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Foundations for the Study of Psychology

The human being, as far as any human being can tell, isthe only creature that contemplates itself. We not onlythink, feel, dream, and act but also wonder how and

why we do these things. Such contemplation has taken manyforms, ranging from just plain wondering to folk tales and pop-ular songs, to poetry and literature, to formal theologies andphilosophies. A little more than a century ago, human self-contemplation took a scientific turn, and we call that sciencepsychology.

Welcome! Welcome to Psychology and to psychology—that is,to this book and to the field of study it is about. I hope you willenjoy them both. The big question of psychology is one of themost fascinating that anyone can ask: What makes people feel,think, and behave the way they do? In this book you will readabout many routes toward answering that big question, and youwill discover many dozens of specific findings and ideas thathelp to answer it.

It is useful to begin with a formal definition of our subject:Psychology is the science of behavior and the mind. In this defi-nition behavior refers to the observable actions of a person oran animal. Mind refers to an individual’s sensations, percep-tions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives, emotional feel-ings, and other subjective experiences. It also refers to all of theunconscious knowledge and operating rules that are built intoor stored in the brain, and that provide the foundation for or-ganizing behavior and conscious experience. Science refers toall attempts to answer questions through the systematic collec-tion and logical analysis of objectively observable data. Most ofthe data in psychology are based on observations of behavior,because behavior is directly observable and mind is not; butpsychologists often use those data to make inferences about themind.

In this opening chapter, I want to do three things, all aimedat helping to prepare you for the rest of the book. First, I wantto present you with a little bit of the history and philosophy

Three Foundation Ideas forPsychology: A HistoricalOverview

The Idea of Physical Causation ofBehavior

The Idea That the Mind and BehaviorAre Shaped by Experience

The Idea That the Machinery ofBehavior and Mind EvolvedThrough Natural Selection

The Scope of PsychologyVarieties of Explanations in

Psychology, and Their Applicationto Sexual Jealousy

The Connections of Psychology toOther Scholarly Fields

Psychology as a Profession

Thoughts About Using This Bookand Its Special Features

chapter1

part 1“Know thyself.” These two words were inscribed on the shrine of the Oracle of Apollo, at Delphi, Greece, in

the sixth century b.c. Throughout recorded history, human beings have striven to understand the nature of

being human, to fathom the mysteries of the human mind and human behavior. Today that endeavor is pursued

as a science, the science of psychology. In this first, background unit, we examine some fundamental ideas

that helped to bring about a science of psychology, and we preview some of the methods that help to make

psychology a science.

Background to the Study of Psychology

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that predate and underlie modern psychology. More specifically, I will say some-thing about the historical origins of three ideas that are so basic to our science thatI refer to them as “foundation ideas for psychology.” Second, I want to tell yousomething about the scope of modern psychology, especially about the various lev-els of analysis that psychologists use in learning about and explaining mental expe-riences and behavior. Third, I want to tell you something about the features of thisbook and how you might use them to maximize your enjoyment of it and yourlearning from it. I put that section last, because I thought you might learn morefrom it after you have read a bit into the book than you would if it came first. If youprefer to read that section first, please do. It starts on page 19.

There is one feature of the book that I want you to notice right now, however. Inthe margins of the text, throughout the book, you will find numbered focus questions.The first such question appears in the margin next to the paragraph you are readingright now. These are the questions that I am trying to answer in the text, and theyare also good test questions. An effective way to study this book is to read and thinkabout each focus question, as you come to it, before you read the adjacent paragraphsof text, which are aimed at answering that question. This method of study will helpyou focus your attention on the text and understand and remember what you read.If you read with the active intention of answering the focus questions, your mind isless likely to drift, and you are more likely to understand and think about what youread than if you read passively just to “learn” or “absorb” the material.

Three Foundation Ideas for Psychology:A Historical OverviewThe founding of psychology as a formal, recognized, scientific discipline is com-monly dated to 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt, in Germany, opened the firstuniversity-based psychology laboratory. At about that same time, Wundt also au-thored the first textbook of psychology and began mentoring the first official grad-uate students of psychology. The first people to earn Ph.D. degrees in psychologywere Wundt’s students.

But the roots of psychology predate Wundt. They were developed by peoplewho called themselves philosophers, physicists, physiologists, and naturalists. Inthis section we shall examine three fundamental ideas of psychology, all of whichwere conceived of and debated before the establishment of psychology as a recog-nized scientific discipline. Briefly, the ideas are these:

1. Behavior and mental experiences have physical causes, so they are amenableto scientific analysis.

2. The way a person behaves, thinks, and feels is modified, over time, by the per-son’s experiences in his or her environment.

3. The body’s machinery, which produces behavior and mental experiences, is aproduct of evolution by natural selection.

The Idea of Physical Causation of BehaviorBefore a science of psychology could emerge, people had to conceive of and acceptthe idea that questions about human behavior and the mind can, in principle, beanswered scientifically. Seeds for this conception can be found in the writings ofsome of the ancient Greeks, who speculated about the senses, the human intellect,and the physical basis of the mind in ways that seem remarkably modern. But suchideas became dormant in the Middle Ages and did not begin to sprout again untilthe fifteenth century (the Renaissance) or to take firm hold until the eighteenthcentury (the Enlightenment).

Philosophy was tightly bound to religion through the seventeenth century. Thechurch maintained that each human being consists of two distinct but intimately

2 P A R T 1 ■ B A C K G R O U N D T O T H E S T U D Y O F P S Y C H O L O G YC

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René Descartes Descartes’s specula-tions, in the seventeenth century,about reflexes and the interaction ofthe body and soul in controlling volun-tary actions were an important steptoward a scientific analysis of humanbehavior.

1How might the focus questions (such asthis one) in the text’s margins be used toguide initial reading and review?

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conjoined entities, a material body and an immaterial soul—a view referred totoday as dualism. The body is part of the natural world and can be studied scientif-ically, just as inanimate matter can be studied. The soul, in contrast, is a supernat-ural entity that operates according to its own free will, not natural law, andtherefore cannot be studied scientifically. This was the accepted religious doctrine,which—at least in most of Europe—could not be challenged publicly without riskof a charge of heresy and consequent execution. Yet the doctrine left some roomfor play, and one who played dangerously near the limits was the great Frenchmathematician, physiologist, and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650).

Descartes’s Version of Dualism: Focus on the BodyPrior to Descartes, most dualists assigned all the interesting qualities of the humanbeing to the soul. The soul was deemed responsible for the body’s heat, for its abil-ity to move, for life itself. In Treatise of Man (1637/1972), and even more explicitlyin The Passions of the Soul (1649/1985), Descartes challenged this view. He had per-formed dissections of animals and of human cadavers, was familiar with researchon the flow of blood, and began to regard the body as an intricate, complex machinethat generates its own heat and is capableof moving even without the influence ofthe soul. Although little was known aboutthe nervous system in his time, Descartes’sconception of the mechanical control ofmovement resembles our modern under-standing of reflexes, which are involuntaryresponses to stimuli (see Figure 1.1).

Descartes believed that even quite com-plex behaviors can occur through purelymechanical means, without involvementof the soul. Consistent with church doc-trine, he contended that non-human ani-mals do not have souls, and he pointed outa logical implication of this belief: Any ac-tivity performed by humans that is qualita-tively no different from the behavior of a non-human animal can, in theory, occurwithout the soul. If my dog (who can do some wondrous things) is just a machine,then a good deal of what I do might occur purely mechanically as well.

In Descartes’s view, the one essential ability that I have but my dog does not isthought, which Descartes defined as conscious deliberation and judgment. Whereasprevious philosophers ascribed many functions to the soul, Descartes ascribed justone—thought. But even in his discussion of thought, Descartes tended to focus onthe body’s machinery. To be useful, thought must be responsive to the sensoryinput channeled into the body through the eyes, ears, and other sense organs, andit must be capable of directing the body’s movements by acting on the muscles.

How can the thinking soul interact with the physical machine—the sense or-gans, muscles, and other parts of the body? Descartes suggested that the soul,though not physical, acts on the body at a particular physical location. Its place ofaction is a small organ (now known as the pineal body) buried between the twohemispheres (halves) of the brain (see Figure 1.2). Threadlike structures, whichwe now call nerves, bring sensory information by physical means into the brain,where the soul receives the information and, by non-physical means, thinks aboutit. On the basis of those thoughts, the soul then wills movements to occur and exe-cutes its will by triggering physical actions in nerves that, in turn, act on muscles.

Descartes’s dualism, with its heavy emphasis on the body, certainly helpedopen the door for a science of psychology. It is a popular theory among non-scientists even today, because it acknowledges the roles of sense organs, nerves,and muscles in behavior without violating people’s religious beliefs or intuitivefeelings that conscious thought occurs on a non-physical plane. But the theory has

C H A P T E R 1 ■ F O U N D A T I O N S F O R T H E S T U D Y O F P S Y C H O L O G Y 3

| figure 1.1 | Descartes’s depic-tion of a reflex Descartes believedthat reflexes occur through purelymechanical means. In describing thisfigure, Descartes (1637/1972) suggest-ed that the fire causes movement inthe nearby particles of skin, pulling ona “thread” (that runs “C” to “C” alongthe back) going to the brain, which, inturn, causes a pore to open in thebrain, allowing fluid to flow through a“small conduit’’ to the muscles thatwithdraw the foot. What Descartescalled a “thread’’ and a “small conduit’’are today called nerves, and we nowknow that nerves operate throughelectrical means, not through physicalpulling or the shunting of fluids.

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2What was Descartes’s version of dualism?How did it help pave the way for a scienceof psychology?

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3Why was Descartes’s theory, despite itsintuitive appeal, unsuitable for a completepsychology?

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4How did Hobbes’s materialism help lay thegroundwork for a science of psychology?

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A seventeenth-century mechanical man Mechanical clocksrepresented the pinnacle of technological achievement of theseventeenth century, comparable to computers today. Foramusement, clocklike mechanisms were used to operaterobotic, humanoid figures, as illustrated here. Such mechanicalmen helped to inspire, in Descartes and Hobbes, the idea thatactual human beings might also operate by mechanical means,not requiring a nonmaterial spirit to move them. S

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serious limitations, both as a philosophy and as a foundation for ascience of psychology. As a philosophy, it stumbles on the ques-tion of how a non-material entity (the soul) can have a material ef-fect (movement of the body), or how the body can follow naturallaw and yet be moved by a soul that does not (Campbell, 1970). Asa foundation for psychology, the theory sets strict limits, whichfew psychologists would accept today, on what can and cannot beunderstood scientifically. The whole realm of thought and all be-haviors that are guided by thought are out of bounds for scientificanalysis if they are the products of a willful soul.

Thomas Hobbes and the Philosophy of MaterialismAt about the same time that Descartes was developing hismachine-oriented version of dualism, an English philosophernamed Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was going much further. Itshould be no surprise that an Englishman, not a Frenchman, wasfirst to break from dualism entirely. The church and state wereconstantly feuding in seventeenth-century England, and inklingsof democracy were emerging. Hobbes had been employed as atutor to the future King Charles II and, when the latter came topower, enjoyed royal protection. When a committee of bishops pe-titioned that Hobbes be burned to death for his blasphemous bookLeviathan, Hobbes received instead a stern warning (Hunt, 1993).The church burned copies of his book, but Hobbes, promising not

to repeat his heresy, lived to the ripe age of 91.In Leviathan, and in a shorter work called Human Nature, Hobbes argued that

spirit, or soul, is a meaningless concept and that nothing exists but matter and en-ergy, a philosophy now known as materialism. In Hobbes’s view, all human be-havior, including the seemingly voluntary choices we make, can in theory beunderstood in terms of physical processes in the body, especially the brain.Conscious thought, he maintained, is purely a product of the brain’s machineryand therefore subject to natural law. With this philosophy there is no theoreticallimit to what psychologists might study scientifically. Most of Hobbes’s work wasdirected toward the implications of materialism for politics and government, buthis ideas helped inspire, in England, a school of thought about the mind known asempiricism, to which we shall soon turn.

Nineteenth-Century Physiology: Learning About the MachineThe idea that the body, including the brain, is a machine, amenable to scientificstudy, helped to promote the science of physiology—the study of the body’s ma-chinery. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, considerable progress had beenmade in this endeavor, and during that century discoveries were made about thenervous system that contributed significantly to the origins of scientific psychology.

Increased Understanding of Reflexes One especially important developmentfor the later emergence of psychology was an increased understanding of reflexes.The basic arrangement of the nervous system—consisting of a central nervous sys-tem (brain and spinal cord) and peripheral nerves that connect the central nervous

| figure 1.2 | Descartes’s depiction of how the soulreceives information through the eyes Descartesbelieved that the human soul is housed in the pineal gland,depicted here as the tear-shaped structure in the center ofthe head. In describing this figure, Descartes (1637/1972)suggested that light from the arrow enters the eyes andopens pores in structures that we now know as the opticnerves. Fluid flows from the eyes through the openedpores, causing movement in the pineal gland, which, inDescartes’s words, “renders the idea’’ of the arrow to thesoul.


system to sense organs and muscles—was well understood by the beginning of thenineteenth century. In 1822 in France, François Magendie demonstrated thatnerves entering the spinal cord contain two separate pathways: one for carryingmessages into the central nervous system from the skin’s sensory receptors andone for carrying messages out to operate muscles. Through experiments with ani-mals, scientists began to learn about the neural connections that underlie simplereflexes, such as the automatic withdrawal response to a pin prick, and found brainareas that, when active, could either enhance or inhibit such reflexes.

Some of these physiologists began to suggest that all human behavior occursthrough reflexes, that even so-called voluntary actions are actually complex re-flexes involving higher parts of the brain. One of the most eloquent proponents ofthis view, known as reflexology, was the Russian physiologist I. M. Sechenov. In hismonograph Reflexes of the Brain, Sechenov (1863/1935) argued that every humanaction, “[b]e it a child laughing at the sight of toys, or . . . Newton enunciatinguniversal laws and writing them on paper,” can in theory be understood as a reflex.All human actions, he claimed, are initiated by stimuli in the environment. Thestimuli act on a person’s sensory receptors, setting in motion a chain of events inthe nervous system that culminates in the muscle movements that constitute theaction. Sechenov’s work inspired another Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov(1849–1936), whose work on reflexes played a critical role in the development, inNorth America, of a school of thought in psychology called behaviorism (discussedin Chapter 4).

The Concept of Localization of Function in the Brain Another important ad-vance in nineteenth-century physiology was the concept of localization of functionin the brain, the idea that specific parts of the brain serve specific functions in theproduction of mental experience and behavior. In Germany, Johannes Müller(1838/1965) proposed that the different qualities of sensory experience comeabout because the nerves from different sense organs excite different parts of thebrain. Thus we experience vision when one part of the brain is active, hearingwhen another part is active, and so on. In France, Pierre Flourens (1824/1965) per-formed experiments with animals showing that damage to different parts of thebrain produces different kinds of deficits in animals’ ability to move. And PaulBroca (1861/1965), also in France, published evidence that people who suffer in-jury to a very specific area of the brain’s left hemisphere lose the ability to speakbut do not lose other mental abilities. All such evidence about the relationships be-tween mind and brain helped lay the groundwork for a scientific psychology, be-cause it gave substance to the idea of a material basis for mental processes.


Early evidence for localization offunction Shown here is the pre-served brain of Paul Broca’s patientknown as Tan, who lost his ability tospeak after suffering brain damage.The damage is in the left frontal lobe,in an area now called Broca’s area(discussed in Chapter 5).Pa

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5How did the nineteenth-century under-standing of the nervous system inspire atheory of behavior called reflexology?

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6How did discoveries of localization of func-tion in the brain help establish the ideathat the mind can be studied scientifically?

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The Idea That the Mind and Behavior Are Shaped by ExperienceBesides helping to inspire research in physiology, the materialist philosophy ofseventeenth-century England led quite directly to a school of thought about the mindknown as British empiricism, carried on by such British philosophers as John Locke(1632–1704), David Hartley (1705–1759), James Mill (1773–1836), and John StuartMill (1806–1873). Empiricism, in this context, refers to the idea that human knowl-edge and thought derive ultimately from sensory experience (vision, hearing, touch,and so forth). If we are machines, we are machines that learn. Our senses providethe input that allows us to acquire knowledge of the world around us, and thisknowledge allows us to think about that world and behave adaptively within it. Theessence of empiricist philosophy is poetically expressed in the following often-quotedpassage from Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690/1975, p. 104):

Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without anyideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busyand boundless fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whencehas it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from ex-perience. In that, all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.

The Empiricist Concept of Association by ContiguityIn keeping with materialist philosophy, Locke and the other British empiricists

argued that thoughts are not products of free will, but reflections of one’s experi-ences in the physical and social environment. All the contents of the mind derivefrom the environment and bear direct relationship to that environment. Accordingto the empiricists, the fundamental units of the mind are elementary ideas, whichderive directly from sensory experiences, and these become linked together, inlawful ways, to form complex ideas and thoughts.

The most basic operating principle of the mind’s machinery, according to theempiricists, is the law of association by contiguity, an idea originally proposed byAristotle in the fourth century B.C. Contiguity refers to closeness in space or time,and the law of association by contiguity can be stated as follows: If a person expe-riences two environmental events (stimuli, or sensations) at the same time or oneright after the other (contiguously), those two events will become associated(bound together) in the person’s mind, such that the thought of one event will, inthe future, tend to elicit the thought of the other.

As a simple illustration, consider a child’s experiences when seeing and bitinginto an apple. The child receives, from the apple, a set of sensations, which pro-duce in her mind such elementary ideas as red color, spherical shape, and sweetand tart taste. The child may also, at the same time, hear the sound apple emanat-ing from the vocal cords of a nearby adult. Because all these sensations are experi-enced together, they become associated in the child’s mind. Together, they formthe complex idea “apple.” Because of association by contiguity, the thought of anyof the sensory qualities of the apple will tend to call forth the thought of all theapple’s other sensory qualities. Thus when the child hears apple, she will think ofthe red color, the spherical shape, and the sweet, tart taste. Or, when the child seesan apple, she will think of the sound apple and imagine the taste.

The empiricists contended that even their own most complex philosophicalponderings could, in theory, be understood as amalgams of elementary ideas thatbecame linked together in their minds as a result of contiguities in their experi-ences. John Stuart Mill (1843/1875) referred to this sort of analysis of the mind asmental chemistry. Complex ideas and thoughts are formed from combinations of el-ementary ideas, much as chemical compounds are formed from combinations ofchemical elements.

As you will discover in Chapters 4 and 9 of this textbook, the law of associationby contiguity is still regarded as a fundamental principle of learning and memory.More broadly, most of psychology—throughout its history—has been devoted to


7How did the British empiricists explain theorigin of complex ideas and thoughts?What role did the law of association bycontiguity play in their philosophy?

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8What influence has empiricist philosophyhad on psychology?

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A complex idea To the empiricistphilosophers, even as simple a con-cept as that of “apple” is a complexidea, consising of a set of elementarysensations—of shape, color, andtaste—that become associated in theperson’s mind through experienceswith apples.

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the study of the effects of experience on one’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Asexamples, social psychologists study the ways in which people are influenced bytheir social environment; cultural psychologists study differences among peoplethat arise from growing up in different cultures; developmental psychologists areinterested in the experiences that lead children to acquire language and to think inever more complex ways; clinical psychologists are interested in the experiencesthat can lead to mental disorders or can help one overcome such disorders; andcognitive psychologists strive to understand the mental machinery that makeslearning and memory possible. The impact of empiricist philosophy on psychologyhas been enormous.

The Nativist Response to EmpiricismFor every philosophy that contains part of the truth, there is an opposite philoso-phy that contains another part of it. The opposite of empiricism is nativism, theview that some knowledge and rules of operation are native to the human mind—that is, are inborn and do not have to be acquired from experience.

Take a sheet of white paper and present it with all the learning experiences thata normal human child might encounter (a suggestion made by Ornstein, 1991).The paper will learn nothing. Talk to it, sing to it, give it apples and oranges, take itfor trips in the country, hug it and kiss it; it will learn nothing about language,music, fruit, nature, or love. To learn anything, any entity must contain some ini-tial machinery, already built into it. At a minimum, that machinery must includean ability to sense some aspects of the environment, some means of interpretingand recording those sensations, some rules for storing and combining those sen-sory records, and some rules for recalling them when needed. The mind, contraryto Locke’s poetic assertion, must come with some initial furnishings in order for itto be furnished further through experience.

While empiricist philosophy flourished in England, nativist philosophy took rootin Germany, led by such thinkers as Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716)and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1908), Kantdistinguished between a priori knowledge, which is built into the human brain anddoes not have to be learned, and a posteriori knowledge, which one gains fromexperience in the environment. Without the first, a person could not acquire thesecond. As an illustration, Kant referred to a child’s learn-ing of language. The specific words and grammar that thechild acquires are a posteriori knowledge, but the child’sability to learn a language at all depends on a priori knowl-edge. The latter includes built-in rules about what to attendto and how to store and organize the verbal sounds that areheard in ways that allow the child eventually to make senseof them. Kant also argued that to make any sense of thephysical world, the child must already have, built into itsmind, certain fundamental physical concepts, such as theconcepts of space and time. Without such concepts, a childwould have no capacity for seeing an apple as spherical orfor detecting the temporal contiguity of two events.


A fun robot that can learn This computer-driven robot,designed by researchers at the University of California,San Diego, can keep track of some of its previous inter-actions with children and incorporate them into its futureresponses to the children. Such machines can learn onlythe kinds of information that they are programmed tolearn. Similarly, according to nativist philosophers, humanlearning is limited by the information and operating rulesthat are genetically programmed into the human brain. A

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9Why is the ability to learn dependent oninborn knowledge? In Kant’s nativist phi-losophy, what is the distinction between a priori knowledge and a posterioriknowledge?

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The Idea That the Machinery of Behavior and MindEvolved Through Natural SelectionKant understood that the human mind has some innate furnishings, but he had noscientific explanation of how those furnishings could have been built or why theyfunction as they do. That understanding came, at last, in 1859, when the Englishnaturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published The Origin of Species, a book thatwas destined to revolutionize biology, mark a new age in philosophy, and provide,along with the developments in physiology, a biological grounding for psychology.

Natural Selection and the Analysis of the Functions of BehaviorDarwin’s fundamental idea (explained much more fully in Chapter 3) was that

living things evolve gradually, over generations, by a process of natural selection.Those individuals whose inherited characteristics are well adapted to their envi-ronment are more likely to survive and reproduce than are other individuals. Ateach generation, random changes in the hereditary material produce variations inoffspring, and those variations that improve the chance of survival and reproduc-tion are passed from generation to generation in increasing numbers.

Because of natural selection, species of plants and animals change graduallyover time in ways that allow them to meet the changing demands of their environ-ments. Because of evolution, the innate characteristics of any given species ofplant or animal can be examined for the functions they serve in allowing individu-als to survive and reproduce. To understand, for example, why finches have stoutbeaks and warblers have slender beaks, one must know what foods the birds eatand how they use their beaks to obtain those foods. The same principle that appliesto anatomy applies to behavior. Through natural selection, living things have ac-quired instinctive tendencies to behave in ways that promote their survival and re-production. A key word here is function. While physiologists were examining theneural mechanisms of behavior, and empiricist philosophers were analyzing law-ful relationships between behavior and the environment, Darwin was studying thefunctions of behavior—the ways in which an organism’s behavior helps it to sur-vive and reproduce.

Application of Darwin’s Ideas to PsychologyIn The Origin of Species, Darwin discussed only plants and non-human animals, butin later writings he made it clear that he viewed humans as no exception. We hu-mans also evolved through natural selection, and our anatomy and behavior can beanalyzed in the same ways as can those of other living things.

In a book entitled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin(1872/1965) illustrated how evolutionary thinking can contribute to a scientific un-derstanding of human behavior. He argued that the basic forms of human emo-tional expressions (such as laughing and crying) are inherited, as are those of otheranimals, and may have evolved because the ability to communicate one’s emo-tions or intentions to others of one’s kind improves one’s chances of survival.Darwin’s work provided psychology with a scientific way of thinking about all theinborn universal tendencies that constitute human nature. The innate mecha-nisms underlying human emotions, drives, perceptual abilities, learning abilities,and capacities for reason came about gradually because they promoted the sur-vival and reproduction of our ancestors. One approach to understanding such char-acteristics is to analyze their evolutionary functions—their ways of promotingsurvival and reproduction.

If Kant had been privy to Darwin’s insight, he would have said that the innatefurnishings of the mind, which make it possible for children to learn language, tolearn about the physical world, to experience human drives and emotions, and,more generally, to behave as human beings and not as blank sheets of paper, cameabout through the process of natural selection, which gradually built all these ca-pacities into the brain’s machinery. Darwin, perhaps more than anyone else,


<<<10How did Darwin’s theory of natural selectionoffer a scientific foundation for explainingbehavior by describing its functions? Howdid it provide a basis for understandingthe origin of a priori knowledge?

Charles Darwin Darwin’s principle ofevolution by natural selection helpedprovide a scientific footing for psy-chology. The principle links humans tothe rest of the biological world andexplains the origin of brain mecha-nisms that promote the individual’ssurvival and reproduction.

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helped convince the intellectual world that we humans, despite our pretensions,are part of the natural world and can be understood through the methods of sci-ence. In this way he helped make the world ripe for psychology.

We have now reached the end of the first section of the chapter, and, beforemoving on, I want to point out a second feature of the book that is designed to helpyou study it. At the end of each major section of each chapter is a section reviewthat summarizes the section’s main ideas. The chart is organized hierarchically:the main idea or topic of the section is at the top, the sub-ideas or subtopics are atthe next level down, and specific facts and lines of evidence pertaining to each sub-idea or subtopic fill the lower parts. A good way to review, before going on, is toread each item in the chart and think about it. Start at the top and think about themain idea or purpose of the whole section. How would you explain it to anotherperson? Then go down each column, one by one; think about how the idea or topicheading the column pertains to the larger idea or topic above it and how it is sup-ported or elaborated upon by the more specific statements below it. If you are un-clear about the meaning of any item in the chart, or can’t elaborate on that item ina meaningful way, you may want to read the relevant part of the chapter again be-fore moving on. Another way to review is to look back at the focus questions in themargins and make sure you can answer each of them.


Psychology—the science of behavior and the mind—rests on prior intellectual developments.

Physical Causation of Behavior

• Descartes’s dualism placed more emphasis onthe role of the body than had previous versionsof dualism. Hobbes’s materialism held thatbehavior is completely a product of the bodyand thus physically caused.

• To the degree that behavior and the mind havea physical basis, they are open to study justlike the rest of the natural world.

• Nineteenth-century physiological studies ofreflexes and of localization of function in thebrain demonstrated the applicability of scienceto mental processes and behavior.

The Role of Experience

• The British empiricists claimedthat all thought and knowledgeare rooted in sensory experience.

• They used the concept of associ-ation by contiguity to explain howsensory experience could ulti-mately lead to complex thought.

• In contrast to empiricism,nativism asserts that someknowledge is innate and thatsuch knowledge enables learningfrom experience.

The Evolutionary Basis ofMind and Behavior

• Darwin proposed that naturalselection leads to the evolutionof behavioral tendencies (aswell as anatomical changes)that promote survival and repro-duction.

• Darwin’s thinking led to a focuson the functions of behavior.

• Natural selection also offered ascientific basis for consideringnativist views.

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Section Review

The Scope of PsychologyPsychology is a vast and diverse field of research. Every question about behaviorand mental experience that is potentially answerable by scientific means is withinits scope. One way to become oriented to this grand science is to preview the vari-ous kinds of explanatory concepts that psychologists use.

Varieties of Explanations in Psychology, and Their Application to Sexual JealousyPsychologists strive to explain mental experiences and behavior. To explain is toidentify causes. What causes us to do what we do, feel what we feel, perceive whatwe perceive, or believe what we believe? What causes us to eat in some conditionsand not in others; to cooperate sometimes and to cheat at other times; to feelangry, frightened, happy, or guilty; to dream; to hate or love; to see red as different

11How can the section review at the end ofeach major section of each chapter beused to guide one’s thought and reviewbefore going on to the next section?

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from blue; to remember or forget; to suddenly see so-lutions to problems that we couldn’t see before; tolearn our native language so easily when we are veryyoung; to become depressed or anxious? This is asample of the kinds of questions that psychologiststry to answer and that are addressed in this book.

The causes of mental experiences and behaviorare complex and can be analyzed at various levels.The phrase level of analysis, as used in psychologyand other sciences, refers to the level, or type, ofcausal process that is studied. More specifically, inpsychology, a person’s behavior or mental experiencecan be examined at the neural level (brain as cause),genetic level (genes as cause), evolutionary level (natu-ral selection as cause), learning level (the individual’sprior experiences with the environment as cause),cognitive level (the individuals’ knowledge or beliefsas cause), social level (the influence of other peopleas cause), cultural level (the culture in which the per-

son develops as cause), and developmental level (age-related changes as cause). It isconvenient to group these eight levels of analysis into two categories. The first cat-egory is biological, and consists of neural, genetic, and evolutionary explanations.The second category is experiential, and consists of learning, cognitive, social, cul-tural, and developmental explanations. You will find many examples of each ofthese eight levels of analysis in this book. Now, as an overview, I’ll describe each ofthem very briefly.

Any given type of behavior or mental experience can, in principle, be analyzedat any of the eight levels. To illustrate that point, I will suggest, in the following de-scriptions, ways by which each level of analysis can be applied to an understandingof sexual jealousy. One reason for choosing sexual jealousy as the example is thatit has not, in fact, been studied very much at most of the levels, so I can describehypothetical ways of studying it without getting into too much factual detail. Forour purposes, sexual jealousy can be defined as the set of emotions and behaviorsthat result when a person believes that his or her relationship with a sexual part-ner, or a potential sexual partner, is threatened by the partner’s involvement withanother person.

Explanations That Focus on Biological ProcessesNeural Explanations All mental experiences and behavioral acts are products ofthe nervous system. One logical route to explanation in psychology, therefore, is totry to understand how the nervous system produces the specific type of experienceor behavior being studied. Researchers who specialize in this level of explanationare referred to as behavioral neuroscientists.

Some behavioral neuroscientists study individual neurons (nerve cells) or smallgroups of neurons to determine how their characteristics contribute to particularpsychological capacities, such as learning. Others map out and study larger brainregions and pathways that are directly involved in some particular category of be-havior or experience, such as speaking grammatically, seeing the shapes of objects,or experiencing an emotion such as fear. Behavioral neuroscientists also study theways that hormones and drugs act on the brain to alter behavior and experience,either in humans or in non-human animals.

To date, no neural studies of jealousy have been conducted with human subjects,but at least one such study has been conducted with macaque monkeys (Rilling &others, 2004). Researchers induced a jealous state in male monkeys by exposingeach male to the sight of a female, with which he had previously mated, beingcourted by another male. During this experience, they measured the animal’s brainactivity using a technique called positron emission tomography (PET, described in

12How do neural, genetic, and evolutionaryexplanations differ from one another? Howmight each be applied toward an under-standing of jealousy?

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Sexual jealousy in humans Likeany common human behavioral pre-disposition, sexual jealousy can bestudied at the neural, genetic, evolu-tionary, learning, cognitive, social, cul-tural, and developmental levels ofanalysis. Here the theme of sexualjealousy is played out by RitaHayworth, Tyrone Power, and AnthonyQuinn in a scene from the 1941 filmBlood and Sand.

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Chapter 5). The result was a preliminary mapping of specific brain areas that be-come especially active during the experience of sexual jealousy in male macaques.

A next step, not yet taken, might be for neuroscientists to try to increase or de-crease jealous behavior in monkeys by artificially activating or inactivating thosesame areas of the brain. They might also examine people who have, throughstrokes or other accidents, suffered damage to those brain areas to determine ifthey have any deficits in the experience of jealousy. These are the kinds of tech-niques regularly used by behavioral neuroscientists.

Genetic Explanations Genes are the units of heredity that provide the codes forbuilding the entire body, including the brain. Differences among individuals in thegenes they inherit can cause differences in the brain and, therefore, differences inmental experiences and behavior. Researchers who attempt to explain psychologi-cal differences among individuals in terms of differences in their genes are calledbehavioral geneticists.

Some behavioral geneticists study non-human animals. They may, for example,deliberately modify animals’ genes to observe the effects on behavior. Others studypeople. To estimate the extent to which variation among people in some particulartrait is the result of variation in genes, researchers might assess the degree towhich genetic relatedness between people correlates with their degree of similar-ity in that trait. A finding that close genetic relatives are more similar in the traitthan are more distant relatives would suggest that genes contribute to variation inthe trait. Behavioral geneticists might also try to identify specific genes that con-tribute to a particular trait by analyzing the DNA (genetic material) of people whodiffer in that trait.

People differ in the degree to which they are prone to sexual jealousy. Some areeasily made jealous; others are not. To measure the degree to which such differ-ences are the result of genetic differences, researchers might assess sexual jeal-ousy in twins. If identical twins, who share all their genes with each other, aremuch more similar in jealousy than are same-sex non-identical twins, who are nomore closely related than other siblings, that would indicate that much of the vari-ation among people in sexual jealousy is caused by variation in genes. A next stepmight be to find out just which genes are involved in these differences and howthey act on the brain to influence jealousy. So far, no such studies have been doneof sexual jealousy, but you will read later of such studies of intelligence (inChapter 10), personality traits such as extraversion (in Chapter 15), and predisposi-tions to mental disorders such as schizophrenia and depression (in Chapter 16).


Viewing the active brain In recentyears the field of behavioral neuro-science has advanced greatly, due inpart to new techniques for assessingthe amount of activity that occurs inspecific brain locations as a personperforms mental tasks. These neuro-imaging techniques are discussed inChapter 5.H

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Evolutionary Explanations All the basic biological machinery underlying behav-ior and mind, coded by genes, is a product of evolution by natural selection. Oneway to explain universal human characteristics, therefore, is to explain how or whythat characteristic came about in evolution. Researchers who specialize in thislevel of analysis are called evolutionary psychologists.

Some evolutionary psychologists are interested in the actual routes by whichparticular behavioral capacities or tendencies evolved. For instance, researchersstudying the evolution of smiling have gained clues about how smiling originatedin our ancestors by examining smile-like behaviors in other primates, includingchimpanzees (discussed in Chapter 3). Most evolutionary psychologists are inter-ested in identifying the evolutionary functions—that is, the survival or reproductivebenefits—of the types of behaviors and mental experiences that they study. In laterchapters you will read about evolutionary, functional explanations of many humanbehavioral tendencies, drives, and emotions.

Evolutionary psychologists have examined the forms and consequences ofhuman jealousy in some detail in order to identify its possible benefits for repro-duction (Buss, 2000). Toward the same end, researchers have also examinedjealous-like behavior in many other animal species. Such research supports theview that jealousy functions to promote long-term mating bonds. In all animalsthat form such bonds, behavioral mechanisms (discussed in Chapter 3) haveevolved that motivate the mated male or female to actively drive off, or in otherways discourage, competitors for his or her mate.

Explanations That Focus on Environmental Experiences,Knowledge, and Development

Learning Explanations Essentially all forms of human behavior and mentalexperience are modifiable by learning; that is, they can be influenced by prior ex-periences. Prior experiences can affect our emotions, drives, perceptions,thoughts, skills, and habits. Most psychologists are in one way or another inter-ested in the role that experience plays in shaping the types of behavior that theystudy. Those who explain behavior most directly in terms of past experiences withthe environment refer to themselves as learning psychologists. These specialistsmight, for example, attempt to explain compulsive gambling in terms of the pat-tern of rewards that the person has experienced in the past while gambling, ormight attempt to explain particular fears in terms of previous experiences with thefeared objects or situations. They might also conduct research, with animals aswell as people, to understand the most efficient ways to acquire new skills (dis-cussed in Chapter 4).


Duck jealousy Ducks, such as theseblue-winged teals, form monogamouspair bonds, at least for the duration ofthe breeding season. When an intruderencroaches, the member of the pairthat is the same sex as the intruderdrives the intruder away. Such jealous-like behavior helps to keep the matedpair intact.

13How do learning and cognitive explana-tions differ from each other? How mighteach be applied toward an understandingof jealousy?

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Differences among individuals in jealousy derive partly from geneticdifferences, but they also derive partly from differences in past experi-ences. Jealous reactions that prove to be effective in obtaining rewards—such as those that succeed in repelling competitors or attracting renewedaffection from the beloved—may increase in frequency with experience,and ineffective reactions may decrease. People and animals may alsolearn, through experience, what sorts of cues are potential signs of infi-delity in their mates, and those cues may come to trigger jealous reac-tions. The intensity of sexual jealousy, the specific manner in which it isexpressed, and the environmental cues that trigger it can all be influ-enced, in many ways, by learning. Learning psychologists might study allof those effects.

Cognitive Explanations The term cognition refers to information in themind—that is, to information that is somehow stored and activated by theworkings of the brain. Such information includes thoughts, beliefs, andall forms of memories. Some information is innate to the human mind, as nativistphilosophers pointed out, and other information is acquired through learning, asempiricist philosophers pointed out. Some information is conscious, in the sensethat the person is aware of it and can describe it, and other information is uncon-scious but can still influence one’s conscious experiences and behavior. One way toexplain any behavioral action or mental experience is to relate it to the cognitions(items of mental information) that underlie that action or experience. Researcherswho specialize in this level of analysis are called cognitive psychologists.

You can think of mental information as analogous to the operating rules (soft-ware) and data that are stored in a computer, which influence the way that the com-puter responds to particular forms of input. Cognitive psychologists are interestedin specifying, as clearly as possible, the types of mental information that underlieand make possible the behaviors that they study. For instance, a cognitive psychol-ogist who is interested in reasoning might attempt to understand the rules by whichpeople manipulate information in their minds in order to solve particular classes ofproblems (discussed in Chapter 10). A cognitive psychologist who is interested inracial prejudice might attempt to specify the particular beliefs—including uncon-scious as well as conscious beliefs—that promote prejudiced behavior (discussed inChapter 13). Cognitive psychologists are also interested in the basic processes bywhich learned information is stored and organized in the mind, which means thatthey are particularly interested in memory (discussed in Chapter 9).

In general, cognitive psychology differs from the psychology of learning in itsfocus on the mind. Learning psychologists generally attempt to relate learning ex-periences directly to behavioral changes and are relatively unconcerned with themental processes that mediate such relationships. To a learning psychologist: expe-rience in the environment leads to change in behavior. To a cognitive psychologist: ex-perience in the environment leads to change in knowledge or beliefs, and that changeleads to change in behavior.

A cognitive psychologist interested in jealousy would define jealousy first andforemost as a set of beliefs—beliefs about the behavior of one’s beloved and somethird party, about the vulnerability of one’s own relationship with the beloved, andabout the appropriateness or inappropriateness of possible ways to react. One wayto study jealousy, from a cognitive perspective, is to ask people to recall episodes ofit from their own lives and to describe the thoughts that went through their minds,the emotions they felt, and the actions they took. Such work reveals that a wide va-riety of thoughts can enter one’s mind in the jealous state, which can lead to actionsranging from romantic expressions of love to murderous violence (Guerrero & oth-ers, 2005). Psychotherapists who use cognitive methods to treat cases of pathologi-cal jealousy try to help their clients change their thought patterns, so they will nolonger misperceive every instance of attention that the beloved pays to someoneelse as a threat to their relationship, and so they will focus on constructive ratherthan destructive ways of reacting to actual threats (Bishay & others, 1996).


Rat learning to press a lever Toidentify basic principles of learning,some learning psychologists studythe processes by which animals learnsimple responses for rewards. Thisthirsty rat receives a drop of water todrink each time it presses the lever.

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Social Explanations We humans are, by nature, social animals. We need to co-operate and get along with others of our species in order to survive and reproduce.For this reason, our behavior is strongly influenced by our perceptions of others.We use others as models of how to behave, and we often strive, consciously or un-consciously, to behave in ways that will lead others to accept us and approve of us.One way to explain mental experiences and behavior, therefore, is to identify howit is influenced by other people or by one’s beliefs about other people (discussed inChapters 13 and 14). Researchers who specialize in this level of analysis are calledsocial psychologists.

According to an often-quoted definition (originally from Allport, 1968), “socialpsychology is the attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, andbehavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied pres-ence of others.” Social psychologists often explain behavior in terms of conformityto social norms, or obedience to authority, or living up to others’ expectations. Apopular term for all such influences is “social pressure.”

Social-psychological explanations are often phrased in terms of people’s con-scious or unconscious beliefs about the potential social consequences of acting in aparticular way. This means that many social-psychological explanations are alsocognitive explanations. Indeed, many modern social psychologists refer to theirspecialty as social cognition. A social psychologist interested in physical fitness, forexample, might attempt to explain how people’s willingness to exercise is influ-enced by their beliefs about others’ fitness efforts and their beliefs about how oth-ers will react to them if they do or do not exercise.

A social psychologist interested in jealousy might focus on the norms and beliefsconcerning romance, mating, and jealousy that surround and influence the jealousperson. How do others react in similar situations? Are the beloved’s flirtations witha third person within or outside the realm of what is considered acceptable byother dating or married couples? Would violent revenge be approved of or disap-proved of by others who are important to the jealous person? Implicitly or explic-itly, the answers to such questions influence the way the jealous person feels andbehaves. An understanding of such influences constitutes a social-psychologicalexplanation of the person’s feelings and behavior.

Cultural Explanations We can predict some aspects of a person’s behavior byknowing what culture that person grew up in. Cultures vary in language or dialect,in the values and attitudes they foster, and in the kinds of behaviors and emotionsthey encourage or discourage. Researchers have found consistent cultural differ-ences even in the ways that people perceive and remember aspects of their physi-cal environment (discussed in Chapter 10). Researchers who explain mental

experiences and behavior in terms of the culturein which the person developed are called culturalpsychologists.

Cultural and social psychology are veryclosely related, but differ in emphasis. While so-cial psychologists emphasize the immediate so-cial influences that act on individuals, culturalpsychologists strive to characterize entire cul-tures in terms of the typical ways that peoplewithin them feel, think, and act. While social psy-chologists use concepts such as conformity andobedience to explain an individual’s behavior,cultural psychologists more often refer to theunique history, economy, and religious or philo-sophical traditions of a culture to explain the val-ues, norms, and habits of its people. For example,a cultural psychologist might contend that thefrontier history of North America, in which indi-viduals and families often had to struggle on their

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own, with little established social support, helps explain why North Americansvalue independence and individuality so strongly.

Concerning jealousy, a cultural psychologist would point to significant culturaldifferences in romantic and sexual mores. Some cultures, for example, are moretolerant of extramarital affairs than are others, and this difference affects the de-gree and quality of jealousy that is experienced. In some cultures a strong doublestandard exists, by which women are condemned far more harshly than are menfor sexual infidelity, and in those cultures violent revenge on the part of a jealousman may be socially sanctioned (Bhugra, 1993; Delgado & others, 1997). In othercultures, the same violence would dishonor the perpetrator and land him in jail. Afull cultural analysis would include an account of the cultures’ histories, which ledto differences in the ways that infidelity is understood and treated.

Developmental Explanations We can predict some aspects of a person’s behav-ior by knowing his or her age. Four-year-olds behave differently from two-year-olds, and middle-aged adults differently from adolescents. Developmentalpsychologists document and describe the typical age differences that occur in theways that people feel, think, and act. For any given type of behavior or mental ca-pacity, they may describe the sequence of changes that occur from infancy toadulthood. For example, developmental psychologists who study language have de-scribed a sequence of stages in speech production that goes from cooing to bab-bling, then to first recognizable words, to frequent one-word utterances, totwo-word utterances, and so on, with each stage beginning, on average, at a certainage. At a superficial level, then, age can itself be an explanation: “She talks in such-and-such a way because she is 3 years old, and that is how most 3-year-olds talk.”

Looking deeper, developmental psychologists are also interested in theprocesses that produce the age-related changes that they document. Thoseprocesses include physical maturation of the body (including the brain), instinc-tive behavioral tendencies that are genetically timed to emerge at particular ages,the accumulated effects of many learning experiences, and new pressures and op-portunities provided by the social environment or the cultural milieu as one getsolder. At this deeper level, then, developmental psychology is an approach thatbrings together the other levels of analysis. Neural, genetic, evolutionary, learning,cognitive, social, and cultural explanations might all be brought to bear on the taskof explaining behavioral changes that occur with age. Developmental psychologistsare particularly interested in understanding how experiences at any given stage ofdevelopment can influence behavior at later stages.

A developmental analysis of jealousy might begin with a description of age-related changes in jealousy that correspond with age-related changes in social rela-tionships. Infants become jealous when their mother or other primary caregiverdevotes extended attention to someone else (Hart & Carrington, 2002). Children ofmiddle-school age, especially girls, often become jealous when their same-sex “bestfriend” becomes best friends with someone else (Parker & others, 2005). Theseearly forms of jealousy are similar in form and function to sexual jealousy, whichtypically emerges along with the first serious romantic attachment, in adolescenceor young adulthood. Researchers have found evidence of continuity between earlyattachments to parents and friends and later attachments to romantic partners(discussed in Chapter 12). People who, in childhood, develop secure relationshipswith their parents and friends also tend, later on, to develop secure relationshipswith romantic partners, relatively untroubled by jealousy (Fraley, 2002; Guerrero,1998).

A Comment on Psychological SpecialtiesBecause of psychology’s vast scope, research psychologists generally identify theirwork as belonging to specific subfields, or specialties, of research. To some degree,as I have implied in the foregoing discussion, different psychological research spe-cialties correspond to different levels of analysis. This is most true of the eight spe-cialties to which I have already referred: behavioral neuroscience, behavioral genetics,


15What constitutes a developmental expla-nation? How can such an explanation beapplied toward understanding jealousy?

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evolutionary psychology, psychology of learning, cognitive psychology, social psychol-ogy, cultural psychology, and developmental psychology.

Other specialties, however, are defined more in terms of the topics of study thanin terms of the level of analysis. For example, sensory psychology is the study ofbasic abilities to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell the environment; and perceptualpsychology is the study of how people and animals make sense of, or interpret, theinput they receive through their senses. Similarly, some psychologists identifytheir specialty as the psychology of motivation or the psychology of emotion. Thesespecialists might use any or all of psychology’s modes of explanation to understandparticular phenomena related to the topics they study.

Two large specialties, which are closely related to each other, are devoted to thetask of understanding individual differences among people. One of these is person-ality psychology (discussed in Chapter 15), which is concerned with normal differ-ences in people’s general ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving—referred to aspersonality traits. The other is abnormal psychology (discussed in Chapter 16),which is concerned with variations in psychological traits that are sufficiently ex-treme and disruptive to people’s lives as to be classified as mental disorders.Personality and abnormal psychologists use various levels of analysis. Differences

in the nervous system, differences in genes, different learningexperiences, different beliefs or expectations gained from learn-ing, and different social pressures or cultural milieus may allcontribute to an understanding of differences in personality andin susceptibility to particular mental disorders.

Closely related to abnormal psychology is clinical psychology(discussed in Chapter 17), the specialty that is concerned withhelping people who have mental disorders or less serious psy-chological problems. Most clinical psychologists are practition-ers rather than researchers. They offer psychotherapy or drugtreatments, or both, to help people cope with or overcome theirdisorders or problems. Clinical psychologists who conduct re-search are usually interested in identifying or developing bettertreatment methods.

In general, research specialties in psychology are not rigidlydefined. They are simply convenient labels aimed at classifying,roughly, the different levels of analysis and topics of study thatcharacterize the work of different research psychologists.Regardless of what they call themselves, good researchers oftenuse several different levels of analysis in their research and maystudy a variety of topics that in some way relate to one another.

My main reason for listing and briefly describing some of the specialties here hasbeen to give you an overview of the broad scope of psychological science.

The Connections of Psychology to Other Scholarly Fields

Another way to characterize psychology is to picture its place in the spectrum ofdisciplines that form the departments of a typical college of arts and sciences.Figure 1.3 illustrates a scheme that I call (with tongue only partly in cheek) thepsychocentric theory of the university. The disciplines are divided roughly into threebroad areas. One division is the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, andbiology, shown on the left side of the figure. The second division is the social sci-ences, including sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics, shownon the right side of the figure. The third division is the humanities—including lan-guages, philosophy, art, and music—shown in the lower part of the figure. The hu-manities represent things that humans do. Humans, unlike other animals, talk toone another, develop philosophies, and create art and music.


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Where does psychology fit into this scheme? Directly in the center, tied to allthree of the broad divisions. On the natural science end, it is tied most directly tobiology by way of behavioral neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionarypsychology. On the social science end, it is tied most directly to sociology and an-thropology by way of social and cultural psychology. In addition to bridging thenatural and social sciences, psychology ties the whole spectrum of sciences to thehumanities, through its interest in how people produce and understand languages,philosophies, art, and music.

If you were to look at the range of research activi-ties of psychologists, you would find that some behavelike natural scientists. They have labs, wear whitecoats, perform experiments, and spend a good deal oftime in university departments of biology, chemistry,and physics exchanging ideas and equipment. Others,you would find, behave more like social scientists.They use surveys, historical documents, and inter-views as sources of data, and they find intellectualcompanionship in the various social science depart-ments of the universities where they work. The dis-tinction between these two groups, however, is oftenfuzzy. Social psychologists often have labs and fancydata-collecting equipment, and biologically orientedpsychologists can be found whose data come mainlythrough their own two eyes, out in the field.

Psychology as a ProfessionPsychology is not only an academic discipline but also a profession. The professionincludes both academic psychologists, who are engaged in research and teaching,and practicing psychologists, who apply psychological knowledge and ideas in clin-ics, businesses, and other settings. The majority of professional psychologists inthe United States hold doctoral degrees in psychology, and most of the rest holdmaster’s degrees (Landrum & others, 2000). The main settings in which they workand the kinds of services they perform in each are:


Physics Chemistry

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| figure 1.3 | Connections between psychologyand other scholarly areas Psychology bridges thenatural and social sciences, and it has strong connec-tions to the humanities. In this sense, it lies in thecenter of the academic pursuits of the university.

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• Academic departments in universities and colleges Academic psychologists areemployed to conduct basic research, such as that which fills this book, and toteach psychology courses.

• Clinical settings Clinical and counseling psychologists work with clients whohave psychological problems or disorders, in independent practice or in hospi-tals, mental health centers, clinics, and counseling or guidance centers.

• Elementary and secondary schools School psychologists administer psycholog-ical tests, supervise programs for children who have special needs, and mayhelp teachers develop more effective classroom techniques.

• Business and government Psychologists are hired by businesses and govern-ment agencies for such varied purposes as conducting research, screening can-didates for employment, helping to design more pleasant and efficient workenvironments, and counseling personnel who have work-related problems.

The decision to major in psychology as an undergraduate does not necessarilyimply a choice of psychology as a career. Most students who major in psychologydo so primarily because they find the subject fun to learn and think about. Most goon to careers in other fields—such as social work, law, education, and business—where they are quite likely to find their psychology background helpful (Carroll &others, 1992; Landrum & others, 2000). If you are considering psychology as a ca-reer, you might want to look at one or more of the books concerning careers in psy-chology that I have listed in the Further Reading section at the end of this chapter.


Psychology is a broad and diverse field of research, and is a profession.

Levels of Causal Analysis and Topics of Study inPsychology

• Three types of biological causal explanations are used inpsychology—neural, genetic, and evolutionary explanations.

• Five other types of causal explanations in psychology arelearning, cognitive, social, cultural, and developmentalexplanations.

• As demonstrated with jealousy, each level of analysis can beapplied to any given type of behavior or mental experience.

• Some subfields in psychology are defined primarily by thelevel of analysis; others are defined more by the topicsstudied.

A DisciplineAmong Disciplines

• Broadly speaking,scholarly disciplinescan be classified asbelonging to naturalsciences, social sci-ences, or humanities.

• Psychology hasstrong ties to andcommonalities with each class ofdisciplines.

The Profession ofPsychology

• The profession includes aca-demic psychologists, who teachand do research, and practic-ing psychologists, who applypsychological knowledge andprinciples to real-world issues.

• Psychologists work in varioussettings—including universi-ties, clinical settings, and busi-nesses—and typically holdadvanced degrees.

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Thoughts About Using This Book and Its Special FeaturesMost of you reading this book are doing so because it was assigned to you as part ofa college course. You are reading it not because you chose it, but because someoneelse chose it for you. This creates a special difficulty.

When you read nonfiction outside of a course, you usually do so because youhave some question or questions in mind that you want to answer. You are curiousabout some issue, and you choose a book that seems to address it. In that case youread actively, constantly thinking about what you read to see if it helps answeryour questions, and you may well skip parts that don’t seem relevant to the issuethat motivates you. But when a book is assigned to you for a course, the situation isdifferent. You don’t necessarily have particular questions in mind that you want toanswer; you don’t usually have the option of skipping parts that fail to interest you;and your job is the rather vaguely defined one of “learning the material.” All thisleads, often, to a passive and rather ineffective mode of reading, aimed more atmemorizing than at thinking and understanding.

Our minds are not designed for memorizing what we don’t understand or whatwe have not thought about actively. Our mental machinery evolved for the pur-pose of making sense of things, and we don’t remember much of what doesn’tmake sense. So, when we read for the passive purpose of “learning” or “absorbing”the material, our minds often wander. We often find that we have read long pas-sages—or, rather, that our eyes have moved across the passages and the words havebeen detected—without our having any idea what we just read. Such conditions arealso excellent for inducing sleep.

My sympathies are with you. I really want you to enjoy this book. I want it tokeep you awake. I want you to question it, argue with it, and get excited aboutsome of the ideas in it. Toward that end, I have done my best to present psychologyas a set of ideas to think about, not as a set of facts to memorize. I have tried to giveyou enough information about each idea, enough of the evidence and logic sup-porting it, to enable you to have something to think about and argue with. Most ofall, I do not want you to read this book as Truth with a capital T. Psychology is a sci-ence, and the essence of science is this: We do not accept anything on authority. Itdoesn’t matter who says that something is or isn’t true; what matters is the evi-dence and logic behind the statement. Each page of this book is offered for yourconsideration, not for your unquestioned acceptance.

Using the Focus Questions to Guide Your StudyIn the introduction to this chapter, I pointed out the numbered focus questions thatappear in the book’s margins. I suggested there a way to use these questions to guideboth your initial reading and your review of the text. Here I’ll elaborate on their use.

Each focus question is the main question that I am trying to answer in the por-tion of text that lies adjacent to and immediately below the question. You can makeyour reading of the text more interesting and active if you read and think abouteach focus question as you come to it, before reading the paragraphs aimed at an-swering it. One way to think about the question is to formulate a preliminary, pos-sible answer based on what you already know or believe. You might also put thequestion into your own words, to make it your question, rather than just mine. Thiswill prepare you to read the relevant portion of text with a clear purpose in mind,that of finding out how I answer the question and how my answer compares toyour preliminary thoughts about it.

As an illustration, consider Focus Question 2, on page 3 of this chapter. Thisquestion consists of two parts: What was Descartes’s version of dualism? How did ithelp pave the way for a science of psychology? When you first came to this question,you already had some good grounds for forming a preliminary answer. You hadjust read a definition of dualism, in the previous paragraph, in which that term


19How can students use the focus questionsin this textbook to make their readingmore thought-provoking and effective?

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18Why is it often more difficult to read a text-book for a course than to read nonfictionthat you have chosen on your own?

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appeared in bold italics. You had read that dualism distinguishes between the body,which is physical and can be studied scientifically, and the soul, which is supernat-ural and cannot be studied scientifically. You may have also noticed that the sec-tion heading just above the focus question reads, Descartes’s Version of Dualism:Focus on the Body, and that the larger section heading above that (on page 2) reads,The Idea of Physical Causation of Behavior. So, in thinking about Focus Question 2,you might have said something like the following to yourself: “Okay, maybeDescartes’s version of dualism placed greater emphasis on the physical body andless emphasis on the soul than did previous versions. Now, I wonder if that guess iscorrect. If it is correct, I wonder just how Descartes developed and supported thisview. What attributes did he ascribe to the body that had previously been ascribedto the soul, and why?” Having said all this to yourself, you would be ready to readthe adjacent portion of text with great understanding.

After reading the portion of text that is relevant to answeringa given focus question, it is a good idea to stop and think aboutthat question again and how you would answer it. You might jotdown, next to the question, the gist of the answer that you wouldnow give. If you aren’t sure how to answer it, you might want toread that portion again. If you still aren’t sure after that, youmight want to mark that question as one to ask of your course in-structor or study companions. Perhaps I didn’t answer the ques-tion sufficiently clearly in the text, and perhaps a discussionwith others will throw some light on it.

In later chapters you will discover that many focus questionsask about the evidence for or against some idea. Be sure to thinkespecially carefully about the answers you read to those questionsand ask yourself whether or not the evidence seems convincing.

Admittedly, this approach to study will slow down your initialreading of each chapter. At first, stopping to think about eachfocus question may seem awkward and annoying. Your naturaltendency may be to read straight through the text and ignore thefocus questions, or to glance at them without thinking aboutthem as you read. But most of the students I have taught, using

previous editions of this book, have told me on course surveys that the focus-question approach begins to seem natural with practice and that it improves theircomprehension, enjoyment, and test performance. In the long run, for most stu-dents, it saves study time. Having understood and thought about the material thefirst time through, later study and review become relatively easy. Some studentshave even told me that they transfer this study skill to their reading of textbooks inother courses. In those books they do not find focus questions already written forthem, but they use section headings and opening sentences to generate their ownfocus questions as they read. For more information about this study method, youmight turn to Chapter 9, where textbook reading is discussed in the context of amore general discussion of ways to improve memory.

I should add, however, that a few students—roughly 10 percent of those I havetaught—find that they do not need the focus questions to read very actively,thoughtfully, and effectively. These are students who naturally form questions asthey read. They don’t have the problem of a drifting mind that most of us havewhen reading assigned material. If you are one of those, then you may happilychoose to ignore the focus questions on your first reading and use them just for re-view after you have finished each major section.

Using the Headings and Section Reviews to See the Hierarchical Structure of IdeasTextbooks are always hierarchically organized. Each main heading refers to somemajor idea or argument, each subheading refers to a more limited idea that is partof the larger one, and each sub-subheading refers to a still more limited idea or ob-


Example of a student’s notes (seepage 30) Don’t be afraid to writeyour own notes in the margin of thistextbook. Your note taking will helpyou think about what you are readingand will be useful for review.

Wor

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servation that is part of the subheading’s idea. In this book I have tried to write allof the headings in such a way as to give you a pretty good idea what each section,subsection, and sub-subsection is about. By turning pages and reading all the head-ings within a main section before you read that section, you can preview the mate-rial and give yourself a head start toward thinking about it. You will see the basicstructure of the argument that you are about to read, which will help you makesense of it as you read.

At the end of each main section of this book you will find a section review, a chartthat reflects the hierarchical organization of the ideas and observations describedin that section. I already described (on p. 9) how to use these charts for review.Reviewing in this way allows you to reflect back on each observation and idea as itrelates to the larger idea to which it pertains. It helps you to see the individual ele-ments of the section not as separate nuggets to memorize but as integral parts of alarger argument, and that helps you to make sense of them and remember them. Acommon mistake in studying is to write out lists of key terms and definitions andthen study only that list. That method causes the student to lose track of the largerarguments, which tie the various elements together and make them interestingand memorable. The section review charts offer you an alternative way to view thekey ideas—a way that maintains their relationship to one another.

For example, the section review on page 9 of this chapter depicts the organiza-tion of my argument that three foundation ideas preceded scientific psychologyhistorically and provided a conceptual base on which psychology could build. Thatchart should help you think about the individual concepts, such as empiricism andnativism, in relation to the argument and should discourage you from memorizingdefinitions out of context. Your main goal is not to memorize definitions of theseterms but to think about how these philosophical ideas helped to provide a founda-tion for the emergence of a science of psychology.

Using the Book’s Other FeaturesNumbered Figures As you read each chapter, pay attention to the numbered figures.Whenever the text says, “see Figure Such-and-Such,” take a few moments to studythe figure and read the caption. Many of the figures are graphs of data that back upan idea described in the text. Others are photographs or drawings that are designedto help you understand a point that would be difficult to grasp from words alone.

Bold Italicized Terms and Glossary Another feature that runs through the text isthe use of bold italics to highlight technical terms that are likely to be new tomany students. I suggest that you not devote much effort, on your first reading, tolearning term definitions. Rather, read with the aim of understanding and thinkingabout the main ideas and the lines of evidence for or against them. In that processyou will learn most of the terms, in the context of the ideas, without explicitly try-ing to learn them. The bold italics will be more useful in your later review. Whileyou are reviewing the focus questions, look also for each of the terms in bold ital-ics and check your knowledge of its meaning. These terms are also defined in theGlossary at the back of the book. If an important term has been defined in an ear-lier chapter, it is sometimes, but not always, defined again when it reappears. If itis not defined, you can use the Glossary to find both the term’s definition and thenumber of the page on which it was first used.

Concluding Thoughts Section Each chapter ends with a section calledConcluding Thoughts. This is not a summary; rather, it provides some ideas and in-tegrating themes that emerge from reflecting back on the chapter as a whole. Italso suggests, in some cases, some alternative ways for you to think about and re-view the whole chapter. This section is in a different format from the rest of thechapter, and there are no focus questions related to it; but that doesn’t mean it isless important than the rest of the chapter. Some instructors, myself included, con-sider any new ideas or themes that emerge in the Concluding Thoughts section tobe fair game for the test. In this first chapter, for example, you will find a discussion


21What purposes are served, for students,by the numbered figures, the use of bolditalics, the Glossary, the ConcludingThoughts sections, the reference citations,the Further Reading sections, and theSubject Index in this book?

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20How can students use the section and sub-section headings, and the section reviewcharts, to preview and review each majoridea or argument? Why is the hierarchicalorganization of these study tools useful?

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Concluding ThoughtsIn some cases, the Concluding Thoughts section at the end of achapter is intended to help you organize your review of thechapter. In other cases, it makes explicit some idea that was im-plicit in the chapter or that emerges in reflecting back on thechapter as a whole. Here are two concluding thoughts, of thelatter type, for the chapter you have just read.

1. Psychology as the study of normal behavior In the worldoutside of colleges and universities, psychology is often associ-ated with the study of mental problems or disorders and how tohelp people overcome them. When people “go to see a psychol-ogist,” they are seeking help. But, as you have gleaned from thischapter, psychology as a research field is primarily aimed at

of the concept of mind in the Concluding Thoughts section that may be especiallyuseful. Don’t skip it.

Reference Citations, Further Reading, and Subject Index A feature that thisbook shares with other books and articles in psychology is the use of reference cita-tions. This first chapter has relatively few of them, but in most chapters you will findthem on nearly every page. Each citation consists of the name of one or more re-searchers followed by a year. Sometimes both the name (or names) and the year arein parentheses, such as (Jones & Smith, 2001); at other times, when the name ornames are part of the sentence, only the year is in parentheses, such as According toAlice Jones (2004) . . . . In either case, the year refers to the year of publication of anarticle or book, by the person or persons named, which describes more fully the ideaor the research study being mentioned or discussed. The full reference to that articleor book can be found in the References section at the back of the textbook, which isarranged alphabetically by authors’ last names. At first you may find these citationsdisruptive to the flow of your reading, but you will soon learn to read right throughthem. Their purpose is to give credit to the people whose work or ideas are being de-scribed and to give you the opportunity to look up, and read more about, any ideas orresearch findings that intrigue you. To entice you to read further, you will also find,at the very end of each chapter, in a section called Further Reading, brief reviews ofseveral interesting books that pertain to topics that were discussed in that chapter.

Many students save their introductory psychology textbook and use it, after thecourse is over, as a reference book to review topics that are relevant to othercourses that they take. For them, the Subject Index at the back of the book, whichlists topics alphabetically and indicates all the pages where each topic is discussed,is very useful. They also find the reference citations and Further Readings to beuseful as sources for term papers, not just in psychology courses, but also in othersocial science courses, education courses, business courses, nursing courses, andsome courses in such diverse subjects as biology, philosophy, and English. Thosewho decide to apply to graduate programs in psychology often use the book to helpthem prepare for the Graduate Record Examination in Psychology.

Using this book’s special features can markedly increase your learning.

Focus Questions

• The focus questions in the mar-gins are designed to help youread in an active, thoughtfulway, which will help you under-stand and remember what youread.

• The focus questions are alsovery useful in reviewing andtesting your knowledge after youhave read a section or chapter.

Headings and Section Reviews

• The book’s hierarchically arrangedheadings can help you quickly pre-view a section and prepare an organ-ized mental structure for thinkingabout it.

• Section reviews can help you tocheck your understanding of content,visualize relationships among theideas and facts discussed, and con-solidate your learning.

Other Features

• Exploring the numbered figures, checkingyour understanding of bold italicizedterms, using the Glossary as needed, andconsidering the integrative discussions inConcluding Thoughts can also benefityour study.

• Reference citations, the Further Readingsections, and the Subject Index can helpyou access material of interest to youwithin and beyond the book.

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Section Review



understanding normal human ways of feeling, thinking, andbehaving. From an intellectual point of view, the problem ofhow any entity normally works—whether it is an automobile, acomputer, or a human being—is much more interesting thanthe problem of how it breaks down. Philosophers such asDescartes, Hobbes, and the British empiricists were fascinatedby the workings of the normal human mind, and that is whatfascinates most academic psychologists today. The normalmental experiences that we take for granted in our everydaylives—such as our ability to see the color red, or to rememberanything, or to learn our native language—become intriguingmysteries when we stop to think about them. As you gothrough this book, I hope you will allow yourself to become fas-cinated by all the normal things that you and other human be-ings do. If your ultimate interest is clinical psychology, keep inmind that some knowledge of normal functioning is essentialbackground for figuring out where a breakdown has occurredand how normality might be restored. After all, automobile me-chanics and computer repair people need to understand thenormal operations of the machines they fix.

2. The concept of the mind as a product of the brain Afterreading this chapter, you may be confused about the meaning ofthe term mind. Join the club. Even today, mind ranks as perhapsthe most debated of all philosophical concepts. Psychologistsuse the term in two quite different ways. In one use, it refers topeople’s conscious experiences—to the sensations, perceptions,memories, thoughts, desires, and emotions that run through ourconscious awareness such that we can describe them to our-selves and to others. This is the usage that generates the mostdebate in philosophy, because it is hard to imagine just what“consciousness” is or how it emerges from physical matter. Thisdifficulty leads some philosophers even today to be dualists. Inpsychology we usually sidestep that philosophical mystery by

defining consciousness as whatever it is that a person can tellus about his or her experiences. If a person can tell us about amemory, or about something that he or she is looking at, then wesay that the person is conscious of that memory or that visualperception.

In its other use, mind refers to all of the knowledge and operat-ing rules that are somehow built into or stored in the brain andthat provide the foundation for organizing behavior and con-scious experiences. By this definition, mind is analogous to theknowledge and rules that are programmed into a computer toorganize its ability to calculate and perform all the operationswe expect of it. In this usage, mind is not equated with con-sciousness. People are not aware of most of the inner knowledgeand processes that organize their feelings, thoughts, and behav-ior, any more than a computer is aware of its software programs.

I have used the term mind in both of these ways in variousparts of this book, but it should be clear from the context whichmeaning I am using at any given time. Some psychologists haveargued—and some still argue—that we should avoid the con-cept of mind entirely. They point out that by either definition,mind refers to something that we cannot see directly. What weobserve is people’s behavior, including their verbal reports oftheir thoughts and feelings. With modern techniques of moni-toring the brain, we can also observe physical changes in thebrain, but, again, that is not the same as observing the mind.According to some psychologists, we should define our scienceas the study of behavior, or as the study of the brain and behav-ior, and leave the unobservable mind out of it. Most psycholo-gists, however, find the concept of mind to be very useful. Wecan infer characteristics of the mind by observing behavior, andthen we can use those inferences to make predictions aboutfurther behavior. Gravity can’t be seen directly, either—it is in-ferred by observing the behavior of physical entities; yet physi-cists find the concept of gravity to be very useful.

Further ReadingDavid Hothersall (2004). History of psy-chology (4th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. This lively historical account begins withthe psychological theories of the ancientGreeks and ends with theories that weredominant in the mid-twentieth century.The book takes primarily a biographicalapproach to history; it describes theideas of the notable figures in psychol-ogy’s history in the context of informa-tion about their lives.

Jeroen Jansz & Peter van Drunen (Eds.)(2004). A social history of psychology.Malden, MA: Blackwell.While most histories of psychology focuson the ideas and discoveries of philoso-phers and scientists, this history focuseson larger developments in society as awhole that influenced and motivatedpsychological thought and research. Thebook includes chapters on child rearingand education, madness and mental

health, work and organizations, cultureand ethnicity, and delinquency and law,as well as three more general chaptersthat describe relationships between psy-chology and social developments.

Eric Landrum, Stephen Davis, & TeresaLandrum (2000). The psychology major:Career options and strategies for success.Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.If you are considering psychology as amajor, this 160-page paperback can helpyou decide. If you have already chosento major in psychology, it can help guideyou through your years of study. It ispacked with practical information andsuggestions—about jobs and careers,how to conduct library research andwrite papers, how to find research andinternship opportunities, and how toprepare for and apply for graduate study.

Mitchell Prinstein & Marcus Patterson(Eds.) (2003). The portable mentor: Expert

guide to a successful career in psychology.New York: Plenum.This book was written primarily for grad-uate students in psychology, but wouldalso be a useful source for undergradu-ates who are trying to decide whether ornot to aim toward a career in psychology.Various chapters deal with the kinds oftraining needed for particular kinds ofpsychological careers, employment op-portunities, and predicted future trendsin psychological employment.

Julie DeGalan & Stephen Lampert (2001).Great jobs for psychology majors (2nd ed.).Lincolnwood, IL: NTC ContemporaryPublishing.This book contains useful informationabout what kinds of jobs are availablefor psychology majors (including jobsthat do not require a postgraduate de-gree), how to find such jobs, and how toapply for them.


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