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Period: 400 to 500
Greeks
They began to study human behavior and came up with a conclusion that people were domiated by their own minds. BC -
Sep 8, 1550
Nicolaus Copernicus
Earth was not the center of the universe, and it actually revolved around the sun. -
Sep 8, 1575
Galileo Galilei
Used star positions to confirm movement based on Copernicus's work. -
Rene Descartes
Disagreed with the idea of dualism and proposed that a link existed between the mind and the body. -
William James
Taught the first class of psychology at Harvard University. -
Wilhelm Wundt
Started his Laboratory of Pschology in Leipzig, Germany. Acknowledged as creating modern psychology as a seperate, formal field of study. -
William James
Often called the "father of psychology" in the united states. Wrote the first psychology textbook titled The Principals of Psychology. -
Sir Francis Galton
Wanted to understand how heredity influeced a person's abilities, character, and behavior. Galton traced the ancestry of eminent people and found that greatness is hereditary. He concluded that genius is hereditary. -
German Psychologists
Wertheimer, Kohler, and Koffka disagreed with the principals of structuralism and behaviorism. They also argued that perception is a whole and is not just a sum of its parts. -
Ivan Pavlov
Used a tuning fork to make sound which made the dog salivate because the sound from the tuning fork provoked a stimulus that made the dog behave that way. -
Sigmund Freud
Was more interested in the unconcious mind becuse he felt that the unconcious motivations and conflicts are most responsible for most human behavior. -
John B. Watson
Formulated the behavior that is known as behaviorist. The position of them was that psychology should concern itself only with the observable facts of behavior. -
Cognitivists
Piaget, Chomsky, and Festinger focused on how we process, store, and use information and how this information influences our thinking, language, problem solving, and creativity. -
B.F. Skinner
Introduced the concept of reinforcement which is the response to a behavior that increases the likelihood the behavior will be repeated. -
Humanists
Maslow, Rogers, and May described human nature as evolving and self directed.