Wundt's Laboratory

Wundt's Laboratory

There are several roadblocks to the elucidation of the day-to-day happenings of Wundt's experimental laboratory at Leipzig. First, Wundt penned more academic articles and books in his lifetime than most people today have read in theirs (Goodwin, 2005). Second, most of Wundt's writings have not been translated into English, leaving us with only the second-hand interpretations of Titchener and Boring to base our investigations on. Notwithstanding, we can draw from the first-hand accounts of two French students--Grafe and Durkheim--as translated into English and published by Nicolas, Gyselinck, Murray & Bandomir (2002).

In these accounts, Wundt's laboratory is described as practical, dependent on several apparatuses to perform experimentation, and the results of which were published in several academic journals, including Wundt's personal journal: Philosophische Studien. The emphasis of many of these experiments was on objectively measurable quantifications of psychological perceptions, such as, "...[attempting] to determine, using the method of bisection, whether the psychophysical law as applied to visual lightness (grayness) was a logarithmic function" (p. 212). Wundt had specific labs designed to carry out specially constructed experiments, which sought to hold constant as many variables as possible, thereby isolating the topic of the research investigation (Nicolas, Gyselinck, Murray & Bandomir, 2002).

Wundtian Psychology in the 21st Century

As mentioned above, there are several obstacles that have stood between historians and a look into the laboratory at Leipzig (i.e. language, sheer volume of literature). Because of these impediments, many misconceptions have surrounded Wundt and his University: 1) that his primary area of focus was the structure of human thoughts; 2) he was not concerned with cultural psychology and; 3) he did not think the mind was a causal agent in the world (Goodwin, 2005). First, even though many of the experiments at Leipzig were geared toward breaking down the separate processes of the mind, his primary aim was to find out exactly how we actively organized our perception of experiences. In this way, Wundt can be thought of as one of the founder fathers of the social-cognitive perspective that has become a dominant force in the psychological community. Second, Wundt--in his latter life--compiled a 10-volume encyclopedia on the social aspects of humanity called Volkerpsychologie that set the stage for the current study of social psychology. Last, Wundt devised a theory of social autonomy called voluntarism, which emphasized the active nature of the psyche and its place in our perception of the world around us. Long before the humanistic postulations of self-actualization and the self-concept, Wundt developed a theoretical framework for understanding the power of the will