STUDY
Strengths - Introspection:
- Psychologists often use Introspection alongside other more scientific methods to investigate people's thought processes. Griffiths (a psychologist) used Introspection to study the irrational thoughts and perception of regular gamblers, asking them to think aloud whilst gambling and say everything that came into their mind. Here, Introspection provided useful insights into the behaviours of said gamblers.
Limitations - Introspection:
- Introspection was an unreliable method of investigation. Participants' introspective reports appeared to be very different when referring to the same stimulus. Even well trained subjects varied their introspective reports about the same stimulus from trial to trial. Early behaviourists such as Pavlov were already achieving reliable and reproducible results in experiments on animal behaviour that could be generalised to human beings.
- Introspection could not be used to study a number of different aspects of human behaviour, such as children (limited vocabulary and inability to express thoughts and/or feelings) or animals (inability to express thoughts and/or feelings), as well as higher mental processes, such as emotion. Behaviourists have the upper hand over introspection here, in focusing only on behaviour that can be observed.
- The validity of introspection is seriously questionable as it was introduced as a method for investigating human behaviours and experience; however, complex topics such as learning, development, mental disorders, and personality could not be investigated with this method, as it is subjective - only an individual can report his/her own mental processes. For Watson, the only way to make Psychology a science was to emulate natural sciences and to adopt its own objective methods.