Wilhelm Wundt: Biography of the Father of Scientific Psychology

In the history of Psychology there are few figures as relevant as Wilhelm Wundt.

In the middle of the 19th century, this researcher gave birth to scientific psychology and was one of the first to confront the practical and epistemological problems of studying mental processes with the intention of extracting knowledge generalizable to many people. In this article I have proposed to make a brief review of her role as the initiator of a science that until not so long ago was one of the many facets of philosophy.

Wilhelm Wundt: Biography of a Fundamental Psychologist

I know many people who, when they set out to study psychology on their own as part of a hobby, start by reading books by classical philosophers such as Plato or Aristotle.

I don't know exactly why they start with this type of reading, although I can imagine it: they are well-known authors, their books are easily accessible (although difficult to interpret) and, furthermore, they represent the first attempts to systematically examine the functioning of the mind human.

However, the works of these philosophers do not deal primarily with psychology (although etymologically the word psychology has its roots in the origins of Western philosophy) and, in fact, they do not tell us anything about the methodologies used today in research on the conduct. The origin of behavioral science is relatively recent: it took place in the late 19th century and was led by Wilhelm Wundt.

Wundt's Role in Psychology

Psychology seems to have been a part of our existence for a long time; basically, since we started asking ourselves questions about how we think and how we perceive reality, millennia ago. However, this is only half true. Neither is psychology simply the formulation of questions about behavior and mental processes, nor has it existed independently of the development of our history.

That is why, although in certain respects it can be said that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle laid the foundations of psychology, the one in charge of making this science emerge as an independent discipline was Wilhelm Wundt, a German researcher who, in addition to being a philosopher, invested a lot of effort in making mental processes something prone to be studied through the experimental method, something that had not been done in centuries previous. This is the reason why, by general consensus, it is considered that psychology was born in 1879, the year Wundt opened the first experimental psychology laboratory in history in Leipzig.

The new investigation of the mind

Until the nineteenth century, the task of many philosophers had been to create theories about the workings of the human mind based on speculation. Authors like David hume or Rene Descartes They talked about the nature of ideas and the way we perceive our environment, but they did not build their theories from experimentation and measurement. Ultimately, his job was to examine ideas and concepts rather than explain in detail what the human body is like. Descartes, for example, spoke about innate ideas not because he had come to the conclusion that they exist from controlled experiments, but from reflection.

However, in Wundt's time the development of the brain study and advances in statistics contributed to the preparation of the necessary bases so that behavior and sensation could begin to be studied using instruments of measurement. Francis Galton, for example, he developed the first tests to measure intelligence, and around 1850 Gustav Fechner He began to study the way in which physical stimulation produces sensations according to their intensity and the way in which our senses are stimulated.

Wundt took the scientific study of the mind further by trying to generate theories about the global functioning of consciousness based on experimentation. If Galton had tried to describe the psychological differences between people to find trends statistics and Fechner had used laboratory tests to study sensation (a very basic level of consciousness), Wundt wanted to combine statistics and the experimental method to generate an image of the deepest mechanisms of the mind.. That is why he decided to stop teaching physiology classes at the University of Heidelberg to investigate the more abstract mental processes in Leipzig.

How did Wundt investigate?

Much of Wilhelm Wundt's experiments were based on the methodology used by Gustav Fechner when studying perception and sensation. For example, for a short time a person was shown a pattern of lights and asked to tell what he was experiencing. Wundt went to a lot of trouble to make it possible to compare cases with each other: the time that a stimulus should last was strictly controlled, as well as its intensity and shape, and the situation of all the volunteers that were used It also had to be controlled so that the results obtained were not contaminated by external factors such as position, noise from the street, etc.

Wundt believed that from these controlled observations in which variables are manipulated, an image could be "sculpted" about the basic secret mechanisms of the mind. What he wanted was, fundamentally, to discover the simplest pieces that explain the functioning of consciousness to see how each works and how they interact with each other, in the same way that a chemist can study a molecule by examining the atoms within it. form.

However, he was also interested in more complex processes, such as selective attention. Wundt believed that the way we attend to certain stimuli and not others is guided by our interest and our motivations; Unlike what happens in other living beings, Wundt said, our will has a very important role in directing mental processes towards goals decided by our own criteria. This led him to defend a conception of the human mind called voluntarism.

Wundt's legacy

Today Wundt's theories have been discarded, among other things, because this researcher relied too much on the introspective method, that is, in obtaining results according to the way in which people speak about what they feel and experience. As is known today, although each individual has a privileged knowledge about what happens in their head, this is almost never valid and is the product of a lot of perceptual biases and limitations and cognitive; our organism is made in a way in which to know objectively what the processes are like psychobiologicals that operate in your back room is much less of a priority than surviving without being distracted too much.

That is why, among other things, that current Cognitive Psychology takes into account those unconscious mental processes that, despite being different from those theorized by Sigmund Freud, they powerfully influence our way of thinking and feeling without our realizing it and without our having the possibility of guessing their causes for ourselves.

However, despite the logical limitations of Wilhelm Wundt's work (or perhaps because of them), the entire community of psychology today is in A debt to this pioneer for being the first to systematically use the experimental method in a laboratory dedicated exclusively to the psychology.