Question

What image comes to mind when you think of a psychologist?

If you walk into my research laboratory, you might see me giving someone this instruction:

After I say a word, come up with as many words as you can that rhyme with it. You’ll have one minute. Ready? The word is “name.” Go.

Why would a psychologist ask anybody to do this? The task measures mental performance. Researchers in psychology explore factors that affect how well people perform on tasks. There are many. Some are expected: how tired you are, how much effort you put into the task. But others are surprising. It turns out that, on average, women produce more words on this task than men do and that their performance can depend on the level, in their bodies, of the body chemical estrogen. Estrogen, which plays an important role in pregnancy, also affects mental abilities. Our research linking estrogen levels to thinking shows a tight connection between biology and the mind.

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Body–mind connections are important for a number of reasons. Women with breast cancer take medications that lower their estrogen levels. Does the medication impair their mental abilities? The topic also is important for men. For example, treatments for prostate cancer affect their body chemistry in ways that might affect mental performance.

So that’s my job. I’m a scientist who studies how body chemistry affects the mind. We hope to better understand how the body’s inner chemistry, as well as the medications people take, impact mental abilities.

When you envision a psychologist, you probably don’t imagine somebody who spends one week talking to farmers in rural India about composting, another talking with urban sex workers in Bangalore about how they use mobile phones, and another working with software engineers to design technologies. But that’s not unusual for me. I’m a psychologist at Microsoft Research India.

I try to understand how computing systems can improve life in developing communities. Although there are nearly 5 billion mobile phones worldwide, technology’s benefits remain out of reach for many. Some countries struggle to provide electricity and connectivity to all citizens, and some businesses and families can’t afford hardware. But finances aren’t the whole story. Limited education and literacy; political, gender, or religious prohibitions on technology use; and differences in cognitive models—how people organize information mentally—also pose obstacles. Overcoming them requires understanding not only technology, but also people. I study how people in diverse communities think, feel, and relate to each other and then connect this to the design of technological solutions.

Our group has designed systems to help farmers share sustainable farming techniques; to help children share PCs in low-resource schools; and to improve nonliterate women’s access to microfinance in rural India. Each technology was designed for people living in a context very different from my own, and most likely yours. My psychology training helps me understand their life contexts, aspirations, and needs, and helps to shape technology for them.

When I tell people I’m a psychologist, they assume I have a leather couch where people lie down and tell me their troubles. However, I spend most of my time in communities in Chicago. I direct the research division of a community mental health center. In this job, I have a wide range of duties:

On top of this, I teach university courses, including African American Psychology. Real-life examples from the community are key to the success of my classes—and my career.

I am watching the team at practice; tomorrow I will be watching the game. I am working; I am the team’s sport psychologist.

I study psychological factors that affect athletic performance, for example:

When working with athletes, I draw on my training in clinical psychology. As in clinical work, sports psychologists teach people various skills to cope with difficulties. If someone—a client in therapy or an athlete—is very anxious, we may teach that person to replace anxiety-related thoughts (e.g., “Everyone will think that I am incompetent”) with thoughts that help people remain calm (e.g., “Others may think that I am nervous, which is true, but I still know what I’m doing”). These strategies help athletes to remain composed and focused.

The bottom line is that psychological skills, just like physical ones, are trainable. Everyone can improve mentally if they work at it. I guess I could be called a “head” coach.

When I tell somebody that I’m a psychologist, they’ll often ask what type of people I work with. Then I have to explain that I don’t work with people; I study Aplysia californica, a large sea slug that lives in the ocean. Usually, this is confusing enough to bring the conversation to a screeching halt. So I’ll introduce my work this way.

I am interested in how memories are formed. We constantly encounter information, some of which we remember permanently. I try to understand how the brain, a biological organ, can store and access memories.

What does this have to do with sea slugs? They provide an amazing opportunity to see how the brain stores memories. Like all animals, Aplysia form memories. But unlike most, they do it with an extremely simple nervous system: only 20,000 brain cells (by comparison, a honeybee has 1 million and humans have 100 billion). With so few cells, we can trace the cell-by-cell formation of memories by implanting electrodes into cells while Aplysia learn new information.

Although sea slugs are a somewhat unusual topic of study, my day is typical for a research psychologist and college professor. In the morning, I check in with students in my lab, make sure the Aplysia are fed and comfortable, and then I’m off to teach classes. In the afternoon, it’s back to the lab. In the evening, I try to digest the day’s research results.

Dropping by my office, you may see me talking with one person, or two, or even five. Depending on the patient(s) in the room and the topic discussed, there may be tears, laughter, hollering, or even silence. It’s what you don’t see that makes me a clinical psychologist.

Inside my head I am schema building. I am creating a knowledge base about the patient, testing my hypotheses, then crafting interventions to figure out exactly where the individual is stuck and how to help.

Psychology researchers, like those described earlier, garner scientific information that I need to assess the combination of psychological factors existing in each of my patients. The scientific findings help me to teach a patient lessons that are necessary for better self-understanding and then to work with the strengths of the patient to reach his or her goals. As a clinical psychologist, I need to understand how patients regulate emotions; organize information and make decisions; perform on the job, socially, and within the family; and understand the world and their place in it. I need to discover the person’s level of confidence and motivation, and how well the individual understands the physiology of the body including the nervous system. Does the person understand that he or she lives in a specific culture? Is the person living in the present, ruminating about the past, or projecting him- or herself into the future in ways that cause distress? Answers to these questions are my data.

Building an understanding of patients and interventions for them—while maintaining a relationship of trust, privacy, and ethical behavior—is the totality of my work. Useful work it is, in part thanks to knowledge gained from the psychological research you are soon to learn about in this book.

Question 1

What’s so bad about intuition?

What’s a good alternative to intuition?

What image comes to mind when you think of a scientist?

How many of the arguments you’ve experienced happened because you and someone else had different intuitions about the same question?

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton (British historian and political theorist)

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible.

—David Brin (Author)

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

—Anne Frank (Diarist and Holocaust victim)

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

—Edmund Burke (Political theorist and philosopher)

God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom.

—George W. Bush (U.S. president)

Few men desire liberty: The majority are satisfied with a just master.

—Sallust (Roman historian and politician)

In Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain, you not only will learn about the results of psychologists’ research, you will also get to experience their research methods firsthand, thanks to a feature called Try This! Get on the Internet and enter the Web address www.pmbpsychology.com to find Try This! research experiences for each chapter of the book.

Do the exercise for Chapter 1 now; it’s a test of your memory ability. We will discuss the results of this test later in the chapter.

And, speaking of memory, don’t forget to come back to read the rest of this chapter once you’re done.

Question 2

Question 3

Question

What are some things you believe, even if no scientific evidence exists to support your belief?

Question 4

The key to understanding anything is a combination of observation, especially the quantitative kind of observation we call measurement, and the systematic way of thinking we call logic.

—Peter Atkins (2003, p. 276)

Earlier in this chapter, you read about research showing that, on average, men are slightly more talkative than women. Is that still true? Some of the studies the researchers reviewed were conducted decades ago (recall that the studies took place between 1968 and 2004). Maybe contemporary social changes, such as women’s greater participation in higher education and expanded leadership roles in government and business, have changed the pattern of gender differences observed previously.

Research in psychology requires specialized tools. Each chapter of this book will highlight one such tool and present it in depth, in a feature called Research Toolkit.

In subsequent chapters, the tool presented in the Research Toolkit will match the specific topic of the chapter. Here in Chapter 1, our topic is psychology as a whole. We’ll thus present a tool that psychologists use no matter what topic they are studying. It is an intellectual tool—a way of thinking—that we’ll call open-minded skepticism.

Like the phrase “jumbo shrimp,” “open-minded skepticism” sounds like an oxymoron (a phrase containing a contradiction). Someone who is open-minded is receptive to unusual ideas; a skeptic doubts them. But in good science, open-mindedness and skepticism combine. A scientist must be receptive to new ideas yet also skeptical about them, accepting them only if substantial research supports them. Let’s see how open-mindedness and skepticism combine on a topic about which you should be skeptical: ESP.

ESP, or extra-sensory perception, refers to an ability to perceive things (i.e., to detect information in the environment) without relying on normal physical and biological mechanisms of perception. If a fortune-teller could literally “look into your future,” it would be a case of ESP.

Is ESP real? The vast majority of psychologists don’t think so. But a good scientist is open-minded. It could be real, and the only way to find out is to conduct research.

One psychologist recently did this. Daryl Bem, of Cornell University, conducted experiments to see whether people could foretell the future (Bem, 2011). For example, in one study he asked participants to predict whether each of five types of pictures— negative images, positive images, emotionally neutral pictures, erotic pictures, and romantic but not erotic pictures—would soon appear on the left or the right side of a computer screen. For the erotic photos (but not the other pictures), participants guessed accurately more than half the time. According to Bem, this meant they could foretell the future; they had powers of ESP (Bem, 2011).

Upon learning of Bem’s results, most psychologists were skeptical. They still doubted that ESP exists. Being scientists, they did not merely sit around doubting. Their skepticism motivated them to carry out research of their own.

One research team in the United Kingdom tried three times to replicate the results of one of Bem’s experiments, but couldn’t; their “results failed to provide any evidence” supporting Bem’s ESP claims (Ritchie, Wiseman, & French, 2012, p. 3). A team of researchers in the United States ran seven experiments using Bem’s method and “found no evidence supporting [ESP’s] existence” (Galak et al., 2012). Researchers in the Netherlands reanalyzed Bem’s data (i.e., the numerical summaries of his results) and concluded that his studies never showed that ESP exists in the first place (Wagenmakers et al., 2011). They detected a problem that you, too, may have noticed. Sure, participants seemed to have ESP when it came to the erotic pictures. But what about the other four types of pictures? On those, they showed no sign of ESP at all. When one examines the overall pattern of results—in the studies by Bem and the other researchers—there is essentially no evidence that ESP exists.

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That may be bad news for members of the American Association of Psychics (an actual organization), but the overall set of events is good for psychological science. The combination of open-mindedness and skepticism enabled psychologists to produce a body of ESP research findings that, in the long run, was consistent and convincing— and negative.