Nicky Hayes

Psychology : theory and application

Methods of investigation.- Personality and coping.- Communication and explanation.- Thinking and intelligence.- Learning and remembering.- Perception and motivation.- Attitudes and groups.- Interacting with others.- Afterword.

What Makes a Psychology Graduate Distinctive

This paper explores the question of what an individual gains from having undertaken and completed an undergraduate (a 3-year bachelor) degree in psychology in the United Kingdom. It addresses the question in two ways. The first is by describing a set of skills and knowledge which an individual can be expected to acquire as a direct result of taking psychology as a subject. These fall into three groups: first, specific skills such as numeracy and literacy; second, knowledge resulting directly from the content of a psychology degree (bearing in mind that these can vary considerably in content and orientation); and third, synthetic skills derived from the epistemological characteristics of psychology as an academic discipline. The paper then goes on to discuss some of the more general outcomes of, or benefits from, the study of psychology. It addresses the question of psychology as a liberal education, and of the internalized and automatized nature of much psychological knowledge, since the latter often acts...

Ethical Issues in Psychological Research

Ethical issues in psychology are becoming increasingly important. Not only do they feature as an area of study in their own right, but all psychological research is coming increasingly under scrutiny with regard to its ethical implications. Studies which were once regarded as acceptable are now no longer considered to be so; and concepts like social responsibility and equity have entered the psychological vocabulary — not before time, many would say.

Thinking and intelligence

This chapter is about how we make sense of the world. Making sense of things, interpreting situations and scenes, and planning activities are such basic human qualities that we take them for granted. We do not need to understand how we think, or how we plan, in order to do it — we just go ahead. It is interesting, though, to consider some of the characteristics of intelligent activity and what we might be able to do to enhance it.

Learning and remembering

How do we learn how we should act and how do we store information? These two questions are among the earliest studied by psychologists and still provide a focus for a substantial amount of research. The ability to learn and to reason was thought of by European scientists in the 19th century as the factor which distinguishes human beings from animals. Animals were thought to acquire their behaviour and knowledge by ‘instinct’, whereas people developed their own knowledge through enquiry and had the gift of reason.

Perspectives in Cognitive Psychology

When the ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s took place, psychology breathed a metaphorical sigh of relief. For many years, it had been dominated by the rigid demands of behaviourism, with an insistence on an ‘objective’ approach that many felt had become increasingly trivialised, not least in view of its emphasis on animal learning as the essence of psychological mechanisms.

The ‘Magic’ of Sociobiology

When E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was first launched in 1975, its arrival was greeted with immense excitement on the part of the media as well as within the academic world. As a theory, it provided a comprehensive — even global — set of ‘explanations’ of the human condition and human societies, in a respectably tentative, academic way. Moreover, it had the ultimate claim to credibility: the theory was, we were told, scientific — drawing on evidence from experts in the worlds of biology and ethology, and presenting its conclusions in a suitably scientific manner, using mathematical models derived from game theory to present a convincing series of numbers, tables and diagrams. The large, coffee-table-style book was an instant hit, resulting in articles in such publications as Readers’ Digest, House and Garden Magazine, and many others. At the same time, it became widely read within the academic world, and while debated hotly by many, was readily accepted by many more working academics.

Perspectives in Social Psychology

Social psychology, during the past twenty years, has been going through a revolution. It is a quiet revolution, but a revolution nonetheless. There is a paradigm shift going on. That paradigm shift concerns the nature of social psychology, and it deals with major issues such as the question of reductionism, the value of laboratory experimentation, and how far social psychology can be considered to be truly social enough to explain human behaviour in a real society.

The Influence of Behaviourism

Philosophically speaking, behaviourism has its origins in the associationism of the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). Locke believed that the human being was born as a tabula rasa — that, mentally, a human infant was a blank slate, with no prior knowledge or ideas. It is experience, received through the senses, according to Locke, which provides the material which forms the human mind. By associating different experiences, complex chains of ideas can be developed, and new combinations can be found. Locke believed that all human thought and mental life was formed by such associations.

The Politics of Nature and Nurture

One of the first questions in psychology that a new student learns about is the nature/nurture debate. A nature/nurture debate is concerned with what causes something to develop. On one side are the nativists, who see development as arising from innate factors — from genetic inheritance. On the other side are the empiricists, who see development as occurring because of experience and learning. Nature/nurture debates are often presented as being simply academic disputes; but they are actually much more than that. They form the basis of the way that we organise our society, and also of our attitudes towards one another. As such, they are highly political issues.