Lec 2 | MIT 9.00SC Introduction to Psychology, Spring 2011
how it is that we can do research of a scientific kind for something as complex as human
behavior as opposed to things that you measure out in space or test tubes or under microscopes..
people are complex organisms and to understand human nature is a challenging story. a lot of our
biggest discoveries have been made on very unusual single individuals who turn out to have a
lesson. there 's what appears to be a druginduced amnesia of the original murderous episode. he
gets hit by a car. he has a severe head injury. he 's in a coma for two weeks., but now a remarkable
thing happens. it 's as if two insults, two wrongs, made a right. the first wrong was PcP, the second
wrong was the accident. the more we understand about the human brain, the more we 'll
understand about behaviors that we find. terrible. and what does that mean about legal and moral
decisions about how to punish those or think about those. So that 's coming in your lifetime. and
how to think about that is really a big question..
Almost half of children of divorce enter adulthood as worried. how do you know what is true?.
how would you prove somebody's underachieving scientifically. what would you measure and
prove that. who as a human being is not sometimes angry about something or another. and if you
are angry, does that tell us that society 's breaking down and your parents did something bad that
you're sometimes angry. you could n't lead your life without kind of believing a lot of stuff. but
you do n't want to believe everything just because you hear it. repetition or tenacity, you hear
something often enough and people tend to believe stuff. the scientists tell you what's true just
because they believe in it just like sports writers say the celtics are the best. today's most exciting
breakthroughs are tomorrow 's things that have to be apologized for and rediscovered, right. I. I
mean, what makes something breaking science is it moves the field forward. there 's many things
that science can not address. and I do n't want to pretend that it does. I'm going to emphasize today
a scientific approach to the human mind and behavior..
Wilhelm Wundt measured how long it takes you to do things in a simple way. he did the test of
mental chronometry, measuring how long a thought takes in your mind.. now Psychology went a
lot of different directions. a famous one from Titchener was introspection, look inside yourself and
think carefully. there 's a response. you measure the response. and that 's your psychology
experiment. and then the 1980 's became the cognitive revolution. partly this path lead to not very
interesting science. that was the biggest problem. and people said we can make inferences about
the mind as it translates what it hears or sees into what a person does. there 's a correlation
between age and whether a child expresses schizophrenia. so let 's guess about the possible causes
of that. maybe the gametes become damaged by age. maybe it may turn out to be right, something.
problematic about the sperm from the male. here 's another one, though. this shows you the
challenges with correlational research on something even so important as this..
Are you more stressed than people 10 years ago at Mit on average across the country. and are you
more or less empathetic towards other people?. how might one answer that kind of a question. Mit
how it is that we can do research of a scientific kind for something as complex as human
behavior as opposed to things that you measure out in space or test tubes or under microscopes..
people are complex organisms and to understand human nature is a challenging story. a lot of our
biggest discoveries have been made on very unusual single individuals who turn out to have a
lesson. there 's what appears to be a druginduced amnesia of the original murderous episode. he
gets hit by a car. he has a severe head injury. he 's in a coma for two weeks., but now a remarkable
thing happens. it 's as if two insults, two wrongs, made a right. the first wrong was PcP, the second
wrong was the accident. the more we understand about the human brain, the more we 'll
understand about behaviors that we find. terrible. and what does that mean about legal and moral
decisions about how to punish those or think about those. So that 's coming in your lifetime. and
how to think about that is really a big question..
Almost half of children of divorce enter adulthood as worried. how do you know what is true?.
how would you prove somebody's underachieving scientifically. what would you measure and
prove that. who as a human being is not sometimes angry about something or another. and if you
are angry, does that tell us that society 's breaking down and your parents did something bad that
you're sometimes angry. you could n't lead your life without kind of believing a lot of stuff. but
you do n't want to believe everything just because you hear it. repetition or tenacity, you hear
something often enough and people tend to believe stuff. the scientists tell you what's true just
because they believe in it just like sports writers say the celtics are the best. today's most exciting
breakthroughs are tomorrow 's things that have to be apologized for and rediscovered, right. I. I
mean, what makes something breaking science is it moves the field forward. there 's many things
that science can not address. and I do n't want to pretend that it does. I'm going to emphasize today
a scientific approach to the human mind and behavior..
Wilhelm Wundt measured how long it takes you to do things in a simple way. he did the test of
mental chronometry, measuring how long a thought takes in your mind.. now Psychology went a
lot of different directions. a famous one from Titchener was introspection, look inside yourself and
think carefully. there 's a response. you measure the response. and that 's your psychology
experiment. and then the 1980 's became the cognitive revolution. partly this path lead to not very
interesting science. that was the biggest problem. and people said we can make inferences about
the mind as it translates what it hears or sees into what a person does. there 's a correlation
between age and whether a child expresses schizophrenia. so let 's guess about the possible causes
of that. maybe the gametes become damaged by age. maybe it may turn out to be right, something.
problematic about the sperm from the male. here 's another one, though. this shows you the
challenges with correlational research on something even so important as this..
Are you more stressed than people 10 years ago at Mit on average across the country. and are you
more or less empathetic towards other people?. how might one answer that kind of a question. Mit
