PSYC 215 Lecture Notes - Reductionism, Startle Response, Psychophysics
16 May 2012
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Document Summary
Turning the clock back to the early 1900s, the type of questions important in psychology (just a science) were: Psychophysics: how long it takes you to make a certain type of decision/detect a certain type of stimuli (mechanistic view of the mind) Cognition/learning: how people learn things (experiments where you had to learn long lists of words, and they looked at what you remembered) Psychopathology: clinical part of psychology; when human being"s developments bring them off track and they experience difficulties. But some psychologists thought that this didn"t tell the whole story. People often say relationships are the most important things in their lives (therefore shouldn"t we study these more?). Groups also have a big influence on behavior (eg: Vancouver riot; people never riot on their own). It affects our relationships between people, countries, etc. On the other hand, people do things that are very selfless; altruism.
