Volunteerism

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) – Founding of psychology as a science……established first research lab in Leipzig in 1879.

---wedded physiology and philosophy and the result was something different than the two….brought empirical methods of physiology to the question of philosophy

Important to Wundt is the concept of “will”…..we decide what to attend to and not…..Different than associationist’s passive ‘mental chemistry’, but he still called Apperception (equivalent to Attention), but voluntary behavior was emphasized.

Subject Matter of Psychology – psychology was a science of the mind or conscious experience…

---thought consciousness at a given moment can be experienced two ways…. Directly (immediate) and indirectly (mediate)….Example…moon produced objective pattern on senses and subjective feelings.

Wundt wanted to study the elements of consciousness as they were impacted by sensation. Direct objective form of an object is its shape, position, and intensity of light……(immediate experience)…

…which is mediated by personal experience (subjective or mediate)……Psychology studies immediate experience and other science mediate information…….that’s b/c psychology is concerned with the mind which is the only immediate way to experience an object….other science have to use instruments, which mediates how perceive any stimulus.

Four Beliefs about nature of consciousness

1. Consciousness is not stable….hard to study

2. Mind is not a single unified whole, but divided into different processes (sensing, feeling, thinking etc).

3. Mental events occur in a lawful fashion (you can find rules that govern them).

4. Mental evens cannot be reduced to physiological events…even if there is a physiological basis

Methodology –Introspection –the observation and reporting of conscious experience…..Wundt had strict methods

---proper training needed to ensure that valid descriptions are made…..introspector had to be able to distinguish between immediate experience and mediate experience……

Historical Analysis – provide information from which the nature of mental events could be inferred. Look at behavior to reveal the parts of the mind responsible…(only way to study questions of voluntary actions).

Research Topics----reactions time –mental chronometry…..reaction time method originated with Helmoholtz…..Wundt wanted to use his method to measure the speed of mental events.

----subject had to judge position of a pointer moving across a calibrated scale at the exact time a bell sounded…..worlds fastest thought occurred in one-tenth of a second

----demonstrated that objective experimental analysis of mental processes is possible

Apprehension, Apperception, and Voluntary Behavior -- sensory impression in consciousness known as apprehension (sensed but not perceived)

---when attention is focused on impression it is known as apperception.

----thus, there are two zones of consciousness…..background zone where mental events are sensed and a zone of focal consciousness where events are perceived more clearly…………….key assumption of his system is that apperception is not passive….requires act of will or intent.

Social Psychology–Volkerpsycholgie more ethnic or cultural psychology…..always interested in problem of relationship between individuals and society….

---creative synthesis….postulated lower mental processes (sensing, feeling, willing) played a role in higher processes (thinking, language), but higher processes not just a simple addition of lower processes. Higher processes are distinctly different than merely the simple elements that compose them.

Language – most relevant to contemporary psychology.

---distinguished between outer and inner linguistic phenomena

---outer – what can be directly observed…written spoken statements

----inner – the internal cognitive principles that are assumed to be responsible for outer phenomenon

---group mind….he believed different ethnic groups had different collective minds….arrived at this idea by combining creative synthesis to social psychology……just as a person’s mind is creative synthesis from individual psychic experiences, so is the group mind created from individual minds of a common culture.

Contributions – created independent science of psychology…..by training large number of students and starting new journal

----created experimental psychology

---43 psych labs by 1900

---bad economics after WWI left many of his ideas unexplored……ideas not seen again until the cognitive revolution (but Wundt not given credit).