Introduction to Psychology in PDF

Running head: INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY
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INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY1
Task 1
Cognitivism and Behaviorism the two various movements of psychology domain and
both have their individual significance. Behaviorism considers behavior as an important
factor for identifying the determinants and works as per the assumption that a person’s
behavior is controlled by some specific list of physical laws. Cognitivism on the other hand is
a response of Behaviorism. It is considered as analysis of different mental methods via the
medium of technical methods and associated concepts from a persons’ conduct. It applies
mechanism along with information treating as the primary descriptions for the purpose of
interpretation of significant findings (Clark 2018). These two approaches differ on their
views related to behavior. The research subject of Behaviorism is animals and thus it views
behavior to be an irreducible consequence of the environmental stimuli. Contrary to this,
Cognitivism considers humans as its research objects and according to it behavior helps in
abstracting the various mental processes. There are certain similar aspects in both these
approaches as well. Behaviorism and Cognitivism both make use of mechanism and consider
it as their primary assumption. Cognitivism goes a step ahead by extending mechanical
expectations to attention and not limiting it to performance. Both of these approaches
consider human actions as is determined by the various physical laws. Behaviorism and
Cognitivism make use of subjective metaphors which is taken as the base of the objective
science. Behaviorism makes use of stimulus along with response metaphor for the
interpretation of exhibited behavior in the world. It sets various inquiries as per the
affordances of metaphors. Cognitivism makes use of information processing for explaining
the human perceptions, their remembrance and understanding of the situations happening
around them. The inquiry of cognitive science is based on the information processing
metaphor (Harasim 2017). The conclusions drawn about the mental processes are objective to
the level till the metaphor is subjective in nature. Cognitive science overcomes some of the

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY2
major faults in Behaviorism. These faults are that the reflexes and reinforcements cannot be
attributed for all human behavior and behavior of animals is not perfect parameter to predict
human behavior.
Cognitivism is considered to be at a step ahead of Behaviorism as it attempts to
explain the way humans reason out, take important decisions, commit errors and remember or
forget things (Patterson 2017). This means it considers all those aspects that are a vital and
important portion of social knowledge and cannot be certainly explained by Behaviorism.
Cognitivism has its roots in mechanism and thus is subjected to reductionism which provides
no option for meaningful actions. Thus it can be said that in case of behaviorism, learning is
defined as the changes that is seen in an individual’s behavior while on the other hand, in
case of Cognitivism, learning is inferred from behavior (Lee 2016). In Behaviorism, memory
is not given that much of importance while in case of Cognitivism memory is considered as a
important parameter for the learning process.
Task 2
In psychology, many different methods are made use of to conduct researches and
some of these are case study, survey, experiment, content analysis and observational study.
These methods are categorized under two areas that are quantitative and qualitative research
methodology. In quantitative research, the conclusions drawn depend on mathematical and
statistical data while qualitative research depends on analyzing existing sources and surveys.
The type of research made use of depends on the goals of the research that is to be conducted.
1. Case Study- This falls under the purview of qualitative research and is about the
observations of either one individual or a specific group of individuals over a span of time. In
this, the researcher takes the interview of an individual and observes his behavior thus
recording informations. This type of psychological research is made use of to show how the