In this video, we're going to be talking about the second school of thought to emerge in psychology, which is functionalism. Functionalism began with William James, who is sometimes known as the father of American psychology. William James was an American scholar, and he was very fascinated by this new scientific field that was emerging. He actually went to Europe and met with Wilhelm Wundt and learned all about psychology, and James loved it. However, he did not like structuralism.
He thought that the idea of breaking our conscious experience down into building blocks was kind of a waste of time. James wanted to focus less on what the mind is doing and more on why it's doing it. He was very heavily inspired by Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was quite new at the time. If you're unfamiliar, the idea behind natural selection is that attributes that promote survival and reproduction become more prevalent in the population over time because individuals who have those attributes survive and reproduce, and so forth. James was thinking, well, if this applies to physical attributes like our opposable thumbs, for example, then it should also apply to mental processes and behavior, because presumably, those things also evolved, and if they have evolved, then they must be adaptive in some way.
This led to the rise of functionalism, which is an approach to psychology that emphasizes the adaptive significance of mental processes. They're trying to figure out why humans have this behavior, why we think in this way, how that would have been adaptive over time. The most important founders to be aware of are William James as well as James Roland Angell.
Angell was a very prolific researcher. He conducted a ton of research under functionalism. The main research question being asked here is how or why does a person do something, such as why do human beings have a bias toward fairness, or why do humans have color vision? Why would those things have evolved? What is their adaptive significance? The functionalists were a bit more creative than the structuralists in terms of methodology. Remember, those structuralists loved their introspection.
That was their main method, but functionalists really branched out and pioneered methodology for psychology. They used observation, experimentation, longitudinal studies, which involve studying the same group over time, as well as questionnaires. They also studied quite varied populations, including children, men, women, and people of all different age groups. Methodologically, they were quite varied and broad. If we had to think of a limitation for this perspective, it's that functionalism tended to overlook individual differences.
When thinking about the adaptive significance of a behavior, they looked at the most predominant behavior in a group of people and considered why that would have evolved over time, which is a perfectly valid research question in itself. However, this approach potentially loses the nuance of each individual in the sample. For example, all humans have memory—we can all remember things. This is a skill that evolved over time. However, different individuals might have very different strategies for how they remember things, illustrating their individual differences. So, you could lose that nuance in your research. Similarly, all humans cope with stress in some way, which is very adaptive, but different individuals might cope with stress in very diverse ways and both be successful.
Functionalism as a school of thought in itself is considered a historic perspective. You're not going to meet a functionalist anymore. However, the ideas of functionalism are very much alive and well in psychology. These ideas are very common in evolutionary psychology, but you'll also find these ideas even within other subfields of psychology. So even though functionalism itself is no longer its own school, the ideas behind functionalism are still prominent today.
Alright, that is William James and functionalism, and I will see you guys in our next video. Bye bye.