What is FUNCTIONALISM in Psychology: Characteristics, Theory and Authors

Describing a psychological school in its entirety and in detail can be an arduous task, since even within the same current different mentalities could coexist among authors. In addition, it is also worth mentioning that to know each school perfectly, you have to go back to its predecessors, which makes things a little more complicated.

However, at we want to provide you with our help so that you can learn a little more about the history of psychology. Therefore, in this article we present one of the schools best known to all psychologists. Discover the characteristics, theory and authors of functionalism.

The school of functionalism is considered the combination of science, concern for practicality, the emphasis on the individual and the theory of evolution. This has its beginnings at the end of the 19th century.

The formal beginning of functionalism began with the publication of the book Principles of Psychology leave me alone. This school predates and evolves parallel to this one, however, it gains many more followers and ends up overthrowing it.

Functionalism considers people’s consciousness as a current that is constantly changing. This has the characteristics of being personal (it reflects the particular experiences of each one) and continuous (it cannot be divided for analysis).

The authors of this current, based on the particular interest they have in knowing the reasons for mental processes, begin to worry about motivation. That is, they worry about know what drives us to move to satisfy our needs.

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The functionalist psychology It had various topics of interest:

  1. He opposed what he considered the useless search for elements of consciousness.
  2. They intend know the function of the mind rather than providing a static description of it. They consider that mental processes have the function of helping the organism adapt to the environment.
  3. They consider psychology a practical science and seek to apply its discoveries in life improvement.
  4. He has great interest in the why of mental processes. They seek to know how willpower of an organism acts differently in the same environment as the subject’s needs change.
  5. They consider the introspection as one of the many valid research tools.
  6. They value the individual differences: They are more interested in what makes organisms different than in what they have in common.
  7. All functionalists are influenced to a greater or lesser extent by James, who in turn was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution.

For functionalists, assumptions concerning the mind derived from The theory of evolution and its objective was know the functioning of the mind and behavior, in an attempt to help the organism adapt to the environment. To do this, the research tools included everything that had informational value, including introspection, the study of animal behavior, and the study of mental illness.

The creator of this trend considered that if an idea worked, it was valid. That is, he stated that the only criterion that should be used to judge an idea was its usefulness. James indicated that by using the scientific method in psychologyit was completely necessary to assume that all behavior of men was determined.

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This thought is what is known as pragmatism, where any belief, behavior or thought must be judged by its consequences. Through this thought, he defined two different types of mentalities:

  • Tender mentality: characterized by being optimistic, religious and dogmatic people.
  • tough mentality: empiricist, atheist and pessimistic people.

However, for him, pragmatism consisted of the compromise of both mentalities, in accept the best of both and use them in the best possible way according to the circumstances that arise.

Functionalism had the central idea that much of behavior, both animal and human, was governed by the instinct. And for this reason, the James-Lange theory of emotion was proposed, one of the , which altered the traditional statement that emotion was the result of perception.

For the authors of this current, first the perception of an event takes place, which will lead to a bodily reaction and finally the emotion will be experienced. In terms of example: If we see a bear, for James, the process we carry out is: first we perceive it, then we run and finally we get scared.

This theory was later criticized by behaviorists because it was not based on controlled experiments, so their theories had little predictive power.