Professor Paul Bloom:
I'd like to welcome people to
this course, Introduction to
Psychology.
My name is Dr. Paul Bloom.
I'm professor of this course.
And what this is going to be is
a comprehensive introduction to
the study of the human mind.
So, we are going to cover a
very, very wide range of topics
including brains,
children, language,
sex, memory,
madness, disgust,
racism and love,
and many others.
We're going to talk about
things like the proper
explanation for differences
between men and women;
the question of whether animals
can learn language;
the puzzle of what grosses us
out;
the problem of why some of us
eat too much and what we could
do to stop;
the question of why people go
crazy in groups;
research into whether you could
trust your childhood memories;
research into why some of us
get depressed and others don't.
The style of this is there'll
be two lectures a week,
as well as course readings.
Now, to do well in the course,
you have to attend both the
lectures and do the readings.
There will be some overlap.
In some cases,
the lectures will be quite
linked to the readings.
But there will be some parts of
the readings that will not find
their way into the lectures,
and some lectures--some entire
lectures that will not connect
at all to the readings.
So, to pursue this course
properly you have to do both.
What this means is that if you
miss a class you need to get
notes, and so you should get
them from a friend or from the
person sitting next to you.
The slides are going to be made
available online.
So, one of the things you don't
have to do is you don't have to
write this down.
You take notes any way you
choose, but if you don't get
anything on there it'll be
available online.
I'm going to post it in a
format which will be black and
white and easy to print out so
you don't have to worry about
this.
But again, attending to the
slides is not a substitute for
attending class.
There's a textbook,
Peter Gray's Psychology,
5th edition, and there's also a
collection of short readings,
The Norton Reader edited by
Gary Marcus.
It's an excellent textbook;
it's an excellent collection,
and you should get them both.
They're available at Labyrinth
bookstore on York Street or you
get them online.
I should note that last time I
taught the course I used the
Marcus Reader,
and when Professor Marvin Chun
taught his course last semester
he used Peter Gray's 5^(th)
edition textbook.
So, there may be a lot of used
copies floating around.
You should feel free to try to
get one of those.
The evaluation goes like this.
There is a Midterm and there is
a Final.
The Final will not be held in
the exam period,
because I like to take long
vacations.
It will be held the last day of
class.
The exams will be multiple
choice and short answer,
fill in the blank,
that sort of thing.
Prior to the exams I will post
previous exams online,
so you have a feeling for how
these exams work and so on.
There will also be review
sessions.
Starting at the beginning of
the third week of class – that
is not next week but the week
after – on each Monday I'm
going to put up a brief question
or set of questions,
which you have to answer and
your answers need to be sent to
your teaching fellow.
And you'll be given a teaching
fellow, assigned one,
by Friday.
This is not meant to be
difficult.
It's not meant to be more than
five, ten minutes of work,
but the point of the
question--15,20 minutes of work,
but the point of the question
is to motivate people to keep up
with the material and do the
readings.
These questions will be marked
pass, fail.
I expect most everybody could
pass all of the questions but
it's just to keep you on track
and keep you going.
There is a book review,
a short book review,
to be written towards near the
end of the class.
I'll give details about that
later on in the semester.
And there's also an
experimental participation
requirement, and next week I'll
hand out a piece of paper
describing the requirement.
The point of the requirement is
to give you all experience
actually seeing what
psychological research is about
as well as to give us hundreds
of subjects to do our
experiments on.
The issue sometimes comes up as
to how to do well in the course.
Here's how to do well.
Attend all the classes.
Keep up with the readings.
Ideally, keep up with the
readings before you come to
class.
And one thing I would strongly
suggest is to form some sort of
study groups,
either formally or informally.
Have people you could talk to
when the--prior to the exams
or--she's patting somebody next
to her.
I hope you know him.
And in fact,
what I'm going to do,
not this class because it's
shopping period.
I don't know who's coming next
class, or what but I'll set up a
few minutes prior,
at the beginning of the class,
for people just to introduce
themselves to the person next to
them so they have some sort of
resource in the class.
Now, this is a large class,
and if you don't do anything
about it, it can be very
anonymous.
And some of you may choose to
pursue it that way and that's
totally fine.
But what I would suggest you do
is establish some contact with
us, either with me or with any
of the teaching fellows,
and I'll introduce the teaching
fellows sometime next week.
You could talk to us at the
beginning or at the end of
class.
Unless there are special
circumstances,
I always try to come at least
ten minutes early,
and I am willing to stay late
to talk to people.
You could come by during my
office hours,
which are on the syllabus,
and you could send me e-mail
and set up an appointment.
I'm very willing to talk to
students about intellectual
ideas, about course problems and
so on.
And if you see me at some point
just on campus,
you could introduce yourself
and I'd like to meet people from
this class.
So, again, I want to stress you
have the option of staying
anonymous in this class,
but you also have the option of
seeking out and making some sort
of contact with us.
Okay.
That's the formal stuff of the
course.
What's this course about?
Unlike a lot of other courses,
some people come to Intro
Psychology with some unusual
motivations.
Maybe you're crazy and hope to
become less crazy.
Maybe you want to learn how to
study better,
improve your sex life,
interpret your dreams,
and win friends and influence
people.
Those are not necessarily bad
reasons to take this course and,
with the exception of the sex
part,
this course might actually help
you out with some of these
things.
The study of scientific
psychology has a lot of insights
of real world relevance to real
problems that we face in our
everyday lives.
And I'm going to try--and when
these issues come up--I'm going
to try to stress them and make
you try to think about the
extent to which the laboratory
research I'll be talking about
can affect your everyday life:
how you study,
how you interact with people,
how you might try to persuade
somebody of something else,
what sort of therapy works best
for you.
But the general goals of this
course are actually I think even
more interesting than that.
What I want to do is provide a
state of the art introduction to
the most important topic that
there is: us.
How the human mind works,
how we think,
what makes us what we are.
And we'll be approaching this
from a range of directions.
So, traditionally,
psychology is often broken up
into the following--into five
sub-areas: Neuroscience,
which is the study of the mind
by looking at the brain;
developmental,
which is the area which I focus
mostly on, which is trying to
learn about how people develop
and grow and learn;
cognitive, which is the one
term of the five that might be
unfamiliar to some of you,
but it refers to a sort of
computational approach to
studying the mind,
often viewing the mind on
analogy with a computer and
looking at how people do things
like understand language,
recognize objects,
play games, and so on.
There is social,
which is the study of how
people act in groups,
how people act with other
people.
And there is clinical,
which is maybe the aspect of
psychology that people think of
immediately when they hear
psychology,
which is the study of mental
health and mental illness.
And we'll be covering all of
those areas.
We'll also be covering a set of
related areas.
I am convinced that you cannot
study the mind solely by looking
at the discipline of psychology.
The discipline of psychology
spills over to issues of how the
mind has evolved.
Economics and game theory are
now essential tools for
understanding human thought and
human behavior--those issues
connecting to philosophy,
computer science,
anthropology,
literature, theology,
and many, many other domains.
So, this course will be wide
ranging in that sense.
At this point I've been
speaking in generalities so I
want to close this introductory
class by giving five examples of
the sorts of topics we'll be
covering.
And I'll start with the topic
that we'll be covering next week
on Monday – the brain.
This is a brain.
In fact, it's a specific
person's brain,
and what's interesting about
the brain is that little white
mark there.
It's her brain.
It's Terri Schiavo's brain.
You recognize her more from
pictures like that.
And what a case like this,
where somebody is in a coma,
is without consciousness as a
result of damage to the brain,
is a stark illustration of the
physical nature of mental life.
The physical basis for
everything that we normally hold
dear, like free will,
consciousness,
morality and emotions,
and that's what we'll begin the
course with,
talking about how a physical
thing can give rise to mental
life.
We'll talk a lot about children.
This is actually a specific
child.
It's my son,
Zachary, my younger son,
dressed up as Spider-Man,
but it is Halloween.
No, it's not Halloween.
Oh.
Well, there's more to say about
that [laughter].
I study child development for a
living and I'm interested in
several questions.
So, one question is just the
question of development.
Everybody in this room can
speak and understand English.
Everybody in this room has some
understanding of how the world
works, how physical things
behave.
Everybody in this room has some
understanding of other people,
and how people behave.
And the question that
preoccupies developmental
psychologists is how do we come
to have this knowledge,
and in particular,
how much of it is hard-wired,
built-in, innate.
And how much of it is the
product of culture,
of language,
of schooling?
And developmental psychologists
use many ingenious methods to
try to pull these apart and try
to figure out what are the basic
components of human nature.
There's also the question of
continuity.
To what extent is Zachary,
at that age,
going to be that way forever?
To what extent is your fate
sealed?
To what extent could--if I were
to meet you when you were five
years old I could describe the
way you are now?
The poet William Wordsworth
wrote, "The child is father to
the man," and what this means is
that you can see within every
child the adult he or she will
become.
We will look and ask the
question whether this is true.
Is it true for your personality?
Is it true for your interests?
Is it true for your
intelligence?
Another question having to do
with development is what makes
us the way we are?
We're different in a lot of
ways.
The people in this room differ
according to their taste in
food.
They differ according to their
IQs;
whether they're aggressive or
shy;
whether they're attracted to
males, females,
both or neither;
whether they are good at music;
whether they are politically
liberal or conservative.
Why are we different?
What's the explanation for why
we're different?
And again, this could be
translated in terms of a
question of genes and
environment.
To what extent are things the
result of the genes we possess?
To what extent are our
individual natures the result of
how we were raised?
And to what extent are they
best explained in terms of an
interaction?
One common theory,
for instance,
is that we are shaped by our
parents.
This was best summarized most
famously by the British poet
Philip Larkin who wrote,
They mess you up,
your mum and dad.
They may not mean to but they
do.
They fill you with the faults
they had
And add some extra just for
you.
Is he right?
It's very controversial.
You-- It's been a series of--a
huge controversy in the popular
culture to the extent of which
parents matter and this is an
issue which will preoccupy us
for much of the course.
A different question:
What makes somebody attractive?
And this can be asked at all
sorts of levels but a simple
level is what makes for a pretty
face?
So, these are,
according to ratings,
very attractive faces.
They are not the faces of real
people.
What's on the screen are
computer generated faces of a
Caucasian male and a Caucasian
female who don't exist in the
real world.
But through using this sort of
computer generation,
and then asking people what
they think of this face,
what they think of that face,
scientists have come to some
sense as to what really makes a
face attractive,
both within cultures and across
cultures.
And that's something which
we're going to devote some time
to when we talk about social
behavior, and in particular,
when we talk about sex.
Not all attractiveness,
not all beauty of course,
is linked to sex.
So, pandas for instance,
like this panda,
are notoriously cute,
and I don't have anything to
say about it really.
It's just a cute picture
[laughter].
Morality is extremely central
to our lives,
and a deep question,
which we will struggle with
throughout most of the course,
is the question of good and
evil, evil and good.
These three pictures exemplify
different sorts of evil.
What you could call
institutional evil by somebody
behaving cruelly toward somebody
else,
perhaps not due to malice but
because of the situation that
she's in.
It has picture of Osama bin
Laden, a mass murderer or driven
by political cause?
And then there's this guy on
the bottom.
Anybody know who he is?
Ted Bundy.
Who got that?
Film that man [laughter].
No.
Ted Bundy, exactly,
and that's before we get into
the technical stuff like
crazy-evil,
and we're going to have to come
to terms with why some people
are like that.
And again, the same situation
comes up.
Is it part of your nature to be
good or bad or is it largely due
to the situation that you fall
in?
And there's a lot of some quite
spectacular experiments that try
to tease that apart.
If we're going to talk about
evil, we should also talk about
good.
These are pictures of two
notoriously good men,
Oskar Schindler and Paul
Rusesabagina,
each who at different times in
history saved the lives of many,
many people at great risk to
themselves.
Schindler in the Holocaust,
and then the other guy,
in – and I can't pronounce
his name – Rusesabagina,
in Rwanda.
And they both had real good
movies made about them.
But what's interesting with
these cases is you couldn't have
predicted ahead of time that
they would be heroes.
And one personal issue within
any of us is what would we do in
such situations?
Finally, throughout this course
we will discuss mental illness.
Now, towards the end of the
class I want to devote a full
week to discussing major
disorders like depression and
anxiety,
because of their profound
social importance.
Such disorders are reasonably
common in college students.
Many people in this room are
currently suffering from a mood
disorder, an anxiety disorder or
both,
and I won't ask for a show of
hands but I know a lot of people
in this room are on some form of
medication for this disorder.
And we'll discuss the current
research and why people get
these disorders and what's the
best way to make them better.
But I also have a weakness for
the less common mental disorders
that I think tell us something
really interesting about mental
life.
So, when we talk about memory,
for instance,
we'll talk about disorders in
memory,
including some disorders that
keep you from forming new
memories as well as disorders of
amnesia where you forget the
past.
And these are extraordinarily
interesting for all sorts of
reasons.
Early in the course,
in fact I think next week,
we will discuss,
no, later on in the course,
in the middle of the semester,
we will discuss an amazing case
of Phineas Gage.
Phineas Gage was a construction
worker about 100 years ago.
Due to an explosion,
a metal pipe went through his
head like so.
Miraculously, he was not killed.
In fact, his friends--it went
through his head,
went--ended up 100 feet away,
covered with brains and blood.
And Phineas Gage sat down and
went, "uh, oh."
And then on the way to the
hospital they stopped by a pub
to have some cider.
He was not blind,
he was not deaf,
he was not retarded,
but something else happened to
him.
He lost his sense of right and
wrong.
He lost his control.
He used to be a hard-working
family man.
After the accident he lost all
of that.
He couldn't hold a job.
He couldn't stay faithful to
his wife.
He couldn't speak for five
minutes without cursing.
He got into fights.
He got into brawls.
He got drunk.
He lost his control.
He ended up on a circus
sideshow traveling through the
country with the big steel pipe
that went through his head.
And this is again an
extraordinary example of how the
brain can give rise to the mind,
and how things that go wrong
with the brain can affect you in
a serious way.
We'll discuss cases of multiple
personality disorder,
where people have more than one
personality.
And also, discuss the debate
over whether such cases are true
or not;
whether they could be taken as
a real phenomena or a made-up
phenomena, which is--there is a
matter of a lot of controversy.
And then, we'll even discuss
some rarer cases like Capgras
syndrome.
Capgras syndrome is typically
– there's hundreds of cases,
not many – hundreds of cases.
It's typically the result of
some sort of stroke,
and what happens to you is very
specific.
You develop a particular
delusion, like it's getting dark
.
And the delusion is that the
people you love the most have
been replaced.
They've been replaced by aliens
or robots – thank you – by
Martians, by CIA agents,
by trained actors and
actresses.
But the people--But the idea
is, the people you care for the
most you believe are gone.
And this could lead to tragic
consequences.
Capgras syndrome is associated
with a very high level of
violence.
One man in Australia a couple
of years ago was under the
delusion that his father was
replaced with a robot and cut
off his head.
A related disorder involving
the very same parts of the brain
is called Cotard's syndrome.
And Cotard's syndrome is you
believe that you're dead;
you are persuaded that you're
dead.
You're walking around.
You know you're walking around.
And you know that there are
people around,
but you think that you're dead.
And what's striking about these
is--it's not--these are not just
sort of big, screwy problems of
messed up people.
Rather, they're
located--they're related at a
pinpoint level to certain parts
of your brain.
And we're going to talk about
the best modern theories as to
why these syndromes occur.
Now, the reason to be
interested in them,
again, is not because they're
frequent.
They aren't.
And it's not because of some
sort of gruesome,
morbid curiosity.
Rather, by looking at extreme
cases, they can help us best
understand normal life.
Often by looking at extremes it
throws into sharp contrast
things we naturally take for
granted.
The issue of psychopathy,
of people who,
either due to brain damage or
because they are born that way,
have no moral understanding,
can help us cope with questions
of free will and responsibility;
of the relationship or
difference between mental
illness and evil.
Multiple personality cases
force us to address the question
of what is a self.
To what extent are all of us
composed of multiple people,
and to what extent are we a
single unified person over time?
Cases like Capgras are
important because they tell us
about how we see the world.
They tell us for instance that
there is a difference between
recognizing something in the
sense that you could name it,
and knowing what it is.
And so, by studying these
abnormal cases we could get some
insight into regular life.
So, that's the end of the
illustration of the example
topics.
The syllabus lists many more.
I'll end by telling you that
there's a lot of stuff that
we'll be talking about,
that I want to talk about,
that I am not expert in.
And fortunately,
there is a community at Yale of
the best scholars and teachers
on the planet.
And so, it would be a shame for
me not to use them to cover some
of these issues.
And so, I'm going to include
four guest lecturers.
The first one is Dr.
Marvin Chun who teaches the
Introduction to Psychology
course in the fall and is my
competition.
And he's going to give an
amazing lecture on cognitive
neuroscience,
especially the cognitive
neuroscience of faces.
Dr.
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema is the
world's authority on depression,
and in particular,
on sex differences and
depression, and she's going to
talk about this towards the end
of the course.
Kelly Brownell is going to
talk--is head of the Rudd
Center, focuses on obesity,
eating disorders,
dieting, and he'll talk about
the psychology of food.
And finally,
Dr.
Peter Salovey,
Dean of Yale College,
is going to come to us on
Valentine's Day and tell us
everything he knows about the
mysteries of love.
All of these details are in the
syllabus and I'll stick around
and answer questions.
Hope to see you next week.
