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Period: 428 BCE to 347 BCE
Plato
He talked about the nature side, some kind of knowledge and abilities were innate or inborn. -
Period: 384 BCE to 322 BCE
Aristotle
He talked about nurture side, each child was born as an "empty state" which acquired through learning and experience. -
Period: to
Rene Descartes
He talked about the free will, and the idea of mind controls the body through the pineal gland in the brain.
Dualism -
Charles Darwin The Voyage of the Beagle
Darwin found that we have the animalistic instinct to do whatever it takes to continue our bloodline and/or our species -
Wilhelm Wundt opens the first psychology lab
Wundt was the first scientist to separate the discipline of philosophy, and psychology. Wundt’s main aim was to study the structure of the mind, via introspection. This frame of thought was coined structuralism. -
Functionalism and Structuralism
Functionalism, an early school of psychology, focuses on the acts and functions of the mind rather than its internal contents. -William James and John Dewey Edward B. Titchener, a leading proponent of structuralism, publishes his Outline of Psychology. Structuralism is the view that all mental experience can be understood as a combination of simple elements or events. -
Sigmund Freud with Psychodynamic
The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, introduces the term in a scholarly paper. Freud’s psychoanalytic approach asserts that people are motivated by powerful, unconscious drives and conflicts. He develops an influential therapy based on this assertion, using free association and dream analysis. -
Behaviorism
John B. Watson publishes “Psychology as Behavior,” launching behaviorism. In contrast to psychoanalysis, behaviorism focuses on observable and measurable behavior. -
Jean Piaget Cognitive Development Stages
This theory is based on the idea that a child's intelligence changes throughout childhood and cognitive skills are learned as a child grows and interacts with their environment. -
Evolution of Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology emphasizes the mind is structured into an information processor similar to a computer. -
Evolutionary psychology
Richard Dawkins publishes The Selfish Gene, which begins to popularize the idea of evolutionary psychology. This approach applies principles from evolutionary biology to the structure and function of the human brain. It offers new ways of looking at social phenomena such as aggression and sexual behavior. -
Cultural psychology
Bruner formulated that culture has the largest impact on human behavior. Sociocultural psychologists believe that it is imperative to understand an individual’s actions in a cultural context to truly understand why humans behave the way they do.