1: Introducing Psychology Flashcards
What is Psychology?
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behaviour.
Where does the word “Psychology” come from?
“Psychology” comes from the Greek words “psyche”, meaning life, and “logos”, meaning explanation.
What do Research Psychologists do?
Research Psychologists use scientific methods to create new knowledge about the causes of behaviour.
What do Psychologist-Practitioners do?
Psychologist-Practitioners use existing research to enhance the everyday lives of others.
What are Empirical Methods?
The processes of collecting and organizing data and drawing conclusions about those data.
What is the Scientific Method?
The scientific method is the set of assumptions, rules, and procedures that scientists use to conduct empirical research.
What are values?
Values are personal statements.
What are facts?
Facts are objective statements determined to be accurate through empirical study.
What are the Levels of Explanation in Psychology?
Levels of explanation are the perspectives that are used to understand behaviour.
What is the lower level of explanation?
The lower levels are more closely tied to biological influences, such as genes, neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones.
What is the middle level of explanation?
The abilities or characteristics of the individual.
Example: “Joe understands math”
What is the higher/upper level of explanation?
They relate to social groups, organizations, and cultures.
What are the challenges of studying psychology?
- People vary and respond differently in different situations.
- Almost all behaviour is multiply determined (produced by many factors).
- Human behaviour is also caused by factors that are outside of our conscious awareness, making it impossible for us, as individuals, to really understand them.
What is the Hindsight Bias?
The hindsight bias leads us to think that we could have predicted events that we actually could not have predicted.
Why do scientists use the scientific method?
Employing the scientific method allows the scientist to collect empirical data objectively, which adds to the accumulation of scientific knowledge.
Who are the earliest psychologists we know about?
The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle.
What did Plato believe?
Plato believed that much knowledge was innate
What did Aristotle believe?
Aristotle thought that each child was born as an “empty slate” and that knowledge was primarily acquired through learning and experience.
Who was Rene Descartes, and what did he believe?
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher that considered free will. He believed that the mind controls the body through the pineal gland.
He was among the first to understand that nerves control muscles.
He believed in dualism: the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body.
What is dualism?
The belief that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body.
Who were the first two research psychologists?
- The German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who developed a psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany.
- The American psychologist William James (1842-1910), who founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard University.
What is Structuralism?
Structuralism is a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of psychological experience.
Its goal was to create a table of elements of sensations.
What method was often used by Structuralist Psychologists?
Introspection, which involved asking research participants to describe exactly what they experienced as they worked on mental tasks.
Who began the field known as structuralism?
Wilhelm Wundt
