Lecture 1: Psychology as a Science Flashcards
What are the different approaches to answering psychological questions?
1) Social
2) Mental
3) Behavioural
4) Neurological
5) Neurochemical
6) Molecular
Why is psychology so difficult to study?
1) HUMAN BEHAVIOUR CANNOT BE RELIABLY MEASURED
2) Behaviour is difficult to predict
3) Behaviour is multiply determined
4) Determinants are not independent
5) Influences can go unnoticed
6) Individuals are different to groups
7) Concepts are popular but ill-defined
8) People react when they are being studied
9) Every culture is different
What is Naïve Realism?
The idea that we do not experience the world as it actually is and not everyone receives information in the same way (has different views of the same information).
What is Patternicity?
Agreeing with our need for pattern recognition, familiarity is imposed upon natural or random patterns.
What are Logical Fallacies?
The idea that human rationality us classically bounded and so we think we act rationally when we do not.
What are 6 common fallacies?
1) Bandwagon
2) Either-or
3) Appeal to authority
4) Appeal to ignorance
5) Argument from Antiquity
6) NOT ME…
What is Pseudoscience?
Something that looks like science because of the techniques it uses but it is not real science.
What are the 7 warning signs of Pseudoscience?
1) Exaggerated claims:
2) Absence of connectivity:
3) Ad-hoc immunisation:
4) Psychobabble:
5) Lack of review:
6) Proof not evidence:
7) Anecdotes:
What defines a good theory?
1) consolidates previous observations (what we know)
2) generates future hypotheses (future predictions)
What are the 6 principals of scientific thinking?
1) Rival hypotheses
2) Replicability
3) Correlation vs. Causation
4) Extraordinary claims
5) Falsifiability
6) Occam’s Razor
What was Descartes main theory?
- Concerned with resolving the Dualism problem.
- Dualists thought mind and brain were separate.
- Monists: one kind of ‘stuff’.
- interaction between physical and mental thought to be in the pineal gland.
- wrong but important in hormone reproduction.
What is Natural Selection?
(1859)
The idea that tendencies have adaptive value.
What is Introspection?
Wundt thought it was possible to boil down complex experiences to combinations of simpler sensations/processes.
What is Structuralism?
The idea that you can decompose something (vision) into many experiences (32,800).
What is Behaviourism?
Introspection about mental processes is hard to verify and so you can only reliably measure behaviour.
