YT YouTube2Text

YouTube2Text → Transcripts → 1. Introduction

1. Introduction — Transcript

by YaleCourses · 3,864 words · 432 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

Open in transcriber Summarize with AI Download SRT/VTT

Full transcript

3:40Professor Paul Bloom: I'd like to welcome people to
3:43this course, Introduction to Psychology.
3:45My name is Dr. Paul Bloom. I'm professor of this course.
3:48And what this is going to be is a comprehensive introduction to
3:54the study of the human mind. So, we are going to cover a
3:59very, very wide range of topics including brains,
4:03children, language, sex, memory,
4:05madness, disgust, racism and love,
4:07and many others. We're going to talk about
4:10things like the proper explanation for differences
4:13between men and women; the question of whether animals
4:17can learn language; the puzzle of what grosses us
4:21out; the problem of why some of us
4:23eat too much and what we could do to stop;
4:26the question of why people go crazy in groups;
4:30research into whether you could trust your childhood memories;
4:34research into why some of us get depressed and others don't.
4:38The style of this is there'll be two lectures a week,
4:43as well as course readings. Now, to do well in the course,
4:48you have to attend both the lectures and do the readings.
4:53There will be some overlap. In some cases,
4:55the lectures will be quite linked to the readings.
4:57But there will be some parts of the readings that will not find
5:00their way into the lectures, and some lectures--some entire
5:04lectures that will not connect at all to the readings.
5:07So, to pursue this course properly you have to do both.
5:12What this means is that if you miss a class you need to get
5:15notes, and so you should get them from a friend or from the
5:19person sitting next to you. The slides are going to be made
5:23available online. So, one of the things you don't
5:26have to do is you don't have to write this down.
5:28You take notes any way you choose, but if you don't get
5:31anything on there it'll be available online.
5:34I'm going to post it in a format which will be black and
5:37white and easy to print out so you don't have to worry about
5:40this. But again, attending to the
5:43slides is not a substitute for attending class.
5:47There's a textbook, Peter Gray's Psychology,
5:515th edition, and there's also a collection of short readings,
5:55The Norton Reader edited by Gary Marcus.
5:59It's an excellent textbook; it's an excellent collection,
6:01and you should get them both. They're available at Labyrinth
6:05bookstore on York Street or you get them online.
6:09I should note that last time I taught the course I used the
6:12Marcus Reader, and when Professor Marvin Chun
6:15taught his course last semester he used Peter Gray's 5^(th)
6:18edition textbook. So, there may be a lot of used
6:21copies floating around. You should feel free to try to
6:24get one of those. The evaluation goes like this.
6:28There is a Midterm and there is a Final.
6:30The Final will not be held in the exam period,
6:33because I like to take long vacations.
6:35It will be held the last day of class.
6:38The exams will be multiple choice and short answer,
6:41fill in the blank, that sort of thing.
6:44Prior to the exams I will post previous exams online,
6:47so you have a feeling for how these exams work and so on.
6:52There will also be review sessions.
6:54Starting at the beginning of the third week of class – that
6:58is not next week but the week after – on each Monday I'm
7:01going to put up a brief question or set of questions,
7:05which you have to answer and your answers need to be sent to
7:08your teaching fellow. And you'll be given a teaching
7:12fellow, assigned one, by Friday.
7:14This is not meant to be difficult.
7:16It's not meant to be more than five, ten minutes of work,
7:19but the point of the question--15,20 minutes of work,
7:23but the point of the question is to motivate people to keep up
7:26with the material and do the readings.
7:29These questions will be marked pass, fail.
7:31I expect most everybody could pass all of the questions but
7:35it's just to keep you on track and keep you going.
7:38There is a book review, a short book review,
7:40to be written towards near the end of the class.
7:43I'll give details about that later on in the semester.
7:46And there's also an experimental participation
7:48requirement, and next week I'll hand out a piece of paper
7:51describing the requirement. The point of the requirement is
7:55to give you all experience actually seeing what
7:58psychological research is about as well as to give us hundreds
8:02of subjects to do our experiments on.
8:05The issue sometimes comes up as to how to do well in the course.
8:10Here's how to do well. Attend all the classes.
8:14Keep up with the readings. Ideally, keep up with the
8:18readings before you come to class.
8:21And one thing I would strongly suggest is to form some sort of
8:24study groups, either formally or informally.
8:27Have people you could talk to when the--prior to the exams
8:30or--she's patting somebody next to her.
8:33I hope you know him. And in fact,
8:39what I'm going to do, not this class because it's
8:42shopping period. I don't know who's coming next
8:44class, or what but I'll set up a few minutes prior,
8:47at the beginning of the class, for people just to introduce
8:51themselves to the person next to them so they have some sort of
8:55resource in the class. Now, this is a large class,
8:58and if you don't do anything about it, it can be very
9:02anonymous. And some of you may choose to
9:05pursue it that way and that's totally fine.
9:07But what I would suggest you do is establish some contact with
9:12us, either with me or with any of the teaching fellows,
9:15and I'll introduce the teaching fellows sometime next week.
9:19You could talk to us at the beginning or at the end of
9:22class. Unless there are special
9:24circumstances, I always try to come at least
9:26ten minutes early, and I am willing to stay late
9:29to talk to people. You could come by during my
9:31office hours, which are on the syllabus,
9:33and you could send me e-mail and set up an appointment.
9:36I'm very willing to talk to students about intellectual
9:39ideas, about course problems and so on.
9:41And if you see me at some point just on campus,
9:44you could introduce yourself and I'd like to meet people from
9:48this class. So, again, I want to stress you
9:51have the option of staying anonymous in this class,
9:54but you also have the option of seeking out and making some sort
9:58of contact with us. Okay.
10:01That's the formal stuff of the course.
10:03What's this course about? Unlike a lot of other courses,
10:08some people come to Intro Psychology with some unusual
10:12motivations. Maybe you're crazy and hope to
10:17become less crazy. Maybe you want to learn how to
10:21study better, improve your sex life,
10:24interpret your dreams, and win friends and influence
10:28people. Those are not necessarily bad
10:31reasons to take this course and, with the exception of the sex
10:36part, this course might actually help
10:38you out with some of these things.
10:40The study of scientific psychology has a lot of insights
10:43of real world relevance to real problems that we face in our
10:47everyday lives. And I'm going to try--and when
10:50these issues come up--I'm going to try to stress them and make
10:53you try to think about the extent to which the laboratory
10:56research I'll be talking about can affect your everyday life:
10:59how you study, how you interact with people,
11:01how you might try to persuade somebody of something else,
11:04what sort of therapy works best for you.
11:07But the general goals of this course are actually I think even
11:14more interesting than that. What I want to do is provide a
11:19state of the art introduction to the most important topic that
11:24there is: us. How the human mind works,
11:27how we think, what makes us what we are.
11:30And we'll be approaching this from a range of directions.
11:33So, traditionally, psychology is often broken up
11:36into the following--into five sub-areas: Neuroscience,
11:40which is the study of the mind by looking at the brain;
11:45developmental, which is the area which I focus
11:48mostly on, which is trying to learn about how people develop
11:52and grow and learn; cognitive, which is the one
11:55term of the five that might be unfamiliar to some of you,
11:59but it refers to a sort of computational approach to
12:02studying the mind, often viewing the mind on
12:05analogy with a computer and looking at how people do things
12:08like understand language, recognize objects,
12:12play games, and so on. There is social,
12:16which is the study of how people act in groups,
12:19how people act with other people.
12:21And there is clinical, which is maybe the aspect of
12:24psychology that people think of immediately when they hear
12:26psychology, which is the study of mental
12:29health and mental illness. And we'll be covering all of
12:32those areas. We'll also be covering a set of
12:34related areas. I am convinced that you cannot
12:37study the mind solely by looking at the discipline of psychology.
12:42The discipline of psychology spills over to issues of how the
12:46mind has evolved. Economics and game theory are
12:49now essential tools for understanding human thought and
12:53human behavior--those issues connecting to philosophy,
12:57computer science, anthropology,
12:59literature, theology, and many, many other domains.
13:02So, this course will be wide ranging in that sense.
13:08At this point I've been speaking in generalities so I
13:11want to close this introductory class by giving five examples of
13:16the sorts of topics we'll be covering.
13:19And I'll start with the topic that we'll be covering next week
13:24on Monday – the brain. This is a brain.
13:27In fact, it's a specific person's brain,
13:31and what's interesting about the brain is that little white
13:36mark there. It's her brain.
13:39It's Terri Schiavo's brain. You recognize her more from
13:43pictures like that. And what a case like this,
13:47where somebody is in a coma, is without consciousness as a
13:52result of damage to the brain, is a stark illustration of the
13:57physical nature of mental life. The physical basis for
14:00everything that we normally hold dear, like free will,
14:04consciousness, morality and emotions,
14:06and that's what we'll begin the course with,
14:09talking about how a physical thing can give rise to mental
14:16life. We'll talk a lot about children.
14:18This is actually a specific child.
14:21It's my son, Zachary, my younger son,
14:25dressed up as Spider-Man, but it is Halloween.
14:29No, it's not Halloween. Oh.
14:32Well, there's more to say about that [laughter].
14:36I study child development for a living and I'm interested in
14:40several questions. So, one question is just the
14:43question of development. Everybody in this room can
14:46speak and understand English. Everybody in this room has some
14:50understanding of how the world works, how physical things
14:53behave. Everybody in this room has some
14:56understanding of other people, and how people behave.
14:59And the question that preoccupies developmental
15:02psychologists is how do we come to have this knowledge,
15:06and in particular, how much of it is hard-wired,
15:10built-in, innate. And how much of it is the
15:14product of culture, of language,
15:17of schooling? And developmental psychologists
15:21use many ingenious methods to try to pull these apart and try
15:26to figure out what are the basic components of human nature.
15:31There's also the question of continuity.
15:35To what extent is Zachary, at that age,
15:40going to be that way forever? To what extent is your fate
15:45sealed? To what extent could--if I were
15:48to meet you when you were five years old I could describe the
15:53way you are now? The poet William Wordsworth
15:57wrote, "The child is father to the man," and what this means is
16:03that you can see within every child the adult he or she will
16:08become. We will look and ask the
16:12question whether this is true. Is it true for your personality?
16:16Is it true for your interests? Is it true for your
16:19intelligence? Another question having to do
16:24with development is what makes us the way we are?
16:29We're different in a lot of ways.
16:32The people in this room differ according to their taste in
16:35food. They differ according to their
16:37IQs; whether they're aggressive or
16:40shy; whether they're attracted to
16:42males, females, both or neither;
16:44whether they are good at music; whether they are politically
16:49liberal or conservative. Why are we different?
16:53What's the explanation for why we're different?
16:56And again, this could be translated in terms of a
16:59question of genes and environment.
17:01To what extent are things the result of the genes we possess?
17:05To what extent are our individual natures the result of
17:09how we were raised? And to what extent are they
17:12best explained in terms of an interaction?
17:15One common theory, for instance,
17:17is that we are shaped by our parents.
17:20This was best summarized most famously by the British poet
17:26Philip Larkin who wrote, They mess you up,
17:31your mum and dad. They may not mean to but they
17:36do. They fill you with the faults
17:38they had And add some extra just for
17:41you. Is he right?
17:44It's very controversial. You-- It's been a series of--a
17:47huge controversy in the popular culture to the extent of which
17:52parents matter and this is an issue which will preoccupy us
17:56for much of the course. A different question:
17:59What makes somebody attractive? And this can be asked at all
18:04sorts of levels but a simple level is what makes for a pretty
18:08face? So, these are,
18:10according to ratings, very attractive faces.
18:15They are not the faces of real people.
18:17What's on the screen are computer generated faces of a
18:21Caucasian male and a Caucasian female who don't exist in the
18:26real world. But through using this sort of
18:29computer generation, and then asking people what
18:32they think of this face, what they think of that face,
18:35scientists have come to some sense as to what really makes a
18:38face attractive, both within cultures and across
18:42cultures. And that's something which
18:44we're going to devote some time to when we talk about social
18:47behavior, and in particular, when we talk about sex.
18:51Not all attractiveness, not all beauty of course,
18:54is linked to sex. So, pandas for instance,
18:58like this panda, are notoriously cute,
19:01and I don't have anything to say about it really.
19:07It's just a cute picture [laughter].
19:12Morality is extremely central to our lives,
19:16and a deep question, which we will struggle with
19:19throughout most of the course, is the question of good and
19:24evil, evil and good. These three pictures exemplify
19:28different sorts of evil. What you could call
19:31institutional evil by somebody behaving cruelly toward somebody
19:37else, perhaps not due to malice but
19:40because of the situation that she's in.
19:43It has picture of Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer or driven
19:46by political cause? And then there's this guy on
19:49the bottom. Anybody know who he is?
19:55Ted Bundy. Who got that?
19:57Film that man [laughter]. No.
19:59Ted Bundy, exactly, and that's before we get into
20:03the technical stuff like crazy-evil,
20:06and we're going to have to come to terms with why some people
20:12are like that. And again, the same situation
20:15comes up. Is it part of your nature to be
20:19good or bad or is it largely due to the situation that you fall
20:26in? And there's a lot of some quite
20:29spectacular experiments that try to tease that apart.
20:32If we're going to talk about evil, we should also talk about
20:37good. These are pictures of two
20:41notoriously good men, Oskar Schindler and Paul
20:47Rusesabagina, each who at different times in
20:52history saved the lives of many, many people at great risk to
20:57themselves. Schindler in the Holocaust,
21:01and then the other guy, in – and I can't pronounce
21:06his name – Rusesabagina, in Rwanda.
21:10And they both had real good movies made about them.
21:15But what's interesting with these cases is you couldn't have
21:19predicted ahead of time that they would be heroes.
21:23And one personal issue within any of us is what would we do in
21:28such situations? Finally, throughout this course
21:33we will discuss mental illness. Now, towards the end of the
21:39class I want to devote a full week to discussing major
21:42disorders like depression and anxiety,
21:45because of their profound social importance.
21:49Such disorders are reasonably common in college students.
21:53Many people in this room are currently suffering from a mood
21:57disorder, an anxiety disorder or both,
22:00and I won't ask for a show of hands but I know a lot of people
22:04in this room are on some form of medication for this disorder.
22:09And we'll discuss the current research and why people get
22:13these disorders and what's the best way to make them better.
22:17But I also have a weakness for the less common mental disorders
22:22that I think tell us something really interesting about mental
22:26life. So, when we talk about memory,
22:29for instance, we'll talk about disorders in
22:31memory, including some disorders that
22:34keep you from forming new memories as well as disorders of
22:38amnesia where you forget the past.
22:40And these are extraordinarily interesting for all sorts of
22:45reasons. Early in the course,
22:47in fact I think next week, we will discuss,
22:50no, later on in the course, in the middle of the semester,
22:53we will discuss an amazing case of Phineas Gage.
22:57Phineas Gage was a construction worker about 100 years ago.
23:01Due to an explosion, a metal pipe went through his
23:05head like so. Miraculously, he was not killed.
23:10In fact, his friends--it went through his head,
23:13went--ended up 100 feet away, covered with brains and blood.
23:17And Phineas Gage sat down and went, "uh, oh."
23:20And then on the way to the hospital they stopped by a pub
23:24to have some cider. He was not blind,
23:28he was not deaf, he was not retarded,
23:33but something else happened to him.
23:37He lost his sense of right and wrong.
23:40He lost his control. He used to be a hard-working
23:46family man. After the accident he lost all
23:49of that. He couldn't hold a job.
23:51He couldn't stay faithful to his wife.
23:53He couldn't speak for five minutes without cursing.
23:57He got into fights. He got into brawls.
23:59He got drunk. He lost his control.
24:01He ended up on a circus sideshow traveling through the
24:05country with the big steel pipe that went through his head.
24:09And this is again an extraordinary example of how the
24:13brain can give rise to the mind, and how things that go wrong
24:18with the brain can affect you in a serious way.
24:21We'll discuss cases of multiple personality disorder,
24:24where people have more than one personality.
24:27And also, discuss the debate over whether such cases are true
24:31or not; whether they could be taken as
24:33a real phenomena or a made-up phenomena, which is--there is a
24:36matter of a lot of controversy. And then, we'll even discuss
24:41some rarer cases like Capgras syndrome.
24:45Capgras syndrome is typically – there's hundreds of cases,
24:50not many – hundreds of cases. It's typically the result of
24:54some sort of stroke, and what happens to you is very
24:57specific. You develop a particular
25:01delusion, like it's getting dark .
25:07And the delusion is that the people you love the most have
25:14been replaced. They've been replaced by aliens
25:19or robots – thank you – by Martians, by CIA agents,
25:23by trained actors and actresses.
25:27But the people--But the idea is, the people you care for the
25:33most you believe are gone. And this could lead to tragic
25:39consequences. Capgras syndrome is associated
25:42with a very high level of violence.
25:45One man in Australia a couple of years ago was under the
25:49delusion that his father was replaced with a robot and cut
25:53off his head. A related disorder involving
25:57the very same parts of the brain is called Cotard's syndrome.
26:02And Cotard's syndrome is you believe that you're dead;
26:07you are persuaded that you're dead.
26:10You're walking around. You know you're walking around.
26:11And you know that there are people around,
26:13but you think that you're dead. And what's striking about these
26:17is--it's not--these are not just sort of big, screwy problems of
26:21messed up people. Rather, they're
26:23located--they're related at a pinpoint level to certain parts
26:27of your brain. And we're going to talk about
26:30the best modern theories as to why these syndromes occur.
26:34Now, the reason to be interested in them,
26:36again, is not because they're frequent.
26:39They aren't. And it's not because of some
26:42sort of gruesome, morbid curiosity.
26:44Rather, by looking at extreme cases, they can help us best
26:51understand normal life. Often by looking at extremes it
26:56throws into sharp contrast things we naturally take for
26:59granted. The issue of psychopathy,
27:01of people who, either due to brain damage or
27:04because they are born that way, have no moral understanding,
27:08can help us cope with questions of free will and responsibility;
27:12of the relationship or difference between mental
27:15illness and evil. Multiple personality cases
27:17force us to address the question of what is a self.
27:21To what extent are all of us composed of multiple people,
27:25and to what extent are we a single unified person over time?
27:30Cases like Capgras are important because they tell us
27:34about how we see the world. They tell us for instance that
27:38there is a difference between recognizing something in the
27:41sense that you could name it, and knowing what it is.
27:44And so, by studying these abnormal cases we could get some
27:49insight into regular life. So, that's the end of the
27:53illustration of the example topics.
27:55The syllabus lists many more. I'll end by telling you that
28:00there's a lot of stuff that we'll be talking about,
28:05that I want to talk about, that I am not expert in.
28:10And fortunately, there is a community at Yale of
28:14the best scholars and teachers on the planet.
28:18And so, it would be a shame for me not to use them to cover some
28:21of these issues. And so, I'm going to include
28:25four guest lecturers. The first one is Dr.
28:29Marvin Chun who teaches the Introduction to Psychology
28:33course in the fall and is my competition.
28:37And he's going to give an amazing lecture on cognitive
28:40neuroscience, especially the cognitive
28:42neuroscience of faces.
28:47Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema is the
28:49world's authority on depression, and in particular,
28:53on sex differences and depression, and she's going to
28:56talk about this towards the end of the course.
28:58Kelly Brownell is going to talk--is head of the Rudd
29:05Center, focuses on obesity, eating disorders,
29:09dieting, and he'll talk about the psychology of food.
29:12And finally, Dr.
29:14Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College,
29:18is going to come to us on Valentine's Day and tell us
29:24everything he knows about the mysteries of love.
29:30All of these details are in the syllabus and I'll stick around
29:33and answer questions. Hope to see you next week.

About this transcript

This page contains the full transcript of 1. Introduction by YaleCourses, generated from the public captions YouTube serves with the video. The transcript has 3,864 words across 432 segments, with the original timestamps preserved so you can click any line to jump to that moment in the embedded player.

What you can do with it

Use the transcript to take notes, quote the speaker, build a study guide, generate a summary with ChatGPT or Claude via the YouTube Summary tool, or export it as a timed subtitle file with YouTube to SRT. You can also re-open it in the transcriber to translate the transcript into 100+ languages.

Free YouTube transcript tool

YouTube2Text is a free YouTube transcript generator — no signup, no daily limit. Paste any YouTube link and get the full transcript instantly, with timestamps, click-to-jump, translation to 100+ languages, AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and exports to TXT, SRT, VTT, or Markdown.