PSYC 308 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Lomita, California, Eth, Citation Analysis

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 308
• Professor: Jack Martin

Document Summary

History is that branch of knowledge that attempts to recover, analyze, and explain events of the past, including those individuals and groups active within those events. History tells non-fiction stories about the past: stories that aim to be as accurate (factual) as possible. Like psychology itself, history is an empirical undertaking that attempts both to describe and to explain. However, the methods of history are not experimental, but archival, archeological, and narrative. Like psychologists, historians of psychology select questions of interest and determine which facts they will look for and which they will not. There are many, many historical events in psychology, so historians of psychology must, of necessity, be selective in determining the events they will focus on. However, any defensible history of psychology must strive to be as factually accurate as possible, and to be critically aware of its own methods, biases and limitations this is what objectivity means in the history of psychology.