1.1 Psychology’s Roots: The Path to a Science of Mind

Psychology is a young science. William James once noted that “[t]he first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave” (quoted in Perry, 1996, p. 228). Of course, that doesn’t mean no one had ever thought about human nature before psychology came along. For more than 2,000 years, philosophers have thought deeply and carefully about many of the issues with which modern psychology is concerned.

Psychology’s Ancestors: The Great Philosophers

What fundamental question has puzzled philosophers for millennia?

Plato (428 bce–347 bce) and Aristotle (384 bce–322 bce) were among the first philosophers to struggle with fundamental questions about how the mind works (Robinson, 1995). They and other Greek philosophers debated many of the questions that psychologists continue to debate today. For example, Plato was a strong proponent of nativism, the view that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that the child’s mind was a “blank slate” on which only experience could write, and he was a strong proponent of what we now call philosophical empiricism, the view that all knowledge is acquired through experience. Interestingly, the debate between these two great thinkers is still alive today as modern psychologists work to understand the roles that “nature” and “nurture” play in determining our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The main difference is that whereas Plato and Aristotle were quite good at formulating positions, they couldn’t settle their debates because they had no objective means of testing those positions. As you will see in the Methods chapter, the ability to devise a theory and then test it is the cornerstone of the scientific approach that separates psychology and philosophy.

How do young children learn about the world? Plato believed that certain kinds of knowledge are innate, whereas Aristotle believed that the mind is a blank slate on which experiences are written.
Geo Martinez/Feature Pics

nativism

The philosophical view that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn.

philosophical empiricism

The view that all knowledge is acquired through experience.

4

The Real World: The Perils of Procrastination

The Perils of Procrastination

William James understood that the human mind and human behavior are fascinating in part because they are not error free. Let’s consider a malfunction that can have significant consequences in your own life: procrastination.

At one time or another, most of us have avoided carrying out a task or we have put it off to a later time. The task may be unpleasant, difficult, or just less entertaining than other things we could be doing at the moment. For college students, procrastination can affect a range of academic activities, such as writing a term paper or preparing for a test.

Some procrastinators defend the practice by claiming that they tend to work best under pressure or by noting that as long as a task gets done, it doesn’t matter all that much if it is completed just before the deadline. Is there any merit to such claims, or are they just feeble excuses for counterproductive behavior?

A study of 60 undergraduate psychology college students provided some intriguing answers (Tice & Baumeister, 1997). At the beginning of the semester, the instructor announced a due date for the term paper and told students that if they could not meet the date, they would receive an extension to a later date. About a month later, students completed a scale that measures tendencies toward procrastination. At that same time and then again during the last week of class, students recorded health symptoms and levels of stress that they had experienced during the past week.

Students who scored high on the procrastination scale tended to turn in their papers late. One month into the semester, these procrastinators reported less stress and fewer symptoms of physical illness than did nonprocrastinators. But at the end of the semester, the procrastinators reported more stress and more health symptoms than did the nonprocrastinators, and the procrastinators also reported more visits to the health center. The procrastinators also received lower grades on their papers and on course exams. More recent studies have found that higher levels of procrastination are associated with poorer academic performance (Moon & Illingworth, 2005) and higher levels of psychological distress (Rice, Richardson, & Clark, 2012). Therefore, in addition to making use of the tips provided in the Real World box on improving study skills (p. 6), you would be wise to avoid procrastination in this course and others.

From the Brain to the Mind: The French Connection

We all know that the brain and the body are physical objects that we can see and touch; we also know that the subjective contents of our minds—our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings—are not visible or tangible. Inner experience is perfectly real, but where in the world is it? French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) argued that body and mind are fundamentally different things—that the body is made of a material substance, whereas the mind (or soul) is made of an immaterial or spiritual substance. But if the mind and the body are different things made of different substances, then how do they interact? How does the mind tell the body to put its foot forward, and when the body steps on a rusty nail, why does the mind say, “Ouch!”? This is the problem of dualism, or how mental activity can be reconciled and coordinated with physical behavior.

Rene Descartes believed that the physical body was a container for the non-physical thing called the mind. Centuries later, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949) argued that Descartes was wrong, that there is no “ghost in the machine,” and that all mental activity is simply the result of the physical activity of the brain. Most modern scientists reject Descartes’s “dualism” and embrace Ryle’s “scientific materialism.”
© Thom Lang/Corbis

How did work involving patients with brain damage help demonstrate the relationship between mind and brain?

These kinds of questions proved to be difficult to answer, and the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) argued that the reason they were difficult is that they were defective questions to begin with. The mind and body aren’t different things at all, he claimed. Rather, the mind is what the brain does. From Hobbes’s perspective, looking for a “place” where the mind meets the body is like looking for the place where heat and fire meet. It sounds like a sensible question only if you don’t think too much about it! The best support for Hobbes’s view came centuries later, when physicians discovered that specific changes in the brain led to specific changes in the mind. For example, the French surgeon Paul Broca (1824–1880) worked with a patient known as Monsieur Leborgne, who had suffered damage to a small part of the left side of the brain (now known as Broca’s area). Leborgne was virtually unable to speak and could utter only the single syllable “tan.” And yet, he understood everything that was said to him and was able to communicate using gestures. Broca had the crucial insight that damage to a specific part of the brain impaired a specific psychological function, demonstrating clearly that our mental lives are the products of the physical workings of one of the body’s major organs: the brain. This may seem obvious to you now, but it was a radical idea in the 19th century when most people believed, as Descartes had, that the mind and the body are different things made of different substances and obeying different rules.

5

Mr. Leborgne was nicknamed “Tan” because it was the only word he could say. When he died in 1861, Paul Broca dissected his brain and found a lesion in the left hemisphere which, he concluded, had been responsible for Leborgne’s loss of speech. Today, Leborgne’s brain lives in a jar at the Musée Dupuytren in Paris, France. And to this day, no one knows his first name.
Apic/Getty Images

Structuralism: From Physiology to Psychology

In an 1867 letter to a friend, William James wrote, “It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to be a science. Helmholtz and a man called Wundt at Heidelberg are working at it.” So who were these guys?

By measuring a person’s reaction times to different stimuli, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) estimated the length of time it takes a nerve impulse to travel to the brain.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) was a physiologist who had developed a method for measuring the speed of nerve impulses. He gave participants a mild electric shock on different parts of their bodies and then recorded their reaction times, or the time it takes to respond to a specific stimulus. Helmholtz found that people generally took longer to respond when he shocked their toes than when he shocked their thighs. He concluded that it must take longer for the nerve impulse to travel from the toe to the brain than from the thigh to the brain because the toe is farther away from the brain. And because he knew exactly how much farther away it was, he knew exactly how fast a nerve impulse could travel! These results were astonishing to 19th-century scientists because, at that time, just about everyone thought that mental processes occurred instantaneously. Helmholtz not only showed that this wasn’t true, but he also showed that something as simple as a reaction time could help scientists unravel the mysteries of the brain and mind.

reaction time

The amount of time taken to respond to a specific stimulus.

What was the useful application of Helmholtz’s results?

The other fellow whom William James admired was Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who had been a student of Helmholtz’s. Wundt taught the first formal course in psychology in 1867 at the University of Heidelberg, and he opened the first psychology laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig. Wundt believed that psychology should focus on analyzing consciousness, a person’s subjective experience of the world and the mind. Wundt noted that chemists try to understand the structure of matter by breaking down natural substances into basic elements, and so he developed an approach to psychology known as structuralism, the analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind. Wundt made good use of reaction times, as his mentor had taught him to do, but his primary research method involved introspection, which is a method that asks people to report on the contents of their subjective experience. In a typical experiment, Wundt’s participants were exposed to a color or a sound and were simply asked to describe its brightness or its loudness. By analyzing the relationship between different aspects of these verbal reports, Wundt hoped to discover the basic elements of conscious experience.

How did the work of chemists influence early psychology?

consciousness

A person’s subjective experience of the world and the mind.

structuralism

The analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind.

introspection

The subjective observation of one’s own experience.

6

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), far right, founded the first laboratory devoted exclusively to psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany. He sought to understand consciousness by breaking it down into its basic parts, including individual sensations and feelings.
Archives of the History of American Psychology

James and the Functional Approach

William James agreed with Wundt on the importance of immediate experience and the usefulness of introspection as a technique (Bjork, 1983). But he disagreed with Wundt’s claim that consciousness could be broken down into separate elements. James believed that trying to isolate and analyze a particular moment of consciousness was absurd because consciousness was like a flowing stream that could only be understood in its entirety. Furthermore, he felt that Wundt was asking the wrong question: He was asking what consciousness was made of rather than what consciousness was for. So James developed an approach now known as functionalism, which is the study of the purpose that mental processes serve. (See the Real World box for some strategies to enhance one of the functions of mental processes—learning.)

functionalism

The study of the purpose mental processes serve in enabling people to adapt to their environment.

The Real World: Improving Study Skills

Improving Study Skills

Our minds don’t work like video cameras, recording everything that happens and then faithfully storing the information. In order to retain new information, you need to take an active role in learning by doing such things as rehearsing, interpreting, and testing yourself. These activities initially might seem difficult, but in fact they are what psychologists call desirable difficulties (Bjork & Bjork, 2011): Making an activity more difficult by actively engaging during learning will increase your retention and ultimately result in improved performance. Here are four specific suggestions:

Anxious feelings about an upcoming exam may be unpleasant, but as you’ve probably experienced yourself, they can motivate much-needed study.
Superstudio/Getty Images
  • Rehearse. One useful type of active manipulation is rehearsal: repeating to-be-learned information to yourself. For example, suppose you want to learn the name of a person you’ve just met. Repeat the name to yourself right away; wait a few seconds and think of it again; wait a bit longer (maybe 30 seconds), and bring the name to mind once more; then rehearse the name again after a minute and once more after 2 or 3 minutes. This type of spaced rehearsal improves long-term learning more than rehearsing the name without any spacing between rehearsals (Landauer & Bjork, 1978). You can apply this technique to names, dates, definitions, and many other kinds of information, including concepts presented in this textbook.
  • Interpret. If we think deeply enough about what we want to remember, the act of reflection itself will virtually guarantee good memory. The Changing Minds scenarios at the end of each chapter require you to review what you’ve learned in the chapter and to relate it to other things you already know about, which in turn will make you more likely to remember the information.
  • Test. Don’t just look at your class notes or this textbook; test yourself on the material as often as you can. Actively testing yourself helps you to later remember that information more than just looking at it again. The Cue Questions that you will encounter throughout the text (highlighted by green question marks) are designed to test you and thereby increase learning and retention. Be sure to use them.
  • Hit the main points. Take some of the load off your memory by developing effective note-taking and outlining skills. Realize that you can’t write down everything an instructor says, so try to focus on making detailed notes about the main ideas, facts, and people mentioned in the lecture. Later, organize your notes into an outline that clearly highlights the major concepts. This will force you to reflect on the information in a way that promotes retention and will also provide you with a helpful study guide to promote self-testing and review.

These four activities may seem difficult or demanding at first, but they will result in improved retention and ultimately will make learning easier for you.

7

How does functionalism relate to Darwin’s theory of natural selection?

You don’t have to look at this photo for more than a half-second to know that Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, is not feeling very happy. William James suggested that your ability to read emotional expressions in an instant serves an important function that promotes your survival and well-being.
Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images

James was inspired not only by Helmholtz and Wundt, but also by the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882),who had recently published a groundbreaking book on the theory of evolution. In that book, Darwin proposed the principle of natural selection: The features of an organism that help it survive and reproduce are more likely than other features to be passed on to subsequent generations. James realized that like all other animals, human beings must avoid predators, locate food, build shelters, attract mates, and so on. Applying Darwin’s principle of natural selection, James (1890) reasoned that the ultimate function of all psychological processes must be to help people survive and reproduce, and he suggested that psychology’s mission should be to find out exactly how different psychological processes execute that function. James’s arguments attracted much attention, and by the 1920s, functionalism was the dominant approach to psychology in North America.

natural selection

Charles Darwin’s theory that the features of an organism that help it survive and reproduce are more likely than other features to be passed on to subsequent generations.

SUMMARY QUIZ [1.1]

Question 1.4

1. In the 1800s, Paul Broca conducted research that demonstrated a connection between
  1. animals and humans.
  2. the mind and the brain.
  3. brain size and mental ability.
  4. skull indentations and psychological attributes.

b.

Question 1.5

2. What was the subject of the famous experiment conducted by Hermann von Helmholtz?
  1. reaction time
  2. childhood learning
  3. structuralism
  4. functions of specific brain areas

a.

Question 1.6

3. Wundt and his students sought to analyze the basic elements that constitute the mind, an approach called
  1. consciousness.
  2. introspection.
  3. structuralism.
  4. objectivity.

c.

Question 1.7

4. William James developed _______, the study of the purpose mental processes serve in enabling people to adapt to their environments.
  1. empiricism
  2. nativism
  3. structuralism
  4. functionalism

d.

8