Fechner
Psychology as a field of experimental study began in 1854 in Leipzig, Germany when Gustav Fechner created the first theory of how judgments about sensory experiences are made and how to experiment on them. Fechner’s theory, recognized today as Signal Detection Theory foreshadowed the development of statistical theories of comparative judgment and thousands of experiments based on his ideas (Link, S. W. Psychological Science
Kahnneman & Tversky
Here are my notes on this topic:
1. Philosophy & Experimental Physiology
Psych is a combination of philosophy and experimental physiology. It uses the methodology of experimental physiology to answer the questions of philosophy
- what is real
- do I have free will
- does God exist
- Is there life after death
- Why are people racist
- What is beauty
- Is personality hard-wired
- What is happiness
Methods of experimental physiology
- controls
- consistency
- independent variable
- dependent variable
2. Waves & Schools
3 major waves
- Freud
- Behaviorism
- Humanism
3 minor waves
- Gestalt
- Information Processing
- Cognitive
Schools (8)
- Structuralism
- Functionalism
- Gestalt
- Psychoanalytic
- Behaviorism
- Humanism
- Existentialism
- Cognitive
3. Psychology as a science
Research with objective methods
Art of helping people
Unscientific
- magic
- card tricks
- rope tricks
- ESP
- Religion
4. Technology & Psych
- Aristotle = comparative physiology
- Galen = dissection
- Gall used correlational studies
- Florens used ablation
- Charcot used an autopsy to discover scars in the brain, now we use an MRI to diagnose multiple sclerosis.
5. Tangen’s Five Paths to Truth
- Religion (revelation)
- Wisdom (insight)
- Philosophy (logic)
- Science (systematic observation)
- Tangen’s path (dumb luck)
