Psychology as a Science

Introduction to Psychology

• Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior.
  • The word "psychology" comes from the Greek words "psyche" (life) and "logos" (explanation).
• Psychology is a broad and diverse discipline that covers various aspects of the human condition.
  • Includes child development, social behavior, emotions, memory, and how to change behavior.
• Psychology is commonly associated with mental illness and therapy, but it is only one aspect of this discipline.
• Psychologists work in various settings.
  • Clinical psychologists diagnose and treat mental health difficulties and disorders.
  • Psychologists also teach and do research at universities and colleges.
  • Work in organizations, schools, forensic settings, and more.
• Most psychologists have a doctorate degree (PhD or PsyD), a master’s degree (MA or MSc), and a bachelor’s degree (BA or BSc).
• Psychology as a discipline is governed by adherence to the scientific method.
• Psychology is built upon empirical evidence.
  • Distinguishes it from pop psychology or pseudoscience, which lacks evidence and depends more on belief, intuition, and common sense.

Psychology as a Science

• Psychologists rely on scientific methods.
  • Research psychologists use scientific methods to create new knowledge about the causes of behavior.
  • Psychologist-practitioners use existing research to enhance the everyday life of others.
• People often rely on common sense, experience, and intuition to understand behavior, making them "intuitive" or "naive" psychologists.
• People are "everyday scientists" who conduct research projects to answer questions about behavior (Nisbett & Ross, 1980).
• The Problem of Intuition:
  • The results of "everyday" research projects can teach us about human behavior.
  • Theories developed from experience may be unique and cannot be generalized.
• People are not always thorough or accurate in collecting and interpreting data.
  • Confirmation bias: seeking information that confirms beliefs and discounting evidence to the contrary.
  • Cognitive and motivational biases influence perceptions and lead to erroneous conclusions (Fiske & Taylor, 2007; Hsee & Hastie, 2006; Kahneman, 2011).
  • Confidence in beliefs is not an indicator of accuracy.
  • Hindsight bias: the tendency to tell ourselves "I knew it all along" when making sense of past events (Kahneman, 2011).
  • One goal of psychology education is to improve thinking and understanding of biases.
• All scientists use empirical methods to study their topics of interest.
  • Empirical methods: collecting and organizing data, and drawing conclusions about those data.
• The scientific method is the set of assumptions, rules, and procedures that scientists use to conduct empirical research.
• Statements that cannot be objectively measured are not within the domain of scientific inquiry.
• Scientists distinguish between values and facts.
  • Values: personal statements.
  • Facts: objective statements determined to be accurate through empirical study.
• Hypothesis: a prediction about what we believe to be true.
  • Testable: possible to test in research.
  • Falsifiable: if the prediction is wrong, data will show it.
• Ideas or values are not always testable or falsifiable.
• Statements that scientists consider to be factual may turn out to be incorrect based on further research.
• Empiricism and objectivity result in a greater chance of producing an accurate understanding of human behavior.
• Levels of explanation in psychology:
  • Lower levels: biological influences (genes, neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones).
  • Middle levels: abilities and characteristics of individual people.
  • Highest levels: social groups, organizations, and cultures (Cacioppo, Berntson, Sheridan, & McClintock, 2000).
• The same topic can be studied at different levels of explanation.
  • Depression can be studied at low levels by investigating chemicals in the brain, at middle levels through psychological therapy, and at high levels by studying differences across cultures.
  • The study of depression shows that no one level of explanation can explain everything.
• Rational, objective thinking is a hallmark of science.
• Critical thinking skills allow you to be a good consumer of ideas.
• Critical thinking processes (Carole Wade, 1995):
  1. Ask questions and be willing to wonder.
  2. Define the problem.
  3. Examine the evidence (Empirical evidence).
  4. Analyze assumptions and biases (Confirmation bias).
  5. Avoid emotional reasoning.
  6. Avoid oversimplification.
  7. Consider other interpretations.
  8. Tolerate uncertainty.
• Psychology is a science because it uses the scientific method to acquire knowledge.
• Science is an open activity where results are shared and published.
• Science is a collaborative process where all aspects of process and results are thrown open to the wider community for consideration and analysis.
• In science, conclusions must be based on empirical evidence and judged by peers before publication (peer review).
• Pseudoscience: claims that purport to have information that will change our lives but lack empirical evidence.
  • Also known as "bad science" or "junk science."

Pseudoscience Alert: Graphology

• Graphology is a pseudoscience that claims to reveal aspects of character through handwriting analysis.
  • Spacing, size of characters, and how you cross your t’s are interpreted.
  • Graphology has a long history related to attempts to explain character based on physical appearance.
• Graphology has no empirical evidence to support it (Dazzi & Pedrabissi, 2009; Lilienfeld, Lynn, Ruscio, & Beyerstein, 2010).

Key Takeaways

• Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior.
• Commonsense thinking is not always correct.
• People are frequently unaware of the causes of their own behaviours.
• Psychologists use the scientific method to collect, analyze, and interpret evidence.
• Psychological phenomena are complex and multiply determined at different levels of explanation.
• Critical thinking involves a number of processes that can be specified and practiced.
• Pseudoscience often involves claims about topics that psychologists are interested in; students should be able to evaluate pseudoscientific claims using critical thinking.

The Evolution of Psychology: History, Approaches, and Questions

• Psychology has moved from speculation about behaviour toward a more objective and scientific approach.
• Most of the earliest psychologists were men, but women have steadily entered psychology.
  • By the mid-1980s, half of the doctorates in psychology were awarded to women (American Psychological Association, 2006).
• The gradual integration of women into the field opened the door for greater diversity in the areas of research and teaching.
• North American psychology has traditionally been the domain of white, middle-class researchers and research subjects.
• The earliest psychologists that we know about are the Greek philosophers Plato (428–347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC).
  • Plato argued on the nature side, believing that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn.
  • Aristotle believed that each child is born as an “empty slate” (in Latin, $tabula rasa$) and that knowledge is primarily acquired through learning and experience.
• Descartes believed in the principle of dualism: that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body.
• Dramatic changes came during the 1800s with the help of the first two research psychologists:
  • Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), who developed a psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany
  • William James (1842–1910), who founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard University.

Structuralism: Introspection and the awareness of subjective experience

• Wundt and his students believed that it was possible to analyze the basic elements of the mind and to classify our conscious experiences scientifically.
• Structuralism: a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of psychological experience.
• Structuralists used the method of introspection to attempt to create a map of the elements of consciousness.
  • Introspection involves asking research participants to describe exactly what they experience as they work on mental tasks.
• Wundt discovered that it took people longer to report what sound they had just heard than to simply respond that they had heard the sound.
• These studies marked the first time researchers realized that there is a difference between the sensation of a stimulus and the perception of that stimulus.
• Perhaps the best known of the structuralists was Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927).
• The structuralists realized that many important aspects of human psychology occur outside our conscious awareness, that reporting on experiences in the here-and-now had limited generalizability. In addition, the structuralists realized that research participants are unable to accurately report on all of their experiences, and that there are numerous individual differences in experiences that further limit generalizability to all humans.

Functionalism and evolutionary psychology

• William James and the other members of the school of functionalism aimed to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess (Hunt, 1993).
• James believed that people have acollection of instincts, and that these instincts were part of our evolved nature.
• James and the other members of the functionalist school were influenced by Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) theory of natural selection, which proposed that the physical characteristics of animals and humans evolved because they were useful (i.e., functional).
• The functionalists believed that Darwin’s theory applied to psychological characteristics as well.
• Evolutionary psychology: a branch of psychology that applies the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human and animal behaviour (Dennett, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).
• Evolutionary psychology accepts the functionalists’ basic assumption, namely that many human psychological systems, including memory, emotion, and personality, serve key adaptive functions.
• Reproductive success depends on the environment.
• Humans have lived a nomadic hunting and gathering lifestyle for virtually all of our evolutionary history.
• The capacity for love, empathy, and attachments have ensured that people look after their close relatives, especially their children.
• Evolutionary psychology has some limitations and one problem is that many of its predictions are extremely difficult to test.

Psychodynamic psychology

• Psychodynamic psychology is an approach to understanding human behaviour that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories.
• Psychodynamics is grounded in psychoanalysis, but it includes other approaches that are not purely Freudian.
• Freud (see Figure 1.5) developed his theories about behaviour through extensive analysis of the patients that he treated in his private clinical practice.
• Freud believed that many of the problems that his patients experienced — including anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction — were the result of the effects of painful childhood experiences that they could no longer remember.
• Freud’s ideas were extended by other psychologists whom he influenced, including Carl Jung (1875–1961), Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Karen Horney (1855–1952), and Erik Erikson (1902–1994).
• Psychodynamics has had substantial impact on the field of psychology and indeed on thinking about human behaviour more generally (Moore & Fine, 1995).
• The founders of the psychodynamic approach were primarily practitioners who worked with individuals to help them understand and confront their psychological symptoms.

Behaviourism

• Behaviourism is a school of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind; therefore, psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behaviour itself.
• Behaviourists believe that the human mind is like a black box into which stimuli are sent and from which responses are received.
• The early American behavioral psychologist John Watson (1878–1958) was influenced in large part by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), who had discovered that dogs would salivate at the sound of a tone that had previously been associated with the presentation of food.
• Watson found that systematically exposing a child to fearful stimuli in the presence of objects that did not themselves elicit fear could lead the child to respond with a fearful behaviour to the presence of the objects (Watson & Rayner, 1920; Beck, Levinson, & Irons, 2009).
• The most famous behaviourist was Burrhus Frederick Skinner (1904–1990).
• The behavioural perspective — or learning perspective, as it is often called — has enormous practical application in the treatment of some disorders such as phobias.

Humanism

• Humanist psychology arose with an optimistic and positive view of human nature.
• Humanist psychologists, such as Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), argued that people strive to reach their full potential and have self-determination.

The cognitive approach and cognitive neuroscience

• The analogy between the brain and the computer, although by no means perfect, provided part of the impetus for a new approach to psychology called cognitive psychology.
• Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment.

Social-cultural psychology

• Social-cultural psychology, which is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behaviour.
• Social-cultural psychologists are particularly concerned with how people perceive themselves and others and how people influence each other’s behaviour.
• Our social worlds by definition involve culture, that is, different cultures aroundthe world have different cultural rules or expectations.
• A culture represents the common set of social norms, including religious and family values and other moral beliefs, shared by the people who live in a geographical region.
• The social-cultural approach reminds us of the difficulty in making broad generalizations about human nature.

Table of Important Approaches in Psychology

Key Takeaways

• The first psychologists were philosophers, but the field became more empirical and objective as more sophisticated scientific approaches were developed and employed.
• The structuralists attempted to analyze the nature of consciousness using introspection.
• The functionalists based their ideas on the work of Darwin, and their approaches led to the field of evolutionary psychology.
• Psychodynamic psychology focuses on unconscious drives and the potential to improve lives through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
• The behaviourists explained behaviour in terms of stimulus, response, and reinforcement, while denying the presence of free will.
• Humanists rejected psychoanalysis and behaviourism as deterministic and pessimistic; they focused on human potential and free will.
• Cognitive psychologists study how people perceive, process, and remember information.
• The social-cultural approach focuses on the social situation, including how cultures and social norms influence our behaviour.

Psychologists at Work

• Psychologists work in diverse fields.
• Psychology encompasses a variety of sub-fields.
• Psychologists with PhD degrees engage in a variety of professional practices.

Psychology in Everyday Life

• Psychological research can help make our lives better or more productive.
• Psychology research can help make our lives better or more productive.
• The most important thing you can learn in college or university is how to better study, learn, and remember.
• To learn well, you need to be ready to learn.