Zeitgeist and Contemporary Psychology
时代精神与当代心理学

Zeitgeist is the dominant ideology of a historical era, reflecting the main trend of social, philosophical, and scientific thoughts of that period in time. Zeitgeist has an impact on the course of scientific thinking, its influence on the development of psychology is evident. The paper describes how the Zeitgeist affected the development of psychology in the 20th century. At the beginning of the century Behaviorism originated and flourished in the atmosphere of American pragmatism. In the second half of the century, the advent of knowledge-based economy gave birth to cognitive psychology. While in the beginning of the 21st century the world is undergoing a globalization process, and brings with it extended exchanges in psychology-the internationalization of psychology. The paper commented on some current and future salient features of psychological science.