INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?is known as the Weber-Fechner Law and it also applies to other
senses (see p.56).
So the earliest psychology laboratories tended to focus on sensory
phenomena, and psychology’s scientific reputation gradually began to
grow. By 1900 there were over forty psychology laboratories in North
America, a large number of them set up by students of Wundt. The first
major British psychology lab was opened at University College London
(UCL) in 1898 by James Sully, with a little help from the scientist and
polymath Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin), while the first in the
southern hemisphere was established in 1908 in New Zealand.
As scientific psychology grew, its pioneers began to organize them-
selves. The American Psychological Association was founded in 1892
by a group that included G. Stanley Hall, its first president. The British
Psychological Society started life as The Psychological Society in 1901
at UCL, with ten founder members including James Sully and W.H.R.
Rivers (famous for his treatment of soldiers during World War I). The
current name was adopted in 1906 to distinguish it from a separate
“unacademic” organization that shared the original name. Psychology’s
first official journals were also established during this era, including the
American Journal of Psychology, founded by G. Stanley Hall in 1887, and
the British Journal of Psychology, created by James Ward and W.H.R.
Rivers in 1904.
The development of psychology at the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the twentieth can be divided broadly between the
structuralists, led by another of Wundt’s students, Edward Titchener,
and the more diverse functionalists, who didn’t really have a leader as
such. Both schools were particularly focused on the scientific study of
consciousness, but structuralists were concerned with breaking it down
into its constituent parts, largely through introspection (reflecting on
one’s own mental experiences), whereas the functionalists (inspired by
Darwin) were more interested in how consciousness works and what
adaptive purposes it serves. Another distinction is that the structuralists
were concerned with purely scientific questions whereas the functional-
ists led the way in applying psychology to real life.
Another powerful influence on psychology near the start of the
twentieth century was the emergence of Sigmund Freud’s psychoa-
nalysis (see p.342). In many ways this was a blow to the new science of
psychology. Although Freud began his career as a hard-nosed scientist,
his later psychoanalytic ideas were based more on case studies and
conjecture than on experimentation. Scientific psychologists were