The scientific study of how individuals think, feel, and behave

Book: the systematic study of behavior and experience

People are not born good or bad

John Locke

Everyone is born a certain way and if they change it is because of their environment

Jacque Rousseau

Nature: Genetics

Nurture: Environment

Mind/body separate entities 

Rene Descartes

Free will: choice and control

Determinism: one's path is pre-determined

looking within oneself

Wilhem Wundt

• What made up the mind and its concepts
• describing the structures that compose the mind

• the purpose of the mind
• the thinking process
• behavior
• how mental processes produce useful behavior

1. psychodynamic
2. behavioral
3. humanistic
4. cognitive
5. biological
6. evolutionary
7. sociocultural

• behavior guided by the unconscious
• Sigmud Freud
• Current theory: though processes occur without our awareness

• identifying alws that predict behavior
• behaviors: observable responses
• JB Watson and BF Skinner

• People are innately good and capable of choice
• reaching potential
• Carl Rodgers and Abraham Maslow

• How people mentally represent information
• the Black Box
• Making decisions, memory, and language
• Piaget and Tolman

• explaining behavior and thought process through genectics, brain chemicals, and nervous system
• how memory is formed in the brain

• Darwin
• Natural Selection
• adaptive value of having mental abilities and behaviors
• sexual selection: passing on genes

• how people interact
• attitudes
• situational influences on behavior
• cross-cultural/similarities

• tests ideas
• approches behavior from multiple avenues

• Skepticism
• Empiricism
• Peer Review

• Not opinionated 
• Questioning

Empiricism

• Has data to support the theory

• Summation of facts
• looks at scientific evidence in order to summarize it

• Judgement based on "gut" feelings
• What they I think is right
• Problems:

1. Gut feelings are not always true
2. biases
3. illiogical

• I knew it all along

1. hear about an event
2. make sense of an event
3. i knew it all along and the event seems less suprising

• People seek out information to confir their beliefs
• sometimes what we already know maybe wrong

• Step 1: Initial observation and question
• Step 2: gather information and form hypothesis (perdiction: if then)
• Step 3: test hypothesis
• Step 4: analyze data

assertions that cannot be tested (God)

Psychology is not Metaphysical

• oversimplifies claims
• anecdotes rather than tests
• "new science"
• no peer review
• belief perserverance
• proof not evidence
• fancy language

• Getting the same results each time
• consistancy

• measuring what we are supposed to measure
• accuracy

• Observe behavior in a natural setting
• Pros: occurs in natural setting; real behavior
• Cons: no control over what happens; people may act differently if they know they are being watched

• an in-depth analysis/study of an individual
• Pros: lots of data on 1 person; great for brain research
• Cons: only 1 person; generalizing the data with everyone is difficult

• the study of how 2 variable relate to each other
• Shows relationships not causations

• the manipulation of one or more variables to show cause and effect relationships

• balances peoples' differences from one group to the next
• allows for cause and effect relationships

• Pros: cause and effect relationship
• ethical and practical issues