Origins of Psychology:
Wilhelm Wundt and Introspection:
● Wilhelm Wundt was known as the ‘father of psychology’
● He wanted to document and describe the human consciousness
● Wundt and his colleagues documented their own conscious thoughts, in order to break them
down into constituent parts to explain behavior
○ Isolating the structure of consciousness like this is called structuralism
● It was the first ‘scientific’ investigation → standardised instructions, strictly controlled
conditions, repetition of investigations…
● Introspection is the systematic investigation of one’s conscious thoughts
○ Wundt used introspection to investigate the human mind
■ Participants were asked to reflect on their own cognitive processes and
describe them
○ Wundt established psychology as a science by using the scientific method - his ideas
would lead to multiple different psychological perspectives
● Introspection relies primarily on non-observable responses, and although participants can
report conscious experiences, they are unable to comment on unconscious factors relating to
their behaviour
○ This produced data that was subjective, so it became very difficult to establish
general principles
■ Introspective experimental results are not reliably reproduced by other
researchers
● Introspection may not seem particularly scientific, but it is still used today to gain access to
cognitive processes
○ Griffiths (1994) used introspection to study the cognitive processes of fruit machine
gamblers
■ He asked them to ‘think aloud’ whilst playing a fruit machine into a
microphone on their lapel and found that gamblers used more irrational
verbalisations
● Evaluation of Introspection:
○ - Introspection does not explain how the mind works
○ - It relies on people describing their own thoughts and feelings
○ - Subjective data makes it hard to establish general principles
○ - Watson → focuses on ‘private mental processes’ - scientific psychology should
restrict itself to only studying phenomena that can be observed and measured
Wilhelm Wundt and Introspection:
● Wilhelm Wundt was known as the ‘father of psychology’
● He wanted to document and describe the human consciousness
● Wundt and his colleagues documented their own conscious thoughts, in order to break them
down into constituent parts to explain behavior
○ Isolating the structure of consciousness like this is called structuralism
● It was the first ‘scientific’ investigation → standardised instructions, strictly controlled
conditions, repetition of investigations…
● Introspection is the systematic investigation of one’s conscious thoughts
○ Wundt used introspection to investigate the human mind
■ Participants were asked to reflect on their own cognitive processes and
describe them
○ Wundt established psychology as a science by using the scientific method - his ideas
would lead to multiple different psychological perspectives
● Introspection relies primarily on non-observable responses, and although participants can
report conscious experiences, they are unable to comment on unconscious factors relating to
their behaviour
○ This produced data that was subjective, so it became very difficult to establish
general principles
■ Introspective experimental results are not reliably reproduced by other
researchers
● Introspection may not seem particularly scientific, but it is still used today to gain access to
cognitive processes
○ Griffiths (1994) used introspection to study the cognitive processes of fruit machine
gamblers
■ He asked them to ‘think aloud’ whilst playing a fruit machine into a
microphone on their lapel and found that gamblers used more irrational
verbalisations
● Evaluation of Introspection:
○ - Introspection does not explain how the mind works
○ - It relies on people describing their own thoughts and feelings
○ - Subjective data makes it hard to establish general principles
○ - Watson → focuses on ‘private mental processes’ - scientific psychology should
restrict itself to only studying phenomena that can be observed and measured
