Edward B. Titchener

Edward Bradford Titchener (Chichester, 1867 – Ithaca, 1927) was an Anglo-American psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, and then built his own school in the United States: structuralism. His lasting importance lies in bringing the experimental method into American psychology and in trying to describe the mind the way a chemist describes a compound.

His father, a clerk who died of tuberculosis when Titchener was a child, left the family with little money, and his education was funded through scholarships and paid work. He studied classics at Oxford, where he first read Wundt and translated one of his books into English. He travelled to Leipzig in 1890 to work with Wundt and earned his doctorate there in 1892 with a dissertation on binocular vision. That same year he joined Cornell University, where he set up a laboratory and became a full professor in 1895. There he led what was then the largest doctoral program in the United States.

Titchener held that consciousness is the sum of a person's experiences at a given moment and that it can be broken into basic elements, much as water separates into hydrogen and oxygen. He relied on introspection, but under strict rules: the observer described sensory qualities such as the colour or length of a pencil without naming the object, since a name was not raw experience. He called the resulting distortion the stimulus error. He sorted mental contents into images, emotions and pure sensations, and believed complex thought could be reduced to elementary sensations. Unlike Wundt, he focused more on identifying the elements than on the relations between them. His manual Experimental Psychology sets out his method and his paired-experiment procedure, in which one person reported and the other recorded.

Structuralism was influential during his lifetime but declined after his death, partly because of its narrow scope and the rigid method he defended. His students, notably Margaret Floy Washburn and Edwin G. Boring, carried his legacy forward. The word "empathy", which he coined in 1909, remains in everyday use today.