Wednesday August 31^st

SYLLABUS: Assignments, links, lectures, TA’s, optional writing assignments

Psychology as a science—historical introduction to the field.

On Monday I introduced the idea that Psychology is a scientific discipline, which may or may not come as a surprise to you. I suspect that Introductory Psychology courses at Colleges and Universities across the country are often filled with incoming students who haven’t been exposed to Psychology as an academic discipline, but think they know what Psychology is.

When people ask me what I do, I never say “I’m a psychologist”, even though I have a PhD in Psychology…because that implies that I talk to people about their problems and try to help them stay grounded and have a good outlook on life. Or others think that “uh oh”…she’s going to be analyzing me! Why is there such a disconnect between what people think someone with a Psychology degree does and what it is I actually do?

So what is it that I actually do…let’s start there. I’m a “psychological scientist”someone who studies behavior using a scientific approach, to use the phrase from Carol Tarvis’ article about the scientist-practitioner gap. That a gap exists between scientists and practitioners implies that there are some Psychologists who are scientists, some who are practitioners, and not nearly enough who are both. So let’s start with the practitioner end—

Practitioners (focus on the kind of training that is received, rather than individual practitioners): I want to start off by saying that although I describe the different routes that people can go through to become what is known as a “psychologist”, and that some kinds of training are more scientific than other, this is not to say that if you’re having a problem that requires psychological help that you should assume that only those with scientific training can help you. In fact, most often it is the least scientifically rigorous programs that are focused instead of helping individual people deal with individual problems. I hope to make clear that the kind of psychology that is practiced in therapy, one on one, with a person talking to another about their problems is very different from the kind of psychology that seeks to understand meanings and mechanisms of behavior in general.

Ph.D.: most often someone trained in sound scientific methods with an ultimate goal of helping people cope with life. Taught to evaluate new therapies, understand what the basic researchers are finding out about the mechanisms of normal and abnormal behavior, and using that knowledge to inform their clinical practice. Someone with this kind of training will call themselves a “clinical psychologist”. Well-versed in the scientific method…programs are affiliated with major universities, require undergraduate psychology degrees and standardized tests, background and experience in research, and includes training in research methodology and statistics.

Other kinds of practitioners:

PsyD…doctoral level, with a focus on individual therapy….the practitioner/professional model, as opposed to the scientist practitioner. Not an empirical, research driven degree. Often (but not always) free-standing, without affiliated universities. The best training of this sort comes from programs that pay attention to the findings within clinical research. Others are really more humanistic.

Whole host of therapists, below the doctoral level, whose job it is to help people make sense of their lives and live effectively. Trained as social workers, marriage counselors, school guidance counselors, family therapists, psychoanalysts. These kinds of practitioners may do a lot of good in individual lives, but as a rule, they are not concerned with general principles of human behavior.

As Tavris pointed out, the lack of a scientific focus within these “helping” professions can lead to dangerous situations. When folk theories—like the cycle of abuse—gain support by seeing violent adults who were abused as children come in for treatment—the failure to ask empirical questions and design well-informed studies to answer such questions can lead to false claims being accepted into the mainstream. It simply takes a scientific approach to be able to validate or falsify claims of this sort. To take that specific example—who has ever heard that particular claim…that there is a cycle of abuse and that those who are abused as children are likely to become abusers themselves?? What key piece of information is this based? What is missing? What do you need to know? The problem is that the claim was not investigated systematically, using the scientific method??

So…what is the scientific method and how is it applied to psychology, the study of mind? Who are the psychological scientists?

It might not be a stretch, especially once you’ve looked at the syllabus for this course, and maybe have found out a little bit about what it is that I do for you to think of me and my approach to psychology as being “scientific”...in line with what you’ve learned in other courses that are considered under the realm of science. In fact, you’ll be drawing on what I hope is a reasonable background in biology and chemistry to make sense of what we will be covering this quarter.

What may be more of a surprise to you is that all of academic psychology uses the scientific method to address questions about behavior

What is science, anyway? Science is a process by which careful observations of phenomena are made and interpreted and subject to public scrutiny and falsifiability.—fallibility or self-correction.

The scientific method boils down to the following steps:

• Observe some aspect of the universe…here is where insight can be very useful
• Invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis, that is consistent with what you have observed.
• Use the hypothesis to make predictions..if the hypothesis is true, what would we expect to observe?.
• Test those predictions by experiments or systematic observations and modify the hypothesis in the light of your results. (Verification)