Questions tagged [psychology]

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2 answers
429 views

Popper on Marx, Freud and Darwin

I've encountered the following claim: If we, as Popper apparantly did, view Marx and Freud's body of work as non-scientific because core tenets are not falsifiable and we apply the same rubic to ...
1 vote
0 answers
49 views

Can anyone recommend sources on the standardisation of research methods in modern (20th-21st c) science?

I’m interested in learning more about how statistical methodology and research design has changed over the course of the 20th and 21st century. I’m particularly interested in ways in which research ...
2 votes
3 answers
542 views

Harm of nature vs nurture debate?

I'm taking a class in language acquisition called "Nature vs Nurture". I'm not particularly fond of that framing, because the divide seems overly dichotomous. In addition, the N-vs-N debate has been ...
3 votes
0 answers
40 views

What alternative theories of learning were there before classical and operant conditioning?

The two main forms of (animal) learning are operant conditioning and classical conditioning, both established only in the 20th century. However, before they were established, surely there have been ...
1 vote
0 answers
80 views

Grey Walter and Norbert Wiener regarding holism

Grey Walter writes: Even in the very simplest system, with two active elements, multiple interconnection between elements give several modes for which simple observation is useless. The study of ...
7 votes
2 answers
219 views

When was nicotine identified as an addictive substance?

I was watching a TV series (Godless) which is set in the Wild West in 1884. At some point they sing Don't forget the girls of LaBelle, which includes the following verses: The Creole girl is a one-...
5 votes
2 answers
2k views

Who first discovered or invented the concept of "muscle memory"?

Who first discovered or invented the concept of "muscle memory," that our habitual bodily movements can be trained? Aristotle, in his De memoria et reminiscentia, realized that memory depends on our ...
-4 votes
1 answer
207 views

What was the work of Robert Muchielli's, a French psychologist, role in the Rwandan Genocide? [closed]

I read recently in an in-depth book-length study by an investigative journalist on the Rwandan Genocide that the work of the French psychologist, Robert Muchielli, was implicated in organised ...
1 vote
1 answer
69 views

How did scientists thought about human motivation before the term willpower came into fashion?

According to Google ngrams the term willpower wasn't used much before 1880. How did humans reason about motivation back then? What kind of conceptions of human ...
3 votes
1 answer
209 views

What is a vortex?

Both Descartes and Llinas use the term of vortex to illustrate their theories, but none of them does it really specifically, and none of them is mentioned in the Wikipedia article on vortices. Could ...
3 votes
1 answer
1k views

What ever happened to the methylphenidate synthesiser and his family?

Leandro Panizzon 1 2 3 synthesised methylphenidate or something like that back in 1944. Ritalin is named after his wife Rita. He doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia page or anything. What happened to ...
3 votes
0 answers
72 views

Raymond Cattell and History of Personality Traits Prior 1947

I find that papers reference Raymond Cattell suggesting 16 or 22, etc, traits, by factor analysis (basically regression), including all five of the modern reproducible traits (openness to experience, ...
1 vote
1 answer
232 views

Did Turing ideas make any impact on Psychology or Brain Science? Why?

Some authors, namely Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter, argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious (Hofstadter, D. R., & Dennett, D. C. (2006). The Mind's ...
13 votes
1 answer
621 views

Four temperaments and medical methodology

One of the traditional ideas about personality was Temperament Theory which probably originated from Egypt and was developed by Hippocrates into a medical theory. In the tenth century, it was extended ...