Psych 10 Vocab - Prologue

Front 1

psychology

Back 1

the study of the mind and brain

Front 2

levels of explanation

Back 2

rungs on a ladder of explanation, with lower levels tied most closely to biological influences and higher levels tied most closely to social influences

Front 3

mysterians

Back 3

people who believe that certain questions regarding human nature are unaswerable

Front 4

Meehl's maxim

Back 4

guideline that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior

Front 5

multiply determined

Back 5

caused by many factors

Front 6

single-variable explanations

Back 6

explanations that try to account for complex behaviors in terms of only a single cause

Front 7

multicollinearity

Back 7

overlap among different causes of behavior, often making it difficult to identify which case or causes are operating

Front 8

reciprocal determinism

Back 8

tendency for people to mutually influence each other's behavior

Front 9

jangle fallacy

Back 9

error of assuming that measures that carry the same label necessarily assess the same thing

Front 10

reflexivity

Back 10

paradox referring to the fact that the human brain is trying to understand itself

Front 11

reactivity

Back 11

tendency for people to behave differently when they know they're being studied

Front 12

individual differences

Back 12

variations among people in their thinking, emotion, and behavior

Front 13

emic

Back 13

approach of studying a culture's behavior from the perspective of an insider

Front 14

etic

Back 14

approach of studying a culture's behavior from the perspective of an outsider

Front 15

introspection

Back 15

method by which trained observers carefully reflect and report on their mental experiences

Front 16

paranormal

Back 16

events, like extrasensory perception, that fall outside the boundaries of traditional science

Front 17

science-practitioner gap

Back 17

divide between psychologists who believe that clinical practice should primarily be a science versus those who believe that clinical practice should primarily be an art

Front 18

structuralism

Back 18

school of psychology that aimed to identify the basic elements of psychological experience

Front 19

functionalism

Back 19

school of psychology that aimed to understand the adaptive purposes of psychological characteristics

Front 20

behaviorism

Back 20

school of psychology that focuses on uncovering the general laws of learning by looking outside the organism

Front 21

black box

Back 21

term sometimes used to describe behaviorists' view of the mind, namely, an unknown entity that we don't need to understand to explain behavior

Front 22

cognition

Back 22

mental processes involved in different aspects of thinking

Front 23

psychoanalysis

Back 23

school of psychology, founded by Sigmund Freud, that focuses on internal psychological processes of which we're unaware

Front 24

critical multiplism

Back 24

approach of using many different methods in concert

Front 25

basic research

Back 25

research examining how the mind works

Front 26

applied research

Back 26

research examining how we can use basic research to solve real-world problems

Front 27

evolutionary psychology

Back 27

discipline that applies Darwin's theory of natural selection to human and animal behavior

Front 28

just-so stories

Back 28

superficial explanations made up after the fact; a term sometimes applied by critics to some evolutionary psychology hypotheses

Front 29

compatibilism

Back 29

compromise between free will and determinism that says the two can coexist