Amy McCarty's Archive

I do not think that automatic responses (as we discussed in class on Friday) are an indicator that all our behavior is predetermined.  I understand that we have automatic processes.  I think that these exist in order to help us sort through the massive amounts of data and stimuli that enter our senses and minds every day.  We need these automatic responses in order to sort and respond to information quickly—sometimes these responses are even used to help us in life and death situations when it is imperative that we act without much thinking.  That being said, I believe that we have the capacity as humans to choose not to accept or act upon these automatic responses.  If we know that we are responding due to an automatic thought process, we can make a different choice.

I found the studies that Dr. McAnulty presented to us on Friday to be interesting.  I would like to proffer another example of an automatic response test.  When I was in my social psychology class, we took an implicit association test.  This test is supposed to measure whether a person prefers one race (white or black) to another race.  In this test, the participant has to perform four tasks.  The first task is to identify European American faces or African American faces as quickly as possible.  Secondly, the participant is asked to identify “good” or “bad” words (such as “glorious,” “awful,” etc.).  Next the participant is shown faces and words; “bad” words and African American faces are identified with the same key stroke and “good” words and European American faces are identified with the same key stroke.  Finally, the previous step is reversed.

Every time I have taken this test, I have scored “strongly prefers European Americans.”  If I believed that only automatic or implicit associations informed my actions, I would be very upset.  Instead, I know that I form opinions about people based upon the people individually.  I like African American people and I like white people.  I also dislike some white people and some African American people (although I can think of more white people I dislike than African American people.

If you would like to try out the implicit association test (and I would strongly recommend taking a few minutes to try it out) the link follows.  It only takes a few short minutes and the results are interesting.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1

PS: one of the flaws I find with the test is the order in which things are presented.  First you are asked to associate African Americans with negative words, then, when you are used to that set of information, you are asked to change and associate African Americans with positive words.  I think that the order may influence the test results–but that is just my opinion.

I was fascinated to read about Mary Cover Jones this past week in our textbook.  It was the first time that a female has been mentioned as making great contributions to psychology, so I decided to look further into her career.

Mary Cover Jones graduated from Vassar in 1919.  She completed her graduate work at Columbia and then held a variety of research positions.  In one such position, she was tasked to follow 200 fifth and sixth grade students through puberty and adolescents.  She actually ended up following some of the students through middle and late adulthood.  With the data she collected, she was able to publish results on a wide variety of topics including the long-term psychological and behavioral effects of late and early physical maturation in adolescence.  Another study she published from this same group was exploring the developmental antecedents of alcohol abuse.  She ended up publishing over 100 studies from data obtained from this original group of 5^th and 6^th graders.  She was coined the “mother of behavior therapy” by Joseph Walpole.

Even though Jones began as a strict behaviorist, she evolved into a psychologist with an eclectic bag of tricks and including a holistic view of people she was studying.  Late in her career, at a behavior conference, she made the following quote about her body of work:

[M]y last 45 years have been spent in longitudinal research in which I have watched the psychobiological development of our study members as they grew from children to adults now in their fifties… My association with this study has broadened my conception of the human experience.  Now I would be less satisfied to treat the fears of a 3-year-old, or of anyone else, without a later follow-up and in isolation from an appreciation of him as a tantalizingly complex person with unique potentials for stability and change

Despite all of her professional achievements, she had some setbacks in her life.  For instance, she was not allowed to use her study of Peter and the rabbit (her now most famous case) as her dissertation because her sample size (1) was too small.  As a result, her work on desensitizing Peter, would not become very well known until the 1960’s.  She was also married to a prominent psychologist (Harold Jones) and was not allowed to become a professor of psychology at Berkeley because her husband already worked in that department.  Instead, she had to settle for an assistant professor position in education.

Overall, I feel that she was a fascinating woman with a long career in a male dominated field in an era when not many women were encouraged to work and think for themselves.  Her work has stood the test of time and made her immortal.  At the end of her life, before she died (at almost 91 years old), she told her sister: “I am still learning about what is important in life.”

While preparing for the quiz last week, I was struck by one of the terms that we were asked to define:  recapitulation, so I decided to do some more research on this term.  I have gathered that there were several forms of this recapitulation theory (which was influential, but is no longer accepted).

One of the earliest recapitulation theorists was Ernst Haeckel who believed that a developing embryo followed the evolutionary phases of each species that was in its evolutionary line.  He made drawings of human embryos in each phase, sometimes overemphasizing the features that he wanted to highlight, but these drawings were used in biology text books.  Haeckel showed how human embryos start out with gill like openings that eventually develop into the jaw and throat area.  He said that this was because humans had a fish-like ancestor. Modern scientist have rejected this theory in part because even though some stages of embryonic development may seem to look like another species, at no time are these apparent similarities functional.  That is the openings that look like gills could never function as gills.

Other theorists who embraced the recapitulation theory applied it to areas such as social development, child development, and education.  Herbert Spencer believed that children learned knowledge in the same order that human species mastered the knowledge originally.  G.S. Hall believed that there was a one-to-one correlation between child development and evolutionary stages.

There is an interesting article discounting the recapitulation theory on the Institute for Creation Research which you can peruse at your leisure here: http://www.icr.org/article/heritage-recapitulation-theory/.  It links Freud to the recapitulation theory, basically stating that Freud believed that all psychosis was functional for our species sometime during evolution, but is no longer useful.  Consider the following:

In a 1915 paper, Freud demonstrates his preoccupation with evolution. Immersed in the theories of Darwin, and of Lamarck, who believed acquired traits could be inherited, Freud concluded that mental disorders were the vestiges of behavior that had been appropriate in earlier stages of evolution.”

The evolutionary idea that Freud relied on most heavily in the manuscript is the maxim that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ that  is, that the development of the individual recapitulates the evolution of the entire species.

I feel like the recapitulation theory is another example of confirmation bias.  It is a theory that seems palatable to many atheists, that life is just a series of explainable patterns.  Of course confirmation bias also occurs with Christians. People latch on to anything that will help support what they already believe.   Sometimes, even proof to atheists that God doesn’t exist is proof to Christians that he does.  I remember when we were talking in class about the brain’s response to God and religion.  We said that people often say that because there was an area of the brain that is active when we are engaged in religious or spiritual activities, that it proves that it the feelings are physiological instead of any spiritual connection.  As a Christian, I think, that those brain connections are proof that there is a God.  Why wouldn’t God make our brains receptive to him?

It seems that there are as many theories available as people on earth.  If you want to explain why anything, there is probably an existing theory to help you out.  I would like to spend my blog post time in discourse on a theory that Dr. McAnulty mentioned in class in passing.  I heard of this theory many years ago.  I remember thinking at the time that it was an interesting theory and something I might be able to believe.

This theory, an extension of the young earth theory (which says that the earth is less than 10,000 years old—around 6,000—much younger than evolutionists believe it to be), is called the mature earth theory.  This theory posits that God created a “mature earth” complete with layers of fossils.  I find this theory very interesting.  I assume that God created man as a mature being and the first animals as mature beings (else how would they have survived).  If he did that, why would he have not created a mature earth.

Some people brush off the mature earth theory by saying that God is not a trickster.  I would agree with that position, but I think that God knows humanity (as he created us).  He knows that man loves challenges and mysteries.  He knows that man wants to understand the world and the workings of it.  Why wouldn’t he create a few mysteries for us to solve?

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:8-9 (New International Version)

The mature earth theory drives my husband crazy as he has a degree in Geology and is quite fond of dinosaurs.  I am not ready to abandon all other theories to adopt this theory as my own, but I think it is an interesting theory.  I think that there is no way to prove it, just as there is no way to prove it is not true or to prove that evolution, the big bang or any other creation theory is true.  I think that as long as man is on this earth, there will be difference of opinion and a plentitude of theories.

Infectious Ideas

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed – fully understood – that sticks; right in there somewhere.”

Dom Cobb – Inception

I am a little behind the times.  I saw the movie, Inception, this weekend.  Besides being a brilliant story, the above quote struck me as extremely compelling, particularly in regard to some of the thinkers from the Renaissance and Reformation eras.  These men were infected with ideas that changed their lives (and ultimately ours).  One early thinker, Galileo, specifically, changed the universe we live in (at least figuratively).  Galileo once said “UI do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”  Those contagious ideas.

What would possess a religious man (Galileo at one time wanted to be a monk) to denounce the church’s teachings?  Those pesky ideas again.  Initially, Galileo wanted to prove that objects fell at the same rate regardless of their weight.  He noticed that hail hit the ground at the same time regardless of its size (another of those parasitic ideas).  Aristotelian’s believed that the heavier hail just started higher up in the clouds so that was why they appeared to hit the ground at the same time.

After improving on the existing telescope, Galileo’s brain was infected by the preposterousness of Aristotle’s claims that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything in the universe was perfectly spherical and rotated around the earth in perfect circles.  Galileo saw mountains and craters on the moon, he saw spots on the sun, he saw changes in Venus that indicated to him that Venus rotated around the sun.  More parasitic ideas.

It is hard to imagine not living in a world that KNOWS that the earth revolves around the sun!  But this was almost literally an earth shattering idea for people of Galileo’s time.  People did not want to be infected by this idea.  Their previous notions of world order had already contaminated and taken hold of their brains and minds.  Fortunately, Galileo persisted in this propagation of ideas.  I want to be open to new ideas, but be able to separate the truth from nonsense.  I do not want to be stuck in a world where the sun revolves around the earth—but only in my head.

The following is a link to an Indigo Girls (Amy and Emily) song that gives tribute to Galileo.  The main theme of the song is about reincarnation and righting past lives wrongs which is more Platonic that Galileo-ian, but it is a good song anyway.

Galileo – Indigo Girls

I certainly find it to be true that once ideas get stuck in the “craw” of your brain, it is hard to eradicate them.  Who hasn’t had trouble falling to sleep because their brain will not turn off?  Some idea keeps bouncing off the walls of your mind.  I know that since I started contemplating writing on Galileo for the blog, I could not get the Indigo Girls song out of my head (which I haven’t heard for years)! Then I found a book on Galileo at the dollar store.  Some of this, I think, is our subconscious searching out “confirmation” for our ideas.  But Galileo was so possessed with his ideas and so wanted other people to hear and see his ideas that he got in trouble for them.

One thought that has been plaguing me throughout our discussion of the early Greek philosophers is why do we start here?  I know that other early cultures and times have their own phalanx of great thinkers (before and after the great thinkers of Greece).

I initially imagined a man (because all great thinkers of that era had to be men), an early Mayan, sitting by the fire with his blue corn tacos espousing his thoughts on the universe to all who would listen.  And because he would not shut-up, the tribe eventually made him a shaman.   I discussed these thoughts with my husband (who is a scholar working on his second and third master’s degrees simultaneously).  He said, you’ve just described Eurocentrism.  I did not know that my thoughts had a term!

In preparation for this blog post, I did a cursory scouring of the internet for information about Eurocentrism.  Here is some of what I found that struck a chord with me.

Eric Gerlach teaches philosophy, logic, ethics and religion at Berkeley City College.  He has a relevant blog post about teaching multiculturalism as opposed to Eurocentrism.  He synthesized my thoughts in the following quote:

“The Eurocentric View of the Ancient World:

Ancient Greece was the birthplace of the Western mind and culture, distinct from others in critical rational inquiry and diverse individual freedom.

The Multicultural View of the Ancient World:

All ancient cultures had critical rational inquiry and diverse individual freedom. Ancient cultures, including ancient Greece, were neither exceptional nor perfect in the exercise of reason and freedom.”

If you would like to see more from Mr. Gerlach, you can visit the following blog post:  http://ericgerlach.blogspot.com/2010/03/teaching-multiculturalism-not.html

Mesopotamia or Babylon was a treasure trove of philosophy, science, mathematics and medicine.  There was even an extensive medical text called Diagnostic Handbook written by the physician Esagil-kin-apli of Borsippa, during the 11^th century, BCE.  That was hundreds of years before Hippocrates.  If you would like to learn more about ancient Babylon and their advances, you can visit the following site:  http://www.reference.com/browse/Mesopotamia

I understand that to study the history of philosophy and further, psychology, we have to start somewhere, I just think that we should remember that as Solomon once said: there is nothing new under the sun.