1. The Field of Psychology
Lecture Notes for Module 1
Welcome to Psychology 101 online!
In a face to face class, you’d be seeing these Powerpoint slides, listening to me talk about these slides, and taking notes on this information. Here in the online section, you’ll read these notes from me. I’ll be referring to the Powerpoint slide just above the text.
For some modules, you’ll have media files from the book publisher rather than, or in addition to, these Powerpoint slides and text boxes. Module 2 is an example of when you’ll have lectures both from me and from the media files. As always, your syllabus is your guide to what you should be doing.

2. What Isn’t Psychology?
Do you recognize this man? Do you recognize the book title “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”?
The man pictured above is John Gray, who authored this book and many others. He’s made a LOT of money off his ideas that women and men are SO different that it is as if we come from different planets.
Should we believe what he says? Is he right?
The problem with claims such as his, is that they are NOT based on research. They are simply his ideas. His ideas may be 100% correct, but his ideas may also be 100% incorrect. Because these are his ideas and not ideas based on research, we will NOT consider his ideas to be psychology in the way we will discuss it in his class. By the way, trivia fact John Gray got his PhD in the mail. Now do you want to trust him?!? Just because he’s sold a lot of books doesn’t make his ideas true or trustworthy. We must have solid research, and he doesn’t have it. We will put him in the category of “NOT psychology.”

3. What Is Psychology? Definition:
Psychology is the Scientific Study of Behavior and the mind.
So if John Gray represents what is NOT psychology, what do we mean when we say psychology?
Above is the definition we will use for this class. Please note the focus on SCIENCE. Psychology as addressed in this class involves scientific study. The conclusions in your book are based on research, not speculation. So, unlike John Gray, we can have confidence in the results and conclusions.
Also note another thing about the definition above. Psychology involves both outward behavior as well as the inner workings of the mind. This wasn’t always the case—but more on that when we get to learning.

4. Goals of Psychology
Not just to describe and explain behavior but also to predict and control behavior.
More important stuff on psychology . . .
It’s not just our goal to describe behavior, but we also want to be able to predict and control it. For example, if you think about extreme acts of violence, like murders, it is certainly helpful to describe WHY someone might murder another person. Even better, though, would be the ability to predict what conditions might make an individual likely to lash out with violence and what can be done to reduce this violent tendency and control their behavior. Thus, psychologists want to be able to do both explain the behavior and predict and control it. We don’t just want to sit back and explain why the events unfolded the way they did. We also want to try and make a difference!

5. What do psychologists do?
Clinical
Provides Psychotherapy; administers and interprets psychological tests
Counseling
Help with everyday issues (e.g. family, career)
Developmental
Research and teach development with age
Cognitive
Research and teach mental processes (e.g memory)
Social
Research and teach how others affect us; human interaction
Personality
Research and teach individual differences
Physiological
Research and teach brain and brain/body interaction
Industrial/
Organizational
Apply psychology to the work place
Sport
Apply psychology to improve athletic performance
School
Applies psychology to improve development of kids
Before they take a psychology course, many people have a somewhat limited understanding of the field of psychology and what psychologists do. People often tend to think of psychologists as people who counsel others who are experiencing life stresses or suffering from mental illness. It is true that SOME psychologists do this (particularly clinical and counseling psychologists) but there are actually many more subfields of psychology and psychologists who are trained to do other things. See the list above for psychologists who do research, work in business and school settings, and study people of different ages. By the way, I am a social psychologist, so I am interested in how our behavior may be affected by others. For example, how is my behavior different when I am with my friends versus with my coworkers? Also, how might behavior differ if I am alone versus in a crowd? Social Psychologists also study things like prejudice and discrimination, and interpersonal attraction.

6. -
From the above chart, you can see that the largest group of psychologists are trained in clinical psychology (44%) but you can also see the other specialties of psychologists. We social psychologists are somewhat rare—only 2.5% of psychologists are social psychologists.

7. A Research Finding About Love
What if I told you that psychological research has found that people are more likely to be attracted to those who are somewhat different from themselves. In short, the research seems to find that “opposites attract.”
Would you be surprised by this research finding, or would you believe it to be somewhat common sense?
I’m guessing that most of you would not be surprised. You may even have the reaction that it is such common sense that we even have the expression “opposites attract”. You may even wonder why psychologists would bother with research that is so obvious!

8. A Research Finding About Love
The catch!
But there’s a catch! The ACTUAL result from psychological research is that people are more likely to be attracted to individuals who are SIMILAR to themselves. The expression that proves true is “birds of a feather flock together” and not “opposites attract.”
Psychology sometimes suffers from an image problem. People sometimes believe that psychological research is a waste of money because the results are so obvious. The problem is, though, that whatever the result, the results may seem obvious once we know the result. In other words, whether I had said that opposites attract or similarity attracts, you have been tempted to say these results were obvious, even though they are exactly OPPOSITE RESULTS! Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon, we call it hindsight bias.

9. The Hindsight Bias The “I knew it all along” phenomenon
Overconfidence that you could have predicted the results of a study
So here’s the definition for hindsight bias. It’s the belief, once you know the results of a study, that you could have predicted the results. But, as the “love” example shows you, it’s possible that you would have been not surprised had the results turned out exactly the opposite! Thus, the research is important to do in order to find out which of the two results proves true—or is it a third possibility we haven’t even considered that proves true.
Throughout the course, be careful to avoid the hindsight bias. Did you REALLY make that prediction before you knew the results?
If you are familiar with the phrase “Monday Quarterback” this is kind of like hindsight bias in football, where after the game is over, fans feel like they knew what was going to happen all along.

10. Popular Versus Scientific Psychology
Popular Psychology
Intuition
Conflicting
Right on or dead wrong?
My main goal for you this week is to begin to understand psychology as a science. Much of what you have been exposed to before this class is better classified as “popular” psychology rather than scientific psychology.
Popular psychology, like that of John Gray and his Mars and Venus books, is based on intuition or gut feelings, and not research.
Popular psychology can be conflicting, such as the “common sense” phrases of opposites attract and birds of a feather flock together. With popular psychology, we have no way of knowing whether the ideas are correct or incorrect. In this class, we will not use popular psychology, but rather focus on SCIENTIFIC psychology.

11. Popular Versus Scientific Psychology
Popular Psychology
Intuition
Conflicting
Right on or dead wrong?
Scientific Psychology
Skepticism
Humility
SCIENTIFIC METHOD
The big difference between popular psychology and scientific psychology is that in scientific psychology we use the scientific method. We don’t just share what we think, but we carefully test our ideas to see if our predictions are true or not.
We are skeptical of intuition and common sense and want to be sure our conclusions are rigorously tested. We’ll be discussing the scientific approach to psychology in some detail in the next module.