PSY328H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Precedent, Threat Assessment, Nomothetic
Document Summary
Psychology: human behaviour lies at the heart of psychology and the law, psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes in an attempt to understand, predict, and in some cases control human behaviour. The law, it depends the legal system is comprised of a body of laws, rules, regulations, and procedures the legal system is designed to govern, regulate and control human behaviour. Differences between law and psychology: stare decisis vs creativity. Now, if you prove your theory, hierarchy does not matter: adversarial vs experimental. Adversarial, one side wins one side loses so rooted in human nature to fight against each other: prescriptive vs descriptive. What happens when, if and how, let the law tell you what to do: idiographic vs nomothetic individual specific facts and cases, this guy vs this guy, Nomothetic talk of general trends and not really about individuals: certainty vs probalistic.