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A short history

Before I learned anything about psychology, I did have a lot of experience about "popular psychology", things like "psychological tests" in magazines; and so-called "folk psychology", which is kind of tradition wisdom and ideas about behaviour concluded not from scientific methods but by experiences.

Psychology is often defined as the study of mind and behaviour, and of course we all have a lot of ideas about these two things, without needing any formal training at all.

The study of mind and behaviour has a very long traditions, starting even from prehistoric times -- things like trying to understand why other people or animals behave in a certain way.

More formal study began by the philosophers, east and west, mostly by what psychologists nowadays would called "introspection", that is asking oneself questions and draw some conclusions by general observation and logical deduction.

The modern, scientific version of psychology, on the other hand, based mostly on experiments. In other words, rather than relying on deduction in one's head, psychologists go one step further and test their ideas.

Different approaches

It started at the turn of the last century, when one Pavlov, who is working with a dog discovered that when the presentation of food is always accompanied by a ring of bell (maybe it's like in a fastfood shop?), the dog comes to salivate even if the bell rings without any food.

This is called Classical conditioning, in which the dog learns to associate the bell to food, and so its body prepares for food everytime the bell rings.

Apart from this form of learning, psychologists later also established "Operant conditioning" (e.g. rats and pigeons learned to press one button and avoid another if one delivers food and the other produce electric shock) and "Observational learning" (e.g. children after watching a violent clip is more likely to behave violently afterwards).

These forms the basis of the Behaviourists Approach to psychology.

One disadvantage of the behaviourists approach is that it only measures visible behaviour, but not what one thinks (they didn't care about that). One classic study exploring that is the Chinese Room paradigm.

The idea is that there is a black box, and from one end we feed in Chinese words or questions; and a person sits inside the box and there's an instruction manual, and he or she would look into the manual and manipulate the input according to choice the correct output.

The question is that from the outside, the output is 100% correct, just like it would be from a native Chinese user; but, in the inside, the person in the black box has not real knowledge of Chinese whatsoever.

This illustrates that observing behaviours only does not tell you very much.

In 1956, borned the Cognitive Approach. That year, Miller published his "magic number", which can be illustrated nicely here. The task is to memorise a list of numbers -- try to memorise a set of numbers, then recall immediately after, and see which set and how much you can remember:

a - 8 5 7

b - 0 7 4 3 8

c - 3 6 4 0 8 2 5

d - 1 7 4 2 7 6 9 5 0

e - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

f - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

g - 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 6 6 6 7 7 7 8 8 8 9 9 9 0 0 0

h - 1 1 1 6 6 6 5 5 5 2 2 2 9 9 9

Most people won't have any problems remember the above sets apart from set d. And Miller proposed that the capacity of our short term memory is 5 ± 2 chunks of information. A chunk of information is a small set that data which has an identity. For example, "KFC" is 1 chunk for most of us, but if you don't know it then it would be three unrelated alphabet and so 3 chunks.

So borned Cognitive Psychology, not just concern about "if condition P then behaviour R", but about Input - Processing - Output of human and other animals.

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Last updated: 7 Mar 2005