The History of Psychology: Fresh Take

  • Explain behaviorism
  • Describe humanism
  • Describe cognitive psychology
  • Describe multicultural and feminist psychology

Psychological Perspectives

Psychologists agree that there is no one right way to study the way people think or behave. There are, however, various schools of thought that evolved throughout the development of psychology that continue to shape the way we investigate human behavior. For example, some psychologists might attribute a certain behavior to biological factors such as genetics while another psychologist might consider early childhood experiences to be a more likely explanation for the behavior. Many expert psychologists focus their entire careers on just one facet of psychology, such as developmental psychology or cognitive psychology, or even more specifically, newborn intelligence or language processing.

Watch this video for an overview of the 7 major perspectives in psychology, including behaviorism, humanism, cognitive and sociocultural perspectives, which you learned about in this section.
You can view the transcript for “Psychology’s 7 Modern Perspectives” here (opens in new window).
This video touches on most of these major perspectives but also provides a broad overview of the study of psychology.

You can view the transcript for “Intro to Psychology: Crash Course Psychology #1” here (opens in new window).