The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  Of the three methods of experimental measurement that he used, he had borrowed two from predecessors and perfected them, and invented the third himself. Until then, no one had ever used such careful, quantitative, and precisely controllable methods to explore psychological responses. His methods were soon widely adopted, and are in constant use today in every laboratory of psychophysical research.

  One is the method of limits, which Fechner called the “method of just noticeable differences.” To determine the threshold of a stimulus, the experimenter presents stimuli one at a time, starting with the most minimal and increasing the magnitude until the subject can perceive them. To determine the j.n.d., the experimenter presents a “standard” stimulus and a “comparison” stimulus, increasing the difference by small steps until the subject says it is perceptible.

  A second is the method of constant stimuli, which Fechner called the “method of right and wrong cases.” The experimenter presents identical stimuli time and again—either single ones at the threshold, or pairs of stimuli that are very similar. The subject replies “Yes” (meaning that he perceives it, or that the two are different), or “No” (he does not perceive it, or the two are not different). The subject’s responses yield averages, and these indicate how likely it is that, at any given stimulus level or difference between stimuli, the subject will perceive the stimulus or the difference between two stimuli.

  The third, Fechner’s original contribution, is called the method of adjustment, which he called the “method of average error.” Either the experimenter or the subject adjusts the comparison stimulus until it seems (to the subject) identical with the standard stimulus. There is always some error, however minuscule, to one side or the other. Every error is recorded, and after many trials the average error is computed; it, too, is a measure of the j.n.d. This method established the useful principle that measuring the variability of data can be as informative as measuring the central tendency.

  In 1860, Fechner published the fruits of his work in the two-volume Elements of Psychophysics. He was fifty-nine, an age at which scientists rarely produce their most original work; Elements, however, was truly original and had an immediate impact. Interest was intense and wide-spread—not in the panpsychism it espoused but in its experimental and quantitative methodology. As Boring once said of Fechner’s failure and triumph, “He attacked the ramparts of materialism and was decorated for measuring sensation.”40 Some psychologists, to be sure, regarded psychophysical methodology as a dreary topic. Years later the great William James wrote:

  It would be terrible if even such a dear old man as this could saddle our science forever with his patient whimsies, and, in a world so full of more nutritious objects of attention, compel all future students to plough through the difficulties, not only of his own works, but of the still drier ones written in his refutation.41

  But many others did not share this view. Even though debate raged over the validity of Fechner’s assumption that all j.n.d.’s are equal, his methods were generally considered a genuine breakthrough. The time was ripe for quantitative research on the relation between stimulus and response; almost at once many psychologists began using Fechner’s three methods, which firmly linked the body’s physical mechanisms to the subjective experiences they aroused.42 (Fechner himself, though he continued to write in defense of psychophysics, devoted most of the rest of his long life to aesthetics, paranormal phenomena, statistics, and panpsychic philosophy.)

  Later psychologists have found fault with or even disproven every one of his findings, yet his methods are not only still useful but fundamental to sensory measurement. Boring sums up Fechner’s paradoxical achievement:

  Without Fechner… there might still have been an experimental psychology… There would, however, have been little of the breath of science in the experimental body, for we hardly recognize a subject as scientific if measurement is not one of its tools. Fechner, because of what he did and the time at which he did it, set experimental quantitative psychology off upon the course which it has followed. One may call him the “founder” of experimental psychology, or one may assign that title to Wundt. It does not matter. Fechner had a fertile idea which grew and brought forth fruit abundantly.43

  * That is, just above and forward of the ears.

  * The term Professor Extraordinarius referred to an unsalaried or low-salaried appointment, valued largely for its prestige. Sometimes, students attending lectures by a Professor Extraordinarius would pay him fees.

  * The so-called primary colors of pigments are red, blue, and yellow (or, more precisely, magenta, cyan, and yellow). Pigments absorb as well as reflect light, and the results of mixing them are therefore different from those of mixing lights.

  FIVE

  First Among Equals:

  Wundt

  As Good a Birth Date as Any

  According to most authorities, psychology was born on a December day in 1879. All that had gone before, from Thales to Fechner, had been the evolution of its ancestors.

  The birth, a quiet affair, went unheralded. At the University of Leipzig that day, in a small room on the third floor of a shabby building called Konvikt (“hostel” or “retreat”), a middle-aged professor and two younger men were setting up apparatus for an experiment. On a table they positioned a chronoscope (a brass clocklike mechanism with a hanging weight and two dials), a “sounder” (a metal stand with an elevated arm from which a ball would fall onto a platform), and a telegrapher’s key, battery, and rheostat. They then wired together the five pieces of apparatus, the circuitry being no more complicated than that of a present-day beginning electric train set.1

  The three were Professor Wilhelm Wundt, a long-faced, austere, densely bearded man of forty-seven, and two young students of his, Max Friedrich, a German, and G. Stanley Hall, an American. The set-up was for Friedrich’s benefit; with it he was going to collect data for a Ph.D. dissertation on “the duration of apperception”—the time lag between the subject’s recognition that he has heard the ball hit the platform and his pressing of the telegraph key.2 It is not on record who made the ball drop that day and who sat at the key, but with the first clack of the ball on the platform, the click of the key, and the registration of elapsed time on the chronoscope, the modern era of psychology had begun.

  One could argue, of course, that it began in the 1830s, with Weber’s work on just noticeable differences, or in 1850, with Helmholtz’s measurement of the speed of nerve transmission and Fechner’s first psychophysical experiment, or in 1868, with Donders’s reaction-time studies. Or even, as Robert Watson has suggested, in 1875, since in that year the University of Leipzig granted Wundt the use of the room in Konvikt to store and demonstrate his apparatus, and Harvard University made a small room in Lawrence Hall available to William James for his experiments.3

  But 1879 is the year recognized by most authorities, and for good reason. That was when the first experiment was conducted in the room in Konvikt that Wundt thenceforth called his “private institute.”4 (In German universities, a formally organized laboratory is called an institute.) Within a few years the laboratory had become a mecca for would-be psychologists and was considerably enlarged and designated the university’s official Psychologisches Institut.

  Largely because of the institute, Wundt is considered not just one of the founders but the principal founder of modern psychology. It was there that he conducted his own psychological research and trained many graduate students in his laboratory methods and theories, and from there that he sent forth cadres of new psychologists—he personally supervised nearly two hundred dissertations—to the universities of Europe and America. In addition, he wrote a number of scholarly articles and massive tomes that established psychology as a field of science with an identity of its own. He himself was the first scientist who can be properly called a psychologist rather than a physiologist, physicist, or philosopher with an interest in psychology.

  Perhaps most important, Wundt restored the study of cons
cious mental processes to psychology. They had been its core from the time of the Greek philosophers, and still were for the English associationists, who, like all their predecessors, explored them through the traditional method of introspection. But the German mechanists, seeking to make psychology scientific, had rejected introspection on the grounds that it was subjective and dealt with unobservable phenomena. A scientific approach to psychological phenomena, they held, dealt only with the physical aspects of neural responses and, in the words of one of them, was a “psychology without a soul.”5

  It is true that long before the first experiment in Wundt’s laboratory both Fechner and Donders had used experimental means to measure certain mental responses. But it was Wundt who fully developed the methods that would be used by the next two generations of psychologists, and it was he who became the leading proponent of the view that mental processes could be experimentally studied. He had, in fact, begun espousing this view as early as 1862, in the introduction to his Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception:

  The importance that experimentation will eventually have in psychology can hardly be visualized to its full extent as yet. It has often been held that the area of sensation and perception is the only one in which the use of the experimental method is possible… [but] surely this is a prejudice. As soon as the psyche is viewed as a natural phenomenon, and psychology as a natural science, the experimental methods must also be capable of full application to this science.

  He drew an analogy between psychology and chemistry. Just as the chemist learns from experiments not only how a substance is affected by others but also what its own chemical nature is,

  in precisely the same way in psychology…it would be quite wrong to say that the experiment determines only the action of [stimuli] on the psyche. The behavior of the psyche in response to the external influences is determined as well, and by varying those external influences we arrive at the laws to which the psychic life as such is subject. The sensory stimuli are, for us, only experimental tools, to put it succinctly. By creating manifold changes in the sensory stimuli while continually studying the psychic phenomena, we apply the principle that is the essence of the experimental method; as [Francis] Bacon put it, “We change the circumstances in which the phenomena occur.”6

  As many as a dozen years before the first experiment in his laboratory, Wundt was known as a bridge builder who sought to link physiology and mental processes. Word of his views had even reached America, where in 1867 the young William James wrote to a friend:

  It seems to me that perhaps the time has come for psychology to begin to be a science—some measurements have already been made in the region lying between the physical changes in the nerves and the appearance of consciousness (in the shape of sense perceptions)… Helmholtz and a man named Wundt at Heidelberg are working on it, and I hope…to go to them in the summer.7

  (James did not manage to meet Wundt that summer but did so many years later, by which time he himself was a leading figure in psychology.)

  Some contemporary historians, critical of the Great Man approach to history, would say that the new science of psychology was created not by Wundt but by the general social and intellectual milieu of the mid-nineteenth century and by the state of development of the behavioral and social sciences. The animal psychology included in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (and later in his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals), the sociological studies of Auguste Comte, the growing number of reports by anthropologists on the life, language, and ideas of preliterate peoples, and other related factors had created an atmosphere in which it was possible to think that human nature could be scientifically studied.

  It is true that no Wundt could have arisen to launch experimental psychology in Tertullian’s time or Aquinas’s or even Descartes’; there were no batteries, telegraph keys, and chronoscopes, much less a view of human behavior as a set of phenomena that could be investigated by experiment. Yet in any field of knowledge, even at the right time and place there spring up not a thousand great men, and not a hundred, but a very few. Or even one: one Galileo, one Newton, one Darwin, inspiring thousands of lesser men (and, later, women) who learn from them and are able to push farther on. And one Wundt, who had the genius and drive to become the guiding light of the new psychology in Europe and the United States.

  Yet today he seems a strange and paradoxical figure. Despite the immense reputation and influence he long had, his name is now all but unknown except to psychologists and scholars; most laypersons who can easily identify Freud, Pavlov, and Piaget have no idea who Wundt was. Even people who do know his place in history cannot agree on what his main ideas were; summaries of his system by various scholars seem to summarize different Wundts. And while for some time most psychologists have felt that Wundt’s psychology was narrow in scope, a few historians of the field have recently re-evaluated his work and pronounced him a psychologist of great vision and breadth.8 (It may be indicative that his Outlines of Psychology was still being republished as late as 1998.) To some degree, what makes him an enigma is that he was the epitome of the nineteenth-century German scholar: encyclopedic, dogged, authoritarian, and, in his own eyes, all but infallible—an ideal and a personality hard to comprehend today.

  The Making of the First Psychologist

  As puzzling as anything about Wundt is how the child could have become the man. In his boyhood and youth he seemed utterly lacking in the drive or intellectual capacity to become even modestly successful, let alone an outstanding figure in science and the world of higher education. He appeared, in fact, to be a dolt.

  Born in 1832 in Neckarau, near Mannheim, in southwestern Germany, Wundt came from a family of intellectual achievers. His father was a village Lutheran pastor, but among his forebears were university presidents, physicians, and scholars.9 For many years Wundt showed no trace of intellectual gifts and had no interest in learning; when he was a child, his only close friend was a retarded boy, and in school he was a habitual daydreamer. One day when Wundt was in first grade, his father visited the school as an observer and was so infuriated by his son’s wool-gathering that he slapped his face in front of his classmates. Wundt never forgot the incident, but it did nothing to change him; even at thirteen, attending a Catholic gymnasium at Bruchsal, he was still such a dreamer that his homeroom teacher would publicly slap him, and another teacher would mock him in front of the other students—mostly ignorant farm boys who were themselves no models of scholarship. The teachers’ punishments did no good; he failed the year and disgraced himself.

  Wundt’s parents then sent him to the Lyceum in Heidelberg. There, among students whom he found more congenial, he gained control over his daydreaming and progressed through the school years, though he never became more than an average student. When he graduated, he had no idea what he wanted to do, but since his father had died and his mother had only a meager pension, he had to prepare for a profession in which he could earn a decent living. He chose medicine and enrolled at the University of Tübingen; out of his mother’s sight, he played and idled a year away, learning almost nothing.

  But when he came home at the end of the year and realized that there was barely enough money to get him through the next three years, he underwent an astonishing change. He started medical training over again in the fall at the University of Heidelberg, threw himself into his studies with such dedication and zeal that he completed his training in three years, and ranked first in the medical state board examinations in 1855.

  Along the way, however, he had discovered that clinical practice did not appeal to him but that he was fascinated by the science courses in the curriculum. After receiving his M.D. summa cum laude in 1855, he spent a semester at the University of Berlin under Johannes Müller and Emil Du Bois-Reymond, and in 1857 was appointed lecturer in physiology at Heidelberg. The following year, when the illustrious Hermann Helmholtz went there to establish a physiology institute, Wundt applied for the job of his laboratory assistant and got i
t. His work for Helmholtz further focused his interest on physiological psychology.

  Still in his mid-twenties and still single, Wundt had become a thorough workaholic. In addition to his laboratory duties, he lectured, wrote textbooks to augment his income, carried on his own research on sense perception, and began drafting a major book on that subject, the Contributions, published in 1862. In it, Wundt, at only thirty, threw down the gauntlet to senior philosophers and mechanist physiologists by asserting that psychology could be a science only if it was based on experimental findings, and that the mind could indeed be experimentally investigated.

  In 1864, Wundt was promoted to associate professor and resigned as Helmholtz’s assistant to concentrate on his own interests. No longer having access to Helmholtz’s laboratory, he created one at home, where he collected and fabricated the necessary apparatus and conducted his own psychological experiments. He continued to teach experimental physiology, but his courses came to contain more and more psychological material. Not until his late thirties did he stray from his work long enough to court a young woman and become engaged to her, although for financial reasons they had to postpone their marriage.

  Helmholtz left Heidelberg in 1871. Wundt seemed the logical successor to his chair, but while the university assigned him to many of Helmholtz’s duties, it appointed him only Professor Extraordinarius at a quarter of Helmholtz’s pay. The promotion enabled Wundt and his fiancée to marry, but he now worked longer and harder than ever on his book, Principles of Physiological Psychology, hoping that it would enable him to escape from Heidelberg.

  It did. In Part One—it appeared in two parts, in 1873 and 1874— Wundt immodestly wrote, “The work I here present to the public is an attempt to mark out a new domain of science.” It brought him the acclaim he sought, the offer of a chair of philosophy at the University of Zürich, and a year later the offer of a much better chair at the University of Leipzig.