Unit 1 - Chapters 1 and 2 Flashcards
The Problem of Intuition
- not thorough or accurate
- confirmation bias
- hindsight bias
Empirical/Scientific Method
Values vs Facts
Values are personal statements.
Facts are objective statements determined to be accurate through empirical study
Levels of explanation in psychology
Lower Biological
Depression is, in part, genetically influenced.
Depression is influenced by the action of neurotransmitters in the brain.
Middle Interpersonal
People who are depressed may interpret the events that occur to them too negatively.
Psychotherapy can be used to help people talk about and combat depression.
Higher Cultural and social
Women experience more depression than do men.
The prevalence of depression varies across cultures and historical time periods.
Critical thinking in psychology - 8 steps
1 - Ask questions and be willing to wonder 2 - Define the problem 3 - Examine the evidence 4 - Analyze assumptions and biases 5 - Avoid emotional reasoning 6 - Avoid oversimplification 7 - Consider other interpretations 8 - Tolerate uncertainty
Peer Review
Thus, science is essentially a collaborative process, with all aspects of process and results thrown open to the wider community for consideration and analysis. In science, your conclusions have to be based on empirical evidence, and the merits of the conclusions will have to be judged by peers before they are published.
Structuralism: Introspection and the awareness of subjective experience
- school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of psychological experience. Its goal was to create a periodic table of the elements of sensations, similar to the periodic table of elements that had recently been created in chemistry.
- Introspection involves asking research participants to describe exactly what they experience as they work on mental tasks, such as viewing colours, reading a page in a book, or performing a math problem. A participant who is reading a book might report, for instance, that he saw some black and coloured straight and curved marks on a white background.
Functionalism and evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology accepts the functionalists’ basic assumption, namely that many human psychological systems, including memory, emotion, and personality, serve key adaptive functions
Evolutionary psychology has some limitations. One problem is that many of its predictions are extremely difficult to test.
Psychodynamic psychology
Psychodynamic psychology is an approach to understanding human behaviour that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories. Psychodynamics is grounded in psychoanalysis, but it includes other approaches that are not purely Freudian
Behaviourism
Behaviourism is a school of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind; therefore, psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behaviour itself. Behaviourists believe that the human mind is like a black box into which stimuli are sent and from which responses are received. They argue that there is no point in trying to determine what happens in the box because we can successfully predict behaviour without knowing what happens inside the mind. Furthermore, behaviourists believe that it is possible to develop laws of learning that can explain all behaviours.
Humanism
Neither psychoanalysis nor behaviourism accounted for the rich inner life that people experience, for the striving for self-betterment, on human needs and motivation, or for the belief that we control our own destinies. Out of this disagreement with psychoanalysis and behaviourism, humanism was born.
Humanist psychology arose with an optimistic and positive view of human nature.
The cognitive approach and cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment. These actions correspond well to the processes that computers perform.
Social-cultural psychology
social-cultural psychology, which is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behaviour.
we frequently change our beliefs and behaviours to be similar to those of the people we care about — a process known as conformity. An important aspect of social-cultural psychology are social norms, which are the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate (Asch, 1952; Cialdini, 1993). Norms include customs, traditions, standards, and rules as well as the general values of the group.
A culture represents the common set of social norms, including religious and family values and other moral beliefs, shared by the people who live in a geographical region
Learning is an active process
- students learned information best when they related it to aspects of themselves, a phenomenon known as the self-reference effect.
.-An approach known as the method of loci involves linking each of the pieces of information that you need to remember to places that you are familiar with. - One of the most fundamental principles of learning is known as the spacing effect
- Our ability to adequately assess our own knowledge is known as metacognition.
Basic/Applied Research
- Basic research is research that answers fundamental questions about behaviour
- Applied research is research that investigates issues that have implications for everyday life and provides solutions to everyday problems.
Scientific Method
1 - Make observations 2 - Think of interesting questions 3 - Formulate Hypotheses 4 - Develop testable predictions 5 - Gather data to test predictions 6 = Refine, Alter, Expand or reject hypotheses 7 - Develop General theories
