Then we got humanism which puts it a little bit right for some of us. I like
to think of myself as a humanistic behaviorist.
I like the humanist perspective. The humanist perspective is not focused
so much on the negative things that are happening with people. You look at psycho
analysis and really it's a
reaction to see that people struggle with mental health issues,
with happiness, fulfillment, anxiety, mental disorders like schizophrenia,
or bipolar and how do we get that way and how do we fix it?
So that's a reasonable line of inquiry, yeah? But the flip side of that is look at all the things
we're capable of as human beings. We can do all kinds of stuff.
We are a pretty amazing species. We have great potential.
We do wonderful things and we should look at that side too.
So they say yes, we do have free will, right?
William James said my first act of free will will be to believe in free will.
That's fun isn't it? You get that?
Our first act of free will will be to believe in free will.
So humanists believe in free will. They think you have a choice.
It doesn't appear like you have a choice sometimes. You feel trapped in your
situations
but you have a potential that's on tap and that untapped potential
if you can learn how to do it can be released and propel you forward
through the worst of times and bring out the best in you and others.
You all have a great great weekend and I hope to see everybody in here on Monday.
Alright we left off last time talking about humanism
and humanism's rather positive take on humanity.
We talked about several
schools that you should know about now, structuralism
Some say it was Wundt, 1879 he started his psych lab right,
looking at the structure of consciousness, looking at functionalism associated with
William James,
looking at the function of consciousness and how it helps us
as a species to adapt, right? Psychoanalysis,
the Freudian point of view early on but much changed
since Freud had his first say about the matter and still
and that they were looking at you not being a master of your own fate but being
in some ways the victim of the circumstances of your upbringing
but in an unconscious way, and then we see
we had behaviorism, talked about BF Skinner and John Watson,
talking about behavior being the only thing worth studying because it's objective,
observable, therefore quantifiable. We can make meaningful measurements of it,
and we can manipulate the environment because we see that people have different
consequences in different situations
and that leads to predictable behavior. But still you're not the master of your own fate there
but really the
the sum total of your cumulative life learning experiences
and that has kind of an odd flavor to it thinking we don't have free will,
that we don't really have control over our lives but yet
we feel like we do and then along come the humanists,
people like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow who say yeah,
actually we do have free will. Life is hard, life throws it at you,
creates a bunch obstacles but if there were no obstacles you'd have no choice but
to be all you can be.
Right? You'd have to rise up to your total fruition
but the world doesn't allow you to do that. It holds you down.
So you get stuck and then you think that you can't get out of that position
and therefore you stay there but if we can enlighten you as to your full potential
and give you some techniques you could rise to your full potential.
You could overcome the obstacles and be all that you could be
and that's the humanist point of view. So we had that as the third force in
psychology. Now we've talked about some dominant,
not ancient paradigms but some of our foundational early paradigms in
psychology.
Some of these elements we keep with us yet today. Others we've discarded and you'll see
as we go through the course
elements that fit kind of in all of these paradigms and we'll talk about
each of those a little more explicitly as we go through. I'm going to finish you off with a
couple other perspectives; three specifically
that I want you to know for your test because they bring another angle
to understanding people. None of them has
all the information. None of them have all of the answers.
In fact, all of them together don't have all the answers but all of them have
perspectives worth considering
and we'll be talking about these perspectives throughout the semester,
so it's nice to know the foundations. It's a little hard to show the practical value
of this knowledge
but if you like a subject, it's good to know from whence it came.
So cognitive psychology focuses on mental processes.
Cognition simply means mental processes; it's a synonym.
So we talk about cognitive psychology, we're talking about the way you think
as differentiated from the actual brain mechanisms that allow you to think,
the thinking itself. So we have to
figure that it's hard to know how we know things. If this was easy to
understand we would have understood it a long time ago but philosophers
have been arguing for centuries upon centuries about
how we acquire knowledge, how do we know that we know anything, how do we remember,
how do we pull it back out when it's relevant,
how come we're so selective in our memories anyway?
So cognitive psychology looks at how we direct attention,
how we perceive situations,
and how we solve problems because as we get into that chapter on
the way we think a little more deeply, we'll talk about problem solving as kind of
something we do all day every day. We just don't usually call it that.
Social cognitive theory is adding on
the behaviorist point of view. The learning chapter will be talking about
that
very much end to this cognitive perspective because the behaviorists didn't really care
for cognition. It's inside what they call the black box. It's in your head.
I can't get at it, therefore it's not something I can study
but then we realized that all behaviors occur in social environments
and learning does occur in a way that's inside your head. Just cause you can't see it
doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It doesn't mean we shouldn't explore it
and try to understand it to the best of our ability. So the social cognitive theory says we
do all of our learning
in a way that embeds us in a social environment
and then cements the way we tend to think about things
and categorically is how we think about things. We are judging machines.
It doesn't you but a second to look at something and
decide what it is, even if you're wrong,
you still made a decision, right? You have a guess at what it is
because you are able to perceive and categorize
really quickly, which is usually adaptive
but can be maladaptive at times especially when we apply our quick categorizations and judgements
to other human beings
who are by definition much more complicated than the objects we perceive
in our environment.
So social cognitive, but particularly cognitive psychology, is a
perspective I'd like you to know. Biological psychology, you could also call it
bio-psychology, as it's called in
some books, looks at the brain and the nervous system, the physical
underlying mechanisms that allow us to do our thinking
and really allow us to do our existing,
right? Without a brain, we don't exist,
not on this plane. You've got to have something to make the heart pump, you've got to have something to make the lungs work, something hard part for gas on made laws work some
has always gotta be functioning at all times for us to live
and the brain drives that activity physically. That's what allows us to
exist.
Everything we think about anything, everything we feel about everything,
anything we do, brain is involved. Brain and nervous system is something we're going to focus
on here
shortly after we go through the research portion of this
first section of material but it also looks at genetics
as well. So when we talk about biology we're talking about
our core physical self. It gets here
as a product of genetic transmission, right? DNA
replicating, and here we are, and then we make more of us and there they are
and a lot of people make a lot of genetics and certainly a lot can be made of it
because without it we don't exist.
It gives us the framework in which we find ourselves experiencing the world
around us.
That's the nature side of nature nurture debate
but the nurture side has just as much to say about it,
how do we become who we are? Well, there are certain kinds of things that are kind of
determined.
I'm going to be male. I'm going to be around six feet tall.
I don't have a lot of choice in that but I can affect that in some ways,
whether I express myself as male or express myself as feminine,
right, or whether I eat enough protein to make me grow to 6'-1"
or I have a deficient diet and it makes me only grow to 5'-11"
right? I can affect genetics to a certain degree
in my environmental interactions but certainly the way that I come to
understand the world around me
has a lot to do with the experiences I have in it. So
genetics interacts with environment. So nature and nurture,
it's not so much of a debate, right? It's both.
But some people want to hang their hat real quick on an explanation, especially when
something goes wrong, they're like, that's genetic isn't it?
As if that answers all the questions, and so what if it was?
In almost all cases it isn't just genetics
but even if it was, what does that answer our question for you in terms of practical
information? How are you going to use that information to help somebody be better?
In some cases we can.
We might be able to grow some new organs but then you have to deal with the replacement of those
organs. I guarantee there is going to be a psychological impact
at that moment, right? So it's always both.
The biological focuses more on the underlying physiology
and the underlying transmission of that physiology down through the generations.
And now I'll bring about socio-cultural recognition
because as I've alluded to already, your world view
has a lot to do with how you see yourself and
how you interact with others around you and what you think about the world
around you in general
and how you have opportunities provided to you, or whether you feel there's limitations
in this world,
and that socio-cultural perspective comes as a function of where you happen to
have been born,
and who happened to raise you, right?
There's no guarantees of anything in this world except that where we get born
and raised you're probably going to adopt a lot of the views
of that culture as being correct because that will be your in group
and you're going to view almost all other groups that don't fit
in some way or another into that group as out groups, as potential threats or
competitors,
or the very least annoyances, cause they don't really understand how things
really are
like our group does, and so when you have that as a
as a defining cell feature, membership in a group,
then the group you happen to be a member of matters. It matters dramatically,
and is oftentimes overlooked by many people cause they just assume
other people must be crazy, right?
They're either mad or they're dangerous; a threat to our way of life,
whoever they may be, and whoever you may be, in whatever group. Any group that ever
fought another group thought
terrible of them, but guaranteed the people in the other group
thought the same way about that group, came in in the consideration of things so
you gotta think
about people, humanity, as being one species
that divides itself up readily into subgroups
and then treats those subgroups as if they are without a doubt the best thing that ever
occurred if they're
in it and sometimes the worst thing that ever occurred if they're not in it,
and then there's every kind of variation in between the extremes,
right? So looking at that as an emphasis,
social and cultural influences, we blend that with some social cognitive
psychology,
biological perspectives, and some of all of the other perspectives we've talked about
thus far and we get the foundations of our science.