Functionalism refers to “how our minds adapt to changing environment.” In other words, it is an approach concentrated towards the operation of the mind, and the role of behavior to better adapt to a given environment.  Nevertheless, it focuses on how the objects are perceived. The functional approach also links to the idea of evolution. For instance, natural selection is an evolutionary process of the physical trait that helped animals to adapt to its changing environment.

My life, similarly, has been about never ending transitions. I had to adopt a whole new culture as I immigrated to Vancouver, Canada in Grade 4. Situated in a diverse community, I struggled to embrace different cultures, ideals, perspective, and most importantly to learn a new language and to “fit in.” I complained from time to time because of the cultural clash. However, I came to realize that it would be impossible to make friends or to even learn the new language if were to be reticent and was closed-minded. I came to accept the fact that I was situated into a certain geographical, ethnic community, and that I should make the best out of the opportunities that I have been given. Such shift in mindset helped me to be opened, reach out to be people first, and start the conversation.

Usually, I would talk about a topic of mutual interest, but what I noticed is that I usually found myself acting differently or talking about different range of topics depending on whom I was with. And sometimes, I would agree to things that I don’t really agree with or be excited over a topic that is not that amusing to me. Perhaps, this was due to the fact that I wanted to fit in and be socially accepted by everyone; nevertheless, by doing so I was able to quickly adapt to new environments. I believe that the functionalist paradigm is also correlated to social conformity in terms of how sometimes people change behaviors depending on who they associate with so that they would be “part of the group” or “in-group,” so that they could adapt to a “given environment” better. The method of social conformity to adapt to changing environment also shows how humans have an inherent request to be accepted, so they will likely pursue different strategies in order to overcome different circumstances. This shows how functionalism is one of an important mechanisms when understanding the role of the mind and behavior.

I was born in a suburb right outside of New York City on November 15^th, 1994. I lived there until I was about two years old and then my parents made the first move of our seemingly never-ending moving period. We moved to upstate New York where my father was working and stayed put for a few years but then moved back to the first town where I was born. I was too young to remember any of this so it’s just history to me. I started preschool in this small suburb right outside of New York City and was a happy child until my parents decided we were moving…to Georgia! I was only eight years old but this was a huge deal for me since I had started elementary school and would have to leave all my childhood best friends and say goodbye. I was always a little bit shy as a kid but when attending my new school in Atlanta, Georgia I was a little more nervous which was expected, since I was the new girl. We stayed in Georgia for about two years and then moved again!  We moved to a beach town in North Florida. Yet again I found myself starting over and having to be the shy new girl. Finally a year later when I was about ten or eleven years old we moved back to my hometown in New York where I would complete middle school and high school and not move again (thankfully). All of these moves subconsciously changed me into a different person. Even though I was little when I moved and it was easy to make friends, it was tough on me already having a shy personality to begin with. When I meet new people I always have a guard up because of this uncertainty of whether or not I will see this person again. The experiences in my early childhood shaped my unconscious trait of being shy and guarded. This is known as the psychodynamic perspective. If you experience something in your early development, for me moving so many times as a kid, it causes a person to have a certain behavior or emotion they wouldn’t have without having the experience they did. If I hadn’t moved so many times I wouldn’t be as guarded and shy because I wouldn’t have a childhood memory of not knowing how long I would be somewhere until I was headed somewhere else. The psychodynamic perspective explains that when a person is a certain way when they are an adult that it is because of their past and something that has shaped this emotion or feeling. This perspective shows that your feelings and emotions towards certain things are shaped only by experience and that is the most important factor in why you are who you are. Though this may not be the case for every emotion a person might have, it is a theory that has been proven to be true.

Operant conditioning has been a major part of psychology and behaviorism ever since B.F. Skinner began began testing the way the brain works through motivations. In operant conditioning, psychologist tend to focus on how the outcomes of certain events could potentially affect future behavior of their subjects. For instance, reinforcers or rewards are outcomes that increase a repeated behavior and they can be given to subjects through tangible items or even through praise. There are two main types of reinforcement; positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement increases repeat behaviors by adding something positive. For instance, if someone were to tell a funny joke, the audience would laugh. In this example, in order to make people laugh, the subject is adding a funny joke to tell in order to get the response of laughter.  On the other hand, negative reinforcement takes something negative away from the equation in order to increase repeat behavior. An example of this would be when a person cleans up his or her room in order to avoid conflict with his or her roommate. Some conflicts come with the use of reinforcers. Reinforcers must be used continuously in order to maintain the desired outcome, if the reinforcer is stopped for long periods of time, the desired outcome will no longer occur. Punishment can also be implemented in operant conditioning on order to decrease a repeat behavior. The use of punishment is most effective when it occurs immediately and consistently. An example of punishment would be when a person scolds a child for jumping on a bed every time that child jumps on the bed. Jumping on the bed will be quickly recognized by the child as something he/she should not be doing, so the child will know in order to avoid a scolding, he/she will not jump on the bed.

Recently my family has adopted a german shepherd puppy named Stella. She is an adorable bundle of energy, but a pain in the butt to train. In order to properly train her, we use reward and punishment much like operant conditioning. Whenever we try and teach her a new trick, if she performs the trick correctly she is rewarded a treat, if she fails to correctly perform the task, no reward is given. Once she naturally begins to perform the trick when asked, we still continue to reward her with treats in order for her to maintain the motivation in order to perform the desired response. Punishment with Stella works the same way. Whenever she jumps onto the furniture, we scold her by saying “No Stella get down”, and she knows that the change in our tone of voice means that jumping on the furniture is something that she should not engage in. Much like operant conditioning, puppy training can be time consuming, but very rewarding in the end whenever the desired outcome is officially achieved.

In the 1920’s, psychologists developed a new approach to psychology known as behaviorism.  The basis of the approach was that an individual’s behaviors are acquired through its interaction with external stimuli. Essentially, rewards and punishments for certain behaviors could be used to trigger mental events that caused the subject to behave in a certain way. This allowed researchers to completely ignore the structure and function of the brain, and simply focus on how stimuli affected the subject’s behavior.

During the summer of 2011, while working as a summer camp counselor at the local athletic club, I found myself in the position to take advantage of behaviorism. In the beginning of the summer, I had a hard time controlling the kids when I wanted them to play a game or take a trip somewhere. After a few days, I realized that the way I reacted to their actions had a huge impact on how well they behaved. I began playing mind games with them to see how far I could take it. I started out by just changing the way I acted towards them when they were doing something I approved of versus something I disapproved of. When they were following directions, I would act cheerful and let them have a fair amount of freedom. However, once they got out of control, I would get angry with them and hand out time-outs, restrictions from playing, etc. The campers soon realized that camp is a lot more fun when their counselor is in a good mood. Eventually I had complete control of the kids; simply by providing them with positive and negative feedback according to the way they behaved.

Soon after that, I began using candy as bribes to get the campers to do favors for me. Each day, I would fill my pockets with candy and use it as incentive for the campers to do whatever I told them. If I reached into my pocket and announced I needed help with something, I immediately had ten campers screaming at me to pick them for the job.

By using positive reinforcement to reward good behavior and negative reinforcement to punish bad behavior, I had completely changed the way the campers acted during camp. Ever since that summer, I have been experimenting with how far I can go in manipulating people by subtlety reinforcing their favorable behaviors.

Over the past few weeks I have managed to obtain five of the required six research study credits for the course (with the sixth coming later this week). My experiences have covered a broad spectrum ranging from interpersonal connections, to team building studies, to how male and females differ with their thought processes. I promise not to go into much detail as I promised to keep some of this information regarding the studies confidential, but I have noticed a peculiar facet with the studies. The quality of data collection and the possible resulting skew of data.

Approximately half of the studies I have participated in limited the subject input to a simple range of agreement or disagreement. Now, this type of input would obviously make data collection and post-processing much more manageable. However, limiting the subject’s ability to respond how they truly feel or truly react not only lowers the resolution of the study but it has the ability to force a certain response or reaction. For example, let us say the subject was exposed to a picture and the person had an initial reaction of disgust. However, the question asked was, ‘did this picture make you happy’ and required a range of agreement. Now, that subject could say ‘disagree’ and move on, but the examiner would most likely not extract the subject’s true feelings. I do believe that cognitive based experiments set with laboratory observation should either be recorded visually or with audio, or at the very least, include truly open ended response. The reasoning behind this is if the examiner is following the scientific method and they extract faulty data that could lead to improper conclusions. This inadvertent skewing of data was actually explored by Malgady. This citation for his article ‘How skewed are psychological data?’ can be found at the end of this post.

Granted, I do not the full intent behind some of these studies. It is possible that the investigators are only interested in reactions dealing with specific emotions or are interested in binary type responses. The point of this post, overall, is if the researchers are taking a random sample of students and limiting their responses in the studies could result in a truncation of psychological responses and thus skewing the data.

Does anyone have an opposing opinion to my observation? Since my major does not deal with studies related to psychology for the most part it can be difficult to alter the way my mind perceives data collection.

Works Cited:

Malgady, Robert G. “How Skewed Are Psychological Data? A Standardized Index of Effect Size.” General Psychology. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 355-59. EBSCO. Web. 4 Feb. 2014. <openurl.ebscohost.com>.

The concept I will write about will be Describing Data based on Random Sampling and Random Assignment. A group from my high school was surveyed and from that specific group conclusions were made that I thought were misleading but at the time didn’t really think of it. Once we covered these parts of lecture in class, the survey rang a bell.

Describing data is done to find a measure of central tendency and/or to find the measure of variation.  Random sampling is when the surveyor randomly chooses the entire group of participants from a given population of potential participants. Random assignment however is the random delegation of the chosen participants to either control or experimental groups.

In research done by surveys, having data portrayed from the survey is one thing, however, it is imperative that there is a proper description of the data collected, to verify the reliability of the survey. For instance, a survey could indicate that 90% of students want co-ed gym rather than male separated by female gym classes. (By the way, this was the survey done at my high school by students) But what is that 90% coming from? Was every student asked the question? If not, were the students selected randomly selected?

The survey did not indicate any of this information. Then, the students went to the principal to protest a change in the gym classes. The principal asked for the proof, and the students said they gave each class a piece of paper indicating whether they support the protest or not.

The principal decided to do his own legitimate survey on the topic. This was indeed random sampling, however selective because he surveyed only the students at the school, and everyone at the school answered. The results ended up being that only 30% wanted co-ed gym.

The students who made the survey were then needed to confess how they actually surveyed and it was found out that they only surveyed close people, a total of 50.

That in turn is they’re wording of “90% of students” which is actually 45 of 50”, not representing close to the 1500 student body population.

From this survey I noted that the students really failed to describe the data, and that this misrepresentation led to false conclusions before the survey was properly taken with the random but correct and selective sampling.

So often in the world today, society tries to find an explanation for everything we see. Whether it be the belief that Dobermans and Pitbulls are inherently dangerous dog breeds, the ritual of wearing the same jersey every time your favorite team plays because they won the first time you wore it, or the superstition that seeing a black cat brings bad luck, people are always looking for cause and effect relationships, even though a relationship between two variables may not exist. In fact, there are two words that, when put together, capture this tendency – illusory correlation.

To completely grasp what illusory correlation is, one must understand what a correlation is. Simply put, correlation is the measure of the strength of a relationship between two variables. Whether negative or positive, correlation strength ranges from positive (+) to negative (-) 1, with 0 being essentially no correlation. Although correlations are very useful for psychological research, misconceptions can quickly form from them. Even though two things maintain a relationship, it doesn’t mean there is a cause and effect relationship between them. The problem arises when people attribute causation to correlation.

However, correlation does not equal causation. This is where illusory correlations come into play through superstitions, stereotypes, prejudices, and imagined patterns in the environment.  I’m very aware of my own tendency for linking two unrelated events together. For instance, I frequently find myself looking at tall people while walking around campus and automatically thinking they’re Penn State athletes of some kind. The belief that blondes are dumb is another example that is popular amongst the population, and is one that sometimes creeps into the back of my mind. There are also instances where stereotypes (such as the aforementioned) get us into trouble. Without going into specifics, there are many times when I attribute a negative cause and effect relationship to events involving race or gender even when there isn’t any merit behind it.

I find that it’s incredibly easy and perhaps instinctive to automatically say that because two things seem to have a relationship, one is the cause of the other. No matter how logically or scientifically we try to think, the idea that correlation equals causation is one that will most likely always pervade the minds of the people.