Simply Psychology

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This has an evolutionary function. Testosterone-deprived men are less likely to wander off in search of new mates to inseminate. They are also less aggressive, which is useful when there is a baby around. A child cannot conserve which means that the child does not understand that quantity remains the same even if the appearance changes.

Piaget defined assimilation as the cognitive process of fitting new information into existing cognitive schemas, perceptions, and understanding. Overall beliefs and understanding of the world do not change as a result of the new information. During the sensorimotor stage, a range of cognitive abilities develop. These include: object permanence; In one of Asch’s experimental variations he showed that the presence of a dissident (a confederate who did not conform) led to a decrease in the conformity levels in true participants. The behaviorist perspective is concerned with how environmental factors (called stimuli) affect observable behavior (called the response). She only conformed publicly to her friends’ behavior but had obviously not privately undergone attitude change to eating organic as she reverted to eating non-organic in the holidays.

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But operational thought is only effective here if the child is asked to reason about materials that are physically present. Children at this stage will tend to make mistakes or be overwhelmed when asked to reason about abstract or hypothetical problems. Individual Differences Everything new we encountered would just get put in the same few “slots” we already had. Neither can we accommodate all the time; if we did, everything we encountered would seem new; there would be no recurring regularities in our world. We’d be exhausted by the mental effort! Agency theory says that people will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is supported by some aspects of Milgram’s evidence. The five major psychological perspectives are biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic, and provide different lenses through which phenomena are explained and analyzed. Minorities wanting social change should avoid behaviors that reinforce social change – essentially off-putting to the majority.

Piaget’s second stage of intellectual development is the preoperational stage. It takes place between 2 and 7 years. At the beginning of this stage, the child does not use operations, so the thinking is influenced by the way things appear rather than logical reasoning. During the beginning of this stage, the infant lives in the present. It does not yet have a mental picture of the world stored in its memory therefore it does not have a sense of object permanence. Operations are more sophisticated mental structures which allow us to combine schemas in a logical (reasonable) way.Psychology is a science because it employs systematic methods of observation, experimentation, and data analysis to understand and predict behavior and mental processes, grounded in empirical evidence and subjected to peer review. He did, however, believe that our bodies could influence our consciousness and that the beginnings of these interactions were in the pineal gland – we know now that this is probably NOT the case! At this point, the people who have not changed their opinion are the minority, and they will often conform to the majority view as a result of group pressures. Observed behavior is likely to have developed because it is adaptive. It has been naturally selected, i.e., individuals who are best adapted to survive and reproduce. behaviors may even be sexually selected, i.e., individuals who are most successful in gaining access to mates leave behind more offspring.