Prologue

Question 1

What is psychology?

Answer 1

The study of the mind and the brain.

Question 2

What are levels of explanation?

Answer 2

Rungs on a ladder - lower levels tied most closely to biological influences and higher levels to social influences.

Question 3

What is an epistemic pessimist?

Answer 3

A person who believes that certain questions regarding human nature are unanswerable.

Question 4

Meehl’s maxim is …

Answer 4

a guideline that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour

Question 5

If something is “multiply determined” it is …

Answer 5

caused by many factors

Question 6

What are single-variable explanations?

Answer 6

Explanations that try to account for complex behaviours in terms of only a single cause.

Question 7

Define multicollinearity.

Answer 7

Overlap among different causes of behaviour, often making it difficult to identify which cause or causes are operating.

Question 8

Reciprocal determinism

Answer 8

Tendency for people to mutually influence each other’s behaviour.

Question 9

Jangle fallacy

Answer 9

error of assuming that measures that carry the same label necessarily assess the same thing

Question 10

Reflexivity

Answer 10

paradox referring to the fact that the human brain is trying to understand itself

Question 11

Reactivity

Answer 11

tendency for people to behave differently when they know they are being studied
aka Hawthorne effect

Question 12

Individual differences

Answer 12

variations among people in their thinking, emotion and behaviour

Question 13

Emic

Answer 13

approach of studying a culture’s behaviour from the perspective of an insider

Question 14

Etic

Answer 14

approach of studying a culture’s behaviour from the perspective of an outsider

Question 15

Introspection

Answer 15

method by which trained observers carefully reflect and report on their mental experiences

Question 16

scientist-practitioner gap

Answer 16

divide between academic/psychologists who believe clinical practice is a science and those clinicians who believe it is an art

Question 17

structuralism

Answer 17

school of psychology aimed to identify the basic structures of psychological experience

Question 18

functionalism

Answer 18

school of psychology that aimed to understand the adaptive purposes of psychological characteristics

Question 19

behaviourism

Answer 19

school of psychology that focuses on uncovering the general laws of learning by looking outside the organism

Question 20

black box

Answer 20

used to describe behaviourists’ view of the mind - an unknown entity that we do not need to understand to explain behaviour

Question 21

cognition

Answer 21

mental processes involved in different aspects of thinking

Question 22

psychoanalysis

Answer 22

Freud - psychotherapy - focuses on internal drives and conflicts that shape the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mental processes

Question 23

basic research

Answer 23

research examining how the mind works

Question 24

applied research

Answer 24

research examining how we can use basic research to solve real-world problems

Question 25

evolutionary psychology

Answer 25

discipline that applies Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human and animal behaviour

Question 26

just-so stories

Answer 26

(often superficial) explanations made up after the fact; a term sometimes applied by critics to some evolutionary psychology hypotheses

Question 27

mind-body monists

Answer 27

those who believe that the mind is fully explained by the action of the brain and nervous system

Question 28

mind-body dualists

Answer 28

those who believe that the mind is not reducible to the brain and nervous system