28/11/2023, 06:11 What Is Structuralism In Psychology?

Psychology

What Is Structuralism In Psychology?

By Gabriel Lopez-Garrido Updated on July 11, 2023
Reviewed by Saul Mcleod, PhD

On This Page:
1. Structuralist School of Thought

2. Introspection Structuralism’s Main Technique

3. Titchener’s Structuralism

4. Influence on Psychology

Take-home Messages
Structuralism is a theory of consciousness that seeks to analyze the elements of mental
experiences, such as sensations, mental images, and feelings, and how these elements combine
to form more complex experiences.

Structuralism was founded by Wilhelm Wundt, who used controlled methods, such as
introspection,to break down consciousness to its basic elements without sacrificing any of the
properties of the whole.

Structuralism was further developed by Wundt’s student, Edward B. Titchener.

Titchener proposed 3 elementary states of consciousness: Sensations (sights, sounds, tastes),

Images (components of thoughts), and Affections (components of emotions).

Structuralist School Of Thought

Structuralism proposes that the structure of conscious experience could be understood

by analyzing the basic elements of thoughts and sensations.

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Structuralism is considered the first school of thought in psychology, and was established in
Germany by Wilhelm Wundt, and mainly associated with Edward B. Titchener.

Structuralism looked to examine the adult mind in terms of analyzing the basic elements of
thoughts and sensations, and afterward to discover the manner by which these segments fit
together in complex structures.

Wundt’s aim was to record thoughts and sensations, and to analyze them into their constituent
elements, in much the same way as a chemist analyses chemical compounds, in order to get at the
underlying structure. The school of psychology founded by Wundt is known as voluntarism, the
process of organizing the mind.

Wundt’s theory was developed and promoted by his one-time student, Edward Titchener (1898),
who described his system as Structuralism, or the analysis of the basic elements that constitute
the mind.

Introspection: Structuralism’s Main Technique

Introspection is the process by which a person looks inward at their own mental
processes to gain insight into how they work. It is the self-observation of one’s
consciousness.

Wundt’s introspection was not a casual affair, but a highly practiced form of self-examination. He
trained psychology students to make observations that were biased by personal interpretation or
previous experience, and used the results to develop a theory of conscious thought.

Highly trained assistants would be given a stimulus such as a ticking metronome and would
reflect on the experience. They would report what the stimulus made them think and feel. The
same stimulus, physical surroundings and instructions were given to each person.

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Wundt’s method of introspection did not remain a fundamental tool of psychological

experimentation past the early 1920″s. His greatest contribution was to show that psychology
could be a valid experimental science.

Titchener trained his students to become skilled at trained introspection, and to report only the
sensations as they were experienced without reliance on “meaning words”, which he called a
stimulus error.

Using this approach, Titchener’s students reported various visual, auditory, tactile, etc
experiences: In An Outline of Psychology (1899), he reported over 44,000 elements of sensation,
including 32,820 Visual, 11,600 Auditory, and 4 Taste.

Titchener’s Structuralism

Elements of the Mind

Titchener (1908) concluded that three kinds of mental components could be considered to
constitute conscious experience:

1. Sensations (components of discernments),

2. Images (components of thoughts),

3. Affections (expressions of warmth which are components of emotions).

He suggested these components could be dissected into their unique properties, which he
identified as quality, intensity, duration, clearness, and extensity.

Quality – “cold” or “red”: distinguishes each element from the others.

Intensity – how strong, loud, bright etc. the sensation is.

Duration – course of a sensation over time; how long it lasts.

Clearness (attensity) – role of attention in consciousness – clearer if attention is directed

toward it.

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Pictures and expressions of warmth could be separated further into just bunches of sensations. It
can therefore be concluded that by following this train of reasoning, all of the thoughts in
question were pictures, which, being developed from rudimentary sensations, implied that all
perplexing thinking and thought could, in the end, be separated into simply the sensations which
he could get at through introspection.

Interaction of Elements
The second issue in Titchener’s hypothesis of structuralism was the topic of how the psychological
components consolidated and interfaced with one another to shape any conscious experience.

His decisions were generally founded on thoughts of associationism. Specifically, Titchener

centers around the law of contiguity, which is the idea the elements combine together.

Titchener dismissed Wundt’s ideas of apperception and innovative blend (intentional activity),
which were the premise of Wundt’s voluntarism. Titchener contended that consideration was
essentially a sign of the “clearness” property inside sensation.

Physical and Mental Relationship

When Titchener distinguished the elements of the mind and the specific interactions they make
with each other, his theory was concerned with figuring out why the components cooperate in the
manner they do.

Specifically, Titchener was keen on the connection between the physical process and the
conscious experience – he wanted to discover specifically what was responsible for most of the
interactions between them.

Titchener accepted that physiological cycles give a nonstop foundation that gives mental cycles a
coherence they in any case would not have. As a result, the sensory system doesn’t cause any form
of conscious experience, yet can be utilized to clarify a few attributes of mental occasions.

Influence On Psychology
Despite the fact that structuralism spoke to the development of psychology as a field separate
from reasoning, the basic school lost significant impact when Titchener eventually passed away.

Over the years Titchener’s approach using introspection became more rigid and limited. By
today’s scientific standards, the experimental methods used to study the structures of the mind
were too subjective; the use of introspection led to a lack of reliability in results.

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Other critics argue that structuralism was too concerned with internal behavior, which is not
directly observable and cannot be accurately measured.

Also, because introspection itself is a conscious process it must interfere with the consciousness it
aims to observe.

The development drove, nonetheless, to the advancement of a few countermovements that would
in general respond firmly to European patterns in the field of exploratory psychology.

Conduct and character were past the degree considered by structuralism. In isolating significance
from current realities of involvement, structuralism contradicted the phenomenological
convention of Franz Brentano’s demonstration psychology and Gestalt psychology, just as the
functionalist school and John B. Watson’s behaviorism.

Filling in as an impetus to functionalism, structuralism was consistently a minority school of

psychology in America.

References
Titchener, E. B. (1898). The postulates of a structural psychology. The Philosophical Review, 7
(5), 449-465.

Titchener, E. B. (1908). Lectures on the elementary psychology of feeling and attention.

Macmillan.

Titchener, E. B. (1899). An outline of psychology (New edition with additions). MacMillan Co

Further Reading
Leahey, T. H. (1981). The mistaken mirror: On Wundt’s and Titchener’s psychologies. Journal of
the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 17(2), 273-282.

Leahey, T. H. (1981). The mistaken mirror: On Wundt’s and Titchener’s psychologies. Journal of
the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 17(2), 273-282.

Titchener, E. B. (1921). Wilhelm Wundt. The American Journal of Psychology, 32(2), 161-178.

FAQs

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What is structuralism in psychology?

Structuralism is an early school of psychology that sought to understand the structure of the mind
by analyzing its components. Introduced by Edward B. Titchener, a student of Wilhelm Wundt,
structuralism used introspection to observe and report on individual sensory experiences and
thoughts.

The goal was to break down mental processes into their most basic elements, such as sensations
and feelings, to understand how they combine to create complex experiences.

Who founded structuralism?

Structuralism was founded by Edward B. Titchener, a student of Wilhelm Wundt, in the early
20th century.

Reviewer Author

Saul Mcleod, PhD

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester
Educator, Researcher

Saul Mcleod, Ph.D., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years experience of working in
further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the
Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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