Psychology

• Psychology


  The scientific study of the mind, brain and behaviour
• Science


  • A set of safeguards against biases
• Psychological pseudoscience


  Distinct from psychological science
• Scientific scepticism


  • Key features
• Principles of scientific thinking

  • 6 principles
• Types of psychologists


  • What each of them does
• Psychological research


  Affects our daily lives
• Evidence-based practice


  Helps bridge the scientist–practitioner gap
• Most beginning psychology students' knowledge comes from the popular psychology industry
• Commonsense can be wrong, especially in psychology
• Familiarity with human nature does not equal understanding of human nature
• Levels of analysis


  Rungs on a ladder, with lower levels tied to biological influences and higher levels tied to social influences
• To fully understand psychology, we must consider multiple levels of analysis
• Biological and social factors are both essential for a complete understanding of psychology
• What makes psychology distinctive

  • Behaviour is difficult to predict
  • Psychological influences are rarely independent
  • People differ from each other
  • People often influence each other
  • Behaviour is shaped by culture
• Our commonsensical understanding of psychology is frequently mistaken
• Psychology may not be a traditional hard science like chemistry, but many of its fundamental questions are even more difficult to answer
• In the museum of everyday life, causation is not a one-way street. In conversations, one person influences a second person, who in turn influences the first person, who in turn influences the second person, and so on. This principle, called reciprocal determinism, makes it challenging to pinpoint the causes of behaviour
• European Americans tended to focus more on the central details of photographs, like the tiger itself, whereas Asian Americans tended to focus more on the peripheral details, like the rocks and leaves surrounding the tiger
• Naive realism


  Belief that we see the world precisely as it is
• Appearances can sometimes be deceiving. The earth seems flat. The sun seems to revolve around the earth

  
• Our commonsense assures us that people who do not share our political views are biased but that we are objective. Yet psychological research demonstrates that just about all of us tend to evaluate political issues in a biased fashion
• Our snap (five-second) judgments about whether someone we have just watched on a video is trustworthy or untrustworthy tend to be right more often than would be expected by chance
• Commonsense can also be a helpful guide for generating hypotheses that scientists can later test in rigorous investigations
• Most people believe that happy employees tend to be more productive on the job than unhappy employees, and research indicates that they are right
• Science


  An approach to evidence and explanations of the world around and in us, consisting of a set of attitudes and skills designed to prevent us from fooling ourselves and others
• A large percentage, perhaps even the majority, of the general public doubts that psychology is scientific
• Scientific psychologists almost always rely on systematic research methods, of which talking to people is only one component, and often not the most important
• Scientific theory


  An explanation for a large number of findings in the natural world
• Hypothesis


  Testable prediction derived from a theory
• A scientific theory is not a specific explanation for an event, nor is it just an educated guess
• The Big Bang theory and Darwinian evolution are well-established theories that are consistent with many differing lines of evidence
• Academic psychologists are more sceptical of many weakly supported claims, such as extrasensory perception, than are their colleagues in more traditional sciences, such as physics and chemistry
• Scientists, including psychological scientists, are only human and so they have their biases too
• Theory


  Explanation of a phenomenon based on scientific principles
• Hypothesis


  Proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon
• The universe began in a gigantic explosion about 14 billion years ago
• Our motivation to help a stranger in need is influenced by the number of people present
• Crime rates in Brisbane increase as the temperature rises
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