Structuralism was the foremost school of thought in the history of psychology. Structuralism seeks to understand the structure, that is, the configuration of components of the mind and its perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into their constituent components e.g. affection, attention, memory, sensation and so on. Structuralists were interested in deconstructing the mind into its elementary components and how those elementary components work together to create the mind.
Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), a German psychologist whose novel ideas contributed to the development and establishment of structuralism. Wundt is the founder of structuralism in psychology (Structuralism, 2009). He used different methods in his research. One …show more content…
Pragmatism is concerned not only with knowing what people do; rather it seeks to know what could be done with our knowledge of what people do. For instance, pragmatists believe in the importance of the psychology of learning and memory. Reason being that it can help us improve the performance of children in school. It can also help us learn to remember the names of people we meet. William James (1842–1910) was a leading guiding functionalism towards pragmatism. His utmost functional contribution was in his single book the landmark Principles of Psychology (1890/1970).
Furthermore, cognitive psychologists frequently point to the works of James in discussions of core topics in the field, such as attention, consciousness, and perception. John Dewey (1859–1952) was another early pragmatist who passionately influenced contemporary thinking in cognitive psychology. Dewey is remembered chiefly for his pragmatic approach to thinking and schooling. Although functionalists were interested in how people learn, they did not really specify a mechanism by which learning takes place. …show more content…
It focuses only on the relation between observable behavior and environmental events or stimuli. Some researchers like Thorndike and other associationists, studied responses that were voluntary (although perhaps lacking any conscious thought, as in Thorndike’s work).Some researchers also studied reactions that were involuntarily triggered in response to what appear to be unrelated external events.
The “father” of radical behaviorism is John Watson (1878–1958). Watson repudiated internal mental contents or mechanisms. He was of the thought that psychologists should focus only on the study of observable behavior (Doyle, 2000). He rejected thinking as nothing but a mere thought. Behaviorism also differed from previous movements in psychology by shifting the emphasis of experimental research from human to animal participants. One the issues using nonhuman animals, however, is determining whether the research can be generalized to