Comprehensive History and Schools of Thought in Psychology

the focus of this lecture will be on the history of psychology the basic idea is that in order for us to understand where

psychology is as a discipline today it's important to know where we came from so let's start with the history of

psychology so psychology really started in 1879. there won't be many dates or years that I'll ask you to remember in

this course but this will be one of them so it's it would be fair game for a quiz or exam at some point for me to ask you

what year did psychology begin and for you to know that 1879 is the year that psychology formally started as a

discipline prior to 1879 it isn't the case that people were never interested in

questions about the mind or anything of that sort but prior to 1879 really those sorts of questions were primarily

addressed by philosophy Scholars or people in physiology and Medicine it wasn't until the formalization of

psychology that we had a group of individuals that really were dedicated to understanding these sorts of issues

the first uh who's often considered to be the founder of modern psychology is Wilhelm vandt he worked at the

University of Leipzig in Germany he was really a very strong advocate for making psychology an independent discipline and

he started the first psychology lab in 1879 that's why we marked the beginning of the discipline as being 1879.

um he also started the first psychology journal in 1881 which was an outlet for researchers in this area to begin

publishing their work to talk to communicate with other Scholars who were interested in similar questions about uh

behavior and mental processes generally as I mentioned Avant is considered to be the founder of modern

psychology his name isn't nearly as much of a household sort of name as folks like Sigmund Freud for example but bunt

uh plays a special role in the history of psychology as being essentially the founder of the discipline

one of the things that bunt did is he developed a process called objective introspection uh to examine and to

measure our own thoughts and mental activities right so if you think about the sorts of questions that was

interested in right how do we think about things why do we behave in certain ways there weren't a lot of techniques

that were that were being used at that time to really try to understand on an empirical level how these sorts of

things actually unfold so one of Von's tasks was to really develop a strategy for thinking about uh

for studying how people think about the world around them and so what Von focused on primarily were on our

physical Sensations and so just to give an example of what objective introspection would be like might do

something like like give someone a rock to hold and then ask them to hold the Rock and to describe all the physical

Sensations that were stimulated by The Rock right so for example you might feel the weight of the rock you could feel

the texture of the rock against your skin maybe it's kind of rough and coarse and so what bunk would do is he would

train participants to be very thoughtful and thorough in terms of describing the sorts of sensation stimulated by

different objects and materials for example if you know maybe someone in your family is a wine connoisseur right

this what what you're frequently getting when they when they taste wine and talk about the earthy elements or the taste

of berries or whatever it is that wine connoisseurs are able to kind of extract from the taste of wine it's sort of

similar to what bunt was looking at here with this idea of objective introspection being able to think very

clearly and concretely about our own inner thoughts and activities in response to some sort of external

stimulation from the environment like holding a rock or tasting a new bottle of wine

vont uh had a tremendous influence on the field of psychology as the founder of the discipline Leipzig was absolutely

the place to study psychology in the late 1800s as people went uh to Leipzig to study with Vons uh his uh his

students and graduates of his program would then kind of Branch out and they started new Labs all across Europe and

moved to North America fairly quickly as well um the first uh psychologist to start a

laboratory in the United States was a gentleman named G Stanley Hall who established the first psychology lab in

1883 in the United States uh there were 24 new psychology Labs started over the next decade so between

1883 and 1893 24 new laps sprung up all all across the United States uh this slide shows some of the uh labs

and in those earliest days and so you can see places like Cornell Clark Harvard Wellesley Yale Brown Columbia

right places like that were popping up very quickly the University of Michigan has a really old uh psychology

department 1890 University of Toronto also started their first program in 1890 Indiana University 1887 so you can get a

sense of kind of the history of psychology within the United States and see how it very quickly kind of spread

across the the United States what we're going to focus on now will be some of the schools of thought within

psychology when we're talking about schools of thought what we're really talking about are different perspectives

right not a physical brick and mortar sort of school but rather different philosophical perspectives on what

psychology should be so the first one that we want to talk about is something called structuralism

structuralism was really formalized and developed by a gentleman named Edward titchener uh tichner was one of Von's

students and what tensioner essentially did is he took some of the ideas that were being developed by vant and

formalize them a bit more what structuralism basically argues is that the primary task of psychology

should be to analyze Consciousness and break it down into its basic elements and then under try to understand how

these basic elements are connected to each other right so very similar to vond what

titchener did is he used this idea of systematic introspection but what he did is he focused more he focused at least

as much on the sorts of thoughts that were stimulated by uh by different sorts of experiences and stimulants as much as

the physical Sensations themselves so for example what titchener might do is he might ask someone to think about

the idea of blue like what is blue right and then a participant might give things like well blue things are birds or the

sky they might also talk about what blue kind of inspires in them right blue is also cool and it's kind of restful blue

stimulates memories of these sorts of experiences and so again what tichner was trying to get at was the idea of

asking people to think about their own internal experiences and be able to systematically communicate that to the

to the researcher or experimenter and so he was using a modified form of the same sort of introspection process that bunt

had developed previously the next uh perspective or school of thought that we want to talk about is

something called functionalism functionalism was developed by a gentleman named William James uh who was

a medical doctor in the United States who became really fascinated by psychology and became a very very

prominent psychologist what James thought was that The Advocates of structuralism like titchner

and bond really had had missed the boat he thought they were on the wrong track he didn't think that the sort of

approach that they were taking was really what psychologists should be doing

right rather what uh what James advocated for was something called functionalism

functionalism is based on the idea that psychology should investigate the function or the purpose right of our

mental processes and behaviors right rather than focusing so much on its structure right he didn't say that

focusing on structures completely awful right but he thought that what really matters is why are we doing these things

right why are we thinking the ways in which we're thinking why are we doing the sorts of things that we do

so for example the sort of question that would have been of interest to William James would have been questions along

the lines of what is the goal or purpose of specific emotional states so for example James uh might have been

interested in something like the emotion of jealousy right romantic jealousy and so if James was interested in thinking

about romantic jealousy right instead of thinking about you know kind of from uh from a structuralist point of view you

know what what is the emotion of Jealousy what does it feel like in reporting on those sorts of things

rather what James would be focused on from a functionalist perspective is why would individuals experience jealousy

right what sort of purpose could this serve in terms of human behavior right and so for example he might uh have

thought about over the course of human history right what is it that jealousy would have done for us right so for

example if people did not experience romantic jealousy right if uh for example if if a married partner came

home and found their partner having sex with someone else and if they didn't experience any sort of jealousy if they

weren't upset at all right what would be the consequences of that right and so one of the consequences James would have

probably argued is that individuals who don't experience romantic jealousy may have been less likely right to actually

have their genes show up in the next Generation right if for example if a male doesn't care that his female

partner is having sex with other men right it might reduce the likelihood right that his own genes may make it

into future Generations right so what James would have argued is there could be issues in terms of The evolutionary

purpose right of things like jealousy maybe one of the reasons why humans are experienced romantic jealousy across

cultures might be because of the idea of getting our genes into subsequent Generations right and also taking care

of offspring that we that we create as well so one of the things that greatly

influenced functionalism which I've already alluded to was the ideas of natural selection that were that had

recently been developed by Charles Darwin and so James was really uh enamored with Darwin's ideas of natural

selection and the whole idea of evolution so just to make sure that we're all on

the same page so Darwin when he was talking about natural selection what he was talking about were heritable

characteristics right that give us some sort of survival or reproductive Advantage being more likely than other

characteristics that don't give us those sorts of advantages to be passed on to subsequent generations and thus over

time they're selected right by the process of evolution and so what what Darwin focused on

primarily were physical characteristics things like the number of bones that we have in our hands right those sorts of

things that might give us some sort of advantage now we can we can for example go through

the fossil record and we can find plenty of evidence in favor of evolution and the role of natural selection and

evolution um but what what James and the functionalists were particularly

interested in was this idea of that psychological traits right in addition to things like physical traits are also

subject to Natural Selection right that natural selection doesn't just apply right to things like the bones in our

hands and our our Skin's tendency to develop calluses through friction right rather what what James was interested in

is the way you and I think about the world around us right since our brain is a is a physical organ right may also

have been shaped right by these same sorts of evolutionary pressures right and so that's going to be kind of the

heart of functionalism is trying to understand the function or purpose right of our behaviors of processes often

having a strong overlap with some of these ideas from evolutionary theory and so again Darwin's theory of

evolution and the role of natural selection in evolution also things like sexual

selection as well have had a huge influence on psychology and we'll come back to some of these ideas in numerous

places as we go along this semester the next school of thought that we want to talk about is something called

Gestalt psychology what the gestural psychologists headed by a general name Max verdheimer they

were interested in trying to understand psychological events as being as being episodes of sensing and perceiving right

that couldn't really be broken down into smaller units right so unlike the structuralists right who were arguing

that what you should be doing is breaking everything down into its simplest units the Gestalt folks in

contrast said that there there are some things that you just really can't break down in that way

um there's some experiences that have to be understood in their totality right in order for us to really understand what

is going on so what Gestalt psychology is primarily focused on is studying patterns right

rather than small pieces of an experience so for example we'll talk a lot about the Gestalt approach when we

talk about sensation and perception soon so just to give you uh kind of an idea of what gestaltus would be interested in

so I'm sure all of you have have seen this image here of what could either be interpreted so when you look at this

image they're they're too likely interpretations right some of you may see two faces uh that are kind of uh

look like they're getting ready to kiss each other right as you can see here if you focus on this part of the image and

this part however if you focus on the center part it may look more like kind of a Voz or a chalice or something like

this and what this image is getting at is the difference between what we consider to be the foreground and the

background of an image so if you're focused on this and if you make that the foreground then the part of the image

over here Fades into the background and right when we see this kind of chalice or something of that sort but if we're

focused over here we see the faces as being the foreground right in the here the part in the center becomes the

background right we see two faces instead so the second image when you look at it

you are likely to see one of two things uh you may see a rabbit for example that you could see this being the head this

is the eye this is the mouth and these are the ears right so you could see a rabbit is one possibility

the other possibility looking at the same image is you could see a duck that's kind of lying on its back looking

up uh looking straight up so this is the the the bill of the duck here's its eye the back of its head and so on right so

the same image can be interpreted quite differently depending on what part of the image it is that you're focused on

the next image uh has uh what appears to be at first um a triangle that's superimposed over a

white triangle superimposed over three black circles however if you look at the image a bit more carefully right what

you'll see is that there actually isn't a white triangle at all right if you look at this part of the image here

right there isn't a solid line right connecting the triangle rather what we're really seeing are really kind of

three uh mostly uh mostly circles but with a wedge cut out of them and then the wedges are lined up in such a way

that it creates the impression right that there's a triangle when there really isn't technically a triangle our

mind just kind of fills in those gaps so it looks like a white triangle superimposed over three black circles

when in fact it's three kind of pac-man-like characters actually and here is a classic image that I'm

sure most if not all of you have seen before um and so you could see this is either

being an old woman uh so if you're focused on this being the the nose of the woman there's her mouth and her chin

right she's got some sort of like hair or hat here's a little feather coming out of uh the hat and this is kind of

like a shawl around her so you see her kind of focused uh this way kind of looking downward

the other possible interpretation as you can see this is being a young woman with this being kind of the side of her face

the young woman's kind of looking away from us this is like her eyelashes and her nose this is kind of the curve of

her jaw and her ear so the young woman's kind of looking away from us in this direction

the gestaltus would argue that in order for us to understand what is going on we have to focus on the totality of these

patterns rather than trying to break them down into their constituent elements in some way

the next perspective we want to address is something called the psychodynamic perspective

the psychodynamic perspective was developed by a general name Sigmund Freud who was an Austrian physician

Freud for those of you who don't know much at all about psychology you've probably still heard of Freud at least

at least he's very pop he's a very popular uh figure in pop culture so I would be shocked if if some of you

haven't heard of Freud at some point right you now you may not necessarily know a great deal about him other than

he smoked cigars and he asked people to talk about his mother or their mothers um but you probably know at least a

little bit about Freud from popular culture so what Freud developed was an idea

called psychoanalytic theory what Freud was interested in doing was trying to understand the sorts of mental disorders

that uh that he was seeing uh among patients at that time and so he was very dissatisfied with the

approaches to understanding psychological issues of that were present and prevalent at the time he was

operating so what fully developed with psychoanalytic theory was a focus on the

unconscious and so he was interested in trying to understand our personality our motivation the sorts of mental disorders

that people experience by focusing on unconscious determinants of behavior so he thought that by going in and

trying to get past our conscious defenses and what we're consciously thinking about he was trying to get what

he thought were the roots of our personality and motivations and mental disorders here in our unconscious mind

we'll talk a great deal about about Freud and his ideas in numerous places over the course of the semester

one of the things that Freud is is most famous for is popularizing the idea of the unconscious now Freud wasn't the

first person to posit that there was an unconscious uh that idea had been around long before Freud but Freud was the

person who really popularized the idea the fact that you and I have watched all sorts of television shows where uh

people uh characters on the show may have dreams that kind of act out unconscious desires and things

um all have to do with Freud's idea of dream interpretation and the role that it plays in helping us understand the

unconscious mind for example the Freudian view of the unconscious is that there are thoughts memories and

desires that are well below the surface of our conscious awareness but even though we don't necessarily have access

to those sorts of uh those sorts of thoughts or memories or desires they still May exert a lot of influence on

our Behavior so what Freud would argue is that some of the things that you and I are doing

we may not necessarily understand why it is that we're doing those things rather those are behaviors or our thoughts or

our memories may be driven in part by these unconscious processes as we'll talk more about as the semester goes on

Freud's ideas uh were were at time and still are uh fairly controversial we'll see that psychology today

um there a lot of Freud's ideas um have been dismissed but we'll see that he still has an influence in in

some other ways is what we'll talk more about as the semester goes along one of the things is that this idea that

the behavior is that our behavior is influenced by the unconscious there there's a fair bit of support for that

um however the exact role of the unconscious may not necessarily look exactly like what Freud thought it would

look like and as the semester goes on we'll talk more about what the unconscious may actually be like

compared to Freud's interpretation and ideas about it he also thought that there was a lot of

unconscious conflict related to sexuality and that it played a huge role in in Behavior now part of why this idea

of uh unconscious issues concerning uh sexual behavior and sexual desire was so important Freud's idea is that he was uh

he was living during the Victorian age when there was a great deal of repression about sexual desire and

interest and behavior and so part of the reason why issues concerning sex may have been so prominent in his theory may

have been because of of the time in which he was developing these ideas and again we'll we'll chat more about that

as we talk about issues and developmental uh psychology later in the semester and personality as well

Freud focused a great deal on Early Childhood experiences that to a modern perspective it seems like well of course

we would think about the role that early childhood experiences may have in kind of shaping the foundation of who we are

as adults but prior to Freud a lot of times Early Childhood experiences were were really

dismissed um Freud in contrast thought that what happens during those earliest year

formed the earliest years of life really set the foundation right for who we become as adults and so we really owe a

debt of gratitude to Freud for helping remind people and and help people become aware of the fact that those early

experiences are not something to be completely dismissed but rather they set the foundation for who people like you

and I become as adults um he had a lot of controversial ideas that led to debate uh in his own time

and that still uh are often beta and there was a lot of resistance to some of his ideas uh Freud also liked

controversy so one of the things that uh that isn't always perfectly clear is how much some of his ideas he may have been

putting out there in part to provoke a response uh from from the from society in general so we'll we'll also chat more

about that when we get into more of Freud's life a little bit later in the semester

um regardless of the debates uh it would be Freud has had a tremendous impact on the field of psychology

um now a lot of his ideas as we'll talk about are no longer part of mainstream psychology but he he still he he still

deserves uh to have a strong place in in the history of psychology a lot of where we are as a field

um owes at least some debt to Freud for setting us on certain paths we also want to mention the behaviorist

perspective behaviorism was really pioneered by a gentleman John Watson what Watson

advocated was that psychologists shouldn't be worried about Consciousness right um so so really uh part of what

was happening is behaviorism like like the the approach developed by Watson was looking at what Freud was arguing right

Freud keeps arguing about this unconscious or at least a Consciousness at the very least and Watson said no no

that's not what we should be focusing on we certainly shouldn't be focusing on unconscious uh kind of uh motives for

our behaviors rather what we should be focused on as a discipline is observable behaviors right Watson didn't like the

idea that you can't observe directly the unconscious right a lot of the unconscious content that Freud was

focused on was stuff that was being um being determined based on things like our our Dream content getting people to

engage in free association where they just talk about whatever comes to mind um as analyzing humor was another thing

that Freud did and Watson said that's really not what we should be focused on we should be focused on observable

behaviors what are people actually doing right not conjecture based off of their reports of their dreams

so behaviorism is a theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only

observable Behavior right the things that we can't see things that we can't measure things that we can't count right

that's not what we should be focused on for Watson right a behavior refers to any sort of overt or observable response

or activity by an organism right so things like the words that people say right what things people are actually

doing right things that other people can observe would be things that would count as Behavior right to Watson

uh he rejected the idea of introspection uh he he said that you know asking people to reflect on their own thoughts

it's really not what psychology should be doing according to the behaviorist he said that it's really difficult to

observe or impossible in some cases to observe most mental processes and that as a result that shouldn't be the focus

of psychology right so if you think back to our definition of psychology as being the scientific study of behavior and

mental processes Watson would say uh I focus on Behavior right not the mental process part right now today we

recognize that behavior certainly is absolutely pivotal for us to study but those mental processes also matter a

lot right so mainstream Psychology today would disagree with the the approach taken by Watson and his rejection of the

importance of mental processes one of the other things that Watson did is he adopted a really extreme view on

the kind of classic nature versus nurture debate and what Watson thought was that it's really nurture is what's

important right what he argued is that it's in our environment and our experiences right that really make us

into the people that we are as adults and so he has this famous quote where he says that if you gave him you know a

dozen healthy infants that what he could do is he could shape them to be any sort of adult that he wanted through through

altering the sort of experiences that they had during their during their lives and so for For What from Watson's

perspective right he thought that nature really doesn't play much of a role right in determining who we are as adults

rather a lot of it has to do with the nurture side of things right our experiences what we learn from the

environment is what matters according to Watson another person who is really influential

in the be from the behaviorist perspective was a gentleman BF Skinner he was a behaviorist and his work became

extremely influential beginning in the 1950s what Skinner did it was a little bit

different from Watson is he didn't say that uh internal mental events uh don't exist or if they do exist that they're

they're not important rather he said we can't study them right he he often would talk about the mind as being kind of

this black box and he thought that what went on inside of the Mind really doesn't matter because we can't get

access to that rather what we should be focused on is the actual behavior that people are engaged in because we can get

access to that right so he would have agreed with Watson in that respect that objective Behavior should be our Focus

um and again he would argue we don't need these sorts of mental events we don't need cognition we don't need

emotion because we can we can describe our Behavior without resorting to those sorts of things rather we can focus on

our learning history for example one of the things that BF Skinner is most famous for was developing one of

the fundamental principles of behavior which is that what organisms tend to do is they tend to repeat responses that

lead to positive outcomes right and they tend not to repeat responses that lead to neutral or negative outcomes

right so one of the things that Skinner focused a great deal of his uh career on was this idea of why do organisms do the

things that they do and what he found is that the reason organisms tend to engage in behaviors and repeat patterns of

behavior again and again and again is because they're getting some sort of reward right for doing so there's some

sort of positive outcome right either that reward is is leading to them getting food a lot of the things that

Skinner focused on is he worked a lot with non-human species so he worked a lot with rats and with pigeons and so

rats and pigeons are very food motivated and so what he would find is that he could train them to do these really

complex behaviors by giving them food rewards right and any of you who have pets you may have trained your dog to do

something like like sit in order to to get a to get treats right what you're doing is using one of uh one of

Skinner's fundamental principles of behavior which will talk about in a great deal of detail later when we talk

about learning but this idea that organisms repeat responses that lead to rewards and we tend not to repeat

responses that either lead to no response from the environment or have negative consequences for us some sort

of punishment and so we'll come back to those ideas later

as I mentioned he developed his ideas about learning primarily through working with rats and pigeons and we'll talk a

great deal about Skinner's work when we get to the chapter on the learning later in the semester

the next perspective we want to mention is the humanistic perspective what the humanists argued is that both

psychoanalytic theory from Freud and behaviorism from folks like Watson and Skinner were both dehumanizing right

from both of these perspectives people really didn't have much control over who they are or what they do for the

psychoanalytic folks it was all coming from the unconscious right these early experiences that started influencing our

unconscious mind right that's why we do what we do for the behaviorists as we'll talk about later it was all about our

learning history right what have we been trained to do by our exposure and the environment the humanists argue that

both of those perspectives take out the role of Free Will right and they they minimize uh our ability to choose who we

are as people so in response to psychoanalytic theory and behaviorism a new school of thought

called humanism emerged and so uh two of the most prominent humanists were Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers uh we'll

talk about both of them in more detail later but Maslow developed something called the hierarchy of needs which was

this pyramid that uh some of you may have seen in different contexts that basically argue humans have different

needs with some being more fundamental and foundational so for example we have basic needs to have our biological

drives satisfied so we need food and shelter and those sorts of things and then as we kind of move up once we have

those needs satisfied then we can start worrying about other higher order sorts of needs

Carl Rogers had a number of ideas that have been popularized over the years one of them is the idea of unconditional

positive regard which is often talked about in terms of parenting for example what Rogers argued is that parents

shouldn't Place conditions of or contingencies of regard on their children so for example children

shouldn't be made to think that Mom and Dad will only love you if you're a really good student or if you're a

really good athlete or if you do X Y or Z rather the idea according to Rogers is

that children should feel as if their parents are going to love them regardless of of what happens now it

doesn't mean that behavior doesn't have consequences that's one of the things that people often misattribute to Rogers

but rather what Rogers was arguing is that children and all of us right should have a feeling of unconditional

acceptance from the people around us on some basic level right that people are going to accept us for who we are that

we don't necessarily have to perform in a particular way we don't have to be the best student in our class as a child for

example to earn Mom and Dad's love right that's one of the things that Rogers was famous for arguing is that this idea of

unconditional positive regard is an important part of shaping early life experiences

so what humanism has as a in in totality represents this is a theoretical orientation that really focuses on the

unique qualities of humans especially our freedom and our potential for growth and so it's a very it's a very positive

approach to to psychology especially in comparison with psychoanalytic theory and behaviorism and we'll come back and

talk about humanistic sorts of ideas in a number of places throughout the semester

we also want to address the cognitive perspective uh the idea behind cognition is that it refers to the sorts of mental

processes that are involved in acquiring knowledge so the basic premise of cognitive

psychology is that human behavior can't really be fully understood without examining how people acquire information

how we store it how we retrieve it and process it right so the basic idea behind cognition is we have to

understand how people are taking in information how we're holding it over time and how we're making use of it down

the road uh really cognitive psychology came to prominence in the 1950s and 60s there

are folks like Jean Piaget who will talk about some of his cognitive theories of development uh later this semester when

we talk about developmental models uh Noam Chomsky uh who uh who is still alive he's born in 1928 Noam Chomsky

made huge contributions to this area uh numerous areas of of numerous Fields even but with his ideas about human

cognition so it's done a tremendous amount of work in things like language for example we'll talk about Chomsky in

a number of places over the course of the semester uh Herbert Simon also very very

influential cognitive psychologist and we'll mention him in a few places uh this semester as well

what cognitive psychologists were really interested in doing was trying to apply scientific methodologies to studying

internal mental events right so a lot of the things that cognitive psychologists were interested in were things that are

going on inside of us right so in direct contrast to the behaviorists who were arguing no no we need to ignore these

sort of internal experiences because they don't matter all that matters is what's going on in terms of our

objective of outside Behavior the cognitive uh folks in in contrast argue no no what's going on inside of

that black box right a Skinner would often refer to it that matters it matters how people are thinking about

the world how they're processing information how they're making sense of things because that's going to have

direct implications for the behaviors that they engage in um starting as early as the 50s and 60s

cognitive psychology could be argued to be the new dominant perspective in Psychology in many ways even in fields

that don't directly identify as cognitive psychology you still see a lot of these ideas being pretty pervasive so

cognitive psychology still exists as a separate sort of discipline within psychology but we'll also see that a lot

of the ideas underlying cognitive psychology also permeate other areas of inquiry within psychology as well

we also want to address the socio-cultural perspective which is going to combine social psychology the

study of groups and social roles and relationship and cultural psychology right so the idea here is that there are

cultural norms values and expectations and that all both of these things all of these different elements are going to

combine to impact our Behavior ethnocentrism refers to the tendency for individuals to see their own group as

being Superior to other groups and as being the standard for judging others so for example in the United States what we

tend to do is we have a tendency to view our own way of existing as being the right way to exist so for example most

of us might view democracy as being the right way for people to live right we look at people who are living in other

sorts of cultures and societies that don't necessarily have the same governmental structure that we have and

we see them as being inferior in some way right now we could have an argument

about well is actually democracy the best form of government well maybe but that's that's a different issue right

the idea is that there's this tendency for people to identify as whatever they're familiar with whatever their

group does right as being the best way for other groups to live um historically in Psychology uh was is

in the past it was often a field dominated by middle and upper class white men who were usually studying

other middle and upper class white men and so it's only been in more recent decades uh that women and people from

other racial ethnic groups have really become much more prominent within psychology there's a there's an old

article titled even the rat was white as a as a joke about how when researchers were doing rat studies right the the

kind of prototypical psychology study is is a psychologist studying white rats in the lab right so the idea is that not

only is was the field in the past dominated by white men as researchers right but they were also primarily

focused on studying other white men and in recent decades thankfully the field has expanded dramatically both in terms

of the researchers involved as well well as the participants in studies there's a and this in part is due to a

growing recognition of the the important similarities and differences between groups and this idea of a growing Global

interdependence for example an increased cultural diversity and these will be issues we'll come back to in a number of

places over the course of the semester we also want to address the biopsychological perspective uh the

basic premise of this perspective is that an organism's functioning can be explained at least in large part due to

its bodily structures and biochemical processes and that these are the things that really underlie behavior and mental

processes right and we'll talk about how the brain works how the how this nervous system works so we'll see that there's a

great deal of validity to this approach every thought every emotion uh every memory that you and I have there's a

biological underpinning to that right so we'll talk about how our brains work and operate so there's there's certainly to

it would be difficult right to oversell the importance of the biopsychological perspective

um to the people who uh who commonly are recognized to be uh really strong advocates for the adoption of the

biopsychological perspective or James olds one of the things that he did is he was uh very uh well known for using

electrical stimulation on the brain to provoke emotional responses in animals and we'll talk we'll talk about some of

his work when we get into into the the bio biological perspective on psychology and we talk about different areas of the

brains of the brain and what they're responsible for and the old played a big role in helping map uh the brains of

different organisms Roger Sperry also made huge contributions to the field one of the

things that he did was uh he was one of the first to really recognize the the special specialization between the right

and the left hemispheres of the brain and so again when we get into the biological perspective we'll talk about

how our brain is separated down the middle into two parts the right and left hemisphere and that those hemispheres

have complementary functions so they're not doing exactly the same sorts of things so for example one of the things

we'll talk about is how the right hemisphere of your brain controls movement on the left side of your body

and so we'll we'll talk about some aspares uh findings when we talk about the biological perspective later in the

semester