INTRODUCTION Why do people do horrible things? Slave owners and Nazis, any of the perpetrators of history's atrocities, how did they so successfully dehumanize other people for so long? At a smaller scale, how do bullies in the lunchroom manage to treat other kids with such cruelty and then go home and pet their dog and call their grandma and say happy birthday? Most of what we've been studying so far has focused on the individual. We've covered sub-fields of psychology like cognitive, personality, and clinical psychology, which tend to address the phenomena contained within a single person's mind. But there's also social psychology, which focuses on the power of the situation. It examines how we think about, influence, and relate to one another in certain conditions, and it's better equipped to answer this question about people doing horrible things. Social psychology can not only give us some of the tools we need to understand why people behave brutally, it
Does psychotherapy Work? If you saw our last lesson on psychotherapy, you might be wondering, what happened to Bernice? Has she found a way to manage her depression? Is she still wracked with anxiety? Well, it's really nice of you to ask, and I'll tell her you said hi. But for our purposes, as students of psychology, the bigger question arising from Bernice's case is, has psychotherapy helped? And just as important, How can we tell? Well, believe it or not, one of the main ways experts use is to simply ask the client and see how they say they're doing. Is Bernice out of bed and living her life? Did she make it through midterms without spiraling into a crisis? And did she take that plane trip to Baja to party with her girls? As a clinician, that would all be useful to know, right? But the key is that we want to ask these questions in a scientifically rigorous manner so that we really know what treatment works. rather than just extrapolating from individual cases. And