Chapter 1 Flashcards
Confirmation bias
We tend to seek info that confirms our beliefs regardless of the accuracy of those beliefs, and discount any evidence to the contrary.
Hindsight bias
“I knew it all along”
We tell ourselves this in an attempt to make sense of previous events.
Levels of Explanation in Psych
Lower level - biological influences (genes, neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones)
Middle level - abilities and characteristics of individual people
Highest level - social groups, organizations, and cultures.
All levels of explanation are required for understanding human behaviour. No one level of explanation can explain everything.
Eight processes for critical thinking
- Ask questions and be willing to wonder
- Define the problem
- Examine the evidence - use properly conducted studies
- Analyze assumptions and biases
- Avoid emotional reasoning
- Avoid oversimplification
- Consider other interpretations
- Tolerate uncertainty - useful to outline what we do, and do not know.
Null hypothesis
No statistically significant difference between the sample means of two groups.
An observed difference is a result of a sampling error.
Structuralism - William Wundt
Focused on the nature of conscious, and that it was possible to analyze the basic elements of the mind, and to classify conscious experiences scientifically.
Created a period table of basic elements to identify psychological experience.
Table of sensations, and introspection to create a map of the elements of consciousness.
STRUCTURED WAY TO MEASURE SENSATIONS (STRUCTURALISM)
Introspection - Wundt
Asks research participants to describe what they experience as they work on mental tasks, such as viewing colours, reading a book, or performing a math problem.
Structuralist approach was rigorous, and scientific and demonstrated mental events that could be quantified.
Structuralism had difficulty moving forward because it relied on participants often being unable to report their subjective experiences. Relied on introspection and died off.
Functionalism - William James
To understand why animals and humans developed psych aspects that they currently possess. Thinking related to one’s behaviour.
Belief was that people have a collection of instincts, and that instincts are part of our evolved nature.
Some animals developed strong muscles to run fast, the HUMAN BRAIN must have then ADAPTED to serve a particular FUNCTION in human experience.
No longer exists, but developed into evolutionary psych - applies the theory of natural selection to human and animal behaviour.
Natural selection - Darwin
Physical characteristics of animals and humans evolved because they were useful/functional.
Evolutionary psychology
Accepts the functionalists’ assumptions that human psych systems (memory, emotion, and personality) serve key adaptive functions.
Provides logical explanations for why we have many psychological characteristics.
Only those with the genetic means to greater reproductive success will survive.
Reproductive success depends on environment. Likely that it requires spatial reasoning, language skills, or the ability to feel love an empathy for one’s own children.
Fight or Flight response
Ability to feel fear, and for the fear to propel us unthinkingly into action.
Adaptation that has helped keep us alive, but this response can be over-activated, leaving us feeling anxious and worn out.
Psychodynamic psychology
Approach to understanding human behaviour that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories.
Relies on psychoanalysis, but includes other approaches like psychotherapy.
Behaviourism
Based on premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, so psychologists should direct their attention to the study of behaviour.
Believed that it was possible to develop laws of learning that explain all behaviour.
Began to use ideas to explain how events that people and other organisms experienced in environment (stimuli) could produce specific behaviours (responses)–Pavlov.
Behaviourists - Skinner, Watson
Skinner - Used ideas of stimulus and response to train pigeons and other animals with reinforcements.
Argued that free will is an illusion, and that all behaviour is determined by environmental factors.
Watson - found that systematically exposing a child to a fearful stimuli in the presence of an object that they did not like would elicit fear and would cause the child to respond in a fearful behaviour (rat and loud noise experiment).
Learning perspective (behaviour perspective)
Has application in the treatment of disorders such as phobias. Places a large emphasis on using testable, falsifiable hypotheses in research.
