1832–1920 · physiologist and psychologist, Heidelberg and Leipzig

ilhelm Wundt trained in medicine and worked from 1858 as an assistant to Helmholtz at Heidelberg. He went on to make psychology a laboratory science with its own institute, its own students and its own journal.

what he did

His Principles of Physiological Psychology (Wundt, 1874) argued that the mind could be studied with the experimental methods of physiology. In 1875 he took a chair of philosophy at Leipzig, and in 1879 he set up the rooms that became the Institute for Experimental Psychology, usually counted as the first. The work there was precise and narrow: reaction times measured with the chronoscope, brief exposures with early tachistoscopes, and trained observers reporting their own experience under controlled conditions.

He also held that the higher products of mind, language, myth and custom, could not be studied in the laboratory, and spent his last two decades on a ten-volume Völkerpsychologie about them.

why he is here

Leipzig trained a generation of psychologists from Europe and America, and the shape of the lab experiment, a controlled stimulus, a timed response, many trials, is still his. Its weak point, trained introspection, is the part that did not survive; compare Nisbett & Wilson (1977) on how little people can report about their own processes.

Primary works and sources

1. Wundt (1874). Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig: Engelmann (issued in two parts, 1873–1874).
2. Nisbett & Wilson (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.84.3.231

Try it yourself. [playful] Small toys on the toy shelf that show this in action:   • the reaction box — Donders' simple and go/no-go reactions

see also

	Hermann von Helmholtz — his Heidelberg chief
	the chronoscope — the clock of his laboratory
	timeline: psychophysics — where Leipzig fits