Quote:
Originally Posted by Hardball47
So yeah, how is it then that we're able to tell people's beliefs, attitudes (base emotions, like fear and joy can already be read with brain scans, so I'm with you on that one) "and so on"? Magic? Or technology?
Methodology?
When you said that psychology is only concerned with studying and predicting behavior, that implied that it treated the cognitive system generating that behavior as a black box. But after the cognitive revolution of the 50s, this hasn't been the case. Psychologists, cognitive scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, and so on want to know what sort of mechanisms yield the observed behavior. You can talk about those mechanisms on different levels: neural networks, symbol systems, schemas, frames, attitudes, beliefs, etc. The main point is that you can infer things about people's minds from their behavior or by using neuro-imaging techniques, eye trackers, physiology monitoring devices, etc.
I'll give you one example. There is this methodology called Implicit Association Test (IAT) that was developed about 10 years ago. One of the things it's used for quite frequently is measuring people's attitudes toward different things (e.g., minorities). It's implicit in that you never explicitly ask participants questions like "how do you feel about Muslims" or "do you dislike homosexuals". It's kinda long to explain the test in detail now, but in short, using the response time data to different stimuli, researchers are able to get access to private attitudes that many times the people holding them don't even know about. That is, it may turn out that you have hidden prejudice toward certain groups of people, even though you are convinced that you actually don't.