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Psychology’s Roots, Big Ideas, and Critical Thinking Tools Psychology’s roots Four big ideas in psychology Why do psychology? How do psychologists ask and answer questions? Frequently asked questions about psychology. Psychology’s Roots. Psychological science is born
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Psychology’s Roots, Big Ideas, and Critical Thinking Tools • Psychology’s roots • Four big ideas in psychology • Why do psychology? • How do psychologists ask and answer questions? • Frequently asked questions about psychology
Psychology’s Roots • Psychological science is born • Contemporary psychology
Psychological Science Is Born • “Magellans of the mind” (Hunt, 1993) • William Wundt • Darwin • Freud • Piaget • James • Whiton Calkins • Washburn
Psychological Science Is Born • Early definitions until 1920s • Psychology: Science of mental life • Watson and Skinner from 1920s into 1960s • Psychology: Objective science that studies behavior without reference to mental processes. • Freud • Psychology: Emphasis on unconscious thought processes and emotional responses to childhood experiences
Psychological Science Is Born • Rogers and Maslow • Psychology: Humanistic view with emphasis on growth potential of healthy people • Cognitive psychologists • Psychology: Scientific exploration of how information is perceived, processed, and remembered • Cognitive neuroscientists • Psychology: Scientific exploration of brain activity underlying mental activity
Psychology • Science of behavior and mental processes. • Behaviorism • View that psychology should be an objective science that studies behavior without reference to mental processes. • Humanistic psychology • Emphasized the growth potential of healthy people.
Psychological Science Is Born • Today • Psychology: Science of behavior and mental processes • Behavior: Anything a human or nonhuman animal does • Mental processes: Internal states inferred from behavior • Science: Key word! AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File Psychology students, such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who majored in psychology and computer science while at Harvard), endup in varied careers.
What event defined the start of scientific psychology? How did the cognitive revolution affect the field of psychology?
Psychology is both a science and a profession. It can take you down many paths! Ted Fitzgerald, Pool/ AP Photo • Basic research • Applied research • Many interesting careers and perspectives How many of these careers can you identify? PSYCHOLOGY IN COURT Forensic psychologists apply psychology’s principles and methods in the criminal justice system. They may consult on witnesses, or testify about a defendant’s state of mind and future risk.
The ________ perspective in psychology focuses on how behavior and thought differ from situation to situation and from culture to culture. The________ perspective emphasizes how we learn observable responses?
Four Big Ideas in Psychology • Critical thinking • The biopsychosocial approach • The two-track mind • Exploring human strengths Let’s take a closer look at each of these.
Big Idea 1: Critical Thinking Is Smart Thinking • Science supports thinking that examines assumptions, uncovers hidden values, weighs evidence, and tests conclusions. • Critical thinkers ask critical questions.
Big Idea 2: Behavior Is a Biopsychosocial Event • Human behavior can be viewed from three levels • Biological • Psychological • Social-cultural • Each level’s viewpoint provides a valuable insight into a behavior or mental process. • Together these provide the most complete picture.
Critical thinking • Thinking that does not blindly accept arguments and conclusions. Rather, it examines assumptions, uncovers hidden values, weighs evidence, and assesses conclusions. • Biopsychosocial approach • Approach that integrates different but complementary views from biological, psychological, and social-cultural viewpoints. • Culture • Enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and handed down from one generation to the next.
Roy Toft/National Geographic/ Getty Images Antonia Brune A SMILE IS A SMILE THE WORLD AROUND Throughout this course, you will see and hear examples not only of our cultural and gender diversity but also of the similarities that define our shared human nature. People in different cultures vary in when and how often they smile, but a naturally happy smile means the same thing anywhere in the world.
Nature versus nurture • This is an age-old controversy focuses on the relative influence of genes and experience in the development of psychological traits and behaviors. Today’s psychological science sees traits and behaviors arising from the interaction of nature and nurture. • In most cases, nurture works on what nature endows. • Psychologists explore this by asking many interesting and important questions. Can you think of any of these?
Big Cheese Photo LLC / Alamy Westend61 / SuperStock NATURE-MADE NATURE-NURTURE EXPERIMENT Identical twins (left) have the same genes. This makes them ideal participants in studies designed to shed light on hereditary and environmental influences on personality, intelligence, and other traits. Fraternal twins (right) have different genes but often share the same environment. Twin studies provide a wealth of findings—described in later chapters—showing the importance of both nature and nurture.
Big Idea 3: We Operate With a Two-Track Mind(Dual Processing) • Much of thinking, feeling, sensing, and acting operates outside awareness. • The brain works on two tracks through dual processing. • Conscious mind • Unconscious mind • Contemporary psychological science explores this dual-processing capacity.
Dualprocessing • Principle that, at the same time, our mind processes information on separate conscious and unconscious tracks. • Positive psychology • Scientific study of human functioning, with the goals of discovering and promoting strengths and virtues that help individuals and communities to thrive.
Big Idea 4: Psychology Explores HumanStrengths as Well as Challenges • Early psychology focused on understanding and treating difficulties. • Contemporary psychology continues this tradition and extends research to include human flourishing. • Positive psychology uses scientific methods to explore • Positive emotions • Positive character traits • Positive institutions
Positive Psychology Courtesy Martin Seligman • Isthe scientific study of human functioning • Has goals of discovering and promoting strengths and virtues that help individuals and communities to thrives MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN “The main purpose of a positive psychology is to measure, understand, and then build the human strengths and the civic virtues.”
Exploring Human Strengths • Positive psychology uses scientific methods to explore • Positive emotions • Positive character traits • Positive institutions Will psychology have a more positive mission in this century? Can it help us all to flourish?
What advantage do we gain by using the biopsychosocial approach to studying psychological events? What is contemporary psychology’s position on the nature-nurture debate?
Why Do Psychology? • The limits of intuition and common sense • The scientific attitude: Curious, skeptical, and humble
The Limits of Intuition and Common Sense • Research shows that thinking, memory, and attitudes often open automatically without awareness. • But…intuitive thinking has three common flaws. • Hindsight bias • Overconfidence • Perceiving patterns in random events
Did we know it all along? REUTERS/ U.S. Coast Guard/ Handout • Hindsight bias • Tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that we could have predicted it. • Also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. HINDSIGHT BIAS When drilling the Deepwater Horizon oil well in 2010, oil industry employees took some shortcuts and ignored some warning signs, without intending to harm the environment or their companies’ reputations. After the resulting Gulf oil spill, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the foolishness of those judgments became obvious.
The Limits of Intuition and Common Sense WREAT → WATER ETRYN → ENTRY GRABE → BARGE • Overconfidence • People tend to think they know more than they do. • This occurs in academic and social behavior. • About how many seconds do you think it would take you to unscramble each anagram?
Perceiving order in random events • People perceive patterns to make sense of their world. • Even in random, unrelated data people often find order, because random sequences often do not look random. • People trust their intuition more than they should because intuitive thinking is flawed. MaciejOleksy /Shutterstock
Perceiving order in random events Roland Weihrauch/ dpa/ picture-alliance/ Newscom During the 2010 World Cup, a German octopus—Paul, “the oracle of Oberhausen”—was offered two boxes, each with mussels and with a national flag on one side. Paul selected the right box eight out of eight times in predicting the outcome of Germany’s seven matches and Spain’s triumph in the final. GIVEN ENOUGH RANDOM EVENTS, SOME WEIRD-SEEMING STREAKS WILL OCCUR:
Why, after friends start dating, do we often feel that we knew they were meant to be together?
The Scientific Attitude: Curious, Skeptical, andHumble • Curiosity • Includes a passion to explore and understand the world without misleading or being misled • Questions to consider • What do you mean? • How do you know?
The Scientific Attitude: Curious, Skeptical, and Humble • Skepticism • Supports questions about behavior and mental processes: What do you mean? How do you know? AP Photo/ Alan Diaz THE AMAZING RANDI: Magician and skeptic James Randi has tested and debunked a variety of psychic phenomena.
The Scientific Attitude: Curious, Skeptical, andHumble • Humility • Involves awareness that mistakes are possible and willingness to be surprised • One of psychology’s early mottos: “The rat is always right.”
“For a lot of bad ideas, science is society’s garbage disposal.” Describe what this tells us about the scientific attitude.
How Do PsychologistsAsk and Answer Questions? • The scientific method • Description • Correlation • Experimentation
Theory • Explanation using an integrated set of principles that organizes observations and predicts behaviors or events • Hypothesis • Testable prediction, often implied by a theory • Operational definition • Carefully worded statement of the exact procedures (operations) used in a research study • Replication • Repeating the essence of a research study, usually with different participants in different situations, to see whether the basic finding extends to other participants and circumstances
The Scientific Method • Testing hypothesis and refining theories • Descriptive methods • Correlational methods • Experimental methods
What does a good theory do? Why is replication important?
Case study • Descriptive technique in which one person is studied in depth in the hope of revealing universal principles • Naturalistic observation • Descriptive technique of observing and recording behavior in naturally occurring situations without trying to change or control the situation • Survey • Descriptive technique for obtaining the self- reportedattitudes or behaviors of a group, usually by questioning a representative, random sample of that group
Population • All those in a group being studied, from which samples may be drawn (Note: Except for national studies, this does not refer to a country’s whole population.) • Random sample • Sample that fairly represents a population because each member has an equal chance of inclusion
We cannot assume that case studies always reveal general principles that apply to all of us. Why not? What are the advantages and disadvantages of naturalistic observation, such as the EARs study? What is an unrepresentative sample, and how do researchers avoid it?
Correlation • Positive correlation (between 0 and +1.00) • Indicates a direct relationship, meaning that two things increase together or decrease together • Negative correlation (between 0 and −1.00) • Indicates an inverse relationship: As one thing increases, the other decreases. • Correlation coefficient • Provides a statistical measure of how closely two things vary together and how well one predicts the other
SCATTERPLOT FOR HEIGHT AND WEIGHT This chart displays data from 20 imagined people, each represented by a data point. The scattered points reveal an upward slope, indicating a positive correlation.
