module one introduction to psychology as a science here are the learning objectives for the first module of this class these two i'm going to use these learning objectives which you can read but i want to use them to make two broad points about psychology the first being it's is a science at least the way that we will be approaching this topic in this class we will be taking a scientific approach to understanding psychology and the second point and the second broad point shown here is that psychology is broad now psychology is a science uh people don't always think of psychology as as the science but in uh in modern academic psychology certainly um psychologists really try to take a scientific approach so what does that mean to say that psychologists take a scientific approach or that psychology is a science well there are a lot of different ways that people can conceive of science and in another module in this class we'll look a little bit more closely at research methods employed in the field of psychology but for now the basic idea is that ideas in psychology which we can think of as hypotheses or theories are checked against data so what that means is that when a psychologist has an idea about the field about people and about how people work they don't just run with the idea but rather they collect some data to check whether or not the data are consistent or inconsistent with that idea and this is something that is common to all natural sciences and social sciences this the idea of using data to check our ideas to check our hypotheses and to check our theories now in order for this to work in psychology it must be true that people are predictable to some extent if scientists are studying something that is unpredictable then well it will be kind of hard to make any progress so in order first first to proceed in order for theories to to to work uh they need to be able to make predictions now psychology is concerned lar with people not exclusively with people but largely with people and it turns out that people are predictable i make this point here because it sort of flies in the face of a lot of common everyday intuition uh sometimes people often make the claim um that people are unpredictable this goes nicely with our our notions of free will we make our own minds up we make our own choices right so we you know we there's nothing predictable about us necessarily um but it turns out that um that that this idea that people are in in unpredictable is just incorrect and in fact if people were truly unpredictable imagine how difficult life would be i like to imagine driving on a road if people were unpredictable how dangerous would driving be as you were approaching a light the light is red are you going to stop are you going to go is the person next to you going to stop or go if they are really unpredictable you have no way of knowing um but it turns out that people are predictable people usually not always but usually obey traffic signals so that's an everyday example another way that people are predictable think of a country that starts with the letter d and i'll give you a second here think of a letter sorry think of a country that starts with the letter d you were probably thinking of the country denmark if you weren't thinking of the country denmark then you were probably thinking of dominican republic and if you weren't thinking of dominican republic or denmark maybe you were thinking of dominica or djibouti if you were thinking of something else like denver then you didn't follow the instructions because denver is not a country but my money if i had to bet it would be on denmark how do i know this i know this because somebody has actually asked this question to large numbers of north american college students and most north american college students when asked to think of a country that starts with the letter d say denmark the next most common response is dominican republic and rounding out the top four would be dominica and djibouti there are no other countries that start with the letter d so if you said denmark you might have been a bit surprised that i was able to guess but i didn't really guess i just made a prediction based on responses that people in the past have given now there's also a good chance that quite a few of you didn't think of denmark that you were thinking of something else yeah dominican republic and every once in a while i even get somebody thinking about i've got that response to denver um uh so i was probably right but not necessarily and if if you were sitting watching this video and you weren't thinking about denmark you were thinking about something else well that's not surprising either that doesn't mean that people aren't predictable what that means is that people are predictable specifically what people think and what people do are predictable mind and behavior are predictable even if the predictions aren't quite perfect the predictions are still better than chance and this is important because it makes taking a scientific approach to psychology possible now hopefully you got the point that i was trying to make in the previous slide that people are predictable to some degree i hope you don't think that you know i'm a mind reader i would never make that claim but you know people other people well and myself i guess included we we we make lots of claims about psychology and it's important to evaluate these critically and that means systematically evaluating claims using well-supported evidence that is don't just accept what people say don't just accept all claims rather you need to stop and think about them and evaluate them to see whether or not they are true that means being skeptical however this is science right and that means that we should be willing to change our minds if the evidence suggests it right so this is sometimes called amiable skepticism that is um you need to be amiable or open to new ideas but also you need to carefully weigh the evidence for the ideas and if if the evidence suggests that this idea that you're evaluating is not correct well then you you shouldn't accept it right you you should uh well maybe hold on to your previous belief maybe look for something new this is uh you know critical thinking and ambient move skepticism are incredibly important in a field like psychology because there are lots of claims about psychology in the news and social media and the textbooks and throughout this course we will have a look at lots of these claims and evaluate them to the second big point psychology is broad as i hinted at in the last couple of slides psychology is often defined as the science of mind and behavior sometimes it's the scientific study of mind and behavior or the scientific study of the thinking brain and behavior or something like that but this is a pretty good generic definition for the field the science of mind and behavior often times when people think of psychology or what psychologists do they think about people who are who who help diagnose and treat people with psychological disorders or people who have personal problems or something like that and indeed there are psychologists called clinical psychologists or counseling psychologists who are involved in mental health however the scope of psychology is way beyond clinical psychology if you think about this definition the science of mind and behavior mind and behavior are necessary for everything people do therefore psychology is relevant for everything that people do and one of the things that you will learn in this course is the breadth of psychology so i want to share with you in the next couple of slides some things that psychologists have studied on some things that psychologists do that might be surprising to you my aim here is not to give a representative view of all of the things that psychologists do but rather to point out some of the things that psychologists do that people often don't associate with psychology some of this will be in the textbook some of this is not in the textbook first is psychologists are involved with bridging the mind and body that's sometimes called the mind body problem what is surprising to some people is that there is a branch of psychology that tries to do this with math in fact this is a very old area of psychology there is a man named fechner gustav fechner who was trained in physics he lived in the 1800s in germany he's the founder of a field called psychophysics and what he did is he discovered mathematical relationships between physical measurements and people's responses he wrote these equations down and psychologists to this day rely on fechner's psychophysical methods and psychophysical laws to develop mathematical models between the physical world and the psychological world now for those of you who are thinking this is going to turn into a math course don't worry again my point here is just to bring up some things that might be surprising about psychology that people don't think of and psychophysics is certainly one of those another thing that psychologists are involved with is improving computer games there's a company called valve software and they employ experimental psychologists in order to improve game play now the games that valve software makes these are not educational games they are not games related to mental health or anything like that these are games that are just meant to be well fun some of them um arguably are a little bit too violent but it sometimes comes as a surprise to people that experi there are some experimental psychologists employed at valve who have worked with them doing research on what goes into making a good game and the psychologists have helped have helped the company okay third thing improving educational outcomes so cognitive psychologists in particular have studied which techniques are best for improving memory in educational settings so this this a lot of what we know about how memory really works has come out of cognitive psychology and one of the things that i hope you will get in this class is an understanding of how your own mind works and how your own memory works so that you can effectively use them in order to learn better and do better in your classes and in other situations where you need to use your memory psychologists have also had an impact in marketing specifically in helping businesses improve sales of their products whatever their products would be might be well how this has happened because one of the things that psychologists have studied social psychologists in particular is how to change people's attitudes and persuade people to do something like buy a product psychologists have also had an impact in economics helping us understand how economies run in fact daniel kahneman who is a psychologist not an economist won the 2001 nobel prize in economics for his research on how people make decisions it turns out that how people make decisions has important implications for how economies work and daniel kahneman quite by accident at least in the initial early days of his research his research on decision making turned out he was doing research on economic decision making that had a huge impact this is something we will learn a little bit more about later in this course finally something else that psychologists have had an impact on is artificial intelligence specifically building art better artificial intelligence so artificial neural networks which if you have a background in computer science you might have heard of artificial neural networks but these were inspired largely by the work of neuropsychologists like donald o hebb donald o hebb studied the brain and how cells in the brain are connected to one another in order to help the brain process information and to learn and computer scientists took note of this work and thought that they could program computers to learn if they could program computers to learn like the brain learns then computers could become a lot more useful so if you use the internet now or you use facebook or lots of software there are artificial neural networks that do things oh lots of different things like help make a recommendations uh when you want to buy something a lot of the computer vision systems are based uh on or they're more evolved from the early artificial neural networks but it had its start in in psychology and some psychologists even to this day are still involved in creating artificial intelligence so these are just six things that i've showed you that psychology is involved in that a lot of times people don't think of they don't people don't think of psychology in economics necessarily or psychology and marketing or psychology and artificial intelligence or psychology and mathematics but these are all things that psychology is has impacted and again this isn't meant to be representative of the field this is meant to be more examples of things that psychologists have done that a lot of people haven't necessarily thought about there is of course much more to psychology we of course don't i don't have time in the span of a single introductory lecture to go over the entirety of the field in fact even in a single course we will not have near enough time to go over the entirety of the field of psychology because psychology is such a broad field one of the things you can do is you can think of this course as kind of like a menu so this course what i will try to do is present to you an overview a broad overview of the field of psychology and so you will get to see the kinds of things the kinds of issues that psychologists deal with and try to get a better understanding of how psychologists have tried to approach these issues now sort of like a menu what that means is you really won't necessarily get a taste for any of the particular areas i will try to do a little bit of sampling here and there for some of the things as we can but psychology is such a broad field that it would be impossible for us to to to get into too many areas in depth and still complete the course in 16 weeks or eight weeks so in conclusion i've tried to convince you of two main points one that psychology is a science or at least psychology can be a science and that psychology is an incredibly broad field much broader than just mental health although mental health is important there's a lot more to psychology if you understand these two points it will help you make sense of the rest of the topics covered in this course