Psychology was brought out from the warfare of mentalistic-mechanistic
point of view. It was defined as science of behavior
Psychology is the ‘Science of Behavior’.
Meaning of ‘Science’:
Science maybe defined as a systematic body of
knowledge which maybe verified at any time by any number of individuals under
given conditions.
Science is engaged in discovering those
conditions and factors that determine or cause the occurrence of a particular
event using scientific method of experimentation and observation.
In the
same way psychology as a science uses the scientific methods to collect data
about individuals and groups to analyze and predict their behavior. We try to
find out new truth in psychology. We deal with the observable behavior and
establish facts by objective proof or evidences.
Psychology
as a science helps us to understand, control and predict behavior. It uses
experimental method, by controlling variable, checking and rechecking findings
and stating its results in objective terms which can be verified and understood
by any one in a given condition. It is
established beyond doubt that psychology is a science but question arises, is
it a biological science or behavioral science?
Psychology
as a biological science began with the study of physiology in Germany during
later half of nineteenth century. In modern times psychologists are engaged to
search biological determinants of motivation, memory, learning and mental
disorders. We can draw the conclusion that psychology is biological science.
Psychology
as a behavioral science aims to study the behavior in groups. Human beings are
by nature social they live in social situation from birth to death. Their
personality is shaped by the interaction of external social environment. In
modern psychology we study how society influences the behavior of an individual
and vice versa. How individual learns in group. We know that the behavior of an
individual is studied in terms of social interaction. Psychology as a social
science studies scientifically cultural and social problems of the society.
Psychology has successfully collected enormous data on problems of minority
groups, group dynamics etc, and has devised measured to solve social problems.
Thus we see that psychology is a behavioral science.
Meaning
of Behavior:
The term behavior is popularized by J.B
Watson, an American psychologist who defined behavior as an action which can be
seen and observed in an objective way. The meaning of behavior includes
internal and external stimulation both. Behavior is observed and also measured
in an objective manner.
Science can be divided into two broader
categories.
1)
Normative science.
2)
Positive science.
In which
category should psychology be included?
Psychology studies facts and describes
‘what is’. It does not concern with ‘ought to’ as emphasized by Normative
sciences like Ethics, logic and philosophy etc. therefore it is quite proper to
describe psychology as a Positive science.
What kind of
positive science is psychology?
1.
It is not as perfect as the sciences like physics,
mathematics, chemistry etc, is. It is a behavior science which deals with the
behavior of organisms.
2.
This behavior is quite dynamic and unexpected. We are
not consistent in our behavior. On the other hand, physical reactions which are
studied by the natural sciences are always predicted. This makes the study in
natural sciences more exact, accurate and objective. Psychology has not yet
attained this status of these sciences although it is trying hard to be more
objective, exact and accurate. Therefore it is better to name it as developing
positive science.
Definition of
Psychology:
“Psychology
is a developing positive science which enables us to study the behavior of a
living organism in relation to his environment”.
The History
of Psychology:
The Roots of
Psychology:
Philosophical
Roots of Psychology
Scientific
Roots of Psychology
The Roots of
Psychology:
Psychology’s
roots are in philosophy and science. When physiologists of the late nineteenth
century began to use scientific methods to study the mind, psychology became an
independent scientific discipline. As a science, psychology relies on objective,
systematic observation as its primary source of knowledge. Philosophy relies
more on reasoning. While philosophers argue about reality, scientists make
predictions called hypotheses and test them in the physical world, fully
accepting the possibility of being wrong.
The
Philosophical roots of Psychology:
The
philosophical roots of psychology reach back to the philosophers of ancient
Greece, most notably Plato (427-347 B.C) and Aristotle (384-322 B.C): who were
especially interested in the origin of knowledge. Plato, who was renowned for
both his physical and mental prowess, excelling as both a soldier and an
intellectual, was suspicious of the senses as a source of knowledge. He
believed that our senses can deceive us, as in illusions such as the bent appearance
of a straight stick that has been partially inserted into a pool of water.
Plato also believed that human beings enter the world with an inborn knowledge
of reality, a position called nativism. He believed that reasoning provided
access to this knowledge, a philosophical approach to knowledge called
rationalism. Plato used reason to study a variety of psychological topics,
including- dreams, perception and mental illness. Yet, when using reasoning to
retrieve supposedly inborn knowledge, even Plato and other philosophers were
sometimes wrong. For example, Plato reasoned incorrectly that we see objects
because they are illuminated by beams of light emanating from our eyes.
Though
Aristotle accepted the importance of reasoning, he was more willing than Plato
to accept sensory experience as a source of knowledge___a philosophical
approach called empiricism. But Aristotle, like Plato, reached some erroneous
calculations. For example, because the heart seemed more responsive than the
brain during emotional experiences, he believed the heart was the site of
mental processes. Aristotle contributed to psychology by being one of the first
thinker to speculate formally on psychological topics, as indicated by the
title of his works, including “On Dreams”, “On Sleep and Sleeplessness”, and
“On the Senses and the Sensed”.
Following the
decline of the ancient Greece, the early Christians and Medieval eras were
given answers to psychological questions more often by theologian philosophers
than by secular philosophers like Plato or Aristotle. The dominant western
authority was Saint Augustine (354-430). As a young man, Augustine sowed his
wild oats as a flower of epicurean philosophy, which proclaimed, “Eat, drink,
and be merry, for tomorrow we die”. He pursued the life style until he
experienced a religious conversion at age 33_but not before making his famous
plea, “lord make me pure, but not right now!”. Augustine wrote of his views
concerning memory, emotion, and motivation in the self analysis he conducted in
his classic autobiographical work Confessions. He provided insights into the
continual battle between our human reason and our animal passions. Though
Augustine contemplated about psychological processes, neither he nor his
contemporaries used the scientific method to study them (Pratt, 11962)
During the
middle ages, when the Christian west was guided largely by religious dogma and
those who dared to conduct empirical studies risked punishment, scientific
investigations became almost the sole province of Islamic intellectuals.
Perhaps the most noteworthy of these was Abu Ibn Sina (980—1037), better known
as Avicenna, who kept alive the teaching of Aristotle. With the reemergence of
western intellectual activity in the late Middle Ages scholars who had access
to Arabia translations of the Greek philosophers rediscovered Aristotle. But
most of these scholars limited their efforts to reconciling Aristotle’s ideas
and Christian teachings. One brave exception was the Franciscan friar Roger
Bacon (1220—1292). Bacon was influenced by his contact with Arab scientists who
stressed the importance of gaining knowledge through the senses. As a
consequence, Bacon urged philosophers to favor empiricism over authority.
With the
coming of Renaissance, extending from fourteenth through the sixteenth
centuries, western authorities relied less on theology and more on philosophy,
once again, to provide answer to psychological questions. The spirit of the
Renaissance inspired Rene Descartes (1596—1650), the great French philosopher-mathematician
scientist. Descartes had broad interests, including gambling, traveling, and
inventing. Among his inventions were wheelchair and a method of dying gray
hair.
Descartes,
the first of the modern rationalists, insisted that we should doubt everything
unless proved self-evident by our own reasoning. In fact, in his famous
statement “I think therefore, I am”, Descartes went to the extreme of using
reasoning to prove to his own satisfaction that he existed. Descartes
contributed to the modern intellectual outlook, which places skepticism above
blind acceptance of dogma put forth by authority that his works were put on its
list of banned books.
Other
intellectuals, though favoring empiricism instead of rationalism, joined
Descartes in rejecting the authority of theologians to provide answers to
scientific questions. Chief among them was the English
politician-philosopher-scientist Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon inspired
the modern scientific attitude that favors skepticism, systematic observation, and
verification of claims by independent empirical observations. He was also a
founder of applied science, which holds that science should have practical
applications. According to Bacon, “to be useless is to be worthless”. But his
interest in the application of scientific findings cost him his life. In
studying the possible use of refrigeration to preserve food, he experimented by
stuffing chickens with ice. This led to a fatal case of pneumonia.
Following in
Francis Bacon’s empiricist footsteps was the English philosopher John Locke
(1632-1704).according to Locke (borrowing from Aristotle), each of us is born a
black slate_ or tabula rasa_ on which are written the life experiences. We
acquire through our senses. While rationalist like Descartes believe our
knowledge primarily inborn, empiricists like Locke believe knowledge is
acquired primarily through life experiences. Thus, Descartes attributed
intellectual abilities chiefly to heredity, and Locke attributed them chiefly
to educational experiences. This concern with the relative importance of
heredity and life experiences is known as the nature versus nurture
controversy. This issue, which is a recurring theme in psychological theory and
research, appears throughout this textbook in discussions about a host of
topics, including language, intelligence, personality, and psychological
disorders.
A compromise
between strict rationalism and strict empiricism was offered by the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724—1804). Kant was the ultimate “ivory tower”
intellectual. He never married, never traveled more than 50 miles from his
home, and maintained a strict scheduled, eating lunch everyday at exactly
1:00p.m. He was so renowned that he had fans from many countries who visited
his hometown just to catch a glimpse of him eating lunch. To avoid them, Kant
continually had to change restaurants.
Kant taught
that knowledge is the product of inborn mental faculties that organize and
interpret sensory input from the physical environment. For example, though the
kind of language we speak (whether English or otherwise) depends on experience
with your native tongue, your ability to learn a language depends on inborn
mechanism. If not, other animals that can hear speech and that have a vocal
apparatus would also develop language. Despite studying psychological topics,
Kant denied that psychology was a science, assuming that psychology studies the
mind. He believed that the mind is not tangible, it can not be observed,
manipulated, or measured directly. Moreover, its contents are in a state of
flux. This, according to Kant makes it impossible to study the mind
objectively.
Scientific
Roots of Psychology
By the
nineteenth century, psychologists were making more progress than philosophers
in answering questions about the nature of psychological processes. As a
consequence, intellectuals began to look more and more to physiology for
guidance. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, popular belief, based on
reasoning, held that nerve impulses travel the length of a nerve as fast as
electricity travels along a wire---- that is, almost instantaneously. This
claim was contradicted by research conducted by the German physiologist Hermann
von Helmholtz (1821—1894), arguably the greatest scientist of the nineteenth
century. Helmholtz also made important contributions to our knowledge of vision
and hearing, including the ophthalmoscope, which is used to examine the inside
of the eye.
In studying
nerve impulses, Helmholtz found that they took a measurable fraction of a
second to travel along a nerve. He demonstrated this in experiments on animal
and human subjects. In one experiment he had human subjects press a button as
soon as they felt a touch on the foot or thigh. A clock recorded their reaction
times. Subjects reacted slower to a touch on the foot than a touch on the
thigh. Helmholtz attributed this difference in reaction time to the longer
distance that the nerve impulse must travel from the foot to the spinal cord
and then to the brain. This indicated that nerve impulses are not
instantaneously.
Other
physiologists were making important discoveries about brain functions. The
leading brain researcher was the French physiologist Pierre Flourens
(1794—1867) who studied the effects of damage to specific brain structures on
the behavior of animals. For example, he found that damage to the cerebellum, a
large structure protruding from the back of the brain, caused motor in-coordination.
His fellow Frenchman, Paul Broca (1624-1880), a surgeon and anthropologist,
conducted similar research on brain damage in human beings. He found that
patients with damage to a region on the left side of the front of the brain
would lose their ability to speak.
In his
research, Fechner used a technique called psychophysics which had been invented
by his colleague, the German physiologist Ernest Weber (1795—1878).
Psychophysics enabled Fechner to quantify the relationship between physical
stimulation and mental experience. This accomplishment would have surprised his
predecessor Immanuel Kant, who had failed to devise a way to study the mind
scientifically. Psychophysics considers questions such as, “How much change in
the intensity of a light is necessary for a person to experience a change in
its brightness?” and “How much change in the intensity of a sound is necessary
for a person to experience a change in its loudness?” Psychophysics contributed
to psychology’s maturation from a child of philosophy and science to an
independent discipline with its own subject matter. Psychophysics has also had
important application during the past century. For example, the scientists who
perfected television relied on psychophysics to determine the relationship
between the television picture and the viewer’s mental experience of qualities
such as color and brightness (Baldwin, 1954)
Early
psychologists were also influenced by the theory of evolution, put forth by the
English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809—1882). Darwin announced his theory in
The Origin of Species (Darwin, 1859/1975). Which described the results of
research he conducted while studying the plants and animals he encountered
during a five-year voyage around the world on the H.M.S. Beagle. Though other
thinkers as far back as ancient Greece had proposed the possibility of animals
having evolved from common ancestors, Darwin was the first to propose a process
that could account for it. According to Darwin, through natural selection
physical characteristics that promote the survival of the individual are more
likely to be passed down to offspring, because individuals with these
characteristics are more likely to live long enough to reproduce.
Darwin’s
theory had its most immediate impact on psychology through the work of his
cousin, the English nobleman Sir Francis Galton (1822—1911). Galton was an
eminent scientist and a man of many interests. He explored Africa and drew some
of the first maps of it; he studies meteorology and invented the concept oh
highs, lows, and fronts; and he invented the practice of fingerprinting, which
helped Scotland Yard solve crimes. In applying Darwin’s theory of evolution,
Galton argued that natural selection could account for the development of human
abilities. Moreover, he claimed that individuals with the most highly developed
abilities would be most likely to survive. This led him to found the field
differential psychology, which studies variations among human beings in
intellectual, personality and physical characteristics.
Differential
psychology was introduced to America by the psychologist James Mckeen Cattell
(1860—1944), who had studied with Gilton. Cattell coined the term mental test,
which he used to describe various tests of vision, hearing and physical skills
that he administered to his students at the University of Pennsylvania. Cattell
was a leading psychologist of his time. He served as president of the American
Psychological Association in 1895 and became the first psychologist to be
elected to the National Academy of science. But Cattell fell into disrepute
after being fired by Columbia University for opposing American’s entrance into
World War 1. This led him to start his own business, The Psychological
Corporation, which to this day is active in the development of tests that
assess abilities, intelligence, and personality.
