Who Wrote The First Psychology Textbook?
William James (A) William James wrote the first psychology textbook, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890.
Contents
- 1 Who is the father of psychology books?
- 2 Did Aristotle write the first book on psychology?
- 3 Who discovered the first psychology?
- 4 Did Aristotle wrote a book on psychology?
- 5 What did Plato say about psychology?
- 6 What was the first school of psychology?
- 7 What is the origin of the psychology?
- 8 Who published the first psychology book?
- 9 Who published the first social psychology textbook?
Did Wundt write the first psychology textbook?
Is Psychology a Science? –
- Psychology is a science thanks to the foundational work of Wilhelm Wundt.
- Wundt, who ran the Leipzig Laboratory in Germany, was the first self-titled Psychologist.
- He also wrote the first ever Psychology textbook: Principles of Physiological Psychology.
- The German academic system of the 19th Century was the perfect setting for the birth of a new scientific discipline as subjects (even traditional arts subjects) were approached through a scientific lens.
- Whilst academics across Europe were discussing Psychology from a philosophical position, Wundt was getting empirical.
Who is the father of psychology books?
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.
- He believed in the notion of voluntarism—that people have free will and should know the intentions of a psychological experiment if they were participating (Danziger, 1980).
Wundt considered his version experimental introspection; he used instruments such as those that measured reaction time. He also wrote Volkerpsychologie in 1904 in which he suggested that psychology should include the study of culture, as it involves the study of people.
- Edward Titchener, one of his students, went on to develop structuralism,
- Its focus was on the contents of mental processes rather than their function (Pickren & Rutherford, 2010).
- Wundt established his psychology laboratory at the University at Leipzig in 1879 ( Figure 1.2 ).
- 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). Figure 1.2 (a) Wilhelm Wundt is credited as one of the founders of psychology. He created the first laboratory for psychological research. (b) This photo shows him seated and surrounded by fellow researchers and equipment in his laboratory in Germany. 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.
Who is the most influential psychologist that wrote the first book of psychology?
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) – Wilhelm Wundt is largely credited with making psychology a separate science. The German psychologist wrote the first psychology textbook in 1874, Principles of Physiological Psychology, In 1879, Wundt opened the Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of Leipzig.
- In doing so, he created the first laboratory to investigate solely psychological phenomena.
- Previous to his creation, psychology had been subsumed under the subjects of philosophy and biology.
- Wundt was the first to operationalize the process of self-examination, also known as introspection, for experimental use.
He is often referred to as the father of experimental psychology and many see him as the father of psychology as a whole.
Who wrote the first modern psychology textbook in 1890 called the Principles of Psychology?
The principles of psychology (1890). By: William James (Volume 1): William James (January 11, 1842 â August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, who was also trained as a physician. Tapa blanda â 19 Agosto 2017 William James (January 11, 1842 — August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician.
The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labeled him the “Father of American psychology”.
Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, James is considered to be one of the major figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James’ work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W.E.B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty, and has even influenced Presidents, such as Jimmy Carter.
Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism.
Among his most influential books are The Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience, which also included the then theories on mind-cure.
Philosophy:James did important work in philosophy of religion. In his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh he provided a wide-ranging account of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and interpreted them according to his pragmatic leanings.
- Some of the important claims he makes in this regard: Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius.
- The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind—that is, they show us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things.
In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must each make certain “over-beliefs” in things which, while they cannot be proven on the basis of experience, help us to live fuller and better lives. Religious Mysticism is only one half of mysticism, the other half is composed of the insane and both of these are co-located in the ‘great subliminal or transmarginal region’.
- James investigated mystical experiences throughout his life, leading him to experiment with chloral hydrate (1870), amyl nitrite (1875), nitrous oxide (1882), and peyote (1896).
- James claimed that it was only when he was under the influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to understand Hegel.
- He concluded that while the revelations of the mystic hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others, they are certainly ideas to be considered, but can hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such.
American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who “took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.”. : The principles of psychology (1890). By: William James (Volume 1): William James (January 11, 1842 â August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher,
Did Aristotle write the first book on psychology?
Aristotle’s Psychology – Para Psyche – Aristotle, building upon the work of the earlier philosophers and their studies into mind, reasoning and thought, wrote the first known text in the history of psychology, called Para Psyche, ‘About the Mind.’ In this landmark work, he laid out the first tenets of the study of reasoning that would determine the direction of the history of psychology; many of his proposals continue to influence modern psychologists.
In the book, the definition of psyche, as was common at the time, used ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ interchangeably, with the Ancient Greek philosophers feeling no need to make no distinction between the two. At this period, apart from dalliances with Atheism from Theodorus, Greek philosophers took the existence of divine influence as given.
Only Socrates really questioned whether human behavior and the need to be a ‘good person’ was about seeking personal happiness rather than placating a divine will. In Para Psyche, Aristotle’s psychology proposed that the mind was the ‘first entelechy,’ or primary reason for the existence and functioning of the body.
- This line of thought was heavily influenced by Aristotle’s zoology, where he proposed that there were three types of souls defining life; the plant soul, the animal soul and the human soul, which gave humanity the unique ability to reason and create.
- Interestingly, this human soul was the ultimate link with the divine and Aristotle believed that mind and reason could exist independently of the body.
He was one of the first minds to examine the urges and impulse that drove and defined life, believing that the libido and urge to reproduce was the overriding impulse of all living things, influenced by the ‘plant soul.’ Whilst he partially linked this to the process of achieving immortality and fulfilling the purposes of a divine mind, he proposed this reproductive urge many centuries before Darwin.
Who created the first psychological textbook and introduced functionalism?
The Functionalism of William James – Psychology flourished in America during the mid- to late-1800s. William James emerged as one of the major American psychologists during this period and publishing his classic textbook, “The Principles of Psychology,” established him as the father of American psychology.
Who wrote psychology for dummies?
Psychology For Dummies is a fun, user-friendly guide to the basics of human behavior and mental processes. In plain English and using lots of everyday examples, psychologist Dr. Adam Cash cuts through the jargon to explain what psychology is all about and what it tells us about why we do the things we do.
Who is the real father of modern psychology?
Wilhelm Wundt is the man most commonly identified as the father of Modern Psychology.
Who wrote the history of psychology?
Early American – Around 1875 the Harvard physiology instructor (as he then was), William James, opened a small experimental psychology demonstration laboratory for use with his courses. The laboratory was never used, at that time, for original research, and so controversy remains as to whether it is to be regarded as the “first” experimental psychology laboratory or not.
In 1878, James gave a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins University entitled “The Senses and the Brain and their Relation to Thought” in which he argued, contra Thomas Henry Huxley, that consciousness is not epiphenomenal, but must have an evolutionary function, or it would not have been naturally selected in humans.
The same year James was contracted by Henry Holt to write a textbook on the “new” experimental psychology. If he had written it quickly, it would have been the first English-language textbook on the topic. It was twelve years, however, before his two-volume The Principles of Psychology would be published.
- In the meantime textbooks were published by George Trumbull Ladd of Yale (1887) and James Mark Baldwin then of Lake Forest College (1889).
- William James was one of the founders of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1885, which studied psychic phenomena ( parapsychology ), before the creation of the American Psychological Association in 1892.
James was also president of the British society that inspired the United States’ one, the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, which investigated psychology and the paranormal on topics such as mediumship, dissociation, telepathy and hypnosis, and it innovated research in psychology, by which, according to science historian Andreas Sommer, were “devised methodological innovations such as randomized study designs” and conducted “the first experiments investigating the psychology of eyewitness testimony (Hodgson and Davey, 1887), empirical and conceptual studies illuminating mechanisms of dissociation and hypnotism”; Its members also initiated and organised the International Congresses of Physiological/Experimental psychology.
- In 1879 Charles Sanders Peirce was hired as a philosophy instructor at Johns Hopkins University,
- Although better known for his astronomical and philosophical work, Peirce also conducted what are perhaps the first American psychology experiments, on the subject of color vision, published in 1877 in the American Journal of Science (see Cadwallader, 1974).
Peirce and his student Joseph Jastrow published “On Small Differences in Sensation” in the Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, in 1884. In 1882, Peirce was joined at Johns Hopkins by G. Stanley Hall, who opened the first American research laboratory devoted to experimental psychology in 1883.
- Peirce was forced out of his position by scandal and Hall was awarded the only professorship in philosophy at Johns Hopkins.
- In 1887 Hall founded the American Journal of Psychology, which published work primarily emanating from his own laboratory.
- In 1888 Hall left his Johns Hopkins professorship for the presidency of the newly founded Clark University, where he remained for the rest of his career.
Soon, experimental psychology laboratories were opened at the University of Pennsylvania (in 1887, by James McKeen Cattell ), Indiana University (1888, William Lowe Bryan ), the University of Wisconsin (1888, Joseph Jastrow ), Clark University (1889, Edmund Sanford ), the McLean Asylum (1889, William Noyes), and the University of Nebraska (1889, Harry Kirke Wolfe ).
However, it was Princeton University ‘s Eno Hall, built in 1924, that became the first university building in the United States to be devoted entirely to experimental psychology when it became the home of the university’s Department of Psychology, In 1890, William James ‘ The Principles of Psychology finally appeared, and rapidly became the most influential textbook in the history of American psychology.
It laid many of the foundations for the sorts of questions that American psychologists would focus on for years to come. The book’s chapters on consciousness, emotion, and habit were particularly agenda-setting. One of those who felt the impact of James’ Principles was John Dewey, then professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan,
With his junior colleagues, James Hayden Tufts (who founded the psychology laboratory at Michigan) and George Herbert Mead, and his student James Rowland Angell, this group began to reformulate psychology, focusing more strongly on the social environment and on the activity of mind and behavior than the psychophysics-inspired physiological psychology of Wundt and his followers had heretofore.
Tufts left Michigan for another junior position at the newly founded University of Chicago in 1892. A year later, the senior philosopher at Chicago, Charles Strong, resigned, and Tufts recommended to Chicago president William Rainey Harper that Dewey be offered the position.
After initial reluctance, Dewey was hired in 1894. Dewey soon filled out the department with his Michigan companions Mead and Angell. These four formed the core of the Chicago School of psychology. In 1892, G. Stanley Hall invited 30-some psychologists and philosophers to a meeting at Clark with the purpose of founding a new American Psychological Association (APA).
(On the history of the APA, see Evans, Staudt Sexton, & Cadwallader, 1992.) The first annual meeting of the APA was held later that year, hosted by George Stuart Fullerton at the University of Pennsylvania, Almost immediately tension arose between the experimentally and philosophically inclined members of the APA.
- Edward Bradford Titchener and Lightner Witmer launched an attempt to either establish a separate “Section” for philosophical presentations, or to eject the philosophers altogether.
- After nearly a decade of debate, a Western Philosophical Association was founded and held its first meeting in 1901 at the University of Nebraska,
The following year (1902), an American Philosophical Association held its first meeting at Columbia University, These ultimately became the Central and Eastern Divisions of the modern American Philosophical Association, In 1894, a number of psychologists, unhappy with the parochial editorial policies of the American Journal of Psychology approached Hall about appointing an editorial board and opening the journal out to more psychologists not within Hall’s immediate circle.
- Hall refused, so James McKeen Cattell (then of Columbia ) and James Mark Baldwin (then of Princeton ) co-founded a new journal, Psychological Review, which rapidly grew to become a major outlet for American psychological researchers.
- Beginning in 1895, James Mark Baldwin ( Princeton, Hopkins ) and Edward Bradford Titchener ( Cornell ) entered into an increasingly acrimonious dispute over the correct interpretation of some anomalous reaction time findings that had come from the Wundt laboratory (originally reported by Ludwig Lange and James McKeen Cattell ).
In 1896, James Rowland Angell and Addison W. Moore (Chicago) published a series of experiments in Psychological Review appearing to show that Baldwin was the more correct of the two. However, they interpreted their findings in light of John Dewey ‘s new approach to psychology, which rejected the traditional stimulus-response understanding of the reflex arc in favor of a “circular” account in which what serves as “stimulus” and what as “response” depends on how one views the situation.
The full position was laid out in Dewey’s landmark article “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” which also appeared in Psychological Review in 1896. Titchener responded in Philosophical Review (1898, 1899) by distinguishing his austere “structural” approach to psychology from what he termed the Chicago group’s more applied “functional” approach, and thus began the first major theoretical rift in American psychology between Structuralism and Functionalism,
The group at Columbia, led by James McKeen Cattell, Edward L. Thorndike, and Robert S. Woodworth, was often regarded as a second (after Chicago) “school” of American Functionalism (see, e.g., Heidbredder, 1933), although they never used that term themselves, because their research focused on the applied areas of mental testing, learning, and education.
Dewey was elected president of the APA in 1899, while Titchener dropped his membership in the association. (In 1904, Titchener formed his own group, eventually known as the Society of Experimental Psychologists,) Jastrow promoted the functionalist approach in his APA presidential address of 1900, and Angell adopted Titchener’s label explicitly in his influential textbook of 1904 and his APA presidential address of 1906.
In reality, Structuralism was, more or less, confined to Titchener and his students. (It was Titchener’s former student E.G. Boring, writing A History of Experimental Psychology, who launched the common idea that the structuralism/functionalism debate was the primary fault line in American psychology at the turn of the 20th century.) Functionalism, broadly speaking, with its more practical emphasis on action and application, better suited the American cultural “style” and, perhaps more important, was more appealing to pragmatic university trustees and private funding agencies.
Who made the first psychology?
Wilhelm Wundt opens first experimental laboratory in psychology at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Credited with establishing psychology as an academic discipline, Wundt’s students include Emil Kraepelin, James McKeen Cattell, and G.
Who are the 4 founder of psychology?
People Also Ask – Who were the three pioneers of psychology? There are a number of important psychologists who are considered the “pioneers” of psychology, though the exact number probably depends on to whom you are speaking. Generally, Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and B.F.
- Skinner are included on lists of those who most paved the way for modern psychologists.
- Is Sigmund Freud the father of psychology? Though Sigmund Freud is certainly one of the most famous psychologists in history, it is actually Wilhelm Wundt who is considered the “father of psychology.” Wundt established the very first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Austria, and it is because of him that we have scientific psychology.
Wundt established the first experimental psychology lab in 1879. He is the reason that psychology became accepted as a scientific discipline. By creating the lab, he established psychology as a separate science. Wundt believed that was an important step in psychology.
- Who is the father of behaviorism? John B.
- Watson is considered the “father of behaviorism” for having founded the idea of classical behaviorism, the psychological theory that says our behavior is a conditioned response to our environment.
- What is cognitive psychology? Cognitive psychology is the study of how people think and process data.
Cognitive development is a widely studied concept of which Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget made famous the cognitive stage theory. Related Resources:
10 Key Moments in the History of Psychology The 10 Most Important People In the History Of Psychology The Top 10 Cases In the History Of Psychology
Who discovered the first psychology?
3.3 Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) – Wundt is commonly regarded as the founding father of Psychology, which established itself as a science around the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1879, Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory of the world in Leipzig, Germany, where he mainly studied sensations and feelings by employing experimental methods.
- This foundation also became influential outside Germany due to the many visits of foreigners—especially American students and scientists (see Hall, Granville Stanley (1844–1924) ).
- Although Wundt often mocks at the methodology of Hegel’s philosophy, he explicitly praises Hegel’s achievement of ‘granting the right to exist to all ‘things in themselves,’ whether they are to count as metaphysical borderline concepts or as practical postulates’ (Wundt 1911, p.736).
Without this basis, it would have been impossible for Wundt to pursue Psychology as an empirical special science, because the soul would have been withdrawn from the applicability of methods borrowed from the natural sciences, as long as it were conceived of as an independent substance removable from the body (Descartes) or were postulated as such on practical grounds (Kant).
- Hegel, on the other hand, ‘has regarded the individual soul as the immediate relationship of the experiences of the soul, as a piece of that infinite reality of the world spirit, which still draws only on its very own actual reality to obtain all that it means’ (Wundt 1911, p.736).
- So Wundt arrives at the conclusion that Hegel ‘had also declared the liberty of Psychology when it proclaimed for all that all mental coming into being—and, therefore, all happening in the soul as well—is actuality, is immediate experienced reality, and that essence and appearance of the Spirit are one and the same, and only mean something different in so far as we comprehend the essence as the relationship of the appearances which is correctly recognized’ (Wundt 1911, p.737; own translations) (see for more Wundt, Wilhelm Maximilian (1832–1920) ).
Read full chapter URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767002564
When was the first psychology book written?
The first book on Psychology titled ‘Principal Psychology’ is about psychology by William James, an American philosopher, and psychologist. It was published in the year 1895.
Did Aristotle wrote a book on psychology?
Aristotle regarded psychology as a part of natural philosophy, and he wrote much about the philosophy of mind, This material appears in his ethical writings, in a systematic treatise on the nature of the soul ( De anima ), and in a number of minor monographs on topics such as sense-perception, memory, sleep, and dreams.
- For Aristotle the biologist, the soul is not—as it was in some of Plato’s writings—an exile from a better world ill-housed in a base body.
- The soul’s very essence is defined by its relationship to an organic structure.
- Not only humans but beasts and plants too have souls, intrinsic principles of animal and vegetable life.
A soul, Aristotle says, is “the actuality of a body that has life,” where life means the capacity for self-sustenance, growth, and reproduction. If one regards a living substance as a composite of matter and form, then the soul is the form of a natural—or, as Aristotle sometimes says, organic—body.
- An organic body is a body that has organs—that is to say, parts that have specific functions, such as the mouths of mammals and the roots of trees.
- The souls of living beings are ordered by Aristotle in a hierarchy,
- Plants have a vegetative or nutritive soul, which consists of the powers of growth, nutrition, and reproduction.
Animals have, in addition, the powers of perception and locomotion—they possess a sensitive soul, and every animal has at least one sense-faculty, touch being the most universal, Whatever can feel at all can feel pleasure; hence, animals, which have senses, also have desires.
- Humans, in addition, have the power of reason and thought ( logismos kai dianoia ), which may be called a rational soul.
- The way in which Aristotle structured the soul and its faculties influenced not only philosophy but also science for nearly two millennia,
- Aristotle’s theoretical concept of soul differs from that of Plato before him and René Descartes (1596–1650) after him.
A soul, for him, is not an interior immaterial agent acting on a body. Soul and body are no more distinct from each other than the impress of a seal is distinct from the wax on which it is impressed. The parts of the soul, moreover, are faculties, which are distinguished from each other by their operations and their objects.
- The power of growth is distinct from the power of sensation because growing and feeling are two different activities, and the sense of sight differs from the sense of hearing not because eyes are different from ears but because colours are different from sounds.
- The objects of sense come in two kinds: those that are proper to particular senses, such as colour, sound, taste, and smell, and those that are perceptible by more than one sense, such as motion, number, shape, and size.
One can tell, for example, whether something is moving either by watching it or by feeling it, and so motion is a “common sensible.” Although there is no special organ for detecting common sensibles, there is a faculty that Aristotle calls a “central sense.” When one encounters a horse, for example, one may see, hear, feel, and smell it; it is the central sense that unifies these sensations into perceptions of a single object (though the knowledge that this object is a horse is, for Aristotle, a function of intellect rather than sense).
- Besides the five senses and the central sense, Aristotle recognizes other faculties that later came to be grouped together as the “inner senses,” notably imagination and memory.
- Even at the purely philosophical level, however, Aristotle’s accounts of the inner senses are unrewarding.
- At the same level within the hierarchy as the senses, which are cognitive faculties, there is also an affective faculty, which is the locus of spontaneous feeling.
This is a part of the soul that is basically irrational but is capable of being controlled by reason. It is the locus of desire and passion; when brought under the sway of reason, it is the seat of the moral virtues, such as courage and temperance. The highest level of the soul is occupied by mind or reason, the locus of thought and understanding.
- Thought differs from sense-perception and is the prerogative, on earth, of human beings.
- Thought, like sensation, is a matter of making judgments; but sensation concerns particulars, while intellectual knowledge is of universals.
- Reasoning may be practical or theoretical, and, accordingly, Aristotle distinguishes between a deliberative and a speculative faculty.
In a notoriously difficult passage of De anima, Aristotle introduces a further distinction between two kinds of mind: one passive, which can “become all things,” and one active, which can “make all things.” The active mind, he says, is “separable, impassible, and unmixed.” In antiquity and the Middle Ages, this passage was the subject of sharply different interpretations.
Some—particularly among Arab commentators—identified the separable active agent with God or with some other superhuman intelligence. Others—particularly among Latin commentators—took Aristotle to be identifying two different faculties within the human mind: an active intellect, which formed concepts, and a passive intellect, which was a storehouse of ideas and beliefs.
If the second interpretation is correct, then Aristotle is here recognizing a part of the human soul that is separable from the body and immortal. Here and elsewhere there is detectable in Aristotle, in addition to his standard biological notion of the soul, a residue of a Platonic vision according to which the intellect is a distinct entity separable from the body.
What did Plato say about psychology?
New book examines Plato’s view of human motivation | Cornell Chronicle Twenty-five hundred years after they were written, Plato’s dialogues continue to yield insights that resonate with current philosophical discussions. In her new book, “Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul, and the Desire for Good,” Rachana Kamtekar, professor of philosophy, examines Plato’s approach to human motivation.
According to the mainstream interpretation of Plato’s psychology, in the early dialogues Plato proposes that human beings only do what we believe to be the best of the things we can do, so that all wrongdoing is due to ignorance and is therefore involuntary (“Socratic intellectualism”). Then, it is supposed, he upends this proposal in the middle dialogues, to account for the fact that we sometimes eat more than we know we should, or vent our anger when we know we shouldn’t, by introducing a “divided soul,” some parts of which have good, independent desires and can take control of our actions.
THE SECRET OF TEXTBOOKS for Psychology Students
Kamtekar departs from this mainstream interpretation. Pointing out that Plato calls wrongdoing involuntary even after he has divided the soul, she argues that across the dialogues Plato posits a natural desire for our own good, and calls actions and conditions that inhibit the fulfillment of this desire “involuntary.” In this respect Plato is following his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, who excuse bad behavior when they see it as due to a person’s being compelled by an outside agent or a passion.
Although Plato is distinctive in emphasizing that ignorance is a condition that makes us vulnerable to such compulsion, he does not treat ignorance by itself as making our actions involuntary. Instead, the latter is a view he depicts Socrates as tempting the sophists – his rivals – with. While Kamtekar agrees that human beings’ natural desire for our own good manifests when we do what we believe is best, she argues that it also manifests in our pursuit of fine or pleasant things in actions directed by nonrational soul-parts, and even in the way our divided soul is embodied so as to divide mental labor and thereby facilitate our doing philosophy, in which Plato believes human happiness is to be found.
Kamtekar’s approach emphasizes both the historical context of Plato’s thought and the fact that in his dialogues the arguments advanced by the main speaker are highly responsive to the positions advanced by the other characters. The Plato that emerges is less dogmatic than in the mainstream view, but one brimful of ideas and arguments about human psychology.
Who wrote the first psychology textbook as well as a functionalist who based behaviors on mental processing skills?
William James – James was the first American psychologist and wrote the first general textbook regarding psychology. In this approach he reasoned that the mental act of consciousness must be an important biological function. He also noted that it was a psychologist’s job to understand these functions so they can discover how the mental processes operate.
This idea was an alternative approach to Structuralism, which was the first paradigm in psychology (Gordon, 1995). In opposition of Titchener’s idea that the mind was simple, William James argued that the mind should be a dynamic concept. James’s main contribution to functionalism was his theory of the subconscious.
He said there were three ways of looking at the subconscious in which it may be related to the conscious. First, the subconscious is identical in nature with states of consciousness. Second, it’s the same as conscious but impersonal. Lastly, he said that the subconscious is a simple brain state but with no mental counterpart.
What was the first school of psychology?
Functionalism : Structuralism was the first school of psychology, and focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components. Major structuralist thinkers include Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener.
What is the origin of the psychology?
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior, according to the American Psychological Association. Psychology is a multifaceted discipline and includes many sub-fields of study such areas as human development, sports, health, clinical, social behavior and cognitive processes.
- Psychology is really a very new science, with most advances happening over the past 150 years or so.
- However, its origins can be traced back to ancient Greece, 400 – 500 years BC.
- The emphasis was a philosophical one, with great thinkers such as Socrates (470 BC – 399 BC) influencing Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC), who in turn influenced Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC).
Philosophers used to discuss many topics now studied by modern psychology, such as memory, free will vs determinism, nature vs. nurture, attraction etc.
Who published the first psychology book?
Activity: Watch a Video – Watch this brief but colourful overview of the history of psychology. It provides a brief but useful to this next section: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo4pMVb0R6M 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 (see Figure 2).
- 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). Figure 2. (a) Wilhelm Wundt is credited as one of the founders of psychology. He created the first laboratory for psychological research. (b) This photo shows him seated and surrounded by fellow researchers and equipment in his laboratory in Germany. 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 favour with the passing of Wundt’s student, Edward Titchener, in 1927 (Gordon, 1995). William James (1842–1910) was the first North American psychologist who espoused a different perspective on how psychology should operate (see Figure 3). 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 behaviour. 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 behaviour 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). Figure 3. William James, shown here in a self-portrait, was the first American psychologist. Perhaps one of the most influential and well-known figures in psychology’s history was Sigmund Freud (see Figure 4). 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. Figure 4. (a) Sigmund Freud was a highly influential figure in the history of psychology. (b) One of his many books, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, shared his ideas about psychoanalytical therapy; it was published in 1922. 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 behaviour, the fact that motivations can cause conflicts that affect behaviour, 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. 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).
Who published the first experimental psychology textbook?
George Trumbull Ladd – George Trumbull Ladd introduced experimental psychology into the United States and founded Yale University ‘s psychological laboratory in 1879. In 1887, Ladd published Elements of Physiological Psychology, the first American textbook that extensively discussed experimental psychology.
What was Wundt’s first book called?
After studying medicine, he worked as a physiologist at Heidelberg University and later at Leipzig University. While at Heidelberg, he delivered the first university course on scientific psychology and went on to write the first textbook on psychology, ‘ Principles of Physiological Psychology ‘ (Wundt, 1873-4).
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Historic Figures in Social Psychology
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| 1890 – 1978 | Floyd Allport is considered a founder of experimental social psychology, in part for his theoretical rigor and emphasis on measurement, and in part for his popular 1924 textbook Social Psychology, which went through 13 editions over the ensuing 50 years.
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| Autobiography of Floyd Henry Allport |
| Wikipedia Entry for Floyd Henry Allport |
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| 1897 – 1967 | Gordon Allport, younger brother of Floyd Allport, conducted pioneering research on attitudes, prejudice, religion, and rumor transmission, among other topics. In addition to training prominent psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, Thomas Pettigrew, Jerome Bruner, and Anthony Greenwald, he helped establish the field of personality psychology.
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| Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood |
| Wikipedia Entry for Gordon Willard Allport |
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| 1907 – 1996 | Solomon Asch is best known for laboratory studies on conformity showing that under certain circumstances, a large percentage of people will conform to a majority position even when the position is clearly incorrect. He also published seminal studies on the primacy effect and halo effect, and helped inspire Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience to authority.
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| Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict |
| The Legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology |
| Wikipedia Entry for Solomon Asch |
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| 1925 – 1997 | Roger Brown wrote the acclaimed 1965 textbook Social Psychology, which played a central role in training a generation of social psychologists. He also made important contributions in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, studying topics such as language acquisition, flashbulb memories, and the tip of the tongue phenomenon.
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| Wikipedia Entry for Roger William Brown |
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| 1916 – 1996 | Donald T. Campbell was a social psychologist and research methodologist who coauthored some of the most frequently cited methodology books and articles ever published. In addition to this work, he served as President of the American Psychological Association and contributed to several fields beyond psychology, including sociology, anthropology, biology, and philosophy.
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| Donald T. Campbell Social Science Research Prize |
| Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences: A Volume in Honor of Donald T. Campbell |
| Wikipedia Entry for Donald Thomas Campbell |
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| 1914 – 2005 | Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie conducted research suggesting that Black children preferred to play with White dolls, a result that the U.S. Supreme Court later cited as evidence that segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority. that may affect the childrens’ hearts and minds.” He was also the first African American to be elected President of the American Psychological Association.
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| Notable New Yorkers: Kenneth Clark |
| Racial Identity in Context: The Legacy of Kenneth B. Clark |
| Wikipedia Entry for Kenneth Bancroft Clark |
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| 1917 – 1983 | Mamie Clark completed a masters thesis that provided the foundation for studies she and her husband Kenneth published on the harmful effects of racial segregation. The U.S. Supreme Court cited these studies in Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark case banning racial segregation in public education.
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| Segregation Ruled Unequal, and Therefore Unconstitutional |
| Wikipedia Entry for Mamie Phipps Clark |
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| 1919 – 1989 | Leon Festinger developed the theory of cognitive dissonance, a motivational theory suggesting that people seek to minimize discomfort caused by inconsistent beliefs and behaviors. He also developed social comparison theory, devised several of the earliest nonparametric statistical tests, and documented the key role of proximity in social relationships.
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| Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance |
| Wikipedia Entry for Leon Festinger |
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| 1896 – 1988 | Fritz Heider was an Austrian-born Gestalt psychologist whose work helped give rise to the field of social cognition. His best known book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, was published in 1958 and was highly influential in the development of attribution theory.
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| The Life of a Psychologist: An Autobiography |
| Wikipedia Entry for Fritz Heider |
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| 1907 – 1996 | Evelyn Hooker was the first social scientist to study the psychosocial adjustment of gay men outside hospital or prison settings. Her results showed no difference between gay and heterosexual men, challenging antigay stereotypes and eventually leading the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic manual of mental disorders.
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| Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker |
| Wikipedia Entry for Evelyn Hooker |
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| 1912 – 1961 | Carl Hovland conducted pathbreaking research on attitude change, propaganda, and persuasion, including studies of the sleeper effect, source credibility, two-sided persuasive appeals, and contrast effects. Later in his career, he also investigated symbolic processes and computer simulations of human thought.
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| Carl Hovland Memorial Lecture Series |
| Wikipedia Entry for Carl Hovland |
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| 1918 – 1990 | Irving Janis carried out studies on attitude change, stress, and decision making, but his best known research was on groupthink, which he defined as “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”
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| Wikipedia Entry for Groupthink |
| A Groupthink Cartoon |
| Wikipedia Entry for Irving L. Janis |
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| 1841 – 1931 | Gustave Le Bon was a French social scientist who wrote about the psychology of crowds and the “collective mind,” which he described as a “single being” more primitive and suggestible than the individuals who comprise it. His views on crowd behavior and inherited racial characteristics helped lay the foundation for fascist ideologies later promulgated by Hitler.
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| The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind |
| Wikipedia Entry for Gustave Le Bon |
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| 1890 – 1947 | Kurt Lewin was an early leader of group dynamic research and is regarded by many as the founder of modern social psychology. Lewin’s Equation, B= f (P,E), stipulates that behavior is a function of the person and environment, and he advocated “action research” applying this equation and scientific methods to address social problems such as prejudice and group conflict.
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| Kurt Lewin Institute |
| Wikipedia Entry for Kurt Lewin |
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| 1871 – 1938 | William McDougall cofounded the British Psychological Society in 1901 and published one of the first social psychology textbooks, An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908). He opposed behaviorism, believing instead that human behavior could be explained by instincts, and was controversial for his views on eugenics and inherited racial differences.
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| Encyclopedia of Psychology Biography of William McDougall |
| Wikipedia Entry for William McDougall |
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| 1933 – 1984 | Stanley Milgram is famous for a set of studies suggesting that most people will obey an experimenter’s order to administer potentially deadly levels of electric shock to a protesting stranger. He also invented several research techniques unrelated to obedience, such as the lost-letter technique, cyranoid technique, and small-world (“six degrees of separation”) technique.
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| The Man Who Shocked the World |
| Wikipedia Entry for Stanley Milgram |
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| 1861 – 1931 | Maximilien Ringelmann was a French agricultural engineer who, in the 1880s, conducted some of the first experiments in social psychology. These experiments showed that individual members of a group often become less productive as the size of their group increases – a phenomenon referred to as the “Ringelmann effect” and now better known as social loafing.
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| Wikipedia Entry for Max Ringelmann |
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| 1922 – 1997 | Stanley Schachter became well known in the 1950s for developing the “two-factor theory of emotion,” which posits that emotions are a joint result of physiological arousal and a cognitive interpretation of that arousal. He also researched a wide range of other phenomena, including cognitive dissonance, misattribution, overeating, and addiction.
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| Wikipedia Entry for Stanley Schachter |
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| 1922 – 1982 | Carolyn Wood Sherif and her husband, Muzafer Sherif, conducted the “Robber’s Cave” experiment (see below) and worked with Carl Hovland to develop social judgment theory, an influential theory about how and when attitude change takes place. She also studied gender identity, social values, and group dynamics, and served as President of the Society for the Psychology of Women.
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| Carolyn Wood Sherif Award |
| Obituary in Psychology of Women Quarterly |
| Wikipedia Entry for Carolyn Wood Sherif |
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| 1906 – 1988 | Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish-born social psychologist who, with his wife Carolyn, conducted the Robber’s Cave experiment in which boys at a summer camp were divided into two rivil groups and ultimately overcame fierce intergroup hostility after working toward superordinate goals. He also studied norm formation, attitude change, and many other topics.
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| Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment |
| Essays in Honor of Muzafer Sherif |
| Wikipedia Entry for Muzafer Sherif |
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| 1895 – 1954 | Francis Cecil Sumner was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in psychology, which he earned from Clark University in 1920. He was an official abstractor for Psychological Bulletin and the Journal of Social Psychology, established an independent psychology program at Howard University, and is widely credited as founding the field of Black psychology.
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| Francis Cecil Sumner: A Slide Show |
| Wikipedia Entry for Francis Cecil Sumner |
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| 1919 – 1982 | Henri Tajfel devised the “minimal group paradigm” in which intergroup relations are studied after arbitrarily dividing experimental participants into groups on the basis of minimally important characteristics. Consistent with social identity theory (co-developed with his student John Turner), he documented that even minimal groups readily form identities and exhibit ingroup favoritism.
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| Wikipedia Entry for Henri Tajfel |
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| 1861 – 1931 | Norman Triplett published one of the first experiments related to social psychology. The report, appearing in the American Journal of Psychology in 1898, compared how fast children wound a reel when alone and in competiton with another child. He concluded that the presence of another contestant “serves to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available.”
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| Wikipedia Entry for Norman Triplett |
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