Contribution of Behaviourism to the Emergence of Modern Psychology as an Empirical Science

Psychology was established as
an empirical science in the 19
th century

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Psychology as an empirical science in the 19th century
Psychology is relatively known as the young science which has its roots from the 19 th
century. The founder of psychology in the 19th century can be credited to two men that is
William James and Wilhelm Wundt (Vada & Hsiao, 2019). Wilehlem was considered the first
psychologist. In his view psychology was a study of conscious experiences and its goal was to
identify the elements of consciousness. However, the modern psychology refers to the ability to
acquire information about individual difference and using that information in solving the
problems. The individual difference emphasis on distinguish between the theories of cognition
from theories of intelligence. Wundt was the first psychologist who created the laboratory for the
psychological research at the university at Leipzig in 1879. in the laboratory experiments like
reaction times were conducted by the students of Wundt. He used to introspect, that is a process
that examined the consciousness as objectivity by making the human mind like any other
science. Thus, this process of understanding the characteristics of human mind was refereed to as
structuralism. However, despite the efforts of Wundt, training individual in the process of the
introspection was highly subjective and it faced criticism.
With the passage of time different authors had different perspective towards the
psychology that is functionalism, Psychoanalytic theory, etc. Although these theory were
concerned with the understanding and describing the inner experiences (Schaller, Murray &
Hofer, 2021). On the other hand there were researchers who focused on study of behaviourism
that is these inner experiences could be legitimate and studying the objectivity of observable
outcomes of the mental process. With this aspect psychology changed dramatically in the early
20th century with the development of new school of behaviourism. It rejected the emphasis on
both the unconscious and the conscious mind. And focused on making psychology more of a
scientific discipline by pursuing observable behaviour. With this regard a Russian physiologist
Ivan Pavlov conducted a research in the behaviourism (Blackman & Pellón, 2018). His theory
was based on the digestive system of animals. That represented the unconscious response of dogs
towards the salivation reflex in the presence of food. With this theory it led to evolution of the
classical conditioning theory which explained that through conditional associations behaviours of
individuals could be learned. On the other hand this theory helped learning the association with
the natural occurring stimulus and the environmental stimulus.