INTROSPECTION
WILHELM WUNDT:
➔ established first psychological lab in Germany in 1879
◆ birth of psychology
INTROSPECTION - process by which a person gains understanding/knowledge
about their mental + emotional states
WUNDT + INTROSPECTION
➔ aimed to study structure of mind - structuralism
➔ believed breaking behaviour down into its basic elements was the
best way to study it
➔ claimed mental processes could be observed systematically as they
occured
◆ using introspection - using same stimuli with lots of different
people in a controlled condition with the same instructions
INTROSPECTION - METHOD
➔ observers given a stimuli & asked to reflect upon how they perceive
it
➔ information can be used to gain insight into the nature of the mental
processes that take place in the brain involved with perception etc.
➔ Wundt’s Study’s of Perception:
◆ participants asked to provide a description of the inner
processes they were experiencing as they looked at an
image/listened to a tone
➔ with different people doing this with the same stimuli - Wundt was
able to draw conclusions about perception and other mental
processes
INTROSPECTION - EVALUATION
P - Wundt’s introspection primarily relied on non-observable responses
E - processes such as memory & perception are considered to be
unobservable concepts
- although participants could report on their conscious experiences
- Wundt’s approach ultimately failed due to the lack of reliability of his
methods
- introspective experiments are not reliable/reproducible by other
researchers in lab experiments
E - Weakness - early behaviourists e.g. Pavlov already achieving reliable,
reproducible results that could be generalised to humans
L - Failure to produce reliable data reduces credibility of theory
WILHELM WUNDT:
➔ established first psychological lab in Germany in 1879
◆ birth of psychology
INTROSPECTION - process by which a person gains understanding/knowledge
about their mental + emotional states
WUNDT + INTROSPECTION
➔ aimed to study structure of mind - structuralism
➔ believed breaking behaviour down into its basic elements was the
best way to study it
➔ claimed mental processes could be observed systematically as they
occured
◆ using introspection - using same stimuli with lots of different
people in a controlled condition with the same instructions
INTROSPECTION - METHOD
➔ observers given a stimuli & asked to reflect upon how they perceive
it
➔ information can be used to gain insight into the nature of the mental
processes that take place in the brain involved with perception etc.
➔ Wundt’s Study’s of Perception:
◆ participants asked to provide a description of the inner
processes they were experiencing as they looked at an
image/listened to a tone
➔ with different people doing this with the same stimuli - Wundt was
able to draw conclusions about perception and other mental
processes
INTROSPECTION - EVALUATION
P - Wundt’s introspection primarily relied on non-observable responses
E - processes such as memory & perception are considered to be
unobservable concepts
- although participants could report on their conscious experiences
- Wundt’s approach ultimately failed due to the lack of reliability of his
methods
- introspective experiments are not reliable/reproducible by other
researchers in lab experiments
E - Weakness - early behaviourists e.g. Pavlov already achieving reliable,
reproducible results that could be generalised to humans
L - Failure to produce reliable data reduces credibility of theory
