Academic Politics in the History of Science: Experimental Psychology in Germany, 1879–1941

Abstract

The rise of large-scale laboratory research in nineteenth-century Germany has often been portrayed as a continuous success story. Taken as indicative are the two sciences on the leading edge of the trend, chemistry and physiology; developments in biology, physics, and the technical fields are then depicted either as imitations of or as the results of knowledge or personnel transfer from the leading disciplines. At first glance, the founding in 1879 of the world's first continuously operating psychological laboratory in Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt, a physiologist turned philosopher, seems to fit this model very well. In one study, Joseph Ben-David and Randall Collins assert that this instance of “role hybridization,” as they call it, marked experimental psychology's “take-off into sustained growth” as a scientific discipline.