WUNDT, WILHELM

WUNDT, WILHELM (1832–1920), German psychologist.

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was the leading institution builder for the modern discipline of experimental psychology. He wrote the first effective textbook for the new field—Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (1874; Principles of physiological psychology)—and in 1879 he established a laboratory and institute at the University of Leipzig to which students could come for the explicit purpose of conducting Ph.D. research in experimental psychology. In 1881 he founded Philosophische Studien, a journal that despite its title published the results of the research conducted in Wundt's institute, thus becoming the first in the world to be explicitly devoted to experimental psychology. Wundt and his institute attracted students from around the world, many of whom returned to their home countries to establish similar psychology laboratories and programs there; by 1900 there were more than one hundred of them worldwide, and psychology was widely recognized as an important new academic discipline.

Wundt was born near Mannheim, Germany, on 16 August 1832, into an academic family, his paternal grandfather having been a professor of history at Heidelberg, and his uncle Philipp Friedrich Arnold (1803–1890) a physician and professor of physiology. Young Wundt followed his uncle first to Tübingen and then to Heidelberg, where he completed his medical degree in 1856. As a student he published two physiological papers in the start of a prodigiously prolific career. Attracted more to research than to medical practice, he briefly worked at Johannes Müller's (1801–1858) celebrated Physiology Laboratory in Berlin before returning to Heidelberg as a Privatdozent in physiology. At that time the famous Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894) arrived to establish a Physiology Institute, and Wundt was named his assistant. Although Helmholtz identified himself as a physiologist, he was also among the vanguard of those mid-nineteenth-century scientists who challenged Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) influential characterization of psychology as an intrinsically nonexperimental, primarily philosophical discipline, on the grounds that psychological phenomena could not be experimentally manipulated or subjected to mathematical analysis. Helmholtz had shown that many aspects of conscious sensation and perception could be accounted for via mechanistic analysis of the physiological systems involved in vision and audition. His demonstration of the finite and measurable speed of the nervous impulse had led to experimental research on "reaction times" and "mental chronometry." Also in 1860, Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) pioneered the field of "psychophysics," showing how the "just noticeable difference" in perceived stimulus intensity—clearly a psychological variable—could be measured and subjected to mathematical analysis.

The young Wundt contributed in a small way to the field of mental chronometry in 1861, with a study showing that the psychological act of switching attention from an auditory to a simultaneously occuring visual stimulus required a measurable one-tenth of a second. More consequentially, he concluded that the growing body of research at the boundary between psychological experience and its physiological underpinnings provided material for a discrete discipline of experimental psychology, an idea he introduced in his 1862 book, Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (Contributions to the Theory of Sensory Perception), and then developed and illustrated more fully twelve years later in his Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874). The latter book greatly enhanced Wundt's visibility and led to his appointment as full professor in philosophy, first at Zurich in 1874 and then at Leipzig the following year.

Most of the experimental research conducted by Wundt's students at the Leipzig institute fell into the general categories of psychophysics and mental chronometry, augmented by introspective analyses of immediately conscious experience into categories of sensations and feelings. Significantly, however, even as he promoted these studies Wundt also argued that experimental methods were only applicable to those psychological phenomena lying close to the border of physiology, and not to the "higher" mental processes including memory and thinking. The latter, he argued, involved supraindividual, communal processes such as language and custom, which had to be studied by comparative and historical methods rather than laboratory manipulations in a separate discipline he called Völkerpsychologie. Wundt also described his overall approach to psychology as "voluntaristic," because it stressed that the higher mental processes occurring at the center of consciousness entailed an inherently unpredictable and sometimes creative process he called "apperception" (as opposed to simple perception), unbound by the mechanistic laws of association.

An ardent German nationalist, Wundt fell out of vogue in English-speaking countries during World War I, and only fragments of his voluminous works have been translated. Further, a later generation of psychologists spearheaded by Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), who invented "nonsense syllables" as a vehicle for the experimental investigation of memory, vigorously challenged Wundt's assumptions regarding the limitations of experimental methods. Modern cognitive science routinely investigates many phenomena that Wundt would have considered out of bounds. But still, legitimate debate continues about the ultimate limitations of mechanistic and experimental analysis, as in the discussions about strong versus weak Artificial Intelligence. Since the 1970s a small but growing number of anglophone historians have called attention to the contemporary relevance of many of Wundt's works.

See alsoHelmholtz, Hermann; Psychology.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Wundt, Wilhelm. Elements of Folk Psychology: Outlines of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind.

Translated by Edward Leroy Schaub. London, 1916. Translation of parts of Wundt's ten-volume Völkerpsychologie.

——. Principles of Physiological Psychology. Translated by Edward Bradford Titchener. Reprint, New York, 1969. Translation of portions of the fifth German edition (1902) of Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, criticized by some historians as providing a misleading picture of Wundt's overall psychology.

Secondary Sources

Bringmann, Wolfgang G., and Ryan D. Tweney, eds. Wundt Studies: A Centennial Collection. Toronto, 1980. Several important articles on Wundt prepared to mark the centennial of his first laboratory in Leipzig.

Fancher, Raymond E. "Wilhelm Wundt and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology." In his Pioneers of Psychology, 3rd ed., 145–185. New York, 1996.

Rieber, Robert W., and David K. Robinson, eds. Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientific Psychology. New York, 2001. Presents important aspects of the modern reevaluation of Wundt's work.

Raymond E. Fancher