Understand Psychology

by Nicky Hayes

We have some needs which are absolutely basic – our physiological survival needs – and if these are not satisfied, they will motivate our behaviour almost completely.

once those needs are satisfied, a different layer in the hierarchy begins to become important.

At the top of the hierarchy, Maslow argued, is self-actualization – realizing our talents and abilities to the full. We have met this idea before, when we looked at Rogers’s work, in Chapter 2

Rogers saw self-actualization as a fundamental human need, whereas Maslow saw it as an ultimate achievement, managed by only a relatively few remarkable people.

Rogers saw it as an ongoing process in our personal development, whereas Maslow saw i...

Another great weakness in Maslow’s way of looking at motivation is that it is very specific to Western cultures. It assumes that people are motivated by a need for individual achievement, and that things like social needs are somehow optional, at least by comparison with the satisfaction of physical ones.

the idea of ‘art’ as a separate entity doesn’t exist, either. Although Balinese culture is full of what we would call art, in dance, carving, weaving and many other ways, there is no separate word for ‘art’ in the Balinese language. It is simply a part of day-to-day living. So seeing it as a separate set of motives, which we adopt once other needs are satisfied simply can’t explain what is going on.

Levels of explanation

more useful, if we are trying to understand human motivation, to take an approach which looks at it in terms of levels of explanation, than to try to explain it as a hierarchy of needs.

From the 1950s onwards though, psychologists began to develop ways of studying the mind in a more objective manner.

Thinking

Thinking can include anything from daydreaming or imagining, to trying to make sensible decisions.

we will look at the study of problem-solving and decision-making.

number of mental ‘traps’ that we fall into very easily.

One of the most important of these is when we have expectations about what we are likely to find, and these expectations affect what we do.

Mental set

lots of examples of mental set

Then Luchins gave them problems with a much simpler solution. But because they had become used to the other way of doing it, they didn’t see the easy answer at all. Instead, they solved the problem using the method they had been using before, which was much more complicated than it need have been.

they had developed a mental set – a readiness to see one particular way of solving the problem – and that meant that they simply didn’t see the other possibilities.

sometimes, we draw on our existing mental sets rather than creating one specially.

1960s, Edward de Bono developed a technique known as lateral thinking, in which people consciously learned to try to solve problems by thinking ‘outside the box’

Lateral solutions aren’t always the right ones, of course; but being able to think laterally helps to increase the range of options that we see as available to us, and can often help to overcome tricky problems.

group-based form of lateral thinking has become very popular when people are looking for new ideas. It is known as brainstorming,

first stage is for people to produce as many ideas as they possibly can, with nobody dismissing anything ...

Censoring ideas as impractical is not real brainstorming.

Groupthink

launch of space shuttle Challenger against technical advice resulted in it blowing up in mid-air, killing not only its crew but also America’s first space-travelling civilian.

economic decisions made by the UK government during the 2008/9 credit crunch were disastrous for the UK economy.

symptoms of groupthink were documented by Janis in the 1970s.

If everyone appears to agree with everyone else, then that’s a sure sign that either someone is hiding something, or that the group needs some fresh viewpoints.

DECISION-MAKING

we don’t always go about it in the most logical possible way.

Heuristics

computer works from strict logic, and what I said, logically, meant that it was possible to draw that conclusion. But a human being uses human logic, and they would know what I really meant – that I would go to the pictures only if it was raining.

sometimes, the cognitive shortcuts or heuristics that we use can actually distort our decisions, so that we don’t make the most sensible ones.

we are most likely to choose from options which come immediately to mind, or which we have recently been exposed to, rather than actually thinking through what our options are.

we are influenced by expectations, and our most recent experiences go a long way to shaping what those expectations actually are.

Studies of human thinking often imply that humans are illogical. And we are, as far as computer logic is concerned. But when we look more closely, we find that human thinking is almost always rational, in terms of social awareness and probabilities.

perception really involves all of our senses, even though it is vision that we know most about.

retina of our eyes, which receives the information from the outside world, is simply composed of a whole array of light-sensitive cells, so what we actually receive is a bit like the dots which make up the TV screen.

automatically, it seems, we organize our perception so that we perceive whole objects and shapes, set against backgrounds.

known as the Gestalt principles of perception, after the Gestalt psychologists who discovered them during the first half of the twentieth century. There are four of them altogether, and together they show how our perceptual system automatically tries to make complete, meaningful units out of the information which it receives.

second principle, though, overrides the first one. It is known as the principle of proximity, and is the way that we tend to group things together if they are close to one another, even if they aren’t very similar (see Figure 7.2b

fourth principle is that we tend to look for figures which have good Gestalt, or whole, complete shapes, rather than figures which seem to be ‘bitty’ or disconnected.

1970s, Hubel and Wiesel showed that there are special cells in the visual cortex (the part of the brain which interprets visual information) and in the thalamus (the part of the brain which channels information from the eyes to the visual cortex) which help us to identify patterns and shapes.

simple cell, fires when it detects a single type of stimulus, such as a line at a particular angle in a particular part of our vision.

only just beginning to understand how visual cells in the brain combine information,

suggests that seeing shapes and objects may be something that our cells do automatically, from the way that they are connected

our visual world is made up of figures against backgrounds, and shaped by movement and change – so a system which computes edges and objects, and looks at how our visual impressions change as we move around in our worlds,

When we are making sense of these, we use our schemas and our existing knowledge, as well as processing the physical images that we receive through our eyes.