How did the object of study in psychology change over the history of the field since 19th century

Video Transcript

All right, let's talk about early psychology and what I mean by early psychology do I mean back way back it. When? Before we had the scientific method where people thought that if other people were acting strange, they might have been possessed by demons. And then we're cracking people. Schools open to let the demons out. Mm, no, that's not what I'm talking about. That's a little too far back. Eso Let's talk about something that's a little bit more recent, but not quite modern psychology, which would be sort of 19th century psychology. On what I mean by that this scene going to get confusing just as a reminder. The 19th century means from the 18 hundreds all the way up until the 19 hundreds. That's what I mean by 19 Ah, 19th century. Sometimes that's getting using. I get confused all the time. So just so that we're all on the same page here So early 18 hundreds we've got things going on like creamy Oscar P, which is basically measuring the school for different personality characteristics, which is, we now know, not accurate at all. But people were interested in what personalities were like. They were really interested in why people differ in some different ways, and this seems pretty like a pretty good idea at the time. We now know that this is pretty ridiculous, but a time is used to be good. Um, And then, you know, we don't have an actual field of psychology at this point, but people are really, really interested in concepts like anxiety, uh, in, uh, crime, or like what we would now call anti social behavior. Um, we also see things in this area around the mid 19th century. So in 1948 ish, we have a little bit of, um a discovery with Phineas Gage, if you have heard of him. And he was the one who was working on a railroad, and he had a railroad tie that got driven through his school, and it completely changed his personality. We now know that this area of the brain that this piece of metal went through went through his prefrontal cortex and it changed his personality because it got rid of his higher order thinking. But at the time, they didn't know that all they knew was that this man who is relatively grumpy before had a rod driven through his brain, and then his entire personality changed. And this started something that was then, and very, very popular treatment for people who were very aggressive or maybe just obedient in time on this was called a lobotomy. So again, not quite the field of psychology at this point. But this is leading upto what starts to get people to think about why it's important to study human behavior. So those are some pretty big hits. Lets a race. It's get a little bit more room. We can move on to some other stuff. Um, so after we've got people like Phineas Gage who help us discover these things, although through unfortunate circumstances um, we're also looking at psychology in the 18 fifties Thereabouts, we're thinking about human behavior, but we thinking about it in the ways of a physiology and philosophy. So we're starting to ponder about why do humans act the way they dio what are their bodies? And one of their brains dio, um, to contribute to how they behave a little bit later on, we start to get something a little bit more formal. So if you remember, we've got people who are in Germany and who are in the United States were starting to think about these things a little bit further. So you have people like, uh, G Stanley Hall, who gets the very first psychology PhD. And this was in 18 87. First psychology. PhD, this is in the United States, and then you have people like will him bunt who actually start the first psychology research lab. This is when you get, um, you get I'm trying to find the exact date I hadn't written down here. But he was the first person to first official psychologist as known in modern history because he had the first psychology book published. He had the first psychology research lab. Remember, this was happening over in Germany. And then you also have people starting to emerge like William James. Uh, and you also then have, um, functional ism and structuralism come out of this. Um, and so it's important, toe. You know, these timelines You've heard about these timelines now, but let's talk about how what they studied was very different. Um, and how this changed over time. So, like you just saw earlier, like you just saw earlier. We um saw that psychology went from this thing. That's sort of mystic in nature is kind of something that we thought about that we may be toward about maybe like with Phineas Gage. We found about certain aspects of it entirely on accident. But, um, once we started to get really, um, psychologist as we would think of them in modern day, we really started to break things apart, piece by piece, a little bit more. And the objects of what we're focusing on changed a little bit here. Right. So you've got William James in the States, and William James is looking at different aspects of the human experience. You've got people like William Bunt that are looking at it in a totally different way. So you've got you've got structuralism versus funk journalism. So we're thinking of psychology in its bits and pieces here. We're looking at it in How is it structured in the brain? How does it make it function? Um, on this slides us all the way into right at the turn of the 8/19 century or right of the turn of the 20th century. Then we start to get people who are not kind of ticket by pieces were starting to look at it in its hole. So right at the beginning of this new century, we've got people like Freud who are thinking about what is happening, the unconscious behavior. And then this leads us down a path of behaviorism to cognitive to humanist. Um, and you know, as we know today, that most people who are in psychology or eclectic in some kind of way, shape or form But the take home message here is that pre modern psychology, the 18th or the 19th century in particular, went from taking this concept of psychology is sort of this, like mystery. What predicts what when we started to study it with pieces of the actual scientific method and that this scientific method really made the focus of psychology, um, predictable behavior. And even though we deviated for a little bit with studying things unconsciously, we now pretty much still reflect a lot of these same values that started in the 19th century.

How has the field of psychology changed over time?

What was psychology like in the 19th century?

How has psychology changed in the 21st century?

What is the history of the field of psychology?