This is a five-section course as part of a two-course sequence in Research Methods in Psychology. This course deals with descriptive methods and the second course deals with experimental methods.
Lesson 1A: Objective vs Subjective Knowledge
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來自 Georgia Institute of Technology 的課程
Descriptive Research Methods in Psychology
2 個評分
從本節課中
Module 1: Introduction
與講師見面
Dr. Anderson D. SmithRegents’ Professor Emeritus
School of Psychology
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Hello, I'm Anderson Smith and
the course is Descriptive Research Methods in Psychology.
Today, we have a first lecture module dealing with the section of psychology as
a science.
And what we want to do is figure out what we really know about psychology.
Psychology is a study of the brain and behaviour, the mind and
how the mind works and behavior, as it operates in the environment.
What do we know about it?
Well, if psychology is the study of the mind and behavior,
then we're all psychologists.
Because we all have spent our whole lives trying to understand why and
how people behave.
From dealing with our parents to dealing with our siblings,
dealing with people around us, we're all psychologists.
So how we have been trained to do that it is just a part of our nature.
But psychologists are trained differently because psychologists have
to learn that you cannot rely on just on your experience and on your intuition.
You have to do research studies that actually give us the facts about behavior.
And the difference between subjective knowledge,
which is knowledge that we all have based on our experience, and
objective knowledge, knowledge that we gain through research.
So subjective knowledge is gained through experiences that we have,
it's gained through hearsay, a lot of myths about how behavior operates,
intuition and pop psychology, things that we read in magazines.
Objective knowledge can only be gained through research that provides facts.
And I also teach a course in introductory psychology here on Coursera, and
on the very first day of class,
very first section, I actually give a pre-test before the class is taught.
If you think about it, there are not many courses, not many disciplines out there,
where you can take a test on the material prior to taking the class.
But in psychology you can, because we already have this knowledge base that
we've built up through intuition and experience.
Now people, there are 25 true, false questions on this test, and people answer
all the questions, they feel like they can do the pre-test and do well on it.
Actually, no one does well because I've rigged the test so that all the true,
false questions are false.
And on the average people in my class get 17 trues out of the 25 questions.
Now, let me give you some of the examples from the test,
first, the right side of the brain is creative, while the left side is analytic.
Very common pop psychology theory but in fact, it's not true,
we use our whole brains.
Whether we analyze something or whether we are trying to be creative,
we use our entire brains and that brains' two hemispheres communicate with each
other across a part of the brain called the corpus callosum.
Now it's true that they are asymmetries in the brain, for example,
language for most people is located in the left side of the brain.
But for big complex kinds of cognitions like creativity or analytic thought,
we use our whole brains, both are important.
Another example would be some people don't dream, well, in fact, everybody dreams.
I have a great video of someone in a sleep lab who claims they never had a dream in
their life.
You put them to sleep, they wait till their eyes show rapid eye movement,
which means they're probably dreaming.
You wake them up, they vividly describe this elaborate dream,
put them back to sleep.
When they wake up the next morning; they look at you and say, see,
I told you I don't dream, when in fact, you have to show them
the video to make them believe that they do dream, everybody dreams.
In operant conditioning, punishment is called negative reinforcement.
Now, in fact, punishment is used to reduce the probability of a behaviour occurring
in the future while reinforcement increases the probability of a behavior
occurring in the future.
So with punishment you're decreasing a behavior, with negative reinforcement,
you're increasing a behavior by taking away a negative stimulus.
By the way, in the Big Bang Theory, the TV show, they did two episodes this past year
on this, the first with a greatly confused negative reinforcement punishment.
And they had to have a second one because all the letters they got from psychology
students saying that punishment was actually different from negative
reinforcement.
Genius is related to mental illness, well, you all saw the movie,
Beautiful Mind, I guess.
But in fact, while intelligence is not correlated with the probability of
developing psychopathologies, very bright people can develop psychopathologies and
not so bright people can do it.
It's not a correlation that's significant there.
Schizophrenia means split personality, most people say true,
that's what schizophrenia means.
Split personality, when someone shows two different personalities in
the same person, is called dissociative disorder, and it's not a controversy but
that really is a good diagnostic category.
Schizophrenia means you've lost contact with everyone else's reality,
you're living in your own world.
Another example, hypnosis is a useful technique for
retrieving forgotten memories.
In fact, hypnosis is not a technique to retrieve forgotten memories,
it doesn't work, under hypnosis, you cannot remember things that happened
in your past, unless you are under hypnosis when you learn that material.
It's called the false memory syndrome when people actually remember things in their
past under hypnosis,
where in fact, it's something that wasn't remembered as made up.
And then, exercising the brain with intellectual games and
tasks can improve your brain efficiency and intelligence, there's no evidence for
this even though the advertisement world is full of that.
For example, Lumosity is something you can buy that will give you lots of games and
things to exercise.
In the original advertisement for Lumosity,
it said that it would allow you to improve your overall IQ and
to avoid slowing and memory loss that occurs with aging.
So if you look at this which is from the Guardian, it says that
the Federal Trade Commission issued a general warning that it's on the lookout
for companies cashing in on the popularity of health related mobile apps.
Lumosity is the biggest name so
far in a series of federal actions in the past year against companies
that make apps claiming to bring users significant health benefits.
If you look down it says, The shine has come off Lumosity with the announcement by
the federal investigators that the makers must pay $2 million to settle the charge
that it made fraudulent claims and preyed on consumers' fears,
and given a $50 million penalty, but they were unable to pay that.
Now, training on different tasks,
psychological tasks, can improve performance on those tasks.
So if I train myself on a working memory task, I can do better on working memory
but there's no evidence that then that would transfer to general cognition and
intelligence.
So most psychologists, most neuroscientists believe this statement,
and this is from a letter in Scientific American, and
David Hambrick was a psychology student at Georgia Tech.
The strong consensus of this group is that the scientific literature does not support
claims that the use of software-based brain games alters neural functioning
in ways that improve general cognitive performance in everyday life, or
prevent cognitive slowing and brain disease.
Now the reasons that people develop these sorts of subjective knowledge states
about behaviour, first we tend to engage in non critical thinking and
that leads to erroneous conclusions, such as, you ignore evidence and
argues against things that you really believe in.
Or you fail to accurately judge the credibility of the source thats providing
you the information, or you misunderstand the information.
Or you don't use statistics to really see whether not that difference that you see
out there in the world is really a significant one or just due to chance.
Or you see relationships that don't exist, you talk about correlationsm when in fact,
the correlations aren't significant.
Or you use relative comparisons, and
this is a phenomenon that's studied by Kahneman, who's a psychologist at
Princeton, who actually won the Nobel prize a few years ago for
his work on decision making and how people make decisions.
Let me give you an example of one of these ways in which
a subjective response can be wrong.
He presented a series of numbers for a very brief period of time and said,
quickly estimate what you think the product of these numbers is,
if you multiply the numbers together, what will you get?
Then he presented them in two ways, you can start with the 8 or
you can start with the 1.
So you see that 8 times 7 times 6 times, so forth, for a very brief period of time,
a few seconds.
Take it off and he'll say, okay,
give me the estimate of what you think the product of that multiplication is.
If you're presented with the 8 starting first, the average guess is 2,250,
if you start with the 1 first, the average is 512.
Big differences in just how you stack the comparison that you're going to make,
in fact, the real answer is 40320, so
everybody underestimates what the product is.
So in summary, there's a difference between subjective knowledge,
knowledge that we all have based on our study of behaviour out there in the world
and that's acquired through our experiences.
And then there's objective knowledge about behaviour which is acquired through good,
valid and reliable psychological research, thank you.
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