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Psychology’s Roots, Big Ideas, and Critical Thinking Tools

Psychology’s roots

Four big ideas in psychology

Why do psychology?

How do psychologists ask and answer questions?

Frequently asked questions about psychology

Psychology’s Roots

Psychological science is born

Contemporary psychology

Psychological Science Is Born

“Magellans of the mind” (Hunt, 1993)

William Wundt

Darwin

Freud

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James

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Psychological Science Is Born

Early definitions until 1920s

Psychology: Science of mental life

Watson and Skinner from 1920s into 1960s

Psychology: Objective science that studies behavior without reference to mental processes.

Freud

Psychology: Emphasis on unconscious thought processes and emotional responses to childhood experiences

Psychological Science Is Born

Rogers and Maslow

Psychology: Humanistic view with emphasis on growth potential of healthy people

Cognitive psychologists

Psychology: Scientific exploration of how information is perceived, processed, and remembered

Cognitive neuroscientists

Psychology: Scientific exploration of brain activity underlying mental activity

Psychology

Science of behavior and mental processes.

Behaviorism

View that psychology should be an objective science that studies behavior without reference to mental processes.

Humanistic psychology

Emphasized the growth potential of healthy people.

Psychological Science Is Born

Today

Psychology: Science of behavior and mental processes

Behavior: Anything a human or nonhuman animal does

Mental processes: Internal states inferred from behavior

Science: Key word!

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What event defined the start of scientific psychology?

How did the cognitive revolution affect the field of psychology?

Psychology’s Current Perspectives

Psychology’s Current Perspectives

Psychology is both a science and a profession. It can take you down many paths!

Basic research

Applied research

Many interesting careers and perspectives

How many of these careers can you identify?

PSYCHOLOGY IN COURT Forensic psychologists apply psychology’sprinciples and methods in the criminal justice system. They may consult on witnesses, or testify about a defendant’s state of mind and future risk.

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The ________ perspective in psychology focuses on how behavior and thought differ from situation to situation and from culture to culture.

The________ perspective emphasizes how we learn observable responses?

Four Big Ideas in Psychology

Critical thinking

The biopsychosocial approach

The two-track mind

Exploring human strengths

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

Big Idea 1: Critical Thinking Is Smart Thinking

Science supports thinking that examines assumptions, uncovers hidden values, weighs evidence, and tests conclusions.

Critical thinkers ask critical questions.

Big Idea 2: Behavior Is a Biopsychosocial Event

Human behavior can be viewed from three levels

Biological

Psychological

Social-cultural

Each level’s viewpoint provides a valuable insight into a behavior or mental process.

Together these provide the most complete picture.

Biopsychosocial Approach: Three Paths to Understanding

Critical thinking

Thinking that does not blindly accept arguments and conclusions. Rather, it examines assumptions, uncovers hidden values, weighs evidence, and assesses conclusions.

Biopsychosocial approach

Approach that integrates different but complementary views from biological, psychological, and social-cultural viewpoints.

Culture

Enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and handed down from one generation to the next.

A SMILE IS A SMILE THE WORLD AROUNDThroughout this course, you will see and hear examples not only of our cultural and gender diversity but also of the similarities that define our shared human nature. People in different cultures vary in when and how often they smile, but a naturally happy smile means the same thing anywhere in the world.

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Nature versus nurture

This is an age-old controversy focuses on the relative influence of genes and experience in the development of psychological traits and behaviors. Today’s psychological science sees traits and behaviors arising from the interaction of nature and nurture.

In most cases, nurture works on what nature endows.

Psychologists explore this by asking many interesting and important questions.

Can you think of any of these?

NATURE-MADE NATURE-NURTURE EXPERIMENTIdentical twins (left) have the same genes. This makes them ideal participants in studies designed to shed light on hereditary and environmental influences on personality, intelligence, and other traits. Fraternal twins (right) have different genes but often share the same environment. Twin studies provide a wealth of findings—described in later chapters—showing the importance of both nature and nurture.

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Big Idea 3: We Operate With a Two-Track Mind(Dual Processing)

Much of thinking, feeling, sensing, and acting operates outside awareness.

The brain works on two tracks through dual processing.

Conscious mind

Unconscious mind

Contemporary psychological science explores this dual-processing capacity.

Dual processing

Principle that, at the same time, our mind processes information on separate conscious and unconscious tracks.

Positive psychology

Scientific study of human functioning, with the goals of discovering and promoting strengths and virtues that help individuals and communities to thrive.

Big Idea 4: Psychology Explores HumanStrengths as Well as Challenges

Early psychology focused on understanding and treating difficulties.

Contemporary psychology continues this tradition and extends research to include human flourishing.

Positive psychology uses scientific methods to explore

Positive emotions

Positive character traits

Positive institutions

Positive Psychology

MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN “The main purpose of a positive psychology is to measure, understand, and then build

the human strengths and the civic virtues.”

• Is the scientific study of human functioning

• Has goals of discovering and promoting strengths and virtues that help individuals and communities to thrives

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Exploring Human Strengths

Positive psychology uses scientific methods to explore

Positive emotions

Positive character traits

Positive institutions

Will psychology have a more positive mission in this century? Can it help us all to flourish?

What advantage do we gain by using the biopsychosocial approach to studying psychological events?

What is contemporary psychology’s position on the nature-nurture debate?

Why Do Psychology?

The limits of intuition and common sense

The scientific attitude: Curious, skeptical, and humble

The Limits of Intuition and Common Sense

Research shows that thinking, memory, and attitudes often open automatically without awareness.

But…intuitive thinking has three common flaws.

Hindsight bias

Overconfidence

Perceiving patterns in random events

Did we know it all along?

Hindsight bias

Tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that we could have predicted it.

Also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon.

HINDSIGHT BIAS When drilling the Deepwater Horizon oil well in 2010, oil

industry employees took some shortcuts and ignored some warning signs, without intending to harm the

environment or their companies’ reputations.

After the resulting Gulf oil spill, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the foolishness of those judgments

became obvious.

REUTERS/ U.S. Coast Guard/ Handout

The Limits of Intuition and Common Sense

Overconfidence

People tend to think they know more than they do.

This occurs in academic and social behavior.

WREAT → WATERETRYN → ENTRYGRABE → BARGE

• About how many seconds do you think it would take you to unscramble each anagram?

Perceiving order in random events

People perceive patterns to make sense of their world.

Even in random, unrelated data people often find order, because random sequences often do not look random.

People trust their intuition more than they should because intuitive thinking is flawed.

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Perceiving order in random events

GIVEN ENOUGH RANDOM EVENTS, SOME WEIRD-SEEMING STREAKS WILL OCCUR:

During the 2010 World Cup, a German octopus—Paul, “the oracle of Oberhausen”—was offered two boxes, each with mussels and with a national flag on one side.

Paul selected the right box eight out of eight times in predicting the outcome of Germany’s seven matches and Spain’s triumph in the final.

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Why, after friends start dating, do we often feel that we knew they were meant to be together?

The Scientific Attitude: Curious, Skeptical, andHumble

Curiosity

Includes a passion to explore and understand the world without misleading or being misled

Questions to consider

What do you mean?

How do you know?

The Scientific Attitude: Curious, Skeptical, and Humble

Skepticism

Supports questions about behavior and mental processes: What do you mean? How do you know?

THE AMAZING RANDI: Magician and skeptic James Randi has tested and debunked a variety of psychic phenomena. AP

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The Scientific Attitude: Curious, Skeptical, andHumble

Humility

Involves awareness that mistakes are possible and willingness to be surprised

One of psychology’s early mottos: “The rat is always right.”

“For a lot of bad ideas, science is society’s garbage disposal.” Describe what this tells us about the scientific attitude.

How Do Psychologists Ask and Answer Questions?

The scientific method

Description

Correlation

Experimentation

The Scientific Method

Theory

Explanation using an integrated set of principles that organizes observations and predicts behaviors or events

Hypothesis

Testable prediction, often implied by a theory

Operational definition

Carefully worded statement of the exact procedures (operations) used in a research study

Replication

Repeating the essence of a research study, usually with different participants in different situations, to see whether the basic finding extends to other participants and circumstances

A Good Theory…

Effectively organizes Leads to clear predictions Often stimulates research May be replicated

The Scientific Method

Testing hypothesis and refining theories

Descriptive methods

Correlational methods

Experimental methods

What does a good theory do?

Why is replication important?

Description

Case studies

• Examines one individual in depth

• Provides fruitful ideas

• Cannot be used to generalize

Naturalistic observations

• Records behavior in natural environment

• Describes but does not explain behavior

• Can be revealing

Surveys and interviews

• Examines many cases in less depth• Wording effect• Random

sampling

• Utilizes random sampling of population for best results

Case study

Descriptive technique in which one person is studied in depth in the hope of revealing universal principles

Naturalistic observation

Descriptive technique of observing and recording behavior in naturally occurring situations without trying to change or control the situation

Survey

Descriptive technique for obtaining the self- reported attitudes or behaviors of a group, usually by questioning a representative, random sample of that group

Population

All those in a group being studied, from which samples may be drawn (Note: Except for national studies, this does not refer to a country’s whole population.)

Random sample

Sample that fairly represents a population because each member has an equal chance of inclusion

We cannot assume that case studies always reveal general principles that apply to all of us. Why not?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of naturalistic observation, such as the EARs study?

What is an unrepresentative sample, and how do researchers avoid it?

Correlation

Positive correlation (between 0 and +1.00)

Indicates a direct relationship, meaning that two things increase together or decrease together

Negative correlation (between 0 and −1.00)

Indicates an inverse relationship: As one thing increases, the other decreases.

Correlation coefficient

Provides a statistical measure of how closely two things vary together and how well one predicts the other

SCATTERPLOT FOR HEIGHT AND WEIGHT

This chart displays data from 20 imagined people, each represented by a data point. The scattered points reveal an upward slope, indicating a positive correlation.

CorrelationMeasure of the extent to which two events vary together, and thus of how well either one predicts the other.

Correlation coefficientMathematical expression of the relationship, ranging from −1.00 to +1.00, with 0 indicating no relationship.

ScatterplotGraphed cluster of dots, each of which represents the values of two factors.

Indicate whether each of the following statements describes a positive correlation or a negative correlation.

1. The more children and youth used various media, the less happy they were with their lives (Kaiser, 2010).

2. The more sexual content teens saw on TV, the more likely they were to have sex (Collins et al., 2004).

3. The longer children were breast-fed, the greater their later academic achievement (Horwood & Ferguson, 1998).

4. The more income rose among a sample of poor families, the fewer symptoms of mental illness their children experienced (Costello et al., 2003).

Length of marriage correlates with hair loss in men. Does this mean that marriage causes men to lose their hair (or that balding men make better husbands)?

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THREE POSSIBLE CAUSE-EFFECT RELATIONSHIPSPeople low in self-esteem are more likely to report depression than are those high in self-esteem. One possible explanation of this negative correlation is that a bad self-image causes depressed feelings. But, as the diagram indicates, other cause-effect relationships are possible.

Experimentation

With experiments, researchers can focus on the possible effects of one or more factors in several ways.

Manipulating the factors of interest to determine their effects

Holding constant (“controlling”) other factors

Experimental group

Control group

Experimentation

Double-blind procedure: Eliminating bias

Neither those in the study nor those collecting the data know which group is receiving the treatment.

Treatment’s actual effects can be separated from potential placebo effect.

Placebo effect

Effect involves results caused by expectations alone.

What measures do researchers use to prevent the placebo effect from confusing their results?

Experimentation

Variables

Independent variable in an experiment

Confounding variable in an experiment

Dependent variable in an experiment

• Factor that is manipulated; the variable whose effect is being studied

• Factor other than the independent variable that might produce an effect

• Factor that is measured; the variable that may change when the independent variable is manipulated

Experimentation

To study cause-effect, psychologists may randomly assign some participants to an dependent variable (intelligence score in later childhood) will determine the effect of the independent variable (type of milk).

Comparing Research Methods

Each of psychology’s research methods has strengths and weaknesses

Match the term on the left with the description on the right.

1. Double-blind procedure a. helps researchers generalize from a small set of survey responses to a large population.

2. Random sampling b. helps minimize preexisting differences between experimental

and control groups.

3. Random assignment c. controls for the placebo effect; neither researchers nor participants know who receives the real treatment.

Why, when testing a new drug to control blood pressure, would we learn more about its effectiveness from giving it to half the participants in a group of 1000 than to all 1000 participants?

Frequently Asked Questions About Psychology

How do simplified laboratory conditions help us understand general principles of behavior? (1-10)

Purpose of experiment is to test theoretical principles.

Resulting principles, not specific findings, help explain everyday behaviors.

Psychologists are less interested in particular behaviors than in the general principles that help explain many behaviors.

Frequently Asked Questions About Psychology

Why do psychologists study animals, and what ethical guidelines safeguard human and animal research participants? (1-11)

Some psychologists study animals to understand about different species.

Others study animals to learn about humans in a variety of ways (e.g., insulin; vaccines for polio and rabies; transplants).

Use of animals for research is debated among psychologists.

APA has an ethical code applying to all research.

Frequently Asked Questions About Psychology

How do personal values influence psychologists’ research and application? Does psychology aim to manipulate people? (1-12)

Values impacts what is studied, how it is studied, and how results are interpreted.

Applied psychology contains hidden values.

There is some concern that psychology is becoming too powerful.

What do you think?

How are human research participants protected?

Improve Your Retention-and Your Grades

How can psychological principles help you learn and remember? (1-13)

• Strategies• Using self-testing and

rehearsal• Implementing SQ3R

study method• Distributing study time• Learning to think

critically• Actively processing

class information• Overlearning

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The ________ describes the improved memory that results from repeated retrieval (as in self-testing) rather than from simple rereading of new information.

What does SQ3R mean?