Intro to Psychology

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Intro to Psychology

What at first seems obvious may not be the case. Psychology looks past intuitions and feelings to search for the true roots to our behaviors. Watch this lesson to learn about two experiments that demonstrate how testing the 'obvious' can yield surprising results.

So you might think that some of things psychologists study are kind of obvious. They're not things that are mindblowingly cool. They study behavior. We all have our own intuitions about behavior. We all have our own ways that we think it works, and this is something that can kind of be a misconception about psychology - that they're confirming things that we already know about ourselves.

One kind of funny example is there was a recent study that studied the weekend effect. That's what they called it in the paper, and there were some researchers at the University of Rochester. What they concluded was that, regardless of whatever job you have, people are happier on the weekend than they are during the week. And this is something that your personal experience has probably confirmed over and over again. You might not think that this is something that scientists need to study. Well in this case, the obvious hypothesis is that the weekend is more fun than the non-weekend. While in this case this was proved to be true, there are a lot of instances in psychology where this hasn't been true.

Some of the coolest experiments have been when people have thought things to be obvious but they've turned out not to be. This would be like if your weekend effect experiment actually proved that people were happier during the work week. That would be the magnitude of some of these experiments that disprove the hypothesis. That seems crazy - it isn't true in this case, but in some cases it is. As an example of this, let's say your friend decides to design an experiment where he's going to see if people get an incredibly easy question wrong just because everyone else in the room is answering wrong as well.

The question he's going to ask is he's going to give two cards. The first card is going to have a line on it, and the second card is going to have three lines on it of different lengths. Now one of them is the same length as the one on the card. These lines are labeled A,B and C. So he's going ask a bunch of people in the room which line is the same as the line on the first card. This is the most obvious, easy question ever, a 3-year-old can answer this - if he can see, he's going to be able to answer this question. But what your friend's going to do is he's going to have everyone else in the room answer wrong. If the answer is B, then he's going to have everyone else say C. Let's see if our subject will also say C.

Social psychologist Soloman Asch

And now, this is a real experiment. The guy who designed it, his name is Solomon Asch, and he thought that people wouldn't do this. Again, they can see that B is clearly the answer, and they're not going to get it wrong even if they're pressured by other people. He thought that he would find this was true. No, people got it wrong all the time. Only about 24% of the subjects didn't say the wrong answer on average - they would do three trials each. 24% didn't say the wrong answer. Everyone else gave the wrong answer at least once because the effect of having all these people in a row saying the wrong answer over and over again was so powerful that they said the wrong answer.

This is something that if Solomon Asch just said 'Oh yeah this is something obvious that people can see, and they're not going to get this wrong,' we would never know this. We would never know how powerful people's peers are and how powerful peer pressure is. And that was an experiment where it was good that it got done, and it turned out not be so obvious. That's a way in which psychology can be useful. It's true of psychology, what you see over and over again, because it's true that we have ideas of how things work and our brains work. We don't actually have any idea a lot of the time.

And there's another study that shows this perfectly. It's about how people misattribute why they're feeling the way they're feeling. In this particular study, the researchers decided to have men go out on a bridge. The had two bridges, one of which was kind of shaky like one of those wood, Indiana Jones bridges where you figure a plank may fall out in the middle. And one of them is really sturdy - it's not going anywhere; you're going to be fine if you're on this bridge.

The men would cross this bridge, and afterward, they would talk to this lovely lady, who was posing as the researcher. And she would ask them a bunch of questions. She would ask them the kind of design scenarios based around certain questions, and she would also give them her phone number to see if they had any questions about the experiment. And you know they'd actually call her because she was a beautiful woman.

And what they found is the ones who went over this shaky bridge in asking their questions and designing the stories that the questions were supposed to elicit, they were actually way more sexual than the ones who went over the not so shaky bridge. And they were way more likely to call the researcher if they went across the shaky bridge. So, shaky bridge equals more sexual content in their answers, and it also equals calling the researcher. Not shaky bridge equals none of that. And what the guys designing this experiment basically concluded was that if you get scared - you're walking across a shaky bridge, and you get scared, and your heart's racing, and you're feeling kind of physiologically aroused in a nondescript way - they attributed this to the beautiful woman. And so they wanted to call because they thought they were feeling all sort of out of whack and heart racing because of her and not necessarily because of the shaky bridge.

So we really have no idea why we do what we do. And so what psychology can do in the Asch experiment and this experiment is it can help us tease apart all of the reasons why we might do things and figure out what actually causes behavior and why we actually think certain things and what influences what. It really allows you to tease apart all these factors without our own intuition getting in the way. And that's the value of psychology you'll see throughout most of the cool experiments. This is what they're doing. They're figuring out why we do what we do and not letting our own feelings and intuitions about that get in the way.

What Is Psychology?

Psychology is the scientific study of how we think, feel and behave. In this lesson, you'll get an overview of the five main approaches that have guided modern psychological research.

Why do you act the way you do? Have you ever wondered why some people are the life of the party and others prefer to curl up with a good book? Or why you remember certain events but not others? People have studied the mind and how it works since the time of the ancient Greeks, but the scientific study of psychology only dates back to a little over a hundred years ago.

Since Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology lab in 1879, psychologists have studied various aspects of human behavior, such as personality, brain functions and socio-cultural influences. As psychology progressed, it began to tackle the question of why we do what we do from different angles, including: biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive and humanistic perspectives. Let's look at each of these five main approaches that guide modern psychological research.

Biological Approach

Biopsychologists look at how your nervous system, hormones and genetic makeup affect your behavior.Biological psychologists explore the connection between your mental states and your brain, nerves and hormones to explore how your thoughts, moods and actions are shaped.

So what does that mean? It means that for the biological approach, you are the sum of your parts. You think the way you do because of the way your brain is built and because of your body's needs. All of your choices are based on your physical body. The biological approach attempts to understand the healthy brain, but it also examines the mind and body to figure out how disorders like schizophrenia develop from genetic roots.

Psychodynamic Approach

The psychodynamic approach was promoted by Sigmund Freud, who believed that many of our impulses are driven by sex. Psychologists in this school of thought believe that unconscious drives and experiences from early childhood are at the root of your behaviors and that conflict arises when societal restrictions are placed on these urges.

Psychologist Sigmund Freud

Now, there are a lot of jokes about Freud and his now mostly outdated theories. But have you ever thought that something about who you are today comes from your experiences as a child? Say, you blame your smoking habit on an oral fixation that stems from being weaned from breastfeeding too early as a baby. Well, that also comes from Freud's theories, and it was an idea that revolutionized how we see ourselves.

Behavioral Approach

Behavioral psychologists believe that external environmental stimuli influence your behavior and that you can be trained to act a certain way. Behaviorists like B.F. Skinner don't believe in free will. They believe that you learn through a system of reinforcement and punishment.

The behavioral approach is really effective when you don't care what someone thinks, as long as you get the desired behavior. The influence of these theories affects us every day and throughout our lives, impacting everything from why we follow the rules of the road when driving to how advertising companies build campaigns to get us to buy their products.

Cognitive Approach

In contrast to behaviorists, cognitive psychologists believe that your behavior is determined by your expectations and emotions. Cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget would argue that you remember things based on what you already know. You also solve problems based on your memory of past experiences.

Piaget was a cognitive psychologist

So, with this approach, we turn away from people as machines without free will and delve back into thoughts and feelings. How you act is based upon internal processes, and there is much more stress upon individuals. From a cognitive perspective, your expectations of an upcoming party will affect how you feel and act while you're there and will color your memory of the night after you return home.

Humanistic Approach

Humanistic psychologists believe that you're essentially good and that you're motivated to realize your full potential. Psychologists from this camp focus on how you can feel good about yourself by fulfilling your needs and goals. The prominent humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers called his patients 'clients' and offered a supportive environment in which clients could gain insight into their own feelings.

In contrast to the behavioral approach, the humanistic approach works on individual empowerment. Whether you are right or not, in a larger sense, you are motivated to be the best person you can be. All your choices come from trying to improve your life. So, if you're trying to cut back on your nightly wine consumption, a humanistic therapist would be encouraging and supportive but won't directly advise you to quit or try to analyze why you drink in the first place.

Review

Let's summarize what you've learned. Psychology is truly modern: it's the way we understand ourselves, our thoughts, our feelings and our behaviors. Five major approaches in psychology are biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive and humanistic. Each has its own perspectives on the roots of why you do what you do.

Psychology Is a Science

How do psychologists use the scientific method to research behaviors? From formulating hypotheses to reducing biases, psychology carefully analyzes behaviors and their potential causes.

The Scientific Method

How do you go about finding an answer to a puzzling question? Let's say you want to improve the speed of your roller skates. You ask yourself, 'How do I make my wheels roll faster?' But you don't know the answer. What do you do? Do you change multiple things at once, or try one possible solution at a time?

You could use the scientific method to tackle your problem. The scientific method is a systematic process of gathering measurable evidence. The first thing to do is to formulate a hypothesis, or testable idea. You did some research to remove some of the guesswork from the process, and you think cleaning your bearings might help to improve your speed. Your hypothesis is: 'Cleaning my bearings can make my skates roll faster.'

Now, it's time to conduct a scientific experiment. You think your dirty bearings are causing your wheels to roll slowly. Your dirty wheel bearings are the independent variable, or cause. The speed is the dependent variable, or effect. You clean the four bearings on your right skate; these are your experimental group to see if the dirty bearings are the cause. The four dirty bearings on your left skate are the control group for your experiment.

Then you push the two skates across the floor to see if your hypothesis was correct. You were right! Using the scientific method, you came up with a hypothesis and then tested it by comparing cause and effect relationship between two different variables and two test groups.

That's science! Scientists record, analyze and report the results of experiments. Regardless of whether the hypothesis was supported or rejected, the results lead scientists to formulate new questions, and the process begins all over again.

Scientific Experiments In Psychology

But what if your question is more abstract? Take the human mind, for example. Can psychological questions be answered scientifically? Can the way people think and feel be directly observed and objectively analyzed? Behaviors can be recorded, but the thought processes behind those behaviors can't be objectively measured. In order for psychology to become a science in its own right, psychologists moved away from philosophy and aspects of the mind that could not be scientifically observed and analyzed and focused more on measurable aspects of behavior. Psychology studies the mind through the observation of behavior.

Let's look at how psychologists use the scientific method. After your wheels are rolling fast, you're toying with the idea of joining your local roller derby league. Maybe you're wondering if you're cut out for what seems to be a violent sport. Must you have an aggressive personality in order to make the team? The psychologist in you comes up with the hypothesis, 'Derby players have aggressive personalities on and off the track.' How would you go about testing this assumption? You'd conduct a scientific experiment similar to the one you did for your wheels.

You go online and find a sports psychology survey that assesses athletes' behavioral profiles through a series of questions. In this experiment, an aggressive personality is the independent variable, or cause of the behavior. The survey questions would measure your own perceptions of how you behave, which is the dependent variable, or effect. By comparing your answers against the answers of other athletes who took the survey, you have more self-awareness of why you behave the way you do and how you interact with others, like aggressive roller derby players.

Clinical Research

Now, the majority of psychologists today work directly with patients instead of conducting online surveys. These clinical psychologists often assess mental health. They are aware that subjects might behave differently than they normally would because they know they're being evaluated.

One way to avoid sampling bias in a clinical study is to expose subjects at random to the independent variable, or cause of the behavior, so that they behave normally under test conditions. So, a clinical psychologist who hypothesizes that increased testosterone levels lead to aggressive behavior in roller derby players may conduct hormone therapy. They may give some derby players drugs to increase their testosterone levels and give others a placebo, or fake pill. Even so, the placebo effect can occur when the control group thinks they're being treated even when they're not. The roller derby players may start acting more aggressive because they think their testosterone levels are higher. To avoid subject bias, psychologists can conduct a blind study where subjects don't know they're being treated.

The experimenters themselves can also influence the outcome. A double blind study can be conducted in which the experimenters don't know which subjects they're giving the treatment to and which ones they're giving the placebo. This research method reduces experimenter bias.

Summary

You've learned that psychologists use a powerful tool, the scientific method, in order to interpret observable behaviors. From these behaviors, they work to understand the underlying processes, like feelings of aggression or high testosterone levels. Psychology is a science because it's about measuring observable cause-and-effect relationships. Because one of the most difficult parts of psychology is making unbiased observations; these scientists use a number of methods to remove bias, including placebos, blind studies and double-blind studies. After all, when we talk about a touchy subject like female aggression, sometimes we see what we want to see. That's why these tools are important.

Two Early Approaches: Functionalism and Structuralism

What were the first two approaches to psychology, and how were they related? What do introspection and evolutionary principles have to do with it? In this lesson, you'll explore structuralism and functionalism.

For a long time, questions of human motivation and behavior were considered a part of philosophy. Philosophers asked many of the questions that underlie psychological study today; particularly, the debate over whether behavior and personality are shaped more by nature or nurture goes all the way back to the Greeks. But philosophers didn't go about answering these questions in systematic or scientific ways. Their theories couldn't be proved right or wrong because they were based only on casual observation.

Psychology really got going as a discipline when two men decided to take the principles of scientific research and apply them to the study of human behavior. Wilhelm Wundt was a German scientist who founded a laboratory in Leipzig that took a structural list approach to psychology. William James was an American who founded a laboratory at Harvard that took a functionalist approach. We'll take a closer look at both men and their approaches in order to more thoroughly understand psychology's foundation as a science.

Wundt's lab, founded in 1879, was the first of its kind. His structuralist approach sought to identify the building blocks, or the structure, of psychological experience. Other sciences had been broken down in this way before; chemistry had its periodic table of elements, and physics had its fundamental laws. Wundt sought to do the same for psychology, establishing a series of fundamental relations or structures that could be used to explain all behavior.

Wundt and colleagues, like student Edward Titchener, used a method called introspection to learn what was going through people's heads as they completed various tasks. Wundt was especially interested in how people processed sensory stimuli, and he was the first to draw a distinction between sensation, or a stimulus' effect on one of our senses, and perception, or our brain's interpretation of the stimulus. He discovered this by realizing that when he asked people to listen to a sound and respond as soon as they heard it, they were much faster than when they had to also say what sound they heard. The processing and categorizing of sound took longer than the hearing of it, indicating that perception is a process that is separate but related to sensation. This is a fundamental concept for psychology that Wundt was able to discover through subjects' introspection.

The problem with introspection, as maybe you've already guessed, is that people's descriptions of their own feelings and reactions are often wrong. Let's say a psychologist like Wundt were trying to figure out the softest sound a person could hear; he'd play a sound and then ask if you could hear it, relying on your introspection to determine how sharp your hearing is. But if you expected to hear a sound, you might think that you heard one even if you didn't--and Wundt would conclude that humans can hear much softer sounds than they actually can. We're inaccurate about all sorts of things; even our memories are full of inaccuracies and exaggerations. So while introspection was valuable as an attempt to apply a scientific method to studies of the mind, some of its results suffered from our inability to accurately report our thoughts and feelings.

Over at Harvard, William James was working out a functionalist approach to solve some of these problems with structuralism. He thought that Wundt's method of trying to understand complex mental processes by subjects' self-reports was ultimately futile, akin to 'seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.' The method of measuring would always change what psychologists were trying to measure. James, heavily influenced by Darwin's theory of natural selection, preferred instead to question why we behave the way we do. He wanted to understand behavior in terms of its function in our lives; how it helps us or hurts us and why certain behaviors are more common than others. As Darwin answered questions about physical features--like which advantages humans gained by evolving to stand upright--James answered questions about behavioral features--like why humans experience jealousy.

James' functionalism gave rise to the modern field of evolutionary psychology. This branch looks at various behavioral and personality traits in terms of how they improve fitness. Evolutionary fitness isn't what happens when you go to the gym and bulk up your muscles; it refers to your likelihood of passing on your genetic material to the next generation--your likelihood of having lots of children. A man who acts jealously is more likely to worry about protecting his wife from the advances of other men and therefore has a better chance of ensuring that all the children she has are actually his. His jealousy improves his fitness because preventing his wife from having other men's babies allows him to have more with her.

So for a quick review, Wilhelm Wundt and William James were some of the first psychologists to study the mind scientifically. Wundt founded the first psychology lab to carry out his structural list experiments. Structuralism relied mainly on introspection, which William James objected to because it was too subjective. James' functionalism sought instead to explain behavior in evolutionary terms, to understand why certain behaviors were helpful to survival and evolutionary fitness and others were not.

Three Later Approaches: Gestalt, Psychoanalysis and Behaviorism

How was psychology studied in the early twentieth century? In this lesson, you'll look at three common approaches of the early twentieth century and get a sense of the diverse routes psychologists can take as they study how the mind works.

Human behavior is varied and has many different motivations and explanations. Because of this diversity, the field of psychology developed many subfields, or different approaches to study. To begin to understand the different kinds of results each approach can yield, we'll take a look at three approaches that were common in the early twentieth century: Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis and behaviorism.

Let's start with Gestalt, which is the German word for 'form.' Gestalt psychology was a primarily German movement that focused on how we perceive whole objects. This is a question that is still relevant today; when engineers try to build machines that can see and interpret visual images just like a human can, they run into a lot of problems trying to program the machine to recognize complex objects like faces. Humans are able to recognize faces and other complex things right away. We don't see a face as a group of shapes and colors; we just see a face.

Gestalt psychologists noticed and described the ways in which humans tend to shape ambiguous or incomplete stimuli into whole, coherent pictures. They call one of these ways emergence, or our ability to perceive a whole without first noticing its parts. Take a look at this picture; do you see the dog sniffing under the tree? Now try picking out his leg or his tail; it's very difficult to see only one piece of the dog because he's made up of disconnected lines and blots. Together, they create an impression of a dog that can only be seen as a whole. A similar concept is called reification, and it refers to the mind's ability to fill in an implied shape. When you look at figure A, you probably see a triangle even though there isn't one really there. In figure C, you see a sphere with spikes coming out even though, again, the sphere itself isn't drawn. In figures B and D, your mind fills in the rest of the missing shape to create a black worm curled around a white pole and a sea monster swimming through the water.

Gestalt psychologists were also interested in the way people tend to group the objects they see. They developed principles of grouping to describe some of these common ways; as an example, their Law of Similarity observes that people tend to group similar items together. A six by six square of dots is perceived in terms of rows rather than columns because all of the dots in a row are either black or white. Another Gestalt principle is the Law of Proximity, which observes that people tend to use how close objects are to one another to perceive a larger image. The figures to the left and right have the same number of dots, but the one to the left looks like a square and the one to the right looks like three tall rectangles because of the law of proximity.

While Gestalt psychologists were interested in questions of perception and organization, psychologists who took a psychodynamic approach were more interested in what's going on in our unconscious minds. Psychodynamic psychology got its start with Sigmund Freud, an Austrian psychologist who came to believe that his patients' problems were caused by repressed memories of childhood trauma. Freud and others who followed this model, like Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, used techniques of psychoanalysis like talk therapy and dream analysis to try to expose and explore these unconscious memories and desires. Freud may be most famous for seemingly relating everything back to sex--his famous Oedipus Complex proposed that young boys are all secretly motivated by the desire to kill their fathers and marry their mothers.

The psychodynamic approach is rarely practiced in its original form today. Many of these psychologists theories about mental health turned out to be largely unfounded--still, the idea that unconscious thoughts and childhood experiences can influence behavior has persisted. Freud's division of the mind into id, or childish impulses; superego, or moderate voice of reason; and ego, or mediator, has influenced the way we think about internal conflict. And Freud's legacy of talk therapy as a way to improve health has certainly lasted until today, though most therapists now use techniques that are not strictly aimed at uncovering hidden desires and wishes.

A third big movement in psychology in the early twentieth century was behaviorism, founded by psychologist John Watson but made most famous by B.F. Skinner. Watson and Skinner decided to do away entirely with questioning what's going on in our heads and decided to focus solely on behavior. They developed the principle of conditioning to explain how people and animals learn some behaviors instead of others. Basically, behaviorists believed that if a behavior receives reinforcements someone will continue to do it, while if it receives punishments the person will stop. Skinner and his colleagues believed that when it comes to decision-making, cognition--what we experience as thinking something over--is basically irrelevant--people will do whatever they've been indirectly conditioned to. The behaviorist approach has some disturbing implications about the existence of free will; if Skinner is correct, decision-making is really an illusion. These more extreme claims about conditioning's dominance over cognition have been largely disproven by later psychologists, but the study of learning and reinforcement is still an important part of studying behavior today.

So as you can see, psychologists have historically taken many diverse approaches to studying the mind. The Gestalt psychologists focused on studying how we perceive whole forms; Freud and others who practiced psychodynamic psychology thought the unconscious played a significant role in mental functioning; Skinner and other behaviorist psychologists thought that all behaviors are conditioned. As psychology grew as a discipline over the next half of the twentieth century, approaches multiplied even more.

Psychology after 1950: Overview of Specializations

Psychologists today study behavior through five main lenses: cognitive, humanistic, social, developmental and clinical. In this lesson, you'll focus on the central ideas behind each approach.

Behaviorism, or the idea that you can be conditioned to respond in certain ways, dominated psychology in the 1950s. Since then, psychologists have developed alternative models for explaining how you learn and act. These models differ from earlier ones that reduce you to a machine with no free will. Modern psychology is the science of behavior, human needs and creative thinking. Let's review five important ways of understanding behavior used by psychologists today.

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology developed as a backlash to the behaviorist stance that we have no free will. Behaviorists believe that cognitive processes are predetermined and that the mind works (or should work) in linear, rational ways. For the behaviorist, people put in similar situations should react in similar ways. The variations in how we act can be explained by previous experience. For behaviorists, the mind is not mysterious.

The cognitive branch of psychology takes a very different approach. It's concerned with how you see yourself and your environment. Having a rational perspective on the world around you is a healthy outlook. Cognitive psychologists study how you learn, solve problems and make decisions. Cognitive psychology is much more focused on processes of change and takes into account internal processes.

Yet the cognitive and behavioral schools of thought are not completely at odds. Cognitive behavioral therapy integrates the two, teaching patients how to consciously change their cognitive states in order to modify both behavior and mood.

Humanistic Psychology

Whereas cognitive psychologists focus on how you think, humanistic psychologists look at what you think. Each of us has our own feelings and personal aspirations that drive us. Humanistic psychology works from the assumption that self-actualization, or the will to be the best that we can be, motivates us.

Humanistic psychology has led to some important breakthroughs, like models for understanding and addressing personal needs. Such models begin at the bottom with the things you need to live and work up the scale to self-actualization. If you're worried about basic survival, you're probably working on different needs than someone who already has taken care of that.

Humanistic psychologists tend to be optimistic about human potential. They're interested in studying how people flourish through happiness, spirituality and motivation.

Social Psychology

The sociocultural perspective focuses on how social expectations and cultural norms influence your actions. While sociology looks at social structures as a whole, social psychologists zoom in on individual behavior. According to this perspective, your attitudes are largely affected by what your social group believes and teaches you. Your family and friends influence your opinions on what behaviors are right or wrong.

Social psychology affects your daily life every time you see an advertisement. Have you ever felt the urge to buy something because the sale was ending soon? Consumer psychologists create a sense of scarcity in potential buyers.

Social psychology has been applied to management, too. Industrial and organizational psychologists attempt to improve job satisfaction and performance levels by examining how an employee's behavior and motivation is influenced by the workplace setting.

Developmental Psychology

A fourth subfield of modern psychology is developmental psychology, which is concerned with how you change over your lifetime. Changes might involve learning to communicate, broadening your perception of the world and forming your self-identity.

This branch of psychology seeks to understand the stages of change that we go through as we develop into adults and beyond. Have your parents or teachers ever accused you of 'just going through a phase'? According to developmental psychology, you are. And more than likely, so are they.

Developmental psychology has been incredibly important in designing age-appropriate school curriculum. It's also used to identify struggling students, assess their challenges and assist them in achieving their goals.

Clinical Psychology

Finally, clinical psychologists diagnose and treat mental health. They work directly with patients. Psychologists are licensed counselors, whereas psychiatrists are medical doctors who specialize in treating mental health. The majority of psychologists in the field today are clinical psychologists.

If you go to see a psychologist because something is bothering you, this is probably the branch of psychology you are depending on to illuminate your problem and give you the tools to solve it. Whether it is counseling, drug therapy, a combination or other approaches, the clinical psychologist is most often the professional we depend on.

Summary

You've learned that cognitive psychologists look at how you think about yourself and the world around you, and humanistic psychologists are concerned with what you think and how it drives you. Social psychologists assess how your family and friends influence your attitudes and behavior. How your thinking develops over the course of your lifetime is the realm of developmental psychologists. You may see a clinical psychologist if you have a mental disorder that requires treatment. So you see, there are many different psychological approaches used today, and psychologists can employ more than one approach.

Ethics of Psychological Experiments

What are the ethical principles of psychological research? In this lesson, you'll take a look at the careful considerations a psychologist must make with respect to her participants when she designs a test.

Let's say a psychologist wanted to test whether people who are thirsty do more poorly on math tests than people who are well-hydrated. She puts out an ad for participants which says that she's conducting a study of math ability that will take an hour. But when her participants turn up, she divides them into thirsty and non-thirsty groups. The non-thirsty people are each given two glasses of water and made to wait in a room for an hour and then take a twenty minute test. This is a little longer than the psychologist said, but they're not too upset about it. The thirsty people, though, are forced to stay in a room without water for five hours before taking a twenty minute test. They're justifiably upset; the psychologist made them uncomfortably thirsty and kept them for far longer than she said. The psychologist did not conduct her experiment with adequate ethical standards.

The importance of ethics in psychological research has grown as the field has evolved. Some of the most famous studies in psychology could not be conducted today because they would violate ethical standards. Philip Zimbardo designed his Stanford Prison Experiment to look into the causes of conflict between guards and prisoners. Zimbardo assigned some college students to play guards and others to play prisoners in a 'prison' set up in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Building. The experiment quickly got out of hand--the guards quickly began abusing the prisoners for the sake of order. Zimbardo let this go on until his girlfriend visited the 'prison' and was shocked at what she found. Zimbardo's experiment allowed its participants to hurt each other both physically and psychologically and would not be approved by today's review boards.

Ethical standards in psychological research are motivated by two main principles: minimized harm and informed consent. The psychologist studying thirst and test performance failed on both of these counts; she made her participants unnecessarily uncomfortable and didn't tell them how long they would really be in the experiment. The experiment would likely not be approved by her university's Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB is in charge of determining whether the harm done by an experiment is worth its potential value to science and whether researchers are taking all of the precautions they can to make the research experience pleasant and informative for participants.

Minimized harm and informed consent underlie the entire process of designing and approving psychological research. When psychologists are designing experiments, they try to think about the least harmful way to test the hypothesis they're interested in. Harm can be physical or psychological; deception is considered a form of psychological harm that is avoided if at all possible. If the psychologist is unable to design the experiment without any risk of harm, she must give patients a consent form to sign that clearly explains all of the risks involved in participating in the study. The psychologist conducting the thirst experiment would have to clearly explain in her consent form that the participants were likely to get uncomfortably thirsty.

Psychologists who feel they need to deceive their participants run into a unique challenge with regard to consent forms. Deception is quite common in psychological research because it allows researchers to design situations in which participants are more likely to act naturally. In another famous unethical experiment, Stanley Milgram told participants that they were helping him conduct an experiment about learning. He had an actor in another room play the 'learner,' and told the participants to administer electric shocks to the learner if he got a question wrong. Milgram's experiment was actually onobedience - how long would his participants continue to listen to him and shock the learner? But if he had told them his real goals, it would clearly have affected their behavior; they would have been far less likely to be obedient if it were put in their minds that this was what Milgram was testing.

There is a genuine need for deception in psychological research, but ethics now require that it be minimized and that patients are fully informed of the deception in a debriefing session once the experiment is over. After every experiment, whether or not deception is involved, researchers will explain to their participants what they were trying to measure and allow the participants to ask any questions.

A final consideration in psychological research is use of animals in experiments. Some psychologists, particularly those that study biological aspects of psychology, feel that they need to conduct experiments on animals. They might want to test a new drug or do brain research that would be clearly unethical on a human. The American Psychological Association allows research to be conducted on animals, though they require that researchers are careful to - as with their human participants - minimize harm and make sure that the harm they do is worth it for its scientific benefit. Most experiments are also now conducted on animals like rats, mice and birds - research on primates, like in Harry Harlow's famous experiment on love in neglected monkeys, is far more restricted.

To sum things up, for the sake of ethics, psychologists are expected to make every effort to minimize harm and get informed consent from participants. Deception is allowed but must be minimized, and participants must be informed of it after the experiment is over. Each research organization's Institutional Review Board oversees the process of approving research. Animal research is allowed, but researchers must treat the animals with respect and dignity.

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