STRCUTURALISM CH 5 LECTURE PREPARED BY: DR. M. SAWHNEY

Topics  Swallow the Rubber Tube—A College Prank?  Edward Bradford Titchener ( )  Criticisms of Structuralism  Contributions of Structuralism

Swallow the Rubber Tube— A College Prank?  Edward Bradford Titchener  Professor of psychology at Cornell University  Conducts experiments on his graduate students  Asks them to participate in introspection  Students asked to record feelings and sensations while participating in different experiments

Edward Bradford Titchener ( )  Titchener was a student of Wundt  Claimed to have brought Wundt’s system to the U.S.  Titchener’s system was radically different  Structuralism: Titchener’s system of psychology that became popular in the U.S. and lasted two decades before being overthrown Titchener's demonstrational classroom, Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, ca. 1905

Edward Bradford Titchener ( ) (cont’d.)  Differences between Wundt and Titchener:  Wundt  Recognized the elements/contents of consciousness but was concerned with their organization  Believed the mind had the power to organize mental elements voluntarily  Titchener  Focused on mental elements  Believed elements were mechanically linked through association  Discarded Wundt’s doctrine of apperception

Titchener's Life  Journeyed from England to Leipzig to study with Wundt  Hoped to bring Wundtian psychology to England  Upon returning to England, found many were skeptical of psychology  Goes to U.S. and establishes his laboratory at Cornell  Prolific writer and respected professor

Titchener’s Experimentalists: No Women Allowed!  Titchener’s Experimentalists:  Group of psychologists from Cornell, Yale, Clark, Michigan, Princeton that met regularly to discuss their work  Titchener selected the topics and ran the meetings  Rule: no women allowed  Titchener’s reason: women too pure to smoke

Titchener’s Experimentalists: No Women Allowed! (cont’d.)  Titchener welcomed women in some situations:  Accepted women into his graduate program when Harvard and Columbia did not  More women completed doctoral degrees with Titchener than any other male psychologist of the time  Favored hiring women faculty Margaret Floy Washburn

The Content of Conscious Experience  Titchener believes the subject matter of psychology is the conscious experience  Other sciences are independent of the experiencing person  Eg., Temperature of a room, as studied in physics will be different than in psychology

Muller Lyer Illusion A B

11 Structuralism A B Stimulus Error: Titchener warns against committing the stimulus error: confusing the mental process under study with the stimulus or object being observed

Introspection  Titchener’s form of self-observation that requires rigorous training  Observers trained to describe the elements of their conscious state rather than report the familiar name  Example: Instead of saying apple, describe it as shiny, red, and round  Similar to Külpe’s system  Unlike Wundt, emphasize parts and not the whole  Influenced by the mechanistic spirit

The Elements of Consciousness  Titchener’s three problems for psychology:  Reduce conscious processes to their simplest components  Determine laws by which these elements were associated  Connect the elements with their physiological conditions  Similar to the natural sciences

The Elements of Consciousness (cont’d.)  Three elementary states of consciousness:  Sensations  Images  Affective states  Mental elements are basic and irreducible  Sensations can be characterized by the following attributes:  quality  intensity  duration  clearness

Criticisms of Structuralism  Criticisms of introspection:  Titchener and Külpe’s methods are subjective reports of the elements of consciousness  Introspection alters the conscious experience it intends on studying  Mind is not capable of studying itself  Meticulously trained observers will be biased  Titchener could not give an exact meaning to introspection

Criticisms of Structuralism (cont’d.)  Additional criticisms of Titchener’s system:  Structuralism accused of artificiality  The whole experience cannot be captured by a combination of elements  Limited concept of the field: Titchener regarded animal psychology and child psychology as not psychology at all

Contributions of Structuralism  Research methods:  Based on observation, experimentation, and measurement  Highest traditions of science  More scientific approach to the method of introspection  Catalyst for other schools of thought:  Served as a point of criticism  Scientific advances need something to oppose