The rise of behaviourism Flashcards
What were the two goals in the German education system?
- 2 goals: 1. Conduct research 2. Make good citizens
- Leading in the development of science
What were Wilhelm Wundt’s firsts?
- Scientific psychologist
- Psychology course
- Psychology lab (beginning of modern psychology)
- Book on the Principles of Physiological Psychology
What were Wilhelm Wundt’s three goals?
- Analyse elements of consciousness
- Connection between elements
- Find laws
What did Wilhelm Wundt believe?
- Psychophysical parallelism –every physical event has a mental counterpart, and vice versa
- Assumption: measurable variables are bi-products of sensations and movements.
- Physiological Psychology
What were Wilhelm Wundt’s three methods?
- Psychophysical methods (study between physical stimuli and positive states)
- Historical method (products of human cultures)
- Method of introspection
What is the method of introspection? (Wilhelm Wundt)
- Ability to observe the phenomena
- Pay close attention
- Repeated experiments
- Conditions should vary
- Distinction between internal perception and experimental self-observation was made due to the criticism of introspection
- Internal perception (reflect inward)
- Experimental self-observation
Problems with introspection - Readiness potentials experiment - Libet (2002)
- EEG’s used to measure brains readiness potential
- Looked at hand muscle activity, asked to flex hand when they felt the urge to do so
- Onset of RP already in action prior to the hand flex, shows inaccurate perception of own behaviour
Problems with introspection - Love on a bridge experiment -Dutton and Aron (1974)
- Attractive women go up to men on a scary or stable bridge
- Ask them to participate in a study about scenic beauty effects creativity
- Gives phone number at the end for an optional follow up
- 50% in the scary condition called, vs 13% in the non-scary condition
- More sexual themes from men on the scary bridge, due to heightened arousal
Problems with introspection - Shopper’s choice experiment -Nisbett and Wilson (1977)
- Completed survey about pantyhose preference
- The rightmost choice was selected the most often (40%)
- “Little ability to access higher-order processes”
- Participants don’t know why they prefer the one they chose
“Intuition’s Dozen Deadly Sins” -Myers 2004
- Memory construction
- Misreading our own minds
- Mis-predicting our own feelings
- Mis-predicting our own behaviors
- Hindsight bias
- Self-serving bias
- Overconfidence bias
- Fundamental attribution error
- Belief preservation and confirmation bias
- Representativeness and availability
- Framing
- Illusory correlation
1 Memory construction
- Influenced by multiple factors
- False memories can form
- Encoding – storage – retrieval
- Memory is not a recording device
- Error can occur such as forgetting
- Influences how memory is reconstructed
2 Misreading our own minds
Often we don’t know why we do what we do
3 Mis-predicting our own feelings
We can mis-predict the intensity and duration of our emotions
4 Mis-predicting our own behaviours
Intuitive self-predictions can go astray
5 Hindsight bias
- ‘I knew it all along’ bias
- Think something will happen after it has happened
- Memory distortion (mis-remembering)
- Inevitability (it had to happen)
- Foreseeability (I knew it would happen)
6 Self-serving bias
- Take credit for success
- Won’t take credit for failure – blame outside source
- Takes away personal responsibility
- We can show inflated self-assessments
- Attribute successes to personal attributes
7 Overconfidence bias
- Our assessments of our knowledge can be more confident than correct
- More confident than you should be
8 Fundamental attribution error
- Attributing others’ behaviour to their dispositions by discounting situational forces
- Discount the situation
- Internal explanations rather than the situation
9 Confirmation bias and belief preservation
- Preferring information which supports their own beliefs, denies any which contradicts
- Prefers information that support beliefs
- Even after their foundation is discredited
10 Availability and representativeness heuristics
- Mental shortcuts, helps us make decisions and judgments with no analysis
- Can lead to incorrect judgment e.g. more likely to die in a plane crash than die from a disease
- Base judgments on how easily the information comes to mind
- Base judgments on how similar something is compared to the typical case
11 Framing effect
-Judgments flip flop depending on how the information is presented
12 Illusory correlation
- Perceiving correlations where none exist
- Relationship between variables when there is no relationship
Experimental psychology in Germany
- German Professors were encouraged to pursue their own interests
- Baconian research methods were used to collect facts
- Germany included biology as part of science
Who was William James ?
- One of the 1st Psychologists
- Functionalist – Introspection (best available method at the time) – Darwin’s theory – Influential in Psychology in US
- Wrote Principles of Psychology
- Looked at functions of the mind
Who was Edward Titchener ?
- Studied under Wundt
- Structuralism (through introspection) – Structure of the mind – Introspection – Not big in the US
- Thought UK wasn’t receptive of psychology
- Didn’t address issues which the US had at the time
- US was influenced by Darwin and James
Why was functionalism embraced in the US?
- Economic superpower
- By 1900 41 labs
- APA founded in 1892
- Darwin’s work was influential
- Influx of immigrants (20 million)
- Invested heavily in research
What happened in the Industrial Revolution ?
- Natural resources
- Human resources
- Tech inventions (e.g. railworks, telegraph, calculator)
- Darwin’s theory appealed
- Functionalism succeeded
What did Thorndike do?
- Changed method in 2 ways:
- Did not rely on anecdotal evidence
- Based conclusions on behaviour (observations)
- Law of effect –behaviours followed by positive consequences are repeated and strengthened
- Wanted to look at how children learn, but used animals in a controlled environment
What did Pavlov do?
- Physiologist studying digestive system
- Accidental discovery: classical conditioning
What did Watson do?
- Established Behaviour School of Psychology
- Classical conditioning of emotional responses
- Psychology should be objective
- Shift from introspection to observation – marked the clear transition
- Little Albert
What was Comte ?
- Because science is based on observation and experimentation, findings are always true
- Scientific theories are summaries of empirical findings; therefore they are always true as well
- Because scientific knowledge is infallible, it should be the motor of all progress
Why is animal research helpful?
- Cornerstone of human progress
- Positivism –describe experienced phenomena
What 3 points need to be met in animal research?
- Operational definitions are needed – Variables must be expressed numerically
- Distinction between independent and dependent variables – Independent –characteristics of the environment. Dependent –measured the effect of the IV
- Needs verification – Increases objectivity
- Statements are only useful if they can be verified by empirical observation
What did Skinner do?
- Operant conditioning – Reinforcement – Punishment
- Radical behaviourism
What did Tolmon do?
- Purposive Behaviourism
- Latent learning –acquisition of knowledge without observable behaviour
- Animal and human behaviours are motivated by goals
- Partially influential in the development of cognitive psychology
What were Tolmon’s 3 conditions?
- Control group: Never found food (HNR)
- Control group: Found food throughout (HR)
- Experimental group: Found food at the end of maze from the 11th day on (HNR-R)
