how much saliva their glands would secrete.

Through his experiments, Pavlov was able to note that dogs would salivate more when expecting food (say, by hearing the dinner bell), even if no food was introduced. This indicated evidence that the environment (the bell warning of food) was enough to teach a physical response (salivation).

Sadly, however, the experiments did not end there. Pavlov’s student, Nikolay Krasnogorsky, took the next step – using orphan children . Drilling into their salivary gland to obtain exact measurements, children would have their hand-squeezed as they were given a cookie. Later, they would have their hand-squeezed and, like the dogs before them, salivate even without the food being present. Through this horrifying process, Krasnogorsky was able to prove that the canine physiological response was also present in humans.

While Pavlov’s experiments still have some validity today, they are often considered in conjunction with biological psychology. Pavlov continued to experiment until his death, which he insisted a student record notes for.

No one knows the fate of the orphans.

What is Cognitive Psychology?

Perhaps the most popular school of psychology today, cognitive psychology studies how mental processes work as separate from the underlying causes. Cognitivists are less concerned about whether behavior comes from the environment or biology, and more about how thought processes lead to choices. Those who were concerned, like Albert Bandura, believed that students could learn simply through exposure to processes, rather than through the reinforcement the behaviorists believed was required.

The most important development from this school was Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT). Now one of the most popular forms of psychotherapy, it was developed by psychologist Albert Ellis and psychiatrist Aaron Beck in the 1960s.

At first, psychologists were wary of using a treatment that did not involve the high levels of introspection others did, and notable luminaries of the profession were unconvinced. However, after repeated experiments with impressive results , more therapists were convinced.

What is Social Psychology?

Social psychology, which has close ties to social anthropology, sociology, and cognitive psychology, is concerned specifically with how a person’s social environment (and relationship with others) affects their behavior. Psychologists who observe and experiment with peer pressure, stereotyping, and leadership strategies are all part of the school.

Social psychology evolved primarily from the work of those psychologists who worked on the use of propaganda during the World Wars and later the Cold War between the USA and the USSR.

However, by the 1970s, the works of people such as Solomon Asch and the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment brought lessons into the civilian sphere.

What Was the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Designed and run by professor Philip Zimbardo, the 1971 experiment held at Stanford University was to replicate the experience of inmates and guards in a two-week simulation.

Volunteers (who were paid) were randomly selected to be either an inmate or guards and told to act accordingly.

Over five days, the guards were said to have become “increasingly brutal” before the experiment was canceled on the sixth . Zimbardo concluded that, based on the feedback of volunteers and observation of students, the personality of the individual does not govern behavior as much as the social circumstances they are placed in.

That is, if you are told to be a guard, you will naturally act out as an authoritarian.

While the story has been adapted many times by the media, and the myth carries itself as a cautionary tale about the cruelty of humanity, the reality was far less convincing. The experiment and its conclusions were never able to be reproduced . It was later noted that guards were encouraged by supervisors early in the experiment to treat inmates poorly, and some participants claimed that they were refused the ability to withdraw from the experiment early.

Psychologists have long rejected the usefulness of the experiment, despite believing that it is worthwhile to continue experimentation and fully explore the conformity theories that Zimbardo was attempting to prove.

What is Psychoanalytic Psychology?

Psychodynamics and psychoanalysis concern themselves with the concept of conscious and unconscious motivation, philosophic concepts such as the Id and Ego, and the power of introspection. The psychoanalytic theory focuses on sexuality, repression, and dream analysis. For a long time, it was synonymous with “psychology.”

If you imagine psychotherapy as laying back on a leather futon and talking about your dreams while an old man smoking a pipe takes notes, you are thinking about the stereotype that grew from early psychoanalysis. 

Popularized in the late 19th century by Sigmund Freud, and then expanded upon by Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, psychodynamics later fell out of favor for its lack of scientific rigor.

Despite this, the works of Freud and Jung are some of the most-examined papers in the history of psychology, and modern experts such as Oliver Sacks have argued that we should reconsider some of the ideas as a form of neuro-psychoanalysis (introspection while under objective imaging observation).

What is the Difference Between Freudian Psychology and Jungian Psychology?

The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was an Austrian doctor and neuroscientist who opened a psychological clinic only four years into his medical career. There he developed his interest in “neurotic disorders” while diving into all available texts on the theory of perception, pedagogy, and philosophy. He was especially intrigued by the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.

Studying hypnosis under Charcot, Freud returned to work more concerned than ever with diving into the “hidden depths” of the mind. However, he believed that “free association” (the voluntary offering of whatever came to the mind) was more effective than hypnosis, and the analysis of dreams could offer far more about the internal motivations of his patients.

In Freud’s “psychoanalysis” method of therapy, dreams represented repressed sexual desire, often stemming from early childhood experiences. All mental disorders were a result of not coming to terms with sexual history and it was the ability to understand unconscious versus conscious motivations that would help a patient find peace.

Among Freud’s more famous concepts were “The Oedipus Complex,” and “The Ego and The Id.” 

Carl Jung was possibly the most famous student of Freud. Starting their relationship in 1906, they spent many years corresponding with, studying with, and generally challenging, each other. Jung was a fan of Freud’s early works and was determined to expand on them.

Unlike Freud, however, Jung did not believe that all dreams and motivations stemmed from sexual desire. Instead, he believed that learned symbols and imagery within dreams held the answers to motivation. Jung also believed that inside every man was a psychological “image” of their feminine self and vice versa. He was the primary influence of the popular lay notion of “introversion and extroversion,” as well as a supporter of art therapy.

Freudian and Jungian “psychologists” today still hold onto the belief that our dreams offer insight into our motivations and carefully pour over thousands of symbols to make their analysis.

What is Humanistic Psychology?

Humanistic, or Existential Psychology, is a relatively new school, developed in response to psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Focusing on the concept of “self-actualization” (the meeting of all needs) and free will, humanists believe that mental health and happiness can be reached simply by having a core set of needs fulfilled.

The primary founder of this school of human behavior was Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist who proposed the idea that there were certain levels of needs and that to find fulfillment in complex needs we must ensure first that more basic needs have been met.

What is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

The concept of meeting core requirements before finding actualization was written out in Abraham Maslow’s 1943 work A Theory of Human Motivation , and was known as “the hierarchy of needs.” 

Despite a distinct lack of scientific rigor, Maslow’s theories have been taken up by education departments , business organizations, and therapists quite willingly due to their simplicity. While there stands criticism that needs could not be “ranked so easily,” and that certain needs were not addressed, Maslow pre-empted this in his original work by recommending his “pyramid” not be taken too strictly. “We have spoken so far as if this hierarchy were a fixed order, but it is not nearly so rigid as we may have implied.” 

What is Existential Psychotherapy?

A subset of humanism, the applied psychology of existentialism draws further influence from the European philosophy of the mid-20th century. The primary founder of such psychotherapy was the renounced doctor and holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl. His “logotherapy,” developed after being ejected from the psychoanalytic school developed by Alfred Adler, was further refined at Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps, where he saw the rest of his family murdered.

Frankl believed that happiness was derived from having meaning in your life and that once you found a meaning to pursue, life became easier. This appealed greatly to a 1960s youth feeling “directionless,” and his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning” was a best-seller. Despite this, very few practitioners of logotherapy exist today.

The Hidden Eighth School: Gestalt Psychology

While the seven main schools of psychology are studied and treated by examining behavior, there is an eighth school entirely devoted to the theory of perception. Gestalt psychology was developed early in the history of psychology, responding directly to the works and writings of Wundt and Titchener. Psychological research was scientifically rigorous, and its findings went on to be used in modern clinical psychology as well as neuroscience and cognitive science.

The scientific psychology of the Gestaltists emphasized the ability of a human being to perceive patterns and how the perception of patterns governs thought more than the perception of individual elements. Founded by the Austro-Hungarian psychologist, Max Wertheimer, Gestalt psychology developed parallel to those schools more interested in therapy and relied more heavily on physical and biological sciences.

Gestalt Psychology, while still rarely used to inform therapy, is one of the cornerstones of the computer science behind “Machine Learning.” Some of the core problems faced by those studying machine learning, or “Artificial Intelligence” are the same ones studied by Wertheimer and his followers. These problems include the ability for humans to recognize an object regardless of rotation (invariance), the ability to see shapes in the “spaces left behind” by other shapes (reification) and to see both a duck and rabbit in the same picture (multistability).

Modern psychology has only developed in recent centuries but the history of psychology goes back millennia. By recording observable behavior and confirming theories through experimentation, we have been able to turn philosophical musings about the mind into psychological theories, and then an academic discipline.

The history of psychology is too large to fully explore in anything less than a textbook. From the first dips into experimental psychology to the mental health professionals of today, it is on the foundational works of many doctors that we are left with psychological science.

The Future of Psychology

Many of the psychological theories were developed in the early stages of the journey of psychology, but that doesn’t mean new theories aren’t being developed.

Recent psychological theories such as Self-Determination Theory and Unified Theory of Human Psychology are attempting to solve some of the bigger challenges we face as a society, with more theories being developed every day.

Where psychology will be in 15-20 years is anyone’s guess, but it’s clear that there are millions of people around the world dedicated to solving these challenges.

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1.2 The Evolution of Psychology: History, Approaches, and Questions

Learning objectives.

• Explain how psychology changed from a philosophical to a scientific discipline.
• List some of the most important questions that concern psychologists.
• Outline the basic schools of psychology and how each school has contributed to psychology.

In this section we will review the history of psychology with a focus on the important questions that psychologists ask and the major approaches (or schools) of psychological inquiry. The schools of psychology that we will review are summarized in Table 1.2 “The Most Important Approaches (Schools) of Psychology” , and Figure 1.5 “Timeline Showing Some of the Most Important Psychologists” presents a timeline of some of the most important psychologists, beginning with the early Greek philosophers and extending to the present day. Table 1.2 “The Most Important Approaches (Schools) of Psychology” and Figure 1.5 “Timeline Showing Some of the Most Important Psychologists” both represent a selection of the most important schools and people; to mention all the approaches and all the psychologists who have contributed to the field is not possible in one chapter.

The approaches that psychologists have used to assess the issues that interest them have changed dramatically over the history of psychology. Perhaps most importantly, the field has moved steadily from speculation about behavior toward a more objective and scientific approach as the technology available to study human behavior has improved (Benjamin & Baker, 2004). There has also been an increasing influx of women into the field. Although most early psychologists were men, now most psychologists, including the presidents of the most important psychological organizations, are women.

Figure 1.4 Female Psychologists

Although most of the earliest psychologists were men, women are increasingly contributing to psychology. The first female president of the American Psychological Association was Mary Whiton Calkins (1861–1930). Calkins made significant contributions to the study of memory and the self-concept. Mahzarin Banaji (left), Marilynn Brewer (not pictured), and Linda Bartoshuk (right) are all recent presidents of the American Psychological Society.

Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung – Keynote: Mahzarin R. Banaji – CC BY-SA 2.0; NIDCD Inside Newsletter – no copyright.

Although it cannot capture every important psychologist, this timeline shows some of the most important contributors to the history of psychology.

Although psychology has changed dramatically over its history, the most important questions that psychologists address have remained constant. Some of these questions follow, and we will discuss them both in this chapter and in the chapters to come:

• Nature versus nurture. Are genes or environment most influential in determining the behavior of individuals and in accounting for differences among people? Most scientists now agree that both genes and environment play crucial roles in most human behaviors, and yet we still have much to learn about how nature (our biological makeup) and nurture (the experiences that we have during our lives) work together (Harris, 1998; Pinker, 2002). The proportion of the observed differences on characteristics among people (e.g., in terms of their height, intelligence, or optimism) that is due to genetics is known as the heritability of the characteristic, and we will make much use of this term in the chapters to come. We will see, for example, that the heritability of intelligence is very high (about .85 out of 1.0) and that the heritability of extraversion is about .50. But we will also see that nature and nurture interact in complex ways, making the question of “Is it nature or is it nurture?” very difficult to answer.
• Free will versus determinism. This question concerns the extent to which people have control over their own actions. Are we the products of our environment, guided by forces out of our control, or are we able to choose the behaviors we engage in? Most of us like to believe in free will, that we are able to do what we want—for instance, that we could get up right now and go fishing. And our legal system is premised on the concept of free will; we punish criminals because we believe that they have choice over their behaviors and freely choose to disobey the law. But as we will discuss later in the research focus in this section, recent research has suggested that we may have less control over our own behavior than we think we do (Wegner, 2002).
• Accuracy versus inaccuracy. To what extent are humans good information processors? Although it appears that people are “good enough” to make sense of the world around them and to make decent decisions (Fiske, 2003), they are far from perfect. Human judgment is sometimes compromised by inaccuracies in our thinking styles and by our motivations and emotions. For instance, our judgment may be affected by our desires to gain material wealth and to see ourselves positively and by emotional responses to the events that happen to us.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden (left photo) meet with BP executives to discuss the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (right photo). Psychologists study the causes of poor judgments such as those made by these executives.

The White House – United States Government Work; International Bird Rescue Research Center – CC BY 2.0

• Conscious versus unconscious processing. To what extent are we conscious of our own actions and the causes of them, and to what extent are our behaviors caused by influences that we are not aware of? Many of the major theories of psychology, ranging from the Freudian psychodynamic theories to contemporary work in cognitive psychology, argue that much of our behavior is determined by variables that we are not aware of.
• Differences versus similarities. To what extent are we all similar, and to what extent are we different? For instance, are there basic psychological and personality differences between men and women, or are men and women by and large similar? And what about people from different ethnicities and cultures? Are people around the world generally the same, or are they influenced by their backgrounds and environments in different ways? Personality, social, and cross-cultural psychologists attempt to answer these classic questions.

Early Psychologists

The earliest psychologists that we know about are the Greek philosophers Plato (428–347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC). These philosophers asked many of the same questions that today’s psychologists ask; for instance, they questioned the distinction between nature and nurture and the existence of free will. In terms of the former, Plato argued on the nature side, believing that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn, whereas Aristotle was more on the nurture side, believing that each child is born as an “empty slate” (in Latin a tabula rasa ) and that knowledge is primarily acquired through learning and experience.

The earliest psychologists were the Greek philosophers Plato (left) and Aristotle. Plato believed that much knowledge was innate, whereas Aristotle thought that each child was born as an “empty slate” and that knowledge was primarily acquired through learning and experience.

Image Editor – Plato and Aristotle – CC BY 2.0

European philosophers continued to ask these fundamental questions during the Renaissance. For instance, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) also considered the issue of free will, arguing in its favor and believing that the mind controls the body through the pineal gland in the brain (an idea that made some sense at the time but was later proved incorrect). Descartes also believed in the existence of innate natural abilities. A scientist as well as a philosopher, Descartes dissected animals and was among the first to understand that the nerves controlled the muscles. He also addressed the relationship between mind (the mental aspects of life) and body (the physical aspects of life). Descartes believed in the principle of dualism : that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body. Other European philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), also weighed in on these issues.

The fundamental problem that these philosophers faced was that they had few methods for settling their claims. Most philosophers didn’t conduct any research on these questions, in part because they didn’t yet know how to do it, and in part because they weren’t sure it was even possible to objectively study human experience. But dramatic changes came during the 1800s with the help of the first two research psychologists: the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), who developed a psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, and the American psychologist William James (1842–1910), who founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard University.

Structuralism: Introspection and the Awareness of Subjective Experience

Wundt’s research in his laboratory in Liepzig focused on the nature of consciousness itself. Wundt and his students believed that it was possible to analyze the basic elements of the mind and to classify our conscious experiences scientifically. Wundt began the field known as structuralism , a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or “structures” of psychological experience . Its goal was to create a “periodic table” of the “elements of sensations,” similar to the periodic table of elements that had recently been created in chemistry.

Structuralists used the method of introspection to attempt to create a map of the elements of consciousness. Introspection involves asking research participants to describe exactly what they experience as they work on mental tasks , such as viewing colors, reading a page in a book, or performing a math problem. A participant who is reading a book might report, for instance, that he saw some black and colored straight and curved marks on a white background. In other studies the structuralists used newly invented reaction time instruments to systematically assess not only what the participants were thinking but how long it took them to do so. Wundt discovered that it took people longer to report what sound they had just heard than to simply respond that they had heard the sound. These studies marked the first time researchers realized that there is a difference between the sensation of a stimulus and the perception of that stimulus, and the idea of using reaction times to study mental events has now become a mainstay of cognitive psychology.

Wilhelm Wundt (seated at left) and Edward Titchener (right) helped create the structuralist school of psychology. Their goal was to classify the elements of sensation through introspection.

Wikimedia Commons – Wundt research group – no copyright; David Webb – Edward Bradford Titchener – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Perhaps the best known of the structuralists was Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927). Titchener was a student of Wundt who came to the United States in the late 1800s and founded a laboratory at Cornell University. In his research using introspection, Titchener and his students claimed to have identified more than 40,000 sensations, including those relating to vision, hearing, and taste.

An important aspect of the structuralist approach was that it was rigorous and scientific. The research marked the beginning of psychology as a science, because it demonstrated that mental events could be quantified. But the structuralists also discovered the limitations of introspection. Even highly trained research participants were often unable to report on their subjective experiences. When the participants were asked to do simple math problems, they could easily do them, but they could not easily answer how they did them. Thus the structuralists were the first to realize the importance of unconscious processes—that many important aspects of human psychology occur outside our conscious awareness, and that psychologists cannot expect research participants to be able to accurately report on all of their experiences.

Functionalism and Evolutionary Psychology

In contrast to Wundt, who attempted to understand the nature of consciousness, the goal of William James and the other members of the school of functionalism was to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess (Hunt, 1993). For James, one’s thinking was relevant only to one’s behavior. As he put it in his psychology textbook, “My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing” (James, 1890).

James and the other members of the functionalist school were influenced by Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) theory of natural selection , which proposed that the physical characteristics of animals and humans evolved because they were useful, or functional. The functionalists believed that Darwin’s theory applied to psychological characteristics too. Just as some animals have developed strong muscles to allow them to run fast, the human brain, so functionalists thought, must have adapted to serve a particular function in human experience.

The functionalist school of psychology, founded by the American psychologist William James (left), was influenced by the work of Charles Darwin.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain. Darwin portrait courtesy of George Richmond, Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Although functionalism no longer exists as a school of psychology, its basic principles have been absorbed into psychology and continue to influence it in many ways. The work of the functionalists has developed into the field of evolutionary psychology , a branch of psychology that applies the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human and animal behavior (Dennett, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology accepts the functionalists’ basic assumption, namely that many human psychological systems, including memory, emotion, and personality, serve key adaptive functions. As we will see in the chapters to come, evolutionary psychologists use evolutionary theory to understand many different behaviors including romantic attraction, stereotypes and prejudice, and even the causes of many psychological disorders.

A key component of the ideas of evolutionary psychology is fitness . Fitness refers to the extent to which having a given characteristic helps the individual organism survive and reproduce at a higher rate than do other members of the species who do not have the characteristic . Fitter organisms pass on their genes more successfully to later generations, making the characteristics that produce fitness more likely to become part of the organism’s nature than characteristics that do not produce fitness. For example, it has been argued that the emotion of jealousy has survived over time in men because men who experience jealousy are more fit than men who do not. According to this idea, the experience of jealously leads men to be more likely to protect their mates and guard against rivals, which increases their reproductive success (Buss, 2000).

Despite its importance in psychological theorizing, evolutionary psychology also has some limitations. One problem is that many of its predictions are extremely difficult to test. Unlike the fossils that are used to learn about the physical evolution of species, we cannot know which psychological characteristics our ancestors possessed or did not possess; we can only make guesses about this. Because it is difficult to directly test evolutionary theories, it is always possible that the explanations we apply are made up after the fact to account for observed data (Gould & Lewontin, 1979). Nevertheless, the evolutionary approach is important to psychology because it provides logical explanations for why we have many psychological characteristics.

Psychodynamic Psychology

Perhaps the school of psychology that is most familiar to the general public is the psychodynamic approach to understanding behavior, which was championed by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his followers. Psychodynamic psychology is an approach to understanding human behavior that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories . Freud developed his theories about behavior through extensive analysis of the patients that he treated in his private clinical practice. Freud believed that many of the problems that his patients experienced, including anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction, were the result of the effects of painful childhood experiences that the person could no longer remember.

Figure 1.10

Sigmund Freud and the other psychodynamic psychologists believed that many of our thoughts and emotions are unconscious. Psychotherapy was designed to help patients recover and confront their “lost” memories.

Max Halberstadt – Wikimedia Commons -public domain.

Freud’s ideas were extended by other psychologists whom he influenced, including Carl Jung (1875–1961), Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Karen Horney (1855–1952), and Erik Erikson (1902–1994). These and others who follow the psychodynamic approach believe that it is possible to help the patient if the unconscious drives can be remembered, particularly through a deep and thorough exploration of the person’s early sexual experiences and current sexual desires. These explorations are revealed through talk therapy and dream analysis, in a process called psychoanalysis .

The founders of the school of psychodynamics were primarily practitioners who worked with individuals to help them understand and confront their psychological symptoms. Although they did not conduct much research on their ideas, and although later, more sophisticated tests of their theories have not always supported their proposals, psychodynamics has nevertheless had substantial impact on the field of psychology, and indeed on thinking about human behavior more generally (Moore & Fine, 1995). The importance of the unconscious in human behavior, the idea that early childhood experiences are critical, and the concept of therapy as a way of improving human lives are all ideas that are derived from the psychodynamic approach and that remain central to psychology.

Behaviorism and the Question of Free Will

Although they differed in approach, both structuralism and functionalism were essentially studies of the mind. The psychologists associated with the school of behaviorism , on the other hand, were reacting in part to the difficulties psychologists encountered when they tried to use introspection to understand behavior. Behaviorism is a school of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behavior itself . Behaviorists believe that the human mind is a “black box” into which stimuli are sent and from which responses are received. They argue that there is no point in trying to determine what happens in the box because we can successfully predict behavior without knowing what happens inside the mind. Furthermore, behaviorists believe that it is possible to develop laws of learning that can explain all behaviors.

The first behaviorist was the American psychologist John B. Watson (1878–1958). Watson was influenced in large part by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), who had discovered that dogs would salivate at the sound of a tone that had previously been associated with the presentation of food. Watson and the other behaviorists began to use these ideas to explain how events that people and other organisms experienced in their environment ( stimuli ) could produce specific behaviors ( responses ). For instance, in Pavlov’s research the stimulus (either the food or, after learning, the tone) would produce the response of salivation in the dogs.

In his research Watson found that systematically exposing a child to fearful stimuli in the presence of objects that did not themselves elicit fear could lead the child to respond with a fearful behavior to the presence of the stimulus (Watson & Rayner, 1920; Beck, Levinson, & Irons, 2009). In the best known of his studies, an 8-month-old boy named Little Albert was used as the subject. Here is a summary of the findings:

In line with the behaviorist approach, the boy had learned to associate the white rat with the loud noise, resulting in crying.

Figure 1.11

B. F. Skinner was a member of the behaviorist school of psychology. He argued that free will is an illusion and that all behavior is determined by environmental factors.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 3.0.

The most famous behaviorist was Burrhus Frederick (B. F.) Skinner (1904–1990), who expanded the principles of behaviorism and also brought them to the attention of the public at large. Skinner used the ideas of stimulus and response, along with the application of rewards or reinforcements , to train pigeons and other animals. And he used the general principles of behaviorism to develop theories about how best to teach children and how to create societies that were peaceful and productive. Skinner even developed a method for studying thoughts and feelings using the behaviorist approach (Skinner, 1957, 1968, 1972).

Research Focus: Do We Have Free Will?

The behaviorist research program had important implications for the fundamental questions about nature and nurture and about free will. In terms of the nature-nurture debate, the behaviorists agreed with the nurture approach, believing that we are shaped exclusively by our environments. They also argued that there is no free will, but rather that our behaviors are determined by the events that we have experienced in our past. In short, this approach argues that organisms, including humans, are a lot like puppets in a show who don’t realize that other people are controlling them. Furthermore, although we do not cause our own actions, we nevertheless believe that we do because we don’t realize all the influences acting on our behavior.

Recent research in psychology has suggested that Skinner and the behaviorists might well have been right, at least in the sense that we overestimate our own free will in responding to the events around us (Libet, 1985; Matsuhashi & Hallett, 2008; Wegner, 2002). In one demonstration of the misperception of our own free will, neuroscientists Soon, Brass, Heinze, and Haynes (2008) placed their research participants in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner while they presented them with a series of letters on a computer screen. The letter on the screen changed every one-half second. The participants were asked, whenever they decided to, to press either of two buttons. Then they were asked to indicate which letter was showing on the screen when they decided to press the button. The researchers analyzed the brain images to see if they could predict which of the two buttons the participant was going to press, even before the letter at which he or she had indicated the decision to press a button. Suggesting that the intention to act occurred in the brain before the research participants became aware of it, the researchers found that the prefrontal cortex region of the brain showed activation that could be used to predict the button press as long as 10 seconds before the participants said that they decided which button to press.

Research has found that we are more likely to think that we control our behavior when the desire to act occurs immediately prior to the outcome, when the thought is consistent with the outcome, and when there are no other apparent causes for the behavior. Aarts, Custers, and Wegner (2005) asked their research participants to control a rapidly moving square along with a computer that was also controlling the square independently. The participants pressed a button to stop the movement. When participants were exposed to words related to the location of the square just before they stopped its movement, they became more likely to think that they controlled the motion, even when it was actually the computer that stopped it. And Dijksterhuis, Preston, Wegner, and Aarts (2008) found that participants who had just been exposed to first-person singular pronouns, such as “I” and “me,” were more likely to believe that they controlled their actions than were people who had seen the words “computer” or “God.”

The idea that we are more likely to take ownership for our actions in some cases than in others is also seen in our attributions for success and failure. Because we normally expect that our behaviors will be met with success, when we are successful we easily believe that the success is the result of our own free will. When an action is met with failure, on the other hand, we are less likely to perceive this outcome as the result of our free will, and we are more likely to blame the outcome on luck or our teacher (Wegner, 2003).

The behaviorists made substantial contributions to psychology by identifying the principles of learning . Although the behaviorists were incorrect in their beliefs that it was not possible to measure thoughts and feelings, their ideas provided new ideas that helped further our understanding regarding the nature-nurture debate as well as the question of free will. The ideas of behaviorism are fundamental to psychology and have been developed to help us better understand the role of prior experiences in a variety of areas of psychology.

The Cognitive Approach and Cognitive Neuroscience

Science is always influenced by the technology that surrounds it, and psychology is no exception. Thus it is no surprise that beginning in the 1960s, growing numbers of psychologists began to think about the brain and about human behavior in terms of the computer, which was being developed and becoming publicly available at that time. The analogy between the brain and the computer, although by no means perfect, provided part of the impetus for a new school of psychology called cognitive psychology . Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment . These actions correspond well to the processes that computers perform.

Although cognitive psychology began in earnest in the 1960s, earlier psychologists had also taken a cognitive orientation. Some of the important contributors to cognitive psychology include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), who studied the ability of people to remember lists of words under different conditions, and the English psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969), who studied the cognitive and social processes of remembering. Bartlett created short stories that were in some ways logical but also contained some very unusual and unexpected events. Bartlett discovered that people found it very difficult to recall the stories exactly, even after being allowed to study them repeatedly, and he hypothesized that the stories were difficult to remember because they did not fit the participants’ expectations about how stories should go. The idea that our memory is influenced by what we already know was also a major idea behind the cognitive-developmental stage model of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Other important cognitive psychologists include Donald E. Broadbent (1926–1993), Daniel Kahneman (1934–), George Miller (1920–), Eleanor Rosch (1938–), and Amos Tversky (1937–1996).

The War of the Ghosts

The War of the Ghosts was a story used by Sir Frederic Bartlett to test the influence of prior expectations on memory. Bartlett found that even when his British research participants were allowed to read the story many times they still could not remember it well, and he believed this was because it did not fit with their prior knowledge.

In its argument that our thinking has a powerful influence on behavior, the cognitive approach provided a distinct alternative to behaviorism. According to cognitive psychologists, ignoring the mind itself will never be sufficient because people interpret the stimuli that they experience. For instance, when a boy turns to a girl on a date and says, “You are so beautiful,” a behaviorist would probably see that as a reinforcing (positive) stimulus. And yet the girl might not be so easily fooled. She might try to understand why the boy is making this particular statement at this particular time and wonder if he might be attempting to influence her through the comment. Cognitive psychologists maintain that when we take into consideration how stimuli are evaluated and interpreted, we understand behavior more deeply.

Cognitive psychology remains enormously influential today, and it has guided research in such varied fields as language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, education, human development, social psychology, and psychotherapy. The cognitive revolution has been given even more life over the past decade as the result of recent advances in our ability to see the brain in action using neuroimaging techniques. Neuroimaging is the use of various techniques to provide pictures of the structure and function of the living brain (Ilardi & Feldman, 2001). These images are used to diagnose brain disease and injury, but they also allow researchers to view information processing as it occurs in the brain, because the processing causes the involved area of the brain to increase metabolism and show up on the scan. We have already discussed the use of one neuroimaging technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in the research focus earlier in this section, and we will discuss the use of neuroimaging techniques in many areas of psychology in the chapters to follow.

Social-Cultural Psychology

A final school, which takes a higher level of analysis and which has had substantial impact on psychology, can be broadly referred to as the social-cultural approach . The field of social-cultural psychology is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behavior . Social-cultural psychologists are particularly concerned with how people perceive themselves and others, and how people influence each other’s behavior. For instance, social psychologists have found that we are attracted to others who are similar to us in terms of attitudes and interests (Byrne, 1969), that we develop our own beliefs and attitudes by comparing our opinions to those of others (Festinger, 1954), and that we frequently change our beliefs and behaviors to be similar to those of the people we care about—a process known as conformity .

An important aspect of social-cultural psychology are social norms — the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate (Asch, 1952; Cialdini, 1993). Norms include customs, traditions, standards, and rules, as well as the general values of the group. Many of the most important social norms are determined by the culture in which we live, and these cultures are studied by cross-cultural psychologists . A culture represents the common set of social norms, including religious and family values and other moral beliefs, shared by the people who live in a geographical region (Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Markus, Kitayama, & Heiman, 1996; Matsumoto, 2001). Cultures influence every aspect of our lives, and it is not inappropriate to say that our culture defines our lives just as much as does our evolutionary experience (Mesoudi, 2009).

Psychologists have found that there is a fundamental difference in social norms between Western cultures (including those in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) and East Asian cultures (including those in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia). Norms in Western cultures are primarily oriented toward individualism , which is about valuing the self and one’s independence from others. Children in Western cultures are taught to develop and to value a sense of their personal self, and to see themselves in large part as separate from the other people around them. Children in Western cultures feel special about themselves; they enjoy getting gold stars on their projects and the best grade in the class. Adults in Western cultures are oriented toward promoting their own individual success, frequently in comparison to (or even at the expense of) others.

Norms in the East Asian culture, on the other hand, are oriented toward interdependence or collectivism . In these cultures children are taught to focus on developing harmonious social relationships with others. The predominant norms relate to group togetherness and connectedness, and duty and responsibility to one’s family and other groups. When asked to describe themselves, the members of East Asian cultures are more likely than those from Western cultures to indicate that they are particularly concerned about the interests of others, including their close friends and their colleagues.

In Western cultures social norms promote a focus on the self ( individualism ), whereas in Eastern cultures the focus is more on families and social groups ( collectivism ).

Another important cultural difference is the extent to which people in different cultures are bound by social norms and customs, rather than being free to express their own individuality without considering social norms (Chan, Gelfand, Triandis, & Tzeng, 1996). Cultures also differ in terms of personal space, such as how closely individuals stand to each other when talking, as well as the communication styles they employ.

It is important to be aware of cultures and cultural differences because people with different cultural backgrounds increasingly come into contact with each other as a result of increased travel and immigration and the development of the Internet and other forms of communication. In the United States, for instance, there are many different ethnic groups, and the proportion of the population that comes from minority (non-White) groups is increasing from year to year. The social-cultural approach to understanding behavior reminds us again of the difficulty of making broad generalizations about human nature. Different people experience things differently, and they experience them differently in different cultures.

The Many Disciplines of Psychology

Psychology is not one discipline but rather a collection of many subdisciplines that all share at least some common approaches and that work together and exchange knowledge to form a coherent discipline (Yang & Chiu, 2009). Because the field of psychology is so broad, students may wonder which areas are most suitable for their interests and which types of careers might be available to them. Table 1.3 “Some Career Paths in Psychology” will help you consider the answers to these questions. You can learn more about these different fields of psychology and the careers associated with them at http://www.apa.org/careers/psyccareers/ .

Table 1.3 Some Career Paths in Psychology

Psychology in Everyday Life: How to Effectively Learn and Remember

One way that the findings of psychological research may be particularly helpful to you is in terms of improving your learning and study skills. Psychological research has provided a substantial amount of knowledge about the principles of learning and memory. This information can help you do better in this and other courses, and can also help you better learn new concepts and techniques in other areas of your life.

The most important thing you can learn in college is how to better study, learn, and remember. These skills will help you throughout your life, as you learn new jobs and take on other responsibilities. There are substantial individual differences in learning and memory, such that some people learn faster than others. But even if it takes you longer to learn than you think it should, the extra time you put into studying is well worth the effort. And you can learn to learn—learning to effectively study and to remember information is just like learning any other skill, such as playing a sport or a video game.

To learn well, you need to be ready to learn. You cannot learn well when you are tired, when you are under stress, or if you are abusing alcohol or drugs. Try to keep a consistent routine of sleeping and eating. Eat moderately and nutritiously, and avoid drugs that can impair memory, particularly alcohol. There is no evidence that stimulants such as caffeine, amphetamines, or any of the many “memory enhancing drugs” on the market will help you learn (Gold, Cahill, & Wenk, 2002; McDaniel, Maier, & Einstein, 2002). Memory supplements are usually no more effective than drinking a can of sugared soda, which also releases glucose and thus improves memory slightly.

Psychologists have studied the ways that best allow people to acquire new information, to retain it over time, and to retrieve information that has been stored in our memories. One important finding is that learning is an active process. To acquire information most effectively, we must actively manipulate it. One active approach is rehearsal—repeating the information that is to be learned over and over again. Although simple repetition does help us learn, psychological research has found that we acquire information most effectively when we actively think about or elaborate on its meaning and relate the material to something else.

When you study, try to elaborate by connecting the information to other things that you already know. If you want to remember the different schools of psychology, for instance, try to think about how each of the approaches is different from the others. As you make the comparisons among the approaches, determine what is most important about each one and then relate it to the features of the other approaches. In an important study showing the effectiveness of elaborative encoding, Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977) found that students learned information best when they related it to aspects of themselves (a phenomenon known as the self-reference effect ). This research suggests that imagining how the material relates to your own interests and goals will help you learn it.

An approach known as the method of loci involves linking each of the pieces of information that you need to remember to places that you are familiar with. You might think about the house that you grew up in and the rooms in it. Then you could put the behaviorists in the bedroom, the structuralists in the living room, and the functionalists in the kitchen. Then when you need to remember the information, you retrieve the mental image of your house and should be able to “see” each of the people in each of the areas.

One of the most fundamental principles of learning is known as the spacing effect . Both humans and animals more easily remember or learn material when they study the material in several shorter study periods over a longer period of time, rather than studying it just once for a long period of time. Cramming for an exam is a particularly ineffective way to learn.

Psychologists have also found that performance is improved when people set difficult yet realistic goals for themselves (Locke & Latham, 2006). You can use this knowledge to help you learn. Set realistic goals for the time you are going to spend studying and what you are going to learn, and try to stick to those goals. Do a small amount every day, and by the end of the week you will have accomplished a lot.

Our ability to adequately assess our own knowledge is known as metacognition . Research suggests that our metacognition may make us overconfident, leading us to believe that we have learned material even when we have not. To counteract this problem, don’t just go over your notes again and again. Instead, make a list of questions and then see if you can answer them. Study the information again and then test yourself again after a few minutes. If you made any mistakes, study again. Then wait for a half hour and test yourself again. Then test again after 1 day and after 2 days. Testing yourself by attempting to retrieve information in an active manner is better than simply studying the material because it will help you determine if you really know it.

In summary, everyone can learn to learn better. Learning is an important skill, and following the previously mentioned guidelines will likely help you learn better.

Key Takeaways

• The first psychologists were philosophers, but the field became more empirical and objective as more sophisticated scientific approaches were developed and employed.
• Some basic questions asked by psychologists include those about nature versus nurture, free will versus determinism, accuracy versus inaccuracy, and conscious versus unconscious processing.
• The structuralists attempted to analyze the nature of consciousness using introspection.
• The functionalists based their ideas on the work of Darwin, and their approaches led to the field of evolutionary psychology.
• The behaviorists explained behavior in terms of stimulus, response, and reinforcement, while denying the presence of free will.
• Cognitive psychologists study how people perceive, process, and remember information.
• Psychodynamic psychology focuses on unconscious drives and the potential to improve lives through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
• The social-cultural approach focuses on the social situation, including how cultures and social norms influence our behavior.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• What type of questions can psychologists answer that philosophers might not be able to answer as completely or as accurately? Explain why you think psychologists can answer these questions better than philosophers can.
• Choose one of the major questions of psychology and provide some evidence from your own experience that supports one side or the other.
• Choose two of the fields of psychology discussed in this section and explain how they differ in their approaches to understanding behavior and the level of explanation at which they are focused.

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Buss, D. M. (2000). The dangerous passion: Why jealousy is as necessary as love and sex . New York, NY: Free Press.

Byrne, D. (1969). Attitudes and attraction. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 4, pp. 35–89). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Chan, D. K. S., Gelfand, M. J., Triandis, H. C., & Tzeng, O. (1996). Tightness-looseness revisited: Some preliminary analyses in Japan and the United States. International Journal of Psychology, 31 , 1–12.

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Dijksterhuis, A., Preston, J., Wegner, D. M., & Aarts, H. (2008). Effects of subliminal priming of self and God on self-attribution of authorship for events. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44 (1), 2–9.

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7 , 117–140.

Fiske, S. T. (2003). Social beings . Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Fiske, A., Kitayama, S., Markus, H., & Nisbett, R. (1998). The cultural matrix of social psychology. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., pp. 915–981). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

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Harris, J. (1998). The nurture assumption: Why children turn out the way they do . New York, NY: Touchstone Books; Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature . New York, NY: Penguin Putnam.

Hunt, M. (1993). The story of psychology . New York, NY: Anchor Books.

Ilardi, S. S., & Feldman, D. (2001). The cognitive neuroscience paradigm: A unifying metatheoretical framework for the science and practice of clinical psychology. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 57 (9), 1067–1088.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology . New York, NY: Dover.

Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8 (4), 529–566; Matsuhashi, M., & Hallett, M. (2008). The timing of the conscious intention to move. European Journal of Neuroscience, 28 (11), 2344–2351.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2006). New directions in goal-setting theory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15 (5), 265–268.

Markus, H. R., Kitayama, S., & Heiman, R. J. (1996). Culture and “basic” psychological principles. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 857–913). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

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McDaniel, M. A., Maier, S. F., & Einstein, G. O. (2002). “Brain-specific” nutrients: A memory cure? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 3 (1), 12–38.

Mesoudi, A. (2009). How cultural evolutionary theory can inform social psychology and vice versa. Psychological Review, 116 (4), 929–952.

Moore, B. E., & Fine, B. D. (1995). Psychoanalysis: The major concepts . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A., & Kirker, W. S. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 35 (9), 677–688.

Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.-J., & Haynes, J.-D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11 (5), 543–545.

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Wegner, D. M. (2003). The mind’s best trick: How we experience conscious will. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7 (2), 65–69.

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Early history

Behaviourism, freud and his followers, after world war ii and sputnik.

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• Table Of Contents

psychology , scientific discipline that studies mental states and processes and behaviour in humans and other animals.

The discipline of psychology is broadly divisible into two parts: a large profession of practitioners and a smaller but growing science of mind , brain , and social behaviour. The two have distinctive goals, training, and practices, but some psychologists integrate the two.

(Read Sigmund Freud’s 1926 Britannica essay on psychoanalysis.)

In Western culture , contributors to the development of psychology came from many areas, beginning with philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle . Hippocrates philosophized about basic human temperaments (e.g., choleric, sanguine , melancholic) and their associated traits. Informed by the biology of his time, he speculated that physical qualities, such as yellow bile or too much blood, might underlie differences in temperament ( see also humour ). Aristotle postulated the brain to be the seat of the rational human mind, and in the 17th century René Descartes argued that the mind gives people the capacities for thought and consciousness : the mind “decides” and the body carries out the decision—a dualistic mind-body split that modern psychological science is still working to overcome. Two figures who helped to found psychology as a formal discipline and science in the 19th century were Wilhelm Wundt in Germany and William James in the United States . James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) defined psychology as the science of mental life and provided insightful discussions of topics and challenges that anticipated much of the field’s research agenda a century later.

During the first half of the 20th century, however, behaviourism dominated most of American academic psychology. In 1913 John B. Watson , one of the influential founders of behaviourism, urged reliance on only objectively measurable actions and conditions, effectively removing the study of consciousness from psychology. He argued that psychology as a science must deal exclusively with directly observable behaviour in lower animals as well as humans, emphasized the importance of rewarding only desired behaviours in child rearing, and drew on principles of learning through classical conditioning (based on studies with dogs by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and thus known as Pavlovian conditioning ). In the United States most university psychology departments became devoted to turning psychology away from philosophy and into a rigorous empirical science.

Beginning in the 1930s, behaviourism flourished in the United States, with B.F. Skinner leading the way in demonstrating the power of operant conditioning through reinforcement. Behaviourists in university settings conducted experiments on the conditions controlling learning and “shaping” behaviour through reinforcement, usually working with laboratory animals such as rats and pigeons. Skinner and his followers explicitly excluded mental life, viewing the human mind as an impenetrable “black box,” open only to conjecture and speculative fictions. Their work showed that social behaviour is readily influenced by manipulating specific contingencies and by changing the consequences or reinforcement (rewards) to which behaviour leads in different situations. Changes in those consequences can modify behaviour in predictable stimulus-response (S-R) patterns. Likewise, a wide range of emotions , both positive and negative, may be acquired through processes of conditioning and can be modified by applying the same principles.

Concurrently, in a curious juxtaposition , the psychoanalytic theories and therapeutic practices developed by the Vienna-trained physician Sigmund Freud and his many disciples—beginning early in the 20th century and enduring for many decades—were undermining the traditional view of human nature as essentially rational. Freudian theory made reason secondary: for Freud, the unconscious and its often socially unacceptable irrational motives and desires, particularly the sexual and aggressive, were the driving force underlying much of human behaviour and mental illness . Making the unconscious conscious became the therapeutic goal of clinicians working within this framework.

Freud proposed that much of what humans feel, think, and do is outside awareness, self-defensive in its motivations, and unconsciously determined. Much of it also reflects conflicts grounded in early childhood that play out in complex patterns of seemingly paradoxical behaviours and symptoms. His followers, the ego psychologists, emphasized the importance of the higher-order functions and cognitive processes (e.g., competence motivation , self-regulatory abilities) as well as the individual’s psychological defense mechanisms . They also shifted their focus to the roles of interpersonal relations and of secure attachment in mental health and adaptive functioning, and they pioneered the analysis of these processes in the clinical setting.

After World War II , American psychology, particularly clinical psychology, grew into a substantial field in its own right, partly in response to the needs of returning veterans. The growth of psychology as a science was stimulated further by the launching of Sputnik in 1957 and the opening of the Russian-American space race to the Moon . As part of this race, the U.S. government fueled the growth of science. For the first time, massive federal funding became available, both to support behavioral research and to enable graduate training. Psychology became both a thriving profession of practitioners and a scientific discipline that investigated all aspects of human social behaviour, child development , and individual differences, as well as the areas of animal psychology, sensation , perception , memory , and learning.

Training in clinical psychology was heavily influenced by Freudian psychology and its offshoots. But some clinical researchers, working with both normal and disturbed populations, began to develop and apply methods focusing on the learning conditions that influence and control social behaviour. This behaviour therapy movement analyzed problematic behaviours (e.g., aggressiveness , bizarre speech patterns, smoking , fear responses) in terms of the observable events and conditions that seemed to influence the person’s problematic behaviour. Behavioral approaches led to innovations for therapy by working to modify problematic behaviour not through insight, awareness, or the uncovering of unconscious motivations but by addressing the behaviour itself. Behaviourists attempted to modify the maladaptive behaviour directly, examining the conditions controlling the individual’s current problems, not their possible historical roots. They also intended to show that such efforts could be successful without the symptom substitution that Freudian theory predicted. Freudians believed that removing the troubling behaviour directly would be followed by new and worse problems. Behaviour therapists showed that this was not necessarily the case.

To begin exploring the role of genetics in personality and social development , psychologists compared the similarity in personality shown by people who share the same genes or the same environment . Twin studies compared monozygotic (identical) as opposed to dizygotic (fraternal) twins, raised either in the same or in different environments . Overall, these studies demonstrated the important role of heredity in a wide range of human characteristics and traits, such as those of the introvert and extravert , and indicated that the biological-genetic influence was far greater than early behaviourism had assumed. At the same time, it also became clear that how such dispositions are expressed in behaviour depends importantly on interactions with the environment in the course of development, beginning in utero.

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The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of Modern Psychology

Contemporary psychology is characterized by complexity of ideas, multiple modes of investigation, and an incredible diversity of topics. The history of psychology provides us with the necessary foundation for understanding our current science and profession, while also revealing alternative paths and suggesting new directions. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of Psychology addresses multiple facets of the historical development of psychology. Included are the range of theory, methods, and tools that have guided the emergence of the scientific discipline of psychology gradually as it emerged in the last third of the 19th century. The in-depth scholarly articles cover topics and are written by authors drawn from around the world, yielding insights and understanding from multiple cultural and intellectual traditions. All of the articles appear online as part of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology .

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Historiography: Metatheoretical Approaches to the History of Psychology

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Methods and Measurement in the History of Psychology

Foundations of Scientific Psychology

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Order and Disorder in Psychological Functioning

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Non-Human Animals and the History of Psychology

Spatial and Material Culture of Psychology

Histories of Indigenous and Post-Colonial Psychologies

Psychology and the Political

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History of Psychology ® features refereed articles addressing all aspects of psychology's past and of its interrelationship with the many contexts within which it has emerged and has been practiced.

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Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 22, No. 4, November 2019. Includes articles about international teamwork, Cold War geopolitics, Internet addiction, and mental hospitals in Apartheid South Africa.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 22, No. 3, August 2019. The articles detail how theories, techniques, and practices of psychology and psychiatry have been translated, adapted, and appropriated in the colonial and postcolonial eras.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 21, No. 3, August 2018. Includes articles about psychotherapy in Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, Canada, and the United States.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 19, No. 3, August 2016. Includes articles about history specialists in psychology; the digital future; psychology in South Africa and South America; and disciplinary isolationism.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 18, No. 3, August 2015. The collection of articles demonstrates how attending to feminism as a historical phenomenon can recast a host of interpretive issues at the core of the historiography of the social sciences, namely, questions of interdisciplinarity, the public, and expertise.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 17, No. 3, August 2014. Includes articles about intelligence testing in the USSR, Barcelona, and Brazil in the 1920s, as well as mental test development in the early 1900s.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 3, August 2011. Includes articles about psychology, politics, and public policy in terms of same-sex relationships; apartheid; crisis counseling and disaster relief; identity politics; and socialism and eugenics.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 13, No. 3, August 2010. Includes articles about the historiography of psychology in Italy, Brazil, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 3, August 2009. Includes articles about religion and politics in Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 10, No. 2, May 2007. Includes articles about gender difference in the late 19th century; theories on the nature of the native mind in the former Dutch East Indies; Lewis Terman and the power of the norm; the lie detector's ambivalent powers; cross-cultural lessons from Japan; and the politics of evolution.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 3, August 2006. Includes articles about the historical context of G. Stanley Hall's book "Adolescence"; the role of reading, speaking, and writing in his psychological work; sex-segregated schooling; and his contribution to science, practice and policy.

Special issue of the APA journal History of Psychology, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 2005. Articles discuss Babbage's analytical engine as a mechanical model of the mind; history of the chronoscope; tracing the psyche with the graphical method; and the impact of electroencephalography on experimental psychology.

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The History of Psychology and Its Major Theorists

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History of Psychology

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• Adrian C. Brock 2  

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Introduction

History of psychology is an unusual field. We can broadly categorize the various specialties within psychology in terms of those that are thought to be central or core and those that are relatively peripheral. The former might include neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology. Some examples of the latter are cultural or cross-cultural psychology, community psychology, theoretical/philosophical psychology, and critical psychology. History of psychology does not fall neatly into either of these categories. The subject is widely taught in psychology departments, and there is a substantial market for its textbooks. History of psychology is also a formal requirement in degrees that are approved by professional organizations like the American Psychological Association and the British Psychological Society, though neither of these organizations requires that it be offered as a separate course. The requirement can be met by including...

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Danziger, K. (2008). Marking the mind: A history of memory . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Dessoir, M. (1912). Outlines of a history of psychology . New York: Macmillan.

Furumoto, L. (1989). The new history of psychology. The G. Stanley Hall Lecture Series, 9 , 9–34.

Gergen, K. J. (1973). Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26 , 309–320.

Gergen, K. J., & Gergen, M. M. (Eds.). (1984). Historical social psychology . Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Harris, B. (1979). Whatever happened to little Albert? American Psychologist, 34 , 151–160.

Harris, B. (1980). Ceremonial versus critical history of psychology. American Psychologist, 35 , 218–219.

Klemm, G. O. (1914). A history of psychology . New York: Scribner.

Lapointe, F. H. (1968). Origin and evolution of the term “psychology”. American Psychologist, 25 , 640–646.

Lovett, B. J. (2006). The new history of psychology: A review and critique. History of Psychology, 9 , 17–37.

Murphy, G. (1929). Historical introduction to modern psychology . New York: Harcourt Brace.

Murphy, G. (1949). Historical introduction to modern psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for profit: Why democracy needs the humanities . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Pillsbury, W. B. (1929). The history of psychology . New York: Norton.

Richards, G. (1987). Of what is the history of psychology a history? British Journal for the History of Science, 20 , 201–211.

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Smith, R. (1988). Does the history of psychology have a subject? History of the Human Sciences, 1 , 147–177.

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Van Rappard, J. F. (1997). History of psychology turned inside(r) out: A comment on Danziger. Theory & Psychology, 7 , 101–105.

Vidal, F. (2011). The sciences of the soul: The early modern origins of psychology . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Watson, R. I. (1963). The great psychologists: From Aristotle to Freud . Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Woodward, W. R. (1980). Toward a critical historiography of psychology. In J. Brožek & L. J. Pongratz (Eds.), Historiography of modern psychology (pp. 29–67). Toronto, ON: Hogrefe.

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Online Resources

Several professional organizations and university departments have a “resources” or “links” page which leads to a large number of websites. Instead of giving these websites individually, I would advise the reader to consult these pages. Some of the best are:

http://historyofpsych.org/historyresources.html : Maintained by the Society for History of Psychology, aka American Psychological Association Division 26.

https://www.uakron.edu/cheiron/links/ : Maintained by Cheiron (International Society for History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences).

http://www.yorku.ca/gradpsyc/field5/moreinfo.html : Maintained by the Graduate Program in History & Theory of Psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada.

http://www.eshhs.eu/wordpress-3.3.1/wordpress/?page_id=2 : Maintained by ESHHS (European Society for the History of the Human Sciences).

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2 History of Psychology

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Understand the importance of Wundt and James in the development of psychology
• Appreciate Freud’s influence on psychology
• Understand the basic tenets of Gestalt psychology
• Appreciate the important role that behaviorism played in psychology’s history
• Understand basic tenets of humanism
• Understand how the cognitive revolution shifted psychology’s focus back to the mind

Psychology is a relatively young science with its experimental roots in the 19th century, compared, for example, to human physiology, which dates much earlier. As mentioned, anyone interested in exploring issues related to the mind generally did so in a philosophical context prior to the 19th century. Two men, who worked in the 19th century, are generally credited as being the founders of psychology as a science and academic discipline that’s distinct from philosophy. Their names were Wilhelm Wundt and William James. This section will provide an overview of the shifts in paradigms that have influenced psychology from Wundt and James through today.

Wundt and Structuralism

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was a German scientist who was the first person to be referred to as a psychologist. His famous book entitled Principles of Physiological Psychology was published in 1873. Wundt viewed psychology as a scientific study of conscious experience, and he believed that the goal of psychology was to identify components of consciousness and how those components combined to result in our conscious experience. Wundt used introspection (he called it “internal perception”), a process by which someone examines their own conscious experience as objectively as possible , making the human mind like any other aspect of nature that a scientist observed. Wundt’s version of introspection used only very specific experimental conditions in which an external stimulus was designed to produce a scientifically observable experience of the mind (Danziger, 1980). The first stringent requirement was the use of “trained” or practiced observers, who could immediately observe and report a reaction. The second requirement was the use of repeatable stimuli that always produced the same experience in the subject and allowed the subject to expect and thus be fully attentive to the inner reaction. These experimental requirements were put in place to eliminate “interpretation” in the reporting of internal experiences and to counter the argument that there is no way to know that an individual is observing their mind or consciousness accurately since it cannot be seen by any other person. This attempt to understand the structure or characteristics of the mind was known as structuralism. Wundt established his psychology laboratory at the University at Leipzig in 1879. In this laboratory, Wundt and his students conducted experiments on, for example, reaction times. A subject, sometimes in a room isolated from the scientist, would receive a stimulus such as light, image, or sound. The subject’s reaction to the stimulus would be to push a button, and an apparatus would record the time to reaction. Wundt could measure reaction time to one-thousandth of a second (Nicolas & Ferrand, 1999).

However, despite his efforts to train individuals in the process of introspection, this process remained highly subjective, and there was very little agreement between individuals. As a result, structuralism fell out of favor with the passing of Wundt’s student, Edward Titchener, in 1927 (Gordon, 1995).

James and Functionalism

William James (1842–1910) was the first American psychologist who espoused a different perspective on how psychology should operate. James was introduced to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and accepted it as an explanation of an organism’s characteristics. Key to that theory is the idea that natural selection leads to organisms that are adapted to their environment, including their behavior. Adaptation means that a trait of an organism has a function for the survival and reproduction of the individual, because it has been naturally selected. As James saw it, psychology’s purpose was to study the function of behavior in the world, and as such, his perspective was known as functionalism . Functionalism focuses on how mental activities help an organism fit into its environment . Functionalism has a second, more subtle meaning in that functionalists were more interested in the operation of the whole mind rather than of its individual parts, which were the focus of structuralism. Like Wundt, James believed that introspection could serve as one means by which someone might study mental activities, but James also relied on more objective measures, including the use of various recording devices, and examinations of concrete products of mental activities and of anatomy and physiology (Gordon, 1995).

Freud and Psychoanalytic Theory

Perhaps one of the most influential and well-known figures in psychology’s history was Sigmund Freud . Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian neurologist who was fascinated by patients suffering from “hysteria” and neurosis. Hysteria was an ancient diagnosis for disorders, primarily of women with a wide variety of symptoms, including physical symptoms and emotional disturbances, none of which had an apparent physical cause. Freud theorized that many of his patients’ problems arose from the unconscious mind. In Freud’s view, the unconscious mind was a repository of feelings and urges of which we have no awareness. Gaining access to the unconscious, then, was crucial to the successful resolution of the patient’s problems. According to Freud, the unconscious mind could be accessed through dream analysis, by examinations of the first words that came to people’s minds, and through seemingly innocent slips of the tongue. Psychoanalytic theory focuses on the role of a person’s unconscious, as well as early childhood experiences , and this particular perspective dominated clinical psychology for several decades (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Freud’s ideas were influential, and you will learn more about them when you study lifespan development, personality, and therapy. For instance, many therapists believe strongly in the unconscious and the impact of early childhood experiences on the rest of a person’s life. The method of psychoanalysis, which involves the patient talking about their experiences and selves, while not invented by Freud, was certainly popularized by him and is still used today. Many of Freud’s other ideas, however, are controversial. Drew Westen (1998) argues that many of the criticisms of Freud’s ideas are misplaced, in that they attack his older ideas without taking into account later writings. Westen also argues that critics fail to consider the success of the broad ideas that Freud introduced or developed, such as the importance of childhood experiences in adult motivations, the role of unconscious versus conscious motivations in driving our behavior, the fact that motivations can cause conflicts that affect behavior, the effects of mental representations of ourselves and others in guiding our interactions, and the development of personality over time. Westen identifies subsequent research support for all of these ideas.

More modern iterations of Freud’s clinical approach have been empirically demonstrated to be effective (Knekt et al., 2008; Shedler, 2010). Some current practices in psychotherapy involve examining unconscious aspects of the self and relationships, often through the relationship between the therapist and the client. Freud’s historical significance and contributions to clinical practice merit his inclusion in a discussion of the historical movements within psychology.

Wertheimer, Koffka, Köhler, and Gestalt Psychology

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) were three German psychologists who immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century to escape Nazi Germany. These men are credited with introducing psychologists in the United States to various Gestalt principles. The word Gestalt roughly translates to “whole”; a major emphasis of Gestalt psychology deals with the fact that although a sensory experience can be broken down into individual parts, how those parts relate to each other as a whole is often what the individual responds to in perception. For example, a song may be made up of individual notes played by different instruments, but the real nature of the song is perceived in the combinations of these notes as they form the melody, rhythm, and harmony. In many ways, this particular perspective would have directly contradicted Wundt’s ideas of structuralism (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Unfortunately, in moving to the United States, these men were forced to abandon much of their work and were unable to continue to conduct research on a large scale. These factors along with the rise of behaviorism (described next) in the United States prevented principles of Gestalt psychology from being as influential in the United States as they had been in their native Germany (Thorne & Henley, 2005). Despite these issues, several Gestalt principles are still very influential today. Considering the human individual as a whole rather than as a sum of individually measured parts became an important foundation in humanistic theory late in the century. The ideas of Gestalt have continued to influence research on sensation and perception.

Structuralism, Freud, and the Gestalt psychologists were all concerned in one way or another with describing and understanding inner experience. But other researchers had concerns that inner experience could be a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry and chose instead to exclusively study behavior, the objectively observable outcome of mental processes.

Pavlov, Watson, Skinner, and Behaviorism

Early work in the field of behavior was conducted by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936). Pavlov studied a form of learning behavior called a conditioned reflex, in which an animal or human produced a reflex (unconscious) response to a stimulus and, over time, was conditioned to produce the response to a different stimulus that the experimenter associated with the original stimulus. The reflex Pavlov worked with was salivation in response to the presence of food. The salivation reflex could be elicited using a second stimulus, such as a specific sound, that was presented in association with the initial food stimulus several times. Once the response to the second stimulus was “learned,” the food stimulus could be omitted. Pavlov’s “classical conditioning” is only one form of learning behavior studied by behaviorists.

John B. Watson (1878–1958) was an influential American psychologist whose most famous work occurred during the early 20th century at Johns Hopkins University. While Wundt and James were concerned with understanding conscious experience, Watson thought that the study of consciousness was flawed. Because he believed that objective analysis of the mind was impossible, Watson preferred to focus directly on observable behavior and try to bring that behavior under control. Watson was a major proponent of shifting the focus of psychology from the mind to behavior, and this approach of observing and controlling behavior came to be known as behaviorism . A major object of study by behaviorists was learned behavior and its interaction with the inborn qualities of the organism. Behaviorism commonly used animals in experiments under the assumption that what was learned using animal models could, to some degree, be applied to human behavior. Indeed, Tolman (1938) stated, “I believe that everything important in psychology (except … such matters as involve society and words) can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determiners of rat behavior at a choice-point in a maze.”

Behaviorism dominated experimental psychology for several decades, and its influence can still be felt today (Thorne & Henley, 2005). Behaviorism is largely responsible for establishing psychology as a scientific discipline through its objective methods and especially experimentation. In addition, it is used in behavioral and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Behavior modification is commonly used in classroom settings. Behaviorism has also led to research on environmental influences on human behavior.

B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) was an American psychologist. Like Watson, Skinner was a behaviorist, and he concentrated on how behavior was affected by its consequences. Therefore, Skinner spoke of reinforcement and punishment as major factors in driving behavior. As a part of his research, Skinner developed a chamber that allowed the careful study of the principles of modifying behavior through reinforcement and punishment. This device, known as an operant conditioning chamber (or more familiarly, a Skinner box), has remained a crucial resource for researchers studying behavior (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

The Skinner box is a chamber that isolates the subject from the external environment and has a behavior indicator such as a lever or a button. When the animal pushes the button or lever, the box is able to deliver a positive reinforcement of the behavior (such as food) or a punishment (such as a noise) or a token conditioner (such as a light) that is correlated with either the positive reinforcement or punishment.

Skinner’s focus on positive and negative reinforcement of learned behaviors had a lasting influence in psychology that has waned somewhat since the growth of research in cognitive psychology. Despite this, conditioned learning is still used in human behavioral modification. Skinner’s two widely read and controversial popular science books about the value of operant conditioning for creating happier lives remain as thought-provoking arguments for his approach (Greengrass, 2004).

Maslow, Rogers, And Humanism

During the early 20th century, American psychology was dominated by behaviorism and psychoanalysis. However, some psychologists were uncomfortable with what they viewed as limited perspectives being so influential to the field. They objected to the pessimism and determinism (all actions driven by the unconscious) of Freud. They also disliked the reductionism, or simplifying nature, of behaviorism. Behaviorism is also deterministic at its core, because it sees human behavior as entirely determined by a combination of genetics and environment. Some psychologists began to form ideas that emphasized personal control, intentionality, and a true predisposition for “good” as important for our self-concept and our behavior. Thus, humanism emerged. Humanism is a perspective within psychology that emphasizes the potential for good that is innate to all humans . Two of the most well-known proponents of humanistic psychology are Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers (O’Hara, n.d.).

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist who is best known for proposing a hierarchy of human needs in motivating behavior. Although this concept will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter, a brief overview will be provided here. Maslow asserted that so long as basic needs necessary for survival were met (e.g., food, water, shelter), higher-level needs (e.g., social needs) would begin to motivate behavior. According to Maslow, the highest-level needs relate to self-actualization, a process by which we achieve our full potential. Obviously, the focus on the positive aspects of human nature that are characteristic of the humanistic perspective is evident (Thorne & Henley, 2005). Humanistic psychologists rejected, on principle, the research approach based on reductionist experimentation in the tradition of the physical and biological sciences, because it missed the “whole” human being. Beginning with Maslow and Rogers, there was an insistence on a humanistic research program. This program has been largely qualitative (not measurement-based), but there exist a number of quantitative research strains within humanistic psychology, including research on happiness, self-concept, meditation, and the outcomes of humanistic psychotherapy (Friedman, 2008).

Carl Rogers (1902–1987) was also an American psychologist who, like Maslow, emphasized the potential for good that exists within all people. Rogers used a therapeutic technique known as client-centered therapy in helping his clients deal with problematic issues that resulted in their seeking psychotherapy. Unlike a psychoanalytic approach in which the therapist plays an important role in interpreting what conscious behavior reveals about the unconscious mind, client-centered therapy involves the patient taking a lead role in the therapy session. Rogers believed that a therapist needed to display three features to maximize the effectiveness of this particular approach: unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathy. Unconditional positive regard refers to the fact that the therapist accepts their client for who they are, no matter what he or she might say. Provided these factors, Rogers believed that people were more than capable of dealing with and working through their own issues (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Humanism has been influential to psychology. Both Maslow and Rogers are well-known names among students of psychology (you will read more about both men later in this text), and their ideas have influenced many scholars. Furthermore, Rogers’ client-centered approach to therapy is still commonly used in psychotherapeutic settings today (O’Hara, n.d.)

View a brief video of Carl Rogers describing his therapeutic approach: Carl Rogers on Person-Centered Therapy Video .

The Cognitive Revolution

Behaviorism’s emphasis on objectivity and focus on external behavior had pulled psychologists’ attention away from the mind for a prolonged period of time. The early work of humanistic psychologists redirected attention to the individual human as a whole, and as a conscious and self-aware being. By the 1950s, new disciplinary perspectives in linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science were emerging, and these areas revived interest in the mind as a focus of scientific inquiry. This particular perspective has come to be known as the cognitive revolution (Miller, 2003). By 1967, Ulric Neisser published the first textbook entitled Cognitive Psychology , which served as a core text in cognitive psychology courses around the country (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Although no one person is entirely responsible for starting the cognitive revolution, Noam Chomsky was very influential in the early days of this movement. Chomsky (1928–), an American linguist, was dissatisfied with the influence that behaviorism had had on psychology. He believed that psychology’s focus on behavior was short-sighted and that the field had to re-incorporate mental functioning into its purview if it were to offer any meaningful contributions to understanding behavior (Miller, 2003).

European psychology had never really been as influenced by behaviorism as had American psychology; and thus, the cognitive revolution helped reestablish lines of communication between European psychologists and their American counterparts. Furthermore, psychologists began to cooperate with scientists in other fields, like anthropology, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience, among others. This interdisciplinary approach often was referred to as the cognitive sciences, and the influence and prominence of this particular perspective resonates in modern-day psychology (Miller, 2003).

Feminist Psychology

The science of psychology has had an impact on human well-being, both positive and negative. The dominant influence of Western, white, and male academics in the early history of psychology meant that psychology developed with the biases inherent in those individuals, which often had negative consequences for members of society who were not white or male. Women, members of ethnic minorities in both the United States and other countries, and individuals with sexual orientations other than heterosexual had difficulties entering the field of psychology and therefore influencing its development. They also suffered from the attitudes of white, male psychologists, who were not immune to the nonscientific attitudes prevalent in the society in which they developed and worked. Until the 1960s, the science of psychology was largely a “womanless” psychology (Crawford & Marecek, 1989), meaning that few women were able to practice psychology, so they had little influence on what was studied. In addition, the experimental subjects of psychology were mostly men, which resulted from underlying assumptions that gender had no influence on psychology and that women were not of sufficient interest to study.

An article by Naomi Weisstein, first published in 1968 (Weisstein, 1993), stimulated a feminist revolution in psychology by presenting a critique of psychology as a science. She also specifically criticized male psychologists for constructing the psychology of women entirely out of their own cultural biases and without careful experimental tests to verify any of their characterizations of women. Weisstein used, as examples, statements by prominent psychologists in the 1960s, such as this quote by Bruno Bettleheim: “. . . we must start with the realization that, as much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers.” Weisstein’s critique formed the foundation for the subsequent development of feminist psychology that attempted to be free of the influence of male cultural biases on our knowledge of the psychology of women and, indeed, of both genders.

Crawford & Marecek (1989) identify several feminist approaches to psychology that can be described as feminist psychology. These include re-evaluating and discovering the contributions of women to the history of psychology, studying psychological gender differences, and questioning the male bias present across the practice of the scientific approach to knowledge.

Multicultural Psychology

Culture has important impacts on individuals and social psychology, yet the effects of culture on psychology are under-studied. There is a risk that psychological theories and data derived from white, American settings could be assumed to apply to individuals and social groups from other cultures, but this is unlikely to be true (Betancourt & López, 1993). One weakness in the field of cross-cultural psychology is that in looking for differences in psychological attributes across cultures, there remains a need to go beyond simple descriptive statistics (Betancourt & López, 1993). In this sense, it has remained a descriptive science, rather than one seeking to determine cause and effect. For example, a study of characteristics of individuals seeking treatment for a binge eating disorder in Hispanic American, African American, and Caucasian American individuals found significant differences between groups (Franko et al., 2012). The study concluded that results from studying any one of the groups could not be extended to the other groups, and yet potential causes of the differences were not measured.

The history of multicultural psychology in the United States is a long one. The role of African American psychologists in researching the cultural differences between African American individuals and social psychology is but one example. In 1920, Cecil Sumner was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology in the United States. Sumner established a psychology degree program at Howard University, leading to the education of a new generation of African American psychologists (Black, Spence, and Omari, 2004). Much of the work of early African American psychologists (and a general focus of much work in the first half of the 20th century in psychology in the United States) was dedicated to testing, and intelligence testing in particular (Black et al., 2004). That emphasis has continued, particularly because of the importance of testing in determining opportunities for children, but other areas of exploration in African-American psychology research include learning style, sense of community and belonging, and spiritualism (Black et al., 2004).

The American Psychological Association has several ethnically based organizations for professional psychologists that facilitate interactions among members. Since psychologists belonging to specific ethnic groups or cultures have the most interest in studying the psychology of their communities, these organizations provide an opportunity for the growth of research on the impact of culture on individual and social psychology.

Before the time of Wundt and James, questions about the mind were considered by philosophers. However, both Wundt and James helped create psychology as a distinct scientific discipline. Wundt was a structuralist, which meant he believed that our cognitive experience was best understood by breaking that experience into its component parts. He thought this was best accomplished by introspection.

William James was the first American psychologist, and he was a proponent of functionalism. This particular perspective focused on how mental activities served as adaptive responses to an organism’s environment. Like Wundt, James also relied on introspection; however, his research approach also incorporated more objective measures as well.

Sigmund Freud believed that understanding the unconscious mind was absolutely critical to understanding conscious behavior. This was especially true for individuals that he saw who suffered from various hysterias and neuroses. Freud relied on dream analysis, slips of the tongue, and free association as means to access the unconscious. The psychoanalytic theory remained a dominant force in clinical psychology for several decades.

Gestalt psychology was very influential in Europe. Gestalt psychology takes a holistic view of an individual and his experiences. As the Nazis came to power in Germany, Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler immigrated to the United States. Although they left their laboratories and their research behind, they did introduce America to Gestalt ideas. Some of the principles of Gestalt psychology are still very influential in the study of sensation and perception.

One of the most influential schools of thought in psychology’s history was behaviorism. Behaviorism focuses on making psychology an objective science by studying overt behavior and deemphasizing the importance of unobservable mental processes. John Watson is often considered the father of behaviorism, and B. F. Skinner’s contributions to our understanding of the principles of operant conditioning cannot be underestimated.

As behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory took hold of so many aspects of psychology, some began to become dissatisfied with psychology’s picture of human nature. Thus, a humanistic movement within psychology began to take hold. Humanism focuses on the potential of all people for good. Both Maslow and Rogers were influential in shaping humanistic psychology.

During the 1950s, the landscape of psychology began to change. The science of behavior began to shift back to its roots of focus on mental processes. The emergence of neuroscience and computer science aided this transition. Ultimately, the cognitive revolution took hold, and people came to realize that cognition was crucial to a true appreciation and understanding of behavior.

Review Questions

Critical thinking questions.

In its early days, psychology could be defined as the scientific study of mind or mental processes. Over time, psychology began to shift more towards the scientific study of behavior. However, as the cognitive revolution took hold, psychology once again began to focus on mental processes as necessary to the understanding of behavior.

Behaviorists studied objectively observable behavior partly in reaction to the psychologists of the mind who were studying things that were not directly observable.

Personal Application Questions

Freud is probably one of the most well-known historical figures in psychology. Where have you encountered references to Freud or his ideas about the role that the unconscious mind plays in determining conscious behavior?

Image Descriptions

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Image Description: A pyramid shape divided into five horizontal sections that are labelled. From top to bottom, the triangle’s sections are labeled as follows:

• Self-actualization corresponds to “Inner fulfillment”;
• Esteem corresponds to “Self-worth, accomplishment, confidence”;
• Social corresponds to “Family, friendship, intimacy, belonging”;
• Security corresponds to “Safety, employment, assets”;
• Physiological corresponds to “Food, water, shelter, warmth.”

[Return to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs image]

Media Attributions

• “ Carl Rogers on Person-Centered Therapy Video ” by PsychotherapyNet . Standard YouTube License. 

focuses on how mental activities help an organism fit into its environment.

focuses on the role of a person’s unconscious, as well as early childhood experiences

approach of observing and controlling behavior

a perspective within psychology that emphasizes the potential for good that is innate to all humans.

History of Psychology Copyright © 2022 by LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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3 History of Psychology

[latexpage]

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Understand the importance of Wundt and James in the development of psychology
• Appreciate Freud’s influence on psychology
• Understand the basic tenets of Gestalt psychology
• Appreciate the important role that behaviorism played in psychology’s history
• Understand basic tenets of humanism
• Understand how the cognitive revolution shifted psychology’s focus back to the mind

Psychology is a relatively young science with its experimental roots in the 19th century, compared, for example, to human physiology, which dates much earlier. As mentioned, anyone interested in exploring issues related to the mind generally did so in a philosophical context prior to the 19th century. Two men, working in the 19th century, are generally credited as being the founders of psychology as a science and academic discipline that was distinct from philosophy. Their names were Wilhelm Wundt and William James. This section will provide an overview of the shifts in paradigms that have influenced psychology from Wundt and James through today.

WUNDT AND STRUCTURALISM

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was a German scientist who was the first person to be referred to as a psychologist. His famous book entitled Principles of Physiological Psychology was published in 1873. Wundt viewed psychology as a scientific study of conscious experience, and he believed that the goal of psychology was to identify components of consciousness and how those components combined to result in our conscious experience. Wundt used introspection (he called it “internal perception”), a process by which someone examines their own conscious experience as objectively as possible, making the human mind like any other aspect of nature that a scientist observed. Wundt’s version of introspection used only very specific experimental conditions in which an external stimulus was designed to produce a scientifically observable (repeatable) experience of the mind (Danziger, 1980). The first stringent requirement was the use of “trained” or practiced observers, who could immediately observe and report a reaction. The second requirement was the use of repeatable stimuli that always produced the same experience in the subject and allowed the subject to expect and thus be fully attentive to the inner reaction. These experimental requirements were put in place to eliminate “interpretation” in the reporting of internal experiences and to counter the argument that there is no way to know that an individual is observing their mind or consciousness accurately, since it cannot be seen by any other person. This attempt to understand the structure or characteristics of the mind was known as structuralism . Wundt established his psychology laboratory at the University at Leipzig in 1879 ( [link] ). In this laboratory, Wundt and his students conducted experiments on, for example, reaction times. A subject, sometimes in a room isolated from the scientist, would receive a stimulus such as a light, image, or sound. The subject’s reaction to the stimulus would be to push a button, and an apparatus would record the time to reaction. Wundt could measure reaction time to one-thousandth of a second (Nicolas & Ferrand, 1999).

However, despite his efforts to train individuals in the process of introspection, this process remained highly subjective, and there was very little agreement between individuals. As a result, structuralism fell out of favor with the passing of Wundt’s student, Edward Titchener, in 1927 (Gordon, 1995).

JAMES AND FUNCTIONALISM

William James (1842–1910) was the first American psychologist who espoused a different perspective on how psychology should operate ( [link] ). James was introduced to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and accepted it as an explanation of an organism’s characteristics. Key to that theory is the idea that natural selection leads to organisms that are adapted to their environment, including their behavior. Adaptation means that a trait of an organism has a function for the survival and reproduction of the individual, because it has been naturally selected. As James saw it, psychology’s purpose was to study the function of behavior in the world, and as such, his perspective was known as functionalism . Functionalism focused on how mental activities helped an organism fit into its environment. Functionalism has a second, more subtle meaning in that functionalists were more interested in the operation of the whole mind rather than of its individual parts, which were the focus of structuralism. Like Wundt, James believed that introspection could serve as one means by which someone might study mental activities, but James also relied on more objective measures, including the use of various recording devices, and examinations of concrete products of mental activities and of anatomy and physiology (Gordon, 1995).

FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

Perhaps one of the most influential and well-known figures in psychology’s history was Sigmund Freud ( [link] ). Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian neurologist who was fascinated by patients suffering from “hysteria” and neurosis. Hysteria was an ancient diagnosis for disorders, primarily of women with a wide variety of symptoms, including physical symptoms and emotional disturbances, none of which had an apparent physical cause. Freud theorized that many of his patients’ problems arose from the unconscious mind. In Freud’s view, the unconscious mind was a repository of feelings and urges of which we have no awareness. Gaining access to the unconscious, then, was crucial to the successful resolution of the patient’s problems. According to Freud, the unconscious mind could be accessed through dream analysis, by examinations of the first words that came to people’s minds, and through seemingly innocent slips of the tongue. Psychoanalytic theory focuses on the role of a person’s unconscious, as well as early childhood experiences, and this particular perspective dominated clinical psychology for several decades (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Freud’s ideas were influential, and you will learn more about them when you study lifespan development, personality, and therapy. For instance, many therapists believe strongly in the unconscious and the impact of early childhood experiences on the rest of a person’s life. The method of psychoanalysis, which involves the patient talking about their experiences and selves, while not invented by Freud, was certainly popularized by him and is still used today. Many of Freud’s other ideas, however, are controversial. Drew Westen (1998) argues that many of the criticisms of Freud’s ideas are misplaced, in that they attack his older ideas without taking into account later writings. Westen also argues that critics fail to consider the success of the broad ideas that Freud introduced or developed, such as the importance of childhood experiences in adult motivations, the role of unconscious versus conscious motivations in driving our behavior, the fact that motivations can cause conflicts that affect behavior, the effects of mental representations of ourselves and others in guiding our interactions, and the development of personality over time. Westen identifies subsequent research support for all of these ideas.

More modern iterations of Freud’s clinical approach have been empirically demonstrated to be effective (Knekt et al., 2008; Shedler, 2010). Some current practices in psychotherapy involve examining unconscious aspects of the self and relationships, often through the relationship between the therapist and the client. Freud’s historical significance and contributions to clinical practice merit his inclusion in a discussion of the historical movements within psychology.

WERTHEIMER, KOFFKA, KÖHLER, AND GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) were three German psychologists who immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century to escape Nazi Germany. These men are credited with introducing psychologists in the United States to various Gestalt principles. The word Gestalt roughly translates to “whole;” a major emphasis of Gestalt psychology deals with the fact that although a sensory experience can be broken down into individual parts, how those parts relate to each other as a whole is often what the individual responds to in perception. For example, a song may be made up of individual notes played by different instruments, but the real nature of the song is perceived in the combinations of these notes as they form the melody, rhythm, and harmony. In many ways, this particular perspective would have directly contradicted Wundt’s ideas of structuralism (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Unfortunately, in moving to the United States, these men were forced to abandon much of their work and were unable to continue to conduct research on a large scale. These factors along with the rise of behaviorism (described next) in the United States prevented principles of Gestalt psychology from being as influential in the United States as they had been in their native Germany (Thorne & Henley, 2005). Despite these issues, several Gestalt principles are still very influential today. Considering the human individual as a whole rather than as a sum of individually measured parts became an important foundation in humanistic theory late in the century. The ideas of Gestalt have continued to influence research on sensation and perception.

Structuralism, Freud, and the Gestalt psychologists were all concerned in one way or another with describing and understanding inner experience. But other researchers had concerns that inner experience could be a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry and chose instead to exclusively study behavior, the objectively observable outcome of mental processes.

PAVLOV, WATSON, SKINNER, AND BEHAVIORISM

Early work in the field of behavior was conducted by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936). Pavlov studied a form of learning behavior called a conditioned reflex, in which an animal or human produced a reflex (unconscious) response to a stimulus and, over time, was conditioned to produce the response to a different stimulus that the experimenter associated with the original stimulus. The reflex Pavlov worked with was salivation in response to the presence of food. The salivation reflex could be elicited using a second stimulus, such as a specific sound, that was presented in association with the initial food stimulus several times. Once the response to the second stimulus was “learned,” the food stimulus could be omitted. Pavlov’s “classical conditioning” is only one form of learning behavior studied by behaviorists.

John B. Watson (1878–1958) was an influential American psychologist whose most famous work occurred during the early 20th century at Johns Hopkins University ( [link] ). While Wundt and James were concerned with understanding conscious experience, Watson thought that the study of consciousness was flawed. Because he believed that objective analysis of the mind was impossible, Watson preferred to focus directly on observable behavior and try to bring that behavior under control. Watson was a major proponent of shifting the focus of psychology from the mind to behavior, and this approach of observing and controlling behavior came to be known as behaviorism . A major object of study by behaviorists was learned behavior and its interaction with inborn qualities of the organism. Behaviorism commonly used animals in experiments under the assumption that what was learned using animal models could, to some degree, be applied to human behavior. Indeed, Tolman (1938) stated, “I believe that everything important in psychology (except … such matters as involve society and words) can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determiners of rat behavior at a choice-point in a maze.”

Behaviorism dominated experimental psychology for several decades, and its influence can still be felt today (Thorne & Henley, 2005). Behaviorism is largely responsible for establishing psychology as a scientific discipline through its objective methods and especially experimentation. In addition, it is used in behavioral and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Behavior modification is commonly used in classroom settings. Behaviorism has also led to research on environmental influences on human behavior.

B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) was an American psychologist ( [link] ). Like Watson, Skinner was a behaviorist, and he concentrated on how behavior was affected by its consequences. Therefore, Skinner spoke of reinforcement and punishment as major factors in driving behavior. As a part of his research, Skinner developed a chamber that allowed the careful study of the principles of modifying behavior through reinforcement and punishment. This device, known as an operant conditioning chamber (or more familiarly, a Skinner box), has remained a crucial resource for researchers studying behavior (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

The Skinner box is a chamber that isolates the subject from the external environment and has a behavior indicator such as a lever or a button. When the animal pushes the button or lever, the box is able to deliver a positive reinforcement of the behavior (such as food) or a punishment (such as a noise) or a token conditioner (such as a light) that is correlated with either the positive reinforcement or punishment.

Skinner’s focus on positive and negative reinforcement of learned behaviors had a lasting influence in psychology that has waned somewhat since the growth of research in cognitive psychology. Despite this, conditioned learning is still used in human behavioral modification. Skinner’s two widely read and controversial popular science books about the value of operant conditioning for creating happier lives remain as thought-provoking arguments for his approach (Greengrass, 2004).

MASLOW, ROGERS, AND HUMANISM

During the early 20th century, American psychology was dominated by behaviorism and psychoanalysis. However, some psychologists were uncomfortable with what they viewed as limited perspectives being so influential to the field. They objected to the pessimism and determinism (all actions driven by the unconscious) of Freud. They also disliked the reductionism, or simplifying nature, of behaviorism. Behaviorism is also deterministic at its core, because it sees human behavior as entirely determined by a combination of genetics and environment. Some psychologists began to form their own ideas that emphasized personal control, intentionality, and a true predisposition for “good” as important for our self-concept and our behavior. Thus, humanism emerged. Humanism is a perspective within psychology that emphasizes the potential for good that is innate to all humans. Two of the most well-known proponents of humanistic psychology are Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers (O’Hara, n.d.).

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist who is best known for proposing a hierarchy of human needs in motivating behavior ( [link] ). Although this concept will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter, a brief overview will be provided here. Maslow asserted that so long as basic needs necessary for survival were met (e.g., food, water, shelter), higher-level needs (e.g., social needs) would begin to motivate behavior. According to Maslow, the highest-level needs relate to self-actualization, a process by which we achieve our full potential. Obviously, the focus on the positive aspects of human nature that are characteristic of the humanistic perspective is evident (Thorne & Henley, 2005). Humanistic psychologists rejected, on principle, the research approach based on reductionist experimentation in the tradition of the physical and biological sciences, because it missed the “whole” human being. Beginning with Maslow and Rogers, there was an insistence on a humanistic research program. This program has been largely qualitative (not measurement-based), but there exist a number of quantitative research strains within humanistic psychology, including research on happiness, self-concept, meditation, and the outcomes of humanistic psychotherapy (Friedman, 2008).

Carl Rogers (1902–1987) was also an American psychologist who, like Maslow, emphasized the potential for good that exists within all people ( [link] ). Rogers used a therapeutic technique known as client-centered therapy in helping his clients deal with problematic issues that resulted in their seeking psychotherapy. Unlike a psychoanalytic approach in which the therapist plays an important role in interpreting what conscious behavior reveals about the unconscious mind, client-centered therapy involves the patient taking a lead role in the therapy session. Rogers believed that a therapist needed to display three features to maximize the effectiveness of this particular approach: unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathy. Unconditional positive regard refers to the fact that the therapist accepts their client for who they are, no matter what he or she might say. Provided these factors, Rogers believed that people were more than capable of dealing with and working through their own issues (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Humanism has been influential to psychology as a whole. Both Maslow and Rogers are well-known names among students of psychology (you will read more about both men later in this text), and their ideas have influenced many scholars. Furthermore, Rogers’ client-centered approach to therapy is still commonly used in psychotherapeutic settings today (O’hara, n.d.)

View a brief video of Carl Rogers describing his therapeutic approach.

THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION

Behaviorism’s emphasis on objectivity and focus on external behavior had pulled psychologists’ attention away from the mind for a prolonged period of time. The early work of the humanistic psychologists redirected attention to the individual human as a whole, and as a conscious and self-aware being. By the 1950s, new disciplinary perspectives in linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science were emerging, and these areas revived interest in the mind as a focus of scientific inquiry. This particular perspective has come to be known as the cognitive revolution (Miller, 2003). By 1967, Ulric Neisser published the first textbook entitled Cognitive Psychology , which served as a core text in cognitive psychology courses around the country (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

Although no one person is entirely responsible for starting the cognitive revolution, Noam Chomsky was very influential in the early days of this movement ( [link] ). Chomsky (1928–), an American linguist, was dissatisfied with the influence that behaviorism had had on psychology. He believed that psychology’s focus on behavior was short-sighted and that the field had to re-incorporate mental functioning into its purview if it were to offer any meaningful contributions to understanding behavior (Miller, 2003).

European psychology had never really been as influenced by behaviorism as had American psychology; and thus, the cognitive revolution helped reestablish lines of communication between European psychologists and their American counterparts. Furthermore, psychologists began to cooperate with scientists in other fields, like anthropology, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience, among others. This interdisciplinary approach often was referred to as the cognitive sciences, and the influence and prominence of this particular perspective resonates in modern-day psychology (Miller, 2003).

The science of psychology has had an impact on human wellbeing, both positive and negative. The dominant influence of Western, white, and male academics in the early history of psychology meant that psychology developed with the biases inherent in those individuals, which often had negative consequences for members of society that were not white or male. Women, members of ethnic minorities in both the United States and other countries, and individuals with sexual orientations other than heterosexual had difficulties entering the field of psychology and therefore influencing its development. They also suffered from the attitudes of white, male psychologists, who were not immune to the nonscientific attitudes prevalent in the society in which they developed and worked. Until the 1960s, the science of psychology was largely a “womanless” psychology (Crawford & Marecek, 1989), meaning that few women were able to practice psychology, so they had little influence on what was studied. In addition, the experimental subjects of psychology were mostly men, which resulted from underlying assumptions that gender had no influence on psychology and that women were not of sufficient interest to study.

An article by Naomi Weisstein, first published in 1968 (Weisstein, 1993), stimulated a feminist revolution in psychology by presenting a critique of psychology as a science. She also specifically criticized male psychologists for constructing the psychology of women entirely out of their own cultural biases and without careful experimental tests to verify any of their characterizations of women. Weisstein used, as examples, statements by prominent psychologists in the 1960s, such as this quote by Bruno Bettleheim: “. . . we must start with the realization that, as much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers.” Weisstein’s critique formed the foundation for the subsequent development of a feminist psychology that attempted to be free of the influence of male cultural biases on our knowledge of the psychology of women and, indeed, of both genders.

Crawford & Marecek (1989) identify several feminist approaches to psychology that can be described as feminist psychology. These include re-evaluating and discovering the contributions of women to the history of psychology, studying psychological gender differences, and questioning the male bias present across the practice of the scientific approach to knowledge.

MULTICULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

Culture has important impacts on individuals and social psychology, yet the effects of culture on psychology are under-studied. There is a risk that psychological theories and data derived from white, American settings could be assumed to apply to individuals and social groups from other cultures and this is unlikely to be true (Betancourt & López, 1993). One weakness in the field of cross-cultural psychology is that in looking for differences in psychological attributes across cultures, there remains a need to go beyond simple descriptive statistics (Betancourt & López, 1993). In this sense, it has remained a descriptive science, rather than one seeking to determine cause and effect. For example, a study of characteristics of individuals seeking treatment for a binge eating disorder in Hispanic American, African American, and Caucasian American individuals found significant differences between groups (Franko et al., 2012). The study concluded that results from studying any one of the groups could not be extended to the other groups, and yet potential causes of the differences were not measured.

This history of multicultural psychology in the United States is a long one. The role of African American psychologists in researching the cultural differences between African American individual and social psychology is but one example. In 1920, Cecil Sumner was the first African American to receive a PhD in psychology in the United States. Sumner established a psychology degree program at Howard University, leading to the education of a new generation of African American psychologists (Black, Spence, and Omari, 2004). Much of the work of early African American psychologists (and a general focus of much work in first half of the 20th century in psychology in the United States) was dedicated to testing and intelligence testing in particular (Black et al., 2004). That emphasis has continued, particularly because of the importance of testing in determining opportunities for children, but other areas of exploration in African-American psychology research include learning style, sense of community and belonging, and spiritualism (Black et al., 2004).

The American Psychological Association has several ethnically based organizations for professional psychologists that facilitate interactions among members. Since psychologists belonging to specific ethnic groups or cultures have the most interest in studying the psychology of their communities, these organizations provide an opportunity for the growth of research on the impact of culture on individual and social psychology.

Read a news story about the influence of an African American’s psychology research on the historic Brown v. Board of Education civil rights case.

Before the time of Wundt and James, questions about the mind were considered by philosophers. However, both Wundt and James helped create psychology as a distinct scientific discipline. Wundt was a structuralist, which meant he believed that our cognitive experience was best understood by breaking that experience into its component parts. He thought this was best accomplished by introspection.

William James was the first American psychologist, and he was a proponent of functionalism. This particular perspective focused on how mental activities served as adaptive responses to an organism’s environment. Like Wundt, James also relied on introspection; however, his research approach also incorporated more objective measures as well.

Sigmund Freud believed that understanding the unconscious mind was absolutely critical to understand conscious behavior. This was especially true for individuals that he saw who suffered from various hysterias and neuroses. Freud relied on dream analysis, slips of the tongue, and free association as means to access the unconscious. Psychoanalytic theory remained a dominant force in clinical psychology for several decades.

Gestalt psychology was very influential in Europe. Gestalt psychology takes a holistic view of an individual and his experiences. As the Nazis came to power in Germany, Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler immigrated to the United States. Although they left their laboratories and their research behind, they did introduce America to Gestalt ideas. Some of the principles of Gestalt psychology are still very influential in the study of sensation and perception.

One of the most influential schools of thought within psychology’s history was behaviorism. Behaviorism focused on making psychology an objective science by studying overt behavior and deemphasizing the importance of unobservable mental processes. John Watson is often considered the father of behaviorism, and B. F. Skinner’s contributions to our understanding of principles of operant conditioning cannot be underestimated.

As behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory took hold of so many aspects of psychology, some began to become dissatisfied with psychology’s picture of human nature. Thus, a humanistic movement within psychology began to take hold. Humanism focuses on the potential of all people for good. Both Maslow and Rogers were influential in shaping humanistic psychology.

During the 1950s, the landscape of psychology began to change. A science of behavior began to shift back to its roots of focus on mental processes. The emergence of neuroscience and computer science aided this transition. Ultimately, the cognitive revolution took hold, and people came to realize that cognition was crucial to a true appreciation and understanding of behavior.

Review Questions

Based on your reading, which theorist would have been most likely to agree with this statement: Perceptual phenomena are best understood as a combination of their components.

• William James
• Max Wertheimer
• Carl Rogers
• Noam Chomsky

________ is most well-known for proposing his hierarchy of needs.

• Abraham Maslow
• Sigmund Freud

Rogers believed that providing genuineness, empathy, and ________ in the therapeutic environment for his clients was critical to their being able to deal with their problems.

• structuralism
• functionalism
• unconditional positive regard

The operant conditioning chamber (aka ________ box) is a device used to study the principles of operant conditioning.

Critical Thinking Questions

How did the object of study in psychology change over the history of the field since the 19th century?

In its early days, psychology could be defined as the scientific study of mind or mental processes. Over time, psychology began to shift more towards the scientific study of behavior. However, as the cognitive revolution took hold, psychology once again began to focus on mental processes as necessary to the understanding of behavior.

In part, what aspect of psychology was the behaviorist approach to psychology a reaction to?

Behaviorists studied objectively observable behavior partly in reaction to the psychologists of the mind who were studying things that were not directly observable.

Personal Application Questions

Freud is probably one of the most well-known historical figures in psychology. Where have you encountered references to Freud or his ideas about the role that the unconscious mind plays in determining conscious behavior?

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What is Historical Psychology?

Historical Psychology is an emerging field that examines the ways in which histories and psychologies co-evolve in a continuous way, seeking to understand how psychology changes over historical time and how the origins of our present-day psychology lie in historical processes. Historical psychology uses a variety of methods including computational text analysis, agent-based modeling, large-scale surveys, economic experiment, etc. Taking history seriously is a critical part of moving beyond the WEIRD-people problem and making psychology a genuinely universal and inclusive science.

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Essay on the History of Psychology!

It is against this background that psychology emerged as an experimental science. The laws of association formulated by the British associationists, the work on sense physiology and the experiments on the speed of reaction performed by Helmholtz on the sciatic nerve of a frog, provided a backdrop for the work in the first experimental laboratory of psychology established immediately afterwards. Some of the early experiments were on the operation of the laws of association, different kinds of reaction time and more particularly on the nature of sensory experience (states of consciousness).

The establishment of laboratories facilitated the entry of scientific thought into psychology. By the end of the 18th century, psychology advanced to such an extent that it acquired techniques and equipment to study behaviour.

Disagreement among psychologists regarding the issues, the subject matter of psychology and its methods and techniques led to the formation of different schools of thought in psychology. These schools, in the course of time, underwent various changes and transformed themselves into new schools of thought. By the end of the 19th century, psychology acquired the status of an independent discipline.

Structuralism :

Edward Bradford Titchener established a school called structuralism. According to him the subject matter of psychology was human experience from the point of view of the experiencing person. Just as scientists concentrate on their subject matter, physicists on energy, chemists on elements, botanists on plants – psychologists study human experience. Thus, both physicists and psychologists may be investigating sound and light, but the physicist is concerned with these phenomena from the viewpoint of the physical processes involved, whereas the psychologist is interested in how they are experienced by the observer.

Conscious experience, then, is the subject matter of psychology. But the conscious experiences which take place within the individual can only be observed by the experiencing person. Consequently, a special technique called introspection was evolved to observe this psychological experience.

Introspection as employed by Titchener, was a highly specialised form of self-observation in which a psychologist attempts to study his own conscious experience scientifically. The aim of the observer is to observe the contents of consciousness, not in the haphazard and dreamy manner of everyday reflections, but in a detached, objective and systematic manner. Accordingly, Titchener and his associates stated that every conscious experience is constituted of elements called sensations, images and feelings.

The structuralists’ investigations were restricted only to the conscious experience of normal adult human beings. According to them, conscious processes of children, animals and mentally disturbed individuals cannot become the subject matter of psychology because the method of introspection could not be employed in these situations.

This school remained restricted and narrow due to its over­emphasis on introspective analysis of consciousness and could not survive later developments in the field of psychology. However, structuralism as a movement brought the scientific method into psychology and vigorously worked to establish psychology as an independent science.

Functionalism :

Early experimental psychology as stated above was primarily concerned with the study and analysis of conscious experience and partly with the phenomenon of association. Their main concern was to arrive at universal generalisations and the laws regulating conscious phenomena, along the lines of the laws of physics and chemistry.

In view of this, the individual organism was lost sight of Individual differences did not receive enough attention. Further, the organism itself was implicitly if not explicitly looked upon as a passive recipient of, and reactant to environmental stimuli, perhaps because of an over-influence of empiricism.

It was at this time that some important influences began to make their impact felt on the growing science of psychology. The first was the doctrine of pragmatism eloquently promoted by William James and its heir, the movement of functionalism spearheaded by J R Angel, John Dewey and Harvey Carr.

Through his powerful writings Dewey, a leading figure in the history of educational thought, argued that human activities were meaningful and functional acts and could not be considered in isolation from the social and personal context of these activities.

According to the functionalists the cold mechanical analysis of conscious experience into sterile units took the essence out of human action. Every activity should be regarded as an attempt on the part of the organism to adapt itself to some aspects in the environment, external or internal.

Hence, the meaningful unit for study and analysis should be the functional act which occurs in a context including the individual and the environment. It was at this time that European psychology saw the emergence of act psychology under the leadership of Brentano. Act psychology maintained that human activities when analysed into very elementary and abstract units tended to lose their significance.

Functionalism had an immediate impact on the development and growth of psychology in the United States as opposed to the classical structural approach of Wundt, Titchener and others. Adaptive activity became the subject matter of psychology instead of conscious experience.

An effect of this was to view the activities of the human being as purposeful functions of whole organisms, the purpose of the act itself being more important than its contents. The pioneers in this direction were Angell and Dewey.

Emergence of Differential Psychology:

It is observed that primary preoccupation the work of the early experimental psychologists was with the development of generalized laws, and there was little concern with individual differences. Functionalism, however, shifted the emphasis to the total individual organism, but nevertheless was not very vocal about the differences among organisms.

The work of Sir Francis Galton heralded a new movement. Galton, a versatile genius, developed several techniques of measurement which led him to emphasise individual differences among organisms in their different characteristics.

In this he was influenced by the Darwinian concept of struggle for existence and “survival of the fittest.” Galton’s work laid the foundation for the emergence of differential psychology with its emphasis on understanding, measuring and analysing individual differences.

Galton himself developed early forms of what are today known as psychological tests, well-known among them being his test of imagery. Galton’s work caught the imagination of American psychologists much more than early experimental psychology did, especially that of J. Mckeen Cattell.

The result was the emergence of a large number of psychological tests. These tests were only concerned with the sensory and motor activities. However, the Galtonian movement struck a crucial blow to early experimental psychology in its quest for generalized laws regulating an abstract consciousness.

The emphasis slowly shifted to differences in the adaptive activities of human organisms. Differences between organisms became more important than similarities and it came to be felt that psychology should be concerned with the individual human organism rather than an abstract and general concept of human nature, unlike other sciences.

Influence of Evolution Theory and Animals Studies:

The theory of organic evolution pointed to the continuity and similarity between lower organisms or animals and the human organism.

This helped in knocking out the narcissistic self-image of human being as a special creation of God in his own image. The vital argument of the Darwinian concept was that man emerged from animal ancestry and thus essentially was more similar to, than different from the lower organisms.

In view of this, one of the best ways of understanding the human organism was through the study of animals. Many forms of human activities could be found among animals in a simpler form and this provided an opportunity for understanding the more complicated human activities.

The result was the emergence of the comparative method and animal psychology. The possibility of studying animals as a means of understanding human activities opened up new avenues. For the experimentalist, it was easier to deal with animals and their activities.

Large number of experiments could be carried out and in addition several activities of the human beings which could not be studied experimentally could now be investigated very easily in the case of animals. Helmholtz’s experiment on the speed of nerve conduction had paved the way for the reaction-time experiments on human beings. The result was the development of experimental psychology with animal subjects.

A development yet more significant was the impact of animal psychology on the subject matter of psychology itself. If animal actions and the human action fell in the same continuum, then one should look askance at the definition of psychology as the study of consciousness. Yet animal behaviour was so much related to human behaviour.

This raised a serious question as to the subject matter of psychology itself. The definition of psychology as the study of consciousness raised several problems. Consciousness itself was an abstract concept and was only an inference. When I say that my friend is conscious, I am only drawing an inference from his activities! Hence, it is a very subjective concept.

The concept of consciousness was not applicable in the case of animals. Very often, the study of a person’s consciousness had to depend on the subject’s own report or introspective account. The use of this method would make psychology much less an objective science than other sciences.

Even earlier the functional psychologists had stressed activities rather than consciousness. William McDougall, the British psychologist was one of the earliest to see this point, and said that psychology should be defined as “the subject studying the behaviour of organisms.” He made observations often related to animals such as his own dogs. These developments led to certain epoch-making events.

Thorndike and His Early Experiments :

It was at this time that E.L. Thorndike, originally inspired by William James, came out with what may be described as the really pioneering experiments in psychology. Influenced by the views of James, by functional psychology and also by the limitations of psychology as a study of consciousness, Thorndike was primarily interested in studying how certain adaptive activities are acquired by the organism, through very simple but ingeniously planned experimenting and using the domestic cat as his subject.

Thorndike tried to study how these animals came to acquire certain simple skills. Through meticulous observation Thorndike arrived at his well-known trial-and-error theory of learning and formulated his epoch- making laws of learning.

These laws were simple generalisations relating to the process by which simple movements (skills) were acquired by the organism. The most famous of these laws, the law of effect, until very recently formed the backbone of much of experimental work in psychology of learning.

Pavlov and His Discovery :

From Russia came yet another important but accidental discovery. The Russian physiologist Ivon Pavlov, using dogs as his subjects, hit upon a brilliant observation while carrying out his investigations on the physiology of the digestive process. This observation on the acquisition of the conditioned reflex is perhaps one of the most crucial events which had a telling effect on subsequent developments in psychology. Pavlov’s observation related to how his experimental animals began to salivate even in the absence of food.

While the sight of food could be assumed to be a natural condition to make a hungry animal salivate, it was difficult to explain how his experimental animals exhibited the salivary response in the absence of food. The ‘fact’ that salivation was an unlearnt reflex action intimately tied up with the sight of food as stimulus made it difficult for one to understand how this reflex action could occur in the absence of a fixed stimulus!

The answer as provided by Pavlov who showed that even a simple natural action like salivation could be made to occur by a stimulus originally incapable of eliciting the response, by pairing this stimulus repeatedly with the original natural stimulus. This, in essence, was Pavlov’s observation.

Emergence of Classical Behaviorism:

In the foregoing paragraphs, an attempt was made to bring out some important trends. First was the increasing emphasis on the adaptive nature of human activities emphasized by the functionalists. The second, was the emphasis on individual differences among the organisms.

The third, was the growing trend to study and relate animal behaviour to human behaviour and the fourth, was the emphasis on the understanding of the process of acquisition of certain responses in the organism and the role of the environment or the stimulus situation. The fifth, was the increasing disenchantment with the concept of consciousness as the subject matter of psychology.

The sixth, was the increasing adoption of quantitative experimental methods in the study of psychology. All these trends tended to move psychology farther and farther away from its early philosophical roots and the simple descriptive experiments of Wundt and Titchener. Psychology became a member of the family of the positive and exact sciences. The die was cast and there was no looking back.

A loud proclamation of this change came through the writings of John B Watson and his movement of behaviourism. With his grounding in functional psychology and inspired by the work of Thorndike and Pavlov, Watson felt that the time had come for a total break from traditional psychology. Stating that “behaviour” should be the subject matter of psychology, he observed that mentalistic terms like consciousness had no place in psychology.

The only method open to psychology was objective observation. All that we know about the activities of human organism is that the organism does something which may be called behaviour and this behaviour consists entirely of actions with muscles and glands, the effect or organs of the body.

To extract meanings like consciousness, mind etc. from these would be unscientific and uncalled for. Watson further observed that most activities and organisms were acquired through the influence of the environment. In his well- known book ‘Behaviourism’ he claimed that it was possible to mould any child into any one of an endless variety of adult characters.

The first reaction of many a psychologist to these views was extreme surprise. But they were as attractive as startling and appeared to provide the right type of qualities to make psychology a full-fledged natural science. If the environment was the key factor in the development of all forms of behaviour, then the development of an unwanted behaviour could be prevented from developing by a suitable manipulation of the environment.

Similarly, a well-planned environment would ensure the proper ‘shaping’ of behaviour (the word was used by Skinner in a more restricted sense later) into desirable and useful forms. These observations were almost semi-Gallilean in their impact. The tasks of psychology, according to Watson, had to be prediction and control of behaviour rather than understanding and explanation alone.

This then was the successful advent of American psychology around the first two decades of the twentieth century, a proclamation of revolt and independence. The new psychology of America had ventured forth into an unseen but promising direction.

The response to Watson showed a high degree of polarisation, with the sharp division of psychologists into comrades and reactionaries. But the writings of Watson and the simplicity and attractiveness of his propositions won many militant proselytes who, at least for the time being, had triumphed over the traditional conservative and dry experimental psychologists of the Wundtian, Titchnerian mould.

Ingenious experiments were designed and several pieces of apparatus and gadgets for studying animal behaviour were developed. Animal psychology became the royal road to the understanding of not only animal behaviour but even human behaviour, and the behaviourists moved relentlessly towards the promised land. But whether the promised land was there or whether it was the mirage of an over-enthusiastic and adolescent brand of psychologists had to be judged only by subsequent developments.

Emergence of Gestalt Psychology:

The works of Thorndike, Pavlov and the emergence of behaviourism had some basic implications.

The first was that the emphasis in psychology should be on the understanding of observable behaviour.

Secondly, it was assumed that all behaviour was the result of the operation of the environment with very little depending on the capacities and conditions within the organism.

A third implication was that behaviour is a result of the combination of small units. A complex skill or operation was nothing but a chain of elementary or unitary responses built into a combination, by the Pavlovian principles of conditioning or the Thorndikean concept of effect. But could this be true? At all levels of the animal kingdom especially at the human level, one could observe sudden changes occurring in organism in response to the same situation without any previous practice or conditioning.

Further, complex responses occur so spontaneously that it is difficult to explain them as painfully and ploddingly combined assemblages of simple unitary responses acquired by practice. American experimental psychology ushered in by Thorndike’s work and culminating in the heyday of behaviourism and also inspired by the Pavlovian doctrine of conditioning had virtually reduced the living organism to a passive mass of clay, that could be shaped by, and only by, the vagaries of the environment.

This raised several questions. Is the living organism really so passive?

Does the living organism only react to the environment and try to change the environment?

Are the activities of the living organism reducible simply to muscular movements?

Are all actions of living organisms the result of the slow acquisition of small unitary actions combined by accident into a complex action?

Perhaps not everybody would agree with this.

The revolt against this trend came through the work of a group of German psychologists who believed in the tradition of the act psychology of Brentano to which a reference has been made. The important personalities were Wertheimer, Koffka and Kohler.

The major premise of gestalt psychology was that the experience and behaviour are inherently organised into meaningful units and carry with them a quality of wholeness. Analysis of phenomena into abstract units destroys the reality. The gestalt psychologists drew inspiration from Ehrenfel’s concept of gestalt qualitat. A melody is something more than a combination of notes. It has a distinct quality resulting from the pattern or configuration of the notes.

In substance, the gestalt psychologists argued that the essential quality of any experience is its totality and indivisibility. The whole is more than a sum of its parts. The living organism is dynamic and actively organises the environment. It is the inherent nature of living organisms to organise and react to their environment in terms of meaningful total perceptions.

This view was totally opposed to the behaviouristic view and the approach of traditional structural psychology in as much as it stressed the wholeness of psychological phenomena, whereas structural psychology and behaviourism tended to view experiences as a sum of elements. True empiricism, according to the gestalt psychologists, lies in accepting experience as real and not analysing it into artificial units.

Thus, Thorndike’s cat was not learning a combination of specific moves but was attempting to organise its experience in a total, meaningful situation. What is important, then, in understanding behaviour is how an organism perceives and organises a given situation. When an incorrect solution is given up and the right solution emerges there occurs a reorganization of the total experience.

Through his well-known experiments with chimpanzees, Kohler demonstrated that these animals could solve difficult problems where the solution appeared suddenly, and once it appeared, remained unchanged. This could not be explained by the trial-and-error theory, according to which any skill is acquired gradually as a sequence of elementary moves.

According to Kohler, any learning involves changing perceptual organisation-cognitive restructuring, involving a movement from one perceptual organisation to another, from one meaning to another meaning and not from meaninglessness to meaningfulness. The success of learning especially depends on the capacity of the organism to perceive and organise the varying elements in a learning situation into a meaningful pattern.

To the extent that the situation does not permit this, the situation is difficult. Kohler argued that Thorndike’s cats had to learn through trial-and-error because the situation did not allow the organism to do anything else. In the language of gestalt psychology, the field was closed. It is only in open situations which permit better perceptual organisation that learning takes place.

It is evident then that gestalt psychology viewed the organism as something totally different from what the behaviourists would have liked. The organism according to them is not a passive reacting entity but an active and dynamic agent operating on the environment. It is not a mechanical system but more like an electromagnetic system with inherent structural properties.

Experience has an immediate and meaningful quality and this can be appreciated only if we approach the organism through its own eyes and ears. Kohler’s experiments on learning produced results diametrically opposite to that of Thorndike. The right solution appeared suddenly and not gradually, and once it appeared it tended to remain permanent.

This phenomenon defied any explanation that the trial-and-error theory could offer. Kohler termed this as an insight. According to him insightful learning is not an exceptional phenomenon but the natural phenomenon to be expected when the learning situation is within the capacity of the organism and does not present barriers to learning,. The gestalt psychologists then presented a view of the organism as a central pivotal agent.

The impact of this on the views and findings of Thorndike and the behaviourists was almost catastrophic and called for total reversal of approach to perceptual phenomena. Past experience, according to the gestalt psychologists, is of little significance in understanding present behaviour.

The laws of frequency, recently laboriously elaborated by the British associationists and experimentally demonstrated by Thorndike were shown to be artifacts of the situations. An element of nativism in behaviour was recognised. The gestalt psychologists, in short, emphasised perceptual organisation and not motor acquisition.

The Psychoanalytic Movement:

Psychology was predominantly concerned with phenomena like learning, sensation, perception, reaction-time, etc. These phenomena fell into what are known as cognitive processes.

Experimental psychology had in all its earlier efforts neglected one major component of behaviour, viz., the emotional or the affective side, and the inner nature of man. The human organism has several inner springs of action, referred to by several terms such as instincts, needs, wishes etc. No doubt all the psychologists were aware of certain biological urges and demands in the living organisms but the importance of these and their influence on the behaviour of the organism was not fully recognised.

Man was assumed either to be a rational animal or a passive animal. This was due to the influence of the mechanistic sciences or the traditional natural sciences. Even though gestalt psychology emphasised the dynamic and active nature of the organism, this was limited to the sphere of the perceptual and learning processes.

Yet another revolution had to take place to rectify this situation and this happened through the work of Sigmund Freud, the founder of what is known as the psychoanalytic movement. Freud was a medical man primarily interested in the treatment of nervous disorders.

Psychological abnormality in those days was invariably traced to defects in the nervous system and Freud himself started his work with this belief. But soon, his experience led him to the conclusion that most psychological disorders arose from psychological factors connected with the individual’s emotional life. This belief led him to hit upon some of the most brilliant discoveries in modem psychology. These are stated briefly here.

The division of the mind into the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious is a structural or a spatial concept. In addition to this, Freud also divides the mind into three functional divisions called the id, the ego and the superego. The id represents all the instinctual impulses which are present at birth and functions unconsciously and automatically

At birth this is the only functional division present and active. Freud grouped the instinctual impulses in the id into two major divisions, the life instincts or the Eros and the death instincts or the thanatos. The life instincts include all the instincts connected with the preservation perpetuation and procreation of human life.

These instinctual activities are carried out with the help of psychic energy. Of all the life instincts, Freud maintains, the sex instinct is the most important. Contrary to early views Freud asserted that the sex instinct is present even at birth and because of dais even the infant is not free from sexuality Just as other instinctual actions undergo a process of development until they reach the normal adult form so does the sex instinct.

According to Freud, this development of the sex instinct is the most crucial aspect of life and influences all other aspects of development. Freud gives the name libido to the energy of the sex instinct and the process of sex development is known as libidinal development. He describes a number of stages through which this development passes before the adult stage is reached. This process of libidinal development is not very smooth.

On the one hand the sex instincts (life instincts) are perpetually in conflict with the death instincts because the two are opposed in their aims, the former being creative and evolutionary and the latter on the other hand being destructive and evolutionary.

This conflict between the two sets of instincts poses a lot of problems. From another angle the sex instincts also come into conflict with the norms, codes and demands of reality which are opposed to an uninhibited expression of the sexual urge. Thus, the id comes into conflict with reality necessitating inhibition or control of the free expression of the instincts. This conflicting situation results in the transformation of a part of the id into a second division known as the ego.

This ego is very much influenced by the demands of reality and its main function is to mediate between the demands of reality known as the reality principle and the demands of the id known as the pleasure principle. The ego is thus responsible for the functions of perception, learning, thinking etc.

It may, therefore, be seen that the elaboration and development of conscious functioning arises out of conflicts. Tracing the developmental processes further, Freud postulates a third division known as the superego which emerges a few years later as a result of intensifying conflicts between the id impulses and the demands of reality.

The superego is primarily concerned with problems of conscience or morality as reflected in the society. It may be seen that the development of the ego and the superego are balancing and adjusting mechanisms calculated to ensure the survival of the organism and also the legitimate satisfaction of the instinctual impulses.

This process of development goes through a maze of conflicts, each conflict only resulting in a further conflict. Life, according to Freud is nothing but a sequence of conflicts and their resolutions. The normal process of development depends on the successful resolution of these conflicts.

Unsatisfactory resolutions of conflicts generate anxiety and a host of other problems. When an individual is faced with such intense anxiety and his main psychic preoccupation revolves around the problem of dealing with it, his behaviour becomes abnormal.

All of us are subject to varying degrees of anxiety. Most of us, fortunately, are able to overcome this, but in some people the problem of anxiety assumes serious proportions and results in the behaviour which is not adaptive and is in some cases even maladaptive.

Freud suggests a number of mechanisms by which the individual can deal with excess of anxiety. These are known as defense mechanisms. Excessive use of defense mechanisms takes the individual away from normal adjustment.

This whole process of development, according to Freud, is completed in the first few years of life. In view of this, the years of early childhood are very crucial. Whether a man is normal or abnormal depends on the way his parents and others handle his childhood.

Psychoanalytic theory proceeds further and explains many aspects of social behaviour, culture, religion, art and civilization on the basis of instincts and the barriers to instinctual expression and the interaction between the two.

The initial reaction to Freudian theory was, of course, disbelief and even hostility. Intellectuals, scientists, men of religion and not to say anything about the common man, were all up in arms against Freud. But gradually the psychoanalytic movement gathered momentum and even today remains probably the most influential system of thought in psychology.

This increasing popularity notwithstanding, differences soon appeared from within the psychoanalytic movement itself. Alfred Adler, a leading disciple of Freud soon parted company and established his own system known as individual psychology Discarding Freud’s elaborate account of the unconscious as well as his monolithic emphasis on the sex instinct, Adler propounded that the most basic urge behind human behaviour was not sex but one of attaining mastery, power and status Failures in achieving these goals result in the development of a strong sense of inferiority, resulting in an inferiority complex.

Urged by a strong inferiority complex, the individual resorts to behaviour which helps him to overcome this inferiority through compensatory achievements. Compensatory behaviour in many instances helps the individual towards normal adjustment and even supenor achievement. Thus, Demosthenes who was a stammerer became one of the greatest orators in history.

Similarly, Eugene Sandow who was a weakling became a strong  man to such an extent that his name became a synonym for describing strong people Excess of compensatory activity, however, can take the individual away from reality, resulting in abnormal behavioural. To Adler, behavioural abnormality is a result of a pathological inferiority complex.

Yet another follower turned rebel was Carl Gustav Jung who deviated from Freud and established his own system known as analytical psychology. The Jungian theory, in a way, was more revolutionary than Freud’s. While affirming the role of the unconscious, Jung went far beyond the Freudian views and hypothesized about the existence of a collective unconscious mind over and above the personal unconscious described by Freud.

According to Jung, this collective unconscious is the most important and powerful agency in human behaviour. He also denounced the undue preoccupation of Freudian psychoanalysis with the sex instinct. While agreeing with the importance of conflicts, he emphasised that conflicts arise not between id and ego or instincts and reality but between the conscious mind and the collective unconscious.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious represents real human nature and this comes into conflict with the so called rational and intellectual attitudes of the conscious mind. It is perhaps not necessary to dwell at any greater length on Jung’s view at this point.

It will be sufficient to say that the Jungian theory elaborated and expanded on Freudian psychoanalysis and took it to the realms of mystery and mysticism. This makes it perhaps true but nevertheless rather abstract. The psychoanalytic theory has been discussed in this article probably in greater detail than the other theories. This is because the theories of Freud, Jung and Adler mark a total departure from the earlier trends in psychology.

The entire basis and approach of psychoanalytic theory was radically different from the academic laboratory psychology of the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis was developed in the chambers of the doctors and not the laboratories of the professors. Its formulations were far- reaching and because of this, the impact Jolting.

The Mental Testing Movement:

Galton had also introduced some simple tools and instruments to measure individual differences. It was, however, Alfred Binet of France whose work gave momentum to this trend.

Binet was entrusted with the responsibility of evolving a tool which would help to discriminate children with weak mental abilities from those with adequate mental abilities in some of the schools of Paris. This resulted in the first intelligence test. The Binet test appeared to work, satisfactorily in screening children who were not likely to do well in their studies. Subsequently, Binet improved and revised this test a number of times.

The work of Binet caught the attention of many psychologists, the most outstanding among them being Terman from the Stanford University. Adopting the basic ideas of Binet, Terman after elaborate efforts brought out the first version of the famous Stanford-Binet Test. This was enough inspiration for several other tests of intelligence, aptitudes, interest etc.

The mental testing movement was extended to just about every conceivable area of human activity. Woodworth’s work resulted in the first personality inventory which became the forerunner for many such inventories to follow.

Measurement and diagnosis of individual differences became a very important trend in psychology. Schools, colleges, hospitals and several other institutions adopted psychological tests for use. Tests were developed for special groups like children, uneducated adults, hospital patients etc.

Whipple’s test of imagination, The Rorschach Ink-blot test and Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test of personality etc. were some of the landmarks in the further growth of the testing movement. Today, one finds a flood of psychological tests covering a variety of subjects, some with specific and others with wide applicability.

From Classical Behaviourism to Neo-Behaviourism:

Classical behaviourism, enunciated by Watson, had gripped the imagination of American psychologists. Soon, Watsonian formulations were found to be too simple and inadequate to explain the complexities of behaviour. This led to the reformulation and elaboration of the behaviouristic theory.

While accepting the basic tenets of behaviourism in defining psychology as the science of behaviour, the role of the environment and learning in the acquisition of behavioural traits and also the germinal validity of the Pavlovian concept of conditioning, a group of psychologists, often called neo-behaviourists, embarked on the job of reorganization and a systematic formulation of a behaviour theory based on experimental work. Outstanding among these were C.L. Hull, B.F. Skinner, B.C. Tolman, E.R. Guthrie and N.E. Miller though each of them differed from the others.

Hull’s work was mainly concerned with the problem of how certain stimulus- response connections are formed, the role of the organism in this and also the role of the consequences of these connections on the strength of the connections themselves. Today, perhaps Hull’s theory is the most systematically developed one with meticulous attention and care for even the smallest details. Skinner, on the other hand, introduced the concept of operant behaviour.

While the classical Pavlovian conditioning and the Hullian theory were concerned with the responses of organisms elicited by known stimuli from the environment. Skinner was mainly concerned with the responses of organisms which occur spontaneously or where the stimuli are unknown.

He called them ’emitted responses’ as opposed to the type of ‘elicited responses’ investigated by Hull and his followers. Sometimes a distinction is also made between ‘instrumental responses’ referring to the type studied by Hull and others and ‘operant responses’ to refer to those investigated by Skinner.

The term instrumental is used because these actions are instrumental in the satisfaction or reduction of some drives or needs in the organism like hunger, thirst or fear. Operant responses are those which produce a change in the environment and are in turn affected by these changes.

The distinction may appear to be hairsplitting and many psychologists do not subscribe to this, but one may simplify this by saying that while Hull’s preoccupation was essentially on the connection between a stimulus and a response. Skinner’s preoccupation was mainly with the strength or weakness of the response itself.

Whereas Hull emphasised the stimulus which arouses a certain response, Skinner explained the consequences of a response and the effect of these consequences on the subsequent intensity and frequency of these responses. To a certain extent it may be said that Skinner considered knowledge of stimulus conditions as not having much relevance in increasing or decreasing the strength of a response.

The third among the neo-behaviourists was E.G. Tolman. though not considered by many as a behaviourist, Tolman considered himself a behavioural scientist. While accepting some of the basic principles of behaviourism, Tolman disagreed with some of the formulations of other behaviourists.

Behaviour, according to Tolman, is molar and not molecular. By molar he meant that there is an indivisible unity in the activities of living organisms and this unity derives from the fact that all behaviour is goal directed. This goal directedness develops in a particular situation. Acquisition of behaviour does not take place through a simple process of conditioning or reinforcement.

He introduces the concept of intervening variable which operates between the stimulus and the response. Most of this depends on how the organism relates itself to the situation. Goal directedness, anticipatory tendencies, sign-Gestalt relationships etc. are some of the concepts introduced by Tolman.

In advancing these concepts Tolman brought behaviourism very close to gestalt psychology and also to the purposive psychology of William McDougall. Tolman’s description of molar behaviour bears a lot of similarity to McDougall’s description of instinctive behaviour. Tolman’s system is known as purposive behaviourism.

Neo-behaviourism expanded the scope of early behaviourism and adapted itself in so many ways that little of Watsonian behaviourism is evident in it. The works of Miller, Mowrer, Bollard, Sears and several others have brought behaviourism very close to the views of other schools. As a result, behaviourists today are busy investigating several Freudian concepts.

From Freudianism to Neo-Freudianism:

The psychoanalytic movement was made to the dissenting movements of Jung and Adler. The subsequent years saw the emergence of other dissenting views through the writings of Karen Homey, Erich Fromm, Abram Kardiner, Harry Stack Sullivan and others.

While each of the above theorists differed from the others, all of them raised certain basic objections to the classical psychoanalytic system of Freud. All these theorists disowned Freud’s description of the nature and characteristics of the unconscious mind as well as his total emphasis on biological instincts.

Emphatically disagreeing with Freud’s exclusive emphasis on the sex instinct as well as his scheme of libidinal development, these psychologists were unequivocal in emphasizing the role of the environment, cultural, social and personal.

According to these theorists the most important challenges to man, as well as his support, come from society. Karen Horney, came up with the concept of basic anxiety as the central factor behind human unhappiness and neurosis.

Erich Fromm, going into a historical psychological analysis of modern society emphasizes the impersonal and dehumanized conditions in society, which according to him drive man to a state of helplessness and estrangement, ironically enough, from the society and also from himself. It is this condition which is responsible for human unhappiness, misery and suffering.

Based on his clinical experience, Sullivan also emphasised the role of the social milieu and the pattern of interpersonal relations but from a completely different angle. The human organism grows up in, through and towards a social milieu and the process as undergone through interpersonal relations and interactions. According to Sullivan, the normalcy or abnormality of an individual is a mirror- image of his interpersonal relations.

Neo-Freudian theories are, therefore, socio-psychological in bias unlike the Freudian theory which was bio-psychological. They further emphasise the importance of conscious activities and conscious interactions. While agreeing with Freud on the importance of childhood experience they disagree with his explanation of all adult behaviour solely in terms of childhood experiences.

Neo-Freudian formulations, to a great extent, have helped in bringing psychoanalysis closer to the other viewpoints in psychology. Their emphasis on social conditions made it possible to initiate wide-ranging observations and comparative studies.

Humanistic Approach:

The humanistic approach to human behaviour is of recent origin. The emergence of this approach owes a lot to the views of Carl Rogers, Abram Maslow and Gordon Allport. Over the past two to three decades this approach has gained wide support and currency among academic psychologists, practising therapists, counselors and others concerned with human behaviour.

Essentially the humanistic approach emerged as a reaction against classical psychoanalysis on the one hand and behaviourism of all varieties on the other. The classical psychoanalytic theory viewed human behaviour essentially as being set in motion by instinctual impulses, basically biological.

Further, this view held that human behaviour, to a large extent, is influenced by unconscious forces. Thirdly it was also held by classical psychoanalysts to that adult behaviour is determined to a large extent by childhood experiences.

Of course, many psychoanalysts of the later years belonging to the neo- Freudian group also rejected these views, as seen in the writings of Erich Fromm. But, the humanistic approach totally rejects the above views of classical psychoanalysis. At the same time the humanistic approach with equal vehemence also rejects the general behaviouristic view that human behaviour is essentially a result of past conditioning and the vagaries of reinforcement.

According to the humanistic approach, human nature is not comparable either to that of a machine or an animal. Further, the human being is neither a slave of instincts nor of the past environment. According to the humanistic approach, the human being is an active- initiating entity, rather than a mere passive and reacting entity.

Human actions, generally, are rational and intelligent. Yet another premise of this approach is that the human being is basically positive and there is no inevitable conflict between the individual and the society. The most important premise of the humanistic approach is that human behaviour is not merely an effort at satisfying some physiological or biological needs, for ensuring survival. No doubt, a part of human behaviour may arise in this context. On the other hand, there is an equally strong basic driving force to grow, develop, express and realise one’s potentialities.

While a very young child may be a purely biological entity, just responding to biological needs aroused by deprivations, the same thing cannot be said of normal adult behaviour. The adult human being is a self-anchored, futuristically-oriented, flexible and adaptive creature.

Behaviour problems arise when the individual’s growth needs and developmental tendencies are not allowed sufficient opportunities for expression and satisfaction. This can happen either due to internal blocks or external barriers, or both. According to the leading advocates of the humanistic approach, modern society does not provide such opportunities to most people.

Modern society with its mass characteristic and high emphasis on automation has created a condition where warmth, love, trust and other types of human relationships are on the decline. This results very often in a feeling of impoverishment.

The humanistic approach, while rejecting the reductionism and past orientation of psychoanalysis and behaviourism, lays emphasis on the total human being, the psychological needs and social needs, and looks at the human being as a positively motivated, and dynamic entity.

It is, therefore, necessary for society to orient itself along these lines:

The Systems Approach:

The systems approach had its origin in physics and subsequently it was adopted by biologists. Later on psychologists also adopted this approach. Essentially the systems approach looks at the human being as a total integrated system which is influenced by both internal forces and the external factors.

This total system includes a number of sub-systems each dependent on the other. Just as a human body is made up of a skeletal system, a nervous system, a circulatory system, a respiratory system etc., each having its own functions and yet marked by mutual inter-dependence, one can view personality on the totality of the behaviour as a larger system with sub-systems like knowledge system, ability system, emotional system , motivational system etc. each having its own specific functions and yet inter-dependent on each other.

A change in any one of these sub-systems has its impact on the other systems to different degrees. This is called the principle of permeability. According to this principle, a change in any sub-system will have its effect on the other sub-systems. Thus, a change in the knowledge system will have an impact on our belief systems, attitude systems, emotional systems etc.

A cardinal feature of the systems approach is that it holds that the characteristics of the total system determine the characteristics of the sub-systems. Further the whole system is not a mere combination of the sub-systems, but something more. Systems are dynamic and always move toward equilibrium. Thus, when the conditions outside change the system also changes. Further, this concept of equilibrium is different from the classical concept of homeostasis.

Growth and learning, are some of the internal factors which bring about changes in equilibrium and lead to a different type of equilibrium. The systems approach has just made its entry recently and is already finding its applications at the level of organisations and social groups. But, it has yet to make a serious impact on the understanding of individual behaviour.

Field Theoretical Approach :

The field theoretical approach is in a way an outcome of the gestalt theory. But this approach goes far beyond gestalt theory. Lewin who introduced the approach compares it to the emergence of quantum physics or even as a parallel to the emergence of the Galilean approach as against the Aristotelian approach.

Basically, according to Lewin, behaviour occurs in a life space which is psychological in nature. The life space of an individual is the psychological world of the individual and not the actual concrete space. The life space is again made up of two parts, the person and the psychological environment. Behaviour is a function of a dynamic interaction between the person and the environment.

It is here that the field theory scores over other theories. It emphasises the person, with his biology, motivation, experiences etc., on the one hand and also the environment which he experiences on the other. A second implication is that the properties or characteristics of any event are related to all the other events with which the particular event is related. This means that the totality of the characteristics of any system influences or even determines the characteristics of every part of the system.

The central concept in ‘field theory’ is the life space. All behaviour and behavioural ‘events’ occur within the life space. Life space includes the person and the environment as mutually inter-dependent and inseparable factors. While we may conceptualize the person and the environment as independent entities for purposes of descriptive analysis, in reality such a separation is impossible because the environment depends on the perception of the persons.

A major premise of this approach is what is known as contemporarily. This means that the events which occur including behaviour have to be understood in terms of the forces and influences which are operative at that moment.

Lewin was totally opposed to historical explanation of contemporary behaviour in terms of past experience as done by the S-R theories. Behaviour is a result of the characteristics and the properties as they are present in the psychological space, at the time of occurrence of the behaviour.

Lewin also uses two other concepts, ‘region’ and ‘systems’. The psychological environment is divided into regions. For example, eating is one region, studying is another region etc. Similarly, the person is also divided into systems or need systems. Thus hunger is one system and thirst another.

Whenever a particular need comes into operation a region is said to be activated. As the individual grows and matures both the psychological environment and the ‘person’ get more and more differentiated. Thus, an infant either sleeps or is awake. But as he grows there are more and more differentiated regions of activity like playing, studying etc. and also more and more differentiated need systems.

According to Lewin whenever a system or need system is activated the person moves from one region of the environment to another region. This movement from one region to another, he calls ‘locomotion’. Thus, all behaviour ultimately is nothing but a locomotion from one region of the psychological environment to another consequent on the activation of a particular system or need system. Lewin introduces two other characteristics of behaviour.

The first one is ‘wholesome’, according to which any activity involves the total organism and also has a characteristic of totality and cannot be reduced to hypothetical elementary unit as is attempted by the S-R theories. Finally, yet another major characteristic is ‘psychologism’. This means that psychological events have to be understood in psychological terms and cannot be reduced to physical or physiological units.

Though much of what is known as research in social psychology does not reflect Lewinian influences, there are significant areas of research where the influence of Lewin’s field theory has been pervasive. The development of ‘group dynamics’ and concepts like organisational culture, organisational climate and even studies of leadership have leaned very heavily on the field theory.

The emergence of phenomenological approach is again very much due to the influence of Lewinian formulations. Thus, on the whole, the field theoretical approach has contributed to the emergence of the new areas of research. This approach has had a lot of impact, in studying and understanding organisations, evolving proper organisational systems, in the development of training programmes and in attempting to point out solutions to inter-personal conflicts etc.

A number of studies on cooperation and competition in groups have been inspired by the field theory. The emergence of organisational psychology also owes a lot to Lewinian formulations on behaviour. Organisational investigations on leadership in autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire conditions were directly derived from these formulations.

Today none can dispute the fact that this experiment by Lewin and his associates was one of the pioneering efforts in the emergence of experimental social psychology, organisational psychology and also study of leadership behaviour.

An important contribution of the field theoretical approach is the emergence of action research which has been discussed in this article ‘The Science of Behaviour’. Action research has been found to be very useful in studying and understanding changes in behaviour. This type of research is also very useful in sorting out the right type of strategy for bringing about changes in behaviour, attitudes etc.

The Organismic and Wholistic Approach :

Apart from these major schools of thought, reference may be made to another set of views known as organismic and wholistic views. Organismic and wholistic psychologists never belonged to a well-knit school, held together by an agreed point of view, like the behaviourists, or the gestalt psychologists.

This group includes leading personalities like Goldstein, Maslow and Carl Rogers. Each of them has his own theory. Nevertheless, there are some principles of agreement. The broad organismic viewpoint emphasises the wholeness of the human organism and questions the utility of reducing behaviour into specific units.

Further, it views the human organism as a dynamic purposeful entity with definite future goals. The essential characteristic of human behaviour is that of striving towards these goals. In this we may see a difference from the earlier schools.

Whereas most behaviourists and psychoanalysts emphasised the role of past experiences, organismic psychology tends to lay importance on the future-directedness of behaviour. The living organism is not only a passively adjusting organism but a seeking, striving, growing and unfolding entity trying to actualize itself. Given the proper environment, every organism can reach and realise its full potentialities and grow into a harmonious and productive entity.

In a way, one may say that this view is humanistic and does not lean on the earlier mechanistic, and animal models as was the case with structuralism, functionalism, behaviourism, psychoanalysis and even gestalt psychology. Organismic psychology emphasises the differences between human beings and animals, thus, reversing the trend set by the behaviourists.

In this section an attempt has been made to present to the reader, a brief introduction to the different approaches to psychology. The reader may wonder why there should be so many approaches. True, if psychology were to be a typical science like physics or chemistry, there may not have been so many different approaches. But, the subject matter of psychology is human behaviour which is very complex and influenced by a number of factors. Human behaviour changes and such changes result both from changes within the organism and also changes in the external environment.

Secondly, being a subject, whose findings and theories are expected to be capable of application, there are certain difficulties. Different psychologists have tended to view human behaviour from their own perspective. Thus, clinical psychologists bring a certain perspective.

Experimental psychologists bring in a strong methodological orientation. In addition, human problems arise in the context of the social environment. This being the case, different problems occupy the focal attention of psychologists in different societies and at different stages.

Thus, psychologists in developing societies are concerned with problems of poverty, malnutrition and ill-health, whereas psychologists in affluent societies are concerned with problems of stress, pollution, anxiety and similar problems. If we look at the situation in the light of these, then it appears reasonable to conclude that each approach has its own strength and limitations and that ultimately there will emerge an integrated approach incorporating the valid findings of each of the above approaches and perhaps a few more.

Even if this does not happen, there is no need to feel panicky or even discouraged. The existence of different approaches alone will not render the findings of psychology less valid, nor less useful. What we should be looking for is a scientific psychology and not necessarily a straight jacketed science of psychology. The term ‘science’ unfortunately has become ‘stereotyped.’

Current Picture :

In the above, an attempt has been made to briefly trace the scientific history of modern psychology from its physiological roots. This account is by no means exhaustive or detailed. The intention was to indicate the major landmarks and changing trends and bring out the expanding scope of psychology.

The emergence of each school must be understood as an effort to include within the scope of psychology aspects of behaviour which were left out earlier. Further, each school contributed to the changing methodological approach of psychology. Psychology cannot be simply a mechanistic or natural science.

It has to reckon with these models but more than these it has social ramifications and also individual roots. Today, one can see psychologists working with mathematicians, biologists, economists, political scientists, medical men and with scientists belonging to every other discipline. This shows the pervasiveness of the scope of psychology and at the same time its individual identity.

In the latter half of the 20th century there are no new schools of psychology. Psychologists individually and in groups are actively working on specific problems. The days are gone where one could expect a master psychologist giving an overall view of the human organism or human behaviour and others either owing allegiance to him or bitterly opposing him.

In a way, preoccupation with general viewpoints has given place to active pursuit of research and study of specific problems. But still one may discern a few broad approaches linking together different groups of psychologists. These different approaches are vaguely reflective of the earlier schools of psychology, though they are by no means vigorous and tight-knit schools of thought. A brief indication of these approaches may be relevant.

Contemporary Approaches :

(a) Stimulus-Response-Behaviouristic Approach :

This approach may be traced to classical behaviourism though it is in no way identical with it. Briefly stated, this approach tries to analyse human behaviour in terms of stimulus-response units acquired through the process of learning, mainly through instrumental conditioning.

This approach also emphasises the role of reinforcement and drive states within the organism. The approach lays emphasis on the organisation of the learning and reinforcing situations in explaining the acquisition of human behaviour. Most of the psychologists belonging to this group also believe in the close similarity between animal and human behaviour. Experimentation in laboratories is the main method of these psychologists.

(b) Cognitive Approach :

The cognitive approach on the other hand emphasises the role of perception and cognitive functioning, the changes in these processes arising out of natural growth. While these views do not neglect the role of the environment, they tend to lay more emphasis on the change in the perceptual organisation.

This approach has its roots in gestalt psychology though psychologists with this approach go far beyond. While these views do not neglect the role of the environment they tend to lay emphasis on the changing nature and pattern of the cognitive processes which follow a predetermined pattern inherent in the human organism. Implicit in this is the limitation of the capacity of environmental manipulation to modify cognitive behaviour. The leading figures of this group are Piaget, Bruner, Witken and others.

(c) Dynamic and Psychoanalytic Approach :

Perhaps this is the only system which still survives very nearly in its rigid form. However, the views of several others like Erikson and Sullivan may be included in this. This approach emphasises the role of the instinctual processes, their modification in the course of interaction with the society and the critical points involved in this.

(d) Organismic, Wholistic and Self Approaches :

These psychologists emphasise the central role of the organism. Under normal conditions the organism is not a passive recipient of stimuli but an active, seeking and striving entity trying to master the environment and also master itself.

Not all psychologists may be said to subscribe to any one of these views. Leading psychologists like G.W. Allport, R.B. Cattell, H.J. Eysenck and several others have their own individual views overlapping sometimes with the approaches  but nevertheless distinct.

(e) Existential Approach :

This approach evolved from the writings of European philosophers like Jaspers, Kierkegard and Jean Paul Satre. This approach emphasises human existence- the need to establish a sense of personal identity and to build meaningful links with the world. This approach developed out of the existentialists’ concern over depersonalization of the individuals in our modern, technological, rocket-age society, which is suffering from a loss of meaning in human existence.

They view modern man as an alienated being and a stranger to God, to nature, to other men and even to himself. Such a state of affairs is leading modern man ultimately to an empty existence, to existential anxiety and to psychopathology.

Existentialism tries to reach this modern man, offer him help in terms of clarifying his values and work out a meaningful and purposive existence. Psychologists who shaped this approach further were Rollo May, R.D. Laing, Erich Fromm and others.

Other approaches which emerged and gained popularity in recent years are the interpersonal approach, psychopharmacological approach etc.

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A Brief History of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia through the ages..

Updated June 23, 2024 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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In 1910, the psychiatrist and eugenicist Paul Eugen Bleuler coined the term ‘schizophrenia’ from the Greek words schizo (‘split’) and phren (‘mind’). Bleuler had intended the term to denote or connote a ‘loosening’ of thoughts and feelings, but many people understood it—and, unfortunately, still do—to mean a ‘split personality ’.

What 'schizophrenia' does not mean

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) did much to popularize the concept of a ‘split personality’, sometimes also referred to as ‘multiple personality disorder ’ (MPD). However, MPD is a vanishingly rare condition that has nothing to do with schizophrenia. The vast majority of psychiatrists, myself included, have never come across a case of MPD, and many suspect that the condition does not even exist. Yes, schizophrenia sufferers may hear voices, or have bizarre beliefs, but this does not amount to having a ‘split personality’. Unlike Dr Jekyll, schizophrenia sufferers do not suddenly morph into another, unrecognizable person.

Ironically, Bleuler had been trying to clarify matters by displacing the older, even more misleading term dementia præcox [‘dementia of early life’], which had been championed by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. Kraepelin believed that the illness only struck young people, and invariably led to cognitive decline —hence dementia præcox . But Bleuler disagreed on both counts, and, accordingly, renamed the illness ‘schizophrenia’.

It is just as common as it is unfortunate to hear the adjective ‘schizophrenic’ being bandied about to mean something like ‘changeable’, ‘erratic’, or ‘contradictory’, as in, ‘The weather today is completely schizophrenic’ or, ‘The reaction from the White House has been typically schizophrenic’. This sort of colloquialism ought to be discouraged insofar as it perpetuates people’s misunderstanding of the illness and contributes to the stigmatization of schizophrenia sufferers. Even used correctly, the term ‘schizophrenic’ does nothing more than label a person by an illness, implicitly reducing him or her to that illness. But people aren’t ‘schizophrenics’ any more than they are ‘diabetics’ or sufferers of toothache.

Who ‘discovered’ schizophrenia?

For all his shortcomings, Kraepelin was the first to distinguish schizophrenia from other forms of psychosis , in particular the ‘affective psychoses’ that can supervene in mood disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder . Kraepelin’s classification of mental disorders, the Compendium of Psychiatry [ Compendium der Psychiatrie ], is the forerunner of today’s most influential classifications of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , 5th Revision (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and the International Classification of Diseases , 11th Revision (ICD-11), published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. As well as listing mental disorders, DSM-5 and ICD-11 provide operational definitions and diagnostic criteria that physicians and researchers can use to make or verify diagnoses.

Although the concept of schizophrenia is of Kraepelin and the nineteenth century, the illness itself, or something like it, has been with us for centuries and millennia. The oldest extant description of an illness closely resembling schizophrenia is contained in the Ebers papyrus, an Egyptian medical compendium compiled in around 1500 BCE, possibly from earlier texts. And archaeological finds of Stone Age skulls with burr holes—drilled, in all likelihood, to release evil spirits—have led some to speculate that schizophrenia may be as old as mankind itself.

How was schizophrenia thought of in antiquity?

In antiquity, people did not think of ‘madness’—a term that they used indiscriminately for all forms of psychosis—in terms of mental disorder, but more in terms of divine punishment or demonic possession. Evidence for this comes, among others, from the Old Testament, and most notably from the First Book of Samuel, according to which King Saul became ‘mad’ after neglecting his religious duties and angering God.

That David played on his harp to appease Saul suggests that, even in biblical times, people understood that psychotic illnesses could be successfully treated:

But the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him … And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.

In Greek mythology and the Homerian epics (circa eighth century BCE), madness is similarly thought of as a punishment from God—or the gods. Thus, Hera punishes Hercules by ‘sending madness upon him’, and Agamemnon confides to Achilles that ‘Zeus robbed me of my wits’.

It is not until the time of Hippocrates (d. 377 BCE) that madness first became an object of scientific speculation. Hippocrates taught that madness resulted from an imbalance in four bodily fluids or ‘humours’. Melancholy, for instance, resulted from an excess of black bile [Greek, melaina chole ], and could be cured by such ‘restorative’ treatments as special diets, purgatives, and bloodlettings.

To modern readers, Hippocrates’ ideas may seem far-fetched, perhaps even on the dangerous side of eccentric, but in the fourth century BCE they represented a significant advance on the idea of madness as divine punishment or demonic possession:

Only from the brain springs our pleasures, our feelings of happiness , laughter and jokes, our pain, our sorrows and tears … This same organ makes us mad or confused, inspires us with fear and anxiety …

Aristotle and, later, the Roman physician Galen (d. c. 210 CE) elaborated upon Hippocrates’ humoral theories, and helped to establish them as Europe’s dominant medical model.

In Rome, the physician Asclepiades (d. 40 BCE) and the statesman and philosopher Cicero (d. 43 BCE) rejected Hippocrates’ humoral theories, advancing, for example, that melancholy results not from an excess of black bile but from emotions such as rage , fear, and grief .

Unfortunately, the influence of these luminaries began to decline in the first century CE, and the physician Celsus (d. 50 CE) sought to re-establish the idea of madness as a punishment from the gods—an idea which returned to currency with the fall of Rome and rise of Christianity.

In the Dark or Middle Ages, religion became central to cure, and, alongside the mediaeval asylums such as the Bethlehem (a famous or infamous asylum in London that is at the origin of the expression, ‘like a bad day at Bedlam’), some monasteries transformed themselves into centres for the treatment of mental disorder. This is not to say that the humoral theories of Hippocrates had been supplanted, but merely that they had been incorporated into the prevailing Christian dogma, with older treatments such as bleeding, cupping, and leeching continuing alongside the prayers and confession.

How did beliefs change?

The burning of the so-called heretics—often people suffering from psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia—began in the early Renaissance and peaked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

First published in 1563, The Deception of Demons [ De præstigiis dæmonum ] argued that the madness of ‘heretics’ resulted from natural rather than supernatural causes. Not content with proscribing the book, the Church accused its author, Johann Weyer, of being a sorcerer.

From the fifteenth century, scientific advances such as the anatomy of Vesalius (d. 1564) and the heliocentric system of Galileo (d. 1642) began challenging the authority of the Church, and the centre of attention and study gradually shifted from God to man and from the heavens to the Earth.

Even so, the humoral theories of Hippocrates perdured well into the nineteenth century, to be lampooned by the playwright Molière (d. 1673) in such works as The Imaginary Invalid [ Le Malade imaginaire ] and The Doctor in Spite of Himself [ Le Médecin malgré lui ]. In the 1830s, France alone imported around forty million leeches a year for medicinal purposes.

Empirical thinkers such as John Locke (d. 1704) in England and Denis Diderot (d. 1784) in France challenged this status quo by arguing, in the same vein as Cicero, that reason and emotion are a product of the senses. Also in France, the physician Philippe Pinel (d. 1826) began to regard mental disorder as the result of exposure to psychological and social stressors, and, to a lesser extent, of heredity and physiological damage.

A landmark in the history of psychiatry, Pinel’s Treatise on Insanity [ Traité Médico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mentale… ] called for a more humane approach to the treatment of mental disorder. This so-called moral treatment included decreased stimuli, routine activity and occupation, and a trusting and confiding doctor-patient relationship. At about the same time as Pinel in France, the Tukes (father and son) in England founded the York Retreat, the first institution ‘for the humane care of the insane’ in the British Isles.

In the nineteenth century, hopes of successful cures lead to a burgeoning of mental hospitals in North America, Britain, and many other parts of Europe. Unlike the foreboding mediaeval asylums, these hospitals treated the ‘insane poor’ according to the principles of moral treatment.

Like Pinel before him, Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol, Pinel’s student and successor at the Salpêtrière in Paris, attempted a classification of mental disorders, and his resulting Concerning Mental Illnesses [ Des Maladies mentales... ] is regarded as the first modern treatise on clinical psychiatry.

Half a century later, Emil Kraepelin published his landmark classification of mental disorders, the Compendium of Psychiatry , in which he isolated schizophrenia (or dementia præcox , as he called it) from other forms of psychosis.

Kraepelin further distinguished three clinical presentations, or variants, of schizophrenia:

• Paranoia , dominated by delusions and hallucinations;
• Hebephrenia, dominated by inappropriate reactions and behaviours; and
• Catatonia, dominated by agitation or immobility, together with odd mannerisms and posturing.

In the early twentieth century, the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (d. 1969) brought the methods of phenomenology—the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced—into the field of psychiatry. This so-called descriptive psychopathology created a more objective foundation for the practice of psychiatry by emphasizing that symptoms of mental disorder ought to be diagnosed on the basis, not of their content, but of their form. This means, for example, that a belief is a delusion not because it is deemed implausible by a person in a position of authority, but because it conforms to the formal definition of a delusion, namely, ‘a strongly held belief that is not amenable to reason and that is out of keeping with its holder’s background or culture.’

How did beliefs evolve in the 20 th century?

Sigmund Freud (d. 1939) and his school influenced much of twentieth century psychiatry, and by the second half of the century a majority of psychiatrists in the US had come to believe that mental disorders such as schizophrenia resulted from unconscious conflicts originating in childhood . As a director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) put it, ‘From 1945 to 1955, it was nearly impossible for a non- psychoanalyst to become a chairman of a department or professor of psychiatry.’

In the latter half of the twentieth century, genetic studies, neuroimaging techniques, and pharmacological developments such as the first antipsychotic drugs completely overturned this psychoanalytical model of mental disorder, prompting a return to a more empirical ‘neo-Kraepelinian’ model.

At present, schizophrenia is regarded as a biological disorder of the brain, although it is acknowledged that psychological and social stressors can play an important role in precipitating episodes of illness, and that different approaches to treatment are more complementary than competing.

Even so, critics deride this ‘bio-psycho-social’ model as little more than a ‘bio-bio-bio’ model, with doctors and psychiatrists reduced to mere diagnosticians and pill pushers. Many critics question the scientific evidence underpinning such a robust biological approach, and call for a radical rethink of mental disorders, not as detached disease processes that can be carved up into diagnostic labels, but as subjective and meaningful experiences grounded in personal and larger sociocultural narratives.

What treatments were used before the advent of antipsychotic medication ?

Febrile illnesses such as malaria had long been known to temper psychotic symptoms, and in the early twentieth century ‘fever therapy ’ became a common treatment for schizophrenia. Psychiatrists attempted to induce fevers in their patients, including, in some cases, with injections of sulphur or oil.

Other treatments included sleep therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, and prefrontal leucotomy (lobotomy), which involved severing the connection between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain.

Unfortunately, many such ‘treatments’ or interventions aimed more at controlling disturbed behaviour than at curing illness or alleviating suffering. In some countries, such as Germany during the Nazi era, the conviction that mental disorders such as schizophrenia amounted to a ‘hereditary defect’ led to barbarous acts of genocide and forced sterilization.

The first antipsychotic drug, chlorpromazine, came out in the 1950s, and, although far from perfect, inaugurated an era of hope and optimism for schizophrenia sufferers and their carers.

So, where to now?

In 1919, Kraepelin stated that ‘the causes of dementia præcox are at the present time still mapped in impenetrable darkness’. Since then, greater understanding of the causes of schizophrenia has opened up multiple avenues for the prevention and treatment of the illness, and a broad range of pharmacological, psychological, and social interventions have been scientifically proven to work.

Today, schizophrenia sufferers stand a better chance than at any other time in history of leading a normal life. And thanks to the fast pace of ongoing medical research, a good outcome is increasingly likely.

Read more in The Meaning of Madness .

Neel Burton, M.D. , is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer who lives and teaches in Oxford, England.

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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that could derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face triggers with less reactivity and get on with our lives.

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A Look at Target’s History: from Humble Beginnings to Retail Giant

This essay about the history of Target Corporation traces its growth from a single store in 1962 to a major player in the U.S. retail sector. It begins with the company’s origins as Dayton Dry Goods Company in 1902, evolving into the first Target store in Minnesota. The narrative highlights Target’s innovative practices such as early computerization of inventory in the 1960s and its expansion throughout the 1970s. The essay details the 2000 rebranding of Dayton Hudson Corporation to Target Corporation, emphasizing the strategic focus on expanding the Target store brand. Additionally, it discusses Target’s collaborations with high-end designers and its adaptations to technological advancements and consumer behavior changes, like online sales and mobile applications. This summary reflects on Target’s commitment to combining style, quality, and affordability, which has solidified its status in the competitive retail industry.

How it works

Target, a name everyone knows in the retail world, has a rich history that stretches back over fifty years. Known for its iconic red bullseye logo and a commitment to offering high-value, trendy merchandise, Target has grown from a single store in Minnesota to a major player across the U.S.

Target’s story begins in 1902 when George Dayton founded the Dayton Dry Goods Company in Minneapolis, which later became the Dayton Company. The first Target store opened on May 1, 1962, in Roseville, Minnesota.

This store was created as a discount offshoot of Dayton’s department stores, aiming to combine upscale, fashionable retail with discount pricing. It was an innovative idea at the time, offering shoppers a quality experience that was also affordable.

The 1960s and 1970s were periods of rapid expansion for Target. They set themselves apart with forward-thinking practices. For instance, by 1966, Target was pioneering the use of computerized inventory systems among discount retailers, significantly improving efficiency and customer service. By 1979, Target had grown to 80 stores across several states, proving their business model was a hit.

In 2000, the Dayton Hudson Corporation, Target’s parent company, rebranded itself as Target Corporation, making Target the company’s main focus. This change marked a strategic shift, concentrating on expanding Target stores nationwide rather than its other department stores.

Over the years, Target has become known for its wide range of products, from groceries to furniture and electronics. But what really stands out are their collaborations with high-end designers and brands. These partnerships brought designer goods to customers at lower prices, enhancing Target’s reputation for affordable style. Big-name collaborations with designers like Missoni, Lilly Pulitzer, and Alexander McQueen added a touch of luxury to Target’s aisles.

Target has also been a leader in adapting to changes in consumer behavior and technology. They’ve focused on enhancing the shopping experience through technology, adopting online sales platforms early on, and more recently, developing mobile apps and curbside pickup services. These innovations have kept Target competitive in the fast-changing retail landscape, especially as e-commerce becomes more dominant.

Today, Target operates over 1,800 stores across the U.S. and has a strong online presence. It remains committed to its founding principles of offering stylish, quality goods at affordable prices while continuously adapting to new market trends and consumer needs.

In conclusion, since opening in 1962, Target has evolved from a discount store within a department store to a leading standalone retail giant. Its journey reflects a mix of strategic foresight, innovative practices, and a steady focus on customer value and convenience, making it a standout in the competitive world of retail.

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‘Confessions of a Good Samaritan’ Review: Penny Lane Delivers a Documentary Essay on Altruism and Its Discontents

An exploration of the science, history and ethics of organ donation in the context of the filmmaker's kidney donation.

By Alissa Simon

Alissa Simon

Film Critic

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The statistics are shocking. In the United States, nearly 100,000 people are listed on a national database for kidney transplantation, but perhaps three-quarters of them will die before an appropriate match is found. Yet the choice to make a live, non-directed donation is relatively rare. As Lane hears from others and experiences for herself, many friends and relatives regard the would-be donor as crazy.

Among the interesting interviewees is psychology professor Abigail Marsh, whose personal history prompted her interest in understanding the neural and cognitive basis of empathy, altruism, aggression and psychopathy. When studying brain scans of people diagnosed with psychopathy, Marsh hypothesized that perhaps they represented one end of a continuum, and that the brains of people expressing more empathy than the average joe would also be differently wired. 

Marsh explains that the brain’s amygdala is linked to all of our sensory processing systems and gives a corresponding emotional response to the information processed. Psychopathic brains have amygdalas that on average are up to 20% smaller than normal people. Altruistic people have amygdalas which are around 8% larger than average. The scan she performs on Lane proves that the filmmaker’s amygdala is quite large.

Meanwhile, advocate and author Dr. Sally Satel, a recipient of a donated kidney, makes a compelling argument for government legislated rewards for altruistic organ donation, since it is against the law for a recipient to offer cash or other financial benefits to a donor and for a donor to accept them. Given that non-directed donations comprise only 2% of all the kidney transplants performed and black-market organs comprise 10%, the title of her book neatly sums up the problem: “Altruism Is Not Enough.” Archival footage showing a 1984 Senate inquiry (chaired by a young Al Gore) into an organs-for-money scheme shows that doctors have been thinking about this issue for some time.

Bio-ethicist and psychiatrist Dr. Jacob Appel helps Lane understand the history of progress in kidney transplantation, which came rapidly after the discovery of cyclosporine, an immunosuppressive agent used to treat organ rejection post-transplant. And he describes to her a possible future of organs being grown inside genetically modified pigs.

In contrast to the theoretical issues that Appel puts forward, the ebullient surgeon Dr. Keith Melancon is literally hands-on. He describes his pleasure at seeing a donated organ “pink-up” inside the body of the recipient.

The film makes a virtue of its small budget through incorporating a digital esthetic throughout.

Reviewed online, June 24, 2024. In SXSW, Hot Docs film festivals. Running time: 103 MIN. 

• Production: (Documentary) A Spinning Nancy presentation of a Sandbox Films production, in association with Olive Hill Media, Impact Partners. (World sales: Submarine Entertainment, NY.) Producer: Gabriel Sedgwick. Executive producers: Greg Boustead, Jessica Harrop, Tim Lee, Michael Cho, Mimi Rode.
• Crew: Director, writer: Penny Lane. Camera: Naiti Gámez. Editor: Hannah Buck. Music: Carolina Eyck. 
• With: Penny Lane, Professor Abigail Marsh, Keith Melancon, Sally Satel, Jacob Appel.

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The Psychology Behind Buying Bad Airport Food—Again and Again

By Ella Quittner

This article is part of our airport food survival guide , which includes tips and tricks—even a hot take or two—that challenge the notion that airport meals are always dull, overpriced, and tasteless.

The absolute worst way for a person to spend $37 for dinner in New York City is on an undressed Caesar salad accompanied by a weird little roll that comes in its own plastic sack and a lukewarm gin and tonic.

The absolute best way for a person to spend $37 for dinner within the confines of a New York City airport is, however, on an undressed Caesar salad accompanied by a weird little roll that comes in its own plastic sack and a lukewarm gin and tonic. This isn’t so much a code I live by as it is a truth that I have come to accept. The moment I see those 25-foot tall circular rings of falling water with a pulsating light show in La Guardia ’s Terminal B, all notions I have constructed of a curated—and occasionally aesthetically pleasing—canon of culinary and alcoholic preferences vanish instantly.

In the presence of immense stress (a woman who is screaming into a phone that her son just had diarrhea, and who is also somehow still more put together than I am and ahead of me in the security line) and in the absence of any self-control or foresight, that $37 meal—consumed under flickering fluorescent lights—feels both inevitable and physically healing. In an airport , a visit to Hudson News, with its bounty of $8 Cheez-Its and nutrition bars, is more effective than back-to-back phone therapy. A poorly imitated French bistro that unspools itself as I wheel my perpetually broken suitcase around a corner is as thrilling as the prospect of quenelles de brochet at Benoit . If I am lucky, there will be a floating oasis in the central strip between the gates, appearing like a mirage to a shipwrecked sailor, and its name will be something that’s neither a real word nor even a real sound, like S03EO, and it will offer craft beer and three or four extremely disparate omelets—and it will be the place to which I didn’t realize I had been waiting to pull up a high top stool for my entire life.

There are two issues at play here. The first is my propensity to succumb to a purchase at all, even when it’s 8 a.m. and I’ve already had breakfast, and my flight is only 74 minutes long.

“We go through our days fighting temptation,” says behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who has penned a number of books on the topic of irrational decision making . “We say no to a cookie. And then we get to the airport. We’re fed up with life.” Ariely calls this—the moment that we shed all pretenses of self-control, adherence to budget, or culinary preference, in favor of a small scary snack—the “break point”: when it feels as though everything is going wrong and our ability to resist temptation lowers. The second piece of the issue, as I see it, is not only that an airport makes some of us dissolve into completely different, frantic people, but also that as those frantic people, we end up spending more money on items we know would cost less elsewhere. At the “break point,” Ariely says, if it is within the bounds of affordability to a given traveler, that traveler is going to be willing to pay more, just to feel better.

I say “our” and “a given traveler” because I am, unfortunately, not alone in this shocking behavior. You and your partner are elbowing me in line to get the last (crust-coated) table at a pan-South American grill that inexplicably also serves sushi; I know this because according to data released by analytics company STR’s Tourism Consumer Insights team, 89% of travelers said that they made purchases in the airport before air travel. (Only 30% said they made a purchase on the flight itself.)

I also asked around.

Some people, like my friend Eric, told me they had a plan in place for airport food. (His is, roughly, to buy Gardetto’s whenever he sees them.) Others, like my friend Maddie—who frequently commutes to other cities from New York City for work—seem to reach their break point as easily as I do. “It’s like I don’t believe the flight will ever take off, which is a valid fear, and so while I’m earthbound I must eat and hoard calories,” Maddie said. “Once I ate an edible to help me sleep on a redeye —it didn’t work, and I ended up slurping down three bowls of ramen in the lounge because I was having a panic attack.”

“Did the ramen help?” I asked.

“Like, no,” she said.

Dr. Ellen Langer, who is often called “the mother of mindfulness” and has taught this topic for more than four decades at Harvard University, believes that the negative emotions I associate with the airport are avoidable. Perhaps most integral, she says, is to preempt the mental error of thinking that situations (i.e. that one especially dismal terminal at LAX where the Dunkin’ sandwiches all for some reason taste like cleaning solution) and events ( a delayed flight , a middle seat assignment ) are what causes stress.

“For stress to occur,” she explained, “ you have to believe that something is going to happen, and you believe that it is going to be awful.” Not only are we fairly bad predictors of actual future events, she argues, but most experiences do not turn out to be awful. Sometimes they are inconvenient, Dr. Langer says, but dreading potential inconveniences is a waste of energy and depletes our ability to be responsive and mindful in the face of strife later, a disposition she calls “defensive pessimism.”

Dr. Langer also challenged me to “accept the fact that virtually anything can be fun” through “choices that make it like a game.” If I made the choice to buy a sad cheeseburger for $24 for example, she suggested I could pretend to be at Noma while eating it, and practice “active noticing”: try to pinpoint what qualities make it good or bad. Or I could eat that $37 undressed Caesar salad leaf by leaf, and attempt to identify its terroir.

As if I needed an excuse to look even wilder at the airport.

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Guest Essay

At the Paris Olympics, Sex Testing Will Be in Full Force. How Did We Get Here?

By Michael Waters

Michael Waters is the author of “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports.”

Sometime in May 1936, a reporter for The Western Morning News, a newspaper based in Plymouth, England, arrived at the doorstep of Mark Weston, a retired shot putter who had embarked on a career as a massage therapist. Mr. Weston brought the reporter into the sitting room, where he handed over a certificate recently signed by his doctor. The certificate stated, “This is to certify that Mr. Mark Weston, who has always been brought up as a female, is a male, and should continue life as such.”

Mr. Weston, born in 1905 in Plymouth, had been labeled a girl for most of his life. Throughout his sports career, he played in women’s leagues. But in early 1936, he began seeing a doctor about living as a man. He checked into Charing Cross Hospital for what turned out to be two sex-reassignment operations — one in April, another in May. Mr. Weston explained to the reporter, “I realize I am now in my true element.”

The Morning News published its article on May 28, 1936, under the headline “Devon Woman Athlete Who Has Become a Man.” Compared with the contentious discussion of trans and intersex athletes today, the article and the coverage that followed were striking for their empathy. The paper focused on explaining how a gender transition like Mr. Weston’s was possible. But eventually, the focus shifted. Mr. Weston’s story made its way to two prominent sports officials — a sports doctor who often advised federations on medical matters and a member of what was then the International Amateur Athletic Federation and is today World Athletics, the track-and-field federation — who responded by drafting early iterations of its modern sex testing policies, the first of their kind in contemporary sports. Mr. Weston did not want to return to sports, much less women’s sports, but the officials worried that gender transitions like his would poke holes in existing male and female categories. Since then, international sports bodies have continued to deny or restrict opportunities for trans and intersex athletes to compete at the highest level, in some cases barring them from competition completely — all for failing to meet a subjective definition of “female.”

When I first encountered this historical coverage of Mr. Weston, I saw that we had missed a chance to chart an alternate path — to organize sports without the regimes of gender surveillance that dominate it today. We still have an opportunity, though, to design policies that acknowledge male and female sports categories as imperfect and permeable and that place the humanity and dignity of athletes first and foremost.

Advocates of sex-testing policies cloak themselves in the guise of fairness; they exist, proponents claim, to exclude anyone with a perceived biological advantage in women’s sports. That group ranges from trans women, who are banned from most major sports even after undergoing a medical transition, to many cisgender and intersex women who have not undergone any medical transition but who have testosterone levels considered higher than normal for women. Yet little evidence supports the idea that these women have physical advantages, in strength or otherwise, over other women.

These sex testing policies also fail to acknowledge natural variations in human bodies. There’s no single way to cleave people into binary categories, but that hasn’t stopped sports officials from trying.

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• The exponential growth of solar power will change the world

An energy-rich future is within reach

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I t is 70 years since AT&T ’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa , where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. Making cells also takes energy, but solar power is fast making that abundant, too. As for demand, it is both huge and elastic—if you make electricity cheaper, people will find uses for it. The result is that, in contrast to earlier energy sources, solar power has routinely become cheaper and will continue to do so.

Other constraints do exist. Given people’s proclivity for living outside daylight hours, solar power needs to be complemented with storage and supplemented by other technologies. Heavy industry and aviation and freight have been hard to electrify. Fortunately, these problems may be solved as batteries and fuels created by electrolysis gradually become cheaper.

Another worry is that the vast majority of the world’s solar panels, and almost all the purified silicon from which they are made, come from China. Its solar industry is highly competitive, heavily subsidised and is outstripping current demand—quite an achievement given all the solar capacity China is installing within its own borders. This means that Chinese capacity is big enough to keep the expansion going for years to come, even if some of the companies involved go to the wall and some investment dries up.

In the long run, a world in which more energy is generated without the oil and gas that come from unstable or unfriendly parts of the world will be more dependable. Still, although the Chinese Communist Party cannot rig the price of sunlight as OPEC tries to rig that of oil, the fact that a vital industry resides in a single hostile country is worrying.

It is a concern that America feels keenly, which is why it has put tariffs on Chinese solar equipment. However, because almost all the demand for solar panels still lies in the future, the rest of the world will have plenty of scope to get into the market. America’s adoption of solar energy could be frustrated by a pro-fossil-fuel Trump presidency, but only temporarily and painfully. It could equally be enhanced if America released pent up demand, by making it easier to install panels on homes and to join the grid—the country has a terawatt of new solar capacity waiting to be connected. Carbon prices would help, just as they did in the switch from coal to gas in the European Union.

The aim should be for the virtuous circle of solar-power production to turn as fast as possible. That is because it offers the prize of cheaper energy. The benefits start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less—and that includes pretty much everything. Then come the things cheap energy will make possible. People who could never afford to will start lighting their houses or driving a car. Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it. It can drive the hungry machinery of artificial intelligence. It can make billions of homes and offices more bearable in summers that will, for decades to come, be getting hotter.

But it is the things that nobody has yet thought of that will be most consequential. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.

This week marks the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The Sun rising to its highest point in the sky will in decades to come shine down on a world where nobody need go without the blessings of electricity and where the access to energy invigorates all those it touches. ■

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This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “The solar age”

Leaders June 22nd 2024

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• Emmanuel Macron’s project of reform is at risk
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• India should liberate its cities and create more states

From the June 22nd 2024 edition

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