心理学导论transcript13.docx

1、心理学导论transcript13Introduction to Psychology: Lecture 13 TranscriptMarch 7, 2007 backProfessor Paul Bloom: What weve been talking about so far in the course are human universals, what everybody shares. So, weve been talking about language, about rationality, about perception, about the emotions, abou

2、t universals of development, and weve been talking about what people share. But honestly, what a lot of us are very interested in is why were different and the nature of these differences and the explanation for them. And thats what well turn to today.So first, well discuss how are people different,

3、 different theories about what makes you different in a psychological way from the person sitting next to you, and then well review different theories about why people are different. And this is the class which is going to bother the most people. Its not dualism. Its not evolution. Its this because

4、the scientific findings on human psychological differences are, to many of us, shocking and unbelievable. And I will just try to persuade you to take them seriously.Okay. So, how are people different? Well, theres all sorts of ways. Your sexual identity-It is at the core of your being for almost all

5、 of us whether youre male or female. How we refer to you in language, what pronoun we use, is indexed on how we-on your-on how-whether youre male or female and related to that though imperfectly is your sexual orientation, who youre attracted to. The question of why some of us think of ourselves as

6、males and others as females, and the question of why some of us would ideally want to have sex with males, others with females, others with both, and then a few others who have harder to define desires, is such a good question that were going to talk about it after spring break while all the sexual

7、desire has been spent and you could focus on laughter on a scientific discussion of this-not that I recommend you do that on spring break.How happy are you? This is also such a good topic its going to get its own class. The very last class of the semester is devoted to happiness and the question of

8、what makes people happy, what makes people unhappy, and what makes people differ in their happiness. If I asked you to rank how happy you are from a scale of 1 to 10, the numbers would differ across this room. And theres different theories as to why. Your success and failure in life-This is somewhat

9、 interesting because you could study this in more or less objective ways. We dont have to ask people. We could look at your relationships, how they begin, how they end, your job satisfaction. We could look at your criminal records. Some of you are going to see time. Most will not. Some of you will g

10、et into little troubles all through your life. Some of you already have seen the inside of a police station, possibly a lineup. Others couldnt go near such a thing. What determines that?And at the root of all human differences are two main factors. And so, I want to talk about the two main interesti

11、ng factors. One is personality. The other is intelligence. And this is what-These are the differences Ill talk about today first from the standpoint of how do we characterize them, how do we explain them, and then from the standpoint of why these differences exist in the first place.One way to chara

12、cterize personality is in terms of peoples style with dealing with-in dealing with the world and particularly their style with dealing-in dealing with other people. So, you take a simple character you know of and you could talk about that persons personality. You could talk about it in terms of bein

13、g impulsive, irresponsible, sometimes lazy, good-hearted. You could compare that persons personality with other peoples personalities such as my colleague who gave a talk last class. Hes wonderful. Hes responsible and reliable and very kind laughter and different from Homer. And so, this difference

14、is a difference in personality.Now, when we talk about personality were talking about something else as well. Were talking about a stable trait across situations and time. So, if all of a sudden the person next to you kind of smacks you in the head, you might be angry but we wouldnt call that person

15、ality because thats something thats a result of a situation. Wed all feel that way in that situation. Its personality if you walk around all the time angry. Thatd be a stable trait. Thatd be something you carry around with you and thats what we mean by personality.Now, how do we scientifically chara

16、cterize differences in personality? And its a deep question. Theres been a lot of attempts to do so. Any assessment has-Any good assessment has to satisfy two conditions. And these are terms which are going to show up all over psychological research but its particularly relevant for this sort of measure. One is reliability. Reliability means there is not measurement error. And one crude way to think about rel