interveiw blog post #7

Blog Post #7
I interviewed Hemang Srikishan who studied psychology for his bachelors degreee.

This bachelors degree makes him relaible because in order to get your bachelors degree you have to be very informed in this subject.  

I interveiwed him on Thursday April 26 by email.

1. What were major events in history that shaped our understanding of psychology?

2.Who were some of the key psychologists that have shaped our understanding of psychology?

3. Do you have any good suggestions for where to find more information on psychology behind criminal behavior?

1. This is a very broad question, so I will try my best to answer it.  I think there are a lot of moments that have defined psychology as it is today.  Probably the most important events were the starting of a lab to study human behavior by Wilhelm Wundt.  After that, the field of psychology spread to America and William James, Ivan Pavlov, and Sigmund Freud started to do studies that were all very influential.  These are some of the people that are covered in any psychology introductory class.  They are big events because they made the field of psychology a legitimate field by showing that there was actual use in studying the human mind in a systematic way. AND more importantly, that the mind could be studied at all.  This was a big shift in the general thinking of the scientific world before since they though only physical things could really be observed or studied scientifically. 

I would say that the next big moments in psychology came as each of the popular schools of psychology were formed (like behaviorism, cognitive psych, humanism, psychoanalysis, gestalt, bio psych, evolutionary psychology, etc.).  These were all huge shifts in the way people thought about human behavior and so they were all very large changes in psychology's history.  Most recently, the studies on happiness are very interesting to me because they are using psychology to study what makes people happy and what leads to lasting happiness.

2. There were a lot of psychologists over time that have shaped the field of psychology.  The study of the human mind has been going on for thousands of years, but was probably more formalized as a field of study in the 1800s and 1900s by people like Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Ivan Pavlov, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and B.F. Skinner.  These men believed in very specific approaches to psychology and to the key element which made people's minds work the way they do.  The behaviorists thought that all behavior could be explained as actions that are rewarding or are conditioned by a desire for rewards and an aversion to punishment.  Psychoanalysis focuses more on relationships and deep seated tension or issues which are hidden away in a part other than the conscious mind called the sub conscious and the unconscious mind.  Basically there have been a lot of different theories that people have come up with and they all try to explain why people behave the way they do. 

3. The most famous criminal psychologist is probably Phillip Zimbardo- famous for the stanford prison experiment.  You can also find good information about why people do "bad" things even when they know they are bad from experiments that Stanley Milgram did.  In fact, there is a great RadioLab Podcast that you can download and listen to that might give you great information and a way to understand how the studies were performed.  Find it at http://www.radiolab.org/2012/jan/09/
A lot of their studies focus on why people do immoral things, so this might point you in the right direction to learn more about criminal psychology.