Wundt’s founding of a laboratory in 1879 marks the birth of psychology. What did Wundt’s lab look like? What are its origins and impact?

Since its creation in 1879, Wundt’s laboratory would be emulated many times, starting with the laboratories of his students that went on to become new champions of the new discipline of psychology. One of them, James Mckeen Cattell, provided an early description of Wundt’s lab in 1888:

“Professor Wundt, by the publication of his Physiologische Psychologie in 1874 and the establishment of a psychological laboratory at Leipsic in 1879, has made himself the representative of the effort to introduce experimental methods into psychology. (…) In 1879 rooms for the laboratory were set apart in the university buildings: the authorities also granted a yearly appropriation for the purchase of apparatus, and more recently a demonstrator with a salary has been appointed. The laboratory is at present established in four rooms, and two more are about to be added. The rooms are conveniently situated in what is known as the Convict building, looking out on quiet courts with both northern and southern exposure. The number of students has gradually increased: last semester there were nineteen carrying on original research and others attending demonstrations. The students come from all quarters (it should be added, except from England); there are nearly always Americans and Russians, and often Scandinavians, Czechs, Greeks and Frenchmen. The men work in groups; at least two are needed to carry on most psychological experiments, the one acting as subject, the other taking charge of the apparatus and registering the results. The students must, therefore, mutually help each other; one is responsible for the research, and if it is successful he prints it, often using it for a doctor’s dissertation. Wundt himself visits the laboratory every day, and is glad to answer questions and give help; he, however, tries to encourage the men to think for themselves, and to be responsible for their own experiments. He suggests subjects for research at the beginning of the semester, but he lets the students choose the direction in which they prefer to work, and encourages them to find independently problems and the methods of solving them.”

This description of Wundt’s laboratory may sound familiar to anyone who has had a chance to experience a modern scientific laboratory with an international flair and a mix of advanced and budding researchers. But how revolutionary was Wundt’s creation at the time? And what impact did it have in the field?

Origins

There are a couple of reasons to think of Wundt’s laboratory as being both a product of its time and, nonetheless, disruptive.

First, Wundt’s laboratory was part of a larger movement of professionalization of academic training and science that was taking place in Europe, through increased investment in institutions of higher education. Specifically, the establishment of Wundt’s laboratory accompanied a larger movement involving the establishment of institutes and laboratories in the natural sciences that took place in the second half of 19th century Germany. Basic research and experimental work were becoming an integral part of the German university system, and institutes in the natural sciences started being housed in dedicated buildings and equipped with technical instrumentation. Equivalent facilities in other areas of science, such as Wundt’s laboratory in psychology, were novel and established subsequently in the following decades. Although initially these new efforts had to be satisfied with less glamorous quarters and little funding, they gained institutional weight and prestige over time (Bringmann & Ungerer, 1980).

Second, Wundt’s laboratory is a symptom of a movement toward the use of instrumentation that is often called the “brass instrument era of psychology”. The use of instrumentation has become common in natural sciences and medicine, including physiological research, but Wundt was keen on making use of this new technology in the service of understanding human psychology that would go beyond perceptual phenomena and could also be used to understand memory and thought. Wundt’s laboratory included various instruments or apparatuses such as chronoscopes (for the precise measurement of small time intervals), tachistoscopes (to display images for a specific amount of time), or sphygmographs (to measure blood pressure) that would become standard devices in many psychological laboratories (Davis, 1970).

Impact

Wundt’s laboratory was to be emulated by many students under Wundt’s tutelage, who themselves would become founders of early psychology laboratories. For example, by 1900, of the 43 psychology laboratories in the United States, 12 were founded by Wundt’s students. Importantly, as Davis (1970) comments, “American psychologists, returning from Germany with newly minted doctorates, carried home not only the ideology but the gadgetry of the new psychology”, leading to similar setups and instrumentation in the laboratories of the new world.

More generally, Wundt’s laboratory became a symbol for the establishment of psychology as an empirical science that aimed to adopt the methods and instrumentation of the natural sciences to understand mental phenomena.

Reflection

Can you think of reasons for and against dating the birth of psychology with the foundation of Wundt’s laboratory?

Wundt (sitting) surrounded by students in his laboratory, ca. 1880.
(Public domain)

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References

Bringmann, W. G., & Ungerer, G. A. (1980). The foundation of the institute for experimental psychology at Leipzig University. Psychological Research, 42 (1-2), 5–18. http://doi.org/10.1007/BF00308688
An account of both the foundations of Wundt’s laboratory and embedding in the German university system of the time.

Cattell, J.M. (1888). The psychological laboratory at Leipsic. Mind, 13, 37-51. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Cattell/leipsic.htm
A contemporary first-person account of work at Wundt’s laboratory by one of his students.

Davis, R. C. (1970). The brass age of psychology. Technology and Culture, 11, 604–612. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894048/pdf
A brief description of the brass instrument era and review of some instruments used in early psychological laboratories.

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