The Philosophy of Psychological Approaches

Hi, My name is Doctor.

You've got to and I am a lecturer

at the University of Birmingham in social psychology.

Today, I'm going to be talking about approaches in psychology,

concentrating more on philosophical ideas.

Not necessarily the actual, um,

methods in which we do research. That's going to be another course.

But today we're gonna be focusing less on the idea of research methods.

Who pays for research, how to get research done, that sort of thing.

I'm gonna focus more on the approach.

So the idea is what we're going to be that we're going to be covering here are free will

versus determinism, whole ism versus reductionism.

Practical uses of psychology around that and ending on questions to consider.

So for this, there are going to be five separate sections.

All will at least contain some of those overlap, as you might guess.

But before we get there,

we're gonna do a practical example to frame our consideration.

Psychology is not excuse ology.

Knowing the reasons why people do things does not

mean that people are absolved of their actions.

And now and this is particularly apparent in forensic psychology as well as in law.

So in this case.

What I want you to do is I want you to think about the idea of being a juror you are,

or a judge.

Whatever have you,

you're a juror,

and you have four cases on the docket today and you're in four separate trials.

You've been unlucky enough to be called for Julie. Julie Duty for four separate,

uh, cases.

The first we're going to call Mr Smokey.

Mr Smokey

goes out and stab someone

for a pack of cigarettes after an argument on the price. Are they guilty?

Should they be punished?

Ms. Clumsy,

clumsy, Miss Clumsy. Basically trips while carrying a knife and stab someone.

Are they guilty?

Ms. Unlucky, a person who has no sense of reality whatsoever. Stab someone.

They are literally do not understand the world around them.

They cannot see things they don't understanding.

They do not understand anything there in a haze. Are they guilty of their action, Mr.

Angry,

A person with a family history of aggression and a family background of aggression.

So that is genetically as well as opera upbringing, stab someone. Are they guilty?

Let's say, for example,

you are part of a jury and you notice

that the jurors split among multiple groups while talking.

One group says, Let's look at the bigger picture

the whole day,

the whole thing leading up to it

and the other one's Another group says, Let's look at all the factors.

Let's break them down Let's add to this

People start talking about things like, Well, did they really have any choice?

And I was like, No, of course they had choice,

which what is what's the most valid way to judge why people are

doing what they're doing and how do we see what people do,

what they do

here?

What we're gonna be talking about in this way is hello,

some versus reductionism and free will versus determinism.

We'll also talk about the psychology of keeping these ideas in mind.

So why does this matter?

You might wonder.

Well,

for the philosophy that underpins any science

is crucial for the science to operate.

There are fundamental assumptions that exist as part of any scientific principle.

These assumptions are tested repeatedly

through experimentation and observation.

We must refine our understanding of the world and

change our use of approaches against these ideas,

and we have to be able to understand exactly why people do what they do.

Psychology is the study of human behaviour.

Why do people do what they do? When do people do what they do?

What parameters exist underneath what people do, what they do?

And these approaches help us understand why this is the case.

There are philosophical debates on this.

Why?

How do we actually analyse human behaviour and what

kind of things matter against human behaviour overall?

So that is, Do we take a look at things more broadly?

Versus more specifically,

do we look at things in terms of fate Basically of things being set in

motion like a machine like a giant machine with all the parts falling into place?

Or do we actually say no? There are choices here,

and this is critical in psychology.

It may sound very philosophical of they had no choice

or we have to look at the bigger picture.

These things may sound very unscientific,

but if we don't have a scientific understanding,

if we don't use our scientific understanding,

then that means that we're actually barking up the wrong tree.

We're not looking at exactly the things we need

to look at when we understand human behaviour,

forensic psychology gets this quite a bit.

Forensic psychology bears the brunt of this.

The reason why people do what they do is critical

in forensic psychology. What, and that is also the question of culpability?

Are people culpable of what they're doing?

Are people as people are people's behaviour,

something that we can subscribe to outside

circumstances versus internal circumstances or choice?

So there's a questions that really are debated in psychology, even to this day.

There are.

There's also the problem, though,

that some of these which will discuss a little bit

some of these ideas are impossible for us to not

accept if we're going to focus on its scientific principle

and we'll talk more about why that's the case soon enough

in the next section,

what we're gonna be doing is we're going to talk about free will versus determinism.

We're going to use these range of people to discuss this following that,

we're going to talk about the idea of of whole is inverse reductionism.

So what level of analysis are we going to be examining?

And then finally, we're gonna talk about the uses around this.

So with this what I want you to keep in mind is our four people, Mr Smoky, Mr Clumsy,

Miss Clumsy, Miss Unlucky and Mr Angry.

Think them through and consider potentially of you being a juror.

I don't want to think of yourself as a psychologist in this case.

I want you to think of yourself as a juror as we proceed.