The Psychology Book Read online

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS • PSYCHOLOGY IN THE MAKINGThe four temperaments of personality • Galen

  There is a reasoning soul in this machine • Descartes

  Dormez! • Abbé Faria

  Concepts become forces when they resist oneanother • Johann Friedrich Herbart

  Be that self which one truly is • Søren Kierkegaard

  Personality is composed of nature and nurture • Francis Galton

  The laws of hysteria are universal • Jean-Martin Charcot

  A peculiar destruction of the internal connections of the psyche • Emil Kraepelin

  The beginnings of the mental life date from the beginnings of life • Wilhelm Wundt

  We know the meaning of “consciousness” so long as no one asks us to define it • William James

  Adolescence is a new birth • G. Stanley Hall

  24 hours after learning something, we forget two-thirds of it • Hermann Ebbinghaus

  The intelligence of an individual is not a fixed quantity • Alfred Binet

  The unconscious sees the men behind the curtains • Pierre Janet

  BEHAVIORISM • RESPONDING TO OUR ENVIRONMENTThe sight of tasty food makes a hungry man’s mouth water • Ivan Pavlov

  Profitless acts are stamped out • Edward Thorndike

  Anyone, regardless of their nature, can be trained to be anything • John B. Watson

  That great God-given maze which is our human world • Edward Tolman

  Once a rat has visited our grain sack we can plan on its return • Edwin Guthrie

  Nothing is more natural than for the cat to “love” the rat • Zing-Yang Kuo

  Learning is just not possible • Karl Lashley

  Imprinting cannot be forgotten! • Konrad Lorenz

  Behavior is shaped by positive and negative reinforcement • B.F. Skinner

  Stop imagining the scene and relax • Joseph Wolpe

  PSYCHOTHERAPY • THE UNCONSCIOUS DETERMINES BEHAVIORThe unconscious is the true psychical reality • Sigmund Freud

  The neurotic carries a feeling of inferiority with him constantly • Alfred Adler

  The collective unconscious is made up of archetypes • Carl Jung

  The struggle between the life and death instincts persists throughout life • Melanie Klein

  The tyranny of the “shoulds” • Karen Horney

  The superego becomes clear only when it confronts the ego with hostility • Anna Freud

  Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself • Fritz Perls

  It is notoriously inadequate to take an adopted child into one’s home and love him • Donald Winnicott

  The unconscious is the discourse of the Other • Jacques Lacan

  Man’s main task is to give birth to himself • Erich Fromm

  The good life is a process not a state of being • Carl Rogers

  What a man can be, he must be • Abraham Maslow

  Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning • Viktor Frankl

  One does not become fully human painlessly • Rollo May

  Rational beliefs create healthy emotional consequences • Albert Ellis

  The family is the “factory” where people are made • Virginia Satir

  Turn on, tune in, drop out • Timothy Leary

  Insight may cause blindness • Paul Watzlawick

  Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through • R.D. Laing

  Our history does not determine our destiny • Boris Cyrulnik

  Only good people get depressed • Dorothy Rowe

  Fathers are subject to a rule of silence • Guy Corneau

  COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY • THE CALCULATING BRAINInstinct is a dynamic pattern • Wolfgang Köhler

  Interruption of a task greatly improves its chances of being remembered • Bluma Zeigarnik

  When a baby hears footsteps, an assembly is excited • Donald Hebb

  Knowing is a process not a product • Jerome Bruner

  A man with conviction is a hard man to change • Leon Festinger

  The magical number 7, plus or minus 2 • George Armitage Miller

  There’s more to the surface than meets the eye • Aaron Beck

  We can listen to only one voice at once • Donald Broadbent

  Time’s arrow is bent into a loop • Endel Tulving

  Perception is externally guided hallucination • Roger N. Shepard

  We are constantly on the lookout for causal connections • Daniel Kahneman

  Events and emotion are stored in memory together • Gordon H. Bower

  Emotions are a runaway train • Paul Ekman

  Ecstasy is a step into an alternative reality • Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

  Happy people are extremely social • Martin Seligman

  What we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth • Elizabeth Loftus

  The seven sins of memory • Daniel Schacter

  One is not one’s thoughts • Jon Kabat-Zinn

  The fear is that biology will debunk all that we hold sacred • Steven Pinker

  Compulsive behavior rituals are attempts to control intrusive thoughts • Paul Salkovskis

  SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY • BEING IN A WORLD OF OTHERSYou cannot understand a system until you try to change it • Kurt Lewin

  How strong is the urge toward social conformity? • Solomon Asch

  Life is a dramatically enacted thing • Erving Goffman

  The more you see it, the more you like it • Robert Zajonc

  Who likes competent women? • Janet Taylor Spence

  Flashbulb memories are fired by events of high emotionality • Roger Brown

  The goal is not to advance knowledge, but to be in the know • Serge Moscovici

  We are, by nature, social beings • William Glasser

  We believe people get what they deserve • Melvin Lerner

  People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy • Elliot Aronson

  People do what they are told to do • Stanley Milgram

  What happens when you put good people in an evil place? • Philip Zimbardo

  Trauma must be understood in terms of the relationship between the individual and society • Ignacio Martín-Baró

  DEVELOPMENTAL PHILOSOPHY • FROM INFANT TO ADULTThe goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things • Jean Piaget

  We become ourselves through others • Lev Vygotsky

  A child is not beholden to any particular parent • Bruno Bettelheim

  Anything that grows has a ground plan • Erik Erikson

  Early emotional bonds are an integral part of human nature • John Bowlby

  Contact comfort is overwhelmingly important • Harry Harlow

  We prepare children for a life about whose course we know nothing • Françoise Dolto

  A sensitive mother creates a secure attachment • Mary Ainsworth

  Who teaches a child to hate and fear a member of another race? • Kenneth Clark

  Girls get better grades than boys • Eleanor E. Maccoby

  Most human behavior is learned through modeling • Albert Bandura

  Morality develops in six stages • Lawrence Kohlberg

  The language organ grows like any other body organ • Noam Chomsky

  Autism is an extreme form of the male brain • Simon Baron-Cohen

  PSYCHOLOGY OF DIFFERENCE • PERSONALITY AND INTELLIGENCEName as many uses as you can think of for a toothpick • J.P. Guilford

  Did Robinson Crusoe lack personality traits before the advent of Friday? • Gordon Allport

  General intelligence consists of both fluid and crystallized intelligence • Raymond Cattell


  There is an association between insanity and genius • Hans J. Eysenck

  Three key motivations drive performance • David C. McClelland

  Emotion is an essentially unconscious process • Nico Frijda

  Behavior without environmental cues would be absurdly chaotic • Walter Mischel

  We cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals • David Rosenhan

  The three faces of Eve • Thigpen & Cleckley

  DIRECTORY

  GLOSSARY

  CONTRIBUTORS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION

  Among all the sciences, psychology is perhaps the most mysterious to the general public, and the most prone to misconceptions. Even though its language and ideas have infiltrated everyday culture, most people have only a hazy idea of what the subject is about, and what psychologists actually do. For some, psychology conjures up images of people in white coats, either staffing an institution for mental disorders or conducting laboratory experiments on rats. Others may imagine a man with a middle-European accent psychoanalyzing a patient on a couch or, if film scripts are to be believed, plotting to exercise some form of mind control.

  Although these stereotypes are an exaggeration, some truth lies beneath them. It is perhaps the huge range of subjects that fall under the umbrella of psychology (and the bewildering array of terms beginning with the prefix “psych-”) that creates confusion over what psychology entails; psychologists themselves are unlikely to agree on a single definition of the word. “Psychology” comes from the ancient Greek psyche, meaning “soul” or “mind,” and logia, a “study” or “account,” which seems to sum up the broad scope of the subject, but today the word most accurately describes “the science of mind and behavior.”

  The new science

  Psychology can also be seen as a bridge between philosophy and physiology. Where physiology describes and explains the physical make-up of the brain and nervous system, psychology examines the mental processes that take place within them and how these are manifested in our thoughts, speech, and behavior. Where philosophy is concerned with thoughts and ideas, psychology studies how we come to have them and what they tell us about the workings of our minds.

  All the sciences evolved from philosophy, by applying scientific methods to philosophical questions, but the intangible nature of subjects such as consciousness, perception, and memory meant that psychology was slow in making the transition from philosophical speculation to scientific practice. In some universities, particularly in the US, psychology departments started out as branches of the philosophy department, while in others, notably those in Germany, they were established in the science faculties. But it was not until the late 19th century that psychology became established as a scientific discipline in its own right.

  The founding of the world’s first laboratory of experimental psychology by Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig in 1879 marked the recognition of psychology as a truly scientific subject, and as one that was breaking new ground in previously unexplored areas of research. In the course of the 20th century, psychology blossomed; all of its major branches and movements evolved. As with all sciences, its history is built upon the theories and discoveries of successive generations, with many of the older theories remaining relevant to contemporary psychologists. Some areas of research have been the subject of study from psychology’s earliest days, undergoing different interpretations by the various schools of thought, while others have fallen in and out of favor, but each time they have exerted a significant influence on subsequent thinking, and have occasionally spawned completely new fields for exploration.

  The simplest way to approach the vast subject of psychology for the first time is to take a look at some of its main movements, as we do in this book. These occurred in roughly chronological order, from its roots in philosophy, through behaviorism, psychotherapy, and the study of cognitive, social, and developmental psychology, to the psychology of difference.

  "Psychology has a long past, but only a short history."

  Hermann Ebbinghaus

  Two approaches

  Even in its earliest days, psychology meant different things to different people. In the US, its roots lay in philosophy, so the approach taken was speculative and theoretical, dealing with concepts such as consciousness and the self. In Europe, the study was rooted in the sciences, so the emphasis was on examining mental processes such as sensory perception and memory under controlled laboratory conditions. However, even the research of these more scientifically oriented psychologists was limited by the introspective nature of their methods: pioneers such as Hermann Ebbinghaus became the subject of their own investigations, effectively restricting the range of topics to those that could be observed in themselves. Although they used scientific methods and their theories laid the foundations for the new science, many in the next generation of psychologists found their processes too subjective, and began to look for a more objective methodology.

  In the 1890s, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov conducted experiments that were to prove critical to the development of psychology in both Europe and the US. He proved that animals could be conditioned to produce a response, an idea that developed into a new movement known as behaviorism. The behaviorists felt that it was impossible to study mental processes objectively, but found it relatively easy to observe and measure behavior: a manifestation of those processes. They began to design experiments that could be conducted under controlled conditions, at first on animals, to gain an insight into human psychology, and later on humans.

  The behaviorists’ studies concentrated almost exclusively on how behavior is shaped by interaction with the environment; this “stimulus–response” theory became well known through the work of John Watson. New learning theories began to spring up in Europe and the US, and attracted the interest of the general public.

  However, at much the same time as behaviorism began to emerge in the US, a young neurologist in Vienna started to develop a theory of mind that was to overturn contemporary thinking and inspire a very different approach. Based on observation of patients and case histories rather than laboratory experiments, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory marked a return to the study of subjective experience. He was interested in memories, childhood development, and interpersonal relationships, and emphasized the importance of the unconscious in determining behavior. Although his ideas were revolutionary at the time, they were quickly and widely adopted, and the notion of a “talking cure” continues within the various forms of psychotherapy today.

  "The first fact for us then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on."

  William James

  New fields of study

  In the mid-20th century, both behaviorism and psychoanalysis fell out of favor, with a return to the scientific study of mental processes. This marked the beginning of cognitive psychology, a movement with its roots in the holistic approach of the Gestalt psychologists, who were interested in studying perception. Their work began to emerge in the US in the years following World War II; by the late 1950s, cognitive psychology had become the predominant approach. The rapidly growing fields of communications and computer science provided psychologists with a useful analogy; they used the model of information processing to develop theories to explain our methods of attention, perception, memory and forgetting, language and language acquisition, problem-solving and decision-making, and motivation.

  Even psychotherapy, which mushroomed in myriad forms from the original “talking cure,” was influenced by the cognitive approach. Cognitive therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy emerged as alternatives to psychoanalysis, lead
ing to movements such as humanist psychology, which focused on the qualities unique to human life. These therapists turned their attention from healing the sick to guiding healthy people toward living more meaningful lives.

  While psychology in its early stages had concentrated largely on the mind and behavior of individuals, there was now an increasing interest in the way we interact with our environment and other people; this became the field of social psychology. Like cognitive psychology, it owed much to the Gestalt psychologists, especially Kurt Lewin, who had fled from Nazi Germany to the US in the 1930s. Social psychology gathered pace during the latter half of the 20th century, when research revealed intriguing new facts about our attitudes and prejudices, our tendencies toward obedience and conformity, and our reasons for aggression or altruism, all of which were increasingly relevant in the modern world of urban life and ever-improving communications.

  Freud’s continuing influence was felt mainly through the new field of developmental psychology. Initially concerned only with childhood development, study in this area expanded to include change throughout life, from infancy to old age. Researchers charted methods of social, cultural, and moral learning, and the ways in which we form attachments. The contribution of developmental psychology to education and training has been significant but, less obviously, it has influenced thinking about the relationship between childhood development and attitudes to race and gender.

  Almost every psychological school has touched upon the subject of human uniqueness, but in the late 20th century this area was recognized as a field in its own right in the psychology of difference. As well as attempting to identify and measure personality traits and the various factors that make up intelligence, psychologists in this growing field examine definitions and measures of normality and abnormality, and look at how much our individual differences are a product of our environment or the result of genetic inheritance.