What 2 discplines (parent disciplines) did psychology emerge from, what did each contribute?

-- matthew fulford (mdf0013@aol.com), September 16, 2002

Answers

You'll receive various answers to this. Check Michael Wertheimer's A Brief History of Psychology for some good discussion. An obvious answer might be philosophy and physiology. Philosophy contributed various frameworks for thinking about the nature of reality, theories of knowledge, social psychology, etc. Physiology provided a research model for scientific psychology. Others might say physics was as important as physiology. Certainly contemporary psychology has "roots" in many disciplines. Statistics developed in part out of experiments in agriculture. Reaction time research in part grew out of experiences of astronomers. Many theories of personality are grounded in religious theories of persons. So perhaps it's a mistake even to limit the possibilities to two, when the answer might be a dozen.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), September 17, 2002.