The science of psychology benefits society and enhances our lives
. Psychologists examine the relationships between brain function and behavior, and the environment and behavior, applying what they learn to illuminate our understanding and improve the world around us.
The Go-To Science
Curiosity is part of human nature. One of the first questions children learn to ask is “why?” As adults, we continue to wonder. Using empirical methods, psychologists apply that universal curiosity to collect and interpret research data to better understand and solve some of society’s most challenging problems.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to think of a facet of life where psychology is not involved. Psychologists employ the scientific method — stating the question, offering a theory and then constructing rigorous laboratory or field experiments to test the hypothesis. Psychologists apply the understanding gleaned through research to create evidence-based strategies that solve problems and improve lives.
The result is that psychological science unveils new and better ways for people to exist and thrive in a complex world.
Science in Action
Psychology is a varied field. Psychologists conduct basic and applied research, serve as consultants to communities and organizations, diagnose and treat people, and teach future psychologists and those who will pursue other disciplines. They test intelligence and personality.
Many psychologists work as health care providers. They assess behavioral and mental function and well-being. Other psychologists study how human beings relate to each other and to machines, and work to improve these relationships.
The application of psychological research can decrease the economic burden of disease on human behavior government and society as people learn how to make choices that improve their health and well-being. The strides made in educational assessments are helping students with learning disabilities. Psychological science helps educators understand how children think, process and remember — helping to design effective teaching methods. Psychological science contributes to justice by helping the courts understand the minds of criminals, evidence and the limits of certain types of evidence or testimony.
The science of psychology is pervasive. Psychologists work in some of the nation’s most prominent companies and organizations. From Google, Boeing and NASA to the federal government, national health care organizations and research groups to Cirque du Soleil, Disney and NASCAR — psychologists are there, playing important roles.
Psychology and Common Sense
findings reported in this book. You may feel you knew all along that this was the way humans behaved. Such a response may reflect a
cognitive heuristic called the hindsight bias. According to this bias, we sometimes falsely overestimate the probability with which we would have predicted an outcome (see also chapter 12). In a well known study, Fischhoff and Beyth (1975) had people predict the likelihood of various outcomes when President Nixon visited China and the Soviet Union. After the trip, they were
asked to again make the same predictions but to ignore what had actually happened. People estimated the probability of outcomes
that actually occurred as higher than they did before the trip. Even when they were told about this hindsight bias and urged to
avoid it, the bias remained. The hindsight bias has implications for forensic psychology, which involves the ‘examination and presentation of evidence for judicial purposes’ (Blackburn, 1996; see also chapter 21). How effective is it when a judge – as judges are prone to do – tells a jury to ignore certain evidence, after they have heard it, when reaching a verdict?
Once you accept that psychology has more to offer than your grandmother when it comes to understanding human behaviour,
you might legitimately ask, ‘How do psychologists – as opposed to my grandmother – explain human behaviour?’ participants (in one study it was as high as 68 per cent) obeyed. In other words, there was a 250- to 500-fold difference between
the common sense answer and the evidence of psychological research.
Human behaviour is complex
If you felt uneasy reading about what Milgram did to participantsin his studies, you are not alone. In addition to what it tells us
about obedience to authority, Milgram’s research was an important stimulus for developing clearer guidelines regarding the
ethical treatment of participants in psychological research. The role of ethics is discussed in chapter 2.
Although the studies demonstrate the power of social norms (in this case the norm of obedience to authority), they attracted,
and rightly, severe ethical criticism (Baumrind, 1964). Milgram (1964; 1977) responded by arguing that participants were carefully and sensitively debriefed – in other words, after the experiment, they were told about its true nature. He reported that his‘teachers’ were greatly relieved, rather than upset, and believed that the research had been worthwhile. In a follow-up several
months later, 84 per cent reported feeling positive about their participation, 15 per cent reported neutral feelings, and 1 per cent
described negative feelings. Milgram’s critics questioned this response, arguing that the debriefing might have eroded the participants’ trust of others and that learning they were capable of committing such harm may have damaged their self-esteem (Schlenker & Forsyth,
1977). This exercise ought to have convinced you that psychologyhas more to offer than your grandmother when it comes to
understanding the complexities of human behaviour. Even so, at times you may find yourself unimpressed by some of the
EXPLAINING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
Imagine you are a psychologist interested in understanding a particular kind of behaviour, such as human aggression. What would you look at to advance your understanding? Brain cells and hormones? Inherited characteristics? Socialization by parents? The stimuli that precede aggressive behaviour? Psychologists pursue all these avenues in their attempt to explain human behaviour. Some look inside the person for causes of behaviour, focusing on physical events such as physiological functioning. As a result, we now know that compulsive
violence is associated with tumours and damage in a particular region of the brain – the temporal lobe (Elliot, 1988). Others
look for causes of aggression in hypothetical mental activity. From this approach, we have learned that aggressive behaviour is more likely to occur when the person producing the aggressive behaviour infers that they have experienced something negative due to a volitional act of another person (Weiner,1986).
Yet other psychologists will look to the environment for causal explanations. They may focus on events or stimuli that precede
an aggressive act or on a general environmental state. From them we have learned that children acquire aggressive behaviour
by observing it in models (see figure 1.3) and that high ambient temperature is associated with naturally occurring aggression.
Hotter regions of the world witness more aggression than cooler regions, and hotter years, seasons and days, in comparison to
The Science of Psychology
cooler ones, are more likely to produce assaults, murders, rapes, riots and spouse abuse (Anderson, 1987).
It should now be apparent that there is no single explanation for aggressive behaviour. Confusion can be avoided if we
accept that each explanation is useful in its own way. The variety
of approaches that psychologists have taken in explaining behaviour is illustrated in the next section, which briefly outlines
the evolution of psychology from philosophy to a behaviouralscience.
There are two reasons why you should be familiar with the history of your subject:
1. Ignorance of psychology’s past leaves you unable to evaluate the significance of new developments and perhaps even
to mistake old facts and viewpoints as new.
2. The vastness of psychology can be both intimidating and
confusing as you try to draw connections between various concepts and approaches. Seemingly unrelated topics
may be intricately bound together through their historical development, so an appreciation of psychology’s past can
help you to integrate the many different areas and subspecialities that make up modern psychology.
only positive facts and observable phenomena. He believed that
social life is governed by laws and principles that we can discover through the methods used in the physical sciences. It was
only a matter of time before the methods of science were applied
to the study of mental phenomena conceived of in mechanisticterms. A third important philosophical tradition, this time rooted
in England, facilitated this application. Empiricism, as we noted earlier, sees sensory experience as the source of all knowledge and provided psychology with both method and theory. The method was observation and, to a lesser extent, experimentation. The theory concerned the growth of the mind, which was seen to occur through the accumulation of sensory
experience. John Locke (1632–1704), whose Essay on Human Understanding (1690) marked the formal beginning of British empiricism,
rejected the notion of innate ideas, arguing that a new-born child has no knowledge whatsoever. He admitted that some ideas
might appear to be innate (such as the idea of God) but argued that this was only because they are so constantly taught that
no student could remember a time when he or she was not aware of it. Instead, Locke argued, each infant is born
with a mind like a blank slate, a tabula rasa, upon which experience is written. For Locke,
all knowledge is empirically derived, with complex ideas consisting of numerous interlinked simple ideas.
Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) developed this notion of the association of ideas, and made it more explicit. He outlined three laws of association, which he saw as the mental counterpart of the laws governing the physical universe
