Most people understand the value of studying the mind --something the behaviorists did not do.
Most ordinary people believed that, by not studying thoughts, (behavioral) psychologists had lost their minds.
Most people think that the behaviorist's Stimulus-Response model is incomplete; most people think that thoughts come between stimulus and response. We like to think that we think before we act.
So, most people reject the behaviorists "Never mind!" approach and instead believe that the mind matters. That is, most people believe that the subject matter of psychology should include the mind.
However, many people overlooked how hard it is to study the mind objectively. Behaviorists pointed out that science relies on evidence that we can see--and thoughts can't be seen.
To see the need for an objective approach to studying thoughts, let's look at an extinct approach to studying the mind: The structuralist (or introspectionist) approach for studying conscious thoughts
Why study an approach that is extinct?
1. Historical reasonsWhat were the structuralists (introspectionists) trying to do?
a. To understand why behaviorism was so popular for so long -- the structuralist approach was such a failure that any time people wanted to study thoughts, behaviorists could say that psychologists had already done that and we certainly don't want to go back to revisit that embarrassing failure..b. Wilhelm Wundt is credited with being the first psychologist and he invented structuralism/introspectionism.
2. To appreciate that objectivity is a defining characteristic of science--beware of people who use jargon, have labs, and claim to be scientific but who do not test their beliefs against objective evidence.
3. To understand that studying thoughts scientifically is not as easy as you might first believe.
Like physics, chemistry, and biology, they were trying to break their subject matter down to its basic elements. The idea is that if you understand the smallest, simplest unit, you understand the whole because the whole is just the sum of the parts. The structuralists eventually may have tried to create a periodic table of the elements of the mind or tried to create a thinking computer by getting it to to combine the elements of thoughts into bigger and bigger thoughts.
Gestalt psychologists thought this approach was misguided because Gestalt psychologists believed that the whole was different from the sum of its parts. For example, water is not just the sum of hydrogen and oxygen--it has qualities that neither hydrogen nor oxygen have. Similarly, you are not just a collection of cells; your cells work together in systems that have qualities that no individual cell has. So, as in the case of the human body, the whole is different from the sum of its parts because it is the relationship between the parts (e.g., the cells) that determines how the body functions--not merely the type and number of parts.
How were the introspectionists (structuralists) trying to accomplish their mission?
Introspectionists/Structuralists tried to make introspection (thinking about your own thoughts) scientific. They tried to make it scientific by rigorously training people how to introspect, having people introspect under standardized conditions, checking to see that people introspecting when exposed to the same stimulus (e.g., a pink circle) reported the same experience. In addition, just as a biologist might look at tissue under a microscope to find the cells that make up that tissue, introspectionists tried to put their own thoughts under the microscope (i.e., analyze their thoughts) by thinking hard about what smaller sensations were making up their experience.
What is wrong with introspection? There is a big difference between introspection--looking at your own thoughts--and observation--looking at something in the observable world. So, introspectionists were not reporting what they observed because you cannot observe thoughts. Because thoughts are not publicly observable, there was no way to check about whether the researcher was accurately reporting their thoughts. The person reporting their thoughts could be lying, delusional, or simply mistaken. The fact that different "observers" (the introspectionists called the people reporting their thoughts "observers" even though these "observers" were not observing anything--they were introspecting). were getting similar results could be attributed to their intensive training really being brainwashing. You could say that the argument between "observers" was an "Emperor has no clothes" moment for the structuralists. That is, it was a "Structuralism has no observable evidence" moment.
The fact that introspection was not objective--and therefore not scientific--became more noticeable when introspectionists started to disagree. When they disagreed, there was no way to settle the argument. They ended up resorting to name calling--arguing that researchers who didn't get the results they got were incompetent. The most (in)famous of these arguments was between Wundt and Kulpe. Kulpe argued that there were just some thought processes that you could not analyze into their smaller parts. Wundt argued that you could analyze these thoughts--and, indeed, researchers in his lab were analyzing these thoughts. The argument between Wundt and Kulpe made it obvious that introspectionism was not scientific because "observers" couldn't agree. "Observers" couldn't agree because "observers" weren't observing thoughts. The argument also foreshadowed what Nisbett and Wilson (1975) clearly demonstrated --that introspection is often inaccurate or impossible. That is, even when we try really hard, there are things that go on in our mind that our conscious mind is not aware of. As Nisbett and Wilson demonstrated, we may think we know why we did something but be wrong. In addition, there are many times when we know we don't know. We can't report everything that went on in our mind while we texted, read, caught a ball, or drove a vehicle. We may not know why we are in a good or bad mood, why we like (or don't like) spinach, or how we woke up right before our alarm clock rang. To emphasize our lack of insight, Wilson says that we sometimes "tell more than we know" and that we are "strangers to ourselves."
Modern Cognitive Psychology:
Like structuralism/introspectionism, (and unlike behaviorism) studies mental processes (memory, problem-solving, etc.)
but unlike structuralism/introspection emphasizes objective measurement.
A. Sees humans as being like computers.
B. Want psychology to replace the S(timulus)-R(esponse) model with the
Stimulus --> Organism ---> Response model, in which a thinking organism interprets the stimulus and decides how to respond.
So, psychology should be the science of behavior and mental processes. Mental processes include things like learning, memory, perception, and problem-solving.
C. Two big challenges (that behaviorists often brought up)
1. How can thoughts be studied objectively?
2. Do thoughts really control behavior? Just as a car's speedometer noticeably changes as a car speeds up but does not cause the car to speed up, thoughts may be noticeable effects of behavior rather than causes of behavior.
D. Addressing those challenges
1. Thoughts, like gravity, can't be directly seen but can be inferred from objective evidence.
Examples #1
If we read participants the words in this order:
"Oak, New York, Toyota, Chicago, Pine, LA, and Ford"
and they recall the words in this order:
" New York, LA, Chicago, Pine, Oak, Ford, Toyota",
we have objective evidence (the order of the words) that participants are organizing the words.
We don't need to ask participants to introspect and tell us that they are organizing the words.
Example #2: Reaction time studies
To see an interactive and fun demonstration of how a reaction time task works, click here. Otherwise, go through the demonstration below.
For each of the following sets of words, your task is to say the color of each word (red, blue, or green) as fast as you can. We find that you are slowest with the third list.
List 1:
TABLE DESK DESK CUP CUP TABLE TABLE DESK CUP
List 2:
GREEN BLUE BLUE RED RED GREEN GREEN BLUE RED
List 3:
BLUE BLUE RED GREEN BLUE RED GREEN BLUE RED
We don't need to ask participants whether it was hard to say "blue" to a blue-colored word when the word was "red" than when the word was "blue" because we have objectively timed participants and found that it takes them longer to say the colors of the words in the third list.
To see another example of how reaction time studies can be used to map the mind, click here.
2. Evidence that at least sometimes thoughts cause behavior.
Locus of control research
To understand this research, you first have to understand locus of control: To what degree does a person think they have control over what happens to them. People who have an internal locus of control think they have control (the power is in them), people who have an external locus of control think that the control of their lives is outside (external to) them.
Find out your own locus of control by taking this test (from Psychology Today)
Rewards do not work well on people who have an extremely external locus of control because those people fail to see the connection between their behavior and getting rewards.
E. The cognitive approach applied to therapy
1. Basic idea: Change your mind. Often, the view is that mental health can be improved by thinking more rationally and logically.
Quotes illustrating the basic idea behind many cognitive therapies
“Men are disturbed not by things but by the views which they take of them.” --Epictetus, 60 A.D.
“… there is
nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so.” --Shakespeare
| Contrasting Behaviorism with the Cognitive Approach | |
| Behaviorism | Cognitive Approach |
|
Events àBehavior |
ThoughtsàBehavior |
|
Learning wrong behavior, not learning right behavior |
Wrong thinking |
|
Change behavior: Replace bad behaviors with good behaviors |
Change thinking “Right thinking”: Logical thinking and reconsidering of illogical assumptions. |
2. Three popular approaches to cognitive therapy
#1 Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy for depression. It is based on three important insights
1. Depressed people often exhibit "all-or-nothing" thinking-- also called "either/or" thinking. For example, if something bad happens that day, they may overgeneralize and say that everything about the day was bad.
2. Depressed people may exhibit this "all-or-nothing" thinking for good--as well as bad events. So, if something good happens, they may overgeneralize and say that everything about their day was good.
3. This all-or-nothing thinking is not a symptom (an effect) of their depression but a cause. So, changing this thinking pattern can cure and prevent depression.
#2. Albert Ellis's rational emotive therapy (RET or REBT) : Critically analyzing assumptions and biases as a way to better mental health. Events don't cause us to react negatively, it's our thoughts about those events that cause our negative reactions. All too often, those thoughts are the result of irrational beliefs such as, "Everyone should love me," "everything should be perfect," "stress makes me miserable," and "if only I didn't have to do anything, I would be happy." To learn more about Ellis's approach, click here.
#3 Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism
Being more optimistic can make it less likely that you will become depressed.
You can learn to be more optimistic-- but not by thinking happy thoughts. Instead, you become more optimistic by explaining failure (e.g., doing poorly on a math test) in terms of being