Three ways Hume was really influential in psychology were:
-
Hume said simple ideas could be built up into complex ideas through
some simple laws of association, instead of depending on the mind
playing an active role with its unexplained homunculus abilities. PDP
models of information processing are based on applying a few generic
rules to a large collection of simple processing units instead of
depending on a program that executes an explicit set of instructions.
-
Hume said all knowledge could be reduced to either matters of fact or
observation (synthetic statements) or matters of the relations among
ideas (analytic statements), and anything else didn't count as knowledge
at all.
Logical positivism was the philosophy of science in the 20th century that
took that as its starting point and said science was the model for all
knowledge; it was the most influential philosophy underlying
behaviorism, affecting the kinds of theories that were developed and
favoring the neglect of any role for the mind.
-
Hume said that cause and effect couldn't be perceived with the senses
and were merely the result of observing repeated contiguity between
successive events, along with the unjustifiable assumption that the
future will be like the past; therefore the best attitude toward science
would be to stick to cataloging the observations and their typical
sequences without
proposing any underlying causal explanations of why things happen. The
most influential behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, adopted much the same
attitude by arguing against complicated theorizing in terms of physiology
or cognition or other unobservable variables, and instead just cataloging
the observed relationships between stimuli, responses, and
reinforcements and punishments.