Thus far in this chapter, we have focused on the present: today’s psychological science. Now let’s look back in time. Understanding psychology’s past can enrich your understanding of the contemporary science.

When reviewing psychology’s history, it is hard to know where to start. Humans have been asking psychological questions about humans—“Can this person be trusted?” “Is that person a good leader?” “Do these people like me?”—throughout our species’ history (Heyes, 2012). The dawn of humanity, however, is too far back to begin. We want to start with the first systematic psychological theories, that is, the first organized frameworks for understanding people and the human mind.

The first systematic psychological theories are ancient. Psychology’s history began more than 2400 years ago.

ARISTOTLE. Many foundations of Western civilization were established in a relatively short period of time by the people of a relatively small city—fifth-century BCE Athens and its population of less than 100,000 citizens. Their accomplishments are nearly beyond belief: unsurpassed architecture and sculpture; philosophical analyses that stood for centuries as the greatest intellectual achievements of the Western world; the invention of novel forms of literature and entertainment, such as dramatic theater; and political systems that form the basis of democratic government.

21

The Athenians also explored psyche—in Greek, “the soul or mind.” Athens’s greatest “psyche-ologist” was Aristotle.

Aristotle was not a psychologist in the contemporary sense of the word. He didn’t answer questions by using scientific methods—but who can blame him? They weren’t invented until 2000 years after he lived. Yet he formulated ideas about the mind, and the relation between mind and body (Bolton, 1978), in the careful, logical, systematic manner of a scientific theory.

Aristotle was interested in classification. To classify something is to identify it as a member of a category. For instance, if Fido strolls by and you call him a “dog,” you’ve classified him, placing him into the category “dog.” Aristotle classified different types of mental capacities, that is, the variety of things that the human mind is able to do. Remarkably, his ancient classification scheme seems modern; it resembles classifications found in twenty-first-century psychology. Aristotle’s categories included:

We’ll say more about Aristotle in a moment. But first, let’s look at the ideas of someone who lived at about the same time as Aristotle, but in a different part of the world.

THE BUDDHA. In northern India, in the sixth to fifth century bce, the son of a wealthy ruler decided to seek wisdom rather than wealth. History tells us that he found it. He became known as the Buddha.

You may think of the Buddha as a religious figure, which certainly is correct. Yet he posed questions that were purely psychological. In particular, he asked about the causes of emotion: Why, despite their intelligence, are people so prone to experiencing negative emotions—anger, jealousy, disappointment, envy? The Buddha proposed that two thoughts combined to create emotional suffering: People (1) believe they are separate from the world (as opposed to being part of the world of nature), and (2) believe they will be happier if they acquire more worldly possessions (more money, a nicer home, higher-status friends, etc.). Rather than happiness, however, these thoughts cause suffering. People inevitably want more and more things. They become stuck in a cycle of desire, disappointment, envy, and more desire.

The Buddha suggested a cure for suffering; in contemporary psychological language, he proposed a “therapy” to reduce negative emotion. It was meditation. Meditating on the nature of self and the causes of suffering, he said, could bring insight that eliminates emotional distress.

22

Like Aristotle, the Buddha did not employ scientific methods; he was not a psychologist in the contemporary sense of the term. Yet his ideas seem contemporary. Researchers today, like the Buddha, study how thinking processes create emotional distress (Chapters 10 and 14). They also explore the effects of meditation on brain functioning (Chapter 9).

LEARNING FROM THE ANCIENTS. Our look at Aristotle and the Buddha teaches us two lessons. The first concerns the question of what is, and is not, “new” in contemporary psychological science.

Although many questions asked in contemporary psychology are new, what is striking is that so many have been asked for ages. Ancient questions—such as how one can classify different types of mental activity and how thoughts and emotions interact—remain current today. Aristotle would be surprised by contemporary research methods, but would find many of the questions being addressed in twenty-first-century psychology familiar. Today’s psychology provides novel, research-based answers to timeless questions about human nature.

The second lesson concerns the goals of psychology, that is, the aims of all this thinking about people, the mind, and the brain. Aristotle’s and the Buddha’s goals differed. Aristotle pursued knowledge for knowledge’s sake: “He wished to understand men for the sake of that understanding” (Watson, 1963, p. 44). The Buddha pursued a practical goal: He was “not motivated by theoretical curiosity” but by “the overriding practical aim … of deliverance from suffering” (Bodhi, 1993, p. 4); he wanted to help people live happier lives (Dalai Lama & Cutler, 1998). The differences mirror those found in psychology today. Many psychologists are researchers whose goal is to expand scientific knowledge about people, the mind, and the brain. But thousands of others, like the Buddha, work on a practical goal. They apply psychological knowledge—in schools, communities, businesses, and one-on-one therapy encounters—to improve people’s well-being.

23

We’re now going to jump ahead by two millennia from the time of Aristotle and the Buddha. It’s quite a jump—yet we are still hundreds of years in the past. You will meet two people who were philosophers, not psychological scientists; they did not answer questions using scientific methods. But they did raise questions that remain current today. Foremost among these is the nature–nurture question.

“NATURE VERSUS NURTURE.” The distinction between nature and nurture pertains to the origin of psychological characteristics. Where did our beliefs, our abilities, and our likes and dislikes come from? Two possibilities are:

Nature undoubtedly is the source of some behaviors: coughing, sneezing, putting your hand out in a fraction of a second to break your fall if you slip on ice. Nobody had to teach you these things. Nurture clearly is the source of other actions: driving, cooking, riding a bicycle. You acquired these skills through experience. But many other cases are less clear. The relative significance of nature and nurture has been debated since the seventeenth century, when it was explored by John Locke.

LOCKE. John Locke was a British philosopher who produced his major work in the late 1600s, a remarkable time in world history. In the prior two centuries, Europe had experienced an intellectual rebirth—a “renaissance.” Scholars abandoned the ancient practice of relying on the authority of Aristotle or the Church for answers to scientific questions. Instead, they looked for their own answers. When, for example, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei asked questions about the universe, he didn’t look to the Bible for answers. He took out his telescope and looked to the skies. Renaissance scholars launched modern scientific methods.

By the time of Locke, scholars became optimistic that their era could unravel not only the mysteries of the physical world, but also the mysteries of the human mind. Locke took up the question “Where do people get their ideas; that is, what is the origin of concepts in the mind?”

Locke said that we get our ideas from experience; he argued for nurture, not nature. Ideas, he claimed, originate in our perceptions of the world. When we experience events, vision, hearing, and other senses bring information from the world into our minds. This experience-based information is the source of our ideas. We repeatedly experience, for example, that we can plunge our hand into a bucket of water but not into a tree, a rock, or a brick wall. From such experiences, we develop the concepts of “liquid” and “solid.”

At birth, one hasn’t yet had any experiences in the world. According to Locke, then, the mind at birth is a “blank slate”: a blackboard on which nothing has yet been written. It has the capacity to be written upon; nature provides the ability to learn. But nurture—experience—provides all the ideas.

This conception of how we acquire ideas seems so obvious that you might wonder if anyone would question it. Someone did: a philosopher in eighteenth-century Germany named Immanuel Kant.

24

KANT. Kant knew that people learned from experience. But he did not think of the mind as a blank slate. Some ideas, he believed, are present in the mind from birth, thanks to nature.

Kant would acknowledge that, yes, experience teaches that if you decide to plunge your hand into a space occupied by a brick wall, your decision will cause pain a short time later. But, Kant would ask, how did you learn the concept of “time,” and the idea that some things happen “after” (later in time than) others? You can’t see time. It’s unlikely that, in childhood, your parents gave you a lecture on the nature of time. Yet concepts of time, and “before” and “after,” seem to be part of the mind at an early age.

Similarly, Kant would ask, where did you learn the concept of “space”—that objects are located in three-dimensional physical space, with one object being behind, in front, above, or below another? Or the concept of causality—that one event can cause another? Again, children seem to know these concepts without being taught them explicitly.

Kant claimed that ideas such as space, time, and causality are innate: products of nature, not nurture. Kant, then, thought Locke got it wrong. The mind is not a blank slate. It contains some ideas at birth.

Today, scientists continue to debate the nature–nurture questions anticipated by Locke and Kant (Elman et al., 1996; Goldhaber, 2012; Pinker, 2002; Shea, 2012). You will see these questions in later chapters, especially Chapter 4, “Nature, Nurture, and Their Interaction.”

When discussing Aristotle, the Buddha, Locke, and Kant, we said that each was not a psychologist, in the contemporary sense of the term. Now let’s turn to the genuine article: psychological scientists.

WUNDT. Scientific psychology has a definitive starting point: 1875, when Wilhelm Wundt arrived at the University of Leipzig as a professor and started the experimental research laboratory that was formalized as the Institute of Experimental Psychology in 1879 (Bringmann & Ungerer, 1980; Harper, 1950).

As a student, Wundt studied biology and earned a medical degree. But three factors turned his attention to psychology. One was sheer interest; studying the mind, he thought, was more interesting than treating patients (Wertheimer, 1970). A second was his knowledge of technical advances in science and medicine. Wundt recognized that newly invented devices for observing parts of the body (e.g., the interior of the eye, the vocal cords) could be used to study psychological functions (seeing, speaking). The third was Wundt’s knowledge of advances in the study of the nervous system. German scientists had developed experimental methods to study how the cells of the body’s nervous system work. Because, as Wundt knew, the brain and nervous system are the biological bases of the mind, the advances in biology held the promise of a successful experimental psychology (Watson, 1963).

25

Wundt, then, initiated this new field. To do so, he took two critical steps. He wrote Principles of Physiological Psychology, a book that combined biological knowledge with analyses of the mind. In particular, he explored the mind’s capacity for consciousness, that is, the capacity to perceive events in the world and to have feelings (Chapter 9). His second big step was to open his laboratory at the University of Leipzig (Harper, 1950). In his laboratory work, Wundt established procedures that would become standard throughout experimental psychology. He systematically varied the circumstances in which people performed tasks. He precisely measured aspects of their performance, such as the length of time it took them to solve problems (Robinson, 2002). In so doing, he pioneered the experimental methods we’ll discuss in Chapter 2.

Wundt’s lab attracted students from both Europe and the United States. When they returned home with their degrees, they spread knowledge of the new science of psychology. Wundt, deservedly called “the father of experimental psychology,” thus planted the seeds of today’s global psychological science community.

JAMES. Wundt was not the only person to open a psychological laboratory in 1875. Another opened in the United States, at Harvard University (Boring, 1929; Harper, 1950). In terms of research activities, it was more modest in scope. But its director was an intellectual giant: William James.

James suffered from a problem that plagues few of us. He had such a wide range of talents that he had trouble deciding what to do for a living. In the 1860s, he switched “from science to painting to science to painting again, then to chemistry, anatomy, natural history, and finally medicine” (Menand, 2001, p. 75). After earning his medical degree, he switched to psychology and began writing an introductory psychology book. (After finishing it, he changed fields again and became one of America’s greatest philosophers.)

James began his introductory psychology book in 1878. He thought he would finish it by 1880, but was off by a decade (Watson, 1963). The book grew “to a length,” James remarked, “which no one can regret more than the writer himself” (James, 1890, p. xiii). When published in 1890, it proved worth the wait. Many view James’s The Principles of Psychology as the greatest comprehensive volume in the history of the field (see Austin, 2013).

James’s book not only introduced the field, but defined it. In 1890 psychology’s scope was unclear; people didn’t know exactly what the field was, or could be. By perceptively analyzing a vast range of topics— consciousness, self-concept, thought, emotion, instinct, social behavior, will power, hypnotism—James made each a part of the new field. His breadth of vision contributed significantly to the breadth of topics you will encounter in this book.

In his book’s final chapter, James addressed nature, nurture, and the views of Locke and Kant. He sided with Kant more than Locke, concluding that the mind at birth has a “native structure” (James, 1890, p. 889). Of particular importance, however, is not the content of James’s conclusion but how he reached it. James explained that the way to resolve the age-old Locke/Kant philosophical debate was not by engaging in more philosophical debate. What was needed, instead, was scientific evidence. This intellectual move—from philosophical debate to scientific data—is the critical step that established psychology as a science.

26

CULTURAL OPPORTUNITIES

27

Most scientific activity in psychology today is problem-focused. Researchers try to solve specific scientific problems in the study of people, the mind, and the brain. But in the field’s early days, they had another task: figuring out how, in general, the field should conduct itself. What should psychology’s main focus of study be? How should psychologists formulate theories and conduct research?

Psychologists provided diverse answers to these questions. The field thus contained alternative schools of thought, that is, general approaches to building a psychological science. Let’s review six of them. The first two, which we will consider together, are structuralism and functionalism.

STRUCTURALISM AND FUNCTIONALISM. The distinction between structuralism and functionalism in psychology is best understood through an analogy to biology (Titchener, 1898). Biologists can study the body in either of two ways. Dissection reveals the body’s structures (bones, soft tissue, fluids). Study of the body in action reveals its functions, that is, what it does (digestion, respiration, and so forth). A similar distinction can be drawn in psychology.

Structuralism is a school of thought that emphasized study of the mind’s basic components, or structures. Structuralists said that complex mental experiences were made up of simple, elementary components of the mind (Titchener, 1898). Like ingredients combined in a cake recipe, components of the mind combine to form an overall mental experience. Suppose, for example, that you look at a painting. You have one overall mental experience (“Hey, I like that weird smile on Mona Lisa”). This experience, structuralists would say, combines basic mental elements such as perception (you perceive patterns of light and color) and feelings (you like the picture). Perception and feeling, then, would be basic structures of the mind.

Functionalism emphasizes study of the mind in action. Functionalists were interested in what the mind does—what it’s good for—rather than what components it contains. Functionalists tried to identify the mental activities that occur (e.g., learning, memory) as organisms adapt to their environment. They highlighted the relation between the mind and the body—in the language of this book, they related mind and brain levels of analysis—because mental functions evolved only if they were successful in promoting physical survival (Angell, 1906).

Proponents of structuralism and functionalism recognized that both schools of thought would contribute to psychology’s growth (Watson, 1963). Their differences, then, were merely differences in emphasis. People disagreed on where psychologists should devote most of their efforts when forging the new field.

PSYCHOANALYSIS. Structuralism and functionalism developed in psychology departments in European and American universities. A third school of thought developed in the late nineteenth century outside of academia—in the offices of a physician in Vienna, Austria.

Sigmund Freud developed a school of thought known as psychoanalysis. As we detail in Chapter 13, psychoanalysis claims that the mind contains different parts (Freud, 1900, 1923). The parts are in conflict with one another. For example, one part contains sexual impulses, whereas another contains social rules that prohibit people from acting on their sexual impulses. Freud claimed that people are not fully aware of these conflicts; much of mental life occurs outside of awareness, or is unconscious.

28

Freud developed a theory of human nature and a therapy for treating psychological disorders, both of which had enormous impact on society. Yet within the science of psychology, Freud’s work was—and, to the present day, is—sharply criticized. Researchers considered psychoanalysis too speculative; many of its claims could not even be tested. They looked for a firmer basis for building a science. One place they found it was the school of thought known as behaviorism.

BEHAVIORISM. Behaviorism differed strikingly from structuralist, functionalist, and psychoanalytic approaches to studying the mind. The big difference was that, according to behaviorism’s founder, John Watson, psychologists shouldn’t study the mind at all. Watson (1913) declared behaviorism to be a school of thought whose sole focus is the “prediction and control of behavior” (p. 158). By behavior, Watson meant observable actions— visible movements of an organism that could be observed and accurately recorded by an experimenter. The contents of mind, by contrast, cannot be directly observed. Because observation is key to successful science, Watson reasoned that the study of mind could not be part of a scientific psychology. Psychology should focus exclusively on behavior.

The psychologist B. F. Skinner (1953) developed a slightly different version of behaviorism. Like Watson, Skinner emphasized the study of behavior, but he defined “behavior” to include thinking and feeling. Skinner’s behaviorism thus analyzed the full range of psychological experiences. In Skinner’s analysis, the ultimate cause of all behavior—all bodily movements, thoughts, and feelings—is the environment; environmental influences gradually shape behavior over the course of an organism’s life. Psychology’s primary task, then, is to study the impact of the environment on behavior. Chapter 7 details the psychological system Skinner developed.

Behaviorists believed that the processes through which the environment shapes behavior are universal—the same for all organisms. This theoretical claim had a major implication for conducting research: It meant that researchers could study any organism they wished. Most behaviorists chose to study animals that were easy to maintain in a laboratory, such as rats. When behaviorism dominated American psychology, in the 1920s through 1950s, the “rat lab” was where psychology students spent most of their time.

Behaviorism added scientific rigor to psychology. But many felt it had a second influence that was detrimental: By studying rats, behaviorism deflected attention from the unique qualities of human beings. This critique motivated a school of thought known as humanistic psychology.

HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY. Humanistic psychology is an intellectual movement which argues that the everyday personal experiences of human beings—their thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, and personal beliefs about who they are and what they wish to become—must be psychologists’ main target of study (Smith, 1990). Humanistic psychologists direct the field’s attention to the person as a whole, rather than to isolated psychological structures and processes considered one at a time.

To you, early in your first course in psychology, this point might seem obvious. Aren’t all psychologists interested in people’s experiences? But when humanistic psychologists surveyed psychology in the mid-twentieth century, they judged that human experience was being shortchanged. Behaviorists experimented on rats. Psychoanalysts discussed mental conflicts of which people were not even aware. “Neither of these two versions of psychology dealt with human beings as human. Nor did they deal with real problems of life,” said Rollo May, a leading humanistic psychologist of the time (quoted in Smith, 1990, p. 8).

29

Humanistic psychologists addressed multiple challenges. Carl Rogers developed a humanistic theory of personality that centered on people’s experiences of themselves, or self-concept (Chapter 13), as well as a method of therapy that provided a major alternative to psychoanalysis (Chapter 15). Abraham Maslow analyzed motivation, identifying human motivational needs ranging from food and safety to the need to mature and grow psychologically (Chapter 11). In this work, humanistic psychologists emphasized human strengths, especially people’s inherent capacities to understand themselves and the world around them and to grow toward psychological maturity.

An intellectual movement in the twenty-first century parallels the earlier humanistic school of thought. Positive psychology argues that psychologists have devoted excessive attention to human frailties, and instead should focus on “positive individual traits” (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 5) such as love, courage, forgiveness, and spirituality. These traits are strengths that enable people to cope with difficult circumstances, to bounce back from setbacks, and to gain wisdom from their experiences (Aspinwall & Staudinger, 2002; Gable & Haidt, 2005; Keyes, Fredrickson, & Park, 2012). Some worry that the positive psychology movement, though well intentioned, is insufficiently complex; most psychological characteristics—even those labeled “positive”—can have either positive or negative effects on well-being, depending on the situation a person is in (McNulty & Fincham, 2012). Nonetheless, positive psychology remains influential today, as it advances themes sounded originally by the humanistic psychologists of the past century.

Humanistic psychology is consistent with something else you can find in psychology today: this book. Humanistic psychologists argued that the experiences of people, who live complex lives and contemplate the lives they live, are psychology’s ultimate target of investigation. They were right. Throughout this book, we strive to show how each of the diverse areas of psychological science illuminates the lives and experiences of people. Our primary tool to accomplish this is the book’s person-first approach: We introduce topics, whenever possible, at a person level of analysis. This lets you see how each of the field’s diverse topics sheds light on the human experience.

The latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed scientific advances that enabled psychologists to combine knowledge of people with information about the workings of the mind and brain. Many of these advances were spurred by the final school of thought to be discussed here, information-processing psychology and the cognitive revolution.

INFORMATION PROCESSING AND THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION. Behaviorists cautioned against studying the mind. They asserted that any analysis of thinking processes—how the mind retains knowledge, how one thought leads to another—would inevitably be speculative and thus unscientific. But this argument lost ground once a new piece of machinery appeared on the scene: computers. Computers store knowledge. One “thought” in the computer leads to another. These activities in the computer are fully understood by science (computer science). If we can understand thinking in computers, many reasoned, why not in humans?

30

This reasoning launched an intellectual revolution in psychology in the late 1950s (McCorduck, 2004; Miller, 2003). The cognitive revolution argued that the mind’s ability to acquire, retain, and draw on knowledge could, and should, be central to psychological science.

But how, exactly, could the mind be studied? Many researchers during the cognitive revolution studied the mind by treating it as an information-processing system (Simon, 1969). An information-processing system is any device that can acquire, store, and manipulate symbols (e.g., words and numbers). The symbols represent information and instructions for transforming information. Consider the calculator program in your computer. If you enter 2 and 3 and press the addition button, it produces 5. This means the calculator stored symbols representing 2 and 3, and instructions for addition that transformed the combination of 2, 3, and a + sign into 5. The key point for psychology was the following: Because you, too, can add 2 and 3 and get 5 in your mind, your mind may be thought of as an information-processing system that stores and manipulates symbols. Principles of information processing thus could guide the study of the human mind (Simon, 1979).

Today, psychologists recognize that the human mind and brain do not work exactly like a computer. For example, the physical brain changes when you repeatedly practice a thinking skill (Chapter 3), but the physical electronics of your computer do not change when you repeatedly run the same computer program. Nonetheless, the information-processing approach and the overall cognitive revolution were a boon to psychological science. As you’ll see later in this book (especially in the chapters on the mind), they produced novel answers to questions about the mind that have intrigued psychologists since the time of Wundt and James.

31