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Elements of Folk Psychology

Disciplines:
psychology
anthropology

Summary

Wundt's account of cultural or folk psychology — his attempt to understand the higher mental processes (language, myth, religion, social customs) that cannot be studied in the laboratory.

Core Contribution

Völkerpsychologie: the study of the collective mental life expressed in language, myth, and social customs. A different program from his laboratory psychology: individual consciousness requires a social-cultural context that laboratory methods cannot capture. An early attempt at what would now be called cultural psychology or cognitive anthropology. Undervalued relative to his laboratory work.

Historical Influences

Hegel Herder

Intellectual Lineage

Experimental Psychology Cultural Anthropology

Allied Works

Principles of Physiological Psychology Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology

Contemporaries & Peers

Principles of Physiological Psychology Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology

Minds Influenced

Cultural Psychology

Intellectual Posterity

Cultural Psychology Social Psychology

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