In the beginning of the year, our class started off with the book definition of psychology simply as the science of behavior and mental processes. Now, I cannot think of a better definition for the discipline because it is perfectly broad. By perfectly broad, I mean that the definition fits perfectly with how we examine the human mind and psyche. To this day, science is still learning more with each passing day about the brain and behavior. With each new discovery, we as a globally community can hope that the discoveries learned from this science can be placed into bettering the world and creating a safer one as well. Discoveries such as helping those within the criminal justice field to help track down people we deem as “sociopaths” and the like, all in the while as clinical psychologists help them treat any mental illnesses and use the various therapy method to have them enter our society. Even those in social or industrial psychology to help everyday people and workers remain healthy to strengthen the foundation of society.
If there is anything I know that I will remember that I learned from this course, it is that people are complicated (in a good sense). Of course, we can’t simply talk about the person without talking about their mind since that is what makes them live and, well, them. Whether it is how we perceive people, how they perceive us, or how we think they perceive us, the reality is we will never truly understand the workings of each individual brains and what they are thinking/perceiving since we cannot actually enter their brain in such a manner (or at least with the current technology we have). But we can at least understand to a pretty good degree on why people do certain things, such as the hacktivists who have recently come to light.
Motivation is the base of everyone’s actions, especially for hacktivists. We can use the perspective of the arousal theory to predict hacktivists perform these acts such as Aaron Swartz’s release of articles from MIT (Smith 2013) for the thrill of it. We can also use the incentive theories to explain his belief that these articles should be released to the public with seeing these articles being seen as “dormant” and useless as the undesirable stimulus he was avoiding, and releasing them to the public so they are “active” and useful as the desirable stimulus he was trying to obtain. Although I personally do not wish for hacktivists to change their behaviors, we can see the government attempting to have them learn not to perform these acts of civil disobedience. An example of this is having Jeremy Hammond institutionalized in prison for 10 years (Smith 2013) in attempt to condition his behavior into an immediate form of extinction.
If there is anything I know that I will remember that I learned from this course, it is that people are complicated (in a good sense). Of course, we can’t simply talk about the person without talking about their mind since that is what makes them live and, well, them. Whether it is how we perceive people, how they perceive us, or how we think they perceive us, the reality is we will never truly understand the workings of each individual brains and what they are thinking/perceiving since we cannot actually enter their brain in such a manner (or at least with the current technology we have). But we can at least understand to a pretty good degree on why people do certain things, such as the hacktivists who have recently come to light.
Motivation is the base of everyone’s actions, especially for hacktivists. We can use the perspective of the arousal theory to predict hacktivists perform these acts such as Aaron Swartz’s release of articles from MIT (Smith 2013) for the thrill of it. We can also use the incentive theories to explain his belief that these articles should be released to the public with seeing these articles being seen as “dormant” and useless as the undesirable stimulus he was avoiding, and releasing them to the public so they are “active” and useful as the desirable stimulus he was trying to obtain. Although I personally do not wish for hacktivists to change their behaviors, we can see the government attempting to have them learn not to perform these acts of civil disobedience. An example of this is having Jeremy Hammond institutionalized in prison for 10 years (Smith 2013) in attempt to condition his behavior into an immediate form of extinction.