Psyc 4008 w/ Baumeister Exam 3

Where was Edward Titchener born?

Britain

Who defined and named the first two schools of psychology in a paper in "Psychological Review": Structuralism and Functionalism?

Edward Titchener

Structuralism is analogous to ____.

Functionalism is analogous to ____.

anatomy; organization of knowledge of mind around it's component structures. (analyze the human mind and and organize it into units.)

physiology; interest is in the function of mental phenomena, including their adaptive significance. (how various parts of the body operate and the functions they serve to keep people alive)

Anatomy is a pre-requisite to physiology. Understanding structure is a pre-requisite to understanding function.

Who is the best representative example of a structuralist?

Titchener

Comparison of functionalism and structuralism

Structuralism was the first school of psychology and focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components. Researchers tried to understand the basic elements of consciousness using a method known as introspection. The use of introspection led to a lack of reliability in results. Critics argue that structuralism was too concerned with internal behavior, which is not directly observable and cannot be accurately measured.

Functionalism formed as a reaction to structuralism and was heavily influenced by the work of William James and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. Functionalists sought to explain the mental processes in a more systematic and accurate manner. Rather than focusing on the elements of consciousness, functionalists focused on the purpose of consciousness and behavior. Functionalism also emphasized individual differences, which had a profound impact on education.

Why didn't Titchener get along with his colleagues when he came to America?

He felt like an outsider because was British-born and had a focus on laboratory psychology that clashed with Functionalism that was rising in America. Also, the APA failed to cite someone who had plagiarized one of his works. He joined and resigned the APA several times.

In response to his disregard for the APA, Titchener formed an exclusive, all-male group called the _____. He thought women shouldn't be involved in these types of academic institutions for what reason?

experimentalists; he wanted men to be able to have conversation and smoke cigars without having to worry about behaving properly in front of the women.

Titchener's primary agenda was ____. His secondary agenda was ____.

Mental "reductionism" or analyzing human consciousness into its basic structural elements;

to describe how elements combine and connect in the "synthesis" of mental phenomenon.

A problem noted with Wundt's introspective method is that it's difficult to have an experience and not think about it at the same time. To get around this problem, Titchener proposed 3 solutions: ?

1. Rely on memory

2. Break the experience into parts

3. The introspective habit

Titchener believed it was possible to train "introspectors" so that introspection became automatic and did not require conscious effort; What did he call this method?

The introspective habit

Using this method, his observers could focus on the experience of a mental task, un-contaminated by "introspective effort."

What were Titchener's 3 elements of mind?

1. Sensations - the elements of perception

2. Images - the elements of ideas

3. Affects - the elements of emotions (pleasantness and unpleasantness)

Attributes:

A. Quality: what distinguishes one sensation from another... (red from green, cold from warm)

B. Intensity: strength of the stimulus

C. Duration: how long sensations last

D. Clearness: gives a sensation its place in a consciousness

Titchener faced backlash against his introspective method. What was the basis for this?

Titchener disagreed with Baldwin over the concept of introspection. Titchener believed in using highly trained observers of the generalized adult mind, while Baldwin focused on using untrained observers with differences in the way they think.

His work on image being the elements of ideas was weakened with the discovery by Kulpe of imageless thought. It was eventually found that Titchener's narrow introspective methods produced bias rather than reducing it.

While most wouldn't have admitted to believing in Darwinism, many of Darwin's ideas dominated American life; all of these lead to interest in individual differences, and eventually functionalism.

individual freedom gave everyone equal opportunity to succeed; competition; winners assumed to be more "fit."

Survival of the fittest lead to social progress. (i.e., "Social Darwinism") Americans acquire a "superiority complex."

("American Exceptionalism" "Manifest Destiny")

Who were the Chicago Functionalists?

Dewey, Angell, Carr

Who was chair of philosophy at U of Chicago and wrote a paper in which he described the "reflex arc" in functionalist terms? He created the Lab school at U of Chicago and is best known for advocating education reform by starting the progressive movement in education. He was the founder of functionalism in America.

Dewey;

Instead of writing on it's components (structure), Dewey used the example of a child reaching for a candle. As the child touches the candle, they learn about their environment; e.g. touching fire hurts.

He de-emphasized authoritarianism and rote learning; emphasized learning by doing and making education practical to life.

Who was the first chair of psychology at the U of Chicago and the 15th APA president? His main contribution to psychology was promoting the functionalist school by publishing "Psychology: An Introductory Study of the Structure and Functions of Human Consciousness." He became known as the most visible spokesperson for Functionalism.

Angell

Who was chairman of the psychology department at U of Chicago from 1926-1938 and is best known for his research on animal intelligence and for collaborating with John B. Watson on the famous Kerplunk experiment?

Carr;

Evaluated the role of kinesthetic sense in maze performance in rats; showed that kinesthetic sense could be more important than other sensory stimuli.

The Kerplunk experiment was a famous stimulus and response experiment conducted on rats and demonstrates the ability to turn voluntary motor responses into a conditioned response. The purpose of the experiment was to get kinesthetic feedback rather than guidance through external stimuli through maze learning. It was conducted in 1907 by John B. Watson and Harvey A. Carr and was named after the sound the rat made after running into the end of the maze.

The Columbia functionalists

Cattell, Thorndike, Woodworth

Who was an early pioneer in mental testing, and actually coined the term "mental test"? Influenced by Galton, he developed a mental test that was based on sensory measures and reaction time.

Cattell; influenced by Galton; mental tests were measures of reaction time and sensory discrimination.

a student of his (Clark Wissler) used Pearson's correlation to discredit Cattell's work.

Who is considered a transitional figure between structuralism and functionalism and also behaviorism? Why is he known as being a transitional thinker?

Thorndike

His work represents the transition from the school of functionalism to behaviorism, and enabled psychology to focus on learning theory

Who had an interest in animal learning and was critical of early comparative psychologists for relying on anecdote?

Thorndike

He brought experimental rigor to the study of animal learning. This would eventually lead to behaviorism.

Thorndike's experiment is called "Trial and Error Learning" or" connectionism" because ______.

Cats placed in a box made attempts at escaping until connections were formed between stimuli and they start seeing repetitive successful responses. They tried... until they learned through connection.

Thorndike's Law of Effect

Any behavior that is followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated, and any behavior followed by unpleasant consequences is likely to be stopped.

Thorndike's Law of Exercise

Behavior is more strongly established through frequent connections of stimulus and response.

Who opposed Thorndike's experiments with cats? Why?

Mills; for using what he considered to be an artificial learning environment

Who is best known for giving the modern conception of "experiment", that is manipulating an IV to determine the effect it had on a DV. He also differentiated b/w experimental and correlational methods, saying that only the experimental method allows causal conclusion: correlation does not imply causation.

Woodworth

Woodworth's transfer training/learning

learning one task improves the learning of another; the strength of transfer is related to the similarity of the materials being learned.

Who introduced the famous S-O-R (stimulus, organism, response) formulation?

Woodworth

Argued that the behaviorist S-R formulation could not fully explain behavior; a stimulus can elicit different effects or responses depending on the state of the organism, e.g., motivation

Who developed the "multiple chronograph" to measure reaction times of football players?

Walter Miles

One of the earliest application of psychology was to ________.

sports (like fencing)

Mental testing originated with _____.

Galton

Who made the first approximation to the modern mental test?

Ebbinghaus (Completion test)

*asked by german educators to determine if 5 hours of instruction would cause fatigue; argued that mental tests should measure cognitive not sensitive abilities; created completion test for students that discriminated between the more and less capable.

Who was asked by Paris school to develop a test to identify children who could benefit from special education?

Alfred Binet

(idiots: severe

imbeciles: moderate

debiles: mild/educable)

What was Binet's motivation behind his intelligence test discovery? What conclusion came from this? What epiphany did it lead to?

His daughters.

Intelligence tests need to measure cognitive, not sensory ability.

While normal and subnormal children might pass the same tests, but normal children did so at a younger age. Subnormal children would equate more with a younger normal child. AGE STANDARDIZATION.

____ is the age in which you are functioning intellectually; it needs to be compared to ____. Where did these terms originate?

mental age; chronological age

Terman took the ideas from a guy named Stern and multiplied by 100.

Who translated the Binet-Simon test into English and applied it to classify the "feeble-minded?" He also studied the Kallikak family, which contributed to the idea that intelligence is inherited, the eugenics movement, and a focus on mental sub-normality.

Goddard

*used the terms idiots, imbeciles, and morons

Who went to Ellis Island to screen immigrants in order to keep out people who weren't smart enough?

Goddard; led to federal legislation involving quotas from certain areas.

What is the belief that intelligence is fixed by heredity? (Goddard) Most early intelligence testers shared this type of meritocracy-based IQ belief.

Nativism

This idea created problems with Goddard's conclusions.

Goddard eventually moderated his views regarding morons because ___.

little risk of genetic transmission and the disability could be overcome through education

Who revised and standardized Goddard's translated version of the Binet-Simon test? What was it called? What does the publication of this test mark?

Lewis Terman. Stanford-Binet. The origin of the concept of IQ.

Who is best known for his study of intellectually gifted children, which became the longest longitudinal study in the history of psychology? Also, why was his study of these children criticized?

Terman

nativist/(heredity) assumptions and sample bias

The children he tested tended to be middle-upper class, protestant, and white.

Who was president of the APA when WWI started? What were the names of the tests he created to be administered to a group that would identify not just intelligence but those who were fit for service. What were the results of WWI testing?

Robert Yerkes

Army Alpha (for literate recruits)

Army Beta (for illiterate recruits)

Mental age of adult recruits was 13, which was less than those of Europe; created fears that America was degenerating into a nation of morons.

Which decade saw mental testing spread into many domains?

1920's

Industrial/organizational psychology was begun with the publishing of what two books written by whom?

The Psychology of Advertising and Increasing Human Efficiency in Business by Walter Dill Scott. He believed that consumers were not rational decision makers and could be influenced easily.

Who is best known for his book "Psychology and Industrial Efficiency," his work on selecting employees, developing the simulation method for selecting trolley operators in Boston, and using the analytic method to select telephone operators. He also wrote "On the Witness Stand", warning about eyewitness testimony and hypnosis.

Hugo Munsterberg (forensic psychology)

America's most visible applied psychologist.

He was reviled by the American public because of his overwhelming support and defense of Germany.

Where did Gestalt psychology arise? Gestalt psychology originated as a movement against ________.

Germany; the structuralism of Wundt and Titchener

Gestalt psychology never really caught on in America because (like Structuralism) subjective conscious experience was considered unscientific; instead, what two schools dominated this area?

functionalism and behaviorism

Who are the "big three," or the 3 people credited with founding gestalt psychology?

Wertheimer, Koffka, and Kohler.

What are the basic premises of Gestalt psychology?

Mind constructs reality based on rules;

Immediate conscious experience; (subjective appearances of things)

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Mary Problem

Mary's Room is a thought experiment that attempts to establish that there are non-physical properties and attainable knowledge that can be discovered only through conscious experience. It attempts to refute the theory that all knowledge is physical knowledge.

Tried to show physical reductionism of mental experience was not possible

Gestalt psychology evolved from the study of _____.

perception

The origins of gestalt psychology are often traced to a paper published by Wertheimer on the subject of _____.

apparent motion;

AKA the "phi phenomenon"

The space b/w 2 flashing lights is devoid of sensory stimuli; yet the observer perceives light in void spaces.

Phi Phenomenon Rules: (Gestalt Organizing Principles)

Wertheimer

Law of proximity

Law of similarity

Good continuation

Closure

the closer two things are, the more likely they are to be perceived as a unity

similar things are more likely to be perceived as a unit

things that have "smoothly flowing" directions tend to be perceived as a unit

when information is missing, we fill it in

Gestalt psychology is best known for its development of laws of _____.

perception of form

Who did research on figure-ground separation? Visual perception is divided in 2 parts: _____ and _____.

Edgar Rubin

Figures: focus of attention, perceived as objects, have contrast borders

Ground: the rest of the visual field, lack detail, margin of attention, not perceived as object, appears to be behind the figure.

Law of simplicity (Pragnanz...simplest good figure)

when a stimuli configuration is ambiguous, the nervous system organizes the stimuli into the "simplest whole" that most reasonably reflects reality;

Wertheimer's "Productive Thinking" advocated teaching designed to make students think about a concept as a whole rather than rote memorization of the parts, this is called _____

insight reasoning

Up-chunking and down-chunking (Wertheimer)

'Chunking up' refers to moving from specific, or small scale ideas or pieces of information to more general, larger ones. (Supermarket--->building)

'Chunking down' means going the other way. (Supermarket ---> a particular supermarket in Birmingham)

Who became director of research at a primate colony on the Island of Tenerife and published influential book The Mentality of Apes? He was also the best-known of the 3 original gestaltists.

Kohler;

studied visual discrimination in chimps; argued that chimps and chickens learn relations among stimuli rather than properties of individual stimuli. (ape joining sticks together to reach food that was unreachable by hands alone)

said that animals are capable of relatively rapid discovery of a solution to a problem by reasoning (insight learning)

Insight learning was in opposition to what?

Thorndike's trial and error learning

Who is MOST responsible for introducing gestalt psychology to America? What was his most important work?

Koffka;

Principles of Gestalt Psychology, which distinguished b/w geographical and behavioral environment.

The ______ environment is the world as it really is. The ______ environment is the world as we perceive it. (Koffka)

geographical, behavioral

Who adopted and expanded gestalt ideas into areas of motivation, emotion, personality development, and social psychology?

Lewin;

Lewin's Field Theory and his famous formula

understanding behavior requires consideration of the totality of all the forces acting on a person (the "field" or life space of the individual)

B = ƒ(P,E)

P is personal factors such as personality, needs, goals, and beliefs

E is the environment as the person perceives it

P and E comprise the life space

Everything outside the life space was called the "foreign hull"; irrelevant to behavior at that moment

Lewin's theory of motivation

when individual needs are fulfilled, a person is in state of psychological equilibrium; when needs are unfulfilled, disequilibrium occurs resulting in tension.

Lewin's ways of analyzing conflicts

Approach-approach conflict - choice must be made between two desirable goals

Avoidance-avoidance conflicts - choice must be made between two undesirable goals

Approach-avoidance - a single goal has both desirable and undesirable aspects

What is the Zeigarnik effect? Who was it inspired by?

people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks;

suggests that students who suspend their study, during which they do unrelated activities (such as studying unrelated subjects or playing games), will remember material better than students who complete study sessions without a break

Lewin was inspired by a waiter at a restaurant who could remember orders without writing it down, but as soon as the check was closed out, that same waiter couldn't remember anything about the order.

Lewin's play study (developmental psychology)

Children played with ordinary toys, then they were allowed to play with cool toys. After 15 minutes, cool toys were replaced with ordinary toys, while cool toys were still visible. Children became upset and play behavior regressed.

Explanation: the "cool" toys had higher positive valence; not being able to play with them created frustration and stress; Stress caused "de-differentiation, regression to a simpler form of behavior.

Lewin's studies on leadership

Place 10-year-old boys in craft-making projects under three different leadership styles: 1) authoritarian, 2) democratic, and 3) Laissez-faire (no active leadership)

1. Under authoritarian leader, boys became submissive, aggressive, lacked initiative, had little interest in tasks, and produced poor quality projects.

2. Similar results were produced in the Laissez-faire group.

3. Under democratic leadership, the group was cohesive, task-oriented, motivated, and produced better quality crafts.

4. When democratic group was placed under authoritarian leadership the boys quickly became like the original authoritarian group.

5. When authoritarian group placed under democratic group they tended to retain the authoritarian pattern.

Saw results as confirmation of superiority of democratic government.

When Lewin studied worker productivity, he found that _____ style improved productivity.

democratic;

workers setting goals, group meetings, etc.

What is idea that people should be allowed to rise or fall in society based on their merit--combination of their merit and their work?

meritocracy (Terman)

Dynamic psychology

incorporated different schools of psychological thought in an attempt to unite them into one coherent theoretical system (Woodworth)

What is a drill course?

Instead of producing original research, American universities replicated classic studies, learned how to use brass instruments and how to work in a lab in general.

Who first brings intelligence testing to America?

Cattell

Why did applied psych flourish in America?

American pragmatism combined with the progressive drive for reform that characterized the early 20th century. Americans were becoming accustomed to the idea that science should improve their lives. Everything was becoming industrialized. There were also 3x as many PhD's as labs at this time, so people had to figure out different ways to make money besides being in academics.

Who criticized early nativist intelligence testers?

Franz Boas; argued for the effect of culture on mental abilities

Lippman; spoke against Terman in saying that heredity can't be the sole measurement of intelligence when environmental factors contribute to the behaviors of humans.

What was Binet's early career tainted by?

He published work on hypnosis that was found to be completely untrue.

Yerkes says a tiny percent would benefit from college education.

10%

Who was an antecedent to Gestalt psychology by discovering that the mind actively organizes thoughts into a coherent experience.

Kant

Of the 3 big names, who had a problem with Nazis?

Wertheimer was Jewish, so he had to leave Germany.

Von Restorff Effect

predicts that when multiple homogenous stimuli are presented, the stimulus that differs from the rest is more likely to be remembered