Wilhelm Wundt: The First Experimentalist
"The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't."
- Ernest Rutherford
Morton Hunt's excellent 'Story of Psychology' helps explain why people doubt the scientific basis of psychology. Think about the famous figures in the history of the more physical sciences: Biology has Charles Darwin, Physics has Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, Chemistry has Francis Crick and whole load of other people whose surnames are immediately recognisable: Anders Celsius, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and Louis Pasteur. Now famous psychologists.
Think for a moment...who have you got?
If you're not a psychologist then you've probably thought of Sigmund Freud...and who else? B. F. Skinner? Maybe Ivan Pavlov and his soggy dog? Perhaps Jean Piaget's developmental psychology and maybe Alfred Kinsey because of the film with Liam Neeson? If you're a psychologist then I'm sure you came up with quite a few more but let's just consider Siggy for a moment because he's prototypical.
Freud was one of the greatest psychologist of all time. Let's not split hairs here about his legacy, many think it is incomparable, a few think he was full of it. Either way, everyone can agree that he was the kind of man you could trust to be creative. While he trained as a neurologist, a man of science, his influence pervades the arts.
And what are the things that people know about Freud? That his theories have largely been discredited (not really true). That he thought it all came down to sex (well yes: sex plus aggression certainly). And that he invented/discovered the unconscious (his greatest idea).
The point is that he's not really known as a scientist in the same way as Darwin, Newton or Einstein. He's seen more as a literary figure, a man of writing and insight certainly, but not a scientific man. How could anyone interested in dreams in these times of cold hard facts be a man of science?
By contrast, not many people have heard of one of the founding fathers of modern psychology: Wilhelm Wundt. It was Wundt who, in the University of Leipzig, carried out what some credit as the first ever psychological experiment in 1879.
The experiment was fairly simple, though it is still employed today in more complicated guises. It simply measured perceptual processing - the time it takes from hearing a bell ring to pressing a button.
Now, if Wilhelm Wundt was the first name that came to mind when you were asked for a famous psychologist, that would make a big difference to the public perception of psychology.
So, to return to today's straw man, Ernest Rutherford, while I'm not sure if Rutherford meant his statement to include psychology, he does sum up many people's attitude to modern psychology. The reason Rutherford is wrong is simply that psychology can also answer the questions: "Which ones?" "Why?" and "How?".
Unfortunately, here is a science regularly represented in the popular press by a man who has worked out a formula for the 'happiest' and 'worst' days of the year. A parody of scientific psychology if ever there was one. Instead psychology needs to remember its more prosaic, and more prototypically scientific, alumni like Wundt, Weber, Fechner and Helmholtz.
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I went into a psychology degree (many years ago, ahem), because I wanted to learn about the human condition. Unfortunately what was presented to me at university (back then anyway) was a cold overly-scientific view of ourselves.
Psychology as a discipline was trying to justify its existence (and its funding I suspect), by highlighting its respectability and lack of 'fluffy' terms like 'spirit', 'art', or even 'feelings'.
I do hope the situation in modern psychology departments has changed, and undergraduates are at least encouraged to embrace what essentially makes us human, as opposed to just animals.
Thanks for your comment Tobin, I think your experience would still be shared by many undergraduates today. I know many arrive expecting to investigate the human condition and end up investigating how they are going to scrape a passing grade in research methods.
My impression is that there is a reasonable amount of variation between psychology departments as to the balance. That said, psychology is still very touchy about the whole 'science' thing and so I expect most departments still place a great emphasis on quantitative methodologies.
Some hope can be seen in the rise of qualitative methods which concentrate on meaning rather than causation. It seems that it's not even considered that ridiculous to mix qualitative and quantitative methods. Still, there's perhaps less hope that academic psychologists are going to completely abandon the worship of methodology that has brought them this far.
Apologies if all this talk of methodologies is making your skin creep!
Traditional psychology has operated under the assumption that human functioning could be analysed in terms of specific variables, each of which could be studied separately, yet which, in conjunction would ultimately ‘explain' man and predict his behavior. With statistical tests of significance, it was presumed, one could identify the relationships among the variables, factoring out the noise of other variables. It was believed that when psychologists had identified all possible relationships, all such noise would be eliminated. "The natural sciences were presumed to have progressed on the basis of this parametric assumption", Bakan said, "and psychologists adopted it without question."
(I would be grateful if anybody could give me a citation for this quotation, which I mislaid.)
The assumption is, of course, inherently fallacious. While it may work for what Weaver has referred to as ‘two variable problems of simplicity’, the chances for success are minimal when the technique is practised on complex systems with many variables. The components of such a system cannot be separated out by doing experiments on them one by one
Immature science is characterized by the unrestrained collection of a welter of facts without a consistent theoretical framework for them to fit in. Before a science can become mature, it must develop at least one coherent, comprehensive theory that attracts a following. Unless and until such a paradigm is formulated, (don't try to tell me that Psychoanalysis fits this bill)the practitioners of the science are doomed to wander, like psychology today, aimlessly in the wilderness. By the way, I define psychology as the study of what goes on in the noetic function in a single brain - otherwise it is is sociology or anthropology).
The field of sleep studies, for example, is dominated by experimentalists. What theoreticians there are seem to be working on a different wavelength from their experimentalist brethren. No theory yet proposed seems willing or able to take into account the experimental findings on the stages of the stages of sleep and the observed patterns into which these stages seen to fall.
One of the most deleterious effects of the lack of a theory has been the contradictory nature of some of the experimental results. It has long been suspected, for example, that there seems to be a connection between memory and sleep. Yet, for every experiment that seems to verify this connection, one can find a contradictory report.