PS101 Chapter 1: chapter 1.docx
Document Summary
Lesson 1: history of psychology, structuralism, wilhelm wundt: first person to announce to make psychology a science. Concentrate in sensation perception, reaction times, imagery, and attention, avoided learning, personality, and abnormal behavior. Wundt wanted to break down the structure of consciousness to understand how it is built. Introspection is a systematic self-observation of one"s own conscious experience. ix) as practiced by the structuralists, introspection required training to make the subject the person being studied more objective and more aware. Consciousness, he argues, consists of a continuous flow of thoughts. So behaviourists attempted to boil human behaviour down to simple processes as well (in contrast to the complexity of the consciousness as studied by wundt and. James): the power of the scientific method rested on the idea of verifiability. In principle, scientific claims can always be verified (or disproved) by anyone who is able and willing to make the required observations.
