Historical and conceptual issues in psychology, by Brysbaert, M and Rastle, K (second edition) - a summary
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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 view
The traditional view of understanding in philosophy was based on rationalism.
Rationalism: view according to which knowledge is obtained by means of reasoning; usually through deductive reasoning on the basis of innate knowledge.
Empiricism
As natural philosophers developed the scientific method, observation and inductive reasoning gained importance.
Empiricism: view according to which knowledge is obtained by means of perceptual experiences; usually involves the idea of association between ideas to combine the individual perceptions; also emphasis on inductive reasoning.
The human mind at birth is a black slate (a tabula rasa) on which experiences leave their marks and make associations with the marks already present.
Interim summary
Rationalism
Empiricism
Epistemology in troubled waters: idealism
Although John Locke is generally considered to be the father of empiricism, his writings were rather cautious.
Berkeley and Hume
It didn’t take long before other philosophers took up Locke’s idea of the mind as a black slate and showed that it could lead to far-reaching, counter-intuitive conclusions.
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
If the contents of the soul entirely consist of impressions acquired through observation, then we have no guarantee, except for God, that the contents of the soul are a faithful rendition of the world.
We have no guarantee that there exists something like an outside world. The contents of the mind could be fully self-generated.
The method of observation promoted by the men of science did not necessarily lead to a true understanding of the world. It could be equally well suited in one grand illusion.
Idealism: view within philosophy that human knowledge is a construction of the mind and does not necessarily correspond to an outside world; the truth of knowledge depends on the coherence with the rest of the knowledge in the social group.
Realism: view within philosophy that human knowledge tries to reveal real properties of the outside world; the truth of knowledge is determined by the correspondence of the knowledge with the real world.
David Hume (1711-1776)
Pointed out that idealism questioned the scientific endeavour of unearthing causes and effects.
When we experience he co-occurrence of events, we tend to see one event as the source of the other.
This gives us an illusion of deeper knowledge beyond senses and memory, but actually there is no guarantee that something in the world corresponds to our postulated causal relationship.
We assume that our impression of causality is due to the existence of a cause-effect relationship in the outside world, which we have discovered, but from an empiricist perspective there is no guarantee for such an assumption. The link could arise entirely form the mind alone.
Hume pointed to a second principle humans use to group sensations, association by similarity.
Because two sensations resemble each other, we assume they come from the same entity in the world.
Again, there is no guarantee that this is true.
Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Kant agreed with Berkeley and Hume that we cannot have direct knowledge of the outside reality (the thing-in-itself) through perception.
Humans not only perceive, they also thing about their perceptions.
By combining input from their senses with understanding, they come to concepts and judgements that generalise across the perceived instances and go beyond basic experiences.
In doing so, the mind adds knowledge (to sensations) that is not derived from the observation itself and, hence, can be considered innate.
The most important types of knowledge added by the mind to incoming stimuli
Human perception could not arise in an environment completely at odds with the sensations.
Even if sensations are subjective, they can only exist if the perceiver inhabits a world that is in line with the input from the senses.
Successive sensations must form continuity and unity to be understood, otherwise they are experienced as incoherent and meaningless snapshots.
Humans do not have direct access to their experiences.
All they can observe is the objects of their experiences and these objects require stimulation that remains constant in time (that continues to exits when unobserved).
Humans are not merely centres of knowledge, they are also agents, operating in the environment on the basis of their knowledge.
Not all of these actions are successful, suggesting that an outside reality constrains human activities.
Scottish common sense
Thomas Reid (1710-1796) argued that it was time for a return to what he called ‘common sense’.
Perception was a direct interaction between the perceiver and the real object, and did not result in a separate stage of perceptual representations, which may or may not be a truthful copy of the outside world.
Rational and empirical psychology
As philosophers became ever more interested in the human mind, the theme ‘psychology’ was added as the fourth part of metaphysics.
Metaphysics: the study of the nature of the universe.
Wolff
Christian Wolff (1679-1754)
Wolff took ideas from Aristotle, Bacon and Newton to define the subject of psychology.
First, he defined rational psychology very much as Aristotle had done for theoretical knowledge.
On the basis of deductive reasoning, these axioms would lead to the ‘demonstration’ of new knowledge.
This rational approach guaranteed true conclusions about the human soul and allowed the philosopher to penetrate more deeply into the matter than by simple observation.
Wolff agreed with Bacon that pure reason without observation entailed risk of error. Long chains of reasoning without reality checks invited mistakes.
So, psychology needed a close interaction between reason and observation, or empirical psychology.
Empirical psychology according to Wolff was built on introspection.
Introspection: research method in psychology consisting of a person looking inward and reporting what he/she is experiencing; usually done under controlled circumstances.
In his view, the human mind could perceive its own operations and use this information to build a science of psychology.
Wolff suggested that psychology should aim for mathematical demonstrations. Only then would there be full understanding.
He called this approach ‘psychometrica’.
Kant again
Kant contemplated the issue of ‘psychology’, as part of this struggle to integrate rationalism and empiricism.
In doing so, he came to a conclusion that was pretty devastating for the scientific ambitions of psychology.
This led to ‘a historical doctrine of nature’, which was below the level of natural science
Natural science required rational analysis, a system of un-disputable axioms and demonstrations.
A proper natural science required the axioms and demonstrations to be written as mathematical laws.
Kant’s objections can be summarised as follows:
Comte
Auguste Comte denied psychology the scientific status of psychology.
Psychology was excluded from his hierarchy of sciences because of the problems with the introspective method.
The only ways in which the human mind could be studied scientifically, according to Comte, was on the basis of biology and the basis of observation of the products produced by the mind.
Interim summary
Psychological studies of the mind
Epistemology
Rational and empirical psychology
Because of psychology’s increasing impact within philosophy, a growing number of psychology courses were taught at university, not only to philosophy students, but also to students of religious and educational studies.
This created a marked for text-books on psychology, which shaped people’s views.
Kant
Kant published a textbook on human functioning, ‘Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinischt’, based on the lecture notes of a course he was teaching.
Kant did not treat the topic as a science, but as a collection of narratives. Nor did he call the subject psychology, but anthropology.
Kant devoted a part of his book to deriving people’s characters from their appearance and behaviour.
Physiognomy: belief that the personality of an individual can be deduced from their appearance, in particular from the shape of the head and face.
Herbart
Johan Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841)
His book ‘Lehrbuch zur psychologie’ was written in particular for use in educational studies.
Herbart was convinced that knowledge of psychology was for principal importance to teachers.
Upham
In the United States, students had to take courses on moral and mental philosophy.
The contents were heavily influenced by Scottish common sense realism, but increasingly took a distinctive American look with locally produced books.
A particularly popular textbook was ‘Elements of intellectual philosophy (1827)’ by Thomas Upham (1799-1872)
Upham’s book starts with:
Bain
The United Kingdom saw an impressive series of psychology-related textbooks published.
Arguably the most influential were two books published by the Scottish philosopher and educationalist Alexander Bain (1818-1903).
These books formed the template of nearly all subsequent English psychology textbooks.
An important new element Bain introduced was the inclusion of physiology in his books.
Interim summary
The increased importance of psychology has resulted in the production of textbooks since the late 1700s, which illustrate the themes considered important and which also influenced people’s views of psychology. Four books have been discussed:
While philosophers in metaphysics were debating the status and contents of psychology, some natural philosophers started to run Baconian experimental histories that nowadays would be classified as psychology experiments.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the findings of these experiments would encourage scholars to establish ‘laboratories of experimental psychology’.
Human perception
Given the importance of observation in natural science, it was normal for men of science to be interested in the possibilities and limits of (human) perception.
Quite a lot was already known about the topic before the scientific revolution.
Hooke
Robert Hooke (1635-1703)
Was interested in determining the minimal visual angle that could be discriminated.
This was important for the use of telescopes and later also determined the degree of detail that could be seen through the newly built microscopes, of which Hooke made extensive use.
On the basis of his studies, Hooke concluded that humans could discriminate lines that covered a visual angle of 1 minute of arc, a retinal wide of 0,0035mm.
Mayer
Hooke’s research was replicated and much extended nearly a century later by the German astronomer Tobias Mayer (1723-1762).
Mayer used more types of stimuli than Hooke had used.
He found that for black dots, the limit of vision was nearly half that of Hooke’s estimate while the limit of gratings was comparable to Hook’s estimate.
He also observed that the relationship between the distance of a candle and the limit of vision was not linear but curvilinear.
Weber and Fechner
Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878)
He was in the first place interested in tactile senses.
He published two treatises that would turn out to be highly influential for the history of psychology.
Weber ran two types of studies
That was finding inspired Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) to develop a mathematical law connecting sensation magnitude to stimulus intensity.
Fechner realised that there could be a Newtonian mathematical function connecting the magnitude of the sensation to the magnitude of the stimulus.
Psychophysics: part of psychological research dealing with the relationship between physical stimuli and the corresponding sensation.
The speed of signal transmission in the nervous system and mental chronometry
The personal equation
Two main tasks of astronomers are:
Before the development of modern equipment with automatic registration, both tasks required a close coupling of clock reading and star-gazing.
This went reasonably well until 1796 when Nevil Maskelyne noticed that the times registered by his assistant were about half a second later than his.
The fact that people differed from each other in the time needed to register precise events became well established among astronomers and other men of science. As a result, scholars became interested in the time needed to transfer information in the nervous system and to perform simple mental operations.
Von Helmholz
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)
Started a series of studies to measure the speed of nerve impulses
By stimulating the nerve in a frog at a certain place and measuring the passage of the signal at several distances, he could estimate the conduction of speed of the nerve.
This meant that information transmission in the nervous system became measurable and had practical consequences.
Donders
Franciscus Cornelis Donders (1818-1889)
Wondered whether he could use a similar technique to measure the speed with which humans could perform elementary mental tasks.
Mental chronometry: using reaction times to measure the time needed for various mental tasks; on the basis of a comparison of different tasks, models of the mental processes involved in the tasks are postulated.
Interim summary
Characteristics and limitations of human perception and information processing interested the natural philosophers, who began to run Baconian experimental studies. They discussed two lines of research:
Darwin’s theory
The right zeitgeist
In hindsight, Darwin’s theory about the evolution of species was bound to be discovered around the mid-nineteenth century, most likely in the United Kingdom.
Cross-fertilisation and natural selection
A first observation that struck Darwin was that, although many plants were capable of self-fertilisation, they seemed to avoid it.
If it happened, the offspring were on average less healthy.
Darwin was at loss to understand how the new offspring could start to dominate and eventually replace the old variety.
Darwin red and economic book and realised that the struggle for existence in a world of limited resources was the reason why some variants hand an advantage and started to outgrow the variants without that advantage.
Natural selection: process in Darwin’s evolutionary theory by which the environment results in the continuation and multiplication of organisms with certain genetic features and hinders the reproduction of organisms with other genetic features; the first type of features are called favourable (within the prevailing environment), the second type unfavourable.
Survival of the fittest: term introduced by Herbert Spencer to describe the outcome of natural selection: only organisms that fit within the environment and can produce viable offspring survive.
The origin of species: book by Charles Darwin (1859) in which he presented the evolutionary theory.
The dilution problem
Although the book was a instant success and led to lively debates, its initial impact was less impressive than we nowadays think.
Common misunderstandings of evolutionary theory
There is no direction in the genetic changes
All that happens is that the material now and then has a random alteration.
Most of these changes result in offspring that do not differ in an observable way from the parents.
Sometimes, a change results in a descendant that is barely to further generations.
Occasionally, an alteration results in a characteristic that is particularly well adapted to the prevailing environment and that increases the chances of the organism to survive and have descendants.
This new variant gradually increases in number at the expense of the variants without the characteristic.
Organisms do not become better or stronger
Just more likely to survive in a certain environment
An example of Darwin’s influence: Galton
Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Searched to find evidence for the argument that features were inherited.
He set out to measure human intelligence.
Interim summary
Evolutionary theory
Common misunderstandings of evolutionary theory
An example of Darwin’s influence: Galton
Psychological research requires the analysis of many observations to detect the underlying patterns
The development of statistics was another innovation of capital importance for the emergence of psychological research.
A crucial difference between physics and psychology is that processes in the former usually yield very much the same outcome each time they are repeated.
Because of the intrinsic variability in psychological (and biological) measures, it is not possible to get rid of the noise simply by trying to improve the accuracy of the measurement.
Quetelet’s contribution
Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874)
Analysed crime statistics.
He was able to predict how many crimes there would be in the next year and which variables affected this number.
Statistics help to design a proper study
Statistics not only allowed researchers to analyse their data, they also provided them with information on how to design biological and behavioural studies, so that valid conclusions could be drawn.
Interim summary
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 physical resemblance to the word’s meaning.
Written documents form an external
.....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 view
The traditional view of understanding in philosophy was based on
.....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:
In 1875 Wundt was appointed Professor in Leubzig were
.....read moreFoundations 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
.....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 heat of the heart.
The heart and the brain formed
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 from the body and as independent of the biological processes in the
.....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.
Psychoanalysis required a long series of treatment sessions and was not
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 reasonably large group of participants.
Two main reasons to include
Foundation 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 map a new, complex problem by making reference to a better
.....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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