Chapter 1

Question 1

What is psychology?

Answer 1

Psychology: scientific study of the mind, brain, and behaviour

Levels of analysis (rungs on a ladder → lower rung more closely related to biological influences (brain), thoughts, feelings, emotions in the middle, and higher rungs to social influences (social and cultural))

Question 2

Where do different research psychologists unify in terms of knowledge?

Answer 2

→ Research psychologists often differ in which rung they investigate → psychology unifies in the purpose of understanding the causes of human and animal behaviour using the best available tools in science

Question 3

What makes the study of psychology complex?

Answer 3

1. Human behaviour is difficult to predict (all actions are multiply determined → produced by many factors)
2. Psychological influences are rarely independent of each other → difficult to pin down which cause (s) are operating
3. People differ from each other in thinking, emotions, personality, and behaviour (everyone responds different to same situation)
4. People often influence each other → makes it difficult to pin down what causes what
   5.

Question 4

What does emic refer to?

Answer 4

Emic: study behaviour of a culture from perspective of someone who grew up in the culture

• Better understand the unique characteristics of a culture, but may overlook characteristics that this culture shares with others

Question 5

What does etic refer to?

Answer 5

Etic: study the behaviour of a culture from the perspective of an outsider

• Better able to view this culture with broader perspective of other cultures, but may impose perspectives from their own culture onto others

Question 6

What does naive realism refer to?

Answer 6

Naive Realism: the belief that we see the world precisely as it is → “seeing is believing”

• Most of the time we should trust our perceptions, yet appearances can be deceiving (earth seems flat or the sun revolves around the earth)
• Naive realism can trip us up when evaluating ourselves and others since believing is seeing → beliefs shape our perceptions of the world

Question 7

What does empiricism mean?

Answer 7

Empiricism: knowledge should initially be acquired through observation → this isn’t enough since observations can fool us

→ Science refines initial observations by subjecting them to stringent tests to determine whether they are accurate = observations that stand up to rigorous examinations are retained, while those that don’t are discarded

Question 8

What is the scientific theory?

Answer 8

Scientific Theory: explanation for a large number of findings in the natural world → offers an account that ties multiple findings together into one package

• Account existing data
• Generate predictions on new data we haven’t observed (for a theory to be scientific, it must generate novel predictions for researchers to test)

Hypothesis: testable prediction (theories are general explanations, whereas hypotheses are specific predictions derived from explanations)
- Based on testing of these hypotheses, scientists can provisionally accept a theory that generated these hypotheses, reject theory, or revise it

Question 9

What are the 2 main characteristics of a theory?

Answer 9

1. A theory explains one specific event
2. A theory is just an educated guess
   - Theories can’t be proven, because it’s always conceivable that a better explanation might come along one day ; however, since this theory is consistent with many lines of evidence → majority accept it as a good explanation

• Aren’t guesses, because they’ve been substantiated over and over by independent investigators → survived repeated efforts to refute them and are well-confirmed models oh how the world works

Question 10

What is confirmation bias?

Answer 10

Confirmation bias: tendency to seek out evidence that supports our beliefs and deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that contradicts them (once we have a belief in mind, we tend to look for and find evidence that supports it)

• Preconception often leads us to focus on evidence that supports our beliefs = tunnel vision
• Judging right and wrong, our side almost always seem to be in the right, and the other side in the wrong

Question 11

What is belief perseverance?

Answer 11

Belief perseverance: tendency to stick to our initial beliefs even when evidence contradicts them (don’t confuse me with the facts)

Question 12

What is a metaphysical claim?

Answer 12

Metaphysical claims: assertions about the world that we can’t test
→ Assertions about the existence of God, the soul, and afterlife; these however aren’t wrong

Question 13

What is a pseudoscience?

Answer 13

Pseudoscience: set of claims that seems scientific but isn’t; lacks of safeguards against confirmation bias and belief perseverance (we need to distinguish claims that are genuinely scientific from those that are imposters of science)

Question 14

What is the downside of the growing popularity of psychology?

Answer 14

Misinformation explosion” due to the lack of quality control (poorly supported beliefs are more popular)

Question 15

What are the 7 warning signs of pseudoscience?

Answer 15

1. Exaggerated claims
2. Overreliance on anecdotes
3. Absence of connectivity to other research: amazing new innovations in research have shown that eye massage results in reading speeds 10x faster than average
4. Lack of review by other scholars
5. Lack of self-correction when contrary evidence is published
   Many scientific claims turn out to be wrong and with time these are weeded out, but in pseudoscience wrong claims never seem to go away due to the belief perseverance despite contrary evidence + they are rarely updated in light of new data
6. Meaningless “psychobabble” that uses fancy scientific.sounding terms that don’t make sense
7. Talk of proof instead of evidence

Question 16

Why aren’t anecdotes reliable?

Answer 16

1. Base claims on the dramatic reports of 1 or 2 individuals → those that benefit and reinforce their product to make it seem more trustworthy and efficient
2. Don’t follow a cause-effect line; rather, they leave unspoken factors that may have been responsible as well (weight loss due to a tea; maybe, the person also went on an additional diet or exercised)
3. Anecdotes aren’t representative: maybe a bunch of people tried the tea and ended up gaining weight and they failed to mention it
4. Anecdotes are difficult to verify

Question 17

What is an ad hoc immunizing hypothesis?

Answer 17

Loopholes that defenders of a theory use to protect it from being disproved (vibes of an experiment are interfering with their psychic powers) making it impossible to test

Question 18

Why are we drawn to pseudoscience?

Answer 18

→ Brains are predisposed to make order out of disorder and find sense in nonsense (this is adaptive since it helps us simplify the world
→ Motivational: we believe, because we want to believe → pseudosciences like astrology may give us comfort because they seem to offer us sense of control over an unpredictable world

Question 19

What are the 3 main types of fallacies?

Answer 19

1. Emotional reasoning fallacy: error of using our emotions as guides for evaluating the validity of a claim

Findings that challenge our pre-existing beliefs often make us angry; whereas those that confirm make us happy → mistake that because a claim makes us feel uncomfortable it must be wrong and we completely disregard it

2. Bandwagon fallacy: error of assuming that a claim is correct because many people believe it → popular opinion isn’t a dependable guide to accuracy of assertion
3. Not me fallacy: error of believing that we’re immune from errors in thinking that afflict other people

• Can mistakenly lead to conclude that we don’t require scientific method, because they are so certain that their claims are right that they don’t bother to test these claims
• “Bias blind spot”: demonstrate most people are unaware of their own biases, but they are of others
• Most of us believe we don’t have biases since we’ve grown accustomed to seeing the world through our lenses

Question 20

List 3 reasons that make pseudosciences dangerous

Answer 20

1. Opportunity cost: what we give up

• Pseudoscientific treatments for mental disorders can lead people to forgo opportunities to seek effective treatments
• Even treatments that are themselves harmless can cause harm indirectly by causing people to forfeit proper treatment

2. Direct harm: direct psychological or physical damage
3. Inability to think scientifically as citizens: we need scientific thinking skills to reach educated decisions regarding the claims that come up today

Question 21

What is scientific skepticism?

Answer 21

Evaluates all claims with an open mind but insists on persuasive evidence before accepting them

• Willingness to keep an open mind to all claims
• Willingness to accept claims only after researchers have subjected them to careful scientific tests
• Unwillingness to accept claims on the basis of authority alone

Question 22

What is the difference between critical and scientific thinking?

Answer 22

Critical thinking: hallmark of scientific skepticism; set of skills for evaluating all claims in an open-minded and careful fashion

Scientific thinking: set of skills for overcoming our own biases (blind us from evidence we prefer to ignore)

Question 23

What are the 6 principles underlying scientific thinking?

Answer 23

1. Ruling out rival hypotheses: Have important alternative explanations for the findings been excluded
2. Correlation vs.causation: Can we be sure that A causes B?
   Correlational designs don’t permit causal inferences (correlation isn’t causation)
   Correlation-causation fallacy: fact that two variables are correlated doesn’t necessarily mean that one causes the other
3. Falsifiability: Can the claim be disproved?
   Flasifiable: capable of being disproven ( if a theory isn’t falsifiable, we can’t test it)
4. Replicability: Can the result be duplicated in other studies?
   Replicability: study’s findings can be duplicated consistently, if they can’t be duplicated, increases the odds that the original findings were due to chance
5. Extraordinary claims: is the evidence as strong as the claim?
6. OCCAM’S Razor: Does a simpler explanation fit the data just as well?
   Principle of parsimony: if two explanations account equally well for a phenomenon, we should select the more parsimonious (the simpler is likely right)

Question 24

What was srtucturalism?

Answer 24

Structuralism: the elements of the mind (what is conscious thought like)

-Aimed to identify the basic elements of psychological experience
-Adopting introspection → structuralists wanted to create a comprehensive map of the elements of consciousness

Problems
-Highly trained introspectionism often disagreed on their subjective reports (unable to report what came to their mind when performing the calculation)

Emphasis on: “systematic observation” to study conscious awareness
Wrong by assuming that an imperfect method like introspection could provide all the information needed for a complete science
Learning outcome: multiple methods are needed to understand complex psychological phenomena

Question 25

What is functionalism?

Answer 25

Functionalism: psychology meets Darwin (why do we forget)

Strive to understand the adaptive purposes or functions of psychological characteristics

Rejection of structuralist approach and methods → careful introspection doesn’t create a # of static elements of consciousness but rather an ever-changing “stream of consciousness” (capture character’s thoughts)

Natural selection: physical and behavioural characteristics evolved because they increased the chances of survival and reproduction → applied to psychology
Figure out how evolved functions that psychological characteristics serve for organisms

Question 26

What is behaviourism?

Answer 26

Behaviourism: The laws of learning

Focuses on uncovering the general principles of learning underlying human and animal behaviour

All behaviours are products of a group of basic learning principles
- Human behaviour can be comprehended just by looking outside the organism (rewards and punishments delivered by the environment), no need to grasp the inside

-Provided a warning on the hazards of relying too heavily on reports that can’t be verified objectively

Question 27

What is cognitivism?

Answer 27

Cognitivism: opening the black box (examine connections between inputs and outputs)
Cognition: mental processes involved in different aspects of thinking
Cognitive psychology argues that our thinking affects our behavior in powerful ways

Cognitivists argued that a psychology based solely on rewards and punishments will never adequate because our interpretation of such is a crucial determinant of our behaviour
Without understanding how people evaluate information, we’ll never fully grasp the causes of their behaviour
We learn by insight, rather than by rewards
Has established strong linkages to the study of brain functioning → better understanding the bases of thinking, memory, and othe mental functions

Answer 28

Psycoanalysis: plumbing the depths of unconscious

• Focused on internal psychological processes
• Primary influences on behaviour aren’t forces outside the organism (rewards and punishments), but rather unconscious drives
• State that much of everyday life is filled with symbols - Goal is to decode those symbolic meanings (dreams, slips of tongue) to get to the roots of deep-seated psychological conflicts
• Especial emphasis is put on infancy and childhood given that they believe that the core of our personality is molded in the first few years of life

Controversial
- Hinders progress of scientific psychology since it focuses heavily on unconscious processes that are difficult to falsify
-This is refuted by the claim that important mental processing goes on outside of conscious awareness

Question 29

What is a clinical psychologist?

Answer 29

Assess, diagnose, and treat mental disorders; conduct research on mental disorders

-Don’t need a PhD

Question 30

What is a counselling psychologist?

Answer 30

work with people experiencing temporary or relatively self-contained life problems (marital conflict)

• Don’t work with people with serious mental disorders, like clinical psychologists do

Question 31

What is a school psychologist?

Answer 31

focus on aiding students’ behavioural, emotional, and learning difficulties

• Not the same as educational psychologists (focuses on helping instructors identify better methods for teaching and evaluating)

Question 32

What is a developmental psychologist?

Answer 32

Study how and why people change over time; research populations of different ages to evaluate the change

Question 33

What is an experimental psychologist?

Answer 33

Use research methods to study memory, language, thinking, and social behaviour

Question 34

What is a biological psychologist?

Answer 34

Examine physiological bases of behaviour in animals and humans

Question 35

What is a forensic psychologist?

Answer 35

Prisons jails, and other facilities to assess and diagnose inmates and assist with their rehabilitation and treatment; others work as eyewitness testimony or jury decision making

Question 36

What is an industrial-organizational psychologist?

Answer 36

Select productive employees, evaluate performance, and examine effects of different working conditions; design equipment to maximize performance and minimize accidents