History of Psychology

1. History of Psychology • This course is partly a psychology course and partly a history course • Psychology – learning about psychological theories and how they develop, conflict, and either modified or rejected • History – learning about the evolution of theories and how factors such as politics, culture, personalities and economics influenced the evolution of psychological thought.

2. Historical Issues • 1. Presentism versus historicism • Presentism – interpreting the past in the context of what we know today. Examples: • Historicism – interpreting the past in its own context • 2. Anticipation versus foundation • Anticipation – early events or ideas (theories) that are similar to later events, but were not a basis for the next logical step • Foundation – the beginning of later ideas, there was a continuous evolution of thought, an earlier theory led to the development of a new theory. Examples:

3. Historical Factors Affecting Psychological History • 1. Lost or suppressed data – Jung and Watson • 2. Data lost or altered in translation – Titchner • 3. Self-serving data

4. Importance of Context • Zeitgeist – the economic, social, cultural, and intellectual environment • Economics – many times money determines what is studied and what a psychologist does • War – isolation of German psychologists as a result of WWI greatly affected psychology. WWII resulted in many German psychologists coming to the U.S. • Discrimination – minorities and women excluded from graduate programs • Subjects not studied because they were not “politically correct”

5. Historical Psychology from 2 Perspectives • Personality theory – understanding the evolution of psychology by studying the people who caused change to occur • Naturalistic theory – understanding the environment that determined whether a new idea or discovery was accepted and pursued or ignored or rejected because it wasn’t consistent with the prevailing Zeitgeist

6. Importance of Theories • A theory can be considered a important theory even if it is later found to be inaccurate if it: • 1. Provides direction for research –testing to see if a theory is accurate • 2. Provides a mechanism for developing new research methods • 3. Provides a record of what has been tried or presented earlier- can help prevent repeating past mistakes

7. To Do Well in this Course • You will not have to memorize important dates • You will not have to memorize people and their different theories in detail • You will need to understand why different ideas and theories developed when they did and why the person who developed them did so