Let's look at what we're going to look at because like I said before we can't look at it
all. An overview of psychology. Psych
equals soul, ology the study thereof.
Soul. Study of soul. Now as I said before
I can posit a soul but that's a metaphysical construct,
meta being above, physical being this plane of reality we share.
I cannot demonstrate empirically that there is such a thing but isn't it
interesting that our discipline is named after the soul,
something that can't be demonstrated and yet we endeavor to be
highly scientific and empirical which means highly scientific
and base our conclusions on data and not just waxing poetic or philosophical
but to understand through science a process that we're going to go over here
shortly, the understanding of the human experience,
which for most people includes some idea that there's an essence inside of you
that might exist after this body shuts down and shuffles off
to atom land to become other things again and again and again.
Matter is not destroyed is it? Y'all know about that right?
Just changes forms, but what about the thing that animates the matter?
That's a different matter altogether, hah! I made a pun.
That little symbol right there
is Greek. It's all Greek to me. Psi
equals psychology. I was in my senior year
at UNC Charlotte before I realized that that's what that meant.
It's a good piece of shorthand. I just saw it in the
department and thought, man they love that little symbol. That little symbol means psychology so
if you're writing notes
one way to make your note writing easier is to develop a shorthand for yourself.
Now I didn't have to write industrial organizational psychology, I could just write, I
O psi. Three symbols got it for me. I knew what it meant so
that's what we're after. When you see that symbol it's not UT
although some of you all love UT. Right? You could have said a UT symbol is really
psychology, right? The psychology of the UT symbol.
What is psychology? Psychology is the scientific study of behavior
and mental processes. You can study things un-scientifically.
I can read other people's accounts of it. Without
ever having making sure that - and having made sure that they actually
did empirical research. That's what philosophy
amounts to. They're studious people. I have a Bachelor's
in philosophy and a bachelor's in psychology.
Philosophy is important to me. Philosophy drives science.
Everybody with a PhD after their name is by definition a philosopher
because that means doctor of philosophy in chemistry
or doctor of philosophy in physics or doctor of philosophy
in psychology. PhD is a philosophy degree
and a research degree so philosophically speaking
that provides us with the questions but scientifically speaking that's what
provides us with the answers.
So here you have a term in white font.
What does that mean? Could be on your test.
Now distinguish from what? Up there, psyche
equals soul - not on your test - logos equals study of a subject - not on your test.
Psi symbol equals psychology - not on your test guaranteed
not on your test. This may or may not be on it but it's likely to be on it.
Most of them ain't going to be that easy
by golly you should be able to see a multiple choice question that says
psychology is the study of
and if it says monkeys, giraffes, and bananas that ain't it.
And if you see something that says study of behavior
and mental processes you should go that's the one.
So there'll be a couple of questions that are easy because
that's foundational. We're the scientific study of behavior
and mental processes and as it turns out you can't get a
study of mental processes without behavior. You've got a mental process telling you what
that means to you right now.
I won't know what you think mentally until you engage in the behavior of writing it
out for me
or the behavior of speaking it to me, right?
So behavior is locked into almost anything we do, even when we take an MRI,
right? We're asking you to behave in a way that gets you locked into a thing
and then somebody's got to be pushing the buttons. Behavior is inherent in understanding
mental processes.
We're questing for answers to ancient questions. We started out as
philosophy and then this thing arose called natural science.
They wanted to understand the book of creation. They really did.
Y'all know Darwin was a Christian, right? That he studied theology,
that he set out on the HMS Beagle not to discover evolution but to discover evidence
for the
captain of the HMS Beagle, Fitzgerald,
evidence of Noah's flood. And that what he found was
painful to him. Took him years to actually publish it.
But what he was on to was a bunch of data that just didn't fit for him.
He had to come up with new ways to explain it and understand it
because if you're looking at the data objectively
then it tells you something. It doesn't necessarily suggest an answer.
In fact, they fought back and forth and still fight back and forth
on what all the data that we could accumulate actually means. It's impossible to say
for a fact it's this or it's that but we can make an assumption based
on a theory and then test the theory
and that's what natural science was doing
but it had not been applied to the realm of philosophy which are where the big
questions are.
Why do I exist? How can I learn anything at all?
If I learn it how could I possibly remember it? Why do I engage
in certain kinds of relationships that are fulfilling and other ones that are
detrimental to my life? Why do I do these things? How do these things occur? Those are
big questions but you can wax poetic all day long on big questions
without really satisfying yourself with an answer
until you start looking at data, which doesn't supply you automatically with an
answer
but it starts letting you eliminate possibilities. Whittle your way down to what
might be truth with a
little t, so that you get a better and better and better understanding.
Structuralism is in white font and I want you to just see this cause we don't have time to
go over it.
We'll hit it here shortly. You see that this
material over here that is indented under the white font, yes?
That's what you'd want to know for your test. This over here which is an interesting
sidebar, a piece of information
that is not indented under the white font, I'll cover cause I think it's interesting
and important
but I will not hold you responsible for it on your test. If you will show up
every day to this class, I will hone you in on what you need to study
so that you will do well in this class and not only do well in this class
but hopefully accumulate knowledge that will change your life in some small way
to some giant way and the lives of others. So when we look at
things like structuralism, I can't ask you a question about
every field of psychology within 25 questions
but I could ask you to know the difference between structuralism and functionalism,
right, and behaviorism on one question, right?
So if you know those four, five, or six disciplines well,
you can answer the one question but the things that won't be on your test
will be distinguished for you as such so that you will not waste time doing
things that will not benefit you in the long run.
And that's it for today. I will see you on Wednesday - here forward all it is is psychology and it might be on your test.
So we were talking about how you know
what you should know
for your tests. I'm going to hone you in on that. I'm going to talk about more stuff that I'm going
to test you on
because I think it's important certainly for context, hopefully for your life
and then I'm going to key you in on the material you need to know for your tests.
And I'm going to highlight that with white font so anytime you see white font you should
be writing something. Now I
encourage you to write your own notes and not just follow along on the ones you printed
out
from me. You know that my notes - these notes - are on D2L in black and white.
You should get them, download them, read them before you come to class
and then bring some blank paper so that when you see the topic come up
you'll be inclined to write what you hear me say which is to say I'm going to expound upon
the foundation you laid when you read this to begin with.
So then you hear my examples, you can ask questions, clarifications,
expounded further on the topic, you write all that down, and now you have a
super fantastic guide for what you ought to read in the book.
Remember I said you ought to get a book but I recognize not everybody has time to read a whole book?
Structuralism is in your book. It's also in the index of the book. You can go right there
and read a paragraph or two on structuralism
to strengthen your knowledge about the topic. Now I can't ask you a question
about every
single thing that I have highlighted with white font but what you'll see is when we
look at structuralism,
and functionalism, and psychodynamics, cognitive perspective,
that they're all white fonted. You should be able to distinguish the difference between
those
when you saw them on a test. So if I gave you a description
of a school of thought in psychology, you'd go oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
structuralism cause you know it cause you over studied it
cause I keyed you in on what you needed to know and therefore you
utilized your time efficiently and maximized your learning
so that you got stuff you can use for life. Structuralism,
probably you ain't going to use in your life but you will use it on your test.
But if you're philosophically-minded, you might use it in your life because
structuralism
is essentially looking at consciousness, the consciousness that we all experience
as something you're in right now.
Some peoples unconscious if they're asleep or passed out
or knocked out so they don't experience the reality that we're all sharing right now
but there's different levels of consciousness. You can be fully engaged
in the very moment we're in right now
and totally locked in on what I'm saying or what I'm doing or what you're
saying or what you're doing
or you can be in a state of consciousness that is far removed
from the place that you're at. You ever driven somewhere and kind of just realized
you don't remember how you got there?
You just kid of realized you're there. Or you've been in a movie
right, and people came in and out, coughed, popcorn, dropped stuff, and you didn't even notice that,
or you were reading a book. Somebody in the room has said your name, you didn't even hear them cause
you were so into that moment
because your consciousness varies from moment to moment depending on the
situation
but consciousness is something we all experience as human beings, it's what
makes us
uniquely human. We seem to be conscious in a way that other species may not be.
And so our fundamental goal for these early psychologists, this is our history of
psychology here,
was to understand this unique human consciousness and the structuralists
wanted to break it down
structurally. They felt like most things have structure, right? You look at
anything and it's built of smaller things which are built of smaller things
and so if consciousness exists, it must have units
of consciousness and so they tried to examine the structure of consciousness.
Hence the name structuralism. So that's what you're looking at. You should be
able to hear
structuralism or talk about structuralism in a way that you could
easily teach it to somebody else. If you can teach the concept to somebody else,
you'll get it right on the test. And it's not a tough concept
but you got to differentiate between all these little jargon-based terms we
have
and the names you might see. I'm not going to hold you responsible for a bunch
of names and a bunch of dates.
But this one name right here, Wilhelm Wundt,
I used to think it was Wilhelm Wundt
because I was American and then I was told, no W's are V's in German, that's (sounds as Vundt - spelled as Wundt)
So now I walk around saying Wilhelm (V)undt and then a student in my class,
cause I learn from my students as much as they learn from me,
who had a German background said that's another W there, that's (V)ilhelm (V)undt
right, not Wilhelm (V)undt. So, we're pronouncing it in his territory it would be (V)ilhelm (V)undt
and Wundt did a big favor to everybody.
You remember we were talking about how philosophy existed and all of our big questions came
from philosophy
and how natural science emerged out of philosophy using the scientific method
to do empirical work to better understand our world and our universe.
Well Wundt started doing empirical work to better understand the human experience
and in that sense he took psychology out of the explicit realm of philosophy
and made it into a science and that date
you'll see right there - 1879 - is a symbolic date.
He opened the first laboratory that explicitly was
under the study of psychology at the University of Leipzig
and said the psychology should be modeled after the hard sciences. In other
words, we should
seek to collect data, objective,
empirical observation should guide our
theorizing, right? And that is a
remarkable move because before that all the stuff that we talked about in psychology
was
in the domain of philosophy. It took a while to separate it. Well, one of the ways you
separate that
is you do the research. To do the research you need lab space and lab space is at a
premium
at ever university. There's never enough space. So to establish your own laboratory
was a big deal. And in a sense
that's our symbolic marking of the birth of psychology as an independent science.
You see that little asterisk right there. The asterisk right there
tells you something that you won't find in your black and white copies of the notes but I
appreciate you all making the effort to be here today.
I appreciate your commitment. I appreciate your time. That little asterisk means it might
be a bonus question on your test.
So knowing the Wilhelm Wundt as a name and the 1879 as a date,
I won't hold you responsible for that on the test in a pure test question that's
four points
but you might see it in a bonus question worth an additional two points. If you get it
wrong,
no points off on a bonus question. If you get it right it adds two points to
your test.
There's two of those on every test. So you can score a maximum of 104
just getting all the questions right. I told you I write good tests. People make
104's on
all of my tests. Multiple people get a hundred percent.
Not tons and tons but reliably ten,
fifteen people, those people are very diligent students, they study very hard,
and the questions are such that they get them right.
It's geared for your success but you are going to have to do the studying and this is a guide to help
you do so. So Wilhelm Wundt
was the founder of structuralism and we'll talk a little bit more about him
because he's an important figure. He's an old white
dude with a beard. And it turns out that because of all kinds of prejudices,
bigotry against
non-whites and females, then that's what you see as the founding fathers of a
lot of Sciences
are a bunch of European white males many of which
sport beards. Because they didn't let other people
into the academic game there was not a fair level playing field.
Diversity was not only not appreciated, it wasn't tolerated.
So, wrong-minded as it was, we later see that psychology now embraces diversity
because the data show that, used appropriately,
diverse elements of society coming together creates synergy
and better products and better bottom lines for companies
and we can see that everybody can succeed in our science if given a fair
chance and what you see now
is a lot of diversity in psychology. When we started out historically
it's a bunch of old white dudes, right, who have some very racist and very sexist views on
the world
that they thought were just the way it was because that is the way the world had
been
but psychology actually was the first to start testing
those assumptions and finding out that that common sense was all wrong,
that people had all kinds of abilities not ascribed to them,
not allowed to them, and therefore they didn't exhibit,
which was then taken as confirmation that they didn't have it at all.
But some pioneers in psychology, not Wilhelm, got us
on the track to understanding human psychology much better.
Introspection is a technique,
technique of looking inside subjects. So how am I going to know
if I want to understand your consciousness, what your experience is?
Back in those days they were certainly no such thing as an MRI or a CAT scan
and that only gives us limited data in terms of what's physically occurring
in the brain as certain thoughts happen, if you're doing functional
MRI, for example, or what kinds of lesions might exist
if you've had some kind of insult to the brain tissue,
right? But back then, if I wanted to know whether you saw a light at a certain
level of illumination, or if you heard a sound at a certain
decibel level, or when it became painful to
experience those perceptions, I would have to ask you.
Introspection was a formalized process whereby you trained participants,
what they called subjects back then, to give you information
in a systematic way so that you could collect data
relatively objectively,
keeping in mind that these are subjective impressions of how perception and other
things occur.
Given that the subjects were trained, they would be able to give you back
information that you could accumulate
and then look across people, right, and form groups and understand how different
functions occurred with different people at different times
depending on what you're studying. So the introspection method got a lot
of slamming from other disciplines who said that's really too
loose and the other discipline in particular was behaviorism which we'll cover in a minute.
They said that's just asking people what's going on and how do they know
what's going on? You ever
had the experience of like seeing a stick and you put it in water and it looks like it's bent?
The stick didn't get bent. Your eyes are deceiving you because of the refraction,
right? So if your own sensations can be a little tricky
how much more could it be tricked inside your own perception when you're making sense of what
you think you experience?
But that's all you had access to and interestingly enough that's what we
still do today!