Key Concepts in Psychology and Social Theory

Positive eugenics

A program developed by Francis Galton that encourages the interbreeding of eminent individuals to improve the quality of the genetic stock.

Complementarity hypothesis

The belief, common in late 19th-century Europe and North America, that men and women differed in the very nature of their mental traits, displaying complementary, but not directly comparable, psychological and intellectual strengths.

Variability hypothesis

A commonly held belief in the late 19th century that men displayed greater variability in psychological and physical traits; therefore, they were responsible for evolutionary progress and exclusively capable of eminence.

Pillarization

A term used to describe the structure of Dutch society in which the educational system and almost all other aspects of social, cultural, political, and economic life are divided into autonomous and separate religious spheres, specifically, Protestant, Catholic, and neutral.

Differential psychology

The approach of German psychologist William Stern, which stressed the understanding of the total personality in its individuality, what he later termed 'personalistic psychology.'

Psychotechnik

A term coined by William Stern in Germany to refer to the practice of studying individual differences for 'human management' purposes and applying psychology to work, law, and education.

Neobehaviorism

A theoretical approach to psychology based on behaviorism with the added influence of operationism and logical positivism, used to examine observable behavior through the stimulus-response relationship with attention paid to the context in which learning occurs.

Positivism

Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius's concept that experience is the basis of all knowledge and that the experience of the observable world is foundational to science.

Operationism

The position that scientific constructs should be defined in terms of how each one is measured.

Operational definition

A statement of the set of methods or techniques used to measure a construct; for example, hunger would be defined as the number of hours of food deprivation.

Logical positivism

The philosophy, based on the work of Ernest Mach and other members of the Vienna Circle, that all scientific constructs must be linked to observable events.

Social Darwinism

 It was used as an explanation for the differences among races, suggesting that these differences were grounded in one racial group’s natural superiority, and for social class differences, which it was believed could be ascribed to a natural process of evolutionary sorting.

Projective test

A type of psychological test developed to elicit unconscious material from a respondent through responses to ambiguous stimuli, such as inkblots or pictures (e.g., the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Thematic Apperception Test).

Hawthorne effect

The term used to describe an increase in worker morale and productivity through increased attention paid to workers, based on research conducted at a plant in Hawthorne, Illinois.

Group fallacy

Floyd Allport's name for the belief that social behavior is not reducible to the sum of its individual parts.

Field theory

A concept developed by Kurt Lewin, which asserts that the effects of specific stimuli are meaningless without reference to the context in which those stimuli occurred.

Kultur

An aspirational term used to describe German social, political, and intellectual life, thus what it meant to be civilized.

Gestalt psychology

It is a branch of psychological theory that became influential in the renewal of German life through its emphasis on holism and methods of understanding in context. They are interested in studying the relationship between the part and the whole in terms of perception and cognition.

Gestalt psychology

A branch of psychological theory that emphasizes holism and methods of understanding in context, focusing on the relationship between the part and the whole in perception and cognition.

Law of Pragnanz

The most general principle of the Gestalt laws of perceptual organization, stating that human perception tends to organize any whole into as good or simple a structure as conditions permit.

Phi phenomenon

A visual illusion described by Max Wertheimer, where the perceived motion of two dots of light flashed in different locations on a screen is seen as a single moving dot.

Zeigarnik effect

A social phenomenon defined by Bluma Zeigarnik, where participants have better recall for incomplete tasks than for completed tasks due to the tension created by the incompleteness.

Action whole

The belief of Kurt Lewin and his students that the experimenter and participant share a life space that affects the participant's performance.

Life space

A term used by Kurt Lewin to indicate that personality includes the organism and its psychological environment at any given moment.

Shell shock

A term coined by psychologist Charles S. Myers to describe symptoms first observed in combat soldiers in World War I, resembling hysteria without demonstrable neurological damage.

Scientist-practitioner model

A model of training for clinical practitioners developed from a conference in Boulder, Colorado, in 1949, emphasizing that psychologists should be trained as scientists first and practitioners second.

Operant conditioning

A term used by Burrhus Frederic Skinner, stating that learning occurs when organisms operate on their environment to produce consequences.

Behavior modification

The process of deliberately modifying behavior through behavioral techniques such as positive and negative reinforcement.

Third force

The emergence of humanistic psychology in the 1960s as an alternative to psychoanalysis and behaviorism.

Conditions of worth

Messages that convey to people they will only be accepted if they are a particular and desirable way, developed by Carl Rogers in client-centered therapy.

Nondirective (client-centered) therapy

An influential therapy modality developed by Carl Rogers, providing clients with empathy, congruence, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

A U.S. Supreme Court legal case in 1954 that ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional.

Incident control project

A project developed by the Commission on Community Interrelations designed to teach people how to intervene in public displays of racism.

Contact hypothesis

The idea proposed by Gordon Allport that intergroup contact can reduce prejudice and foster positive attitudes under certain conditions.

Keyword

Raymond Williams's term for a word or phrase in any discipline that has become normative and is no longer subject to critical examination

Modernization theory

A term used to describe models of development on a historical arc, with traditional societies and modern societies at opposite ends of the arc.

Indigenization from without

A phrase introduced by Indian psychologist Durganand Sinha to refer to the process whereby principles and methods learned outside of a culture are reevaluated and adjusted to fit the local context.

Indigenization from within

A phrase introduced by Indian psychologist Durganand Sinha to refer to the process whereby a culture's own ideas, concepts, and experiences are used to develop psychological theory and practice.

Sikolohiyang Pilipino

An indigenous psychology created by Virgilio Enriquez and Alfredo Lagmay that became a movement away from the epistemology and methods of American psychology and was more suited to the diverse cultures of the Philippines. Filipino psychology became a major force and an innovative conceptualization of the power of an indigenous approach to psychology.

Liberation psychology

A social movement in South and Central America that arose from protests against increasing poverty and marginalization of the poor. It involved liberation theology in the Roman Catholic Church, as well as a move toward the use of social science for social action; humans were seen as active instead of passive agents.

Conscientization

Brazilian educator and psychologist Paolo Freire's approach to psicologia social de la liberacion (liberation social psychology), whereby engaging and educating poor citizens and providing them with reading skills helps them recognize themselves as fully human, thereby creating the possibility that political, social, and economic oppression can be broken.

Feminist therapy

An independent model of therapy created by feminist psychologists in the 1970s that was developed from the maxim ''the personal is political.'' Theoretical background and therapeutic practices were drawn from consciousness-raising movements. Emphasis was placed on a commitment to social justice, greater power sharing and a collaborative relationship during therapy, and structural instead of intrapsychic explanations for women's problems.

Androgyny

An equal measure of both masculine and feminine traits. The term is usually associated with Sandra Bem's Sex Role Inventory, which measures androgyny.

Relational-cultural theory

Jean Baker Miller's theory that the ability to sustain relationships is central to human growth and psychological development and that the absence of this ability results in a disconnect that is detrimental to psychological well-being. Disconnectedness often develops from power imbalances (between gender, race, class, sexual orientation, etc.) whereby one member in a relationship hides or distorts authentic feelings for fear of being ridiculed or invalidated.

Variability hypothesis

A commonly held belief in the late 19th century that men displayed greater variability in psychological and physical traits; therefore, they were responsible for evolutionary progress and exclusively capable of eminence. Women, who it was believed did not display the same variability, were thus relegated to mediocrity, or the middle of the distribution of any trait.

Intersectionality

The interdependent relations among categories such as gender, race, and class.

Multiracial feminism

A branch of feminism created by women of color in response to liberal feminism's tendency to overlook differences among women in terms of race, class, and religion. Multicultural feminists seek to place greater emphasis on such differences and the oppression that exists among women, not only between women and men.

Socialist feminism

A branch of feminism that asserts that the oppression and struggle faced by women can be inextricably tied to the class oppression inherent to capitalism; the struggles of class and women are interconnected.

Radical feminism

A branch of feminism that views the oppression of women by men as the root of all forms of oppression.

Postmodernism

A reaction to modernism. It is the philosophy that absolute truths do not exist and knowledge is constructed rather than discovered.

Feminist standpoint theory

Feminist philosopher Sandra Harding's theory in which the socially oppressed can access knowledge unavailable to the socially privileged. This knowledge is superior, it is argued, because it is not based on dominant assumptions and allows the socially-contingent nature of such knowledge claims to be revealed.

Feminist empiricism

The use of empirical, positivist methods to dismantle commonly held unscientific and biased beliefs about women and support fairer treatment of both women and men.

Postmodern feminism

A branch of feminism that asserts that all knowledge is constructed rather than discovered, and that the purpose of science is not to discover truths but to critically examine why certain questions have been investigated while others have been excluded. It examines what effects certain forms of knowledge have had on women as a class, and proposes transformative alternatives.

Community psychology

An area of psychology created to address problems of a social and structural nature, such as poverty, racism, and classism. Psychologists involved in this movement sought to affect individuals by intervening at the level of the community.

Community mental health centers

A facility created to provide mental health services to communities across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Cybernetics

The interdisciplinary study of self regulating physical and social systems that draws on developments in linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, physiology, and engineering.

Equipotentiality

A concept suggested by Karl Lashley that parts of the brain have the ability to take over the function of other parts should those parts be destroyed.

Mass action

The idea that the efficiency of performance of a complex function is affected in direct proportion to the degree of brain injury.

Cell assemblies

Donald Hebb's term for a particular group of cells that become connected after being repeatedly activated simultaneously. These cell groupings result in the gradual development of behavioral patterns.

Phase sequences

Donald Hebb's term for the connection of cell assemblies into a set.

Epigenesis

A process introduced by Jean Piaget whereby changes and growth in a child's development reflect not only a biologically evolved pattern, or inner determinism, but also the child's practical experiences in the world.

Genetic epistemology

A synthesized science of evolutionary and developmental psychology that Jean Piaget believed would be important to a complete theory of knowledge.

Anterograde amnesia

The inability to form new memories of events, experiences, or knowledge following brain injury or trauma.

Declarative memory

Memory for information such as knowledge or facts of which we have a conscious awareness. The term was coined by Brenda Milner through her work with neuropsychological patient Henry.

Procedural memory

Memory for skills and procedures that is generally implicit or unconscious. This form of memory was described by Brenda Milner through her work with patient Henry.

Computational functionalism

The position, developed in the 1960s, that physical similarity between machine and mind was not necessary for a useful theory of artificial intelligence, as demonstrated by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon's General Problem Solver program.

Means-end analysis

A mathematical analysis whereby the current state of a problem is regularly compared to the end goal. This analysis allows for the option with the greatest reduction in distance between the current state and the end goal to be chosen. This is done during every step of any given problem until the distance between the current state and the end goal is zero.

Feedback

A central concept to cybernetics whereby information about a system's actions is fed back into that system so as to regulate future actions.

Reflex arc

A concept used by physiologists and psychologists to explain the transmission of neural signals to produce an immediate motor reaction. Karl Lashley critiqued the concept of the reflex arc, providing evidence through his research with rats that had had sections of their brains destroyed yet were still able to relearn maze running

Project Camelot

An American Department of Defense-sponsored initiative created to gain the upper hand in the Cold War through the use of behavioural experts' abilities and techniques, which could be useful in the manipulation of individuals and cultures to gain intelligence information.