Behavior and Mind

Loosely speaking, physics is the science of time, space, matter, and its motion; chemistry is concerned with the composition of elements and compounds. In the same manner, we describe psychology as the science of behavior and the mind.

The term behavior is easy to understand: observable actions by people or other living creatures. Behavior is public: it can be recorded on video, sampled, measured, and quantified. Behavior is just the kind of data that scientists are accustomed to working with.

Mind, however, is quite a different thing. Mind refers to our private inner experience including the perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and memories we have. The private nature of the mind causes difficulty for psychologists because they cannot observe, record, or measure it. How then can psychologists study mind?

One solution that was tried in the early part of the 20th century was to train people to report about their private inner experiences. This approach was referred to as introspectionism. Introspectionism sought to reveal the private inner experience by having observers translate it directly into public behavior. Introspectionism soon got into trouble, however, because different observers reported vastly different internal experiences in similar circumstances. [need example here]. Who was right, and who was wrong? Without any way to independently verify the private inner experience, there was no way to tell.

For introspectionism to work, all mental processes would have to be internally observable: our mind would have to be completely aware of itself. Psychologists soon discovered that many mental processes occur so quickly that we can’t internally observe them. Sometimes called the unconscious, these rapid mental processes are like magical illusions in our minds: That magician is not really pulling a quarter out of your ear — he is just moving his hands so quickly that it appears like that’s what happened. The existence of rapid mental processes was the undoing of introspectionism.

How can psychologists study the mind? Or can something so private be studied at all?