Structuralism

At the turn of the century, many advances in science were

occurring due to a fundamental concept that philosophers of
science refer to as "elementism". Elementism refers to the
conception of complex phenomena in terms of basic parts or
elements.

This conception of science was leading to many important

discoveries with important applications in areas such as the
biological sciences in the late 1800s. It was at this time that, what
most psychologists acknowledge as, the first "school of
psychology" began. In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt began the first
psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. The school of
psychology that Wundt began and championed all his life is
referred to as "structuralism". For this reason, Wundt is often
referred to as the father of structuralism.

Structuralism can be defined as psychology as the study of the

elements of consciousness. The idea is that conscious experience
can be broken down into basic conscious elements, much as a
physical phenomenon can be viewed as consisting of chemical
structures, that can in turn be broken down into basic elements. In
fact, much of the research conducted in Wundt's laboratory
consisted of cataloging these basic conscious elements. In order to
reduce a normal conscious experience into basic elements,
structuralism relied on a method called introspection.

For example, one of Wundt's research assistants might describe an

object such as an apple in terms of the basic perceptions it invoked
(e.g., "cold", "crisp", and "sweet"). An important principal of
introspection is that any given conscious experience must be
described in it's most basic terms, so that a researcher could not
describe some experience or object as itself, such as describing an
apple as an apple. Such a mistake is a major instrospection faux
pas and is referred to as the "stimulus error". Through introspection
experiments, Wundt began to catalog a large number of basic
conscious elements, which could hypothetically be combined to
describe all human experiences.

Limitations

Unlike other schools of psychology that I will discuss in the virtual

lecture and in class, the school of Structuralism is, for the most
part, completely dead in psychology. In fact, the school pretty
much died with Wundt.

One basic reason this occurred was that Wundt's methodology had
a principal flaw that is not consistent with the main stream views
of experimental psychologists today, and this had to do with
subject agreement and reliability. Since psychology often deals
with data that are difficult to describe in concrete terms, it is very
important to make sure that multiple observers can agree
independently on a phenomenon that is being experienced. This is
referred to as reliability.

In the contemporary study of sensory and perceptual phenomena,

when observers view, touch, or taste some stimulus, researchers go
to great lengths to make sure that the observers are not biased or
influenced in their report of their experience. Further, agreement
among observers in terms of what they are experiencing, is a
prerequisite for considering the observations as valid

Unfortunately, Wundt's observers were students trained by Wundt,

and, in fact, any disagreement was resolved by Wundt. Therefore,
reliability or agreement among observers in Wundt's experiments
only occurred due to bias induced by training. The use of trained
observers, such as those in Wundt's laboratory is diametrically
opposed to the current practice of using participants who know as
little as possible about the phenomenon being studied in order to
decrease bias, and increase objectivity. This is one reason why
general psychology students often serve as subjects in psychology
experiments.

A second criticism of structuralism, mainly leveled by behaviorists

who came some years later, was that structuralist theory dealt
primarily with "nonobservable" abstractions. Though participants
could report on conscious experiences, these elements of
consciousness themselves were thought to be unobservable
theoretical constructions.

The emphasis then, was on "internal" behavior. Interestingly,

structuralism would eventually be vindicated in this internal
behavior criticism, in that the cognitive psychologists, one of the
most historically recent schools of psychology, have returned to
elaborate speculation about internal, nonobservable phenomenon.
Further, the basic structuralist notion that conscious experience can
be broken down into fundamental elements is also consistent with
contemporary research in sensory neuroscience. For example, cells
have been identified in visual portions of the brain that respond to
basic lines and shapes, and these are eventually combined in
subsequent brain areas.