Lecture 2: What is psychology?

There is still perception that much of psychology is really just ‘common sense’ (Eysenck 2004)

• There is some common sense involved in psychology 

• Would common sense suggest:

• You would give someone a shock you knew might kill them? (Milgram,1963)

• That students taking part in an experiment would harass each other just because of the group they were assigned too? Or endure abuse for $15 a day (Zimbardo,1971)

• By taking a photo of something would make your memory for it poorer? Even if you knew you must delete the photo shortly after (Soares & Storm,2018)

• ‘Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behaviour’ (Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner & Hood,2012)

                        - Mind = is our internal experience

                        - Behaviour = our observable actions

• Biological Psychology - Explores how our biology interacts with Psychological processes

• Cognitive psychology - Is the study of mental processes, ‘thinking’ and problem solving 

• Development psychology - Study of how psychological processes change over the lifespan 

• Personality & Individual Differences - the study of personality and how psychological processes vary from one person to the next

• Social psychology - explores the psychological processes that operate when we interact with others

• Wide range of approaches in psychology, doesn’t make any right or wrong

• Lenses through which we make sense of phenomena 

• Not exclusive, several lenses can be applied to the same topic

• Memory:

                    - Biology
                    - Underlying processes
                    - Development in kids/deterioration in old age 
                    - Why performance differs between people 
                    - Social influences

• A pivotal question relates to how we move our discipline forward

• Psychologists ask questions and address them using scientific methods 

• Develop theories:

                - Via observation
                - Using previous literature

• Then develop questions to explore that theory

Theory

     ↓

Question

     ↓

Hypothesis

     ↓

Test

↓                                        ↓

Hypothesis supported      Hypothesis rejected 

↓                                        ↓

Conclusions 

↓

Theory

• It must be theory driven

• It needs to make a prediction 

• We need to be able to refute it

• Psychology is an evolving discipline and the questions we ask reflect our changing understanding and world

• Questions that were pivotal 50 years ago, are seen as less important now 

• Three examples:

                       - Project Orcon
                       - Darley and Latané (1968)
                       - Loftus and Palmer (1974)

• To discover if we can convert ‘a lower creature into an unwitting hero?’

• Skinner trained pigeons to direct pelican missiles 

• Pigeons could be trained to recognise enemy ships and steer a missile towards it 

• At this time, this was an important question

                        - Win the war
                        - Save lives

• Project was theoretical and never used in warfare

• Attack of Kitty Genovese 13th March 1964

                   - At least 38 witnesses

• Darley and Latané (1968) 

                    - Question = why didn’t people come to Kitty’s aid?

                    - Experiment where a participant witnessed a seizure, with 1,2 or 5 iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii  i                              additional bystanders

• Findings:

                     - Less likely to help if as number of bystanders increased
                     - Those who did help, took longer to help with larger groups

• Does the wording of questions affect how people remember information?

• Asked participants to watch a video of a car crash

• They were then asked to recall the speed the car was travelling when it:

                             - Hit = 34 mph
                             - Collided = 39.3 mph
                             - Contacted = 31.8 mph
                             - Smashed = 40.8 mph

• Participants were more likely to wrongly remember broken glass with smashed as opposed to hit (32% vs 14%)

• The examples discussed are areas where psychology has directly addressed real world problems 

• Not all research directly focuses on real world problems

• Whilst we are guided by the real world to develop our questions, we are also influenced by the academic literature

• The first stage of any research project is to review the academic literature and begin to develop a theory to explain/explore a phenomena

• Therefore we use the academic literature to begin to address our real world problems

• Psychology is a scientific discipline

• Our focus is to devise theories and ask questions to help us understand the mind and behavior 

• The conclusions we draw and help guide future research, it can also be applied to real world problems

• Theories are not facts, so they are open to being questioned

• Through this process, psychology can massively impact our world and help better society 

• You are not part of this process