Outline the contribution of any three figures to the development of psychology.

Which of the three

contributed most?

There are a number of psychologist who did various contribution to the development of
psychology. Psychology and the other behavioral or social sciences are not as precise in their
measurements as are biology, chemistry or physics, but to the extent that psychologists use
empirical evidence, their findings may be referred to as scientific. Various psychologist use the
empirical evidence way back from 1800s. In this write up the contributions of Wilhelm Wundt,
William James and Edward Bradford Titchener in the development of psychology is going to
outlined. The term psychology is and development is going to be defined.

American Psychological Association. (2018) defined psychology as the study of behavior and
mental processes. Clearly, this definition covers a lot of territory. Thus, it’s not surprising that,
over the years, psychology has become a highly specialized field. Psychology is best defined as
the scientific study of behavior in humans and animals (Hunt, 1993). Behavior is what people and
animals do such as what a person says about last night's dream, and how long it takes a rat to run
a maze.

The beginnings of modern psychology are usually traced to the year 1879. That’s when Wilhelm
Wundt (1832–1920) established the first dedicated psychological laboratory at Leipzig. The
selection of this date is somewhat arbitrary. Wundt himself had, for example, highlighted the
possibility of a distinct psychological discipline as early as 1862 in his book Contributions to the
theory of sensory perception. Yet the key events which led Wundt and others to this distinct
discipline occurred even earlier. His work helped establish psychology as its own discipline
separate from philosophy and physiology.

In 1873, Wundt’s Principles of physiological psychology described the emerging discipline of

psychology. It combined physiology, which ‘informs us about those life phenomena that we
perceive by our external senses’, with a psychological and introspective approach in which ‘the
person looks upon himself from within’ . The introspective method, which relied on a process of
self-report about the ‘goings-on’ in one’s psychological world, had previously been dismissed by
scientists and philosophers alike because of its unreliability and inherent subjectivity (Chan,
Gelfand, Triandis and Tzeng, 1996). Wundt himself doubted its effectiveness. He had responded,
however, by trying to transform this unreliable act of internal perception into something akin to
scientific observation.

To do this, Wundt restricted his so-called physiological psychology to the study of processes that
were simultaneously accessible to both internal and external acts of observation. In practice, a
stimulus was presented to a participant and quantified response measures were gathered at the
same time as subjective reports of the conscious content elicited by the stimulus . In this way, the
introspective data always appeared alongside the more important objective measures. In order to
control the style of the introspective reports they were only collected from trained researchers.
This move was clever in as much as it gave introspection a new status as a special skill. Only a
trained scientist could carry out these scientific observations with sufficient reliability. Despite
this, the qualitative data introspection produced were still not accepted as a basis for knowledge
claims. Only quantitative data could do that.

Wundt spent the last 20 years of his life developing his Völkerpsychologie that is a kind of
historical and comparative psychology which looked at people as part of a collective and which
tried to understand them within their social, cultural and communal context. Wundt believed these
historical, qualitative and distinctly social scientific analyses were a very necessary addition to
experimental studies of individual people in the laboratory. He felt strongly that the ‘experimental
method plus Völkerpsychologie would furnish a complete, albeit not completely natural-scientific,
psychology’.

As we have seen, modern psychology traces its immediate origins to the late nineteenth century,
when Wilhelm Wundt created his laboratory in Leipzig. Since that time, the discipline has moved
to and fro between conceptions of psychology as (1) a natural science and (2) a social science .Few
agreed: Wundt’s desire for psychology to retain links with the humanities was at odds with the
prevailing vision. Psychology wanted to be a natural science.

Another figure who contributed to the development of psychology was American psychologist
William James (1842–1910) was an advocate of functionalism, even though he did much of his
writing before this school of psychology emerged. James’s best-known work is his highly regarded
and frequently quoted textbook Principles of Psychology, published more than a century ago
(1890). James taught that mental processes are fluid and have continuity, rather than the rigid, or
fixed, structure that the structuralists suggested. James spoke of the “stream of consciousness,”
which, he said, functions to help humans adapt to their environment.

On this side of the Atlantic, William James was an American physician who offered the first U.S.
course in psychology in 1875 and also developed a demonstration laboratory at Harvard. His
school became known as American Functionalism because he emphasized how organisms function
with respect to their environments (James, 1890). Although James recognized the power of habits,
he championed the doctrine of free will that people are not mere billiard balls who react to their
environment, but conscious organisms with the power of deciding how to respond.

The field of modern scientific psychology is actually triangular, with the three corners representing
the three starting points of medicine, natural science and philosophy. Each of these left a different
focus in the study of human behavior: clinical practice, laboratory research, or theoretical
formulations. William James had training as a physician, a laboratory for some rudimentary
research, and a growing interest in pragmatic philosophy.

Also another psychologist who contributed in the development psychology was Edward Bradford
Titchener (1867–1927). Titchener was a student of Wundt who came to the United States in the
late 1800s and founded a laboratory at Cornell University (Yang and Chiu, 2009). In his research
using introspection, Titchener and his students claimed to have identified more than 40,000
sensations, including those relating to vision, hearing, and taste.

He gave the name structuralism to this first formal school of thought in psychology, which aimed
at analyzing the basic elements, or the structure, of conscious mental experience. Like Wundt
before him, Titchener thought that consciousness could be reduced to its basic elements, just as
water (H2O) can be broken down into its constituent elements hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O). For
Wundt, pure sensations such as sweetness, coldness, or redness were the basic elements of
consciousness. And these pure sensations, he believed, combined to form perceptions.

The structuralist approach marked the beginning of psychology as a science, because it

demonstrated that mental events could be quantified, but the structuralists also discovered the
limitations of introspection (Craword, 2012). Even highly trained research participants were often
unable to report on their subjective experiences. When the participants were asked to do simple
math problems, they could easily do them, but they could not easily answer how they did them.
Thus, the structuralists were the first to realize the importance of unconscious processes, that many
important aspects of human psychology occur outside our conscious awareness, and that
psychologists cannot expect research participants to be able to accurately report on all their
experiences.

In my concluding remark, I thought James Willium is the best figure who contributed much in the
development of psychology. His contributions are still used today as pragmatist and functionalist
with various psychologist.
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