Psychological Science: Thinking Critically

The History and Growth of Psychology

  • Aristotle (4th century BCE):
    • Hypothesized about the body and mind.
    • Relied on guesses rather than measured observations or experiments.
  • Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920):
    • Added measured observations and experiments to psychology, helping to make it a science.
    • Conducted an experiment in 1879 measuring reaction times when participants were asked to push a button when a ball dropped (1/10th of a second) and when they were consciously aware of hearing the ball hit a platform (2/10ths of a second).

Schools of Thought

  • Structuralism:
    • Edward Titchener used introspection to gather data, focusing on sensations and the elements of experience.
    • Aims to build a view of the mind’s structure using introspective reports.
  • Functionalism:
    • William James (1842-1910) developed functionalism, emphasizing the purpose of psychological processes in helping individuals survive and adapt.
    • Asked how thinking and behavior patterns enabled ancestors to survive and reproduce.

Shifting Definitions of Psychology

  • Around 1900 (Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener): Psychology was defined as "the science of mental life."
  • 1920s (John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner): Behaviorists redefined psychology as "the scientific study of observable behavior."
  • 1960s (Cognitive Psychologists): Studied internal mental processes, aided by neuroscience.
  • Current Definition: "The science of behavior and mental processes."

Trends in Psychological Science

  • Behaviorism:
    • John B. Watson experimented with conditioned responses.
    • B. F. Skinner studied how consequences shape behavior and saw little value in introspection.
  • Freudian/Psychoanalytic Psychology:
    • Sigmund Freud studied and assisted individuals with various mental disorders.
  • Humanism (1960s):
    • Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers studied thriving individuals.
    • Developed theories and treatments to help individuals feel accepted and reach their full potential.

The Growth of Psychology

  • Pioneers came from diverse fields such as physiology, philosophy, medicine, and biology.
  • Advances were made in many countries.
  • Rapid spread, with 71 member nations in the IUPS.
  • Subjects studied have greatly multiplied.

The Nature-Nurture Question

  • Debate: To what extent are traits determined at birth (nature) versus developed through environment and experience (nurture)?
  • Historical Views:
    • Plato: Ideas like "the good" and "beauty" are inborn.
    • Descartes: Some ideas are innate.
    • Charles Darwin: Traits evolve through natural selection to aid survival and are passed to future generations.
    • Aristotle: Knowledge comes through the senses.
    • John Locke: The mind is a blank slate written on by experience.
  • Resolution: Nature provides a common origin with inborn human nature, while nurture shapes differences through the environment.
  • Quote: "Nurture works on what Nature endows."

Biopsychosocial Levels of Analysis

  • Biology:
    • Focuses on genes, the brain, neurotransmitters, survival mechanisms, reflexes, and sensation.
  • Psychology:
    • Examines thoughts, emotions, moods, choices, behaviors, traits, motivations, knowledge, and perceptions.
  • Environment:
    • Considers social influences, culture, education, and relationships.

Perspectives for Describing Psychological Phenomena

  • Cognitive: Examines memory reliability and methods to improve thinking.
  • Social-cultural: Explores how behavior, skills, and attitudes are influenced by culture.
  • Behavioral genetics: Studies whether behavior, skills, and attitudes are genetically programmed.
  • Neuroscience: Investigates the roles of the body and brain in emotions; how pain is inhibited; reliability of senses.
  • Psychodynamic: Focuses on whether inner childhood conflicts affect behavior.
  • Behaviorist: Studies reinforcement of problematic behaviors and how fears become conditioned.
  • Evolutionary: Examines the reasons behind panic, anger, and irrational judgments in humans.

Psychology’s Subfields

  • Basic Research:
    • Biological, developmental, cognitive, personality, social, and positive psychology.
  • Applied:
    • Clinical, counseling, educational, industrial-organizational, and community psychology.

Examples of Research

  • Biological: Explore structural brain problems in autism.
  • Developmental: Study cognitive and emotional development stages in autism.
  • Cognitive: Clarify difficulties autistic children have with understanding sarcasm.
  • Personality: Decide if traits like neuroticism need different measurement in autism.
  • Social: Find how autistic children can learn social skills as procedures if not by intuition.
  • Positive Psychology: Explore motivators and contributors to life satisfaction.

Applied Psychology Examples

  • Clinical: Use exposure therapy to decrease phobic reactions in a traumatized client.
  • Counseling: Help someone achieve career goals despite family conflict and self-doubt.
  • Educational: Evaluate aptitudes and achievement to plan for a student with learning problems.
  • Industrial-Organizational: Improve coordination of tasks, roles, and personalities in a factory.
  • Community: Coordinate a city’s efforts to prevent elder abuse.

Psychology in Context with Other Professions

  • Psychiatrists:
    • Physicians with M.D.s or D.O.s who can prescribe medication.
  • Other Professionals:
    • Social workers, counselors, and marriage and family therapists may be trained to do psychotherapy.

The Need for Psychological Science: Overview

  • Typical errors in thinking include hindsight bias, overconfidence, and perceiving coincidence.
  • Importance of the scientific attitude and critical thinking.
  • The scientific method involves theories and hypotheses.
  • Psychological data can be gathered through description, correlation, and experimentation/causation.
  • Issues in psychology: laboratory versus real life, culture and gender, values and ethics.

Failures in Natural Thinking

  • Hindsight bias:
    • The "I knew it all along" phenomenon.
  • Overconfidence error:
    • Overestimating correctness.
  • Coincidence error:
    • Mistakenly perceiving order in random events.

Hindsight Bias

  • Definition: The tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have foreseen it.
  • Example: After watching a competition, stating who would win after the fact.
  • Bias: The mind builds wisdom around what we have already been told; biased in favor of old information.

Overconfidence Error

  • Definition: Overestimating performance, rate of work, skills, and self-control.
  • Judging Accuracy: Confidence level is usually much higher than accuracy level.
  • Implications: Overconfidence can hinder test preparation; familiarity is not understanding.

Perceiving Order in Random Events

  • The Error: Reacting to coincidence as if it has meaning.
  • Example: Assuming a coin toss is rigged after five heads in a row.
  • Misconception: Having the wrong idea about what randomness looks like.

Making Ideas More Accurate Scientifically

  • Example: "Amazing Randi" tested aura-readers.
    • Prediction: Aura-readers should be able to locate the aura around Randi’s body without seeing Randi’s body itself.
    • Outcome: Claim was not supported, as aura-readers failed the test.

Scientific Attitude

  • Curiosity: Always asking new questions.
  • Skepticism: Not accepting ‘facts’ without challenging them; testing if ‘facts’ can withstand attempts to disprove them.
  • Humility: Seeking the truth rather than trying to be right; accepting being wrong.

Critical Thinking

  • Definition: Analyzing information, arguments, and conclusions to decide if they make sense, rather than simply accepting them.
  • Steps:
    • Look for hidden assumptions.
    • Look for hidden bias, politics, values, or personal connections.
    • Put aside own assumptions and biases, and look at the evidence.
    • Consider if there are other possible explanations for the facts or results.
  • Goal: Develop more effective and accurate ways to understand why people do, think, and feel the things they do.

The Scientific Method

  • Process: Testing ideas about the world by:
    • Turning theories into testable predictions.
    • Gathering information related to predictions.
    • Analyzing whether the data fits with ideas.
    • Modifying hypotheses if data doesn’t fit, setting up a study or experiment.

Scientific Method: Tools and Goals

  • Basics:
    • Theory: Set of principles built on observations that explains some phenomenon and predicts its future behavior.
    • Hypothesis: Testable prediction consistent with theory.
    • Operational Definitions: How to measure variables in observable terms.
    • Replication: Trying methods of a study again for consistent results.
  • Research Goals/Types:
    • Description: Systematic, objective observation of people.
    • Correlation: Measure of how closely two factors vary together.
    • Prediction
    • Causation: Determining cause and effect via experiments.

Theory

  • e.g., All ADHD symptoms are a reaction to eating sugar.
  • Definition: a set of principles, built on observations and other verifiable facts, that explains some phenomenon and predicts its future behavior.

Hypotheses

  • Testable predictions consistent with our theory.
  • e.g., If a kid gets sugar, the kid will act more distracted, impulsive, and hyper.
  • Danger when testing hypotheses: theories can bias our observations.

Replication

  • Replicating research means trying the methods of a study again, but with different participants or situations, to see if the same results happen.

Descriptive Research

  • Goal: Provide a clear, accurate picture of people’s behaviors, thoughts, and attributes.
  • Strategies:
    • Case Study: In-depth study of one individual.
    • Naturalistic Observation: Gathering data about behavior through watching but not intervening.
    • Surveys and Interviews: Having people report on their own attitudes and behavior.

Case Study

  • Examining one individual in depth.
  • Benefit: Source of ideas about human nature in general.
  • Danger: Overgeneralization from one example.

Naturalistic Observation

  • Observing "natural" behavior means just watching (and taking notes), and not trying to change anything.

The Survey

  • Definition: A method of gathering information about many people’s thoughts or behaviors through self-report rather than observation.
  • Keys to getting useful information:
    • Be careful about the wording of questions
    • Only question randomly sampled people

Random Sampling

  • Definition: A technique for making sure that every individual in a population has an equal chance of being in your sample.

Correlation

  • General Definition: an observation that two traits or attributes are related to each other (thus, they are “co”- related)
  • Scientific definition: a measure of how closely two factors vary together, or how well you can predict a change in one from observing a change in the other

Correlation Coefficient

  • The correlation coefficient is a number representing how closely and in what way two variables correlate (change together).
  • The direction of the correlation can be positive (direct relationship; both variables increase together) or negative (inverse relationship: as one increases, the other decreases).
  • The strength of the relationship, how tightly, predictably they vary together, is measured in a number that varies from 0.00 to +/- 1.00.

Correlation is not Causation!

  • e.g. "People who floss more regularly have less risk of heart disease."
  • Correlation does not imply causation.

Experimentation : manipulating one factor in a situation to determine its effect

  • Testing the theory that ADHD = sugar: removing sugar from the diet of children with ADHD to see if it makes a difference

The Control Group

  • We solve this problem by comparing this group to a control group, a group that is the same in every way except the one variable we are changing.
  • By using random assignment: randomly selecting some study participants to be assigned to the control group or the experimental group.

Random assignment

  • Random assignment of participants to control or experimental groups is how you control all variables except the one you’re manipulating.
  • Random sampling is how you get a pool of research participants that represents the population you’re trying to learn about.

Placebo effect

  • Placebo effect: experimental effects that are caused by expectations about the intervention
  • Control groups may be given a placebo – an inactive substance or other fake treatment in place of the experimental treatment.

Naming the variables

  • The variable we are able to manipulate independently of what the other variables are doing is called the independent variable (IV).
  • The variable we expect to experience a change which depends on the manipulation we’re doing is called the dependent variable (DV).

Defining Experimentation

  • An experiment is a type of research in which the researcher carefully manipulates a limited number of factors (IVs) and measures the impact on other factors (DVs).

Ruling out confounding variables: experiment with random assignment

  • e.g. women were randomly selected to be in a group in which breastfeeding was promoted

Descriptive

  • To observe and record behavior.
  • Perform case studies, surveys, or naturalistic observations.
  • No control of variables; single cases may be misleading

Correlational

  • To detect naturally occurring relationships; to assess how well one variable predicts another.
  • Compute statistical association, sometimes among survey responses.
  • Does not specify cause-effect; one variable predicts another but this does not mean one causes the other

Experimental

  • To explore cause-effect
  • Manipulate one or more factors; randomly assign some to control group
  • The independent variable(s) Sometimes not possible for practical or ethical reasons; results may not generalize to other contexts

Drawing conclusions from data: are the results useful?

  • Is the difference reliable: can we use this result to generalize or to predict the future behavior of the broader population?
  • Is the difference significant: could the result have been caused by random/ chance variation between the groups?

FAQ about Psychology

  • By isolating variables and studying them carefully, we can discover general principles that might apply to all people.
  • Research can discover human universals AND study how culture and gender influence behavior. However, we must be careful not to generalize too much from studies done with subjects who do not represent the general population.

FAQ about Psychology Ethics

  • Sometimes, biologically related creatures are less complex than humans and thus easier to study. In some cases, harm to animals generates important insights to help all creatures. The value of animal research remains extremely controversial.
  • People in experiments may experience discomfort; deceiving people sometimes yields insights into human behavior.

FAQ about Psychology The impact of Values

  • Researchers’ values affect their choices of topics, their interpretations, their labels for what they see, and the advice they generate from their results. Value-free research remains an impossible ideal.

SQ3R

  • Survey: Scan what you are about to read, especially chapter outlines and section heads.
  • Question: Ask questions that the text might answer; write guesses.
  • Read: Look for the answer to your questions, reading a manageable amount at a time.
  • Rehearse: Recall what you’ve read in your own words. Test yourself with quizzes.
  • Review: Look over text and notes and quickly review the main ideas of the whole chapter.