Best of the Best: Psychologists & Sociologists Quiz

Answer: B.F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a proponent of the Radical Behaviorism school of thought; he believed that all behavior is learned, and the focus of study should be on a person's actions rather than mental state. One of Skinner's techniques, called operant conditioning, is based on a system of rewards and punishments for certain types of behavior. To demonstrate this method, he constructed the Skinner Box, which he used to study animal behavior based on the ability to train an animal to perform a certain task, while receiving some type of primary reinforcer, such as food.

Answer: Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud founded a method of treating mental disorders called psychoanalysis. The relationship between the analyst and analysand, or client, is the key to this type of therapy; the analysand talks about whatever they want to talk about, a technique called free association, while the analyst listens in order to attempt to uncover information which may help in the client's recovery. Freud believed that dream interpretation was especially vital as it could help uncover the latent content of the dream to provide insights into the client's unconscious mind.

Answer: Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget, a pioneer in the study of cognitive development in children, was able to show not only that young children think differently than adults, but also that individuals move through stages of learning development that increasingly become more complex. Each child, he believed, has a mental representation, or knowledge, of the world, which is called a schema.

As children develop, they acquire new information through assimilation, when an existing schema is able to deal with a new object, or idea, or accommodation, when the schema must change to deal with the new idea or object. Throughout one's lifetime, Piaget believed there are four stages of learning development, which include sensorimotor (infancy), preoperational (toddler-early childhood), concrete operational (elementary-early adolescence), and formal operational (adolescence-adulthood).

Answer: Ivan Pavlov

Classical Conditioning, also called Respondent Conditioning, was the first types of learning models; it was formulated by Ivan Pavlov as he was studying the physiology of digestion using dogs. He found that dogs naturally salivated (unconditioned response) whenever they saw or smelled food (unconditioned stimulus).

His experiment attempted to teach the dog to salivate (conditioned response) when he was presented with some other stimulus (conditioned stimulus), such as a sound from a tuning fork or a flash of bright light. Sound a bit ridiculous? If so, just take a moment and think of all of the conditioned stimuli that occur in our lives everyday - from the ringing of school bells, to the flashing of a red light, to seeing a stop sign, or to hearing a simple command like "Look out"!

Answer: Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow was known for his humanistic approach to psychology. Rather than seeing his client as "ill", he believed that all humans want to reach their full potential, an event that he called self-actualization. He used the term metamotivation to describe people who reach beyond their basic needs in an attempt to realize their full potential.

His famous Hierarchy of Needs proposed different levels that, after achievement, could lead to self-actualization. These include physiological need, such as food or water, safety needs, such as health or employment, love/belonging, and esteem, before reaching self-actualization.

Answer: Herbert Spencer

Although much of Spencer's theories have been discounted by later sociologists, he was one of the most influential and popular in the original group; many of his contemporaries borrowed heavily from his work. His belief in Social Darwinism proposed that humans were evolved from the same "survival of the fittest" means of natural selection as plants and animals. One of his theories, called Lamarckism, was the idea that organisms could pass on attributes acquired during their lifetime to their progeny.

Interestingly, Spencer's ideas were published two years before Darwin's "On the Origin of Species".

Answer: Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte has been given the distinction of being the first to use the term "sociology" for the study of human social behavior. His doctrine of positivism held that information derived from the use of sensory experience and interpreted using logic and reason is the source of authoritative knowledge. Working after the French Revolution, Comte sought to apply these ideas to remedy the subsequent social problems.

His law of three stages proposed that society develops through the theological stage (associated with abstract religious beliefs), the metaphysical stage (which used rational thought rather religion to explain nature), and the positive stage (also known as the scientific stage where scientific method was applied).

Answer: Max Weber

One of the Fathers of Sociology, Max Weber believed that sociologists should study social actions; in other words, actions that were carried out by individuals that had a particular meaning to them. If a person did not think about an action, he theorized, then it was not a social action.

For example, a car accident is not a social action because it is not typically carried out due to a conscious thought, while going to work is a social action because it does have a motive or intent. He believed in two different types of understanding, "aktuelles verstehen", which is understanding as the result of direct observation, and "erklärendes verstehen", where a sociologist must try to understand an action based on the motive(s) that caused it to happen. Weber believed that the rise of capitalism was connected to the Protestant ethic, as Protestantism promoted capitalism by encouraging adherents to work hard in order to praise God.

Answer: Émile Durkheim

Commonly viewed as one of the Fathers of Sociology, Durkheim supported the idea of structural functionalism, which is a theory that studies the relationships of many aspects of a society, such as government, education, and religion, in order to explain why a society works the way it does.

He coined the term "collective consciousness", also called solidarism, which is used to study a society as a whole due to a shared set of beliefs including morals and ideas, instead of studying the ideas and morals of the individual.

Answer: Karl Marx

Considered to be one of the three Fathers of Sociology, Karl Marx saw history as a continuous class struggle between the bourgeoisie, or ruling class, and the proletariat, or working class, over the control of means of production (farms, mines, factories) and means of distribution (trucks, trains, ships).

He believed this struggle could be eliminated by the system of socialism, which favored government/community ownership of the means of production and distribution until the need for such ownership was replaced by a classless society, or communism.