1-1 What were some important milestones in psychology’s early development?

To be human is to be curious about ourselves and the world around us. Before 300 B.C.E., the Greek naturalist and philosopher Aristotle theorized about learning and memory, motivation and emotion, perception and personality. Today we chuckle at some of his guesses, like his suggestion that a meal makes us sleepy by causing gas and heat to collect around the source of our personality, the heart. But credit Aristotle with asking the right questions.

Psychology’s First LaboratoryPhilosophers’ thinking about thinking continued until the birth of psychology as we know it, on a December day in 1879, in a small, third-floor room at Germany’s University of Leipzig. There, two young men were helping an austere, middle-aged professor, Wilhelm Wundt, create an experimental apparatus. Their machine measured the time lag between people’s hearing a ball hit a platform and their pressing a telegraph key (Hunt, 1993). Curiously, people responded in about one-tenth of a second when asked to press the key as soon as the sound occurred—and in about two-tenths of a second when asked to press the key as soon as they were consciously aware of perceiving the sound. (To be aware of one’s awareness takes a little longer.) Wundt was seeking to measure “atoms of the mind”—the fastest and simplest mental processes. So began the first psychological laboratory, staffed by Wundt and by psychology’s first graduate students.

Structuralism and FunctionalismBefore long, this new science of psychology became organized into different branches, or schools of thought, each promoted by pioneering thinkers. Two early schools were structuralism and functionalism.

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STRUCTURALISM As physicists and chemists discerned the structure of matter, so Edward Bradford Titchener aimed to discover the mind’s structure. He engaged people in self-reflective introspection (looking inward), training them to report elements of their experience as they looked at a rose, listened to a metronome, smelled a scent, or tasted a substance. What were their immediate sensations, their images, their feelings? And how did these relate to one another? Alas, introspection proved somewhat unreliable. It required smart, verbal people, and its results varied from person to person and experience to experience. As introspection waned, so did structuralism.

FUNCTIONALISM Hoping to assemble the mind’s structure from simple elements was rather like trying to understand a car by examining its disconnected parts. Philosopher-psychologist William James thought it would be more fruitful to consider the evolved functions of our thoughts and feelings. Smelling is what the nose does; thinking is what the brain does. But why do the nose and brain do these things? Under the influence of evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin, James assumed that thinking, like smelling, developed because it was adaptive—it contributed to our ancestors’ survival. Consciousness serves a function. It enables us to consider our past, adjust to our present, and plan our future. James encouraged explorations of the functions of emotions, memories, willpower, habits, and moment-to-moment streams of consciousness.

James’ writings moved the publisher Henry Holt to offer James a contract for a textbook of the new science of psychology. James agreed and began work in 1878, with an apology for requesting two years to finish his writing. The text proved an unexpected chore and actually took him 12 years. (Why am I not surprised?) More than a century later, people still read the resulting Principles of Psychology (1890) and marvel at the brilliance and elegance with which James introduced psychology to the educated public.

First Women in PsychologyJames’ legacy stems partly from his Harvard mentoring and his writing. In 1890, over the objections of Harvard’s president, he admitted Mary Whiton Calkins into his graduate seminar (Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987). (In those years women lacked even the right to vote.) When Calkins joined, the other students (all men) dropped out. So James tutored her alone. Later, she finished all of Harvard’s Ph.D. requirements, outscoring all the male students on the qualifying exams. Alas, Harvard denied her the degree she had earned, offering her instead a degree from Radcliffe College, its undergraduate “sister” school for women. Calkins resisted the unequal treatment and refused the degree. She nevertheless went on to become a distinguished memory researcher and the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) first female president in 1905.

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The honor of being the first female psychology Ph.D. later fell to Margaret Floy Washburn, who also wrote an influential book, The Animal Mind, and became the second female APA president in 1921. But Washburn’s gender barred doors for her, too. Although her thesis was the first foreign study Wundt published in his psychology journal, she could not join the all-male organization of experimental psychologists founded by Titchener, her own graduate adviser (Johnson, 1997). (What a different world from the recent past—1996 to 2014—when women were 10 of the 19 elected presidents of the science-oriented Association for Psychological Science. In the United States, Canada, and Europe, most psychology doctorates are now earned by women.)