shape of the skull could reveal the person’s psychological profile.
Gall based his conclusions on empirical techniques (i.e., he measured the skulls of hundreds of people), but his biased methods allowed him to pick and choose his findings to fit his theories. Phrenology became very popular over the next century, and phrenology busts were quite common. Phrenology only fell out of favor in the twentieth century after modern science advanced enough to prove it wrong. As with the later theory of eugenics, it was sometimes used to justify racist and socially prejudiced theories. Similarly, it was adopted by the Nazis to prove Aryan supremacy. On a more positive note, it challenged neuroscientists to study the important question of localization of function to ask which parts of the brain support different psychological functions.
German physiologist Joseph Franz Gall developed the theory that personality profiles can be detected by examining the shape of people’s skulls because the parts of the brain associated with specific personality traits will press up against the inside of the skull and create telltale bumps.
Why is William James considered the father of American psychology?
William James (1842–1910) was among the first professors of psychology in the United States. Hired by Harvard University in 1872 as a professor of physiology, he took on the new title of professor of psychology in 1889. Like Wundt, he was an avid promoter of the new field of psychology. Just as Wundt did, James taught many students who would disseminate his ideas into the wider world. Although his interests eventually took him far beyond psychology, his book Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, had a long and powerful influence on the development of the field.
How did James differ from Wundt in his approach to psychology?
In general, James had a hard time with the atomistic approach to studying psychology exemplified by Wundt’s lab. Although he ran his own lab using similar methodology, James felt that the psychophysiology practiced by Wundt and others focused only on the smallest and ultimately least interesting of mental phenomena. He believed that treating moments of consciousness as discrete, isolated units was at odds with the real nature of experience, which is continuous. He believed in the flow of consciousness. He was also more interested in holistic concerns, such as the meaning and continuity of the self. How do I know that I am me? What gives me the continuous sense of self across time?
This conflict between a holistic vs. atomistic approach marks a theme that persists throughout the history of psychology as well as the natural sciences in general. Do we study something by breaking it down into its smallest parts or do we try to grasp it as an organic whole? Like Wundt, however, James was an advocate of introspection as a method of studying consciousness, something the behaviorists would later reject vigorously.
How did James’s functionalism differ from Wundt’s structuralism?
James was particularly interested in how the mind affects behavior, how it helps us function in the world. This approach was termed functionalism. He was less interested in simply identifying the components of the mind, which was more in keeping with Wundt’s structuralism. In fact, later in his career, James abandoned psychology for a school of philosophy called pragmatism. Pragmatists maintained that the value of a belief was less in its accuracy than in its effectiveness, the degree to which it helped people function in their environment.
William James is considered the father of psychology in the United States. He was interested in functionalism, or how the mind affects a person’s functioning in the world.
Who was Francis Galton?
Francis Galton (1822–1911) was never formally trained as a psychologist but, an extremely innovative and creative man, he made enormous and long-lasting contributions to the methods of psychological research. In mid-life, after a wide range of endeavors, which included explorations in Africa and new discoveries in meteorology, he became preoccupied with the question of the heritability of intelligence. Is intelligence passed on in families, much like height or hair color? That his own family tree was filled with gifted intellectuals is probably relevant to Galton’s choice of study. He was a child prodigy and was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin (a noted physician and botanist) and a first cousin of Charles Darwin (1809-1882).
Francis Galton, an expert on statistics (among many other disciplines), introduced the concept of correlation and studied the heritability of intelligence.
What were the contributions of Francis Galton?
In his search to prove the heritability of intelligence, Francis Galton made several astounding methodological innovations that are still in wide use today. These included the statistical technique of correlation (a mathematical test to see how much two traits increase or decrease together), the comparison of identical and fraternal twins, the use of self-report questionnaires and word association tests, the phrase “nature and nurture,” and the concept of “regression towards the mean.” This last idea derives from Galton’s observation that when measurements are repeated over time, the extreme values tend to move toward the middle. For example, very tall parents will often have less tall children. His less illustrious contribution was the field of eugenics.
What is eugenics?
Galton’s interest in the heritability of intelligence was not only academic. He wanted to apply it to social policy so that only families with high intelligence would breed and the less fortunate would be discouraged from reproducing. These ideas, known as the theory of eugenics, were expressed in several books and later spread to numerous academic departments and international societies. The fact that he greatly discounted the impact of environment on intellectual development, specifically the effect of social class, racial discrimination, and access to education, inevitably set the stage for prejudicial and racist applications of this theory. Moral questions regarding the civil rights of the genetically “less fit” were also neglected. Eugenics had significant impact on American immigration policies in the 1920s, justifying the restriction of Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Eugenics fell out of favor after the Nazis championed it in support of their genocidal policies during World War II.
How can social prejudice impact psychological data?
The early history of psychology and the social sciences in general is littered with examples of gross social prejudice. In the early nineteenth century, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) introduced the study of phrenology, which mapped various personality traits onto different parts of the brain. Although Gall tried to ground his theories in the scientific measurement of skulls, he let his preconceptions shape his collection and analysis of the data.
Later proponents of phrenology tried to use it to justify ethnic and class discrimination. Likewise, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a proponent of Social Darwinism, interpreted Darwin’s theory of natural selection as a justification for social inequality. The studies of Francis Galton (1822–1911) on the heritability of intellectual giftedness led to the theory of eugenics, which promoted selective breeding of the social elite and discouraged childbearing within socially disadvantaged groups.
Not surprisingly, when psychological tests were first developed, they also fell prey to the confusion between scientific objectivity and social prejudice. The first intelligence tests were full of socially biased items that unfairly favored affluent, American-born English speakers over poor, uneducated immigrants and non-white minorities. While psychological science has developed more sophisticated methodology to minimize the effect of experimenter bias, it is important to realize that as long as science is conducted by human beings, it is subject to human error. The beauty of