Lesson 2: A Brief History of Human Curiosity
Transcript
Welcome back to The Introduction to Psychology Series. I’m RJ Starr.
If you’re here, you probably already think like a psychologist. You notice behavior. You wonder why people act the way they do. You reflect on your past. You try to make sense of how people think, how they feel, why they repeat patterns, or why they change. That curiosity is the foundation of this entire field.
But before psychology became a science… it was just that. Curiosity. A quiet—and sometimes loud—urge to understand what it means to be human.
Today we’re going to take a walk through that curiosity. Not as a lecture. Not to memorize names and dates. But to understand how psychology became what it is now, and why its early foundations still shape the way we ask questions today.
Long before anyone used the word “psychology,” humans were trying to explain behavior. In ancient times, most explanations for human thought and feeling came from religion, mythology, and philosophy. If someone was angry, depressed, possessed, or acting outside the norm, the cause was usually seen as spiritual. Demons. Divine punishment. Karma. Fate. And the remedies? Prayer. Ritual. Exile. Or in many cases, punishment.
Emotions were often viewed as moral weaknesses. Thoughts were tied to the soul. Behavior was either good or evil. But rarely was it studied.
Still, humans have always tried to make sense of themselves. The Greeks, for example, gave us early theories about the mind. Plato believed that reason was the highest human faculty—that emotion and desire needed to be controlled by logic. Aristotle, his student, disagreed. He believed that emotions were not enemies of reason, but essential to moral understanding. They each had their own version of psychology before the word existed. They were asking the right kinds of questions. But they didn’t have tools. No experiments. No data. Just speculation.
Fast forward to the Enlightenment, and things start shifting. People begin to imagine that the human mind could be studied just like the natural world. Scientists are discovering laws of motion, gravity, anatomy—and slowly, thinkers begin wondering whether there are laws that govern human behavior too. Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am,” placing consciousness at the center of identity. Hobbes, Hume, and Locke began theorizing about sensation, learning, and memory. They weren’t psychologists yet—but they were building a bridge from philosophy to science.
Then, in the 19th century, the door finally opened.
In 1879, a German physiologist named Wilhelm Wundt set up what is widely considered the first psychology laboratory. He wanted to measure consciousness—to treat thoughts and experiences as data. His method was called introspection. He’d present people with a sound, an image, or a word, and then ask them to describe, in precise detail, what they experienced. Not just what they thought, but how it felt—what came up first, where their attention went, how long it lasted.
It was slow. It was clunky. And it wasn’t always reliable. But it was groundbreaking. Wundt’s core belief was that the mind could be studied. Not just guessed at. Studied.
Meanwhile, across the ocean in the United States, William James was asking his own questions. He was less interested in the structure of thought and more interested in its function. What do thoughts do? How do they help us survive? Adapt? Learn? His work became known as functionalism, and his writing—still beautiful to read today—treats the mind not as a machine, but as a flowing, living process. He believed psychology should be practical. It should help us live better lives. It wasn’t about categorizing people—it was about helping them grow.
Then came Freud.
Sigmund Freud wasn’t working in a lab. He was a physician, trying to help people whose symptoms didn’t have physical causes. He saw patients who were paralyzed with no injury. Women who fainted without illness. People overwhelmed by anxiety with no clear trigger. He believed their symptoms had psychological roots—that emotional experiences, especially repressed ones, could live in the body, silently shaping behavior.
Freud introduced the idea of the unconscious mind—a place where memories, desires, fears, and unresolved conflicts are stored outside of our awareness. He developed a model of the psyche that included the id, ego, and superego. He proposed that childhood experiences—especially those tied to love, shame, and authority—left a deep imprint. And he offered a method to access those hidden places through talk, dream analysis, and free association.
Now, to be clear: much of Freud’s theory doesn’t hold up under modern scrutiny. His views on sexuality were narrow. His research lacked scientific rigor. And his ideas about women reflected the biases of his time. But his impact was enormous. Freud gave language to what had previously been invisible. He made the inner world speakable. And he made the case that psychological pain deserves attention.
At the same time Freud was making waves, other thinkers were rejecting the idea that we should study the mind at all.
Enter behaviorism.
In the early 20th century, John B. Watson argued that psychology should only focus on observable behavior. You can’t see thoughts, he said. You can’t measure feelings. But you can see what people do. And if you want to understand behavior, don’t ask people how they feel. Change what they’re exposed to. Watson believed that all behavior was learned through conditioning. That if you control the environment, you can shape the person.
Later, B.F. Skinner took these ideas further, developing theories around reinforcement and punishment. Skinner didn’t just study rats pressing levers—he believed that human behavior followed the same laws. If a behavior is rewarded, it’s more likely to continue. If it’s ignored or punished, it’s more likely to fade. Behaviorism influenced education, parenting, advertising, and even therapy. It gave us tools for shaping habits and understanding learning. But it left out one huge piece of the puzzle: the mind.
By the 1950s and 60s, a new movement emerged to bring the mind back into focus. This was called the cognitive revolution. Psychologists began studying how people perceive, remember, solve problems, and make decisions. They treated the mind like a kind of information processor—taking in data, storing it, retrieving it, organizing it.
Cognitive psychology helped explain why we make mistakes in memory. Why eyewitnesses remember things that didn’t happen. Why we believe what we want to believe. Why we overestimate our abilities. Why we cling to first impressions even when we know they’re wrong.
But not everyone wanted psychology to become so technical. Another group of thinkers—known as the humanists—argued that people were more than data points. Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and others believed that psychology should honor human experience, not reduce it. They focused on growth, meaning, and authenticity. On love. On empathy. On creativity. They believed people were not just products of their environment or their childhood—they were capable of becoming more. Not in a fluffy, feel-good way. But in a grounded, practical way that centered self-awareness and choice.
Maslow introduced the idea of a hierarchy of needs—the belief that humans move from basic survival toward higher levels of purpose and fulfillment. Rogers developed person-centered therapy, which emphasized unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence. These ideas helped shift therapy from fixing what’s broken to nurturing what’s possible.
Over time, all of these threads—Freud’s focus on the unconscious, the behaviorists’ attention to patterns, the cognitive researchers’ focus on thought, the humanists’ focus on meaning—they all started to weave together. Modern psychology draws from each of them.
Today, the field includes neuroscience, which studies how the brain and body affect behavior. Developmental psychology, which looks at how we grow from infancy through old age. Social psychology, which explores how we influence and are influenced by others. Cultural psychology, which asks how beliefs, values, and norms shape our worldview. Positive psychology, which focuses on well-being and strengths. Clinical psychology, which supports people struggling with distress.
There’s no single lens anymore. And that’s a strength.
So why does all this history matter?
Because the questions we ask today are shaped by the answers people gave before us. If you think behavior is shaped by reward, you’re drawing from behaviorism. If you believe unconscious emotions influence relationships, you’re building on Freud. If you think empathy is healing, you’re carrying Rogers. If you believe thoughts can change behavior, you’re using cognitive principles.
Psychology’s past is not perfect. It includes bias. Exclusion. Harm. It includes narrow models of gender, race, and culture. But the field continues to evolve. To challenge itself. To make space for new voices and deeper understanding.
And your curiosity is part of that. Every time you ask why do I act like this, or why do people struggle with change, or how can I help someone without fixing them, you’re carrying the legacy forward.
In the next lesson, we’ll shift from history to method. How do psychologists study something as invisible as thought? What makes their research trustworthy—or questionable? And why does it matter that we ground our insights in more than just opinion?
We’ll explore the science behind psychology—and why the way we ask questions is just as important as the answers we find.
Thanks for listening. I’ll see you in Lesson Three.