Content: The sociocultural approach
Content: The cognitive approach
Content: The biological approach
Concepts=your toolbox for critical thinking
Psychology books, films and podcasts
<aside> 💡 Basic assumptions:
Human beings are information processers and mental frameworks guide behaviour
The mind can be studied scientifically
Cognition is affected by social and cultural factors
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📄The content: bio-psycho-social factors of behaviour
The foundation of modern psychology lies within 3 broader approaches in investigating human behaviour, these 3 approaches are biological psychology, cognitive psychology and sociocultural psychology. IB chooses to call these perspectives CONTENT. Each perspective has its own focus of investigation, its own prefered methods to study behaviour and it unique basic assumptions about human behaviour. If we want to understand why Messi or Neymar is such a good football player it will not be enough to attribute his success to genetics (biological appraoch), to his mindset or memory (cognitive approach) or his family, friends and wider society (sociocultural approach). We need all 3 perspectives to understand someone’s behaviour and all three perspectives influence each other, this is also important to remember. Your genes influence what environment you choose. Your social groups influence your interests and how you see the world. Each perspective contributes with its own knowledge of human behaviour but also with its own biases.
Cognitive Psychology
The cognitive approach investigates human thinking and decision making, memory and language, amongst other things. The cognitive approach stems from the cognitive psychological revolution in the 1930s where researchers protested against older approaches which did not study the mind as thinking cannot be observed.
Every psychological perspective has its basic assumptions, preferred methods, and its own explanations for human behavior. Cognitive psychologists mean that behaviour (cognition) can be studied using scientific methods such as experiments where hypotheses are tested (e.g. do mental models affect behaviour). Cognitive psychologists are interested in how our minds work, how we think and make decisions and why we remember and forget.
The cognitive approach to understanding human behaviour emerged as a reaction to behaviourism in the early to mid-20th century. Behaviourism introduced classical conditioning, which demonstrated how links are formed between stimuli and responses, and operant conditioning, which showed how behaviours are shaped through reinforcement and punishment. It continues to be applied in modern education through techniques such as personalized learning, where individual rewards and feedback are used to reinforce desired behaviours and motivate students. However, the cognitive approach focuses on the importance of mental processes in understanding observable behaviour, with the mind acting as an information processor that bridges the gap between a stimulus input and the behavioural output. Exactly how humans process sensory information is the content of cognitive psychology and psychologists have developed cognitive models, such as the computer model of information processing, memory models and language development, to try to explain this. The reliability of human cognitive processes and how they are affected by our different individual, social and cultural experiences and by language used to communicate ideas were the first areas of interest. Early in the 20th century, psychologists investigated how we organize and interpret information through mental frameworks, or schemas, shaping our perceptions and memories. This model still has explanatory value today. The dual processing model, another key theory of the cognitive approach, suggests that our minds process information both consciously and unconsciously, leading to cognitive biases that influence our behaviour and decision-making. Cognitive theories are powerful in applied psychology and used to explain humadevelopment and the prevalence and prevention of health problems and learning.
Cognitive psychology has many robust studies that have been replicated with the same or similar reusults which suggests some theories are reliable (e.g. schema theory). Internal validity can sometimes be an issue when studying cognition (thinking and memory) since we are investigating something vague and abstract which can be difficult to define and pinpoint. However, there is ample evidence to support many cognitive theories such as cognitive schema theory and system 1 and 2 (Kahneman).