Essay on "Human or Animal Behavior"

Essay 7 pages (2750 words) Sources: 2 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

human or animal behavior you would like to study experimentally. Develop a hypothesis and describe the variables you want to study. How would you assign the subject to the various groups, manipulate the independent variable or variables, control extraneous variables and minimize forms of bias?

People assume that a researcher who has graduated from an Ivy League institution of higher learning is more competent and credible than a researcher who has not graduated from an Ivy League School.

Researchers who have gone to more prestigious vs. less prestigious institutions of higher education

Experiment design: Three groups of people would be given the same research study, one of which would state that it was conducted by Harvard University graduates. A second group would be given the same research study with the same results and design but the researchers would be stated graduates of a non-Ivy League, relatively obscure institutions. A third group would be given the same research study with no information on the educational background of the researchers.

Subject assignation: Subjects would be randomly assigned to the two groups to create mixed group of races, genders, and also background (some high school graduates, some college graduates, and some graduate students). Then, they would be asked to rate the study's credibility.

Bias minimization: Subjects with a background in the research area who might have a bias as to the results based on professional knowledge would be eliminated. It would also be very important to make sure that the groups were evenly divided in terms of the educational background of the subjects, because, given the bias of the subjects towards higher education in general, this might affect the results as well.

Portfolio: What did you find most interesting about this chapter? What will be most useful?

The emphasis on experimentation in psychology was particularly interesting in this chapter. It shows how modern psychology, in contrast to psychology in the past, is interested in becoming a truly rigorous and scientific discipline, based in the six-step scientific method. Using animals to better understand human responses is at the heart of behaviorism, but many of the other schools of psychology, like Gestalt psychology and humanistic psychology seem less grounded in science, and more dependant upon philosophy. The chapter also acknowledged that experimentation is seldom perfect. In other words, even psychological research is subject to the same biases that it is attempting to study in its subjects. Studying psychology through experimentation can also be difficult because human beings do not live in laboratories, and the influences of different variables in the real world, over time, cannot always be replicated in experiments.

The analysis of correlation vs. causation was especially important, and the chapter made clear that merely because two factors are linked does not mean that one factor causes the other. For example, poverty and obesity may be linked in the United States, but that does not mean that being poor causes obesity, rather that being poor is linked to a number of other conditions, like a high-calorie diet of inexpensive foods, lack of access to safe exercise facilities, and other factors that contribute to and cause obesity, which is directly caused by ingesting more calories than one burns.

Chapter 2

Question: 2.2.

What would it be like to have facial agnosia? What problems would you experience? What reactions do you think you would have from others? How would you feel?

Facial agnosia is the inability to recognize people's faces, because of brain damage. The problems caused by the condition are relatively obvious. People in our society, especially in small social spheres such as work or school are expected to be able to identify individuals on the basis of their facial appearance. To not to be able to do so might make people believe an individual was snobbish, deliberately snubbing his or her co-workers, or simply being rude. This could hamper making friends or being promoted at work, as it might gain the individual the reputation that he or she was not a 'team player.' It would make forging new relationships outside of the sufferer's family who was aware of the impairment especially difficult.

One of the reasons the condition would be so difficult to endure is that the condition would not be immediately obvious to others. A sufferer of facial agnosia looks the same as everyone else. The person would have to explain his or her difficulty to others and for a casual acquaintance not to feel snubbed would almost be impossible. Also, people might think that the person with facial agnosia was suffering from dementia, and was completely incompetent, because he or she did not seem to recognize people whom he or she ought to know well.

Portfolio: What did you find most interesting about this chapter? What will be most useful?

The interrelationship between the brain and psychology is a fascinating subject, because so much of what we assume to be based upon our childhood and upon 'the mind' is linked to the body, and aspects of biology and development such as hemispherical dominance and the impact of hormones on the different genders during infant development can affect the way humans perceive the world, feel, and think about the world.

Question: 3.1. How do effective parents discipline their children? Discuss the major parental styles, and the elements of optimal care giving. Give examples of effective and ineffective parenting.

Effective parents strike a balance between an authoritarian style, that is, a style of enforcing rigid rules and demanding strict obedience to authority, and a permissive style, being overly permissive and giving children little guidance, or allowing children too much freedom and not requiring the child to take responsibility for his or her actions. Parents who supply firm and consistent guidance combined with love and affection are authoritative without being authoritarian.

Interestingly, a parent who is authoritarian vs. A parent who is overly permissive might produce the same bad behavior in a child. A parent who is authoritarian whose child gets a bad grade or has been acting out in school might ground the child, force the child to get tutoring after school, or physically discipline the child. The child may resent the parent, and comply outwardly, but refuse to really listen or make a sincere attempt to do better in school. A permissively raised child might be acting badly to get attention from the parent, and if the parent ignores the problem, the bad behavior will not go away. Or the permissive parent might complain that the teacher is biased against his or her child and teach the child nothing about personal responsibility. A responsible authoritative parent would try to find out why the child is having problems -- was it the difficulty of the material, is the child unhappy socially at school, etc., and attempt to address those problems by listening to the child, but still use adult wisdom and guidance and setting limits, like banning television until the child has completed his or her homework, if that was the cause the problem.

Portfolio: What did you find most interesting about this chapter? What will be most useful?

One of the most interesting aspects about this chapter is that what are commonly thought of as 'discipline problems' such as the 'terrible twos' are actually normal phases of childhood development, a necessary way for the child to establish autonomy from the parent, and what might seem like a child's failure to understand certain concepts, like space and mass, may have less to do with the child's comprehension level that the child's stage of development and neurological capacity. However, the most useful aspect of the chapter is undoubtedly the section on discipline, from the negative aggression stirred up by spanking to advice on the right way to balance the need for authority and freedom in an authoritative parenting style.

Chapter 4

Question 4.1.

Many children are now part of "blended" stepfamilies. How would this affect the development of a child's identity?

Rather than merely being exposed to one form of discipline and schema of values, a child from a blended family is invariably exposed to two, or perhaps several moral systems. He or she is exposed to one value system growing up with his or her birth parents, and then two different systems with the new families. This can create a sense of increased developmental anxiety for the child, and may complicate the child's sense of trust in the world, as the child begins with an unstable moral base from which to build his or her own personal sense of self. However, if the child is resilient, this exposure to alternative ways of thinking and life may be personally enriching, and benefit the child's ability to deal with conflicting moral schemas later on.

Portfolio: What did you find most interesting about this chapter? What will be most useful?

Many of the topics covered in this chapter are not simply areas of interest to psychologists but also hot-button issues on the evening news, like… READ MORE

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