This chapter’s opening story showed you that psychologists address questions in three ways: by studying (1) persons, (2) the mind, and (3) the brain. Let’s now examine this idea in depth. We will explore the notion of levels of analysis, and then present person, mind, and brain analyses of the same phenomenon: gender differences in performance on math tests.

Research on persons, the mind, and the brain represents different levels of analysis in psychological science. In any science, levels of analysis are different ways of describing and explaining an object or event. A concrete example clarifies the idea.

Suppose you see an iPhone on which someone is playing a game—let’s say, Angry Birds. How would you describe what you are seeing? You could say:

These three statements reflect different levels of analysis. The level of analysis of Statement A is the phone as a whole (viewed from the perspective of a person using it). The level of analysis of Statement B is computer software; the statement refers to the steps of information processing that take place according to commands in a computer program. The level of analysis of Statement C is electronic hardware; electrons are racing around in the phone’s CPU.

The levels differ considerably. Answers to the question “How does it work?” illustrate how big the differences are. At the level of hardware, the answer is “a silicon chip electronically processes digitized instructions.” At the level of software, the answer is “a series of programming steps displays screen images that are partly based on input from a user.” At the highest level (Statement A), the answer is, “You fling birds with a slingshot and they land on pigs.”

Notice three facts about the levels of analysis:

Levels of analysis in psychology are similar to the levels of analysis in the Angry Birds example:

Let’s see how levels of analysis work in psychology through an example.

Our example involves performance on math tests. Research shows that when men and women take math tests that are important to them, fewer women than men attain the highest test scores (Cole, 1997). Gender differences are not always found. Instead, they occur in a specific setting: when people take “high-stakes” tests, that is, tests that are highly personally significant (e.g., a college entrance exam). The scientific question, then, is: Why do relatively few women get the highest-level scores on high-stakes math tests?

EXPLANATION AT PERSON, MIND, AND BRAIN LEVELS OF ANALYSIS. This question can be answered in three different ways:

Answer 1: One stereotype in our society is that women are not good at math. All women—even those who are brilliant mathematicians—will be aware of this stereotype. If they think of the stereotype when taking an important math test, it will distract them, lowering their performance. The impact of social stereotypes on women’s performance thus explains the gender difference.

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Answer 2: Good performance on math tests requires not only knowledge of math, but also a calm state of mind. Distressing emotions, such as anxiety, can interfere with the thinking processes (memory, concentration) needed to solve math problems. If women experience more anxiety than men during important math tests, then the influence of emotion on thinking explains the gender difference.

Answer 3: The brain is very complex; different parts of the brain do different things. If parts of the brain that are not useful for solving math problems are highly active during a math test, their activity can interfere with regions of the brain needed for math. This can hurt performance. If women’s brain activity during math tests differs from men’s, then brain activity explains the gender difference in math test performance.

The answers refer to three different aspects of the same phenomenon: people (who experience stereotypes), the mind (in which emotions influence thinking processes), and the brain (and its many subparts). The person, mind, and brain explanations may each be correct and can complement one another. As you move down a level, you get a deeper understanding of the higher level. Why are people affected by stereotypes? It is because, at the level of mental processes, emotions influence thinking. Why do emotions influence thinking? It is because, at the level of the brain, a part of the brain that generates emotions is connected to parts of the brain involved in the logical thinking needed to do math.

Note that the three levels of analysis, although complementary, are not identical. Person and mind differ. People have minds, but the mind is not identical to the person as a whole; there is more to you than just your thinking processes. Mind and brain differ. If you poke around in a human brain, you won’t literally see any thoughts in there, and a brain removed from a body won’t, by itself, be able to do any thinking.

You (a person) think (a mental, or mind, activity) using your brain (the biological tool needed for thinking). The three answers about women and math tests, then, illustrate distinct person, mind, and brain levels of analysis.

RESEARCH AT PERSON, MIND, AND BRAIN LEVELS OF ANALYSIS. In addition to proposing explanations at different levels of analysis, psychologists also conduct research at each of the three levels—person, mind, and brain— to see whether their explanations are correct. Here is an example.

At a person level, two psychologists (Quinn & Spencer, 2001) ran the following study. They asked men and women to come to a psychology laboratory and take a math test. Some of the men and women simply sat down and took the test. Others first received this information: “Prior use of these problems has shown them to be gender-fair—that is, men and women perform equally well on these problems” (Quinn & Spencer, 2001, p. 64). The researchers found that when men and women just sat down and took the test, men outperformed women. But when participants first were told that the tests were gender-fair, women and men performed equally. The gender-fair instructions reduced stereotype threat (Steele, 1997), that is, negative thoughts and feelings that occur when people think they may confirm a negative stereotype about their group (as you saw in this chapter’s opening story). The elimination of stereotype threat eliminated male–female differences in performance (Quinn & Spencer, 2001). The findings, then, supported a person-level explanation: Women are affected by stereotypes that lower their performance.

In research conducted at a mind level of analysis, psychologists explored the relationship between anxiety and thinking processes (Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001). They expected that, within the minds of all persons, anxiety can impair thinking. To test a this, they asked a group of research participants (1) to report how much anxiety they experience when thinking about math and (2) to try to remember a list of words and numbers. When the researchers related levels of anxiety to accuracy of memory, they found that higher anxiety was associated with worse memory (Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001). Because memory is needed to perform well in math (you have to keep track of the numbers and words in a math problem), high anxiety thus could reduce math performance. This fact about the mind (anxiety can impair memory and thinking) deepens our understanding of the previous fact about people. Why do stereotypes affect people’s scores on math tests? The stereotypes may increase anxiety, which impairs thinking.

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At our third level of analysis, a team of psychologists (Krendl et al., 2008) studied women’s brain activity during math tests by using brain-imaging methods, which depict activity in the brain while people perform tasks. In their study, some women, but not others, were told that prior research shows that men and women differ in math ability; this information was expected to increase the impact of stereotypes. All women—whether they heard this stereotype-relevant information or not—then took a math test.

The study produced two findings. First, stereotypes influenced performance; women who heard the stereotype-relevant information performed less well. Second, stereotypes influenced the brain. Women who heard the stereotype-related information showed increased activity in a brain region involved in the production of emotional experiences. Among women who did not hear the stereotype information, the most active brain regions were those useful for solving math problems (Krendl et al., 2008). This finding further deepens our understanding. Stereotypes activate different brain regions; the brain activity contributes (at the level of the mind) to different patterns of emotion and thought; and the brain and mental activity contribute (at the level of persons) to gender differences in test scores (Figure 1.2).

Factors in addition to stereotypes can affect math performance and contribute to gender differences. Men and women may differ in their level of interest in math, in specific mental abilities (including abilities that enable people to succeed in nonmathematical fields), and in brain structure and functioning (Ceci, Williams, & Barnett, 2009; Stoet & Geary, 2012). Most psychological phenomena are affected by many factors, and math performance is no exception. Nonetheless, research on how stereotypes can affect persons, the mind, and the brain shows how different levels of explanation can combine to provide multilevel understanding in psychological science.

Earlier in this chapter, you tried our first Try This! exercise. If you didn’t, do it now; it’s at www.pmbpsychology.com. Let’s review what you learned.

Our first Try This! teaches a valuable lesson about the power of scientific methods, which can provide knowledge that exceeds what one knows from intuition alone.

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TRY THIS!

Intuitively, you probably thought that the only way in which memory could be flawed is that you might forget information you saw previously. But thanks to Try This!, you learn of the existence of another type of flaw: “remembering” information you did not see previously. When trying to remember words presented on a list, many people have the experience of recalling a word that was not actually present. The carefully constructed research methods of the Try This! exercise (Roediger & McDermott, 1995) convincingly demonstrate this fascinating and surprising fact about memory.

At this point in your reading, you also should be able to identify the level of analysis at which the Try This! exercise was conducted. It was at a mind level of analysis; the study reveals a property of the mind, namely, a memory error. You will learn more about the mind, and its powers—and errors—of memory, in Chapter 6.

You will encounter person, mind, and brain analyses throughout this book; this is why it is titled Psychology: The Science of Person, Mind, and Brain. The book’s organization reflects activity in the twenty-first-century science of psychology. After psychologists learn an interesting fact about the behavior of people, they often try to “dig deeper” to understand it at the level of the mind’s structures and processes. Once they accomplish that, they dig deeper still, to understand the brain activity that enables the mind to function as it does. You’ll do the same thing, as you encounter research findings at the levels of person, mind, and brain.

This book reflects psychology’s multilevel nature in two ways:

Learning that your psychology book has separate parts, each with chapters on separate topics, can create a false impression. It might appear that psychology is a collection of isolated subfields that have little to do with one another. This is not the case. Especially in recent years, psychology has become a highly integrated science, with different parts of the field informing one another. The levels of analysis we have discussed are key to this integration. Researchers in different branches of the field commonly explore, at different levels, the same psychological phenomenon. Their research results thus inform one another. Consider this example.

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Psychologists are interested in self-control, people’s ability to regulate their emotions and behavior. If you feel like ordering a big dessert but then give yourself contrary instructions (e.g., “Don’t forget how fattening desserts are!” or “Don’t even look at the dessert menu!”), you are exerting self-control. Self-control is explored in different branches of the field, at different levels of analysis:

Research in these different areas combines to yield a coherent portrait of how the brain and mind enable people to exert self-control. Such examples of integration abound in psychology today, as you’ll see in the chapters ahead.

Throughout this book, we will highlight these interconnections among different branches of psychology. A PMB Connections feature will show you how research studies conducted at one level of analysis connect to studies conducted at other levels of analysis, which are presented elsewhere in the text.