1.4
Psychology's Present: The Four Perspectives of Psychological Science
If you had a noisy, rude, surly neighbor, and you asked a group of psychologists to explain why this guy was such a miserable jerk, you would probably get different answers: It's because of his biological makeup, his belligerent attitude toward the world, the way he has learned to use his nasty temper to get his way, an unhappy family situation, or the customs of his culture. Modern psychological scientists typically approach their investigations from one of four different, although overlapping, approaches: biological, learning, cognitive, and sociocultural. Each perspective reflects different questions about human behavior, different assumptions about how the mind works, and, most important, different ways of explaining why people do what they do. In addition to these perspectives, various movements, such as feminist psychology, have emerged that don't fit neatly into one of these perspectives.
The Major Perspectives in Psychology
Let's look at the four major perspectives in psychology. You can also get more information in the video Diverse Perspectives.
Watch
Diverse Perspectives
The Biological Perspective The biological perspective focuses on how bodily events affect behavior, feelings, and thoughts. Electrical impulses shoot along the intricate pathways of the nervous system. Hormones course through the bloodstream, telling internal organs to slow down or speed up. Chemical substances flow across the tiny gaps that separate one microscopic brain cell from another. Biological psychologists study how these physical events interact with events in the external environment to produce perceptions, memories, and behavior.
Researchers adopting this perspective study how biology affects learning and performance, perceptions of reality, the experience of emotion, and vulnerability to emotional disorder. They study how the mind and body interact in illness and health. They investigate the contributions of genes in the development of abilities and personality traits. One popular specialty, evolutionary psychology, follows in the footsteps of functionalism by focusing on how genetically influenced behavior that was functional or adaptive during our evolutionary past may be reflected in many of our present behaviors, mental processes, and traits. The message of the biological approach is that we cannot really know ourselves if we do not know our bodies.
The Learning Perspective The learning perspective is concerned with how the environment and experience affect the behavior of human beings (and other animals). Within this perspective, behaviorists focus on the environmental rewards and punishers that maintain or discourage specific behaviors. Behaviorists do not invoke the mind or mental states to explain behavior. They prefer to stick to what they can observe and measure directly: acts and events taking place in the environment. For example, do you have trouble sticking to a schedule? A behaviorist would identify the environmental distractions that could help account for this common problem. Behaviorism was the dominant school of scientific psychology in North America for nearly 50 years, through the 1960s.
Today, social-cognitive learning theorists combine elements of behaviorism with research on thoughts, values, expectations, and intentions. They believe that people learn not only by adapting their behavior to the environment, but also by observing and imitating others and by thinking about the events happening around them. As we will see, the learning perspective has many practical applications. Historically, the behaviorists' insistence on precision and objectivity has done much to advance psychology as a science, and learning research in general has given psychology some of its most reliable findings.
The Cognitive Perspective The cognitive perspective emphasizes what goes on in people's heads—how people reason, remember, understand language, solve problems, explain experiences, acquire moral standards, and form beliefs. (The word cognitive comes from the Latin for “to know.”) One of its most important contributions has been to show how people's thoughts and explanations affect their actions, feelings, and choices. Using clever methods to infer mental processes from observable behavior, cognitive researchers have been able to study phenomena that were previously only the stuff of speculation, such as emotions, motivations, insight, and the kind of “thinking” that goes on without awareness. They are designing computer programs that model how humans perform complex tasks, discovering what goes on in the mind of an infant, and identifying types of intelligence not measured by conventional IQ tests. The cognitive approach is one of the strongest forces in psychology and has inspired an explosion of research on the intricate workings of the mind.
The Sociocultural Perspective The sociocultural perspective focuses on social and cultural forces outside the individual, forces that shape every aspect of behavior, from how we kiss to what and where we eat. Most of us underestimate the impact of other people, the social context, and cultural rules on nearly everything we do. We are like fish that are unaware they live in water, so obvious is water in their lives. Sociocultural psychologists study the water—the social and cultural environment that we “swim” in every day.
Within this perspective, social psychologists focus on social rules and roles, how groups affect attitudes and behavior, why people obey authority, and how each of us is affected by other people—spouses, lovers, friends, bosses, parents, and strangers. Cultural psychologists examine how cultural rules and values, both explicit and unspoken, affect people's development, behavior, and feelings. They might study how culture influences people's willingness to help a stranger in distress or what they do when they are angry. American researchers still focus mainly on Americans, who comprise less than 5 percent of the world's population (Arnett, 2008). However, in this text we have made a concerted effort to cite studies that include other nationalities as well. Because human beings are social animals who are profoundly affected by their different cultural worlds, the sociocultural perspective is making psychology a more representative and rigorous discipline.
Review1.2 summarizes these four perspectives and shows how they might be applied to a concrete issue, the problem of violence. See if you can apply these perspectives to another issue of your choosing.
Review1.2
Major Perspectives in Psychological Science
Feminist Psychology
Throughout psychology's history, various movements and intellectual trends have emerged that do not fit neatly into any of the major perspectives but that have had an impact on all of them. One is feminist psychology. As women began to enter psychology in greater numbers in the 1970s, they documented evidence of a pervasive bias in the research methods used and in the very questions that researchers had been asking (Crawford & Marecek, 1989; Eagly et al., 2012; Shields & Dicicco, 2011). They noted that many studies had used only men as subjects—and usually only young, white, middle-class men at that—and they showed why it was often inappropriate to generalize to everyone else from such a narrow research base. They spurred the growth of research on topics that had long been ignored in psychology, including menstruation, motherhood, rape and domestic violence, the dynamics of power and sexuality in relationships, definitions of masculinity and femininity, gender roles, and sexist attitudes. They critically examined the male bias in psychotherapy, starting with Freud's own case studies. And they analyzed the social consequences of psychological findings, showing how research has often been used to justify the lower status of women and other disadvantaged groups. Feminist psychology has even influenced the study of men. In recent years, the field of men's studies and the psychology of men has been gaining prominence, focusing on such diverse topics as men's health, emotions, and the ways that culture shapes notions of “masculinity” (Vandello & Bosson, 2013).
Feminist psychology greatly advanced efforts to make psychology the study of all human beings, of all cultures and ethnicities, and other groups have made similar contributions. In 1976, black psychologist Robert Guthrie, in Even the Rat Was White, wrote a searing and influential indictment of racism in psychological research. Since the 1970s, African American, Latino, and Asian psychologists, gay and lesbian psychologists, and disabled psychologists have greatly expanded the theoretical and empirical vistas of psychology, as we will see throughout this book.