What is Pyschology

             Before entering the History of Psychology class, I thought that psychology was the science of human and animal behavior, experience and mental processes. I still believe that this statement is true, but now I know that psychology is more than that. I also felt that psychology is used to help people through analyzing their behavior, this is true but it is also used to classify people. Now I can see that psychology is a social construct used to organized people, manipulate people, and to maintain the status quo.
             Knowledge, power and interest, all three must be explored when discussing the virtues of psychology. In our Genes, Lewontin, Rose and Kamin, discuss the legitimacy of inequality. In this chapter they discuss how the bourgeois revolution destroyed random chance of social class and allowed the ideology of natural differences to be brought forth, natural differences, referring to our genetic make-up. In other words we are all on the same playing field, and any differences that come about is because of our genes, which are inherited. Inheritance in this context has two meanings –"social and the biological--legitimizes the passage of social power from generation to generation. It can still be asserted that we have an equal opportunity society with each individual rising or falling in the social scale according to merit, provided we understand that merit is carried in the genes"(Lewontin, Rose & Kamin p.72). It is of the interest of the bourgeois class to perpetuate the myth of reification, so that they can maintain their power and keep the knowledge. Jacobi said that this social illusion serves to maintain the status quo, reification helps us to forget that we can be an active part of society.
             Also while in this class I learned that intelligence testing was at first used by Alfred Binet to identify children whose intelligence level was not at the proper point and increase the
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