Distinguishing psychology

This book is suitable for all kinds of readers. If you are curious about psychology and interested in what psychologists are doing, you can find the answer from the book. If you are preparing or conducting psychological research, this book will help you to have a macro understanding of the systematicness of psychological research; If you think Freud is psychology, then you admire the psychological counselors appearing in the media who are more powerful than fortune tellers. You must read this book and master some tools to judge true knowledge and pseudoscience.

1 Introduction to Modern Psychology

Before explaining the present situation of modern psychology, it must be explained that Freud, who is well-known far and near, has profoundly influenced people's understanding of psychology, and the exaggeration of popular psychology by various media has led to many misinterpretations of modern psychology. In fact, Freud's psychoanalysis is just a drop in the bucket in the topic, data and theory of modern psychological research. Among the members of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Department Association, the psychologists who pay attention to Freudian psychoanalysis account for only 10% and 5% respectively.

Novices may be confused. How to disperse psychological knowledge? This suspicion may come from our educational experience. Both physics and chemistry have a unified and complete theory, while psychology has no theory that can be used to explain all aspects of human consciousness and behavior. Contemporary psychology is more like medicine, with many branches, and the unified or integrated part is scientific research methods.

To sum up, what does psychology study: using scientific and technological means to study human consciousness and behavior; And put these research results into practice.

2 psychological research methods

There are two important parts in psychological research methods, operation definition and control, which ensure the scientific nature of psychological research.

When it comes to the definition of operation, everyone can understand that there are some methods to measure what to study, both direct and indirect. However, it should be noted that the operational definition of psychology may be very different from the theory of personality and personal behavior formed in everyone's mind. It may be difficult for us to imagine that "first principal component factor obtained from factor analysis of large sample cognitive tasks" is part of the operational definition of the psychological term "intelligence". The operational definition of "depression", which we often talk about, occupies 12 page in the Handbook of Diagnosis and Statistics of Psychological Disorders, which is completely different from what we call "a feeling of falling into a trough".

Control refers to balancing or eliminating the influence of other variables when studying whether one variable has an influence on the result through a certain method. Let's take a look at the examples of the study on mother-infant attachment in the book. Previously, the popular assumption of this phenomenon was that mother-infant attachment was because mother was the source of baby food. But after careful analysis, we found that mothers can provide not only food, but also comfort, warmth, caress, stimulation and so on, which may also cause attachment. Psychologists choose monkeys to study and design artificial scenes. In each case, except for one possible reason, the other variables are controllable.

Not just psychology.

In addition to the related knowledge of psychology, the book also points out some misunderstandings that often appear in our cognition. For example, people are always fascinated by theories or doctrines that are more absurd and have no precise definition; For the explanation of many things, most people tend to rely on intuition, so the probability problem is often the death point of people. You can test yourself with the following examples to see how your statistics are:

If 1000 people have 1 000 people carrying HIV, it is assumed that there is a test that can 100% diagnose people who really carry the virus; Finally, suppose this test has a 5% chance that there is no carrier. In other words, among people who do not carry HIV, this test will also wrongly detect that 5% of people are HIV carriers. Suppose we randomly find a person to do this test and get a positive reaction, that is, this person is HIV positive. Suppose we don't know this person's medical history, what is the probability that he is really an HIV carrier?

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