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What is Psychology?

  • Study of mind, brain, and behavior through rigorous empirical research

    • Mind - perceptions, thoughts, memories, feelings

    • Brain - biological processes

    • Behavior - observable actions



Level and Scope of Psychological Research

  • Psychological phenomena can be explained at different levels

    • Based on biology

      • Dysfunction of the neurotransmitter serotonin in depression

    • Based on mental states

      • Effects of different studying strategies on exam scores

    • Based on social/cultural factors

      • Gender differences in who is likely to take care of family finances

  • Scope of psychological research refers to whether it applies to 

    • ALL human beings

    • Certain groups of people (e.g. people who have schizophrenia)

    • Individual people (e.g. my mom)

    • Specific actions by a specific individual (ex: why mom called me by my brothers name last week)



Intuition vs Science

  • Have many intuitions about why people behavior the way they do, and many of those intuitions are wrong

    • Therefore use science to understand the mind and behavior

  • Science relies on critical thinking

    • Critical = careful, not negative

    • “Amiable skepticism”

  • Critical thinking systematically questions and evaluates information using well supported evidence

    • Weighs facts, consider sources, uses logic and reasoning to see whether information makes senses, considering alternative explanations

    • Keep an open mind



Why We Need Science: Biases in Thinking

  • Confirmation bias: ignoring evidence that opposes our beliefs (ex: how effective were masks during th COVID-19 pandemic?)

  • Failing to accurately judge source credibility (ex: celebrity podcasters)

  • Misunderstanding or not using probability/statistics



Historical Foundations of Psychology (antiquity -18th century)

  • Psychology originated in philosophy

    • Epistemology: how do we gain knowledge?

    • Plato: founder of rationalism (understanding the world purely by rational analysis, without empirical observation)

      • Born with the knowledge inside our mind - we just need to find a way to get it out

      • Case in point: mathematics can predict the word even before we get to observe it

    • Aristotle: founder of empiricism (my teacher is nuts - we need to observe the physical world to understand it)

      • How could we understand the role of the brain and the heart without looking at the brains and hearts of people and animals?

      • John Locke (ca. 1960): the mind is like a sheet of paper, void of all characters (blank slate or tabula rasa)

    • Mind-body (mind-brain) problem since antiquity

      • How can my experience of the color of a rose (the redness of red) arise from a sack of chemicals?

      • How can my non-physical thoughts allow me to raise my physical hand to ask a question?

      • Cartesian Dualism (from Descartes, 17th c.)

    • Nature-nurture debate since antiquity

      • Is a person’s behavior a result of their intrinsic nature or a result of their experience?

      • Continues today - sort of



Origins of Experimental Psychology (19th century)

  • Emergence of psychology as a separate field from philosophy

    • Wilhelm Wundt (1832 - 1920)

      • Established first psychology lab in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany

      • First person to call himself a psychologist

      • Introduced quantification into the study of the mind (e.g. response time)

      • Developed “introspection”: carefully examining the contents of one's mind while perceiving or acting

        • Problems: subjective, can be biased, cannot be independently verified

      • Introspection led to the structuralism approach

        • Experience is broken down into a set of component parts (color, shapes, emotions)

    • Functionalism

      • Whereas structuralism focuses on the individual parts, functionalism asks how the whole system allows the organism to function effectively in a changing world

      • Influenced by Darwin and the idea that species evolve over generations to adapt to the environment - individuals also learn over time to adapt to a changing environment

      • Early proponent was William James (1842-1920); often called “the father of American psychology”)



Gestalt Psychology (20th century; “Gestalt” = “confirmation”)

  • Central tenet: whole of an experience is more than the sum of the parts

    • Looks like a bunch of splotches

  • The  perception of each part of the picture is influenced by the entire image

    • Not it is a painting of a dalmatian

  • Grouping by proximity: Do you see 2 columns or 6 rows?

    • See 2 columns but it is also 6 rows



Influence of Contemporary Psychology

  • Structuralism: isolating different memory systems

    • Sensory memory: iconic (vision) and echoic (auditory)

    • Working memory: spatial information, nonspatial features, verbal information, conceptual information

    • Long-term memory: explicit memory (episodic/autobiographical, semantic), implicit memory (priming, procedural, conditioning)



Working Memory Capacity & Cognitive Ability

  • Conclusion: cognitive ability greater in people with higher working memory capacity



Influence on Contemporary Psychology

  • Gestalt psychology: importance of the whole configuration



Sigmund Freud & Psychodynamics (20th century)

  • Much of human behavior is determined by unconscious mental processes

    • Three mental entities competing for control:

      • id: unconscious, basic desires and instincts

      • superego: higher moral values, mostly conscious

      • ego: rational & Conscious, tries to balance ego and superego

    • Dreams and slips-of-the-tongue can be revealing of these unconscious struggles

    • Psychoanalysis: bring the contents of the unconscious into awareness so that conflicts can be revealed

    • BUT: not really scientific - cannot predict; only supplies post-hoc explanations



Behaviorism (20th century)

  • John B. Watson (1878-1958): developed behaviorism, a psychological approach that emphasizes the role of environmental forces in producing observable behavior

    • Focus on nurture rather than nature

  • Behaviorism asserts that the mind cannot be studied scientifically because it is unobservable

  • Dominated american psychology from the early 1900s through the 1960s, and many findings are still applicable today

  • Explains AND predicts many behaviors based on a few principles

  • BUT: overemphasizes observable behavior and ignores all else



The Cognitive Revolution (beginning in the 1960s)

  • Cognition: Co + Gnosis (to know)

    • How knowledge is obtained (perception and learning)

    • How knowledge is represented in the brain (concepts and memory)

    • How knowledge is communicated (language)

  • Asserts that the mind can be studied scientifically because we can measure its effect on behavior (just as gravity has observable effects on objects)

  • Conceives of the mind as an information processing system 

    • Originally inspired by traditional digital computers

    • 1980s, cognitive research inspired by the information processing of the brain

      • Huge number of “dumb” interconnected processing units (neurons)

      • Learning occurs by changing the strength of the connections between units

      • Ultimately led to contemporary machine learning systems (ChatGPT)



Social & Personality Psychology (parallel evolution over the 20th century)

  • Social psychology asks

    • How humans form and maintain social bonds

    • How people perceive themselves and others

    • How people make social choices, such as joining groups and choosing partners

  • Uses a mixture of experimental and observational approaches

  • Personality psychology asks

    • How people differ from each other

    • How someone's personality traits develop over time

    • How a person's traits are selected for life outcomes (career, family, etc.)

  • Primarily uses correlational/observational approaches (e.g. surveys, electronically activated recorders)



Psychology & Biology

  • Psychology and neuroscience have gradually become more connected over the last 50+ years

    • Initially in the areas of perception and motor control

    • Then in cognitive processing (cognitive neuroscience)

    • More recently in social and personality psychology

  • Advances in genetics have also been valuable in understanding why people differ in psychologically



Psychological Disabilities

  • Many people differ from what is typical (e.g. autism, ADHD), making it difficult to deal with some aspects of the modern world

  • Some have significant problems with daily life (e.g. relationships problems, school problems) that are a result of psychological factors

  • Some suffer from temporary or long lasting mental illness (e.g. major depressive disorder, schizophrenia)

  • Basic science research on psychological processes (e.g. cognitive psychology, social psychology, personality psychology) helps us to understand these kinds of disabilities and develop solutions

    • More inclusive educational environments for atypical individuals

    • Counseling for people having problems with daily life

    • Psychological and biological therapies for mental illnesses



From Schools of Thought to Eclecticism

  • Prior to late 20th century, psychology was divided into distinct “schools of thought” that were more philosophical than scientific

    • Structuralism, functionalism, psychodynamics, behaviorism, gestalt psychology

  • As psychology became a true science, these philosophical differences faded, and researchers started combining multiple approaches