Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [89]
Külpe used this method to test Donders’s hypothesis that complex mental processes consist of simple ones linked together; it revealed that the addition of mental steps to a reaction-time experiment often changed the nature of the thought process altogether, yielding a reaction time different from the simple addition of all the steps involved.36
The work of others in the Würzburg School—Karl Marbe, Narziss Ach, and Karl Bühler—made its name synonymous with the experimental study of human thought.37 In a typical Würzburg experiment, a subject might have been given a stimulus word and asked to produce an associated word that was more comprehensive, or else an associated word that was more specific. If the stimulus was, say, “bird,” a “superordinate” (more comprehensive) association might be “animal,” a “subordinate” (more specific) one “canary.” Afterward the subject recounted everything that had gone on in his mind during the few seconds it had taken him to perform the task—his recognition of the stimulus word, his reaction to the task, the appearance of mental images aroused by the stimulus word, the search for the appropriate response, and the appearance of the appropriate word.38 These recollections, written down, were analyzed for clues as to how memory works.
(In recent years this very method has been used by artificial intelligence specialists to create “expert systems”—computer programs that simulate human problem-solving activities such as medical diagnosis by replicating, in computer language, the steps of reasoning used by human experts.)
A curious discovery made by members of the Würzburg School was that subjects sometimes found no trace of mental imagery in their introspection. Adding or subtracting numbers, for instance, or making a judgment as to whether a statement was true or false, might involve no images. The researchers called this phenomenon “imageless thought”; it showed that, contrary to Wundtian theory, some thought processes are not composed of elemental sensations and perceptions.39
A researcher named Henry Watt made another of the Würzburg School’s valuable discoveries. He found that if he told a subject what the task was—perhaps “Find a superordinate word”—before giving him the stimulus word, introspection would show that the subject had not searched for the superordinate word but that it simply appeared of itself. Watt had discovered the effect of a “determining tendency” or, as it came to be more generally known, “mental set”—the mind’s preparedness to perform a task by unconscious means.40
In these and other ways the Würzburg School expanded experimental psychology far beyond Wundtian boundaries and led the move toward a more holistic psychology.
By the 1920s Wundtian psychology was fading from the scene. Professor Ludy T. Benjamin, a leading historian of the field, sums up what became of it:
In the end, Wundt’s psychology, and that of his contemporaries, was replaced by newer psychological approaches. Although parts of this psychological system exist in modern psychology…we continue to remember him principally for his vision in seeing the promise of a science of psychology and then taking the giant steps required in the nineteenth century to establish the discipline.41
But, he adds, recent scholarship has shown that Wundt had “a depth of understanding and breadth of interest (e.g., his writings on culture, law, art, language, history, and religion)” that have long been overlooked.
For all that, Boring’s evaluation of Wundt, first made