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Item Condition: Used; Very Good
First couple of pages a little creased.
This book is for students taking their irst course in psychology. We hope it will not be their last. Human behavior is a fascinating and amazingly complex subject. We would be delighted if our readers caught from this text an enthusiasm for psychology that carried their studies beyond the beginning level.
Most fields of scientific study begin with a set of scattered facts and hypotheses and evolve toward a unified, logical pattern of basic concepts. Psychology, in a sense, can be seen as a science in its youth, vigorous but full of contradictions and conflicts. We have attempted, in the organization of our book, to bring order to this wealth of information by moving from past to present, from the individual to the group, from normal to abnormal.
Our wish to offer a balanced account of theories and experiments guided our decisions at every stage, the result is an eclectic text. We have no interest in emphasizing favorite, personal notions and have presented competing theories and differing views of controversial issues. Although our book covers a wide spectrum of psychology, we have tried to treat each topic in enough depth to give the reader a sense of its significance. We should like to show psychologists in action - to allow students to see that psychologists strive constantly for better answers, that in the process they sometimes make mistakes (and sometimes learn from them!), that they often discover more than one useful answer to a question; and that no answer is absolutely final. Thus, we try not to tell students what to think, instead, we tell them what has been observed and how it was observed, and we present the sometimes-conflicting interpretations of these observations. On occasion, we show how successive experiments have altered and even overturned theories that once seemed well grounded in observation or common sense, or both. Our conviction is that the proper study of man is man himself, so we pay special attention to human bchavior. Nonetheless, references to animal experiments are essential, as well as stimulating, so we include these wherever they can help us make a principle or process clear…