William James

(a) Psychologists do not conduct a study involving deception unless they have determined that the use of deceptive techniques is justified by the study’s significant prospective scientific, educational, or applied value and that effective nondeceptive alternative procedures are not feasible.

James was a functionalist. Wundt and Structuralism. The key proponents for the school of structuralism were Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Bradford Titchener, while the influential figures who developed the school of functionalism were William James, G.

Gestalt theory emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. That is, the attributes of the whole are not deducible from analysis of the parts in isolation. The word Gestalt is used in modern German to mean the way a thing has been “placed,” or “put together.” There is no exact equivalent in English.

Behaviorism focuses on the idea that all behaviors are learned through interaction with the environment. This learning theory states that behaviors are learned from the environment, and says that innate or inherited factors have very little influence on behavior.

FUNCTIONALISM AND STRUCTURALISM TODAY First, both emphasize that the subject matter of sociology is to be relations among parts. Functionalism was plagued by its emphasis on functional requisites, whereas French structuralism was always handicapped by a vagueness about what structure is.

What is Functionalism? Functionalism is the doctrine that what makes something a thought, desire, pain (or any other type of mental state) depends not on its internal constitution, but solely on its function, or the role it plays, in the cognitive system of which it is a part.