Hello and welcome to the Mind Matters podcast. Today we’re going to be covering and discussing a brief history of psychology. How does the human mind work?
And why do we behave the way that we do? The field of psychology has been a journey of discovery, debate, and innovation where nascent ideas were formulated and developed, ultimately informing, engaging, and inspiring many in both the scientific and lay communities. In this introductory podcast, we’re going back to the roots of experimental psychology and follow a few of the field’s major developments through history.
We’ll glance in on the fascinating evolution of psychological theory, uncovering how these early thinkers laid the foundation for our understanding of behavior and mental processes today, as they realized the quest to understand the mind is as dynamic and multifaceted as the brain itself. Scientific psychology was born in 1879 in the first psychological laboratory. The German physician, Wilhelm Wundt, created this laboratory at the University of Leipzig, just a few years after publishing what was considered the first psychological textbook, Principles of Physiological Psychology.
Wundt, along with his student, Edward Bradford Titchener, formulated the short-lived school of thought called structuralism, which argued that if chemists and physicists could break down all matter into simple elements or structures, the same could be done for the brain. Using this argument, Wundt and Edward tried to understand the structure of consciousness, and to do so he wanted to be able to look into the minds of others. Ultimately, he deduced that this was no easy task, so he attempted to teach individuals to look inside their own mind, and this was known as introspection.
But the main reason for this school of thought being so short-lived was because experience is subjective, and so results could never be truly objective, could never be measurable, and thus valid and reliable. Ten years later, William James, an American physician and philosopher, proposed another genre of questions. While Wundt focused on what mental states looked like, William James focused on the function of those mental states and behavior.
He inquired why we think, remember, smell, and lick. His approach, deemed functionalism, was found to be inspired by Charles Darwin’s idea that adaptive behaviors are conserved throughout the evolutionary process, and ultimately led to the first psychological experiments with animals. Arguably the most impactful psychologist of all time, Sigmund Freud was a neurologist turned psychologist of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Freud introduced the idea of free association, what is considered the first talk therapy, in which the patient would discuss their symptoms and by doing so, lessen their severity. In 1900, Freud published his revolutionary book, The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he introduced his theory of psychoanalysis. He argued that our personalities are morphed by unconscious motives, and that it is possible to make these motivations conscious or discover them through the use of dreams, projections, and free association.
While psychologists today recognize a cognitive unconscious due to his work, Freud took it a step further and described almost everything to a deeper meaning. He even suggested that motivations could be biologically inherited. For example, the reason someone is easily angered could be because their ancestors were angered by the toppling of Rome.
On top of that, because Freud’s theories are not founded on any empirical data and rely primarily on subjective interpretation and theory, they have been labeled as pseudoscientific. While Freud delved into emotion and desires, a scientifically driven man by the name of B.F. Skinner emerged some years later to the psychological scene.
Skinner packaged together and expanded upon many of the ideas that had been previously circulating the field and formalized a theory he called behaviorism. The ideas of Freud and Skinner clash as the ideas of nature versus nurture do today. Skinner believed that everything you know and are is a result of your experience, or your nurture.
Skinner claimed that humanity is endlessly malleable, and a scholar named John Watson echoed this argument, claiming it’s so regardless of his talents, pensions, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. Skinner also discredited the works of Sigmund Freud, and championed behaviorism as it was measurable and thus scientific. Behaviorists believed you could only study behavior and not cognition.
But perhaps behaviorism is most notable for its takes on behavior across species. Behaviorists proposed the radical idea that while there may be a slight difference in learning capacities among species, the principles of learning were consistent across all species, and so the only true difference between a human and a pigeon was their nurturing. As the world entered World War II in the late 1930s, British scientist Alan Turing created what is considered the first computer.
As the public came to the knowledge of this computer’s existence, many scientists drew parallels between its function and the brain’s. The device was a communication system that allowed the Allies to decode messages from Nazi Germany, as well as communicate with Allies across the battlefield. This led Turing to develop what was known as the Turing test, in order to gauge just how similar the brain and the computer were.
The test was constructed so that a blind judge would receive typed communication from multiple participants, judging responses on their humanness. If the judge could not decipher a computer’s response as a computer’s response, it would pass the test, and would be considered humanly intelligent. Inspired by Turing’s findings, a group of psychologists banded together to prove behaviorists wrong and study cognition and the mind, and this was hence called cognitive psychology.
In Latin, psychology is defined as the study of the soul, but today we can define psychology as the science of behavior and mental processes. Despite the debates of these iconic theologians and scientists, the truth is that there is no single best way to understand the mind. I believe Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich said it best when he acknowledged, the human mind is by far the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos.
Current scientists can build from the many theories and discoveries lent by their predecessors. Cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior are best studied with many lenses and from multiple orientations. With this spirit, with trial and error, we are best situated to learn the most about the ever-evolving field of psychology.