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People have always been interested in the behavior of other people. We can trace some of the philosophical ideas in psychology back to the early Greeks. For example, Aristotle and Plato debated whether human ideas are innate or need to be experienced. Philosophers have always been interested in the nature of people. In the seventeenth century, the British philosopher John Locke described the human mind as a blank slate (tabula rasa) upon which could be written all of life's experiences.
Other influences on early psychology came from biology and physics. Charles Darwin was a naturalist whose observations while on a worldwide voyage were published in The Origin of Species in 1859, in which he also outlined his theory of evolution. Darwin's influence on psychology included both his method of naturalistic observation of behavior and his theory of evolution. In his theory of evolution, Darwin suggested that animals and people show behavior that is adaptive to the environment and that helps them to survive. A year after Darwin's book, Gustav Fechner published Elements of Psychophysics, in which he outlined his experimental method of measuring sensory experience. Fechner would produce a tone on a tuning fork and determine if his subject could hear it. By manipulating the conditions of the experiment, he was able to examine the relationship between the physical stimulus and sensory experience. His experimental approach was important for the new science of psychology. |
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