Mental illness is losing its stigma. Not so long ago, people would avert their eyes when confessing they were in therapy. Those who've had any type of breakdown were objects of pity and maybe scorn. Today, even celebrities promote good mental health, often by announcing they're taking themselves out of the spotlight for a time.
Many believe that psychology begins and ends with Sigmund Freud. Or they see films like Girl, Interrupted and interpret it to mean that only rich people have psychological problems. Neither of those extremes is true. And besides, Dr Freud violated the premise of psychological study by including aspects of the unconscious in his analytic processes. More on that later.
Psychology has fascinated history's greatest thinkers. Plato and Aristotle contemplated psychological phenomena. So did Confucius and Lao Tzu. For most of human history, psychology was intertwined with the philosophical study. In the early 1800s, psychology became a discipline in its own right.
Today, every aspect of the human experience is grounded in psychology. Education, socialisation, aggression, how and why we conduct business... All of these aspects of our lives have a corresponding psychological theory. That suggests there must have been many great thinkers to establish them. Academically inclined people like:
- Wilhelm Wundt. who divorced psychology from philosophy
- Ivan Pavlov, Dr Wundt's contemporary, laid the groundwork for the Classical Conditioning Theory
- Jean Piaget established the stages of cognitive development
- B. F. Skinner: like Dr Wundt, he believed that only trained clinicians should practise introspection
- Albert Bandura, who developed the Social Learning Theory
By no means are these six a complete list of all the psychologists who've contributed to the discipline. They were, however, especially impactful. Not just to our understanding of the human psyche but to the institutions that shape our lives. We need to learn more about these pioneering men.
Albert Bandura
Early in his career, Dr Bandura abandoned his research in psychoanalytic theory to work on social learning. He sought to clarify the role of behaviour modelling in human thought and action. You might say he believed that every action had an equal and opposite reaction. He wanted to understand why. Thus, he stumbled on social learning.
People 'react' to modelled behaviours. If we see someone at work doing something that garners praise, we will take the same action so that we, too, can be praised. Conversely, we might see someone who had one pint too many at the pub and is now in the middle of a slugfest. From them, we learn to avoid excessive drinking and heightened aggression.
This social learning applies to humans of all ages. Babies learn from their social contexts, too. For instance, if a child sees someone acting aggressively, they might imitate that behaviour pattern. Especially if there were no negative consequences of those acts of aggression.
Dr Bandura's controversial Bobo Doll Experiment established that children learn from modelled behaviour. The study entailed dividing his cadre of tiny test subjects into two groups. One would be exposed to an adult who violently attacked a roly-poly toy. The other group would witness an adult test participant who played nicely with their collection of toys, which included a bobo doll. Many found his methodology shocking but Dr Bandura's results were conclusive.
B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner suffered two dramatic childhood events that may have shaped his psychology career. One such event causes him to reject the concept of free will. He believed that people 'operated' sequentially. That their every action was an inevitable step in a long, predetermined chain.
Dr Skinner called it the principle of reinforcement. If an action taken yields a good result, it will likely be repeated. The same is true for the inverse. He was an ardent advocate of operant behaviour conditioning, the idea that 'operators' can be 'trained' to behave in certain ways. That Skinnerian principle gave rise to the token economy.
The token economy underpins behaviour modification strategies in prisons, mental hospitals and other similar institutions. When the 'operant' exhibits desirable behaviours, they are rewarded. Cigarettes, sweets; maybe extra food or outdoor privileges are the doled-out 'tokens'.
This conditioning applies in school, home and work settings, as well. For instance, good performance might earn praise or a wage rise. On the negative side, an operant might exhibit behaviours - guilt, shame and remorse that could absolve them of punishment for a 'bad' action. Dr Skinner was aware of how limited his theory was so he expanded on it later in his career.
Jean Piaget
If you've ever been in a paediatric doctor's office or seen a film with babies as a plot point, you know about developmental milestones. The baby should be able to sit up by six months old. They should be verbal by age two. They will turn less egocentric starting at age seven.
We have Jean Piaget to thank for establishing these stages. He formulated them as a clarification of his biological model of intellectual development. That model states that every behaviour a human exhibits, from birth and throughout their life, is an assimilation attempt. Assimilation happens when a child responds in a manner consistent with a schema - an established pattern of thought or behaviour.
Piaget divided intellectual development into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete, and formal. Each stage corresponds to a particular age group. Dr Piaget wasn't wholly satisfied with his Theory of Cognitive Development, though. He realised that the stages were too rigid. They didn't allow for any flexibility or continuum between stages.
Others found his work problematic, too. They criticise his comparatively small sampling. His work is heavy with selection bias. He had no set methodology and laid out no conditions for his experiments. In short, they contend his studies are more in the vein of casual observation than formal experimentation. That doesn't mean that every Jean Piaget theory currently in practice should be repealed.
Ivan Pavlov
After the aforementioned Dr Freud, Ivan Pavlov is likely the most renowned psychologist. Unfortunately, he's famous for a study completely incidental to his actual work. Dr Pavlov focused on the digestive processes; specifically, gastric secretions. Saliva, in other words. Drool. As in 'dogs drooling when they hear a bell ring'.
Pavlov was primarily a physiologist. He trained in medicine first at Saint Petersburg University and then, at the prestigious Military Medical Academy. As an intern, he perfected the Heidenhain Pouch; a surgical technique to place a portion of a stomach outside of the body. That pouch made it easy to study digestive processes but the research was incomplete because the pouch had no nerve connections. That's the part Pavlov perfected.
Enter the dogs. Now established in his own lab, Pavlov had externalised a portion of dogs' salivary glands to observe how they secreted. He noticed that his dogs salivated even before any food appeared. He pursued that enquiry by training his dogs to respond to stimuli. The technician charged with feeding the dogs was a stimulus. His sudden appearance caused salivation whether he brought food or not. The dogs had the same reaction to other stimuli, pleasant and maybe not so pleasant.
Pavlov was an accidental psychologist. His studies on reflex mechanisms led him to wonder if involuntary responses could be conditioned. That led him to formulate his theory of classical conditioning used in behaviour modification therapy today.
Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Wundt defined psychology by what it's not. It's not introspective; nor should it be. It has nothing to do with metaphysics because science doesn't study souls. Psychology doesn't deal with unconscious phenomena; it studies only conscious states. It's not philosophical; it's scientific.
Dr Wundt is revered as the father of experimental psychology. He was the first to call himself a psychologist. But he was not the first to invoke psychology as a discipline. Nor was he the first to ponder psychological phenomena, as we alluded to in this article's introduction.
He established the world's first laboratory of experimental psychology when he was just 47 years old. He only had roughly 20 years in the field but had firm ideas about examining and determining psychological conditions. He laid the groundwork for all future psychological studies in his Development Theory of the Mind.
Unlike other great thinkers of his time, Dr Wundt had no trouble connecting biological and psychological aspects of development. He espoused critical realism; the concept that natural studies and humanities must complement psychological research. He was a physiologist before turning to psychology. His grounding in medicine taught him how to conduct legitimate scientific inquiries into psychological phenomena.
Main Features of Physiological Psychology enmeshes both disciplines. He wrote this textbook; the very first that addressed experimental psychology. Dr Wundt established psychology as a field of study at just the right time. Society was ready for someone to define why humans think and act the way they do. Born post-Enlightenment and professionally active at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Wilhelm Wundt was ideally positioned to take the lead in psychological studies.
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