Chapter 1 Reading

Question 1

data

Answer 1

any information collected through formal observation or measurement

Question 2

research psychologists

Answer 2

use scientific method to explore origins of behavior

Question 3

psychologist practitioners

Answer 3

use existing research to offer psychological help to people

Question 4

people as everyday psychologists

Answer 4

everyday people try to understand the root causes of things in their everyday lives, so as to predict+act better next time

Question 5

intuition problem

Answer 5

the way people gather and understand everyday info is often wrong. ex: overconfidence in visual ID of perps, ESP/astrology. Roots of this wrongness often studied in psych.

Question 6

hindsight bias

Answer 6

When something happens and people believe that they could have predicted it, but they probably couldn’t have

Question 7

scientific method

Answer 7

Empirical study of nature. Collect, organize, analyze data. Scientific method is the set of assumptions, rules, and procedures that scientists use to conduct empirical research.

Question 8

values v facts

Answer 8

Values (beliefs) cannot be proven true or false, however, facts related to those values can be studied and made available to inform values. Facts can be proven false later

Question 9

levels of explanation

Answer 9

perspectives used to understand behavior. Lower levels: biology, neurology. middle: individual characteristics, abilities. Highest: social groups and organization

Question 10

example of uses of levels:

Answer 10

studying depression. low approach results in prozac (god bless), middle in psychotherapy, highest studying prevalence in man vs woman.

Question 11

individual differences

Answer 11

variations among people in physical or psychological dimensions. one of the main difficulties in studying psychology, different things manifest themselves in vary different ways in different people.

Question 12

multiply determined

Answer 12

influenced by multiple factors. something that is multiply determined is more difficult to study as you have to account of all these factors, which occur at different levels of explanation.

Question 13

multiply determined example

Answer 13

depression: biological imbalance in brain, lashing out leads to people to treat them negatively, two become intertwined

Question 14

unconcious influece

Answer 14

big part of freud’s thinking. a lot of what we do is outside of our consciousness, making it hard to study. repressed memories are ones we have discarded.

Question 15

origins of scientific psychology

Answer 15

grew out of philosophy when scientific methods began to be applied

Question 16

big 5 questions

Answer 16

Nature vs nuture (genetics vs experience), free will vs determinism, accuracy vs inaccuracy, councious vs unconscious processing, differences vs similiarities

Question 17

nature v nurture

Answer 17

to what extent is ourselves determined by genetics vs our life experiences

Question 18

heritability

Answer 18

Proportion of differences (physical and mental) between people that is due to genetics

Question 19

free will vs determinism

Answer 19

how much do people have control over their own actions? Can our behaviors be predicted? recently thought: not as much control as thought

Question 20

accuracy vs inaccuracy

Answer 20

how good are people at processing information? recent: good enough but far from perfect

Question 21

concious vs unconscious processing

Answer 21

how aware are we of how we process information and what causes our actions?

Question 22

differences vs similarities

Answer 22

how are we all similar and/or different? how big are the differences?

Question 23

problem with philosophy as psychology

Answer 23

no methods to settle claims, not scientific

Question 24

structuralism

Answer 24

from Wilhelm Wundt, field of psych that tries to identify basic elements/structures of psych experience. important the first big scientific approach to psych.

Question 25

introspection

Answer 25

in which subjects create a “map” of their consciousness, by describing what happens as they do different mental tasks. Asks “What?”

Question 26

ex of introspection

Answer 26

reporting WHAT sound takes longer than reporting heard sound: difference in time between sensation and perception.

Question 27

functionalism

Answer 27

school of psych. tries to understand why animals and humans have developed psych aspects they currently possess. grew out of natural selection. no longer around but grew into evolutionary psych. the
asks “why?”

Question 28

evolutionary psychology

Answer 28

branch of psych, applies natural selection to human and animal behavior. problem: difficult to test, no fossil record.

Question 29

fitness

Answer 29

key component of evolutionary psych. how does having a given characteristic help an individual organism survive and reproduce at a higher rate than other members that don’t have the characteristic. i.e. men get jealous to hold+protect mate.

Question 30

psychodynamic psych

Answer 30

most familiar to most people. approach to human understanding that focuses on role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, memories.

Question 31

behaviorism

Answer 31

school of psych that is based on premise that it’s not possible to objectively study mind, psychologists should limit their attention to study of behavior itself

Question 32

stimulus response

Answer 32

Ivan Pavlov’s dog. events in environment trigger specific behavioral responses.

Question 33

cognitive psych

Answer 33

a field of psych that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment

Question 34

neuroimaging

Answer 34

the use of various techniques to provide pictures of the structure of the living brain

Question 35

socio-cultural psych

Answer 35

the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behavior.

Question 36

conformity

Answer 36

changing or beliefs and behaviors to be similar to people we care about

Question 37

social norms

Answer 37

ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are shared by a group and believed by them to be appropriate

Question 38

example of social norms east vs west

Answer 38

west promotes individualism, east collectivism. westerners more interested in their own success but easterners are happy about success of others