Psychology and Its Different Approaches - Essay Example

? Psychology and its Different Approaches of Psychology and its Different Approaches Robert M. Yerkes was one of those proponents of psychology who believed that there were significant differences in the abilities that people were born with. According to his theory, these variations in the abilities of different people and different populations significantly affected their prospects in certain areas of work and study. There was a certain amount of genetic determinism in the kind of work that was done by Yerkes. His work has thus largely to do with genetics and the study of the genetic makeup of human beings and other organisms. His work came in for a great deal of criticism on this count as it promoted a certain form of genetic determinism and also seemed to suggest that racial differences could be held responsible for some of the differences that existed between people (Dewsbury, 1996). There was a difference in the case of J. Watson, though. Inasmuch as he believed that psychology was very important, he did not ascribe any deterministic aspect to the theories that he propounded. He felt that the behavior of a person was entirely dependent upon the kind of environment that person was exposed to. Watson felt that the roles that a person was to take up later in life depended largely on the kind of stimuli that the person could work with in his or her life (Heft, 2001). This is different from the theories that were propounded by Yerkes as it placed the agency for change to a greater extent in the hands of the individual. When Watson says, “I am not willing to turn psychology over to Titchener and his school”, he means to say that he would not allow the school of thought that was followed by Titchener to dominate psychology as a field. There is a reluctance to allow structuralism as a form of thought to replace behaviorism as the dominant school of thought. This was one of the most important debates in the area of psychology towards the initial stages of the twentieth century. This debate was sought to not be lost by Watson and this is why he makes the above statement. His statement needs to be taken in the context of this debate where there is a feeling on his part that the structuralist school had led to a lessening of the theoretical rigor in the field of psychology. The empirical backing that the behavioralists claimed for their school of thought was missing in the studies that were undertaken by the structuralists. This, they felt, was a betrayal of the very field of psychology that they were all a part of. The betrayal was then done, according to them, not just by the structuralists but also by those people who failed to undertake good research for the behavioralist school of thought. This statement is then made also because there is a lack of willingness on the part of Watson to accept a different point of view and accept change in the field that he was a part of. There was a great difference in the manner in which the structuralists like Edward Titchener and Watson felt. Titchener felt that there was a need to change the way in which the very idea of consciousness was looked at. He thought of consciousness as something that needed to be broken down into component parts. This then would be looked upon as a structure that could then be looked upon as a conglomerate. While Watson talked about the lack of importance that introspection had in the shaping of an individual and the consciousness of a person, Titchener looked at introspection as a major force in the shaping of the mind and consciousness of a person (Nevid, 2008). In this sense, there was a major difference in the ways in which these two thinkers thought of the development of human consciousness. While Watson’s approach gave a certain amount of agency to the human being for the mind that he or she constructed, Titchener went a step further in attributing to man greater potential and ability. He ascribed to man a greater role in shaping his own consciousness and as a result, his or her own life. This was all connected to the attempts that were made to understand consciousness in a scientific manner. It is significant that there was an attempt to make a periodic table of consciousness in the manner in which there was a periodic table for the elements in the world. According to Watson, psychology is a field which can be enjoyed and studied by many. This then ties in with his beliefs regarding the field which were largely based on the behavioralist school of thought. Watson and other behavioralists like him believed in the agency that men had in a certain sense as they would be able to decide their lives according to the exposure that they had received. Nurture of a mind was thus, much more important than nature. One may go so far as to say that nurture is the only thing that matters in the development of a mind. This would be the situation as far as theorists like Watson are concerned. When he says, “I believe that it can be made a desirable field for work”, he also means to say that psychology as an area of study can be one which can then be turned into one where there is an enormous scope for looking into the different aspects of the working of the human mind. In the context of the early twentieth century when psychoanalysis had begun to challenge the boundaries of how the human mind was perceived, this was an interesting comment to make as it also revealed the insecurities that conventional models of psychology was facing at this point of time in history. This was also an age when the human mind was being subjected to great scrutiny and consciousness was also looked into in greater detail by writers of fiction and non-fiction alike. References Dewsbury, D. A. (1996). Portraits of pioneers in psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Heft, H. (2001). Ecological psychology in context. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Nevid, J. S. (2008). Psychology: concepts and applications. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company. Read More