INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
Inspired in part by developments in computer technology and artificial
intelligence, the second half of the twentieth century saw a new dawn
in psychology as more and more researchers began to study the mental
processes that behaviourism had outlawed. Some historians have even
described this change as a cognitive revolution. Cognitive psychology
pioneers include British psychologist Frederic Bartlett, who performed
ground-breaking work on memory; Noam Chomsky, famous for his
work on language acquisition and the idea that there is a universal
grammar; and Ulric Neisser, whose 1967 book Cognitive Psychology is
credited by some for giving a name to this new and exciting field.
Cognitive psychology is all about the mental activities that go on in
our brains, as we process and store incoming sensory information and
plan and execute bodily movements. Many of its models are based on
flow diagrams of boxes and arrows, rather like the input and output
schematics of a computer. Today, cognitive psychology is the dominant
approach in experimental psychology and researchers in other fields
often adopt a cognitive perspective. Social cognition, for example, is a
popular and influential branch of social psychology, which recognizes
that in order to understand social behaviour it is important to consider
how people think about themselves and others. And perhaps the fastest
moving and most well-funded area of psychology at the beginning of the
twenty-first century is cognitive neuroscience, which aims to understand
the relationship between our mental processes and the wet tissue housed
in our skulls.
A taxonomy of psychology and
psychologists
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of psychologist – researchers or
psychological scientists who perform experiments, and practitioners
who apply the findings of psychology in real world settings. Many
psychologists do both, but for simplicity’s sake let’s start with psycho-
logical researchers. Like a city, psychology has been prone to sprawl,
so today we find psychologists conducting research in an astonishing
multitude of areas, with new avenues of investigation appearing all the
time. In the same psychology department, you’re likely to find a social
psychologist analysing the use of language in newspaper coverage,