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Debating Experimental Psychology’s Frontiers: Re-discovering Wilhelm Wundt’s Contribution to Contemporary Psychological Research

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Abstract

Can the contemporary academic discipline of psychology, strongly relying on experiment as ideal way of psychological research, learn from Wilhelm Wundt’s strictly limited methodical understanding of the psychological experiment? Addressing this question, I firstly draw on Wundt’s early proposal of his research programme of experimental self-observation and then proceed with his methodical argument against the Würzburg school’s application of introspection on complex psychological phenomena. Centrally, Wundt aimed at showing the unprofessionalism of the Würzburg school’s introspective approach. Holzkamp’s early analysis suggested that this strong focus on showing the “wrongness” of introspective methods will in the long-term block addressing the more important underlying question regarding psychology’s research object(s)—what can and should be accessed by introspection? Against the backdrop of cultural theoretical approaches, this seems confirmed for today’s academic landscape of psychology: These approaches namely point to the fact that is exactly the relation between the researcher, the research subject and the research object that is still undetermined in answering this question. Beyond Wundt’s methodical approach that strongly limited the experiment’s scope to the objectifiable “simple” mental phenomena—and with it reducing the introspective encounter of the researcher and the research subject to a minimum—today, experimental, quantitative approaches encompass a much broader field of application, frequently working with self-reporting questionnaires that do not address the topic of introspection at all anymore. I therefore point to the fact that Wundt's objection against the Würzburg’s school’s research practice is more topical than ever: The question of a person’s relatedness with the (cultural) world seems to also demand that researcher understand psychological data that were quantified by questionnaire also as dialogical and not per se as a purely objectified third-person perspective on complex psychological phenomena.

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Notes

  1. Observation, as Brentano characterises it, involves dedicating full attention to a phenomenon, to understand and examine it. He however argues that fully concentrating one’s attention to a phenomenon simultaneously alters the phenomenon (‘If someone is in a state in which he wants to observe his own anger raging within him, the anger must already be somewhat diminished, and so his original object of observation would have disappeared’ (Brentano, 2015/[1874], p. 30)). Brentano’s solution to this is the method of retrospection (using memory for retrieving an inner perception). This is where the approaches of Wundt and Brentano centrally diverge, as Wundt’s aim was first and foremost: keeping the moment of introspection as measurable, i.e. as controllable as possible (see above).

  2. “Um die Beobachtung von der bloßen Wahrnehmung zu trennen, genügt es, wie ich glaube, sie als seine absichtliche Richtung der Aufmerksamkeit auf die Erscheinungen zu definiren [sic], wobei dahingestellt bleiben mag, ob diese Richtung dem Eintritt der Erscheinungen vorausgeht oder sie begleitet. Nur das muss wiederum als Bedingung festgehalten werden, dass sie nicht erst den Erscheinungen nachfolgt “ (Wundt, 1888, p. 296, translation: “To separate observation from mere perception, it is sufficient, I believe, to define it as an intentional directedness of attention to the phenomena, regardless of whether this direction precedes or accompanies the occurrence of the phenomena. It is a necessary condition that it does not come after the phenomena”).

  3. Calling him an ‘opposing sparring partner’ does not imply judging their personal relationship. Indeed, Külpe was known as warm as amiable person when he worked under Wundt, during his time as research assistant in Leipzig. And even though their approaches tremendously varied when Külpe established his own research centre in Würzburg, the two seem to have kept a friendly relationship. For instance, in a letter to Külpe, Wundt (1907) wrote that he is “absolutely convinced that one could disagree in questions of science and even that it is possible to run in a fundamentally different direction, without harming the feelings of personal friendship and sincere scientific respect” (as cited in Wontorra, 2009, p. 157–158, translated by the author of this article; see also the scans of the original document available at https://psychologie.biphaps.uni-leipzig.de/wundt/letters/frmwundt/ku1907.htm). The fact that they strongly disagreed in terms of their proposed research programmes, but seemed to manage to worship each other’s position (both: in science and personally), their relationship per se appears as an interesting object of a historical analysis, that has—to my knowledge—not yet systematically been accounted for.

  4. Of course, also ideas and concepts of gestalt psychology were more heterogenous. For instance, the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology (e.g. Wertheimer, 1912) worked on quite the opposite, addressing “Gestalt” more strongly focussed on introducing purely physiological models of Gestalt.

  5. Also Messer (1906) published important work explicitly on thought in his “experimental psychological exploration on thought (“Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchungen über das Denken”).

  6. See also Mandler (2007, p. 78).

  7. This is informed by Müller’s and Pilzecker’s (1900) work on memory, and the concept that mental processes remain present in one’s conscious for a short period of time after it occurred; see also Brentano (2015/[1874]).

  8. Translation by the author of the contribution, original: “(1) Der Beobachter muß womöglich in der Lage sein, den Eintritt des zu beobachtenden Vorganges selbst bestimmen zu können. (2) Der Beobachter muß, soweit möglich, im Zustand gespannter Aufmerksamkeit die Erscheinungen auffassen und in ihrem Verlauf verfolgen. (3) Jede Beobachtung muß zum Zweck der Sicherung der Ergebnisse unter den gleichen Umständen mehrmals wiederholt werden können. (4) Die Bedingungen, unter denen die Erscheinung eintritt, müssen durch Variation der begleitenden Umstände ermittelt und, wenn sie ermittelt sind, in den verschiedenen zusammengehörigen Versuchen planmäßig verändert werden, indem man sie teils in einzelnen Versuchen ganz ausschaltet, teils in ihrer Stärke oder Qualität abstuft.“ (Wundt, 1907, 2. Die allgemeinen Regeln der experimentellen Methode in ihren psychologischen Anwendungen, available at https://psychologie.biphaps.uni-leipzig.de/wundt/viewerz.htm).

  9. In contrast to his strict method programme of experimental psychology, Wundt did not propose a strict methodical setting for his Völkerpsychologie but rather broadly suggested analysing cultural products such as language, historical sources, religious practices, and art (Fahrenberg, 2013, p. 59).

  10. Translated from French by the authors of this contribution.

  11. Translated from German by the authors of this contribution.

  12. Translated from French by the authors of this contribution.

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    Natalie Rodax & Gerhard Benetka

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Rodax, N., Benetka, G. Debating Experimental Psychology’s Frontiers: Re-discovering Wilhelm Wundt’s Contribution to Contemporary Psychological Research. Hu Arenas 4, 48–63 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-020-00173-z

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