Psych 100 notes! - Psych 100 Remember to do research, SONA,...

Psych 100
 Remember to do research, SONA, section 3
Chapter 1 Psychology and Scientific Thinking
 What is Psychology?
o Study the mind and behavior
o Spans many levels of explanation, from biological to social influences
 Gain knowledge from each vantage point
o Attempts to answer many difficult questions (eg. Consciousness)
 “Mysterians”- believe that certain questions regarding human
nature are unanswerable
 10 things that make psychology difficult
o behavior is difficult to predict
 Meehl’s maxim
 Past/future behavior connection
o Behavior is multiply determined
 Question all single-variable explanations
o Psychological influences are rarely independent of one another
 “Multicollinearity”- overlap among different causes of behavior
o Psychological influences are often unknown
o People affect each other
 “reciprocal determinism”
o Many psychological concepts are difficult to define (e.g., intelligence)
o The brain didn’t evolve to understand itself
 “paradox of reflexivity”
o People in psychological experiments usually know they’re being study
 Problem of reactivity
o People differ from each other – individual differences in thinking, emotion,
and behavior
o Culture influences people’s behavior
 Emic (insider) vs. etic (outsider) approaches to studying a culture’s
behavior
 Great Theoretical Frameworks of Psychology
o Structuralism
 Wundt, Titchener, and others aimed to identify the basic elements
of psychological experience
 Wundt developed first “psychology” lab
 ‘Map’ the elements of consciousness (sensations, images,
feeling) using i ntrospection
o Introspection = self-reported, subjective mental
experiences. This lacked reliability
 Underscored importance of systematic observations
 Systematic observations

o Being able to get results that are standardized, not based on casual or
informal observations,
o Need to be repeatable under the same or similar conditions
o Functionalism
 Aimed to understand the adaptive purposes (instead of elements)
of psychological characteristics (behavior, emotions, thoughts) and
consciousness
 William James
o Said mental events could be quantified via description
of conscious experience
o Individual differences in purpose/ adaptation to
environment
o Psychoanalysm
 Focuses on internal psychological processes (impulses, thoughts,
memories) of which we’re away
 Shit you’re unaware of, subconscious
 Maintains our everyday lives are filled with symbols, which
psychoanalysts must decode
 Emphasized the role of early experiences
 Unconscious processes
 Very subjective
o Behaviorism
 focuses on uncovering the general laws of learning by looking
OUTSIDE the organism to rewards and punishments delivered by
the environment
 psychological science must be objective, not relying on
subjective reports
 founded by Watson, followed by Skinner
 Black box – their view of the mind: an unknown entity which
we need not understand in order to explain behavior
o Cognitivism
 Purposes that our thinking (cognition) affects our behavior in
powerful ways
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