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Wilhelm Wundt and

Geoff Bunn looks at the gap between what Wundt hoped for intended to take up James’ provocative call-
psychology and what actually came to pass to-arms and devote himself to the ‘somewhat

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suspect borderland between physiology
I am prepared to say that Wundt is Then, in 1867, the revered American and philosophy’. He dedicated the last half

’
the founder, not of experimental philosopher William James announced that of his life to this field, and subsequently
psychology alone, but of psychology. ‘perhaps the time has come for psychology became known as ‘the father of experimental
Edward B. Titchener (1921) to begin to be a science. Some measurements psychology’.

‘I
have already been made in the region lying Wundt’s claims to this title are impressive.

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Virtually everything that happened in between the physical changes in the nerves His Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874)
modern psychology was a repudiation and the appearance of consciousness,’ he was psychology’s first textbook. He opened
of Wundt. Kurt Danziger (1990)
explained, ‘and more may come of it… the first laboratory to be exclusively devoted
Helmholtz and a man named Wundt at to psychological experimentation at the
n the mid-nineteenth centur y,
Heidelberg are working on it.’ A challenge University of Leipzig in 1879, the event
psychology did not exist as a formal
had been laid down. that has been taken to mark the birth of
academic discipline. Admittedly a few
psychology as an independent discipline.
independently wealthy Victorian ‘men of The father of experimental In 1883 he launched an academic journal,
science’, such as Francis Galton and Herbert psychology Philosophical Studies, to publish the Leipzig
Spencer, had started to collect statistics on
The ‘man named Wundt’ was Wilhelm school’s research.
individual abilities and construct elaborate
Maximilian Wundt, a conscientious physician
theories of human nature. However there Where are the discoveries?
and one-time politician who had been born
were, as yet, no degree courses, academic
in Mannheim in 1832 to religious parents. But there is an irony at the heart of Wundt’s
journals or research laboratories devoted to
Wundt was still a relatively obscure assistant reputation as the devoted father to a newborn
psychology.
professor of physiology in 1867, although science: he had no desire to bring a new
he had already taught the first university discipline of psychology into the world
Signposts course in psychology and had published his at all. His principle goal, in fact, was to
Lectures on the Mind of Humans and Animals. revitalise philosophy using physiological
history of psychology, introspection
In 1872 Wundt informed his fiancée that he methods to produce data about the human

10 Psychology Review February 2017

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leave an enduring legacy of either empirical in the early 1890s, reckoned that Wundt Wundt went on to develop another
discoveries or theoretical principles, despite procedure: introspection. This technique
whatever his intellectual gifts, could not
his legendary productivity. involved the perception of a sensory event
have compassed this bulk of scientific
Wundt’s first American student, G. Stanley work had he not been dowered with and then reporting on the phenomenological

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Hall, wrote: a good physical constitution and had experience of the event. This procedure

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he not lived a strictly regulated life. His sounds simple. However in practice it was
It does not seem to me that he made
days passed, in fact, with the regularity extremely tricky to get right. Firstly, of course,
any epoch-making contributions to
psychology, although he will always fill of clockwork (Baldwin 1921). there were large variations in reaction times
between subjects. Perceiving a sensory event

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a large place as the first to establish
this science on an experimental basis. Accurate time-keeping was both a personal and then reporting on the phenomenological
(Baldwin 1921) value for Wundt and the basis of his scientific e xperience of the event were not
practice. His insistence on exact measurement straightforward matters. Experimental
We are therefore left with a disconcerting was made possible by restricting the scope of subjects had to be knowledgeable about the
puzzle: the methods that apparently psychological investigation to those topics purpose of the experiment and adopt the
established psychology’s scientific credentials that could be legitimately investigated in the right ‘mental set’ to perceive stimuli correctly.
did not generate any discoveries that have laboratory. Seventy percent of his graduate They effectively had to know how to produce
stood the test of time. students were therefore assigned fundamental the kind of data Wundt wanted.
topics of sensation or perception such as As both experimenter and subject had to be
Lessons from early psychology vision, touch or taste. The rest worked on experts on experimental protocol, their roles
So why should Wundt’s story interest us memory, attention or methodology. It was a were therefore interchangeable. As a result,
today? I believe the answer is that it tells us precise vision for a new science. only a few experimenter-subjects needed to
a lot about what happens when psychology be trained in the art of introspection, because
attempts to travel across cultural boundaries. Measurement and the aim was to discover the workings of the
Psychology is highly sensitive to its social psychophysics generalised human mind that everyone was
context because it is both a science and an art. Time was also Wundt’s royal road towards a assumed to share.
It strives for the objectivity of numbers, yet scientific model of the human mind. He relied According to Wundt, introspection
also craves the subjectivity of meaning. Some on the skills of clock makers to construct the was not about ruminating on one’s own
of the categories it studies are real things that delicate instruments his methods demanded. feelings or emotions, in the manner of
can be measured because they have a basis in Matthäus Hipp’s chronoscope (1840) for a poet or philosopher. On the contrary,
physiology (neurons, genes, hormones, sex). example, an instrument that often featured introspection was a highly controlled process
But some of its categories are not things at all in photographs of Wundt’s laboratory, was — a systematic method used to study the
and cannot be measured because they have theoretically capable of recording intervals mind by breaking up conscious awareness
come down to us from philosophy (neurosis, of 1/1000th of a second. into basic structures of thoughts, images
personality, race, gender). The Leipzig group used the chronoscope and sensations. Focusing too much on
Wundt was right that psychology exists on to measure ‘reaction time’, the time it took for one’s mental state could compromise the
a ‘somewhat suspect borderland’ between the a subject to respond to a stimulus. A credible experiment. In practice, introspective reports
two aspects of physiology and philosophy. new science should be able to produce exact tended to consist of simple judgments of
These two aspects to his vision for psychology measurements, as another one of Wundt’s the size, intensity and duration of physical
each look in a different direction across that American students, James McKeen Cattell stimuli, occasionally supplemented by

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borderland. (1890), explained: judgments of the simultaneity and succession
of stimuli. Wundt’s ambition to construct a
Rigorous methods and a As Experimental Physics is devoted
theory of the human mind began with this
clockwork life to the measurement of time, space
and mass in the material world, so simple technique of ‘mental chronometry’.
Like any strict father figure, Wundt had strong

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Experimental Psychology may measure
opinions on what he considered best for his time, complexity and intensity in
Perception and apperception
offspring. At the start of each academic year, consciousness. Wundt knew that experimental methods
new students were obliged to stand in line were only useful for investigating the most
while Wundt assigned each one a research All the ‘subject’ had to do in a typical elementary psychological processes. In his
topic. Anyone who plucked up the courage psychophysics experiment was press a switch theory, he distinguished between perception on

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had to when he heard the sound of a falling pellet hit the one hand, and what he called apperception
a metal plate. The chronoscope started when on the other. Stimuli outside awareness are
wait for His Excellency to pass from
the pellet struck the plate and it stopped when merely perceived, he said, whereas stimuli
the laboratory down the corridor to his
lecture room. Disappointed ones were the subject heard the strike and released the receiving attention are apperceived.
directed to take up their position at a switch. The instrument therefore measured Apperception was therefore affected by

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certain place on Thomas Ring Street the time elapsed between the stimulus and ‘higher level’ psychological processes such as
which he was known to pass daily with the response. A typical reaction time lasted motives, innate tendencies, memory and so
clocklike regularity (Kusch 1995) around 300 milliseconds. on. Higher mental processes such as emotion

www.hoddereducation.psychologyreview 11
and language were not readily amenable to in business, education and the military. Such
experimental investigation and could not a practical ethos evidently had no need for a
be reliably studied using introspection and philosophically-informed qualitative theory
mental chronometry. This was because they of culture. It was not the right time to reflect
were irreducibly historical phenomena, as on the charms of the world’s many languages,

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Wundt (1916) explained: myths and customs. America’s melting pot
was mixing immigrants from across the
Individual consciousness is wholly
globe in order to forge a new society for a
incapable of giving us a history of the
development of human thought, for new century. Wundt’s cultural psychology
— half of his overall vision for psychology

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it is conditioned by an earlier history
concerning which it cannot of itself — was ignored.
give us any knowledge.
And in the end…
Cultural psychology A year after Wundt’s death, the cover of
Given the problems of investigating the October 1921 issue of Popular Science
apperception, Wundt argued that there must Monthly magazine showed Babe Ruth, the
therefore be an alternative to experimental greatest baseball player of the day, ready to
psychology — a way to investigate social, swing, his bat awkwardly attached to a Hipp
cultural and historical phenomena beyond chronoscope (a timing device). ‘Babe Ruth’s
the confines of the laboratory. This would Home Run Secrets Solved By Science’, the
be a kind of social psychology based on story proclaimed (Fuchs 1998). His so-called
the historical analysis of human cultural secrets were his rapid speed of reaction and
products, especially language, myth and his extraordinary hand-eye coordination.
customs. Experimental psychology rightly The self-satisfied piece was little more than
studied the lower perceptual processes propaganda for the new ‘applied psychology’.
of sensation and perception. But cultural Wundt would have been appalled by this
psychology — or what Wundt called illegitimate extension of laboratory methods.
‘völkerpsychologie’ — examined the higher He would have been even more disappointed
processes of thinking, emotion and other by the failure of American psychology to
products of collective activity. study the social and cultural origins of the
Two different laws, Wundt explained, human mind. Yet at the very moment that
governed the two systems: the higher system
was governed by the laws of apperception; the
lower system by the laws of association. The References
higher processes presupposed the lower ones A Hipp chronoscope, as used in
but they were not determined by them. A Baldwin, B. T. (1921) ‘In memory of Wilhelm Wundt’s psychophysics experiments
complete psychology must therefore embrace Wundt. By his American students’, The
both quantitative and qualitative methods. Psychological Review, Vol. 28, No. 3,
pp. 153–88. his blueprint for psychology was being torn
Developments in the USA Cattell, J. McK. (1890) ‘V. — Mental tests up, Wundt was being elevated into position as
While Wundt embarked on what would and measurements’, Mind, Vol. 15, the chief architect, the man who had started
eventually become ten volumes of pp. 373–81. it all. The true legacy of the man they were
Völkerpsychologie, his students returned home Danziger, K. (1990) Constructing the already calling ‘the father of psychology’ was
to launch scientific psychology in America. Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological being systematically dismantled.
The first American experimental psychology Research, Cambridge University Press.
research laboratory was established by G. Fuchs, A. H. (1998) ‘Psychology and “The PsychologyReviewExtras
Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins University Babe”’, Journal of the History of the Go online (see back cover) for a
in 1883. Four years later, James McKeen Behavioural Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2, podcast giving personal reflections
pp. 153–65. on Wundt’s ideas and the
Cattell founded one at the University of
emergence of scientific psychology.
Pennsylvania. They closely followed Wundt’s Kusch, M. (1995) ‘Recluse, interlocutor,
practice of stocking their laboratories with interrogator: natural and social order in
impressive-looking ‘brass instruments’. turn-of-the-century’, Psychological Research Dr Geoff Bunn is senior lecturer in
By 1913 there were ten times as many Schools. Isis, Vol. 86, No. 3, pp. 419–39. psychology at Manchester Metropolitan
psychological laboratories in the USA as there Wundt, W. (1916) quoted in John University. He is the author of The Truth
were across the whole of Europe. D. Greenwood (2003) ‘Wundt, Machine: A Social History of the Lie
It was an exciting time to be a psychologist. Völkerpsychologie, and experimental social Detector (2012) and the co-editor of
psychology’, History of Psychology, Vol. 6, Psychology in Britain: Historical Essays
America was hoping that the new discipline
No. 1, pp. 70–88. and Personal Reflections (2001).
could apply its know-how to solving problems

12 Psychology Review February 2017