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origins of psychology - 8 mark essay
This is a draft cheat sheet. It is a work in progress and is not finished yet.
AO1
Wundt was a German psychologist who is often referred to as the father of psychology. He opened a laboratory for experimental psychology in Leipzig Germany which was the first laboratory dedicated to psychology – this is often seen as the beginning of modern science. Wundt introduced the structuralism approach. Structuralism is the study of the human mind by breaking down behaviours such as memory and perception into their basic elements. Wundt argued that mental processes could be scientifically studied by introspection. Introspection is the systematic analysis of one’s own conscious experience of a stimulus. Wundt believed that with enough specialised training mental processes such as memory or perception could be systematically analysed using introspection. Observers would be shown an object and asked to reflect upon how they perceived it. Participants responses to the same stimulus could be used to establish general theories about perception and other mental processes |
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unreliable - non-observable processes
A weakness of Wundt’s methods is that they are unreliable as the approach relies primarily on non-observable processes. For example, behaviourist psychologists believed that that the structuralist approach relies heavily on non-observable processes such as memory. This matters because the experimental results cannot be reproduced by other researchers when they carried out the study again. Therefore, the method is not seen as reliable as the methods are not seen as scientific. |
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lacks validity - not an accurate meaurement
A weakness of introspection is that it is not an accurate measure of one’s own mental processes. For example, Nisbett and Wilson found that an individual may be implicitly racist which will affect the way in which they interact with people of different ethnic groups. This matters because they are not consciously aware so it would not uncover implicit stereotypes, so we have little knowledge about the processes underlying our behaviour. Therefore, introspection does not accurately measure mental processes and lacks validity |
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