The establishment of the academic discipline of Psychology

The establishment of the academic discipline of Psychology (Psychology 304)
In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt, at the University of Leipzig, was given some space to conduct psychological experiments. This event is significant not because Wundt at Leipzig won out over others at other universities. Nor was it significant because Wundt somehow that year decided it might be nice to have a psychology laboratory and asked and was given one. Psychology did not become an academic (autonomous) discipline “out of the blue”; Wundt did not just one day invent its concepts or formulate psychological problems; rather, he borrowed these from already existing disciplines like philosophy and physiology.
Similarly, the activities that become known as the methods of psychological research were hardly Wundt’s invention. Rather, Wundt adapted existing methods/practices to a different conceptual context. That is, Wundt and others who became “psychologists”, borrowed existing concepts, problems, and methods from elsewhere and adapted these to suit their new “psychological” goals.
Danziger maintains that Wundt gave shape to his new program of psychological research by borrowing from two explicit investigative practices and one implicit practice.

1. 
   He based himself, as a physiologist, on a specific form of experimental practice that only recently (one generation earlier) had been formulated in physiology. This provided him with certain material techniques of experimentation and, importantly, a certain way of asking psychological questions.
   
2. 
   He then proposed to apply these material techniques to a different “object” than experimental physiologists had done which had applied these techniques to organs and organ systems. The object to which Wundt addressed these techniques was the “inner world” of “individual, private, consciousness”. From where did Wundt get this “object” of psychology? After all, not long after Wundt constituted inner experience as the object of psychological investigation, psychologists quickly rejected this as the proper object of psychological investigation. In any case, Wundt along with the selection of this “object” (inner experience) also imported the formulation of a method that was historical tied to this object, namely introspection, although he carefully reformulated introspection to suit his view of the object (inner experience) and to meet the demands of the material techniques of experimentation as well as the kinds of questions he asked of the object borrowed from physiology.
   
3. 
   Introspection and experimentation usually receive all the attention by those who write of the history of the founding of psychology as an autonomous discipline. But there was also a third element that profoundly affected the founding of the new discipline, namely the “social organization of psychological experimentation”. In fact it is this social organization of experimentation that provides the most convincing grounds on which to credit Wundt with having founded psychology. That is, Wundt’s laboratory was where “scientific (physiological) psychology” was first practiced as an organized and self-conscious activity by a community of investigators. This community in turn spawned other communities at other universities. That is the founding of psychology as a distinct academic discipline of psychological inquiry was identified with a research community (i.e., a social organization). Wundt did this by adopting the prevailing university link between teaching and research that only recently originated in Germany. That is, Wundt’s laboratory was a place where student pursued experimental research. This resulted in a particular pattern of psychological experimentation which quickly became “traditional” in the discipline and in some way remains so to the present.
   

1. Introspection
Contra contemporary psychology, introspection was a major topic of discussion at the time of the founding of psychology and for several decades after that well into the 20^th c. Yet, contra the claims of the later behaviorists who maintained that introspection was the hallowed method of pre-scientific psychology, introspection was a relatively recent invention. [The behaviorists were eager to distance themselves from Wundt’s “introspection method” in order that they might count Wundt as a full-fledge member their behaviorist vision of the “science of psychology”.]
It is generally acknowledged (see C. Taylor) that introspection finds it roots in the protestant theology of the Reformation which encouraged the careful self-examination of one’s conscience (which partially took the place of the Roman Catholic confessional). Yet the use of the word ‘introspection’ as a systematic and ethically neutral practice of self-observation does not appear in English until the second half the 19^th c.
Of course, philosophy had long appealed to self-awareness (just as they appealed to

the observation of others, their actions, beliefs, feelings and motives). But philosophers never thought of this self-awareness as a method or methodology (theory of methods), and self-awareness no more than awareness (observation) of the world was considered a method of philosophy. That is, we distinguish between our everyday commonsense “experience” (of either or both the outer world or the inner world) and the systematic arrangement for the methodological production of certain kinds of experiences that we might call method/ologies. In the latter sense there certainly was no introspection before the 19^th c.

We recall that John Locke had distinguished between two sources of knowledge: sensation and reflection. Sensation gave us knowledge of the external world whereas reflection gave us knowledge of the inner world (of our own minds). Thus we get a philosophy of nature (external world) and a philosophy of mind (inner world). Yet Locke and the empiricist tradition more generally did not distinguish between the awareness of the mind (mental states) and the deliberate observation of mind (mental states).
It was the continental tradition, specifically Immanuel Kant, which in trying to overcome the conflict between the rationalist and empiricist traditions, distinguished between awareness and deliberate observation of mental states. Thus, while Kant accepted Locke’s distinction between inner sense and outer sense, he raised the crucial question which Locke did not, namely “can the experience of inner sense (inner world) be a basis for a “mental science” just like the experience of outer sense was the basis for physical science?” Kant answered “no”. The reason Kant gave is that science always involves the systematic ordering of sensory information in terms of a synthesis expressed in mathematical terms. But the information provided by inner sense was resistant to mathematization (measurement) and hence there could be no science of the inner sense; that is, there not be a science of psychology. Thus, while Kant acknowledged that Locke was correct in that there was an empirical basis for psychology (inner sense), this was insufficient to establish a “science”. [One can readily appreciate that Kant’s standard of science was far “higher” than the empiricist standard – it is one reason why even today many natural scientists do not consider psychology to be a science – since it is not possible to mathematize (measure) psychological (inner sense) phenomena.]
In addition to making a fundamental distinction between “science” and psychology, Kant made an even more important distinction (which was to be the fate of psychology in the 19^th c.) namely between the very different domains of psychology and philosophy. The empiricists in the Lockean tradition of the “philosophy of mind” did not make this distinction between psychology and philosophy – which meant of course that psychology lacked any special domain of study (it had no objects or methods that could distinguish it from philosophy). The empiricists were primarily concerned to provide an empiricist theory of knowledge and in doing so they formulated a theory of mental functioning (a “psychological” theory) but they saw this effort as the proper domain of philosophy.
This point is enormously important (even and perhaps especially so today). The empiricists did not distinguish between the following two questions: “how mental contents were caused by the natural (inner or outer) world?” (the empiricist focus) and “in what sense mental contents could be said to constitute knowledge?” As long as these two questions were not distinguished psychology (presumably answering the first question) and philosophy (presumable answering the second question) were indissolubly fused. Hence it follows that the empiricists also were not concerned to formulate a special method for psychology, and could simply appeal to everyday commonsense awareness of experience.
However, Kant did make the distinction between mental as it is present to experience (the “how” of mental content) and the principles in terms of which that mental life was organized (the “what” of mental content). That is, Kant held that the inner world was part of the empirical world just like our perceptions of the outer world, but that the empirical world (both inner and outer) points beyond itself to the empirical to the transcendental ego as the source of the categories that characterize human experience in general.
To give an example of what difference this distinction between the two questions makes consider that there is a huge difference between examining the factors involved in particular spatial perceptions (presumably the “how” psychological question) and examining the implications of the fact that our perceptions are always characterized by spatiality (the “what” philosophical question). In any case, in making the distinction between these two kinds of questions (which the empiricist philosophers collapsed), Kant separated philosophy from psychology and thereby raised the question of “psychology as a non-philosophical but empirical discipline”. Such a discipline would be empirical (based on the evidence of inner sense in the same way that the natural sciences based themselves on the evidence of outer sense). But being empirical was not sufficient to be a science (e.g. Botany was empirical in it formulated a system of classification based on the different features that characterized plants, but it was not a science since it was unable to demonstrate why a plant took on the features it does rather than say take on other features). In contrast Newtonian science (Physics) was able to demonstrate mathematically why a system of moving physical bodies, like the planets, maintained, given certain assumptions, the particular arrangement of its parts.
It is interesting then that Kant provided us with a clear cut distinction between psychology and philosophy but he also had a strong view of what constituted a science, and psychology could not meet those standards in principle. At best psychology would be a kind of “natural history of mind”, a catalogue or classification of empirical mental contents lacking both the fundamental importance of philosophy and the rational consistency of science.
We might just examine this change from Locke’s empiricism to Kant’s critical philosophy more closely because the change involved a set of interconnected distinctions that profoundly affected the sphere of intellectual work. Kant’s writings were “critical” precisely in that he raised the standards of and the interest in the organization of intellectual work. Of course, Kant as a follower of the Enlightenment’s “new science” was interested in the acquisition of knowledge but he also recognized that there are different kinds of knowledge based on different practices. It was now accepted that intellectual work was divided into different disciplines (fields) each of which was constituted by a trio of independent factors:
(1) a certain object of investigation,

(2) certain questions/problems that were characteristic of the field and asked of the object, and

(3) a specific methodology whereby these questions/problems are answered.
Although the conception of the object of investigation limits the problems that can be formulated with respect to the object and suggests certain methods appropriate in order to answer the problems posed with respect to the object, the adoption of these methods will continually re-create the object presupposed and constrain the questions that can be legitimately posed with respect to the object. Thus, the advance of introspection from the everyday commonsense use to a self-conscious method of investigation (as Wundt formulated it) would not have been possible without having first established that inner experience was as a legitimate part of experience as outer experience, but in turn the development of the systematic practice of introspection also confirms just such an inner world of experience.
Be careful here. It is often simply asserted that psychology as an academic discipline owes it existence to Descartes’ rationalist distinction between the “extended” and mechanical world of matter and the totally different world of mind. This is partially correct for this was also the starting point of Locke’s empiricist philosophy (the inner, individual mind). However for both Descartes and Locke (and here the rationalist and the empiricist both come under Kant’s critique), the mind remained but a potential object of technical scrutiny. Both empiricism and rationalism made distinctions and divisions in our experience of life but these were but a first step. To talk about inner experience makes it a potential object of specialized study but it required further development to make inner experience an “object” of systematic study.
This development involved the growth of the sciences in the 18^th c. As knowledge of the natural world accumulated it gradually became more differentiated and more self-conscious. The question of the relationship between science, or natural philosophy, and the more traditional concerns of philosophy came under scrutiny particularly in Germany where science was likely to occupy members of the university philosophy departments. The result was a sharpened focus on the methodological requirement of the various sciences (witness Kant’s effort to “ground” Newton’s physics). Kant was clearly concerned with the role of the philosopher in a situation that was rapidly being changed by the prestige of the newly emerging sciences (natural knowledge). What Kant did so brilliantly was to give philosophy the major role in adjudicating divergent knowledge by the newly emerging sciences. As a result philosophy, for well over the course of the 19th c., assigned intellectual limits to the new empirical fields of study based on methodological considerations. In turn, the newly emerging sciences were eager to justify themselves before this court of appeal.
Hence, in 19^th c. German universities the question of psychology as a field of study became a question of its methodology. Three issues dominated this debate:

1. 
   introspection
   
2. 
   mathematization
   
3. 
   experimentation
   

The first two found their source in Kant and the second in Friedrich Herbart who was Kant’s successor at Konigsberg and who tried to demonstrate (in what was a monumental exercise) that the mathematization of psychology was possible and this remained an important influence until the end of the 19^th c.

Introspection remained a contentious issue. For Kant description of inner experience like that of outer experience was limited to the phenomenal world of appearances (the only world we know) and hence introspection was also limited to the phenomenal self (as I appear to myself). The true basis of mental life, the true subject of pure apperception (transcendental ego) cannot be grasped in experience (either inner or outer).
Hegel confirmed this low evaluation of individual self-observation. Since Spirit was for Hegel the all-embracing objective category embodied in (historical) social and cultural manifestations, and abstractions of philosophical reflection (speculation), the role of observing the inner mind had little role to play.
In general the 19th c. was split into two camps with regard to introspection depending on which aspect of Kant’ ambiguous legacy it chose to emphasize. There were those like Hegel and Kant himself who devalued the evidence of inner experience (that is, the knowledge claims derived from inner experience), while there were others who sought to develop a new empirical discipline on the basis of evidence from inner experience (e.g., Fries, Beneke, and Fortlage, none of whom received much recognition in Germany however). The critical factor that distinguished these two camps was the degree of individualism that characterized each camp. Those in the British empiricist tradition grounded philosophical speculation in the experience of individual minds, those in the German idealist tradition grounded philosophical speculation on supra-individual principles. [In France the positivism of August Comte also distrusts introspection and affirms supra-individual principles of “order”/nature. This point is important for it shows that at least Comte’s positivism was not the positivism of British empiricism as in J. S. Mill for example. The 19^th c. is marked by different “positivisms”.] The German idealist tradition rejected introspection as unreliable and superficial, whereas the empiricist tradition held that introspection was the necessary basis of philosophy/psychology – remember the latter did not really distinguish the two. Thus, where individualism (the self-conscious individual) held sway it became the center piece of around which the world was arranged and introspection was held in high regard as a method or else, in contrast, where the order of the world held precedence over the individual as in idealism (and notably Comte’s positivism) introspection was regarded with suspicion and condescension.
[A note here is in order. For it would seem from the preceding paragraph that the British empiricist tradition are more inclined to emphasize the importance of “inner experience” whereas I have I suggested in class that the empiricist tradition’s conception of “consciousness” (and this was also true for the rationalist influence of Descartes) was very thin indeed. That is, inner experience was either a purely logical starting point as in Descartes (where the “I think” is not a substantial “self” or habitus) or else the focal role of experience was divided between “subjective”, secondary properties, which were deemed to be epiphenomenal and “objective”, primary properties, which were deemed to be real (e.g., Locke’s “scientific materialism”). Whether in empiricism, the Scottish School of philosophy, or early American psychology introspection was deemed important and stands in stark contrast to the later rise of behaviorism on American psychology which also signaled a break with Anglo-Saxon mental philosophy. Strangely enough there was more “consciousness” in idealism (from Kant’s critical realism/idealism to Hegel’s Spirit) than there was in Anglo-Saxon “mental philosophy” and this because the latter were constrained in their effort to accommodate mind to their over-riding adherence to scientific materialism (which Kant tried to limit and Hegel absorbed in his idealism). We might also note that August Comte’s French positivism was really an effort to eliminate the Anglo-Saxon empiricist’s primary/secondary properties distinction altogether (and with it the distinction between inner and outer experience). Comte held to a kind of naïve realism, precluding any philosophical metaphysics, in favor a “realism” of a direct access to the world as given in experience.]
Since the order of the world (nature) always included the social order as an important even all-important component, conceptions of introspection were not unconnected to political considerations. During the 19^th c. a positive attitude towards introspection tended to accompany a philosophy of liberal individualism while negative attitude towards introspection (inner experience/sense) were likely to be found among those who stressed the priority of collective interests (today, “communitarians”) and social cultural institutions (i.e., idealists and, strangely enough, positivists of Comte’s ilk).
Even an apparently private technique such as introspection turns out to be a form of social action and this on two levels. (1) On the immediate technical level introspection is a social performance insofar as its use as a methodology requires the employment of language for categorizing experience (experience must be articulated to be experience of something). (2) Introspection as an avowed method of inquiry leading to true knowledge is always a collective project of putting individual cognitive interests/goals to work in a shared social context. It is not introspection as an idiosyncratic habit of mind that is of interest, but introspection as a methodological social project that was at stake in Wundt’s use of it to establish the discipline of psychology. As such introspection derives its meaning historically – and this is so even when introspection is used casually – it is always a means of practice in a shared social context. Thus, it is the social-historical context that endows introspection with the significance it has and also determines its actual forms in practice.
As we have seen the emergence of the notion of introspection as a method was intimately linked to the emergence of psychology as a separate discipline of study with it own subject matter (object). The belief in this object, the private world of inner experience, was a precondition for any meaningful discussion of introspection as a method. In turn the actual practice of this method validated the belief that the object, inner private experience, was the object of psychology. Thus method and object mutually or reciprocally confirmed each other. Different opinions/evaluations about the object led to different evaluations about the method. (for example, when the object became ‘behavior” instead of inner experience, the method also changed from introspection to observation/perception). Hence, there could be differences of opinion not only whether introspection was valuable but about what one was actually doing in practice when one used introspection. Thus, introspection took on different meanings depending on how the object (private inner experience) was seen as fitting into the scheme of things. Obviously, the latter (the scheme of things ‘psychological”) also depended on general and social interests (e.g., Wundt believed the social interest was one of understanding the human mind - he was very “conservative” - whereas the behaviorists, later in the context of American progressivism and pragmatism, believed that behavior was more important than mind).

2. Experimental physiology
Discussions of experimentation in psychology have suffered from a misplaced abstractness, meaning that we often talk about the experimental method as though there were only one such method, and worse, the experimental method was often identified with the scientific method. This kind of abstraction can only be defended if one is ignorant of the history of psychology/science which provides evidence for several different kinds of experimentation. Moreover, these different kinds of experimentation have very different historical roots. Therefore any inquiry into the origins of psychological experimentation must be concerned with the specific historical forms of experimentation that played a role in the establishment of the new science of psychology.
There is no doubt that the physics of sound and optics (see Helmholtz) affected the early practices of the psychological laboratory – but the systematic and programmatic aspects of psychological experimentation derived not from physics but from physiology (hence, Wundt called the new discipline “physiological psychology” which was a synonym for “experimental psychology”). Yet the experimental method in physiology had only just been established in Germany. The older generation of physiologists such as Johannes Muller (d. 1858) did not regard physiology as essentially experimental, although they did occasionally conduct experiments. It was Du Bois-Reymond, Ludwig, and Helmholtz, Muller’s students who preceded Wundt by one generation, who transformed physiology into an experimental discipline. Wundt hoped that he might similarly transform psychology into an experimental science.
While Wundt was inspired by his immediate predecessors, they in turn were inspired by the French investigators earlier in the 19^th c., most notably Francois Magendie (1783-1855). It is here in post-Napoleonic France that experimental physiology became an experimental science par excellence. Experimentation came to define scientific physiology but this was made possible because of some more fundamental changes in the conception of physiology and its objects of investigation.
Traditionally physiology was not a separate discipline but merely a junior add-on to anatomy. Medical had chairs in anatomy and physiology but the latter was clearly junior. [One should note that there is a parallel between the anatomy and physiology and philosophy and psychology. The junior partner became of age when it defined its subject matter in terms of experimentation.] Associated with this arrangement was a certain view of the subject matter of physiology. Function was subordinate to structure. One began by examination (observation) of a particular organ and then one looked for what the organ does or its function. The body was conceived as a static hierarchy of organs each with its own characteristic function. Thus, the question of physiological function could arise only after the structures to which the functions belonged had been established anatomically. The object of investigation was the visible anatomical organ and the preferred method was dissection.
But this situation changes as with the development that was as much a change in the object of investigation as it was a change in method (see above). Functions were no longer deemed to be properties of anatomically visible organs but rather they were abstract objects that might involve several organs as well as all sorts of invisible processes. Thus, it was no longer the structure of a specific organ that was at issue but the role of the organ, namely its “function” (e.g., no longer merely the organ of the stomach as an observable structure but the function of the stomach in nutrition). Structures were now subordinate to functions, and functions involved the interplay of several or many organs and organ systems. This dominance of the functional perspective (over the structural one) changed the method of investigation from one of observation to one of experimental intervention – investigating living systems and their effects. The systematic use of experimentation ensured the dominance of the functional perspective – and the only questions asked were questions about functions. Thus, experimentation meant that questions were asked in terms of the contribution of various factors to particular functional effects. The choice of one’s primary method implied a certain conception of the object of investigation.
For the emerging science of physiology, experimentation provide a “disciplinary identity” that was needed if it was to separate itself institutionally from anatomy in order to establish itself as an independent discipline which did not happen until well into the second half of the 19^th c.
The functional dominance over structural thinking in physiology was also to deeply affect psychology. Already in the 18^th c. there was a reaction against the absolute separation of voluntary mental and involuntary physical causes of action and in the 19^th c. there were a number of medical investigators (e.g., Whytt, Unzer, Prochaska and Haller) who formulated “animal motion” in strictly functional terms. The antecedents of action of living beings were now defined in terms of their effects rather than in terms of their status as mental or physical causes. This resulted in the modern conception of “stimulation” (which was to be important for psychology for most of the 20^th c. as referring to all those factors which had together an effect). But note that this concept of stimulation also legitimized the treatment of psychological topics in a physiological context [contemporary psychology in all areas of research still follows this functional perspective of adjudicating the effect in terms of stimulation].
In the long run there were two channels through which experimental physiology influenced the investigative practices of psychology. (1) Sensory physiology (see Chs. 8, 9) became the topic of psychology’s first decades, and (2) Reflex movement which deeply influenced behaviorism and derived from Russian physiology notably Pavlov. When the new program of experimental physiology was extended to sensory functions, there were immediate psychological implications. In these physiological experiments variations in sensory effects were investigated as a function of variations in conditions of stimulation. But in terms of the prevailing metaphysics, sensory effects (at least in humans) were categorized as belonging to the private world of individual experience that was the subject matter of the philosophy of mind, or the “object” of the new psychology. Thus, experimental physiology gained theoretical significance far beyond that envisioned by its originators. It wasn’t just the senses that were being experimentally investigated; rather, it was the “mind” itself.
[The classical example of this was of course Fechner’s appropriation of Weber’s experiments in sensory physiology with the purpose of providing empirical evidence for Fechner’s metaphysical intuitions about the soul. One reason was that the new experimental physiology forced the re-localization of sensory experience in the central parts of the nervous system –those parts which were often regarded as the seat of the soul (e.g., the brain).]
Wundt first textbook in the new experimental psychology (1874) contained fully 2/3 sensory physiology and the effect of this was to put the entire discussion of psychological objects in a functional context. This was extremely significant for it meant that whatever is of psychological interest had to be investigated in terms of stimulation. Thus, the kinds of questions that could be posed were of the kind that physiology posed, namely the functional dependence of sensory experience as the effect of conditions of stimulation (namely intensity, weight, spatial location, temporal duration, etc. see Chs. 8 and 9) Much later the behaviorists would deem all behavior to be a function of the stimulus (stimulation). This view was what the psychology texts during the next 100 years were to perpetuate.
If traditional philosophy of mind (empiricism) with its notion of introspection bequeathed to psychology to notion of its object as inner private experience, the model of physiological experimentation left psychology no option but to pursue this study (the introspection of inner private experience) in a functional framework. Now it was only in the areas of sensation and perception wherein both these approaches (philosophy of mind and experimental physiology) could be combined. That is why, in case you wondered, why psychology texts all begin with these two topics, still, today.
All efforts to combine these two approaches in the investigation of topic beyond sensation and perception presented the new discipline with all sorts of problems (e.g., Wurzburg school, the Gestalt school, Titchener’s structuralism) which forced major realignments.

3. The social practice of psychological experimentation
So far I have treated experimentation as though it were a cognitive activity. But this ignores a crucial point about modern scientific experimentation (which distinguishes it from say alchemy investigation) is that it is a public activity. That is, experimentation is all about a technique for producing consensus about the facts. Scientific experiments are supposed to about phenomena that are in principle accessible to anyone and the procedures for doing should be replicable by all others who have the necessary training. Thus, a successful program of experimentation requires a community of investigators able to agree on the veracity of certain observations because they actually shared their replication (or can in principle do so). Obviously the effective functioning of such a community involves the acceptance of certain rules and conventions about the conditions under which the phenomena (facts) are produced, witnessed, and about the manner in which all such matters are publicly communicated. Experimentation is not just a matter of cognitive construction; rather, it is a matter of social arrangement (normative order).
In the middle of the 17^th c. the Royal Society of England constituted the original experimental community but by the 19th c such societies were more specialized. As the sciences developed, the basic model was extended and variations governing the scientific community had to be adapted to the “objects” objects of their respective investigation. But these variations (e.g., with the newly emerging experimental physiology and of course “physiological psychology”) also retained a common theme namely they were the means of distinguishing between the production of facts and the theoretical interpretations of these facts (the latter might vary considerably from investigator to investigator, but the production of the facts were a common concern and demanded agreement. What is of particular interest for the history of psychology is that these societies regulated the public communications within the community of investigators (within the particular science) as well as the social relations among its investigators.
The critical step that Wundt took in the formation/establishment of the new experimental discipline of psychology was not first of all the writing of a textbook (1874, important as that was), but the setting aside of a special space (the psychology laboratory) for conducting psychological experiments by his senior students and himself. This happened some five years after he published his textbook. The lab soon received official recognition as a scientific institute and also received a budget. In the same year Wundt also started a journal, Philosophische Studien, which regularly published the experimental reports coming out of his lab. Wundt was of course fortunate in being at the second largest university in Germany (Leipzig), and German science was at its height. He quickly gathered many students and more than 150 went to complete their doctorate with Wundt (both in philosophy and sensory physiology or psychology).
Rather than work in isolation, several students would be doing experimental research at any one time, sharing facilities and assisting each other in various ways: they shared theoretical interests, and their experiments had a bearing one on the other. In other words, the students and Wundt together formed a research community – a community of experimenters. Students after they graduated went elsewhere and established laboratories like the one at Leipzig (most notable is perhaps begun by Titchener at Cornell University). In Germany itself a second laboratory was begun at the University of Gottingen and in 1890 a second professional journal was added (Journal of psychology and the physiology of the sense organs).
In order for this experimental community to thrive, as it certainly did, certain technologies (material, literary, and social) were needed to regulate its internal life. The material technology could be taken over directly from experimental physiology, as well the literary conventions of communicating the procedures and results of experimental investigations could also be adopted from existing models and it was only gradually that the special features of psychological experimentation led to new textual means of presenting experimental results. In the early years, it was the regulation of the social relationships inherent in the practice of psychological research that presented the most interesting problems.
Thus, the classical work in sensory physiology by Weber, Hering, Helmholtz, and Fechner was carried out by single investigators. They communicated their findings in monographs and papers of the form that was pretty standard in Germany by mid-19^th c. The question of communication therefore only arose when their work was published.
But Wundt established his laboratory explicitly for the benefit of his students, so that they would have a place to do their experimental work, which for many of them would be the basis of their doctoral dissertation and scientific publications. In doing so, Wundt was simply following the general trend in Germany of translating the ideal linkage between teaching and research into a specific organized form. Increasingly the new sciences were linking the production of knowledge to the training of recruits at universities, institutes or laboratories, and Wundt followed this pattern. But this meant that the research coming out of his lab was essentially collaborative in which several individuals worked on different aspects of the same problem or on related problems. This kind of collaboration made it possible to share the tedium that characterized much of the research especially in psychophysics. It also made possible the exploitation of rather complex recording equipment (e.g., chronoscope, kymograph) that was becoming available. But these advantages were available only insofar as the collaboration was extended from the usual convergence between studies (experiments) to the systematic division of labor within a study (experiment).
The latter had profound implications for the nature of psychological research. The division of labor that was adopted in Wundt’s lab was none other than the well-known division between the roles of experimenter and subject in psychological experiments. But this division had no fundamental theoretical significance whatsoever for the Leipzig group and was simply undertaken as a practical response to the conditions of research in Wundt’s lab. As in other scientific experiments the observational data that constituted the experimental yield consisted mostly of instrument readings (e.g., time measurements) or simple sensory judgments (relative size or weight or brightness of two presented physical stimuli). But these targets (judgments) were categorized as psychological stimuli; that is, as events that depended on an individual’s conscious response. In other words, variations in the sensory target were of interest not because of what they might indicate about its own physical nature but because of what they might signify about the nature of consciousness of the respondent (this was the function of introspection).
But this change in interpretative framework within which individual observations were placed also entailed certain changes in the way in which individual investigators interacted with the apparatus and with other investigators who might be assisting them in the experiment. Individual consciousness being the object of investigation had to be shielded from external and internal influences of unknown effect which might distort the particular response of interest. So that it seemed desirable to get immediate responses (again this was the way Wundt systematized introspection) that allowed for no time reflection and to keep the responding individual in ignorance of the precise short-term variations in the stimulus conditions to which he was to respond. (Note this was not the same ignorance as that of being ignorant of the purpose of the experiment – which the early investigators did not deem to be desirable at all.) Obviously, this made it extremely difficult for individuals to experiment on themselves without assistance. The task of simultaneously manipulating the apparatus and playing the role of the possessor of the shielded private consciousness whose precise responses were the object of investigation was not easy; in fact it was impossible. To share the burden one had to make use of other members of laboratory, or of friends. This necessary collaboration thus took the form of a division of labor between those that manipulated the apparatus and those whose consciousness was being investigated.
Now the effect of these practical measures was not foreseen and hardly noticed for several generations. What occurred in practice was the development of a fundamental difference between the social conditions of experimentation in the natural sciences compared to the psychology. In the natural sciences any division of labor within the experimental investigation was unconnected to the relation between investigator and object of investigation. Thus in chemistry one person might do the distillation process while another might weigh the residue but none of this affected their relation to the chemical object itself. However in the psychological experiment one person would function as the repository of the object of investigation, the source of data, while the other person would merely manipulate the apparatus. This meant however that this division of labor resulted in a product (data) that was itself the product of a social interaction which defined the object of investigation. In contrast to the natural sciences wherein the division of labor was ad hoc, in psychological experimentation the division of labor between experimenters and experimental subjects quickly developed into a universally accepted structural feature of the psychological experiment as such.
So once the psychological laboratory was established, self-experimentation declined rapidly and quickly reports on self-experimentation were no longer published or at least very few were published. One reason was the rise of socially organized research and the establishment of research laboratories (which was true for the other sciences as well, except that in case of psychology this socially organized research was there form the beginning). The second reason was of course psychology’s peculiar subject matter (object) which was individual private consciousness. The latter made it inevitable that whenever an experimental division of labor was adopted it would take the form of a division of labor between the role of experimenter (manipulator) and experimental subject or the data source. The resulting product of psychological investigation depended not only on the interaction of investigators who all had the same fundamental relation to the object of investigation, but also depended on a unique kind of interaction between the experimenter role and the subject role.
This special social organization of the psychological experiment is reflected in a certain discourse that was published in these early studies. When describing the procedural aspects of experiments these published articles not only referred to the apparatus but also to the human participants in the experimental situation. That is, these human participants were referred to in terms of the activity they had been assigned by the experimental division of labor. So we get references to the “discriminator”, “associator”, or “reactor” depending on the activity they performed in the experiment. Similarly, those who arranged and read the apparatus were referred to as “manipulator,” “signaler,” and “reader” because manipulated the apparatus signaled the experimental stimuli, and read the experimental results. The published reports not only referred to the collaborators’ function (in what the collaborators did in the experiment) but the collaborators were also mentioned by their proper name, as historical persons, collaborating in experiment even as they were also described in terms of just what they in the experiment.
Later this changed as the institutionalization of the psychological laboratory spread rapidly – thus, we now get “observer” or “reactor” or just “person under experiment” on the one hand and “experimenter” on the other hand. In other words, as psychological experimentation matured, the reports or scientific articles began to reflect simply the division of labor without specific reference to just what either side did specifically in the experiment. Similarly, as the laboratories became institutionalized there was also a standardization of terminology. In Leipzig in 1879 and the following years, there was not yet a uniformity of terminology that referred to the experimental participants. Thus, even when two investigators were concerned with the same research topic, they might use different terms (say “reactors” or “observers”) to refer to their experimental subject (collaborators), but gradually usage became more standardized even though complete standardization did not occur until well into the 20th c. when the use of “experimenter” and “subject” became commonplace.
The social process that is reflected in these developments clearly involved the institutionalization of psychological experimentation. In the1880s the Leipzig lab showed a distinct pattern of practice that defined for its participants/students just what the psychological experiment looked like. Thus model was quickly emulated elsewhere and included not only an inventory of apparatus and the kinds of research problems that defined psychological research, but also involved the social arrangements required of psychological experimentation. There began a tradition of just how the psychological experiment ought to be conducted/structured. This tradition depended on (1) a certain definition of the “object” of psychological experimentation, (2) on the specific heritage of experimentation in sensory physiology (the function of “stimulation”), and (3) on some local conditions that gave particular form to the social arrangements of psychological experimentation.
But this tradition only extended so far as there was the historical conjunction of these three factors. Changes in any one of them would produce as different model of experimentation. See below.