The Science of Psychology
Psychology · Section 1.1 · 18 study cards
What psychology is, its four goals, the historical schools, the seven modern perspectives, the subfields, and why it is a science.
Practice this set → Spaced repetition, card by card. No account needed.
Method
Hold two timelines at once
This unit is really two lists that keep getting confused on exams: the historical schools, which are dated and mostly dead, and the contemporary perspectives, which are alive and used side by side today. Build them as separate columns from the start. The schools run in a rough sequence, each a reaction to the one before it; the perspectives do not run in any sequence at all.
Learn each school as a reaction
- Functionalism reacted to structuralism: what the mind does, not what it is made of.
- Gestalt reacted to structuralism too: wholes, not elements.
- Behaviourism reacted to both introspection and psychoanalysis: observable behaviour only.
- Humanism reacted to behaviourism and psychoanalysis: free will and growth, not conditioning or unconscious conflict.
- The cognitive revolution reacted to behaviourism: mental processes can be studied scientifically after all.
Stored this way, a single question about any school gives you its neighbours for free.
Work perspective questions from the vocabulary
- Read the proposed explanation, not the behaviour. The behaviour is usually neutral; the explanation carries the clue.
- Find the causal noun. Neurons, hormones, genes and brain regions signal biological. Survival and reproduction across ancestral generations signal evolutionary. Unconscious conflict and childhood signal psychodynamic. Rewards, punishments and learned associations signal behavioural. Thoughts, beliefs, memory and interpretation signal cognitive. Growth, potential and self-concept signal humanistic. Family, peers, norms and culture signal sociocultural.
- Check for interaction. If the item describes two or more of these working together, the answer is the biopsychosocial model, not any single perspective.
Separate the practitioners by credential
Do not memorise what each professional does; memorise what degree each holds. The degree predicts the rest: a medical degree brings prescribing, a doctorate in psychology brings assessment and therapy, a master's in social work brings therapy plus links to community services.
Definitions and theorems
Worked example
An examiner gives you this item. A twelve-year-old boy is repeatedly aggressive at school. Dr Alvarez argues that the boy's aggression is best understood as a learned habit: aggression has reliably got him what he wanted from other children, and he has watched his older brother succeed the same way. Identify the perspective Dr Alvarez is taking, name one other perspective that would give a different account, state what that account would be, and say what a fully integrated explanation would be called.
Read the explanation rather than the behaviour. Aggression by itself fits any perspective; the clue is in why Dr Alvarez says it happens.
Identify the causal vocabulary. Aggression has reliably got him what he wanted is a statement about consequences following a response, and watching his brother succeed is observational learning. Both belong to the behavioural perspective.
Rule out near misses. This is not cognitive, because no thought or belief is mentioned; not psychodynamic, because no unconscious conflict is invoked; not biological, because no neuron, hormone or gene appears.
Choose a genuinely different second perspective and keep its vocabulary consistent. The biological perspective would attribute the aggression to factors such as heightened testosterone, atypical amygdala reactivity or an inherited temperament.
Alternatively, the sociocultural perspective would point to norms in the boy's school or neighbourhood that treat aggression as an acceptable way to settle disputes. Either answer earns the mark provided the vocabulary matches the label.
Name the integrated account. An explanation drawing on biological, psychological and social-cultural influences together is the biopsychosocial model, and it is the expected answer whenever a question asks for the most complete explanation.
Common mistakes
- Swapping Wundt and Watson. The names look alike and both are founders of something. Wundt founded the first laboratory in 1879 and used introspection; Watson founded behaviourism in 1913 and threw introspection out. Fix the pair by date: Wundt is nineteenth century, Watson is twentieth.
- Calling psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic perspective the same thing. Psychoanalysis is Freud's specific historical theory and therapy. The modern psychodynamic perspective keeps the general claim that unconscious processes and early experience matter, while dropping most of Freud's specific machinery. Exams award the modern label for modern examples.
- Treating the perspectives as competitors, one of which is right. Items that ask which perspective best explains a behaviour are asking which vocabulary the stem used, not which theory is true. Answer from the wording of the explanation, and reserve the biopsychosocial model for stems that combine several influences.
- Saying a psychologist cannot prescribe, full stop, or that a psychiatrist does not do therapy. The reliable contrast is the degree: psychiatrists hold a medical degree and prescribe routinely, psychologists hold a doctorate in psychology and prescribe only in a few states with extra training. Many psychiatrists do provide therapy as well.
- Arguing that psychology is a science because it studies the brain. It is a science because of its method, not its subject: systematic observation, testable predictions, controlled comparison and replication. That method is exactly what common sense, hindsight bias and a persuasive anecdote lack.
Practice it
Reading the method is not the same as being able to recall it under pressure. This set drills 18 cards one at a time and schedules each card separately, so the ones you keep missing come back sooner.