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PS122 - Psychology in Context > Week 1 > Flashcards

Week 1 Flashcards

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1
Q

Why study the history of psychology

A
  • The study of the study of minds
  • Reveals how concepts and approaches to mind have changed
  • Learn about key advances in study of mind
  • Evolving schools of thought and zeitgeists
  • Place contemporary psychology in context
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2
Q

Psyche

A

mind

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3
Q

Logia

A

To study

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4
Q

Origins of psychology

A
  • Psychology is a relatively young science
  • Less than 200 years old
  • However study of human nature is much longer
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5
Q

Ancient Greek thought

A
  • Before development of science
  • The world was viewed as full of minds (souls and spirits) and magic
  • Greek science was first step towards naturalistic view of the world
  • EG Pythagorus, astronomy
  • Began to question what we really know about reality
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6
Q

Appearance and reality

A
  • There is sometimes a difference between appearance and reality
  • Which is to be trusted?
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7
Q

Plato – rationalism

A
  • Senses can be deceiving
  • Thus they should not be trusted
  • People should rely on logic instead
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8
Q

Allegory of the cave

A
  • Prisoners in a cave can only see shadows on a wall
  • These shadows become their reality
  • Once they are allowed to leave the cave can they see real objects
  • Cave is a parable of the human condition
  • Soul imprisoned in body and forced to look at imperfect copies of objects
  • Forms are the only true example
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9
Q

Empiricism

A
  • Contrasts with rationalism
  • Emphasises role of experience
  • Gains information through sensory perception and observation
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10
Q

Aristotle 384-322 BC

A
  • Gained knowledge from observation
  • Believed observation and analysis are reliable
  • Empiricist
  • He did no experimentation
  • Studied living things and analysed the nature of causes
  • Defined the soul as that which animates and gives form to matter
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11
Q

History after Aristotle

A
  • Romans invade Greece
  • Roman empire falls
  • Greek ideas preserved by Islamic scholars
  • Christian scholars rediscover the Greeks
  • Scientific revolution – Newton
  • Enlightenment – questions about how to approach the mind scientifically emerge
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12
Q

Rene Descartes

A
  • Mind body dualism
  • Rationalist
  • Cogito ergo sum
  • I think therefore I am
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13
Q

Mind body dualism

A
  • Ontological distinction
  • Mind and matter are fundamentally different things
  • Matter occupies space but doesn’t think
  • Mind thinks but doesn’t occupy space
  • The human mind is uniquely reflexive, linguistic and rational
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14
Q

John Locke

A
  • How do we acquire knowledge
  • Nature vs nurture
  • We don’t have innate ideas
  • Perception vs reality
  • Tabula rasa
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15
Q

David Hume

A
  • Skepticism
  • The age of reason
  • One of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment
  • Argued that reason is the slave of passions
  • We argue from our convictions, not to them
  • What do we really know from experience?
  • Experience actually provides fewer grounds of belief than we conventionally assume
  • Problem of falsifiability – swans
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16
Q

Correlation is not causation

A
  • This reasoning applies to what we take to be causes
  • Flames have so often been accompanied by the experience of heat that we take them to be the cause of heat
  • But there is no necessary reason to do so
  • It is merely a habitual belief
  • Cause itself is not perceivable
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17
Q

19th Century

A
  • Empirical science started investigating the senses experimentally
  • Move to apply physiology to study of the mind
  • Modern psychology emerged between 1850 and 1900
  • Principles of materialism and mechanism expressed the spirit of modernism
  • Around 1840, Helmholtz, Brucke and other German scientists signed an anti-vitalism oath
  • No other forces other than the common physical chemical ones are active within the organism
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18
Q

Emerging Zeitgeist

A
  • Scientific revolution – empirical methods are the best way of knowing
  • Modernism – principles of objectivity in measurement
  • Materialism – everything is rules by physical forces
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19
Q

Early experimental psychology

A
  • Psychometrics – intelligence testing
  • Psychophysics – perception and sensation
  • Structuralism and consciousness
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20
Q

Early experimentalists

A
  • Francis Galton
  • Alfred Binet
  • Franz Joseph Gall
  • EH Weber
  • Hermann von Helmholtz
  • Wilhelm Wundt
  • William James
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21
Q

Psychometrics

A
  • Measuring the mind
  • Science of measuring mental faculties
  • Intelligence, personality, educational problems
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22
Q

Francis Galton – 1822-1911

A
  • Cousin of Darwin
  • Born in Birmingham
  • Made first weather maps
  • Classified fingerprints
  • Great statistical contribution to psychology
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23
Q

Galton – statistical contribution

A
  • Suggested intelligence could also be form of normal distribution
  • Developed the standard deviation
  • Plotted scores from top 100 candidates at Cambridge
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24
Q

Galton board

A
  • Demonstrates that with sufficient sample size
  • The binomial distribution approximates a normal distribution
  • It afforded insight into regression to the mean
25
Q

Statistical contributions

A
  • Standard deviation
  • Regression to the mean
  • Devised persons correlation coefficient
26
Q

Hereditary genius – evolution of intelligence

A
  • Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin
  • Read and admired Darwin’s origin of the species
  • Published Hereditary Genius
  • Individual differences in intelligence must be innate
27
Q

Inheritance of eminence

A
  • Classified families as eminent or not
  • Closer the kinship, the greater likelihood of eminence (gene sharing)
  • First attempt to account for heritability of psychological characteristics
  • Closer the relative, the more likely for shared environment
  • 31% of fathers were eminent
  • 27% of brothers were eminent
  • 48% of sons
  • 5-8% of grandfathers, grandsons, uncles and nephews
28
Q

Eugenics

A
  • Galton believed that, because horses can be bred with certain characteristics
  • So, could humans
  • “Produce a highly gifted race of men during several consecutive generations”
  • Eugenics – improving the human race by selective breeding
  • Set up anthropometric lab
  • Eugenics generally abandoned after early 20th century
29
Q

Binet intelligence scales

A
  • Alfred Binet – french doctor
  • 1905 – joined a government commission to identify school children with mental handicap
  • Worked with Theodore Simon to develop tests
  • Wanted to create a fair system of testing intelligence, not based on previous education experience
  • Used large banks of tests, including word associations, drawing and digit span
  • Realised that age needed to be considered
30
Q

First intelligence test

A
  • Binet and Simon constructed first usable test of intelligence – 1905
  • Comprised of 30 separate items with increasing difficulty
31
Q

IQ test

A
  • German psychologist William Stern introduced intelligence quotient in 1912
  • Mental age divided by chronological age times by 100
32
Q

Intelligence testing today

A
  • Mental testing ad IQ is still in common use
  • Tests often updated every few years
  • Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
  • Galton’s and Binet’s ideas very influential and have had major impact on modern psychology
33
Q

How do we measure the mind?

A
  • Problem of subjectivity
  • Study things that are objective
  • Perception, sensation, physical components
34
Q

Franz Joseph Gall

A
  • Found nerve fibres passing from one side to the other of the brain (commissures)
  • Comparative anatomist – compared brains
  • The larger the brain, the more advanced the mental functions
  • Mostly accurate except in adult human population
  • A mixture of anatomical research and wind speculation
  • Put the brain centre stage – brain an important higher function
35
Q

Phrenology

A
  • Gall believed that certain faculties were based in specific parts of the brain
  • Bumps and indentations on the surface of the skull reflect the size of phrenological organs in the brain
  • Ultimately discredited by the initial ideas were based on empirical observations
36
Q

Psychophysics

A
  • How do we measure the mind scientifically
  • Physics was the natural model for early psychology
  • Psychophysics – the objective investigation of subjective experience
  • Interested in sensation and perception
37
Q

EH Weber 1795-1878

A
  • Pioneered methods for measuring the sensitivity of the senses
  • Especially looked at thresholds
  • Conscious sensations of stimuli may not reflect reality
  • One way of constraining the problem of subjectivity is to measure thresholds
38
Q

Absolute thresholds

A
  • Smallest quantities that give any sensation at all
  • Level of stimulus intensity at which stimulus can no longer be detected
39
Q

Relative thresholds

A
  • Are the smallest quantitative change that is noticeable
  • Minimum difference between two items to be able to tell them apart
  • Also known as Just noticeable differences
  • The Weber-Fechner Law states they are a constant proportion of the absolute intensity
  • It was hopes that psychophysics would steadily discover all such laws
40
Q

Webers Law

A
  • Only notice a change when the magnitude of the change is bigger than a critical fraction
41
Q

Hermann Von Helmholtz

A
  • One of the greatest 19th century physiologists
  • Adopted a doctrine of mechanism
  • Opposed to vitalism
42
Q

Rate of neural conduction

A
  • Initially used frogs legs
  • Stimulating the nerve in the leg would cause the foot to twitch
  • Stimulated different distances from the foot and measured time taken for foot to twitch
  • Calculated the neural conduction = 25 meters per second
43
Q

Helmholtz – trichromatic theory

A
  • Groundbreaking work on colour perception
  • Noted only three colour receptor cones
  • But can see many different hues
  • Hues arise from a mix of cones excited to different degrees
44
Q

Helmholtz – unconscious interference

A
  • Realised that image on the retina may not accurately reflect the external world
  • Eg blind spot
  • Sometimes the brain’s perceptions contradict the raw sensations
  • Visual illusions
  • Derive the most probable explanation (unconscious interference)
  • Based on prior visual learning experience
45
Q

Gestalt psychology

A
  • Psychophysics revealed a lot about senses
  • But not about how sensated become perception
  • Gestalt psychology – a whole is more than just its parts
  • Principles – emergence, reification, multistablity, invariance
46
Q

Wundt

A
  • Considered the founder of experimental psychology
  • Set up first experimental psychology lab in Leipzig Germany
  • Supervised 186 PhDs including Titchener, William James, Cattell
47
Q

Wundt – cultural psychology

A
  • 10 volume work on cultural psychology
  • Religion, language, myths, history, art, laws, customs
  • Not only shaped by sensation / perception but by culture
  • Very interested in language – verbal communication of idea one wants to say
48
Q

Wundt’s ideas

A
  • consciousness is inner experience
  • every living thing has this experience
  • every living being must have always had this inner experience
  • the beginnings of mental life date from the beginnings of time
  • so psychology must begin with self-observation
  • introspection - combines self-observation with experimentation
  • this yields quantitative data bout consciousness
  • psychology is the scientific study of the mental life
49
Q

Wundt – structuralism

A
  • Wondered whether complex mental experience could be broken down into simple processes – building blocks
  • Influenced by physicists and chemists breaking down molecules into atoms
  • Systematic introspection
50
Q

Introspections

A
  • There is external observation and internal observation – inside own mind
  • Wundt described psychology as the science of conscious experience
  • Therefore the best method is to observe the conscious experience
  • However, only the person having the experience can observe it
  • Thus he used introspection
  • Had explicit rules for how to use introspection
  • Must be possible to systematically manipulate the experimental conditions
51
Q

Wundt and structuralism

A
  • Could the taste of apple pie
  • Be broken down into elements
  • Hot, sweet
52
Q

Introspection process

A
  • Observation – observer must pay close attention to the stimulus – used observers trained in introspection
  • Experimental control – experiment creates external conditions that are stables across time and participants
  • Observer must report the elements of consciousness
53
Q

Wundt – problems for introspection

A
  • Wundt noticed that introspective reports were unverifiable
  • Memory can often play tricks with recollection of psychological states
  • As a result, higher mental processes will be too complex to study
54
Q

Criticism of introspections

A
  • Participants may not agree on their introspection
  • Wundt acknowledges this problem but thought that further training could help
  • Introspection could also be classified as retrospection – depending on the time between the stimulus and report
  • Examining an experience in an introspective manner may alter it (anger)
  • Imageless thoughts
  • Cannot report on their introspections – the solution just appears
  • Implies that many psychological processes are not available for introspective access
55
Q

William James

A
  • First to teach psychology course – Harvard 1875
  • The stream of consciousness
  • Consciousness is not a thing but a process
  • Did not believe in breaking down experiences
  • Pragmatism – true beliefs are those the believers find useful
  • Functionalism
56
Q

Gestalt

A
  • The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
57
Q

Structuralism

A
  • The study of conscious experiences by introspection
58
Q

Pragmatism

A
  • The usefulness of beliefs
59
Q

Functionalism

A
  • Consciousness is a stream

PS122 - Psychology in Context (4 decks)

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