Research library Required reading Where it started
The Mind, Measured.
In 1874 Wilhelm Wundt set out to make psychology an experimental science. Every test of a headline or a landing page descends from that idea: that a human response can be measured.
Wilhelm Wundt · Principles of Physiological Psychology · 1873–74
What it is
The book that marked out experimental psychology as a field of its own, first published in German as Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. Wundt says so in the first sentence of his preface:
“The work which I here present to the public is an attempt to mark out a new domain of science.” Author’s preface to the first edition (E. B. Titchener’s translation, 1904)
A few years later, at the University of Leipzig, he opened a laboratory dedicated to psychological experiments, and students came from across Europe and America to train in it. One of them, Walter Dill Scott, earned his PhD under Wundt in 1900 and went on to write The Theory of Advertising (1903) and The Psychology of Advertising (1908). Advertising was among the first places the new psychology was put to work.
What we took from it
The starting assumption. Before Wundt, the mind was mostly a subject for philosophy. After him, a response to a stimulus was something you could set up, time and count, under controlled conditions, and compare.
Advertising picked up that assumption early, and performance marketing runs on it. A click, a reply, a form fill: each one is a measured response to a stimulus we control.
Where it shows up in our work
The measurement is the gift. The trap is forgetting what was measured. Wundt’s subjects reacted to lights and sounds in a lab; nobody mistook the reaction time for the person. A click is the same kind of thing: a response to an ad, not a measure of what the customer will be worth.
Most of what goes wrong in this newsletter starts there, when the response that’s easy to measure quietly stands in for the value that isn’t.
Next on the shelf John E. Kennedy, Reason-Why Advertising