Long-Standing Goals for the Book
The primary purpose of a liberal arts education is to gain experience in thinking critically about ideas. Information today is available at everyone’s fingertips; we don’t need to store a lot of it in our heads. We do, however, need to use our heads to evaluate information and apply it logically to larger ideas. Our hope is that students who are introduced to psychology through our book will, upon hearing of some new idea in psychology, almost reflexively ask, “What is the evidence?” and will feel empowered to think logically and critically about that evidence.
Even if the goal of the book were merely to teach students the main concepts of psychology, the best means would still be one that stimulates thought. As cognitive psychologists have shown repeatedly, the human mind is not particularly good at absorbing and remembering miscellaneous pieces of information. It is designed for thinking, figuring out, and understanding; and it remembers what it understands. In the absence of some knowledge of the logic and evidence behind them, the concepts in psychology are words devoid of meaning.
In this book, critical thinking does not come in separate boxes or in exercises at the ends of chapters. It is—if we have done our job—woven through almost every paragraph of the text. We have entered each domain of psychology to identify its main questions, its main approaches to answering questions, its main discoveries, and the most durable ideas and theories that have resulted from those discoveries. In writing each edition of this book, we have constantly imagined ourselves carrying on a dialogue with an inquiring, thinking, appropriately skeptical student.
One of our dearest aims has been to achieve some small measure of the personal touch that William James accomplished so masterfully in The Principles of Psychology—the book that still stands, in our minds, as the best introduction to psychology ever written. While reading James, one constantly senses a mind at work, a mind that is honestly struggling to understand the big issues in psychology and that invites readers into the process. We also confess to sharing two of James’s biases: rationalism and functionalism. As rationalists, we are uncomfortable presenting findings and facts without trying to make sense of them. Sometimes in our teaching of psychology we overplay the methods for gathering and analyzing data and underplay the value of logical thought. As functionalists, we want to know why, in terms of survival or other benefits, people behave as they do.
The functionalist theme runs through the book and is particularly emphasized in Part II (Chapters 3 and 4), The Adaptiveness of Behavior. Natural selection and learning are the two reasons behavior is functional, and we want students to know something about those processes, and their interaction, right from the start. The functionalist orientation also leads us, throughout the book, to pay more than the usual amount of attention to cross-cultural research and to behavioral processes as they operate in the contexts of people’s everyday lives.
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Our two main goals in each revision of the book are (1) to keep the book current and accurate, and (2) to make the book more enjoyable and useful to all who read it.
Most of the work and fun of each revision lies in our own continued learning and rethinking of each realm of psychology. In producing this revision, we skimmed thousands of new research articles and chapters and read hundreds carefully to determine which new developments warrant inclusion in the introductory course. The result was not so much the discovery of new ideas as the determination of how long-standing ideas are playing themselves out in current research and debate. This edition contains approximately 730 new references to research, mainly to works published within the past 5 years, out of a total reference list of approximately 2,750. On average, 28 percent of the references in each chapter are new. By including the most recent research and controversies, we can convey to students the understanding that psychology is a continuously advancing, dynamic, contemporary human activity, not a stale collection of facts.
When we compare this new edition of Psychology with the first edition, we see the great progress psychology has made in the past 20 years. What a pleasure it has been to keep pace with it! The progress has come on all fronts and is not easily summarized, but it is pleasing to us that the general theme of adaptation, which was central to Peter’s initial conception of the book, is even more central to psychology today. Our basic behavioral machinery is adapted, by natural selection, to the general, long-standing conditions of human life. That machinery, however, is itself shaped, by natural selection, to be adaptive to the conditions of life within which the individual person develops. An enormous amount of research over the past few years, in all areas of psychology and neuroscience, elaborates on the theme of adaptation. That work is well represented in this new edition.
Here are a few examples of new or expanded discussions in this edition that reflect our increased understanding of adaptive mechanisms:
A book becomes more useful and enjoyable not by being “dumbed down” but by being “smartened up.” The clearer the logic and the more precisely it is expressed, the easier a book is to understand and the more engaging it becomes. With each revision—and with feedback from adopters, students, and editors—we continually try new ways to make difficult ideas clearer without ignoring their inherent subtlety or complexity. In this edition, our efforts toward clarity were greatly facilitated by our development editor, Elsa Peterson. Elsa read the entire manuscript for the first time, as a student would, and helped very much to sharpen the wording and even suggested new research for us to consider.
In the last two editions, Peter made some major changes aimed at making the book more accessible to the full range of students. One such change was a reformulated Chapter 1, which became an orientation to the textbook and how to use its study features, as well as an orientation to psychology as a discipline. Another major change was the addition of a new review aid, hierarchical review charts, at the end of each major section within each chapter. The value of these charts is described in the “Special Features” section of this Preface and again, more fully, on pp. 3-27 of Chapter 1. Feedback from reviewers indicated that the new orientation chapter and the review charts have been very useful in helping students to learn from the book, and so these features have been retained and improved upon for this edition.
The book is divided into eight parts, each of which consists of two or (in one case) three chapters.
Part I, Background to the Study of Psychology, has two relatively brief chapters. Chapter 1, Foundations for the Study of Psychology, is an orientation both to psychology as a discipline and to the book. It presents three major historical ideas that underlie contemporary psychology. It outlines the scope of contemporary psychology, and it offers students some advice about studying this book. Chapter 2, Methods of Psychology, lays out some general elements of psychological research that will be useful to students in later chapters. (This can be supplemented with the first three sections of the Statistical Appendix, found at the back of the book.)
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Part II, The Adaptiveness of Behavior, is devoted explicitly to the functionalist theme that reappears throughout the book. Behavior can be understood as adaptation to the environment, which occurs at two levels—the phylogenetic level (through natural selection) and the individual level (through learning). Chapter 3, Genetics and Evolutionary Foundations of Behavior, includes the idea that even behaviors that are most highly prepared by evolution must develop, in the individual, through interaction with the environment. Chapter 4, Basic Processes of Learning, includes the idea that learning mechanisms themselves are products of evolution.
Part III, Physiological Mechanisms of Behavior, is concerned most directly with psychologists’ attempts to explain behavior in terms of the neural and hormonal mechanisms that produce it. Chapter 5, The Neural Control of Behavior, is a functional introduction to the nervous system and to the actions of hormones and drugs. This chapter continues the theme of adaptation with an up-to-date discussion of neuroplasticity and brain mechanisms of learning. Chapter 6, Mechanisms of Motivation and Emotion, applies the preceding chapter’s ideas about the nervous system and hormones to the topics of hunger, sex, reward mechanisms, sleep, and emotionality. The discussions of motives and emotions also pay ample attention to environmental influences.
Part IV, Sensation and Perception, is about the processes through which the brain or mind gathers information about the outside world. It contains Chapter 7, Smell, Taste, Pain, Hearing, and Psychophysics, and Chapter 8, The Psychology of Vision. The main question for both chapters is this: How does our nervous system respond to and make sense of the patterns of energy in the physical world? In both chapters the discussion of sensory and perceptual mechanisms is placed in a functionalist context. The senses are understood as survival mechanisms, which evolved not to provide full, objective accounts of the world’s physical properties, but, rather, to provide the specific kinds of information that are needed to survive and reproduce.
Part V, The Human Intellect, is about the ability of the brain or mind to store information and use it to solve problems. Chapter 9, Memory and Attention, focuses on the roles of both unconscious and conscious mechanisms in attention, memory encoding, and memory retrieval, as well as how information is represented in memory. The chapter includes an analysis of the multiple memory systems that have evolved to serve different adaptive functions. Chapter 10, Solving Problems: Reasoning and Intelligence, deals with the cognitive processes by which people solve problems, both in everyday life and on structured tests, and with the measurement of intelligence and controversies associated with such measurement. Throughout these chapters, the information-processing perspective is highlighted but is tempered by ecological discussions that draw attention to the functions of each mental process and the environmental contexts within which it operates.
In sum, Parts II, III, IV, and V are all concerned with basic psychological processes—processes of learning, motivation, emotion, sensation, perception, attention, memory, and problem solving—and each process is discussed in a manner that integrates ideas about its mechanisms with ideas about its adaptive functions. The remaining three parts are concerned with understanding the whole person and the person’s relationships to the social environment.
Part VI, Growth of the Mind and Person, is about developmental psychology. Its two chapters develop the functionalist perspective further by emphasizing the interactions between evolved human tendencies and environmental experiences in shaping a person’s behavior. Chapter 11, The Development of Body, Thought, and Language, is concerned with the traditional topics of physical, cognitive, and language development. Chapter 12, Social Development, is concerned with the changes in social relationships and life tasks that occur throughout the life span and with ways in which these relationships and tasks vary across cultures. Chapter 12 also sets the stage for the next pair of chapters.
Part VII, The Person in a World of People, is about social psychology. Chapter 13, Social Perception and Attitudes, is concerned with the mental processes involved in forming judgments of other people, perceiving and presenting the self in the social environment, and forming and modifying attitudes. Chapter 14, Social Influences on Behavior, deals with compliance, obedience, conformity, cooperation, competition, group decision-making, conflict, and the social regulatory roles of emotions. A theme of this chapter is the contrast between normative and informational influences. This unit on social psychology is placed before the one on personality and mental disorders because the insights of social psychology—especially those pertaining to social cognition—contribute to modern personality theories and to ways of understanding and treating mental disorders.
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Part VIII, Personality and Disorders, incorporates material from the new DSM-5 and consists of three chapters on topics that students tend to identify most strongly as “psychology” before they enter the course. Chapter 15, Personality, has sections on the nature and origins of traits, the adaptive value of individual differences, and the classic theories of personality. Chapter 16, Mental Disorders, begins by discussing the problems involved in categorizing and diagnosing disorders and then, through the discussion of specific disorders, emphasizes the idea of multiple causation and the theme that the symptoms characterizing disorders are different in degree, not in kind, from normal psychological experiences and processes. Chapter 17, Treatment, offers an opportunity to recapitulate many of the main ideas of earlier chapters—now in the context of their application to therapy. Ideas from Parts II, III, V, and VII reappear in the discussions of biological, behavioral, and cognitive therapies, and ideas from the personality chapter reappear in the discussions of psychodynamic and humanistic therapies.
Although this ordering of topics makes the most sense to us, each chapter is written so that it can be read as a separate entity, independent of others. Links are often made to material presented in another chapter, but most of these cross-references are spelled out in enough detail to be understood by students who have not read the other chapter. The only major exception falls in the physiological unit: Chapter 6, on motivation, sleep, and emotion, assumes that the student has learned some of the basic information presented in Chapter 5, on the nervous system. Specific suggestions for making deletions within each chapter can be found in the Instructor’s Resources, which is available on Worth Publishers’ website, at http://www.worthpublishers.com/Catalog/product/psychology-seventhedition-gray.
The main pedagogical feature of this or any other textbook is, of course, the narrative itself, which should be clear, logical, and interesting. Everything else is secondary. We have attempted through every page of every chapter to produce as logical and clear a flow of ideas as we possibly can. We have avoided the kinds of boxes and inserts that are often found in introductory psychology texts, because such digressions distract from the flow of thought and add to the impression that psychology is a jumble of topics that don’t fit together very well.
We want students to read and think about the ideas of this book, not attempt to memorize bits and pieces of isolated information. Toward that end we have refrained from the use of review lists of terms, presented out of context of the larger arguments, and have developed, instead, study aids that help students to focus their attention on the arguments and think about individual findings and terms in relation to those arguments.
The most useful study aid in this book—in our judgment and that of many students who have provided feedback—are the focus questions, which appear in the margins throughout the text at an average frequency of about 1 question per page. Each question is designed to direct students’ attention to the main idea, argument, or evidence addressed in the adjacent paragraphs of text. In Chapter 1 (on pp. 3-27) we spell out more fully the rationale behind the focus questions and offer advice to students for using them to guide both their initial reading and their review of each main section of each chapter. We ask students to develop the habit of reading and thinking about each focus question as they come to it, before they read the paragraph or paragraphs of text that answer that question. Most students, once they get used to this method of study, find that it helps them greatly in focusing their attention, stimulating their thought, and increasing their understanding of what they are reading. We have even had students tell us that the focus questions are so helpful that they find themselves writing their own focus questions in the margins of their other textbooks. We urge instructors to reinforce the value of the focus questions by talking about ways of using them in an early lecture and perhaps also by modeling their use with a think-aloud exercise.
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The focus questions also offer instructors a means to make selective assignments within any chapter. The questions are numbered so instructors can easily let students know, with a list of numbers, which questions will be fair game for exams. The multiple-choice questions in the Test Bank are keyed by number to the focus questions. When we teach the course, we tell students that tests will consist of multiple-choice and brief essay questions that are derived from the book’s focus questions. This makes clear what students must do to prepare. If they can answer the focus questions, they will do well on the test.
At the end of each major section of each chapter, we provide a section review, which depicts explicitly the hierarchical structure that relates the section’s main idea to its subordinate ideas and to specific observations and concepts that are relevant to those ideas. The primary purpose of this feature is to help students to review each section before moving on to the next. Here they can see, in one organized picture, the structure of the argument that they have just read. Some students may also find these charts useful as previews. By looking ahead at the section review before reading each new section, students can get a coherent overview, which should help them to read with greater focus and thought.
In Chapter 1 (pp. 3-27), we advise students on how to use the section reviews, but, as with the focus questions, we urge instructors to encourage their use by offering their own advice and, perhaps, by demonstrating in an early lecture how to use them.
Because the focus questions and section reviews make a traditional end-of-chapter review unnecessary, we end each chapter with a section called Reflections and Connections that expands on the broad themes of the chapter, points out relationships to ideas discussed in other chapters, and raises new ideas for students to consider as they reflect on the chapter. In many cases these thoughts are aimed at helping students to see connections between ideas from different sections of the chapter that were not tied together in any of the section reviews.
Reflections and Connections is followed by a brief section called Find Out More, which contains thumbnail reviews of several relevant and interesting books, websites, and content from various media that are sufficiently nontechnical to be read by first-year students. The kinds of students who continue in psychology or in related disciplines, who become the next crop of professors or professional psychologists, are the ones who take most advantage of this feature.
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Beginning in 2015, the Medical College Admission Test, (MCAT) is devoting 25 percent of its questions to the “Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior.” The exam will also recognize the importance the sociocultural and behavioral determinants of health. The exam’s new psychology section covers the breadth of topics in this text. For a full pairing of content, see this book’s website at http://www.worthpublishers.com/Catalog/product/psychology-seventhedition-gray.
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