he knows a lot about the science star
professor dave explains
if we are going to learn psychology we
actually have to start with a little bit
of history first
now you may be wondering why a
psychology series is starting with a
history lesson well it turns out that
what we consider to be psychology today
is very different than what was
considered to be psychology in the past
we will be focusing mainly on modern
psychology in this series but knowing
the history of psychology will give us a
better understanding of the influences
that shaped psychology into the field of
study that it is today it will also give
us an idea of how psychologists both
past and present think about the mind
and how it works
in knowing psychology's history we will
be better prepared to understand and
appreciate the psychological concepts to
be covered later
we're going to start by going way back
people have been thinking about the mind
for thousands of years
many cultures throughout history spent a
lot of time speculating on the nature of
the mind and soul the most prominent
figures in ancient psychology are
ancient greek philosophers like plato
and his student aristotle they created
theories attempting to explain how the
mind works and what causes human
behavior plato for example believed that
the soul or psyche had three parts
the intellectual part or logistican the
part that focused on wants and desires
or epithumeticon and the emotional part
or thumoides
a healthy psyche would have all three
parts in balance aristotle built on
plato's ideas about the mind emphasizing
observation and reason as the way to
acquire knowledge and understand nature
these ideas became the foundation of
what we consider early psychology today
the greeks were so influential that we
took their word for soul psyche and made
it part of the word psychology
psychology continued to develop through
the renaissance and was heavily
influenced by the work of 17th century
philosopher rene descartes
descartes believed that the mind and the
body are two separate things this is a
theory called cartesian dualism or
mind-body dualism
in dualism the mind is an immaterial
substance that is the source of your
thoughts emotions and beliefs while the
body is a physical substance the central
claim of dualism is therefore that the
immaterial mind and the material body
are two distinct substances which
interact to cause behavior
but how can an immaterial thing interact
with a material thing descartes
suggested that the immaterial soul
resides in and influences the body from
the pineal gland a part of the brain we
learned about in our study of the
endocrine system
philosophers continued to debate this
idea and theorize other ways the mind
could work up until the middle of the
19th century
now you may have noticed that we have
been using the term philosopher instead
of psychologist when talking about early
psychology when thinking about the mind
philosophers struggled with how to
measure immaterial things like thoughts
and feelings since we couldn't actually
measure anything early psychology was
considered to be a branch of philosophy
and not a science
it wasn't until we started learning how
the brain actually works that we could
start using the scientific method to
study the mind what we think of as
psychology began in 1879 when german
professor wilhelm vunt founded the first
experimental psychology lab at the
university of leipzig officially
separating psychology from philosophy
in fact vunt was the first person ever
to call himself a psychologist he and
those in his lab began using the
scientific method to study the mind
thereby setting the stage for future
psychologists
after vunt psychology grew into multiple
schools of thought and fields of study
the earliest school of thought is known
as structuralism which was founded by
edward titchener a student of wundt
structuralists believed that all
psychological processes were made of
basic elements or structures
they discovered these elements by asking
research participants to describe their
exact experiences as they work on mental
tasks a process known as introspection
a person reading a book for example
might say that they are seeing some
black lines on white paper
but structuralism was limited
participants often couldn't accurately
describe how they performed mental tasks
you're seeing black lines on paper when
you read but how do you get information
from those lines how do you describe the
manner in which you complete a math
problem
from these questions the structuralists
realized that the mind was doing things
like processing information outside of
our conscious awareness
this leads us to another school of
thought called functionalism
unlike the structuralists the
functionalists believed that
consciousness could not be broken down
into parts they believed it was a
continuous and changing mental process
because of this view the functionalists
asked a different question than the
structuralists instead of trying to
understand how the mind works
functionalists wanted to know why the
mind does certain things
why do we have emotions
why do we form relationships how do
human behaviors help us live in our
environment
functionalists tried to answer these
questions by directly observing the
human mind and human behavior
the neurologist sigmund freud created
his own theory of psychology in the late
1800s and early 1900s he is the founding
father of psychoanalysis which focuses
on the role of unconscious thoughts
feelings and memories in understanding
behavior
freud theorized that these unconscious
thoughts and forgotten memories
controlled literally everything that a
person does
in freudian psychology the psyche is
made up of three parts much like what
plato believed in ancient greece to
freud these three parts were the id or
instincts
the ego or reality and the super ego or
morality
so the id is the part of the psyche that
is full of primitive desires sexual and
aggressive drives as well as hidden
memories while the superego is the
psyche's moral conscience the ego's job
is to mediate between the other two
parts
all three parts working together is what
ultimately creates human behavior
unfortunately for freud the id ego and
superego are unobservable and cannot be
tested scientifically making this theory
more philosophy than psychology
very few modern psychologists fully
subscribed to freudian principles any
longer particularly his theory regarding
psychosexual stages but he was
incredibly influential in the
development of psychoanalysis as well as
the field of psychology itself and we
will circle back to go deeper with
freud's work later in the series
it was because of him that psychologists
began to study the unconscious mind and
how basic motivations and desires
influence behavior freud was also one of
the first people to understand the
importance of early childhood in shaping
adult behavior and personality and one
of the few people of his time to
willingly discuss pleasure and sexuality
in a scientific context
another school of thought arose in the
early 20th century which was called
behaviorism unlike other schools of
thought which focused on the conscious
and unconscious mind behaviorism
attempted to make psychology more
scientific by only studying observable
behavior
one of the earliest behaviorists was
ivan pavlov the physiologist who studied
classical conditioning in dogs this is
something we talked about while
discussing learning and memory in the
biopsychology series as we recall he
studied dogs who learned by repetition
to associate a ringing bell with meal
time and would eventually salivate when
they simply heard a bell in anticipation
of the associated meal
pavlov and other behaviorists thought
that psychology was the study of
behavior because you can't see or
measure consciousness or the mind you
can't use it as part of your scientific
study of psychology the behaviorists
were wrong about this as we will discuss
later
one can indeed study thoughts and
feelings although behaviorism isn't a
school of thought any longer it was
important in establishing how learning
occurs and focusing on observable
behavior is an important part of
psychology today
starting in the 1960s psychologists
began to wonder how the brain might be
involved in mental processes like
perception thinking memory and judgment
they still wanted to study observable
behaviors like the behaviorists but they
wanted to know what was going on inside
the mind and the brain this type of
psychology called cognitive psychology
is an active area of research today
cognitive psychologists study things
like perception decision making and
problem solving often using brain
imaging tools like mri to see what role
the brain plays in these behaviors
as we can see psychology has changed
immensely from its early beginnings in
philosophy with the ancient greeks to
the start of experimental psychology in
wundt's lab and it continues to change
and grow every year
unlike psychologists of the past today's
psychologists do not necessarily
identify with a particular school of
thought like functionalism structuralism
or behaviorism modern psychologists
instead typically have a particular
field of research that they focus on
like the cognitive psychologists we
mentioned before other fields include
developmental psychology which looks at
how the mind changes over a lifetime and
social psychology which asks how social
situations and cultures affect our
behavior
each of these fields are huge and
continuing to grow in this series we
will talk about a few main ideas from
each of these fields to give you an idea
of what kind of research is occurring in
psychology as a whole
for now let's move forward and talk
about how psychologists actually test
what the mind is doing
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[Music]
you