Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [88]
And yet very minor:
Wundt’s ideas play little part in contemporary psychological theory. The principal reasons:
—Wundt wrote on every imaginable branch of psychology, including many not amenable to his own experimental methods, such as psychic causality, hypnosis, and mediumship. As a result, certain young psychologists saw him as something of a dualist and meta-physician, and thereupon adopted even more rigorously positivist criteria for those psychological phenomena which could be investigated scientifically.32 Their views would be embodied in behaviorism, which would regard introspection, even of the Wundtian kind, as unscientific and valueless.
—Many other psychologists, however, reacted against what they saw as the excessive narrowness and rigidity of Wundtian psychology. They were drawn to areas of research with practical applications, among them child psychology, educational psychology, psychological testing, and clinical psychology. All these fields, though beyond the Wundtian pale, grew and prospered.
—Certain new schools of research psychology emerged during Wundt’s later years as protests against characteristics of his system. These schools had in common the view that experimental psychology should not be limited to the elemental components of immediate experience but should explore higher mental processes.
Such as memory. At the University of Berlin, Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) invented a method of investigating memory processes that eliminated subjectivity and the effects of the individual’s previous experiences. He created twenty-three hundred nonsense syllables—meaningless combinations of two consonants separated by a vowel, such as bap, tox, muk, and rif— and used them in a series of memory experiments.
He would read a list of the syllables, for instance, then recall as many as he could. By varying the conditions—the length of the list, the speed at which he read it, the number of times he read it—he rigorously explored such issues as how the number of items is related to the speed with which they can be memorized (the difficulty of memorizing the list increases far faster than its length), how forgetting is related to the time lapse between learning and recall, the effect on learning and forgetting of repetition and review.33
So dedicated was Ebbinghaus to his research that he subjected himself to almost incredible labors. In an effort to determine how the number of repetitions affects retention, for instance, he rehearsed 420 lists of 16 syllables 34 times each, a total of 14,280 trials—an Edmond Dantès of psychology, scratching his way through the walls of a Château d’If of research. His method, dreadful as it sounds, was so successful that it has been a staple of the armamentarium of experimental psychology ever since. (In recent decades, to be sure, the predictions he derived from his work have dwindled in importance; the emphasis on memory research in recent decades has been on meaningful rather than meaningless learning.)34
George Elias Müller (1850–1934), at the University of Göttingen, added introspection to Ebbinghaus’s method in order to examine the mental processes behind the statistical findings. Müller found that the recall of nonsense syllables, far from being related solely to the length of the list, the number of repetitions, and similar factors, was in considerable part contingent on his subjects’ active use of stratagems of their own, such as the groupings, rhythms, and even consciously contrived meanings they had imposed on the nonsense syllables. Learning, in short, is not a passive process but an active and creative one.35 These findings, too, helped free psychology from the limits imposed on it at Leipzig.
Certain other psychologists, including some of Wundt’s students, developed even more radical methods of experimental research. Oswald Külpe (1862–1915), though he took his