If you did not receive chapter 2 in your e-mail, let me know. Remember, this outline follows chapter 2 closely and adds material to help you learn and understand it.
PREVIEW
Why go back so far into human history? I'm reminded of Vince Lombardi's first practice with the Green Bay Packers. He assumed his new team needed to be made anew from the ground up. So, in their first meeting, he held a football in his hands and told them, "Gentlemen, this is a football."
Similarly, I want you to learn from the ground up. "Here are our ancestors, how are they like us?"
It is nearly impossible to form a clear picture of what humans were like before they began to keep written records.
What those prehistoric peoples thought and did cannot be understood using methods requiring living participants. However, as cognitive archeologists and others have shown, inferences about their thinking and behavior can be made by the careful analysis of ancient artifacts, akin to Wundt’s völkerpsychologie.
Wundt believed all of psychology was obligated to appreciate and explore the developmental and social processes that led to the creation of individual consciousness. As such, Wundt saw psychology as a discipline consisting of two parts. One part, first psychology, for which he remains revered, was lab-centered and used scientific methods to study presumably universal human characteristics such as sensation, perception and physiological psychology. The other part, second psychology, culminates with his Völkerpsychologie. As time passed psychology seized upon Wundt’s experimental approach and its laboratory methods, and all but ignored his Völkerpsychologie. (Kardas and Henley, 2020)
Völkerpsychologie explored language, myths, customs, and other similar areas in a manner very different from laboratory psychology. Wundt, likely, would find this chapter necessary for a complete understanding of psychology.
Biologically, however, the picture is clearer. Most likely, members of the species Homo sapiens are more similar to each other than different, at least over the last 50,000 years. Culturally, much has changed over the last 15,000 years. The human species has multiplied exponentially and has transformed much of the Earth through technology and radically changed its demography with most now living in large cities and subject to conditions of crowding scarcely imaginable in the past.
Narvaez (2020) urges us to see outside our fishbowl and consider the restraints that civilization has imposed: a foreshortened view of humanity, a negative view of human nature and prehistory, biases against individualism and towards abstraction, and a misunderstanding of human potential.
She believes that (p. 113), “Understanding where we have been can help us figure out how to move forward.” We could learn much about how to live and prosper in partnership with the environment she argues; the San Bushmen, for example, have maintained such a balance with nature for over 150,000 years. We should understand that civilization is very new and it profoundly altered older lifeways.
Only some 7,000 years ago did civilizations begin to appear and create surpluses of goods and specialization. One of those specializations was philosophy, an essential part of any civilization and the mother of nearly every other academic discipline including psychology.
ZEITGEIST
Every chapter from now on will include a Zeitgeist section. Their purpose is to situate your learning about psychology into a broader context. In this chapter I want you to think of what the world would be like without all of the things we now have available to us to make life easier. Below, you'll also find an assignment that will ask you to briefly describe how you would cope one million years ago.
ASSIGNMENT: Tell me how your day might be 1 million years ago. See HERE
A Very Brief History of the Universe
Time
Big Bang--~13.8 billion years ago
Earth--~4.5 billion years ago
Human lifetime--78.8 years (USA 2012)
So it's difficult for us to understand time
Carl Sagan (1977) provided a calendar analogy where the Big Bang took place on January 1 and the present was December 31. In other words, he made each month last just over a billion years each.
This is a good example of how modern scientists must interpret prehistory, obviously we cannot find the motivation for creating the figurine but its existence speaks to a concern with art and esthetics
Language
6,000 languages in the world but declining fast
FOXP2 gene and language
Mutated gene in Homo neanderthalenis and Homo sapiens may be part of a genetic language complex
Homo sapiens spoke 50,000 ybp (and, likely so did Homo neanderthalensis)
Language research supports evidence from anthropology
Basque language (NW Spain and SW France) [Original video is in English but narrated in Spanish with English subtitles. If you ever find the version in English, let me know!]
Sociality
Reasons for extinction of other hominin species?
Why is Homo sapiens the only living species from the genus Homo?
Donald (2020) argues that a complex of factors was responsible and included:
access to procedural memory
metacognitive self-supervision
developmental plasticity
socialization
mindsharing
He concludes that signs, gestures, and tool use preceded language
Hunter-Gatherers
Hunter-Gatherer: A human lifestyle based around males hunting animals and women gathering plant materials. The lifestyle demands constant movement from place to place as local conditions change.
e.g.,--phases of the moon, natural lore, medicinal plants
Red sky at night, sailor's delight.
If there's a halo around the moon, expect rain soon.
Are we less knowledgeable than primitive hunter gatherers?
Here's a short online quiz on surviving in the wild. (You have to answer questions at the end to see your score) I did not do too well, got 57%. Guess I should stay at home.
Technical intelligence
Technology is always changing
Tool use (think of cars, computers, the Internet vs bows and arrows, the atlatl, or starting a fire)
Most likely, we'd have trouble with Stone Age technology and vice versa, they would have trouble with modern technology
IDEA: sedentism-a human lifestyle associated with largely remaining in one place or locality with food production based on farming plants and livestock.
Farming creates a population trap
No longer possible to revert to hunter-gathering because families are larger because of increased fecundity
"Lucky latitudes"
parts of the Earth between 20 to 35 degrees north AND with domesticable animals nearby
few such areas exist below the equator
Food distribution is problem, not production
competitive feasting
cultivated crops as luxury goods
beer (whiskey in Kentucky)
population trap (can't stop farming once you start)
Is USA learning to similarly cope with mass murders?
"The current survey found that more than three-quarters of adults (79%) in the U.S. say they experience stress as a result of the possibility of a mass shooting."
"Mask-wearing in the United States has gradually increased over time while distancing measures have dramatically fallen, according to a study that has continuously tracked the virus-related personal behaviors of thousands of people since April."
The Rise of Philosophy
Writing, history, and philosophy are natural partners
Philosophy began in ancient Greece about 3,000 years ago
The goal of the early philosophers was to explain world without resorting to supernatural explanations: Natural philosophy
Some of their first (and enduring) questions were:
What is the nature of the universe?
still under exploration (e.g., Big Bang, dark matter, black holes)
What separates living from nonliving?
Biology
Can we trust our senses?
Senses can deceive
Scientific methods control for sensory data
Is the universe constant or variable?
An early question for philosophy
Mind and Soul
Mind: a focus for psychology except during the Behaviorist era
Soul: no longer a focus for science but a hallmark of many religions
-isms
Materialism: the belief that everything in the universe must consist of matter, including minds and mental states.
Nihilism: the belief that nothing that exists can be known or communicated.
Monism: the search for the one thing that will explain all.
Relativism: the belief that no universal values exist and that instead values vary by individuals, groups, or historical era.
Harry Triandis in India
Cultural psychologist Harry Triandis told this story at a meeting.
He received a note from the conference host hotel in India that looked like the one below. Naturally, he interpreted the note as meaning he no longer had a room there because the check mark was in the "No Vacancy" box. Disgusted, he made a reservation at another hotel, one with fewer stars. Later, he was at the conference hotel when a manager found him and asked why he had not checked in. Triandis pulled out the note and showed it. The manager respondes, "We always check the box that does not apply."
This section is designed to acquaint you with the zeitgeist of the original philosophers. These gods were the source of the supernatural explainations they wished to dispel.
The earliest philosophers attempted to offer naturalistic explanations for the universe against the panoply of available gods in Greek religion.
But, as you will see soon, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had to create their philosophical systems against the backdrop of Greek religious ideas. Socrates chose suicide by drinking hemlock, Plato and Aristotle each had to flee Athens at peril of their lives.
Ancient Greek Medicine
Greek Medicine: empirical
Original Greek contribution
Evolved into empirical practice
Shed its mythological roots
Rejection of supernatural explanations
Alcmaeon
Likely knew Pythagoras
Naturalistic view of humans, On Nature
Mental faculties in the brain
Discovered optic nerve
Inferred other connections: hearing, taste, smell
Seat of intelligence
Health and illness related to balance or imbalance
Empiricist
Immortality of soul
Hippocrates
Most famous Greek physician
Empiricist
Not all works with his name really his
Clinical care and prognosis
Keep patients clean, treat them gently, use natural means
Physician should restore balance
Four humors/Greek elements:
blood/air, black bile/earth, yellow bile/fire, phlegm/water
sanguine: hopeful, cheerful, spirited
black bile: depressed (melancholia)
yellow bile: irritable and grumply
phlegm: apathetic and unemotional
Longterm effect
Hippocratic Oath
First ethical code
Do no harm
no poisons
no abortions
no sex with patients
confidentiality
restore balance
Paradoxical effect, loss of empirical practice
Set back progress of medicine for well over thousand years
In other words, Greek medical empiricism did not last
It was not until the 19th century that medicine regained its empiricism
IDEA: humorism-the belief that health was maintained by a balance of the four humors
