Chapter 7 Flashcards
How is the social science ontology and epistemology different to natural science?
Humans are not causal machines which can be understood in the lab.
What does natural science do to context, meaning and intentionality?
Strips phenomena of these.
According to social science people’s actions and experiences are given meaning in interaction with what?
Other people.
What does the concept of ‘being-in-the-world’ mean?
Actions and experiences come from our setting
The lifeworld consists of which four dimensions that can be applied to almost every psychological phenomenon?
A phenomenon is always social, embodied, temporal, spatial.
What does natural science step back from?
Experience, what we take to be reality (taken-for-granted attitude), implicated and changing world of psychological processes.
What does discursive psychology step back from?
From experience.
What does phenomenology require you to step into?
Experience, but in a new way.
Whose experience does natural science try to identify?
Everyone’s experience, universal laws.
What does natural science focus on?
The external which can be described and is measurable from a third person perspective.
Why is emotion not really worth studying for many natural scientists in the past? How did scientists get around this problem?
Because an emotion is clearly internal and subjective. They got around this by e.g. trying to work out which facial expressions are universal, observing changes in the ANS, trying to identify which parts of the brain are responsible for specific emotions (brain imaging has done this more recently)
What, for Husserl, is the natural attitude?
The common sense way of thinking and experiencing the world. We don’t notice we are experiencing. Natural science steps back by thinking, for example, that an apple is not just an apple but a mass of atoms. An emotion is neural activity etc.
What are four limits of quantification?
What about setting, context, meaning, experience?
Is experimentation useful?
Yes but not for complex social phenomena.
Can we reduce subjective feelings and emotions and focus on the external, measurable and observable?
No.
What is reductionism?
Reducing something so that it distorts our understanding.
What is reification?
To reduce something (like an emotion) to a thing which is measurable.
How did Buss et al. convert jealousy to a variable?
Asked men and women whether they would be more jealous if their partner had sex or were emotionally attached to another person.
What was the basis of Buss et al.’s reasoning?
Men and women’s jealousy modules have evolved differently.
What does the Buss et al. experiment assume? Ignore?
Assumes that the two types of jealousy exist. Ignores how jealousy feels.
In a separate study, what physiological indicator did Buss et al. assume to b indicative of jealousy?
Increased pulse rate.
What is the double shot hypothesis which casts doubt on Buss et al.’s findings?
The logic is that men can have sex easily, without love. The same logic suggests that men assume that women need to be in love to have sex. The double shot is that women having sex must also be in love.
What is a problem with suggesting that increased pulse rate is indicative of jealousy?
Just thinking about any kind of sex increases pulse rate in men. It’s the same for men thinking about sex with girlfriend and thinking about someone else having sex with girlfriend.
What is the ultimate critique of Buss et al.?
That beliefs are just constructed perspectives.
What is epoché?
Step back from natural attitude and scientific assumptions. Bracket out natural attitude and scientific positivism and focus on conscious experience.
