Origin of Psychology

Psychology is the applied and academic study of the human mind and behavior. The goals of psychological study are to describe, explain, predict and change human behavior.  Many consider Wilhelm Wundt to be the father of modern day psychological study. Wundt is the first person to have called themselves a psychologist and differentiate psychology as an actual science on the same level of biology or physics. The first laboratory dedicated to psychological research was created by Wilhelm as well. The other prominent figure in early psychology is William James who is widely associated with modern day American psychology. William is credited with offering the first academic class on psychology as part of his teachings.

Early psychological perspectives can be simplified to two main ideas, Structuralism and Functionalism. Structuralism is the study of the human brain and behavior broken down into individual elements as with the periodic table. Functionalism on the other hand has a focus on how each behavior and part of the brain has a specific function. Functionalism can be linked to the work of Charles Darwin in that our behaviors evolve with social, cultural, and environmental stresses. After these two preliminary ideas we can spawn much of the more modern ideas about the human mind.

• Psychodynamic theory comes from the mind of Sigmund Freud as a substitute for physics study of thermodynamics. It is based on the principle that our minds use a type of psychological energy that can be measured to determine thought and behavioral processes. 
• Behaviorist theory has roots based on the work of Ivan Pavlov and his classical conditioning approach to animal behavior. Essentially it is the idea that human minds can be conditioned into behaving a certain way through use of a punishment and reward system. 
• Humanistic theory is based around the idea that human beings are essentially good willed creatures and will strive to better ourselves and our surroundings in an effort to realize our full potential. 
• Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes as they occur in the brain.
• Evolutionary psychology studies the way in which the evolutionary process affects our behavioral tendencies. 
• Biological psychology is the study of how our biological makeup plays a roll in the way we behave and think.
• Sociocultural psychology studies how much influence the culture we are exposed to has over our minds. 
• Positive psychology studies the way in which positive reinforcement affects our minds. 
• Ethnic Subdivisions is the study in which we look at how different ethnicity's have different psychological profiles and behave differently from one another. 

When studying psychology one can look at the layout of a ladder with many rungs where each rung represents a level of analysis. Each level of analysis can tell us something different about the way we think and behave. Without looking at multiple rungs of the ladder it can be difficult to get even a partial understanding of the way the human brain works. These layers cover from the structure of the brain in a biological and physical sense to the functions, thoughts, feelings, and emotions caused by the mind. 

Studying psychology isn't always as straightforward as we might hope. Our minds are able to trick us into a few very real issues that can cause unwanted errors in the scientific method of research. Naive Realism is an issue where we assume that "seeing is believing" and end up trusting out intuitive perception of the world. Our perceptions are generally right such is the case when avoiding collisions while driving however sometimes we are mistaken in our preliminary assessment of a situation. 

Human beings suffer from a continued bias towards our own thoughts and belief as is the issue with confirmation bias. When suffering from confirmation bias scientists tend to focus on evidence that will prove a theory correct rather than any contradicting evidence which may disprove a theory. This is almost always a subconscious action on the researchers part but can happen to even the best of us. Belief perseverance is another bit of bias we face where even after evidence comes forward to disprove something we believe in we tend to still believe in the inaccurate theory.

Science is not able to prove or disprove every claim it comes against. These are known as Metaphysical claims. One type of claim would be the case of religion. With a metaphysical claim there is no way to measure with scientific instruments the idea that is put forth and without such evidence there is no way for science to either stand for or against the claim. A secondary limitation to science is pseudoscience which is often a claim found in advertisements that sounds like scientific truth but often relies on a lack of safeguards against bias and an over reliance on anecdotes.  

Two large debates in the world of psychological study are the nature-nurture debate and the free will-determinism debate. Nature-nurture has a focus on how much of our behavior comes from our biological and evolutionary structure (nature) and how much we change based on our social and environmental contact (nurture). With the free will debate scientists are focused on how much we control our own fate and to what degree we have free will when it comes to our actions and behavior.