Psychology Ch 1 Psychology the science of behavior and mental processes o We understand by examining all levels not just one Challenges o All actions are multiply determined o Psychological influences rarely independent o Individual differences o Reciprocal humans influence each other Determinism o Culture Individualist vs collectivist cultures o Personal identity o Major goals o Criteria for self esteem o Sources of success and failure o Major frame of reference Common Sense o Most of us trust our gut intuitions about how the world works o Not all common sense is wrong o Should serve as a generator for hypotheses which can be tested o Thinking like a scientist when to use and when not to use common sense Barriers o Naive realism seeing is believing seeing the world like it is o Confirmation bias neglecting or distorting contradicting evidence o Belief perseverance sticking to what we believe despite contradicting evidence Principles of critical scientific thinking o Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence o Replicability o Ruling out rival hypotheses o Occam s razor Parsimony simpler is better o Falsifiability o Correlation is not causation Pseudoscience o Set of claims that seem scientific but aren t o Testable beliefs that are not supported by the evidence o Seven Deadly Sins Overuse of ad hoc immunizing hypotheses Lack of self correction Exaggerated claims Overreliance on anecdotes Evasion of peer review Absence of connectivity Psychobabble o Logical Fallacies Emotional reasoning affect heuristic using emotions as a guide Bandwagon fallacy Either or fallacy Not me fallacy everyone else but not me Pseudoscience and Popular Opinion o Psychobabble pseudoscience and quackery covered by a veneer of psychological and scientific sounding language o Why does belief in psychobabble persist We need control Predictability No challenge Brief History o Began in 1879 with William Wundt o What makes us human o Psychology used to be indistinguishable from philosophy o Always asked just without answers 3 Historical Movements o Structuralism William Wundt and Edward Bradford Titchener aimed to identify the basic elements of psychological experience what Used introspection observers carefully reflected and reported on their mental experiences o Functionalism William James influenced by Darwin aimed to understand the adaptive purposes of psychological characteristics why o Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud focuses on internal psychological processes of which we re unaware Debates o Nature Nurture o Mind body Manism dualism o Free will vs Determinism
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