PSYC 215 Chapter 2: Textbook Chapter 2.docx

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 215
• Professor: Michael Sullivan

Document Summary

These stories are important because they suggest limits to the power of socialization. In the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists accepted that the differences between men and women were due to parental care and upbringing. The problems that erupted later with brenda suggested that the differences between male and female are partly innate. Social psychology is aimed at exploring how people think, feel, and act. The ultimate explanations for human behaviour lie in nature and culture, and there have been many long, bitter debates over which of those is more important. One approach to understanding how people think, feel and act is to try and understand what the human psyche is designed for: psyche: broader term for mind, encompassing emotions, desires, perceptions, and all psychological processes. We want to understand the psyche, and to do that we need to understand what it was designed for (eg: you would not understand a can opener if you didn"t understand what its purpose was).