FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Perhaps the three most distinguishing characteristics of Gray’s Psychology are (a) the thoughtful, intellectually engaging style of the narrative; (b) the evolutionary perspective that runs throughout the book and helps to tie all of psychology together; and (c) the cultural perspective that also runs throughout the book.

Peter Gray believes that the main purpose of higher education is to gain experience in thinking critically about ideas. In this book, psychology is not a set of terms and facts to memorize, but a set of ideas to think about. Peter Gray writes in a way that continuously invites students to join him—and to join you—in thinking about the causes, mechanisms, and purposes of human behavior and experience. He presents evidence and logic supporting and/or refuting each main idea, and he presents himself as a flesh-and-blood thinking person who is grappling with those ideas and has opinions about them.

The evolutionary perspective fits well with the goal of stimulating thought and discussion. In the functionalist tradition of William James, Peter Gray is interested in understanding how human psychological traits help—or have helped—to promote the survival and reproduction of individuals. Through the book he asks functionalist questions about all aspects of human psychology—about our sensory systems, our ways of learning, our drives and emotions, our sociability, our altruism, our tendency to conform to cultural norms, and even our personality differences. Evolution by natural selection provides a biological foundation for psychology that is far more intellectually engaging to most students than is the neural foundation that attempts to explain human traits in terms of which parts of the brain are involved. Peter Gray does not neglect neural mechanisms of behavior, but he places greater emphasis on the functions of behavior.

To Peter Gray, the cultural perspective in psychology is an essential complement to the evolutionary perspective. We are cultural animals. Just as the theme of natural selection runs throughout the book, so does the theme of cultural adaptation and cultural differences in psychological characteristics. This is especially true in the chapters on reasoning, intellectual and social development, social perception and attitudes, social influences, personality, mental disorders, and treatments for mental disorders.

Evolution by natural selection provides an organizing theme and a framework for thinking about the functions of universal human traits and human adaptability. However, the evolutionary perspective is not a royal road or shortcut to truth in psychology. The evidence concerning the causes, mechanisms, and functions of all human psychological characteristics comes from research conducted in the here-and-now. You will find in this book all of the traditional research approaches and findings that are included in other major introductions to psychology. Many instructors who themselves are not enamored of evolutionary psychology nevertheless use this book, year after year, because of its engaging, authoritative treatment of all of the standard psychological topics.

Because of its thoughtful orientation and its high respect for students’ intellectual abilities, Gray’s Psychology is used in many of the most selective colleges and universities in North America. However, it is also used, year after year, in many less-selective colleges and universities. It is even used successfully in some community colleges and high schools. Students consistently praise the book for its clarity, humor, and ability to draw them into its content (see What Students Say About Gray’s Psychology). The book assumes no more background knowledge—in biology or in any other field—than do most other major introductions to psychology. When students have difficulty with the book, it is usually because they fail to recognize that this is a book that must be read actively and thoughtfully, as a set of arguments, not as a book that can be studied primarily by looking at key terms or lists of concepts and trying to memorize them as isolated bits and pieces of information. What Students Say About Gray's Psychology.

The success of the book in less-selective or non-selective institutions depends largely on the instructor’s manner of presenting and using the book. Instructors who use the book most successfully are those who have high respect for their students’ intellectual abilities, regardless of the institution in which they are teaching, and who challenge their students to rise to the level of the book. They induce pride in their students by naming some of the prestigious universities that regularly use the same book that they are using. They show students how to use the book’s focus questions (which appear in the margins throughout the book) to guide their reading and review, and how to use the book’s other study aids. They also generally find ways to cut the book down, so students can spend more time on fewer total topics. Many instructors help students focus their study by identifying, in advance, the focus questions that will be fair game for the test.

The study aids for this book are designed to be consistent with the overall goal of engaging students’ thought processes rather than their rote memory processes.

The book’s most unique study aid is its set of focus questions, which appear in the margins throughout the text at an average frequency of about 1 per page. Each question is designed to direct students’ attention to the main idea, argument, or line of evidence addressed in the adjacent paragraphs of text. Students are advised to read each question before reading the relevant paragraphs as a means of guiding their reading, and again later as a means of testing themselves. The focus questions within each chapter are numbered, so instructors can easily indicate, with a list of numbers, which ones are fair game for class tests. (The multiple-choice questions in the Test Bank, which is available to instructors, are keyed to the focus questions.) Students regularly report that their use of the focus questions to guide their first reading promotes active rather than passive reading and that their later use of them for review is of tremendous help in preparing for tests.

Another study aid unique to this textbook is its set of hierarchical section reviews, which appear after each major section in each chapter. These reviews are constructed in the form of hierarchical charts, with the section’s main idea or theme at the top, subordinate ideas under it, and specific observations and concepts related to each subordinate idea under that idea. Unlike the lists of terms and concepts typically found in other textbooks, these charts preserve the relationships among the various ideas and observations of the section just read. With each chart, students can see an abbreviated summary of the argument they have just read. The chart shows how each concept or term relates to a larger idea.

In the section of Chapter 1 entitled Thoughts About Using This Book and Its Special Features (available here by clicking on the hyperlink), Peter Gray advises students about how to use the focus questions, section reviews, and other features of the book to maximal advantage. Many instructors find it useful to emphasize these ideas and to demonstrate, in class, how to use the focus questions and review charts.

Although the focus of the text is on ideas, not on term definitions, key technical terms are highlighted in the text with boldface Italics, so students can easily find them as part of their review of each chapter. Each such term is also defined in the Glossary at the end of the book.

For students who can benefit from further help, a study guide—entitled Focus on Psychology: A Guide to Mastering Gray’s Psychology—is available. This guide, authored by cognitive psychologist Mary Trahan, helps students to structure their study of the textbook by asking them to write out answer to questions as they go. Students who have used this guide have praised it highly. For more information about this guide, and for other information about supplements available to adopters of this textbook, see Supplements or go to the Supplements and Media Preface of the sixth edition book on pages xxvi-xxvii.

Gray’s Psychology, like most of the other major introductions to psychology, contains more information than many instructors have time for in the typical semester-length or quarter-length course. The length problem is endemic to introductory psychology textbooks because of the vast scope of the field. Even William James complained about that, more than a century ago. Any attempt on the part of textbook authors to be selective—to present some topics and leave out others—is unsatisfactory, because each instructor has his or her own set of favorite topics, some of which would be left out in the author’s selection. The solution, for most instructors, is to adopt a comprehensive textbook, such as Gray’s Psychology, but use it selectively.

Gray’s Psychology can be cut down by omitting whole chapters, and many instructors do that, but an even better way to cut it down, generally, is to omit sections within chapters. Peter Gray suggests that an efficient way to reduce Psychology for the shorter course is to let students know which focus questions, within each assigned chapter, will be fair game for the test. This allows students to focus their study on those parts of each chapter that the instructor deems most crucial to his or her own course. The completeness of Peter Gray’s book allows instructors to carve it up, in whatever way they choose, to create their own unique course. As one professor who has long used the book successfully at a community college put it, “I use Gray because it's ALL there. I don't have to fill in the blanks. I am the one who directs traffic through the book and that's why they need to listen to me and come to my class.”

In the Instructors’ Resources manual for the book, Peter Gray offers suggestions for reducing the content of each chapter with minimal disruption to the flow of ideas. These suggestions occur in the section entitled “Teaching Suggestions from Peter Gray,” which can be found near the beginning of each chapter of the manual (available here by clicking on the hyperlink).

Peter Gray presents Psychology in eight parts, each of which consists of two or (in one case) three chapters. The most unique aspect of his ordering of topics is that he discusses both evolution and learning very early in the book, before he discusses the nervous system.

The book begins with a brief background unit (Part I), consisting of an orientation to psychology and to the textbook (Chapter 1) and an introduction to research methods in psychology (Chapter 2). Then comes Part II—The Adaptiveness of Behavior—which contains a chapter on Genetic and Evolutionary Foundations of Behavior (Chapter 3) and a chapter on Basic Processes of Learning (Chapter 4). These chapters come early because they provide the grounding for the functionalist theme that runs throughout the book. Natural selection and learning are the processes that make behavior adaptive to the environment. An understanding of these processes and their importance in psychology does not require an understanding of the nervous system.

The rest of the book’s organization is in line with that which is fairly standard in introductions to psychology: nervous system, motivation and emotion, sensation and perception, memory, reasoning, cognitive and social development, social psychology, personality theories, mental disorders, and treatment of mental disorders—in that order. For a more complete summary of the contents of each unit of the book, see General Organization of Textbook.

Many professors who adopt Gray’s Psychology find that like the book’s order of chapters, but many others prefer a different order. To permit such flexibility, each chapter is written so that it can be read as a separate entity, independent of others. Links are often made to material presented in another chapter, but most of these cross-references are spelled out in enough detail to be understood by students who have not read the other chapter. The only major exception falls in the physiological unit: Chapter 6, on motivation, sleep, and emotion, assumes that the student has learned some of the basic information presented in Chapter 5, on the nervous system.

The best way to answer this question is to quote directly from Peter Gray’s description of “Goals for the Sixth Edition,” which appears in the book’s preface:

“My two main goals in each revision of the book are (1) to keep the book current and accurate, and (2) to make the book more enjoyable and useful to all who read it.

Keeping the Book Current and Accurate

“Most of the work and fun of each revision, for me, lies in my own continued learning and rethinking of each realm of psychology. In producing this revision, I skimmed thousands of new research articles and chapters and read hundreds carefully to determine which new developments warrant inclusion in the introductory course. The result was not so much the discovery of new ideas as the determination of how long-standing ideas are playing themselves out in current research and debate. This edition contains approximately 530 new references to research, mainly to work published within the past five years, out of a total reference list of approximately 2,200. By including the most recent research and controversies, I can convey to students the understanding that psychology is a continuously advancing, dynamic, contemporary human activity, not a stale collection of facts.

“When I compare this new edition of Psychology with my first edition, I see the great progress psychology has made in the past 20 years. What a pleasure it has been for me to keep pace with it! The progress has come on all fronts and is not easily summarized, but it is pleasing to me that the general theme of adaptation, which was central to my initial conception of the book, is even more central to psychology today. Our basic behavioral machinery is adapted, by natural selection, to the general, long-standing conditions of human life. That machinery, however, is itself designed, by natural selection, to be adaptive to the conditions of life within which the individual person develops. An enormous amount of research over the past few years, in all areas of psychology and neuroscience, elaborates on the theme of adaptation. That work is well represented in this new edition.

“Here are a few examples of new or expanded discussions, in this edition, that reflect our increased understanding of adaptive mechanisms: Chapter 4 brings our understanding of observational learning up to date with a new section on the role of mirror neurons. Chapter 5 extends the already present theme of neuroplasticity to include new work on the rapidity by which brain structures alter themselves in response to changes in sensory input. Chapter 6 presents new work showing that circulating levels of sex hormones not only influence sexual behavior, but are themselves influenced by the environmental context. Chapter 8 presents new work on memory consolidation, showing how those memories that are most likely to be useful in the future become most durable. Chapter 10 presents new work suggesting that abstract reasoning ability has advanced, from generation to generation, in step with historical changes in the ways that people use their minds in everyday life. Chapters 12 and 16 present new work showing how a particular gene variation may make a person more or less sensitive to stressful environmental occurrences. Chapter 15 includes new work showing that people’s beliefs about the modifiability of personality and intelligence actually influence that modifiability. Chapter 16 expands on the already present theme that cultural differences in attitudes toward mental disorders affect the course of those disorders.

Making the Book More Enjoyable and Useful to All Who Use It

“A book becomes more useful and enjoyable not by being ‘dumbed down’ but by being ‘smartened up.’ The clearer the logic and the more precisely it is expressed, the easier a book is to understand and the more engaging it becomes. With each revision, and with feedback from adopters, students, and editors, I find new ways to make difficult ideas clearer without ignoring their inherent subtlety or complexity. Sometimes this involves a simple change in wording or a minor alteration in the sequence of an argument’s elements or a new example or visual illustration that captures the essence of the argument. At other times the change is more fundamental. In this edition, my efforts toward clarity were greatly facilitated by two excellent editors—Valerie Raymond and Mary Trahan. Valerie was reading my manuscript for the first time, as a student would, and helped very much to sharpen the wording. Mary, who is the author of the study guide for each edition, brought her long experience in reading the book from the viewpoint of a student to the task of showing me where students might have difficulty.

“In the last (fifth) edition I made some large changes aimed at making the book more accessible to the full range of students. One such change was a reformulated Chapter 1, which became an orientation to the textbook and how to use its study features, as well as an orientation to psychology as a discipline. Another large change was the addition of a new review aid, hierarchical review charts, at the end of each major section within each chapter. The value of these charts is described in the “Special Features” section of this preface and again, more fully, on pp. 20-24 of Chapter 1 of the sixth edition of Psychology. Feedback concerning the fifth edition indicates that the new orientation chapter and the review charts have been very useful in helping students to learn from the book, and so these features have been retained and improved upon for this edition.

“With each edition, I take personal responsibility for every detail of the book, including all of the illustrations. I am never content to add an illustration simply to brighten up the page; each photograph, drawing, and cartoon must in my mind serve a purpose that is relevant to the text. I have hand chosen all of these and written all of the captions. For this edition I have added more than the usual number of new cartoons, not just for humor but also for their value in stimulating thought. My favorite cartoons are those that in some way poke fun at the very idea I am discussing and in that way help stimulate critical thought about the idea.”