112 history of psychology notes PDF

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PS112 history week 1Roots in Philosophy1: the origins of western psychologyWhat is Psychology?The word psychology is Greek: - “psyche” = mind - “logia” = to study Ancient Greek thought: - Before science, world was viewed in terms of souls, spirits and magic - Greek science waws the first step toward...

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PS112 history week 1 Roots in Philosophy 1.1: the origins of western psychology What is Psychology? The word psychology is Greek: - “psyche” = mind - “logia” = to study Ancient Greek thought: - Before science, world was viewed in terms of souls, spirits and magic - Greek science waws the first step towards naturalistic view of the world o E.g. astronomy - Began to question what we really knew about reality Presocratics: - Mark a transition in western culture - Rational thought began to replace belief in myths - Aim was to understand the “logos”  the underlying order of the cosmos o This aim continues today  expressed in science, philosophy and religion - Both Presocratics and Ancient Greeks were interested in appearance and reality: o E.g. the stick appears bent when submersed in water  appearance is bent, reality is straight  which is to be trusted? o What does it say about our senses? o What does it say about the conclusions we draw?

Philosophers and early roots Intro: • To understand anything you have to know about its history and its roots, where it comes from • H. Ebbinghaus (psychologist of memory) (1850-1909): “the history of psychology is short, but its past is long” • Psychology as a real science is really only 100-200 years old compared to physics. • History is a science that hasn’t been studied for not very long, In terms of applying a scientific method to the questions about the mind and behaviour and personality. But the ideas that are central to psychology, the questions we ask ourselves about human nature has brought us here today studying psychology • History of psychology is short, but its past is very long- that’s why its important to study the history of psychology. • Psychology is relatively young but the questions that we have been asking about human nature and behaviour are much older Origins of Psychology

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psychology is a relatively ‘young’ science Less than 200 years old… However, study of human nature is much older Can be traces back to the 5th century B.C. (Ancient Greeks)

Why study the history of psychology? • humans have wondered about psychology since before recorded time. • What makes people good or bad? (Morality) • Why are people so different? (Personality) • How do we predict behaviour? • How does the mind work? Fundamental questions History of psychology is the study of the study of the mind… reveals how concepts and approaches to the mind have changed Also a history of wrong ideas- Pseudoscience Psychology: Also improving and correcting itself When and where we go down those oaths that aren’t that scientific or not so valid and how this leads us to pseudoscience HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY: • Learn about key advances in study of mind • Evolving schools of thought and zeitgeists (the school of thought in a particular time and era- in this time/ particular time in history this is how we think and how it changes) • Place contemporary psychology in context Thought human history we have changed quite a bit, ideas of what’s both inside the brain and outside the brain. Science has changed out ideas about what’s outside the brain Picture in a book by Rene Decart • trying to illustrate in a mechanistic way how our interactions and perceptions of the outside world are perceived and interact within the mind so that we can understand and perceive them

1.2: appearance vs reality Appearance and Reality: State of being : -

Parmenides (fl. 475 BC): Stated “it is” Reality of the universe is unchanging  BEING There are eternal truths that are unchanging However, experience changes continually  therefore observation cannot be trusted (Precursors to Socrates and Plato)

Appearance and Reality: BECOMING

- Heraclitus (fl. 500BC): The only constant in the universe is CHANGE -

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o Things are always becoming something else There is less permanence in the world than there seems to be o E.g. a stone is a condensed ball of ever-changing fire (modern day knowledge of atoms) o “No one ever steps in the same river twice” Change is the only constant, yet it is lawful

Rationalism (Nativist view) - Senses can be deceiving  cannot be trusted  people should rely on logic instead

Empiricism - Contrasts with rationalism - Emphasises the role of experience - Gains information through sensory perception and observation

1.3: ancient philosophers Socrates (269-399): - By systematic questioning, we can refine our ideas - More concern with ethics and politics than with the nature of the world (than natural scientists)

- Major psychological idea: the only true knowledge is knowing you know

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nothing o Relates to ideas about cognitive biases  all biased in our cognition that leads us astray in one way or another Purpose of philosophy is to increase happiness through understanding oneself

Plato (428-348) - Rationalism: -

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Studied geometry and mathematical proofs Used maths as a general standard for knowledge If things are true, they are ALWAYS TRUE  rationalism Knowledge has to be rationally justifiable Knowledge cannot be derived from the senses (senses are error prone)  but that truth was derived from logic Observation can be tainted by individual differences Tripartite mind: o Logistikon:  The intellect  Seat of reasoning and logic o Thumos:  Spiritual centre of mind  Dictated emotions o Epithumetikon:  Governed desires and appetite Allegory of the cave:

o Prisoners in a cave can only see shadows on a wall  shadows become their reality  only once they are allowed to leave the cave can they see real objects o “Cave” = parable of the human condition o Soul is imprisoned in the body and forced to look at imperfect copies of objects o “Forms” are the only true/perfect example  There is a form for everything (goodness, dogs, tables, etc)  the perfect example  Everyday instances are imperfect copies filtered through untrustworthy senses  Perfect example is never experienced

Aristotle (384-322) - Empiricism: - Was an empiricist  gained knowledge from observation  believed that -

observation and analysis was reliable However he did no experimentation  studied living things and analysed the nature of causes Agency arises from the soul  defined the “soul” as that which animates and gives form to matter Was interested in virtues  saw them as a perfect medium between two vices (wit is between boorishness and buffoonery) Was interested in virtue ethics  the idea that moral goodness takes habit (would see people who lack virtue as unfortunate, not wicked (nurture over nature))

Galen - Humourism: - Believed that four fluids in the body had power over your personality and

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health o Sanguine: blood  Dictated courage, hope and love o Choleric: yellow bile  Dictated bad temper and anger o Melancholic: black bile:  Dictated sleeplessness and irritation o Phlegmatic: phlegm  Dictated rationality An example of pseudoscience

1.4: modern worldview Overview of Modern Worldview’s Transition: - Change between 16th and 19th century  industrial revolution - Transition changed the balance between faith and reason  observation and empiricism favoured

- Epistemology = what knowledge is and how we get it - Ontology = what exists

- Foundation of modern worldview laid by philosophers Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard  they all were interested in epistemology and ontology

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) - Mind-Body Dualism: - Rationalist - “I think therefore I am”  came from his quest to question ev4rything  skeptic

- Interested in systematic doubt questioning of epistemology - Found reason to doubt everything EXCEPT for that he was doubting - Mind-body dualism: Ontological distinction between mind and matter Mind and matter are fundamentally different things Matter occupies space, but doesn’t think Mind thinks, but doesn’t think Human mind is uniquely reflexive, linguistic and rational  yet it interacts with the body  mind-body dualism Wrote “Treatise on Man” which dealt with the nature of mind and body Argued that the Pineal gland was the seat of the soul, and the place where the body and the mind interact  because it is in the centre of the brain Immense influence  significance in psychology lies in his theory of how the mind, body and senses interact o o o o o

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John Locke (1632-1704) Nativism: - Was politically active  advocated the separation of the church and state  had influential views in the American and French revolutions - What is the world? Was one of his questions: o Claimed that the world consists solely of matter in motion o Matter has primary qualities such as mass, motion and size  exist independently of the mind o Impact of primary qualities on the senses leads to the exp4rience of secondary qualities  colour, weight, smell o Secondary qualities:  Exist in the mind but not in the world  E.g. intentions, ideas, feelings o Primary qualities:  Exist in the objective physical world Nature vs Nurture: - Tabula rasa  born as a blank slate - Argued that we do not have innate ideas - Not born knowing the difference between a cube and a sphere - We become who we are by association learnt by experience

David Hume (1711-1776) - Skepticism: - Lived in the age of reason -

o One of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment Reason is the slave of passions:

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o We argue from our convictions, not to them o People have a feeling about something, then use rational and logical reasons to support them Developed the role of association o Interested in systematic doubt One of his aims was to answer the question: “what do we really know from experience?” o Cannot make conclusions based on our experience  E.g. If you only see white swans, you cannot assume that all swans are white  Repeated instances do not justify ontological induction  Falsifiability vs verifying Influence: o Moral psychology  Morality is felt, then reasoned o Psychology of religion  We cannot have rational argument over religion, so leave others religious beliefs alone o Free will  We cannot perceive causality  The causality of free will is an illusion o Core self  There is no core self  Cannot perceive self without some relation to senses

Rene Kant (1724-1804) - Nature: - Proposed that some fundamental perceptual experiences were not merely

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habitual beliefs, but they exist in the mind  supports nature  must be a priori categories in the mind if we are to experience anything at all o Babies must be born with some reference in order to form associations Categorical imperative: o Moral concept  what would it be like if everyone behaved in that way? o If everyone did not wear face coverings on the bus, it would be a bad thing  categorical imperative is that you should wear a mask on the bus

Rene Kierkegaard (1811-1855) - Existentialism: - Problem of despair  alienation from the self - Be the self that one truly is - Idea that either way you’ll end up miserable

PS112 history week 2 Early Experimentalists in Psychology 1.1: intro The brain: 18th/19th century - Doctors began to see a relation between head injury and certain functions

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o E.g. strokes causing a loss of speech o Injury on one side of the brain causes problems for other side of the body Empirical science began investigating the senses experimentally Move to a combination of physiology and psychology Is the mind of man no more than a mechanism? o Modern psychology emergence o Principles of materialism and mechanism Emerging zeitgeist: o Scientific method o Modernism – objectivity o Materialism  Psychology is born!

1.2: psychometrics: intelligence testing

Psychometrics: This is the science of measuring mental faculties, and measures: - Intelligence - Personality - Aptitudes for specific skills/occupations - Natural/degree of mental illness - Educational problems

Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) - Born in Birmingham - Made first weather maps - Classified fingerprints Cousin of Darwin - Influenced by his principle of natural selection - Natural variation within a species is essential to natural selection - Humans, like animals, are the product of natural selection o Came up with the idea of how individual difference in intelligence is innate, runs in families o Inheritance of eminence  looked at families of eminent people  for the most eminent family member:  31% of fathers were eminent  27% of brothers were eminent  48% of sons were eminent  5-8% of grandfathers/grandsons/uncles/nephews eminent  less eminence in more distant relationship  Therefore, the closer the kinship, the greater likelihood of eminence  First attempt to prove heritability of psychological characteristics  BUT the closer the relative, the more likely to share the environment He was a statistician - Suggested that intelligence could form a normal distribution o Categorised people in terms of their mental ability and stated they could only do certain jobs - Developed standard deviation - Plotted scores from 100 candidates at Cambridge  they also had a similar pattern - Regression to the mean: o After producing an outlier, the next score will go back to being average - Developed the correlation co-efficient Eugenics: - Believed that we can improve the human race by selective breeding - Applied ideas of genetic variability to humans - Needed intelligence tests to identify “eugenic” parents - Set up anthropometric lab

Science vs pseudoscience:

Alfred Binet (1857-1911) - French doctor - Influences by Galton and Darwin - Aimed to encapsulate individual personality in tests of under 2 hours  concluded that it was impossible - Develop many tests in memory imagination, comprehension, attention, etc - Joined a government commission to identify school children with mental handicaps Binet’s intelligence scales: - Wanted to create a fair system of testing intelligence - Used large banks of tests: word associations, drawing, digit span - Realised that age needed to be considered - Children from both groups could answer questions, but children without a handicap could answer them at an earlier age First intelligence test: - Constructed in 1905 - Comprised of 30 separate items with increasing difficulty

Intelligence quotient (IQ) -

German psychologist William Stern introduced IQ in 1912 IQ = (mental age/chronological age) x 100 E.g. child of 10 with mental age of 12 has IQ of 120 Higher IQ = superior intellectual level Intelligence today: - Much more developed than when it was first created - Use of Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

1.3: psychophysics: perception and sensation How do we measure the mind? - Problem of subjectivity  so they studied things that are objective  perception, sensation Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828): - Interested in the anatomy of the brain - Compared brains

- In general, the larger the brain, the more advanced the mental functions -

o Mostly accurate except in human adult population Found nerve fibres passing from one side to the other (commissures) Phrenology: o Believed that certain faculties were based in specific parts of the brain o True: motor area, visual area, language o Not true: parental love, causality, friendship o If these areas were overdeveloped, they would enlarge and stick out of the skull  pseudoscience Recognised for brilliant anatomical research and wild speculation But the brain on a pedestal  recognised for its higher function phrenology

Psychophysics - Early experimentalists trying to move away from speculation, trying to apply rigorous scientific method to measure the mind

- Physics known to be the most sciencey of the sciences  natural model for early psychology - Hence psychophysics  objective investigation of subjective experience - Interested in sensation and perception Johannes Muller (1801-1858) - Proposed that sensations (e.g. colour) were properties of the nervous system - Sensations were merely states of our nerves induced by physical objects - Can “trick” our nerves into experiencing things without external stimuli o E.g. pressing on the eyeball causes people to see flashes of light o Therefore, optic nerve is stimulated by sight and pressure E. H. Weber (1795-1878) - Pioneered methods for measuring the sensitivity of the senses - Conscious sensations of a stimuli may not reflect reality - Especially looked at thresholds o Absolute thresholds:  Smallest quantities that give any sensation at all  Level of stimulus intensity at which stimulus can no longer be detected o Relative thresholds/Just noticeable differences (JNDs):  The smallest quantitative change that allows you to detect a change  Minimum difference between two items to be able to tell them apart  JND’s are a constant proportion of absolute intensity  Weber’s Law:  Only notice a change when the magnitude of the change is bigger than a critical fraction  E.g. 10 candles – add one candle and you notice a difference  for 100 candles, you need to add 10 candles to notice a difference Hermann Von Helmholtz (1821-1894) - Adopted a “doctrine of mechanism” (opposed to vitalism) - Looked at the rate of neural conduction: o Initially used a frog leg o Stimulated the nerve in the leg caused the foot to twitch

o Stimulated different distances from the foot and measured time taken for the foot to twitch o Calculated the neural conduction = 25 metres/second  physically travelling through the body - Created the trichromatic theory: o Ground-breaking work on colour perception o Noted only 3 colour receptors (cones - RGB) o But can see many hues  arise from a mix of cones excited to different degrees o Physical process  has smaller components - Unconscious inference: o Blind spot in our eye where nerve connects  brain fills in the area o Realised that an image on the retina may not accurately reflect the external world o Brain’s perceptions contradict raw sensations  e.g. visual illusions  we derive the most probable explanation  unconscious inference based on prior visual learning experience Gestalt psychology: - The whole is more than the sum of its parts - This image is a dalmatian sniffing the ground  no longer just blobs

1.4: wundt, james, and the struggle to study consciousness Structuralist psychology: - Psychophysics did not show how sensations become perception - Structuralist psychology: the study of conscious experiences by introspection

Wundt: - The founder of experimental psychology - Contributions:

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o Cultural psychology:  Religion, language, myths, history, art, laws, customs  How our psychology is shaped by sensation/perception, and also culture Study and quantification of consciousness: o Three categories of consciousness:  Representation (concepts)  Willing (agency, capacity to command actions)  Feeling (sensations and emotions)

 Integrated together to create an impression of a unitary flow of events Structuralism: - Wondered if complex mental processes could be broken into simple processes - Breaking down consciousness into smaller elements  structure to the experience Systematic introspection – the method of structuralism

- This is external and internal observation  awareness of your environment and inside your -

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mind Wundt: “psychology = conscious experience  must observe conscious experience  only the person having the experience can observe it  introspection!” Method of introspection: o Observation: observer must pay close attention to the stimulus o Experimental control: external conditions that are stable across time and ppts o Observer reports elements of consciousness (duration of a stimulus, etc) Rules for introspection: o Must be able to repeat the observation many times o Must be possible to systematically ...