1.3 Thoughts About Using This Book and Its Special Features

This final section of this chapter normally would go in a preface; it’s about how to study this book. We’ve put it here because we’ve found that many people don’t read prefaces, and we’d like you to read this. The suggestions here have proven helpful to thousands of previous students, and we want you to benefit from them. You are probably reading this book because it was assigned to you as part of a college course. You are reading it not because you chose it, but because someone chose it for you. This creates a special difficulty. When you read nonfiction outside of a course, you usually do so because you are curious about some issue, and you choose a book that seems to address it. In that case you read actively, constantly thinking about what you read to see if it helps answer your questions. But when a book is assigned to you for a course, you do not necessarily have particular questions in mind that you want to answer, and you may understand your job rather vaguely as that of “learning the material.” This often leads to a passive and rather ineffective mode of reading, aimed more at memorizing than at thinking and understanding.

Our minds are not designed for memorizing what we don’t understand or what we have not thought about actively. Our mental machinery evolved for the purpose of making sense of things, and we don’t remember much of what doesn’t make sense to us. So, when we read for the passive purpose of “learning” or “absorbing” the material, our minds often wander. We often find that we have read long passages—or, rather, that our eyes have moved across the lines of text—without having any idea what we just read.

Our sympathies are with you. We’ve been there before ourselves. We really want you to enjoy this book. We want you to read it actively, to question it, argue with it, and get excited by the ideas in it. Toward that end, we have done our best to present psychology as a set of ideas to think about, not as a set of facts to memorize. We have tried to give you enough information about each idea, enough of the evidence and logic supporting it, to enable you to have something to think about and argue with. Most of all, we do not want you to read this book as Truth with a capital T. Psychology is a science, and the essence of science is this: We do not accept anything on authority. It doesn’t matter who says that something is or isn’t true; what matters is the evidence and logic behind the statement. Each page of this book is offered for your consideration, not for your unquestioned acceptance.

Example of a student’s notes (see page 34) Don’t be afraid to write your own notes in the margin of this textbook. Your note taking will help you think about what you are reading and will be useful for review.

Worth Publishers

Using the Focus Questions to Guide Your Study

In the introduction to this chapter, we pointed out the numbered focus questions that appear in the book’s margins. We suggested a way to use these questions to guide both your initial reading and your review of the text. Here we’ll elaborate on their use.

Each focus question is the main question that we are trying to answer in the portion of text that immediately follows the question. You can make your reading of the text more interesting and active if you reflect on each focus question as you come to it, before reading the paragraphs aimed at answering it. One way to approach the question is to formulate a preliminary, possible answer based on what you already know or believe. You might also put the question into your own words, to make it your question rather than ours. This will prepare you to read the relevant portion of text with a clear purpose in mind—finding out how we answer the question, and how our answer compares with your preliminary thoughts about it.

As an illustration, consider Focus Question 2, on page 5 of this chapter. This question consists of two parts: What was Descartes’ version of dualism? How did it help pave the way for a science of psychology? When you first came to this question, you already had some good grounds for forming a preliminary answer. You had just read a definition of dualism in the previous paragraph, in which that term appeared in boldface italics. You had read that dualism distinguishes between the body, which is physical and can be studied scientifically, and the soul, which is supernatural and cannot be studied scientifically. You may have also noticed that the section heading just above the focus question reads Descartes’ Version of Dualism: Focus on the Body, and that the larger section heading above that (on page 5) reads, The Idea of Physical Causation of Behavior. So, in thinking about Focus Question 2, you might have said something to yourself like: “Okay, maybe Descartes’ version of dualism placed greater emphasis on the physical body and less emphasis on the soul than did previous versions. Now, I wonder if that guess is correct. If it is correct, I wonder just how Descartes developed and supported this view. What attributes did he ascribe to the body that had previously been ascribed to the soul, and why?” Having said all this to yourself, you would be ready to read the adjacent portion of text with great understanding.

After reading the portion of text that is relevant to answering a given focus question, it’s a good idea to stop and think about that question again and how you would answer it. You might jot down, next to the question, the gist of the answer that you would now give. If you aren’t sure how to answer it, you might want to read that portion again. If you still aren’t sure after that, you might want to mark that question as one to ask of your course instructor or study companions. Perhaps we didn’t answer the question clearly in the text, and perhaps a discussion with others will throw some light on it.

In later chapters, you will discover that many focus questions ask about the evidence for or against some idea. Be sure to think especially carefully about the answers you will read to those questions, and ask yourself whether or not the evidence seems convincing.

Admittedly, this approach to study will slow down your initial reading of each chapter. At first, stopping to think about each focus question may seem awkward and annoying. But most students we have taught, using previous editions of this book, have told us on course surveys that the focus-question approach begins to seem natural with practice and that it improves their comprehension, enjoyment, and test performance. In the long run, for most students, it saves study time. Understanding and thinking about the material the first time through makes later study and review relatively easy. Some students have even told us that they transfer this study skill to their reading of textbooks in other courses. For books without focus questions, they use section headings and opening sentences to generate their own focus questions as they read. For more information about this study method, turn to page 351, in Chapter 9, where textbook reading is discussed in the context of a more general discussion of ways to improve memory.

We should add, however, that a few students—roughly 10 percent of those we have taught—find that they do not need the focus questions to read very actively, thoughtfully, and effectively. These are students who naturally form questions as they read. They don’t have the problem of a drifting mind that most of us have when reading assigned material. If you are one of those students, then you may happily choose to ignore the focus questions on your first reading and use them just for review after you have finished each major section.

Using the Headings and Section Reviews to See the Hierarchical Structure of Ideas

Textbooks are always hierarchically organized. Each main heading refers to some major idea or argument, each subheading refers to a more limited idea that is part of the larger one, and each sub-subheading refers to a still more limited idea or observation that is part of the subheading’s idea. In this book, we have tried to compose all headings in such a way as to give you a pretty good idea of what each section, subsection, and sub-subsection is about. By turning pages and reading all the headings within a main section before you read that section, you can preview the material and give yourself a head start toward thinking about it. You will see the basic structure of the argument that you are about to read, which will help you make sense of it as you read. Just as importantly, it will help you generate your own set of questions to try to answer as you read.

At the end of each main section of this book, you will find a section review, which reflects the hierarchical organization of the ideas and observations described in that section. We already described (on p. 11) how to use these charts for review. Reviewing in this way allows you to reflect back on each observation and idea as it relates to the larger idea to which it pertains. It helps you to see the individual elements of the section not as separate nuggets to memorize but as integral parts of a larger argument that helps you to make sense of them and remember them. A common mistake many students make is to study only the key terms and their definitions. That method causes the student to lose track of the larger arguments, which tie the various elements together and make them interesting and memorable. The section review charts offer you an alternative way to view the key ideas—a way that maintains their relationships to one another.

For example, the section review on page 26 of this chapter depicts the organization of our argument that three fundamental ideas preceded scientific psychology historically and provided a conceptual base on which psychology could build. That chart should help you think about the individual concepts, such as empiricism and nativism, in relation to the argument and should discourage you from memorizing definitions out of context. Your main goal is not to memorize definitions of these terms, but rather to think about how these philosophical ideas helped to provide a foundation for the emergence of a science of psychology.

Using the Book’s Other Features

Numbered Figures

As you read each chapter, pay attention to the numbered figures. Whenever the text refers you to a figure, take a few moments to study the figure and read its caption. Many figures are graphs of data that back up an idea described in the text. Others are photographs or drawings that are designed to help you understand a point that would be difficult to grasp from words alone.

Bold Italicized Terms and Glossary

Another feature that runs through the text is the use of boldface italics to highlight technical terms that are likely to be new to many students. We suggest that you not devote much effort, on your first reading, to learning term definitions. Rather, read with the aim of understanding and thinking about the main ideas and the lines of evidence for or against them. In that process you will learn most of the terms, in the context of the ideas, without explicitly trying to learn them. The bold italics will be more useful in your later review. While you are reviewing the focus questions, look also for each of the terms in bold italics and check your knowledge of its meaning. These terms are also defined in the Glossary at the back of the book. If an important term has been defined in an earlier chapter, it is sometimes, but not always, defined again when it reappears. If it is not defined, you can use the Glossary to find both the term’s definition and the number of the page on which it was first used.

Reflections and Connections Section

Each chapter ends with a section called Reflections and Connections. This is not a summary; rather, it provides some ideas and integrating themes that emerge from reflecting back on the chapter as a whole. It also suggests, in some cases, alternative ways to think about and review the whole chapter. This section is in a different format from the rest of the chapter—and there are no focus questions related to it—but that doesn’t mean it is less important than the rest of the chapter. Some instructors, ourselves included, consider any new ideas or themes that emerge in the Reflections and Connections section to be fair game for the test. In this first chapter, for example, you will find a discussion of the concept of mind in Reflections and Connections that may be especially useful.

Reference Citations, Find Out More, and Subject Index

A feature that this book shares with other books and articles on psychology is the use of reference citations. This first chapter has relatively few of them, but in most chapters you will find them on nearly every page. Each citation consists of the name of one or more researchers followed by a year. Sometimes both the name (or names) and the year are in parentheses, such as “(Jones & Smith, 2001)”; at other times, when the name or names are part of the sentence, only the year is in parentheses, such as “According to Alice Jones (2009)…” In either case, the year refers to the year of publication of an article or book, by the person or persons named, which describes more fully the idea or the research study being mentioned or discussed. When the cited publication has three or more authors, we follow the convention of citing the first author’s name followed by “et al.,” a Latin abbreviation for “and others”—for example, Johnson et al., 2009. The full reference to that article or book can be found in the References section at the back of the textbook, which is arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names. At first you may find these citations disruptive to the flow of your reading, but you will soon learn to read right through them. Their purpose is to give credit to the people whose work or ideas are being described and to give you the opportunity to look up and read more about any ideas or research findings that intrigue you. To entice you to read further, you will also find, at the very end of each chapter, in a section called Find Out More, brief reviews of several interesting resources that pertain to topics that were discussed in that chapter.

Many students save their introductory psychology textbook and use it after the course is over as a reference to review topics that are relevant to other courses that they take. The Subject Index at the back of the book, which lists topics alphabetically and indicates all the pages where each topic is discussed, is very useful for this purpose. The reference citations and Find Out More resources are useful as sources for term papers, not just in psychology courses, but also in other social science courses, education courses, business courses, nursing courses, and courses in such diverse subjects as biology, philosophy, and English. Students who decide to apply to graduate programs in psychology often use the book to help prepare for the GRE Psychology Test.