Chapter 1
NATURE AND SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY
What Is Psychology?
we define psychology as the science of behavior and mental processes.
Let’s unpack this definition. Behavior is anything an organism does—any action
we can observe and record. Yelling, smiling, blinking, sweating, talking, and ques-
tionnaire marking are all observable behaviors. Mental processes are the internal,
subjective experiences we infer from behavior—sensations, perceptions, dreams,
thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.
Once upon a time, on a planet in this neighborhood of the universe, there came to be
people. Soon thereafter, these creatures became intensely interested in themselves and in
one another: “Who are we? What produces our thoughts? Our feelings? Our actions? And
how are we to understand and manage those around us?”
Historical perspective:
Psychological Science Is Born
To be human is to be curious about ourselves and the world around us. Before 300 B.C.E.,
the Greek naturalist and philosopher Aristotle theorized about learning and memory, moti-
vation and emotion, perception and personality. Today we chuckle at some of his guesses,
like his suggestion that a meal makes us sleepy by causing gas and heat to collect around
the source of our personality, the heart. But credit Aristotle with asking the right questions.
Philosophers’ thinking about thinking continued until the birth of psychology as we
know it, on a December day in 1879, in a small, third-floor room at Germany’s Univer-
sity of Leipzig. There, two young men were helping an austere, middle – aged professor,
Wilhelm Wundt, create an experimental apparatus. Their machine measured the time
lag between people’s hearing a ball hit a platform and their pressing a telegraph key
(Hunt, 1993). Curiously, people responded in about one – tenth of a second when asked to
press the key as soon as the sound occurred—and in about two – tenths of a second when
asked to press the key as soon as they were consciously aware of perceiving the sound. (To
be aware of one’s awareness takes a little longer.) Wundt was seeking to measure “atoms of the mind”- the fastest and simplest mental processes. Hence began the first psychological
laboratory, staffed by Wundt and by psychology’s first graduate students.
Before long, this new science of psychology became organized into different branches,
or schools of thought, each promoted by pioneering thinkers. Two early schools were struc-
turalism and functionalism. As physicists and chemists discerned the structure of matter,
so Wundt’s student Edward Bradford Titchener aimed to discover the mind’s structure. He
engaged people in self – reflective introspection (looking inward), training them to report ele-
ments of their experience as they looked at a rose, listened to a metronome, smelled a scent,
or tasted a substance. What were their immediate sensations, their images, their feelings?
And how did these relate to one another? Alas, introspection proved somewhat unreliable. It
required smart, verbal people, and its results varied from person to person and experience to
experience. As introspection waned, so did structuralism.
Hoping to assemble the mind’s structure from simple elements was rather like trying
to understand a car by examining its disconnected parts. Philosopher – psychologist
William James thought it would be more fruitful to consider the evolved functions of our
thoughts and feelings. Smelling is what the nose does; thinking is what the brain does.
But why do the nose and brain do these things? Under the influence of evolutionary
theorist Charles Darwin, James assumed that thinking, like smelling, developed because
it was adaptive—it contributed to our ancestors’ survival. Consciousness serves a function.
It enables us to consider our past, adjust to our present, and plan our future. As a function-
alist, James encouraged explorations of down – to – earth emotions, memories, willpower,
habits, and moment – to – moment streams of consciousness.
In the field’s early days, many psychologists shared with the English essayist C. S. Lewis
the view that “there is one thing, and only one in the whole universe which we know
more about than we could learn from external observation.” That one thing, Lewis said,
is ourselves. “We have, so to speak, inside information” (1960, pp. 18–19). Wundt and
Titchener focused on inner sensations, images, and feelings. James engaged in introspec-
tive examination of the stream of consciousness and of emotion. For these and other early
pioneers, psychology was defined as “the science of mental life.”
From 1920 onwards:
The traditional view of phycology saw a paradigm shift in 1920s, when two larger-than-life American psychologists
appeared on the scene. Flamboyant and provocative John B. Watson, and later the equally
provocative B. F. Skinner, dismissed introspection and redefined psychology as “the sci-
entific study of observable behavior.” After all, they said, science is rooted in observation.
You cannot observe a sensation, a feeling, or a thought, but you can observe and record
people’s behavior as they respond to different situations. Many agreed, and the behaviorists
were one of two major forces in psychology well into the 1960s.
The other major force was Freudian psychology, which emphasized the ways our
unconscious thought processes and our emotional responses to childhood experiences
affect our behavior.
As the behaviorists had done in the early 1900s, two other groups rejected the definition
of psychology that was current in the 1960s. The first, the humanistic psychologists, led by
Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, found both Freudian psychology and behaviorism too
limiting. Rather than focusing on the meaning of early childhood memories or the learning
of conditioned responses, the humanistic psychologists drew attention to ways that current
environmental influences can nurture or limit our growth potential, and the importance of
having our needs for love and acceptance satisfied.
The rebellion of a second group of psychologists during the 1960s is now known as the
cognitive revolution, and it led the field back to its early interest in mental processes, such as the importance of how our mind processes and retains information. Cognitive psychol-
ogy scientifically explores the ways we perceive, process, and remember information.
Cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary study, has enriched our understanding of
the brain activity underlying mental activity
Contemporary Psychology
The young science of psychology developed from the more established fields of phi-
losophy and biology. Wundt was both a philosopher and a physiologist. James was an
American philosopher. Freud was an Austrian physician. Ivan Pavlov, who pioneered the
study of learning was a Russian physiologist. Jean Piaget, the last century’s
most influential observer of children was a Swiss biologist. These “Magel-
lans of the mind,” as Morton Hunt (1993) has called them, illustrate psychology’s origins
in many disciplines and many countries.
Like those early pioneers, today’s psychologists are citizens of many lands. The Inter-
national Union of Psychological Science has 71 member nations, from Albania to Zim-
babwe. In China, the first university psychology department began in 1978; in 2008 there
were nearly 200 (Han, 2008; Tversky, 2008). Moreover, thanks to international publi-
cations, joint meetings, and the Internet, collaboration and communication now cross
borders. Psychology is growing and it is globalizing. The story of psychology—the subject
of this book—continues to develop in many places, at many levels, with interests ranging
from the study of nerve cell activity to the study of international conflicts.
Three levels of analysis:
Each of us is a complex system that is part of a larger social system. But each of us is also
composed of smaller systems, such as our nervous system and body organs, which are
composed of still smaller systems—cells, molecules, and atoms.
These tiered systems suggest different levels of analysis, which offer complementary
outlooks. It’s like explaining why grizzly bears hibernate. Is it because hibernation helped
their ancestors to survive and reproduce? Because their inner physiology drives them
to do so? Because cold environments hinder food gathering during winter? Such per-
spectives are complementary because “everything is related to everything else” (Brewer,
1996). Together, different levels of analysis form an integrated bio psycho social approach,
which considers the influences of biological, psychological, and social-cultural factors.
Biological influences:
° Natural selection of adoptive traits
° Genetic predisposition responding to environment
°Brain mechanisms
° Hormonal Influences
Psychological level:
° Learned fears and other learned expectations
°Emotional Responses
°Cognitive processing and perceptual interpretations
Socio-cultural:
° Presence of others
° Cultural, Societal and Family expectations
° Peer and other group influences
° Compelling models( Such as Media)
Psychology current perspectives:
Someone working from a neuroscience perspective might study brain circuits that
cause us to be “red in the face” and “hot under the collar.”
• Someone working from the evolutionary perspective might analyze how anger facili-
tated the survival of our ancestors’ genes.
• Someone working from the behavior genetics perspective might study how heredity
and experience influence our individual differences in temperament.
• Someone working from the psychodynamic perspective might view an outburst as an
outlet for unconscious hostility.
• Someone working from the behavioral perspective might attempt to determine which
external stimuli trigger angry responses or aggressive acts.
• Someone working from the cognitive perspective might study how our interpretation
of a situation affects our anger and how our anger affects our thinking.
• Someone working from the social – cultural perspective might explore how expressions
of anger vary across cultural contexts.
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