This text was adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee. Saylor URL: http://www.org/books Saylor.org 1 Preface When I first started teaching Introduction to Psychology, I found it difficult—much harder than teaching classes in statistics or research methods. I was able to give a lecture on the sympathetic nervous system, a lecture on Piaget, and a lecture on social cognition, but how could I link these topics together for the student? I felt a bit like I was presenting a laundry list of research findings rather than an integrated set of principles and knowledge. Of course, what was difficult for me was harder still for my students.
How could they be expected to remember and understand all the many phenomena of psychology? How could they tell what was most important? And why, given the abundance of information that was freely available to them on the web, should they care about my approach? My pedagogy needed something to structure, integrate, and motivate their learning. Eventually, I found some techniques to help my students understand and appreciate what I found to be important. First, I realized that psychology actually did matter to my students, but that I needed to make it clear to them why it did. I therefore created a more consistent focus on the theme of behavior.
One of the most fundamental integrating principles of the discipline of psychology is its focus on behavior, and yet that is often not made clear to students. Affect, cognition, and motivation are critical and essential, and yet are frequently best understood and made relevant through their links with behavior. Once I figured this out, I began tying all the material to this concept: The sympathetic nervous system matters because it has specific and predictable influences on our behavior. Piaget’s findings matter because they help us understand the child’s behavior (not just his or her thinking).
And social cognition matters because our social thinking helps us better relate to the other people in our everyday social lives. This integrating theme allows me to organize my lectures, my writing assignments, and my testing. Second was the issue of empiricism: I emphasized that what seems true might not be true, and we need to try to determine whether it is. The idea of empirical research testing falsifiable hypotheses and explaining much (but never all) behavior—the idea of psychology as a science— was critical, and it helped me differentiate psychology from other disciplines.
Another reason for emphasizing empiricism is that the Introduction to Psychology course represents many students’ best opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of scientific research. Saylor URL: http://www.org/books Saylor.org 2 The length of existing textbooks was creating a real and unnecessary impediment to student learning. I was condensing and abridging my coverage, but often without a clear rationale for choosing to cover one topic and omit another. My focus on behavior, coupled with a consistent focus on empiricism, helped in this regard—focusing on these themes helped me identify the underlying principles of psychology and separate more essential topics from less essential ones.
Saylor URL: http://www.org/books Saylor.org 3 Approach and Pedagogy I wrote this book to help students organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual level. Five or ten years from now, I do not expect my students to remember the details of most of what I teach them. However, I do hope that they will remember that psychology matters because it helps us understand behavior and that our knowledge of psychology is based on empirical study. This book is designed to facilitate these learning outcomes.
I have used three techniques to help focus students on behavior: 1. I begin my focus on behavior by opening each chapter with a chapter opener showcasing an interesting real-world example of people who are dealing with behavioral questions and who can use psychology to help them answer those questions. The opener is designed to draw the student into the chapter and create an interest in learning about the topic. Psychology in everyday life.
Each chapter contains one or two features designed to link the principles from the chapter to real-world applications in business, environment, health, law, learning, and other relevant domains. For instance, the application in Chapter 6 "Growing and Developing"—“What Makes a Good Parent?”—applies the concepts of parenting styles in a mini handbook about parenting, and the application in Chapter 3 "Brains, Bodies, and Behavior" is about the difficulties that left-handed people face performing everyday tasks in a right-handed world. I have also emphasized empiricism throughout, but without making it a distraction from the main story line. Each chapter presents two close-ups on research— well-articulated and specific examples of research within the content area, each including a summary of the hypotheses, methods, results, and interpretations.
This feature provides a continuous thread that reminds students of the importance of empirical research. The research foci also emphasize the fact that findings are not always predictable ahead of time (dispelling the myth of hindsight bias) and help students understand how research really works. Saylor URL: http://www.org/books Saylor.org 4 My focus on behavior and empiricism has produced a text that is better organized, has fewer chapters, and is somewhat shorter than many of the leading books. `In short, I think that this book will provide a useful and productive synthesis between your goals and the goals of your students.
I have tried to focus on the forest rather than the trees and to bring psychology to life—in ways that really matter—for the students. At the same time, the book maintains content and conceptual rigor, with a strong focus on the fundamental principles of empiricism and the scientific method. Saylor URL: http://www.org/books Saylor.org 5 Chapter 1 Introducing Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. The word “psychology” comes from the Greek words “psyche,” meaning life, and “logos,” meaning explanation.
Psychology is a popular major for students, a popular topic in the public media, and a part of our everyday lives. Television shows such as Dr. Phil feature psychologists who provide personal advice to those with personal or family difficulties. Crime dramas such as CSI, Lie to Me, and others feature the work of forensic psychologists who use psychological principles to help solve crimes.
And many people have direct knowledge about psychology because they have visited psychologists, for instance, school counselors, family therapists, and religious, marriage, or bereavement counselors. Because we are frequently exposed to the work of psychologists in our everyday lives, we all have an idea about what psychology is and what psychologists do. In many ways I am sure that your conceptions are correct. Psychologists do work in forensic fields, and they do provide counseling and therapy for people in distress.
But there are hundreds of thousands of psychologists in the world, and most of them work in other places, doing work that you are probably not aware of. Most psychologists work in research laboratories, hospitals, and other field settings where they study the behavior of humans and animals. For instance, my colleagues in the Psychology Department at the University of Maryland study such diverse topics as anxiety in children, the interpretation of dreams, the effects of caffeine on thinking, how birds recognize each other, how praying mantises hear, how people from different cultures react differently in negotiation, and the factors that lead people to engage in terrorism. Other psychologists study such topics as alcohol and drug addiction, memory, emotion, hypnosis, love, what makes people aggressive or helpful, and the psychologies of politics, prejudice, culture, and religion.
Psychologists also work in schools and businesses, and they use a variety of methods, including observation, questionnaires, interviews, and laboratory studies, to help them understand behavior. Saylor URL: http://www.org/books Saylor.org 6 This chapter provides an introduction to the broad field of psychology and the many approaches that psychologists take to understanding human behavior. We will consider how psychologists conduct scientific research, with an overview of some of the most important approaches used and topics studied by psychologists, and also consider the variety of fields in which psychologists work and the careers that are available to people with psychology degrees. I expect that you may find that at least some of your preconceptions about psychology will be challenged and changed, and you will learn that psychology is a field that will provide you with new ways of thinking about your own thoughts, feelings, and actions.1 Psychology as a Science LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1.
Explain why using our intuition about everyday behavior is insufficient for a complete understanding of the causes of behavior. Describe the difference between values and facts and explain how the scientific method is used to differentiate between the two. Despite the differences in their interests, areas of study, and approaches, all psychologists have one thing in common: They rely on scientific methods. Research psychologists use scientific methods to create new knowledge about the causes of behavior, whereas psychologist- practitioners, such as clinical, counseling, industrial-organizational, and school psychologists, use existing research to enhance the everyday life of others.
The science of psychology is important for both researchers and practitioners. In a sense all humans are scientists. We all have an interest in asking and answering questions about our world. We want to know why things happen, when and if they are likely to happen again, and how to reproduce or change them.
Such knowledge enables us to predict our own behavior and that of others. We may even collect data (i., any information collected through formal observation or measurement) to aid us in this undertaking. It has been argued that people are “everyday scientists” who conduct research projects to answer questions about behavior (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). [1] When we perform poorly on an important test, we try to understand what caused our failure to remember or understand the material and what might help us do better the next time.
When our good friends Monisha and Charlie break up, despite the fact that they Saylor URL: http://www.org/books Saylor.org 7 appeared to have a relationship made in heaven, we try to determine what happened. When we contemplate the rise of terrorist acts around the world, we try to investigate the causes of this problem by looking at the terrorists themselves, the situation around them, and others’ responses to them. The Problem of Intuition The results of these “everyday” research projects can teach us many principles of human behavior. We learn through experience that if we give someone bad news, he or she may blame us even though the news was not our fault.
We learn that people may become depressed after they fail at an important task. We see that aggressive behavior occurs frequently in our society, and we develop theories to explain why this is so. These insights are part of everyday social life. In fact, much research in psychology involves the scientific study of everyday behavior (Heider, 1958; Kelley, 1967).
[2] The problem, however, with the way people collect and interpret data in their everyday lives is that they are not always particularly thorough. Often, when one explanation for an event seems “right,” we adopt that explanation as the truth even when other explanations are possible and potentially more accurate. For example, eyewitnesses to violent crimes are often extremely confident in their identifications of the perpetrators of these crimes. But research finds that eyewitnesses are no less confident in their identifications when they are incorrect than when they are correct (Cutler & Wells, 2009; Wells & Hasel, 2008).
[5] In summary, accepting explanations for events without testing them thoroughly may lead us to think that we know the causes of things when we really do not. Saylor URL: http://www.org/books Saylor.