Psychology has wide appeal

Psychology has wide appeal
Some people will be doing this psychology unit to consolidate earlier study and experience and to build a career. Others will be quite new to psychology as a formal research-based discipline. Some will have been stimulated to study a unit in psychology by the well-publicised examples of research findings or psychologists at work that are presented in the media. Some will be coming to this course because of experiences in their own personal lives. This may be because they have been touched by especially difficult circumstances which they want to come to terms with, or because they feel the need to understand psychological topics such as identity, personality, relationships, intergroup relations or unconscious motivations. Others may have become curious about basic psychological questions such as how we perceive, the nature of memory, why we forget, and how we can understand the processes of learning. Psychologists working professionally, whether doing research or in their psychotherapeutic practices, can help us to think about such everyday issues.

Whilst no psychology course can promise definitive answers to all the questions in which you personally may be interested, the material in this unit will increase your knowledge and your awareness, and provide ways of thinking about psychological issues of many kinds. In this unit we want to indicate how we have arrived at the contemporary, multifaceted discipline of twenty-first-century psychology and discuss some of the issues which psychologists debate and study.

Activity 2
Consider the suggestions we made about why people might be studying this unit and then list your own reasons for studying psychology. Think about this question in some depth; don't stop at just one reason. Try to bring into mind anything that might be of relevance to you, especially at this particular point in your life. If you can, keep these notes until you reach the end of the unit and then consider if, and how, the psychology you have studied has illuminated these original goals.
Psychology has social impact
The relevance of psychology to everyday concerns, and the ease with which it can be popularised and used, mean that psychological knowledge – some of it dubious, some of it accurate – is continually absorbed into culture and often incorporated into the very language we use. Examples of psychological concepts that have entered popular discourse include the notion that we are predisposed, both through evolution and through the functioning of our brains and nervous systems, to behave in certain ways and to have intellectual and emotional capacities and limitations. In many cultures psychoanalytic ideas are commonplace; for example, the centrality of sexuality and its repression, and the idea that Freudian ‘slips’ – mistakes of action – reveal unconscious motivation. Many people speak of having short-term and long-term memories and recognise that they use different strategies for remembering details of recent and more distant events. And a lot of people now know that it is possible to be fooled into perceiving illusions as real and that things as routine as face-recognition or behaviour-in-groups are extremely complex. Many people have absorbed and take for granted the psychological notion that what happens to us in childhood has an influence on our psychological functioning over the rest of our lives. Ideas about the importance of parenting and parental styles of child rearing have also become part of ordinary talk, with the result that some children now complain about not getting enough ‘quality time’ with their parents.

These examples demonstrate also how psychological concepts have an impact on the ways in which we think life should, ideally, be lived. Such ideas, and many others, have been influenced by psychological research, even when they are ideas that are not widely recognised as psychological. Furthermore, psychologists are increasingly being called on to give expert evidence on questions as disparate as legal decisions and design issues. It would, therefore, be true to say that psychology has an impact on our beliefs about ourselves and how life ought to be lived as well as on our everyday behaviours.

So far we have highlighted a pathway of influence from psychology to society. But this is not a one-way street. It is certainly the case that psychological research quite often addresses questions that originate in common-sense understandings. And this direction of influence between psychology and ordinary, everyday knowledge about people has led some to suggest that perhaps psychology is no more than common sense. However, as a field of enquiry, psychology is about much more than common sense, particularly in the way it investigates its subject matter.

Psychological knowledge advances through systematic research that is based on consciously articulated ideas. And psychology is evidence-based. Psychologists may start from the knowledge they already have by virtue of being people themselves. This can be knowledge about people and psychological processes that are common in the culture or it may come from personal experiences of dealing with the world. It is these kinds of knowledge that are often called common sense. For example, one tradition in the study of personality began from the ordinary-language adjectives that everyone uses to describe other people's characteristics. And many psychological researchers have chosen research topics and studied them in ways that seem to reflect their own life concerns.

However, evidence-based research findings quite often contradict the common-sense understandings of the time, and can produce new understandings that themselves eventually become accepted as common sense. For example, in the middle of the last century, it was widely accepted in Western societies that infants should not be ‘spoiled’ by being attended to every time they cried. Consequently, they were expected to learn to spend time without adult attention. But a wealth of psychological research from the 1960s onwards has reported that even very young infants are able to interact with other people in far more sophisticated ways than had been thought. And it has been found that they develop best when they receive plenty of stimulation from the people around them and their environments more generally. The idea of leaving infants to cry or to spend time alone is now much less accepted than it was. Instead, the notion that they need stimulation has become part of ordinary knowledge about child rearing and generated a multimillion dollar industry in the production of infant educational toys.

Although psychologists may begin from ‘ordinary’ knowledge or their own preoccupations, they usually start formulating their research questions using the existing body of psychological knowledge (the literature) and the evidence-based research that their colleagues and co-workers are engaged in (see Box 1). Sometimes technological developments can lead to entirely new research directions. These new directions might not have been envisaged through the application of common sense or using older evidence-based methods. One example of such a technology-driven new direction is neuropsychology and the increasing application of brain-imaging techniques as a way of furthering understanding of behaviour and mental processes. Other examples are advances in genetics and the decoding of the human genome, as well as computer-aided analysis of videotaped observations.

Case study 1: Using evidence: the cycle of enquiry
What do we mean when we say that psychology is an evidence-based discipline? The basic principle is that it is necessary to have some means of evaluating the answers to psychological research questions. Sherratt and her colleagues (Sherratt et al., 2000) devised a ‘circuit of knowledge’ as a way to help students examine evidence and move away from common-sense reactions to psychological questions. We have used a version of this that we call the cycle of enquiry (see Figure 1).


Figure 1: The cycle of enquiry
There are four elements in the cycle of enquiry:

Psychological research starts with the framing of appropriate, answerable questions.
The answers to these questions are claims. These claims have to be clearly identified so that they can be thoroughly assessed.
Assessing claims requires the amassing of information called data. The word ‘data’ is a plural word for the building blocks that make up the evidence that is presented in support of a claim.
The evidence then has to be interpreted and evaluated. The process of evaluation often generates new questions to be addressed as well as providing support for, or disconfirmation of, the original claims.


The diversity of psychology
Since psychology is concerned with the full range of what makes us human, it is not surprising that the scope of the discipline is extensive. Psychology has always been a diverse, multi-perspective discipline. This partly results from its origins. Psychological questions were asked first by philosophers, then increasingly by biologists, physiologists and medical scientists. The diverse origins of psychology are visible if we consider four ‘founders’ of psychology – all of whom produced influential work at the end of the nineteenth century.


Figure 2: The four founders of psychology
In 1877, Charles Darwin, the biologist who later put forward the theory of evolution, was doing the first scientific infant-observation study, observing and writing about his son's behaviours and emotions in descriptive psychological terms. Darwin was trying to make inferences about what his baby's internal mental states might be, based on what he could observe ‘from the outside’. Darwin went on to become a renowned biological scientist whose methods were essentially the painstaking collection, description, categorisation and cataloguing of biological diversity. These were the data that later provided the evidence for his theory of evolution.

Wilhelm Wundt is considered by many to have started psychology as a formal discipline when he opened the first psychological laboratory in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany. He was interested both in philosophical and physiological questions and, as a result, advocated a range of methodological approaches to collecting evidence. His own methods included use of the scientific experimental method, introspection (asking people to think about and report on their inner feelings and experiences), and ethnography (observations of human culture).

William James, an American professor trained in philosophy, medicine and physiology, who published the influential Principles of Psychology in 1890, also advocated a multi-method approach that included introspection and observation. Sigmund Freud, the first psychoanalyst, was a medical doctor and research physiologist who opened his psychology consulting room in Vienna in 1886. Freud, working at the same time as Wundt and James, pioneered a method that involved listening closely to people's personal accounts of their symptoms, emotions, and their lives more generally, asking insightful questions and attending to the particulars of language use and unconscious phenomena.

The methods established by Darwin, Wundt, James and Freud – observation and description, experimentation, introspection and a focus on language – provided psychology with the beginnings of its diverse traditions. Some of these continue to be influential, whilst others have lost favour or been substantially developed.

Although psychology has diverse roots, psychologists with different approaches and methods have not always happily coexisted. There have been many heated debates about the scope of the subject matter and methods that can be claimed to be psychological. Many of the clashes have been about what can be thought of as ‘real’ or ‘legitimate’ evidence. But it has not just been individuals with their own inspirations and beliefs who have introduced particular ways of doing psychology. Different historical periods, cultures and countries generate their own assumptions about what to study and how knowledge, including psychological knowledge is, therefore, situated in time and place.

A graphic example of this concerns the impact of the Second World War on the development of Western psychology. Many Jewish German psychologists and others from German-occupied territories fled, some to Britain (for example, Freud), but most to the USA. These eminent psychologists brought their substantial influence – their ideas and European way of thinking about psychology – to universities in the USA where psychology was expanding. And then the horror at what had happened in Nazi Germany led some psychologists to direct their research to issues like authoritarianism, conformity, prejudice, leadership, small-group dynamics and attitudes.

It is not only cataclysmic events that have led to change and development in psychology. There have also been gradual cultural shifts in ways of thinking about how knowledge should be gained and evaluated. It is perhaps not surprising that different historical periods can produce dominant trends in psychology that occur almost simultaneously in different countries – no doubt influenced by international contacts between psychologists. It is striking, for example, how laboratories devoted to systematic psychological research were initially founded in several Western countries within about 10 years of each other (see Table 1). But the climate of thought can also be very different in different countries and the topics and methods of psychological research, at a given time, may be very different across different countries.

Table 1: Foundation of early psychological laboratories
Germany: 1879 (Wundt opened the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig)
USA: 1883 (American Psychological Association founded in 1892)
Denmark: 1886
Russia: 1886
Japan: 1888
France: 1889
Italy: 1890
Canada: 1890
Belgium: 1891
Switzerland: 1891
United Kingdom: 1891 (British Psychological Society founded in 1901)
Netherlands: 1892

Source: adapted from Zimbardo et al., 1995, p. 6

In psychology, different historical times have also been characterised by the dominance of different methods and theories. For example, dissatisfaction with the limitations of introspection as a method of enquiry – resulting from the difficulty of reporting on conscious experience – gradually developed in the early twentieth century. This difficulty with the method of looking inward into the conscious mind and with the kinds of data that can be collected by this means led to the rise of behaviourism, which became dominant in the 1940s and 1950s. Behaviourism insists that psychologists should study only behaviours that are observable from the outside and should make no inferences at all about mental states and what might be going on inside the head.

Then, in the 1960s, there was a ‘cognitive revolution’, a rather dramatic phrase which describes what was indeed an important shift in thinking about psychology. Many (although not all) researchers in psychology began to take a greater interest in what goes on in the mind. This change of perspective led to what is known as cognitive psychology. The shift began with the study of learning, but became established as the study of information processing associated with mental activities such as attention, perception and memory. Researchers in cognitive psychology did not return to introspective methods but devised other ways of testing their ideas about mental processes. They have, for the most part, continued the tradition of using experimental methods but have adapted them to investigate what goes on in the mind; for example, by finding out how well people remember words presented in lists of related words (e.g. ‘Fox’ in a list of animals), compared with words presented in lists of unrelated words. A clear behavioural measure (the numbers of words remembered) can be used to make inferences about how the lists have been processed and how memory works. This scientific experimental method continues to be dominant within psychology.

More recently, there has been a second cognitive revolution; this time the shift being a broadening of focus from mental processes to studying how meaning is understood through cultural practices and language. As a result there are a variety of methods available to psychologists who want to study language and culture. And many psychologists who conduct experimental investigations of cognitive or social processes now also attend to participants’ own accounts of their experiences.

All areas of psychology are increasingly concerned with investigating issues relevant to people's everyday functioning and their social and cultural contexts. The practical and professional application of psychology is important in many areas of life. Psychologists work as professional advisors, consultants or therapists in a range of settings such as education, the workplace, sport and mental health; and they increasingly research areas of immediate practical concern such as dyslexia, stress, police interviewing of eye-witnesses, and autism.

So, whilst earlier traditions like psychoanalysis or behaviourism still contribute and produce important innovations, the discipline of psychology has continued to develop in ways which have fostered an ever broader range of perspectives. No one approach is either ‘right’, or adequate for answering all psychological questions. As a result, psychology is now seen as legitimately multifaceted, with many traditions working in parallel, and also drawing on other disciplines and their methods for inspiration.