The following activity (based on Fernald & Fernald, 1978) will let you express your opinion about a variety of topics. Based on the pattern of your responses, you can determine the extent to which your world view is consistent with views in the psychoanalytic school, the behavioral school, and the humanistic school. When you discover that your view is consistent with one of the perspectives you will be studying, you may find yourself much more interested in learning about these different theoretical orientations.
Below you will find a number of general statements that espouse various points of view associated with the major approaches to psychology. Complete the survey as quickly as possible prior to reading section 1.2.
Please indicate how you feel about each of the following statements, using the following scale:
____ 1. People are free spirits, and science will never be able to really understand what causes their behavior.
____ 2. Basically, our personalities are shaped and determined by the things that happen to us during our lives.
____ 3. Most of the time, we do what we do in order to defend ourselves from threats that come from within.
____ 4. Most people's personalities are set by the time they are five or six years old. Typically, people don't change much after that.
____ 5. All that talk of deep-rooted forces sounds like bunk to me. We should just worry about what people actually do.
____ 6. Science makes a mistake when it tries to take everything apart. If you want to understand a person, you have to look at him or her as a whole.
____ 7. The best thing about people is that we are free to make choices and direct our own lives.
____ 8. Strong drives, such as sex, cause people to behave in certain ways.
____ 9. I think that anyone could grow up to be a criminal if he or she was raised in the wrong environment.
____ 10. I think people are not really fully conscious of the kinds of forces that direct their behavior.
____ 11. Someday we will be able to explain behavior in the same way that we can explain events in biology and chemistry.
____ 12. Thinking and feeling are the most important causes of behavior.
You can now calculate the subscore for the psychoanalytic school by adding together your responses to questions 3, 4, 8, and 10. You can calculate the behavioral subscore by adding together your responses for questions 2, 5, 9, and 11. Finally, a humanistic subscore is obtained by adding together responses for questions 1, 6, 7, and 12.
| Psychoanalytical | Behavioral | Humanistic |
|---|---|---|
| ____________ | ____________ | ____________ |
