PSYC001 CH1 - Summary Psychological Science PDF

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Chapter 1 : The Science of Psychology (1-26) What Is Psychological Science? ● Psychology : Involves the study of mental activity and behavior ● Psychologist : Career involves understanding mental life or predicting behavior 1.1 Psychological Science Is the Study of Mind, Brain, and Behavior ● Psychological science : The study, through research, of mind/brain/behavior ● Mind : Mental activity ○ Perceptual experiences (sights, smells, tastes, sounds, touches), memories, thoughts, feelings ○ Results from biological processes of the brain ● Behavior : Totality of observable human/animal action ○ Exclusive to human - debating philosophy, performing surgery ○ All animals - eating, drinking, mating ● Development of technology to study working brain in action allow study of mental states ● Psychologists seek to understand the biological basis of that activity, how people change as they grow older, how people vary in response to social settings, how people acquire healthy/unhealthy behaviors 1.2 Psychological Science Teaches Critical Thinking ● Media reports can be distorted or flat-out wrong ● Amiable skepticism : Remains open to new ideas but is wary of new “scientific findings” when good evidence and sound reasoning do not seem to support them ● Critical thinking : Systematically question and evaluate information using well-supported evidence ○ Look for holes in evidence, use logic/reasoning to see whether information makes sense, consider alternative explanations ○ Demands healthy questioning and keeping an open mind ○ Is my belief still true? What led me to believe it? What facts support it? Has science produced new findings that require us to reevaluate and update our beliefs? ● People’s intuitions are often wrong in predictable ways ○ Human thoughts are often biased in ways that make critical thinking very difficult 1.3 Psychological Science Helps Us Understand Biased or Inaccurate Thinking ● Noncritical thinking can lead to enormous conclusions ○ Our minds are constantly analyzing all the information we receive and trying to make sense of that information ● Although human brain is highly efficient at finding patterns/connection between things, sometimes we see patterns that don’t really exist ○ See what we expect to see, fail to notice things that don’t fit with our expectations ● Thomas Gilovich - Most Americans believe in extrasensory perception (reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the

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mind) than in evolution / 20x more astrologers than astronomers ○ Base important decisions based on wrong beliefs, leading to dangerous actions Ignoring evidence (confirmation bias) ○ Strong tendency to place great importance on evidence that supports what they believe, while downplaying evidence that doesn’t match their belief ○ Selective sampling of information contributes to confirmation bias Seeing relationships that do not exist ○ Misconception that two events that happen at the same time must somehow relate Accepting after-the-fact explanations ○ Once people know an outcome, they interpret and reinterpret old evidence to make sense of that outcome ○ People often come up with explanations for why events happen even when they don’t have complete information ○ Hindsight bias : can explain why things happened, but can’t predict future events / tendency to overestimate ability to have predicted an outcome that couldn’t possibly have been predicted Taking mental shortcuts ○ Often follow heuristics (simple rules) to make decisions ○ Can produce reasonably good decisions without too much effort, but can lead to inaccurate judgements and biased outcomes ○ Availability heuristic - when things that come most easily to mind guide our thinking

1.4 Why Are People Unaware of Their Weakness? ● People fail to see their own inadequacies ○ People motivated to feel good about themselves, which affects how they think ○ Credit personal strengths for successes and blame outside forces for failures ○ Interpret information in ways that support positive beliefs about themselves ● Fremdschamen : times when we experience embarrassment for other people because they do not realize that they should be embarrassed for themselves ● (David Dunning/Justin Kruger) People are often unaware of their weaknesses because they cannot judge those weaknesses at all ○ Lack of skill prevents people from knowing what good results AND from knowing what good results are ○ People unaware of their weaknesses fail to make any effort at self-improvement to overcome because they already believe that they are performing well ○ Teaching people specific skills helps them be more accurate in judging their performance (identify weakness before fixing) ○ Most people believe that they are better than average in many things What Are the Scientific Foundations of Psychology? ● Psychology originated in philosophy

1.5 Many Psychological Questions Have a Long History ● Nature/Nurture debate ○ Whether individual’s psychology is attributed more to nature or to nurture ○ Are psychological characteristics biologically innate? Or are they acquired through education, experience, and culture (beliefs, values, rules, customs)? ● Mind/Body problem ○ Are the mind and body separate and distinct, or is the mind simply the subjective experience of ongoing brain activity? ● (히스토리 나중에) 1.6 Experimental Psychology Initially Focused on the Structure, Not the Function, of Mental Activity ● (인트로 나중에) ● Structuralism : Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Tichener ○ Based on the idea that conscious experience can be broken down into its basic underlying components ○ Understanding basic elements of conscious experience would provide the scientific basis for understanding the mind ○ Take a stimulus and analyze its quality/intensity/duration/clarity through introspection ○ Problem : experience is subjective ■ Each person brings a unique perceptual system to introspection, making it difficult to determine whether they are employing introspection similarly ○ Problem : Reporting of the experience changes the experience (not reliable) ● Functionalism : William James ○ Mind consists of stream of consciousness ○ Psychologists should examine functions served by mind (how mind operates) ○ The mind came into existence over the course of human evolution ○ It works as it does because it is useful for preserving life and passing along genes to future generations (helps humans adapt to environmental demands) ● Evolution, Adaptation, and Behavior : Charles Darwin (Influence of functionalism) ○ Evolutionary theory ■ Species change over time ■ Some changes increase individual’s chances of surviving and reproducing ■ Surviving and reproducing ensure that these changes will be passed along to future generations (changes=adaptations) ○ Natural selection : changes that are adaptive are passed along and those not adaptive are not passed along (survival of the fittest) 1.7 Different Schools of Thought Reflected Different Perspectives on Mind, Brain, and Behavior ● (오프닝 나중에) ● Psychoanalytic approach : Sigmund Freud ○ Speculated that much of human behavior is determined by unconscious awareness

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Unconscious mental forces (sexual, in conflict) produce psychological discomfort and sometimes psychological disorders ■ Many arise from blocked troubling childhood experiences ○ Psychoanalysis : bring the contents of the patient’s unconscious into awareness and helps deal with them constructively ○ Free association : patient talk about whatever they wanted to for as long as they wanted to ■ Eventually revealed the unconscious conflicts caused by psychological problems ○ Many of his ideas were impossible to test using the methods of science Behaviorism : John B. Watson, B.F. Skinner ○ Emphasizes environmental effects on observable behavior ○ Believed that if psychology was to be a science, it had to stop trying to study mental events that could not be observed directly ○ NURTURE - believed that animals acquire/learn all behaviors through environmental experience ○ By studying the stimuli/triggers, can predict the animals’ behavioral responses in those situations ○ Skinner believed that mental states were simply another form of behavior, subject to the same behavioralist principles as publicly observable behavior ○ Skinner wanted to understand how behaviors, whether occurring “inside the skin” or observable, are shaped or influenced by the events or consequences that follow them Gestalt movement ○

What Are the Latest Developments in Psychology? 1.8 Biology Is Increasingly Emphasized in Explaining Psychological Phenomena 1.9 Evolutionary Thinking Is Increasingly Influential 1.10 Culture Provides Adaptive Solutions 1.11 Psychological Science Now Cross Levels of Analysis 1.12 Subfields in Psychology Focus on Different Levels of Analysis 1.13 Will Psychology Benefit You in Your Career?...