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  University of Idaho
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  Psychology Dept.
  University of Idaho

The Structuralists were one of the first groups as a particular school that studied psychology, and there are a couple of major players in this group. The first individual was Wundt, who is considered to be the first psychologist, and a true psychologist that we have today. Titchener was one of his students and he’s considered to be the first United States psychologist.

The Structuralists were the first real school or group of psychologists. These individuals were impressed by what was going on in the physical sciences, such as chemistry and biology. Especially chemistry; where people were breaking down complex things into simple things. The classic example is what we talked about last time, molecules to atoms. The Structuralists thought they could do the same kind of thing with mental thoughts.

The main idea was to basically try to figure out what was going on in someone’s head. To do that, we needed to think about what was the smallest subjective unit that was out there. For the Structuralists, as we see in slide three, these were the elementary elements of consciousness. Now, how do you get at these elementary elements of consciousness say the Structuralists? Well, what we have to do is kind of sit down and think and use what they called introspection. Basically what you would do is train an observer to reflect on and analyze a particular mental experience. It required someone who was very highly trained. This individual would sit down and basically think of a concept. The classic example would be a table, and as we see in slide four, that person would take the table and break it down into its basic elements. So it would include things such as the legs, the top, the back, etc. Then, what you would do is go to the next concept. That next concept might be the legs. So you would take the legs and you would break that down. It would long and cylindrical, it may be made of wood and on and on and on. Until ultimately you would get down to the very underlying basic concepts of what that leg, was. And so, you would go all the way back to the basic start of a concept.

Now for the Structuralists, as we see in slide five, there were some things that were extremely important. Number one, experience was extremely important with a concept. If you have no experience with some kind of particular concept, it’s very difficult to break it down.

Number two, the mind is passive. That is, when one thought comes, it is followed by another thought, and on and on and on. As we can see here, this is the classic model of Associationism that we talked about in earlier sections.

Number three, the structuralists believed that you could break down complex thoughts into very simple thoughts and study these. In essence, each thought was the sum of the other thoughts. That is, all the other thoughts that you had in your system. Finally they were empiricists. That is, they gathered information by observation and recording.

Now what was the problem with the Structuralist school? The classic thing that we see here is starting on slide six. Let’s take the concept of love. What I’d like you to do is stop the slide here for a minute and break down the concept of love. What is love? Break it down into its elementary elements. After you do that, then restart the material.

Well, a lot of people put down lots of different things for love. For example, they might put down intimacy, sex and lots and lots of other things such as caring, compassion and all these kinds of things. However, another group might put down a couple of those and put down other things, such as relationships, and children and on and on and on. And I’ll always put down that there are three main concepts of love. That is, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Ok, so which of those groups is right? What we would have, then, is a conference, we would have nine or ten different groups from nine or ten different labs all coming together. We would then have this debate about which concept of love was right. People would say, well, my concepts are better than your concepts and on and on. So the first problem is with the Structuralist’s model is that it had no reliability. That is, you should get the same results over and over and over again. That is, one lab should get the same kind of results as another lab. That did not happen in the Structuralist school. As a consequence, it really couldn’t test what it was supposed to be testing, so it had no validity as well. And as a result of these problems (and others), it received a lot of major criticism.

The first major group that that criticized the Structuralists is shown in slide seven. This is the second school of psychology and is called the Gestalt School. There are three major players in the Gestalt School, and this is not the same Gestalt psychology that we talk about in later times in more of the clinical area. The three major players in the Gestalt School were Kohler, Werner, Kofka and Wertheimer. This school developed as a reaction to the Structuralists and also the Behaviorists which we’ll talk about a little bit later.

They disagreed with the Structuralists that complex thoughts could be broken down into simple thoughts, and they also disagreed with the behaviorists that complex behavior could be broken down into simple behavior.

The problem with the Structuralists contend the Gestalt school proponents is this. When you break down the elementary elements of consciousness or break down elementary behaviors into its very small units, you take out the meaning. So for the Gestaltists, the saying developed, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” In addition, and as we see here on slide nine, the Gestaltists said you needed Naïve Observers: that is, people who were not trained. What the Gestalt group ended up trying to do was explain perception. Consequently, they developed lots of major and clever experiments that were major problems for the Structuralists. Ultimately, the Gestalt School gives rise to other fields of psychology, such as Sensation and Perception and Cognitive psychology.

In relation to attacking the Behaviorists, they tried to knock learning by examining insight learning where things basically just come to you out of the blue. However, overall, the Gestaltists had little impact on the Behaviorist school because of the objectivity that the behaviorists were going to show. We’ll talk about that in a little bit.

The Gestaltists also had major influences in social psychology, where as we see in slide 11, behavior of individuals or groups can be controlled by the whole situation. So what they argued was when you had lots of things together, you put some kind of new meaning to it, and as a result of that, you are able to determine and make new things.

Again, points to note. For the Gestaltists, on slide 12, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I’ll give you a final example and see if you can come up with the product. Here we go; what is this substance?

Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose, caramel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors and caffeine.

Now if you might think about that, a lot of things come to mind. However, if we could add one more word to the product , “Rum” what do come up with? Well, the first thing is that it’s a Coke. And when you say Coke, there is a perception that you develop. When you put rum with that, a rum and Coke, you develop a perception or a thought about what a rum and Coke is. However, if you put something different to that, such as a rum and Pepsi, it’s just not quite the same. It’s a little different from the idea that you have of a rum and Pepsi. A rum and Coke is totally different. And if you have consumed both products and tested them side by side, you will know what I’m talking about.

So, as a school, the Gestalt School did not have much impact at it’s time, but it had major influences in other areas that will be used by other psychology areas later in the future.

Now a third school also developed around this time and this, as we see on slide 13, is the Functionalism School or the Functionalists. There are several major players. They include people like James, Hall, Cattell, and Angel. They also developed as a reaction to the Structuralists and were basically a United States phenomenon.

As we see in slide 14, the Functionalists weren’t really concerned with the elementary elements of consciousness. They were more concerned with how the mind works. What mediated between the external world and the internal events that were located inside the body? That is, what is the function of things? What is the function of the cortex, the hypocampus, the hypothalamus, and on and on and on. In addition to that, from a little less physiological measure, how does an organism adapt and survive? What are the things that allow an organism to adapt within its environment? That is, what is the function of certain things, such as your thumb or a big toe or whatever it may be. As a result, the functionalists examined both humans and animals to try to determine what the function of some particular thing was.

And as we see in slide 15, the key for the Functionalists is, “What is the function of some behavior?” We could take an example of that. What is the function of love? So the importance is not on the components that make up the behavior, but what is the function of that particular behavior. What is the function of doing something? As a result, they studied real life events and ultimately they allowed psychology to be applied into industry, education, medicine and many other areas, and that is where it’s primarily used today.

The next major model that develops in reaction to the Structuralists is the Behaviorist School. And as we see in slide 16, there are many players that will be involved in this school. There’s some that I’ll just list here, Watson, Rescorla, Hull and many, many, many, many others. But Behaviorism, as a school of psychology, did not really develop until Watson’s publication of “Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It.” For Watson, as we see in slide 17, the only legitimate object of psychological study was objective behavior. That is, what you can see. Don’t give me this elementary element of consciousness stuff, says the Behaviorists. How do you know what it is? It’s not objective. Science really can’t study the mind. You can’t study consciousness, images, or whatever because they’re not really observable. Instead what you should try to do is study objective behavior. So the goal for Watson and behaviorists, as we see in slide 18, was to make psychology an objective science, and discover particular laws that could predict the behavior. Ultimately if we can predict it, we can control behavior.

As a result, we can use animals to discover the basic laws. Based on the concepts of evolution, if the same laws hold in animals or we discover a law in animals, it should hold in humans. That’s exactly what we have found. In addition to that, says the behaviorists, we can break complex behaviors down into simple behaviors, not subjective thoughts, but behaviors. And when you break these complex behaviors down into simple ones, you can find basic things that work with that.

Now Watson’s model; Watson does not deny that the mind exists. In fact, the mind does exist for Watson. The key here with the behaviorists and Watson in particular, is that you cannot study it objectively. And until you can study it objectively, you shouldn’t really put much emphasis in studying it at all.

Now other individuals after Watson came along, and some individuals before Watson will also have an impact in the Behaviorist school. These are the classic theorists in what we will call Instrumental Conditioning. The Instrumental Conditioning folks are Behaviorists, but they concentrate in a particular area of psychology and that will be called instrumental conditioning. As we can see on slide 20, there are several major players that occur in this group. They include Thorndike and Hull, which will have a huge impact, and their students Spence, Miller and Dollard and many others during that time.

Basically, instrumental conditioning focused on how stimuli influenced responding. What was the thing that influenced the particular response that was out there?

Now in addition to this group, other people came along who were also behaviorists. These are called the Radical Behaviorists. Not from the sense that they were far out on the extreme, but on the sense of what they were trying to propose. As you can see here, these are individuals like Skinner, Estes, Premack, and many, many others. They are also called the Neobehaviorists, a la, new behaviorists. They, in essence, recapitulate a lot of the things that Watson was talking about that went away with the Instrumental Conditioning theorists (primarily Hull, Tolman, and others).

The focus of the Neobehaviorists was instead of looking at the stimuli and having their impact on behavior, what they focused was on the consequences of the behavior. What follows a particular response. That is, the rewards and punishers. This group of psychologists will have huge, huge impacts in all areas of psychology. In addition to that, they will have major impacts in areas such as education and business and on and on and on. We will talk about the these psychologists in great detail later in the course, but their impact in psychology has been absolutely tremendous, and has really been one of the things that’s made clinical psychology what it is today.

The next group, are also behaviorists but they have a different take on things. These are related to what we call social learning or observational learning types of folks. As we see in slide 24, the major player here is Bandura. Basically, what Bandura contends is that a lot of the learning we do occurs through observing other things, or observing other people. The other major name for this field is ‘Modeling.” What does the model do and then what do you do?

The next major group of behaviorists emphasize different things. These are the Cognitive Learning Behaviorists. What the cognitive psychologists emphasize are the internal processes of the behavior. That is, don’t give me this stuff about the stimuli or the consequences, really what’s the most important thing is what is happening inside the person. What are those variables inside the person that caused us to do things? Thus, things such as personality variables become very important. What’s your personality like. Will that make you do something or will that not make you do something. Or internal versus external locus of control, attributes, and how the mind, in essence, influences the behavior are the things that’s the most important.

The problem with the cognitive models of behavioral psychology is that they often use correlational data to make causal inferences, and there’s a problem with correlational data. In addition to that, concentrating only on the mind and not the behavior doesn’t always work. For example, if you’re trying to increase work performance, working with a cognitive model and changing a person’s internal expectations and on and on and on, oftentimes have much poorer results than just giving you an extra five bucks for every widget that you make. So as a result, in some areas of industry and other places, cognitive models do not work very well. We will again talk about cognitive models in great detail as we get later in the course.

The thing, though, about cognitive psychology is that it is currently the dominant field of psychology today despite its problems.

The next major model is as we see in slide 28, is the cognitive information processing models of learning. These are a little bit different than what we’ve talked about before, and have lots of different players as well. This field comes out of a lot of the early memory literature, and people such as Chomsky, Broadbent, Craik, and many, many others will have major contributions in this area.

As we said before, and as we see in slide 29, most of the information processing models primarily come out of the memory literature and what they’re emphasizing again are the internal processes of a particular behavior. Again, what happens inside the organism or the person is important. But the focus is not the function of a particular structure, although some people talk about that. The focus is more of what is going on, that is, the processing systems that are working in the systems.

This area of psychology has made major impacts in how the mind works. For example, we understand what’s going on within the system such as how much work that you can do, how much your mind can do before it collapses, or before you begin making mistakes. As a result, this area has made major contributions in industry and design. The classic example is an airplane cockpit where the pilot has to a wide variety of different things. If you make the pilot do too many things at one time, then the pilot makes mistakes. So what you have to do is break down tasks in the hierarchy, or you have a co-pilot in the system, or you develop a computer to take care of some of the tasks of the flight while the pilot is flying the plane.

So in essence, these major schools of psychology are what we’re going to begin talking about. Not primarily within the Structuralist model or the Gestalt models, but within some of the more traditional learning models. We will continue from the late 1800s through the present, These areas are really what made psychology develop into what it is today.

So the next time when we get together, we’ll begin talking about an early model of psychology. That will be classical conditioning. So until that time, you have yourself a good day and we will see you soon.