PSYCHOLOGY’S FIRST LABORATORY

The founding of the first laboratory in experimental psychology has generally been credited (but not without some debate; see Green, 2000) to German physician and physiologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). Wundt received his MD degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1855. The natural sciences had become legitimized as a proper field of study and were allied with medical training in the universities.
Research laboratories for scientific investigations were an accepted part of the university structure, and careers in scientific research were made possible Ben-David, 1971). Wundt, trained in physiology as part of his medical education, pursued independent research as a student and chose physiology, not medicine, for his career (Bringmann, Balance, & Evans, 1975). As a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, Wundt offered courses privately for a fee, conducted research, and became an assistant to Helmholtz. In 1862, he offered his first course in “psychology as a natural science” (Bringmann et al., 1975) at Heidelberg, and in 1873–1874, the first edition of his book, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology) called for the recognition of psychology as a discipline independent of philosophy and physiology (Blumenthal, 1985a; Fancher, 1996; but see Danziger, 1990).In 1875, at the age of 42, Wundt accepted a position as professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, where he established the first experimental research program in psychology. Chairs in science carried more prestige than those in
philosophy, but the limited number of chairs available in science at the time made one in philosophy attractive to Wundt (Ben-David & Collins, 1966). Thus, psychology, like other sciences before it, began as part of the curriculum in philosophy; the acceptance of research laboratories as part of the university establishment permitted the founding of a laboratory in conjunction with Wundt’s research. Wundt had been engaged in psychological research for some time. As early as 1857, he constructed an apparatus in his home to measure reaction time and began accumulating a collection of instruments (kymographs, chronoscopes, tachistoscopes, and devices to measure responses) that were eventually employed in his laboratory (Blumenthal, 1985a). Upon his arrival at Leipzig, a space in a former university refectory building was assigned to Wundt to permit him to store his apparatus and to conduct demonstrations
associated with his lectures. In 1879, Wundt and students Max Friedrich and American G. Stanley Hall began a program of independent research (Boring, 1965; Bringmann,
Bringmann, & Ungerer, 1980) that initiated psychology as “the organized and self-conscious activity of a community of investigators” (Danziger, 1990). In 1881, the first issue of Wundt’s journal, Philosophische Studien, appeared featuring
Friedrich’s dissertation research, and by 1883, the laboratory had acquired the status and budget of a research institute within the university (Boring, 1965; Bringmann et al., 1980;Danziger, 1990). Experimental psychology as practiced by Wundt and his students at Leipzig employed the methods of physiology to study the contents and processes of individual human consciousness. Among the studies pursued in Wundt’s laboratory were psychophysical experiments to analyze and measure sensations, reaction-time experiments to measure the duration of mental processes, and experiments on attention, memory, and the association of ideas (Cattell, 1888). Wundt
extended Donders’s subtractive procedure to the measurement of other mental processes, including association and judgment. His American student, James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944), elaborated on Donders’ method in his research investigations at Leipzig between 1883 and 1886 and measured the speed of verbal associations. In a particularly innovative set of experiments, he varied the number of letters, numbers, words, or sentences a stimulus card contained and exposed the card to observers very briefly (.01 sec) to measure the number of items that could be contained in consciousness at one time; the result was an estimate of the span of attention, or span of apprehension (Ladd, 1888). Early reports of experiments were enthusiastic in detailing the empirical results that the laboratory could provide but that were
beyond the reach of the older philosophical psychology. Reports that the time taken to name a short word was .05 seconds less than the time taken to name a letter of the alphabet (Jastrow, 1886), or that the time taken to name colors or pictures was “about twice as long as the corresponding times for recognizing and naming letters or words” (Cattell, 1947b), exemplify this fascination with quantifying dimensions of mental processes. Intrigued by the individual differences in performance that he observed, Cattell would later explore the range of individual differences in a program of mental testing at Columbia University (Cattell, 1947c;Wundt, 1974; Fancher, 1996; Sokal, 1987). In addition to the psychophysical and reaction time measures that he employed, Wundt’s physiological psychology made use of reports of conscious experience. He distinguished between Selbstbeobachtung (self-observation), the introspection of the philosophers, and innere Wahrnehmung (internal perception); the basis of conscious experience. Selfobservation, as traditionally employed, could not meet the standard of scientific observation. To make a scientific introspection
possible required careful control over the stimulus that was to produce the mental event to be observed and as short an interval as possible between the observation of the event and its recall and report. This was to be achieved by the experiment conducted in the laboratory under carefully controlled conditions; experimentelle. Selbstbeobachtung was the form of introspection raised to scientific status by experimental procedures (although terminology when translated from the German can be problematic; compare Blumenthal, 1985a, p. 28 and Danziger, 1980, p. 244). In any case, to ensure that this observational procedure could be a rigorous scientific
method to assess mental events and did not lapse into the older philosophical reflection,Wundt established rules or guidelines by which introspection might achieve scientific validity:
(1) The observer, if at all possible, must be in a position to determine when the process is to be introduced.
(2) He must be in a state of ‘strained attention’.
(3) The observation must be capable of being repeated several times;
(4) The conditions of the experiment must be such as to be capable
of variation of the strength and quality of the stimuli (R. I. Watson & Evans, 1991).

By knowing when a process is to be introduced (a stimulus presented), an observer may concentrate (strainedattention) on the observation to be made and, to ensure reliability, be able to repeat the process. Varying conditions allowed the observer to identify changes in consciousness as a function of changes in the conditions of the experiment. Replicating conditions enhanced the reliability of the observations
to approach those of the observation of external events. These tight restrictions meant, with minor exceptions, that “the introspective reports from his laboratory are
very largely limited to judgments of size, intensity, and duration of physical stimuli, supplemented at times by judgments of their simultaneity and succession” (Danziger, 1980). Confidence in the results of introspection depended upon confidence in the skill and experience of the observer who, as the source of the data, was the critical component in psychological experiments. In Wundt’s laboratories, the observer possessed psychological authority and expertise. Experimental control over the introspective process was obtained not only by the rules for the conduct of an experiment but also by the use of observers whose habits of attentiveness and
quickness of observation and reporting provided reliable data (Danziger, 1980). Published reports of experiments conducted in German and American laboratories identified each of the observers and their level of experience in introspection
(e.g., Geissler, 1909; cf. Bazerman, 1987). The experimenter played a secondary role in manipulating the apparatus, presenting stimuli, and recording responses. The division of labor between experimenters and observers, who were colleagues and collaborators, was primarily one of convenience; roles were routinely exchanged, with few exceptions: Wundt, for example, served as an observer in some of the Leipzig
experiments but never as experimenter. However, the published reports of experiments by Oswald Külpe (1862–1915), a former student of Wundt, failed to identify the observers in experiments that used introspection in his laboratory at the University of Würzburg. Külpe’s experiments were designed to explore the thought processes
involved in making inferences and judgments. The Würzburg method of introspection, “systematic introspection” (Danziger, 1980; 1990) or “systematic introspectionism”
(Blumenthal, 1985b, p. 64), was a form of self-reflection that required thinking about a problem to solve and then retrospectively recounting the thought processes that led to its solution. In these experiments, the experimenter would interrupt
the observer’s introspective report with questions designed to probe the content of consciousness. This procedure,which shifted the power and authority in the experimental situation from the observer to the experimenter, represented a departure from the careful experimental control over introspection exercised in Wundt’s laboratory. Wundt vigorously opposed the Würzburg method as unreliable(Blumenthal, 1985a; Leahey, 1981), particularly as it was applied to those higher mental processes that Wundt believed to be beyond the reach of introspection and, indeed, of any laboratory method. Others pointed out that the “demand characteristics” inherent in this interrogation procedure(Müller, 1911; cited in Kusch, 1995) were likely to bias an observer’s responses. The status of introspection as a laboratory method would concern psychology well into the twentieth century.

Wundt argued that experimental self-observation could reveal the existence of mental processes such as apperception (an active attentional process that organized perceptions), volition (will or effort), and emotion, but he strongly believed that these higher mental processes could not be studied using the experimental method. The only methods appropriate for the study of these hidden, higher cognitive processes
were naturalistic observation and history. Wundt’s physiological psychology was one of “outer phenomena,” sensation,perceptions, and movement, his Völkerpsychologie,”
the study of language, religion, myth, and culture, was one of “inner phenomena” (Leahey, 1981). Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie encompasses 10 volumes. Because so many American students studied at Leipzig (Benjamin, Durkin, Link, Vesta, & Acord, 1992), Wundt assumed a position of particular significance in the accounts of the origins of the new psychology. Nevertheless, pioneers in the new discipline at other German universities attracted their share of students from the United States and from other
countries. The development of psychology, even in its early stages, was not the work of a single individual. Much of the development of psychology consisted of attempting to study in the laboratory those psychological processes that Wundt had declared beyond the reach of experiment.