PSY 497: Capstone Exam 4 (CH: 8 & 9) USI

Sidney Hall

Who was Steve Ward?

• 2002

• Western Connecticut Sociologist

• Suggested that Psychology has done more than any other discipline to positively affect day-to-day life in the world over the past 123 years

Who was Jerry Jansz & Pete van Drunen?

• 2004

• Dutch Professors

• Called Ward’s theory, “Psychologization of Society”

Who was David Rosenhan?

• 1973

• Wrote “On being Sane in Insane Places”

  • Mental Asylums

Who was Ron Laing?

• Wrote several books suggesting symptoms and feelings are valid results of one’s (unusual) experiences

Who was Tomas Szasz?

• Wrote the “Myth of Mental Illness”

• Claimed that most psychological dysfunctioning does not reflect an incurable mental disease that requires extreme forms of intervention

Who was Hans Eysenck?

• 1952

• German-British Psychologist

• Conducted a meta-analysis of research on the effectiveness of traditional psychotherapy

  • Found that 2/3 of Ps (ones receiving psychotherapy) showed improvement across 2 year period

  • However 2/3 of control group also showed improvement…

  • Concluded that psychotherapy in that era was ineffective b/c it wasn’t securely founded in sound psychological research

Who was Paul Meehl?

• 1954: Published “Clinical vs. Statistical Predictions: Theoretical Analysis & Review of Evidence”

  • Book Major Predicate: Any judgement or decision requires a means of combining information in order to make a choice

  • Minor Predicate: Clinical diagnosis is 1 type of judgement

• Essentially stated that an objective algorithmic approach to combining information was better than a subjective one

Who was Marty Kohn

• ER/ Physician/ Medical Scientist

• Trained “Watson” → a specialized computer in medical diagnosis

• Found one official cause of death in the U.S. is medical errors / death by doctors

• Approximately 1/3 of all ER errors are due to misdiagnosis which is caused by anchoring bias

Who was Bill Grove et al.?

• Completed a meta-analysis of research comparing these 2 approaches across a wide variety of instance in health & behavior assessment

• 11% of time clinical judgement is better

• 40% of time, algorithmic judgement is better

• 49% of time, there is n.s.d

• so ~ 89% of time, across a diverse set of circumstances, algorithmic/ statistical judgement is @ least as good as clinical judgement

Who was David Kahneman?

• Won the Nobel Prize for research on expert intuition which was based off Meehl’s work regarding research on expert intuition

  • Ex:

    • Master chess player can examine chessboard & quickly know next move and be correct

    • Veteran firefighters can glance @ a situation & almost immediately make the correct life-or-death decisions

• Stated that unless certain conditions of expertise are met - prolonged practice & rapid, unequivocal feedback needed (experience ≠ expertise)

• Stated humans are not as rational as we’d like to think

• Also found that when non-experts make decisions, they suppress alternative interpretations and become overly focused on a single solution (use of anchoring bias)

Who was Henry Hollingsworth?

• 1922, Columbia Psychologist

• Conducted earliest analysis of the face-to-face interview

• Found that face-to-face interviews and things similar are not only low in reliability but devoid of validity

Who was Buckley & Eder?

• 1989

• Found that ¾ of professional interviewers make. their decision within the 1st 5 minutes

  • Using contrast effects, negative information bias, the halo effect, over-attention to nonverbal behavior…

Who was Young & Beier?

• 1977

• Found that nonverbal behavior accounts for >80% of the variance in an interview decision

Who was Bob Yerkes?

• 1917

• U.S. Military asks Harvard Comparative Psychologist to develop an intelligence test to admin. to recruits

• Was a animal experimentalist/ nascent eugenist

• Known for Yerkes-Dodson Law; Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta

• Developed 1st MC tests

  • Army Alpha & Army Beta Tests

Who was Bob Woodworth?

• Designed the WPDS to predict which army recruits would most likely experience “shell-shock” in battle

  • Was too late to employ in WWI

Who was Tom Langner?

• 1962

• Cornell Med School Psychologist

• Desired to create a predictive test of general psychological impairment

• Test was split between 2 groups:

  • psychiatric patients

  • ps w/o psychiatric symptoms

• Id’d 21 of of 120 items that the 2 groups consistently answered differently

What is Psychologization?

• The notion that psychology has done more than any other discipline to positively affect day-to-day life in the world over the previous 123 years

• Suggested concept by Steve Ward

• Coined by Jerry Jansz and Pete vanDrunen

What is “Shellshock”?

• An anxiety disorder resulting form exposure to the new horrors of war resulting in dysfunctioning to the point where a solider no longer responded to most stimuli, including threatened punishments

• Other names:

  • Battle fatigue

  • Operational exhaustion

  • PTSD

• Discovered during WWI

What 2 ways prompted the need for psychologists in WWI?

• 1.) Identifying beforehand those who might be (even more) prone to shellshock

• 2.) Treating those who suffered from it, after the fact

What is Humanistic Psychology?

• Humanists believe that people have the desire & ability to initiate positive steps in an effort to “self-actualize”

• Noted as the “3rd movement”

What were the 3 major developments in the Post-WWII era that helped establish the importance of clinical psychology in American society?

• 1.) Psychiatric misadventures in mental asylums

• 2.) Research on psychotherapy

• 3.) As a result of [1] & [2], psychiatrists reinvent themselves as medicinal prescribers

What were some developments that occurred from availability of psychoactive medication?

• 1.) Long periods of hospitalization were necessary far less often

• 2.) b/c of lower overhead, the cost pf treatment was substantially reduced, making this variety of psychotherapy much more widely available to the general population

• 3.) The rise to prominence of social management (controlling “deviant” individuals through social-run “social services”)

What is a Algorithm?

• A set of rules for determining the solution to a problem in a finite # of steps

  • Like a computer program

What is Anchoring Bias?

• Tendency to over-rely on one piece of evidence/ info

What is Social Management?

• Controlling “deviant” individuals through social-run “social services”

  • i.e.: decentralizing mental health care by allowing local agencies to help maintain cases on an outpatient basis

What is Psychological Testing?

• Administration of one or more standardized procedures under particular environmental conditions (e.g., quiet, good lighting) in order to obtain a representative sample of behavior

• Tool clinical psychologists use

What was the 1st standardized psychological test?

• The Binetti - Simon IQ test

What were Authenticity Tests?

• Oldest type of psychological testing

• 2 early authenticity tests:

  • Dried rice test (China)

  • Magic Donkey Test (Ancient India)

What are Qualifying Tests?

• Assigning a task to determine the best candidate for something

What are the 2 most important issues when assessing any test?

• 1.) Reliability

• 2.) Validity

What is Nomotheticism?

• A perspective emphasizing the general laws of human behavior

What is Primacy Effect?

• How we perceive and remember information

• Studies that looked at Primacy Effect:

  • Buckley & Eder (1989)

  • Young & Beier (1977)

What are Personality Tests?

• A series of Qs designed to identify the traits or stable patterns of behavior that define an individual

What is Idiographicism?

• A perspective emphasizing individual differences vs. general laws of behavior

What is the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet?

• 1st Personality Test

• Designed to predict which army recruits would most likely experience shell-shock in battle

What are the 2 major problems with the WPDS → (Woodworth Personal Data Sheet)?

• 1.) Woodworth didn’t bother to determine whether any of the items on the test actually distinguished the susceptible from teh extra-susceptible

  • wrote + selected items b/c they were intuitively valid

    • sounded good

  • face-validity within his test

• 2.) Woodworth assumed Ps would respond to each item honestly, despite the fact the MC options were replete w/ social desirability

What is Social Desirability?

• The tendency for people to present themselves in a generally favorable fashion

What are ways to avoid the social desirability problem?

• 1.) Ensure anonymity

  • anonymity increases truthfulness

• 2.) Create subtler questions

  • playfulness/ stability

• 3.) Use other formats (vs. self-report questionnaires)

  • e.g. projective tests

• 4.) Create sub-scale that assesses respondent bias

  • e.g. validity scale on the MMPI

    • response consistency, lying, defensiveness, etc.

Who was Karl Popper?

• 1919

• Enchanted by Marxist socialism

• After incident with friends being shot dueing demonstration, became disillusioned by pseudoscience underlying Marxism and began supporting liberalism

• 1934: Published 1st book - The Logic of Scientific Discovery

  • w/ the book, attempted to turn science upside down

  • 1 thing that distinguishes science from pseudoscience is that science constantly Qs itself and is the only means of understanding the world that does so by definition

What did Popper find that he DID NOT like b/w actual science of physics & what so called “science” of Freudian psychodynamism?

• Saw psychodynamism similar to Marxism in their common attempt to intercept everything through their chosen prism

• Saw insecure perspectives such as psychodynamism, Marxism, and religion as attempting to verify rather than attempt to falsify

• Found that this is human nature but not sound science

  • people’s use of confirmation bias → (seeking out examples & incidents that coincide with personal beliefs)

Why did Popper criticize verificationism & promote falsificationism?

• In order to determine whether you’re right about something, you also have to demonstrate there’s no evidence you’re wrong

What are factors that determine the difference b/w science & pseudoscience?

• 1.) Confusing correlation w/ causation

• 2.) Small sample sizes

• 3.) Non-representative samples

• 4.) No control group to compare to

• 5.) Cherry-picked results

• 6.) Sensational headlines

Who was Carney, Cuddy, & Yap?

• Completed a study on power-posing that had an extremely small sample size (n = 42)

Who was James Vicary?

• Completed a study with subliminal advertising in movie theaters

  • admitted that he made up the whole thing and later attempted an actual experiment to demonstrate the phenomena but never succeeded

  • Example study of having no control group

Who was Tom Kuhn?

• 1962

• Berkeley Philosopher of Science & Harvard trained physicist

• Published a book that changed the way scientists view science

  • “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”

• Characterized any scientific discipline as a never-ending cycle of 3 phases

  • 1.) Normal science (longest phase)

  • 2.) Crisis

  • 3.) Revolution

    • Later was introduced as a paradigm

What does Tom Kuhn force us to realize in regards to the paradigm of psychology?

• Forces us to recognize that our underpinnings for understanding the (physical or psychological) world are periodically kicked out from under us completely

  • “unbearable lightness of science”

Who was Jorge Hirsch?

• Cal- San Diego physicist

• Developed the h-index

Who was Bennett, Gadlin & Finley?

• Found that high-impact research results are more likely to come from research teams (often spanning several universities) than from a single scientist

Who was Chris Chartier?

• Co-founded the Psychological Science Accelerator

• Has 183 labs on 6 continents

Who was Stanley Milgram?

• 1969: seminal work on the study of social networks used postcards → The “Small World Experiment”

  • Demonstrated that most people in the U.S. are connected as @ least acquaintances to everyone else via no more than 6 other individuals

What is The Acquisition of (Truthful) Knowledge?

• We have philosophers (of science) to thank for our understanding of what science is and how it contributes to our understanding of the world -- although most of that wasn’t until well into the 20th

• Plato and others of his ilk believed in the primacy of deductive reasoning

What is Logical Empiricism?

• Movement within the 20th c. philosophy that promoted less concern w/ metaphysics & more concern w/ understanding the value of science

• Other names:

  • Logical Positivism

What are that 3 steps science follows acc. to logical empiricism?

• 1.) (Controlled) observation of facts

• 2.) Through inductive logic, the derivation of hypotheses/ theories to potentially explain those facts

• 3.) Empirical verification: testing the hypotheses/ theories before you decide whether to believe them

What are the 4 problems w/ the notion of inductive reasoning by itself resulting in a completely accurate understanding of the phenomena being examined?

• 1.) Observations requires perception, & perception involves interpretation

  • subjectively & unconscious filtering

  • w/o theory (from deductive reasoning) what is guiding thought process?

• 2.) Verified observations don’t guarantee understanding

• 3.) Non-observable/ non-measurable variables

  • sometimes theories require that certain phenomena exist even though there is no way to measure them (@ least @ the time)

• 4.) Verification is not always possible through inductive reasoning

What is the Hypothetico - Deductive Method?

• Popper’s replacement for the common verification approach pf psychological science which is 2 parts:

  • 1.) Use observation & inductive reasoning to formulate a hypothesis or theory about an observed phenomenon

  • 2.) Use deductive reasoning to rigorously test the hypothesis/ theory

What is a Paradigm?

• A framework of concepts, definitions, assumptions, & methods within which some scientific investigation is conducted

• What sets the table for doing “normal science”

  • Ex:

    • astronomy:

      • geocentricism → heliocentricism → Lamda CDM (cold dark matter) model

    • Physics:

      • mechanical (newtonian) physics → general relativity → quantum physics

What is “Normal” Science"

• Essentially glorified puzzle-solving - finding evidence either supporting or contradicting some element of prevailing wisdom

What is Crisis?

• When someone proposes an alternative paradigm and arguing back & forth begins

What is the Scientific Revolution?

• Occurs within a scientific community, characterized by the replacement of one framework of understanding with another that is often not able to judged with the previous paradigm

What is Scientometrics?

• The science of measuring the impact of science

What is the h - index?

• Measures the impact of a research article on other research

What is the Psychological Science Accelorator?

• An organization that coordinates dozens of studies around the world all using the same design to answer the same question

What is Exponential Decay?

• The process of reducing an amount by a consistent percentage rate over a period of time

How do you phrase a retention decision in hypothesis testing?

• NOT… we can be 95% sure that a △ in X does not cause a △ in Y… rather?

• We can NOT be 95% sure that a △ in X does cause a △ in Y

Why do we fall into logical traps?

• We overemphasize the importance of things we already know rather than attempting to consider what we don’t know yet

  • Similar to availability heuristic

What is Inductive Reasoning?

Going from general to specific information

What is Deductive Reasoning?

Going from specific to general information