What is psychology

1. WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?

2. • Why do people buy so many self-help books,
goes do psychics and read horoscopes?
• What do these people have in common with
psychology student?

3. • People use psychology every day.
• When we explain human actions in terms of
beliefs, motives, love or childhood
experiences, we are using common-sense
psychology or naive psychology or folk
psychology.

4. • Common – sense psychology is not the same
as scientific psychology.
• People use psychological ideas and terms
without knowledge what it really means, for
exemple:
– „repressing” bad memories,
– talking about somebody big „ego”,
– saying that they have depression.

5. Milgram’s (1966) famous experiment
into conformity
• Before carrying out the research, Milgram had asked
other psychologists whether he should go ahead with
the experiment. He was told that nearly all participants
would withdraw before causing any ‘pain.’
• Approx 70% people gave ‘electric shocks’ to what they
believed was another test subject, at a level high
enough to kill them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcvSNg0HZwk&list=FLucLI1DMDsqBvHJ-SK3INYA&index=53&feature=plpp

6. The Milgram experiment
on obedience to authority
Stanley Milgram
August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984

7. DEFINITION OF PSYCHOLOGY
Scientific study of mental processes and
behavior and how these are effected by
internal processes and the environment

8. • Scientific - it means systematic and controlled
study of human behavior with the hope of
establishing cause-and-effect relationships
and describing behaviour.
• Mental processes – attention, memory,
emotion and attitudes
• Behaviours – aggression, helping, sleeping

9. • Internal processes - hormones, genes
• Enviroment – nurture, social influence, culture
NATURE vs NURTURE
BIOLOGY vs ENVIROMENT

10. Working with tekst
• Look at page 8 (Psychology Course Companion; John
Crane, Jette Hannibal) and read „research in
psychology” (in frame)
• Answear these questions:
1. What was tested?
2. Who were the subjects, and how many?
3. How was eksperyment conducted? (method)
4. What was the conclusion?

11. Working in groups
• How would you test the theory that
heat makes people more agressive?
• Write down your ideas.

12. testing proposals
1. Let people solve difficult problems in a hot room then in a cold room.
Measure their blood pressure during excercises.
2. One group of people solve problems in a hot room and a diffrent group
solve them in a cool room. Stop the exercise and invite them into one
room for a coffee break. Assess agression from observation.
3. Observe amount of horn-hooting by drivers in a city on hot and cold
days.
4. Check public records for a number of crimes involving agression
committed in hot and cold seasons in the same city.
5. Measure people aggression with an aggression scale in a hot and cold
days.

13. The diversity of psychology
• Multidisciplinary science.
• Psychologists use a number of data collection
methods
• They study variety of topics

14. • List three topics that you think could be
investigated using information and
understanding from different areas of
knowledge, and explain why.

15. Psychologists
• clinical psychologists
• counseling psychologists
• school psychologists
• educational psychologists
• experimental or research
psychologists
• developmental
psychologists
• personality psychologists
• social psychologists
• environmental psychologists
• industrial-organizational
psychologists
• forensic psychologists
• health psychologists
• sport psychologists

16. LEVELS OF ANALYSIS IN PSYCHOLOGY
• BIOLOGICAL LEVEL – PHYSIOLOGY & GENETETICS
• COGNITIVE LEVEL – MENTAL PROCESSES: MEMORY, THINKING,
PERCEPTION & ATTENTION
• SOCIOCULTURAL LEVEL – HOW ENVIRONMENT AND CULTURE
AFFECT BEHAVIOUR OR THINKING

17. Various levels of analysis
the exemple: GENDER differences
• BIOLOGICAL LEVEL – genetic make-up (XX or XY chromosomes) & hormones
(testosterone & estrogen)
• COGNITIVE LEVEL – schema theory: forming mental representations of what
it means to be either a girl or a boy. Representation guide behaviour.
• SOCIOCULTURAL LEVEL – social theory learning – people learn gender
behaviour by watching how other people of their own sex behave

18. Why men and women are different and why they
have different opportunities around the world?