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Introduction to psychology 1
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UIUC Psych 100 Textbook Notes
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Psych 104 Final Notes40 multiple choice questions, and 6 written responses (8 given to choose from). Given 2 hours to complete.
Chapter 1: Psychology and Scientific Thinking
Psychology: the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behaviour.
Levels of Analysis: rungs on a ladder (low=biological & high=social)
- The lower rungs are more closely tied to what we traditionally call “the brain,” the higher rungs to what we traditionally call “the
mind.”
Multiply Determined: caused by many factors
- That’s why we need to be profoundly skeptical of single-variable explanations of behaviour
- psychological influences are rarely independent of each other, making it difficult to pin down which cause or causes are operating
- like anxiety-proneness, compulsive exercise, perfectionism, excessive concern with body image, and exposure to television programs
that feature thin models.
Individual Differences: variations among people in their thinking, emotion, personality, and behaviour
- help to explain why each person responds in a different way to the same objective situation, such as an insulting comment from a boss
- Individual differences make psychology challenging because they make it difficult to come up with explanations of behaviour that
apply to everyone
- people often influence each other, making it difficult to pin down what causes what
Reciprocal Determinism: tendency for people to mutually influence each other’s behaviour
- can make it enormously challenging to isolate the causes of human behaviour
Social scientists sometimes distinguish between emic and etic approaches to cross-cultural psychology
● Emic Approach: investigators study the behaviour of a culture from the perspective of someone who grew up in the culture
- Investigators who adopt an emic approach may better understand the unique characteristics of a culture, but they may
overlook characteristics that this culture shares with others.
● Etic Approach: study the behaviour of a culture from the perspective of an outsider
, - investigators who adopt an etic approach may be better able to view this culture within the broader perspective of other
cultures, but they may unintentionally impose perspectives from their own culture onto others.
Naive Realism: the belief that we see the world precisely as it is
- We assume that “seeing is believing” and trust our intuitive perceptions of the world and ourselves
- Our beliefs shape our perceptions of the world
Scientific Theory: is an explanation for a large number of findings in the natural world, including the psychological world. A scientific theory
offers an account that ties multiple findings together into one pretty package.
- They generate predictions regarding new data we haven’t yet observed.
- theories are general explanations, whereas hypotheses are specific predictions derived from these explanations
Confirmation Bias: the tendency to seek out evidence that supports our beliefs and deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that contradicts them
- once we have a belief in mind, we tend to look for and find evidence that supports it.
- “Mother of all biases”
Belief Perseverance: refers to the tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them.
- “don’t confuse me with the facts”
- Because none of us wants to think we’re wrong, we’re usually reluctant to give up our cherished notions.
Metaphysical Claims: assertions about the world that we can’t test
- include assertions about the existence of God, the soul, and the afterlife. These claims differ from scientific claims in that we can
never test them using scientific methods.
Pseudoscience: a set of claims that seems scientific but isn’t. In particular, pseudoscience lacks the safeguards against confirmation bias and
belief perseverance that characterize science
Ad Hoc Immunizing Hypothesis: is just an escape hatch or loophole that defenders of a theory use to protect this theory from being
disproved.
Patternicity: the tendency to detect meaningful patterns in random stimuli
- our brains tend to seek out patterns and connections among events because of a basic evolutionary principle: “better safe than sorry.”
Terror Management Theory: our awareness of our own inevitable death leaves many of us with an underlying sense of terror. We cope with
these feelings of terror, advocates of this theory propose, by adopting cultural worldviews that reassure us that our lives possess a broader
meaning and purpose—one that extends well beyond our vanishingly brief existence on this planet.
Emotional Reasoning Fallacy: the error of using our emotions as guides for evaluating the validity of a claim.
- Some psychologists also refer to this error as the affect heuristic
Bandwagon Fallacy: the error of assuming that a claim is correct just because many people believe it.
,Scientific Skepticism: evaluates all claims with an open mind but insists on persuasive evidence before accepting them. So we should be
certain to distinguish skepticism from cynicism, which implies a dismissal of claims before we’ve had the opportunity to adequately evaluate
them.
- to be a scientific skeptic, we must adopt two attitudes that may seem contradictory but aren’t: (1) a willingness to keep an open mind
to all claims and (2) a willingness to accept claims only after researchers have subjected them to careful scientific tests.
Critical Thinking: a set of skills for evaluating all claims in an open-minded and careful fashion. We can also think of critical thinking in
psychology as scientific thinking
Correlation-Causation Fallacy: error of assuming that because one thing is associated with another, it must cause the other
Falsifiable: capable of being disproved. If a theory isn’t falsifiable, we can’t test it.
Replicability: means that a study’s findings can be duplicated consistently. If they can’t be duplicated, it increases the odds that the original
findings were due to chance. We shouldn’t place too much stock in a psychological finding until it’s been replicated.
Introspection: trained observers to reflect carefully and report on their mental experiences. Introspectionists might ask participants to look at
an object—say, an apple—and carefully report everything they saw.
Structuralism: aimed to identify the basic elements, or “structures,” of psychological experience.
Functionalism: strive to understand the adaptive purposes, or functions, of psychological characteristics, such as thoughts, feelings, and
behaviours. Whereas structuralists asked “what” questions, such as “What is conscious thought like?”, functionalists asked “why” questions,
such as “Why do we sometimes forget things?”
Natural Selection: which emphasized that physical and behavioural characteristics evolved because they increased the chances of an
organism’s survival and reproduction. The functionalists believed that Darwin’s theory applied to psychological characteristics, too.
Behaviourism: which focuses on uncovering the general principles of learning underlying human and animal behaviour.
Cognitive Psychology: our thinking affects our behaviour in powerful ways.
Psychoanalysis: focused on internal psychological processes, especially impulses, thoughts, and memories of which we’re unaware.
Evolutionary Psychology: a discipline that began in the 1970s and applies Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human and animal
behaviour
Basic Research: examines how the mind works
Applied Research: examines how we can use basic research to solve real-world problems
Chapter 2: Research Methods
Prefrontal Lobotomy: was an effective treatment for schizophrenia, as well as other severe mental disorders. Surgeons who used this
technique severed the neural fibres that connect the brain’s frontal lobes to the underlying thalamus
Intuitive Thinking: quick and reflexive, and its output consists mostly of “gut hunches.” This mode of thinking also doesn’t require much
mental effort.
Analytical Thinking: slow and reflective. It takes mental effort. We engage in analytical thinking whenever we’re trying to reason through a
problem
Naturalistic Observation: watching behaviour in real-world settings without trying to manipulate people’s behaviour
- High in external validity (extent to which we can generalize our findings to real-world settings)
- Low in internal validity (extent to which we can draw cause-and-effect inferences)
- Doesn’t allow us to infer causation
Case Studies: researchers examine one person or a small number of people, often over an extended period of time
, - Can provide existence proofs (demonstrations that a given psychological phenomenon can occur. For example, the existence of
“recovered memories” of child abuse)
- Allow us to study rare or unusual phenomena
- Can offer insights for later systematic testing
- Are typically anecdotal
- Don’t allow us to infer causation
Correlational Designs: psychologists examine the extent to which two variables are associated. Recall that a variable is anything that can vary
across individuals, like impulsivity, creativity, or religiosity
- Can help us to predict behaviour
- Don’t allow us to infer causation
- Scatter Plot: a grouping of points on a two-dimensional graph. Each dot on the scatter plot depicts a person
- Illusory Correlation: the perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists
Experimental Designs
- Allow us to infer causation
- High in internal validity
- Can sometimes be low in external validity
Random Selection: every person in the population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate. Random selection is crucial if we want
to generalize our results to the broader population.
Random Assignment: we mean that the experimenter randomly sorts participants into one of two groups
Experimental Group: group that receives the manipulation
Control Group: does not receive manipulation
Independent Variable: experimenter manipulates
Dependent Variable: the variable that the experimenter measures to see whether this manipulation has had an effect
Between-Subjects Design: one group of participants will be randomly assigned to receive some level of the independent variable, while
another group will be assigned to the control condition.
Within-Subject Design: a researcher will take a measurement before the independent variable manipulation, and then measure that same
participant again after the independent variable manipulation.
Reliability: refers to consistency of measurement. For example, a reliable questionnaire yields similar scores over time; this type of reliability
is called test–retest reliability.
- Interrater reliability is the extent to which different people who conduct an interview, or who make behavioural observations, agree on
the characteristics they’re measuring.
Validity: is the extent to which a measure assesses what it purports (claims) to measure - “truth in advertising.”
Response Set: tendencies to distort their answers to questions, often in a way that paints them in a positive light
Malingering: the tendency to make ourselves appear psychologically disturbed with the aim of achieving a clear-cut personal goal
Halo Effect: This is the tendency of ratings of one positive characteristic to “spill over” to influence the ratings of other positive characteristics
Placebo Effect: is improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement
Researcher Expectancy Effect: researchers’ biases affect the results in subtle ways, almost always outside of their knowledge.
Double Blind Study: neither researchers nor participants know who’s in the experimental or control group
Demand Characteristics: Research participants can pick up cues from an experiment that allow them to generate guesses regarding the
experimenter’s hypotheses
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