Psychology Made Simple (Made Simple Books (Doubleday))

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Rand had helped Branden obtain a contract with World Publishing, which was affiliated with her own publisher, and had offered to write an introduction for the book. She also threatened to withhold the use of material that had been copyrighted by The Objectivist , although she took no legal action when Branden used the material anyway. Despite Rand's effort's to prevent the book's publication, the newly founded Nash Publishing released it in the fall of The book was a popular success and has sold over a million copies. Critics such as sociologist Frank Furedi [13] and neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall [14] cited the book as an example of what they see as a cultural trend of over-emphasizing the significance of self-esteem.

Psychology professor Robyn Dawes said that Branden propagated a false "belief that human distress can be traced to deficient self-esteem", which Dawes describes as based in bias rather than evidence. Murray said it would have been better if other promoters of self-esteem "had focused on self-esteem as Branden described it—an internalized sense of self-responsibility and self-sufficiency. In contrast, author Alfie Kohn supported the idea that self-esteem was important, but criticized Branden for founding his work "in Ayn Rand's glorification of selfishness.

He accuses Branden of "an exaggerated sense of self-importance and an uncritical reverence for Rand as a psychologist.

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In The Myth of Self-Esteem , psychologist Albert Ellis faulted the book for focusing on "reason and competence" as the only sources of self-esteem, a position he describes Branden as moving away from later. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Psychology of Self-Esteem 32nd anniversary edition cover. There is no value-judgment more important to man—no factor more decisive in his psychological development and motivation—than the estimate he passes on himself. Books by Nathaniel Branden. Who Is Ayn Rand? Something like this reasoning seems to have led Snow to begin to describe aptitudes in terms of affordances that a unique set of environmental features offer a person with a unique set of habits or tendencies, with each sampling from among elements in the other Snow, Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

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An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality. A third example of conceptual confusion in psychology comes from the adoption of the computational theory of mind. The leaders of the cognitive revolution that began in the late s rejected both behaviorism and trait psychology. American psychology was dominated by behaviorism, the stimulus-response connection,… the nonsense syllable, and the rat. Cognitive processes—what went on between the ears after the stimulus was received and before the response was given- were hardly mentioned, and the word mind was reserved for philosophers, not to be uttered by respectable psychologists.

Descartes viewed the body as a physical entity or machine, while the soul or mind, was a meta-physical entity. How is the mind related to the body? How can the mind know the external world? The whole issue seems to derive from the fact that we have developed two incompatible ways of explaining things. A materialistic account, drawn from the natural sciences, explains the behavior of things in terms of the interaction of material entities in accord with physical laws. Everyday moral accounts, on the other hand, explain behavior in terms of beliefs and desires, hopes and fears, wishes and intentions.

As long as these two types of explanation are applied to different types of objects there is no problem. We can explain the movement of the planets in one way and the actions of our neighbors in another. But once these two kinds of things interact, as it seems they do in human behavior, we face the Cartesian problem of explaining how such different kinds of entities can possibly affect one another.

One approach to a dualism is to try to eliminate one of the sides, viewing it as unreal or as a side effect of the operation of the other side. Thus, in the latter version, the behavioral description is seen as the basic or fundamental one, while the mental description is viewed as derivative.

But if mind and matter, or mind and brain, really are different in some way that cannot be so easily swept aside, and yet are not different entities, one physical, the other metaphysical, then how can their relationship be understood? Here is where the computational model offers a solution. This function is different from the material entity allowing it to be performed.

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The study of logic and computers has revealed to us that intelligence resides in physical symbol systems. Symbol systems are collections of patterns and processes, the latter being capable of producing, destroying and modifying the former. The most important properties of patterns is that they can designate objects, processes, or other patterns, and that, when they designate processes, they can be interpreted.

Interpretation means carrying out the designated process. The two most significant classes of symbol systems with which we are acquainted are human beings and computers. It also does not reduce mental phenomena to brain events, like the identity theory. Rather, it views mind as the functioning of a computational system instantiated in a material system, the brain. The mind is not a strange metaphysical entity, but a particular kind of useful process.

But if people literally followed such grammatical patterns or shuffled them about grammatically the way our learning programs do, they would not be very intelligent. We have confused our representations with the phenomenon we are modeling. The map is not the territory. The roboticist Rodney Brooks argues that the computational theory of mind got things confused in this way because the field of artificial intelligence developed in a fragmented manner.

Those modeling reasoning and problem-solving processes tended to work separately from those modeling perceptual and motor processes Brooks, As a result, thinking was modeled independently of the process of functioning in the world, giving an overly formal or intellectualist view of mind. Brooks and others like Clark , have suggested that this perspective needs to be reversed by starting with activity in the world, and asking how thinking is stimulated by experienced problems of coordination and control.

Another criticism of the computational model of mind comes from asking for whom the symbols being used are meaningful. It might even be an oblique marriage proposal, suggesting that two adults, each with a child already, consider forming a blended family. Words gain shared meaning because they are used in similar ways in mutually understood conjoint activities Dewey, The limitations resulting from this view have often been hidden by studying problemsolving in well-defined or well-controlled task situations Newman, et al.


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In such situations people are, in effect, made to function like computers. But this makes generalization to less well-defined or controlled settings difficult. The practical ramifications of this shift from a computational to a practice-based, socially-collaborative model are substantial. Whether these latter day models will eventually fall prey to similar confusions, such as reifying the notion of community Ortiz, , remains to be seen. What seems clear is that any attempt to claim that one has mind in a box will fall prey to the same fallacy.

In the foregoing I have attempted to trace certain forms of conceptual confusion through a variety of movements in psychological and educational theory. I have suggested that psychology gets into theoretical and practical difficulties whenever it attempts to enclose human psychic life in a watertight conceptual box. Attempting to capture psychic life in a closed system cannot be done because there is no place to stand from which it can be accomplished. It might be seen as analogous to trying to swallow oneself or catch the self that is observing oneself.

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Everything suggests that we are too close to our own behavior, too much a product our own linguistic and cultural practices, too narrowly interested, to get the necessary distance. Nonetheless, there always seems to be a new effort on the horizon to identify the right conceptual level to capture thinking or learning in a scientific net.

Although each new model or metaphor, or each new level of analysis— genetic, individual, socio-cultural, or some other—adds something to our understanding, each is limited. In effect, there is a confusion of map and territory, of representation and thing represented. Having done this one can study the system by seeing how its inputs are transformed into outputs. This is what the behaviorists tended to do when they discriminated between stimulus and response, viewing the stimulus as coming from the environment and the response as coming from the organism.

It is, finally, what cognitive psychologists have done when they drew a line between brain and body and placed the mind in the cranium, viewing it as analogous to a computer. But the tendency is strong to forget that one is using a model or metaphor, especially when it becomes familiar, transparent and, ultimately, literal. In the case of the computational model of mind, for example, what began as a metaphor tended to end up with the claim that people are computers.

Adopting the latest metaphor, particularly a high status mechanical one, may seem tough-minded and scientific, but over-enthusiasm can also lead to overgeneralizing the approach, confusing the model with the world. Such overgeneralization can be disguised by limiting research to well-controlled settings in which people behave in a way that is consistent with the model, but this tends to break down when extrapolated to less controlled settings.


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The attempt to reduce human behavior to a particular model may also lead to practical harm. It leads, primarily, to treating people as though they were limited in the ways in which the model is limited. Potentially harmful side effects of use of the trait model are also quite evident, principally the ease with which it shifts all responsibility to the character of the person being described This is not to say that they do not bear some of the causal responsibility.

Their degree of moral culpability is another issue. Finally, the computational model may lend support to a passive and socially isolated model of thinking and learning. One remedy for these difficulties would seem to be to adopt a situated view of educational psychology itself. In this view, educational psychology is a partial effort, based on a variety of untested and unrecognized assumptions, to understand the way things work for certain purposes.

Conceived in this way, there is no one way the world is, for the world is many ways Goodman, As William James put it, … the truth is too great for any one actual mind. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal, Private and un- communicable perceptions always remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look for them from the outside never know where.

Learning Theories and Educa Goals, Values, and Affect: We are using cookies to provide statistics that help us give you the best experience of our site. You can find out more in our Privacy Policy. By continuing to use the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Free trial voucher code. Enter keywords, authors, DOI etc. Search history from this session 0. The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man,—present to all particular men only partially … and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man But, unfortunately, this original unit… has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it has spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered.

Emerson , p. Our choicest plans are fallen through, Our airiest castles tumbled over, Because of lines we neatly drew And later neatly stumbled over. At other times they adopted too rigidly or generalized beyond their proper sphere. For all of these reasons the basic distinctions utilized in a field may trip its practitioners up in subtle ways. In a familiar matchstick puzzle, for example, one is directed to take six matchsticks, and without bending or breaking them, or letting any matchstick cross over another, make four identical equilateral triangles.

Most people attempt to solve the problem by laying the matchsticks flat on a table and trying various patterns with them, but the problem turns out to be impossible when approached in this way. It is easily solved, however, when one uses the matchsticks to build a three-dimensional pyramid with three matchsticks forming a triangle on the table and the other three going from each of its vertices to a common apex above them.

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Difficulty Recognizing Conceptual Confusion One reason that conceptual confusion is worthy of attention is that it is so difficult to recognize. Wittgenstein, , p. Conceptual Confusion in Psychology While all of the human sciences can be accused of harboring considerable conceptual confusion, psychology has at times come in for specific criticism. This is because they are concepts, not concrete things. Confusing the two is like confusing the map with the territory or attempting to eat the restaurant menu instead of the food Bateson, a.

I will do so by considering three influential traditions in educational psychology: While these are not the only traditions of interest today, showing how a form of conceptual confusion recurs in all of them will hopefully indicate that there is a persisting problem that needs attention if it is to be avoided in the future. Watson, , pp. Dewey, , p. Which sub-act is a beginning and which an ending depends on how you parse the sequence. A state of things characterizing an outcome is regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this outcome; when, as a matter of fact, if this outcome had already been in existence, there would have been no necessity for the process Dewey, , p.

Chomsky, , p. Chomsky argued that Skinner could not have it both ways. Trait and Treatment A second example of conceptual confusion occurs in traditional personality psychology. Snow, , p. Cronbach, In other words, a positivistic psychology modeled on physics may be an unrealistic aspiration. If nothing else, this reminds us that teaching is an art and not a science. Teachers may use psychological generalizations to inform their practice, but must ultimately practice their art using their own judgment regarding the particular situation at hand.

As William James put it: Mind and Matter A third example of conceptual confusion in psychology comes from the adoption of the computational theory of mind. Simon , p. Rather than measuring its size one needed to understand how it does its job. For this purpose the development of the computer provided a helpful and high status metaphor.

A second approach admits that mental experiences exist, but equates them with physiological events in the brain. This helps account for the possibility that two people may have different subjective experiences yet show the same outward behavior, which the behavioristic account cannot deal with.. On the other hand it may relate subjective experiences too concretely to the operation of a specific physical substrate. Despite Rand's effort's to prevent the book's publication, the newly founded Nash Publishing released it in the fall of The book was a popular success and has sold over a million copies.

Critics such as sociologist Frank Furedi [13] and neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall [14] cited the book as an example of what they see as a cultural trend of over-emphasizing the significance of self-esteem. Psychology professor Robyn Dawes said that Branden propagated a false "belief that human distress can be traced to deficient self-esteem", which Dawes describes as based in bias rather than evidence.

Murray said it would have been better if other promoters of self-esteem "had focused on self-esteem as Branden described it—an internalized sense of self-responsibility and self-sufficiency. In contrast, author Alfie Kohn supported the idea that self-esteem was important, but criticized Branden for founding his work "in Ayn Rand's glorification of selfishness.

He accuses Branden of "an exaggerated sense of self-importance and an uncritical reverence for Rand as a psychologist. In The Myth of Self-Esteem , psychologist Albert Ellis faulted the book for focusing on "reason and competence" as the only sources of self-esteem, a position he describes Branden as moving away from later. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Psychology of Self-Esteem - Wikipedia

The Psychology of Self-Esteem 32nd anniversary edition cover. There is no value-judgment more important to man—no factor more decisive in his psychological development and motivation—than the estimate he passes on himself. Books by Nathaniel Branden. Who Is Ayn Rand? The Unknown Ideal with Ayn Rand Nathaniel Branden Institute Objectivism Objectivist movement.