Strengthening the scientific standing of psychology Flashcards
Describe what eugenics is and how it affected America
Eugenics is a social philosophy claiming that the fate of a nation can be improved by selective breeding of its inhabitants.
It started with Galton, who saw this as a logical consequence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. However, whereas Galton predominantly preached positive eugenics (improve society by encouraging people with desirable features to have more children), others after him diverged towards negative eugenics, Several US states adopted legislation aimed at preventing marriage or at compulsory sterilisation of certain individuals (e.g. mentally retarded people). For instance, in 1913, Iowa supported the establishment of sterilisation laws aimed at ‘the prevention of the procreation of criminals, rapists, idiots, feeble minded, imbeciles, lunatics, drunkards, drug fiends, epileptics, syphilitics, moral and sexual perverts, and diseased and degenerate persons’
Name two other American values which Psychology would have to subscibe to to survive
the Americans believed in the importance of the environment. Being a country of immigrants, they were convinced that human characteristics and achievements were not solely due to inheritance but depended on the environment as well. Among other things, this meant that one could change and control human actions for the better
Finally, there was mistrust of intellectualism, knowledge for the sake of knowledge. America was a nation of common-sense businessmen, not interested in abstract science (which was left to Europe), but in practical accomplishments
What type of psychology resulted in matching these values?
Functionalism: “The first American psychology”
How did the Americans interpret Wundt’s research differently to him?
When Wundt started his laboratory, it was centred on mental chronometry. Wundt had continued the work of Donders on response times in simple reaction tasks and extended Donders’s theory from three stages (simple reaction, input selection, output selection) to five. Wundt assumed that the durations of the stages were fixed (as was the case in physics and physiology) and could be determined by precise measurement. However, even though the research was based on highly motivated participants, there were large individual differences in the estimates, making it impossible to derive a scientific law from them. Arguably this is one of the reasons why Wundt, in his later years, turned to introspection and the historical method. The Americans, however, saw the differences between the participants as evidence for Darwin’s theory. Rather than a nuisance, the individual differences pointed to inherited variability.
What is meant by phrenology?
view that mental functions are localised in the brain and that the capacity of a function corresponds to the size of the brain part devoted to it
With which scientist did phrenology start?
German physician Franz Joseph Gall (1758– 1828)
What practical technique did phrenology give rise to which was claimed to be able to predict the strengths and weaknesses of a person? (2)
cranioscopy; By measuring the skull, it was thus possible to predict the strengths and weaknesses of a person.
Phrenology gave rise to personality assessment on the basis of scalp analysis (by locating the bumps and the troughs on the head)
What two other movements became popular in America around this time (phrenology) which psychologists were associated with?
Mesmerism and spiritualism
What was the lay people’s perception of psychology around this time? (phrenology)
In the second half of the nineteenth century, lay society associated psychology with phrenology, mesmerism, spiritualism and other paranormal subjects. In an attempt to turn the tide, the ‘new psychologists’ (as they called themselves) published hundreds of articles about the new, scientific psychology in popular magazines. Unfortunately, their impact was limited, because the topics they talked about failed to capture the public’s imagination to the same degree as phrenology, mesmerism and spiritualism
What were established in the US which reflected scientific psychology expanding rapidly there? (3)
many laboratories were established at universities, the APA was founded, and two important journals were initiated
What discoveries and endeavours first inspired animal research?
Evolution theory, studies on genetics and hereditary.
As a result of Darwin’s and Spencer’s (1820–1903) writings, many learned individuals became interested in animal behaviour and started to interpret it in terms of the struggle for life. They looked for similarities between human and animal behaviour to place the different species on the evolution scale, and they searched for evidence of intelligent behaviour that had been passed on from generation to generation.
Name a name in the early enterprise of animal research and describe how he perceived animal research
George Romanes (1848–1894). According to him, the approach combined observations of behaviour with inference of the animal’s adaptive capacities. These capacities were considered to be the result of a mind that resem- bled that of humans. In other words, the mental processes in animals were thought to be of the same sort as you would expect to find after introspection of your own consciousness
What is anthropomorphic interpretation and how does it apply to early animal research?
interpreting behaviour of non-human living creatures by attributing human motives and human-like intelligence to them; On the basis of anecdotal evidence authors claimed that animals had reasoning capacities similar to those of humans.
How did Thorndike change how he studied animals?
- he did not rely on anecdotal evidence, but on careful observation of animals put in controlled environments.
- he based his conclusions on the animals’ behaviour, not on what supposedly went on in their minds.
What practical method of studying animals did Thorndike often employ?
He put hungry animals (chickens, rats, dogs and in particular cats) in puzzle boxes he constructed himself. Outside the box, food was presented which the animal could reach if it managed to solve the puzzle and open the door (e.g. by moving a lever, pulley or treadle). These were known as his puzzle boxes
What law did Thorndike derive from these puzzle boxes and how was this observed?
Thorndike noted how long it took the animal to get out of the box. He observed that the time rapidly decreased on successive trials, because the animal did not repeat the behaviours that had failed before but focused on the behaviours that had been successful. Thorndike called this the law of effect. Behaviours that are followed by positive consequences are strengthened and repeated; behaviours that are not followed by such consequences are not repeated.
How did Thorndike examine whether the animal had any “knowledge” of the contingency involved? What did he conclude?
Thorndike had cats observe other cats solve the puzzle. Afterwards he put these ‘expert’ cats in the box and examined whether they solved the puzzle faster than naïve cats that had not observed the required behaviour. Given that this was not the case, Thorndike concluded that the learning consisted of mak- ing an association between the situation of being in the box and performing the appropriate act.
What did Thorndike call this type of learning?
instrumental
conditioning; learning on the basis of the law of effect; called operant conditioning by Skinner
What does comparitive psychology entail?
study of behaviour of animals, usually with the intention to shed light on human functioning within the framework of the evolutionary theory
Who published a scathing article against the lack of scientific rigour in the ongoing investigations in most psychological laboratories and subsequently formed the beginning of behaviourism?
John B. Watson (1878–1958)
How did evolutionary theory influence how behaviourists viewed their methods?
Survival in a context of natural selection primarily depends on how the animal acts, not on what it ‘thinks’.
What was Watson’s stance on studying mental phenomena such as consciousness, thinking, feelings, motives, plans, purposes, images, knowledge or the self?
In order to become a real science, psychology had to focus on observable behaviour (just as Thorndike had done) and ignore everything that referred to consciousness, thinking, feelings, motives, plans, purposes, images, knowledge or the self. In the manifesto Watson left an opening for later study of more complex behaviour (such as imagination and reasoning). In his later writings he came to deny the importance of such behaviour.
Watson’s attempt to increase the scientific standing of psychology was embedded within a wider movement to make science the cornerstone of human progress. What was this wider movement called?
Positivism
What three messages did scientifically minded authors give to convince society that scientific knowledge was superior to humanist knowledge?
- Because science is based on observation and experimentation, its findings are always true.
- Scientific theories are summaries of the empirical findings. Therefore, they are always true as well.
- Because scientific knowledge is infallible, it should be the motor of all progress.
