Marshall High School Psychology Mr. Cline Unit One AA What is Psychology?
We are going to begin this semester with a little experiment You have each been provided with the same simple simple math problem You are going to look at these three lines, and then one by one I am going to ask you which of the three lines; A, B or C, is the longest. I will keep track of how many of you select each available option So, look at your sheets, and answer the following question: Which of the three lines (A, B or C) is the longest?
What at first seems obvious may not be the case. Psychology looks past intuitions and feelings to search for the true roots to our behaviors. You might think that some of things psychologists study are kind of obvious. They're not things that are mind blowingly cool. They study behavior. We all have our own intuitions about behavior. We all have our own ways that we think it works, and this is something that can kind of be a misconception about psychology - that they're confirming things that we already know about ourselves. One kind of funny example is there was a recent study that studied the weekend effect. That's what they called it in the paper, and what researchers at the University of Rochester concluded was that, regardless of whatever job you have, people are happier on the weekend than they are during the week. This is something that your personal experience has probably confirmed over and over again.
You might not think that this is something that scientists need to study. Well in this case, the obvious hypothesis is that the weekend is more fun than the non-weekend. While in this case this was proved to be true, there are a lot of instances in psychology where this hasn't been true. Some of the coolest experiments have been when people have thought things to be obvious but they've turned out not to be. This would be like if your weekend effect experiment actually proved that people were happier during the work week. That would be the magnitude of some of these experiments that disprove the hypothesis. That seems crazy - it isn't true in this case, but in some cases it is. As an example of this, let's say your friend decides to design an experiment where he's going to see if people get an incredibly easy question wrong just because everyone else in the room is answering wrong as well. The experimenter is going to give you two cards.
The first card is going to have a line on it, and the second card is going to have three lines on it of different lengths. Now one of them is the same length as the one on the card. These lines are labeled A,B and C. So the experimenter will ask a bunch of people in the room which line is the same as the line on the first card. This is the most obvious, easy question ever, a 3-year-old can answer this - if he can see, he's going to be able to answer this question. But what the experimenter will do is have everyone else in the room answer wrong. If the answer is B, then he's going to have everyone else say C. So, let s see if our subject said C.
And now, we have a real experiment. The guy who designed it is Solomon Asch, and he thought that people wouldn't do this. Again, people can see that B is clearly the answer, and they're not going to get it wrong even if they're pressured by other people. He thought that he would find this was true, but, no, people got it wrong all the time. 24% didn't say the wrong answer. Everyone else gave the wrong answer at least once because the effect of having all these people in a row saying the wrong answer over and over again was so powerful that they said the wrong answer. This is something that if Solomon Asch just said 'Oh yeah this is something obvious that people can see, and they're not going to get this wrong,' we would never know this. We would never know how powerful people's peers are and how powerful peer pressure is.
And that was an experiment where it was good that it got done, and it turned out not be so obvious. That's a way in which psychology can be useful. It's true of psychology, what you see over and over again, because it's true that we have ideas of how things work and our brains work. We don't actually have any idea a lot of the time. And there's another study that shows this perfectly. It's about how people misattribute why they're feeling the way they're feeling. In this particular study, the researchers decided to have men go out on a bridge. They had two bridges, one of which was kind of shaky like one of those wood, Indiana Jones bridges where you figure a plank may fall out in the middle.
And one of them is really sturdy - it's not going anywhere; you're going to be fine if you're on this bridge. The men would cross this bridge, and afterward, they would talk to this lovely lady, who was posing as the researcher. And she would ask them a bunch of questions. She would ask them to design scenarios based around certain questions, and she would also give them her phone number to see if they had any questions about the experiment. And you know they'd actually call her because she was a beautiful woman. What they found is the ones who went over this shaky bridge in asking their questions and designing the stories that the questions were supposed to elicit, they were actually way more sexual than the ones who went over the not so shaky bridge. And they were way more likely to call the researcher if they went across the shaky bridge.
So, shaky bridge equals more sexual content in their answers, and it also equals calling the researcher. Not shaky bridge equals none of that. And what the guys designing this experiment basically concluded was that if you get scared - you're walking across a shaky bridge, and you get scared, and your heart's racing, and you're feeling kind of physiologically aroused in a nondescript way - they attributed this to the beautiful woman. And so they wanted to call because they thought they were feeling all sort of out of whack and heart racing because of her and not necessarily because of the shaky bridge. So we really have no idea why we do what we do. And so what psychology can do in the Asch experiment and this experiment is it can help us tease apart all of the reasons why we might do things and figure out what actually causes behavior and why we actually think certain things and what influences what. It really allows you to tease apart all these factors without our own intuition getting in the way.
And that's the value of psychology you'll see throughout most of the cool experiments. This is what they're doing. They're figuring out why we do what we do and not letting our own feelings and intuitions about that get in the way. Psychology is the scientific study of how we think, feel and behave. Why do you act the way you do? Have you ever wondered why some people are the life of the party and others prefer to curl up with a good book? Or why you remember certain events but not others? People have studied the mind and how it works since the time of the ancient Greeks, but the scientific study of psychology only dates back to a little over a hundred years ago. Since Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology lab in 1879, psychologists have studied various aspects of human behavior, such as personality, brain functions and socio-cultural influences. As psychology progressed, it began to tackle the question of why we do what we do from different angles, including: biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive and humanistic perspectives
Let's look at each of these five main approaches that guide modern psychological research. Biological Approach Biopsychologists look at how your nervous system, hormones and genetic makeup affect your behavior. Biological psychologists explore the connection between your mental states and your brain, nerves and hormones to explore how your thoughts, moods and actions are shaped. So what does that mean? It means that for the biological approach, you are the sum of your parts. You think the way you do because of the way your brain is built and because of your body's needs. All of your choices are based on your physical body.
Psychodynamic Approach The biological approach attempts to understand the healthy brain, but it also examines the mind and body to figure out how disorders like schizophrenia develop from genetic roots. The psychodynamic approach was promoted by Sigmund Freud, who believed that many of our impulses are driven by sex. Psychologists in this school of thought believe that unconscious drives and experiences from early childhood are at the root of your behaviors and that conflict arises when societal restrictions are placed on these urges. Now, there are a lot of jokes about Freud and his now mostly outdated theories. But have you ever thought that something about who you are today comes from your experiences as a child? Say, you blame your smoking habit on an oral fixation that stems from being weaned from breastfeeding too early as a baby. Well, that also comes from Freud's theories, and it was an idea that revolutionized how we see ourselves.
Behavioral Approach Behavioral psychologists believe that external environmental stimuli influence your behavior and that you can be trained to act a certain way. Behaviorists like B.F. Skinner don't believe in free will. They believe that you learn through a system of reinforcement and punishment. The behavioral approach is really effective when you don't care what someone thinks, as long as you get the desired behavior. The influence of these theories affects us every day and throughout our lives, impacting everything from why we follow the rules of the road when driving to how advertising companies build campaigns to get us to buy their products. Cognitive Approach In contrast to behaviorists, cognitive psychologists believe that your behavior is determined by your expectations and emotions.
Cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget would argue that you remember things based on what you already know. You also solve problems based on your memory of past experiences. So, with this approach, we turn away from people as machines without free will and delve back into thoughts and feelings. How you act is based upon internal processes, and there is much more stress upon individuals. From a cognitive perspective, your expectations of an upcoming party will affect how you feel and act while you're there and will color your memory of the night after you return home. Humanistic Approach Humanistic psychologists believe that you're essentially good and that you're motivated to realize your full potential. Psychologists from this camp focus on how you can feel good about yourself by fulfilling your needs and goals.
Humanistic Approach The prominent humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers called his patients 'clients' and offered a supportive environment in which clients could gain insight into their own feelings. In contrast to the behavioral approach, the humanistic approach works on individual empowerment. Whether you are right or not, in a larger sense, you are motivated to be the best person you can be. All your choices come from trying to improve your life. So, if you're trying to cut back on your nightly wine consumption, a humanistic therapist would be encouraging and supportive but won't directly advise you to quit or try to analyze why you drink in the first place.