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

2. Topics  Swallow the Rubber Tube—A College Prank?  Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927)  Criticisms of Structuralism  Contributions of Structuralism

3. 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

4. Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927)  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

5. Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) (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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. Muller Lyer Illusion A B

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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