Complete notes: Introduction to Psychology

Lecture 1: Intro



What is psychology?

 Most common definition – scientific study of behaviour
 Psychology is a science in which behavioural and other evidence (including individuals’
reports of their thoughts and feelings) is used to understand the internal processes leading
people (and members of other species) to behave as they do
 Approaches of different psychologists to study human behaviour differ because behaviour is
jointly determined by several factors including
 Specific stimuli presented to us
 Recent experiences
 Genetic endowment
 Our physiological system
 Our cognitive system
 Social environment
 Cultural environment
 Previous life experiences including those of childhood
 Our personal characteristics
 No single ‘correct’ interpretation of behaviour
 Scope of psychology needs to be very broad



Biological psychology

 Darwin’s views had several major implications on psych
1. Psychologists began to realize that it was worth considering human behaviour from
the biological perspective
2. Emphasized the role of heredity and the notion that offsprings resemble their
parents and suggested role of heredity in influencing behaviour should be explored
3. Survival of the fittest – led to an interest in the role of heredity in explaining
individual differences in intelligence and personality.



Cognitive psychology

 Study of human cognition with its focus on thinking and other mental processes originated
with Plato and Aristotle
 Focuses on internal processes and structures involved in cognition, including perception,
attention, learning, memory, language, thinking, and reasoning – opposite to behaviourism
 Importance of cognitive approach to psych
 Has great impact on social, developmental, and abnormal psychology
 Insights obtained by cognitive psychologists have had real-life application in the
design of computer and other systems in order to make them relatively easy to use
 Beneficial effects on treatment of depression and the anxiety disorders

,Is Psychology a Science?

 All of the enormously diverse research in psych cannot be reasonably regarded a science
 Examples of supposedly unscientific approach
 Phenomenon of groupthink where groups often make irrational decisions due to
considerable pressures on the members to reach a unanimous decision – research
based on famous political decisions rather than experiments
 Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis – form of therapy for mental disorders on basis of
individual case studies
 Principles of science and their applicability to psych
1. Controlled experiments
 Involve observing the effects of some specific manipulation
 Based on experimental method in psych
 Even though many such experiments are carried out in psych it works mostly
when effects of immediate situation on behaviour is studied
 Our behaviour is also influenced by numerous factors which can’t be
manipulated example health, childhood events, genetic factors, etc.
 Not fully applicable to psych
2. Objectivity
 Science requires collection of data in an objective way
 But what you observe is in part dependent of what you expect to see
 Is not exactly applicable to psych
3. Replicability
 Important in science to replicate findings of any given experiment
 At one extreme – everyone experiences the phenomenon of apparent
motion – illusion of movement created by the rapid presentation of still
images
 At the other extreme – social behaviour has very low replicability
 What can be done is to combine the findings from numerous similar studies
into one very large analysis – aka meta-analysis
 Potential problems with meta-analysis
 Apple and Oranges problem - Dissimilar studies may be included
together
 File Drawer problem - Often ignores unpublished findings and may
not be representative of all the studies on a given topic
 Garbage in-Garbage out problem - Very poor and inadequate
studies may sometimes be included with good quality ones
 Can be solved by establishing clear criteria needed for a study to be included in the meta-
analysis and by asking researchers in the area of the meta-analysis to supply their
unpublished data
 Psych has made reasonable progress in meeting this criterion
 Meta-analysis facilitates the task of deciding what general trends exist in research in any
given area
4. Testing theoretical predictions
 Most experiments are designed to test one or more of these theories
 But numerous experiments lack any theoretical purpose and are motivated
by curiosity rather than theory
5. Falsifiability

,  Hallmark of science
 Notion that scientific theories can potentially be disproved by negative
evidence
 At one extreme, Freud’s theoretical ideas are unfalsifiable
 At the other extreme, numerous theories have been falsified
 A theory is only abandoned when a better and more comprehensive theory
is put forward
6. Use of a paradigm
 Called the most essential ingredient in science by Kuhn
 Paradigm – general theoretical orientation accepted by the great majority of
researchers in a given field of study
 Three distinct stages in development of science - by Kuhn:
 Pre-science – no paradigm and a wide range of opinion about the
best theoretical approach to adopt
 Normal science – generally accepted paradigm; most scientists very
attached to the paradigm they are using
 Revolutionary science – problems with current paradigm become so
great that it is overthrown eventually and replaced; aka paradigm
shift – example acceptance of sun as the centre of the universe and
not the earth as per previous theories
 Psych has failed to develop a paradigm and so remains at the pre-science
stage
 Difficult to reach a common paradigm or general theoretical orientation –
psych is unusually fragmented a discipline and has connections with biology,
physiology, biochemistry, neurology, and sociology



It is a challenge for psych to study important issues while remaining scientific. Psychologists are
increasingly meeting that challenge through use of sophisticated experimental approaches, new tech
and are more prepared to answer some of the most complex and important issues in psychology.




Reasons for understanding psychology’s past

 Ignorance of the same may leave you unable to evaluate the significance of new
developments and perhaps even mistake old facts and viewpoints as new.
 The vastness of psych is both intimidating and confusing as you try to draw connections
between various concepts and approaches. Seemingly unrelated topics may be intricately
bound together through their historical development, so an appreciation of psychology’s
past can help you to integrate the many different areas and sub-specialities that make up
modern psych.


The bystander effect

 Bystander apathy – when people witness an emergency and take no action.

,  Few potential positive rewards in an emergency
 People’s reactions are untrained and unrehearsed
 Togetherness reduces people’s perception of fear even when actual danger is not reduced
 May alternatively be that people are inhibited from showing fear in a group
 Personal responsibility diffuses across strangers but not across friends
 Even those who don’t act seem visibly distressed


Origins of psych

1. Humans are intrigued by their own behaviour
2. Breakthrough occurred with tools of science (controlled observation and experimentation)
applied to the study of humans, and psych began to emerge as a distinct entity
3. Influences of philosophy
 Descartes’ idea of mechanism – image of the universe as a machine and physical
entities like mechanical devices
 Humans set apart from animals due to possession of a ‘mind’
 Since Plato, mind was believed to influence the body – dualism
 Cartesian dualism (by Descartes) – mutual interaction between the mind and the
body
 Point of interaction supposed to be the pineal gland or conarium at
the top of the brain stem
 Also points to legacy of philosophy believing that some ideas are
innate e.g. God because his existence is proved by the mere idea of
him in our minds
 Positivism (by Auguste Comte) – way of thinking that recognizes only positive facts
and observable phenomena, as practised in physical sciences
 Believed that social life is governed by laws and principles that we can
discover through methods used in physical sciences
 Empiricism – sensory experience is the source of all knowledge and provided
psychology with both method and theory
 Method – observation and a bit of experimentation
 Theory – growth of the mind through accumulation of sensory experience
 Rejects notion of innate ideas
 Tabula rasa – blank slate – mind when a child is born with experience to be
written on it
 Laws of association (of ideas) by David Hume
 Resemblance or similarity
 Contiguity in time or place
 Causality (linking effects to causes)
 Materialism – view that all things, including mental phenomena, can be described in
physical terms and understood in terms of matter and energy
 Pillars of modern psych
 Materialism
 Positivism
 Empericism
4. Influences of physiology
 Imbued early psych with the experimental method

,  Hermann von Helmholtz – investigated speed of neural impulses – suggests that
thought occurs first followed by movement
 Time taken to react to a stimulus aka reaction time or response latency
 Contributions to sensory psych – audition and vision
 Ernst Weber – found smallest difference between two stimuli that could be discriminated
(Just Noticeable Difference – JND)
 Psychophysics (by Gustav Fechner) – systematic attempt to relate changes in the physical
world to differences in our psychological perceptions
 Example – the idea of average error assumes that we can’t obtain a ‘true’ measure
of sensation to match it to a constant, standard stimulus
 Founder of modern psych (birth date 1879) – Wilhelm Wundt – Structuralism – focuses of
structure of the mind
 Wundt put students through introspection – observational method used to describe
the elements of experience (colours, tones, tastes and so on)
 Like chemistry – discovery of basic elements of conscious thought and synthesis –
discovering connections between elements and the laws governing these
connections.
 Elementary sensations have to be combined as we experience conscious thought as
a unity, not as a series of varied sensations
 Process of ‘creative synthesis’ by which elementary experiences are organized as a
whole – psychic compounds have new properties which are not merely a sum of
characteristics of the elements
 Functionalism – addresses the very practical question of what functions the mind, or mental
processes, accomplish
 ‘thinking is doing’ is the hallmark
 Owes much to Charles Darwin
 Theory of evolution gave rise to the idea that behaviour might also reflect
adaptation to the environment
 Also raised possibility of continuity in behaviour and mental functioning between
animals and humans
 William James – coined phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ to emphasize its continual flow
 Feels consciousness guides behaviour that will help the organism adapt to the
environment and thus, has some biological use
 Provided a bridge for the emergence of the polar opposite of structuralism – a
psychology that focused on behaviour and eschewed study of the mind
 Behaviourism – John Watson
 Promotes a totally objective psychology – subject matter is observable behaviour
 Stimulus-response units – basic building blocks of complex behaviour
 Edward Thorndike – Law of Effect – articulates two central experimental findings
 Any act that produces satisfaction is more likely to recur in the same situation
 Any act that produces discomfort is less likely to recur
 Burrhus Fredrick Skinner – radical behaviourism
 ‘radical’ because skinner accepted private life as behaviour
 Mental state affected by both external and internal environment
 Same principles apply equally well to both environments
 Focus only on behaviour and the variables that control it