Preamble:

Psychology emerged as an independent science when Wilhelm Wundt established

a laboratory in Germany in 1879. The current lesson focuses on the emergence of
school of thoughts in Psychology.

Lesson Objectives:
The current lesson focuses on the earlier school of thoughts in Psychology and how
they laid foundation for the modern trends. Each school of thought/approach
explained behavior uniquely.
Following topics shall be studied in this lesson:
1. Structuralism.
2. Functionalism.
3. Gestalt Psychology.

Lesson 03
SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
Wilhelm Wundt, in Germany, established the foundations of modern psychology in
1879. He wanted to study, experimentally, the conscious experience of individuals.
As discussed earlier, the different schools of thought gradually emerged after
psychology took this scientific turn. These schools were basically different ways of
observation, description, understanding, and prediction of psychological
phenomena; in the present context, mental processes and behavior.

Earlier Schools Of Thought

The earlier schools that paved the way for further developments in modern
psychology were

• Structuralism: focused on studying the conscious experience by looking into

its individual parts or elements.

• Functionalism: focused on what the mind does and how it does.

• Gestalt psychology: focused on studying the whole experience of a person

rather than breaking it into individual components.
• Psychodynamic School: focuses on the unconscious forces that drive/
motivate human behavior.

• Behaviorist / Behavioral School: focuses on studying the behavior that is

observable and overt.

Prevalent Approaches / Models / Perspectives

At present some of the earlier approaches still exist. Psychologists belonging to

these sets of theories have contributed a lot to the body of psychological
knowledge and practice. Today, we can see at least six approaches or models of
dealing with the psychological phenomena.

Biological Approach

The psychological model that views behavior from the perspective of biological
functioning. The role of brain, genes, neurotransmitters, endocrine glands etc. How
the individual nerve cells are joined together, how the inheritance of certain
characteristics from parents and other ancestors influences behavior, how
the functioning of the body affects hopes and fears, what behaviors are due to
instincts, and so on. Psychologists using the biological model view even more
complex kinds of behaviors such as emotional responses e.g. anxiety, as having
critical biological components.

Psychodynamic Approach

The approach that concentrates on the belief that behavior is motivated by the inner
forces, over which individuals have little control. Founded by the Viennese
physician Sigmund Freud in early 1900s, proponents of psychodynamic
perspective give importance to the inner unconscious experiences and the forces
that led that behavior. Freud believed that unconscious determinants of behavior
had a revolutionary effect on 20th century thinking, not just in psychology but also
in related fields a well. Although many of the basic principles of psychodynamic
thinking have been highly criticized, the model grown out of Freud’s work has
provided a way not only for treating mental disorders but also for understanding
everyday phenomena such a prejudice and aggression.

Behaviorist / Behavioral Approach

The psychological model that focuses on the overt observable behavior. The model
emerged as a reaction to the earlier approaches that emphasized the significance of
hidden, underlying, predetermined forces. The behaviorists suggest that observable
behavior alone should be the main area of interest to psychology.

Humanistic Approach

The psychological model, that suggests that people are in control of their lives. It is
considered as one of the most recent approaches to psychology. This approach
rejected the view, that predetermined, automatic, biological forces, unconscious
processes or the environment determines behavior. On the contrary, it proposes
that people themselves decide about their lives. A failure in being capable of doing
so leads to psychological problems. It also stresses the idea that people, by nature,
tend to move towards higher levels of maturity and maximum potential.

Cognitive Approach

The psychological model that focuses on how people know, understands, and
thinks about the world. Main emphasis is on how people understand of the world,
and their thinking, affects their responses; how it may lead to positive or negative
psychological consequences, and even health-related outcomes.

Earlier Schools of Thought

Structuralism

• The school of thought that focused upon the study of mind and conscious
experience: consciousness, thinking, and emotions. They used introspection as
their method of study.

• Focused upon the structure and operations of the mind rather than studying
whole things and phenomenon. Hence named as Structuralism.

• The first well formed system of psychology that laid the foundations for the
scientific and experimentally oriented study of mind and mental processes.

• Emerged from the work of Wilhelm Wundt who set up the first psychology
laboratory at Leipzig, Germany, in 1879 to study the “building blocks of the
mind”, and is generally known as the founder of “scientific psychology”. He
proposed materialism because he did not think a science could be operated solely
through physical investigations of the brain. He felt that the study of mind must be
a science of experience. He supported the existence of the science of psychology
quite independent of biology and physiology. He believed that psychology
must have an experimental side.

Subject matter of psychology

According to Wundt, the subject matter of psychology is to be immediate

experience, as contrasted to mediate experience. By mediate experience Wundt
meant experiences used as a way to find out about something other than the
experience itself. This is the way in which we use experience in gaining
knowledge about the world. Immediate experience is the experience as such, and
the task of psychology is to study this immediate experience. The physicists are, on
the other hand, interested in studying only the mediate experience, but the
Wundtian psychologists study immediate experience.

Main Presumption

• All human mental experience could be understood as the combination of

simple events or elements. By analyzing the basic elements of sensations and other
mental experiences, the underlying structure of the mind could be unveiled

• Task of psychology is to identify the basic elements of consciousness just like

physicists could break down the basic particles of matter

At Wundt’s Laboratory

• Studies and experiments were conducted on the fundamental elements that

form the foundation of thinking, consciousness, emotions and other mental states

• Systematic, organized and objective procedures were used so that replication

was possible

• The procedure used for studying the “structure of mind” was called
“Introspection”; a method used to study the structure of the mind, in which
subjects were asked to describe in detail what they were experiencing when
exposed to a stimulus.

Introspection

o The subjects gave detailed reports of what they experienced when they were
exposed to a stimulus
The Impact of Wundt’s Lab

Attracted leading scientists and students from Europe and U.S.A.

James Mckeen Cattell

Known for his work on individual differences and “Mental Tests”.

Emil Kraeplin

Postulated a physical cause of mental illness. In 1883, he gave the first

classification system of mental disorders.

Hugo Munsterberg

First to apply psychology to industry and law.

Edward B. Tichener

Known as the formal founder of Structuralism.

Edward Bradford Tichener

Criticism

• American psychologist, who was English by birth, but German in professional

and personal temperament, who spent his most productive years in Cornell
University, New York.

• He was solely concerned with studying the brain, and the unconscious, and for
this he believed, we should break it down into basic elements. After that, we can
construct the separate elements into a whole and understand what it does.

• He believed that we can study perception, emotions and ideas through

introspection, by reducing them to their elementary parts

• There are four elements in the sensation of taste: sweet, sour, salty and bitter

• Ideas and images are related: ideas were always accompanied by images

• The underlying process in emotions was affection

This school of thought has been criticized on various grounds i.e.

It was Reductionist

It reduced all complex human experience to simple sensations

It was Elementalistic

The structuraralists sought to look at individual elements first, and then combine
parts into a whole, rather than study the variety of behavior directly.

It was Mentalistic

Structuralism studied only verbal reports of human conscious experience and

awareness, ignoring the study of subjects who could not report their introspection.

Functionalism

An approach that concentrated on what the mind does, in other words the functions
of mental activity, and the role of behavior in allowing people to adapt to their
environments. The functionalist psychologists start with the fact that objects are
perceived and “how” they are perceived. They asked “why” as well. This school
became prominent in the1900s. It emerged as a reaction to Structuralism.

• Founded by William James, also known as the founder of American

Psychology.

• Emphasized “function” rather than “Structure” of human consciousness i.e.,

what the mind does

• Focused upon the way humans adapt to their environment; what roles behavior
played in allowing people to better adapt to their environment

• Examined the ways in which behavior allows people to satisfy their needs

• Functionalists were especially interested in education and applied psychology

Method of Investigation

Longitudinal Research
Observation, interviews, and testing of a person over a long period of time: made
possible to observe and record the subject’s development and his reaction to
different circumstance.

William James

He was the leading precursor of functionalist psychology. James was a Harvard

University professor, primarily trained in physiology and medicine. Psychology
and philosophy fascinated him, and he treated psychology as a natural science. In
1875 he offered his first course in psychology. In 1890 he published “Principles of
Psychology”, a two-volume book, which became a leading psychology text in the
U.S.

James wrote about the stream of consciousness, emotions, the self, habit formation,
mind-body link and much more. He was also interested in will, values, religious
and mystical experiences. James said: “We should study consciousness but should
not reduce it into elements, content and structure”. Acts and functions of mental
processes need to be focused upon, rather than contents of the mind.
Consciousness was an ongoing stream, and was in continual interaction with the
environment. Careful observation is important; Wundt’s rigorous laboratory
methods are of little value. James believed that each individual has a uniqueness
that could not be reduced to formulas or numbers

John Dewey

• Famous American educator

• One of the key founders of “Functionalism”

• Stimulus– Response phenomenon is not an automatic behavior, the goal of the

person performing it has the main role in it; the stimulus and the response
determine each other

• It is the function, or the goal, of the whole action that elicits response

• Dewey developed the field of ‘School Psychology’ and recommended ways for
meeting student’s needs

• Teachers are strongly influenced by their psychological assumptions about

children and the educational process
Teachers need to understand two issues:

i. Children and adults are different; teaching/education should be in accordance

with children’s developmental readiness

ii. Children are similar to adults in the sense that they perform better when they
have some control over what they are to accomplish; the curriculum should be
designed accordingly

Applied psychology flourished following the emergence of functionalism

i. James Mckeen Cattell began studying ways to measure intelligence

ii. Psychology entered the world of business; Frederick Taylor developed

‘scientific management’

iii. Other functionalists: James Rowland Angell, Harvey A.Carr

James Rowland Angell

• Founded the psychology department in Chicago, the most influential of its

time.

• Believed that the function of consciousness is to improve the adaptive abilities

of the organism and that psychology must study how mind did these kinds of
adjustments with respect to the environment.

Harvey A.Carr

• Defined the subject matter of psychology as mental activity, whose function is

to acquire, fixate, retain, organize and evaluate experiences and use these
experiences in some kind of action.

• Carr believed that the study of cultural products such as literature, art, language
or social and political institutions could provide information on the kind of
activities that produced the actions and behaviors.

Gestalt Psychology

• An approach that focuses on the organization of perception and thinking in a

‘‘whole” sense rather than on the individual elements of perception. Instead of
considering the individual parts that make up thinking, gestalt psychologists
concentrated on how people consider individual

elements as units or wholes. They made great contributions to the understanding of

the perceptual phenomena.

• This school developed as a reaction to structuralism in the early 1900s

• In contrast to the structuralist approach of breaking down conscious experience

into elements, or focusing upon the structure, the Gestalt school emphasized the
significance of studying any phenomenon in its overall form.

• The word gestalt means “Configuration”

• The main concept that the Gestaltists posed was that the “WHOLE” is more
than the sum of its parts, and it is different from it too.

• They concentrated on how people consider individual elements together as

units or wholes

• The concept of Gestalt applies to everything, objects, ideas, thinking processes

and human relationships

• Any phenomenon in its entirety may be much greater than when it is seen in a
disintegrated form

• Three German psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang

Kohler were regarded as the founders of gestalt school as each one of them had
done significant work in his respective field.

Max Wertheimer

• The founder of Gestalt Psychology, born in Prague in 1880

• Studying at the University of Frankfurt he became aware of a form of apparent

motion that was called “Phi phenomenon

• Phi phenomenon = when two lights are in close proximity to each other,
flashing alternately they appear to be one light moving back and forth; therefore
the whole was different from the separate parts; movement perceived whereas it
never occurred
• We perceive experiences in a way that calls for the simplest explanation, even
though reality may be entirely different; this is Gestalt Law of Minimum
Principle. We tend to organize our experience so that it is as simple as possible.

• Explanation of phi phenomenon led to a separate school of thought i.e., Gestalt

school, that had deep rooted impact on learning, ethics, and social psychology

Gestalt Laws of Organization

We organize our experiences according to certain rules, in a simple way:

Proximity: Close or nearer objects are perceived as coherent and related.

Similarity: Tendency to perceive objects, patterns or stimuli as groups, which are

similar in appearance__parts of the visual field that are similar in color, lightness,
texture, shape, or any other quality

Good Continuation: Tendency to group the stimuli into smooth and continuous
patterns or parts

Closure: It is the perceptual tendency to fill in the gaps and completing the
contours; enables us to perceive the disconnected parts as the whole object.

Figure and Ground: Our perceptual tendency to see objects with the foreground
as well as the background___ the object is being recognized with respect to its
background. e.g. black board and chalk. (These will be discussed in detail in the
section of perception).

Kurt Koffka

• Wrote the famous “Principles of Gestalt Psychology” (1935)

• Talked about geographical versus behavioral environment: people’s behavior is

determined by how they perceive the environment rather than by the nature of the
environment.

Wolfgang Kohler

• Gave the concept of “insight” and “transposition”, as a result of his

observations of a caged chimpanzee and experiments with chickens

• Insight = spontaneous restructuring of the situation

• Transposition = generalization of knowledge from one situation to another

• Kohler also talked about Isomorphism; changes in the brain structure yield
changes in experiences

Other major contributions

• Gestalt approach to ethics: Truth is truth when it is complete and

corresponds fully to the facts of the situation

• Zeigarnik’s Effect: Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiments; we remember

interrupted tasks better. The tension caused by unfinished tasks helps us in
remembering

• Group Dynamics: Instead of focusing on people’s individual attributes we

should see them as whole persons