PSYCH 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Robert Plomin, Positive Psychology, Natural Selection
Document Summary
In psychology"s early history things appeared black and white- are structuralists or functionalists right?! We see in the history and development of psychology and human development we see that separate approaches are asking slightly different questions. Different groups are looking at different parts of the puzzle- each branch. Structuralism (late 1800"s) of psychology is complimentary. Interested in contents of the mind (i. e. , building blocks or structures of mental life); used method of introspection. Belief in reductionism- understand the parts, you can have an accurate picture of putting it together and how it works. In contrast with one view that believes we can"t divide things into parts and put them together and understand (the sum is more than the total) We can learn a lot by looking at the parts, there"s something more to understand when putting the whole picture together. We needed to understand our minds and our world in the context of real environments.