Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt - Essay Example 852). In 1879, he founded the Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig, where he concentrated on experimental psychology (Kling & Riggs, 1971, p. 1) and developed a methodology that sought to develop more accurate data for testing mental activities. He is primarily responsible for moving the subject of psychology out of the realm of philosophy and into the venue of experimental or modern scientific method. He accomplished this by focusing on the physiological aspects of experimentation and how they related to the mind. The purpose of this paper is, having providing a brief biography and contextual frame of reference, to discuss the contemporaneous environment surrounding the development of some of Wundt's theories, to review the contribution of those theories to the subject and practice of Psychology in general, and to provide a personal statement of opinion on some of Wundt's theories. Of all the possible environmental contributors to Wundt's theoretical development, there are two that will be mentioned here. The first is the philosophical environment of the day in regards to psychological study, and the second is the laboratory environment at Leipzig. Wundt did not develop his ideas in a vacuum. He was heavily influenced by John Stuart Mill's "System of Logic," from which he often quoted (Schmidgen, 2003, p. 469). No doubt as part of his training, he would have studied both logic and philosophy, and Brown, et al., maintain that he was drawn toward idealism while opposing sensationalism (1996, p. 852). It is interesting to consider the difficulty of bridging from a philosophical approach to the scientific method when studying psychology. In Wundt's day, the mind was perceived in terms of the soul and introspection was the primary means of investigating those aspects of human understanding. Wundt did not accept the notion that self observation was effective; in applying his scientific approach, he believed that psychological study required a trained observer, and that observer needed to be performing those observations in a controlled environment while investigating a properly limited question. Thus, by taking the study of the mind out of the philosophical and into the practical, Wundt introduced a radical new perspective. The second environmental influence of note is his time spent in the laboratory at Leipzig where he actually performed many of his experiments. In one such experiment, he would use a pendulum or analog clock and have his subjects report "the time that coincided with some other event such as the ringing of a bell" (Carlson, Hogendoorn, & Verstraten, 2006, p. 1406). In this way, he was able to use empirical data to quantify the difference between those with fast responses and those with slow ones. Based upon those observations, he could draw conclusions about the way the mind processed