Video on the origins of Experimental Psychology

In the latest among his various contributions to the teaching of the history of psychology, Christopher Green (the current president of APA Division 26) has posted a new video on the origins of experimental psychology.  He describes it thus: “An impossibly brief history of the origins of experimental psychology, from Aristotle to Wundt.”

Green’s other videos can be found here:

  • Toward a School of Their Own (part 1)
    Documentary about the “prehistory” of American Functionalist Psychology, from about the time of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” to the naming of functionalism by its chief opponent, E. B. Titchener. Includes material on Chauncey Wright, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, James Mark Baldwin, John Dewey, James Rowland Angell.
  • A School of Their Own (part 2)
    The second and final part of a documentary about the history of American Functionalist Psychology, running from about the time the “school” was named “functionalism” by its chief opponent, E. B. Titchener up to the end of World War I. Includes material on Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, James Rowland Angell, James Mark Baldwin, Granville Stanley Hall, John Dewey, William Lowe Bryan, Noble Harter, Edward Lee Thorndike, Robert Sessions Woodworth, Walter Bingham, Walter Dill Scott, Frank and Lillian Gibreth, Harry and Leta Hollingworth, Hugo Munsterberg (Muensterberg), Henry H. Goddard, Lewis M. Terman, Robert Mearns Yerkes, Linus Kline, Willard Small, John Broadus Watson, and others.
  • An Academy in Crisis
    Documentary describing the public controversy that swirled around the hiring of a new professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1889. The debate was focused on the prospect of an American, James Mark Baldwin, later a major developmental psychologist and evolutionary theorist, being hired over a Canadian competitor, James Gibson Hume, who later headed the U. Toronto philosophy department for 30 years (based on Green, 2004).
In addition, his series of interviews with prominent historians of psychology — This Week in the History of Psychology — can be found here.  And of course his archive of important historical articles, Classics in the History of Psychology, can be found here.

About Jeremy Burman

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman is a senior doctoral student in York University’s Department of Psychology, specializing in the history of developmental psychology and its theory (especially that pertaining to Jean Piaget). Prior to returning to academia, he was a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.