One of the questions we’ll talk about throughout the semester is how we know what we know (or what we think we know.) As part of this, I ask you to actively document how these topics come up in your life outside the classroom throughout the semester. How you do this is up to you. You could create a twitter or tumblr account to keep track of how often psychology comes up in your day-to-day life, use hypothes.is to collect and annotate things you read online, or start your own blog to write your observations in… It’s up to you.
The goal of this assignment is for you to actively notice when topics relevant to our course come up in your own life outside of the classroom. Did you see a movie that featured a psychologist? Tweet about it. Did you read a news article that referred to a psychology study? Blog about whether the news article got the research right or wrong. Think about this assignment as an attempt to document your own experiences and as a way to see where your knowledge about psychology and history comes from.
Something we’ll be talking about throughout the semester is the relationship between scientific knowledge, popular ideas and personal ideas. As more information is available and as psychology has become increasingly empirical, we still gain knowledge from a variety of sources and use those sources to interpret the world around us.
History of Psychology 