---
title: "History of psychology"
chunk: 11/15
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychology"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:20.149396+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Early British ==
Although the British had the first scholarly journal dedicated to the topic of psychology – Mind, founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain and edited by George Croom Robertson – it was quite a long while before experimental psychology developed there to challenge the strong tradition of "mental philosophy". The experimental reports that appeared in Mind in the first two decades of its existence were almost entirely authored by Americans, especially G. Stanley Hall and his students (notably Henry Herbert Donaldson) and James McKeen Cattell.
Francis Galton's (1822–1911) anthropometric laboratory opened in 1884. There people were tested on a wide variety of physical (e.g., strength of blow) and perceptual (e.g., visual acuity) attributes. In 1886 Galton was visited by James McKeen Cattell who would later adapt Galton's techniques in developing his own mental testing research program in the United States. Galton was not primarily a psychologist, however. The data he accumulated in the anthropometric laboratory primarily went toward supporting his case for eugenics. To help interpret the mounds of data he accumulated, Galton developed a number of important statistical techniques, including the precursors to the scatterplot and the product-moment correlation coefficient (later perfected by Karl Pearson, 1857–1936).
Soon after, Charles Spearman (1863–1945) developed the correlation-based statistical procedure of factor analysis in the process of building a case for his two-factor theory of intelligence, published in 1901. Spearman believed that people have an inborn level of general intelligence or g which can be crystallized into a specific skill in any of a number of narrow content area (s, or specific intelligence).
Laboratory psychology of the kind practiced in Germany and the United States was slow in coming to Britain. Although the philosopher James Ward (1843–1925) urged Cambridge University to establish a psychophysics laboratory from the mid-1870s forward, it was not until the 1891 that they put so much as £50 toward some basic apparatus (Bartlett, 1937). A laboratory was established through the assistance of the physiology department in 1897 and a lectureship in psychology was established which first went to W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922). Soon Rivers was joined by C. S. Myers (1873–1946) and William McDougall (1871–1938). This group showed as much interest in anthropology as psychology, going with Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940) on the famed Torres Straits expedition of 1898.
In 1901 the Psychological Society was established (which renamed itself the British Psychological Society in 1906), and in 1904 Ward and Rivers co-founded the British Journal of Psychology.

== Early Russian ==
Insofar as psychology was regarded as the science of the soul and institutionally part of philosophy courses in theology schools, psychology was present in Russia from the second half of the 18th century. By contrast, if by psychology we mean a separate discipline, with university chairs and people employed as psychologists, then it appeared only after the October Revolution. All the same, by the end of the 19th century, many different kinds of activities called psychology had spread in philosophy, natural science, literature, medicine, education, legal practice, and even military science. Psychology was as much a cultural resource as it was a defined area of scholarship.
The question, "Who Is to Develop Psychology and How?", was of such importance that Ivan Sechenov, a physiologist and doctor by training and a teacher in institutions of higher education, chose it as the title for an essay in 1873. His question was rhetorical, for he was already convinced that physiology was the scientific basis on which to build psychology. The response to Sechenov's popular essay included one, in 1872–1873, from a liberal professor of law, Konstantin Kavelin. He supported a psychology drawing on ethnographic materials about national character, a program that had existed since 1847, when the ethnographic division of the recently founded Russian Geographical Society circulated a request for information on the people's way of life, including "intellectual and moral abilities". This was part of a larger debate about national character, national resources, and national development, in the context of which a prominent linguist, Alexander Potebnja, began, in 1862, to publish studies of the relation between mentality and language.
Although it was the history and philology departments that traditionally taught courses in psychology, it was the medical schools that first introduced psychological laboratories and courses on experimental psychology. As early as the 1860s and 1870s, I. M. Balinskii (1827–1902) at the Military-Surgical Academy (which changed its name in the 1880s to the Military Medical Academy) in St. Petersburg and Sergey Korsakov, a psychiatrist at Moscow university, began to purchase psychometric apparatus. Vladimir Bekhterev created the first laboratory—a special space for psychological experiments—in Kazan' in 1885. At a meeting of the Moscow Psychological Society in 1887, the psychiatrists Grigory Rossolimo and Ardalion Tokarskii (1859–1901) demonstrated both Wundt's experiments and hypnosis. In 1895, Tokarskii set up a psychological laboratory in the psychiatric clinic of Moscow university with the support of its head, Korsakov, to teach future psychiatrists about what he promoted as new and necessary techniques.
In January 1884, the philosophers Matvei Troitskii and Iakov Grot founded the Moscow Psychological Society. They wished to discuss philosophical issues, but because anything called "philosophical" could attract official disapproval, they used "psychological" as a euphemism. In 1907, Georgy Chelpanov announced a 3-year course in psychology based on laboratory work and a well-structured teaching seminar. In the following years, Chelpanov traveled in Europe and the United States to see existing institutes; the result was a luxurious four-story building for the Psychological Institute of Moscow with well-equipped laboratories, opening formally on March 23, 1914.

== Second generation German ==