Psychology is the science of behaviour. The word ‘psychology’ comes from two Greek words, ‘psukhe’ meaning breath or soul and ‘logos’ meaning word or reason. The modern meaning of psycho is mind and the modern meaning of logy is science, thus the word psychology literally means the science of the mind.

People used to conceive the mind as a floating spirit but that changed to the functioning brain, which we use to control behaviours. Therefore the study of the mind turned to the study of the brain.

This study of the brain was taken up by several modern psychologists. Some of these will be familiar to you and some will not.

Willhelm Wundt, 1832-1920. He was part of the German school and he described psychology as The science of immediate experience or Structuralism. He told his colleagues to engage in introspection, which simply meant looking within and recording the findings.

Hermann Ebbinghaus, 1850-1909.
Hermann was also part of the German School. He attempted to measure human memory. He also recorded the speed with which forgetting occurred.

Charles Darwin, 1809-1882. He proposed the theory of evolution in his book, ‘On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection’. This was published in 1859.

Galtan 1882-1911
He was Darwin’s cousin and he was interested in whether people’s features correlated with each other and whether such occurred for psychological features such as memory capacity, reaction time and intellect. He wrote a book entitled ‘Hereditary Genius’ in 1869.

Sigmund Freud 1856-1939
Freud (pictured above) worked in the area of the theory of personality. He described the concept of ego, superego, id and other mental structures.

Edward Thorndike, 1874-1949
He specialised in Behaviourism, a direct follow-on from Functionalism. It is the study of the relation between people’s environments and their behaviour.

Ivan Pavlov, 1849-1936
Pavlov was a Russian who believed animals could be taught cause and effect relations in the environment, i.e. a dog could be taught to salivate quite easily and at will.

John B Watson, 1878-1958
Watson is the author of a book entitled, ‘Psychology From The Standpoint Of A Behaviourist’. He believed that psychology was a natural science whose domain was restricted to observable events, i.e. the behaviour of organisms.

Edward Tolman, 1886-1959
Clark Leonard Hull, 1884-1952 and
Skinner, 1904-1990
These men specialised in descriptions of the ways in which organisms behaved and also in the explanation for why they behaved in the way they did. Each had a different view on how behaviour occurred, but all used animal experiments. Hull also used mathematics. Tolman’s theory became known as purposive behaviourism. Skinner published a book in which he described radical behaviourism and how it could operate. This was called ‘Waldan Two’.

Jean Piaget, 1896-1980
He became interested in the question of human knowledge and how we begin to acquire knowledge. He experimented by using children and rating the knowledge acquired at various ages.

Max Wertheimer, 1880-1943
Wertheimer was German and attempted to discover the organisation of cognitive processes. This was called Gestalt psychology. This meant that perception resulted from patterns of interaction among many elements. These patterns could exist across space and time.