William James The Early Years Essay Research

William James: The Early Years Essay, Research Paper

William James: The Later Years

William James introduced experimental psychology to America. He began giving laboratory demonstrations to students at least as early as Wundt, and he and his students started performing laboratory experiments about the same time as Wundt and his students. Ironically, while James made much of the value of experimentation, he himself found it boring. He usually spent no more than two hours a day in the laboratory. Yet he believed in it and had his students perform a broad array of experiments. Although James hated to do experiments, he forced himself to when it was the best way to prove or disprove a theory.

But James’s own experiments were only one source of his ideas about psychology.

He came up with many of his major insights and hypotheses from another and very different source: introspection, of a kind quite unlike that practiced by Wundt and his students. In James’s opinion, any effort to seize and isolate individual elements of a thought process by means of Wundtian introspection would fail. But he felt that a naturalistic kind of introspection, to observe our own thoughts and feelings as they actually seem to us, could tell us alot about our mental life. This was for him, the most important of the investigative methods. Introspection required both concentration and practice, because inner states follow each other rapidly and often are blended and difficult to distinguish from one another. Just as with practice one can notice, observe, name, and classify objects outside oneself, one can do so with inner events. Introspection is in reality, immediate retrospection; the conscious mind looks back and reports what it has just experienced.

James admitted that introspection is difficult and prone to error. Who could be sure of the exact order of feelings when they were excessively rapid? Etc But he said that the validity of some kinds of introspective reports could be tested and verified by at least half a dozen kinds of well-established experimentation. The duration of simple mental processes for one, could be estimated introspectively and then verified by reaction-time experiments; the introspective report of how many digits or letters one could simultaneously keep in mind for another, could be verified by apperception experiments. And while introspective reports of the more complex and subtle mental states might be impossible to verify experimentally, James said that since those acts are introspectively observable, any straightforward account of them can be regarded as literal.

One other source of James’s psychological ideas possibly the most important of all was personal and nonscientific: his naturalistic, perceptive, and wise interpretation of human behavior, based on his own experience and understanding. Many of his major insights came from psychologizing.

James had influence in many topics of psychology but is main studies were in his following concepts:

Functionalism: Mainly applied to James. Unlike the New psychologists, who maintained that higher mental processes are assembled in each individual from simple elements, James held that the higher processes were developed over the ages by evolution because of their adaptive value. It was clear to James that the mind’s complex processes had evolved because of their life-preserving functions, and to understand those processes one had to ask what functions they perform.

Functionalism is accurate enough, except that it applied only to some parts of James’s psychology. He viewed mental life as real, and the physiological view that mind was nothing but physical reactions to outside stimuli as unworthy of belief or even debate:

The proper subject of psychology was therefore, the introspective analysis of the “states of mind” that we are conscious of in daily life and of the functions they perform for the organism.