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LESSON 1

THE NATURE OF PSYCHOLOGY

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

At the end of this lesson the student will be able to:

  1. Define psychology and the scope of its activities.
  2. Describe the history of psychology as a formal discipline, including the five early schools of psychological research and identify their founders.
  3. Describe the five main perspectives in contemporary psychology.
  4. Identify the main subfields of contemporary psychology.
  5. Demonstrate an understanding of the research methods used by psychologists.
  6. Discuss the ethical issues involved in conducting psychological research.

FOCUS QUESTIONS

  1. How is psychology defined? What kinds of things do psychologists do?
  2. Where and by whom did psychology start as a formal discipline? What were the five schools of psychology and who were their founders?
  3. What are five main approaches to psychology taken by psychologists today?
  4. What is the experimental method? What other methods do psychologists use to study human behavior?
  5. What special ethical issues are involved in the study of animals and humans?

KEY POINTS AND COMMENTARY

Definition:Psychology can be defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

Beginning with the earliest Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and continuing up through modern times, certain questions have been asked about our nature as human beings. How do we acquire knowledge? Are humans rational or irrational? What is the relation between the mind and the body? What makes humans different from other animals? Is our behavior caused by our biological nature or is it due to experience? Do humans have “free will” or is our behavior “determined?”

These questions are still being debated by modern psychologists.

Back in the 1800’s, when science was making progress in areas such as chemistry and physics, some people thought that these ancient philosophical questions might finally be answered if we were to apply the scientific method to the study of human beings. Thus psychology was born as a formal discipline by combining philosophical concerns with the study of physiology. What better way to answer the question “How do we know?” than to study how the eyes and ears actually work?

Psychology’s First Laboratory

The first laboratory dedicated to psychology was founded by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. Researchers in his laboratory studied the senses, especially vision, but also studied what were considered to be “basic” psychological processes such as attention, emotion and memory. Wundt conceived of psychology as “mental chemistry.” His idea was to study the “elements” or basic sensations, and then someday explain how we put these elements together into complex perceptions, or “compounds.” The method he used was called introspection, which refers to observing and recording the nature of one’s own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. Examples of introspections include people’s reports of how heavy they perceive an object to be and how bright a flash of light seems to be.

Wundt’s laboratory trained a lot of people who then went on to other places to start psychology departments. However, the early psychologists couldn’t quite agree on a major issue - what is the best way to go about studying human behavior? What methods should we use? The differences of opinion gave rise to what are known as the early five schools of psychology.

The Five Schools of Psychology

Structuralism: The major proponent of this school was the American psychologist E.B. Titchener, who had studied under Wundt in Germany. Like Wundt, he conceived psychology as the analysis of mental structures, and used introspection as his primary methodology.

Functionalism: There were other psychologists who disagreed that the mind could be broken down into elements. William James, often considered to be the father of American psychology, felt that conscious experience was fluid and constantly adapting to changes in our surroundings. The “stream of consciousness,” as he called it, served to guide our activities. These psychologists felt that actual behavior, viewed as a continual adaptive response to the environment, was to be the focus of study.

Behaviorism: A bit later, in the 1920’s, J.B. Watson declared that if psychology wanted to be a science it had to be more “objective.” Watson said that the idea of “consciousness” was not scientific because it could not be seen. Psychology had to be based on actual behavior, not on something hidden like mental processes. Introspection as a method was not scientific, because no one could verify another’s private experiences. Based on the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, Watson viewed all behavior as habits that had been learned. As will be seen later, this is often called Stimulus–Response (S-R) psychology.

Gestalt Psychology: At about the same time that Behaviorism was developing in the United States, Gestalt psychology was being developed in Germany. The word gestalt means “form” or “configuration,” and this approach was mostly concerned with perception. These psychologists, most notably Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kóhler, claimed that we directly perceive things as wholes in relation to a context. When you see a person you know, you don’t have to put their face together from bits and pieces, like the structuralists would hold - you directly percieve the whole “gestalt” of the face.

Psychoanalysis: While the four previous schools of psychology were founded in academic settings, Psychoanalysis came out of the field of medicine. Sigmund Freud, its founder, was a doctor concerned with explaining certain psychological disorders. He concluded that the major portion of our behavior is caused by unconscious motivations, which, because of their anxiety-provoking character, we cannot admit to ourselves

Later Influences on 20th Century Psychology

These five schools had different degrees of influence on subsequent developments in psychology. Some ideas from the Structuralist, Functionalist and Gestalt schools have been incorporated in different ways into various areas of contemporary psychology. The Behaviorist approach was dominant in American and Russian psychology during at least half of the 20th century. Psychoanalysis thrived primarily outside of academic psychology in the context of mental hospitals and in the clinical (therapeutic) professions.

Other influences on modern psychology are the following:

  • The metaphor of the computer for explaining human mental processes as information processing.
  • The development of modern linguistics, which provided us with a model of mental structures.
  • Advances in neuropsychology, revealing relationships between mental experiences and activity in the nervous system.

These three developments have led psychology in a full circle, back to the study of mental processes. We could probably say that the dominant trend in modern psychology is the study of cognitive, or mental, processes.

Contemporary Perspectives in Psychology

The following perspectives characterize the different approaches in psychology today:

  • The Biological Perspective: Research in this area seeks to specify the neurobiological processes that underlie behavior and mental processes.
  • The Behavioral Perspective: This perspective focuses on observable stimuli and responses and regards nearly all behavior as a result of conditioning (learning) and reinforcement (reward).
  • The Cognitive Perspective: This approach is concerned with mental processes such as perceiving remembering, reasoning, deciding, and problem solving.
  • The Psychoanalytic Perspective: From this point of view, behavior comes from unconscious processes – beliefs, fears, and desires that a person is unaware of but that nonetheless influence behavior.
  • The Subjectivist Perspective: This perspective contends that human behavior is a function of the perceived world, not the objective world. In other words, if you define something as real, it is real in its consequences.

What do Psychologists Do? The Major Subfields of Psychology

When you think of a psychologist, what do you think they do? Therapy? Well, a good number of psychologists in the United States do practice therapy, but there are many other activities. About 50% work in universities teaching, training, and conducting research. The following are some of the main areas in which psychologists work:

  • Biological psychology: Physiological psychologists look for the relationship between biological processes and behavior.
  • Experimental psychology: Psychologists who use experimental methods to study how people react to sensory stimuli, perceive the world, learn and remember, reason, and respond emotionally.
  • Developmental psychology: Psychologists who are concerned with human development and the factors that shape behavior from birth to old age.
  • Social and Personality psychology: Social psychologists are interested in how people perceive and interpret their social world and how their beliefs, emotions, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of others. Personality psychologists study the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that define an individual’s personal style of interacting with the world.
  • Clinical, Counseling and Health psychology: Clinical psychologists apply psychological principles to the diagnosis and treatment of emotional and behavioral problems. Counseling psychologists do many of the same things, although they often deal with less serious problems. Health psychologists will often be found in health settings doing research on lifestyle factors, such as stress, and its effect on health.
  • School and Educational psychology: School psychologists work with children to evaluate learning and emotions problems. Educational psychologists are specialists in learning and teaching.
  • Organizational and Engineering psychology: Organizational or industrial psychologists usually work for companies and consulting firms, and are concerned with selecting people who are most suitable for particular jobs or designing structures that facilitate collaboration and teamwork. Engineering psychologists try to improve the relationship between people and machines.

Doing Research in Psychology

Psychologists try to understand why we behave the way we do by using the scientific method. Science is an activity of inquiry that 1) systematically introduces changes in ongoing events under conditions that we control, 2) makes our procedures public and therefore available to others to repeat. To say that we “control” a situation is to say that we compare one situation with another. Making comparisons is basic to any form of inquiry. If you want to study artistic painting, you have to look at paintings, comparing one with another. If you want to study poetry, you have to read different styles of poetry. So too in science.

Psychologists use a variety of methods to study human behavior and mental processes. We do experiments, we use direct observation, questionnaires or surveys, and written studies of individuals that we call case histories. We will go into the general characteristics about experiments below, but your text will give you more details and examples.

THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD

Conducting a formal, controlled experiment is the best way to determine cause and effect relationships between variables. A variable is anything that can occur with different values.

An example will help us understand how we design experiments. A number of years ago a psychologist by the name of Albert Bandura wanted to find out if watching violent T.V. programs caused children to be more aggressive. He suspected that it does, so he set up an experiment to test his hypothesis: “Children will show more aggressive behavior after having seen a violent T.V. program.” A hypothesis is a statement of a proposed relationship between two variables. The variables in this case are 1) the degree of violence on T.V. and 2) the amount of aggression shown by children.

Bandura set up an experimental situation in which children were taken by a teacher, one-by-one, into a room where they watched a video. Half of the children watched a travel video. The other group saw a video in which there was a playroom with toys and a large “Bobo Doll” in the center. A Bobo Doll is one of those plastic inflatable dolls with a clown face that has sand in the bottom, so that when someone hits the doll it will fall over and then bounce back up. In the video, an adult walked into the room, looked around at the toys, and then went over to the Bobo Doll and started attacking it while making all kinds of noises – “pow!” “bang!”, “take that!”, etc. After hitting the doll for a while the adult went over to a table, found a toy wooden hammer, and came back to the doll, knocked it over and sat on it, all the while hitting it with the hammer!

After the children saw one of the two movies, they were taken down the hall to a playroom and found themselves in the same room that was in the video. They were left alone, and the investigators watched the children through a one-way mirror and observed what they did. The prediction was that the children who saw the violent video would be more aggressive with the Bobo doll. Aggression was measured by the number of times the child hit the doll.

What do you think happened? The children who watched the violent video were, on average, much more aggressive towards the Bobo doll than those children who saw the non-violent film.

We can draw the experiment in this way:

Independent Dependent

variable variable

Experimental Violent # of attacks

Group Film on doll

Hypothesis Compare

Control Non-violent # of attacks

Group Film on doll

The selection of subjects for our experiment is important. Bandura was assuming that the results of his study would apply to all children. Therefore his subjects must be “typical” children. The best way to assure this is to select subjects at random from the population of interest. In addition, we want to be sure the two groups of children are equivalent in terms of their characteristics. Otherwise we couldn’t be sure that the amount of aggression at the end was due to watching the violent film. It wouldn’t do to have all girls in one group and all boys in another, or one group consisting of more children with aggressive personalities. In order to avoid this, we randomly assign the children we will use for our study to the experimental and control groups.

Definitions of key terms:

Subjects are randomly selected from the population of interest, so that our sample is representative of the population.

Subjects are randomly assigned to treatment groups, so that both groups will contain equal characteristics.

hypothesis - a statement of relationship between two variables.

experimental group - the group receiving the special treatment.

control group - the group that does not receive the special treatment.

independent variable - the factor which can be varied independently of other factors.

dependent variable - the behavior that we measure. The value of this variable should change depending on the value of the independent variable.

operational definition – a definition of our variables in such a way that they can be measured. In the above example, the operational definition of aggression was “number of times the child hit the Bobo doll.”

Conducting a controlled experiment is the only way we can make inferences about possible causal relationships between variables. This may be contrasted with studies that discover correlations between variables. A correlation is a statement of relationship between two variables. For example, “Children who are obese watch more television.” In this case we cannot say which variable causes which, or if there is a third factor that causes both. Do obese children like sedentary activities and therefore watch more T.V.? Or does watching a lot of T.V. mean that children do not get enough exercise and become obese? Correlational studies are often done when we use a test, for example a personality or aptitude test, and correlate scores on the test with some behavior.

The Ethics of Psychological Research

In conducting psychological research we must be concerned that the risks anticipated in the research are not greater than those ordinarily encountered in daily life. Therefore we have established some ethical guidelines for conducting research, which may be summarized as the following:

  • Informed consent – subjects (people participating in the research) must be told ahead of time about any aspects of the research that might influence their willingness to participate. They must participate in the research voluntarily and be given the choice of stopping their participation at any time.
  • Debriefing – if for any reason it was necessary to withhold information about the real purpose of the research (deception) so as not to influence their behavior while participating, the subjects must be debriefed after their participation. They must be told about the real purpose of the research so that their dignity is maintained and their appreciation for the research enhanced.
  • Confidentiality – any information collected from or about the person during the research process must be kept confidential.