耶鲁大学公开课心理学导论英文字幕transcript04.docx

1、耶鲁大学公开课心理学导论英文字幕transcript04Introduction to Psychology: Lecture 4 TranscriptJanuary 29, 2007 backProfessor Paul Bloom: I actually want to begin by going back to Freud and hitting a couple of loose ends. There was a point in my lecture on Wednesday where I skipped over some parts. I said, We dont hav

2、e time for this and I just whipped past it. And I couldnt sleep over the weekend. Ive been tormented. I shouldnt have skipped that and I want to hit-Let me tell you why I skipped it. The discussion I skipped was the discussion of why we would have an unconscious at all. So, I was talking about the s

3、cientifically respectable ideas of Freud and I want to talk about some new ideas about why there could be an unconscious.Now, the reason why I skipped it is Im not sure this is the best way to look at the question. As we will learn throughout the course, by far the vast majority of what our brains d

4、o, the vast majority of what our minds do, is unconscious and were unaware of it. So the right question to ask may not be, Why are some things unconscious? but rather, why is this tiny subset of mental life-why is this conscious? On the other hand, these claims about the utility of unconsciousness,

5、I think, are provocative and interesting. So I just wanted to quickly share them with you.So, the question is, from an evolutionary standpoint, Why would an unconscious evolve? And an answer that some psychologists and biologists have given is deception. So, most animals do some deception. And decep

6、tion defined broadly is simply to act or be in some way that fools others into believing or thinking or responding to something thats false.Theres physical examples of deception. When threatened, chimpanzees-their hair stands up on end and that makes them look bigger to fool others to thinking theyr

7、e more dangerous than they are. Theres an angler fish at the bottom of the ocean that has a rod sticking up from the top of its head with a lure to capture other fish 鈥 to fool them in thinking that this is something edible and then to themselves be devoured. But humans, primates in general but part

8、icularly humans, are masters of deception. We use our minds and our behaviors and our actions continually to try to trick people into believing whats not true. We try to trick people, for instance, into believing that were tougher, smarter, sexier, more reliable, more trustworthy and so on, than we

9、really are. And a large part of social psychology concerns the way in which we present ourselves to other people so as to make the maximally positive impression even when that impression isnt true.At the same time, though, weve also evolved very good lie detection mechanisms. So not only is there ev

10、olutionary pressure for me to lie to you, for me to persuade you for instance, that if were going to have a-if you are threatening me dont threaten me, I am not the sort of man you could screw around with. But theres evolutionary pressure for you to look and say, No. You are the sort of man you coul

11、d screw around with. I can tell. So how do you become a good liar? And heres where the unconscious comes in. The hypothesis is: the best lies are lies we tell ourselves. Youre a better liar, more generally, if you believe the lie that youre telling.This could be illustrated with a story about Alfred

12、 Hitchcock. The story goes-He hated working with child actors but he often had to. And the story goes-He was dealing with a child actor who simply could not cry. And, finally frustrated, Hitchcock went to the actor, leaned over, whispered in his ear, Your parents have left you and theyre never comin

13、g back. The kid burst into tears. Hitchcock said, Roll 鈥榚m and filmed the kid. And the kid, if you were to see him, youd say, Thats-Boy, hes-he really looks as if hes sad because he was. If I had a competition where Id give $100,000 to the person who looks the most as if they are in pain, it is a ve

14、ry good tactic to take a pen and jam it into your groin because you will look extremely persuasively as if you are in pain. If I want to persuade you that I love you, would never leave you, you can trust me with everything, it may be a superb tactic for me to believe it. And so, this account of the

15、evolution of the unconscious is that certain motivations and goals, particularly sinister ones, are better made to be unconscious because if a person doesnt know they have them they will not give them away. And this is something I think we should return to later on when we talk about social interact

16、ion and social relationships.One other thing on Freud-just a story of the falsification of Freud. I was taking my younger child home from a play date on Sunday and he asked me out of the blue, Why cant you marry your mother or your father? Now, thats actually a difficult question to ask-to answer fo

17、r a child, but I tried my best to give him an answer. And then I said-then I thought back on the Freud lecture and so I asked him, If you could marry anybody you want, who would it be? imagining hed make explicit the Oedipal complex and name his mother. Instead, he paused for a moment and said, I wo

18、uld marry a donkey and a big bag of peanuts. laughter Both his parents are psychologists and he hates these questions and at times he just screws around with us. laughterOkay. Last class I started with Freud and now I want to turn to Skinner. And the story of Skinner and science is somewhat differen

19、t from the story of Freud. Freud developed and championed the theory of psychoanalysis by himself. It is as close as you could find in science to a solitary invention. Obviously, he drew upon all sorts of sources and predecessors but psychoanalysis is identified as Freuds creation. Behaviorism is di

20、fferent. Behaviorism is a school of thought that was there long before Skinner, championed by psychologists like John Watson, for instance. Skinner came a bit late into this but the reason why weve heard of Skinner and why Skinner is so well known is he packaged these notions. He expanded upon them;

21、 he publicized them; he developed them scientifically and presented them both to the scientific community and to the popular community and sociologically in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States, behaviorism was incredibly well known and so was Skinner. He was the sort of person you would see on

22、 talk shows. His books were bestsellers.Now, at the core of behaviorism are three extremely radical and interesting views. The first is a strong emphasis on learning. The strong view of behaviorism is everything you know, everything you are, is the result of experience. Theres no real human nature.

23、Rather, people are infinitely malleable. Theres a wonderful quote from John Watson and in this quote John Watson is paraphrasing a famous boast by the Jesuits. The Jesuits used to claim, Give me a child until the age of seven and Ill show you the man, that they would take a child and turn him into a

24、nything they wanted. And Watson expanded on this boast,Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up and Ill guarantee to take any one at random and train them to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and yes,

25、 even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.Now, you could imagine-You could see in this a tremendous appeal to this view because Watson has an extremely egalitarian view in a sense. If theres no human nature, then ther

26、es no sense in which one group of humans by dint of their race or their sex could be better than another group. And Watson was explicit. None of those facts about people will ever make any difference. What matters to what you are is what you learn and how youre treated. And so, Watson claimed he cou

27、ld create anybody in any way simply by treating them in a certain fashion.A second aspect of behaviorism was anti-mentalism. And what I mean by this is the behaviorists were obsessed with the idea of doing science and they felt, largely in reaction to Freud, that claims about internal mental states

28、like desires, wishes, goals, emotions and so on, are unscientific. These invisible, vague things can never form the basis of a serious science. And so, the behaviorist manifesto would then be to develop a science without anything thats unobservable and instead use notions like stimulus and response

29、and reinforcement and punishment and environment that refer to real world and tangible events.Finally, behaviorists believed there were no interesting differences across species. A behaviorist might admit that a human can do things that a rat or pigeon couldnt but a behaviorist might just say, Look.

30、 Those are just general associative powers that differ or they may even deny it. They might say, Humans and rats arent different at all. Its just humans tend to live in a richer environment than rats. From that standpoint, from that theoretical standpoint, comes a methodological approach which is, i

31、f theyre all the same then you could study human learning by studying nonhuman animals. And thats a lot of what they did.Okay. Im going to frame my introduction-my discussion of behaviors in terms of the three main learning principles that they argue can explain all of human mental life, all of huma

32、n behavior. And then, I want to turn to objections to behaviorism but these three principles are powerful and very interesting.The first is habituation. This is the very simplest form of learning. And what this is is technically described as a decline in the tendency to respond to stimuli that are familiar due to repeated exposure. Hey! shouting, then pausing Hey! shouting again The sudden noise startles but as it-as you hear it a second time it startles less. The third time is just me being goofy. Its just-Its-You get used to things. And this, of