GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY

General Psychology

General Psychology

Introduction

American psychology at the start of the 20th century was the psychology of human consciousness and mental life. There was also strong interest in animal behavior, primarily as it related to the question of the evolution of human mental processes. This new discipline of psychology emerged in the second half of the 19th century, the offspring of recurring philosophical questions about human nature, advances in knowledge about the physiology of the brain and nervous system, and the strong influence of Darwinian evolutionary biology.(Vandenbos,2002) This so-called “New Psychology,” in contrast to the older psychology of philosophical speculation and logical analysis, was one that developed in an academic environment, through the creation of research laboratories for the study of such cognitive phenomena as sensation, perception, association, attention, and memory. By 1900, there were no fewer than 41 laboratories of experimental psychology in America (Benjamin, 2000), ranging from the well established (e.g., Cornell University, Clark University) to the fledgling (e.g., University of Maine, Northwestern University).

On the final page of his Psychology (Briefer Course) (1892), a condensed version of his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890), Harvard psychologist/philosopher William James reflected on the “New Psychology” of the 19th century and concluded that psychology “is no science, it is only the hope of a science” (p. 468). In the 20th century that hope became reality. This chapter, necessarily incomplete, will trace the evolution of the discipline of psychology from a potential science at the start of the 20th century to a real one by the end of the century. Any organizational scheme will be arbitrary, and the choice here is topical, with the chapter segmented into two main sections that roughly parallel the distinction between broad categories of activity—research and practice. A brief third section will describe four trends that were evident near the end of the 20th century.(Vandenbos,2002) Although psychology is an international discipline, the focus of this chapter will be the development of psychology in the United States.

Structuralism and Functionalism

In the first decade of the 20th century, one major issue that occupied psychologists in America concerned the primary goal for this new laboratory psychology. The question divided advocates of two schools of thought who have come to be known as structuralists and functionalists, and led directly to the development of a third school, behaviorism. The central figure of the structuralist school was E. B. Titchener (1867-1927), a British psychologist with a German temperament who earned a PhD with Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig in 1892 and in that same year came to Cornell University, where he spent his entire career. For Titchener, the new psychology was to be the study of the basic structure of adult human consciousness, to be studied in the laboratory using precise instruments (e.g., chronoscopes for measuring the amount of time it took to respond to various stimuli) and a self-report procedure called systematic experimental introspection.(Goodwin, 2005) To introspect in Titchener's laboratory meant to participate in some lab experiment ...