Psychology for Dummies (16 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
When was the last time you went out with a friend just to talk? Did you go to a coffeehouse? Did you talk about recent romances and frustrating relationships in your life? Did you talk about politics or the weather? It doesn’t matter what you talked about, you were talking about a concept.
A
concept
is a thought or idea that represents a set of related ideas. “Romance” is a concept. “Relationship” is a concept. “Politics” is a concept. “Weather” is a concept. Remember, these concepts are represented as symbols in your information processing systems of thought. How do they get there? We learn them. Concepts are derived and generated; they are formed. When objects share characteristics, they represent the same concept. Some concepts are well-defined, others are not.
Consider the following words:
Tail, Fur, Teeth, Four legs
What do these words describe? It could be a cat, a dog, a lion, or a bear. The fact is, you really can’t tell just from those four words. Some crucial detail is missing, some piece of information that clearly defines the concept and separates it from others.
Now, consider this list of words:
Tail, Fur, Teeth, Four legs, Bark
What is being described now? This has to be a dog. Why? Cats, lions, and bears don’t bark. The feature “bark” uniquely defines the concept of “dog.” “Bark” is the concept’s
defining feature.
It is an attribute that must be present in order for the object to be classified as an example of a particular concept. Consider the following words:
Feathers, Beak, Eggs, Fly
What do these describe? A bird? Hold on a minute. Aren’t there at least two birds that don’t fly? What about penguins and ostriches? They don’t fly, but they’re still birds. So, flying is not a defining feature of being a bird because animals don’t have to have that attribute in order to be considered a bird. However, most birds do fly, so “flying” is what we call a
characteristic feature
or attribute. It is an attribute that most members of a concept group, but not all, possess.
Think about a chair. Try to imagine and picture a chair. Now, describe it. (Describe it to someone else or you’ll look funny describing an imaginary chair to yourself.) Your imagined chair probably consists of wood, four legs, a rectangular or square seat, and a back constructed of two vertical supports on each side of the seat connected by a couple of horizontal slats.
This is a typical chair. It’s common. In fact, it might be considered as a prototypical chair. A
prototype
is the most typical example of an object or event within a particular category. It is the quintessential example of the concept being represented.
Early in our development, category attributes are combined in an incremental fashion, building on simple characteristics, combining them into larger units until your conceptual net of information about the objects in your world grows to an immense capacity. But we all know that our thinking is much more complex than a simple one-word understanding. After a while, we combine single word concepts into sentence-long concepts, sentence-long concepts into paragraph-long concepts, and so on. Check out this process, which continuously builds upon itself.
“War is hell” is an example of two concepts, “war” and “hell” being related.
You build
mental models
by clustering many propositions to help you understand how things relate to each other. Here’s an example:
War is hell.
World War II was a war.
World War II was hell.
Schemas
are basic units of understanding that represent the world and are the result of organizing mental models into larger groups. An example might be, “Some of the soldiers who fought in WWII experienced psychological trauma. Some people believe that this was due to the extreme nature of war. Some people have even said that war is hell.”
Attributes are combined into concepts. Concepts are combined into propositions. Multiple propositions are combined into mental models. Finally, mental models are combined into schemas, which are used as basic units of understanding and representing the world in our language of thought.
An example may be to consider the concept “book.” Combine the concept of book with another concept, like reading. Then connect those concepts to another concept, like library. Now, you have three concepts related to each other: book, reading, and library. These three concepts may give rise to the proposition of studying (as opposed to reading for pleasure). Studying then can be imbedded into the larger divisions, or schema, of school or going to school.
Human thinking depends upon a conceptual grasp and representation of the world we live in. So, after we’ve got all these concepts inside our minds, what do we do with them?
Consider this: Every two to three months, in every university across the country, something very strange happens. The event is as predictable as the tides, the cycles of the moon, or student debt. With each new course a student takes and a professor teaches, a predictable phenomenon occurs. John Smith, student, walks into the classroom or lecture hall, faces forward, takes out a notebook and a writing utensil, and waits for the professor to begin speaking about things that the student will take down as notes. This repeating process or sequence of events is a perfect example of a script, representing a type of schema that demonstrates a student’s knowledge of the concepts of “being in class” or “being a student.”
How does thinking employ concepts (like “being a student”) to navigate our world and solve the problems that we face every day? If thinking is a form of computation, and our minds are very powerful computers, then how exactly are these calculations carried out? We know that the substance of our mental language consists of concepts, propositions, mental models, and schemas, but how do these chunks or organized sets of concepts actually guide our thinking and behavior?
Most of the time, thinking is organized and goal-directed. Some would even say it’s logical and rational. Organized thinking is rule-determined and based on the goal of solving the numerous problems that each of us face every day. And the number one problem we face every day? Survival. Thinking has a point, and it directs our actions so that we reach our goals, the goals of staying alive!
Take a baby, for example. (Well, don’t really take him. Just mull him over.) If I’m a baby and I’m getting hungry, I will instinctively and reflexively cry out. Finally, someone puts the remote control down long enough to come over and give me a bottle. At that point, my thinking becomes very important. Hopefully, I establish an understanding of a relationship between the behavior of crying and the consequence of being fed a bottle. Basically, I generate the thought, “When I cry, someone gives me a bottle.” This is now a “rule” for me. It is based on simple logic: if A, then B; if A and B, then C.
A (crying) + B (someone gives me a bottle) = C (satisfied hunger)
In the sections that follow, I introduce you to the basic mechanisms of thinking, sometimes called the
architecture
of thought. These are the
rules of thought.
In addition to the representation of knowledge of the world in the form of concepts, thinking requires all the following basic components:
Input:
Sensory information coming in from our world or from within our own minds.
Memory:
System necessary for storage of knowledge. Information about the world is stored in our minds and memories. Birthdays, names, and other information are all stored in our memory.
Operations:
Rules that determine how the information in the memory system is utilized (reasoning, problem solving, and logical analysis). Take math as an example: If I have 100 numbers stored in my memory and am confronted with a mathematical problem, these operations determine how I solve that problem.
Output:
Action “programs” that involve telling the rest of the mind and body what to do after the thinking operations have been carried out.