Psychologists

• Freud (1905)


  Alpha bias

  Psychosexual development

  Phallic stage develop desire for opposite-sex parent

  Castration anxiety resolved when he identifies with father

  Girls identification with mother weaker suggests Superego weaker

  Women morally inferior to men

  
  

  Psychic determinism

  Free will an illusion

  Behaviour a result of unconscious conflicts, repressed in childhood

  Influence of biological drives and instincts

  No such thing as an accident

  
  

  Idiographic

  Careful observation of individuals

  Little Hans
• Nancy Chodorow (1968)

  Alpha bias

  Psychodynamic approach

  Daughters and mothers have greater connectiveness than sons and mothers due to biological similarities

  As a result women develop better abilities to bond with others and empathise
• Shelley Taylor et al. (2000)

  Beta bias

  Tend and befriend (evolved response for looking for others)

  Love hormone oxytocin more plentiful in females and smaller quantities in men

  Women respond to stress by increasing oxytocin production

  Reduces fight or flight and enhances preference for tend and befriend
• American Psychological Association

  Androcentrism

  List of 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th century

  Only 6 women
• Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin (1974)

  Several gender studies showed girls have superior verbal ability

  Boys better spatial ability

  Differences hardwired in the brain before birth
• Daphna Joel et al. (2015)

  Used brain scanning

  Found no difference in brain structure or processing

  Disproves girls are verbal and boys spatial
• Madura Ingalhalikar et al. (2014)

  Popular social stereotypes that girls are better at multitasking may have biological truth

  Female brains may have better connections between the hemispheres than men

  Shows there may be biological differences
• Magdalena Formanowicz et al. (2018)

  Analysed more than 1000 articles relating to gender bias published over 8 years

  Research on gender bias funded less often and published by less prestigious journals

  Fewer scholars aware of it or apply it within their work

  Gender bias may not be taken as seriously as other biases
• Carol Tavris (1993)

  'It becomes normal for women to feel abnormal'

  Gender bias not just a methodological problem but as consequences damaging the lives and prospects of women
• Claire Dambrin and Caroline Lambert (2008)

  Gender bias

  Lack of women in executive positions within accountancy firms

  Includes reflection on how their gender related experiences influence their readings of events
• Joseph Henrich et al. (2010)

  Culture bias

  Reviewed hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals

  68% of research participants came from the United States

  96% from industrialised nations

  WEIRD to describe the group of people most likely to be studied by psychologists

  Westernised Educated people from Industrialised, Rich Democracies
• Mary Ainsworth and Silvia Bell (1970)

  Ethnocentrism

  Strange Situation

  Norms and values of America

  The ideal attachment type characterised by babies showing a moderate amount of distress when left alone by their mother-figure

  Japanese infants more likely to be identified as insecurely attached because they were considerably distressed upon separation

  Japanese babies rarely separated from their mothers

  
  

  Imposed etic

  Studied inside one culture and assumed the ideal attachment type could be applied universally

  
  

  Reductionism

  Operationalised component behaviours
• John Berry (1969)

  Distinction between etic and emic

  Etic - Looks at behaviour outside a culture and attempts to describe those behaviours as universal

  Emic - Functions from inside a culture and identifies behaviours that are specific to that culture

  Psychology guilty of an imposed etic approach, arguing things are universal bur came about by emic research inside a single culture so psychologists should be more mindful of cultural relativism
• Asch

  Cultural bias

  Conducted exclusively with US participants (most white middle-class students)

  Replications in collectivist cultures found significantly higher rates of conformity than the original studies in the individualist US
• Yohtaro Takano and Eiko Osaka (1999)

  Universality

  14/15 studies compared US and Japan found no evidence of individualism or collectivism

  Describing the distinction as lazy and simplistic
• Dov Cohen (2017)

  Cultural bias

  Cultural psychology is an emerging field and incorporates work from researchers in their discipline including anthropology, sociology and political science

  Strive to avoid ethnocentric assumptions by taking an emic approach often working alongside local researchers using culturally-based techniques

  Cross-cultural research focuses on two cultures instead of eight or more
• Stephen Jay Gould (1981)

  Cultural bias

  First intelligence texts led to eugenic social policies in the US

  Psychologists used WW1 to pilot the first IQ tests on 1.75 million army recruits

  Many parts of the test ethnocentric, assumed everyone would know the names of the US presidents

  Recruits from south-eastern Europe and African-Americans lowest scores

  Used to inform racist discourse about the genetic inferiority of particular cultural and ethic groups

  Ethnic minorities mentally unfit and feeble minded compared to white majority

  Denied educational and professional opportunities
• William James (1890)

  Soft determinism

  Scientists job to explain what determines our behaviour but this does not detract from the freedom to make rational conscious everyday decisions
• B. F. Skinner

  Environmental determinism

  Free will an illusion

  All behaviour the result of conditioning

  Think we are acting independently

  Out experience of choice is merely the sum of total reinforcement contingencies that have acted upon us throughout our lives

  
  

  Nomothetic

  Studied animals to develop the general laws of learning
• Rebecca Roberts et al. (2000)

  Free will

  Looked at adolescents who had a strong belief in fatalism were at significantly greater risk of developing depression

  Fatalism - lives decided by events outside of their control

  People who exhibit external locus of control are less likely to be optimistic
• Benjamin Libet et al. (1983)

  Determinism

  Participants choose a random moment to flick their wrist while he measured activity in their brain, readiness potential

  Participants said when they felt the conscious will to move

  Unconscious brain activity half a second before the conscious decision

  Brain determines before we do or conscious awareness reads out our unconscious decision making and it takes time to reach the consciousness
• John Bowlby (1958)

  Nurture

  A baby's attachment type is determined by the warmth ad continuity of parental love
• Jerome Kagan (1984)

  Nature

  Baby's innate personality affects attachment relationship

  The temperament of the baby creates the nurture of their parent
• Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

  Nature

  All human characteristics and some aspects of knowledge are innate

  Psychological characteristics are determined by biological factors the same as physical characteristics
• John Locke (1632-1704)

  Nurture

  Mind is a blank slate from birth shaped by environment

  Behaviourist approach
• Richard Lerner (1986)

  Nurture

  Identified different levels of the environment

  Prenatal factors - physical and psychological influences on the foetus

  Postnatal - social conditions a child grows up in
• Soo Rhee and Irwin Waldman (2002)

  Nature/nurture

  Genetic influences accounted for 41% of the variance in aggression
• Robert Plomin (1994)

  Nature/nurture

  People create their own nurture by actively selecting environments that are appropriate for their nature

  Feel comfortable with those who show similar behaviours, choose this environment, companions further influence their development (niche-picking)
• Ezra Susser and Shang Lin (1992)

  Epigenetics

  Women who became pregnant during the famine went on to have low birth weight babies

  Babies twice as likely to develop schizophrenia
• Gerald Nestadt et al. (2010)

  Nature

  Heritability rate of OCD .76
• Zimbardo

  Holism

  Could not be understood by observing the participants as individuals

  It was the interaction between people and behaviour of the group that was important

  No conformity gene so conformity can only be explained at the level at which they occur
• Carl Rogers

  Idiographic

  Unconditional positive regard

  Derived from in depth conversations with clients in therapy
• Roger Sperry

  Nomothetic

  Split-brain research

  Repeated testing

  Basis for understanding hemispheric lateralisation
• Schaffer

  Nomothetic

  General stages of development
• Theodore Milton (1995)

  When diagnosing personality disorders clinicians begin with general nomothetic criteria, then use this to focus on the individual and their unique needs
• Joan Sieber amd Barbara Stanley (1988)

  The way in which research questions are phrased and investIgated may influence which findings are interpretated
• Celia Kitzinger and Adrian Coyle (1995)

  Research into so-called alternative relationships

  Guilty of heterosexual bias

  Homosexual relationships compared and judged against heterosexual norms
• Adrian Owen

  Research on people in a minimally conscious state

  Received enormous media attention

  It appeared as if he had made contact with patients who were thought to be unreachable
• Office for National Statistics

  UK independent group

  Responsible for collecting, analysing and disseminating objective statistics about the UK economy, society and population

  Data used in research
• Cyril Burt (1955)

  Ethical implications

  Influential in establishing the 11+ exam which determines what type of secondary school a child goes to which has later impacts on life opportunities

  Based its policies on twin studies which showed intelligence was highly heritable and could be detected by the age of 11

  Discrepancies in data revealed much of it was fake including 2 imaginary research assistants and he was publicly discredited

  11+ continued to be used after the fraud was exposed

  Still used in selection process in some parrs of the UK