Psychological Perspectives and Research Biases

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering core and additional psychological perspectives, evolutionary psychology concepts, research biases, and sampling representation.

WEIRD

An acronym representing research populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

Perspective

The lens through which we understand something.

Bias

A systematic distortion in judgment or interpretation.

Researcher Perspective

The viewpoint of an investigator that can influence what they choose to study, how they study it, and how they interpret results.

Participant Perspective

The viewpoint of a subject that influences how information and experiences are interpreted, such as rating relationship satisfaction.

Ethnocentrism

A form of bias contributed to by one's perspective that introduces systematic distortions into judgment and interpretation.

The Complexity Challenge

The reality that human behavior is complex and influenced by biology, cognition, culture, and environment, meaning no single theory can fully explain it.

Biological Perspective

A psychological approach focusing on the physiological and genetic underpinnings of behavior, emphasizing genetics, brain structures, neurotransmitters, and hormones.

Cognitive Perspective

A psychological approach that examines mental processes such as thinking, memory, perception, and problem-solving to understand how information processing influences behavior.

Sociocultural Perspective

A psychological approach that examines how social and cultural factors—such as ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and environmental context—shape behavior and mental processes.

Behaviorist Perspective

A psychological approach focused on observable behavior and learning through the environment, centered on classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and reinforcement.

Psychodynamic Perspective

A psychological approach that emphasizes unconscious processes, internal conflicts, and early childhood experiences and relationships.

Humanistic Perspective

A psychological approach emphasizing free will, personal growth, self actualization, subjective experiences, and individual potential.

Evolutionary Perspective

A psychological approach that explains behavior in terms of evolution and natural selection, considering how traits increased survival or reproductive success.

Natural Selection

The process by which heritable traits that increase survival or reproductive success become more common across generations.

Adaptation

A heritable characteristic that evolved because it increased survival or reproductive success.

Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA)

The ancestral environments in which many human psychological tendencies are thought to have evolved.

Evolutionary Mismatch

A condition in which traits that were adaptive in ancestral environments become less adaptive in modern environments, such as a preference for high-calorie foods.

Limitation of Evolutionary Explanations

The methodological challenge that evolutionary hypotheses are difficult to test because researchers cannot directly observe ancestral environments.

Pollet & Saxton (2019)

A study examining $311$ samples from two evolutionary psychology journals, revealing that $81\%$ came from Western populations, $70\%$ were student or online samples, and only $8\%$ were non-Western, non-student adults.