Psychology I / Structuralism and Functionalism
Practice question · Multiple choice

Psychology dates its founding to Wundt opening a laboratory in 1879, not to a book or a theory. Why does the room matter more than the idea?

Hints
  1. People had theorised about the mind for millennia. Ask what was genuinely new in 1879.
  2. What can a laboratory settle that an argument cannot?
Show the answer

C. Because the lab is the commitment to measurement

Why

The mind had been discussed for two thousand years; what changed was submitting the questions to apparatus and a stopwatch. That is also the seed of structuralism's failure, the one method it chose, trained introspection, turned out to be the one that could not settle its own disputes.

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