Unit 1
• Greeks began studying human
behavior
• By the 17th century, the idea of
dualism emerged
•Mind and body are separate and
distinct
• Interested in the basic elements of
human experiences
• Wilhelm Wundt
•Use self-observation/introspection
• Study how people and animals adapt
to their environment
• William James- father of psychology
•focused on the actions of the conscious
mind and the purposes of behavior
• Study how heredity influences abilities,
character, and behavior
• Sir Francis Galton
• Is behavior determined by heredity or
environment?
• Study how sensations are assembled into
perceptual experiences
• Perception is more than the sum of its parts
• Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka
• Sigmund Freud
• Interested in unconscious mind
• Conscious experiences are tip of iceberg, beneath
surface are primitive biological urges that are in
conflict with the requirements of society and morality
• Free Association- say what comes to mind
• Reveals the operation of unconscious processes
• Dreams= expressions of primitive, unconscious urges
•
•
•
•
Ivan Pavlov
Dogs and Bells
Investigate observable behavior
Behavior is the result of conditioning and appears
because an appropriate stimulus is present
• John B. Watson, B.F. Skinner
• Human nature is evolving and self-directed
• Humans are not controlled by events in the
environment or unseen forces- background to
internal growth
• Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May
• Focus on how people process, store, and use
information and how this information influences
our thinking, language, problem solving, and
creativity
• Behavior is more than a response to a stimulus
• Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky, and Leon Festings
• Impact of biology on behavior
• Study how brain, nervous system,
hormones, and genetics influence behavior
• Genetic factors influence behavior
• Ethnicity, gender, culture and
socioeconomics affect behavior
Different ways to collect data:
• Sample- small group out of the total pop.
being studied (desire to go to college among
Jrs. and Srs.)
• Samples must be representative (if studying
how tall the avg. man is, don’t include a lot of
professional basketball players= nonrepresentative)
• To avoid non-representative sample, either
have a random sample, or deliberately pick
people
• Naturalistic Observations- natural setting
• Case Study- long term, intensive study
• Survey- questions
• Longitudinal Study- study the same group
over time
• Cross- Sectional Study- age groups
• Correlation- descriptive study
• Positive- IQ scores and academic success
• Negative- hrs spent working on serve & double
faults
• None
• Shows relation between 2 things, one does not cause
the other
• Experiments- provide control over the situation
• Hypothesis
• Variables- what changes
• Independent- changed by experimenter to observe
effects (hours studying)
• Dependent- changes in relation to independent
variable (grade on exam)
• Experimental group- exposed to independent variable
• Control group- not exposed to iv, but treated the same
• Ethical Issues must be considered when conducting
experiments
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Having expectations and acting in a way, unknowingly, to carry
out that behavior
• Researchers can influence a subject’s behavior
• How to fix this?
• Single Blind Experiments- participants are unaware
• Double Blind Experiment- experimenter and participants are
unaware
• Milgram Experiment
• Experiment on obedience to authority figures
• series of social psychology experiments which
measured the willingness of study participants to
obey an authority figure who instructed them to
perform acts that conflicted with their personal
conscience.
• Change in a patient’s illness or physical state that
results from the patient’s knowledge and perceptions
of treatment
• Treatment that resembles medical therapy, but had
no effect
• Sugar water
• Does the amount of time you study for a quiz affect the
grade you get??
• Kate asks 15 students how many hours of TV they watch the
night before and after the quiz, their quiz grade, to check off
a list of products advertised on TV the night before the quiz,
and their height.
• Listing and summarizing of data in a practical,
efficient way
• Create frequency tables and graphs
• Frequency distribution- arranging data to know who
often a score or observation occurs
• Histograms- show frequency distributions with
rectangles whose widths represent intervals
• Bell-curve
• Kate wants to know how many hours of TV were watched
before and after the quiz.
• She makes a chart of the number of hours and counts the
participants in each category.
• Frequency Polygon
• Central tendency- number that describes something about the average
score
• Mean- average, used to measure central tendency
• Median- middle score
• Mode- most frequent score
• Variance- how spread out are the
scores
• Range- subtract the lowest score from highest score
• Standard Deviation
• scores above the mean have a positive deviation
• scores below the mean have a negative deviation
• Correlation Coefficient
• direction and strength of the relationship
between 2 sets of observations
• Positive correlation- as one variable increases,
the second increases
• Negative correlation- as one variable increases,
the second decreases
• Results can be duplicated and are not due to chance