Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) is described as the father of psychology being the first person to study psychology separately from philosophy and biology. He studied medicine and later worked as a lecturer and a physiologist at Heidelberg University and later moved to Leipzig University. He established the first experimental laboratory on psychology. He wrote the first textbook on psychology entitled “Principles of Physiological Psychology.” The main contribution by Wundt was in the area of methodology rather than the field of theoretical frameworks. He developed and improved the existing techniques used in other fields. He applied a method that helped him investigate conscious processes based on their context by experiment and introspection. During the experiments, he was concerned about the immediate contents of experiences which were not modified by either reflection or abstraction.
During the first years of Wundt, he carried out reaction-time studies in his psychology laboratory which were the first examples of coherent research programs. The experiments were directly related to psychological aspects and they also involved other interlocking researches. According to him, experiments were ways of asking and answering theoretical questions. He argued that experiments arose due to a rise in demand for causal explanations. The argument is the basis of experiments today whereby demand for explanations of psychological causality trigger psychologist to carry out research.
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Wilhelm Wundt’s differentiated psychological experiments are based on differences in theoretical questions. Therefore, they are expected to answer based on theoretical questions and not based on technical procedures. He argued that physiological experiments were designed to answer physiological questions and psychological experiments designed to answer the psychological question. For example, the difference between the experiments on reaction time by Wilhelm Wundt in his psychological laboratory. During the experiment, he wanted to test whether a person can perceive two stimuli at the same time. He was the subject and stimuli were sound of a bell and a sight of a pendulum. He concluded that a person cannot attend simultaneously to two stimuli. According to him, this was a psychological experiment which was based on the theoretical context.
He carried out a conscious experience experiment whereby he concluded that there was voluntarism. It is an idea that the mind can organize the contents of the mind into higher-level thoughts. He argued that conscious experience could be scientifically studied through experiments that used introspection. In this experiment, there was no causal affair by self-examination which would be largely practiced. During his experiments, he allowed observations that were influenced by past experiences and also personal interpretation. The result of those studies would be then used in developing theories of conscious thoughts. While studying the human mind, Wundt applied reductionism. By that, he believed that consciousness would be broken down into smaller parts without compromising the state of the whole.
Wilhelm Wundt had highly trained assistants who would be given stimuli such as ticking metronome and later after the experience they would reflect on it. They would give feedback on how the stimulus they had taken made them feel and think. The experiments were done in a controlled environment where the same surrounding, stimulus, and instructions were given to the participants.
Edward Bradford Titchener was a student of Wilhelm Wundt and therefore their systems of psychology had some similarities. However, when Titchener was translating Wundt’s writing from German to English he only wrote he agreed with. While Wundt focused on the organization of the mental elements, Titchener developed a new approach that he called Structuralism. According to Wundt, the mind could arrange mental elements. He focused his experiments on the synthesis of processes responsible for the arrangement of mental elements. Titchener’s goals were to describe the combination of basic elements, give a description of the components of consciousness in basic elements, and offer an explanation of the connections of consciousness to the central nervous system.
Wilhelm Wundt referred to his experiments as voluntarism while Edward Titchener came up with the term structuralism. Wundt’s theories were more holistic than those introduced by Titchener. The early works of Wundt helped in the separation of psychology from biology and philosophy while Titchener led to the establishment of the first school of psychology. The methods that Titchener used to study the structures of the mind were subjective when he used introspection and hence the results lacked reliability. Structuralism focused on internal behavior which was not directly visible and therefore could not be measured accurately.
Although Wundt recognized mental elements and contents consciousness, his main concern was how they were organized. His conclusion was not based on findings of a study but rather he believed that the mind had arranged the elements. Contrary, Titchener’s main focus was on mental elements and he believed that the linkage was mechanical through association. He disagreed with Wundt’s idea of apperception. He was committed to avoiding stimulus error which was confusing the object under observation or stimulus with the mental process being studied.
The limitation of introspection is that it alters the conscious experience that it intends to study because the mind cannot study itself. The high chances trained observers to give biased results made the findings and conclusion of the experiments unreliable. Structuralism had a superficial approach when experimenting because it would not be possible to capture the whole experience through a combination of elements.
It is important to emphasize that Wundt’s system was not structuralism because his method was less scientific. He allowed people to be biased based on their experiences and therefore his findings were inconsistent. Another reason is that structuralism aimed at describing basic elements while Wundt focused on organizing mental elements and he concludes that the mind could arrange mental elements.
