All right. Last time and where we're going today is we're going to look at some key themes that are going to recur throughout this class. As we introduce what psychology is, what you're going to find, first of all, is this.
If I could summarize what I'm about to cover over the next hour and time, it's going to be that we humans are very complex. As we begin to study human behavior, and as we begin, we have to apply a method, and that method is science. And science has uncovered that you guys and all of the other humans out there Have behaviors that have multiple determinations, that is, what we call multiple causes as to why they occur. I'll give you an example.
When we start to learn and explore why people behave, we find that they do some things very interestingly, very quick. So if I was to ask you why you trusted somebody, How many met somebody recently that you never, you didn't know them at all, but your first impression of them was, I like them and I trust them. How many has that happened to recently, anybody? Oh, a lot of you. Somebody tell me why, if you didn't know them and they're a stranger, why did you trust them?
Why did your first thought was that? My roommate, she was really open and just put on this like, Where you could tell, you would tell your secrets to other people. Okay, when you met your roommate for the first time, you felt real close to her, like she was friendly, she would maintain confidentiality, if you shared some things with her.
The people who I trusted, trusted them. Oh, they knew people that you knew, and so you liked those other people, and you go, okay, they trust this person, right? They were like really close. They seem to have offered and feel comfortable and then she said, and then even offered help without you even asking for it.
That's good. Because of their first impression? Maybe their first impression that they kind of give off was positive.
And let me ask the real quick, just the opposite. Have you ever had an interaction recently with somebody that you didn't trust and didn't like right away? Anything that gave it away to you?
Most of you raised your hands as meeting somebody recently that you didn't trust and didn't really maybe like right away and maybe still don't. If they're your roommates, don't raise your hand. If I ask, but you could.
I don't know, that's fine. What gave it away? Why that? Well, what did they give that made you give the opposite feeling? Insincerity.
What? Insincerity. There was some insincerity. Was that a bad thing? If there's not a lot of sincerity, we go, that's not a good thing.
They didn't like what I was eating. They didn't like what you were eating. OK?
And so like, I don't like that. And like, well then we can never eat meals together. Bad start. They might gossip and so you've said something to them and you heard them talking about it later on, right? Or they're telling you stuff about.
things, yeah? Or maybe self-interest. I'm standing at my door one night, no I wasn't standing there actually, I was at my house, it was 9.30 at night, 9.50, 9.45, whatever like this. Kids were in bed and here's what I heard, on my front door.
Like, it's 9.45 at night. Who knocks on your door unless you live in a dorm? And even then they don't knock. But I'm in a house.
I got kids, family, and all of a sudden there's a knock on the door. And I go to, I look at Alicia like, that's weird. I go to the door.
And standing on my front porch is a woman. Little, beauty, tiny woman. Who was kind of mousy because I could barely hear her and I open the door and I say oh Hi Stranger never met her before took a look at her thought. Oh, hi.
Can I help you? What's up like that? She was Yeah, in a very mousy way, it's hard for me to even say that real quiet and I was like, I'm sorry, I can't hear you, can you speak up?
Well, this is really weird. And I'm really sorry to interrupt you and bug you, it's so late at night, but something happened. And I went, oh, what? Tell me, what's going on?
Well... See I got a new job and I've been working for a couple of weeks but I don't get paid for about four days. And my rent is due tonight and I'm going to get kicked out of my apartment tonight if I don't pay my rent.
And I'm just wondering, I know this is really weird, but do you think you can help? What would you say if somebody like that short little thing mousy knocks on your door? What's your... I'll tell you what I did. See, I even think about...
about these kinds of things. I studied altruism, that's what my degree is in, Master of PhD, I understand what helping behavior is and when someone asks, I also, as a believer, as a Christian, believe that one of the things we ought to do is when somebody asks for help, We ought to be prepared, yes? How many feel like that's an important value?
We can even talk about some biblical verses that help guide us in helping people. And so I said this to her. I said, oh, well, first of all, what would you do?
And I said, well, like, how much do you need? She goes, well, I'm looking like maybe for $75 or $100. I need about $100 to make rent. And I said this. Oh, I'm sorry.
so glad you came. Yeah, God has given us so much to be thankful for. And you know, we don't have a hundred just necessarily lying around, but when people need help, no problem. I'm so glad.
Yeah. You know, my wife and I talk about helping people in need like this all of the time. And that's, that's great.
Okay. No problem. That's my initial, that's what happened on this door.
But now see, all kinds of things are going through my mind. I'm evaluating this person. I happen to know a lot about this kind of topic. And so one thing I have learned, learned over time is that it's okay to ask questions. See a lot of times people come up and ask for help and they don't know you ask questions and all of a sudden you start to find out new things but people when they get in this other side and you know they feel like they shouldn't ask well why or anything and they feel like that's maybe rude but it's not rude at all.
In fact let me challenge you if someone comes up and asks for aid it's okay to not only be gracious and generous and help but it's also okay to ask questions. You see people sometimes react very quickly. quickly in odd situations like that. I'll continue with this story in just a minute, but we used to have people in psychology, great demonstration, people lined up to, back in the days when there were copy machines and people had to make a lot of copies, there would always be lines late at night, sometimes in the library, and especially during busy times, people would be lining up trying to make copies of a book they were reading or whatever, and psychologists began to study line behavior and to find out what would give people a way, what would allow people to be able to cut into a line. You ever want I wanted to know that, what would allow me to be able to cut into a line without people getting real mad at me?
Do you know there's one simple thing you can do to enhance your ability to cut into a line and people letting you? What is it that you think you could do to get in, and by the way, I'm gonna tie this back to our story in just a second, but what is it I could do to get into this line? What might I do to enhance or increase my likelihood of being able to cut without people being real mad at me?
Ask for help to make a copy. Ah, maybe I'd say, listen, I need some help making a copy. Make yourself. Ask questions, start conversations. Maybe going long, how do you cut, maybe start talking to somebody, right?
Like, hey, just wondering if I can ask some questions of you, is that what you would do? What else could you maybe enhance your likelihood of cutting? Act like it's really urgent.
Act like it's really urgent, like I don't know how you would do that, but like, oh my gosh, like that. Like that. Maybe that didn't work, but they might.
I just need to, and you're a stroke, I just need to pay attention, everyone does, but if you say that, then people are like, oh, go ahead. Oh, okay, I just gotta hurry up and without thinking, and by the way, eventually we're going to get at what I was trying to get at, which is a lot of people do things without thinking and asking questions. Anything else you would do to enhance the likelihood of you being able to cut? Act a little crazy so that people are scared of you.
Yeah, that's always been an effective way of influencing people. Is it, how many, what are maybe some of the things you've done, have you done that? Act really crazy so people are afraid of you? He'd prefer not to express and tell you yes or no.
Act really sad because they don't wanna make you say words. Act really sad because maybe they don't wanna make you feel words like, oh my gosh, I lied. They'll feel sorry for you.
Yeah, and they'll feel sorry for you. Try and find somebody in the line that you know and hang out or get to know someone in line that you would like to get to know. Okay, they did all these different things but the single most effective one is ready for you to cut in any line. The most effective technique they found was simply for you to have a reason. That's worked the best.
You walked up to somebody near the front of the line and say, I'm so sorry, I'm really late for class. Could I cut in line here and make copies? Or, I'm so sorry, you're not gonna believe this, but man, I gotta catch a taxi. In like, well, not maybe in LA. or a bus, not even that.
My roommate is leaving like in one minute. I have to make a copy, is that possible? And people without thinking go like this.
Oh, sure. They don't ask questions. In fact, it's such a likelihood that They respond to you out of this script that this works just as effectively.
People are standing in line, and you walk up. Excuse me, I really got to make some copies. You think I can cut in line?
People go, oh, yeah, sure. And then they go, oh, I got to make copies. You see, you just gave a reason. I gotta make copies, can I get in line? Yeah, sure.
People just respond, that's weird. I gotta get some coke, I gotta stand in this line. Can I, oh yeah, go ahead.
Wait, that's what I'm doing. So the lady needs help and I think, well that's an okay thing, I just respond. If somebody asks you for something, you're like, oh if I have it, sure. Walking down the street of Denver one day with this girl, we were on a date.
We're going to a restaurant and this guy comes up to me and he says, yeah, hey, do you have $5? I said, no, I don't, sorry. Do you have, okay, do you have like then a dollar?
Do you have change for a dollar? Or do you have change? And I went, no, I'm sorry, I don't have anything. And he goes, nothing, not even a quarter.
I said, no, I'm sorry. And we walked away. We get into the restaurant.
We sit down. And we're eating. And I say to the person that I was sitting with, I said, hi, how are you?
had change for a dollar and I also had five. And she's like, kind of like, well, why'd you tell him no? You lied to him, that kind of thing. And I went, well, actually, and then I went through this whole sequence of my thoughts when he came out. You see, the first thing I thought about him was I didn't trust him.
He looked dangerous to me. The way he was dressed, what he was looking for, where we were, I felt uncomfortable and all these things went off. By the way, the reason I did all this is about another of the things we're going to talk about is life is very subjective. You see, I also worked in a lot of homes, in a lot of places, with some scary people. You see, I worked with behaviorally disturbed boys that were placed there by the courts.
Fifty of them lived in a home. A ranch where I worked. I worked, ready, with the criminally insane on a maximum security ward at Colorado State Hospital. The most serious criminally insane people who are too dangerous.
dangerous to even have up at their prisons are put into this maximum security ward. And so now I'm walking down the street, I have all of these things in my background. I also worked with emotionally disturbed boys and girls, two different homes. And now this guy comes walking up to me, everything about him said, run, run, run.
And so I said, no, no, no, fairly aggressively stay away because now was I right? I don't know, how accurate? We'll never know.
But he walked away, I walked away, I told her and she still didn't understand, like, but why didn't you give anything? Well, because I tried to explain it, she's like, huh, you're weird, kind of thing. That was like one of our last dates.
She didn't like the food I was eating. So the lady at my door, I now know it's okay to ask questions instead of just going, yeah, sure, we do like to help. And in fact, that's why I said, yeah, sure.
In fact, I don't think I have that much cash, but I'll give you a check. Is that okay? Uh-huh.
All right. But let me ask you a couple questions. and so I just started asking her questions like, you just got a job, where'd you get a job? Is that an okay question to ask somebody? She's knocking at my door late at night, and I say, oh, and she said someplace, I never heard of it, but oh, it's like this industry.
Really, cool, and so. What do you do there? She kind of explained. And so you're getting kicked out tonight?
Yeah. Unless you come up with the money. Yeah.
Huh. Well, I'll tell you what. That sounds fine. We'll give you some.
But I'll tell you what. Instead of giving you money, what we like to do is go ahead. And another thing we do is working in these kind of environments.
We've learned some other things like we'll go pay for you. Now, put yourself in her shoes. You're knocking on somebody's door. You're so desperate that you've got to go knock on a stranger's door and ask for $75 to $100. And you feel like led to this place and you knock and you ask for it.
If the person at that door says, I'll tell you what, I'll drive you or walk you. And I thought she might feel uncomfortable with that because she kind of hesitated. And I said, well, then my wife will take you because female, female thing, whatever, she'll take you. Now, what if somebody offered that to you?
What would you say if I said, I'll go pay that $100 to your landlady if you really want it? What would you say? Yes, thank you.
And so if they don't say yes, thank you, what do you think you should do? You should have all kinds of red flags go up. And she goes, oh, no, that wouldn't work at all.
And I go, oh, that's weird. Why not? Well, just because it'd be spirit if you gave me the money. I said, well, I'll tell you what.
That's OK, but you don't live that far away, you said, right? Oh, no worries. Don't worry. Oh, it's so late. Oh, no worry.
My wife, she'll go with you. In fact, she's getting her stuff on. Yeah, come on.
Let's go. And she goes, no, it would be better if you just gave me the money. So now these first red flags go up, and I go, really?
Huh, well, we kind of have a policy that we'll give the money to your landlady, not a problem, or even put you up in a hotel tonight if you need, no problem, if you're going to get kicked out. And I said, but I think it would be good. And she said, I said, why would you not want?
Well, the other thing is, she goes to bed early, and so she'll be woken up. And I went, huh, and yet she's going to kick you out tonight. Oh, yeah.
And now all of a sudden my reading of her changed. By the way, the whole time I'm kind of like, suspicious, suspicious, suspicious. And I did something I'm not sure if I'm really proud of. I started, I kind of got mad at her.
And I said this, I said, now wait a minute, hold on. You don't, we're offered to go pay the rent tonight and give you money and go even put you up in a hotel if you need, because you're gonna get kicked out if you can't. But you're not accepting any of this, you just want me to give you the money and you can walk away from here.
And I said. I said, I'm not sure I believe your story. And she's like, now that's uncomfortable, isn't it?
But by the way, I think it's very appropriate. And I'll just say, here's what I wasn't really proud of. I say, you know what, not only do I don't want to help you tonight because I think you're lying to me, I want you to get off my property. That's what I wasn't really proud of. Was that bad?
How many would have done that? How many feel like I was a bad man? I said, not only do I want you off my property, then I took my finger like this.
I said, I don't want you to go to my neighbors either. Go on, you're lying to me, I can tell, and I'm... Again, I'm trained in this area. I understand things.
I didn't tell her that, but I understand deception and lying and she was doing it the whole way. She didn't want it, she just wanted it. And I said, stay off, go, leave, don't go.
And if you go to my neighbors, I promise. I'll go tell them what you're doing."And I'm like, gee, Lisa's like, well that was a kind of a quick change in you. But she understands and she trusts me. I didn't feel all that good about it. Next day I went to work, I saw one of my buddies over here, a professor, and I just happened to mention to him, I said, oh this was weird last night. And he goes, and you told her to leave? I said, yeah, it was kind of mean too. Like, get off my property, I'll go tell the neighbors and all that. And he goes, wow. So I told him about it. Less than 10 days later, my buddy that I told comes over to my office and he says, Chris, you are not going to believe what just happened to me. Can you tell me what that lady looked like? And I said, she's a little mousy thing, kind of like that. She kind of tugged. He goes, you're not going to believe what just happened to me. to believe what he lives not far maybe about two miles from me because you're not going to believe who knocked on my door last night and I said who he goes little mousy girl just like that she needed 75 dollars for rent who were going to get kicked down and I offered I listened I remembered your story I said I won't go take your money to the landlord he said no just give me the me the cash and I said what happened goes I told her to get off my property you were over there you went to my friend's house and I told her to leave and I went yeah she was making her way all over here making money because people don't like to necessarily ask these questions and do things we like to go by scripts they need help oh man I better help I'm also got some money that I want to Invest wisely in people and it's not mine, it's all God's, I'd love to give you some, whatever I have, but doesn't mean you have to be stupid about it. Now, as we study psychology, I'm making very quick conscious and unconscious decisions in this and we psychologists gotta study that. We have to slow things down. There are things that you have to learn and ways in which you have to go and study. It's not just, for most of us, it's not just going, oh, I think I trust or don't trust you, so therefore I'll do this. There's also a science behind it. We are very, very good at determining and detecting these things, but sometimes it takes years to even slow this down, pay attention, watch it, which is why I told you that there's a man out there who's watched couples for over 20 years, filmed them, and is able to say that he can predict with 90-some percent accuracy the likelihood of two people getting a divorce by just simply watching them interact with each other, by watching certain things. We're very good at this. How trustworthy is it? What are some ways that we might err? What are some things that we might need to pay attention to? How and why does the human brain work to process things? I told you about the amygdala and the speed at which we pick things up. We pick up emotions from other people by this very quick route. And you said, I trusted this person. I bet some things hit you in this what we call low road of consciousness, where the amygdala picks things up. But if you stop and thought, how can I get to know this person better? That's the high road of consciousness. What might be a good way for me to study? That's thinking up here, what we call the high road, probably through the frontal cortex and the part of the brain that works this way, which we're going to study in here. And sometimes it's very... very quick, but even making these statements requires people to slow down the process of studying humans and watching for a long time. And that's the themes we're going to cover. You see, psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes. I put this up last time, but it's the study of the mind or mental processes and behavior. But to do it as a science is what we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about, requires an investment and a method by which we explore things like helping or giving or lying or deceiving. We're very good quick. What we call natural or maybe a better way is lay psychologists. We're very good at that. Most of your instincts are pretty good. You read people in a certain way. My guess is you're probably reading them accurately if you said I really kind of trusted this person or didn't trust it because we're pretty good detectors of that. They had people sitting just like you in a classroom and at the end of the semester, they had them evaluate professors. to say, did you like that class? Was that a good, was this professor any good or not? Did, was the material good, but did they present it in such a way, and they rated them at the end. Well, studies have shown that they've also found out, you know, these scores, and those scores were highly correlated with people who only saw, they decided, how much time do you need to be with that professor before you decide that they're pretty good? How much time do you think you need in a class in front of a particular professor to realize if they're any good or not? How much time do you think you would need to compare with evaluations of somebody that sat in the entire semester and watched them? Do you think you could just simply watch this person for how long, how many times before you thought you could make a pretty good judgment of them? Anybody wanna take a guess? 30 minutes. Ooh, 30 minutes? Could you tell in 30 minutes? The first one. About a minute, the first minute. First minute of class? That's all you need to know. Maybe a couple classes. They decided to try this out. By the way, they took snippets of faculty teaching for five minutes. And they took snippets and people were, by the way, they went, whoo. And they correlated very well at the end of the semester with that. And then they said, well, let's try it a little bit lower. And they went one minute. Then they went to 30 seconds. They even found students were pretty good at determining and were pretty strongly matched up with this professor's do after a five second clip of just watching this person, him or her. We're pretty good at it. at it, but what does it mean and can it be wrong? And what about these kinds of what we call unconscious processes that are very, we call it unconscious cognition, you're good at it. Ready, think about a stranger that you've met in the last 24 hours. Somebody that may be a waiter or a waitress at a restaurant, you've never seen them before. Or somebody that checked you out somewhere at a grocery store. Whatever, checked you out or checked you out at the grocery store. A stranger. Anybody have that? Ready? Think of their face. How many have, within the last 48 hours, somebody you've never seen before. How many have their face in mind? Think about it real quick. 24, 40 hours. Can you picture their face? Are you good? If I showed you their face, do you think if I flashed it up here, remember, you've never seen them before, do you think you'd be able to pick their face out? Then I took another group of people, and suppose that was in this classroom, I said, ready? And I happened to have the picture of these strangers, and I flashed them up to you, and you'd go, oh, that's him, that's her. She was checking me out at the grocery store. What if we took another classroom and said the same thing, somebody over the last 24 to 48 hours. And you've never seen... Now write down their face. Tell me everything about them. What did they look like? Describe for me what their hair was like. What kind of features? What were they wearing? Were they tall, short? Start describing and writing down what they looked like. And what if we spent like 30 minutes going over the details? Who would be able to pick out the faces of the stranger better, you or classroom B when I had them go through all that scenario? Who would be better? at picking out the faces of a stranger and remembering somebody you've never seen before. If you just simply did it like I described it, think about the face, could you pick them out? Or we went through a detailed way in which we start to look at and think about faces. Who says this classroom would be better than the classroom that I just described? How many say that classroom I described over there where they took 30 minutes to write down the details and thought about it and kind of, hmm, how many don't know? You don't even know what I'm talking about right now. The answer is, the other classroom is not better at this. In fact, they do worse. Because it's something like this, your brains do something very quickly when we process information about faces we've never seen before. Our brains lodge them in. and we record them kind of in this facial recognition part of the brain in something called, well, in the right hemisphere, which has a lot to do in this right hemisphere with kind of images and pictures, not all of it, but most of the time it's housed there. And your recall for that is pretty good. What happened to the other group when I started to ask them to tell me about the face and to write it down? It also happens to people who happen to see crimes. When they start to rehearse it and write it down and think through the face and say, well, it was kind of brown hair. and I couldn't tell he's kind of parted there and a little short but he had kind of weird eyebrows and well let me think this. The left hemisphere begins to take over and the left hemisphere starts to write and overwrite the picture. the picture that you had in the right hemisphere by something, a process that we call verbal overshadowing. And in this verbal overshadowing, we now find that it actually messes up the recall of the real face. Isn't that interesting? So. All's the point is, is that to get to these kinds of conclusions about human behavior, things that I think are very important, because they're about us, we have to do this scientifically and it has to be done in a discipline, using a method that we say is empirically based. You see, just because you tell me something about, oh, I like this professor or not, well, that's great, it's an armchair kind of reaction, why you trust or not trust somebody, which is accurate, but also, is also prone to error, but the only way we eventually get down to what are the factors involved, what parts of the brain are even involved, what kinds of experiences and background, we have to do this by doing something called an empirical investigation using observation and documentation. That's the theme. We'll talk about science. as the method, the preferred method, for psychologists to use. In fact, most of my lecture next time is going to be on the science of psychology. Another key theme is that behavior is going to be multi-determined. What that simply means is that behavior, your behavior, whether or not you like or dislike something, why in which you acted in a particular way is what we call multi-determined. How do we know and explain people's behavior By narrowing it down, we try and find, but rarely do we ever find a single cause for your behavior. If you had a friend that, anybody know somebody that dropped out of college after the first semester? Dropped out. 20 hands are raised. If I asked you why did they drop out of college, You can probably give me an answer, well they didn't have enough money, they didn't do very well, they didn't connect, they didn't do anything. But rarely is the answer that simple. We call this that there are probably many factors related to explaining why we did what we did. Why did I get mad at this poor lady standing on my my doorstep, well it wasn't one single thing. You see, but her behavior was determined by things but so was my behavior, a lot of things that went into that. And so a theme in psychology is going to be that psychology is multi-behavior, multi-determined. Psychology says that behavior, sorry, is multi-determined. It could be because I mentioned before, shyness has a very strong hereditary link, it's very what we call internally explainable, that is is there's some genetic reasons for a lot of our shy behavior or high excitability or reactivity we talked about last time. But sometimes our behavior is the result More of our experiences. I think I'm a little bit more suspicious, maybe, of people. Better yet, maybe I guess a little bit more skeptical because I've been around people that, you know, are disturbed. People that are criminally insane act and think differently and it influences your worldview, yes? But that means that some of my environment, some of my experiences have shaped who I am. And so when we look at your behavior, we have to look at your genetic background and your external environment. We'll put it all together. It becomes what we call this multifactorial causation of behavior. Okay? A multifactorial causation of behavior. There's lots of reasons. There's a man who recently claimed, well, no, didn't claim. He confessed to a crime. He confessed to this crime this way, and it was... To this person, you don't need to write this down. Colorado, JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in 1996. How many have heard of this murder? Long time ago, possibly she'd be close to your age now, I would imagine, if she had lived. No. Yeah. What year were some of y'all born? January 1st. Yeah. She was probably around your age. 1996, she was six years old, some of you. Close, not far off. You don't have to write this down. John Bonnet was murdered in Colorado in 1996. Her killer has never been found. Two years ago, no, four years ago, this man, John Mark Carr, was arrested and confessed to killing her. And John Mark Carr said, I killed her. The investigation had been going on for over, yeah, 10 years then at that point. It was later determined he was in Atlanta at the time of the murders, and his DNA cleared him of being there. Why would John Mark Carr confess to killing somebody that he didn't kill? Maybe what? Maybe he had a guilty conscience about something, that maybe something else happened, and he just wanted to confess it, maybe. I think maybe just to cover for the... Maybe to cover for somebody else. Maybe there was something he did. The other person he killed. Maybe there was some sort of way in which the real murderer convinced him or forced him. What's that? Oh, maybe he just simply wanted to be known for something and to be popular, that's a good one. Maybe he was told so many times that he did it. Maybe he told himself or somebody told him so many times they did it, he just started believing it. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he was crazy. Why did he confess, no one knows. Why would an innocent man, what factors? Do you see what I mean by multi-causal? You came up with about 10 to 15, you'd have to go out and explore all of these and understand this. There's lots of reasons why somebody might do something. And this is just an odd behavior. By the way, a family spokesperson said he may have some personality problems, but he's not a killer. Is it personality? personality issues, are there disorders, is there a way in which he wanted to maybe bring attention to himself, all kinds of things. Alright, it's hard enough when a person has some struggles and issues and let's call this, he's suffering most likely from a mental disorder, then predicting his behavior can be difficult. But what if we took people more normal? What if we tried to predict behavior, let's say somebody like, I don't know, let's try somebody more normal, let's try Michael Jackson. Okay, maybe not. Let's do this person. Who is that? Lady Gaga. Okay, she's not normal. Could we predict somebody's behavior normal? How about a bunch of you all, by all the students, at a basketball game? or midnight madness or at some other event. Could we explain, why would people all dress up in the same colors? Why are they screaming and lifting their hands? Why are they yelling like that? Or dancing looking like that? Or is he, why would you behave that way? Could we explain their behavior? Riot mentality. Riot mentality? They feel what we talked about last time, maybe anonymity to act in a crazy way. How else can we explain behavior like that in groups? Peer pressure. Peer pressure? The excitement of the moment? Maybe they just naturally kinda like to hang out in big groups and act. They could be feeding off each other. Feeding off others'energy and the emotions that we talked about. Okay. All that to say, when we take even more normal behavior, just simply taking a snapshot, it becomes complex. You sitting here taking notes, some of you, it's pretty easy. You're sitting here taking notes. You're writing down things. That's pretty easy to explain. Hmm, but there's a lot that goes into it. And psychologists, as a key theme that we're going to explore throughout this class, has found that our behavior has lots of causes to it, and it is all... almost impossible for me and anybody else to give you a single answer. People say, oh you study psychology, can you tell me why this? Like, no I can't. We work with couples and they get divorced. Why does somebody get divorced? It's like, oh my God. I can tell you like many reasons. There's no one thing. People say, oh they got divorced because he cheated on her. She just could not, you know, whatever, and that's why they got divorced. Nah, it was destined to fail at the beginning because, well, guess what? As we stop and explore these kinds of behaviors, they become very multi-determined. On top of that... Level of complexity is the fact that many psychologists come out of different disciplines, what we call a theoretically diverse set of assumptions and schools exist in the field of psychology. Currently, we would say there are a number of perspectives out there in the field of psychology that help orient and guide how we even explain or study human behavior. Some of the most common perspectives out there, and you'll see these listed in your textbook would be, a neuroscience perspective. The one I've been kinda talking a little bit about when I say the amygdala has a very important role in us understanding things like emotions or fear or even the guy who lost his sight and still saw what? He saw because of the amygdala pathway to the eyes, he still was able to pick out how he felt when he saw a picture of a human in front of him even though he couldn't see it. Remember, he still felt happy because they were smiling. Well, that's a neuroscience perspective. that says some of, and they would approach the world by looking at that, but there are others, like the evolutionary perspective is huge. Explaining our behavior, and humans on the basis of understanding that we've, from an evolutionary standpoint, have had millions of years, and you can explain, oh, that's why people behave the way they do. That's a big, common, popular perspective out there. But so is behavioral genetics. Our behavior is a result of our genetic background, and that which is influenced. in many ways, shape, or form is because of some of the things that have occurred in our genetic history. Epigenes and every other kind of ways in which we can think through behavior that way. Or there's still even an old perspective on psychodynamic or behavioral, cognitive, and social cultural perspectives. These are talked about in your book. I want you just to look at them, but they're different perspectives. That is, and there's a lot of diversity. So even if you meet a single psychologist, you don't necessarily know what theoretical perspective they might be. be bringing. So for me, by the way, my training, my training is usually right here in social, cultural, okay? A little bit of cognitive and a little bit of behavioral. That's my training. But I have interests in some of these others. And they're very diverse. Just to show you, you don't have to write this down. Psychologists have what's called this division of American Psychological Association. I'll call it APA, the American Psychological Association. And there are all these different... different divisions and so just to show you how diverse this group is, you can be a member of like one or two or you can be a member of as many divisions as you want but most people are members of like two or three divisions and they go to these national conferences and I'll give you two pages of these, ready? Here are all the different divisions that are recognized by the American Psychological Association of which you can be a member and go to their and there are hundreds and hundreds of psychologists that are members of each of these divisions and they have their own little groups and they're all very diverse. and they meet and they talk about research. And then by the way, here's the next page. Right now there's like 56, there's actually fewer than that, maybe there's more, you know, because there's a few that aren't up there, they disbanded or don't, you know, aren't around as much anymore, so they lose their number, but they, anyway, I'll tell you what, just to show you, you can, I don't know, you might wanna see these number different topics they might study, but let's go back. Do you have a question about what might they study or might they be interested in as psychologists in one of these divisions? If you have an interest, maybe I can tell you what they do. there, just give me maybe the number that you want me to say. What do they do in like number 19 or whatever? Number 10. Okay, number 10, psychology and the arts. Well, primarily psychologists and this connection with the art world involves lots of things. Understanding Appreciating art, but even the very fact of how we take in things, the use of, for example, three dimensions and what that does, the use of colors and its impact, how you might use contexts or locations to change how a person might feel or experience a work of art, but those are just some different ways. Gosh, that's just on the sensation side and the perception side, Escher's use of, you know, two figures, even applying this, there's different ways in which they might apply the findings, like doing art therapy, for example, with kids. Anybody else have a number? That was a good one. If not, I'll move on, yeah. 20, what? 25 is experimental analysis of behavior, kind of what we've been talking about. All of the principles involved with understanding how and why humans behave, but even understanding the methods and the different approaches, the limitations that we have, but they would study, well you can imagine, mostly about how you go about studying it. Okay, anybody else? 21, oh applied experimental and engineering psychology. Engineering psychology, this is kind of known as, have you ever heard of human factor psychology? Human factors, you can create, let's say, an engineer, a product, let's say like this computer keyboard, but psychologists or human factors or engineering psychologists would come alongside and help how you design a keyboard to interact with a human like... One of my classes in this, we studied, we were looking at the space shuttle, and at the time they were doing these man maneuvering units. These were the old things that they would be able to take space, you know, space walks, and you have to be tethered, but these would be untethered, because they'd be in this, have you ever heard of those? They're sitting in like this chair, they would kinda like move them around, you know, it was like a man maneuvering unit, you could, more like a, you know, I don't know, but you could do it, well engineers created this cool thing, but the The engineering psychologist came around and said, look, this guy's gonna have a big old glove and you have these two buttons. This one moves you forward, this one moves you back, and they're right next to each other. With the big glove, he can move them both. Or this one ejects him or something. You gotta scoot that button over. Or if they're under all these Gs of pressure, you gotta reach up, should you have, ready? I had a whole class on buttons and knobs. Because if you want somebody, engineering, let's say you're in a fighter jet and you're flying this thing, and all of a sudden you now have Somebody's about to shoot you down and you have to take evasive action. You have to do it really quick. Should you have a button that you push, twist, lift up and down, punch? What should it be? You have to make the quickest decision. Should it be beep, beep, beep, beep? And milliseconds matter. Well that's what we studied. What color should they be? Does the human process certain colors faster, better, quicker? And if you wanted them to go ooh, bat, like that. Should they be in a certain way, order, sequence? That's way cool, huh? That's engineering psychology. Any other numbers? If not, I'll, yeah. 47, exercise and sport, as you might imagine, could be almost anything related to helping athletes, in particular, but even non-athletes, you know, people that are just exercising, how to get, let's say, the best out of the routine. So they'll study things like exercise programs, how to, like, visualization processes to get the most out of it. Olympic athletes have this great training center and you have guys that are there in exercise and sports psychology training and teaching them. My office mate when I was a graduate student studied exercise psychology and she wanted to find out what's the influence of exercise on pregnant moms. If moms are pregnant, should you exercise or not? Well, she studied this by studying pregnant rats. And she put pregnant rats into this thing of water and they had to keep going in a barrel and they had to keep going like that and like that and like that and like that and they would lift their heads up all the time but that's how she got them to exercise without saying, you know, run a mile because they never did. And so she just put them in the water and they'd be like, and she wanted to see, does it affect their birth weight? Do they have smaller, my, what do they call those things? Smaller litters than if they had, you know, if they didn't exercise and does exercise at certain times and so. I'd come in and I'd be looking at these mice swimming around all the time, pregnant mice. Very weird. Okay, I'll do maybe two more. 46, ooh, media psychology. We'll talk about some of these as we go along, but you can see how diverse it is. All of these areas are different. Media psychology, as you might imagine, is not only the side of presenting psychology to the media and doing things like that. And how to be involved in that kind of thing and whatever. But also the study of the process. How do people understand messages, get them out of media? How does, for example, just being in a movie theater influence us? Y'all know what happened, the very first movie that they ever showed to a group like this is about 19 when, anybody? 18, 19, something like that. They put together a film. What happened to the audience, the very first movie? Well, influenced them in this way. They showed a train. Coming at the audience, and what did the audience do? First movie they ever sat through and watched, the first film clip, they got up and ran. Because they thought the train was going to hit them. That's weird. Could you imagine? Like, oh, he's got a knife, run, man. We'd never get through any movie. But that tells you something about human brains and how we respond to media. That looks real to me. And you react as if it is. You've just turned off that part that says run. but you do like hold on to the seat, run, grab. That's media psychology. We gotta move on. Cool stuff. These are just some different topics, whether it's addictions or adult development or conflict resolution or, like I said, engineering or. or history or human factors as I mentioned, law. You name it, lots of issues, broadly diverse field. You can specialize in bigger fields like developmental. My specialty was in social and cognitive psych, but you can do personality, psychometrics, physiology, and other, we don't know what these guys do, but they specialize in something. And where they work, if you find out, we found a whole bunch, we don't know where they work either. And so, other. You can work in businesses, or governments, counseling centers, hospitals, clinics, independent practices, schools, anyway, so you can see it's very broad and diverse. Last key thing for today, the last key thing is that our world is highly subjective. When I reacted to that lady on my doorstep, that was because of my background, my history, my culture, all the things that make me, even my mood at the time. So therefore, one of the things we're also going to find out is the way you and the way I experience the world are highly subjective depending upon our culture, our mood, our families of origin, how much attention you pay. I said this, we were in this store and this guy reached over and we're standing in front of one of the fast food restaurant and the guy ordered in front of us and he distracted the lady as he distracted her. The cashier, he reached over and grabbed all these cups, big gigantic drink cups, and he walked over and he took them over there and plain as day, I thought, and I'm like, oh my gosh, he just distracted, reached over, look, it was pretty quick, reached over, took them, put them over there, did some kind of ruse and walked over, said, oh hey, thanks for the cups, buddy, like that, so the lady didn't think he was stealing them, whatever, and he went and gave them to his family and they drank. So we're sitting down eating, I said, oh my God, that was. and Lisa goes, what, that guy, he's reaching over, digging those cups, she's like, what guy? That guy over there, she goes, he did what? When we were standing there, you didn't see that? She goes, no, I didn't see any of that. You didn't see him do it? No, I didn't see that. Huh, that's weird. Our behaviors are the result of the things we kind of pay attention to. It's not that she, she just was thinking about other things at the moment. But if we miss some things, then it's going to influence, and so therefore, I pay attention to you, you pay attention to me, but sometimes we're distracted. And when we're distracted, we don't always comprehend or record experiences. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I. Yeah. Yeah. No, there are very, your experiences, your life backgrounds do influence lots of things that even attention, right? What you pay attention to, if you come from a background in a certain area, you're gonna pay more attention to that area, right? If you say, if you are, by the way. you work around behavior disturbed kids or people that are in locked up facilities, you start to be able to pick them out a little bit easier. Even walking down the street, I pay attention to people. The other day, a guy was wearing a Troy Polamalu jersey. from the Pittsburgh Steelers, he walks in, we were in another restaurant, he walks in, he orders some food, he's on his skateboard, walks out, I'm with my family, whole family, he comes in, takes his food, he walks out, walks away. And I noticed the Troy Palamalu jersey, but I noticed him, what he looked like, long hair, young guy, blah, blah, blah, walking that, he walks out with his bag, and then he came. Back right around the restaurant and he went past us a few minutes and he didn't have the bag and then about five minutes later he went the other way on his skateboard and we're still eating and I'm noticing all this and then we walk out to the car we get ready to go in and the same guy is on his skateboard coming down right by us and one of my kids says wow look at that guy's got a Troy Palamoglu jersey on and I said yeah is that in the in there oh cool look at it and I said well haven't you guys seen him before they're like what do you mean And none of them saw him before. He's been here three times. He came in, he ordered this, and they look at me like, who are you? Why do you care about that? Like, because he came in, he did this, and they just look at me like, we don't think about those kinds of things. We're more normal than you. But they get used to it, so we all look at different things based upon our experiences. By the way, we do start with some assumptions in the idea of how we take some, the relationship between Christianity and science. I just really want to switch over to this and just say this. Our experience and the way we look at the world is so different. even the field of psychology has been impacted by some of the ways in which we even make assumptions about the field. So we make assumptions about like science. Do Christians make assumptions about science that might be different than what maybe some that are not Christian make about science? Some Christians take assumptions about science like things like this, ready? Scientists as a general rule, but not all of them, what we might call naturalists, those who say there is no maybe a supernatural world out there, make an assumption that there is a world based upon natural principles. By the way, we call that very thing naturalism. But they make some other assumptions that maybe are different than what some people might make. And because of this, there's been some conflict at times between a Christian worldview and a scientific worldview. scientific worldview, mostly because a naturalistic worldview would say, ah, everything is about nature, you don't have to appeal to anything supernatural. You don't have to appeal to an immaterial. We don't have an immaterial soul. You're not gonna find a lot of psychologists that believe in an immaterial soul. Christians. Have however, this very powerful idea notion that we're not just composed of matter, there is something else there. And so ideas like reductionism, assumptions like evolution or relativism, all are some of the most basic assumptions you'll. find in science, but it doesn't mean that they are assumptions that you have to have if your worldview is different, and mine, and many of your worldviews are different, because we do believe that there is a God. who exists, that we have souls that do have an immaterial sense, that sometimes we can't explain behavior just by simply reducing it down to its most basic parts. Now not all naturalists necessarily believe in all of these, things like determinism or evolution, but I'm telling you these are assumptions that a lot of scientists make because they believe, and these all depend very heavily upon what's called a natural basis for the origin and operation. of the universe. But I'm here to say that you could be a very good scientist and not make any of these assumptions. In fact, some of the best scientists have been those who didn't necessarily buy into a naturalistic worldview. They did and were open to the possibility that God did come in and create and do some things in this created order and therefore we can find design or evidence of design in creation. Or that maybe, it just maybe there's the chance that there's a way to explore and understand some things about the created order that would give us some sense about order that we find. And so all of these assumptions of science are necessarily bad or good. It's just that when we sometimes make these assumptions and we say everybody else has to have these, and then we will find ourselves at differences and at odds with some scientists out there. if they believe these things. Many of them are not talked about though. Did a whole PhD, ready, in a scientific field? Experimental social psychology, we never once talked about assumptions like, well, only in a history class. We just didn't talk about it because they were. What? Because they were assumptions. Lastly, I'm just going to put up the last thing and then we'll go. Some biblical presuppositions, I'll just put up these three, that there are presuppositions we make. A creator God, an immaterial essence of human nature. Ready? Some biblical presuppositions that are in kind of contrast is that there was a creator God, there is an immaterial essence to human nature. and there's a sinful, fallen human nature and then God ultimately sanctifies. Those assumptions do bring a needed balance, I think, to this perspective and this kind of, what I think is a somewhat limited view of human nature if we stick with just simply a materialistic, naturalistic assumption. All right. You're done. We're going to talk next time about a very quick who psychologists are, a history of psychology, and then the methods of. Biola University offers a variety of biblically-centered degree programs, ranging from business to ministry to the arts and sciences. Visit biola.edu to find out how Biola could make a difference in your life.