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Early Beginnings: Rene Descartes
Figure 1: Descartes’ famous saying: “I think, therefore I am.”
— For hundreds of years medieval Christian churches felt the human mind, like
God, was an unsolvable mystery. Descartes was the first to start the trek into
our own mind. He was a firm believer in the power of introspection.
— Rene Descartes argued that human sensations and behaviors were based on
activity in the nervous system.
Write out an “I am poem” about yourself. What do you like? What
are your passions/interests?
Structuralism: Psychology is becoming a Science.
Figure 2 Wilhelm Wundt 1832-1929
— Wilhelm Wundt (Voont) was the first to declare himself a psychologist.
Structuralists- concerned with discovering the basic elements of consciousness.
Objective sensations. (taste, sight) things most can experience.
Subjective feelings. (emotional responses and mental images) reactions that only
you can have.
Structuralism:
— Relies on introspection, or the process of reporting your own conscious
mental experiences.
Take a look at the objects below. What do you see? What are they?
What do you think of when you see these objects? How do they make you feel?
Functionalism: Another model rises
Figure 3: William James 1842-1910
— Functionalism- A theory about functions of consciousness and the ways consciousness helps
people adapt to their environment.
— Experience is a stream of consciousness.
— Mental processes help organisms adapt to their environment.
You think about how and why something is used, not its parts
— We repeat actions which become habits. But habits must begin by giving our full attention to
learn it to begin with. (riding a bike, driving)
When you learned how to ride a bike or to drive a car, what factors motivated
you to do so?
Behaviorism: Maybe the mind is a big mystery after all!
Figure 4: John B. Watson 1878-1958
— Psychology should only deal with observable events: stimuli from the environment and the
organism’s response to that stimuli.
— Thought of the mind as a black box which could not be opened or understood.
— Consciousness is a “private event” known only to the individual
— If we can’t understand it, we shouldn’t try to guess what role it has in our actions.
— Watson defined Psychology as the scientific study of observable behavior. No more, no less.
How would you explain the difference between Functionalism and
Behaviorism?
B.F. Skinner and Reinforcement:
Figure 5: B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)
— Showed that when an animal is reinforced (rewarded) for doing something
then it’s more likely to do it again in the future.
— Called Operant Conditioning
— Skinner felt that people learn to behave because they have been reinforced
for doing so.
In what ways have your teachers used reinforcement in the
classroom?
Gestalt Philosophy: The anti-structuralism
Figure 6: Ebbinghaus illusion or Titchener circles
—Gestalt psychology tries to understand how the brain works
by studying perception and perceptual thinking.
—Gestalt Psychologists examine how our minds use context
clues to tell us what we are looking at.
—Two main beliefs of Gestalt Philosophy:
—We perceive things relative to what is around them.
—The larger picture will be seen before its component
parts
Take a look at the circles above. Which of the circles in the
middle is larger?
Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis
Figure 7: Sigmund Freud, the Godfather of Modern Psychology
— Mental disorders result from conflicts of the unconscious mind
— Behavior comes from conflicts and experience in which we may have no memory.
— Freud says the mind is like a mental boiler which holds the rising pressure of
unconscious sexual and destructive desires, along with memories of traumatic
events.
— Free Association: Patients recline and talk about thoughts, wishes, memories
dreams, or whatever else comes to mind. The analyst interprets the thoughts.
Freud believed that dreams were our mind trying to put make sense of everything
going on in our mind.
What was the most recent dream that you remember? Why do you
think that you dreamed about this?
Freud’s three levels of consciousness:
o Id: Bottom of the iceberg, our most basic instincts. The Id acts on its own,
without conscious thought. (I WANT IT NOW!!)
o Superego: Bridges the gap between the Id and the Ego. Superego is
concerned with social rules and morals—similar to what many people call
their "conscience" or their "moral compass." (If I take what I want, what
will people think of me??)
o Ego: the rational, pragmatic part of our personality. It is less primitive than
the id and is partly conscious and partly unconscious. It's what Freud
considered to be the "self," and its job is to balance the demands of the id
and superego in everyday life. (Okay, what can I do to get what I want?)
You are walking around campus and you see that someone has
somehow managed to get Cook Out for lunch. You love Cook Out. You
now realize that you really, really want some Cook Out. How does each
level of consciousness respond to this situation?