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Psychology

This is the homepage for the Psychology category, a subcategory of Thought.

Some general resources

Crash Course Psychology YT Playlist
School of Life Psychology YT Playlist (created by Anna Csiki-Fejer)
Spark Notes Philosophy

Alfred Adler

An Austrian psychologist, he split with Freud over the degree to which neuroses had a sexual basis and founded the school of individual psychology, which built on Nietzsche’s notion of “will-to-power”. Individual psychology was based on understanding tenets of character development outlined in Understanding Human Nature.

“Guiding friction” and “guiding principle” create the idealized masculine ego. “Masculine protest” is the desire to be a real man. These ideas were influenced by correspondence with Hans Vaihinger and his philosophy of “As If”, known as fictionalism or fictional goals.

Adler put forth pampering, neglect, and “organ dysfunction” (physical afflictions can reflect someone’s attitudes and opinions) as the three factors that give rise to personality problems.

Adler argued that lazy children are fulfilling their desires when they are scolded in a work that proceeds to discuss ohow similar they are to children that feign sickness.

The Neurotic Constitution/Character

neuroses result from people’s inability to achieve self-realization
in failing to achieve this sense of completeness, they develop “inferiority complexes” which inhibited their relations with successful people and dominated their relations with fellow unsuccessful people

Understanding Human Nature

Vienna lectures elaborating individual psychology’s tenets
firstborn children were “dethroned” upon the arrival of a new child”
proposed that middle children usually have the most rebellious personalities, and the one most likely to be revolutionary with the least amount of personality defects
birth order supposedly influenced personality
elaborated his idea of understanding character development

Social Interest

described four methods of creating “distance” from personal problems
- “moving backwards”
- “standing still”
- “hesitation”
- “constructing obstacles”
“social interest” is the feeling of living and cooperating in a community
a lack of social interest can be seen in the “ruling”, “getting”, and “avoiding” types of lifestyles
built on Jan Smut’s idea of holism

In one book, Adler discussed how social inequality leads both boys and girls to express exaggerated masculine behavior and claimed that children spend their first 4-5 years developing their “style of life”

Bruce Alexander

In one experiment, rats chose to drink untainted water despite being addicted to morphine.

Solomon Asch

He was a Polish-born Princeton psychologist. He was an immigrant to the United States and learned English as a teenager from reading Charles Dickens. Asch mentored Stanley Milgram at Princeton and inspired him to perform the obedience experiment.

Asch advocated the notion that subjects reinterpret the intended meaning of words based on information about the speaker to criticize Irving Lorge’s experiment on prestige suggestion. Asch showed that people perceive quotations about rebellion differently if the source was listed as either Thomas Jefferson or Vladimir Lenin, an example of prestige suggestion.

Asch wrote one work about how children achieve acculturation and it may have been influenced by his own experiment.

In one experiment, Asch gave groups of subjects two lists of adjectives for a person with the only difference being the word “warm” or “cold” to test “impression formation”. The traits of people who had “warm” on the list were interpreted positively, while the traits of people of who had “cold” on the list were interpreted negatively, even if those traits were exactly the same.

In one experiment with Ebenholz, Asch found that the order of things listed in free recall doesn’t correlate with the order they were learned. They posited the principle of associative symmetry to explain the direction of associatve recall.

First Asch conformity experiment

1951
intended to test the conclusions of Muzafar Sharif’s use of the autokinetic effect
published in Groups, Leadership, and Men
tested whether individuals would conform to the thinking of a group of peers when the group was clearly wrong
Swarthmore college students were paired with seven other people who were actually confederates for a supposed vision test
group was shown a “base” line and then shown two other lines
asked which of the three other lines was the same length
seven confederates each picked the same wrong line
40% of the time, the subject also gave a wrong answer to conform with the group
after the experiment, “I called them as I saw them, sir” and “if I’d been the first I probably would have responded differently”

Albert Bandura

A Stanford psychologist, the most frequently cited living psychologist according to a 2014 Diener et al study. As a graduate student, Bandura pinned a dead rat to the department bulletin board with a note reading “ran according to Tolman’s theory”, thus implying it had been murdered by his advisor, Kenneth Spence.

Bandura formulated social learning theory, which says that behaviors may be learned by observing models, not strictly behavioral. The four methods of learning are attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.

Bandura developed a guided mastery therapy, behavioral modeling therapy for phobias that helped snake-phobes by first watch an actor pretend to fear a snake, but succeed in taking it out of a cage. The snake-phobes then were able to drape snakes around their necks. They were helped in getting over their fear of they had greater self-efficacy.

Bandura described a “judgmental sub-function” in the mind as part of his negative feedback model of self-regulation.

Bandura coined the term “agentic” to describe people who are proactive about self-learning.

In one experiment with Carol and Kupers Whalen, test subjects only took candy after getting above 40 points in a rigged bowling contraption.

In a paper discussing primary and secondary suggestibility, Asch and Arthur Benton replaced the heat illusion test of Eysenck and Furneaux with a vibration suggestion test.

Asch collaborated with Charles Benight in various articles, challenging th ediathesis-stress model’s application to depression and PTSD.

Bobo doll experiment

conducted at Stanford, early 1960s, with Dorothea and Sheila Ross
studied the effect of watching an adult model on the behavior of Palo Alto children
children observed an adult interacting with a “Bobo doll”—a large self-righting toy designed to look like a clown, bowling pin-shaped
in some cases, adult ignored doll; in others, the adult was highly aggressive towards it
- hitting it with a mallet, throwing it, and yelling at it (“pow!”, “sock him!”, “sockeroo!”)
the children who watched the adult who was aggressive towards it were far more likely to also be aggressive towards it
supported social learning theory
in a follow-up, there were live, filmed, or cartoon versions of the same behavior
“He sure is a tough fella”

Social Foundations of Thought and Action

landmark text on social cognitive theory
self-efficacy = the belief in oneself in order to improve and reach goals
- derived from vicarious experience, either vicarious reinforcement or vicarious punishment
- advised phrasing questionnaire items as “can do” rather than “will do” in designing scales for self-efficacy
- advocates changing your self-perception to improve your abilities via higher self-efficacy
discussed vicarious motivators and observational learning
reciprocal determinism/triadic reciprocal causation
- “personal factors”, environment, and behavior interact

Self-Efficacy

1997
expands on Social Foundations of Thought and Action
drew on Rotter’s theory of locus of control

Moral Disengagement

emphasized the agency of people who act inhumanely, claiming that they actively repress their ethical standards
attempts to justify inhumane acts led to the process of moral disengagement

Adolescent Aggression

based on experiment with Richard Walters
a study on delinquent children
published under the tutelage of Roger Sears

Aaron Beck

Norman O. Brown

Life Against Death

endorses Freud’s takes on religions
draws parallels betwen the works of Freud and Martin Luther

Edmond Cahn

Criticized the Clark Doll experiments for its small sample size of 16 people from Clarendon County and asserted that the Clarks overstepped their bounds when selecting the dolls that looked “most like me”.

Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth Clark

They were a married team of psychologists, the first African Americans to receive doctorates of psychology at Columbia University.

Clark doll experiment

presented children across the country from all races with dolls that were identical except for skin color and hairstyle
asked children to identify “nice doll” and “bad doll” and other subjective judgements
children of all races showed a preference for the white doll
showed racism created an inherent sense of inferiority in black children even by the age of 5
asked children to draw a picture of themselves to test if the subjects had knowledge of social difference
some children objected to putting a black and a white doll into the same box during free play sessons
expanded on studies of “wishful thinking” by Ruth Horowitz
children spontaneously rationalized their decisions such as “he hasn’t got an eyelash” and “I burned my face and made it spoil”
used by Robert Carter of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Brown v. Board
cited by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board as evidence to overturn “separate but equal” and in Briggs v. Elliott

Frederick Crews

Th Memory Wars

collected arguments that defenders of Sigmund Freud had with Crews in the letters page of the New York Review of Books

Christian von Ehrenfels

Wrote of the “qualities” of gestalt psychology

Paul Ekman

Henri Ellenberger

The Discovery of the Unconscious

challenged Freud’s originality
describes the Protestant seelsorge practice

Erik Erikson

He theorized about how social institutions reflect the universal features of psychosocial development. He developed the idea of “psychohistory”, explaining how famous people were able to think and act the way they did.

Erickson’s son dren on his work in order to publish the monograph Wayward Puritans about the Salem witch trials.

Erickson developed some of his ideas while observing schools on the Pine Ridge reservation.

He interviewed Sioux children at Pine Ridge and assisted Alfred Kroeber in examining the Yurok.

Erikson’s epigenetic principle contrasts virtues with maladaptations and malignancies.

Erickson developed the concept of a psychosocial moratorium, in which adolsecents freely experiment to find their place.

Childhood and Society

posited eight stages of psychosocial development, based on Freud’s theory of development
each stage has a fundamental conflict of existence
the tension at each stage is an “identity crisis”
1. trust vs mistrust (infancy, birth-18 months)
2. autonomy vs shame and doubt (toddler years, 18 months-3 years)
3. initiative vs guilt (preschool years, 3-5)
4. industry vs inferiority (middle school years, 6-11)
5. identity vs confusion (teen years, 12-18)
6. intimacy vs isolation (young adult years, 18-40)
7. generativity vs stagnation (middle age, 40-65)
8. integrity vs despair (older adulthood, 65-death)
contrasts legends of Hitler with those of Maxim Gorky
contains fieldwork observations of the Sioux and Yurok peoples

Young Man Luther

psychohistory of Martin Luther
examined “The Meaning of Meaning It”
uses incidents such as the “revelation in the tower” and “the fit in the choir” to connect Luther’s theological positions to the individual ego
Luther shouts “I am not!” during choir practice and then undergoes a “good son” vs “good monk” crisis

Gandhi’s Truth

psychohistory of Gandhi
coined the phase “homo religiosus”

On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

analyzed Ghandi’s concept of satyagraha

Vital Involvement in Old Age

interviewed 29 octogenarians from California

A Way of Looking at Things

a collection of essays

Leon Festinger

A psychologist who devised the theory of cognitive dissonance. He studied under Kurt Lewin at MIT.

Cognitive dissonance experiment

with Merill Carlsmith
71 Stanford males were offered either $1 or $20 to convince others that a tedious knob-turning task was fun
those paid $1 reported that it was more enjoyable because of the cognitive dissonance of telling others it was fun but only getting a small sum of money
results for one subject were tossed out when the subject hit on a girl and gave her his number so that he could allegedly “explain to her further what the study was about”
established the “forced compliance” paradigm, which modified the “belief disconfirmation” theory of Festinger in 1956
led Carlsmith to work with Elliot Aronson in a later study that placed a steam shovel and several crappier items in a play room to observe whether children played with the “forbidden toy”

Effectiveness of Unanticipated Persuasion Communications

with J. Allyn
a group of students were told to pay close attention to a speaker’s personality and then measured the change in their attitudes
results led Festinger to formulate a divided attention hypothesis with Maccoby

The Westgate studies

participants at the Westgate apartment complex living near stairways were more likely to make friends on other floors
led Festinger to propose that “propiniquity” or proximity, was more important to forming friendships and romantic attachments than shared beliefs or interests

Some consequences of de-individuation in a group

with Albert Pepitone and Thomas Newcomb
gave subjects a falsified study saying that most college students hated their parents
caused people in the group to feel safer talking about parental issues
coined the term deindividuation

When Prophecy Fails

with Henrick Riecken and Stanley Shlachter
profiles the “Seekers”, a UFO cult led by Marion Keech whose doomsday prediction did not come true
discusses individuals like Edna Post and Dr. Armstrong
interviwed a connoiter who claimed to remember the day she was concieved and who stated that atomic bombs had broken the sonic barrier

A Theory of Social Comparison Processes

observed that people cease comparing themselves to others with dissimilar skill levels
social comparison theory
- people assess their own abilities with reference to people they perceive as their peers in those abilities

Joyce Fletcher

She adapted one of Bandura’s theories to explain the link between role expectations and work performance

Anna Freud

The daughter of Sigmund Freud. She preserved her father’s house in Hampstead, London and turned it into a museum.

She identified 10 defense mechanisms in a work that recommended “ego psychology”.

Sigmund Freud

The Austrian founder of psychoanalysis. The father of Anna Freud. Most of his theories were expunged from the third ediciton of the DSM. The Sigmund Freud Museum does not have his couch. His letters to his fiancee Martha Bernays were recently published. His offical biographer was Ernest Jones, and his British disciples engaged in the “controversial discussions”.

Freud used the free-association technique to identify neuroses caused by repressed memories.

In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud theorized a sort of vivid but false memory called the “screen memory”.

Freud believed, contra materialists, that many problems were caused by mental states rather than by biochemical dysfunction.

Freud divided the psyche into id (illogical passion), ego (rational thought), and superego (moral and social conscience).

Freud created the concept of the Oedipus complex, that all males go through a stage where they fixate on their mothers and resent their fathers. He also created the concept of penis envy, which led to girls disparaging their mothers for appearing to be castrated.

Freud claimed totemism was the first form of father-surrogate. He stated that totemism prevented incest and linked it with taboo.

Freud unsuccessfully treated his friend Ernst Fleischl von Marxow with cocaine.

In a 1919 essay inspired by the work of Ernst Jentsch, Freud contrasted a word meaning “concealed” with a related word meaning “uncanny”.

Freud analyzed Little Hans’s fear of horeses as a case of castration anxiety.

In one book, Freud recalls accidentally using the Latin words “non vixit” instead of “non vivit” after seeing those words on the pedestal of a statue.

Freud claimed that child development happend in oral, anal, and phallic stages.

Freud worked with Josef Breuer and Jean-Marie Charcot on the causes of hysteria, treating patients like Anna O.

The Interpretation of Dreams

dreams are wish fulfillment
distinguished between “manifest” and “latent” content of dreams
“Irma’s Injection”
- the woman Irma has whitish patches insid her mouth after she is given an injection by Otto
analyzzed a dream about chopping down a tree that may represent your father
Freud called Sergei Pankjeff the “Wolf Man” after he analyzed a dream in which Pankjeff imagined six white wolves in a tree watching him

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

criticized a hypothetical therapist who posits a forgetting preference for proper names and focused on the deviations from everyday stereotpyes
he recalls saying “Botticelli” and “Boltraffio” rather than “Signorelli”, a type of parapraxis (Freudian slip)
- used a complex chain of steps involving a journey to Herzegovina to explain the forgetting of Luca Signorelli’s last name

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

described a life drive competing with a death drive as Eros versus Thanatos
divided the mind into parts ruled by social mores, reality, and the pleasure principle
uses children’s games and self-injury as examples of the life-drive, the universal mental urge to “restore to an earlier state”
Freud’s grandson Ernst threw a cotton reel out of his crib and uttered the sounds “ooh”, and then his mother would bring it back to him and Ernst woudl say “aah”, which he interpreted as the words fort and da (Germn for “gone” and “there”)
after seeing the trauma of veterans from the first World War
claimed that the original sin must have been a patricide against the “God Father”.
claimed that organic life has an “urge” to restore an earlier, inorganic state of things.
compared an “American flirtation in which it is understood from the beginning that nothing is to happen” to the impoverished life that results from lack of risk or stakes
“Reflections on War and Death”
- argued that we wish the death of strangers but are ambivalent towards those we love
- war strips away the pretense of our civilized attitude toward death

Civilization and its Discontents

men revert to an infantile state when subject to the “oceanic feeling” of religion experienced by Romain Rolland
conventional society has led men to hide their primitive instincts
chronicled the conflict between individuality and society’s demand for conformity
claims that civilization can only exist by frustrating individual drives
claimed that science and technology makes people into “unhappy gods with prosthetic limbs”
includes an attempt to analogise the mental development of a persontothe gradual agglomeration of layers of cities in Rome

The Future of an Illusion

perspective on religion

Project for a Scientific Psychology

sought to isolate an active quantity “Q” that is retained only by memory-bearing impermeable neurons

Moses and Monotheism

argued that the guilt from killing a political leader led an Egyptian group to embrace religion

Totem and Taboo

For more information, see…

Isadore From

Contributed to the creation of a theory of gestalt psychology

Richard Griggs

In 2015, Griggs showed that the Asch conformity experiment has been consistently misrepresented in textbooks.

James Hillman

Led the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich

The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling

mainly draws from Jung’s ideas

Karen Horney

Horney was an early female Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst, the founding editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. She was the student of Karl Abraham and the lover of Erich Fromm.

Horney claimed that people strive for inner perfection in the hopes that it will allow them to control external reality in a so-called “bargain with fate”.

Horney created the concept of “womb envy”, that men were drown to creative endeavors as a compensation for not being able to give birth, as a male counterpart Freud’s “penis envy” for females.

New Ways in Psychoanalysis

chapter espousing the benefits of “self-analysis”
- the only extended case study describes Clare, who learns to recognize and overcome her “compulsive modesty” and “parasitic helplessness” in her relationship to Peter

Neurosis and Human Growth

“basic anxiety” of environmental and social factors influenced personality disorders more than biology
“the search for glory” leads people with neuroses experience a split between the ideal and inner selves that leads to self-hate, or “tyranny of the shoulds”
people have two views of the self: the ideal self is used as a model for the real self when working toward self-actualization, but troble arises when the real self deteriorates into the despised self

Our Inner Conflicts

ten patterns of needs, which can be classified into (includes need for a partner, need for social recognition)
three types of coping mechanisms of neurosis
- “moving towards people”
  - “self-effacement”
- “moving against people”
  - “expansive solution”
  - “individual identifies himself with his glorified self”
  - narcissistic, perfectionistic, and arrogant-vindictic approaches to life
- “moving away from people”
  - “resigning solution”

“The Problem of the Monogamous Ideal”

men have “a more polygamous disposition” than women
disillusionment and incest-prohibition are the two factors that cause people to seek love-objects outside of their partners, creating the “problem of the monogamous ideal”

“The Overvaluation of Love”

looks at the histories of seven women and their obsessive need for a male partner

Luce Irigaray

She was expelled from the Freudian School of Paris for her thesis Speculum of the Other Woman.

Carl Jung

The Swiss founder of analytic psychology. He split with Freud over the degree to which neuroses had a sexual basis, like Alfred Adler.

He studied word association at the Burgholzli Clinic.

He examined the schizophrenic fantasies of Frank Miller.

The collective unconscious is the “reservoir of the experiences of our species”, the cumulative experience of past generations. In one of Jung’s dreams, the collective unconscious was represented as a cave located below a basement and containing two human skulls. The collective unconscious is the basis for archetypes like the Shadow, the Great Mother, the Animus (male archetype) and the Anima (female archetype).

Individuation is the person’s relationship with history and mythology. He claimed individuation can give meaning to the elderly.

Synchronicity is two supposedly unrelated events that are still linked in some ways (an “acausal connecting principle”). For example, the similarities that exist in the mythology and folklore of various cultures throughout history. He argued that synchronicity can be explained through his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Jung was collaborated with a statistician to examine hundreds of horoscopes of married couples to look for an “acausal connecting principle” that would explain parapsychology.

Syzygy is the way opposites interact, including male/female, sun/moon, and life/death.

Jung summarized his theories in the introduction to the Evans-Wentz translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Jung divided people into introverts and extraverts, and provided the basis for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality system.

Jung designated Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia as four stages of male development.

Jung had a vision of a “monstrous flood” devastating Europe shortly before the outbreak of World War One.

Jung names the first codex of the Nag-Hammadi library.

Jung argued that the promulgation of the dogma of the Assumption in 1854 expressed a deep yearning within a concept composed of two parts: instinct and archetypes.

Answer to Job

theorised and fourth evil side of God
“God who knew no moderation in his emotion”

The Seven Sermons to the Dead

a collection of seven texts he attributed to Basilides of Alexandria
interest in Gnosticism and mysticism apparent

Psychology and Religion: The Phenomenology of the Self

“The Sign of the Fishes”
- discussed the “union of extreme opposites”
- considering Rabbinic and astrological explanations for the sign of the fishes

Liber Novus, the Red Book

a leather-bound folio
left unpublished until its 2009 translation by Sonu Shamdasani
Jung did his own illustrations
written during a period of what he termed “creative illness”
includes a description of Jung’s encounter with a spirit he called Philemon

The Undiscovered Self

the state had replaced God, and it had become an object of worship

Symbols of Transformation

analyzed the fantasies of a woman named Frank Miller

Transformations and Symbols of the Libido

Jung meets a god named Izdubar, who dies and is reborn as an egg

For more infomation, see…

Lawrence Kohlberg

Formulated a theory of moral development. It was derived from the “druggist’s dilemma” experiment and originally based on the cognitive development work of Jean Piaget. Carol Gilligan later modified it, arguing it was largely male-centered.

Pre-conventional phase
- Stage one (driven by obedience and punishment)
- Stage two (driven by self-interest)
Conventional phase
- Stage three (good intentions as determined by social consensus)
- Stage four (driven by authority and social order obedience)
Post-conventional phase
- Stage five (driven by social contract)
- Stage six (driven by universal ethical principles)

Kurt Koffka

Introduced gestalt psychology to the United States in the 1920s

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Jacques Lacan

Advocated for a “return to Freud”

Jean LaPlanche

Developed Freud’s notion of “afterwardness”

James Marcia

Influenced by Erickson’s concept of a psychosocial moratorium

Herbert Marcuse

Eros and Civilization

a “philosophical inquiry” into Freud
synthesized the thought of Marx and Freud
draws on Freud’s claim that civilization is based on the suppression of mankind’s instincts

Abraham Maslow

American psychologist known almost entirely for his idea of the “hierarchy of needs”. In the hierarchy of needs, human needs are placed on a pyramidal scale. Basic needs like food and safety are on the bottom and “self-actualization” is on the top. Self-actualized people are those who understand their individual needs and abilities and who have families, friends, and colleagues that support them and allow them to accomplish things on which they place value. The lowest unmet need on the hierarchy tends to dominate conscious thought. He developed this theory by examining Einstein and Jane Addams. The hierarchy is an elaboration upon a concept first proposed in The Organism by Kurt Goldstein.

He described transpersonal psychology as the “fourth force” of psychology.

He listed ten characteristics of a healthy individual, including the “ability to love and be loved” and “more openness to experience”.

He called moments of intense happiness “peak experiences”.

Motivation and Human Personality

rejected determinism
further described the hierarchy of needs
hierarchy of needs expanded into the ERG theory by Clayton Alderfer

Toward a Psychology of Being

expanded on the hierarchy of needs

Eupsychian Management

J. M. Masson

The Assault on Truth

controversial book
argued that Freud suppressed/denied earlier theories that promoted sexual abuse of infants
based on Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliesse

Sean J. McGrath

The Dark Ground of Spirit

argues that Freud was greatly influenced by Schelling’s brand of German Idealism

Stanley Milgram

A Yale psychologist who performed a number of interesting experiments. He coined the term “familiar stranger”, which refers to a person one sees regularly but does not interact with.

Shock/Obedience experiment

After Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s high-profile trial
- Claimed that the Nazis carrying out the Holocaust did it because they were merely “following orders”
At Yale University
Tested obedience to authority
Ordered “teachers” to test the memories of “learners” an punish them for wrong answers
Punished with increasingly intense electric shocks to test the teachers’ willingness to inflict pain under orders
Learners screamed in pain and pleaded with them to stop, experimenter said “please continue”
Over 60% of teachers administered shocks so powerful they would have killed the learner if real
Used to describe the behavior that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison (like Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment)

Small World experiment

Mailed a number of people in Nebraska and Kansas a package, and asked them to send it to a target in Boston
If they knew the target directly, they could send it directly to the target. If not, they were to send it to an acquaintance most likely to directly know the target.
Of the packages that did make it to Boston, they typically did so in five or six steps
Led to the coining of the phrase “six degrees of separation”
Important early study of social networks
“Lost letter” experiment
Left around letters addressed to hospitals and Nazis an waited to see which got delivered
Obviously letters to Friends of the Nazi Party got mailed less often

Other experiments

Subjects speak shadow words provided by a radio
Studied the mental maps of residents of New York and Paris
Breaching experiments
- Subway riders asked to give up their seats

“Vertical City”

examined the effect of skyscrapers on urban life

George Miller

The “Magic Number” of 7 +/- 2 (5-9), the number of items which fit in short-term/working memory

Paul Niedenthal

Ivan Pavlov

A physiologist who originally studied the digestive tracks of dogs (Novel Prize 1904) who happened to perform a psychological experiment. He originally studied transmarginal inhibition, the body’s proclivity to shut down when faced with overwhelming pain and stress.

Pavlov’s dogs

First to study the ways in which unconditioned and neutral stimuli could be linked together through repetition to produce a conditioned response
Noticed his dogs began to salivate as soon as they saw the lab assistant who normally fed them - “psychic secretion”
Produced the sound of metronome (not bell) and then presented food to the dogs
Dogs were trained to salivate whenever they heard the metronome/bell
“Conditional reflex”

See Qwiz5’s article for more information

Jean Piaget

The Swiss founder of developmental psychology.

He performed rigorous studies of the way in which children learn and come to understand and respond to the world around them.

He divided children’s cognitive development into four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal.

He was a proponent of genetic epistemology and founded the International Centre of Genetic Epistemology.

He argued for reflective abstraction rather than pre-existing linguistic structures in a debate with Noam Chomsky.

He performed experiments demonstrating that some people lack the understanding of conversation of number, one of which involved pouring water from a tall thin cup to a short fat cup.

He called new skills and knowledge “schema”.

He originated the term “object permanence”, and studied it’s learning.

He worked closely with programming language designer Seymour Papert, whose namesake principle attempts to explain some of Piaget’s results.

The Language and Thought of a Child

The Origins of Intelligence in Children.

Paul Robinson

Freud and His Critics

presents the criticisms of Frank Sulloway and Jeffrey Masson alongside a summary of Freud’s ideas

Howard Roffwarg

Performed a 1978 study that altered dreams by having subjects wear red-tinted goggles for nine days.

Martin Seligman

Learned helplessness experiments

divided dogs into three groups: no electric shocks, stoppable electric shocks, and unstoppable electric shocks (“no control”)
then placed the dogs in aa new situation where there was control (an easy means of escape)
those given no control originally made no attempt at escape, they learned helplessness
major implications for the understanding and treatment of clinical depression via therapy

B. F. Skinner

20th century American physiologist who became a leading proponent of behaviorism. He created the school of radical behaviorism.

He claimed that all human actions could be understood in terms of physical stimuli and learned responses.

He taught pigeons to play table tennis using his ideas.

Walden II

utopia
T. E. Frazier and five others lead a community
Planners, Managers, Workers, and Scientists

Skinner box

explored the effects of operant conditioning
similar to puzzle box developed by Edward Thorndike
small chamber into which an animal is introduced, and a lever/button/etc, called “manipulandum”
manipulandum can deliver food, turn off an electrified floor, or otherwise affect environment
allows researchers to observe changes in behavior in response to repeated reinforcements or punishments

Verbal Behavior

proposed the idea of “mand”
behaviorist theory of language learning

Beyond Freedom and Dignity

“people are bodies”
argued against free will

Andrew Solomon

Elizabeth Thornton

The Freudian Fallacy

charts how Jean-Martin Charcot inspired his work on hysteria
concludes that Freud’s ideas were mainly fueled by his cocaine abuse

Edward Tolman

He originated the theory of cognitive maps after experiments with rats.

Robert Tucker

Wrote several biographies of Joseph Stalin that analyze him through the lens of Karen Horney’s theories

John Watson

The American psychologist who was the founder of behaviorism. He was heavily influenced by the ideas of Jacques Loeb. He collaborated with Knight Dunlap and Adolf Meyer. He also created the “Twelve Infants Theory”

He was also a marketer, which is kind of weird but comes up in power clues. He created the Marlboro Man and boosted series of Bumble Bee tuna by adding labels saying “Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can!”

Methods of studying vision in animals

with Robert Yerkes, also founded Journal of Animal Behavior

Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology

psychology could be completely grounded in objective measurements of events and physical human reactions

Kerplunk experiment

with Harvey Carr
named after the sound rats when they hit unexpected walls

Little Albert Experiment

assisted by Rosalie Raynor, his wife
conditioned fear in an otherwise normal child
the 11-month-old boy “Albert” was exposed to numerous white fluffy stimuli (rat, rabbit, wool), initially no fear
then exposed to white rat while banging a bar with a hammer to create a loud, scary noise and burning newspaper
eventually, Albert reached with distress when exposed to any white fluffy stimuli, including Santa Claus mask
criticized on ethical and procedural grounds
- one child identified as potentially being “Little Albert” may have been born with serious cognitive impariment
- Mary Cover Jones in a response experiment four years later used milk and crackers over two months, noted the presence of “degrees of toleration”
Maren and Fanselow suggested that neuronal and synaptic plasticity may have been responsible for the results

Richard Webster

Why Freud Was Wrong

discussed biographies of Freud by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay

Max Wertheimer

Founded the gestalt school of philosophy, which emphasizes the whole as greater than its parts. Its central idea is the law of pragnanz, which predicts that the mind tends to connect broken lines in images to form shapes in its closure principle.

Robert Zajonc

Phillip Zimbardo

Stanford Prison Experiment

Designed to study the effects of power dynamics in custodial situations
Randomly assigned Stanford University students into “prisoners” and “guards”
Guards could refer to prisoners only by their number, not name
By the second day, prisoners began to rebel and guards implemented sadistic practices designed to degrade, humiliate, and dehumanize inmates
Stopped after six days instead of two weeks when Christina Maslach raised ethical objections, sadism of the guards and growing depression in the prisoners
“John Wayne”
Many aspects questioned/disputed
See Qwiz5’s article for more information

The Lucifer Effect

examines how seemingly good people can act in ways society deems evil
extends on the events of the Stanford Prison Experiment
compared those events to the abuses at Abu Ghraib

The Time Paradox

explores how differences in how people understand time reflects on their role in society
an experiment regarding children and marshmallows was the impetus