Objectives: Prologue(pages 1-13) In class, we discuss a number of fields (besides psychology) that have something to say about human experience. Explain what is distinctive about psychology’s study of human experience. Psychology’s study of human experience is distinctive because it studies at the mental processes and consciousness of human experience. Contrast structuralism and functionalism. Stucturalism is an early school of psychology that focused on the structural elements of the human mind and functionalism is the functions of our thoughts and feelings. Describe how the definition of psychology has changed from the time of the first psychology lab (1879) through today. Wilhelm Wundt created the first psychology lab and psychology definition was consciousness and mental processes (Atoms of the mind. Explain why the behaviorists sought to change the focus of psychological research. Introspection is unreliable (too subjective)“Mentalism” is unreliable (too speculative)Only human behavior is observable. Describe what the cognitive revolution (around the 1960s) reintroduced to psychology.It recaptured interest in the importance of mental processes and the way that people perceive, process, and remember info is due to the advances of how we study cognitive. Identify the three main levels of analysis in the biopsychosocial approach, and explainwhy psychology’s varied perspectives are complementary. Biological, psychological, and social-cultural, Psychology's varied perspectives are complementary because they offer richer understanding than could usually be gained from any one viewpoint alone. Name five major subfields of psychology (hint: our psychology department offers five Ph.D. programs). SocialClinicalCognitiveDevelopmentalNeuroscience Describe several effective study techniques. Overlearn-learn more than you need. Learn to think critically-think outside the box. Bea smart test taker-know the type of question on the test and budget your time.Objectives: Chapter 1(Thinking Critically with Psychological Science)(pages 15-45) Define confirmation bias and hindsight bias; explain how overconfidence contaminates our everyday judgments.Confirmation bias – Looking for evidence that supports a theory while ignoring contradictory evidence (Some people won’t fly on airplanes but how many daily flightsare completely trouble free?)Hindsight bias – “I knew it all along” Claiming that something should have been done differently and thinking that we would have done something different. (BP Oil Spill, Medical Malpractice)Overconfidence – We think we know more than we do. When we don’t spend enough time on preparing for something because we think we already know how to do it.Thinking errors often lead us to overestimate our intuition, but scientific inquiry helps “sift” reality from illusion. Explain how the scientific attitude encourages critical thinking. Scientific attitude encourages skepticism (What do you mean? How do you know? Show me the evidence!)It requires humility and we may reject our own ideas. Identify the steps of the scientific method (for our purposes, step into the process at the point where a psychologist has first articulated a theory). An attitude leads to a method. Scientific method: A self-correcting (it acts in a loop) process for asking questions andobserving nature’s answers. 1. State a clear theory (A relationship between the environment, mental processes, and behavior)2. Form a hypotheses.3. Make observations or measurements.4. Draw conclusions/evaluate the theory.5. Share the results. (Publish findings in a journal) In line with current consensus within the scientific community, define what constitutes a good scientific theory. Explains through an integrated set of principles. (lies in its ability to test for predictions.)Organizes observations.Predicts behaviors or events (produces testable hypotheses) Describe three methods of conducting descriptive research. Descriptive: Goal is to describe a person, group, or psychological phenomenon. (Ex. Case Study, Survey, and Naturalistic Observation – Observing and describing behavior in naturally occurring situations.)Correlational: Goal is to identify relationships between variables so that one may be used to predict another. (Positive/Negative/None)Experimental: Describe positive and negative correlations, and explain how correlational measures can aid the process of prediction but not offer evidence of cause-effect relationships. Positive: Higher value of one variable predicts higher value of another variable.Negative: A higher value of one variable predicts a lower value of the second variable.None: The value of one variable has no relationship to the value of the second variable.There can be additional factors that affect the cause-and-effect in a correlation. Differentiate between a spurious correlation and an illusory correlation.Spurious correlation is when things can be correlated, but the correlation is due to a third variable that you don’t know about (Ice cream and green lawns). Illusory correlation is when one falsely believes there is a correlation when there really isn’t one. Explain how experiments help researchers isolate cause and effect, focusing on the characteristics of experimentation that make this possible. - Cause must come BEFORE the effect.- There MUST be a correlation- The causal relationship must be NONSPURIOUS Be able to identify examples of independent variables and dependent variables. Independent Variables – Variable that you change.Dependent Variables – The outcome variable that changes due to the Independent Variable.Control Group – Goal is to be able to compare experimental group to a group that varies from them only in terms of the independent variable. State the goal and value of random assignment. The goal of random assignment is to give each person an equal chance of being in anexperimental or control group and it minimizes pre-existing differences. Explain how psychologists decide whether differences are meaningful. Statistical Reasoning – A measure of how likely it is that the difference between the groups occurred by chance using mean and standard deviation. Explain the danger of neglecting measures of variance (e.g., the standard deviation) when analyzing means (averages).You can have non-normal or skewed distributions. There can be outliers that skew themean.
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