Psychological Science
Summary
1 The Science of Psychology
1.1 Psychological Science Is the Study of Mind, Brain and Behavior
Psychology involves the study of mental activity and behavior. The term psychologist is used broadly
to describe someone whose career involves understanding mental life or predicting behavior.
Psychological science is the study, through research, of mind, brain, and behavior.
Mind refers to mental activity (sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and touches). The mind is also
responsible for memories, thoughts, and feelings.
Mental activity results from biological processes within the brain.
Behavior describes the totality of observable human (or animal) actions.
The advent of technology to observe the working brain in action has enabled psychologists to study
mental states and has led to contributions to understanding and treating mental disorders.
1.2 Psychological Science Teaches Critical Thinking
One of the hallmarks of a good scientist is amiable skepticism. This trait combines openness and
wariness. The ability to thinks in this way – to systematically question and evaluate information using
well supported evidence – is called critical thinking.
1.3 Psychological Science Helps Us Understand Biased or Inaccurate Thinking
A few major biases:
- Ignoring evidence (conformation bias). One factor that contributes to confirmation bias is the
selective sampling of information.
- Seeing relationships that do not exist.
- Accepting after-the-fact explanations. Because people expect the world to make sense, they
often come up with explanations for why events happen. One form of this reasoning bias is
known as hindsight bias. We are wonderful at explaining why things happened, but we are
much less successful at predicting future events.
- Taking mental shortcuts. People often follow simple rules, called heuristics, to make
decisions.
1.4 Why Are People Unaware of Their Weaknesses?
Another bias in thinking is that people fail to see their own inadequacies. People are motivated to
feel good about themselves, and this motivation affects how they think.
The term Fremdschämen refers to times when we experience embarrassment for other people in
part because they do not realize that they should be embarrassed for themselves.
1.5 Many Psychological Questions Have a Long History
The nature/nurture debate has taken one form or another throughout psychology’s history. People
question if psychological characteristics are biologically innate? Or if they are acquired through
education, experience, and culture (the beliefs, values, rules, norms, and customs existing within a
group of people who share a common language and environment)?
The mind/body problem was perhaps the quintessential psychological issue: Are the mind and boy
separate and distinct, or is the mind simply the subjective experience of ongoing brain activity?
Scholars believed that the mind was separate from and in control of the body. They held this belief
partly because of the strong theological belief that a divine and immortal soul separates humans
from nonhuman animals.
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,Da Vinci theorized that all sensory messages (vision, touch, smell, etc.) arrived at one location in the
brain. He called that region the sensus communis, and he believed it to be the home of thought and
judgement; its name may be the root of the modern term common sense.
In the 1600s, the philosopher René Descartes promoted the influential theory of dualism. This term
refers to the idea that the mind and the body are separate yet intertwined. The body, he argued, was
nothing more than an organic machine governed by ‘reflex’. Many mental functions – such as
memory and imagination – resulted from body functions. Deliberate action was controlled by the
rational mind. Nowadays, psychologists reject dualism. In their view, the mind arises from brain
activity. It does not exist separately.
1.6 Experimental Psychology Initially Focused on the Structure, Not the Function, of Mental
Activity
In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology laboratory and institute. At this facility
students could earn advanced academic degrees in psychology for the first time.
Wundt realized that psychological processes, the products of physiological actions in the brain, take
time to occur. Therefore, he used a method developed earlier, called reaction time, to assess how
quickly people can respond to events.
Wundt was not satisfied with simply studying mental reaction times. He wanted to measure
conscious experiences. To do so, he developed the method of introspection, a systematic
examination of mental experiences that requires people to inspect and report on the content of their
thoughts. It is a subjective process because it assesses how each individual personally experiences an
event.
Edward Titchener, a student of Wundt’s, used methods such as introspection to pioneer a school of
thought that became known as structuralism. This school is based on the idea that conscious
experience can be broken down into its basic underlying components, much as the periodic table
breaks down chemical elements. Titchener believed that an understanding of the basic elements of
conscious experience would provide the scientific basis for understanding the mind.
He argued that one could take a stimulus such as a musical tone and, through introspection, analyze
its ‘quality’, ‘intensity’, duration’, and ‘clarity’.
The general problem with introspection is that experience is subjective. Each person brings a unique
perceptual system to introspection, and it is difficult for researchers to determine whether each
participant in a study is employing introspection similarly.
William James noted that the mind consists of an ever-changing, continuous series of thoughts. This
stream of consciousness cannot be frozen in time. According to his approach, which became known
as functionalism, the mind came into existence over the course of human evolution. It works as It
does because it is useful for preserving life and passing along genes to future generations. In other
words, it helps humans adapt to environmental demands.
The mind’s elements matter less than the mind’s usefulness to people.
One of the major influences on functionalism was the work of the naturalist Charles Darwin. He
published his revolutionary study On the Origin of Species, which introduced the world to
evolutionary theory. By observing the variations in species and in individual members of species, he
reasoned that species change over time. Some of these changes – physical characteristics, skills, and
abilities – increase individuals’ chances of surviving and reproducing.
Surviving and reproducing in turn ensure that these changes will be passed along to future
generations. Changes passed along in this way are called adaptions.
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,Darwin first presented the mechanism of evolution. He called this mechanism natural selection: the
process by which changes that are adaptive (i.e., that facilitate survival and reproduction) are passed
along and those that are not adaptive (i.e., that hinder survival and reproduction) are not passed
along.
In the idea survival of the fittest, the term fittest has to do with reproductive success and survival and
not merely strength.
1.7 Different Schools of Thought Reflected Different Perspectives on Mind, Brain, and
Behavior
The subconscious level is called the unconscious. Freud believed that unconscious mental forces,
often sexual and in conflict, produce psychological discomfort and in some cases even psychological
disorders. According to Freudian thinking, many of these unconscious conflicts arise from troubling
childhood experiences that the person is blocking from memory.
From his theories, Freud pioneered the clinical case study approach and developed psychoanalyses.
In this therapeutic method, the therapist, and the patient work together to bring the contents of the
patient’s unconscious into his or her conscious awareness. Once the patient’s unconscious conflicts
are revealed, the therapist helps the patient deal with them constructively.
Freud also used free association, in which a patient would talk about whatever he or she wanted to
for as long as he or she wanted to. He believed that through free association, a person eventually
revealed the unconscious conflicts that caused the psychological problems.
John B. Watson challenged, as inherently unscientific, psychology’s focus on conscious and
unconscious mental processes. He believed that if
psychology was to be a science, it had to stop
School of thought and Goal.
trying to study mental events that could not influential scientists.
be observed directly. He developed Structuralism Identify basic parts, or structures, of the
behaviorism. This approach emphasizes - Wilhelm Wundt conscious mind.
environmental effects on observable - Edward Titchener
behavior. Functionalism Describe how the conscious mind aids
- William James adaptation to an environment.
The most central intellectual issue was the - Charles Darwin
nature/nurture question. For Watson and Psychoanalytic theory Understand how the unconscious
other behaviorists, nurture was all. He - Sigmund Freud thoughts cause psychological disorders.
believed that animals – including humans – Gestalt movement Study subjective perceptions as a unified
- Max Wertheimer whole.
acquire, or learn, all behaviors through
- Wolfing Köhler
environmental experience. Therefore, we
Behaviorism Describe behavior in response to
need to study the environmental stimuli, or - John B. Watson environmental stimuli.
triggers, in particular situation. By - B. F. Skinner
understanding the stimuli, we can predict the Humanistic psychology Investigate how people become happier
animals’ behavioral responses in those - Abraham and more fulfilled; focused on the basic
situations. Maslow goodness of people.
- Carl Rogers
Skinner argued that concepts about mental Cognitivism Explore internal mental processes that
processes were of no scientific value in - George Miller influence behavior.
explaining behavior. He believed that mental - Ulric Neisser
states were simply another form of behavior,
subject to the same behaviorists principles as
publicly observable behavior.
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, A school of thought that arose in opposition to structuralism was the Gestalt school. According to
Gestalt theory, the whole of personal experience is not simply the sum of its constituent elements. In
other words, the whole is different from the sum of its parts. In experimentally investigating
subjective experience, the Gestalt psychologists did not rely on the reports of trained observers. They
sought out ordinary people’s observations.
The Gestalt movement reflected an important idea that was at the heart of criticisms of structuralism
– namely, that the perception of objects is subjective and dependent on context.
Psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers focused on how people are free to choose
activities that make them happy and bring them fulfillment. This more positive perspective became
known as humanistic psychology. This approach emphasized the basic goodness of people.
The rise of computers and artificial intelligence influenced many cognitive psychologists, who
focused exclusively on the ‘software’ and ignored the ‘hardware’. That is, they studied the thought
processes but had little interest in the specific brain mechanisms involved. However, some early
cognitive psychologists recognized that the brain is important for cognition.
Researchers in the cognitive neuroscience study the neural mechanisms (mechanisms involving the
brain, nerves, and nerve cells) that underlie thought, learning, perception, language, and memory.
During the last decade, this approach has been used to study how people think about others, an
approach known as social neuroscience.
1.8 Biology Is Increasingly Emphasized in Explaining Psychological Phenomena
Brain chemistry is different when we are aroused than when we are calm, and those same chemicals
influence the neural mechanisms involved in memory.
When consistent patterns of brain activation are associated with specific mental tasks, the activation
appears to be connected with the tasks.
Scientists have made enormous progress in understanding the human genome: the basic genetic
code, or blueprint, for the human body. For psychologists, this map represents the foundational
knowledge for studying how specific genes – the basic units of hereditary transmission – affect
thoughts, actions, feelings, and disorders.
1.9 Evolutionary Thinking Is Increasingly Influential
The evolutionary changes in the brain have occurred in response to our ancestors’ problems related
to survival and reproduction. The field of evolutionary psychology attempts to explain mental traits
as products of natural selection. In other words, functions such as memory, perception, and language
are seen as adaptation.
Evolutionary theory is especially useful for considering whether behaviors and physical mechanisms
are adaptive – in other words, whether they affect survival and reproduction. Through evolution,
specialized mechanisms and adaptive behaviors have been built into our bodies and brains.
1.10 Culture Provides Adaptive Solutions
Human cultural evolution has occurred much faster than human biological evolution. The flow of
people, commodities, and financial instruments among all regions of the world, often referred to as
globalization, has increased in velocity and scale over the past century in ways that were previously
unimaginable.
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