AP Psychology

Module 1 - Psychology's History

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

Psychology's Roots

Once upon a time, on a planet in this neighborhood of the universe, there came to be people. Soon thereafter, these creatures became intensely interested in themselves and in one another: "Who are we? What produces our thoughts? Our feelings? Our actions? And how are we to understand and manage those around us?"

Prescientific Psychology

FOCUS QUESTION: How did psychology develop from its prescientific roots in early understandings of mind and body to the beginnings of modern science?

We can trace many of psychology's current questions back through human history. These early thinkers wondered: How does our mind work? How does our body relate to our mind? How much of what we know comes built in? How much is acquired through experience? In India, Buddha pondered how sensations and perceptions combine to form ideas. In China, Confucius stressed the power of ideas and of an educated mind. In ancient Israel, Hebrew scholars anticipated today's psychology by linking mind and emotion to the body; people were said to think with their heart and feel with their bowels.

In ancient Greece, the philosopher-teacher Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.) and his student Plato (428-348 B.C.E.) concluded that mind is separable from body and continues after the body dies, and that knowledge is innate - born within us. Unlike Socrates and Plato, who derived principles by logic, Plato's student Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) had a love of data. An intellectual ancestor of today's scientists, Aristotle derived principles from careful observations. Moreover, he said knowledge is not preexisting (sorry, Socrates and Plato); instead it grows from the experiences stored in our memories.

The next 2000 years brought few enduring new insights into human nature, but that changed in the 1600s, when modern science began to flourish. With it came new theories of human behavior, and new versions of the ancient debates. A frail but brilliant Frenchman named René Descartes (1595-1650) agreed with Socrates and Plato about the existence of innate ideas and mind's being "entirely distinct from body" and able to survive its death. Descartes' concept of mind forced him to conjecture, as people have ever since, how the immaterial mind and physical body communicate. A scientist as well as a philosopher, Descartes dissected animals and concluded that the fluid in the brain's cavities contained "animal spirits." These spirits, he surmised, flowed from the brain through what we call the nerves (which he thought were hollow) to the muscles, provoking movement. Memories formed as experiences opened pores in the brain into which the animal spirits also flowed.

Descartes was right that nerve paths are important and that they enable reflexes. Yet, genius though he was, and standing upon the knowledge accumulated from 99+ percent of our human history, he hardly had a clue of what to day's average 12-year-old knows. Indeed, most of the scientific story of our self-exploration - the story told in this book - has been written in but the last historical eye-blink of human time.

Meanwhile, across the English Channel in Britain, science was taking a more down-to-earth form, centered on experiment, experience, and common-sense judgment. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) became one of the founders of modern science, and his influence lingers in the experiments of today's psychological science. Bacon also was fascinated by the human mind and its failings. Anticipating what we have come to appreciate about our mind's hunger to perceive patterns even in random events, he wrote that "the human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds" (Novum Organuum, 1620). He also foresaw research findings on our noticing and remembering events that confirm our beliefs: "All superstition is much the same whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens ... in all of which the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common."

Some 50 years after Bacon's death, John Locke (1632-1704), a British political philosopher, sat down to write a one-page essay on "our own abilities" for an upcoming discussion with friends. After 20 years and hundreds of pages, Locke had completed one of history's greatest late papers (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding), in which he famously argued that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa - a "blank slate" - on which experience writes. This idea, adding to Bacon's ideas, helped form modern empiricism, the idea that what we know comes from experience, and that observation and experimentation experimentation. enable scientific knowledge.

Psychological Science Is Born

FOCUS QUESTION: What are some important milestones in psychology's early development?

Philosophers' thinking about thinking continued until the birth of psychology as we know it, on a December day in 1879, in a small, third-floor room at Germany's University of Leipzig. There, two young men were helping an austere, middle-aged professor, Wilhelm Wundt, create an experimental apparatus. Their machine measured the time lag between people's hearing a ball hit a platform and their pressing a telegraph key (Hunt, 1993). Curiously, people responded in about one-tenth of a second when asked to press the key as soon as the sound occurred - and in about two-tenths of a second when asked to press the key as soon as they were consciously aware of perceiving the sound. (To be aware of one's awareness takes a little longer.) Wundt was seeking to measure"atoms of the mind" - the fastest and simplest mental processes. So began the first psychological laboratory, staffed by Wundt and by psychology’s first graduate students. (In 1883, Wundt's American student G. Stanley Hall went on to establish the first formal U.S. psychology laboratory, at Johns Hopkins University.)

Before long, this new science of psychology became organized into different branches, or schools of thought, each promoted by pioneering thinkers. These early schools included structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism, described here (with more on behaviorism in Modules 26-30), and two schools described in later modules: Gestalt psychology (Module 19) and psychoanalysis (Module 55).

Thinking About the Mind's Structure

Soon after receiving his Ph.D. in 1892, Wundt's student Edward Bradford Titchener joined the Cornell University faculty and introduced structuralism. As physicists and chemists discerned the structure of matter, so Titchener aimed to discover the structural elements of mind. His method was to engage people in self-reflective introspection (looking inward), training them to report elements of their experience as they looked at a rose, listened to a metronome, smelled a scent, or tasted a substance. What were their immediate sensations, their images, their feelings? And how did these relate to one another? Titchener shared with the English essayist C. S. Lewis the view that "there is one thing, and only one in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation." That one thing, Lewis said, is ourselves. "We have, so to speak, inside information" (1960, pp. 18-19) .

Alas, introspection required smart, verbal people. It also proved somewhat unreliable, its results varying from person to person and experience to experience. Moreover, we often just don't know why we feel what we feel and do what we do. Recent studies indicate that people's recollections frequently err. So do their self-reports about what, for example, has caused them to help or hurt another (Myers, 2002). As introspection waned, so did structuralism.

Thinking About the Mind's Function

Hoping to assemble the mind's structure from simple elements was rather like trying to understand a car by examining its disconnected parts. Philosopher-psychologist William James thought it would be more fruitful to consider the evolved functions of our thoughts and feelings. Smelling is what the nose does; thinking is what the brain does. But why do the nose and brain do these things? Under the influence of evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin, James assumed that thinking, like smelling, developed because it was adaptive - it contributed to our ancestors' survival. Consciousness serves a function. It enables us to consider our past, adjust to our present, and plan our future. As a functionalist, James encouraged explorations of down-to-earth emotions, memories, willpower, habits, and moment-to-moment streams of consciousness.

James' greatest legacy, however, came less from his laboratory than from his Harvard teaching and his writing. When not plagued by ill health and depression, James was an impish, outgoing, and joyous man, who once recalled that "the first lecture on psychology I ever heard was the first I ever gave." During one of his wise-cracking lectures, a student interrupted and asked him to get serious (Hunt, 1993). He loved his students, his family, and the world of ideas, but he tired of painstaking chores such as proofreading. "Send me no proofs!" he once told an editor. "I will return them unopened and never speak to you again" (Hunt, 1993, p. 145).

James displayed the same spunk in 1890, when - over the objections of Harvard's president - he admitted Mary Whiton Calkins into his graduate seminar (Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987). (In those years women lacked even the right to vote.) When Calkins joined, the other students (all men) dropped out. So James tutored her alone. Later, she finished all the requirements for a Harvard Ph.D., outscoring all the male students on the qualifying exams. Alas, Harvard denied her the degree she had earned, offering her instead a degree from Radcliffe College, its undergraduate sister school for women. Calkins resisted the unequal treatment and refused the degree. (More than a century later, psychologists and psychology students were lobbying Harvard to posthumously award Calkins the Ph.D. she earned [Feminist Psychologist, 2002].) Calkins nevertheless went on to become a distinguished memory researcher and the APA's first female president in 1905.

When Harvard denied Calkins the claim to being psychology's first female psychology Ph.D., that honor fell to Margaret Floy Washburn, who later wrote an influential book, The Animal Mind, and became the second female APA president in 1921. Although Washburn's thesis was the first foreign study Wundt published in his journal, her gender meant she was barred from joining the organization of experimental psychologists (who explore behavior and thinking with experiments), despite its being founded by Titchener, her own graduate adviser (Johnson, 1997). What a different world from the recent past - 1996 to 2013 - when women claimed two-thirds or more of new U.S. psychology Ph.D.s and were 9 of the 18 elected presidents of the science-oriented Association for Psychological Science. In Canada and Europe, too, most recent psychology doctorates have been earned by women.

James' influence reached even further through his dozens of well-received articles, which moved the publisher Henry Holt to offer a contract for a textbook of the new science of psychology. James agreed and began work in 1878, with an apology for requesting two years to finish his writing. The text proved an unexpected chore and actually took him 12 years. (Why am I not surprised?) More than a century later, people still read the resulting Principles of Psychology and marvel at the brilliance and elegance with which James introduced psychology to the educated public.

Psychological Science Develops

FOCUS QUESTION: How did psychology continue to develop from the 1920s through today?

In psychology's early days, Wundt and Titchener focused on inner sensations, images, and feelings. James, too, engaged in introspective examination of the stream of consciousness and of emotion. Sigmund Freud emphasized the ways emotional responses to childhood experiences and our unconscious thought processes affect our behavior. Thus, until the 1920s, psychology was defined as "the science of mental life."

And so it continued until the 1920s, when the first of two larger-than-life American psychologists appeared on the scene. Flamboyant and provocative John B. Watson, and later the equally provocative B. F. Skinner, dismissed introspection and redefined psychology as "the scientific study of observable behavior." After all, they said, science is rooted in observation. You cannot observe a sensation, a feeling, or a thought, but you can observe and record people's behavior as they respond to different situations. They further suggested that our behavior is influenced by learned associations, through a process called conditioning. Many agreed, and the behaviorists were one of two major forces in psychology well into the 1960s. (More on these psychologists in Modules 26-30.)

The other major force was Freudian psychology, which emphasized the ways our unconscious thought processes and our emotional responses to childhood experiences affect our behavior. (In modules to come, we'll look more closely at Sigmund Freud's teachings, including his theory of personality and his views on unconscious sexual conflicts and the mind's defenses against its own wishes and impulses. We will also study the psychodynamic approach, which is the updated, modern-day version of Freud's ideas.)

As the behaviorists had done in the early 1900s, two other groups rejected the definition of psychology that was current in the 1960s. The first, the humanistic psychologists, led by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, found both Freudian psychology and behaviorism too limiting. Rather than focusing on the meaning of early childhood memories or the learning of conditioned responses, the humanistic psychologists drew attention to ways that current environmental influences can nurture or limit our growth potential, and to the importance of having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied. (More on this in Module 57.)

The rebellion of a second group of psychologists during the 1960s is now known as the cognitive revolution, and it led the field back to its early interest in mental processes, such as the importance of how our mind processes and retains information. Cognitive psychology scientifically explores the ways we perceive, process, and remember information. Cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary study, has enriched our understanding of the brain activity underlying mental activity. The cognitive approach has given us new ways to understand ourselves and to treat disorders such as depression, as we shall see in Module 71.

To encompass psychology's concern with observable behavior and with inner thoughts and feelings, today we define psychology as the science of behavior and mental processes. Let's unpack this definition. Behavior is anything an organism does - any action we can observe and record. Yelling, smiling, blinking, sweating, talking, and questionnaire marking are all observable behaviors. Mental processes are the internal, subjective experiences we infer from behavior - sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

The key word in psychology's definition is science. Psychology, as I will emphasize throughout this book, is less a set of findings than a way of asking and answering questions. My aim, then, is not merely to report results but also to show you how psychologists play their game. You will see how researchers evaluate conflicting opinions and ideas. And you will learn how all of us, whether scientists or simply curious people, can think smarter when describing and explaining the events of our lives.