Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [84]
With his graduate students, Wundt was helpful, concerned, kindly— and authoritarian. At the beginning of the academic year, he would order the students in his graduate research seminar to assemble at the institute; they would stand before him in a row and he would read a list of the research projects he wanted to see carried out that year, assigning the first topic to the first student in the row, the second to the second, and so on. According to Raymond Fancher,
No one dared to question these assignments, and the students went dutifully off to conduct their research—which in most cases became their doctoral theses…[Wundt] supervised the writing of the report[s] for publication. Though he occasionally permitted students to express their own views in their reports, he often exercised his blue pencil. One of his last American students reported that “Wundt exhibited the well-known German trait of guarding zealously the fundamental principles of his standpoint. About one-third of my thesis failed to support the Wundtian doctrine of assimilation, and so received elimination.”14
It is only fair to add that in his later years Wundt became relatively mellow and grandfatherly. He enjoyed playing host, in his study, to younger people after his lectures and reminiscing about his early experiences. He taught, wrote, and supervised psychological research until his retirement at eighty-five in 1917, and thereafter was busy at his writing until eight days before his death, at eighty-eight, in 1920.
The Curious Goings-on at Konvikt
If we visit Wundt’s laboratory in imagination, either in its one-room or later embodiments, and watch experiments being conducted, we will think them curiously trivial, or at least limited to what look like trivial mental phenomena; they explore none of what we usually consider the more intriguing areas of human psychology—learning, thinking, language skills, the emotions, and interpersonal relations.
We see Wundt’s students and occasionally Wundt himself spending hours listening to a metronome; they run it at speeds ranging from the very slow to the very fast, sometimes stopping it after only a few beats, sometimes letting it run for many minutes. Each time, the listeners examine their sensations closely and then report their conscious reactions. They find that some conditions are pleasant and some unpleasant, that rapid beats create a touch of excitement and slow beats a mood of relaxation, and that they experience a faint sense of tension before each click and a faint sense of relief afterward.15
This seemingly insignificant exercise is serious business; it is training in what Wundt calls introspection. He means by it something very different from the introspection practiced by philosophers from Socrates to Hume, which consisted of thinking about their thoughts and feelings. Wundtian introspection is precise, circumscribed, and controlled; it is confined to what Wundt calls the “elements” of psychic life—the immediate, simple perceptions and feelings aroused by sounds, lights, colors,and other stimuli. The experimenter provides these stimuli and observes the subject’s visible reactions, while the subject focuses his attention on the perceptions and feelings the stimuli generate in him.*
Such introspection is a crucial part of many experiments in Wundt’s laboratory, the most common being reaction-time research. Like Donders, Wundt and his students often measure the time needed to respond to different kinds of stimuli, in the effort to discern the components of psychic processes and the connections among them.
Many of the experiments we see taking place are somewhat like the very first one in that laboratory, Max Friedrich’s. Hour after hour, day after day, an observer causes the ball to drop to the platform, making a sharp noise and closing a contact that starts the chronoscope. As soon as the subject hears the noise, he presses the telegrapher’s key, stopping the chronoscope. Such experiments usually