Read The Story of Psychology Online
Authors: Morton Hunt
The casual onlooker might see little difference between the two cases, but the researchers, after a great many trials and chronoscope readings, find that the first kind of reaction, involving awareness of one’s perception of the sound followed by a conscious voluntary response, usually takes about two tenths of a second; the second kind, involving a purely muscular or reflexive response, takes only about one tenth of a second.
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These findings seem like mere crumbs of psychology, but there are other differences, more revealing than duration, between the two forms of the experiment. The subjects, having been trained in introspection, report that when their attention is focused on their awareness of hearing the sound, they experience a clear, though fluctuating, mental image of what they expect to hear, a minor, wavering sense of strain, mild surprise when they hear the sound, and a strong motivation to press the key. In the reflexive form of the experiment, on the other hand, they experience a feeble mental image of the expected sound, a considerable sense of strain, strong surprise when the ball drops, and an impulse to press the key almost without consciously willing to. Thus the experiment measures not only the different times taken by conscious volition and reflexive
volition but identifies the conscious processes that take place in the self-aware version of this simple act.
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Despite the focus on conscious mental processes, the researchers look only at the basic components of those processes. Wundt had boldly proclaimed years earlier that experiments could explore the psyche, but now he feels that they can do so only for sensations or perceptions and feelings—the elemental materials of consciousness—and the connections among them. He says that higher mental processes, including complex thoughts, are “of too variable a character to be the subjects of objective observation.”
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He argues that language, concept formation, and other high-level cognitive functions can be studied only by observation, particularly of general trends among groups of people.
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Wundt defines a scientific psychological experiment as one in which a known, controlled physiological stimulus—the “antecedent variable,” he calls it—is applied and the individual’s responses observed and measured. Helmholtz and others had already done that but confined their observations to the individual’s visible reactions; Wundt’s great contribution is the use of his kind of introspection to gain quantitative information about the subject’s conscious inner reactions, though he limits these to the simplest feeling states.
During the laboratory’s first two decades, about a hundred major experimental research studies and numerous minor ones were conducted there. Many dealt with sensation and perception, and were generally along the same lines as the work of Weber, Helmholtz, and Fechner. But the laboratory’s most original and important findings came from its studies of “mental chronometry,” the measuring of the time required by particular mental processes and the interactions among them.
Still others introduced a number of complications in order to invoke and measure a variety of mental processes. For instance, by having several possible stimuli and responses—a stimulus might come in any of four different colors, each calling for a different kind of response—the experimenter could extend the inquiry to include discrimination and choice.
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Other studies concerned the boundary between perception and apperception. In a notable one, the experimenter flashed a group of letters or words very briefly through a slit in a revolving drum; the subject “perceived” them (saw them at the periphery of awareness, without having time to recognize them) but in the next instant “apperceived” (consciously remembered and recognized) some of what he had seen. The
major finding was the size of the attention span: most subjects could apperceive and name four to six letters or words after having seen them too briefly to identify them.
A smaller group of studies explored association—not the high-level kind discussed by the English associationists, but the elemental building blocks of association. In a typical study the assistant would call out single-syllable words and the subject would press a key the instant he identified each; this measured “apperception time.” Then the assistant would utter similar words and the subject would press the key as soon as each word awakened an associated idea. This took longer. Subtracting the apperception time from the total time yielded a measure of what Wundt called “association time”—how long it took the mind to locate a word associated with a heard and recognized word—which, for the average person, is about three quarters of a second.
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As the British physicist Lord Kelvin, a contemporary of Wundt’s, used to say, “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” The data generated in Wundt’s laboratory definitely met this criterion of knowledge, at least concerning the elementary components of mental processes.
Wundt saw himself as much more than an experimentalist. In his books and articles he assumed the role of the systematist of psychology and architect of its master plan. But his system has proven difficult to explicate, and summaries of it differ widely as to its main features.
One reason, according to Boring, is that Wundt’s system is a classification scheme that cannot be experimentally proved or disproved.
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Rather than being the outgrowth of a testable grand theory, it is an orderly pedagogical arrangement of topics based on middle-range theories, many of which could not be explored by the methods used in the Leipzig laboratory.
An even greater obstacle to summarizing Wundt’s system is that he constantly revised it and added to it, so that it is not one thing but many. Indeed, in his time critics could hardly find fault with any part of the system before he either changed it in a new edition of one of his works or moved on to some other topic. William James, though he admired
Wundt’s laboratory work, complained that his profusion of writings and viewpoints made him unassailable as a theorist:
Whilst [other psychologists] make mincemeat of some of his views by their criticisms, he is meanwhile writing another book on an entirely different subject. Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls; there is no
noeud vital
in his mental medulla oblongata, so that you can’t kill him all at once.
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Yet if no central theme is visible in Wundt’s psychology, it is possible to name some of its recurring themes.
One is psychic parallelism. Although Wundt has often been labeled a dualist, he did not believe that anything called mind existed apart from the body. He did say that the phenomena of consciousness parallel the processes of the nervous system, but he considered the former to be based on combinations of actual neural events.
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Another theme is his view of psychology as a science. At first he proclaimed that it was, or could be, a
Naturwissenschaft
(natural science), but later said that it was largely a
Geisteswissenschaft
(science of the spirit—spirit not in the sense of incorporeal soul but of higher mental activity). He said that only the experimental study of immediate experience was a
Naturwissenschaft;
the rest was
Geisteswissenschaft.
He wrote at length about individual and social psychology and related social sciences, but descriptively and without admitting or even recognizing that rigorous experimental methods could be developed in these fields.
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The most nearly central doctrine of Wundtian psychology is that conscious mental processes are composed of basic elements—the sensations and feelings of immediate experience.
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In his early writings Wundt says that these elements automatically combine to become mental processes, somewhat as chemical elements form chemical compounds. But later he says that the chemical analogy is inaccurate and that the compounding takes place not as in chemistry but by means of attention, volition, and creativity.
Although immediate experience has its rules of causality—particular stimuli cause particular elemental experiences—mental life has its own kind of causality: The mind develops, and ideas follow each other, according to specific laws. Wundt had special names for these laws, but essentially they were his reformulations of association, judgment, creativity, and memory.
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Another major theme in his psychology, especially in his later writings,
is that “volitional activities” are central to all conscious actions and mental processes; those processes are products of an apperceiving agent that actively
chooses
to think, speak, and act in certain ways. Even simple, unthinking acts are volitional, in his view, although he calls them
impulsive.
Acts resulting from more complex mental processes are volitional and
voluntary.
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Although this theory did not survive in psychology, it was an effort on Wundt’s part to move beyond the automatism of mechanist psychology and toward a more holistic model.
In sum, Wundt had a broader and more inclusive view of psychology than he is often given credit for. Nonetheless, on balance he was restrictive and confining, leaving out or proscribing many areas that today are commonly accepted as essential parts of the field:
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—He was unalterably opposed to practical applications of psychology; when one of his gifted students, Ernst Meumann, turned to educational psychology, Wundt looked at it as desertion to the enemy.
—He was equally opposed to the use of introspection in any way but his own. He scathingly criticized the work of certain researchers— members of the Würzburg School, of whom we will hear more in a moment—who asked their subjects about everything that had gone on in their minds during an experiment. Such procedures, Wundt said, were “mock” experiments, neither experimental nor introspective.
—He rejected out of hand the beginnings of child psychology on the grounds that the conditions of study could not be adequately controlled, so the results were not real psychology.
—He considered animal psychology a fit subject for ruminations, philosophizing, and informal experiments (such as those with his poodle) but allowed no work with animals to be performed in his laboratory because no data based on introspection could be obtained. —He dismissed contemporaneous French work in psychology that relied largely on hypnotism and suggestion. Since this research lacked exact introspection, he said it was not true psychological experimentation.
—Finally, he was particularly scornful of the psychology of William James, which was far more holistic, insightful, and personally relevant than his own. After reading James’s
The Principles of Psychology—
which was greeted enthusiastically by psychologists
throughout the world—Wundt sourly commented, “It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology.”
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Nothing about Wilhelm Wundt is as curious as his influence on psychology—paradoxically vast and yet very minor.
—He was the encyclopedist and systematist of the field; he drew the intellectual map of the territory and defined it as a new domain of science.
—He personally trained many of the people who became the leading psychologists in Germany and the United States during the first decades of the new science.
—He assembled from the scattered beginnings of physiological psychology a distinct methodology for experimental psychology. His laboratory and its methods were the model for many of those established during the next half century.
—Through his immensely authoritative textbooks, he influenced most of the first two generations of American psychologists and their students. During the early part of the twentieth century, the majority of American students of psychology could trace their historical lineage back to Wundt.
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Wundt’s ideas play little part in contemporary psychological theory. The principal reasons:
—Wundt wrote on every imaginable branch of psychology, including many not amenable to his own experimental methods, such as psychic causality, hypnosis, and mediumship. As a result, certain young psychologists saw him as something of a dualist and meta-physician, and thereupon adopted even more rigorously positivist criteria for those psychological phenomena which could be investigated scientifically.
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Their views would be embodied in behaviorism, which would regard introspection, even of the Wundtian kind, as unscientific and valueless.
—Many other psychologists, however, reacted against what they saw as the excessive narrowness and rigidity of Wundtian psychology. They were drawn to areas of research with practical applications, among them child psychology, educational psychology, psychological testing, and clinical psychology. All these fields, though beyond the Wundtian pale, grew and prospered.
—Certain new schools of research psychology emerged during Wundt’s later years as protests against characteristics of his system. These schools had in common the view that experimental psychology should not be limited to the elemental components of immediate experience but should explore higher mental processes.
Such as memory. At the University of Berlin, Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) invented a method of investigating memory processes that eliminated subjectivity and the effects of the individual’s previous experiences. He created twenty-three hundred nonsense syllables—meaningless combinations of two consonants separated by a vowel, such as
bap, tox, muk
, and
rif—
and used them in a series of memory experiments.