A brief history...

greenspun.com : LUSENET : History & Theory of Psychology : One Thread

Fantastic site Chris et all. Just a quick one, i have this brief paper to write on the historical developments in Psy and i'm just wondering: If you had to put these key psychologists in order of their influnces, would you agree that it would read like this?:

Functionalism: Wundt, James Psychoanalysis: Freud Associationism and Behaviourism: Thorndike; Pavlov; Watson; Gestalt: Humanistic: Rogers Cognative: ? Social: ?

If anyone thinks i'm well off the mark please let me know. Thanks.

-- Nick Gooding (dobsy02@hotmail.com), October 21, 2002

Answers

Wundt was not a functionalist at all. He was the inspiration for Titchener's "structuralism" (but, as we have learned over the last couple of decades, not a structuralist himself). Similarly, James was an inpriation to the functionalists, but not a functionalist himself. Functionalism began as a debate in 1896 between James Mark Baldwin and E.B. Titichener. The problem was picked up (more or less on Baldwin's side) by James Rowland Angell at Chicago, who with John Dewey and, later, Harvey Carr, turned it into a full fledged "school." (George Herbert Mead was involved too, but as a sociologist.).

There was a functionalist "school" at Columbia as well, involving folks like James McKeen Cattell (who developed early mental tests with Baldwin and Joseph Jastrow) and E.L. Thorndike. R.S. Woodworth later developed this strain of functionalism into his "dynamic psychology."

The behaviorist approach was invented and re-invented by many people in many places, but it was made into a "school" by John B. Watson in 1913 when his famous article was published in Psych. Rev. (which he edited at the time). Watson adopted some of Pavlov's terminology (which he had learned in a 1909 Psych. Bull. article about Pavlov by Yerkes & Morgulis). Pavlov himself was never a behaviorist, or any kind of psychologist, but regarded himself as a physiologist (a topic in which he won a Nobel Prize). Later behaviorists adopted and adapted Thorndike's "Law of Effect" (which was originally stated in functionalist terms, referring to the animal's state of "satisfaction" as I recall -- a decidedly non-behaviorist way of putting things). Other important behaviorists include Edwin Guthrie, Edward Tolman, Clark Hull, and B.F. Skinner. (Although behaviorism may be regarded as a latter-day *form* of associationism, associationism per se was a mentalist philosophy population in the 18th & 19th centuries, particularly in Great Britain).

Gestalt traces its roots back to the work of Ernst Mach, Franz Brentano, and Christian von Ehrenfels, but was made into a "school" in 1913 (the same year as behaviorism) in an article on the phi phenomenon by Max Werthemier. The other two "founders" of the Gestalt school were Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler.

I don't know to what degree Rogers can be considered the "founder" of humanism, though he was certainly an early major figure in the "third wave," as it was known. People such as Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Albert Ellis (and perhaps Viktor Frankl, Erich Fromm, and Fritz Perls) have equal claims as "founders"). Humanism was never unified "school." It was a pluralistic revolt against both psychoanalysis and behaviorism than emphasized human experience and freedom, but did so in many different -- often conflicting -- ways.

Cognitive and social psychology aren't so much "schools" as specialized areas of the discipline. Social dates back to the days of William McDougall (who wrote one of the first textbooks on the topic in 1919). Cognitive psychology grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. There is no one founder, though a number of people (several of them from outside of psychology) are credited with profoundly influencing its early development: Noam Chomsky (who flattened Skinner's account of language in a 1959 review of _Verbal Behavior_), John McCarthy (who invented the programming language LISP and is reputed to have given us the phrase "artificial intelligence"), Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (who wrote "Logic Theorist" and "General Problem Solver", the two most important early AI programs), Jerome Bruner (who conducted some well-known early problem-solving experiments), Urich Neisser (who wrote the first Cognitive Psychology textbook), and George Miller ("Magic number 7"). The British often add Kenneth Craik and F. Bartlett to this list as well. There were many others as well.

Hope this helps.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), October 21, 2002.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ