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 19th century, this researcher gave rise to scientific psychology and was one of the first to face the practical and epistemological problems of studying mental processes with the intention of extracting knowledge that can be generalized to many people. In this article I have proposed to briefly review his 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 have decided to start studying psychology on their own as part of a hobby, start by reading books by classic philosophers like Plato or Aristotle.

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

However, the works of these philosophers do not fundamentally deal with psychology (even though 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 that are used today. in behavioral research. The origin of behavioral science is relatively recent: it took place at the end of the 19th century and was led by Wilhelm Wundt.

Wundt’s role in Psychology

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

That is why, although in certain aspects it can be said that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle laid the foundations of psychology, The person 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 previous centuries. This is the reason why, by general consensus, it is considered that psychology was born in 1879, the year in which Wundt opened the first experimental psychology laboratory in history in Leipzig.

The new research of the mind

Until the 19th century, the task of many philosophers had been to create theories about the functioning of the human mind based on speculation. Authors like David Hume either 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, their 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 study of the brain and advances in statistics contributed to the preparation of the necessary foundations so that behavior and sensation could begin to be studied using measuring instruments. Francis Galton for example, developed the first tests to measure intelligence, and around 1850 Gustav Fechner He began to study the way in which physical stimulation produces sensations depending on its intensity and the way in which our senses are stimulated.

Wundt took the scientific study of the mind further by seeking to generate theories about the global functioning of consciousness based on experimentation. If Galton had intended to describe psychological differences between people to find statistical trends 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 a picture of the deepest mechanisms of the mind That is why he decided to stop teaching physiology classes at the University of Heidelberg to start researching 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, a person was briefly shown a pattern of lights and asked to say what he experienced. Wundt went to great 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 form, and the situation of all the volunteers used also had to be controlled so that the results obtained were not contaminated due to external factors such as the position, the noises coming 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 I wanted was, fundamentally, to discover the simplest pieces that explain the functioning of consciousness to see how each one works and how they interact with each other, in the same way that a chemist can study a molecule by examining the atoms that contain it. they form it.

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 talk about what they feel and experience. As is known today, although each individual has privileged knowledge about what happens in their head, this is almost never valid and is the product of a large number of biases and perceptual and cognitive limitations; Our body is made in a way in which objectively knowing what the psychobiological processes that operate behind it are like is much less of a priority than surviving without being too distracted.

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

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