Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K (second edition) - a summary
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Foundations of psychology
Chapter 5
Strengthening the scientific standing of psychology
The USA began to rule psychology in the twentieth century.
The expansion of psychology around the start of the twentieth century
As well as laboratories, in 1892 the American Psychological Association (APA) was founded, giving psychology researchers a forum to meet and discuss their findings.
Two journals were established that would dominate the field and that still exists today.
The first American psychology: functionalism
As psychology in the USA expanded, it got moulded by the expectations and preoccupations of American society.
There was a mistrust of intellectualism, knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
America was a nation of common-sense businessmen, not interested in abstract science, but in practical accomplishments that at the same time made money, revealed God’s glory, and advanced the American dream.
If psychology were to prosper, it had to subscribe to American values, which it readily did.
Part of the attraction to the functionalist approach to the Americans was that Wundt’s experimental research programme ran into problems in 1880s.
Psychology and its position within universities
Most psychology laboratories were set up within philosophical and theological institutes.
Staff members were not always happy with this.
On other occasions experimental psychologists were told not to stay too far from good old psychology as developed in philosophical writings.
Trying to win over the public
Phrenology
Phrenology: view that mental functions are localised in the brain and that the capacity of a function corresponds to the size of the brain part devoted to it; gave rise to personality assessment by means of analysing bumps on the skull; initiated by Gall and Spurzheim at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Gall was one of the first to hypothesize that different functions were controlled by different parts of the brain.
He conjectured that the well-developed functions were supported by the parts of the brain with larger volume.
Phrenology was part of a wider and earlier belief that an individual’s personality could be deduced from his or her physical appearance, in particular from the head and the face.
Mesmerism
Mesmerism became popular in America after the Parisian Charled Poyen in the 1830-40s gave a series of lectures.
Poyen rapidly had a string of followers who took up the practice.
Demonstrations of mesmeric powers were presented as ‘psychological experiments’, to be surveyed by honourable gentlemen form the audience.
Spiritualism
Spiritualism: the belief that the spirits of the dead could be contacted by mediums.
Belief in spiritualism spread rapidly the more so because the raging Civil War claimed many lives.
By the end of the nineteenth century, spiritual sessions were a common feature in social and cultural life and scholars were invited to investigate them.
Informing the public about the ‘new psychology’
In an attempt to turn the tide, the ‘new psychologists’ (as they called themselves) published hundreds of articles about the new, scientific psychology in popular magazines.
The psychologists also held thousands of popular speeches, ‘reaching out to the public’.
Unfortunately, their impact was limited, because the topics they talked about failed to capture the public’s imagination to the same degree as phrenology, mesmerism and spiritualism.
Interim summary
Inspiration form animal research
Researching the preservation of races in the struggle for life
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
A central person in the dissemination of the evolutionary theory.
He wrote an essay on evolution two years before Darwin published his Origin of species.
As a result of Darwin’s and Spencer’s writings, many learned individuals became interested in animal behaviour and started to interpret it in terms of the struggle for life.
They looked to similarities between human and animal behaviour to place the different species on the evolution scale, and they searched for evidence of intelligent behaviour that had been passed from generation to generation.
Early research: trying to understand the animal’s mind
In the beginning much of the evidence gathered was anecdotal and based on the interpretation of the underlying reasoning by the animal.
According to Briton George Romanes (1848-1894), the approach combined observations of behaviour with inference of the animal’s adaptive capacities.
These capacities were considered to be the result of a mind that resembled that of humans.
Anthropomorphic interpretation: interpreting behaviour of non-humans living creatures by attributing human motives and human-like intelligence to them.
Thorndike’s puzzle box
Thorndike proposed the study of instinctive and intelligent behaviour in chickens.
Thorndike was forced to keep the chickens in his apartment.
He made a puzzle box.
He put animals in a box, and outside the box food was presented which the animal could reach if it managed to solve the puzzle and open the door.
Thorndike noted how long it took the animal to get out of the box.
Law of effect: behavioural law introduced by Thorndike to refer to the fact that behaviours followed by consequences are strengthened and more likely to be repeated.
Learning in animals did not involve the animal solving the problem by associating ideas of actions and rewards.
Instrumental conditioning: name introduced by Thorndike to refer to learning on the basis of the law of effect; called operant conditioning by Skinner.
Much later, Thorndike’s claim against social learning in animals is proven wrong.
Thorndike’s work had an enormous impact on animal research, because his approach was much more in line with the research methods in the natural sciences than the previous anecdotal and anthropomorphic attempts.
Comparative psychology: study of behaviour of animals, usually with the intention to shed light on human functioning within the framework of the evolutionary theory.
Pavolov’s research on classical conditioning
Ivan Pavolov (1849-1936)
Classical conditioning: form of learning discovered by Pavlov in which an association is made between two events in the environment; usually studied with a stimulus that elicits a reflex-like response to which a second, initially neutral stimulus is coupled.
Pavlov’s research brought research on animal behaviour into the realm of natural sciences.
Interim summary
The 1913 behaviourist manifesto
Watson used his position as editor of Psychological Review to promote the case for animal research.
In 1913 he published a scathing article against the lack of scientific rigour in the ongoing investigations in most psychological laboratories.
This article would be the beginning of behaviourism.
Behaviourism: movement in psychology arguing that observable behaviours are the most important aspect of human functioning to be understood; denies to various extents the relevance of information processing going on in the mind; particularly strong in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century.
Interim summary
The influence of the philosophy of science
Positivism
Watson’s attempt to increase the scientific standing of psychology was embedded within a wider movement to make science the cornerstone of human progress.
Positivism: a movement which saw science as the motor of progress.
The appeal to positivism was due to the triumphant writings of scientists and scientifically-minded authors, who used the scientific achievements to try to convince society that scientific knowledge was superior to humanists knowledge.
Given the positivist tenet that the natural sciences were the most successful development in human reasoning, philosophers and scientists started to examine what exactly was the core of the scientific approach.
Philosophy of science: branch of philosophy that studies that foundations of scientific research, to better understand the position of scientific research to other forms of information acquisition and generation.
Requirement of operational definitions
From the writings about the philosophy of science, the behaviourists distilled three ideas that were important for the further development of scientific psychology and behavioural sciences in general
Interim summary
Further developments in behaviourism: Skinner versus Tolman
Skinner and radical behaviourism
Watson’s legacy was continued by three heavyweight successors
Radical behaviourism: strong version of behaviourism, defended by Skinner, which denies the relevance of information processing in the mind and holds that all human behaviour can be understood on the basis of S-R associations.
Skinner denied the relevance of information processing in the mind.
All that happened was the direct activation of responses on the basis of stimulus input.
One of Skinner’s views was that humans have much less control over their actions than they assume.
They simply respond to events in the environment and do not take initiative themselves.
Skinner’s strong stance eventually did behaviourism more harm than good.
Tolman and purposive behaviourism
Tolman thought that operant conditioning could not be understood in simple S-R terms and he devised several experiments to show this.
In Skinner’s view, animals acquired behaviours because the association between an environmental cue and a particular behaviour was strengthened by subsequent reinforcement.
If this reasoning was true, Tolman argued, animals who were not reinforced would not learn.
But this was not what he observed.
Latent learning: the acquisition of knowledge that is not demonstrated in observable behaviour.
On the basis of these and other findings Tolman stated that animal and human behaviour was motivated by goals.
Purposive behaviourism: version of behaviourism, defended by Tolman, which saw behaviour as goal-related; agreed with other behaviourists that psychology should be based on observable behaviour.
Interim summary
Shortly after World War II voices against behaviourism grew louder and a new movement became visible, cognitive psychology.
Mathematical and technological advances questioning the behaviourist tenets
The most important factors in the developments of the 1940s were technological advances outside the psychological laboratories.
Before and during World War II the new spearhead of technology became information handling.
Whereas behaviourism denied information processing inside the human head, the scientific world outside became very much centred on information handing in machines.
Information can be represented as logical operations
By the beginning of the twentieth century it became clear among mathematicians that any mathematical operation, and indeed any type of information, could be expressed by means of logical operations involving the values 0 and 1. this are Boolean operations.
Turing proved in 1936 that extremely basic machines working on the basis of Boolean logic would be able to simulate the performance of much more complex and powerful machines working on the same principles.
Turing machine: basic (hypothetical) machine operating on the basis of Boolean logic and able to simulate the processing of more complex machines operating according to these principles.
By the end of World War II, the first practical applications of the new computers became visible.
The brain can do Boolean operations
In 1943 a neurophysiologists, Warren McCulloch, and a logician, Walter Pitts, published an article in which they argued that the human brain could be thought of as a Boolean device as well.
Strings of S-R connections cannot be used to represent human thinking
Once it was realised that a Turing machine on the basis of Boolean logic could simulate all types of information processing, including human thinking and language, researchers started to examine whether the same was true for the S-R models postulated by the behaviourists.
These models accepted only a subset of operations.
Karl Lashley was the first researcher to question the viability of the behaviourist S-R models.
Interim summary
After World War II experimental psychologists came to include mental processing in their models. This was due to the following developments:
The liberating metaphor of the computer
Three further ways in which the availability of computers changed research for psychologists
A new explanation of the purposiveness of behaviour
A problem that had faced psychologists from the start was how to account for the fact that people appear to have clear goals in their life which they deliberately choose and which direct behaviour.
This seemed to require the existence of a homunculus.
Homunculus: word (meaning ‘little man’) used to refer to the difficulty of explaining goal-oriented behaviour without making use of an ultimate intelligent (human-like) control centre
Computers showed intelligent functioning that could be described as goal-directed.
Information feedback: mechanism in which the current performance level is compared to the desired end-state and the discrepancy is used to bring the performance closer to the end-state aimed for.
This was important for psychology because it explained a great deal of goal-directed behaviour that previously seemed to require a homunculus explanation.
Although informational feedback did not solve the whole homunculus problem, it drastically increased the similarity between man and machine.
Simulation of human thinking
Computers could start to simulate the hypothesised psychological processes in computer programs, with the ideal being a computer program that would pass the Turing test.
Turing test: test described by Alan Turing, which involves a human interacting with a machine and another human without being able to discriminate the machine from the human; machines that pass the Turing test are seen as the goal of artificial intelligence.
The comparison of human and computer functioning gave rise to a new research field, artificial intelligence (AI).
Psychologists as software engineers
Computers gave psychological researchers a better idea of their role relative to that of other scientists.
They were programmers working on the software of humans.
Interim summary
The existence of computers provided psychologists with a new metaphor to understand the mind and the nature of their own research
The emergence of cognitive psychology
Because of the above developments, behaviourism came under increasing pressure
Miller’s article on the limits of short-term memory
George Millder
Wrote an article on the limits of human short-term memory.
Up to the publication of that article, new ideas had largely been ‘imposed’ on psychology from the outside.
What psychologists missed were psychological experiments that would convince them of the potential of the new movement.
In his publication, Miller reviewed the experimental evidence indicating that humans could report only seven unrelated items presented at a rate of about one stimulus per second.
This finding was the first empirical evidence that the human mind could be considered as a computer with limited ‘working memory’.
Neisser’s (1967) Cognitive psychology
Ulric Neisser.
Published a book with the title Cognitive Psychology.
By the mid-1970s academic psychologists identified themselves predominantly with cognitive psychology and not with behaviourism.
Cognitive psychology: movement ins psychology arguing that observable behaviours are the result of information processing in the mind; started in the 1950s and currently the dominant form of mainstream psychology.
Interim summary
Major steps in the emergence of cognitive psychology:
Specific features of cognitive psychology
The fledgling cognitive psychology differed in two important ways from its predecessors
Information processing on the basis of mental representations
Thinking of information as bits (0 and 1) made it possible to think of information as a separate realm, independent of the transmission device and also separate from the outside world.
Mental representation: information pattern in the mind representing knowledge obtained through observation of the application of an algorithm; forms a realm separate from the brain and could in principle be copied to another brain.
Mental representations not only became a layer different from the outside world and the brain.
Psychologists started to examine how information could be transformed by means of algorithms.
Information processing: encoding mental representations, transforming them by means of algorithms, and integrating them with existing knowledge; forms the core of cognitive psychology
Two approaches were taken
More complex procedures were needed than foreseen and top-down processes had to be introduced
While trying to make their computer programs work, psychologists were soon confronted by the fact that they had seriously underestimated the complexity of the information processing involved.
One of the new elements the cognitive psychologists had to introduce in their information-processing models was the existence of top-down processes.
Top-down processes: processes by which information from a higher processing stage is fed back to previous processing stages and influences the processing at these stages; found to be a helpful (and even essential) element in many computational models.
Verifiable predictions and experimental tests of the hypothesised processes
To investigate information processing in humans, cognitive psychology gratefully relied on the experimental expertise gathered by the behaviourists.
They noticed that other sciences also investigated imperceptible processes and did so by examining the influences of these processes on perceptible phenomena.
There was nothing wrong with postulating non-observable information algorithms, as long as their impact could be verified in a valid way.
Interim summary
Specific features of cognitive psychology are
Elements that radical behaviourism still has to offer to psychology
Interim summary
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Foundation of Psychology
Chapter 1
The wider picture, where did it all start?
Introduction
This book describes the growth of psychology as an independent branch of learning and tries to comprehend the essence of the discipline.
The introduction of written records represents one of the most important moments in the development of science.
The preliterate culture
Preliterate civilisation: civilisation before writing was invented.
Though these civilisations have not left us with written testimonies, it is possible to discern several important features of them by studying existing cultures that do not use writing.
This research revealed three important characteristics of knowledge in these kinds of cultures:
The first writing systems
Written language appeard separately in at least four cultures:
These four written languages were preceded by protowriting, the use of symbols to represent entities without linguistic information lining to them.
Characteristics of writing systems
From an early stage, writing systems were a combination of pictograms and phonograms.
Pictogram: an information-conveying sign that consists of a picture resembling the person, animal or object it represents.
Phonogram: a sign that represents a sound or a syllable of spoken language.
Phonograms were gradually replaced by simpler signs symbolizing meaningful sounds in language, (phonemes or syllables).
The use of phonograms to represent phonemes led to the alphabetic writing systems.
Logograph: a sign representing a spoken word, which no longer has a
.....read moreFoundation of Psychology
Chapter 2
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and its aftermath
Introduction
The word psychology did not appear in literature before 1500.
Scientific revolution: name given to a series of discoveries in the seventeenth century, involving Galilei, Descartes and Newton, that enhanced the status of science in society.
The geocentric model of the universe in the sixteenth century
The earth as the centre of the universe
The model that of the universe used in the sixteenth century was the model described by Aristotle who built on others) and elaborated by Ptolemy.
Aristotle’s universe was a limited universe with the Earth in the middle
Geocentric model: model of the universe in which the Earth is at the centre; was dominant until the seventeenth century.
The addition of epicycles
A key problem within the Aristotelian universe was the movements of some of the wandering stars.
To explain strange movements, Ptolemy used the notion of ‘epicycles’.
Epicycles: small cycles made by the wandering stars in addition to their main orbit around the earth.
Copernicus’s alternative heliocentric model
The sun at the centre of the universe
Aristotle’s model was not the only one that had been proposed in ancient cultures.
Heliocentric model: model of the universe in which the sun is at the centre.
Copernicus saw the heliocentric model as a valid alternative for the geocentric model.
Why Copernicus waited to publish his model
Only shortly before his death, Copernicus was persuaded to get his book printed.
Possible reasons
Galilei uses a telescope
Because of the many problems with Copernicus’s model, it failed to have much impact.
Galilei’s observations
Galilei built a telescope and found out that:
Foundation of Psychology
Chapter 3
Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century precursors to a scientific psychology
A characteristic of current Western society is that people derive their self-image and self-esteem from their own qualities and accomplishments rather than from the position of their family in society.
Individualisation: trend in a society towards looser social relations and a greater focus by individuals on themselves than on the groups they belong to.
Historians believe that this process of individualisation started sometime around the end of the Middle Ages and is still growing.
Following factors are contributions:
Interim summary
Since the end of the middle ages there has been increasing individualisation in society. Factors hypothesised to play a role include:
Descartes was the first Western philosopher after the Ancient Greeks to value new and independent thinking.
Epistemology: branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge.
Empiricism instead of rationalism
The traditional rationalist
.....read moreFoundation of psychology
Chapter 4
Establishing psychology as an independent academic discipline
By 1850 there was a thriving literature of psychological subjects in Germany.
The universities reform in Germany
Universities in the German states for a long time were dominated by the humanities and religion.
This was a feature proponents of the Enlightenment fought against.
The Enlightenment ideas mainly came from a group of academics who had been expelled from the University of Leipzig, because of their critical attitude and modern ways of thinking.
A reform took place after the defeat of the Holy Roman Empire in 1805-1806.
The defeat by the French particularly upset the Prussians, who decided it was high time to modernise their country.
The school system was reorganised and a new university model was installed.
The emphasis on scientific research and the freedom given to the professors made the German universities dynamic and open to new areas for scientific investigation.
Wundt and the first laboratory of experimental psychology
Wundt’s career
After this Phd in medicine, he obtained an assistantship with Hermann von Helmholtz where Wundt began to identify himself as a scientific psychologist.
In 1862 he gave his first course in ‘Psychology as a natural science’ and in 1874 he published a book on physiological psychology.
In the book, psychology was defined as the study of the way in which persons look upon themselves, on the basis of internal physiological changes that inform them about the phenomena perceived by the external senses.
Wundt called his psychology physiological because:
Foundations of psychology
Chapter 5
Strengthening the scientific standing of psychology
The USA began to rule psychology in the twentieth century.
The expansion of psychology around the start of the twentieth century
As well as laboratories, in 1892 the American Psychological Association (APA) was founded, giving psychology researchers a forum to meet and discuss their findings.
Two journals were established that would dominate the field and that still exists today.
The first American psychology: functionalism
As psychology in the USA expanded, it got moulded by the expectations and preoccupations of American society.
There was a mistrust of intellectualism, knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
America was a nation of common-sense businessmen, not interested in abstract science, but in practical accomplishments that at the same time made money, revealed God’s glory, and advanced the American dream.
If psychology were to prosper, it had to subscribe to American values, which it readily did.
Part of the attraction to the functionalist approach to the Americans was that Wundt’s experimental research programme ran into problems in 1880s.
Psychology and its position within universities
Most psychology laboratories were set up within philosophical and theological institutes.
Staff members were not always happy with this.
On other occasions experimental psychologists were told not to stay too far from good old psychology as developed in philosophical writings.
Trying to win over the public
Phrenology
Phrenology: view that mental functions are localised in the
.....read moreFoundations of psychology
Chapter 6
The input from brain research
Beliefs of the ancient Egyptians
The Edwin Smith papyrus
In 1862 an American collector, Edwin Smith, bought a papyrus scroll in the Egyptian city of Luxor.
In the text, written around 1700 BCE, but probably a copy of an older papyrus from 3000 BCE, a series of 48 cases were described dealing with the consequences of head and neck injuries.
Each case included a title, details of the examination, a diagnosis and an indication of the treatment.
The diagnosis consisted of one of three conclusions
The Edwin Smith papyrus: papyrus from Ancient Egypt that contains short descriptions of the symptoms and treatment of different forms of brain injury; named after the person who bought the papyrus in Egypt and had it analysed.
They illustrate how physicians treating wounded soldiers quite early became convinced of the importance of the head (brain) in controlling behaviour.
Beliefs in the wider society
The existence of the Edwin Smith papyrus did not imply that the knowledge contained in it was widespread.
In Ancient Egypt most scholars were convinced that the heart was the seat of the soul.
The roles of the heart and brain in Ancient Greece
The discussion over whether the soul was in the heart or in the brain continued in Ancient Greece.
Plato
Plato and Hippocrates placed the soul in the brain.
Plat also saw a function for the heart.
According to Plato, the soul was divided into three parts
Aristotle
Aristotle was convinced that the heart was the seat of the soul.
The function of the brain was to counterbalance the
Foundations of psychology
Chapter 7
The mind-brain problem, free will and consciousness
Throughout history, humans have been impressed by their ability to reflect about themselves and the world around them.
Self: the feeling of being an individual with private experiences, feelings and beliefs, who interacts in a coherent and purposeful way with the environment.
Mind-brain problem: issue of how the mind is related to the brain.
Three main views
Mind: aggregate of faculties humans (and animals) have to perceive, feel, think, remember and want.
Dualism: view of the mind-body relation according to which the mind is immaterial and completely independent of the body; central within religions and also in Descartes’ philosophy.
Dualism in religion and traditional philosophy
Religion
Dualism is central to religions.
They are grounded in the belief that people possess a divine soul created by God, which temporarily lives in the body, and which leaves the corpse upon its death.
The soul is what gives people their purpose and values in life.
It usually aims for the good, but can be tempted and seduced by evil forces.
This gave rise to the demonologist view of psychopathology.
Demonologists view: the conviction that mental disorders are due to possession by bad spirits.
Plato and Descartes
Dualism was central in the philosophies of Plato and Descartes.
Cartesian dualism: theories in which the mind is seen as radically different
.....read moreFoundation of psychology
Chapter 8
How did psychology affect everyday life?
Introduction
Over the course of the twentieth century, the discipline of psychology grew from a marginal academic field to a discipline that has done more than any other to transform the routines and experiences of everyday life.
Applied psychology: the application of psychological knowledge and research methods to solve practical problems.
Evolutions before World War II
Mental health problems must be treated by partitioners with a medical degree
Psychologists were not allowed to provide unsupervised therapies in official settings and their private practices were not covered by health insurance.
The first clinical psychology centres
Treatment centres run by psychologists started in the USA and were university-related.
Lightner Witmer
Opened the faculty that was the first psychology health centre in 1896.
Aimed at helping behavioural and learning problems in school children.
The founding of clinical psychology centres was impeded by the lack of support from academic psychologists.
In the meantime mental health problems and psychoanalysis became popular courses in psychology.
Clinical psychology: branch of psychology applying psychological knowledge to the assessment and treatment of mental disorders.
The first clinical psychology centre in the UK was set up in 1920 in a private house in London.
The impact of World War II
An urgent need for psychological advice and treatment
Shell-shock: anxiety response of battlefield that prevents soldiers from functioning properly; was one of the first topics addressed by applied psychology.
The finding of shell-shock in World War I gave rise tow two developments
When the USA decided to join World War II they also decided to properly staff the military psychiatric service.
A crash course in the treatment of mental disorders was offered to all medical officers, and clinical psychologists were taken on broad, both for testing and treatment.
The beginning of client-centred therapy
The rising demand for psychological help provided a rich environment for new developments in therapy.
Foundation of psychology
Chapter 9
What is science?
Science’s claim of superiority was based on four principles
Thoughts before the scientific revolution
Plato, Aristotle and the sceptics
Plato
A strong rationalist view of knowledge acquisition.
Human perception was fallible and the observable world was only a shadow of the Real world.
The human soul had innate knowledge of the universe, which could be harnessed
Aristotle
More scope for observation and made a distinction between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning.
True, theoretical knowledge started from axioms, form which new knowledge was deduced via so-called demonstrations.
Perception was the source of information but not knowledge itself.
Correspondence theory of truth: a statement is true when it corresponds with reality. Assumes that there is a physical reality which has priority and which the human mind tries to understand it. First formulated by Aristotle.
Pyrrho of Ellis
Scepticism: philosophical view that does not deny the existence of a physical reality, but denies that humans can have reliable knowledge of it; first formulated by Pyrrho of Ellis.
Humans must suspend judgment on all matters of reality.
Augustine
Augustine (354-430CE)
True knowledge was knowledge based on God’s revelations.
This view became dominant until well into the seventeenth century.
Interaction between theory and experiment: the scientific revolution
Galilei’s thought experiments
Galilei is usually credited as the person who convinced the world of the importance of observation and experimentation for the acquisition of knowledge.
But Galilei might in reality be a transition figure steeped in the Aristotelian tradition.
Foundation of psychology
Chapter 10
Is psychology a science?
The foundation of psychology as an academic discipline was legitimised on two pillars
Psychology has a long, respectful past and uses the scientific method
Steven Ward
Makes the case that a new branch of knowledge can establish itself and survive only if it succeeds in convincing the ruling powers of the need for such knowledge as well as reassuring them that it is no threat to their prosperity.
The founders of psychology promoted it as a new academic discipline by stressing two messages
Consequences for the psychology curriculum
Because psychology was promoted on the basis of its long past and its sound method, both ‘history of psychology’ and ‘research methods’ were major components of the curriculum.
These books on history were self-legitimisation as much as essential stepping stones for a good psychology education.
Science is defined by its method rather than by its subject matter
Every topic studied within the scientific method is a science
To be accepted as a science, psychologists had to make the case that what differentiated sciences from non-sciences was the way in which problems were investigated, and not the type of problems addressed.
Although few people spontaneously associated the study of mental life with scientific research, the first academic psychologists maintained that there was nothing inherent in the subject matter that prevented it from being studied using the scientific method.
Methodolatry
Because of its emphasis on method in the definition of science, academic psychology invested heavily in developing appropriate research designs and analysis techniques.
It has been argued that psychology throughout its existence has overplayed the role of research methods at the expense of theory building.
Methodolarty or methodologism: tendency to see methodological rigour as the only requirement for scientific research, at the expense of theory formation.
The shadow of positivism
One reason why psychologists tended to stress valid testing rather than theory formation was that they tried too hard to be good scientists.
Foundation of psychology
Chapter 11
The contribution of quantitative and qualitative research methods
Quantitative research methods: research methods based on quantifiable data; are associated with the natural-science approach based on the hypothetico-deductive method.
Assumptions underlying quantitative research methods
There is an outside reality that can be discovered
Quantitative psychologists start from the assumption that phenomena in the world have an existence outside people’s minds.
They defend the idea that humans can discover reality by using the scientific method.
They are well aware of the fact that science is not a linear accumulation of facts but proceeds through trial and error. But are convinced that in the long term the scientific method based on the hypothetico-deductive model leads to an understanding of reality → scientific knowledge is cumulative
The main aim of scientific research is to find universal causal relationships
Researchers are primarily interested in discovering relationships between causes and effects.
How general are principles? And how do humans function?
Ideally they hope the mechanisms they discover will apply to all humans.
Trying to avoid confounds and sources of noise
Users of quantitative research methods are extremely vigilant about the possible intrusion of undesired factors into their designs.
They try to maximally control the circumstances under which they run their studies
They also try to eliminate the impact of random variables called noise.
Suspicion about the researcher’s input
A source of confounding and noise that is of particular interest to quantitative psychology researchers is the researcher him- or herself.
To protect themselves against biases and noise, quantitative researchers make use of standardised measurements and instruments.
Progress through falsification
Researchers constantly try to prove each other wrong.
Research methods are divided into three broad orientations
Descriptive research
Observation of numerical data
Detailed observation is the start of scientific research.
Typical for quantitative research is that the data are gathered in a numerical form, either by collecting measurements or by counting frequencies of occurrence.
Before researchers collect data, they have a good idea of how they will analyse them; what types of measurements they will obtain and what types of statistics they can apply to summarise and evaluate the data.
Large samples and a few data points per participant
The vast majority of descriptive quantitative studies involve the collection of a limited amount of data from a
.....read moreFoundation of psychology
Chapter 13
Psychology and society
Science overtakes religion in Western society
Initial strong links between psychological thinking and religion
Psychology as a separate branch of knowledge grew out of the rising role of scientific thinking in Western society.
Education for a long time was controlled by the churches, which did not look favourably upon those who tried to examine the soul.
Many early psychologists had strong connections with religion.
Alliance formation with the expanding sciences
Rapidly, the experimental psychologists distanced themselves from religion, because it jeopardies their scientific credentials.
They sought to align themselves with the rapidly growing natural sciences, by denouncing weaker fields that might contaminate them, such as religion, philosophy, and sociology.
Psychologists replace pastors
Fewer people felt comfortable discussing their mental health problems with religious authorities.
Whereas for a long time churches were the first port to call for mental health problems, growing secularisation increased the need for non-religious counselling.
At the same time, a growing number of clergy started to study psychology to improve the help they were able to provide.
Changes in society impinge on psychological practice
Impact on psychological research
The massive changes in the organisation of Western society in the nineteenth and twentieth century generated ideas and research opportunities for psychologists.
Six historical developments that affected psychological research
Societal influences were not limited to the science-oriented track of psychology, but also shaped thought in the hermeneutic part.
Impact on clinical practice
Changes in society influenced clinical practice.
Mental disorders show cultural variation.
This is not only true between cultures, but also across time within a culture.
Each culture has a symptom pool, a collective memory of how to behave when ill.
At each time period patients with psychological problems gravitate towards the symptoms that at the time are thought to be legitimate indications of disease, as no patients wants to select illegitimate symptoms.
Society as a metaphor provider
Metaphors: in science, stands for an analogy from another area that helps to
.....read moreThis is my personal collection of content about the history of psychology
The invention of writing
The discovery of numbers
The Fertile Crescent
Civilisations in the Fertile crescent:
The Greeks
Developments from the Roman Empire to the end of the Middle Ages
Ancient Romans:
Byzantine empire
Arab empire:
Western Roman empire:
Introduction
Mind-brain problem: issue of how the mind is related to the brain.
Three main views
Dualism
Materialism
Functionalism
In this magazine, you can find the summaries you need to finish the course foundations of psychology in the second year of the study psychology at the uva.
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