Psych 1000 Notes

CHAPTER 1

Philosophy of Science

What is Science?

Science - a method for getting closer and closer to the truth
Science is not a method of finding truth, science is a method for constantly getting closer approximations to truth without ever knowing whether we have reached the destination
Like a function for an asymptote
This is a fundamental viewpoint on how to approach the results of research
Science never tells us “x is true”, it can only tell us that “the current evidence strongly supports x and strongly argues against y”
Mathematical truth - the only discipline that has concussions that are definitely true and it is necessarily true (cannot be otherwise)
The strength of the force of gravity, the charge on an electron, the mass of a proton, these are all things that could logically be different
A truth of mathematics will be true in all universes (a consistent universe cannot exist if any of these mathematical truths were false in it)
You should be especially wary of any discipline that makes such claims but cannot provide the evidence to back them up - unfortunately this is not as rare as it should be in academia
Science relies on falsification
Key difference between science and rhetoric - the kind of evidence that is used
A key defining feature of science is that it looks constantly to prove its own theories wrong

Rhetoric - a set of techniques for arguing/convincing people of things, whether they are true or not

If someone only looks for evidence that supports their hypothesis, rather than looking for evidence that could falsify their hypothesis, then they are not pursuing the truth, they are trying to convince people of a position (not science)
*rhetoric can be useful, even in science ust make sure you are clear whether you are doing science or rhetoric and don’t confuse them*

Falsification - Scientists test their theories by figuring out predictions of those theories and then looking where the predictions fail

If the theory does not fail - it is considered possibly true until the next test
If the theory has passed the test over and over and hasn’t been showed wrong - it is accepted as very likely to be true (but not with absolute certainty - the next test could show it to be wrong)

Confirmation Bias - looking only for evidence that supports the hypothesis that you like, people don’t see the evidence that matches and ignores the evidence that doesn’t

Is just one of the many cognitive biases that can fool us into misunderstanding the world, we will encounter lots of others

Barnum effect (after the circus promoter P. T. Barnum)

P. T. Barnum is also the person who supposedly said “There’s a sucker born every minute”

Ex. How many people think this personality fits them?

You are generally fairly well-grounded and sensible
You have a tendency to be critical of yourself
Security is one of your major goals in life
You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage
You have a need for other people to like and admire you
Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved
Some of you aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic
You prefer a certain amount of change and variety

This is the standard horoscope pretending to be a personality profile
Most people report that the description accurately describes them
This is partly because the description is vague and general, but also because of confirmation bias; people see the evidence that matches and ignores the evidence that doesn’t
If you look again, you can see that several of the points contradict other points
This is the basis of uch of horoscopes and fortune telling
- Astrology is not a valid approach to understanding the world

Pseudo-science - a way of explaining things that relies on science-like theories, but which does not use falsification

It makes predictions that are so vague that it can always claim that the results of a test agree with the theory (Freud)
It ignores test results that show the theory is wrong (homeopathy)
Important things to keep in mind
- Telepathy doesn’t exist
- Your astrological sign says nothing about your personality
- Homeopathy doesn’t work
- Alternative medicines in general are guesses about medical treatment; we don’t know if they work or not (if they had been tested and found to work, they would no longer be alternative), therefore be very careful with these treatments

Key aspect of science (as opposed to rhetoric or pseudoscience)

The way we collect information
People often come up with ideas about how the world works based on reflecting on their own experiences
However, as we’ve seen, we can be biased in how we interpret things
Science sets up situations in which we can observe things while trying to minimize our biases

Scientific Observation - is different from the kind of observation you experience in daily life because it is planned ahead of time

Ex. I will observe something at noon tomorrow
It is designed to be inter subjective

Intersubjective - the method of observation is so specific that other people can reliably observe the same thing given the same situation

Scientific Method

Examine past research
Define question
Propose hypothesis
Gather evidence and Test hypothesis
Reject hypothesis OR Retain Hypothesis
Build theory
Publish/replicate results

A scientific method distinguishes hypotheses from theory

Theory - a worked-out model of some phenomenon that is capable of making predictions, and it incorporates a large body of observations and can be used to explain many thing

A theory is a big complex thing

Hypothesis - essentially a guess about how a theory will work in some new situation.

Scientists will test a hypothesis to see if it is correct, the results can then be applied to the theory - validating it or modifying it
A hypothesis is a guess (basically)
Ex. when you think you know why your friend is angry with you, you have a hypothesis, not a theory

Evolution - a very well developed model of how populations of organisms change over time, it is very work out and the evidence for it is overwhelming

“Theory of evolution” is NOT taken to mean that the theory is only a guess

Science is based on measuring things, but it can often be difficult to measure abstract topics, like “happiness” or “friendliness”

Operationalize - we find a consistent definition of what we will measure to “count” as a measure of what we’re interested in

Ex. if you want to see how friendly someone is, we could operationalize that by having the person meet several other people and counting how much that person smile
Some people might disagree with the operationalization, and psychology often improves as the operational definitions get better and better
By operationalizing, we can be consistent and allow comparison across different experiments, and we can quantify our findings

Ex when operationalization can go wrong

An early project on intelligence in s0me (non-human) animals operationalized intelligence as how quickly the animal solved a maze
- problem - they released several animals at once. The more social animals “hung out” at the start of the maze, the less social ones just went through the maze. So they were measuring sociability, not intelligence
Some early work on aggression in (non-human) animals concluded that the hypothalamus was a brain area involved. They had operationalized aggression in terms of how much damage the animal did to another animal (or to a cardboard box)
- Predators use violence to get their food (hunting). Is this the same thing as aggression against other members of their species? It turns out, no, it is not. Violence in terms of hunting is a different thing from within-community violence and different brain areas are involved. The hypothalamus is involved in hunger not aggression
In academia, professors’ research is often rated by how may citations their work has had (how many times other researchers have mentioned their work in a publication)
- You can be cited because your work was really bad. Often a publication in which people are pointing out an error gets ore mentions than other publications, so mu=ore citations doesn’t necessarily mean better research

Critical Thinking - a mode of investigation or reflection in which we evaluate information as to its reliability and usefulness

By assessing the information we encounter we help determine whether our beliefs are justified
Any scientific approach to understanding the world (including understanding the mind and human behaviour) depends on critical thinking
The fancy term for trying to avoid the many cognitive biases (like the confirmation bias) that humans are prone to

Five Principles of Critical Thinking

This makes it seem as if there is a “final” list of points that all scientists (and philosophers of science) agree can be followed to make sure one is “thinking critically”
It is not like that - textbooks have gathered together some valid and important points to keep in mind, but this is not some universally agreed final list of “critical thinking”

Few “truths” transcend the need for logical analysis and empirical testing (basically a new way of saying - in science we don’t believe anything without evidence and even then we change our beliefs if new evidence comes in)

Falsifiability - scientists always think in terms of “what would show this belief to be wrong” rather than “what would support this belief”. If you can’t (in principle) test a theory, then it’s not science

“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as is it not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality” - Karl Popper
*science in not synonyms with truth*
There are true things that cannot be tested and cannot be proved by logic
In fact that there are unprovable truths was demonstrated in a famous mathematical proof that absolutely shocked the scientific community at the beginning of the 20th century, but mathematician (and friend of Einstein’s) Kurt Gödel
This proof is fascinating and has implications for the limits of science and logic. There is a fascinating book that explains the proof and connects it to music, art, and consciousness:
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
While there are definitely true things that we cannot text and cannot deduce from logic, they are not a part of science, because science is a method for advancing our misunderstanding of what is true by testing and logic - if you can’t text and reason about them, they are not science
This does not open the door to claiming that astrology provides an alternate path to the truth. There may be truths that are unreachable by science, but that does NOT mean that there are other methods to get to those truths
There are simply some truths that are not accessible to us, and we should not allow this fact to lead us into believing things without evidence
If there is no path to finding the truth, we really can’t say much about them
- There is a small part of the truth that is reachable by science

No arguments from authority - It doesn’t matter who makes a claim, a claim is evaluated on the basis of evidence (even is the most famous person in the world says it, that doesn’t make it true)

Check the quality of the evidence - some sources of information are more reliable than others. You have to consider that when evaluating how much weight to give to a source of evidence
Be open minded - the truth may be very different from what you believe, it may also be stranger than you have ever imagined. Follow the evidence and the conclusions of logic, even if it leads to ideas that you never would have thought possible before

We need to be very skeptical of any claim and thoroughly test it, while at the same time being open to new ideas
This requires two personality traits that often don’t go together (skepticism and openness to new ideas)
While one should be very open to new ideas, if taken too far, that can lead to wasting time following absurd and unscientific theories

“There is such a thing as being open-minded your brain falls out” - Richard Dawkins

It's a balancing act and not even the best scientists always get it right:

“It seems to me that what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas” - Carl Sagan

It seems that as scientists get older they tend to become more skeptical. Which means that they are often better at not falling for new ideas that will be a waste of time, but will also miss exciting new insights
In many disciplines, the most revolutionary new theories tend to come from the younger scientists
This is not to say that you should give up on science as you get older. Older scientists, with more experience, are usually much better as knowing how to test new theories, judging whether a theory is plausible and getting the work done efficiently. There are trade-offs

History of Psychology

Psychology - the study of the mind and behavior, “the scientific study of behavior and metal processes”

“Mental processes” are also defined as a form of behavior - covert (hidden or unseen) behavior
Psychology is a new term for an old subject
People have been discussing the mind and how it works (or doesn’t) probably for as long as there have been humans
The word “psychology” comes from the Greek roots:
- Psyche - “soul, spirit, mind”
- Logos - “word, explanation, theory”

Covert behaviors - things going on inside of you that other cannot (necessarily) observe, so they are “hidden”

Ex. getting angry - covert behavior that we sometimes can see in other when they let it alter their overt behavior (like clenching their jaw)
Ex. thinking, dreaming, understanding, talking inside your head

Philosophy - the investigation of the mind

Philosophy if mind is still a major field and interacts with psychology most directly in the field of cognitive psychology (or cognitive scientist)
All academic disciplines started off as branches of philosophy
Philosophy is concerned with exploring foundational questions for which other modes of investigation are not yet available. Once a topic has a concrete set of investigative techniques available to it, this is becomes its own field
Computer science grew straight out of philosophy quite recently
Betrand Russell was a philosopher whose work in the early 20th is the basis of all modern computer science. His work showed that discrete math can be derived from logic
All topics came out from philosophy: physics, computer science, chemistry, psychology
Armchair philosophy:

Facts Behind Psychology

The symbol for psychology is the symbol “psi”
- The Greek letter that represents the sound “ps” in Greek, but which we pronounce without the (p) sound in English

As with all other disciplines, psychology grows out of philosophy
Many researchers argue that science is one more approach, along with other such as myth and religion, to describe, explain, predict and control our reality
While this is probably a fair statement, science has a built in improvement mechanism (testing, refining, retesting, refining, retesting, …) so that, unlike mythical approaches to understanding, science constantly gets better at it
Psychology seek to: describe, explain, predict, and control
Those who work in applied psychology would be more concerned with prediction and control

Branches of Psychology:

Academic - professors, teaching and doing research (mostly concerned with describing and explaining)
Clinical and Counseling - psychiatrists, therapists (mostly concerned with predicting and controlling)
Applied - school psychologists, marketing, industrial psychologists (mostly concerned with predicting and controlling)

Clinical psychology is the biggest part of psychology

Psychiatrists - medical doctors who specialize in treating severe mental disorders and can prescribe medication
(clinical) Psychologists - treat mental disorders,but they do not go to medical school and typically cannot prescribe medication

Socrates (470-399 BCE)

The Western tradition, which is the historical source of modern psychology
From Arthens showed an early version of the scientific method by constantly testing the claims made by supposed experts
This did not make him popular and eventually he was executed by the people of Athens (forced to drink hemlock)
So influential that the history of philosophy is divided into the presocratics and the post socratics
He did not actually write any texts, so we only know about his theories and arguments from others, most notable his students Plato
Plato
- Plato wrote a lot and much of what he wrote has been preserved (unlike other ancient Greek philosophers whose writings we know enlisted, but which have been lost)
- Plato spent a lot of time discussing the mind and how it works
- His most famous dialogue “The Republic” is supposedly about the ideal political organization for a state, but is in reality an analogy for the structure of the mind
- Plato’s view of the subconscious was that it was like two horses (desire and emotion) pulling a chariot being controlled by a charioteer (reason)
- Freud’s later Id, Ego and Superego are very similar

Plato founded a school called the “academy” - hence our modern word
The most famous student of Plato’s Academy was Aristotle
- Aristotle founded his own school, the “Lyceum” (In French a lycée is a high school)

Freud
- The idea of the mind having a subconscious (and being divisible into three parts) - was not Freud
- Plato discusses this three-part mind concept in “the Republic” more than two thousand years before Freud

Introspection

The Greek philosophers largely relied on introspection when trying to figure out the mind
Intro - inside
Spection - look
Is a useful tool and people still rely on it today
Ex. how many of you when you were a kid wondered: “Does anything exist outside of my mind? Or is everything I experience just in my mind?”
- This is a common idea for many children to have (particularly those who later end up being psychologists or philosophers) and it demonstrates one problem with introspection:
- How do you confirm the conclusions of your own inspection? What you conclude based on looking into you mind may be different from what I conclude from looking into mine
Another issue is that our minds evolved to allow us to interact with the world, to see our environment, hear predators, small and taste food, feel trees..
- We have awareness of those aspects of the world that are important to our survival and reproduction
What would be the survival advantage of being aware of how our own senses worked? (to see how we see, to hear how we hear)
- While fun for psychologists/philosophers, being aware of the internal workings of our own minds/sense would not help us find more food or raise more children and se we have not involved mechanisms for being aware of these internal things
Many aspects of the mind are not accessible to introspection
- Another way of saying this is that many aspects of the mind are part of the cognitive unconscious
- So, introspection really can’t get us very far (and leads to all sorts of arguments with introspective conclusions don’t agree)
Ex. a famous study found that asking people to choose from 4 identical sets of silk stockings led people to choose the last set (even though they were all the same)
- People provided all kinds of reasons for why they chose the stockings, but their introspective reports are obviously incorrect because the real reason is they they were the last set of stockings they tested
Ex. found in patients with hemispatial neglect - a condition caused by brain damage to the parietal lobe in which the person is not aware of images in their left visual field
Ex. when presented with these pictures (a normal house and a house with a fire), they say that they would rather live in the first house (they are not aware of the flames because they are in the left visual field).
- Their introspective explanations offer all sorts of reasons, none of which is fire
The introspective tradition continued right up until the 19th century

Wilhelm Wundt

The limitations of introspection became clear with his work
One of the first experimental psychologists
Was able to show that we are aware of many things (like which of two weights is heavier without having any sense of how we become aware of these things
Wundt was the first person to be called a psychologist
Voluntarism - emphasized the role of “the will” in organizing perceptual experiences
- Today Wundt would probably express this as a “top down” view of perception in which expectation and attention influences which aspects of information are emphasized
- Ex. have you ever sipped a cup of orange juice just thinking it was apple juice? You get an odd experience caused by your expectation shaping the sensory information
One of Wundt’s students, Edward Titchener, helped develop the approach known as structuralism

Structuralism

Used to mean somewhat different things is different disciplines
The theory is that there are basic units of mund (like a particular experience of red or a particular degree of sweetness) and that mental experiences can be explained as the way in which these elements combine (the structure of their combination)
This made psychology like chemistry
It also moved the focus away from the function of mind to its content
Structuralism still relied on introspection though, so it was difficult to make progress as each person came to different conclusions
Used to refer to different theories in different fields (something that is unfortunately quite common in academia)

William James

The first north American psychologist who is often called (despite Wundt being earlier) the “father of psychology”
He once famously quipped “the first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave”
He wrote a textbook called “the principles of Psychology”, which is still widely read today
Given its date, 1890, many of its claims have been superseded, but it is still popular because of how well its written
James’ brother Henry was a famous novelist who wrote very psychological novels, so people often say that William was the real novelist and Henry was the real psychologist
The principles is often called The James
His later brief summary is often called the Jimmy
James helped found the approach known as functionalism

Functionalism

Looks at the function of the mind as a whole in its relation to the environment
The evolutionary benefits of aspects of mind
James read Darwin and incorporated the new discovery of evolution into psychology (today this would be called evolutionary psychology)

Evolution

The theory of evolution is “so simple that anyone can misunderstand it”
Here is the theory of evolution in a nutshell:
- Children inherit traits from their parents (kids look like their parents)
- Some traits make it easier to survive/have children (“beneficial traits”)
- People who have “beneficial traits” will have more children that those who don’t have that trait
- In the next generation, a larger percentage of children will have the “beneficial trait”
The implications that we draw from this can be very complex, and that’s where debates and controversy come in, but the basic process is incredibly simple
Evolution changes the frequency of traits in a group of individuals, not the individuals themselves
- Ex. just like the wind shapes a sand-dune by removing individual grains of sad (but does not shape the sand-grains themselves
Farmers have known since earliest history that:
- If you want to have cows that produce a lot of milk, then choose only the most productive cows in your herd to have offspring
- If you want horses that are faster, then choose only the fastest horses in your stock to breed
- This is called artificial selection
Artificial selection
- A human is artificially influencing which animals will have children
- This was perfectly well understood since the dawn of farming
- Darwin simply realized that the environment does the same shaping of which animals breed - it does it naturally (natural selection)
- It might be better to call it natural filtering because basically it’s a subtractive process in which individuals with less advantageous features are filtered out (through death/not having as many children) from the population, so the average characteristics of the population shifts over time
The phrase “Survival of the fittest '' (which was not from Darwin), does not mean “fit” in the sense of being physically strong (ex. Wow that athlete is so fit!) It means “fit” as in a key fitting into a lock
- Animals features fit into their environment will (so they can survive better/have more children are the ones who will have more offspring
- This can mean “fit” in the sense of “big, strong” but it doesn’t have to
- Ex. a common phenomenon is island dwarfism in which animals that live on small islands evolve to be smaller than their ancestors (they were even tiny little Mammoths)
- This is because food is typically scarce on an island so the animal that needs fewer calories (the smaller animal) is fitter (more likely to survive/have children)
- Its also not really about the survival, its about the number of offspring the organisms have
- Being fit, means the organism can use the environment to have more children (though, of course, survival helps with that)
- Its all about “differential reproductive success” - survival is only important in so far as it allows one to have more kids
- If an animal lives to be 1 million years old but never has offspring, then it is not evolutionary successful
The peppered moth is a famous example. In britain, there are two color variants in the moth:
- Mainly black with white speckles
- Mainly white with black speckles
- They mostly land on birch trees, so the mainly-white variant is much better camouflaged. As a result, black moths were much more likely to get eaten by birds. So the % of the population that was black was tiny
Then the industrial revolution happened - lots of pollution from burning coal. Birch trees suddenly were covered in soot, and so suddenly the black variant was better camouflaged
- Suddenly, being white meant you were likely to get eaten by birds. The black variants survived better, so had more kids, and very quickly the population was 95% black
- The government eventually put in pollution-control laws, and suddenly the trees were white again
- Black moths (the majority) were much more likely to get eaten, the white ones were more likely to survive and so had more kids
- Over the generations the populations shifted back towards being mostly white
NOTE - no individual moth changed color
- The change was in the percentage of the population that had the white vs black color variant
Evolution remains somewhat controversial in the non-scientific world for largely political and religious reasons
Within science evolution is, essentially, universally accepted
The universal acceptance of evolution is based on two factors
- The evidence supporting evolution is vast - it has passed test after test after test…
- Evolution can actually be deduced from pure logic/mathematics - which means, as we discussed before, this it is not just likely to be true, it must be true
Evolution is a logical necessity. There could not be a coherent universe in which evolution does not occur when the right factors are present
You can see how logical it is - evolution is essentially pointing out that “something that makes it more likely for you to have kids will make it more likely that you will have kids”
The fact that evolution will occur when the right circumstances are present, does not mean that any particular biological feature is the result of evolutionary selection
Ex. what is the evolutionary function of nipples on biological males?
- Probably no evolutionary function. They’re probable there just as a side-effect of the evolutionary benefit they provide to biological females (to nurse babies)
The theory of evolution is remarkably simple and, in retrospect, remarkably obvious
The almost universal reaction of naturalists when Darwin published his theory of evolution was; “Of course!! Why didn’t I think of that??!!”
It is so obvious that it turns out that a naturalist (Patrick Matthew) had actually published the theory before Darwin but didn’t realize how revolutionary it was
- He had published the theory as an aside in a book about timber used in shipbuilding
- Matthew didn’t make a big deal of his discovery because the logic seemed so obvious to him that he didn’t realize that not everyone could see it
- Darwin acknowledged that Matthew had developed the theory first, but because of the obscurity of the publication no-one was aware of Matthew’s discovery
We did not evolve from apes. We are apes (genetically, we are right in the middle of the various types of ape)
We did not evolve from apes. We are cousins with other apes. They didn’t evolve from us, we didn;t evolve from them; we all evolved from a common ancestor
We are not more evolved than any other species. We may be more complex than some, but all organisms on earth trace back to the ame source so all species have spent the same amount of time evolving
Humans are not the goal of evolution - Evolution does not have a particular goal (other than more offspring in the next generation)
- Common in science fiction - many shows/movies involve some mistake concept of evolutionary advancement or evolutionary regression
There is no goal to evolution, it's a mindless inevitable process that shapes species to match their environment, like a river shaping the landscape (the river isn’t trying to achieve some particular shape)
Evolution is the description of how the frequency of traits changes in a population over the generations

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Within psychology it is basically universally accepted that the mind has been shaped by evolution. There are some people in academia who really do not like this
The reason for resistance to the accepting that our minds have been shaped by evolution is that this fact has been used in the past (and sometimes in the present) as an excuse for discrimination
The abuse of evolutionary psychology to promote discrimination is horrific and wrong, and is still fairly common (among those who don’t understand evolution/biology)
Does evolution be used to support discrimination - it turns out that humans went through an evolutionary bottleneck in which only a small population of humans survived
So, we are all descended in the recent past from a small group of people and are extremely similar to each other genetically (more so than almost any animal on the planet)
This is a coincidence of evolutionary history, but it means that there is not enough genetic variety between humans to support claims that one group has some superiority over others. In fact, most of the genetic variability between people is within rather than across what traditionally were called “races”
Fear of evolution being used to excuse immoral behavior explains why many people reject evolution, but the logic is faulty - it is like saying that the atomic theory is incorrect because it led to the atomic bomb
This is fundamental and very common error in reasoning
The truth of a claim is not dependent on the claim supporting any particular religious, political, or moral viewpoint
“There is no method of reasoning more common and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavor the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretense of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false ; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence” - Hume
Arguing the truth of a scientific claim on the basis of politics/ethics is an error of logic
However it has, unfortunately, become quite common (even in the university where people really should know better)
In some disciplines outside psychology it is common to accept that evolution has shaped the human body, but not the mind. This is sometimes called the “neck-down” view of evolution( based on politics, not science)
The mind is just as susceptible to evolutionary influences, and there is not a cleewan divide in genetics between gees “for” the body and genes “for” the mind, so evolution often cannot influence just the body without influencing the mind
- Ex. breeding foxes for docile behavior causes their bodies to develop floppy ears
- This same thing is apparently why out wolf-descended docile dogs have floppy ears
- There are some dog populations that have started to return to being wild and they are starting to develop pointy ears
Just because evolution has shaped the mind that does not mean that every aspect of the mind is the result of evolutionary selection
Some aspects of mind do not serve an evolutionary purpose
Assuming that every feature of the mind must have an evolutionary explanation that has led to some bizarre “just-so” stories in which people argue for some truly implausible origins for mental features
- Ex. reading is too recent an invention for us to have adapter to it through evolution, so we did not evolve “to read'' (it's just a lucky by-product of a mind that evolved for other things)
- Ex. there is certainly evolutionary selection for certain sexual behaviors (if animals had no innate desie for sex, then they obviously wouldn’t have as many children)
- However, that does not mean that all aspects of sexuality are the result of evolutionary selection. There are some particular desires (fetishes) that involve quite recent artifacts, so could not have been the result of evolution
Naturalistic fallacy:
- The mistake of assuming that something is morally correct because it is natural (or result, of evolutionary selection) or wrong because it is unnatural (was not selected for by evolution)
Just because something is natural does not make it ethical
Just because something is unnatural does not make it unethical

Gestalt Psychology

An approach to psychology (specifically, perception) that developed in Germany and then spread to North America (where it became a truly independent school of thought)
The key figures were Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka

Gestalt

Is a German word that means “pattern”
The motivating idea is that we perceive things in terms of whole items not just as part (this was a bit of a push-back against structuralism, with its emphasis on analyzing things into parts)
Perceptions are argued to have a powerful tendency to form meaningful patterns
Ex of seeing the whole and not just a series of parts

Many interesting visual illusions have developed to demonstrate gestalt principles. Perhaps the most basic is continuity and closure
- Ex. we tend to assume ides continue behind interruptions and we assume that figures are closed (no gaps)

Here are some other gestalt perception examples where we see things in terms of the whole pattern

This figure is equally compatible with two interpretations. People often find that they see it alternately as one or the other

Your interpretation of the individual elements is always consistent - you see them as all participation in one perspective or the other, never both at the same time. This is another example of gestalt “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” concept

Freud

Freud was the biggest name in psychology in the 20th Century
He popularized the idea of the subconscious (though he did not invent the idea)
He popularized the talking approach to therapy - think of the patient on a couch (again, he did not invent it)
Psychotherapy - freud's talking therapy, in which he claimed to analyze people's subconscious problems caused by childhood trauma
Freud emphasized:
- Behaviour is influenced by unconscious thoughts, impulses, and desires, especially sex and aggression
- Mental life is like an iceberg, with only a small part exposed
- Symptoms could be traced back to toxic childhood events
Freud had many theories that have become part of pop culture. These theories are typically either wrong or unscientific (untestable)
- The oedipal complex
- Penis envy (this is not men being jealous of other men’s anatomy, which how it's often interpreted)
- Anal retentive personality
Freud also made much of the idea of hysteria which he felt was a common problem in women (the word is derived from the Greek word for “womb”)
Freud is not taken seriously by most psychologists
Some people still call themselves “Freudian” but usually that means that they use talking approaches that Freud popularized, even if they reject his particular (and peculiar) theories

Behaviorism

The limitations of introspection are so in contrast with the ethos of science that at the start of the 20th Century, there was a “backlash” against introspection
The key issue in behaviorism is that introspection is unreliable so had to be abandoned for something measurable
The behaviorists argued that psychology should not discuss anything other than behavior (particularly overt behavior)
John B. Watson actually took curare - a deadly poison used by indigenous people in the Amazon - to prevent himself from being able to do any overt behavior - he then checked to see whether he could still talk to himself inside his head (he could)
Watson was one of the founders of behaviorism an approach to psychology that was dominant for most of the 20th century
The most famous person associated with behaviorism was B. F Skinner
Skinner often referred to as a Radical Behaviorist
Behaviorism focuses exclusively on measuring (overt) behavior and relied on conditioning to explain many behaviors
Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist studying digestion (not psychology)
- He had dogs hooked up to machines measuring saliva during eating

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Pavlov noticed that the dogs started to produce saliva before the food was delivered, when they heard the food-delivery mechanism click as it started to deliver the food (it wasn’t a bell)
Pavlov realized that the physiology of digestion was being influenced by learning
Pavlov went on a study how this learning works
The basic idea is that organisms have some basic reflexes (like salivation) that are triggered by certain natural stimuli (like food in the mouth)
Unconditioned response - the reflex
Unconditioned stimulus - the stimulus that triggers it naturally
The animal can learn that some new (not innately specified) stimulus reliably indicates that the unconditioned stimulus will occur
So they start to respond to this new (conditioned) stimulus as if it were the unconditioned stimulus
For the dogs, they start to salivate to the sound of the food arriving, instead of the food

What was an unconditioned response to an unconditioned stimulus, becomes a conditioned response to a conditioned stimulus

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This is called classical (or Pavlovian) conditioning

Behaviorists tried to explain essentially all behavior as the result of this sort of conditioning by rewards (or by punishment)
Operant conditioning - when it is a more complex behavior, rather than a reflex, this is conditioned
Edward Thorndike - the person who really developed this with animals, and who created puzzle boxes to train animals to perform behaviors

There are some great videos of things animals were trained to do using operant conditioning, including pigeons playing ping-pong
Psychology was basically all about classical conditioning and operant conditioning for decades
Psychologists tried to explain everything using these forms of learning
Radical behaviorists like B.F Skinner took it to an extreme
Radical Behaviorism - takes the anti-introspection viewpoint to a silly extreme where people not only felt that we shouldn’t waste time arguing over introspectie data that can’t be confirmed, and started to claim that mental events (like imagining) don’t really exist
- This took things way too far, as it required people to deny thet existence of their own experience
- Just because we don’t have tools to investigate it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist
Behaviorism was a black lash against the excesses of Introspection
There was then a backlash against the excesses of Behaviorism this was: The Cognitive Revolution

Cognitive Revolution

Started in the 1950’s and was led by several researchers who pointed out that denying the existence of cognition (thinking) was: “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”
- Yes, introspection is unreliable, but that just means we need to develop better tools, not deny the existence of the mind
The cognitive revolution was stated, in part, by a famous book-review
In 1959 Noam Chomsky (a linguist) wrote a review of B. F Skinner’s book “verbal behavior” in which Skinner tried to explain language as being the result of conditioning
- This review was devastating
- Chomsky proved (in the mathematical sense) that grammatical behaviors could not be explained by conditioning
- This was the beginning of the end for behaviorism
While conditioning does explain many aspects of behavior, it can’t explain everything and cognition does actually exist
At roughly the same time, Ulric Neisser started pushing for an information processing view of the mind (using the analogy of the computer)
He coined the term cognitive psychology for this information processing approach
Cognitive psychology - particularly interested in how we use thinking to solve problems (rather than behaving because of being conditioned)
This was the birth of cognitive science which is an interdisciplinary approach to understand the mind that involves the fields of:
- Psychology
- Linguistics
- Philosophy
- Computer science
Cognitive behaviorism - some behaviorists tried to continue the behaviorist approach but also incorporate the new concepts in cognition

Humanistic Psychology: A Recent Approach

Humanistic psychology - a fairly recent move in psychology
- Has been championed by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow
This is not really a different field of psychology, it’s more of a viewpoint on the value of psychology and what we should be emphasizing
Humanistic Psychology empasizes:
- The inherent goodness of people
- The importance of achieving self-actualization (developing personal potential)
- The individual’s ability to choose
You may have heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which puts self-actualization at the top (meaning that while it is perhaps our ultimate goal, we need to deal with the others first)

Biopsychosocial Model

The modern approach to psychology is a combination (or “synthesis”) of different approaches
There are, pretty obviously, three parts to the model:
- Biological (basically brain/evolution stuff)
- Psychological (basically mind/behavior stuff)
- Social (basically cultural stuff)
Biological:
- Genetics , brain processes, evolution
- Inherited, adaptive aspects of behavior and mental processes
- Neuroscience
Psychological:
- Behavior is the result of processes within each person
- Scientific observation, research, objectivity
- Mental processes
Social:
- Impact of social context, crowds, groups, and cultures on human behavior
- Effect on education, ethnicity, religion, and poverty on social norms
- Has become more important over the last few decades, as it has become clear that the cultural factors play a larger role than the first understood in psychology
- Ex. it has turned out that several psychological findings that were discovered and have been very well replicated (confirmed by follow-up tests) by Western researchers, does not occur in many Eastern cultures
A key difference between individualistic vs. collectivist cultures
- Western cultures (Anglo cultures) tend to emphasize the importance of individual action and responsibility
- Eastern cultures (China and Japan) emphasize the importance of the community and one’s duty to that community
- It turns out that this distinction can have an impact on many aspects of psychology
Fundamental attribution error - in which people tend to attribute the majority of a person’s behaviors (including mistakes) to the person’s individual characters, not to the situation the person is in
- In the fundamental attribution error, the person typically attributes their own failings, not to their own character but to the situation
- Ex. why did the person fail the quiz
- Individualistic culture - “because they are lazy and didn’t study” (fundamental attribution error)
- Collectivist culture - “because the quiz was so hard”
Such culture-based differences have led people to re-evaluate previous findings and consider the fact that most researchers have been
- Western
- Male
- Middle/Upper Class
- From INdustrialized Democratic Societies
It have become clear that facets of psychology are different across these dimensions and so the findings of psychology so far may ot generalize to all humans because the concentrated on men from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultures
Two quick examples of how the background of the researcher can matter:
- Cognitive decline with age
- Gender in moral judgment
Cognitive Decline
- The research showing cognitive decline in the elderly was typically ran by young graduate students
- They gave cognitive tests to younger and older people and they found that older people scored much worse
- However, how sharp you are cognitively varies over the day as you get more awake/tired
- As you get older, your circadian rhythm changes (you get up earlier in the day and go to bed earlier), so in the late afternoon, eldery people are getting tired, which undergraduates are generally only just beginning to be really awake
- When were the tests conducted?
- Usually in the afternoon, when it was convenient for the young graduate students running the experiments
- The young people had only been awake a couple of horse and were fully alert and attentive, the older people had already been up for half the day and were beginning to get tired and distracted
- When the tests are re-run in the early morning, the alert elderly actually showed better cognition than the sleepy undergrads
There is cognitive decline with age (unfortunately) - it just turns out that the bias in the group of researchers caused the decline to seem bigger than it actually is
Gender and Moral Differences
- Early studies on moral development in children were conducted by men and they tended to view achieving a rule-based ethical system as the “final-stage”
- However, it turns out that there is a gender-difference in moral intuitions, with women tending to see the importance of caring for other to be more important than strictly following rules
Ethics is a complex topic and there are arguments to be made for systems that emphasize care over rules and for systems that emphasize rules over care
The male researchers had not provided any logical reason for assuming that the rule-based approach should be considered superior or the ultimate goal of ethical development - it just seemed obvious to them that this was the best system (an the other male researchers who checked their work agreed with their intuition)
As more women have entered the field of psychology, may such errors based on the unexamined assumptions of the researchers have been caught
However, there are always going to be errors based on unchecked assumptions of the researchers
One political view was more associated with a particular bad behavior
- The researchers operationalized the bad behavior as anyone who agrees with the political view they were investigating
- (they didn’t do this on purpose, and they did it indirectly so the connection wasn’t obvious at first glance)
Circular definition - a definition that is circular
- They were assuming the connection they were trying to test
- This is like doing a study to see whether owning newspapers make people happy
- Then operationalizing “being happy” as: “having many newspapers”
- If you do it this way, you are guaranteed to find that “owning newspapers make people happy”, but that’s because you definition of happiness is a cheat
- In such a study you are actually proving that: “owning newspapers is likely to make people own newspapers”!
- In reality, such a study proves nothing and is a waste of time. However, because the researchers all shared the same attitude about the political view they were investigation, none of them noticed that their study was using a “cheating” definition that guaranteed they would find the result that they wanted
- Because the same political attitude was shared by most other researchers in the field, when these studies were checked by the community the error was not caught
To make this point clearer:
- I knew someone who felt that everyone who disagreed with him was stupid. He measured people’s stupidity by seeing whether they agreed with him or not
- Do you think he had really proven that people who disagreed with him were stupid?
This is why it is important that:
- We have a wide range of viewpoints when examining anything
- We constantly check our assumptions
- The issue has gotten a bit better over the last few decades as the field has become broader with psychological research being conducted in a wider range of cultures and by a wider range of people
- However, in science, we must always look to challenge previous findings and improve our understanding, so this process of correcting previous biases will continue

Biopsychology

This is the study of the biological origins of behaviors and mental processes
This would include physiology (body stuff) neuropsychology (brain stuff) as well as hormones, digestion, sleep patterns, …

Evolutionary Psychology

Closely related to biopsychology but is concerned with the ultimate evolutionary (adaptive) reasons for aspects of our bodies and minds
The theories developed are fascination, BUT, since it can be hard to prove that a behavior is adaptive (or was adaptive when it would have evolved thousands of years ago)
The conclusions reached are necessarily tentative
One quite consistent finding, cross-culturally and across periods, is the average difference in mate-selection between the sexes
Across many cultures and at various time periods, it is quite consistently found that females prefer mates with resources/the skills for obtaining resources, whereas males prefer mates who are young and attractive
Ex. all the recent pop-culture jokes about Leonardo da Caprio’s dating habits
- He is a successful wealthy man in his 50’s who is attracted to women (who are models) in their early 20’s and plenty of such women seem to find him attractive as well
This finding is exactly in line with evolutionary predictions given the different paths to evolutionary “success” that male and female reproductive anatomy lead to
Specifically, because the female gestates she has more evolutionary pressure to be concerned with having a mate who can help raise the offspring, because if things go wrong, she is taking a bigger risk (both literally, in terms of her body’s health, and evolutionary, in terms of how many children she can have)
This is a tendency not an absolute - lots of males are more interested in resources than lots of females and lost of females are more into a potential mate’s looks than lots of males
While there is an average difference on these traits, both males and females rate the importance of a partner who is nice as more important than these other traits

Sensation and Perception

The study of how receptors across multiple systems inform us about the world and how this information is processed
Sensation - is the ‘raw’ information picked up by our sensory-receptors
Perception - the psychological interpretation of this information (what you actually see, hear)

Development Psychology

A very large part of psychological research concerns the sequence of changes that one undergoes from infancy to adulthood (and into old age) ‘
Piaget - the first person who laid out several stages that children go through in development
Despite the behaviorist view that all behavior can be explained through conditioning, it turns out that there are fundamental difference in people’s tendency to behave that are strongly genetically influenced
- We have personalities

Personality

Personality traits are - relatively consistent patterns of thought and behavior that are relatively stable over the lifespan and seen to have a large degree of heritability (they have a strong genetic component)
A standard model (with a lot of support) argues that there 5 main dimensions along which personalities differ
The acronym is CANOE (or OCEAN if you put them in different order)
- Conscientiousness
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
- Openness
- Extraversion

Social Psychology

Deals with how social pressures (and culture, which is like a big background social pressure) influence behavior
The one study that is perhaps the most famous (and disturbing) is the Stanley Milgram experiment
Stanley Milgram - a Yale psychologist who wanted to understand (in the wake of WWII) how normal people could end up committing horrible acts
- So he conducted an experiment in which people were told be an authority figure to deliver a shock to another person (there was no actual shock, the other person was just faking it)
- Participants gave increasingly intense “shocks” to a person, each time the person made an error in a test (the experiment pretended to by studying learning)
- The scientist (the “authority” figure) told the participants to keep administering the shocks, even when those shocks were labeled as dangerous
- Even though they expressed concern about doing it, most people (2/3rds) delivered a “shock” that was potentially fatal. Only a minority refuse
This study is famous, but has several problems:
- It is unethical (think of the stress these volunteers were put under, an ethics board would not accept this experiment today)
- It turns out that the majority of people were able to guess that the shock were fake, so the results are not quite as shocking as originally believed

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