Transcript for:
An Introduction to Human Behavior and Psychology

[Music] hello friends welcome back to this new lecture series of MOOCs the present course is called human behavior and in this course what we are going to focus is on what is human behavior how do we study human behavior and what is the need of studying human behavior the core to this course is studying human beings and the most difficult thing that has happened since the inception of time is studying humans and why this is difficult is because human beings don't follow predictive paths just like chemical sciences or physical sciences where atoms molecules planets and other objects they follow certain laws and can be studied human beings cannot be studied following certain universal laws the reason being that human beings want to study human beings and that is one of the basic problems and so science of studying human being is very interesting one of the most primitive questions or primitive powers that humans wanted was to control to control other humans and this is very interesting because imagine a situation where you got the chance or you got the abilities to control other people now if that is true or that power becomes available to you we could do wonders we could control other people's thought we could get into other people's mind we could predict what other people will do and it would be nicer world but the problem is we don't have that power so the best possible option which is quite near to controlling other people is studying human behavior which is basically a probabilistic science so what we could do is observe what certain people do in certain situations and based on that make predictions of how someone would react at certain period of time and that friends is of psychology and that is what this course is all about so in this particular course what you're going to do is study those methods those problems those techniques which actually help us under understand ourselves and that's a very great power the power to understand human beings to understand why human beings do what they do why they do when they do and what are the outcomes of whatever a person does so this is at the core of this particular class or this particular lecture on human behavior now since this is the very first class what I'm going to do is I'm going to introduce the field of psychology or field of human behavior to you and in this particular lecture I'm going to tell you a little bit about what entails the study of human behavior how do we start what are the methods of doing it a little bit about the history of how Frank's of psychology the science of human behavior actually came through and a little bit of what the problems that we can study with the signs now the problems that I'm going to discuss here these are not exclusive there are a number of problems beside the ones that I'm going to name the name here but these are just representative problems that the science of psychology can actually study so let's quickly dwell in to get into this course of psychology and study the nature of the in the first lecture study the nature of psychology so before we begin this lecture let me give you a small snippet a small story and tell you what psychology can do now in the early 20th 21st century or 20th century rather and the United States students were not able to focus or school students were not able to focus on their course they're not able to do eat and so the community decided that they are going to help this children this younger adults into studying so what can the community do and this is this is the first or I would say a very good application of psychology so famous pizza chain came up to schoolteachers offering them help saying that the students who perform very good in their exams they would be given tokens by the teachers and these tokens can then be later on exchanged for discounts and pieces and this is something that people like eating's it's rewarding it's it's very good and so this kind of an paradigm was developed this kind of an offer was developed and so what really happened is that students started studying and performing well on their exams and exchanging these four pieces or four discounts on pieces on Pisa chains this could have been good this thing was very good because children started studying more and more now with the passage of time after a period of time these companies are profit companies and so they decided that they would stop this offer of offering pieces and so as soon as this Pisa offers were stopped the performance of children the ability of children to read they went down so children started performing more poorly and so this was one example to show that an external stimulus and an external reinforcement or reward can actually make perform people do better on certain tasks and so what happened is the very idea that they're going to get something good they're going to get something deserving they're going to get something that they want which is the pizza made them work harder on the rectus and earn good marks now there is a an extension of this this particular approach and I will discuss this extension in a minute but this is the this is a very good example to show what psychology can do so people when they were as or children when on their own were not able to perform or were not willing to perform good on the exams were pushed or associated using a theory of learning with a deserving reward and this deserving reward had the capacity to make people perform better and also the fact that after certain period of time when the reward was taken back this children perform Upali non extension of this project was done where two group of children were taken one group and both this group of children were actually given some tasks some puzzling tasks and some mathematical puzzles too to play with now both group of children actually started playing with these puzzles and tasks after a certain period of time one group of children were actually given a reward for the playing and the other group of children were actually not given a reward at all no reward was given in this that kept on playing on their own certain period of time passed and after that the reward was withdrawn it was found out that the children who were actually given a reward to perform better to play with certain tasks or to get engaged in certain mathematical puzzles and tasks their performance decreased sharply when the other hand the children were not given any reward and they played on the task on their own where performing in the optimal level there was no deviation there was no change in their performance after some time passed the rewards were again given back to these children and it was found out that the children who were not given at any leave what to start with when when later given a reward they performed at a very very high level then the children who were actually given a reward then blocked the reward and then the reward was given what could be the reason the reason is that the children who were actually not given a reward to start with started enjoying the task started enjoying playing with the task and they were not doing the behavior or they were not playing with the task just for the PISA or just for the reward that was given to them they were playing it because they liked it and so when a reward was added to it the performance increased what does this mean does this mean the tree bar actually increases performance and an optimal question here or a question here is that marks that people get are actually also rewards and so should people be given marks because if you give marks then people perform better so should people be given higher marks were performing better obvious answer is no these marks that people get are not actually reward because rewards that you get are fixed and so the marks that you get is not actually a part it is a kind of a reward or not and not actually a reinforcing reward the reason being that the marks that you get is the contingent upon your performance the better you do the better the marks so max is not something which is given to you or given to people in a uniform manner on one hand the PISA which was given to children was in uniform manner so let's say one slice was given to everyone but in terms of marks that we get and on on exams it's not that similar marks are given to everyone the marks are contingent or dependent on how you perform and so marks are not a part of a reward it is actually a manifestation is actually a measure of your performance and so that is why they are not reward convenient so summing it up this is what psychology can do this is the power of psychology psychology can make or the study of psychology our study of human behavior through the method of psychology can actually make you perform an act which you never wanted to perform by associating this act with something that you were never liking with something that you never wanted to like so this is all about psychology or the study of human behavior no generally speaking then what is psychology and where does it come from let's get a idea of that now this course on human behavior is centered on the study of psychology and so what we'll be doing here is introducing you to the concepts of what is psychology what a psychology do and what are the methods of doing it and what are the areas or what are the fields of psychology and what are the subproblems of psychology so that's what we will be doing and since this is the first lecture I'll be just telling you what is psychology where did it come from what are its history and what how we do psychology what are the various met doing psychology and so on and so forth and in the upcoming lectures we'll take up several other associated fields or associated events in psychology like studying memory studying perception sanding sensation because all of these are psychological processes so what we'll be doing in the upcoming lectures is studying these processes so we'll be studying perception sensation will be studying consciousness will be studying memory learning social influences so how people behave in society how does how to study people in in a social group and also what is personality what is intelligence all these will combine to work together to this course of psychology so let's start with first looking at what is psychology so the definition of psychology is like this the word psychology comes from two words which is psyche which is the soul or in some terms it is called the mind plus logos which is the knowledge so psychology is the study of order knowledge about the soul and the question is where did it start from where did the whole idea of psychology start from obviously we have established that it's it's a science psychology is a science why it's a science because I ecology does everything that the science does what does the science do earlier believes or psychology or earlier proponents of psychology believe that psychology is not a science but the modern study of psychology says it's the science now psychology started from philosophy and in philosophy the main questions in the fourth fifth sixth century was about consciousness about the idea of soul about the idea of mind and these are the questions that philosophers were looking at but what they were doing was not scientific the reason being that they were proposing theories so weeper like Aristotle Socrates and other people are the philosophers they were opposing theories some kind of proposing knowledge banks but then they were not able to scientifically describe what it was all about and so from philosophy a branch broken a science broken or a field broken which was called psychology and that was that branch tried to study scientifically these problems so we'll come back to that so basically what is psychology psychology is the study of mental processes and behavior the definition of psychology says that psychology is basically a study of behavior and mental processes what is behavior behavior is any act that we do let's try and explain what is behavior so somebody is angry at you comes to you and slaps you the reaction to this is your behavior how do you react to that is what is called behavior and this behavior is influenced by so many things it could be experience influenced by your past experiences it could be influenced by your judging of the situation for example if it's a hefty person if it's a person the the person who slaps you is big tall bigger than you you might not think of hitting him back but if you're smaller than you you can manage him he will hit him back so this is basically dependent on perception this this behavior of hitting back can also be explained by certain personality types for example certain people are aggressive and so if you hit them they'll hit you back certain people are not aggressive or cool people so they will think back and then they will react and later on so this act of hitting back of the behavior is influenced by so many things it is also influenced by cognitive processes for example how do you perceive the situation to be maybe your boss hits you you don't want to hit him back because you think of losing the job but on the other hand if your personality is different you might hit him back and not think about losing the job and so this behavior or the act of hitting impact is influenced by so many things and what we'll do in this course is study all these perspective focus on all this perspective so psychology is basically the study of behavior how we act and the mental processes which is the reason behind that what do you think made you act in that way and so psychology is not just studying behavior simply what you do or simply how you act but also the study of mental processes also the thinking that went into it the kind of imagination that you had the kind of problem-solving factors or thought processes that emerge in you before doing an act now this is what the scientific study of psychology is and it is deviated from philosophy in certain ways now what philosophers are actually filler philosophers were actually focusing on is the study of soul but the problem is soul cannot be studied the question that philosophers had was studying consciousness and consciousness cannot be studied scientifically so what psychology did was developed methods are studying soul and consciousness now what is soul the idea about soul was closely linked to the idea of what mine because soul cannot manifest itself soul cannot show itself and so the most clearest act so how do I study soul for studying soul I have to observe it and there is no way to observe the soul so the manifestation or the act of the soul or whatever the soul wanted was actually mirrored on to something called the mind and what philosophers wanted to do is to study the soul was to study the mind what psychology did was to study what is this mind also consciousness was related to this mind consciousness of which is basically how aware you are of your external features of your external environment is what is consciousness and the study of scientific study of mind in consciousness is what psychology that did so what psychology did was what it started studying mind but then again the problem is how do I study mind because there is nothing called the mind right so soul the study of soul is soul manifests itself or soul projects itself onto the mind and the doing of the mind is what the doing of the soul is but as you all know there is no way to study the mind so how do we study the mind the study of the mind or study of what the mind does can only be done in terms of behavior let's take an example I want to eat something my mind says to eat something now how do I know that this is what the mind was once so or the only way to understand what the mind was is to actually watch the behavior so if I'm wine says I want to eat something my behavior will describe it so me going to a food outlet buying something and eating is actually a manifestation of the mind because the mind wants me to eat something and the soul wants the mind sold once the mind that it is hungry and mind tells the body to do something or to act accordingly and the body does a behavior in compliance with the mind so to study the mind we have to study the behavior and that's what psychology did psychology studied behavior which we have believed is a manifestation of the mind and this mind manifestation or this basically projection was of the soul so the studying of the soul or the mind in terms of behavior is what is the achievement of psychology social psychology started studying behavior so what is psychology again the definition of psychology is it is the study of behavior and mental processes so before we go further into it let's quickly jump into some brief definitions of what psychology is and what it can do and what it cannot do so nature of psychology as I said the definition of psychology that are given to you in psychology is the study of psyche which is the soul or which is the manifest in your soul in terms of the mind and the knowledge of it that is a very old definition the most recent definition or the most accurate definition of what psychology is is that psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes that I haven't said to you know the question is what is scientific study as I said philosophers were theorizing and and telling a lot of things about what psychology is or what what the soul is what the idea of mind is or the idea of consciousness in this one and so forth but none of them were scientific so how do I describe a science to be or a free body of knowledge to be scientific and non-scientific and for that you have to know what is a science and the basic understanding is science is a four part system now most of us would have understood or would have learned this very early on in a class eight nine syllabus what is science science is any body of knowledge can be called a science when it has observation when you can observe certain phenomena so certain acts happens and you can observe it not only observe you can replicate this phenomena so if you observe a phenomena if you replicate a pre-nominal if you can verify a phenomena and you can falsify a phenomena these four are the gold standards of a science so let's say that each time a dog barks I feel afraid how do I know that this is a scientific study or what is the most scientific way of explaining this can I observe you when a dog can I observe your fear when a dog box if I can do that then what I am doing is a scientific study can i replicate it replicate in the sense that in a natural setting of course in a dog box you will feel afraid but can if I can take you to a lab and and and and make you hear a sound of a dog where the dog is not present and if I can get the same fear out of you then it is called application and so the the knowledge that I'm gathering is scientific in nature can I verify it which basically means that each name of a dog barks or if I use some other animals which is more equivalent to a dog and you get into a freeze which is basically a reaction of fear or demonstration of fear then I am verifying it and falsify if I can use this data and come up with another theory and falsify the results that has come up then it's a science so what is science science is basically using these four methods if a body of science or if a body of knowledge can be observed in replicated can be verified and falsified then it is a scientific study and so psychology what it does why it is science is because it can do all these things whenever something happens when every event happens whenever somebody acts in a certain way and if we can observe that not only observe we can replicate that behavior we can make this behavior again and again organs are we are sure that the same behavior will happen if same situations appear then this is called replication we can verify that in other situations also the person acted in the same way and if I can falsify what we have proved earlier then it's a science and that is why psychology can be studied a science because it it actually comprises of these four observations or these four laws so psychology then is actually a scientific study of people act and what are mental processes water mental processes mental processes are those mental events which take place in in your mind or for our purpose will say the brain things like memory perception thinking this is and making all these are mental processes these are covert processes in the sense that they are not visible to you but they happen in your head and these processes actually make you add a take a take a decision and so these are called mental process so mental processes are things like thinking problem-solving memory attention etcetera decision-making and all these things are mental process now psychology itself is very broad in its scope as I said it is it starts with management on one side and neuropsychology on the side so there are various fields of it or there are the scope or psychology is very broad and so some of the topics which I have here as I said I'll tell you what it can do is some of the topics that I have included for you which we may study in psychology is for example face recognition now a very specific area of the brain which we called the fusiform gyrus actually helps you in recognizing faces and so our damage to this area of fusiform gyrus the or the FFA actually makes you not recognize famous faces or any face for that matter and this is called processor prognosis Faiza this term of not recognizing faces is called prosopagnosia face aphasia now psychology goes ahead and tell you why this face recognition is not possible and there has been cases for it there have been times people have been studied where they have damage to this area and the damage to this area make them not study or make them not understand people or make them not recognize people at all this has been studied by several people and one queer case or one curious case exciting case that has been developing face recognition was of a person who were actually sitting in restaurant and he complained the waiter that somebody was looking at him the waiter pointed very quietly and gently to him saying that sir it is a mirror this is actually looking at you and look at the broad scope of it look at the problem that is happening here the person cannot recognize himself a very famous book written by a very famous author a neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks is the person the man who took his wife for a hat there they have demonstrated how this program is superior which is the damage to the fusiform area of the brain actually not less you recognize any faces other than that you can recognize and anything and everything and so one dimension of psychology or one good demonstration of psychology is a study of face recognition the other could be the other area or the other interesting problem that can be studied in psychology is the idea of social judgments now what does this social judgment mean let's say you are standing in a queue now you are saying a supermarket standing in a very big queue and what you observe is that there is a lady who's taking some supplies grocery supplies and so what happens if somebody appears suddenly in front of this lady and says that I want to collect some charity the lady gives some money to charity what do you think is the lady altruistic is the lady generous now most people will actually tell that this lady is generous and she is very good at giving things or she is generous and she likes to help people but is that true is it not true that she is doing it because other people are in in front of her and so other people are present in front of her and that is the reason why she is generous this basically and so if we study this lady at some point of other time we may not see you see herself as generous and it is because the other people are there who are evaluating her at at point of time and she doesn't want to look non generous non empathetic she gives some money to this charity but given the fact that nobody is there in somebody else and then this person observes maybe this person is not generous so how did we decide that this person is generous or this old lady is generous the idea that we while interpreting other behavior other people's behavior hold responsible their personality or their their trait to be the reason for the behavior is called the fundamental attribution error and so social judgments actually are a very good example of study psychology so when we are looking at other people's behavior we hold that their personality or that their core or that their traits are responsible for whatever we have been doing this is called a fundamental attribution error and so the study of fundamental attribution error is basically a subfield of psychology and this can be studied but there is that there is a deviance the deviance is when we study other people we believe that the core personality is responsible but when we are studying our own behavior we hold the situation responsible so let's say two people sit in an exam you and your friend your friend failed what is the reason why he failed you believe that he was bad he was poor he was not working and that is called a fundamental attribution error because we put more weight on to his personality type use it in an exam you feel what is the reason most people describe this as the test was hard the situation was bad the room was all warm and situation was not good the environment was not good disturbance was the noise was there in so many other reasons you never hold yourself responsible and so this basically of holding environment responsible for your behavior and the person this trait or personally responsible for his act is called the fundamental attribution error and this is a good way of studying or a good example of what psychology can do memory study of memory for example there is there is there is a type of disorder in memory where people lose the short term memory in those cases what really happened is people are not able to recover recognize anyone so I am talking to someone and people who have lost a certain area of the brain which is called a medial temporal lobe they are not able to recognize are not in recognize they are not able to form short-term memories so think of a person who is talking to you and within very five minutes he goes and ask who are you and so that kind of thing or how things are stored in memory how do we store factual information things like mathematical rules things like where is America and that kind of a geographical rule or geographical knowledge and how do we store episodes for example relating to your birthday relating to what happened on some other day or some other event how do we store all this that can also fall into the purview of psychology studying obesity studying the revision of a basic you know a lot of people in this world are obese and that's a great problem so most people who are obese studying the reason behind obesity psychology can help you do that so why do people over it one reason is that some people and psychology predicts that some people who have been deprived eating at some point of time in the childhood actually overeat and some one other reason is that depression makes you eat more and more and so that's another a field that can be ordered another problem that can be studied with psychology violence why do people do violence why do people turn up to be aggressive and one reason that a psychology has provided is that people who resort to violence actually think that they get rewarded with it and so here also very simple experiment was done with two group of children one group of children were actually shown a while in film and the other group of children is not shown a violent film and later on both of group children were exposed to something called a Bobo doll which is basically a harmless doll and the people who saw violence or children who saw violent films reacted violently to the doll whereas children who were not seen a wall and film they reacted very normally to the doll now it is believed that these films actually induce violence now there are two theories to it one theory says that this movie actually makes children realize that when the hero does violence he gets rewarded and so they learn this and they do one less to the Bobo doll but the other group of children actually never saw that they anybody got rewarded because of violence and so they didn't follow it and so in psychology gives an answer but there is another approach it basically says that when children do violence they actually let out the cathartic feelings and because of that they should feel good but then there are opposition's and there are there is a debate which is going on we will not get into the boat but we can also study the reason behind violence and there are many other problems that can be studied through psychology as I said the scope of psychology is right from studying management to the other end where we can study what is neuro psychology are studying the brain now another interesting thing is that psychology space must decrease disagree so research is conducted to increase our knowledge about how people think and behave and different studies may have different things now what are the good things about psychology why it is scientific is because of this reason because what psychologists do is not only study they design experiments to kind to understand the psychological process behind any act and not only that they bring up 2ds with that and then later on they do different kind of studies which sometimes negate each other or sometimes add on to each other and that is why psychology is the nature of psychology is scientific nature psychology scientific because we can not only observe replicate and verify we can also falsify so this is the idea about falsify so different experiments are done to look at how people behave and sometimes they add on to it or sometimes they negate and that increases the knowledge of why somebody does something now little bit of history now the roots of psychology date back from fourth and fifth century BC and from the gate philosophy of the ancient Greece now as I've discussed before these philosophers we Socrates Aristotle or any other philosopher that matter they were discussing psychology as or the the thought of psychology as a study of consciousness study of soul study of mind and so on and so forth and so their idea was studying these things right now these people most of these people believed that the behavior of people the way people do what they do how they do is governed by this consciousness or the idea of what the mind and how the mind plays is structure and and so on so many other philosophical things not since this is not a class of philosophy we will not go into the details of those but if you are interested there several books out there which will talk about the philosophically origins so what we'll stick to here is the basic premises of scientific psychology so what happened is that these philosophers were actually looking at the philosophical questions of what is the nature of self what is the nature of how anxieties develop what is the idea about consciousness and so on and so forth and what psychology did was it took all these problems philosophically problems and started doing research or started studying these problems in a more scientific way and one of the most famous debates about psychology is nurture nature what is this debate about there is a question in psychology which says that whatever behavior we do whether it comes from nurture or from nature what does it mean it means that the behavior that we do any act that we do any event we respond to whatever the way of response our personalities our self our memories our attention process perception all these are innate in nature innate in the sense that it is brought down from father to son kind of a thing so it is passed on from father to son kind of a thing and it is believed that our personalities our self our behaviors all are hardwired into the brain so the nature debate basically believes that most of the human capabilities of doing mathematics singing or any other capability for that matter of the way you are the personality the self is basically nature dependent now there are two group of philosophers actually working with it now Rene Descartes was one of those people who actually believed that most of the human capabilities that humans have or most of the human acts that humans have most of the most of the features that human have are brought down from nature which basically means that it is passed on from your father to a grandfather and through genes or through some way then nature passes these things to you so we are born with certain capabilities and we are born and that's why Mozart was born a good musician a Freud was not born as a good psychotherapist in a position to that there's another group of philosophers which is called the nurturer the nature the natural group of people who believe that experiences into the world actually make you develop any capability or any human capability for that matter so whereas Rene Descartes believes that your the the capabilities that human have for example the cells the personalities the way of thinking the way of reacting are all formed from nature they are born with it another group of philosophers led by John Locke believed that the mind at the time of being born is a tabula rasa what does it really mean it means that the mind is gone blank it has nothing on it and so as we progress as we move into this world our experiences make us develop capabilities the way we are brought forward in this world the way we are brought up in this world the way we interact with this world actually shape our behavior actually shaped the self BR would actually make who we are develop our abilities and so on and so forth taking a good example so was Mozart's capacity because Mirza actually composed his first opera which was which was a wonder and he did that at six years of age so basically where did Mozart learn all this thing was it nature or nurture so nature people will believe that Mozart actually got this from nature which basically means that he was born with these capabilities and nurture would say that Mozart was brought up in a situation or brought up in an environment where he actually heard music a lot when since when he was born of course his father and mother we're trained musicians and he was always around people who actually developed music so no doubt that he had intelligence but this capability of playing music was not involved and so what happened is that the environment in which he was brought up that trained him into being the best music into the world so nature people believe that interaction with the environment as we are born we love we experience things and when we develop our capabilities from experiences where as the nature people believe that everything is of to us or is passed on to us from nature the way we are born and that is one of the biggest debate which is which is out there and in psychology but nowadays we have what we have done is we have married them together these two features and more psychologies these days take an integrated approach and look at how nature and nurture they combine to shape human psychology so human psychology is not favored onto either nature or nurture but then what really happens is that what today's psychologist is looking at what part does nature has what part does your genes have to play in what you are and what part does your experiences have to play so we have experience on one end and you're in bond capabilities or your genes on the other hand they combined together to form who you are and that's what the new psychologists are the recent psychologists are actually looking at and so that's a historical way or the historical origin of psychology so one of the greatest debate was about nature nature the other debate was about psychology is a scientific science as I said so a psychology was developed in the scientific science so what is the science about it now the idea that the mind and behavior could be the subject of scientific study they wound up in the 19th century in the 18th century it was all about consciousnesses or it was all about studying soul and so on and so forth but there's no way to study the soul there was no way to study what the soul was doing and so the idea about studying the mind and behavior or mind as a projection of the soul and the manifestation of the mind and behavior developing to the 19th century frankly speaking or actually speaking the scientific psychology started with William Boone start establishing his lab in Leipzig in the late 18th century so it around 1879 I don't get the date right now but around the late 18th century we William there was a person called William Boone he actually started his first scientific lab in in a place in Germany which is called Leipzig and that is the first ever lab which has been established now what William wouldn't wanted to do was to study consciousness and how would he study consciousness he wanted to study consciousness in a scientific way now how can that be possible so what he was doing he brought a technique from philosophy which is called introspection and you have this introspection to study consciousness now since he couldn't study all consciousness and he was only demonstrated so he wanted to show that psychology can be study scientific so he was basically focused on studying perception and reaction times and so what William won't actually did was he wanted to see how people respond to certain stimuli so his first experiments was on in terms of reaction times he wanted to see so he had developed a scientific experiment in which ball was dropped and there was a tapping machine in which person can tap and what he wanted to do is how people how fast can people hear an external stimuli and respond to it so when the ball would hit the ground or hit some disc a sound was made and what people were made to do is respond to that and the time was calculated between the time the ball hit the ground and the person tapped on a tapping machine to report that he has heard the ball hit the Sun hit the ground and that was the calculation of thing calculation of reaction time and what method William bunt was actually using was called introspection what is introspection in introspection a person vividly describes what's going in his mind so when a person who's doing this experiment who's to tap on a tapping machine when he hears the sound of the ball he will actually describe what all is going in his mind through verbal report and that's called into introspection so introspection is a method where people analyze themselves or analyze their own acts and then report what is happening but this was not scientific in at all although this is the first scientific way of studying psychology because what William went was doing is studying reaction time was studying how quickly people hear or is there is a difference between how people hear and then act now William won't for the first time believed that human body was a machine and so this machine could be actually studied using the scientific process now from the development of psychology using this method or studying mind and behavior so what the mind does and so what William wound was doing through his reaction time experiment was studying what the mind does and what what is behavior so how does the mind make the behavior and whether there was a difference between the mind making a decision and the behavior act on to it and of course to basically decipher whether the minor behavior was related so the mind would tell the person that act hear the sound the mind will hear the sound and the behavior will actually demonstrate that he has heard the sound because hearing the sound can be demonstrated through a behavior of pressing the tapping machine which will which will tell you that you not only heard this one but you have reacted to it now there are several early schools or several schools of psychology which actually started developing which showed what psychology was all about and so the first I have made a line through this so the first two schools of psychology was called the primitive schools we believe that psychology was a study of consciousness and the later three schools was actually the original schools or the schools which believe the psychology was not the study of consciousness rather it was a study of behavior and mental processes look here what has happened is that hoon was studying mind and behavior but behaviorism get started in psychoanalysis were actually studying mind as in terms of mental processes so mental processes define the mind not the behavior so mind is basically a construction of mental processes mind is an organization of mental process the mental processes actually make the behavior because what wouldn't said is there is something on the mind but what is the mind comprised of and that's what these three theory says so let's quickly jump into understanding what is structuralism and functionalism now these are the some schools of and I said these are the primitive schools so basically what structure list or the structurally school of psychology how did they start it started with someone called advertised nerd who was actually a student of William Boone but he went to Cornell University in the United States and then he started the school what was the school's focus on the school's main focus was on how does mental processes really work how does the mind work and what he believed is that mental processes just like any hard sciences chemical and physical sciences mental processes can be broken down into its physical parts for example the taste of a lemonade can be broken down in two or the can be broken down into its physical sensations for example bitter cold and whether it is bitter it is sweet it is cold and so on and so forth so the taste so this is structuralism what they believe is the taste which is a psychological property can be broken down to a physical property which is bitter which is physical in nature or say cold which is temperature so bitter is a is a physical property and or some other things so these are physical in nature as you can see and this is psychological in nature and what structural is believe is that any psychological phenomena for example taste can be broken down into his physical properties for example bitter is a physical property it depends upon how many molecules of a certain to Korean you have added or if sweetness witnesses depend upon how much fructose you have added and all these fructose and all can be measured or for example how cold is a lemonade now the cold can be measured in terms of temperature so on this end I have physical properties and on this end I have psychological properties so most psychological behavioral properties can be studied in terms of physical properties in a position to that function list came in and so that they said that every behavior can be broken down to this part in a person that came in the functionalist who said that behaved most behaviors cannot be studied in this way and so what the functionalist actually saw or functionalist actually said that most behaviors are adaptive in nature what does it mean what is the meaning of that behavior is adaptive in nature what it says is that for understanding a behavior you have to actually see a behavior in action you cannot have a behavior somebody acts something somebody does something right so you drink a lemonade and you feel bitter cold that kind of a so this act of drinking the lemonade and feeling about it cannot be broken down into taste is equal to bittersweet and so on and so forth the very idea of how you feel the taste depends upon you are I watching you actually drink the lemonade and so the same lemonade at different different situations will mate maybe taste bitter to you and sweet to you and so on and so forth so depending upon the environment depending upon your behavior depending upon your environment where you are the same behaviors can vary and so what functionally said is behaviors cannot be or acts cannot be broken down into its constituent parts in terms of physical and psychological property rather functionalism says that most behaviors are adaptive in nature and for other understanding why people do what they do we have to actually see the behavior being in action when the behavior is taking place and so these are the two primitive schools one opposing the other but both of these schools were actually focused on consciousness they were focused on studying the mind and that was what was devoid of now the problem was there is no way to study the mind and so a very important school came into being which is called behaviorism which was with us started by something called John Watson now John Watson is the father of behaviorism and what did he say he said that look if psychology has to be a scientific science then it's data has to be open to public scrutiny just like physical sciences and chemical sciences and other hard sciences they give the data to people they give some observations that people can see psychology should also provide data when every event happens and if you have collected data on why and even happen this data should be given to public and public should be able to verify this what structuralism and functionalism was doing is they were using the method of introspection they were using the method of consciousness and they were saying that whatever psychological behavior is there it's a part of psychology instead of structuralism it is psychological versus sensations of physical and psychological properties can be explained in terms of functionalism if you want to study human behavior to actually see it doing but all these are personal to people I not people cannot view what is happening in their head but for behavior for the first time said that no this is wrong in psychology scientific what we have to do is take its data and give it to the public not there is no way to study the mind and so how do we study psychology using behaviorism so what we a vision said is psychology is or human acts human behavior is influenced by something called conditioning and learning so people behave in certain ways because they are conditioned in certain ways because they learn that certain acts are rewarded and certain acts or not and this is what is called the famous SR psychology what this SR psychology really means that if this is a very simple psychology what it says is when you do a part of a particular act when you when a particular when you get into a particular situation you do a particular kind of an act so let's say you get to get into a cold room you wear a sweater now wearing the sweater actually helps you is rewarding right it is rewarding to you and you learn this so each time you go into a cold room you wear a sweater because sweater protects you from cold and so this act is rewarding and so when this act is rewarding you do this act again and again now you go into a cold room and you do not wear a sweater you drink a cold drink and because of this cold ring you actually catch cold and so this act of drinking holding in into a cold room will be non rewarded we will actually present some kind of a discomfort for you and so you will not do this act so those acts because being in a situation and doing a certain act if it rewards you in certain way people choose to do that act again and again in future but a certain acts actually don't reward you in certain way then people do not choose those acts and that is called learning and that is called conditioning the conditioning and learning conditioning means that learning is learn learning is realizing that these acts are good and these acts are not and conditioning is giving reward for doing the certain act giving reward remember the first case that we discovered both the PISA there we actually showed that giving certain reward actually may mate perform better and so what behaviorism says is that there is nothing called mental processes mind and all so on and so forth people in certain situations act in certain way if the act that they do is rewarding they learn it and they do that act again in future if the act becomes non rewarding then they don't do this act and this is called a simple law of effect loss effect says that people learn through association if doing something in a certain situation is rewarding they'll do it again and again and if it is not will not do it and this can be verified because a person if he if a person is more prone to doing something in certain situations we can very easily predict that getting in this situation be the person we do the same at for example somebody who's afraid of horror movies closes their eye and if we have we have established this then we can very easily predict that this person when he goes to the movie again which is a horrible we will again close his eyes because that is rewarding for him and so this prediction can be made and there is no need for understanding his mind mental process thinking and so on and so forth it's very easy so take this person into a horror movie he'll close his eyes as simple as that a stimulus leads to a response and why he is doing that response because it is rewarding closing his eyes actually make him not fearful but if he opens his eyes you'll see the movie will become afraid and so closing his eyes is related to watching this movies and this is caught what is called behaviorism or the proponent of behaviorism where everything that psychology does is in terms of stimulus response the responses which are rewarded are learnt and the response which are not rewarded are not learned so rewarded response learn not rewarded response not learned the fourth kind of theory or the fourth theory of psychology was the gestalt psychology now at the time when John Watson came up with his idea of an objective psychology where data can be viewed a group of psychologists in in Germany they they brought up a school called gestalt psychologists which are actually about perceptions about experiences and so on and so forth and so what the school actually did was they wanted to study sensory perception they wanted to study sensations and sensory perceptions and things like that now the father of the school was max Wertheimer cut Kafka and Wolfgang köhler and what these people were actually doing get start to actually doing is the meaning of Gestalt in German is actually called form and so what they said is perception is dependent on on what background something is presented so perception is dependent on background how do we perceive things how do we see things and these people say that we see things in relation to two things first what background is presented in and second how it is organized things are organized in certain manner and the way things are organized together we see thing in this way so certain things which if they are close together we perceive them as together and that is this the idea about the school brought us the knowledge of how people perceive motion how people perceive look at movies how do we see movies there are 24 frames which go one one after another and since they are 24 frames which are passing over the eye one after another we actually see the movie moving if we make only 22 frames or less frames people will not see us movement because these 24 frames appear to be grouped together and that is how we see movies so basically that's what guest artist psychologist proposed they believe that perception is all about about situation in things present around and how they are organized also one important thing with Gestalt of an important proponent of Gestalt one important knowledge from BIA style is that the whole is not the sum of it part what is the meaning of this the experience that you have by observing something as whole cannot be equivalent to something seeing something as part think about the favorite song that you can hear or your favorite song when you hear the song it has lyrics it has music it has so many other things into it now when you hear the song with all lyrics and music and everything you have a different experience together now take away the lyrics and just hear the music take away the music and just hear the lyrics and take away the music and lyrics and just hear the tune and so on and so forth if you do that one by one the same experience that you get when you have when you hear the sound or when here the total song is not equivalent to just hearing these tools music and lyrics who are alone on their own so if you combined them together the experience that you have is entirely different from the experience that you have vibe by looking at it part or looking at these three things on the separately which basically means that the song itself everything composed together gives you an entirely different experience then the tune played alone and then the lyrics played alone and then the music played on and so on and so forth so basically this is what Gestalt is all about but we'll study get started on all these theories one by one in in a later class and the last school was the psychoanalysis or the last origin of psychology where the psychoanalysis now psychoanalysis was started by someone called Sigmund Freud and most of his theories Sigmund Freud based on the idea that most of human behavior is unconscious so most desires that people have or childhood expectations childhood desires if they are not fulfilled or if they are not worth fulfilling not worth will worth looking at they are pushed into the unconscious what is unconscious unconscious is a part of the brain or part of the mind which you cannot see which nobody can see and so what Freud believed is that the unconscious are unconscious shapes our conscious how we are our personalities are so Freud Siri is basically a personality theory as well as a theory of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy theory what Freud believed that the behavior that we do any behavior that we do is governed a lot by the unconscious and what is in the unconscious the unconscious compose is composed of all those acts all those childhood desires all those ones that we have desires that we have which we cannot openly express so those desires are pushed into into the unconscious for example if you see a girl use you think about kissing her but you cannot do that and so this act of your your act of thinking or your thinking about doing this is pushed into the unconscious or pushed into the push into your mind deep back into the mind where they it cannot come up and so by the very act of not being able to kiss this girl what really happens is that you will show a deviant behavior so maybe you make a comment now this comment is now is is actually a cover-up of your desire that you wanted to kiss this girl but you cannot do that and so the comment is actually a manifestation of the unconscious unconscious wants to show behavior now this behavior is this comment is actually a behavior which basically shows that you wanted to do this act but since you are not able to do this act it is replaced by this act and that is what Freud said and most of what Freud said almost of what Freud's theory about human behavior is in terms of sexuality that most behaviors have sexual core or anxieties behind its behavior so most behaviors have either a sexual interpretation or some kind of an anxiety or aggression behind its doing any behavior is composed of these things so we will look into Freud psychoanalysis also at a later point of time so this these are the historical origins now the 20th century started with some new fields of psychology or the Trinity in the coming of the 20th century brought some new fields of psychology what are the most important field of psychology that was brought up in the 20th century what's called the information processing field so the world were coming up these schools of psychology that we had which had mostly theoretical in nature and had data which cannot which could be verified to certain levels they died though the Second World War comma came up and with the second Second World War after Second World War newer equipments came in your methods of doing things came in studying the mind came in and so for the Herbert Simon in 1950 around 1950s he developed the information processing theory which now believed that human behavior can be studied in terms of the computer model of course the computer of a design in terms of human being or could be could be developed the human behavior could be studied through the information processing model what is the information processing model the it believed that human beings are just simple processes they are machines which human beings are machines which can process information so they have an input system which takes an input and so the senses are input system then your main your brain which you have or the mind that you have is actually a processing system information and then the behavior that you do is actually an output system so the input system the mind that we have this is the processing system and the output system can explain any behavior that we do and this is the first development or the 20th century another interesting field that came up with the 20th century was the idea about human language what is human language and what are the mental structures which are there in human language how do people invent language language is a very powerful thing the most basic thing the most interesting thing that I happen to human is language most lower forms of animal don't have a language they do have a language they do have a method of communication but they don't have a language with human beings we have language we can communicate with each other and so the development of language was a classic impetus to the study of psychology and so norm Chomsky developed this idea of what are the mental structures which are involved in language how people make language how they understand language and how his language form and so another interesting school we started in the 20th century was how and what mental structures form language and how they are processed and how language is used by people and the third important thing or third important school that came up with the 20th century or 21st century was the study of neuropsychology now this to neuropsychology is the field which actually studies how the brain makes the mind it studies the relationship between neurological events and mental process for example certain regions the brain show activity so they're coming up with the MRI fMRI eg PT all those machines actually showed that whenever something meant something the person does a mental event happens these events can be captured through certain process in the brain for example blood flow certain activity in the brain electrical activity in the brain and so on and so forth so there is simultaneously correlational activity in the brain there is simultaneously an activity so if you are thinking of something there is an activity of brain if you're thinking or something else there is an activity of brain and these activities can be actually studied and a prediction made about what are you thinking and what mental process you are using so whether you if you are using memory it is the middle temporal lobe if you are using perception it is the olivet or the occipital lobe and so on and so forth so different regions of the brain have different different idea and so George Sperry was the key person who developed this area or this of neuropsychology and he showed that the growth areas the brain they're connected to something called commercial fibers and which basically means that the brain doesn't the brain is first of all it is split into two parts and it's that both parts of the brain are specialized for doing specialized functions and so for that he was ignorant Nobel Prize even the information processing model which was developed was awarded the Nobel Prize and so these are the new developments in the coming up of psychology so basically what I will do is I will take a break here and and let this information which are given to you grasp onto you so let's do a quick recap of what we did in this class what we actually did in this class is I explained to you what is psychology and what it can do what are what is its breadth in length what kind of problems do we study in psychology and what is its scope with that we went into studying some of the problems were looking at some of the problems with psychology can do and then we went into a little bit of history of looking at how psychology started we defined those questions which the Philosopher's are asking and we also define how psychologists tackle those questions we looked at some of the basic schools for example structuralism functionalism behaviorism Gestalt ISM and psychoanalysis and what are the basics of these schools and how these schools handle problems or behavior how these schools actually explain how human behavior can be defined then we I define so the recent schools of psychology for example the information processing school then us I call neuro psych linguistic school and then your psychology school the psycho linguistic school all these schools are defined and how these schools actually hand handle model problems of psychology so let me take a break here will continue on this Lange lecture in the next class and we will what we'll do in the next class is we'll take up a problem and I'll show to you the various perspectives the various ways of looking at one single problem one single psychological problem from different different psychological perspectives what we'll do other than that is we look at how is psychological research done so that will conclude our chapter or our section or module on what is psychology the nature of psychology what it can study what it can do and what are the methods of studying psychology so for now from here it's goodbye [Music] you