Psychology for the Curious, second edition

By Michael S. Swett, Ph.D.

This edition delivers the highlights of a typical Introduction to Psychology college course in about 280 pages, providing the reader with links to psychology-related Websites and additional readings in the fields of scientific methodology, sensation and perception, motivation and emotion, cognition, the brain and its relation to behavior, learning and memory, consciousness, personality, psychopathology, psychotherapy, intelligence, human development, stress and health, social psychology and deviance.

The author, Michael S. Swett, Ph.D. has taught college-level psychology courses since the Earth cooled. Over the past dozen years he has designed and administered ten online college credit courses for three institutions of higher learning as well as providing print- and online content for supplements and textbooks published by McGraw-Hill, Allyn & Bacon and Worth Publishers. He currently teaches psychology at Portland Community College and at the University of California, Berkeley, Extension Online where his upper-division course: “Psychology of Communication” was awarded the “Meritorious Award for the Best College-Level Distance Course” for 2004 by the University Continuing Education Association.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael S. Swett, Ph.D.
• Release date: Feb 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452410883

Michael S. Swett, Ph.D.

This edition delivers the highlights of a typical Introduction to Psychology college course in about 280 pages, providing the reader with links to psychology-related Websites and additional readings in the fields of scientific methodology, sensation and perception, motivation and emotion, cognition, the brain and its relation to behavior, learning and memory, consciousness, personality, psychopathology, psychotherapy, intelligence, human development, stress and health, social psychology and deviance.The author, Michael S. Swett, Ph.D. has taught college-level psychology courses since the Earth cooled. Over the past dozen years he has designed and administered ten online college credit courses for three institutions of higher learning as well as providing print- and online content for supplements and textbooks published by McGraw-Hill, Allyn & Bacon and Worth Publishers. He currently teaches psychology at Portland Community College and at the University of California, Berkeley, Extension Online where his upper-division course: “Psychology of Communication” was awarded the “Meritorious Award for the Best College-Level Distance Course” for 2004 by the University Continuing Education Association.

Book preview

Psychology for the Curious:

Sensation, Perception, Motivation, Emotion, Cognition, Brain and Behavior, Learning, Memory, Consciousness, Personality, Psychopathology, Psychotherapy, Intelligence, Human Development,  Stress and Health, Social Psychology and Deviance, Scientific Method

Michael S. Swett, Ph.D. 

Published by Michael S. Swett, Ph.D. at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Michael S. Swett, Ph.D.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Psychology: What's it  all About?

Chapter 2: The Brain and Behavior

Chapter 3: Sensation and Perception

Chapter 4: Motivation and Emotion

Chapter 5: Learning and Memory

Chapter 6: Consciousness

Chapter 7: Cognition

Chapter 8: Developmental Psychology

Chapter 9: Social Psychology and Deviance

Chapter 10: Personality

Chapter 11: Stress and Health

Chapter 12: Abnormal Psychology

Chapter 13: Intelligence

Chapter 14: Psychotherapy

Chapter 15: Epilogue

Chapter 1 What is Psychology all about?

Psychology appeals to people because it offers a rational and objective means to understanding the thinking and behavior of individuals and groups.  Psychology is a science that seeks to describe, explain, predict and control behavior and mental processes.  Psychology studies human relationships, consumer behavior and advertising, violence and aggression, mental illness, motivation and emotion, learning and memory, and the development of the personality.  In this course, we will explore these topics and more, leaving you with a greater understanding of the individual and society.

In the world of ideas, psychology does not operate in a vacuum.  Psychology relates to many other subject areas in the social sciences.  For example, economics describes human psychological behavior in the marketplace; people often buy things based on emotion- rather than rational decision making.  This is particularly true with expensive cars and homes- people who sell real estate and luxury cars know this, and they use applied psychology to steer the customer to the sale.  What does the Wall Street Journal mean when it reports on   consumer confidence?  It is a catch phrase for describing an emotion, a feeling in the collective American gut about where the economy is going. So much of the US economy rides on the perceptions and spending behavior of its citizens.   Advertising is the great living laboratory of psychology where the science of persuasion seeks to influence the process of consumer choice.  Ads have moved beyond just selling you a product: they now sell you an idea, a lifestyle, an attitude; a fantasy- the product is secondary to this feeling.  Some recent Nike ads are an example of this kind of advertising- you don't see the product anywhere.

Political science is driven essentially by the way people think; political ideologies are usually expressed in motivational terms, offering the prospect of a better world for the masses in words most people can understand.  Political campaigns engage the services of social psychologists to define the pivotal issues of the time, so messages can be crafted and candidates packaged and sold to the electorate like so many bars of soap.

Sociology and cultural anthropology focus on how groups of people form and how they interact, whether in social groups or in societies and cultures.  The fundamental unit of a social group or a society is the individual, and the way people think and relate to one another is the province of social psychology as well.

Biology and physiology have made major contributions to psychology in the last twenty years, giving psychologists the methodological tools to study the workings of the living brain, and its relationship to thought, language, behavior and mental illness.

As the science of the mind and behavior, psychology gives us the tools to check out our hunches and intuitions about human thought and behavior, enabling us to base what we know about the mind on fact rather than fiction.  There is no shortage of misinformation in popular culture about how the mind works.  TV and radio talk shows, psychic networks, self-help books and societies for the study of paranormal phenomena offer a pseudoscientific perspective of the workings of the human mind.  The popularity of these sources of misinformation shows not only how much concern and interest people have about matters of mental life, but also gives truth to P.T.  Barnum’s adage: There’s a sucker born every minute.  The scientific method offers us an alternative to the sucker’s view of psychology and puts us on the road to a rational, objective examination of human thought and behavior.  This book is your vehicle for traveling that road.

The Scientific Method and the Goals of Psychology

Simply put, the four goals of psychology are to describe, predict, explain and control behavior and mental processes.  Let’s turn first to description.

Describing What Happens

Let’s say that you want to study the effect of food on a rat’s motivation to learn his way through a maze.  The first thing you do is formulate a hypothesis, or guess, about what you think is going to happen.  You state your hypothesis in the form of an operational definition: terms that are observable, measurable, and worded in terms of planning for an outcome which will support the hypothesis or reject it.  For our example, we will start with a hypothesis that says Rats will take less time to run a maze from the start box to the goal box if you put food in the goal box.  There is a problem here, and you have probably already guessed it- the rat has to be hungry.  How do you define hunger in a rat?  What is your operational definition of hunger?  You could withhold food from the rat for a day, or you could simply withhold breakfast from the rat, and then have the rat run the maze before dinnertime.  The problem is that your definition of breakfast time and dinner time may be different from that of the next persons’.  Some rats eat more at mealtime than others, and some rats are heavier than others.  So what do you do?  You weigh each rat over a period of a week when the rats have unlimited access to food. That way you get a baseline measurement of a rat’s average free-feeding weight.  Starting the second week, you allow your rats unrestricted access to food for only an hour a day, until each rat gets down to 80% of his   free-feeding weight.  A rat that is 80% of its free feeding weight is a hungry rat, and he (By the way, lab rats are all males, to eliminate variations in behavior and physiology due to female rats' estrus cycle.) will work for food.  Your operational definition of hunger in a rat is expressed in terms of its present weight compared to its free feeding weight.

Now that you have a hungry rat, how do you operationally define whether he has learned the maze?  You put your hungry rat in the start of the maze and you let him run around until he happens upon the food in the goal box.  Has he learned the maze on this first trial?  Probably not.  Rats, like people, engage in trial-and-error learning, and the rat more than likely just got lucky on his first trial.  So you put the rat back in the start box and send him off on his quest for food again.  You will probably notice two things: 1) the rat makes fewer false moves and wrong turns with each successive trial in the maze; 2) as the rat gets full he runs slower, until he stops entirely.  Depending on how much food you put into the goal box, this can happen after two trials or twenty.  So you need to standardize your food quantity for each trial, by let’s say, putting one small food pellet in the goal box before each trial.  That way, your rat will be good for  about 20 trials before he stops.

Learning has been operationally defined by psychologists as being a relatively permanent change in behavior because of experience.  In the case of our rat, if he finds the goal box within a set amount of time, let’s say 30 seconds, and he does this ten times in a row, we can say that he has learned the maze to a criterion of ten consecutive successful trials.  In this case, we operationally define learning in terms of this criterion.  The advantage of this operational definition is that others will know exactly what we mean when we tell them that our rat has learned the maze.

An operational definition of an idea or concept is expressed in terms of what operations or procedures will produce it, much as we did with our story of the hungry rat and his learning experience above.  To relate the concept of operational definition to your present life situation, an A in your psychology course may be defined as getting 90% or more of the total points possible from a combination of tests, term papers or other projects.

Many of the terms used in psychology have more than one meaning because, after all, words are just symbols and people determine their meanings.  To say that a person is anxious, intoxicated or angry can be interpreted in a variety of ways, depending upon who the listener is.  Using these terms in everyday life usually poses no problem in communicating what you mean to a listener.  But when you are describing the concepts of anxiety, anger or intoxication in a scientific way, you need to describe the steps the person in question took to become anxious, angry or intoxicated.  These steps must be defined clearly enough for another person to reproduce exactly the conditions of anxiety, anger or intoxication that you are talking about.  When you succeed in the process you gain precision and objectivity, two qualities essential for scientific research and communication.

Explaining What Happens

The description of our hungry rat’s successful quest for food in the maze is just that, a description, which is of little value if we don’t know why it happened.  To give our story some meaning, we have to say why it happened, and to do that, we have to make some inferences.  After all, we can’t get inside our rats’ heads to see the precise biological, chemical and physical phenomena that caused them to learn the maze.  We have to make a judgment about what went on that could explain the rat’s behavior.  For this judgment, we turn to learning theory.  Now a theory is a body of interrelated concepts and principles that are used to explain a psychological phenomenon.  A theory can be visualized as the scaffolding the construction crew puts up when they build a bridge or a building.  The scaffolding forms the outline of the structure and serves to provide a platform from which elements of the building can be assembled.

 In everyday use people often refer to theories as unproven ideas; for scientists, this is not the case.  A theory consists of a set of explanations that have passed objective tests, establishing their validity; although some scientific theories are little more than educated guesses (theories in the field of astrophysics about the origin of the universe, for example).  But other scientific theories have a great deal of evidence supporting them: Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Pavlov’s theory of classical conditioning (Windholz, 1990).  Theories are an important tool in guiding the process of scientific inquiry and are subject to verification at every turn.  Science is a democracy of sorts, with scientists putting their theories up to be tested by all comers.  If the theory stands all the tests that the scientific community can throw at it, it becomes accepted that is, until a better idea comes along and displaces it.  Even the best of theories are never finally proven; they are always subject to change without notice.

 Learning theory allows us to make inferences about what is going on inside the rat that we can’t see.  These unknown processes that influence or cause our rat to learn are referred to as intervening variables.  In this case, the intervening variables are what link the observable stimuli (the maze) with the rat’s responses.  Learning theory tells us that if a particular response is followed immediately by the presentation of food to a hungry rat, the rat will be more likely to repeat the food-rewarded response in the future.  And with each successive learning trial, the response that was followed by food will become stronger and stronger (That is, it will become more and more likely to occur.).

Predicting What Will Happen

The real test of a psychological theory is how well it can predict the behavior of a person or a rat in a given situation. Before the test can begin, however, we have to be very precise in defining our terms (our operational definitions, for example) our methods, our subjects, and our procedures and equipment.  In the case of the rat experiment described above, we have to describe the subjects (all our rats are the same age and sex, they live in the same environment, eat the same food and are genetically very similar to one another) very precisely.  We have to describe the maze very precisely, together with the time of day the rats ran the maze, and how much time and how many trials each rat got per day.  We have to specify the quantity of food available to the rat in the goal box at the end of each trial, together with its brand name (yes, there are brand names for rat food!).  And we have to insure that each rat is treated the same in the experiment- no rat gets more time in the maze than any other, and no rat gets more food in the goal box than any other.

 Once we specify the conditions of the experiment we put the rat in the maze and watch him go.  Eventually he will find the goal box with the food in it and immediately eat it.  Let’s say it took him 5 minutes to run the maze and find the food the first time.  This five-minute time is his baseline- the time we use as a benchmark to compare each of his subsequent trials.  If he takes the same amount of time per trial for the next 20 trials, we can say that his experience with the maze has not changed his behavior.  In other words, we can infer that he hasn’t learned the path to the goal box- he just stumbled onto it each time.

 But if our rat takes less and less time to find the goal box with the food in it over the course of 20 trials; we can demonstrate that he has learned the sequence of behavior necessary to find the food. If we give him a week’s vacation from the maze and test him in the maze on his first day back at work and runs the maze faster than he did when he first started training, we can infer that we have produced a relatively permanent change in the rat’s behavior as a result of his prior experience running the maze and finding food at the end of it.  We now know what it takes to train a rat to run that particular maze.

 Does the rat have a sort of map of the maze in his head?  Or does his formula for finding the food just boil down to something like five steps down the alley,  take two steps to the right, go another 10 steps, then  two steps to the left, etc.?  Years ago, some investigators flooded the maze with water to see if an experienced rat could find the goal box faster than a naïve rat.  Sure enough, the rats that had learned to walk the maze swam it faster than rats that had no experience with the maze (Innis, 1992).  The results of this experiment suggested that learning the maze was not tied to a particular kind of motor behavior (walking), but rather depended upon a sort of cognitive map the rat had in its head.  The rat used the map to locate the goal box whether he walked or swam there.

Using the methods described above, you can establish that learning has taken place, and using the same methods and procedures you can predict that a rat can find its way to the goal box within a specified amount of time, whether it walks or swims to get there.  And you can communicate to another person precisely how to replicate your results, which further confirms the predictive ability of your methods and procedures.

Being Able To Control What Happens

 The word control conjures up images of mad scientists or authoritarian governments controlling the minds and behavior of others.  In the science of psychology, the objective is to gain enough understanding of a phenomenon to be able to exert some control over how, when, and under what conditions said phenomenon occurs.  Helping people gain control over undesirable behaviors such as addictions, excessive anger, and self-defeating patterns of behavior are just some of the objectives of contemporary psychology.

The term control is to some extent culture-bound: Americans tend to think of control in terms of influencing or manipulating external events or other people, whereas many Asians think of control in terms of self control in the face of external realities that cannot be changed (

 Psychology cannot be used for mind control and psychologists are not capable of making people act against their will.  Psychologists cannot read another person’s mind, nor can they predict exactly what a person (or a rat) will do at any given time. Many psychologists will bet on a horse race or a poker hand, but not on people. However, through the application of scientific methods, psychologists have learned what influences human behavior and advertisers and politicians use this information everyday to sell us products or ideas.  But psychology is not about secret tricks and you can learn enough about psychology to recognize when advertisers, politicians or others are attempting to influence your behavior.

Psychology’s Methods of Study

The Experimental Study

 The most precise method of study psychology has to offer is the experimental method, where all possible sources of error or ambiguity are controlled by the investigator.  This is usually done in a laboratory setting.  Experiments involve manipulating two kinds of variables, the independent variable and the dependent variable.

 The independent variable is the variable that the experimenter directly manipulates in order to see what happens to the dependent variable.  In the case of our rat study, the independent variable was whether or not we put food in the goal box of the maze; the independent variable had two levels: food and no food.  One group of rats got food at the end of the maze (the experimental group), and another group of rats (the control group) got no food at the end of the maze. The rats were randomly assigned to either the experimental group or the control group, meaning that each rat had a 50/50 chance of being in the experimental group.  The objective was to see whether putting food at the end (the goal box) of the maze affected the speed (the dependent variable) at which the rat ran the maze.

Every experiment has a control group, which serves as a reference point for measurement of the effects of the experimental treatment.  In this case, the experimental treatment was providing food in the goal box at the end of the maze.  The rats in the experimental group were the lucky ones- they got the food.  And they wound up running the maze faster than the rats in the control group, who didn’t get any food in the goal box.  Other than that, the rats in the experimental and control group were treated the same. So when we found that the rats in the experimental group ran the maze faster than those in the control group, we could argue convincingly that the only factor which accounted for their speed was the presence of food in the goal box.

 In our rat experiment, virtually everything was under our control: the age, sex and genetic heritage of the rats, the food they ate, the conditions in which they lived, the configuration of the maze and the time the rats spent in the maze.  We controlled the temperature and humidity of the maze, the level of illumination, the odors present, the noise level and the time of day when the rats did their duty.  We left nothing to chance: we didn’t allow music or snacks in the experimental space; we kept the maze clean, we kept the rats at 80% of their baseline free-feeding weights, we didn’t change the kind of food we fed them during the course of the experiment.  We controlled everything that might have affected the outcome of the experiment.

The scientific method demands that we collect objective data, free from any expectations or prejudices that we, the investigators might have.  In the case of our rat study, the data are expressed in terms of behavioral measures. The data take the form of objective behavioral observations, and the relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable is expressed as directly observable behavior that can be precisely described.

Behavioral measures are one form of data used by scientists.  Other forms of data come in the form of physiological measures that reflect subjects’ biological responses, such as blood pressure, heart rate, blood chemistry and brain waves.  Brain researchers might use an electroencephalograph (EEG) in conjunction with a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanner to observe what parts of the brain are active during certain mental tasks.  Both the EEG and the PET scanner provide high-quality, objective, recordable data about the functioning of the subject’s brain during the experimental procedure. Fast magnetic imaging (fMRI) of the brain has given us great insight into how the brain works and how pathological conditions affect the brain (Samantha, 2008).

At the end of the study, the objective data are analyzed to see if the initial hypothesis is supported by the results.  In our rat experiment, our hypothesis was: Rats will take less time to run from the start box to the goal box if you put food in the goal box.  You will remember that we took great pains to ensure that our rats were hungry and that all our rats were treated the same with the exception of their assignment to either the experimental group or the control group.  We compare the times the rats in the control group (the no-food group) took to run the maze with those from the experimental group (the food group).  If the differences in times is large enough (a five percent difference or more in time), then we can say that the results of the experiment support our hypothesis.  There are a number of powerful inferential statistical techniques you can use to determine if the differences between the experimental and control groups are significant and reliable (reproducible).  A discussion of these statistical techniques would quickly take us beyond the scope of this chapter.

The laboratory experiment represents the pinnacle of experimental control, objectivity and precision in the world of psychological investigation.  We are able to exercise virtually complete control over all the experimental conditions in the laboratory.  However, not every situation psychologists want to investigate can be studied in the laboratory.  Let’s look at some alternatives to laboratory investigation.

The Correlational Study

In many cases, exercising the degree of control available in the laboratory simply isn’t practical or ethical.  Let’s say you want to test the hypothesis that young children who are exposed to agricultural chemicals (pesticides and herbicides) suffer learning disabilities.  Doing an experiment to test this hypothesis would be unethical in the extreme.  You would have to manipulate the independent variable (exposure to herbicides or pesticides for the unlucky kids in the experimental group, and exposure to non-toxic substances for the lucky ones in the control group) such that some children would be exposed to toxic substances!

So what do you do?  You do a correlational study- you look for a situation in the real world where kids are already being exposed to toxic chemicals, (the experimental group) and you find another group of kids who have not been exposed (the control group), and you compare their test scores, grades and teacher reports.

You make sure that the kids in both the experimental and control groups are as similar as possible in terms of age, sex, family income, geographic location, proficiency with the English language, etc., with the only discernable difference being their exposure to toxic chemicals.  The price you pay for doing a correlational study comes in terms of the precision of your findings.  You were not able to randomly assign the kids to one condition or the other and you didn’t have any control over what the kids ate, their level of general health, their respective body weights or metabolic rates, or the levels and types of toxic chemicals they were exposed to.  So the most you can say at the end of your study is that exposure to toxic chemicals and learning disabilities vary together; that exposure to toxic chemicals and learning disabilities occur together.  But you can’t, on the basis of your observations; say that exposure to toxic chemicals causes learning disabilities in children. But there is ample evidence that exposure to toxic chemicals causes developmental cognitive deficits in children (Schettler, 2001).

 To achieve greater precision in your study you could collect two sets of two scores, one for the level of toxic chemicals in the blood of the children in the experimental and in the control group, and the I.Q. score of each child in each group.  Next, you would calculate a statistic known as the correlation coefficient, which represents the degree of relationship between the blood level of toxic chemicals and I.Q.  This correlation coefficient (represented by the letter r in the world of statistics) can vary from -1.0 to +1.0.  If there were a perfect relationship between exposure to toxic chemicals and the degree of intellectual impairment, the correlation coefficient would be +1.0.  This would be the case when an increase in blood level of toxic chemicals results in a corresponding decrease in I.Q. score.  For example, if for each microgram of toxic chemical found in a unit of blood there is a corresponding decrease in I.Q. score of one point.  On the other hand, if there is no relationship at all between blood levels of toxic chemicals and I.Q. score, the correlation coefficient would be zero.  And if toxic chemicals served to increase I.Q. scores, then the correlation coefficient would be negative.  For example, for each microgram of toxic chemical found in a unit of blood, there is a corresponding increase in I.Q. score of one point, the correlation coefficient would be -1.0.

 You would expect to see a positive correlation between scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and GPA of college freshman (it’s about .40), and you would expect a negative correlation to exist between college grades and liters of beer consumed by college freshman.  In some cases, you would expect to find no relationship at all between two variables, such as shoe size and grades in math- the correlation would be zero.

 The correlation coefficient expresses how much two variables are in step with one another.  If they vary together, there is a positive correlation coefficient.  In the case of time spent studying for a final exam and one’s score on that exam, you would expect that the more time spent preparing for the test, the better the grade, and thus the higher the correlation coefficient (provided the student did not study all night before the test). A good example of two variables being out of step with one another is the relationship between test anxiety and time spent preparing for the test in question.  Test anxiety might be negatively correlated with time spent preparing for the test.  The more time you spend preparing for the test, the less anxious you feel when sit down to take the test.  So as preparation time increases, test anxiety decreases, and you have a negative correlation between the two variables of test anxiety and preparation time.

Correlational research takes many forms.  Studies of television viewing and its effect on attitudes, for example, have found that people who watch a lot of television tend to be more fearful of being victims of violent crime and want to take measures to protect themselves (Nabi & Sullivan, 2001)  Just because you watch a lot of TV (more than 7 hours per day) doesn’t mean you are necessarily afraid of being a crime victim.  All the studies are saying is that hours spent in front of the tube and fear of being a victim of violent crime happen to vary together.  We don’t know why they vary together, they just do.  In other words, watching a lot of TV will not cause you to think that you will be a victim of violent crime.

Naturalistic studies often use correlation to highlight the relationship between two or more variables occurring in the natural environment where the investigator merely observes what’s going on and collects data, but does not intervene in the phenomena being studied.  Historians using computer software mine historical census data and military records to study behavioral trends occurring in the past. These studies collect data on behavioral measures of persons in the natural environment.  For example, studies linking violent crime to weekends and unusually hot weather merely state that violent crime and hot weekends occur together.  Just because it’s 97 degrees at 11:30pm Friday night on a payday with a full moon in August doesn’t mean that violent crime will necessarily occur at a given location where these conditions exist.  Correlational studies merely say that the probability of violent crime is greater at this particular time than it would be on a Monday night in February when it’s 42 degrees and raining.

The Case Study

 So far we have looked at the experimental study and the correlational study.  A third major area of research is the case study, which focuses on only a few subjects, or sometimes-just a single subject.  The case study is sometimes referred to as the clinical method. The object of a case study is often a person or persons with unusual characteristics, such as murderers (for example, school shooter Kip Kinkel), people with multiple personality disorder (the story of Sybil, whose therapist claimed she had 50 different personalities) or people with extraordinary mathematical, musical, or chess playing abilities.  Case studies have focused on Gulf War veterans to determine mental and physical impairments associated with their particular military service.  Case studies have been done on veterans of Vietnam, Korea and World Wars One and Two in the area of post-traumatic stress disorder (formerly known as combat fatigue and shell shock in the last two World Wars).  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have raged on for years, have spawned a new generation of damaged veterans, the signature wound of these wars being the traumatic brain injury (TBI) often caused by roadside bombs.

 The limitations of case studies stem from their small sample sizes and hence their application to the human population as a whole.  But these shortcomings can sometimes be outweighed by the valuable insights they provide into the functioning of the human mind under unusual or extreme conditions.

Defending against Murphy’s Law in Psychology

 You have probably heard of Murphy’s Law: that Anything that can go wrong, will.  Science is constantly engaged in a struggle against Murphy’s Law, expressed in the many things can go wrong and introduce error, bias and just plain misinformation into the process of its scientific inquiry.  Some of the manifestations of Murphy’s Law include the following:

1. Personal bias on the part of the investigator, expressed through political, moral, religious, racial and cultural beliefs, prejudices values and attitudes.

2. Individual differences in subjects’ personality characteristics, physical and mental abilities, levels of motivation and alertness at the time you are studying them that can have an effect on the outcome of your investigation.

3. Your expectations of what’s going to happen in your investigation can affect the outcome of your study.  A classic study from the 1960’s demonstrated the effect of teachers’ expectations on the academic performance and standardized test scores of students in their sixth grade classes.

4. The placebo effect has been well documented. It often happens in studies of pain relief by experimental drugs.  The placebo effect occurs when people think a treatment is working when it really shouldn’t be, such as when an actor dressed as physician gives subjects a sugar pill and tells the patients that the sugar pill is really a new type of painkiller.  The patients often report a reduction in their pain after taking the sugar pill. Packaging over-the-counter inexpensive but effective drugs such as aspirin in the form of pills and capsules that look like prescription medications affects consumers’ expectancies.  Consumers expect a pain relief product which is packaged like prescription medicine and carries a higher price to relieve their headache pain more effectively, so they buy the more expensive product, when simply taking two cheap aspirin tablets would do the same job.   One way experimenters control for the placebo effect is by using the double blind procedure: have all the pills look alike and don’t tell either the patient or the person administering the pills what’s in them. The patient and the pill administrator see only a code on the pill bottle; no person with patient contact has any idea what the pills contain.

5. Confounding variables, such as the effect of different body weights or tolerance levels of a particular drug, can affect the relationship between the independent variable (drug dosage of a painkiller) and the degree of pain relief reported by subjects.  A person studying how people perceive different colors could have the data confounded by using incandescent light in the experimental space.  Incandescent light has a lot of red in it, which can influence the way people perceive the various color samples presented in the experiment.

Six Perspectives of Psychology in the Modern World

The Biological View of Psychology

 The biological perspective of psychology takes the position that thought and behaviors are products of the biological processes of the brain and nervous system, the hormonal or endocrine system and one’s genetic makeup.  The biological view closely resembles the medical model; it postulates that modifying the biology of the individual can modify the individual’s thought and behavior, and that all behavior and thought are determined by biological activity.

The biological model is deterministic; it asserts that all living processes can be understood in terms of the physical laws of the universe.  If you carry this position to its logical extreme, you wind up saying that there is no such thing as free will and we are totally controlled by the interaction of matter and energy.  We have no choices at all. Perhaps our heredity and our environment conspire to make all the decisions for us and that our choices are an illusion, being merely reactions to that complex of heredity and environment.  The problem is that no one has found a way to test whether or not this notion of determinism