FREE ESSAY ON GENERAL HISTORY OF

GENERAL HISTORY OF

Psych Two Take-Home Essay 
The study of Behaviorism dates can be traced back to the classical Greek philosophers,
and goes into the nineteenth and twentieth-century psychology. Below is a list of
fundamental psychologists and their contributions. 
* Greeks
Philosophers and psychologists have been intrigued with the human thought process for
thousands of years, with one of the first being the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He
presented some of the first operational methods in how human learning and memory are
formed. He also emphasized the importance of mental imagery. 
* Wundt
William Wundt is considered the father of Psychology when he opened his laboratory in
Leipzig, Germany. With this done, Wundt separated the disciplines of philosophy and
physiology and psychology emerged as a new and separate discipline. G. Stanley Hall was
one of Wundt's early students, and was important in that he contributed to psychology's
rapid growth in America. 
Hall opened America's first psychological research lab at John Hopkins University in
1883. A few years after that, Hall launched America's first Psychology journal. Finally,
in 1892, he pushed to establish the American Psychological Association (APA), and was
elected as the first president. Today, the APA is the world's largest organization that
strives to further psychological research, and has over 14,000 members.
Wundt also proposed that psychology should study mental processes via a method called
introspection. Introspection is where trained observers would pay careful attention to
their own sensations and try to report them as subjectively as possible. The observers
were encouraged to describe the sensations they felt, rather than the stimuli that
produced it. 
Wundt worked hard for fifty years to promote his introspection technique through various
conferences and journals. His techniques have been incorporated into today's research on
cognitive processes. Wundt also emphasized the importance of replications, where the
phenomenon in experiments would be tested under different conditions. Although Wundt's
methods are similar to today's methods in cognitive research, he wrote that introspection
could not investigate higher level mental processes such as thinking, language, and
critical thinking.
On a final note about Wundt and his colleagues, they subscribed to the school of
structuralism, which was based on the belief that the goal of psychology is to analyze
consciousness into basic elements and investigate how these elements relate. The end goal
of structuralists was to identify and examine the fundamental components of living, like
sensations, feelings and images--in a way, an early study of cognition. 
* Ebbinghaus/Calkins 
Hermann Ebbinghaus was another German psychologist that was around at the time of Wundt,
but he decided not to subscribe to Wundt's philosophy of introspection. He devised his
own methods for studying human memory where he devised over 2000 nonsense syllables and
tested his own ability to learn these stimuli. He devised these nonsense syllables in
order to prevent past experience/knowledge from interfering with the subjects'
performance levels. Ebbinghaus also examined the factors that might influence performance
like the time delay between the lists of presentations. 
Meanwhile in America, Mary Whiten Calkins, who was also the first woman to be president
of The American Psychological Association, was also conducting similar experiments in
memory research. Calkins also reported a phenomenon now known as the recency effect,
which referred to recalling items in memory. 
These two and others made a bigger impact on cognitive psychology then Wundt did with his
introspective techniques. For example, Ebbinghaus's use of nonsense syllables encouraged
other research psychologists to use meaningless material to study how memory works. Also,
unlike introspection, later researchers conducted experiments in where testing how
selected variables influenced memory rather then to describe and report the sensations
produced by the stimulus.
Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Cognitive Psychology
* William James
A competitor to Wundt's concepts of introspection/structuralism was William James, and
his school of thought, functionalism. Functionalism was based on the belief that
psychology should study the function and purpose of consciousness, instead of its
structure. 
While James' formal training was in medicine, he quickly became bored of it, with it
being not intellectually challenging enough. James was highly impressed with Darwin's
natural selection theory, where only the fittest survive. James applied this theory to
humans where he noted that consciousness is an important characteristic of our
species--from which he argued that psychology should investigate the functions of
consciousness, rather then, the structure. He argued that consciousness is a stream of
thought, and when one analyzes consciousness into its elements, structuralists would look
at static points in the flow. 
Functionalists did not concentrate on sensation and perception, but instead on mental
testing, patterns of developments in kinds, behavioral differences in the two sexes, etc.
Cognition started to become the focus of study as functionalism played out its role, and
on to Behaviorism and Gestalt psychology. 
* John B. Watson
John Watson believed that psychologists should only study observable behavior, hence his
school of thought called behaviorism. He proposed that psychologists should abandon the
study of consciousness altogether, and focus on behaviors that could be directly
observed. This way, he asserted, all data collected could be verified via using the
scientific method. 
Behaviorists began to concentrate their studies by using the stimulus-response psychology
method. This research method was epitomized be Pavlov's dog salivating experiment. This
relatively simple experiment gave insights into how cognitive bonds are formed-and so a
methodology was made with Pavlov's experiment.
Despite how Watson's influential views shaped the development of psychology for decades,
he didn't get to actively participate in the actual research. He left the science
community after a divorce scandal back in 1920. Watson's views were challenged by another
school of thought called Gestalt psychology.
* Pavlov
Pavlov was a Russian psychologist, whose research on digestive glands won
him the Nobel Prize and led to his studies in classical conditioning. His work greatly
advanced experimental animal physiology, provided psychology with a more objective
methodology, and led to new methods of treating mental illnesses.
Although he was a brilliant physiologist and a skillful surgeon, Ivan Pavlov is
remembered primarily for his development of the concept of conditioned reflex. In a
well-known experiment he trained a hungry dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. The
bell had
previously become associated by the dog with the sight of food. (Classical conditioning)

Pavlov's work laid a foundation for the scientific analysis of human behavior. In 1904 he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his work on digestive
secretions.
* Behaviorism
Behaviorism is the theoretical orientation that is based on the belief that scientific
psychology should study only observable behavior. One of the biggest contributions that
came out of behaviorism was the rise of animal research in psychology. From the use of
animal research, experiments with a tighter control over variables are not possible.