Not required to know the foundations but the thoughts for psychology

Psamtik I

• Earliest psychology experiment by the Greeks

• According to Horiatus, Psamtik wanted to prove that the Egyptians were the oldest people on Earth

  • To do so, he used an if-then statement/hypothesis by saying that if a child had no opportunity to language, he believed that the child would speak an old instinctual knowledge (Egyptian)

  • Psamtik is a pharaoh and so to test this, he kidnaps a set of twins to prove that the innate language is Egyptian

    • He gives them to a shepherd and his wife and sends them out of the city and tells them to not speak anything in front of the children

    • When the twins were 18 months old, the shepherd heard them speak and he brings them back to the pharaoh

    • The shepherd brought them back and said that the first word spoken was bekos, which the pharaoh doesn’t recognize

    • After research, they find it was a Frigian word (hypothesis disproved)

• Not a good experiment

  • There was no control group to compare to

  • It doesn’t make sense for babies to speak words as it might have been babbling

  • It doesn’t prevent the kids from overhearing as there could have unintentional noises

  • The experiment doesn’t really answer the question because it doesn’t prove that it is the ancient race

  • There were no repeated trials

  • There was only one observer who was in charge of everything

• Some strengths were that he was willing to admit he was wrong about his hypothesis and he properly isolated the experimental group

Twin studies have shown us that when two individuals have shared a lot of the same experiences, they develop their own language

Until Psychology developed ethics until the 20th century, it was common to take people for experiments such as children without any consent

Timeline of Psychology

• Late 19th century

  • First modern experiment was conducted by William Wundt

  • He tried to figure out the duration of perception

  • What is the lag of time between the sound and hearing something?

  • He built an apparatus to test this with hanging weight dials that created a sound, a key that meant to be pressed when they heard the sound, and a timer

  • They thought that understanding how the brain worked was based on objective perception because they didn’t really understand the brain at that time

  • He ended up establishing a protocol for further testing

• 1927

  • William’s student, Edward Titchener started studying at Cornell

  • He starts to establish his own understanding of psychology: structuralism

  • He analyzed basic elements of perception to categorize them as sensations, images, and feelings

  • In categorizing them, he wanted to figure out how they were connected and independent

  • Basically have to observe and understand what they were saying

  • He assumed by doing this would figure out the laws of perception

  • Studies of these started focusing on introspection where the subject had to self-report what was happening

    • This causes problems because two people sitting next to each other might experience the same situation but experience different feelings causing descriptions to be different

    • Therefore, Tichtener and his students started creating a long list of possible sensations and adjectives to have their subjects describe it correctly (very tedious)

  •  Problems

    • We are all so different and we can have different taste buds, causing adjectives to be different

    • Self-reporting is very unreliable because of bias

• 1910

  • William James develops a counter to Titchener called functionalism

  • James thought they shouldn’t study conscious processes because we don’t know how it works, rather, it is better to see how organisms develop in their natural environment

  • He thought that if you observe the organism, make all the observations, and then ask them why they did that, it would help you understand why people did what they did

    • They go and watch baseball players playing a game because baseball players act against instinct (such as running towards a ball coming at high velocity and voluntarily putting themselves in pain)

    • He asks them why they did that and how do you catch the ball step-by-step

  • Became popular in many universities and schools

  • Problems

    • People might break down the process in different steps as to some it might be too obvious or not necessary

• 1943

  • Max Wetheimer said that none of this was right and came up with something called Gestalt

  • Gestalt says that you are not looking at every single movement in every time period; instead, you are looking at it as a whole

  • Apparent movement - looking at the whole and seeing movement together

  • Proximity - objects that are close together tend to belong together

  • Similarity - similar things belong to a group (pattern recognition)

    • 5 cars and 1 apple - 5 cars belong together and apple doesn’t

  • Continuity - continuously placed elements appear more together than randomly placed elements

  • Figure and Ground - What is in the front? What needs attention? What is in the background? Composition of elements in the front and back

  • Closure - something that fills in the initial elements

    • If you take your driver’s test and you are told that the decision will be told later

    • Your brain doesn’t like missing information/pieces, causing your brain to form a story and try to sow the conflict

  • Gestalt is a very important part of graphic design

• 1939

  • Sigmund Freud was an Austrian psychologist who began to believe that people’s disordered behavior was due to past trauma that was not dealt with, leading them to show abnormal behaviors

  • To resolve it, you have to delve into the trauma - psychoanalysis

  • Most of his ideas are challenged and we no longer believe what he said mostly

  • Some things that he said were true - trauma has a long-standing effect

  • Freud saw many women who felt out-of-place in society, so he mostly dealt with women’s troubles

    • Most of what he saw as abnormal behavior were that a woman wants to boat, which is not proper for woman

  • Psychology must be continuously examined in the social and cultural context that that study was conducted in because the views might have been affected by their understanding of abnormal behaviors

  • Freud had an enormous effect on psychology and contributed to mental health

    • Did things like dream analysis, free association (what do we need to talk about, what do we need to do)

• 1958

  • John Watson founded the idea of behaviorism as a result of subjects who couldn’t speak or children who couldn’t express themselves

  • Watson wanted to study what could be observed and measured objectively, did not do introspection

  • Trained under William James, so he was interested in observing organisms

  • He redefines psychology as a study of observable behavior (brand new)

  • Behavior is focused on how they are learned and how they can be changed/modified

  • Watson conducted studies on infants to see if a certain behavior was innate or learned