Psychology 101 Chapter 1 & 2

Psychology is the study of mind (our private thoughts, experiences) and behaviour (what other people
can observe). It is often said that if we want to understand why something works, we need to know
what it is working for.
Our minds can occasionally break down and in their breaking down, we can examine the components
and purposes that healthy minds have.
Scientists have often had disagreements on the way we should approach what is now considered
'psychology'....
Plato, for instance, argued in favour of nativism, meaning the knowledge and talents we may have
were present since birth and we either have them or do not.
Aristotle argued the complete opposite: philosophical empiricism-- that all knowledge is acquired
through experience.
(It is really a combination of both)
William James: Important guy. Invented functionalism.
Initially trying to understand the connection between mind and body:
Early on, Ren Descartes suggested that the mind and the body were separate things and that the mind
controlled the body through the pineal gland. This was met with disagreement.
Franz Joseph Gall then suggested that the brain and the mind were connected through his beliefs of
phrenology, that certain mental abilities were associated with very specific parts of the brain. He
suggested that each bump and indent on the brain had to do with a mental process. Phrenology quickly
lost any merit.
Pierre Flourens thought Gall's ideas were extreme and messy so he experimented on animals and
removed parts of their brains, learning that their actions changed after doing so. Paul Broca, of the
same mindset, studied a brain-damaged patient and learned that the damaged part was what caused
their impaired mental function. These scientists connected the brain and mind.
Structuralism vs. Functionalism:
Hermann von Helmholtz conducted experiments about reaction time after applying a stimulus-- and
thus demonstrated that reactions were not instantaneous (neurons needed to send messages to the
brain).
He had a research assistant, William Wundt, who is credited for creating psychology. Wundt thought
psychology should focus on consciousness because like elements making up a compound, there must
be 'elements' of the mind. Thus, he created structuralism-- the analysis of basic elements that
constitute the mind.
He tried to analyze people using introspection, which essentially means asking people how they feel

about things (think Rorschach test?). He ran tests involving pressing buttons after certain instructions to
measure reaction time and was the first to realize that psychologist could use scientific methods to
research conscious processes.
Edward Titchener studied with Wundt and brought structuralism to the US.
Structuralism faded away after people realized it was too subjective and many psychologists disagreed
on matters. William James was a skeptic of structuralism.
William James created functionalism after disagreeing with Wundt about breaking down
consciousness into elements. He believed that consciousness worked as a whole.
Functionalism is the study of the purpose mental processes serve in enabling people to adapt to their
environment. It relied on some of Darwin's theories of evolution, like natural selection. This meant he
believed that consciousness must serve an important biological purpose since we still have it after all
these years.
Wundt thought James didn't appreciate the structuralists' lab findings and was sad. James didn't care.
The world agreed with James and so functionalism moved onward.
Example: G. Stanley Hall studied with Wundt and James. He believed that children's mental
growth mirrored humankind's mental growth over the centuries (also helped create the APA and the
AJP).
Together, Hall and James progressed functionalism.
Psychoanalytic Theory:
French physicians Charcot and Janet observed hysteria patients getting better when they were put
under hypnosis. Many psychologists paid no attention, but William James took special interest. He
believed we needed to observe the 'broken' mind to understand the healthy one.
At this point, psychologists were starting to suggest that the brain can create many selves that the
conscious self is not aware of.
A certain psychologist visited Charcot's clinic and worked with 'hysteria' patients. Sigmund Freud
now theorized that people's troubles could be connected to childhood trauma that people couldn't
remember anymore.
~*~the unconscious mind did though~*~
Thus, Freud developed psychoanalytic theory, in that unconscious mental processes were important in
shaping our feelings and thoughts.
Psychoanalysis then, involves becoming aware of these unconscious feelings.
It was controversial, though, because it was the 50's and since psychoanalysis often involved exploring
a person's sexual history, that was considered racy and bad.

Psychoanalysis's initial popularity eventually died down. Freud's ideas about humanity were dark and
depressing; not reflective of the happy post-WWII times. His ideas were also hard to test and thus
seemed useless to some scientists. Humanistic theory was also gaining popularity.
Humanistic theory
Was the answer to the depressing psychoanalysis. Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers created
humanistic psychology,which focused on understanding human behaviour based on the potential of
people. The patients were called 'clients' and things were focused on positive potential of humankind.
Certain needs just had to be met before the potential could be brought out (think hierarchy of needs or
Harper singing With A Little Help From My Friends).
Behaviourism Becomes Popular
Behaviourism became popular in the 20th century as people started thinking the current ways of
understanding people were unscientific and unreliable. People started to believe that focusing on the
mind was not the right way to go and turned to behaviourism.
Behaviourism is the scientific study of directly observable behaviour (ie Jesse punching Walt in the
face is directly observable behaviour but Jesse thinking about Walt murdering him is not).
John Watson (not from Sherlock Holmes) thought that the mind and the inner thoughts were too vague
to be studied scientific. He thought that the introspective methods functionalism and structuralism
usually used were too subjective.
He wanted to focus on what people did. It would then be more beneficial to the greater good this way
because behaviour was a public thing.
He didn't like the idea of focusing on the mind because when he looked at animals, things got tricky.
Which had minds and which didn't. Dogs? Worms? It seemed irrelevant. We can't ask dogs about how
they're feeling so we must observe what they do. Humans, in his opinion, should be studied the same
way.
(Margaret Washburn wrote a book called he Animal Mind about mental processes and the minds in
animals. Watson got really angry).
Watson was influenced by Ivan Pavlov, who studied stimulus and response (ie dogs salivating when
they get fed by someone and then salivating when they see that person). Behaviourism is sometimes
referred to as S-R psychology.
Watson believed that humans were so susceptible to environmental factors that anyone could become
anything due to outside forces and not inside factors (ex: making Little Albert terrified of rats).
He eventually had to leave his job due to a scandal where he became involved with his assistant,
Rayner.
Burrhus Frederick Skinner agreed with Watson and came up with the idea of reinforcement, which is

that the consequences of a behaviour determine whether it will be likely to happen again.
He built the Skinner box that conditioned rats to press a button to be dispensed food. He wanted to
apply this idea to the school system when he built teaching machines that would systematically teach
children (ex. math problems).
He eventually came to the point where he claimed that free will didn't really exist and that we're just
responding to patterns of reinforcement we learned earlier. We don't really choose anything but act due
to reinforcement.
Skinner thought this was great and this logic could solve social problems. People thought it was terrible
and manipulative and started saying he wanted to turn society into a dog obedience school. His ideas
were this so extreme yet people rebelled against his ideas.
He did, however, become really famous.
The Mind Comes Back
Ulric Neisser recalled that for a long time, behaviourism was the only thing that was taught. But to
him, it ignored important parts of psychology, namely the mind. He also believed that behaviourism
ignored parts of evolutionary history about why organisms act in certain ways and the associations they
make.
Many psychologists at this point were studying illusions, or errors in perception people make (for
example, optical illusions).
A German psychologist Max Wertheimer did an experiment involving flashing lights in two slits.
People perceived the flashing lights differently depending on the speed of the lights. Essentially this is
the study of Gesalt psychology, which is a psychological approach that emphasizes that we often
perceive things as a whole rather than a sum of their parts.
Frederick Barlett was a psychologist that was interested in memory but wanted a new approach to
studying it. Rather than getting people to study random meaningless things, he told stories and asked
people to remember them later.
He found that people often remembered wrong, recalling instead what they thought should happen.
This showed scientists that memory is not merely a photograph of past events but rather coloured and
changed from our feelings and beliefs.
Jean Piaget studied perceptual errors that young children make to understand how our minds work. He
realized that children lacked certain cognitive abilities that older children had (ie dividing does not
increase mass was something young children didn't understand).
Kurt Lewis theorized that it was not the stimulus that caused a response but how people perceived it.
Sometimes people misunderstand and it is important to study that.
But what really brought the mind back into the world of psychology was the creation of the computer.

Cognitive psychology
The scientific study of mental processes, thought, memory, and reason.
In WWII, the military asked psychologists to help them perfect how soldiers could learn technologies
such as radar and how they could maximize their abilities. Everyone realized that when the equipment
was designed, perception, attention, identification, memory, etc had to be considered. Behaviourism
wouldn't cut it because it ignored the fact that these things mattered.
Donald Broadbent was the first to study how we're really bad at multitasking we are. George Miller
also studied this and learned that we can really only remember about seven things at once. The mind
had limited capacity, and behaviourists ignored this.
Noam Chomsky attacked Skinner's ideas by asking why young children could compose new sentences
they had never heard. This contradicted the ideas of behaviourism, because behaviourists thought that
children learn to speak by reinforcement.
Neuroscience: BRAINS
It was clear by this point that studying the brain was important for psychology. The mind depended on
the brain to work properly. This dependence is shown when people who have damage to certain parts of
the brain also have loss of a specific cognitive ability.
Karl Lashley, who studied with Watson, trained rats to run in mazes. He cut out parts of their brains
and then tested them again to see how well they could do it. He wanted to find the part of the brain
where learning happened. He couldn't.
Other scientists wanted to, though, and thus behavioural neuroscience was created. It links
psychological processes to other parts of the body. Neuroscientists observe brain activity during
experiments. When working with animals, they can also remove parts of the brain and see how the
responses are affected.
We can't just be cutting out brains in people or purposely damaging their brain, so we have to rely on
natural damages to study.
Brain scanning is good because it shows us what parts of the brain operate during specific activities and
how the brain operates differently in mentally-ill or brain-damaged people.
Cognitive neuroscience is the field that attempts to understand the links between cognitive processes
and brain activity.
Evolutionary Psychology
Behaviourism essentially said that any lesson is as easy to learn as the next, and our minds are a blank
slate. But what really happens is that ancestors develop certain associations and habits and evolution
has 'prepared' organisms to learn things to keep them alive. Evolutionary psychology is very closely
related to Darwin's theories of evolution.
The brain is not an 'all-purpose' computer that lets us learn all things as easily as the next but rather the

brain is built to do certain things well and everything else not at all.
ex. People become jealous of their lovers because jealous lovers in history have held onto their
partners better and have passed on the 'jealous' gene.
People criticize evolutionary psychology by saying that the traits of organisms can change purposes.
For example, people learn to drive rather easily but there were no pre-historic cars that cavemen drove.
Evolutionary psychological hypotheses are hard to test.
Social Psychology
Social psychology is the study of the causes and consequences of interpersonal behaviour. It is
essentially how people interact with other people. For example, bike riders tend to ride faster with other
bike riders.
Social psychology started and was driven by experiments in Nazi Germany. The Gesalt motto that the
whole was greater than the sum of its parts/
Field theory viewed social behaviour of internal forces (like personality and thoughts) and external
forces (like social pressure and culture).
The Holocaust and the civil rights movement spurred an examination of social psychology and why
things happen in society.
Cultural Psychology
Cultural psychology is similar, as it studies how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes
of its members, and takes into account the different cultures around the world cause different things to
the people inside of them.
Oddly enough, William Wundt was an advocate of the importance of examining culture when
considering psychology.
People appreciate, do, and perceive things differently depending on the culture they live in.
Absolutism suggests that human emotions and psychological happenings are the same everywhere.
Relativism suggests that psychological happenings vary extremely from place to place. For example,
people in Western cultures often devalue themselves when they are depressed-- people in Eastern
cultures tend not to.
Most cultural psychologists fall between absolutism and relativism.