Explaining Humans: Winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2020

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Cognitive psychology states that mediational processes occur between stimulus and response, such as memory, thinking, problem-solving, etc. It is important to appreciate that the human brain is a highly complicated piece of biological machinery. Scientists have only just “scratched the surface” of understanding the many functions of the workings of the human brain. The brain can influence many types of behavior. human evolution, the process by which human beings developed on Earth from now-extinct primates. Viewed zoologically, we humans are Homo sapiens, a culture-bearing upright-walking species that lives on the ground and very likely first evolved in Africa about 315,000 years ago. We are now the only living members of what many zoologists refer to as the human tribe, Hominini, but there is abundant fossil evidence to indicate that we were preceded for millions of years by other hominins, such as Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and other species of Homo, and that our species also lived for a time contemporaneously with at least one other member of our genus, H. neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals). In addition, we and our predecessors have always shared Earth with other apelike primates, from the modern-day gorilla to the long-extinct Dryopithecus. That we and the extinct hominins are somehow related and that we and the apes, both living and extinct, are also somehow related is accepted by anthropologists and biologists everywhere. Yet the exact nature of our evolutionary relationships has been the subject of debate and investigation since the great British naturalist Charles Darwin published his monumental books On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin never claimed, as some of his Victorian contemporaries insisted he had, that “man was descended from the apes,” and modern scientists would view such a statement as a useless simplification—just as they would dismiss any popular notions that a certain extinct species is the “ missing link” between humans and the apes. There is theoretically, however, a common ancestor that existed millions of years ago. This ancestral species does not constitute a “missing link” along a lineage but rather a node for divergence into separate lineages. This ancient primate has not been identified and may never be known with certainty, because fossil relationships are unclear even within the human lineage, which is more recent. In fact, the human “family tree” may be better described as a “family bush,” within which it is impossible to connect a full chronological series of species, leading to Homo sapiens, that experts can agree upon. The fundamental belief of this type of therapy is that clients can fulfill their full potential as human beings if they can achieve these goals. Examples of humanistic therapies include client-centered therapy and Gestalt therapy. A possible reason for the limited impact on academic psychology perhaps lies with the fact that humanism deliberately adopts a non-scientific approach to studying humans.

The CAT scan (Computerised Axial Tomography) is a moving X-ray beam which takes “pictures” from different angles around the head and can be used to build up a 3-dimensional image of which areas of the brain are damaged. Client-centered therapy aims to increase clients’ self-worth and decrease the incongruence between the self-concept and the ideal self. Braat, M., Engelen, J., van Gemert, T., & Verhaegh, S. (2020). The rise and fall of behaviorism: The narrative and the numbers. History of Psychology, 23(3), 252-280.Classical conditioning refers to learning by association, and involves the conditioning of innate bodily reflexes with new stimuli. Pavlov’s Experiment

Humanistic psychology: a more recent development in the history of psychology, humanistic psychology grew out of the need for a more positive view of human beings than was offered by psychoanalysis or behaviorism. Edward Wilson (1975) published his book, Sociobiology which brought together an evolutionary perspective to psychology.However, the flip side to this is that humanism can gain a better insight into an individual’s behavior through the use of qualitative methods, such as unstructured interviews. Pang hopes the book “will give people that missing link so that they can feel complete enough to take the next step.” At school, she struggled to make sense of the “ecosystem of playground species” and never fitted in. “Maybe it was the fact that I had a dedicated adult mentor sitting next to me in each class, my tendency to go into meltdown when a teacher said a word that scared me, or my uncontrollable nervous tics. I can’t imagine my penchant for giant tubes of antiseptic cream did me any favours either,” she writes, also revealing the “raging tempest” inside her head. Humanism rejects scientific methodology like experiments and typically uses qualitative research methods. For example, diary accounts, open-ended questionnaires, unstructured interviews, and observations. The approach is optimistic and focuses on the noble human capacity to overcome hardship, pain and despair. People are motivated to self-actualize: Humanism rejected the assumptions of the behaviorist perspective which is characterized as deterministic, focused on reinforcement of stimulus-response behavior and heavily dependent on animal research.

Chair of this year’s judging panel, Professor Anne Osbourn FRS, Group Leader at the John Innes Centre and Director of the Norwich Research Park Industrial Biotechnology Alliance, said: “ Explaining Humans is an intelligent and charming investigation into how we understand human behaviour, while drawing on the author’s superpower of neurodivergence –but it does a lot more than that. Each chapter focuses on a different facet of science and, while explaining the scientific theory in a readily accessible way, also delves into analogies of accepted social norms and how to interpret and respond to them. Crucially, the book also provides insights into different ways of thinking and the challenges of being neurodiverse in a ‘normal’ world. Pang may have written this book as a manual to understand a world that sometimes feels alien to her, but it also allows neurotypicals to see the world from an entirely new perspective.”

References

In no decade did behaviorist authors belong to the most prominent citation clusters. Even a combined “behaviorist” cluster accounted for max. 28% of highly cited authors. According to Rogers (1959), we want to feel, experience and behave in ways which are consistent with our self-image and which reflect what we would like to be like, our ideal-self. The closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the more consistent or congruent we are and the higher our sense of self-worth. However, Rogers did attempt to introduce more rigor into his work by developing Q-sort – an objective measure of progress in therapy. Q-sort is a method used to collect data on outcome of therapy based on changes in clients self-concepts before, during, and after therapy in that it is used to measure actual changes based on differences between self and ideal self. Rogers, C. R. (1946). Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. American Psychologist, 1, 415-422. Homo sapiens, (Latin: “wise man”) the species to which all modern human beings belong. Homo sapiens is one of several species grouped into the genus Homo, but it is the only one that is not extinct. See also human evolution.