Psychology: Where to Begin?

Psychology is a field of science that is an amalgamation of many different areas of inquiry. On the one hand, it's about trying to understand how and why people change throughout their lives. But this understanding grows from a foundation of previous knowledge based on our history of science and how we know what we know.

The past 100 years we've seen a shift in science. It's moved from an objectivist philosophy to that of a constructivist one. What does this mean? It means that instead of believing that we are mere observers, passively watching events unfold, we are actually participating in the creation and interpretation of those very events and experiences.

For example, consider the following illusion: (it may be easier to print these illusions out on paper and trying it there)

 

Move your face about 15 inches away from your screen, cover or close your left eye, and stare at the cross.You may have to move your head closer or away from the screen for this to occur. You should notice that the big black dot disappears. Don’t move your gaze from the cross, or the dot will magically reappear.

Once you have mastered that “illusion,” try this one:

 

Again, cover your left eye and stare at the cross about 15 inches from your face. What happens here? Instead of the bottom line having a gap, your system, your biology, your cognition, creates a continuous line. In other words, you construct something that isn't "really" there. The mechanical explanation of this event is simply that each of your eyes has a "blind spot" where we don’t have any sense receptors (photoreceptors—rods or cones). However, each eye has a blind spot that is in a different location from the other, so that when we use both eyes, the blind spot isn’t experienced. What is significant, though, is that ordinarily we aren't noticing the blind spot: we don't know that we don't know. This is important because it should call into question what you think you know.

The point of this exercise is to illustrate that we do a lot of "filling in" of experience. We create continuity when there may be none. All forms of life has a tendency to create order and organization, and we are no different. There are many examples of this, and we will encounter them at different points in the course. And note that the mechancial explanation doesn't help us understand how we exerience this "filling-in" or how it affects our perception of other events. The mechanical explanation is useful in answering 'how' the system works. It does not help in explaining 'when' (in other words it deosn't answer anything about context). It also does not help explaining 'how it develops', nor does it answer the ever perplexing question 'why?'.

To finish the thought about the history of science, it may be helpful to know that Sir Isaac Newton is a classic figure of the "old" philosophy of science, or the objectivist persuasion; he once said that "he makes no hypotheses," which is taken to mean that he doesn't ever ask questions or make predictions--he "just" observes.  What we have learned in psychology is that we never "just"observe.  We are more active than that, in ways that we aren’t always aware.

Many people, including psychologists, continue to operate like Newton, as if there is an "objective" world out there independent from our biologically based perception. They would say that if a tree fell in the woods, it would objectively make a sound whether or not someone was there to hear it. A constructivist would agree that a tree falling in the woods would cause some type of disturbance, but the sound that is heard, or perceived, is dependent on how the "hearer's"own nervous system works.  For instance, a worm would probably experience the tree falling differently then say a bat or a person. 

The "game"of psychology, then, is to find rules and principles that help us understand, explain, and predict how people will experience, think, feel and behave in responses to "trees falling in the woods." And the understanding and explaining depend on the 'how', 'when', 'development', and 'why'.

In our course, we will be reviewing many of the theories that have been created over the past 100 years as they relate to human psychology. We will find that the 'arguments' between the theories are a consequence of this objectivist/constructivist split. By the end of this course, you will be aware of these distinctions in addition to many informative principles in psychology.

Welcome to the course.

If you haven’t logged into WEBCT, now is as good a time as any.

When you go there, the first place you should check out is the Calender