(2pts.) 5. How were Titchener\'s views on the science of psychology the same or
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Question
(2pts.) 5. How were Titchener's views on the science of psychology the same or different from those of Wundts'? (4pts.) 6. Give evidence for how Titchener viewed psychology as a science as compared to American psychologists such as Hall, Cattell, Woodworth, Dewey, and Angell. (6pts.) 7. What content in Cattell's original letters can you identify that relates to psychology today? Provide at three points. (4 pts.) Optional Bonus: What were William James' personal interests that contributed to the emphasis of individual differences' in a functionalist psychology?Explanation / Answer
Answer 5.
Wundt
It has often been claimed that Wilhelm Wundt, the father of modern psychology, was the first to adopt introspection to experimental psychology though the methodological theory had been presented long before, as by 18th century German philosopher-psychologists such as Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten or Johann Nicolaus Tetens.Also, Wundt's views on introspection must be approached with great care. Wundt was influenced by notable physiologists, such as Gustav Fechner, who used a kind of controlled introspection as a means to study human sensory organs. Building upon the pre-existing use of introspection in physiology, Wundt believed the method of introspection was the ability to observe an experience,not just the logical reflection or speculations which some others interpreted his meaning to be. Wundt imposed exacting control over the use of introspection in his experimental laboratory at the University of Leipzig making it possible for other scientists to replicate his experiments elsewhere, a development that proved essential to the development of psychology as a modern, peer-reviewed scientific discipline. Such exact purism was typical of Wundt and he instructed all introspection observations be performed under these same instructions "1) the Observer must, if possible, be in a position to determine beforehand the entrance of the process to be observed. 2) the introspectionist must, as far as possible, grasp the phenomenon in a state of strained attention and follow its course. 3) Every observation must, in order to make certain, be capable of being repeated several times under the same conditions and 4) the conditions under which the phenomenon appears must be found out by the variation of the attendant circumstances and when this was done the various coherent experiments must be varied according to a plan partly by eliminating certain stimuli and partly by grading their strength and quality".
Titchener
Edward Titchener was an early pioneer in experimental psychology and student of Wilhelm Wundt.After earning his doctorate under the tutelage of Wundt at the University of Leipzig, he made his way to Cornell University where he established his own laboratory and research. When Titchener arrived at Cornell, psychology was still a fledgling discipline, especially in the United States, and Titchener was a key figure in bringing Wundt's ideas to America. However, Titchener misrepresented some of Wundt's ideas to the American psychological establishment, especially in his account of introspection which, Titchener taught, only served a purpose in the qualitative analysis of consciousness into its various parts,while Wundt saw it as a means to quantitatively measure the whole of conscious experience.Titchener was exclusively interested in the individual components that comprise conscious experience, while Wundt, seeing little purpose in the analysis of individual components, focused on synthesis of these components. Ultimately Titchener's ideas would form the basis of the short-lived psychological theory of structuralism.
Answer 6:
Titchener's goal for psychology was to make it an accepted science, classified in the same category as physics and chemistry (King et al., 2009). He firmly believed that psychology should be studied in a laboratory, and that studying psychology was no different than studying physics, chemistry, and other hard sciences (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2008). Titchener's view on psychology was called Structuralism. He believed that human thoughts, emotions, and behaviors could be charted on a table as elements are on the periodic table (King et al., 2009). Titchener's view was reductionistic in that he did not feel it was important to understand how the parts of the mind worked together as a whole, but only the individual parts themselves. He felt that if each part could be understood then all one would need to do is to learn how these parts interact to conclude the origin of a thought or behavior (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2008).
Structuralism consists of five main goals within psychology; 1) to study it using specific methods, 2) to provide more definitions in the field of psychology, 3) to use it to make assumptions about more general philosophical issues, 4) to make connections between the physical sciences and psychology, and 5) to prove that psychology should be in the same category as the hard sciences (King et al., 2009).
Titchener believed that all science begins with experience, and that without this, there could be no cognition or knowledge (Schultz & Schultz, 2011). He felt that experiences could have various points of view depending on the person who is experiencing the situation. Titchener believed that the main difference between the accepted physical sciences and psychology was that psychological experience was dependent on human judgment, and the other physical sciences were not dependent on human experience (Sternberg, 1988).
Answer 7: One of the landmark artifacts of western culture is a common writing system based on the Latin alphabet. The importance of the Latin alphabet has inspired researchers since the early days of modern psychology and visual science to investigate how letters are identified, and to characterize the similarity structure of the alphabet (Cattell, 1886; Javal, 1881). Over the past 130 years numerous researchers have studied the alphabet, and have attributed performance in letter identification and rating tasks to factors such as letter perceivability, letter similarity, and response biases. However, it is often challenging to distinguish the effects of these factors, and thus difficult to establish the psychological validity and independence of each individual factor. For example, a letter may be identified poorly because it is inherently difficult to perceive, or because it is highly similar to other letters in the alphabet, or because observers are reluctant to give the correct response. Thus, the relationship between these factors, and indeed whether they are all even independent theoretical concepts, remains an open question.
Optional Answer: James wrote extensively on such topics as perception, association, emotion, will, habit, and the "stream-of-thought," At that time, the subject of individual differences was evidently not considered within the purview of formal psychology.
William James and the other members of the school of functionalism was to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess (Hunt, 1993). For James, one’s thinking was relevant only to one’s behavior. As he put it in his psychology textbook, “My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing” (James, 1890).
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