Psychology
Chapter 1 | Background to the Study of Psychology
Learning outcomes
- Summarize 3 fundamental ideas for psychology.
- Define psychology and explain how it relates to other scholarly field.
- Explain how this book is organized and how to use its learning tools.
Focus question 1
How will you use the focus questions in text’s margins as a guide to reading this book?
In the late 1800s, human self-contemplation took a scientific turn and we call that science of
psychology.
Psychology = the science of behaviour and the mind.
Behaviour refers to the observable action of a person or an animal.
Mind refers to an individual’s sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams,
motives, emotions and other subjective experiences.
Science refers to all attempts to answer questions through the systematic collection and
logical analysis of objectively observable data.
Most of the data in psychology are based on observations of behaviour, because it is directly
observable and the mind is not. But those data are often used to make inferences about the
mind.
This book will generally deal with typical behaviour and thought: how most people think and
behave most of the time and the factors that influence such actions. The book will also
examine individual differences in thought and behaviour.
The founding of psychology as a formal, recognizes, scientific disciplines dates back to
Wilhelm Wundt at 1879 in Leipzig. His students earned the first PhD degrees in psychology.
But the roots of psychology predate Wundt by people who called themselves philosophers,
physicists, etc. The 3 fundamental ideas of psychology were conceived before psychology
was recognized as a scientific discipline.
3 fundamental ideas of psychology:
1. Behaviour and mental experiences have physical causes that can be studied
scientifically.
2. The way people behave, think and feel is modified over time by their experiences in
their environment.
3. The body’s machinery, which produces behaviour and mental experiences, is a
product of evolution by natural selection.
,The idea of physical causation of behaviour
The Greeks speculated about the senses, human intellect and physical basis of the mind.
These ideas didn’t sprout again until the Renaissance (15th century) or take firm hold until
the Enlightment (18th century). Till then philosophy was tightly bound to religion.
Dualism = each human being consist of 2 distinct but intimately conjoined entities, a
material body and an immaterial soul (maintained by the church). The body can be studied
scientifically, but the soul operates according to its own free will, and therefore cannot be
studied scientifically. This couldn’t be challenged publicly, it was a religious doctrine.
Focus question 2
What was Descartes’ version of dualism? How did it help pave the way for science of
psychology?
Descartes’s version of Dualism → Focus on the body
Before Descartes, most dualist assigned the interesting qualities of the human being to the
soul, that was responsible for the body’s heat, the ability to move and life itself. Descartes
challenged this view (1649).
He began to regard the body as an intricate, complex machine that generates its own heat
and is capable of moving even without the influence of the soul. This conception resembles
our modern understanding of reflexes, which are involuntary responses to stimuli.
Consistent with the church doctrine, Descartes contended that nonhuman animals don’t
have souls → any activity performed by humans that is qualitatively no different from the
behaviour of nonhuman animal can, in theory, occur without the soul.
In Descartes view, one essential ability that humans have but dogs don’t is thought which he
defined as conscious deliberation (bewuste afweging/raadgeving) and judgement.
Previous philosophers ascribed many functions to the soul, but Descartes ascribed just one:
thought.
He suggested that the soul, though not physical, acts on the body at a particular physical
location: a small organ (today the pineal body) buried between the two hemispheres
(halves) of the brain.
Nerves/neurons bring sensory information by physical means into the brain, where the soul
receives the information and, by nonphysical means, think about it. On the basis of those
thoughts, the soul then wills movements to occur and executes its will by triggering physical
actions in nerves that, in turn, act on muscles.
,Focus question 3
What reasons can you think of for why Descartes’ theory, despite its intuitive appeal, was
unsuitable for a complete psychology?
Descartes’ theory is popular among non-scientists even today, because it acknowledges the
roles of sense organs, nerves, and muscles in behaviour without violating people’s religious
beliefs or intuitive feelings that conscious thought occurs in a nonphysical plane.
But it has serious limitations:
As a philosophy → it stumbles on the question of how a nonmaterial entity (the soul) can
have a material effect (movement of the body), or how the body can follow natural law and
yet be moved by a soul that doesn’t.
As a foundation for psychology → the theory sets strict limits, which few psychologists
would accept today, on what can and cannot be understood scientifically. The whole realm
of thought, and all behaviours that are guided by thought, are out of bounds for scientific
analysis if they are the products of a willful soul.
Focus question 4
How did Hobbes’s materialism help lay the groundwork for a science of psychology?
Thomas Hobbes and the Philosophy of Materialism
(Around the same time as Descartes → 1649)
In his book Leviathan, Hobbes argued that spirit, or soul, is a meaningless concept and that
nothing exists but matter (materie) and energy, a philosophy now known as materialism.
In Hobbes’s view, all human behaviour, including the seemingly voluntary choices we make,
can be understood in terms of physical processes in the body, especially the brain.
Conscious thought, he maintained, is purely a product of the brain’s machinery and
therefore subject to natural law.
This philosophy places no theoretical limit on what psychologists might study scientifically.
Most of Hobbes’s work was directed toward politics and government, but his ideas helped
inspire a school of thought about the mind known as empiricism.
Nineteenth-Century Physiology → Learning about the Machine
The idea that the body, including the brain, is a machine, helped to promote the science of
physiology. By the early 1800s, considerable progress had been made in this endeavour
(poging), and during the ensuing decades discoveries were made about the nervous system
that contributed significantly to the origins of scientific psychology…
1. Increased understanding of reflexes
2. The concept of localization of function in the brain
, Increased understanding of reflexes
Focus question 5
How did the nineteenth-century understanding of the nervous system inspire a theory of
behaviour called reflexology?
The basic arrangement of the nervous system and peripheral nerves (aan de buitenkant, niet
centraal) that connect the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord = ruggengraat) to
sense organs (zintuigen) and muscles, was well understood by the beginning of the 19th
century.
In 1822 Francois Magendie demonstrated that nerves entering the spinal cord contain 2
separate pathways:
- One for carrying messages into the central nervous system from the skin’s sensory
receptors.
- One for carrying messages out to operate neural connections that underlie simple
reflexes, such as the automatic withdrawal response to a pinprick.
They also found that certain brain areas, when active, could either enhance or inhibit such
reflexes.
Some of these physiologists began to suggest that all human behaviour occurs through
reflexes – that even so-called voluntary (vrijwillig) actions are actually complex reflexes
involving higher parts of the brain.
Sechenov was a Russian physiologist and one of the most eloquent proponents of this view.
He argued that every human action can in theory be understood as a reflex = Reflexology.
All human actions, he claimed, are initiated by stimuli in the environment. The stimuli act on
a person’s sensory receptors, setting in motion a chain of events in the nervous system that
culminates in the muscle movements that constitute the action.
Sechenov’s work inspired another Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849), whose work on
reflexes played a crucial role in the development of a scientific psychology (chapter 8).
The concept of localization of function in the brain
Focus question 6
How did discoveries of localization of function in the brain help establish the idea that the
mind can be studies scientifically?
Localization of function in the brain is the idea that specific parts of the brain serve specific
functions in the production of mental experience and behaviour.
Johannes Müller (1838) proposed that the different qualities of sensory experience come
about because the nerves from different sense organs excite different parts of the brain (so
we experience vision when one part of the brain is active, hearing when another part is
active etc.).
