Humans have studied the mind in some sense for thousands of years. The earliest philosophers debated the nature of consciousness, theologians wondered about the soul, and early medical scientists studied the brain and bodily humours.
But the dedicated and scientific study of psychology – as we know it today – only started taking form in the late 19th Century with Wilhelm Wundt.
Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory – the Institute of Experimental Psychology – in 1879. He’s often called the ‘father of experimental psychology’ due to his pioneering application of controlled, systematic, and scientific methods to the study of the mind.
In this post, we look at Wundt’s work, its key limitations, and how his early experiments laid the groundwork for the modern approaches to psychology we use today.
Introspection
At the core of Wundt’s experimental work was the technique of introspection.
Introspection involves looking ‘inward’ and examining one’s thoughts, emotions, and sensations. For example, an experiment might involve showing subjects a picture, and the subjects would then report back their inner experiences.
But introspection wasn’t about reporting whatever random thing the subject felt. Wundt intended it as a highly systematic and controlled process – a science.
Wundt tried to apply the scientific method to his studies. He carefully controlled the environment where he conducted his introspection experiments to prevent this extraneous variable from skewing the results. He trained subjects to adopt the same state of mind and report back the specific data he wanted – this should, in theory, produce more reliable results.
But despite these attempts to study the mind scientifically, Wundt often found that reports were highly subjective and varied from person to person, which meant they were unreliable.
Science is about what is objective, measurable, and repeatable. However, because introspection examines private internal experiences, Wundt’s findings were inherently subjective and impossible to measure directly. As a result, his reports varied wildly from person to person and could not be consistently replicated, which rendered much of his research unscientific by modern scientific standards.
But Wundt’s work was profoundly influential despite these methodological limitations. By establishing the world’s first experimental laboratory and insisting on standardised observation, he successfully separated psychology from philosophy and established it as a formal science. In particular, his systematic study of inner mental processes and early experiments laid the theoretical groundwork for the cognitive approach that followed.
Psychology as a science
Since Wundt, a variety of approaches to psychology have emerged – some more scientific than others.
Science is concerned with empirically observable facts that can be repeated and measured. For example, by repeatedly observing and measuring objects falling to the ground, scientists can deduce the laws that govern these observations (e.g. gravity).
In theory, the science of psychology would observe human behaviour and deduce the laws that govern it in a similar way. However, human behaviour is much less consistent than stuff like gravitation – people don’t always behave in the same ways or for the same reasons.
This subjective dimension has led to various different approaches to the study of psychology, which developed along the following rough timeline:
- Behaviourism emerged in the early 20th century and remained the dominant approach to psychology until the 1950s. It rejected Wundt’s introspective approach as too subjective, instead focusing only on externally observable and measurable data – behaviour.
- The ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1960s saw renewed interest in inner mental processes. Although thoughts and feelings are private and unobservable, the cognitive approach sought to make inferences about these inner mental processes from experiments.
- Advances in technology (particularly in the early 21st century) have progressively increased the power of a biological approach to psychology. For example, the discovery of fMRI brain scanning in 1990 enabled psychologists to measure brain activity and correlate it with mental processes. Elsewhere, advances in genome sequencing since the early 2000s have enabled psychologists to identify a genetic basis for some psychological disorders.
Lasting impact
While Wilhelm Wundt’s reliance on introspection ultimately proved too subjective to stand up to modern scientific rigour, his overall impact on the discipline cannot be overstated. By moving the study of the mind out of the realm of pure philosophical speculation and into controlled laboratory settings, he successfully carved out a distinct identity for psychology, establishing it as an independent scientific field.
Wundt’s insistence on standardised observations and empirical measurement set a crucial precedent for future researchers. Although early behaviourists rejected introspection in favour of strictly observable actions, they were still building on Wundt’s primary idea: that human behaviour and mental life should be studied through systematic and controlled experimentation – scientifically.
Ultimately, all modern psychological approaches – from early behaviourism to today’s advanced brain-scanning technologies – owe a debt to Wundt and his early efforts to study the mind scientifically. His early methods may have lacked the objectivity we demand today, but his pioneering vision to apply scientific principles to the human mind laid the essential foundation for psychology as a science.