The little book of Psychology — Summary
— by Emily Ralls and Caroline Riggs
127 pages read
As the book is pocket handy and consists of magnificently everything to get started and ignite the spark in readers. The book can be put to practice by people in qualitative research, early birds in psychology, or even the players of the field itself as a reference book.
The book is an insightful read if you want to understand your history, biology, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, social, and humanistic psychology. This approachable little book will take you on a whirlwind tour of the key thinkers, themes, and theories you would like to know to understand how the study of mind and behavior has sculpted the planet we sleep in and therefore the way we expect today. It gives meaning to our mindful being from various aspects to broaden our perspective towards other beings.
Initiating the conversation on historical grounds of psychology. It linearly comprises 10 segments to build the construct, an understanding, and connecting dots for human brains. And every little subset is explained with the help of a proven approach taken by the named scientist and how it became important and inspirational work of the future.
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself” — Carl Sagan
The history of Psychology
It is difficult to trace the beginning of psychology as history. It was initially taken with philosophy in ancient Greece, together. The book talks about emerging of psychology as an entirely different discipline in the 1800s by German scientist Wilhelm Wundt, he used the word “the scientific method” to study human behavior.
The Biological Approach
It talks about the biological and electrical function of the brain, how it works in getting information, generating the feedback loop, channelizing, understanding, and finally taking action.
For example, neurotransmitters are responsible for our feeling of happiness, actions, and so on. There is one neuromyth buzzing around, that we use our brain only to 10%. Is it so? No! We use our brain to its full potential, it is just that some part of the brain is functioning harder than the other. We never hear people losing the sense of air touching their skin while writing a blog, we have just kept our analytical and creative minds on work. (If that example explains 😝)
Also, how the evolution of our brains has happened due to learning from the past and how our behavior responds to that instance in today's world. Example from the book, Phantom limbs — how a person still senses the presence of a lost limb and how it takes hardly any time to become a syndrome as the mind goes for lots of remapping work.
The future of this area is very exciting as many institutes are working to develop a better understanding of our brain for a long to give us more awe-inspiring and fascinating results. The Yale School of Medicine has been working on understanding how the brain of people with autism develops differently from those who are non-autistic.
“In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry” — Sigmund Freud
The Psychodynamic Approach
This section observes the work of the famous scientist Sigmund Freud and his theories. He is the one who also described anxiety as a ‘morbid state of mind’. He talks about the division of the brain in psychological and behavioral contexts. He believed that If we can pass on the physical traits why, not the psychological ones? He believed that our behavior is made of our unconscious needs and biological urges which are balanced by the conscious mind. Therefore, mentioned as a tripartite personality that consists of three major parts, the ID, the Superego, and the Ego. Our ID is fully developed when we are born, whereas Ego and superego grow with us.
There are also theories on how our psychosexual stages contribute to our behavior, which defense mechanism we choose in the situations we are put in. For example, when one is in the denial stage, the mind refuses to accept reality or fact, and an individual continues as if that reality or fact does not exist. The book talks about the concept of collective unconsciousness (when shared between a group of humans, for example, innate memories, images from our ancestral past) and its archetypes described by Carl Jung.
Hence, it concludes with the connection of our childhood experience to adulthood behavior and how the psychology of human behavior is derived from biological needs.
The Behavioural Approach
“Education survives when what has been learned has been forgotten” — B. F. Skinner
As we have learned in the past that our current behaviors are experiences of the past, scientists tried to understand what conditions to a stimulus can be provided to change it as a behavior.
It gathers various theories proven around reflex actions, classical conditioning (example: image shown below), systematic desensitization (where therapists use reverse conditioning of humans in small steps to remove fear for example), operant conditioning (behaviors are learned based on whether they are punished or rewarded), reciprocal inhibition (inability to feel two opposite emotions at the same time).
The Cognitive Approach
Manipulating stimulus and observing response is very straightforward, there is a mental process that we go through as we have brains (making it more complex to understand) to process the received information. Therefore, a need to talk a little more on the subject.
There are various types of knowledge and beliefs we gather in our brain and no wonder having the entire branch as epistemology to understand it. There are four stages we all go through necessarily in the same order, to develop and acquire knowledge about the world, time and age can be different and this progression might be influenced externally or internally.
- Sensorimotor
- Pre-operational
- Concrete operational
- Formal operational
These learnings take place in the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which is carried out by more knowledgeable people like parents etc to continuously challenge the ability to an extent that helps them grow but not to the level that they start having frustrations and fear. This training is still mandatory in UK schools for teachers for the development of students.
In this section, the book also talks about the most important process of our brain which is memory and thoughts (How to challenge the negative thoughts through a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?). Did you know? Taking a nap could improve your memory. — study by Lahl at the University of Dusseldorf. What an excuse if you are caught sleeping in a classroom?? 😄
Social Psychology
“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority” — Stanley Milgram
Humans are social beings. Societies are a proven way of growing together, learning creating balance with each other. But due to these necessities, we come under pressure to conform. We conform outwardly to those in our social circle to remain part of it even if we don’t conform inwardly, similarly, we do not mingle with the person with unmatching vibes. This subset talks about the studies done by psychologists to understand the conformist nature of human beings.
There are two types of conformist one those who want to be part of the group and not to be seen as unusual and other who question their sensing abilities based on the surrounding pieces of information.
“It is not the kind of person we are that determines how we act, but rather the kind of situation we found ourselves in” — Thomas Blass
The Humanist Approach
What do people say they say, but at last we humans take actions based on our needs right? Hence, Abraham Maslow came up with the theory of the hierarchy of human needs.
Therefore, to reach our full potential i.e self-actualization, there needs to be a balance between three major personal perceptions: our self-worth, our self-image, and our ideal self.
Controversies in Psychology
Being human, you and I will have lots of questions about how this research is conducted? Were they taking care of subjects under test? Was there any kind of impact on those subjects after being processed under psychological factors? To these answers no, some of these research had the in-human approach. Some of those can be easily bypassed and few may not. For example, the ZPD study conducted with children had an impact on their future fears. The study or reciprocal conditioning deepened the fear of many subjects.
But still, we will agree to an aspect to understand the true behavior we hide the actual research agenda so that the subject sitting there is not biased on the area to which we need answers. To address these there are community-led rules around integrity, respect, ethics, competence, responsibility which need to be strictly followed to conduct this researches.
Conclusion
With all the stated areas of psychology, psychologists have developed lots of techniques and processes to understand them in all the areas of life whether it is health, space, or let's say a gaming firm. All want to understand the users and impacts. Few basic processes and methods are mentioned in the book. For example, holism and reductionism, determinism versus free will, etc.
As daunting as it feels to summarise this complex field of our complex brain. We at least understand that there are enormous ways to understand the psychology of human brains and their behavior. As this is a constantly changing world and we live there so our demands change accordingly. So we need to broaden and make our perspective more clear and clearer in the area of study.
Further reads
Mentioning the reads from the book helps in better understanding of the concepts:
Principles of physiological psychology — Wilhelm Wundt
The interpretation of dreams — Sigmund Freud
On the origin of species — Darwin
Behaviourism — John B. Watson
Philosophy — Bertrand Russel
Conditioned Reflexes — I. P. Pavlov
Thought and Language — Lev Vygotsky
The Lucifer Effect — Philip Zimbardo
