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2 The Evolution of Psychology: History, Approaches, and Questions – Introduction to Psychology – 1st Canadian Edition

Figure 1.3 Early Psychologists. The earliest psychologists

were the Greek Philosophers Plato (left) and Aristotle
(right). 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.

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 favour 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 philoso-
phers, 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 expe-
rience. But dramatic changes came during the 1800s with the help of the first two research psy-
chologists: the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who developed a psycholo-
gy 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 Leipzig 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 struc-
turalism, a 1.1
Previous: school of psychology
Psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of
as a Science
psychological experience. Its goal was to create a periodic table of the elements of sensations,
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18/01/2023, 02:10 1.2 The Evolution of Psychology: History, Approaches, and Questions – Introduction to Psychology – 1st Canadian Edition

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 colours, reading a page in a
book, or performing a math problem. A participant who is reading a book might report, for in-
stance, that he saw some black and coloured straight and curved marks on a white background.
In other studies the structuralists used newly invented reaction time instruments to systemati-
cally 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 main-
stay of cognitive psychology.

Figure 1.4 Wundt and Titchener. 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.

Perhaps the best known of the structuralists was Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927).
Titchener was a student of Wundt’s who came to the United States in the late 1800s and found-
ed a laboratory at Cornell University (Figure 1.4). (Titchener was later rejected by McGill
University (1903). Perhaps he was ahead of his time; Brenda Milner did not open the Montreal
Neurological Institute until 1950.) In his research using introspection, Titchener and his stu-
dents claimed to have identified more than 40,000 sensations, including those relating to vi-
sion, hearing, and taste. An important aspect of the structuralist approach was that it was rigor-
ous 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 re-
port on their subjective experiences. When the participants were asked to do simple math prob-
lems, they could easily do them, but they could not easily answer how they did them. Thus the
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structuralists were the first to realize the importance of unconscious processes—that many im-
portant aspects of human psychology occur outside our conscious awareness, and that
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18/01/2023, 02:10 1.2 The Evolution of Psychology: History, Approaches, and Questions – Introduction to Psychology – 1st Canadian Edition

ogists 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, William James
and the other members of the school of functionalism aimed 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 behaviour. As he put it in his psy-
chology 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 (Figure 1.5) were influenced
by Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory of natural selection, which proposed that the physi-
cal 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.

Figure 1.5 Functionalist School. The functionalist school of

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

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 psycholo-
gy that applies the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human and animal behaviour
(Dennett, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology accepts the functional-
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ists’ basic assumption, namely that many human psychological systems, including memory,
emotion, and personality, serve key adaptive functions. As we will see in 1.3
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chapters to come,
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