What is Psychology?

KennedyKennedy assassination, 1963

911 The Second Crash

"The new world order is about order and control... This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy. All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood., and seemed frightening, like madmen. " - Oliver Stone

Oct 6th, 2001

Authority is bad. Order is bad. Simplicity is bad. Change is good. Ambiguity is good. Complexity is good.

“[The] pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists... who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, and the gays and the lesbians, and the ACLU… all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.’

Reverend Jerry Falwell

Change is bad. Ambiguity is bad. Complexity is bad. Authority is good. Order is good. Simplicity is good

What is Psychology?

Why was Princess Diana's death so upsetting to so many women?

Why did Oliver Stone say something admiring about the 9-11 attack?

Why did Jerry Falwell blame 9-11 on America’s individual rights and freedoms (“secularism”)?

©2001 Prentice Hall

Historical Roots of Psychology

Ancient Greece: Physiology Hippocrates

• The founder of modern medicine

• Brain --> behavior

• Earliest biological psychology

Ancient Greece: Philosophy

Plato

Idealism (can deduce all knowledge merely by pondering)

Aristotle

Empiricism (show me)

Long pause…

• Fall of Rome…

• Bubonic plague, leprosy… nasty time

• Inquisitions (1100-1800)• Malleus Maleficarum (1487)• Galileo’s trial (1633)

Renaissance 1450-1650

Francis Baconapproach to truth: radical empiricism promotes “method of experiment”

Francis Bacon

by slow and faithful toil gathers information from things and brings it into understanding

To move from the sensible to the real requires the correction of the senses, the tables of natural history, the abstraction of propositions and the induction of notions. In other words, the full carrying out of the inductive method is needed.

Renaissance 1450-1650

Francis Baconapproach to truth: radical empiricism promotes “method of experiment”

Rene Descartes mind & body dualism (separate) promotes idea of physical causes of

behavior

Enlightenment 1650 -- 1800 John Locke

Political philosopherFather of liberalism

Philosophy of mind, and “self” Mind is a blank slate

• no ideas are innate (inborn)Associationism

• Ideas= Sensations + Associations + Deductions

Spiral (“hypothetico-deductive”)

data->theory->test, datatheorytest

Enlightenment 1650-1800

La Mettrie

Mind is “just a machine” Mind and brain = same thing

Hobbes

Non-supernatural view of religionMechanistic view of human nature

Decline of dualism rise of “monism”

19th Century: 3 roads to psychology

1. Experimental road

Helmholtz theories of vision

Fechner qualitifying sensation

Wertheimer theories of perception

Wundt investig consciousness first psychology laboratory:

1879

19th Century: 3 roads to modern psyc

2. Correlational road

Francis Galton statistics, indiv differences

Alfred Binet intelligence test

JM Cattell “mental test”, journals

19th Century: 3 roads to modern psyc

3. Clinical road

Sigmund Freud

Psychodynamic theoryPsychoanalysis

©2001 Prentice Hall

Early Schools of Thinking in Psychology

Four Early Schools of Thought

Structuralism Functionalism Psychodynamic (e.g., Freud) Gestalt

Perception

Structuralism

Titchener (1880s-1920s)

•Analyze consciousnessinto elements, parts

•Method?

• Introspection • Train people to do systematic “inward” observation

•Historical context?• Late 19th century advances in physics, chemistry • copy that model : search for basic elements, parts

Functionalism: William James

Ask: “What is it for?” Focus upon adaptation

What is emotion for?

What is consciousness for?

Darwinian influences Led to investigation of mental

testing, developmental patterns, and sex differences

Who Won the Battle?

Functionalism (Introspection not a useful technique).

But: all psychologists today are functionalists

all psychologist today are structuralists

However, Behaviorism--the next really influential school of thought in psychology--was a direct descendants of functionalism

6 Current Major Theoretical Perspectives

in Psychology

6 Major theoretical perspectives

“Theoretical Perspective” General orienting assumptions about psychology

Can be grouped into 6 very general ones

They differ in terms ofGeneral value commitments of researchers

Level of analysis (micro / macro)

Types of research data

Types of procedures / methods

What is your general theoretical perspective?

Rate how much you agree/disagree with the following 12 statements, using a 1-5 scale:

(When everyone is finished, we will score it.)

Theoretical Perspectives Survey

1. People are free spirits, and science will never be able to really understand what causes their behavior.

2. Our personalities are shaped and determined by the things that happen to us during our lives.

3. Most of the time, we do what we do in order to defend ourselves from threats that come from within.

4. Most people’s personalities are set by the time they are 5 or 6 years old.

Theoretical Perspectives Survey 5. That stuff about unconscious forces in the mind sounds like

bunk to me. We should just worry about what people actually do.

6. Science makes a mistake when it tries to take everything apart. If you want to understand a person, you have to look at him or her as a whole.

7. The best thing about people is that we are free to make choices and direct our own lives.

8. Strong drives such as sex cause people to behave in certain ways that are difficult to suppress.

Theoretical Perspectives Survey

9. I think that anyone could grow up to be a criminal if he or she was raised in the wrong environment.

10. I think that people are not really fully conscious of the kind of forces that direct their behavior.

11. Someday, we will be able to explain behavior in the same way that we can explain events in biology and chemistry.

12. Thinking and feeling are the most important causes of behavior.

Psychoanalytic (3,4,8,10)

Behavioral (2,5,9,11)

Humanistic (1,6,7,12)

Compare your 3 scores. Similar, or different?

6 Broad Theoretical Perspectives

Psychodynamic Perspective

Sigmund Freud:

“Parapraxes”

Free association

Talking cure

Famous case studies: Anna O