21  A little bit of history | I-C

Experimental psychology evolved in 19th century Germany. Figure 21.1 shows three of the key scholars involved.

Figure 21.1: Gustav Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt.

Why were they all men? Well, women were simply not allowed to study! In Germany, women were only allowed to matriculate at universities starting between 1900 and 1909 (depending on the Bundesland).1 In England, the first degrees for women were awarded by the University of London in 1878 (although Oxford only followed suit in 1920 and Cambridge in 1948!).

Before the advent of experimental psychology, psychological theorising had been the purview of philosophers. Unfortunately, while coming up with some ideas highly relevant to psychology (see, e.g., John Locke, David Hume and John Stuart Mill), they were not interested in testing their ideas empirically. In 19th century Germany, the physiologists mentioned above2, among others, took a different approach and started to perform experiments to empirically test ideas relevant to the nascent field of psychology. Among his many other contributions to science, in 1849 von Helmholtz measured neuronal conduction speeds and showed that, while neuronal conduction was fast (about 25 to 40 m/s in frog neurons), it was not so fast that it could not be measured.3 This insight opened the door to investigating the human mind by measuring the time it took to complete certain tasks. Fechner on the other hand, building on the work of Ernst Heinrich Weber, established the field of psychophysics. In 1879, Wundt founded the first psychological institute at the University of Leipzig. According to Boring (1950), he should be considered the first proper psychologist.

References

Boring, E. G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology (2nd ed.). Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Cobb, M. (2020). The idea of the brain: A history. Profile Books.

  1. A notable, but also singular, exception was Dorothea Erxleben.↩︎

  2. Notably, Fechner, von Helmholtz and Wundt had all studied medicine, not philosophy. That said, they were not just physiologists or psychologists. Boring (1950) notes that Fechner “was for seven years a physiologist (1817-1824); for fifteen a physicist (1824-1839); for a dozen years an invalid (1839 to about 1851); for fourteen years a psychophysicist (1851-1865); for eleven years an experimental estheticist (1865-1876); (…) recurrently and persistently a philosopher (1836-1879); and finally, during his last eleven years, an old man whose attention had been brought back (…) to psychophysics (1876-1887)” (p. 283). Von Helmholtz was also an eminent physicist. And Wundt was also a philosopher.]↩︎

  3. Even Johannes Müller, one of the most eminent physiologists of the time, was of the opinion that neuronal conduction speeds must be so fast they cannot be measured (Cobb, 2020).↩︎