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The general public loved phrenology, which became enormously popular during the 19th century.
Gall and Spurzheim spread the faith throughout Europe, and Spurzheim and others exported it to the United States
Especially popular in US
Although Gall believed the size of a person's faculties was an indication of native traits, Spurzheim argued that faculties could be affected by nurture To Spurzheim, the brain was analogous to a muscle—its faculties could be exercised and strengthened through education and self-help
Provided a seemingly scientific basis for the traditional American belief that anyone, regardless of heritage, could "pull oneself up by one's bootstraps" and accomplish anything in life
Also was consistent with the American idea that everyone is a unique person, possessing his or her own special talents
Other appealing elements: If individual differences could be identified and measured, then a person's strengths and weaknesses could be known and he or she could be counseled about careers, mate selection, and so on Its promise to deliver practical applications to improve daily living.
Although the scientific and more educated community rejected phrenology rather quickly, the public never seemed to tire of it
Circumstances in 19th-century Germany were especially conducive to the development of a new and more scientific approach to psychology.
Beginning in the middle of the century, and originating at the University of Berlin, German universities developed a distinctive philosophy of education known as Wissenschaft (translates as "scientific,")
philosophy encouraged scholars to take a scientific approach to the examination of nature.
academic culture developed that established academic freedom for professors to pursue their research interests without fear of administrative or political censure.
Students were free to wander from one university to another, and earning a degree resulted more from passing special exams and defending a research thesis than from completing a specific curriculum.
The success of the physiologists reinforced the Wissenschaft emphasis on a research-based atmosphere and contributed directly to the growth of the new experimental approach to psychology throughout Germany, especially at Leipzig.
The methods being developed by the physiologists, "involving measurement, replicability, public data, and controlled tests" were being applied to the study of the nervous system, but they might just as well be applied to other aspects of human behavior.
Immediate Conscious Experience
Wundt's new science involved studying immediate conscious experience under controlled laboratory conditions.
Self-observation - Traditional philosophical attempt to analyze life experiences through introspective reflection
Internal perception - Narrower process than self-observation, responding to precisely controlled stimuli
Investigated in the lab
Higher Mental Process
higher mental processes (e.g., language), as well as social and cultural phenomena, had to be studied through nonlaboratory methods (e.g., observation).
precise control & replication not possible
Observation, case study, etc.
Thinking, language, culture, social psychology 10 volume Volker (roughly meaning cultural/social/communal/ethnic)
Believed cultures could be arranged on a continuum (primitive to advanced)
most of the research concerned basic sensory and perceptual processes (i.e. positive and negative afterimages, visual contrast, illusions, and the perception of size, depth, and motion).
The lab also produced a large number of "mental chronometry" studies, which attempted to measure the amount of time taken for various mental processes (aka reaction time).
Recent historical scholarship has uncovered serious distortions in the traditional accounts of Wundt's ideas.
Rather than being a structuralist, seeking to reduce consciousness to its basic elements, Wundt was more interested in the mind's ability to actively organize information.
One of his main interests was the process of apperception—an active, meaningful, and attentive perception of some event.
He called his system voluntarism to reflect the active nature of mental processing. The distortions stem from Boring's famous history text.
G. E. Müller and his students significantly extended contemporary research on color vision, the psychophysics research of Fechner, and the memory research of Ebbinghaus.
By adding introspection to the nonsense syllable experiments, he argued that memory was an active process, not the passive buildup of associative strength.
Whereas Ebbinghaus concluded that associations were formed automatically and mechanically as a result of stimulus factors such as the number of repetitions and list length, and that the memorizer played a relatively passive role in the process, Müller believed that the individual forming the associations played a more active role.
The conclusion resulted from a procedural modification—Müller added introspection to the memory process, and his observers reported that they engaged in a number of active strategies to learn the nonsense syllables.
Grouping nonsense syllables in clusters, organizing them by different degrees of meaning, and in general doing much more than just associating them by contiguity
This outcome fore-shadows the modern view of memory, which assumes the learner is actively involved in the memorizing process.
He was the first to identify retroactive inhibitions and he invented the memory drum
Ales Hrdlicka & Smithsonian
Early 1900s - Smithsonian anthropological division pushed standardizing measurement and observation of human characteristics
Objective measurements based on bones, etc and make conclusions on characteristics and human nature
Hrdlicka collected crania, brains, skeletons and consisted of general observations
Called for aids and instruments to assist in the measure of senses, pressure/traction force, to observe pulse, respiration and temperature, running, hunger, thirst, etc.
Focus on skin color differences (used Broca's 1879 skin color standards as reference)
White skin, straight hair was the reference point, which all other colors/textures deviated from
Became difficult to visually classify people due to mixed ancestry, and other "misleadings", such as wigs, skin/hair dying, hair straightening, etc.
Sullivan (1928) called for "solicitation of hearsay info"
Recorded evidence such as "neighbor says he is part Negro" or "looks part white"
US Census Bureau classified anybody with African ancestry as "negro"
Disregard for ethnic subdivisions, point of origin, mixed races, etc. (assumption that all black people are the same)
Eventually classification of black indiv. was broken down a little to "mulatto", "quadroon", "octroon"
Mulatto - originated from term "mule", which was a horse+donkey & couldn't produce offspring (racist term, implies breeding of pure and of a "jackass" and also thought that two mulattos could not have children)
Quadroon - Offspring of mulatto and a white person (3/4 white)
Octroon - Offspring of quadroon and a white person (7/8 white) No official term for a mulatto and a black person's offspring
Herkovits believed in sameness among humans —> black & white culture "were the same pattern, only different shade"