ECON 2030 : Exam2. 1
Document Summary
3 fundamental facts about learning from 70 years of cognitive psychology: acquiring new knowledge is difficult and requires practice. 4 goals of psychology: description, explanation, prediction, control. What is psychology: psychology: the scientific study of behavior and mental processes, behavior-any action, mental processes-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, latent constructs. A brief overview of the history of psychology. Pre-psychology (ancient philosophy): aristotle (384-322 bce, tabula rasa roughly translated to mean clean slate , idea is that we are born a clean slate and experience writes upon us, plato, the mind pre-exists. Psychology in which he outlined what he thought psychology should study: to this day we basically follow his chapter headings with some minimal tweaking, believed we should study perception, thinking, grief, and religious experience among other things. Introduction to the scientific method: steps to using the scientific method, perceiving a question: description (psych goal, forming a hypothesis: description & explanation, testing the hypothesis: explanation, drawing conclusions: prediction, reporting results: control.
