Lecture 11 - Rethinking Psychology Flashcards
What is meant with old history being internalist and presentist?
It doesn’t focus on context only on the details within a discipline + an explicit attempt is often made to interpret past work in light of present knowledge
What is the whig interpretation/which conception of history?
A type of historic interpretation that tells the story of an oppressed field > glorious blabla (aka that of progress that gets better with time)
What was Boring’s “history of experimental psychology”? What biases did it hold?
It was the first book on the history of exp. psych, focused on white western man, focus on exp, tradition and only documented psych as improvement over time
What are differences with the new history of psych vs. the old? (4)
- Critical view rather than ceremonial
- Contextual rather than the history of ideas
- More inclusive
- See the issues at the time as they would have appeared back then
What is a diagnostic example of science changing the conception of ourselves?
Burn-out
1. First observed among employees in human services (first in society)
2. Later (post-1990s) research > burn-out in other fields + extensive line of research
How does Freudenberg’s definition of burn-out tie into it being societal and personal?
“A demon born of the society and times we live in and our ongoing struggle to invest our lives with meaning” - so yeah, both personal factors and societal interactions/changes
What was the view of burn-out in the 1970s?
A lack of reciprocity (erosion of traditional communities and rise of “me-culture”)
What may have been the historic name and form of burn-out?
Neurasthenia = fatigue and stress as symptoms
What is Ian Hacking’s looping effect of social kinds?
That social kinds usually start as arbitrary, but acquire causal power in our social system and also change over time
What is an example of a Looping?
Autism
1. Started out as abnormal introversion and egocentricity (acceptance of fantasy rather than reality)
2. Change in the 2000s (adding factors, obvs changing more to how you know it today)
The point = That categories are not neutral, but susceptible to change
What is Foucault’s opinion of mental disorders? What school of thought does he belong to?
Post-modernist + mental disorders are a way to exercising power and to outcast people
What is drapetomania and how does it illustrate Foucalt’s point?
A psychiatric disorder that was invented to label unto runaway slaves (and so, the exercising power point)
Why is the psychological test an example of ovelap of society and science?
- Could say that it is an objective test (e.g., doesn’t take demographic information into account)
- However, certainly used/wanted to be used to construct social orders, etc.
Why does the aptitude test become much more popular than the intelligence test in the USA?
- Immigration (unofficially to decide who does and does not get into the States)
- For war, to assess which soldiers are mentally stable enough to fulfill their tasks
- How to structure this new country (meritocracy- so social order according to cognitive/intelligence)
What is Gould’s critique of biological determinism?
A test is not neutral nor unbiased and that society is not an accurate reflection of our biology (e.g., the access to education, etc.)
How do political values influence the psych field?
Most are left-winged, so less attention of things like safety, criminality, immigration, etc.
The point, that themes that are uncomfortable for the values of the researchers get less attention
What does critical psych focus on?
Response against traditional focus on the individual > should keep in mind social, cultural and political context
