What is Psychology?. Kennedy Kennedy assassination, 1963.
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Transcript of What is Psychology?. Kennedy Kennedy assassination, 1963.
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