Unit 1 Organizer: Prologue and Chapter 1
Unit 1: History and Scope of Psychology
http://bcs.worthpublishers.com/myers8e/
The Big Picture:
I. History and Approaches (2–4%)
Psychology has evolved markedly since its inception as a discipline in 1879. There have been significant changes in the theories that psychologists use to
explain behavior and mental processes. In addition, the methodology of psychological research has expanded to include a diversity of approaches to data
gathering.
Current Unit1:
Last Unit:
Unit Pacing:
8/7 – Introduction to the Course intro-topsychology PPt History of Psychology
Introspection
8/20 – Outrageous Celebrity due next class
8/9 – Read pgs 1-6
what-is-psychology?
8/12 – Read pgs 8-15
HW: Research the college you would like to attend and
find out what your ap score needs to be to get credit, print
out on 8 1/2 by 11 sheet, include how much a regular
college class will cost.
8/9 –P.P. on Early History of Psychology
8/12 – Test Design, Perspectives P.P.
three-later-approaches-gestaltpsychoanalysis-and-behaviorism
8/13 – PsychSim 5: PSYCHOLOGY’S TIMELINE
8/14 – psychology-after-1950-overviewof-specializations
8/15 – COUNTY Pretest/ vocab quiz
8/16 – ethics-of-psychological-experiments
Social Psychology
8/19 –PSYSIM COMPUTER LAB
8/20 PPt Research Methods
8/8 –, Local pre test assign books, syllabus
two-early-approaches-functionalism-andstructuralism
Next Unit:
History and Scope of Psychology
Prologue and Chapter 1
None 
8/21 – Outrageous Celebrity presentations
8/13 – Read pgs 19- 24
8/22 PPT NOTES RESEARCH METHODS
8/14 – Read pgs 26-29
8/23 PPT NOTES RESEARCH METHODS
8/15 – Read pgs 30-34
8/26 – Unit 1 Review
8/16 – Read pgs 36-38
8/27 - Unit 1 Test All AP Psychology homework listed below
is due.
8/19 – Read pgs 39-55
8/20
8/27 - STUDY
8/27 - STUDY
Key Terms and Phrases:
Prologue/Unit 1
http://www.education.com/study-help/article/historyapproaches-rapid-review/ 1
Chapter 1/ Unit 2
http://www.education.com/study-help/article/researchmethods-rapid-review/
AP Psychology Homework
History of Psychology
1. The principle that inherited traits that contribute to reproduction and survival will be most likely to be passed on to succeeding generations. ______________
______________.
2. The psychological perspective that focuses on how the body and brain create emotions, memories, and sensory experiences. _________________________
3. The psychological perspective that focuses on how we encode, process, store, and retrieve information. _________________________ psychology
4. The type of scientific research that aims to solve practical problems. ______________ research
5. The type of research that is "pure science". It is only aimed at increasing the scientific knowledge base. ____________________ research.
6. The early school of psychology that used "introspection" to study the elemental components of the human mind.
Wundt and Titchner were proponents of this school. ________________________.
7. The early school of psychology that focused on how mental and behavioral processes help organisms adapt,
survive, and flourish. William James headed this group. ______________________.
8. The school of psychology that has the motto: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts", and focuses much
of its work in the field of perception. _____________________ psychology
9. The psychological perspective that focuses on how behavior and thinking vary across situations and cultures. _______________-_______________ psychology.
10. The psychological perspective that focuses on "learning", but only in terms of how observable behavior is
influenced by contingencies in the environment. ______________________________
11. The long-standing controversy over the relative contributions that genes and experience make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors.
___________________ vs __________________.
12. The science of behavior and mental processes.
________________________.
13 The psychological perspective that focuses on how our genes, and our environment influence individual differences. __________________ _________________
14. The branch of medicine that deals with psychological disorders. It is practiced by physicians who sometimes provide
medical treatments as well as psychological therapy. _______________________
15. The branch of psychology that studies, assesses, and treats people with psychological problems.
_____________________ psychology
16. The psychological perspective that focuses on how nature selects traits that promote the perpetuation of one's genes.
_______________________ psychology
17. The psychological approach that examines how behavior springs from unconscious drives and conflicts. ________________________ theory
18. The “Big Issue” in psychology that asks, “do our individual traits persist as we age or are our personality traits fairly
unstable over time”. __________________ vs _______________
PsychSim 5: PSYCHOLOGY’S TIMELINE
http://bcs.worthpublishers.com/gray/content/psychsim5/Psychology%20Timeline/PsychSim_Shell.html
PsychSim 5:Correlation
http://bcs.worthpublishers.com/gray/content/psychsim5/Correlation/correlation.htm
PsychSim 5: What’s wrong with this study?
http://bcs.worthpublishers.com/gray/content/psychsim5/Whats%20Wrong/WhatsWrong.htm
PsychSim 5: Descriptive Statistics
http://bcs.worthpublishers.com/psychsim5/Descriptive%20Statistics/PsychSim_Shell.html
Internet Homework:
1. Choose one of the following articles below and summarize the article , and how it can be applied to everyday life. You need to also include the perspective that
it is using.
The Psychology of Deja Vu:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081118122146.htm
How and Why We Lie to Ourselves:
http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/how-and-why-we-lie-to-ourselves.php
IQ to the Test:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200107/iq-the-test
2. Read the following article and write four paragraphs that contain the following: 1. Summarize the article, include 3 different examples of Availability Bias 2.
Explain why we feel the need to buy lottery tickets. 3. Explain the importance of this article in understanding human behavior and why it is considered valuable
insight into the way people think/ act and how you can apply this to everyday life:
http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/08/the-availability-bias-why-people-buy-lottery-tickets.php
Prologue: The Story of Psychology
Psychology’s Roots
Psychology traces its roots back through recorded history to the writings of many scholars who spent their lives
wondering about people—in India, China, the Middle East, and Europe. In their attempt to understand human nature,
they looked carefully at how our minds work and how our bodies relate to our minds.
Prescientific Psychology
More than 2000 years ago, Buddha and Confucius focused on the powers and origin of ideas. In other parts of the world,
the ancient Hebrews, Socrates, his student Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle pondered whether mind and body are
connected or distinct, and whether human ideas are innate or result from experience. In the 1700s, René Descartes and
John Locke reengaged aspects of those ancient debates, and Locke coined his famous description of the mind as a
“white paper.”
Psychological Science Is Born
Psychology as we know it today was born in a laboratory in Germany in the late 1800s, when Wilhelm Wundt ran the
first true experiments in psychology’s first lab. Soon, the new discipline formed branches: structuralism, which searched
for the basic elements of the mind, and functionalism, which tried to explain why we do what we do. William James, a
pragmatist and functionalist, wrote the first text for the new discipline.
Psychological Science Develops
After beginning as a “science of mental life,” psychology evolved in the 1920s into a “science of observable behavior.”
After rediscovering the mind in the 1960s, psychology now views itself as a “science of behavior and mental processes.”
Psychology is growing and globalizing, as psychologists in 69 countries around the world work, teach, and do research.
Contemporary Psychology
Psychology’s Big Issues
Psychologists wrestle with several recurring issues. One of these is stability and change over our lifetimes. Another is
whether we are consistently rational or sporadically irrational. But the biggest and most enduring issue continues the
debate of the early philosophers: the relative influences of nature (genes) and nurture (all other influences, from
conception to death). In most cases, the debate is no debate: Every psychological event is simultaneously a biological
event.
Psychology’s Perspectives
Psychologists view behavior and mental processes from various perspectives. These viewpoints are complementary, not
contradictory, and each offers useful insights in the study of behavior and mental processes.
Psychology’s Subfields
Psychology’s subfields encompass basic research (often done by biological, developmental, cognitive, personality, and
social psychologists), applied research (sometimes conducted by industrial/organizational psychologists), and clinical
applications. Psychology’s methods and findings aid other disciplines, and they contribute to the growing knowledge
base we apply in our everyday lives.
CHAPTER 1: THINKING CRITICALLY WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
The Need for Psychological Science
The Limits of Intuition and Common Sense
Although in some ways we outsmart the smartest computers, our intuition often goes awry. To err is human. Without
scientific inquiry and critical thinking we readily succumb to hindsight bias, also called the I-knew-it-all-along
phenomenon. Learning the outcome of a study (or of an everyday happening) can make it seem like obvious common
sense. We also are routinely overconfident of our judgments, thanks partly to our bias to seek information that confirms
them. Such biases lead us to overestimate our unaided intuition.
Enter psychological science. Science, with its procedures for gathering and sifting evidence, restrains error. Although
limited by the testable questions it can address, a scientific approach helps us sift reality from illusion, taking us beyond
the limits of our intuition and common sense.
The Scientific Attitude
Scientific inquiry begins with an attitude—a curious eagerness to skeptically scrutinize competing ideas and an openminded humility before nature. Putting ideas, even crazy-sounding ideas, to the test helps us winnow sense from
nonsense. The curiosity that drives us to test ideas and to expose their underlying assumptions carries into everyday life
as critical thinking.
The Scientific Method
Research stimulates the construction of theories, which organize observations and imply predictive hypotheses. These
hypotheses (predictions) are then tested to validate and refine the theory and to suggest practical applications.
Description
The Case Study, the Survey, and Naturalistic Observation
Through individual case studies, surveys among random samples of a population, and naturalistic observations,
psychologists observe and describe behavior and mental processes. In generalizing from observations, remember:
Representative samples are a better guide than vivid examples.
Correlation
Correlation and Causation
The strength of the relationship between one factor and another is expressed as a number in their correlation
coefficient. Scatterplots and the correlations they reveal help us to see relationships that the naked eye might miss.
Knowing how closely two things are positively or negatively correlated tells us how much one predicts the other. But it is
crucial to remember that correlation is a measure of relationship; it does not reveal cause and effect.
Illusory Correlations and Perceiving Order in Random Events
Correlations also help us to discount relationships that do not exist. Illusory correlations—random events we notice and
assume are related—arise from our search for patterns.
Experimentation
Exploring Cause and Effect
To discover cause-and-effect relationships, psychologists conduct experiments. By constructing a controlled reality,
experimenters can manipulate one or more factors and discover how these independent variables affect a particular
behavior, the dependent variable.
Evaluating Therapies
In many experiments, control is achieved by randomly assigning people either to the experimental condition, the group
exposed to the treatment, or to a control condition, a group that experiences no treatment or a different version of the
treatment.
Independent and Dependent Variables
Experiments examine the effects of variables on one another in order to answer questions with a level of precision that
allows others to repeat the study. The aim of an experiment is to manipulate an independent variable, measure the
dependent variable, and control all other variables.
Statistical Reasoning
Describing Data and Making Inferences
To be an educated person today is to be able to apply simple statistical principles to everyday reasoning. One needn’t
remember complicated formulas to think more clearly and critically about data.
From this section’s consideration of how we can organize, summarize, and make inferences from data—by constructing
distributions and computing measures of central tendency, variation, and statistical significance—we derived five points
to remember:
1. Doubt big, round, undocumented numbers.
2. When looking at statistical graphs in books and magazines and on television ads and news broadcasts, think
critically: Always read the scale labels and note their range.
3. Always note which measure of central tendency is reported. Then, if it is a mean, consider whether a few atypical
scores could be distorting it.
4. Don’t be overly impressed by a few anecdotes. Generalizations based on only a few cases are unreliable.
5. Statistical significance indicates the likelihood that a result will occur by chance. It does not indicate the
importance of the result.
Frequently Asked Questions About Psychology
Can Laboratory Experiments Illuminate Everyday Life?
By intentionally creating a controlled, artificial environment in the lab, researchers aim to test theoretical principles.
These principles help us to understand, describe, explain, and predict everyday behaviors.
Does Behavior Depend on One’s Culture?
Attitudes and behaviors do vary across cultures, but the principles that underlie them vary much less. Cross-cultural
psychology explores both our cultural differences and the universal similarities that define our human kinship.
Does Behavior Vary with Gender?
Gender is a basic fact of life. Although gender differences tend to capture attention, it is important to remember our
greater gender similarities.
Why Do Psychologists Study Animals?
Some psychologists study animals out of an interest in animal behavior. Others do so because knowledge of the
physiological and psychological processes of animals gives them a better understanding of the similar processes
operating in humans.
Is It Ethical to Experiment on Animals?
Only about 7 percent of all psychological experiments involve animals, and under ethical and legal guidelines these
animals rarely experience pain. Nevertheless, animal rights groups raise an important issue: Even if it leads to the relief
of human suffering, is an animal’s temporary suffering justified?
Is It Ethical to Experiment on People?
Occasionally researchers temporarily stress or deceive people in order to learn something important. Professional ethical
standards provide guidelines concerning the treatment of both human and animal participants.
Is Psychology Free of Value Judgments?
Psychology is not value-free. Psychologists’ own values influence their choice of research topics, their theories and
observations, their labels for behavior, and their professional advice.
Is Psychology Potentially Dangerous?
Knowledge is power that can be used for good or evil. Applications of psychology’s principles have so far been
overwhelmingly for the good. Psychology addresses some of humanity’s greatest problems and deepest longings.