Psychology For Dummies

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Now I’m going to enter into the fray with my own metaphor for better or worse. I don’t think this metaphor is particularly unique, however, and there’s likely chance that I borrowed it from someone else. But I think it’s a good one, so here it is: B.F. Skinner (1948) published Walden Two, in which he described a utopian society founded upon behaviorist principles. According to Rogers (1959), we want to feel, experience and behave in ways which are consistent with our self-image and which reflect what we would like to be like, our ideal-self. The closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the more consistent or congruent we are and the higher our sense of self-worth.

Psychology covers a topic we all have experience with — people. It’s pretty hard to say the same thing about chemistry, astronomy, or electrical engineering. Of course, we all encounter chemicals every day, but I can’t remember the last time I asked, How do they get that mouthwash to taste like mint? However, a psychologist may ask, What happens inside a person so that her toothpaste tastes like mint? As Rogers once said, “The only reality I can possibly know is the world as I perceive and experience it at this particular moment. The only reality you can possibly know is the world as you perceive and experience at this moment. And the only certainty is that those perceived realities are different. There are as many ‘real worlds’ as there are people! (Rogers, 1980, p. 102). These psychologists engage in discussions, debates, and analyses of theories, looking at philosophical issues such as epistemology, method, scientific progress, and other big picture concepts. A possible reason for the limited impact on academic psychology perhaps lies with the fact that humanism deliberately adopts a non-scientific approach to studying humans. Like all other carbon-based living organisms on planet Earth, human beings are staying alive machines. (Admit it; you instantly thought of the Bee Gees, didn’t you, or John Travolta in that white bell-bottom suit?) I’m not saying there is no meaning to life. Quite the contrary; I’m saying that the function of life is to be alive, to stay alive, and to perpetuate life. What’s the meaning of it all? Wrong book; try Philosophy For Dummies or Religion For Dummies.When I try to imagine all the reasons people do what they do, what they use to do it, and how they do it, I often run with a mad-scientist approach. I’ve always thought that one of the best ways to answer the why, what, and how questions would be to think about building a person and then set that person out performing the tasks of personhood, doing what persons do. Well, I'm not talking about actually building one like Dr. Frankenstein did — out of parts and brains and electricity — but creating a blueprint of a person’s mind and behavior, performing functions, embedded in context, like a performance space of sorts, in the way that basketball players play basketball, singers give performances, and people do people stuff. The point is, if they can cause it to happen, then they can un-cause it to happen, too. And that means they understand why and how it’s happening. This is a type of reverse psychological engineering for figuring out the why, what, and how questions of human behavior. (It’s also a good example of an empirical approach in as much as the process is observable and testable.) Over the years, each of these metatheories has enjoyed its day in the sun, only to be put on the shelf when the next big thing came along. This revolving door of explanatory frameworks makes it tough to sort through the different metatheories and choose the best one for finding the answers you’re seeking. Where do you begin?

A person is said to be in a state of incongruence if some of the totality of their experience is unacceptable to them and is denied or distorted in the self-image. Remember We’re all psychologists really. Some of us just happen to be professional psychologists. The difference between a professional psychologist and a non-professional psychologist is really a matter of degree (get it?), separated by focus, time spent, materials consumed, and methods used. Over the years, I have been asked (sometimes respectfully and nicely, sometimes not) these questions: What makes you better at this than me? What do you know that I don’t? Well, I believe it’s really a matter of degree, perspective, and the psychologist tools I use to see and do the psychologist thing. Professionals in any field seem to immerse themselves in it. Again, it's a matter of degree. We all occupy the space of a psychologist to one degree or another. Psychologists just spend more time engaged in conscious and deliberate effort to stay in that space and look at the world from that viewpoint. We spend our time and careers occupying that space and doing the psychologist thing, occasionally coming out of the trance to share what we have seen, think, and found to be objectively true, at least as far as science allows us. But ultimately, psychology is only one way of looking at people and the world they interact with.Rogers, C. R. (1946). Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. American Psychologist, 1, 415-422.

Humanistic theorists say these individual subjective realities must be looked at under three simultaneous conditions.

Science represents a protracted attempt to contribute to a public edifice of knowledge founded on probabilistic evidence that the piecemeal construction achieves some important similarities with reality. No one sincerely believes that his or her single experiment will answer any useful question once and for all… .

Both Rogers and Maslow regarded personal growth and fulfillment in life as basic human motives. This means that each person, in different ways, seeks to grow psychologically and continuously enhance themselves. Behaviorism emphasizes the role and influence of a person’s environment and previous learning experiences to understanding behavior. Behaviorists don’t traditionally focus on mental processes per se because they believe that mental processes are too difficult to observe and measure objectively. In the framework of behaviorism, the why of behavior can be explained by looking at the circumstances in which it occurs and the consequences surrounding someone’s actions. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning are ways of understanding behavior and they lead to behavior modification, a specific approach to modifying behavior, and helping people change that comes from the metatheory of behaviorism (see Chapter 8 for details on some behavior-modification techniques that are based on classical and operant conditioning). Cognitive Rogers’ view of education saw schools as generally rigid, bureaucratic institutions which are resistant to change. Applied to education, his approach becomes ‘student-centered learning’ in which children are trusted to participate in developing and to take charge of their own learning agendas. His attitude to examinations, in particular, would no doubt, find a most receptive audience in many students: Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will. Free will is the idea that people can make choices in how they act and are self-determining. Studying a person’s subjective experience is the biggest problem for scientific psychology, which stresses the need for its subject matter to be publicly observable and verifiable. Subjective experience, by definition, resists such processes.

The foundations of this function approach are built on a philosophy know as functionalism, which is the notion that the mind, mental processes, and behavior are tools for adaptive functioning that lead to a human functioning most effectively in his or her environment (survival and perpetuation of the species). Humanism rejects scientific methodology like experiments and typically uses qualitative research methods. For example, diary accounts, open-ended questionnaires, unstructured interviews, and observations. Humanistic psychologists rejected a rigorous scientific approach to psychology because they saw it as dehumanizing and unable to capture the richness of conscious experience.Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is widely used in health and social work as a framework for assessing clients’ needs. The humanistic approach emphasizes the individual’s personal worth, the centrality of human values, and the creative, active nature of human beings. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with saying, The only constant in life is change. Developmental psychology is a metatheory that is built on the idea that mental processes and behavior change over time, from one mental process and behavior to another in a progressive manner. Mental processes are built from and upon previous ones. Behaviors are built from and upon previous ones. But then it happens: change. That’s right, something unexpected happens, and my human begins floundering, struggling, and verging on failing to achieve its primary function. How could I have forgotten that the world is not a static place? Is psychology right about people? It may or may not be, but in an attempt to live up to that challenge, psychology uses the standards of science to do so, and if conducting and practicing psychological science lends itself to some use, exposes someone to one new idea or way of thinking, and helps just one person live a better life, then it has served a valuable role in the world. It is not privileged per se. It cannot explain everything about being human. Come on, that would just pompous and downright impossible.