Chapter 1 Introduction to the Science of Psychology: History and Research Methods
On a balmy April day in 2002, a young man was playing golf. Nothing unusual about that. But when this young man sank his final putt, the watching crowd let out a roar, and he looked for his parents and embraced them, fighting back tears. The occasion was the PGA Masters Tournament, and the young man was Tiger Woods. In a sport that had long been effectively closed to all but Whites, Woods was of Asian, Black, White, and Native American ancestry. He then went on to dominate the sport of golf like no one before him. In the years that followed, he was awarded PGA player of the year 11 times (a record), and was the highest paid athlete for 11 consecutive years. In 2008, he earned about $115 million!
But then, at the end of 2009, the world learned that Woods had multiple extramarital relationships, and his storybook marriage was left in shambles. He became the butt of jokes on late-night talk shows and a target of gossip in the media and around water coolers across the country. His product endorsements—which made up the bulk of his income—quickly began to disappear. How could someone who “had it all” have put his hard-won efforts and the trust of his family members at risk like this?
After taking a hiatus from golf and then playing poorly, Woods was able to come back to win several matches in 2012 and 2013, only to fall out of the top 100 golfers in the world by 2015, and to withdraw from professional golf while recovering from various surgeries. In 2017, he was arrested for driving under the influence (DUI) of various drugs, including painkillers, a sleeping pill, and Xanax, a medicine typically prescribed for anxiety. Yet in 2018, he was back on top, winning his 80th PGA Tour.
If you were a psychologist and could identify and explain the factors that led to Tiger Woods’s meteoric rise to fame and his subsequent fall from grace, his rise back to the top and then the way he dealt with his injuries and pain, you would be a very insightful psychologist indeed. But where would you begin? To understand his ability at golf, you could look at his hand–eye coordination, his concentration and focus, and his intelligence. You could look at his personality, his religious beliefs (he was raised in his mother’s faith, Buddhism), and his discipline in training. You could look at his relationships with the social world around him—his family, his competitors, and his fans.
To try to understand Woods's personal problems, you could look at the role of sex in human motivation, you could look at his self-image and how he conceived of his role in the world, how his fame and money affected him, how women behaved toward him and how he responded, and the role of his friends and employees, sometimes referred to as Team Tiger.
All of this is psychology. Psychologists use science to try to understand not only why people behave in abnormal or self-destructive ways but also why and how people think, feel, and behave in “normal” ways. Psychology is about the mind and behavior, both exceptional and ordinary. In this chapter, we show you how to look at and answer questions about mind and behavior by methods used in current research and (because the inquiry into what makes us tick has a history) how psychologists over the past century have approached these questions.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
The Science of Psychology: Getting to Know You
What is Psychology?
Levels of Analysis: The Complete Psychology
Psychology Then and Now
The Evolution of a Science
The Psychological Way: What Today’s Psychologists Do
The Research Process: How We Find Things Out
The Scientific Method
The Psychologist’s Toolbox: Techniques of Scientific Research
Be a Critical Consumer of Psychology
Ethics: Doing It Right