History of psychology: The Beginnings of psychology

Ernst weber

Ernst Weber (1795-1878) was born June 24 in Wit-temburg, Germany, the third of 13 children. He received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1815, in physiology. He began teaching there after graduation, and continued until he retired in 1871.

His research was predominantly concerned with the senses of touch and kinesthesia (the experience of muscle position and movement). He was the first to clearly demonstrate the existence of kinesthesia, and showed that touch was actually a conglomerate sense composed of senses for pressure, temperature, and pain.

His chosen interests led him to certain techniques: First, there is the two-point threshold, which is a matter of measuring the smallest distance noticeable to touch, at various parts of the body. For example, the tongue had the smallest threshold (1 mm), and the back had the largest (60 mm).

A second technique involved kinesthesia: Just-noticeable difference is the smallest difference in weight a person is capable of perceiving through holding two things. He discovered that the just-noticeable difference was a constant fraction of the weights involved. If you are holding a 40 pound weight in one hand, you will be able to recognize that a 41 pound weight in the other hand is in fact different. But if it were a 20 pound weight, you could detect that a mere half pound difference. In other words, as regards weight, we could recognize a 1/40 difference, whatever the weights.

This is known as Weber's Law, and is the first such «law» relating a physical stimulus with a mental experience.

Custav fechner

Gustav Fechner was born April 1,1801. His father, a village pastor, died early in Gustav's childhood, so he, with his mother and brother, went to live with their uncle. In 1817, at the age of 16, he went off to study medicine at the University of Leipzig (were Weber was teach-ing)/lle received his MD degree in 1822 at the age of 21.

But his interests moved to physics and math, so he made his living tutoring, translating, and occasionally lecturing. After writing a significant paper on electricity in 1831, he was invited to become a professor of physics at Leipzig. There, he became friends with a number of people, including Wilhelm Wundt, and his interests moved again, this time to psychology, especially vision.

In 1840, he had a nervous breakdown, and he had to resign his position due to severe depression. His interests switched again, now to philosophy. Like many people at the time, he found Spinoza's double-aspectism convincing and found in panpsychism something akin to a personal religion.

Using the pseudonym Dr. Mises, he wrote a number of satires about the medicine and philosophy of his day.

But he also used it to communicate, often in an amusing

if

Way, his spiritual perspective. As a panpsychist, he believed that all of nature was alive and capable of awareness of one degree or another. Even the planet earth itself, he believed, had a soul. He called this the day-view, and opposed it to the night-view of materialism.

Further, he felt that our lives come in three stages — the fetal life, the ordinary life, and the life after death. When we die, our souls join with other souls as part of the supreme soul.

It was double-aspectism that led him to study (and name) psychophysics, which he defined as the study of the systematic relationships between physical events and mental events. In 1860, he topped his career by publishing the Elements of Psychophysics.

In this book, he introduced a mathematical expression of Weber's Law, and named it such. The expression looked like this...

*R /R = к

which means that the proportion of the minimum change in stimulus detectable (*R) to the strength of the stimulus (R) is a constant (k). (R is for the German Reiz, meaning stimulus.) Or...

S = klogR

Where S is the experienced sensation.

What Weber and Fechner showed that makes them far more significant than just Weber's Law is that psychological events are in fact tied to measurable physical events in a systematic way, which everyone had thought impossible. Psychology could be a science after all.

Sir Francis Galton

Francis Galton was born February 16, 1822 near Birmingham, England. He was the youngest of 7 children, and first cousin of Charles Darwin. His father, a wealthy banker, insisted on educating Francis at home, especially considering that Francis could read at 2 and a half years old.

Later in childhood, he was sent off to boarding school, which he despised and criticized even in adulthood. At 16, he went to medical school at King's College at Oxford. He finished his degree at Cambridge in 1843, at 21.

His father died, leaving Galton a wealthy young aristocrat. He traveled extensively and became a member of the Royal Geographical Society, for which he developed maps of new territories and accounts of his adventures. He became president of that organization in 1856.

Galton had a penchant for measuring everything — extending even to the behinds of women he encountered in his travels (something he had to do from a distance, of course, by means of triangulation). This interest in measurement led to his invention of the weathermap (including highs, lows, and front — terms he introduced), and to suggesting the use of fingerprints to Scotland Yard.

His obsession eventually led to his efforts at measuring intelligence. In 1869, he published Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences, in which he demonstrates that the children of geniuses tend to be geniuses themselves.

In 1874, he produced English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture, based on long surveys passed out to thousands of established scientists. In this volume, he noted that, although the potential for high intelligence is still clearly inherited, that it also needed to be nurtured to come to full fruition. In particular, the broad, liberal education provided by the Scottish school system proved far superior to the English school system he hated so much.

In 1883, he wrote Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. This would be the first time anyone compared identical and fraternal twins, a method now considered ideal when investigating nature vs nurture issues.

In 1888, he published Co-Relations and Their Measurement, Chiefly from Anthropometric Data. As the title suggests, it was Galton who invented correlation, as well as scatter plots and regression toward the mean. Later, Karl Pearson (1857-1936) would discover the mathematical formulation of correlation.