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Summary AQA Psychology A-Level Knowledge Organiser Approaches
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• psychology is a branch of the broader discipline philosophy17th century – 19th century
• understood best as experimental philosophy
• Wilhelm Wundt opens first psychology in Germany
1879
• psychology emerges as a distinct discipline in its own right
• Sigmund Freud publishes ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’
1900s
• the psychodynamic approach is established
• John B. Watson writes ‘Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It’
1913 • BF Skinner establishes the behaviourist approach
• psychodynamic and behaviourist approach dominate psychology for next 50 years
1950s • Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow develop the humanistic approach
• the cognitive revolution came with the introduction of the digital computer
1960s • gave psychologists a metaphor for the operations of the human mind
• Albert Bandura proposes the social learning theory
• biological approach begins to establish itself as psychology’s dominant scientific perspective
1980s
• due to advance in technology that have led to increased understanding of the brain and the biological processes
Eve of the 21st Century • cognitive neuroscience emerges as a distinct discipline bringing together the cognitive and biological approaches
, WILHELM WUNDT (1832-1920): EVALUATION:
o first person to call himself a psychologist, believing all aspect of nature, including the human mind, could be studied scientifically Strengths:
o approach paved the way for the acceptance of psychology as a distinct science in its own right, and experimental psychology as Introspection is Still Useful in Scientific Psychology
the preferred method of studying human behaviour
• despite the fact that introspection rapidly fell out of favour as a research tool, it has not been entirely
o in his laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, he studied only those aspect of behaviour that could be strictly controlled under
experimental conditions abandoned by psychologists, and in recent years it has made something of a comeback
o these included the study of reaction time and various aspects of sensation and perception • Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter (2003): used introspective methods to make ‘happiness’ a measurable phenomenon
→ they gave a group of teenagers beepers that went off during random times throughout the day, requiring
AIM: study the structure of the human mind, and he believed the best way to do this was to break down behaviours such as sensation - them to write down their thoughts and feelings in the moment before the beep
------- and perception into their basic elements → most of the entries indicated that the teens were unhappy rather than happy, by then their energies were
→ because of this, his approach was referred to as structuralism and the technique he used as introspection focused on a challenging task, they tended to be more upbeat
→ although he originally believed all aspects of human experience could be investigated experimentally, he eventually came to • therefore, introspection offers researchers a way of understanding more clearly the momentary conditions that
realise higher mental processes, such as learning, language, and emotions, could not be studied in this strict controlled manner
affect happiness, and as such may help them to improve the quality of our lives
Introspection = the process by which a person gains knowledge about his or her own mental and emotional states as a --------------------
result of the examination or observation of their conscious thoughts and feelings Limitations:
→ just as our perceptual ability enables us to observe and make sense of the outer world, our introspective ability enables us t o Wundt’s Methods Were Unreliable
observe our inner world • a criticism of Wundt’s structuralist approach, mainly from behaviourists, was that this approach relied primarily
• Wundt claimed that, with sufficient training, mental processes such as memory and perception could be observed systematically as on ‘nonobservable’ responses
they occurred using introspection • although participants could report on their conscious experiences, the processes themselves (e.g. memory,
• For Example: observers might be shown an object and asked to reflect upon how they were perceiving it perception) were considered to be unobservable constructions, Wundt’s approach ultimately failed because of
→ this information could be used to gain insight into the nature of the mental processes involved in perception, reaction time, etc the lack of reliability of his methods
• For Example: in Wundt’s study of perception, participants would be presented with carefully controlled stimuli • introspective ‘experimental’ results were not reliably reproducible by other researchers in other labs
→ they would then be asked to provide a description of the inner processes they were experiencing as they looked at the image • in contrast, the early behaviourists such as Pavlov were already achieving reliably reproducible results and
or listened to the time discovering explanatory principles that could be easily generalised to all human beings
• this made it possible to compare different participants’ reports in response to the same stimuli, and so establish general the ories
about perception and other mental processes A Scientific Approach is Not Always Appropriate
• not all psychologists share the view all human behaviour can, or should, be explored by use of scientific methods
THE EMERGENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY AS A SCIENCE: • if human behaviour is not subject to the laws and regularities implied by scientific methods, then predictions
Empiricism = belief all knowledge is derived from sensory experience, generally characterised by use of scientific method in psychology become impossible, and these methods are inappropriate
• empiricists believe that knowledge comes from observation and experience alone (rather than being innate)
• likewise, much of the subject matter of psychology is unobservable, therefore cannot be measured with any
• when empirical methods were first applied to the study of human beings by Wundt and his followers, psychology began to degree of accuracy
emerge as a distinct entity • a consequence of this is that much of psychological knowledge is inferential, there is a gap between the actual
• this new ‘scientific’ approach to psychology was based on two major assumptions: data obtained in research investigations and the theories put forward to explain this data
→ first, all behaviour is seen as being caused (the assumption of determinism)
→ second, if behaviour is determined, then it should be possible to predict how human beings would behave in different
conditions (the assumption of predictability)
introspection is not particularly accurate
• the technique used to explore these assumptions became known as the scientific methods • Nisbett and Wilson (1977): claim we have very little knowledge of the causes of, and processes underlying, our -
-------------------------------------behaviour and attitudes
Scientific Method = refers to the use of investigative methods that are objective, systematic, and replicable, and the formulation, ------- → they found this problem was particularly acute in the study of implicit attitudes (attitudes or stereotypes
---------------------------testing, and modification of hypotheses based on these methods
that are unknown to us)
• it is objective in that researchers do not let preconceived ideas or biases influence the collection of their data, and systematic in → for example, a person may be implicitly racist, which influences the way they react to members of a
that observations or experiments are carried out in an orderly way
different ethnic group
• measurement and recording of empirical data are carried out accurately and with due consideration for the possible influence of
other factors on the results obtained → because such attitudes exists outside of conscious awareness, self-reports through introspection would not
• it is replicable in the observations can be repeated by other researchers to determine whether the same results are obtained uncover them
• if results are not replicable, then they are not reliable and cannot be accepted as being universally true • this challenges the value of introspective reports in exploring the roots of our behaviour
• the research process is not restricted to empirical observation alone, but also necessitates the use of reason to explain the results
of these observations
• the development of scientific theories and the constant testing and refining of these theories through further observation
completes the scientific cycle
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