User research: A different psychology

Recommend a book, "Different Psychology". Read this book at the beginning of this year, was quite excited, because for a long time did not read such a wise reading, a sense of encounter. Heard at home and abroad many colleges and universities, this book is as a psychological students of the required readings, this is enough to prove the weight of the book, but do not have to create fear, the book introduced a variety of interesting story illustrations to explain the truth in simple, easy to understand, to take this opportunity to recommend to everyone.

This book is suitable for all kinds of readers, if you are curious about psychology and are interested in what psychologists are doing, you can find the answer in books, and if you are prepared or are conducting a psychological study, this book will help you to have a macroscopic understanding of the systemic nature of psychological research; If you think Freud is psychology, You have to look at this book and have some tools for judging true knowledge and pseudoscience, and you have a great admiration for the psychological counselors appearing in the media that are more powerful than fortune tellers.

What's the best part of the book?

1 Introduction to the present situation of modern psychology

Before explaining the present situation of modern psychology, it must be explained that the "renowned" Freud has far-reaching influence on people's understanding of psychology and the rendering of popular psychology by various media, which leads to many misinterpretations of modern psychology. In fact, Freud's psychoanalysis is only bucket in the topics, data and theories of various studies of modern psychology, and the psychologists of the American Psychological Association and the American Institute of Psychology, who are concerned with the Freudian psychoanalysis school, add up to 10% and 5% respectively.

Contemporary psychology contains a variety of content and level, spanning the education, social, industrial, legal, clinical and other fields. The American Psychological Council (APA) contains as many as 53 branches, each representing a specific area of research. A look at the results of the application of psychological research may have a more intuitive concept of it: the basic behavioral principles of classical and operational conditioned reflex, by identifying the relationship between external stimuli and behavior, have been successfully applied to the treatment of autism in children, the teaching of a large number of digital materials, the treatment of alcoholism, obesity, and the treatment of phobia. The findings of the perceptual process are applied to radar surveillance, illumination and flight cockpit design, and the way in which information is processed and memorized also accumulates a large number of results that can be repeatedly validated, such as the effect of aging on cognitive effects, and help design programmes for rehabilitation training for the cognitively deprived.

Beginners may be confused, psychological knowledge is how fragmented? This confusion may come from the experience of the physics and chemistry education that we receive, which have a unified and complete theory, and that psychology does not have a set of theories that can be used to explain all aspects of human consciousness and behavior. In fact, this phenomenon in the field of physics and chemistry has been the same, the early 20th century physics is in a split state, undergraduate teaching is also taught different views, until the emergence of a higher level of mathematical theory of mathematics to achieve integration. Contemporary psychology is more like medicine, divided into many branches, with a unified or integrated part of scientific research methods.

To sum up, psychology is the study of what: the use of scientific techniques to study human consciousness and behavior, and to apply these findings.

2 Research methods of the psychology

There are two important parts in the research method of psychology, such as operational definition and control, which guarantee the scientific nature of psychological research.

The reference to operational definitions is understandable, using a number of methods to measure what is being studied and to use direct or indirect methods. However, it is important to note that the operational definition of psychology may differ greatly from the theory of personality and personal behavior that is formed in each person's mind. We may not be able to imagine that "the first principal component factor in the analysis of the cognitive task of a large sample" is part of the operational definition of the mental term "intelligence". The definition of "depression", as we often call it, is 12 of the same in the Handbook of Psychological Disorders Diagnostics and statistics, and it's not the same as what we call "some sort of sinking feeling."

Control refers to the study of the phenomenon of maternal and infant attachment in the book by means of a certain method of balancing or removing the effects of other variables in the study of whether a variable affects the outcome. Previous popular assumptions about the phenomenon were that maternal attachment was the source of the baby's food. However, careful analysis, we found that the mother can provide not only food, but also comfort, warmth, caress, stimulation, etc., may also cause attachment. Psychologists use monkeys to study and design artificial situations in which other variables are controlled except for a possible cause of maternal and infant attachment. Psychologists have let a baby monkey growing near an isolated environment choose an artificial female to live with, and observing his behavior, he found that artificial females made of wool were more comfortable to touch than female monkeys made of barbed wire, and that, at two weeks, the baby monkeys were more likely to touch the cold, woolly female monkeys than the warm wire nets made of female monkeys, The sense of comfort brought by touch is far more important than warmth, and when a baby monkey's food is made entirely of a female monkey with a wire mesh, it still chooses the female monkey, which is enough to prove that attachment to the mother can provide food is wrong. The conclusion comes from the fact that psychologists have separated the variable variables in the real world by control.

3 is not just psychology

In addition to the knowledge of psychology, the book also points out some of the misconceptions that often arise in our cognition, for example, that people are obsessed with theories or doctrines that are more gadget and have no precise qualification; For many explanations, most people tend to rely on intuition, so the probability problem is often the people's dead point, You can use the following example to test, to see how their statistics are:

If there are 1 people in each of the 1000 who carry the HIV virus, then assume that there is a test that can completely diagnose the person carrying the virus; Finally, suppose that the test has a 5% chance of saying no to the carrier. In other words, this examination in people who do not carry HIV, will also be wrong to check out that 5% of those who carry the virus. Let's say we randomly find someone to carry out this test and get a positive response, that is, the person is HIV carriers. Assuming we don't know the history of this person, what is the probability that he is really HIV-carriers? (Press CTRL + A, find the answer in the article ha)

Here is not a lot of spoilers, more detailed content please read "canon".